Stone Angel

by Carol O’Connell

  Malcolm strutted across the truck bed passing in front of the coffin. “He would tell any lie. He would spew any filth. All we know for certain is that Riker raped and killed that poor idiot. Maybe he was afraid we wouldn’t turn him over to the sheriff. Maybe he thought we would be so outraged by what he had done, that we would pluck out his eyes and flay his skin and stone him to death. And I could not blame any man or woman for doing this.” He pointed to the torches. “Take up these torches and shine the light on him. See this monster for what he is.”

  Riker staggered to his feet again. Malcolm pointed one finger at the musicians. “Play,” he commanded them.

  They stared at one another. “Play loud!” Malcolm screamed, and then Ray was there with his rifle leveled on the bandleader. Clark jumped down from the truck fender and lifted his horn with the rest of the band, and they began to play.

  “Louder!” yelled Malcolm.

  The band played, Riker screamed out in pain. Malcolm Laurie jumped down from the truck and walked away across the fairgrounds, heading for the lower bayou.

  All the lights of Owltown went out, followed by the strobes positioned around the truck. This was Charles’s only clue that Mallory was not yet in the fray. He held fast to Augusta. She was not frail. Where he encircled her waist, the body was firm and well muscled. Her hair was flowing over him like a soft river, and to his left was the mighty Mississippi and the long sloping fall to night-black water. He could feel every pounding, jarring meeting of hoof and earth. They had cleared Upland Bayou and Dayborn township. The torch flames from Owltown were still match size from this distance.

  Augusta screamed, “We’re going down now.”

  The horse was descending, flying down from the road, his massive heart pumping fast. The animal stumbled badly, and they were falling. Charles’s stomach was rising, and his body was flooded with the chill of adrenaline. He watched the ground coming up to meet him as the horse went into a roll. Charles held Augusta closer, raised his knee and braced his foot on the horse’s back to push off with one leg. Then he and Augusta were flying through the air, clear of the horse, which now lay screaming in the dirt, rolling the rest of the way.

  Charles hit the ground on his back with Augusta on top of him. She was first to her feet. The horse was struggling to rise, and falling back in a fresh agony of screams with every attempt. The moon was brilliant. He could see the broken white bone shining through the skin and the blood of the horse’s leg.

  Charles moved toward Augusta and put his hand under her arm. She waved him off, scowling at him and pulling the derringer from her pocket. “Look out for your own damn self. Get on. I have to do this.”

  As he was turning toward the far edge of the fairgrounds, Augusta knelt by the horse, one hand on the muzzle, the barrel of the derringer behind an ear. Charles was on the run when he heard the gunshot. The screams ended. His steps faltered, and then he ran on toward the firelight of Owltown.

  The first person he saw was Malcolm, walking away from the mob while the band played on.

  Charles ran into the crowd. He had no difficulty forcing his way through the crush of smaller people. He found Riker at the center of the mob, lying on the ground amid a scattering of rocks. He covered Riker with his own body and absorbed the blow of a stone to his back, then another hit one leg. He did have the sense to tuck in his head. He had learned a great deal from turtles.

  The mob parted long enough for Charles to see Augusta standing by the truck’s rear wheel. By the light of a passing torch, he watched her feed a rag into the gas tank. The cloth darkened, soaking with gasoline. She looked up and caught the eye of the trumpet player. She struck a match and showed it to him. The musician dropped his jaw and nudged the sax man standing next to him, and then all five musicians fell back from the truck. Augusta touched her match to the rag and calmly lit a black cheroot as the flame traveled along the rag and into the tank.

  Ray Laurie stood on the bed of the truck, overseeing the mob, while Augusta walked steadily into the enfolding darkness, and a Dixieland band ran across the deserted fairgrounds toward the parking lot.

  The explosion rocked the ground. Charles felt the impact of the waves of energy exploding outward in a wide spray of flying bits of metal and flame, leaving a vacuum at the core of the blast. A roar of fire rushed back inward in a ball, then plumed up in a mushroom cloud of bright orange heat. Ray Laurie’s body shot straight out from the truck, and spikes of flame licked him in flight to set his hair and clothes afire. The man stood up and screamed, as the horse had screamed. He ran into the crowd, and the people backed away from the human bonfire. Ray fell to earth and writhed at their feet. The crowd had grown deathly still. A wicked whiff hung in the air, and Charles was stunned to realize that burnt human flesh could initiate hunger.

  So this was hell.

  While the crowd was in thrall to the spectacle of Ray Laurie burning to death, Charles was on his knees, pulling one of Riker’s limp arms around his neck. He was rising to a stand with one arm circled around the man’s waist, and now he dragged Riker’s unconscious body along with him. The toes of Riker’s shoes made ruts in the dirt behind them, and their progress was slow.

  Ray Laurie had ceased to scream, to flail, even to twitch. The crowd turned its attention back on Charles and his heavy burden. He could feel their eyes on him, the heat of the flames at his back, and the tension growing with the sound of slow shuffles as a hundred pairs of feet were set into motion.

  Though there was nothing spoken, no signal, they moved in unison, walking toward him, fanning out to form the next stoning ring. One by one, a head bowed down, low to the earth, and a hand shot out to snatch up a rock.

  Charles braced himself for the next blow. He was preparing to lower Riker to the ground, to lie across his friend’s body and give him cover.

  “Look there!” A woman standing at the fringe of the crowd was pointing to the other end of Owltown’s main road flanked by darkened shabby storefronts.

  Only one streetlamp was lit. Standing in the pool of light was a lone figure wearing boots and a horseman’s duster. The face was shaded by the brim of a black hat.

  CHAPTER 27

  Tom Jessup stood by the nurse’s station in the hospital corridor, holding Ira in his arms. Other cases were rolling by on gurneys, each one an entourage of emergency personnel. Darlene was crying, the public address system was issuing orders, and the harried triage nurse was looking down at Ira’s swollen, bloody face as she checked his pulse and pulled back the lid of one eye.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff. We’re stacking up critical cases in the halls. It’ll be a while before a doctor can see him. The chemical burns are first priority.”

  He knew what she really meant. The boy’s breathing was a ragged whistle, and his color was edging toward a blue pallor. He had seen this before in the aftermath of road accidents. Ira was dying, and the nurse was more interested in the patients who might be saved.

  She hurried off to examine the next victim coming through the emergency entrance. The new arrival had bubbly skin and blood-soaked clothes. Half of the woman’s long dark hair had been burned away. The sheriff watched the nurse shake her head over this patient too, condemning an unconscious woman to die alone by the wall where the gurney was pushed.

  Well, he had not broken the sound barrier getting Ira to the hospital in thirteen minutes flat just to lose him in the waiting line for a doctor. He turned to Lilith. “Get me one of those little bastards with a stethoscope. I don’t care how you do it.”

  The sheriff laid his burden down on the long counter of the nurses station. All around him was a desperate energy of noise and motion, blood passing by in plastic bags on metal carts, and more blood on the people wheeling down the hall on the way to the operating rooms at the far end.

  Darlene hovered over her son, her head very close to his. She was listening for breath, ready to breathe for Ira if he should stop.

  The sheriff looked up to see Lilith walking down the hall wi
th a stalking gait, and he could guess where she was heading. Her father could go directly to that place in the trout stream where the fish gathered to exchange secret handshakes and plan strategies to outwit fishermen, and Guy never came home without a trophy. Apparently, his daughter knew the source pool of doctors.

  A door swung open and he could see the cloud of cigarette smoke, the vending machines and furniture a damn sight more comfortable than the plastic junk in the lobby. Lilith was smiling as she snagged a doctor on his way out.

  The man was angry at first, but then he smiled, openly appraising the young woman in front of him, taking inventory of her parts and pausing awhile at her breasts, as if he had the right. She leaned in tight to whisper something in the man’s ear. Tom Jessop was certain the doctor meant to cover his balls with one hand, but the motion was aborted as Lilith grabbed his arm and propelled him down the hall.

  The sheriff smiled at his deputy and mouthed the words “Nice catch.”

  The doctor leaned over Ira, and assessed the damage. “Definitely a collapsed lung. I need a nurse and an OR, but – ”

  “You got it, Doc,” said Lilith, slipping away down the hall in search of a nurse to terrify and an operating room she might commandeer.

  While Ira was being prepped for surgery, the sheriff was leading Darlene to the waiting room, another kind of bedlam, voices rising in hysteria and tears, shouts and laments for the dead and near-dead. He settled her in the only empty chair. She had been crying softly all this time, but now the fingers of one hand slowly opened, and she was staring down at a tiny cell phone in her hand. Her head snapped up with some new anxiety.

  “Kathy,” she said.

  And now Darlene had his complete attention.

  “Kathy’s gone to Owltown.” She gripped his arm tightly. “I know she means to kill somebody.”

  “I might be able to give her a hand with that.” Before Darlene could say any more, he was striding across the lobby. He pushed through the glass door, and crossed the driveway to his car. As he was pulling out of the parking lot, the passenger door flew open and Deputy Beaudare piled into the front seat.

  The coffin had been thrown clear in the blast. It lay cracked open in the dirt just short of the paved road. The glass dome had shattered to tumble the corpse of Babe Laurie onto the ground. Flames from the truck had reached across nine feet of strewn rubble to find him. The suit caught fire and Babe’s face was passive as the flames lapped at his head and ate the mortician’s wax from the cracks of his broken skull.

  But the mob was oblivious to Babe. They were all staring down the dark road where only one streetlamp was lit. It went out. Farther down the street, another lamp switched on, and there was Mallory again. And so she moved toward them, in and out of the dark. The last lamp at the foot of the road went on, but the pool of light was empty. Yet the crowd was riveted, staring at it, waiting for her.

  But she was already among them, passing through their ranks while they were looking for her in the light.

  Mallory stepped out from the thick of the crowd, and stood at the rim of the stoning circle. The men closest to her backed away as she lifted the side of the duster and swept it back over the holstered gun riding low on her hip. Unhurried, almost casual, she walked toward Riker’s unsupported right side. She flung one of the unconscious man’s arms over her shoulder and encircled his waist.

  Mallory was facing the road ahead as she spoke to Charles. “Go forward, don’t stop for anything.” Her free hand gripped the gun in its holster.

  Four men moved into the road in front of them. All held rocks in their hands. One greedy man held three, and this one stepped forward, grinning as he bent his arm back to throw his first rock.

  Her gun cleared the holster.

  The man had heard the bang of the bullet that ripped open his thigh, and he had seen the flash of the gun, but now he only stood there looking down at his ruined leg and wondering if these events might be connected. And then the commonsensical laws of gravity and insupportable limbs kicked in. He fell to the ground and dragged himself off, crying, still shaking his head in disbelief. The crowd parted to let him pass, but showed no signs of helping him and no fear of the gun in her hand.

  Slowly, Charles and Mallory walked forward, dragging Riker’s body between them. The mob was not so concentrated now. They had spread out, walking on either side of them. A woman in a red satin dress screamed obscenities at Mallory and tossed a bottle. It missed Mallory by three feet, but she drew her gun on the woman and fired. The woman looked down on the black hole in the sleeve of her dress, and her face waffled between outrage and confusion.

  Of course she would be astonished. A moment ago, this woman had been invincible. But now she was a naked target in a red dress.

  Mallory raised the gun again, and the wounded woman ran screaming between the gray buildings.

  They walked forward into the lull. One teenager ran in front of them, and the next missile was a brick. It hit Charles’s shoe, glancing off and doing no real damage, but Mallory drew on the assailant. Though he could only be fourteen or fifteen years old, the boy understood immediately that his tender age was not going to shield him, that when she leveled her gun at his head, she meant to kill him. He melted back behind the adults on the sidewalk. In the bar behind the boy, a wide front window broke in an outward burst of flames and flying glass. The crowd rippled in jerks and starts.

  “They don’t have a leader,” said Mallory. “They’ll take their cues from us. Stay cool, Charles.”

  Oh, right.

  A small barrel-chested man appeared in front of them, and his rock hit Mallory in the shoulder. Retribution was swift. She leveled her gun and fired it as the man was running away. The little man fell, screaming and clutching his side where the blood was spurting between his fingers Another rock came from behind a car. She put her next bullet through the vehicle’s window. An anguished man stumbled away from the car one hand to his shoulder where the red stain of blood was spreading down the front of his shirt.

  She fired another round into the crowd, at random this time, and then another shot.

  Now they all stopped, beginning to sense their individual mortality in this strange lottery of bullets. She only had to raise her gun this time, and more of them fell away. By Charles’s count, her six-shooter should be out of bullets now. There were only stragglers hanging on the fringe, but at least twenty of them.

  A rock hit Mallory between the shoulder blades. She turned and took aim at the man who had thrown it. He put out his hands as though this might stop a bullet, and then he faded back into the heat of the growing fire.

  “Charles, take Riker’s weight for a second and don’t stop moving.” She swung out the speedloader from her belt and jammed the bullets into the free chambers of her gun. Then she picked up her share of Riker’s weight again.

  Charles felt the heat at his back, and his head was turning when she said, “Don’t look. The buildings are burning. There’s nothing else to see.”

  Ah, but there was, and only Charles could see it. He looked over the heads of the crowd to follow the quick lean figure with flowing white hair moving away from the most recent fire and on to another building. Augusta was carrying a gas can and a bottle with a rag stuffed in its mouth.

  Another rock flew to Mallory, hitting her in the leg. Cheers came up from the crowd, hurrays for a strike. She raised her gun and fired into the clot of men on the sidewalk. One of them screamed and the rest moved away from this victim, as if bullets might be contagious. Mallory was still looking that way when Charles saw another arm rise to hurl a rock in their direction. But now this man was himself hit in the head with a rock. A light laughter was heard in the dark. The tone was young, sweet and high, but Charles knew it was Augusta.

  Two rats crossed the porch of a near building, running in advance of the black smoke hugging the boards as it crawled forward. But then, the smoke sipped back under the doorsill, as though the wood structure had inhaled it. In the next secon
d, two front windows blasted outward in a hot spray of fire and glass shards. Rolling waves of flame quickly covered the outer wall.

  The fire might have been Augusta’s pet when it started, but now it went where it wanted to, spreading to the roof. A tongue of flame licked straight up in the air. He could feel the heat on his face, and his eyes stung. The wind washed over him and carried the smoke back toward the lower bayou. The acrid stench remained. The fire roared.

  It was feeding.

  “Don’t be afraid.” Mallory spoke in an easy conversational tone. “There’s no point in it anymore.”

  He understood. He had given himself up for dead the moment he had lain down to cover Riker’s body. Mallory had given him all these remaining minutes of life – a gift she bought at great cost. And he had bought nothing for her. But while he understood that fear was pointless and almost ungrateful, his heart was racing. His body was still afraid and pounding out adrenaline.

  Two young men stood close to the burning building, passing a whiskey bottle between them and laughing at the fire. They didn’t realize it was alive and hungry.

  Charles knew; he could hear it eating things.

  A flame stabbed straight out and ran its tongue around one man’s head, searing his flesh and setting his hair afire. They ran away together, one man madly slapping the head of the other, batting out the flames. The burning man screamed, yet he would not let go of the whiskey bottle in his hand.

  For the rest, they hardly noticed the fire. They were drunk on liquor and drunk on the moment, reeling and cursing alongside Charles and Mallory, all moving inexorably along the road.

  Mallory’s gun banged off a shot and cast a wider protective circle around Charles and Riker. The crowd hovered at the edge of this unseen line and came no closer, menacing only with raised fists and their mouths twisting in ugly shapes. The mob screamed, the fire roared. Mallory’s gun shattered the night and scattered them again.