I ducked inside of Henry’s study and dumped out the footlocker that had contained the guns and sacks and brought it outside. Together Anne and I scooped the nightmarish things up with spades that we found leaning in a corner with Henry’s gardening gear and threw them in the footlocker.
We stayed well back from the worms themselves, as we had no idea how they got inside of people, and we weren’t eager to find out. When we were done, the box was six inches deep in limp gray coils.
Henry came out of the door holding one of the cloth bags and a propane blowtorch.
“I figured it would be a little harder for us to get phosphorus grenades these days, so I came up with this. Thermite powder in the bag, magnesium ribbons to get it started, and a torch to light up the magnesium.”
“If you say so.” I ripped open the cloth bags, dumped the gray powder liberally over the slimy mass, and threw the silver ribbon on top. Henry passed me the blowtorch. It lit with a pop and a roar. I touched the blue flame to the magnesium ribbon, which started burning with a fierce white light that was painful to look at. Immediately after, the thermite powder caught with an eruption of heat and sparks that filled the entire box.
I backed away from the nauseating smell of the black greasy smoke billowing out of the charred and melted container. Henry and Anne had moved to crouch over Leon’s supine form.
“We can’t move him. I think his back is broken,” said Anne.
“If we leave him out here, he’s a sitting duck for the other one,” replied Henry.
Leon spoke through chattering teeth. “Carlos. Where’s Carlos?”
Henry leaned down and peered into his eyes, one after the other. “He’s going into shock. Anne, run back into my barn and get some blankets, they’re inside the door to your left. Don’t bother looking for a clean one.”
She nodded and ran for the doorway. After three steps the loud crack of a gunshot made her flinch, and I saw Henry jerk sideways. A thin spray of blood appeared on the grass behind him.
“Abe!” screamed Anne. “Do something!”
I ran towards the sound of the shot.
12
The shots were coming from the shadow of the kitchen door, but at least they were now directed at me and not my friends. I cut across the yard at an angle to the door, straining to move faster. The gunshots increased in frequency as I closed the gap, but as I expected, none of the shots came anywhere near me.
The more excited a bag gets, the more the worms thrash around inside them making them jitter. I threw myself to the ground behind the police car just in time to hear the slide lock back on the Glock, empty. I stood up and met the eyes of the bag, not ten feet away.
He was young and good-looking, like a fresh-faced college grad, albeit one in scorched clothes and with one badly burned hand. In that second, as we stared at each other over the hood of the car, he seemed so normal to me. His light blue eyes were a little glazed, and he looked flushed as though he had been running, but he could have been any young man stepping off of a basketball court or a football field. I wondered if he and the other one had talked in the car on the way down to Henry’s house. I wondered who he was and if anyone knew what had happened to him.
He grinned at me wide and easy and then tossed the gun away into the yard. Then he ducked back into the house and out of sight. I glanced back at Anne. She had torn Henry’s shirt into strips and was trying to bandage both men. I couldn’t tell from here how badly Henry was hurt, but he was over eighty years old with a gunshot wound, and Leon’s spine was broken. I needed to get them to a hospital.
Keeping my baton low, I moved into the kitchen. The table had been overturned and the floor was covered in broken glass. I crunched across the shattered fragments as quietly as I could manage.
“I’m glad I ran out of bullets.” I froze. The voice was coming from somewhere past the living room. “I like my knife better. Sometimes, after I shoot somebody, I stab ‘em anyway, even if they’re already dead. No harm in that. It doesn’t matter to them, and it makes me feel better, you know?”
He sounded like somebody striking up a conversation at a party, all breezy and unconcerned. If I hadn’t heard what he said, the tone would have been very pleasant.
I made it to the hallway where I could walk without making so much noise and crept down to the living room. The boards creaked slightly underfoot.
“You’re Abe, right? Peter said we might run into you. My name’s Jeff. You look just like your picture. Of course, the way you were jack-rabbiting across that yard was a real giveaway. That was something else. And that’s saying something, considering the things I’ve seen over the last year.”
The voice was moving, circling around to my left, but it still sounded about a room away. I crept across the living room and glanced behind the recliner just in case. Then I moved towards the other hallway and the guest bathroom. I could feel my hand sweating on the leather grip of my baton.
The bathroom was empty, so I kept going towards the master bedroom at the end of the hallway. The door was half open, and light from the window was painting a stripe down the floor out into the hall. I hugged the wall close to the hinge side of the door and switched my baton to my left hand and raised it. I listened hard, but there was only the silence of the old house, so I pushed the door open slowly with my right hand, braced to swing.
I didn’t see anything, so I went in, staying close to the wall. I didn’t want to get too close to the bed.
“We call him Saint Peter, you know, back in town.” I froze. The voice was coming from the house behind me, towards the living room. That was impossible. The hair stood up on my arms. “Not to his face, but we still do it. Some of us. He lets you into the promised land, you know? And he’s older than dirt. He says that when we kill your friends, we’re supposed to bring the bodies back to him, because he wants to do something to them. I don’t know what, but I bet it’ll be pretty cool.”
I spun around and looked out the door and down the hall. Nothing. I could see all the way into the living room. “I know you have a piece of the sacred altar. Not the one from your farm, because Billy is bringing that one back home, but the one that Henry was hiding. They’re not yours, you know. I know you don’t want to give it to me, but I bet you would trade me.” The voice was coming from the living room. I moved down the hallway, more quickly now, until I could see the whole room. It was empty. “I just need something you’d rather have.”
I looked down. The voice was coming from the floor. The son of a bitch was under the goddamn floor. I heard scuffling under the house. He was moving fast for the porch, and no longer concerned about being quiet about it. I ran across the room and looked out the window in time to see him scrabble and crawl out from under the porch and start running across the yard, his knife glinting in the sun as he pelted across the grass.
Towards Anne and Henry and Leon.
I almost dove through the front windows to follow him, but unlike in the movies, you tend to bleed to death pretty quickly afterwards if you get unlucky. Instead I bolted back towards the kitchen, nearly slipping and falling on all the broken glass in there, as if fate were determined to roll me in glass one way or another today.
The kitchen door was closed, but I didn’t care. I ran at it full out and hit it with my shoulder. The hinges ripped right out of the doorframe, and the door flew gracefully out into the sunlight, end over end. I didn’t see it land because I was already racing across the yard.
I hurdled a low bush without breaking stride and without taking my eyes off of Jeff’s back. He was nearly there. On the other side of him, I could just see Anne’s head start to come up as she heard something, but she was still facing the wrong way.
I wasn’t going to make it in time. As fast as I am, I was going to be a heartbeat too late. Jeff had his knife raised and he was nearly on top of her.
I screamed, “Behind you!” Anne spun around, rising from her crouch, and whipped the shotgun across Jeff’s skull like a baseball bat. It s
ounded like somebody hitting a melon. Blood flew and he went sideways in a pinwheel and tumbled to the ground.
And then I was there, just in time to see him surge to his feet brandishing his long hunting knife like everything was still going according to plan. I heard Anne’s sudden intake of breath. Her blow had crushed his temple and shattered his left eye socket. That whole side of his face was a red ruin, and flaps of skin hung from the exposed fragments of bone and brain.
As grisly as that was, I don’t think it was the blood and gore that got to Anne. It was the mass of tiny worms that was hanging out of the side of his head, the wound dripping small wriggling clots onto the ground.
He slashed at me impossibly fast, because no matter how shitty bags are with guns, they take to knives like mother’s milk. A line of fire traced across my hastily raised forearm as he cut me to the bone. I was still registering that fact when the blade came blurring towards me again. Instead of trying a second block, I whipped the baton out and across his shoulder.
It cost me a nice deep cut across my chest before it impacted, but once it did Jeff went one way, and his knife went another. The heavy steel bar had shattered his shoulder and one collarbone and thrown him to the ground. I hit him again as he rose, this time crushing though the top of his skull, and it was over.
My legs gave out, and I dropped heavily to the soft grass, blood soaking into the front of my shirt and running freely down one arm.
Anne patched me up with more shirt strips, and I vowed to buy a first aid kit as soon as possible. After she was done, we turned back to Henry and Leon. Henry was kneeling down, strips of makeshift bandage wound around his shoulder. I breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like he was going to be fine. Leon, on the other hand, had gone gray, and he shivered in the warm sunlight. I knelt down beside him.
“How’s he doing?”
Henry shook his head. “Needs an ambulance.”
Anne jumped up and bolted for the house, “I got it.”
“I’m so sorry, Henry. I should have sent the two of you away as soon as I knew they were coming.”
“I wouldn’t have gone. It’s my fight, too. You and I, we deserve this. We should have finished it a lifetime ago in Warsaw, but we didn’t, we ran away. It’s my fault that Leon is hurt, not yours.” He wiped a smooth hand across his old, tired face. “I thought I was educating him, telling him about the real world. From the day he found out, he wanted to know more. In the last few years, he’s even been helping me with my research, if you can believe that.
“I thought I was opening his eyes and making him safe, but in the end I think I was just looking for someone to share my burden.” He fussed with Leon’s blanket. “I knew that if I told him those things were coming, he’d insist on being here. I knew it and I told him anyway. I wanted him to be here, because I was afraid. Now Carlos is dead, and Leon isn’t far from joining him.”
“How do you think Leon would have felt if you hadn’t told him, and you had been killed? He’s no different than you were at his age when you were putting yourself in harm’s way. Nobody could have stopped you then, any more than you can stop him now.”
“We shouldn’t have run.”
“I know.”
“We could have finished it, Abe. We could have ended it once and for all, but instead I’ve lived my life afraid, and you just plain stopped living.”
“If we had chased Piotr back into the switching station that day, we probably would have died. We were hollowed out, Henry. You know that. Shad was dead and I was delirious when you pulled me out of that pool. Everybody else was wounded. Hell, it was all Frank and Don could do to get us out of there.”
Henry smiled tightly and nodded. “Frank. Old Two Penny almost bled out by the time we got help. We didn’t even know he was shot.”
I remembered. “He was a tough son of a bitch.” Cancer had killed him at the age of seventy-four. His funeral was the last time I had gone out into the world before closing myself off.
I hoped Frank’s widow was still around. “You know where Georgia lives these days?”
“I’ve tried to keep touch. I’ve got her address in the house. You think they know where she is?”
“They knew where to find you and Patty. Besides, they aren’t going to give up on the last piece.” I heard Anne yell across the yard that the ambulance was on its way. I glanced back and saw that she was coming with more blankets and some clean towels from the house. “We should have gotten his piece at the funeral.”
“I told you that at the time.”
“Well, now I’m agreeing with you.”
Anne draped the new blankets over Leon, cocooning him from neck to toe. Then she began cleaning his face with a damp towel. None of that was really helping, but I figured she needed to feel like she was doing something. Long nights at Maggie’s side had made me familiar with the feeling.
Henry stood up slowly and sucked in his breath as his shoulder moved. “Let me get my address book so you can get moving. You two need to be gone when the authorities arrive.”
13
I watched Henry and Leon dwindle in the rearview mirror until the curve of the gravel drive took them away. Henry wanted me to keep going on this fool’s errand, despite the risk to both his and Leon’s life, so that he could have a chance at peace, at closure, before he died. We both knew how slim that chance was.
Anne’s eyes were red like she had been crying, but I never saw her shed a tear. When she spoke, her voice was strong and steady. “Where are we going?”
“Airport.” I handed her two wallets. One was brown leather and the other was silver fabric and Velcro. They were both well worn and looked like part of someone’s life. I had taken them from the baitbags who had attacked us. “Take a look and see what you can tell me.” She took them from me like they were live snakes.
“The airport isn’t a destination. What am I looking for?”
“Those things used to be people. They lived somewhere, and I’m betting that’s where they were … changed. And to answer your question, we’re going to DC to look up the widow of Frank Eaton.”
“Frank Eaton. That was Two Penny, right?”
“That’s right. Got his name because his family was really poor, even for folks during the depression. One day he found a penny in the barracks, and some wiseass congratulated him, saying that he could quit the army a rich man, now that he had two pennies to rub together.” I had to smile remembering it. Two Penny had laughed louder than any of us.
“You guys were assholes.”
“Damn straight. Wallets?”
“I’m doing it, shut up.” I drove while she went through them carefully, even flexing the empty pieces in her hands to feel for anything sewn inside. “It’s hard to match the things that tried to burn us alive with the owners of these wallets, you know? That big guy was named David Burgher. He’s got a library card in here, and pictures of his kids. Can you believe that? Look at this, he’s wearing some goofy Christmas sweater and everything.”
I glanced at the picture. He was smiling with his arms around two blonde children, a boy and a girl. Next to him was a pretty woman leaning on his shoulder. It was one of those studio portraits that people used to get at department stores for their Christmas cards. I guess they still do.
Anne put the picture down. “Whoever turned him into that thing deserves to die. He was just a regular guy. I wonder what happened to his family.”
“I hope they’re fine and wondering where he is.”
“But you don’t think so?”
I just shrugged. “Where’s he from?”
“His license has an address in Belmont, Wyoming. The library card is from there, too.”
“How about the other one? Same town?”
She rummaged through the other wallet and produced a driver’s license. “Nope. This one, Jeff Grant, is from Columbus, Ohio. Sorry.”
“Dammit.”
“Maybe this Peter guy is just moving around, catching people as he goes.”
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“Maybe. But the last time I saw him, he had spent months sacrificing people and stockpiling their blood in a giant pit. That’s not very portable. I’m betting that he’s holed up somewhere with a high enough population to avoid arousing suspicion when people start disappearing. If I had to pick one of the two places, I’d bet on Columbus. I’ve never heard of Belmont, but if it’s not Casper or Cheyenne, it’s probably too small to hide a bunch of murders.”
“Looks like Jeff was a student at OSU. Not too good with the ladies, either.”
“What makes you say that?”
She waved a condom in a wrapper so old that the logo was too faded to read. “My keen deductive skills.”
“That’s pretty good for a girl.”
“Jerk.” She laughed and threw the condom at me. I was fishing it off of the floorboard with a grin when her phone rang. She glanced at the number and flipped it open. “Hi, Henry.”
I watched while she was on the phone. She spent more time listening than talking, but she seemed relieved, so that was good. It was that time of the day when the afternoon sunlight turns gold, between the white of noon and the copper of sunset. Fall trees just beginning to show a few red and yellow leaves stood proud and tall to either side of the black velvet asphalt and swayed seductively in the breeze. The sky was blue like a daydream and the crisp scents of fall filled the car. I felt happy, comfortable in my skin, and at peace.
Anne closed the phone and looked over to see me watching her. “Henry and Leon are on the way to the hospital. He says that Leon’s back really is broken, but that he’s stable now and out of danger.”
“That’s good.”
“He also said that the surprise in Leon’s trunk turned out to be a couple of M16s that they somehow smuggled off the base. He wrapped them in plastic and buried them behind the house.”
I whistled. “Those would have come in handy. What else did he say?”
She hesitated. “Nothing, really.”
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