by Bryan Smith
Dez looked at Lana. “What do you think? Time to get Big Ted in on this?”
Lana stared off into a middle distance for a moment. Then she sighed and shrugged. “Yeah. Even if he doesn’t give a shit about this de Rais motherfucker, he’s not gonna be happy about having his distribution point compromised. I’ll call him soon as we get clear of this place.”
Dez nodded. “True that. The fuck are we waiting for? Let’s hit the road.”
No one voiced opposition to this idea.
In another few minutes they were speeding away from the backwoods conflagration.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Runaways
Things were falling apart at the de Rais compound. John Wayne’s mental confusion was accelerating by the hour, rendering the entire organization essentially rudderless much of the time. The situation was verging on chaos less than a day after Keely’s impulsive decision to murder Susan Wagner.
A peek outside her door the next afternoon revealed an empty hallway. The guard who had replaced the supposed police informant was nowhere in sight. Keely stood in the open doorway and listened to people yelling at each other somewhere else in the house. Though she couldn’t make out what was being said, she detected an unmistakable sense of panic. Moments later, she heard the sound of glass shattering, followed by footsteps pounding up the stairs. Keely cringed backward a step and peeked around the doorjamb.
A heavyset woman came stomping down the hallway. Her eyes flicked toward Keely’s partially hidden face for an instant. The woman’s gaze slid away from her a millisecond later as she entered a room about halfway down the hallway and slammed the door shut. Keely didn’t recognize the woman, but her relatively stylish attire—as well as her mere presence in the big house—indicated she was someone in the inner circle.
A fat man appeared at the end of the hallway a few seconds later. He was wearing cargo shorts and a garish Hawaiian shirt. The goofy bastard looked like he should be at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Keely had seen him before. She was pretty sure he was the bloated-looking dude she’d seen fiddling with an iPad on the back deck the day Boyd had taken her to meet John Wayne.
He tried to open the door to the room the heavyset woman had entered. The knob wouldn’t turn when he tried it so he banged on the door with the base of a fist. “Laura! Goddammit, let me in! We’ve gotta figure this shit out before it’s too late.”
There was a brief, tense silence.
Then the door to the room quietly snicked open and the big man slipped inside, easing the door shut again once he had disappeared from view.
Keely let out a breath and stepped out into the hallway. She did this without any forethought or even the vaguest inkling what she had in mind. She was several steps down the hallway before she realized she meant to get out of the house and somehow escape the compound.
It was a significant moment in the brief history of her membership in the Order of Wandering Souls. Even as recently as a day ago she had wrestled with ways of rationalizing a continued devotion to the Order. That need to believe in something remained strong within her and making that final call to break completely with something she had invested so much hope in wasn’t easy. But at this stage further attempts at denial of the obvious were impossible.
John Wayne told her some truly disturbing things after fucking her the previous day. The man was nothing less than a madman. What he had in mind for his followers was deranged enough to earn him a place in the top ranks of the world’s most infamous maniacs. How much of this was a product of his deteriorating condition was an open question. According to him, it had been part of his endgame all along, but his declining health was forcing him to implement it sooner than originally planned. Keely wasn’t so sure about that. This “endgame” could be a new thing dreamed up by his fractured mind. At this point even John Wayne himself was too far gone to know the whole truth.
The winding staircase down to the first floor was empty, as was what she could see of the wide foyer beyond. She started down the stairs, listening intently for other voices or approaching footsteps. She knew John Wayne still wanted her confined to her room, thus the presence of the new guard who had been stationed outside her door overnight. His fixation on her remained strong. She was one of his chosen, or so he said, but being one of the chosen apparently didn’t mean he trusted her to stay put left to her own devices. And yet her personal guard—and seemingly everyone else—had disappeared. She was grateful for the lack of human presence, but she couldn’t help seeing it as ominous.
She reached the bottom of the staircase and took a look around the big foyer. The architecture was expensive, with lots of ornate touches and marble tiles on the floor. A sculpted bust of John Wayne sat on a pedestal in a corner. The sculpture was a fine, nearly lifelike piece of work. You could almost believe the real John had been turned to stone and cut in half. It was pretty fucking eerie.
Keely eased the front door open and stepped out onto the long front porch. Her heart lurched at the sight of two armed men lounging against the side of a black Hummer. The men wore black sunglasses and had semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. They were smoking and talking quietly as Keely came outside. Her appearance caused a brief pause in their conversation. They glanced at her with curious expressions and for one supremely terrifying moment she was sure she was about to be marched back to her room.
But they appeared to take no interest in her and soon resumed their conversation. Keely remained where she was another few moments. This was largely because she had difficulty trusting this apparent new freedom to move about the property without an escort. She kept expecting someone to come rushing out of the house and drag her back inside. During those moments, she studied the men lounging against the Hummer while trying to appear uninterested in them. She suspected she wasn’t entirely convincing, but they went right on ignoring her anyway.
She moved to the edge of the porch in an effort to better eavesdrop on their conversation. It still wasn’t easy to pick up on what they were saying, but Keely sensed a pronounced tenseness. And though the clipped snippets she heard made it hard to know for certain, she got the general drift. They were planning to bail on John Wayne and his organization at the earliest opportunity. For Keely, it was additional confirmation that fleeing was absolutely the right move to make.
She started down the steps, taking care not to go too fast lest she rattle the already uptight security or draw the attention of someone who might still be loyal to John. At first blush, this seemed a non-issue. A couple more black Hummers were parked down by the access road that led away from the compound. No one was lounging around outside those vehicles and their tinted windows made it impossible to glimpse any occupants. Keely suspected there were more security personnel inside them, but, for the moment at least, she doubted they were at all concerned with her.
When she reached the ground, she started walking at an unhurried pace, still trying her best not to look like someone trying to escape. She turned right at the side of the house and kept going, the Hummers and the security guys disappearing from view within seconds. A nervous glance over her shoulder confirmed she wasn’t being followed and she picked up the pace. A flat-out run was still probably a bad idea, but being overly cautious might doom her attempt to get away just as certainly. The situation at the big house was in a serious state of flux and people were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, completely clueless about what to do next, but sooner or later someone who mattered would note her absence and raise the alarm. Her only hope lay in getting clear of this place before that could happen.
She spotted her destination some one hundred yards up ahead. The big red barn no longer housed horses or bales of hay. Instead it had been pressed into service for another kind of storage. Keely recalled the day she had pledged herself to John Wayne and the Order in a hazy way. She had been high as fuck at the time. No surprise, as she had been high as fuck almost all the time for most of the last several years. One of th
e requirements of Order membership was surrender of all material possessions. And she remembered seeing one of the ranch hands drive her maroon Toyota into the barn as Susan Wagner led her away from the big house to her assigned cabin.
Giving the car up had been easy. It was symbolic of the end of her old life.
The life she now hoped to reclaim.
She sighed.
Boy, have I been fucking stupid.
Of course, there was no guarantee her car was still in there. During her months of residence at the compound, she had occasionally seen more cars formerly belonging to other new initiates driven into the barn, which didn’t seem nearly large enough to house all the surrendered vehicles. She suspected they were eventually taken away and sold elsewhere. It was yet another way of filling the Order’s overflowing coffers and an especially cynical way of exploiting the gullible lost souls the organization had accepted into its fold.
Even so, whatever process they used to convert the cars into cash could only move so fast. Maybe her Toyota was long gone, but odds were strong there would be some other car she could commandeer to take her away from this ridiculous place.
That thought made her smile and tremble with hope. In many ways coming here and putting herself in the hands of these lunatics was the single dumbest thing she had ever done. However, outside of her short jail stint, these last several days of enforced sobriety while confined to her room was the longest she had stayed straight in just about forever. And the sobriety had gifted her with a rare clarity and a fledgling sense of purpose. If she managed to make it out of here, she was going to change her life, this time for real. That would include making things right with Casey. She was grateful he had managed to elude capture so far and could only hope his luck was still holding out.
As she reached the barn door, she glanced behind her again to check for signs of being watched or followed. She still hadn’t been observed as far as she could tell. There were a few initiates milling around in the area between the rows of cabins, but none of them appeared to have taken note of her.
She eased the door open and slipped inside the barn, squinting against bright sunlight streaming in through the hayloft window. A half-dozen cars were packed inside the barn. As she suspected, there was no sign of her Toyota, but that was okay because here was her means of escape. She had hardly dared believe it possible those first several minutes after abandoning her room, but now it was beginning to feel real.
The barn appeared to be unoccupied, another stroke of almost unbelievable good luck. But she supposed anyone in any kind of position of responsibility was too busy trying to keep the sinking Order ship afloat to keep an eye on things here. She hurried over to the closest car—a late-model Fiat, surprisingly fancy for a new Order initiate—and peeked inside, hoping to see a key in the ignition. There wasn’t one, though, and the ignition slots of the other cars were empty too.
But the backseat of the last car she checked was not empty. A young hippie couple was hunkered down behind the seatbacks, clearly hoping to avoid discovery. Keely almost missed them when she checked the ignition, but she caught a quick glimpse of furtive movement that made her peer through the rear window. The couple—a meek-looking boy and a slender, deeply tanned girl with dark hair and eyes a startling shade of blue—gaped at her in shock for a long moment. They were clearly hiding out rather than using the car’s backseat as a place to fuck, which maybe meant they were trying to escape too.
Keely had scarcely begun to process this when she heard a creak behind her as the barn door came fully open. An attractive, familiar-looking woman in dark sunglasses entered the barn holding a gun. She wore black jeans and a black V-neck shirt. An ankh pendant dangled from a slender gold chain around her neck. For a moment Keely puzzled over where she had seen the woman before, but then it came to her—she was the curvaceous beauty she had seen lounging in a tiny red bikini on the back deck the day Boyd took her to the big house. Faces from that day were popping up everywhere suddenly, which probably had to do with John Wayne’s indisposition.
The woman pointed the gun at her. “There you are. I was worried you’d gotten away already.”
Keely frowned as she took a step back from the car. “Gotten away?”
The woman smirked. “No need to play coy. You were trying to escape.”
Keely gave her head an emphatic shake. “No. I was just…wait…who are you?”
“You can call me Jade.”
“Pretty name.”
Jade smiled. “Thank you.”
“Look, there’s no need to point that thing at me. I was just…out for a walk.”
“Oh?”
Keely nodded. “Things have been tense up at the big house. I thought I’d get out for a while and breathe in some fresh air. That’s all.”
Jade kept the gun leveled at Keely’s midsection as she came a few steps closer, her gait an unhurried, hip-swaying strut. She was still smiling, but there was a hint of something vicious in her eyes. “Here’s the thing, Keely. Your story sounds almost plausible, but it doesn’t explain why you’re in here checking out these cars. Do you want to know what I think?”
Keely could still see the hippie kids in her peripheral vision. Knowing they were there made it hard not to glance directly at them. Doing so would almost certainly alert Jade to their presence.
She swallowed a lump in her throat and forced herself to keep her eyes staring straight ahead. “I know what it looks like, but—”
“Shut up!”
Keely flinched at the barked command. Her heart was beating fast and she knew she was on the verge of surrendering to panic. Tears stung her eyes as she struggled against a total collapse.
“I’ll tell you what I think, bitch.” The heat in her voice surprised Keely. She had never talked to Jade until just now. The animosity made no sense. “I think you were planning to steal one of these cars and drive away, which makes you a low-down cowardly traitor.” She sneered disdainfully. “You know what makes me really sick? The way you’ve betrayed John’s trust. He thinks you’re special. Which should be hilarious, because you’re nothing more than a common drug whore. But John isn’t himself these days. So instead of being hilarious, it’s just sad.”
Keely was having a hard time focusing on anything other than that looming gun barrel, but she made herself lock eyes with Jade. “You’ve got it all wrong. I swear. I—”
Jade cocked the gun’s hammer and smiled at Keely’s stricken expression. “I love the look on your face, like you’re about to piss yourself you’re so scared. Like you know you’re about to die.”
Keely made a pitiful sound of pure terror. “What? You can’t shoot me. You just…please…you can’t…”
“You should hear yourself. You’re pathetic.” There was something more than anger in Jade’s expression now, a suggestion of almost sexual excitement. “A pathetic, worthless little whore.”
Keely sniffled. “Why are you so angry with me? What have I done to you?”
Jade raised the gun and sighted down the barrel at Keely’s forehead. “You killed Susan Wagner. My best friend.” Her eyes gleamed with moisture. “I loved her, and you took her away from me.”
Hot tears spilled down Keely’s face. “Please. I don’t want to die.”
Jade laughed. “You can’t always get what you want. You’ve heard that before, haven’t you? It definitely applies to you.”
“But what about John? Won’t he be angry with you for killing me?”
Jade shrugged. “I’ve already got my cover story worked out. You attacked me when I tried to stop you from escaping and I wound up killing you in self-defense.”
“He won’t believe you.”
“Of course he will. He’ll believe anything I tell him.” Jade’s smile had a leering quality to it. “Or did you imagine you were his only special girl?”
In desperation, Keely tried appealing to her common sense and humanity. “You’re right. You could totally make him believe that story. But what’s the poin
t? You know everything’s going to hell here. And you know what he has planned. Why not go away with me right now? We could go to the cops and tell them everything. They could put a stop to it and save a lot of lives. And instead of being seen as a villain, you’ll be a hero. You don’t really want to die with the rest of them, do you?”
Jade’s expression hardened. “Of course I do. I’m a true believer in John’s message.” She kept the gun’s barrel trained on Keely’s forehead and came another few steps closer to ensure the accuracy of her shot. “Say goodbye, bitch.”
“Wait! Don’t you want to know the real reason I came in here?”
The question surprised Jade enough to forestall the execution a few seconds longer. “This isn’t television, Keely. You’re not saving your sorry life by stalling me with some made-up bullshit.”
Keely shook her head. “But it’s not made up! Look!” She felt a stab of burning shame the instant she realized what she was about to do, but her absolute terror overrode any compassion she might have felt. She gestured at the car next to her and heard a muffled cry of distress from inside. “I followed these kids in here. I was trying to stop them from getting away.”
The rear door on the other side of the car popped open and the kids scrambled out. They hit the ground running and headed straight for the back of the barn, apparently seeking a rear exit.
Jade was quick off the mark, launching herself past Keely with the speed of a champion track runner. Keely watched the woman plant her feet and aim the gun at the retreating backs of the would-be escapees. She cringed as the shots rang out. The boy took a slug between the shoulders and ran a few steps more before stumbling and falling to the ground. The girl had her brains blasted out of her skull by a bullet that punched through the back of her head. As she fell over dead, Keely thought of the girl’s stunning blue eyes and felt that sick feeling inside her again.
Their killer let out a breath and relaxed out of her shooting stance. She walked over to the fallen bodies and kicked at each of them. The boy made a pitiful sound, indicating he still had some life in him.