Kylie finds her mom’s phone and dials 911. She tells the dispatcher that she needs the police and an ambulance.
Kylie hands the phone to Stuart and goes to help her dad.
Stuart tells the dispatcher exactly how to get to them from Route 1A. When he sees the house behind them is burning, he tells them to send the fire department too. “Stay on the line, honey, help is on the way,” the dispatcher says.
Kylie finds pieces of tarp and puts one over her uncle Pete and her dad and another around her mom and Stuart as protection against the wind and snow howling through the abattoir.
“Come here,” Rachel says to Kylie and Stuart, and she pulls the two kids close.
She tells them it’s going to be all right in the voice mothers have used to reassure their little ones for tens of thousands of years.
“How can I help?” Marty asks, crawling toward them.
“Help Uncle Pete. Keep pressure on his wound,” Kylie says to her dad.
Marty nods and presses the rag hard against Pete’s stomach. “Hang in there, big brother, I’m sure you’ve faced worse than this,” Marty says.
Pete’s wound looks terrible, but his dark eyes still have fire in them. Death is going to have to deal with a force that is shamanic, strong, inimical.
Embers are falling onto the remains of the abattoir’s roof.
“Guys, we may have to get out of here,” Marty says.
Rachel looks at the ferocious blaze taking hold of the entire west side of the house.
“Can we move Pete?” she asks.
“I think we need to,” Marty replies.
Flames engulf the house’s upper story and send the wooden deck crashing to the ground.
Snow and embers mingle in the slaughterhouse, drifting down from the black sky.
“I think I hear them coming,” Rachel says as the sound of sirens comes out of the night.
Kylie smiles and Stuart nods and Rachel tightens the tarpaulin around them. It will be hard to ever let her daughter go again. Impossible. Rachel kisses Kylie on the top of her head.
Pete is glad to see it.
He blinks slowly.
He tries to say something but there are no words now.
He knows he’s going into shock. He has seen it a million times. He’ll need a medic soon if he’s going to survive.
Marty is speaking to him, but he needs the—where is it?
His fingers search the ground until they touch his grandfather’s Colt .45, supposedly fired in anger at a Zero heading for the USS Missouri.
Pete somehow manages to lift it.
His grandfather’s .45…the lucky charm that kept the old man safe through the Pacific and kept Pete himself safe through five combat tours.
Pete hopes there is just one ounce of luck left in it.
74
Ever since he was little, people have called him Red. They’d christened him Daniel, after his father, but the old man is a little too free with his fists to be popular with the boy.
In the service they call him Red. Or Sarge. Or Sergeant Fitzpatrick. Red he likes.
The army is good for him. The army teaches him his letters.
There’s Red in the remedial reading class. Red skimming the funny papers. Red digging the comics. A swollen red Krypton sun. Superman walking the red road.
The army sends him overseas.
Red in the jungle.
Red in the delta.
Red in a whorehouse in Nha Trang.
Red in a whorehouse in Saigon.
He knows the whores are scared of him. The whores don’t like his eyes or the fish-scale birthmark on his neck. The whores don’t call him Red or Daniel or Sergeant. Behind his back they call him ông ma quy, which means “sea demon.”
Red in a chopper.
Red in a firefight in the Ia Drang Valley. Red keeping cool as mortars come in. Red getting recommended for the Silver Star.
Red back in America being presented with a baby boy by his Southie girlfriend.
Red joining the Boston PD.
It’s the mid-1960s and there are a lot of opportunities for a young man on the make. Sometimes you have to smack a few people around.
Sometimes you have to do a lot worse.
Red stains on the floor of a Dorchester shebeen.
Red all over the walls of a snitch’s basement apartment.
Red the hands. Red the eyes. Rooms full of red.
Red’s wife runs off with another man to Michigan. Red footprints in the snow outside a house in Ann Arbor.
Red’s boy grows up and follows his old man into law enforcement.
Glory days.
Red-letter days.
Before the fall. Before that hippie bitch comes into his boy’s life.
He is an old man now. His hair is white. But the old Red is still there.
They think they can kill me?
I’m hard to kill.
Red picks himself up off the linen-closet floor where he has been recovering. He limps to the room next to the library. Smoke is everywhere. The house is on fire. He finds the first-aid kit. He looks at the shotgun wound in his side. He’s had worse. Worse in that gun battle with hoods in ’77. Worse when a collection went wrong in Revere in ’85.
A younger man then, though. A much younger man.
He’s bleeding bad. Red the bandages. Red the lint. He limps to the gun rack. There’s yelling and shooting coming from the old abattoir outside.
He gets himself an M16 with an underslung M203 grenade launcher.
The only weapon to choose when you need something more convincing.
He staggers to the kitchen, coughing in the thick black smoke.
The hurt is incredible. At least four broken ribs and probably a punctured lung. But he’ll get through it. Red would get through it and he’s still Red even if his hair is white.
He staggers out into the blizzard and shuffles toward the back of the old slaughterhouse.
One step at a time through searing pain.
He blinks the snow out of his eyes.
It’s only fifty feet but it might as well be fifty yards.
He is reduced to crawling. His outbreaths are frothing blood. Definitely a punctured lung.
He reaches the rear door of the abattoir. The death entrance.
Red on the dirt. Red the handrail and the snow.
Breathing is hard. He has only one working lung and that is filling with blood too.
He climbs the last concrete step and peers over the lip of the back door.
The arc light is on and he can see everything.
There are his two beloved grandchildren dead on the floor. The kids he’d rescued all those years ago. The only ones who ever really loved him or understood him. Olly and Ginger in the world of red.
That woman is there, huddled with the two kids under a tarp. Marty and another man are lying on the floor next to them—both, apparently, still alive. Not for long.
Red raises the M16 and puts his finger on the trigger of the underslung grenade launcher. It is loaded with an armor-piercing high-explosive grenade that will kill everyone in the room. Probably including him.
That’s good, he thinks, and he pulls the trigger.
75
People talking from a long way off. Something cold and wet falling on his face.
Where is he?
Oh yeah.
Blacked out for a second there. Marty is talking to him. Trying to lift him up. Rachel is holding Kylie and Stuart.
Pete’s holding his .45. He looks along the line of the floor and sees Daniel at the back entrance of the abattoir at the same time that Daniel sees him. The old man has an M16 with a grenade-launcher attachment.
Rachel’s wrong. It is deep stuff. It is mythology. Old versus young, army versus navy, catharsis versus chaos. Clearly the god of war is keeping one of them alive just for his own amusement.
Both of them pull their triggers. The old man pulls his first and he has only the briefest moment of confusion when t
he metal trigger stays in place. Confusion and then realization: He forgot to flick off the manual safety on the M203 grenade launcher. The M203 is dangerous. You can’t have it going off willy-nilly. It needs to be armed and the safety switched off by hand.
Shit.
He fumbles for the clunky safety catch for a split second before Pete’s gun barrel flares a brilliant white and Daniel’s chest explodes in pain and fire and his soul is cleaved by a slug from a World War II .45.
76
Shapes. Sirens. Snow.
A blanket.
“I’m sorry, Pete, but this place is going up in flames. We gotta get you outside.”
Rachel, Kylie, and Stuart help Marty and Pete across the abattoir floor to the exit.
They stagger away from the burning building and collapse in the snow. Behind them, bottled gas tanks under the kitchen begin exploding.
“Come on!” Rachel says and carries and drags them farther away from the property.
Blue flames.
Snowflakes.
Flashing lights.
A Miskatonic River Valley fire engine is coming up the road. The word Fire is spelled out mirror-backward above a big yellow arrow.
Rachel nods.
Three dead foxes and the yellow arrow at last. Deliverance finally at hand.
Pete beckons Rachel close.
“Yes?”
“If I don’t make it, don’t let them cast some asshole to play me in the movie version of this,” he croaks.
She grins and kisses him.
“One more thing,” he says, but his voice dies in his throat.
“Me too,” she agrees and kisses him again.
77
No one is going to play Pete in the movie version of this. Pete is far too controversial a figure for a movie. After their confessions, Pete and Rachel are charged with felony kidnapping, false imprisonment, and child endangerment. For that alone it’s fifty years in prison.
And then there’s the little expedition to Innsmouth. Was that a vigilante rescue attempt or a home invasion?
It has taken a long time to sort everything out.
It has taken a team of federal agents weeks to fully analyze The Chain documents they found on Ginger’s hard drive.
It has taken the Dunleavy family to heroically step forward and tell the police that Rachel took Amelia with their consent because she told them that she was going to break The Chain. That explains the money too. The cops don’t believe a word of it, but it’s clear that the Dunleavys are going to be hostile witnesses for any prosecution.
By this time, the tide of compassion is fully with Rachel and Pete and all the victims of The Chain. The public is overwhelmingly behind them; Rachel and Pete are sympathetic defendants, and there’s a high probability of jury nullification. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office can see which way the wind is blowing. Rachel and Pete are released from custody pending further inquiries. And without the Dunleavy family testifying against them, with the public on their side, and with Ginger’s career of evil becoming more and more apparent, Rachel’s lawyers tell her that an expensive, unpopular trial now looks very unlikely indeed. Rachel has killed the monster. The Chain has been stopped forever and everyone who was a link in that chain has been freed.
The history of The Chain itself is being investigated by dozens of reporters. A journalist from the Boston Globe discovers its roots in a substitute-kidnapping scheme that began in Mexico.
There are hundreds of victims of The Chain but the fear of retaliation and the occasional brutal, bloody reprisal were enough to keep almost all of them quiet over the years.
That, anyway, is what Rachel has read in the press. That’s the Globe summary. There are more sensational accounts in the tabloids and on the internet. But for self-preservation, Rachel doesn’t read the tabloids and she hasn’t really gone on the internet since she’s been released from custody.
Rachel doesn’t give interviews; she avoids the limelight; she doesn’t do anything much but pick up her daughter from school and write her community-college philosophy lectures, and eventually, through these prudent un-twenty-first-century measures, she becomes old news.
Gradually she’s no longer a trending topic on Twitter or Instagram. Some other poor devil has come along to take her place. And then another one will come along after that. And then another. It’s all very familiar…
In Newburyport she’s still recognized—how could she not be?—but when she drives up to the malls in New Hampshire or into the Boston suburbs, she’s anonymous again and that’s the way she likes it.
A sunny morning in late March.
Rachel is in bed with her laptop. She deletes the twenty new requests from her e-mail inbox asking for interviews and closes the computer. Pete is next door in the shower. Singing. Badly.
She smiles. Pete is doing really great now on his methadone program and at his brand-new job as a security consultant for a high-tech firm in Cambridge. She walks barefoot into the kitchen, lights the stove, fills the kettle, and puts the water on to boil.
Upstairs, she can hear the occasional ping of Kylie’s iPad. Kylie’s awake and hunkered under the sheets, chatting with her friends. Kylie is also doing amazingly well. They always say that kids are resilient and can bounce back from trauma, but it’s still incredible to see how high she is bouncing back.
At eight o’clock, Stuart comes by and she gives him a hug and he sits there petting the cat, waiting patiently for Kylie to be ready. Stuart also is doing great, and out of all of them he seems to be the one digging the fame the most. Although Marty also appears to be enjoying all the attention. He has popped up on the TV several times to talk about his experiences. And with each telling, his own role in the rescue has become a little bit more extravagant. Marty is all right and his new, very young girlfriend, Julie, seems to believe that they are all in some kind of romcom together in which Rachel, the gloomy first wife, will eventually be won over by her effervescent charms.
Rachel sits down at the dining-room table and opens her laptop again. Her thoughts drift. She thumbs through Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café and is momentarily taken aback by a striking picture of Simone de Beauvoir wearing a brooch in the shape of a labyrinth.
She shuts the book and waves at Dr. Havercamp as he walks through the reeds to pump the bilge from his boat.
“Trying to start this lecture with a joke, Stuart. How does this sound? ‘My friend is opening a bookstore to sell German philosophy texts. I told him it wouldn’t work—it’s too much of a Nietzsche market,’” Rachel says with a look of triumph.
Stuart grimaces.
“Not good?” Rachel asks.
“I’m not really qualified to judge the, uh…”
“What he’s trying to say, Mother, is that your comedy stylings skew to an older demographic,” Kylie says, leaning over the balcony rail.
Pete comes out of the shower and shakes his head. “I hope your plan B isn’t a career in stand-up,” he says.
“To hell with all of you!” Rachel says and shuts the laptop.
When everyone’s ready they go out to the car, and since they’re early for school, they swing by Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 1.
Rachel looks at her daughter as she takes a bite of a bear claw. Kylie and Stuart are arguing about spoilers for season three of Stranger Things. This is nearly the old, carefree, bullshitty Kylie again. The splinter will always be there, of course. The darkness. They’ll never quite be able to get that out. It’s part of her now, part of all of them. But the bed-wetting has stopped and the bad dreams are fewer. And that’s something.
“OK, here’s one that’s a winner. How many hipsters does it take to change a light bulb?” she asks.
“Mom, don’t! Please. Don’t even!” Kylie pleads.
“How many?” Stuart asks.
“It’s a pretty obscure number, you’ve probably never heard of it,” Rachel says, and at least Pete grins.
She leaves the kids at school an
d she drops Pete at the commuter-rail stop in Newburyport. His new job requires him to wear a suit and he hates that. He is continually fussing with his tie.
“Leave it alone! You look fabulous,” she says and means it.
When his train comes, she walks back to the Volvo, drives into town, and goes straight to the Walgreens. She checks that Mary Anne, the cashier she knows, isn’t working, and she slinks down the aisles to the pregnancy-test-kit section.
There’s a baffling number of choices. She grabs a kit more or less at random and takes it to the counter.
The cashier is a high-school-age girl whose name tag claims that she’s Ripley. She’s reading Moby-Dick.
She doesn’t appear to be at the “devious-cruising Rachel” bit. Their eyes meet.
“What chapter are you on?” Rachel asks.
“Seventy-six.”
“A man once told me that all books should end at chapter seventy-seven.”
“God, I wish this one did. I have loads to go. Hey, um, you should probably get the Clearblue kit,” the girl says.
“The Clearblue?”
“You think you’re saving money by getting the FastResponse. But the FastResponse has a higher rate of false positives.” She lowers her voice. “I speak from experience.”
“I’ll get the Clearblue,” Rachel says.
She pays for the kit, gets another coffee from the Starbucks on State Street, and drives back to the island.
She goes to the bathroom, takes the kit out of the box, reads the instructions, urinates on the stick over the toilet bowl, and puts the stick back in the box.
It’s surprisingly warm for March, so she takes the box and goes outside and sits on the edge of the deck with her feet dangling above the sand.
The tide’s in. The smell of the sea is strong. Wisps of heat are rising above the big houses on the Atlantic side. A gawking white heron wades among the weeds as a hawk flies westward toward the mainland.
Fishing boats. Crabbers. The lazy bark of a dog down near the convenience store.
She feels the force of the metaphors—comfort, stability, safety.
The Chain Page 29