Other Side of the Woods

by Koontz, Dean

  If I tried to run, they would know that I was not a faithful attendee at the altar of their asylum, and I would never get through the roadblock alive.

  I had the pistol, and I could make a valiant stand, but it was two against one, and I wouldn’t get a chance to let Penny Annie Oakley out of the trunk to help me defend our little piece of the American dream.

  In spite of my reputed flaming optimism, I concluded that we were screwed. Lassie’s growling in the backseat seemed to confirm my judgment, and I heard myself chanting over and over a four-letter synonym for poop.

  He closed to within fifty yards as I ransacked my brain for strategy. To forty yards … to thirty … to twenty. Ten.

  Then an inexplicable but not unwelcome event occurred.

  In my rearview mirror, I saw the southbound Explorer abruptly swing hard left, into the northbound lane, as though to avoid a collision with something that had bounded into the driver’s path, such as a leaping deer, though there was no deer nor anything else from which he needed to swerve.

  At risk of crashing into the trees that crowded close to the pavement, the driver braked hard and pulled the wheel to the right. Considering that he had been accelerating when he made his first sudden change of course and that he was on a downhill run, this maneuver proved too extreme, and the Explorer tipped precariously to port as it came back across the pavement toward the southbound lane.

  Careening off the road just where an embankment rose, the driver turned hard left again, ran along the slope at an angle that was not sustainable, wrestled the SUV back onto the pavement, but then shot across the southbound lane into the northbound once more, this time listing wildly to starboard.

  He seemed to have gone from sobriety to extreme inebriation in an instant, or perhaps they were transporting a beehive for some nefarious purpose and the wee critters suddenly erupted in a rage, mercilessly stinging Blockhead and his companion.

  Rapt by this spectacle, I almost made a lethal error. Switching my attention back and forth between the road ahead and the mirrors, I braked gently and reduced my speed to compensate for the distraction.

  Blockhead pulled his steering wheel too hard to the right again but also seemed to tramp on the accelerator when he wanted the brake. The heroic Explorer could endure no more, and it leaned disastrously toward port, went over, and completed a wonderfully destructive 360-degree roll.

  Because we were on a downhill run and because gravity will always have its way, the Explorer didn’t lose speed in its tumble but came on as fast as ever as it rolled again—directly toward me.

  I might have squealed, I’m not sure, but I swung the sedan to the right, onto the shoulder, but found room to get only half the car off the pavement.

  Half proved enough, and the Explorer tumbled past as it came out of its second roll and with great exuberance executed a third.

  I braked to a full stop and sat transfixed by the sight of the SUV rolling again and again, and yet again, down the hill, scattering pieces of itself in its wake. Finally the vehicle tumbled off the farther side of the road, ricocheted off a tree, caromed off another tree, and knocked this way and that into the woods, as if Mother Nature had decided to have a game of pinball.

  By the time the Explorer came to a stop, both occupants were most likely dead, but for sure neither of them would be dancing by Christmas.

  I suppose a good Samaritan would have hurried to the crash site and provided tender care to the survivors, if any.

  After I considered what these people had done to the Landulf and Clitherow families—and what they hoped to do to mine—I found myself driving past the scene with a clear conscience. And if I spent 705 years in Purgatory instead of 704—well, I would just have to cope.

  I drove on for perhaps half a mile in a daze.

  Only then did I realize that Lassie no longer occupied the back of the sedan. At some point during the death plunge of the SUV, she must have clambered into the front. She perched now in the passenger seat, riding shotgun, gazing at the highway ahead with keen interest.

  Less than five minutes after Blockhead and his nameless sidekick arrived at the pearly gates with résumés that made Saint Peter call for the celestial security guards, I topped another rise and looked down another slope at a roadblock formed by two sheriffs-department cars parked nose to nose.

  Although frightened, I was not a fraction as terrified as when we were playing let’s-shoot-each-other-in-the-head at the Landulf house. I had been through so much in the past seventy-two hours that I earned my good-scout medal for nerves of steel and was working on my titanium certification.

  In fact, I have to admit that I got a cheap thrill from the fact that this police roadblock was in my honor. All my life, I had been a good boy, living by the rules: making my bed each morning, flossing my teeth twice a day, eating my vegetables dutifully…. When I was a lad and then a single young man, all those girls who liked bad boys— which, strangely enough, seemed to be most of them—thought of me as a boring nerd, or thought of me not at all. If they could see me now—head shaved, carrying an unregistered concealed weapon, driving a vehicle stolen from a federal agent—they would swoon, become giddy with desire, and perhaps even throw their panties at me as if I were a rock star.

  In truth, of course, I remained a good boy, trying my best to do the right thing. In this inverted world of the twenty-first century, the authorities were the unprincipled thugs, and the armed fugitive in the stolen car was a churchgoing family man who had a dog named Lassie.

  As we approached the roadblock, I worried that having a dog beside me would blow my cover, but I didn’t want the sheriff’s deputies to see me stop and put her in the trunk. Then I decided that a psychopathic agent for a psychopathic federal agency might well have a service dog to assist him in chasing down and savaging the innocent.

  That scenario would have been more plausible if Lassie were a Doberman or a German shepherd, weighed a hundred pounds more than she did, and were foaming at the mouth with rabies. But she was what she was, and I came slowly to a stop at the barricade with every intention of claiming that beside me sat a canine as highly trained as a circus bear and a thousand times more dangerous.

  The four men manning the roadblock were uniformed sheriffs-department deputies. They looked wholesome, earnest, and sane. Two of them were leaning against the back end of a patrol car, drinking coffee and chatting.

  Earlier, in the cellar of the Landulf house, Shearman Waxx told Brock that because he needed every man under his command to conduct the search for us, the two roadblocks would be manned solely by sheriffs-department personnel, and for once he was not lying like a snake in Eden. No plainclothes goons were in sight.

  I was prepared to flash Rink’s badge and ID, held so that one of my fingers covered his face in the photo, but the deputy at the point position reacted to the triskelion on the windshield and waved me around the barricade without delay.

  The shoulder of the road was wide here, with sufficient room on the right to squeeze past the patrol cars, once the two deputies with the coffee cups politely moved out of my way. I almost gave them a thumbs-up sign, but then decided that might get me shot. Instead I remained stone-faced and ignored them, as I imagined an arrogant fed might disdain members of a rural police force, whom he regarded as hicks.

  Perhaps eighty feet beyond the roadblock, a man walked in the northbound lane. Although his back was to me, I recognized Shearman Waxx. Ahead of him, past a couple of stone pines, off the road in a rest stop with a graveled area for parking and two picnic tables on a grassy sward, stood the black Hummer.

  He must have been recently conferring with the four deputies. If I had arrived at the barricade two minutes sooner, Waxx would have recognized Lassie. Then the dog, Milo, Penny, and I would have been on our way to a torture chamber and thereafter to a wood chipper.

  My initial impulse was to run him down and then stand on the accelerator, racing into the misty morning with the hope that, before a sheriffs-department
cruiser caught up with us, an alien ship from a faraway star would levitate us into its cargo hold and whisk us away to be studied.

  Repressing that urge, I did something riskier than hit-and-run. As Waxx opened the driver’s door and climbed into the Hummer, I drove into the rest area and parked twenty feet behind him, where the stone pines partially screened the sedan from the men at the roadblock.

  I could discern his silhouette in the driver’s seat. He was alone in the Hummer, having assigned the three other men at Landulf’s house to the search for us.

  On the night Tray Durant murdered my family, when spared from death, I was six years old. Now Milo, six years old, condemned by the order of Shearman Waxx, was mine to save or lose. Driven by intuition, we had come north less on the run than on the hunt for information that might empower us. In the mysterious roundness of all things, Waxx might here be delivered into my hands, as I had been delivered from the hands of Tray.

  Lassie curled up on the passenger seat to take a nap, and I got out of the car, wiping my face with one hand as if I were weary from long hours of committing whatever monstrous crimes one of the people-of-the-red-arms committed on an average workday. Turning my back to the Hummer, I raised my arms high, stretched elaborately, and finally sauntered around to the back of the sedan.

  When I opened the trunk, Penny said excitedly, incoherently, “Lassie, she was here— The lid closed— Panting in the dark— She was— Then she—”

  “Later, later, later,” I insisted, taking her by the arm as she clambered out of the trunk. “Crouch down, use the raised lid as cover, Waxx is sitting in the Hummer like twenty feet away.”

  Milo popped out of the trunk as if on a spring and huddled with his mother.

  In perhaps twenty seconds or less, I told them what we were going to do.

  Milo said, “Cool,” and Penny said, “Oh, my God,” and leaving the trunk lid raised, I walked around the sedan and headed for the Hummer.

  I approached the vehicle with my bald head down, as if brooding about a problem. I drew my pistol only as I reached the driver’s door and yanked it open.

  Evidently, Waxx hadn’t been watching me, as I feared. Surprised, he looked up from a BlackBerry, on which he was composing a text message.

  Jamming the muzzle of the .45 into his side, I said, “Believe me, one wrong move, and I’ll kill you with great pleasure.”

  He switched off the BlackBerry and started to put it on the dashboard.

  “No,” I said, and held out my hand.

  When he gave it to me, I threw it hard to the ground, stomped it twice, and kicked it away.

  “Imagine there’s a bomb strapped to you,” I said, “and it’s got such a delicate trigger mechanism, any quick move will blow you to Hell.” I backed off a step. “Now get out.”

  He appeared calm, but fury teemed in his maroon eyes.

  I expected him to throw himself at me and try to seize my gun, but maybe he was a guy who took chances only after he had already stacked the deck.

  At any moment, someone could drive into the rest stop and see me apparently robbing a respectable-looking gentleman. The deputies at the roadblock were partially screened from us by the stone pines, but they were within hailing distance.

  When Waxx was out of the Hummer, I said, “Open the back door.”

  He did as he was told—and was surprised again when Penny swung up and into the backseat through the opposite door and pulled it shut behind her.

  As she covered him with her pistol, I pressed mine against his spine and said, “She’s handled guns all her life. She shot Rink from thirty feet and put the first round through his carotid artery.”

  To Waxx, Penny said, “I want to kill you worse than Cubby does. Keep that in mind as you’re getting in.”

  He climbed into the backseat beside her, and I closed the door after him.

  Holstering the .45, I hurried around to the other side of the vehicle, where Milo waited with Lassie.

  I opened the passenger door and boosted the boy into the front seat. Lassie allowed herself to be lifted onto his lap.

  After closing the door, I went around to the back, where Penny had left the suitcase and where Milo had put down the sack of stuff that we took from the Mountaineer before abandoning it. I opened the tailgate and stowed our things.

  The immense cargo space already contained a large black suitcase with stainless-steel fittings. The luggage intrigued me. It did not appear to be a bag that contained only a few clean shirts and changes of underwear, but this wasn’t the time to explore its contents.

  A moment later, I settled into the driver’s seat. The key was in the ignition, and I started the engine.

  The huge wraparound windshield not only provided an excellent view but also made me feel that I was less a driver than a pilot, and king of the road.

  As we headed north, Waxx said, “You’re all as dead as Rink and Shucker.”

  “Shut up, asshole,” Penny said, not as the author of The Other Side of the Woods might have said it, not as either the mice or the owl in that story might have said it, but rather like Joe Pesci, playing a sociopath in a movie like Goodfellas, would have said it.

  Milo’s eyes were as round and as large as any owl’s when he whispered, “Dad, did you hear that word?”

  I said, “Which word do you mean—shut or up?”

  The motto of Titus Springs was definitely not “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” According to the sign at the town limits, the population was 1,500, but that probably included the out-of-towners who had been abducted and locked in the basements of some of the community’s more colorful citizens, to serve as unconventional pets or as blood sacrifices the next time the weather gods withheld rain for too long.

  Because the town served as the commercial hub for a score of even smaller towns and surrounding rural residents, there were more shopping opportunities than I expected, including a large locally owned hardware store that sold everything from horseshoes to nail guns to cattle prods to curling irons, from calendars of scantily clad women holding a variety of tools to forty kinds of hammers.

  They offered numerous styles and gauges of chain, which they sold by the foot off large drum dispensers. I bought twenty feet of a sturdy chain, a bolt cutter, eight padlocks keyed the same, a roll of wide duct tape, scissors, a package of cotton rags, and a blanket.

  The clerk at the checkout was a gangly young man with a crane’s neck, a large Adam’s apple, a rat’s-nest beard, yellow teeth, and Charles Manson eyes. After he rang up the items and before he hit the TOTAL key on the register, he said, “You want some chloroform with that?”

  I stared at him a moment and then said, “What?”

  Scratching his beard with long bony fingers, he said, “To make her easier to handle while you’re chaining her down.”

  This time I was speechless.

  He laughed and waved his hand dismissively “Sorry, mister. Don’t mind me. I’ve got the best sense of humor in the family. If I’m not careful, Uncle Frank’s gonna pull me off the register and make me stockboy again.”

  “Oh,” I said, forcing a smile, then a small laugh. “I see what you mean—chains, padlocks, duct tape. Pretty funny.”

  Suddenly deadpan again, he said, “So you want that chloroform or not?”

  I half thought he would produce a bottle of the stuff if I asked for it. But I laughed again, said “Not,” and he hit the TOTAL key.

  The windows of the old church were boarded up, and weeds grew from cracks in the walkway and in the front steps.

  The gravel parking lot behind the building was not visible from the highway out front, and it backed up to rolling fields with no other structures in sight.

  Milo and Lassie remained in the front seat, but the rest of us got out of the Hummer.

  At my instruction, Waxx put his wallet and the contents of his pockets in the empty hardware-store bag.

  I ordered him to lie on his back, and he refused to complain about the grave
l, though his eyes told the whole story of what he wanted to do to me, starting with the extraction of all my teeth using pliers and a ball-peen hammer.

  As Penny stood aside from Waxx, covering him with her gun, I told her, “If you see some guy coming, he’s barefoot and buck-toothed and carrying a banjo, wound him first and ask questions later.”

  “This place isn’t all that Deliverance.”

  “Yeah? You didn’t meet Uncle Frank’s nephew, he’s got the best sense of humor in the family.”

  With a length of chain and two padlocks, I fitted Shearman Waxx with shackles, allowing enough slack for him to shuffle but not to run.

  Next, I shackled his hands together in front of him, not behind, and left a comfortable but cautious foot of chain between his wrists.

  Previously, I transferred our gear from the cargo space to the backseat. Waxx’s black suitcase stood on the ground by the Hummer.

  Chained, he had some difficulty getting to his feet.

  At last I assisted him, and he glared at me as if my assistance might be another reason to mutilate and murder me.

  I made him lie faceup in the Hummer’s cargo space, head toward the backseat.

  Penny stood at the open tailgate, her pistol aimed at Waxx’s crotch. As I worked, they got into a staring contest that neither of them would break.

  Flip-up metal rings were recessed in the carpeted floor of the Hummer. Items could be secured to the rings to prevent them from shifting during transit.

  With additional lengths of chain, I padlocked Waxx’s wrist shackles to one of those anchors, his ankle shackles to another.

  When that task was completed, Penny put her pistol away, and we opened the black bag with the stainless-steel fixtures.

  In an aluminum case within the suitcase, we found a formidable pistol with two spare magazines, a screw-on sound suppressor, and a shoulder rig.

  Penny fitted the silencer to the barrel, stepped away from the Hummer, and fired two shots at one of the boarded-up windows of the church. The cracking plywood made a lot more noise than the weapon.