The sound of splintering wood sliced through his reverie like a straight razor drawn carelessly across an unsuspecting cheek; fear welled into his throat.
SHE WAS COMING TO FINISH HIM OFF....
Clay quickly rolled onto his stomach, drew his knees into the snow and painfully levered himself upright.
His left arm was a massive ache; he couldn’t move it. His head throbbed and when he moved his jaw, the jagged edge of a shattered molar cut the inside of his cheek. He tried to raise his left arm. Pain brought waves of nausea rolling over him. He started to vomit but nothing came up. Glancing down he saw his left arm hanging uselessly by his side, the hand facing outward at an unnatural angle.
A board cracked again and he looked up towards the house.
The child stood on the front porch in the waning light, a sadistic grin on her face, eyes glowing with a ferocity and maliciousness that both angered and terrified him.
His right hand whipped down and swept the parka aside as he snatched the Glock from its holster with a speed that would have rivaled some of the best gunfighters in the old west. Panting hard, he spit the blood and pieces of teeth from his mouth as he faced her. He jammed the pistol hard against his hip to try to yank the slide back and remembered there was a shell already in the chamber from earlier.
“I don’t know WHO the hell you are or WHAT the hell you are, but if you don’t stay WHERE the hell you are...I’ll blow your little ass to Kingdom Come!” he screamed through battered and swollen lips.
She smiled, a horrible patronizing type of grin, and stepped forward onto the broken screen door lying on the porch. As she moved forward to the top of the steps, she sealed her fate.
Grimacing in pain at the movement, Clay extended the pistol, aimed and rapidly squeezed off three shots. The weapon bucked violently in his hand. The explosions from the .45 sounded like cannons in his ears, the sound both magnified and multiplied as the sharp cracks of the weapon echoed off the trees, building and mountains, and bounced further down into the valley.
The bullets seemed to hit the girl almost simultaneously, the first punching through her chest, the second ripping a hole in her throat, and the third tearing a sizable chunk out of her shoulder. She reeled backwards through the doorway.
Her small body crashed somewhere inside and, for a moment, Clay felt an unholy satisfaction; it was quickly followed by a gut-wrenching sickness. He had shot a child!
He had killed a little girl!
MOTHER OF GOD...WHAT HAVE I DONE?
His head began to spin, his legs gave way and he sank to his knees in the snow. He waited until the mental merry-go-round stopped, then got unsteadily to his feet. Fear drove him into action.
Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he could still save her, get her to a hospital in time. Maybe his slug hadn’t really hit her dead center. He bent over in the snow and threw up.
Praying that he’d actually missed his aim, he began to limp towards the steps to save her.
HE CLUTCHED THE PISTOL WITH A DEATH GRIP....
He stumbled up the wooden stairs, booted the remnants of the splintered screen door to the side and made his way across the porch mouthing a silent prayer he’d find her alive.
HE LOOKED DOWN AT THE PISTOL TO ENSURE IT HADN’T JAMMED; THE SLIDE WAS CLOSED, ANOTHER BULLET WAITING PATIENTLY IN THE FIRING CHAMBER....
Cautiously, Clay moved forward. No blood, a good sign. Still, he prepared himself for the sight of the tiny, wasted body lying on its back in the foyer, her chest a mass of blood, her eyes staring unseeingly at the ceiling. Or would he find her in a twisted, convulsing heap, throat torn open and leaking crimson, head askew and nerves still making her tiny body crawl and twist and jerk as she moaned in agony? Sickened, he shuddered and entered the house.
As his eyes adjusted to the inner darkness of the foyer, he mentally prepared himself for the end of his career. There could be no justification for shooting an unarmed child. Plain and simple, he was wrong. No matter how spooked he was, no matter how frightened, nothing could make it right; no-one could grant him absolution on this one. He’d be lucky if he didn’t spend his remaining years doing hard time in prison.
He stared in the doorway.
She was gone!
There was no body!
He’d missed...all three shots!
A wave of joy and gratitude welled up inside him. Thank you Lord.
HE SPUN ABOUT...PISTOL AT THE READY...!
Satisfied there was nothing there, he breathed a sigh of relief. His thankfulness was abruptly replaced with a measure of disbelief that he’d missed all three shots. He’d seen them hit her.
OR WAS IT WISHFUL THINKING...?
A new thought sobered him.
Maybe she was wounded. Maybe she had dragged herself away to one of the other rooms where she now lay dying from shock as she bled out.
Clay spotted his flashlight in the foyer over near the wall. Its halogen beam cut a neat swathe through the dark lighting dirt and old pieces of wood on the floor. He’d need the light to check inside for a blood trail. All he had to do was cross the foyer and pick it up.
He tried to step forward.
His legs refused to budge.
It was as though his body was acknowledging what his mind refused to accept; namely that walking through that doorway could, in all probability, be a death sentence.
Face it! Somewhere in that house was an insane SOMETHING that took three direct hits from one of the most powerful handguns in the world and walked away. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be from this world.
This is silly, Clay told himself sternly. There is nothing supernatural here. After all, he’d read of dozens of stories about people who had displayed abnormal strength when an emergency or a life-threatening situation occurred; a man lifted a car weighting more than two thousand pounds off his son; a girl held back a streetcar with her bare hands because her sister had fallen in front of it; and the countless hypnotic acts, scientifically verified, which showed people, placed in the right frame of mind, performing incredible physical stunts
“What kind of a cop am I?” he muttered aloud. “There’s a mortally wounded child inside and I’m standing out here spooked out of my mind.”
He swallowed, vowed to enter the house and immediately felt an unreasonable amount of trepidation returning.
Who was he trying to fool? This wasn’t an ordinary child. It was a horror straight out of a Marvel comic book. Its eyes glowed in the dark, it had the strength of ten men and it was hoarding a refrigerator full of blood.
NOT EXACTLY YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY THIRD-GRADER.
Clay took a deep breath and leaned back against one of the porch railing supports. His adrenaline level was falling, his heartbeat returning to a semblance of normality. As it did, the pain of his broken arm became more intense. He groaned and winced with every breath he took. Even a slight movement caused waves of agony to radiate through the arm. Before he did anything else, it had to be restrained in some fashion.
Maintaining a careful eye on the front door, Clay carefully shrugged out of his parka and dropped it by his feet.
There was a small tear in the left sleeve of his uniform and he hooked the barrel of the .45 in the hole and pulled downward to rip it open.
The sleeve parted and he almost fainted from the pain the movement generated. Swallowing bile, he examined the arm awkwardly.
The fracture was about six inches below the elbow, almost midway to the wrist. Massive swelling had enlarged it to almost twice its size and it was already turning purple mixed with angry striations of red.
At least it wasn’t a compound fracture, he thought. The bone hadn’t broken the surface of the skin. Thank God for small favors.
Holding his weapon under his good arm, he loosened the belt of his pants, gritted his teeth and slipped the broken arm between the belt and his hip. He fastened it as tight as he dared, thereby pinning the arm by his side and minimizing its movement.
Feeling more in control
Clay got a fresh grip on his gun. He knew he’d fired three rounds and that meant he had seven more. The clip would be impossible to top up with cartridges from his gun belt with one hand. Even getting the spare clip out of his pouch would cost him great pain. He decided against it.
Before he went inside, he had to get his psyche under control. A clear-thinking pragmatist by nature, Clay was usually a good man in a crisis. He told himself that now was not the time to join the lunatic fringe and assume he was hunting a ghost.
Sure, there were extraordinary circumstances...but certainly nothing that couldn’t be explained logically. Frightened by the appearance of a strange man in the house, and fearing God knows what sort of abuse, the child had gone berserk and attacked him.
Case closed.
It was his own, unreasonable over-reaction that now sickened him. Throughout his military experiences, his time with the highway patrol, and as sheriff in Woodstrom County, he’d never been that spooked, never felt fear that intense, nor lost control as he had when he’d drawn his weapon and fired at the little girl.
Whatever. He had to do the right thing and it was time to do it.
Clay stifled a desire to yell for his deputy. If Hitch hadn’t appeared with the sound of gunfire, he was probably in trouble himself. Maybe she was with her family right now. He had to find the little girl, assess her condition and get help. He also had to find his deputy.
Steeling his nerves, he brought the weapon level and forced himself to step through the doorway. Crouching in an awkward semblance of a combat stance, he painfully spun to the left and right with the pistol swinging to cover his field of vision. He reminded himself he had to be ready to render first aid if needed.
HIS FINGER TENSED ON THE TRIGGER...!
The foyer proved to be empty.
In his mind, a small voice nagged him, pointing out the seeming cross purpose of his mission of mercy; here he was looking to help the child and yet, if she appeared, he was primed to start shooting again.
He pushed the though aside. One couldn’t be too careful.
ESPECIALLY IF THE LITTLE BITCH WAS STILL BREATHING...!
He carefully scanned the darkened foyer as thoroughly as he could.
Nothing moved.
Slowly, gingerly, he knelt and picked up the flashlight. Unable to hold the .45 and the flashlight in the same hand, he carefully worked it under his left armpit. The pinned arm throbbed fiercely but held the light securely in place.
He checked the floor and walls of the foyer. There was no more blood anywhere; in fact, no sign of the girl at all. He checked all rooms downstairs, noting again that a long hallway led off the dining room towards the east wing and another into the west wing.
If she was hit even once, she would have bled like a stuck pig, he thought. Not to mention shock. She’d never make it down the hall nor up the stairs. So why no blood? Where was the girl?
Clay entered the kitchen and tried to open the French door leading to the backyard. The stubborn lock refused to release.
Finally he stepped back, aimed, fired and blew the lock and part of the door away. Three small window panes cracked from the shock. The door swung open flooding the room with a frigid blast of air. A huge yellow moon was just peaking over the low, shadowy mountains. It threw a pale beige light across the stone patio, its luminescence glinting off the ice-covered swimming pool.
The echo of the shot died away. Clay listened for sounds from the rest of the house.
Nothing but silence! Where was Hitch?
The wind blew a thin veil of snow inside the kitchen and he could hear the trees rustling and smell the crisp, clean air tainted slightly by the pungent odor of the pines. It was bizarre; everything smelled so natural and yet the reality of the situation was totally unnatural. If he could just find Hitch, maybe life would return to normal. New waves of pain invaded his back, his side, his head, arm and knees.
He looked to his Glock.
IF HE MET SOMETHING HE DIDN’T LIKE, HE’D GREET IT APPRO PRIATELY.
Pushing the pain aside he stepped out onto the patio, slipped and barely caught himself before he fell. Nevertheless, he jarred his arm and more intense stabs of pain pulsed up through his shoulder and across his back. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He was nauseated. He was shivering in the cold night air. His stomach was rolling and churning from the pain. Groaning aloud he called on his years of military and police training to force himself to concentrate on the task at hand.
Moving across the patio, he noted the headless statues near the pool. In the twilight they were becoming grim, indistinct shadows, some with half-broken limbs extended towards him as if in supplication.
He yelled: “Hitch!”
“HITCH.......Hitch...hitch....”
His voice resonated through the mountains with the echo seeming to mock him.
He tried again: “Hitch...if you’re hurt...if you can’t shout...fire a shot!”
“...FIRE A SHOT...Fire a shot...fire a shot...!”
The echo finally faded. Silence returned.
After listening for a moment, Clay cursed and went carefully down the stone steps into the backyard. He was becoming more afraid for his friend with each passing second. If Hitch had encountered that crazy – he hesitated to use the word “child” – and she chose to go berserk again, she could just as easily have torn his head off.
He debated going for help.
But his deputy might be lying wounded someplace, needing immediate attention. Getting through on the radio was highly unlikely, so going for help might mean an hour or more before he got back.
He ruled that option out. He refused to abandon his friend.
In the yard, he found himself knee-deep in virgin snow. He could barely make out a single set of footprints, their depth already half filled by the thick flakes that were making it more and more difficult to see.
He stared at the prints leading to the angled wooden doors atop a frame set on a pile of earth. Root cellar? One door was covered with deep snow; the other was quickly assuming a new mantle of white. Obviously it had been disturbed. Maybe Hitch was trapped down there. Any sounds he tried to make would surely be muffled by the earth and doors.
“That’s where you are, my friend,” he said aloud, relief flooding through him despite his pain.
He spit blood and tried to avoid jostling his throbbing arm as he slogged through the snow over to the cellar entrance.
There was a pile of snow adjacent to the bare door. Hitch had probably dislodged this snow as he pulled up the doors.
Clay reluctantly holstered his pistol, then reached down, grabbed the handle and pulled with all his might. The door came up a few inches and then a tremendous weight dragged it back down with a thud. With his bad arm on fire, he sank back panting from the exertion. He tried again, at the same time calling the deputy’s name.
There was no response from below and once more he was only able to raise the door a few inches before it slammed back down. And again he was rewarded by needles of agony shooting up the arm, into his neck and face, and radiating across his shoulders and back.
Each time he tried to open the door, it was almost as though someone was dragging it closed trying to prevent him from accessing the cellar. Maybe Hitch was being held prisoner down there.
Clay toyed with the idea of banging on the heavy wooden covering but quickly discarded it. He could illicit a fusillade of shots from the captors. And, if he returned fire, Hitch could be hit.
A momentary vision of the child waiting patiently in the dark below flashed through his mind and he felt a tangible manifestation of fear in his gut. He was also trembling from the pain now and feeling third spaced. Could he be going into shock? After a few deep breaths, he shrugged aside any concerns for himself. If Hitch was down there, Clay was going to get him out!
Using the fuel of his pent-up anger, his desperate need to find his friend, and the fear associated with encountering something which defied logic and reason, Clay desperately gr
abbed the handle with his good arm. Bracing his feet against the door frame of the root cellar entrance, he summoned every ounce of strength he could muster. He leveraged the pain-induced adrenaline and dragged the door upward with an amplified brute force.
He yelled in triumph as the door came up. Unexpectedly it carried through its arc flopping wide open. The momentum threw Clay backwards into the snow.
He hit the ground with a jolt and screamed in anguish. Tears flooded his eyes and he choked back a sob, then regained control and staggered to his feet. He glanced down at his arm where blood ran freely from an open wound evident through his torn uniform shirt. A shard of grey bone now poked through an ugly purple bruise in the skin.
“Jesus...Jesus...” he cursed, more tears flooding his eyes. He’d compounded the fracture. Rings of pain throbbed mercilessly with each beat of his heart which was now doing a credible imitation of a tom-tom.
Slowly he raised his gaze and dismay flooded every atom of his body; the shock hit him with a series of mental impacts like repeated hammer strikes on his brain.
His own voice sounded from afar: “Oh dear God...no...NO!”
Hitch was there alright. Or, at least, what was left of the man hung in full view. His body lay nailed upside down to the inside of the door, mostly naked and shredded except for a few shards of uniform. Thick, rusted railroad-type spikes had been used to pinion him; one had been hammered through his throat, more through the center of his rib cage, and more through his outstretched arms and feet.
The deputy had been crucified upside down.
But the horror didn’t end there.
His head – huge, bloodied eyeballs rolled back, mouth open in a soundless scream – was almost unrecognizable. Clay was looking at a mass of oozing meat, muscle and ligaments strung with glistening yellow fat through which peeked a dull, cream-yellow skull. His head, from the neck up, had been skinned; hardly a square inch of derma remained undamaged.
All the exacerbated might of Clay’s hate and anger echoed over the mountains and into the valleys as he screamed again and again. His rage was quickly followed by repeated explosions as he vainly emptied his pistol blindly into the cellar. In the darkness below nothing moved despite the explosions and rounds burrowing into the dirt floor.
The Plan Page 13