by Robert Brown
“I just couldn’t stay in my parents’ house no more,” Trisha said at last.
“Her daddy used to whup her, saying he’d beat the Devil out of her,” Clayton said as he rounded the corner with a shovel.
“Why don’t you tell the whole neighborhood!” Trisha shouted.
Clayton looked around. “What neighborhood? Come on, Professor, time to get your hands dirty.”
They buried the dog in the field out back and then went into the trailer. Nick took a seat on the sofa while Clayton went to the refrigerator for beers. Trisha, who had sulked all the way through the burial except when she said a little prayer for the dog, went into the bedroom and slammed the door.
Clayton made a face. “I shouldn’t have told you about her family.”
“I don’t judge her.”
Clayton lowered his voice as he handed Nick a beer. “She judges herself, though. Still got a lot of that Bible thumping in her head. Thinks it’s a sin to be with me.”
“Then why is she with you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Because she loves me, dummy. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel guilty about it.”
“That’s a problem.”
“You’re a real genius.”
“So, what do we do? How did they find out where you live?”
“Dunno. Maybe they came to do a second ritual here. I haven’t been back in the woods to check. No way I’m going out there tonight, not even with a wingman. I guess they scouted around and found the trailer, put two and two together that I was involved. Ain’t no one else gonna know about them ruins. Or maybe they been spying on us and overheard us talking.”
Nick yawned. “Let’s get you to that hotel. It’s late.”
“All right.” Clayton took a swig of beer and stood up.
Just as he did, a scream came from the bedroom.
“What is it, baby?” Clayton rushed to the door and yanked it open.
Trisha was lying on the bed in her underwear. She had her arms around herself, covering her nakedness.
“I saw a face at the window!”
Before he knew it, Nick had the pistol in his hand and his finger on the trigger. Then he remembered his safety lesson. He took his finger away from the trigger and rested it on the side of the trigger guard.
The odd thought came to him that Gus would be proud.
A moment later, everything got crazy.
Suddenly, the aluminum sides of the trailer shook and rattled from dozens of impacts. As the racket continued, Clayton rushed out and grabbed his shotgun from where it leaned against the easy chair. Trisha screamed again.
The banging increased in tempo. It sounded like the trailer was surrounded by people pounding their fists against the thin walls.
Nick looked at each of the windows, seeing nothing but the black of night. Clayton hit the switch and the room was plunged in darkness.
They still couldn’t see anything. Whoever it was made sure they stayed away from the windows.
“Get away from my house, you sick motherfuckers!” Clayton shouted.
The room was almost pitch black. Nick saw Clayton’s shadow rise, then move toward the window.
Next came a blinding flash and an ear-splitting roar.
Clayton had set off his shotgun, blasting through the window.
Nick hit the deck, banging his shoulder against the coffee table and nearly dropping his gun. At least it didn’t go off.
Through the ringing in his ears, he heard nothing. For a minute he thought the place would erupt in gunfire. At least two of the cultists had guns and they could shoot right through the thin metal walls of this trailer.
But no shots came.
Nick spotted a silhouette briefly peek up from below the windowsill. He aimed and fired, cursing himself when his finger pressed against the unyielding metal of the trigger guard.
“Just looked out there,” Clayton whispered. “Don’t see them.”
Nick felt a cold rush of fear and a sickness in his stomach. That had been Clayton he had seen. If he had been any better with the gun, Nick might have killed him.
“What are they doing?” Trisha whispered.
“Dunno. You got your gun?” her boyfriend asked.
“Yes, baby.”
“I love you, Trisha.”
“I love you too, baby.”
Nick cut in, whispering, “I’m going to look out the back window. If you see a head, that’s me, all right?”
“You think I’m stupid? I ain’t gonna shoot at someone without knowing who it is.”
Nick felt relieved that Clayton and Trisha couldn’t see him blush. He crawled the few feet over to the back of the room, feeling just how dirty and gritty the carpet was. Then he slowly rose so that he could peek with one eye from the lower corner of the window. The window was open a crack and the cool night air blew over his sweating forehead.
At first, he saw nothing, as the afterimage of Clayton’s shotgun blast was still seared onto his retinas. After a minute, though, Nick made out the darkness of the field and distant treeline, as well as the light gray of the overcast sky above. He heard a rustle and saw two figures move across the field, about twenty yards behind the trailer.
Nick’s heart hammered in his chest. Slowly, he raised his pistol, resting the bottom of the barrel on the windowsill.
He hesitated. The cultists hadn’t done anything but scare them. Should he do the same and just shoot in the air? The trailer and the field outside were deathly silent, as if waiting for his decision. Nick eased his finger inside the trigger guard, then slowly pulled it out again. He couldn’t shoot someone in cold blood.
That all changed when one of the cultists flicked on a lighter.
Its flare illuminated a wine bottle with a rag sticking out of it. The cultist touched the flame to the rag, which lit up.
Every action movie Nick had ever seen came back to him. That was a Molotov cocktail, and it was about to be thrown right at him.
Nick paused and collected himself. Trying to aim in the dark was almost impossible. He lined up the sights as well as he could and squeezed the trigger.
The report sounded loud in the cramped trailer. He saw the cultists duck to the side. The one with the Molotov threw it.
Nick fired again, not even trying to aim this time. The Molotov made a fiery arc and landed not far in front of him, smashing on the stony ground and bursting into flame.
Nick cried out and dove back, blinded. A couple of shots rang out behind him. He patted his face and shoulders. Nothing was on fire.
He blinked, his vision shrouded by a garish afterimage through which flames wavered. He turned toward Clayton and Trisha. Nick could just make out that they were both firing out the window.
The flames danced outside the window. Nick stumbled to the sink, found a dirty bowl, and filled it with water.
Opening the window wide, he dumped it out, then went back for more. A bullet thumped through the wall of the trailer close to him, although he couldn’t see exactly where.
Nick stumbled back with another bowl of water and dumped the liquid on the flames as well. He saw a vague figure moving not far off. Nick took a couple of shots at it. The figure disappeared.
Through the ringing in his ears, he could just make out the rasp of tires on gravel.
“We scared them off!” Trisha said.
“Yeah, run, you sick motherfuckers!” Clayton shouted.
“Help me with this fire,” Nick said.
Despite the water he had poured on the fire, it had spread, the space outside the window now a wall of flames. The air inside the trailer grew oppressively hot.
Trisha set aside her rifle and rushed to help him. Clayton opened the front door and stormed out.
Nick and Trisha worked as a team, her filling bowls and cups at the sink as fast as she could and handing them to Nick, who dumped them out the window.
“Don’t you have any bigger containers than this?” Nick asked.
“There’s
a bucket in the shed but we don’t have the time to get it.”
“You don’t have a garden hose or anything?”
“You see a garden around here?” Trisha asked.
They kept at it, sweat pouring off them. Nick was beginning to feel lightheaded and Trisha was slowing down.
After another minute, Trisha shouted and pointed at the roof.
It was beginning to blacken, and smoke was coming through a crack on the edge. The heat had buckled the metal.
The were losing the battle against the fire.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“We have to get out of here!” Nick said, coughing as the smoke reached his lungs.
Trisha rushed to the bedroom.
“No!” Nick said, going after her. “We have to get out of here now.”
Trisha had grabbed a bag and was stuffing clothes into it. She was still in her underwear, and Nick couldn’t help but notice how alluring her body was, glistening with sweat in the reddish glow of the flames.
A sudden fit of coughing hit the two of them, helping Nick focus on what was important. Nick grabbed Trisha and hustled her out of the trailer. Clayton met them at the front door. With despair, he looked at the smoke filling his living room. Then he took Trisha’s hand and, together, they all ran to where the cars were parked.
“We’re never going to stop it!” Nick said.
“We gotta try!” Clayton shouted.
They ran around the trailer to the shed. The flames encompassed the entire back of the trailer. Clayton grabbed a bucket from the tool shed and turned on a spigot at the end of a pipe that came up from the ground. He then turned on the tap and filled the bucket while Nick rummaged through the shed, throwing aside tools and mildewed boxes in a desperate search for another container.
All he found was an old plastic jug.
It would have to do. Clayton and Nick took turns at the spigot.
They worked like a machine, each aligning with the other’s movements and putting a constant series of splashes on the flames. Nick was soaked in sweat, his lungs burned from the smoke, and his head spun from the heat, but he kept going. Dimly, he was aware of Trisha standing nearby, not looking at her burning home but keeping a sharp eye on the field and surrounding woods, her .22 rifle at the ready.
They worked for what seemed like hours. For a time, it looked like they might win. The flames ebbed a little, stopped spreading, but then they shot up inside the trailer. They had reached the flammable carpet and furnishings, which combusted with a sudden flare.
Still they fought for Clayton and Trisha’s home. Clayton wouldn’t stop, and even after it was grimly clear that the battle had been lost, he continued filling the bucket and throwing water on the conflagration. Nick didn’t have the heart to stop until Clayton did.
At last, when the flames had engulfed the trailer and rose high into the sky, Clayton relented. Tossing down the bucket, he staggered over to Trisha and gave her a hug. They embraced for a long time. Nick poured water on his face, took a long drink, and filled the jug for Clayton. Then he turned off the spigot. The simple movement felt like the most depressing thing he had ever done.
He went over to the weeping couple. Clayton took the jug and drank deeply before handing it to Trisha.
“Do you have insurance?” Nick asked.
Clayton shook his head.
Trisha rubbed his neck. “I got the ammo and wallets, baby, plus our phones and some other stuff. There was no time to get anything else.”
A siren wailed in the distance, coming closer.
Trisha looked in that direction.
“Mr. and Mrs. Connor must have seen the fire and called 911.”
Nick remembered a farm about a mile back. The way the flames had taken hold of the trailer, the fire must be visible for miles. Nick took a quick survey of the surrounding area, his pistol in his hand. There were no bloodstains around the spot where the cultists had stood. Nick felt a mixture of relief and regret.
He went back to Clayton and Trisha, who were hiding their guns in the pickup. The siren was loud now, the fire truck almost to them. Nick hurried to his car and tucked his pistol under the front seat.
The fire truck came, followed by the police. Nick kept quiet as Clayton gave a statement and the firefighters doused the flames. Clayton didn’t mention the cultists. As they talked, Nick noticed a shell casing gleaming in the light of the fire. Nick went over, picked it up when no one was looking, and put it in his pocket.
After a couple of hours, it was over. Clayton had told them he had spilled some gasoline from a jerry can and a spark from his cigarette had lit it. Trisha backed him up. When the officers had asked Nick, he reluctantly backed them up. He knew that to talk about the cult would have led to more questions—questions that might have led to who Trisha was and why she was there.
At last, the emergency crews left. Nick didn’t want to look at his watch to see how late it was.
He took the homeless couple to a 24-hour supermarket and bought them toiletries and food. Then he took them to a motel on the business loop and paid for a week.
Clayton shook his hand at the hotel room door.
“Thanks, bud. I owe you big time.”
“Don’t mention it. Look, I’m going to call in sick tomorrow. We have to plan.”
“Right. See you tomorrow. I gotta get some shuteye.”
“You and me both,” Nick sighed.
When Nick pulled into his driveway, the light turned on in their bedroom.
“Oh, crap,” he muttered. “Time to face the music.”
His wife didn’t take sleeping pills every night. This, of all nights, turned out to be one of her nights off.
Cheryl met him on the stairs in her nightgown. As soon as she saw him, her eyes went wide.
“What happened?” she whispered so as not to wake their daughter. She sniffed. “Why do you smell like smoke?”
“Come on and sit down in the kitchen for a minute,” he sighed.
They sat and Nick told her everything—the first sighting of the sacrifices in the woods, meeting the locals, disrupting the ceremony, the gunfight, his visit to the shooting range, the attack on the trailer, everything. He even unzipped the leather bag and showed her the gun Wayne had lent him.
Once he was done, Cheryl sat for a long moment in silence, studying him.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this from the beginning?” she asked at last.
Nick gave an ineffectual shrug. “I didn’t want to scare you and … I kind of liked having my own thing going on. You’re so much more successful than I am. It was nice to have a project of my own for a change. Then things got dangerous and I didn’t want to scare you.”
“Scare me?” Cheryl said, a note of irritation in her voice. “Nick, we’re in danger. If they found whatshisname’s trailer, they can find this house. Damn it, Nick, what about Elaine?”
“I know. I’m sorry. Until tonight, I hadn’t realized how dangerous this cult was. I don’t think they know anything about me.”
Once the words were out of his mouth, he realized that he hadn’t told her everything after all. He hadn’t told her about the stick man hanging outside his office window.
Chery frowned. “You can’t say that for sure. What if they decide to burn this house down too?”
“Clayton lives … lived … in the middle of nowhere. We’re right in town.”
“Jesus Christ, Nick, how can you be so stupid? These people are crazy. They cut apart dogs and cats, try to burn down a trailer with three people in it, and you don’t think they’ll risk an attack just because we’re in town?”
She stood up and headed out of the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” Nick asked.
“To call the police, like you should have done days ago.”
Nick leaped up. “You can’t! I told you. Matt’s got a felony conviction and Clayton is sheltering a runaway, an abuse victim!”
Cheryl rounded on him. “I don’t give a damn what your white
trash friends get up to. We have a daughter to protect.”
She headed upstairs. Cheryl always kept her phone next to the bed. Nick followed her.
“You can’t call,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper so that he wouldn’t awaken Elaine.
“Watch me.”
“If you do, I’ll be put in custody. I won’t be able to protect you.”
They were at the door to the bedroom now. Cheryl turned and glared at him.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The fire tonight. I was using a gun I’m not registered to have. Clayton didn’t want the cops asking any questions, so he told them he did it by accident while filling up a jerry can with gasoline. I backed him up. If we tell the police the truth, we’ll both go to jail.”
Cheryl stared at him for a moment in disgust, then shook her head and walked into the bedroom.
“Whatever. We’ll talk about this tomorrow. Take a shower before you come to bed. You stink.”
“I’ll get a burglar alarm installed first thing tomorrow.”
Cheryl got into bed.
“And I’ll get you some pepper spray. Or I could get you a gun. This guy named Gus gives really good lessons. He—”
“Shut up and take a shower, Nick.”
Nick did as he was told. He really did stink. Once he washed up, he threw his clothes in the washing machine and climbed into bed, leaving the gun in the drawer of his bedside table. Cheryl had turned her back on him and didn’t say anything when he got in.
He put his arm around her and kissed her cheek.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he whispered.
“How can you be such an idiot?” she grumbled.
Nick sighed, turned on his back, and tried to sleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The next morning, Cheryl was sullen and unresponsive. Elaine, staring at her cell phone throughout breakfast, was her usual cute, oblivious self. Nick kept looking at her, grateful for that last bit of normalcy in his life. He announced that he felt sick and would be taking the day off. This gave him an excuse to drive Elaine to school. By the time he got back home, Cheryl was gone.