It’ll tear his head off, Priscilla thought. She willed herself to intervene, to ball up her fists and fight for the Irishman’s life, but her body was numb and unresponsive, as if under the influence of a powerful, immobilizing anesthetic.
Mason’s neck cracked as it turned, his nose past nine o’clock. He fought more frantically, fingers tearing at the old man’s forearms, but he was trapped.
The driver’s side door behind Priscilla opened and a pair of hands wrestle her from the vehicle. It was the young soldier. He dragged her out into the lot and dropped her onto the wet ground. Brandishing his side arm, he stepped back up to the truck, took aim, and fired off three rapid shots.
Tamir slumped back against the seat. Mason slid free of his grasp and pushed himself out of the truck through the windshield. Kneeling on the hood, he held his head in his hands and grimaced in pain.
Cold rain and sewage and debris fell, stinging where they struck her face and arms. She folded her legs underneath her and sat on the cold blacktop. She felt her body returning to her and the terrible demonic influence fade. Demonic? she thought. Do I even believe in that sort of thing?
Demonic was as good a word as any, she decided.
The soldier came to her and asked, “Are you injured?”
She shook her head. “Nothing serious. Are Dara and—”
“The little girl and the bloke? He’s fine, couple of scratches is all. The little girl’s arm is broken, I fear. Nasty looking thing from the glance I got. Told them to hide out behind the wheels.” The soldier pointed to his Jeep. Brigham, still ducking, his head peeking around the side of the vehicle, held Dara to his chest. She wailed..
Mason slid off the truck’s hood and gathered Keena in his arms. His feet wandered as he walked, each step threatening to take him in a new direction, until he was at Priscilla’s feet. He set Keena down gently.
Priscilla asked in a whisper, “Is she …”
“Unconscious, that’s all I can tell until she wakes up.” Propping a hand against the asphalt to guide his descent, Mason sat beside her. “She took a lot of abuse in there, from what I saw. We’ll just have to see.”
Glancing back toward Brigham and Dara, she said, “Can you set a broken arm?”
He nodded.
The soldier turned back toward the truck and raised his pistol. Following his aim, Priscilla’s mouth dropped open. Tamir was crawling from the open driver’s side door. His head was cratered by three bullet holes. An off-white, gelatinous substance poured from the wounds.
Brains, she thought, his brains are running out of his head.
“Mine,” Tamir said. The word exited his lips in a firm tone, a statement of fact.
The soldier fired again. This shot tore Tamir’s head in two, skullcap spinning loose above his brow and clattering against the door. Tamir dropped, his body dangling, stumped head swinging. The remainder of his brain emptied out onto the pavement.
Chapter 6
Morning saw the winds strengthen and shift, sailing the dark storm clouds into the north where they hung over the open fields of Essex. The ground under Priscilla’s feet still glistened with rainwater, sewage, and tiny shards of broken glass.
Mason and the soldier moved Tamir’s body into the grassy yard across the road. In daylight, she saw other bodies already there, covered by gray ordinance tarps, corners held down by stones stolen from the property line’s rock wall. They were victims of the bombings, of course, wounded in the city and left at the fueling station when they died. The soldier told her he’d buried the first four with his folding spade. He’d given up when it became clear there would be more bodies. Many more. And now he was down to his last tarp.
A crosswind caught the edges of the tarps, ruffling them, and making them sound like the flap of a dozen wet flags, momentarily drowning out the wheeze and moan of Dara’s pained breathing.
The fueling station’s first aid box was nearly empty. Cherry picked of antibiotics, aspirin, and bandages, the only useful item remaining was a half-used tube of antiseptic cream. They passed it among them, dotting their wounds with the pearly goo and massaging it in. The young soldier came up with a few wrapped candies and gave them to Dara. She’d stopped crying, though Priscilla couldn’t understand how a dollop of sugar could possibly quell the pain. The soldier was wrong; the little girl’s arm wasn’t broken. It was fractured and already swollen to twice its normal size. The irritated skin had bruised into a distorted mesh of fine purple lines over pink blotches.
Overnight, Brigham had held her, hushed her when the pain grew too intense, sang her nursery rhymes to lull her into brief moments of sleep. Priscilla could see that he needed Dara as much as she needed him; as long as she was in his charge he could keep his mind off Owney.
Glancing over to the soldier’s Jeep, she felt a pang of worry. Sprawled out on the bench seat, Keena remained unconscious and motionless. A sleeping body never rested long in a single position before rolling or shifting or scratching. Her husband had been a restless sleeper, constantly fidgeting his way through the night beside her, often waking her by brushing alongside her, or rolling away to the edge of the bed with the sheets. When her mother had first gotten sick, Priscilla too had tossed and turned, fitful and always in motion whenever she would check in on her. Toward the end, though, in those last few days before they took her away, she stopped moving, as if her body understood it could not squirm away from death.
Keena lay perfectly still.
What if she—? Priscilla thought. She couldn’t bring herself to even think the word dies, instead leaving the sentence incomplete in her head. It was a superstition carried over from her childhood, the idea that fully forming an unpleasant thought gave it license to become real. In her early teens, she developed a talent for clearing her head whenever she felt threatened by the activity inside it. That ritual hadn’t saved her mother or brother, she knew, but she pushed that thought away, too. What will happen to Dara? What chance does a little girl have all alone in a world tearing itself apart with machine guns, airplanes, and tanks?
“You a’right?” Mason called as he returned from the makeshift potter’s field. “You’ve gone pale enough to give a ghost a fright.”
Shaking her head, she said, “No, nothing’s right. I was supposed to pick up antiques and bring them back to America. Put little check marks on a check list. Keep an accurate inventory. I wasn’t prepared for any of this—planes shot down, bombs falling, attacked …”
“Well, it is war,” he said, but didn’t wait for her face to scrunch up before he shook his head and put an arm around her shoulder. “Sorry. You’ve never seen this, that’s all. Some of us have been around death for most of our lives. You forget how it feels to still be shocked by every little daily atrocity.”
Her instincts told her to shrug his arm off her shoulder, but the morning was cold and he was warm. That’s what she told herself. “No, it’s more than that. Last night … wasn’t natural.”
Casting a quick glance back at Dara, Mason lowered his voice. “Look, I told you when we met them, we don’t know these people. I warned you they might try to slit our throats in the night.”
His warmth calmed her. It wasn’t only the goose bumps on her skin that relaxed; she felt her guard come down all at once. “No, there’s more.”
She didn’t worry what he might think. Instead, she told him everything: the voice in the truck’s bed, the sensations and memories that Tamir’s touch flared up inside her, all of it. When she was finished, he pulled her in a little closer.
“You believe me?” she asked.
“I believe you,” he answered. She could tell he was lying, not with malice or any intent to mislead her, but lying nevertheless.
Again she felt as if she should squeeze out of his embrace, but again she didn’t. It was cold. “Then what about everything I saw? Heard? Felt?”
“When the truck got upset back at the Museum, you got shuffled around good and nasty. Your head took a nasty hit, if you remember. There are pl
enty of reasons you should hesitate to trust your senses right now.” Perhaps noticing the conflict inside her, he withdrew his arm. “I’m not saying you haven’t seen horrible things—you have. And you’ve nothing to be embarrassed about. I think all of us have taken a few shocks. I’d be more worried if you weren’t a bit jumbled up inside.”
“What about you?” Tilting her head at Brigham, she asked, “What did you see?”
Not taking his eyes off Dara, Brigham shrugged. “It was dark. I was sleeping. I don’t know what I saw. And it doesn’t matter anyway, does it? Mad old man’s dead.”
She wanted to argue, just the same way she wanted to shrug off his arm, but the idea in his words was as seductive as his body heat. If she had suffered a concussion in the attack, could she be certain that everything she saw and sensed and smelled was real? None of it had felt compromised or altered, but without believing in the supernatural—and what other way could she explain what she had experienced?—how else could she account for it all?
She slid her hand into his and flashed a queasy smile. “Maybe I should let you know if things start to go wonky?”
“I think that’d be a good idea,” he said, and smiled back. The sun was rising behind him, shadowing his features and spreading a haloed prism around his head. “I can point and laugh at the crazy lady.”
She laughed and leaned her body against his chest and fell fully into his arms. Closing her eyes, she let all of England—sights, sounds, and smells—fade away and basked in the warmth of his body and the morning sunlight. For a moment, the first in a very long time, she felt safe.
A moment passed. A good moment.
The soldier’s voice broke the spell. “You’ll want to get down the road before long, now.”
Mason asked, “Why’s that?”
“Once the sun’s up the smell comes visiting from across the way. I can’t stand to be out in it for more than a few minutes at a time. I spend my day in the Jeep with the windows up reading the same book over and over.”
Priscilla opened her eyes and saw the gray tarps flapping in the wind in the distance behind the soldier. The sense of safety fled. “Don’t we have to … report what happened to Tamir to … someone?”
The soldier scratched the back of his neck. “Far as I’m concerned, he was just dumped by the roadside with the rest of ’em.” When Priscilla’s brow dropped, he added, “It’s a war, ma’am. Not across the ocean or on the other side of the continent, right here at home. The bureaucrats are all hiding under their desks, not filling out paperwork on them.”
Brigham stepped up behind Mason with Dara in his arms. She was awake and chewing lightly on the last of the candies. Brigham had bundled up her fractured arm in a sling stitched together out of his jacket’s liner. To Priscilla it looked like a makeshift straightjacket.
“Is it any good?” he said.
Turning, the soldier asked, “Is what good? The bloody war?”
“The book,” Brigham said.
The soldier squinted into the sun. “No, it’s complete rubbish, wasn’t even a good read the first time. It’s one of those pulp romances, the cheap ones with the black binding. Woman left it behind when she dumped off her husband. They were hiding in a wine cellar when the roof started to collapse. A brick hit his head, she said. He’s in the field now.”
Brigham balanced Dara in the crook of his arm, careful not to jostle her, freed up a hand, and pulled a heavily-creased paperback from his back pocket. “I’ve probably read this one as many times as you’ve done yours. It’s a detective story. The ending doesn’t make a sour spit’s worth of sense, I’ll warn you. But if you want, I’d trade you.”
The soldier didn’t smile, he beamed. “Yessir, I would most appreciate it. Just let me get that blasted romance from the Jeep for you.”
The soldier snatched up the book and bounced off toward his Jeep, a wide crescent smile on his face, juggling his new prize between his hands. As he swung the passenger side door open, however, his dancing swagger disappeared and he ducked down over Keena’s body. Dropping the book on her chest, he put a hand against her throat.
No, Priscilla thought and could feel words that she did not want to think bubbling to the surface. No, she can’t be—
Straightening, the soldier removed his service cap.
Against her will, the word emerged: “Dead.”
Chapter 7
She chose not to think about Keena’s body abandoned in a cold English field under a cheap military tarp. It was better to focus her thoughts on the road in front of them and Mason’s strong hands on the steering wheel, driving to the eastern edge of the country where a ship waited to sail them away from this island of death. Escape. Back to America. To Sanity.
Dara slept on Brigham’s lap, mouth open against his shirt. He stroked her hair, lightly, fingertips barely skimming over her curls. He was not far from sleep himself, each eye open only a slit. Without a windshield to protect them from the cold, Priscilla was amazed any of them could even think about rest, but the night’s activity had left them all exhausted, and she felt herself numbing over, too. If she allowed herself, she’d be asleep in seconds.
The truck’s cab felt larger than she’d remembered, more spacious. It wasn’t just Keena’s absence, it was something more, almost indefinable but impossible to ignore. Another passenger had been left behind at the refueling plant, a relative to the innocence lost with virginity and the security that vanished with every grandparent’s death. Throughout her life, she’d never really felt life-threatening danger; there had always been an invisible safety net underneath her, ready to catch her fall. She could no longer feel that protection. Even the Stuka attack at the library hadn’t been able to shake her sense of security for long, but Tamir—or whatever he had become—had obliterated it. Permanently, she feared.
Mine, he’d said.
She shifted her weight, leaned in, and rested her head on Mason’s shoulder. She felt the vibrations of the road passing under the truck, the gentle dithering thrum of the tire rotations, the occasional dip of a pothole or bounce of crushing debris, and accompanying all that, the throb of Mason’s pulse against her cheek. It almost sounded like music playing from a distant radio, little more than humming and murmurs, but soothing and familiar.
Her face felt heavy.
She felt a yawn building just behind her ears, moving forward like a bubble, but before it could reach her jaws and part them, her eyelids dropped and she drifted into a shallow sleep. She continued to hear the roadway and Mason’s heart, but the radio’s volume was lower now, or perhaps just farther away, and beginning to distort as if she was not hearing the sound itself at all, but rather only an echo at the end of a long tunnel.
Aware that she was asleep, she let herself drift.
Occasionally she would awaken for a moment, just long enough for her eyes to crack open and snatch a glimpse of the roadway and landscape. There was no sensation of passing time. Blinking, moving snapshots of the eastern English countryside seemed to flash in quick succession, although the position of the sun contradicted this, the effect reminding her hazy mind of the flicker box movies she’d seen on the Jersey boardwalk as a child, her brother James doling out pennies while her mother worked the crank on the machine’s side. The sound of the truck’s tires rolling across the road became the grind of the movie box’s gears.
She saw: a grazing pasture littered with dead cattle, a crater in its center, a scavenging dog feeding on one of the carcasses. It didn’t bother to look up from its meal as the museum truck passed.
She saw: a row of abandoned cars on the edge of the road with dented fenders and scraped paint.
She saw: a pink baby carriage in the center of the asphalt, overturned, a soiled blanket laying out across the road.
She saw: her sister, Katie, eyes pressed to the flicker box goggles, grinning. Her mother ran a hand through Katie’s hair, but her attention was on the sea, endless rows of blue waves extending to the horizon.
“Mom?” she murmured.
She saw: the road cracked like a dry riverbed, an unexploded bomb in the center of its spider web design, loose puzzle pieces skittering as Mason navigated the truck past.
She saw: a farmhouse on fire, its roof gone, walls leaning away from its core as a funnel cloud of black smoke rose from inside.
She saw: her mother, turning away from the ocean, staring at her children with eyes that refused to focus, eyes like the ones at the end of her illness, large black pupils with a bloodshot red halo. She whispered, “You gave me to him, Prissy. Now I’m his.”
The brakes squealed as the truck lurched to a stop. Priscilla bolted awake. Straightening, she wiped her eyes, evicting the last traces of the snapshots out of her sight.
“It’s a good deal more grand than I would have thought,” Brigham pointed out. A freighter waited in the sea beyond the long Southend Pier. A trespassing notice noted the pier’s new name: HMS Leigh. The pavilion at the end of the metal bridge blocked view of most of the ship’s length, but it was clear that the truck’s load wouldn’t even begin to fill the ship’s hold.
“That’s the US government for you,” she said. “They’ll stall you for months, lose the paperwork a half dozen times, but once they approve your order you get ten times what you need at an unhealthy cost to the taxpayers.”
Smirking, Brigham asked, “And what was this about a tax on tea? Prefer a hundred thousand tax accountants to one fat king, did ya?”
Opening the driver’s side door, Mason leaped out, extended a hand up to Priscilla, and helped her down. “I dunno, Brigham, I’ve always heard that everyone in America prefers coffee.”
Brushing herself off, she nodded. “Black, two sugars.”
Brigham carried Dara out, set her down, and stretched.
A guard hustled down the pier swinging a clipboard in one hand. When he reached the chain-length fence, he brought the board up to his chin, squinted, and asked, “Names, please.”
“Doctor Priscilla Stuyvesant … and escorts.”
Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror Page 6