Then Jason stood, telling them to do the same. Whit got into the coupe, softly shutting its doors, and guided it into the woods where they’d stashed their other stolen car. Jason marched the captive kidnappers alongside the coupe, and when Whit shut off the engine he had one man lie down on the front seat and the other in back. Jason found some socks in the trunk and stuffed them into the men’s mouths. With rope he’d bought that day, he tied makeshift gags and hog-tied the men’s feet to their wrists.
Before gagging the primate, Jason asked, “Anybody keeping watch at night?”
“Not tonight.”
“Guys sleep upstairs or down?”
“Three in the bedrooms upstairs, two more in the parlor.”
“You keep Darcy on the second floor?”
The man seemed to consider this. “Yeah. Back bedroom, top of the stairs.”
The guy in the backseat moaned something.
“I bet your boys have a lot of guns in there.”
“They do.”
“Bet they’ll be awful ticked at you if we shoot some of ’em up. If me and my brother don’t live to see morning, they’ll come out here and plug you for messing their works.”
The guy didn’t say anything. Jason fastened the gag.
“So you’d better hope we come out of this alive and in no mood for more shooting. Then you might live to see prison.”
The brothers rolled the windows up, then closed the doors. Jason handed Whit the Luger he’d procured from their captives, keeping the revolver in his pocket. A rift in the clouds like a celestial quake revealed a thin line of stars, that tiny amount of light helpful as the brothers crossed through the woods.
“So,” Whit said in a whisper, “the worst that can happen to us is what’s already happened, right?”
“Let’s hope so.”
“And we walked away from that just fine. Twice. So, really, there’s nothing to worry about, huh?”
“Are you trying to talk yourself into this, or out of it?”
But even Jason was sweating beneath his heavy vest. He hadn’t been nervous before an endeavor in quite some time, but this was something different. They should have made Marriner come with them, or Owney. They were two against five, if the ape was telling the truth. Apart from this strange magic they seemed to be carrying inside them, their only allies would be the element of surprise and their adversaries’ midnight grogginess. Jason was accustomed to being on the side of superior man- and firepower, and even then he’d raided only banks whose floor plans he had memorized. He knew that he had killed people, but he preferred to think of those events as accidents, or as awful decisions that were necessary for his survival. Tonight, however, they would need to be quick and shoot anything that moved. Unless it was Darcy. Hopefully she was alone in her room. Hopefully the kidnappers would be too busy scrambling to think of using her as a human shield or a bargaining chip. Hopefully this wasn’t a very bad idea.
They emerged from the trees and the farmhouse was before them, no lights in the windows, no sound but the crickets.
Jason stepped onto the old wooden porch first, trying to will his body into lightness. He hadn’t yet put his hand on the screen door when whichever plank Whit was standing on groaned. Jason pulled at the screen door’s handle, held the screen open with his back, then tried the knob of the wooden door. Unlocked. Thank you, boys.
It was the kind of door that liked to announce it was being opened.
Jason tried it slowly, but that only made it worse, so he swung it the rest of the way. His night vision was sharp enough now to tell him this was the kitchen. It smelled like things unwashed. That probably confirmed Darcy as the only woman in the place. Jason could hear snoring from close by.
Floorboards groaned again, but this wasn’t Whit. Someone was moving upstairs. Ahead of Jason and to his left, a sliver of light fell from above, down a stairway. Forms slowly took shape.
“What the hell!” A man upstairs, screaming. “What the hell!” A man who sounded like Brickbat Sanders.
Then rustling from the shadows and the room exploded with light from a lamp. The guy who’d pulled the cord was sprawled on a couch six feet in front of Jason. Without thinking, Jason offered an explosion of sound to match the light.
The figure danced and threw violent new colors on the dull palette before him, and then the lamp shattered. Now the only light was that coming from Jason’s barrel, and he spied more motion to the left. Before he could turn that way, Whit fired, too.
More light fell down the stairway. Feet were pounding upstairs.
Jason remembered how few Thompson rounds he had and stopped firing at the man on the couch. Stuffing was floating in the air like clouds.
Whit fired another burst at the corner around which a second man had disappeared. Plaster spat onto the floor.
Two flashes of light sneaked around that wall. Jason didn’t hear the pistol shots until he felt them. Invisible nails hammered his back to the wall behind him.
Whit fired again and the kidnapper’s hand and pistol disappeared.
Jason stayed nailed to the wall for an extra second, then slid down. His collapsed lungs tried to expand and he doubled over in a coughing fit. It felt as if the nails were still inside him, but he told himself they couldn’t be. The day someone invented a bulletproof vest that didn’t still hurt like hell when you took rounds in the chest would be a very good day indeed. He forced himself to sit up and made sure the Thompson was still in his hands.
A squat body and a submachine gun appeared at the top of the stairs. Jason remembered how to move just in time. Wood slivers dug into his hair as he fell forward and rolled out of the shooter’s range.
Whit hurried to the corner that the other downstairs sleeper had raced behind. His Thompson had nearly torn all the plaster from the wall, revealing the ancient wood studs and the metal piping. Blood on the far wall told him his bullets had worked through the corner and found their target. He heard panting and fired through the corner wall again. The body that had been hiding there lost its fight with gravity. It fell facefirst, long limbs and jet-black hair that Whit figured for Elton Roberts. One of his hands held an automatic pistol, but Whit didn’t have any extra pockets so he let the corpse keep it.
Whit’s ears were ringing and cordite burned his nostrils. The shattered walls seemed to be releasing the scent of the building’s past inhabitants, generations of roasts and firewood and hard labor escaping into the humid air. Around the corner was a large dining room, but it was empty of anything but a collapsible table, three chairs, and some playing cards.
In the living room, Jason stood up and trained his weapon at the topmost stair, where the other shooter had been. He sprayed a few rounds to keep the guy off guard. Where the hell was Whit? He heard a cry of pain and the staircase shooter’s feet appeared again. One of them wasn’t really a foot anymore but a pulpy mess. Jason fired at it and the screams weren’t loud enough to be heard above the bucking Thompson. The rest of the man’s body slipped down the stairs, presenting larger targets. It finally landed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, a dead man who had liked to sleep in the nude.
Was that two, or three? Motion again and Jason swung around, nearly pulling the trigger on his brother. They stared at each other, both of them lowering their weapons, and stepped closer. They listened. Floorboards creaked upstairs. Whit pointed his Thompson at the ceiling. A very old ceiling. Cracks of light appearing through weak spots in the wood. Jason read his mind and grabbed Whit’s barrel and pulled it down, scalding his hand.
Whit looked at him as if he was crazy.
“You might hit her, too,” Jason whispered. Then he shouted into the silence: “Darcy!”
Nothing in return. Not her voice or anyone else’s.
Then came shots from the kitchen, an automatic pistol. The brothers ducked. Jesus, maybe there was a second stairwell leading down to the kitchen. They hadn’t thought to look for one. From behind a couch Whit poked his Thompson’s barrel and fired
toward the kitchen until the massive gun clicked. After that instant of silence, the kitchen shooter filled it again. Cushions exploded and Whit flattened himself to the floor.
Jason pressed himself against the wall and silently inched toward the entrance to the kitchen. Then he stepped away and was about to fire when the hand of something very large slapped his back and slammed his chest to the floor. Glass shattering all around him, cutting his neck and ears. After an instant of numbness, his back throbbed.
No.
Someone had leaped outside and gotten him through the windows. With a Thompson. The rounds had pierced his vest and burrowed into his flesh. But how deeply? He tried to inhale. He coughed. He rolled to his side. From across the room, Whit was staring at him with wide eyes. Jason coughed and something came out. A different window exploded this time and Whit blindly returned fire with his requisitioned Luger.
No shots for a moment, nothing but ringing ears and the occasional whisper of glass shavings falling from the jamb. Jason couldn’t move his right arm. With his left he rolled himself onto his back. It felt as if he’d been impaled; it was as though parts of his insides were fixed in place and wouldn’t budge even if the rest of him did. When he tried to move, they sent enraged messages that his brain could only begin to comprehend. Just concentrate on breathing, he thought. He could breathe, but not deeply.
“Jason,” Whit whispered. Jason thought about answering but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He sucked his neck into his body so he could stare at the windows through which he’d been shot.
Jason reminded himself that this didn’t matter. He would walk away from this. He would be whole tomorrow. He repeated this in his mind, an endless mantra, while his body, unconvinced, did what it could to get the hell out of there.
He’d dropped the Thompson, so he took the stolen revolver from his left pants pocket and pointed it at the shattered windows. The automatic in his shoulder holster would have been better, but with his dead right arm it was unreachable. Compared with the Thompson, the revolver felt so light, as if his arm were floating upward, which was when he started wondering if he was about to pass out.
He dared to turn his head to the left, away from the kitchen and toward his brother. It was as if he had known what was coming, because as soon as he saw Whit—sitting there with his back against the wall, behind the ravaged couch and beside the stripped corner wall—someone stepped around that corner. Jason opened his mouth to warn Whit but only blood came out. He also aimed with his revolver. Whit saw his brother’s gun pointed at him and his eyes scrunched in confused terror, but before he could respond Brickbat Sanders was in front of him. In Brickbat’s right hand a Thompson was pointed at the ceiling. In his left was an automatic pistol. Brickbat reached toward Whit’s head, and when Whit finally felt his presence and turned to face him Brickbat pressed the barrel of his pistol into Whit’s forehead and killed him.
Jason’s finger finally understood that it should be squeezing. His mouth opened weakly and his pistol screamed twice as loud to compensate. Brickbat leaped behind the corner again, too quickly for Jason to know if he’d been hit.
Somehow Jason sat up. He kept firing the revolver until its little merry-go-round was horseless. He tried to walk to the stairs but his legs didn’t work. He dragged himself with his one good arm. He dared to look at Whit, but all he saw was a body, like the others. Sitting against the wall, the shoulders erect but the head leaning forward at such a sharp angle that at first it looked as if he’d been decapitated. There was a large circle of blood on the wall at what should have been eye level.
Jason again reminded himself that this didn’t matter. What he had just seen happen to his brother didn’t matter. His own pain and imminent death didn’t matter. They would both wake up again tomorrow, surely. He was losing his mind.
He made it to the stairs. He crawled past the naked corpse. Still no sounds from the kitchen, so either that guy, too, was dead or he’d lammed off.
Jason tried to scream Darcy’s name again but he had no voice. His voice was dead. So was most of his body.
He looked behind him to see if Brickbat was following. He didn’t see anything or anyone alive. At the other end of the room was a pool of blood from his own mauled back.
He was so, so thirsty. He was sweating as if the building were on fire, and he was pretty sure he’d soiled his pants.
It actually got easier to crawl up the stairs once he managed some momentum.
So much brighter up there, a naked bulb dangling in the second-floor hallway, tracing an arc in the air as if the gunfire had shaken the whole house. Jason paused for a few labored breaths, then crawled toward the nearest door. He told himself again that this was not a problem. Death was not a problem. It was life that was so damn confusing.
His left palm was slick with sweat and it was difficult to pull the rest of him after it. The hand seemed the only part of him that was working correctly. He admired its tirelessness. Maybe the rest of him had been like that, too, once. Up until only a few minutes ago. Now the left hand seemed ashamed of the rest of Jason Fireson and was trying to get as far away from all this dead weight as it could. Yet the dead weight followed, as it always did.
He was in a small bedroom containing an old chaise in place of a bed. There was an end table in the corner and upon it sat an unshaded lamp that provided the room with its meager light. A thick chain lay in the center of the room, coiled around a two-foot metal base pinned down by what looked like barbells. His left hand reached forward again to pull, but it landed on something. The hand grabbed the something and wandered back to Jason’s face, opening up to present its finding. It was gold and thin, with a red stone hanging from it. It was an earring. Jason had bought it himself.
The stairs groaned. Jason’s left hand closed to a fist around the earring. He turned his head. The light from the lamp illuminated the imposing figure of Brickbat Sanders, a big gun in one hand and a small one in the other, a homicidal fiddler crab.
Brickbat grunted as he lowered himself, sitting on the floor a few feet from Jason. He rested the Thompson on his lap but held on to the automatic. Either he’d been sleeping in his dark slacks and shoes or he had found the time to put them on during the attack. Apart from that, Brickbat wore only a sleeveless undershirt. Pomade and a pillow had sculpted his blond hair into a violent wave. One of his shoulders was bleeding, but so little that Jason was envious.
“Well, you got me with one, Jason,” his voice hoarse, his breath labored. “But I got you a lot worse.”
Brickbat’s automatic was so silver you could melt it into bars and make a fortune. It gleamed in the light.
“I was thinking I’d give you one more, right between the eyes like that idiot brother of yours. But you know what? I think it’ll be more fun to just watch it happen, real slow.”
He was no more than five feet away. Jason wanted to drive his foot through that ugly mug, but no single part of his body was obeying his commands. Even the left hand had turned mutinous. He was still breathing, and his heart was still beating, but that had nothing to do with him anymore.
“Take your time,” Brickbat said, smiling. And Jason did.
THE THIRD DEATH
OF THE
FIREFLY BROTHERS
As more time passed and the official line on the Firefly Brothers became less believable, an equally absurd list of deeds and misdeeds were attributed to the outlaws, dead or not. The brothers had been endowed with supernatural powers, people told me, divine abilities. Calls came in from parents claiming the Firesons had visited them at night and cured their sick children. Formerly dry cows were producing milk again on farms where the Firefly Brothers had allegedly hid. A family in Kansas claimed that an elderly relative had died one night but that the Firesons had stopped by for dinner, and after their departure the old-timer had risen from his deathbed demanding steak and potatoes. Destitute families found bricks of hundred-dollar bills stashed beneath rocks at the periphery of their property lines,
or hidden in decaying fences, or sitting beneath their bedframes, the mornings after they’d had vivid dreams about the brothers.
Across the country, newspaper editors debated the merits of sensationalism versus missing the story of a lifetime. Police officers didn’t know whether to doubt their panicked constituents’ stories, or their superiors’ rational explanations, or their own eyes.
In Kansas City, three municipal employees who had been pilfering from a food bank were found shot to death; hungry witnesses claimed the Firefly Brothers had avenged them. The city of Toledo suffered an all-night power outage that began only moments after a telephone-line repairman had seen the Firesons driving into town. Several reports out of Lincoln City claimed that mysterious fires had been lit on the surrounding hilltops, a spectacle beheld by thousands, but by the time firefighters reached those outposts there were neither flames nor ashes nor embers to welcome them. Rallies and marches had turned violent in Akron, Grand Rapids, Pittsburgh, and Omaha after the Firefly Brothers, rumored to be appearing, were no-shows. Governors’ mansions in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were being patrolled by the National Guard after the chief executives received death threats allegedly signed by the Firefly Brothers, and citizens’ militias were patrolling the streets outside dozens of the Midwest’s largest banks.
There was already so much in the world to be overwhelmed by, to be confused about. I used to think—or hope—that no sane person truly bought those stories but simply had fun telling them. It was a parlor game, a communal experiment in storytelling, something to pass the time. The whole country was sitting on a rocking chair, spinning a ridiculous yarn. The only true believers, I figured, were the pathetic, the depressed. Those unfortunate souls who were already unhinged by mental illness or who had become so by the hard times—the ones who had lost sight of anything else to believe in.
I would soon learn otherwise.
XXI.
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