He had not the slightest idea what to say, so he asked, “What’d you do to Bridget?”
“I am Bridget.”
Joe could hear the crackle of the spreading flames. The odor of smoke was growing fearsome. “Where did that guy take Stevie?”
“For fifteen years I remained in darkness,” the woman said. “And then I was reborn as Bridget Martin.”
“Are they upstairs?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He stepped closer, his grip on the sword tightening. “The hell it doesn’t. I mean to get that child away from here.”
“It won’t matter, Joe. Even if you escape tonight, it won’t matter.”
He made to move past her. “I can’t stand here and talk.”
“Why do you think Sharon sprinkled Angie’s remains on your house?”
“Because she’s a fucking lunatic.”
The woman shook her head again, and this close Joe could smell her. Fir trees and soil and incense, and beneath all that, the indelible odor of ashes. Joe moved past her, grabbed the knob.
“Your daughter will become like Angela,” the woman said.
That stopped him. Without looking up, he said, “My daughter is safe.”
“Not from this. All the preparations were made. The ashes, the dolly, the invocation. Have you been having nightmares, Joe?”
Joe whirled and seized the woman by the throat. “Where the hell is the boy?”
When she didn’t answer, only continued to smile at him with that same placid expression, he pivoted and slammed her against the wall, thrust the sword point to her voice box. Joe brought his face close to hers. The smell of smoke was all around them, stinging his eyes.
“Where did that son of a bitch take Stevie?”
But the woman said, “Lily won’t know right away, but she’ll suspect something about her is different, she’ll—”
“Don’t talk about my daughter.”
“—become interested in our ways, our past. She’ll gaze at the moon, develop an unnatural attraction to fire—”
Joe shook the woman, her head snapping back and forth. “I’ll kill you now! Just like I killed the others.”
But she pressed on, seemingly in no haste to comply. “She will burn herself alive, just as Angie did.”
“Goddamn you!”
“That’s what the preparations were for, Joe. The same rites were performed on Angie Waltz when she was a child.”
“No.”
“But her mother didn’t think it would happen. And when the urge to immolate herself won out in Angie, her mother blamed you, blamed Copeland—”
“Where is Stevie?”
“—but Sharon made sure she got her revenge. Lily will die so that others may live. You can’t save your daughter from her fate, Joe. Enjoy her while you still have her. The suicide urge will one day grow too strong.”
He drove the sword point into her throat. The blade pierced her flesh, a rivulet of blood dribbling down her neck.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Do you believe me?”
“Where’s the boy?”
The woman closed her eyes. “Upstairs,” she said.
Joe shoved her away, ripped open the door, and leaped back as something near the floor darted at him. The snake’s head grazed his ankle, brought its darting tongue around for another strike. Gasping, Joe danced around it into the hallway. He swung the sword like a golf club. He missed the snake but apparently startled it enough to hold it at bay. It watched him balefully from the doorway, and beyond it he saw the nude woman appear. It was Bridget again—perhaps it had always been Bridget—and she watched him expressionlessly now, the smoke enshrouding her, making her look more than ever like some mystical being. Then she turned and moved to the bed. She lay down and folded her hands over her belly. The last glimpse Joe had of her was the beatific look on her face as she closed her eyes.
Joe turned and headed down the hallway.
Around him the second floor became a white-gray haze.
On his way toward the stairs, Joe passed several rooms. In each of them he saw a cluster of cult members seated on the floor, holding hands and muttering words he couldn’t make out. The sight made him sick to his stomach, but on some level he supposed it was better to have them accepting a fiery death than attacking him like poorly trained kamikaze pilots.
Joe mounted the stairs and within moments reached the third story.
In its dimensions the third floor was a low-ceilinged version of the living room. It was also an unfinished attic that reminded him of some artist’s studio, and though Joe hadn’t done much work up here—the roofing company had taken care of the new roof and the replacement of the warped joists—he knew the space well enough to guess where Baldy had taken the little boy.
But when Joe glanced into the rear dormer window, he saw that it wasn’t Baldy who grasped the child.
It was Sharon who held Little Stevie on her lap.
The pair sat in an old rocking chair, the casement window next to them open and allowing in fresh air.
But moving closer, Joe saw that Sharon looked crazier than she’d ever looked, and that was saying a hell of a lot. Her makeup was smeared, the bizarre flower child dress torn in several places. The child in her lap was crying, and Joe couldn’t blame him. Sharon had the carving knife pressed to Stevie’s throat.
From twenty or so feet away, Joe said, “Put him down, Sharon.”
She tipped Joe a wink. “We’ve won, you know. Even if we perish here tonight, we’ll be reborn. And you will burn with this house, just as your daughter will burn someday.”
Joe glanced right and left, stole a look behind him. He was sure Baldy was up here lurking. The soulless bastard had been the one to deliver the child to Sharon. Which meant he could be hiding anywhere. Him and his machete.
“You’re weak,” Sharon said. “You’ve failed to protect your family, and you’ve failed to protect yourself.”
Distantly, Joe heard sirens. He peered into the pooled shadows of the attic, saw the glints of nails the roofers had pounded through and not bothered to pound flat.
“I’m not weak,” Joe said, “I’m only—”
But he never finished because a shape flashed toward him, something big and screaming. The sword skittered across the floor as Joe and his attacker landed on the dusty wood. Joe thought at first it was Baldy, but then he realized Baldy would have used the machete. Whoever it was had Joe pinned down, had gotten a forearm under Joe’s neck and squeezed him into one hell of a headlock. Joe’s consciousness was already starting to dim. From far away he heard Sharon Waltz laughing, egging on the attacker, and perhaps it was this that galvanized him, that endowed him with enough energy to wrench down on the man’s forearm and send him flipping over his shoulder.
The forearm came loose of his throat as the man smacked down in front of him. Joe pushed away, gasping for air, and saw Kevin Gentry scramble to his feet and prepare for another rush. Joe glanced to his left, realized the sword was a good eight or nine feet away. He wanted to behead this peeping bastard, but Gentry was coming at him already, the man’s face a mask of vengeance. Gentry was feebleminded, Joe knew, but he had momentum and a good deal of strength. Before Joe could recover, Gentry was on him, so Joe did the only thing he could think to do, which was to let himself be tackled and then use his legs to lever the man up and off. When Joe rolled back on his burned shoulders, white-hot spires of pain sizzled through his body, but he leg-pressed Gentry anyway, the man’s wrath turning to confusion as Joe drove him toward the low, slanting ceiling. Then Gentry flinched and howled in pain, and after a moment Joe realized why. Gentry collapsed onto him, but his aggression was gone, eclipsed by the agony in his back. Joe stared up at the dripping nail points that had punctured Gentry’s flesh. He pushed Gentry off and scrambled on top of him. He knew Gentry
was hurting, but the wounds wouldn’t be fatal. No, unless he took care of the shithead now, Gentry would be right back at him, endangering Joe and Little Stevie.
Joe wrapped his hands around Gentry’s throat and began to throttle him.
At first Gentry’s eyes bugged out, the severity of his situation perhaps finally dawning in his pea-sized brain. Then his sooty eyes shifted to something over Joe’s shoulder, and Gentry’s mouth split in an ugly grin.
Joe sucked in air and dove sideways just as the machete whooshed down. He didn’t see Gentry’s face in that last moment, but he was sure the man had looked as dumb and cowardly as ever as the machete plunged into the middle of his chest. Joe did see Gentry’s arms and legs go ramrod straight, did hear Sharon bellowing in indignation. Most of all, he saw how furious Baldy was to have slain the wrong man.
Joe clambered over to the sword, grabbed hold of the hilt just as Baldy stood to extricate the machete from Gentry’s gushing chest. Baldy tugged the machete free as Joe swung, but Baldy wasn’t deft enough to block Joe’s sword. It cleaved through the muscular man’s left arm just above the elbow. Forgetting all about the machete, Baldy grasped his spraying stump and squealed like a hog at slaughter time. Joe cocked the sword again, noting as he did that Baldy seemed to have forgotten all about Joe’s presence. It was just as well. Sharon shrieked at Baldy to turn around, turn around, but Joe was already letting loose with his hardest swing yet.
Baldy turned to run at the last moment, his broad back facing Joe, but the blade caught him in the side of the bicep, crunched through his humerus, and embedded six inches deep in his side. His huge right arm fell to the floor with a squishy thud. There was a gruesome whistling sound as the man’s perforated lung struggled to take in air. Baldy slouched forward, Joe’s sword slithering out of him with a wet slurp.
Thinking of Copeland, Joe decided to let Baldy bleed his last moments away.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sharon said. “You and your family will be dead soon.”
Joe noticed how close Sharon held Stevie to the open casement window. The attic was swirling with smoke now, the air becoming noxious. Joe coughed into his arm, saw Stevie coughing too.
He stepped closer, the sword clutched before him. “My family’s still with me, Sharon. You’re the one whose daughter burned herself alive.”
She whirled, her face wild with rage. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you dare talk about my baby that way.”
“Your baby?” Joe asked, ten feet away now. “How about your grandchild? Doesn’t he matter? Look at his face, for chrissakes.”
“He’s as much to blame as you,” she spat. “My Angie would be alive if it weren’t for the two of you.”
Joe clenched the steel hilt. Despite the burns on his back and the fatigue and the smoke he’d inhaled, he felt a tremendous power surging through him. A breathtaking vitality. He said, “You’re the one who let them use Angie.”
A look of horror spread over Sharon’s features. “How dare you? How dare you accuse me of…of…”
“Of letting them spread ashes around that tenement of yours? Of providing them with something of Angie’s to use on a corn dolly?”
Sharon’s smeared lips trembled. “I didn’t…I would never—”
“But you did,” Joe said, only five feet away now. “You did, you miserable bitch. Why’d you do it? So they’d let you back into the group? So they’d forget Angie’s dad wasn’t one of them?”
And now something ghastly came into Sharon’s face, which contorted in the billowing smoke, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
Sharon’s gaze hardened.
Joe reached for Little Stevie, but Sharon was too fast for him. With a crisp jerk the little boy was suspended out the window, Sharon’s hands grasping him loosely about the armpits. Joe’s stomach gave a sick lurch, and he froze where he was, his feet leaden and rooted to the floor. Behind him, smoke continued to flow up the stairwell, the room now draped in a misty white cowl. Joe coughed into his wrist, fought off the tingling in his throat, the deep burning in his lungs. God, like the worst case of bronchitis ever.
The wailing sirens drew nearer, but Joe had little hope the fire trucks would do them much good. The house was becoming an inferno.
Dangling three stories above the earth, Little Stevie screamed in terror, but his cries weren’t nearly as intense now as they’d been that first day at the gas station. It was as though something had been removed from the boy. Something irreplaceable. Joe thought it could be the loss of his mother, but it seemed even deeper than that. A part of the child’s psyche that had been damaged by all the trauma, a part that was beyond healing, beyond love.
“Don’t come any closer!” Sharon shouted, but her voice was pinched with grief.
Joe had thought to snatch Stevie out of her hands, but now it would only take an infinitesimal error to send the child plummeting to his death. Sharon’s body was turned mostly toward the window, though Joe could still see her profile limned against the unbroken tapestry of the night sky. Sharon’s hands looked slick with sweat—either hers or Stevie’s or both—and her head was bobbing up and down as though she were nodding off. But Joe knew it wasn’t fatigue but sorrow that was draining her, and she was so far past caring about the child that his life and death were interchangeable.
Joe kept his voice low so as not to startle her. “Sharon, we need to get out of this house.”
She only shook her head, mumbled something he couldn’t make out.
He stepped nearer. “Sharon, it’s—”
“It won’t matter,” she said tonelessly. “They never cared about me.”
Joe hesitated. “That’s right, Sharon, they never cared about you. They just used you and Angie.”
She was crying now, mucus and slaver dripping from her chin. “I never thought it would happen,” she moaned. “I never thought Angie would get burned.”
Joe inched forward. “That’s right. They used you. How could you have known it would happen? You just wanted acceptance. It was your grandmother’s group after all, not yours.”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, Joe regretted them. Because at mention of Antonia Baxter, Sharon’s eyes shot wide, her face coming round to glare at him, her features drawn taut like a carapace of loathing. “They’ll take her too, you son of a bitch. They’ll take your Lily.”
And to Joe’s horror, Sharon brought a hand around to poke a forefinger in his direction. Which left the child supported by only one clawed hand.
Little Stevie started to slide.
Joe dropped the sword and lunged toward the window, his chest smacking the frame. Time seemed to stop as his hands darted through the aperture into the cool night. Sharon’s knobby fingers were clenched around Stevie’s armpit one moment, and the next her fingers were relaxing, the boy lowering almost gracefully into empty space.
Joe grabbed for the only thing he could—the boy’s blond hair. There was an endless, soul-shattering moment when he was sure he’d missed, was sure the child was plummeting to his death. Then he felt the boy’s hand slap weakly at the fingers cinched in his hair, the child obviously in severe pain, but no longer falling. He heard Little Stevie wail, and it was one of the most glorious sounds Joe had ever heard. He began hauling Stevie backward when a firebomb of pain exploded in his side.
Sharon had discovered the sword.
Chapter Twenty-Two
As the blade slid deeper into his side, pain spread through him like he’d never dreamed possible. He had no idea what organs the sword was shearing through, but he had no doubt the wound would be fatal.
At his ear Sharon was growling, “Feel that, you worthless fucker. Feel that, you sorry son of a bitch.”
His whole body clenched in anguish, Joe dropped back away from the window.
With Little Stevie clutched to his chest.
The boy squirmed agains
t him, and though the lancing pain in his side remained, on the floor here at least the air was a tick more breathable.
Sharon loomed over him. “You two can burn together,” she said. And she made toward the stairwell.
Joe had a moment in which he was sure his body would not cooperate, that his limbs would no longer obey the commands his brain sent out. Then he twitched spasmodically, the boy on his chest whimpering, and he knew he still had life left in him. Joe reached down, grabbed hold of the blade, and thrust it away from his side. It slid out with a queasy snick, and looking down at the sword he realized Sharon must have jabbed it into him rather than running him through like a marauding Viking. It had penetrated maybe two inches. Not good, but hopefully not fatal.
He glanced askance and saw, through blurred eyes, how her gait canted and lurched as she drifted toward the stairwell. Joe recalled the slurry sound of her words, the demented look in her eyes and realized she was on something—alcohol, meth, Valvoline motor oil, something. She was almost to the steps, but even from here Joe could see the orange tongues of flame licking up the stairwell.
On his chest, Little Stevie was coughing. Joe realized he was coughing too, and soon it would be so bad up here you couldn’t stop coughing. They had to get out of this furnace, but there was nowhere to go. They couldn’t wait for the firemen. He supposed he could bust out the small window that bordered the street, but then what? It would take time for the fire truck to arrive, for the men to spot them, the ladder to be fitted into place. And they were down to perhaps one minute before they both asphyxiated on the smoke. Or were burned alive.
A violent cough racked Joe’s chest, doubling him up and forcing the child to the floor next to him.
They might not even have a minute.
Joe glanced about the dim space as if seeing it for the first time. There was a dormer window on each of the four sides of the house. The front and back windows were the smallest, and the front one was strictly ornamental. The back window was cranked open, but they couldn’t very well climb onto the roof. First of all, the roof could be ablaze already, and the fact was, there was very little roof there to begin with—perhaps four or five inches before the eaves trough began.
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