Normally, this would have been embarrassing.
Aided by storybook-ideal conditions, bathed in the radiant glow of a Blue Moon and buoyed along by a week-long, $25,000 advertisement campaign, and he still hadn’t managed to kindle the flames of pandemonium in Stepford Town.
Normally, this would have sent him packing.
But right now he couldn’t help feeling lucky—lucky not only to be alive, but for every passing moment of calm.
It wasn’t until 11:30—seated in his Legacy, parked in a tavern lot, staring at the moon in vague disquiet—that a garbled exchange broke the scanner’s silence, hinting at the first, however initially vague indication that maybe, just maybe, the evening wasn’t entirely over.
One of the voices had mentioned a fire.
Owen, starting his engine, thought here we go …
Ten minutes later he arrived on the scene—the Holtwood Development headquarters trailer—to find its exterior paneling scorched and the front porch smoldering, stinking of gas.
The company spokesman, whom Owen had met once before, was shouting at a pair of officers.
A guard behind them dispensed with the last of a portable fire extinguisher’s foam. Two other property guards stood watching. The charred stoop was coated in lather. From what Owen gathered, the trailer had just been nailed in a “drive-by Molotov cocktailing.” One of the guards had spotted the vehicle: a “light blue Hessian-mobile,” as he put it.
The smaller of the cops stepped back from the spokesman to ask for Owen’s press credentials. Before they were checked, however, the spokesman flew off the handle, blasting both officers, along with the sheriff, as incompetent scumbags. With that, the officer went back to arguing, forgetting all about Owen’s clearance. Watching them go at it, Owen began to sense what felt like a coming storm—a drop in the air pressure sweeping The Basin: something approaching with terrible certainty.
Two miles north, on Eby Hess Road, just south of Bareville, driving west, Officer Rudolf Beaumont was so deranged with agitation, he was having trouble keeping his grip on the wheel.
Over the course of the past ninety minutes, he’d taken a blind-siding: first, by way of a call from the sheriff demanding to know about “bribery charges,” the details of which were scant and confusing, at best, however directly alarming. Beaumont had lied through his teeth, of course. The sheriff knew nothing about the mill. Beaumont alone had been working with Tulk and the Stoltzfi and Grabers and Benedictus. His involvement amounted not only to turning the other cheek to their operations—but to strong-arming, ushering off and / or bearing false witness against their opposition—i.e., overly persistent intruders. Over the years, he’d made seven related arrests, and administered even more beatings. Most of the suspects, what Tulk called the “animal activist prowlers”—had wound up in jail. In exchange for testifying against them, Rudolf had been given monthly payoffs. Essentially, this arrangement had always been simple, if undemanding enough. On select occasions, when circumstance dictated, Beaumont had even guarded the mill. Today had been one such occasion, as most of its keepers had been locked up, evidently. The idiots. Something had happened in town that morning to land them in Stepford’s prison. Ezekiel Stoltzfus had contacted Rudolf at 5:15 in search of his father. By that point, Beaumont had already heard all about the attack on his cruiser radio. Ten minutes later, he’d been at the mill. A distraught Ezekiel had filled him in while, behind them, the hounds had been wailing chaotically. The timing couldn’t have been any worse.
Sheriff Highman, braced for a loaded evening, was calling out all of his units. In moments, Rudolf would be assigned to “crowd control” at the Blue Ball Devil maze. From there, he wouldn’t be able to steal away for more than a couple of minutes. Hence, the mill would be left under insufficient guard for most of the evening.
He managed to slip away from his post at ten, right when the call had come in: Sheriff Highman’s voice crackled over the radio, demanding explanations.
By this point, Highman was fed up with Rudolf—what with the beatings and all, and the bad publicity they had brought the department.
But these charges, felony bribery charges, if true, were a whole different game altogether.
Rudolf, parked in the compound lot with his headlights cut, listened in horror—all the while, pretending to be at the fair-grounds (minus the carnival roar), which didn’t sit well with the sheriff—“Where are you?”—as Rudolf replied: “In a portable toilet.”
He blew his cool in the conversation. He might have done better to simulate bad reception for all of his grace under pressure. And Highman wasn’t about to let up. His interrogation was only suspended, momentarily, due to distraction: a call had come in on a situation apparently pending in Bird-in-Hand. This left Rudolf standing at a loss with a frazzled Ezekiel, who couldn’t enlighten him. It wasn’t until—by stroke of fortune—Jonas Tulk pulled in behind him, rocking along in his family wagon, that hope for an explanation surfaced. But Tulk, for that matter, would be in the foulest of moods himself, and for solid reason: Beaumont and Benedictus had landed them all in a world of shit, he said. And with that, the picture began to unravel, however imbued with acrimony.
Back on patrol at the maze by 11, Rudolf began to register the full implications. Beaumont would surely be called to the stand to account for his role in accepting the offerings. Someone had caught him on film, red-handed. And knowing Benedictus, he’d botched their arraignment—Rudolf could hear the old windbag raving of Devils and hippies in Percy’s courtroom. The harder he thought about Minister Bontrager taking the stand, the more nervous he grew. And the crowd around him was no help at all—hundreds of drunks in masquerade walking by, some lipping off to him (“Look, it’s a pig!”) from behind their veils of anonymity—as, all the while, the park’s director, now seated inside of the ticket booth, glared at him. Rudolf felt himself flushing over. A simmering inner panic welled up in him. Presently, Sheriff High-man’s voice came over the radio, calling for Kutay.
Allegedly, the city police had issued a warrant for violation of house arrest on an Ephraim Elias Bontrager. The young man and his aunt, his legal escort, had been due back at her house by ten. Officer Kutay was ordered to check on it …
Finally.
Rudolf broke for his cruiser, blasting himself for not realizing earlier: yes—of course. The kid, that bastard …
He and those Dough Balls—or Crubbills, or whatnot—had carried this whole thing out with a camera.
Resourceful, they were. Every one of them: crafty. Punks.
Beaumont knew where to find them.
He slowed on approaching the old gravel lane that cut into the woods from a bend in the road. A trail of dust hung over its weed-choked corridor. Someone had just driven through.
Rudolf turned off his headlights and slowly drifted up the rising incline, shadowed on either side by deciduous trees, their silhouettes etched in the moonlight—around a bend to a break in the forest, then out to a narrow path between cornfields. From there, he slowed his advance even further. An acre of stalks moved by at a crawl, beyond which a floating expanse of darkness harbored the glow of a distant bonfire.
Yes. Exactly as he had suspected: the Schlabach Farm. They were gathering here.
The last three barn party raids had been launched against out-in-the open, high-profile targets. In light of foreseeable heightened police opposition to underaged drinking this evening, surely the Dough Balls would have relocated operations to somewhere secluded. The long-abandoned Schlabach Farm was the obvious choice, to Beaumont’s reckoning. Situated 500 yards from the northernmost bend in Eby Hess Road, behind him—and a mile to the nearest lane in all other directions—the place was nearly invisible. No one could see it from any road. The nearest house was miles away. And the aging couple who owned the property lived in Ronks and didn’t patrol it.
Across the field, a couple of figures were moving around in a haze of firelight. Stacks of what looked like boxes dotted the yard. A car was par
ked to one side. The southern wall of the barn was faintly discernible, patterned with networks of ivy. Beaumont cut his engine and stared for a minute.
Yes. This was it.
He reached for a sack on the floor of the passenger’s seat. Inside, there were ten pairs of handcuffs—as issued by Sheriff Highman that evening—one box of .45-caliber bullets, one canister of tear gas, a stun gun and Mace. Perching the load on his lap, he unpacked it. Everything snapped or slid into place.
Then he went for his cruiser’s radio.
“This is Unit 4.” He gripped the receiver and waited. No answer came back. Again, he spoke. “Unit 4.”
Still nothing.
Annoyed, he checked the volume. All systems were go.
He didn’t have time for this.
“This is Beaumont, Unit 4,” he growled. “I’m switching my handheld off …”
A glitch in the static came back in response. Rudolf stared at the radio’s digital equalizer in puzzled annoyance. One of its ranges peaked abruptly. The speakers crackled. What sounded like laughter filled the cruiser. The officer flinched.
“Hey, Rudy—” An unfamiliar, oddly accented voice of a young man spoke. “What are you doing out there in the bushes?”
A twitter of laughter went up in the background.
The tone was insolent, thoroughly spiteful. Beaumont could scarcely believe his ears.
“What do you call ten thousand cops at the bottom of a lake?” the voice continued.
Dead air spanned the gap to the punch line. Then: “A good start!”
It howled uncontrollably.
“Give me that thing!” came another voice. “What’s up, Rude-oaf?” More defiant: “How long’s it been since you slept with a woman?”
Which really made them laugh out loud—as though the idea were beyond preposterous.
“How about a man, then?”
They roared all the more.
Beaumont sat there, paralyzed, watching the figures double over around the fire.
Passing the mouthpiece again, someone else started in: “You ought to be grateful for asthma. You wouldn’t have lasted a week in boot camp.”
“Yeah.”
“He’d be crying for his teddy bear.”
“BAH!”
Rudolf could feel something twist in his bowels.
“Rudy. Hey, is it true that your father wore women’s clothing?”
That did it.
He grabbed the receiver and fired back. “You sons of bitches!” He squawked, overloading. Then: “I swear to Jesus, I’ll kill every one of—”
He seized up, choking.
They crowed in triumph.
Again, Beaumont flew off the handle, but this time, he ended up puckering mutely.
Snapping at last, he reached for his keys. He was starting the engine just as the radio cut to silence. A moment later, a voice returned, unencumbered by static.
Calmly: “Hey, Officer—look to your right.”
He froze.
“It’s coming …”
Cringing, he turned.
His cruiser was slammed on the passenger’s side by what felt like a hurtling fire hydrant. The vehicle went up on two wheels, lurching. Beaumont’s head hit the ceiling. His scalp opened up, spraying blood all over the dash.
The cruiser teetered—wheels in the air and, suspended, leveling off, then—
Returning momentum and falling—crashed back down.
A chorus of wild cheering went up.
“SCORE!” came a call from across the field.
Coughing, blood-soaked and losing his vision, Beaumont reached for his door handle. Jammed. The entire frame of the car had been twisted.
He couldn’t see ten feet ahead through the darkness.
“Hog roast tonight!” came a drunken holler.
Another round of cheers went up.
A shadow passed in the rearview mirror. He craned his neck for a look, but was stopped by a sharp, unbearable pain in his back. He gasped. The blood dribbled into his eyes.
He unholstered his .45. Something appeared to his right. It was coming. He pointed the barrel …
A mile and a half to the south and closing, over the hill, approaching on foot via Old 18, between Ronkers Lane and an overly active Stumptown Drive, Jonathan Becker had already been on the frayed end of calm when the shot rang out. Having opted to walk, as opposed to driving his buggy, for dread of police entanglement, he’d found out the hard way, and quickly enough, that the township police were completely outnumbered. In the past twenty minutes, he’d managed to elude one black bumper squadron—a five-man party from District Nineteen, well out of its loop—two security vans from the Sprawl Mart, and a couple of Redcoats spotting the ditches with a high-powered halogen lamp—eluding them all by dodging into the corn as their wagons or vehicles passed; an act which, in all probability, would have gotten him strung up and whipped, were he spotted. To add to the tension, an amplified hollering match between warring English camps down the road was filling The Basin with hair-raising, overextended belches of feedback. The whole thing had put him on edge to begin with: fear of reprisal had kept him going. Ephraim’s final admonishment (“Midnight. Alone. No excuses.”) still rang in his head. He knew to take that warning to heart. He knew they would seek him out, were he absent. Visions of Colin Graybill waking his family at midnight spurred him on.
Just as the fear of search and seizure had kept him on foot, so the traffic had frazzled him. Then came the gunshot, followed by a booming metallic SLAM that rang through The Basin, then something worse: a shrill, though equally deep-ended, wholly phantasmal howl. It carried across the fields in an echo. A haunting silence fell over the night. The English hollering match desisted. Everything seemed to rear up for a moment, as though to say, nervously, What was that? … The calm to follow was thick with portent. Yes, this evening would come to pass, and all within it to resolution: but not without facing the music first. A purge was in order.
The moon was full.
Jonathan picked up his pace, moving nervously east at a shuffle, down the fleetingly empty stretch of Old 18, past where the end of the field on his left gave way to a jagged incline that grew to a high, craggy, barren escarpment, the bank of which shimmered with quartz in the moonlight. Ahead, maybe two hundred yards, an overgrown pathway led up and over the ridge. Jonathan focused on getting there quickly.
By morning, this nightmare would all be over.
The roar of a motor preceded the burst of movement from over the ridge by an instant: launching as quickly into the open air, on a downward angle and plunging, its engine a whining combustible blast in flight, the vehicle shattered the silence.
Terrified, Jonathan leapt in his tracks.
The Hornet’s bumper tore into the downgrade, ripping through silt and gravel. It glanced off a boulder, upended, went over and flipped. It cleared the ditch and came down in the road on its side, grinding across the asphalt. A shower of sparks went up underneath it. The tearing of metal on pavement resounded—and, lost in the rumble, a voice crying out.
Finally, the vehicle ground to a halt. Still on one side, it swayed momentarily, the driver’s seat cocked toward the belt of Orion. Then it fell back to its base with a crash.
At once, hysterical laughter rolled out of it. Smoke wafted over the road from the engine. The road was now quiet. In place of the rattle and crash, there was Gideon’s voice, in stitches: “That’s what I’m talking about!” in Plain Folk. Colin joined in with a whoop of accord: “I can’t believe you fucking did that!” A door came open. In English: “Ach! Let me out …” Still laughing. Gideon tried the ignition. “Hold on—” He coughed.
It started.
“Damn, this thing is incredible.”
“That’s the second time.”
They got out of the car. From a distance, Jonathan watched them circle it. He didn’t know whether or not they had spotted him. As such, he hung back in the shadows.
Gideon came up for air with a b
elch.
He dabbed his brow with a shirtsleeve and looked at it. “Hey. I’m bleeding …”
Colin laughed. “We ought to get back.”
They returned to the car.
Breathlessly, Jonathan watched them move. They had already climbed in, shut their doors and shifted into gear when they called to him.
“Well, come on!” Colin shouted impatiently. “You’re the fucking guest of honor.”
The back door opened. The engine rumbled and spat. They were waiting.
“Ach! Get in!”
Officer Kutay, who, so far, had spent his evening responding to noise complaints, received orders to check on the Bontrager kid at the Hostler residence just before midnight. A few minutes later, he rolled down the gravel drive, feeling vaguely insulted by the order. While everyone else (some thirteen officers, along with a five-man squad from the city) was out and about—whether chasing a Holtwood van that was clocked running ninety in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone or responding to a rise in complaints re: rampant drunk driving along Route 21—Fatty had been assigned to check on a missing eighteen-year-old Dutchie.
He rounded a bend in the drive to spot someone, a hatless, bearded figure in black, wandering circles around the yard. As Fatty’s cruiser slowed to a halt, the figure looked up, bathed in the headlights. The look on his face shone of tormented worry.
As expected, his name was Abraham Hostler. His wife, it followed, was named Grizelda. And no, they hadn’t come home—neither she nor Ephraim, their nephew: Ephraim Bontrager. Both were a couple of hours late. A social worker had already come by to check the house and living conditions. Then a city policeman had come to install an electrical boundary network (the “bracelet line”) around their property. Ephraim was now in violation of house arrest, an annulment of same. And if Mrs. Hostler didn’t appear in the next hour (by one a.m.) a warrant would go out on her, as well.
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