by Jan Strnad
Brant had reached the pulpit. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder and took aim. He wasn't giving the bastard two seconds.
Before he could pull the trigger the pulpit exploded at him, blinding him with flying splinters of wood. He turned away instinctively as Small stepped to the side, a Smith & Wesson revolver heavy in his hand. Small fired two wild shots at Brant as he edged toward the sacristy door.
Brant's watering eyes reduced Small to a blurry figure in black. He pointed the shotgun at the blur and fired, pumped another cartridge into the chamber and fired again. He heard Small cry out. He wiped the tears from his eyes and for a moment thought that Small had escaped. His eyes followed the smear of blood on the sacristy door down to the body lying on the floor. Blood seeped from beneath Small's body and crept across the hardwood floor. The body twitched.
Brant approached it warily. The pistol lay near Small's twitching fingers. Brant kicked it away, then nudged Small with his foot. He kicked him hard in the ribs and watched his face for any reaction. None.
Seth was dead.
Brant pumped another cartridge into the chamber and pointed the barrel at Small's head. It was bare minutes before midnight. If Small came back, Brant was ready for him. After that came burial in a deep, unmarked grave, maybe in a field where he would lie, unsuspected and undisturbed, for decades. Or he would cremate the body and scatter the ashes on the wind. Even Seth's powers of resurrection must have some limit.
He heard a noise, the creak of hinges. The sacristy door was opening slowly. He aimed the shotgun at the door. With Seth dead, the other Risen should have died also. Whoever was opening the door might be another survivor like Brant. Either that or something was horribly wrong.
The door opened to reveal Sheriff Clark, his hands raised shoulder high. He nudged the door open with his foot.
"I don't want trouble," Clark said. "You wouldn't kill a man in cold blood, would you? I just want to talk."
"Keep your distance," Brant warned. He would've pulled the trigger but he wasn't sure about his ammunition. He didn't want to spend all his shells on Risen and find he had none left for Seth if he came back. There was also the slight chance that Clark, like himself, had escaped the night's slaughter and wasn't Risen at all.
Footsteps behind him. Brant whirled to see Madge Duffy and Doris Gunnarsen enter the sanctuary. He swung the gun back around to cover the Sheriff. Clark had been joined by Frank Gunnarsen. Both men inched toward him from the sacristy, arms raised. Brant heard the murmur of voices on the stairs, coming up from the Sunday School rooms in the basement.
"Stay back," he warned. Risen seemed to be coming out of the woodwork.
He backed toward the side exit, pointing the gun first one way and then the other. Madge and Doris were joined by three other Anderson women, all dressed as if for church, who had been laying out refreshments downstairs. Bernice Tompkins wore a cotton apron and carried a paper cup of punch. They closed on Brant like gawkers surrounding an accident victim.
"Stay back," Brant said again, but they continued to advance. Brant was baffled. They were Risen, they had to be. So why did they fear the gun? Did they know that, with Seth dead, this life was their last? Without Seth to sustain them, would they expire at midnight? It frustrated him that didn't understand what was going on. He was sweating harder now than when he'd shot Small.
Suddenly strong arms closed around him from behind and pinned his arms to his side. The Risen surged forward. Brant closed his finger on the trigger and blasted a hole in Sheriff Clark's gut. Clark went down. The other Risen stepped over his body without a thought.
Frank Gunnarsen grabbed the shotgun and wrested it from Brant's hand. Madge Duffy clawed at his face. Frank drove the butt of the shotgun into Brant's stomach. The air whooshed from Brant's lungs and he fell limp. The arms holding him let him slide to the floor. He looked up to see Jed Grimm. Behind Grimm, the side exit door closed automatically and clicked shut. The others had been a distraction that allowed Jed to slip up on Brant from behind. They didn't fear the gun. They didn't fear death. They were sustained by the power of Seth. The undiminished power of Seth.
"Looks like you shot the wrong man," Jed said, bending down.
The Risen clutched Brant's arms and pinned his legs. They lifted him to a sitting position, twisting his arms until he thought they would pop from their sockets.
Grimm's huge fingers reached for Brant's face, closed over it, gripped it tight. Grimm's other hand grabbed the back of Brant's head.
"How's that stiff neck, Brant?" Grimm asked. "You've been under a lot of pressure lately. It feels tight. I think it wants a twist."
Grimm twisted Brant's head like an oil field worker closing a wellhead. The neck cracked, bones broke, tendons snapped. Brant saw the room spin and go sideways. Then he was looking up at his own shoulder, his head resting loosely against his chest. Behind him he saw Madge Duffy's upside down face smiling at him. Next to Madge, crowding in for a better look, Bernice Tompkins took a loud sip of punch.
***
With every corner he turned, fate seemed to move Tom further away from the access road to the highway. Peg sat beside him and stared out the window. Did she notice the two dead bodies inside the car with the shattered windows, or the corpse slung over the Optimists' cannon in the Square? Did she realize how warped the world had become, how tranquil little Anderson had been transformed in the space of a few days into a deadly caricature of itself, an image in a strange and malevolent mirror?
If so, she showed no sign of comprehension. Gunshots peppered the stillness, some in the distance, some alarmingly near. Every pair of headlights he glimpsed convinced Tom to duck the car into the next alley or to douse his own lights and cruise invisibly down another dark street.
He became aware of a pair of lights in the rear view mirror. He watched as the car passed under a street lamp. He recognized it as Carl Tompkins' Acura, an import that had foreshadowed Carl's stocking of Japanese power tools at the hardware store. It was a four-banger and Tom could have left it on a straight-away, but this was no time for a race. Tom was trying to remain inconspicuous. Tom turned the corner and the other car followed.
Tom turned into an alley and the Acura dogged his heels. It was on his tail, all right. He had to lose it. He glanced over at Peg. He'd strapped her in earlier, when he'd turned off the lights and cut the engine and fought the sudden loss of power steering to muscle the Impala into a shadowed driveway and wait for a car to pass. If the cat-and-mouse with Carl turned into a Hollywood car chase of screaming tires and battered steel, at least she wouldn't go flying around the passenger compartment.
He barreled straight through the alley, shout out the other end, bounced on worn-out shocks over the street and plunged into the alley on the opposite side. Carl did the same. He must have had the accelerator pushed to the floor as the Acura closed the space between them.
The Impala was doing sixty down the second alley with the Acura biting at its tail when Tom hit the brakes. The Impala skidded to a halt, kicking up a cloud of dirt, and Tom fought to keep its nose pointed straight ahead. If the car went into a spin, his plan would go bust.
Carl hit his brakes too late. The Acura rear-ended the Impala with a crunch of metal and a loud pop and the swelling air bag smashed Carl back into his seat. He fought it down, cursing. He opened the door and stepped out to face Tom and stare into the barrel of the brand new .22 he'd loaned to Mark Lunger.
Tom put a bullet squarely into Carl Tompkins' forehead. He watched the body fall to the ground, then he rolled it over on its back. Carl's eyes were wide and unseeing. Tom examined the rear end of the Impala. It was damaged but driveable.
He returned to Carl's body, the .22 in hand. Across town, the church bell tolled. Carl's body went into the spastic dance, drew in air to fill empty lungs. Tom watched in fascination, unable to tear his eyes away from the spectacle. He watched the hole he'd put in Carl's head close. He watched as new skin grew to cover the exposed skull. He watched as Carl
opened his eyes and registered the gun pointed at his head.
"Shit," Tom said, pulling the trigger. Brant had failed. Anderson belonged to the Risen.
Tom checked Carl's car for weapons. He found a shotgun and a 9mm pistol. He took both and hurried back to the Impala.
Peg stared at him as he climbed in. The fog over her brain seemed to be lifting ever so slightly. She was fighting it hard, forcing herself to focus her eyes and her mind.
"Tom?" she said, puzzled.
"It's all right, Mom," he said as he started the engine. "Everything's going to be all right."
Even in her drugged state, Peg could tell when her boy was lying.
Day Five, Tuesday
Twenty-Five
Risen walked the streets as if someone had declared a holiday, and maybe someone had.
Tom drove through the city-wide come-as-you-are party as if he had all the time in the world. He saw Toby Morris who worked at the gas station comparing bloodstains with Pete Klassen, one of the nation's few surviving milkmen. Someone had put a bullet straight through the embroidered name patch on Toby's gas station shirt, and Pete proudly displayed the entry and exit holes in his blood encrusted milkman's cap.
Tom saw Lucy Haws, the deputy's depressive sister, strolling down the street in her night clothes, greeting everyone she met with a smile and a wave. He saw Ma from the diner and Merle Tippert from the movie theater and Nathan Smart who played the accordion and his wife Opal who could not be beaten at bridge. Tom wondered if Nathan had squeezed the life from his wife as he squeezed music from his instrument, or if Opal had poisoned the hors d'oeuvres at their weekly bridge game with Opal's sister and her husband.
He saw Bernice Tompkins in a car full of agitated cats, driving slowly and looking from side to side, searching for her husband Carl whose thrice-killed body lay cooling in an alley five blocks away, the only true corpse in a town populated by the dead.
He saw Ira who delivered the mail and Franco who cut his hair. He saw his teachers, his classmates, the people he'd known since he was a child, the people he now recognized as the touchstones of his life.
He knew them all from the schoolyard, the neighborhood, the stores, the softball games, the picnics and county fairs. He knew them as the men who populated Carl Tompkins' hardware store and talked about feed and tools and harvests and wives. He knew them as the women who gathered in twos and threes to gossip and laugh and brag on the children who, at other times, would surely drive them to drink. He knew these people as he knew every lamp post on Main Street, every storefront, every common and boring and steadfast thing in his life, only he no longer knew them at all. With the turning of the earth and the tolling of a bell, they had become something alien, something deadly strange.
They would kill him if they knew he wasn't one of them. So Tom drove slowly, as if he, too, had been invited to the party. When they waved, he waved back, smiling, shooting worried looks at Peg in the passenger's seat.
She stared out the window, her left hand nervously massaging her right. The veil was lifting. She registered the bloodstains and the ripped clothing. She recognized the perversity behind the teeming midnight streets. But the underlying sense of it eluded her. She did not comprehend the why or how. She did not know--or could not summon the concentration--to force onto her face an answering smile or lift her hand in a mock-friendly wave.
It was only a matter of time before someone noticed her detachment. The lethal accusation would sear through the air and ignite the crowd. Risen would swarm the car like locusts, clawing at the windows, tugging at the doors. Someone would have a gun....
"We have to lay low," Tom said. "You need time to clear your head. We'll get a chance to make a break for it soon. They have to sleep sometime. They're still just people, despite everything. They have to sleep."
"Annie," Peg said.
"We'll find Annie when your head's clear," Tom said.
He pulled in behind Ma's Diner and dug through Peg's purse until he found her keys. One of them opened the back door and they slipped inside. He sat Peg in the kitchen and went around to the front and snagged several packets of the No-Doz they kept by the cash register. He poured Peg a glass of water and fed her four of the caffeine pills, then decided what-the-hell and gave her four more.
They sat in the darkness of the kitchen and, through the service window, watched the parade of townsfolk march by. Tom heard the church bell ringing, drawing Risen from all corners of the town, luring them out with its Pied Piper tones. It seemed that half the town passed by the diner window. The Meyerses, the Verheidens, the Coles, the Hogans, the Nowlans, the Cardenases. All the familiar faces, the children and grandparents, the high and mighty, the lowly, the pleasant and the mean of heart. All passed by, happy and sinister and murderous as crows. They didn't look in the diner window to see Tom and his mother hunkered in the dark, afraid, wondering if they were the last doomed souls in a town gone mad with life.
Time and caffeine were having their effect on Peg. She sat attentively as Tom told her about his and Brant's research in Junction City, about Eloise and Seth and Donald Pritchett, about their encounters at the roadblock and with Josh Lunger and Cindy Robertson. The flood of reanimated souls outside the diner window slowed to a trickle. Tom started to tell Peg about Reverend Small, but he stopped when she shook her head.
"It isn't Small," she said. "Seth is no stranger."
"But everything started happening when Small moved to town. Before that"
Peg interrupted with a voice flat with resignation. "They moved the cemetery more than two years ago, before construction ever began on the nuclear plant."
Tom's stomach did a flip-flop.
"Jesus," he said, turning the new fact over in his head. Seth had been loose for two years. He'd been biding his time, studying the town, planning this night for two years. For one wild moment Tom suspected Brant. He'd shown up in Anderson two years ago. Who better to study a town than a reporter? But no, it didn't make any sense. If Brant were Seth, he'd have killed Tom long ago, when Tom first came to him with his fears. He tried to think of other newcomers, but Tom was sixteen years old two years ago, more keenly aware of the comings and goings of baseball players, rock musicians and super-heroes than of the adult population of his home town.
"Who else could it be?" he asked.
"It doesn't matter," Peg replied.
Tom stared at her incredulously, thinking that the tranquilizer hadn't worn off completely. She still wasn't thinking straight, didn't understand any of what he'd told her.
"Mom, listen to me. Seth is the key to everything. We have to kill Seth to put an end to this nightmare!"
"There's no end. One nightmare or another, that's all. Take your choice."
"You're not making sense."
"I don't think you and I would choose the same nightmare."
"It's the drugs. They're still messing you up."
"What was that?"
Peg turned, alert. Tom froze, listening hard.
"Something at the back door," Peg whispered.
Tom went to investigate. He put his ear to the door for long seconds but heard nothing.
"Probably just a cat," he said to the darkness. Then a bell tinkled and Tom turned to see Peg throwing the front door of the diner wide. He called after her as she ran for the street, toward two figures standing silently in the middle of the road. Brant and Annie. Tom spat an oath and gave chase, the shotgun in his hand.
Annie ran to her mother and launched herself into Peg's arms. Mother and daughter held each other tight. Peg peppered Annie with kisses and murmured her name over and over. Tears from Peg's eyes dampened Annie's face and Annie said, "You're getting me all wet!" and Peg laughed and said she couldn't help it, she was just so glad to have her back.
Tom glared at Brant and ordered him to step away, aiming the shotgun at his head. Brant only smiled and shook his head.
"You know the gun doesn't intimidate me," Brant said. "Besides, I'm not here to convert anyo
ne. Not you, not even Peg. If Seth had wanted to convert your mom, he could have done it long ago."
"So you're one of them."
"They converted me before I could reach Reverend Small, and now I'm glad they did. But none of that matters anymore, Tom. I'm not here as an enemy." Brant put his arm around Peg. He drew her and Annie to his side.
"I want to heal, not destroy," Brant continued. "Your family is broken. You know how nothing's been the same since the accident. Your father's dead and, unfortunately, there's nothing I or Seth or anyone can do about that. I know that I can't take his place, not completely. But I can be here for you and for Peg and Annie. We can be a family, Tom, whole and strong again, living in a wonderful little town. You don't even have to be converted, not if you don't want to."
"Bullshit. Seth is a cancer. Cancer doesn't make deals."
"Come with us to the church. Come and see for yourself. There's no evil at work here. The church is overflowing. Everybody's there. They're singing hymns...you can almost hear them from here. The town's come together like never before. Anderson will be a better place to live than ever, because we're united in our devotion to Seth. We're of one mind."
"Everybody thinking the same, believing the same."
"Exactly!"
"Sounds like hell to me," Tom stated. "I'll keep my own mind, thank you."
Brant sighed.
"I know," he said. "I know how strange it sounds. I was skeptical myself, you'll remember. I fought against Seth, but I'm glad I lost. Seth is the way, Tom. Seth is the answer."
Tom stepped forward, keeping the shotgun trained on Brant's chest.
"Let go of my mom. She and Annie are coming with me."
Annie squeezed Peg tighter.
"No," Annie said, defiant and afraid.
Peg shot a reproving look at Tom and said, "You're scaring Annie."
Annie scares me, Tom thought, and he said, "She isn't Annie, Mom. She's a thing back from the grave. She's a walking corpse."