The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  Dietrich listens to this, too. Unruh’s got to be a hundred years old by now, from the way that guy spoke about him in prison, like he’s been alive the whole century, haunting the countryside. Probably he’s now just some old man sitting in his own shit in a bungalow, babbling about nothing to no one. Not much sport to that. But, yes, a good story. A good trophy. A great tattoo.

  “And why are you telling me this, Sheriff?”

  “Because I want to live, and I don’t have anything else to bargain with.”

  “And what are you asking me for again?”

  “Just time. Ten minutes. To get to my truck. Me, the woman, and the boy.”

  “You have to leave that boy. That’s non-negotiable.”

  “The woman will never leave without her son.”

  “Then leave them both.”

  Dietrich shrugs. Final offer. Cooper, a man with no leverage, considers the options. His hands still held high. Then he acquiesces, visibly. Dietrich sees it happen. A slumping, an internal collapse, a moral crumbling.

  For Cooper, it’s a well-practiced look.

  “All right. That’s fair. Just me,” says Cooper softly. “I’ll go. Ten minutes. That’s all I need.” It’s so hot out right now, he thinks. Their two shadows stretch in the street grotesquely. Cooper and Dietrich, out here chatting, like old buddies. Cooper’s sweating. His hands tremble. Weary from being raised in surrender for so long.

  “Which way? To Unruh?” says Dietrich.

  Cooper nods toward a cul-de-sac. “Last house on the next street over. He’s alone. No one ever bothers him. He’s home right now.”

  “I just came from that block,” says Dietrich.

  “Trust me, he’s there. Look, you can take care of him, then get back to your business. I just need ten minutes to get to my truck. You see me again, you kill me. Deal?”

  Dietrich’s not even sure where the sheriff intends to go. The fences are locked. The agents aren’t letting anyone leave. If he does try to go, they’ll shoot him down as quick as Dietrich would.

  “Yes, all right, it’s a deal,” says Dietrich. “You go.”

  Cooper bows, like a supplicant being dismissed. “Ten minutes,” he says, then turns to walk away, then breaks into a jog and runs. Dietrich watches him go. He fires a few shots from the rifle straight up in the air, as though celebrating, pop pop pop, just to remind whoever’s out there that he’s still here, he’s still in their town, and he’s still coming. In fact, he’s on his way right now.

  36.

  FRAN HAS ALWAYS HAD an awareness of vague evil in the world, as well as the knowledge that her one job in life is to protect her son from it. There is a freedom to this clarity. Like joining a religious order—the freedom of complete and unquestioning discipline. Whether you previously had a purpose, or wanted a purpose, in life, like it or not, you now have a purpose.

  Keep him safe.

  Eight years can go by in an instant. She remembers Isaac when he seemed no heavier to hoist than a loaf of bread. She remembers his first words, his first steps, Isaac as a toddler playing in the yard that rings their bungalow. She remembers tugging on, then discarding, pair after pair of inadequate trousers, all of which seemingly just moments ago had fit him perfectly. These images are the pages on her internal calendar. Not days, not months, not years—these milestones mark her time here. Isaac breaking his arm, and Nurse Breckinridge setting it, and assuring her no X-rays were needed, and Fran’s almost overwhelming relief at not having to leave the gated town with her son. Or Isaac, planted in the corner of his bedroom with his books, reading and re-reading the pages, making the most of everything because months would pass between the arrival of anything new. When some new toy did arrive, ordered on the sly by Spiro, they’d unbox it together and invent some new mythology around it. Neither of them had any idea who the Ultrabots were, or the Cosmos Squad, or the Jungletrex Ultimate Warriors, or whatever off-brand knockoff Spiro managed to purloin, so they just made up their own stories together. They sat and determined who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. You can always tell the bad guys, she told him, because they’re the ones who look bad.

  She knew then that this wasn’t a good life lesson, but if they stayed here together in this gated town forever, maybe it wouldn’t matter.

  But now, in this chapel, she realizes there’s nowhere left for them to go. No further hole to hide in, no further fallout shelter buried below this shelter, no hiding place left on this earth where the world won’t arrive one day and find you. He never struck her as an evil person, all those years, even up to the moment when she shot him. He certainly never looked like the bad guy. But now she sees. She knows. She understands. About evil, or whatever you care to name it. It comes. It’s relentless. It doesn’t care if you forgot it. It searches, and it finds you, and it arrives on your doorstep one day, and it lights up a screen, it calls you by your real name, it smiles at you, it says hello, it eyes your son and promises to take him home.

  Cooper arrives at the chapel at the same time as Robinson.

  “You look like you just ran a marathon,” says Robinson.

  “Fuck you, too,” Cooper says. “Where have you been?”

  “Trying to find people. Figured we’d all rendezvous here.” He nods to a small group of people, four or five, who are trailing him.

  “That’s all you found?” says Cooper.

  “All that were alive.”

  “Where’s Nurse Breckinridge? We’re going to need her.”

  Robinson shakes his head.

  “How about Ginger Van Buren? Vivien King?”

  Robinson shakes his head again. Cooper decides to stop asking about specific people. “And what about Santayana and the other agents?” he says.

  “I saw them headed that way, toward the intake trailer. I figured they went to find Rigo. Tell him we’re massing here in the chapel.”

  “You think they know about the chapel?”

  Robinson shrugs. “If they did, I imagine they’d be here, trying to stop us.”

  Cooper nods, then pounds on the red metal door.

  “What happened to you?” says Santayana, in a pitying tone, in the intake trailer, as Rigo sits bloodied and doubled over in a plastic chair.

  “He kicked me in the fucking nuts. Twice,” Rigo says, trying to affect an uncompromised posture. “I’ve just been waiting for you.”

  Santayana suppresses a smile. You don’t often get to see a man who’s just been kicked in the nuts, but she always enjoys it. All that male weakness, so comically concentrated in one convenient anatomical target.

  “I thought the sheriff was supposed to be with us,” she says.

  “It turns out he feels some attachment to that kid.”

  “And no one thought to tell us that?”

  “No one knew. And it gets worse.”

  “What?”

  “He’s got a thing for the woman, too.”

  “Well, fuck him, then,” she says. “He can die like the rest of them.” She’s annoyed now. Rigo assumed they could just ride in, make trouble, wreak havoc, unleash Dietrich, and slip out again. She understood, however, that in a community that’s lived in isolation for eight years, there are bound to be some emotional entanglements. Fucking shitty intel, she thinks. It will fuck you every time. Two years spent to track this whore down, and then Vincent finds out she has a kid.

  His kid.

  Now, here we are in this clusterfuck, she thinks.

  The other two agents, Burly and Gains, linger in the background, slightly abashed, like children in the presence of bickering parents.

  “Where are Corey and Bigelow?” she asks.

  “They’re trailing Dietrich.”

  “Okay,” she says, “at this point, I vote we just let Dietrich finish up, then we take care of him, then we take the kid, then we go. We torch this whole town on the way out. We’ll say the residents lit it. We can say they went full Waco on us. Just burned their own compound to the ground.”

  �
��Sounds like a plan,” says Rigo. He stands, gingerly, feeling emboldened. “I want that sheriff, though. I want to strangle that fucker myself. I want to personally drop his dead body in a ditch.”

  “Don’t worry, you can have him. And he won’t be hard to find,” she says. “None of them are now.”

  Rigo turns to the other agents. “Everyone else in this town is to be considered target practice. Understood? Scorched earth. No witnesses. No regrets.”

  Santayana says to the agents: “You two go find Corey and Bigelow. Tell them to take care of Dietrich and wrap things up. Then meet us back at the chapel in the center of town.”

  Rigo turns. “Why the chapel?”

  “Because everyone who’s left in the town is holed up there,” she says. “Convenient, right?”

  “Oh, fuck me.” Rigo looks caught between distress and fury. He also looks like someone just kicked him in the balls again. “Santayana, did you not read the fucking briefing?”

  “Of course I did,” she says, trying to remember if she read the whole thing right to the end.

  “Did you read the part about tornados? That this place is in Tornado Alley?”

  “Yes.” She definitely did not read the part about tornados. What the fuck is Tornado Alley? she thinks.

  Rigo starts pacing. Fretting. Muttering. “Oh, fuck me.”

  “What?” she says. For once, she’s earnestly confused. And genuinely annoyed. And ever-so-slightly concerned.

  He turns to her sharply. “That’s not just a fucking chapel. It’s a fucking safe house.”

  37.

  DIETRICH WANDERS SLOWLY BACK DOWN the middle of a street he just came from, his eyes on the last house on the left. He wonders how he should do it. Quick shots aren’t much of a story. He should do it by hand, up close. How old is Unruh, anyway? Dietrich wishes he had a knife. Some hefty combat type of knife, with a serrated edge on it. He’s used so many improvisatory things to cut so many people that it’s funny for him to think about how long it’s been since he held a proper knife.

  What he could do with a proper knife.

  There should be some sense of ceremony. He wishes he knew more about this man. He remembers the guy in the Colorado supermax who wouldn’t shut up about Unruh. Said he’d run up against him once, or knew someone who had, or heard about it—his stories never added up too much, sense-wise. He said Unruh came from the North, stood seven feet tall, had a tattoo of a bloodstain on his face. Even to Dietrich, whose tattoos never failed to enthrall once their stories were revealed, the idea of a facial tattoo seemed impressive. Like war paint.

  I was born at the wrong time, Dietrich thinks, as he mounts the stairs to the porch. There have been times in human history when it was simply understood that you moved from man to man and each man fought without rules or mercy or restraint. That was simply the way of the world. Maybe we’ll fight a little bit today, he thinks. He’d like to find out how this old man smells. These will all be good details for the story. And, if it gets out of hand for some reason, I’m the one with the guns.

  He walks up to the door. Knocking seems polite. He’d like this man to answer the door. Frankly, he’d like to be invited in.

  So he knocks. And waits.

  Notices light through the peephole.

  Sees a shadow swallow the light.

  He steps back slightly and squares himself to the door, and with his rifle held waist-high in two hands he fires twice.

  Door blisters.

  He hears a thud.

  Light blooms again in the peephole.

  Too easy.

  He’ll fudge the story later, he thinks.

  He’s about to kick in the door when he catches the sight of himself in the large picture window. His double, his companion, like in the full-length mirror, but even larger. It’s nigh on dusk by now so the window catches the last light of the sun and reflects the street scene. Reflects Dietrich. He regards himself, his rifle held low in his hands, and he looks to himself like a war-stained soldier of old. Battle-tested. He straightens up, as though for a portrait. He notices dots of blood here and there all over him, his arms, his white linen shirt, now road-dusty and bloody. The tattoos of the faces crawl up from under the linen, up his neck, out his sleeves, like a little brood of children, looking up at him. His dead. His legacy.

  He smoothes a hand over his shaved head. He steps closer to the mirror of the glass. Inspects his face. Not dead-eyed. Not at all. Turning the name of this vanquished old man over in his mind. A name like a primal grunt. Like a death rattle.

  Unruh.

  Dietrich looks closer still at his reflection in the window. He looks tired. There are bruised bags under his eyes. Well, no wonder, he thinks. He’s been working so hard.

  And as he leans in and studies his face more intently, a strange thing occurs. He sees his face, reflected back at him, suddenly buckle, then crumble, sagging as though in sudden despair, starting right from the very center, dead between his eyes, then spiderwebbing outward, his whole face falling, slowly, with great deliberation; he watches with focused curiosity and puzzlement as his face disassembles itself into a dozen jagged sections, like a jigsaw patiently unsolving itself, and then he realizes it’s not his face that’s falling apart, it’s the mirror, it’s the window, that’s breaking and collapsing and now the whole window glistens and sparkles and shatters, then erupts in a million brilliant shards. And only now does he realize that this is all happening—has all happened, it’s all over—in a moment, an instant, the very last instant of his life.

  Dietrich’s lean body goes limp, then buckles, as the bullet passes brightly through his brain, having traveled already through the glistening glass and then his forehead and then out of his head in a great red spray, then continuing onward in a hurry, as though Dietrich’s thin skull was just a minor detour on a longer, more urgent journey. As he slumps, a bright red mist forms a speckled cloud over his falling body, like a final thought bubble left to linger in the air. His body clatters to the porch with a thump, but he’s long past dead now, long dead, his last thoughts lost, his corpse already cooling on the porch. Only the empty tattooed eyes of his victims remain open, bearing witness.

  Once the whole window has fallen in shards like a brittle curtain, Unruh steps out over the jagged sill and onto the porch, bending himself through the now-vacated windowpane, with Cooper’s revolver, gifted to him, along with its single bullet, held limp and smoking and empty in his left hand.

  Unruh’s body is crooked and old and he strains in the sun to unfold himself to something like his former stature. Having dispatched Dietrich, he doesn’t give the corpse another thought. He’s more concerned with the warmth of the sun on his face, which is a feeling he hasn’t felt in a great long while. The spreading warmth on his cheeks and forehead, and on the wine stain that’s marked him since birth. He stretches in the sun—

  —and to a distant observer, Unruh seems to dance now, his body spasming in a joyful jitterbug that belies his obvious age. As he dances, the two agents move closer, their drawn weapons firing rhythmically, each round catching Unruh as they carefully sight the old man and squeeze their triggers methodically and expertly put him down. He topples like an ancient oak, felled, his body folding over Dietrich’s and lying still.

  And as Burly and Gains inch closer, cautious to the end, they spot the blood-splashed photo clutched in Unruh’s out-flung hand, the photo of a smiling man, and they both wonder if this was some last target, some last victim, for this cold killer, before they stand over the bodies and empty their weapons into the pile, just to be sure.

  When Burly kicks the door of the bungalow open, they find Bette Burr standing in the gloom inside. She’s unarmed, hands raised innocently. The body of Agent Bigelow, dragged in from the street, lies just inside the doorway, where Bette had hoisted him up and used him as a shield, propping his bulk up just long enough against the door to darken the peephole, so that his corpse absorbed Dietrich’s shots through the door. Then she let the bod
y drop with a hard and noticeable thud. It was Unruh’s idea, the part with the body, but she enacted it; he was far too feeble. She went out into the empty street and dragged the body inside and hefted it up against the door, then let it drop with a heavy thump, while Unruh waited by the window with the gun, Unruh and Eleanor inside, the two of them accomplices at last.

  With everyone else dead and her unarmed, the agents collect her and take her with them, not suspecting that this unassuming woman with an open face is anything more than a simple witness to this carnage. Not knowing that, today, pressing her full weight behind the hefted corpse against the peephole, she understood for the first time that some part of her father lives on in her, waiting to be acknowledged, and accessed.

  Cooper does a head count.

  Him, Dawes, and Robinson all made it here—that’s three. Fran and Isaac, too. That’s five. Beyond them, there’s a half dozen or so other residents arranged in little anxious clusters. Cooper glances over them, counting: There’s Greta Fillmore, Chet Holden, that goombah from intake day, Hannibal what’s his name. There’s Doris Agnew and Spiro Mitchum, who, God bless him, showed up in his apron with two armloads of groceries in large paper bags, in case they’re hunkered down for a while. There may be others still alive and hiding in their homes out in the town, but they’re on their own for now, Cooper thinks—he can’t do anything about that, not now, he saved everyone he could before he came here. There’s eleven of them in total in the chapel, versus six agents, so they have numbers, at least. But they don’t have a firearm between them, or even a sharp stick, and they don’t have a phone, or any way to contact the outside world, and Cooper has no idea who’d they contact if they could.

  And of all the people who made it inside the chapel, he knows there are maybe two or three of them, tops, who will be of any use if the situation gets dicey. Dawes is done; with her wound, she’s barely conscious, and he’s not sure how bad it is or how long she can hold out. Robinson’s useful, and maybe the goombah. Otherwise, he looks around at these confused and panicked people in their bathrobes and dungarees and the irony of it almost makes him chuckle. Here he is, stuck in a safe house with nearly a dozen crooks, cutthroats, and infamous killers, and not a single one remembers who they are, let alone what they used to be so good at.