_____
“Put down the gun,” the stranger said. He swallowed hard, but his hands did not shake as they pointed the shotgun at Victor.
“You first,” Victor answered.
The man tried to smile, but it looked more like a twitch. “This barrel is loaded with buckshot. I fire, there ain’t no way you escape it.”
“Unless you’re Keanu Reeves, you ain’t escaping my bullet neither,” Victor replied, caricaturing the stranger’s drawl.
The other man shifted, adjusting his grip on the shotgun. Sweat swarmed across his face.
Victor said, “I guess that brings us back to my previous question. Should we die today? It’s a little soon for me—see, I still have some wrongs to set right. But if this is my time, I promise you I’m not going alone.”
He heard shouts and footsteps as the other militiamen moved in. Soon he would be surrounded and they would give him no choice but to surrender his weapons. He wanted to set the terms first, while the balance of power was still even.
“Lower your weapon,” Victor said. “That’s the only way we both walk away from this.”
The shotgun wavered. Then, just as the stranger appeared ready to lower the weapon, Victor felt the barrel of a gun press against the back of his head.
“So much for your Mexican standoff,” Felix said.
Chapter 9: The Birdwatcher's Widower
He ran as he had never run before, feeling every bruise Walker had given him that morning, sensing the noose that still hung around his neck even as the voices of the horsemen dimmed behind him. Roots snaked across his path, branches swatted at his face in passing, and as he turned his head to scan the woods around him, his shin struck something hard and he sprawled forward in the leaves.
His breath came quick. A knot of fiery pain swelled in his shin, but he thought he would still be able to run. He lifted his head to see what he had tripped on, and he read:
SIDNEY GALE, 1955-2006
BELOVED MOTHER, SISTER, AND BIRDWATCHER
More stones rose around him from a swamp of moss. Trees grew in the midst of the stones, and Dante suspected this graveyard had been neglected long before the events that, falling in domino succession, had pulled the country down to its knees. He hoped his bones would never rest in a roadside graveyard. Let his body be cast into the depths of the ocean or laid beneath a cairn of stones on a mountaintop, but not left to molder in the damp earth of a forest.
If you don’t get moving, he told himself, this is exactly where your body will rot.
But even as he rose and began pushing forward again, limping now, he doubted whether the horsemen would kill him. Oh, he had no doubt Walker would like to cause him a world of pain, and maybe finish it with a coup de grâce, but the other one—
“You were supposed to deliver a message,” he heard the big man say.
And Dante stopped caring how Walker and the horsemen had found him, so much as why Walker had shown himself by the carcass of the deer—
“Hell, I even tried cabbage, but the only things that seem to grow for me are rhubarb and soybeans. Soybeans! Maybe it’s the soil.”
Why he had tried to scare Dante—
“There are things worse than death.”
And why he had invented a story to lure Victor from the cabin, even though the six horsemen could easily have surrounded the brothers and—
Done what? Killed them both? Kidnapped them both? It made no sense. Dante had asked plenty of questions since riding from the cabin that morning, but the Arab had kept a stony silence, breaking it only to threaten a gag if Dante wasn’t quiet. It all seemed like a practical joke, and he was just waiting for someone to crack a smile and tell him what it was all about.
Something caught his eye. A facade of stone stood against a hill, with a half-moon arch rising above. The shape, though broken and cracked, contrasted the vertical lines of the trees and drew Dante’s eyes to it. As he paused to study the structure, he noticed sounds he had missed moments earlier—the snapping of branches, the murmur of voices. The horsemen were close. They had already pushed through the thicket of brush and were now moving among the open trees.
Dante caught movement to his left and knew he could not waste any more time deliberating. With a deep breath, he limped toward the tomb.
_____
This is what it all comes down to, Victor thought as he held the AK-47 out. Those with the most guns get to make the laws. Then again, had it ever been any different?
His heart was hammering in his chest. He imagined the horsemen thundering down the road, getting farther and farther away, taking with them the only family he had left.
“Damn it!” he said.
“And the backpack,” Felix demanded. “This is not a negotiation.”
That was unfortunate, Victor decided, because Felix did not strike him as the kind of man who knew how to negotiate. But instead of surrendering the rifle and backpack, knowing full well they would rummage through his things and take what they liked, he pointed in the direction of the man whose moans just barely reached their ears.
“Do you want me to help that man,” he asked, “or let him bleed out while we argue? If I try pulling the rifle free, you can just shoot me.”
Felix, a wiry man whose receding hair had left him with a steep widow’s peak, stared at Victor for a few long moments. Victor had the impression this was a man who did not like dealing with those ready to resort to the final argument.
“Alright,” Felix answered cautiously. “But if you even reach to scratch your back, my men will shoot you down. Do we understand each other?”
“I think we do,” Victor said with complete sincerity. He had dealt with men like Felix before. He was a bureaucrat, an armchair general, a glorified pencil-pusher. How he had come to lead this small community was a mystery to Victor.
Felix nodded. “Good. Provided you can help Allen, we just might be able to forget this little incident.”
Victor hoped this would not become a battle of semantics, since he could not guarantee he would be able to do anything for this Allen, but it was better than the alternative.
They found Allen in the same place as before. He had a long cut that went diagonally across his chest, from his right collarbone down to his left hip. Though the wound was shallow, Allen had lost enough blood for Victor to know it was too late to help him. Placed in an ER room with state-of-the-art equipment, a team of trained surgeons might have saved his life. But this was beyond Victor’s scope.
“Well?” Felix said from behind him with a touch of impatience. “What should we do?”
Victor was kneeling by Allen, still examining the wound. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“You said you had training.”
Victor stood and faced Felix. “He’s lost too much blood. Unless you think we can staunch the bleeding and set up a transfusion in the next minute—” He shook his head.
One of the militiamen grabbed Victor by the front of his shirt. “That’s my cousin!” he shouted into Victor’s face. “Don’t you fucking stand here and tell me you can’t do anything!”
“My daughter,” Allen murmured, and a trail of blood came with the words and coursed down his cheek, leaving a dark stain.
The man holding Victor’s shirt let go and stooped by Allen’s side. “What did you say? Come on, Al, talk to me!”
Victor turned to Felix. “I’ll take my rifle back,” he said quietly.
Felix’s eyes widened, and Victor could see this was not going to be easy. “The hell you will!” he said. “You’re supposed to help him!”
“He’s beyond helping,” Victor answered, making no effort to soften the words. He wanted Felix to hear it straight. “He’ll bleed out in a couple of minutes. There’s no point in wasting resources when he’s just going—”
The man who had earlier grabbed his shirt now barreled into him, knocking him on his back. Victor felt the breath leave his lungs in a rush. He felt the man’s hands grasping for his throat as
they rolled on the ground, each trying to gain an advantage on the other.
Then a pistol shot broke through the air, accompanied by the crash of glass. And then, faintly, they heard a muted scream. Felix was standing with his arm raised, the gun pointed at the second story of the house.
“Jenny,” the dying man murmured. “My daughter…she’s in the house.”
_____
Dante saw - but did not notice - the tracks leading up to the gates of the tomb. He smelled - but did not dwell on - the stink that wafted out from that bowel of darkness, an odor of things wasting away, succumbing to the invincible greed of the earth that always in the end takes back what it has given. And why, when he had trained his mind so carefully to pick up the clues he would have previously neglected (notwithstanding Walker’s deception—he considered that to be the exception, not the rule), did he give so little thought to these details?
Because of the crashing in the brush. Because of the voices coming from all sides that told Dante they were surrounding him like a pack of African wild dogs, each trusting in the ability of the pack as they drove him toward the kill zone. As much as he would have liked to plunge through the forest, heedless of where it might lead him, Dante decided not to do what they were probably expecting him to do.
There was no lock on the tomb’s iron doors, whose bars allowed Dante a glimpse of the darkness inside. That smell… The tomb was empty as far as he could tell, but there were…yes, he was sure of it…footprints on the floor. Human footprints—not of boots or shoes, but bare feet. A man’s, a woman’s? He could not tell, because the voices were growing louder and he opened the gate - hardly a squeak as the hinges turned, he was relieved to discover - and then he was inside, closing the gate, moving toward the shadows.
The smell seemed to thicken in the darkness of the tomb. There was the smell of rot, but also a different smell that was not entirely unpleasant. In fact, it almost caused his mouth to water.
His hat ripped through cobwebs with a soft tearing sound, bringing to mind the phobias of childhood. As he moved toward the back of the tomb (Cave, he thought), he tried to decide what he would do if one of the horsemen opened the gate. Would he rush out, swinging his fists? Would he curl into a ball and hope he went unnoticed?
His shoe caught something on the floor and sent it rattling away. It sounded like—but no, it couldn’t be that.
Just reach out your hand, he told himself. It’s right there…in the shadows…
With a shiver, he sidestepped the unseen thing and pressed himself flat against the back of the tomb, ignoring the legs of a small creature that brushed against his elbow. There were only a few dangerous spiders in New England, he reminded himself, and the chance of his making one angry enough to sink its fangs into his skin was negligible.
Footsteps stalked through the leaves outside. Something was moving along the side of the tomb. He wondered how the horsemen had so quickly discovered his hiding place. But then he realized there was something wrong in the movement of this creature. The pattern he heard was not made by two feet. Had this tomb become the den of a bear or some other wild animal? No, the gate had been closed. Bears, he was fairly certain, were not known to open and close doors.
The footsteps continued to move around the side of the tomb with a thump…thump-thump, the second and third steps coming almost at the same time. Closer…around to the front of the tomb…and then silence. Through the bars of the gate, Dante could see the edge of a shadow wavering there. He told himself it could be the shadow of a tree.
But there was no shadow there before.
He heard leaves spilling in a sudden breeze, and the shadow shifted the way a tree might, balancing itself, waiting for the wind to continue along past it. When the forest was still again (he no longer heard the voices of the horsemen, but perhaps that was because the walls of the tomb blocked the sound), the shadow began to move toward the gate.
Now he heard the click of the first foot on the ground. A long stick, leading back to a gloved hand, came into view. The creature - human or otherwise, he could not tell - set its free hand on the gate and pulled it open.
Chapter 10: Suffer, Little Children
Hours later, the last thing she would remember before the world exploded with light was the sight of her foster father’s body bleeding in the street.
They had come in the early hours of the morning when the frost was still on the windows, a train of leather and steaming breath that moved with the unbending will of a boulder plunging over the side of a cliff.
But it was the sound that caught her attention long before the sight—a furious beating of the earth, as of a hundred men striking the ground with hammers.
“Papa,” she’d said, grabbing hold of his shirt as he moved among the rows of corn, tipping the watering can a few more degrees with every step. He’d turned at the tone of her voice, frowning with those bristling eyebrows, and then looked past her and seen something climbing the hill to the center of town, something that snuffed the humor from his eyes with the suddenness of winter’s first frost.
“Get inside,” he said, pushing her toward the door while keeping his eyes on the street. His eyes seemed to be stuck there. He could have turned around, and still his eyes would have tracked those shapes bending shadows along the hard ground.
Jenny stepped toward the house, balancing herself after Allen’s push. She was not watching the street, but the watering can that had fallen from Allen’s hand to lie on its side. The water was pooling in the greedy topsoil, carrying bits of dirt and one helpless ant along a course of gravity’s choosing, and she could only think how far a walk it had been to fetch that water and how much she did not want to walk there again today.
“Jenny!” Allen said, his voice crossing a threshold it had never crossed before. His eyes at last broke from the sight that had transfixed them and met hers. In that moment, he did not look so much like her father - or anyone’s father - as he looked like a boy who has fallen among bullies and knows the beating must soon start.
“Run!” he said.
It was not so much the word itself, but the face that shaped it, that caused her to run toward the front door. She did not look toward the street but stared at the latch on the door as if she might coax it closer, bending it into the space between her feet and the door step. The rush of sound along the street clarified itself into individual notes: the rattle of metal against teeth, the creak of leather, the patter of dirt tossed by crescent hooves. The sounds became so distinct that for a long moment she imagined they would reach her before she could reach the door, sweeping her up as the spilled water had swept up the ant, carrying her where she did not wish to go.
She depressed the latch with her thumb, swung the door outward, and threw herself into the house. She did not pause to ask why Allen had not followed her into the house. She did not consider the significance of Allen’s being on the outside of the door when that train of hooves and leather rolled up from the street, sweeping all before it. By the time she stood in the dark hallway of the house, her mind had gone cold.
Going cold was something she had learned to do years ago, sitting in the closet with her knees against her chest while the voices down in the kitchen rose and fell on the swell of an angry tide, a swell sometimes punctured by the shatter of glass or the slap of a picture frame on the floor. She would teach herself to move her feelings just far enough from mind so that she could know they were there without really feeling them, leaving her free to focus on the things she knew.
That no argument could last forever.
That in the morning, one of them would be gone and they would take the bad words with them.
That one day, maybe not today or tomorrow or the next, but one day her parents would either make amends or kill each other, and either way the horror would finally end.
She remembered her English teacher, while talking about the subject of childhood, asking the class, “If you could change one thing about your childhood, what would it b
e?” And Jenny had thought, My parents. I would make them disappear. She didn’t think, I would force them to make amends—oh no, because even if they had made amends, she couldn’t trust for a second that any such peace would last. No, the only solution would have been for both of them to just disappear, fall off the face of the earth.
And then, on that brutal night when the screams had finally reached a sympathetic neighbor’s ears, they had disappeared. Or, rather, Jenny had disappeared. She remembered looking through the car window at her mother standing on the porch, kneading her hands. Tears were coursing down her mother’s cheeks. Maybe she understood why Jenny had to go; maybe all she wanted was a look of compassion in her daughter’s eyes, just to plant the seed that years later all might be forgiven. But Jenny had already gone cold.
Now, standing in the empty house as the hooves beat the earth outside, Jenny sensed the agitated voice of fear and pushed it farther back into the recesses of her mind. Without pausing more than two seconds to gather her thoughts, she bounded up the stairs to the second floor.
Brothers (The Last Colony Book 1) Page 7