“She’s still breathing.”
It was a chore but I got a door open even though the car was upside down. It grated in the mud, and then it hung, but I was able to squeeze out. That’s when I noticed the back hatch had twisted off like it was made of wet cardboard. Would have been nicer had I noticed that right away. I was lucky I knew who I was.
Leonard and I got the girl out that way.
I found the shotgun and then the handgun, which I put in my pocket, and then we looked around carefully to see if our friends in the Lincoln were about. It was possible the tornado had missed them, and it was possible it had hit them too. It sure was one hell of a wind.
We tried our cell phones, as it was the first time we’d had a minute to consider it. I remembered my battery was dead, and Leonard didn’t have any service, so we might as well have been carrying turnips.
“Now what?” Leonard said.
“We take turns toting her.”
“Where to?”
“Good question.”
I looked at the sky. It was a pearly mist and the mist was damp on our faces. There were no clouds, and though there was light, the sun wasn’t visible. I was trembling a bit with the cold, and the girl certainly was.
“Feels and looks like the end of the world,” I said.
Leonard helped boost the girl onto my shoulder, tried to pull the gown around her a little and tie it off. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave her some modesty and made us feel better. Leonard carried the shotgun and crawled back inside the car and got the pistol from the glove box and put it in his belt.
I carried the girl along what served as a trail, though there was twisted wood everywhere, and we constantly had to navigate around or between debris.
The tornado had cut a path through the forest, and we followed that path, even though it was in places littered with tree limbs and pieces of tin and shingles that had been torn off houses or barns. We had no idea where we were going but had decided the highway might not be a good idea, as the Lincoln and its occupants might be up there. For all we knew, they might be making their way through the woods on foot, trying to find us.
I looked at my watch, realized we couldn’t have been knocked out long. I had seen the time on the dashboard clock shortly before the tornado tossed the car around like a toy, and only about a half hour had passed. That made me think the thugs had experienced the storm as well, otherwise they would have found us easily enough. Didn’t want to be tacky about it, but I hoped the tornado had wadded them and the Lincoln up and tossed them into the Gulf of Mexico.
After a long time walking, switching the girl out occasionally, we heard birds rise up in a great blast of wings, and then we saw that they were rising off a large misty patch of water, and then we generally knew where we were.
Lake LaBorde.
We looked out at it. It was impossibly swollen. It swelled shiny into the trees on the far side of the lake and washed up against the doors of lake houses over there that had once had frontage between themselves and the lake.
“I was sure we were going in the other direction,” Leonard said. “I can’t tell north from south under this sky.”
“This means we aren’t anywhere near help…wait. What’s that?”
I could see a small cabin through the trees. It was always iffy these days to come up on someone unexpectedly, because now everyone had learned to live in fear from television news, and people who wanted to be sure they were safe might be packing enough guns for defense against an invasion from Mars. They might shoot on sight if they saw us come out of the woods, me with a girl slung over my shoulder like a hunter bringing home a deer.
She wasn’t heavy, but she was heavy enough, and I was getting tired and was bone damp. I was chilled and hungry, and while whoever was in the cabin might shoot us, I was willing to chance it, since those in the Lincoln definitely would. Why they had cut the girl’s tongue and come after her was still an unknown, but I was quite certain they were unpleasant people and now we too were on their shit list.
When we got to the cabin, I switched the girl to Leonard and went up to the porch. There was still that whole thing about a black guy showing up on your porch unexpected, and we thought we’d put our best foot forward with a white foot.
I knocked on the door several times, but no one answered. I walked around the cabin, past an overturned barbecue grill and a little shed with a padlock on the door. The water from the lake had washed up around the shed, but the front of it was still clear.
I knocked on the back door of the cabin with the same lack of results, and then I walked around and looked in the windows. It looked dead inside, like no one had been there for a while. I got out my lock-pick kit, which is really a couple of little picks I have in my wallet, and worked on the back door and popped it open easy.
I went inside and looked around. I tried the light switch. Nope. Electricity was out over here too. Expected, but disappointing.
I ran my hand over a table. It was coated with dust. Same for the couch and the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. It was a small two-story cabin. I went upstairs, calling out in case someone was asleep, but no one answered. Up there I found an open door that led into a bedroom. On the bed, under a blanket of flies, was a corpse. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman, as the person had been dead some time. The corpse was dressed in pajamas, but they were the sort either a man or a woman might wear. The person’s hair was short, but lots of women had short hair. A large revolver was near the withered, nearly skeletal hand, and what had been the person’s head was broken open and some of what had been in it was in dark, dried wads on the wall. A window was open. Which was how the flies had got in.
I crept out and closed the door. I didn’t know how long the person had been dead, but it seemed obvious they had got that way by their own hand and it had been long enough ago to allow a lot of flies to cluster.
I walked down the hall and came to glass double doors. They looked out onto a roofed deck surrounded by wooden rails. There was a heavy metal chair there, turned over and caught up in the railing. I didn’t open the doors and go out there.
Downstairs, I opened the front door and signaled Leonard, who was standing in the misting rain with a frown on his face. He brought the girl in and laid her out on the couch, used couch pillows to prop up her head. There was a thin folded cover on the back of the couch, and he put that over her.
“She hasn’t got the bag and the juice anymore,” he said. “She needs a doctor.”
“We’ll just have to make her comfortable for now,” I said. I told him what was upstairs.
“Well, shit. Aren’t we on a run of luck?”
“Whoever is up there, their luck is worse.”
“I’m sorry and everything, but my main problem right now is I’m starving,” Leonard said.
The refrigerator was full of food, and the electricity hadn’t been out so long as to allow things to rot. It was like it had been waiting on us.
Well, mostly. There was a gallon of milk that turned out to be spoiled, as it had been in there probably since the person upstairs decided to redecorate the wall. Electricity or no electricity, it had turned into a white glob of stink. I took it outside, found a big fifty-five-gallon drum for trash next to the overturned barbecue grill, and dropped it in. It was the only thing in the drum.
I was at a spot now where I could see behind the shed and through the twisted branches of a fallen sweet gum tree lying partially in the water. There was a long dock and a pretty good-size boat out there with a roof and fishing chairs fastened to a deck at the back. Of course, it was riding high in the water. So high it had lifted up over a weathered dock. The weight of it was starting to cause the dock to collapse. The boat surely belonged to the fly target upstairs.
I went back in the house. Leonard had found some TV dinners, but since the microwave didn’t work, that wasn’t all that much of a help. I found a set of a dozen keys on a ring hung on a nail by the door and went out to
the little shed near the barbecue grill to try them.
After going through seven or eight keys, I found one that worked on the padlock. I opened the shed. Inside there were the usual things—a chain saw, general tools on a wall rack. A snakeskin on the floor. I knew the mice were in there because I could hear them squeaking. I prowled around in the shadows until I found a bag of charcoal and some flammable liquid in a squeeze bottle. I also found one of those things you could press and start a spark with. I tried it. It didn’t work. I found a box of large kitchen matches. I shoved the matches into the windbreaker pocket that didn’t house the gun.
The misting rain had ceased, so I felt I could get a fire going in the grill. I went over and righted it and put some charcoal in. I used the fluid in the squeeze bottle to coat it. I lit the doused charcoal directly with one of the kitchen matches. A flame jumped up and nearly took my eyebrows. I cocked the cooker lid over the fire without closing it all the way, then went back inside the cabin.
Leonard found a beer and a bottle of ginger ale in the fridge, and he pulled those out. I carried the TV dinners outside. They were enchiladas in paper containers, the kind designed for microwaves. I set them on the ground, went back inside, and me and Leonard looked through the shelves until I came across some aluminum foil.
Outside I shook the food out of the boxes and wrapped them in the foil and put them on the grill, waited impatiently while they heated up. I went inside and found some plates, went back out, put the food on those by nudging it loose from the foil with a stick, and took it all inside.
I sat the plates on the table. Leonard had found forks, and he gave me one, and we unrolled the foil and ate. It wasn’t half-bad, though there were some cool spots in it. I had been too hungry to let them heat properly. I drank warm ginger ale and Leonard drank the warm beer.
I put the plates in the sink and washed them with tap water and bottled soap. I didn’t want to leave the dead person a heap of dirty plates.
The wind began to whistle outside, and the rain picked up again, and the sky turned darker.
I said, “Damn it. Just quit already, will you?”
Leonard said, “I found some candles.”
“Not sure we want to light them,” I said. “The Lincoln folks may be searching for us.”
“Good point.”
Leonard went through the cabin, looking about. He went upstairs too, came down carrying a deer rifle and a box of ammunition. “We might need this.”
“There’s the handgun too,” I said. “You know, next to the corpse.”
“We’ll let the dead keep it for now.”
Leonard went over and sat by the window near the front door and pulled the curtain to, then pushed it slightly aside at one corner so he could see outside. He sat with the rifle in his lap. He put the box of ammunition in his windbreaker pocket.
I went around and pulled all the other curtains closed and locked the back door.
Then I checked on the girl. She was still out. I assumed that was due to the drugs she had been given, maybe what had been in the IV bag. She was breathing evenly.
In the bathroom, I found some over-the-counter pain relievers. I brought the bottle out with me, used a cutting board and the butt of a butcher knife to grind a few pills into a powder, and then I put the stuff in a cup, dampened it with water, let it set. I planned to give it to the girl if she woke up, so I thought it needed to be easy to take. I put the bottle of pills in my pocket.
I found a chair to sit in. There was a spare couch pillow. I got up and took it and put it behind my head. I wondered how many rounds were left in the pump shotgun. I wondered how many flies were on the corpse upstairs. Would we go to Mars in my lifetime? It was stuff like that running through my exhausted brain.
The chair I was in was a stuffed chair. It was comfortable. It was the most comfortable chair I had ever sat in since I was born. I yawned.
Leonard said, “Go to sleep, Hap. I got this.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
14
When I came awake, the wind was still blowing and the rain was still coming down. The sky was partially light, but the shadows were creeping in, dragging night along after them. I had slept a long time and I felt slightly refreshed.
I took Leonard’s spot and the rifle, and Leonard took my chair. He was asleep immediately.
I’m not sure how long I sat there looking out the window, but at one point I chose to go upstairs to the deck, as I thought it might be a better vantage point. I opened the glass doors and stepped out. The rain was blowing onto the deck and splattering at my feet and hammering on the roof above. I stayed back enough to not get wet, close to the door. It was then that I saw something moving in the tangled woods beyond. And then I didn’t see it anymore. I stepped back through the open doors and stood there, just inside.
It was starting to be solid dark again, and as the night oozed in with its wind and its rain, it was harder to see. I stood there for several long minutes watching that spot, but I didn’t see anything again, and now it was so dark if a bear were dancing in a top hat, I couldn’t have seen him. Though I would have liked to.
And then lightning cut across the sky and cracked a tree in the woods, and in that flash, I saw Big Guy and, off to his right, what I think was a woman. Pale-skinned with a rain hood around her head, damp black hair dangling out from under it, plastered wet against her cheeks.
Both wore black and they both had very nasty-looking guns. I couldn’t tell what kind, but I was pretty sure they weren’t water guns.
When the lightning was gone, they were out of sight, so I went downstairs quickly and shook Leonard awake.
“They’ve found us,” I said.
He got up and got the shotgun I had been carrying. The handguns were still on us.
“I guess we play Alamo,” he said.
“I don’t want to. Hey, the boat out back.”
I didn’t have to say it twice. Leonard gave me the shotgun, picked the girl up off the couch, and carried her in his arms like a baby. She made a moaning sound. They headed out the back door, and I followed.
I thought, All right, they may assume we’re here, but they don’t know that for sure.
Or maybe they did. Maybe one of them or all of them were trackers. Maybe they had a pack of bloodhounds with them. One thing I’d say for them—storm, tornado, what have you, they were not quitters.
Outside we moved swiftly toward the boat. We had to climb over a tree trunk and push through some shattered limbs with wet leaves on them, but we made it to the sagging dock and finally onto the boat.
Leonard tossed loose the tie lines that held the boat to the dock. It was a tenuous connection. A little bit more storm, and the dock wouldn’t be there to hold anything.
We pushed against the boat, and it came off the dock with a scraping sound that made me turn and look back at the cabin.
No one yet.
I kept my guard position there on the deck, giving Leonard time to get the girl inside. No one shot at me. No flashlights bobbed our way.
I had the ring of keys in my pocket and hoped like hell one of them was for the boat. I ended my vigil and went into the wheelhouse. There was a short stairway that led down, and I logically assumed that’s where the girl was, that Leonard had tucked her away down there. She had certainly been through hell, although she’d spent most of it asleep.
I fumbled with the key ring while Leonard came up from below and stood at one of the wheelhouse windows and looked out. The view wasn’t a good one, as there was a tree or two in the way, mainly that big sweet gum, plus the shed. From where we were, we could see in the direction of the back door, but the night had pretty much swallowed it and the cabin.
I found a key that fit. I hoped there was gas in the engine and the damn craft was in working condition.
I said, “I’m going to try and start it.”
“Wait,” Leonard said. He put the shotgun aside and picked up the rifle I had leaned against a wall.
He gently opened the door to the cabin, stepped on deck. I started the engine. It hummed like a champ. I heard a shot, and something struck the boat, and then a lot of shots struck the boat. I heard Leonard open up with the rifle, less rapid-fire, but by then I was steering us away from the dock and pushing out into the lake.
Bullets snapped. The boat pinged and ripped in places I hoped weren’t serious. Lightning flashed across the water, and the wind made the water swell and the night was as solid as a big black brick.
I didn’t try to turn on any lights. I gave the boat the throttle and went on into darkness, hoping there wasn’t anything I might hit.
15
When Leonard came into the wheelhouse, I said, “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Hit anything?”
“I shot at the gunfire. I don’t know. The boat took some shots, though. Guess it’s okay.”
“We aren’t sinking,” I said. “Better check on the girl.”
Leonard went down, came back in a short time.
“She’s all right. Still out but starting to stir some. Did you notice she smells like strawberries?”
“I did.”
“Shampoo, I guess.”
I reached in my pocket and took out the pills I had taken from the cabin. “Doubt she can swallow these,” I said. “Mashed her up a batch at the cabin but never got around to giving it to her. If you can find a cup and a spoon down there, if there’s water, maybe you can crush them up, make a liquid. You might give them to her if she wakes up.”
“Right now, all I’m worried about is this black water. I can crush pills anytime.”
I fumbled around until I found the lights, and when I hit them, the water lit up, and so did the wheelhouse.
“I think we’re far enough away now,” I said.
“Man, they are relentless.”
“Won’t be the first time we’ve dealt with their sort,” I said.
“It’ll be the first time we’re as old and tired as we are. And you know what? I think it may be the first time we’ve dealt with their sort. They are major prepared.”
The Elephant of Surprise Page 4