"I'm not saying..." He stopped, deciding on his approach. "It's nobody's fault, Leanne. I never blamed you for what happened. If that's what you think..."
Leanne turned on him then, eyes full of tears. "You never had to."
"Honey..."
She got up and grabbed her Tyvek suit from the behind him. He put a hand on her shoulder—that heavy spider again, poisonous now—and she jerked away from his touch, glaring at him with ice cold, red-rimmed eyes. She stepped into the suit a leg at a time, got the wrong leg first and tried to yank herself free. It bunched around her shoe and she crumpled against the bumper, allowing herself to weep openly for the first time in years.
Jim risked another hand on her shoulders. She fell into his embrace, jerking beneath his arms with each shuddering, long-postponed sob. He held her, stroking her sweat-dampened hair, rocking her like a baby, waiting for her to speak. She said nothing. Finally, she wiped away her tears, and he let her go.
"Thank you," she said, the corners of her mouth quivering.
"Thank you."
She blinked the last traces of tears away. "For what?"
"For staying with me, after everything," Jim said. "I know how difficult a decision it must have been for you."
She said nothing, only smiled.
"I couldn't live without you," he said. "You know that, don't you?"
"You could."
"No. I can't."
Leanne thought about this for a moment. Then she spoke: "I used to think that, too. I thought if you died before me, I'd leap into your grave and let them bury me with you."
"And now...?"
"I love you, Jim. I'll always love you, no matter what. That's something I've decided, too." She traced the rough hair on his cheek with her fingers. "But I don't need you like I used to."
Jim nodded, the lump in the back of his throat a cork holding back tears of his own. He knew it could never be the same between them, but he was grateful for the years they'd had. Whatever came next, those damnable monsters couldn't take that away from them. He would hold on to that just as long as he could.
20
BY COMPARISON TO death by fire, Cordelia's rat poisoning was the rough equivalent of sending her a gift basket from FTD Flowers. It is believed that unconsciousness strikes the victims before the pain becomes too much to bear. More than likely this is something people say to comfort the bereaved. It certainly doesn't explain the Tibetan fellow in New Delhi, who ran a country mile while burning from head to foot, though I suppose he could have been an exception to the rule.
It is not a pretty death, despite the beauty inherent in fire. I have watched, horrified and amazed, as great arcs of burning napalm from Navy riverboats torched entire villages; I know more than a man ought to of the metaphorical shadows of the dead etched onto those walls in Hiroshima. Jim and Leanne discovered their shadows quite suddenly on that beautiful, summery night in May.
The heavyset checkout lady arrived first. They had parked the Suburban a few blocks from the fairgrounds, and sat watching from an old hunting blind they'd happened upon in a tree near the unnamed creek. (Leanne was no climber, and had had to be hauled half the way up.) They had donned their Tyveks to be safe, and the woman, Tess or Tina or maybe Tammy, didn't even raise her head as she passed under the blind.
The woman appeared to be in a daze, swinging her arms like a Bigfoot as she trod through the woods until she eventually disappeared among the trees. They gave it until full dark, and when nobody else appeared beneath them, Leanne figured it was a safe bet the others had come from the front, as Richard Holland had two nights prior. The Taymors climbed down one after the other, and weaved through the moonlit woods, only losing their way once before the trees opened up on the Schultz house.
The grunting chants Leanne had heard were already in progress, offering sound cover to sneak around to the front of the house. She threw a passing glance through an unevenly boarded side window, saw them slapping their hands in the excrement and raising them to the sky in exultation, the air already redolent with its nasty smell. Leanne thought she detected a hint of thermite, but it was probably her imagination; if the lurkers hadn't caught it, there likely wasn't anything to smell.
It had worked.
Don't get ahead of yourself, she thought. There's still a chance it won't ignite.
Jim crouch-walked ahead of her, the flare gun held out at his side, his Tyvek a crinkly white beacon under the moon. She saw the glow of her own suit in her peripherals, but it was already too late to turn back. Jim was under the window now, and as she crouched down beside him, he loaded a flare into the red plastic barrel. They could always turn around and run, she supposed, but if Buddy Ames was right, if there really were lurkers just about everywhere, in every town, they could find themselves running for the rest of their lives.
This was no time for indecision.
The grunts from inside stopped, and the night fell silent but for the sound of frogs chirping and the whine of mosquitoes. The lurkers would be resting soon, gathering their strength for a long night of scavenging... or a hunt. Jim rose up on his haunches. She wanted to cry out to him—too soon!—but didn't dare raise her voice, certain they would tear both of them apart, limb from limb, with or without the use of hedge clippers.
She wasn't about to become the first human meal of these particular lurkers because of her husband's poor timing.
Jim raised the flare gun, the index finger of his safety gloves creaking as it tightened on the trigger. But his right eye twitched behind the mask—and the finger relaxed.
He turned to her, his face twisted in a voiceless scream.
She saw it then, too: Pete Wallin holding a gentle hand on the checkout clerk's swelled, naked belly. The others shined their eyes toward the proud Mama and Papa as those Three Wise Men might have looked at Mary rocking Jesus in his manger.
The heavyset woman was pregnant.
Leanne snatched the flare gun from Jim's hand; he'd all but dropped it in his astonishment. Rage had overcome her, unsure if she was mad at Jim for hesitating, or at the two lurkers for being able to conceive, even if their spawn would be born a monster.
Whatever the reason, she did not hesitate to squeeze the trigger. A flare burst from the barrel, a red so bright that trails remained on her retinas for several minutes afterward. She watched it arc above the heads of the creatures inside, saw them look up from the heavyset woman's belly and follow its descent in shock and awe. Saw it overshoot them by a dozen feet or more, and land somewhere in the kitchen, where it fizzled out on the cruddy linoleum.
Eyes as bright as lamps flashed toward the window.
"Flare," she snapped. Jim sat in a daze, stunned into idiocy. "Gimme the FLARES!"
Jim's face alighted with awareness then, and he began to rummage through his pockets.
The lurkers rose on all fours. Flares fell from the pocket of his vest and scattered on the beige carpet of pine needles. Leanne darted for them.
Jim was still fixated on the window, the lurkers skulking toward them, orange cinders burning in their filth-blackened faces. Leanne scrabbled with a flare in the barrel, like trying to thread a needle with a poisonous snake in her lap. It kept scraping the edges and sliding out. She heard them in there, their animal screeches, their wet hands and feet slapping against the floorboards, closing the distance.
She heard a dull click. By some sort of miracle, the flare had struck home. She snapped it shut and stood. Richard Holland was ahead of the others, a lumbering giant, his mouth upturned in a snarl, his white, fanged molars visible even from a distance.
She squeezed the trigger.
The flare hit the floor behind Dutch's charging feet, igniting the thermite so suddenly and violently it was difficult to believe what she was seeing. One second there was a dingy old room, and the next they were looking through the window at the inside of the sun.
PHOOM!
Waves of heat blew Leanne's mask off her head and whiffled her hair back from her brow
. She closed her eyes, for fear they'd bake in the hollows of her skull. When the ringing in her ears stopped, the lurkers' agonized screams rushed in to take its place. She opened her eyes again to see sparks flying from dancing white-hot pillars of flame. They were living sparklers, writhing and tearing at their charring flesh, human-shaped candles melting into fatty puddles on the floor.
Dutch had been thrown like a giant ragdoll with the force of the explosion. He lay huddled against the far wall near the stairs, virtually the only part of the first floor not yet ablaze. He rose to his feet, no crawling now, skirting the flames like some invincible movie monster rising from the ashes of his own death, barely giving a glance to his dead and dying companions, things he'd once referred to as "family," at first only striding and then running toward the open window.
Jim fell back from it, immobile with terror, certain now that this was how it would end: with husband and wife gored by the hands of the lumbering giant for a paltry $15,000.
But Leanne hadn't given up. Moving on autopilot, she plucked another flare from the pile. Her hands shook badly, her brain felt like it was on fire, but she managed to get it loaded just as Dutch reached the window, planting his hands on either side. The heat had burned the hair right off his head and baked the flesh from his skull—a decidedly human skull. Just two cavernous slits remained of his nose, between eyes glowing not with eyeshine now but with the reflection of the flames. All of Dutch's flesh hung in charred strips, yet still she could smell the fresh, cool scent of his aftershave: Brut for the brute. Sharp teeth bloodied, rows of molars stretching all the way up between his eyes and the oozing holes of his ears, the lurker grinned right in her face. Then his jaw opened wider than any human jaw had been meant, wide enough to gnaw off her head, and Leanne breathed a silent prayer.
The floor collapsed beneath Dutch with a belch of fire. He dropped, hanging onto the window ledge with hands that were no more than skeletal claws, fragile things, true terror registering on what was left of his face for scarcely a moment.
Then he plunged into the inferno.
Leanne fell back in utter exhaustion. Jim crawled over to her, put his arms around her. She let him hold her. It was over (For now, her strained mind added, but she thrust the useless thought away). As the great conflagration overtook the upper floors and that awful house burned to the ground, Leanne and Jim hugged each other, hot tears baking on their cheeks.
21
VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS STRUGGLED all night to put out the fire. Once it spread to the woods, dry as bone from that long, hot first week of May, it was a losing battle. They had the knowhow, they just didn't have the tools. But rain came, mercifully, early that morning, a torrential downfall that filled the gutters and swelled the nameless creek from my childhood, flooding basements and smothering the blaze in under an hour.
People speculated that the Schultz kid had set the fire for the insurance money, just as Leanne had suspected they would; the bastard would have burned down all of Knee High if the wind had blown in the right direction, and the rain hadn't come when it had. Nothing was left of the house but coal, some of it still upright in blackened columns. Most of it lay in a heap in the cement pit that had been Dotty Schultz's basement, along with the charred remains of six people, burned so badly that dental records had to be used to identify those without families to miss them.
After the roof collapsed, sealing the Knee High Chapter's tomb for good, Leanne and Jim had tossed the Tyvek suits into the fire and left through the fairgrounds. Leanne placed an anonymous call to the fire department from the payphone at Daisy's Pantry. The convenience store had been closed. No one had seen them arrive or leave, and the store had no cameras.
In a tragic bit of irony, Jim and Leanne arrived at the restaurant Friday morning to find their rat terrier dead at the foot of the Dumpster. At first, neither of them could believe the wretched thing slumped on the cracked asphalt (where the orange cat had been less than a week ago) was their Rosco. He was scruffy, dirty, and possibly mange-ridden. He looked like the kind of creature you might see shuffling through the street in the background of those ads about children in some scorching, dirt-poor corner of the world. Choose the child you want to adopt. Call now, operators are standing by.
It wasn't until Leanne gasped and staggered back a step that Jim realized he was looking the same dog from the posters he'd tacked up all over town. Leanne fell to her knees beside Rosco, and wept.
One of the trash bags Jim had left for Cordelia had been dragged out of the bin. The dog lay among its contents, gathering flies. Probably a raccoon had done it, and had realized before it was too late that the food was bad. Surely Rosco hadn't; he had neither the smarts nor the stature to manage such maneuvers. Jim used a big spatula from the kitchen and oven gloves to peel the stiffened corpse off the concrete ("It sounded like peeling a Band-Aid off a hairy leg," Jim told me, with understandable distaste, from behind a glass partition at Nebraska State Penitentiary), while Leanne held open a trash bag, fresh tears running down her face.
Jim comforted his wife, but didn't join her in her tears, not as he had for his boyhood dog, Rufus, nor for Cordelia Moone. Not as he would when the County Sheriff's Department finally hauled off him and Leanne to their separate cells, either.
They tied the bag and tossed it in with the rest of the trash. I suppose we in the accounting trade would consider the death of Rosco the rat terrier a passive-activity loss. As I've said, I didn't much care for Rosco, but I would not will such a death on any creature, man or animal.
The following Monday, Jim mowed neat rows into his lawn with a smile. But the smile was forced. After what he'd seen, what he'd done, he might reach up to find his eyes leaking like bad plumbing every so often, but he didn't think he'd ever truly smile again.
Nobody suspected Jim and Leanne Taymor of the crime. Why would they? They'd been nothing but model citizens until the night Jim Taymor had stepped on the unstable precipice at the edge of sanity and tumbled headlong into the abyss. Days became weeks, months, as speculation grew and the investigations proved arson. The Schultz kid (who was in his mid-thirties, not much of a kid at all) was questioned and released. Residents petitioned for the State Fire Marshal's resignation. He stayed on another term, and is still in office at the time of this writing. All the while, Jim and Leanne lived with those death shadows on the walls of their minds, hiding in plain sight much as the lurkers had, living in fear of being discovered, and marveling when another day passed and the police hadn't come knocking at their door.
La Costina continued to thrive, but their hearts were no longer in it.
They came to us in early October, the trees in the woods surrounding the fire pit that had once been the Schultz house already bare, the black streaks on their trunks a physical representation of the marks the tragedy had painted on all our hearts. The guilt had gotten too much for them to bear. They spilled their guts, and Gin, after they'd told us everything they could remember, asked for them to confess.
They agreed almost at once, as if all they'd needed was our approval.
There was no trial. Had forensic psychologists been asked to testify, they might have pushed for psychiatric care. Folie à deux, the well-spoken interviewees said on those 24-hour news channels. The public would have none of it. They cried out for blood—for the life of the child, mostly, and for Rosco. It was 26 days before the sentence was handed down, during which time it was as if the entire town held its breath: seven consecutive counts each of life with no chance of parole. Overkill again: Neither Jim nor Leanne are immortal, so far as I know.
I cannot speak for the mortality of their Lurkers.
I went to see them quite a bit over the next six months. Their visitation days were staggered, and the drives gave me plenty of time to consider whether I believed any of it. And the thing of it is, the more they told me, the absolute sincerity of their words, the more I found myself wanting to believe them. The alternative is a far worse thing to contemplate: that Jim and Leanne
Taymor, my two closest friends, had decided as a sort of a lark to murder seven innocent people, and if anyone found them out, they would simply pretend they had gone insane.
My rational mind refuses to believe their story, of course. But the primitive part of my brain has me checking the darkened corners of the house, quickening my step past the opened doorway to the basement, looking under the bed and behind the door before I settle down for the night. Primitive me jumps at the sound of raccoons fighting in some trash-strewn alley. Primitive me looks for that distinctive glow in the eyes of everyone I pass. He sees a flicker of lamplight in a man's glasses and shouts, Lurker! There! Right there! Can't you see?! Can't you see it's only a mask?!
Rational me, meanwhile, tightens his lips.
Leanne seemed to be doing well, the last I saw of her. She'd even signed up for the Second Chance Pups program, and had brought with her a Golden Retriever—who probably looked a lot like the dog Jim had loved as a boy—she was training to be a seeing-eye dog, of all things. I have to say, I find some pleasure in knowing she'll be okay, in spite of all that has happened. As long as I've known her, she's been a fighter. The dog sat pretty for a treat. Around his neck was the same blue bandana Jim had used to tie on his head for yardwork. Everything neat, and in its right place.
I'd like to say Jim Taymor held up in prison as well as his wife had, but I'd be lying. The last time I saw him, he was a hollow shell that had once contained a man. Sunken, jittering eyes, lips chapped and pursed, stubbly flesh hanging under his chin.
"Thanks for coming," he said.
"My pleasure," I told him, though it had never been much of a pleasure visiting either of them. It felt more like penance, like those non-alcoholic beers I drank less and less of these days. "You look good."
He shook his head, and said nothing for some time. Something on his mind, I suppose, but I didn't have all day. I'd been about to ask if he wanted to be left alone when he came out with it. "Can you do something for me? I know you've done enough just coming here to see me, but this is the last thing, I swear it." He looked at me imploringly. "I swear," he said again.
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