Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  “No,” Hutter said. “You had a position. There was no reason not to hold it. If they leave, they’ll go out the front door. That’s completely reasonable.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “I’m puzzled.”

  “About . . . ?”

  “Why they’re sitting in the dark. They shut the lights off back here, but they didn’t come into the front of the house. So that means they’re sitting in the back of the house with the lights off. Doesn’t that seem peculiar?”

  On her next step, her foot sank into cold, brackish water, three inches deep. She grabbed the slender trunk of a birch sapling to steady herself. In another yard Hutter was in up to her knees. The water didn’t look any different from the ground, a black surface carpeted in leaves and branches.

  As Daltry came up along beside them, he plunged into the water up to his thighs, staggered, nearly fell.

  “We could use a light,” Chitra said.

  “Or a snorkel,” Daltry said.

  “No light,” Hutter said. “And you can go back if you don’t like getting wet.”

  “What? And miss all the fun? I’d rather drown.”

  “Don’t get our hopes up,” Hutter told him.

  Inside

  MCQUEEN SAT AT THE TABLE WITH THEM IN THE DARK. HE HAD the bag of detonators in his lap and had removed one and held it in his hand. Lou was not reassured to see that the detonator in no way resembled the high-tech devices used to ignite explosives on 24 or in a Mission: Impossible film. They were instead little black timers from Home Depot, with curiously familiar-looking brass-ended wires dangling from them.

  “Uh, Mr. McQueen? Dude?” Lou asked. “That looks like the kind of timer I use to switch on the Christmas lights when it’s getting dark.”

  “That’s all it is,” he said. “Best I could do on short notice. The sacks are prepped, which means the compounds inside have been soaked in diesel and wired with a small charge. You just tie in the line, same as you’d tie in your Christmas lights. The black hand tells you what time it is. The red hand tells you when it’ll turn on your lights. Or, in this case, go off with about twenty thousand foot-pounds of force. Enough to tear off the front of a three-story building, if the charge is placed right.” He paused and looked at Vic. “Don’t wire them until you get where you’re going. You don’t want to be bouncing around on your bike with these wired up.”

  Lou wasn’t sure what frightened him more: the knapsack full of ANFO or the way the guy looked at his daughter, his watery pale eyes so clear and cool as to have nearly no color at all.

  “I kept it simple and real al-Qaeda,” McQueen said, and dropped the timer back into the shopping bag. “This wouldn’t pass state requirements, but it would do okay in Baghdad. Ten-year-olds strap this stuff to their bodies and blow themselves up without any trouble all the time. Nothing will get you to Allah faster. Guaranteed.”

  Vic said, “I understand.” Reaching for the backpack and pushing up from the table. “Dad, I have to go. It isn’t safe for me to be here.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t have come if there was any other way,” he said.

  She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. “I knew you’d have my back.”

  “Always,” he said.

  He held on to her, arm around her waist. His gaze reminded Lou of certain mountain lakes that appeared crystalline and pure because acid rain had killed everything in them.

  “Minimum safe distance for an open-air blast—that’s a bomb on the surface of the ground—is a hundred feet. Anyone within a hundred feet will have their insides jellied by the shockwave. Have you scoped out this joint? This Christmasland? Do you know where you’re going to place your charges? It’ll probably take an hour or two to safely wire and set these things.”

  “I’ll have time,” she said, but Lou knew from the way she held her father’s gaze, from the look of perfect calm on her face, that she was full of it.

  “I won’t let her kill herself, Mr. McQueen,” Lou said, pushing himself up and reaching for the grocery bag full of timers. He plucked it out of Christopher McQueen’s lap before the man could move. “You can trust me.”

  Vic blanched. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m going with you,” Lou said. “Wayne’s my fuckin’ kid, too. Anyway. We had a deal, remember? I fix the bike and you take me along. You don’t get to go off and do this thing without me being there to make sure you don’t blow the both of you up. Don’t worry. I’ll ride bitch seat.”

  “What about me?” Chris McQueen said. “You think I could follow you across the magic rainbow bridge in my truck?”

  Vic drew a thin breath. “No. I mean . . . just no. Neither of you can come. I know you want to help, but neither of you can go with me. Look. This bridge . . . it’s real, you’ll both be able to see it. It’ll be here, with us, in our world. But at the same time, in some way I don’t understand, it also mostly exists in my head. And the structure isn’t very safe anymore. Hasn’t been safe since I was a teenager. It could collapse under the weight of carrying another mind. Besides. I might have to come back through with Wayne sitting behind me. Probably will have to come back through that way. If he’s on the bike, Lou, where are you going to sit?”

  “Maybe I could just follow you back across on foot. You ever think of that?” Lou asked.

  “That’s a bad idea,” she said. “If you saw it, you’d understand.”

  “Well,” Lou said, “let’s go see.”

  She gave him a look that was pained and pleading. A look like she was fighting the urge to cry.

  “I need to see,” Lou said. “I need to know this is real, and not because I’m worried you’re crazy but because I need to believe there’s a chance here for Wayne to come home.”

  Vic gave her head a savage shake, but then she swiveled on her heel and hobbled for the back door.

  She got two steps before she began to tilt over. Lou caught her arm.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Dude. You can hardly stay upright.”

  The heat coming off her sickened him.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “This will be over soon.”

  But in her eyes was a dull shine of something worse than fear—desperation, maybe. Her father had said that any numb-ass ten-year-old could strap himself to ANFO and blow himself to Allah, and it came to Lou now that this was in fact a rough approximation of her plan.

  They pushed through the screen door, into the cool of the night. Lou had noticed Vic swiping her hand under her left eye now and then. She was not crying, but water ran from the eye uncontrollably, a faint but continuous trickle. He had seen that before, in the bad days in Colorado, when she answered phones that weren’t ringing and talked to people who weren’t there.

  Except they had been there. It was strange how quickly he had acclimated himself to that idea, how little struggle it had been to accept the terms of her madness as fact after all. Perhaps it wasn’t so incredible. He had long accepted that everyone had his own world inside, each as real as the communal world shared by all but impossible for others to access. She had said she could bring her bridge into this world but that in some way it also existed only in her mind. It sounded like delusion until you remembered that people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

  They stepped past the woodpile, out from under the overhang of the roof and into the gentle, trembling mist. He glanced back as the screen door slapped shut again, Christopher McQueen following them out. Vic’s dad snapped his lighter and lowered his head to set fire to another cigarette, then looked up and squinted through the smoke at her bike.

  “Evel Knievel used to ride Triumphs,” he told them, the last thing any of them said before the cops came out of the woods.

  “EFF BEE EYE!” shouted a familiar voice from the tree line. “DON’T MOVE. HANDS IN THE AIR, HANDS IN THE AIR,
ALL OF YOU!”

  A dull throb of pain shot up the left side of Lou’s neck, a thing he felt in his jaw, in his teeth. It crossed his mind that Vic wasn’t the only one in possession of high explosive—he had a grenade ready to go off in his brain.

  Of the three of them, only Lou seemed to think “HANDS IN THE AIR” was more than a suggestion. Lou’s hands began to drift upward, palms out, although he still held the bag of detonators, the plastic strap looped over one thumb. He could see Chris McQueen at the periphery of his vision, over by the woodpile. The guy was perfectly motionless, still hunched in the act of lighting his cigarette, the tip glowing, his lighter in his other hand.

  Vic, though. Vic bolted at the first shout, slipping away from Lou and staggering across the yard, her left leg stiff, refusing to bend. Lou dropped his hands and reached for her, but she was already ten feet away. By the time the woman coming out of the woods shouted “ALL OF YOU!” Vic had thrown one leg over the saddle of the Triumph. The other foot was coming down on the kickstart. The motorcycle roared to life in a shattering blast of noise. It was hard to imagine that a bag of ANFO could be any louder.

  “NO, VIC, NO, VIC, NO! I WILL HAVE TO SHOOT YOU!” cried Tabitha Hutter.

  The little woman was coming through the wet grass in a kind of sideways jog, holding an automatic pistol in both hands, just like cops did on TV shows. She was already close—fifteen, twenty feet away, close enough for Lou to see that her spectacles were dappled with raindrops. She had two others with her: the detective, Daltry, and a state trooper Lou recognized, an Indian woman. Daltry’s trousers were soaked to the crotch, and he had dead leaves sticking to his pant legs, and he looked bad-tempered about it. He had a gun but was holding it out from his body, pointed away and at the ground. Taking them in, Lou recognized—half consciously—that only one of them was an immediate threat. Daltry’s gun was pointing away, and Hutter couldn’t see through her glasses. The Indian woman, though, held her gun on Vic, pointing it at Vic’s center mass, and her eyes had a tragic look to them—her eyes seemed to say, Please, please do not make me do something I don’t want to do.

  “I’m going to get Wayne, Tabitha!” Vic shouted. “If you shoot me, you’ll kill him, too. I’m the only way he’s coming home.”

  “Wait!” Lou cried. “Wait! No one shoot anyone!”

  “STOP MOVING!” Hutter shouted.

  Lou didn’t know who the hell she was talking about—Vic was sitting on her bike, and Chris was over at the woodpile, hadn’t taken a single step. It was only when she twitched the barrel of the gun to point it at him that he realized he was the one moving. Without thinking about it, and with his hands up by his head, he had begun to cross the yard, stepping between Vic and the police officers.

  By now Hutter was just three long steps away from him. She squinted through her glasses, the barrel of the gun lowered to point at Lou’s vast expanse of belly. She might not be able to see him very well, but he supposed it was like shooting at a barn; the challenge would be in missing him.

  Daltry had turned toward Christopher McQueen but in a sign of profound indifference did not bother to even cover him with his gun.

  Lou said, “Hang on. No one’s the bad guy here. The bad guy is Charlie Manx.”

  “Charlie Manx is dead,” Tabitha Hutter said.

  “Tell that to Maggie Leigh,” Vic said. “Charlie just murdered her in Iowa at the Here Public Library. One hour ago. Check it out. I was there.”

  “You were—” Hutter started, then shook her head, as if to whisk a mosquito away from her face. “Get off the bike and lie facedown on the ground, Vic.”

  In the distance Lou heard other voices shouting, heard branches splintering, people charging through the bush. The sounds came from the other side of the house, which meant they probably had as much as twenty seconds before they were encircled.

  Vic said, “I have to ride,” and clunked the motorcycle into first gear.

  “I’m going with her,” Lou said.

  Hutter continued to approach. The barrel of the gun was almost but not quite close enough to grab.

  “Officer Surinam, will you cuff this man?” Hutter said.

  Chitra Surinam began to move past and around Hutter. She lowered the barrel of her gun, and her right hand dropped to reach for the cuffs dangling from the side of her utility belt. Lou had always wanted a utility belt, like Batman’s, with a grappling-hook gun on it and a few flash-bang bombs. If he had a utility belt and a flash-bang bomb now, he could throw one and blind the cops, and he and Vic could make their getaway. Instead he was holding a bag of Christmas-light timers from Home Depot.

  Lou took a step back, so he was next to the bike, close enough to feel the blazing heat of the shuddering pipes.

  “Give me the bag, Lou,” Vic said.

  Lou said, “Ms. Hutter. Ms. Hutter, please, please, radio your guys and ask about Maggie Leigh. Ask about what just happened in Iowa. You’re getting ready to arrest the only person who can get my kid back. If you want to help our son, you need to let us go.”

  “No more talk, Lou,” Vic said. “I’ve got to leave.”

  Hutter squinted, as if she were having trouble seeing through her glasses. No doubt she was.

  Chitra Surinam closed in on him. Lou held out one hand, as to ward her off, and he heard a steely cranking sound and found she had thrown one bracelet of the handcuffs on him.

  “Whoa!” he said. “Whoa, dude!”

  Hutter slipped a cell phone out of her pocket, a silver rectangle the size of a hotel soap. She did not dial a number but depressed a single button. The phone blooped, and a male voice came through static.

  “Cundy here. You throw down on the bad guys out there?”

  Hutter said, “Cundy. Any word on the hunt for Margaret Leigh?”

  The phone hissed.

  Chitra said to Lou, “Your other hand, please, Mr. Carmody. Your other hand.”

  He didn’t give it to her. Instead he held his left hand up out of reach, the plastic bag looped over his thumb, as if it were a bag of stolen candy and he was the schoolyard bully who had snatched it and didn’t intend to give it back.

  Cundy’s voice came through the hiss, his tone unhappy. “Uh, are you feeling especially psychic today? We just got word. Five minutes ago. I was going to tell you when you got back.”

  The shouts from the other side of the house were closer.

  “Tell me now,” Hutter said.

  “What the fuck is this?” Daltry asked.

  Cundy said, “She’s dead. Margaret Leigh was beaten to death. The cops there like McQueen for it. She was spotted leaving the scene on her motorcycle.”

  “No,” Hutter said. “No, that’s . . . that’s impossible. Where did this happen?”

  “Here, Iowa. A little over an hour ago. Why is it so imposs—”

  But Hutter hit the button again, cut him off. She looked past Lou at Vic. Vic was twisted around on the saddle, the bike shuddering beneath her, staring back at her.

  “It wasn’t me,” Vic said. “It was Manx. They’re going to find out she was beaten to death with a hammer.”

  At some point Hutter had lowered her gun entirely. She put her phone in the pocket of her coat, wiped at the water on her face.

  “A bone mallet,” Hutter said. “The one Manx took with him when he walked out of that morgue in Colorado. I don’t—I can’t—understand this. I’m trying, Vic, but I just can’t make sense of it. How is he up and walking? How are you here when you were just in Iowa?”

  “I don’t have time to explain about the rest. But if you want to know how I got here from Iowa, stick around. I’ll show you.”

  Hutter said to Chitra, “Officer, will you please . . . take the cuffs off Mr. Carmody? They won’t be necessary. Maybe we should just talk. Maybe all of us should just talk.”

  “I don’t have time to—” Vic started, but none of them heard the rest.

  “Oh, what the fuck is this?” Daltry said, turning away from Chris McQueen and bri
nging up his gun to aim at Vic. “Get off the motorcycle.”

  “Officer, holster your weapon!” Hutter cried.

  “The fuck I will,” Daltry said. “You’re out of your mind, Hutter. Shut off the bike, McQueen. Shut it off now.”

  “Officer!” Hutter yelled. “I am in charge here, and I said—”

  “On the ground!” screamed the first FBI agent around the eastern side of the house. He had an assault rifle. Lou thought it might be an M16. “ON THE FUCKING GROUND!”

  It seemed as if everyone was yelling, and Lou felt another dull wallop of pain in his temple and the left side of his neck. Chitra wasn’t looking at him, her head twisted around to stare at Hutter with a mix of anxiety and wonder.

  Chris McQueen flicked his cigarette into Daltry’s face. It hit below his right eye in a spray of red sparks, and Daltry flinched, the barrel of his gun lurching off target. Chris’s free hand found a piece of stovewood at the top of the woodpile, and he came around with it and clubbed Daltry across the shoulder hard enough to stagger him.

  “Get out of here, Brat!” he yelled.

  Daltry took three stumbling steps across the mucky earth, steadied himself, lifted the gun, and put one bullet into McQueen’s stomach and another into his throat.

  Vic screamed. Lou turned toward her, and as he did, his shoulder bumped Chitra Surinam. This was, unfortunately, a bit like being bumped by a horse. Surinam put one foot back into the soggy earth, bent her ankle wrong, and went straight backward, sitting down in the wet grass.

  “Everyone lower your weapons!” Hutter cried. “Goddamn it, HOLD YOUR FIRE!”

  Lou reached for Vic. The best way to get his arms around her was to put a leg over the back of the bike.

  “Off the motorcycle, off the motorcycle!” hollered one of the men in body armor. There were three of them coming across the grass with their machine guns.

  Vic’s face was turned to look back at her father, her mouth stretched open in her last cry, her eyes blind with amazement. Lou kissed her fevered cheek.