(1995) The Oath (51 page)

Two blocks before the main part of town, Tracy wrenched the steering wheel to the left, went down a narrow street, turned into an alley, and tucked the car into a narrow gap between an empty concrete-block house and a long-defunct machine shop. She hoped she hadn’t been seen but knew it was a slim hope, at best.

Now, how could she carry two shotguns while using one of them? Where could she carry the extra sidearm? Which was the safest and quickest route to the tavern? How could she keep from getting stopped—or shot?

HAROLD
BLY
buttoned up his shirt, as did the others. They’d made their point in devastating fashion.

“Messing around with another man’s wife did it for your brother, too,” said Bly. “Kind of funny you didn’t learn anything from that.” Bly reflected on it and shook his head. “But what’s to learn anyway? Do what you want, I say, and when your time comes, you cash in.”

Steve didn’t understand everything Bly was saying, but he did get the impression he’d contracted a fatal disease that was killing him this very moment.

Bly leaned back in his chair and gloated. “How about it, Stevie? Feeling proud yet? Feeling immortal? I’ll bet your brother Cliff did. Just ask Evelyn. They all did: Cliff did, Maggie did, so did Vic and Charlie. And now they’re dragon manure.”

“So you
are
saying the dragon ate them?”

Bly smirked. “What do you think?”

Steve touched his chest. “And this is the dragon’s doing?”

Bly raised his eyebrows as though impressed. “Hey, you’re learning. A little late, though. You should have gotten out of here while you had the chance.”

Steve looked around the room. “Why do you let this happen to you? Why don’t you just leave?”

“Why should we?”

“Doesn’t this mark mean—? Well, I think I hear you saying the dragon is going to eat you.”

“Could be.”

“Then don’t you want to leave? Escape?”

Bly exchanged glances with the others. “We like it here, Benson. Don’t you?”

Steve didn’t like it here at all, but he knew better than to say so.

Bly answered for him, “Sure you do. We all do. You just haven’t figured that out yet.” Bly picked up his beer mug and raised it high. “But you’ve been selected, buddy, so drink up. You’re one of us now.”

Bly took a long drink from his beer. The others in the room did the same, as if it were a toast. It was eerie. Suddenly everyone seemed so jovial, but Steve could clearly sense they were dancing on his grave.

He went with the flow and drank. Maybe they were all crazy. Maybe he was dreaming. In any event, maybe, just maybe, he’d get out of there alive if he went along.

Bly set his mug down and eyed Steve slyly. “But listen, it’s not a done deal; I wouldn’t want you to think that. The way I look at it, you can get out of just about anything if you know the right strings to pull. We’ve got ourselves a little problem, but all we’ve got to do is get rid of what’s causing it. Get rid of the troublemaker, and you’re rid of the trouble.”

Benjamin Hyde, Steve thought. I’m drinking beer with Benjamin Hyde. “Mr. Bly, I don’t want to cause trouble. That’s why I’m here, to talk this thing through.”

Bly picked up his beer mug again. “So, drink up, and we’ll talk it through.”

Steve picked up his beer again and put it to his lips just as the back door swung open.

“Don’t drink that!” a voice ordered.

Tracy! Steve twisted in his chair to see her standing just inside the back door, awkwardly grasping a shotgun in her right hand while carrying another in her left, and wearing a sidearm on each hip. She was just aiming a shotgun at Bernie behind the bar. “Hands, Bernie! Let’s see those hands!”

Bernie, who had been reaching for something, raised his hands.

Tracy panned the room with the muzzle of the shotgun, and hands went up like weeds growing. “No one move! Steve, come on!”

Steve protested, “Tracy, I’m trying to make friends here.”

“Get away from that door!” she ordered Carl, who sat back down. “Hands, Andy! Hands!” Andy withdrew his hands from behind the pool table and held them high.

“Does your boss know where you are?” Harold Bly asked in a condescending tone.

“I shot him, Harold.”

She said that so quickly and simply that it took a moment for the others in the room to grasp it. There was a shocked silence, and everyone in the room, except Steve, looked at Bly.

Bly didn’t believe her, and sneered. “Oh, come on, Tracy.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” she fired back. “If he was still alive then I’d be dead, and I think you know it. I think you put him up to it. And I’ll bet you’ve got a nasty wound over your heart just like he did.”

Bly gave a derisive chuckle as he exchanged a quick glance with the others. “And how is yours?” he asked.

She looked at him with seething hatred. “Like fire, Harold. Like fire. So I’m very upset right now, like I want to shoot somebody. Steve, get over here. They’re out to kill you, too.”

Looking warily all directions, Steve got up from the table.

“Come on!” Tracy urged.

He hurried across the room. She handed him the extra shotgun, then addressed the room. “Okay. You want to be rid of the trouble. Well the trouble’s leaving right now. We’re through with you; we’re through with the valley. You can have the dragon, all right? He’s all yours. We’re out of here.”

She reached behind her, yanked the back door open, and they made their escape, Tracy leading, Steve covering the rear.

The door closed, and every man went for his gun.

“Easy now,” Bly shouted, jumping up from his place. “Go with the plan! Go with the plan! Elmer! Joe! Take the south end! Carl, take the north! Move!”

STEVE’S FIRST
thought was to head for his camper. Tracy grabbed his arm and pulled him down the alley. “Forget it, the tires are slashed!”

Adrenaline pumping, Steve followed Tracy, his senses alert, the shotgun ready.

They ran full speed behind the old businesses, past garbage cans and loading doors, along cracked retaining walls and over deep potholes, fearing a sniper in every window, an assailant around every corner. They could hear shouting from the streets out front and the growling of engines starting.

They came out of the alley and onto a gravel street. There was a shout from the main road. A woman had spotted them and was alerting someone farther down.

“Hurry!” Tracy urged. “If they find the patrol car we’re in deep soup.”

They got across that street and ducked down another alley, racing past small homes and cluttered yards, along a cyclone fence with two yapping dogs chasing them on the other side, through a small flock of free-ranging chickens that squawked and long-stepped for cover.

They came to what looked like an old machine shop, now deserted, and Tracy pressed close against the building as Steve came up silently behind her. They inched toward the corner, and Tracy peeked around into the alley beyond.

“Okay,” she whispered, and they rounded the corner.

The patrol car looked okay. They jumped in. Tracy started the engine and drove down the alley to the next cross street. From there, the only route available was the main highway.

“Hang on.”

With a burst of power and rocks flying from under the spinning tires, the car surged for the highway, skidded around the corner, and roared south on the Hyde River Road toward the edge of town.

They rounded the corner and Tracy braked.

Elmer McCoy’s flatbed truck and Joe Staggart’s old school-bus-turned-into-a-camper had just arrived and were parked across the road, blocking their way. Andy Schuller and his buddies were already there, looking grimly from under their billed caps, armed with hunting rifles, waiting, backed up by some more crew from the mine and Bly’s small logging company, at least ten men.

Tracy veered onto the right shoulder, cranked the wheel all the way left, and shrieked out a tight circle that barely missed the old bus and the men standing by it. Steve, slouching down in his seat, shotgun in hand, could see their bellies and belt buckles blurring right by his window. He turned and saw them running after the car, trying to line up a shot. The car bounded and bounced off the narrow road, over the shoulder, and into the widow Dorning’s little yard, where it took out Mrs. Dorning’s birdbath, half a row of marigolds, three painted concrete squirrels, and a plastic Bambi before fishtailing onto the highway again and turning north, back through town.

“They’re going to have the other end cut off, too!” Steve shouted.

“So what do you suggest?” she shouted back. “There are only two ways out of town.”

“We may have to hoof it if we can’t get out by car.”

“Hoof it where? Over those mountains?”

It was not a promising alternative.

The car raced by Cobb’s Garage. Both the big doors were open, but Steve saw no sign of Levi.

“Levi!”

Tracy kept driving without a response.

Steve shouted to her, “What about Levi?”

“What about him?”

“If they’re after us, they have to be after him!”

“He’ll have to take care of himself.”

“We can’t leave him here!”

Tracy only hit the gas harder and accelerated through the four-way stop. “We don’t have a choice.”

At the north end of town, where the little train of ore cars sat alongside the road, one of Harold Bly’s big logging trucks now spanned the highway, blocking their path. Carl Ingfeldt was manning the roadblock, along with some of the mine crew.

“Hold on again!” Tracy cranked the wheel for another skidding, squealing, gravel-throwing one-eighty-degree turn. Once again, Steve could see huge wheels, iron, chrome, and human bodies blurring by the window as the car skidded around.

Then he caught a glimpse of a face: Doug Ellis. Ellis started running after the car. “I’ll kill you, Benson!”

Carl Ingfeldt raised a shotgun.

“Duck!” Steve hollered just as the rear window exploded in a shower of glass.

FROM THE PORCH
of his little parsonage next to the church, Reverend Ron Woods could hear the gunshot, the shouting, the roar of vehicles racing through the town below.

It’s finally happening, he thought.

It was something he’d long feared, long expected. He’d heard the murmuring around town, the rumors, the bitter talk about the professor and the turncoat sheriff’s deputy. He’d heard the hatred being spat in Levi’s direction. He knew Harold Bly’s ways.

And now it was finally happening. The hatred, the fear, the superstitions of the town had erupted. Now people might even be killed.

But he remained where he was, above it all, safe—and helpless. What could he do? How could he stop it? How could this kind of madness even listen to reason? How long had he tried to quell it, soothe it, make it go away by continuous words of peace and goodwill? This thing simply would not die, only hide for a while to crop up again later. Woods’s theology could not account for it. What wisdom he thought he had was exhausted.

But one thing had become clear to him, even as he listened to the trouble below: He could stay there on his front porch and pretend he was different, but he was not. He was like them. He was them.

Like the people below, his own heart harbored bitter secrets. Like his neighbors, he had come face to face with what he was.

He had discovered the red mark over his heart that morning when he awoke. He’d heard enough of the folk tales to know what it was. By now it had grown to several inches long, was a deep red, and burned with the slightest touch.

JUST AS
the patrol car neared the four-way stop, a dump truck and a pickup approached from the opposite direction, side by side, taking up both lanes. The net was closing.

Not yet, Tracy thought. She roared into the four-way stop and cut a hard left turn, slamming Steve into the side of the car. Instead of straightening up, he remained leaning against the door. His whole body felt heavy, and he was having trouble focusing. Snap out of it! he ordered himself and forced his body upright. He recovered just in time to see the massive, concrete Hyde Mining Company building ahead. The car rumbled and bounced over a timber bridge, then Tracy veered to the right, up a narrow ramp that paralleled the river. There was a tunnel coming up, a yawning black cave that ran under the building.

“The railroad used to come through here,” she explained. “They’ve torn the tracks up, so maybe—”

Maybe, Steve heard, as if from a distance.

Tracy drove into the black tunnel, the roar of the engine rumbling back at them off the water-streaked concrete walls. They burst through into sunlight again, into a wide expanse, once a loading area. On one side, built into the mountain, was the loading complex with huge ore chutes that had once been used to fill trains. On the other side was a thick concrete wall and beyond that, a deadly vertical drop to the river. Straight ahead, another tunnel went through the foot of the mountain.

It could have led them into the clear, hopefully beyond the roadblock, but the tunnel was blocked, barricaded with many years’ worth of old timbers, metal scrap, and empty diesel drums.

Tracy braked to a growling, skidding stop, then gave the steering wheel an angry pound and slumped back against the seat. “Now what?” she said to herself, looking around.

“Why’d we stop?” Steve asked groggily.

She flung her door open and jumped out. Then she looked back. He was still sitting there, bewildered. “Steve, come on! We’ve got to find a way out of here!”

Steve groped for the door handle, finally found it, and pushed the door open. He staggered out of the car just as the rumble of vehicles echoed out of the tunnel behind them.

There were doors along the wall beneath the ore chutes. Tracy ran along, trying each one. They had been locked years ago and wouldn’t budge. Then she saw an iron stairway leading up to a catwalk. “The stairs! Let’s go!”

She ran past Steve toward the stairway. He turned to follow her but crumpled to the ground.

“Steve!”

He tried to stand up but flopped to the ground again. The earth was reeling and rocking beneath him and wouldn’t stop.