Cold Heart (27 page)

El was a machine.

He ate.

He slept.

He killed.

Did he have sex?

Is that what this is about?

Sex?

Was he murdering everyone in McRay under the sick delusion that he and she could live happily ever after?

Killers often lived in fantasy worlds. The problem was that sooner or later their fantasies came up against the harshness of the real world, and then they were forced to make adjustments. Adjustments like Aaron and Terry and Howard and Stan. And many if not all of them were sexually frustrated because of real or imagined inadequacies so that, even if El got his wish and wiped out everyone in McRay but the two of them, pretty soon it all would go sour for him. He would be unable to perform and, thwarted by his own inability, he would turn his anger against her.

She would probably suffer a far crueler death than anyone else.

It was useless to try to talk to him but she couldn't help herself.

“You can't get away with this, El,” she said, realizing her mistake even as she spoke.

His lips spread straight across his face so that he looked as if his cheeks had been slashed. He straightened the glasses and pulled himself to his feet, moving around to her side. With lightning speed he slapped her, backhanded. A burst of white pain blinded her and she tasted salty blood.

He bent calmly to tape her wrist. “My name is Eldred.”

She nodded an apology.

He knelt beside the chair and jerked her leg back, taping it to the leg of the rocker.

“No one will miss them,” he said, standing and inspecting his work.

“Of course they will,” she said. “Clive calls in the weather.”

“I'm going to do it,” he said. “I have the key to the phone room.” He jingled keys in his pocket.

But he seemed uncertain, as though that had not been part of the original plan and Micky wondered just how his brain did function.

What strange stew is simmering inside that skull?

Would it even be recognizable as thought to a normal person?

“They'll know it isn't Clive,” she said.

“Clive passed away. I'm the new store owner.”

“You don't think anyone will consider that odd?”

“Shut up about it,” he said. His voice wasn't raised but she noticed a slight tenseness in his body and she pulled her head back, expecting another blow. But after a second he relaxed.

He readjusted the glasses and she noticed that he wasn't looking at her face. He was focused on her jacket. She remembered the radio and tried to shift inconspicuously to put it behind her, but he leaned over and slipped it out of her pocket.

He studied it, touching but not depressing the transmit button, and turning the volume and squelch controls slightly.

Testing.

“Where's Dawn?” he said.

“How would I know?”

He nodded at the radio. “I heard her.”

Was that possible?

Could he have heard the girl on the radio from that distance across the clearing, in the excitement of the bear attack and her own and Stan's sudden appearance?

Maybe.

She couldn't make the mistake of comparing his senses to those of an ordinary human being. El's senses might not be more acute, but he wasn't hindered by ordinary emotions. He'd probably felt no fear at all during the bear attack, merely been registering input like computer. The normal person would have blocked out everything but the most crucial info, his brain systematically shutting off information that wasn't immediately necessary for survival. But El might well have been taking it all in for later review.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said.

“Why are you being like this?”

“Like what?”

“I did this all for you,” he said.

What did he want her to say?

Thank you?

Although the thought of apologizing to the monster standing in front of her made her physically ill, she knew that was exactly was what she had to do. She had to somehow go along with his madness long enough to get an edge. To get that one slim chance at survival that almost all victims received. Some seized it, some didn't. And some who did didn't survive. But if she irritated him now, he'd grow enraged and kill her anyway, and then Dawn would be alone.

Just as
she
had been alone.

That was unacceptable.

“Thank you,” she said.

He stared at her for three long breaths.

Then he nodded and clicked the radio.

“Come on out, Dawn,” he said. “Or I'm going to kill Micky.”

Did I misread him completely?

Was he lying all along?

Could it be Dawn he wanted?

“Come on out, now,” he repeated. “I'll take care of you.”

He held the radio out at arm's length, and turned to stare down at Micky. A slow thin smile spread across his face.

No.

I was right.

He's lying to Dawn.

“She's in the store,” he said, freezing Micky's heart. “Isn't she?”

She tried with all her will not to show anything, to maintain a poker face. But even that seemed a betrayal. She knew that El was reading her like a book because now his smile spread impossibly wide, slashing his cheeks.

“She is,” he said. But instead of the pistol, he slipped the huge bowie knife out of his boot sheath and cradled the radio lovingly in the other hand.

“If you hurt her,” Micky said, “I'll never do what you want.”

“You'll come to understand,” he said. “I knew you wouldn't at first. But you will.”

He lifted the radio to his lips and spoke in a clear, calm voice.

“I know you're in the store, Dawn,” he said. “I'm going to find you.”

M
ARTY COULD BARELY HEAR
above the roar of the fire. The smoke was too dense to see through. It was so hot he was sure his hair would catch soon and the pain in his back and shoulder was another flame, almost indistinguishable from the raging heat all around him.

He had slipped flat against the floor again after he realized that the door was locked from outside and there was no way he could open it. Now he clasped both hands over his nose and mouth, breathing the little bit of air that was left in the cabin.

He curled into a ball against the door, his eyes watering, nose and throat burning from the acrid stench. The fire had spread across the floor and crept up the loft ladder. It was burning the worktable and running up the logs like liquid light.

He hadn't failed to notice the ammunition boxes in the far corner. Flames licked teasingly at the cardboard. He wasn't only going to burn to death. He was curled up next to a powder keg.

For the first seconds, after giving up on the door, he had rested against it, convinced that he was locked in and that now he was going to die, cooked like a goose. He had all but given up.

Now and then, though, he felt a gust of cold air on his cheeks.

He held up his hand and waited.

Sure enough, a puff of wind passed and he glimpsed a flicker of light. Fumbling with his left hand, he felt the rough wool blanket that blocked the window. Gripping it, he tried to pull himself up, but only succeeded in draping it down on top of him like a shroud. A gust of cool air rushed over him and he heard the fire
whoof
behind him. He threw the blanket aside and found himself staring up into blue sky.

The heat was so intense he couldn't breathe and the flames had caught the blanket and now they were reaching toward him with white-hot fingers. He ignored his pain, pulled himself up and over the windowsill, dragging himself onto the stoop and then down into the mud and grass at the bottom.

He lay on his good side, gasping, staring up at the front of the cabin as a burst of flame erupted through the window and hurtled skyward, spewing black smoke. Shells began to explode inside. Again the heat drove him back. He was about to pass out again. But he knew that he had to get farther from the house before he did, or he'd die for certain.

He dragged himself roughly through the slush, annoyed by the strange buzzing noise overhead.

Was it real? Or just another symptom of the damage the bear had done to him?

M
ICKY COULDN'T SEE EL
but she knew from the sounds that he had completed his search of the workshed. She also knew that Clive's corpse was in there with him because El kept talking to Clive.

She had heard El open and close the padlock on the phone-room door, although how he thought Dawn might have gotten in there through a locked door, she had no idea. He was throwing things about and there was the sound of breaking glass again.

If I live, will that be the only sound I remember when I think of McRay?

Or will I remember Marty's moans? His screams as the bear tore into him?

Or Dawn's frightened call to me on the radio?

She had no idea where Dawn might be hiding. Like the other buildings in town, the store was built on short pilings and there was no cellar, not even a real crawl space, and all access would be from outside. Dawn's last call had been from inside the store and Micky was pretty sure the girl was still here. But she prayed that she was wrong. El was looking in places a cockroach couldn't hide, much less a teenage girl.

When El returned, Micky noticed a change in his attitude.

Just a little of the cocksureness was gone. There was more jerkiness to his motion, as though an invisible fly were darting about his face and he wanted to catch it with his tongue. He moved the big knife back and forth in front of him as he paced, like a blind man armed with a razor-sharp cane. He was looking under the counter, under the shelves, kicking aside boxes that wouldn't have held shoes, much less a young girl. And he kept babbling into the radio at Dawn.

Threatening.

Then cajoling.

Then whining.

Then threatening again.

Had any of those techniques ever worked for him?

Or was he so divorced from any experience with human society that he had no clue how to deal with real people?

Micky tried to picture what was happening inside his head, but she couldn't. There was no way to reason with him because he was reasoning—if what he did could be called reason—on some level that she couldn't reach, could never comprehend. He was calculating with figures that were skewed before they reached his brain, so the output had to be totally unrecognizable to anyone functioning in the sane world Micky lived in.

Maybe a professional psychiatrist could figure out what he was doing.

But it was beyond her.

What she did know was that part of his plan was unraveling and so was El.

As he continued to speak into the radio, she noticed that half the time he was forgetting to depress the button so that Dawn had to be getting very weird, half sentences at best.

And he kept glancing at his watch.

Micky tried to see the watch face.

It has to be late afternoon by now.

Rich will be coming in soon.

El was planning to kill the pilot. Micky was certain of that. And he wanted McRay to look as normal as possible when the mail plane got to town. Couldn't have bodies lying all over the place or people running around loose to warn Rich.

But Stan was outside, draped over the stair rail.

Dawn was inside and she and Stan were screwing up El's timetable.

El moved around behind her and she twisted painfully to watch. He was rummaging through rubber boots and sleeping bags, slashing them angrily with the knife, muttering into the radio.

“Dawn, come on out. You can't get away. And if you don't come out, I'm going to have to kill Micky.”

Micky waited until his thumb depressed the button again.

“He's lying, Dawn!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

The sound of her voice bounced off the rafters like a wounded bat.

D
AWN KNELT IN THE
darkness. Both fists pressed against her temples so hard her head felt as though stakes were being driven into it. She tried to shut out El's voice and the scream that had cut through the radio and echoed through the floorboards beneath her.

The scream had been so unexpected that Dawn dropped the radio.

It was lying only inches from her face, but she didn't want to touch it again. It had begun to feel slimy and creepy as El's disjointed speech oozed out of it into the tight confines of her man-made cave. Every time El spoke he seemed to be reaching out for her with scaly hands in the inky blackness, and each time he spoke she shivered.

Micky's scream had slashed through Dawn's fear and hit her with an instant new terror. It was as though Dawn had been listening to some horror story, told from a distance, and somehow her mind had grown numb to it. As long as it was coming from the radio it couldn't touch her, she didn't have to consider the fact that the man on the other end was only a few feet away, down the stairs. She could hold him at arm's length and, if she dared, could even click a button and shut out his voice.

But Micky's scream came out of nowhere, blasting through the tiny speaker and slicing through pine and insulation, to touch her heart.

The horror was real again.

And close.

M
ICKY'S NECK HURT FROM
twisting around so far, but she was frozen, staring into her own double reflection in the glinting lenses above El's smirk.

The knife had stopped flitting. He cocked his head ever so slowly, looking over his shoulder, back toward the stairs.

So he did hear it.

Micky had hoped that her scream had taken him by surprise. Shocked him. He had certainly looked that way when he whipped around to stare at her. She prayed that, after the scream, he hadn't heard the sound of something solid hitting the floor over their heads. Micky had jerked the rocker violently, pretending to try to free herself, knowing all too well she couldn't get away, hoping to disguise the sound that thankfully did not repeat itself.