Mountain Madness (21 page)

Before she let herself do anything else, Libby took a tour of the house, potato peeler still in hand, locking all the doors and windows and pulling the drapes tight. By the time she’d finished, her heart had slowed to normal speed and she could breathe regularly again, but she still felt dirty and more than a little scared.

Stupid
. She had nothing to be scared of. He hadn’t actually
done
anything except slobber and feel her up a little. Besides, she’d fought him off, kicked him in the nuts and broken his nose, for God’s sake. If anything, she should have felt powerful, proud.

She didn’t.

In the kitchen, she replaced the unused potato peeler and retrieved the water-damaged book from the floor where she’d dropped it. Later, she could press the book under some heavy dictionaries and blow dry it to keep it from warping too badly, but it would never look quite normal again.

Hopefully
, she thought,
neither will Marshall
.

She wondered why he’d done it, what he’d actually expected to happen. Marshall had always seemed a little strange in a nerdy sort of way, but until today she’d thought of his sometimes-odd behavior as eccentric, unconventional. She’d never realized he was crazy. Did he think he’d woo her with his cheap flowers and his rumpled suit or win her over with his use of archaic coffee terminology? Maybe he’d been on drugs.

Libby shivered and returned to the staircase where she’d left the beer and the rest of her bath gear. The ice in the plastic bucket had melted a little, but not as much as she would have expected. How long had Marshall been here? It seemed much longer than it probably had been, seemed like hours.

She wasn’t sure she still wanted the bath. How could she ever expect to relax after what had just happened? But at the same time, she
needed
the bath. She felt like she’d swum through a sea of slugs and dried off with a couple of dirty diapers. Plus, her body was still tense from her experience at the mall.

God, what a day.

She gathered her book, her candles, and her beer and climbed the stairs. From the bedroom, Paul McCartney sang a love song, and although it should have seemed ironically inappropriate, Libby found it soothing.

She hurried toward the music and away from any thoughts of what had happened downstairs.

TWENTY-TWO

TREVOR HAD JUST
locked himself in his daddy’s workshop when he heard the screaming. Long, terrible screams. Like somebody had just dumped a truckload of bowling balls into a room full of people with no shoes on. On top of that, the barks, almost as loud, coming from what sounded like a pretty big doggy.

Trevor wondered if he should go back, maybe take one of his daddy’s tools and use it to attack the man who’d come through their kitchen window. But he knew if his daddy was hurt, he wouldn’t want Trevor to come back, and he wouldn’t want him messing with his tools. Trevor would probably only end up cutting off his own hand or shooting a nail into his head, and what good would that do?

He would stay, obey Daddy, and try to pretend the screams weren’t happening. Only he wished he knew why he couldn’t turn on the lights. It was so dark in here, darker than under the covers with the lights turned off and your eyes closed, and tables and machines and bits and pieces of Daddy’s furniture were all over the place. He walked with his hands held out in front of him, the way the zombies and the mummies did on the late-night movies his daddy sometimes let him see, although Mommy said they would warp his mind. He wasn’t exactly sure what it meant to get your mind warped, but he was pretty sure his was still in its regular shape because his head hadn’t changed at all, and how could your mind warp if your head stayed the same?

A teeny bit of moonshine came in through one of the garage windows—one of the only ones not covered all the way up with Daddy’s things—enough light that Trevor could eventually make out some of the shadowy shapes. He found the table where his daddy put holes in the furniture pieces and crawled underneath. Sawdust covered the floor, and although it felt soft under his hands and knees, it also made him sneeze and got into his mouth. Trevor wanted to spit the stuff out, except then he might crawl into his own loogie, which would only make things worse. Instead, he settled for pulling his shirt away from his neck and licking his tongue across the inside. It didn’t get off all the dust or all the bad taste, but it was a little better at least.

He tried to flip himself into a sitting position and ended up bumping his head on the bottom of the table. For a second, bright sparks flashed in his head, and he thought someone must have turned on the lights after all, but then the lights disappeared and Trevor realized they were only the pain lights you saw in the cartoons, except not in the shapes of stars or little birdies.

He rubbed his head, which felt worse than the time he’d fallen out of the tire swing in the back yard, scooting deeper beneath the table as he did so and feeling the sawdust slide beneath his bottom.

Would the man in the kitchen window warp his mind? He didn’t know. The movies hadn’t done it, but the kitchen man was a lot scarier than the zombies or the mummies or the werewolves.

Trevor heard another bark and jumped.

Maybe the guy
was
a werewolf, come to bite him and turn him into a werewolf too, or maybe just use him for food, eat out all his guts. Trevor wrapped his arms around his knees and waited for something to come crashing in after him, probably with long furry arms and claws for fingers and his daddy on its breath.

—:—:—:—

Dave kicked the boy’s knife across the room. It slid beneath the bed frame and clinked against the baseboard on the bed’s other side. The knife wound in his chest wasn’t bad—he could tell just from the feel of it—but it might require some self-applied stitches later and would certainly sting for a while. Still, he supposed the boy could have found a gun.

He turned to Georgie, surprised to find him standing fully erect, his fists at his sides and his chest puffed. He would have expected crouching and crying, blubbering, streamers of snot dangling from the nose. He supposed by now he should have counted on more from the boy, although he wondered if the original Georgie would have done the same thing. A small boy against a grown man with two wickedly sharp knives. He supposed Georgie would have—otherwise, how could this one be his replacement?

Still, Georgie wouldn’t have stabbed his daddy. Georgie loved Daddy, and Daddy loved him back.

He stared Georgie down for another few seconds, not knowing what to think, and then made a sudden decision.

At the girl’s house, where he’d been boarding Manny, the hostage ploy had worked like a charm. It was funny what some people would do to save the lives of perfect strangers. Funny and sad. And pathetic.

Dave hurtled himself at Georgie, circled around behind him before the boy could blink, wrapped an arm around his chest, and brought one of the knives to his jugular.

The man at the window, Pullman, holding his hip and grimacing, threw out a splay-fingered hand and groaned.
As if he could reach us
, Dave thought, grinning at the helpless helping hand.

“I know you don’t know this boy,” Dave said, though he actually knew no such thing, only assumed. “But I also know you don’t want his blood sprayed across your bedroom and his guts in a puddle at your feet.”

“Leave him alone,” Pullman said, almost whispering, and dropped his outstretched hand like he’d used up the last of his energy.

Georgie squirmed, and he pulled him in tighter. “Tell me where the boy went, and I won’t hurt a one of them. Promise.”

The man said nothing.

“But if you don’t,” he said, “you’ll pray for me to butcher them both, just to quit their screaming.” He flicked the tip of the knife enough to get Georgie’s attention, and the boy squealed.

Blood oozed from Pullman’s hip, but not enough, not much more than bled from Dave’s own wound. He raised his hand again, but only about a foot before letting it flop back onto the ground. “Let him go. I—”

“Which,” Dave said, and Georgie squealed again. “Way.”

Pullman twisted his wrist to point. “Neighbors,” he said. “I sent him to the neighbors, you son of a bitch.”

Dave smiled and loosened the knife a little. “Liar.”

At this word, Georgie tightened. It was funny the way they did that, got all tight when they thought they were going to take a knife to the throat. Funny ha ha. As if Dave would actually kill him, as if he hadn’t gone through so much to save him in the first place, and as if flexing his muscles would do anything to protect him from a well-honed knife if Dave
did
start slicing.

Pullman shook his head, or tried to. “No. I sent him over to—”

“No you didn’t. There aren’t neighbors that way for five miles. If you sent him anywhere, it woulda been the little girl’s house.” Dave shook his own head, looking ashamed. “But I reckon he’s still here, hiding, and you just killed yourself two little boys.”

What he did with the knife, he did too quickly for anyone but himself to see: he drew the blade across Georgie’s throat from ear to ear and then lifted the knife high into the air, the way a magician will do with his wand after he’s just completed a magic trick. The boy fell away from him, and the man pulled himself to his feet and charged, just how Dave had thought he might, moving low to the ground like a tackling football player.

Dave shot a well-aimed foot at Pullman’s face and caught him right on the chin. A loud clicking of teeth and a woof of air followed, like the man was really just a man-shaped balloon and Dave had popped him. He fell to the floor and didn’t move. Stunned, or maybe unconscious, but out of action either way.

On the floor, Georgie grabbed at his throat, wheezing and flailing and making such a spectacle of himself that Dave had to chuckle.

“Come on,” Dave said and prodded him a little with the same foot he’d used on the Pullman man’s face. “You’re not cut.”

Georgie’s flailing continued. He either hadn’t heard, or hadn’t understood.

“You’re not cut,” Dave repeated. “I only got you with the dull side.” To prove it, he held out the knife for Georgie’s inspection. Except maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea. Georgie saw the knife and screamed. Dave looked at it himself, confused about what he was seeing until he remembered the blood dripping from the weapon had come from Pullman’s hip.

Dave shook his head and pocketed the blade. He didn’t bother saying anything else, just reached down, scooped up the uninjured (or at least not recently injured) boy, and flung him over his shoulder. Below, Pullman might as well have been one of the floorboards. Dave walked across him and carried Georgie through the open window.

Dave moved along Pullman’s supernova of a porch, Georgie beating on his back with his fists. The blows almost felt nice, the way Dave imagined a massage might feel. Personally, he’d never gotten so much as a foot rub except from himself and Mr. Boots, who’d sometimes rubbed more than that.

No
, Dave told himself,
don’t think about that
. His breathing had become suddenly heavy, and he realized he was squeezing Georgie much more tightly than was probably safe.
Just forget it
.

He trudged to the corner of the porch and stared through the darkness at the disconnected garage.

Yes. Of course.

On the other side of the house, the dog barked up a storm. Dave wondered if dogs ever got sore throats, if they made doggy throat lozenges or cough syrup. Surely not, but you never knew. People got a little crazy sometimes about their animals—he’d once watched a woman slather sunscreen on a thin-haired cat. He’d been fifteen at the time, and had giggled so loud he thought the woman almost noticed him in his hiding spot. Later, he’d caught the cat and slow roasted it over a campfire before bringing it back in a paper sack and leaving it on the woman’s front steps with a note reading:
must not have used enough sunscreen.

The cat had died hard, yowling until long after the point at which it should have quieted, but Dave hadn’t felt especially bad about it. He’d never been much of a cat person.

Georgie had gone into another one of his periods of silent motionlessness. Dave removed him from his shoulder, lowered him into the grass on the other side of the porch railing, and then hopped over the barrier himself, the stab wound burning with every move he made, every breath he took. Once beside Georgie, Dave pressed his hand between the boy’s shoulder blades and steered him toward the property’s smaller structure. Their shoes slapped against the dewy grass, and they both shivered, Georgie a little more so than Dave.

Manny barked again, a series of three yelps followed by another pair, and Dave could only assume the boy had tied him up somewhere. They didn’t sound like the barks of a happy dog. To Dave, those barks said,
Let me loose, let me go, I wanna play, too.

Dave reached up and touched his chest, pressed in on it but didn’t rub. Rubbing only would have worsened the pain, torn the hole bigger and maybe loosened whatever thin membrane held in the rest of his blood. He’d killed the kid’s old mother for much less, but that had been different. She was an adult, and a woman, and should have known better. Georgie had just done what any kid would do. He couldn’t kill Georgie. He wouldn’t. If he did, everything else would be pointless, and he’d never have another chance. Today was the day. His most important birthday ever.

He pushed the boy to the large rolling door and reached down to grab the handle.

Locked.

He yanked at it harder, trying to pop it open. Considering the flimsiness of their locks, some of these garage doors might as well have been held shut with scotch tape, but this one held tight, didn’t even rattle. If there had been windows, Dave would have pressed his face against them and peered inside, but the door’s series of solid panels completely concealed the interior.

Dave told Georgie to lead him around the side of the garage, and the boy obeyed.