Mountain Madness (33 page)

“You should have just let us be this time, old man,” said the kidnapper. He pulled back the sword.

Mike could do nothing but sit and groan and watch the blade advance.

—:—:—:—

Inside the living room, Libby watched through a dusty window, squinting.

At first, she didn’t believe what she was seeing, thought the thing in the kidnapper’s hands must have only
looked
like a sword but been something else entirely—maybe a pipe or a broom handle. When the weapon slid into Mike’s stomach and re-emerged from his lower back, however, she could no longer pretend.

Mike’s scream was the worst thing she’d ever heard in her life, a sound she was sure she’d remember until the day she died, a wet, gurgling bawl that didn’t seem muffled by the walls or the door or the windows. Libby thought that scream might have gone straight from his mouth to her brain, some strange sort of telepathy.

She sensed Trevor coming to join her at the window and turned immediately to keep him away.

“What was that?” he said.

Libby flipped him around and pushed on his back. “Through the back door,” she said. “We have to get out of here.”

Trevor didn’t want to go at first, but Libby kept pushing. She heard Zach and the dog padding along ahead, heard a strange flapping sound like someone walking through mud.

“The car’s around the side of the house,” she said. “Get in back with the dog and wait for me.”

They found the back door and exited the house. “Hurry to the car,” she said, looking at the back of the boys’ heads. Part of her wanted to follow them, needed to follow them, knew it was the smart thing to do, but Mike might still be all right. She couldn’t leave him there to die. She’d loved him once, maybe loved him a little still. She couldn’t leave him.

When she saw the boys moving in the right direction, she cut around the truck and found the ax in the tree stump. She’d noticed it on the way in, before running in to Trevor. It wasn’t as good as a shotgun, but it was a damn sight better than a hammer. She dropped Mike’s tools in the dirt at the stump’s base and grabbed the ax with both hands.

It didn’t come loose easily. She had to wrench it back and forth five or six times before it finally unstuck.

She thought about Marshall, thought she’d gotten herself out of that situation fairly well, almost entirely unharmed physically despite the mental trauma. Carrying the ax back to the house, she told herself she wasn’t a pushover, that she wasn’t a victim.

—:—:—:—

Hank jerked backward on the sword, and the man fell onto his back.

Mr. Boots
, he thought, staring at the man’s footwear. He should have expected this sort of thing.

Mr. Boots flailed a little, and Hank stabbed him again, this time higher up on his stomach, closer to his heart. “Guess you thought you’d do it again, huh?” He twisted the sword. “Kill us all off and take the boy for yourself. But it doesn’t work that way.” He leaned on the sword’s handle, listened to Mr. Boots groan. “You never killed me. It was the moose. Everything’s different this time.”

He pulled the sword free again and grinned.

Stupid son of a bitch
, he thought and jabbed the sword into the old man once more.

—:—:—:—

Trevor helped get the leashed doggy into the back seat but didn’t climb in after him.

“What’s wrong?” Zach asked.

“I have to find my daddy. Wait here.” Trevor turned away from the car and hurried around the front of the house.

—:—:—:—

Libby burst through the front door. In the yard, the kidnapper hovered over Mike’s slumped body. She charged him.

The ax was heavy, not the kind of plastic-handled thing you bought at Wal-mart, but an old wooden tool with a head that felt like it must have been made of lead.

She was ten feet from her target when Trevor came at her from around the side of the house.

“No,” she said, though she’d meant to scream it. She twisted his way at the last minute, meaning to push him away from the bare-chested stranger, but she was moving awkwardly and ended up tripping over her own feet.

The ax fell on the ground beside her. Trevor approached from one direction, and the man from the other.

Run
, she wanted to say,
get away
. But she couldn’t speak. Something smacked the side of her head, and she had time enough to realize it was the man’s fist before unconsciousness took her and everything was lost.

—:—:—:—

Hank loaded Lori into the passenger’s seat and strapped her into her belt. He’d gotten the boys in the back where they were still huddled, the dog between them and whimpering again. He’d tied the kids’ hands with their own shoelaces and knotted Manny’s leash to the headrest. Later, if everything went well, he could let them loose. But for now, he had to drive and couldn’t risk any of them trying something stupid.

He ran a hand through Lori’s hair and kissed her softly on the forehead, sorry he’d had to hurt her but knowing he could make up for it later. She was a beautiful woman—a fine wife—and he knew she’d be a good mother to their boys. He closed her door and circled around the front of the car to his own side.

After finding the gearshift and studying the car’s controls for just a moment, he shifted into reverse, backed partway down the driveway, and then turned the car around and drove away from the house.

As they moved, he looked into the rearview mirror and thought,
Goodbye forever
. The house and the body in front of it grew smaller until, finally, they were gone.

THIRTY-EIGHT

MIKE HAD CRAWLED
halfway along the front of the house, dragging himself with his good arm and trying to ignore the pain just about everywhere else.

He coughed once and tasted blood sliding over his teeth.

The monster had taken his family, had loaded them into the car and stolen them away.

Mike crawled another foot. There was a truck in the back yard. He’d seen its rear bumper when they arrived. If he could get to it, and if the keys were inside, he could go after them, rescue them.

He coughed again, and something thick flowed across his tongue. Maybe vomit, maybe more blood, or maybe some of his internal organs, cut loose and floating freely through his insides. He didn’t know. He spit out the wad and dragged himself farther.

He’d gotten almost to the corner of the house when everything blurred. He tried to shake his head to clear it but only made the dizziness worse. He closed his eyes, tried taking deep breaths, then coughed and dropped flat to the ground, still at least fifty feet from the truck and the chance to be the hero.

—:—:—:—

When he heard the siren, his eyes opened, and he didn’t know how long he’d been out. He hadn’t died, though he thought he must be only a few breaths away. The man standing over him wasn’t Deputy Willis, nor was it the thinner man who’d been with him at the house.

Mike tried to gesture to him, point in the direction the Honda had gone, but he could move only his pinky finger. Still, he did what he could, pointed with the tip off his littlest digit and blinked at the looming lawman.

“—try to stay still,” the man said, and Mike found that pretty funny.

Against the man’s ridiculous suggestion, he used the last of his strength to lift his hand and point after the missing car.

The deputy grabbed Mike’s hand like he thought he wanted to shake. “Hold on, buddy. We’ve got paramedics on the way.”

But Mike couldn’t hold on. He felt the breath coming out of him like air from a punctured tire. He tried to suck in a little more but didn’t think it got much farther than the back of his mouth.

Family
, he tried to say, but it came out as a soft groan. It was the best he could do. He dropped his head to the ground but let the deputy hold on to his hand. It felt good to be touched. He didn’t want to die alone.

—:—:—:—

Deputy Ben Moore leaned close to the bloody man and let go of his hand. He touched the man’s neck. Nothing.

He wasn’t sure if this was the guy they were looking for or another one of his victims, hadn’t actually been sure they were at the right house until he stumbled across the crawling mess of a guy and the trail of blood behind him. He shone a flashlight back along the streaked gore and found a sword lying in the grass beside the house’s foundation.

I’ll be hanged
, he thought. He didn’t guess he’d ever seen a sword like that before. Not in real life.

He moved away from the body and back to the patrol car, where Hollis Breckmore was yakking into the radio. He opened the door and said, “We’re looking at a DB here. Better call in for some backup. I’m gonna take a look around.”

Breckmore nodded, and Moore shut the door. He’d made it halfway around the house, hand on his holstered pistol, when the patrol car’s headlights shut off and he heard the passenger’s door slam. He looked back. Breckmore hustled after him, his flashlight and his gut both bobbing.

Breckmore paused at the corner of the house to have a look at the corpse before hurrying to catch up with his partner.

“That’s a mess,” Breckmore said.

Moore nodded and told him it sure was, and then the two of them walked around the back of the house together.

EPILOGUE

THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS

2005

ON THE FIRST
night of the rest of his life, Hank Abbott drove out of the mountains in a silence broken only by the sound of gravel ricocheting off the undercarriage of the Honda and the occasional groans and bursts of rustling from his newfound family. Lori sat slumped in the passenger’s seat with her cheek flattened against the window, her lips parted, her breath frosting the glass. George and Davy sat tangled around the dog in the back seat, looking scared though Hank knew what they really felt was relief.

The clock on the dashboard went from 11:59 to 12:00, and Hank realized it was no longer his birthday. But that was all right—he’d gotten everything he wanted.

Their trip out of the mountains had been twenty-three years in the making, but late was better than never at all. Hank watched the sides of the road carefully, looking for glowing eyes or dark-brown blurs. He couldn’t make the same mistake twice. This was his family, after all, and he loved them.

He piloted the car around a sharp curve and thought to himself that this had been one hell of a vacation. As the road straightened out ahead, Hank guessed he didn’t care if he never saw the mountains again.

For my blood brother, Enoch, who helped me point my career back in the right direction.

1

IT’S FUNNY WHAT
you hear when your house shuts down, when the heater stops coughing air through the vents and the television ceases spewing out its nonsense. As she stood at the kitchen sink, her hands wrist deep in sudsy, too-cold dishwater, Tess listened to the logs burning in the living room, the water heater kicking on, and (loudest of all) the ice-laden wind blowing against the western side of the house.

She grabbed the last dish (a yellowed mug that had started life as white as fresh snow) from the sink and cleaned it the old-fashioned way: rubbing, frowning, cursing. After she’d rinsed and dried the mug with a rag so threadbare you could see right through it, she put it in the cabinet and glared at the dishwasher. As if the outage was the appliance’s fault.

She dried her hands, cupped them around her mouth, and tried to breathe some heat back into them. She felt the air slipping past her lips, but there was no warmth to it. Not even a tiny bit. If she didn’t get back into the living room and spend some quality time in front of the fire, she was afraid her outermost bits might freeze right off.

The water heater turned off. The fire continued to crackle. Besides the sounds in the house, she heard Warren in the shed out back, sifting through wood, loading it onto the sled, heard him through the wall and across at least a couple hundred feet of snow-covered yard.

Never mind what you can hear. Pay attention to what you can feel. Which is going to be just about nothing if you don’t get yourself back to that fire.

She was about to do just that when she heard another sound, a kind of tinkling almost like breaking glass. Only slower, raspy. She turned her head, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise. For a second, she thought it must be coming from the fire, an air pocket in one of the logs or something, but after listening a little longer, a little harder, she decided it might actually be coming from outside.

The wind? More snow?

She returned to the sink and leaned toward the window just above it. She parted the curtains, leaned closer, frowned.

Normally, she’d have been able to see the mountains through the window, the highest of the towering Rockies. Although their property officially stood 6,961 feet above sea level, she and Warren lived nowhere near the top of the world. Sometimes she would stare out at those peaks and marvel at their beauty, their magnitude. As far as views went, it wasn’t the worst. Today, however, a sheet of frost covered the glass and made it all but impossible to see through. Still, she thought she could make out something moving toward her, a blurry shadow of a thing. She squinted and moved her face so close her nose almost touched the glass.