Read The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) Online
Authors: Jon Land
“Against Leeds?”
“And Peet.”
“He’ll kill again if I don’t stop him,” Kimberlain said very softly.
“They both will … Ferryman.”
Both the vacationers and the people who operated the Towanda Family Resort were suffering through the storm. Rain lashed against windows, accompanied by heavy roars of thunder. Sleep did not come easy for the guests in the forty cabins nestled in a pair of clearings. Those at the main lodge had resigned themselves to a night of complaints and impossible requests from the guests.
Lightning flashed over the rolling fields dotted with tennis and basketball courts. Down at the waterfront, the small white sandy beach had been swallowed by the resort’s private Sunset Lake. Canoes and kayaks had been tipped off their platforms and lay piled in heaps atop one another. A single light had been left on at the tennis courts, and the dim glow it cast upon the inch-deep pooling water made the asphalt seem an ice rink, albeit one whose surface was melting. Trees shifted and bent as the wind buffeted them.
By ten o’clock the visibility was reduced to practically zero. The mountains that rose in the distance were dark specters without form. Those windows that looked into the storm were leaking, and they had been plugged with towels and sheets. In some cases, buckets had been placed on the floor to catch the water that poured in.
Just before eleven, lightning struck an electrical transformer in the center of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. The light over the tennis courts flickered once and died. The guests still up watching television or listening to tape decks worked the on-off switches as if that might have helped.
The Towanda Family Resort had been plunged into darkness.
“MARBLES?” HEDDA ASKED,
as a small bag of them spilled out on the countertop. A few rolled off to the floor, and the Ferryman retrieved them near the trio of pump action twelve-gauge shotguns he and Chalmers had brought back.
“Last bag on the shelf,” Kimberlain told her. “Like I said, we need a weapon that can penetrate Kevlar but won’t hit bystanders.”
“I’d rather take my chances with the twelve-gauges,” Hedda said.
“I think you’ll change your mind,” he answered, and reached into a box at his feet.
Chalmers had visited the supermarket while the Ferryman had gone to a hardware store and a toy shop. While they were gone, Hedda had worked much of her own magic in the Carbondale Area High School. The chem lab had proven to be a Disneyland of powders and liquids. She made a brief visit to the industrial arts section to fill a few gaps.
She returned to the chem lab with a dozen foot-long, inch-wide plastic pipes and a roll of heavy twine. Leaving them on the counter, she located a box of candles on a nearby shelf. These she placed in trays over Bunsen burners to melt the wax for future use. Next she rummaged through the chemical storage area and found jars containing sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter.
Hedda emptied the proper amount of each into a large bowl and mixed them until the colors of the contents swirled together. She brought over a fourth jar containing phosphorus packed in water and placed it near the mixing bowl before turning her attention back to the plastic pipes. One at a time, she brushed quick-dry cement onto their accompanying plastic caps and then sealed one end of each.
This done, she siphoned the proper portion of the fine, yellowish phosphorus powder into the pipes. There was enough for six. After packing the powder down, she poured a small amount of water on the phosphorus in all of the pipes. Then she grasped the tray of wax with a gloved hand and poured just enough inside each pipe to cover the water. After the wax hardened, she checked her handiwork by turning each of the pipes upside down to make sure nothing could leak out. Satisfied, she reached for the mixing bowl.
Her next task was to add the makeshift gunpowder to the half-dozen pipes. Then she drilled one-eighth-inch holes into another six plastic caps and affixed them to the pipes’ open tops. Finally she cut a half-dozen eight-inch strips from the roll of fuzzy twine and let them soak in a bowl of concentrated potassium nitrate. She removed the strips after twenty seconds and laid them neatly on the counter to dry.
“What are these?” Kimberlain asked, as he removed a section of black iron pipe from his box and placed it near the eight-inch twine strips lying on the counter.
“The fuses for my pipe bombs. They should be just about ready now.”
“Impressive,” the Ferryman said. “Of course, I could have spared some of the fusing I got from town.”
“No way I could be sure you would find any. Besides, I’ve worked with this version before.”
She began forcing the twine fuses through the holes she had drilled in the top caps, twisting until they sank deep into the gunpowder.
“Okay,” she pronounced when the last one was in tight. “Now tell me what you’re going to do with these marbles.”
Kimberlain picked up the yard-long, three-quarter-inch-thick black pipe. “Pretty similar principle to your bombs actually. Except the clerk at the hardware store was kind enough to drill my caps for me.”
With that, Kimberlain screwed a steel cap into one end of the pipe.
“He didn’t have any dynamite, but he did have this blast fusing. Chalmers?”
Chalmers had just finished cutting fuses to the prescribed lengths. Kimberlain threaded one through the bottom of his black iron pipe, much as Hedda had done with her smaller, plastic versions.
“Might not have been able to pull this off if the gun store we visited didn’t carry black powder for old-fashioned muzzle loaders,” the Ferryman continued. “Triple X.”
“You only got one can?”
“More than enough.”
Hedda watched as he siphoned a fifth of the can’s contents into the first pipe, while Chalmers cut white chamois cloths into neat round pieces two-and-a-half inches in diameter and then wrapped a marble in each. Kimberlain jammed four wads down the pipe and worked them in tight.
“Voilà,” the Ferryman said. “Light the fuse, and two seconds later the marbles are blown outward.”
“With more force than a bullet …”
“Plenty more. I wouldn’t want to try it at more than thirty yards, but from that distance or less I doubt even Kevlar will stop them.”
Hedda’s eyes wandered to the four kegs of kerosene still left over. “Then what are they for?”
Kimberlain pulled a pair of stainless steel, pressurized bug sprayers up from the floor to the table. “Flamethrowers.”
The four kegs, as it turned out, were just enough to fill the two four-gallon bug sprayers.
“Hold a match or cigarette here,” he said, pointing to the adjustable nozzle at the end of the brass wand, “and the kerosene rushing out catches fire. The result is a spray of fire as far as this thing would ordinarily shoot pesticide.”
“Which is?”
“I’d say twenty-five, thirty yards.”
“How accurate?”
“Won’t know that until we try it.”
The storm welcomed him, as Tiny Tim stepped out of his van into the night enveloping the Towanda Family Resort. Unlike the preparation he had made for his earlier visits, he had not done a thorough reconnaissance of the site, and much of what he saw was disturbing from a logistical standpoint. Most challenging was the close proximity of the cabins to each other. They were duplexes and triplexes mostly, separate entrances sharing a common screened-in porch. Wiping out the occupants of one without alerting the neighbors would be his greatest challenge. A panic-stricken site with parents and children running everywhere was not something he was accustomed to dealing with. But he would find a way to make that work for him. The true test of genius was improvisation, and Seckle considered himself a genius when it came to this evening’s tasks. He had already disabled the cars in the resort parking lot, so there would be no escape.
His first job now was to locate the nephew of the Ferryman. The cabins were marked with numbers, and he could read them clearly through his night-vision goggles. Find the cabin the boy was in and he would find the boy. To accomplish that, he would have to break into the office and check the roster.
Then the fun would begin.
“My God,” Hedda uttered after they had turned through the gate marked
TOWANDA FAMILY RESORT
, “it’s huge.”
The road had vanished three miles back to be replaced by hardpacked dirt that the pounding storm had transformed into thick mud. The track was so precarious and narrow they feared they were on the wrong route. Only skillful driving prevented them from going off the road or hitting any of the half-dozen deer that dashed in front of them, frightened by the storm. But finally their headlights had found the brown and white sign welcoming them to the resort.
The storm and darkness could not hide the size of the place. They made out a nine-hole golf course on the immediate right. Near the golf course was a grass parking lot lined with cars. Not a space to spare. The resort must be packed.
Turning up the hill leading into the resort, their highbeams briefly illuminated a seemingly endless series of fields and courts laid out further above them on the primary resort grounds. A huge flash of lightning revealed the shape of buildings, larger ones by themselves and smaller ones—family cabins obviously—in clusters.
“Notice anything else?” Kimberlain asked.
“What do you mean?” replied Hedda.
“No lights. Not a single one on anywhere.”
“A … blackout,” Chalmers’s speaker crackled.
“You think he did it?” Hedda asked, aware that an affirmative answer could only mean that Tiny Tim had beaten them here.
“I don’t know.”
“I still think we should call the police. Take our chances.”
“He’d kill them all and you know it. Make things worse because he’d be forced to speed up his process. Our biggest advantage is that he likes to savor his work.”
Hedda nodded. She knew the Ferryman was speaking from inside Garth Seckle’s head, laying out the way he would do it if the roles were reversed. Her shiver came only when she realized she was thinking that way, too.
“We need somewhere to gear up,” Kimberlain announced, continuing to snail the car forward. He killed the lights to avoid drawing attention as they drove further along the resort road. They swung right up a hill where a huge, wood-carved sign with the resort’s logo flapped in the wind.
“Over there on the right,” Hedda pointed. “A building.”
“Ranger station,” Kimberlain said. “Part of the resort must be on federally owned—” He stopped his words and the car.
“What’s wrong?”
“The front door’s open.”
They stowed the car on the side of the building not visible from the main part of the resort. A green and yellow Jeep with federal markings was parked beneath the overhang that extended beyond the porch. The name
STATION
61 was carved into a piece of badge-shaped wood that was nailed over the front door. Kimberlain saw the first body just when he cleared the last step up to the porch. Rain had poured in through the crack and soaked the uniform on the corpse up past the ankles. This ranger was a young man of nineteen or twenty. His neck had been snapped.
The Ferryman led the way in warily, with Hedda holding her pistol just behind him. Chalmers stood guard outside on the porch, a shotgun in his hands.
They found the second ranger in the doorway leading from what looked like a den into the front hall. He was an older man, his outdoorsman’s hands lying in the pool of blood that had drained from the neat slice in his throat.
Tiny Tim had beaten them here!
Dread and fear, both unfamiliar and uncomfortable, raced through the Ferryman. How much deeper into the resort might Tiny Tim have ventured by now?
The Ferryman turned to see Hedda had disappeared. Before he could call out to her, she had returned to the ranger station toting a large portion of their gear under both arms.
“I figured it was time,” she said.
The office was located at the very top of the hill diagonally across from six of the resort’s twelve tennis courts. Tiny Tim found it with little trouble. It was closed at this time of night, of course, but gaining entry was as easy as breaking one of the padlocks. He checked the phones to make sure they weren’t functioning and then made his way through the door leading into the inner office.
Shining his mag light before him, he quickly located the daily manifest of cabin assignments posted on the wall. It was too good to be true, too easy. All the names right there on a detailed schema of the resort. The adoptive family of Kimberlain’s nephew, according to the files he had been given on the island, was named Berman. The schema listed the Bermans in cabin 12½.
Twelve-and-a-half, Seckle thought. The resort didn’t want to call it thirteen for superstitious reasons.
The irony made him smile. It was the bad luck of the family inside cabin 12½ that his work tonight would begin with them. Of course, his biggest problem remained what to do about the panic that would inevitably arise from his initial kills.
But he could make that situation work for him. Yes. Just beyond the office was a combination cafeteria and rec center, easily the resort’s largest building. A gathering point, then, the place the panicked throngs were certain to come when they found their cars at the bottom of the hill disabled.
Tiny Tim decided to make a stop there. He had time to burn anyway. Indeed, the fire was all his.
“There’s something else,” Kimberlain said as they strapped on their gear. “The two dead rangers must have been off duty. That means there’s another one or two patrolling the grounds.”
“Radios?” Hedda asked.
“Might come in handy.”
“Later.”
“If there is one.”
Tiny Tim glided away from the lodge, keeping close to cover. There were two separate clusters of cabins, north and south; basketball and tennis courts lay between them. The first ones to panic would run for their disabled cars, but he needed to herd them back to the lodge.
How could he get them there?
Garth Seckle had barely asked himself the question when the answer occurred to him. He shrank back into the shadows beneath the cover of a tree and inventoried his weapons. He counted his fragmentary grenades, along with his forty-millimeter charges for his M-203, a combination M-16 and grenade launcher. Last and most important, he drew his shoulder pack around to the front of his body and fingered through his claymore mines. He had plenty.