The Witch of the Wood (23 page)

So here was the infamous Coach Sullivan, most probably thanking God for this disaster, this distraction, allowing him to reinvent himself as “Lord of the Bonfire” with his criminal stooge Brian Duffey right there at his elbow.

“I’m not going to talk you to death,” Sullivan said, his voice a rasp as if he’d been shouting all day and into the night. “But things have changed, and now it’s cold and dark, at least out there beyond the fire.” He took a step closer. “How many of you came home to the dead? What’s left of your neighborhood? Did you raid the fridge and take what you could? Did you bust into the 7-Eleven? Then what?”

He stalked to the side of the bonfire where one man, shirtless and covered with sweat and grime, turned the spits, and three others behind him tossed timber into the massive blaze, throwing twirls of sparks up into the darkness.

“We’ve got venison here,” he said. “Warmth. Water from the river. Three hundred cases of beer!”

That one raised another roar from the formation of supporters, and Sullivan came so close to the camera he filled it with his face.

“I know . . .” he said paternally. “Soon the power will come back on. We’ll wood-chip all the trees, clear the roads, put out the fires, we always do. But there’s a cancer among us, one that will eat us alive right here and right now while we’re scrambling for candles. The ‘Dogman’ gives you his fancy preaching, but these are not women he speaks of. They are monsters, trying to assimilate, trying to
breed.
Funny thing, though . . .”

He moved aside and let Brian Duffey come into the shot, hauling over a terrified girl who looked very much like Linda Birch, the one who was over at the apartment last night. She tried to push backward, and Duffey gripped her tight, hand over her mouth, arm clamped around her waist. Sullivan came back into the shot with an iPad.

“See,” he said. “Professor Rudy Barnes is your masked coward, your boy-killer, your freak-lover, and he has his picture on the Internet.” He gave a sour laugh, and Rudy ground his teeth. He hadn’t known there was a picture of him online; must have been the headshot Frank Willis took of him last year when he’d volunteered to edit the
Pioneer Review,
Widener’s literary journal. Sullivan walked over toward the squirming girl and said, “It seems the monsters can’t look their Dog-Master in the face, even after they transform.”

He put the screen up in front of her and Duffey held her head in place, both hands plastered hard to her cheeks and temples, thumbs pressing her eyes open. Like a shopper in self-checkout trying for the right angle for the barcode scanner, Sullivan put the iPad in multiple positionings in front of her. Finally he caught a sightline, and her head burst. Duffey retained his tight grip, and the force cracked her face in three places, both eyes rupturing in hearty pops, meaty runners from the top of her crown bleeding down over Duffey’s thick knuckles.

The crowd cheered as the witch’s body crumpled, and after he dropped her Duffey shook his hands off dramatically, mouth open like a rock star bending a note, up on one foot bunny-hopping with it. Sullivan got camera-close once again.

“No impostors here, Dogman. Every woman to the side of this bonfire is pure.”

He ran the back of his hand across his mouth and got sincere with it. Went down to a whisper.

“Dogman, come here. I want to show you something.”

The camera followed him away from the fire, past the crowd, and into the darkness of the field. He was but a blackened form on black background for a moment, afterimage leaving ghosted outlines, and then his voice said, “Let there be light.”

Offscreen it sounded as if Duffey were pulling ripcords, a number of chokes and grinds, and suddenly the area behind the fire lit up to a brightness so potent it washed everything to near blacks and whites. Rudy gasped. They had obviously utilized Sullivan’s access back at the school to raid for football field lights and gas generators, moving them through the fallen woods behind the grandstand, down the slope a few hundred yards off property where suburb abruptly became highway. There was an antenna tower in the background, partially toppled, hanging on by its stubborn wires, confirming that it was the Runnemede cornfield at the edge of the Blue Route, all the crop curled down and blackened from last summer’s drought; they’d done a piece about it on the news comparing it in microcosm to the disasters in the Midwest. But now there were crude wooden crosses rising up from the dark mass of dead corn husks, most of them ten to twelve feet high, probably built of the fallen timber two meadows over where the edge of Scutters Woods bordered the landscape for fifteen miles both north and southwest.

The crosses were in rows patterned in rough alternate, and there must have been three thousand of them, all leaning a bit one way or the other, each bearing a witch hanging there like Jesus. They were all blank slates, all of them naked, and Rudy could only assume that they’d chosen to retain their raw form for pride, for protest, so as not to be found out through an iPad weeding procedure that would inevitably make their talent of transformation seem an act of deceit.

One of them was set off from the others, and the camera walked its way over to a full body closeup. Her dark hair was a toss of damp strands clinging to her forehead, curling on her cheeks, spiked to wet points along her shoulders and collarbones. Her black eyes were wide open in terror and her frail white body was emaciated, bony, almost translucent, knees together, one crossed over the other, wrists and ankles chafed raw where she was tied to the wood. The camera backed off to accommodate its narrator, who was joined by Duffey, carrying a torch.

“Here’s the thing, Dogman,” Sullivan said. “We don’t want your Stepford Wives, and we’re going to have a pyro party, one per every five minutes until dawn. Then . . . we burn them all and hunt for new ones.”

He nodded to Duffey, and the kid ambled over, bending with it, wary of the flames licking backward up the branch leaving black marks along the shank. The blank slate squirmed and strained against the cords as he drew near, the flickering light of the torch reflecting off of her. Then at the moment before contact, she stopped struggling and looked straight into the camera.

“My name is Rebecca,” she said. “Rebecca.”

Duffey brought the torch to her toes and she went up like kindling, flames spreading up the sides of her, and for a moment she appeared to be wearing a translucent blue aureole. It was the pause before the screaming. Then the fire took her, ate through her. The hair burned the brightest, leaving spots of afterimage on the camera lens. There was a long moment of peeling and curling, eyes liquefied to parallel runners of molten tar, then strange movements within her down low, things dropping untethered. Next was utter consumption, flames snaking the voids, licking clean the openings. It was but moments. It was forever. Finally the angry blaze started to vanish one flickering brother at a time, the hangers-on lapping and flicking at the remains.

Her blackened skeleton grinned, smoke coming off her in wisps.

The scene ended.

Caroline put the iPad aside.

“There’s no ultimatum here,” she said. “No deal, no ransom.”

“Her name was Rebecca,” Rudy murmured.

“You can’t let this go on.”

“I know.”

“He’ll fill the crosses again; he’s not bluffing.”

“Quite.”

She cricked her neck one way, then the other.

“Elephant in the room, Rudy. He doesn’t need you as his hostage, taking you on a leash cleansing the streets as you go because he’s got your picture. This is bait.”

“Exactly.”

“He wants to erase you before you gain a following more practical than a pack of dogs.”

“I realize this, Caroline.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Take the bait,” he said quietly.

There was a thick silence, and Caroline tried to touch him on the shoulder. She got absolute deadwood and withdrew, next folding her hands in her lap and speaking to them.

“Even with your wolfpack, Rudy, you won’t be able to get to your guns fast enough. That bastard has law enforcement and military, let alone the potential arsenal he didn’t show on camera, plus the fact that—”

“I can’t let another witch die on my watch,” Rudy interrupted, “not if I can save her. They’re not just blank slates, they’re people.” He looked at her with what felt like bloodshot eyes. “Her name was Rebecca.”

“I know, but your word is currently stronger than your might.”

“I’m going in.”

“You’ll die.”

“I know,” he lied. It quieted her, and that was a good thing. He didn’t need to argue with her and dance around the truth, now that it had come unveiled to him like some hideous primeval sculpture. For he’d had what alcoholics, gamblers, and petty thieves called a “moment of clarity” just now. He wasn’t meant to preach, but rather to betray and deceive. For the good of the many, he was destined to delude and destroy the ones closest to him, as he’d done with Wolfie. It was inevitable.

But there were lies and there were lies, and rather than the out-and-out bold-faced variety, he opted for partial truth and avoidance.

“Sullivan,” he said, “is a health teacher, Caroline. He’s also seems quite a man’s man who’d rather entertain barroom philosophy than a more global assessment that accounts for the past.”

“Riddles, Rudy. Riddles.”

He stood.

“What I mean is, I don’t think he really thinks I’ll attack with nothing for backup but a bunch of dogs, not tonight anyway. That video clip was more a way for him to gain more disciples, pardon the clumsy religious allusion. The thing was addressed to me but postmarked for the world, a demonstration that proves I won’t make a showing, that I’ll live up to his accusation of cowardice.”

She rose to her feet as well and stepped near.

“So you’re banking on the fact that he won’t be ready.”

“I’m banking on beer,” he said. “Three hundred cases of it. That and the lesson of the Hessians.”

She smiled.

“And he’s a health teacher.”

“Right. He’s no history scholar, at least I hope he isn’t.”

“And the lessons of the past . . .”

“Repeat themselves.” He put his hands on her shoulders and gave the most meaningful look of sincerity he could muster, hating himself for it. “Will you trust me on this?”

“I’ll try,” she said. “But before you attempt . . . whatever you plan to do out there . . . you, uh . . . promised to stop in on my mother.” She sucked in her top lip for a second. “I apologize for sounding inappropriate, but a deal’s a deal.”

“Of course,” Rudy said, pretending he’d forgotten about it. “Just give me the cooler with the bags of blood and do me a favor.”

“Of course.”

“It’s a dangerous mission.”

“No more than yours, I’m sure.”

He pointed to the black footlocker at the edge of the arsenal.

“What exactly do you have in there, anyway?”

She grinned girlishly.

“Oh, the usual: aerial tubes, bottle rockets, pinwheels, Roman candles, black snakes, you know. Why? You looking for a big entrance?”

“More like a diversion. And you won’t have tree cover. You’ll have to crawl around to get these fireworks set up. Can you handle it?”

“I think so. But Rudy, please. It’s suicide. It’s not worth—”

“Saving three thousand human beings? It most certainly is.”

“And you’re sure I can’t convince you otherwise.”

“Dead sure.”

“Bad choice of words, Rudy.”

“I’ve made a lot of bad choices in my life, Caroline, and this isn’t one of them.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Right.”

She shrugged sadly, like
I give up,
and got the cooler.

“Well, we thank you for this, both my mother and I.”

He took it and stuck it under his arm.

“Just have those fireworks positioned, Caroline. That’s all I ask. Wait there for me and make sure you’re ready to light the fuse.”

“And my cue?”

“The dogs,” Rudy said, “the moment they make their appearance. And be punctual, please.” He smiled a little. “I realize we’re going colonial here, but it’ll be too late if you can see the whites of my eyes.”

The hospital up on the hill had a mass of people waiting at the emergency room entrance for sign-in, spilling across the concrete rotary and into the parking area. There was a construction zone outside the orthopedics wing, and its plastic fencing had been forced to the dirt, the road cones kicked aside, people sitting on the skid steer loader buckets and piles of crushed stone, caution tape fluttering at the perimeter like loose strands of hair. The trailer had been raided and stood open to the night; three groups huddled around rusted fifty-gallon drums with fires in them.

For the sake of stealth Rudy brought his dogs around back along the angle of the rise just below the lip of the access lane, the concourse itself covered with fallen trees and brushwork too dense for those without paws and claws to advance through. At the rear of the facility there was a set of dumpsters, bay doors, and loading zones for maintenance and food service; to the far side, the ambulances. Considering the fact that vehicles had been deemed useless, the area was vacated; were it summertime you would have heard the crickets chirping. Rudy left his wolfpack to sit at attention in a culvert just off the apron and made his way toward the building.

The service entrance was locked, of course, but there was a basement door at the bottom of a ramp that was open.

Would it last? Rudy suddenly had a bad feeling, as if the minute he’d walk through that door he’d be nailed by security, or an orderly, or some RN looking for blankets, or worse, someone from the crowd who had made it inside, looking for comfort, for medicine, for food, for answers.

Rudy turned the knob slowly. This was the lower level, and if the hospital administration and staff were worth their salt, they would have blocked access to the elevators up front somehow and condensed the emergency space to protect from burglary down here. And wouldn’t they keep the proletariat away from ICU and the in-patient areas where the beds were already full, especially with the sensitive cases, like those recovering from radiation and chemotherapy? He pushed open the door.