The Witch of the Wood (25 page)

The enemy was so deeply integrated it was hard to get a clear shot, and one of the biker dudes suddenly ran right past Duffey, jumping the sandbags and booking away across the pasture toward the wide rise ahead that led up to the high school. The guy was pumping his knees at crazy angles, zigzagging as if he knew someone was going to take offense to his desertion, and Duffey moved the muzzle back and forth, cursing softly.

Suddenly, the guy’s feet came out from under him as if he’d been clotheslined, and he crumpled down to the earth in a heap. Duffey had a moment where he actually wondered if he’d pulled the trigger without knowing it, and the sky lit up in grand finale style, total saturation, a criss-cross effect of shooting rainbows and glitter-bombs. The hill leading to the high school went bright underneath, and it was flooded now with wolves and huge dogs coming on hard. Duffey lowered his rifle, mouth falling open.

This was no zoo-rush. It was an army of ghouls riding the canines like horses; they were skeletons with spotted skin and tumors, mummies without the bandages, the living dead, many of them hairless, some toothless, all with their mouths stretched open in hideous war screams, eyes rolling in their sockets, guns blazing.

It was hard to hear anything, but Duffey felt bullets whipping past him, hitting things, dropping people. At the back side of the swarming advance coming down the hill, there rode a figure, tall, hooded, white ghost-mask, cape whipping and flying behind him.

The Dogman.

Duffey fired his rifle dry, making no visible dent in the attack coming on, then dropped it and turned, looking back through the campground, hating himself a bit for not grabbing another weapon and standing his ground, but knowing deep down that he held the ultimate trump card here.

He was going for the gas cans.

The wave came in hard behind him, bullets kicking up dirt, people around him twisting and spinning to the ground, wolves and dogs and foxes pounding through the space, screams, skids, sounds of blunt force. The west side of the fire was an attack zone, flooded and overrun, and Duffey hustled around the long way, bullets whipping past his right ear, blasting some cooking pans hanging on a wire, hitting a guy in the back of the head and sending him sprawling, ripping into the face of a woman he knew who had worked at the Walmart, cutting one of the knife-throwers across the chest on a slant. To the left, there were women and children (and some dads Duffey wanted badly to thrash) abandoning the tent area, and running off into the darkness behind the camp ground like frightened mice.

One of the canvas flaps was thrown open then, and Coach Sullivan came out. He was buttoning his pants, and Mary-Beth Healy, a ninth-grader, came out behind him, slinking off, pulling her shirt back on. Duffey tried to shout something to him, but from the side a skeleton-ghoul-lady riding an enormous white Arctic wolf burst into view. She was wearing a black knit skullcap, eyes wide, teeth bared in a ferocious war-cry. She aimed a semi-automatic weapon at Sullivan and hip-fired it, missing wide right. She kept coming on hard, timing her jump off the animal, and ramming her body into her enemy, snapping the tent stakes, whip-folding the canvas over them like a set of dark wings. Duffy ran past as hard as he could. Back in the corn, the witches were loose, a lot of them, at least twenty. They were untying one another, gnawing at the ropes, yanking their feet and hands through.

Duffey cut across their bow and went for the lean-to, the thirty red gas cans lined there like soldiers. He reached down for the one closest to him and started unscrewing the cap.

Behind him someone hissed, and there was a low growling.

Duffey spun around, major déjà vu, just like when he’d been getting a drink of water and that faggoty-ass Wolfie Barnes had pulled a sneak and whisper on him. This time it was the kid’s father, the Dogman himself, down off his wolf, weapons in hand.

They were pointed at the ground, and Brian Duffey knew he only had one chance here. He burst out of his crouch, sprang forward, and “rushed the quarterback,” surprised him, slammed in full speed and rolled him hard to the dirt. Barnes hit like a sack of bricks, guns flying out of his hands, spinning and flashing in the air, and Duffey scrambled on top of him. Oh yeah, this was going to be better than a mass burning, for now Duffey had the opportunity to unmask the false prophet, make him a hostage, walk him back through the rows one by one and wipe clean the field. It beat doing it with an iPad anyway. . . .

Duffey held him down and reached for the gauze. He yanked it free and blinked stupidly.

Rudy Barnes wondered if it wasn’t hubris, the tragic flaw the classic Greeks had most warned us about, a stubborn sort of pride that had influenced him at the last minute to lower his guns, make the scales a bit more even, a “mano-a-mano” kind of thing. Or was this the blacker side of the binary, the animal in him, raw and primed with the unhealthy desire to surpass the impersonal nature of a bullet in the dark back here and get dirty with it, kill this heartless fucker with his bare hands . . . ?

Duffey yanked off the gauze and blinked stupidly. Checkmate. Both his hands were occupied, one clenched around Rudy’s shirt at the collar, the other balled in a fist around the fluttering mask material. And of course, Rudy’s right hand was free to grab the scissors he had between his teeth. He snatched them by the finger holes and made to plunge upward.

Like magic, Duffey’s throat then blew open just below the Adam’s apple, and he was hurled forward and off as if some invisible giant had rope-pulled him toward the dark western slope. Rudy pushed up on his elbows, looking back into the space Duffey had just vacated, and twenty feet away was the blank slate, down on one knee, still looking down the barrel of the Bushmaster Rudy had dropped on the ground. The skin on the back of her prop hand was hanging down in a flap, and the freed witches behind her were pressed to the ground like Hindus, hands out flat, faces in the dirt. The ones on the crosses were looking away, and the shooter rose. She avoided Rudy’s eyes, retrieved the face-gauze, and dropped it near him as she passed.

Rudy slipped it over his head and secured it into the rope necklace. By the time he turned, the bloody, naked witch was standing over Brian Duffey, writhing down there in the dark by the lean-to. She leveled her weapon and spat on him across the muzzle.

“You rotten, ignorant bigot,” she said. She pumped five shots into him, making his body jump in the wild grass. Discharge smoke blew off in threads, and she lowered the gun, letting it hang by her side.

“We are not used to violence,” she said, still looking at the body. “We are a docile people, but men like this have taught us the concept of murder.”

“He had it coming,” Rudy said.

She looked at him.

“It isn’t the way things were meant to pass.”

“It never is.” He stood. “You’re a brave one.”

“You are masked.”

“Still, your sisters are frail, and they are afraid of more than just gazing at my mask.”

“They’ll learn.” She came closer to him. “It was an honor to defend you. I didn’t realize I could do such a thing, but the saying ‘The Lord doth not kill directly’ has been in my mind since the ancient times, like a law, a commandment.”

“I understand.”

She made to walk past him and stopped.

“I want to give you a list of the sisters who were burned here. Rebecca is not the only saint who died on the wood.”

“And what is your name?” Rudy asked.

“Elizabella,” she said, turning. “Will my Lord honor the names of those dead?”

“I’ll put them in a book.”

Her eyes flickered.

“With new human laws.”

“That’s the idea.”

“You will always have my sincere thanks, my Lord.”

“And you mine for your acts of valor.”

Elizabella bowed her head; awkward yet sincere, using the moment as an exit strategy to turn politely back to her girls. But she froze right there. The unbound witches were still on their knees face down to the ground, and there was a stranger behind them in the corn. It was a rather round woman standing there shivering, dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized Villanova University sweatshirt. She had a sleeping bag and a couple of blankets in her arms.

“I lost my husband,” she said. “My house was destroyed, and my neighborhood turned to a disaster zone. I didn’t know where to go, and these men promised food and shelter.” She looked down. “By the time I realized what they were doing to these poor women it seemed it was too late. I panicked and hid in my tent.” Her voice went down to a whisper. “I am so ashamed.”

“Help me get my girls down,” Elizabella said. “Can you do that?”

The woman looked up.

“There are others,” she said, “more with blankets, back in the tents. I can get them. We can untie the knots together, all of us.”

Elizabella nodded, and the two women moved toward a cautious embrace. Rudy looked off, as moments of sentimentality had always made him feel odd and misplaced, and his gaze swept across the campground that had been laid to waste, smoke from the fireworks an acrid cloud floating above it all. There were bodies from both sides lying cold, too many bodies, sprawled in the dirt, lying across things in awkward positions, and Rudy was sickened inside. He’d always been a pacifist. Over at the tent area there was a lot of activity now, men and women gathering in small groups, making their way toward the corn. At the back end of the space a dark spot moved. It slinked and crawled and rose up to make a break for the far side of the pasture where the highway stretched off behind the mass of downed trees.

It was Sullivan running for it, limping, favoring an arm too.

Rudy cursed himself for his dress shoes and briefly considered kicking them off. At the same time he had to admit to himself that on a certain level he was considering just letting the bastard go. But the terrain was rough with debris, and a man didn’t run around in his stocking feet out here just to gain a step or two on his given adversary. And men like Sullivan didn’t halt their campaigns just because of a bum leg, a missing eye, a bruise on the arm, and one battle lost. These individuals were incorrigible cancers, popping up again and again even if you nuked the living shit out of them with radiation and drowned them in chemo. Best to cut them out with that metaphorical blade if and when you had that first chance.

Rudy cut across the site, pausing only briefly to kick a dude in the face who’d held a stick underneath him, playing possum by the trash pit. Sullivan had a good lead and was fading, despite the intermittent flickerings thrown by the ebbing flames of the bonfire.

Rudy took a deep breath. Then he jumped into the high grass and chased the wounded man in through the meadow.

Professor Rudy Barnes suddenly wished he’d spent more time all these years gaining a higher level of personal fitness. He was a tall man, “big” in a sense, yet blessed with a high metabolism passed down by his mother. It kept him wiry-thin. Moreover, years of practice helped him bottle emotions most of the time, internalizing them, working them down and through the strong and silent way, and maybe there was a little bit of credence to the idea of manufacturing some kind of inner furnace that burned fat off by tension alone. But dissecting student papers with aggressive red slashes, planning lessons with a measure of competitive intensity, and stewing and poring over journal articles that only one percent of the population was interested in reading didn’t equal the toning and conditioning one got at the gym. Sullivan was wounded and still outrunning him. And though shadows were no longer existent in this world, there was certainly darkness, the kind Sullivan was steadily becoming a part of.

Rudy called out suddenly, “My kingdom for a fucking horse!” but no dog came running, no wolf conveniently sliding between his legs. He had acted impulsively, running like a madman into the pasturage, and now he was out of earshot, alone.

The meadow-grass was iced over, and the further he got into the depths of it, the more dampness accumulated in the fabric of his pants, weighing him down. Ahead he thought he could hear Sullivan’s breathing, but he couldn’t be sure if it was just the haunt of his own footfalls, like a residue of dark hope.

Up ahead was the dim spread of the highway curving off right to a fine point that got lost in the rise of the valley. There were abandoned vehicles hulking there in the darkness, and Rudy pounded toward them. By the time he made it to the edge of the blacktop his chest was heaving, and his legs ached as he pulled them over the guardrail. The roadside gravel made loud, guttural sounds beneath his shoes, and after a step or two he paused there, hands on his knees. He wanted to quiet himself so he could continue to monitor the exhalations of his foe, but the more he tried to tone it down, the harder he seemed to pant and wheeze.

Something clanked.

It was distinct, some iron product, two hundred or so feet north. Rudy strode forward through a toss of broken glass in the breakdown lane. There was a shredded tire he had to step over and a bent sign to his right with a picture of a truck tipping on a sharp curve.

Now he heard grunts, cursing, more clanking, and at the top of the mild crest and a bend left he looked down over the guardrail.

There was a graded dirt slope leading to a wide bed of crushed stone. Directly behind was a huge concrete pipe built into the landscape and a massive storm drain at the foot of it; hence the sounds of steel on steel. Sullivan had been struggling to haul off the grate cover. Rudy got a fleeting glimpse of the man’s head disappearing down into the hole and then slid down the slope after him, almost tripping over his own feet and taking a header. What he planned to do when he caught up with Sullivan in the catacombs was not entirely clear. He wasn’t going down there to talk, that was for sure.

Could Rudy take him?

That wasn’t clear either. There were a lot of factors, a lot of unknowns. How injured was the man? Was he really blind in one eye, or was the patch just for show? He was younger, but Rudy was taller. The man was more buff, but Rudy had that wiry leverage going for him. Seemed kind of even.