Wormwood (10 page)

Rudy nodded in sympathy.  “Neither have I, but I’ll do it if you don’t think you can.”

Larry gave him the rifle.  “There’s a bullet in the chamber.  It only holds one, so you’ll have to eject the shell and load another before you can fire again,” Larry reminded him, then reached into his pocket for a handful of brass.  “I brought some spare ammunition.”

“Get ready to load it for me,” Rudy said, setting his shotgun aside and lifting the gun to his shoulder.  “When I pull back the bolt, put in another round.”

“All right,” Larry said, nodding nervously.  He picked a bullet out of his palm.

Rudy gazed down the barrel, saw one of the men raise a hunting rifle toward Keith’s rooftop, then saw a thin lick of flame a fraction of a second before the sound of the shot came rolling past.  He sighted on the man’s chest, just below the left shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.

He lifted his head from the scope and pulled back the bolt, ejecting the spent casing.  Larry was staring down the creek.  “You hit him,” he said, amazed.

“Load the rifle,” Rudy told him flatly, glancing at the bullet floating between Larry’s thumb and forefinger.

“Whoops.”  Larry plugged the round into the breach and Rudy slammed it home.  “Sorry.”

By the time Rudy got his eye back to the scope, the second man had swung his rifle around and was sighting in on them.  “
Get down
,” he warned Larry and his finger twitched on the trigger, discharging the bullet against the side of the bridge, digging out a chipped splinter of concrete.

Larry took that as a call to retreat and took off running, making a beeline back to his house and the safety of his bomb shelter, leaving the rifle with Rudy but taking the handful of ammunition with him.

Rudy swore and tossed the useless rifle aside, reaching for his shotgun and suppressing a wild urge to send a load of buckshot after his neighbor.  He scurried up the slope of the Dawley’s side yard, ducking behind the thickest part of the spruce to get clear of the gunman’s line of sight.

An angry shot whizzed past and ricocheted up the hillside.  It was answered by a shot from the Sturling’s roof.  Rudy circled around the spruce and saw Mike and Keith break cover, firing a fresh volley into the murmuring shadows beneath the bridge.

10

Standing in the kitchen of the Dawley house, his rifle pointed out the sliding glass door, Tad Kemper was sighting in on a tall man behind a walnut tree when a furtive creak in the flooring behind him warned that he wasn’t alone.

He let the tall man go for the moment and turned toward the dining room, the rifle at his hip, ready to gutshoot anyone who stepped out of the murky brown shadows.

“Mike?”

A woman’s voice: muffled, coming from somewhere to the right and slightly down. 
Basement
, he thought, smiling.

“Mike, what’s happening up there?”

No nearer now than she was at first, yet the slow creak continued on as she shifted her weight on the squeaky riser, trying to make up her mind whether to come upstairs or stay put.

Tad moved cautiously from the back door, treading as softly as his boots would carry him.  The riser stopped creaking and he froze, listening to the low whisper of voices that took its place; coming from somewhere behind a closed door between the dining room and the back hall.

At least two of them,
Tad thought, his smile spreading.  It was a dark and cadaverous smile, all the warmth and humanity eaten away.  The trip up the hill had been his idea.  It had occurred to him the previous evening while gazing out the back window of his tiny house on Lyle Street, seeing the lights in the homes above him twinkling like stars — distant and detached from the rest of the world, as if what was happening down in the streets of town couldn’t touch them.

At that point Tad had already killed two people.  His boss had been the first, for trying to stop him from walking out of the garage with an expensive tool set.  And his wife had been the other.

So far, his conscience had little to say about either killing.

The truth be known, he’d been daydreaming about putting an end to Audrey ever since finding out about her affair with Jed Robinson last fall.  Robinson lived down the block and taught art classes at the college.  A born pussylicker if Tad had ever seen one.  He had admitted to these murderous urges in the office of the marriage counselor he and Audrey had gone to for a few weeks, but somehow he couldn’t quite rid himself of them, nor the indelible, overriding image of his wife fucking another man: her back arched as she rocked and moaned with pleasure; a pleasure that he himself, apparently, had never been able to give her.

Now she lay in a dark corner of the garage, her fucking days over for good.  He’d been washing her blood from his hands at the kitchen sink when the twinkling lights had caught his eye, almost beckoning.

And with Audrey gone, he was going to need a new place to stay.

It just seemed natural to shoot for the stars, so he called up some of his poker and hunting buddies: Stan Lizotte, Bret Chastain, Greg Mashburn, Jimmy Nye.  Only Nye had backed out on him, but then old Jimmy had always had a yellow streak in him, so that was no big loss.  Probably would have shot himself in the foot by now anyway.

It occurred to Tad, standing there in the Dawley’s kitchen (and didn’t it seem that his best ideas came to him either in the bathroom or the kitchen?), that if you were without a wife or a steady girl and you were going to rob a man of his house and possessions, you might as well rob him off his woman too, because a man could get to feeling mighty lonely up here amongst the stars, waiting for some ripe piece of pussy to fall into his lap, so there was something to be said, perhaps, for a certain quality of mercy…

So long as one of the women had a face or a nice pair of jugs on her.

With that thought in mind, Tad Kemper moved a step closer to the door and the whispering voices.

11

“Is that it?” Keith wondered, glancing at Mike.  “Did we get them all?”

There were two bodies sprawled under the bridge, another upstream behind Mike’s house, but neither of them was sure that that was the extent of the raiding party.

Mike looked up at Shane, his boy, who’d had a hand in putting down two of them.  “We count
three
,” he called, still kneeling beside the creek, his pistol at the ready.  “Is that all?”

Shane’s head rose slightly in silhouette against the sky.  “Where are they?” he shouted back down.

Keith pointed.  “Two here,” he said, then moved his arm, “and one up behind your place.”

Shane hesitated.  “There were
two
of them running toward the house.”

Mike frowned.  “Are you sure.”

“Positive.”

Mike rose up on the balls of his feet, ready to drop again if someone took a potshot at him.  He could see the back of his house, but it was dark and mute, holding its breath, wives and children somewhere inside its belly.  He glanced fretfully at Keith.  “You don’t think one of them got
inside
, do you?”

Keith was frowning; clearly the same concern had crossed his mind.  “It’s awful quiet,” he conceded.

Mike raised an eyebrow.  “Is that good or bad?”

“Well
good
, I suppose.”  Keith shook his head.  “But I think we better check it out right away.”

Mike nodded and glanced about, looking for Bud or Rudy.  “Where the hell
is
everyone?”

“We ought to check that out too.  Could be that one or two of them got tagged.”

Mike surveyed the land between the creek and his back patio, looking at it in a way he’d never honestly considered before, as if it were a battlefield, laden with mines and foxholes.  “How do you want to go about this?” he asked.  “You’re trained in this sort of thing.”

“Straight from here to my house,” Keith said, his eyes checking the bushes, marking the windows, “then under the eaves to your place.  We’ll cut between the two houses and go in through the front, that way if anyone’s watching they’ll lose sight of us.  They won’t know where the hell we’re going.”

Mike nodded.  “All right.”

“I’ll go first,” Keith said, checking his gun.  “Stay spaced apart and keep your head down, especially crossing in front of the windows.”

“Okay.”  Mike took a deep breath.  “What about Shane?”

“Tell him to keep his eyes open.  He can cover us.”

“I mean is he going to be
safe
up there?”

“As safe as any of us, I guess.  He did some good shooting.”

Mike hesitated.  “I don’t want to lose him.”

“I know you don’t.”  Keith studied the rooftop and the wide stretch of lawn.  “But right now it’s out of our hands.  The sooner we get the area secured, the safer we’ll
all
be.”

“Let’s do it then,” Mike said, impatient for it to happen.

Keith nodded, positioning himself to run while Mike signaled their intention to move to his son.

Shane gave him a thumb’s-up, reshouldering the rifle.

“Wait until I get to the back of the house before you follow,” Keith said over his shoulder, then took off across the grass, bent over in a crouching stride.

A few seconds later Mike was pounding in his footsteps.

12

Pam Dawley was moving up the basement stairs when the door above her opened, revealing a fat, scruffy-looking man she’d never seen before.  He had a rifle in his hands and, despite his angry shout to stay where she was, Pam backpedaled and ducked out of sight before he could take aim and stop her.  The bullet he fired exploded within the close confines of the stairwell and smashed through a corner of the basement wall, blasting out splinters of ragged pine and a chalky cloud of atomized drywall.

The basement filled up with screams and the women turned like gazelles, stampeding to the far side of the room, Aimee Cheng herding and shoving her three children ahead of her.

The Dawley basement was not an especially large one.  It had two small bedrooms, a bathroom with a shower stall, an unfinished space where the furnace and washer and dryer could chug and belch to their heart’s content, and a somewhat larger room that could be used for recreation or storage.  What windows it had were small and set high on the walls, revealing only overgrown shrubs or pale glimpses of sky.  The only exit was narrow and opened (with effort, since it was seldom used) into a concrete stairwell leading to the back yard.  All of which did them little good since it stood, with the bath and bedrooms, on the opposite side of the interior stairs, leaving them nowhere except the dry darkness of the furnace room to retreat to.

Tad Kemper knew none of this, but he knew he had them on the run; that he was the wolf and they were the rabbits, their hearts thump-thumping as they scurried to the dead-end reaches of their warren.  There was a fleeting moment of doubt as he turned the blind corner at the bottom of stairs, an unsettling image of one of them pointing a trembling shotgun in his direction, but as he swung his rifle around and crouched behind it, the room stood empty in front of him.

Confidence and certainty came flooding back.  “Ladies?” he called, a toothy smile between his lips.

A hushed whisper met his ears: pleas for mercy… a prayer to a god who no longer mattered?  His rabbits were hiding, shivering against one another in the dark.