04.Final Edge v5 (52 page)

"Mommie? Is it...you? 'Ave you...come back...for... for me?"

She fell forward into Meredyth in a paroxysm of cold trembling, and Meredyth, overwhelmed, took Lauralie's hand as she lay dying in Meredyth's ams. Meredyth's muddy feet had left a trail from the doorway to here, and Lauralie's blood commingled with the muddy tracks in a starburst of purple spreading over the carpet.

Meredyth eased the now-silent girl from her embrace, and she rushed to her bathroom, finding and tearing into her state-of-the-art first-aid kit to the sound of a gurgling death rattle beginning a slow roll that welled up from Lauralie's depths. She tore into the case, tossing aside creams and syringes, bottles and pills to get at the Fresh Flesh textured bandage wrap, an item developed in aerospace technology for stopping blood loss in a battlefield wound. She rushed back to Lauralie Blodgett and worked the bandage into the wound, allowing the blood to coagulate around the porous synthetic weave of the bandage to eventually stem the blood flow.

Lauralie spat up blood as Meredyth worked to save the life of the multiple murderer. On her knees over the woman, Meredyth caught a glimpse of herself in a full- length mirror. Her features and body caked in dried mud, she realized that the lunatic Lauralie had driven her to become an assassin herself. "Christ, what am I doing? Saving you for what? To give you just what you've wanted all along? A media-circus arrest and incarceration, a jury trial, a forum for your twisted mind? A lifetime in a federal facility for the criminally insane?"

Meredyth's action to stop Lauralie's bleeding to death here and now had simply been an automatic response to help the wounded animal at her feet. But now she slowed for a moment in her ministrations over the weakened, wounded Ripper, allowing the ramifications of saving Lauralie to sink in. "I should fucking let you die. Damn you... damn child of Satan."

A moment's hesitation more, and then Meredyth's instinct to save the young woman took root, as she yanked tightly at the bandages and tied off the porous, textured spider's web of nylon threads that acted as an effective seal, a dike and a tourniquet at once. The blood flow at the wound site ended.

Blinking, her brain getting more oxygen now, Lauralie looked up into Meredyth's mud-caked features. She painfully choked out a handful of broken words. "Hooow'd you...clim' owt... hell?"

Meredyth realized for the first time that the girl, in her pain-induced hallucination, mistook her muddy appearance here in the dark for that of her mother's cemetery ghost, returned to drag her into eternity with her, finally a family. Lauralie then fell unconscious.

"Go ahead, die, Lauralie Blodgett. Go with your mother," Meredyth said, and thought: Justice it isn 't, your going out so peacefully, but maybe now Mira Lourdes and the rest of your victims can rest in peace.

MEREDYTH LIFTED THE bloodied rifle and went to the window with it in her hands. She called out to Lucas down below, unable to actually see him. "I've ended it, Lucas! You can come out now! She's dead! The wicked bitch is dead! Here's the rifle!" She hurled the Remington as far as she could. It responded with a thunderous clatter down the tin roof of a shed situated below the window, and then it slid to the earth into a clump of bushes to do no more harm. Atop the shed, the night breeze twisted a black, wrought- iron windmill in the shape of a greyhound, reminding her of the two hounds Lauralie had poisoned and posed at Arthur Belkvin's feet.

Lucas emerged from the bam, riding bareback and guiding a second horse, saddled, by the reins. He lifted his war club table leg overhead in the melancholy, soft sapphire moonlight, looking like an ancient warrior, but then his club slipped from his grasp and he slowly, painfully, slid down the side of Yesyado. Meredyth screamed, seeing the blood smear down the side of his horse, the one she had gifted him with that afternoon. Somehow Lucas got back to his feet, and limping, he started toward the house, but only a handful of steps and he fell, rolled onto his back, and loosed an audible grown to the heavens.

"Oh, my God! Lucas! Hold on, Lucas! I'm calling nine- one-one now! Hold on! I'm coming!"

In the same instant, Meredyth felt three sharp blunt punctures strike her nude back at the bra line, but the blow proved weak and failed to puncture her deeply.

'Turn roun', Ma-me dear'st," came Lauralie's chilling voice. "Wanna see y'r eyes."

The sharp pain in Meredyth's back did not slow her from wheeling to protect herself, throwing up her hands to block the next blow from the dead woman who'd somehow slipped back from death's hand. Short attention span, Meredyth thought, finding the prongs of the long-handled pitchfork inches from her eyes. "Damn hellion! I should've let you bleed to death."

Lauralie jabbed and Meredyth feinted left, grabbing the handle and wresting the garden tool from the wounded woman's faint grasp, the weeding fork falling once more to the floor between them. Gathering all remaining anemic strength, screaming, Lauralie lunged now with Lucas's bowie knife, using her weight and catapulting her body at her mother, to put her once and for all in her grave.

Meredyth dodged, stepping aside, and Lauralie's tripping over the pitchfork combining with her momentum sent her careening out the window and onto the shed below, a howling banshee scream rising back up to Meredyth, echoing off the house and into the heavens.

Meredyth looked down once again at the shed. Lauralie— still alive, her legs, arms, and extremities twitching— looked like a beetle stabbed through with a needle. She lay faceup; the wrought-iron greyhound windmill had caught her weight and had spiked her through the back. She lifted a defiant fist to Meredyth and muttered, "See...in Hell... mow-ther..."

"I'll make that call now, bitch!" Meredyth swore, and rushed for the phones lying on the bed, finding hers and dialing 911. "I have an emergency...need help immediately at—"

"What is the nature of your emergency?"

"Christ...ahhh, ahhh.... Six, no, seven dead, an eighth dying—in desperate need of paramedics immediately."

"Gun wound, head trauma?"

"Officer down! Gunshot to...to the body, I believe."

"Is the shooter still a threat, ma'am? Are you in any immediate danger?"

"No, no! Damn it, she's dead. Hurry, please!"

"You're on a cell phone, ma'am. I'm Larry. Remain calm and give me your address, and stay on the line, please."

After giving the dispatcher the address and the Brody address, Meredyth snatched up the space-aged bandaging that now must save Lucas's life. She grabbed a blanket and a robe as well, and she then raced down to where Lucas had gotten to his knees and had slumped against a tractor, his eyes glazed, in trauma, unable to coherently answer her.

As she neared him, she saw the horrible exit wound in the middle of his back, between the shoulder blades, just below the neck. She feared she didn't have enough bandages left, and cursed herself now for having wasted them on Lauralie.

She then saw that Lucas had also been hit in the right side, lower abdomen, and there was no exit wound there. She imagined the bullet having careened about inside him, exploding into various deadly shards that had likely ripped at his organs. She feared the internal blood flow would kill him, that the NASA-developed super bandage could not save him if she'd had a mile of it. He needed emergency medical attention; a team of surgeons and experts might have a chance to save his life. She shouted into the phone at the dispatcher, "He's in shock! He's dying! Hurry!"

"Tell me your name, ma'am. Calm down and tell me your name."

"What?"

"Your name."

"Meredyth...Meredyth Sanger. We need an airlift for Lucas! Officer Stonecoat. He's been shot twice! He's suffering internal wounds, and he's hemorrhaging and in shock."

"I'll relay that, Meredyth."

"Doctor! I'm a doctor. I know what I'm talking about! Get a chopper out here, a medevac chopper! Stat!"

She looked into Lucas's eyes, rolled back in his head. He looked ready to faint, in need of medical assistance fast. He'd made it to the barn and the horses, but at what price? "Lucas! Stay with me! Hold on!" She'd thrown the blanket over his legs, and she worked the Fresh Flesh into his back to staunch the blood flow there. She talked as she worked, telling him he was going to be okay. She didn't have enough of the bandage to reach around his wide chest, so she held it in place until the blood was absorbed into it, the absorption creating enough glue to hold the bandage. She got up, raced to the stable, and located the sports-wrap bandages used for binding the legs of horses, and returning, she dressed the back wound with the sports wrap.

"Grandfather...calls me," muttered Lucas.

"I've called for a medevac chopper, Lucas! Hold on! Don't you go anywhere! Don't you listen to that old man either!"

He tried to get up.

She forced him to remain sitting, taking him now into the folds of the robe she had thrown on herself. She kept talking to him. "We must look like a couple of aliens in all this mud and dirt. No telling how long our hideaway is going to be a crime scene. They'll have to process the house, the stable, the grounds, the damn rowboats, not to mention the Brody house." She kept talking to him, trying to keep him conscious.

She heard a car drive up behind them. "Oh, dear God...it's Janie Farnsworth... come looking for her boys. How am I going to deal with all this, Lucas, without you... without your help? You can't leave me, Lucas! I won't let you, damn it! Not now...now that we've finally discovered we can't live without one another. What the futz! It's not fair. Tell your grandfather to go back to the Great Spirit or wherever he came from! Doya-hear- me. doya? I need you in this life; I need you here."

Lucas's glazed look signaled his slipping into some invisible place ahead of him. Again he tried to get to his feet. She struggled to keep him down as a concerned Yesyado sniffed and whinnied at the pair of them. "Damn it, Lucas, stay down! Don't fight me! Stop it! Don't move! You'll only cause more blood loss!"

He's dying. Get used to the idea. Nothing you can do about it, a nagging ugly voice said at the back of her head, sounding like Lauralie, and then she heard Janie Farnsworth standing over them and saying, "My God, Meredyth, what in the name of heaven and hell's happened? Where's my Tommy? Where's Jeff?"

She looked up at the middle-aged single mother of two, unable to tell her what had happened, but her eyes spoke clearly enough. Mrs. Farnsworth gasped and raced for the bam to locate her boys, calling out their names and getting no answer. "Where's their truck?" she finally asked, and looking up at the house, she got her answer.

"Those boys didn't do anything wrong, did they? Who shot your man, Meredyth? Talk to me, damn it!"

"Jeff and Tommy're..."

"Spit it out!"

"...are dead, Janie. I'm sorry. A maniac got hold of their rifle and used it on them. She shot Lucas too."

"My boys...are they badly hurt?" She didn't want to hear the word dead. "Where are they? Where are my boys?" Tears flowed freely now.

"Out on the lawn, halfway down to the lake."

She climbed back into her car and raced up the path to the house, plowing over the lawn in her car to get to where her boys lay. Meredyth's heart, once more, was ripped apart.

She heard the dispatcher on the phone calling to her. "Meredyth... Doctor...are you still there?"

"Where the hell's the help we need?"

"You're in a remote location. They're on their way!"

"I need blood plasma, maybe a transfusion; he needs stabilizing now!"

She saw that Lucas's normal red pallor had a skein of ashen white painted on now. His usual vigor and bravado had been replaced by a limp body and a lethargic malaise. He no longer fought her, allowing himself to be enveloped in her arms. She feared he would die here in her arms at any moment. "Don't do it, Lucas. Don't leave me! Please, don't."

She got no response from him. Lucas Stonecoat lay in her arms in a hemorrhagic coma.

In the distance, she heard the sirens that could not get here soon enough to suit her. In another three minutes, her tree-lined drive around the lake was lit by a parade of fire engines and paramedic vans followed by police cruisers.

"Where's the damned chopper!" she called out through the phone. "He's gone into coma!"

"The chopper's on its way, Meredyth. It's on its way," replied the calm voice of the 911 emergency dispatcher. "It's in the air and on its way."

She heard the faint sound of chopper blades—chomp- chomp-chomp-chomp—competing now with the ambulances and fire trucks that'd pulled down to the stables, encircling them. Over the blackened horizon, she saw the helicopter come into view. On its side, she read the luminescent logo—2NEWS. It was a damned news crew chopper!

It's too late...too late, came the evil voice in her head. And it's all your fault for wasting time on that lunatic bitch.

Paramedics flooded round them, and someone tugged her away, freeing the medics to attend to Lucas's wounds. They'd come from nearby rural Harris County Memorial Hospital, their emergency response unit. They immediately put Lucas on a plasma-and-glucose hookup, attempting to stabilize him for transportation. They examined the bandages Meredyth had wrapped him in, and these were replaced with sterile wraps. In what seemed a lifetime for Meredyth, they finally had him on a stretcher and into the waiting ambulance. Meredyth jumped into the rear with him, and they drove out into a field, and from overhead, a medevac chopper appeared, setting down, ready to take Lucas aboard.

Meredyth insisted on taking flight with him, certain it might be the last opportunity to see him alive. He remained in a coma.

CHAPTER 21

DR. LEONARD CHANG shakily balanced himself atop the tin-roofed shed, having left the safety of the ladder he'd ascended, and now he cautiously made his way to the impaled body. The sight stopped him, so chillingly ironic, the proud head of the metal greyhound protruding out of the woman's abdomen.

Fearful of falling, Steve Perelli followed and stopped short alongside Chang, crouching to keep his balance, his video camera in one hand. He too stared down at the curious wrought-iron spike and made out the greyhound's arrogant grin and alert ears painted in blood, poking through the young woman's abdomen. "Looks like something out of a B horror movie," the police photographer said.