Bag of Bones (67 page)

Buddy and his friends were in a pickup truck
headed this way.
BAMM CONSTRUCTION
, it said on the side.

“Mike!” George cried. He sounded panicky. “You got to hurry!”

“Hold on!” I called back. “Hold on, George!”

Mattie and the others had started stacking picnic things beside the sink, but I'm almost positive that the stretch of Formica counter above the drawers had been clean and bare when I hurried after Kyra. Not now. The yellow sugar cannister had been overturned. Written in the spilled sugar was this:

“No shit,” I muttered, and checked the remaining drawers. No tape, no rope. Not even a lousy set of handcuffs, and in most well-equipped kitchens you can count on finding three or four. Then I had an idea and looked in the cabinet under the sink. When I went back out, our George was swaying on his feet and Footman was looking at him with a kind of predatory concentration.

“Did you get some tape?” George Kennedy asked.

“No, something better,” I said. “Tell me, Footman, who actually paid you? Devore or Whitmore? Or don't you know?”

“Fuck you,” he said.

I had my right hand behind my back. Now I pointed down the hill with my left one and endeavored to look surprised. “What the hell's Osgood doing? Tell him to go away!”

Footman looked in that direction—it was instinctive—and I hit him in the back of the head with the
Craftsman hammer I'd found in the toolbox under Mattie's sink. The sound was horrible, the spray of blood erupting from the flying hair was horrible, but worst of all was the feeling of the skull giving way—a spongy collapse that came right up the handle and into my fingers. He went down like a sandbag, and I dropped the hammer, gagging.

“Okay,” George said. “A little ugly, but probably the best thing you could have done under . . . under the . . .”

He didn't go down like Footman—it was slower and more controlled, almost graceful—but he was just as out. I picked up the revolver, looked at it, then threw it into the woods across the road. A gun was nothing for me to have right now; it could only get me into more trouble.

A couple of other men had also left the church; a carful of ladies in black dresses and veils, as well. I had to hurry on even faster. I unbuckled George's pants and pulled them down. The bullet which had taken him in the leg had torn into his thigh, but the wound looked as if it was clotting. John's upper arm was a different story—it was still pumping out blood in frightening quantities. I yanked his belt free and cinched it around his arm as tightly as I could. Then I slapped him across the face. His eyes opened and stared at me with a bleary lack of recognition.

“Open your mouth, John!” He only stared at me. I leaned down until our noses were almost touching and screamed, “
OPEN YOUR MOUTH! DO IT NOW!
” He opened it like a kid when the nurse tells him just say aahh. I stuck the end of the belt between his teeth.
“Close!” He closed. “Now hold it,” I said. “Even if you pass out, hold it.”

I didn't have time to see if he was paying attention. I got to my feet and looked up as the whole world went glare-blue. For a second it was like being inside a neon sign. There was a black suspended river up there, roiling and coiling like a basket of snakes. I had never seen such a baleful sky.

I dashed up the cement-block steps and into the trailer again. Rommie had slumped forward onto the table with his face in his folded arms. He would have looked like a kindergartner taking a timeout if not for the broken salad bowl and the bits of lettuce in his hair. Kyra still sat with her back to the dishwasher, weeping hysterically.

I picked her up and realized that she had wet herself. “We have to go now, Ki.”

“I want Mattie! I want Mommy!
I want my Mattie, make her stop being hurt! Make her stop being dead!
”

I hurried across the trailer. On the way to the door I passed the end-table with the Mary Higgins Clark novel on it. I noticed the tangle of hair ribbons again—ribbons perhaps tried on before the party and then discarded in favor of the scrunchy. They were white with bright red edges. Pretty. I picked them up without stopping, stuffed them into a pants pocket, then switched Ki to my other arm.

“I want Mattie! I want Mommy!
Make her come back!
” She swatted at me, trying to make me stop, then began to buck and kick in my arms again. She drummed her fists on the side of my head. “Put me down! Land me! Land me!”

“No, Kyra.”

“Put me down! Land me! Land me!
PUT ME DOWN!
”

I was losing her. Then, as we came out onto the top step, she abruptly stopped struggling. “Give me Stricken! I want Stricken!”

At first I had no idea what she was talking about, but when I looked where she was pointing I understood. Lying on the walk not far from the pot with the key underneath it was the stuffed toy from Ki's Happy Meal. Strickland had put in a fair amount of outside playtime from the look of him—the light-gray fur was now dark-gray with dust—but if the toy would calm her, I wanted her to have it. This was no time to worry about dirt and germs.

“I'll give you Strickland if you promise to close your eyes and not open them until I tell you. Will you promise?”

“I promise,” she said. She was trembling in my arms, and great globular tears—the kind you expect to see in fairy-tale books, never in real life—rose in her eyes and went spilling down her cheeks. I could smell burning grass and charred beefsteak. For one terrible moment I thought I was going to vomit, and then I got it under control.

Ki closed her eyes. Two more tears fell from them and onto my arm. They were hot. She held out one hand, groping. I went down the steps, got the dog, then hesitated. First the ribbons, now the dog. The ribbons were probably okay, but it seemed wrong to give her the dog and let her bring it along. It seemed wrong but . . .

It's gray, Irish,
the UFO voice whispered.
You don't need to worry about it because it's gray. The stuffed toy in your dream was black.

I didn't know exactly what the voice was talking about and had no time to care. I put the stuffed dog in Kyra's open hand. She held it up to her face and kissed the dusty fur, her eyes still closed.

“Maybe Stricken can make Mommy better, Mike. Stricken a magic dog.”

“Just keep your eyes closed. Don't open them until I say.”

She put her face against my neck. I carried her across the yard and to my car that way. I put her on the passenger side of the front seat. She lay down with her arms over her head and the dirty stuffed dog clutched in one pudgy hand. I told her to stay just like that, lying down on the seat. She made no outward sign that she heard me, but I knew that she did.

We had to hurry because the old-timers were coming. The old-timers wanted this business over, wanted this river to run into the sea. And there was only one place we could go, only one place where we might be safe, and that was Sara Laughs. But there was something I had to do first.

I kept a blanket in the trunk, old but clean. I took it out, walked across the yard, and shook it down over Mattie Devore. The hump it made as it settled around her was pitifully slight. I looked around and saw John staring at me. His eyes were glassy with shock, but I thought maybe he was coming back. The belt was still clamped in his teeth; he looked like a junkie preparing to shoot up.

“Iss ant eee,” he said—
This can't be.
I knew exactly how he felt.

“There'll be help here in just a few minutes. Hang in there. I have to go.”

“Go air?”

I didn't answer. There wasn't time. I stopped and took George Kennedy's pulse. Slow but strong. Beside him, Footman was deep in unconsciousness, but muttering thickly. Nowhere near dead. It takes a lot to kill a daddy. The jerky wind blew the smoke from the overturned car in my direction, and now I could smell cooking flesh as well as barbecued steak. My stomach clenched again.

I ran to the Chevy, dropped behind the wheel, and backed out of the driveway. I took one more look—at the blanket-covered body, at the three knocked-over men, at the trailer with the line of black bulletholes wavering down its side and its door standing open. John was up on his good elbow, the end of the belt still clamped in his teeth, looking at me with uncomprehending eyes. Lightning flashed so brilliantly I tried to shield my eyes from it, although by the time my hand was up, the flash had gone and the day was as dark as late dusk.

“Stay down, Ki,” I said. “Just like you are.”

“I can't hear you,” she said in a voice so hoarse and choked with tears that I could barely make out the words. “Ki's takin a nap wif Stricken.”

“Okay,” I said. “Good.”

I drove past the burning Ford and down to the foot of the hill, where I stopped at the rusty bullet-pocked stop-sign. I looked right and saw the pickup truck parked on the shoulder.
BAMM CONSTRUCTION
on the side. Three men crowded together in the cab, watching me. The one by the passenger window was Buddy
Jellison; I could tell him by his hat. Very slowly and deliberately, I raised my right hand and gave them the finger. None of them responded and their stony faces didn't change, but the pickup began to roll slowly toward me.

I turned left onto 68, heading for Sara Laughs under a black sky.

*   *   *

Two miles from where Lane Forty-two branches off the highway and winds west to the lake, there stood an old abandoned barn upon which one could still make out faded letters reading
DONCASTER DAIRY
. As we approached it, the whole eastern side of the sky lit up in a purple-white blister. I cried out, and the Chevy's horn honked—by itself, I'm almost positive. A thorn of lightning grew from the bottom of that light-blister and struck the barn. For a moment it was still completely there, glowing like something radioactive, and then it spewed itself in all directions. I have never seen anything even remotely like it outside of a movie theater. The thunderclap which followed was like a bombshell. Kyra screamed and slid onto the floor on the passenger side of the car with her hands clapped to her ears. She still clutched the little stuffed dog in one of them.

A minute later I topped Sugar Ridge. Lane Forty-two splits left from the highway at the bottom of the ridge's north slope. From the top I could see a wide swath of TR-90—woods and fields and barns and farms, even a darkling gleam from the lake. The sky was as black as coal dust, flashing almost constantly with internal lightnings. The air had a clear ochre glow. Every breath I took tasted like the shavings in a
tinderbox. The topography beyond the ridge stood out with a surreal clarity I cannot forget. That sense of mystery swarmed my heart and mind, that sense of the world as thin skin over unknowable bones and gulfs.

I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw that the pickup truck had been joined by two other cars, one with a V-plate that means the vehicle is registered to a combat veteran of the armed services. When I slowed down, they slowed down. When I sped up, they sped up. I doubted they would follow us any farther once I turned onto Lane Forty-two, however.

“Ki? Are you okay?”

“Sleepun,” she said from the footwell.

“Okay,” I said, and started down the hill.

I could just see the red bicycle reflectors marking my turn onto Forty-two when it began to hail—great big chunks of white ice that fell out of the sky, drummed on the roof like heavy fingers, and bounced off the hood. They began to heap in the gutter where my windshield wipers hid.

“What's happening?” Kyra cried.

“It's just hail,” I said. “It can't hurt us.” This was barely out of my mouth when a hailstone the size of a small lemon struck my side of the windshield and then bounced high into the air again, leaving a white mark from which a number of short cracks radiated. Were John and George Kennedy lying helpless out in this? I turned my mind in that direction, but could sense nothing.

When I made the left onto Lane Forty-two, it was hailing almost too hard to see. The wheelruts were
heaped with ice. The white faded out under the trees, though. I headed for that cover, flipping on my headlights as I went. They cut bright cones through the pelting hail.

As we went into the trees, that purple-white blister glowed again, and my rearview mirror went too bright to look at. There was a rending, crackling crash. Kyra screamed again. I looked around and saw a huge old spruce toppling slowly across the lane, its ragged stump on fire. It carried the electrical lines with it.

Blocked in,
I thought.
This end, probably the other end, too. We're here. For better or for worse, we're here.

The trees grew over Lane Forty-two in a canopy except for where the road passed beside Tidwell's Meadow. The sound of the hail in the woods was an immense splintery rattle. Trees
were
splintering, of course; it was the most damaging hail ever to fall in that part of the world, and although it spent itself in fifteen minutes, that was long enough to ruin a season's worth of crops.