By the Light of the Moon (32 page)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

T
ICK-TOCK, PIG CLOCK. GLEAMING LITTLE EYES
squinting out of folds of pink fat. That knowing leer.

Forget the damn clock. The pig clock isn’t a threat. Focus.

Dylan returned to his brother, closed the refrigerator door for the third time, and drew Shep toward Jilly. “We’ve got to go, buddy.”

“Where’s all the ice?” Shep asked, deeper into this obsession than Jilly had seen him in any other. “Where’s all the ice?”

“What ice?” Dylan asked.

This clairvoyance, this foreshadowing talent was still new to Jilly, as frightening as it was new, as
unwanted
as it was new, and she had not been channeling it properly.

“Where’s all the ice?” Shepherd persisted.

“We don’t need ice,” Dylan told him. “Buddy, you’re starting to scare me here. Don’t freeze up on me.”

“Where’s all the ice?”

“Shep, be with me now. Listen to me, hear me, stay with me.”

By struggling to identify the cause of her alarm, letting her suspicion hop from object to object, place to place, she had not been allowing the alarm to direct the compass needle of her intuition. She needed to relax, to trust this strange precognition and let it show her precisely what to fear.

“Where’s all the ice?”

“Forget about the ice. We don’t need ice, buddy. We need to get out of here, all right?”

“Nothing but ice.”

Inevitably, Jilly’s attention was drawn toward the windows, and the deep backyard beyond the windows. The green grass, the garage, the golden meadow behind the garage.

“Nothing but ice.”

Dylan said, “He’s fixated on this ice thing.”

“Get him off it.”

“Nothing but ice,” said Shepherd. “Where’s all the ice?”

“You know Shep by now. There’s no getting him off it until he
wants
to get off. The thing keeps…ricocheting around in his head. And this seems worse than usual.”

“Sweetie,” she said, her gaze riveted on the windows, “we have to fold. We can get you some ice after we fold.”

“Where’s all the ice?”

Dylan put a hand under his brother’s tucked chin, raised his head. “Shep, this is crucial now. You understand crucial? I know you do, buddy. It’s crucial that we fold out of here.”

“Where’s all the ice?”

Glancing at Shepherd, she saw that he refused to relate to his brother. Behind his closed lids, his eyes moved ceaselessly.

When Jilly returned her attention to the backyard, a man knelt on one knee at the northwest corner of the garage. He sheltered in shadows. She almost didn’t spot him, but she was sure he hadn’t been there a moment ago.

Another man ran in a crouch from the cover of the meadow to the
southwest
corner of the garage.

“They’re here,” she told Dylan.

Neither of these men wore desert-resort pastels, but they were of a type with the faux golfers in Arizona. They were big, they were purposeful, and they weren’t going door to door to preach salvation through Jesus.

“Where’s all the ice?”

As far as Jilly was concerned, the scariest thing about them was the headset that each man wore. Not just earpieces but also extension arms that placed penny-size microphones at their mouths. This high degree of coordination argued that the assault force had to be larger than two men, and further suggested that these weren’t just your ordinary knee-breaking, contract-kill thugs, but thugs with a keen sense of organization.

“Where’s all the ice?”

The second man had covered the ground between meadow and garage. He crouched at the southwest corner, half concealed by a shrub.

She expected them to come well armed, so their guns were only the
second
scariest thing about them. Big weapons. Sort of futuristic looking. Probably what were called assault rifles. She didn’t know much about firearms, didn’t need to know much to be a comedian, even in front of the most unruly audience, but she figured that these guns were capable of firing a gazillion rounds before they needed to be reloaded.

“Where’s all the ice?”

She and Dylan had to buy time until Shepherd could be persuaded that the way to get cake
and
ice would be to fold the three of them someplace that offered both.

“Get away from the windows,” Jilly warned, retreating from those that faced the backyard. “Windows are…windows are death.”

“Every room has windows,” Dylan worried. “Lots of windows.”

“Basement?”

“Isn’t one. California. Slab construction.”

Shep asked, “Where’s all the ice?”

Jilly said, “They know we’re here.”

“How could they know? We didn’t come in from outside.”

“Maybe a listening device, planted in the house earlier,” she suggested. “Or they spotted us with binoculars through the windows.”

“They sent Vonetta home,” he realized.

“Let’s hope that’s all they did to her.”

“Where’s all the ice?”

The thought of harm having come to his housekeeper cast an ashen pallor over Dylan’s face as the recognition of his own mortal danger had not. “But we only folded out of Holbrook half an hour ago.”

“So?”

“We must have surprised the hell out of the guy in the motel room, the one who saw us go.”

“He probably needed clean underwear,” she agreed.

“So how could they have even figured out what folding
was
in just half an hour, let alone alerted people here in California?”

“These guys didn’t come here on an alert sent out half an hour ago. They staked out this house when they didn’t know where we were, before the Arizona goons confirmed we were in Holbrook, hours before they went into the motel after us.”

“So they connected you to the Coupe DeVille and me to you last night, pretty quick,” Dylan said. “We’ve always been just a few hours ahead of them.”

“They didn’t
know
we’d come back here soon or ever. They were just here waiting, hoping.”

“Nobody was running surveillance on the house this morning when Shep and I folded onto that hilltop back there.”

“They must’ve gotten here not long after that.”

“Ice,” said Shep, “ice, ice, ice, ice.”

The guy on one knee in the shadows, the other guy half hidden by the shrub, talking on their headsets, were probably not talking just to each other, but were chatting with a cozy knitting circle of like-minded assassins surrounding the house, exchanging tips on weapons maintenance, garroting-wire techniques, and recipes for nerve poison, while synchronizing their watches and coordinating their murderous attack.

Jilly could have tapped her veins for the ice Shep wanted. She felt defenseless. She felt naked. Naked in the hands of fate.

“Ice, ice, ice, ice, ice.”

In her mind’s eye, she considered the slowly drifting shards of glass, the bullet crawling through the air. She said, “But
by now
this team has talked to the team in Arizona, bet your ass, talked to them sometime in the past fifteen or twenty minutes, so they know we can do the old herethere boogie.”

Dylan’s mind was spinning as fast as hers: “In fact, maybe one of Proctor’s previous experimental subjects pulled the same trick, so they
have
seen folding before.”

“The idea of a bunch of nano-whacked ginks running around with superpowers scares the hell out of them.”

“Who can blame ’em? Scares the hell out of me,” Dylan said, “even when the ginks are us.”

“Ice, ice, ice.”

Jilly said, “So when they come, they’re going to come in fast and blast the crap out of the house, hoping to kill us before we know they’re here and can do our folding routine.”

“This is what you think or what you know?”

She knew it, felt it,
saw
it. “They’re using armor-piercing rounds that’ll punch straight through the walls, through masonry, through anydamnthing.”

“Ice, ice, ice.”

“And worse than armor-piercing rounds,” she continued. “Lots worse. Stuff like…explosive rounds that throw off cyanide-coated shrapnel.”

She had never read about such hideous weapons, had never heard about them, but thanks to the new nanobot-engineered connections in her brain, she foresaw their use here. She heard ghost voices in her head, men’s voices talking about details of the attack at some point in the future, perhaps policemen sifting through the ruins of the house later today or tomorrow, perhaps the killers themselves engaged in a little nostalgic reminiscence about bloody destruction conducted with perfect timing and homicidal flair.

“Cyanide shrapnel, and God knows what else,” she continued, and shuddered. “When they’re finished with us, what Janet Reno did to the Branch Davidians will seem like a friendly Christian taffy pull.”

“Ice, ice, ice.”

With a new urgency, Dylan confronted Shep. “Open your eyes, buddy, get out of that hole, out of the ice, Shep.”

Shepherd kept his eyes closed.

“If you ever want cake again, Shep, open your eyes.”

“Ice, ice, ice.”

“He’s not close to coming around yet,” Dylan told Jilly. “He’s lost in there.”

“Upstairs,” she said. “It’s not going to be a picnic up there, but the downstairs is going to get chopped to pieces.”

Out at the garage, the guy stood up from the shadows, and the other guy stood up from the masking shrub. They started toward the house. They were coming at a run.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

J
ILLY SAID, “UPSTAIRS!” AND DYLAN SAID, “GO!” AND
Shepherd said, “Ice, ice, ice,” and a kink in Dylan’s mental wiring brought to mind that old dance-party hit “Hot, Hot, Hot” by Buster Poindexter, which might have struck him as funny under more congenial circumstances and if the idea of “Hot, Hot, Hot” as suitable death-throe music had not been so ghastly.

The stairs were at the front of the house, and two doors led out of the kitchen, one into the dining room, one into the lower hall. The second route would have been the safer of the two, less exposed to windows.

Jilly didn’t realize the hall option existed because that door was closed. She probably thought it was a pantry. She hurried out of the kitchen, into the dining room, before Dylan thought to direct her the other way.

He was afraid to take the hallway because he figured she might look back, fail to see him following her, and return here in search of him and Shep, or at least falter in her flight. A lost second might mean the difference between life and death.

Urging, pushing, all but lifting his brother, Dylan harried him forward. Shep shuffled, of course, but faster than he was accustomed to shuffling, still fretting about ice, ice, ice, the repetitions coming in threes, and he sounded more aggrieved with every step, unhappy about being driven like a wayward sheep.

Jilly had already reached the living room by the time Dylan and Shep got out of the kitchen. Shepherd balked slightly at the door, but he allowed himself to be herded forward.

Entering the dining room, Dylan half expected to see ten-year-old Shep working a puppy puzzle. As much as he had wanted to get out of that hateful night in the past, it seemed preferable to the present, which offered only the most fragile of bridges to any future whatsoever.

Shep protested his brother’s insistent prodding—“Ice, don’t, ice, don’t, ice, don’t”—and after crossing the dining room, he grabbed at the next doorjamb with both hands.

Before Shepherd could get a firm grip, before he could spread his legs and wedge his shoes against the jamb, Dylan shoved him into the living room. The kid stumbled and dropped to his hands and knees, which proved to be a fortuitous fall, for in that instant the gunmen opened fire.

The woodpecker-fast rapping of submachine guns—even noisier than they were in movies, as hard and loud as jackhammers knocking steel chisels through high-density concrete—shattered the stillness, shattered the kitchen windows, the dining-room windows. More than two submachine guns, perhaps three, maybe four. Underlying this extreme rapid fire came the lower-pitched, more reverberant, and slower-paced reports of what might have been a heavier-caliber rifle, something that sounded as though it had enough punch to knock the shooter on his ass with recoil.

At the first rattle of gunfire, Dylan pitched forward onto the living-room floor. He knocked Shepherd’s arms out from under him, dropping the kid off his hands and knees, flat on the tongue-and-groove maple.

“Where’s all the ice?” Shepherd asked, as though unaware of the ceaseless fusillades pumping into the house.

Following the shattering of the windows, following the ringing cascades of glass, wood splintered, plaster cracked, bullet-rapped pipes sang
plonk-plonk-plonk
in the walls.

Dylan’s heart raced rabbit-fast, and he knew what small game animals must feel like when their pastoral fields became killing grounds on the first day of hunting season.

The gunfire seemed to come from two directions only. Out of the east, toward the rear of the house. And out of the south.

If assassins were on all four sides of the structure—and he was sure they were—then to the west and north, they were lying low. They were too professional to establish a crossfire that might kill them or their comrades.

“Belly-crawl with me, Shep.” He raised his voice above the cacophony. “Belly-crawl, come on,
let’s scoot!
”

Shepherd hugged the floor, head turned toward Dylan but eyes closed. “Ice.”

The living room featured two south-facing windows, and four that presented a view to the west. The glass in the south wall had dissolved in the first instant of the barrage, but the west windows remained intact, untouched even by ricochets.

“Make like a snake,” Dylan urged.

Shep remained frozen: “Ice, ice, ice.”

Relentless raking volleys punched the south wall, penetrated to the living room, chopping wooden furniture into kindling, smashing lamps, vases. Scores of rounds punched upholstered furniture, each with a thick flat slap that unnerved Dylan, maybe because this might be what flesh sounded like when a bullet tore into it.

Although his face was inches from Shep’s face, Dylan shouted, partly to be sure he was heard above the din of gunfire, partly in the hope of stirring Shep to action, partly because he was angry with his brother, but mostly because he seethed again with that righteous rage he had first felt in the house on Eucalyptus Avenue, furious about the bastards who always had their way by force, who resorted to violence, first, second, last, and always. “Damn it, Shep, are you going to let them kill us the way they killed Mom? Cut us down and leave us here to rot? Are you going to let them get away with it
again?
Are you, Shep, damn you, Shep,
are you?
”

Lincoln Proctor had killed their mother, and these gunmen were opposed to Proctor and to his life’s work, but as far as Dylan was concerned, Proctor and these thugs were on the same team. They just wore different unit patches in the army of darkness.

Stirred either by Dylan’s passion and anger, or perhaps by the delayed realization that they were besieged, Shep stopped chanting
ice.
His eyes popped open. Terror had found him.

Dylan’s heart double-clutched, shifting first into neutral when it skipped a beat or two, then shifting into higher gear, because he thought Shep would fold them, right here and now, without Jilly, who had reached the front hall.

Instead, Shepherd decided to make like a snake. He polished the floor with his belly as he squirmed from the dining room doorway into the downstairs hall, angling across the northeast quadrant of the living room.

Raised on his forearms, locomoting on his elbows and on the toes of his shoes, the kid moved so fast that Dylan had trouble keeping up with him.

Chips of plaster, splinters of wood, chunks of foam padding, and other debris rained on them as they crawled. Between them and the south wall, a reassuring bulk of furniture absorbed or deflected the lower incoming rounds, while the rest passed over them.

Bullets whistled overhead, the sound of fate sucking air through its teeth, but Dylan didn’t yet hear any shrieking shards of whirling shrapnel, neither cyanide nor any other flavor.

A thin haze of plaster dust cast a dream pall over the room, and pillow feathers floated in the air, as thick as in a henhouse roiled by a fox.

Shep snaked into the hallway and might have kept going into the study if Jilly had not been lying prone at the foot of the stairs. She wriggled backward, blocked him, grabbed him by the loose seat of his jeans, and redirected him to the steps.

When not stopped by furniture or otherwise deflected, bullets penetrated the front hall through the open door to the living room. They also slammed into the south wall of the hallway, which was also the north wall of the living room. Impact with this second mass of wood and plaster stopped some rounds, but others punched through with plenty of killing force left.

Wheezing with fear more than with exertion, grimacing at the alkaline taste of plaster dust, gazing up from the floor, Dylan saw scores of holes in that wall. Some were no larger than a quarter, but a few were as big as his fist.

Bullets had hacked chips and chunks out of the handrail. They hacked another and another as he watched.

Several balusters had been notched. Two were shattered.

Those rounds that made it through the wall and past the stair railing were finally stopped by the north wall of hallway, which became the stairwell wall. Therein, the powerful rounds had spent the last of their energy, leaving the plaster as pocked and drilled as the backstop to a firing squad.

Even if Jilly and the brothers O’Conner, like a family of snake-imitating sideshow freaks, ascended the steps with a profile as low as that of a descending Slinky toy, they weren’t going to be able to reach the first landing unscathed. Maybe one of them would make it alive and whole. Maybe even two, which would be irrefutable proof of guardian angels. If miracles came in threes, however, they wouldn’t be miracles anymore; they would be common experience. Jilly or Shep, or Dylan himself, would be killed or gravely wounded in the attempt. They were trapped here, flat on the floor, inhaling plaster dust with a gasp, exhaling it with a wheeze, without options, without hope.

Then the gunfire abated and, within just three or four seconds, stopped altogether.

With the first phase of the assault completed in no more than two minutes, the assassins to the east and south of the house were falling back. Taking cover to avoid being wounded by crossfire.

Simultaneously, to the west and north of the house, other gunmen would be approaching at a run. Phase two.

The front door, in the west wall of the house, lay immediately behind Dylan, flanked by stained-glass sidelights. The study was to their left as they faced the first landing, just beyond the stairwell wall, and the study had three windows.

In phase two, the hallway would be riddled with such a storm of bullets that everything heretofore would seem, by comparison, like a mere tantrum thrown by belligerent children.

Taunting Death had granted them a mere handful of seconds in which to save themselves, and his skeletal fingers were spread wide to facilitate the sifting of time.

These same lightning calculations must have flashed through Jilly’s mind, for even as the echo of the last barrage still boomed through the house, she bolted to her feet in concert with Dylan. Without pause for even one word of strategic planning, they both reached down, grabbed Shep by his belt, and hauled him to his feet between them.

With the superhuman strength of adrenaline-flushed mothers lifting overturned automobiles off their trapped babies, they pulled Shep onto tiptoe and muscled him up the steps, against which his feet rapped, tapped, scraped, and occasionally even landed on a tread in such a way as to modestly advance the cause and assist them with a little upward thrust.

“Where’s all the ice?” Shep asked.

“Upstairs,” Jilly gasped.

“Where’s all the ice?”

“Damn it, buddy!”

“We’re almost there,” Jilly encouraged them.

“Where’s all the ice?”

The first landing loomed.

Shep hooked the toe of one foot under a tread.

They maneuvered him over it, onward, up.

“Where’s all the ice?”

The stained-glass sidelights dissolved in a roar of gunfire, and many sharp bony knuckles knocked fiercely against the front door, as if a score of determined demons with death warrants were demanding admission, splitting the wood, punching holes, and vibrations passed through the staircase underfoot as round after round smashed into the risers between the lower treads.