In The Falling Light (4 page)

Cesar grinned broadly, then his mind started
clicking. First off, the pathetic armload of pillow cases wouldn’t
be close to enough. He’d have to find luggage – plenty of that up
here – and start loading. He would stage the cases near the attic
door, then make trips downstairs. The mansion had a mini-van to be
used for emergencies or light errands, and Cesar had the key. He
would back the van to the kitchen door and start loading. How many
trips? Didn’t matter, he had all night. He’d try to be quiet so as
not to wake the old woman, but if he did, what did that matter
either? He could smother her easily, leave her in the bed, let the
doctors wonder if she had simply died in her sleep. As for Cesar?
They’d think he got scared when she died and took off, maybe try to
charge him with negligence or car theft, but it wouldn’t make any
difference. It was only Tuesday, and she wouldn’t be missed until
Saturday. By then he’d have dumped the van and would be in South
America, rich as a Latin dictator.

“Thanks, Jevon,” he whispered, chuckling,
and then noticed the ladder. It was small, too small for a child,
something for a doll’s bunk bed maybe, leaning up against the open
shelving of the vault. The shelf it reached looked more depleted of
stacks than the others. Was that the shelf where Rosie got her
money? He pointed the flashlight in there and saw a stack of
business envelopes. She could get to the attic? That was a lot of
stairs, but he supposed she could, he had seen her walking
virtually unassisted outdoors. But why the ladder? The shelf would
only come to her waist, there’d be no need for it, and she probably
couldn’t climb it anyway.

Something bit deeply into his right ankle,
and Cesar screamed, spinning, dropping the flashlight. It rolled to
the base of the vault and stopped, the beam at floor level. A
stuffed animal, a bear with patches of fur missing, was attached to
his ankle, biting –
biting?
– deep into his flesh. He tried
to kick it free but it hung on, small paws raking red furrows in
his shin as it clawed for a better hold. Cesar shook his leg
wildly, his breath coming fast, and then there was a metallic
squeak and a new pain, this one sharper, his other ankle, a deep
slice into the tendon. He screamed and had a moment to see a small
figure beside him, something a foot tall and wearing a black cone
for a hat, closing a long, gleaming pair of sewing scissors. Then
his severed tendon took him to the floor.

“
Eeeeeeee!”
A high-pitched screaming
came from all around as small shapes leaped upon him from atop
boxes and furniture, landing and sinking nails and teeth into his
hands and thighs and cheeks. He kicked out, hitting the flashlight
and making it roll, and in the crazy white light he saw dolls and
puppets and more stuffed animals, all old and worn from long-ago
use. They were stitched and patched, missing eyes and limbs, but
the eyes they did have blazed with a silvery light, and their
mouths were filled with tiny, sharp teeth. They shrieked and
squealed as they covered him, biting and biting.

The scissors plunged into his left thigh,
and Cesar screamed again, arching his back like a wrestler on the
wooden floor, the toys hanging on like obscene cowboys in a hellish
rodeo. Cesar saw the thing with the scissors, a doll twelve inches
high with a black cone hat, tiny black beads for eyes. It was
grinning with evil little teeth. He recognized it, the toy which
Rosie had been playing with as a child in the photo.

This is me with Pumpkin.

Pumpkin yanked out the bloody scissors with
two hands, then drove them in over his head like a whaler with a
harpoon, burying them to the handles in Cesar’s belly just above
his left hip. He gasped, eyes snapping wide as it pierced flesh and
then organs. A dark jet of liquid spurted onto the vault door,
spattering the grinning doll. It looked into his face with its
silvery eyes and snickered.

Cesar tore the creatures off his face, and
they took away bites of his flesh as they went. He pounded his
fists at them, forcing them off, but they came right back, biting
anew. He thrashed, his impressive strength sending toys flying,
crushing several, ripping others apart with his hands. He was
screaming nonstop now, his wails rising and falling, and he flipped
to his stomach and started crawling. They leaped upon him, and he
felt the scissors stab into one butt cheek, missing his scrotum by
an inch. His only thought now was survival, safety. He saw a huge
steamer trunk standing open in the gloom not far away, big enough
for a man, big enough for him. He fast-crawled to it, leaving a
bloody trail, then turned and began slapping and pulling madly at
the dozens of toy creatures still biting at him. He threw them, he
twisted off their heads, he pounded them with his big fists. With a
last kick at a china doll with a fractured face, he heaved himself
into the trunk and pulled it closed with a thump, landing in a thin
layer of old dresses that smelled of mothballs. His searching hands
found a pair of garment straps set in the interior of the lid, and
he pulled down on them, hanging on to keep the trunk closed.

“
Eeeeeeeee!”
A chorus of tiny shrieks
from outside the trunk as dozens of little fists began pounding the
walls in fury.

Cesar realized he was screaming, and forced
himself to shut up. His breathing was ragged, his body afire with
pain, and the deepest wound of all, the one in his side, was
pulsing. That was a bad one, and it would kill him if he didn’t get
medical help soon. He pressed a palm against it, feeling blood
sliding through his fingers.

And then it got quiet, the pounding and
unholy screeching stopping suddenly. Silence except for Cesar’s
harsh breath.

A moment later he heard the soft shushing
noise of rubberized hospital socks on a wooden floor. “What’s this?
What’s this?” Rosie’s dry voice floated through the trunk. The lid
moved, someone trying to lift it, and Cesar held it down with both
hands.

“Lyle? Are you in there, dear?”

He let go of the strap with a gasp of
relief, and the old woman slowly lifted it open. In the muted glare
of the flashlight she looked down at the shivering, bloody man
curled in the bottom of the trunk. “Oh, my!”

“Rosie,” Cesar gasped, tears in his eyes,
“thank God you…”

“Oh, my, he’s still alive.” Rosie shook her
head, as Pumpkin leaped into the trunk with a shrill little cry,
scissors raised. Cesar screamed and held up his hands as the old
woman let the lid drop back into place.

She was slumped in her chair in a doze, the
morning sun beaming through lace curtains and warming the parlor.
She snored lightly, and drooled into her afghan. A sound brought
her around, and she lifted her head, focusing runny eyes on the
small figure before her, standing a few feet away beneath a coffee
table, hugging one of the legs. It had black bead eyes and a black
cone for a hat.

“Hello, Pumpkin,” she said, smiling.

The doll hid its face shyly behind the table
leg, then peeked out again.

“I’ll have the agency send over another one
right away.”

Pumpkin smiled with sharp little teeth.

“Would you like a cookie, dear?”

Cheap carpet was making her nose itch,
rubbing a slow burn across the side of her face as the van bumped
and swayed. Zip ties at her ankles and wrists cut her skin, and the
duct tape across her mouth reeked of the man who put it there.
Cassie tried desperately to slow her racing heart as her mother’s
words came back to her.

“Predators hunt the Silver River Mall.”

She should have listened a long time
ago.

Terrence Cobb tried to focus on the road,
but the twelve-year-old in back kept pulling his attention, the
excitement giving him dry mouth. The snatch had been easy, the girl
standing alone at the end of the sidewalk just down from the movie
theatre, far from security lights. She’d been so surprised that she
didn’t even have a chance to put up a fight. Terrence watched his
headlights sweep across the empty blacktop and endless trees,
checking his mirrors, seeing they were clear. Focus, he told
himself. He could relive it all later.

Barringer Road was a body dump. Terrence had
used it three times before, but he wasn’t the only one. People
settling old scores, ending marriages with a shovel blade, even
others like him had been leaving their problems out here for years.
An eleven mile stretch of two lane asphalt tracing lazy curves
through deep woods, Barringer Road cut across from US 14 to County
Road 107 without a single inhabitant to disrupt the solitude.
Dozens of turn-outs, deserted camp sites and dead end logging roads
ensured the privacy Terrence craved, and its distance from
population made it impractical for the law to patrol with any
regularity.

He had scouted his spot weeks earlier, an
overgrown pair of ruts that dead-ended a mile in at a cluster of
old stumps, long unused and out of screaming distance. Terrence had
placed a yellowing deer skull on the shoulder near the turn-off to
mark it. Now the headlights picked it out in the darkness ahead,
lifeless sockets staring into the night like a harbinger of what
was to come.

Cassie felt the van slow and turn, now
lurching over a rougher surface, branches cracking under the tires.
She was sweating, and her dark hair hung across her face in wet
strands, her heart speeding. The zip ties were cranked down
tightly. The man was strong, had thrown her effortlessly into the
van.

Within minutes they reached the dead end,
and Terrence shut off the headlights. He preferred moonlight for
this part of it, the cold whiteness washing away all color. His
hands trembled as he moved to the side door, patting his pants
pocket for the reassuring weight of the big folding knife, his old
companion.

He wiped the back of his hand across his
lips and rolled open the door, gazing at the girl lying on her
side. Her dark eyes were wide and watching him over the silver
tape, her shallow chest heaving.

“Almost home, sweetheart,” he said,
smiling.

And then the girl arched her back and
snapped the zip ties like they were paper instead of hard plastic.
Her body contorted, enlarging with a ripple of muscle and an
explosion of coarse hair, hands curling to talons, her face
extending into a snapping muzzle.

Terrence stumbled backwards and started to
scream, but the adolescent werewolf was on him in a second, bearing
him to the ground, pulling his ribcage open and tearing into his
throat with a violent thrash of her snout. Hot liquid sprayed
across the side of the van, black in the starlight.

He died staring at the moon.

Later, her belly full and satisfied, Cassie
loped through the forest on all fours, heading home. She couldn’t
wait to tell the pack about her first solo kill, and to hug her
Mom, thank her for her good advice.

Real
predators hunted the Silver
River Mall.

Hurricane Sophie, a Category-5 nightmare,
swept in off the Gulf on September 16
^th
, devastating the
coastal regions. Everyone had seen the giant coming, swift and
terrible, but despite widespread evacuations she savaged all she
came in contact with, flinging her destructive arms wide. Corpus
Christi vanished, and pieces of obliterated oil platforms as well
as entire tankers were cast ten miles inland.

She tore north across the Hill Country, into
the Big Country, and failed to drop to a Cat-3 as predicted by the
time she reached Leesville, population 18,000, located in a county
which averaged only seventeen people per square mile. Along with
her merciless winds, Sophie brought rain. Lots of rain.

Everyone expected flooding. Central Texas
was known as Flash Flood Alley, and every fire department was
trained and equipped for swift water rescue. Most flooding deaths
were the result of people trying to cross moving water,
underestimating the force and weight of the currents, and every
year the news ran footage of some fool standing on the roof of his
pickup amid white water, waving his arms while people worked to
save him. For the most part, this was the type of rescue firemen in
rural Texas were trained for. Helicopter crewmen were similarly
trained to descend on cables to pluck folks from rooftops and
trees.

No one expected Sophie to come this far,
with such force.

No one imagined what was approaching, and by
the time her full fury was realized, it was too late.

Dell McCall straddled the peak of his roof
as if he was riding one of his horses, facing his family. They were
straddling too, all in a line like half-drowned crows. Above them
the sky was a boiling mix of black and charcoal, clouds tumbling
over one another as rain slashed down in dark curtains. Water
poured down their faces, and they tried to wipe it from their eyes
and hold onto the roof at the same time. The wind was a woman’s
scream.

Arlene, Dell’s wife of twenty-two years,
hugged their two-year-old Dylan to her chest as she looked at her
other two children. Their seventeen-year-old was closest to her,
and Ricky, eleven, rode the roof behind her.

“Bailey, I want you to climb over your
brother and sit so you’re facing me again.”

“I’ll fall!”

“You won’t fall. I’ve seen you ride in the
rain plenty of times. You just hold on tight, you can do it.”
Arlene said something else, but it was lost in the wind. When her
voice came back it was firm. “Go on, now.” Bailey nodded but stayed
put.

“Once you’re set, you’re going to scooch
backwards all the way to the chimney, put your back hard against
it. You understand me?”