Moving Day: A Thriller (32 page)

They are not trained dogs. They may smell him initially, but his scent will disappear at the edge of the pond, and they will not know where he has emerged. They won’t know his exit point. Untrained dogs, they may not be able to pick up his trail again at all, crossed as it will be with deer, muskrat, rabbit, the wildlife that certainly comes to drink at the far side of this pond. And that will buy him some time. Anything to buy some time.

It’s not that the knowledge is coming back to him. It’s that it never left. It is still somehow in him, in the quick of his being, from the time he was seven, and something in him so long practically qualifies as instinct.

The pond, it turns out, is shallow enough to walk across. It never reaches higher than his chest. He is able to hold the shoes up, wade across through the muck, pebbles, rocks, weeds, frogs, and snakes to the other side. Better not to have to swim. Better to conserve his strength.

He works his way through the night around to the barn. Comes at it from the far side, to minimize the chance they will see any movement in the charcoal dark.

He can’t outrun the dogs. It is open land right here, low scrub, so he has to keep moving. While he might make it to the woods, might even make it through the woods to a road, might get a ride, the odds are good that they will eventually find him, by alerting the rest of their crazy militia to keep an eye out for him, by using his escape as a chance to awaken the bloodthirst of a hundred waiting soldiers. Whereas if he stays within the compound, he has to deal only with them. Within the compound, he is their problem to solve. An enemy now known to him. And there is a lot of acreage.

He remembers lying in open fields, sleeping in them, but there is no option of that here. They are too close to him already. They know he is here, and they are looking.

Lying in open fields, in cold, in fear. Feelings, memories, he has pushed away. Now he will not merely remember it all. Now he will relive it.

There were barns then, too. That winter—huddling into the stenchy warmth of the sheep. With Abel, only two years older than Peke, sneaking into a barn when the lights of the farmhouse went out, leaving it at the first crowing of the roosters, their strutting alarm clock hustling Abel and him back out into the cold fields before the farmer arrived. Once, exhausted, he and Abel overslept. The farmer came in before dawn, before the rooster’s crowing. Peke opened his eyes to see the farmer staring at them. And then the farmer turned away wordlessly and went about his work as if he had never seen them.

He and Abel came in the next night, and in the morning, the same thing happened. The farmer stared, then turned away and went about his work. This time even leaving the barn before Peke and Abel did.

This went on, might have gone on indefinitely, until one morning Abel asked, with an overweening politeness and deference—a nine-year-old’s best effort at formality—if there was something, anything, for them to eat or drink.

The farmer began screaming, cursing, throwing hay at them. As if his fury had been building, and yet he did not lash out in any physical way, and once he had finished his round of furious cursing, he turned to his chores once again, just as before. And as for the hay he’d thrown—they had to suppress their laughter.

They discussed whether they should continue to sleep in the barn. The farmer, for all his cursing, had not hurt them, after all. But Abel with his caution prevailed, arguing that despite the bitter cold, despite sacrificing the warmth of the barn and the docile sheep’s thick winter coats, they should sleep at the edge of the field. The seven-year-old Peke had protested violently. Even hardened to it as they were, the cold was almost unbearable at that time of year. But Abel remained firm.

In the morning they awoke to a military truck pulling up to the barn, and voices. They could just see, over the tops of the protective weeds, three uniformed soldiers and the farmer, talking, gesticulating.

Their small, skimming lives were lived dodging, skirting, alert for those big, uniformed, hulking, gleaming presences. Their shiny belts and boots, their ruddy faces, their big, gruff voices, their sheer size, their pure power. A seven-year-old boy and his barely older protector, always watching them. Gauging their every mood, their every movement, reading their gesticulations, their tone. A necessary preoccupation, for the purpose of survival.

They’re the champs, the winners
, thought the seven-year-old boy. He wanted to join them, be part of them somehow, but Abel said he couldn’t.

The soldiers made some final gestures of annoyance to the farmer and got back into their truck.

Peke and Abel would have been finished. But Abel saved them.

And when the time came, Peke could not do the same for Abel.

Peke knew barns. A barn could be sanctuary, salvation. A barn could be a trap, a cemetery.

In the dark, he slips the key into the padlock. He unclips the padlock, quickly works off the metal strap beneath, pulls the heavy door open, slips behind it and into the darkness. He pulls the door closed and feels around on the door’s inside to see if there is a hook to clip the padlock to and lock the door from inside. Yes. Good. They’ll have to work it off, bend the lock, maybe destroy the door’s hardware. It will give him another minute or two. Maybe more.

He remembers there is a path, an unobstructed aisle, down the center of the barn. He feels his way along that, knocks his foot on an object or two, but it doesn’t stop him. Nothing will.

It is unfortunate his own possessions are gone. He knows where particular things might be. Tools. Wire. But there must be much else to choose from here. Barn implements. The possessions of other victims. If he could just see. Because it is pitch black. The cloudiness, the moonlessness, is an advantage in being unseen, a disadvantage in seeing.

Before, while he waited here in the barn for the truck to arrive, to load his things, he saw the generator at the back. Rusty orange. Substantial. Survivalists, off the grid, he remembers thinking on seeing it. A generator—of course. The lights undoubtedly connect
directly to it. If he turns on the generator, though, they’ll come running when they see the lights. But it would give him a chance to find things. A minute or so. Maybe less. To cobble together some kind of defense. Locate some kind of weapon. He has no idea what he’ll find. But this is a barn, after all. He will be prepared to think fast—to improvise, to think ahead—in that minute or so of light.

He stumbles along the aisle to where he remembers the primitive generator. Feeling the objects, trying to see anything, as he makes his way along.

He reaches where he remembers the generator being. Tucked at the bottom of a ladder leading to a small loft. He reaches out blindly to where he saw the generator, and his hands soon find its cold metal surfaces.

He takes a breath in preparation. It will be a moment of light. A moment of illumination that—ironically—will summon the Nazis. That will bring the dogs. That will bring an unknown outcome charging toward him.

He feels around the generator’s bulky shape to find its start cord. He grips it, pulls hard. Nothing. He feels a wave of panic rise in him like liquid. He struggles to quell it, to push it down. The night isn’t cold. It should start. He pulls hard again. The generator rumbles on. The overhead lights flicker, then glare. The light visible, he knows, through the high slats at the crease of the barn’s roof.

He hears the barking immediately. A bloodthirsty chorus. Next to the generator, leaned against the ladder, there is a rusty old spade. A pile of old tire chains. A sledgehammer.

Some coils of rope a few yards away. He hustles over to them, throws them over his shoulder, hustles back to the generator.

The dogs are coming closer. It sounds like only a couple hundred yards now. The fragile, rusty inside lock will not keep them out for long. But maybe long enough.

In the light, he can see the generator’s little choke. He pulls it, and the generator momentarily runs on high, spewing smoke and fumes into the barn. He lets go of the little choke lever in order to trace the path of the wire that runs from the generator to the wall—obviously the wire for the lights—and at the point where the wire reaches the wall and begins its climb up the side of the barn, he slams the spade’s blade several times into it, until the wire severs. He is plunged into the safety of darkness. He leaves the generator running. In the dark now, he feels for the little choke again, pulls it to spew more smoke, more fumes, more noise into the barn. This time, he wedges a little piece of wood from the barn floor against the choke lever, to keep the choke on high. To keep the smoke, the fumes, the noise, spewing maximally into the closed barn.

Pork finds the barn’s side door wedged shut. He struggles with it uselessly. “Fuck.” The old Colonel, the three skinheads—all awake now, all together, all invigorated by the chase—walk once with their flashlights around the barn, a building they don’t know, have never been to, and determine that the side door is the best possible entrance.

So they return to it. “Fuck.” Big, beefy Dustin rams himself into the door repeatedly, furiously, to no avail. “I could drive my truck into it,” he says angrily. But the Colonel holds up his hand, turns, and silently jogs—with a concise, purposeful, military confidence—the hundred yards or so to his own pickup truck. He returns with some heavy screwdrivers. They begin the process of prying the door off its hinges, the dogs barking furiously, annoyingly, around them.

When the door comes off, the skinheads hoot with victory like Indian warriors. The smoke tumbles out. But that hardly deters them.

The dogs rush straight toward the noisy, belching generator—the source of commotion, the logical place to charge to—then stop there for a moment, confused. They smell nothing but smoke. They can hear nothing but the loud, belching machine. Their two acute exploratory senses—smell and hearing—are momentarily useless. Their sullen looks betray that, and their next sense, sight, is as inept in the dark as it is for the men who come up right behind them.

The three skinheads stumbling in on the heels of the dogs are not much different from the animals preceding them. Packed together, plunging forward unthinking, newly motivated by increased proximity to the prize, the increased excitement of the game. They have quickly blocked the door, to not let the Jew escape, and in moments they stand at the generator, alongside the dogs, their flashlight beams eerie—and not much use—in the smoke. The old Colonel, only a little bit slower, is right behind them.

The barn lights are out, but the generator is humming. The light switch must be near the generator, because the Jew must have started the generator to briefly switch on the lights, before switching them off again. They will turn on the lights and find him, hiding somewhere in here. That must be why he turned the lights back off.

Lights off, lights on. Darkness, illumination. People of the darkness, people of the light. The chosen, the unchosen. The children of God, the seed of Satan.

From amid the smoke, a heavy, rusty black object swings and lands against the big, beefy skinhead’s skull. It catches him fully, resoundingly, on the side of the skull, and he crumples silently, doll-like—that outsize form, that blustery, ceaseless aggression, so powerfully present until the previous moment, and then so utterly absent in the next.

Before any of them can understand what’s happened—as the dogs bark in blind, confused reaction, as the other skinheads and the Colonel turn instinctively amid the generator smoke and noise
and thick dark to process what has just occurred—the object lands against the skull of the second skinhead. The force of the spade—the Colonel can make it out this time, a rusty black spade—makes contact with the second skinhead’s skull, and his flashlight goes flying into the smoke and across the barn.

The flashlights are like convenient beacons, the Colonel will soon realize, guides in the fog, helping the spade accurately land its blows.

The second skinhead, Pork, the muscled one, staggers a moment, standing stunned—the side of his face in a single stroke a paste of bone and blood and torn flesh—then kneels, then curls to the unforgiving barn floor in anguished moans.