Pines (21 page)

His face was sheet-white, and he stared at Ethan with no expression at all, just blinking slowly, as if lost in some mesmerizing daydream.

He finally slid off the island and crashed through a bar stool and onto the floor.

* * *

In the bedroom closet, Ethan requisitioned a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a black hoodie. The shirt and jeans were a few sizes small, but nothing Ethan couldn’t manage. The tennis shoes he found were another matter. He could squeeze his feet into them, lace them up, but walking around was agony and guaranteed to produce blisters in no time.

The dead man’s boots, while much larger, looked promising.

Ethan tugged them off and kept adding layers of socks until his feet fit snugly inside.

It felt good to be clothed again, even better to be out of the rain in this warm apartment. There was a strong temptation to spend another half hour here, patching up what injuries he could, but he needed to keep moving. If a large group happened to search this floor, there’d be nowhere for him to run.

Ethan grabbed the flashlight, the machete, and went to the sink.

Spent a full minute with his mouth under the faucet, half-crazy with thirst and yet trying not to overload on water.

He opened the fridge.

Strange.

There were glass bottles of milk. Fresh veggies. A carton of eggs. Meat wrapped in butcher paper.

But nothing prepackaged.

He reached in, grabbed a bag of carrots and a small loaf of bread, crammed them down into the side pockets of his jeans.

Noise stopped Ethan as he headed for the door—voices and shouts welling up from Main Street.

He rushed back through the apartment to one of the large windows and moved just enough of the curtain for him to peek outside.

Twenty feet below: bedlam.

The buildings and storefronts glowed and darkened under the ceaseless exchange of firelight and shadow, the source of it all a giant bonfire raging in the middle of the street in spite of the rain, fueled with pine saplings and long strips of siding ripped from houses. Two men carried a wooden bench toward the blaze, Ethan watching as they heaved it onto the pyre to the great delight of the rain-drenched masses who packed the block, the concentration of bodies increasing with proximity to the flames.

The people below looked nothing like the residents he’d encountered prior to this moment.

Most had outfitted themselves in extravagant costumes.

Fake, gaudy jewelry dripped from the wrists and necks of women. Beaded necklaces and pearls and tiaras. Their faces were a-sparkle with glitter and heavily made-up, eyes
popping with eyeliner, and all scantily clad despite the cold and the rain, like a throng of reveling prostitutes.

The men looked equally absurd.

One wore a sports coat and no pants.

Another, dark slacks and red suspenders and no shirt with a Santa Claus hat perched atop his head. He pointed a baseball bat to the sky, the weapon stark white and covered with grotesque drawings of monsters that Ethan could barely see from his vantage point.

Standing on a brick planter, head and shoulders above the crowd, an immense figure caught his notice. The monstrous man was dressed in the fur of a brown bear—still pinned with his brass star—and he wore some sort of metal headpiece mounted with antlers, his face streaked with lurid war paint, a shotgun slung over one shoulder, a sheathed sword hanging off the other.

Pope.

The man surveyed the crowd like it was something he owned, the liquid pools of his eyes reflecting the bonfire like a pair of stars.

All he had to do was look up across the street, and in the wealth of firelight, he couldn’t fail to miss Ethan peeking down from the third-floor apartment.

He knew he should leave, but Ethan couldn’t turn away.

A segment of the crowd beyond Ethan’s line of sight erupted in shouts that caught Pope’s attention, a big smile expanding across the lawman’s face.

From an inner pocket in his bearskin coat, Pope took a clear, unlabeled bottle containing some brown liquid, raised it toward the sky, and said something that ignited the crowd into a frenzy of fist-pumping cheers.

While Pope took a long pull from his bottle, the crowd began to part, a corridor forming down the middle of Main Street, everyone straining to see.

Three figures appeared, moving through the crowd toward the bonfire.

The outer two—men dressed in dark clothes with machetes dangling from shoulder straps—held the person in the middle by her arms.

Beverly.

Ethan felt something dislodge inside him, a molten core of rage metastasizing in the pit of his stomach.

He could see that she didn’t have the strength to stand, her feet sliding across the pavement as her captors dragged her along. One of her eyes was closed from what must have been a savage blow, and what he could see of her face was covered in blood.

But she was conscious.

Conscious and terrified, her gaze fixed on the wet pavement under her feet like she was attempting to shut out everything else.

The two men toted her to within ten yards of the bonfire and then pushed her forward, releasing her.

Pope shouted something as Beverly crumpled to the ground.

The people in her immediate vicinity pressed back, forming a circle of open space around her, twenty feet in diameter.

Through the window, Ethan heard Beverly crying.

She sounded like a wounded animal—something so desperate in her high-pitched keening.

Everywhere, people were elbowing their way through the crowd, trying to reach the outskirts of the circle, the cluster of bodies forming the perimeter becoming tighter and tighter.

Pope tucked the bottle back into his coat and took hold of his shotgun.

He pumped it, aimed it at the sky.

The report echoed between the buildings, rattling the glass in the window frame.

The crowd fell silent.

No one moved.

Ethan could hear the rainfall again.

Beverly struggled to her feet and wiped away a line of blood running down the middle of her face. Even from this third-floor window, Ethan couldn’t miss the quaking that had enveloped her, the all-encompassing fear that consumes a person who knows exactly what horrible thing they’re about to experience.

Beverly stood teetering in the rain, favoring her left foot.

She turned slowly, hobbling, taking in the surrounding faces, and though Ethan couldn’t hear her words, the tone of her voice was unmissable.

Imploring.

Desperation.

Rain and tears and blood streaming down her face.

A full minute elapsed.

Someone shouldered his way through the mass of people and broke out into the circle.

Cheers erupted.

Wild applause.

It was the shirtless man with red suspenders and a Santa hat.

At first, he lingered on the edge as if steeling himself—a boxer in his corner, moments before the bell.

Someone handed him a bottle.

He tilted it back, took a long, reckless swig.

Then he gripped his painted bat and stumbled out into the circle.

Toward Beverly.

He circled her.

She backed away, veering close to the edge of the crowd.

Someone gave her a hard shove out into the middle of the circle, the momentum propelling her straight at the man with the bat.

Ethan didn’t see it coming.

Neither did Beverly.

Happened fast, as if the man decided at the last possible second.

A single, fluid motion.

Raised the bat and swung.

The sound of maple striking skull made Ethan instinctively shut his eyes and turn away.

The crowd roared.

When he opened them again, Beverly was on the ground, struggling to crawl.

Ethan felt a surge of bile threatening to surface.

The man in the Santa hat dropped the bat on the pavement and strutted off into the crowd.

The bat rolled across the road toward Beverly.

She reached for it, her fingers inches away.

A woman wearing a black bikini, black heels, a black crown, and black angel wings stepped into the circle.

She preened.

The crowd cheered.

The woman strolled across to where Beverly lay straining for the bat.

She squatted down, flashed Beverly a bright, toothy smile, and lifted the weapon, gripping it in both hands and raising it above her head like the battle-ax of some demon queen.

No, no, no, no, no...

She smashed it into the dead center of Beverly’s back.

Screams of joy filled the street as Beverly writhed on the ground.

What he’d have given to be hovering in a Black Hawk two hundred feet above Main in control of a GAU-19 Gatling, burning two thousand rounds per minute into the crowd, cutting these motherfuckers in half.

Ethan turned away from the window, lifted the coffee table with both hands, and slammed it into the wall, wood splintering, glass shattering.

The effort only whetted his rage.

He craved violence, a small voice inside him suggesting he go down there into the crowd with the machete right now and hack away. Yes, they would eventually overpower him, but God there was nothing he wanted more than to go slashing through the masses, a one-man massacre.

But then you’ll die.

Never see your family again.

Never know what any of this was all about.

Ethan returned to the window.

Beverly lay unmoving on the street, a lake of blood widening around her head.

The circle was breaking down and closing in.

Then all at once, the mob descended upon her.

It was a betrayal to leave, but he couldn’t bear to stand there and watch, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it—five hundred people versus one.

There’s nothing you can do for her. She’s gone. Now go while
you
still can.

As Ethan stormed back toward the door, he heard Beverly cry out, the sound of her pain, her utter hopelessness, bringing tears to his eyes.

Calm down.

There could be people outside this door waiting for you.

Must be vigilant.

Ethan stepped out into the hallway.

Empty.

He shut the apartment door.

The commotion on Main became an indistinct murmur.

He wiped his eyes and headed back the way he’d come, up the hallway and then through the door to the stairwell.

On the third-floor landing, he hesitated, listening, staring down through the railing.

No sound.

No movement.

Eerily still.

He descended.

At the bottom, he cracked open the door just wide enough so he could squeeze through.

A sliver of light escaped into the alley.

Ethan stepped down into a puddle and closed the door.

It rained harder than before.

For thirty seconds, he didn’t move, waiting for his eyes to readjust to the darkness.

Then, pulling the hood over his head, he moved south, up the middle of the alley.

In the distance, rain poured through the spherical illumination of a streetlamp, but otherwise, the darkness between the buildings was so complete Ethan couldn’t see his feet beneath him.

The crowd exploded with its loudest roar yet.

He thought of Beverly, had to stop himself from imagining what was happening to her, his grip tightening around the machete, molars grinding together.

Footsteps up ahead brought Ethan to a sudden halt.

He stood thirty feet back from where the alley intersected the next street, confident of his invisibility in the shadows.

A man in a dark slicker walked into view, heading west from Main.

He stopped under the streetlamp and stared into the alley.

He held a hatchet and a flashlight.

Ethan could hear the rain pattering on his jacket.

The man crossed the street and came into the alley.

Turned his flashlight on, shined the light at Ethan.

“Who’s there?”

Ethan could see his own breath steaming in the cold.

“It’s me,” Ethan said, starting toward him. “Have you seen him?”

“Me who?”

The light was still in Ethan’s face, and he hoped the man could see him smiling, hoped he grasped the madness that was coming his way.

The man’s eyes went wide as Ethan drew close enough for him to see bruises and blood streaks and stitches and the general ruin of his face, but his reaction—cocking the hatchet back for a strike—came a half second late.

Ethan swung the blade parallel to the ground with a single-handed grip that generated enough force to split him open across the middle.

The man’s legs buckled, his knees hit the ground, and Ethan finished him with three devastating slashes.

He began to run, buzzing with the rush of the kill like he’d done a hit of speed.

Ethan streaked out of the alley and across Seventh.

Right—a half dozen points of light two blocks down moving up the street toward the center of town.

Left—fifty or more people flooding around the corner from Main, flashlights winking on as they encountered the darkness of the side street.

Ethan accelerated, blasting into the next alley, no lights ahead, but over his own panting, he could hear multiple footsteps falling in behind his.

He glanced back—a wall of light thundering down the alley.

People shouting.

Up ahead, Eighth Street fast approaching.

He needed a course change, was already calculating the possibilities, but he couldn’t pull the trigger until he saw what lay ahead.

Ethan exploded onto Eighth.

Left—no one.

Right—a single light two blocks away.

Ethan veered right, moving at a dead run as he angled across the street.

Leaped over the curb and hit the opposite sidewalk, nearly tripping over a raised lip of concrete, but he somehow managed to stay afoot.

Twenty yards carried him to the next block west of Main, and he looked back two seconds before he made the turn, saw the first group of lights emerging out of the alley.

If he was lucky, they hadn’t seen him.