Rockinghorse (29 page)

“Hang on, people,” Mark said. “Just hang on.”

“I've about reached the end of my rope,” Tracy said.

Jackie looked at her. “Then tie a knot, mother.”

The two troop commanders from North Georgia held a very short conversation on a Tac frequency, then both squalled to a halt at widely separated county sheriff's offices, mutually agreed upon on the air. They finished their initial conversation via Ma Bell.

“You believe in ghosts, Carl?” Al asked.

“I don't know. Maybe. I got mixed feelings about it.”

“The number of men missing, you counted them up?”

“Yeah. I know what you're driving at. 666—right? ”

Al Johnson looked at the local deputy, who was looking strangely at him. “You real sure you want to hear this?”

“I think I need to go to the bathroom,” the deputy said.

“Good idea.”

When the deputy had left the room, quietly closing the door behind him, Al said, “Listen to me, Carl. The FBI's been working on this Brotherhood thing for months. You remember Carson, out of Waycross?”

“Yeah. I heard he went hard underground. Haven't heard anything out of him in a long time, though.”

“You won't. He's dead.”

“What!”

“The lab boys are still working on what they think is his body. But they're pretty sure it's Carson. It's my understanding you were about to be notified of a joint federal/state strike in Edmund County. It's due to go down next month.”

“But you think that'll be too late?”

“That's a big 10–4. How many men did you bring up with you?”

“Two. You?”

“Same.”

“Where in Edmund County were they going to hit?”

“That, partner, is something I don't know. It pissed me off that I had to learn all I know from the grapevine, so to speak.”

“I do know the feeling. Sometimes I get the impression that certain hotdogs look down on us plain ol' highway cops.”

“Another big 10–4. Kind of like some of us do local deputies, Carl?”

Carl laughed. “Yeah, I heard that.”

“So where is your missing Kyle supposed to be holed up?”

“At the old Bowers Plantation home. You know it?”

“Yeah. Big ol' spooky place. I'll meet you in Palma.”

“See you.”

* * *

The men removed two doors from rooms and nailed those over the splintered door leading to the ground level. The trio of women had warned them all of the empty jugs and other crates down there—crates that looked just like the one Anne's grandfather had risen out of.

“I wonder who those hands once belonged to?” Karen asked.

“And where are Lige's eyes?” Louisa asked.

“And what happens next?” Mimi asked.

As if in reply, a crude arrow hummed through an open window and imbedded itself in the soft back of a sofa.

“Didn't take them long,” Kyle said, pulling the arrow out and looking at it. “Keep all candles out. Don't expose yourselves to the windows.”

And then Lucas grinned as his brother's voice cut through the night.

“Let's talk, Lucas,” Ira yelled. “You're beat and you know it. But we can make a deal. How about it?”

“This ought to be interesting,” Kyle said.

Lucas walked to a window and stood with his back to the wall, staying out of the open window. “What have you got in mind, Ira?”

“Come outside and we'll talk. I guarantee you'll be safe.”

Lucas laughed at that. “I may be a city boy, brother, but I'm not stupid. We'll talk this way.”

“Come on, Lucas. Don't you trust your own flesh and blood?”

“Say what you have to say, Ira. And cut the bullshit.”

“You disappoint me, brother. I'm offering you your life.”

“I'm still very much alive, Ira,” Lucas reminded him.

“But as they say, brother, the night is young.”

Lucas whispered to Kyle. “I get the feeling he's stalling.”

“Yeah. I'm going to inspect the guard posts. He's up to something. Keep him talking.”

Kyle disappeared into the darkness of the house.

“What kind of deal, Ira?”

“It don't have to be you, brother. Just a member of the family. It don't make any difference how far back the relation goes, just a member of the family will do.”

“He's talking about me,” Anne said. “We're very distantly related.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lucas said.

“And the Jews,” Lucas recognized his uncle's voice. “Them, too.”

“That's all you got to do, brother,” Ira called. “Just send them out and the rest of you leave. Simple as that.”

“I think we'll all stay together,” Lucas called.

“Then you're a damn fool, brother!”

At the north end of the house, Kyle waited by a window, a short spear in his hands. He had detected movement in the darkness, and suspected the Brotherhood was slipping up on them; perhaps attempting to get one or two people inside the house.

Kyle had other ideas.

He could hear Lucas still talking to his nutty brother. He could tell Jim/Ira was getting angry, on the edge of losing control. Good. That would be just fine.

A shoe or boot scraped on the veranda. Kyle tensed, big hands gripping the spear. His eyes could just make out the shape of a man standing in front of the open window Kyle had opened.

Kyle jammed the spear hard, the butcher knife sinking deep into human flesh.

The man screamed in pain as the blade ripped into his stomach. Kyle pulled the blade out and jammed it again. This time the blade caught the man in the chest. He howled and coughed and fell off the veranda.

Kyle heard the
wang
of a bow string releasing. He cut his eyes to Paul, then to a smushing/cracking noise. A man had taken the steel-tipped arrow through the side of his face, just where the jaw connected, the arrow driving all the way through. The man's mouth made horrible sounds, indecipherable as the arrow prevented the jaw from working. He ran into the night, dropping his club.

The man's “
Uhh, uhh, uhhing,”
faded as he ran further from the house.

“They're in the house!” Jan yelled.

“Stand firm,” Kyle told Paul

“I will,” the man said, a sureness in his voice.

Kyle collided with a man in the hall. He recoiled as he recognized the man.

Highway Patrolman Lancer.

“Die!” Lancer said.

“No way, buddy! ” Kyle said. He jammed stiffened fingers into the man's throat, hit the man with a short hard left, slammed a right into the man's belly, and brought his knee up into the man's face as he doubled over. Lancer's nose smashed and blood squirted. Kyle kicked him in the face twice as he was going down. Then, for added insurance, Kyle kicked him hard in the throat. Even if the man lived through his crushed throat, he was out of action for the duration.

Kyle heard the throaty roar of the chain saw being jerked to life. With that thing roaring and slicing, Kyle could stop worrying about the front of the house.

“You son of a bitch!” Joe Bowers snarled at Lucas. Using a homemade battering ram, the men of the Brotherhood had splintered the front door.

Lucas lifted the chain saw and cut his uncle's jaw off.

Teeth, bone, and blood flew in all directions as the spinning teeth of the chain mangled the man's face.

Turning, Lucas lifted the saw just as a man raised a club to hit him.

The man's arm, from the elbow down, spun away to spat wetly against a wall. The man howled in pain and disbelief.

Lucas laid the roaring chain saw on top of a man's head and held it there. The teeth bit through the skull, tried to die out sputtering, and Lucas triggered more gas. The teeth sliced the man in half, angling off and spinning out just above the man's hip. Human organs, blood, and shards of bone blew about the room.

Coming up with the spinning teeth, Lucas cut into a man's crotch, struggling to hold the saw at full power as the teeth bit and sawed upward. Screams of pure anguish filled the room. The floor of the den was slick with blood.

What was left of the Brotherhood members who had battered their way into the front of the house ran howling in fright out the front door, tripping and stumbling and falling over each other in their haste to escape the awesome weapon.

Jackie and Johnny and Carla and Ruth and Peter were all over a man, kicking and punching and biting and pounding the man with clubs. He soon lay unconscious on the floor, his face beaten beyond recognition.

Harry lay on the floor, his one good hand locked into the throat of a man with a bulldog's tenacity. He felt the throat collapse under his fingers. The man fell away, choking to death.

George had not had a fistfight since high school, and he had lost his last fight. But he was winning this one. The man stood and duked it out with two members of the Brotherhood, his fists pumping like a prize fighter. If the men had been expecting an easy win, they were very much surprised. George knocked one down with a hard fist to the temple and grabbed the second man, shoving him across the room. His daughter, Betty, grabbed a spear and held it in young hands, the knife on the end at an angle. Her father propelled the man onto the spear, the blade cutting through his spine.

Tracy dumped a pot of boiling water over a man's head, then used the empty pot to beat another man's skull in.

David Siekmann jerked one member of the Brotherhood off his feet and held him like a grizzly bear might, literally crushing his rib cage. As the man's eyes bugged out and he cried in pain, David said, “You don't like Jews? Well, I don't like you, either.” He broke the man's back and let him slump to the floor

Then it was over. Those of the Brotherhood remaining in the house ran in all directions. Running in fear and shock and surprise.

Lucas looked around the room, now faintly lit by candles. He laid the chain saw down on the floor and flexed his arms, relieving the strain.

The room looked like a slaughterhouse at quitting time.

“We're winning, folks,” he announced. “We're winning.”

Kyle dragged the dead body of the turncoat trooper out the back and tossed him in the yard.

“Never did like that sneak,” Kyle said.

Then he returned to the den to help Lucas and the others clean up the mess caused by the biting teeth of the chain saw.

All present soon agreed it would be an impossible task.

“Let's just board up the door and windows,” Tracy suggested. “Close it off. It's positively ghastly in here.”

The walls were splattered with blood; the floor slick with blood, and no one wanted to start the tough job of cleaning it. Even the high ceiling of the room was dabbed with bloodspots.

“Yeah, let's do that,” Lucas agreed. “It still gives us two front doors to keep an eye on.”

Using long heavy nails and material from ripped-up bookshelves, they hurriedly covered the windows and doors of the room, then locked and barricaded the doors leading out of the den.

Kyle looked at his watch and was surprised to see it was three o'clock in the morning. “Time flies when you're having fun,” he muttered.

His wife touched his arm. “Honey, don't you imagine someone from the Patrol's been trying to contact you.”

“I'd bet on it,” he said softly, so only she could hear.

“Then help just might be on the way.”

“Probably. But there is one thing about that thought that worries me.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. If Captain Denning is on the way, or has sent help—once they get in, can they get back out?”

* * *

“Has anybody answered your knocking on their door?” Captain Denning asked Trooper Austin.

“No, sir. I can just feel people in these houses. But they won't come to the door.”

“Davis?”

“Same here, sir. I can't get any response from anybody. And I've really pounded on some of these doors.”

“What's wrong with these people in this damn town?” Captain Johnson asked, walking up to the group.

“Your boys not having any luck?” Carl asked him.

“Striking out on every house. This is damn weird.”

Carl was silent for a moment, listening; for what, he didn't know. But something was wrong. Then it came to him.

Johnson picked it up. “What's wrong, Carl? You got a real funny look on your face.”

“No traffic on the radios. They've all gone silent.”

“Hunt, Scott,” Johnson said. “Check your radios.”

“Davis, Austin,” Carl said. “Check 'em.”

The four troopers checked them out and returned. “Dead, sir,” they reported.

“All right, by God!” Captain Johnson said. “I've had enough of this.” He walked to the center of the main street of Palma and pulled his pistol from leather. Pointing the weapon straight up in the air, he pulled the trigger.

The hammer fell with a click. Nothing else.

The trooper looked at his pistol as if it were a stranger to him, instead of the pistol he'd carried for years.

Trooper Paul Hunt could not suppress a giggle at his captain's expression.

“Well . . . you think it's so funny, Hunt,” Johnson said. “You come out here and fire one round from your weapon.”

Hunt walked to the center stripe and pointed his sidearm toward the heavens. He pulled the trigger.

Click.

Red-faced, Hunt checked his pistol. Fully loaded. He tried again. Same results.

It was a strange scene. All the troopers standing in the center of the road, pointing their weapons into the air, pulling the trigger.

Click, click, click.

“Get your shotguns,” Carl told his men. “Try them.”

But the slide action would not work. They could not jack a round into the chamber.

“All right,” Johnson said. “I know all you boys have backups and cold pistols with you. Get them and try to fire them.”

The troopers produced a .22-magnum derringer, a 9mm, a .32 automatic, and a Chief's Special .38. None of them would fire.

Captain Al Johnson kicked at a rock in the highway, kicking like a four-year-old just caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Jesus!” he said.

“Which way is the Bowers home?” Hunt asked.

“Straight ahead,” Johnson told him.

“I got an idea,” Hunt said.

“I assure you all,” Johnson said, “I am certainly open to suggestion.”

“We know the engines in our cars are still working,” the young trooper said. “We can hear them running?”

“Very astute of you,” Carl said tightly. “So?”

“Let me see if I can back up or turn around,” Hunt said.

“What would prevent you doing that?” Johnson asked.

“The same . . . well, force, or power that . . . ah. . . prevents our weapons from working.”

“Force?” Johnson said. “
Force
!” he shouted. “Goddamn it, Hunt, you think E.T. has something to do with this . . . this . . . phenomenon?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“All right. Back your car up. I feel like an idiot!”

Hunt's patrol car would not back up and he could not turn it around.

All the men tried to back their cars up or turn them around.

They could not.

Once more standing in the center of the road, Johnson said, “Carl, you've been getting me into trouble ever since we first met—in the first grade.”

“Yeah,” Carl agreed. “You remember that time we spent the night over in the—”

“Knock it off, Carl!”

“. . . Pines?” Carl finished it.

“Goddamn it, Carl. We agreed never to speak of that night.”

The other men stood in silence, listening to their commanders talk.

“You can't deny what we saw that night, Al.”

“The Woods' Children do not exist. They do not
exist
!”

“And the beasts we saw that night? They don't exist, either?”

“We were boys, Carl. Scared little boys camping out alone for the first time. Our imaginations ran wild, that's all.”

“Where are the Pines, sir?” Austin asked.

“In the woods directly behind the Bowers Plantation.”

“I do not believe any of this is happening,” Al said. “We are all grown, mature men. There is a logical explanation for what is occurring.”

“Then what is it?” Carl challenged.

“I don't know,” his friend replied sourly.

“I'm going to kick in the goddamned door to a house,” Carl said. “I am going to find out why these people refuse to answer our knocks.”

“Ah, Captain,” Davis said. “That's just a, ah, little bit on the illegal side, sir.”

The captain visually visited the patrolman with a look guaranteed to freeze water.

“Lead on, Commander,” Davis said. “Where you go, I follow”

They didn't have to kick in the door of the house. It was unlocked. Carl reached in, found the light switch, and flipped on the lights. “Hello!” he called. “This is the Georgia Highway Patrol. Anybody home?”

“What other Highway Patrol would it be?” Al asked, smiling. “Montana?”

“Stuff it, Pookie,” Carl said.

“Pookie
?
”
Hunt and Scott both said.

“That was his nickname in grade school,” Carl told them. He looked at his lifelong friend. “Right, Pookie?”

“I'll get you for this, Carl,” Al said. “I'll get you. I promise.”

“Pookie?” his two patrolmen again said.

“If either of you ever repeat that name aloud,” Al warned them. “I swear to you both, you will spend the next fifteen years regretting you ever heard my name.”

Both men grinned. “Yes, Pookie!” they said.

Al ground his teeth together and said, “I'll get you, Carl. I'll get you.” He cut his eyes to the hall of the house and all play-anger at his friend was forgotten. “Look at that,” he said, pointing.

A body lay stretched out on the hall floor.

“Check it out,” Al told his men.

“He's alive, sir,” Scott said. “All vital signs are OK. But I can't rouse him.”

Hunt stepped out of a bedroom. “Two kids in here, sir. They seem to be in some sort of coma.”

“Davis, Austin,” Carl said. “Take the next house.

Come on, Al. Let's check the one just north of here.”

“Try the phones,” Al called over his shoulder.

“Yes, sir,” Hunt said. And under his breath, “Pookie.”

Carl and Al found an entire family, man and wife, three kids, and the parents of one of the spouses, all in bed, unconscious, but breathing steadily, color good, pulse normal, pupils of the eyes responding to light.

“Weird,” Carl said.

Al picked up the nearest phone. It was dead.

The troopers reported that all the phones thus far checked were dead.

Captain looked at captain. “Weirder,” Al said.

The men checked one entire block of residential homes, both sides. Some houses were empty, but most held people. All unconscious. No phones worked.

“Hunt, Scott,” Al said. “You two take the block just west of here. Davis, Austin, take the block east of us. Me and Carl'll keep working our way north. Let's meet back here in thirty minutes. Take off. And be careful.”

* * *

All those in the mansion could sense they had scored a very important victory. But George, inspecting his swollen and cut knuckles, put it vocally.

“I don't know
what
we've won! I don't even know what it is those people represent, or why they want us.”

“Evil,” Jackie said. “We're fighting evil.”

“But why us?” Harry asked. He was sitting up, his arm in a sling.

“I can't answer that,” the girl said.

“I don't know if there is an answer that anyone of us would understand,” her brother added.

“Now you've really messed up!” Ira's scream shattered the quiet. “All bets are off. All of you are going to die.”

“He knows he's losing,” Kyle said.

“I wish he'd hurry up and do it,” Tracy said.

“Look up on the landing!” Ira shouted.

None had to look. They knew what they would find.

The familiar whinny of the rocking horse drifted down the curving steps.