Shadow Season (19 page)

“You don’t know how often I’ve stopped a hit going out on you.”

“Yeah?” Finn says. “Next time tell them to go for it. Do what you got to do. I will.”

“Because it’s your job to protect the innocent.”

“It’s yours too, you prick.”

Finn had to admit to himself that at the time, he really didn’t know what he’d done.

But all the following years of darkness gave him plenty of time to dwell on that moment, as his choices continue to sweep forward through time to find him again with each new puzzled breath.

“FINN!”

Someone’s always yelling at him.

“Motherfuckers.”

“Finn!”

He’s on his knees and Vi is on the floor, shouting in his ear.

“I’m here,” he says.

“You need to run.”

“I’m here. Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

He shrugs out of his coat and wraps it around Vi’s shoulders. She groans at his touch. “Did you hear them leave the building?”

“No.” She coughs and it’s a wet red sound. “But I think I might’ve—might’ve—”

“Passed out?”

“I think so. Maybe.”

“You’re bleeding. How badly hurt are you, Vi?”

“I don’t know.”

“I need to get you up and into my office.”

“No! We’ll be trapped then.”

She’s right. You can’t barricade yourself in a room with only one exit. With a pebbled-glass door.

“You can hide.”

“No, they’ll find me again.”

“Let’s use the phone.”

“I want to go home,” she says, sounding about nine years old.

“Oh Christ,” he begs, and tightens his hold on her.

Then he gathers her up, unlocks his office door, and leads her inside. She’s terrified and starting to mewl. It’s a sound he’s heard a thousand times before and never heard before. It’s a whimper that’s lived inside him for five years, and perhaps longer. He shuts the door and locks it again.

He needs to call someone. Alert Judith and Murph to what’s happening. They can prepare for trouble, keep an eye out. Call the cops, get their country-hick asses out here on their Sno-Cats. He tries the phone. Dead. He wonders if it’s the storm or if the holler men have cut the hard line.

“Tell me what happened.”

“There’s two of them. They raped me. They held me down.” He turns his head to face the window, thinking, My enemies have found me. Whichever ones they are. An ill will had been thinking on me. They will punish my loved ones. There’s two of them, and I have to kill them.

“It was all so quiet,” she continues, breathing shallowly. “One of them didn’t talk, not the whole time. I’m not sure he can. He punched me. He kept hitting me. He has a knife.” Her voice firms again with an unbelievable resolve. She tries hard to keep from cracking, but she’s going to. They all do.

The sobbing starts and she forces her words out between
gasps. “He put… his knife in me first. He stuck it in… before him… before he stuck himself in…”

“Shh, Vi, you’re okay now.” Finn listens to himself, thinking he sounds so much closer to the edge of hysteria than she does. Everyone is stronger than he is. She actually touches the side of his face with a bloody palm, trying to comfort him.

“I came back to see you. I’m sorry. I came back to your office… hoping you’d be there. I’m so dumb… I can’t control myself…”

“None of us can.” Jesus Christ, she’s just a kid. “Don’t worry about any of that. Did you see a gun? Any guns?”

“No.”

Two of them, still nearby. But in the building? Could they have missed him out in the storm? Where he was yelling his head off, calling for Roz, for Harley, for Moon?

“He didn’t make a sound,” Vi says. She’s stopped crying. She’s trying to hand over information, something that might help. “The other, he’s … retarded, I think. He
leered
the whole time. Or maybe he’s just crazy. He put a piece of tape over my mouth. He was happy. He said he was my friend. While he was holding me down. I tried to fight, I swear I did.”

“I know you did.”

“I swear, I swear to God.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, it does!”

Finn knows it’s costing her a great deal, talking this way, open with him. She’s making the effort to keep
calm, to distance herself from the situation, and she’s doing it for his sake.

His heart is slamming crossways inside him.

Roz. Did they get to Roz?

“His name is Pudge. He talks in the third person. He called me girlie. He told me ‘Pudge likes you, girlie, Pudge is gonna take care of you.’ And I could tell he meant it. He was careful when he held me. He’s strong. Very strong. Insane strong, you know? He thought he was being nice. Sweet to me. The other, Pudge called him Rack. I think they’re brothers. Rack, he’s strong too, but he’s bad, Finn, he’s a bad one. I could feel it. I could feel it in him. He’s dead inside. God. He … he only let me go because he knows we can’t get away. How can we get away in the storm? Where could we go? He never made a sound.”

Finn’s got to get word to the sheriff’s office, the state troopers, someone.

She can tell what he’s thinking and says, “The storm’s too intense. No one can see anything out there.”

“I don’t need to see.”

“You can’t do anything. No one’s going to help us.”

Finn presumes that Rack planned it this way. Backwoods boy, probably knows these hills and valleys better than anyone, has some hard-chugging four-wheel drive truck on campus that can grind through the drifts.

“Did the one who talked … Pudge … did he say why they were doing this?”

“No. He just said it was your fault.”

She spares asking him why.

But Harley Moon, she knows the answer. She said
he would pay. Finn feels a sudden burning resentment for the girl.

Violet goes into a coughing fit and spits blood. The aroma of it soars into his head. Finn grits his teeth and turns his face away, the past inside him wanting to take over. He’s suddenly partially aroused, his temples throbbing. The craving for light and vision is so strong it’s almost impossible to resist. Especially because he doesn’t want to. He’s an addict. He’s a junkie for his lost sight. His own history recedes like a red tide.

Violet moans and goes into a coughing fit. She could have internal bleeding. It would be like Vi to say nothing, dying while she patted his hand. He should’ve checked her more thoroughly but he’s afraid to put his hands on her. Worried about what he might find, what he might become.

Every move he makes or thinks of making is wrong. Finn reaches out and touches her belly, checking for knife wounds. Moves his hands upward across her ribs, feels the fractures. Then continues on to her throat. Then her face. The nose needs to be packed. “Violet, we have to go—”

“Please hold me. I’ll be okay in a second, but … I need … please … just for a second … I mean, like … like maybe how my father would? Like…”

He hugs her to him and she lets loose with the beginning of a wail that she muffles against his chest. He lets it go on for as long as he can. Then he hushes her, the way a father might. They need to get the hell out of here.

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

“Come on, let’s go. We’ve got to get you over to the
Gate House. Everyone else is there. If we get separated, you go alone.”

“Why would we—”

“If it’s a whiteout, aim for the lights. You can make it. You tell them to lock everything. Call the sheriff’s office, the state troopers. Someone’s cell should work if they take it to the roof. You tell them to fight if they have to.”

“I will. You and I, we both will.” Her voice so cool, so in control. Preparing him as best she can for what’s to come.

Finn only caught one school shooting while he was on the force. A substitute teacher who was dismissed for reasons that boiled down to him just acting too fuckin’ weird. Guy came back six weeks after being let go, packed to party. He carried a pair of TEC-9s, a five-shot S&W .50-cal. Magnum, and a satchel filled with an assortment of pipe bombs, handcuffs, sex toys, and flavored lubricants. Fuckin’ weird, yeah.

He popped a teacher and the principal on his way inside, then marched to his old schoolroom. He let all the male students go and most of the females as well.

During the siege he kept hidden behind seven girls, blocked the windows with taped-up newspapers, and went on to indulge himself for five and a half hours. He let one of the girls contact her parents explaining in detail what he was doing to them. What he was forcing them to do to each other.

It got extreme enough that one of the girls tried to toss a desk through the window and jump to safety. She broke her back and he lobbed a bomb down on top of
her, killing her and Finn’s sergeant, who’d made a move to help.

SWAT went in twice. Both efforts were massive fuckups. The first time they blew a wall and killed one of the kids but never got a clear shot at the perp. The second time they blew the door to find the perp hiding behind two of the girls. SWAT’s sniper was good and fast but the perp wanted to die with his finger on the trigger. He shot one of the students in the back before he went down. The .50-cal. took out her entire torso.

When Finn made it into the room the body was still there and he got to see the girl’s head sitting inside her own stomach cavity. The rest was on the walls.

He thinks of it all again as he tells Vi, “It’s going to be all right.”

He pulls his blade, knowing it won’t be enough.

She leans on him as he opens the office door. “Come on, Vi, we have to leave.”

She staggers along beside him down the hall. He tries to block out her noise and focus beyond it.

With one arm around her he pulls her along. Soon he realizes he’s dragging her.

“Leave me here,” she says, and crumples beside him.

“I’m not leaving you here. Come on.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, Vi, you have to.”

“Something inside is … scraping together.”

“You’ve got a couple of broken ribs. You can make it. Now get up, Violet. I need you to move. Get the hell up, Miss Treato, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Finn. You need me.”

“Yes, I need you. Get up.”

Violet levers herself to her feet and shrugs into his arms. She sighs against his chest, clinging to him. Half-hanging there, half-embracing him like a lover. He tries to think of the best way to get out of here. He’s got to keep the girl safe, needs to find Roz, has to get over to the dorm. Murph is there. Murph is tough. Murph’s got balls. Murph’s got notions. He’ll put up a fight. A part of Finn wishes that Ray were here for backup.

He and Vi move down the corridor again.

Every few seconds she lets out a pained whimper and tries to squelch it. She’s still trying to be the woman he wants—tough, independent, uncomplaining. A strange calm descends over him the instant he truly decides that no matter what happens from this point on, he’s going to kill the men who did this to her.

They maneuver down the stairs together.

Her weight pressed against him, he allows his shoulder to slide along the wall. This stairway has killed a lot of people over the years. Its extravagance was made for dramatic suicides.

“I think I’ve figured out why my mother hates me,” Vi says.

“She doesn’t hate you, Violet. No one hates you.”

“She does. She hates me because she knows I like older men. Maybe she thinks I’m going to steal my father from her.”

It actually sounds pretty reasonable to Finn.

She pants her words. “Or her gynecologist … Dr. Calhoun. Can you imagine, having an affair…withyour OB-GYN? Gross.”

Vi’s beginning to unravel a touch. He’s got to hold her together until they get to the others. If they’re attacked
on their way across campus, Finn will fight, Vi will go it alone. Out in the storm, he’ll have the edge, while they’re blinded by snow and darkness.

On the ground floor they take five steps toward the front door and Vi stops short, one heel squeaking.

“Oh God,” she whispers. “I can see them through the glass in the door. They’re outside and coming in here.”

NO TIME TO BE GENTLE. FINN
dumps Vi on the floor and she cuts loose with a yelp. He makes an awkward leap, extends his cane, and snaps off the switch to three of the overhead lights. Even at night Murph keeps half of them on to deter prowlers.