Shine Your Light on Me (13 page)

“Hope is important, I guess,” Bobby said. He wanted to say more, to probe for answers alongside Elroy, but Pine’s headlight sliced through the murk a quarter mile south of them, on the road, and down through the ditch, and up into a field. There were others out beyond him, walking, shining their flashlights on the crusted snow. He said, “I wonder what they’re all searching for.”

Elroy freed himself of his seatbelt and climbed out and brought the duffle bag with him. It looked heavy in his hand. “I don’t know.”

Bobby glanced back at the field and said, “Don’t go into school tomorrow morning, okay?”

“Why would I go into school?”

Bobby smiled. “Just don’t.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m leaving too,” Bobby said.

Elroy didn’t reply. There were voices in the distance. Bobby said, “It looks like they’re headed this way.”

“You sound scared.”

He was. Something was wrong. Somehow they’d found out, he realized now, and they were all looking for him. Cars appeared on the road, more flashlight beams shining from passenger windows, sweeping the ditch on either side. Bobby turned away and said, “Thanks again. Don’t tell anybody you saw me, okay?”

• • •

Mitch didn’t acknowledge the carnage surrounding them. Jack LeDoux sat stiff as a weathered board in his wheelchair, his face carved from ancient wood, hands tightly gripping the empty shotgun. Mitch said, “Where would your son take my daughter?”

“In this mess? I have no idea.”

“It’ll have to be somewhere warm, somewhere nobody would look for them.”

“My bar, a church, the school. Those are about the only options they have. But that crowd out there will catch up with them before they make it anywhere. The longer we sit here the worse it could be for our kids.”

“I don’t need you with me.”

“I lost my wife because you led them back here. They’ve destroyed my home. They’re chasing down my son. You’re a blight. If you don’t kill me now, you’re never going to have the chance again and I won’t let you see me coming. Do you hear me? I’ll blow your head apart and you won’t hear but the faintest whisper of your death. There will just be oblivion, which I think will welcome you gladly.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” Mitch said. He walked over the bodies in front of the door with Jack screaming something behind him. He didn’t want to hear it, so didn’t. His pulse pounded in his ears. The air outside was cold enough that it hurt to breathe. He tromped to Jack’s van and climbed in the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition. He started it, let the heater work on the ice coating the windshield. Looking back at the house, the broken door, the dead clogging it, he could see Jack reloading the shotgun in the entryway. Mitch pulled the van into gear, bent forward and floored the accelerator just as Jack pulled the trigger and buckshot peppered the rear quarter panel. He let out a whoop, half-crazed, then regained control of himself, fearing for a second that he had tasted how Pine must always feel, that he was in control of not only his destiny, but also the destinies of others. He’d killed men in Jack’s house with a cold efficiency, and he could have killed Jack, but he’d shown him mercy. Those others were not necessary deaths, although he told himself they were warranted. Jack’s would have been too much. All that mattered now was finding the children.

He’d wipe out the whole town with Pine’s help, if they had to, if people got between him and Aiden and his daughter. They’d already shown they were willing to do it.

He needed to kidnap the kid, find a quiet, secluded place to hole up. Keep Aiden fed, keep him happy, feed him a line that his parents were dead although Mitch had tried to save them, and now he wanted to protect Aiden, because their town was nothing, a speck of sand in the desert that would be coming for him once they knew what he was capable of. Distraught, afraid, with no other option, the kid would believe him. It wasn’t that far-fetched to begin with. The government would take him, or some nut, believing the boy to be the anti-Christ, would gun him down. Neither fate was any more desirable than the other. Mitch was doing him a favor.

Jack had given him direction, helped him clear his mind. The bar, a church, or the school. The kids would be at one of them, as long as they outran and eluded their pursuers. But they wouldn’t elude Pine or Mitch. He ruled out a church. Aiden would take Jessica somewhere with food. The kid probably filched his dad’s keys or a spare set. The bar was the closest anyway on his route to the school. If they weren’t at LeDoux’s, he’d call Pine back and ask for an update.

For the first time in a long while, Aria was not trumping all his other thoughts.

• • •

Aria pulled into Jack’s driveway and noticed his van was gone, and that the front door was hanging inside form the bottom hinge, the porch and the snow covered in tracks and marked red by spilled blood. Such devastation, to see just from the exterior. The snow had been trampled through the front yard and around the sides of the house. All the windows appeared broken and what had once been a home now appeared a charnel house.

Her heart pained her over such senseless loss. She imagined what fear and rage Jack and Janice and Mitch and the two children must have faced when the frantic town descended upon them, buckling doors, dragging the walls apart, eyes glazed and hellish, the masses like a storm sent by God or Devil to reduce them all to their base elements. Flesh immobile, blood stilled, bone crushed. Before, she could not have imagined what terror they must have felt, but her own, after facing Mickey, gave her a sense of it.

She sat in her Lexus and let the heat envelope her, her fingers tracing what she assumed would scar her face. The whole world had gone mad, her along with it, she realized as she opened the car door and stepped tentatively toward the porch. At first she feared her curiosity border lined the morbid, yet it quickly passed as she steeled herself to witness whatever destruction waited inside. She had to see for herself, that’s all there was to it. To know that they had once been, and now they were gone, beyond help, beyond comfort, beyond repair.

Inside, the house was nearly as cold as outside and she guessed that it had all taken place hours ago; probably when she was snooping in Pine’s bedroom. There was guilt too; she should have stayed with Jessica and Mitch from the beginning. They’d needed her, and with reflection, she’d needed them, only she’d not known it at the time.

 She jumped over the bodies inside the entryway and paused to listen to someone whispering deeper in the house. She had not expected to find a survivor. Her throat felt as if it was closing and she tried to call out a hello, but merely squawked awkwardly, like a wounded bird.

She rubbed her throat. Her knees trembled, yet they carried her toward the dining room. His voice and his prayers grew clearer and she wanted to run to Jack, to hold him, if only because she felt they were the only two to survive the night. The clock on the wall read 2:11 a.m. on the far wall, over the kitchen table, past where Jack sat in his wheelchair with Janice cradled clumsily on his lap. He looked up, sensing her presence, or having heard her gasp.

He had tears on his cheeks and his face resembled the photographs she’d seen of his night in the forest with Mitch and Pine and Elroy.

All she could say, as she stumbled closer, was, “I’m sorry.”

He stroked his wife’s arm. “Me too.”

“I should have been here.”

“I’m glad you weren’t.” He studied her for a second and she raised her left hand to cover the burn running the length of her jawbone. He said, “Who hurt you?”

“Where are Mitch? Aiden? Jessica?”

“I don’t know. Who hurt you, Aria? Was it Pine?”

She laughed, suddenly, coldly, a little mad. “Indirectly,” she said, moving closer to him, her eyes itching. “How did you survive this?”

“Luck or misfortune, take your pick.”

“Luck then,” she said, looking around the room, her eyes coming to rest on the corpse of Pastor Clement. “He brought a mob here?”

“He had a very high opinion of himself, all men like him do, believing they’re God’s instrument, that they’re chosen for it and very few others ever could be. But look at him now, a bag of bones.”

“Do you need medical attention? Are you hurt?”

“Can you take me somewhere?”

“Name the place,” she said.

“Bring your car up to the garage, make sure the hallway and the ramp in the garage are cleared. I’ll be out in just a moment.”

She nodded yet lingered there a moment. She had watched Jack with this woman for years. She had loved, deeply, how he had loved his wife. Aria had known many benefits of her attractiveness; on looks alone usually able to get anything she wanted. But for the longest time she’d wanted the one thing she couldn’t have, or simply couldn’t find, or just didn’t believe existed for her: true love, a man who would touch her inside and out, and look into her eyes because of the spirit he saw in her depths, a man who cared little for outside appearance but valued the heart. She had never envied anyone else.

Jack said, “Get moving. We need to find my son and take him as far from here as we can.”

She wiped her eyes, nodded again, turned around, her face flushed. She went down the hall to the garage. Photographs had been knocked from the walls, and trampled, but there were no other obstructions until she opened the door leading into the garage. Two men—an older man with little hair, a white skull, bloodied mouth and ears; and a younger man who seemed unscathed, but lacked the breath of life—lay intertwined at the top of the ramp. There were footprints on their necks, one’s forehead. She didn’t want to touch either of them but she didn’t believe she had a choice.

Neither was a big man. She took a deep breath to settle her nerves the best she could and doe-stepped around them, bending over on the handicap ramp and seized the younger man’s ankle. She pulled with all her might and his corpse budged an inch or two, then no more.

She straddled them and slung their arms aside, realizing they had clung to each other as they’d died, so neither had to face the turn into eternity alone. She imagined neither of them would have ever guessed that the tunnel leading toward eternity would have been here, a long, darkened ramp in the garage of a man they’d seen nearly every day.

Once she had them apart she dragged one and then the other off the ramp and onto the garage floor. She was sweating and could smell their blood on her, and she felt like gagging but didn’t because Jack was rolling down the ramp with the shotgun and a box of shells in his lap. She couldn’t fathom what was going through his mind. She said, “Where are we going to take him when we find him?”

“We’ll have to get him away from Mitch and Pine. They’ll find him first.”

“Mitch won’t let him go.”

“Then I’ll kill him, or he’ll kill me.”

“Hasn’t there been enough death?”

“Not yet,” Jack said. “Aiden didn’t ask for any of this, and neither did Janice, and neither have I.”

“No one asked for any of this.”

“Someone must have, and for the first time God was listening. But that doesn’t matter.” He looked at her with skepticism. “Are you all right?”

“No. But what choice do I have? I don’t want them to hurt Aiden, and I don’t want to see Mitch hurt either, or you for that matter. But I can’t stop any of you, and I can’t stand on the sidelines. I can only do what I feel is right. And if I fail, so be it. At least I tried, like I did earlier with Mickey.” She shook her head and tears pricked her eyes. “I’ll bring the car up. I guess we’ll roll with whatever comes along.”

“You’re a tough woman, Aria.”

“Thanks, but I don’t feel very tough.”

“How we feel at any given moment isn’t who or what we are.”

She left him there but his words hung in her head as she walked out to the Lexus and heard screams of joy and rapture somewhere in the darkness.

• • •

Jack watched her pull her car up to the garage with the passenger door facing him. With anyone else he wouldn’t have minded them watching him slide out of his wheelchair, sit on his butt, on the cold concrete, fold the contraption shut, and scoot to the back door to place the chair in the rear seat. All of that would have been fine, but he didn’t want to watch her expression change as he lugged his useless legs behind him into the passenger seat, turn his body and lifted his legs in.

It was hard enough to look at her without feeling the shame roaring in his head, and making his heart soften terribly at the same time. It was like internal bleeding, damage beneath the flesh and close to the bone, hidden but slowly, secretly, killing him.

She got out and came around the front of the car, and walked behind him and pushed him over to the vehicle. She opened the passenger door and he pulled himself from the chair and into the seat and she said, “Where are we going?” as she handed him the shotgun and the box of shells. The weapon was cool to the touch as he took it from her and leaned it against his shoulder, stock between his feet, the cool barrel resting against his cheek as he hung his head and glanced at his shoes. When he didn’t answer her, she closed the door. But he’d heard the voices in the night by then, their excitement like a thunderclap, and as she climbed in beside him, Jack said, “Head for the school.”

She didn’t question him. She eased the car onto the front lawn, the wheels spinning until they got traction, and pointed the Lexus toward the road. Jack lowered the passenger window and said in a tone that felt as if it’d amputated part of him, “They already found the kids.”

CHAPTER 7

Bobby was halfway up the ladder on the water tower when he noticed Pine’s four-wheeler spitting snow behind him, Elroy clutching tight to the skinnier brother’s waist, terrified of being tossed from the ATV, or maybe just terrified of who he was holding on to.

Bobby climbed faster, although by then he was about frozen through and hungrier than he’d been before Elroy had given him the Twinkie. He didn’t know why they were following him; he didn’t mind Elroy, but he wanted nothing to do with Pine.