The Meridians (37 page)

Scott rose quickly to his feet. Once deciding that they were being tracked, he felt an almost panicked need to flee, his flight instinct nearly overwhelming all his other senses. "Come on," he said, pulling Kevin to his feet and then helping Lynette up as well.

Moving quickly with Kevin proved to be an impossibility when the boy did not want to run. He moved at a gait that was faster than walking, but considerably slower than the running speed that Scott wanted to take. Finally, he picked the boy up and ran with him.

Kevin buried his head in Scott's chest, as though by doing so he could erase the terrors that sought him out even now. Scott wished that could be true; that if only by not looking they could avoid the demon in their wake. But he knew -
knew
somehow - that the only chance they had to survive lay in movement, in constant motion without rest.

A sudden shout behind them seemed to confirm Scott's premonition. It was Mr. Gray, and it was the shout of someone deeply disappointed, the shout of a man who had gone searching for something, expecting fully to find it, and had then discovered only that it was absent. Mr. Gray was on their trail, he knew.

Move, move, move, he thought.

Behind him, he heard Lynette huffing and puffing, trying to keep up with him as he ran over the grass and dirt, through the baseball field and then through the football field. A part of him wanted to stop when he reached the football bleachers, to go under them and hide in the hopes that Mr. Gray would lose their trail and would overshoot them, leaving them safely behind. But the part of him that had been gripped by the sure knowledge that Mr. Gray would be able to track them no matter where they went vetoed that idea. The only survival lay in continuing to run, at least for now.

So he continued with Kevin and Lynette past the bleachers, then into the main part of the school grounds. There were, of course, no cars in the parking lot at this time of night, but he hoped that they could find some on the nearby street.

Luck was with them, for once. They immediately found four cars parked one after another on the side of the road. Probably friends who had stayed overnight at one of the nearby farmhouses and had decided to park their cars on the road for whatever reason. Scott didn't much care, he just cared about the number of cars there were. He knew that in smaller cities and towns one in three people left their cars open and their keys in the car, so the odds were good that one of these cars was such a vehicle, driven by a trusting soul whose trust was about to be rewarded by the theft of his or her car.

Sure enough, the second pull on a car door yielded an open one, and Scott quickly located the key in the visor a moment later. "Get in," he said to Lynette, at the same time as he pushed Kevin into the backseat and put a seatbelt on him. The boy looked torpid, almost drugged, as though the events of the past twenty four hours had proved too much for him to process. Scott was worried about the boy, but couldn't spare the time to examine him right now. He felt as though time was running out, as though they had little time to escape whatever fate the gray man might have in store for them.

He got in the driver's side as Lynette got in the passenger door, and started the car.

The headlights illuminated a stretch of the street ahead of them. They also illuminated Mr. Gray.

He must have followed them out of the fields, past the school, and caught up to them while they looked for a car to steal. Now he stood directly in front of the car they were in, only feet away from them.

Scott squinted in shock for a moment as the older man threw his hands up to ward off the sudden light. In the instant before he had done so, Scott thought he had seen something impossible - one more impossibility on what was becoming a long list of the events. Though Lynette had hit him hard in the face with the two by four only a few hours ago, and though Scott had seen the man's blood splash and seen his nose shatter, there was now no sign whatever that any such incident had occurred. The gray man looked hearty and whole, and smiled widely as he looked back at the car.

His knife, silvery and gleaming like a bright light in the darkness of the night, flashed in his hands.

Beside Scott, Lynette screamed. He floored the accelerator, but the car didn't move for a moment. Scott wondered what had happened, then realized that in his panic he had failed to put the car in gear.

Now he did so, but it was also too late, for Mr. Gray had had the time to rush in toward them. He threw a fist at the backseat window, trying to claw and scratch his way through the safety glass to reach Kevin. Kevin cried out, worming his way down into the seat, hunching low as he could to stay as safe as possible.

The safety glass crazed, and Scott wondered how long it would take Mr. Gray - with his insane strength and maniacally single-minded purpose - to get through the glass and to the boy beyond. Scott didn't intend to find out, however. He again pushed the gas pedal to the floor, and this time the car - a mid-sized sedan with a decent engine in it - leapt forward with a squeal of rubber on pavement.

He felt something jounce the car, and looked into his rearview mirror. The gray man had jumped onto the back of the car, holding onto the trunk with both hands, making his way slowly up toward the rear window; to Kevin.

"Scott!" screamed Lynette.

"I see it," he responded.

Mr. Gray reached up high in the air with the hand holding the knife, clearly intending to drive the pommel through the safety glass of the rear window and from there continue the deadly arc of the knife until it ended in Kevin's small, quivering body. But before he could complete the movement, Scott dragged the steering wheel hard to one side. There was a satisfying thud as Mr. Gray rolled off the back of the car and landed on the side of the road. Scott watched him roll silently along the road, then the older man was gone from his sight as he continued to give the car all the gas she would take.

They were safe.

Or at least, so it seemed, but then Kevin began screaming. Just as Lynette had told him about, it sounded like there were two Kevins making the horrific noise, as though a chorus of twins were shrieking in agony. Scott glanced in the rearview mirror, and saw the boy pointing off to the right.

Just then he passed a small side street.

"Turn here!" shouted Lynette.

Without thinking, Scott cranked the wheel to one side, feeling the car fishtail beneath him as it transitioned from a paved road to a dirt one. He brought the car under control again, continuing on down the dirt road, then said, "Where are we going?"

"I don't know," admitted Lynette.

"What?"

"I don't know. But this is what happened when we found you, when we saved you from Mr. Gray," she said. "I don't know where we're going, but I know that we have to go there."

Thankfully, Kevin - the Kevins - were no longer screaming, though when Scott looked back he still saw the boys' flickering images staring straight ahead, hands at eye level and pointing straight ahead. Scott wondered how long the boy would stay like that, though he suspected he knew the answer: as long as it took.

The trail rode straight for about a mile, then turned into a private driveway. Scott started to slow, thinking perhaps they were going the wrong way when he saw the driveway, but again Kevin began that terrible screaming, and Scott knew he would get no relief from the sound until he capitulated to the will of the nine year old autistic child in the back of the car. So he continued ahead, driving slowly through the corn stalks that shot up on either side of the car like silent sentinels, and finally stopping when he could go no farther, when he was confronted by a house that stood directly in the path before them.

This time when he stopped, however, Kevin raised no hue nor cry of alarm.

Scott looked at the house in front of them. "What now, Kevin?" he asked.

Kevin looked around the car, typically avoiding the gazes of any and all around him. "Hush little baby, don't say a word," he sang in an oddly endearing voice. But though the tune was beautiful in a strange sort of way, it hardly answered Scott's question.

"Kevin," he repeated. "What are we doing here?"

"Momma's gonna buy you a mockingbird," sang the boy.

"Do you know what that's about?" Scott asked Lynette.

She shrugged. "No idea," she admitted. "But the last few times he's acted like this, it's been to save someone's life, so I'm inclined to go with it, you know?"

Scott looked at the house in front of them. It was dark and, to all appearances, completely deserted. It was two stories, with a basement door to one side proclaiming the presence of a third level below ground. Like many houses in Idaho, it was modest and clean, though there was something about it, something below the surface of it, that made Scott feel somewhat ill. As though he was looking at a cancer on a friend's X-ray, not knowing really what he was looking at, but knowing that there was something wrong about it.

Scott looked at Lynette. "Stay here," he said finally.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

Scott nodded at the house. "To check it out."

"What?" she asked. "And you want us to just stay here? No way, buster."

"Come on, Lynette," he pleaded. "We don't know what's inside there. It could be anything. But we do know that the last few times have involved danger to the people around you and Kevin. So assuming that this is no exception, I'd like you both well out of harm's way."

"I'm sorry," said Lynette. "But I'm going with you."

There was a scream and a bump from behind them. Kevin was on his side in the backseat, thrashing around mightily, groaning as though he had some kind of internal infection.

"What's going on, Kevin?" asked Scott. He reached back to touch the boy, to see if he could calm him. But before he could, Kevin reached forward and grabbed his laptop from Lynette, who had managed to keep a hold of the computer throughout their flight from the gray man.

He opened it, and after the machine had spun up he opened a new document and began typing. Then, without looking at Lynette or at Scott, he showed the computer to them.

"Only Scott goes in," he had written.

Scott looked at Lynette and resisted the urge to smirk at her. The only things that kept him from doing so were the twin facts that the gray man was still somewhere out there, searching for them; and that he had no idea what lay inside the house before them, but he suspected it was going to be something difficult at best, downright hazardous at worst.

He looked at Lynette for a long moment, as though drinking in her image, then without another word got out of the car. He walked up to the house, which now seemed to loom over-large in the night, a hulking giant that stood, dark and silent, in the light of the moon overhead.

Scott stepped up to the door, and reached out a hand to knock. Something stopped him from doing it, however. He didn't knock, but rather stood to the side and tried to peer into the house through the window that was near to the front door.

Only darkness greeted his questing eyes, darkness and an ever-increasing sense of fear that had come into his heart like a snake coiling about his innards, restless and flickering. He could feel his heart pounding, and wondered if he was going to be able to do whatever it was that was required of him in this dark house in the night.

Then he cocked his head to one side as he saw something. It was just a moment, but he was sure he saw it: someone laying on the sofa near to the window. The person was a nearly-shapeless lump on the couch, but he could make out something - or thought he could - in the night: the person was a child, too small to be a man or woman, and the child was tied up hand and foot.

Someone had a hostage inside the house.

***

40.

***

Scott had only seen a handful of murders that made him angry in his time as a homicide cop. He had seen plenty that were upsetting, sure, and all of them were sad in one way or another, but only the handful that he had seen involving children made him actively angry. Children were too young to be involved in such evil, he thought, too innocent to be a part of the hatred that made people turn against one another in anger. So the sight of the child on the bed, bound and gagged and clearly frightened, made Scott see red for a moment.

He didn't have his gun. And chances were that the person inside who was responsible for this heinous crime was at least armed with a kitchen knife, if not with something even more lethal. Still, Scott would have gone in at that point no matter what, because of the child.

The question was, what was the best way to go in? Through the front door? The side? Try a window? Scott knew that he had to get to a phone to call the police, but also worried more than a little bit about taking that avenue of action. After all, surely the destroyed car had been discovered by now, and an all points bulletin put out for its owner. If this had been Los Angeles, the discovery of a wrecked car might have been relegated to a back burner in favor of the more pressing crimes that were a part of everyday life there. But in Meridian the car would be hot news. And Scott had no intention of ending up in a holding cell - not until he had figured out how to stop Mr. Gray, at any rate. He had the suspicion that if he allowed himself to be admitted into a prison before doing that, Mr. Gray would appear in the cell with him - or with Kevin or Lynette - and cut them to ribbons before anyone could be summoned to aid them.