The Remnant (6 page)

She would just have to protect all of
them.

The hush of deepest night hung about the
farmhouse like a pall now, and Ashley sensed the valley lolling
itself to sleep once more, but she was far too keyed up to even
think about bed. She spread a blue plastic tarp on the living room
rug and began placing guns atop it. The pistol from under her
pillow, the revolver from the drawer in the bedside table, the
Remington pump twelve-gauge from beside the bedroom door. She
lifted the shorter double-barrel shotgun from the hooks beside the
kitchen cupboard and carried it and the lever-action 30-30 beside
the refrigerator into the livingroom. Opening the gun cabinet next
to her reading table, she lay the four rifles and carbines and the
stockless 18" Winchester pump riot gun beside the other weapons.
Finally she retrieved the sawed off from beside the front door.

Maxie lay beside her as she broke down every
gun to its last screw and bolt-always careful to keep at least one
loaded beside her-cleaned them as carefully as a surgical nurse
cleansing a scalpel, then placed them back in their designated
space. The guns were only moved from their assigned positions for
target practice or her cleaning ritual. Without thinking Ashley
could place her hand on a weapon and know what it was, what it was
loaded with, and what it could do. Finished with the 44 magnum
carbine, she shoved it back into the gun case and closed the door,
then slid the Glock from beneath the middle cushion on the sofa and
field stripped it.

When she was certain not a speck of dust was
left anywhere on the weapon she slipped it back into its assigned
place. She glanced at Maxie and noticed the hint of anxiety in his
eyes. The dog understood her patterns. Tonight the cleaning.
Tomorrow target practice.

"Don’t give me the glum look," she said. "I
put cotton in your ears."

She folded the tarp and stuck it behind the
sofa. Only then did she turn out the lights and head for bed,
exhausted enough that she just might be able to sleep at last.

Clad in a t-shirt and panties she pulled back
the sheets. Maxie curled onto his blanket beside the door, watching
her. When she opened the drawer on her bedside table to replace the
revolver there she stared for just a moment at the face in the
frame resting inside. She set the revolver on the table top and
removed the picture, wincing at the tugging in her chest. In that
instant she wished that there was some way she did not have to face
the world alone anymore. She replaced the picture and closed the
drawer, but Trace’s image was now burnt onto her brain again, and
she knew sleep would be illusive.

Drip.

Drip.

In counterpoint to Trace’s pounding pulse,
the incessant sound of something splattering in the distance echoed
along the sinuous acoustic channels of the underground maze like
the rimshots of some infernal, one-armed drummer. Unnerved by his
blindness and convinced now that he was bound to die and be buried
forever below the streets of New York, it had taken him ages to
work his way back down to the main sewer tunnel to search for the
flashlight. Maybe, just
maybe
, the splash he’d heard earlier
hadn’t been the flashlight falling into the sluice. If there was
the remotest possibility that it had simply rolled against the wall
and gone unnoticed he had to check.

He crawled twenty yards up and down the walk,
feeling for the light, even running his fingers along the side of
the open trough to see if it might possibly have gotten caught
there somehow, all the time unreasoningly fearful of something
reaching up out of that dark water and dragging him into its
depths. The fear was so irrational it brought a cautious smirk to
his lips, but he could not dispel it.

But finally he had to admit that the
flashlight was, indeed, somewhere in the sluice, and he just
couldn’t imagine himself dipping beneath the surface of
that...gunk... again. Even if he did and somehow-against all
odds-found the flashlight, what were the chances that it would
still work? Zero to none. But what really kept him from sliding
back into the sluice was the memory of the way he’d gotten himself
lost in the middle of a six foot span of filthy, stagnant water.
That was completely impossible, and yet it had happened, and the
very idea of setting foot in the trough and being dragged back into
that insanity was more than he cared to even consider.

So, he really was blind now. The realization
brought the tunnel walls and ceiling in even closer, and the very
air around him seemed thicker, harder to drag down into his lungs.
He forced himself to take slow, deep breaths, refusing to give in
to the racing pulse that urged his legs to break into the same
rhythm and
run
, anywhere, just run...

Trying to feel his way back the way he’d come
wasn’t an option because he was no more certain of that path than
any other, and Softie and Leadie would eventually turn around to
find their way home and more than likely simply trip over him. He
could head past the T and on down the sewage tunnel. But it might
wander for miles under the city or simply dead end around some
corner, and it wasn’t leading him upward, where he needed to go,
anyway. Finally he climbed back up the rusted rungs and into the
side shaft again, but he hadn’t made it fifty yards along that
narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, before surreptitious skittering
noises sounded all around. The scurrying of a thousand tiny claws
was not one to be forgotten. Being entombed beneath the city of New
York seemed a horrible enough final fate to Trace. He really didn’t
need rats to turn it into Hell, but there they were.

One of the little beasts brushed against his
leg, and skittering nails scritched on stone as the rodent raced
away ahead. A thin eeping noise off to his right sounded like one
of the vermin laughing.

Ever since he was a kid Trace had hated rats.
To most small boys the creatures’ stealthy habits, nasty little
claws, worm-like, hairless tails, and oversized incisors, made them
seem grotesque, frightening, and larger than life, but Trace had
very personal memories of the hairy little beasts that made his
skin crawl.

Stifling a shudder he continued on blindly
ahead, taking one hesitant step at a time, frightened that any
moment he might fall into yet another shaft or be overwhelmed by
the rodents. When something nudged his pant cuff again he kicked
back, dislodging another squeaking rat. God only knew how many of
the nasty little beasts were down here. His free hand rubbed
involuntarily across his belly, and he jerked it away.

The scars didn’t hurt. They just reminded him
of the pain and his long childhood battle with the vermin that had
changed his life.

The rats in the tunnel grew steadily bolder.
No longer content to remain just out of reach, eeping and
skittering blindly about through the dark passage, he could feel
waves of them, swooshing around his legs with every step he took.
They moved when he moved, lining the floor of the horizontal shaft
in an undulating, verminous river, and his memory-reverberating
with the present-threatened to paralyze him with fear.

But these rats didn’t bite or claw. In fact,
he had the strangest sensation that they had accepted him as one of
them.

I really am going batshit down here.

He couldn’t stop himself from chuckling
nervously under his breath at the thought.

That’s all I fucking need now. Bats.

As though conjured by the power of his
imagination, leathery wings flapped past his ear, and he
cringed.

Bats were little more than rats with wings,
and now his mind filled with images of not only the horde of hairy,
worm-tailed rodents roaming around and through his legs, but walls
and ceilings dripping with upside-down, winged versions. Only bats
didn’t have little Alvin the Chipmunk buck teeth. They had
rapier-pointed canines. Not to mention the fact that both rats and
bats carried who-the-hell knew what-all diseases. Bubonic and
pneumonic plague, rabies...cholera and dysentery for all Trace
knew. For the first time he noticed the acrid, ammonia odor of
guano, and as he trudged forward he could feel the slime, slippery
beneath the soles of his shoes.

There had been no rats and no bats in the
lower tunnels. And if these vermin weren’t interested in eating him
then they must not be that hungry, which meant they were finding
something to survive on in the tunnels. Or else they only
lived
down here, and found sustenance above. That meant they
knew a way out. It also occurred to Trace that both creatures were
nocturnal, and the bat that had nearly slapped him in the face was
headed the other way back down the shaft. The bats were returning
to their dark home-world as the sun prepared to rise outside.

As though powered by the thought another bat
fluttered past in the opposite direction.

But the rats kept nudging Trace along like a
mob of penitents shuffling their way through the alleyways of some
medieval city. That image called forth another. The Pied Piper.
Only Trace wasn’t leading the rats. They were leading him.

When the tunnel reached another cross shaft
Trace halted, and the horde stopped with him. He carefully groped
his way around this new space, anxious of his footing lest he trip
into another down-shaft and fall right through the mass of
creatures to his death somewhere in the depths below. But he was
becoming more and more certain that that would not happen,
that-insane as the notion seemed-the rats would somehow
stop
 
him from taking that last fateful step.

The nexus of narrow passages was not t-shaped
but an x. Trace shuffled-so as not to step on any of the rats-back
into the center of the crossing and waited to see if the creatures
would miraculously make the decision for him. But after a couple of
minutes it was clear that the rodents were now content to sit or
stand or whatever the hell they were all doing in the pitch
blackness and wait for him to decide.

"I’m lost," he explained to the horde.

Why not give them a lecture?

A slapping sound suddenly echoed around him,
approaching from the corridor to his right, and he realized it was
a whole flock of bats. The flying hairballs swarmed over and past,
stirring the air, cloaking Trace in the suffocating smell of guano
again. He shielded his eyes, but not one of the blind flyers
touched him.

Melodramatically raising one fist like Moses
lifting a staff, Trace nodded ahead.

"Onward," he commanded..

The rats followed.

Moments later he splashed through ankle deep
water. He could hear the horde paddling furiously, feel the rats
floating and bumping against his legs. But, though they might have
drowned, none of the animals clung to his pants to save themselves.
When he spotted the faintest reflected glimmer of what appeared to
be crimson-soaked sunlight ahead he glanced down at the shadowy
animals, their blood-red eyes feverishly aglow.

For just an instant he felt a strange sense
of communion with the tiny, verminous band. Their pointy faces
seemed to plead forgiveness for a wrong their clan had long ago
perpetrated upon him. Trace nodded, and again as one, they turned
and pattered away into the darkness.

Trace shook his head.

"Go with God," he muttered.

Ashley awakened when the softest pink finger
of dawn stroked the thin cotton curtain beside her bed. She lay
there unmoving, waiting to see if Maxie would react to the light or
the change in her breathing. The dog rose lazily to lick her hand
and rest his jaw on the covers.

"Made it through another night, boy," she
said, stretching as she rose.

He followed her into the kitchen, watching as
she filled the coffee pot. Then he stood guard outside the open
door while she showered and completed her morning toilet. They
shared a hot breakfast-her bacon and eggs, he hot water over dry
kibble-and then he continued eying her cautiously as she stood in
the center of the den staring at the guncase. When Marie wandered
in she watched Ashley quietly.

"Want me to make you breakfast?" asked
Ashley.

Marie shook her head.

"You go shoot. I’ll make some cereal."

Ashley studied the girl. She was slender with
breasts that were just beginning to develop, and yet Ashley could
already see the strong willed woman who would emerge, as though
Marie were the Chrysalis for some steel butterfly. A thing of
beauty and yet strength.

"You don’t want to come along?"

Marie shook her head. "You know I don’t like
guns."

That was true, although she had been quick
enough the night before to grab a pistol when the need arose. Marie
was a mass of contradictions.

"All right," said Ashley, at last. "I won’t
be long. If you like you can take Sparkie for a ride when I get
back."

Finally she chose the forty-four magnum,
semi-automatic carbine from the gun cabinet and dug out a couple of
boxes of shells for it and for her nine-millimeter pistol. She
found two paper targets and also pocketed her own ear plugs and a
couple of cotton balls for Maxie. Before leaving she snagged the
hand-held radio and keyed it.

"It’s Ashley. I’m going to be doing some
target shooting."

"Okay, Ash," a male voice replied. "We’ll
spread the word so no one gets excited."

She clipped the radio to her belt. Maxie
followed her out the door, through the back gate past Sparkie’s
stall and up the slope through the trees to a narrow ravine cut
into the granite slope and overhung by ragged pine and alder
bushes. She rested the carbine against a rock then taped the
man-shaped targets to a couple of fifty gallon barrels that were
more holes than metal. Maxie bowed his head resignedly when she
returned to shove the cotton balls in his ears.