The Siege (53 page)

Donna pressed herself against the door, even though she knew her added weight would do little to stop the onslaught. The crossbars sagged inward from the pressure, and already the ends were digging divots into the plaster wall, slowly losing their brace.

“Where’s Hocker? Did Dale come back?” Donna screamed. Her throat was vibrating so hard, she thought for sure it was being shredded. “Tasha! Answer me! Don’t just stand there! Where the Christ is
Hocker
?”

She glanced over her shoulder, down the steps at Tasha, who was standing there motionlessly, shrugging and shaking her head.

“I don’t know where he is,” Tasha said. “He wasn’t here when I got here. Are you sure he even came down here?”

VII

D
ale thought for sure he was going to shit his pants when he felt the hand grab his ankle. With a scream bubbling in the back of his throat, he tried to kick free but only succeeded in slamming his knee against the tunnel mouth. Pain shot up to his hips, and blind panic filled his mind like lightning.

“No…
No!
…” he wailed as he kicked to release the hold on his leg. His arms trembled as they strained to boost him upward, and miraculously he did get himself up enough so his hips were clear.

His left hand still gripped the flashlight tightly, and counting on a sudden blast of light to startle the creature that held him, he swung the beam downward.

In a flickering instant, he saw a dirt-smeared face glaring up at him with a wide smile, and then, in a sudden rush, he recognized who it was. “Jesus Christ, Hocker!”

“Jesus Christ,
yourself
, man,” Hocker said, laughing deeply. “Your sure are jumpy.”

Relief flooded Dale so fast it almost took away all ol his strength. With a sudden outrush of breath, he settled jack down into the tunnel opening, wishing to God the rapid hammering of his pulse in his ears would slow. His arms felt like frayed elastic.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Dale asked once he had regained a bit of his composure. Sweat dripped from his forehead and ran from his armpits down his side, making him shiver.

“Go on,” Hocker said, chuckling. “Get your ass out of here so I can get out.”

Dale wiped his arm across his forehead, he hoisted himself up into the barn and rolled over onto his back. For several seconds, he lay there, staring up at the barn roof. Hocker quickly scrambled up after him and, standing up, stretched his arms over his head.

“Sure is cramped down there, ain’t it?” Hocker said looking down at Dale with a wide smile.

“I can’t
believe
you,” Dale said with a snarl as he slowly stood up and stretched his legs and arms. “Why the hell’d you follow me?”

“I didn’t want to miss any of the fun,” Hocker said as he moved over toward the cruiser. “ ’N I figured, this was my gig, so I ought to help you with the gasoline.”

“You came down that tunnel without a flashlight?” Dale asked, raising his eyebrows in astonishment.

Hocker shrugged as he leaned into the open cruiser trunk and grabbed the five gallon can of gasoline.

“No problem,” he said casually. “I figured it would be pretty straight and you’d be up ahead. Hey, you know, I don’t think they’ve been in here since I parked the cruiser here last night. It doesn’t look like anything’s been disturbed.”

Dale whistled through his teeth as he gave Winfield’s cruiser a quick once-over. The lights were smashed out, the fenders and sides were dented, and the radio and huge chunks of the interior had been blown away by the shotgun blast.

“You did a damned fine job of it,” Dale said, shaking his head with disgust. “Think it’ll still work?”

“I don’t think the trunk light, being on all night, would be enough to drain the battery.” He brightened and looked at Dale. “You got the key? Give it a crank.”

Dale glanced at the window toward the house, fearful that at any moment a dead man’s face would fill the window. He knew Donna was waiting for him to signal her, but he wasn’t so sure he wanted to do anything to draw attention to the barn.

“Let’s just get the flares and gas and get the hell back there,” Dale said gruffly. “If we trap enough of those creatures in the cellar when you torch it, we’ll probably be able to make it back to town through the woods if the car doesn’t start.”

“Fine by me,” Hocker said. There was a sing-song tone in his voice that irritated Dale as well as warned him to keep a close eye on this guy. Dale took the package of road flares from the trunk, then slammed the trunk lid shut. Hocker carried the can of gasoline to the tunnel entrance. What neither of them saw, as they lowered themselves down into the opening, was the pair of eyes watching them from the crack between the two large, sliding front doors. One of the eyes had a wide, dilated pupil, fringed with a cold, blue iris.

VIII

“W
e’re in deep trouble!” Donna said when first Hocker and Dale emerged from the tunnel into the cellar. Their faces were smudged with dirt and streaked with sweat.

“What’s going on?” Dale asked, glancing around the cellar. The steady pounding sound coming from up the top of the stairs immediately drew his attention. “Where’s Winfield?”

Donna cast her glance down at the floor and sadly shook her head. Her lower lip was trembling when she looked at Dale and said simply, “I think… they got him.”

“What? What do you mean?” The flood of anger and frustration that swept through him was almost too much to handle. All he could think was,
I shouldn’t have gone! I should have stayed here!

“We were waiting in the kitchen, for some sign that you had made it, and those creatures broke into the living room. He tried to fight them off, but there were just too many. I…” Her voice choked off, and tears flowed down her face. “I turned and ran down here just as they piled all over him.”

“Holy Mother of God,” Dale said, shaking his head as he tried to absorb this new loss. He felt that same numb rush he had felt when Nichols had called him Saturday morning to tell him Larry Cole had died… that same cold hand on his neck that he had felt when the call had come eight years ago, informing him that Natalie had been hit by an oncoming truck.

“You’re… you’re sure he… didn’t make it?” he stammered, looking up at the door where the pounding continued, unabated.

Donna nodded, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“Well, fuck it!” Hocker said. “We’ve got some fun ahead of us!”

He held up the can of gasoline and sloshed it back and forth. There was a wicked gleam in his eyes. Tasha recognized it as the same look from the night he had torched the old man’s truck and sent it off the cliff into the river.

Dale turned toward him, his jaw chattering with sputtering rage. He clenched his fists and, for the first time, fully understood how much Winfield had hated this man. The least he could do, he thought, in memory of Jeff Winfield, was throttle the shit out of this jerk; but he stopped himself: there might be time to throttle him later! First, they had to get everyone, including Donna, down that tunnel and out of the house!

The harsh sound of tearing cloth drew his attention, and he looked over to see Tasha, kneeling over her opened backpack by the coal bin, shredding one of her shirts. Hocker smiled and said, “Well, at least someone knows how to have a good time! If you two feel like helping, I could use a
lot
of flammable material—cloth, those wood shavings over there… anything to help the fire get along.”

He walked up the stairs to the closed door, still vibrating with the heavy hammering from the other side, and started to splash gasoline around the door frame and on the stairs.

Dale and Donna stood in the middle of the cellar, watching while they both tried to register the loss of Winfield in their numbed brains. Neither one of them had noticed that Tasha’s shoulder shook with wrenching sobs as she worked. She was thinking how she wasn’t going to need any of her clothes anymore; she was either getting out of here and going home, or she was going to be
dead
!

“If we can get enough gasoline, maybe use those road flares to get it real hot, to make sure the stairs go up good, we should have ’em,” Hocker said as he backed slowly down the steps, splashing gas as he went.

Dale suddenly had an idea. He went over to the space beneath the cellar stairs and trained his flashlight upward. The three stringers were made of well-seasoned wood, free of any rot. Clumps of black cobwebs hung in the corners, drifting lazily with the stirring of the air as Dale poked around. In a few spots, funnel-shaped stains of Hocker’s gasoline seeped through between the steps and dripped down.

“Hey! Hocker! Come here,” Dale called, once he was sure by the sound that Hocker had finished dousing the stairs.

With the gas can hanging at his side, sloshing with a hollow, near-empty sound, Hocker came around under the stairs. Dale directed his flashlight beam upward, toward the source of the heavy pounding.

“Think we could use the saw and maybe help this sucker collapse once they start coming down?”

Hocker snorted a loud laugh, and a fleck of mucous shot from his nose. He wiped his hand across his face and nodded. “Those fuckers are probably so
stupid
, they’ll keep coming even if the steps are gone. Christ, Harmon,” he said, slapping Dale on the shoulder, knocking him off balance. “There might be some hope for you yet!”

The comment made Dale miss Winfield all the more, but as waves of grief swept through him, he forced himself to smile and said, “Let’s get a move on. That barrier up there isn’t going to hold them all day.”

“You do the cutting,” Hocker said, “I want to check out where I can pop a few lighted flares, where they might get the floorboards upstairs burning.”

Dale got the rusty saw and, propping the light upward, set to work. The sound of his efforts were almost completely drowned out by the noise Rodgers’ creatures were making in the kitchen upstairs. As the rusty teeth chewed into the first stringer, dry sawdust, almost as dry as the dust in that tunnel, sifted down into his face. It fell down his neck and inside his shirt collar, mixed with his sweat, and started to itch fiercely. It wasn’t long before his neck and shoulders were screaming with pain.

Donna came over and held the light for him as he worked. She didn’t say a word while he was hacking away at the underside of the stairs, but when he stopped, gasping from the effort, her glance caught him, and he knew she had something on her mind.

“Don’t hold back on me,” he whispered. “What’s bugging you?”

He craned his head around the stairs to see what Hocker was up to. He was over by the workbench, pawing through the accumulated junk. Every time he found a can of paint or turpentine he’d shake it to see if there was anything left. The expression on his face reminded Dale of a kid on Christmas morning. He was having the time of his life.
And maybe the threat of death added spice to it all
, Dale thought.

Donna’s eyes flickered briefly. “It’s Tasha. She’s really freaking out.”

Dale nodded, sighing deeply as he regarded his work. So far, he wasn’t even a quarter of the way through the first stringer. The old wood had dried until it was as hard as steel.

“She’s really freaked that…
they
got Jeff.”

Dale nodded again. “I still can’t quite accept it, either,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Donna said, shrugging helplessly. “She keeps saying there’s no reason for us to make it out of here, that she can’t think of many reasons to live anymore.”

“Look, we’ve got things to do if we’re going to get out of here,” Dale said, suddenly charged with anger. “I mean, think about what I’ve got to deal with! For all I know, Rodgers has already been over to Mrs. Appleby’s and got Angie. You don’t think I’m a little anxious to get out of here? Tasha’s been through a lot for a kid her age. And I can imagine she feels pretty alienated, but I’m not going to let her bullshit slow me down! Tell her to get it together and come along for the ride! I really don’t have time to be her goddamned shrink!”

With that, he turned back to his sawing, attacking the wood with renewed fury. The sawdust flew everywhere, sprinkling the dirt floor like snow.

“Well, Mr. Sensitive,” Donna said, but she didn’t leave; she continued to hold the light for him while he worked in spite of the awkward silence that had fallen between them.

“I have no fucking idea how much to cut these,” Dale said, sounding totally frustrated after a short-lived round of furious cutting. His face and hair were covered with sawdust, making him look like he had a case of terminal dandruff.

“I don’t know,” Donna said, laughing at how funny he looked. “As long as no one’s going up there, I’d say go almost all the way.”

She couldn’t account for her sudden giddiness. Maybe, like Tasha, she was finally buckling under the strain… only she was going to end up
laughing
hysterically in the corner of the coal bin while Tasha
cried
.

Either way, she thought, we’re both going to end up in the rubber room, writing letters home with Crayolas.

“Aww, screw it! That’s enough for that one,” Dale said, snorting as he brushed the sawdust from his face. He rotated his shoulder, trying to get the circulation back into it, then set to work on the middle stringer.