The Siege (59 page)

She went out the door and let it swing shut softly behind her. All the way down the corridor, she could hear him back in his room, wailing with laughter.

Maybe he’ll learn someday
, she thought. She pressed the button for the elevator, and when it arrived, its door opening with a hydraulic hiss, she glanced down the corridor at Hocker’s closed door. His laughter echoed like a madman’s in the corridor.

As she stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the lobby, she thought,
then again… he probably won’t
.

V

“T
his is sort of how it all began, isn’t it?” Dale said, smiling as he put his arm around Donna’s shoulder. “Only last time, as I recall, we were sitting in my car.” He tried not to think about the flattened wreck he had left in the farmhouse driveway.

They were parked in front of Donna’s sister’s house, directly under the streetlight on purpose. Donna had driven them back in her car from the police station where they had spent most of the day, answering the same questions over and over, filling in more details then seemed necessary. Dale, Donna, Angie, and Tasha grabbed a quick supper at Kellerman’s. It was take-out because they didn’t want to sit and eat with everyone in the restaurant staring at them, asking questions with their eyes. Word had traveled fast about the accident out on Casey’s Curve and what had happened out at the LaPierre place.

The facts, at least, were simple.

Franklin Rodgers was dead in the car wreck at Casey’s Curve, along with four other bodies, only one of which had been identified—that of Stephen Wayne, a physician’s assistant who lived and worked in Houlton.

The LaPierre farmhouse had burned flat to the ground, and twenty-eight charred corpses had been found in the remains, mostly in the cellar. The smashed barn door, the remains of Dale’s car in the driveway, and the shattered pieces from Winfield’s cruiser, strewn around inside the barn, helped confirm the basic outline of their story, but the authorities who interviewed Dale, Donna, and Tasha, were skeptical when given the full explanation.

Jeff Winfield’s battered cruiser was returned to the Dyer Police, and his decapitated body was taken to a funeral home in Haynesville. Dale saw the irony but no humor in the fact that he was resting—
finally
—in a closed casket.

The State Police sealed off Rodgers’ Funeral Home, and as Bates seemed so fond of saying, “the boys from the lab” were going through the place. Yes, Bates had also said, “with a fine-toothed comb.” The people who interviewed Dale and Donna remained tight-lipped about what they found, but Dale learned that they had also brought Sam Higgins in for what Bates called “routine questioning.” Dale got the usual police reaction whenever he mentioned the body he had seen on the marble slab in Rodgers’ laboratory: flat, expressionless faces with not a hint of emotion.

Probably
, he thought,
like typical bureaucrats, they’ll cover this one up… real deep!

“It’s been a hell of a few days,” Donna said. She let her breath out slowly, and the breeze, angling upward, ruffled her hair.

“I always like to show my dates a good time,” Dale said, forcing a laugh. “You know, really impress them.”

When Donna looked at him, he could tell she was trying to soften her eyes, but they still looked haunted and scared as though she expected to see one more of Rodgers’ creatures lurch out of the darkness at them.

“Do you think,” she said, licking her lips to keep them moist, “they’re all dead for real now?”

Dale shrugged and tightened his hand on her shoulder. He didn’t want to think about any of it anymore, but he knew he would.

“I’d say the chances are fifty-fifty,” he said, after letting his gaze drift out the window, up and down the street. “The cops didn’t say anything about finding any others at the funeral home.”

“As if they’d tell us what they found,” Donna snapped.

“True, but you’ve got to figure Rodgers probably threw everything he had against us. And I think, if there are any left, they’ll probably die off for good when they can’t get more of the drug or whatever Rodgers was using to keep them going.”

“Seems like kind of a frail hope,” Donna said. Her eyes continually shifted to look around the car. She was remembering the man in the cemetery, trying not to wonder if
he
had been one of those things.
Maybe he had been up there, digging up corpses and eating them!
she thought with a shiver.

“Overall, I’d say we both can thank frail hope,” Dale said with a snicker. “If you had ever asked me what our odds were for getting out of the farmhouse, I think I might have mentioned something like ’frail hope.’ ”

Donna suddenly turned and looked squarely at him. Her lower lip was trembling, and she seemed on the verge of breaking down entirely. He admired her courage and stamina, but he wouldn’t have blamed her if she lost control of herself right now.

“What kind of ‘frail hope’ do we have for the future?” she asked.

Dale leaned his head back, rubbed his neck, and sighed. “Well, that’s as much your choice as mine, I’d say. Lisa will be staying with Angie and me until Mrs. Appleby’s out of the hospital. I just can’t believe how much that girl eats. Did you see the size of that hamburger the nurse got for her? And she ate it all just about in one bite.”

“She needs to regain her strength,” Donna said.

“Anyway, like I told you, I’m sure I could get you a job in Augusta if you want it. What are you looking for?”

Donna shook her head, covering her mouth with her hand. Dale had the impression it was so she wouldn’t scream.

“I’d like to think,” she said, her voice muffled by her hand, “that sometime in the future I’m not going to jump at every shadow I see after sunset. I’d like to think I won’t wake up half a dozen times, like I did last night, screaming and covered with sweat.”

“I’d like to think that, if you do, I’ll be there in bed beside you to calm you down,” Dale said softly. His hand rose and began to stroke the side of her face.

Donna’s hand dropped, but her mouth remained in a hard line. “I know you would,” she said huskily, “and I think I would, too.”

“
Think?
”

She nodded. “Yes. I need time to think. I told you why I came back to Dyer in the first place—to think my life through a bit. The last year, not to mention the past few days, was absolute hell!”

“Look,” Dale said, trying to draw her close enough to kiss; she resisted for a moment, then gave in. The kiss lasted a long time, and the longer it went one, the softer and more yielding Donna’s lips became.

VI

L
isa was released from the hospital early the next morning. Angie, Dale, and Donna went in to pick her up. As they left the hospital room she and Angie were chattering excitedly about her coming to stay with them.

Angie was thinking it could have been a really fun holiday if Lisa didn’t have her grandmother to worry about. But she
did
, and when she saw Mrs. Appleby for the first time since she left Lisa at the hospital yesterday morning, Angie couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt that she had caused all of this, too.

Mrs. Appleby smiled when the three of them entered her room. She spent a bad night, but now, in the clear light of morning, she found that the nightmares were receding. She knew her sleep had been filled with images of Rodgers’ strange eye and expressionless face as he reached for her again and again in night, trying to choke the life from her. Once she had her strength back, maybe this afternoon, she knew she would have to tell Chief Bates more of what she remembered. Her memory was coming back to her now, and as much as she didn’t like it, she knew she would have to tell him everything.

While those three were with Mrs. Appleby, Tasha decided to pay one last visit to Hocker. She couldn’t quite admit to herself that she cared even a little bit how he was doing; she simply told herself that, since she hadn’t gotten to go straight home yesterday, because the cops had so many questions for her, she’d check up on how his shoulder was healing.

As she walked down the corridor, she was swept by a sudden feeling that something had gone wrong. It wasn’t anything that was going on in the hospital. The two nurses at the nurses’ station nodded a cheerful greeting to her. The corridor was quiet and calm. But there was a foreboding sense of something going wrong, the way she believed she could
smell
a thunderstorm before it hit.

Her hands were shaking when she raised them up to the door of Hocker’s room and gave it a push. The door swung silently inward and hit the rubber-tipped bar that stopped it from banging the wall. The curtains were drawn, and the room was cast in a heavy yellow glow. Tasha cringed, remembering the dim light that had filtered through the barriers into the farmhouse living room.

“Hock…?” she called out, sticking her head into the overheated room. On the nightstand was the vase of flowers all of them had sent. The heater was running full-tilt, rattling as the fans spun. Below the whirring of the fan, though, was another sound, a soft
thump-thump
.

Hocker’s bed was disheveled, the sheets draped onto the floor. It looked to Tasha as though one side of the sheet had been torn.

“Hey! Hocker!” she called out, a bit louder.

As she walked over toward the bed, she saw that the bathroom door was closed. Stepping up to it, she pressed her ear against the warm wood and listened. She jumped when she heard the thump sound again. It came from the bathroom.

“Hock?” she said as she raised her hand and rapped gently on the door.

There was no response from the other side, and the feeling that something was wrong grew much stronger.

“Hey! Come on,” she said, her voice warbling with tension. “Don’t play any games with me, all right?”

Again, she knocked on the bathroom door, this time hard enough to hurt her knuckles and to knock the door open. When she saw Hocker, his head was cocked to one side as he dangled from the curtain rod in the shower, a twisted length of sheet tied around his neck. Tasha let out a scream that echoed through the entire wing. Several people on staff thought, at first, that it was someone having a particularly tough time in the delivery room.

For several seconds Tasha stood there, frozen, as she stared at Hocker’s twisted, broken neck. His eyes were opened and rolled back, showing only the bloodshot whites. His tongue protruded through his teeth, almost bitten completely through. A thin streak of blood ran from one corner of his mouth. The crotch of his hospital johnny was drenched with urine, and tiny drops had fallen from the cuff and puddled on the floor. As his body swung slowly around, his toe flipped the edge of the lead-weighted shower curtain; it hit the tub edge with a dull
thump
.

Within seconds, two nurses rushed into the room. One of them left immediately to notify the head nurse who, Tasha assumed, would call the police. The other one, unsure what to do, took Tasha by the arm and led her over to a chair. She gently shut the bathroom door behind them.

After the initial shock, Tasha was too stunned to react with any emotion. The nurse was kind enough; she kept trying to help by talking to Tasha, to comfort her. But Tasha wanted nothing more than to be left alone.

Now, maybe, it’s really over
, her mind kept repeating.

When the nurse asked her if she would like something to drink, Tasha asked her for a cup of coffee just to get her out of the room. Once she was alone, Tasha leaned back into the chair, closed her eyes, and tried as best she could to blank her mind. She didn’t want to feel anything, so she filled her mind with thoughts of all the stupid, idiotic things Hocker had ever done. She remembered all the things he had done to scare and intimidate her, to keep her under his control, even up until yesterday when he threatened to turn her in to the cops if they started checking up on what he had done.

“Not anymore, you bastard,” she whispered.

She opened her eyes, surprised at how much they were stinging. It was then that she noticed a piece of yellow, lined paper, torn from a notebook folded in half on the bed stand. Her mind went numb when she registered her name, scrawled along the top in heavy pencil strokes. The “S” in Tasha was backwards. Tasha was reaching for the paper when the nurse returned with her coffee. She snatched the paper up quickly, crumpling it as she jammed it into her jeans pocket.

“Oh… thanks,” she said, taking the coffee from the nurse but then not bothering to sip it.

“If you’d like to come down to the staff room, you can. You might not want to be here when the police arrive,” the nurse said softly.

Tasha nodded and stood. She quickly brushed her hand on her leg to flatten out the paper in her pocket, then followed the nurse out of Hocker’s room. She paused for a moment at the closed bathroom door and, touching the wood lightly, said, “See yah, Hock.”

Much later that evening, back at Mrs. Appleby’s house, after being questioned again by the police, Tasha found the courage to read the letter. With trembling hands, she unfolded the crumpled piece of paper, flattening it on her leg. The words were scrawled in a mixture of cursive and printing, but with a bit of effort she made out what it said.