The Impaler

sixteen rounds apiece. If the Impaler was using his M9 Beretta—well, Sam Markham couldn’t remember how many rounds that model held.

“Please, help me,” the young woman whimpered.

“Are you wounded?” Markham asked her. “Are you shot?”

“It was Edmund Lambert,” she sobbed. “It was Edmund….”

Markham took off his jacket and covered her. She had bite marks on her neck and shoulders; large patches of flesh missing from her breasts, too. She was bleeding badly, but he could tell for the time being she was going to be okay. She would have to be.

“What’s your name?” Markham asked.

“Cindy Smith.”

“Sam Markham, FBI,” he said, checking his pistols. “Hold my jacket against your chest to slow the bleeding. You’re going to be fine.”

“It was Edmund Lambert! He killed Bradley—”

“I need you to find a phone, Cindy Smith,” Markham said, tucking the pistols into the small of his back. “Call 911. Wait until I’m gone, then—”

“Don’t leave me!” the girl cried, reaching for his leg—but Markham ignored her and replaced the ladder.

“I need you to be strong,” he said. “Call 911—the kitchen. I saw a phone in the kitchen downstairs. You understand me?”

“No—he’ll come back for me!”

Markham stepped onto the ladder. “All right, stay put,” he shouted as he climbed. “You’ll be safe here. I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”

“Don’t leave me!”

But Markham was already at the top of the ladder. He poked his gun out of the hole and stepped up onto the roof as the girl went on screaming beneath him.

He was in the middle of nowhere; didn’t know which way to turn—the silvery farmland stretching out for what seemed like miles in every direction—when suddenly he heard the sound of a car starting behind him.

Markham scrambled over the roof peak and headed to the other side of the house—jumped onto the porch overhang just as the headlights of the Impaler’s pickup began backing away from him down the driveway.

Markham leaped from the porch roof and fired after the truck—broke a headlight on the first shot, then heard the windshield shatter and the hiss-pop of the radiator bursting as he emptied one of the pistols. He let it fall in the dirt and began firing with the other.

He’s going to get away, he thought—when unexpectedly the truck spun out and plowed backwards into one of the old tobacco sheds.

The weathered boards crumbled down and bounced off the hood as the truck came to a stop—its one remaining headlight cutting through the swirling dust like a laser beam. Markham ran for it, his stomach in his throat, as the old Ford’s engine whined painfully, its tires spinning in the dirt.

He fired one last time—heard a loud crack—and then everything cut off into a long, menacing hiss.

Markham slowed as he drew closer to the shed; took cover behind some remaining wall planks and checked his pistol.

The clip was empty. Only one bullet left in the chamber.

He pointed his gun at the driver’s side door and shouted, “FBI! Come out with your hands up!” His heart was pounding. He was a dead man if the Impaler called his bluff and decided to shoot it out with him. But there was nothing, no sound at all except for the hissy sputtering of the F-150’s radiator.

Markham approached the driver’s side door, leveled his gun, and quickly peered inside. The pickup’s interior light was on, and he could see blood on the front seat—but the passenger door was open, the Impaler nowhere in sight.

Markham dropped his head and ducked behind the truck bed for cover. Silence—only the crickets, his breathing and the faint hissing of the truck’s radiator dying out—when suddenly, he heard what sounded like boards cracking inside the shed.

He’s trying to break out the back, Markham thought. He craned his neck—peered over the truck bed into the dark- ness—and saw the outline of the missing boards against the moonlight. No sign of the Impaler.

He squatted back down—closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Come out with your hands up!” he shouted, frightened and feeling foolish. “There’s nowhere for you to run now, Edmund Lambert!”

You sure that’s his name? a voice taunted in his head. Edmund Lambert. You sure that’s what the girl said?

Another board—Crack!—then a scraping sound.

Markham swallowed hard, and then he was moving, covering himself as he circled around to the rear of the tobacco shed.

C rack!

Markham stopped, listening.

Silence again, only his breathing.

He sidled along the wall—thought he heard a thumping from around the corner—and stopped short at the rear of the shed. He could see the field stretching out in the distance beyond the trees; could hear nothing now but his heart throbbing in his ears. The Impaler was on the other side of the wall—he was sure of it—and in a burst of adrenaline, he wheeled around the corner and dropped to his knees.

Nothing.

Markham rose to his feet, saw where the Impaler had broken through the rear of the shed, and moved away from the wall. There was an old oak tree only a few yards away. The Impaler might be behind it—but he hadn’t heard any footsteps in the dry grass.

And then Markham understood.

He turned just in time to see the Impaler jumping from the low roof of the overhang. Instinctively he raised his gun, but the Impaler came down on him hard, his forearm slamming into Markham’s face as the gun went off.

Then they fell together to the ground.

Chapter 90

Now he is Edmund Lambert again, a boy on the road holding hands between the General and the Prince. He knows they are there but makes no attempt to look at them; understands that he is too small to see their faces, and keeps his eyes fixed on the light in the distance as they escort him past the lines of the impaled.

But the boy’s steps are their steps. Giant steps. And before the boy can wonder at it he has reached the temple doors at Kutha.

The Prince and the General leave him. The boy feels their hands slip away.

Now he is alone. Now there is only his mother, standing with her arms outstretched high above him at the top of the stairs—a silhouette in the temple doorway with the light of a billion stars behind her.

“Be a good boy and carry that rope for me,” she says.

“It’s not my fault,” the boy replies. “I only did what they told me.”

“C’est mieux d’oublier,” another voice echoes from somewhere, and his mother beckons him, disappearing slowly into the light.

Now the boy is climbing the stairs—black stairs, like rows of forgotten pictures in a yearbook—when all at once, it seems, he is standing in the doorway.

But the boy hesitates, unsure if he should enter. He hears the other voice again—a man’s voice that reminds him of his own—but cannot make out what it’s saying. Two words, only two words—but the voice is behind him now, far away in the void at the bottom of the stairs.

It doesn’t matter, the boy thinks.

And then he steps forward into an attic full of stars.