said.
“Then you can take my place for as long as you need it,” she said. A confession extracted through torture might have sounded more gracious. “Need someone to show you the way, or can you handle simple directions?”
“I’ll take him, Orfamay.” It was the little girl, who had showed up at his side again.
“That’s very generous,” Matt said. “But I don’t need to throw you out of your home. I just need to get back to the highway.”
“Mouse will show you around,” Orfamay said. She turned back to the crowd of Vetches and Gilhoolies, Runcibles and Hogginses. “You going to stand around staring like a bunch of dead sheep? There’s work to do preparing for tonight.”
She clapped her hands sharply and the crowd immediately started to dissipate. “Six o’clock sharp,” she said, and Matt couldn’t tell if she was addressing the little girl or him. “We’re punctual in these parts.”
Orfamay Vetch gave Matt one last, penetrating look and then marched off with the rest of the crowd. The girl slipped her hand into his and pulled him toward a side street.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I knew you’d come if I summ-if I prayed hard enough.”
“I can’t stay,” Matt said. “But thank you. Did she call you Mouse?”
The girl smiled happily at the sound of her name coming from his lips. “My real name is Mary Elizabeth Gilhoolie, but my brother Vern, he’s called me Mouse since forever, because I’m little and I can creep around without anyone hearing me. We’re going this way.”
The road she led him toward ran out of asphalt about six feet from the main street. It was pocked with small, dark, crumbling houses lurking behind rotting picket fences. Between them chicken coops and hog wallows sent clouds of foul dust into the hot air. Matt had grown up in one of the Northwest’s dying lumber towns, but he’d never seen any place that looked as poor and miserable as this.
“You prayed for me to come,” Matt said, giving into the questions that had been pounding at his brain. “How did you know my name?”
“I dreamed it,” she said proudly. “You came to me riding that motorcycle and told me your name was Matt and that you were coming to save us.”
Again, Matt flashed on that Frazetta image of himself as King Conan. He tried to laugh it out of his head, but it wouldn’t go. Maybe he had been brought back to be some kind of hero.
“Do you often have dreams like that?” Matt said.
“The Book tells me how-” she broke off again.
“The Book?”
“The Good Book,” Mouse said quickly, a flush coming to her cheeks. “That’s what my mother used to call the Bible. It tells me how to pray.”
There was a quaver in her voice, and Matt thought she was hiding something. But it didn’t seem worth calling her a liar simply to discover the deepest secrets of an eleven-year-old girl. If he’d known how many deaths he might have prevented if he’d pushed her, no doubt he would have. There was something else she’d said that seemed more important at the moment.
“You say she used to call it the Good Book,” Matt said. “Is she
…?”
“Dead,” Mouse said. “Pa, too. My brother Vern looks after me now. He’s the leader of all the Gilhoolies. Hogginses, too.”
“I’m sorry about your parents,” Matt said. “Was it Joan?”
“Before Joan came,” Mouse said. “That was why I-”
A scream came from behind one of the houses. It was filled with pain and terror. And then it stopped, drowned in a bubbling of blood.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Matt froze, looking for the source of the cry.
“Over there!” Mouse pointed at a small shack on the left side of the road.
Matt ran toward the shack, not noticing that the pain in his ankle had all but disappeared, his cracked ribs seemed to have knit back together. All he could think about was that scream, and what it could mean.
When he got to the far side of the shack, what he saw was worse than anything he could have imagined.
There was blood everywhere, an inch deep even as it soaked into the dry ground. Two men lay on the ground, covered in gore, each with a hand on the other’s throat. Their free hands were outstretched as if they were begging not to be killed, and at first Matt thought they had both died this way.
Then he saw them move, and realized they were struggling in the mud and blood. Fighting to reach the machete that lay just out of their reach.
Matt vaulted over a decaying split rail fence, then took three long steps and brought his foot down on the machete just as one of the men reached its handle.
“What the hell do you think-” the man grunted. And then he stopped as he looked up and saw Matt standing over him. His hand fell away from the knife, and then slowly he rolled away from the other man. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you.”
Matt didn’t know why that should make a difference. Maybe the slayer of Joan was entitled to some respect in this town. Then he realized he was still carrying the axe. It fit so comfortably in his hand he’d forgotten he’d been holding it the entire time. So it was possible that it was simply a matter of the axe in the hand outweighing the machete on the ground. Whatever the reason, the two men had stopped trying to kill each other.
For the moment.
“Get to your feet,” Matt said, then turned to the other one. “You, too.”
Both men rose. Matt couldn’t tell if they’d been among the ones he met on Main Street. Blood obscured their features and covered their clothes. They stared down at their feet like schoolchildren waiting for a scolding.
Matt tried to figure out what he was supposed to do here. If he was King Conan, he supposed he would just cut both their heads off. That didn’t have a lot of appeal for him.
Before the silence had dragged on long enough so that that even these two would realize Matt had no idea what he was doing, Mouse ran up beside him. She gave the two men a quick, dismissive glance, then ducked around them to where a mound of bloody flesh lay on the ground.
“That’s Sweetpie,” she said accusingly. “Which one of you two did this?”
Mouse kneeled in the blood and gently stroked what Matt could now make out as the head of a large pig. The animal was dead, its throat slit and its body hacked to shreds, apparently with the bloody machete that still stuck out of one wound. Astonishingly, there were still a few dribbles of blood oozing out of the body, despite the flood that covered its sty.
“It was this murdering bastard,” the first man said. “Alwyn Hoggins came running in here waving that blade over his head like a madman and killed my poor Sweetpie, and her getting ready to breed again in the spring.”
“Your poor Sweetpie is the only murderer here,” said the other one, whom Matt now realized he had met in the line-up with a cluster of other Hogginses. “You Vetches think you own this town and everyone in it. But that doesn’t give you the right to let your pigs run free in my chicken coop. Killed eight of my best layers and chased off three more. I told you last time what would happen if that beast got into my hens, and I meant it.”
“My Sweetpie wouldn’t hurt your damn hens. Just because you can’t string chicken wire tight enough to keep out the foxes, you’ve got to blame your problems on me.”
“You’re so sure of that, Ezekiel Vetch, then let’s cut open that fat sow’s belly and see what we got in there,” Alwyn said.
“Sure thing,” Vetch said. “Right after we cut open yours. You don’t have that bitch protecting you anymore.”
Ezekiel Vetch dived down to the bloody ground and grabbed for the machete. Matt stepped back, then kicked him hard on the chin. Vetch rolled over, clutching his head. Hoggins jumped on his enemy, flipped him over, and
