where a new section of the wooden barricade is going up. Piles of timber lie nearby. The bulldozer sits in the gloom. Nick indicates a clearing up ahead.
“There he is,” Nick whispers as they approach a deadfall on the threshold of the clearing. He drops down behind the logs, looking almost like a hysterical little boy playing army. Brian joins him, crouching down and peering over the top of the rotting timber.
About twenty yards in the distance, in a natural basin of mossy earth, shrouded by a canopy of ancient live oaks and longleaf pine, Philip Blake is visible. The ground is carpeted in matted pine needles, fungus, and weeds, and a low faint glow of methane clings to the forest floor, a ghostly magenta haze that gives the clearing an almost mystical cast. Nick raises the shotgun. “‘Dear Lord,’” he mumbles under his breath, “‘please cleanse us of all this unrighteousness—’”
“Nick, stop it,” Brian whispers.
“‘I renounce all sins,’” Nick drones on, gaping at the horror in the clearing. “‘They offend thee, O Lord —’”
“Shut up, just
A frigid blast of horror swirls through Brian when he realizes it is
Nick keeps babbling under his breath: “‘Forgive me, Lord, for what I’m about to do, and with the help of Thy grace I serve Thy will—’”
“Shut the fuck up!” Brian’s brain is chugging, seizing up with panic, racing with frantic assumptions: Philip is either going to rape this poor woman or kill her and feed her to Penny. Something has to be done, and it has to be done quickly. Nick is right. He was right all along. There has to be a way to stop this before—
A blur of movement next to Brian.
Nick is vaulting over the deadfall, pushing his way through the briars and into the clearing.
“Nick, wait!” Brian gets halfway through the brambles when he sees the deadly tableau taking shape in the shadowy clearing like an arrangement of players on a surreal chessboard, coming together in dreamy slow motion.
Nick stumbles out into the open with his shotgun raised at Philip, and Philip, startled by the sudden sound of Brian’s warning cry, springs to his feet. Weaponless, glancing nervously from the wriggling women to the duffel bag lying in the toadstools next to her, Philip raises his hands. “Put that goddamn thing down, Nicky.”
Nick raises the bead of the muzzle until it’s trained directly on Philip. “Devil’s got his hooks in you, Philip. You’ve sinned against God … desecrated His name. It’s in the hands of the Lord now.”
Brian is staggering into the clearing, fumbling for his .38, hyperventilating with adrenaline. “Nick, don’t!— DON’T DO IT!” Brian’s mind races as he comes to a halt ten feet behind Nick.
By this point, the girl on the ground has managed to roll over—still bound and gagged—and she’s crying into the moist earth, as if wishing it would open up and let her climb in and die. Meanwhile, Nick and Philip are standing six feet away from each other, their gazes locked.
“What are you, the avenging angel?” Philip asks his longtime friend.
“Maybe I am.”
“This doesn’t concern you, Nicky.”
Nick is trembling with emotion, his eyes blinking away tears. “There’s a better place for you and your daughter, Philly.”
Philip stands as still as a stone monument, his narrow, weathered face looking positively grotesque in the gloomy light. “And I suppose you’re the one who’s gonna send me and Penny to Glory?”
“Somebody’s gotta stop this, Philly. Might as well be me.” Nick raises the sight to his eye and mutters, “‘Lord, please forgive—’”
“Nick, wait!—Please, please!
Nick shakes. He keeps the sight fixed. Sweat beads on his forehead.
Philip takes a step closer. “Don’t worry about it, Brian. Nicky’s always been a talker. He ain’t got the stones to shoot somebody who’s still alive.”
Nick trembles furiously.
Brian watches, frozen with indecision.
Philip calmly reaches down to the girl, grabs her by the scruff of her collar, and yanks her up like a stray piece of luggage. He turns and starts dragging the squirming girl toward the far side of the clearing.
Nick’s voice drops into a lower register. “Have mercy on us all.”
The shotgun ratchets suddenly.
And the muzzle roars.
A 12-gauge shotgun is a blunt instrument. The lethal .33-caliber pellets can spread as wide as a foot or more in a short distance, tearing through its target with enough force to penetrate a cinder block.
The buckshot that hits Philip in the back punches through the meat of his shoulder blades and the cords of his neck, sending half his brain stem out through the front of his throat. The grains also take the side of the girl’s scalp off, killing her instantly. The two bodies are launched in a cloud of pink mist.
The pair tumble forward in a tangled clench before sprawling side by side on the forest floor, their arms and legs akimbo. The girl is already stone-still dead but Philip twitches in his death throes for several agonizing seconds. His face is upturned, frozen in a mask of utter surprise. He tries to breathe but the damage to his brain is shutting everything down.
The shock of what has just happened drives Nick Parsons to his knees, his finger still frozen on the trigger pad, the shotgun sizzling hot.
His vision tunnels as he gapes at the damage inflicted on the two human bodies in the path of the blast. He drops the shotgun in the weeds and moves his mouth but makes no sound. What has he done? He feels himself contracting inward like a seed pod, cold and desolate, the clanging noise of Armageddon ringing in his ears, the scalding tears of shame coming now in rivulets down his face: What has he done? What has he done? What has he done?
Brian Blake turns to ice. His pupils dilate. The sight of his brother lying in a bloody heap on the ground next to the dead girl stamps itself forever on his brain. All other thoughts drain out of his mind.
Only the noise of Nick’s keening wails penetrate Brian’s stupor.
Howling with sobs now, Nick is still on his knees next to Brian. All reason and sanity have drained out of Nick Parsons’s face, and he caterwauls at the sight of the carnage. Bursts of gibberish come out of him in stringers of snot—part prayer, part insane pleading—his breath showing in the chill twilight. He looks up at the heavens.
Brian raises the .38 without thinking—a jolt of psychotic rage driving him—and he squeezes off a single shot, point-blank, into the side of Nick Parsons’s skull.
The battering ram drives Nick over in a jet of red fluid, the slug ripping through his brain, coming out the other side and chewing through a tree. Nick folds, eyes rolling back, brain already dead.
He lands with the profound surrender of a child going to sleep.
The passage of time loses all meaning. Brian doesn’t see the dark silhouettes of figures approaching through the distant trees, drawn to the noise. Nor does he have any awareness of moving across the clearing to the mangled pair of bodies. But somehow, without even being conscious of it, Brian Blake ends up on the ground next to Philip, cradling his younger brother’s bloody form in his lap.
