Curtis tries the door handle, lifts the tailgate.
Disengagement of the latch activates a soft light in the SUV, revealing two corpses in the cargo space. They have been tumbled together in such a way as to suggest that they were heaved in here as if they were bags of garbage.
His heart, a sudden stutterer, spasms on the l in lub, and on the d in dub.
He would run if he were not his mother’s son, but he’d rather die than, by his actions, cast shame upon her memory.
Pity and revulsion would turn him away had he not been taught to react to every horror like this as though it were a survival text, to read it quickly but closely for clues that might save his life and the lives of others.
Others, in this case, means Cass and Polly.
Tall, bald, and male, the first of these cadavers appears to be a physical match for the station attendant who’d been talking to the twins a moment ago, Curtis didn’t sec that guy’s face; nevertheless, he’s convinced that it will prove to he identical to this one, though not wrenched by terror.
Billowy, glossy, chestnut hair surrounds and softens the dead woman’s features. Her wide-open hazel eyes stare with startlement at the first glimpse of eternity that she received in the instant when her soul fled this world.
Neither victim bears a visible wound, but each appears to have a broken neck. Heads loll at such unnatural angles that the cervical vertebrae must have been shattered. For these hunters, who thrill to the administration of terror and who revel in murder, such kills are unusually clean and merciful.
Necessity rather than mercy explains the simple wounds. Each corpse has been stripped of its shoes and outer layer of clothing. To masquerade as their victims, the killers needed costumes without rips or stains.
If the combination service station and convenience store is a mom-and-pop operation, then here lie mom and pop. Their business and their identities have been subjected to a hostile takeover.
The dog’s attention is directed once more at the Corvette. Her interest, though intense, isn’t strong enough to draw her toward the sports car, which she regards with obvious dread. She appears to be as puzzled as she is apprehensive, cocking her head left, and then right, blinking, turning half away from the vehicle but then snapping her head toward it as if she’d seen it start to move.
Perhaps in the Corvette waits something worse than what he found in the Explorer, in which case he’ll keep his distance, too. Instead, seeking to learn what he can by sharing the dog’s perceptions, Curtis opens himself more completely to their bond, and looks at the ‘Vette through her eyes.
At first his sister-become seems to see nothing more than Curtis sees — but then for just a second, no longer, the moonlit car shimmers like a mirage. Dream car in more ways than one, internal-combustion illusion, it is merely the suggestion of a 197 °Corvette, masking a fearsome reality. The dog blinks, blinks, but the sports car remains apparently solid, so she turns her head away from it, and out of the corner of her eye, for two seconds or three, she glimpses what Curtis can’t perceive from the corner of his: a transport not of this earth, sleeker even than the sharklike Corvette, like a beast born to stalk sharks with a vengeance. So mighty-looking is this vehicle that you can’t think of it in the language of designers or engineers, but must resort to the vocabulary of military architecture, because in spite of its sleekness, it seems to be a fortress on wheels: all compact buttresses, ramparts, terrepleins, scarps, counterscarps, bastions made aerodynamic, condensed and adapted to rolling stock.
With this evidence before him, no doubt can linger any longer. The worse scalawags have arrived.
His nerves feel as taut as high-tuned violin strings, and his dark imagination plucks them with dire possibilities.
Death is here now, as always it is here, but it is not always as engaged and attentive as it is at this moment, waiting for a third course in its supper of bones.
The hunters must suspect that Curtis is in the motor home. Kind fate and his clever sister-become brought him out of the Fleetwood and around the building to this moonlit killing ground without being detected. He won’t remain undiscovered for long: perhaps two minutes, maybe three if his luck holds.
The instant that he shows himself, he will be known.
In his place, therefore, he sends the dog to Polly.
Fearful but obedient, she trots away, retracing the route along which she led him.
Curtis has no illusions that he’ll survive this encounter. The enemy is too near, too powerful, too remorseless to be defeated by one as small and defenseless as this motherless boy.
He harbors some hope, however, that he might be able to warn off Cass and Polly, that they might escape with the dog rather than be slaughtered with him.
Old Yeller disappears around the corner of the building. Beloved familiar, companion spirit, she walks always with an awareness of her Maker — and she will need Him now as never before.
Chapter 46
The penitentiary walls crumbled away from her, but she restacked the stones around herself, and when the bars fell out of the windows, she repaired them with a welder’s torch and fresh mortar.
From this dream of a self-made prison — not a nightmare, scary only because she labored so cheerfully to rebuild her cell — Micky woke, instantly aware that something was wrong.
Life had taught her to recognize danger at a distance. Now even in sleep, she’d sensed a threat in the waking world that called her back from that faraway, comfortable incarceration.
On the living-room sofa, lying on her side, eyes closed, head raised slightly upon a throw pillow, chin tucked down and resting against her clasped hands, she remained perfectly still, breathing softly like a sleeper, listening. Listening.
The house lay enfolded by a shroud of quiet as deep as that in a mortuary after viewing hours, the mourners gone.
Deaf to the threat, she was nonetheless able to sense it, feel it, as she could feel the change in atmospheric pressure when the air thickened just before a thunderstorm flashed and cracked and broke.
Micky had settled on the sofa to read a magazine while waiting for Leilani. The evening waned, and Geneva eventually retreated to her bedroom, leaving instructions to be awakened at once if the girl paid a visit. With Aunt Gen gone, with the contents of the magazine exhausted, Micky stretched out merely to rest her eyes, not to nap.
The cumulative weight of the difficult day, the heat, the humidity, and a growing despair had pressed her down into that dream prison.
Instinctively, she hadn’t opened her eyes when she woke. Now she kept them closed, operating on the theory — so dear to every child and sometimes resurgent in adulthood — that the boogeyman could not hurt her until she looked him in the eye and acknowledged his existence.
Frequently, in prison, she had learned that a pretense of sleep, of stupidity, of naivete, of cataleptic indifference, a pretense of deafness to an obscene invitation and of blindness to an insult, were all wiser responses than confrontation. Childhood can be remarkably similar to prison; the theory of the boogeyman’s eye offers guidance to child and inmate alike.
Someone moved nearby. The soft scuff of shoes on carpet and the creak of floorboards argued against the possibility that the intruder was either a figment of her imagination or a trailer-park ghost.
The footsteps approached. Stopped.
She sensed a looming presence. Someone stood over her, watching as she pretended to sleep.
Not Geneva. Even in one of her movie moments, she wouldn’t be furtive or unnervingly strange like this. Gen remembered being Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, Goldie Hawn in Foul Play, but she shared no darker experiences than those of Mildred Pierce. Her secondhand lives were romantic, even if sometimes tragic, and you didn’t have to worry that she would ever be in the grip of a Bette Davis psychosis per Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or Glenn Close per Fatal Attraction.
Micky’s sense of smell seemed heightened by her meditative stillness and her defensive blindness. She detected the faint astringent scent of strange soap. A crisp aftershave.
