She nodded and ran for the doorway. After three steps the loud crack of a gunshot made her flinch, and I saw Henry jerk sideways. A thin spray of blood appeared on the grass behind him.
“Abe!” screamed Anne. “Do something!”
I ran towards the sound of the shot.
12
The shots were coming from the shadow of the kitchen door, but at least they were now directed at me and not my friends. I cut across the yard at an angle to the door, straining to move faster. The gunshots increased in frequency as I closed the gap, but as I expected, none of the shots came anywhere near me.
The more excited a bag gets, the more the worms thrash around inside them making them jitter. I threw myself to the ground behind the police car just in time to hear the slide lock back on the Glock, empty. I stood up and met the eyes of the bag, not ten feet away.
He was young and good-looking, like a fresh-faced college grad, albeit one in scorched clothes and with one badly burned hand. In that second, as we stared at each other over the hood of the car, he seemed so normal to me. His light blue eyes were a little glazed, and he looked flushed as though he had been running, but he could have been any young man stepping off of a basketball court or a football field. I wondered if he and the other one had talked in the car on the way down to Henry’s house. I wondered who he was and if anyone knew what had happened to him.
He grinned at me wide and easy and then tossed the gun away into the yard. Then he ducked back into the house and out of sight. I glanced back at Anne. She had torn Henry’s shirt into strips and was trying to bandage both men. I couldn’t tell from here how badly Henry was hurt, but he was over eighty years old with a gunshot wound, and Leon’s spine was broken. I needed to get them to a hospital.
Keeping my baton low, I moved into the kitchen. The table had been overturned and the floor was covered in broken glass. I crunched across the shattered fragments as quietly as I could manage.
“I’m glad I ran out of bullets.” I froze. The voice was coming from somewhere past the living room. “I like my knife better. Sometimes, after I shoot somebody, I stab ‘em anyway, even if they’re already dead. No harm in that. It doesn’t matter to them, and it makes me feel better, you know?”
He sounded like somebody striking up a conversation at a party, all breezy and unconcerned. If I hadn’t heard what he said, the tone would have been very pleasant.
I made it to the hallway where I could walk without making so much noise and crept down to the living room. The boards creaked slightly underfoot.
“You’re Abe, right? Peter said we might run into you. My name’s Jeff. You look just like your picture. Of course, the way you were jack-rabbiting across that yard was a real giveaway. That was something else. And that’s saying something, considering the things I’ve seen over the last year.”
The voice was moving, circling around to my left, but it still sounded about a room away. I crept across the living room and glanced behind the recliner just in case. Then I moved towards the other hallway and the guest bathroom. I could feel my hand sweating on the leather grip of my baton.
The bathroom was empty, so I kept going towards the master bedroom at the end of the hallway. The door was half open, and light from the window was painting a stripe down the floor out into the hall. I hugged the wall close to the hinge side of the door and switched my baton to my left hand and raised it. I listened hard, but there was only the silence of the old house, so I pushed the door open slowly with my right hand, braced to swing.
I didn’t see anything, so I went in, staying close to the wall. I didn’t want to get too close to the bed.
“We call him Saint Peter, you know, back in town.” I froze. The voice was coming from the house behind me, towards the living room. That was impossible. The hair stood up on my arms. “Not to his face, but we still do it. Some of us. He lets you into the promised land, you know? And he’s older than dirt. He says that when we kill your friends, we’re supposed to bring the bodies back to him, because he wants to do something to them. I don’t know what, but I bet it’ll be pretty cool.”
I spun around and looked out the door and down the hall. Nothing. I could see all the way into the living room. “I know you have a piece of the sacred altar. Not the one from your farm, because Billy is bringing that one back home, but the one that Henry was hiding. They’re not yours, you know. I know you don’t want to give it to me, but I bet you would trade me.” The voice was coming from the living room. I moved down the hallway, more quickly now, until I could see the whole room. It was empty. “I just need something you’d rather have.”
I looked down. The voice was coming from the floor. The son of a bitch was under the goddamn floor. I heard scuffling under the house. He was moving fast for the porch, and no longer concerned about being quiet about it. I ran across the room and looked out the window in time to see him scrabble and crawl out from under the porch and start running across the yard, his knife glinting in the sun as he pelted across the grass.
Towards Anne and Henry and Leon.
I almost dove through the front windows to follow him, but unlike in the movies, you tend to bleed to death pretty quickly afterwards if you get unlucky. Instead I bolted back towards the kitchen, nearly slipping and falling on all the broken glass in there, as if fate were determined to roll me in glass one way or another today.
The kitchen door was closed, but I didn’t care. I ran at it full out and hit it with my shoulder. The hinges ripped right out of the doorframe, and the door flew gracefully out into the sunlight, end over end. I didn’t see it land because I was already racing across the yard.
I hurdled a low bush without breaking stride and without taking my eyes off of Jeff’s back. He was nearly there. On the other side of him, I could just see Anne’s head start to come up as she heard something, but she was still facing the wrong way.
I wasn’t going to make it in time. As fast as I am, I was going to be a heartbeat too late. Jeff had his knife raised and he was nearly on top of her.
I screamed, “Behind you!” Anne spun around, rising from her crouch, and whipped the shotgun across Jeff’s skull like a baseball bat. It sounded like somebody hitting a melon. Blood flew and he went sideways in a pinwheel and tumbled to the ground.
And then I was there, just in time to see him surge to his feet brandishing his long hunting knife like everything was still going according to plan. I heard Anne’s sudden intake of breath. Her blow had crushed his temple and shattered his left eye socket. That whole side of his face was a red ruin, and flaps of skin hung from the exposed fragments of bone and brain.
As grisly as that was, I don’t think it was the blood and gore that got to Anne. It was the mass of tiny worms that was hanging out of the side of his head, the wound dripping small wriggling clots onto the ground.
He slashed at me impossibly fast, because no matter how shitty bags are with guns, they take to knives like mother’s milk. A line of fire traced across my hastily raised forearm as he cut me to the bone. I was still registering that fact when the blade came blurring towards me again. Instead of trying a second block, I whipped the baton out and across his shoulder.
It cost me a nice deep cut across my chest before it impacted, but once it did Jeff went one way, and his knife went another. The heavy steel bar had shattered his shoulder and one collarbone and thrown him to the ground. I hit him again as he rose, this time crushing though the top of his skull, and it was over.
My legs gave out, and I dropped heavily to the soft grass, blood soaking into the front of my shirt and running freely down one arm.
Anne patched me up with more shirt strips, and I vowed to buy a first aid kit as soon as possible. After she was done, we turned back to Henry and Leon. Henry was kneeling down, strips of makeshift bandage wound around his shoulder. I breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like he was going to be fine. Leon, on the other hand, had gone gray, and he shivered in the warm sunlight. I knelt down beside him.
“How’s he doing?”
Henry shook his head. “Needs an ambulance.”
Anne jumped up and bolted for the house, “I got it.”
“I’m so sorry, Henry. I should have sent the two of you away as soon as I knew they were coming.”
“I wouldn’t have gone. It’s my fight, too. You and I, we deserve this. We should have finished it a lifetime ago in Warsaw, but we didn’t, we ran away. It’s my fault that Leon is hurt, not yours.” He wiped a smooth hand across
