Something buzzed in her skull. In confusion, she seemed to hear his voice duplicated by an echoing whisper.
“…come with me please just once lef’ me wi’ a kid come with me to the woods Marl please…”
Speaking almost simultaneously, Matthew parroted every word, and when the other no longer had the strength, Matthew spoke alone.
“…think you could take this alla this fer yer ole man shoulda blowed yer head off like I blowed hers off inna woods…”
She put her arms around her son’s shoulders, tried to jerk him out of this communion. As though she’d touched a power line, awareness jolted through her; she drowned in unending misery as all the frightening filth of Marl’s life poured through her. Sometimes it seemed more than words, more than just a sordid, horrible ramble. It entwined her, and she caught a sense of something that churned, deep and turbulent and hot, fuming over and obscured, a molten sadness that foamed upon the cold rawness of death. She smelled things, tasted things— jumbled memories—saw gigantic Spencer edge closer, leering, too close, the pores like craters in his bristling face, his clothes open. She saw the Devil loom transparent, and the pines breathed to her, moaning of the hunt and of wetness and of love. She broke away from the boy, and it ended.
“…if I tie you you’ll be safe here the stateys won’t hurt you only I know Marl I found you only me but it’s me they want put your whole head in ’is mouth and bite it off an’ its wings glisten in the sunlight w-when it breaks free…”
His limbs trembled in a final convulsion, then Marl lay still.
She felt something twinge at the back of her consciousness; something like a whitish grub stirred blindly. Like a naked hatchling, fallen from the nest, it struggled to lift its head and gaze with still-shut eyes into a sky it would never know—struggled—then lay flattened on the ground.
“My friend! I can’t hear ’im anymore. I won’t! Chabwok! No! Not the chains!” He threw himself on Marl. “Please, not chains! Be good now! I’ll be good!”
“Matty! No!” She couldn’t pull him off.
He yelled and clawed at the body.
“My God, what are you doing? No, Matty!”
Sobbing, he bit it.
She tried to drag him away, but he backhanded her, knocking her down. He grunted and growled.
“Oh no, my baby. I won’t let it happen.” Soft things splashed on her, soaking the front of her shirt. “I promise you, I won’t let it happen that way to you!”
Dried reeds rattled behind them. The boy shook her off and turned from the body, dark fluids pouring from his chin. He snarled.
Steve lay a few yards away, arched to one side as he crawled on his belly through the weeds. Mud covered him. Blood covered him. And the gun in his hand was leveled on the boy.
A wail tore from Athena as she hurled herself in front of her son.
Steve jerked the revolver away at the last instant, firing into the woods, then dropped it in front of his face. Instantly, he seemed to slip out of consciousness, his head falling to the soft ground.
An acrid stench washed over them with the hot, crushing wind. She smelled the smoke then, finally understood what was happening. The woods burned.
Her strength came from somewhere beyond her ability to comprehend, and she moved as in a dream, somehow half-rousing Steve, somehow getting him to his feet. She dragged and carried him through the pines. “Keep going, Steve. Just a little farther. Don’t give up now. Stay with me, Matty. Don’t cry. Stay with me.”
Soon the pines had vanished, melting into a dense, featureless gray. Yet they stumbled onward, and many times she considered leaving the injured man and saving the boy. Somehow she led them. In silence, the boy clung to her clothing, sometimes helping her to bear the man along. They knew no direction, only movement and the effort to keep breathing.
The glow of baleful eyes filtered through the haze, though the headlights seemed to grow dimmer even as they watched.
With a final heaving effort, they reached the automobile. She got the back door open and tried to push the man onto the seat, and the boy tried to help by getting in the other side and dragging him in by the shoulders. Steve’s eyes blinked open—he saw the boy.
He screamed once, then went limp.
They locked the doors, and rolled the windows tight. She clicked off the headlights and put her head down on the steering wheel. She wanted to sleep. Only the boy’s coughing roused her.
The engine choked, then silence.
With no panic left, she tried again, turning the key, pumping the gas pedal.
Matty lay beside her on the seat. He was so very still. She drove through a world of blankness, eyes tearing, knowing she couldn’t go on, knowing she could never stop. Vaguely, she wondered if they were already dead.
The car floated through an empty universe that separated into gray currents and eddies of reflected light.
“It bit me.” Delirious, Steve gasped from the backseat. “I’m It.” Each breath an ordeal, he kept repeating the same words. “I’m It now.”
Coughing, she drove through a tunnel of smoke, the gleam of the headlights forming a bright, enveloping cocoon.
EPILOGUE/PROLOGUE
Those seriously injured had been taken elsewhere.
Filling the room, an irritating film coated their throats and burned their eyes, seeming to rise from the very clothing of the nearly two hundred refugees crowded into the high-school gymnasium. The volunteers, pot bellied men in clerical collars, matronly women and earnest teenagers from rural churches, milled about, distributing sandwiches—mean circles of cold cuts wedged into dry bread—urging their charges to try some of the soft local apples.
Most of the people hunched on cots, dazed but eating—it was after all a free lunch. Others sprawled in exhaustion; some just wandered about.
The boy slept with his mouth pressed into the canvas, the rough woolen blanket bunched about his feet. “Dooley…save…?” Some dark dream clotted in his face, and his voice held petulant wildness. “…find…” His hands clenched. “…come this way…come…”
The hall echoed, raucous with murmured complaints, with whining and crying and laughter, with the shuffling of feet and the blared chatter of a television and several radios, all amplified and distorted by the high ceiling and the polished floor.
“Old dogs are smart, baby. Dooley’s all right. You hush now.” Athena gazed down at the dreaming, rolling movement beneath his eyelids. “Just sleep.” His face still looked red and puffy. A drop of blood at one nostril smeared toward his upper lip, and she wiped it away with her sleeve.
Finally, he seemed peaceful, and she stood up, easing a sharp twinge in her leg. After getting more coffee, she drifted toward the television set. The words and images jangled in her exhausted consciousness.
