“Terrible way to go,” Mrs. Teller said. “Terrible way. Burning in a fire.”
She had her eyes closed. Duncan didn’t think she was talking to him.
“It will be okay,” she said. “It will be okay. I can do this. We won’t burn. The Lord is my shepherd and He’ll give me the strength.”
Duncan coughed, then asked, “Strength for what?”
Mrs. Teller stared at Duncan. She was sobbing, so bad it shook her whole body.
“I won’t let you suffer like that, child. I won’t let you burn to death. I promise.”
Duncan didn’t like seeing Mrs. Teller like this. She was an adult. She was supposed to be strong. It made him even more scared.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“When the time comes, I’ll be strong,” Mrs. Teller answered. “I’ll take care of us both.”
Then she racked her shotgun.
Dr. Stubin combed through the wreckage site, looking for something that might help him. The three soldiers who’d been babysitting him were mostly intact, though the explosion had thrown one of them almost fifty yards from where Stubin had last seen him. Another, the sergeant, had actually lived long enough to ask Stubin for help. He died less than a minute later.
The Green Berets had fared even worse. Stubin had found bits and pieces of them, but nothing larger than an arm.
The Huey they’d arrived in no longer resembled anything other than junk. It, and the previous wreck, and been reduced to smoking scrap iron and burning bits of rubber and plastic. The whole area looked like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.
Stubin knew General Tope wasn’t foolish. He’d counter the loss of his team with firepower, and a lot of it. It was only a question of waiting and the cavalry would come.
The problem was Mathison. After the explosion, he’d fled into the forest. Stubin had called to him, and whistled for him, but the monkey was apparently too spooked to come back. And Mathison was important to Stubin. Very important.
Stubin wasn’t sure how much monkey instinct Mathison retained after all of the brain tinkering he’d undergone, but the doctor doubted his capuchin friend could survive in the wild on his own. He’d seek out humans. And it might be the wrong group of humans. Stubin had to find him. But first, he had to salvage what he could from the wreck.
Stubin walked to the epicenter of the disaster, then began a 360-degree spiral outward, watching where he stepped, eyes peeled for anything useful. A radio would be nice.
After five minutes, he hadn’t found anything except some broken night-vision goggles and a boot containing three-quarters of a foot. Hadn’t they been carrying supplies? Food? Guns? Didn’t they know the danger they were facing?
Apparently not, any more than they expected to be blown up.
Moving to the perimeter of the crash site, Stubin poked at a smoking bush with a stick and pried away something that looked like a shotgun, but with a much bigger barrel. It appeared unscathed. He touched it quickly, ascertained it was cool enough to hold, and picked it up. Stubin took a few seconds to locate the lock on the breech, and the barrel swiveled down, revealing a grenade—probably nonlethal if they were following instructions. He pulled the large canister out, judged it in working condition, and let it drop back in.
The grenade launcher had a sling, and Stubin wrapped it around his shoulder and continued hunting. He found two MRE rations, considered leaving them, but realized he didn’t know how long he’d be in the woods. They went into his jacket, along with some compact binoculars with one cracked lens. The binocs also had a compass on the top, and amazingly it still worked.
Stubin found north, tried to picture the map of the area he’d seen briefly while riding in the chopper, and deduced he was east of town. He whistled again for Mathison, got no response, and then headed west, toward Safe Haven.
The instant Taylor looked up, Jessie Lee scrambled forward. Her knees banged into the joists, and the mousetrap still pinched her fingers, but she moved as fast as possible while still maintaining her balance. After getting two body lengths away from where she’d been, Jessie Lee held her breath and tried to listen, straining to hear anything other than the hammering of her heart.
She heard nothing.
Noise, directly beneath her. The unmistakable clang of a metal locker opening.
She gingerly pulled off the mousetrap and tried to move forward, but there wasn’t anyplace further to go— she hit the wall. Turning around while balancing on one-inch sections of board would take more time than she had. She could hear Taylor climbing up the locker, and any second he’d be pushing up a ceiling tile, reaching out with the stun gun.
Jessie Lee chose to move backward. She couldn’t see behind her in the dark, but the joists were spaced evenly apart and she could sense where they were. Fast as she dared she began to crab backward, heading for the girls’ locker room.
Ahead of her light surged in from where a ceiling tile used to be. She squinted at Taylor, less than three feet away, poking his head through. Could he see her in the dark?
Apparently he could. The killer stared directly at her and offered one of his cold smiles.
“I like the feisty ones. Maura Talbott was feisty. She was my sixth girl, in Madison. I tied her down with baling wire and bit off all of her fingers.”
Jessie Lee remembered the TV special, which showed the autopsy photos after the obligatory
She moved even faster, feet missing the boards and sometimes slipping between them and hitting ceiling tile. She banged her elbow—the same one—and then the thick gold Omega anklet that Erwin bought her became caught on something. One of the wires, holding up the tiles. She tried to pull free, without success. It held her like a claw.
Ahead of her, Taylor crawled up onto the joists. He still had the smile on, and he pressed the button on the stun gun to show her what was in store. A burst of white light crackled across the two probes.
Jessie Lee pushed with her free foot. No good. She crawled back, bending the knee of her trapped leg as she got closer, and then her handhold slipped and her butt fell directly between two boards, breaking through the ceiling tile. Her upper body followed.
She cried out, hands grasping at the air, and for a crazy moment Jessie Lee was free falling to the floor of the boys’ locker room, headfirst. But her leg stayed stuck. So instead of falling through, she hung there by her knees, upside down like a child on a jungle gym.
She swung back and forth, the bright lights in the room and the blood rushing to her head adding to her disorientation. It took a moment for the world to stop spinning, for things to come back into focus. When they did, she freaked out.
Bodies. Dead bodies. Stacked ten high, like cordwood, in the showers directly beneath her. At least fifty people. Neighbors. Friends. Jesus—her cousin Rachel. Seamus Dailey. Mary Porter. John Kramer. Sarah Richardson, the head teller from the town bank.
A sob tore loose from Jessie Lee’s throat. On top of the pile, close enough to reach out and touch, was her best friend and maid of honor, Mandy Sprinkle.
Blood coated every inch of the showers like paint, so thick Jessie Lee could taste copper. It brought back a long-ago trip to a turkey-rendering plant, to placate a boyfriend who worked there. The blood inside the slaughterhouse flowed knee deep—a swirling river filled with bits of tissue and swarming with flies.
Creaking, above. Taylor.
Jessie Lee tried to pull herself up, to free her leg, but she couldn’t get any handholds through the hole she
