“Thank God.”
Fran pointed to the road ahead. Josh saw the blinking red and blue lights in the distance. Lots of them. He cut his speed, waiting for them to approach.
Oddly, they stayed still.
“Why aren’t they coming?” Duncan asked.
Josh didn’t know, and he didn’t like it. He slowed down even further, then had to brake. Both lanes were blocked off with orange traffic cones and neon-yellow barrels. Josh pulled up to them and noticed two rows of steel stinger spikes on the asphalt, extending out into the woods on either side of the road. Josh had watched enough TV to know that police used the spikes to blow tires during high-speed chases.
Josh gazed beyond the roadblock. Parked fifty yards ahead were four police cars, several army Humvees, and an honest-to-God tank.
“Why do they want us to go back?” Duncan asked. He scooted closer to Josh again.
“I have no idea, Duncan.”
Josh reached for the door handle. Fran grabbed his arm.
“Maybe you shouldn’t do that, Josh.”
“What are they going to do? Shoot me?”
He opened the door and three shots punched through his driver’s-side window. The megaphone boomed again.
Josh’s pants were peppered with tiny square bits of glass. He noticed his hands were shaking. Next to him Fran and Duncan were ducking down, covering their heads. Mathison had jumped into the back seat, where he and Woof huddled together on the car floor.
What the hell were these people doing, shooting at civilians?
“I’m driving a woman and child!” He yelled through the open door but decided to keep his head inside the car. “They need medical attention!”
“Damn it, we need help! We’ve been attacked! We need to get to a hospital!”
Josh stared impotently at Fran, not knowing what they should do.
“We have to go,” Fran said.
“Where?”
“Maybe we can park someplace and walk to the road.”
“There are at least thirty army guys out there. They have a tank.”
“I thought the army was supposed to help us,” Duncan said.
Josh had no choice. He backed up and continued driving backward until he felt safe enough to close his door and make a three-point turn.
“Now what?” he asked Fran. “This is the only road in and out of Safe Haven.”
“We could go back to my neighbor’s house. There’s obviously something going on. It looks like the authorities are aware of the situation. Maybe we should lie low, wait it out.”
Josh wasn’t convinced. He tried to come up with a scenario where the military would put up roadblocks. A quarantine of some kind? Were Bernie, Taylor, Santiago, and Ajax here to spread some sort of germ or poison? Or was this a media blackout, ensuring news didn’t spread? That could explain the phone problems they’d been having—someone might be jamming the signals and blocking the land lines.
“You need to see a doctor.” Josh stared at Fran so she could see how serious he was. “As soon as possible. Duncan does, too. And I’m not sure going back to Safe Haven is a smart idea.”
“How about Doc Wainwright?” Duncan asked. “He gives me my shots every year.”
Doc Wainwright had a clinic in town, open Tuesday and Thursday. The other days of the week he divided his time between Shell Lake and Eau Claire.
“He won’t be open now, Duncan,” Fran said.
“Can’t we go to his house? He told me he lives on the lake.”
Josh considered it. Wainwright had a house on Big Lake McDonald, on the shore opposite the Mortons’. But Fran needed more than a few stitches and some antibiotics. She needed surgery.
Still, Wainwright was better than not doing anything.
“Doc Wainwright it is,” Josh said. He hit the gas and then had to slam on the brakes once again to avoid hitting the man standing in the middle of the road.
Streng and Erwin walked the still-docile Bernie over to the sheriff’s Jeep. Streng locked him in the back and tossed the McDonald’s bag full of Bernie’s things onto the floor of the front seat. Then Streng turned his attention to Sal Morton’s house.
Streng had no reason to doubt Josh. And he really didn’t want to go back into that house and see what his cousin had seen. But he’d dropped his .45 on the roof, and he’d feel much safer riding with Bernie if he had it back.
“Erwin, you and Olen come with me, help find my gun.”
Erwin’s face pinched. “I really need to get to the junior high, Sheriff. If those soldier guys have the mayor, then that whole lottery story could be BS. My fiancee is there.”
From what Streng understood, much of the town had gone to that lottery thing. Surely there was safety in numbers. But Streng wasn’t going to prevent Erwin from looking after his own.
“Okay. I’ll meet you there after I drop off Bernie at my office. If anything strange is going on, grab your girl and run.”
“You don’t need to tell me twice. See you later, Sheriff.”
“Good luck, Erwin.”
The men clasped hands, but it felt forced. Or perhaps final. Then Erwin headed back to the Honey Wagon, and Streng again focused on the house. His recent bad experience prompted memory flashes of fear and panic. He pushed those memories aside, shined Olen’s dirty flashlight at the front door, and made himself walk toward it.
Darkness and silence greeted Streng as he entered. Though the commonly accepted veteran stereotype spoke otherwise, Streng never had posttraumatic stress disorder, never had any kind of flashbacks. He’d seen some horrible things in the war and still had occasional bad dreams, but he managed to escape Vietnam with both his mind and his body intact.
Stepping into Sal’s house, though, brought back a feeling he hadn’t experienced in more than thirty years. The hell that was patrol.
Streng hated patrol. You had an equal chance of dying no matter how quiet you were, how careful you were. During those nighttime missions Streng felt like he had a hundred bull’s-eyes on his body, each one with rifle crosshairs zeroing in on a different body part. Nowhere to hide, and running was useless. The Cong were part of the jungle, and every tree, every rock, every shadow had deadly potential. All you could do was stay low and hope.
That same feeling enveloped Streng as he crept into Sal’s house for the second time that night. The feeling of being watched, hunted. Except this time he didn’t have a gun, just a Ka-Bar knife. Not that it mattered much. If Santiago was waiting in the shadows, Streng doubted anything less than a rocket launcher would keep him at bay.
He took the stairs slowly, shining the light on each step so he didn’t trip, pausing every three steps to listen. Streng’s injured kidney throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Halfway up the staircase the odor of death hit, and hit hard. Streng switched to breathing through his mouth, which didn’t help much. He pressed his hand hard against his aching side and ascended to Sal’s bedroom.
A snatch of childhood skipped across Streng’s mind, him and Wiley and cousin Sal, climbing the fence to the Safe Haven cemetery on Halloween night to prove their preteen bravery. Streng, the youngest of the trio, had been
