the back. And I’ve still got too old pennies in my pocket from a loan I’m going to have to pay back whether I want to or not.
In the time it takes me to get back in the truck, the sun has dragged its head up over the hills, sending streams of fire through the trees. The road’s become a latticework of red-orange light. I sit there for a moment, wishing I had the kind of brain that could appreciate such a scene, but it still feels the same as it has for as long as I can remember: Like a flashlight beam washing over corpses. It doesn’t help that one of my passengers stinks of barbecued flesh.
“The hell are we doing here, Wintry?” I ask.
“Watchin’ the sun.”
It’s not what I meant, but I figure it’s as good an answer as any, so I let my hand slip away from the keys to my thigh, and I sit back, just watching that pumpkin colored light burning off the dark, chasing it underground, reflecting itself off windows that looked like dead eyes not twenty minutes ago.
Brody snorts in his sleep. It’s almost mirthful, and as I reach down, fingers touching the cold metal of the keys dangling from the ignition, I catch a flurry of movement in the rearview and my seat is nudged from behind.
In the mirror, Brody is suddenly a hell of a lot closer.
Wintry’s looking at me, agonized expression deepening.
I’m somewhat surprised to realize Brody’s no longer wearing the handcuffs, and that one of those newly liberated hands is holding something cold and sharp to my throat.
Chapter Thirteen
Hendricks tips the cup and spills what’s left of the cold tea onto the rug. Ordinarily he’s the kind of man who’d abhor such sloppiness. He’s always tried to keep a clean house, as hard as that’s been considering how long it has harbored sickness, and how many years the town has striven to shove its filth under his door. But none of that matters any longer, and there is a great sense of liberation in watching the muddy brown liquid darkening the rug. It signals the beginning and the end.
He sets the cup on the mantel, and with quaking hands, reaches up until his fingers find the cold wood stock of the Winchester rifle. The fire, though all but dead, still warms his feet as he lifts the gun free of its brackets. It’s an old weapon, meant to spend its final days as an ornament, but today it will get a chance to live again, to blast the killing shot from a cartridge, and breathe the smell of gunpowder into the stale air of this old house.
Hendricks lowers his arms, breeches the stock, his eyes moving to the couch, and the maroon stains on the towel crumpled there where the whore died. He feels a pang of regret that he couldn’t prevent her suffering, but then he thinks of Queenie, how she woke up and spun into an immediate panic-driven rage when he crept into the room an hour later, trying not to disturb her. She looked at him as if he’d come to rape her.
Tears well in his eyes.
He couldn’t save the whore.
He hefts the rifle.
But he can save his wife.
With a shuddering sigh, he makes his way upstairs. The steps are thickly carpeted and so his ascent is a silent one. The wood is old but doesn’t creak, perhaps out of respect for his grim mission.
The gun is loaded. It has always been loaded, sitting there above the fire, waiting, as if it’s known he would need it someday.
Silly. Silly thoughts. He shakes his head and a tear trickles down his cheek. He has thought of other ways, other options, but all of them have meant Queenie will be taken away from him, to die as she would die here, in agony. And if they let her stay, what choice would he have but to enter her bedroom each and every morning, his heart shattering, hope fading, each and every time she looked at him in terror.
Top step.
The landing.
He does not worry about visitors. It has been an unusually busy night, but no one will bother him now. Most people will be at church, he assumes, waiting for a priest who isn’t coming. But no one will come here, not in time to prevent what must happen here.
He opens the bedroom door.
Queenie is sitting up, eyes narrowed against the brilliant glow of morning sun through the windows. She raises a hand to shield her tired eyes so she can see him.
“Bill?”
It does her voice so well.
Her eyes find the gun. The color drains from her face.
His heart breaks and he levels the rifle at her quickly, before she can fool him into believing everything is all right, that this brief period of lucidity is the rule and not the exception. Before the parasite can use his love for her against him.
“Bill…” Her voice wavers. She stiffens, gaze dropping to the Winchester’s double barrel stare. “What are you doing?”
He eases back the hammer. “I won’t let it do this to you,” he says.
“Please…” she sobs, scooting back until she’s pressed against the ornate mahogany headboard. “Please… don’t.”
She raises her hand and it looks like a blood-drained spider, splayed for dissection.
“I love you,” he tells her. “So much.”
She wraps her arms around her head, her knees drawn up below her chin, as if she fears the roof might fall in.
“So much,” Hendricks says and brings the rifle up to his shoulder, one eye closed to ensure his aim is accurate.
“Oh God,” Queenie whimpers, and begins to pray, then drops her arm. Looks pleadingly at him. “Don’t. We can get help. You’re not—”
Hendricks pulls the trigger.
The blast deafens him as the barrel coughs fire. Through the plume of smoke he sees his wife rise up as if she’s going to leap from the bed. But just as quickly she falls and the face that looked at him with such alien terror is gone in a burst of crimson and gray. Blood and bone rains down around her. She settles on the bed, kneeling, propped up against the headboard, her arms twitching, and suddenly he is deathly afraid that the ruin above her neck will turn toward him.
He is surprised to find that what has erupted from the addled shell of her skull is not black.
He weeps, bites his lower lip hard enough to draw blood and closes his eyes. It hurts, the pain of what he’s done. It’s so much worse than what he imagined it would be, worse almost than having to look at his wife dying every day in this room, turned against him by the invader that made its home in her head, an invader that’s now splattered across the wall and can harm her no more.
“There you go,” says a voice that barely filters through the ringing in Hendrick’s ears, and his eyes fly open.
In front of him, between where he stands and the bed where his wife’s body still twitches, is an old man.
Hendricks recognizes him, but that recognition makes his presence here, now, no less baffling. No less unwelcome.
“What…?” he starts to say, but falls silent as Cadaver’s gnarled hand, the hand not holding that stubby little metal microphone to his throat, reaches out and forces him to lower the rifle so it’s pointing at the floor.
Confusion becomes fear and desperation as Hendricks realizes the old man might attempt to stop him from finishing what needs to be done. He is not a murderer, no matter how this might look to anyone who doesn’t understand what he’s lived with. This isn’t a crime. He does not deserve to go to prison. Can’t go to prison. He
