an art magazine at the dentist’s office in Saddleback: A bunch of shadowy things flowing up a mountain toward a cabin with a single light shining in the window. He remembers wondering who in their right mind would hang something like that in their home, or even in a museum. It gave him the creeps just like the sight of it happening now in real life makes his heart slow and the hair rise to attention all over his body. But while it was too tough to make out what that dark mass in the painting was, he can see all too clearly what’s racing toward Eddie’s.
It’s the deer, a whole herd of them, the same ones he almost plowed into back at the intersection. But that’s not all that’s robbed the breath from him. He raises a finger, presses it to the windshield glass. “Isn’t that —?”
From the corner of his eye, he sees Iris nod.
Blue Moon Running Bear, the obsidian man, running like the hounds of Hell are snapping at his heels. Three feet behind him, there’s someone else, someone who doesn’t seem to be moving quite as fast and yet never falls behind. His arms are flapping wildly, at least that’s how it seems to Kyle, until he realizes there are pockets appearing in the herd as they scramble to get to him.
“What the hell?”
“Here,” Iris says, drawing his attention away from the windshield. He looks down and sees she’s put a gun in his hand, still warm from wherever she’s kept it hidden. “You’ll need this.”
He shakes his head, not to deny that he thinks she’s right, but because right now, as he looks back out to the chaos on the hill, he can’t figure out how a gun, or anything else, is going to give him an advantage over what appears to be a thousand angry deer.
“Go.” Iris pokes him in the shoulder.
“Go where? What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re the Sheriff now. Go help the people who need one.”
He looks at her for a long moment, at how her eyes still manage to sparkle in the gloom, and he wishes just once, that he could read her mind and see what it is he’s done wrong, see how to fix it, because it occurs to him that hate, in leaving him, has opened his eyes to a lot of things he has let go to waste, a lot of things he’s squandered, and Iris is one of them. He’s known her for most of his life, and doesn’t know her at all.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“Me too,” she tells him, only her words don’t sound like an apology. “Get movin’. And keep your eyes open up there.”
Lian Su screams and every one of those glasses behind the counter explodes. I don’t quite flinch, don’t quite duck, but I make damn well sure my head is turned the other way when that blizzard of shards comes toward me. And as the glass needles my back, I see what’s become of the woman in the open doorway. Down on her knees, Lian Su is no longer a woman, but a slideshow. There are so many shapes and colors and different forms slouching back into the bar, all of them pushing against her skin in an effort to escape, it’s hard to focus on any single one of them without it making my head hurt. Her face is a misshapen blob, mapped with dark veins, her hair more like snakes that rage around her skull as branch-like arms claw at the floor, dragging a body that no longer has the strength to carry it back to safety.
Her mouth, little more than a dark hole leaking worm-like things onto the floor, opens wide, and from that ancient and rotten gullet fly words in a language I don’t understand. The force behind them though, makes it clear they are not compliments.
I back away from the bar.
Back on this side of the threshold, Lian Su looks a little more human. The shape of her has settled, even if the activity beneath her skin hasn’t. There are still all manner of things pulsating and pushing at her from the inside out, making her seem like a rubber glove filled with cockroaches.
The head she raises to regard me is pitted with dark spots, like a negative image of chicken pox. Dark stuff runs from every hole in it. She convulses, grunts with pain, and I feel something inside me respond in sympathy. “
That’s not exactly true. After all, isn’t death an escape in itself? And it’s not as if she didn’t provide me with the means to make this happen. Back here, after the fire, while still in her Gracie costume, she told me something she didn’t have to share, and I didn’t think I’d ever need to know:
This will be her third try.
“I’m giving you what you wanted,” I explain, moving to the center of the room.
She gurgles something I can’t understand, and hauls herself closer until she’s lying about two feet from my shoes. If she stretched out her arm, she could touch me.
I trust her injuries to keep her prostrate for a moment and raise my head.
The door to the tavern is wide open. Beyond, I can hear rumbling as Blue Moon’s tribe try to run him down, the
Kyle’s feet pump the crumbling earth as he races alongside the deer. They move like maddened things, their hooves barely scraping the earth, but much to his relief, they pay him no mind. It’s the two Indians they’re after, though Kyle can’t begin to fathom what they could possibly have done to invoke the rage of a dumb bunch of animals. Then again, neither man is made of flesh and bone, so trying to gauge the severity of their transgressions seems a bit ridiculous. As he runs, gun heavy in his hand, heart heavy in his chest, he realizes he’s glad to be alive. There was nothing in death but a vast empty space, now a small dark pocket in his memory, and despite the confusion that clings to him like a shroud, he’s
A woman’s scream drifts down the hill and Kyle falters. Stops dead. He waits, listening for it to come again, and despite the thunderous passage of the deer only a few feet away, does not feel compelled to move.
Up ahead, Red Cloud turns and hurries, his stiff-legged gait carrying him into the tavern.
There is no sign of Blue Moon Running Bear, which suggests to Kyle that he has already made it inside. Then again, the man has been sculpted from the night itself and his eyes are stars, so it could be he’s up there somewhere and hidden within the folds of darkness.
Kyle stands alone, the grass damp with dew, crickets sawing their songs around him, birds making unenthusiastic attempts at nightsongs for an unappreciative audience. Some of the deer, heads lowered, antlers like daggers of bone aimed at the wood, assault the door of the tavern. The rest spread out around the long narrow building, encircling it, trapping the men inside. Still Kyle waits. He knows Iris has sent him here to help his father, to repay the personal debt they’ve established between them, and that time is of the essence, but he finds himself unable and unwilling to move. He waits, tells himself that despite the urgency of the situation and the obvious need for his help, he will continue to stand here until he hears the scream again and is proved wrong in thinking it came from his long dead mother.
When Dean gets done crooning some song Brody’s never heard, he flashes that famous smile, then, with a deft move like a magician shucking back his sleeve to demonstrate there’s nothing concealed inside it, his hand flashes out and he breaks one of Brody’s fingers.
Brody cries out with pain and doubles over, hitting his head hard on the steering wheel. Tears flow as he cradles the wounded digit. “Jesus, man. What the
Dean sits back, admiring the night beyond the windshield. “The problem wasn’t so much you killing that guy pretending to be me, sonny. Problem was when you whacked him, you took away another reason for folks to remember me.”
