Dead Level (31 page)

Now they were fuel. As I crawled, feeling my knees shredding on bent nails, stones, and who knew what other tetanus-bearing sharp bits of discarded stuff—
God, I should be so lucky as to live to get tetanus
, I thought irrelevantly—I
knew
there was a way out of here, I
knew
one end of this dark place opened out into the space under the new deck.

I knew it. But I couldn’t find it, as a sudden downdraft sucked thick, black smoke under the house, blinding me. Somehow in the panic of the explosion and the fire I’d gotten turned around. Now I was too blinded by the smoke and the awful heat to be able to see the dim, gray dawn that had to be showing somewhere out there, even through the lattice we’d nailed around the deck.

Had to be. Only it wasn’t. The smoke kept coming, thickening around me, choking me … and I couldn’t find Ellie. After she’d landed, she must have crawled, then maybe lost consciousness or worse.

But no. I wasn’t going to think that. I just wasn’t. I sat up, hit my head on a floor joist, saw flocks of stars twinkling in a sky that was sullenly green and purple, the color of an old bruise.

No
, I told myself even as real fright dug its claws into me,
she
wasn’t
dead
. She was down here somewhere, and I would find her, and … and she
wasn’t
.

Fighting back panic, I sat up again more cautiously, pawing away cascades of more spiderwebs studded thickly with egg cases. The smoke thinned, but now stinging tears poured from my eyes; I knew there was a way out, somewhere, but I couldn’t
find
it.…

The dry, sneaky tickle of a centipede skittered across my neck, the boards above me grew steadily warmer with the awful heat of the swiftly advancing fire just over my head, and—

And then the strong sensation of someone else there with me went through me like an icicle dagger.

Not Ellie. Because Ellie wasn’t dead. She
wasn’t
.

But when I turned my head—

—slowly, not at all wanting to, terrified and with that sharp, shivery-cold icicle’s jab rising up from my heart into my throat—

Ellie wasn’t dead. But the person hunkering next to me in the dark, smoke-stinking crawlspace, with spiders and centipedes swarming busily over his gleaming jawbone and prowling his empty eye sockets—

That person most definitely was.

At the sound of the gunshot, Sam dropped flat onto the wet leaves and matted pine needles of the forest floor. He didn’t know which way it had come from, or if there would be another.

And he had to reach Wade. Scrambling forward, he peered up and around, spying no one but the man still shambling at him as if nothing had happened.

That smell, though, getting stronger, fire and smoke from somewhere nearby. Through thick, tangled brush and evergreens, the hot yellow glow intensified as Sam watched with horror.

The shambling guy had gotten up. He swung nearer, one arm hanging uselessly and the other waving back and forth in front of him like a blind man trying to feel his way. When he got close enough, Sam saw the bruise swelling the man’s left eye shut, the other one wide open, bloodshot and staring wildly.

“Hey. Hey, get down,” Sam whispered. But before he could do or say anything more, another shot cracked through the billows of smoke now pouring from the clearing around the cabin.

Rocking on his heels, the man appeared to consider the sound for a moment, a quizzical look coming onto his battered face. Then he dropped once more, first to his knees, finally falling forward, his good hand outflung.

There was a gun in it. Sam’s heart leapt at the sight. But if he tried to get it … “Oh, God,” he breathed, pinned down as a dozen yards away Wade grunted in pain, then lay still also.

“Wade?” But there was no reply. Sam scrambled sideways. No shots whizzed over his head, so he scrambled some more, until he reached the stranger. A .22 pistol lay under his limp hand.

Sam grabbed it, checked it, and found it loaded. Stuffing the weapon inside his jacket, he glanced once more at the prone man, spotted the birdshot pinholing his shoulder.
Sorry, buddy
. But there was nothing Sam could do for him now.

He crawled on his belly over to Wade and saw at once that he was in even worse shape. The shot had caught his upper leg, and the wound was bleeding very freely in gouts that scared Sam more than anything else so far.

Meanwhile, the cottage was burning fast, smoke now boiling furiously from it, flames licking behind the black, reeking billows. Yet his mother and Ellie weren’t out here anywhere that he could see … so where were they?

Not inside. Please, don’t let them be …
“Okay, guy,” he whispered to Wade as he pulled the big man’s leather belt off. “Hang in there.”

Getting up onto his knees meant getting his head blown off, maybe, but by now Sam hardly cared. He ran the belt under Wade’s leg, pulled it tight through the buckle, scrabbled around on the ground until a long, fat fallen branch came to hand.

He twisted the free end of the belt around it. Then, using the branch like a makeshift turning crank, he tightened the belt even more, until the rhythmic pumps of blood from Wade’s thigh slowed to a sickening ooze. He bent the branch down and dropped Wade’s limp arm over it to keep it in place so the belt wouldn’t loosen—he hoped.

But there was nothing he could do to make sure. No shots from the clearing lately, he noticed; grabbing up a rock, he threw it hard in the direction of the cottage, waited for a barrage in reply. None came; cautiously he got himself up into a crouch, then stood, just as a horrendous,
creaking-and-groaning crash from over there sent torrents of sparks spiraling up; it sounded as if the rest of the roof had collapsed.

Wade’s eyes flickered open. His lips moved. “Go.”

Still Sam hesitated, not wanting to leave Wade, until he saw Wade’s uncertain hands find the makeshift tourniquet-stick, seize it, and twist it in the right direction to hold the belt tight.

“Don’t you let go of that,” Sam said. “Don’t you let go.”

Then, unsure whether or not Wade had heard him—or, if he had heard, would be able to obey for very long—Sam ran.

The reek of burnt gasoline was like a rag pressed to my face as I recoiled from the apparition down there in the crawlspace. Above, the house fell to flaming bits; around me, no light showed the way to safety.

Rearing back from the ghastly thing, I felt my arms flinging out one way, my legs another. Scrabbling wildly in leaf mold and construction debris, my hand touched something softly warm and yielding, like human skin.

It was Ellie, lying limp on her side; I found her pulse and felt it bumping in her wrist, though it wouldn’t be much longer if we didn’t get out of here soon. Sparks flew from the hole now widening in the floor above; the tortured crashing and fracturing sounds from the burning cottage went on and on.

Ellie moaned, tried to sit up. “What …?” Her eyes widened.

I seized her shoulders. “Ellie, come on. We’ve got to—”

Back where the sparks were falling, something big collapsed, sending a rush of flaming debris into the crawlspace; briefly the fire above us had been sucking the smoke upward, keeping the air at least halfway decent down here for a few precious breaths. But not anymore.

I didn’t know where the way out might be, but as the smoke thickened toward us I knew we couldn’t go toward it. And I knew I wasn’t
going where I’d just seen
—had
I?—my dead ex-husband, grinning and nearly fleshless, with just enough of his face still clinging on so I could recognize …

Another huge crash sounded from above. Grabbing Ellie’s hand, I began hunching along fast in the only direction that didn’t have something bad waiting for me in it.

And for once, that simple strategy worked. Scooching under the floor joists and the big beams they rested on, we went away from the smoke thickening fast around us, toward where fresh air puffed in.

Ellie dropped my hand when we had to duck down hard, crawling through a mess of sawdust, insect bodies, and what felt like a lot of chicken bones, wrapped in a few feathers; an owl’s long-ago-deposited leavings, maybe. But when we got through that obstacle course, she grabbed my wrist again.

She’d gotten a look at me in the light we could just make out now, through the lattice under the deck. An expression of alarm she couldn’t hide said my nose was bleeding again; it had been all along, really. Sometimes a trickle, other times more; I gathered now was one of the “more” times.

But then I saw the dark puddle forming in the dust in front of me: a
lot
more.

“Oh,” I said, realizing suddenly how faint I felt. Drained, actually.

“You know, I might be in trouble,” I said, hearing my own voice through the ringing in my ears, like a gong being struck. Also, my legs seemed to have turned to water.

Ellie gave me a shove. “Outside,” she gasped, and we ducked from beneath the house, emerging into the enclosed area under the deck. There I sank down onto a rock.

“Oof,” I gasped. The fire was still consuming the house, but it began dying down now, the hot snap and pop of charred wood gradually replacing the earlier furnace roar.

Cool air flowed in through the spaces in the latticework I’d nailed to the deck supports. Beyond them, gray dawn brightened over the
lake. As if to help celebrate our somehow having lived through the night, a loon laughed out his early-morning call, out on the water.

We crept from under the deck. Blood dripped in blackish splotches onto my pants leg. “I don’t get it. You should be …”

Dead
. The blast, the heat … I’d been just sheltered enough, but she hadn’t.

“You said to hold my breath,” she managed, gulping in more fresh air. “And … someone
pushed
me. Two hands.”

A strange expression passed over her face. “Really
skinny
hands, like …”

The memory of the face under the house, nearly fleshless but still hideously familiar, punched me like a fist. But before I could go any further with that thought, which I didn’t
want
to, I definitely
didn’t
, the loon called again, nearly.

Only not quite. “Wait a minute. That’s not a loon,” I said.

The laugh was slightly mad sounding; all loon calls were, I knew. But: “It’s too close to be a—”

Yeah,
way
too close. Ellie and I turned together fast toward the lattice enclosing the space under the deck.

Well,
almost
enclosing it. There was a gap two feet wide in the lattice; I hadn’t nailed any there because I wanted the deck frame in that area to be accessible later, when I started building the steps. I had to be able to get at it so I could fasten the stringers, which are those long zigzag side pieces that the steps themselves sit on, to the deck frame, and then—

Oh, never mind, the point is that there
was
an opening. And now Dewey Hooper stood in front of it, grinning at us, holding a shotgun.

Close up, at first glance he wasn’t what I remembered. Back in the courtroom he’d been clean-shaven, spiffed up and dressed in a cheap suit, no doubt purchased for the occasion. But prison hadn’t improved his looks, and neither had living rough, which from the look of him must’ve been what he’d been doing recently.

Now he was just a small, unshaven, frowzy-haired man dressed
in a hodgepodge collection of clothes ranging from a half-decent-looking pair of boots to a jacket so old and moldy-appearing, he might’ve stolen it off a corpse.

The more I looked at him, though, the more I recalled what had struck me most about him back then, and still did: that he wanted what he wanted, and that’s all he cared about, ever.

And that he would do anything to get it, like birds flew and fish swam: naturally, unself-consciously. He held the shotgun in one hand, a long, dagger-sharp stick of kindling wood gripped in the other, and a look of crazed triumph on his bearded face.

Stepping forward, he looked past me, his gaze fastening on Ellie with gloating hunger; for just a moment it seemed possible that his hideous leer might soften into something else.

Regret, maybe, or even guilt. But then, “Marianne,” he said. Quietly, the way you’d try talking to a dog you were afraid of. First talking to it, but if that didn’t work—

“Marianne, I’m here to kill you. For good, this time.”

I got up; stepping past me, he thrust an arm out absently at me and I went down again; now that adrenaline wasn’t pumping unnatural energy through me, my whole body felt wavery, like a TV picture that wasn’t coming in very well, and my peripheral vision kept fading in and out.

“Stop right there. I’m not who you think I am,” declared Ellie, her hand thrust gallantly up in a “halt” gesture. But he just kept advancing on her, while she went on backing away and then around until she was almost under the deck again.

And then she
was
under there, behind the lattice. He took a step and stopped uncertainly, trying to decide if he wanted to follow her into the enclosure.

But no; instead he shouldered the shotgun. “Dewey Hooper,” I said to try to stop him, and as I’d hoped, he paused, turning slightly. But what came next, I couldn’t have expected:

Seizing the moment, Ellie thrust both hands up through those
loose decking boards laid out above her head. Then, despite what must’ve been agony from her wounded arm, she hooked her fingers over a pair of the joists that the decking rested on, and
pulled
.

Quick as a little monkey, she hauled herself up between the two uncovered joists and then out onto the deck platform. My face must’ve alerted him; his lips twisted in a snarl. But when he turned back to look under the deck again, she wasn’t there.

He peered around with eyes suddenly wide and frightened, even bending to glance under the house. Then he stood straight and spotted her, poised as if to jump from the far end of the deck.

But she didn’t; instead came her voice: “Dewey.” Crooning it, sort of; crooking her finger at him invitingly.