Fire and Ice (8 page)

Terri climbed into the back of the GTO and got down on the floorboard, as Matt had instructed. Matt switched on the radio and turned it to the news channel, just in case Shelly was unleashing whatever hell she had in mind. If a bulletin came on about an ax murderer loose in a school or a department store or something, at least Matt would know where to go.

And what he had to do.

Because every person she hurt … or killed … was on him.

For bringing Mr. Dark into her life.

And for letting her walk out of the factory.

Matt listened to the radio program, but the only story being broadcast at the moment was from an economist, something about the possibility of interest rates going up. The usual boring crap.

“I need to pee,” Terri said.

“What?”

“I gotta go. Really bad.”

They were currently on a stretch of two-lane blacktop lined with pine trees on both sides. The closest bathroom was at the Retro, still several miles away, and Matt wanted Terri to stay in the car when they got there.

“There’s nowhere to go,” Matt said. “You’re just going to have to hold it. Or pee your pants.”

“I can’t hold it much longer, and I’m
not
going to pee my pants. Pull over to the side of the road and let me out. It’ll only take a minute.”

Matt cursed under his breath. He eased to the shoulder, braked to a stop, and put the car in neutral.

Why the hell are they stopping here?
Shelly wondered. Then she saw the petite young woman climbing out of the passenger’s side door.
He’s going to do it to her right there in the trees. Can’t even wait to get back to her place.
She should have known he was just like all the rest of the assholes she’d been with.

Matt had his eyes on the bitch and paid no attention as Shelly sped by. No worries about him seeing and recognizing her car. Shelly knew where Matt and his little chickadee were headed.

The only thing out this way was the Retro.

The Retro. Hmm. The day care could wait. She’d take out the parents first—then there would be no one to get in her way. It was close to lunchtime, and they’d all be heading to the Retro.

Heads will roll!

She laughed out loud.

Matt didn’t see the driver of the car as it passed … but he recognized it from the Nitko parking lot.

And there was nobody alive at Nitko to drive it.

Except one person.

Matt jammed the transmission into first gear and burned rubber back onto the highway. Terri was safer here than where he was going.

Shelly pulled into the Retro’s lot, found a parking place, and killed the engine. She popped the hatch and reached into the cargo area and removed the long and slender nylon pouch from one of the two tailgating chairs she kept back there. She slid Matt’s ax and the sawed-off shotgun into the pouch, walked inside, and made a beeline to the ladies’ room. It was a large restroom, very nice, with eight stalls and a triple granite-top vanity. There was a young woman, college age, standing at the mirror touching up her makeup.

“How’s it going?” Shelly said.

“Great, except my stupid boyfriend would rather stand outside and smoke cigarettes than come in here with me.”

“Men.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. Hey, what’s in the pouch?”

Shelly pulled the ax out, and in a single swift motion buried the blade in the young woman’s skull. The sound of the sharpened steel breaking through bone and tearing into brain tissue made Shelly burst into laughter. Or maybe she was crying—she couldn’t really tell. She dragged the body across the marble floor to the stall farthest from the door, positioned it on the toilet, and closed the door.

There were still seven stalls to go!

K-Rad was on his way back inside when an old Pontiac GTO screeched to a stop at the sidewalk. A man got out of the car and limped toward him. The man looked like a nightmare, his clothes black with soot and his face and left shoe crusted with blood.

K-Rad assessed the filthy man. “What the—”

As K-Rad was saying
the
, the man clouted him with an uppercut to the chin. The impact caused K-Rad to bite his tongue, his incisors slicing down hard and completely severing the tip of the highly vascular and highly innervated organ. Blood gushed from his mouth, and he started dancing around trying to stop the flow with his hand. The pain radiated through his jaw and to the bones in his ears.

“Fuck!” he said. “You made me bite my fucking tongue off.”
Uck! Ew ade ee ite i ucking ung off.

The man came forward with his fist cocked. Who the fuck was this idiot? K-Rad knew it wasn’t someone from the plant, because everyone there was dead now. Anyone who had avoided being shot had surely died from the explosion. Nobody could have survived that.

The man punched swift and hard, but K-Rad somehow managed to dodge the blow.

Matt could see boils on K-Rad’s face oozing with thick pus the color and consistency of custard, and slimy brown earthworms crawled in and out of his eye sockets like living strands of lo mein. K-Rad ran out into the parking lot, bright red blood dripping down his rotting chin. Matt followed, limping as fast as he could, but K-Rad darted behind a minivan and Matt lost sight of him. Sirens wailed in the distance as more firefighters and rescue personnel headed to Nitko. Matt hobbled forward a few steps, looked between some cars for K-Rad, but didn’t see him anywhere.

A muffled gunshot crackled, and a bullet whistled past Matt’s left ear. K-Rad stood forty feet away with his elbows propped on the roof of a light blue compact automobile, a Camry or a Sentra or one of the other generic sedans from overseas. He fired a second time and a third, and both those rounds missed their mark, but the fourth time K-Rad pulled the trigger Matt felt a sizzling-hot bolus of lead burrow deep into his left shoulder. The shock and pain from the bullet’s impact, along with everything else that had happened over the past few hours, caused Matt to have a momentary lapse of consciousness. He fell dizzily to the pavement and lay flat on his back, clutching the fresh wound with his right hand.

K-Rad walked over with the pistol and aimed it straight at Matt’s face. “I don’t know who you are, but you just fucked with the wrong motherfucker, motherfucker.”

Matt stared Radowski down, resigned to his fate now but unwilling to beg or whimper or flinch, unwilling to give this poor excuse for a human being the satisfaction of seeing him sweat.

“Fuck you,” Matt said.

K-Rad laughed. He pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire. While he was reaching into his backpack and pulling a second identical pistol out and jacking a round into the chamber, Matt felt something uncomfortable pressing against his right buttocks.

Then he remembered.

He reached into the back pocket of his jeans. An instant before K-Rad took aim again, Matt sprayed the entire contents of the Mace canister at his unprotected face. Radowski squealed and cussed and clawed at his eyes. Matt scissored his legs with K-Rad’s and sent the gunman tumbling facedown onto the pavement.

Matt rose to a sitting position, grabbed K-Rad by the hair, and smashed his face into the hot blacktop. He picked up the pistol, rose and steadied himself, and limped toward the entrance.

From the ladies’ restroom Shelly heard women screaming and dishes breaking and pieces of silverware clanging metallically to the floor. A man shouted, “Oh my God, he’s got a gun.”

Shelly didn’t know what the hell was going on, but she was missing all the excitement and that wasn’t cool. Fuck a bunch of waiting around for these bitches to come in and potty. Time to kick things up a notch.

She pulled the Remington twelve-gauge pump from the pouch and stuffed some extra shells into her pockets. She pumped one into the chamber and walked out with the barrel leading the way.

The worst table in a restaurant is always the one nearest the restrooms. There are people constantly walking by, on their way to piss or shit or hock a loogie, and in the worst establishments you can even hear the toilets flushing. Not very appetizing. Plus, the hallway to the restroom is usually near the door to the kitchen, so you have servers and busboys scurrying back and forth with trays of hot food or plastic bins of dirty dishes, and the chef is always shouting at someone for screwing something up. The worst table in a restaurant is always the one nearest the restrooms, and at the Retro it was a four-top nestled between the lobster tank and a life-sized statue of Elvis. Shelly turned the corner and saw the unlucky party, an elderly couple on one side of the table and a much younger couple on the other. Next to the younger woman there was a little girl, probably between the ages of one and two, strapped into a wooden high chair. The baby was screaming for all she was worth, and all four of the adults had their elbows on the table and their hands laced together and their eyes closed. They were praying. Shelly aimed the gun and pulled the trigger, and chunks of Grandma and Grandpa splattered all over Elvis’s chubby face. It looked like someone had thrown a plate of spaghetti and meatballs at him. The young couple’s expressions had quickly turned from worry to terror, and they backed toward the wall and held their palms out in a defensive gesture as Shelly turned the gun on them and their baby.

“Stop!”

Shelly looked toward the front entrance. It was Matt Cahill, and he was pointing a pistol right at her.

Decaying flesh hung from Shelly’s face in strips, as though someone had fed rotten liver through a paper shredder. Her teeth were thick and yellow, her inflamed eyeballs bobbing around in their sockets like hardboiled eggs in some sort of ghastly stew. Matt had seen her car in the parking lot when he drove in, so he’d known she was here at the Retro, but he had no clue as to how she’d managed to get hold of a gun. A sawed-off shotgun, no less, a goddamn portable cannon. She had already slaughtered an elderly man and woman, and she was about to do the same to a young couple and their toddler.

“Let them go, Shelly,” Matt shouted. “They never did anything to you.”

Matt was still dizzy. Sweat trickled down his face in streams, and his heart raced, but jacked on adrenaline, he felt no pain from the shrapnel wound in his left leg or the slug embedded in his left shoulder. He felt nothing but an intense rage at all the bloodshed this horrible day had brought, and an intense sorrow for what he was going to have to do now.

He lined the pistol’s sites at Shelly’s chest, trying his best to focus.

“Drop your gun,” she said, pointing the shotgun directly at the baby’s head. “Or I shoot the baby.”

It was a stalemate. If Matt pulled the trigger, Shelly would die, but so would the baby.

“Why the baby?” Matt asked.

“Why not?” she said. “Aren’t they adorable? That’s all the bitches at the plant ever talk about. Let them talk about this.”

Matt saw her finger tense on the trigger. “What’s the baby’s name?” He turned to the terrified mother. “Tell me.”

In a quivering voice, the young woman said, “Kylie. Her name is Kylie.”

“You hear that, Shelly? Her name is Kylie. Why would you possibly—”

“Shut up,” Shelly said. “Or shoot me. I’d be doing this kid a favor.”

“A favor?”

Shelly gestured to the horrified mother. “Look at her, sopping up the beer. A couple years from now she’ll be too drunk to notice when her man starts feeling up little Kylie. Or she’ll notice and not even give a shit. Hell, maybe she’ll even pimp her out for drug money.”

“Or maybe her mother will love her and she’ll grow up to live a happy life,” Matt said.

“No such thing,” Shelly said.

Suddenly, blue lights started flashing against the restaurant’s window shades. Shelly saw them, too.

The cops had arrived, but Matt knew they wouldn’t storm in right away. They would secure the area, try to negotiate a surrender, and eventually send in a SWAT team. By that time, little Kylie and no telling how many others would perish.

One way or another, it would be over soon.

“I know you drift off sometimes,” Matt said. “When the pain becomes too much. Where do you go?”

Shelly turned and faced Matt. The expression on her gruesome face seemed to soften, and her voice sounded like it belonged to a little girl.

“High school. Isn’t that fucking pathetic? Everybody in the world hated high school, and it’s all I’ve got to look back on … I was almost head cheerleader, you know. I was …” She paused and then shouted, “
Fuck you!
”

She gritted her teeth and scrunched her brow, and as she started to turn back toward the child in the high chair, Matt squeezed the trigger three times in quick succession. Shelly spun and fell backward, and the shotgun blasted a hole in the ceiling as she crashed into the lobster tank. The glass shattered, and a hundred gallons of murky green water flooded the floor.

The liberated creatures did not crawl on Shelly, or even toward her. They crawled away from her, as though she and they were opposite poles of a magnet.

The restaurant patrons, many of whom had climbed under tables or had taken other defensive positions, seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Someone began clapping.

It was Mr. Dark, sitting at a table, wearing a lobster bib, waiting for his meal.

“Nicely done,” Mr. Dark said. “Shame you couldn’t do it before.”

“I’m not a murderer,” Matt said.

“No, no, you’re not,” the baby’s mother said, clutching her baby now and sobbing. “You saved us. Thank God, you saved us.”

Matt looked at her, wanting to believe she was right. But the bodies on the floor said otherwise.

When he turned back around, Mr. Dark was gone.