Malus Domestica (47 page)

“What is it?”

Joel blinked. The vet was staring into space, hunched over with his shoulders squeezed into the roof opening.

“Why’d you stop?”

“Nnnrr
rrrrrr.”
Ashe was growling, a weird nasal growl like an impression of an airplane. Choking and snuffling, he shrank away from the opening, disappearing, and daylight poured through in his place.

Joel met Fisher’s eyes and the two of them struggled with the cages. Ashe had taken enough of them out that they had room to push them out of the way. Fish reached up over his head, shoving the last couple of kennels toward the gap. The cages on top of them shifted precariously.

Dragging himself underneath them, Fisher pulled his body through the hole and out into the grass.

Orange light flickered from the back of the compartment. Through the chaos of wires, Joel could see a fire guttering somewhere deep in the pile of kennels. The diesel had leaked into the cargo hold and something had set it ablaze. The smoke was foul, thick and pungent. He shoved at the cages, crawling forward, and Fisher pulled them out from the other side, throwing them away.

Finally, he was free. Joel dragged his legs out and lay exhausted in the churned-up dirt. The truck had come to rest on its right side at the bottom of a slope, next to a river.

“Rrrrooowwwwwrrrrll,”
said Ashe.

Joel turned over. The vet was doubled over in a crazy Spider-Man pose on his hands and feet, crawling along the riverbank and staring at them.

“The hell are you doing?” asked Fisher, and Ashe lunged at him, slamming him against the back of the cargo box.

Fish bounced off the aluminum sheet and the two men went down with Ashe on top, hissing and growling like a man insane. The vet’s ponytail had come undone and his hair was a wild brown Tarzan mane. Ashe tried to bite Fish and the smaller man pushed at him, fending him off with a bloody forearm.

One of the cages lay next to Joel, bars twisted in every direction, the cat gone. He grabbed a bar and bent it until it broke free, then scrambled over to Ashe and jammed it deep through his shirt, feeling skin give way.

“ROOOOWL!”

Flinching and screaming, the vet rolled off of Fish and spidered backwards. One of his shoes pried free of his foot, stuck in gluey mud, the sock still inside. Joel stared, kneeling in a three-point stance, the wire jutting from his fingers like a knife fighter. That feeling of unreality came back.
The man is acting like a cat.

His brother snatched up a rock and threw it—
“Bitch-ass bitch!”
—and Ashe blinked just as the rock hit him in the forehead.
TOCK!
He fell over and writhed like a crushed bug, holding his eyes, his heels grinding furrows in the dirt.

In the fight, Fisher had been pushed backward on the ground, and his pants were shucked down off his hips, revealing one butt cheek. Joel caught a glimpse of the
algiz
brand on his ass and got an idea.

“Hold the man down,” he told Fish, scooping his hand through the mud.

“What?”

“Just do it!”

Fish clambered up and clapped his hands to Ashe’s biceps, pinning him down and uncovering his face. Ashe snarled at the sky and twisted back and forth trying to free himself, a livid purple bruise rising over his right eyebrow.

Grinding up the mud in his hands, Joel ripped Ashe’s shirt open. A white belly glowed underneath. Joel painted Robin’s
algiz
on him with the mud—one long smear and two little arms on top—and then Ashe overpowered them, throwing Fish aside. Joel crawled away, using the side of the box-truck to climb to his feet.

Flames crackled inside the cargo compartment, and when he looked inside he saw the beginnings of a roaring bonfire. He swore out loud and pulled out a cage with a howling cat inside, and another and another.

God, there are so many,
he thought, pitching the kennels into the weeds like a baggage-handler.

“What’s
wrong
with him?” shouted Fisher.

Ashe Armstrong lay on his back, thick spittle-foam collecting between his lips, convulsing violently and thrashing his arms and legs like a man electrocuted. His eyes rolled back in his head.

Struck by indecision and driven by the smell of burning cat-hair, Joel couldn’t figure out what to do—help Ashe? Save the cats? Yell at Fish to help him get the cages out of the fire? The dilemma was rendered moot when Ashe opened his mouth and the face of a cat pressed itself out between his teeth, eyes squinting, fur matted.

The vet’s face had become a livid lavender. He grabbed his neck with both hands as if he was trying to pull off his own head and rolled over on his hands and knees. He convulsed again—this time slowly, methodically, his stomach tensing the way a dog sicks. His whole torso inchwormed back to front, his shoulders bunched up to his ears.

A cat’s head protruded from his mouth like a big hairy tongue. Ashe reached up with one hand and took hold of the cat’s neck with an A-OK gesture, and pulled.

The cat let out a strangled duck-squawk.

Standing half-naked in the mud under a cooling overcast sky, black smoke billowing past, Joel lost his handle on the present. Somehow the threads of reality had unraveled to the point that his mind refused to put two and two together anymore, and all of a sudden he forgot what his hands were for. The only thing he could do was watch helplessly as Armstrong struggled.

Fisher snatched him back with a slap to the face. “Stop screamin and go check on those two cops.”

He had been screaming? Joel shook his head and a pang of dizziness almost sprawled him in the weeds. The birds were singing in the trees. Why were the birds singing?
Look at this shit! What is there to sing about?

“I said
go!”
growled Fisher, pushing him out of the way. Fish went back into the cargo compartment and pitched a kennel outside. Smoke was roiling out. A few seconds later, he came out, coughing hard and wet. He didn’t go back in.

Staggering through the mud, Joel went around to the driver’s side of the truck and was amazed to see a wall of black, dirty machinery. Then he remembered that the truck had fallen over on its side; the door was now on top. He climbed the underside of the cab and pulled himself up and over the running-board.

Through the window, he could see the two men inside. Euchiss was unconscious behind a deflated airbag, slumped against the passenger side door with blood trickling down the side of his face, but Bowker was dead. He was
extremely
dead. The steering column had been driven backward, but the Second Chance vest he’d been wearing had prevented it from impaling him. Instead, it had caused the armor plates to squish his torso like a s’more, breaking his ribs and pinning him against the seat. His eyes and throat bulged like a toad and his face was grape-purple, gray viscera flowering from his mouth.

Luckily, the window-glass was smashed out. Joel reached into the cab and plucked the Glock out of Bowker’s hip holster, jamming it into the back of his jeans.

Movement on the other side caught his eye. Euchiss’s eyes were open, and he was staring straight at Joel. Without a word, the cop drew his own Glock and pointed it up at him.

Joel recoiled away from the window and jumped down into the mud, heading back to the rear of the cargo compartment. When he got there, Ashe Armstrong was lying on his back in the undergrowth where he’d fallen, cradling a blood-wet cat in his arms like a new mother and looking thoroughly wrung-out. “Uuuunnggh,” the big man grunted hoarsely, and closed his eyes, exhausted.

By now, the fire was licking up out of the hole in the roof. Cats screamed inside in a great siren-chorus of panic and agony, consumed by the flames. Fish was on his knees in the mud, his eyes red and streaming down his face, though Joel couldn’t tell if it was because of the smoke or because of the cats.

“I can’t save them,” Fish sobbed. “I can’t get in.”

“We got to go.”

Fish got up, still weeping. Ashe lay in Roman repose, his head lolling back, his eyes closed. The newly reborn cat wriggled out of his arms and shook itself, crawling weakly into the treeline.

Ashe opened his eyes. “My throat. Killing me.”

“Come on,” said Joel, grabbing his hands. “We got to go. Get up. We got to go.” The brothers helped the vet up off the ground and they headed up the slope toward the highway. Ashe’s pickup truck waited for them at the gap in the guardrail, the right quarter smashed in a way that gave Joel pause.

A sluggish, raspy voice echoed off the trees.
“Where you goin?”

They all looked up. Euchiss had climbed over his partner and was now standing up in the sidelong driver window as if it were a tank hatch. He pulled the rifle out of the cab hand-over-hand and cycled the bolt,
chik-a-chik!

Joel reached behind his back and came up with Bowker’s pistol, pointing it at the Serpent. It went off as soon as he tugged the trigger, firing with a paper-bag
POP!
, and the bullet kicked sparks off the side of the truck.

Euchiss slithered down into the window for cover.

Reaching the roadside first, Joel went around to the driver’s side of Ashe’s truck. The highway was a lonely country two-lane out in the middle of nowhere, stretching toward the horizon in both directions. Soldier pines made an impenetrable wall on either side of the highway under a sky like stirred milk. There were no power lines or poles, which made the road look naked, unfinished.

The Frontier’s door was open and the keys were still in it, but the right front of the truck was smashed in and smoke was snaking out from under the hood. Joel twisted the keys and the engine grunted—
grrr-unh-unh-unh, grrr-unh-unh-unh.

It wouldn’t start. “Damn!”

The windshield imploded with a delicate smash, raining glass all over the dash, and Joel dove out onto the highway. Lying on his belly, it occurred to him that Euchiss could still see him underneath the truck, but when he peered through the gap he saw that the shoulder of the road concealed him well enough.

Fisher and Ashe came bounding around the back of the truck and hunkered down behind the Frontier’s bed. “Wouldn’t start?” croaked the vet, wincing.

“No.”

“Now what?” asked Fish.

Ashe’s fingers curled over the bed wall and he rose up to peer over the edge. A bolt from the blue exploded on the other side, whispering across the forest, and a bullet fanned his hair back in a mist of blood.

Both brothers swore out loud as Ashe toppled over and slapped against the asphalt.

“No!” shrieked Fisher.
“No!”

Joel looked away, squeezing his eyes shut and covering his face, trying to collect himself.

Staring into the abyss behind his eyelids, listening to Fish curse over the dead man, he knew they had no other recourse but to run or be shot. He could hit a man point-blank with a shotgun, but with a pistol and a handful of bullets, Joel knew he had no chance against Euchiss’s scoped hunting rifle and a whole box of rounds.

He tangled a hand in Fisher’s shirt and pulled him to his feet. “Let’s get out of here.”

26

A
T
LEAST
THE
FIRE
had taken care of the cats, which was what they’d come out here to get rid of anyway.

When Euchiss finally managed to get out of the overturned truck, he twisted his ankle jumping down. He sat in the back of the Frontier for a few minutes, massaging his ankle and waiting for someone to happen by with a vehicle he could commandeer, but the road to the quarry was a long and lonely one. Nobody came out this way except for the pulpwood trucks going to the clear-cut out on the ridge, and that had dried up three weeks ago. There would be no more traffic.

They had only been six miles from the quarry when the big guy with the ponytail ran them off the road.

He kicked the lanky vet for good measure before he left.

Two hours into the pursuit, the pain had drained out of his ankle and it’d become stiff and swollen. Euchiss paused to examine it and found a portwine bruise the size of a baseball across the outside of his heel. Sprained. Damn.

The forest crowded around him in an infinity of tall pine trees, and the ground was a carpet of rusty red needles. The sky behind the treetops was an endless wind-blasted white. Four-fifths of a box of
6.5mm
rustled softly in his pocket.

He took his phone out and woke it up. No signal. His LMR was also out of the picture—too far away from town for the walkie. “Son of a bitch,” he fussed to himself in his New England drawl. He carried the rifle, a scoped Nosler M48 Patriot, underhand like a briefcase.
Oh well. Cutty would just be pissed I messed up.
Better he get this tied off by himself, ASAP.

He wriggled back into his shoe and picked his way over a brook. On the other side was the decades-old remains of a barbed-wire fence, and several yards to the south was a N
O
T
RESPASSING
sign.
We’ve been curving in a northeasterly direction,
he thought, slinking through the rusty wires like a wrestler getting into a ring.
Must be getting close to the mines.

The aforementioned quarry that Bowker had been heading to lay at the far end of a network of mine shafts snaking through the belly of Red Hill Mountain. The locals called it the Mushroom Mines because the damp conditions inside the cave caused white fungus to grow on the wooden tables and scaffolding. The air inside was thick with mold spores. He wasn’t sure if it was poisonous, but he and Bowker never took any chances and usually went in with gas masks.

They were in the foothills of Red Hill Mountain now, crossing increasingly steep and stony terrain. Up ahead, the trees thinned out, and Euchiss found himself on a bare shelf of limestone overlooking a large gorge some two or three hundred yards across—the sort of gap that would have warranted a bridge were it more traveled. Briars and heather choked the bottom, but the sides were steep and clear.

The two black guys were scrambling up the opposite bank, picking their way through the boulders and briars. They were almost to the top, no more than a stone’s-throw from the treeline. Euchiss threw himself down and shouldered the rifle, a frisson of glee coursing through his body. A quick adjustment to get an optimal angle, cocking one knee up, and he thrust the gun forward, resting his elbows on the cliff and looking through the scope.