Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children (22 page)

Part Four: Reckonings

Chapter 32

Cat felt the rope around her wrists give a little. She scooted farther along the cold floor on her stomach, intent upon reaching the chair. One word kept tumbling through her head…

Ethan…

She pictured her son’s face as she inched forward, concrete scraping her knees and breasts raw. She rolled over and pulled at the bonds on her wrists. They gave more and she felt hope blossoming in her chest. A determined smile tugged at her lips that she knew nothing could wipe away. “Come on.”

She kicked the chair over, stomach groaning and throat dry, and the shears hit concrete with a loud:
ting
. Heart hammering, Cat kicked and slid over to them and worked them apart, trying to get the handles between her knees, the blades against the rope. She worked in the dark, thinking,
Please God, let me get out of here. Let me find my son.

A door slammed upstairs with the hollow chunk of leaded glass.

No.

She worked more fervently, back and forth, drawing the rope around her wrist over the blade. A strand snapped. Another. Nylon uncoiled and pressure released all around her. It went beyond the physical bond and she shook her hands to get the circulation flowing. The shears chewed through the bonds around her ankles. Standing, she nearly fell, twisted by vertigo, her limbs stiff and cold.

The lock on the basement door snapped back and light splashed over the floor, the man’s shadow splayed across the wall facing the stairwell, as she pulled the gag off. Cat moved in a jagged line toward the wall hiding the staircase. She knelt, blood pounding in her temples, nerves on edge. His footsteps were slow, so at ease.

It fueled her anger, how someone could take someone else’s life and give it so little meaning.

Shears in hand, she waited for him to step off the last riser.

* * *

I didn’t answer Angela, didn’t see a need to. Inside the house, my soul twisted at the sight of Rusty on the floor, growing colder until there wasn’t any heat left inside him. I wanted to ask Herb about it, wanted to sink my fist in the fat asshole’s gut and make him talk.
Eye for an eye
, like a marching beat tapping along with my pulse. Mike came down the steps, slowly, hand on the banister, a soft mist of dust floating in the air around his sunken face. He looked dead. I shivered and took a step back. I said, “What now? We have to go to the manor don’t we?”

Mike nodded. “It’s the crossroads. All those legends from different cultures, there’s always been a grain of truth in them.”

Rubbing my hands together, I tilted my head and a sharp pain shot up my neck, as my muscles twitched from his exertions on the roof. More than anything, I wanted a good night’s sleep. Wanted to tuck Ethan into bed and hold Cat, feel her hair and cheek stir on my chest as she listened to my heartbeat and I stroked her ear and felt the gap that had spread between us close. “I don’t know if I can go.”

“I don’t blame you. What happened here isn’t nothing compared to what’s going to happen if the others make it over.”

“She’s their sister.”

“I figured.”

“How do you know we can trust her? She makes me nervous.”

Mike smiled. “We could have died up there if she hadn’t given me the key. You gave it to her because you knew it was the right thing to do.”

No, I gave it to her because I didn’t know what else to do. And she’s looked out for a couple of kids. But that doesn’t mean she has our best interest at heart.

“I don’t know.”

Mike squeezed the banister, standing on the bottom step, and the wood groaned beneath his grip. “You know what matters.”

“She thinks I’m some kind of Judas.”

“No. She’s just testing you. She can’t help it. You know how people sometimes do things and they irritate you, but you know the thing they do is never going to change? It’s part of their makeup?” He wiped his eyes, then studied me. He said, “Don’t run from this. You’ll regret it. I’ve seen things like this before. I wish I had time to tell you. Later, huh?”

“I feel like a coward. But I don’t think I can handle this.”

Mike wiped his hand along his pant leg. “Do what you have to do.”

“If you try to stop them you could die. I don’t want that.”

“Me neither.”

“Then why follow her blindly?”

Mike sat down and draped his arms over his knees. I shifted my weight to my left leg and waited. Mike took a deep breath. “There was a time when I got off on the energy of what some people would have thought suicide missions. In the military. Part of me was always scared, but I thought, if things work out and we make a difference that has a direct impact on someone else’s life, it’s worth the risk, isn’t it? I don’t know. But I think so.”

I tried to process it, but shook my head, feeling Cat drift away from me even though she wasn’t physically there. “My uncle knew about all this.”

“Yeah? It doesn’t surprise me. You think he likes living up above his store because he’s a hermit? He’s a hermit because he’s seen things most people haven’t.”

“I feel like I need to talk to him. Right now.”

“It can’t hurt. But he isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know in your heart.”

Angela slid across the floor like a worm. She knelt by the wall and smacked her hands together. “We need to go. John’s right. I was mistaken. He’s not who I thought he was.” She pointed at Mike. “But you are.”

I ran a shaking hand through my hair. “I told you all along I wasn’t anyone special. I’ve never done anything special. I played on the river, went to my dad’s stupid church and listened to him lie and live a double standard, I stress about falling behind on my bills. Thought I was creative but it never amounted to much. I’m normal. And I’m fine with that.” I glared at her, knowing she wouldn’t fold, wouldn’t back down, but I didn’t care.

Mike pulled his suit coat off and pointed at a hole three inches in diameter in his shoulder. It sizzled like grease in a pan. I thought,
Jesus, man
. Mike said, “I think it infected me with something. We’re going to need your help, John. As soon as you’re done talking to your uncle. Okay? Promise me. I can’t do this without you, I feel it in my guts.”

Angela said, “No. Just us.” She jerked her head toward the front door. “And the brave one out there. The cop.”

I stared at the open front door, my stomach heavy and chest so tense it felt like my breastbone would snap. I wanted to run out into the night and just keep going, never stop. I wondered if Duncan felt that way too, if he was already running away.

It’s too much. We’re all going to die.

“Look at me, John.”

“I can’t. I just want to go see Wylie, tell my sister I love her, and wait for Cat and Ethan to come home.” I walked out into the night, and they didn’t stop me, didn’t beg me to stay and I wondered if they really needed me to begin with. My thoughts tumbled over all I’d learned and all I hadn’t as I stepped up behind Duncan on the porch. The big cop turned his head and studied me a moment.

“What’s wrong?” Duncan chuckled. “Dumb question, huh? Everything, I know. What’s the plan?”

“You’ll have to ask Mike. I’m going home.”

“Is that the right thing to do?”

“For my family, I think so. For my own mental health.”

Duncan wiped his hands on his pants, brushed mud off his knees, and leaned against the column supporting the porch. “Just so you know, I’m going to defend you and cover your friend, Mr. Wright, when the time comes.”

“Why?”

“It’s the right thing to do, for me.”

I wasn’t sure if it was some kind of guilt trip. I wiped my tired eyes and rapped my knuckles against the siding. “Are you going with them to the manor? Or do you want me to run you to the hospital so they can take care of your leg?”

Duncan let out a long breath, his lips fluttering, gaze locked on the cars in the drive. “It’s not broke. Just sprained maybe. I’ll be fine.”

“So, you’re going with them.”

“Looks that way.” Duncan stared at his feet. “If there are more of those things we don’t want them dancing around Pennsylvania, do we?”

I sighed and rubbed my temples. I stepped past Duncan and tapped his shoulder, walked out to Pat’s old cruiser, climbed in the passenger seat. “Jesus Christ.” I slid over behind the wheel. “No one’s going to drive you where you need to go.” I turned the ignition on as the rest of them moved in a tight bunch toward Mike’s Jaguar.

* * *

Mike’s vision dotted with red blots like blood rain on a windshield. He put his foot down on the Jaguar’s accelerator, felt the motor open up, trees stream by out the side windows, the fading yellow line just outside his door as the road twisted. Angela toyed with her hair in the passenger seat. Duncan tapped Mike’s shoulder, from the back seat, and Mike thought,
Watch where you’re touching, bud
.

“Thanks, Johnston.”

Mike glanced in the rearview; saw the one-time father, the cop, this good man half hidden in shadow. “I didn’t do anything. We can thank Angela. I think she’s been pointing us all in the right direction. And thanks for what you tried to do. I don’t like many people. But you’re okay.”

Duncan nodded, his head a dark blob on his thick neck as he leaned back into the rear seat. “You, too. And thanks, Angela.”

She tapped the dash with long thin fingers. “John ran out on us. He wasn’t supposed to do that.”

Mike turned his head. “It’s for the best. I don’t want him getting hurt.”

The woman bothered him still. But he knew that they needed her as much as she needed them. He traced his finger over the key in his pants pocket and let out a breath that tickled the backs of his teeth. Angela played with the radio until she found a song she liked. He glanced at her, the road. Her again. The night stretched out so deep beyond the headlights it made him sick to his stomach. “You were the raven playing with the radio earlier.” She shifted in the seat and ignored him. Duncan started snoring. His head plopped against the window and he kicked the back of Mike’s seat. “Weren’t you? I thought it was just that fucking thing messing with me before we went in that house. I know the damn games they like, like they’re the cats, we’re the mice.”

She nodded as Paul Simon sang about Rosemary and Thyme.

“So, what happened?”

Angela braced her arm on the door. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“My brothers are a little more selfish than I am.”

“What do they want?”

She smiled at him. “What do you think?”

“None of that shit. We’re helping each other, or not at all. Spit it out.”

Angela folded her hands in her lap and looked like a little girl, though he doubted she’d ever existed as one. “All I want is to get out of the cold. It’s never-ending here. Trapped half in this world, half in another. You can’t imagine.”

“You know about my other situation, don’t you?”

She nodded, just the slightest tilt of her head. “I can smell it on you.”

“So, who did you track down? Me? Or John?” He slowed for the crossroad as the moon dipped beneath the clouds and slathered the valley in silver. “Well?”

“I came for you.” She looked him in the eye, but for some reason he didn’t believe her.

It’s that crazy little smile trying to gouge her lips.

“What are they after?”

“They want you, Michael. They want to possess your flesh. It’s the only way they can knock God’s door off its hinges. I don’t want them to do that. God may be an asshole sometimes, but He’s better than the alternative.”

“There’s a process to them possessing me, isn’t there?”

A dab of her hand on his cheek. “You know, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Sacrifice.”

She leaned over and kissed his cheek as he tried to sort out what type of sacrifice. His mind felt like it was grasping at straws. He turned onto the highway and headed east, feeling his sister’s bones in his hand, his mother’s rage like a cold kiss between his eyes.

“I’m dropping this cop off.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Why not? Then there won’t be a sacrifice?”

She slapped him and the skin over his right cheekbone split. Blood slicked his cheek. “They need a sacrifice to get what they want, not me. I am not like them.”

They passed the hospital. He dabbed at the blood with his tongue as it settled in the crook of his mouth. John’s house, dark and cold, came into view, the road leading up to the cemetery before it, but hidden still by the dark. “You hit like a girl.”

“We both know better than that.” She smiled. “I’m not a girl, no matter how much I wish I were.”

Mike heard the self-pity in her voice, and shivered, knowing how she looked wasn’t reality. Like people, she cloaked herself with what she thought others would find acceptable; only with her, she wore a real second skin.

Chapter 33

Black dots rimmed with yellowish-green danced before her eyes after he closed the door. Cat waited until his dark silhouette stepped off the last stair. She pulled the blades apart and rammed the shears forward, aiming for his head. The darkness was heavy, now it was wet, on the insides of her arms, the front of her shirt. He gurgled out something she couldn’t understand. She leaned into the shears but they wouldn’t go any further. “Where is my son?”

She tried to make out his face but couldn’t. His hands pulled at the blade, trying to keep her from closing it around his neck. But she knew it was too late for him. He was bleeding all over. “Where is he?”

The man tapped her shoulder with his fingers, gently, one, two, three. And she didn’t understand what he meant. One of her hands slipped as his blood coated her palm and she righted it, felt his flesh give and he screamed in her face, wet and thick, “Upstairs!”

“Walk up them, backwards.” She pushed with her left, steered him to the right. He held onto the blade around his neck with one hand to keep it from cutting further and slapped the stair wall with his other as they climbed, slowly. Too slowly, she thought. She wanted Ethan, wanted to tie this man to the back of John’s Jeep and…

He threw the door open and light spilled over her eyes, half blocked by his large shape. “Take the last step,” she ordered him, but he froze there, his face still lost to shadow, and her stomach tumbled as she thought—
He’s going to kick me down the steps
—and headlights flashed across a large window that looked out over the street and around his side she saw the police station and a car turning, looking like it’d drive right into the building, and she knew where she was.

The car did a sharp U-turn and her abductor pulled something from his pocket—a syringe—and she pictured her baby, and what this man might have done to him. Cat punched him between the legs. He leaned forward against the pain, cutting himself worse. She drove her knee into his face as he dropped the syringe and held his crotch. Blood sprayed her pant leg. He fell, and she pulled the shears over her head, blades together to ram them into his chest. Everything playing out in savage slow motion. He grabbed her ankle and jerked.

The car lights disappeared, and the room spun as she slammed to the floor, his wet hands already on her, face pressed tight against her shoulder, his feet kicking like he was hanging on just enough to take her with him.

* * *

I watched the taillights of the Jag pull away from me down Valentine, shrink until there was nothing left of them. Cold crept through my chest. Angela’s words kept swirling black between my ears:
No. It said not to trust yourself.

I wrung the steering wheel, wishing to be somebody else, someone heroic. But I knew that wishing for it would never make it happen. And I knew that Uncle Red had some answers, even if they were hard truths that pierced the soul like silver needles. I wanted to know what the old man knew, what things he’d done to gain that wisdom.

Turning onto Main, I drove slow, picturing Mike and Duncan facing six more of those demons, Angela there, but maybe not enough to save them. I thought about the black hole in Mike’s shoulder and shivered. It had taken part of him and left something in return. I imagined it eating away at Mike like cancer, until his flesh disappeared and only empty space remained.

The station stood to my right, Red’s Hardware to my left. The light burned upstairs, threw a soft glow against the night and beginning rain.
Maybe he’s expected this visit, maybe he knew all along how things were going to play out.
I swung a sharp U-turn, tires squealing, light cascading out across the sidewalk and glass-fronted buildings.

Something shifted inside Jim White’s shop, a flash of white skin, dark hair. I followed it with my head, thinking I was seeing things again, as I completed the turn and pulled up along the curb in front of my uncle’s store.

I shut the car off and pulled the pistol, not sure why other than my skin crawled, and my scalp tingled, and my gut said that danger was on the wind as it roared against the car and I stepped out onto the road. Rain dotted the sidewalk and turned it darker. I stepped up to the picture window in front of Jim’s shop, just to disprove that I’d actually seen anything, but the memory of the man’s weird behavior in the hospital kept nagging at me, like a stubborn kid tugging at his weak mother’s shirt.

I pressed my left hand to the glass to see inside and my breath bloomed against it as the rain turned the dirt caked to my clothes to mud. I looked left, right, inside, saw an open door in the back of the shop. I pulled my face away from the glass.

It’s my frayed nerves
.
Feeling guilty because I left Mike to tend to something that will probably kill him
.

It felt true. Uncle Red could tell me. I turned from the window.

Lightning crackled across the sky and a woman screamed. I pressed my face back to the glass and my stomach dropped, and my blood pressure rose, as Cat jumped up, blood smeared across the left side of her face, stumbling around like she’d been blinded. She didn’t see me. Jim White sprang from the floor, slapped his hand against the wall and left a bloody print.

I ran to the glass-paned door and kicked just beneath the gold colored handle. The force of it knocked me back a step but the door didn’t budge.

Jim grabbed Cat by the hair from behind and jerked her to his chest.

I aimed the pistol at the floor inside and pulled the trigger. The gunshot echoed through the night and faraway dogs howled. My ears rang and the glass spider-webbed, blurred. I kicked it twice and the chunks flew inside and shattered on the floor, pieces skidding to where Jim had his head buried in the crook of Cat’s shoulder. His arm came up, trying to get a firm hold around her throat, as I sprang inside.

I lifted the gun.

Cat bit Jim’s forearm and he screamed. She stomped on his instep and slammed her fist between his legs. Jim buckled, coughed a mouthful of blood across the floor. Cat spun to the right, out of his reach. Blood covered his dress shirt. His forehead stood out milky white as he tried to keep his footing.

I yelled, “Turn around, put your hands on the wall!”

Jim’s head jabbed left—toward the open basement door; to the right—toward a small room on the west side of the building, where Cat had fled.

Her sobs, a horrible, torn sound, spilled out the door.

I stopped six feet away from him, gun leveled on his chest. “Against the wall!”

Jim waved his hands in the air, an
I give up gesture
, and staggered back, trying to catch his breath. He slid down the wall, two shoulder-wide red stripes above him, as he sat heavily. Hands in his lap, head sagging, he stared at my feet.

“Look at me, Mr. White.”

The damage to his neck was horrible, but I didn’t think Cat had cut the jugular or he’d be dead by now. She carried Ethan out of the operating room, holding him to her chest. Her tears wet his cheek. The boy stroked her shoulder as if he knew mommy was distressed and he wanted to still her emotions, smooth away the sadness. She clung to him the way my mother had clung to me when I’d had a high fever when I was six years old, thinking she could somehow hang onto me forever if she just squeezed tight enough. In that moment I loved Cat more than I ever had.

Jim raised his head and blood bubbled on his lips as I knelt in front of him. The man smiled, his eyes all fever glow and dark in his face, like he’d been waiting for it to end, stirring mad in his own crazy. I hit him between the eyes with the pistol butt, wanting to let all my frustration loose, glad I finally had somewhere to direct it. Jim’s head bounced off the wall with a loud thud and blood dripped from the tip of his nose. “You have something against me, Mr. White? You take my fucking fiancé and her son?”

I hit him again, the spring inside me winding tighter than I’d ever felt it.

Don’t kill him.
A flurry of voices—mine, Mark’s, our fathers, as if they all knew that someday this test would come. I felt what I thought Wylie might have, after he’d watched Tiffany take a bullet in the skull and her blood splattered his face, and the object of his hate and his pain right there in front of him, trapped between two vehicles.

Cat said, “He came right to the house, while you were up in the cemetery with everyone else.”

I nodded and looked back at the bleeding man. “You burnt Pat’s car.”

Jim didn’t answer.

I asked Cat, “Are you two okay?”

She nodded, trembling, and sobbed. “He bought Ethan some action figures, and a playpen.” Cat shook her head, confused.

Jim’s head sagged. I slapped his cheek, hoping he’d hold on long enough, breathe a few more breaths. “Why? Why’d you do it?”

Cat walked toward the front window where plastic chairs sat around a glass-topped coffee table littered with dog-eared magazines. “He took the clothes you brought home when you went out late the other night.”

“Talk to me, Mr. White. Did you kill those girls? Did someone help you? Who helped you?” I looked at the wall behind him. I’d followed a path right up to the motherfucker earlier, after meeting Mark in the ghost manor, when Angela waited in the cruiser behind the station just to fuck with me. “You took them through the woods from right here, didn’t you?”

Jim’s voice came out a whisper, face all crunched in pain. I leaned in. “The jungle rotted men from the inside out. Everyone came home darker than when they left.”

“What jungle?”

“Pat,” he coughed. “He took away part of those girls. They could never get it back. It’s all recorded.” He sobbed and blood bubbled from the wounds in his neck, out his right nostril. “I tried to save them.” Jim’s shoulders sagged, his face slackened, fingers clutching his pant leg. He stared at my right knee. I smacked him again.

Cat said, “He’s dead.”

I spun, afraid she meant her son. But Ethan held his mother’s index finger and talked gibberish, all the cuter for it. I put the pistol in the holster. I crossed the room, glass crunching underfoot, and hugged them to me—breathed Cat and Ethan in, and squeezed, knowing that feeling that my mother felt, that Cat felt, as she shook against me and her tears tickled my neck.

* * *

Uncle Red rapped his knuckles on the door. He had his head down like he was ashamed to see us in such a moment of weakness, and I wanted to hug him too, this relief in my chest, so much swirling around inside with it. Red held a shotgun, finger scratching the trigger guard. “I heard a gunshot. I was upstairs reading.”

I kissed the crown of Cat’s head. “Jim White killed some girls. Hell, I can’t even remember if I told you about the woods the other day when I saw you.”

“Yesterday morning, it was,” Red said. “I knew he was up to something when he started going in and out of here in the middle of the night a lot last week. Everybody okay?” He pointed at where Jim sat. “Other than him I mean.”

I tried to take Ethan so Cat didn’t have to hold him, but she hung on and shook her head. I nodded. “We’re okay.”

“You ever see what Mark left you?” Red cradled the shotgun in the crook of his arm. “You haven’t, have you?”

Cat gave me a look, like we were both crazy. But it was light, different than her attitude of wanting me to see a psychologist. Not that I thought it a bad idea now.

“I’ve been busy.” I let out a long breath.

“Yep. Do you know your fate now?”

“I wish I did.”

“Get the bowl. Help your friends. People you love are all you got in life. Trust me. Everything else is just trinkets.”

I nodded. “Will you look after—”

Cat shook her head. “Whatever you’re doing I want to go with you.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Red said.

You have no idea, hon
.

I wanted to tell her that I was risking my life, but didn’t want to worry her further. Red scratched his chin and said, “Let me show her.”

I faced him. “How?”

“Magic, son. It’s the gears of life. Seldom seen, rarely heard, but it’s what makes things run. It might give you a little more strength you could use, too.” He sat the shotgun against a chair and knelt among the broken glass. “Let’s see if I still have any left.”