Storm Front (16 page)

As his world spun in red circles, he thought it was funny that everything was so disconnected. He couldn’t feel his arms and legs. And why didn’t he hurt?

* * *

There was a strange similarity in the way houses were constructed in many parts of Sheridan, and with the way they were built in older sections of Detroit and other major cities. In Detroit, there frequently weren’t driveways or garages, and any rear way access was through the stinking garbage-filled alleys in the back. The houses were small, often with only two bedrooms, and equally often only a couple of feet from their neighbors. The houses were generally wood frame, which meant that a fire could travel from one to the other with ease.

In Sheridan, the houses were larger and filled the lots that were as small as the builders could get away with. Smaller lots meant more lots, and more lots meant more houses sold and that meant more profit. The houses had garages, minimum two-car and usually three, and boasted brick facades. But usually only the facades were brick. They were still essentially frame homes built with an abundance of wood. As with their poorer relations in Detroit, they were still uncomfortably close to their neighbors.

The fire at the Cunningham residence on Winston Street quickly devoured its source house and moved on to others. The fire department arrived within minutes of the alarm, but only in the form of two men on a snowmobile that carried a short length of hose and a ton of frustration. By the time Mike and Petkowski arrived on the scene, the flames were roaring incongruously through the billowing snow.

A harried fireman tramped through the snow, as if looking for something. “What’s the problem?” Mike asked. The fireman glared at him, then saw the badge and realized it wasn’t a civilian who’d only be in the way with unwanted advice and dumb questions. Normally, he could put up with it, but not now. The fireman had been going all day and all night. For that matter, so had Mike and Stan. They were all almost drained, physically and emotionally.

“Can’t find the Goddamned hydrant,” the fireman snapped. “You want to be useful, help us look.”

The only water going on the fire was coming from garden hoses that were manned by frightened neighbors. Mike, little trained in fire prevention, saw that their efforts were ineffective. Understandably, the neighbors were trying to put out the fire and save their homes, when their efforts should have been used to contain it. Three houses were burning furiously, and there was nothing anyone could do to save them, while billowing clouds of smoke carried burning ashes through the snow to others. Unless something was done, the fire would continue to spread until it hit either a playground or a street. Until that time, many homes could burn.

“You’d think all this snow would put it out,” Petkowski said. It seemed logical to Mike, too. Snow was water, after all, but the heat from the fire was evaporating much of the snow before it hit the flames. Rain might have worked, but snow lacked the density.

“Might as well piss on it,” Petkowski added.

“You might burn yourself and never be able to live it down,” Mike said. “Instead, why don’t we help them find the hydrant?”

The two men began to crawl around where they thought there was a curb. Hydrants were funny things, always around and always in the way when you were mowing your lawn or looking for a place to park. Nobody liked the ugly things except when you needed one. Every few houses had a hydrant in front, but few people would be able to tell you exactly where they were. Your dog could, of course, but dogs had different agendas and, besides, they couldn’t talk.

As Mike crawled and duck-walked through the snow, he thought of Maddy and her excursions that had gotten her soaked. At least he had better protective gear, although he could feel rivulets of melting snow going down his neck and onto his chest and back.

Damn it, how far away could one be? And how far from the curb was it? And where on earth was the curb? He couldn’t recall. He and Petkowski had split up. Maybe they should have stayed together? They could have held hands and walked their way through the snow until they found one.

Mike stumbled and fell face down in the snow. He picked himself up and hoped no one had seen him. They hadn’t. They were all either fighting the fire or also looking for a hydrant. A second fire department snowmobile showed up with more personnel and more hose and they joined in the search.

“Got it,” yelled one of the newly arrived firemen. Mike swore in frustration at his own wasted effort, and aided in the effort to clear a mountain of snow off the hydrant.

“God, I hope this one works,” the fireman said. “A lot of them don’t, you know.”

Mike winced. It had taken them forever to find this one. How many more houses would be ashes if they had to look again? Nonworking hydrants were a minor scandal that the mayor had sworn was corrected. They would soon find out.

Luck was with them. A hose was connected and a powerful stream of water began to soak the houses not yet touched by the fire. A couple of roofs were smoking from the heat, but the water quickly put an end to that nonsense. The second hose was just as effective. It would be a long while before the fires were out, but, for the time being, they were contained. A couple of homeowners were pissed that more effort wasn’t being made to save their houses, but it quickly became obvious that nothing could be done.

“We’re covered with snow,” Stan said. “I look like Casper the Friendly Ghost and you look like Frosty the Obscene Snowman.”

Mike took a deep breath and grinned. “Screw you, Polack. I’m the Grinch.”

* * *

Traci Lawford lay naked and huddled on the floor of her bedroom. Her entire body hurt. She was numbed from pain that was both physical and psychological. She had promised to cooperate in return for not being mutilated and she had done her part. But she never dreamed that anything this awful could happen in her life. Until now, she never realized how fortunate her life had been.

Traci could have lain down on her bed instead of the floor, but her bed had been defiled, profaned by the repeated assaults upon her. She would stay on the floor.

They had taken her up to her bedroom and Raines had raped her first. It wasn’t as horrible as it could have been when she closed her eyes and willed her mind to be elsewhere. Then the little guy, Tower, had assaulted her with a degree of violence and built-up anger that stunned her, and she’d screamed from the pain. She quickly realized that women didn’t like Tower and he was taking out his rage and frustrations on her, and that she shouldn’t provoke him. He thought her screams were a rejection of him, which they were, and they made him angrier. With more emotional strength than she thought she possessed, she willed herself to silent endurance.

Then Raines wanted oral sex and she complied, hating every moment of the humiliation as she knelt before him. Tower watched them and laughed, which made it worse. She considered biting down on Raines, but rejected it. What they would do to her wouldn’t be worth the momentary satisfaction.

A moment later, Tower was ready again and she complied, this time in silence. Tower was an animal with incredible sexual recuperative powers. Time and again he assaulted her, and long after Raines was satisfied. Raines thought Tower’s stamina was funny.

Tower hit her once, splitting her lip. She’d begged him to stop when he was forcing himself on her for perhaps the fourth time, and it had angered him. She didn’t scream again, not even when he’d sodomized her, which was far more painful.

Finally, Tower grew tired and left her in the bedroom.

For a few moments after they’d left her, she wanted to die. She rolled from the bed and lay on the floor of her bedroom and wished her world would end. But it wouldn’t. Traci was not going to commit suicide, even if she knew how, considering that there was nothing resembling a weapon in her room. In their contempt for her, Tower and Raines hadn’t even tied her up. Therefore, she concluded reluctantly, she was going to have to live. She thought about escape. They had taken her clothes and emptied out her closet and removed the bedding. She was on the second floor and scared to death of heights. A jump to the ground would hurt her, perhaps breaking bones and leaving her to freeze to death in a mound of snow. Even if she were to make it to the ground safely, where would she go? She would leave a trail through the snow that they could follow to where? A neighbor’s? Do that and she’d endanger others, and she could not bring herself to do that. At least not yet.

Of course, she had their word that they would not kill her. Sure. She’d seen their faces, and heard their voices, and they already were killers. Like they’d said, what would one more murder mean? If it was to their advantage to keep her alive, they would do so. But if it wasn’t, she had no illusions. They would cut her throat just like the others they’d bragged about. Traci shuddered from a fear she couldn’t control.

Traci had to do something. She couldn’t leave the room because they’d locked it and barricaded it from the outside. She thought about barricading it from the inside with furniture, but that would only delay them for a moment. Her own bedroom had become a jail cell.

She wasn’t thinking rationally and knew it. The abuse and the terror had overwhelmed her. She had to take back some control or she would die.

Muffled voices came through the heat vent. Traci crawled over to it and pressed her ear to the metal grill. The acoustics in old houses were funny. Sometimes you could hear things you didn’t think you could. And sometimes you heard things you didn’t want to.

* * *

Joe Gomez and Tommy Hummel had finished the six cans of Coors in a very short while, and had gotten thoroughly bored playing cards. The news from the radio and on the small portable television told them nothing they didn’t already know—it was snowing. The television news said that power was out in many places but, knock on wood, not yet in their corner of the world, and even if it did, they’d hook up to a truck battery.

They’d dozed fitfully on the uncomfortable furniture in the office. Joe’d pulled rank and claimed the old, beat-up couch and wondered if he’d made the right decision. All the springs seemed to be broken and attacking his kidneys. At least they still had heat and the toilet flushed.

“This is stupid,” Joe said.

Tommy yawned. “Agreed.”

“We just can’t sit here all night. We’ve got a big-ass truck with a plow and lots of power. We ought to be able to do something useful.”

“It’d be easy if we could actually drive it somewhere. We could get through the snow if the roads weren’t jammed with tourists.”

“What if we don’t use the roads?”

Tommy giggled. “Tell me you are not suggesting that we go cross-country, through parks and over people’s lawns with that gigantic thing; are you? Christ, we’d break anything we rode over and get sued.”

“If it’s an emergency, why not?”

“If we knew something was an emergency, I suppose we could do it. But who’s going to tell us what an emergency is?”

Joe smiled and reached for the phone. “First, I think I’ll phone the cops and tell them we’re available and see what they think. Then maybe we can go out and play.”

Tommy thoughtfully examined an empty Coors can. “If we’re going to be on call, I guess we should stop drinking. Too bad we ran out of this stuff several hours ago. Stopping would have meant something. Now it just means I gotta go take a tremendous piss.”

* * *

They didn’t find Wilson Craft for a while. He wasn’t one of the kids, so no one was keeping track of him. He’d always come and gone as he wished; doing whatever job he thought needed to be done. Technically, he worked for the principal, but the staff thought of him as basically self-employed.

He wasn’t discovered until one of the teachers, young Sue Stapleton, wandered into the gym to see if there was anything else in the way of padding to help make the hallway floors more comfortable. Her screams brought Maddy and Donna. Wilson lay on his back. His eyes were wide open and he seemed to be conscious, but wasn’t responsive. There was a huge bruise on his head and blood seeped from an ear. The ladder was on its side in mute explanation of what had transpired.

Maddy and Donna checked for a pulse—it was steady but weak—and tried to talk to him while a distraught Sue called 911.

They were lucky. An EMS snowmobile just happened to be a couple of blocks away and arrived within minutes. The two technicians checked him briefly and radioed for more help.

“Possible fractured skull and possible broken back” was the rough and grim prognosis. Obviously, he had to be transported to a hospital for proper care and, equally obviously, that wasn’t going to happen for a long while.

Instead, one of the techs took the snowmobile and returned shortly with a doctor who lived a couple of blocks away. The doctor confirmed the technician’s diagnosis—it was either a broken back or a fractured skull or both.

“Doctor, can he hear us?” Maddy asked. The doctor shrugged. He didn’t know. Wilson Craft would have to be transported with extreme care to a hospital and in an ambulance, not a snowmobile. In a perfect world, they would place a wooden board under him, wrap him in cushioning material so he wouldn’t shift and hurt himself even more, gently place him on a stretcher, and then put him in an ambulance. He would be driven carefully to a hospital where experts would evaluate him, X-ray and scan him, and perform numerous other tests that would likely save his life. But not tonight. The doctor said he wouldn’t survive a trip on a snowmobile and the techs agreed.

Everything that could be done was done. The doctor said he would remain and stand watch. Without proper medical care, Wilson Craft was going to die. The only question was how soon.

* * *

“Wally, do you know where I am?” Governor Lauren Landsman asked over the telephone.

“Hopefully, somewhere nice and warm and dry and holding a warm brandy in your delicate and sensuous hands,” Wally Wellman responded. He was still in the TV6 studio and very tired, but it was good to hear her voice. “And may I guess what you’re wearing?”

“No such luck to the first and no to guessing the second. I am outside and standing on what was once Interstate 96, and I’m just about at the Brighton exit. I guess I’m about fifty miles from downtown Detroit. I’m watching the National Guard try to bull their way through the snow with armor that took down Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This whole thing is incredible.”