There was nothing. No reaction. No one came for him. No one shouted at him to go away. Best of all, no one pointed a gun at him. With a wary eye toward the house, he backed up against the storage building and pulled the door gently open. At this point, he took a broader sweep around the neighborhood, watching for any neighbors, any pursuers, who might be watching him. He saw no one so he backed through the door, into the outbuilding, and pulled the door shut.
Muncie stood there in the dark trying to get his breathing under control. The sound of it was deafening, as if everyone in this town could hear him sucking wind. The effort to get enough oxygen into his lungs was hampered by the sweltering heat of the building. The air smelled of rotted wood, dried grass, and an undercurrent of gasoline gone bad with age.
He pressed his face to the half-inch crack around the edge of the door, scanning back and forth to see if he had been followed. He saw no one. Perhaps he’d gotten away. Unless, of course, they’d seen him hide and were preparing to assault his location. Before he could stop himself, his mind went to the worst of places, imagining the hiker army dragging him into to town to make him pay for the men Asbury had killed at the ambush, poking him to death with hundreds of pointy trekking poles.
He'd never experienced anything like that ambush before. He was not a combat veteran and had never been in a gunfight since joining the Capitol Police. Although he’d drawn his weapon before, usually when some crackpot protester wouldn’t leave when asked to, he’d never been in a battle. He couldn't believe Asbury, mouthy jerk that he was, was dead. It didn’t matter that he never liked the guy. He'd been a jerk back on the job and his attitude had become even worse once outside of the confines of professional responsibility. Still, they were partners. They had been on a mission together and Asbury wasn’t going home.
Speaking of which, what the hell was he going to do about that? Where did the mission stand? After the ambush at the roadblock it was likely there were people all over town looking for him. They had killed what was likely part of the occupying hiker army and that left more of an impression than simply being a stranger in town. It would make people want to find him, want to kill him for revenge.
He needed to take this moment of respite and get his head together. There was no immediate pressure to change locations or escape town. It didn't appear as if anyone had seen him hide in the outbuilding. He heard no one rushing through the alleys hunting for him. He needed to sit down and rest while he could. He peered into the darkness. He had a flashlight in his pocket but he didn’t think he needed it. If he gave his eyes a moment to adjust, the murky light filtering in through the crack in the door should be sufficient.
As his eyes adjusted, shapes within the building became objects. He saw a rusty metal folding chair in the corner and started for it but his foot struck something. He staggered and nearly tripped. He gazed downward toward his feet but his body was blocking the light and he couldn’t see what he’d run into. It felt soft, like a rolled up rug.
He carefully stepped to the side. Once unobstructed by Muncie’s body, the strip of light cut a swath through the dark building, clearly illuminating the ruined head of Leslie Brown lolling in the floor. Muncie’s breath froze in his chest. This was not a clean corpse laying in a casket at a funeral. This was the bloody and pulverized head of someone cruelly bludgeoned to death.
Muncie could not help himself. He screamed with revulsion and pinwheeled backwards. His back struck the shed door and it flew open. Muncie staggered and sat down hard, directly in front of the door. When the harsh daylight illuminated the interior of the shed, he saw what he’d missed when he went inside—a large pool of congealing blood in the floor.
How had he missed that? How had he missed the body and the damaged face? Distracted, his attention had been elsewhere, panicked at the idea he was being pursued and desperate to hide.
He felt slickness under his hand. He thought he’d cut himself at first, seeing his bloodstained palm, but it was not his blood. He could see now that he’d landed in the blood trail marking the drag path of the body. He rolled onto his hands and knees to scrub his palms in the clean grass and found himself looking directly at a pair of legs. He looked upward but the sun was in his eyes and he could not see who it was.
He threw a hand up to block the blinding sunlight from his eyes. Only then did he see the woman with an ax raised above her head. Not a stranger. Familiar somehow. He saw a flatness on the scabby face, a lack of affect and emotion. He could see no recognition in her eyes. He was uncertain if she even recognized him, or if she cared at all.
"It's me!" he groaned.
It was too late. She’d already begun the downswing.
Slowly, the low-wattage filament in Debbie’s impaired brain began to glow and she understood that this face belonged to the man who had helped her on the trail. The man who’d patched her foot up. She remembered a name–Muncie—and she averted the ax at the last moment.
Muncie finally detected a flicker of recognition on her face just before the ax veered to the right, barely missing his head. He felt a wave of relief at having been spared. The sensation was so overwhelming, so powerful, his bladder almost released.
Endorphins flooded his body, granting an overwhelming sensation of well-being and quite successfully blocking the pain of the ax severing three fingers and part of the very hand he rested on. Debbie saw it before he did, the splayed fingers falling to the side and laying at an odd angle in the overgrown grass. She threw a hand to her mouth and her glassy eyes widened.
Muncie followed her gaze and only then was there a sensation. It was not immediately identifiable as pain but as an odd feeling of numbness, as if he’d struck his hand against a door frame while walking. Whatever fragile strips of damaged meat bound him to his severed appendages gave way as he violently retracted his hand. The severed fingers remained in place on the other side of the sunken ax as if they were evidence of a well-performed magic trick.
Whatever revulsion Muncie had experienced at the sight of the ax parting his hand was magnified a hundred times by the sight of those detached fingers laying there so neatly. So unnaturally. He felt lightheaded, not from the loss of blood but from the wrongness of it all. From the violation.
He wasn’t someone who normally swooned at the sight of blood, even his own, yet he fought to stay conscious. The ragged cross-section of hand gushed blood with each beat of his heart. He stared at it in horror, with the vague awareness that there was only so much blood in the human body and he needed to contain this loss or he was a dead man. He rose to his knees, clutched his hand to his abdomen, and looked at Debbie with a desperate, silent plea. It was a look of accusation for what she’d done but also a cry for help.
Whether motivated by guilt or the recollection of this man’s kindness on the trail, Debbie leapt into action as if she’d been kicked. Recalling the first aid kit he’d kept in his pack, she pulled it from his back, fumbling with the straps until she managed to get the lid open. She jammed a hand into the puckered opening beneath it, cinched closed by a drawstring, and yanked it open. The first aid kit was there on top, right where she’d seen him place it earlier.
The kit was roughly the dimensions of a paperback book though several times thicker. She tugged on the zipper and spilled the contents onto the ground as she wrestled it open. She flicked a finger through the items.
“Trauma pad,” he growled through gritted teeth. “Thickest thing in there.”
The word “trauma” caught her eye on a white paper packet. She ripped it open, exposing a thick gauze pad approximately the size of the sanitary napkin. She took Muncie’s wrist and tried to pull his hand toward her. “Let me.”
He reluctantly released his taut muscles, allowing her to move his hand. She jerked his good hand away. Without the direct pressure, blood ran like water. She quickly wrapped the trauma pad over his abbreviated hand. It slowed but did not stop the bleeding.
"Hold this," she said.
He clamped his hand ar
ound the bandage, desperately trying to stem the flow of his life from the wound. Debbie rifled through the pile of first aid supplies laying between them, finding one more trauma pad and several four-inch squares of gauze. She opened all of it, clamping each additional layer onto the wound until the blood stopped running to the ground.
While the girl swaddled his hand in an amateurish effort to help him, Muncie struggled with his feelings about the situation. He had been kind to this girl, had patched her foot up, and she was trying to help him now. Hell, she might even have saved his life, but he wouldn’t be in this current predicament if she hadn’t come after him with an ax. He was thinking like Asbury now, wanting to whip out his gun and put a bullet in the middle of her forehead. He wanted to do this for the pain and aggravation this wound would cause him both now and for the rest of his life.
He realized for the first time that he couldn't even draw his gun anymore. She'd cut off his right fingers, his dominant hand, his gun hand. Not only could he not easily shoot her now, he may never shoot well again. Everything would be different from this point forward. He would have to learn to shoot offhanded. He would have to convert his rifle to shoot ambidextrously. He probably wouldn’t be able to do any of this for a long time because there would be a lot of healing involved. He had one skill and this girl had taken it from him.
That surge of awareness, the onrush of thoughts, angered him all over again. It made him want to kill just because the pain was pushing him beyond that precipice. Her death would not cost him any sleep. He should do it now.
As he was figuring out how to crossdraw without having to release the direct pressure on his wound, a child's voice called out, "Mommy? Where are you?"
She had a kid. Dammit! Regardless of where he’d been in his head just seconds ago this changed things for him. He could not orphan a child out here. Then he wondered if the child was even hers. She didn’t have a child when he encountered her on the trail. Just as he almost convinced himself he’d imagined the voice, a child appeared at the corner of the wooden fence, peering at them cautiously.
"Mommy?"
"I'm here, baby. This man cut himself real bad and I'm trying to help him."
Gritting his teeth, Muncie shot a quick look at the kid and saw a wary skepticism on his face. He wasn't buying the story. Muncie wondered about that. If her own kid doubted her, maybe he needed to stay wary.
"I think this is all I can do here,” Debbie said. “Let’s get out of the open.”
"Where?"
"My house. Next door."
"Nana's house," the boy interjected.
Muncie was putting the pieces together. This girl wasn’t very good at maintaining her cover story. "So Asbury was right? You were lying, weren’t you? This is your town and your kid. You’re no more of a backpacker than I am. What were you trying to hide?"
"Why were you trying to hide?" Debbie snapped. “I thought you were here for a job? Why were you in my neighbor’s outbuilding? Were you spying on me? And where’s your friend, anyway—he still out there? I need to get my ax and find his ass?”
"I wasn’t spying on you. I was on a job but we got attacked. Did you hear the shooting?"
Debbie nodded.
"We were ambushed in a roadblock. They killed him."
Debbie’s face didn’t portray any sympathy. Just the same kind of look locals everywhere give any out-of-towner who makes a dumb decision. "Why on Earth would you walk through the middle of town? You have to be sneaky."
She may not know much about town and nothing about gunfighting but it was only common sense to her. The way things were now you simply couldn't march around like you owned the place. Someone would come along and take you down a notch, just like they did Asbury.
Muncie tried to get to his feet but found it difficult with one hand bandaged and the other plugging a potentially fatal leak. Finally noticing his struggle, Debbie got behind him, slipped her hands under his armpits, and helped him awkwardly to his feet. She released him immediately, walking beside him without providing assistance. Nurture and support were not her strong suits.
"Pick up all his shit and bring it to the house," she called back to the boy.
"We were going to the school," Muncie said, seeing no reason to hide that information at this point.
"Why?"
"Information," Muncie replied. "We thought we could get it at the courthouse but there wasn’t any courthouse.”
She gave him another one of those out-of-towner looks, as if he should have damn well known better. "Ain't no courthouse here. It's in Abingdon."
He flashed her an angry look. "It would've been a big help if you told us that on the trail instead of pretending like you’d never been here. You could have saved us a lot of trouble. You may also have saved Asbury’s life.” He looked for indications of remorse but all he saw was a smug look of satisfaction.
"Y’all never said anything about what you were doing. Never mentioned a courthouse. Besides, your friend got what he deserved as far as I'm concerned. He was an asshole."
Muncie would have to remember this before he considered closing his eyes under the same roof as this woman. The girl had a little psycho in her. "We were trying to find a man that might live around here. His name is Hardwick. Writes books. Might have a big place outside of town."
Debbie stopped in her tracks. "Well, I'll be damned."
Muncie continued on for a few steps, feeling lightheaded and having difficulty focusing. His hand throbbed. Recalling his training, he raised his hand to head level to reduce the blood pressure at the extremity. While he was focusing on this, the girl kept talking but he didn’t get any of it. "What did you say?”
"I think it’s funny you’re looking for the Hardwicks. My mother has been staying with that family. I've been to that house and I know exactly where it is. Why are you looking for it? Is it because it’s still got power?"
That piece of information sliced through the pain fog in Muncie’s brain like a machete. She not only knew the Hardwicks, she knew about the house. If she knew it had power, she may know other useful things about it. "We need to talk, but I need to sit down first."
She nodded. "You'll have to excuse the house, it's a bit of a mess."
16
Dylan was nervous about being in a strange yard by himself, though less nervous than when his mother was with him. Everything about this town scared him now, even being at his grandmother's house, which had always been the safest place in his little world. His granny wasn't there to protect him now. That meant he had to follow his mother’s orders and she was unpredictable. She could hug you one moment and punch you the next. She was hard to understand. Hard to trust.
He sank to the ground beside the man's pack. He was an orderly and methodical child. He liked organizing things, perhaps because there was so much disorder in his life, so many things he couldn’t control. He couldn’t just cram the first-aid supplies into the open top of the pack even though that was probably what his mother expected. It had to be done right. He began replacing the dumped supplies neatly back in the zippered first-aid kit. He discovered the process distracted him from his nervous feeling.
When he’d replaced everything he zipped the first-aid kit shut and placed it in the open top of the pack. It took him a moment to figure out how the toggle lock worked. When he mastered that, he tugged the drawstring top closed. The pack looked heavy but he assumed he could drag it the short distance to the house if he couldn’t lift it. He closed the flap on the top and was working on the pair of plastic buckles when he noticed the foot visible through the open door of the storage building.
He wasn't sure how he’d missed it, other than that he was trying not to look around very much. There was a lot of blood and those severed fingers on the ground a short distance from him. He didn’t want to see them again.
The shoe on the foot was a worn brown slipper. He recognized it as his granny’s favorite shoe. When they wore out she went to the dollar store and bought another pair
just like them. It wasn't the shoe alone that made him think it was his granny, it was the green pants. His granny had worn those pants for days now, but they hadn't been covered in blood. They were now.
He wondered if his granny was hurt. She wasn’t moving. It could be something worse. While he had to know, it was hard to make his body cooperate. The still body in the shed both repelled him and pulled at him with an irresistible force. Even while he wanted to turn and run back home, his legs began moving in that direction, taking single, hesitant steps.
Each step revealed more of the body. After three he saw his grandmother's pale hand, the blood drying on it contrasting starkly against her pale, spotted skin. Another step and he saw the hem of her t-shirt. Like the hand, there was a lot of blood on it. Another step and he could see her neck, more blood than skin. Her brown hair, streaked with gray, was matted into the blood.
His heart raced and he couldn’t even blink. Surely he'd seen enough at that point. She had to be dead. Although there was no way someone could lose that much blood and still be alive he held out hope. Maybe he would take that last step and her eyes would be open. Her bloody lips would smile at his appearance and she would extend a gory hand to him for assistance.
If she did, he would run to her and help her up, take her back to the house. Everything would be alright. He took that last agonizing step and knew for certain that things would never be alright again. The horrific sight before him would visit him in nightmares for the rest of his life. It was something no child, no person, should ever see. His granny’s head was not right. It was deformed and crushed, an irreparable mass of hair and blood and insides.
An involuntary whimper escaped Dylan’s throat. Finally, his feet responded to the commands of his horrified mind and he started to back away from the building. When he’d gone far enough that he lost sight of his grandmother’s body he spun, intent on running back to the house and back to his mother. The thought of that stopped him in his tracks, a realization dawning on him. A horrible but inescapable truth.
Blood Bought: Book Four in The Locker Nine Series Page 16
