He watched her struggle with the rifle scope, then gripped the jittering barrel and held it level.
“Right. There you go.” He pointed across the stream again. “We hike across that hillside and up a canyon—you can just see it, the break in texture—where a little feeder joins this creek. A few hundred yards up that feeder is where the ground levels out into a meadow not much bigger than a baseball field. That’s where the place is. We’ll cross the feeder and bushwhack our approach high on the opposite side, away from the buildings, so we can stay out of sight. The whole trip is just about a quarter mile. Except it seems like two hundred years into the past.”
She tightened down the scope.
“Let’s move.”
CHAPTER 38
At Supercuts, the window glass surrenders with a bright chime. She snaps across the wreckage in her new pink flip-flops, shucks the Disney princess mask, towels off her hot face, and spends a minute inches from a mirror, plucking black hairs from her chin and upper lip.
Then she flings her bonnet away and hops into a chair. She tells him something in her strange language. Then she tries to make it English.
“Hurt me, many, not hamburger. He koam, I kill. Boam!”
She taps her sweat-damp dress between her breasts, concentrates on her words.
“Jailhouse. Safety.”
At her command, he uncoils her braid and with a pair of long sharp scissors he hacks it off. It falls like an old rope to the floor.
CHAPTER 39
A long time ago—long to Taylor Kick—in the days just after his and Dylan’s seventh birthday, but before the end of the school year had separated him from his special teacher, Miss Garland, Taylor had seen the first mean sign about his mother from the window of the school bus.
The sign was where the bus stopped on Ten Hollows Road to pick up Chad Mooney, in Taylor’s first-grade class. It was stuck into Chad Mooney’s yard, his mother waving nearby it with a baby on her hip. Miss Garland had been telling him, Read everything you can, all the time. Practice The world is full of words.
The sign was red with white capital-letter words that were stacked on top of one another, a pattern he had later described to Miss Garland as easier for him to read, and she had told him that is not how you write words, unless you are in China writing Chinese words. If you want to be an American, she said, always put words left to right and always read them left to right, even if your brain and eyes are trying to tell you something different.
KICK
HER
OUT
It had taken him a few moments. Then as the bus pulled away fierce tears had filled his eyes. Chad Mooney had goofed his way down the aisle like always, but when he had tried to sit in his usual spot, next to his classmate Taylor Kick, Taylor had nearly put a boot up his wormy little butt.
Soon after that, school ended, the heat wave began, Opie left for camp, the caterpillars came to strangle the trees, and a different mean sign began to appear everywhere.
BARRY HER
Taylor had been in a secret bad mood about many things for a long time. When he saw that sign, suggesting his mommy would be dead—because dead is when people got barried—his bad mood became so bad that eventually he had put a hoe-point into Dylan’s arm when Dylan said, Just ignore the signs. After he hurt Dylan, he was alone.
Then what happened at the pool. Turd-mouth Riley Rilke-Rickreiner had said to him, “Don’t you know your mom likes Mexican weiner? She’s going to have a Mexican baby. My dad told me, and my dad is going to be the sheriff. He’s going to barry her.”
He had shoved Riley into the pool. When Riley’s mother had started screaming, he had taken a good run and shoved her in too. But it didn’t change the problem. My dad is going to barry her. He had already been thinking of a ski mask and a hammer. He didn’t know where the Rickreiners lived—it was on a different bus route—but last night his mom had taken him there.
* * *
The man who pulled up beside him wore weird glasses that pinched his bald head and sucked his buried eyes forward and made them look like giant frog eggs. He had no hair. Gray lumps hung on his dripping face.
“Where you headed, hot dog?”
He had practiced his answer.
“Home. I live at four-thirty-eight Sunset Ridge Road. The white house with the triple garage past the Town of Blooming Hill water tower. If you don’t know where that is, I can show you where to go.”
The man began to hum, not saying if he knew or not. Then he smiled, showing chalky purplish teeth.
“All aboard for Sunset Ridge Road.”
CHAPTER 40
“I saw lights in one of the buildings last night,” Bender whispered. He pointed from the brushy hillside. After leaving Jim Golly’s forest road, they had crossed a rivulet of springwater in one long stride, then bushwhacked painstakingly through underbrush, mindful of a dog, until they could look down upon the same vague geometric shapes that Sheriff Kick had seen from the airplane: arcs and partial rectangles, limned by just-visible gaps in the natural meadow plants. She strained to see clearly through ground fog that drifted up and became lustrous as it intersected with sunlight. As she focused, she began to understand what Bender meant by “buildings.” She began to see depth, a perpendicular plane. She was looking at walls.
“Otherwise I would have bumped right into one of them,” Bender said. “Those are sod buildings, like pioneers, natural bricks, dirt and root and grass, blend right in. But there were lights and moaning coming from the bigger one on the far right.”
The coulee looked about a hundred yards across and three hundred yards long. Birds called cheerily as they flitted through its layered fog and light. The tiny creek, rocky and fast, barreled down the center, bobbing jewelweed and oxeyes. She counted four structures, two rounded, two squared.
“Some are sheds,” Bender whispered, “storage probably. There are two more of those round ones that we can’t see because they’re right under us. That other square-cornered one is a garage where I saw the vehicles. Both the square ones are dug back into the bluff behind them. We’re just looking at the front. The one on the far right, I guess that’s the house.”
“You saw lights? You mean lanterns?”
“No, incandescent lights. No power lines. No generator running. So, solar. Batteries from his brother. He had to have support to live this way.”
Bender pointed toward the opposite ridge, where the sun ignited a stagger of tall red pines.
“Off that way is where I heard the dog barking again, kind of trailing away, and more gunshots—”
He stopped.
“Sheriff, speak of the devil.”
A great black dog galloped out of the pines and down a tarn of tumbled limestone toward the coulee bottom. From the last rock the creature leapt and disappeared, its progress toward them marked by stirring goldenrod and asters. Then it reappeared, trotted out between the two rounded sod buildings, and leapt over the creek. Now they could see the dog wore a harness with a handle. Once across the creek it advanced more slowly, head raised, sniffing in their direction.
“Or maybe that’s the devil’s guide dog,” Bender muttered as he raised his rifle.
She stopped him, pointing down the near bluff. Below them, three lean and ragged coyotes pawed through a mound of earth, haunching up and squirming backward, yanking on something buried. The dog had picked up the coyotes’ scent.
It released a low woof. Alerted, the coyotes squared to the challenge, bristling and hunching their backs. The dog stopped at thirty yards and woofed louder. It knew better than to fight. At the same time, the coyotes seemed to know they had been vanquished. Sure enough, a gunshot fractured the stalemate and the coyotes skulked away looking over their shoulders. The black dog followed woofing and snarling at a distance until all four disappeared.
Now a heavy old woman limped down the opposite hillside. She gripped a rifle. With each lumbering footfall, a long gray braid swung behind her. She dragged herself stiffly between the several smal
ler sod structures. Then, as she entered what Bender had identified as the house, she seemed to vanish directly into the hillside.
“Stay here and cover me.”
When Bender was ready, the sheriff descended two hundred feet through buckthorn and berry brambles and reached level ground through a reef of red-tinged sumac. The first low sod building had a rounded roof that merged with the terrain on either side and framed a hobbit door of hewn wood. She bandoliered her rifle and opened the door. From inside came a sweetly nauseating stench, mysterious until her eyes adjusted to make out shelved walls stacked with canning jars, some ruptured and billowing mold. A root cellar. She swallowed back her revulsion as she closed the door.
The next structure, another low, freestanding dome, contained tools and hardware, cans of diesel fuel and gasoline, coils of cable and wire, lumber, nails, the requirements of self-sufficiency. She hunched beneath the roof and probed the corners with her Maglite. Nothing else to see. She closed the door.
She crossed the creek on stepping-stones. The contents of the next structure astonished her: bundles and bales of decomposing, mouse-chewed newspapers. With hesitant fingers she separated the layers of one bale, mid-heap, and found a masthead: New York Times, Saturday, December 5, 2015. Above this was a Broadcaster of the same vintage. Below it, a Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The bales were bound with twine.
As she ducked and followed her flashlight into what Bender had called the garage, she held her breath, sick with fear at the sight of Leroy Fanta’s old Tercel. Beside it was a rusted, mud-spattered Bronco, its last renewal tag 2009. Next was an empty slot.
She reeled out into blinding sunshine. As she tried to signal Bender—No white truck!—she heard the door of the house creak open behind her.
CHAPTER 41
Taylor could not read the road signs. He worried that the man couldn’t see with his frog eyes and would drive them right off into a ditch. This had almost happened twice, and by the time Taylor saw any signs the words were flashing by too fast.
But then they were on gravel and he knew.
“Sir, this isn’t the right way.”
The man kept humming, kept going even faster, kept leaning up until his glasses were inches from his windshield, and even then he could barely keep the truck on the road.
Taylor’s backpack sat on the floor between his knees. He crept his hand to the zipper, slowly opened it two inches, and saw the handle of his hammer. He looked up. The truck’s shadow lunged long in front of them, spreading all over the road.
“Sir, I would like to get out, please.”
“What’s your name?”
He had practiced this. “My name is Riley Rilke-Rickreiner. I’m going home. But this is not the way to my house. I would like to get out. Please.”
“Your name is Riley?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Rickreiner?”
“Yes, sir.”
The man’s bloated hand dropped off the steering wheel and snatched up the backpack. As he held it close to his face, the truck’s outer wheels caught the shoulder. Gravel flew. The truck jolted left and right, then plunged into a deep and rocky ditch, shearing off small trees until the road surged back up beneath them.
The backpack still dangled from the man’s fist. He dropped it into Taylor’s lap to show exactly where Grammy Belle had stitched Taylor down one shoulder strap and Kick down the other.
“You,” he said, “are the sheriff’s little boy.”
“She will find you,” he blurted, tears rising.
He waited for a reply, but the man kept humming and driving.
“Wherever you take me,” Taylor said, “my mom will come there, with a gun, and a whole bunch of other people will come there too. Fast.”
The man stepped on his brake. The truck fishtailed into the opposite ditch. He bulled it out in reverse and began to turn it around.
“Exactly,” he said. “Bring the world to you, a friend of mine told me. I was blind but now I see.”
“I have a hammer,” Taylor warned him. But it came out as barely a squeak.
“Good boy. We’re going to need a hammer.”
CHAPTER 42
The woman staggered toward Sheriff Kick, her large raw hands gripping what looked like the same rifle the sheriff had seen her carry down the hillside.
Bender bellowed from above, “Stop! Drop the weapon! Get on the ground!”
She didn’t seem to hear, or maybe from the look on her face she didn’t care.
The sheriff reached a hand to her rifle strap. She needed two seconds to swing it around and bring it to a useful angle. She could get shot in that amount of time.
“Ma’am, Mrs. Golly, stop.”
“Jim’s not here,” she said, still coming.
“Ma’am, stop. An officer on the hill has his weapon on you. You will be killed. Drop the rifle. Sit down on the ground. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“He’s gone,” she said, her voice a croak, escaping her downturned mouth as she worked her way across a mound of earth. “He must have found a way.”
Bender came crashing down the hillside and stopped at the creek. He went to one knee and aimed. “Drop the weapon and get on the ground!” he bellowed again.
“Mrs. Golly, please. Stop exactly where you are. Talk to me. He found a way to do what? Tell me. Do what?”
As if she seemed to hear this finally, the ragged woman paused, her head and shoulders swaying side to side, the rifle moving with her. Her words came out as cries of pain.
“Jim thinks it’s his call to save us all.”
“From what?”
“He was calling people, warning them. No one believed. He must have found a way,” she repeated.
“To do what, Mrs. Golly?”
“The newspaperman said bring the world to him.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’m free,” she wrenched out.
“Mrs. Golly, put the rifle down.”
“Free,” she repeated.
She took another step and Bender shot her.
The impact spun the woman and dropped her onto her face. The birdsong stopped. As the woman convulsed and tried to crawl, Sheriff Kick lunged and picked up her rifle. It was unloaded, she saw, its chamber struck hollow by the first rays of light to touch the bottom of Jim Golly’s abruptly silent abyss.
CHAPTER 43
More glass shatters. To the wail of a fourth alarm, she drags him inside a bowling alley, where they swill soda and roll bowling balls. It seems like she has never used a straw before, doesn’t understand until he plunges one into her icy Coke and fits the other end between her lips.
“Never hamburger,” she tells him for some reason. “Many hurt. Bad men. Never hamburger.”
She doesn’t know which fingers to put inside the bowling ball until he shows her. She rolls with startling strength, claps her rough hands when she hits anything.
But she moves from one thing to another in a hurry. After half a dozen rolls, she ignores her returning ball and takes his ball away and drops it and walks him to the red vinyl seating. There she kisses him. She moves her shotgun off the cushion, sits him down, and places his hands upon the pins that close her dress.
“Love.”
He turns toward police sirens.
“Love me,” she commands.
He pulls six straight pins and the dress falls.
“Love me beautiful.”
As she fumbles with his filthy shorts he has an uneasy memory of how this went with Cassie, back when, awkwardly in the dark, high on the same bunchgrass hillside that later caught fire and swept down.
Wanting to resist, he fails the moment that she touches him. Instantly trembling, he carefully kisses her everywhere, then lifts her and lays her gently on the vinyl. He kisses her everywhere again, begins to worry again. But she gasps, shuddering and hitting and keening strange words. He seems to be in shock after that, gliding from the chaos of pleasure into a deep wild dream.
H
e dreams he flies upon a horse that lands upon a sailboat. A great bird flaps over. Then he and Cassie are riding on the bird, which answers to the name of her horse, and the earth spins brightly green and blue below.
Later, he only dimly senses the absence of her smell and weight. He believes she is still there and tries to hold Cassie from inside the dream.
But he stands and finds she has vanished.
He wanders in a vacant fuzz, hearing many sirens now. Beyond the broken window, the frightened horse tosses its head, rattling the dumpster where she tied it. Her dress and slip are where he dropped them.
But the shotgun is gone. So are his shorts, his shirt, and his backpack. She has dumped out his rock, spike, fork, and reflector, his blanket, phone, and chalk upon the floor.
A stuck-tongue, do-nothing chickenshit like you, the voice awakens to tell him, funny you could ever think she loved you.
But he stares at what she’s drawn.
And kneels to draw the truth around it.
CHAPTER 44
Bucking out Jon Golly’s driveway in Luck’s Tahoe, the sheriff set her phone to dial dispatch, tossed it on the seat, and concentrated on a prayer she was trying to remember.
Oh, Lord, protect…
But she was too frantic to put abstract language together. She blasted through the swing gate, felt it clip the Tahoe’s rear end. She was throwing gravel behind on Liberty Hill Road when Denise’s voice rose through the commotion.
“There you are, Heidi! We’ve been trying to—”
“Get EMS help for Bender on the Golly property. He’s in there with a shooting victim, critical when I left. Tell them to drive through the stream where Bender’s car is and follow that old road. Put everybody else in a contain pattern on the roads looking for Derp Hubbard’s white truck. It’s Jim Golly. He’s the telephone ranter, From Hell Hollow. He has Taylor.”
“Heidi—”
“Assume Golly is outbound with a big head start. He’s had way too much time since I saw him from the plane.”
Bad Moon Rising Page 18
