by Ninie Hammon
The oldest of the two girls was in full-bore adolescence, sporting a bumper crop of pimples all over her face, the kind that made you cringe because you wanted somebody to pop them.
The younger girl had pretty blonde hair. It curled around her face — which was the wrong color somehow. It didn’t look like … real skin. It was sallow and so very, very pale. Her lips were blue. All their lips were blue. She was the image of her father.
Of course they all looked like Reece now because all their faces were frozen in identical, though individual, looks of abject terror.
It was like a family portrait snapped when they’d all looked up to see a charging elephant bearing down on them.
“They’re … holograms,” she whispered, her voice airless. “They are, aren’t they?”
She thought he nodded, but maybe he shook his head. She couldn’t tell because she was unable to drag her eyes off the tableau to look at Stuart’s face.
“The aperture” thing was fully open now, floor to ceiling, from one edge of the window to the other. They’d been staring straight ahead, sightlessly — no, like they were looking at something awful in front of them that you couldn’t see. Then they all looked at Jolene and somebody started screaming, wailing a high horrified cry that sounded like the sail on a ship ripping from top to bottom. It was several seconds before Jolene realized she was the one screaming, so transfixed in horror was she at the four figures that stood only a few feet away.
Their faces remained frozen, but they had all cut their eyes toward her in unison — without moving their heads. Snap, four sets of eyes staring at her out of horrified, terrified faces. But the look in the eyes wasn’t fear. The faces were afraid. The eyes were angry. Furious, raging. The bodies before them might be Reece Tibbits and his wife and daughters. But whatever was behind the eyes — it was the Jabberwock.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Toby tried to shut Custard up, but there was no silencing her. The fur on the back of her neck was standing up and she was in full-bore yap mode, and when she got that way she wouldn’t shut up until she felt like it.
“Go away,” he whispered to her fiercely. “Go back to the house.”
But she wouldn’t budge, stood her ground between him and the concealing branches of the bush.
Then a voice spoke from beyond the branches, and when Toby peered out through them he could see the shoes of somebody standing next to the oak tree.
“Come on out, boy,” his father said. “You think I don’t know you’re hiding in there with the dog?”
Toby considered refusing. Thought about making his father drag him out, kicking and screaming. But that awful tiredness washed over him again, taking all his strength. He wanted to resist, but he was just too tired.
The dog kept yapping. When Toby parted the branches of the oleander bush and crawled out, she went with him, hopping around his father’s feet in a yapping frenzy. Toby was surprised the dog wasn’t quick enough to dodge the blow, but his father’s foot shot out too fast. The toe of his shoe connected with the side of the dog, lifted her off the ground like one of those guys on the football field, kicking a ball off that little tee thing they set up in the ground.
Custard emitted only a single pain-filled yip, then her body flew through the air and connected with a tree trunk, making a sickening thud sound. She lay there at the base of the tree. Still. Blood leaked out the corner of her mouth.
“Shoulda killed that dog a long time ago,” his father said. “Useless mutt. Wasn’t worth the bullet it’d a took to put her down.”
That’s when Toby noticed the knife in his father’s hand. His father saw him notice it and an unreadable look crossed his face, was gone almost as quickly as it came. Pity, maybe. Sympathy. It had been a kind emotion of some sort but it could find no purchase in the folds of his father’s hard face.
“I don’t want to hurt you, son.”
Toby began to back away.
“This can go easy, or hard. I didn’t never want you to be a party to this. But you couldn’t keep your nose out of it. Taking your mama’s purse to Viola Tackett like you done. Didn’t leave me no choice.”
Shifting the blame. A little observation flitted through Toby’s mind then and was gone. Nothing was ever his father’s fault. His mother should have had supper ready on time. She shouldn’t have nagged him. Toby should have kept his nose out of his father’s business. Everything would be fine in his father’s life if the people around him would just do what they were supposed to do. And when they didn’t … well, it certainly wasn’t Howie Witherspoon’s fault when they got what was coming to them.
Toby shook his head as he backed away, a knot of fear in his throat so he could barely speak.
“Please …” That was all he could get out. The one word. It sounded so tiny and weak and pitiful. Toby didn’t want to sound like that, wanted to sound strong and brave.
But he was eight years old and neither strong nor brave.
And his father was about to kill him.
Jolene was standing beside Stuart, shrieking, the sound assaulting his ears.
Then Reece Tibbits opened his mouth.
Before he could speak, a bug crawled across his tongue and fell off the end of it to the floor.
The shrieking turned up in volume and in shrillness, a sound so sharp it sliced into his ears, seemed to shred his eardrums.
“I warned you,” said a voice that came out of the throat of Reece Tibbits. It was a hoary sound, like chains dragged slowly across a metal floor. The words themselves carried no threat, were as lifeless as the frozen faces. But there was anger in the eyes. Raging fury. “You can’t have them. They’re mine.”
Stuart could see now that there were things crawling on all of them, bugs, creatures with many legs and shiny bodies. Beetles. Scarabs.
It’s not real! His mind screamed the words inside the confines of his skull and they bounced around in there. They’re holograms! Yeah, more lifelike than the others, but holograms.
Then the thing that was/wasn’t Reece Tibbits moved, a lumbering, ungraceful motion with his hands out in front of him, fingers clenching and unclenching.
The woman and girls moved, too. Started for Jolene. The expressions on the faces never changed, though, remained frozen in terror. Only the eyes were alive, pulsing with blinding fury.
Stuart hadn’t felt this sensation in years, but he slipped into the unreality of it as naturally as he had done so many, many times before. Time slowed down. The world on its axis stopped its normal spinning. Every sound, every movement, every sensation was stretched out, took too long to hear, to see and to feel.
Life in slow motion.
He had been gripped by the sensation every time he played a football game. He’d tried to ask other players if they felt something similar, but the looks on their faces told him they thought he wasn’t dragging a full string of fish.
The snap.
He turns to run his route.
Gets one step on the tackle.
Dodges a lineman.
Runs — his feet hitting the ground in individual impacts that shake his body, and he feels each vibration.
His head slowly revolves, turns to look back over his shoulder.
The ball is in the air, spiraling across the blue sky.
He reaches up.
Catches it.
Clutches it to his chest.
Feels the tackle on his heels grab him and the impact of hitting the ground, a grunt forced out of his chest.
Stuart grunted like that now, a low, guttural sound he’d only ever made when he’d been slammed into the turf beneath a 250-pound tackle. Only now, he had been hammered with an emotional wallop that packed as much force and impact. The sight of the creature that was/wasn’t Reece Tibbits lunging at him knocked all the wind out of Stuart.
Reece crossed the room in two long, clumsy strides and threw himself the rest of the way.
And the familiar slow-motion sensation carried Stuart along.
Reece’s clumsy collapse took his wife and one of the other girls down with him.
But the other girl, the older one with a pimpled face, had flung herself at Jolene, slammed her into the wall and then the two of them tumbled to the floor with the girl on top, her hands around Jolene’s throat.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Malachi wheeled the bicycle into the Witherspoons’ driveway and leapt off it, panting. The ride from town had been a workout and he was drenched in sweat and gasping for breath. Pulling his pistol out of his waistband, he approached the house from the driveway, careful to stay behind Witherspoon’s car out of the line of sight from the windows on the front of the house.
He hadn’t really formulated a plan, what he would do when he found Toby and his father. Though it was clear Howie Witherspoon had killed Toby’s mother, Malachi wouldn’t set himself up as judge and jury — and executioner. All he wanted was the boy, to take him away from his murderous father and keep him safe. Beyond that—
He suddenly heard the furious yapping of a small dog. It was coming from the woods behind the house. It must be the dog that had dug up Toby’s mother’s purse out of the compost heap. The yapping cut off suddenly, ended in a single pain-filled yip and then the woods were silent. Malachi took off running into the trees toward where the sound had been.
Malachi could see Howie and Toby through the trees ahead. Toby was backing away from his father, shaking his head. His father had a knife.
Then Howie reached out with the speed of a rattlesnake and grabbed Toby by the upper arm, yanked him almost off his feet as he lifted the knife above him.
“Drop the knife, Howie,” Malachi called out.
The fingers that encircled Jolene’s throat were cold.
She registered the sensation, the unnaturalness of it.
Even as the force of the assault drove her against the wall, she felt the delicacy of the fingers, frail and skinny, like a baby bird’s wings.
But squeezing. Squeezing tight.
Jolene couldn’t breathe. No air in or out. Black spots appeared before her eyes as she fell sideways onto the floor, felt the blow when her head hit the boards, watched the world spin crazily, and a whahm, whahm, whahm sound reverberated in her ears.
The girl on top of her was no weight at all. A child. But the force of her fingers digging into the skin of Jolene’s neck was stealing reality out of the world, graying out the edges of her vision.
And somewhere inside Jolene a little spark of anger ignited.
Nooooo!
It burst instantly into her own flame of rage.
I don’t think so, sweetheart!
Jolene grabbed the wrists attached to the hands that choked her, squeezed as hard as she could and then yanked them apart. In the same motion, she lurched upward.
The girl let go, couldn’t hold on, and fell away when Jolene rolled over on her side and dumped her off.
Before Jolene had time to do more than grab a single lungful of air, she felt a big hand encircle her wrist, nothing fragile and frail, a hold she could not possibly break.
She was literally yanked off the floor to her feet.
Stuart!
“Come on!” he yelled, dragging her along behind him as he made for the door. The instant they stepped out of the building, a blast of air so cold it would have frozen water droplets in the air pushed them forward. There was a sound behind them, a moaning sound, accompanied by whispers. Whispers fed into a microphone and their volume amplified until the sound was ear-splitting.
She didn’t remember running to the van, just felt Stuart shove her in the side panel door they’d left open and slam it behind her. Then she heard the front door slam, the engine start, and lurched forward as the vehicle fishtailed in the dirt and shot forward down the road.
Somewhere along in there, Jolene Rutherford started to cry.
Howie Witherspoon almost jumped out of his skin when he heard the voice. He looked around frantically, trying to locate the source, but either didn’t see very well or was too scared to focus because his eyes passed over Malachi and kept searching.
That gave Malachi another couple of seconds to cross more ground. He needed to get closer.
“Who are — Malachi Tackett — what are you doing—?” He yanked the boy to him, clutched him up tight against his chest with the hand that had an injured thumb, and held the knife to the boy’s throat with his other hand. “You get on outta here and mind your own business. Your mama—”
“You let me worry about Mama. She’s my problem. Now put the knife down.”
His eyes snapped to where Malachi was advancing through the trees. He held the pistol out in front of him in a two-hand grip, which soldiers called “cop mode.” Most military firearms training wasn’t designed to prepare a soldier to stand out in the open with his weapon drawn, facing down a lone enemy.
“This ain’t none of your concern—”
Malachi continued to advance and Howie appeared to realize he’d allowed him to get too close.
“Stop right there. I mean it. Stop or I will slit this kid’s throat.”
Malachi stopped.
“This doesn’t have to end badly. Nobody has gotten hurt here, no harm, no foul. Let the boy go and I will—”
“Shoot me where I stand. You think I’m stupid? You think I don’t know you’re all ‘Superman to the rescue’ here, Army Ranger or Special Forces or whatever it is? I know your kind, think you’re better than everybody else, think you’re the meanest dog in the junkyard.” The man straightened and actually puffed out his chest. “Well, you ain’t. Not this time, you ain’t. You done met your match, hero. Now, you turn around right now or this kid’ll be dead before he hits the ground.”
“And then I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
“Yeah, but the kid you done knocked yourself out to rescue’ll be dead as roadkill. You ain’t gonna let me do that.”
He was right, Malachi was not going to let him do that. He still wasn’t as close as he’d like. He could certainly land a lethal body shot or a simple headshot from this range, but he had to hit the T-zone for an instant kill. The T-zone was an area about an inch wide that stretched across the eyebrow ridge and the bridge of the nose. Though a shot anywhere in the head would be fatal, only a shot to the T-zone would sever the medulla, the lower base of the brainstem, preventing brain signals from reaching the rest of the body. Instant death, not so much as the twitch of the fingers he had wrapped around the hilt of that knife.
“I’ll give you to the count of three. One …”
Malachi had stopped with his feet spread wide for stability. Now, he steadied his hands, drew in a breath.
“Two … I mean it, Malachi. I’ll do it! Thr—”
Malachi squeezed the trigger. A red blotch appeared on Howie Witherspoon’s forehead at the bridge of his mangled nose. The knife dropped from his lifeless fingers and Howie Witherspoon was dead before he hit the ground.
Toby stood there as if his father still had a grip on his arm. His eyes were wide with terror and shock, but looking at the boy’s face, Malachi felt a jubilant sense of triumph. He hadn’t been able to save the other little boy, the one who’d clutched at his leg in terror in the nightmare world of Rwanda. But he had saved this boy.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Sam leapt out of the chair and rushed to the front window when they heard the car pull into her driveway, exchanging a terrified look with Charlie.
“Is it …?” Charlie didn’t seem to have enough air to finish.
If Viola had come for her …
As soon as she and Sam had stopped shaking, sitting in Charlie’s car in the parking lot, watching the crowd around the courthouse begin to disperse, they had agreed that hiding was f
utile. There wasn’t a rock anywhere in the county Charlie could crawl under that Viola Tackett couldn’t find her.
Either Malachi had talked his mother off the ledge or he hadn’t. That was Charlie’s only hope.
“It’s Malachi,” Sam said. She waited at the door, then opened it, but it wasn’t Malachi who stepped inside. It was a little boy, the boy who’d climbed a tree to watch the hanging.
“This is Toby Witherspoon,” Malachi said. Then to the boy, “Toby, this is Charlie McClintock and—”
“I know Miss Sheridan,” the boy said in a small voice. “You came to the house after my mother broke …” He stopped, then started again with a tangle of emotions gripping his words. “When my father broke my mother’s arm!”
Sam shot a look at Malachi.
“Toby’s father killed his mother and tried to kill Toby.”
“But Malachi shot him.”
That was a conversation stopper.
Sam recovered first.
“Uh … how about you two have a seat,” she said, and Charlie thought she sounded like Vanna White turning letters on the set of Wheel of Fortune.
Gratefully, Merrie — who’d been sitting on the floor playing with a magnifying glass from Rusty’s chemistry set — rescued them all from awkward. She stood up with her feet spread far apart and announced to the group.
“I think I just pooped my pants.”
After the kids were finally out from under foot, and after the huge pot of spaghetti Sam whipped up out of nowhere, Sam, Charlie and Malachi sat in Sam’s living room sipping cups of really good coffee.
Charlie’d always admired women who could do a thing like that — walk into an empty kitchen, turn around three times and put a full meal on the table without so much as a dusting of flour on a countertop. Oh, Charlie could whip up a meal that fast. Easy peasy. It was called “carry-out” or “home delivery” or simply, “pizza.”
