by Dean H Wild
“What do you mean?”
Even as he spoke he felt the first hot and heavy thuds from his left shoulder. As he followed Will’s gaze he saw a shaft of raw wood, neat and slender for all of its brokenness which lent it the appearance of a 12-inch ruler jutting from just below the ball of his shoulder. Blood was oozing out, bright and glittering in the sunlight.
“Come on,” Will said and started to lead him away. “Before you fall down.”
And fall I might, he decided as a light, disconnected feel took him over. He glanced back at Thekan who stood at the podium, slumped and spent, and yet somehow satiated. His lips moved across teeth gone suddenly broken and yellow, and in spite of the din, Mick once again heard every word.
“How do you like the turnout now, Mr. Logan?”
A low, plaintive sound rose into the air, the protest of a disturbed beast or the groan of massive ancient machinery made to run after years of rusty slumber. The crowd hushed momentarily and looked around to place the source. The southeast.
The Crymost.
The sound faded as quickly as it came, and in congruity, the crowd returned to calling out and vacating the grounds, more restless than before.
Mick traded worried glances with Will. Judy ran up behind him, already in capable mode, and led him out to the car.
“We can’t wait anymore,” he said under his breath as the first real pain erupted in his shoulder. “We don’t dare.”
The Knoll First Responders vehicle pulled up in a cloud of spring dust. Gordy Prellwitz’s wife, wrangling a squalling baby in her arms, found her husband, fell to her knees and began to weep.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Twelve goddamn stitches,” Mick said as he got to his feet in the procedure room of the Baylor Clinic. He was still shirtless and he regarded the bandage on his shoulder with disdain. “Jesus.”
Judy held out his shirt for him. He eased into it while they waited for the clinic nurse to come back with word of his dismissal.
“Is it even safe to go back home?” Judy asked him. She looked exhausted. “We both saw what Thekan did. What defense do we have against something like that?”
“But did you see how exhausted he was afterward? I’m hoping he ran his battery down with today’s big blast. That will give us some time.”
“But it’s not just him. It’s The Crymost too. You heard that sound. That groan. It’s hungry, like you said. And hungry things are driven things, Mick.”
“The alternative is what? Hide? Run away? Neither of us is set up that way and you know it. Let me find out about the tunnel, see if the double barrel even exists. If it’s a bust, if those men from the ‘60s were hoping to hold back a flood with the equivalent of two sticks and a paper bag, I’ll help you pack and have the moving van at our door in the morning. Deal?”
Her sigh was long and low. “Please don’t go running off the minute we get home. Give the glue some time to dry.”
He nodded, and as if on cue, the nurse came back wearing a quiet smile.
***
Once he was home, the kindling pain in his shoulder, banking like an old boiler furnace, joined forces with an encroaching sense of exhaustion. He stretched out on the couch, but a moment later a call came in from Harley. “You need some quiet time, so I’ll make it fast,” his friend said.
He listened, with Judy standing vigil in the doorway.
Gordy Prellwitz was, not surprising, pronounced dead at the scene. Jack Hamilton’s larynx was crushed by the flying barrier, and there was other internal damage to his throat and upper chest. All of it was too much; he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Mrs. Merk lost her right eye (when he heard this, he passed a miserable glance to the right, as if he could see through the wall to the Merk’s house next door), and Alice Vandergalien was in critical condition following a massive heart attack. She was due to be airlifted to a Madison hospital where specialists were standing by. Melody Carmichael’s abdominal wound was deep and damaging. She was in critical condition as well and might not make it through the night. Both of the Belamys took wood impalements similar to Mick’s in severity: Mr. Belamy in the calf and Mrs. Belamy on the left side buttock. Shifting Sands’s guitar player was out with second degree burns on his fingers. There were lots of minor cuts and bruises on lots of other folks.
“Thekan’s nowhere in sight,” Harley threw in at the end. “Coiled up resting, is my guess. And if he was willing to put on that kind of show, it means it’s close, doesn’t it? This thing that’s going to happen?”
“My gut tells me it is,” he said.
After they ended the call he gave Judy all the updates, which she received with stony acceptance. His lids grew heavy as he talked and when Judy asked if they were going to check the tunnel tonight, he was already on the verge of sleep. The last thing he said came out without any thought on his part.
“Have to,” he said. “It’s just us, Thekan, and The Crymost.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Near sunset, Stu Rueplinger drove the First Responders van down The Plank, the fatigue of the day weighing on him like millstones. His dirty blonde hair, thick for a man of forty, stood out in tufts starched by dried sweat. The scene at the Borth house had been a wild one, but it kept him and Nancy and Jerry Sterr jumping for a while. So many folks; so much blood.
They’d nearly cleared out the trauma box in the van, which was a first. But they helped a good share of people before the Baylor and Drury EMTs started arriving as backup. The truth was, Stu liked the atmosphere of disaster—in small doses at least. He had tried to talk out some of his excitement while he gassed up at Copeland’s earlier, but Roger seemed particularly glum on the subject, which was understandable. Some folks folded up in the face of calamity while others took up the reins of responsibility.
The man in the road seemed to come out of nowhere, the way an image flickered to life on an old antenna television set. It was that Judge Thekan fellow, and he was dangerously close to the front of the van.
Stu punched the brakes and swerved to the side of The Plank to keep from hitting the man. The sudden shock must have knocked his awareness out of kilter because when he looked around, the Judge wasn’t in the road at all. He was standing near the F&F bay door where farm trucks made their drop-offs and pickups.
The Judge seemed a little drained in his own right. Hurt, maybe. So many people, he thought again, so much blood. He shut down the van and climbed out, his heart hammering.
“You okay?” he called out and began to walk over.
Thekan smiled at him. “Awake,” he said and slipped around the corner of the building.
That couldn’t be right. Made no sense. Stu wanted to follow him but a groggy voice from the other side of the bay door drew his attention.
“Help me. No more dicking with Ichabod,” the voice said. It was a pronouncement and a lament rolled into one. “I just want out. Somebody fucking help me.”
Stu pushed and the door trundled open on overhead suspension wheels. “Hello?” he called out.
“Fucking hello yourself, feast meat,” the voice called back.
“Axel?” he said and stepped into the dark.
A moment later he ran back to the van and snatched his cell phone off the dash. Damned if they didn’t have another mess in Knoll.
CHAPTER SIX
“You’re looking better than last time I saw you,” Will said as Mick stepped from the cool evening air into the bar. “How’s the shoulder?”
“Stiff but functional. Although I promised the boss I wouldn’t do any rock climbing tonight.” Mick passed a smile to Judy who stepped in behind him.
“He thinks some ibuprofen and a long nap have made him all better.”
“Things were bad here for a while after we left, I understand,” Mick said.
“Chaos.” Will touched the scratch on his cheek. It was not deep, but still described an angry red line from the crest of his cheekbone to nearly the corner of his mouth. “Cops. Reporters. The last of them
left just before dark. I think I’ll open up tomorrow night with some kind of two-for-one special. This town needs to drown a few sorrows.”
“Maybe,” Mick said and sat with Judy at one of the tables. “Are we the first?”
“Yeah.” Will glanced through the front windows and jumped. “Uh-oh. Roger Copeland is coming. Can’t he see I’ve got the closed sign up?”
“I asked him to come,” Mick said. “He’s got an interest in this and I think he’ll be of some help. Nancy will be here, too.”
“I keep thinking about how quiet the town is tonight,” Judy said. “Usually a fender bender on The Plank is enough to keep the town talking for hours. But on the way over I saw nobody chatting on their porches or stopped on the sidewalk to gab. No one in the streets at all. It’s eerie.”
Mick took her hand.
Roger Copeland stepped inside. He wrung a greasy ballcap between his hands like a drifter invited in for a late supper. “H’lo.”
“Roger.” Mick ushered him in while Will continued to man the entrance. Through the open door, he could see the Kroeners just getting out of their car. “How are you?”
“Still shook, I guess. Can I get a shot of Turkey, Will?”
“I’ll pour us all something once Harley and Beth Ann are inside.”
Roger sat across from Judy but kept his eyes downcast. His hands shook. “Damned if I know what I’m doing here. I didn’t understand half of what you told me on the phone, Mick. But I want to help.”
“I’m hoping tonight will clear up a lot of things,” Mick said and swung back around to address the Kroeners as they stepped inside, Beth Ann in particular. “I’m glad you came. Are you up for helping with this?”
There were dark pain circles under her eyes. The left one remained a glossy red blank. “I’m willing to give it a try.”
Mick nodded. “Thank you.” He strode to the bar, then turned to face them all. They waited, attentive. It seems class is in session, Mr. Logan. “Thekan made a big mistake this morning.”
“Overreacted,” Will said as he stepped behind the bar to fill shot glasses.
“And Knoll paid a terrible price for it. Terrible. But we’ve got to keep going. The price will be more dire if we can’t figure out how to stop this die-off, this culling.”
“Culling. Jesus,” Copeland said. “I don’t see what a tunnel has to do with keeping something like that from coming. It don’t make no sense to me.” He worked his hand over the pocket watch at his side. “Goddamn tight, lightless places like that.”
The front door burst open and they all looked around. Nancy Berns hurried in, out of breath. Stu Rueplinger was right behind her. “It’s Cy,” she said in a trembling voice. “He’s dead.”
She waited for their shocked responses to die down and stepped over to one of the tables to lean on it. Stu followed her. Mick and Harley stood on either side of them like sentinels.
“I would have called one of you,” she said, “but we were tied up with the authorities and the mess at the F&F.”
Stu spoke like a man haunted. “He fell into his old ramshackle corn grinder in the mill floor. When those augers started up, they just—”
“Sit down, everybody,” Mick told them.
Nancy continued, still breathless: “It seems Axel pushed him in and then turned it on. Some kind of fight, I guess, because Axel was shot. He broke his leg trying to get away, but—”
“Slipped in those ridiculous shoes, I thought,” Stu broke in. “And it wasn’t just me. The cops were interested in Axel’s shoes, too.”
“But what?” Mick said to Nancy. “Go on.”
She took a deep breath. “Well, he was as high as a kite. He must have laid in there for hours, even smoked a couple of those marijuana cigarettes. There were spent butts on the floor next to him. And he wasn’t just high, he was talking nonsense. I think he snapped, emotionally, over it all.”
“Here,” Will said and put a shot glass in front of her.
She downed the contents and handed it back without a flinch. “Thanks. What I find funny is there wasn’t a spent match or lighter in sight, nor any ashes. I’m no hop head but you can’t smoke cigarettes and not produce any ash. Am I right?”
Harley looked at Mick. “Thekan set him up.”
Judy stepped over to join them. “What would be the point?”
“Axel wasn’t no threat,” Roger Copeland said. “Pain in the ass, maybe, but he don’t have the ambition to make himself a concern to Thekan.”
Beth Ann came forward as well. Her fingers rubbed absent circles at her temples. “But fingers will be pointed at him now.”
“That’s right.” Mick turned to Stu. “What did you say about his shoes?”
“The cops were making notes about them,” Stu said, his eyes bulging a little. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed. But they weren’t like the shi—uh the stuff Axel usually wears. They were dressy-like.”
“Pointed in the toe?” Mick asked and let out a conclusive breath when Stu nodded to the affirmative.
“The stairs,” Harley said under his breath.
“Yes.” Mick returned to his place in front of the bar. “If Axel is pinned in the murders of Cy and of Kippy Evert—and I’ll bet a million dollars the shoes on his feet will match a bloody footprint found in Kippy’s house—it knocks the investigative presence in this town way down, keeps the outside world, police, news media, the whole works, from speculating and snooping while the die-off moves in.”
Will came around with full shot glasses for everyone. “It doesn’t change what happened at the Mellar Borth place.”
“No.” Mick knocked back his drink. The motion put a hot stitching sensation in his shoulder. “But it still cuts interest in Knoll down by a good share. At any rate, we should talk to Axel. Tomorrow. First thing.”
“No go,” Stu said. “They’re taking him to the health center in Allycegate after his leg is set and casted. He’s under 72-hour psychological evaluation. No visits, no phone calls. Not even from the cops.”
“Damn, that might be too long,” Harley said.
“We’re it, then.” Mick said and reached out for Beth Ann. “Are you ready?”
Her fingers laced cold and tight over his. “I am.”
“One for good measure,” Will said and passed out another round of shots.
They all took one, without hesitation.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They went down the stairs one at a time and gathered around a table Will had set with a row of flickering candles and several flashlights.
“I thought it seemed too dark down here,” Will told them. Mick smiled, thinking the gesture was just right.
“There she is,” Harley said and strode over to the tunnel door. He opened it with hesitation and stuck his face inside. He filled up most of the opening. “In all her glory.”
“Going to be a tight fit for you,” Mick said.
Roger made a distressed gaaaa sound. “Damned tight places.”
“More room than the crawlspace under the kitchen at home,” Harley said, plucking a flashlight from the table and shining it into the tunnel mouth. “Nice smooth concrete. Like a walk in the park.”
Beth Ann stepped forward. “What do you want me to do, exactly?”
“Just say a few words,” Mick said. “We need a blessing of some kind, I think, and you’re the best candidate for the job.”
“We’ll help you,” Judy chimed in. “Hold hands everybody. Make a chain.”
It was a simple request, but it felt resoundingly right. They linked hands, wordlessly, forming a loose S shape in the flickering light. Beth Ann was at the end near the tunnel, with Harley by her side, and she closed her eyes, seeming soothed and ready. Mick felt the energy almost immediately, like a surging current.
“I want . . . ” Beth Ann began, then shook off the attempt.
“Go on, honey pie,” Harley said.
“The light and breath of goodness is invited into this place,” Beth Ann said, the finge
rs of her free hand plucking at a gold cross around her neck. “May the angels bring them—”
A gust of air turned the candles’ light to a raddled gasp.
“Jesus,” Stu exclaimed.
“—and plunge them deep and revealing to part these dangerous waters. Amen.”
They all traded uncertain glances in the silence. Done, Mick thought, as easy as tying a shoe, as mundane as mailing a letter. However, the energy in the air switched to a feeling of constraint, as if dark water was pushing against an unstable dam. His hand went to his pocket where the chess pieces rested in their velvet bag. It seemed ages since he sought their comfort. “Okay,” he said. “We’ve accomplished something. Look.”
A glow radiated from the tunnel, deep and slow but increasing, the way distant fog builds on the horizon. As it grew it took on color. Crymost green.
They all stared. “What in the world—?” Nancy Berns said, her eyes wide.
The wall behind Nancy and Stu, which was the stone and mortar plug at the opening to the old bootleggers’ run, blew open with a deafening billiard ball crack and a disgorgement of stone and dust. Nancy leapt away with a harsh bird-like cry and collided with Will and Judy, nearly fell but kept her feet because Will caught her under the arms. Stu, however, stumbled over a batch of still-rolling stones and went down with a cry of pain.
At the same time, the tunnel door before Beth Ann swooped around, slammed with a thunderous boom, and shattered into bits of raw lumber and rusted nails. A shrieking rush of air pulled the fragments into the gloomy throat of the tunnel.
The tunnel glow winked out. Beth Ann stared after it, her mouth pulled into a rictus. “What have I done?”
They were no longer an S-shaped chain. Each of them stood independently and a little dazed. Nancy and Roger bent over Stu, who favored his left ankle as he struggled to get up. Will and Judy went to the newly opened bootlegger’s run. Harley put his arm around his wife and muttered reassuringly to her. Mick stood by them and stared into the open tunnel.
