by Ninie Hammon
Beside Stuart, Jolene was shaking her head slowly in denial. He wasn’t touching her, but still could feel her trembling. The woman was just about done, was clinging to … sanity, herself, her soul … with broken fingernails. This — a whack-job with a rifle — was simply a bridge too far.
She whispered, “Please … don’t.”
But the man couldn’t have heard, and would have paid her no mind if he had. He ignored Cotton, too, focused on Stuart as if they were the only two people present.
Cotton retreated a single step, slightly behind Stuart, but stopped there and held his ground.
Think!
Do something!
What?
Stuart could grab the pick he’d tried to use on the … or the shovel.
The guy would drop him as soon as he leaned over to pick it up.
A random line from some forgotten movie: Never bring a knife to a gunfight. The same went for picks and shovels.
The emotion that had been absent from Shepherd Clayton’s voice was very much present in his face. His eyes were boring into Stuart. The intensity of hatred twisted his features into such a rictus of rage that he was unrecognizable.
Stuart tensed his muscles, got ready. He would launch himself at the man as soon as he got within range. Wouldn’t just stand here and be executed.
But he knew he’d be shot as he did so. What was it the movies also said? He’d be dead before he hit the ground.
Stuart McClintock was about to die.
Three or four more seconds.
He summoned Charlie’s face, smiling, holding Merrie close.
One more step.
Charlie! was the last thing Stuart thought as he began to release his tensed muscles. But before he could spring, several things happened right on top of each other.
A woman’s voice from somewhere nearby screamed, “No!”
Shep’s eyes cocked in that direction for only an instant. And then the roar of a gunshot filled up the world.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Fish stared in horror as Neb Tackett dragged Thelma Jackson out of the crowd and hauled her up onto the porch of the school to stand in front of Viola.
Neb! — who was the person Viola was looking for, but she didn’t know it. Fish was convinced Neb had killed his sister, accidentally shot her, then made up the drive-by-shooter story to cover his tracks. And now Neb planned to stand by passively while his mother killed no telling how many innocent people, too cowardly to confess what he’d done.
That wasn’t going to happen, though. Viola wasn’t going to kill anybody this day. Pete, Judd and Lester would see to that. Not one of them was an all-star, a hero, but all of them were solid and dependable. You could count on them.
Fish trusted that they would be able to pull off their plan to stop the massacre. Each had a role to play, and Fish would carry out his duty with the same dedication and determination as the men who were now crouched and ready, rifles aimed at the would-be murderers below.
Viola said she was going to start with Thelma, and would then select one person after another until …
It took a great force of will for Fish not to look down the street at the post office, or turn and look up at the rooftops across the street. He’d seen where Sebastian Nower had stopped in the crowd, looked right and left at Oscar Manning and Skeeter Burkett.
Viola started counting. Fish tensed. Then two things happened one on top of the other. Pete Rutherford’s voice called out something, Fish didn’t get anything but the word “surrender,” and Neb Tackett took aim and fired a pistol at him.
The world all around Fish exploded in pandemonium. The rumble of gunfire echoed between the buildings and the stunned crowd took about half a second to panic, was a heartbeat away from running madly off in all directions.
“This way,” he called out in the orator’s voice he hadn’t used in years. It boomed out above the noise. He grabbed a woman he didn’t know and an old man who might have been Henry Goodbody and shoved them toward the sidewalk, as gunfire continued to rattle around them.
“Oscar, help me get everybody to the bank, out past the fountain,” he yelled at Oscar Manning, who had started running toward the other side of the street, and literally turned on a dime and began running toward the sidewalk in front of the school, grabbing others and shoving them along ahead of him.
“The bank!” Oscar yelled. He got it, understood that was the only way out. “Get to the bank!”
“This way!” Sebastian Nower cried, and the combination of their three voices turned the herd. Almost as one, the panicked crowd stampeded across the street to the sidewalk in front of the school. They hit the sidewalk like a wave washing up on shore and Oscar called out something unintelligible and the wave flowed to the right toward the bank courtyard down the block.
Fish hung back, everything happening too fast around him.
Men had been shot, were lying in the street. A man … looked like one of Angus Scully’s sons, had hunkered down behind a mailbox, though, and was firing up toward the rooftop of the drug store building.
Some other guy Fish didn’t know was behind a parked car, blood gushing out of his leg as he fired off one shot after another at the roof of the beauty parlor.
Suddenly, Sebastian Nower appeared a few feet in front of Fish, yelling for people to “run to the fountain” and shoving them that way.
Then time and life slowed down, like some slow-motion scene in a movie where a drip of water falls gently out of the sky and lands in a pond, making an ever-widening hole in the water’s surface.
Fish looked past Nower at the porch of the school … right down the barrel of Viola Tackett’s pistol.
Viola Tackett thought a mule had kicked her. The force of the blow flung her backward away from Thelma Jackson, knocked her off her feet and she slid across the concrete and banged her head painfully.
She hadn’t even stopped sliding when the world erupted in gunfire.
What the—?
She noticed her own shoulder then and the pain hit at the sight of blood gushing out a hole in her flesh and down the front of her shirt.
She’d been shot in the shoulder.
Wasn’t no life-threatening wound, though, and she dismissed it. She’d been hurt worse. Where was her gun? She searched the now empty porch — Neb and Thelma Jackson were gone — and saw the pistol lying near the edge of the porch to her left.
Rifle shots rumbled from the rooftops across the street — where she’d sent Obie a few minutes ago to investigate that sparkle.
Not now … she’d think about that part later. Now, she focused on the gun, dragged herself toward it, fast as she could, eager to shoot the lights outta whoever was firing at her.
Her right arm didn’t work right with her shoulder shot, so she reached out her left hand and picked up the pistol. After rolling over, she pushed herself up to a sitting position against one of the pillars and pointed the gun with her trembling left hand at …
What …?
Couldn’t see nothing on the roofs.
People was running ever which way.
It was a big pistol, heavy, and Viola was trying to hold it with her left hand, aim it at something. She had six shots and she was determined to kill somebody — anybody — with one of them.
She fired up at the rooftops. Again. And again. Bam! Bam! Bam! The gun roared, but wasn’t no way to hit somebody behind cover up there, not with a pistol anyway.
She was getting weak. Her left hand holding the gun began to shake.
“Mama!” It was Zach. He was standing over her, looking bewildered and frightened.
“Help me up,” she demanded. Standing upright, she’d be able to shoot and hit something.
Zach started to take her right arm, seen the blood and grabbed her left arm instead, the one holding the gun. He pulled upward—
Then red mist exploded out of Zach’s left temple.
There wasn’t no gunshot. They was just suddenly a hole in his head and blood sp
lattering in her face. He’d been pulling upward, and when he went limp, he collapsed on top of her, pinning her down with his lifeless body.
Viola blinked gore out of her eyes, couldn’t move or breathe, turned her head … and seen Sebastian Nower, not fifteen feet away.
He was standing there hollering, telling people to “make for the bank, out past the fountain.”
She couldn’t do much aiming, lying on her back under Zach like she was, but she was able to lift the pistol and point it in his direction. She fired, and a chunk of asphalt at his feet splattered upward. He didn’t notice and she lifted the pistol, got it pointed at his belly. As she pulled the trigger, there was a blur of motion and Sebastian disappeared.
She pulled the trigger again and the hammer landed on an empty chamber with a hollow clacking sound. Again and again. Clack, clack. Out of ammo, and the shape she was in, with Zach on top of her, wasn’t no way she could get to the extra rounds in her pocket.
They was a gunfight going on in the middle of Main Street in Persimmon Ridge, Kentucky. Didn’t take but one glance to see her side was losing.
It was like a series of still photographs.
Click-click. Viola Tackett is sprawled on her back with one of her sons — Zach — on top of her.
Click-click. A close-up of her face. The look of violent hatred and anger had so twisted her features she is hardly recognizable.
Click-click. Viola lifts her gun, an enormous pistol, and the barrel is pointed right at Sebastian.
It seemed to Fish that time slowed down, way slower than Jabberwock time, so slow the world was magnified into credible detail.
The sounds of screaming and gunfire were frozen into a single sound, high, loud, screeching and rumbling all at the same time.
He could smell his own fear sweat, somebody’s aftershave lotion, and a whiff of … was it cordite, from the gunshots.
He thought he actually watched the cylinder on Viola’s pistol move as she began to squeeze the trigger.
And he knew then what he had to do. Seemed to have all the time in the world to consider the decision and the ramifications of it.
Holmes Fischer had been the unwitting instrument of death three times. The lives of three people had been snuffed out by something he had done. It wasn’t a particularly thorny philosophical consideration to determine that he owed a great debt to the universe.
And now the universe had shown up on his doorstep in the form of Viola Tackett’s pistol and demanded payment in full.
It was long past Fish’s time. And besides, he was so very, very tired of living.
So Fish leapt. He’d never been particularly agile or athletic and years of alcohol saturation had done nothing to improve his motor skills. Even so, he took note that there was a singular grace to his movements, a fluidity, and a speed he was totally incapable of mustering.
In real time, all his musings took place between one heartbeat and the next as he was already leaping forward with his hands extended as far as he could reach. Slapping Sebastian Nower on the back, Fish knocked him sideways. The forward momentum of his lunge carried Fish into the space Sebastian had just occupied.
The bullet aimed at Sebastian hit Fish instead, entered his body on the left side, ripped a hole there the size of a baseball. It shattered a rib and sent shards of it along with the bullet tumbling like a buzz saw through his chest. It shredded his heart. Then it tore out his right lung as it veered toward his back and blasted an exit hole the size of a grapefruit.
Fish was dead before he hit the pavement.
The crowd had scattered far wider than Pete’d hoped it would. Though Fish gathered a considerable number of people in a rush toward the sidewalk, panic still hit folks like a bomb, sending men, women, old people and little kids skittering off in every direction, all of them screaming their lungs out.
Pete had dropped two gunmen quick, Judd had got that many, too, looked like, maybe more, before the others leapt for cover and returned fire.
Parked cars, light posts, a mailbox, even a fire hydrant, now blocked most of his shots — but the men below just kept dropping. Both Pete and Judd were firing at the dude behind the mailbox, their bullets thunk, thunk, thunking off metal on the front, when the man suddenly flew sideways and lay still in a growing pool of blood.
Another of Viola’s gunmen was shielded from the rooftop shooters behind a parked car when all at once his head snapped to the side like somebody’d smacked him and a spray of pink mist splattered all over the car’s grill.
Lester.
The gunmen hunkering down behind whatever cover they could find that stood between them and the other side of the street were completely unaware that they were wide open to the sniper shooting down the street from the Post Office.
Lester dropped one after another. None of them knew what hit them.
Then a voice rang out from behind the big metal switch box for the traffic light on the corner.
“Stop! Hold your fire. I give, I give!”
The man belonging to the voice threw his gun out into the street. Gunfire from the men around him stopped, too.
“Don’t shoot,” somebody else yelled and another rifle skidded across the asphalt and came to rest against the dead body of a man in a black-and-red checked shirt.
“Hands in the air, all of you,” Pete called out. “Get out in the middle of the street where I can see you.”
More weapons hit the asphalt and two men stood, one with blood streaming out of a hole in his thigh, another with a bleeding arm. Other men followed their lead, hands raised high and staggered out into the open, looking up at the rooftop where Pete’s voice was coming from.
One of them stumbled and almost went down on one knee next to a rifle somebody’d dropped, and a hole exploded in the asphalt in front of the rifle. There’d been no sound of a gunshot. The men looked around, frightened, aware for the first time that gunfire could come literally from anywhere.
Another man threw out his weapon then, and rose up from between two cars. He might have been intending to hide, see if he could pick off the guys on the roof, but thought better of it when it was clear they weren’t the only, and maybe not even the worst, threat.
Only then did Pete rise slowly to his feet, his rifle trained on the small group of men looking up at him. The whole shootout hadn’t lasted more’n a couple of minutes. It’d felt like a lifetime.
Pete turned and hollered at Judd, “Anybody moves, you blow—”
Judd wasn’t hunkered down with his rifle stuck through the slot in the facade of the Hair Affair Beauty Parlor roof. He lay splayed out on his back. It was clear to Pete, even at this distance, that Judd was dead.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Charlie watched, stunned, as the thing, the black monster crouching to lunge at them and rip them apart … shrank back into the mist and vanished.
Sam squeaked out a sound of some kind, a cry. Malachi made some kind of sound, too, maybe a grunt like when he got tackled.
Then there was silence.
No, not silence. Not the unnatural awful quiet of the presence sucking all the air and energy out of the world. The normal silence that wasn’t really quiet at all. A bird called from the trees and another answered. The raucous cry of a chorus of cicadas buzzed in the distance.
A warm breeze kissed her cheek.
“What …?” Sam’s voice was small and trembling.
“Did you hear … music?” Charlie asked.
“Singing!” Sam said, and Charlie turned in the direction the children had gone, up the hill and over the top to the other side. “It was coming from there. We need to …”
She didn’t finish because she found herself moving that way, an instinctive thing, with a sense of urgency she didn’t quite understand.
Sam was behind her and they had both taken several steps before they realized Malachi hadn’t come with them. Charlie looked over her shoulder and stopped in her tracks, and Sam almost stumbled over her.
Malachi was
standing still, his hands at his sides, his head tilted up, looking at the sky.
She followed his gaze, but couldn’t see what he could possibly be staring at. Empty sky—
Sam cried out beside her, something very like a sob, and Charlie turned to her. There was the most incredible look on her face, unreadable, emotions too tangled to identify. But there was nothing negative in the look. Not fear or the ever-present dread that had sunk its teeth into their souls two weeks ago and wouldn’t let go.
The look was primarily … wonder.
Maybe … joy?
Charlie finally looked up, trying to figure out what the two of them …
There was nothing, just … and then she saw, really saw.
Her hand flew to her mouth and tears squirted out of her eyes and down her cheeks too fast for her to wipe them away.
A simple thing, really. Nothing to get all excited about. Just puffy white balls of fluff against the bright blue of the sky above the mountaintops.
Clouds.
Clouds!
She turned then and ran to the hillside, clambering up it, clawing her way faster and faster. She didn’t understand her urgency, but gave in to the instinct. There was something on the other side …
Staggering across the small top of the hill, Charlie looked down the other side. She saw a cleft between two steep mountains where a meadow lay just beyond a cemetery. A red Lexus with the lid of the trunk up was parked next to what looked like a fresh grave and there were three people beside it — two men and a woman.
Charlie took in that whole scene in the first second she stood on the hilltop. In the second second, she saw that the people were two black men and a white woman. In the third second, she saw that the bigger of the two men was Stuart.
It was. It was Stuart.
In the fourth second, she saw the man crossing the meadow toward them. He had rifle to his shoulder, pointed at them.
