by Lee Thompson
She didn’t question him. She eased the car onto the front lawn, the wheels spinning until they got traction, and pointed the Lexus toward the road. Jack lowered the passenger window and said in a tone that felt as if it’d amputated part of him, “They already found the kids.”
CHAPTER 7
Bobby was halfway up the ladder on the water tower when he noticed Pine’s four-wheeler spitting snow behind him, Elroy clutching tight to the skinnier brother’s waist, terrified of being tossed from the ATV, or maybe just terrified of who he was holding on to.
Bobby climbed faster, although by then he was about frozen through and hungrier than he’d been before Elroy had given him the Twinkie. He didn’t know why they were following him; he didn’t mind Elroy, but he wanted nothing to do with Pine.
Beyond them, those sweeping their flashlights in the woods had found a trail and were following it toward the water tower, too. Had to be fifty people on foot at least, maybe more if some weren’t carrying lights. He was breathing hard by the time he reached the platform, and looking down saw that Pine had parked his four-wheeler near the ladder. He wasted no time in beginning the climb, he had the strength and speed of a cat. It was startling to witness, especially contrasted against Elroy’s progress far below him.
Bobby didn’t know what the hell everybody was chasing him for; he suspected one of those with the resources—Cindy, his mother, his father—had found his journal, which seemed impossible because he kept it far from his house. But not far from Cindy’s. Maybe her dad had stumbled across his hiding place, read all Bobby had written (he’d held nothing back, about anything, or anyone).
They’d close in on him and then the school. Nothing he’d planned would follow the pure path he’d set for it.
Pine was halfway up the ladder, his face distorted by the distance, his limbs a blur. The crazy bastard would reach the top in no time, and he’d be a hero to the town when he threw Bobby over the railing. Only Bobby couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let some bully rob him like that.
He ran to the utility room and grabbed his dad’s rifle and worked the bolt and watched the brass casing disappear into the chamber. He knelt down by the edge of the hatch and looked down. He raised and planted the butt of the rifle to his shoulder. Beyond Pine, still only a quarter ways up, he could see Elroy struggling to reach the heights his brother had so effortlessly.
Bobby didn’t want to accidently kill Elroy, or even wound him (the fall after being wounded would kill him) but he couldn’t let Pine reach the platform. The closer he got, the more Bobby’s hands trembled. Even with someone as despicable as Pine, looking at his sweating face, his bared teeth, through the rifle scope, Bobby didn’t want to pull the trigger and take another human life. All the fantasies he’d had over the last month seemed demented and childish.
The crowd was coming out of the wood line and across the field toward the water tower. Some had their flashlights lifted but at such a distance their beams could not penetrate much. They couldn’t see him up there and he doubted they could see Pine or Elroy. Cars were sputtering onto the field too, dozens of them, and Pine was only fifty feet away, his breath marking his face, that damned devil horn sprouting from his forehead, glistening above the wild, cunning eyes.
Pine closed the distance between them rapidly, unfazed by the cold or his exertion or the rifle Bobby had trained on him. Bobby called out, “Stop! Go back down!”
Below people were climbing out of their cars. Pine had paused to look down. Bobby put the crosshairs on the steel between Pine’s hands and pulled the trigger. The gunshot was loud, but not as extreme as the joyous sound of the living mass of bodies swarming the ground below.
• • •
Jessica had grown bored of Aiden’s shadow games and for the last half hour had been curled up against his side. She slept soundlessly and he hoped she did not dream but existed simply in the warmth and blackness of unconsciousness where for a time she’d remain safe and at peace.
He didn’t know what he could do to appease her if she woke startled, grasping, crying for her father. Once the sun rose, he could only hope that those who had been out all night searching for them would succumb to exhaustion. He’d find a vehicle with keys in it then—it wasn’t uncommon around there—and he’d drive until they were out of gas. It didn’t really matter which direction they went, all were equally full of danger and equally full of potential.
He did his best to not recall or explore the chaos that had driven him from home and into the unknown with a young hostage in his arms. And the chaos that he feared, he was almost certain, had left them both orphans. He had never realized how much he had depended on his parents. He was counting the ways when he heard someone fire a gun and Jessica jumped in his arms.
He pushed her back and studied her face, torso, arms and legs for any sign of a wound. When he was convinced she was okay, he ran his chilly hands over his own body, afraid he’d find a wet hole in his middle, his blood staining his shirt and the lap of his pants.
Jessica tugged at his arm and pulled herself up. The light in the utility room was dim, cast by a single bulb, and a bone-chilling draft seeped beneath the door. Aiden grabbed his notepad and wrote: Stay here! Then he knelt in front of her and showed her the order and her face scrunched and she shook her head violently and threw her arms around his neck. He could smell her hair, and feel her tears against his neck and he stood, unable to let her go.
He thought maybe the gunshot had not been meant for them—just kids, or maybe a poacher who had accidently fired a round into the sky—but then he heard a voice he recognized, although it was not as soft when issued through the bullhorn. Aiden cracked the door an inch.
Mr. Russell, the principal at his school, said through the loudspeaker, “Listen to me, son. We all know things have changed drastically for you in the last few months. It’s hard to make sense of anything when all you can feel is pain, it makes it difficult, damn near impossible to combat the loneliness you feel, or the questions you have. And we all know how hard it is to ask those questions, about life and death, and the lesser but just as important subjects, like relationships, and doubts, and that quiet rage that seems to sneak up on us out of nowhere...”
Many on the ground murmured affirmation. Lying down on the platform, Aiden could see them through the diamond-shaped floor, tiny figures stuck in the snow and abandoned by God, their hands cast together in frigid relief against their chests, their faces reddened and uplifted.
He felt something for them, a combination of pity, perhaps, and love, and Bobby Russell’s dad, whom Aiden had always felt indifferent about, continued addressing Aiden, but Aiden saw his father down there with Aria O’Connell standing proud and tall and expectant beside him; and a dozen bodies to their left, he saw Emmy, his girlfriend, and his cousin Connor, only recognizable by the way they stood.
Mr. Russell said, “I’ve always known you had something special about you, for real, and for true. I’m sorry that I’ve had to see evidence of it to ever say anything... Come down from there now, before you hurt yourself and the gift that lives inside you is lost to all of us. I’m begging. We’re all begging you.”
And beg they did.
And Aiden was about to push himself up, knowing that he couldn’t communicate with them, but if the light would rise in him—and he did feel it, like a coiled copper wire gathering heat in his stomach—then he would give them all what they wanted.
It would be good, and right, to see them smile, to know that he had played a part in making more wounded whole. But then he caught movement on the ladder and saw Pine nearing the entrance, maybe twenty feet from the platform, and Elroy was following him up, his wide, cherub face flushed with concentration, his lips purple in the waving lights.
Below them there was an expectant silence and Jessica rubbed his back with her small mitten-clad hand, the girl sitting Indian-style next to him on the icy steel, her eyes wide and clear, and for a moment she appeared to have the wisdom of all
the earth, and the peace that came with acceptance.
He pushed up onto one knee. He looked down through the platform, at his father and Aria there without his mother. Maybe that was what Jessica had noticed a moment before him. They were brother and sister in their loss, so he took her hand and held her tight to his side, the furnace inside him on the brink of igniting, until he heard a gunshot close by, and the crowd below let out a shared breath of acceptance, the lot of them, for a single second, believing the muzzle flash was the miracle they’d been anticipating.
• • •
Being married to Mickey, Aria had grown accustomed to large functions and men and women in awe of someone they believed removed so far above them that they could never scale to the same heights even if they’d been granted ten lifetimes.
Unlike the others, she did not see Aiden as some kind of messiah, more so, a victim, a martyr, with all those below standing around her representing his wounds.
Jack said little, but she kept her hand on his left shoulder hoping she could offer him any small comfort, come whatever may. His head was cranked back to watch the tower, like many others were doing, and so far, she had given the spectacle above little attention afraid of her imagination and what it would do, where it would go, if she allowed it imagery.
But there was Jack, unable to look away. A man who lost his wife, and was still powerless to help his son. For all his talk of getting the boy back and fleeing town, she could see now that their chances were nonexistent, and judging by the grief on Jack’s face, he realized it too.
So she comforted him, the best she could, with only her touch and her silence, knowing that it wasn’t enough, could never be enough. She glanced up for only a heartbeat at the platform where the children played out their fates, and then she squeezed Jack’s shoulder and leaned over and kissed the crown of his head, and worked her way through the crowd determined to find Mitch.
It took less than a minute—like his father, he had a presence about him others flocked around but did not broach. The cluster of bodies was tightly knitted. She parted them with nothing more than her reputation. Once one of the men saw her trying to approach Mitch, he had tapped the next on the arm and pointed. The knot unwound and she entered and it quickly closed around them like a shield, or a prison.
Mitch stared at the water tower, his face stricken.
She said his name and he didn’t reply, so she said it louder, her voice lost even to her own ears among the voices whispering around them. She wedged herself in front of him, and felt men at her back, and she raised her hand and slapped him as hard as she could. She feared she’d hit him too hard because the strike nearly turned his head backward and he nearly lost his balance. But he regained it, blinking, furious, raised a fist to strike her, his eyes unfocused. Aria stepped closer and said, “Did you get my voicemail?”
He shook his head and tried to look over her head, but she had one of his hands by then and was pulling him down to her level, and then below, almost onto his knees, and she said, “Where is Pine?”
“He’s up there. He’s going to bring Aiden and Jessica down.”
“Do you know what he’s done?”
“He’s done a lot of things.”
“He’s molesting your daughter, honey.”
He looked up at the tower and she waited for him to call her a liar, or for him to rage. The crowd around them, watching whatever was happening above let out a simultaneous sigh and all took a step closer to the tower—even those surrounding her and Mitch, their unified motion pushing him right into her arms. She had to cling to the sleeves of his jacket just above the elbows to prevent falling. Looking up into his face she couldn’t see any malice or indecision, only love. And he titled his head forward and down to kiss her. She pushed him away and said, “Did you hear me?”
“No.” Not quite bashful again, the love, or lust in his eyes uncontrollable. It was a night, or morning now, for revelations.
She cleared her throat and straightened her jacket and told him again: “Pine has been molesting your daughter.”
She couldn’t read his expression.
He looked at her a long second, sadly, like he was giving up on something that had once meant so much to him, and then he turned away from her and the knot caging them opened to allow him passage before it closed behind him and he disappeared into the crowd.
CHAPTER 8
There wasn’t much light on the ladder by which Bobby could get a proper bead on Pine O’Connell. He didn’t truly want to kill him to begin with, simply frighten him enough that the older boy would cease his chase and return to the ground among the others. He fired blindly and the shove against his shoulder and the muzzle flash in the near-darkness up there quickly disoriented him.
If Pine was unharmed, wounded, or had fallen, Bobby couldn’t tell, his eyes momentarily blinded by the flash. And it mattered little anyway—whether Pine retreated or continued climbing—because Bobby heard his father’s voice in the wind and, for a second or two, was afraid he’d lost his mind.
He loped to the railing, two pieces of pipe, two feet apart; one knee high, the other hip level. Light shed by the cars and trucks and flashlights below caused the ice on the railing to shimmer. He used the lower support, rested the rifle on it, kneeling now on one knee, and used the rifle’s scope to find his dad’s face amid the mass of them, so indistinguishable by the distance. It was an easy face to find with the bullhorn obliterating the bottom half, and what he heard his father proclaiming made no sense at first, each sentence was heard and then felt, as if hearing and understanding were unrelated.
Bobby stared at him through the scope, at first coldly, but the coldness began to melt as his father—in front of what appeared the whole town, all of them obviously feeling the same way—shared that he was sorry and said that Bobby was special. That he had a gift to share with all of them and the world and wouldn’t he please come down?
He wanted to, he wanted to run to them, all of them, and cry: Why did you wait so long to tell me this?
Through his tears, adjusting the rifle, he saw his mother standing so close to his dad, and beside her he saw Cindy and her parents, and like most of the others, his girlfriend had clasped her hands as if in prayer.
What had brought all of this on baffled him, and he had such mixed and ancient and complicated feelings about his dad that he felt he could kneel there forever, listening to him, studying his face, and never gain an inch of understanding about who he was.
Yet, he couldn’t wait up there forever and part of him didn’t want to. He was about to stand and wave down to them when a sharp pain spread through his side and lit a fire in his ribcage. It felt hot enough to burn his being to cinder in an instant. And he thought the pain he felt should have stayed in his heart where it belonged, until he heard Pine say behind him, very close, one hand gripping Bobby’s left shoulder: “Why you shoot at me? What have I ever done to you?”
Bobby couldn’t answer, the pain was too intense, already he could taste blood on his tongue, his lips, feel his fingers going numb and see the veil descending as he turned his head and looked at the school only a couple acres away. The building was dark and empty, but Bobby could picture himself inside it again, now, in the girl’s locker room, in the woodshop, in his dad’s office, planting the bombs that would kill them all. And it was a harrowing feeling to not want that anymore, to want to warn them instead, and for his mouth to open and confess his wrong, and for only a bubble of blood to pop from his lips the instant before his final scream as Pine twisted the knife in his kidney and ripped it free with such joy and exuberance, his laughter caught by the wind until the darkness carried it away.
• • •
To Aiden, Bobby Russell seemed to be grinning as Pine tore the knife free from his back, the boy glancing over his shoulder, his dad carrying on below.
The air chill and damp, Pine knelt by Bobby, used a Bowie knife as long as hand to elbow to chop at Bobby’s neck and the blood looked black as it le
apt over Pine’s shoulders and splattered against his face.
He turned once to look at Aiden or Jessica. His eyes were those of something demonic, the horn Aiden saw more confusing than anything else he’d experienced so far. Like here he was supposed to be some kind of messiah, or at least that’s how people were acting, and he was trapped in a dangerous place with his anti-Christ. It was like some kind of cosmic, world-changing play, and the fate of all those he knew, and all those who wished for his miraculous light, were down below, dancing in anticipation for the final showdown.
Only, Evil would win a physical fight in this case, Aiden had no problem admitting that. Yet watching the older boy hack Bobby’s head free of its body like some kind of victorious gladiator, rising with his fingers intertwined in Bobby’s hair, the skull swinging freely, that look of utter peace still carved into Bobby’s lips and dead eyes, filled Aiden with rage.
He couldn’t label it righteous, he couldn’t even analyze it, because Jessica was clinging to his left arm, shivering from the cold and from fear, and Pine turned away to look over the railing.
After a moment’s hesitation, or decision, he turned back, scooped Bobby’s body, lifted it over the rail and let it drop, releasing his hold on Bobby’s hair, too. The darkness and gravity quickly swallowed the two parts of what had once been one whole boy, not one Aiden had particularly liked or disliked, but a person who had not wanted the ending that came to him.
