by J. M. Hayes
His problem was that the row of evergreens petered out well short of infinity. Short, in fact, of the east end of the Irons’ yard. About three more drifts, and a change of tactics would be called for. None occurred to him. The Irons’ farm offered lots of outbuildings where he might hide, but there were people with guns over there. Ahead, or to the south, lay a wind-swept field without any drifts to slow the bull. Behind was the bull himself, following on Wynn’s heels with the kind of loyalty he’d always hoped to inspire from one of his bird dogs. So, when he tumbled off the final drift, it was to a near absence of options. His only chance seemed some promising drifts that might slow the monster over in the Irons’ yard. There wasn’t a Hornbaker to be seen.
Wynn waded the ditch. Facing into the storm, the wind was sharp enough to open a wound, and cold enough to freeze it shut. He fancied he heard another wind behind him, the bellows-hot breath of the beast pursuing him. He was too scared to look, and too blinded from facing into the snow to see much anyway.
That’s why he was so surprised when he glimpsed the monster charging from his side. He couldn’t understand how the thing had turned itself such an improbable shade of yellow, either. It butted him with a single steel horn and he stopped worrying about anything.
***
“Be damned!” the chairman exclaimed. “Road’s been plowed.”
He pulled into the side of the intersection. Indeed, the road leading west toward the Irons farm bore fresh tracks, and evidence they had been left by a bright yellow vehicle preceded by a blade designed to move snow, and the occasional Cadillac, from its way.
“Figures,” the sheriff said. “Everything keeps pointing to Tommie’s place.”
“I bet Zeke Hornbaker was driving that plow,” Judy said.
The sheriff nodded. “I thought I recognized him.”
“You really think the kids are there?” Judy’s voice was an odd blend of doubt, fear, and hope.
“Let’s find out,” the sheriff said.
The chairman put the Caddy back in gear just in time to get out of the way of the green Blazer that grazed the same corner the snowplow had clipped. The Chevy went sideways as its rear wheels lost traction. It swiveled to face them. A familiar bald head peered from the driver’s seat and nodded, then all four wheels grabbed hold and the SUV threw a spray of snow and gravel, aimed itself west again, and departed in haste.
“That was your brother in Tommie Irons’ truck,” the chairman said.
“Party’s getting crowded,” the sheriff observed. “We better join it.”
The Cadillac did a nice imitation of the Blazer.
“You aren’t gonna believe this,” Mrs. Kraus’ voice squeaked from the sheriff’s pocket, “but I just found an envelope with fifty thousand in cash, and a passport and some other IDs with his picture, but somebody else’s name, in Zeke Hornbaker’s office.”
The sheriff fumbled the walkie-talkie out of his pocket. “Whose name?”
“It don’t make no sense,” she rasped. “Shows him as Tommie Irons. And listen, there’s some stuff about swastikas I remembered that you need to hear.”
***
“No.”
Judah hadn’t expected that. He couldn’t remember ever refusing a direct order. It was unthinkable. He couldn’t imagine what would happen if he tried it with Gran.
The one who said it was just a little shorter than the other one. He could see some small differences in the two. This one’s cheekbones were more pronounced and she had paler eyes. He wondered if there would be differences elsewhere.
“You got to,” he said. “I got the gun.” He showed it to them in case they’d forgotten.
“You know who I am?” she said. He didn’t like this one much. “You know who my dad is? He’s the sheriff, that’s who. You can’t believe what he’ll do to you if you lay a finger on either of us.”
Sheriff English scared Judah, but Sheriff English wasn’t here. Neither was most of his own family. Simon had taken the truck to town to help Gran. That meant just he and Levi were on the farm. If things went the way he wanted, nobody would ever know about this. Maybe he didn’t need for both of them to show him their naughty parts. He worked the bolt to be sure there was a bullet in the chamber, then remembered he couldn’t shoot the talkative one. She was supposed to freeze to death, unmarked. Simon had decreed it.
Working the bolt had an effect. They got even bigger eyed and more frightened than before. The little one didn’t back off though. Not even when he poked the barrel at her to show he meant business, even if he supposed he really didn’t. Instead, she swung the hoe at him. He took it away from her, snapped the handle, and tossed it in the far corner.
“OK. I’ll show you mine,” the other one said. She reached up and undid a couple of buttons on her jacket. Then she shivered provocatively. “But not here. It’s too cold. If you want me to take my clothes off, you’ve got to take us some place warm.”
The uppity one looked surprised, but she didn’t object. In fact, her face relaxed a little. “Yeah,” she said. “Me too, maybe, if we were somewhere warm enough.”
That didn’t fit the freezing-to-death plan, but the plan was no longer at the top of Judah’s priorities. Blood that might have fed his brain was coursing elsewhere.
“We can go to the forge,” he said. “I know how to light it.”
“Show us the way, big guy,” the tall one said. “Light my fire.”
Judah practically ran across the hayloft. His was already lit.
***
The road had been plowed, but the plow had been at least a foot above its surface. There were tire tracks to follow too, but the tracks were rapidly filling and drifts re-establishing themselves. Mad Dog found it hard to believe, but the storm was getting worse. He could barely make out the trail he was following. It disappeared into a swirling froth of frozen foam just yards in front of the Chevy’s bumper.
“They’ll be expecting us,” Dorothy said. “Or someone, anyway. And they’ll be armed. I think we best go in the back way.”
“There’s something evil there,” Mad Dog told her. He wasn’t sure he knew how to explain or if she could understand, but he had to try. “That was my brother and his wife back there at the corner. They’ll be along any minute. I plan to see they don’t get hurt.”
“Can’t do that if you’re dead. They’ll have guns and they’ll be watching the road. That’s where they’ll be expecting us, so it’s where we shouldn’t come from. Do you have a gun?”
“No. I don’t believe in them.”
“Oh, they’re real enough. Trust me on that one, Mr. Wizard. They have racks of them on the farm, everything from .22s to Kalashnikovs.”
He’d been about to explain that he meant he didn’t believe in using guns to solve disputes. He had a petition in the Saab to require gun owners be licensed like drivers. No signatures on it yet, except his own. He’d been ready to launch into one of his pet political arguments until the reality of what she said registered.
“Kalashnikovs?”
“Yeah, AK 47s.”
He would have looked away from the road to check the expression on her face and be sure she wasn’t joking, only seeing the road at all was becoming a problem.
“Why would they have AK 47s, and how would you know?”
“They were for some little war.” Her voice turned smaller, less confident. “And I live here sometimes.”
“Dorothy. You live at the Sunshine Towers.”
“Before that,” she whispered. “Sometimes, when I wasn’t in Oz, I was an Irons.”
***
The air bags were impotent this time. They made better draperies than balloons when the bumper of the Cadillac encountered the rear quarter panel of the Blazer. The impact was harder than the one with the snowplow, but, like condoms, air bags were only intended for a single use.
It could have been worse. Visibility was so bad that they hadn’t been going very fast. And both vehicles were on snow, a non-stick surface on
which each could bounce away with a minimum of resistance. Still, it put Judy back on the floor behind the front seats and bounced the sheriff’s head off the seat rest again. He saw double for a moment, but since he could hardly see anything outside, it didn’t really matter.
“What was that?” the sheriff asked. His voice sounded far away even to himself.
“Tommie Irons’ Blazer.” The chairman wasn’t the least shaken by the accident. He’d seen it coming, though not soon enough to get his foot on the brakes. Still, he had the steering wheel in a death’s grip already and the impact hadn’t thrown him around the way it had his passengers.
“Mad Dog still in it?” The sheriff could barely recognize the outlines of a pair of Blazers out there. He couldn’t tell if anyone was behind the windows.
“Don’t think so,” the chairman said. “Let’s go see.” He reached down and twisted the key to start the stalled Cadillac. Nothing happened.
“I’ll go check,” Judy volunteered. She went out on the south side where the wind couldn’t stop her from opening a door. The sheriff knew he should have done it, but he was still floating somewhere else. He knew he needed to get a grip.
“I’ll check under the hood.” The chairman let himself out. The sheriff was alone with his aching head and a moaning that might be the wind, unless it was him. He didn’t like listening to it. He opened his own door and joined his little posse in the road. If he was moaning, no one seemed to notice. The wind screamed like a banshee. It bounced him off the fender and knocked him down. Crawling proved an efficient method of reaching the front bumper. By the time he regained his feet, the chairman had the hood open—open and tearing loose on broken hinges. He and the chairman fell back and watched it peel off and go tumbling into a nightmare sky.
“Nobody in the Blazer,” Judy shouted. The chairman nodded his head to indicate he understood, then pointed at the Cadillac and shrugged his shoulders. The meaning was clear. He didn’t know how to make it move again.
“Are there keys in the Blazer?” The sheriff combined the words with gestures that got him a distinct negative. “Then I guess we walk.”
At least the cold air cleared his head a little. If he was having trouble staying steady, he couldn’t tell whether it was because of the blows he’d taken or the storm. The wind made Judy and the chairman equally awkward. He led them behind the Blazer’s mashed fender where they could duck down and he could make himself heard.
They all had their guns. No telling why Mad Dog had left the Blazer here. The sheriff believed it was for a good reason, but Mad Dog’s good reasons didn’t always make sense to anyone else.
“How far to the farm?” No one knew, but the chairman pointed out some tracks the sheriff hadn’t noticed before.
“Looks like your brother cut across country, and he wasn’t alone. They couldn’t go far in this so we must be close. You want to follow him?”
The sheriff shook his head and, when his head seemed to want to go on shaking even after he’d stopped the effort, wished he’d chosen another method of expression.
“We lose those tracks out there, without any landmarks, we might never find the place. No, we stick together and we stick to the road.”
They started and the wind pummeled them. The snow tried to etch icy designs in exposed flesh. The sheriff lost his footing before they were out of sight of the Blazer, one time less than each of his companions.
***
Heather English thought this was the stupidest thing she’d ever done. Toying with this manchild’s confused libido could get them killed. Of course, so could all sorts of the other things around this farm, to say nothing of the weather. Going with Judah was like playing with fire, but however dangerous the flame, they needed its warmth.
He led the way down the stairs at the front of the loft, so eager that they could have turned and fled back and maybe found another exit. Only then what? So they followed. He wasn’t bothering to point the rifle at them anymore, though he was still carrying it. Heather thought they could maybe get him to put it down, if they were willing to go far enough. Then, with two of them and only one of him, they might get the gun. Problem was, he would likely catch the remaining Heather at the same time.
He was big and incredibly strong. She’d never seen anyone do a one-handed chin up like the one he’d done to get his pictures. A couple of guys in her class bragged they could do them, but they grabbed the bar with one hand and their wrist with the other. And they weren’t burdened with heavy winter clothes and boots and a rifle at the same time.
The forge was in a machine shop. It was crowded with shelves and benches, their surfaces covered with unidentifiable mechanical devices in various stages of assembly.
It was an old-fashioned forge powered by pressurized gas, the bottles for which stood in a far corner. Judah twisted knobs, adjusted flow, then brought one of those flint-and-steel welding lighters down near the nozzle. The result was closer to an explosion than Heather was expecting, but Judah just glanced from one to the other and seemed inordinately proud of himself.
“OK,” he said. “Now show me.”
Two smiled but shook her head. “Not yet, you silly. It’s still freezing in here. Wait until it warms up some.”
He looked disappointed. “How long?”
“You’ll know,” she teased. “When you start to sweat under all those clothes, then these can come off.”
He understood. He reached down and readjusted the flow of gas. Flame spilled over the bricks and began to liquefy the piles of snow on the floor. The roar of the gas was loud, even over the roar of the blizzard.
“Sweat soon,” Judah told them. Heather English was sweating already, but not from the heat.
***
“This used to be a hog barn.” Mad Dog had expected to have to drag Dorothy into the wind, but she’d dipped a shoulder and led the way through a maze of snow dunes that lay behind every inconsequential shrub and bush. She’d known where she was going. Mad Dog and Hailey followed.
He’d left the Blazer square in the middle of the road. It was the only way Mad Dog could think of to slow down his brother. If Dorothy knew what she was talking about and there really was an arsenal fit for a small army in there, he wanted to delay them until he had a chance to…Well, his planning hadn’t gotten that far yet.
“Used to keep a herd of prime Yorkshires in here, long time ago.” She dropped to her knees just inside the long narrow shed, open on its south side. Under the roof, the floor was only lightly dusted with snow, ideal for her purposes. She began drawing. “Here’s where we are. Here’s the barn. It’s right across from the house.”
He knew some of it, but welcomed the refresher. “How do I stop them?”
“Like a rattlesnake. Cut off the head. The body can writhe around all it wants to and it won’t hurt nothing. They’re all dangerous, but you’re after Becky or Zeke, whichever you can find. Once you take care of them, and let the kids know, they won’t be no more trouble.”
“Where do I find them?”
She looked at him, faintly puzzled. “I thought you could sense the evil.” And it was true. He could. It was somewhere close.
“Be nice if you had a gun,” she mused, “though I suppose that’s hardly the sort of thing a sorcerer needs. Call down some thunderbolts instead.” She reached in a pocket and pulled out an ugly lump of metal. “You might need this, though. Found it on the seat of the Blazer where you must of dropped it.”
It was Tommie Irons’ ring, the one all the Hornbakers seemed to be looking for. How had it gotten there? Then he remembered. Mary said she’d left Hailey and him some luck. Here it was.
“Don’t know how you come by it. Guess that’s why you’re the Wizard. Magic ring, though, Wizard can always use a magic ring.”
She climbed to her feet and began dusting the snow from her pants. “Where are you going?” Mad Dog asked, still wondering how to call down thunderbolts.
“Me?” She seemed surprised he didn’t know already. �
��I’ll be dealing with the witch.”
***
They almost missed Tommie’s farm. They might have if it weren’t for the mass of the abandoned snowplow in the front yard.
Looking to the north, facing into that gale of glass-like ice shards, was nearly impossible. The sheriff never saw the driveway, only that the path that had been plowed veered into the wind and ended at the back of a great yellow truck sitting between a pair of stick-like elms. Their branches faded until they were absorbed by a wild surge of churning white.
The sheriff grabbed the chairman and Judy and pulled them behind the tailgate.
“I think the house is almost due north. I thought I saw it a minute ago. That’s where we’re headed. Stay together and be ready. We don’t know what we’re getting into.”
They nodded. The chairman massaged some feeling back into his right hand and got a gloved finger into the trigger guard. Judy drew her pistol just long enough to show the sheriff that she had chambered a round and it was cocked and ready to fire in her coat pocket.
“OK then.” He didn’t have anything more to say. He led them around the driver’s side of the truck and checked the cab. The door hung open and the interior was deserted. He peered out the windshield over the steel blade. He couldn’t see anyone out there. Not that that meant a thing. The house should be no more than a few yards away and it was invisible. He remembered a front yard filled with elms. He could barely make out the pair on either side of the plow.
“Let’s go,” he shouted as he led them around the side of the blade. He needn’t have bothered. He couldn’t even hear himself.
Crossing the Irons’ front lawn felt as alien as crossing the face of the moon, only visibility would have been better on the moon, and even lunar shade was probably warmer. They found occasional trees, but didn’t run into the huge drift that must be building up south of the house. The sheriff knew they’d gone far enough that its absence was a bad sign. He paused to reassess their position and be sure he still had both members of his posse. They were there, but so was something else.
The figure was immense. He might have taken it for an outbuilding except that it was moving. He thought it might come close enough to spot them.
