Then, as I strained to peer harder into the distance, I saw that she wasn’t just waving. She had something in her hand. A brown lunch bag.
Wendell took the detonator from his father’s hand like a relay runner grasping a baton. He pivoted, started running after his brother.
“Don’t hit the red button!” Timmy warned.
“Don’t worry!” Wendell shouted back. “I know how it works!”
The pit bulls, Gristle and Bone, raised their snouts again. Something had caught their attention and was distracting them from their task of guarding the prisoners. Their hindquarters lifted from the floor, and they turned about, attempting to track down the source of what was wafting up their nostrils.
They fixed their eyes on Wendell, and their heads turned with him as he ran from the barn.
I knew then what had sparked their interest. It was the scent of fish guts, smeared all over Wendell’s pants and the front of his shirt from his plunge into the pit.
The dogs were transformed into low-flying missiles.
“Hey!” Timmy shouted at the dogs. “Get back to your post!”
They were oblivious. Nothing else mattered now. They were on a mission to find their dinner. Their paws pounded the floor as they took off after Wendell, their jaws already open in anticipation, the gums pulling back away from their teeth through the sheer force of their acceleration.
Wendell never saw them coming. He was running, and then he wasn’t, as each dog grabbed hold of a leg, like a pair of lions bringing down a gazelle.
Wendell screamed.
“Hey!” Timmy shouted again at the dogs. “Halt!”
“Let’s move,” Lawrence whispered. With Timmy occupied by the dogs and what they were evidently about to do to Wendell, he wasn’t watching the stall. Lawrence hopped the gate, slid back the bolt, and opened it wide for the rest of us.
“An ambulance,” said Betty, still kneeling over and tending to her husband. “We need an ambulance.”
Wendell’s screams were unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I’d once heard a man trapped in a car trunk with a python, but even that was nothing like this. As the dogs brought him down they ripped into his legs with an insane ferocity. Wendell pitched forward, the detonator still gripped tightly in his right hand.
At the house, Charlene turned her head to see what the fuss was about.
I saw Wendell’s hand fall toward the ground.
The van slowed as it passed the farmhouse. Charlene held out the lunchbag as Dougie stuck his hand out the window to grab it.
The dogs, frenzied, ripped away chunks of Wendell’s jeans. And, judging from the blood that was instantly appearing, chunks of him, too.
His hand, still clutching the detonator, slammed into the ground.
The van blew up.
The explosion was so intense, the fireball so massive, I never even saw scraps of sheet metal or glass blowing outwards. One second there was a van, and the next, this huge orange ball.
Timmy, who was out of the barn and about ten yards away from the dogs and Wendell, was blown back by the force of the explosion. In the barn, we could feel the shock wave of heat blast past us.
I turned away, fearful that some bits of debris might strike me, get in my eye. When I looked back, a second later, I couldn’t see the farmhouse. At first, I thought it was obscured by the flames and smoke. But then I realized the farmhouse was gone.
No, not all of it, as it turned out. There was a small part, at the back, still standing. The rest of the building-a pile of rubble with a few timbers and beams poking out of it-was ablaze.
“Ahhhh!” Wendell screamed. “Mommmmm!”
There appeared to be no mother left to hear Wendell’s cries.
Lawrence said to Betty, “Can he move?”
She looked at Hank, whose eyes were drifting open and then shut. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Lawrence ran over to the workbench, where two shotguns were leaned up. He grabbed one, returned to the stall, and handed it to Betty. “In case Timmy comes back,” Lawrence said. “I think he’s the only one left we have to worry about.”
I grabbed Dad by the arm, started leading him out, and he did his best on the healing ankle, skipping and hopping.
“We need to get help,” I said.
“They took the car keys, they cut the phone line,” Dad reminded me. The keys to the other vehicles outside the Wickens place would probably be inside the house that didn’t exist anymore.
“Can you hop your way back to the cabin?” I asked.
“I think so.”
“Take the tractor,” I said. “You leave the key in it, right?”
Dad said, “Yes.”
“Go into Braynor, or the closest house with a phone.”
Dad nodded, and was about to start hopping and skipping off into the night, when Bob Spooner slipped his hand over Dad’s shoulder and said, “I can get there faster.”
Dad looked at me. “You think?”
I smiled at Bob. “Yeah, you go. Get an ambulance, get Orville, get the fire department, get everybody.”
“Got it,” Bob said.
“And tomorrow, you can take me fishing.”
Bob managed a smile back. “Sounds good.” He ran off into the night.
I turned to Lawrence. “May,” I said. “And Jeffrey.”
Lawrence took a look at the house, at how little was left of it, saw the back part, where the kitchen was, still standing. But the flames were quickly spreading to it.
We ran, side by side, past the dogs, who had somehow managed to nudge Wendell over and were ripping into his belly.
Wendell was no longer screaming.
“Get off him, you fuckers!” Timmy screamed. He barely glanced at Lawrence and me as we ran past. I looked back, saw Timmy run back into the barn. He was heading, I guessed, for the other shotgun.
Lawrence and I reached the back door of the farmhouse together, and he hopped up the steps to open the door. Some smoke billowed out, but the room wasn’t fully engulfed yet. What hindered our efforts, however, was that the explosion had cut off power to the house, and there were no lights.
“May!” I shouted as loud as I could. “Jeffrey!”
Lawrence shouted, too. “Where are you?”
We held our breath a moment, not wanting to miss their call back. The only sound, and it was considerable, was the fire.
“In here!” May.
“Help!” Jeffrey.
Their voices came from the left, and we worked our way over, bumping into kitchen chairs, knocking things off the table until our eyes adjusted to the dim moonlight coming through the window. I found a narrow door, with a padlock attached.
It was getting unbearably hot in the kitchen.
“It’s locked,” I told Lawrence.
“Help!” May screamed. They would have heard the explosion, be feeling the heat from the fire that was sure to spread into this room any second.
“Hang on!” I shouted.
Outside, I heard a shotgun blast. I looked out the window, saw Timmy standing over Wendell, pump the gun, then another blast. A third, and a fourth.
Lawrence grabbed something off the kitchen counter, an appliance of some kind. An electric can opener. He bashed the lock with it. Five, eight, ten times, until the can opener’s plastic casing shattered into half a dozen pieces.
“Hang on!” Lawrence shouted. He was opening drawers now, rummaging around in the dark. “Shit!” he said. He drew out a hand, shook it as though trying to dry it. Fleck of something dark flew off. Blood. He’d encountered a drawerful of knives.
Then he was into another drawer, and came out with a short silver mallet, the kind used to flatten meat.
He swung at the lock like a madman, and finally, the hardware that the padlock snapped onto came free. Lawrence got the pantry door open a crack, worked his fingers in, and broke the door open.
May pushed Jeffrey out first, then followed. “What’s happened?” she asked. “What
was that noise?”
“Later,” I said. “We’re going down to my father’s place.”
The four of us went out the door as the roof caved in on the kitchen. Smoke and sparks billowed out around us.
In the light of the fire, Timmy stood, motionless, over the bodies of Wendell and the two pit bulls.
“This way,” Lawrence said, moving May and Jeffrey toward the gate and the lane that would lead us back to the cabins. Jeffrey had, clutched in one hand, the two Star Wars figures Lawrence had purchased for him that afternoon.
When he caught me noticing, he said, “I hid ’em in the pantry.”
We were all running now, and as we passed the gate, there was a loud racket coming from around the bend that led down to the cottages. Suddenly, Dad’s customized tractor appeared, Bob Spooner at the wheel. He saluted us as he blasted past for the highway.
May looked, agog, at the front of the farmhouse. Bits and pieces of van, no doubt mixed with bits and pieces of Dougie, were scattered as far as we could see in the moonlight.
It was anyone’s guess where the remains of Charlene had been scattered to.
We ran down the lane and around the bend, and when I saw the light over the back door of Dad’s cabin, it was like a beacon of hope, a sign that maybe, just maybe, we were going to get out of this alive.
We filed into Dad’s cabin, Lawrence first, then May and Jeffrey. I waited for Dad to catch up, held the door for him.
“Betty and Hank,” I said.
“Bob’ll get help,” Dad assured me. “You can count on him.”
“He’s still out there,” I told Lawrence. “Timmy’s still out there, with a shotgun.”
He nodded. “We have to hide everyone until help arrives.”
Dad said, “A boat. Why don’t we take a boat?”
Lawrence and I liked that idea, and ushered everyone out the front door of the cabin and down to the water.
Somewhere, off in the distance, I thought I heard a siren.
Dad had a small fishing boat like Bob’s, and we got May and Jeffrey into it. Dad, with some difficulty, got himself straddled over the back bench, and started pulling the outboard motor cord while Lawrence and I untied the boat from the dock.
“When it’s safe,” I said, “I’ll keep flashing your cabin lights on and off. Just go out there and sit until the signal.”
Dad gave me a thumbs-up, gently turned the throttle on the outboard, and the boat glided away over the dark lake.
“I want to sneak back, keep an eye on Betty and Hank,” Lawrence said. “Why don’t you wait here for the troops to arrive.”
I nodded as Lawrence ran off.
And then, for the first time in several hours, I was alone. I stood at the end of the dock, listening to the receding sound of Dad’s boat as he took May and Jeffrey to temporary safety.
The sirens sounded as though they were getting closer. Bob had done good.
I slipped into Dad’s cabin and turned off all the lights. No sense advertising to Timmy Wickens, wherever he might be, that anyone was here. In the dark, I ran some water at the sink and filled a glass. I drank it down fast, filled the glass a second time.
I wanted to call Sarah, but with the phone line cut, there wasn’t much I could do there. Our cells, our keys, were all with Wendell. In his jacket. So long as the dogs hadn’t eaten them, we’d probably be able to retrieve them from his body when the sun came up.
I went back outside, walked down to the water’s edge and gazed up at the stars. There was a glow in the sky beyond the trees. The last of the farmhouse hadn’t quite burned to the ground yet.
So much chaos, so much death, and now, things seemed almost peaceful.
My shirt-Lawrence’s shirt-reeked of smoke, and I felt confident I could slip into cabin 3, strip it off and find a fresh one, without having to turn on any lights. I walked over to the cabin, went in from the lake side.
Once the door had closed behind me and I was in the main room, the lights flashed on.
I blinked a couple of times, trying to adjust my eyes more quickly than they wanted to.
Standing by the other door, with his shotgun aimed straight at my chest, was Timmy Wickens.
38
“Where are my daughter and grandson?” Timmy asked, the shotgun still raised and staring me in the face.
“They’re okay,” I said. “We got them out of the farmhouse just before the rest of it went.” I paused. “I don’t know if that’s good news or bad news as far as you’re concerned.”
He ignored that. “The rest of them,” he said. “They’re all dead.”
I nodded. “So it would seem. Dougie couldn’t have survived that explosion. Same with Charlene. And I’m guessing the dogs finished off Wendell.”
Timmy remained stone-faced. “The dogs are dead, too,” he said.
I nodded again. It would have been hard to offer condolences and sound sincere about all the lives lost, so I opted to say nothing.
“Where are they now?” Timmy asked. “My daughter. Jeffrey.”
“They’re safe,” I said.
“I asked you where they are.”
“They’re already miles from here,” I said. “Getting as far away as possible, as fast as possible.”
“I didn’t see any cars leave here,” he said. “Wendell got all the keys.”
“He missed a set,” I said, and swallowed. The sirens sounded closer. “They’re gone, and there isn’t anything I can do about it. Even if I wanted to. Wendell collected cell phones, too. I can’t call them, and if I could, they haven’t got a phone.”
Timmy Wickens thought about that, ran his tongue over his teeth. Then he sucked the spit off them, hissing, and bared his teeth like one of his now dead pit bulls.
Or a wolf.
“It’s your fault,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet went past my left ear and blew a hole in the wall. It was like thunder. It couldn’t have been meant to hit me. I was too close for him to miss.
“Everything’s gone wrong since you came up here. Started nosing around. Talking to May behind my back.”
He fired again. This time the bullet went past my right ear and blew out a window. I was cold with fear.
But I managed to find some words in my throat. I needed time for help to arrive, and talking might stretch things out.
“I think things went wrong when you let your dogs kill Morton Dewart,” I said, and swallowed. “That’s what got people asking questions. That, and killing Tiff Riley, stealing the fertilizer, those kinds of things.”
I thought I heard the sound of crunching gravel, of a car coming down the hill to the cabins.
Timmy motioned for me to move toward the center of the room. He took three steps in, away from the door.
“I was going to be somebody,” Timmy said.
“Excuse me?”
“I was going to be somebody. People would’ve talked about me. I’d have gone into the history books.”
“I suppose that’s true,” I said. “Just like McVeigh.”
Timmy nodded.
“But people would have had to find out,” I said. “You’d have to be caught for the world to know what you’d done.”
Timmy thought about that. “Eventually. I wouldn’t have minded waiting a little while. Turning on the news, hearing about them looking for me. Other people, cheering me on.” He moved forward and pushed the barrel of the gun up against my neck. “Except not people like you. People who don’t give a fuck about how this country is going into the toilet.”
Unless I stepped back, I couldn’t talk or swallow. I inched backwards, but Timmy moved with me, the barrel pushing into the flesh of my neck. Before I knew it, I was up against the wall.
“Why don’t you make a run for it?” I said, my chin raised, head tilted to one side. “Just go. Disappear into the woods.”
He grinned. “There’s still a nasty bear out there.”
No, I thought. There isn’t.
Ti
mmy forced the gun a little harder into my neck. “But with this, I guess I’d stand a pretty good chance, wouldn’t I?”
“So go,” I said, shifting my neck a bit to the right to keep from choking. “Take off.”
Timmy stared at me. “I got just one thing left to do,” he said. “And that’s deal with you.”
Could I run? Could I rush him? Was there anything I could do to avoid getting shot by Timmy Wickens? With the barrel of a gun already pressed up against my neck?
I thought of Sarah. And Paul, and Angie.
“Hear those sirens?” I asked Timmy. “Sounds like they’re already up at your place. Fire department, ambulance. Police. They’re going to be down here soon. You don’t have much time.”
The door he’d been standing by when I came in suddenly swung open. Chief Orville Thorne stepped in, his pistol drawn.
Even though Orville had a gun and I didn’t, Timmy Wickens kept his weapon fixed on me.
“Timmy, Mr. Wickens,” Orville said. “Put down your weapon.”
Timmy grinned, and showed his teeth again. “Well, look who’s here to save the day. How’s that make you feel, Mr. Walker? You’re waiting for help to arrive, and look who shows.”
“Hi, Orville,” I said, and tried to swallow my fear.
Orville didn’t look at me. He raised his pistol, wrapped both hands around it.
“Come on, Timmy,” he said, almost pleading. “Put your gun down.”
“Orville, take a walk,” Timmy said, his voice confident. He’d been in this place before. “Go home. Go home before I take away your hat and your gun.”
Orville kept his pistol aimed at Timmy. But he kept blinking, like he had sweat or tears in his eyes.
“Maybe I’m not getting through to you, Orville,” Timmy said. “You walk away and you don’t even see what it is I have to do. You can say you came in just a minute too late, that Mr. Walker was already dead, that I was gone. You’ve always been a reasonable sort, Orville, and this would be the wrong time to be stupid.”
Timmy glanced at Orville, just for a moment, long enough to see that Orville was scared. Maybe not as scared as I was. But scared.
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