Isabelle.
Miles didn’t know how all of this came to him, but it did. He wanted to follow Boone until the end of time. He wanted to become a part of Boone’s history, to put his feet where Boone’s had been.
But more importantly, he wanted to create a union between he and the man with the axe, the sacred union he’d been dreaming about since he sat at Boone’s desk fifteen long years ago.
~
Remy and Marci drove back to the station in silence. All the lights were on, including the streetlamps. You could look out over the Junction 21 Turnpike, to the neighborhoods and the land below, and see nothing but darkness. The power had gone out in the lower regions as the Miramac continued to rise. By morning, it would no longer be a river but a giant lake.
He pulled into the parking lot and noticed several things at once: the car in the middle of the turnpike on its hood, the rain making rapid fire splashes in the shallow lake forming in the lot, Reba’s Volvo, and Wally’s patrol car.
It was dark and quiet.
He pulled up, parking across three spaces at once, and sat still, letting the engine idle.
“What are you doing?” Marci asked.
“Shh,” he said.
“Hey, don’t tell me to—”
“Marci, would you shut-up for two seconds? It’s too damn quiet.”
“There’s the rain.”
He looked at her. She was cute, a little red Dutch bob, green eyes, fair skin, and long legs, not that he could see them under the long pants and sweater.
“I still say it’s too quiet,” he said.
He shut the engine off and listened to the rain.
“Remy?”
He was looking into the police station. A large shadow moved across the wall inside. His eyes widened. “Did you see that?”
“What?”
“I just saw someone outside.”
“It’s probably Wally.”
“I don’t think that was Wally.”
He reached underneath the seat and grabbed the .357 he had there, checking to see if it was loaded. It was a good gun, solid, compact, and powerful.
“Come on,” he said, and opened the door.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Come on.’”
“I don’t want to go in there, Remy. I’m scared.”
“Yeah, well how do you think I feel? Like Luke Skywalker?”
“I’d feel safer in the truck.”
“Alone and defenseless?”
Marci sighed. “All right.”
“Just get out quietly and don’t slam the door. If this guy’s around, we don’t want him knowing we’re here, all right?”
Marci nodded and opened the door. She didn’t slam it shut, but when she saw Reba’s body in the Volvo, she started wailing.
“Marci! For God’s sake!” Remy said.
Marci kept on screaming, a high-pitched careening wail that went on and on. She had her hands to her face, and backed up from the Volvo, her feet in several inches of water.
“Marci!” Remy said. He moved around the truck, saw what she was screaming at, and grabbed her. He put his hand over her mouth.
But she was hysterical. She fought him, screaming as loud as she could. His ears were starting to ring.
He got behind her and picked her up, dragging her away from the car. Her legs kicked, hands flailing, beating at his arms.
“Jesus Christ, Marci! Calm down! Shut up!”
Remy saw the blood on the dashboard of the Volvo, the matted clump of hair, the blue dress soaked in blood.
“Marci, for the love of God, you have to keep still! You have to calm down!”
She smacked his arms, kicked at him with her sandaled feet.
“Marci! Goddamnit! Stop it! You’re gonna get us both killed!”
He had no choice. He spun her around and slapped her, hard. She quieted instantly, stunned. Her face was dead white, then a slow red welt began to appear on the side of her face.
“I told you to be quiet, didn’t I? I told you what was going on. Goddamnit, I should have taken you home.”
She didn’t say anything. She was looking over his shoulder. Her eyes widened. She started to shake her head and backed away from him.
Her hands went to her face, and she started screaming again.
Remy turned around and stared directly into the eyes of Boone.
~
It was like being hit with a pile driver. For every ounce of silence Boone created, a thousand screams rose from obscurity. It was the machines, the televisions, radios, speakers, sirens, everything. But more than all these things, it was the screaming that hurt the worst. It rose higher and higher each time, and it came from every direction.
Boone could no longer zero in on where it was coming from. He would swing to the left and miss, swing to the right, and miss again. He would move in front of him and there’d be nothing there.
But the screaming seemed to have no end.
“Frankie! Frankie Boone, what have you done?!?”
He had been moving closer to the sound of screaming. He pushed open the front doors of the police station to see where it was coming from. It had to stop, he told himself, because if it didn’t, it would kill him.
Boone stepped out into the rain.
The waters were slowly moving the vehicle he had destroyed. It looked like a giant black beetle on its back. He could see it shifting, grinding against the pavement in the road from the water that was steering it toward the guardrail.
He stepped closer to the girl and the man. The girl backed away from him, her hands to her face, screaming with all the power of her lungs.
The man was yelling at her. He had a gun in one hand. She’d quieted after he hit her . . . until she saw Boone, then she started screaming again. She was pulling away from the man, but she would not stop screaming. She got her arm free and hit the hand he was holding the gun with. It sailed through the air and disappeared in the water of the parking lot.
~
Remy watched the gun fly through the air and disappear into the water. Marci got free of him, bolted through the parking lot, and disappeared around the corner of the police station.
The man came for him, moving quickly across the lot. Remy moved to where he thought the gun had fallen and fished around for it on all fours.
The man was right behind him. He had seconds. Remy felt for the gun in the water, but it wasn’t there. His fingers only found the pebbly surface of the parking lot. The lights were on. Everything was extremely bright.
Boone’s shadow moved over him.
His knee touched something, solid metal. It moved several inches across the ground. He knew the weight of his gun, reached down by his knee and grabbed it. He turned over on his back, took aim, and fired.
~
Boone flinched, the bullet sailing past his ear. It was like a little toy noisemaker, easily forgotten, but still bothersome.
He lifted the axe, wielding it above the man holding the gun, the brought it down.
~
Marci turned, coming around the other side of the police station, and turned the corner just in time to see Boone bury the axe into Remy’s skull. She screamed, turned, and bolted toward downtown.
She looked back just in time to see Boone coming after her.
~
From where he was parked just down the road on the south side of the police station, Miles had a perfect view of the entire scene. He had found a spot where he could stakeout the police station and still remain out of sight.
He watched as Marci bolted around the building. He watched as Remy looked for the gun, fired, then lost his life.
But there was something else, a twitch, a force that drove Boone beyond something he’d never understood until now.
It began and ended with Marci.
Boone was sensitive to noise . . . to screaming most of all.
~
She beat on windows through the downtown streets, looking behind her. She ran as fast as sh
e could, sandals slipping out from under her, the rain slowing her down.
Boone moved after her in quick, undaunted strides, holding the axe in both hands.
She kept screaming, a sound broken only by the thunder.
“Help me, please! God, help me, please!”
Her mind ran off without her, a reeling twist of terror like a freight train. She screamed into the dark, beat her hands against windows, crying, pleading, begging for anyone to help her.
Her throat was raw from screaming. She was hysterical over what had happened to Remy, seeing the woman in the Volvo . . . all that blood.
One of her sandals fell off, and she fell forward in several inches of water. She kicked the other sandal off, spit water from her mouth, got up, and started running again.
She ran off the main road, thinking she was too exposed under all the lights. The dark would be a better place to hide . . . along the edge of the Miramac.
~
She was not hard to follow. Her small size, trying to run through the water, and Boone’s large size, were advantages to him. She was slower, and he moved easily.
He saw the girl up ahead in the dark. She’d taken a side road, away from the downtown streets, where the land dipped away from the main highway. It was a treacherous path along where the Miramac was spreading wide and forceful. She headed straight north, along the edge of the road. But she had come to a dead end, where the water spread out all around her. It was too deep to cross. The road dipped into a giant lake.
She stopped, turned, and looked directly at him. The lightning flashed, lighting up the sky. She turned, having to double-back toward him, keeping as far away to the edge of the road as she could.
But the land sloped away, and her feet sailed out from under her when she took a step, the bank collapsing into the water. It dragged her into the current.
She screamed again, her arms sailing out above her head.
Boone stood and watched as the current carried her past him. Her head bobbed in the gloom from the downtown lights, then disappeared in the darkness.
She was no longer screaming.
~
“He has worshipers, followers, already, and that we cannot have.”
“FRAAANNKIIEEE!”
“When the fires of hell rise up and swallow the masses, you’ll know the devil has come, and with it, his tool for silence.”
“What do you expect with a maniac on the loose? Bolt your windows. Lock your doors. Get out of town. That’s the best you can do.”
“Judgment must come.”
“Thou shalt not slaughter the masses.”
“He was a horrible child. All his mother tried to do was put him in line, instill some discipline. You have to deal with that. You have to make sure it gets corrected. His father was never there. What do you expect? He was bad from the moment of conception.”
“Someone should hunt him down and kill him. But who has the guts? Who?”
Boone stood near the edge of Miramac and heard all this clearly. It was coming from under the water, from over the water, from behind and all around him. The water was haunted, the deep rushing Miramac. His mother was down there orchestrating it all, a wasted corpse of a woman eaten away by catfish and time.
He still had all of the eastern side of Shepherd’s Grove to get to. Some of those houses still had their lights on, as if waiting for him. He could see the televisions, slow-old fashioned boxes rotating above the rooftops.
He could do it, he knew. He could find a way. He felt the strength rising in him. To extinguish violence with violence.
But they were everywhere. He could hear them talking, wishing him gone. He was the devil’s child.
But he wasn’t. He refused to believe it. He’d never been the devil’s child. A different hand had been guiding him since his mother had tried to kill him all those years ago. He knew that, and he would be rewarded by the Divine Source . . .
As long as he finished his pilgrimage.
Chapter 12
Even though Miles had seen what had taken place at the police station, he wondered if it was possible to stop Boone at all. He was aware of Boone’s weakness, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to use it against him. Miles loved Boone, adored him, would lie naked on the ground he walked on, but he wondered if there was another way to get through to him.
He had all the police sirens at his disposal, the warning sirens from the switchboard. The microphone Wally used to warn the town of Shepherd’s Grove of the flood. He could turn the volume on as high as it could go.
He could talk directly to Boone.
~
Carrie Dewhurst turned on the radio as he drove the Cherokee through the pouring rain. He knew this wasn’t the wisest decision. It was, in fact, pretty damn stupid, but it was a risk he had to take.
He’d been trying to catch whatever news he could about Shepherd’s Grove, but it was just the same thing over and over. Stay on higher ground, stay off the roads (which, of course, he’d failed to do). The death toll had risen to 11, the only bit of information he’d found.
There had been some deep pools along the roads. Carrie stepped on the gas pedal, and plowed through, screaming, “YEEE-HAAAWW!” Hydroplaning would be bad, but sometimes you had to step up to the plate and take a chance, and his excitement for the story was getting the best of him. In some ways, it was the most fun he’d had in a long time.
But he slowed down just as quickly. He’d had a few scares along Highway 48, feeling the deepening water lift the vehicle off the ground, before carrying the Jeep onto the road again.
It was over thirty miles from Old Hartford to Shepherd’s Grove, the terrain mostly plains, hillocks, and farmlands. There were plenty of streams, tributaries, and he would be coming up on the Miramac soon. The small mountain peaks hemmed it all in like a giant soup bowl.
The Jeep’s high beams were on, but in the constant downpour, visibility was limited.
He was doing 35mph, plenty fast enough to hit a pool and go hydroplaning. Part of him was excited, but another part realized he should slow down. He wanted to make it into town alive, and the water began to frighten him.
He had cramps in his hands from holding the steering wheel so tight. His foot on the gas was growing tense.
Carrie bit his bottom lip, drawing blood, and clenched the wheel tighter.
~
There was no consensus as to who had lost their lives in Shepherd’s Grove, but Boone alone counted for almost a hundred, including the sanitarium, the First Presbyterian Church, and random people in their homes.
The power had gone out in the lower regions of the Grove. The river had widened, submerging most of the neighborhoods in water now.
Farmers tended their livestock as best they could, but many people, cattle, sheep, horses, and animals had drowned, carried away by the river.
Boone, too, began to battle the flood. But to him, it was just another element helping him on his pilgrimage.
If it got in his way, it got the axe. If it squawked, screamed, moved, gossiped, lied or threatened him in any way, it was silenced.
~
The televisions had begun to squawk again, each one on a different channel, making a huge, garbled mess of white noise and madness.
He moved through the floodwaters. Because of his size, he did just doing fine.
The storm, that strange, steady crackling loudness was a longtime companion, guiding him to an end result he could only dream about.
~
He was moving east of downtown now, toward the neighborhoods on higher elevations.
“You just have to silence them, Boone,” Isabelle said from long ago. “With whatever you can.”
He nodded a single time. He could hear her clearly.
“You just put your hands over your ears, like this. See?”
Fair, soft skin, silver hair, like a winter elf.
When the people of the Grove saw Boone coming, they saw their lives in the axe. As the lightning flashed and the thunder sou
nded, Boone came to do their reckoning.
He beat down their doors. They screamed when he stepped inside.
Then he moved to the next house.
~
One woman, Mrs. Travers, started in her chair. They’d been up late watching movies. She’d put a hand to her heart, looked at her husband, and chuckled before Boone tore down the door.
In another house, several kids had stayed up late telling ghost stories. As Boone came through, their words turned to screaming. Boone stepped inside and silenced them all.
From house to house, he moved on, sometimes the front door, sometimes the back. Sometimes, he crashed through an entire window, creating silence . . . until it was only he and the rain.
~
Carrie was coming up a slight hill, the windshield wipers going back and forth, when the deer came out of nowhere and clipped the front bumper. He veered hard to the left, skidded in a complete circle, then crashed into a bank on the left side of the road. The front end crumpled, and he was thrown back in a horrible whip-lashing movement that wrenched his neck. The Jeep stalled instantly, and the horn blared.
“Are you kidding me?” he shouted.
He’d been making good time, had run into several pools he’d been able to pull himself out of, but for the most part, he’d been coming up on Shepherd’s Grove or close to it. The last sign he’d seen a few miles back said only six miles.
The deer, of which there was no sign, had bolted. The damn thing probably wasn’t even injured.
Carrie turned the ignition. It clicked but would not turn over. The Jeep wouldn’t start. The dashboard lights came on, but the engine light was red.
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