by Ilsa J. Bick
“You getting another headache?” Pru asked. “Didn’t Kincaid say that might make you see flashes of light and stuff?”
“Yeah.” Greg realized his hand had snuck up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “But I could’ve sworn—” Behind, Greg heard the scrape of a door and then a guard call: “Everything okay out here?”
“He thought he saw something,” Pru said to the guard.
“I heard something, too,” Greg said.
“Yeah? I didn’t see anything.” The guard craned a look at his companion, who shook his head, and then back. He chinned the sacks. “Whatcha got?”
“Loot,” the snorkel said, “which I would really, really like to put away now, please.”
“Sure. Okay,” Greg said. His headache felt like it was sprouting claws and digging at the back of his left eye. “You’re right. It was probably nothing.”
47
The shotgun blast was enormous, a BOOM Sarah felt and heard crash and bang against the vestibule’s stone walls. A tongue of muzzle flash, bright as lightning, spurted from the weapon’s throat, sheeting the stone gray where it wasn’t purpled with Tori’s blood and bits of her brain and skull.
Without pause, the boy simultaneously worked the pump and pivoted as Sarah shrieked and leapt again for the bell tower steps. Hooking the wrought iron latch with her left hand, she dragged the door partly shut just in time. Another flash, a gigantic BOOM. Something slapped her right calf, and she stumbled as more buckshot punched through the wood, exploding in splinters that nipped her back and blew past her cheeks. She careered up the slippery steps as her calf bawled, the blood streaming in runnels down her pant leg and sock.
Shot, I’m shot. She gimped up steps before her leg suddenly gave. Pitching forward, she sprawled against stone. Her heart was yammering, not only in fear but pain. With all these gunshots, someone would hear, wouldn’t they? She didn’t know. All this heavy, thick stone and wood … Maybe no one could.
He was down there, waiting, deciding. She could feel him. Have to save myself. She still had the Sig. Is there a round ready? She didn’t remember or know how to check. Any sound would give her away. The Changed had already seen her with the weapon. The longer he assumed she didn’t know what to do—not such a stretch—the better off she might be.
Then, the glimmer of an idea … Find the safety. Her fingers walked the weapon. This time, she found the lever and thumbed it off. Grimacing, she eased onto her back, reached down, and skimmed an oozy handful of warm blood to smear her cheeks and neck. Scooping another palmful, she slathered her chest. There, that ought to sell it. One look at me and he’ll think I’m dying.
Shuddering, she scrubbed her hand on her jeans, then pulled herself into as tight a crouch as she could manage, hissing at the pain in her calf. No expert on guns, but she knew geometry. They were in a tight tube, a circular space with narrow, essentially triangular steps that tapered to a point around the stone newel. He was a boy and much bigger, and had the long gun besides, which meant he had no choice but to hug the outer wall. But she was above him, and small. Clutching the Sig, she steadied her hands on her knees, aiming for what she thought would be the most logical spot.
“Help.” She injected as much fear and pain into that little whimper of a word as she could. It wasn’t such a stretch. “I’m shot. Please don’t hurt me. I won’t tell anyone you’re here, I promise.”
Nothing. This isn’t going to work. She listened, straining above the thump of her heart, the buzz in her ears. She was trembling so badly her teeth stuttered. Sweat, oily and as thick as the blood seeping into her right boot, spilled over the shelf of her eyebrows to burn her eyes. “Help.” She threw in a long grind of a groan for good measure. “I’m hurt. Please, help me.”
A second later, from somewhere below, she heard the distinctive rasp of a boot over stone. A clup. Then another clup.
Coming up. How many steps had she managed? She couldn’t remember. “Help.” Her hands were cramped so tightly around the Sig’s butt, the ridged grip digging into her palms. Her right index finger curled over the trigger. “I’m hurt.”
Another clup. And another.
“Please. Help me.” The newel was cold on her neck. She was staring so hard into the silvery gloom, her eyes watered. “I’m bleeding, I’m—”
A dark, stiff finger slid into view. She felt her breath catch as the barrel of Tori’s shotgun—just the tip—hung there a moment. She was afraid to call out again because she didn’t want him to look her way. The sound of his boot on stone reached her again, just that single step. The shotgun moved. The shotgun was pointing up, away from her and at an angle. He had no choice because of the tower’s geometry. It would take time to swing down for a shot.
Heart rampaging in her chest, she watched the barrel bob as he took another step and then another. First, his hands came into view—wait, wait—then the hump of his forehead, the jut of his nose—wait, just another second—and then he was only three steps below her—wait, wait—and she saw shoulders, his chest, how his head was swiveling, his face ballooning to a gray oval—almost, almost—and then she heard his quick inhale the instant he realized he was looking in the wrong place at the wrong time and the sharp rap of the shotgun’s butt against stone as he tried swinging down but couldn’t—because he was a tall boy with a long gun trying to turn in a too-tight space.
“Ahh!” The sound was more wheeze than scream. But she squeezed the trigger.
And this time, the gun went off.
48
Greg’s headache still pulsed in his teeth. His vision was fuzzing around the edges, but as he shouldered open the door and stepped from the village hall’s entryway and back into the cold, Greg huffed out in relief. The village hall triggered a lot of bad memories: images of refugees, all of them old and decrepit, cringing along the walls; the Council eyeing him owlishly from their raised bench in that bat cave of a courtroom the very first day he’d sought sanctuary.
Probably that post-traumatic stuff. Pulling on his gloves, he stomped his feet in a freezing-kid two-step, shuffling from right to left as he waited. The others were still inside, offloading their loot. Located belowground and through a double set of iron doors, the basement jail was where they stored what remained of their food and feed as well as stockpiles of fuel, high-grade fertilizer, and ammo.
What nagged even more was how much they didn’t have. The jail was wide and deep, equipped with ten four-person cells, five to a row. One huge iron cage—probably once a drunk tank, from the faint, steeped-in odor of old vomit—dominated the wall at the very back. This was where they kept their fuel stores: propane tanks, red plastic cans of gasoline siphoned from stalled cars, fuel oil, premix. Of all their supplies, their fuel situation was the least dire simply because no one did any welding, went boating, fired up a chain saw, or headed out for a nice country drive anymore. All that combustible material made him nervous, too. No one had asked him, but he always worried about what might happen if someone got careless, or a spark flew. Couldn’t you use premix or fuel oil and fertilizer to make ANFO?
Of the remaining cells, only three held food, and of those, one was devoted to dog food: cans of wet, twenty-pound sacks of dry kibbles. While not exactly barren, the steel shelves in the remaining cells weren’t fully stocked either. What had looked so amazing in the tight, dark cubby of the Landrys’ pantry hidey-hole made barely a dent. Those eight jars he’d hauled now huddled in a forlorn little knot, surrounded by a lot of empty space. As the guard had slotted in the jars, Greg had counted the cans of condensed soup on the shelf above … just to see.
Thirty cans. The thought sent a shiver down his neck. That would last forty hungry kids about three minutes. The guards also kept a very careful tally of every single can and jar, every sack of kibble. So just how were they supposed to sneak out food, much less bricks of ammo, for their great escape? Hopeless. He massaged his right temple with a forefinger. We’ll never find enough—
Something snapped. The sound
was very brief, crisp, firecracker-short. Greg stiffened, his ears suddenly tingling, aware of just the faintest echo bouncing off brownstone. That had been a shot. Headache forgotten, he turned in a full circle. But from where?
Behind, he heard the door scrape open. “Boy, I’m glad that’s …” Then Pru must’ve gotten a look at Greg’s face. “What is it?”
“Either I’m going crazy,” Greg said, “or I just heard a shot.”
49
Sarah wasn’t aware she’d screamed or even fired until she felt the burn in her throat and the kick in her hands. The sound was monstrous, although the muzzle flash was more like the burst of a spent bulb. Yet in that brief, spastic light, she saw him drop, not straight down as if he had ducked—or, better yet, had no head left to duck with—but backward. Just falling? Or dead? She didn’t know, couldn’t hear anything. Scrambling to her feet, she turned to scurry up but pivoted much too quickly. Her right boot skidded on a slick of her own blood. Her center of gravity shifted; she could feel her balance going, and then the scream tear itself from her throat.
Sarah knew how to run with a weapon about as well as she knew how to fire it. So she was holding onto the Sig in exactly the wrong way, with her finger through the trigger guard. When she tripped and fell up the stairs, her hand hit stone, and the gun went off again. This time, she lost her grip, too. The Sig went skittering down the steps as shards of stone—blowback from where the bullet punched into the newel—nipped her face and neck and cut fresh blood.
God, oh God, please make him be dead or hurt or gone.… If he was still alive, he’d now have her pistol. How many bullets did that thing hold? Doesn’t matter. One will be enough.
She scrabbled up the slippery steps. All she could hope now was that the Changed was running the opposite way. Maybe no one had heard the shotgun because the church’s walls were so thick, but someone had to have heard those pistol shots through the open bell tower. So where was everyone?
All at once, she ran out of stairs and stumbled into a short, stone-lined passage slotted with rectangular openings on either side to let in light. Dead ahead, no more than ten feet away, she saw an array of trusses and ropes and handles that reminded her of a weaver’s loom.
But where are the bells? She stood, panting, heart thudding, calf screaming with pain, ears still roaring. The bells must be above her somewhere. Lurching to the tangle of ropes, she saw how they looped around dowels and were tied off in hard knots. The icy ropes would be stiff, and her chilled fingers were tacky with blood. If the knots were too tight, she’d never loosen them. But all she needed was one, right? She yanked ropes, searched the knots with quaking fingers, then gasped as the tip of her right index finger slipped through a very small loop.
Yes! Tugging, she felt the rope give. She worked in another finger and then a third, and felt the knot suddenly relax as the ropes parted in her hands. All right, come on! Grasping a single rope, she hauled straight down as hard as she could, let her weight drop, grunting as her wounded calf screamed—and heard a hollow bong.
Hurry, please, hurry! She sent the thought winging after each bong-dong, bong-dong of the bell. Hurry, hurry, help us, help us, help us!
50
“Come on!” Storming down the village steps, Greg dashed to his horse and yanked his Bushmaster from its scabbard. He was already spinning away as the village hall doors popped open and Aidan spilled out, shouting over the dong-bong of the bell, “What the hell?”
Greg sprinted for the church, only a hundred yards away, with Pru hard on his heels. Now that the bell was ringing—now that he knew something was wrong—he could hear the dogs, too: very faint, but unmistakable, a rhythmic oof-oof-oof floating from the rear of the church. The dogs and kids must be in the school; God, he hoped so. Which meant Tori and Sarah were in the bell tower.
Or it might be only one of them. Instead of bounding up the front steps, he turned, saw Aidan, Lucian, and now Jarvis and two of the village guards running after, and shouted back: “The kids! Go make sure the kids …!” Then, pivoting, he blasted past the church’s front entrance, dodged right, and headed around back, slipping into slate shadows painted on snow by the coming night.
“Side door?” To his left, he could hear Pru’s ragged breaths. “Thought … Tori locked it. Where … the hell … are Cutter and Benton?”
“Don’t know.” He was sure Tori locked up after he’d left, too. What was in the church that anyone would want? Food, mostly. Not a lot, but easier to get to than the jail. Suddenly, his boots skated on something slick. He landed with a splish in a mucky, slithery tangle that reeked of salty metal and the fouler, rank odor of guts.
“Guh.” Pru sounded as if he was going to be as sick as Greg felt. “Oh, fuck me.”
“God.” Greg’s voice was thick with sour puke. He spat. In the bad light, Greg couldn’t see if he was wallowing in Cutter or Benton. Didn’t much matter. From the size of the puddle and spools of chilled intestines, most of the body—or bodies—was elsewhere. He swam forward, leaving a snail’s slick of gore, then got a knee under as Pru dragged him upright.
“Jesus.” Pru pressed a hand to his forehead like a kid taking his fever. “A Changed?”
“Maybe more than one.” The bell was still tolling. Greg could feel the dry air wicking the wet from his face and chest, leaving behind a tacky, toxic sludge of half-congealed blood and ruptured guts. “Whatever. I’m going inside.”
“Are you nuts?” Pru’s hand shot for Greg’s arm. “What’s gone down has gone down.”
“Stay here if you want.” Greg tore himself free. “I don’t care what you do, but Tori’s in there, and Sarah, and I’m going.”
“No.” Pru tried another grab but missed. “Greg, be smart. Chris or Peter wouldn’t—”
“Fuck smart,” he said. “And that just shows what you don’t know, because they would, and so will I.”
Turning, he dashed the last hundred feet. The door was open, not yawning but wide enough for him to scuttle through with room to spare. He held his breath as he did it, expecting the shot. None came, and he heard the air sigh from his mouth. As soon as he was inside, the bell’s clanging diminished. Directly ahead and up a short but very steep flight of stairs, he made out the arched entryway into the sanctuary. Enough of the day’s dying light splashed in through the open door for him to see a stack of folding chairs leaning against the wall to his right. This was bad because it meant that he could be seen if someone was on the altar platform, maybe waiting out of his line of sight.
If anyone’s still in here. When the bells started, the smart thing for the Changed would be to get out, fast, just as the wiser play for Greg would have been to wait, like Pru said. He hoped the Changed were smarter than he was. He’d been here only a couple of hours before and remembered the layout: that the stairs to the basement were on his right. He peeked, saw the door was open, and thought, Oh boy, that’s bad. With no flashlight, it would be crazy to go down—
He heard something shuffle off his left shoulder, tensed, swiveled, socked the Bushmaster in place, then felt a surge of relief. “I thought this wasn’t smart.”
“Yeah, so we’re both stupid. Now wha—” Pru’s voice died as he saw the gaping maw of the basement door. “Shit. Block it?”
The door opened out, so that should work. “I’ll do it,” he murmured. He didn’t want to let go of his gun, but he couldn’t do this with one hand. He laid the Bushmaster flat, then gently pulled one folding chair away from the other ten, the metal letting out a faint, rasping scaw that made him wince. Slowly padding down the steps, he levered the door closed, all his muscles trying to turn to jelly at every creak and squeak, and wedged the chair under the knob. He repeated this maneuver twice more, moving as fast as he could. Total time: maybe a minute.
“Good deal. Anything in there’ll be trapped like a bug in a jar. You remember the layout?” Pru chinned toward the sanctuary. “Sundays, I try to sleep with my eyes open.”
“Three steps and you’re o
n the platform. Choir on the right, altar on the left along the wall and under the cross. Pulpit at one o’clock on the far end. Go straight through and you’ll be in the organist’s pit.” He thought. “I’ll go right, down the side aisle. Depending on what happens next, you head for the platform.”
Pru nodded, and Greg took the stairs as fast as he dared. He saw the cross suddenly slip into view on his left and then the high arches of stained glass lining the sanctuary’s far wall; heard a sudden creak under his boot and thought, Shit, in the movies they hug the wall, so stairs won’t—
There was a thundering roar, a clap of lightning. Greg let out a startled gasp as the wall above his head suddenly cratered. Swaying, he stumbled back, tripped over his boots, and fell the rest of the way as another shot blasted past. Greg felt the whir of a slug cleave air by his left temple.
“Shit.” Pru’s face swam into view. “You hit?”
“No.” His left ear felt as if someone had crammed in a fistful of cotton, but he could hear the tick-tick-tick of buckshot and the lighter patter of grit and pulverized drywall. Well, at least they knew what kind of weapon the Changed had. Eyeing the hole in the drywall, Greg saw the teardrop shape and how it curved up. “I think he’s under the altar table.”
“Yeah? And?” Pru sounded angry. “How the hell are we supposed to … wait, Greg, why are you taking off your boots?”
Giving him something else to look at. Quickly yanking off his other boot, Greg stripped the sock, then crammed both socks into a parka pocket. Hefting the boot in his left hand, Greg glanced back at Pru. “He’s got a shotgun.”
“So?” Pru gave him a strange look and then Greg saw the second his friend got his meaning. A shotgun had a max effective distance of about forty yards. Plenty of stopping power, but if he could get far enough away, his rifle, or Pru’s Mini-14, would be much more effective. Pru jerked a nod. “Okay,” Pru said. “Just … run fast.”
