"Fuck it! Move on, man!" Mary picked up Drummer and started desperately trying to rock him back to sleep.
"Oh!" Rachel winced as Peevey turned and began to walk away. "Mary, such terrible language!"
Peevey took another step and stopped.
Mary felt her heart slam. She knew. Whether the kid had suddenly put together the names Mary and David, whether her description in a newspaper story had become clear in his mind, or whether the word terrible had translated into Terrell or Terror, it was impossible to say. But Austin Peevey stood very still, his back to her.
God spoke next, right in her ear: "He's tagged you."
Peevey started turning toward her again. Mary zipped open the shoulder bag and slid her hand down amid the Pampers, her fingers closing on the Magnum's grip. Peevey's face had gone chalky, his eyes wide behind his hornrims. "You're…" he said, but he couldn't get it out. "You're… you're the woman who stole —"
Mary pulled the automatic out of her bag, and Rachel Jiles gave a shocked gasp.
"— the baby," Peevey finished, taking a backward stagger as the gun pointed up at him.
Mary hooked the bag's strap over her shoulder again and stood up with the crying baby held in her other arm. As she did, such fierce pain ripped through her thigh that it robbed her breath for a few seconds and left her dizzy. Oily sweat clung to her face, a damp bloodstain in a large crescent on her jeans. "Stand back," she told them, and they obeyed.
The front door opened.
The cowboy entered first, snow caught on the brim of his hat and.on his shoulders. Behind him were two women shivering in thick sweaters, their faces reddened by the cold.
"— get these big 'uns in February," Jiles was saying. "The skiers like 'em when they're over and done with."
Laura heard a baby crying. She knew that sound, and her gaze tracked it like a hawk on the wing. The broad-shouldered woman holding the infant stood twenty-five feet away.
Her eyes locked with Mary's. Time slowed to a nightmare crawl, and she heard Didi say, "Oh… my… God…"
Mary Terror was frozen. It was a majesty of bad karma, a weird acid trip bursting its paisley seams. There they were, the two women Mary despised most on earth, and if she had not felt such overwhelming, white-hot hatred she might have laughed at the twisted joke. But there was no time for laughter, and no time for freaking out. She turned the pistol on Laura.
The Indian woman let loose a shriek and attacked Mary, grabbing at the hand that held the gun. The Magnum went off an instant after Laura and Didi had flung themselves to the oak-planked floor, and a hole the size of Sam Jiles's fist punched through the door in a spray of splinters. The cowboy scrambled behind the registration desk, as Mary and Rachel fought for the gun. Laura reached beneath her double sweaters for her own automatic in the waistband of her jeans, but as she tried to yank it out, something snagged in the folds.
The sleepers were awake. "She's got a gun!" somebody shouted, as if the sound of a Magnum going off could be mistaken for a kernel of corn popping.
Mary held on to Drummer with one arm and clenched the gun in her other hand as Rachel Jiles tried to force her fingers open. Her husband came up from behind the registration desk, his hat off, his blue eyes wild, and an ax handle in a two-handed grip. Mary kicked the Indian woman in the shin as hard as she could with her left foot, and Rachel let go and staggered back, her eyes squeezed shut. Mary saw Laura struggling to pull a gun from her waistband, Didi crawling for cover behind a big urn full of dried wildflowers. She was aware of Sam Jiles swinging the ax handle at her like a baseball bat, and she fired a shot at Laura without aiming as the cowboy released his grip and the ax handle came spinning at her.
The bullet tugged at Laura's K-Mart sweater, passing across her right side like a burning kiss and then slamming into the wall. A heartbeat after that, the ax handle thunked into Mary Terror's left shoulder, about three inches from Drummer's skull, and knocked her to the floor. She held on to Drummer, but her hand lost the gun. It skidded over beside Rachel Jiles, who had gone down and was gripping her splintered shin.
The cowboy came over the registration desk, and Mary grabbed the ax handle. He got a kick in at her, hitting her shoulder near where the first blow had been, and the air hissed between her clenched teeth. Pain shivered through her, and then it was her turn: she swung at one of the man's knees with the ax handle, striking it with a noise like a grapefruit bursting open. As Jiles cried out and limped backward, Mary came up off the floor in a surge of desperate power. She swung at him again, this time hitting him on the collarbone and reeling him against the registration desk.
Laura wrenched the automatic free. She saw the fury in Mary's eyes, like that of an animal who has heard the noise of a cage springing shut. Didi was scrambling across the floor after the fallen Magnum. Laura saw Mary look from one to the other, trying to decide whom to attack. And then the big woman suddenly wheeled around, took two long strides, and smashed the ax handle down upon the CB radio, turning technology to junk in an eye blink. The communication to the pigs taken care of, Mary turned again, her teeth gritted in her sweating face, and hurled the ax handle at Laura.
As it came flying at her, Laura shielded her head and curled her body up into a ball. The ax handle hit the floor beside her and skidded past.
"Stop!" Didi shouted, aiming the gun at Mary's legs.
Mary ran. Not toward the front door, but the way Rachel had left the lobby to get water for the coffee. She grunted with pain as she dragged her bad leg behind her, and she burst through a pair of double doors into a long hallway with more doors on both sides. People were coming out, alerted by the noise. As Mary half ran, half limped and Drummer wailed in her grip she rummaged in her shoulder bag until her hand found the.38 revolver. The sight of the gun cleared the hallway of human obstruction, and Mary kept going with tears of torment clouding her eyes.
In the lobby, Didi was helping Laura to her feet and some of the others were going to the aid of Sam and Rachel Jiles. "Call the troopers, call the troopers," Jiles was saying as he clutched his broken collarbone, but the CB radio was way past saving. "This way!" Didi pulled at Laura, and Laura followed her into the corridor Mary had taken.
"She's bleeding!" Didi said, pointing to drops of scarlet on the floor. She and Laura were about halfway down the corridor, a few people nervously peering from their doorways, when both heard David crying. The sound stalled them, and suddenly Mary Terror leaned out from around a curve in the hallway and an overhead light glinted off the revolver in her hand. Two bullets fired, one hitting the wall to Laura's left and the second putting a hole through a door next to Didi and spraying the side of her face with splinters. Didi fired back, the slug smashing the glass of a fire alarm at the hallway's curve and setting off the siren. Then Mary was gone, and Didi saw a green sign overhead: EXIT.
"Don't shoot at her!" Laura shouted. "You might hit David!"
"I hit what I was aiming at! If we don't shoot back, she'll just stay in one place and take us to pieces!"
Didi crouched along the wall, watching for Mary to reappear around the curve. But on the other side the corridor was empty, and there was a safety door with a glass inset and snow whirling beyond in the exterior floodlights. Blood spattered the floor.
Mary was out in the storm.
Didi went out first, expecting a bullet and throwing herself on her stomach into the snow. No bullet came. Laura emerged cautiously through the door into the freezing wind, the automatic clenched in her fist. The snow aged them within seconds, turning their hair white as grannies.
Didi's eyes narrowed. "There," she said, and she pointed straight ahead.
Laura saw the figure, just at the edge of the light, limping frantically through the blowing snow toward the monsters of the Dinosaur Gardens.
Amid the prehistoric beasts, in the swamp of snow, Mary trudged on. She had left her gloves and the warm, fleece-lined coat behind. Drummer was zipped up in his parka, but the wind was tearing through her sweater. He
r hair was white, her face tight with cold. Her thigh wound had split open, and she could feel the hot rivulets of blood oozing down her leg and into her boot. The crust of her forearm wound had also opened again, the bandage wet and red drops falling from her fingertips. But the cold had chilled her fever and frozen the beads of sweat on her face, and she felt that God was somewhere very close, watching her with his lizard eyes. She was not afraid. She had lived through worse injuries, both to the body and the spirit, and she would live through this. Drummer's crying came to her, a high note tattered by the wind. She zipped up his face as best she could without smothering him, and she concentrated on keeping her balance because it seemed that all the world was in tumultuous motion. It seemed the dinosaurs were roaring — the cries of the doomed — and Mary lifted her head toward the iron sky and roared with them.
But she had to keep going. Had to. Jack was waiting for her. Ahead, at the end of the road. In sunny, warm California. Jack, with his face a blaze of beauty and his hair more golden than the sun.
She could not cry. Oh no. The cold would freeze her eyelids shut if she did. So she blocked out the pain and thought of the distance between herself and the Cherokee on the mountain road. Two hundred yards? Three hundred? The monsters towered over her, grinning. They knew the secrets of life and death, she thought. They were crazy, just like her.
She looked back, could make out the two figures advancing on her against the lights from the Silver Cloud Inn. Laura Clayhead and Benedict Bedelia. They wanted to play some more. They wanted to be taught a lesson in the survival of the fittest.
Mary crouched down against a dinosaur's curved tail, the beast twelve feet tall, and she positioned herself so she was shielded from most of the wind and she could watch them coming. They would be on her in a couple of minutes. They were walking fast, those two, on healthy legs. Come on, she thought. Come to Mama. She cocked the revolver, propping her arm up on the monster's tail, and she took careful aim. Her damned hand was jittering again, the nerves all screwed up. But the figures were good targets against the lights. Let them get closer, she decided. She wanted to be able to tell Clayhead from Benedict. Let them get real close.
"Where'd she go?" Laura shouted to Didi, but Didi shook her head. They went on twenty more yards, the cold gnawing at them and the wind shrieking around the dinosaurs. Mary was lost from sight, but her ragged trail through the snow was clear enough. Didi leaned her head close to Laura's and shouted, "Her car's got to be parked on the road down there! That's where she's going!" She thought of the blood in the corridor. "She could be hurt pretty badly, though! She could have fallen and passed out!"
"Okay! Let's go!"
Didi caught her arm. "One other thing! She could be waiting for us in there!" She nodded toward the monsters of the Dinosaur Gardens. "Watch your ass!"
They went on, following Mary Terror's tracks through mounds of snow as high as their knees. The brutal wind howled into their faces and stung them with bits of ice. They passed between dinosaurs, snow caught on the curves of the mountainous spines and foot-long icicles hanging from the jaws like vampire fangs. It had occurred to Didi that she didn't know how many bullets remained in the Magnum automatic. Two had been fired in the inn; the gun probably held four or five if the magazine had been full. But shooting at Mary would be playing Russian roulette with David, a fact that Laura already feared. Even a shot at Mary's legs might go wild and hit him. If I were Mary, Didi thought, I'd find a place to set up an ambush. We've got the inn's lights behind us and the wind in our faces. But there was no choice but to follow the trail, and both Didi and Laura saw black spots of blood on the snow.
The furrow Mary had left behind her curved toward a tableau of dinosaurs frozen in an attitude of combat, fangs bared and claws swiping the air. The road wasn't too far beyond it. There was no sign of Mary but the trail, and snow was already blowing over it. Didi didn't like the looks of the dinosaur tableau; Mary could be hiding behind any one of the statues. She stopped, and grabbed Laura's shoulder to stop her, too. "I don't want to go through here!" she said. "Go around it!"
Laura nodded and started walking to the right of the monsters, heading for the road. Didi was two paces behind, her shoulders hunched against the wind and her body starting to shiver uncontrollably. Ice chips struck her cheeks, and she turned her head slightly to the left to protect her eyes.
That was when she saw the figure stand up from behind the tail of one of the thunder lizards, about a dozen feet away.
The big woman's face was ghastly white, snowflakes snagged in her hair. Didi could see the shine of the Silver Cloud Inn's lights in her eyes, a glint of light leaping like an electric spark from the yellow Smiley Face button on her sweater. Mary held a bundle in the crook of her left arm, her right arm outstretched and the revolver at the end of it. The gun was pointed at Laura, who hadn't yet seen the danger.
Didi had an instant of gut-wrenching terror, and she realized exactly how Mary had earned her name. Mary's expression was a white blank, without triumph or anger just the sure knowledge of who held the upper hand.
Didi's shout would be lost in the wind. There was no time for anything else. She threw herself at Laura, hitting her with a solid shoulderblock, and at the same instant she heard Mary's gun go off: crackcrack.
Laura went down on her stomach into the snow. Didi felt the bite of a bullet at her throat, and something hit her in the chest like the kick of a mule. The pain choked her, her finger spasming on the Magnum's trigger and the bullet going up into the sky. Then Laura had twisted her body, and as Mary fired again, snow kicked up where she'd been a second before. Laura saw the woman standing there, behind the dinosaur's tail, and she had an instant to make her decision. She took aim and pulled the automatic's trigger.
The bullet hit its mark: not Mary Terror, but the larger target of the dinosaur's gray-scaled hip. Chips of concrete flew up, and Mary dodged behind the monster's body. Laura got up and threw herself against the shelter of a stegosaurus's concrete-plated back. She looked at Didi, who lay on her side. Darkness was spreading around her. Laura started to crawl back to her friend, but she was stopped short when a bullet hit one of the dinosaur's spine plates next to her head and ricocheted off with a scream.
On her knees, Mary fumbled in her shoulder bag for the box of.38 shells she'd taken from the dead man's gun cabinet. Her fingers were stiffening up and slick with icy blood. She got two more bullets into the revolver and lost two into the snow. But she was freezing, her strength going fast, and she knew she couldn't stay out in this cold much longer. Benedict Bedelia was down, the other bitch behind cover. Getting to the Cherokee was going to be tough, but it had to be done. There was no other way out.
It was time to get moving, before her legs were useless. She fired another shot at Laura, the bullet knocking a second chunk off the stegosaurus's hide, and then she stood up with Drummer and began to struggle toward the road again.
Laura peered out from her refuge and saw Mary limping through the snow. "Stop!" she shouted. "STOP!" The wind took her voice, and she stepped out from cover and aimed her pistol at the other woman's back.
She had a vision of the bullet passing through Mary's body and ripping into David. She lifted her gun and fired it into the air. "STOP!" she screamed, her throat raw. Mary didn't look back; she kept going with a crippled but determined stride through the white drifts.
Laura started after her. Three strides and she stopped, the gun hanging at her side. She looked at Didi, lying in a black pool. Then at Mary again, the figure drawing steadily away. Back to Didi, steam swirling up from the blood.
She turned toward Didi, walked to her side, and knelt down.
Didi's eyes were open. A creeper of blood spilled from her mouth, her face plastered with snow. She was still breathing, but it was a terrible sound. Laura looked at Mary, limping away with Drummer in her arms, about to leave the Dinosaur Gardens and reach the road.
One of Didi's hands rose up like a dying bird, and clutched the front
of Laura's shoplifted sweater.
Didi's mouth moved. A soft groan emerged, taken quickly by the wind. Laura saw Didi's other hand twitch, the fingers grasping at the pocket of her jeans. There was a message in Didi's pain-shocked eyes, something she wanted Laura to understand. Didi's fingers kept clawing at the pocket with fading strength.
The pocket. Something in Didi's pocket.
Laura carefully worked her hand into it. She found the car keys and a folded piece of paper, and she brought them out together. Unfolding the paper, she made out the cracked bell of the Liberty Motor Lodge. The distant lights of the Silver Cloud Inn helped her see the names of the three men written on it, above a Smiley Face.
Didi pulled her close, and Laura bent her head down.
"Remember," Didi whispered. "He's… mine, too."
Didi's hand let go of the sweater.
Laura knelt in the snow, beside her sister. At last she lifted her head, and looked toward the road.
Mary Terror was gone.
Perhaps two minutes passed. Laura realized Didi was no longer breathing. Her eyes were filling up with snow, and Laura closed them. It wasn't a hard thing to do.
Somewhere the bells of freedom were ringing.
Laura put the piece of paper into her pocket and stood up, the gun and keys in her hand. Streaks of ice were on her face, but her heart was an inferno. She began to trudge away from the dead woman, after the walking dead who had her baby. The wind hit her, tried to knock her legs out from under her, spat snow in her face, and wrenched her hair.
She walked faster, pushing through the snow like a hard-eyed engine. In another moment she roused up everything within her that could still pump out heat and she began to run. The snow grabbed at her ankles, tripped her up, and sent her sprawling. Pain tore through her broken hand, the bandages dangling down. Laura got up again, fresh tears on her face. There was no one left to hear her crying. Her companion now was agony.
She kept going, plowing the snow aside, her body shivering and her jeans and sweater and face wet, her hair white beyond her years, and the beginnings of new lines at the corners of her eyes.
1990 - Mine v4 Page 41
