Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  Moving again-one step, two.

  Steady.

  Twenty yards now, any second now.

  Steady steady steady.

  And the looter stopped again, jerkily this time. His body started to dip into a crouch, the pump gun swinging hard across in front of him.

  He’s seen me, Cain thought-and let his finger compress the trigger.

  The recoil jumped the automatic’s barrel off his forearm, the roar seemed to hammer deafeningly in his ears. He snapped the muzzle down again, trying to rebrace it-but the man was falling, Cain realized this with a kind of fascination and watched him fall as though in cinematic slow motion, one foot coming up, leg bending, body turning and then arching backward, falling with the shotgun still held in his hands, striking the yielding snow on his back, the pump jarring loose finally and rolling up over his head and away; the body settling, becoming still, lying there in twisted repose.

  Cain leaned heavily against his left arm, weakness in his legs, weakness in the pit of his stomach. The illusion of slow motion vanished, and he thought: My God, my God, dully. He did not move from his position, staring at the sprawled figure in the snow beyond. Breath shuddered and rattled in his throat. The chill of it, the numbing wind against his face, sharpened his thoughts again: you did it, okay you did it, and now you’ve got to do it again. His eyes probed the parking lot, the church’s facade, the area behind him to the west. Empty darkness.

  He rubbed harshly at his face, stepped out bent-bodied, and went quickly, gun extended, toward the motionless body. The looter lay on his back, and when Cain came up to him he could see the sightlessly open eyes, the grimaced mouth, blood on the mouth, blood on the coat front. Dead-yes. Heart-shot. He backed around the body, swallowing a faint ascendance of nausea, and approached the car at which the looter had crouched.

  The door still stood partially open. Nausea surged again when Cain squatted and looked inside and saw what the looter had reacted to: the body of the third man behind the wheel, the blood, the haft of the pocketknife-dead in there all this time. The psycho had done it, no doubt of that, and that was all the explanation he needed; details were meaningless. All that had meaning now was not one but two of the terrorists were dead, and in all probability Tribucci as well, and it was only the psycho and himself who were left. Just the two of them, one against one.

  Sure-one against one.

  Well suppose he sought help, suppose with the way things were now he went up to the church doors and tried to break them open or shouted for some of the men inside to break them open, told them what the situation was… No, that was foolish thinking. He didn’t know where the psycho was, and he would make a fine target up there on the steps. And the threat of a stampede was a real one, you couldn’t predict the actions of each and every one of seventy-five trapped people once the doors to freedom were open to them.

  He’d have to do it alone, then; nothing had changed, nothing could change. Remain here at the church, guard the entrance, and begin the waiting all over again. Back around the south corner? Or right here in the lot? The lot-behind the car nearest the front doors. The surface snow was full of tracks now, and without that problem to worry about, the lot was the more tactical location. From here he could see both front corners, and Sierra Street, and most of the village to the north, and all of the lot, and the open incline leading up into the trees beyond the lake roads’ fork.

  Rising up, Cain ran in a low stiff crouch to that nearest car, an old finned Mercury. The flurries were less heavy now, and the force of the wind seemed to have abated somewhat; the darkness harbored nothing that he could see. He knelt in the snow at the right rear fin-and almost immediately he could feel the chill penetrating his trousers and the heavy skirt of his overcoat. He could feel, too, the aching cold-tightness of muscles and joints throughout his body and the beginnings of enervation in his limbs. It was as if the freezing night were sucking strength out of him like sweat through the pores of his skin.

  Make it soon, damn you, he thought. Make it soon.

  Twenty

  Crouched beside an evergreen shrub on Shasta Street, a half block off Sierra, Kubion watched skull-grinning as Brodie died in the church parking lot.

  He had come across Sierra and made a rapid, though guarded, check of the Sport Shop, front and rear; then he’d recrossed the street at Modoc and gone up to Shasta, into it laterally through thickly concealing darkness. When he reached the shrub, he paused to reconnoiter the church and the short length of Shasta to the west. It was while he had been doing that that Brodie came out of one of the yards in the next block and ran across to the fir tree at the edge of the church property.

  Going to the church all right, Kubion had thought. Got him a shotgun or a rifle, some piece in a snowstorm but he’s running scared, and the first thing he’ll do when he gets over there is go to the car looking for Loxner. Fifty yards closer and you wouldn’t go anywhere you fairy son of a bitch, but maybe it was better this way maybe he’d flush any other stupid hero hicks hiding in the area. Big black blowfly, that’s what Brodie was, big black blowfly circling around and when he landed he was going to get squashed flat, spill his guts all over the goddamn snow.

  Brodie had stepped out from under the tree, and through the gusting snowfall Kubion’s slitted eyes had followed his progress to the church and to the car. Surprise! Surprise, Vic! Oh Jesus his face must have been something to see right then, trying to figure out when and how it happened well I did it just after we took over the church, I put the knife in him while you were walking away with your back turned, the whispering told me it was time; one stroke clean when Duff was leaning over the seat to get the flour sack and he never made a sound and you thought all along he was alive, you could see him sitting behind the wheel all the while and you thought he was alive and he was just another dead lump of shit…

  The grin had stretched Kubion’s cold-cracked lips as Brodie turned and started back toward the church. Now what, blowfly? Now what? And that was when he saw the brief muzzle flash from the church corner; Brodie falling, staying down without moving. Kubion stood up against the shrub, head craned forward; nothing changed in his face, the skull grin remained fixed. Seconds later the shadows at the corner separated, and he watched the figure of the man materialize.

  Mothering bastard! Hick got him hick killed him; where did he get the gun? Well fuck that, he had it and he’d picked Brodie off with it, one shot lucky shot and Brodie was dead, he’d wanted Brodie for himself but it was okay this way too-okay, okay. Kubion kept staring over at the lot, saw the hick check the car and then come back and take a position behind another car and not show himself again. So-digging in out there this time, where he could cover all approaches and the church doors. No way to slip up on him but that was okay too because he knew exactly where the hick was and that the hick was armed and that there probably weren’t any others or they would’ve come into the lot, or else he’d have gone to them to report if they were too far away to know what had happened with Brodie. Right on, he was right on top again ten feet tall; no more screwing up from here on in, no more screwing up.

  The impulse was talking to him again, telling him exactly what he had to do because it was time now to finish everything.

  Fire-bomb the church, it murmured. Fire-bomb the church!

  Get material for Molotov cocktails from one of the houses and cross to the church from where the sharpshooting hick couldn’t see him and toss a couple through one of the stained-glass windows on the far side and maybe another to block off the escape route the two heroes had used, if it wasn’t a window, and then move to the front. When the hick heard and saw what was happening, his instant reaction would be to try to help the ones inside, forgetting everything else because that was the way these silly Eskimos always reacted and always would react, and he’d run up to the doors and Kubion would stand out and pick him off and then dump another cocktail on the entrance to make sure nobody broke down the doors and nobody got out alive.

  He c
ould imagine vividly the way it would be, he could see the bright burning flames and he could hear the screams; and when he backed away through the shadows to Sierra, he felt a sharp hurting in his groin and realized that the urge’s excitement had given him a stone-hard erection.

  Twenty-One

  Within the church, balanced precariously on the edge of panic, the people of Hidden Valley waited for some indication of what was taking place in the storm and darkness outside-and for the bitter incongruity of the birth of a child.

  At Webb Edwards’ direction, the pews forward and rear of the one where Ann Tribucci lay had been cleared immediately after he’d satisfied himself that her labor was not false. With the exception of Lew Coopersmith, who had taken up a listening post at the front doors, all the men and all the children had been grouped on or near the pulpit; most of the women were spaced in the pews between or along the walls. Edwards had taken the prayer cloth from the altar and draped it across the pew backs above Ann, to form a kind of awning that would offer a measure of privacy. Some of the heavier winter coats helped anchor the cloth. Sally Chilton had taken Rebecca’s place, holding Ann’s head in her lap, mopping perspiration from her paper-white cheeks, talking to her softly, soothingly. Once Edwards had removed some of Ann’s garments, he had placed his own soft fur-lined coat beneath her hips; then he’d gotten two heavy shawls from Judy Tribucci and Ellen Coopersmith, had unfastened the string tie he was wearing and divested it of its thin, metal, caduceus-shaped slip ring-swaddling clothes and umbilical binding and surgical cutting tool, all poor unsterile substitutes that would have to do because there was nothing else, there was not even any water for cleansing. Kneeling at the edge of the prayer cloth, he massaged her heaving abdomen gently and timed the frequency of her pains.

  Rebecca stood against the south wall, hugging herself, not wanting to watch this grim enactment of what must ordinarily be the moving spectacle of childbirth, watching anyway because Ann was her friend and because it was as momentarily inescapable as their prison itself. Would there be complications? It was a wretched possibility. And if there were, would Webb Edwards’ simple medical knowledge be enough?

  Would it matter to Ann and the baby even if there were no complications at all?

  Minutes ticked away-empty, barren. Rebecca listened to the softly vocal praying of the Reverend Mr. Keyes, Ann’s muffled cries, the monotonous droning of Sally Chilton’s voice and that of Agnes Tyler crooning to her unresponsive daughter-and her nerves grew tigher, tighter, until they seemed on the verge of snapping like rubber bands stretched to the limit of their elasticity. She wanted to scream, to fling herself at someone, to run in circles until she collapsed: something, anything, to relieve the inexorably mounting pressure. She could not stand it much longer, she thought; none of them could stand it much longer. When she looked around at the others, she could see some of what she felt in their groping movements, in the way their eyes shifted from Ann to the front doors to one another, in the hollowness of their faces. It was like watching, being a part of, the beginnings of a collective nervous breakdown.

  She swallowed thickly, thinking: I’ve got to get a grip on myself, I can’t let go now, there’s still hope-there is still hope. Cling to that, to faith in Johnny and in Zachary Cain, to faith. We’re not going to die. We’re not going to die…

  And she remembered that Cain had spoken those same words to her earlier, remembered again the conviction in his voice and the new strength of him. Curiously, she had not been surprised when she’d learned he had gone out there with Johnny and what the two of them intended to do; her only surprise had been that they’d found a way to get out in the first place. Like Johnny, Cain-and this was something she now understood she’d seen in him from the first, dormant but perceptible-was a basically forceful, selflessly compassionate man: the kind of man who acted and reacted strongly to any given situation. The hell he had put himself through because of the death of his family was testimony to that, just as what he was doing now, for them, was testimony to it.

  I wonder what Matt would have done if he’d been spared, she thought. For all his benevolence and professed love for the people of the valley, would he have volunteered to go out there and try to kill three men to save all our lives? She did not think so; no, she did not think so.

  The entire nature of her relationship with Matt seemed to have become quite clear now. There hadn’t been anything left of their marriage or of her love for him; the last binding threads had unraveled a long time ago, and she had been living a foolish lie, hiding the debilitating ugliness of that lie behind the guise of weakness and self-pity-not fully understanding what it was doing to her as a woman, as a human being. And yet she had, slowly, been coming to an understanding of the truth, would have reached that understanding sooner or later. And when she had, the strength so long repressed in her would have manifested itself and she’d have left him and gotten a divorce. It was a simple matter of self-preservation: if she had stayed with Matt, she would have died spiritually, died inside, and for all her weakness and timidity and indecisiveness she would never have allowed it to happen. Knowing that, she knew herself: she had at last rediscovered her own identity.

  Only now, bitterly, it might have come too late.

  There you go again, she told herself; stop it now, stop it. It’s not too late, think about something else, think about anything else. Think about Zachary Cain; yes, think about him, and what he said, and the way he looked, and the way he was and is and will be when you see him again…

  Fifty minutes after she had gone into labor, and mercifully without complications, Ann Tribucci gave birth.

  From his position at the doors, Coopersmith saw Edwards lift the newborn infant by the ankles-long, finger-thick umbilical cord trailing down beneath the prayer cloth like a wet white rope, seeming to pulse faintly-and use a clean handkerchief to sponge away accumulated blood and mucus from mouth and nose; slap tiny buttocks sharply to begin normal respiration. The child’s cries echoed piercingly through the grim silence.

  Ann said weakly, tearfully, “Webb… oh Webb…”

  “It’s a girl, honey,” Edwards said. His voice was thick. “Normal in every way, and you can hear how healthy she is.”

  He laid the baby down on one of the shawls, took up his string tie and bound off the umbilical cord, used the tie’s metal caduceus clip to saw through it. Then he wiped her dry and wrapped her in the other shawl and handed her across to Sally. His hands and clothing were spattered with reddish fluid as he knelt again to minister to Ann.

  Coopersmith, as some of the others had already done, looked away; he had fathered two sons but had seen neither of them born, and he’d never realized that childbirth could be quite so messy-a messiness that only added fuel to the sick terror in the room. Facing the side wall, he heard Ann say, “I want to hold her, please let me hold her,” and he thought: Life and death, in the midst of one you have the other, you can’t separate them; one Tribucci born and one ready to die, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away…

  The tightness had returned to his chest, the sourness like trapped gas to his stomach. He passed a hand over his face. And standing there that way, with his ear close to the joining of the two doors, he heard something else, something outside-a faint cracking sound thinned by the storm. He knew immediately that it was a shot, strained to pick up further sounds; there were none. He turned his head to see if anyone else had heard the report. Each of their attentions, he saw, was centered on Ann and Edwards and the cries of the baby, or turned within.

  Let it be Cain or Johnny who fired that shot, he thought fervently. Let them stay alive and do what they have to do-so all these people can live, so Johnny’s baby can live. You’ve given, but don’t take away; let Cain and Tribucci live…

  Twenty-Two

  John Tribucci was still alive.

  He was alive because the bullets which had entered his chest had both missed vital organs-one chipping the left collarbone and one lodging against a right uppe
r rib-and because of the two vicious kicks in the side Kubion had delivered just after the shooting. Shock had been responsible for the red-black haze, the initial unconsciousness; but if it had not been for the kicks, the freezing wind and snow would have prevented him from coming to and eventually have done the job the bullets failed to do.

  The sudden pain in his side brought him out of it gradually, into a vague awareness of where he was and what had happened, and he did not move perceptibly or make any sound. He lay there at first feeling only the cold and the pain in his side where he had been kicked and a bitter hollow helplessness, half expecting a final bullet, the coup de grace, that he would never really feel or hear. Instead, there was the audible crunching of steps going away from him-not far, it seemed, just up to the garage wall a few yards distant, but far enough for Tribucci to begin to taste faint hope. His thoughts cleared somewhat then, and he clung with silent desperation to the threads of consciousness, giving thanks that he had fallen with his face turned downward against one arm, so that each thin expulsion of breath went into the snow and did not dilate upward in a telltale white vapor.

  In his wounded and cold-stiffened condition, he knew it would be suicidal to go after the second. 22 revolver in his left coat pocket or the knife strapped to his leg, or to make any sort of movement at all, while the psycho remained in the vicinity. He waited, playing dead-and kept on waiting. Pain began to seep through the numbness in his chest, muted at first but gathering a pulsing intensity; he was aware of the faint cold stickiness of blood on his upper torso.

  And then, above the cry of the wind, he thought he heard steps crackling again, retreating to the south. But he was not completely sure, and still he kept his body immobile. One or five or ten more minutes ebbed away. He began to feel a kind of torpid warmth, lying there in the snow, and that was a certain sign you were on your way to freezing to death; he could not wait any longer, if he didn’t move very soon now he would never move at all.