Kain fought the pain. He started to rise, but Brikker set him back, quickly drawing a small service pistol from the shouldered holster buried in his jacket. The man wouldn’t kill him, certainly, but wouldn’t hesitate—and take great pleasure—in incapacitating him. A bullet to the knee, maybe … or both.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Brikker said.
The girl shuddered as the one-eyed man moved closer.
“Leave her alone, you sick bastard.”
Brikker regarded him only briefly, then knelt behind her. He moved somewhat awkwardly, as if his muscles ached. Lee tried to move away, but all she could do was cry out as her busted leg gave under her.
“Shhhhh,” Brikker whispered, and put his hand to her long, fine hair. He stroked it gently, let it slip through his thin fingers. “Such lovely hair. So lovely … it would be an indignity to lose it.”
“It’s me you want, Brikker. Leave her out of this.”
“She’s already in this,” Brikker blared. He brought a hand to his face, his nails sharp razors that glistened in the orangey light. He led his touch along his worn and fractured skin. “Look around you. You can smell the carnage you’ve wrought.”
As if Brikker had thrust it with a thought, a blast of static struck, a massive charge far more debilitating than any prior. Kain endured it, slipping to his side in agony. He rocked. Everything was spinning. He was drowning in the din.
“Curious,” Brikker whispered, matter-of-factly. He rose, examining the drifter more closely. “I could take it all away, Number Three.”
Kain glared at him. “Stay away from me.”
“Kain—”
“… It’s all right, Lee.”
“Why don’t you leave us ALONE!”
The girl’s explosion—and Kain knew it—had been a grave mistake. Brikker missed not a heartbeat, driving a boot into her broken leg. The shattered bone breached the skin, and Lee-Anne screamed. Kain was already staring down the pistol’s barrel before he could move.
“Because I can,” Brikker said, reading Kain’s mind.
The man took aim at the girl. Cocked the pistol.
“Don’t do this,” Kain pleaded. “Don’t.”
Brikker considered; he finally drew back. He stepped away from her and slipped a hand in an inside pocket. He offered what he found there to the drifter.
“I won’t ask twice.”
Kain surrendered and took the syringe. The contents were no doubt a home-made Brikker concoction, a sedative more than potent enough to put him out. He slipped the protective cover off and primed the plunger. A small drip of the solution dribbled from the tip.
“It’s a long walk to the desert,” he said. “Hope you have a strong back, Brikker.”
The good Doctor, rarely one for humor, eked a grin. He regarded the beaten Chevrolet beyond them.
“A dreadful color,” he said. “No style at all.”
“Damn … and I went and left the keys in the house.”
“Any monkey can cross wires,” Brikker snapped.
“I see you brought your ugliest,” Kain told him, spying the burning lump that was Strong. “But I guess you’ll be doing all the driving now.”
“Still the same,” Brikker replied, with a modest touch of a sigh. “Defiant to a fault. But this cat-and-mouse play … is finally over.”
The man scowled as he stabbed a hard boot to the girl again. This time, the screaming endured.
“Damn you, Brikker!”
Kain looked to her, utterly helpless; he could only endure it with her.
“I’ll do what you want,” he said. “The experiments … everything. Just promise m—”
“You’re in no position to make demands,” Brikker scoffed, cutting him off. “And my patience has worn.”
He brought the pistol to the girl’s head. Lee-Anne Bishop closed her eyes and began to whimper.
“NO! … Please. No.”
Again Brikker capitulated.
“Lee … Lee.”
She trembled terribly. Tears rolled down her bloodied cheeks. His heart seemed to shred.
Kain regarded his bared shoulder.
“I’m not exactly sterile.”
“I can take care of any infection,” Brikker said flatly. “Although you may suffer in the interim.”
Kain nodded dimly. He brought the needle in close to his left shoulder. He had countless marks, pinhole-sized, as reminders, as guides, and winced as he injected himself. Slowly, he pumped the serum inside of him until Brikker told him enough. He drew out the needle, and in a few moments, felt his mind and his will slipping away. It wouldn’t take long for him to lose consciousness, and so he settled himself into the dirt. The syringe slipped from his fingers. Already Brikker was a blur, his voice distant.
“A rather fitting end,” the physician said, watching the drug work its magic. “Don’t you think? After all … it was just a matter of—”
Brikker hesitated. His face fell as his eye grew.
“I can … take care of … any infect—”
Again the man cut himself off. Brikker swayed a moment, clearly undone by the sudden rip in time. Then, just as the drifter was about to inject himself, he whipped round. The pistol went off recklessly, the bullet grazing his assailant’s hair.
Lynn Bishop, already in full swing of the bat, struck him clear across the bridge of his nose. There was a definitive crakkk, and Brikker’s face exploded in blood. He shrieked as he slipped to his knees, and in his daze raised the pistol, firing twice with uncertain aim. Both shots missed, and Lynn swung blindly as a deep grunt escaped her. Brikker brought his arm up to block the blow, and the bat hammered his hand; the gun went flying as he screamed. He leapt for it, but it was just out of reach. The bat came down again, narrowly missing him. He tumbled into a stand of grassfire, his jacket catching, and he rolled back onto the drive to put out the flames. Lynn howled as she raised the bat, her grip faltering in her broken fingers. Brikker scrambled for the pistol. The Doctor was on his knees when he fired.
The bullet ripped into Lynn’s shoulder, and she cried out as she dropped to the ground in a heap. Blood gushed from the wound. Her daughter was already screaming, and kept on screaming.
Kain staggered to his feet. Static threatened to take him. In desperation, he leapt at the dark shape before him, striking it broadside and taking it down. He suffered a solid fist to the jaw, rocking him, and he swung blindly and returned the favor. The pistol slipped from Brikker’s grasp, but the man got a hand round his throat and started to choke him. Those sharp nails clawed into his flesh, and he had to roll off into the dirt. Brikker was on him then, but a solid knee to the man’s groin leveled him. Kain quickly straddled him. The eyepatch slipped off, exposing a hideous cavity. Blood seeped into it. Brikker snatched up the gun, but Kain snared his wrist, and out of pure animal instinct, ripped into the man’s flesh with his teeth. The good Doctor screamed bloody murder, and as he dropped the pistol, Kain found the syringe and brought it down with all the thrust he could muster. He drove it hard into the bastard’s good eye, and as Brikker shrieked, his thin body twitched, twitched again … and that was all.
Kain Richards trembled. His heart and his mind pounded. His sight had nearly abandoned him. He tried desperately to keep himself from falling apart, but then it came, all the years in an instant, and he thrust his head back, crying out in anguish. He got halfway to his feet and doubled, and as he tried to right himself, his legs simply gave. He fell first to his knees, then groaned as he slumped to the ground spent, his head spinning. The stars were fading quickly. He heard his name, somewhere in that muted screaming that enveloped him, heard the faint thrum of the fires, their lulling whisper slipping away like ghosts. And in his next breath, this new world he had conjured from his magic—this dark and backward abysm—finally, mercifully, went black.
~ 26
The first thing that struck Kain when he came to was not the flickering firelight, nor the linger of smoke and its subtle undercurrent of ro
tting waste … not even the sweet sound of a young girl’s voice.
It was the static … rather, the lack of it.
His mind was clear. The pain was gone.
He blinked a few times. His vision still failed him, but it had recovered enough to serve him. He could make her lovely smile.
“Lee …”
She had managed to drag herself to him, brave soul that she was. And yes, she was smiling, although for the life of him, he could grasp no possible reason. Perhaps it was enough, just to be alive.
He struggled to sit up and suffered a wicked body ache. It seemed to possess claws and was having its way with every inch of him. But when he saw what the girl was on about, the pain seemed to melt away.
“Hey, cowboy.”
His heart throbbed. Lynn Bishop had never looked so downtrodden, so beaten—and so beautiful.
“I’m all right,” she went on, as if reading his mind. She took a sharp breath and winced. “I think the bullet went right through.”
Kain swallowed a thick rise in his throat. Only a few small fires burned here and there, most of them spent patches of smolder. He regarded the remains—of the home, of Strong, of the demon beside him—and then looked to Lynn and her daughter with sorrow. He could barely hold back his tears.
“… Ryan?”
“In there,” Lynn said, and she tipped her head toward the barn. She called out to her son, called again, and this time, he called back … weakly, but strong enough. Strong enough.
Lynn struggled as she moved beside Kain.
This time, he read her mind.
“It’s over,” he said. And that’s all he said.
She seemed to crumble as she lowered her head. She started to tremble. He put his arms around her, and she broke. Finally.
He held her close. He would not let her go. Not this time.
She sensed his sudden unease.
“Kain?”
The hazy light from the farmhouse, the Hembruff place, glowed against that inky sky. It came back to him then, all of it, the memory of the first timeline. He looked about, at the destruction he had laid. A cold fear rose within him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, sniffling. “What is it?”
He didn’t answer; he couldn’t. It wasn’t what was … but what wasn’t.
It wasn’t here … the flatbed wasn’t here.
~
They buried Allan Jefferson Hembruff on the very next Saturday, in a small ceremony in a small cemetery. Only his closest friends were invited; the Tribe carried him. His wife was there, as was his little girl and her family; at Georgia’s request, Kain Richards was there, too. Young Ben Caldwell, his body in a brace and lying in a hospital bed in Spencer, had been unable to attend, but he had done the noble thing, taking the blame, even though Georgia Hembruff had never held him responsible, had never spoken a foul word of him, even up to her death a month later. She died on a Saturday, in her sleep. Doc Wheatley had called it arrest, but the truth was, she died of a broken heart.
~
Kain slipped into Al Hembruff’s old rocker. He rocked a while. The months-long heat wave had finally begun to break in the afternoon, and now that the early evening was upon him, he could savor the soft breeze that it offered. The work in the fields, a monotonous task of cutting down or plowing through endless acres of corn dust, had drained him. On the plus side, the extent of the crop damage had petered out after a few miles in every direction. It had made the local news for a day or two, creating a minor stir in the county—not to mention a certain radio disc jockey down in Fort Dodge, who had gone on record as saying that something very strange had happened in Clay County, that no one wanted to talk about it, save that crazy from Mason City who kept calling every day, insisting how he had traveled into the past—and for the grace of God, that had been it.
Lynn joined him with some lemonade for two. Her face had cleared up nicely, as had his, but her arm was still in a sling, even though it had been a week since her father’s funeral. Her broken fingers were set razor-straight in a cast. It was due to come off next week.
“Do you think it’ll come back? The land?”
Kain shrugged as he took a glass.
“What do you suppose happened? I mean—” She stopped herself. “Sometimes, I … well … it’s all so crazy.”
He looked out over the dead fields. The lazy sun had just started to set on the hazy horizon.
“I can’t explain it,” he said. “I guess … I guess it’s gone.”
“The Turn, you mean,” and she said it with sadness. As if it were the most horrible thing in the world.
The static was gone, that much was certain. It was all he really knew anymore.
He sipped. “How are the kids?”
“They’re good,” she told him. “They’re good.”
“How is … ?”
Lynn sighed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But Mom’s not herself. She hardly speaks to anyone anymore.”
“I wish … I wish I could take it all back.”
Lynn nodded wistfully.
There was a long, drawn silence between them. He was just about to break it, but she already knew.
“Canada.” You could hear the hurt in her voice. She fidgeted. Looked away. Her eyes fell to the barrel, to the knapsack laid up against it. “Will I … will I ever see you again?”
He faltered, clearly undone. He took her hand in his, and his eyes, like hers, could only search.
He sighed. Looked to her earnestly.
He started to speak, could only choke on his words. He never got any further.
A tear slid down Lynn’s cheek.
Kain wavered. But then he leaned in and threw his arms around her. He brought her head back, losing himself in those eyes, and then he kissed her deeply. It felt like the first time.
It would be the last.
~ epilogue
Sixteen inches of snow fell on the twenty-second of November.
It had come without warning. The enduring autumn had been unseasonably mild, casting a spell that had lulled most folks into fanciful thoughts of spring. The Midwest had suddenly slipped into an ice age, the white stuff burying most of the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska, blowing clear across to the Great Lakes. Most roads, including the interstates, would be impassable for days, the cruel northern wind wreaking havoc on motorists and pedestrians. Airports shut down, stranding hundreds. A biplane crashed in a lonely Iowa cornfield, killing three people less than a half mile from where Buddy Holly’s chartered Beechcraft had nearly killed him, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens almost three winters past. Power was out in large parts of Wisconsin and northern Iowa, as temperatures plummeted from the positively balmy mid-fifties to the chilling low-twenties, turning foolish dreams of a clement winter to dust.
Ah, to dust. Diagnosed on the twelfth of October with inoperable lung cancer, Frank Wright had smoked his last nail on the eighteenth. He never made it to California with his wife’s inheritance … never made it out of the county. The train, a full fifty-three cars of freight coming east, had seen eye to eye with his pickup, and it had taken three ironworkers nearly six hours to strip his twisted body from the wreckage.
Jake Maxwell was fired—just last week—from his two-bit service job at the Texaco. His mother kicked him out, but not to worry. He shacked up with a real screamer, who lived in a burned-out trailer out near the river.
Henry Roberts took his life … sort of. It wasn’t a police raid over the illegal goings-on at the Wild that had forced his hand, not with his connections. It wasn’t even an arrest over what the Stick Man had done to Billy Kingston and Billy’s little brother. It was the boys’ father. He had received an anonymous letter the day after Labor Day, a letter penned in his son’s trembling hand, and when he had gone to the bar and had stayed until closing, he had waited for the stragglers to leave and for the barkeep to tell him to follow. Old Henry, not one for games on his watch, quickly found himself playing one at the business end of a .38,
and the next thing he knew, he was on his skinny knees, sucking the barrel of his trusty .30-.30. All the cops found was a mash of wet shit in those big old shorts of his—that, and the word BUTTFUCK fingered through blood and brains on the mirror behind the bar. They never knew who did it.
Jimmy Long was never found. No one ever looked.
Ben Caldwell, who had shattered both heels, broken his left leg and six ribs in the crash, was well on the mend. Still, he had trouble sleeping these days, partly from the pain, but mostly from the strange dreams. Sometimes he would bolt awake in the darkness, cold and screaming.
Elsewhere, far removed from this little corner of the world, a young man out of Winterset—the Little Duke, to you and me—found himself a nice down-home girl in South Dakota. It didn’t last past the fall harvest, but what the hay—those long-distance relationships rarely do. As for those three spunky teenagers who had taken that one-way all the way to Des Moines in their ’58 Sunliner with the top down, well, their lives had taken them to jobs and adventure, after all.
And … oh yes … out in the Nevada desert, an ignoramus named Albrecht down at Area 51, canceled the Project.
~
Lynn placed a log in the hearth. She set her hands together as if in prayer and rubbed them, then threw her thick wool blanket around her as she curled up on the sofa. She stirred her late-night cocoa, and as she did, found herself looking up at the mantelpiece, at the faded photograph of her parents. Her mother had been dead for nearly three months; her father, nearly four. It was hard to believe sometimes. It didn’t seem so long ago when she was just their little girl, sitting in this very same spot between them … time was funny that way.
How well she knew.
Stop it, she told herself. You don’t know a damn thing. You don’t.
If only the nightmares would stop.
“Hi, you,” she said, and her smile, while small, was genuine. She had almost forgotten what it felt like.
Big Al leapt up beside her, and she coaxed the kitten to her lap. It settled in, clawing at the wool, and began to purr as she stroked its thick black fur. She had found her three weeks ago in the barn; poor thing had been bones. Ryan had said it was a stupid name for a girl cat, as he’d called it (he’d said the same about Abbott and Costello some years back), but Lee-Anne had loved it.
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