Big Mac bit his lower lip.
“Excellent,” Sam said. “Let’s get to work.”
He turned and headed for the helicopter. Behind him, Winston said to Big Mac, “That was long overdue.”
“Shut the hell up,” Big Mac said.
Two cruisers rolled in off US 41. Sam waved them forward and pointed to Deputy Winston. The cars continued on.
Bentley sat in the shade inside the Lifeflight helicopter’s open door. The stick of a lollipop protruded from the corner of his mouth. “What’s the news, Chief? All quiet on the western front?”
“So far. You?”
“Fueled up and awaiting the disaster we all hope never comes.”
Sam couldn’t agree more.
Chapter Forty-Two
Theresa bustled about the kitchen, simultaneously preparing dinner and Dustin’s snacks for the night. She sizzled with energy.
This brief time period was the only upside to her curse of premonition. On the rare occasions when she could make all the pieces fit before the event, she could take action to prevent it. That purpose, that sense of mission, sparked an adrenaline surge that fueled a rapid chain of action.
But that wasn’t the only thing that had pumped up Theresa’s enthusiasm. Laura was back. Theresa wasn’t going to take on the burden of stopping the longarex alone, as she’d had to do with so many premonitions in the past. She and Laura had taken on the evil spirit at Galaxy Farm together and won. By herself, Theresa knew she didn’t stand a chance against the entire coven. At three or more, she was outnumbered any way she cut it. But, somehow, she was certain that she and Laura together would take on these witches and win again. Adding Laura evened the odds, no matter how many were arrayed against them.
She scooped up Dustin’s accumulated snacks from the counter. She picked up his backpack from the kitchen table and her hand went numb. The kitchen popped out of existence and a premonition took its place.
A low circle of flame danced at the base of a wide ring of kindling. In the center, two shadows, side by side, were strapped to poles like sacrificial victims. One shadow was too familiar. The twin horsemen of dread and panic galloped in, arriving with the speed that only a parent can summon. The flames leapt up to bonfire level and in the resulting light illuminated her worst fears. Dustin was tied to one pole. Fire spread forward and licked at his feet. He screamed in agony.
Theresa dropped the backpack and the quiet kitchen returned around her. Her heart pounded in panic. Her hands shook so hard she had to grip the sink to keep them still.
Not since her first premonition when she was a girl had a family member figured as the prominent character, the victim. That time, the imperiled person had been her mother. This time was worse. Her son, her flesh and blood, her universe, was threatened. She’d always wondered how she would take it if a vision foretold her own death. She’d have traded this one for that without hesitation.
These premonitions were all connected. Dustin was destined to be part of this plot to resurrect the longarex, and from the looks of it, an integral player in whatever sick ritual the coven had planned. She was not about to let that happen.
Instinct number one was to run. Pack Dustin into the Explorer and drive. Destination? Key West, Bangor, Seattle, wherever was as far as she could get from here without having to swim, far enough to escape the reach of whatever evil was gathering in this little Tennessee town.
But what if they could just substitute another child for Dustin in whatever sacrificial rite they had planned at the sabbat? If Theresa ran out to try and ensure the safety of her son, she’d leave the town wide open.
Then she remembered it wasn’t just the town in general, but also Sam in specific. The good-looking sheriff had slipped into her protective circle when she’d seen him in a vision. She considered his safety now in her hands. If she didn’t head off the witch’s worst work, would he survive the blazing horror she’d seen for him? Could she live with that?
What would Laura say? She’d tell Theresa to go and save her son. Then she’d try to break up the sabbat by herself, fail, and probably die trying. Not an acceptable outcome at all.
None of her actions ever ensured an outcome anyway. Even after all these years, she could never guarantee whether her reaction to her vision would change the timeline or ensure it. Events had cut both ways in the past. Her attempted escape with Dustin could just as easily lead him into the coven’s clutches as it could to safety. She wouldn’t know until it was too late.
Paralysis struck. She closed her eyes and tried to herd the random stampede of conflicting thoughts in one direction, towards the one correct resolution.
The microwave dinged that dinner was ready.
Moultrie needed her, Laura needed her, and Sam needed her. The three witches at the Petty place had to be stopped. Dustin was in danger and she had to put him in the safest place possible. The Princess Day Care sleep-in could not have been safer. Dozens of kids would be adult supervised in a place built to keep kids safe, a place miles from where the longarex would be. Sam had promised to send a deputy over to keep the children out of harm’s way. That was three levels of security she could trust, and she didn’t have to panic Dustin with a scary all-night escape to some unknown destination.
She pulled a plate of steaming burritos out of the microwave.
“Dustin! Dinner! Hurry up or you’ll be late for the dinosaur movie.”
He ran in with a big smile of anticipation on his face. “Burritos! You are seriously the best mom ever.”
She prayed she’d still be a mom when the sun rose tomorrow.
Chapter Forty-Three
Laura’s phone rang as she loaded the Donkey Day action bag into her car. The caller’s number did not display.
“Hello?”
“Laura?” a woman asked.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know nobody else to call,” she said. Her voice was low, barely more than a whisper, no one Laura recognized. “Child Services don’t answer. The hotline is all the way in Nashville. The sheriff’s department is at Donkey Day. All I could think of was you.”
Laura ran through a list of women this might be. A parent from last year? A parent from this year? Too long a list.
“Who’s this?” Laura asked.
“Someone needs to come quick,” the woman said, “before something happens to Karlina. You know where to take her, what to do.”
Laura searched for a memory of a Karlina. She hadn’t had one in any of her classes, but that didn’t mean anything. Moultrie Elementary was big, and not the only elementary in the county, not to mention hundreds of younger preschool siblings.
“What’s wrong?”
“Her parents is all strung out on the meth. She been in the house for days and ain’t nobody taking care of her. Her parents is passed out all day. Ain’t no guns or nothing there. Someone’s just got to scoop her up and save her.”
Laura had seen stories like this dozens of times all over the country. She gripped her phone tighter.
“Just go get her then,” she said.
“Noo!” the woman hissed. “My husband would kill me. You gotta go—448 Beaker’s Mill Road. A white trailer—”
The phone went silent. Call ended.
Laura cursed under her breath. Of all the nights to have this happen. She checked her watch. Beaker’s Mill Road wasn’t far out of town. She could make it there and get the girl to safety before she was supposed to meet Theresa. If it was as easy as the woman said.
Whatever was going to happen at Donkey Day happened after dark. That was hours away. There was no decision to make. She got into her car and headed to Beaker’s Mill Road. She’d call the Sheriff from there, if need be. She remembered she owed him a return call anyway.
The trailer sat back a few hundred yards from the road, at the end of a rocky dirt driveway. Dim lights backlit cheap curtains in the side bedroom window. No car in the driveway. Weeds grew all the way to the sagging front screen door, a classic meth-hea
d situation. She imagined everything inside that could be sold had been sold, all in vain to satiate an insatiable need.
Laura rolled up the driveway and stopped short of the trailer. She shut off the car. A tinny country song played from a cheap radio inside the trailer. The front door was open inward, or perhaps missing. The living room beyond lay in total darkness.
She got out of her car and eased the door closed without a sound. Her pulse quickened. She approached the front door with slow, measured steps along an irregular path of overgrown paving stones. She peered up at the screen door and into the impenetrable dark.
From the other side of the door came a sobbing sniff, then a hitched, sharp breath. Laura envisioned a dirty, scared little girl, dressed in days-old clothing, cowering in a dark corner. She mounted the steps. At the top, she shielded her eyes and looked in through the screen.
Rhonda Mears sat on the couch. She had a strange, enormous shotgun pointed dead at Laura. The barrel was easily over an inch across. Rhonda smiled and let out a sniffing, little plaintive sob.
“Come quick before something happens to Karlina,” she said in a mocking tone.
The shotgun boomed. A thick, black beanbag blasted out of one end and through the haggard screen. It slammed Laura in the chest and knocked her off the front porch. She landed flat on her back and her head slammed the ground hard enough to see stars. The heavy beanbag knocked all the wind out of her. She sucked in short wheezing breaths as she stared at the sky.
Rhonda’s face loomed over her. “Hey, bitch.”
She swiped Laura across the face with the butt of the gun. Laura went unconscious.
Chapter Forty-Four
“I’ll be back early,” Theresa told her son. “You may not spend the whole night.”
She didn’t need to ask Dustin if he was ready. The look on his face in the rearview mirror was all anticipation. Anytime a boy got to go out in public in pajamas was an exciting event to begin with. Add in dinosaur movies, and who could blame him.
She jerked the Explorer to a stop outside Princess Day Care. The parking lot was near empty, but the lights were on and the muffled melee of playing kids sounded from within.
Before she could unfasten her seat belt, Dustin was in motion. He grabbed his sleeping bag and plastic T. rex and was gone. Theresa grumbled an epithet under her breath. At the door to the day care, Ms. Gentry stood smiling and giving a cheery wave.
Dustin’s bag of snacks sat on the floor behind the passenger seat. Theresa snatched it and went to chase down her son. She caught him halfway to the door.
“Dustin, your snacks!”
Ms. Gentry met her there and extended her hand. “So glad you made it. The other children were asking for him.”
Theresa touched her hand and the day-care center dissolved into a vibrant premonition.
Four children sat stone-faced and staring with lifeless, glassy eyes from the back of an SUV. Theresa could feel that their collective heartbeats were at dead slow. In the front seat, with a self-satisfied smirk on her face, sat Ms. Gentry.
Theresa yanked back her hand. The vision disappeared. Chills ran up her arm. Dustin tugged at the bag of snacks in her other hand. He had a quizzical expression as he looked up at her.
“Mom?”
Theresa dropped the snack bag and grabbed him under the arms. Her heart sent an adrenaline blast through her body. She swept her son up as if he weighed nothing at all.
“Mom!”
She didn’t have time to explain. She couldn’t explain to him what she’d seen without terrifying him. She trundled him back to the Explorer. Behind her, Ms. Gentry’s expression morphed from surprise to distress. She pulled out her phone and dialed a number.
“We have to go home,” Theresa said to her son. “Now.”
“But the movie!”
She plopped Dustin down against the rear tire. She dropped to one knee and locked her eyes on his.
“We have to go home,” she said. “Remember when Daddy was dangerous and you had to do just as I said?”
Dustin’s jaw dropped. There had been a night, a night with Bastard Bobby in a drunken rage about the impending divorce. She’d awakened Dustin with the same words she said now.
“We need to get out of here to somewhere safe.”
He snapped several quick nods of understanding. She yanked open the door and he bolted inside. By the time she was back in the driver’s seat he was white-faced and buckled in.
“I-is Daddy coming back?” he said.
“No, honey,” she said as she peeled away from the day care. “It’s something else.”
She couldn’t tell him that it was something worse.
Chapter Forty-Five
Minutes later in the day care, Ms. Gentry popped in the DVD and the big television screen came to life, though the picture on it was fuzzy.
“Magic glasses!” she said. “Everyone put them on!”
The children donned pairs of oversized glasses and looked like a sea of pint-sized Buddy Holly impersonators. A flock of animated doves flew across the screen and then seemed to explode outward into the audience. The children ooed in wonder. Several reached out to touch the birds that seemed to be right in front of them.
With her charges properly distracted, Ms. Gentry backed away to the rear of the room. She knelt and pulled against the low air-conditioning intake vent. With a lot of effort, she overcame the suction and popped the cover free. She struck a wooden match and touched a lump of oil-soaked coal in a shallow earthenware dish. It puffed into flame then settled into a dull-red glow.
A mixture of dried leaves and herbs half filled a small paper cup next to the dish. She sprinkled the contents onto the rosy coal. The herbs blackened and began to smolder. A gray-blue smoke curled up from the bowl and the air-conditioning sucked it up into the shaft.
On the television, a digitally animated mouse in a pirate hat swiped a sword at a cat in an old British naval uniform. The cat fell over the side of the ship and the children laughed.
Smoke curled from the three exhaust vents in the room. Ms. Gentry smiled and closed the door to the hallway.
In moments, only the sound of the television filled the room. The kids’ raucous cajoling, the running commentaries on the movie, the general controlled mayhem, all petered out. They just sat watching the movie, or really just staring at the screen. The onscreen mouse slapped the cat with a fish. None of the children reacted.
Ms. Gentry pulled out a list of five names, the names Dalton had provided. Only four were present.
“Sherry, Janet, Gerry, Francis,” she read. “Stand up.”
Four children stood, still staring at the screen without comprehension.
“Come with me,” she said.
The chosen children picked their way through the silent crowd. These four met the requirements, all unbaptized and with the right combination of test scores, the right attributes to fill the holes in the sabbat mosaic. They followed her out the door.
The rest of the children sat mesmerized. In the front row, a puddle of urine grew underneath one girl. A trickle of it meandered across the linoleum floor like a snake and found a boy’s pant leg. Neither child moved. The front door swung shut as Ms. Gentry and her charges left the building.
Ms. Gentry loaded the four children into the rear of her minivan. They took their seats in silence, sat up straight and folded their hands in their laps. Every parent’s dream.
A sheriff’s cruiser barreled into the parking lot. The lights played across the nose of the minivan as the cruiser swung to block its exit. Ms. Gentry shielded her eyes against the glare and rolled the van’s side door shut.
Deputy Donna Graff stepped out of the cruiser. Her nightstick slapped her thigh as she advanced towards Ms. Gentry. Her right hand slid to the butt of her pistol.
“The sheriff wanted me to check on the kids here,” she said. “Everything okay?”
“Just fine, Officer,” Ms. Gentry answered. “Just taking a few of the children out for a
ride.”
Deputy Graff peered in the window of the van at the four catatonic children. She smiled.
“Aren’t you short one?”
Ms. Gentry shook her head. “Something spooked Grissom at the last minute and she took her son back home. I called it in.”
“I’d better check up on that,” Deputy Graff said. “His mother might try something stupid. See you later tonight.”
As Ms. Gentry took her place in the driver’s seat, she checked the children in the rearview mirror. Four out of five wasn’t bad. Good thing there was a backup plan for the missing boy.
As soon as Theresa and Dustin arrived home, she hustled him inside and threw the deadbolt behind them. She pounded her code into the security system. It beeped and the red Armed light lit. Her emotional state stood down from panicked to anxious. She at least had a first line of defense against whoever thought her son was fit for sacrifice.
Dustin stood in the hallway, frozen. His eyes pleaded with his mother for protection. Her heart tore inside her for scaring him so badly. She struggled to put on a more normal front.
“We’re okay now,” she said. She suppressed the tremor in her voice. “We’re fine here. We’ll stick together tonight, make popcorn and have a great time.” She looped an arm around his shoulders and he wrapped his around her waist in a bear hug. “Sorry for scaring you. Everything will be okay.”
“Are you sure?” he said into her blouse.
“Absolutely,” she lied. “Now put your jacket in your room and we’ll get some DVDs going.”
He let go like a nonswimmer pushing out into the deep end of the pool. He scampered to his room. Theresa whipped out her phone. She dialed Laura. Six rings and it rolled over to voice mail. She tapped out a message.
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