Drawn Into Darkness(94)

He blinked, barking, “What?”

“Justin! Said! You’re not a bad guy, and he’d be right if—there’s a term the ancient Greek philosophers used. . . .”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“He’d be right if you weren’t such a consummate ontological asshole!” I ducked.

He struck so swiftly I got out no more than half a scream, fled no more than half an inch, before the butt of the shotgun smashed my upraised arm and bashed the side of my head. I felt no pain, just an odd inner snick, and I heard no whack of impact, not with my ears. My brain registered the bump, and I saw nothing that made any sense, just fireworks behind my eyelids, and then I heard, although I’m not sure it was real, the most clangorous crescendo of sound, crashing shouting yelling pounding bedlam. All my philosophies be damned, there was a hell after all, and it sure seemed as if I was going to it.





TWENTY-SEVEN





“Isaw somebody open the windows over there!” Justin’s words hung echoing in Forrest’s mind for a moment after he had said them.

“When?” Forrest demanded.

“Around dark.”

“Yesterday?” It must have been when they were burying Schweitzer.

“No! Today! Just a little while ago.”

Quinn leaned forward from his seat on the ground. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure,” Justin said with a country boy’s innate patience. “I was hiding out back, wondering if it was safe to go inside, and I saw somebody over there open the windows.”

Forrest felt Quinn’s stare and turned to face his brother. He knew how Quinn felt, because he felt the same way: incredulous, afraid to hope. He shook his head. “It’s too simple. Why would Mom—”

His words were snatched away by a loud, chilling scream.

It stopped his breath, a woman’s scream of deathly terror, coming from the direction of the pink house.

Forrest had never heard anything like that scream, not even in a horror movie. Such extremity, the terror of the valley of the shadow of death, could not be faked. Its primal power catapulted him into a run toward the pink shack, run, run, the fastest he had ever run in his life, during which he heard that piercing scream again, twice; Forrest felt it like a stiletto stabbing his gut. Quite abstractly by comparison he noticed headlights bearing down on him as he pounded across the asphalt road, but the car swerved to miss him, then turned in at the pink shack. With those screams reverberating in his ears, Forrest couldn’t think; not until the car stopped right in front of the pink shack, its high beams flooding the front door with much-needed light, did he realize it was his brother, Quinn, the quick thinker. And he had Justin with him. As Forrest sprinted across the front yard, he saw the kid leap out of the car’s passenger side, but then limp as he tried to run.

Forrest saw Justin and his brother peripherally, his focus all on Mom’s front door. Thinking his momentum would bust him right through it, he rammed it with his shoulder, but the door shrugged him off, made him mad. As Quinn and Justin ran up beside him, Forrest reared back and kicked in the door, right beside the knob, the way cops did on TV.

Those people, though, on TV, they always had guns to point and warnings to roar. Forrest had neither. When the door burst open, he retained just enough sense to flip on the indoor light switch, but then he stood frozen in helplessness at what he saw.

Justin shouted, “Uncle Steve, don’t!”

Forrest would not have recognized the man as Steven Stoat. He saw a monster with a grotesquely lopsided, blackened, rotting face, with slits for eyes, a snarl for a mouth, a hollow-chested shambles of a body interrupted in the midst of swinging some sort of a club at—Forrest saw red hair and crimson blood, bruised skin and torn clothes, a face way too still: Mom. On the floor, hurt. Forrest could look at nothing else. Yet somehow he kept getting closer; his feet had carried him through the door and inside the house without his knowing he had moved.

Beside him Quinn yelled, “Forrie, he’s got a gun!”

Forrest didn’t really care about anything his brother had to say. He just wanted to get to Mom and make sure she—please, God, she had to be alive—but Quinn grabbed him by the arm and yanked so Forrest’s head flew up. He saw Stoat fumbling with his club to point—

It wasn’t just a club. It was a gun. Long. Big. To Forrest it seemed as big as a cannon.

And he had no weapon with which to fight back, not even a stone to throw. Quinn and Justin looked as helpless as Forrest felt. Quinn still had that stupid jack handle, but what was the use of it against a gun?

One, two, three, Forrest thought crazily. Three beer cans on a fence rail, three ducks in a shooting gallery. Stoat would take out him and Quinn and Justin just like that.