“You ain’t leaving,” said Packard, “if that’s what you’re rooting after.”
“I’m just saying —”
“We know what you’re saying son, and I ain’t listening. If I see you hitch up your britches to leave I’ll string you up by your balls. If you’ve got any.”
The bastard would try it too, thought Davidson, even if he only had one hand to do it with. Just go with the flow, he told himself, trying to stop his lip curling. If Packard went out to find the monsters and his damn bazooka backfired, that was his business. Let it be.
“There’s a whole tribe of them,” Lou was quietly pointing out. “According to this man. So how do we take out so many of them?”
“Strategy,” said Packard.
“We don’t know their positions.”
“Surveillance,” replied Packard.
“They could really fuck us up Sheriff,” Jebediah observed, picking a collapsed gum-bubble from his moustache.
“This is our territory,” said Eleanor. “We got it: we keep it.”
Jebediah nodded.
“Yes, ma,” he said.
“Suppose they just disappeared? Suppose we can’t find them no more?” Lou was arguing. “Couldn’t we just let ‘em go to ground?”
“Sure,” said Packard. “And then we’re left waiting around for them to come out again and devour the women folk.”
“Maybe they mean no harm —” Lou replied.
Packard”s reply was to raise his bandaged hand.
“They done me harm.”
That was incontestable.
Packard continued, his voice hoarse with feeling.
“Shit, I want them come-bags so bad I’m going out there with or without help. But we’ve got to out-think them, out manoeuvre them, so we don’t get anybody hurt.”
The man talks some sense, thought Davidson. Indeed, the whole room seemed impressed. Murmurs of approval all round; even from the mantelpiece.
Packard rounded on the deputy again.
“You get your ass moving, son. I want you to call up that bastard Crumb out of Caution and get his boys down here with every goddam gun and grenade they’ve got. And if he asks what for you tell him Sheriff Packard’s declaring a State of Emergency, and I’m requisitioning every asshole weapon in fifty miles, and the man on the other end of it. Move it, son.”
Now the room was positively glowing with admiration, and Packard knew it.
“We’ll blow the fuckers apart,” he said.
For a moment the rhetoric seemed to work its magic on Davidson, and he half-believed it might be possible; then he remembered the details of the procession, tails, teeth and all, and his bravado sank without trace.
They came up to the house so quietly, not intending to creep, just so gentle with their tread nobody heard them.
Inside, Eugene’s anger had subsided. He was sitting with his legs up on the table, an empty bottle of whisky in front of him. The silence in the room was so heavy it suffocated.
Aaron, his face puffed up with his father”s blows, was sitting beside the window. He didn’t need to look up to see them coming across the sand towards the house, their approach sounded in his veins. His bruised face wanted to light up with a smile of welcome, but he repressed the instinct and simply waited, slumped in beaten resignation, until they were almost upon the house. Only when their massive bodies blocked out the sunlight through the window did he stand up. The boy’s movement woke Eugene from his trance.
“What is it, boy?”
The child had backed off from the window, and was standing in the middle of the room, sobbing quietly with anticipation. His tiny hands were spread like sun-rays, his fingers jittering and twitching in his excitement.
“What’s wrong with the window, boy?”
Aaron heard one of his true father’s voices eclipse Eugene’s mumblings. Like a dog eager to greet his master after a long separation, the boy ran to the door and tried to claw it open. It was locked and bolted.
“What’s that noise, boy?”
Eugene pushed his son aside and fumbled with the key in the lock, while Aaron’s father called to his child through the door. His voice sounded like a rush of water, counter pointed by soft, piping sighs. It was an eager voice, a loving voice.