Jocelyn and Sukie had both dived under the dining table to lie sobbing alongside the thrashing, dying body of their half brother.
Effectively there were only four adults to try to repel the attackers: Mac, Paul, Jeanne and Pamela herself.
There were figures struggling to push aside the broken door and gain access through the hall. A window on the far side of the house had been broken, and Mac could smell more smoke.
In a moment of dazzling clarity he realized that it was all over.
Whatever happened in the next couple of minutes, life at the white frame house on Melville Avenue, Mystic, was finished.
“Take out the father!” shouted someone from the back of the building. It was a woman’s voice, hoarse and flooded with anger and vicious hatred.
Mac was heading toward the hallway, intent on getting his own Brazzi shotgun. He ran past the blazing sideboard, slipping in the spreading pool of his oldest son’s blood, when he became aware of movement behind him, by the smashed window.
There was a man in a fur hood, his head and shoulders halfway through the broken casement. He was holding a blue-steeled automatic in his right hand, leveling it at Jeanne, who was near the doorway.
Without breaking stride, Mac swiveled and picked up the heavy blue-and-white porcelain bowl, then heaved it as he would a discus. It sliced across the room and exploded in the man’s face, driving jagged splinters into his eyes.
Before he could begin to scream in blinded horror, Mac had jinked sideways, plucking up the blood-slick hilt of the cleaver where Pamela had dropped it. He grabbed at the greasy hair of the yelling man, making his neck taut, the tendons standing out like harp strings.
He cut the throat with a single savage blow, then vaulted the corner of the table and reached the hall.
The attack had been far better organized than the previous raid against them by mad Preacher Casey. But the work that Paul and John McGill had put in to strengthen doors and windows had thwarted the outsiders.
The front entrance was a congested shambles of splintered wood and twisted steel, with fully half a dozen men fighting to get in. But Mac’s five-round pump-action Brazzi rested on the antique settle in the hall with one of the Winchester Defender 1700s alongside it.
Mac’s face was a distorted mask of blind hatred and rage, lips peeled back off his teeth in a feral snarl.
He grabbed up the blued-steel Brazzi and emptied it into the doorway. Dropping the shotgun without even glancing up to see what carnage the powerful shells had done, he snatched up the Winchester and fired off all eight rounds. He went on pulling the trigger again and again, even though the hammer was clicking on an empty chamber.
He wasn’t aware of the shooting in the room behind him, blanking his mind off from the screaming and shouting, not even realizing that all of the noises were fading away.
All he could see was his youngest son enveloped in a golden hail of fire, and John, his firstborn, tumbling to the floor, arterial blood gouting over the fresh icing of the birthday cake.
Mac could see both scenes, repeated and repeated in his mind’s eye.
Then a voice reached him, high and thin with pain.
“Dad!”
In front of him he saw a jumbled pile of meat. Raw and bloody.
“Dad? Stop it!”
Now the voice was familiar enough, though changed. Pamela. The birthday girl. He’d never heard her voice sound like that…on the edge of some undefinable terror…a voice from a nightmare.
Mac kept the pump-action Winchester going, squeezing the trigger time after time. He wasn’t taking any chances on anyone trying to get in…into his home… and harming his family.
“They’ve gone.” Tears were in her voice. “Please stop, Dad. The gun’s empty.”
He moved his feet, aware that he was standing in blood.
A pool of blood.
A lake of blood.
Blood still oozing from the mountain of meat jammed in the front door of Melville Avenue, Mystic. Meat that contained sections that were almost human. A hand, and a portion of scalp. A severed foot, still in a hiking boot. A knife with its blade broken in a jagged edge of steel. A segment of flesh showing splintered ends of ribs.