Facts. Stick to facts.
Wide trigger. The smooth action and the deep-set, checkered hammer clicking back.
Mercy Oliphaunt made an instant change of tactics as she saw the blued-steel revolver in the hand of her intended victim, showing a moment of cunning sanity as she ducked away and lunged toward the helpless teenage boy.
Jim had a splinter of a second to alter his aim and snap off a shot at the moving target.
“Missed me, Beelzebub!” she giggled in delight as she disappeared behind the table.
“Stop her, Daddy!” Sly’s voice almost unrecognizable in the depths of terror.
Jim dropped to his knees, but he snagged the tablecloth and pulled it half off the table, cutlery and china and glasses clattering and shattering on the floor, making it impossible to see clearly enough to try for a second shot.
There was a strange sound amid the chaos, a noise that managed to be both dull and sharp at the same time.
“You wicked slattern,” said Mercy Oliphaunt, sounding just as if she’d caught one of her pupils writing obscenities on the outhouse wall.
“I stabbed her, Dad,” Heather said, a tremble in her voice that mixed fear and exultation.
Now Jim could see what was going on.
Sly had his knees drawn up to his chin and was waving his hands in front of his staring eyes.
Heather, backing away toward the far side of the table, was crawling through the detritus of the nightmare meal toward Carrie and Kyle.
And there was Mercy Oliphaunt, face twisted in a rictus of grinning hatred, kneeling in the shadows. The steel carving blade was still gripped tightly in her right hand, twitching as though it had been connected to a high-voltage wire.
The hilt of a butter knife stuck out of her left eye, behind the distorting glasses, like some obscene piece of jewelry. Blood, mingled with clear, aqueous fluid, leaked from the blinded orb.
“Tried to take my little ones away. School comes first.” She crawled very slowly toward Jim Hilton. “I stopped that nonsense for good and all.”
“Shoot her, Dad.”
Heather’s voice broke the hypnotic spell that had gripped Jim, turning him into a helpless rabbit in front of the weaving coils of a rattler. The wide trigger came back once. His hand jerked upward, the roar deafening under the long table, with a blur of smoke from the explosion.
The .44 almost ripped the old woman’s head clear off her scrawny shoulders. The bullet struck her through the bridge of her beaky nose, angling upward and exiting through the top of the table, smashing into the white-painted ceiling. It lifted the top of her cranium, splattering the floor with blood and brains and matted silvery hair.
Her glasses flew off, landing right by Jim’s knee, the thick lenses slobbered with a gray-pink grue.
“It’s all right, Sly,” Jim said, trying to keep his voice steady and reassuring. “It’s over.”
When they had calmed down a little, they dragged the limp corpse outside and tidied up the dining room, restoring things to normal. Heather, Sly and Kyle went out into the tidy little kitchen to start cooking up something approximating a proper meal.
They’d agreed that it would be foolish to leave such a secure place, when there was warmth and shelter, but that they’d move on north first thing in the morning.
“At least we got some gas, and there’s quite a cache of canned meat and fruit in the larder.” Carrie was still pale from the effects of the horrific scene. “Won’t be sorry to get out and back into the clean air. Got the feeling that she might rise up like one of the walking dead and come after me in the darkness.”
She and Jim were alone together in the hall, with framed steel engravings of European mountains frowning grimly down from both the walls.
He put his arm around her. “Want to stay the night with me, Carrie?” he asked.
“Yeah. Think I would. Not for…you know. Just to get me some warm vibes from you.”
HE WENT UP the narrow staircase to check out the sleeping arrangements. Mercy’s own room was neat, with a dimity nightgown laid over the end of the double bed. Two guest rooms each had single beds. And then in the attic, two small rooms had been knocked through into one.