The snapping of the cervical vertebrae was startlingly loud, like a dry branch beneath an unwary heel in a hunter’s wood.
The feet continued to twitch after the powerful man dropped the corpse onto the carpet to lie alongside Pete Turner.
“Not me, m-m-mister.” The kid was backing away toward the door into the hall, the ax clattering on the floor. His hands were up, frantic. The stench of urine was strong in the room.
Mac snatched at the left hand of the terrified teenager and broke three fingers in a single vicious twist. The boy screamed at the top of his voice.
Mac smiled at him. A dreadful, cold smile.
“You sick little shit,” he breathed.
He shook the still-screaming boy, then whacked him against the wall again and again. The body felt light and thin in his hands, and at last he felt disgust come over him. Disgust for what the world had become, for the murderous little bastard, and disgust with himself for becoming just like the rest.
Picking the boy up, he carried him to the door and flung him outside, letting him crumple in a barely moaning heap. “You be gone now,” he said. “I find you here in half an hour, you’ll be dead. Remember this, it’s better to die decent than live like bloody ghouls.”
The boy had managed to crawl off. Before leaving for Mystic the next morning, Mac set a fire, burning the body of his friend along with his killer.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The first few spots of rain dappled the top of the oak table set in the corner of the patio, near the angle of the stone walls. But then it began to pour down with a serious purpose and it layered the wood, slick like a sheet of ice.
A battery-operated digital clock-calendar was clicking busily away in the corner of the room. It was almost the only unbroken thing in the whole of the luxurious log-built house.
Steve Romero looked at it, hypnotized by the constantly changing numbers.
“Wonder why they didn’t break that?” Kyle Lynch remarked, pulling the door shut, collar turned up against the sudden rain.
“Who needs to know what the time is? Or the date? Not now.”
“I do,” Kyle said, grinning. The empty Mondadori pistol was tucked in his belt, the Mannlicher rifle propped in a corner of the ravaged room.
“You do?”
“Sure.”
“Then I can tell you that it’s eleven minutes after four in the afternoon of October 12.”
“That mountain time, Steve? I mean, I need to know precisely what we’re talking about here. Wouldn’t want to miss my favorite soap by an hour because I was in the wrong zone.”
“What’s your favorite soap?”
The tall black navigator sniffed. “I guess… Yeah, Leanne and me used to watch ‘Pity’s Problems’ most weeks. Always sick kids and dying grannies. Used to laugh till I cried.”
“Well, it’s mountain time.”
“Sure, buddy?”
“We’re three miles from Aspen, Colorado. In the heart of the Rockies. If this isn’t mountain time, Kyle, then I don’t know what the fuck is.” He shook his head in mock disgust.
“Like you say, time doesn’t matter much anymore, does it?”
“Want to know the ambient temperature? Clock shows that, as well.”
“Why not?”
“In or out?”
Kyle threw back his head and laughed. “I don’t… No, make it outside. Just been out there and it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a steel cougar. Close to snow.”
Steve looked at the green digital figures. “There. It’s one degree above freezing. So you guessed about right.”
“Inside?”
It was Steve’s turn to laugh. “It’s one degree below freezing inside.”
“What we need is a fire,” Kyle suggested.
They found the cords of wood stacked neatly outside the back of the house, which sat high up the side of an isolated ski trail.
It didn’t take long to get a good fire blazing in the wide hearth. They managed to block the worst of the gaps in the shattered windows with tacked-up lengths of torn carpeting.
“All we need now are some weenies and a bag of marshmallows.”
“I’d settle for any kind of food.” Steve glanced at himself. “I’m six-two and I used to weigh in around one-fifty-five. Alison said it was like getting laid by a xylophone. Now it’s like a starving xylophone. I bet I’m way under one-forty now. Honestly can’t remember the last real food.”