Shaddack came from the darkness in the corridor, into the pale and inconstant pulse of light from her flash, and rammed the barrel of his shotgun into her stomach. “You’re gonna be sorry now,” he said excitedly.
27
They pulled the trapdoor down. A shaft of light from the closet shot up to the rafters, but it didn’t illuminate the far corner in which Harry sat with his useless legs splayed out in front of him.
His bad hand was curled in his lap, while his good hand fiercely clasped the pistol.
His heart was hammering harder and faster than it had in twenty years, since the battlefields of Southeast Asia. His stomach was churning. His throat was so tight he could barely breathe. He was dizzy with fear. But, God in heaven, he sure felt alive.
With a squeak and clatter, they unfolded the ladder.
28
Tommy Shaddack shoved the muzzle into her belly and almost blew her guts out, almost wasted her, before he realized how pretty she was, and then he didn’t want to kill her any more, at least not right away, not until he’d made her do some things with him, do some things to him. She’d have to do whatever he wanted, anything, whatever he told her to do, or he could just smear her across the wall, yeah, she was his, and she better realize that, or she’d be sorry, he’d make her sorry.
Then he saw the girl beside her, a pretty little girl, only ten or twelve, and she excited him even more. He could have her first, and then the older one, have them any which way he wanted them, make them do things, all sorts of things, and then hurt them, that was his right, they couldn’t deny him, not him, because all the power was in his hands now, he had seen the moonhawk three times.
He pushed through the open door, into the room, keeping the gun in the woman’s belly, and she backed up to accommodate him, pulling the girl with her. Booker was behind them, a startled expression on his face. Tommy Shaddack said, “Drop your gun and back away from it, or I’ll make raspberry jelly out of this bitch, I swear I will, you can’t move fast enough to stop me.”
Booker hesitated.
“Drop it!” Tommy Shaddack insisted.
The agent let go of the revolver and sidestepped away from it.
Keeping the muzzle of the Remington hard against the woman’s belly, he made her edge around until she could reach the light switch and click on the fluorescents. The room leaped out of shadows.
“Okay, now, all of you,” Tommy Shaddack said, “sit down on those three stools, by that lab bench, yeah, there, and don’t do anything funny.”
He stepped back from the woman and covered them all with the shotgun. They looked scared, and that made him laugh.
Tommy was getting excited now, really excited, because he had decided he would kill Booker in front of the woman and the girl, not swift and clean but slowly, the first shot in the legs, let him lie on the floor and wriggle a while, the second shot in the gut but not from such a close range that it finished him instantly, make him hurt, make the woman and the girl watch, show them what a customer they had in Tommy Shaddack, what a damned tough customer, make them grateful for being spared, so grateful they’d get on their knees and let him do things to them, do all the things he had wanted to do for thirty years but which he had denied himself, let off thirty years of steam right here, right now, tonight… .
29
Beyond the house, filtering into the attic through vents in the eaves, came eerie howling, point and counterpoint, first solo and then chorus. It sounded as if the gates of hell had been thrown open, letting denizens of the pit pour forth into Moonlight Cove.
Harry worried about Sam, Tessa, and Chrissie.
Below him, the unseen conversion team locked the collapsible ladder in place. One of them began to climb into the attic.
Harry wondered what they would look like. Would they be just ordinary men—old Doc Fitz with a syringe and a couple of deputies to assist him? Or would they be Boogeymen? Or some of the machine-men Sam had talked about?