“The place you’d think of last,” she had replied without hesitation. “The unlikeliest pla ce on earth. Akron or Afghanistan, makes no difference.”
That call had made Terry rich, because he had shared his Kitty-Cat income with her, penny for penny. And that call had led him here. Not Akron but Wentworth, Ohio’s Good Cheer Community. A place he had never been before. He had picked the area in the first place by shutting his eyes and sticking a pushpin into a wall-map of the United States, and Terry had turned out to be right, Bill Harris’s horrified reaction notwithstanding. What he had originally regarded as a kind of sabbatical had-
Lost in his reverie, he walked straight into Jim Reed’s back. The boys had stopped on the edge of the path. Jim had raised the gun and was pointing it south, his face pale and grim.
“What’s-” Johnny be gan, and Dave Reed clapped a hand over his mouth before he could say anymore.
There was a gunshot, then a scream. As if the scream had been a signal, Marielle Soderson opened her eyes, arched her back, uttered a long, guttural sound that might have been words, and then began to shiver all over. Her feet rattled on the floor.
“Doc!” Cynthia cried, running to Marielle. “Doc!”
Gary came first. He stumbled in the kitchen doorway and would have knee-dropped on to his wife’s stomach if Cynthia hadn’t pushed him backward. The smell of cooking sherry hung around him in a sweet cloud.
“Wass happen?” Gary asked. “Wass wrong my wi?”
Marielle whipped her head from side to side. It thumped against the wall. The picture of Daisy, the Corgi who could count and add, fell off and landed on her chest. Mercifully, the glass in the frame didn’t break. Cynthia grabbed it and tossed it aside. As she did, she saw the gauze over the stump of the woman’s arm had turned red. The stitches-some of them, at least-had broken.
“Doc!” she screamed.
He came hurrying across from the door, where he had been standing and staring out, almost hypnotized by the changes which were still taking place. There were snarling sounds from the greenbelt out back, more screams, more gunshots. At least two. Gary looked in that direction, blinking owlishly. “Wass happen?” he asked again.
Marielle stopped shivering. Her fingers moved, as if she was trying to snap them, and then that stopped, too. Her eyes stared up blankly at the ceiling. A single tear trickled from the corner of the left one. Doc took her wrist and felt for a pulse. He stared at Cynthia with a kind of desperate intensity as he did. “I guess if you want to go on working downstreet, you’ll have to turn in that cashier’s duster for a dancehall dress,” he said. “The E-Z Stop’s a saloon now. The Lady Day.”
“Is she dead?” Cynthia asked.
“Yuh,” Old Doc said, lowering Marielle’s hand. “For whatever it’s worth, I think she ran out of chances fifteen minutes ago. She needed a trauma unit, not an old veterinarian with shaky hands.”
More screams. Shouts. Someone was crying out there, crying and shouting you should have stopped him, you should have stopped him. A sudden surety came to Cynthia: Steve, a guy she’d already come to like, was dead. The shooters were out there, and they’d killed him.
“Wass happen?” Gary asked for the third time. Neither the old man nor the girl answered him. Although he had been right there, kneeling in the kitchen doorway beside her when Billingsley pronounced his wife dead, Gary didn’t seem to realize what had happened until Old Doc pulled the brown corduroy cover off his couch and spread it over her. Then it got through to Gary, drunk or not. His face began to shiver. He groped under the couch cover, found his wife’s hand, brought it out, kissed it. Then he held it against his cheek and began to cry.
When Jim Reed saw rapidly approaching shapes coming up the path toward him, his excitement vanished. Terror filled the space where it had been. For the first time it occurred to him that coming out here might not have been a very intelligent idea.
If you see strangers in the woods, come right back. That was what his mom had said. But he couldn’t even move. He was frozen. Then there was a horrible growling sound in the undergrowth, the sound of an animal, and he panicked. He did not see Collie Entragian and Steve Ames when they burst into view; he saw killers who had left their vans to infiltrate the woods. He didn’t hear Johnny’s muffled yell, or see Johnny struggling to free himself from Dave’s clutching hands.
“Shoot, Jimmy!” Dave shrieked. His voice was a trembling, freaked-out falsetto. “Shoot, Jeezum Crow, it’s them!”
Jim fired and the one on the left went down, clutching for the top of his head, which blew back in a red film of scalp and hair and bone. The rifle the man had been carrying tumbled to the side of the path. Blood poured through his fingers and sheeted down over his face.
“Get the other one!” Dave cried. “Get him, Jimmy, get him before he gets us!”
“No, don’t shoot!” the other guy said, holding out his hands. There was a rifle in one of them. “Please, man, don’t shoot me!”
He was going to, though, going to shoot him dead. Jim pointed the gun at him, hardly aware that he was yelling at the guy, calling him names: cocksucker, bastard, fuckwad. All he wanted to do was kill the guy and get back to his mother. Him and Dave both. Coming out here had been a terrible mistake.
Johnny rammed both elbows back into Dave Reed’s stomach, which was trim and hard but unprepared. Dave let out a surprised Ooof! and Johnny tore out of his grasp. Before Jim could fire again, Johnny had seized his arm and twisted it savagely. The boy screamed in pain. His hand opened and David Carver’s pistol thumped to the path.
“What are you doing?” Dave yelled. “He’ll kill us, are you crazy?”
“Your brother just shot Collie Entragian from down the block, how’s that for crazy?” Johnny said. Yes, that was what the boy had done, but whose fault was it? He was the adult here. He should have taken the gun as soon as they were safely away from Cammie Reed’s fanatic eyes and dry orders. He could have done it; why hadn’t he?
“No,” Jim whispered, turning to him, shaking his head. “No!” But his eyes already knew; they were huge, and filling with tears.
“Why would he be out here?” Dave asked. “Why didn’t he warn us, for God’s-”
The growl, which had never really stopped, reasserted itself in the hot red air, quickly rising to a snarl. The man who was still on his feet-the guy from the rental truck-turned toward it, instinctively raising his hands. The rifle in them was a very small one, and the guy might be right to use it that way, shielding his neck with it rather than pointing it.
Then the creature which had chased them up the path sprang out of the woods. Johnny’s ability to think consciously and coherently ceased when he saw it-all he could do was see. That clear sight-more curse than blessing-had never failed him before, nor did it now.
The thing was a nightmare with a tawny brown coat, crooked green eyes, and a mouthful of jagged orange teeth. Not a cat but a misbegotten feline freak. It leaped, splintering the upheld Mossberg rifle with its enormous claws and tearing it away from the clenched hands which had held it. Then, still snarling, it went for Steve’s throat.
From Audrey Wyler’s journal June 12, 1995
It happened again-the daydream thing. If that’s what it is. 3rd or 4th time, but the first (I think) since I’ve been keeping this journal, amp; by far the most vivid. It always seems to happen when things around here aren’t going well, amp; oh God are things around here ever not going well!
Herb got up with Seth this morning, ran through the shower with him (saves lots of time), and when they came down Seth was sulking amp; Herb had. the start of a black eye. I didn’t have to ask him about it. Seth made him punch himself, of course, the same way he made him twist his lip when we got back from the ice cream parlor and Seth discovered his damned Power Wagon was gone. I looked at Herb amp; he gave me a little head-shake, telling me to keep quiet. Which I did. I’ve discovered you can always find something to be grateful for, in this case that making Herb punch himself was all Seth did (although it’s not really Seth who does the bad stuff but the other one, the Stalky Little Boy). Seth likes to stand by the bathroom sink and watch Herb shave in the mornings. The SLB could have popped out and made him cut his throat with his own Bic disposable, I suppose. Frightens me to write such a thing, but sometimes it’s better to have it out on the page. Like squeezing infected material out of a cut.