Aurora(58)

After sixteen years of living on Shit Street, Rusty Wheeler had finally drawn a monster hand.





22.





Outside Jericho

Thom lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, and counted the minutes. He hadn’t wanted to know exactly when it was coming, lest his reaction seem anything less than credible and surprised, but now that he was lying awake at 3:35 a.m., he realized a window would have been nice.

He rolled over on his side. Ann-Sophie’s cascade of white-blond hair lay across the pillow, visible in the soft blue glow coming from the night-vision light in the bathroom. Thom hated stumbling around in the night; it went back to a fear of sleeping in the dark that he’d developed when he was a teenager, after the accident. For at least a year after it happened, he couldn’t close his eyes at night without seeing Kyle Luedtke’s face, upside-down, laughing at him. Sleeping with a light on seemed to make it better, if only because when he opened his eyes the light chased the images away. So, at the age of eighteen, a grown-ass man, he’d started going to bed with a night-light again.

Ann-Sophie had been the only one of his girlfriends over the years who’d never questioned it. In the middle of his fumbling cover story the first time she’d spent the night, she’d interrupted him with a shrug and a smile. “It’s better that way for some people,” she said, and never brought it up again. Sometimes Thom wondered if that was when he fell in love with her. The lust part was easy to pin down; it had come before he’d even met her. He’d seen her picture in a magazine ad and asked to meet her, so obviously the visual portion of his attraction was clear. But the love part, the tenderness, the gratitude, the feeling of being understood by another human being without being questioned—it might have come in that very moment. At the top of his consciousness, he told himself Ann-Sophie understood his aversion to darkness because she was Scandinavian, and light was precious there. But lower down, in the places he didn’t go very often, he imagined she probably knew.

Knew what? That he’d gotten away with something and could never, ever be right with it? Maybe. As the years went by and she observed his relationship with Aubrey, Thom wondered if she hadn’t intuited that it had something to do with his sister. From there, knowing what she did, it wouldn’t have been much of a leap for Ann-Sophie to guess what had really happened. Did his telltale heart beat that loudly? he wondered.

Either way, she’d never said a word, and he loved her for that. He resisted the urge to reach out and stroke her hair now. He didn’t want to wake her or have to answer any questions about why he was already awake when—

The gunfire was softer than he’d been expecting. The first few rounds, Thom had to lift his head off the pillow to confirm that he’d actually heard it.

It was louder the second time, two quick series of brap-brap-braps, clearly identifiable as an exchange of semiautomatic weapons fire.

Thom sat up abruptly, the reaction coming naturally even though he’d been waiting for it the past two and a half hours. He threw aside the covers and stood, his breath quickening.

Outside, there were two more prolonged bursts of gunfire, but they were still muffled, and goddamn it, why hadn’t he considered the thick, soundproof windows of the place? He should have insisted they use higher calibers or something.

Ann-Sophie stirred, not from the noises outside but because she’d been jostled when Thom leapt out of bed.

“What’s going on?” she asked, half-asleep.

“I don’t know. Stay here!” Thom answered, sounding very much in command. He pulled on a pair of jeans he’d draped over a chair, opened the bedroom door, and hurried down the short hallway into the living room. He went to the big windows, the ones that looked out over the desert expanse to one side, and the concrete guardhouse that was the main entrance to the bunker on the other.

There was another burst of gunfire outside, longer and louder, and this time he could see muzzle flashes. One set of flashes came from far off to his right, twenty or thirty yards down the faux-dirt road that led to the complex, and the other from just below them, near the entrance to the guardhouse.

“We’re being attacked!” Thom yelled, and no acting was required at this point. The gunfire, the flashes of light that lit up the surrounding area, the adrenaline in his veins—it was all real. Ann-Sophie jumped out of bed, grabbed her robe, and started to run out toward him.

“Don’t come out here!” Thom shouted back. “Get down!”

She did, and almost on cue, there was another round of gunfire outside. Thom noticed the muzzle flashes on the road were drawing closer. He ducked and turned, hissing to Ann-Sophie. “Get the kids and get down to the bunker!”

“What about you?!” she shouted back.

“I’ll be right behind you. I need to make sure everything’s secure first.”

“Thom—”

“Go!” he shouted, urgent and convincing.

Ann-Sophie scurried across the floor toward the kids’ bedrooms. As she went, Thom stood and turned to look out the window again, assessing the state of things. Just as he reached his full height, he heard the brap of another round of semiautomatic weapons fire, followed by a loud thud and a series of interconnected cracks.

Ann-Sophie screamed, Thom shouted, and they both fell backward as the window in front of Thom suddenly bloomed with three side-by-side spiderweb patterns, radiating out directly in front of where he was standing.