Devoted(53)
“I hope that’s true. For the dummy’s sake, I hope that’s true, Megan. I hope you’ve learned and you’re chastened. I feel his eyes moving under the lids, like when a dreamer dreams and there’s rapid eye movement. So there are three things I want you to do, Megan. Are you with me?”
“Yes. I’m with you.”
“First, I want you to put down the gun. Second, I want you to take off what you’re wearing. Third, I want you to lie down on the bed and spread those long lovely legs for me.”
“Here?”
“Of course here. Are you worried about corrupting a minor?” That juvenile snicker again. “The dummy won’t even understand what we’re doing. He’ll lie here sucking his thumb while we make a better baby than him, a baby for the new world becoming.”
“Don’t hurt him.”
“Don’t make me hurt him, Jason’s little freak. You understand how much I would like to hurt him, Megan?”
“I think so, yes.”
“For you, just for you, I’m not hurting the little dummy. We’re making a bargain here. You’re not as smart as you think you are. You don’t know what you think you know.”
By that he probably meant that she didn’t know he had taken the ammunition out of her pistol. He was taunting her. He wanted her to pull the trigger, experience the shock of its failure to fire.
“Where do you want me to put down the gun?”
“On the bed. Be very, very careful, Megan. If you try anything, you’ll be surprised how badly it works out for you and him. You try anything, and it doesn’t work out, I’ll take his eyes, and that will be on you, his blindness on you forever.”
The moment had come. The boy was his shield, even though he didn’t believe he needed a shield. He had an animal cunning. She wasn’t going to get a clearer shot than the one the next minute might offer.
As she approached him, she didn’t lower the pistol, hoping he would tempt her by rising up just a little, putting slightly more space between his head and Woody.
Fear of what might happen abruptly became an abhorrence of allowing it to happen, and in an instant her tremors stopped, her aim steadied, the front sight fixed on his face, and as she reached the bed, she squeezed off a shot.
Maybe he smelled her deception. He juked as she was about to fire, and the bullet tore his left ear. He howled like an animal, didn’t blind the boy, but instead, as fast as a skink, inhumanly fast, he swept Woody off the bed, into his arms, using him as a shield. She didn’t dare another shot. The bathroom door stood just three steps away, and Shacket was through it, slamming it behind him—Sweet Jesus, so crazy fast—so supernaturally fast she knew in an instant he hadn’t been warning her just that her pistol might be empty when he had said You don’t know what you think you know. Something else must be going on with him, something beyond easy comprehension.
She tried the door, it was locked, he was going to blind Woody, she fired two rounds into the latch, shouldered the door, crashed through into a tumult of wind rattling the medicine cabinet door, flapping the towels on the rack.
Woody on the floor, in the corner by the shower, his beautiful eyes wider than they’d ever been, staring at something far beyond this room.
To her right, the lower sash of the tall double-hung window open, Shacket going through, no alarm wailing because no porch roof beyond. A fleeting glimpse of him, hunched and troll-like on the sill, under the sash, looking over his shoulder, his eyes wild and shot with light, hissing at her through clenched teeth, hissing like some reptile, then dropping away into the dark.
She stepped to the window, saw he’d landed on all fours maybe fifteen feet below, like a cat, clad in black in the black night, looking up at her, his face a pale oval, as ghostly as that of a spirit wandering between worlds. Then quick across the lawn, toward the front of the property, the highway, and out of sight.
She put her pistol down on the vanity, slammed the window, gasping for breath as if she’d been running for her life. She went to Woody, knelt before him on the cold bathroom tile. Blood. Oh God. Spatters of blood. Yes, but not his. Blood from Shacket’s torn ear. She touched Woody’s face, smoothed his hair, picked up his hands and kissed them, all the while telling him it was all right, they were safe, the bad man was gone, she was so sorry, sorry this happened, but it was over.
Woody wasn’t here with her. Sometimes he withdrew and there was no reaching him, no indication that he saw her or heard her. He went away somewhere when he was badly stressed, although she seldom knew what stressed him, couldn’t get in his mind to learn the source of his upset, though of course she knew this time.
She sat on the floor and put her arms around Woody, pulling him into her lap as best she could, rocking him. “It’s all right, baby. Everything’s okay now.”
Glass shattered in a downstairs room and a glass-break sensor set off the security alarm. Shacket had returned.
58
One lane of highway 89 was finally cleared, and the highway patrol allowed southbound and northbound traffic to get past the remaining wreckage in alternating waves. The heavy fog began to lift as Rosa Leon drove inland from the lake, toward Tahoe City. By the time she found herself two miles from Olympic Village, the last rags of mist raveled into the darkness behind her, and the night ahead lay clear but starless under an overcast.