Final Edge

CHAPTER 20

Meredyth had watched Lucas disappear below the water and swim out of the boathouse to the hidden side where trees and bush covered his movements. She followed, bobbing in the water, watching him now as he caked himself with mud until he became a living shadow. Hearing her in the water and seeing that she'd disobeyed him and followed, he shot her a disapproving look. He waved for her to go back into the shelter. Then he disappeared into the cover of the path they had so leisurely taken down to the boathouse that afternoon. Lucas seemed to become part of the weave of the green-black cloth of the world around him, and once more she was reminded of just how wild and predatory he could be when circumstances warranted. In the past, she had been both excited by this side of him and afraid of it, but tonight Meredyth thanked God for Lucas's wild side; tonight, she realized she would always be safe in his care. She knew that Lucas was risking his life for her, and that he wanted this opportunity at blood vengeance-payback usually reserved for the death of a loved one. This situation, she decided, was close enough to satisfy his Cherokee blood.

But if she were to lose Lucas tonight as Lauralie planned, if there were no more tomorrows with Lucas, Meredyth decided that she would not want to go on. This conclusion spurred her to climb from the water and coat her body with the war paint of the muddy bottom. Lauralie had brought her to this, a state of being calling for her to smear her scantily clad body with muddy, pungent earth. And to a state of consciousness never before experienced, one of pure hatred for another human being, for Lauralie's unfixable, poisoned soul. And what of the classically mad Lauralie? For all the research and study and analysis and scrutiny of Meredyth's life that the younger woman had done, Lauralie actually had learned nothing of Meredyth's core traits. Now her raw personality, stripped of any pretense and faced with a monster relentlessly stalking her, stepped forward. Not even Meredyth was familiar with the Meredyth now smearing the lather of sludge over her face and the remaining white comers of her skin.

As a scudding army of dark clouds continued to hold captive the moon, Meredyth made her move, doing a slow, even belly crawl along the tree line leading up to the knoll her house sat upon. Lauralie occupied the high ground in this private war. As Meredyth crawled past Tommy's body, his white oversized cowboy shirt lifting in the wind, the bloodstain long dry by now, made a gentle slapping sound rivaling the insect hum. The sight made her think of all the innocent people who had been caught in the vortex. Closer to her as she passed his body lay Jeff, his eyes staring wide, his hair matted with blood. At any time, their mother might drive over in that little coupe of hers in search of her boys, and if she did, Lauralie would likely take her down with a sniper shot as well.

"Where is the bitch?" she muttered to herself. Might she be at the bam, say in the loft? Or was she in the house at the bedroom windows, one overlooking the lawn, the other the stables? Was she alternating between the two views?

She inched onward, gaining confidence with each foot, each yard gained. She could read Howard Kemper's logo- LAWn ORDER-on his truck from here, and she made out Lucas's car just the other side of the gardener's truck. If she could make it to the driveway undetected, get to Lucas's radio, she could call out for help, if only-big If — Lauralie had overlooked the radio in the unmarked vehicle.

She moved on, praying Lucas was being as cautious as she. At any moment, she expected a gunshot to ring out. She feared how she might react when it came. A single gunshot without any follow-up shots must mean Lucas had been hit and brought down like Jeff and Tommy. She prayed it would not come before she could get to the squad car.

Then she froze, seeing the sash at the second-story window overlooking the lawn and lake move with the glint of steel revealed by returning moonlight, but that same blue moon meant danger for her and for Lucas. She dared not move a muscle, her painted face turned up, her eyes watching the dark figure at the window. It was Lauralie.

She wished to God she could get a message to Lucas; he was free for the moment to rush the stable door and gain the safety of the interior, but he had no way of knowing Lauralie was surveying this side of the house. "Go, Lucas, go now!" she whispered, willing him to somehow psychically hear her plea. But suddenly Lauralie was gone from the window.

"My time to go!" she told herself, lifting from her belly and racing for the safety of the Farnsworth truck, hiding behind it. Glancing inside, she saw there were no keys in the ignition. She slipped around the rear, and glancing up at the bedroom window, she dashed to the gardener's truck, skirted round it, and found herself kneeling outside Lucas's car.

She was winded from the effort, breathing so heavily, she feared anyone within fifty feet must hear her. She inched along the length of the car to the front door, quietly, cautiously squeezed the handle, and opened the door just as a blast from the hunting rifle thundered, startling Meredyth into action. She leaped into the car and grabbed for the radio receiver, but it was not there. It'd been ripped out, gone.

She sat for a moment, paralyzed, hearing only the single shot and fearing that Lucas was down, bleeding, lying halfway between the trees and the stables in the sawdust road. She then heard a second shot and did not know whether to be relieved or not; she recalled what the second shot had meant for young Tommy and for Jeff.

"Lucas!" she called out, and leaped from the car, returning to Kemper's truck and grabbing at his tools, finally selecting a long-handled, three-pronged earth turner, a kind of clawing pitchfork. With it clutched in her hands, disregarding any obstacle in her way, she raced up the steps and through the front door as a third shot rang out. A good sign, she prayed. Perhaps Lucas, while spotted, and perhaps even wounded, had found a hiding place, and Lauralie was attempting to ferret him out with additional shots. A lot of good a damned table leg was now, Meredyth thought bitterly as she inched her way quietly to the second floor.

Making the second-floor landing, Meredyth now inch- wormed her way toward the expansive second-story bedroom. Glancing in, she saw that Lauralie Blodgett's complete attention was on Lucas, trapped somewhere below and under her gaze through the scope. Was she about to squeeze off another shot to pump an additional bullet into him where he lay helpless? Or was she patiently awaiting his next move, anticipating where he would next dart? Meredyth could feel the woman's unadulterated hatred culminating in the finger curled about the trigger of the big gun held snug against her shoulder here in the dark.

Slowly, cautiously, the barefoot Meredyth tiptoed over the carpet, moving within striking distance, raising the neat little earth turner with its three razor-sharp prongs over-head. She could stab the woman in the back of the neck and end it now and shed no tears, but a small voice held her in place. Can you do this? Is it murder? How will it play in the cold light of day to the outside world, to the police, to a D.A…, a grand jury, a judge? Was she justified morally and legally to murder the murderer? Lucas would not hesitate. It's either her or Lucas, her mind screamed at the instant one of the cell phones in the room went off, causing Lauralie to start and turn just as Meredyth let the mini- pitchfork fall. The fork bit into Lauralie's neck just as she had turned. Lauralie tried to bring the big gun around to bear, the pitchfork swinging wildly around with her, Meredyth having let go of the handle. The trio of teeth at the end of the spear had bitten deep into Lauralie's jugular vein, spraying the air with her blood, causing her grip on the rifle to steal away. The deadly weapon hit the win- dowsill and thudded against the garden tool, which had already released its stinging bite on her, leaving her fatally punctured. Lauralie's eyes had gone wide, her nostrils flaring, bleeding, and her gaping mouth swallowed repeatedly, desperate for air, choking on her own blood, struggling against the pain in a pirouette of horror about the room that painted Meredyth's white bedclothes red. Even dying so, Lauralie fought to speak.

"Mommie? Is it…you? 'Ave you…come back…for… for me?"

She fell forward into Meredyth in a paroxysm of cold trembling, and Meredyth, overwhelmed, took Lauralie's hand as she lay dying in Meredyth's ams. Meredyth's muddy feet had left a trail from the doorway to here, and Lauralie's blood commingled with the muddy tracks in a starburst of purple spreading over the carpet.

Meredyth eased the now-silent girl from her embrace, and she rushed to her bathroom, finding and tearing into her state-of-the-art first-aid kit to the sound of a gurgling death rattle beginning a slow roll that welled up from Lauralie's depths. She tore into the case, tossing aside creams and syringes, bottles and pills to get at the Fresh Flesh textured bandage wrap, an item developed in aerospace technology for stopping blood loss in a battlefield wound. She rushed back to Lauralie Blodgett and worked the bandage into the wound, allowing the blood to coagulate around the porous synthetic weave of the bandage to eventually stem the blood flow.

Lauralie spat up blood as Meredyth worked to save the life of the multiple murderer. On her knees over the woman, Meredyth caught a glimpse of herself in a full- length mirror. Her features and body caked in dried mud, she realized that the lunatic Lauralie had driven her to become an assassin herself. "Christ, what am I doing? Saving you for what? To give you just what you've wanted all along? A media-circus arrest and incarceration, a jury trial, a forum for your twisted mind? A lifetime in a federal facility for the criminally insane?"

Meredyth's action to stop Lauralie's bleeding to death here and now had simply been an automatic response to help the wounded animal at her feet. But now she slowed for a moment in her ministrations over the weakened, wounded Ripper, allowing the ramifications of saving Lauralie to sink in. "I should fucking let you die. Damn you… damn child of Satan."

A moment's hesitation more, and then Meredyth's instinct to save the young woman took root, as she yanked tightly at the bandages and tied off the porous, textured spider's web of nylon threads that acted as an effective seal, a dike and a tourniquet at once. The blood flow at the wound site ended.

Blinking, her brain getting more oxygen now, Lauralie looked up into Meredyth's mud-caked features. She painfully choked out a handful of broken words. "Hooow'd you…clim' owt… hell?"

Meredyth realized for the first time that the girl, in her pain-induced hallucination, mistook her muddy appearance here in the dark for that of her mother's cemetery ghost, returned to drag her into eternity with her, finally a family. Lauralie then fell unconscious.

"Go ahead, die, Lauralie Blodgett. Go with your mother," Meredyth said, and thought: Justice it isn 't, your going out so peacefully, but maybe now Mira Lourdes and the rest of your victims can rest in peace.

Meredyth lifted the bloodied rifle and went to the window with it in her hands. She called out to Lucas down below, unable to actually see him. "I've ended it, Lucas! You can come out now! She's dead! The wicked bitch is dead! Here's the rifle!" She hurled the Remington as far as she could. It responded with a thunderous clatter down the tin roof of a shed situated below the window, and then it slid to the earth into a clump of bushes to do no more harm. Atop the shed, the night breeze twisted a black, wrought- iron windmill in the shape of a greyhound, reminding her of the two hounds Lauralie had poisoned and posed at Arthur Belkvin's feet.

Lucas emerged from the bam, riding bareback and guiding a second horse, saddled, by the reins. He lifted his war club table leg overhead in the melancholy, soft sapphire moonlight, looking like an ancient warrior, but then his club slipped from his grasp and he slowly, painfully, slid down the side of Yesyado. Meredyth screamed, seeing the blood smear down the side of his horse, the one she had gifted him with that afternoon. Somehow Lucas got back to his feet, and limping, he started toward the house, but only a handful of steps and he fell, rolled onto his back, and loosed an audible grown to the heavens.

"Oh, my God! Lucas! Hold on, Lucas! I'm calling nine- one-one now! Hold on! I'm coming!"

In the same instant, Meredyth felt three sharp blunt punctures strike her nude back at the bra line, but the blow proved weak and failed to puncture her deeply.

'Turn roun', Ma-me dear'st," came Lauralie's chilling voice. "Wanna see y'r eyes."

The sharp pain in Meredyth's back did not slow her from wheeling to protect herself, throwing up her hands to block the next blow from the dead woman who'd somehow slipped back from death's hand. Short attention span, Meredyth thought, finding the prongs of the long-handled pitchfork inches from her eyes. "Damn hellion! I should've let you bleed to death."

Lauralie jabbed and Meredyth feinted left, grabbing the handle and wresting the garden tool from the wounded woman's faint grasp, the weeding fork falling once more to the floor between them. Gathering all remaining anemic strength, screaming, Lauralie lunged now with Lucas's bowie knife, using her weight and catapulting her body at her mother, to put her once and for all in her grave.

Meredyth dodged, stepping aside, and Lauralie's tripping over the pitchfork combining with her momentum sent her careening out the window and onto the shed below, a howling banshee scream rising back up to Meredyth, echoing off the house and into the heavens.

Meredyth looked down once again at the shed. Lauralie- still alive, her legs, arms, and extremities twitching- looked like a beetle stabbed through with a needle. She lay faceup; the wrought-iron greyhound windmill had caught her weight and had spiked her through the back. She lifted a defiant fist to Meredyth and muttered, "See…in Hell… mow-ther…"

"I'll make that call now, bitch!" Meredyth swore, and rushed for the phones lying on the bed, finding hers and dialing 911. "I have an emergency…need help immediately at-"

"What is the nature of your emergency?"

"Christ…ahhh, ahhh…. Six, no, seven dead, an eighth dying-in desperate need of paramedics immediately."

"Gun wound, head trauma?"

"Officer down! Gunshot to…to the body, I believe."

"Is the shooter still a threat, ma'am? Are you in any immediate danger?"

"No, no! Damn it, she's dead. Hurry, please!"

"You're on a cell phone, ma'am. I'm Larry. Remain calm and give me your address, and stay on the line, please."

After giving the dispatcher the address and the Brody address, Meredyth snatched up the space-aged bandaging that now must save Lucas's life. She grabbed a blanket and a robe as well, and she then raced down to where Lucas had gotten to his knees and had slumped against a tractor, his eyes glazed, in trauma, unable to coherently answer her.

As she neared him, she saw the horrible exit wound in the middle of his back, between the shoulder blades, just below the neck. She feared she didn't have enough bandages left, and cursed herself now for having wasted them on Lauralie.

She then saw that Lucas had also been hit in the right side, lower abdomen, and there was no exit wound there. She imagined the bullet having careened about inside him, exploding into various deadly shards that had likely ripped at his organs. She feared the internal blood flow would kill him, that the NASA-developed super bandage could not save him if she'd had a mile of it. He needed emergency medical attention; a team of surgeons and experts might have a chance to save his life. She shouted into the phone at the dispatcher, "He's in shock! He's dying! Hurry!"

"Tell me your name, ma'am. Calm down and tell me your name."

"What?"

"Your name."

"Meredyth…Meredyth Sanger. We need an airlift for Lucas! Officer Stonecoat. He's been shot twice! He's suffering internal wounds, and he's hemorrhaging and in shock."

"I'll relay that, Meredyth."

"Doctor! I'm a doctor. I know what I'm talking about! Get a chopper out here, a medevac chopper! Stat!"

She looked into Lucas's eyes, rolled back in his head. He looked ready to faint, in need of medical assistance fast. He'd made it to the barn and the horses, but at what price? "Lucas! Stay with me! Hold on!" She'd thrown the blanket over his legs, and she worked the Fresh Flesh into his back to staunch the blood flow there. She talked as she worked, telling him he was going to be okay. She didn't have enough of the bandage to reach around his wide chest, so she held it in place until the blood was absorbed into it, the absorption creating enough glue to hold the bandage. She got up, raced to the stable, and located the sports-wrap bandages used for binding the legs of horses, and returning, she dressed the back wound with the sports wrap.

"Grandfather…calls me," muttered Lucas.

"I've called for a medevac chopper, Lucas! Hold on! Don't you go anywhere! Don't you listen to that old man either!"

He tried to get up.

She forced him to remain sitting, taking him now into the folds of the robe she had thrown on herself. She kept talking to him. "We must look like a couple of aliens in all this mud and dirt. No telling how long our hideaway is going to be a crime scene. They'll have to process the house, the stable, the grounds, the damn rowboats, not to mention the Brody house." She kept talking to him, trying to keep him conscious.

She heard a car drive up behind them. "Oh, dear God…it's Janie Farnsworth… come looking for her boys. How am I going to deal with all this, Lucas, without you… without your help? You can't leave me, Lucas! I won't let you, damn it! Not now…now that we've finally discovered we can't live without one another. What the futz! It's not fair. Tell your grandfather to go back to the Great Spirit or wherever he came from! Doya-hear- me. doya? I need you in this life; I need you here."

Lucas's glazed look signaled his slipping into some invisible place ahead of him. Again he tried to get to his feet. She struggled to keep him down as a concerned Yesyado sniffed and whinnied at the pair of them. "Damn it, Lucas, stay down! Don't fight me! Stop it! Don't move! You'll only cause more blood loss!"

He's dying. Get used to the idea. Nothing you can do about it, a nagging ugly voice said at the back of her head, sounding like Lauralie, and then she heard Janie Farnsworth standing over them and saying, "My God, Meredyth, what in the name of heaven and hell's happened? Where's my Tommy? Where's Jeff?"

She looked up at the middle-aged single mother of two, unable to tell her what had happened, but her eyes spoke clearly enough. Mrs. Farnsworth gasped and raced for the bam to locate her boys, calling out their names and getting no answer. "Where's their truck?" she finally asked, and looking up at the house, she got her answer.

"Those boys didn't do anything wrong, did they? Who shot your man, Meredyth? Talk to me, damn it!"

"Jeff and Tommy're…"

"Spit it out!"

"…are dead, Janie. I'm sorry. A maniac got hold of their rifle and used it on them. She shot Lucas too."

"My boys…are they badly hurt?" She didn't want to hear the word dead. "Where are they? Where are my boys?" Tears flowed freely now.

"Out on the lawn, halfway down to the lake."

She climbed back into her car and raced up the path to the house, plowing over the lawn in her car to get to where her boys lay. Meredyth's heart, once more, was ripped apart.

She heard the dispatcher on the phone calling to her. "Meredyth… Doctor…are you still there?"

"Where the hell's the help we need?"

"You're in a remote location. They're on their way!"

"I need blood plasma, maybe a transfusion; he needs stabilizing now!"

She saw that Lucas's normal red pallor had a skein of ashen white painted on now. His usual vigor and bravado had been replaced by a limp body and a lethargic malaise. He no longer fought her, allowing himself to be enveloped in her arms. She feared he would die here in her arms at any moment. "Don't do it, Lucas. Don't leave me! Please, don't."

She got no response from him. Lucas Stonecoat lay in her arms in a hemorrhagic coma.

In the distance, she heard the sirens that could not get here soon enough to suit her. In another three minutes, her tree-lined drive around the lake was lit by a parade of fire engines and paramedic vans followed by police cruisers.

"Where's the damned chopper!" she called out through the phone. "He's gone into coma!"

"The chopper's on its way, Meredyth. It's on its way," replied the calm voice of the 911 emergency dispatcher. "It's in the air and on its way."

She heard the faint sound of chopper blades-chomp- chomp-chomp-chomp-competing now with the ambulances and fire trucks that'd pulled down to the stables, encircling them. Over the blackened horizon, she saw the helicopter come into view. On its side, she read the luminescent logo-2NEWS. It was a damned news crew chopper!

It's too late…too late, came the evil voice in her head. And it's all your fault for wasting time on that lunatic bitch.

Paramedics flooded round them, and someone tugged her away, freeing the medics to attend to Lucas's wounds. They'd come from nearby rural Harris County Memorial Hospital, their emergency response unit. They immediately put Lucas on a plasma-and-glucose hookup, attempting to stabilize him for transportation. They examined the bandages Meredyth had wrapped him in, and these were replaced with sterile wraps. In what seemed a lifetime for Meredyth, they finally had him on a stretcher and into the waiting ambulance. Meredyth jumped into the rear with him, and they drove out into a field, and from overhead, a medevac chopper appeared, setting down, ready to take Lucas aboard.

Meredyth insisted on taking flight with him, certain it might be the last opportunity to see him alive. He remained in a coma.