Snowbound

Twenty

Crouched beside an evergreen shrub on Shasta Street, a half block off Sierra, Kubion watched skull-grinning as Brodie died in the church parking lot.

He had come across Sierra and made a rapid, though guarded, check of the Sport Shop, front and rear; then he’d recrossed the street at Modoc and gone up to Shasta, into it laterally through thickly concealing darkness. When he reached the shrub, he paused to reconnoiter the church and the short length of Shasta to the west. It was while he had been doing that that Brodie came out of one of the yards in the next block and ran across to the fir tree at the edge of the church property.

Going to the church all right, Kubion had thought. Got him a shotgun or a rifle, some piece in a snowstorm but he’s running scared, and the first thing he’ll do when he gets over there is go to the car looking for Loxner. Fifty yards closer and you wouldn’t go anywhere you fairy son of a bitch, but maybe it was better this way maybe he’d flush any other stupid hero hicks hiding in the area. Big black blowfly, that’s what Brodie was, big black blowfly circling around and when he landed he was going to get squashed flat, spill his guts all over the goddamn snow.

Brodie had stepped out from under the tree, and through the gusting snowfall Kubion’s slitted eyes had followed his progress to the church and to the car. Surprise! Surprise, Vic! Oh Jesus his face must have been something to see right then, trying to figure out when and how it happened well I did it just after we took over the church, I put the knife in him while you were walking away with your back turned, the whispering told me it was time; one stroke clean when Duff was leaning over the seat to get the flour sack and he never made a sound and you thought all along he was alive, you could see him sitting behind the wheel all the while and you thought he was alive and he was just another dead lump of shit…

The grin had stretched Kubion’s cold-cracked lips as Brodie turned and started back toward the church. Now what, blowfly? Now what? And that was when he saw the brief muzzle flash from the church corner; Brodie falling, staying down without moving. Kubion stood up against the shrub, head craned forward; nothing changed in his face, the skull grin remained fixed. Seconds later the shadows at the corner separated, and he watched the figure of the man materialize.

Mothering bastard! Hick got him hick killed him; where did he get the gun? Well fuck that, he had it and he’d picked Brodie off with it, one shot lucky shot and Brodie was dead, he’d wanted Brodie for himself but it was okay this way too-okay, okay. Kubion kept staring over at the lot, saw the hick check the car and then come back and take a position behind another car and not show himself again. So-digging in out there this time, where he could cover all approaches and the church doors. No way to slip up on him but that was okay too because he knew exactly where the hick was and that the hick was armed and that there probably weren’t any others or they would’ve come into the lot, or else he’d have gone to them to report if they were too far away to know what had happened with Brodie. Right on, he was right on top again ten feet tall; no more screwing up from here on in, no more screwing up.

The impulse was talking to him again, telling him exactly what he had to do because it was time now to finish everything.

Fire-bomb the church, it murmured. Fire-bomb the church!

Get material for Molotov cocktails from one of the houses and cross to the church from where the sharpshooting hick couldn’t see him and toss a couple through one of the stained-glass windows on the far side and maybe another to block off the escape route the two heroes had used, if it wasn’t a window, and then move to the front. When the hick heard and saw what was happening, his instant reaction would be to try to help the ones inside, forgetting everything else because that was the way these silly Eskimos always reacted and always would react, and he’d run up to the doors and Kubion would stand out and pick him off and then dump another cocktail on the entrance to make sure nobody broke down the doors and nobody got out alive.

He could imagine vividly the way it would be, he could see the bright burning flames and he could hear the screams; and when he backed away through the shadows to Sierra, he felt a sharp hurting in his groin and realized that the urge’s excitement had given him a stone-hard erection.