Deeply Odd

Thirty-six

No one shouted “get him” or anything similar, which seemed to indicate that they had not yet seen me.

The woods were a long way off, nothing but open yard between here and there. The moon would soon emerge once more. Although I wore dark clothes, they would see me when the lunar lamp returned, and I didn’t want to lead them in the direction that Boo and the kids had gone.

Between the gazebo and the stable, isolated trees stood here and there, as well as a few shrubs. I drew a Glock and headed that way, as more voices enlivened the night.

They would have guns. They would have knives. God alone knew what else they might have. My swift execution, however, was not what they intended. If they took me alive, I would end up on that steel stage, either here or at another of their secure locations. They would peel me alive, head to foot, until I spilled every secret that I possessed, which would probably occur even as they were laying out their skinning instruments and sharing with one another fond memories of previous flayings they had conducted together.

I felt like Frodo in Mordor, but without good Samwise to fight alongside me, alone and with no idea where I’d put the damn ring. When Gollum showed up, he would bite off my finger anyway, ring or not, just for the hell of it. If you’ve never read The Lord of the Rings, my apologies for alluding to it at such length.

Huddled under the first tree along my planned route, I scoped the way ahead and couldn’t detect any cultists in my path. When I looked back the way I’d come, past the gazebo, I saw three people with flashlights, the beams sweeping the ground ahead of them as they hurried toward their church. The search had begun in earnest.

Before the clouds stopped conspiring with me and the moon became a traitor, I ran in a crouch to a tall pine and sheltered against its trunk long enough to scan the night. I almost bolted for the next bit of cover, but three men appeared, hurrying up the gentle slope from the house, carving away the darkness with their flashlights. I pulled back, putting the pine between us a moment before one of the beams painted the curve of the trunk where I had just been standing.

Because I didn’t have a ghost dog to lead me, I didn’t want to make my way through the woods to the road where Mrs. Fischer waited. Psychic magnetism would reliably pull me to her, and there were most likely deer trails that I could follow rather than blunder noisily through the brush, but I would have to use my flashlight, which was out of the question.

I intended to leave via the long driveway by which I’d entered earlier. A crew of cultists would already have taken up position there, guarding the exit. To leave by that route, I would have to be reckless, and I would have to kill everyone I encountered before any of them might go out to the end of the private lane and discover the limo parked along the state route. No doubt Mrs. Fischer was expert with a handgun, smoothed out and fully blue, but she couldn’t hold off an army while she loaded the kids in the superstretch.

As the three men continued toward the stable, I saw more flashlights past that building, probing along the tree line. They would soon find the sleeping Dobermans.

The night was a box of dynamite. The fuse had been lit.

Ever since fleeing the house, I’d operated under the assumption that they knew who they were looking for; but that wasn’t necessarily true. Rob Burkett, Jinx, and the two Kens were too dead to describe me to anyone. The senoculus knew my face, which was exactly like its face with a more reasonable number of eyes, but just because that demon and all of these devil-worshippers were on the same team didn’t mean that they were constantly text messaging one another.

Anyway, in the dark, probing here and there with a light, I might be just another bad guy looking for the intruding bigot who had violated the sanctity of our religious service. Pistol in my right hand, flashlight in my left, I walked boldly away from the pine tree, toward the parking area, beyond which lay the driveway that led out to the state route.

So many flashlights were sweeping this way and that across the large property that I was reminded of the scene in E.T. when Peter Coyote and the other feds are searching the woods and fields for any indication of where the little visitor from another planet might have gone. I was E.T. and I really did just want to go home, but these searchers had crossed over from a different movie; Rosemary’s Baby.

As I walked past the back of the ProStar+, someone came around the side of it and shone a flashlight in my face just as I shone mine in his, and thus began an encounter as choreographed as any Rockettes number. The rhinestone cowboy. High priest of the cult. He wore the suit from the vision in which he had torched three children. He was probably more startled than I was, because he thought that I was dead but I knew that he wasn’t. He had a pistol with a silencer, and I had a pistol with a silencer. Simultaneously, we said, “You.” We pointed our weapons at each other, but neither of us fired immediately. I hesitated because I suddenly thought there was something I needed to know that only he could tell me. I think he hesitated because, even though I’d taken out the Kens and freed the children, he still felt invulnerable. He said, “Where are they?” I said, “Where are who?” He said, “Listen, pussy boy, I need those kids. I have a commitment, and I’m damn sure gonna keep it.” He looked a little fearful, like maybe, if he failed to sacrifice the seventeen, he would spend eternity in Hell, eating toe jam and boogers, and none of it fried. I realized what I needed to ask him, but first I said, “I think everything’s now coming full circle for me.” With some fury, he said, “Where are those snot-nosed little bastards?” I said, “I think soon I’ve got to go back home.” He said, “You [fornicating] little [fornicating] [fornicator], WHERE ARE THOSE KIDS!” I asked what I needed to ask: “You people, you or others like you, have something planned for Pico Mundo?” His eyes widened, and I had my answer. He shot me in the chest at the same moment that I shot him in the chest. Whifff, whifff. Because he wasn’t wearing a Kevlar vest, he collapsed. I was wearing one, but I also collapsed, because although the bullet flattened against the bulletproof fabric and didn’t penetrate, I felt as though I’d been hit in the breastbone by a hard-pitched baseball. He dropped his pistol. I dropped my flashlight. I knocked his weapon beyond his reach. He tried to kick my gun hand, but with a bullet lodged in the torso, he lacked the strength to follow through. He coughed up some blood, and I spit out a little blood because I’d bitten my tongue. He was weak and going fast. He called me a disgusting name that suggested I had committed incest, and as I got my wind back, I called him a nutjob. I took the flashlight from his hand and switched it off.

My flashlight, lying on the ground and aimed at me, drew his attention to something, and in a thin, quavering voice, he said, “Why are you wearing that, where did you get that?” The object of his astonishment proved to be the diamond-and-ruby exclamation point, the brooch that Mrs. Fischer had pinned to the sleeve of my sweater for good luck. The cowboy’s gaze shifted from the pin to my eyes. He said, “Who are you? Who are you to be wearing that?” Instead of answering him, I said, “I’m done with you, Lyle Hetland,” and I put him out of his misery with another shot, this time to the throat.

Gagging but trying to be quiet about it, I got to my feet and leaned against the back of the eighteen-wheeler. A quick survey of the night confirmed that our encounter had attracted no attention. The various clusters of flashlights were fanning the night elsewhere, with increasing urgency.

Being a positive thinker, at least overall, I thought that putting an end to the cowboy must be a good omen, a sign that, with my primary enemy dead, I would walk off this property unscathed. That was when the night really got nuts.