Hard as Nails

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

The train's single headlight blinded him from fifty yards away as it turned around the curve of the hill and chugged toward him down the gleaming green-white tracks.

Kurtz tugged off his night-vision goggles and let them dangle around his neck as he climbed fifteen yards up the hill and hid in some thick shrubs. He racked a slug into the Browning's chamber and propped his elbow on his knee, holding his aim steady as the train racketed closer. Avoiding looking into the single, bobbing headlight, Kurtz pulled the goggles up and into place.

Then the amusement-park mini-train was chugging past him, filling the air with its two-stroke lawnmower engine chug and exhaust stink. And then it was past, rattling and rocking around the curve of the hill and into the woods to the south.

"Jesus," whispered Kurtz.

There had been no driver, the engine car was empty. But the following three cars, each styled like a passenger or freight car in miniature, but each also open to the air and just big enough for two children to sit in comfort or a single adult in discomfort, butt on a low cushion and knees high, had been carrying passengers. Kurtz had counted eight corpses propped up in the passenger cars—four dead men, two dead women, and two dead children.

"Jesus," Kurtz whispered again. The train was audible on the other side of the hill through the bare trees and rustling leaves now, heading back toward the burned mansion and then around again in its closed loop. There must have been a line switch thrown somewhere to keep the train looping around this hill, its metal throttle lever taped in the open position.

No dead man lever, thought Kurtz and resisted the urge to laugh.

He crossed the tracks and headed downhill toward the lighted midway, pistol at his side, trying not to break branches or step on more leaves than he had to. But any sound that he made was lost under the tinny carnival music that grew louder as he grew nearer. Right now, speakers were blaring with an organ version of "Pop Goes the Weasel."

The sight of the midway when he arrived was too surreal through the night vision goggles, so he took them off again. The images remained surreal in moonlight and midway glow.

Somewhere nearby a generator popped and sputtered. The broken, rusted Ferris wheel moved creakingly, in spurts and fits, but it turned. There were a dozen or so working lights on its frame, where scores had once burned when Cloud Nine was new. But those few were enough to illuminate the half dozen adult corpses riding in the four remaining passenger benches on the creaking wheel. Two had slumped forward against the rusted restraining bars.

The merry-go-round was turning ponderously. The music came from there, from a boom box set up in the center of the creaking, groaning circle. The broken horses and shattered zebras and headless lions were not going up and down, but five of them had riders—a dead woman with a bullet hole in her blue forehead slumped forward against the vertical pole rising out of the golden palomino; a male corpse with three black holes in his Eddie Izzard T-shirt lay sprawled stiffly across the lion with the missing lower jaw; a little girl no older than five, part of her skull missing between braids, slumped against a giraffe's long, splintered neck.

The merry-go-round turned round and round to the musk in the rustling woods.

Kurtz tried to move from shadow to shadow, his finger clammy against the trigger. He could smell popcorn. Popcorn and something sticky-smelling—either fresh blood or cotton candy. The lawnmower exhaust stink of the train wafted down as the locomotive rumbled by just up the hill again.

The bumper car pavilion was still shattered and flooded, dead leaves blowing across the rubber-streaked floor, but a single floodlight illuminated the pavilion, showing where a man and a woman—long dead from the looks of the sunken eyes and gums pulled back from the teeth—sat in one of the upright cars. The male corpse had his arm around the female corpse and the brittle bone-fingers seemed to be pawing at her shrunken breast under the tattered rags of what had been a pink sweater.

"Holy Christ," Kurtz whispered to himself, mouthing the words but making no noise. He raised the Browning in both hands and proceeded stealthily uphill, past the patch of grass where he had almost made love to Rigby King less than thirty-six hours earlier, past the fallen plywood front facade of the funhouse where a faded clown's face looked up from the grass, past the funhouse ticket booth where a male corpse had been propped up behind the wiremesh of the ticket cage. This corpse had had a clown's face painted on it and was wearing a red rubber nose. Its white shirt had a row of bloody holes across the chest.

Kurtz approached the shack he and Rigby had peered into. This new building was the epicenter of the night's madness. The big gasoline generator was running just beyond the shack, somehow powering the various lights and motors turning the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round.

Kurtz moved from tree to tree approaching the shack, his gun extended. He tried to breathe shallowly through his mouth, tried to listen. The porch of the little shack creaked slightly as he stepped onto it He moved to one side of the doorway and peered in. There was a lantern glowing in there and a figure lying on the cot in the corner. Kurtz pulled the goggles down out of the way, the better to use his peripheral vision. His mouth was dry.

The wind came up then, blowing leaves across the moldy midway, rattling branches in the bare trees. Because of that noise—as well as the repetitive, tinny carousel music from the boom box, as well as the creaking and groaning of the Ferris wheel and the putt-putt of the train making yet another round uphill—Kurtz didn't hear or see the dead clown in the ticket booth sit up, turn its white face, and step outside.

Because of the glow of the lantern light inside the shack and because of his own rapt attention on the corpse under the blanket, because he was watching and waiting for anything to move in or around the shack, Kurtz didn't see or hear the clown with the bloody white shirt step lightly and carefully around the edge of the funhouse twenty-five paces behind him.

Kurtz's instincts had served him well through almost twelve years in Attica's prison yards and showers and halls, but they failed him now in this strange place as the clown raised its silenced 9mm Beretta and fired three times from less than fifteen yards away, all three slugs striking Kurtz high up in the back, two between his shoulder blades and the third just beside his neck.

Kurtz pitched face forward into the shack, landing hard and lifelessly on his face, the dropped Browning bouncing away across the plywood floor.

The dead clown that was the Dodger approached cautiously, Beretta raised and unwavering. He never blinked, but he was grinning so widely that his great, horse's teeth glowed yellow against the flat, white makeup of his face.

He stepped up onto the small porch and paused at the doorway, Beretta aimed at the back of Kurtz's head.

Kurtz had fallen with one arm flung out and one pinned under his body. The detective's pistol was six feet away on the floor. Three holes in the back of the peacoat showed where all three bullets had struck and a small pool of blood was beginning to pool near the fallen man's face.

The Dodger lowered his gun and laughed. "I've saved the last car of the Ferris wheel for you, Kurtz, you…"

Kurtz rolled onto his back and fired the big, yellow nail gun with a pneumatic whoomp. The nail drove into the Dodger's belly and knocked him back into the door frame, but the Beretta still came up.

Dazed, working more from instinct than cognition, still holding the heavy cordless nail gun he'd fallen on, Kurtz lurched up and crashed into the Dodger, shoulder-slamming him against the door frame again and then pushing him out across the porch. Kurtz used his free left hand to grab the Dodger's right wrist as the two plunged off the porch and rolled across the grass and down the hill, through the leaves, onto the scattered plywood of the fallen funhouse facade.

"Goddamn you, goddamn you," grunted the Dodger, flailing and biting at Kurtz's right wrist even as he tried to wrench his own gun hand free.

Kurtz hit the clown face with the wide barrel of the heavy nail gun. White makeup turned to a bloody streak and the rubber nose flew off. The Beretta fired twice, the second slug burning past Kurtz's left ear and ripping through the collar of his peacoat.

The Dodger was very strong, but Kurtz was heavier and came out on top as they rolled onto the fallen plywood clown face. He smashed the screaming man's face with the heavy butt-magazine of the industrial nail gun and tried to knock the Beretta free again. Even with a four-inch galvanized nail in his belly, the Dodger wouldn't let go of the gun. He flailed his left hand free and grabbed his own wrist, trying to force the muzzle of the Beretta upward toward Kurtz's face.

On his knees now, straddling the bloody-shirted figure, Kurtz drove the big yellow nail gun down against the Dodger's right wrist and fired again. Twice.

The nails slammed through the burned man's wrist between the radius and ulna, pinning it to plywood. The Dodger screamed at the top of his lungs.

Kurtz stood and kicked the Beretta and silencer into the woods.

The Dodger kicked and writhed and flopped on the wooden clown-face board. Kurtz pinned down the flailing left arm with his boot, aimed, and fired a nail through the man's left hand.

The Dodger ripped his palm free with a scream and a gout of blood that splattered Kurtz's black vest.

Kurtz stepped on his hand again and fired the nail gun three more times, two of the nails hammering home through the palm and wrist.

Panting, weaving back and forth, only half conscious himself because of the terrible impact through his Kevlar armor, Kurtz stood astride the frenzied figure. "Lie still, goddamn you," he gasped.

The Dodger kicked upward, kneeing at Kurtz's legs, boots clattering on the rotted wood.

Kurtz shook his head, laid the wide muzzle of the yellow nail gun against the Dodger's crotch, and said, "Lie still, you crazy fuck."

The Dodger laughed and screamed and writhed, trying to rip his wrists and palm free.

Kurtz fired twice through the twisting man's testicles, nailing his center deep to the wood.

Now the Dodger lay still, his clown mouth open wide, red lips gaping, teeth very yellow and eyes very white as he stared up at Kurtz. Much of the white paint had come off, showing the old burns that covered Sean Michael O'Toole's ravaged face and ran up into the hairline like cords of white rope.

"I want… to know…" panted Kurtz. "Did you… shoot… Peg O'Toole? Were you part of that?"

The Dodger's mouth stayed open and silent as he strained up against the nails. It seemed like he was trying to breathe.

"Who do you take your orders from?" said Kurtz. "I know it wasn't the Major."

The Dodger's clown mouth opened and closed like a fish's. He was trying to speak. Kurtz leaned over, listening.

"I… learned… something," gasped the Dodger, voice almost inaudible, tone almost conversational. The merry-go-round music switched from "Farmer in the Dell" to "Three Blind Mice."

Kurtz leaned and listened. Blood and sweat from his chin and torn neck dripped onto the white face.

"Always… go… for… the… head… shot," said the Dodger and started laughing and screaming. The noise came up out of the open, straining mouth like a black stink from hell. And it kept coming. The Dodger was laughing hysterically, his screams and laughs echoing back from the hillside and funhouse.

Kurtz was suddenly very, very tired. "Yeah," he said softly. "You're right." He leaned forward again, into the geyser of screams and laughter and stench, lifted the heavy nail gun, aimed the muzzle into that dark, braying maw, and fired three times.