Locked Doors

68

I sat seething behind the steering wheel, the Hatteras shore looming.

No fucking way I wasn’t going to follow the Kites off this ferry. I’d finish them right now if it wouldn’t endanger the other passengers.

The ferry engines quieted as we neared the island.

My thoughts turned to Beth but I shut them down. The coming hours would require my full attention. And if I lived beyond them there’d be ample time to grieve.

Violet drew a sharp breath. I glanced back, saw her eyes fluttering. They opened. They died. Went broken and void as though she’d ingested some awful truth.

Turning into the vinyl seat, she wept.

The engines quit altogether.

I climbed into the backseat, let my fingers slide through her hair.

“Violet. We’re on a ferry, about to dock on Hatteras.”

She looked up at me, said, “How are you alive?”

“I have no idea.”

Glass exploded.

We both jumped.

Something crashing through the windshield.

The ferry captain, headfirst, his torso draped backward over the dashboard, spraying the car with a warm burgundy mist.

I wiped blood out of my eyes as gunshots resounded from the observation lounge, three cataclysmic booms carrying the thunderous authority of a shotgun.

Elsewhere on deck there erupted the dry staccato cracks of a lesser firearm.

Screaming.

Another thud caving in the roof of the Impala.

Blood sheeting down the back window.

Someone moaning in the lounge, pleading for help.

The driver of the Chevy Blazer stumbled out of his idling car, suit wrinkled, bewildered.

I called out to him through the busted windshield. He looked at me, then moved dreamlike toward the bow, gazing all around in a sort of stupefied disbelief, as though he’d fallen into a movie.

At the front of the ferry he stopped abruptly, backpedaled, and went to his knees.

Rufus approached him, revolver in hand.

The businessman raising his arms in surrender.

I didn’t see him die, just heard the tiny pop as I opened the door and dropped down between the railing and the car.

“Stay here,” I told Violet.

“What’s happening?”

“They’re killing everyone on board.”

I closed the door and crawled on between the cars and the railing, glancing back at the Impala, the crewman sprawled across its devastated roof like a giant mortar shell.

Sternside, Maxine emerged from the gunsmoky observation lounge, two of its starboard windows blown out. Swallowed in her black coat like a demon queen, she bore the long pumpaction shotgun I’d seen in the cab.

Luther descended from the pilothouse, met her on the second level.

Rufus fishing the pockets of his leather jacket for more bullets.

I froze. Bereft of strength or will. Heaving, I disgorged what little water I’d been given in the last twenty-four hours.

Gonna sit here, let them kill you? Let them have Violet?

As Maxine and Luther walked down the steps together, I sprang to my feet and charged Rufus, the old man looking up when I was ten feet from the bow, still fumbling to reload the. 38, bullets spilling on the deck. He closed the breech anyway, pointed the gun between my eyes, and pulled the trigger.

It clicked as I swung at his face, felt his tender bones fracture. He tripped over the man he’d just executed, Maxine and Luther running toward me now from the stern.

I fled to the other side of the galley and took cover between the railing and the Kites’ truck, crouching behind the left front wheel.

I opened the revolver.

Rufus had managed to shove two bullets into the cylinder. Had he squeezed the trigger once more I’d be dead or dying.

From portside I could see the carnage up in the observation lounge. Two silhouettes leaning against each other, the glass behind them splintered and shimmering red in the early sun. Wind gusted and the window collapsed, glass raining on the deck.

Closing the breech, I peeked over the hood of the old Dodge.

Maxine and Luther were helping Rufus to his feet.

I aligned Luther in the sight, pulled the trigger twice.

Luther looked in my direction, his raven hair windblown and twining about his bonewhite face, the gunshot echoes fading fast across the water.

He fell.

His parents knelt around him, Maxine lifting his shirt.

I could hear Luther talking.

Then his mother roared, struggled to her feet with the shotgun, and started for the truck, eyes soulless, raging, Rufus trailing after her.

I scrambled toward the stern, passing the navy Honda again, a single bullet through the window, the driver shot through the cheek while he slept.

I heard the shotgun cocking, glanced back between the railing and the cars, saw Maxine leveling the barrel on me.

I rolled behind the Honda.

The twelve gauge boomed, pellets shattering the windshield, chinking on the metal. As the old woman pumped the shotgun again I made for the sternside steps and climbed to the rear entrance of the observation lounge.

The door stood open.

Row of seats in the middle, more along the windows.

Dead couple on the left.

Still sitting upright.

Shotgun blasts to the face.

Obliteration beyond all reckoning.

Another facedown on the floor, heavy sluglike smear where they’d tried to crawl.

The pink sun brilliant through the fissured glass.

Quiet now save for a few idling engines and the sound the bow made ripping through water, the ferry moving with its own deteriorating momentum.

I peered down through the glassless windows, saw the Kites rounding the stern. In five seconds they’d be climbing the stairs.

Rufus dropped bullets on the deck.

I rushed toward the front of the lounge.

The Kites’ footfalls on the steps now.

As I reached to open the door it swung back.

Luther faced me, smiling and unscathed, his Windex breath warm on my nose.

“You’re a lousy shot, Andrew,” he said as his mother entered wheezing through the back of the lounge.

I tried to punch him in the throat.

He caught my fist and I was tumbling down the steps.

I lay dazed on the concrete deck, my head throbbing, left arm sprained or broken.

The Kites came down the stairs.

Luther grabbed me under my armpits, dragged me to my feet.

They surrounded me at the starboard bow, backed me up against the railing.

The wind cold and blasting.

Everyone squinting in the sunlight.

Maxine aiming the shotgun at my stomach.

Rufus at her side, one arm around her shoulder, the other holding his jaw.

Their son stepped toward me.

“What’d you think, Andrew? No hard feelings? We all just go our separate ways?”

“Wasn’t necessary to kill everyone on-”

“Couldn’t have you borrowing someone’s cell phone, having the police waiting for us at the dock. You killed these people, Andrew. No one would’ve died if you’d let us go. Now we’ve got a little swim ahead of us, so…”

I noticed Orson’s bowie knife in his left hand, thinking, So that’s how I end.

“What about Violet?”

“She’s amazing,” he said. “I look at her and think maybe she’ll make me different.”

It happened so fast.

Engine revving.

Screech of tires.

Heads turning.

Luther and I dove out of the way as the Chevy Blazer clipped Rufus and Maxine and slammed them into the railing, Violet gunning the engine, the tires pressing the crushing weight of the Blazer directly into Sweet-Sweet and Beautiful.

She shifted the vehicle into park, pinning the Kites solidly against the railing.

Stepping out, she lifted the shotgun from the deck.

Luther back on his feet.

Running.

She shouldered the twelve gauge.

He leapt over the portside railing as the shotgun bucked and boomed.

We dashed over.

Violet pumped the shotgun, trained it on the water.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“I don’t see him.”

The ferry was still drifting, the spot where he’d gone in falling farther and farther behind.

We ran back to the stern, leaned over the railing.

“You hit him, right?” I said, scanning the churned water in the ferry’s wake.

“I’m not sure.”

The light gleaming off the chop made it difficult to see but we stood watching, the water reflective and glimmering, a smashed liquid mirror catching all the colors of sunrise.

“Andrew,” she said finally.

“What, you see him?”

“I hear sirens.”