Lone Wolf

37

THE VAN, its rear red taillights coming on as Dougie tapped the brakes going across the bumpy yard, was nearing the house when Charlene stepped out to wave goodbye.

Then, as I strained to peer harder into the distance, I saw that she wasn’t just waving. She had something in her hand. A brown lunch bag.

Wendell took the detonator from his father’s hand like a relay runner grasping a baton. He pivoted, started running after his brother.

“Don’t hit the red button!” Timmy warned.

“Don’t worry!” Wendell shouted back. “I know how it works!”

The pit bulls, Gristle and Bone, raised their snouts again. Something had caught their attention and was distracting them from their task of guarding the prisoners. Their hindquarters lifted from the floor, and they turned about, attempting to track down the source of what was wafting up their nostrils.

They fixed their eyes on Wendell, and their heads turned with him as he ran from the barn.

I knew then what had sparked their interest. It was the scent of fish guts, smeared all over Wendell’s pants and the front of his shirt from his plunge into the pit.

The dogs were transformed into low-flying missiles.

“Hey!” Timmy shouted at the dogs. “Get back to your post!”

They were oblivious. Nothing else mattered now. They were on a mission to find their dinner. Their paws pounded the floor as they took off after Wendell, their jaws already open in anticipation, the gums pulling back away from their teeth through the sheer force of their acceleration.

Wendell never saw them coming. He was running, and then he wasn’t, as each dog grabbed hold of a leg, like a pair of lions bringing down a gazelle.

Wendell screamed.

“Hey!” Timmy shouted again at the dogs. “Halt!”

“Let’s move,” Lawrence whispered. With Timmy occupied by the dogs and what they were evidently about to do to Wendell, he wasn’t watching the stall. Lawrence hopped the gate, slid back the bolt, and opened it wide for the rest of us.

“An ambulance,” said Betty, still kneeling over and tending to her husband. “We need an ambulance.”

Wendell’s screams were unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I’d once heard a man trapped in a car trunk with a python, but even that was nothing like this. As the dogs brought him down they ripped into his legs with an insane ferocity. Wendell pitched forward, the detonator still gripped tightly in his right hand.

At the house, Charlene turned her head to see what the fuss was about.

I saw Wendell’s hand fall toward the ground.

The van slowed as it passed the farmhouse. Charlene held out the lunchbag as Dougie stuck his hand out the window to grab it.

The dogs, frenzied, ripped away chunks of Wendell’s jeans. And, judging from the blood that was instantly appearing, chunks of him, too.

His hand, still clutching the detonator, slammed into the ground.

The van blew up.

The explosion was so intense, the fireball so massive, I never even saw scraps of sheet metal or glass blowing outwards. One second there was a van, and the next, this huge orange ball.

Timmy, who was out of the barn and about ten yards away from the dogs and Wendell, was blown back by the force of the explosion. In the barn, we could feel the shock wave of heat blast past us.

I turned away, fearful that some bits of debris might strike me, get in my eye. When I looked back, a second later, I couldn’t see the farmhouse. At first, I thought it was obscured by the flames and smoke. But then I realized the farmhouse was gone.

No, not all of it, as it turned out. There was a small part, at the back, still standing. The rest of the building-a pile of rubble with a few timbers and beams poking out of it-was ablaze.

“Ahhhh!” Wendell screamed. “Mommmmm!”

There appeared to be no mother left to hear Wendell’s cries.

Lawrence said to Betty, “Can he move?”

She looked at Hank, whose eyes were drifting open and then shut. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Lawrence ran over to the workbench, where two shotguns were leaned up. He grabbed one, returned to the stall, and handed it to Betty. “In case Timmy comes back,” Lawrence said. “I think he’s the only one left we have to worry about.”

I grabbed Dad by the arm, started leading him out, and he did his best on the healing ankle, skipping and hopping.

“We need to get help,” I said.

“They took the car keys, they cut the phone line,” Dad reminded me. The keys to the other vehicles outside the Wickens place would probably be inside the house that didn’t exist anymore.

“Can you hop your way back to the cabin?” I asked.

“I think so.”

“Take the tractor,” I said. “You leave the key in it, right?”

Dad said, “Yes.”

“Go into Braynor, or the closest house with a phone.”

Dad nodded, and was about to start hopping and skipping off into the night, when Bob Spooner slipped his hand over Dad’s shoulder and said, “I can get there faster.”

Dad looked at me. “You think?”

I smiled at Bob. “Yeah, you go. Get an ambulance, get Orville, get the fire department, get everybody.”

“Got it,” Bob said.

“And tomorrow, you can take me fishing.”

Bob managed a smile back. “Sounds good.” He ran off into the night.

I turned to Lawrence. “May,” I said. “And Jeffrey.”

Lawrence took a look at the house, at how little was left of it, saw the back part, where the kitchen was, still standing. But the flames were quickly spreading to it.

We ran, side by side, past the dogs, who had somehow managed to nudge Wendell over and were ripping into his belly.

Wendell was no longer screaming.

“Get off him, you fuckers!” Timmy screamed. He barely glanced at Lawrence and me as we ran past. I looked back, saw Timmy run back into the barn. He was heading, I guessed, for the other shotgun.

Lawrence and I reached the back door of the farmhouse together, and he hopped up the steps to open the door. Some smoke billowed out, but the room wasn’t fully engulfed yet. What hindered our efforts, however, was that the explosion had cut off power to the house, and there were no lights.

“May!” I shouted as loud as I could. “Jeffrey!”

Lawrence shouted, too. “Where are you?”

We held our breath a moment, not wanting to miss their call back. The only sound, and it was considerable, was the fire.

“In here!” May.

“Help!” Jeffrey.

Their voices came from the left, and we worked our way over, bumping into kitchen chairs, knocking things off the table until our eyes adjusted to the dim moonlight coming through the window. I found a narrow door, with a padlock attached.

It was getting unbearably hot in the kitchen.

“It’s locked,” I told Lawrence.

“Help!” May screamed. They would have heard the explosion, be feeling the heat from the fire that was sure to spread into this room any second.

“Hang on!” I shouted.

Outside, I heard a shotgun blast. I looked out the window, saw Timmy standing over Wendell, pump the gun, then another blast. A third, and a fourth.

Lawrence grabbed something off the kitchen counter, an appliance of some kind. An electric can opener. He bashed the lock with it. Five, eight, ten times, until the can opener’s plastic casing shattered into half a dozen pieces.

“Hang on!” Lawrence shouted. He was opening drawers now, rummaging around in the dark. “Shit!” he said. He drew out a hand, shook it as though trying to dry it. Fleck of something dark flew off. Blood. He’d encountered a drawerful of knives.

Then he was into another drawer, and came out with a short silver mallet, the kind used to flatten meat.

He swung at the lock like a madman, and finally, the hardware that the padlock snapped onto came free. Lawrence got the pantry door open a crack, worked his fingers in, and broke the door open.

May pushed Jeffrey out first, then followed. “What’s happened?” she asked. “What was that noise?”

“Later,” I said. “We’re going down to my father’s place.”

The four of us went out the door as the roof caved in on the kitchen. Smoke and sparks billowed out around us.

In the light of the fire, Timmy stood, motionless, over the bodies of Wendell and the two pit bulls.

“This way,” Lawrence said, moving May and Jeffrey toward the gate and the lane that would lead us back to the cabins. Jeffrey had, clutched in one hand, the two Star Wars figures Lawrence had purchased for him that afternoon.

When he caught me noticing, he said, “I hid ’em in the pantry.”

We were all running now, and as we passed the gate, there was a loud racket coming from around the bend that led down to the cottages. Suddenly, Dad’s customized tractor appeared, Bob Spooner at the wheel. He saluted us as he blasted past for the highway.

May looked, agog, at the front of the farmhouse. Bits and pieces of van, no doubt mixed with bits and pieces of Dougie, were scattered as far as we could see in the moonlight.

It was anyone’s guess where the remains of Charlene had been scattered to.

We ran down the lane and around the bend, and when I saw the light over the back door of Dad’s cabin, it was like a beacon of hope, a sign that maybe, just maybe, we were going to get out of this alive.

We filed into Dad’s cabin, Lawrence first, then May and Jeffrey. I waited for Dad to catch up, held the door for him.

“Betty and Hank,” I said.

“Bob’ll get help,” Dad assured me. “You can count on him.”

“He’s still out there,” I told Lawrence. “Timmy’s still out there, with a shotgun.”

He nodded. “We have to hide everyone until help arrives.”

Dad said, “A boat. Why don’t we take a boat?”

Lawrence and I liked that idea, and ushered everyone out the front door of the cabin and down to the water.

Somewhere, off in the distance, I thought I heard a siren.

Dad had a small fishing boat like Bob’s, and we got May and Jeffrey into it. Dad, with some difficulty, got himself straddled over the back bench, and started pulling the outboard motor cord while Lawrence and I untied the boat from the dock.

“When it’s safe,” I said, “I’ll keep flashing your cabin lights on and off. Just go out there and sit until the signal.”

Dad gave me a thumbs-up, gently turned the throttle on the outboard, and the boat glided away over the dark lake.

“I want to sneak back, keep an eye on Betty and Hank,” Lawrence said. “Why don’t you wait here for the troops to arrive.”

I nodded as Lawrence ran off.

And then, for the first time in several hours, I was alone. I stood at the end of the dock, listening to the receding sound of Dad’s boat as he took May and Jeffrey to temporary safety.

The sirens sounded as though they were getting closer. Bob had done good.

I slipped into Dad’s cabin and turned off all the lights. No sense advertising to Timmy Wickens, wherever he might be, that anyone was here. In the dark, I ran some water at the sink and filled a glass. I drank it down fast, filled the glass a second time.

I wanted to call Sarah, but with the phone line cut, there wasn’t much I could do there. Our cells, our keys, were all with Wendell. In his jacket. So long as the dogs hadn’t eaten them, we’d probably be able to retrieve them from his body when the sun came up.

I went back outside, walked down to the water’s edge and gazed up at the stars. There was a glow in the sky beyond the trees. The last of the farmhouse hadn’t quite burned to the ground yet.

So much chaos, so much death, and now, things seemed almost peaceful.

My shirt-Lawrence’s shirt-reeked of smoke, and I felt confident I could slip into cabin 3, strip it off and find a fresh one, without having to turn on any lights. I walked over to the cabin, went in from the lake side.

Once the door had closed behind me and I was in the main room, the lights flashed on.

I blinked a couple of times, trying to adjust my eyes more quickly than they wanted to.

Standing by the other door, with his shotgun aimed straight at my chest, was Timmy Wickens.