Mortal Pursuit

41

Cain flung himself outside, onto the paved path between the house and the garage, and a shock wave shuddered through the yard in time with a bellowing blast.

He looked back. The house’s exterior wall flexed, networks of veins crisscrossing the puckered stucco. Windows cracked in the dining area, the living room. The side door was wrenched off its hinges in a cloud of greasy black smoke.

“Cain!” From somewhere far away, Tyler’s yell rose above the roar. “God damn it, I knew you used too much!”

Wild slide through a limestone funnel, rough rock chafing her exposed skin, then another hard landing, a blade of pain knifing her ankle.

Trish hardly felt it.

Over the echoing thunderclap of the blast she heard something like hailstones pelting the well, ringing on the rocky walls and cement floor directly above her.

She dived clear of the sinkhole. Behind her, a sudden metallic clinking.

Some of the hailstones-whatever they really were-had ricocheted into the cave.

Sprawling on her stomach, she fumbled the flashlight free of her belt.

The beam found Ally huddled in a corner. Trish threw herself at the girl and covered her protectively as the limestone chamber groaned like a living thing.

Dust flew everywhere, gritty and stinging, clouds of it, coating hair and skin and clothes. Ally shook with terror.

Trish pulled her still closer, wishing she could hug the girl but unable to do so with her chained hands, and then her back sizzled with a hot wire of pain.

One of the hailstones had slashed a horizontal wound across her shoulder blades. She hissed through clenched teeth.

Other, larger debris tumbled down the sinkhole, thudding and bouncing. A fist-sized projectile smacked into the wall a few inches away.

Ally screamed.

“There, there.” Trish pressed her mouth close to the girl’s ear. “There, there.”

Earthquake.

The thought registered distantly in Charles Kent’s mind as the closet shook and Barbara and Philip and Judy cried out in distress.

Around them, a bedlam of clashing noise: rattle of bifold doors, groan of walls, squeal of floorboards, and the clothes hangers coming down in a clattering cascade.

Another hanger pole was jostled free of its mounting. An overhead shelf tipped forward, spilling shoe boxes and hats and scarves. Judy was screaming.

An hour ago Charles would have been afraid. Now he was past fear, past feelings of any kind. He was very tired. He’d never been so tired, not even after pulling all-nighters at law school, cramming for finals, shoveling knowledge into his skull with the joyless fervor of compulsion.

Back then his exhaustion had been temporary, certain to be relieved by rest, but now there could be no rest ever again.

Ally was dead.

The gunshots Barbara had heard-there could be no other explanation.

The tremors died away. Sudden silence, broken only by Judy’s fitful sobs. Her husband comforted her while the beam of his flashlight traced an unsteady course around the closet, passing over heaps of fallen clothes and swirls of dust and a broken scatter of light bulbs that had been stored with other emergency supplies.

“What … what in God’s name … what …” Judy’s question was a moan of fear.

“Quake,” Barbara stammered, her voice raw from her earlier shouting.

Philip shook his head. “I’m not so sure. Felt more like-well, like an explosion.”

“Explosion” Barbara made a hiccupping noise. “Why would they set off an explosion Charles already opened the safe. Didn’t you, Charles”

He heard his name and understood that some sort of answer was expected.

“Opened the safe,” he echoed. “Yes.”

“Then they wouldn’t need to blow it open. So it must have been a quake.”

Philip touched her arm. “It was. Of course it was.”

Barbara stood staring blindly at the damage, her eyes wide and wild, and then she sagged, giving up.

“Or maybe not,” she whispered. “Maybe you’re right. First shots, now this. Oh, dear God, what’s going on out there”

All the life seeped out of her, and she dropped her head, too weary for tears.

Charles paid little attention to the exchange. He was thinking of the Weimaraner named Toto the family had put to sleep last year after the heartrending discovery of cancer. He remembered watching death creep into the dog’s eyes, remembered seeing the alert stare blur into glazed emptiness.

Ally’s eyes must be glassy like Toto’s, her gaze unfocused and unblinking.

Hard to face that fact. Hard to make it real. But there was something worse.

He would survive.

There it was: the blunt and simple truth. He would go on. He would put all this behind him. He would spend his wife’s money and after a time, rarely think of Ally at all.

Cain was a monster, but he was not the only one. Charles knew that now. He had peered deep inside himself, and at his core there was nothing. Simply nothing.

An earthquake, even the detonation of a bomb, seemed of trifling consequence when compared to that.