Soultaker

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

It was starting already.

Raymond could feel it in his bones and at the back of his mouth like the sting of a poison. Even here, hunched down in the floor of Patricia’s Jaguar, the atmospheric shift was palpable. The air felt charged the way it did before a storm. There was that same pregnant stillness in the last moments before that first furious clap of thunder. And yet a glance through the Jaguar’s windows revealed only a clear blue sky.

Raymond crawled out of the floor and stared at the back of the school.

The rear entrance-which opened to a hallway directly adjacent to the backstage area of the auditorium-stood open. Ten minutes ago there’d been two men there, standing guard, admitting a steady stream of local luminaries, as well as a handful of people he didn’t recognize. The mayor was here. So were the chief of police and a couple of city commissioners. A number of heavy hitters in the local business community were also present. Many of them wore formal attire, as if they were arriving for the opening night of an opera or play. They parked their cars in the lot of the nearby public library and walked across a short expanse of green lawn, looking almost regal in the brilliant sunlight. You would never guess these respectable-looking people had gathered to revel in the deaths of so many of Rockville’s young.

Raymond had wedged the Jag into a narrow space at the end of a row in the student parking lot. He’d had to run the driver side tires up over the curb to fit the Jag in the space. More than an hour had passed since he’d had to shoot Carter Brown. The Jag’s interior was thick with the sickly sweet stench of recent death. He yearned to be out of the car and away from the corpse, but he hadn’t dared to make a move with the guards around. But now they were gone, presumably to grab a ringside seat for the slaughter.

The slaughter…

The full weight of the situation fell upon him again and his breath caught in his throat. It was happening. People were dying in that building right now. Kids. Hundreds of them.

He was terrified.

Yet he knew he couldn’t wait another second.

He sucked in a big breath and expelled it fast.

“Go,” he told himself.

He reached for the driver side door handle, pulled it, and kicked the door open wide. He stepped out and stood erect. He checked the Glock. Safety off. The pockets of his black trench coat were heavy with the weight of spare clips and shotgun shells. He reached back into the car to retrieve the Moss-berg. Then, with the Mossberg pointed at the ground in one hand and the Glock in the other, he began to move toward the rear entrance.

He was halfway there when one of the guards stepped back through the door and noticed him. The man gaped at him for a moment, obviously not believing what he was seeing. Raymond thought of how he must look-like a heavily armed outlaw approaching the OK Corral at high noon-and a grim smile curved the corners of his mouth.

He increased his stride and cut the remaining distance in half.

The guard snapped out of it and reached for his weapon, but by then it was too late. Raymond squeezed the Glock’s trigger. The gun boomed and a bright patch of red bloomed at the center of the man’s gray uniform shirt. He fell dead to the ground with his weapon still in its holster. Raymond was close enough to the open door now to hear the screams, high and keening, aural testimony to intense agony and horrible death.

Raymond started running.

In another moment he was past the dead guard and through the open entrance. He was in a hallway now, with rows of gray metal lockers to either side of him. There was an open door on the left, some ten yards ahead. It also stood open, like an invitation to hell. Come on in, it seemed to say. We’ve been waiting for you. Raymond shivered and started toward the door. The screams were louder now. It was the most awful sound he’d ever heard, like something from the worst nightmares of a madman come to life. And there was another sound, something like the whine of a large generator working at peak capacity.

He stepped through the door and went up a short set of stairs to another door. This one was closed. He tucked the Mossberg under his arm and turned the knob. He threw open the door and waited a beat. No one came to investigate. There were no shots. But the terrible screams were louder still. That, more than anything else, got him moving again. He went through the open door and moved down a short hallway past a dressing room.

Then he came into the larger backstage area and saw them. All those local bigwigs with their spouses and/or lovers. They stood with their backs to him, watching the show from the wings.

Raymond hesitated.

He knew he had to kill as many of them as possible. At least any of them who got in his way. But for a moment he couldn’t bring himself to start shooting at their backs. It was something basic hardwired within him. Every boy raised on old Westerns knew it was cowardly to shoot unarmed people, especially in the back.

One of those backs stiffened abruptly.

A man in a tuxedo turned toward him.

It was Sheldon Prather, the chief of police.

He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps raise the alarm.

Raymond shot him in the face.

A hole appeared between the man’s eyes and a larger hole erupted at the back of his head. Blood and tissue from the exit wound splashed the front of Mrs. Cheever’s evening gown as the dead man’s body staggered backward a step before toppling to the floor. They all turned to face him then, and their expressions were a mixture of shock and hatred. And then outrage. He saw it in their eyes. He was here to spoil it. To stop the sacred Harvest. Raymond spared another second to study the faces of men and women he’d thought he’d known so well. Friends and neighbors. Colleagues. Formerly God-fearing members of several local churches.

Secretly monsters, all of them.

Raymond set his jaw and advanced on them.

Fuck them all.

He squeezed the Glock’s trigger again and again. The gun bucked in his hand, a wild thing working at his will as he kept his aim steady enough to mow them down. They fled to the stage and he started after them, firing at their backs, no longer caring a damn about whether it made him a coward. They fell, one by one, holes appearing in their torsos and heads. He felt like an avenging angel come to earth to invoke the wrath of God.

He paused a moment to eject the Glock’s spent clip and slap another one home.

He raised the gun to resume the righteous slaughter.

Then he felt it.

The cold steel barrel against the back of his head.

No.

He was so close. It couldn’t end this way. The screams of the children taunted him. He was their only hope. He would not surrender. Not now. Not ever. Instinct caused him to spin and lash out at the son of a bitch who’d gotten the drop on him. He struck the man’s arm in the millisecond before the gun went off. Raymond staggered backward, a burst of bright pain setting his torso afire. The Mossberg flew out of his left hand and went spinning across the shiny floor.

But the Glock was still in his right hand.

He raised it and managed to squeeze off one round in the same instant another bullet punched through his stomach and sent him to the floor.

The pain was extraordinary. It unmanned him. He cried out for his mother and knew he was finished. But he managed to raise his head and saw the guard on his knees, with a hand held over a bloody hole in his own belly. Raymond raised the Glock one last time and shot the man in the throat, finishing him.

The gun slipped from his numb fingers and thunked on the floor.

He knew there was no way he could lift it again.

I’ve failed, he thought.

They’ll all die. All the children.

And it’s all my fault.

This was his last conscious thought before slipping beyond the veil.

The harrowing screams from the auditorium continued unabated.