The Dispatcher

FIVE

Ian wakes to the sound of a knock at the door. He opens his eyes and sees white ceiling and a fan turning slowly. A few flies hang above him, punctuating the ceiling. His chest aches and throbs. He sits up and grabs the bottle of pain pills and pours a few into his mouth, then punches some caffeine tablets through the foil backing of the plastic sheet in which they were packaged and swallows those as well. There is another knock at the door. He gets to his feet, bending down to pick up the satchel, and he walks to the door and pulls it open.

Diego stands on the other side, looking tired. But he is showered and dressed in clean clothes and freshly shaved, though he missed a patch of hair under his left ear and another just under his chin.

‘What time is it?’

Diego looks at his watch. ‘Nine thirty.’

‘What? Fuck. What did you let me sleep so long for?’

‘You needed it.’

‘Anything last night?’

Diego shakes his head.

‘Not that I saw. Might have driven past, several cars did, but nobody stopped here.’

Ian nods.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Guess I catch up with them in California.’

‘We catch up with them in California.’

Ian shakes his head.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Get dressed. I’ll buy you breakfast.’

Monica brings them eggs and bacon and bagels soggy with butter. Ian thanks her and takes a sip of orange juice and watches her walk away. He wishes there was more in him. He wishes when he looked at Monica he felt something. But he does not, nor does he think he could. Not now. Even thoughts of the future are oddly emotionless, not like they used to be.

‘Distant,’ he says under his breath.

‘What?’ Diego picks up a piece of bacon and takes a bite of it.

Ian shakes his head. Nothing. ‘I’m serious about wanting you to go back to Bulls Mouth,’ he says. ‘I don’t want you near this. You have Cordelia and Elias to think about and you shouldn’t be here.’

‘He’ll kill you.’

‘Maybe.’

‘And if he does, what happens to Maggie?’

Ian looks down at his plate and pokes at his eggs with a dirty fork, but does not eat. After a while he simply sets his fork down again.

‘That doesn’t concern you,’ he says finally.

‘You know better than that.’

‘There’s nothing I can say, is there?’

‘Nothing you can say what?’

‘To get you to drive back to Bulls Mouth.’

‘No,’ Diego says.

Ian nods and is silent a long time. Finally he says, ‘Okay.’

He picks up his fork again and scoops egg into his mouth. It is flavorless and the texture is somehow terrible and dead in his mouth, but he chews and swallows and takes another bite. They have a long day ahead of them.

A long day during which someone will almost certainly die.

Ian throws his duffel bag into the back seat of his car.

‘Why don’t I ride with you?’ Diego has his own duffel bag hanging from his fist. ‘I was up all night. I could get some sleep in on the way.’

‘What about your car?’

‘I’ll pick it up on the way back.’

‘Okay. Get in. I’ll be right back.’

Ian stands in the doorway and says, ‘I’m going.’

Monica looks up from a crossword puzzle she has laid out on the counter before her and sets her pencil down. It rolls to the edge of the counter and falls to the floor, but she only glances at it a moment before looking back to Ian.

‘Are you really gonna stop by on your way back?’

‘We’re leaving Diego’s car. We’ll have to pick it up.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

She smiles.

‘Good. Maybe we can really go on that date then.’ Ian is silent for a long time. Then, smiling: ‘Maybe we can.’

Ian and Diego are on the road by ten fifteen. Diego smokes a cigarette with the window down and looks out at the desert while they drive, and then he snuffs his cigarette out in the ashtray, puts his seat back, and goes to sleep.

Ian drives in the silence.

Today is the day he gets his daughter back. It is strange to think about. Strange and frightening for reasons he cannot begin to understand. Or perhaps for reasons he refuses to understand. But he will get her back nonetheless. He will get her back and he will hold her in his arms.

In a life of failures he will have this.

They pass a sign that says KAISER NEXT EXIT, and Henry puts on his turn signal and merges into the right lane. Maggie looks out at the desert. She feels half in a dream. They drove all night. Almost all night. Henry fell asleep once and the truck rolled onto the shoulder of the road, but he snapped awake as the truck jerked about and grabbed the steering wheel and pulled them back out onto the interstate. Shortly after that he pulled off the road and they slept. But Henry must not have slept too long because the next time she awoke it was still dark and Henry was driving again.

He pulls off the interstate and onto a smaller road, passing a place with a sign that says DESERT CAFE, and Maggie imagines they serve dirt sandwiches. You pick them up and the sand falls out between the slices of bread and into your lap.

How’s the sammy?

Oh, it’s a bit dry.

Then they’re past the cafe and all that Maggie can see is empty desert. The road is filled with potholes. Thatches of dead grass sprout from cracks in the asphalt. Vapor rises in the distance.

They drive by a sign riddled with shotgun holes, rusted and barely readable. It says KAISER 8 MILES, and there is a white arrow pointing straight ahead.

‘We’re almost there, Bee,’ Henry says.

‘I can’t wait to get out of this truck,’ Beatrice says.

Maggie can’t either. They have been driving a very long time. She can’t wait to get out, but she is afraid of what will happen once they get where they’re going. She doesn’t understand why she hasn’t seen Daddy since yesterday afternoon. Maybe he forgot about her. No, she knows better than that. He did not forget about her. Her daddy would never do that. Maybe Borden got him, got him and killed him for Henry. Borden isn’t real. She knows that. Borden isn’t real and even if he was real he couldn’t leave the Nightmare World. He is like a fish in that way and cannot leave the waters of the dark place where he was born. Even if he was real he couldn’t. But he isn’t. Her daddy didn’t forget her and Borden didn’t get him. Daddy is coming for her. She looks back over her shoulder but sees only road: empty gray road: and everything in the distance receding and receding and receding.

They drive through miles of emptiness. Dirt and shrubs and strange-looking trees. There are stretches of road that vanish beneath the windswept sand, but the asphalt always emerges some time later. And after a while they start passing by gray hills like heaps of ash, and the ground looks harder, and then a great gray pit in the earth, carved down and down and down, like stairs for a giant, and the pit is surrounded by broken machinery and at the bottom of it blue blue water, the only water in sight.

‘Iron mine,’ Henry says. ‘Dried up in the seventies.’

Not long after that they arrive at the entrance to a small town surrounded by hills. A lonesome, desolate town, seemingly abandoned. There are buildings here, but they are not peopled. There is not a soul in sight. And it is silent. Not even the barking of a dog to stain the clear, quiet air.

‘Goddamn,’ Henry says.

He drives up the main street slowly, passing a gas station whose windows have been shattered. A Coke machine out front is lying on its side looking like someone took a baseball bat or a crowbar or a sledge hammer to it. Past that and on the other side is a grocery store, also empty. The middle of the day and not a single car in the parking lot, only a few bushes growing from the cracks in the asphalt. The front windows of the grocery store have also been shattered, and Maggie can see what look like food cans scattered across the lot, maybe things people didn’t want like beets and lima beans.

They round a bend and pass an abandoned school, blue buildings left to flake apart beneath the desert sun, a baseball diamond which once had green grass growing in it now dead brown, bleachers sitting empty in the distance. Another turn and they enter a neighborhood of residences, the street lined with telephone poles made gray by the weather. Two out of three houses seem to have vanished. There is evidence that they were once there; the foundations laid out on the ground in the shapes of houses let you see where various rooms should be, but the buildings are gone. In the back yards rusty clothesline poles poke from the ground, usually with the lines long rotted away. Occasionally a T-shirt hangs from a rope like a flag of surrender.

‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ Beatrice asks.

‘This is the right place,’ Henry says.

‘Where’d all them houses go?’

‘Sold. Cut in half and put on trucks and hauled off to be planted in better ground.’

‘Your brother lives here?’

‘You been here, Bee, about twenty years ago.’

‘That was here?’

‘Changed, hasn’t it?’

Maggie wasn’t even born twenty years ago, but she doesn’t think it’s changed. She thinks it’s died. When she was locked down in that basement, in the Nightmare World, she sometimes found the shells of beetles whose insides had been eaten hollow by ants. This town reminds her of that.

Henry pulls the truck to a stop in front of a small single-storey house which was probably once painted white. It now looks about ready to collapse in on itself.

Henry looks at her and at Beatrice and says, ‘Wait here.’

Then he pushes open the door and steps from the truck. He walks to the front door of the house. A moment later he knocks.

Henry knocks on the peeling green-painted door and waits. When, after some time, there is no answer he knocks again. Ron hasn’t had a phone for several years so Henry could not call him to let him know he was coming. Probably he is at work. Last time the two men exchanged letters-four maybe five years ago-Ron had gotten a job as a guard at a privately run prison about twenty miles away, Joshua Tree Medium-Security Correctional Facility, mostly populated by non-violent drug offenders.

Henry walks around the perimeter of the house, looking for open windows and checking the closed ones to see if he can push them open, but in the end he finds himself back out front with no way inside. He could break a window, but Ron’s the kind of man who upon seeing signs of a break-in will shoot first and asks questions later. While there might be some irony in driving fifteen hundred miles only to get shot by the man you came to for help, irony just ain’t a thing Henry is willing to die for.

He walks to the truck and looks in the window.

‘He ain’t here. We’ll have to wait. You guys might as well get out and stretch some.’

‘I have to pee,’ Bee says.

‘Just take some of them McDonald’s napkins around back of the house and squat.’

He looks out at the faded gray street. He needs Ron to come home. Ian Hunt could arrive at any moment, and Henry has no weapons. He lost both his Lupara and his.22 in Sierra Blanca and has been utterly defenseless since. Ian could drive right up the street and put a bullet in his head and he couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it. That ain’t no position to be in.

That ain’t no fucking position to be in at all.

‘Come on, Ron,’ he says.

He looks at his watch. It’s only noon. If Ron works eight to four, as he used to, he won’t be getting home till four thirty at least, and that’s if he don’t stop off someplace to get lit. That leaves over four hours during which Henry can get his brains blowed out. And while this corpse of a town is a good place to finish this, nobody around to call the police about any noise and plenty of places to dump a body where it won’t ever be found, the qualities that could work in his favor could also work in Hunt’s.

If Hunt shows up in the next four hours or so.

If it weren’t for getting pulled over this would have ended yesterday, it would have ended last night. But after Henry lost his weapons, he knew the only thing to do was to get to Ron’s as quick as possible and hope when he got here he had time enough to prepare for Hunt. He still doesn’t know if he has that time. If it weren’t for that fucking cop this would be over. He felt kind of bad about having to shoot him at the time, the man was just doing his job, after all, opposed to Henry though he was, but thinking about the situation it’s put him in Henry’s glad he killed the son of a bitch.

He looks at his watch again, and he waits.

Ian and Diego cross the state line into Arizona around two o’clock in the afternoon, passing a sign welcoming them to THE GRAND CANYON STATE, though the surrounding desert looks the same as it did ten minutes earlier when they were in New Mexico. Ian has always liked the desert. The harshness of it and the emptiness. If God exists He lives in the desert, of that Ian is certain. None of the masks of civilization here. No grinning handshakes and knives in the back. The desert is honest: it will take you whole and leave a husk and you will know what it is doing while it’s happening. It is what it is and makes no apologies.

There is something to be said for that.

Ian coughs into his hand, and the cough becomes a fit.

Between the coughs he manages to say, ‘Take the wheel,’ in a tight, strangled voice, and Diego does so. His coughing fit is wet and painful and comes from a very deep place in him and when it is over tears stream down his face and the strong taste of metal fills his mouth.

He wipes his hands off on his Levis, rubs at his eyes, and takes the wheel once more.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

Diego stares at him silently for a long time.

‘Do you need to stop?’

‘No.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘ No.’

He glances at Diego, expecting him to say something, expecting him to tell Ian he needs to go to the hospital and take care of himself, expecting him to once more suggest that they tell the police what is happening, but he does none of those things. With only a nod he makes it clear that Ian’s answer is okay. As long as Ian knows what he is doing to himself, Diego will accept it and help him. He does not turn his back on his friends.

Diego rolls a cigarette and looks out the window. ‘When do you think we’ll get there?’

‘Around sunset.’

Diego grunts in acknowledgment, lights his cigarette, and cracks the window.

The wind blowing through the car is very loud and very hot, but it feels good against Ian’s face even as hot as it is.

He looks to the gray road ahead.

In another four and a half or five hours they should be there. In another four and a half or five hours he gets his daughter back.

Maggie hears the car before she sees it, and Henry must hear it about the same time she does, because he gets to his feet from the curb where he was sitting with her and Beatrice and sort of leans forward as if that will help him see it sooner. Maggie feels a burning hope that it is her daddy. It is her daddy and he has come to save her and he will wrap her in his arms and take her away from here forever.

A white Toyota turns the corner and the face behind the windshield is not her daddy’s. It is nothing like her daddy’s. It is an ancient face into which time has carved great hollows. The eyebrows are thick and bushy and gray. The nostrils flare. The tongue, a colorless piece of meat, pokes out and licks the dry lips and disappears back into the pit of the mouth like some blind burrowing animal that’s sensed a predator.

The car slows and, though it is merely a machine, seems to approach them with great caution.

Henry waves.

The man behind the wheel of the Toyota lifts his hand in an automatic return wave, but for a moment his face remains blank and stupid. Then his mouth opens in an ah and he smiles and says, audibly, ‘I’ll be a goddamned son of a whore.’

He pulls the Toyota into the driveway, pushes open the car door, steps out into the daylight, and holds out his arms. He is wearing a beige uniform and a belt with a black stick and a pair of handcuffs and a can of pepper spray hanging from it and black shoes. His thin gray hair is cut close to his head.

‘Henry,’ he says.

‘Ron.’

They hug.

‘How you doin’, Bee?’

‘Okay.’

‘Good to hear it. And you must be Sarah,’ looking toward Maggie. ‘I can’t believe I never met you before. I’m your Uncle Ron.’

Henry grabs Ron’s arm.

‘Listen, we need to talk-now.’

‘Okay,’ Ron says, ‘let’s head inside.’

Maggie sits silent on the floor while Henry and Ron sit on the couch. Henry talks, and though his talk is at least half lies Maggie does not interrupt him. She merely watches and listens. While Henry tells his story Ron’s face changes, and his posture. His eyebrows lower on his head and his brown eyes seem to go black as shadows fill the deep pits of his sockets. The corners of his mouth curl down. His large nostrils flare. His loose bones weld together, locking him into a tight robotic posture. His round shoulders square, his c-shaped back snaps straight. His hands open and close in a motion Maggie recognizes from Henry. His tongue licks his dry lips. And when Henry is done Ron nods and says, ‘So how long we got, you reckon?’

‘I don’t know. He could be here any time.’

‘And he’ll be heading to the house?’

‘Best as I can figure.’

‘Okay,’ Ron says, ‘I know just what to do.’

Henry and Beatrice and Maggie pile into Ron’s Toyota as Ron said they should before he disappeared into a hallway, and now he emerges from the green-painted front door of his house with two rifles under one arm, boxes of shells in the other hand, and a pistol tucked into his waistband.

He hands the rifles to Henry, who slides them between his legs, butts on the floorboard, barrels aimed at the roof of the car.

Then Ron gets into the car himself and closes the door behind him.

Maggie does not understand what is happening, not exactly, but she knows it is bad. They’re going to try to use those guns on Daddy. She wants to do something, but she doesn’t know what. She can’t even run. This town is empty, and miles from anywhere else. She only wanted to go home. She only wanted to go home to her daddy and mommy and-

Stop it, Maggie. Stop it.

One two three four five six seven eight.

She exhales in a slow breath. She has to be a big girl. She has to stay calm. She has to stay calm and see what happens and if there’s anything she can do to help herself or help Daddy she will. But she can’t panic. That won’t get her anywhere. She closes her eyes and is enveloped by darkness. She opens her eyes, feeling a bit better, though still scared.

‘Where we going?’ Henry asks.

‘High school.’

‘High school?’

Ron nods.

‘Trust me,’ he says and starts the car.

They park in an otherwise empty parking lot. It is strange to be the only car in this vast field of asphalt. They get out of the car. There are several textbooks lying open on the asphalt, the hot breeze like a ghost occasionally turning their pages. Henry hands Ron one of the rifles and keeps the other for himself.

‘This way,’ Ron says.

They walk toward the front door of a two-storey building. It is a light blue color, the paint chipped and peeling. Not just the paint is peeling-time and weather have taken out chunks of the outer wall itself, leaving behind empty pits guarded only by what looks like chicken wire. They walk up five concrete steps and into a large empty corridor lined with lockers, some open, some closed, several still padlocked. The open ones have pens and pencils and books in them, pictures taped inside some of the doors. Books litter the vinyl floor. There are also occasional animal skeletons.

A rattlesnake lies on the vinyl floor in front of them. It looks to be in pretty bad shape. Ron pokes at it with the barrel of his rifle to make sure it’s dead. It is. They step over it and continue walking.

‘Beatrice and Sarah can wait for us in one of the classrooms,’ Ron says.

‘I’m hungry,’ Beatrice says. ‘Are you hungry, Sarah?’

Maggie nods.

‘You couldn’t’ve said nothing before this minute?’

‘I didn’t want to interrupt.’

‘We was at Ron’s house. There was food there. What the fuck do you think we’re gonna find here?’

‘I just wanted to use the vending machine.’

‘What fucking vending machine?’

Beatrice points. At the end of the hallway sits an ancient vending machine with ancient food in it. Bags of chips, candy bars.

‘All right,’ Henry says. ‘Let’s get you some.’

They walk to the end of the hall where the vending machine sits. As they near it Maggie can see that several of the bags have been chewed through by animals-small rough-edged holes in the packaging, and pieces of food visible, usually small crumbs of it littered with even smaller pieces of insect shit.

‘All right,’ Henry says, ‘stand back.’

He slams the butt of his rifle into the glass front of the vending machine and it cracks loudly, sounding to Maggie like God clapping His hands. Then he slams the butt of the gun against it once more, and it shatters and pieces of glass fall to the floor where they shatter further. He knocks more glass away, then hands the rifle to Ron and starts pulling out packages and going through them.

‘Most of this shit’s been got to, Bee.’

He throws the stuff that’s been gotten to to the floor.

But they still manage to find six bags of chips and three candy bars and two bags of pork rinds that seem safe, or at least undisturbed by animals. With Beatrice’s arms piled up with food, they head toward the nearest classroom.

‘I need to talk to my girls a sec,’ Henry says.

‘Have to it,’ Ron says, ‘but make it quick. I wanna get to the roof ASAP.’

Henry nods, and then guides Beatrice and Maggie into a classroom.

The room is bright with daylight. It is empty save about twenty desks stacked in the corner. A tattered poster of the multiplication table hangs on the wall. There are math problems written on the chalkboard, faded white ghosts of what used to be. The floor itself is littered with textbooks and math papers. A row of windows, some of which are now shattered, reveal the baseball diamond. Empty bleachers. A rusty dugout. Plugs where bases used to be. A pitcher’s mound. Dead grass.

Henry grabs Maggie by the arm and walks her to the stack of desks. He grabs one of the desks from the top of the stack and pulls it down and puts it on the floor. He shoves her into it.

‘Sit here.’

Then he stops, apparently thinking. Turns silently and walks out. When he returns he has a pair of handcuffs, Ron’s handcuffs, in one hand and a pistol, also Ron’s, in the other. He tucks the pistol into his waistband, and then walks to Maggie with the handcuffs. He puts one of the cuffs on her wrist, tight, and the other he wraps around the desk, around part of the metal frame that curves up from the seat and bends to become the desk-top frame, onto which the slab of wood is screwed.

‘What if I have to pee?’

‘Squat by the desk.’

He turns away from her and walks to Beatrice. He pulls the pistol from his waistband and puts it into her hand.

‘What’s this for?’

‘Just in case.’

‘Just in case what?’

‘It’s a semiautomatic and the safety’s off, so be careful. All you have to do is aim and pull the trigger, Bee. You got that?’

‘Aim and pull the trigger at what?’

‘Anybody walks through that door other than me or Ron.’

‘I don’t wanna shoot nobody, Henry.’

‘What do we do, Bee?’

‘What do we do?’

‘We do what we have to to keep the family together.’

She is silent a long time, and then she nods.

‘Good girl. Now keep an eye on Maggie, give her some chips or something, and if anybody walks through the door other than me or Ron. .’

Bee just stares at him.

‘Bee?’

‘What?’

‘If anybody comes through the door other than me or Ron what are you gonna do?’

‘Aim and pull the trigger?’

‘That’s right.’

As soon as Henry is gone Maggie begins trying to squeeze her hand out through the cuff. It hurts, but if she squeezes her hand tight, and folds her thumb into her palm, she thinks she might be able to get free. If she has enough time.

Henry walks out of the classroom and into the corridor.

‘All taken care of?’ Ron says, pulling himself up from his leaning position against a wall of lockers.

‘Yeah.’

‘Good.’

He hands Henry back one of the two rifles, what was once their dad’s.30–06, an old army job that takes an eight-round en bloc clip. When their dad got drunk he would shoot bottles off fence posts with it and tell them, ‘Patton used to say this was the finest piece of military machinery ever made, and you know what? That crazy motherfucker was right.’ Henry checks to make sure it’s loaded, and then nods to himself.

‘To the roof?’ he says.

‘To the roof.’

They climb an access ladder in the janitor’s closet, push open a hatch, and make their way out onto the asphalt roof. It is early evening now and the sun is low and red in the sky. For some reason it makes Henry think of cracking a fertilized egg into a frying pan. That yellow yolk, that seed of red upon it cooking and dead. The evening sun. He turns in a circle and looks at the deserted town around them. He stops and looks down the long gray strip of asphalt leading to town. He can see for miles. If he had better eyes he could see all the way to the interstate.

‘Good place,’ Henry says.

‘I know it,’ Ron says. ‘Only the Jackrabbit Inn’s taller, three storeys instead of two, but you can’t see the road leading to town as good.’ Ron nods to his right and says, ‘Let’s take a load off while we wait.’

There are two lawn chairs sitting out in the red evening light and between them a styrofoam ice chest. Ron walks over and eases into one of the chairs. The thing protests under his weight. He pulls the lid off the ice chest, reaches inside, and pulls out a Coors. He breaks it open. It foams and he sips at it.

‘It’s warm,’ he says, ‘but it’s beer.’

‘Who’s the other chair for?’ Henry asks.

‘For you.’

Henry sits beside his brother and looks west toward the falling sun. A warm beer rests between his legs. He felt panicky before when he was unarmed and simply waiting to be killed, but now he feels oddly calm. He’s here and ready. Beatrice is safe. Sarah is locked up and incapable of doing any harm. And soon Hunt will be dead.

He glances over at Ron. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he says.

‘Too bad it’s under these circumstances.’

‘I think he got Donald. I didn’t tell you that part at the house. It’s the only way he could’ve found out where I was heading.’

‘Got Donald?’ Ron says. ‘You mean kilt him?’

Henry nods.

‘You think or you know?’

‘I think.’

Ron shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says, ‘he didn’t kill Donald.’

‘I think maybe-’

‘Donald’s the only one of us who’s any good. He couldn’t’ve got killed.’

‘I think he-’

‘Hush up and watch the sunset.’

‘I just-’

‘Hush up, Henry. You never did know when to keep your goddamned mouth shut.’

Henry picks up his beer and takes a swallow. He squints toward the sunset, then looks left at the gray road to the south leading from the interstate into town. It is empty.

By the time they each finish their second beer and grab their third Ron is smiling again.

‘I missed you, Henry.’

‘I missed you too.’

‘This kinda feels like fishing, don’t it?’

Henry nods. ‘It’s nice.’

But suddenly the smile is gone from Ron’s face and he is no longer looking at Henry but past him. He nods his head.

‘Look it.’

Henry looks left, to the south, and sees it. A dirty red car coming toward them. At this distance it looks like little more than a matchbox, a toy you could lose under your bed, but it’s Ian Hunt all right. And suddenly Henry’s heart is beating very fast in his chest, a percussive blood-drum pounding out the rhythm of his fear. And even now, even up here with his older brother, two rifles, and a couple boxes of ammunition, the sight of Hunt’s red car coming toward him does make him feel fear. He does not know why, but it does.

He finishes his warm beer, tosses the can aside, and drops into a prone firing position, up on his elbows, butt of the rifle in his shoulder, legs forming the number four behind him. He leads the red Mustang with the barrel of his gun. It grows larger as it comes nearer. A dusty old beater of a car.

He breathes in and out in tight, jerky fits. He’s going to have to get himself under control if he’s to make this shot count. A man has only one unexpected shot, and he’d do well to make it count. That means creating a calm in his center. At this distance a small shift can mean putting the bullet off target by a foot or two. The throbbing beat of his heart or a poorly timed inhalation and that is it: he’s missed.

Ron remains seated in his lawn chair. He takes a loud swallow of his beer, sets it down, then drops to a knee. Henry doesn’t see it, but he hears it, and he knows that’s the position Ron likes to shoot from, for some reason.

‘You got him?’

‘Hush it up,’ Henry says. ‘Lemme concentrate.’

‘So you got it.’

‘Yeah, now quiet.’

As the car gets nearer Hunt’s face becomes visible. As does the face of the man beside him. He is not alone. He brought someone with him. Henry is sure that he was alone when he saw him on the interstate yesterday. Somewhere along the way he picked someone up. He squints, trying to see if he recognizes the man in the passenger seat. Officer Peña. Diego Peña.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he says under his breath.

‘What is it?’

‘I said lemme concentrate.’

‘Then stop cursing and start concentrating.’

Did Hunt involve the police after all? No, that doesn’t make any sense. Peña’s just a city cop and this is way outside his jurisdiction. Peña doesn’t even count as a policeman this far west. He’s just another si habla español with a gun.

He looks past the Mustang and into the distance. There are no other vehicles within miles. Hunt and Peña are alone out here. They’re alone out here, and Henry has to make sure they never leave. He has to kill them. Then it’s over.

He licks his lips. He inhales and holds his breath. The world is a storm but he is its eye. He lines Ian up in his sights.

The cold metal of the trigger dents the pad of his finger as he puts pressure upon it, then it moves beneath that pressure.

It is nearly seven o’clock when Ian pulls the Mustang off the interstate; the sun is low in the sky and has lost much of its midday polish and the sky itself is reddening. They drive past a place called the Desert Cafe, and then past a shotgunned sign that says KAISER 8 MILES. Beyond the sign there is no evidence of human life save the road itself, the desert stretching out on either side of them dotted only with shrubbery and Joshua trees. A rattlesnake is stretched out on the other side of the road to catch the last of the day’s sun before slithering off for the night. The corpse of a jackrabbit half a mile past it.

Neither he nor Diego say anything for a long time.

Then Ian breaks the silence: ‘You don’t have to be here for this.’

‘But I do.’

‘You don’t. You have a wife and a son and you don’t have to be here for this.’

Diego looks at him a moment, and then out toward the desert to his right. Ian glances at him, but he is silent and his head is turned away.

‘When I was in grade school,’ Diego says after a while, still looking out his window, ‘around twelve or so, I was hanging out with these older kids at recess. They walked up to this kid sitting on one of the picnic benches next to the basketball courts, just this kid about my age reading a Stephen King novel or something, and started harassing him. ‘Nice shoes,’ someone said. They were the cheap plastic kind and the tops were already cracked. ‘Thank you,’ he said. You could hear the nervous tremor in his voice. I remember that very clearly, that nervous tremor. ‘You find ’em in the trash?’ That kind of thing. I just stood there. I might have even thrown out an insult of my own, you know, to fit in, but I felt ashamed of myself, Ian. My heart felt sick. I’ve never forgotten that.’

Ian slows down as they approach the town itself. To the right is an abandoned gas station with a tipped-over Coke machine lying dead in its parking lot. Civilization felled. Dead grass juts from cracks in the asphalt. Then they pass a grocery store, also abandoned.

‘Jesus,’ Diego says. ‘It’s like a preview of the end of the world.’

Ian nods. ‘Keep a lookout for any sign of them. I don’t like driving into this at-’

Thwack.

For a moment Ian has no idea what happened. Then he sees a small hole in the middle of the windshield. He looks to Diego. Diego looks back.

‘Your ear’s bleeding,’ Diego says.

Ian touches his right ear. It stings sharply and his fingers come away red. He glances to his seat’s headrest. A hole just big enough to stick your pinky finger into.

‘Put your head down,’ he says to Diego as he drops his own. Thwack.

Pieces of the windshield start to fall around them.

Ian puts his foot on the gas, panicking and trying to get them out of the line of fire, but accidentally stalls the engine after only ten or fifteen feet. He reaches out to the driver’s side door-he thinks the gunfire is coming from the school to the northeast and wants the car between him and any bullets flying toward him-and pushes it open.

Then he pushes himself out the car door and onto the road saying, ‘This way, Diego, and keep your fucking head down.’

He hits asphalt and a terrible pain rips through his chest.

He looks down. Red spreads quickly across his shirt. The tube tore out. He forgot about it and it tore out. It lies across his seat and hangs down the outside of the car and drips pink pus-blood onto the dirty asphalt. On the end of it, wrapped around it, is the black string that was once stitched through his skin, making the edges of the wound pucker like a tulip, and a pink triangle of the skin itself. When he breathes he hears that punctured-tire wheeze. He puts his hand over his chest to stop the air from leaking out that way. The last thing he needs right now is a collapsed lung.

Thwack. Thwack.

Two more bullets hit the car.

Diego drops to the road beside him.

‘Are you shot?’

Ian shakes his head.

‘I need plastic,’ he says.

‘Plastic?’

He closes his eyes and grimaces in pain. Then he opens them again. Diego sits on his haunches, ducked behind the Mustang and looking down at him.

‘In the car,’ Ian says. ‘On the floorboard. There should be a small sheet of plastic. Can you get it?’

Diego nods and climbs back into the car.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

Silence from within the car.

‘Diego?’

More silence. He’s almost convinced himself that Diego was shot when he emerges with a rectangle of plastic about six inches long and three inches wide. It has two stickers on it. The first sticker marks it as a TUNA FISH AND CHEDDAR SANDWICH and the second has the price, $4.99, and a barcode.

‘This?’ Diego asks.

Ian nods. ‘That’s the one.’

He unbuttons his shirt with his right hand while holding his left over the hole in his chest.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Listen. I’m gonna pull my hand away from my chest. I need you to slap that piece of plastic over the hole.’

‘Okay.’

Ian licks his dry lips. ‘Okay.’

Ian pulls his hand away. He inhales and hears that terrible whistle. Then pressure and it stops. Diego is leaning over him, hand holding the plastic over the wound in his chest.

‘Okay,’ Ian says. ‘I got it.’

He puts his own hand over the piece of plastic.

‘Help me sit up and get this shirt off.’

They get Ian up and then get his right arm out of his shirt; then, after putting his right hand over the wound in his chest, his left arm.

‘Now,’ Ian says. ‘Let’s tie the shirt around me. Use it to hold the plastic in place.’

Diego nods. ‘Okay,’ he says.

He shakes the dust off the shirt, then slings it around Ian’s back.

Ian simply sits with his back against the car’s left front fender and catches his breath. Tears of pain stream down his face and his heart beats irregularly in his chest. He breathes in and out. He closes his eyes and opens them. The pain is tremendous. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the bottle of tramadol. He thumbs the cap off the bottle and looks inside. Three pills left. He pours them into his mouth and dry swallows, then throws the bottle aside.

‘Are you gonna be okay?’

He shakes his head.

‘No,’ he says. ‘But we’re here and we’re doing this, so let’s finish it.’

‘Let’s.’

‘Get the guns from the back seat.’

Maggie is pulling her hand against the cuff, grimacing, unable to get the metal ring over the meat of her thumb, when she hears the first gunshot. Beatrice jumps at the sound and drops the bag of chips in her hand.

She leaves the chips where they lie and walks to the pistol Henry gave her and picks it up from the floor where she set it. She examines it, a confused look on her face, like she doesn’t know how it got into her hand, sets it down again, and walks to the window. The evening light splashes across her face.

Another gunshot sounds and Beatrice jumps again.

‘What can you see?’

‘Nothing,’ Beatrice says. ‘Just a baseball field.’

‘That’s my daddy,’ Maggie says. ‘Those gunshots mean my daddy’s here.’

‘Henry’s your daddy, Sarah.’

‘Henry will never be my daddy.’

Two more gunshots echo through the hollow school building, the sounds bouncing off the walls and repeating and repeating and repeating, but softer each time.

‘Henry will never be my daddy,’ she says again, ‘and you’ll never be my momma.’

Beatrice looks at her with wide, sad eyes, half her face lit by what is left of the day splashing in through the windows, the other half covered in shadows and seemingly younger as the shadows hide the lines in her face.

‘Why would you say such a thing, Sarah? We’re doing all this for you. To keep our family together. Family’s the most important thing there is and we’re doing this for you.’

‘I don’t want you to. I want to go back to my real family.’

‘We’re your real family now.’

Maggie shakes her head.

‘No,’ she says. ‘My daddy’s here. My real daddy. He’s my family. Him and my momma and Jeffrey. My daddy’s a policeman and he’s going to put you and Henry in jail forever and ever. He’s going to put you in jail and take me home and I’ll never have to see you again.’

‘Don’t talk like that, Sarah.’

Tears stream down Beatrice’s round face, but her eyes are ablaze with anger as well as sadness. Her hands form fists at her sides. She almost looks capable of violence.

Maggie has never spoken to her this way, mostly out of fear that Henry would find out and put her on the punishment hook, but also because she always felt a little bit sorry for her, she has always seemed so sad, but she does not feel sorry for her now, and she is no longer afraid of Henry. No longer so afraid of him that she is willing to remain silent. She simply wants to be home with her real family. That want burns hot within her chest. She thought she would never feel that again. She thought the sun that burns within her had died, but it did not die.

It was only nighttime.

Three more gunshots echo through the air one after the other in quick succession.

‘Henry’s probably dead now,’ Maggie says. ‘You’ll be in jail alone and Henry will be dead. No one will even write you any letters and no one will visit.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ Beatrice says, pushing Maggie. The desk tilts, holds a moment, precariously balanced on two legs, and then crashes onto its side. Maggie’s elbow slams against the floor and pain vibrates through her body and a strange sensation shoots up her arm and her pinky and ring fingers go numb.

Beatrice rushes to her side and works to pull her and the desk up. It takes some doing, but she manages it. Maggie rubs at her elbow with her free hand. She thinks of pulling out of the handcuffs and grabbing the gun from the floor and running out of here. She knows her daddy is here, but she cannot just sit and wait to be saved. She waited trapped in the Nightmare World for a long time, and it was the longest night she has ever known, the longest night, she hopes, she will ever know, and she will not sit and wait ever again.

‘I’m sorry, Sarah,’ Beatrice says. ‘I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.’ She strokes Maggie’s hair and pulls Maggie’s head to her fat belly and presses her head against it. ‘I’m sorry.’

Maggie pulls her head away.

‘Just leave me alone.’

‘You’ll feel better when all this is over,’ Beatrice says.

‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’

Beatrice wipes at her eyes. She walks to the window and looks out again.

‘You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.’

‘I do mean it.’

Beatrice looks at her once more, and then turns back to the window. She simply stares out into the fading light of evening.

Maggie looks down at her wrist and tries once more to pull her hand through the cuff. It slides fine until the meat of her thumb, and there it stays no matter how hard she pulls, the metal digging deeper and deeper into her flesh.

Frustrated, she hits the top of the desk with her free hand. The other end tilts into the air and slams back down. It is loose. Eyeing Beatrice to make sure the woman is not looking at her, she pushes up on the desk. She lifts the top of the desk as far as it will go. Two of the screws have been stripped from the fiberboard underside. Maybe by the fall. She can almost slide the cuff wrapped around the desk right off. She doesn’t have to free her hand. All she has to do is pull off the top of the desk. She just has to get the final screw out, and she can slide the cuff right off.

Beatrice is still staring sadly out the window. Maggie is stung by another pang of pity for her. Her face just hangs there looking so lonesome. Even after everything there is a part of her that wants to give Beatrice the love she so obviously needs. But Maggie cannot love her. Maggie cannot even like her. She can only feel a strange combination of pity and hatred.

She pushes up on the top of the desk, trying to pry it loose.

Henry lies prone on the roof of the high school. He squints down at the car on the street below, but has seen no movement for some time. He has no idea what they’re doing back there. His arms are cramping. He’s not going to be able to lie like this much longer. And their silence is making him nervous. They cannot just wait there forever. They have to do something. Why aren’t they shooting back? If they were returning fire he might be able to locate them and finish them off. Just one or two shots would be enough. Then he would know where they were-and when they popped up to shoot again that would be it.

Maybe he already has finished them off and that’s why they aren’t moving. Except he knows better than that. That’s the kind of thinking that will get him into trouble. If he lets his guard down he’ll get himself killed.

‘Can you see anything?’ he says to Ron, who is behind him, crouched down on one knee, rifle at the ready.

‘No,’ he says. ‘What the fuck are they waiting for?’

‘I dunno,’ Henry says. ‘But I don’t like it.’

That’s when he sees the driver’s seat slide forward and tilt toward the steering wheel.

He sees movement behind it-an arm reaching into the back seat, he thinks. It’s hard to tell for certain. But it is movement.

Inhale. Hold the breath. Take aim. Steady.

The world is a storm but he is its eye.

Exhale.

Squeeze the trigger.

Ian hears the bullet slam into his car and flinches, but Diego does not. Diego simply reaches into the back seat and comes out first with the rifled Remington 11–87 and the sawed-off Remington 870, and then with the.308 and the duffel bag in which the boxes of ammunition are stored. Ian pulls the duffel bag toward him and unzips it. He tosses Diego the shells for the.308. Then pulls out shells for himself and gets to loading the two shotguns.

Once they’re loaded he slides to the front of the car and looks around the bumper trying to spot Henry, trying to spot movement of any kind. He knows the shots are coming from across the wide street, and from the north, and from a good distance, by the sound of it.

‘Where are you, you son of a-’

He pulls his head back quickly and a moment later there is the sound of a gunshot and the dirt three feet behind the place where his face was kicks up a cloud of dust, and a few pebbles from the ground throw themselves against the right leg of his Levis.

‘They’re on the roof of the school,’ he says. ‘About fifty, sixty yards away.’

Diego nods. ‘What do you want to do?’

Ian closes his eyes a moment, thinking. He did not want to get Diego involved in this way. He did not want to ask of him what he is about to ask of him. Even now he wishes he had talked Diego into heading back to Bulls Mouth. If Diego was not here he would have to think of something else. But Diego is here. He opens his eyes and looks at his friend. This will change him. What he is about to ask of his friend will change him forever.

‘How’s your long-distance shooting?’ he says.

Ian sits on his haunches behind the Mustang. To his right Diego is readying himself for a run toward what once was a hardware store. If he can get behind it, he can make his way in relative safety to the top floor of a three-storey hotel called the Jackrabbit Inn about three hundred yards further on. From that vantage point he should have clear shots at Henry Dean and his brother on the roof of the school.

‘You ready?’ he says.

Diego nods.

Ian exhales and his exhalation turns into a deep cough. Liquid gags up from his lungs like muddy water from a well-pump and he spits it to the asphalt between his feet. Tears stream down his face. He leans his head against the car fender before him and spits once more. His chest is throbbing with pain. Last time he tried to do this he was shot. What is it they say about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results?

‘One,’ he says, looking toward Diego.

‘You sure you’re-’

‘Two,’ he says, cutting off the question.

Diego nods briefly. The nod tells Ian that he accepts that as an answer.

‘Three.’

Diego takes off running.

Ian jumps to his feet, swinging the shotgun up and into the crook of his shoulder, and he fires at the roof of the schoolhouse. The pain is incredible. Concrete explodes less than a foot below the place where Henry is crouched. A white shell flies from the shotgun, arcs in a blur through the air, and hits the asphalt to his right. He fires again and again and again. Both Henry and his brother drop down, becoming invisible from this angle.

But Ian remains standing, squinting toward the school, watching the flat line of the roof and waiting.

Blood runs down his sweaty belly from the hole in his chest, which is throbbing with pain. His breaths are quick and shallow, as he can manage nothing but shallow breaths any longer. Any time he tries to breathe deep it turns into a painful coughing fit. He knows what is happening. With the tube removed from his lung he is drowning in his own blood. It is beyond a feeling of drowning now; it is the actual thing.

A flash of movement from the roof of the school. He fires. Concrete explodes.

The movement ceases.

Ian glances behind him.

Diego is out of sight.

Good. Black dots are swimming before Ian’s eyes and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to remain standing much longer.

He fires off the last three rounds in the 11–87’s magazine, listening to the shells clink to the asphalt to his right between shots, and then allows himself to sink to the ground behind the car, out of breath and in pain. Every shot sent a terrible force through his right shoulder and his wounds are now screaming. Sweat runs down his face and drips from the end of his nose. He blinks several times, and then looks for Diego.

He does not see him, nor does he hear him.

The air is silent and still but for the sound of his own breathing.

And then he does hear him. He hears the rapid rhythm of his boots. He hears running. He is far away and getting farther.

Ian nods. Good.

He grabs the box of deer slugs and starts reloading.

Maggie slides the handcuffs down the length of the arm of the desk, being careful they don’t rattle too much. She slides them beneath the wooden desktop, now detached from the frame, and then she is loose. The cuff slides off and dangles from her wrist. It is strange: a tightness in her chest seems to uncoil with the simple knowledge that her arm is free.

Her arm is free.

She looks up at Beatrice.

Beatrice does not look back.

The gun sits on the floor next to a pile of chips and candy bars.

Maggie slides out of the desk, eyes on Beatrice, and makes her way silently across the room. She is barefoot, so it is not difficult to be silent. But Beatrice must see her movements out of the corner of her eye, in her periphery, because she turns to look at her and says, ‘Sarah, what are you doing? Henry said to stay here.’

Maggie runs to the gun and picks it up.

Beatrice walks toward her, but stops when Maggie points the gun at her.

‘I don’t want to shoot you,’ she says with a shaky voice. ‘But I will.’

Beatrice is silent. She simply stares at Maggie with her wide, glistening eyes. Tears once more roll down her round face. Her chin trembles. Her shoulders sag with defeat.

‘We’re never gonna be a family again, are we?’

‘We never were,’ Maggie says.

Beatrice leans back against the wall and slides down it to a sitting position, with her knees up and her arms on her knees. She looks down at her lap. Maggie can see her cotton panties. Somehow that makes her seem very much like a little girl. Tears drip off her face and splash against her dress.

‘We never were,’ Beatrice says, eyes focused on nothing, and it seems as if she is speaking a foreign phrase for the first time. A foreign phrase whose meaning she does not quite understand.

She looks up at Maggie as Maggie backs her way out of the room.

‘We never were,’ Beatrice says again. Then: ‘But I loved you.’

‘I didn’t love you,’ Maggie says.

Then she turns around and runs out into the corridor, looking for a way out.

The first shot from above thwacks into the roof just to the left of Henry’s legs. He can feel the displaced air ripple outward and press itself against his body and he hears the bullet connect with the roof, an almost wet crack like a bone breaking open and spilling its marrow, and several splinters are thrown against his Levis.

‘Where the fuck did that come from?’

Ron behind him scanning the surrounding buildings, looking for the source of the gunshot whose bang still echoes through the empty streets of the town.

‘I don’t know,’ Henry says. ‘It had to come from above. The angle is wrong for-’

The second shot hits less than a foot shy of the place where Ron is crouched, and splinters fly from the roof and into his face. He falls backwards with a curse, blinking as tears stream down his face, about a dozen bleeding pin-prick holes in his cheeks.

Henry looks back toward the street. The shooter, which has to be Peña because Hunt is still trapped behind his now bullet-riddled car, has to be in the Jackrabbit Inn, it’s the only building taller than the schoolhouse, but Henry can’t see him anywhere. He doesn’t see him on the roof, and while several of the windows on the third floor are open, all he can see behind those windows is darkness. The sun is setting behind the building, lighting Henry and his brother while keeping the east side of the Jackrabbit Inn in shadows. And it’s the east side of the hotel he and Ron are facing.

‘We have to get off the roof,’ he says. ‘Ron, we gotta get off the-’

Ron is sitting up, rubbing his eyes, when a third shot is fired. A red dot presses itself into the center of Ron’s left hand. He pulls it away from his face and looks at it.

But the bullet continued through the hand, and there is another dot in his left cheekbone and his left eye is filling with blood and a slow trickle runs from his right nostril, down onto his lip, and then along the top of his lip, drawing a red mustache there before dripping from his face.

‘Ron?’

Ron looks up from his hand to Henry.

‘Something happened to my. . hand.’

He holds it up for Henry to see, blinks several times, and falls over sideways.

‘Ron?’

Henry gets to his feet and turns in a full circle, confused somehow-this isn’t how it was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be easy and quick, a few shots and finished. He glances toward the Jackrabbit Inn and again sees only darkness in the windows there. He turns and runs toward the hatch in the roof as the fourth shot cuts through the air. He drops down the ladder and lands in the janitor’s closet and falls backwards against a shelf full of cleaning supplies.

What the fuck just happened?

He tries to accept what he saw, but his mind keeps rejecting it. He cannot have just seen his brother get killed. That’s impossible. It’s impossible.

It happened.

First his younger brother, then his older brother.

Hunt has to pay for that if for nothing else. He knows Donald would never give him up unless he was forced to. He knows he would never-

He closes his eyes and tries to get his mind right.

He has to finish this.

He opens his eyes and walks out of the janitor’s closet and down a wide flight of stairs to the first floor. He walks down the corridor, and is about to pass the classroom that Beatrice and Sarah are waiting in when Sarah runs out of it, into the corridor. A gun hangs from her right hand, the handcuffs still wrapped around her wrist clinking against its barrel.

She looks left and sees him, and there is a moment of terror in her eyes, but only a moment of it. Then she lifts the pistol in her hand and points it at him.

‘Don’t move,’ she says.

He stops and puts his arms up, still holding his dad’s.30–06 in his right hand. First his younger brother, then his older brother. Now the one in the middle.

‘What are you doing, Sarah? How’d you get out?’

‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘Shut up and put down that gun.’

‘You don’t even know how to use that gun, Sarah. You’re not gonna shoot me.’

‘It’s a semiautomatic and the safety’s off,’ Sarah says. ‘You told Beatrice. All I have to do is aim and pull the trigger.’

He takes a slow step toward her.

‘I said stop!’

He does.

‘Put down your gun.’

‘You’re not gonna shoot me.’

Sarah licks her lips and raises the barrel of the pistol so it’s pointed at his face. He stares into it, and then past it to Sarah, and he sees that she will shoot him. If he isn’t careful she will shoot him. He thinks of Beatrice’s ankle. He never did find out exactly how that happened, but looking into Sarah’s face he thinks he knows. Her eyes tell him that she is very much her father’s daughter. At least in one respect she is: once she begins something, she does not quit.

‘Put down your gun,’ she says again. ‘Right now.’ Her voice trembles with rage.

He thinks of all the times he tied her hands, all the times he hung her from the punishment hook. He thinks of leaving her in the basement. He thinks of hearing her cry when she was younger. He thinks of when the crying stopped.

He nods, then leans down slowly and sets the rifle onto the floor.

‘Did you shoot Beatrice?’

‘No,’ Sarah says. ‘I didn’t have to.’

‘Good,’ he says. With him leaning forward she is almost within arm’s reach. He wonders if he might be able to lunge at her and get the gun away. ‘Good,’ he says again. ‘You don’t want to shoot anybody.’

‘I don’t. But I will.’

‘I know that, Sarah,’ he says. ‘I know th-’

He jumps at her and just manages, barely, to grab her wrist before the gun goes off. The sound rings in his ears, deafening him completely, if only momentarily, and he staggers backwards, hand still wrapped around Sarah’s wrist.

Son of a bitch: she actually shot him. He’s faced off against half a dozen cops in the last few days and come out unscathed, only to be shot by a fourteen-year-old girl.

But he will not die like this. He will not.

He struggles to pull the gun out of Sarah’s hands.

Ian sits on his haunches and waits, the rifled shotgun in his hands and the sawed-off shotgun tucked into the back of his Levis. He heard gunfire echo its way out the front door of the school and now he waits for something human to emerge.

Silence follows silence.

He swallows and can feel his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. His mouth is dry, his lips cracked. His eyes sting.

And then he sees movement on the other side of the doorway, behind the shadows. His first urge is to stand and shoot, but he does not do that. He waits to see what emerges from the shadows and what emerges from the shadows is Henry. Henry carrying Maggie, holding her around the waist and with a pistol to her head. He is pale and glistening with sweat and there is a hole in the middle of his neck like a tracheotomy and blood is running down the front of his shirt and Maggie is trying to pull his arm away from her waist so she will be let loose.

Behind Henry and Maggie is Beatrice. Her head is low and her shoulders slumped. She barely seems to be there at all.

Ian stands, pointing the 11–87 at Henry and walking around the front of the car. He feels wobbly on his legs, but he does not care and he does not move slowly. He cuts the distance between Henry and himself in half.

‘Let her go,’ he says.

‘So you can shoot me?’ Henry says, his voice little more than a frog’s croak. ‘No chance.’

‘I’m gonna shoot you anyway, you son of a bitch.’

Henry shakes his head. ‘You won’t risk killing your own daughter, Hunt.’

‘I said let her go.’

‘No. You’re not gonna risk shooting her. I know it and you know it. So just drop your gun. We’re walking to Ron’s car and we’re driving away and that’s the end of it. You lose, Hunt. You tried, but you lose.’

Henry takes several slow steps toward the parking lot where a white Toyota sits. His wife Beatrice walks behind him. Her eyes are wet with tears and glistening.

‘Put down your gun, Hunt.’

‘Let her go.’

‘Put it down or I’ll shoot her myself.’

He presses his pistol against Maggie’s temple.

Maggie looks at him with eyes filled not with fear but with anger. ‘No, Daddy! Don’t put it down! Don’t let him get away! Don’t let him take me away again! Please, just don’t let him take me away again!’

‘Shut up, Sarah,’ Henry says. ‘Put it down, Hunt, or she dies.’

Ian’s chest throbs with pain. He thinks he could probably get Henry. He could probably get Henry, but even the small chance of hitting Maggie makes him hesitate. He will not do that. He nods, more to himself than to Henry, and leans down to set the 11–87 on the ground. But as he stands, black dots swim before his eyes and the light seems to fade from the sky, as if night were falling all at once, and there is a brief moment during which he thinks he may pass out, just drop like a corseted lady in an old film, and then will come the gentlemen with fans, and all he can think is two words over and over again: not now not now not now not now.

And he manages, barely, to hold on to consciousness. Light runs back into the dome of the sky like liquid over an upturned glass bowl. He regains his balance.

‘Smart man,’ Henry says.

‘No,’ Maggie says. ‘No!’

And she slams both her elbows back simultaneously into Henry. The left elbow sinks into his gut, and a strange sound explodes from Henry’s mouth, like a large dog letting go a single bark, and Maggie drops to the ground from his loosened grip. She drops to the ground and runs toward Ian. Her face is full of terror and joy.

Henry swings the pistol around toward her, and shouts, ‘Stop, Sarah, or I’ll-’

But that’s all he manages to get out before Ian reaches behind him-with a great tearing pain in his chest and back, as if a hot metal rod were pushed clean through him-and pulls out the sawed-off shotgun and swings it around so it’s pointing at Henry, and fires. It seems to happen in slow motion. First everything quickly-the elbow, the drop, the running-and then he grabs the shotgun and time slows like suddenly they were all moving through honey. Maggie seems to hang in the air between running steps and Henry’s arm is moving slowly-slowly-and his words sound like a seventy-eight playing at thirty-three and a third. The sound of Ian’s shotgun firing is extremely loud, and he can see the buckshot emerge. He can see the last few grains of gunpowder spit from the barrel behind the eight.36 inch pellets before they burn to nothing on the air. He can see smoke blue and thin curl from the barrel. Multiple cracks as the buckshot hits bone and tight groups of holes punch themselves into his face and head, and his skull seems to dent inward like an empty beer can as the contents splatter on the sun-bleached asphalt behind him as well as Beatrice’s face and hair and dress.

Then Maggie is jumping at Ian and he leans down to accept her hug. She wraps her arms around him and kisses him and says, ‘You’re bleeding, Daddy. You’re bleeding,’ and he kisses her cheeks and her eyes and her mouth and he can feel her heart beating against his stomach, and tears well in his eyes, the first time he has cried in a long time.

Henry falls to the ground and a puddle of blood spreads like a blanket beneath him.

‘Maggie,’ Ian says. ‘My Maggie.’

But then he sees Beatrice lean down and pick up Henry’s pistol and he swings the shotgun up, aiming at her. But he does not fire. He sees immediately that she does not intend to continue Henry’s fight. She stands and she looks toward them and tears well in her eyes as she says, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then she puts the pistol into her mouth.

It’s a semiautomatic and the safety’s off, so all she has to do is pull the trigger.

Diego walks down the street toward them and they wait, Ian and Maggie, with her small hand in his large hand. Ian looks down at her and smiles. She looks up at him and smiles back and her green eyes that could break your heart if she wanted them to smile also. He can hardly believe it is her hand he’s holding. His daughter. His little girl. His Maggie. He thinks of holding her on the day she was born. He thinks of standing over her crib and watching her sleep. He thinks of the first time she wrapped her tiny fist around his thumb. He thinks of changing her diapers. He thinks of her cradled in his arm, taking a bottle. No matter what happens next he knows what he’s done and what he’s become, it was a price worth paying. He would pay it twice and again if he had it still to give. And if there’s more to pay he will pay that too.

Diego looks sick. He is pale and sweaty and his eyes are far away.

‘I killed one of them,’ he says.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ian says. ‘I didn’t want you to have to do that.’

‘The bullet hit him right here.’ He touches his own cheek.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Right here,’ he says.

They take the white Toyota back to the falling-down house Ron lived in before he decided the world was no longer his home. Diego, Ian knows, would try to talk him into heading to a hospital if he weren’t lost inside himself, but he is, and Ian does not intend to go anywhere tonight. He is too tired. If he wakes up tomorrow he’ll think about it, but he believes he’s earned a few hours with his daughter. He believes she’s earned a few hours with her daddy.

They get to the house and open the door and go inside.

Diego finds a bedroom in the back and goes there and sits alone.

Maggie eats and talks and talks and talks, as if she has not spoken to a soul in years. Ian sits with her and listens. She tells him about the Nightmare World, and about counting till her head was filled with numbers so that the bad thoughts could not get in, and about how Henry’s brother Donald brought her books and even gave her lessons sometimes, in history and math, and about Borden and how he was her only friend, and about how she tried to escape, how she ran through the woods and how his voice, her daddy’s voice, gave her hope and made something in her that she thought was cold burn hot. She asks about Mommy and he tells her that Mommy is waiting for her return. He tells her that Mommy loves her very much. He tells her that Mommy will probably let her sleep in bed with her for a long time. He tells her that she is the strongest, bravest person he has ever met. He tells her that she is a miracle.

The hours they spend together are the best hours he’s ever lived and the truest, and when they fall asleep beside one another on the fold-out sofa-bed with Maggie’s head leaning against his shoulder and her small hand in his large hand he has a smile on his face and the dreams he dreams are of the future, a bright future full of joy and laughter.