She looked up, distracted by a rustling in the straw on the earth floor of the barn. Rachel had returned and stood leaning on the stall’s gate. She said, “Josie, you did yourself proud.” The doe was too occupied with her offspring even to look up. Rachel took her watch out of her jeans pocket where she had put it for safekeeping during the birthing. It was a mechanical watch with a dial on which the date was revealed in a tiny window. She insisted she liked to see time in a circle; it reflected the realities of existence on a spherical, rotating world. Now, as she buckled the strap to her wrist, she frowned. “Damn, it’s nearly three. We’d better try Connie and Jim again.”
On their way to the house, they were joined by Topaz and Shadow, who had kept their distance from the barn for the last few hours. Goats had no tolerance for dogs, nor any compunction about butting or trampling them. Once inside the house, Rachel washed her hands and put fresh water down for the dogs, then went to the telephone in the north studio. Within a minute, she returned to the kitchen, where Mary was at the sink downing a glass of water.
“Still busy. Damn phones are probably out of order again.” She took the glass Mary offered and drank half of it, then went back to the telephone.
Mary felt her mood of quiet elation undermined by a whisper of apprehension as she followed Rachel into the studio. She listened to Rachel’s end of the conversation, heard the name Joanie. One of the nurses at the clinic. When Rachel hung up, her eyes were narrowed, focused inward. “Joanie hasn’t heard from Connie today, but she didn’t expect to. It’s Connie’s day off. I think… maybe we’d better walk down to their house.”
“But if you got a busy signal…” Yet Mary could find no assurance in that to dispel the fear taking root in her mind.
“It probably means Connie or Jim were on the phone when we called.” She mustered a smile as she added: “We’ll just go check on them, and if everything’s okay, they can give us a cup of coffee.”
Mary heard the dry, gravel crunch of their footfalls as she looked south at the distant, silent blocks of houses. They might all have been empty for any sign of life in them. She turned, stared up at the Acres house, and stopped, realizing she was holding her breath at the same moment she realized what sound she was listening for and not hearing: Sparky’s bark. They were close enough to the house for Sparky to be aware of them and raise his usual strident alarm. She glanced at Rachel, who had stopped with her. She seemed to be listening, too. Then, as if Mary had asked a question, she nodded and continued toward the house.
Jim’s brown van was gone. There was no garage, so if the van wasn’t in the driveway, it wasn’t here. The dogs paused a few yards ahead in the driveway, sniffing the wind. Then Topaz curled her lips to show her teeth, Shadow retreated toward Rachel with an uncertain whine. And Mary felt her skin crawl with dread. She shivered as she walked with Rachel along the tree-shadowed path to the south side of the house. The front door was open a few inches. She thought, I don’t want to go in there.
Rachel ordered the dogs to stay, then: “Mary, wait here. I’ll go in.”
Mary shook her head. “No. We’ll go in together.”
Inside the door was a small foyer. On the wall opposite the door, Connie had proudly hung a painting, one of Rachel’s encaustics. Now it lay on the floor, its frame splintered, bone white gesso ground exposed in a hectic pattern of crisscross streaks.
On the wall where the painting had hung was a huge hieroglyphic of a skull executed in spray paint in black and blood red.
Mary pressed a hand to her mouth, gasping for breath, eyes closed to shut out that monstrous image, but the skull icon was limned in memory with a night of terrified flight.
Rachel turned away, crossed to the double doors on the left that opened into the living room, and Mary swallowed at the constriction in her throat, fighting the resistance of her muscles. But again, she followed Rachel.
Some maniacal beast had been unleashed in this room: furniture was overturned, smashed, slashed; bookshelves toppled; the white walls hideously muraled with obscene, spray-painted graffiti and stitchings of bullet holes; the cabinets where Connie kept her china and crystal empty, doors ripped off; the floor graveled with shattered glass and porcelain.
Rachel’s whispered “No…” echoed in the silence, and the sheer agony in her eyes made Mary want to cry out. Then it was gone, and nothing took its place. Nothing.
And where was Connie? Where was Jim?
There on the far wall—that wasn’t just more demented graffiti. Spattered red brown and a curving, downward smear. Mary couldn’t see the bottom of the smear; the overturned couch blocked her view. She made her way toward the wall, glass grinding under her soles.
Jim lay with his back against the wall, and he looked like something old and tattered that had been tossed away, his clothing and flesh riddled with bullet holes, caked with dried blood. Even his face had been smashed by craters of bullets.
For a long time Rachel stood motionless, staring at Jim’s body, then without a word, she turned away, walked slowly toward the kitchen.
Rachel, don’t go in there. Don’t go…
Mary followed her. And they found Connie.
On her back on the floor, naked from the waist down, legs splayed, cold, dusky skin smeared with blood. Around her neck, the telephone cord cut deep into swollen flesh. Her face was bloated and purpled, tongue protruding, open eyes filmed like acid-dipped glass.
Mary felt darkness suffocating her, and perhaps she screamed, but she didn’t hear it; she didn’t hear or see anything until finally she recognized Rachel’s face only inches away, felt the hard grip of her hands on her arms. But Rachel’s eyes were as devoid of life as Connie’s.
She said, “Mary, we have to go back to Amarna to get the van.”
And Mary accepted that not because she understood it—she understood nothing at this moment—but because it imposed some semblance of structure on the chaos in her mind.
She didn’t remember the walk to Amarna. She was only vaguely aware that Rachel left the dogs there, vaguely aware after a passage of ambiguous time of Rachel backing the VW into the driveway at the Acres house.
Rachel took the machete from the van, and Mary followed her to the back of the house and watched with neither comprehension nor curiosity while she hacked at the blackberry vines shrouding a mound of earth. Beneath the camouflage of vines, a metal door lay at an angle in the earth, brown paint rotten with rust. Rachel had a key for the lock. Together they pulled the heavy door back, hinges wailing. Under it, nine cement steps, another door. Rachel found the kerosene lamp and matches in the niche at the foot of the stairs. The yellow light went before them into a cell of a room. Jim’s radiation shelter. Shelves filled with boxes, jars, canisters lined the walls. The air was chill and sterile.
Rachel went directly to a cabinet by the door, and it was then that Mary realized that all this had been rehearsed in a sense. Rachel had been told what she must do in case…
Mary couldn’t hold on to that train of thought. Rachel opened the cabinet. A gun rack. Two rifles, a shotgun, three handguns. Two slots were empty. She thrust a rifle into Mary’s hands. It was heavier than she expected, black metal, polished wood, the lens of the telescopic sight all gleaming with exquisite menace. In front of the trigger guard was mounted a flat, curved magazine, its steel dull and gray.
Rachel’s voice was as dull and gray as the steel. “It’s semiautomatic. That’s the safety there. You have thirty cartridges in the clip.”