The rotted boards overhead splintered, gave, splintered again. With his balance failing, Dale made a fist and punched his way up through the rotten wood, punched again, then reached up and wedged his elbow over the edge just before he fell. He widened the hole, using his laptop as a battering ram, and pulled his head and shoulders up through the splintered opening.
He was in the chicken coop. Dale could see gaps in the east wall and around the door illuminated by brilliant red and yellow, flames from the burning house a hundred feet away. He slid the laptop across the rough floor, pulled himself out of the hole, and set his eye to the crack between the door and its hinge.
The Jolly Corner was fully engulfed in flame. Parts of the roof had already caved in, and even as he watched, flames exploded out both the first-floor kitchen window and the corner second-floor window. Silhouettes moved in front of the flames, cavorting, carrying weapons. The five skinheads ran back and forth, high-fiving one another and leaping into the air. They seemed to have no concern that the Elm Haven fire department would show up, and this late on New Year’s Eve, this early on New Year’s morning, they were almost certainly correct in their confidence. Dale could see the gleaming skull of the chief Nazi skinhead, Lester Bonheur, as he directed two of the others to get back around the front of the burning building, obviously hoping that the Jewboy nigger-loving professor would run, burning, from the building so that they could shoot him.
But the skinheads had eyes only for their conflagration. Dale stayed on his belly, trying to slow his panting and pounding heart. All he had to do was hide here until the bastards left or until the flames died enough for him to slip out and make his way across the snowy fields to the Johnson farm to call for help. He wasn’t going to freeze to death yet. The heat from the burning building was strong here even a hundred feet away. The skinheads could not wait all night with impunity—the farmhouse would be collapsing in fifteen or twenty minutes anyway, convincing them that Dale was dead—and there should be no reason for them to search the chicken coop or other outbuildings.
All Dale had to do was stay put and wait.
“Don’t bet on it, Stewart, you cowardly fuck.” The voice was infinitely cold and totally dead, and it came from directly behind him.
TWENTY-EIGHT
C.J. Congden was sitting against the back wall of the chicken coop not ten feet from Dale. He did not look good. Even in the flickering red light filtering through the chinks in the east wall, the skin of Congden’s face glowed mold-white and green. His eyes were sunken and opaque with white, as if covered with fly eggs. The ex-sheriff was not wearing a hat tonight, and as Congden turned his head slightly, Dale could see the exit hole the suicide.45 slug had left in the back of his skull and the fragment of bloody hair and scalp hanging over that hole as if in an obscene attempt at concealment.
Congden grinned, showing a black gap where the recoil of the pistol he had fired into his soft palate had knocked out his front teeth. That pistol was still in his hand, and now the thing aimed the weapon at Dale, its white fingers looking like bloated worms on the trigger guard and pearl handle. Congden’s mouth did not move when the voice spoke, and the sound seemed to come from the thing’s bloated belly. “Time to go out and join the party, Stewart.”
Dale reached for the hammer in his belt and then remembered that he had dropped it down the hole. “Fuck you, Congden,” he whispered. He had no intention of going anywhere, not knowing whether this apparition from hell could harm him but having no doubts as to what the skinheads would do. “Fuck you,” he said again.
Congden seemed amused by this. His mouth opened wide for a grin and continued widening, stretching impossibly and terribly wide, fat cheeks and jowls rippling as if in a high wind. The thing’s mouth became nothing more than a widening hole, as ragged as the hole Dale had just burst through, broken teeth substituting for splinters. In a literally heart-stopping moment, Dale realized that he could see through Congden’s skull within that rippling maw, through the hole in the palate and out the back of the thing’s head.
A noise issued from Congden then: at first a hissing, a tea kettle beginning to announce itself, but then the hissing rose until it became the rush and roar of a fire hose, then a boiler pipe exploding steam, and then a siren.
Dale crouched on his knees and clapped both hands over his ears. It did not block the noise. Nothing could block that noise. Congden had raised his ruined face toward the ceiling of the bloodied chicken coop and seemed to be hauling in air through the wound in the back of his skull as the screaming whistle roared from the funneled mouth. The skinheads had to hear this.
Dale surrendered, swung around, flung the door of the chicken coop open, and staggered out into the snow and naked light of the burning farmhouse.
One of the skinheads saw him and set up a hue and cry before Dale had run thirty steps toward the darkness of the fields. Injured as he was, Dale would have preferred taking his chances reaching the Land Cruiser and driving away for help, trusting his four-wheel drive once again to keep him ahead of the other vehicle. But the keys to the Land Cruiser were in his peacoat pocket, and the peacoat was hanging on the hook in the kitchen.
That entire kitchen side of The Jolly Corner’s first floor was a wall of flame throwing red light like a spotlight toward Dale as he followed the lane toward the barn, jogging from side to side in the deep snow, trying to put the chicken coop and other outbuildings between himself and the screaming skinheads. Twice he fell, each time leaving bloody streaks in the snow. Both times he clawed his way to his feet and staggered on through drifts up to his knees. Even the falling snow seemed blood red in the light of the burning house.
How bad was I hurt? How much blood have I lost?The pain was no worse than it had been, but his entire right side from shirt collar to pant cuffs was soaked with his own blood now. Dale felt light-headed and fought vertigo with each running, staggering step.
Out away from the fire now, running left past the fueling station and into the fields. It was darker out here, if he could just keep low, head for the creek and the woods a mile southwest.
They can follow my trail in the snow.Dale looked behind him and saw not only the path he was leaving through the drifts but the bloody smears like painted arrows.
The skinheads were whooping like cowboys, throwing open doors to the outbuildings and throwing the last of their Molotov cocktails inside. The old shed holding Mr. McBride’s antiquated punch card learning machines went up in a ball of flame.
The skinheads were firing their shotguns and rifles into the shadows behind the outbuildings now, the muzzle flashes bright against the dark structures. One of the silhouetted figures found Dale’s track in the snow and began screaming above the din.
I’ll never get across that field.Dale knew that he did not have the strength left to run that far even if there were no snow slowing him down. The punks would be on him in minutes.
He slid to a halt in the snowy field. The barn was to his right. Perhaps he could climb to the lofts, hide in the maze of rafters up there in the dark.
One of the skinheads flicked on a handheld spotlight, throwing thousands of candlepowers in a single, blinding beam stabbing across the field. Dale ran toward the barn anyway. It was the only thing he could think of.