I stepped back from Leon and without warning the worm’s top half vanished in a black spray as Anne blew it apart with the shotgun.
The other worms went mad all at once, unlatching from Leon and thrashing and keening with a horrible whistling sound. They became blurs as their frenzied thrashing sped up, and then seconds later, they all went limp. They were dead.
I ducked inside of Henry’s study and dumped out the footlocker that had contained the guns and sacks and brought it outside. Together Anne and I scooped the nightmarish things up with spades that we found leaning in a corner with Henry’s gardening gear and threw them in the footlocker.
We stayed well back from the worms themselves, as we had no idea how they got inside of people, and we weren’t eager to find out. When we were done, the box was six inches deep in limp gray coils.
Henry came out of the door holding one of the cloth bags and a propane blowtorch.
“I figured it would be a little harder for us to get phosphorus grenades these days, so I came up with this. Thermite powder in the bag, magnesium ribbons to get it started, and a torch to light up the magnesium.”
“If you say so.” I ripped open the cloth bags, dumped the gray powder liberally over the slimy mass, and threw the silver ribbon on top. Henry passed me the blowtorch. It lit with a pop and a roar. I touched the blue flame to the magnesium ribbon, which started burning with a fierce white light that was painful to look at. Immediately after, the thermite powder caught with an eruption of heat and sparks that filled the entire box.
I backed away from the nauseating smell of the black greasy smoke billowing out of the charred and melted container. Henry and Anne had moved to crouch over Leon’s supine form.
“We can’t move him. I think his back is broken,” said Anne.
“If we leave him out here, he’s a sitting duck for the other one,” replied Henry.
Leon spoke through chattering teeth. “Carlos. Where’s Carlos?”
Henry leaned down and peered into his eyes, one after the other. “He’s going into shock. Anne, run back into my barn and get some blankets, they’re inside the door to your left. Don’t bother looking for a clean one.”
She nodded and ran for the doorway. After three steps the loud crack of a gunshot made her flinch, and I saw Henry jerk sideways. A thin spray of blood appeared on the grass behind him.
“Abe!” screamed Anne. “Do something!”
I ran towards the sound of the shot.
12
The shots were coming from the shadow of the kitchen door, but at least they were now directed at me and not my friends. I cut across the yard at an angle to the door, straining to move faster. The gunshots increased in frequency as I closed the gap, but as I expected, none of the shots came anywhere near me.
The more excited a bag gets, the more the worms thrash around inside them making them jitter. I threw myself to the ground behind the police car just in time to hear the slide lock back on the Glock, empty. I stood up and met the eyes of the bag, not ten feet away.
He was young and good-looking, like a fresh-faced college grad, albeit one in scorched clothes and with one badly burned hand. In that second, as we stared at each other over the hood of the car, he seemed so normal to me. His light blue eyes were a little glazed, and he looked flushed as though he had been running, but he could have been any young man stepping off of a basketball court or a football field. I wondered if he and the other one had talked in the car on the way down to Henry’s house. I wondered who he was and if anyone knew what had happened to him.
He grinned at me wide and easy and then tossed the gun away into the yard. Then he ducked back into the house and out of sight. I glanced back at Anne. She had torn Henry’s shirt into strips and was trying to bandage both men. I couldn’t tell from here how badly Henry was hurt, but he was over eighty years old with a gunshot wound, and Leon’s spine was broken. I needed to get them to a hospital.
Keeping my baton low, I moved into the kitchen. The table had been overturned and the floor was covered in broken glass. I crunched across the shattered fragments as quietly as I could manage.
“I’m glad I ran out of bullets.” I froze. The voice was coming from somewhere past the living room. “I like my knife better. Sometimes, after I shoot somebody, I stab ‘em anyway, even if they’re already dead. No harm in that. It doesn’t matter to them, and it makes me feel better, you know?”
He sounded like somebody striking up a conversation at a party, all breezy and unconcerned. If I hadn’t heard what he said, the tone would have been very pleasant.
I made it to the hallway where I could walk without making so much noise and crept down to the living room. The boards creaked slightly underfoot.
“You’re Abe, right? Peter said we might run into you. My name’s Jeff. You look just like your picture. Of course, the way you were jack-rabbiting across that yard was a real giveaway. That was something else. And that’s saying something, considering the things I’ve seen over the last year.”
The voice was moving, circling around to my left, but it still sounded about a room away. I crept across the living room and glanced behind the recliner just in case. Then I moved towards the other hallway and the guest bathroom. I could feel my hand sweating on the leather grip of my baton.
The bathroom was empty, so I kept going towards the master bedroom at the end of the hallway. The door was half open, and light from the window was painting a stripe down the floor out into the hall. I hugged the wall close to the hinge side of the door and switched my baton to my left hand and raised it. I listened hard, but there was only the silence of the old house, so I pushed the door open slowly with my right hand, braced to swing.
I didn’t see anything, so I went in, staying close to the wall. I didn’t want to get too close to the bed.
“We call him Saint Peter, you know, back in town.” I froze. The voice was coming from the house behind me, towards the living room. That was impossible. The hair stood up on my arms. “Not to his face, but we still do it. Some of us. He lets you into the promised land, you know? And he’s older than dirt. He says that when we kill your friends, we’re supposed to bring the bodies back to him, because he wants to do something to them. I don’t know what, but I bet it’ll be pretty cool.”
I spun around and looked out the door and down the hall. Nothing. I could see all the way into the living room. “I know you have a piece of the sacred altar. Not the one from your farm, because Billy is bringing that one back home, but the one that Henry was hiding. They’re not yours, you know. I know you don’t want to give it to me, but I bet you would trade me.” The voice was coming from the living room. I moved down the hallway, more quickly now, until I could see the whole room. It was empty. “I just need something you’d rather have.”
I looked down. The voice was coming from the floor. The son of a bitch was under the goddamn floor. I heard scuffling under the house. He was moving fast for the porch, and no longer concerned about being quiet about it. I ran across the room and looked out the window in time to see him scrabble and crawl out from under the porch and start running across the yard, his knife glinting in the sun as he pelted across the grass.
Towards Anne and Henry and Leon.
I almost dove through the front windows to follow him, but unlike in the movies, you tend to bleed to death pretty quickly afterwards if you get unlucky. Instead I bolted back towards the kitchen, nearly slipping and falling on all the broken glass in there, as if fate were determined to roll me in glass one way or another today.