The sheds then, maybe.
She stepped back into the room she had just left and peered out through the window, straining to see through the grime. Annoyed, she scrubbed a rough circle clear with her sleeve. Looked out again. Scanned the yard, but saw nothing, not even the Sheriff.
Then finally, she located the source of the sound.
Her heart skipped a beat.
Cold filled her.
Danny’s phone was out there, ringing, and now she could see it too. It was on its back, display facing up, the violet glow granting an eerie luminescence to the inside of the Sheriff’s car.
-38-
“Hell of a way to go,” Beau said as he lowered himself to the ground, one bloody hand pressed against his belly.
Finch was breathing, but only just. Every inhalation felt like he was drawing boiling water into his lungs; every exhalation felt like waves of ice. He couldn’t move, and didn’t try. The mere idea of it made him want to throw up.
Beau sat back against the tree. “Kids,” he said. “Who’d have believed it.”
“You would,” Finch said hoarsely, and tried to smile. He was on his back, the ground cold beneath him. The shaft of the final arrow protruded from his stomach. Blood ran freely. “You could probably have told me how this was going to go right down to the last detail.”
Beau said nothing, and for a moment Finch assumed he had died, but then he spoke softly. “I could, but it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”
Finch’s smile faded.
“Was it?” Beau asked.
“No.”
“You find what you were lookin’ for down here?”
“I think it found me.”
“Deep,” Beau said and chuckled. It quickly turned to a fit of coughing. “Shit…Any time you’d like to call 911 is fine by me. I’m not dyin’ here or nothin’. Unless you want me to do the honors.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Start with: We’re dyin’. They’ll probably take the ball and run with it after that.”
“Then what?”
“Then wh—? Shit, now I get why people in movies tell dyin’ folks not to talk. They talk shit is why. They’ll send someone to patch us up.”
“So we’ll be in full health in prison. Two dead kids lying out here, Beau.”
Beau started to respond, then thought better of it.
“I’m sorry,” Finch said. “I fucked this all right to hell.”
“It was pretty much the only way it could go, right?”
“Guess so. But I’m sorry for bringing you down here.”
“Hey,” Beau told him. “You don’t owe me no apologies. I knew what I was doin’.”
“I didn’t,” Finch said and smiled.
“Yeah, no shit. So now what?”
“I think,” Finch told him. “I’m just going to lay real still and rest for a while.”
Beau shifted and moaned in pain. “You always was a lazy sonofabitch. I’m gonna try and get my ass to that cabin. Maybe they got a first aid kit or somethin’ so I can sew my stuffin’ back in. Hell, maybe they even got a phone.”
They hadn’t seen any telephone poles on the way in, but Finch didn’t bother pointing that out. Beau already knew, but talking and thinking was better than dying any day of the week.
“Maybe they’ve got a mini-bar,” he continued. “And a Jacuzzi. Hell, I bet these boys got their own game room. Didn’t see any, but that don’t mean they ain’t there.”
“Turntables and a karaoke machine,” Finch added.
“Yeah, and a waterbed, with pink cushions and silk sheets.”
Finch laughed despite the pain. “Heart-shaped.”
Beau snorted. It looked like it hurt. “Barry White on Dolby surround.”
Though the pain was unbearable, Finch couldn’t stem the mirth that rippled through him. “I can’t feel my legs.”
“Why would you want to?” Beau asked. “They’re not much to look at.”
“Aw shit,” Finch said, and his voice cracked. “We failed, man.”
“We thinned the herd,” Beau told him. “It’s all we’ve ever done. Tried to reduce the threat, just like in the desert. Certain things just are, you know. Bad things. And nothin’ will ever stop them. Even if we’d wiped these fuckers off the planet, there are a million others just like them out there, preyin’ on people whenever the mood takes them. We weren’t gonna make a difference down here, Finch. No matter what we did.”
“It might have made a difference to us.”
“To you,” Beau said. “Not me. This was never my fight. It’s like that friend you have when you’re in high school whose younger brother gets jumped. The friend organizes a lynch mob and without a second thought you agree to go kick the livin’ shit out of a bunch of strangers. You do it because it’s important to someone, and because maybe the violence appeals to you on some level you prefer to keep hidden, even from yourself.”
“That why you’re here?”
“I’m here because I’m the cheerful type.”
“The hell does that mean?”
“Means everythin’ about me’s bullshit. A front. I saw what you did in the desert, and I fed you…some speech about it being par for the course in wartime. Well, that may be so but it don’t make it right. And I wasn’t lecturin’ you. I was tryin’ to make myself…believe it.”
With great effort, Finch turned his head to look at him. Pine needles pricked his cheek. Beau’s eyes were closed.
“What did you do over there?”
Beau might have shrugged, or it might have been the shadows around him deepening as the moon slid behind a cloud. “Tried to stay alive. Same as everyone else.”
“You know what’s funny?”
“Do tell.”
“For as long as I can remember I’ve been pissed off. Only time it got even a little better was when I was with Kara. And still, I pushed her away, let some of that anger rub off on her. Then she broke up with me and I accused her of being cold.”
“That’s not funny,” Beau said. “Gotta work on your comic timin’.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m bleedin’ like a stuck pig,” Beau told him. “If I’m gonna get us help, I’d better get my ass up.”
Finch pondered this, and when next he spoke, to tell Beau that for a guy in a hurry, he sure wasn’t getting very far, he didn’t receive an answer, only the insects in the brush and the birds high in the trees. He listened to them for what seemed like eternity, before he let his eyes drift shut. Peace washed over him, alien and new and he embraced it.
Kara’s face materialized in the dark. He thought about calling her, but realized he didn’t have the breath left to power the words, and maybe that was for the best. He had nothing to tell her that she didn’t already know.
Claire considered hiding, or running, or seeking a back exit, but indecision kept her rooted to the spot. She stood in the room with the monstrous bed, her back to the window, watching as the Sheriff stepped into the hall and made his way toward her. Opposite the window was a door leading outside and she could easily have taken this route while the Sheriff was looking for her, but a chain had been looped around the simple bolt, and a rusted padlock hung from the links. She had already tested it, and it had opened barely enough for her to get her arm through.
“There you are, Missy,” the Sheriff said cheerfully. So cheerfully in fact, that she was struck with sudden doubt. Maybe he found the phone on the road, or at Pete’s house, or the Doctor’s place? There were any number of ways in which he could have come by it, so why had she immediately assumed the most malevolent one? Still, she refused to let herself relax too much. The last time she’d seen that phone, it had been in Danny’s shirt pocket. Now Danny was dead, and the phone was in a Sheriff’s car when there was no reason for him to have it. He should have returned it to Danny’s mother. And what about the call? The sense she’d had of someone listening?