Someone grabbed her from behind, shoving her and the baby away from the hot burner. "No! Jesus, no!" A pair of hands winnowed in, trying to grasp Drummer. Mary slammed an elbow backward and heard a grunt of pain as it connected. A woman with red hair was fighting to take Drummer, and Mary didn't know her face. The woman was saying, "Mary, don't! Don't, please don't!" Her hands grasped at the baby again, and Mary shoved the red-haired stranger back hard against the wall. This was her baby, to do with as she pleased. She had risked her life to have this child, and no one would take him away from her. The woman was fighting her for Drummer once more, the red-glowing burner behind them and the baby wailing. "Listen to me! Listen!" the woman was pleading as she grabbed hold of Mary's shoulders and hung on. Mary looked at the woman's white throat, and she saw where she should punch into it to crush her windpipe. "Don't hurt the baby! Please don't!" the woman said, still hanging on. "Mary, look at me! It's Didi! It's Didi Morse!"
Didi Morse? Mary lifted her gaze from the vulnerable throat and stared into the woman's heavy-jowled, deeply lined face.
"No," Mary said over Drummer's crying. "No. Didi Morse was beautiful."
"I had surgery. Remember what I told you? I had the plastic surgeon do it. Don't hurt the baby, Mary. Don't hurt Drummer."
Plastic surgeon. Didi Morse, her face made ugly by a scalpel, silicone implants, and a hammer that had broken her nose. I had it done when I went underground, she'd told Mary and Edward. A surgeon who did work on a lot of people who wanted to disappear. Didi had actually paid to have herself made ugly, and the surgeon – who was part of the militant underground – had done the work in St. Louis. Didi Morse, still with green eyes and red hair but now drastically different. Pleading with her not to hurt Drummer.
"Hurt… Drummer?" Mary whispered. "Hurt my baby?" Tears came to her eyes. She heard Drummer crying, but the sound didn't razor her brain anymore; it was a cry of innocent need, and Mary pressed Drummer against her and sobbed as she realized what her rage had been guiding her toward. "Oh God, oh God, oh God," she moaned as the baby trembled in her arms. "I'm sick, Didi. I'm so sick."
Didi switched off the stove's burner. Her collarbone was still throbbing from the collision with Mary's elbow, and Mary had almost broken her back against the wall. She said, "Come on, let's sit down." She wanted to get Mary away from the stove. Her sight of the woman about to mash the infant's face down on that burner had been a horror beyond belief. She grasped Mary's arm with a careful touch. "Come on, sister."
Mary allowed herself to be steered out of the kitchenette. Tears were streaming down her face, her lungs ratcheted by sobbing. "I'm sick," she repeated. "Something's wrong with me, I get crazy. Oh God, I wouldn't hurt my sweet Drummer!" She hugged him close. His crying was starting to weaken. They were in Mary's room at the Cameo Motor Lodge. Didi and Mary had gone there after leaving Edward's at eight o'clock, and they'd shared a couple of bottles of wine and talked about the old days. Mary had folded down the sofa bed for Didi, and it was there that Didi had been sleeping when she'd heard Mary stalk out of the bedroom and go into the kitchenette. Then Mary had gone back for the crying baby, and the rest of what might have happened had been only narrowly averted.
Mary sat down in a chair and began to rock Drummer, the tears glistening on her face and her eyes red and swollen. Drummer was growing quiet, getting sleepy again. Didi sat on the rumpled sofa bed, her nerves still jangling.
"I love my baby," Mary said. "Can't you see I do?"
"Yes," Didi answered. But what she saw was an insane woman with a stolen infant in her arms.
"Mine," Mary whispered. She kissed his forehead and nuzzled his soft whorls of dark hair. "He's mine. All mine."
Sardonicus.
One side of the man's mouth was frozen open in a hideous rictus that showed teeth ground down to stubs. Like Sardonicus, Laura thought as the gloved hand clamped to her face. His cheek on the grinning side was caved in, his lower jaw crooked and jutting forward like a barracuda's underbite. He had black eyes, the one on the damaged hemisphere of his face sunken and glassy. A battlefield of scars streaked back from the corner of his grin across his collapsed cheek. In his throat there was a flesh-colored plug with a three-holed socket.
The sight was terrifying, but Laura had no time to be terrified. She struck out with the tire iron, the strength of desperation behind it, and hit him a glancing blow across the left shoulder. It was hard enough: the man staggered back, and he opened his ruined mouth and made a hissing sound of pain like a ruptured steam pipe.
At once he was on her again, reaching for her throat. Laura stepped back, giving herself room, and swung the tire iron once more. The man lifted his arm to ward off the blow; their forearms collided with a jolt that knocked numbness into Laura's hand, but it was the man who lost what he was holding. A small flashlight fell to the floor and rolled under the kitchen table.
He caught Laura's wrist, and they fought for the tire iron. The man was tall and sinewy, wearing a black outfit and a black woolen cap. His face was pallid, the color of the moon. He slammed Laura back against a counter, and pottery knickknacks clattered and fell. A knee came up, hitting Laura between the legs; the pain made her cry out, but she clenched her teeth and hung on to the tire iron. They careened across the kitchen, crashing into the table and throwing it over. The man grasped her chin with one hand and shoved her head back, trying to snap her neck. Laura clawed at his throat, digging furrows in his flesh. Her fingers found the plug, and she tore at it.
He retreated, clutching at his throat, the breath shrieking from his predator's grin. Laura advanced on him, her eyes wild. She lifted the tire iron for another blow, her intent to knock his brains out before he could kill her. He made a guttural growling sound that might have been rage, and he darted in before she could swing the tool. He trapped her arm, twisted his body, and lifted her off her feet, flinging her like a flour sack to the other side of the kitchen. She went down on her right shoulder, the air whooshing from her lungs as she slammed to the floor.
Time hitched and spun, knocked out of rhythm. Laura tasted blood. Pain throbbed through her shoulder, and her hand had lost the tire iron. When she could gather the strength to sit up, she found herself alone in Bedelia Morse's kitchen. The back door was wide open, dead leaves blowing in. Laura spat a red scrawl on the floor, and her tongue found the wound inside her cheek where her teeth had met. I'm all right, she thought. I'm all right. But she was starting to shake uncontrollably now that the man with the death's-head grin had gone, and fear and nausea hit her in tandem. She barely made it outside to throw up, next to one of the abstract sculptures. She heaved until nothing would come up, and then she sat on the ground away from her mess and breathed in lungfuls of frigid air. Between her thighs there was a pulse of pain. She felt warm wetness spreading there, and she realized with a flash of anger that the son of a bitch had torn her stitches open again.
She stood up and walked back into the kitchen. The flashlight was gone. Her tire iron remained. The urge to cry fell upon her, and she almost gave in to this brutal friend. But she couldn't trust herself to stop crying if she began, and so she stood with her hands pressed to her eyes until the urge passed. Shock lurked in the back of her mind, waiting its turn to creep over her. There was nothing to be done now but to go to her car and drive back to the Days Inn. Her right shoulder was going to be one black bruise tomorrow, and her back was aching where the man had driven her against the counter.
But she had not been killed. She had stood up against him, whoever he'd been, and she'd survived. Before all this had started, she would have crumpled into a heap and cried her heart out, but things were different now. Her heart was harder, her vision colder. Violence had suddenly and irrevocably become a part of her life.