The noise grew louder as they rounded the curve in the road. From a side street, another couple emerged, carrying flashlights trained on the pavement before them. Barry was tempted to say hello, to try and talk with them, find out if they knew anything more about what was happening than he did, but they were not people he recognized and for all he knew they could be association supporters.
He and Maureen were walking hand in hand, and he squeezed her fingers and slowed the pace, holding back until the other couple moved far enough ahead.
She understood without him having to say a word.
"You can't tell who's on which side," she said quietly"I after the couple pulled away.
He nodded. "It's best to be careful."
The trees on the left disappeared, the land flattening out as they came to the cleared site of communal property. The pool was done, Barry saw, and filled, the water reflecting back the blackness of the sky above. To the right of the pool, a rough wood frame and cement foundation were already in place for the community center.
The volunteers had been busy.
They walked quickly past the site. In horror fiction, even his own, evil was usually ascribed to locations that were old, that had troubled histories, not to places that were not even finished, that had only a future and not a past or present. But everything was bassackwards here, and the newly completed pool and partially constructed community center seemed imbued with malevolence and engendered within him a shivery sense of revulsion.
They passed Frank and Audrey's house, passed the lighted tennis courts.
The street straightened out.
Here was the crowd.
There must have been close to a hundred people milling around. Powerful halogens atop the guard shack illuminated a large section of road and gave the surrounding trees a flat, painted look. Although most of the residents had walked down, there were quite a few cars and trucks--the people who lived on the other side of the hills, no doubt. They were parked in rows in front of the gate, as though to buttress the defenses. The sheriff's cruiser was behind the kiosk, by itself.
It looked like a block party. People were laughing, talking, drinking beer. The only indication that anything was out of the ordinary was the strict line of demarcation, the gate, beyond which was dark, empty silence. And the fact that nearly everyone was armed. He saw no guns, other than those being examined by the sheriff and the guard inside the kiosk, but people were carrying hammers and bats and tire irons. He saw a woman with a carving knife talking to a man wielding a pool cue.
"I don't like this," Maureen whispered.
Barry didn't either. There was something unsettling about seeing ordinary people, upscale neighbors and casual acquaintances, gathered together for the purpose of fighting an opposition mob from the wrong side of the tracks.
"Here they come!" someone yelled.
Barry looked south, over the vehicles, through the interstices of the gate. There was a line of headlights visible through the trees, snaking up the road toward Bonita Vista. He was reminded of Universal's Frankenstein films and the hoary cliche ' of angry villagers storming the mad scientist's castle, pitchforks and torches held aloft.
There'd be no pitchforks or torches this time, though.
Flashlights, maybe.
Possibly guns.
The crowd grew momentarily silent, as though the gravity of the situation had suddenly and simultaneously sunk in with all of them, as though they realized that there was a very realistic possibility of violence. Barry felt a knot of dread forming in the pit of his stomach.
Pickups and old Chevys, boat like Buicks and battered Jeeps began parking along the dirt shoulder abutting the ditch outside Bonita Vista and quickly became so numerous that succeeding vehicles were forced to spread out into the middle of the street.
He looked over at Hitman standing next to the guard, the two of them loading their weapons, and he wondered again why the sheriff was so pro-Bonita Vista, why he would sacrifice the integrity of his job to do the bidding of the home-1 owners' association. It didn't make any sense. He didn't| even live here.
Did he?
The thought had never occurred to him before, and Barry was surprised at himself for overlooking so obvious a connection. Greg Davidson was a local boy made good who'd moved up into the environs of Bonita Vista.
Maybe die same was true for Hitman . It would account for a lot, and he thought it was more than possible that Hitman had been lured to Bonita Vista, that the sheriff had been actively solicited by the association's board and perhaps given a deal on financing and annual dues in order to recruit him to their side.
Beyond the gate, car doors were being slammed, engines were shutting off, though no one was stepping forward. A buzz passed through the crowd of Bonita Vistans , a repeated phrase that did not quite make it to where Barry and Maureen stood.
Moments later, the Corbanites started marching en masse, a ragtag group of angry ranchers, construction workers, mechanics, and business owners who appeared ready to storm the gates. Barry recognized some of the people in the crowd. Hank. Joe. Lyle. Bert. He felt sick to his stomach, but self preservation trumped loyalty and social conscience any day of the week, and he was prepared to help fend off an assault.
Mike was right. He couldn't stand idly by while his home was under attack.
He just hoped there wouldn't be any injuries.
Or dead is He took Maureen's hand, squeezed it. Her fingers were cold, her body shivering. To his right was the ruddy-faced redneck who'd harassed the Mexican handyman. The fat bastard was in his element, grinning from ear to ear as he pulled a crossbow from the back of his pickup.
"My old buddies," Maureen said, nodding to her left, and Barry saw Chuck Shea and Terry Abbey walking purposefully forward, swinging bats.
In his mind, he'd considered the Bonita Vista people soft compared to the townies, rich, pampered, slumming city folk as opposed to rough, tough, hard scrabble manual laborers, but he saw now that that was an incorrect generalization. If anything, the Corbanites , despite their very visible and understandable anger, seemed awkward and amateurish, unorganized in their opposition, while the Bonita Vistans seemed prepared, methodical, and capable.
Was it the association's influence?
Barry thought not, and that was the frightening thing. They were this way on their own.
The sheriff and the guard aligned themselves near the stone pillars at each end of the gate, many of the more gung ho and enthusiastic residents filling the space in between.
All of a sudden, the crowd grew completely silent, individuals stopping in place, their attention drawn to someone or something in the pines behind him. Barry turned and saw a line of six old men in black robes standing at the edge of the lighted area, next to the trees. Odd gold stripes and insignia decorated the formal garb, and for some reason he thought of that jackass William Rehnquist during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial, decked out in the robes of a Supreme Court Justice that were desecrated by ridiculous homemade gold stripes supposedly inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan. There was the same sort of absurdity here, only there was also an element of menace, a hint of something dark, dangerous, and fundamentally wrong.
All eyes remained on the six figures. He thought the men would move forward and take charge, but they remained in place and there was something odd about that, too. The one in the middle appeared to be the leader, and Barry had no doubt that this was the president, the famous Jasper Calhoun. Liz had told Maureen something about Calhoun's peculiar appearance, had said there was some-1 thing unnatural in the way he looked, and while it could have been the angle of the lights, could have been the fault] of distance, Barry thought that all of the board members seemed strange, each of their too-white faces bizarre and abnormal.