Come Little Children (45 page)

Is the rope still there?

She reached as high as her current angle would allow, but nothing reached back. She scooted herself up, curling her spine uncomfortably through the hole, and weaseled her entire upper body into the shaft like a finger sliding into a snug glove. Still nothing. With one more grunt, she scraped her back along the edge of the hot cement and forced her rubbery legs underneath her; she was now standing straight up in the shoulder-to-shoulder chimney with both hands clawing frantically above her head.

It’s not here. THE ROPE ISN’T HERE. It got burned up, just like you’re about to be
.

She cried out and gave herself one more desperate boost from her tippy toes; all of a sudden her eyes popped open as she felt the frayed ends of a thick manila rope grace her fingertips.

A rush of energy shot through her body and she seized the rope, pushing herself against the hot wall as leverage. Her weakened muscles banned together and lifted her a foot into the air. The success energized her more. Hand over hand, she began scaling the shaft one painful inch at a time.

The heat chased her, boiling her feet with its hot breath and burning the exposed skin between her shoes and pants hem. The rope was greasy with decades of ash and soot cooked into the threads, and the closer she got to the end, the greasier her hands became. Every six or seven pulls, she slipped and had to hurriedly blot her palms on her shirt before resuming.

Just as the top of the shaft appeared within five feet, the furnace rumbled and sent a powerful heat wave blasting into her face. She coughed, closing her eyes, and clung on for dear life. Then grunting—heaving one hand over the other—she kept scaling the cord with her eyes closed, clambering higher, higher, higher until…

A sudden whoosh of cold air blew the scorching heat away.

Camilla coughed as she pulled herself over the lip of the smokestack. Shivers rippled up and down her body, and her skin felt molten hot and freezing cold at the same time. For a second she breathed in the fresh air and felt completely relieved, but the sensation did not last long.

Someone was screaming.

She wobbled off the chimney and slid across the snowy shingles toward a bright flare in the distance. The roof was steep and slippery, but there was no time to slow down. When she got to the eaves troughs, the rear courtyard came into view like a miniature battlefield laid out below.

The flames bellowing off the giant tree illuminated over a dozen bodies scattered across the snow. Some were motionless, while others circled another figure—Peter—who had ditched his shotgun in exchange for two .22 Glocks. The bodies had the strength and agility Camilla recognized from the hospital and the Cory twins, and they used anything they could find to attack with: lawn ornaments, yard tools, flaming branches from the burning tree. Peter’s guns had them at a distance, but he must have been low on bullets because he was doing more pointing than shooting.

Camilla wanted to jump down and help, but the ground was a forty-foot free fall away. Moreover, she still hadn’t caught
Abigail, and if there was any chance her daughter was still in the house, she had to go for it—now or never.

A loud
CLANK
echoed behind her. She ducked to her stomach and wormed her way to the top of the roof again, peeking over the other side of the house to see a mob of townspeople attempting to crash through the front gate. The iron rocked violently, then another
CLANK
burst as someone’s shovel came down and broke the lock on the chain links. Moira flooded in first with Maddock and Brutus right behind her, and in their wake were at least a hundred Nolaners, all of whom were crying murder as they spilled onto the grounds.

Camilla looked behind her, then in front again. On one side, the undead horde had Peter up against the porch, and on the other, the mob was surging forward with rifles and hatchets and war cries. The two of them were caught between pincers, and it finally hit her that they would never make it out alive. They couldn’t win; they couldn’t do anything except run the clock.

There was a dormer—a semicircular window that rose up from the shingles—at the front of the roof. She shimmied toward it, aware that if anyone spotted her, she would be shot down like a duck in hunting season. She made it all the way over when the whole mob suddenly went quiet.

No!
She cringed.
They’re staring straight at me. Here come the bullets…

But the Nolaners weren’t staring at her. They were frozen halfway across the yard, looking up at Jasper’s decapitated head on top of the fountain. Suddenly, they didn’t seem so eager to enter the house.

“Keep moving!” Moira hollered. “There’s three of them and a hundred of us!”

The Nolaners weren’t reassured. While they continued staring at the severed head, Camilla slipped around the dormer and pushed firmly on the sill, sneaking inside with barely a peep.

She was standing in the attic now. The air was as musty as it had been when Peter proposed to her in this same spot more than eight years ago, and she doubted that anyone else had come up since then. But as she rounded a pile of antique trunks, her hypothesis was quickly disproved.

The attic’s staircase was hanging wide open.

Camilla froze. She noticed a track of footprints—size twos—in the dust, coming up the stairs and trailing off into the sea of clutter.

Her breathing stopped. She followed the prints through the room, tiptoeing along the dotted path, and came all the way to the north wall. And there, standing on a trunk in order to see high enough out the window to the courtyard, was Abigail.

Camilla didn’t believe the apparition. But there the devil was, standing on her tiptoes, surveying the chaos she had created in less than an hour. The blazing tree, the dead bodies, her fighting father. As the little girl continued watching her little chess match play out, she had no idea that for once someone was watching
her
.

Camilla felt herself pulling on the rope that was still looped around her left wrist. She hadn’t planned how she would do it until now, but wasn’t it obvious? Hadn’t it played out too perfectly, as if one of them had to die that way like it was the only choice?
Yes. This is it. This is the way a mother kills her daughter, the same way she fed her to life. With a rope—a manila umbilical cord—tightened around her throat to ease her gently into that dark, cavernous sleep that bears no consciousness
.

She pulled the rope taught, summoning some reserve of unknown strength to slip it over her daughter’s neck.

Do it for Peter. He’s out there fighting so you can do this; don’t back down. If she had the chance, she wouldn’t think twice. Just do it
.

That was it. No more thinking, only doing. She raised the rope and tiptoed within five feet of Abigail, then four, then three…

Then two…

Then…then…

Then as a last act of vile deception, the Vincent manor betrayed her with a
crack
under her step. Abigail spun around and saw her mother towering over her with the rope, and she screamed—not a quick, shrill screech, but a full-bodied wail unlike anything Camilla had ever heard—as the rope came down around her neck.

Abigail was too quick. She slipped away and went barreling through the attic, knocking over the pyramids of clutter as her mother tore after her.

Camilla vaulted over broken clothes racks and flew down the staircase just in time to hear Abigail’s feet patter down the stairwell at the end of the hall. She shot through the corridor—past the bedrooms, past the viewing room, past the showroom—and leaped down the steps three at a time, landing on the main floor with a solid thud.

There was a
slam!
nearby. Camilla bolted past the dining room and into the kitchen, where the backdoor was still shaking on its hinges.

She knows she’s trapped. She can’t get out the front, so she’s joining her playmates in the back
.

As Camilla bolted for the porch, she snatched a meat cleaver from the island and emerged in the courtyard, seeing Abigail’s
white dress weaving through the blood-drenched snow toward the blazing tree at the far end.

She raced down the patio steps, entirely fixated on her daughter, and never noticed the contorted man running toward her at ninety degrees. The man leaped through the air, his broken jaw flapping off the side of his face, when another figure soared through the air and drove him into the mud. The second figure grabbed a chunk of marble from a broken fountain and hammered the contorted creature’s head in until it stopped moving.

“Peter!” Camilla shouted, helping her husband off the corpse. There were gashes covering Peter’s body, and his shirt was nothing but shreds.

“You owe me,” he grunted. “Again.”

Camilla reached up and wiped the blood off his face. “Are you all right?”

“All things considered. Is Abigail...?”

“No. She just ran by.”

“Then go, hurry!”

“Peter…” She didn’t know how to put it. Her assessment of the situation and all its alternatives was more than bleak: it was conclusive. “It’s over. The town’s through the gate, and any second—”

“Don’t worry about that,” he shot back. “I love you. Now go! Go!”

There were half a dozen undead still stalking the perimeter of the yard, their hollow concentration-camp faces waiting patiently for the right time to attack.

Camilla turned for the tree, about to take a step forward when all of a sudden another voice erupted in the air.

“ENOUGH!”

Camilla’s eyes bulged at the sound of Moira tearing out of the funeral home. The old woman billowed from the house with a pistol clenched in her gnarled hand. No one else was with her, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close behind.

Moira stopped. She took in the sights of the burning tree, the bloody yard, and her bleeding son, and quivered with antipathy.

“This ends now!” she screamed. The daggers in her eyes and the gun in her hand pointed straight ahead as she flew down the steps…

“Mother—”

“YOU’RE NOT MY SON!” Moira screamed. She locked her vision on her targets like Camilla had when she was running after Abigail. And just like Camilla, Moira never saw the attack coming from the side.

There were two undead—one man, one woman—on her instantly. They pounced like panthers, and Peter’s warning cries were too late.

They wrapped Moira’s arms around her back and threw another hand over her mouth to stifle her screaming. Peter raised his gun, but the creatures used his mother as a shield while they backed across the yard and dragged her to the edge of the pond. When her old legs touched the water, Moira began thrashing even more desperately, but it wasn’t enough. The corpses smiled as they pulled her in, deeper and deeper, and then all three of their heads vanished under the surface of the water. A second later, only two came back up.

“Go,” Peter whispered, letting the tears run down his face. “Last chance. Go.”

Camilla gripped her cleaver.
No more hesitating
. She sprinted away and resisted the urge to look over her shoulder again as she trained her eyes on the blazing tree in front of her.

She could see Abigail clearly now. The blotches of red on the girl’s little white dress sharpened into more defined splatters from fifty feet away, then clearer from forty and thirty and twenty.

Abigail was already backed up against the burning roots. She leaped over a line of fire and grabbed hold of the ladder boards that snaked up the side of the tree. The tree house wasn’t on fire yet, but the flames were closing in fast.

Camilla leaped over the flaming roots and went for the ladder too. With one hand she gripped the planks and with the other she swung the cleaver; the blade stuck into the wood and helped her reach the next highest peg. She kept climbing this way, like a mountaineer with a meat cleaver instead of a pickax and a short scrap of rope hanging off her wrist instead of a safety line, and reached the halfway point.

Abigail’s feet were scrambling like mad. They kicked down chunks of wood and dirt, but Camilla was catching up. She lunged higher with her cleaver, only half a meter away from Abigail’s foot, and stepped up and tried again.

Abigail reached the platform and pulled herself into the tree house just as the cleaver came down where her leg was a second ago.

Camilla took the last step up.

Instantly a foot came flying toward her face. She raised the cleaver to shield herself, but the seven-year-old’s shoe made contact with the knife and sent it spiraling to the ground. Camilla didn’t waste a second. She jumped into the tree house and threw herself at her daughter.

Abigail slipped free and dove through the only other available exit: the window. There was a thick branch that stretched to the farthest tips of the foliage, and the little girl darted along
it with incredible balance. It was as if the tree wouldn’t let her fall—like it was helping her get away.

Camilla bent her body through the window and set a foot on the branch. Balance didn’t come nearly as easy for her as it had for Abigail.

The uncontrolled fire roared all around them. The leaves were crumbling as the knotted bark popped with miniexplosions. It was even hotter than it had been in the crematorium.

Camilla paused, sweat pouring over her face, and looked down: the branch was forty feet above the shallow edge of the pond.
There’s no chance it’s deep enough to save a fall
. She glanced at the yard, knowing this would be her final view, and saw Peter battling the last of the undead corpses. He was down to his fists, having run out of ammo, and fought just as vigorously, standing in front of the porch to stop them from escaping through the house. He had sacrificed so much for her, she thought. It was time she sacrificed herself for him.

“You can’t stop this,” a meek voice called out. Abigail was staring back. “It’s too late.”

“No,” Camilla said. “This ends. Right now.” She crawled farther down the branch, and it groaned under her weight.

“Please, mom,” Abigail pleaded. The oily darkness drained out of her face, and suddenly she seemed like a regular girl again. In that moment Camilla saw her real daughter standing in front of her, a daughter she might have had in another life. “Let’s leave Nolan. It’s the town, I promise. It’s not me.”