F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (47 page)

They had to move, but she
couldn’t cover any ground carrying Katie. She’d have to go without
her.

“Katie,” she said,
peeling the dripping child off her, “I’m going for help. You stay
here and keep quiet and I’ll be right back.” I hope.

Katie wailed again and grabbed for
her. “No! Don’t leave me!”

“I got to, honey
bunch,” she said, fending her off. “It’s the only way. Just
sit tight and don’t make a sound.” Poppy gave her a quick kiss on
the forehead and resisted the impulse to hug her—she might never get
free. Then she turned and slipped away.

She felt like such a creep, leaving
her there cold, wet, crying, and scared half to death. But this was their only
chance. At least Katie was alive.

Her regrets faded into fear as she
bent into a crouch and began running through the bushes, making as much noise
as she could.

“Help!” she shouted as
she ran. “Help! Murder! Somebody! Help!” But how much noise was too
much? She wanted to draw Mac off, but she sure as hell didn’t want him to
find her.

She could make out the Appleton
house to her right. Some of the windows—and there weren’t all that
many of them to begin with—were lit, but mostly it looked dark and empty.
She thought she saw movement around the side but couldn’t be sure. Were
all the women and kids hiding? Afraid of the storm or afraid of the shots?
Where was Levon now when she needed him? He looked like he could break Mac in
half with one hand.

Her heart pounding, she kept
thrashing through the bushes, moving away from Katie, and yelling as loud as
she could. No way Mac could miss hearing her.

She paused between thunder claps
and looked around, listening. She heard the rain, her own harsh breathing…
and something else. Scraping branches, breaking twigs… getting
closer… coming this way.

Oh, Jesus, it had worked.
She’d pulled Mac away from Katie, but now she had to find a way to keep
herself alive until help came. Had to keep moving. But which way? Where was he?
What direction was the noise coming from? The sounds mixed with the falling
rain and seemed to come from everywhere—like the rain.

Suddenly, the loud crack of a
breaking branch to her right. So close! Poppy bolted to her left, moving as
fast as she could. The underbrush was thick here, and she had to move sideways to
slip through. One advantage of being smaller than Mac—these thickets
would slow him up even more.

She almost fell as the brush
suddenly thinned and she stumbled into a small clearing. Now she could really
move.

But she skidded to a halt when she
saw the shadow a dozen feet ahead of her. She couldn’t see his face but
she recognized his voice from the single word he spoke.

“Bitch!” As Poppy
screamed and turned to run back the way she’d come, she saw a flash and
heard a shot.

Missed!

She ducked into a crouch and veered
left. She saw the house ahead. Please let me make it there! If she could put
the house between Mac and her—and keep it there—she had a chance.

Another shot and suddenly she felt
as if she’d been hit by a truck. A crushing, tearing, pain against her
back, ripping into her chest, hurling her forward. She felt the ground slam
against her front, felt the mud and pine needles slop against her face. And
then she stopped feeling.

Her last thought before the
darkness took her was terror… Katie… alone there… with no one
to protect her… Katie… I’m so sorry!

Snake ran up to where Poppy lay and
flipped her over onto her back. He dropped to his knees beside her and shoved
the muzzle of the Cobra under her jaw. He wanted to pull the trigger now.
Goddamn how he wanted to pull that trigger but not yet. He gritted his teeth
and held off.

“The tape!” he shouted.
“Where’s the tape? Tell me and I’ll let the kid live!”
Not true. Not even close to true. But so what?

She didn’t answer. His fury
surged. But as he raised his left arm to give her a backhand slap across her
face, lightning flashed and he saw her slack features, the blood on her shirt
and the dark trickle from the corner of her mouth.

“Shit!” Of all the
goddamn luck. He’d never been more than a mediocre shot, and now, when
winging Poppy was all he’d needed, he’d gone and killed her. He
jammed the pistol into his belt and began poking through her pockets. He’d
already checked that rat-hole room he’d found her in.

Empty. Nothing on her. Nothing.
Snake jumped to his feet. The kid. She’d been running around without the
kid. Which meant she’d left her somewhere. And maybe the tape with her.

He looked around, trying to
remember where he’d heard her first shout for help… Over there,
wasn’t it?

Snake started in that direction.

“Hear that?” Decker
said as they stepped out of the car. “Sounded like a shot.”

John strained his ears and wondered
how Decker had heard anything above the rain, thunder, and slamming car doors.
He squinted through the dimness at the red panel truck tucked behind the motley
array of pickups.

The Mulliner brothers had leapt
from their pickup and were checking out the mud-splattered Jeep Cherokee that
sat in the middle of the clearing.

“This don’t belong
here, Luke,” the bearded one was saying. “This don’t belong
here ay-tall.”

“We better get up the
house,” the bigger one said as he and his brother returned to the cab of
their pickup and pulled shotguns from the rack across the rear window.

“Is that where Katie
is?” John said.

Both stared at him from under the
dripping peaks of their caps.

“You the little girl’s
daddy?” the bigger one said.

John nodded. “Is she all
right?”

“She was this morning.
Let’s go.”

John got directly behind the
Mulliners as they miraculously found a path through the surrounding brush. He
felt someone grab his arm.

“Better let us go first.
Doc,” said Canney’s voice directly behind him.

John didn’t look back. He
shook off his hand and kept going. Katie… he was almost to her and dammit
he was going to be first to her.

Uphill, and then into a larger
clearing where lightning strobes revealed a rambling, ramshackle house that
looked as if it had been designed by a schizophrenic. The bigger
Mulliner—by now John had gathered that his name was Luke—picked up
his pace and headed directly for a rectangle of light pouring from an open
doorway.

Inside, Luke darted to his left and
cried, “Lester!”

John ducked in behind him and froze
in shock at the sight of an old man with a scoliotic spine lying on the floor,
gasping, his shirt covered with blood.

“Katie?” John said,
barely able to get the word out as he whirled in a circle, searching the
shadows of this filthy little room, praying to see her face looking back at
him. “Where’s Katie?”

“Poppy took her,”
Lester said. “And he went out after her.”

“Who?” Decker said.

“Guy with a patch over his
eye.”

“Snake!” Decker said.

Canney nodded. “Got to
be.”

“Shot me,” Lester was
saying. “Then he went after Poppy! Go find her!”

“You need doctorin‘,
Lester,” Luke said. “I’ll get someone to stay—”

“Git!” Lester said.
“This looks a lot worse’n it is. You gotta help Poppy. That guy
went outta here with murder in his one good eye. Gonna kill her sure!”

John didn’t wait to hear
more. In a panic he dashed out into the storm and began shouting, “Katie!
Katieeeee!” He heard someone come up behind him and give him a rough
shove in his back. He turned as saw Canney glaring at him.

“Knock that off!” Rage
flared. No one was going to tell him not to look for his daughter. John grabbed
the front of Canney’s shirt, “She’s out here!” he
shouted. “We’ve got to find her!”

“But we’re not the only
ones looking for her,” Canney said, pushing John’s hands away.
“If she answers you, Snake might be closer. Think about it.”

John realized Canney was right.
“But what—?”

Just then, one of the Mulliners
came out of the house carrying a shotgun. He started yelling.

“Poppy! It’s your Uncle
Luke! Stay where you are. We’re coming to find you. Let us know when one
of us gets near you. We’ll protect you.” He turned to Canney and
began pointing to different spots in the bushy undergrowth that rimmed the rear
of the clearing.

“Everybody fan out and move into
the brush. Keep calling her name.” The two Mulliners moved off. John saw
the three feds look at each other; then Decker shrugged.

“Unless someone can come up
with a better idea,” he said, “I suggest we follow their
lead.”

He turned to John. “Maybe
you’d better stay here and—”

“Like hell,” John said.
Without giving anyone a chance to stop him, he began moving off in one of the
directions Luke had indicated.

The branches of the underbrush
clawed at his clothes and his skin, raked at his eyes, but he kept pushing
through, calling out, praying for a reply.

“Poppy, it’s me!
Katie’s father! I’m here with your uncles.” Over and over.
“Poppy, it’s me…” As he came to the base of a small
rise, lightning flashed. He looked up and gasped. Someone was standing on its
crest, someone huge, and he was holding something in his arms.

Something child sized… and
limp.

Oh, God! he thought. Is this Snake?
I should have a gun!

Then he heard a voice shouting to
him: “Are you Katie’s daddy?” That wasn’t Snake’s
voice.

“Yes… y-yes, I
am.” The figure started crashing down the rise toward John.

God, he was big. “I think
she’s hurt.”

“Oh, no!” John
staggered forward, arms outstretched. Please, God, not now, not when
she’s so close to going home! “Give her to me!” As the big
man laid her gently in his arms, John crushed her to him.

Katie? And then he knew it was
Katie oh yes it was Katie his Katie—Oh, Katie, it’s been so
long!—and she was soaked and she was cold but he could feel her heart
beating and he wanted to drop to his knees and bury his face against the
dripping rat tails of her sodden hair and sob out his uncounted joy and relief
at having her back again, but he had to get her out of here, get her inside
where it was dry and he could see her in the light and—

“I found her in a
gully,” the giant said. “I think she fell and hit her head.”
Aw, no, not her head! Not again!

John turned and began carrying her
toward the lights of the house.

“Where’s Poppy?”
the giant asked from behind him.

“She’s hiding out
here,” John said, still moving away. “A man with one eye is trying
to hurt her. Her uncles and some other men are here to help her.”

“I’ll help her
too,” the giant said. “I can find her. I’ll save her from the
one-eyed man.”

John glanced back. As lightning
flashed he saw the giant’s face and a diagnosis popped immediately into
his mind: Fragile-X syndrome.

“You do that,” he told
him. “And… thanks for finding Katie.” But the giant was
already crashing away through the brush in the opposite direction.

“Hang on, Katie,” John
said as he edged closer and closer to the house. “Daddy’s got you
now and he’s never letting you go.” Finally he was clear of the
brush. He broke into a run and carried Katie toward the light of an open
doorway.

“So you found her,”
Lester said as John ducked through the opening and dropped gasping to his
knees.

John could only nod as he gently
laid Katie on the dry floor and checked her head. He found a bloody, one-inch
gash in her scalp—on the side opposite her old fracture, thank
God—with a goose-egg hematoma swelling beneath it. Quickly he lifted her
eyelids and watched her pupils constrict. Good! Her breathing was shallow but
regular. She could have been asleep. Except for the blood. Had she fallen and
hit her head? Or had she suffered a seizure out there? Either way she’d
suffered a significant concussion. He needed to get her to a hospital.

He glanced over at Lester. The old
man was propped against an inside wall holding a dirty cloth against his bloody
left flank. He looked pale but alert.

“Are you all right?”

“About as well as a man can
be with a hole in his side, I guess. But I don’t think the slug did much
more’n puncture my love handle and one of my ass cheeks.” Lester
winced and took a swig from a big ceramic jug. “Hurts like hell, but this
eases the pain. You want some? Take the chill off.” John shook his head.
He knew he should check out the old man too, but he couldn’t bring
himself to leave Katie’s side. Not yet.

At a noise behind him he turned
toward the door, hoping to see either Decker or Canney, or even one of the
Mulliners. But it was someone else. John didn’t get a good look at
him—didn’t give himself a chance. He saw the black eye patch and
the next thing he knew he was charging across the room, arms outstretched,
fingers curved into claws, an animal-like growl building in his throat. Six
days of pent-up rage, fear, terror, frustration had finally found a target.

Snake!

He rammed his shoulder into the
man’s midsection and knocked him down. Then he was on him, pummeling him
with his fists, battering at his face, wanting to rip the skin off him, pound
him into the dirt, and keep pounding at him until Snake was flattened, until he
was little more than a thin smear of bloody jelly.

But his attack lasted only seconds,
and his red fantasy was shattered by the deafening explosion of a pistol only
inches away and a tearing, concussive blow to his right shoulder that spun him
completely around and left him lying on his back, writhing with the pain from
his shattered shoulder, and Snake standing over him, his one eye blazing, his
teeth bared, his dark hair plastered over the sutured lacerations that
crisscrossed his shaven scalp, and his pistol pointed between John’s
eyes.