Risen (40 page)

They couldn't do anything. Nobody would believe them, and his mom would still be trapped in Anderson.

They'd have to hijack the car, run the roadblock, pick up Peg and get out again. Of course, with no way to tell which cars held strangers—who were now, in this new bass-ackwards world, more trustworthy than the people he'd grown up with—they couldn't risk being seen by anyone at all. At the first sight of headlights, he and Brant headed for the ditches.

"What we need is a truck," Brant said as they walked along in the darkness. "A semi. We'd know it didn't come from Anderson, and it'd plow through the roadblock like a son of a bitch."

"Trucks take the Interstate," Tom said.

"You never know. If one does come by, I'm going to wave it down."

"Fine by me."

No truck came.

The woods quickly gave way to more dry, autumn fields. Brant and Tom kept to the highway until they were out of flashlight range of anyone searching the woods, then climbed over the barbed wire fence and headed across the field. They picked their way over the wheat stubble, walked down the plowed rows, stumbling and cursing silently and taking, it seemed, forever to make any headway at all.

It was the perfect time for Tom to slip into the Blacklands. Instead, he realized, he was charged with energy, his mind racing a mile a minute. Peering into the darkness ahead, turning to regard the darkness behind, surrounded on every side by deep country dark, the Blacklands had come to Tom. They had become manifest, swallowing him physically as the horror radiated from its evil center and spread, ripple upon ripple, engulfing everything he knew and (he was only now, this very minute, realizing) all that he loved. Suddenly the little town that had constrained him, that pinched and chafed with his every movement, seemed precious beyond all belief, precious and lost and irrecoverable.

It would take everything he had to hang on to the vestiges that remained.

He had to cross the Blacklands and see what lay beyond.

***

For the first time in his life, Brant regretted his lack of military service. He could've used some basic training right now, or better yet, experience as a Green Beret stalking Charlie through the jungles of the 'Nam.

The broken ground, invisible in the darkness, made every step a chore. Trying to walk in the furrows bent his ankles at an awkward angle. The wheat stubble scratched and poked and crackled underfoot. He couldn't get any rhythm going in his stride. It was frustrating. He felt time running out on him. He was worried sick about Peg.

He looked at his watch. The radium numbers glowed so brightly that he feared they would attract attention. He unfastened the strap and stuffed the watch in his pocket, and he hissed at Tom to do the same.

It was after nine o'clock.

At midnight, whatever victims the Risen had claimed would be back. The odds against him and Tom would double or triple or worse. And Peg....

If he didn't reach her before midnight, how would he know if she was still the woman he loved? How would he know that the Risen hadn't gotten to her first and made her one of their own?

He tried to walk faster. His foot slid into a rut and he felt his ankle twist and he fell to one knee. He was picking himself up when Tom stumbled into him and both of them tumbled to the ground, cursing.

Brant regained his feet and tested the ankle. It wasn't sprained but it was sore. That's what he got for being in a hurry.

He had no idea how far they'd gone or how far they had yet to go. Not a light was visible but for the stars overhead, a brilliant swath across the black sky that dazzled the eyes and did nothing to illuminate the ground below. If he got turned around, he could walk for hours in the wrong direction and never know it. He tried to fix the town's location by the stars but couldn't. He didn't know how.

He felt Tom's hand on his shoulder.

"This way," Tom said.

Thank God, Brant thought, the kid knows where he's going.

He staggered on in the blackness. Somewhere not too far away a dog barked, then a gun, and then there was silence broken only by the pounding of blood in his ears and the crunch of dry wheat underfoot.

***

The Lunger house was haunted by the ghosts of children Old Man Lunger had caught in his peach orchard, fattened up in the cellar, and dismembered over a period of weeks while he feasted on their flesh.

Lunger had an understanding with the parents of Anderson that he would not prey on their children in their homes and yards or on the school grounds or anywhere in town except his orchard. This way the "bad children" who stole peaches were selected out of the population and the "good children" were allowed to thrive. Thus he got away with murder for several decades, until 1982, when he broke his vow and took a Girl Scout who'd come to the house selling cookies. He killed and ate her and, as God's punishment for breaking his promise, choked to death on her finger bone.

Lunger's ghost and those of the murdered children still infested the ramshackle house. On windy nights you could hear Old Man Lunger's maniacal laugh as he stripped the flesh from his victims, and you could hear the shrieks of the tortured children carried on the wind.

Or so the story went when Tom was nine years old.

The Lunger house then sat in ruin on the edge of town, abandoned, boarded up, and given a wide berth by anyone with a lick of sense, which naturally excluded every boy in town, Tom among them. It was worth a
Playboy
centerfold to anyone with the guts to run up and pound on the front door at night.

Tom had done it once. He banged on the screen door with his fist and turned and ran full speed off the rotting porch, but a warped board snagged a dangling shoelace and down he went. He tried to jerk his foot free but he could feel that Old Man Lunger had a tight hold of it from his hiding place under the porch. Galen yelled at him from safety fifty feet away. Tom looked back knowing that he would see Old Man Lunger's bony fingers wrapped around his foot and perhaps another hand rising up from below with a meat cleaver ready to whack his foot off at the ankle. Instead he saw the pinched shoelace and summoned enough courage to reach back and work it free, and then he sped off the Lungers' porch and he and Galen plunged into the orchard.

The orchard stank of rotten fruit. Their feet slid on peaches mashed underfoot, but Tom kept running and running until a stitch in his side forced him to slow down. Even then he staggered on, winded, his knees smarting, praying the breeze would dry the wet spot on the front of his shorts before Galen noticed.

Now he and Brant watched the house from behind one of the crooked peach trees in the surrounding orchard. Lights burned in some upstairs windows but no shadows moved inside.

A few years ago, a pair of Old Man Lunger's relatives—his nephew Mark and his new wife, Carol—rescued the house from demolition and began the long process of remodeling. They let it be known that they would lease the orchard for one dollar a year and a small share of the profits to anyone who would pledge himself to the organic method of farming. Edgar Miller's son, Tony, said he'd give it a try and had done all right, better some years than others, but most years coming out in the black. His crop was smaller than some, but the fruit commanded a premium price from health nuts and Tony saved a mint on expensive pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

Mark Lunger quit his job in the big city and became a private investment counselor who published a monthly newsletter. He also contributed a bi-weekly column called "It's Your Dime" to the
Cooves County Times
which he hoped to organize into a book one of these days. Carol maintained her real estate license but devoted most of her time to raising their son, Joshua, and to gardening, various civic functions and handling secretarial duties for Mark's business.

They were not the sort to be armed to the teeth like some of the malcontent farmers in the area, which made breaking in a lot more attractive to Tom and Brant.

"If they were in bed, they'd have turned off those lights," Brant said. "I don't think they're home."

"What if they are?"

"Then we have to assume they're Risen. If they try to bluff us, play along, but watch your back. If they make any overt moves...."

"What...stab them with my keys? We need some weapons."

"Okay, let's break in through the kitchen and grab a couple of knives. I'll try to phone Peg."

"I can't believe I'm breaking into the old Lunger house," Tom said, shaking his head and feeling suddenly nine years old again.

"I don't believe any of this," Brant replied. "Let's go."

The light from the windows was a relief after the near-total darkness of the countryside. Tom and Brant hugged the shadows as they dashed from the orchard to the house and worked their way around toward the kitchen door. Brant nudged Tom and pointed to a white lump lying thirty feet from the house in the side yard.  The Lungers' prize-winning Spitz. They remembered the barking and the gunshot heard earlier.

"They never would've shot that dog if they weren't Risen," Brant whispered.

"Maybe somebody else shot it."

That thought gave them pause. Very possibly, they were about to break into the scene of a mass murder. Images of blood-spattered walls leaped unbidden into their heads. Carol Lunger could be lying on that kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood. Mark and Josh could be in the living room, cut down in the middle of a video game. Their killer could be waiting inside.

The thought stilled their voices and slowed their footsteps to a stealthy creep. Brant opened the screen door slowly. The closing spring sang, the hinges creaked. The inside door was locked. Tom thought of Kent and his lock picks and how easy it would have been for him to get inside quietly. Instead, Brant elbowed a pane of glass and broke it. He picked out the shards of glass that hung in the glazing and reached through, unlocked the deadbolt, and swung the door open on more creaking hinges.

They stepped into the dark kitchen. Their dark-adapted eyes picked out vague forms illumined by the blue glow of electronic clocks on the stove and microwave. They couldn't see a telephone, but Tom spotted a knife block on the counter and pulled out the two largest knives. He handed the smaller of the two to Brant.

An open doorway led to the dining room, pitch black. Tom's foot encountered a chair leg that groaned as it skidded on the hardwood floor, startling Brant into dropping his knife. Tom thought that, with all the noise they were making, they might as well have rung the front bell.

"We have to get a light on," Brant whispered. He was thinking of all the breakables planted like booby traps in the average dining room. Glasses, pitchers, vases, plates sitting on edge—all waited patiently to be bumped by a careless elbow as he and Tom felt around for a telephone.

Before Tom could answer, the darkness exploded with a blinding flash and the crack of a small caliber pistol. A bullet whizzed by Tom's right ear and Brant's left and there was a shattering of porcelain on the wall behind them. They hit the floor as another shot rang out. In the flash of light, frozen like a photograph, they saw seven-year-old Joshua Lunger in his Spider-Man pajamas, holding a mag-loaded .22 pistol in both hands, chest high, firing blindly into the room.

"It's Josh!" Tom yelled.

"Josh, it's all right!" Brant said. "We aren't going to hurt you!"

"Put down the gun!"

Josh pulled the trigger six more times while Tom and Brant put as much Ethan Allen as possible between them and their would-be killer. Bullets tore into the dining room table, splintered the wood off chairs, pierced the china cabinet and sent shards of glass whirling through the air. Tom and Brant sheltered their eyes against the flying glass. Their ears rang with the explosions. Josh's footsteps retreated deeper into the house and Tom yelled, "Come on, before he reloads!" and he and Brant were on their feet in a second, running over broken glass in the total darkness.

Brant's fumbling fingers discovered a light switch and flicked it on. The light was blinding over their shoulders but it spilled usefully into the living room where they caught sight of Josh Lunger running up the stairs, still clutching the pistol.

Brant called out to him and the boy paused and stared at them over the banister. His eyes were narrow and he chewed his upper lip nervously, but there was no hint of fear. He stared at Brant with a coldness that shot straight through Brant's brain like a bullet, then he turned and dashed up the stairs.

"Josh!" Tom yelled and started after him, but Brant grabbed his arm and held him back.

"There's the phone," Brant said, pointing. "Call your mom. Tell her we're on our way."

"Where are you going?"

"Upstairs."

"He's one of them, isn't he? One of the Risen."

Brant nodded. There had been a few moments of doubt when he first glimpsed Josh Lunger in the flash of the pistol. He could have been a scared little boy left home alone by irresponsible parents, confronting prowlers in the middle of the night. But Mark and Carol Lunger weren't irresponsible parents and they would never have left their boy alone with a loaded pistol. Unless it didn't matter. So what if he shot himself or someone else? All would be well again come midnight.

"Here," Tom said, and he handed Brant the big knife. Brant accepted the trade and headed up the stairs to find out just how mad his world had become.