But he’d heard it.
He knew it was true.
And he knew he was next.
His hands were sweaty, his heart pounding. It was hard to breathe, but though the wind outside seemed deafening, he did not allow himself to suck in the air he needed. He was afraid it would be too loud, his dad would hear. He rationed his air, forcing himself to keep his mouth closed, to breathe through his nose and take short, shallow breaths.
In the hall, his father’s footsteps drew closer.
The flashlight slipped out of his hands.
It fell to the floor, banging loudly against the hardwood, the clattering noise of its landing distinct even above the sound of the sandstorm. He crouched down, scrambled to pick it up.
He heard his father’s careful footstep on the hall floor.
“Son?”
He was so scared that he wanted to cry, felt like he was going to wet his pants, but he remained in place against the wall, next to the door, the hard plastic nub of the light switch digging into his back. He would only get one chance, he knew, one shot—if that—and he’d better make it good. Most likely, he would be killed instantly. His father would probably be expecting something: he’d heard the flashlight fall, and he would no doubt come in like a cop, swinging his gun around in a semicircle, ready to shoot at the slightest sign of movement.
Adam held his breath.
His father walked through the door.
He swung hard, hitting his dad in the head. He swung with all his might, with a ferocity he had never been able to manage playing baseball during PE, and the blow connected, the shock wave passing through the metal into his hand and almost causing him to drop the flashlight.
His father fell to the floor.
“Thank God,” his mother cried. “Thank God!”
He picked up the flashlight, turned it on, shone it toward her. She stood in the hallway, knife raised, both arms shaking, her knees practically buckling. She’d obviously heard the shots from downstairs and had come up here to save him, and though she hadn’t had to attack his father, the fact that she was willing to do so filled Adam with gratitude, relief, and a childish sort of happiness. It was a brave, selfless love that had brought her up here, into the mouth of danger, and at that moment he felt closer to her than he ever had before.
His father was on the ground, bleeding, lying perfectly still, and Adam rushed over his unmoving body to give his mother a quick, hard hug. She squeezed back, but she was already moving away, bending down, checking to see if his dad was . . . what? Unconscious?
Dead?
He’d automatically assumed that he’d just knocked his father out. But what if he was dead? What if he’d killed him?
The gun had fallen out of his father’s hand, and his mother picked it up gingerly. In movies, people always knocked out the bad guy, then forgot to pick up the gun, leading to another inevitable showdown, but his mom was no dummy, and there was no way that was going to happen here.
She stood up, and he still didn’t know if his dad was alive or dead, but Adam assumed he was alive because his mother said, “We’d better get out of here.”
The flashlight in his hand was bloody, but it was still working, and he wiped the bloody end on his jeans and waited while his mom quickly ran to Sasha’s room, went inside, then hurried back, her face white, blanched. She bent down again, dug through his dad’s pockets, looking for something, and finally withdrew a key ring. She stood, grabbed his hand. “Let’s go!”
They practically flew down the stairs, and he tried to concentrate on the task immediately at hand—escape—but his mind kept going back to Sasha.
There were tears streaming out of his eyes, down his cheeks, but he was not really crying, and he was able to speak clearly. “Where’s Teo? Where’s Babunya?”
“Teo’s in her room.”
Teo
was
in her room, crying, but she’d been smart enough to lock the door, and she did not immediately open it. Even when they pounded and yelled for her to open up, she did not do so right away. It was only after Adam said, “He’s just knocked out! We have to get out of here before he wakes up!” that she finally unlocked her door and came out.
Adam grabbed his sister by the arm and the three of them rushed out of the house into the sandstorm. Dirt and grit sprayed into his face, needling his skin, little jabs of pain like pinpricks, causing him to turn away, squinting. The wind was tremendous, cold and powerful, strong enough to practically blow him off his feet, and he held tight to Teo’s hand.
The van was parked in the drive, in front of the carport, but as he started toward it, his mom pulled him away, in the opposite direction.
Where were they going?
“The
banya
!” his mother yelled over the wind, as if reading his mind. “Babunya’s there!”
He pulled ahead of her, in the lead, running down the path toward the bathhouse, dragging Teo with him, his feet moving from memory. The last thing he wanted to do right now was go out to the
banya,
but Babunya was probably out there praying or something, and they couldn’t just leave her. He thought fast. If they got her, brought her back, they could probably be in the van and gone before his father came to.
They
were
like stupid movie people, he realized. They should not only have taken his father’s gun, they should have tied him up before they left so he wouldn’t be able to come after them when he did regain consciousness.
But Adam didn’t know where ropes were or even if they had any, and he thought that maybe they had done the right thing after all. It might have wasted too much time had they stopped to figure out how to restrain him.
Time, he suspected, was the one thing they didn’t have.
They reached the boulders, ran past them. He could not see the
banya,
but he knew it was ahead and he led them straight to it, stopping in front of the open doorway, and shining his flashlight inside.
Babunya was in there.
She was standing in the center of the bathhouse with a whole bunch of old Molokans who looked like they were dressed for church. It was creepy to see them all inside the bathhouse, dressed in white, in the dark, while outside the wind and sand blew wildly, but . . . but somehow the
banya
didn’t seem quite as spooky as it had before. It was as if whatever had been in here, whatever had possessed this place, had fled, leaving behind only the eerieness of an ordinary abandoned building. Behind them, he noticed, the shadow on the wall had disappeared.
He felt a small shove on his right side, and then Teo was pushing past him, running inside, throwing her arms around her grandmother.
“He killed Sasha!” Teo cried. “And he tried to kill Adam!”
His mother’s hand was on his shoulder, and then all of them were moving into the
banya
.
“It’s Dad,” he explained. “I hit him in the head with this flashlight”—he held it up—“but I think it only knocked him out.” He cast a quick look out the door. “He’s after all of us. He’s crazy.”
Babunya nodded. “I know.”
They started talking in Russian, the Molokans, and he had no idea what they were saying, but the tone was easy enough to read: they were scared. He heard high, fast syllables filled with far too many consonants. He looked over at his mom and she was listening intently, but he had the feeling that even she was having a difficult time keeping up.
Teo glanced around, frowning. “What happened?” she asked. “Is the
banya
dead?”
She’d been here too, Adam realized, and the thought of that made his blood run cold.
Babunya smiled at her, hugged her. “Yes,” she said in English. “We kill it.” She walked over to his mom and said something to her in Russian.
His mother nodded.
“Come on,” Babunya said. “Work here done. We have to go.” She moved forward, gently took the gun from his mother’s hand. “Others are waiting.”
Like his mom, Babunya held the weapon as though it was a hand grenade about to go off. He realized that the gun was what his father had used to kill Sasha. It was what had murdered his sister.
Murdered his sister.
It still didn’t seem real to him. In some ways it seemed
too
real—the horrific specifics of it were imprinted on his mind and would be there forever—but at the same time, the knowledge was too large to grasp any way but intellectually. He
knew
Sasha was dead, but he hadn’t really
felt
it yet, not the full force of it, and he was afraid of what would happen when he did.
“Oh, shit!” his mother said. “Oh, shit!” She started beating her rear end, hitting her pockets in the front. She looked at the ground around her, turning in a circle, then glanced up at Babunya. “The keys! I lost the keys!”
Adam’s heart lurched in his chest. “The van keys?”
“Oh, shit!”
“There are cars,” Babunya said, nodding toward the other Molokans. “We go with them.”
His mom sounded as though she was about to cry. “But—”
Babunya put a hand on her shoulder. “We go with them.”
3
When Gregory came to, his face was stuck to the floor. His head had stopped bleeding, but the congealed pool of blood had cemented his hair and cheek and left temple to the hardwood of the upstairs hallway, and it felt like his face was being ripped away as he pulled himself free and stood up.
He did not scream, though. He did not cry out from the pain.
He welcomed it.
He thought of his family, smiled to himself. They were stupid. They should have killed him when they had the chance. Now they would have to pay for that mistake. And from somewhere down the hall he heard the voice of his father, agreeing with him. “Kill them all,” his father said. “They don’t deserve to live.”
No, they didn’t, Gregory agreed. He put a hand up to the side of his face, it came back wet and red. His wound had been newly reopened, and it hurt like a motherfucker. Adam would pay for that. He’d been planning to dispatch the boy like he had his sister—quickly—but his plans had changed. Now the little shit was going to die a slow, horrible, painful death.
He hobbled down the hallway, using his hand to guide himself along the wall because of his closed eye and the subsequent loss of depth perception.
He used the handrail on his way down the stairs.
“Kill them all,” his father whispered again.
He did not even bother to answer. His father had become irrelevant, and Gregory was acting now on his own reasons, for his own purposes.
The house was silent and the sound of the wind and sand outside was maddening. His head was aching, a sharp pain that seemed to run down the entire left side of his body, but the pain was good and he was grateful for it. It spurred him on, enabled him to remain focused on what he had to do.
Hunt down his family and kill them.
Bill Megan had been lucky. He’d been able to take out his family easily, with no difficulties or complications. Gregory wondered if he’d had a silencer on his gun. Maybe that had been the problem, not having a silencer, and he cursed his Molokan upbringing for not allowing him to be more familiar with firearms.
His mother would pay for that.
He staggered through the living room, reached the front door, pulled it open. The wind and sand stung his face, blowing into his wound and amplifying the agony tenfold. He looked down, steeling himself against the onslaught—
And something caught his eyes.
A key ring.
He bent down. Smiled. The stupid bitch had tried to steal his keys, but she’d dropped them on the porch, right on the welcome mat, like a present for him. He laughed, the laughter spiraling upward, out of control, until he finally forced himself to cut it off.
He walked through the stinging sand out to the van, got in.
He could see out of only one eye, but there was not much to be seen in the sandstorm anyway, and he drove by instinct, drove from memory, heading up the drive, down the road, through the dirty black night toward the center of town.
He drove directly to the gun store, and as he’d hoped, its doors were wide open. The place had obviously been looted, but there were still plenty of weapons available, and he chose a revolver exactly like the one he’d had. He was familiar with it, knew how it worked, and he wouldn’t have to waste any time adjusting to a new weapon. He walked behind the counter, grabbed a box of ammunition from the cupboard beneath the display case, loaded the gun, and put the rest of the ammo in his pockets.
Outside, through the blowing dust, he saw what looked like Paul’s car parked in front of the café, and he smiled. He should’ve known that little pussy would be living in there now. He was probably crying himself to sleep. Or trying to hump the chalk outline the pigs had drawn around Deanna’s dead body.
Or both.
He was glad Deanna was dead. He’d never liked that bitch, and it served her right that she’d met her end in her husband’s café. He wondered what her last thoughts had been. He hoped they were desperate and despairing.
He walked against the wind, keeping his head down, until he reached the café. The door was closed and locked, but he raised his revolver and held it against the door handle, pulling the trigger.
There was a loud report that was swallowed instantly by the wind, and the door swung open, its lock and handle shattered.
His night vision was still intact, and, out of the sand, he could see clearly, though there were no lights on in the café and no illumination filtered in from outside. He didn’t see any sign of Paul, but the café owner was a lazy fuck, and Gregory knew there was no way in hell that Paul would walk home and leave his car. Especially not in this kind of weather.
Revolver extended, he walked along the side of the counter to the short hallway that led to Paul’s office. He kicked open the office door.