EMMA MADE TEA. She didn’t know what else to do. Trouble reared up, you put the kettle on. It was how her mother handled a crisis, her grandmother too. Cancer, war, plagues of locusts? Make the tea and then we’ll deal with it.
Her lip was still swollen and hot to the touch. The ice had done nothing to get the swelling down and the thought of anything hot touching it made her wince. She pushed the tea aside and reached into the hutch, pulling down her dad’s response to crises. She poured a lethal dose into a rock glass and knocked the bar off the first finger. It burned, just not the way tea does.
Make it hurt.
Of all the bloody-minded things to say. Her last words to Jim flinging back at her like an angry boomerang. She’d meant it in the moment, pure revenge in her heart, but that moment was over. She had sobered up in the stillness after he left. Those stupid words tumbling through her head. The implications of it. Consequences.
Corrigan was armed too. The gun on the mantle. She’d spotted it there when he tore at her clothes and clawed her skin. If she could have gotten her hands on it, she would have shot him dead herself. But that’s not what had happened. When it was over, she had simply pulled her clothes back into place and walked out the door without even looking at the rifle. It mocked her from its perch, just out of reach.
She had sent her husband off to a gunfight. Given her blessing to blind revenge against a dangerous man. A violent ex-con and killer by his own admission.
Make it hurt.
She killed the glass and poured again and her eyes latched on the phone in the hall. She scooped it up and dialled his cell. She would tell him to forget what she’d said and come home and everything would be all right. It rang and rang without an answer.
The linoleum creaked. Travis stood in the doorway. His face a drawn disc of white.
Emma put the phone down. “You okay?”
“I heard something,” he said. “I think it was a gunshot.”
“Are you sure?” An instinctive response to allay her child’s fear, assure him that everything was okay. A lie she’d told at least once a day since Travis was two years old. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Just a tree branch falling off. Something.”
As if angry at the dismissal, gunfire cracked through the still air. Bang, bang, bang. All of it downwind from the old house down the road.
Emma’s hand shot to her mouth, bumping the tender lip. Gunfire, without a doubt. Travis sprinted to the door, flung back the lock and ran outside. She barked at him to get back inside and rushed after him.
“Something’s on fire over there,” he shouted.
She followed him onto the porch where he pointed across the field. An orange glow lit up the treeline like a false sunset. Flames wisped up and winked out and rose again. Whatever was burning out there had to be big. The house itself?
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Come back inside, honey.”
“No.”
She chased him back inside and locked the door and hurried him into the kitchen. Crises spilling all over the place, one went to the kitchen. Why? To brew more tea? Make a sandwich?
She should call the police. They would stop it. But Jim had told her to leave if he called. He meant for her and Travis to be far away when the trouble started.
“We should go over there.” Travis pressed his nose against the dark glass of the window.
“Stay away from the window, honey.”
“What if Dad’s in trouble?” Travis didn’t move, didn’t even turn around.
“Get away from the window!”
Travis spooked like a horse and turned with a nasty look on his face and she immediately regretted it. She was regretting a lot of things tonight. Let this be the last of it.
Travis flopped into a chair and she dialled Jim’s number again.
Bill Berryhill was still alive. Out there in the dark, calling for help. For his mother. Pleading with God to make the hurting stop.
Jim couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. Just out there, somewhere. Puddy stifled his moaning and stilled himself, listening to those awful cries. “Can you see him?”
“I can’t see anything.”
The crackle of the burning truck and then the cries started up again. Bill called out Jim’s name, begging Jim for help.
Jim crept forward, one knee in the damp clover, ready to go to him. He did it without thinking. His name called out by a man injured in the dark, a magnetic pull impossible to deny.
Puddy held him back, hissing in his ear. “Don’t be stupid. He’ll shoot you down before you get there.”
“I can’t just listen to that.”
“Do you think I want to?”
Bill wouldn’t let up, calling and crying and pleading. When no one came, he turned nasty. Jim, you fucking bastard! This is your fault! This all your fucking fault you fucking bastard!
Worse than the cries for help, stinging deeper than the lead shot puncturing his leg. Worse because of its veracity. Puddycombe gripped his arm, worried he’d run but all Jim did was lower his head.
“Don’t you listen to that,” Puddy hissed. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
An image popped into Jim’s brain, slotting down in front of his eyes. Stones tumbling into the weeds, rolling and knocking through strands of timothy. The tractor blade pushing down the old stone fence that divided the property.
Who was going to know? Go ahead, till that unused land.
In knocking down the stone fence he had rifled a graveyard that should never have been disturbed. Shaking loose the old ghosts, uprooting them from the cold soil. Uprooting Hell. Bill was right. He wished he could tell him that.
Puddy was hissing into his ear again. Tugging his sleeve the way Travis used to, hijacking attention. He snarled at Puddy, annoyed at the man’s insistence but then he saw what it was.
Corrigan stood in the yard, twenty feet to their left. Looking north into the night, to the sound of Berryhill’s cries. In plain view and wide open. The shotgun in one hand, cracked open at the hinge. Slotting fresh hulls into the barrels. Vulnerable.
The Mossberg lay in Jim’s lap. One round left, loaded into the chamber. One shot, make it count. His fingers wrapped around the grip but his hands had gone numb like frozen clubs at the end of his wrists. But all he had to do was swing the gun up to his shoulder and blow the son of a bitch away. He didn’t even have to really aim at this distance. The spread of buckshot would flay the man to shreds. But he had to do it slow, a sudden movement would alert Corrigan.
Puddycombe held his breath and leaned back away from the gun barrel. Hope bubbled his stomach, they were gonna make it after all—
Ring. Ring.
The phone in Jim’s pocket.
As loud as bombs.
Click. Corrigan had the gun snapped and shouldered in less than a heartbeat. Squinting down the barrels with Jim dead to rights.
Jim’s hands atrophied. He almost pissed himself, eyes dilating at the twin bores pointed at his face.
The phone rang on and on, burning a hole in Jim’s pocket.
Corrigan leered at him. “That’d be the missus, yeah?”
Puddycombe started whimpering. Arms covering his head like it could ward off the shotgun blast. “Please…”
“Don’t beg, Mister Puddycombe,” Corrigan spat. “You come up here like cowboys looking for blood, the least you can do is take your punishment like a man.”
“Wait,” Jim broke, his guts ready to pour out. The rifle a stick of useless in his frozen hands. “Just wait a minute.”
The gun barrel raised up a notch, Corrigan squaring the bead between Jim’s eyes. “Goodbye Jimmy Hawkshaw—”
A new sound broke the spell, sharp and metallic. The click-clack of a bolt sliding, locking. Corrigan tore his eyes from his gunsight.
Combat Kyle shimmered in the heat ripple of the burning truck. His face freckled with blood and Hitchens’ lost rifle in his hands. Aimed square at Corrigan. His teeth bared, chittering at a curse. “F-f-fucking p-p-pig,” he spat, taking forever to chew off each consonant. “D-d-drop the f-f-fucking gun!”
Corrigan, cold as stone. “Go home, little man.”
Nobody moved. A Mexican standoff.
“Fucking shoot him!” Puddy shrieked.
No one was minding the bottle. Least of all Kyle. Still burning less than a stride away from his foot. The Molotov exploded, the inferno swallowing Kyle to the waist in flames and glass shrapnel.
The shockwave punched Corrigan out at the knees. Slammed Jim and Puddycombe hard up against the tank.
Combat Kyle bansheed at the flames riffling over him. It didn’t sound human. The burning man scurried this way and that like some lesser demon spit out of damnation to dance on the ground, flames dripping from its flailing hands. The man no longer visible, a black silhouette inside rippling waves of orange. He fell and then crawled towards the two men and then collapsed. Rolled over. A godawful hissing sound leaked out of him.
Jim felt his arm being tugged. Puddycombe pulling him away, screaming at him to run. Jim stumbled along, legs stiff and uncooperative. Dragging the Mossberg along.
God knew where Corrigan was. Hell with it. Keep running.
They tripped over Berryhill. The big man on his hands and knees, crawling away in the dark. “Help me up!” Bill’s voice shrill and terrified.
They each hooked an arm and hauled Berryhill to his feet, grunting and wheezing under the strain. “Move your feet, you fat bastard!” Puddycombe barked, blowing out his cheeks. “I can’t carry you!”
Jim looked over his shoulder. The house, the burning truck. The smouldering man. No Corrigan.
Keep moving.
Berryhill lurched and pitched on puppet legs. Clinging to the two men, a hair away from bringing them all down in a tumble. “Don’t you fucking leave me!”
Jim bit back the pain in his leg. He could feel it bleeding fresh, leaking down his ankle into his boot. Soaking the sock sticky and hot. Eyes front. Where to run? Hitch’s Tahoe sat in the rutted track where they’d left it. “Get to the truck! Move your fucking feet, Bill!”
“I am!”
They jerked and stumbled like tenpins. Hitchens had left the keys in the ignition. Jim remembered seeing them there.
A gun blast, the shotgun report cracking in their ears. All three went down. When Jim looked up, he saw the blown out front tire of Hitch’s Tahoe. Something shuffled in the darkness and the shotgun sang again. The vehicle listed as the rear tire was shot out.
The three men panted in the dark and their jaws dropped as flames appeared as if by magic inside the Tahoe. Escape route gone. Corrigan routing them from the darkness.
Over the crackle of the flames came the click and snap of the shotgun being reloaded.
They ran the other way. Back towards the house, dragging Berryhill along. Skirting around the other flaming vehicle and the headless carcass on the stairs. The husk of Combat Kyle, roasting in the flames, shifted and rolled over. One flaming hand flopped towards them, as if reaching for their ankles. Fire was everywhere, Hell landing a beachhead here in this world, this acreage.
They grunted and heaved and kept moving. Berryhill’s legs like spastic clubs as the dipping willow leaves raked their hot faces. Staggering uphill until they came upon the little family graveyard. Six low stones and the big monument toppled and broken on the ground.
Puddycombe tripped over a headstone and they all went down. The injured man taking the worst of it. Puddy wheezed, his face pink. “I can’t carry him.”
“Get up,” Jim ordered. Noble words, he could barely stand himself.
Bill swore and groaned. “Don’t leave me.”
The barkeep shook his head, refusing to move. Jim snarled at him to get on his feet.
Puddycombe got up too fast and staggered backwards with pinpricks of white beguiling his eyes. A loud snap. And then the screaming.
Puddy dropped like a sack of dirt, clawing at his ankle. Screeching in hot pain, flailing his arms. The rusty jaws of the bear trap vised around his shin. Iron teeth cutting to the bone.
“Get it off! Jesuschrist Get it off!”
Jim gaped stupidly. It looked unreal, some Wiley Coyote cartoon made real. Puddy’s screams snapped him back to life and he pulled at the iron jaws. No give whatsoever. Tight as death. “I can’t get it open.”
“Pry it off! Shoot it off! I don’t care.”
Bill and Jim tugged and strained but their bare hands were no match for the iron vise and they had nothing to pry it open with. The tire iron that Puddy had was gone, lost in the weeds somewhere. Jim slid the barrel of the shotgun through the jaws but had no way to pry it open, no leverage to work off of.
There was nothing to do and Puddycombe read it in their eyes. “No,” he pleaded. “No no no no.”
Jim took up the chain and followed the links to where it was anchored to the ground. Pulling and straining against it until the spike plucked free and Jim fell back on his ass. He dropped the chain into Puddy’s hands. “You’ll have to run with it.”
“Are you fucking crazy! I can’t even stand!”
The snap of a twig. Footfalls, somewhere in the dark. “Rub a dub dub, gentlemen.”
A glowing haze of light floating in the pitch. Corrigan bled out of the night with the lantern in hand like some nightmarish railwayman.
Jim dove for cover as Corrigan swung and fired from the hip. A red hot blast ripped into his good leg, his buttock. Hot and searing like a thousand bee stings.
Puddycombe bore the brunt of it. The skin flayed from his cheek, flapping wet and free. His back shredded to exposed meat. Pinholes of gunblack against red muscle tissue.
Berryhill took his share of spray. He lay face down in the clover making an ungodly noise.
Jim rolled up and popped onto his knees, drawing the Mossberg up fast and outgunning Corrigan. Faster than fucking Eastwood, getting the drop on the murderous sonofabitch.
Corrigan bristled, his gun frozen at the half cock.
Jim’s heart knocked into his throat. He wanted to spit words at him, something matching his rage but his brain emptied of all but the most banal words and comforting curses.
“Go to hell.”
Corrigan’s hand shot up to ward off the blast. A useless instinct. Jim pulled the trigger—
Click.
The sound all wrong. No righteous blast, no redeeming kick to the shoulder. He squeezed harder but nothing would move the trigger piece. Load fail. Gun jam. Death.
Glee stitched across Corrigan’s mouth. “Misfire.”