A tremor ages Harry’s voice to match his trembling hands. “The kitchen, the back porch. That’s where …”
Filtered through the roof and walls of the house, the sound of the windmills is not as it is outside, not like giant swords slicing the air, but rather a low, rhythmic hum. To Jergen it sounds as if some hive fills the attic, a teeming population busy wax-laying and honey-making and brewing a potent venom to ensure a lethal sting.
He follows Dubose into a shadowy hallway where one of two bulbs is burned out in the ceiling light. Beyond open doors to each side, rooms are little revealed by sunshine leaking around the edges of closed draperies. On the walls between the doors, rough seas roll without motion, and tumultuous skies storm without sound.
The first victim is just past the kitchen threshold. Homeland Security ID clipped to the breast pocket of his suit coat. On his back. Face torn and puckered and hollowed by several bite marks. As eyeless as Samson in Gaza.
The father, Rooney Corrigan, lies to the right of a chrome-legged dining table with a yellow Formica top. He’s also faceup, though head and body are not joined.
Dubose steps cautiously to avoid the biological debris that slathers the floor, and Jergen follows with equal care.
Rooney’s younger of two teenage sons is sprawled beyond the table. The condition of the corpse is so appalling that Jergen must look away.
“It’s the remaining son,” Dubose says, “who’s suffered the psychological collapse. His name’s Ramsey. From the Old English, meaning ‘male sheep.’ Ironic, huh? He might have been a lamb once, but not anymore.”
The mother had tried to flee. She’d made it out the back door and onto the screened porch.
Blouse ripped away. Bra torn off. Face wrenched in terror. Lips cruelly bitten, mouth agape in a silent scream. The wide-open eyes suggest that the last thing she’d seen was an abomination worse than her oncoming death. Her neck is broken.
Here on the screened porch, the sound of the windmills has yet a different character. The fine mesh that bars flying insects also seines the crisp edges from the slashing-sword noise, so that the porch seems to be a way station between life and afterlife, where a host of spirit voices softly whisper secrets about what lies beyond death.
Dubose says, “Let’s go have a look at Ramsey.”
10
THE DIRT LANE IS ELEVATED a foot or two above the flanking fields. It is hardpan in which Egon Gottfrey and his men leave no tracks, nor are there any bootprints impressed by Ancel and Clare Hawk the previous day.
Seen closer than from the paved road, the flourishing weeds are even stranger than they had seemed before, riotous thickets in great variety, many of the species unknown to Gottfrey. His attention is drawn to certain gnarled bushes with needled leaves and wiry stems from which are suspended clusters of pale sacs. From the highway, he’d thought the sacs were thumbsize, bladderlike. But they are larger and more like cocoons than bladders, but not cocoons, either, vaguely reminiscent of something that eludes him.
Perhaps because the eerie fields appear to be hostile, like some alien landscape that harbors unknown lethal life forms, Gottfrey thinks of Judge Sheila Draper-Cruxton and the angry dressing-down she meted out to him in their most recent phone conversation. You better stop wasting your testosterone, Gottfrey. Keep your pants zipped, man up, start breaking heads, and get the job done.
The dark clouds race north, harried by some high-altitude wind not felt at ground level. The sky lowers, and birds shriek overhead as they flee toward what few roosts of refuge this flat territory contains.
As Gottfrey and his men continue along the hardpan, they come to a place where the creepy bushes grow within a foot of the lane. He stops to peer more closely at them. The clustered and slightly wrinkled sacs are moist and milky but not opaque. In fact, they are semitranslucent, and dark shapes are coddled within them, as if things wait therein to be born. But these are definitely not cocoons.
“What is it, what’re you doing?” Rupert Baldwin asks.
Rupert and Vince have halted twenty feet ahead of him and are watching him inspect the plant.
“I just thought …” Gottfrey shakes his head. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
As they continue toward the buildings, he stares at the bushes, fascinated beyond all reason. He wonders if the sacs are actually part of the plant. Although they aren’t spun-silk cocoons, perhaps they’re extruded in another fashion by an insect unknown to him, the fields infested by some pestilence. Abruptly he stops again when he realizes of what the sacs remind him. Pale, yes. Semitranslucent, yes. But they nonetheless resemble testicles.
“Egon?” Rupert says.
“Yes, all right,” he responds, and again he proceeds with them toward the buildings.
He has no doubt now that the Unknown Playwright is endorsing Judge Draper-Cruxton’s instructions to break heads and get the job done. Recently, the author of all this has set the scenes with too little detail. These fields, however, are so vividly and intricately presented that they are meant to be a sign to guide him back to the proper performance of his role. Fields of testicle-bearing plants never seen before, they are put here to remind him of what Judge Draper-Cruxton has demanded—and of what she has threatened should he fail to perform as expected.
He has been under great stress, and this revelation has not relieved any of the pressure on him. But at least he now knows what he must do to avoid suffering the pain that the Unknown Playwright is so capable of doling out. Fulfill the dream he’s had of Jane’s in-laws. Shoot Ancel. Slit Clare’s throat.
Yes, they must first be captured, injected, and interrogated after being enslaved. But once they reveal the whereabouts of young Travis, they will be Gottfrey’s to dispose of as he wishes.
He and his men have drawn close to the buildings and now better understand their nature. The house is old, weathered, offering more bare wood than paint. Swaybacked steps. Some porch-railing balusters broken, others missing. Most windows are shattered, and the few that remain intact stare blindly from behind cataracts of dust. The yard is weeds and crawling vines that climb the rotting walls of the abandoned residence. The darkest of the structures is a sun-scorched barn with a rusted-metal roof and concave walls. What appears to be a small stable is in no better condition.
Jane’s in-laws are not likely to have hidden away in such ruins. Yet the lane ends here, and no other dwellings are in sight. Maybe the scene is not only what it appears to be.
Guns drawn, Gottfrey, Rupert, and Vince begin the search.
11
THE HUMBLE DESERT HOME now seeming almost to groan under the weight of an incidental, terrible grandeur bestowed by horror and tragedy, its rooms given a new dimension by a threat to the future of humanity that is here made manifest …
Carter Jergen is in the presence of the beast. The smell of blood and urine. The study window covered by draperies. Only the desk lamp aglow. Ordinary shadows seem to pulse with threat.
The master bedroom and Rooney Corrigan’s home office are served by a different hallway from the one that connects the living room to the kitchen. In the office, DHS agents Solomon and Taratucci keep guard over seventeen-year-old Ramsey, who is in the desk chair.
The teenager’s wrists are zip-tied to the arms of the chair, his ankles to the center post from which radiate five legs with wheels. In light of what the kid has done, the zip-ties have been deemed insufficient restraint. A length of rope twice encircles his chest and is knotted tightly behind the back of the chair. Likewise, rope crosses his thighs twice and secures him to the seat.