David did not let her go.
The guy in the bandanna stepped forward and pressed the muzzle of his pistol against David’s forehead.
“Stop this,” Tim said, but even his voice was quaking now.
“Ain’t got no problem opening up your head right here, Pops,” Bandanna said. His voice was as deep as a drum.
“No!” Ellie sobbed, pulling free of David’s arms. “Don’t hurt my dad!”
“Ellie,” he said.
She shook her head. There was terror in her eyes, but she wasn’t crying. She looked at Kahle and said, “I’ll go. Just don’t hurt him.”
“No, Ellie,” David said.
She hugged him around the neck, kissed the side of his face, and whispered something too low for him to decipher into his ear. When she pulled away from him, it was as if something vital had extracted itself from inside his body.
Ellie took Kahle’s outstretched hand and got up off the sofa.
“Ellie . . .” David said.
She glanced at him over her shoulder as Kahle hauled her toward the doorway. And then David saw it—the slight narrowing of Ellie’s eyes on an otherwise impassive face. The terror was gone, replaced by a sharp calculation. It was tantamount to the look that had overtaken her just before she’d touched Cooper back in Goodwin.
“You want me to shoot ’em anyway?” Bandanna said. He’d removed the pistol from David’s forehead but still had the gun trained on him, no more than two feet from his face.
“No!” Ellie shouted. She tried to pull her hand free of Kahle’s, but he wouldn’t release her. “I’ll never do anything for any of you if you hurt them.”
Kahle nodded at her. “Fair enough.” He turned to Bandanna and said, “You heard the little lady. Let them be.”
They marshaled out of the room, Gany bringing up the rear with the shotgun still pointed at both David and Tim.
“It isn’t too late to do the right thing, Gany,” Tim said.
Gany just shook her head at him. The look on her face suggested that Tim was a fool and that she pitied him. And then she was gone, moving quickly down the hallway toward the front of the house.
David got up and rushed after them.
“David!” Tim called after him.
David made it to the front porch in time to see Kahle leading Ellie across the lawn toward the SUV. Bandanna hurried ahead and opened the rear door of the SUV. He had collected David’s and Tim’s weapons from the porch and was sliding them into the SUV’s open door now. Gany hung back, the shotgun still trained on David.
“You just stay up there,” she instructed him.
“Shoot the tires out of their cars so they can’t follow us,” Kahle told her. “I don’t want to take any—”
Kahle stopped suddenly and froze in midstride. Then he looked down at Ellie’s hand, which was gripping his own so tightly now that the tips of her fingers had turned white.
“You’re—” Kahle began.
Fear ghosted like a quick shadow over his face. He tried to jerk his arm away from Ellie’s grip, but she did not release his hand. For a split second, it was as if Kahle was fighting off a laugh, or at least a smile . . . but then something changed, and that laugh, that smile, never came. Instead, his mouth stretched to an impossible length, as though his jaw had become unhinged, and then there was the sound of a teakettle whistling on a stove top. It took David a moment or two to realize that sound was coming from Kahle.
And then Aaron Kahle began screaming.
Gany spun around. Beside the open door of the SUV, Bandanna stood, trying to comprehend what was happening.
Ellie reached up and placed her other hand on Kahle’s forehead.
“Hey!” Bandanna yelled, though he looked suddenly terrified and did not move away from the vehicle. “Hey! Aaron, what’s—”
Kahle began thrashing his head from side to side, though whether this was to loosen Ellie’s grip on him or simply out of sheer pain, David could not be sure.
Bright red blood burst from Kahle’s right nostril. A second later, crimson tendrils spilled out of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. The high-pitched keening that was emanating from his throat suddenly took on a wet, clotted sound before dying out altogether.
Ellie kept her hand firmly against Kahle’s forehead, her other hand still clutching one of his, as Kahle dropped to his knees. He was shrieking and tearing at his hair now, his eyes rolled back to their whites. Blood whipped from his nose and spattered across Ellie’s face.
She didn’t even blink.
Gany suddenly broke her stupor and ran toward Kahle and Ellie. At the same time, Bandanna peeled himself off the SUV and took a few timid steps in their direction, too.
David sprung up and jumped over the porch railing.