The White Road

The only traffic encountered by Faulkner’s small convoy as it headed up Golden Road was a big container truck that was signaling right from the Ambajejus Parkway. The man behind the wheel lifted three fingers in greeting as they passed, then began to make his turn onto the road. He checked his rearview mirror and watched as the vans turned onto Fire Road 17 and headed for the lake.

He stopped his turn and started to reverse.



Cyrus moved faster, his short legs struggling to eat up the distance as he tried to draw closer to the woman. He could see her clearly now. She had left the shelter of the trees and moved into the open, her head low, the long grass parting as she went then reforming itself behind her. The dog, he noticed, was now on its leash. It didn’t matter much to Cyrus either way. The dog was unlikely to respond quickly to the threat posed by Cyrus, if he responded at all. The blade on Cyrus’s knife was five inches long. It would cut the dog’s throat as easily as it would cut the woman’s.

Cyrus left the shade of the trees and entered the marsh.



The fire road was strewn with brown and yellow leaves. Huge rocks lined its edges, and the trees grew thickly beyond them. Faulkner’s people were within sight of the lakeshore when the driver’s side window of the lead van disintegrated in a shower of glass and plastic, the impact of the bullets throwing the driver sideways and sending the van hurtling toward the trees. The woman beside him tried to wrench the wheel to the right but more shots came, tearing a ribbon of holes across the windshield and through the sides of the van. The rear door opened as the others inside tried to run for cover, but they were dead before they hit the road. The driver of the second van responded quickly. He kept his head low and put his foot down hard, screeching around the disabled lead vehicle in a cloud of leaves and sending the front wheels and hood of the van straight into one of the rocks by the side of the road. Dazed, he reached beneath the dashboard, released the sawed-off, and rose up in time to take Louis’s first bullet in his chest. The shotgun fell from his hands and he slumped forward. Meanwhile, the woman was in the back of the van and preparing to respond. She took Faulkner by the arm and told him to start running for the lake as soon as she opened the doors. In her hands she held an H&K G11 automatic rifle set to fire bursts of three rounds, each round a special caseless cartridge that was simply a block of explosive with a bullet buried at its center. She counted down from three, then hit the release handle on the door and began firing. In front of her, a small fat man was punched backward by the impact of the rounds and lay twitching on the road. Behind the woman, Faulkner began to run for the trees and the waters beyond as she sprayed bursts toward the roadside and then turned to follow him. She was almost level with the old man when she felt the impact at her left thigh, felling her instantly. She turned on her back, flipped the catch to fully automatic, and kept firing toward the approaching men as they dived for cover. When the gun locked empty, she tossed it to one side and drew her pistol. She had almost raised it when a hand touched her arm gently. Her head turned, her arm moving milliseconds slower. She barely had time to register the gaping hole of the gun leveled at her face before her life ended.



Mary Mason heard the sirens and the raised voices of her neighbors. She reached out her hand to let the big man know, and felt his stillness.

She began to cry.



Out on the road, the truck had reversed down and had already reached the scene of the trap. Its rear doors were opened, and a ramp was lowered to enable the two disabled vans to be pushed into its interior. The bodies of the dead were placed inside, while two men with back-mounted vacuums scoured the blood and broken glass from the road.

But the old man was still running hard, despite the briers that pulled at his feet and the branches of the trees that tugged at his clothes. He slipped on the damp leaves and sensed movement to either side of him as he struggled to rise, a gun clutched in his right hand. He got to his feet just as one of the figures detached itself from the trees and moved to intercept him. He tried to turn, to make for a gap in the woods to the north, but a second figure appeared, and the old man stopped.

Faulkner’s face wrinkled in recognition.

“Remember me?” asked Angel. He had a gun in his hand, hanging loosely by his side. To Faulkner’s right, Louis walked slowly across the earth and stone. He too carried a gun by his side. Faulkner tried to back away, then turned to see my face. He raised his gun. It swung first toward me, then Angel, and finally Louis.

“Go ahead, Reverend,” said Louis. His gun was now pointing at Faulkner, one eye closed as he sighted down the barrel. “You choose.”

“They’ll know,” said Faulkner. “You’ll make me a martyr.”

“They ain’t never gonna find you, Reverend,” said Louis. “Far as people gonna know, you just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

I lifted my gun. So did Angel.

“But we’ll know,” Angel said. “We’ll always know.”

Faulkner tried to turn his gun on himself as the three shots came simultaneously and the old man bucked and fell. He lay on his back, looking at the sky. Thin streams of blood trailed from the corners of his mouth, then the sky disappeared as we stared down upon him. His mouth opened and closed as he tried to say something. He swallowed, and licked at the blood with his tongue. The fingers of his right hand moved feebly as he looked at me.

Slowly, carefully, I knelt down.

“Your bitch is dead,” he whispered, as his eyes closed for the last time. And when I looked up, the trees were filled with ravens.

*

Cyrus’s mouth was dry. He was so close to her now, thirty, maybe thirty-five feet away. He ran his finger along the blade and watched the dog tugging at the leash, straining to get ahead of its mistress, its attention distracted by the presence of the birds and small rodents it could hear moving through the grass. Cyrus couldn’t understand why she had leashed the dog. Let it run, he thought. The hell harm can it do?

Twenty feet now. Just a few more steps. The woman stepped into a copse of trees above a small pool of water, an outpost of the larger forest that shadowed the marsh to the north, and was suddenly out of his sight. Ahead of him, Cyrus heard the ringing of a cell phone. He ran, his legs aching as he reached the trees. The first thing he saw was the dog. It was tied by its leash to the rotting trunk of a fallen tree. It looked at Cyrus in puzzlement, then yapped happily at what it saw behind.

Cyrus turned and the log caught him full in the face, breaking his nose and sending him stumbling backward out of the trees. He tried to raise his knife and was hit again in the same spot, the pain blinding him. He felt empty space beneath his heels and lifted his arms to try to stop himself from falling even as he tumbled and landed with a splash in the water. He broke back to the surface and began to struggle toward the bank, but Cyrus was not built for swimming. In fact, he could barely swim a stroke and panic had almost immediately set in as he sensed the depth of the water. Water levels in the Scarborough marshes were usually six to eight feet, but the monthly flood had raised them to fourteen and sixteen feet in places. Cyrus couldn’t touch the bottom with his feet.

And then there was another impact on his skull and he felt something break in his head. The energy seemed to leach from his body, his hands and legs refusing to move. Slowly, he began to sink, descending until his lower body was surrounded by weeds and fallen branches, his feet deep in the mud. Air bubbled from his lips and the sight of it seemed to force one final effort from him. His whole body jerked and his hands and arms began to beat at the water, the surface drawing closer as he started to rise.

Cyrus’s ascent was arrested as something pulled at his feet. He looked down but could see only weeds and grass. He tried kicking, but his feet were held fast in the murk and vegetation below, the branches like fingers wrapped around his ankles.

Hands. There were hands upon him. The voices in his head were shrieking, sending out contradictory messages as his air supply dwindled.

Hands.

Branches.

They’re just branches.

But he could feel the hands down there. He could feel the fingers pulling at him, dragging him deeper, forcing him to join them; and he knew that they were waiting down there for him. The women from the hollow were waiting for him.

A shadow fell across him. Blood was flowing freely from the wound in his head and from his ears and nose. He looked up and the woman was staring down at him from the bank, the dog’s head to one side as it peered at the water in puzzlement. The headphones were no longer at the woman’s ears, but lay curled around her neck, and something told Cyrus that they had been silent from the moment she had spotted him and began to draw him deeper into the marsh. He stared up at the woman imploringly and opened his mouth as if to beg her to save him, but instead the last of his air floated away and the water coursed into his body. He raised his hands to the woman, but the only move she made was to take her right hand and rub it slowly and rhythmically against the slight swell of her belly, so that it seemed that she was soothing the child within, that it was aware of what was occurring outside its world and was distressed by the action. The woman’s face was empty. There was no pity, no shame, no guilt, no regret. There was not even anger, just a blankness that was worse than any fury Cyrus had ever seen or felt. Cyrus felt a final tug at his legs as he began to drown, the water filling his lungs, the pain in his head growing as he was starved of oxygen, the voices in his mind rising to a last crescendo, then, slowly, fading away, his final vision that of a pale, pitiless woman rubbing gently at her womb, calming her unborn child.