The Siege (58 page)

On the way to the hospital, Dale and Donna tried to fill Bates in on what had happened. He listened to their story in disbelief, interrupting them several times to question them on certain points that didn’t make sense and probably never would. Several times, Dale had to tell him not to worry, none of it made sense in the way he was trying to understand it; he was going to have to see the basement of Rodgers’ Funeral Home in order to begin to accept what had been going on. Dale wished he still had the tape from Larry’s dictating machine, but it had been destroyed in the fire at Donna’s homestead.

When Dale and Donna burst into Lisa’s room, Angie shot up out of the chair where she had been dozing. Lisa, who had been contentedly watching TV, looked up and smiled as Angie and her father embraced and wouldn’t let go.

“Good God, Almighty, I thought I’d never see you again,” Dale said as tears streamed down his face. He held her back at arm’s length, looked at her, then hugged her tightly to him again, patting his hands on her shoulders as if in disbelief.

“You don’t look so hot, Dad,” Angie said. “Why didn’t you call and tell me where you were? God, I was
wicked
worried!”

Dale glanced at Donna and gave her a feeble smile. “Well, you see, we were kind of in a place where we couldn’t get to a phone. I’ll tell you all about it later,” he said. In the back of his mind, though, he was already wondering exactly how much he would tell her. He certainly couldn’t tell her he had had to kill Larry…
a second time
!

“Have a seat, Mr. Harmon,” Lisa said, her voice bright and chipper from the bed. “I’ve got some ginger ale here you can have. Haven’t even touched it. I’m still waiting for the nurse to bring me that hamburger I asked her for.”

Dale smiled. Lisa looked thinner than he remembered. He took the clear plastic cup from her. Dale considered for a moment, then took it and handed it to Donna, who eagerly gulped down half of it before handing it back to him.

“So,” Angie said, eyeing him with a slight smirk and a suspicious gleam in her eye. “You two haven’t been…” She waved one hand back and forth in front of her face, as if she had just burned it on a hot stove.

“No… no, nothing of the sort,” Dale said after taking a sip of ginger ale. The carbonation exploded on the back of his throat like a string of firecrackers. “I only got part of the story from Chief Bates. What’s Lisa in here for?”

Angie and Lisa exchanged glances. At last, Angie cast her eyes downward and said, “I guess it was my fault, kind of.”

“It was not,” Lisa said, shifting forward on the bed. A magazine slid off the side and fell to the floor. “It was my own stupid fault. I fell off my bicycle and banged my head on the sidewalk.”

“But you wouldn’t have if I hadn’t surprised you from behind,” Angie protested.

Lisa waved her to silence. “I would too have!”

In the course of the next fifteen minutes, the girls filled Dale and Donna in on what had happened. They explained Lisa’s biting of Officer Brook’s arm as simply a hysterical reaction, brought about by her head injury. What they left out, by mutual and silent agreement, was any mention of Lisa’s hamburger “snack” in the hospital refrigerator.

When it was Dale’s turn to tell Angie and Lisa about his last twenty-four hours, he also conveniently left certain details out of the picture. Some, he knew, he would eventually tell her; others, she would never hear from him. When he was finished, he and Donna left to see how Mrs. Appleby was faring.

He gasped when he saw her. If he had thought Lisa looked worse than he remembered, there was no doubt Mrs. Appleby had been through a lot. He and Donna both smiled cheerful greetings at her as they entered the room and sat down at her bedside, but both of them were instantly worried about her.

“Chief Bates told me what had happened out at your place,” Dale said. Police Chief Bates had told him Mrs. Appleby said Franklin Rodgers had done this to her.

Mrs. Appleby’s eyes fluttered and shifted to the side to look up at him, but she didn’t—or couldn’t—turn her head. Her mumbled greeting was just barely louder than the bubbling glucose solution in her IV bottle.

As soon as Dale heard that Rodgers had been to Mrs. Appleby’s house, his suspicions were confirmed: Rodgers had been looking for Angie and, not finding her, had made Mrs. Appleby suffer for his bad luck. He was chilled by the thought that, had she died, she wouldn’t have even been allowed the luxury of finally resting. It gave him another reason to be happy about Rodgers’ death.

“I’m… feeling… better,” Mrs. Appleby said, her voice a strangled caw. With each word, her eyelids flickered, and her pupils jerked back and forth. If Dale hadn’t also seen the flickering smile on her face, he would have been very concerned; but he knew what a determined woman she was, and he suspected she’d be on the mend soon enough.

“I don’t want to tire you out,” Dale said softly, “but I did want you to know that, if you’d like, we could have Lisa stay with us until you’re up and about.”

Mrs. Appleby smiled. Her lips opened with a papery smack. “If it’s… no… problem.”

“It’s no problem at all,” Dale said. His eyes were beginning to sting, and he knew it wasn’t from lack of sleep. “I feel like I owe you a lot.” His unvoiced thought was that she had almost died, essentially protecting Angie; he owed her more than his life!

Donna was standing by the door. The accumulated strain of the past few nights was beginning to tell on her; she felt she was going to collapse if she didn’t sit down soon.

“You saw… his… eye,” Mrs. Appleby said. Her voice dropped to no more than a low moan. “Didn’t you… His…
eye
!”

The mere mention of Rodgers’ eye sent chills racing through Dale, but he knew he couldn’t let her see his true reaction; he couldn’t allow any chinks in the armor.

“His…
eye
!” Mrs. Appleby, her voice winding upward, bordering on a scream that she didn’t have the strength to produce.

Dale nodded and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Yes,” he said. “I saw it. And I saw a lot of other things I’d just as soon not remember. Right now, you have to worry about getting better.”

He patted the back of her hand and stepped back from the bed. It saddened him to realize how small and frail she looked in the hospital bed; it was difficult to see her as anything but the robust, life-filled woman in her house on Main Street.

“Let’s let her rest now,” Donna said softly.

“Don’t worry about Lisa,” Dale said. “We’ll get her discharged, and she can come to Thomaston with us. He glanced over his shoulder at Donna, standing in the doorway. “I’m pretty sure we’ll be coming up to Dyer on weekends quite a bit this fall.” He almost laughed aloud at the understatement.

“Thank… you,” Mrs. Appleby said. Her eyelids fluttered and sank down, staying shut this time. As Dale and Donna walked out into the corridor, they were unaware that the old woman had drifted off to a warm, dark, “centerless” place where her words glowed with purple and blue light. She knew she would find her way back eventually, but for now, at least, she wanted just to stay there a little while longer.

IV

W
hile Dale and Donna were visiting Mrs. Appleby, Tasha was down the corridor, visiting with Hocker. He had remained unconscious through most of the drive to the hospital, and by the time he realized what was happening, he didn’t have the strength to resist. They admitted him, stuck his arms full of needles, and wheeled him into this room before he could say, “Boo!”

The pain in his shoulder convinced him to stay right where he was rather than try to leave. After the nurse and doctor washed and dressed the wound, he was content, for now, to float along with the roller-coaster ride of pain killers they had given him.

But that had been a couple of hours ago. Now, once his mind cleared, he was royally pissed! Because Tasha was the only one there at the time, he lashed out at her as soon as she walked into the room.

“Why the Christ’d you let them bring me here?” he shouted. His face was nearly purple, and saliva flew from his mouth. “You know what they’re gonna do? Huh? They’ve got me now!”

“Hock,” Tasha said as tears filled her eyes. She was angry at herself for feeling anything about this man; this was her chance to head home and be done with him! But no matter how much she wanted to, she just couldn’t leave until she knew he was going to be all right.

“Jesus Christ, Tasha! They’ve got me! They’re going to check me out now. Hell, that friggin’ cop probably already has my face and name out on the wire. They’re gonna find out that I escaped from that mental hospital down south. They’re gonna find out about the truck we stole, that old man and those three guys in the woods.”

As soon as he reminded her of the woods, Tasha’s face went cold. The back of her head suddenly started to tingle. In the frenzy of fighting their way out of the farmhouse, she had forgotten all about the three men who had attacked them in the woods. If they hadn’t been some of Rodgers’ zombies, if they had been real, living men, then both Hocker and she were… Her mind formed word and denied it simultaneously:

Murderers!

The creatures they had killed in the farmhouse were one thing. It hadn’t been like killing real people. Bates had assured her that the authorities wouldn’t press charges against any of them for that. Then again, it was going to take Bates and the authorities a big leap into the irrational to believe that there actually had been zombies out there.

But there still was those three men in the woods! They had killed them!

“They’re gonna connect me to thirty or more fires from here to Georgia,” Hocker said. “They’re gonna put my ass away forever!”

“What?” Tasha said, almost a bark.

Hocker looked at her, his eyes skimmed with pain like thin ice now that his first jolt of pain killers was wearing off. One corner of his mouth twitched into a smile.

“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head and staring out the hospital window at the solid brick wall of the adjacent building. “I, uhh, might have set a few warehouses on fire… you know, while we were traveling north.”

Tasha opened her mouth, but no words came out as she sank back in her chair. She remembered the look of pure ecstasy on his face the night he had torched the stolen truck and sent it off the cliff. She remembered the joy that had filled him when he had looked back at the old farmhouse as it went up in flames. She remembered the way he had craned his neck to watch the flaming wreck of Rogers’ limo as long as he could. And suddenly it all made sense. Now she understood why, when they were hitchhiking north, Hocker had taken all those detours; he was setting fires as they went!

“Look,” Hocker said. “What I want you to do is help me get out of here.”

She shook her head and, standing up, started backing toward the door. “Uh-uh,” she said. “No way. I’ve already done too many things I regret. I’m not going to do anything like that.”

“I’m not under arrest or anything!” Hocker yelled. He punched his mattress, but the sudden shock sent a wave of pain through his shoulder, and he cried out.

“Not yet, you aren’t,” Tasha said as she eased open the door. “But if what you say is true, you will be, and I’m not sticking around. I don’t wanna have nothing to do with you!”

“Oh, yeah?” Hocker said, his upper lip curling back in a snarl. The pain helped him make it look mean. “Well, you may not want to, but you already do! You actually think I’m gonna let you desert me like this? You think I won’t tell them you were with me every step of the way?”

As Tasha started back out the door, every word he spoke hit her ears with needle-sharp pain.

This is very serious
, she was thinking as she squirmed inside herself. It might have started as a lark, a joyride, running away from home and heading north, but it had gotten very serious very fast; if she didn’t get out now, she was never going to escape.

“You won’t,” she said, keeping her voice as low and steady as she could. “They’re going to spend all their time trying to figure out what happened out at the farmhouse. They won’t bother to check on your background.”

Hocker snorted with laughter. He coughed up a wad of mucous and spit onto the floor. Shaking his head from side to side, he closed his eyes and rubbed his brow.

“I thought there might have been hope for you,” he said, “but there ain’t.” Looking up, he nailed her with the harshest look he could muster. “You’re always gonna be an ignorant bitch, so fucking ignorant you don’t even know how fucking ignorant you are.”

Tears welled up in Tasha’s eyes, blurring her vision.

“No,” site said, clawing at her cheeks to wipe away the tears. “I think you are. I ran away from home, thinking I could find something I was missing at home. But what I learned, and maybe knowing you had a little something to do with it, is, I won’t find it anywhere unless I find it inside myself.”

Hocker roared with laughter so hard it shook the bed. The motion sent a shock wave of pain up his shoulder to his neck, but he ignored it.

“That is so much bullshit!” he gasped as his laughter built even higher. “Such… total bullshit!”

“Maybe to you,” she said, so softly she wasn’t sure and didn’t care if he heard. “But not to me. I’m gonna go home to Port Charlotte.”