The Travelling Man (26 page)

“Are you okay?” Bobby repeated.

“Shut your filthy mouth, Bobby, if you know what’s good for you,” Grange snarled, all elegance dropped from his accent. “You don’t ask me anything.”

“It’s just that you seemed a little upset,” Bobby continued regardless.

“What did I just say?” Grange said incredulously. “I told you to shut your stinking rat hole of a mouth. You don’t ask me anything, you don’t offer me help, you don’t commiserate with me, you REVOLTING MAGGOT!”

There was a long pause.

“Maybe I can help?” Bobby said and both of them were oblivious to the irony that Bobby’s new found blind confidence had been a gift from Grange in the first place. 

Grange sprang to his feet, casting aside all elegant torturous ideas in his mind. He was a chess grandmaster, used to painting his pictures upon a monstrous canvas, but now he was starting to wonder about the attraction of murder at one’s own hands.

He grabbed Cohen by the throat and slammed him into the mine office wall. He felt the man’s brittle flesh beneath his fingers as he tightened his grip, and Bobby’s face flushed red as he spluttered and tried to talk.

Grange’s eyes bulged in their sockets and his whole body trembled. He brought his face in close to Bobby’s and inspiration struck. He sank his sharp teeth into the little worm’s face and tore a large chunk of his nose clean off. He spat the lump of bloody flesh across the room and it hit the wall and stayed there under its own gore laden adhesive.

Bobby screamed and started to thrash about under his powerful grip and Grange smiled to the music. He was starting to think that perhaps there was something to be said for getting one’s hands dirty after all, as he sunk a thumb into Bobby’s eye and popped it free.

It was about 10 minutes later before Grange felt like himself again. He stared down at the mess on the floor at his feet and found it hard to recognise the man in the pool of blood and shredded flesh. His breathing started to slow and his hands shook a little less. He looked down at his once pristinely manicured nails and saw the hands of an old man gnarled by time and work.

He didn’t care for Bobby’s demise, as it had not been according to his schedule. There was a timetable for Granton’s end and everyone in it, and this had not been Bobby’s time or method of disposal.

Grange moved over to the main charge and sat down before he fell down. He had anticipated a decline in his powers and ability, but nothing like this had ever occurred to him. He had lived through the ages with nothing but complete control and excellence of execution, and just now he had descended into the realms of the talking monkeys that he so despised. How could God rule a world when he was no better than the animals that slithered through the mud at his feet.

His head sank into his hands and a strange salty discharge started to leak from his eyes and spill onto his cheeks. His raised a finger to touch the strange liquid and stared at the droplet for some time.

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“MOM!” Ellie screamed into the still air.

The picture froze in front of her and looked exactly the same as the charcoal drawing that she had just flung aside in the Town Hall. She had been trying to focus and draw anything of help to the group, but when her eyes had cleared she had been looking at her mother shooting dead the nice
Mr. “Call me Matt” Kravis.

She’d rushed out of her hidey hole and found the scene unfolding before her exactly as she had drawn. There was a crowd gathered and their faces were all full of hypnotic stares as though someone else was pulling the strings. Ellie knew that this whole scene was being written by someone else; she knew exactly how everything was supposed to play out. Her mother shot
Mr. Kravis and then the mob of nice gentle people stormed the church with guns and clubs and everyone died.

“MOM, PLEASE!” she begged. “Please don’t.”

Her mom had stopped at that precise instant. Her finger seemed to ease slightly on the trigger and Ellie could see the gun’s hammer pull back but stay back. “Mom, please, don’t make it true,” she wept, terrified. “It’s me, it’s your Ellie-Belly, please hear me.”

At the sound of her nickname, her mother seemed to twitch slightly as though she’d heard her daughter’s voice. For some reason, Ellie knew that this was the critical point, that it was crucial to not make one of her drawings come true. If they could avoid the charcoal sketch, then there was hope. She knew that instinctively; if there was hope, then they were not lost.

Her mom’s arm started to tremble but it stayed aimed at Mr. Kravis. The sun glinted on the silver barrel and, just as her mother’s finger tightened involuntarily again, through some Herculean effort she yanked her arm upwards just as the gun fired.

The spell was broken in that loud explosion and the gathered crowd seemed to slump in unison. Shock filled their faces and everyone looked at each other, unable to comprehend just what they had been about to do.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” her mom gasped, “I was going to do it, Matt. I’m so sorry. I could see what was happening but I couldn’t do anything to stop it. There was a voice in my head and it was drowning out everything else. I couldn’t hear myself in there anymore; all I wanted to do was shoot you and then kill everyone at the church.”

Ellie ran to her mother’s side and was swept up into a powerful arm and almost crushed under the hug, but she didn’t care. “We can stop it, Mom,” she whispered. “We don’t have to do what he wants. We still have a choice but he lies, Mom; you have to remember that he always lies.”

CHAPTER 17

bullets and guns

Cassie held up her hands to try and control the rising tide of anger that threatened to get out of control. “PLEASE, PLEASE!” she implored, striving for an authoritative tone which wasn’t easy considering the fact that she had almost shot Kravis in the face mere minutes before. “We have to have order. I know that you are all angry and I sympathize, I really do. Doc Stewart was a good man and he didn’t deserve what happened to him and I promise you that I will find out what happened!”

“We know what happened,” a voice boomed out from the centre of the group. “Those religious maniacs up there killed him!”

Cassie looked towards the voice and saw Jimmy Galloon. The local lawyer’s large round face was flushed a deep purple and his body language told a tale of a man on the edge of losing all control. He wore jeans and a red and black checked lumberjack shirt that was buttoned across his large bulging stomach. Most worryingly for Cassie, his fat fist was gripped tightly around a large hunting rifle.

“Look, we don’t know anything for certain yet,” she said strongly, unwilling to let the lawyer incite the crowd any more than they already were. “I found the doctor, I saw the crime scene and I’m still the Sheriff here.”

“Sherriff? Crime scene?” Jimmy laughed without humor. “You’re kidding, right? Take a look around, Ms Wheeler. Granton is dead and most of us are too. Those bastards up there are going to finish the job that the quake started and you want us to do what? Just sit around and wait for them to pick us off one by one?”

Cassie stepped down from the Town Hall steps and strode out through the gathering to stand in the face of Jimmy. She towered over him by several inches and where he was soft and round, she was broad and strong and he cringed slightly beneath her hard glare.

“I run things here, Mr. Galloon,” she said quietly but with no small amount of menace in her voice. “And we do things my way or else.”

“Or else what?” he asked, meekly enough to let her know that his rebellion at least had been nipped in the bud.

She leaned in and whispered coldly into his ear. “Do you really want to find out?”

Jimmy backed away and Cassie was relieved to see that, despite several disgruntled murmurings from the rest of the group, no one else stepped forward to back the lawyer up. “We have to hold on to who we are,” she said loudly for all to hear. “We were good people and Granton was...
is...
a good town. We have to remember that; we have to hold on to who we really are.”

“So where’s the help?” Andrea Lacey cried out, close to tears. “I mean, how is it possible that we can just be left to rot like this?”

Cassie felt every face turn towards her for answers, but she had none to give. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she finally said, reluctantly. “We should have had help by now but we can’t breach the town borders and our communications all seem to be down, but that’s no excuse for acting like animals.”

“Who’s doing this to us?” Sera Gamble implored to blanks stares and a stony silence.

“I’ve dreamt about him, you know,” Cary Borage piped up in a small and very tired voice.

Cassie looked around as eyes were suddenly fixated on the ground. “What are you talking about, Cary?”

“The man, that foreign fella,” Cary replied. “He’s always wearing the same grey suit and hat; he’s the one that has come to judge us.”

“I’ve seen him too,” Natalie Haim joined in.

“Me too,” Heather Chapman said. “He’s always in my dreams, always walking and carrying some ugly old case with him.”

“I’ve dreamed that as well,” Neil Tolken gasped. “That bag of his was bulging at the sides as though he had something living trapped in there that was desperate to get out!”

“It’s souls,” Cary added quickly. “The guy had been buying souls in town, that’s why all this creepy shit is happening to us!”

Cassie looked around as several other people nodded in agreement. “Look folks, I know that we’re all under a lot of strain here. We have suffered a terrible tragedy, but there is nothing supernatural going on here. There is no bogeyman; there is no thief in the night stealing souls!”

“He doesn’t steal them, he buys them,” Ellie said in a small nervous voice.

“Ellie, please,” Cassie said, holding up a finger of authority.

“You have to know the truth about him, Mom, otherwise he wins,” Ellie said with sad eyes.

“Ellie, sweetheart, it’s just bad dreams,” Cassie said as she turned to her daughter. For the first time in a while she noticed how pale and drawn Ellie looked close up. With everything happening and a whole town to worry about, her daughter’s health still sat at the front of her mind. She couldn’t help the small slither of selfish reasoning that Dr Stewart’s death would have an impact on Ellie most of all, especially with the hospital gone along with its entire medical staff.

She wiped a small tear from Ellie’s cheek as her daughter looked scared to the bone. “It’s going to be okay, honey, I promise.”

Cassie’s words were rendered as lies just as she bent down to scoop Ellie up and the sound of gunfire erupted in the air.   

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Bray Broker led the assault with his brother Darrin taking a position on the flank. Bray had been handed the reins as he was the most controlled of the pair. He could be violent when the situation called for it, but his mind was sharp, or at least sharper than Darrin’s.

He had been a devoted member of Father Luther’s flock for most of his life and now that The Rapture had finally begun, he was in his element. He saw himself as the priest’s right hand now, a fist of God to smash those that had fallen from grace and brought Granton to its knees.

He wore combat pants and a sleeveless, quilted, padded hunting vest that had multiple pockets useful for carrying weapons and ammo. He had a Glock G20SF strapped to his hip and a Mannlicher Pro Hunter rifle slung over his shoulder. He currently had a pair of high powered binoculars fixed to his face and was watching the outdoor Town Hall meeting.

Father Luther had wanted to launch a full scale assault on their enemies and the congregation was in full agreement, but Bray had a cold - almost reptilian - intellect and he knew that wasn’t the way.

He had taken only his brother, who was working his way quietly into position lying quiet and still on the ground.

He could see the Sheriff amidst the throng and he should have known that the Amazonian bitch would be leading The Fallen. He eased the rifle from his shoulder and brought it under his chin in a hunter’s pose. He had been shooting since he had been a child and his father had shown him how to use firearms of all sizes, teaching him as much about weapons as he had about life. According to his father, the end was always on the horizon and there was always a “them” about to smash down your door and take what you owned. Bray had always taken his father’s words with a large pinch of salt, putting much of the man’s crazed rhetoric down to the gallons of cheap strong alcohol that he consumed. Now, however, he could see that the man had at least been partly right.

Bray lined up the shot, aiming at the Sheriff’s head. He knew that whenever you were confronted by a snake, you chopped off its head.    

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Cassie felt the whoosh of wind as the bullet passed through the air where her head had been only a split second before. She heard a soft grunt as Kyle Goodeve was hit. He looked down at the rapidly spreading red patch on his chest.

“MOVE MOVE!” she yelled, flapping her hands back towards the safety of the Town Hall building.

Kevin was at her side quickly with his gun drawn. “They’re too far away,” she snapped instantly. “It sounded like a rifle.”

As if to prove her point, the air was suddenly filled with similar cracks, as rifle fire peppered the sky above and around them. She heard and saw a few people get hit as they stumbled with bloody wounds towards the safety of the Town Hall. Soon, the air around her was filled with the sound of returning cracks as her people started firing indiscriminately without a clear target.

She swept Ellie up into her arms and tried to wrap herself around her daughter so as not to leave a spare inch where the young girl could be hit. It was only as the ground around her was peppered with bullets that she realised that she was the shooter’s prime target.

She had been instantly aware of what was going on and had sprung into action, only now the realisation that she was placing her own daughter in danger almost made her freeze.

It was strong hands in her back that propelled her forward and she heard someone grunt behind her as they took a couple of bullets meant for her. With her daughter in her arms, she sprinted for the Town Hall doors, not turning back to see who had sacrificed themselves for her. As she reached the doors, she threw Ellie inside low and hard and the girl skidded across the parquet flooring like a flat stone skipping across a still lake.

A bullet tore a large chunk out of the double door frame close to her head as she turned back around instinctively ducking low. Whoever was out there was a damn good shot and she had to keep moving.

She looked back to the bottom of the stone steps and saw that Kravis was lying on the ground not moving. Her heart skipped a beat at the sight as it had been him that had taken her bullet. She couldn’t turn away without being sure and, now that everyone who could walk was back inside, she moved quickly behind the palm trees that surrounded the building.

Covering fire rang out from inside the Town Hall and the shots were steady and well aimed and she knew that Kevin had taken control of the response. His shots started to send up puffs of dust off in the distance and she caught sight of a muzzle flash from the undergrowth near there.

As she looked, Kravis had started moving and was slowly dragging himself towards a parked car that had been left upturned in the quake but still offered shelter.

A shot rang out and concrete sparked close to Kravis. Her first instinct was to run to him, but a second shot landed a little closer and she knew that the shooter was trying to draw her out. As if to confirm this, as she leaned out to get a better look at the bleeding man a bullet hit the tree that she was covering behind and a chunk of bark splintered next to her face sending wooden shards into her cheek. She absently wiped the blood from her cheek and sank to her knees before leaning out again, only quicker. Kravis was pinned down and did not look good. There was a trail of dark blood leaking out of him and the moment that she stepped out, she would be hit with no cover between them.

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Kevin shoved wannabe helpers aside, roughly sending men and women alike tumbling like bowling pins. The sound of gunfire had fallen outside to only the occasional crack. A quick check through the window allowed him to identify the shooter’s positions.

He snatched up a police issue M4 semiautomatic rifle that he had taken from the station and took careful aim through the window. Now that the shooter’s attention seemed fully focused on the Sheriff and away from the building, he was able to lay down covering fire.

It soon dawned on him that they were all stuck in an impasse. The shooters were content to stay in the distance and under cover, while the Sheriff was pinned down by a tree. Kevin could see Kravis trying to crawl to cover, but every time he moved, a shot rang out to deter him and to tempt the Sheriff out to try and save him.

Now that the Town Hall was no longer under direct fire, Kevin called over a couple of men that he trusted and set them to watch the shooters and put down covering fire in case they tried to move closer. The two men both held hunting rifles that had seen better days but looked operational. He left them with strict instructions not to waste ammo as it was in short supply. It had never occurred to him that they would be placed in a position where they needed arming against their fellow townsfolk.

He headed out towards the back door but was stopped by a soft hand grabbing his forearm.

“Where are you going?” Jeanne Rainwood asked in a small scared voice.

“I’ve got to get around the flank otherwise that Kravis guy is going to bleed to death or else the Sheriff is going to try and get to him and she’s going to get picked off,” Kevin said quickly as he made for the door.

“Let someone else go,” she said defiantly. “Please not you; so many people have already died and I couldn’t stand it if you…” She trailed off, looking down at the floor.

“Damn it, I haven’t got time for this,” he snapped and shook her hand away with more force than he’d intended and instantly regretted it as she flinched. She was a woman who knew nothing of men other than her long dead husband’s fists and temper. Kevin had struggled all of his life to avoid becoming his own father; following in the man’s dark and violent footsteps had always been his greatest fear.

“It’s got to be me, Jeanne,” he said kindly. “I’m still the law here, no matter what else has happened. Would I really be the kind of man that you might want if I just let two people die in the street?”

She looked up at him and he saw the strength in her eyes that she must have found to finally end her marriage when her husband came at her for the last time with an aluminum baseball bat. “Go,” she urged. “Just come back again.”

He was out the door and across the rear parking lot quickly. He carried the M4 in two hands with the butt of the rifle tucked in against his right shoulder. He reached the Town Hall’s outer wall and climbed quickly over it, noticing the muzzle flash from the tree line as another shot rang out. He knew that the Sheriff wasn’t going to wait much longer before trying to reach Kravis and he could only pray that the shooter’s attention would stay fully focused on them.