Come Little Children (44 page)

BANG!
The bullet snagged one of the cans and it spun harmlessly across the dirt. Nothing else happened. The jugs lay there, mockingly.

Peter fired another shot, then another. The last bullet clipped a piece of metal at just the right angle and there was a sudden spark; the flash touched a puddle of gasoline and a flame whooshed up. It wasn’t an explosion, but it did the trick.
The fire came to life in the cold winter air and spread across the roots, then up the old, stony bark.

He looked over his shoulder—still nothing in the pond—and watched the fire tails swirl for a second longer as the wind blew ferociously through the yard.

He bit his lip. The flames weren’t spreading fast enough. They weren’t catching the wood, either; they seemed to be feeding solely off the gasoline.

Peter pivoted and ran back to the toolshed. When he came out again, he was carrying two of the barbecue’s propane tanks. He rolled them toward the tree and they settled perfectly amid the flickering gas flames, then he slung his shotgun off his shoulder and took aim. The butt kicked back and a propane tank exploded. Fire spewed into the branches and ignited the leaves underneath their shawl of snow, and the flames at the base of the trunk crackled and licked the bark with a blaze that lit the night sky like a Roman funeral pyre.

The blaze polished a brief gleam of satisfaction in Peter’s eye. He allowed himself to watch it roar for another second, then he turned to the pond.

Still motionless.

He glanced at the sky and saw that the stars had appeared out of nowhere. They sat behind the moon and watched the world like distant audience members nestled in their mezzanine seats; the show had already begun, but with any luck, it would end before any other performers took the stage.

Peter surveyed the pond one more time and made a split-second decision. His guns clattered onto the nearest bench as he pulled his sweater and undershirt over his head and kicked off his boots, then without any time to talk himself out of it, he dove headfirst into the ice water and vanished below the surface.

Peter’s nipples turned into stone arrowheads and his testicles sucked inside his stomach. His face was pinched shut, but he forced himself to open his eyes and peer through the murky water.

The pond was deep at its center—deeper than anyone would have guessed—and he couldn’t see the bottom through the tenebrous grime. He had to go farther.

The lower he dove, the darker and colder it became. The moonlight didn’t stretch far below the surface, and he was quickly consumed by dirt and shadows.

Suddenly, something came into focus.

It was the bottom of the pond.

His eyes popped open. Ten feet below him, lying on the dark gray sediment of the pond floor, were more than twenty corpses. Some were slumped lifelessly on top of each other, while others had drifted apart. A few of their faces were buried in the sand or stuck underneath another cadaver’s limb, but most of them stared up with glossed-over eyeballs and black, cavernous mouths agape. It was like an image from a ghostly shipwreck.

Peter clenched his teeth and swam closer to the bodies, reaching out for a man’s shriveled arm. The arm was waving eerily in the water—back and forth, back and forth—but his distant expression read dead. Their fingers were an inch away from each other’s, when all of a sudden something moved in the corner of Peter’s eye.

He spun around.

The bodies were all waving eerily back, but none were animate. He dismissed it and reached toward the man again, grabbing the shriveled wrist with a Viking handshake, and pulled him loose of his jettisoned peers.

Peter’s head broke the surface of the water. He gasped and the freezing air filled his lungs, turning his insides as cold as his extremities. He breaststroked to the icy shore and pulled the man’s body out of the water, dragging it to the lawn, and then ran back and dove into the water again.

Plumes of mist rose off the pond and mixed with the black smoke burning in the tree above. The
crackles
and
pops
sounded like a northern campfire, and the glow alone was enough to melt a wide circle of snow around the base of the trunk. Patiently the flames spread—the tree was enormous and it would take time to consume it all.

Peter’s head emerged sooner this time, now that he had known where to go. He hauled two more bodies out of the water, both women with identical gashes across their throats, and tossed them beside the first man. They lay there, lifeless, like a line of war casualties. And because he had gotten them out in time, they would never move again.

Below the pond’s surface, Peter torpedoed for the bottom like a prizewinning marlin. When the corpses came into view, he kicked to the closest one—a heavier man with bulging chest muscles—and clutched an arm with both hands.

The man’s legs were stuck underneath an older woman, and no matter how hard Peter pulled, he couldn’t yank the corpse loose. He let go of his original grip and threw his arms around the man’s waist, straining his neck muscles as he tugged and tugged with every ounce of submerged strength he could muster. Finally the man slid free and the old woman fell in slow, underwater motion to the smooth marine floor. As she settled onto her back, a bubble escaped her wrinkly lips.

Peter kicked one leg for the surface of the pond, then stopped.

He looked down again and saw another bubble, then another, float up from the old woman’s mouth. He glanced around and noticed bubbles coming from the other corpses’ mouths as well.

A string of bubbles floated in front of his own face.

Peter gawped as the man in his arms stiffened. Before he got a chance to kick to the surface, the clouds in the cadaver’s eyes peeled back, and the two of them were suddenly staring at each other less than a finger width away.

Peter let go, but the man grabbed him in a bear hug and their bodies began thrashing in the glacial water. The pool churned, stirring up grime and pebbles, and the moon cut in and out from behind the billowing smoke off the burning tree. If it weren’t for the orange glow of firelight on the surface of the pond, all sense of direction would have been lost.

Writhing viciously, Peter kicked and kneed and squirmed within an inch his life. His skin was white and his lips were blue, but no matter how hard he struggled, the strength of his enemy was as overpowering as a polar bear in arctic waters.

Peter weakened. The juggernaut cinched his death grip and forced the last bursts of air out of Peter’s lungs, when suddenly the look on the killer’s face went pale too. The bubbles stopped pouring out of the man’s mouth, and before either of them could black out, he let go and went sailing for the surface.

Peter sunk through the water, blinking slower and slower, when another pair of eyes peeled open in the darkness. Then two more sets flickered to life. The new trio was up, paddling toward him with their purple, bloated hands.

A final bolt of terror galvanized Peter’s system and he spun around and paddled for his life. His legs scissored harder and harder as the predators below him graced his toes and ankles,
and then suddenly—wondrously—his fingers touched a solid chunk of ice on the surface.

He pulled himself up on the ledge, choking back water and air like a hydro-vac. The muscular man was towering over top of him, trails of ice frozen across his barrel-size chest, and a meaty fist reached down and grabbed Peter’s arm at the exact moment that another hand lurched out of the pond and seized his leg. Suddenly, Peter’s body was the rope in a lethal game of human tug-of-war.

“
Mmmph—rrr—ahhh!
” he screamed in and out of the water, his head smashing against the ice as he fought for gasps of oxygen.

The huskier man grabbed a hold with both hands and yanked harder, practically tearing Peter’s arm out of its socket.

Peter’s mouth flew open as he let out another howl—

And then he saw it: his shotgun lying in the snow behind the hulk’s frame.
God let me get to it before I’m ripped apart
. He acted fast, dipping his legs deeper into the water, and felt another set of pruny hands close around him, then a fourth set. Suddenly the tug-of-war game was four against one, and the corpses in the water overpowered the one on land. The first man slipped on the ice, and Peter swung him around, sliding him into the pond on top of the creatures that had a hold of his legs. The brawny man’s frame knocked the four smaller ones off, and Peter lunged across the ice, grabbing his shotgun, and whirled around.

BOOM!

A corpse blasted a foot in the air. Another one came leaping out of the pond, scuttling for him like a demonic crustacean, and he fired twice.
BOOM! BOOM!
A shell slammed out and tore away the second man’s face. The third punched a hole in another one’s stomach.

Peter panted, eyes lit up with warlike electricity. He grabbed his sweater and threw it over his sopping torso.

The pond was still rocking. Together with the crackling fire, the sound of waves filled the air while he waited for the next challengers to burst through.

As his breath gushed out in thick clouds of smoke, he turned and looked worriedly at the manor. “Where are you?” he whispered. “C’mon, c’mon. Hurry.”

A response echoed in the wind, though it wasn’t the reply he had hoped for. Voices were coming from the other side of the house, louder and louder, as the sounds of a mob approached the Vincents’ front gate. Peter could hear his mother’s voice above everyone else’s, shrill and bloodcurdling, screaming at the house to “give up these possessed children.” The chains on the gate rattled like metallic snakes and the throng hollered with her, banging their rifles and axes and sledgehammers against the iron bars and calling for vengeance. The shouting was so loud that Peter missed the screams now echoing out of the crematorium chimney.

Behind him, the water stirred again.

He whipped around and gripped the rifle with white knuckles, stepping backwards to the porch.

He was trapped on both sides now: a deadly assault in the backyard and a bloodthirsty mob in the front. There was no chance they would make it out alive anymore—the best they could do was go down fighting.

Peter stopped at the top of the veranda and stood there, waiting. He watched the bonfire continue to consume the tree, and his eyes followed the smoke as it coiled around the Yukon moon and evanesced among the stars.

The pond rippled again, and suddenly a forehead poked out of the water. Then two, then five, then ten.

Peter stared at the eyes from the patio and they stared back, glistening, looking straight into his soul. Nothing moved for a moment as the skulls bobbed there, black sockets planning to kill him, until finally he lifted the shotgun and let out a cry. The cry for his family—his father, his brother, his uncle—soared through the air and was followed by cold, screaming bullets as he started to shoot.

34

Battle of the Yukon

C
amilla’s screams were amplified in the hellish cylinder, spinning around and around, burrowing into her ear canals like sonic drill bits.

Her hands were still bound behind her back and there was less than an arm’s length of wiggle room on all four sides. But claustrophobia wasn’t the issue. She could handle tight spaces; what she
couldn’t
handle was the heat.

She saw the crematorium in her memory, picturing the jet of flame that shot down from the roof and consumed caskets like campfire kindling. The belly of the dragon was warming up fast, and even if it took forty-five minutes to reach its peak temperature of 1,800 degrees, she knew she would be dead long before then. At the rate it was rising, she had two minutes tops.

Her feet slammed harder on the oven door, but it didn’t budge. The temperature continued climbing.

Camilla looked up at the roof of the chamber. There was a nozzle aimed straight down, like a hot tub jet, which would spew the flames when the time came. Knowing her entire body would soon be nothing more than an 8-pound pile of ash was almost more terrifying than the thought of the accompanying
nonexistence.
Eight pounds. We leave the world the same weight we come into it
. She looked the cremator in the eye and cursed at how unforgiving it was. It would blast her with no remorse, offering no chance for forgiveness, and be done with her.
Of course
, she considered,
if God exists, He might do the same thing in the next minute or two, in which case this rising heat is a not-so-comforting hint of what could be in store
.

She forced herself to look away from the nozzle and laid her head on the cement shaft. It was as warm as a hot sidewalk in July. She couldn’t think. The stifling heat and the panic were too much.
This is how I’m going to die
.

She peered up and saw only blackness. Sweat shimmered on her forehead, down her cheeks, and above her upper lip while she choked on the warmth. As her eyes began to close, there was a little twinkle, and then everything went black.

Death hugged her in its torrid blanket, about to raise its veil over her mouth and suffocate her for good, when she frowned. Camilla looked up—blinking—and saw the little twinkle again, a dot high, high above her. Then there was another one beside it, and another.

Stars? If I can see stars, the exhaust shaft must be directly above me…

She leaned on her side with a new glimmer of hope set in her features. Her hands felt the frayed ends of the rope around her wrists and grinded back and forth until the final threads snapped and she slipped out of the cords. Another wave of hope shot through her system as she squeezed her arms in front of her body and reached into the chimney.

Hide and seek!
The memory rushed back.
This is how Peter escaped! He said he tied a rope up the shaft and climbed out before Lucas could find him
.

Looking up the shaft was like looking up from the bottom of a narrow well. A dozen variables were uncertain:
Am I skinny enough? Strong enough? Fast enough
? But one question counted more than any of the rest. If that one variable was missing, the others would never matter.