Crusade (Eden Book 2) (11 page)

He was stretched out on a king sized bed in one of the upstairs bedrooms, his booted feet on the mattress. His head and shoulders were propped up on a pile of pillows and he had his portable DVD player on his lap.

Well, I’ve always thought the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner
, Hud Bannon was telling his father and a group of other men out on the Texas range.
Sometimes I lean one way and sometimes I lean the other
.

Gwen sat down on the bed next to Mickey and propped her M16A4 against the mattress near her. She unlaced her boots enough to pull one then the other off her feet. The room was dark, lit only by the glow from the DVD player’s screen. Mickey didn’t get up but scooted over, giving her some room. He had his assault shotgun on the comforter next to him and it rested between them. Gwen climbed under the covers, turned on her side, and rested her head on one of her hands.

“
Hud
.”

The windows were closed and boarded over but were doing a poor job of keeping the cold out. Still, it was better than spending the night outside in the snow.

“Forrest was like me. He didn’t have a favorite movie. I mean, how do you pick one movie, right? Or one
anything
for that matter?”

“Well, what kind of movies did he like?”

“Forrest liked westerns.”

Mickey watched the movie and Gwen watched him. She thought of her husband Bobby, murdered down in a basement by Julie’s boyfriend only several months ago. She felt no anger towards Julie. Harris had deceived her. He had deceived them all.

After some time Homer Bannon remarked that
It don’t take long to kill things, not like it takes to grow
.

Mickey looked over at Gwen. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing calmly, asleep. He curled his toes in his boots and returned to his movie.

You know something Fantan?
shouted Paul Newman.
This world is so full of crap, a man’s gonna get it sooner or later whether he’s careful or not
.

The credits rolled and he turned off the movie then the DVD player. The room was pitch-black. He laid the portable player on the bed next to him, well away from the edge of the mattress. He rested there with his head and shoulders propped up and thought about his child, taken from him, of Julie and the baby within her, of Bear and Buddy. He listened to Gwen breathing next to him and sometime later he fell asleep.

Buddy unzipped his sleeping bag and spread it out on the living room floor. His head rested on one of his saddle bags. He looked up into the dark where the ceiling was. Bear was somewhere in the room with him, but he could neither see nor hear him. The dead family was there too, seated in their chairs next to one another, together until the end.

He grew restless listening to nothing and turned over on one elbow, unbuckling a saddle bag then rummaging about inside. Buddy found his mini-mag and switched it on, shining it inside the saddle bag. Boxes of ammunition for his weapons, his bayonet, his meds. He picked up an amber vial and looked at the label. Sesaquel. He shook it and there was a rattle. A few tabs left in the vial.

The Resperdol vial was empty. Two tabs left in the Zyprexal. The Thorazine. God, he
hated
taking the Thorazine. It knocked him on his ass. More vials, most empty, the others almost empty.
Shit
.

Buddy shut his flashlight off, lay back down, and stared towards the ceiling, his hands folded on his chest over the mini-mag. Mickey and Gwen and Julie were up on the second floor. Down in the basement there was probably something that had once been human and named Ted. Here in the dark was a dead family and a one-time bad man who went by the name Bear, with another bad man who went by the name Buddy.

Truth was, Buddy admitted to himself, he was scared.

Something was happening to him. Something he couldn’t control and he couldn’t understand. It had happened to him before, but not in a long time, and he had sworn to himself it never would again, but…he was scared, scared in a way he hadn’t been scared in a long, long time.

Creak

Buddy.

He recognized the voice and froze where he lay. He opened his mouth but nothing would come out of it.
Bear
, he had to wake Bear. His mouth was dry and his breath came to him in short, ragged gasps.

The thing in the dark was walking somewhere down here with them.

Hey boy, thought much about me lately
?

It was in the room with them. Buddy tried to move, to roll over for his 9mm, but he was paralyzed.

Creak-creak-creak

It was nearly upon him. He closed his eyes, hyperventilating, and tried to extricate himself mentally from the situation, thinking of Henry and Monique and their smiling little faces, frozen in time. That freed him up enough so his trembling hand could turn the mini-mag around on his chest as his—

It’s lonely here, jig, why don’t you—

—thumb flicked the switch on, the beam illuminating the room. The corpses were in their seated positions, the room otherwise empty, no nightmare creature skulking through the shadows.

The hand was enormous and it splayed itself on his chest and held him in position. His immediate instinct was to fight but he was pinned to the floor. When he went to scream in fear and anguish he found a second giant hand clasped over his mouth and he realized—

“Buddy,
shhhhh
. Buddy, be quiet. Calm down now.”

Bear
. Bear, oh god. He relaxed immediately. It was Bear stooping over him, holding him down, Bear’s mighty hand across his mouth, stifling his cries.

They made eye contact and Bear saw the recognition in his eyes.

“I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now. But you can’t scream. You can’t wake up the others, okay?”

Buddy nodded mutely and Bear took his hand off the man’s mouth. He gasped and gulped down breaths of air and Bear waited until he could speak.

He took his hand off Buddy’s chest and sat down, his back against one of the chairs in which a corpse was positioned. Bear took the flashlight from him but did not turn it off, aiming it instead at his own face.

“It’s only me, got it?”

Buddy sweat profusely but was immensely relieved. Bear’s face, he thought, flush with the garish light, one eye unseeing, big head bald, was the most beautiful and most terrifying thing he had ever seen.

“Got it, got it.” He rolled over onto his side then sat up, across from Bear, who directed the flashlight beam at the space between them.

“Buddy,” he asked after some time. “What’s wrong with you?”

He didn’t know what to say or where to begin.

“Bear, what happened to Harris?
Exactly
I mean.”

Bear nodded but he could not see him.

“Harris got bit. None of us knew.”

“
You
didn’t know? Julie didn’t know?” His voice wasn’t accusing, it was asking.

“None of us knew. That afternoon we’re outside watching a volleyball game or whatever, and after awhile I kind of notice Harris isn’t around, and then we heard a gunshot.

“I was the first one down in the basement, after Julie—what she had to see, what she saw—Harris had it in his head that Thompson was responsible, I guess. He had Thompson staked to one of those poles Markowski had down in his basement. He’d chained himself to the other. Shot himself through the chest, bled out quick, came back.”

“When I was Inside—when I was in prison—they kept me correct. I mean with the meds situation and all. But out here…I’m losing it, man.”

Bear had had his eye on Buddy for some time. When Buddy came back to Eden to find his best friend dead, and his best friend’s woman pregnant, many who knew Buddy had been relieved, thinking him dead and gone all those months. But Bear had detected something was up pretty early on. He’d worked in the health care field way back when, enough to recognize the signs of mental illness, even if he didn’t possess the medical terminology to label what he saw.

“I hear voices,” continued Buddy. “I hear Harris. I hear…I hear voices. They tell me to, to do things. They aren’t really there, are they?”

Buddy shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, I thought—I think—we fought. He fought hard. I killed him. I
think
. But, I don’t know. I keep seeing myself sawing his head off in the dark, not even giving him a…a chance. I don’t know which is the real version anymore.”

“
I do
.”

“I would
never
hurt Julie, or the baby, I mean, they’re my…they’re the only reason—”

“I know you would never purposefully harm Julie. But you need to know, if you ever try and harm that woman or child, I’ll end you.”