Dead Run (16 page)

Sharon looked left down the aisle lined with stanchions. Sloppy, wet piles of manure deteriorated into brown dots, heading for the door at the far end of the barn, a bovine dotted line. "That's where the cows are. There's probably a huge pasture behind the barn."

"Maybe we can get out that way," Annie whispered. "Through the fields with the cows."

The cold glow of moonlight made white vertical stripes out of the cracks in the siding as they walked tentatively past the medieval-looking stanchions. The door at the end was a double-Dutch affair, each half latched with a simple hook and eye. As Annie and Sharon crowded in on either side of her, Grace popped the top one and pushed the door open.

The women stared out at a large, empty paddock with a sturdy three-rail fence. The dirt was ice-rink smooth and totally barren. "Shit. No cows," Annie whispered.

"No shit, either." Sharon's eyes coursed over the strangely pristine surface.

Grace was leaning over the bottom half of the door, squinting into the distance. Moonlight laced the top rail of the fence at the far end, except for a broad gap of darkness directly across from them. "It looks like there's an open gate down there. Probably pasture beyond that. Are you ready?"

Annie looked to the left and right of the paddock, at the grass on either side of the rectangle of smooth dirt. Tall, but not tall enough to hide a man standing upright, or even hunched over. "Looks okay."

But Sharon felt her stomach caving in as she stared out at nothing, her expression bleak. This was wrong. Just like the lack of a yard

light and the absence of vehicles. No way cows didn't leave hoof-prints.

Grace glanced at her, then touched her arm. Sharon blinked, then her head jerked once in a reluctant nod.

Grace unlatched the bottom half of the door and pushed it open, and they all stepped down nearly a foot onto soil so hard-packed it felt like cement. "What's that?" she whispered.

Sharon followed her gaze to the far end of the paddock. Something big. And . . , green? She squinted at the shape hulking in the opening in the paddock fence, trying to bring it into focus. "Tractor. One of the big ones. A John Deere."

Annie frowned, took a few tentative steps forward, then stretched her head forward on her neck like a turtle. The huge shape was just beyond the back fence line, cold light glinting off dirty green metal. She took another step forward, then another.

Mother may I? Mother may I take two giant steps?They'd always played "Mother May I?" on the playground at recess-how old had she been then? Eight? Nine?-and no one would ever let roly-poly Annie take a giant step, because nobody wanted the fat girl on their side, as if fat were a disease you could catch by standing too close. Well, she could take goddamned giant steps now, she thought, stretching her right leg out in a long stride, grunting softly when her foot sank promptly in soil so soft, it seemed to suck at her shoe. She made a tiny cry, pinwheeling her arms to keep her balance as she brought her left foot forward. It sank, too, down over the laces of the purple high-tops, past her ankle, halfway up her calf, and then suddenly she was flat on her face with her arms stretched, her nose and mouth jammed into dirt that tasted of manure, her chest aching from the impact.

She raised her head, sputtering, spitting, furious with herself at the momentary loss of grace that made her trip over dirt. She tried to bring a knee under her, it sank, and she almost panicked. The stuff was like quicksand. Oh, Lord, maybe it was like one of those sink-holes that kept sucking up houses in Florida, and maybe that's what happened to the cows, and maybe that's what was going to happen to her.

She floundered halfheartedly, afraid to move, afraid not to, tugging at the foot that had somehow gotten jammed into the hole it had made. When she tried to brace herself, her arms sank to her elbows, but by then Grace and Sharon were on either side, grabbing her upper arms, pulling her back up onto her haunches.

"Damnit," she panted, brushing the dirt from her chest and arms. Grace was looking down to where her own feet had sunk into the earth. "Whatis this?"

"They must have just plowed it up."

Annie was using her hand like a trowel to move the dirt away from her trapped foot.

Grace looked out at the undisturbed surface beyond them, so smooth it looked as if it had been ironed. She started to say that it didn't look plowed, but then Annie made a funny sound and she looked down. "What?"

Annie was just sitting there in the dirt, staring straight ahead. Grace followed her gaze but saw nothing."What, Annie?"

Still, she didn't say anything. It didn't look like she was even breathing.

Grace fell to her knees and peered into Annie's face, her whisper tense. "Whatis it?"

Annie's eyes shifted a fraction to look at Grace, then dropped to look at what her hand had grabbed instead of soft, mucky earth. She felt a little pop inside her head, as if something tiny and fragile had just been disconnected.

Her fingers were wrapped around a smooth, plump human forearm, half buried in the dirt. It was a strange, grayish color, and tiny grains of soil were caught in the downy hairs along its length.

Annie knew those barely audible, high-pitched sounds were coming from her throat, and then as Grace and Sharon bent to examine

what she'd seen, she heard other sounds join in with the ones she was making. They were all tiny sounds, as if she were standing on the shore, listening to someone drowning far, far out in the ocean.

Sharon pressed the fingers of both hands so hard over her mouth that the skin around them seemed to glow white.

Grace was staring down at the arm, not blinking, not moving, the only one of the three not making a sound. Very, very slowly, she lifted her eyes and gazed down the full length of the paddock, and it seemed to go on forever.

The sounds coming from Annie's throat began to form the words of a frantic chant: "I have to go, I have to go, I have to go . . ." And suddenly she was scrambling in the loose soil like a panicked crab, the purple high-tops digging long, shallow trenches as she struggled. "Come on, come on." Her voice came out tiny and staccato, like a little girl screaming in a whisper as she shot to her feet and began to stumble-run headlong down the center of the paddock.

Behind her, Grace and Sharon saw her feet unearth another tubular shape of grayish, ghostly white, but this one was broad and muscular and sprinkled with dark, coarse hair, and it wasn't the mate to the first, it didn't belong, it wasn't a matched set. God, how many?They're here. They're all here. Welcome to Four Corners.

They both cried out at the same time to stop Annie, but Annie couldn't hear them anymore.

Dirt sprayed from the holes that her tennis shoes punched in the ground, like tiny volcanic eruptions marking her passage. Sometimes she could take as many as three strides without falling, then suddenly she would sink almost to the knee in an air pocket, her foot sliding against spongy lumps that shouldn't have been there. She tripped again and again, caught herself with her hands, touched things she wouldn't look at, and pushed herself up to plunge forward again. Finally, near the end of the paddock, she fell hard. She felt the searing pain of lungs emptied of air and simply lay there with her right cheek pressed to the dirt, trying to gasp.

If I move my arms and legs, I can make an angel in the dirt. It would have a head, a long skirt, wings, and very big boobs. That's why you never make angels in the snow on your stomach, because then they would show body parts that angels aren't supposed to have.

Then she heard Grace and Sharon floundering toward her from the back. She heard the tiny gasps and cries that meant they'd seen something, felt something, stepped on something.. . .

She lifted her head and gazed at the great concave blade that faced her from just a few feet away. Clods of earth stuck to its shadowy surface, and behind and above that, the cab of the enormous tractor gleamed in the moonlight.

Sharon and Grace collapsed to their knees on either side of her until she sat up and looked at them both.

Her lungs tugged at the sodden air while she wiped her face with the heel of her hand, leaving a ragged white streak in the grime. "They buried them with that," she said, pointing at the tractor that seemed to crouch like some great beast waiting to spring on unsuspecting prey.

Grace was sucking in deep breaths. She felt strangely light, like a helium-filled balloon in the slippery grasp of a child's hand. She looked over her shoulder at the pockmarks behind them and shuddered at the tactile memory of softness that wasn't soil.

Annie was sitting there, staring back in the direction of the barn, at the holes and furrows that opened up into the land of the dead. Her eyes drifted a yard to the right, where the last ghostly shape lay exposed. She felt empty now, numb, staring at a little jeans-clad leg, trying to make her mind connect it to a body she knew had to be a child. Very close to it, a long, silky, brown-and-black ear lay on top of a soil clod like a disconnected thing she couldn't make sense of.

After what might have been a few seconds or ten or twenty, she took a deep breath and moved on her hands and knees. Two paces. Two little, soft, round knee holes in the dirt, and she was there. She sat back on her heels and looked down, and with a trembling hand, she reached out like a child trying to make herself touch a snake for the first time.It's not slimy, it's dry, really, and the moment her fingertips brushed against the little leg, she started to cry.

In all the years she had known her, Grace had never seen Annie cry, and this, more than anything that had happened this day, scared her to death.

The leg was cold.This was a person, Annie kept telling herself.Thiswas a person. This isn't a horror movie, and this isn't a monster or a ghost, just the empty body of the little person it used to be. And it isn't scary at all. It's just very, very sad.

Sharon was kneeling right next to her, hands away from her mouthand covering her eyes now.See no evil, see no evil; hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women. . . . Where are you, Mary? Where were you when all these people died? Did you watch from some heavenly perch with your plump little hands folded in front of your flowing blue gown, and did that Mona Lisa smile falter just a little when they shoveled dirt on top of the bodies, and how about when my own mother stuck a gun in her mouth? WHERE WERE YOU THEN?

She was vaguely aware of Grace murmuring to Annie in the background, a whispery, soothing drone of comfort that rang horribly false, seemed almost as evil as what had happened here.Quiet, Annie, hush. It's going to be all right. ., a nd that was such a dreadful lie. She took her hands away from her eyes and gazed dully past the corner of the barn toward the farmhouse, couldn't see very well anymore because her vision was blurred. When she blinked, water fell from her eyes onto the front of her little filthy FBI suit, and now it looked like one of the farmhouse windows was winking at her. She blinked again, her head tipped curiously. The window winked again, and then the window next to it winked, flashing a circle of light like the pupil of a large eye reflecting the sun.

Suddenly, her fuzzy thoughts sharpened and splintered away from one another. She jerked her eyes left, looked past the corner of the barn down the long drive, and breathed, "Oh my God."

Grace and Annie grunted when Sharon crashed into them, her hands clutching and pulling, her feet digging trenches into the soil around them. "Quick, quick," she hissed frantically. "Headlights, cars coming down the driveway, hurry, hurry. . . ."

. . , and then they were all scrambling in the loose soil, hitting the solid ground outside the paddock fence and into the tall grass on the other side.

Sharon was flying, number-one hunchback in a party of three, racing away from the barn and the paddock, past the dirty, green tractor at the end, over the lip of a hill, and onto a downward slope. She could hear Grace and Annie close behind her, their breath like thunder. Ahead of them, the moonlit tops of tall grass marched down a hill to mingle at the bottom with the oblong heads of cattails.

"Down!" someone hissed, just as headlights pierced the gloom above their heads like fingers of light jabbing into the dark sky. They all crashed to their bellies in the grass, facing the crest of the shallow hill, their nostrils flaring at the ripe smell of a midwestern lake in midsummer.

The still night air carried the sound of jeep doors creaking open up near the barn, then slamming shut.

"Jesus Christ," a man said aloud after a moment, his voice even closer than the sound of the jeep's doors. "Look at this shit. Looks like someone tried to dig them all up."

The women flattened themselves even farther into the long grass, pressing their faces close to the fragrant earth beneath.

"Get on the radio," the voice said to someone else. "Get the Colonel out here, fast."

With her left cheek smashed into the bent stalks of grass, Grace stared at Sharon and Annie on her right, staring back at her.They'll come now. They'll all come.

Her arms were stretched out in front of her, her left hand cradling the right. She continued to stare into Sharon's eyes as her right thumb moved up the Sig's grip to the safety and flicked it off.

WITHIN TEN MINUTES of the harried radio call announcing the mess in the paddock, the disturbed mass grave was striped with the yellow beams of headlights. Haifa dozen jeeps nosed up to the paddock's fence, engines murmuring as their drivers stared solemnly at the things their headlights illuminated in the disturbed soil.

Like hunting dogs coursing for a scent, a dozen men spread out over the farmyard and surrounding land. They used flashlights indiscriminately, and the small noises of their movements carried clearly in the still night air.

From just inside the paddock fence, Colonel Hemmer glanced up at the five-man squad approaching the fence, ammo pouches and canteens clattering softly against their pistol belts. He squinted against the glare of the headlights, his grizzled face reflecting an unearthly glow beneath the black shadow of his field cap. "Anything, soldier?"