Insomnia (70 page)

‘
PICKERING
!
’the amplified voice bellowed, and Ralph found he could actually taste the words in his mouth, like small silver pellets. ‘
YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEAD, PICKERING! THROW DOWN YOUR WEAPON AND STEP OUT INTO THE YARD! LET US SAVE THE WOMEN
!
’

Ralph and Lois rounded the corner, unseen by the men running all around them, and came to a tangle of police cars parked at the place where the road became a driveway lined on both sides by pretty planter-boxes filled with bright flowers.

The woman’s touch that means so much,
Ralph thought.

The driveway opened into the dooryard of a rambling white farmhouse at least seventy years old. It was three storeys high, with two wings and a long porch which ran the length of the building and commanded a fabulous view toward the west, where dim blue mountains rose in the mid-morning light. This house with its peaceful view had once housed the Barrett family and their apple business and had more recently housed dozens of battered, frightened women, but one look was enough to tell Ralph that it would house no one at all come this time tomorrow morning. The south wing was in flames, and that side of the porch was catching; tongues of fire poked out the windows and licked lasciviously along the eaves, sending shingles floating upward in fiery scraps. He saw a wicker rocking chair burning at the far end of the porch. A half-knitted scarf lay over one of the rocker’s arms; the needles dangling from it glowed white-hot. Somewhere a wind-chime was tinkling a mad repetitive melody.

A dead woman in green fatigues and a flak-jacket sprawled head-down on the porch steps, glaring at the sky through the blood-smeared lenses of her glasses. There was dirt in her hair, a pistol in her hand, and a ragged black hole in her midsection. A man lay draped over the railing at the north end of the porch with one booted foot propped on the lawn-glider. He was also wearing fatigues and a flak-jacket. An assault-rifle with a banana clip sticking out of it lay in a flower-bed below him. Blood ran down his fingers and dripped from his nails. To Ralph’s heightened eye, the drops looked black and dead.

Felton,
he thought.
If the police are still yelling at Charlie Pickering – if Pickering’s inside – then that must be Frank Felton. And what about Susan Day? Ed’s down the coast somewhere – Lois seemed sure of that, and I think she’s right – but what if Susan Day’s in there? Jesus, is that possible?

He supposed it was, but the possibilities didn’t matter – not now. Helen and Natalie were almost certainly in there, along with God knew how many other helpless, terrorized women, and that
did
matter.

There was the sound of breaking glass from inside the house, followed by a soft explosion – almost a gasp. Ralph saw new flames jump up behind the panes of the front door.

Molotov cocktails,
he thought.
Charlie Pickering finally got a chance to throw a few. How wonderful for him.

Ralph didn’t know how many cops were crouched behind the cars parked at the head of the driveway – it looked like at least thirty – but he picked out the two who had busted Ed Deepneau at once. Chris Nell was crouched behind the front tire of the Derry police car closest to the house, and John Leydecker was down on one knee beside him. Nell was the one with the bullhorn, and as Ralph and Lois approached the police strongpoint, he glanced at Leydecker. Leydecker nodded, pointed at the house, then pushed his palms at Nell in a gesture Ralph read easily:
Be careful
. He read something more distressing in Chris Nell’s aura – the younger man was too excited to be careful. Too stoked. And at that instant, almost as if Ralph’s thought had caused it to happen, Nell’s aura began changing color. It cycled from pale blue to dark gray to dead black with gruesome speed.

‘
GIVE IT UP
,
PICKERING
!
’ Nell shouted, unaware that he was a dead man breathing.

The wire stock of an assault-rifle smashed through the glass of a window on the lower floor of the north wing, then disappeared back inside. At the same instant the fanlight over the front door exploded, showering the porch with glass. Flames roared out through the hole. A second later the door itself shuddered open, as if nudged by an invisible hand. Nell leaned out farther, perhaps believing the shooter had finally seen reason and intended to give himself up.

Ralph, screaming: [
‘Pull him back, Johnny!
PULL HIM BACK
!’
]

The rifle emerged again, barrel-first this time.

Leydecker reached for Nell’s collar, but he was too slow. The automatic rifle hacked its series of rapid dry coughs, and Ralph heard the metallic
pank! pank! pank!
of bullets poking holes in the thin steel of the police car. Chris Nell’s aura was totally black now – it had become a deathbag. He jerked sideways as a bullet caught him in the neck, breaking Leydecker’s grip on his collar and sprawling into the dooryard with one foot kicking spasmodically. The bullhorn spilled from his hand with a brief squawk of feedback. A policeman behind one of the other cars cried out in surprise and horror. Lois’s shriek was much louder.

More bullets stitched across the ground toward Nell and then slapped small black holes into the thighs of his blue uniform. Ralph could dimly see the man inside the deathbag which was suffocating him; he was making blind efforts to roll over and get up. There was something singularly horrible about his struggles – to Ralph it was like watching a creature caught in a net drown in shallow, filthy water.

Leydecker lunged out from behind the police car, and as his fingers disappeared into the black membrane surrounding Chris Nell, Ralph heard Old Dor say,
I wouldn’t touch him anymore if I were you, Ralph – I can’t see your hands
.

Lois: [
‘Don’t! Don’t, he’s dead, he’s already dead!’
]

The gun poking out of the window had started to move to the right. Now it swivelled unhurriedly back toward Leydecker, the man behind it undeterred – and apparently unhurt – by the hail of bullets directed at him from the other police. Ralph raised his right hand and brought it down in the karate-chop gesture again, but this time instead of a wedge of light, his fingertips produced something that looked like a large blue teardrop. It spread across Leydecker’s lemon-colored aura just as the rifle sticking out of the window opened fire. Ralph saw two slugs strike the tree just to Leydecker’s right, sending chips of bark flying into the air and making black holes in the fir’s yellowish-white undersurface. A third struck the blue covering which had coated Leydecker’s aura – Ralph saw a momentary flicker of dark red just to the left of the detective’s temple and heard a low whine as the bullet either richocheted or
skipped,
the way a flat stone will skip across the surface of a pond.

Leydecker pulled Nell back behind the car, looked at him, then tore open the driver’s-side door and threw himself into the front seat. Ralph could no longer see him, but could hear him screaming at someone over the radio, asking where the fuck the rescue vehicles were.

More shattering glass, and Lois was grabbing frantically at Ralph’s arm, pointing at something – at a brick tumbling end over end into the dooryard. It had come through one of the low, narrow windows at the base of the north wing. These windows were almost obscured by the flower-beds which edged the house.

‘
Help us!
’ a voice screamed through the broken window, even as the man with the assault-rifle fired reflexively at the tumbling brick, sending up puffs of reddish dust and then breaking it into three jagged chunks. Neither Ralph nor Lois had ever heard that voice raised in a scream, but both recognized it at once, nevertheless; it was Helen Deepneau’s voice. ‘
Help us, please! We’re in the cellar! We have children! Please don’t let us burn to death,
WE HAVE CHILDREN
!
’

Ralph and Lois exchanged a single wide-eyed glance, then ran for the house.

Two uniformed figures, looking more like pro football linemen than cops in their bulky Kevlar vests, charged from behind one of the cruisers, running flat-out for the porch with their riot guns held at port arms. As they crossed the dooryard on a diagonal, Charlie Pickering leaned out of his window, still laughing wildly, his gray hair zanier than ever. The volume of fire directed at him was enormous, showering him with splinters from the sides of the window and actually knocking down the rusty gutter above his head – it struck the porch with a hollow
bonk
– but not a single bullet touched him.

How can they not be hitting him?
Ralph thought as he and Lois mounted the porch toward the lime-colored flames which were now billowing through the open front door.
Christ Jesus, it’s almost point-blank range, how can they possibly not be hitting him?

But he knew how . . . and why. Clotho had told them that both Atropos and Ed Deepneau had been surrounded by forces which were malignant yet protective. Was it not likely that those same forces were now taking care of Charlie Pickering, much as Ralph himself had taken care of Leydecker when he’d left the protection of the police car to drag his dying colleague back to cover?

Pickering opened up on the charging State Troopers, his weapon switched to rapid-fire. He aimed low to negate the value of the vests they were wearing and swept their legs out from under them. One of them fell in a silent heap; the other crawled back the way he had come, shrieking that he was hit, he was hit, oh fuck, he was hit bad.

‘
Barbecue
!’ Pickering cried out the window in his screaming, laughing voice. ‘
Barbecue! Barbecue! Holy cookout! Burn the bitches! God’s fire! God’s holy fire!
’

There were more screams now, seemingly from right under Ralph’s feet, and when he looked down he saw a terrible thing: a medley of auras was seeping up from between the porch boards like steam, the variety of their colors muted by the scarlet blood-glow which was rising with them . . . and surrounding them. This blood-red shape wasn’t quite the same as the thunderhead which had formed above the fight between Green Boy and Orange Boy outside the Red Apple, but Ralph thought it was closely related; the only difference was that this one had been born of fear instead of anger and aggression.

‘
Barbecue!
’ Charlie Pickering was screaming, and then something about killing the devil-cunts. Suddenly Ralph hated him more than he had ever hated anyone in his life.

[
‘Come on, Lois – let’s go get that asshole.’
]

He took her by the hand and pulled her into the burning house.

The porch door opened on a central hallway that ran from the front of the house to the back, and the whole length of it was now engulfed in flames. To Ralph’s eyes they were a bright green, and when he and Lois passed through them, they were cool – it was like passing through gauzy membranes which had been infused with Mentholatum. The crackle of the burning house was muffled; the gunfire had become as faint and unimportant as the sound of thunder to someone who is swimming underwater . . . and that was what this felt like more than anything, Ralph decided – being underwater. He and Lois were unseen beings swimming through a river of fire.

He pointed to a doorway on the right and looked questioningly at Lois. She nodded. He reached for the knob and grimaced with disgust as his fingers passed right through it. Just as well, of course; if he had actually been able to grab the damned thing, he would have left the top two layers of his fingers hanging off the brass knob in charbroiled strips.

[
‘We have to go through it, Ralph!’
]

He looked at her assessingly, saw a great deal of fear and worry in her eyes but no panic, and nodded. They went through the door together just as the chandelier halfway down the hall fell to the floor with an unmusical crash of glass pendants and iron chain.

There was a parlor on the other side, and what they saw there made Ralph’s stomach clench in horror. Two women were propped against the wall below a large poster of Susan Day in jeans and a Western-style shirt (
DON
’
T LET HIM CALL YOU BABY UNLESS YOU WANT HIM TO TREAT YOU LIKE ONE
, the poster advised). Both had been shot in the head at point-blank range; brains, ragged flaps of scalp, and bits of bone were splattered across the flowered wallpaper and Susan Day’s fancy-stitched cowgirl boots. One of the women had been pregnant. The other had been Gretchen Tillbury.

Ralph remembered the day she had come to his home with Helen to warn him and to give him a can of something called Bodyguard; on that day he had thought her beautiful . . . but of course on that day her finely made head had still been intact and half of her pretty blonde hair hadn’t been roasted off by a close-range rifle-blast. Fifteen years after she had narrowly escaped being killed by her abusive husband, another man had put a gun to Gretchen Tillbury’s head and blown her right out of the world. She would never tell another woman about how she had gotten the scar on her left thigh.

For one horrible moment Ralph thought he was going to faint. He concentrated and pulled himself back by thinking of Lois. Her aura had gone a dark, shocked red. Jagged black lines raced across it and through it. They looked like the EKG readout of someone suffering a fatal heart attack.

[
‘Oh Ralph! Oh Ralph, dear God!’
]

Something exploded at the south end of the house with force enough to blow open the door they had just walked through. Ralph guessed it might have been a propane tank or tanks . . . not that it mattered much at this point. Flaming scraps of wallpaper came wafting in from the hall, and he saw both the room’s curtains and the remaining hair on Gretchen Tillbury’s head ripple toward the doorway as the fire sucked the air out of the room to feed itself. How long would it take for the fire to turn the women and children down cellar into crispy critters? Ralph didn’t know, and suspected that didn’t matter much, either; the people trapped down there would be dead of suffocation or smoke inhalation long before they began to burn.