The Covenant (36 page)

“It doesn't make sense. A rock is a weapon of opportunity. Heat of the moment.”

“Not if it's your weapon of choice. The one weapon you know you can kill somebody with.”

“But there's two rocks,” Lorio said. “Why take two rocks to bash somebody over the head?”

“In case the first one misses.”

He didn't get it, and I never got a chance to explain it to him.

Neither one of us spotted Nathan coming across the levee. Lorio's back was to him and I was too busy congratulating myself on the brilliance of my deduction. By the time I saw Nathan, he was already lifting the shotgun to his shoulder. I tried to shove Lorio to the side, but he was a heavy guy, mostly muscle, and I just bounced off him. He took most of the charge in his back while I tumbled helplessly down the levee, like a doll thrown out of a car window.

I ended up on my feet at the bottom just as Nathan was swinging the gun toward me. A flash of lightning lit me up bright as day as he let loose. The elevation, or the darkness, or the sudden light, or maybe Divine Providence threw him off, because all I received was a single pellet in my left cheek.

One was more than enough. I lit out for the trees. Nathan chambered another round and blasted at me. I felt a swarm of wasps sting my backside but none of them broke skin—I was already too far away, running serpentine through the tall grass.

I had lost a shoe by the time I entered the woods, but I kept running. Sticks and stumps murdered my bare foot and wild rose vines snatched and jerked at my skin and hair and ripped my legs like whiplashes, but I kept running. I heard Nathan crashing through the woods behind me. He knew this place better than I did. He'd grown up here. I was blind in the dark. I couldn't even see the trees I was blundering into, but I kept running.

Then I remembered Lorio's flashlight. By some miracle, it was still in my hand. I clicked it on and found myself standing in a gully in the woods with trees arching completely overhead, like the roof of a church. Part of the roof had been broken through and my car hung through the hole, its tires wrapped in vines, headlights smashed, windows empty with broken glass, like small piles of diamonds, lying beneath the wheels.

My face felt swollen to twice its normal size. I touched my cheek and held my bloody fingers up to the light. The collar of my shirt was dark with blood. I heard a crunch of gravel and dove to the side but the blast hit me in the legs and spun me in the air, flinging the flashlight spinning, its beam slicing through the woods until it hit a tree and the bulb shattered into darkness. I lay on the ground beneath my car amid the broken window glass and saw a violent orange flower erupt from the barrel of the gun and light up Nathan's face.

Then I was running again, through the pain and the darkness, without even a moon to steer by, just the occasional whip of buckshot to guide and goad, until I tripped and fetched up headfirst against the trunk of a bald cypress as black and hard as the gates of hell. I rolled over and the woods were no longer dark. They were flashing with lights that illuminated nothing, ghost lights moving in and out of the ghosts of trees. I lay in a shallow muddy pool at the bottom of a crown of cypress knees, while Nathan roamed the witch fields behind me, bellowing like a castrated bull, the
blast
of his shotgun cutting through the underbrush like a million angry bees.

I closed my eyes and lay rabbit-still, hoping he would miss me in the dark, maybe give up, go home, wash the blood off his hands and pretend it never happened. I knew better but in my pain I preferred the safe fantasy this notch afforded, this moment of rest with the muddy cold against the blistering stings of buckshot peppering my legs. I knew Nathan couldn't give me up now. If he couldn't find me here, he'd look for me at Jenny's. I couldn't call her because my phone had burned up in the fire. Before long I realized something was sharing my mud pool. It felt like a snake trying to crawl up my leg, but I didn't move. If I moved, he'd find me. He was still out there, somewhere close by, stuffing fresh shells into his shotgun.

I wondered how I was still alive. He'd hit me twice, once from close range, but I knew from the intensity of the pain that he hadn't done much damage. I tried to brush the snake off my leg and felt a hard lump of buckshot with my fingers, just below the skin behind my knee. I was lucky he didn't blow my leg clean off.

Then I wondered
if
I was still alive. I opened my eyes and couldn't tell if my eyes were open at all. The ghost lights were gone, the woods dark again, dark and lovely deep and miles to go before I sleep. I reached out my hand and groped blindly for the tree under which I lay and instead my fingers closed around a cool, strong hand.

“Get up, Jackie,” a familiar voice whispered. His fingers tightened around mine and he pulled me to my feet. He guided me past trees I couldn't see but could feel with my outstretched hand, then past trees I thought I could see, dark vertical stripes against the greater darkness, and then there was the moon shining down through the branches well enough to see by, and at last the silver of the lake in the woods spreading out before me. He turned at the shore.

I stepped into the circle of his arms and nestled my cheek against his chest. I thought about Holly and how as a child she had run from the fire and hidden in these woods, maybe even by this same lake. “How did you escape the fire?” I said into his chest. “I waited for you. Where have you been?”

I felt him stiffen. “I didn't escape…” But it wasn't Deacon's voice that spoke. It was deeper voice, with a drawl slow and thick as cold molasses, uneducated but not ignorant. He felt thinner and taller, the muscles of his arms leaner, harder, strong enough to lift an eight-pound maul with just one hand and split a stick of green sweetgum with a single stroke.

“… that far,” he finished.

I pushed him away.

He leaned over me, tall, taller even than Deacon, black and featureless and two-dimensional, like a silhouette. “Roof sent me.”

“You saved me from the fire.”

“Yessum.”

“You stole my car.”

“Yessum.”

“Why?”

“Roof sent me,” he repeated, but his voice had grown distant, not in space but in time. A memory of a voice. A memory of hands on my body, of flesh against flesh and the memory of a moment of purity that consumed its fuel in one incandescent flash and was gone. Not even my memory. His memory and Ruth's memory.

I saw him move across the water with the trees limned like clouds in the moonlight behind him. Then he was no longer there. He didn't disappear. He was just gone, as though he had never been.

But Nathan was still out there.

 

50

I
COULDN'T WALK ON
water. I was still too tied to the world to let go entirely. So I swam, gliding out quietly on my back so I could watch the shore behind me. The water was arctic-cold. A summer of unseasonable heat had done nothing to warm it. My muscles stiffened around my bones and threatened to cramp from exhaustion, but the lake wasn't deeper than my shoulders at its deepest point.

Nathan appeared under the trees. I stopped and felt the sandy bottom under my feet, sank down until the water was just under my nose, then submerged as he lifted the shotgun to his shoulder. The report was like distant thunder heard under the covers. Pellets sleeted across the water above my head like a handful of gravel thrown by a sissy.

I kicked off and glided along the moon-striped bottom, a curious, nightmarish feeling of heavy flight through water clear as air or air thick as water, while load after impotent load of steel buckshot pocketed the surface and sank bubbling around me. I swam until it was too shallow to swim, then stood up and climbed out onto the bank, hidden by the shadow of the trees.

I lay in the leaves looking up at the dim stars, listening to Nathan thrash through the woods rather than make that swim. What had sounded before like incoherent roars of rage I now recognized as screams of frustration. “Go away! Leave me alone!” Every time he spoke, a ripple of taunting childish laughter spread through the woods.
Wire, briar, limber, lock.
He fired his shotgun into the darkened woods, but they continued to sing.
Three old geese in a flock. One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

It would take him a while to circumnavigate the lake, time I badly needed to rest and ease my legs. I'd never felt so tired in my life. I shivered uncontrollably, my breath painfully cold in my nose, heart kicking like a mule so that my pulse shook the leaves. The cold spring water helped slow the flow of blood from my wounds. Slow, but not stop entirely. Even an idiot like Nathan could follow my trail, and in these woods he was no idiot.

I had to go on. I followed the bed of the dry creek, leading him away from the lake. I passed the stone where the slaves used to wash Marse Stirling's linens. My sopping clothes dripped where their sweat had fallen, my blood spattered the gravel where they had walked. I couldn't go home. Nathan would have to kill Jenny, too. He couldn't take any chances now. I'd have to stop him, or at the very least keep him busy until help arrived. If help arrived. I hoped someone would hear the shots and call the police, but out here in East Bumfuck, a few shots even in the dark of night might not rouse any interest.

I hoped Doris Dye was wearing her hearing aids.

I crossed under the log footbridge and continued down the creek another twenty yards, then climbed up the steep bank and doubled back. I crouched down at the end of the log among blackberry brambles and waited. I didn't think about dying. I was past dying. I just wanted one shot at him, the shot I was owed.

Nathan moved tactical-fashion up the creek bed, his Benelli M1014 combat 12-gauge in a constant state of readiness, the flashlight mounted under the barrel scanning every bush and twig. He'd spent some of his considerable money on some kind of urban-warfare course, probably in preparation for the race war he and his ilk asked Santa for Christmas every year. He was dressed in full camo with a black ski mask and black gloves, black combat boots crunching the gravel. Enough buckshot slung on his bandolier to fight a small war in a third-world country. It must have been hot as Texas Dick's balls in that ski mask, but it probably kept the mosquitoes from sucking him dry.

He stopped just below the bridge and pointed the beam of his flash down at a splatter of my blood decorating a rock beside his boot. “Cunt,” he whispered, switched instantly back to ready position. “Got that cunt. Got her,” he reassured himself nervously. He was so scared he could barely move, but one sound out of me and he'd swap my face for a fistful of steel. I was close enough to piss on his head, too close for him to miss this time.

A girl's voice said behind him, “What are you thinking about?” He spun and I jumped. He must have heard the crack of wood as my weight left the log because he dropped the gun to his hip and let off a charge that smashed the log to splinters.

My knee snapped his collarbone as I rode him to the ground. He broke my fall nicely, soft as a pile of mattresses, but God must have been looking out for him because I'd been aiming to break his neck. I snatched his gun away and caved in his face with the butt. “Hello, sport,” I said as I staggered to my feet. “How's it feel?”

“I'm sorry,” he said through bloody teeth. “I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry?”

“I'm so sorry.”

The wail of sirens sounded through the trees and I heard the distant
thump-thump-thump
of an approaching helicopter. Sorry bastards, just when I didn't need their help. Now, I only had a couple of minutes to work. “You think you can say you're sorry and everything will be OK? Did you kill Sam?”

He dragged the ski mask off his head, screaming in agony as the splintered ends of his collarbone ground together. “I didn't! I swear, I never killed anybody in my life.”

“Until now.” His lips looked like hamburger, but his nose was still as straight as a catalogue model's. I bent it for him. He fell back in the gravel with a groan, his eyes rolling in his head. “Pal, you just killed a cop. I could dust you right here and Sheriff Stegall would shake my hand. Senator Mickelson himself would pin a medal to my tit.”

“Please don't kill me,” he sobbed. “I'm so sorry.” He lay on his back, hands waving weakly in front of his face, waiting for the next blow.

I kicked his arms out of the way and ground my bare foot into his broken collarbone. When he screamed, I shoved the barrel past his last good tooth and said, “Suck on this.” I pulled the trigger but the action was fouled with sand. I squeezed with everything I had left, but it wouldn't budge.

I flung the gun away. A spotlight hit the lake from above and began a grid-pattern search up the creek toward us, the bright beam shining weirdly through the trees. The wash from the chopper blades began to swirl up dust and leaves. Nathan blinked up at it, his mouth a gaping bloody hole in his face.

I said, “God's looking out for you, sport. A good-looking short-eyes like you, they'll love your cherry ass down on the farm. You'll be their favorite.”

“Thank you,” he wept. He grabbed my ankle and tried to kiss it. You'd have thought I just saved his life.

 

51

J
ENNY PICKED ME UP AT THE
hospital. I didn't have insurance so they didn't give me a room, just picked the buckshot out of my ass and stitched up the holes that would give my butt that desirable cellulite look despite my heroin junkie body, and pushed me out the emergency room door.

As we pulled into the driveway, she noted with a sharp, disgusted suck of her teeth the promiscuous ruin of her stately home. “God, look at this place.” The hedges surrounding the property had grown huge and shaggy over the summer, some of the ancient pecan trees were entirely barren of leaves, the flowerbeds hip-deep in weeds.