The Town (50 page)

 

The cells were full. The sheriff tried once again to radio the Rio Verde sheriff’s station to ask if they had any open cells where prisoners could be transferred, but, as before, he was unable to get through.

He tried Willcox, tried Safford, tried Benson.

No answer.

Roland slammed down the mike on the radio set, frustrated. Tish, holding down the front desk by herself, looked over at him, worried, and he forced himself to smile reassuringly at her.

“Still no answer?”

He shook his head. “I’ll try again in a few minutes.” He started to walk back to his office but noticed something strange when he passed the hallway leading to the holding area.

Silence.

He frowned, listening. The prisoners were awfully quiet all of a sudden, and that didn’t sit well with him. Not with things going the way they were. He made a detour down the hall, knocked on the metal door that led to the holding area. “Tom!” he called.

He expected the door to be opened immediately, but when there was no response, he called his deputy’s name again and quickly pulled out his own keys, a feeling of dread growing within him. “Tom!”

He pulled open the door.

Tom was lying unmoving in the middle of the corridor that ran between the two rows of cells. In the cells themselves, the prisoners were dead. All of them. Pressed against the bars, faces blue-black from lack of oxygen, eyes bulging from their sockets in contrasting white.

A cold fear gripped Roland’s heart and he turned around, wanting to get out of here as quickly as possible, not even bothering to check on Tom’s condition to make sure he was dead.

The metal door slammed shut in his face.

 

Faron Kent pulled to a stop in front of the temple. He’d been born and raised Mormon, had left the church only when he’d married Claire, but he still considered Mormons his people, and when he saw all of the cars and trucks parked in front of the temple, he knew where he had to go.

He’d just come into town, and he’d almost pulled off to the side of the road to wait out the sandstorm once he’d come through the tunnel and experienced its ferocity. There’d been only a slight wind in the adjoining canyons through which he’d driven, nothing at all on the flat desert plain before. Which mean that this freakishly localized weather could not possibly last the night. It was probably safer to pull onto the shoulder and catch a couple winks than attempt to maneuver these narrow roads with zero visibility.

But . . .

But he saw shadows in the sandstorm. Figures. Creatures. And he
heard
things. And he thought it safer to try and navigate the roads than pull off and wait for . . . what?

As he drove down the sloping highway into town, as the sand and its hidden inhabitants swirled about his car, old buried beliefs from his upbringing suddenly kicked in, and he found himself wondering if this was the end, if these were the last days.

It did not seem that far-fetched, and when he saw all the vehicles parked in front of the dark Mormon temple, he immediately and impulsively pulled in.

Even as he braked, however, the wind was lessening, the sandstorm dying down. There were still no lights on in McGuane, other than what looked like headlights further up the road, but a faint glow of moonlight from above the storm could now be seen filtering onto the scattered buildings.

And the mine.

For that was the only place where he saw movement, the open pit across the highway, and the movement that he saw, that instantly grabbed his attention, scared the living shit out of him.

There were creatures crawling out from the mine, emerging from the pit onto the ground above, creatures of dirt and gravel, monsters made from copper tailings and animated with some hellish spark of life.

His first instinct was to run inside the temple for sanctuary, but his experiences during the intervening years proved far stronger than the influence of his upbringing, and he reached for the rack behind him and pulled his shotgun down.

He got out of the pickup, locked and loaded, and strode bravely across the highway. He pointed his shotgun, aimed it at the first sand creature and pulled the trigger.

With a short, high wail, the creature dissolved into dust.

He targeted the next monster pulling itself up, its mineral fingers still clutching the edge of the pit, and when its head exploded in a shower of dirt, it fell back into the mine.

Behind him, a few of the braver men were walking out onto the steps from inside the temple to see what was going on. The wind had died down enough now that the sound of the shotgun blasts had carried.

“Grab some weapons!” he yelled as loud as he could. “I need some help here!”

There was a second’s hesitation, then two men sprinted down the steps and out to their pickups. A moment later, three others ran out of the temple to help.

He smiled, feeling good, feeling strong, and blew the next monster into a cloud of dust that dissipated in the wind.

They were starting toward the cars when Agafia saw Gregory staggering up to the church through the blowing sand.

Even with the flashlights pointed at him, he remained only a silhouette, but she would have recognized her son’s shape anywhere, and she drew in her breath sharply. He was lurching to the left, and it was obvious that there was something seriously wrong. Her first instinct was maternal, and she wanted to run to him and hug him and pray over him and make him feel better. But pragmatism took over instantly, and she ordered the others back into the shot-up and now hairless church, warning them to stay down. Julia shoved the kids through the door, and Adam’s little friend went with them. The older Molokans obeyed as well, but some merely doused their flashlights and moved off to the right or to the left, waiting to see what was going to happen. The Indians, following some plan of their own, broke up and began moving into the dust storm, into the night, attempting, she assumed, to sneak up behind Gregory.

He came closer.

She kept her flashlight trained on his indistinct form.

The sight of him with a gun in his hand was not only shocking but repulsive, and her first thought was that she was glad his father was not alive to see this.

She still had in her own hand the gun she’d taken from Julia—
the gun he’d used to kill Sasha

—and though she had no intention of using it, did not even know
how
to use it, she grasped it as she’d seen in movies and on television and pointed it at Gregory, illogically hoping that it would scare him away.

He shot at her.

Agafia jumped back, almost fell, and did drop the flashlight, though she managed to hold on to the revolver. She chanced a quick look behind her, but did not see anybody dead or injured, and she prayed that he had not hit anyone.

Gregory ran forward as fast as he could.

It was totally unexpected behavior, and in this place and under these circumstances, it appeared to be the move of a madman.

Screaming crazily, shooting at the church, causing everyone to scatter, he ran toward her, past her, up the steps—

And pointed his gun at Julia.

Agafia knew she had to act fast. He was not playing around, not trying to gain leverage or make demands. He wanted only to kill his wife, and Agafia stepped up, shoving her gun hard against the side of his head, the side with all the blood. He winced but did not drop his weapon, did not waiver from his intent.

“Forgive me,” Agafia said softly in Russian, not knowing if it was Gregory to whom she was speaking or God.

She pulled the trigger.

Gregory dropped.

Julia screamed. It was a cry of sheer pain unlike any she had ever heard, and Agafia felt a twin of that pain within herself, a cry that wanted to escape and be let out but that she kept bottled up inside for fear if allowed free rein it would never end.

They were staring at her with horror, all of the other Russians. Aside from Gregory, she was the only Molokan she had ever known who had willingly and intentionally taken a human life, and that sin weighed on her like a mountain on a peasant’s back. Awareness that the life she had taken was also the life she had created, her son’s, made her crime that much more heinous, made Agafia feel empty inside. She almost expected God to strike her dead right here and now, but as the others started moving forward, as the Indians emerged from the storm, she understood that that was not going to happen. She would not be taken, she would not be granted an easy way out. She would have to live with what she’d done, with what she was.

She thought of Russiantown.

But she could have done nothing else. It was either her son or her daughter-in-law, and she had chosen. If she’d done nothing, Gregory would have killed
her
next, and the kids, and then however many others he could have before someone stopped him, so she’d made the decision to do it herself. It was something she would not have been able to carry out had she had time to think about it, but running on instinct, she’d made the split-second decision to kill him.

It would be God who judged her finally, and she was prepared to accept His verdict no matter what it was.

Julia was next to her, next to him, on the ground, touching Gregory’s face, but she was already pulling herself together, obviously attempting to be strong for the children, and Agafia admired that. Julia was tough. She was a survivor and, no matter what, could always be counted on to do what had to be done. Agafia was proud of the choice her son had made.

She had no son any more.

Again, the scream was within her, threatening to escape, but she pressed it back, would not let it out. She looked down at Gregory’s bloody body, then turned away, looked over at the others watching her, staring at her.

She took Julia’s arm, pulled her up. “It not over,” she said in English. “Indians are right. We go back to house. Finish it.”

T
hey parked on the road.

Julia made Adam and Teo stay in the van, with the doors locked. They were both stunned, shell-shocked, and neither objected nor even responded. Dan was in there with them, and one of the old Molokan men volunteered to remain outside and guard the kids.

The rest of them walked up the drive to the house.

There were at least forty of them—Molokans and Indians—and the sheer number of people made her feel safer, more secure. There
was
safety in numbers, and even up against something as vast and incomprehensible as the supernatural, she felt reassured being part of a crowd.

The wind had disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived, but the blackout continued, and after all the howling, this new silence seemed creepy and somehow ominous. Most of them had flashlights, and the way before them was well lit. Ahead, at the end of the drive, its black bulk still too far away to be illuminated by their lights, was their destination.

The house.

Where Sasha lay murdered in her bed.
Julia focused on Jedushka Di Muvedushka, trying to figure out where the Owner of the House might be hiding. Like an alcoholic, she was taking everything one step at a time. She concentrated only on the present, only on the here and now, only on what lay immediately before her—
not on the fact that her husband, her lifemate, her love, had been shot and killed by his mother on the steps of the Molokan church while their son and daughter watched

—and she purposely kept herself from thinking about the larger issues and implications, about what she was going to do after this was all over, about what was to become of the rest of her life.

They reached the porch.

“I’ll go in first,” the chief said, moving in front.

Agafia pushed past him, motioning for Julia to follow. “No,” she told him. “Our house. We go first.”

Julia did not want to be first. She wanted to remain right where she was, safely in the middle of the crowd, borne along by the momentum of those around her, carried on the tide of consensus. She didn’t want to have to make decisions, didn’t want to think about—
his brains blown out of his head by his mother seconds before he was going to shoot
her,
and the expression on his face in the second before it disintegrated into a wash of red, that knowing, horrified look that she would remember to her dying day, that was imprinted forever on her mind, that would always cause her to wonder if at the last minute he realized what he had done

—what to do, but she accompanied her mother-in-law up the porch steps, the others falling in behind them.

They walked into the house, and as scary as it should have been, the atmosphere was dissipated by the number of people tramping through her living room. They were like an army, and Agafia was the general, directing half of the Indians and Molokans to explore the first floor and the back porch with Vera and the chief while the rest of them went upstairs.

Julia realized that she did not know the chief’s name, that none of them had even bothered to ask. Of course, she didn’t know the names of most of the Molokans either, and somehow the fact that she was here with strangers lent to the proceedings a dispassionate, objective air that further served to dispel the aura of horror that overhung the house.

The downstairs people started searching the kitchen and the first floor bedrooms while the rest of them went upstairs with Agafia.

They planned to go through this floor, then, if they didn’t find anything, check out the attic. The thought of going up into the attic scared her—
it was where Gregory had hidden, where he’d stored his gun

—and she decided that she would remain here and let some of the hardier people, the Indian men, check for her. She could not go up there. Not now. Not yet.