Wide Open (31 page)

“I’m at Seven Mile Creek, Martin. You remember? That’s where Dell died. Where you killed her. You want me? Come and get me.”

She broke the connection before he had the chance to reply.

35

Hallie got back into the pickup. Brett had used the time to replace the bloody T-shirts with a pressure bandage. Boyd looked better, less pale. Or, she hoped he did, hoped she wasn’t just fooling herself, hadn’t made a grim and terrible mistake when she didn’t insist on getting him in that ambulance and headed to the hospital.

“Tell me,” Boyd said. He sounded rough, like he’d just come off a twenty-four-hour shift. Hallie put her hand on his good leg, because she was so tired of being in this alone. And even though she was still alone—what was he going to do to help her, after all, he couldn’t even walk—it made her feel calmer, more centered. He laid his hand over hers and squeezed. It was warm, his hand, and so … human, like no one had ever touched her before.

“He’ll come,” she said.

“Hallie…”

She shook her head. There was nothing he could say. It had to happen. Martin would keep killing people. He would burn the ranch and hurt people she knew and maybe destroy a whole town because he could, he could do that. They’d talk about freak storms and tragic acts of God, about the horrible magnificence of nature and the destruction it wreaks, but it would be Martin.

She would face him, win or lose. Her only choice was whether she faced him alone. Or with Boyd.

“What exactly is going on?”

Both Boyd and Hallie turned to look at Brett. Hallie assessed her—the Brett she’d always known, the Brett she’d become, was becoming, would someday become. She wanted Brett to come with them, to take care of Boyd, make sure the bandages stayed in place, that he had water, that she could drive the truck, and Boyd, out of there if things went bad.

On the other hand, Brett didn’t know anything about … well, anything. And she needed to know. Hallie figured she had about fifteen minutes to fill her in.

“Everything I’m going to tell you,” Hallie said to Brett as she pulled back onto the road, “is fantastic. Okay? And I don’t mean fantastic, like,
awesome
. But fantastic, like fantasy, like things you wouldn’t believe in a million years. But you have to believe it because it’s the truth, because it’s bad, because it’s going to get worse, and because I’m sorry—I really am—but you’re going to be right in the middle of it.”

Boyd leaned his head against the back of the seat, his injured leg stretched so that Brett had to pull her own legs in and to the side to accommodate him. His breath came quick and shallow, but Hallie knew he was listening to every word she said.

She took a deep breath.

“Martin Weber kills women so he can use their blood to control the weather. He burned my father’s barn as a threat to me. He burned St. Mary’s church because he was trying to kill me. To stop me from trying to stop him. He killed Lorie. He killed Dell. He’s killed at least three other women, too.”

Silence.

“I—” Hallie stopped. This was harder than telling Boyd. This was Brett, practical, rational Brett, who wouldn’t even pretend to believe in the Tooth Fairy when she was seven. “I see ghosts, Brett,” she said, because even if it was hard, there was no other way to say it—not for Hallie—other than straight out.

“I see Dell’s ghost.”

She looked over, and she could actually see Dell right then, floating just in front of Brett, as if for once she knew what the conversation was about, as if she knew they were talking about her. “I can see the ghosts of the girls that Martin’s killed.”

“Martin hasn’t—,” Brett began, latching on to the one comprehensible fact.

“Martin shot Boyd, Brett,” Hallie said tightly.

“Technically, Pete shot me,” Boyd offered.

“Shut up,” Hallie said.

Brett shifted so she could look at Boyd’s face. “Martin
shot
you?”

“Pete—”

“Yes! Martin kills people, Brett!”

Brett chewed on her lower lip. “These—” She coughed. “These ‘ghosts’ … they haunt you?”

“Yeah,” Hallie said after a moment. “I guess you could call it that. They want something, want me to do something for them. And they show me … things.”

“Is this, like, posttraumatic stress?”

“No! It’s not posttraumatic stress. It’s I-actually-died-in-Afghanistan-then-came-back and now I see ghosts. Look, I don’t care if you believe me. This is the way it is.”

“And Martin controls the weather,” Brett said, as if saying it in that way, flat, like a fact, would force Hallie to see how ridiculous it was.

“Yes,” Hallie said. “I think he draws the energy from storm lightning. I think he’s pulling too much, and I think it’s starting to backfire on him. That’s why this.” She waved her hand at the pervasive gloom outside the truck cab. It had to be at least noon by now, maybe later, but it felt like five o’clock in the morning all dark gray clouds and knee-high ground fog and spattering rain. “Martin blew up Boyd’s car tonight with a fireball. He burned Lorie to ash and bone at St. Mary’s church. Didn’t Jennie tell you?”

“Jennie,” Brett said heavily, “was not exactly coherent.”

“You mean, you didn’t believe her.”

“No one believed her! They gave her a sedative to calm her down.”

“I can let you out,” Hallie said.

“What?”

“I can stop the truck, and I can drop you off right here. There should be a cell phone signal. Someone can pick you up. You’ll be fine.”

Brett was quiet for a long moment. She looked at Boyd, whose eyes were half-closed as he tried to brace himself against the vibration of the truck as it traveled down the highway. “Do you believe this?” she finally asked him.

Boyd seemed to consider his answer. “Everything she’s telling you is true.”

More silence.

Hallie slowed for the turn onto 54 South. She was sure she would reach Seven Mile Creek before Martin, but there were things to do once they were there, and she needed to know whether Brett was on board with this or not. From here until the end, everything had to work as planned—there would be no second chances.

“Look,” Brett said, “what you’re telling me is not possible. It’s not. I’m studying psychiatry, for Christ’s sake, Hallie! The mind—people believe things all the time that just aren’t true. And there’s help. We help people.”

“Someone shot Boyd,” Hallie pointed out. “Someone killed Dell.”

Brett worried at her lower lip some more. “Yeah,” she said, sat up straighter in the seat. “Okay.
Okay
. Look, what you’re telling me, it’s not possible. It’s not.” She held up her hand. “I don’t even want to talk about it. But—” She leaned forward to look around Boyd, looked
at
him, too, taking in his pale face and wounded leg. “—but you need me to help you? Yes. Absolutely. I will do that.” Her voice was brisk and firm. Hallie knew she wouldn’t waver either, no matter what happened, because once Brett decided, it was done.

Hallie turned onto Seven Mile Creek Road and drove slowly into the abandoned town of Jasper. The old Jasper church sat on the edge of town, roof completely collapsed and sagging into itself so the walls were only five or six feet high, all shattered gray wood and old framing. Everything else had been mostly flattened, and it was an eerie place to be today, with ground fog weaving in and around the uneven landscape. There was another half wall a block-length or so past the church and a crumbling chimney. Hallie turned and headed toward the creek, back to the place where Dell had died.

Boyd put his hand over hers again. She’d forgotten her own hand was still on his knee. He lifted her hand off his leg and held it. She wanted to squeeze his hand so tight, it would crush the bones in his fingers to dust, felt like that was the only way the feelings inside her—love and fear and hate—could be acknowledged and understood. She wanted something from him so desperately that it scared her—wanted him to stand with her, to believe in her—she didn’t even know what it was that she wanted, but she wanted it bad.

Right now, though, he was the ticking clock, the thing that was saying,
This is how much time you have.
Not much. Because he needed more than a pressure bandage and a couple of ratty old T-shirts.

Finish this
.

The words echoed in Hallie’s head. For the first time, she actually, maybe, thought that she could.

She pulled off the old lane halfway down the quarter-mile stretch between Jasper and the old farmhouse. There were traces of gravel underneath the grass, everything, including the road itself, grown in since the tornado had destroyed the town, way back. She turned the pickup so it faced back the way they’d come, left it running with the headlights on.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t want Martin to find her.

She got out and stood, taking in the landscape around her. She was certain she was right. Really pretty certain she could stop Martin. But what if she couldn’t? She wasn’t alone. If she didn’t stop him, if she failed, Boyd and Brett would die with her. She should have dumped Boyd at the church, left Brett behind with him. She shouldn’t … she should have done this on her own.

“I need to be here.” Boyd’s words echoed her thoughts almost exactly, like he had seen inside her head.

“You were wrong before, about what was going to happen,” she said. She didn’t look at him when she spoke.

“I wasn’t wrong,” he told her. “Things changed.”

“You’re not…” Her voice was a half whisper, and she still wasn’t looking at him, though she’d taken a step back, her legs tight up against the running board, because this wasn’t a real conversation, they weren’t really talking about life and death and dreams that foretold the future. They weren’t.

“I thought you only saw these things in dreams.”

“These are dreams,” he said. “Because I’m—”

“Okay,” she said quickly. “But you don’t
know
. About whether they’re
really
dreams and about whether—you’re guessing.”

“I’m not guessing,” he said. “And neither are you.”

She finally looked at him. “Brett can drive you out of here right now,” she said. Her voice had gotten even softer, and she wasn’t entirely sure why. “You need a doctor.”

“Brett can drive herself out of here,” Boyd said. He drew his pistol and handed it to Hallie. “But I’m staying.” He made a gesture with his right hand. “Give me your shotgun,” he said.

She studied his face, as if she could memorize each specific feature, as if she needed to. “I know what I’m doing,” she said.

“So do I.”

She tucked the gun into the waistband of her jeans, which seemed awkward and, frankly, dangerous, but there wasn’t anything else to do with it, and Boyd was probably right. She would probably need it. She took a moment to scout the immediate area. Ghosts followed her as she circled the truck and assured herself that it was solidly right out in the open. There was Dell and Sarah and Karen and Jesse and—oh crap—Lorie. Which stopped her, like she couldn’t breathe anymore.

Goddamnit
.

Then there were two more ghosts, women she’d never seen before, but, hell—they were welcome. It was going to be a party.

Close to where Hallie had parked were two small outbuildings, like toolsheds or gatehouses. One was mostly collapsed in a heap of soft gray lumber. The other leaned strongly, like a gentle breeze might topple it. Hallie kicked in the door. In the distance, she heard a truck engine, not close, but out there.

She returned to the truck, and without a word between them, she helped Boyd out and over to the shed. He could barely put any weight on his right leg, and before he’d gone a half dozen steps, he was leaning nearly his whole weight on her.

This was a mistake. Her mistake.

But it was too late to argue about it now.

He stopped her when they reached the shed. “Not inside,” he said.

She looked at him. “You can’t—”
Run. Hide. Save yourself.
“They’ll see you.”

“It will be Martin and Pete,” Boyd said. He looked at her, but his eyes were unfocused, like he wasn’t quite seeing her. “And I want them to see me,” he said. “I want them to know you’re not alone.”

Hallie looked at him for a long moment. “All right,” she said with a sharp nod. She found an old wooden chair with no seat and one leg an inch shorter and a flat piece of board to lay across it. She helped him lower himself and handed him the shotgun, which he managed to hold in surprisingly steady hands.

“What you’re seeing,” she asked him after a moment. “It seems more—” She wasn’t sure what word she wanted. “—accurate? Because I thought your dreams were symbolic. I thought you had to figure them out. You don’t seem to be guessing here.”

He shook his head, winced, and wiped a hand up across his cheekbone. “Right now?” he said. “It’s like a movie. Not constant. It still comes and goes, but sometimes I can see you, for example. And it’s just you. Right here. Right now. But at the same time, I see you thirty minutes from now. Or an hour. Or whenever.”

“Jesus,” Hallie said.

She left Boyd and walked farther into the open. There was a row of trees twenty yards or so from the old outbuildings. Not the farmhouse windbreak but a boundary for the town of Jasper. On this side, once, there had been groomed grass and monuments and flowers. On the other side, it would have been winter wheat or grazing cattle or bromegrass for hay. It took her a minute or two with the ground fog and the general gloominess of the day to find what she was looking for. She literally tripped over it, or over a broken fence post, sticking up about six inches, but obscured by the tall prairie grass. She tested things a few times—two steps forward, a step back, several steps directly to the side, then forward again.

All right, she thought. She could do this. She knew where the line was, knew she could find it again when she needed to. She could make this work. She could.

She returned to the truck, where Brett was standing with her arms crossed, hunched against the damp. Hallie handed her the keys. “You should leave,” she said.

“No,” said Brett. “I told you I was in and I’m in. I’m not leaving.”