In some ways, Philip seems to be doing better now that the burden of his guilt has been off-loaded. Brian keeps the secret to himself, thinking about it often, but never broaching the subject again. The two brothers are less edgy with each other, and even Penny seems to be settling in nicely to this new routine that they are carving out for themselves.
She finds an antique dollhouse in an upper parlor, and stakes out a little place for herself (and all her broken, misfit toys) at the end of the second-floor hallway. Brian comes up there one day and finds all the dolls lying in neat little rows on the floor, all the severed appendages lying next to their corresponding bodies. He stares for quite a long while at the strange miniature morgue before Penny snaps him out of his daze. “C’mon, Uncle Brian,” she says. “You can be a doctor … help me put them back together.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” he says with a nod. “Let’s put them back together.”
On another occasion, early in the morning, Brian hears a sound coming from the first floor. He goes down into the kitchen and finds Penny standing on a chair, covered in flour and gunk, fiddling with pots and pans, her hair matted with makeshift pancake batter. The kitchen is a disaster area. The others arrive, and the three men just stand there, in the doorway of the kitchen, staring. “Don’t be mad,” Penny says, glancing over her shoulder. “I promise I’ll clean up the mess.”
The men look at each other. Philip, grinning now for the first time in weeks, says, “Who’s mad? We ain’t mad. We’re just hungry. When’s breakfast gonna be ready?”
* * *
As the days pass, they take precautions. They decide to burn firewood only at night, when the smoke cannot be seen from the highway. Philip and Nick construct a perimeter of baling wire stretched between small wooden stakes at each corner of the property, placing tin cans at key junctures, to alarm them of possible intruders—Biters and human alike. They even find an old antique double-barrel 12-gauge in the villa’s attic.
The shotgun is filmed in dust and engraved with cherubs, and looks as if it might blow up in their faces if they tried to fire the thing. They don’t even have any shells for it—the gun looks like the kind of thing somebody would hang in their study on the wall next to old photographs of Ernest Hemingway—but Philip sees some value in having it around. It looks threatening enough—on a galloping horse, as his dad used to say.
“You never know,” Philip says one night, leaning the shotgun against the hearth and settling back to numb himself with more cooking sherry.
* * *
The days continue to slip away with shapeless regularity. They catch up on their sleep, and they explore the orchards, and they harvest fruit. They set box traps for stray critters and one day they even catch a scrawny jackrabbit. Nick volunteers to clean the thing, and he ends up making a fairly decent braised rabbit on the woodstove that night.
They have only a few encounters with Biters during this time. One day, Nick is halfway up a tree, reaching for some withered plums, when he sees a walking corpse in farmer’s overalls way off in the shadows of a neighboring grove. He calmly climbs down and sneaks up on the thing with his pitchfork, skewering the back of its head as though popping a balloon. On another occasion, Philip is siphoning gas from a tractor when he notices a mangled corpse in a nearby drainage ditch. Legs smashed and contorted underneath it, the woman-thing looks like it dragged itself miles to get here. Philip chops off its head with the scythe, and burns the remains with a squirt of gas and a spark of a Bic.
Piece of cake.
All the while, the villa seems to be adopting them as much as they are adopting it. With all the sheets removed from the opulent old furniture, it seems almost like a place they could call home. They each have their own room now. And although they’re each still plagued by nightmares, there’s nothing more soothing than coming down to an old elegant kitchen with the November sun streaming through French windows, and the fragrance of a coffeepot that’s been simmering all night.
In fact, if it weren’t for the periodic feelings of being watched, things would be pretty close to perfect.
* * *
The feelings began to intensify for Brian as early as the second night they were there. Brian had just moved into his own bedroom on the second floor—an austere sewing parlor with a quaint little four-poster bed and an eighteenth-century armoire—when he sprang awake in the middle of the night.
He had been dreaming that he was a castaway, adrift on a makeshift raft on a sea of blood, when he saw a flash of light. In the dream, he thought it might be a distant lighthouse on some distant shore, summoning him, rescuing him from this endless plague of blood, but when he awakened, he realized he had just seen actual light in the waking world—just for a second—a rectangular slice of light, sliding across the ceiling.
In a blink, it was gone.
He wasn’t even sure he had actually seen it, but every fiber of his being told him to get up and go to the window. He did, and gazing out at the black void of the night, he could have sworn he caught a glimpse of a car, a quarter mile away, turning around at the point where the highway met the farm road. Then the thing vanished, sliding into nothingness.
Brian found it exceedingly difficult to get any more sleep that night.
When he told Philip and Nick about it the next morning, they simply wrote it off as a dream. Who the hell would pull off the highway, and then turn around and take off?
But the suspicion grew in Brian over that next week and a half. At night, he kept catching glimpses of slowly moving lights out on the highway or on the far side of the orchard. Some nights, in the wee hours, he could swear that he was hearing the crunch of tires on gravel. The furtive, fleeting quality of these sounds was the worst part. It gave Brian the feeling that somehow the villa was being cased. But he got so tired of having his paranoid suspicion dismissed by the others that he simply stopped reporting it. Maybe he was imagining all of it.
He didn’t say another word on the matter until the two-week anniversary of their stay in the villa, when, at a point just before dawn, the sound of tin cans rattling stirred him from a deep sleep.
EIGHTEEN
“What the hell?” Brian snaps awake in the darkness of his room. He fumbles for one of the kerosene lanterns on his bedside table, knocking over the hurricane glass and spilling fluid. He gets up and goes to the window, the floor icy on the soles of his bare feet.
Moonlight shines down from a crystalline cold autumn night sky, lining every shape outside with a luminous halo of silver. Brian can still hear the tin cans on the trip wires rattling out there somewhere. He can also hear the others stirring in their bedrooms behind him, down the hall. Everybody is up now, awakened by the jangling cans.
The strangest part is—and Brian wonders if he’s imagining this—the rattling sounds are coming from all directions. Tin cans are clattering in the groves behind the villa as well as in front of it. Brian is craning his neck to see better when his bedroom door bursts open.
“Sport! You up?” Philip is shirtless, wearing jeans and logger boots that he hasn’t had a chance to tie yet. He holds the old shotgun with one hand, his eyes wide open with alarm. “I’m gonna need you to go get that pitchfork in the back hallway—pronto!”
“Is it Biters?”
“Just get moving!”
Brian gives a nod and hurries out of the room, his brain swimming with panic. He wears only his sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt. As he pads through the darkness of the house—down the stairs, across the parlor, and into the back hall—he senses movement outside the windows, the presence of others closing in on them from outside.
Grabbing the pitchfork, which leans against the back door, Brian whirls and heads back to the front room.
By this point, Philip, Nick, and even Penny have reached the bottom of the steps. They go to the front bay window, which offers a wide-angle view of the surrounding yards, the sloping drive down to the adjacent road, and even the edge of the closest orchard. Immediat
ely they see dark shapes—low to the ground—sliding across the property from three different directions.
“Are those cars?” Nick utters in barely a whisper.
As their eyes adjust to the moonlit night, they each realize that yes, indeed, those are cars moving slowly across the property toward the villa. One comes up the winding drive, another one from the north end of the orchard, a third just visible to the south, crunching slowly over the gravel path leading out of the trees.
Almost with perfect synchronous timing, each vehicle suddenly stops at an equidistant point from the house. They sit there for a second, each one maybe fifty feet away, their windows too dark to reveal their occupants. “This ain’t no welcome wagon,” Philip murmurs, the understatement of the evening.
Again, almost in perfect concurrence, each pair of headlights suddenly snaps on. The effect is fairly dramatic—almost theatrical, in fact—as the beams strike the windows of the villa, filling the dark interior with cold chromium light. Philip is about to go outside and make a stand with the defunct shotgun when the sound of a crash is heard, coming from the rear of the villa.
“Punkin, you stay with Brian,” Philip says to Penny. Then he shoots a glance at Nick. “Nicky, I want you to see if you can slip out a side window, take the machete, double back on ’em if you can. You follow me?”
Nick understands exactly what he’s saying, and he takes off down the side hallway.
“Stay behind me, but stay close.” Philip raises the shotgun, the butt against his shoulder. Carefully and focused with cobralike calm, Philip shuffles commando-style toward the sound of footsteps on broken glass now coming from the kitchen.
* * *
“Nice and easy does it, hoss,” the home invader says in a cheerful Tennessee twang, raising the barrel of a nine-millimeter Glock as Philip enters the kitchen with the shotgun also raised.
Before being so rudely interrupted, the intruder had been calmly looking around the kitchen as though he had just climbed out of bed for a midnight snack. Headlamps, coming from outside, pierce the room with harsh radiance. The pane of glass above the doorknob behind the man is busted in, and the faint light of dawn is just beginning to glow.
Well over six feet tall, dressed in shopworn camo-pants, muddy jackboots, and a blood-soaked Kevlar flak vest, the home invader is completely bald, with a scarred, missile-shaped head and eyes like craters cut by tiny meteors. On closer scrutiny, he looks sick, like he’s been exposed to radiation, his jaundiced skin mottled with sores.
Philip points the worthless antique shotgun at the bald man’s cranium—about eight feet between the two men—and Philip concentrates on pretending—maybe even believing—that the shotgun is loaded. “I’ll give y’all the benefit of the doubt,” Philip says. “I’ll assume you thought the place was empty.”
“That’s exactly right, hoss,” the bald man says, his voice calm, maybe medicated, like that of a dreamy disc jockey. His teeth are capped in gold, and they shimmer dully as he smiles a reptilian smile.
“So, we’ll thank y’all to just leave us be—no harm, no foul.”
The man with the Glock apes a hurt frown. “Now, that ain’t too neighborly of you.” The man has a slight tremor, a tic, percolating with latent violence. “I see y’all got a cute little thang back there.”
“Never mind that.” Philip stands his ground. He can hear the front door squeak, footsteps crossing the parlor. His brain crashes with panic and warring impulses. He knows the next few seconds are critical, maybe even mortally so. But all he can think of doing is to stall. “We don’t want any bloodshed, and brother, I guarantee you, no matter what happens, yours and mine’s gonna be the first blood that’s shed.”
“Smooth talker.” The bald man calls out suddenly to one of his comrades in the dark. “Shorty?”
A voice answers from outside the back door. “Got him, Tommy!”
Almost on cue, Nick appears outside the jagged window of the back door, a large Bowie knife held against his windpipe. His captor, a skinny kid with pimples and a marine jarhead haircut, pushes open the door and shoves Nick into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, Philly,” Nick says as he is shoved against the cabinets—hard enough to steal his breath. The slender young man with the crew cut holds the knife against Nick’s Adam’s apple, a machete thrust down the young man’s belt. A jittery, bony specimen with fingerless Carnaby gloves on his hands, the skinny kid looks like an escapee from a marine brig. His fatigue jacket has the sleeves torn off, and his long bare arms are riddled with jailhouse hieroglyph.
“Hold on, now,” Philip says to the bald man. “There’s no reason to—”
“Sonny!” The bald man calls out to another accomplice at the precise same moment Philip hears the footsteps creaking across the hundred-year-old hardwood floor out in the front parlor. Philip keeps the shotgun raised and aimed, but shoots a quick side glance back over his shoulder. Brian and Penny huddle in the shadows directly behind Philip, maybe five feet off his heels.
Two more figures have suddenly appeared behind Brian and Penny, making the little girl jump.
“Got it covered, Tommy!” says one of the figures as the steel-plated barrel of a large-caliber revolver—maybe a .357 Magnum, maybe an Army .45—becomes visible for all to see, pressing against the back of Brian Blake’s skull. Brian stiffens like a cornered animal.
“Hold on now,” Philip says.
In his peripheral vision, he can see that the two figures holding guns on Brian and Penny are a man and a woman … although he would use the word woman loosely in this case. The gal clutching a piece of Penny’s collar is an androgynous marionette of skin and bones, clad in leather pants and layers of mesh, with lampblack eyeliner, spikey hair, and the slightly greenish pallor of a junkie. She nervously taps the barrel of a .38 police special against the shank of her beanpole thigh.
The man next to her—the one apparently named Sonny—also looks as though he’s no stranger to the needle. His sunken eyes stare out from a pockmarked mask of ignorance and meanness, his emaciated form clad in army-surplus rags.
“I want to thank you, brother,” the bald man says, shoving his nine-millimeter back into its belt sheath, acting like the showdown has now officially ended. “You dug up quite a spot here. I’ll give you that.” He goes over to the sink and calmly helps himself to the jug of well water sitting on the counter, quaffing down an entire glassful. “This’ll do nicely as a home base.”
“That’s all well and good,” Philip says, not making any move to lower his faux weapon. “Only problem is, we can’t take on any more people.”
“That’s okay, brother.”
“Then what exactly are you planning to…? What are your intentions?”
“Our intentions?” The bald man enunciates the word with mock profundity. “Our intentions are to take this place from y’all.”
Somebody that Philip can’t see snickers with great amusement.
Philip’s brain is a fractured chessboard, pieces moving now in herky-jerky motion. He knows that it’s likely that these hardened road rats mean to kill him and everybody else in the house. He knows they’re parasites, and they’ve most likely been circling the place like buzzards for weeks—Brian wasn’t hearing things, it turns out.
Even now, Philip can hear others outside—low voices, twigs snapping—and he does the quick mental arithmetic: There are at least six of them, maybe more, and at least four vehicles, and each one seems to be heavily armed, with plenty of ammo—Philip can see mags and speed-loaders clipped to some of the belts—but the one thing they seem to lack that maybe, just maybe, Philip can work with, is the appearance of intelligence. Even the big bald guy—who seems to be the honcho—has the look of a dull stoner in his eyes. There won’t be any appeals to mercy, no appeals to the better angels here. Philip has only one chance at survival.
“You mind if I say something?” he asks. “Before y’all do anything rash.”
The bald man raises his glass as though giving
a toast. “You got the floor, friend.”
“We got two ways this can go down, is all I’m trying to say.”
This seems to pique the bald man’s curiosity. He sets down his glass and turns to Philip. “Only two ways?”
“One way is, we start blazing and I can tell you how that’s gonna play out.”
“Do tell.”
“Your folks will overpower us and that’ll be that, but the only thing is, I promise you one thing and—I’ll be honest with you—I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”
“And what’s that?”
“No matter what, I know that I’ll be able to get off a single shot, and I say this with no disrespect, but I will make damn sure that the overwhelmin’ majority of these steel beads go into the top half of your body. Now, sir, do you want to hear option two?”
The bald man has lost his sense of humor. “Keep talkin’.”
“Option two is you let us walk outta here alive, and you take our place with our compliments, and nobody has to clean up no messes and you get to keep the top half of your body.”
* * *
For quite a while, things proceed in a very orderly fashion (on the bald man’s orders). The junkie couple—in his stricken brain, Philip is coming to think of them as Sonny and Cher—simply back away slowly from Brian and Penny, allowing Brian to lift the child off the floor and carry her across the front parlor to the door.
The agreement—if you can call it that—is for Philip and his group to simply walk away from the villa, leaving all their things, and that’s that. Brian watches Philip backing out of the house with the shotgun still raised. Thank God for that piece of shit antique. Nick follows. The two of them join Brian and Penny in the doorway, and Brian nudges the door open with Penny in his arms.
They shuffle outside, the shotgun still aimed at the intruders inside.
A number of things flood Brian’s senses—the cool wind, the pale light of dawn rising behind the orchards, the silhouettes of two additional gunmen on either flank of the house, the cars angled with their high beams still on like theatrical spotlights heralding the next act of a nightmarish play.