“Guilford loves the world too much,” Tom had told her. “He loves it like it’s real.”
Isn’t it? she had asked. Even if the world is made of numbers and machines… isn’t it real enough to love?
“For you,” Tom had allowed. “Some of us can’t let ourselves think that way.”
The Hindus spoke of detachment, or was it the Buddhists? To abandon the world. Abandon desire. How awful, Lily thought. An awful thing to ask of anyone, much less of Guilford Law, who not only loved the world but knew how fragile it was.
The old rifle sat across her legs with a terrible weight. Nothing moved beyond the window but the stars above the water, distant suns sliding through the night.
Abby, weaponless, crouched in a corner of the dimly candlelit room. Sometime after midnight Guilford came and hunkered down on the floor beside her. He put a hand on her shoulder. Her skin was cool under the heat of his palm.
She said, “We’ll never be safe here again.”
“If we have to, Abby, we’ll leave. Move up-country, take another name…”
“Will we? Even if we do go somewhere else, somewhere no one knows us — what then? Do you watch me grow old? Watch me die? Watch Nicholas grow old? Wait for whatever miracle it was that put you here to come and take you away again?”
He sat back, startled.
“You couldn’t have hidden it much longer. You still look like you’re on the shy side of thirty.”
He closed his eyes. You won’t die, his ghost had told him, and he had watched his cuts heal miraculously, watched the flu pass him by even when it took his baby daughter. Hated himself for it, often enough.
But most of the time he just pretended. And as for Abby, Abby aging, Abby dying…
He healed quickly, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be killed. Some wounds were irrevocable, as even Tom was plainly aware. He couldn’t imagine a future past Abby, even if that meant throwing himself off a cliff or taking the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. Everybody was entitled to death. Nobody deserved a century of grief.
Abby seemed to read his thoughts. She took his hand and held it in hers. “You do what you have to, Guilford.”
“I won’t let them hurt you, Abby.”
“You do what you have to,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-One
The first shot fractured a living-room window.
Nicholas, who had been dozing, sat upright on the sofa and began to cry. Abby ran to him, pressed his head down. “Curl up,” she said. “Curl up, Nicky, and cover your head!”
“Stay with him,” Guilford shouted. More bullets flashed through the window, whipping the curtains like a hurricane wind, punching holes the size of fists in the opposite wall.
“Guard this room,” Tom said. “Lily, upstairs with me.”
He wanted an east-facing window and some elevation. Dawn was only twenty minutes away. There would be light in the sky by now.
Guilford crouched behind the front door. He fired a couple of blind shots through the mail slot, hoping to discourage whoever was out there.
An answering volley of bullets tore through the mosquewood door above him. He ducked under a shower of splinters.
Bullets fractured wood, plaster, upholstery, curtains. One of Abby’s kitchen candles winked out. The smell of charred wood was pungent and intense.
“Abby?” he called out. “Are you all right?”
The east-facing room was Nick’s. His balsa-wood airplane models were lined up on a shelf with his crystal radio and his seashell collection.
Tom Compton tore the drapes away from the window and kicked the glass out of the lower pane.
The house was still ringing with the sound of breaking glass.
The frontiersman ducked under the sill, raised his head briefly and ducked back.
“I see four of ’em,” he said. “Two hiding back of the cars, at least two more out by the elm. Are you a good marksman, Lil?”
“Yes.” No sense being modest. Although she had never fired this Remington.
“Shoot for the tree,” he said. “I’ll cover the close targets.”
No time for thought. He didn’t hesitate, simply gripped the window frame with his left hand and began to fire his pistol in a steady, rapid rhythm.
The pearly sky cast a dim light. Lily came to the window, exposing her head as little as possible, and drew a bead on the elm, and then on the rough shape beside it. She fired.
This was not a rabbit. But she could pretend. She thought of the farm outside Wollongong, shooting rabbits with Colin Watson back when she still called him “Daddy.” In those days the rifle had seemed bigger and heavier. But she was steady with it. He taught her to anticipate the noise, the kick.
It had made her queasy when the rabbits died, spilling themselves like torn paper bags over the dry earth. But the rabbits were vermin, a plague; she learned to suppress the sympathy.
And here was another plague. She fired the rifle calmly. It kicked her shoulder. A cartridge rattled across the wooden floor of Nick’s room and lodged under the bed.
Had the shadow-figure fallen? She thought so, but the light was so poor…
“Don’t stop,” Tom said, reloading. “You can’t take these people out with a single shot. They’re not that easy to kill.”
Guilford had lost the feeling in his left leg. When he looked down he saw a dark wetness above his knee and smelled blood and meat. The wound was healing already, but a nerve must have been severed; that would take time to repair.
He crawled toward the sofa, trailing blood.
“Abby?” he said.
More bullets pounded through the ruined door and window. Across the room Abby’s cloth curtains began to smolder, oozing dark smoke. Something banged repeatedly against the kitchen door.
“Abby?”
There was no answer from the sofa.
He heard Tom and Lily’s gunfire from upstairs, shouts of pain and confusion outside.
“Talk to me, Abby!”
The back of the sofa had been struck several times. Particles of horsehair and cotton stuffing hung in the air like dirty snow.
He put his hand in a puddle of blood, not his own.
“I count four down,” Tom Compton said, “but they won’t stay down unless we finish ’em. And there might be more out back.” But no second-story window faced that direction.
He hurried down the stairs. Lily followed close behind him. Her hands were shaking now. The house stank of cordite and smoke and male sweat and worse things.
Down to the living room, where the frontiersman stopped short in the arched doorway and said, “Oh, Christ!”
Someone had come in through the back door.
A fat man in a gray Territory Police uniform.
“Sheriff Carlyle,” Guilford said.
Guilford was obviously wounded and dazed, but he had managed to stand up. One hand clasped his bloody thigh. He held out the other imploringly. He had dropped his pistol by the sofa—
By the blood-drenched sofa.
“They’re hurt,” Guilford said plaintively. “You have to help me take them to town. The hospital.”
But the sheriff only smiled and raised his own pistol.
Sheriff Carlyle: one of the bad guys.
Lily struggled to aim her rifle. Her heart pumped, but her blood had turned into a cold sludge.
The sheriff fired twice before Tom got off a shot that sent him twisting against the wall.
The frontiersman stepped close to the fallen Sheriff Carlyle. He pounded three bullets into the sheriff at close range until the sheriff’s head was as red and shapeless as one of Colin Watson’s rabbits.
Guilford lay on the floor, fountaining blood from a chest wound.
Abby and Nicholas were behind the useless fortress of the sofa, unspeakably dead.
Interlude
Guilford woke in the shade of the elm, in the tall grass, in a patch of false anemones blue as glacial ice. A gentle breeze cooled his skin. Diffuse daylight held each object suspended in its even glow, as if his perception had been washed clean of every defect.