Meredyth, from the floor, flashed the beam on the assailant, hoping to help Lucas, expecting to blind Lauralie Blodgett, but instead, the light illuminated the dripping half-torso of Mira Lourdes. her legs and lower abdomen dangling in the blackness, each heel lashed to Candice Brody's white ceiling fan.
"Christ, my heart!" shouted Lucas.
"It's our final ration of fun with the Antichrist and her twisted miracles," Meredyth bitterly said. "Behold the beast cometh. Damn that ugly bitch child of evil wherever she is."
Lucas slipped now on the dank gruel below the half- corpse, and he instantly grabbed Meredyth up in his powerful arms, giving up any effort to regain his feet so he could lift her at the same time from the wet floor soiling their clothes.
"I'm going after her, Mere. You stay here, and I will track her in the night, comer her, and bring her pain and ours to an end."
"No, you can't leave me here alone, and you can't go after her alone, Lucas, no!"
"I can move faster and stealthier alone. Mere. Having you to worry about is more apt to get me killed, trust me. You remain here. I can revert to the old ways and blend in with the night. I can get close enough to break her neck before she sees me coming."
"She's got a high-powered rifle with a scope. I can at least help create a diversion."
"Doing so could get you killed."
"No, don't you see? She gets me in her scope, she won't pull the trigger. She wants me to survive and suffer your loss."
He took a deep breath and then began peeling off his clothing down to his black BVDs. 'Try to keep up," he told her, taking his table leg with him.
Even as she kept pace down the stairs, Meredyth peeled off her own clothes, beginning with her soiled pants, down to her Navy blue bra and panties. She'd not forgotten her war club, which thudded down the carpeted stairs with her. "Lake's going to be cold," she said, shivering at the thought.
"Cold is a state of mind. Hold on to that thought and you'll be all right."
Lucas turned on the flashlight and placed it on the chopping block so it would flash to the ceiling. It decoyed their whereabouts, as it would be seen clearly in the window in Lauralie's telescopic lens. They exited out the back, and belly-crawled to the water's edge down from the pier among the reeds where the. capsized boat had hung up. There they inched into the water and took hold of the waiting, upturned boat. They began to make their way across the lake, back toward Meredyth's home.
Once on the other side, they were masked by the boat- house, where they tied the roaming overturned boat to a mooring. They went into the boathouse by swimming under. Once inside, they caught a moment's rest. Meredyth was trembling and exhausted. He found a blanket and wrapped her in it. "My squaw," he said, smiling. Then, holding his table leg high, he asked, "Where is your war club?"
"At the bottom of the lake by now. I couldn't hold onto it and the boat any longer."
"I want you to remain here until I get back with the horses," he ordered her. "No arguments."
"Just because I dropped my…my war club?"
"Come on. Mere, we both know your ethics alone prevent you from drawing blood. And like I said, I can move faster and safer on my own."
"Lucas, it's too dangerous. She's up there in one of those windows just waiting for one glimpse of you and-"
He put his finger to her lips. "It's not so easy hitting a moving target, especially a painted Cherokee with a war club."
'Tell that to Jeff and Tommy."
"Jeff and Tommy were forced to run ahead of her down a slope, their backs to the bitch. She won't know when I'm coming. She won't see me coming. When and if she fires, she'll miss. If you hear multiple shots, you'll know she missed. Just have faith and wait here for me, understood?"
"No, Lucas! No!"
But he'd already dived into the blue fluid floor, swimming underwater to the outside, going for the boggy, swampy area on the north side of the structure. "Damnit, Lucas!" she whispered, then dropped the blanket and dove in after him.
CHAPTER 20
Meredyth had watched Lucas disappear below the water and swim out of the boathouse to the hidden side where trees and bush covered his movements. She followed, bobbing in the water, watching him now as he caked himself with mud until he became a living shadow. Hearing her in the water and seeing that she'd disobeyed him and followed, he shot her a disapproving look. He waved for her to go back into the shelter. Then he disappeared into the cover of the path they had so leisurely taken down to the boathouse that afternoon. Lucas seemed to become part of the weave of the green-black cloth of the world around him, and once more she was reminded of just how wild and predatory he could be when circumstances warranted. In the past, she had been both excited by this side of him and afraid of it, but tonight Meredyth thanked God for Lucas's wild side; tonight, she realized she would always be safe in his care. She knew that Lucas was risking his life for her, and that he wanted this opportunity at blood vengeance-payback usually reserved for the death of a loved one. This situation, she decided, was close enough to satisfy his Cherokee blood.
But if she were to lose Lucas tonight as Lauralie planned, if there were no more tomorrows with Lucas, Meredyth decided that she would not want to go on. This conclusion spurred her to climb from the water and coat her body with the war paint of the muddy bottom. Lauralie had brought her to this, a state of being calling for her to smear her scantily clad body with muddy, pungent earth. And to a state of consciousness never before experienced, one of pure hatred for another human being, for Lauralie's unfixable, poisoned soul. And what of the classically mad Lauralie? For all the research and study and analysis and scrutiny of Meredyth's life that the younger woman had done, Lauralie actually had learned nothing of Meredyth's core traits. Now her raw personality, stripped of any pretense and faced with a monster relentlessly stalking her, stepped forward. Not even Meredyth was familiar with the Meredyth now smearing the lather of sludge over her face and the remaining white comers of her skin.
As a scudding army of dark clouds continued to hold captive the moon, Meredyth made her move, doing a slow, even belly crawl along the tree line leading up to the knoll her house sat upon. Lauralie occupied the high ground in this private war. As Meredyth crawled past Tommy's body, his white oversized cowboy shirt lifting in the wind, the bloodstain long dry by now, made a gentle slapping sound rivaling the insect hum. The sight made her think of all the innocent people who had been caught in the vortex. Closer to her as she passed his body lay Jeff, his eyes staring wide, his hair matted with blood. At any time, their mother might drive over in that little coupe of hers in search of her boys, and if she did, Lauralie would likely take her down with a sniper shot as well.
"Where is the bitch?" she muttered to herself. Might she be at the bam, say in the loft? Or was she in the house at the bedroom windows, one overlooking the lawn, the other the stables? Was she alternating between the two views?
She inched onward, gaining confidence with each foot, each yard gained. She could read Howard Kemper's logo- LAWn ORDER-on his truck from here, and she made out Lucas's car just the other side of the gardener's truck. If she could make it to the driveway undetected, get to Lucas's radio, she could call out for help, if only-big If — Lauralie had overlooked the radio in the unmarked vehicle.