“What about the zip pills?” she whispered.
They were in the brush near the edge of a yard. Sheets on a line luffed softly, straining skyward, as if to gather whatever light remained. The house’s clapboards were shedding paint. There was a light in the back window, presumably the kitchen, and a thin thread of smoke from the chimney. The breeze lifted, and the sheets stretched out in unison, and then luffed down again.
“We won’t need them,” he said.
A few minutes later they heard a screen door slam, and an old woman came out onto the back porch huffing, grunting down the steps and shambling into the yard with a basket in her arms. She took down the sheets one by one, folding each one over her arm and then in half and then in quarter before laying it in the basket. Then she began to unfold each one, lifting the corners up to the line, pinning them back into place.
“Sure this is the right place?”
“I’m sure,” he said. “You know what they say. Every failed enfold has a hefty old lady tending to his needs, some mother figure who believes he’s a pure little angel. The hardened cases are often the most pathetically in need of maternal care.”
“OK, but she looks nondangerous in a deep way.”
“All the better for us.”
The old lady took the sheets down from the line again and stood with her arms at her side and her face to the sky. What happened then was hard to see from their position. She’d fallen to the ground and was partly obscured by the basket. Holy holy, she seemed to be saying.
The subject appeared to be speaking in tongues, he thought. Glory and holy, or holy and glory — the wind rose and covered the words — and then something about the wrath of God being torn away. She seemed to be running in a supine position. The screen door slapped again, and a similarly large man (a son, Singleton thought) with a beard strode across the yard and said, Mom, MomMom, it’s OK, go easy.
Wendy took a step forward, her gun out.
“Wait,” he said.
The man was helping the woman into his big arms. Likeness of physique indicated a genetic relationship. No sound from the house. We held our position and assessed the situation. Male subject assisted female subject up the steps to the porch …
The screen door creaked open as they approached. A young woman emerged, wiping her hands on a towel, and let them into the house.
“That might be the one Rake kidnapped out of the Grid.”
“Total weirdness,” Wendy whispered. “They don’t look dangerous. I get a vibe of a loving relationship.”
“The closeness of these folks, from what I understand, is even more intense than the closeness of normal folks. They practice violence externally and live in small-group formations, or whatever the Corps calls them, an intense familial groove. A failed enfold often doubles not only his psychotic intensities but his sentimental attachments.”
We posited that the familial vibration derived from a projection of mother-son love as he had experienced it in the field of battle heightened by an abnormal dose of Tripizoid to an abnormal intensity.
“I know that. But I don’t necessarily see it in front of me.”
“When we’re sure they’re inside we’ll get up to the porch and take a look.”
Northern darkness fell slowly, and they waited until the yard was dark and the window in the back glowed brighter, throwing bars of light onto the floor of the porch. Over the yard a bowl of stars appeared.
“Now,” Singleton said. “Cut around as far as you can to the side of the house and then we’ll cross one at a time. Keep me covered. I’ll go first. If anyone comes out, give them a warning shot. I don’t want an element of surprise in any form but gunfire.”
He mentally set aside the report and placed himself in the moment. He felt mosquitoes biting his legs and the heavy pull of the rifle on his shoulder as he moved swiftly around to the driveway, taking the shortest exposed approach between wooded cover and porch, and without thinking, without even saying go, he ran across the gravel and flattened himself against the side of the house. Moving in a side step, he slid to the corner of the house and peered around it — gun first, always gun first. Then, removing his shoes and glancing back to sight his cover, he walked heel and toe up the steps and onto the porch.
He crouched, glanced through the window, and ducked back down with an image in his head: The image might have been called “Domestic Bliss”: three people were seated at a table, lit by a lamp hanging down over steaming dishes, and eating together with their bodies relaxed, no sign of a gun, no sign of intensity (and no Rake, no Rake at all). The man with the beard was sitting on one end of the table, the girl named Meg (if this was Meg) was at the other end, the old woman between them, with her back to the window. Singleton briefly raised his head again. The man with the beard was lifting his fork while the girl laughed about something. (Her laugh came through the glass, a flutter, delicate-sounding.) Beyond the table was a dark doorway.
It was possible that Rake was away (or actually dead) and they were holding down the fort. Also possible that the bearded man was Rake with some extra weight after a summer of killing and eating, killing and eating. Target had gained weight. Target had facial hair. Singleton struggled to get an intuitive read on the situation.
He waved Wendy in. She came running silently and crouched down beside him. She indicated the door with her gun. He pointed to the window with his own gun and made a poking motion. “Break the glass and hold them,” he whispered. “I’ll go through the door.”
She spread her fingers, clenched her fist, and spread them again. Count of five. Everything on a count, the manual said. Decide upon a course of action, using hand signals if necessary, and then, on a count, strike.
At the count of five she shattered the window with her gun and yelled, “Don’t move,” before they registered her gun and shouted and jerked in terror, for a split second, forks and spoons midair in the warm kitchen. Singleton passed through the mudroom — its smell of rubber boots and tools and mink oil — and burst into the kitchen as they froze.
“Move, I’ll shoot.”
The old lady heaved up from the table and began to howl.
Wendy went in with her gun raised, moving it from Singleton’s target — the big man — to her target, the girl.
Norman Rockwell, he’d write in the report. We approached target in cover formation — Wendy covered — and entered a Norman Rockwell scene. Total element of surprise accomplished. No reactive counterattack in relation to our action in the field.
“Christ, what took you so long,” the man at the table said.
HOMECOMING
Jesus Christ. What took you so long. The words came to Hank swiftly, and he said them and felt himself grow still in the brilliant tension of the moment. To project a sense of knowingness, to center the fear, to draw everything into an assurance that it was unexpected. This was his instinctual reaction to the breaking glass and the sudden appearance of two guns. Not sarcasm, but basic survival in the form of nonchalance with a dash of sarcasm as MomMom slid down against the stove, hands up, waving, making an unusual screeching sound, like a wounded animal, her watery, rheumy eyes bulging, a sound that somehow matched the persistent buzz in his ears. The man in the doorway was blinking and lowering his aim slightly. The woman, beautiful, with startling eyes, in a leather jacket, her legs spread, her arms up, looked like she was Psych Corps. Both were, Hank speculated, keeping his elbows on the table, a finger on his chin, scanning the room. It was clear they were Corps from their careful adherence to their training. Or maybe not. The man had scars and was holding his gun in a soldierlike way, in a zone, breathing hard with his eyes pinpointing. But the woman was clearly leaning on her training, with her legs properly apart but her finger off the trigger, down around the guard. An agent for sure. A renegade, one of Rake’s old customers, a Black Flag member, would’ve trigger-fingered and shot the ceiling or hit somebody by now.