Kelly was a dead weight, unconscious or dead she wasn’t sure. But there were cars and trucks parked under the trees and she kept heading for them on weaker and weaker legs, reaching down to draw her .45. There was a bellow behind her and she looked over her shoulder, with difficulty, to see the monster tearing at the door she had exited through. It seemed a little pissed.
There had been candles in the chancel. A couple of them had fallen over but gone out in the blood. The rest… propane was heavier than air. But even though most of it would pool along the ground, some was bound to raise up. When, when?
As she was thinking that the world went white and she was thrown off her feet.
She could only have been unconscious for a moment because when she got to her knees pieces of the church were still raining down around her. The fish thing had disappeared but from the screams from within the burning building, she guessed that he was having a fine old fish-fry.
“All that catfish and so little time,” she muttered.
She looked at Kelly and shook her head at all the damage. Besides what was obviously a flailed chest he’d caught some splinters from the exploding church. Feeling for a pulse at the neck she got nothing. It didn’t seem fair to have carried him this far and have him die on her.
“Fuck,” she muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck…”
Some of the former worshippers were still on the ground from the explosion; others were getting to their feet. She walked over to the nearest one and put the barrel of her gun to his forehead.
“Give me your fucking keys,” she ground out.
When the dazed man had handed them over she picked him up by the front of his shirt.
“Which one?” she asked.
“Red truck,” he muttered, pointing. “What happened?”
“I killed your fucking god,” Barb said, throwing him to the ground and trotting to the truck. She realized as she did so that it was the mechanic. “AND MY CAR HAD BETTER BE READY ON MONDAY!” Well, at least the truck should work.
Mondaine turned at the shots from the church and swore.
“The bitch got behind us!”
“Who the fuck is she?” Henri Lancereau cursed.
“I don’t know,” Mondaine said, trotting for his police car. “But she is going to die tonight. If we can’t give her soul to the Master, then we’ll just have to send it to hell.”
He hurried to his car and drove to the church, pulling up out front in a squeal of tires. But even as he started for the front door a wave of people came rushing out. Suddenly, with the sound of a hail of bullets, his head exploded in pain.
He sank to the ground, moaning, at the white fire that filled his head. He was usually one of the acolytes and his link to the Master was strong. Now it filled him with pain as the Master was filled with pain. But it stopped and he stumbled to his feet, shaking his head to clear it.
“What’s happening?” he yelled as people streamed by. “What’s happening?”
He pulled his shotgun out of the car, heading for the front and then angling to the side. It sounded like the Master was at the back left for some reason. He was trotting around the side when the building erupted.
When he came to, he felt a horrible wash of dread. The link he’d felt to his Master this last six months was gone. It felt as if the Master was gone. He suddenly remembered, unshielded by the power that had filled him, all the things he’d done, all the women he had raped and killed before the Master’s first manifestation and raped and helped to kill since. The pleasure that he’d gotten from it, and still did. He had gone to the Master freely.
But with the Master gone, retribution was sure to fall on all of them. Unless… it would be hard to cover up. But nobody in the town would talk; they were all implicated. A fire in the old church. People dead. They could clean up the remains of the hooker. He wasn’t sure what would be left of the Master.
If…
That bitch. There was one fucking witness. What she would say would seem insane, but she could point fingers, talk about things best left buried.
Where the fuck was she? Dead in the church?
But then he saw a figure, striding across the parking lot. A look, a move.
Her.
He stumbled to his feet, looking around. Many of the Cult of Almadu had not come freely to the worship and apparently, bereft of their cozy link to the Master, many of them had gone insane. Others were sitting with their heads in their hands or stumbling around drunkenly.
He had to stop her. He saw the bitch getting in Claude Thibideau’s red pickup and hurried back to his squad car.
It was a long way to the next town.
One of the things Barbara had been careful to carry along was the hand-held GPS she used for navigation. She started the truck, put on her seatbelt, pulled the GPS out of her backpack, unfolded the little suction cup thingy and slapped it on the windshield. Then she put the truck in gear and floored it, spinning gravel and squealing tires as she hit the blacktop.
The GPS was taking a while to find satellites, but that was okay. The first possible turn wasn’t for a few miles. She put the headlights on bright, pressed the accelerator down and settled down to put miles between herself and Thibideau. She wasn’t sure what she was going to tell the authorities. Tell them it was attempted rape by the deputy? Anything to get them into the town, asking questions. Or, maybe, just walk away? No, that was the wrong thing in the eyes of the Lord.
Oh… heck. The things she’d said. And done.
“Dear Lord, please forgive me for some of my words, thoughts and actions this night. I really was… Well, I’m sorry…”
She was a half mile out of town, approaching the first curve, when she saw lights behind her, closing fast.
The parish car was an unmodified Ford Crown Victoria, but there was no way that a pickup truck could outrun it on the bayou roads. It was lower to the ground and could take the turns faster, not to mention being faster in the straightaway. Slowly, he gained ground. And there was nothing around, nowhere for her to go but straight on. He’d push her off the road, put a bullet in her head if she was still alive and then feed her body to the gators. He wasn’t getting anywhere close to the bitch after what she’d done to Claude and Marceau and the rest. What was she, a fucking ninja? Soccer mom, my ass. The truck could get pulled out and dumped. Or fixed up. Whatever. No witnesses meant no witnesses. Probably some of the people in town would have to be… cleaned up as well. More gator food. Save that for later.
He’d closed from better than a mile to less than a hundred yards. All he had to do was run her off the road.
“You’d think a mechanic would soup up his own truck,” Barbara muttered as the police car started to drift to the left. He was going to try to hit her on the rear end and spin her out. At the speed she was going, she was likely to go into a roll. And that would be that.
“Fine,” she muttered. “You wanna dance. Let’s fu… let’s dance.”
She slammed on her brakes and pulled to the left, fighting the truck as it tried to get away from her.
The truck suddenly braked, swerving to the left and caught his right front quarter panel. He was going nearly a hundred miles an hour and the slight change in vector pulled the car into an out-of-control spin. The last thing Deputy Sheriff Mondaine saw was the tree-trunk headed for his windshield.