He was surprised to find the back door of the hardware store half-open, silence warning him away and simultaneously urging him to enter, have a look inside. The open door was nothing, really. In the present circumstances, it was less than nothing, trivia beneath consideration by the conscious mind. But Amy's parents never left the back door open. Never.
Pushing through as quietly as possible, he closed the door behind him, heard the latch engage. The storeroom was as silent as a church when all the members of the congregation have departed for their homes, a hush that somehow was not reassuring in the least. He listened briefly at the open doorway to the store itself, stepped through... and froze.
He spotted Amy's mother first, a crumpled rag-doll figure to his right, her face averted, wispy hair in back all clotted with blood and something that resembled suet. Stancell felt his stomach lurch again, but fought it down, eyes traveling around the store until they came to rest on Amy's father, sprawled behind the register. The whole top of his head was gone, and there was no need for a check on vital signs.
A moaning, whisper-soft, distracted Rick and brought his heart into his throat. It came from the direction of the rifle rack, which Amy's father kept well-stocked, empty now, together with the shelves that usually supported ammunition boxes. In a flash, it registered that someone had cleaned out the weapons, obviously trying to disarm the town, and then his thoughts were back with Amy, focused on that feeble moan.
He stepped around the counter and the first glance told him everything. Naked, she huddled against the wall, her knees drawn up and encircled by her arms. Her face was hidden, muffling the hollow sound of weeping, but she flinched and screamed out loud as Rick knelt down beside her and rested one hand on her shoulder. It took several moments for the girl to recognize him — one eye was swollen nearly shut from the explosive impact of a fist or boot heel. Blood had dried in abstract patterns on her face, but Rick ignored it, busy helping her to stand, supporting her while she tested her legs to see if she could walk with his assistance. Holding her against him, standing between Amy and the lifeless bodies of her parents, he eventually steered her toward the storage room and found a long smock hanging behind the door. He helped her into it, but Amy folded as he fumbled with the topmost button. He caught her halfway to the floor.
He held her in his arms, and she was feather-light, as if the substance of her soul had already flown. He checked her pulse with trembling fingers, pressed his ear against her lips and held his breath until he felt hers, faint and tickling on his skin. She moaned when he lifted her again, and Rick was thankful for the smallest sign that she was still alive.
The Santa Rosa Clinic was a hundred yards from where he stood, but Rick knew he would make it, as he had succeeded with his father earlier that morning. This time, with a little luck, his trek might not end up in death for someone he loved. This time there might still be a chance.
He carried Amy, and the rage within him had a different thrust, a different focus now. He knew precisely what had happened in the hardware store, what she had suffered — granting that a man can understand the pain, the stark humiliation. He hurt for Amy, for his father and the Grundys, and his burning anger made itself apparent in the tears that streaked his face, the wordless curses that emerged in primal snarls as Rick pushed through the doorway, out into the alley and the noonday heat.
One final stop to make before he doubled back and got his father's pistol at the station. One more stop before he set about exacting his revenge. It might be brief, but it would still be sweet, for all of that. When he was finished — when they finished him — the bastards would be conscious of the fact that someone had opposed them, someone had resisted to the death. It wasn't much, but at the moment it was all Rick Stancell had. And it would have to do.
Enoch Snyder had been old as long as anyone in Santa Rosa could remember. He had been Old Enoch, since the fifties, maybe earlier. He had been old at twenty-two, when he came home from Tarawa with steel enough inside him to make magnets go berserk, and scars like some demented road map covering his slender frame. At twenty-three, his hair had been snow white, and he had been Old Enoch ever since. A man could only see so much and cling to youth, a solemn fact Enoch viewed with philosophical acceptance, leaving the regrets to others who were cursed with worse misfortunes than himself. He did not really mind the way his body ached all over just before a rain; the rains were few and far between in Santa Rosa, as it was, and he had not seen snow in more than thirty years. At sixty-six, the wiry former Leatherneck admitted that was old now, but he was far from finished.
Those madmen in the street had startled him — with all their guns, and bodies being hauled out of the ambulance that way — but he was not afraid. He knew that he would miss Bud Stancell and their conversations over coffee in the afternoon. Ex-Leathernecks were hard to find these days, and Stancell knew — had known — what it was like to lose your youth inside a foxhole, waiting for the enemy to hit you one last time before the break of dawn. Korea wasn't Tarawa, but hell was hell, no matter where you found it. And if you came out of the flames at all, you were a different man. You came out old before your time, with something hard and cold inside that never really went away. The memory of wholesale killing followed you around forever, waiting on the fringe of your unconscious for a chance to haunt your dreams, but you survived and went about your life as if that frozen part of you inside was still alive and well.
For Enoch Snyder, fear had been erased at Tarawa, blown out of him along with spleen, appendix and eighteen inches of intestine. Having seen the worst that life could offer, having dragged himself away from it and lived to walk again, he knew that fear was nothing more than dread of the unknown. He did not pass his hand through fire or pick up rattlesnakes, because he knew precisely what would happen, but he did not fear tomorrow, either. Having seen and done the worst that man could see or do, he had no tune for fear. He would survive, or he would die, depending on his timing, whether it turned out to be his turn, and in the end, it would not make a bit of difference either way.
But in the meantime he could make the dirty sons of bitches dance a little, yes, indeed.
The M-l rifle was a classic carbon copy of the one that he had used on Tarawa. He had not fired the piece in over seven years, but it was oiled and polished, sighted in and ready. Once a week or so, he took the weapon out and cleaned it, for the practice, for the memories it held. They did not give him nightmares anymore; they were the stuff of Snyder's life, and he had learned to live with them, as he had learned to live with stiffness in one hip, the aches and pains of growing old with bits of shrapnel in your flesh.
His eyes were clear, his vision twenty-twenty, uncorrected, and his hands were steady as he raised the rifle to his shoulder, looped his index finger through the trigger guard and sighted on a mental image of the dark man's face. On Tarawa, he had been taught to kill up close and personal, before the world exploded in his face and he was hauled away for makeshift reconstruction on the mercy ship offshore. How many had he killed before they nearly killed him back? No way to tell, at this late date. In the confusion, with steel and smoky thunder in the air, you killed with the finesse of a demented butcher run amok, and some of those you killed got up a moment later, slashing at your back, your friends, with bayonets and sabers. It's hard to keep a tally when the dead don't die, and all a man can think about is whether he has ammo left to kill again, again, again.