Rory froze, mouth gaping inside the helmet. He blinked, telling himself that couldn’t have just happened.
A pile of ashes sat on the top step.
The front lawn, on either side of the steps, was smoking from the heat.
Oh shit. Oh God. Oh shit, Rory thought, even as the more analytical part of his mind examined the event and tried to make sense of what had happened. A weapon had whirred out from the side of the helmet. Its sensors had reacted to the attack, thinking the stoner was a threat because of the impact of the apple.
Now he turned, in utter shock, and stared at E.J. and Derek, who seemed just as stunned. As soon as the bullies realized the mask was now pointing in their direction, however, they screamed and fled, moving faster than he had ever seen them move before.
He raised the helmet and turned to glance again at the ruin of the front door and the ashes on the steps, too shaken to appreciate the terror of his tormentors. At some point, he had dropped his trick or treat bag. Now he lowered the helmet and bent to retrieve it, numbly picking up items of candy that had spilled from it as he attempted to restore a semblance of order to his mind.
Once he had done, he looked again at the smoking ruin of the house, and suddenly the shell of shock that had formed around him cracked and fell away. Tearing off the Predator mask, he tossed it into the bushes surrounding the house.
Then he ran.
The two-way radio squawked. Nettles was back in the RV, monitoring local police chatter. Now his voice burst in from the static.
“McKenna, you hearing this?” he barked.
He must’ve put his two-way up to the police scanner, because McKenna and Casey heard the crackling voice come through, but it sounded like it was coming from deep inside a well.
“…got a male juvenile, ten to twelve years old,” the officer was saying. “Ran right in front of my car, now moving east on Woodruff.”
McKenna swore, spun the wheel, and turned the car into a squealing, smoking one-eighty. Emily wouldn’t thank him later for the rubber he’d left back on the road, but the officer had spotted what could well have been Rory, and she wasn’t going to give a shit about her tires if he could get their boy back in one piece.
“Repeat,” the voice on the police scanner said. “Moving east on Woodruff.”
Stay alive, kid, McKenna thought. Whatever just blew up, stay the hell alive.
“Nebraska,” he barked into his radio. “You got wheels?”
Janice Pelham had joined the Neighborhood Watch out of civic duty. She wasn’t a cop, not quite, but as a security officer she had been deputized to perform certain functions in conjunction with the police. She also had a sweet ride and a uniform that her boyfriend Elwin loved her to wear at home, and she didn’t mind at all.
In the three years since she’d started this job, she’d mostly dealt with burglary, vandalism, and illegal parking, plus some domestic disturbances that had required the police to step in. Now she stared at the front of the house whose front door had been vaporized and realized that this job might be dangerous, that even though she wasn’t a real cop, she could still be killed doing it, even in a neighborhood like this one.
The kid had bolted, but she’d radioed it in. The real police could track him down. She wanted to get home to Elwin and take the uniform off—and not in the fun way they both preferred. Janice was thinking about taking it off and never putting it on again.
She turned and started back toward her patrol car—and froze.
“Where’s my fucking car?”
Nebraska Williams held onto the wheel as he blasted the stolen Neighborhood Watch patrol car around a corner. The tires shrieked. He had the flashers turning, strobing red light and pale shadows all over the lawns and houses. Parents and kids had scrambled out of the street when the explosion had erupted, and now they mostly stared from front lawns or had gone indoors, where they peered out of windows. Trick or treat had ended abruptly this year, but the kiddies in McKenna’s neighborhood would never forget it.
When McKenna’s question came through, he snatched up the two-way from the seat and thumbed the button.
“I got wheels,” he said, and grinned. “Something flashy.” Then he dropped the humor, was suddenly all business again. “Kid’s spooked, he’s rabbiting. Talk to me. Where’s he gonna feel safe? Where’s someplace he knows?”
Huffing, heart thundering in his chest, Rory raced across the middle school baseball field. His thoughts were beginning to return to their orderly nature as he went back through the events of the previous minutes. He had killed a man, but he told himself that he couldn’t be held responsible… that he didn’t hold himself responsible.
Dad, he thought.
But no. He couldn’t be blamed either. Even though his father had sent the helmet and gauntlet, he hadn’t expected the package to fall into his son’s hands. Not even the manufacturer of the technology—whom Rory assumed must be some nation’s military, some corporation that specialized in finding inventive ways to murder people on battlefields—could really be said to be responsible. They had all had a part to play in the death of the stoner and the destruction of his front door—Rory, his dad, the military, the postal worker, E.J., Derek, and the stoner prick who’d thrown a rotten apple at a kid.
But when it came right down to it, when you reached the end of the long rope of cause and effect, only one sure and solid fact remained: a man was dead. And despite everything, Rory still felt like it was his fault, and although he didn’t process emotions the way other people did, he thought he might cry.
He reached the scoreboard and found the niche he had used several times to hide from the bullies. In the darkness there, he cowered and tried to catch his breath. He knew he ought to run home, but the police would be looking for him. They hadn’t seen his face, but if anyone talked to E.J. or Derek, they would figure out pretty quickly that they were looking for Rory McKenna and then the cops would be at his house and his mother would know what he had done… and that was the worst part. The idea that his mother would learn that he had killed someone, even if it really wasn’t his fault, even if it was just the stupid fucking helmet… Rory loved his mother more than anything. She understood him like nobody else ever would and he knew that. If his mom cried or screamed or felt horror or disgust because of him…
In the niche beneath the scoreboard, he kept trying to catch his breath, wondering how all this had happened.
Am I going to jail?
“Dad,” he whispered in the darkness. “Where are you?”
A low growl replied from the shadows. Rory froze, turning slowly to see a flash of canine eyes in the dark. A dog—a big damn dog—ready to bite his face off. Still winded, he knew he should run, but knew he wouldn’t get far before it caught him.
The dog shifted and some of the starlight bled in, letting him see the silhouette of its head. He recognized it immediately—Bugsy, the damn pit bull that menaced him every fucking day on his way home from school. It growled again, low, quieter this time… and moved closer.
Then the pit bull dropped its head and let its tongue loll out. It moved even nearer to him and nudged him with its huge, heavy head. Rory furrowed his brow in confusion. Tentatively, he reached out… and petted the pit bull’s head. To his surprise, the dog didn’t flinch. Instead, it lifted its eyes and looked at him, and a sound came from its chest that was different from a growl. A friendly, contented sound. Rory petted the dog again, smiling in amazement at the sudden sweetness of the dog that had so terrified him.