“Miss?” he said to the sprawled tangle of red hair on the other side of the screen door. “Hey, miss? Can you hear me?” He swallowed and heard a loud click in his throat. His ear was no longer screaming, but there was a steady hum deep inside it. Johnny had an idea he was going to be living with that for a while. “If you can’t talk, wiggle your fingers.”
There was no sound, and the girl’s fingers didn’t wiggle. She didn’t appear to be breathing. He could see rain trickling down her pale redhead’s skin between the strap of her halter and the waistband of her shorts, but nothing else seemed to be moving. Only her hair looked alive, lush and vibrant, about two tones darker than orange. Drops of water glistened in it like seed pearls.
Thunder rumbled, less threatening now, moving off. He was reaching for the screen door when there was a much sharper report. To Johnny it sounded like a small-caliber rifle, and he threw himself flat.
“That was just a shingle, I think,” a voice whispered from close behind him, and Johnny cried out in surprise. He turned and saw Brad Josephson behind him. Brad was also on his hands and knees. The whites of his eyes were very bright in his dark face.
“What the fuck’re you doing here?” Johnny asked.
“White Folks” Fun Patrol,” Brad said. “Somebody’s got to make sure you guys don’t have too much of it-it’s bad for your hearts.”
“Thought you were going to get the rest of them in the kitchen.”
“And there they be,” Brad said. “Sitting on the floor in a neat little line. Cammie Reed tried the phone. It’s dead, just like yours. Probably the storm.”
“Yeah, probably.”
Brad looked at the mass of red hair on the Carvers” stoop. “She’s dead, too, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know. I think so, but… I’m going to ease the screen door open, try to make sure. Any objections?”
He rather hoped Brad would say hell yes, he had objections, a whole damn book of them, but Brad only shook his head.
“You better stay low while I do it,” Johnny said. “We’re okay on the right, but on the left I can’t see past Mary’s car.”
“I’ll be lower than a garter-snake in a stamping press.”
“I hope you’re never in a writing seminar I teach,” Johnny said. “And watch out for that broken china widget-don’t cut your hand.”
“Go on,” Brad said. “If you’re going to do it, do it.”
Johnny pulled the screen door open. He hesitated, not sure how to proceed, then picked up the girl’s cold starfish hand and felt for a pulse. For a moment there was nothing, and then-
“I think she’s alive!” he whispered to Brad. His voice was harsh with excitement. “I think I feel a pulse!”
Forgetting that there might still be people with guns lurking out there in the rain, Johnny yanked the screen wide, grabbed a handful of the girl’s hair, and lifted her head. Brad was crowded into the doorway with him now; Johnny could hear his excited breathing, could smell mingled sweat and aftershave.
The girl’s face came up, except it didn’t, not really, because there was no face there. All he could see was a shattered mass of red and a black hole that had been her mouth. Below it was a litter of white that he at first thought was rice. Then he realized it was her teeth, what was left of them. The two men screamed together in perfect soprano harmony, Brad’s shooting directly into Johnny’s humming ear like a spike. The pain seemed to go all the way into the middle of him.
“What’s wrong?” Cammie Reed cried from behind the swinging door that led into the kitchen. “Oh God, what’s wrong now?”
“Nothing,” the two men said, also together, and then looked at each other. Brad Josephson’s face had gone a queer ashy color.
“Just stay back,” Johnny called. He wanted it to be louder, but couldn’t seem to get any real volume into his voice. “Stay in the kitchen!”
He realized he was still holding the dead girl’s hair. It was kinky, like an unravelled Brillo pad-
No, he thought coldly. Not like that. Like what holding a scalp would be like, a human scalp.
He grimaced at that and opened his fingers. The girl’s face dropped back on to the concrete stoop with a wet smack that he could have lived without. Beside him, Brad moaned and then pressed the inner part of his forearm against his mouth to stifle the sound.
Johnny pulled his hand back, and as the screen door swung closed, he thought he saw movement across the street, in the Wyler house. A figure moving in the living room, behind the picture window. He couldn’t worry about the people over there now, though. He was currently too freaked to worry about anybody, including himself. What he wanted-the only thing in the world he did want, it seemed-was to hear the warble of approaching police cars and fire trucks.
All he did hear was thunder, the crackle of the fire at the Hobarts”, and the hiss of falling rain.
“Leave-” Brad began, then stopped and made a sound caught somewhere between a retch and a swallow. The spasm passed and he tried again. “Leave her.”
Yes. What else, at least for now, was there?
They began to retreat down the hall on their hands and knees. Johnny went backward at first, then swung around, brushing the splinters of the fallen Hummel figure with his moccasins. Brad was already past the doorway to the Carver dining room and most of the way to the kitchen, where his wife, also on her knees, waited for him. Brad’s considerable rear end wagged back and forth in a way Johnny might have considered comical under other circumstances.
Something caught his eye and he stopped. There was a small decorative table by the entrance to the dining room where David Carver would never preside over another Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas goose. This table had been loaded down with, gee, what a surprise, a dozen or so Hummel figures. The table wasn’t standing flat but leaning back against the wall to the right of the door, like a drunk dozing against a lamppost. One of its legs had been sheared off. The Hummel shepherdesses and milkmaids and farmboys were now mostly on their backs or faces, and there were more china fragments under the table where one or more had fallen off and shattered. Among the painted pieces there was something else, something black. In the gloom, Johnny first took it for the corpse of some huge dead bug. Another crawling pace disabused him of that idea.
He looked back over his shoulder at the fist-sized hole in the upper panel of the screen door. If a slug had made that, one running the last part of a downward trajectory-
He traced the course such a hypothetical slug might have taken and saw that, yes, it could have sheared off the table-leg, knocking the table itself back into that posture of leaning drunken surprise. And then, its force spent, come to rest?
Johnny reached into the litter of china, hoping he wouldn’t cut himself (his hand was shaking badly, and concentration would not still it), and picked up the black object.
“What you got?” Brad asked, crawling toward Johnny.
“Brad, you get back here!” Belinda whispered fiercely.
“Hush, now,” Brad told her. “What you got there, John?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and held it up. He supposed he did know, actually, had known almost as soon as he had determined that it wasn’t the remains of some weird summer beetle. But it was like no fired slug he had ever seen in his life. It wasn’t the one that had taken the girl’s life, that much seemed certain; it would have been flattened and twisted out of shape. This thing didn’t seem to have so much as a scratch on it, although it had been fired, had gone through a panel of the screen door, and had sheared off the table-leg.