The moon slid behind a wall of dark, boiling clouds.
She came up again, the knife flaying at his face. He knocked it away, ducked under it, and cracked her alongside the head with the butt of the 12-gauge. She made an almost canine yelping-sound and fell backward with a resounding splash.
He went right over the top of her, feeling his shoes come down on her soft belly, then on the ball of her head. He pitched forward and was half-dog paddling, half-crawling through the violently thrashing water.
He fell back on his ass and he was only in a few feet of water now, the shadows of the willows on the riverbank falling over him with a dark chill. He could feel the sticky, warm oozing of his own blood running down his face and chest.
The woman came out of the water about seven, eight feet away.
She was small and frail, pathetically thin. She’d lost her knife, but was coming on anyway. Making a low growling sound, she fought through the water, her jaws snapping open and closed.
“Come and get it, bitch,” Lou gasped.
He brought the shotgun up, aimed generally for her chest, and pulled the trigger. The chamber explosion was like thunder. Buckshot vaporized her neck, her sternum, meat spraying out over the surface of the water.
She was thrown back into the deep.
She fought free one more time, the hole in her upper chest big enough to toss a softball into. She screamed and writhed and sank beneath the water.
Lou made it to shore.
Panting, he watched and waited.
Nothing. He figured with that hole in her, she had filled up with water like an empty can and sank to the bottom, down into that loathsome blackness. In his fatigued, frazzled mind, he could see the currents dragging her along the muddy bottom, easing her past the drop-off where she would submerge into the depths, her clown-white face caressed by river weeds.
He pulled himself wearily to his feet.
Jesus, he was running on batteries here; he couldn’t take much more. Dawn was still hours away. The river had turned into a nightmare. What next?
He looked and saw the schoolhouse.
And then he knew.
23
Joe was a large man and he was not designed for running.
Powerful and menacing, you didn’t want to go one on one with him. He’d crush you, pull your arms off, and use your skull for an ashtray. In his checkered career, he’d ridden with both the Outlaws and Satan’s Choice up in Canada.
He’d fought with them.
Killed with them.
Done time with them.
He was a tough man and a good guy to have at your side.
But he was not a runner.
Two blocks of steady pounding after they’d evacuated the church and his legs felt like they’d been pumped with gelatin. He grabbed Ruby Sue by the shoulder, pulled her to a stop.
“Can’t, babe,” he panted. “Can’t run… no more.”
She looked around desperately.
She was winded, too, but, then again, she weighed 115 pounds and not 350 like Joe. That was one hell of a wagon of meat to be pulling around.
“Over there,” she said, indicating a narrow passage between two Quonset huts.
Joe nodded, dragging his ass over there, squeezing in and collapsing. “Damn,” he said.
“Easy, baby, easy,” Ruby Sue said, stroking his huge forearm. She peered around the corner of the hut. Wet streets reflected moonlight. Leaves were heaped in gutters. Storefronts were silent and staring.
“It’s cool, babe. It’s cool. They must’ve found easier pickings.”
Joe suddenly looked up. “You hear that?”
Ruby Sue cocked her head. “What?”
“That,” Joe said, narrowing his eyes. “Gunfire. You hear it?”
She nodded. “Oh yeah. Somebody’s bustin’ some caps.”
“Big time.”
Joe was jealous, if anything.
They’d rolled into this shithole with enough artillery to start World War III and look where they were now—unarmed, desperate, in a world of serious hurt. About all they had were their wits and that wasn’t gonna slay the beast.
Joe figured he could probably take one of the rabids out with his bare hands. Had they been people, he could’ve done three or four of them without working up a sweat. He’d done it before.
But these things, damn, they were wild. Vicious. And strong, too. They fought like animals.
Ruby Sue and he had barely made it out of the church alive.
As it was, he had two of those pricks hanging off him like remoras on a shark’s belly. He’d tossed them—one into the bushes, the other right through the windshield of a parked car—but it had been close. Real close.
They’d scratched him, but he hadn’t been bitten and that was the important thing. He figured the others got killed.
And if Lisa was among them, all the better.
Rested now, he crawled out and checked the scene. Looked cool. He had some ideas here. One of them was to get some kind of earthmover, maybe a front-end loader, a big nasty piece of iron, and plow right through the car barricade. That was a possibility.
Then he looked up the street. “You check that?” he said to Ruby Sue.
“What’s that, babe?”
“Right there.”
She saw it, nodded, started to smile. “We on the same page?”
“Sure as shit,” he said.
There was a sporting goods store just up the block. It looked like maybe it had been ransacked—the plate glass windows were shattered, the door was hanging off its hinges… but if they were really lucky, they might find some guns there. And ammo. Then they could get a car, find themselves a big piece of iron and they’d be good to go.
Silently, cautiously, they moved up the sidewalk.
“We gonna leave without her?” Ruby Sue asked.
“We gotta, babe,” he said. “No choice in the matter. I think she’s done anyway.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He put his arm around her, held her tight. She felt good. “But I ain’t taking any chances. We can’t go back to Detroit empty-handed. That’s why we’re going to Utah.”
She stopped. “Utah?”
“Sure. Remember Brooker? Glen Brook? Rode with the Angels? He’s retired now. Got hisself a big place out in Utah—horses, cattle, bikes. Big old ranch. That’s where we’re going. Nobody’ll find us there. We get out of here, we quick clean out our place, and head west. Fuck the rest.”
The inside of the sporting good’s store looked very much like a cyclone had done its thing there. Shelves were emptied, display cases broken. Everything from rubber waders to fishing poles, hunting vests to basketballs was heaped and piled on the floor.
They had to wade through the mess.
The gun cases were shattered, too, but the guns themselves, for the most part, had not been disturbed. Joe got a nice piece for himself: a Colt Python .357 Mag and some speedloaders. He found Ruby Sue a Browning .380 semi-auto. He took a 12-gauge Remington pump off the rack and filled a duffel with boxes of ammo. The guns all had trigger locks, but the keys were in a drawer beneath the cash register.
“Now we’re ready,” he said.
Ruby Sue went to use the head and he kept an eye out. A thief most of his life, the desire to back a truck up and empty the place was overwhelming. Overwhelming, just not exactly practical. Or smart.
He turned around, smiling at the idea, and there was an elderly man standing a few feet away.