The Grays (46 page)

Screaming in agony, he forced his mangled hand into his pocket. As he got a fresh clip into his pistol, he gagged, bent double, and retched from the agony of using the hand.

Step by agonized step, he moved toward the tableau in the clearing. His uniform hung in tatters, blood gushed down his right arm and left a frozen trail in the snow. Now the gun came back up, this time pointing toward John Kelton.

John raised his rifle but he was not a military man and Rob got off the first round, which sent him flying back thirty feet into the trees. It hadn’t been a fatal shot, Rob saw, as John clutched a bleeding shoulder.

Snow cascaded down around Terry, who cried out when he saw his dad go down. Mrs. Kelton came rushing through the woods screaming.

Good, Rob thought, they were distracted. He prepared to shoot them both the moment he had clear lines of fire.

Dan lay in the sanctity of his wounds, looking into the peace of the darkening sky. He remembered Katelyn on the catwalk in the secret world of their childhood, when the grays had stitched their lives together. He remembered her thin summer nightgown, and that face, Katelyn in the summer of her girlhood, became what he would take with him if now was when he traveled on.

Lauren got off the inert form of the Kelton boy she had taken down. In that moment, Rob appeared. He looked through his one unswollen eye. Like a stone, the pistol dropped from his hand. His head lolled to his chest. “The others are coming,” he slurred. “Got to stop them, Lauren.”

As he toppled forward, Lauren shouted, “Somebody help him!” But there was nobody to do that. Rob was so caked with frozen blood he looked like he was wearing the uniform of a butcher.

She went down to him and embraced him, telling him that she would save him. She ripped off her own parka and put it under his head. He smiled a little. “You’re gonna freeze your ass,” he said. Then his eyes closed in the way people’s eyes close when they are dying and she cried out again, “Help us, somebody help us!”

Suddenly, the eyes opened. They bored into hers. “You’ve got work to do, soldier.”

Crying, begging God for his life, she picked up his pistol and ran to her duty in the woods.

It was dark and silent in among the trees. She peered ahead. Every time she moved, snow came in cascades off the pines. But the movement of others was easy to follow, because their passing had done the same thing.

She listened.

At that moment, a shocking and, she thought, totally inappropriate thing happened. She was plunged back into her babyhood, and was walking again for the first time.

That was Adam’s signature!

But Adam was dead, so—

She saw movement in the woods—a shadow back among the branches that had a great, soft eye like a deer.

At that instant, Conner, who was running blindly, saw Lauren’s face in his mind just as clearly as if she’d been on a TV screen five feet in front of him. Her eyes were full of a very special sort of light, pure blue as the sky, tinged at the edges with a million other colors, the richest, most beautiful light he had ever seen.

She saw him, also, in that moment, as if at the end of a tunnel of light that wound through the trees.

She struggled forward in a haze of cascading snow and whipping branches, and the light gleamed on the snow, elusive, disappearing at moments, then coming again.

Before she could reach Conner, though, a figure was there. The older of the two teens. He had a rifle and he was pointing it. Then Conner came into view. The kid turned toward him.

Lauren raised Rob’s pistol and in one motion fired, and the shooter flew into the snow and lay still. Then she moved toward Conner.

He turned toward her, looked from her face to the pistol—and literally disappeared before her eyes.

She still saw him, but only in her mind’s eye, standing there staring fixedly at her. Like Adam had done,
exactly like Adam!

She went down on one knee, put the pistol in the snow, and said, “Conner, Conner, I won’t hurt you.” She projected an image of herself hugging him. Instantly, an image came back into her head from Conner, of him begging silently with his hands.
I won’t hurt you
, she said in her mind, in exactly the same way she had talked to Adam.

There was a flash of movement before her, then another, this one more clear. Then he was standing there again. She threw her arms around him and lifted him to her. Her mind and his mind seemed to swirl together, and it was sheer pleasure and joy, like counting every number to the highest number, and knowing that there would be ever more perfect numbers ahead.

Katelyn came out of the woods.

As Conner went to his mother, Lauren asked him, “Where are the other shooters? Can you tell?”

“Close your eyes,” he said.

She saw an image of a man lying at the bottom of a ravine with his shoulder bleeding, a woman bending over him. They were huddled together, obviously desperate, trying to keep warm. John and Mrs. Kelton had given up the fight and moved to safety.

Conner asked Lauren, “What’s happening?”

“It’s going to end, honey. Very soon, it’s going to end.”

His face turned red, he grabbed her shoulders.
“What is it? Why do they hate me?”

“Conner, it’s going to end, it has to end.”

He pushed back from her, his eyes rolling back into his head. “Dad needs us.”

They began running, then, all three of them coming out of the shock of the moment, realizing that lives still depended on them.

They found both Rob and Dan, and Terry Kelton nearby huddled in the snow. As it turned out, Lauren had missed and he wasn’t even wounded, just in shock. His eyes were glazed with fear and he kept shaking his head. “What—what,” he whispered, “what?”

He’d come out of it, whatever Mike had done to him, whatever evil, evil thing.

Dan was still alive and conscious, and as they lifted him Conner took off his own jacket and tucked it around his father.

Lauren hurried to Rob. The moment she looked at him, she began to weep. She reached out and touched his graying face. The eyes stared, the lips lay open as if amazed by a death that had been, also, a discovery. With trembling fingers, she closed the eyes. Then she doubled over, gasped, and began to grieve.

Conner came. “He’s not dead,” he said, as if that was the strangest idea in the world. He laid a hand on his forehead, and Rob’s eyes flickered open. “See?”

Rob gazed up at her, silent. She looked to him, then to Conner, then back to Rob.

“Help us,” Conner said. Katelyn was trying to get Dan to his feet.

“Let me look,” Lauren said. She’d had standard survival and first-aid training, and she saw that he had a bullet-pierced shoulder. The bones were intact. The shoulder, while dislocated, had not been shattered by the bullet. There was blood, though, a lot of it. “You need a hospital,” she said. “Right now.”

On the way to the car, she saw more movement in the woods beside them. She whirled—but there was nothing there. To her horror, she realized that she had left the pistol behind. That had been stupid but it was also a warning that she was in shock. She had be careful, now, force herself to stay rational for them all. Survival, always, was in the details.

The movement came again.

Dan saw it, too. “A deer,” he gasped.

“Conner?” she asked.

He waved her to silence.

They continued to the car, the five of them, following the tracks that had
been laid in madness and terror. Dan cried out in pain, but they managed to help him across the Niederdorfer’s fence.

Once on the other side, he leaned on it. “Give me a second . . . a second . . .”

“We need an ambulance,” Katelyn said.

Lauren opened her cell phone. Fortunately, they were close enough to the town for a signal. She called Alfred, got through to Rob’s adjutant, and reported Rob as severely wounded and the pilot as a KIA to a very saddened young man. Then she arranged for air evac. Because of the trouble in the town, it might be delayed, but there was nothing more they could do.

The Air Force would come and gather its dead pilot and take him home in a box, where he would lie in honored earth and the memories of those who loved him. But maybe Rob would live to fight another fight.

Are you gonna marry him?

She actually laughed a little. “If I can.”

Katelyn gave her a questioning look.

“Terry,” Conner said, “your mom and dad are okay.” He looked at Lauren. “There’s another one out there.”

“I know, Rob.”

“No, alive. Near Rob. He’s crawling. He’s trying to get to me.”

“Can he, Conner?”

Conner shook his head.

“What are you talking about?” Dan asked

“Nothing,” Conner said quickly.

Lauren heard in her mind,
Don’t tell them I can hear their thoughts
.

No, Conner, I won’t
.

Dan touched the implant in his ear. It almost seemed as if he had heard Conner talking again, his voice curiously gentled, coming from the center of his own head. He would have to understand this, but not now. Now he had to save his family. He leaned on Katelyn as they walked, and she whispered, “I love you, Dan, I’ve remembered it all, and I love you.”

He turned to her. As much as he hurt, those words filled him with a torrent of swirling, strengthening relief. He raised his arms and held her, felt her against him and felt in his depths the love that defined his soul, for his Katelyn.

She raised her face to his and kissed him, and the kiss seemed to give him new life—until a wrong movement sent a firebrand of agony through his shoulder.

Tears in his eyes, he managed a smile as he went toward the car. “The spare,” he said. “I’ll change the tire.”

“We’ll change it,” Lauren said.

The light was almost gone, now, but they weren’t but two hundred feet away from the car.

“We’ll drive straight out the Wilton Road,” Katelyn said, “and take you to the hospital in Berryville. Unless this insanity is all over the place? Is it, Lauren, do you know?”

“Hold it.” Lauren could not believe what she was seeing. “Don’t move.”

An enormous dog had jumped onto the roof of the Callaghans’ car.

THE DOG STARED STRAIGHT AT
Conner, a long string of drool sliding out of its panting jaws.

“Jesus,” Dan said.

“That’s Manrico,” Katelyn said. “That’s the Keltons’ dog.”

“Conner, what’s happening?” Lauren asked.

Conner took a step back.

The dog jumped off the roof, came toward him.

“Don’t look in his eyes,” Conner said.

Manrico started toward them.

As he had with the people who had gotten like this, Conner tried to send Manrico calming thoughts, but the dog kept leaping through the snow, coming right toward him.

At that moment, a deer—a graceful, careful doe—came out of the woods. Her appearance was so unexpected, her form so exquisite, that even the onrushing Manrico paused and turned.

She had great, soft eyes and long lashes, and a face like a deep song. She walked forward, her narrow legs pushing aside snow that gleamed gold in the sun’s long, final rays. Then she sounded, the vaporous whistling that signals alarm in that peaceable race.

Manrico’s ears pointed toward her. She came closer, her delicate nose questing in the air, her eyes as calm and dark as midnight lakes.

The Two felt sure that the dog could be drawn away, now that the transmitter was no longer broadcasting its order to kill. He did not understand that the animal’s savagery would not end. While he knew he could not control the dog’s mind, he could distract it the way he was doing, by appearing
to be a succulent deer. He went closer, projecting every single detail of a female deer that he could recall.

Conner’s voice said,
Be careful
.

The Two went closer yet.

“Is that really a deer?” Lauren asked.

“Of course it is,” Terry said.

Conner took Lauren’s hand.

The deer came closer. Manrico looked from her back to Conner. He growled softly, a deadly sound. The deer sounded again, then began limping as a mother deer will when her fawn is threatened.

She was close now, just beyond the fence. Manrico’s haunches stiffened, his ears pricked forward, he whined a little. She sounded again and limped, lurching in the snow. That did it: he leaped the fence, barking and howling as he reached her and tore into her throat.

She screamed, then, and suddenly she was not a deer at all, she was a gray and in terrible trouble, being torn apart by the maddened dog. It leaped away from Manrico, one arm dangling, its head wobbling horribly.

Conner screamed and ran for the fence, but Lauren tackled him. “No!”

Sparks like fluid began spewing out of the gray. As the dog screamed and twisted against itself, the gray whirled faster and faster, until it became a dervish of sparks and flying fire.