Seven
Leon had taught her how to shoot Vivian's revolver in
the woods behind the house. Nobody, however, had ever taught her how to
handle her own impulsiveness. Caitlin cried out her frustration the
instant the pistol barked and snapped back in her hand. She hadn't meant
to shoot him, only to scare him away.
But her bullet went a few inches astray, and guns did
not scare Leon Biggs. He surged forward with a growl. Shrieking in rage
that she could be so stupid, she tossed aside the handgun and fled into
the trees. She had nowhere to go. Rex would never be able to protect her
now, not after what she had done. Leon was the only law of the land in
Brighton County.
She ran to dispel the tension tearing at her gut.
She flew through the trees, sucking the air of the hills into her lungs.
It was getting dark now, and a full moon shown through the purple sky.
Dew from an earlier shower sparkled in the underbrush like the scattering
of precious diamonds.
She generated her own cooling breeze as she ran. She
could run into the next county or even the next state with her long legs
and callused feet flying so effortlessly along the deer trail. Except
that it would be pitch black when the moon set, and she was already hungry
and thirsty. Wearing nothing but an old, loose-fitting shift, where would
she go in the wilderness? Leon had deputies in the two closest towns.
A bit of nagging guilt accompanied her flight through
the trees. It wasn't all Leon's fault. He had spoiled her as she had
gotten older. He had given her the master bedroom and bought her a stereo
and a canopied bed from the big cities. He had courted her in his own
sick fashion, and in her naive greed, she had taken his offerings, even
knowing what he had done to Aunt Vivian and how badly her mother's death
had twisted him inside.
She should have stayed in school. Leon had let her
drop out on purpose. If he had wanted to isolate her from the world and
keep her ignorant so that he could have her for himself, he had
succeeded. She had been too blind to see.
Caitlin moaned in anguish and ran all the faster. In
the end, she winded herself. Her bare feet slapped the wet earth of a
trail meandering down a quiet ravine. She stopped there, confident that
she had outdistanced Leon by miles and miles. He was a big man, built
like a bear, and he positively waddled when he ran. How could he hope to
catch her? In her last year of school, she had been able to outrun even
the boys in her gym class, and she could certainly outrun the Rather
brothers.
She hadn't thought about a destination, but she was
near Troll Valley Road. Just down the hill a bit awaited a burned out
hulk of an old school bus where she and her friends had played during her
early school years. It had become her personal sanctuary. She visited
often during the summer when she needed time alone to think.
An interlocking mass of grape vines hid the hulk of
rusting metal from view. The door yawned open like the opening to a
cave. Nothing was left of the day's light to seep through windows
rendered mostly opaque by rust stains seeping down the sides from the pitted
roof.
She circled the giant fairy-mound among the trees,
then stuck her head inside in search of coons and possums that may have
taken up housekeeping. Or maybe a transient, some old toothless alcoholic
who'd like nothing better than to have a hapless, half-dressed girl come
stumbling into his isolated abode.
The dingy old bus was empty inside. Sheets of
cardboard and nests of dried grass warned of past tenants, both human and
animal, but nothing looked at all fresh. Caitlin went to the back seat,
brushed the dust off, and lay herself down in the cool dark. Her heart
pitter-pattered in her chest, not because of the long run through the
woods, but in fear of what Leon would do when he caught her.
Leon had hardened over the years. She had heard
stories of shoot-outs with drug and moonshine runners, and especially the
one about dragging old man Cramer into the woods and putting a bullet in
his head for sodomizing some local grade school kids. She knew what the
word meant. She lived between the hills and civilization, between
ignorance and the kind of street smarts only a cop could bequeath to a
daughter.
A stepdaughter, rather. She had been a baby in
Katrina Kingsley's bruised arms when her mother had arrived in Brighton
Hollow, so she had no memory of her real father, or of her home in the
hills. Her memories of childhood began with Sheriff Leon Biggs and his
beautiful house on the edge of town. They were vaguely pleasant memories
for the most part, until her mother died and Aunt Vivian tried to take her
place and keep the household together.
Caitlin rested in the dark and the cool and made her
plans behind closed eyelids. She'd go into Brighton Hollow and talk again
to Deputy Rex Hogan. Rex knew what was going on between the sheriff and
his second-hand family. The young deputy would give in to her sooner or
later. Someday, Rex would be sheriff, and she would be his wife. When
that day came, Leon would be a sorry old man who would never dare touch
her again.
Caitlin clambered to her feet when she heard the hiss
of static. Leon's radio. The yellow beam of a flashlight darted through
the front door of the bus. She rolled off the seat and squatted behind
one of the rear seats, trembling with panic. She should never have come
here. Leon had known where she would go. Now, if she could only keep her
harsh, ragged breathing from giving her away entirely.
"Caitlin? You in here, child?"
The beam of light darted about the interior of the
bus. Debris crackled beneath his weight.
"You came about a half foot from putting a bullet in
my face, little girl. If you think I'm gonna let that pass lightly, it's
not going to happen. But if you wanna come out and discuss the situation
calmly..."
When he got close, Caitlin came out screaming. She
leaped into the man's face, clawing his eyes with both hands and bringing
one knee up into his groin, a technique a girlfriend had suggested she use
on the Rather brothers and one she had never tried before.
A massive arm swung out and sent her careening to the
floor of the bus. She crawled away frantically only to have a heavy foot
clamp down on a bare ankle and pin her in place.
Leon dragged her screaming to her feet by one arm.
Her own frantic writhing tore her shift down her right side from shoulder
to hip, and her thrashing accomplished nothing but to show them both how
helpless she was. He cuffed her wrists together with a snap of cold
metal, hoisted her into the air by her arms, and hung her bodily from the
broken end of an overhead hand rail.
Caitlin cried out as the cuffs dug into the skin of
her wrists, astonished that he could move so fast and be so thoughtlessly
brutal. She kicked about in a futile display of anger, her bare toes
inches above the floor of the old bus, but she fell quiet when Leon gave a
low, ominous chuckle. With her shift all but torn from her body, Caitlin
was suddenly deathly afraid.
Casually, Leon unholstered his thirty-eight
revolver. He ran the cold tip of the barrel up the side of her bare leg.
"Use your head, little girl. You know the things people have done to one
another in these woods. Nobody sees. Nobody hears."
"I didn't mean to shoot at you!" Caitlin cried. "I
just didn't want you hurting me anymore!"
"Hurting you?" Leon snorted in disgust. "I've never
hurt you, child."
"You raped Aunt Vivian!" Caitlin shrieked, enraged
that he could deny his crimes. "And if you weren't so drunk all the time,
you'd rape me, too!"
His free hand lashed out and grasped her throat,
shutting off her air. "I never tried to kill you, little girl. I never
left a bruise on your lily white body. That aunt of yours is so frail, I
could bust her in half if I so much as sneezed, and neither did that ever
happen."
Even so, he was a bully and a terrorist. She wished
in her final moments of consciousness that she had shot the bastard in the
face and killed him.
Leon let go of her throat before she fainted. Her
lungs sucked air of their own accord. She would have preferred
unconsciousness to what was going to happen next. His anger calmly
evaporated, and he put his gun away with one hand, but he placed the other
against her bare hip in absent-minded fascination.
A dull, distant thunder intervened. At first she
thought it a part of the roar of her own pulse pounding in her head. And
then she heard lightning crackle, except that it was a long, drawn-out
sound, growing louder by the moment. And then it didn't sound like
lightning at all, but rather like an airplane tearing through the sky at
horrendous speed.
The sound of its impact boomed in the near distance.
She jerked violently, certain that she had just heard the sound of a
hundred people getting killed.
Except that it happened again further off to the
north. This time, she recognized it as the sound of another shooting star
hitting the ground, although closer to her than the one that had hit
Connie’s house. Still another came from the south. And a third, and a
fourth from all around. The very air quivered with multiple impacts.
Distracted by the noise, Leon looked around. "What
the hell..."
The door of the old bus flickered green light. Leon
went outside to investigate. Caitlin kicked against the seat behind her
and sent her handcuffed wrists sliding down the chromed handrail and off
the broken end. She careened forward, twisting to one side to absorb the
impact of her fall.
"My God!" Leon cried out from outside. "What's
happening?"
Caitlin struggled to her feet holding to what was
left of her torn shift with cuffed hands. With a cry of frustration, she
let it fall from her body and kicked it aside in frustration. Dressed in
nothing but a pair of Leon's handcuffs, she went outside to see what the
commotion was all about.
There were lights in the evening sky, thousands of
tiny balls of green light that spat and sparkled as they came roaring down
to earth. They were beautiful, handfuls of flickering emeralds thrown to
earth by the hand of some strange god. They cast a green illumination and
darting shadows though the dark interior of the bus.
Caitlin retained enough presence of mind to duck
around the front of the bus and dive into dense underbrush. Within
seconds, she had made a clean escape, except that her wrists were still
cuffed, and the underbrush was tearing at her skin. It was hard to
imagine what she might do with her newfound freedom as naked and helpless
as a nightcrawler stranded on concrete. Deputy Rex Hogan in Brighton
Hollow was her only hope.
"My God, Caitlin!" Leon Biggs cried out behind her.
"Will you look at this! Caitlin, come out here and look at this!"
Caitlin was out of earshot by that time, using the
light of the meteors crashing through the atmosphere to wend her way
between the trees. She fought to put as much distance between herself and
her stepfather as possible. When he noticed her missing, not even the
spectacle of all history taking place over Brighton Hollow would distract
him in his search for her. Too much was at stake. She didn't dare allow
him to catch her a second time.
Her very life was at risk.
