Thirty-five
Abe had taken to sleeping in a back room of the
plant. He awoke at dawn, ate at the saloon, and often spent a quiet hour
before the shift began pushing a broom across the quiet floors.
Delaney stuck his head in the back door and called
out over the empty plant. “Security people from Trevor Industries are on
their way. King wants you to see how well we handle an armed
confrontation. I suggest you keep your eyes open and do what you’re
told.”
Abe set his broom aside and followed Delaney to his
car. He looked out his window during the short drive, unsettled, but
defenseless. As hateful as the Darkers had been toward the Trevors, Abe
had always harbored a secret admiration for Trevor Industries. The
inhabitants of Silver Ridge thought the die-casting plant a crumb thrown
in disrespect in their faces for lives lost in the mines. They
believed that Trevor Industries owed the region. Abe
understood that Trevor Industries owed Silver Ridge nothing. Billy
Trevor’s father and grandfather had maintained the mansion and provided
the die-casting plant out of simple and self-centered nostalgia for the
modest beginnings of the corporation. No one in Silver Ridge had been
shackled in chains. It had been one of the reservations he had had
against a marriage to Ella May and her dream of having children. The
children of Silver Ridge were the true victims of the town’s poverty, but
victims of their own ignorant and uneducated parents, not of Trevor
Industries’ greed.
And now he was being asked to defend against the only
benefactor Silver Ridge had ever known.
“Relax,” Delaney advised on the short ride though
town. “It’s just a job. King makes himself clear, and he doesn’t expect
more than a man can handle.”
Abe grimaced in revulsion for Delaney’s simple-minded
loyalty to the monster.
Delaney grinned, amused by Abe’s bleak mood. “If you
want to pull out of that funk of yours, King’s your best bet. King has
the world by the balls.’
“What’s going down?” Abe growled at the man.
“Krueger got a call. They told him a team from
Trevor Industries will arrive by chopper and set down by the gate.
They’ll check for radiation or whatever, then be joined by a ground team
before they go on up to investigate. All we have to do is to take out the
helicopter and trust that King has thought through the rest.”
Abe jerked his head around hard enough to pull a
muscle. “Take the chopper out? You mean kill them?”
Delaney chuckled. “When the Trevor rent-a-cops all
disappear without a trace, King figures things will be quiet enough to get
his stuff through and leave.”
“He’ll bring the damn state and the FBI down on our
heads!”
“Won’t happen,” Delaney said with infuriating
calmness. “As far as the law is concerned, a house burned down. Big
deal.”
“Then why the bullshit?”
Delaney glanced at him sharply.
“You don’t kill for no reason,” Abe said, willing to
push at least the need for a little common sense.
“The Trevor boy’s been talking to his mother.
There’s something about the boy that spooks King. He’s going to come down
hard and heavy on anything the Trevors bring into the area. Either you
cooperate or you take your questions to King himself. Don’t pester me
with them. Do what you’re told and King treats you like gold. Believe
me, he knows what he’s doing. I’ve seen him in action before. There’s
never a loose end.”
A thousand things could go wrong with King’s
simple-minded scenario. Hopefully someone would risk the threat of having
their throats ripped out by titanium teeth and clue the feds in on King’s
insanity.
Or was there more to the situation than he knew
about? Abe was just beginning to realize his abyssal ignorance of the
outside world and its workings. “What stuff is he bringing through?” he
asked Delaney.
Delaney wagged a finger in warning. “Know what you
ain’t supposed to and it’ll get you killed, Abraham Darker. You be
ignorant of everything except what King tells you, and you live to party
hardy.”
Delaney parked halfway between town and the barren
hill still surrounded by its wrought iron fence. The drive meandered up
to the blackened hole of the garage entrance staring balefully out over
the town. Abe’s mind still refused to believe that the mansion was gone.
It seemed more likely that it had been rendered invisible than destroyed
so utterly. Even the trees had vanished.
Delaney left the car. He lit a cigarette and circled
around back to open the trunk. Abe followed. Sight of the olive drab
crate in back sent him reeling back in alarm.
“Relax. It ain’t one of those rocket launchers.”
Delaney opened the crate and extracted a device similar to a rifle. It
had a butt and a trigger and a trigger guard like a rifle, but with a fat
plastic barrel ending in four or five rods of different lengths, the
longest being roughly a foot and a half. It looked for all the world
like a children's water gun.
Delaney eyed him hard. “This gadget kills ignition
systems and electronic gadgets on one setting. Its rough on the human
nervous system on the second setting. When I use it, stay behind me. You
get in the way and you get your brain microwaved. And it’s my ass if you
get yourself wasted. Got it?”
Abe nodded. Delaney picked up two small grenades
from the trunk and hooked them onto his belt. He then turned and leaned
against the side of the car, smoking his cigarette with the futuristic
rifle dangling from his right hand. It seemed to weigh next to nothing.
But Abe stayed well behind the car. Once stung,
twice shy, was the old saying that came to mind. And when he heard
the beating of helicopter rotors in the sky a half hour later, he stepped
back another few yards just to play it safe.
The chopper was similar to the one that circled the
hill the morning after the explosion, small, fast and highly
maneuverable. It carried no more than a pilot and a passenger. It
swooped about the bald hill twice, then dipped down and hovered not thirty
feet overhead. Men in reflective sunglasses and dark uniforms studied the
car below and the two men standing alongside. Then the machine dipped to
one side and set down directly in front of the gate.
Delaney lifted the enigmatic device dangling from his
grasp, took rough aim from the hip, and pulled the trigger. Abe heard it
click. A tooth filling on the right side of his face stung. He cried
out, more in alarm than pain.
The chopper motor coughed once and fell silent. The
pilot and passenger emerged from their disabled machine perplexed,
leveling their carbines on the only two parties in sight.
What followed made no sense to Abe. Delaney fired
again and the two men dropped as abruptly as if they had had their legs
cut out from beneath them. Abe could tell by the way they fell that they
were dead before they reached the ground.
Abe looked to Delaney for an explanation. Delaney
shot him a look of warning. “I once saw a man ask one question too many
to King’s face. King told him that it was an expensive secret, but that a
demonstration of that expense was free of charge. The poor bastard
should have kept his mouth shut.”
Delaney unhooked both grenades and tossed one to
Abe. Abe caught it deftly rather than risk an explosive clattering to the
pavement at his feet. Delaney gestured for him to follow. Abe had no
choice but to see the nightmare through to its end.
Delaney walked to one of the dead men and pulled the
pin of the grenade. He held the little device high in the air. “Hold the
lever down. Pocket the pin. We don’t want to leave any evidence behind.
Then drop the cookie alongside your buddy over there, no more than a yard
away. Turn and walk away. There’s no blast, but there’s a flash of
light, so don’t look back, or you get your eyeballs roasted. Got it?”
Abe had no intent of arguing with King’s henchman.
“Do it!”
Abe pulled the pin and held the lever of the small
grenade. He glanced at Delaney before committing himself. Delaney nodded
his grim consent.
Abe dropped the grenade, turned and walked away as
instructed. As he and Delaney converged on the car, he saw Delaney lower
his head and close his eyes.
Abe’s eyes were on Delaney when the grenades flashed,
first one, then the other. The reflection against the car alone blinded
him. The heat struck from behind with the intensity of a blowtorch, just
a fraction of a second and degree of heat sufficient to sing the hair on
the back of his head. Along with the gentle blast and wall of heat came
the intense stench of burnt flesh, and the sound of Delaney chuckling in
amusement as Abe cried out his fright.
Abe paused long enough for his eyesight to recover,
then looked around to see what effect the heat grenades had had on the
corpses.
There were no corpses. Nothing of the bodies
remained but a gray smudge surrounded by a halo of scorched pavement. The
grenades had been smaller versions of the warhead that had destroyed the
Trevor mansion.
Delaney climbed behind the wheel of the car. Abe
hurriedly circled the car and climbed in at his side.
“Just remember one thing,” Delaney said. “King’s
playthings are rigged for remote self-destruction. We had one dude in
Tampa run off with one of those rockets you used to burn the house away.
We figure he was an undercover cop. The warhead went off in the guts of
this old brownstone tenement building where we figure he met with his
contact. What was left of the building caved in before the firemen and
cops showed up. There were these thousands of bricks glowing like white
hot cokes in a blast furnace. The firemen and the copes were so scared
that some of them ran away and hid like babies. It was a supernatural
occurrence, they figured. The rest of them just figured the next day that
things didn’t happen quite as weird as they remembered. When people can’t
explain things, King says, they just brush it off like it never happened.
Any questions?”
Abe had no questions. He would take Delaney’s advice
and do what he was told. His life was at stake. Not that much of its
value remained. He wanted only to live long enough to ensure that Lazarus
reaped the harvest of his betrayal and his part in Evie’s death. And Ella
May’s death. And, indirectly, his own.
Lazarus had killed them all, although Abe understood
that he had started the chain of events by falling prey to King’s
temptations. They had all forfeited their lives and gone to a living
hell, as far as he was concerned. All that was left was to patiently wait
to see it all mercifully end.
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