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  “Easily. The simplest way would be to put a bullet between your eyes. But I wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “Thanks so very much for that. Are you fucking serious, man?”

  The hard look he gave her told her that he was very serious.

  “Who do you think you are, Carl—God’s warrior?”

  “No. That’s Michael. Sonya, before the next few days are over, you’re going to see things that will haunt you for the rest of your life. And quite possibly change your life. It did mine, back in Ruger County a few years ago.”

  “What happened back there, Carl?”

  “If I answer that, Sonya, and you print one word of it, there are certain agencies within the government that will move very quickly against you. Quickly, and fatally. Believe that, Sonya. I’m telling you the truth.”

  She was silent for a moment as the road yawned before the headlights of the Jag. The darkness on either side of the blacktop looked menacing. And something else: evil. “I believe it, Carl. Reporters have to make deals and compromises just like anyone else. Any reporter who says he or she doesn’t is lying. I don’t want to die, Carl. Tell me what happened. What really happened in Ruger County. I won’t print it. I’ve got a funny feeling that a lot of reporters know what happened, and some of those people are dead, right?”

  “That is correct, Sonya. Butler is going to blow wide open before too many more hours pass. It’s like a pressure cooker with too much steam contained. That’s what this particular coven wants—total destruction. Mindless horror and violence. This county and everyone in it destroyed. And no, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  Sonya thought about the micro-cassette unit in her purse. She took it out and showed it to Carl, then placed it on the seat. “It’s off. What are we driving into, Carl?”

  He told her.

  Chapter 26

  When Carl concluded his story, Sonya sat in silence during the remainder of the drive into town. Carl didn’t know whether she believed any of what he’d told her, or not. But he knew one thing for sure: Before long, she could see much of the same horror for herself.

  As he turned onto the main street of the town, the headlights picked up the mob of people and Carl knew the lid had just blown off the bubbling and hate-and horror-filled pot.

  He saw Chuck and Mike being dragged off the street, toward a dark alleyway, men and women beating them as they were dragged.

  Carl did not hesitate. He accelerated quickly and drove up to the half dozen who were dragging and hammering on Mike. Lowering the window, he shot a man in the head with his 9-mm, then shifted the muzzle and shot another in the chest.

  Sonya looked on in numbed and speechless horror—not at the screaming, cursing, howling, and seemingly maddened crowd, who were doing their best to kill the deputy and the priest, but at what Carl had just done. Her mouth was hanging open in shock. She was actually a witness to someone using one of those nasty, terrible, awful handguns.

  Carl used it again, this time shooting a club-wielding woman in the belly, knocking her backward and dumping her on the sidewalk, where she lay screaming curses at Carl, the blood leaking from her belly.

  Chuck staggered to his feet and stumbled toward the Jag, jerking open the back door and falling onto the seat. He was bleeding from several cuts on his face.

  Carl jumped out of the car and jerked out the shotgun from the backseat, shoving the priest to one side as he did. He leveled the shotgun at a screaming mob of people who were running toward him, waving clubs and knives. Some had rifles and shotguns. He started blasting, the double-ought buckshot tearing into bodies and knocking out chunks of flesh, sending those on the receiving end spinning to the street.

  The crowd decided that pursuing Carl had been and still was a very bad idea and ran off into the night, leaving the dead and dying on the blood-slick street.

  “Carl!” Mike’s voice reached him. But it was weak and pain-filled. It came from an alleyway.

  Carl tossed the shotgun into the back seat. “Boxes of shells on the floor, Chuck. You know how to use it?”

  “Yes,” the man gasped, wiping his bloody face with a handkerchief.

  Carl nodded and grabbed up his M-16, slinging a bandolier of filled thirty-round clips over his shoulder. He ran toward the sound of Mike’s voice.

  As before, he did not hesitate when he confronted the mob of coven members who were beating the now-nearly-unconscious deputy. Carl leveled the M-16 and pulled the trigger, holding it back. The M-16 began singing a death song in three-round bursts of. 223’s.

  Those still alive and standing after the thirty rounds of lead ran up the alley. Carl jerked Mike to his feet. “Can you make it to the car?”

  “I ... can damn sure try,” the deputy said, pushing the words past bloody lips.

  Carl found the deputy’s .357 on the littered alley and tossed it to him. “Go. And goddamnit, don’t hesitate to use that mag.”

  “Not after this night,” Mike said grimly, and limped out into the street.

  Carl heard the sounds of shots and ran up the street, literally knocking men and women to one side. A huge fat man blocked Carl’s way, holding his arms out wide while his saliva-slick lips were screaming the most hideous of obscenities at Carl.

  Carl shot him in the belly and kept on running. He could hear Jim’s voice yelling for assistance. Carl located the man, frantically trying to reload his .357 while attempting to keep at bay a dozen men and women who were circling him, clubs and knives in their hands.

  Carl dropped to one knee and began picking his targets, firing select-fire, each shot slamming home into flesh, clearing a hole for the bloodied Jim to limp through.

  Then the street emptied as if on silent signal, leaving the chief deputy and the coven-buster standing in the center of the wide main street, amid the bloody dead and moaning dying and wounded.

  “I don’t know what caused all this,” Jim drawled. “But I shore am glad I got you for a friend, boy. You don’t mess around, do you?”

  “There is no percentage in dying, Jim,” Carl replied. “Besides, God has other plans for me. I think my work has just begun here on earth.”

  The look Jim gave him was a strange one. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I reckon you’re right. Have you knowed that all along?”

  “No,” Carl said, his voice just as soft. “Something just told me that.”

  Jim had no intention of asking who, or what had delivered the message, or in what manner it came to the young man.

  * * *

  Tolson and Daly had been on the other side of town, investigating the breakout of the creatures at the clinic and the death of the nurse. By the time they arrived downtown, the melee was all over. Both men could but stand and look with awe in their eyes at the carnage wrought by Carl Garrett.

  Carl was leaning up against the Jag, calmly reloading clips with .223 rounds.

  “Well, we’d best get ready for a lot of legal action,” Tolson remarked.

  “I don’t think so,” Carl said. “We’ll just play it by ear, but I doubt that anybody will make any complaints about this night.”

  “Man, look at the bodies!” Daly waved his hand at the bloody street.

  The doctors and the EMTs had arrived, moving among the dead and injured, looking for and giving aid to the wounded.

  “If you people don’t want to burn these bodies,” Carl said, looking at the cops and the priest, “let’s get out of here. Their own kind will be along to get them as soon as we leave.”

  “George MacVeedy,” Jim said, squatting down in the street, looking at the dead body of a man. “Me and George growed up together. Used to fish together on the weekends. All that stopped about . . . oh, two, three years back. I should have known that something was bad wrong back then. I just didn’t put it together.” He paused as a sheet was spread over the body of a woman lying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk. “Lucy Jordan. She was always a strange one.” He pointed. “Over yonder’s Ned Carson. He quit the church about the same
time George stopped speakin’ to me and started actin’ funny. It’s all beginnin’ to add up now. It all started happenin’ about the same time, but none of us could see it.”

  Sonya sat in the Jag, her face pale as she struggled out of a mild case of shock. Carl met her eyes. She just shook her head. He had no idea what that meant. But he did not think the reporter was going to file any stories with her paper. At least not yet. He had gotten his point across to her . . . with technicolor vividness.

  Father Vincent was holding a bloody handkerchief to his face. Mike was nearly shirtless—scratched and bruised, but not hurt badly. Jim’s nose was bloody and there was a darkening bruise on his cheek. Other than that, he appeared to be all right.

  “Don’t take the wounded to the hospital,” Carl urged. “They’ll kill any innocents there.”

  “Well, what in the goddamn hell do you want us to do with them?” Doctor Loring yelled at him.

  “Leave them in the street. I told you, their own kind will come back as soon as we leave. Trust me on this; I know what I’m talking about.”

  “We’re doctors, Carl,” Cal Bartlett told him. “We can’t just leave these people on the street to die.”

  “I agree,” Doctor Perry said. “These people have to be treated.”

  “Then you’re all fools,” Carl told him. He turned and walked to the Jag, getting in and closing the door. He cranked the engine just as Jim yelled at him.

  “Carl! All right. We’ll give it thirty minutes your way. We’ll all back off the street and see what happens. We’ll get clear away.” He looked at the others. “And that’s an order. Back off. Do it now.”

  Doctor Jennings opened his mouth to speak.

  “Just shut up and do it,” Jim said, closing the man’s mouth.

  “I’ll meet you back at your office, Jim,” Carl slipped the Jag in gear and drove off.

  They had gone only a block when Sonya said, “You were like a machine.” Her voice was emotionless. “A killing machine.”

  “I did what I knew had to be done, Sonya. There is no hope, no salvation for these people. They are forever lost.”

  “The last part is highly debatable.” He could feel her eyes on him. “You’ve done this before, Carl.” It was not posed as a question.

  He hesitated, and knew that hesitation gave it away to her reporter’s mind. “Yes. But not on this grand a scale.”

  “Many times?”

  “Two.”

  “How come the mass killings were not reported?”

  “There was no press around. And they weren’t that mass. And yes, there were witnesses left. The first time,” he added grimly. “But I didn’t go in to kill—not the first time or the second time. In the end it wasn’t left up to me. They didn’t give me any choice.”

  “Were they in this state?”

  “No. A thousand miles away.”

  “You left witnesses?”

  “These people don’t call the law, Sonya. They can’t afford to draw attention to their activities. In thirty minutes, the main street of this town will be empty and hosed down. There will be no complaints filed with any law-enforcement agency. And I’ll bet you a thousand dollars the local funeral home owner and his morticians are part of the coven. Everything has a pattern, Sonya. I’ve spent hundreds of hours studying these people. I know what they are, and it can be summed up in one word: evil.”

  * * *

  “Nothing,” Jim said, looking up the main street of town. “This is the damnest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Then he remembered the dead fingers of Ermma Barstow goosing him, later grabbing at his privates, and the bodiless head grinning and speaking to him. “Well . . . almost.”

  In thirty minutes the street had been cleared of the dead and wounded and hosed down clean. The street glistened with wetness.

  Max Bancroft turned to Carl, suspicion in his eyes. “How did you know they would do this?”

  “Why don’t you call it a lucky guess and leave it at that.”

  Tom Malone had rejoined the group, a bandage on one forearm and his face bruised by the fists and clubs of the coven members.

  Pastor Speed had been picked up at his house by a city patrolman and briefed on what had happened. He was silent—for a change—and his face was drawn and pale. He had inquired about Sheriff Rodale and was told that the sheriff was drunk and passed out cold.

  “Has anyone filed any complaints or pressed charges?” Sonya asked. “Has anybody done anything?”

  “Nothing has happened from anyone on the . . . other side,” Jim told her.

  “What are you going to do from your side, Chief Deputy?” she asked.

  “Well, ma’am . . . I don’t know. Yet. There are lots of things I could do. Like the obvious: arrest those who attacked us.” He glanced at Carl. “Those that are still alive, that is. But I’m not going to do that.” She opened her mouth to speak and he waved her silent. “I’m not going to do that, lady. And I think you know why.”

  Sonya’s smile was tight and knowing and not a bit friendly. “It never happened, did it, Mister Hunt? If no one on either side presses charges, I can’t very well write about something that didn’t take place, can I?”

  “You catch on real fast, miss,” Jim said with a smile.

  “I explained to her about the DA being a suspected coven member,” Carl said.

  Jim nodded. “Most of the town is under suspicion far as I’m concerned.”

  “I also told her that, as far as I’m concerned, once this is over, if she leaves my name out of it, she and Jesse can have the exclusive story . . . subject to your approval, that is.”

  Again, Jim nodded his head. “All that’s providin’, of course, any of us come out of this alive.”

  Chapter 27

  Those known members of the several covens in town and in the county behaved as if nothing had happened. The remainder of the citizens seemed to Jim and Carl and the others who had resisted Satan’s call to be in some sort of daze. They functioned, going about their daily business, but their movements were slowed and their speech robotic. Gene Wadell, owner and director of the local funeral home, when questioned by Jim Hunt, shook his head and commented about what a terrible tragedy it had all been.

  “What tragedy, Gene?” Jim questioned.

  “The outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that killed so many people, of course.”

  “Right,” Jim replied. “Sure.”

  Jim and the others were curious to see what the local paper would have to say. The editor, Dick Goshen, had been unavailable for comment. When the newspaper came out the day after the shootings on Main Street there was no mention of the violence or any reporting of the dead and wounded.

  “So Dick is a part of it,” Jim said to Carl, sitting on the front porch of the A-frame.

  “Does it surprise you?” Carl asked.

  “You’ve done this before,” the chief deputy told him. “It’s my first time. And hopefully, my last.” He thought about that remark for a few seconds. “I didn’t mean that the way it come out.”

  “I know. Have you had any word from the governor’s office?”

  “No. Nothing. Daly said he got word that the governor is walking around with his head stuck up his butt, not wanting to admit that something like this is possible.”

  “He’s not sending more people in?”

  “I don’t think so. Carl? The other times you done this . . . something like this . . . what was the end result?”

  “They forced my hand and I defended myself.”

  “That don’t exactly answer my question.”

  “A lot of people died, Jim. Like I told Sonya last night, I didn’t go in to kill people; not the first time or the second time. But after the last . . . operation, I realized that was the only way to deal with it.”

  “And there was no press on it? Nothing?”

  “No. But entire towns weren’t involved. Nothing like the numbers we face now. And speaking of towns, how are things in town?”

&
nbsp; “Quiet. No sign of those creatures, the escaped cons, Ralph Geason, Old Lady Barstow—nothing. Rodale sobered up and come to work this morning. He’s actin’ like he’s in charge, but there ain’t nobody payin’ him no mind.”

  As if on cue, both men looked toward the timber around the Conners home. Jim said, “Them Old Ones have surfaced, right?”

  “I think so. It’ll take them two or three days to regain strength and then all hell will break loose. That’s the way it was in Ruger.”

  “That was a good idea your dad had to get rid of them: lurin’ them on that metal grid and then shootin’ the juice to them.”

  “Yes. But it won’t work again. They wouldn’t fall for it twice. You said you talked to the man at the funeral home. Have the dead been buried?”

  “Started early this mornin’. I got a man watchin’ the cemetery but he can’t see much. All the services is bein’ held under a tent.” He looked at Carl. “Why are you smilin’?”

  “They’re not being buried.”

  Jim blinked. “What?”

  “I said the bodies are not being buried. I’ll bet you they never left the funeral home.”

  “You mean . . .”

  “Yes. They’ll walk again.”

  * * *

  “I’m a gittin’ tarred of sittin’ around this damned old motel room,” Bullfrog said. “I think I’ll take me a run back to the home place now that it’s good light out.”

  “Jim said to stay put,” Sonny reminded him.

  “We ain’t done nothin’ wrong,” Bubba cried. “Jim Hunt ain’t got no right to tell us what we can and can’t do.”

  “I need to get out and fetch me something,” Keith said. “I’m a-gettin’ jumpy.”

  All the brothers knew what Keith had to fetch, but said nothing about it. They all knew their brother was a dopehead and would probably die a dopehead.

  Bullfrog stood up. “Anybody goin’ with me?”

  Keith and Bubba rose to their boots.

  “Not me,” Sonny told them. “I’m some curious to know what all that shootin’ was about last night. But I ain’t curious enough to venture far from this motel. And that thing that Daddy turned into is probably lurkin’ close to the house.”