(1995) The Oath (61 page)

Paul smirked at that. “So you can cash out the account? You think I’m crazy?”

“Hey, you want the pumper back, you give me the money. Simple!”

“You want simple?” Paul answered, pulling a pistol from his belt.

Jimmy looked down the barrel, hands outstretched pleadingly. “Hey, Paul, now come on . . .”

Paul smiled. What a feeling!

STEVE HUNG
from some low limbs and groped with his feet until they found a resting place on a large rock just above the river. He let go of the limbs and perched on the rock, looking down at the rippling, moon-dappled water. The river was deeper here, and moving fast. It would be a cold swim, but for now the river would be the easiest way to go until he could find some navigable ground. It was also one way to keep from getting lost out here. The decision made, he slid down the rock and into the water, then pushed himself out into the main stream, where the current carried him away.

KYLE
FIGGIN
heard the gunshot from Paul’s house as he ran by but gave it no thought. There was shooting going on all around him right now, and he was in a hurry.

Doug came out of the Nelson house and blocked his path. “Where are you going?”

Kyle tried to dodge around him. “Out of my way!”

Doug grabbed him by the arm and brought him to a joint-stretching halt. “Where’s the flatbed?”

“Who cares?”

Now Doug jerked him close. “I told you to take it back to Elmer’s before something happens to it.”

“Why don’t you do it then?”

“Because I told you to.”

Kyle beat Doug’s hands off. “Yeah, while you and everybody else get to pick through the houses. Forget it!”

Doug tried to deck him, but Kyle knew it was coming and ducked, then head-butted Doug in the stomach. Doug reached down, grabbed Kyle around the waist, and heaved him through the air.

Kyle rolled in the street, and then his hand went to his gun. Doug’s boot went to Kyle’s jaw.

Just then, a car horn sounded. It was Harold Bly, pulling up with his head out the window. “Doug!”

Doug was in no mood to talk to anybody. “What?”

Bly was in a mood where he’d better be talked to. “What’s going on? Where’s Andy?”

Doug was keeping an eye on Kyle in case he got up again. “I don’t know.”

“What about Carl and Bernie?”

“They’re cleaning out the houses.”

“I haven’t seen any of you guys! Did you get the jobs done?”

“Yeah, we did them all.”

Kyle was getting up shakily.

Bly demanded, “What’s the matter with him?”

“Nothing.”

“What about the Nelsons and the Hazeletts?”

“They’re out.”

“So why didn’t anybody tell me?”

“We’re busy!”

“Yeah, we’re busy,” Kyle agreed, wiping his bleeding jaw.

Bly didn’t take that very well. “Yeah? Well, you’re not through. Get some men together. Dottie Moore has to go!”

Doug and Kyle looked at each other. Doug said, “Who says?”

Bly repeated his order. “Get some men together! I’ll meet you over there!” And with that, Bly drove off.

“Do it yourself,” Doug hollered after him.

CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING
?” Susan Woods asked. “

Reverend Ron Woods was on the floor, peering over the sill of the front window toward the town below. “I see some people running. I think that was Harold Bly’s car that just went by.”

Susan was huddled on the floor beside the sofa with their young son and daughter, as far as she could get from the outside walls and windows.

Another gunshot rang out.

“Ron, get away from the window!” He joined her.

“What are we going to do?”

“They won’t hurt us.”

“But what about the others? Some of our friends, and the Nelsons and the Carlsons . . .”

“It’s not our problem.”

“Ron,” she pleaded, “we’ve got to do something!”

He shrugged lazily. “All we really have to do is wait. Things will settle down, I’m sure.” Susan was about to protest, but he tried to soothe her with, “We can’t blame them, you know. They’re only doing what they think is best.”

DOTTIE
MOORE
had been hiding as well and feared the worst when she heard a loud banging on her door.

For some reason, when she found out it was Harold Bly, she felt relieved. “Well, hello, Harold. And what brings you out of your shell tonight?”

He looked behind him; the other guys hadn’t shown up yet. “Dottie, you may have noticed there are some changes being made.”

“Oh, I’ve noticed, all right.”

Now Bly straightened his spine and found a stronger voice. “Well, it’s going to apply to you as well. We’ve asked some families to vacate their homes and take up lodging somewhere else. So unless other arrangements can be made, I’ll have to ask you to do the same.”

She raised one eyebrow. “Other arrangements?”

Bly nodded. “Sure. Things we’ve discussed.”

Well, she could straighten her spine and speak in a strong voice too. “Harold, I think you have the wrong address. This house doesn’t belong to the company. Vic and I bought it eight years ago.”

“Well, I’m foreclosing on the mortgage.”

“You don’t hold the mortgage, remember? We bought it through the bank in West Fork. Sure, the company owned it, but it defaulted. This house was never yours!”

Suddenly, and much too late, he remembered. He tried not to feel stupid but felt stupid anyway. He looked for his men, who still hadn’t arrived.

Dottie summarized for him. “So the house isn’t yours and never will be. Now, was there anything else?”

He scowled at her. “I want you out of town, Dottie! I can make things really difficult for you.”

“Get a job, Harold,” she said, and tried to close the door.

He held the door open with his hand. “Dottie, I mean it!”

Her eyes looked beyond him, and she smiled. “Harold, maybe you should worry about the property you do own.”

He looked in the same direction, down the street, just in time to see Andy Schuller setting fire to the Carlson house while a cheer went up from Andy’s buddies.

“That’s my property!” Harold realized.

“Good night, Harold,” said Dottie, closing the door on him.

Bly ran down the street as flames engulfed the gasoline-soaked front porch and licked up the siding of the little house.

“What are you doing?” he screamed. “I didn’t tell you to burn it down!”

Andy still had the empty gasoline can in his hands and didn’t seem a bit sorry as he said, “Gee, sorry, Harold! I thought—”

Bly grabbed Andy by the neck. “You stupid—”

Then Andy’s buddies were all over Bly. He kicked and wriggled and shook them loose and then stood there with fists clenched, glaring at the grinning Andy in the light and heat of the growing fire. Andy’s shirt was smeared black, and so was Bly’s. He looked at every man standing there. All of them were smeared and stained with the stuff, their chests, their arms, their faces.

“Are you all crazy?” he demanded. “That’s company property! It belonged to me!”

They just laughed at him. Harold Bly on the losing end! Too much!

“Somebody call the fire department!” Bly shouted, nearly hysterical. Then he realized that most of them were the fire department.

Just then, Carl Ingfeldt’s wife came running down the street pushing a brand new lawn mower, the wheels rumbling loudly over the asphalt.

They all cheered. “All right!” “Nice catch!” “Go, baby, go!”

She was followed by her children, each carrying a new toy with the price tag still attached. She and the children were followed by a limping, bleeding Henry Gorst. “Margaret! Stop! Those aren’t yours! Please!”

“Henry!” Bly cried in shock.

Henry Gorst only glared at him. “Look what you’ve done!”

Bly ran toward the center of town in time to see neighbors, friends, and even people he’d never met running into Henry Gorst’s hardware store and back out with anything and everything they could carry.

He shouted, he hollered, he protested.

They laughed, they smiled, they kept stealing.

STEVE HAD
floated down the river until he saw the old road, then run down the road until he feared detection, then blazed his way along the river bank until he was close to town. He’d finally finished the whole trip in the river again, floating when it was deep enough and crawling when it was too shallow. Now he stood in the waist-deep water just under the bridge that connected the four-way stop with the big Hyde Mining Company complex. He was completely, thoroughly wet and cold enough to be blue but so pumped with adrenaline he didn’t notice. He was listening to the shouting, the shooting, the screams and jeers. He could see the glow of fire reflected from the face of the company building. The town was going nuts, and no doubt some people were being hurt, maybe even killed. The dragon, though physically in the mountains, was present everywhere in this place right now.

He knew his behavior was going to defy all evolutionary explanation. His actions would not be those of any avowed rationalist college professor. As for the rules of self-preservation, he was about to defy them. But he’d spent the whole trip down the river from Saddlehorse thinking about it, and now he intended to do something distinctly and oddly human: He intended to stick around, risk his life, and complete Levi Cobb’s plan.

He waded to the concrete bulkhead, reached up to the ledge, found some footholds, and clambered up out of the river to a graveled alley that ran behind a row of houses. He kept low and got moving. The water in his shoes squished between his toes, but he gave it no mind.

The action in town seemed concentrated around the four-way stop: he heard shouting, screeching tires, breaking glass. He headed south, ducking past the small houses and closed businesses until he found the street that would take him up the hill into the older part of town, the quieter part where the old church was still standing.

He felt as though he were still in the woods, stealing and stalking about to preserve his own life. Only this time the hiding places were of stone, steel, and concrete. Part animal, part commando, his nerves primed and his muscles taut, he stole from old car to oil-drum fence to concrete retaining wall, hearing, seeing, sensing.

He came to the main street and peered around the corner of a windowless grocery store. A house was going up in flames, and no one was doing a thing about it. People were scurrying like ants, each loaded down with something stolen. Prone bodies lay in the street, ignored and unaided. Some teenagers were out breaking windows, and some men were firing guns at buildings, cars, and road signs.

They’ve all lost it, he thought. Like Charlie, like Tracy, like all the others.

That could only mean the dragon was on its way to collect.

So where did that put him? Through all the running, climbing, and crawling he’d done, he’d managed to get black stuff on just about every part of himself, and swimming in the river had removed only some of it. He rubbed his fingers over his chest. His shirt had been saturated with it before, but right now there didn’t seem to be anything fresh. If he could just stay ahead of that beast, if he could just keep hating it . .

Okay, God. It’s Your show now. You call it.

He made a mad dash across the Hyde River Road and up the hill beyond, unnoticed.

THE
CARLSON
house was burning down to a blackened skeleton, the hardware store was nearly empty, the homes of the evicted had been picked clean, but the appetites of the town had not diminished. The two-pump Chevron station offered little, but across the street, Charlie’s Tavern and Mercantile, recently renovated, fully stocked, and newly reopened for business, called to the crowds like an irresistible promised land.

Andy Schuller was the first to burst into Charlie’s. “Beer! Free beer! We’ve earned it!”

Paul Myers and Carl Ingfeldt were right behind him in full agreement. Paul hollered to Carl, “Carl, man the pumps!”

Carl leapt over the bar and started pulling the handles, setting the suds in motion and leaving black handprints on everything.

The cowbell over the door rang nonstop as the place filled up. Beer, whiskey, and wine couldn’t flow fast enough. Bottles flew across the room to waiting hands, bottle tops twisted, corks popped, and foam sprayed. The cash register rang as it gave away money, folks spat on the floor because it wasn’t allowed, and somewhere under all the noise, Harold Bly screamed while nobody listened.

SMOOTHLY, SILENTLY
, black as night, cold as the river in which it slithered and swam, the creature slipped into the raucous, noisily preoccupied town, passing under the bridge, low in the water like a crocodile, hearing the sounds, sniffing the stench of its own handiwork. It lowered its three good feet into the rocky river bed and halted just past the bridge.

STEVE FOUND
the church door unlocked. He opened it, stepped through into the dark foyer, and closed the door behind him as quietly as possible. He didn’t look for the light switch. Lights would attract attention. He needed time, quiet, and privacy.

The church had a warm and intimate little sanctuary with short, rustic pews, a carpeted center aisle, a sturdy pulpit of varnished planks, and a large, stained-glass window above the choir loft. Steve hurried up to the front, looked around for a place that would be appropriate, and finally knelt in front of the platform. He realized his shoes and knees were going to leave muddy circles on the carpet, but that was unimportant at the moment.

Now to pray. Except . . . was there a proper way to do it? Well, he was kneeling, and maybe he’d fold his hands; he’d seen that done.

Should he close his eyes too? No way, not tonight.

He began. At least, he tried to begin. But no words came to mind.

Get on with it, Steve, there’s a dragon out there!

“Lord God,” he blurted out loud, his eyes looking about warily, “as You know, I am not a religious person. I’ve seldom if ever entered a church. But I’m a believer now. I believe what Levi said. I’m willing to accept Your existence and the rightness of Your commandments, Your truth, the Ten Commandments, and whatever else there is. We’ll just have to make this all-inclusive, all right?