Bad Things (46 page)

I heard the sound of pain immediately afterward, but this time

the bullet hadn’t hit me.

Becki screamed.

At least one of the people behind me started shooting immedi-

ately.

“John—stay down!”

I ignored Bill’s advice, got to my feet, and zigzagged back. I’d

been way out in front, isolated in the middle of the lawn. If whoever

had fi red had me in mind, I would have been an easy drop.

B A D T H I N G S 339

The others were hunkered down at the back of the house, to one

side where they were covered by shadow. Bill was letting spaced shots

off into the trees, from a steady double-handed grip. Becki had most

of her right hand in her mouth and was biting on it, her eyes bulging.

But she wasn’t who’d been hit.

Little D was lying sprawled on the ground, the small of his back

curving up, hands around his own throat. Blood was pulsing from

between his fi ngers in thick, dark clots. He was blinking fast, his

eyes trying to fi nd something to fasten on beyond what was happen-

ing to him.

“Fuck,” I said, kneeling at his side, unconsciously reaching for a ser-

vice backpack that wasn’t there, trying to remember how you were sup-

posed to respond in these circumstances. “Where’s the other guy?”

“Went running off into the trees,” Bill said. He stopped shooting,

reloaded, listened. Silence for a moment, then the sound of shots in

the distance.

Little D coughed, spraying blood.

I told him to keep his hands where they were, but I’m not sure he

was hearing me. I tried to turn him on his side, to keep the blood from

fl ooding straight down into his lungs. His arms started to spasm, and

it was hard to hold him still.

“Bill, you remember what to do?”

“Find a medic. Call for a chopper. Run away.”

“Apart from that?”

“No.”

“He’s dead,” Becki said dully.

He wasn’t. But he’d stopped blinking and his hands were no lon-

ger gripping as tightly. A couple of minutes later he did die. His last

cough sounded like a man deep underwater. Snow dropped onto his

face, falling harder now.

“This is a nightmare,” Becki said to herself.

“Go back to the car,” I told her. “Drive back to Black Ridge,

340 Michael Marshall

fi nd the sheriff’s department. Get anybody you can fi nd to come out

here.”

“Screw that. If they’re not going to come when you call, why

would they just because some chick turns up?”

“Because you’re covered in blood.”

Becki looked down at her hands and arms and seemed to realize

for the fi rst time that this was true.

Bill turned his head back toward the front of the house. “Incom-

ing,” he said, already moving.

I grabbed Becki’s arm and pulled her with me, as Bill went wide.

He hadn’t made it to a viable position before we realized it was Kyle,

running toward us. He saw Little D’s body and stopped so fast he

skidded, staring down at it.

“Kyle, go back to the—”

“Something’s coming,” he said.

“You mean ‘someone’?”

“I guess,” he said, uncertainly. “I’m sure I saw people in the trees,

or
something
in there, on the other side of the road. I mean, I couldn’t really see properly because it was so dark over there. But I know something was coming. Some people or . . . shit, I don’t
know
, okay?”

I realized that Kyle was terrifi ed, his eyes and hands in constant

movement, as if his body was panicking even worse than his mind.

“We need to rethink,” Bill said. “Go back to the car, regroup.”

“No way,” I said, pointing toward the woods. “Whatever’s going

down is happening in that direction and it’s happening
now
.”

“With who knows how many assholes in the trees with guns

pointing at us. Come on, John. You know it makes no sense to just go

running in there.”

“I
heard Carol
.”

“Maybe. Point still holds. We run into there and they’ll take

us one by one. Though I guess . . . maybe it’s everyone except you,

right?”

“What?”

B A D T H I N G S 341

He was looking at me steadily. “They grab you out of a parking

lot, but don’t kill you. They don’t do it when they’ve got you in a se-

cluded house with no one around, either, and they make a half-assed

job of it when you
escape
. Five minutes ago you’re in the middle of the lawn, with the house lights full on you. But they shoot the guy over

there instead, who means nothing to them.”

“We can’t go back to the car,” Kyle said urgently, near tears. “I’m

not going back there
.”

Bill ignored him. “They aren’t looking to kill you, John, at least

not like that. The rest of us . . .”

“You’re right,” I said. “Get these people out of here.”

And I broke from the house and ran straight across the lawn and

into the woods.

C H A P T E R 4 5

As soon as I got among the trees I dodged over to the biggest trunk

I could fi nd and got around the far side of it, crouching low to the

ground.

To the right and left of me lay blackness, undifferentiated but

for a few gray lines where moonlight caught jagged bark. Straight

ahead, however, there was a different quality to the darkness, as

though there might be a clearing in the distance. I guessed that was

where I was headed.

I left it a beat, panning my eyes back and forth, listening. I heard

something that could have been two rapid shots from a handgun,

but it was a long way from where I was and could equally have been

a branch brought down by the wind. It was beginning to pick up

again, twitching the tops of the trees back and forth.

I was just about to move when I heard a noise behind me and

whirled around. It was Bill.

“You asshole,” he said, coming up to me in a running crouch.

“Fuck are you doing here?”

He hunkered down next to me, his back to the tree trunk. “I

said we needed to rethink—not that you should come in here by

yourself.”

B A D T H I N G S 343

“What about the other two?”

“Told them to stay where they are.”

“They going to?”

“If that girl has anything to do with it, yes. The other kid hasn’t

got the balls to do anything by himself.”

“So—”

Another scream, from somewhere ahead.

We set off toward it.

There was no shape or structure to the forest we were entering. The

woods around our old house had paths through it, a couple of scenic

vista points, even a bench dragged nearly half a mile from the house

by some former owner with more dedication than me. This was just

trees, growing every which way. Generations of Robertsons had

evidently elected to leave these woods exactly as they were, despite

choosing to build their house here instead of in the center of the town

they’d created.

Bill kept pace to the side of me, his shotgun held at port arms.

“This place feel right to you?” he asked after a while.

“No.”

I knew what he meant. The trees were getting thicker and within

a hundred yards there was no snow on the ground. The forest fl oor

barely seemed wet, despite hours of rain. It was easy to run, harder

to decide where to run to. The air was heavy and dead with darkness,

and for a bizarre moment it was like being fi fteen years back in time,

two young guns running through the night in another country, on

missions we didn’t understand.

I’m not sure I ever felt that afraid there, though. You can, to a

degree, keep yourself out of the way of bullets and shells. What we

were running toward now felt like it started inside.

Bill suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, his hand held up.

“Hang on.”

344 Michael Marshall

“What?”

He was swallowing compulsively. “I heard something.”

At fi rst I could hear nothing but pregnant silence, so oppressive

that it made the sound of my own blood loud and unnatural. Then we

heard another shout, from far over toward the left.

We changed course and ran in this new direction. The forest

fl oor was declining now, and rockier, and more moonlight was mak-

ing it down through the trees.

“There’s something up there,” Bill panted.

I could see it, too, a change in the pattern of the trunks, confi rm-

ing that something other than forest lay ahead. It seemed to be getting

a little warmer, too. It wasn’t just because we were running. It was as

though the air itself had been trapped here since the height of sum-

mer, or before that, as if the air in this part of the woods had lived here

forever and didn’t travel anywhere else, and never had. Suddenly what

Carol had said about things living in the wilderness didn’t sound so

dumb. Did air count as a thing? What did it think? What did it want?

I started to speed up, leaving Bill behind, until after a few hun-

dred yards I could barely hear him. I wasn’t even sure I was running

in the right direction any longer. I was simply running.

The trees thinned out all at once, snow once more on the ground,

and then there were no more ahead. Instead there was openness, and

beyond that, a lake.

I skidded to a halt.

It looked alien in this light and with a thin layer of white all

around. I’d never seen it from this side before, either—nor with the

body of a black man sprawled on its shore, an arm and a leg under its

surface, trying in vain to sit up.

But I knew immediately what this place was, what it had to be. I

knew the name of the only lake in the area of anything like this size.

The water was absolutely still. Patches close to the shore had

started to freeze and gather snow, sticks pushing from beneath the

surface like tiny bones.

B A D T H I N G S 345

Bill arrived behind me breathing hard, then went over to pull

Switch up onto the shore. The guy had taken a bullet high up to the

leg, but looked like he’d live. He was swearing to himself, in a low and

insistent tone.

“Where the hell is this?” Bill asked.

“It’s Murdo Pond.”

I was standing close to the lake’s edge, craning my head around

to the left. Our old house had to be up that way, a mile or two past a

long, wide bend in the shore that would have hidden it even in day-

light. I had never been to the Robertson place, of course, and never

took a boat out on “our” part of the pond, and so had simply never

put it together that their house, assuming deep enough access to the

woods, could have had frontage on the same lake, at the other end

from where we’d lived.

The odor came from here. It did right now, at any rate, though I’d

never noticed it when we lived on the lake. The thing we’d smelled

in the Robertson house, and coming through the forest beforehand;

it started here.

I turned the other way and saw that trees came right down to the

waterline on either side of where we were standing. But about a third

of a mile away I could make out an open section of rocky shore, and a

jetty. Someone was standing on it.

Bill saw it, too. “There, look, John.”

The person at the end of the jetty looked as if they had two heads,

one smaller than the other.

I could hear the distant crying of a child, and the ragged sound of

a woman shouting, Carol gone way past the edge of hysteria, scream-

ing as if trying to break someone’s mind.

“Going to have to leave you here,” I told Switch. He nodded, his

face pulled tight with pain.

“Fuck them up bad,” he said.

Bill and I plunged back into the trees and ran.

346 Michael Marshall

We tried to, anyway, but the trees stood even closer together, the

ground between them uneven and rocky and plagued with small

gullies where spring thaws would trickle down toward the lake.

Moonlight struggled to reach the ground here, and cast strange shad-

ows, and for a moment I thought I saw a small group of people run-

ning with us, over to the right, but it couldn’t have been. There was

no way anyone could have got to that side, or be running that fast

without making any sound, and a few of the shapes had seemed no

bigger than children.

The wind was really starting to pick up, high in the trees, making

the branches move constantly against one another. Rustling, whis-

pering sounds, and a harsh crack, a feeling like someone was behind

us, or to the side, or perhaps even all around.

Then we were out the other side of the thicket and all was still

like a tableau. I saw Carol standing on the shore, pleading. I real-

ized with horror that the double-headed creature on the jetty had not

been her, but Brooke.

The walkway went forty feet out into the lake, and she was close

to the very end, holding Tyler fast in her arms. He was struggling,

but she was strong.

Carol turned when she heard me running out of the woods. Her

face was broken with grief, red and wet with tears. She didn’t look like

anyone I’d ever met.

“John,” she screamed. “Get him back!”

I started toward the jetty, but Brooke held up her hand.

“One more step and I’ll throw him in,” she said.