Broken Heartland (30 page)

“I expect that's true, Lieutenant Greer.” Chucky sounded sincere, but unafraid. The boy might be almost ready to die. But the sheriff didn't think Chucky intended to let it happen until the old evangelist and the doctor preceded him.

“I'd rather take you alive,” Greer said, stepping out from behind the sheriff's daughter.

“Why?” Chucky seemed honestly puzzled.

“I don't know,” Greer admitted. “Maybe a live prisoner will get me a few more votes than a corpse.”

Chucky smiled. “At least you're honest,” he said. “Let's bargain. How about you let me kill the doctor and the Reverend Aldus P. Goodfellow first? Then I'll give myself up?”

“You've got nothing to bargain with,” Greer said.

“Actually,” Chucky said, “I do.” The sheriff wondered what with. Chucky's gun was aimed just in front of his feet. No way he'd be able to get it up to take Greer, or anyone else, before the lieutenant blew him all over the basement. “I've got this.”

There was something about the rubble in front of Chucky. Something the sheriff should recognize.

“Don't kill me,” another voice said. Chucky's hand, the one that wasn't holding the gun, yanked something up off the floor in front of him. Not something, someone—a pale man in scrubs. Another doctor? A male nurse? Whoever he was, he was suddenly between Chucky and the lieutenant.

“Please don't hurt me,” the man whined.

Chucky twisted his AK-47, putting the barrel under the small man's chin.

“Damn!” Greer whispered.

Three feet to the left, four maybe, and the sheriff would be right above Chucky. He would only have to drop into the basement and he could knock Chucky's gun aside. Probably take Chucky down, too, and then he was a lot bigger and stronger than the high school sophomore. A few feet and this would all be over.

“Maybe I don't care about him,” Greer said. He could kill Chucky, easy, but only through the second guy in scrubs.

The lieutenant aimed and Chucky made a small target of himself behind his hostage.

“Let him go or I'll shoot you both,” Greer said.

Did he mean it? If the sheriff dropped, would he get shot by his opponent, too? It didn't matter. This was his county. At least until after the election. That made Chucky his responsibility. And Heather. He was responsible for her, too. The changing situation, though, had changed his angle. He had to go another couple of feet and then he could….

“No,” Heather shouted.

The sheriff glanced over in time to see her reach out and knock Greer's barrel up. The muzzle spouted flame. Holes appeared in the floor all around English, raising tufts of carpet like a swarm of moths. And then the weakened floor gave and the sheriff was falling and Chucky was
not
immediately below.

***

He was really going to do it, Heather thought. Greer was really going to shoot Chucky, who deserved it, but he was going to shoot Chucky's hostage at the same time. She couldn't believe it. She knew Greer was one of those holier-than-thou sorts, sure his way was the only right way. He'd said all those terrible things about her and her sister and, especially, their dad. But she hadn't thought he was capable of outright murder. Not until now. Englishman would never do that. No lawman worth his salt would think of it, or permit it. No lawwoman, either.

“No,” she shouted, and threw her arm out and knocked his muzzle skyward.

And then life turned into a slow-motion explosion. It was like sitting at home in front of the TV and watching film from Iraq. Another bomb going off in the middle of a crowded intersection. They slowed the images down, paused for effect, turned the horror of an instant into something that seemed eternal. That's how this felt.

Greer's gun went off, tearing into the ruined ceiling over Chucky's head. A section of ceiling gave, collapsing into the room. But it brought someone with it. Her father. She saw him fall, twist, drift down with the wreckage. For a moment, it felt as if she had time to take Greer's gun away and run over and catch Englishman before he hit the floor.

She didn't. In fact, Greer's gun was still chewing up ceiling when Englishman hit. His legs went out from under him and he pitched sideways, falling toward Uncle Mad Dog and Hailey. He had a pistol in his hand all the way to the floor, but it went flying when he landed—much harder than she would have expected, considering how sluggish time had otherwise become.

Chucky shoved his hostage toward Englishman and swiveled his gun toward the doctor and his patient. Greer's gun went quiet on an empty magazine just as Chucky's spoke. Twice. It wasn't on automatic anymore. One bullet exploded Aldus P. Goodfellow's head like an overripe melon. The second produced a crimson blossom in the middle of the doctor's abdomen.

“You get to go slow,” Chucky told the doctor.

Greer tossed his rifle at Chucky and fumbled a pistol off his belt, diving for cover behind the end of Uncle Mad Dog's gurney. The pistol fired, once, but Chucky wasn't there anymore.

Chucky wasn't there because someone had tackled him from behind. A girl. Heather wondered what the hell Pam Epperson was doing here, and why Pam was able to move and accomplish things while Englishman's only deputy seemed to have lost the ability to act. Heather had become a camera. She was recording all this, taking it in and digesting it, but somehow no longer part of what was going on.

Chucky went down, but he still had his gun. It looked like it was aimed at Englishman, now, but Heather could no longer be sure because Pam was all over the boy, clawing, kicking, butting, biting.

Greer sighted down his pistol, up for another try. There was no open shot there. He'd have to shoot Pam to get Chucky. Heather thought she should do something.

She didn't have to. Mad Dog's hand shot out and took the pistol out of Greer's grip. Greer tried to grab it back but slipped on the liquid that was spilling out of the IV that had been patched into Uncle Mad Dog's arm.

How had Mad Dog managed that? He'd been unconscious, waiting to become the source for some horrible process of harvesting vital organs. But none of the wires and tubes that had been attached to him had survived Hailey's fury. And Uncle Mad Dog was back with them. Not enough to do more than grab the gun and hurl it across the room, but back.

Despite the surprise and savagery of Pam's attack, Chucky got a hand in Pam's hair and dislodged her. She tried to kick him in the face and he dodged it, caught her foot, and pulled it out from under her. He covered her with his gun long enough for her to back off a little while he regained his feet.

“I think I'm done,” Chucky said. He looked around the room. Ruins would be a more accurate description. “And now nobody's left with a gun to end it except for you, Heather, the girl who can't shoot me.”

He was right. Mad Dog, Greer, Englishman—none of them had a gun anymore.

Mad Dog could hardly move. Greer was on his butt near Heather's side. The doctor was folded over his wound, moaning softly. The televangelist and the last of the hired guns were dead. The guy with the bad hair wasn't moving or complaining anymore, though he still looked to be alive. The pale guy in scrubs had scrambled off of her father and assumed a fetal position, as if that might render him invisible. And her dad….

Englishman was trying to sit up, and not doing a good job of it. He'd hurt himself in the fall. One leg of his jeans was soaked with blood. He didn't look capable of making a dash for one of the discarded guns scattered about the basement floor.

“Too bad…,” Chucky continued. Heather was still in that slow motion world where she had time to stop and evaluate things while he simply took a normal pause for breath. “…'cause I've got to die but I can't kill myself. You probably won't understand, but I think God may forgive me for everything I've done today. But not for suicide. That's what I've been taught. So I guess I just have to go on killing.” He began to swing his muzzle. It was coming toward her.

“You're killing the people who're responsible, right?” Englishman said. “Or saving those they might have used the same way they intended to use you.”

Heather hadn't thought Englishman was with it enough to talk.

“Then you know what this was about.” Chucky made it a statement, not a question.

Englishman nodded. “That makes me next,” her dad said. “This is
my
county. When people break the law here, I'm responsible.”

Chucky's eyes went from Heather to her father and back again. The boy nodded. “I think I understand what you're saying.”

Chucky's muzzle moved back to center on Englishman.

“Maybe…,” Chucky began.

He didn't finish. He didn't pull
his
trigger. Time began moving again for Heather. She pulled
hers
, and turned Chucky's frail body into chunks of tissue and bone and a spray of blood that painted the remains of the wall behind him.

***

Heather sat in a waiting room in a Wichita hospital and held hands with Greer, of all people.

“I'm all right,” she reassured him. But she knew, if she was holding hands with the man whose finger she had considered breaking earlier that morning, she was not all right.

“You did what you had to do,” Greer said. “Just keep remembering that. It'll pull you through.”

She wasn't sure if he was right. She thought so, but she just couldn't convince herself that Chucky would really have shot her dad. Not now, in hindsight anyway. At the moment, she'd had no doubt. Otherwise, she never could have broken free of the paralysis that gripped her while other people were shooting or trying to shoot or saving people from getting shot. Actually, she supposed, she might have saved the nurse when she knocked Greer's gun aside. But, like everything else, that hadn't worked out the way it was supposed to.

“I'm a marksman, Heather,” Greer had told her later. “I've been through sniper training. I wouldn't have shot anyone but Chucky. That nurse and Pam, no way I would have harmed either one.”

But that was later, after Englishman was stabilized and while they were waiting for the medevac helicopter to take her dad, and the other seriously wounded survivors, to the gun-shot trauma specialists in Wichita.

At first, she'd felt euphoric. She'd killed a man and saved her dad and it was a rush like she'd never felt before. Greer told her that was normal, too, as well as the horror she later felt about that reaction.

“Yes!” She remembered shouting it, because it was over. Her dad was alive and Chucky couldn't kill anyone ever again.

And then Greer was clawing his way up off the floor and saying something that reminded her of the reason she'd turned her radio off as she drove home from Lawrence that morning. It was a country rock station and they'd started playing a golden oldie that, after the terrible premonition she'd awakened to, just wasn't something she wanted to hear. How bizarre, she'd thought, that Greer should choose the moment after she'd killed a human being to tell her the name of the song.

“I shot the sheriff,” Greer said.

She was so high on adrenaline and the moment that she almost sang the next line back to him.
But you did not shoot the deputy.

And then she remembered the blood on her dad's leg and where Greer's gun had been pointing when it went off, and who was responsible for knocking the barrel up there in the first place.

A bullet had struck Englishman, in the thigh. The wound was pumping blood. “Artery,” Greer said, and began cutting her dad's Levis away with the knife he'd had sheathed at the back of his neck.

“I'm all right,” she told Greer again in the waiting room. A television was tuned to one of the all-news networks so people like her could reassure themselves that theirs was hardly a major tragedy. Since the news included coverage from Buffalo Springs, it didn't reassure her at all.

“I'm all right,” was what Englishman had told her, and Greer, too, before he passed out.

Blood loss, that was what Greer and Neuhauser said, later, after the two of them treated the wounded and got everyone up out of that ruined basement. Englishman had come first—a pressure bandage and a tourniquet, and even a person-to-person transfusion after they checked his blood type and discovered Greer matched.

It was true, though. Englishman really was going to be all right. She could see it in the surgeon's face as he came into the waiting room.

“Sheriff English did very well,” the doctor said. “He's coming around now and we'll have him ready for visitors soon.”

“Thank God,” Heather said. God was not someone she'd thought of or spoken with much since her mother died. Not until today.

“We saved the bullet fragment. Thought he might like a souvenir of what chipped a piece of bone off his spine.”

“His spine?” Heather felt the dread seeping back.

“Spine?” Greer said. “That wound wasn't anywhere near his spine.”

“First bullet went through his thigh without stopping. The second one, the one in his lower back, you never found. I'm not surprised. It didn't bleed much and you were so busy with the other.”

“Will he be paralyzed?” Heather asked.

“Oh no,” the doctor said. “That will only be temporary. Your father will have a full life. He'll have to put some real effort in with the physical therapists, but I fully expect he'll eventually walk again.”

“Eventually?”

The surgeon reached out and patted the hand Greer wasn't holding. “Like he told me before we put him under. Maybe it's a good thing he lost that election today. He'll regain a lot of motion, but he shouldn't be trying to perform a sheriff's duties again.”

***

Doc was beat. It was almost midnight and his day had started before dawn with a catastrophe and ended this afternoon in total carnage. Actually, it hadn't ended yet, but he knew he couldn't stay on his feet much longer.