Keeping Promise Rock (28 page)

“I knew at the first taste, Benny—she didn’t hold a gun to my head to make me swallow.”

“
So-the-fuck-what
?”
Benny spat, wiping her eyes with the back of her hands. “Sorry, Deacon—sounds a lot like the night Parry was made to me. Just because you’re not a little girl….” Deacon blinked past the pain in his head and grabbed her hand, wondering when his life had turned into an emotional Escher print. “He got you drunk?” he asked, feeling a little ill. Maybe he should eat something… and then his gorge rose, and he thought,
maybe not
.

“We’re not talking about this now,” Benny muttered, turning away, and Deacon looked around the kitchen helplessly.

Amy shrugged and murmured, “She’s right—we don’t have a lot of time before the next storm system rolls in and shit gets really ugly, and you guys need to unload the sandbags. Besides, Crystal managed to sneak a call in—step-Bob hasn’t done jack about the flooding, and the girls are standing on the goddamned beds. If we’re going to go fetch them….” Deacon groaned. One goddamned thing after a fucking other. “Okay, here’s the plan, the new revised version. Jon, you and Andrew unload the sandbags and shore up that section closest to the levee. Amy, you stay here and mind Parry. Benny, you come with me, we’re going to collect your sisters, and if your mom’s still telling them I’m some sort of deviant, they may be flat-out afraid of me. Jon, I’m taking your car. If anybody else has any fun stories about getting drunk and waking up with strangers, I’d advise you to shut the fuck up and save it until fucking June, am I clear?”

“So the story about Private Jimmy and the camel will have to wait, sir?” Andrew asked drolly, and since his voice was the driest thing any of them had seen in a week, it wasn’t such a hardship to laugh as Jon threw him the keys.

Deacon had to cold-cock the sonovabitch to get in the door, and step-Bob fell with a splash on his front room floor. However, Crystal and Missy trotted willingly out when Benny called them, and that was a plus.

They didn’t seem scared of him either, which was pretty damned nice as well. Deacon and Benny had been keeping tabs on them—visiting after school when their parents weren’t home—but still, it was rewarding to watch them hug their sister.

“Is he going to be all right?” Missy asked, prodding her groaning father a little with her toe.

“You didn’t need to hit him that hard!” Melanie Coats accused, bending down to tend to her husband in the six inches of dirty water.

Deacon was so used to ignoring the two of them, to thinking of them as obstacles, as thorns in Crick’s side instead of human beings, that he didn’t need a whole lot of prompting to wash his hands of them now.

“Probably not,” he growled, shaking his hand out with a grim smile,

“but it was pretty damned satisfying. C’mon, girls, the water’s only getting higher.”

“You’re just going to leave me here?” Melanie wailed, and Deacon made a rather fascinating discovery about himself. His compassion for strays only went so far.

“You’ve sided with your husband for Crick’s whole life,” Deacon said without even the tiniest bit of pity in him. “There’s no reason to stop now.” With that, they loaded up the car and left.

When everyone was rounded up and gathered back at home, it was hard watching them all leave for Rocklin—it was such a crapshoot. Stay at The Pulpit and hope the sandbagging worked, or drive through the storm to someplace safe and hope the car didn’t get stopped or flooded. Fuck. It was certainly not the easiest decision Deacon had ever made. But the power was already off—although the old phone in the kitchen worked—

and the roads were already three inches under. If they were going to leave, they needed to leave right the fuck now. Deacon found he was enough of a caveman to want the women-folk safe while he stayed and battled the mastodons.

Which was why, after getting Parry Angel strapped into the car and her port-a-crib and shit loaded in, as well as a suitcase of Benny’s with extra clothes for the girls, Deacon was shocked and plenty dismayed when the car started to pull away and Benny hopped out.

Amy honked twice, and Benny waved, and Deacon and Jon walked up to her, their mouths open to chew her out, when she turned a tear-ravaged face to them both.

“Amy’s keeping the baby safe, assholes—this here’s my home.” With that, she stomped toward the house and called, “Go finish with the sandbags, Deacon—I’ll move all the important shit off the floor.”

“Well,” Deacon said, and they moved their bodies into a soft run because the river was getting louder, “I got nothin’.” Jon smacked him on the back of the head and kept on moving.

“You’ve got us.”

The next two hours felt like swimming through quicksand. Andrew would throw a bag to Jon, who would hand it to Deacon, and Deacon would shore up the four-foot, two-hundred yard stretch of low-lying pastureland that faced the levee road. The truck had officially died when they’d parked it, so the sections of sandbagged fence that were farthest away had to be trekked towards, and Deacon was off on the far end of the pasture when he saw them.

“Oh
fuck!”
He turned and sprinted back towards the house, going off at an angle from the truck because that was the quickest way.

“Deacon—Deacon, what the hell!” Jon called, and Deacon paused and turned around, watching his feet as he went.

“Fucking rattlers!” he called out. “The pasture over must be flooded!” It had been vacant for years, and unlike Deacon’s property, it didn’t have the two potbelly pigs to kill the varmints in an eco-friendly, circle-of-life sort of way. The half-dozen or so adolescent rattlesnakes that Deacon had just seen did not look interested in hearing why rattlesnakes shouldn’t eat the horses—they were just as freaked out as every other living thing in this neck of the woods.

“There’s a whole fucking family of them! All the horses are out in pasture, Jon—including the babies! I need the goddamned shotgun and a shovel—the fuckers are heading towards the barn!” Because the barn was high ground, and all of the pastures circled it.

Fuck.

“Deacon—man, the levee looks like she’s gonna go!” Keeping Promise Rock

“Man, throw some sandbags around them if you can, finish unloading, and get the hell back to the house! I’ll be back in five with Comet and take care of it!”

“Great,” Deacon heard Jon grumble, even as he threw his body into his sprint. “Bad cops, floods, rattlesnakes… when’s God gonna give us a plague of goddamned locusts, just for kicks?!”

“He’s saving the locusts for my birthday!” Deacon yelled, and then he kept all his wind for running.

By the time he splatted through the wet garage to get the shotgun out of the gun safe, a shovel from the barn, and a bareback pad for Comet, Andrew and Jon were already halfway back to the garage.

“I trapped most of them,” Jon called across the rain as Deacon rode by, “but one or two got away—be careful, Deac!”

“Will do!” And then Comet was picking up a cautious canter while Deacon kept his eyes scanning the ground. Thanks to the rain, the grass was long and green—once he saw the irregular movement under the rain-flattened grasses, the tan and black snakes were pretty easy to spot. He hopped off Comet and nailed the first one he saw with the shovel, chopping at it until the shovel came up red and the thrashing in the grass stopped. He brushed the grass back with the shovel and cut the head off of the poor thing with the shovel blade and then buried it right there while Comet waited like the patient creature he was.

In a minute, Deacon was back up on the horse, looking unhappily at both the threatening sky and the levee, which was starting to crumble and spill water. The bareback pad shifted uneasily, and Deacon adjusted his seat and grimaced. Those things just never felt as secure as a good, solid leather saddle, at least not to Deacon, but he’d been in a hurry and hadn’t wanted to bother. That didn’t mean he wasn’t hoping that Comet kept up his record of being the world’s most placid horse.

Together they kept riding, and the heavens kept threatening to crack.

The thunder and lightning were getting worse. Deacon took this as a good sign, because it meant that the weather was changing in some way, but the clouds over his head were roiling and black, and he felt like the last man on the planet under them. There were enough oak trees scattered about the property that he didn’t feel
too
exposed, but still—the way his day had been going so far, getting hit by lightning would be the cherry on the shit-sundae.

He found Jon’s little circle of sandbags—Jon and Andrew had done a good job, even crushed one of the buggers between bags—and Deacon got off Comet and started hacking at them with the shovel, thinking that maybe he could get this finished and get up behind the second row of sandbags that were banking the house and maybe get warm and dry. He’d given up feeling his hands, but he was pretty sure that he had blisters forming from being wet under his leather gloves for so long and then chopping at the snakes like a madman, and he was starting to dread clenching the reins to steer the damned horse.

He finished the grisly job and rested his hand on Comet’s flanks to keep the gelding calm. The thunder and lightning were getting closer and louder, and the shushing roar of the river felt like it was right at his feet instead of two hundred yards away. Just to check, he looked up from the sandbag circle of dead rattlers and kept his eye on the shored-up levee across the road. The water was high, dammit—dangerously high, and he saw some sandbags squelching their way down the sides.
Please, God…

please, could you pay back that dead-truck-in-front-of-the-bar stunt by not
flooding the house just now? Plea—

God rewarded him with the subtle sound of rattling practically right under Comet’s feet and a horrific crack of thunder directly overhead.

Comet did what horses did, but what he’d never done, even as a baby, even as a yearling—he reared up on his hind legs in a panic, and again and again as Deacon reached for the reins anxiously.
Damn… don’t let the
dumbassed horse get snake-bit, please, please.
Another crack of thunder and the horse actually threw Deacon down
as he reared back, and Deacon found himself face to face with a pissed off rattlesnake and, thank God, with a shovel in his hand.

The snake drew itself back to strike and threw itself into the shovel instead, and Deacon scrambled up to smack the fucker on the head before Comet could trample the poor dumb human in his way. He got the snake once, twice, in the back with the blade, and Comet squealed and reared and then came down hard on his forelegs and then… Oh God. Oh God.

What in the fuck was that sound? It was a sick snapping, a squelching thud, followed by a scream that shred Deacon’s eardrums. He had spent his whole life around horses, and he had
never
heard a sound like that
.
Oh Christ. Oh holy fucking Christ….

Comet reared up again, and there was the heavy thudding of his back legs as he scrabbled for purchase, struggling to do anything but put his Keeping Promise Rock

weight on the leg that… Deacon almost couldn’t look at it. He’d seen death and snapped limbs in humans, but never on a horse. Oh Jesus—that was his foreleg and
it was snapped in two!
That was his metacarpal bone, sticking out like a dagger, and the rest of the useless foreleg, flapping on the ground, held only by a strip of skin. And the damned horse was trying to stay off it but he couldn’t do it, couldn’t walk upright like a human, and he came down on the bone stump and snapped the upper radius bone with a sound not quite as loud as the thunder above them. His shoulder rolled to the ground, and he came to a quivering halt, squealing and thrashing on his side.

Deacon could do nothing but look dumbly at Crick’s horse, panicked, in agony, and doomed.

Crick’s horse. Easygoing Comet, who had kept Deacon sane while Crick was gone… and Deacon was going to have to… Oh God.

Comet screamed, a terrible sound that felt like it cracked Deacon’s own ribs, and Deacon closed his eyes and swallowed. He had to take care of that. He had to take care of that right now. Comet had been a friend, and his friend was panicked and in pain, and there was no way to cure a leg that had been broken off like that, not in two places, not in the thick part of the thigh.

Deacon swallowed again and manned the fuck up. Lucky for both of them, Comet had rolled onto his right side, and the shotgun was on his left. Deacon was tempted for a moment to run and get the bolt-action rifle—the wound would be cleaner, and the corpse would be prettier—but one look at Comet’s pathetic panic made him knock that shit off.

A pretty corpse would be for Deacon’s benefit, not for Comet’s.

Either way, death would be instantaneous, and, if Deacon held the shotgun right there, under Comet’s jaw….

“Easy, boy,” Deacon murmured, not wanting him to go thinking the world was all chaos, wanting him to have some peace before he made the dark journey. “It’s all good. You know, Parish’ll be there—I know you miss him. Parish, my mom—they tell me she liked horses.” He thought it, he did, but he wasn’t going to promise Comet that Crick would be there, not when Deacon needed him so badly on this end of things, so he just patted the horse some more until the animal’s squeals stopped. Comet finally lay there, eyes rolling, heart thundering, breath coming in pants, and waited for Deacon to make it better.

Deacon positioned the gun, patted Comet’s nose one last time, then stepped back and pulled the trigger and made it all better.

Carefully, he put the safety on the gun again, set it down, and grabbed the shovel that he’d dropped when Comet had crashed to the ground. And then he began to dig.

Common sense told him it was insane—the ground was saturated, and it didn’t matter how many shovelfuls of dirt he was moving, it would be a giant puddle of mud. Even if it was six feet deep and eight-by-ten feet wide and long, it would still be an armpit-deep puddle, and he would have to shovel quicklime on it. That was always a bad idea so close to the levee, but damn… he’d be goddamned if he sent his friend to the rendering plant to be made into dog food by strangers.