Scare Tactics (47 page)

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” the Major said, his eyes glittering as he smashed the butt through Practice’s hands. Practice barely felt the blow at all, and suddenly the Major’s voice stopped. He couldn’t hear, but he could feel the floor under his face. He tried to move, but it was no use, his head was as heavy as stone; six horses couldn’t have dragged it an inch.

Hands tugged at one shoulder and he was rolled over on his back. He could see, a little, but his throat was paralyzed and he made no sound. A shadow was moving over him. From a great height the Major’s face appeared, and light glinted briefly on glass; then a shower of liquid spilled over his face, stung his eyes, ran into his open mouth. The taste was familiar; the liquid burned his throat and he choked.

Whiskey. He was drunk again, all hope was gone.

He lay still for a few moments, looking up at the beamed ceiling of the cottage, trying to remember what he had wanted here. He was having a drink with Steppie, and that seemed all right. But something had happened, something disastrous, and he had to get up ...

As he stared at the beams, trying to locate the rest of his body, his mouth seared by the unaccustomed taste of whiskey, the ceiling seemed to waver and go out of focus. Clouds drifted below it. That was odd. A nagging fear took hold of him and again he struggled to rise. Sure, he was drunk. But there was another reason.

The Major ...

The Major had shot at him and bludgeoned him. And now the cottage was filled with light, flickering light, deadly firelight, the pungency of smoke.

Get up!

He tried to rise, using his right arm for support, and pitched forward on his face. The floor was hot. He put both hands under him and tried again. The smoke was thicker, biting; he covered his nose and mouth with his sleeve to avoid sucking smoke into his lungs. His eyes wouldn’t focus. The crackle of dry, blazing wood scared him.

Overhead the beams were crawling with flame and one entire paneled wall was burning. Everything else had ignited: draperies, carpets, lampshades, furniture.

In the midst of the flames Steppie lay on the red leather sofa. The blanket was smoldering at her feet, and as he stared, it burst into flame.

He crawled to the sofa and snatched the blanket from her body. Dimly he realized that the heat and the smoke in the closed house were reaching the suffocation point. He got to his feet and stumbled across a blazing carpet to the door. His coat had caught fire, and he shed it painfully, noticing the bloody wound above his elbow. But he was using his arm, so the bullet hadn’t crippled him.

He tugged futilely at the front door for valuable seconds, then turned and made his way back to the sofa.

Blackened draperies had fallen close to Steppie’s head, and he snatched them away, singeing his hand. A tarnished window, not more than three feet square, gaped at him behind the sofa. It was almost head-high from the floor. Coughing, Practice looked around and seized a straight chair. The paint on it was beginning to blister. He lunged for the window and shattered it with the chair, then cleaned the pane of fragments. Fresh air billowed in and he sucked at it greedily, turning in horror as he heard the ominous buckling of the roof. He picked Steppie up in his arms and carried her to the window, maneuvered her awkwardly, feet-first, through the space, and let her go. Then he wriggled out after her and tumbled down a slope into a damp bed of grass. He lay there, semiconscious, until he was able to go back and drag Steppie a safe distance from the house.

He sat with his back against a well, staring numbly at the spectacle, his head pounding, his throat raw from swallowed smoke. His shirt stank of the smoke and spilled whiskey. He wondered if someone had seen the fire yet. There was a fresh evening breeze, and as the smoke rose against the background of trees, it was carried away swiftly. How long had he been inside—ten minutes or an hour? Had he been unconscious for any length of time? He rubbed his forehead and looked up. The sun was not visible and the sky was darkening.

In an hour,
the Major had said,
the sun will have Set and John Guthrie and his family will be at dinner ...

P
ractice forced himself to stand and groaned. He looked down at Steppie. Skull fracture, he thought. Probably in a bad way. I should help her—but soon, in only a few minutes, John Guthrie and his family will be at dinner. And when they sit down, the Major is going to shoot them, one after another.

Somebody would discover the fire, he hoped, and Steppie. But he had to stop the Major.

The next farm,
he thought. There would be a road. Three miles. No, that was the distance on foot. Maybe longer by the road. How much time did he have?

He went out through the gate and saw that the rim of the sun was just visible in the west, within a great pink shell of sky. The Major’s Cadillac was there. Shakily he got into his own car and for once was happy about his habit of leaving his keys in the ignition. He backed around and roared down the narrow gravel road beside the stream, now with only a twinkling of light on the surface, as it flowed through the darkness.

The highway. He made the turn, skidding dangerously, straightened out, and pushed his foot hard on the accelerator. One minute,, two minutes, at seventy miles an hour around blind curves,
three minutes!
The twilight had almost ended. He was aware of the moon in the dark blue sky as he peered through the windshield, searching for the access road to the Crenshaw farm.
Or had he missed it somehow?

He visualized the Major sitting patiently in concealment with the Winchester at his shoulder, securely held by the leather sling, waiting another few seconds until he was absolutely sure he couldn’t miss ...

A hundred yards down the paved road Practice glimpsed a break in the hedgerow, a passage between trees, and he hurriedly braked. Just as he was making the turn into a lane marked with a discreet “C” on the gateposts, he realized that he had lost his revolver during the scuffle with the Major. He had no weapon at all.

The Crenshaw road inclined steadily toward a woods, and the trees on either side rushed by precipitously as Practice drove on. He was forced to shift down into second to make some of the turns. Abruptly the trees fell away and the house was ahead of him, a two-story frame building with a slim stone chimney on the left. He shoved his hand down on the horn. In a fraction of a second he saw that two of the front windows had lights behind them. He saw the barn situated behind the house, and the abrupt rise of a wooded hill away to the left of house and barn. In the next second the car lurched over a deep rut and Practice’s hands were torn from the wheel; he fell sideways in the seat, but his foot was on the brake and he quickly regained control of the car.

As he raised his head, he saw the broken glass of the windshield over the wheel, an area as big as a saucer, with a small hole in the center, and ducked his head below the window line again. This time he heard the small splintering sound as a second bullet pierced the windshield.

Instinctively he swung the car around to make himself less of a target, and with his head still down, opened the door and crawled out. He heard two more bullets strike the car with a precise deadly thumping, and this time he also heard the far-off reports of the Major’s rifle.

From the brief look he’d had at the farmyard and the hill beyond as he drove in, he’d decided that the Major was either high on the hill, effectively screened by trees, or in the barn loft.

Practice looked over his shoulder. The barn loft was plainly visible to him, which meant that if the Major were sitting up there, he had a clean shot at Practice. But the bullets had struck the other side of the car. He raised his head cautiously and sighted through the rear windows for an instant, but it was too dark to see ...

Another bullet smashed through both windows, so close that specks of glass struck his cheek. Practice crouched again, wondering if the Major’s bullets could reach through the body of the car for him, and he felt his stomach cramping with fear.

“Jim!”

Again he looked over his shoulder, and this time saw John Guthrie, in a white shirt and denims, standing in the doorway of the farmhouse.

“What the hell is going on out there?”

“Get back!” Practice shouted. “Get in the house!” But the screen door had slammed and he saw the Governor advancing toward him, his white shirt clearly visible in the dark.

“Who’s doing the shooting ... ?”

“No!” Practice shouted, but before he could say more he heard the crack of the Major’s rifle, and John Guthrie pitched forward and lay motionless on the grass.

Practice stared at him in horror. The white shirt had given the Major a target he couldn’t possibly have missed. Whether he had chosen to place his bullet a little above the collar or through the heart was unimportant.

“Daddy!”

This time it was Chris in the doorway, holding the screen open, and as Practice glanced up he saw Dore’s blond head behind the boy. Again Chris screamed, “Daddy!” And Practice suddenly broke from cover, running toward the door which seemed half a mile away. There was no cover at all. Perhaps the Major would be momentarily off guard. Or perhaps he was now centering Practice within the scope, tracking him in his headlong, hopeless run, timing his heartbeat, waiting for the moment to send Practice into the dirt with another perfectly placed bullet.

With a groan of fear and anguish, Practice threw himself toward the ground in a diving somersault, distantly hearing the crack of the rifle. Then he scrambled to his knees, ran, dived again, seeing nothing but the doorway and the terrified faces of Chris and Dore. Another bullet whined off the concrete doorstep just ahead of him.

The door was open. He hurtled through, pushing Chris and Dore aside.

“Get down, get down,” he pleaded, and before he was finished, the house began to explode, fragment after fragment, windows, table lamps, even the walls. He crawled on hands and knees to where Chris was standing, staring out at his father on the lawn. He pulled the child down with one hand and yanked at Dore with the other.

“What’s happening, what’s happening?” Dore moaned. “Who’s trying to kill us?”

Practice heard the bullets hitting inside the house, digging into floors, walls, furniture. As he looked up, a light fixture over the dining room table shattered with a little puff of smoke and swayed crookedly on its chain.
Stop it,
he thought, his teeth gritted.
Enough!
He wondered how long it would be before one of the Major’s volleys found them, flat on the floor; how long before he heard the unmistakable sound of a bullet striking flesh.

And then, magically, it was quiet. Chris whimpered on the floor, and Practice moved slightly, holding him. One light remained on, a table lamp in front of the chimney, the one place safe from the bullets that had been fired into the house. They were lying on a diagonal line from the chimney and fireplace to the front door, and now Practice thought he knew approximately where the Major was hiding up on the hill.

Was he changing position now, so that the chimney would no longer be an obstacle to him? Would his next bullets search them out and kill them as they lay helplessly pinned to the floor, unable to move or to run away?

“Dore!”

He heard her sobbing nearby and lifted his head slightly to look at her.

“Tell him to stop—tell him to stop ...”

“Dore! Listen to me. As soon as you hear the next shot, I want you to scream, ‘Chris! Chris!’ And then cry as loud as you can. When he shoots again, scream as if you’re hit. Can you remember that?”

“Tell him to stop,” she moaned.

“Dore ...”

He lifted his head again and saw, not far away, a chaise with a padded, canvas-covered cushion. He squirmed to the chaise and lifted off the pad, then worked it back to where Dore was lying. He doubled the pad, and covered her. Only her arms and legs were unprotected. The doubled pad was more than a foot thick. He didn’t know if it could stop a .30-06, but it might.

Chris was beginning to stir, and Practice crawled back to him and lay down so that he was covering Chris with his body.

They waited.

There were six shots this time, each about three seconds apart. He heard them hitting the floor all around them. After the fourth shot Dore suddenly roused herself and began to scream Chris’s name. And then, as suddenly, she stopped. Practice had been listening for the last bullet, but he hadn’t heard it hit. There might have been a slight, almost undetectable
thump,
as if the cushions which covered Dore had been struck. But he couldn’t be sure. He bit his lip and kept Chris absolutely still beneath him.

Come on,
he thought grimly.
Come on, you bastard, and take a look. You have to know, don’t you? You have to know!

He heard his watch ticking close to his ear and tried to gauge the passing of time, but soon abandoned the effort. Was it five minutes since the bullets had stopped? How long could he keep Chris still? What had happened to Dore? He was afraid to make the slightest move. The Major was a hunter; he could stalk like a ghost. He might be outside the screen right now, looking in, his rifle on them, alert for any movement.

Back in the woods an owl hooted. Chris’s breathing was labored. Practice held his hand firmly on the back of Chris’s head, wishing he could talk to the boy, reassure him in some way.