The Stickmen (24 page)

But—

There was one thing that this sudden rush of
greed had caused him to forget.

The kid… The kid’s going to die unless I
find him…

Garrett pushed it all away, regained his
senses. He had no idea where Depot 12 was, and neither did
Sanders.

“Maybe Danny’s father knows where the depot
is,” he suggested.

Sanders’ face drew into a web of creases.
“What is
wrong
with you. Forget the depot! Forget the damn
kid! You can’t save him anyway! The stuff I’ll give you will make
you
famous!
”

“Shut up,” Garrett said. “There’s no deal.
The only thing you’d give me is a garrote.”

“I’m serious, man!” Sanders nearly bellowed.
“I swear!”

“Shut up, Garrett repeated, though he was
fidgeting a bit. “Where’d you tie up General Vander and his
wife?”

“Oh, for God’s sake! We don’t have time for
this bullshit!”

Garrett stiffened his stance, aimed the
pistol at Sanders’ forehead. “Which room? Vander might know how to
get to the depot, and I’m not gonna sit back and let some little
kid fry because of a pipe dream. Tell me which room Danny’s father
is in…or I’ll blow you away right here.”

Sanders’ posture and verve seemed to
deflate, a popped raft. “I told you, I knocked him and his wife out
with amobarbital.”

“Then we’ll wake ’em up!” Garrett barked.
“Where are they?”

Sanders shrugged and pointed. “Master
bedroom. Right in there.”

Garrett moved for the door but then caught
his wits. “You,” he said. “Lead the way. I can’t believe I almost
turned my back on a trained assassin.”

Sanders winked at him. “And it’s probably a
good thing you didn’t.”

Sanders walked to the other end of the
upstairs hall, Garret following. Ubel had said that no one knew the
depot’s location but certainly there was a chance that General
Vander, the post’s commander, might know or at least have some
inkling. Garrett’s heart pumped up a few beats in the meager
hope.

“In here,” Sanders said, and opened the door
at the end of the hall. Garrett glanced past Sanders, into the lit
bedroom. Just a normal middle-class bedroom, nice drapes, nice
decor. And Sanders had indeed done as he’d said: he’d tied General
and Mrs. Vander up quite securely.

But it wasn’t like they were going
anywhere.

Garrett’s belly flinched at the sight. The
plush beige bedspread was half red with blood. Long streaks of more
blood drooled down the back wall in long thin lines of scarlet
going brown.

Oh, no,
Garrett thought.
Holy
shit….
And then he was one spasm short of throwing up.

General Vander lay stiff as a sprawled
scarecrow, the center of his t-shirt an explosion of blood. What
looked like a broken-off wooden chair leg had been driven into his
chest, nailing him to the bed.

Mrs. Vander had fared ever worse. Her body
lay decapitated beside her husband, and her pale head stared back
at Garrett, propped up neatly on a bedpost.

“Go ahead,” Sanders said. “Ask General
Vander if he know where Depot 12 is.”

Finally, Garrett’s face turned up, and he
growled, “You evil murderous piece of shit motherfuck—”

Sanders sprang forward, falling onto Garrett
like brick wall collapsing, his “move” finally made, and Sanders
had expertly made it at just the proper moment as Garrett was
trying to filter his revulsion. Sanders had Garret’s throat in one
hand—instantly squeezing off the air supply—and the other hand on
the gun, which he twisted out of Garrett’s hand as effortlessly as
taking a rattle away from a baby. Suddenly, all of Sanders’ hard
frame and toned muscles seemed to lay atop Garrett as if to flatten
him. The hand snapped off his throat; Garrett shrieked in air.

Then Lynn’s gun was pressed hard to
Garrett’s forehead.

Sanders’ steely eyes glared down, and his
voice flow like some black fluid. “If I wasn’t in a hurry, I’d take
you down slow. I’d do a real job on you—an all-nighter—like I did
to all them VC gook teenagers in the Central Sector. I’d cut off a
piece at a time and cauterize each wound with a blow torch. I’d
flame your face half off like I did to those SDECE schmucks in the
French Congo, and I’d pull your cock off with a pair of vise-grips.
Then I stick lock needles into your kidneys and liver. Real slow.”
Sanders smiled ever so faintly. “Consider yourself fortunate that
I’m in a hurry.”

“Go ahead and shoot me, dickhead,” Garrett
croaked. “And by the way, your mother give
lousy
head. What
do
you
think?”

Sanders’ face reddened, tightening. The
barrel of Lynn’s gun pressed harder against Garrett’s forehead as
his finger tightened against the trigger.

And tightened—

And tightened—

“What’s the matter, Ally McBeal?” Garrett
asked. “Big strong tough-guy killer like you isn’t strong enough to
squeeze that measly little trigger?”

Sanders’ grit his teeth, and his finger
whitened from the forces it was exerting against the trigger.

He couldn’t fire the gun.

“What the fuck did you—”

“I told you downstairs, I knew you’d make a
move on me,” Garrett said, grinning up. “So when we were coming up
the steps, I took the clip out of the gun. Even a dick-for-brains
ex-Army moron like you knows that a semi-automatic pistol won’t
fire with the clip removed even when there’s a round in the
chamber.”

Appalled, Sanders leaned up and gaped at the
pistol’s butt. The ammo clip was gone.

“Now look down, at the approximate location
of your navel,” Garrett said.

Sanders, very slowly, did so. And saw his
own pistol, which Garrett had taken off him earlier, firmly
clenched now in Garrett’s hand. The small-caliber barrel was half
an inch away from Sanders’ belly.

“Good job, punk. I’m impressed.”

“And isn’t it a bummer that a guy like you,
who’s killed hundred of people, is gona buy the farm from a
non-hacking liberal skinny milquetoast computer-geek tabloid writer
like me?” Garrett posed.

Sanders chuckled right down into his face.
“You ain’t got the nuts to kill me.”

BAM!

Sanders howled as the first round popped
into his abdomen. He rolled over, and—

BAM!

Garrett put the second round between
Sanders’ eyes.

“Say
what?
” Garrett asked the corpse
when he got up off the floor and dusted himself off. “I don’t have
the
what?
”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Past midnight now. The warped moon hung low,
as if sitting atop the treeline, a sickly dark-yellow glow. The
air—still warm and sticky even at this time of night—seemed to
throb back and forth in its faint yet somehow deafening chorus of
crickets. peepers, and nightbirds.

Danny Vander’s sneakered feet took him over
another low, weedy hill. The mon followed him along the trees. The
harsh Maryland summer had brought a lengthy drought, browning the
post’s vast grasslands, sucking life from plants and flowers. The
parched weeds crunched beneath each of Danny’s steps. Several
times, owls hooted at him from high trees, and every so often, he
felt a creepy, silent whir above his head: bats.

By now, as he marched on, Danny thought he
must be going crazy. Why else would he be seeing a psychiatrist?
Why else would he feel like everything around him was breaking up
into hundreds of pieces like a pop bottle dropped on the pavement?
Between his anguish at home during the day, and the Stickmen at
night, sometimes Danny wished he could just die.

Steady tears kept his cheeks wet. What had
happened just a little while ago seemed like a terrible nightmare.
But
this
nightmare, he knew, was real.

That terrible man who’d come into the
house….

And what he’d done to Danny’s parents while
the man had made him watch…

He…cut off…Mom’s…

Danny gagged, squeezed his eyes shut, and
stopped for a moment. He pushed it all out of his mind, forced
himself not to think about it, not to remember it. He had to
pretend that it didn’t exist.

My Mom and Dad are dead…

It took a little while—to push it all away.
But he knew it was the Stickmen helping him.

And they
had
helped him, hadn’t
they?

Well, sort of.

They’d helped him get away.

Yeah,
he thought,
but only so I
can help
them.

He didn’t understand, and he guess he never
would. And for some reason, he
knew
he wasn’t supposed to.
He knew that he
couldn’t
, he
couldn’t
understand. It
was like what his parents had told him about God, that time just a
little while ago when they’d all been in the living room watching
the news channel about the big earthquake in some place on the
other side of the world called Turkey. Thousands and thousands of
people had died, all in one night, and Danny didn’t understand, so
he’d asked “How could God let that happen?”

His Mom and Dad had both looked at each
other funny, but then his mother had said, “He didn’t
let
it
happen, Danny. It just happened because—”

“The
devil
owns the title deed to
this
world, son,” his father had cut in, drinking beer like
he almost always did at night. “It’s been that way since Eve bit
the apple, since mankind said no to paradise.”

Danny did get it, and his mother didn’t look
too happy with Dad’s explanation. “God’s much bigger than us,
honey,” she said. “He’s a lot smarter than us, and there are a lot
of things about his plan for us that we simply can’t understand
because we aren’t able to.”

Danny still didn’t get it…but he guessed
this must be pretty much the same thing. He didn’t understand why
all of this was happening because humans
couldn’t
understand
it. They weren’t smart enough. But God understood because He was
smarter.

So were the Stickmen, Danny figured.

After the man had killed his parents and
handcuffed Danny’s wrist to the bed, he’d gone back downstairs.

That’s when the Stickmen had come back into
his head and told him how to get away.

The glove…

Danny always kept it in his back pocket,
just like the Stickmen had told him.

He continued walking, carrying the big case
along with him. He knew where he was supposed to go now—the
Stickmen had told him that too, just a little while ago.

Danny felt like a doll being pulled apart
four different ways. But he just kept walking. He just kept moving
on, to the place he knew…but didn’t.

This…this must be it,
he thought. His
skin started to prickle, and he heard a drone in his head. It was
the way that the Stickmen talked to him when they couldn’t be close
enough to actually see him or put the weird shape-like words in his
head.

The prickling, the drone.

At least, after tonight, there’d be no more
headaches. The Stickmen promised him that.

He stood in a clearing now, just slight dip
against the belt of trees along the rising hills. The moonlight
drenched the entire area in its creepy yellow light. Danny set the
big case down, then lowered himself to his knees. He began sweeping
the leaves away with his hands, moving brush off the dry ground. It
took him a while; there was almost an inch of soil beneath the
leaves, and he had to dig through that, too. Several earthworms
came up between his fingers but he flung them aside. He knew this
was the right place.

He just didn’t know what the
place
was.

He smoothed his hands around some more—it
began to hurt, scuffing against his skin—but then after only a few
more seconds, he felt it.

Something underneath.

Underneath the leaves and branches and
dirt.

Here…

It felt perfectly flat and cool, like metal.
Then he felt something else: a Square bump, like a box about half
the size of a video tape like the kind they rented sometimes at
Blockbuster.

When he brushed off all the dirt, he could
see it in the moonlight: the small box.

It was a lock.

The lock had sort of a lid on top, and Danny
simply flicked a little switch on the side, then the lid popped
open, to reveal ten buttons that reminded of the buttons on a
telephone. It was a combination lock, and the buttons were the
combination.

Danny didn’t know what the right buttons to
push were—but he didn’t really care.

It didn’t really matter, did it?

He firmly gasped the body of the lock with
his gloved hand, and
pulled.

The lock broke open with a loud
snap!

Danny threw the pieces off to the side. Then
he grabbed the heavy steel ring underneath. He lifted the ring…

And then the cool flat surface beneath the
dirt began to rise, and that’s when Danny figured out what this
was.

A great big trapdoor—in the ground.

The face of the door itself was about the
size of his bed mattress. When he lifted the door up all the way to
standing height, he effortlessly flung it back. Its hinges
screeched a little, then the doors fell back flat against the
ground with a muffled
swoosh,
then a
thud.

It was a square black hole that he was
looking at now. Then, very slowly, a light came on, faint at first
then gaining in strength, until Danny could see its detail. The
light was red, mounted on the side of a metal wall inside the hole,
like a backup light on a submarine.

Now he could see inside of the hole, he
could see what was there:

A gridded metal ramp.

Danny stood there for a time, wrapped up in
the warm summer air and the swarming nightsounds. The owl hooted
again, and deeper in the woods, he could hear the quick rustles of
an animal, squirrels probably, or a fox.