As he watched, Mike saw something else, too. He saw Vic’s face grow steadily more red, saw sweat burst from his pores, saw his hands redden with tissue damage each time a blow struck one of Mike’s elbows or his forehead, saw the labored heave of his chest as the beating took its toll of Vic.
That was very, very interesting. It was a revelation that focused his mind like a laser passing through crystal. In that moment he was able to think more clearly, reason more incisively that his mind burst open with new possibilities. He could look at Vic and see him more clearly and more completely than he ever had before. In that moment, for the very first time, he was seeing the man Vic Wingate. The man. It was something that Mike, for all his intelligence, had never once really considered, and it was something that was of immeasurable importance. Even without a body or muscles or lips, Mike smiled. His spirit smiled.
Vic, it turned out, was human.
He was flesh, and blood, and breath. He was meat and bone and muscle. He could be hurt, he could tire. He was merely human and because of that it was not possible for him to be either invincible or invulnerable.
Mike had always believed that Vic was both, but Vic was really only human.
Despite the lack of chemical triggers Mike’s spirit was becoming supercharged by this amazing knowledge. It was the most important thing that Mike had ever learned, so obvious and yet Mike had never seen it. Never even suspected it.
Vic was human.
Mike considered this. Vic was forty-seven years old. Vic was middle-aged. No matter how strong he was, no matter how much he worked out, he was middle-aged and every day forward would take him a day further from his youth and peak strength. Mike was fourteen. In ten years Mike would be twenty-four and Vic would be fifty-seven.
Unless Vic actually killed Mike—and even Mike did not believe that Vic would go that far—then one day Mike would be a fully grown adult man and Vic would be—old.
All Mike had to do was endure.
Vic was human.
Mike felt pain. Instant and overwhelming. It was everywhere in his body, and in that flash of awareness he realized that he was back in his body. He was no longer a hovering spirit, no longer detached from the bruised flesh and violated nerve endings. No longer a bystander witnessing horror but the subject of it. His mouth and nose were bleeding. One eye was puffed nearly shut—the other peered through a red haze of blood. Mike’s broken ribs were worse now, and every muscle felt mashed and ruined. He tasted blood on his thick tongue.
Vic stood above him, impossibly tall and powerful, his arms knotted with muscle, his hands clenched in fists. Gasping for air from his exertions he stared down at Mike, a smile of triumph half formed on his mouth.
But only half formed.
Above the crooked smile Vic’s eyes were slowly clouding with doubt, and double vertical lines deepened between his brows.
“You had enough, you little shit?”
On the floor Mike lay like a smashed bug, his limbs sprawled, his skin bloody and bruised, his face a ruin. The pain was everywhere, in every cell of his body, and Vic was there, ready to give him more of it.
And Mike Sweeney did not care.
He lifted his battered head, opened his puffed eyes, parted his split lips…and smiled up at Vic.
There must have been something in that smile beyond Mike’s joy in knowing that he could outlast this man. That he had taken the worst beating of his life and had endured it. There must have been something there, flickering in his bloodshot eyes or trembling in his mashed lips, that Vic read differently, or read wrong—or read correctly—because he took a single involuntary step backward and Mike saw something in Vic’s face that he had never expected to see. Something he didn’t believe he could see in Vic’s face.
He saw a flicker of fear.
Not much, just a touch, but it was there.
Vic was human after all.
Vic was just a human being, and Mike—well, Mike would endure him. And Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, would outlast him.
The fear that had flickered in Vic’s eyes for the briefest of moments was gone and his usual dark intensity returned. He held his ground, but he lowered his hands.
“Now get up and get your sorry ass to bed. Go on—get out of my sight!”
It took Mike a while to get his arms and legs to work well enough to turn his aching body over onto hands and knees, and then to fingertips and toes, and then, swaying, to his feet. He took a couple of wandering sideways steps before orienting himself.
At the doorway to the kitchen he stopped, holding on to the frame, and turned for a moment to look back at Vic, and once more he gave his stepfather a bloody-toothed smile.
Vic didn’t say another word as Mike tottered away and then slowly clawed his way upstairs.
2
Standing in the parking lot, Crow watched the last of the tourists and staff go and then heaved out a long sigh of mingled relief and weariness. He was tired, and what he really wanted was to go home and crawl into bed, but…he smiled as the thought sprang into his mind, someone was waiting with a late dinner for him.
He walked back into the office to switch off the lights, but before he did he reached for the phone.
Mark Guthrie heard two sounds almost at once.
The first was the first ring of the telephone, and there was a split fraction of a second in which he realized that whoever was calling could send help if only he could manage to get over to the phone, to knock it off its cradle, to make some kind of sound that would let the caller know that there was trouble, but in the second part of that fractured second of time he heard a single sharp report. A gunshot.
Through the gag and through his fear, Mark tried to scream his father’s name, his sister’s name, and the name of God.
The phone kept ringing.
Crow set the phone down in disappointment, but at the very last moment, just as the handset was touching the plunger, there was a sound. It was just a muffled and inarticulate sound, and Crow tried to catch himself in time, but when he whipped the handset away from the cradle, the connection had already been broken.
“Shit!”
He pushed down on the plunger to clear the connection, got a dial tone, and punched in Val’s number again. Busy.
He tried again. Busy.
Once more. Still busy. Crow made a rude sound and hung up the phone. He stood there and looked around, assessing the place. Everything was locked up and dark.
“Okay then,” he said to nobody in particular, and started for the door. Just as he touched the knob he stopped, turned, and walked back to the phone, murmuring, “Once more for luck.”
He punched in the numbers. Busy. “Shit balls,” he observed. He called Val’s cell. No answer except voice mail.
“This is bullshit,” he said aloud and left the office, locking it up nice and tight, crunched across the gravel to where Missy waited for him, and climbed in. He turned on the motor and then tugged the pistol out of his waistband and crammed it back into the glove compartment. Then he put the car into drive and in a spray of gravel, he spun wheels in the direction of the Guthrie farm.
3
Val ran as if all the evil things in the dark were at her heels.
Except for moments of crackling white light from the heavens, the darkness was absolute. Cornstalks stood up to whip at her, slapping her face, biting at her legs, tugging at her wrists. She fought them away as she ran, battering her way through the fields, running nowhere and anywhere.
She ran and ran and ran.
Her strong legs propelled her with great force, and her muscular arms crushed a path for her slim body as she surged forward. Then her sneakered foot came down on something wet and slippery and suddenly she was flying forward, hands coming up to meet the ground that rushed at her in the darkness. Her palms hit hard, sooner than she had expected, and the jolt raced up her arms and into her shoulders and something hot and white and loud seemed to detonate in her left arm just below the deltoid. The arm buckled, refusing to bear even an ounce of weight, and she twisted as she fell, landing with all her weight on the white-hot shoulder.
She didn’t want to scream, but she couldn’t help it. The pain was a storm of knives whirling around inside her. She had no idea how long she lay there, stunned to breathlessness by the sheer weight of the pain. She tried to roll off the arm, but the pain came with her. Her left arm absolutely refused to work. She could feel the fingers opening and closing, but from the elbow to the shoulder blade everything felt as if boiling oil had been poured over it.
“Crow!” she cried out into the swirling darkness. “Help me!”
But Crow wasn’t there. Only the darkness and the pain and the madman with the gun were in her part of the universe. The deep voice of the thunder mocked her pain. Val knew that she had to—absolutely had to—get up.
Get up and run or lie there and wait to be slaughtered.
That was when she heard the single sharp, cold gunshot. It was a small sound, almost lost in the moan of the wind.
It took half a second for her to process the sound, and then she screamed, “Dad!”
That got her up. How, she could never explain, but somehow she was on her feet. Her shoes were wet and sticky from the ears of corn she had slipped on, but she stayed steady on her feet, as steady as waves of nausea and vertigo would allow her to be.
“Dad…” she said, looking back into the utter blackness the way she had come.
She didn’t know what to do. Indecision born of terror polluted her resolve.
If she kept running, then the maniac might kill her father. Might already have killed him!
If she went back, she might be killed, too. What would happen to Mark and Connie?
Seconds burst around her like firecrackers and she didn’t know what to do.
She felt something brush against her cheek and she used her only living hand to try and brush it away. Her fingertips touched lips, a nose, a cheek.
Val screamed and spun, backpedaling and almost falling, flailing out with her good hand.
“Valerie…” said a soft voice.
Val froze. She had a vague impression of a shape, black against the blacker shadows of the field.
“Go back,” whispered the voice.