Swaggering along behind the coyotes came Drake Merwin.
He held in his hand a long, thick red whip.
Only he wasn’t holding it in his hand. The whip was his hand.
“Shoot him,” Brianna urged. “Do it.”
Quinn unlimbered the gun. He laid the short barrel on the Spanish tile and aimed. Drake wasn’t running, he wasn’t moving furtively, he was right in the middle of the alleyway in plain view.
“I can’t get a shot at him,” Quinn said.
“You’re lying,” Brianna accused.
Quinn licked his lips. He aimed. He wrapped his finger around the trigger.
Impossible to miss from here. Drake was no more than thirty feet away. Quinn had practiced firing the machine pistol. He had fired it at a tree trunk and seen the way it chewed through wood.
Squeeze the trigger, and the bullets would chew through Drake the same way.
Squeeze the trigger.
Drake passed directly below.
“He’s gone,” Quinn whispered.
“I couldn’t…,” he said.
From the day care below there came the screams of terrified children.
Mary Terrafino had had a very bad day. That morning she’d had a major pig-out, a real gorge-a-thon, as she called it. She had found a carton of snack-sized Doritos. She’d sat and torn through twenty-four snack packs.
Then she had vomited it all back up. But even that didn’t seem like enough to cleanse her of the offending food, so she had taken a strong laxative. The laxative kept her running back and forth to the bathroom all day.
Now she was sick to her stomach, wrung out, seething with anger at herself, ashamed.
Mary usually popped her pills in the morning, her Prozac and vitamins. But she was so frazzled as the day wore on that she had also popped a Diazepam she had found in her mother’s bathroom medicine cabinet. The Diazepam spread a gentle mellowness over her mind, like molasses poured into gears. On the drug everything was slow, frustrating, fuzzy. To counteract the Diazepam she poured herself a cup of coffee in a covered safety cup, stirred in sugar, and carried it with her into the classroom.
That’s when Quinn had walked through carrying a machine gun. She had shielded the kids from seeing him, but there was something deeply disturbing about the sight of a machine gun in the real world, not on TV or in a video game, but right there in front of her.
Now she sat cross-legged in circle time. A dozen kids paid varying degrees of attention as she read Mama Cat Has Three Kittens and The Buffalo Storm. She had read all the books so many times she could do them by heart.
Other kids were in various other corners playing with dress-up costumes, or painting, or stacking blocks.
Her brother, John, was doing diaper check on “the tinies,” as they now called the prees who were still in diapers.
One of Mary’s helpers, a girl named Manuela, was bouncing a little boy on her knee while trying to get a marker stain out of her blouse. She muttered under her breath as she worked.
Isabella, who had become Mary’s shadow since being brought to the day care, sat cross-legged and looked over her shoulder. Mary followed the words with her finger, word by word, thinking maybe she was teaching Isabella to read a little and feeling vaguely good about that.
She heard the sound of the back door opening. Probably Quinn wandering back through.
A scream.
Mary twisted around to see.
Screams, and a torrent of dirty yellow shapes piled into the room.
Screams as the coyotes brushed children aside, knocked them down, overturned easels and chairs.
Screams from little throats, screams and little faces filled with terror, eyes pleading.
Isabella bolted, panicked. A coyote was on her in a flash, knocked her to the ground, and stood over her, teeth bared, growling. His slavering muzzle was six inches from her throat.
Mary didn’t scream or cry, she roared. She leaped to her feet bellowing a word she would never have wanted the prees to hear. She beat the coyote’s shoulders with her fists.
“Get off her!” Mary cried. “Get off her, you filthy animal!”
John tried to run to her aid and let loose a strangling cry. A coyote had the back of his hoodie in its jaws and was worrying it, shaking it like a frenzied dog with a chew toy, choking John with each twist.
Manuela stood frozen in a corner, hands over her mouth, rigid with fear.
The coyotes, excited and wild and agitated, yipped and jumped and snapped at everyone around them. A little boy named Jackson yelled at one of the coyotes, “Bad dog, bad dog!”
The animal snapped and made contact, leaving a bloody scrape on Jackson’s ankle.
Jackson wailed in pain and terror.
“Mary,” he cried. “Mary.”
Then an aged, mangy coyote snarled and the animals calmed a little. But the children were all crying and wailing and John was shaking and Manuela was clutching two of the prees to her and trying to look brave.
And then Drake stepped into the room.
“You,” Mary raged. “How dare you scare these children this way!”
Drake snapped his snakelike arm. The tip of it left a red welt across Mary’s cheek.
“Shut up, Mary.”
The whip-crack had silenced some of the children. They stared with appalled amazement as the girl they had come to think of as their guardian touched the wound on her face.
“Caine won’t like this,” Mary warned. “He always said he’d keep the children safe.”
“You’ll be safe,” Drake said. “As long as you keep your mouths shut and do what I say.”