RATTLEMAN: Praise for 18 Seconds 'Excellent! Stephen King Page 20

  Chapter 30

  Iron Mountain, West Virginia

  The Blackhawks carrying SWAT teams advanced in tandem across the foothills east of Iron Mountain. Just before they reached their B Team objective one of the A Team handlers shouted that their dogs were also beginning to sound on the summit. Was it possible, the command center wondered, that the killer and agent had become separated? Was it possible that she was down, and there were now two trails to follow?

  The command center had no choice but to divide the Sikorsky helicopters, one directed to continue east of the mountain, one to loop back toward the summit, and it arrived first.

  Dusk was blending into the slate covered stone. The A Team dogs charged blindly uphill, zigzagging through thirty-foot outcrops of granite and vegetation. Then suddenly they stopped and formed a barrier around the mouth of a cave. Ten minutes later the SWAT team arrived and used a concussion grenade to clear their assault. But inside they found no evidence of the fugitive or his hostage, only the rotting corpse of a young woman that had been disemboweled. Her body and her lice-covered insides had been laid on what appeared to be a cornflower blue dress.

  East of the summit the B Team was approaching a gap in the foothills.

  The Black Hawk pilot swooped overhead. “Copy B Leader, we have you crossing Becky Creek.”

  “Command, that’s an affirmative. How far to Route 250?”

  “Point nine tenths, B Leader, do you copy? We’re touching down on the other side.”

  “Copy, that’s nine tenths mile. You’ll be hearing the dogs shortly.”

  A mile east, the helicopter touched down on the barricaded road. Men and women spilled from the cargo bay, spreading into the trees on either side of Route 250. Then the helicopter lifted off again and banked out of sight.

  “Go ahead, B Leader. This is J Hawk One. We are on the ground and we can hear your dogs.” He raised a hand to signal his team.

  Snipers burrowed into the brush along the road. Some lay limp across tree limbs.

  The dogs were closing in, then something big came crashing out of the trees. A shot was fired and others followed and the thing went down in a hail of bullets.

  The dogs surrounded it, growling as it lay across the double yellow lines on Route 250. The snipers left their positions and closed in. It was a goat. Its head was thrashing and they could hear the chatter of beads tied around its neck. Only it wasn’t beads they found but a dozen Rattlesnake rattles and a swath of blood soaked cloth. And the cloth had a buttonhole and appeared to have been a shirtsleeve.

  “Jesus,” one of them said, kneeling to hold the necklace in his hand. “Goat must have gone crazy thinking it was carrying a snake.”

  Far south below the summit, the Rainfield Bluetick pup was trotting lazily through a cataract bog, sniffing sphagnum moss and cranberry vines while its master ate an apple and listened to the frantic calls from the A and B Team handlers.

  The Bluetick’s American Kennel Association designation for the pup was Blizzard O’Poopsey II, but Phillip’s grandchildren named the dog ‘Molasses’ and not for lack of speed, but love of Grandma’s syrup which they fed to her with their fingers from a jar.

  Phillips had continued to radio changing positions throughout the night, but he was moving south and away from the action and until now the FBI dispatcher had seemed uninterested.

  The pilot of the small Forest Service Bell helicopter set down on a grassy clearing just south of the canyon.

  “See you at thirteen hundred hours unless I hear from you first?”

  “Right here.” Marty pointed at the ground, stepping from the cockpit to the landing skid. “I’ll radio the command center to call if anything changes.” Then he jumped to the ground with his rifle and pack. The helicopter lifted off, banking into darkness, and there was silence.

  Marty looked up. The clouds had parted to reveal a patch of clear sky and one bright star.

  He gazed at the rock walls standing like giant bookends on either side of the canyon, sheer and shimmering wet under the moonlight. To the north he would see the outline of the Iron Summit; to his back the Monongahela Forest.

  The Canyon between was a narrow strip of meadow grass and wildflowers. This was the ground he had come to protect.

  Chapter 31

  Singing Rocks, West Virginia

  They maneuvered through the boulders as if in a maze. It took them nearly two hours before Judy saw the gap between the mountains.

  Above them winds were pushing the cloud ceiling apart, patches of haze moving like icebergs across the smooth black sea of night. Judy saw a star flickering in the south and it made her think of Marty.

  Her back and legs ached from the day’s climb and descent. She had stumbled once and gone down on her injured arm, crying out in pain. He had given her more of the leaves to chew, but the bandages were covered in dirt and crusty blood. The pain was radiating through her arm to her shoulder.

  Just as they cleared the last of the boulders the man threw his packs on the ground and pointed for Judy to sit.

  She lowered herself carefully, pulling her knees into her chest, thankful to catch her breath, but anxious about why they had stopped walking.

  The man knelt beside her and drew his knife, cutting away the poultices and discarding them to one side. The skin was raw and she was unable to move her fingers.

  He prodded her with his boot until her back was against a sapling, undid the belt on her jeans and pulled it free. Then he took her mangled hand and jerked it behind her, tied her hands behind the trunk with the belt, and straddled her legs until they were face to face.

  Judy almost passed out from the pain. She could feel the bones move under the belt as he stared into her eyes.

  What was he thinking? Was this how it ended for the others?

  It was ironic, Judy thought, how much she would have welcomed death in the weeks following her daughter’s funeral. There was a time, before the anti-depressants, when she only wanted to end the pain. To end the dark feelings of guilt and sorrow that continued to build inside of her. She couldn’t know of course, that the partitions of her mind were beginning to crack; that behind the death of her daughter and Tom’s desertion were much older memories trying to emerge.

  It was only on top of the mountain when she had pondered quitting, that it began to occur to her that her father must have experienced a similar reflection before he died. He must have sat in his office and stared out the windows at the garden. He must have looked around the room and seen her picture on the mantle. He must have stared at the gun in those seconds before he pulled the trigger. For some reason he couldn’t hang on. He had to die along with whatever was slowly killing him.

  She tried to remember those days following her father’s death, living with a distant relative and going to a strange school where she had no friends. Visits to the lady doctor who liked to play memory games and watch her draw. Something had been wrong even then, she realized. It was already in her genes.

  The man’s hands went to her shirt and tore it open and peeled it down her shoulders. He took the gold chain in his fingers and stared at the cross, then pulled until it snapped and let it fall as he reached for her jeans. He jerked them apart above the zipper, wrenching them over her hips and she screamed until he picked up one of the bloodied poultices and stuffed it in her mouth.

  He was going to rape her, she knew. Then he was going to gut her with his knife and make her watch as he put his hands on her organs and began to tear them out of her body. When she died from the pain or loss of blood he would take the cross and pry the rings from her fingers and check her mouth with bloody hands to look for fillings.

  They would find her here, lying below the rocks, naked to the world, slashed open with her insides piled between her legs. She imagined Marty standing among them.

  Wind rustled through the trees, shaking rain off wet leaves. She looked at the rifle leaning against a tree. The way the butt-plate was sitting in the dirt. The swipe of a foot migh
t bring the barrel down facing him. Could a toe or a stick pull the trigger?

  She thought of Marty and how quickly she had lost him. Stop it! she commanded herself. Just stop it!

  But the thoughts continued to drip one after another into a fermenting brew, and the drink it produced was rage. Rage for all the helplessness she had ever felt; for her father’s suicide and her mother’s weakness; rage for the God who stole her daughter in the night; rage for the narcissistic husband who thought that people were disposable like toys. Rage for loving and losing again. And suddenly an unsettling kind of peace came over her and with it – malignant desire.

  She sat there perfectly calm, chin against his shoulder, studying the delicate flesh under his eyes, the lobes of his ears where they protruded from his long hair, lips beneath the beard, his Adam’s apple sliding above the base of his neck and the pulsing blue artery alongside it. And the more she saw the more excited she became. He wasn’t a man anymore. He was a target with kill zones.

  She stared at the carotid artery and imagined it dangling from an open tear in the flesh. Blue and umbilical-like it would pump blood all over his chest. She tensed her muscles, about to lunge for it with her teeth when his hands suddenly stopped and he recoiled from her body with a look of horror on his face.

  She saw confusion in his eyes; something important had just happened. She followed his eyes to her stomach where his fingers were caught under the waistband of her panties.

  He reached her abdomen and ran his fingers across the scar – the final relic of her daughter’s cesarean birth.

  Her mind raced. What had happened? What was going on?

  His silence made her want to scream, but she fought the impulse. Something important was happening in his mind. Something she didn’t understand and she needed to figure it out fast.

  Then there was a sound, muffled, mournful, inhuman. He was coming apart, she thought. She had pushed him too far.

  She readied herself, knowing she would only get one chance and then she heard the sound again and she realized it wasn’t coming from him at all.

  It was the baying of a hound.

  Chapter 32

  Singing Rocks, West Virginia

  Marty had already heard enough on the radio to know that the Mount Olive Correction Facility dogs had split in two and followed false trails. Johnny Lazarus would probably be calling him on the radio, but he had committed himself to the canyon and while he was anxious to know what was happening on the mountain, he was here for one purpose and that was to lie in ambush. This was not the time to be making noise in the brush or tuning on a police radio.

  He had water and an extra battery for his radio and a jacket in his backpack to keep him warm. He shouldered his rifle and started across the canyon, staring at the towering walls on either side, feeling vulnerable until once more he reached the cover of trees.

  There was a band of mountain spruce between the canyon and the boulder field. He would find a place in the tree line, just at the rim of the canyon, and wait. If Toby was right they would leave the boulder field, cross through the pines and give him a clear shot when they stepped into the canyon.

  The winds had now cleared the sky of heavy clouds, the slightest shade of gray announcing dawn. He settled in a hollowed place.

  And waited.

  It had become necessary in the boulder field for Lance Phillips to keep his Bluetick on a lead. Otherwise she would have lost him as they zigzagged through the complex mass of outcrops and vehicle sized boulders. Lance was soaked with sweat. He was exhausted, but also pleased. It was amusing in a sense; she was so young for the work and to her it was still a game. But it was a game she was very good at and a game she had been born to win. The little Bluetick was holding fast to a trail.

  They were nearly out of the rocks and into the pines when the pup began to howl.

  “Phillips!” Lance yelled into the radio. “We’re coming out of the boulder field on the south side of your map. There’s someone out in front of us and we’re going to need backup.”

  The radio dispatcher paused before he answered, seemingly perplexed. “Phillips, you say? This is the Rainfield dog that’s sounding?”

  “Get someone down here,” Lance barked impatiently into the radio. Then he leaned down to cut the Bluetick loose and began to jog after her.

  He knew the pup was finding an abundance of Judy’s scents: clotting proteins, gamma globulins, chloride and tissues crammed with cells. Night was the very best time to smell, with the air molecules closest to the earth, ten thousand scents per minute. The pup laid her nose to the earth, dripping and sniffing side to side.

  She ran and she circled and ran once again. Little by little she eliminated the distractions and came back to Judy’s trail.

  Marty heard the baying hound, grabbed his rifle and leapt to his feet.

  They were coming at him from the direction of the boulder field, just as Toby said.

  The helicopters should already be in the air and ready to drop snipers. He was about to become an observer, he thought, pulling the radio from his shoulder. There was little point in maintaining silence now. They would need to know he was here.

  But then he heard a gunshot, hundreds of feet away. He looked at the trees, flicked off the safety on his rifle and waited for the sounds of running footsteps. But nothing happened. There were no bodies crashing through the trees, no beating blades of approaching helicopters to seal off the canyon. He heard the dog yelp again, then another shot.

  He turned his radio on, volume low, and pressed it against his ear. The command center dispatcher was repeating the name Phillips, but no one was answering.

  Lance Phillips! It was the Rainfield dog that had come off the mountain. Marty could hear the rising urgency in the dispatcher’s voice. If Phillips was out there he needed help.

  He took a few careful steps into the pines, listening and then taking a few more. In minutes he was midway to the boulder field when he heard twigs snapping and then the monotone voice over a police radio repeating the name Phillips.

  He was just ahead!

  The light was poor. Every footfall could be heard through the trees. He moved cautiously toward the sound of the radio and suddenly heard the metallic click of a rifle bolt.

  He froze and held his breath, finger wrapped around the trigger.

  Then a gunshot rang out and he saw the muzzle flash as a bullet whacked into a nearby tree. He ran to escape a second shot that passed inches from his head. The police radio crackled several yards away. He dove to get behind a small mound and landed on the legs of a body. It was Lance Phillips and he had taken a bullet in the head. There was another muzzle flash and this time a bullet slammed into Marty’s thigh.

  He rolled to his left and came up behind Phillips’ body, reaching for his pistol when a shot struck the earth and showered his face with dirt. He could make out nothing but the tops of the trees. How in the hell could this guy see him in the dark?

  He put his hand across Phillips’ neck, feeling for a pulse but there was none. He tried to blink the dirt from his eyes. Come on, he thought, feeling the blood saturate his jeans. He knew the thigh wound was bad and needed pressure to slow the bleeding. He knew that couldn’t wait long or he’d pass out where he lay.

  A dog started barking frantically.

  Footsteps were coming closer and he gripped Phillips’ body. He could hear a man circling him, noisy and unafraid. Marty still couldn’t make out a thing, only the tops of the trees, which were glazed with a soft coating of moonlight.

  The sound of the man’s steps stopped, but was he to the right or to the left? Marty held the pistol out in front of him and swiveled both ways.

  Then he heard it – the snap of a twig as the mountain man charged out of the forest toward him. And as soon as he was close enough for Marty to make out a silhouette, he sat up holding Phillips’ body in front of him.

  The muzzle flashed and the round hit Phillips’ chest. The concussion knocked Marty backward, but
his arm was still extended and the Beretta was kicking out empty casings as fast as he could pull the trigger. When the noise stopped he heard an “Ughh,” and knew that at least one of his rounds had hit home. He heard the man crashing through the trees, but this time he was heading away from him in retreat.

  Chapter 33

  Singing Rocks, West Virginia

  Judy heard the bay of a hound as the man jumped to his feet, grabbed his rifle and ran into the trees. She heard two shots followed by a moan and the faint sound of a dispatcher’s tedious voice. Someone was out there with a police radio! Someone was looking for her.

  She tried to yell but the bloody rag muffled her voice. She looked at the man’s bag and fought to free herself from the strap, knowing her pistol was still inside with fifteen rounds in the magazine.

  Then something moved in the brush behind her and in a blur leaped from the darkness right to her feet. It was a dog, small and pale and crouched in excitement. With eyes fixed upon her, it began to bark frantically.

  She heard someone running and the rifle fired again, but this time a second weapon began to respond, a very different kind of weapon. It was the sound of a semi-automatic pistol. Someone else was out there. Someone had come to save her.

  There were more footsteps and the mountain man staggered out of the woods. He wrenched the belt free from behind the tree and pulled her violently to her feet, picked up the knapsack and dragged her into the trees.

  Her instinct was to resist, to slow him down until help arrived. But now that someone was chasing them he would probably shoot her if she fell or stopped, so this was not the time to take that chance. All of a sudden things were quite different: he was favoring a leg and there was a dark stain just below his hip. One of the shots had hit him.