Off Season - Jack Ketchum [37]
He peered out the kitchen window. He saw three smaller figures standing on the porch. He felt a surge of terror. They’ve got us, he thought, we’re trapped, we’re dead. Oh shit! Then almost at once he thought, maybe not, maybe not yet. He locked the door and fastened the latch on the window. He went to the phone. Dead, of course. He ran back toward the living room.
He saw Laura huddled in her room against the headboard of the bed, still clutching her blankets. “Come on,” he shouted, “get out of there!” He went to her window and looked outside. Could they possibly be what they appeared to be? He counted them. Six. Six children. He was not crazy. They were children, all right. He could handle six children with the poker, God help him, but how many more were there? How many adults? He threw the lock on the window. Laura watched him but she refused to move when he took her arm. She knows, he thought. She smells the blood out there.
He went to the living room. Nick was on the floor, his back to the foldout bed, one side of his face horribly pale and the other covered with blood. Behind him the corpse lay quiet. Marjie stood immobile by the stairway to the attic, her hands to her mouth, her face a grimace of pain, staring horrified out the open window. What he saw in her face made him shudder. What was she staring at? Carefully he moved in front of her, into her line of vision. The curtains fluttered in the breeze.
They had turned on the headlights in Carla’s Pinto. He saw them thirty yards away, standing under a tree.
A thin man in a checked shirt and faded gray pants, and another, heavier man in red, holding Carla in his arms. She still seemed unconscious. The big man he’d seen at the door was not among them. But he saw more children there, five of them. With the six by the side of the house that made eleven. Three more smaller figures on the porch and a monster at the door. That made six adults and seventeen people altogether, and that was no odds at all.
For a moment he stood there stunned, the poker gripped tight in his hand, breathing heavily; looking around in every direction for he knew not what—for some egress to safety (he could imagine none), for some defensible position or, failing that, some idea to occur to him that would fill the void he could feel growing and spreading through his mind and urging him toward forgetfulness, emptiness, shock. He shook his head, forced his eyes to focus. Come on, he thought, come on. Think.
They would have to fortify the house immediately, barricade the doors, and find themselves some sort of defense. He could not even consider going out after Carla. That would only get them killed. There might even be more of them somewhere. His mind was working now. He looked at Jim’s body on the bed. The bed was slick with blood. There was an awful lot of blood in a man. He felt a familiar churning in his stomach. He had not seen that kind of bleeding since ‘Nam. I’d better get busy, he thought. He backed away silently from the window. He knelt down to Nick on the floor.
“How bad?” he said.
“Not bad,” said Nick without conviction. But Dan saw the film over his eyes begin to clear and thought that maybe he was all right, after all. As gently as possible he moved Nick’s hand away from the wound. He’d been lucky. The knife had caught him just under the left eye and cut him all the way to the chin. Half an inch more and he’d have lost the eye. The wound was relatively shallow except where the knife had met with the most resistance across the cheekbone and chin. The bleeding had nearly stopped. Now if he could just get the guy moving. That open window scared hell out of him.
“Nick,” he said, “do you know where the tools are?”
“Where’s Carla?” The voice