Off Season - Jack Ketchum [79]
It was the pregnant woman who led them down the path, her nose still dripping blood from the blow from Nick’s pistol. They had fled the gun. All the men were dead now except for the one the woman had rendered useless, and the intruder had fought like a demon. So they had fled. As the woman left the cave, she found two of the children already ahead of her. She called them to a halt. She was leader now, and an idea was slowly forming in her. It went like this: they had to leave the cave sometime.
The women and children would wait for them down below. She knew the man was wounded, and as for the woman—she thought that the woman must be nearly dead. So the two of them would leave the cave eventually and die together on the beach. It was good that way. They would surprise them; as they came down the narrow path the children would attack them. The man would not have time to use the gun. They would gather rocks and smash them to pieces. They would sleep outside that night and feed on the flesh of the man and woman until dawn came. Then they would return to the cave. The man and woman would die in the moonlight where the gun did not roar and split the shadows.
She whispered some of this to the fat woman and the children as they descended the cliff to the beach. By the time they were nearly at the bottom, the young pregnant girl was laughing, merry with the prospect of a clever kill. The woman had to make her stop laughing and restrain the children from running noisily ahead of her. She was leader now. She told them to keep quiet or she would send them to where their brothers and sisters had gone, skinned and jointed. Her plan was a good one. Perhaps she would not even kill the man right away. The man was strong and their own men were dead, and many of the children were dead. She knew ways to make a man fuck her even if he hated her. When the time came, she would decide.
Peters guessed later that the woman was as surprised as they were.
Had it not been a woman, and looking the way she did, they might have reacted a split second sooner. Shearing had barely moved when she walked right into him. None of them had ever seen anything like her, half-naked and maybe eight months gone, covered with filth and grime, bleeding from the nose and smelling like a herd of cattle. Peters thought he’d smelled her even before he saw her. And he knew for a fact that he’d never heard her at all. Where the knife had come from none of them could say.
It was obvious they were in for bad trouble, packed together the way they were, waiting to begin to climb. There was no room to maneuver, and the woman was fast. He saw the wildness in her eyes and saw the knife and tried to step back to give them room up front and to raise his weapon, stumbling against Daniels right behind him in the process, but Shearing never even got his safety off. She cut his throat from ear to ear and never made a sound.
His body fell forward against her instead of backward into Peters, and dying that way, Peters guessed, Shearing saved his life. Because the little pump moved up fast then and before she could move again, Peters blew off the top of her head. The woman went down like a cardboard duck in a shooting gallery. The others were right behind her.
Peters saw them scatter off the path, leaping down over both sides of the rockface into the sand. And for a moment he felt like he was in some crazy Western movie with them all huddled tightly together like the last survivors at a wagon-train massacre, shotguns pointed every which way while the strange mad bastards turned and ran at them as if there were hordes of them and not just three kids and a woman against twelve armed men.
He’d never seen anything so fast or so audacious. They haven’t got a prayer, he thought, but nobody seems to know that, and nobody seems to care. Like rats, he thought. Except that they were not cornered, there was the whole wide beach to run to