Off Season - Jack Ketchum [80]
It began and ended in less than three minutes. Suddenly the knife was up and then down and Parsons screamed and Kunstler stepped forward and took her out with both barrels at point-blank range, nearly cutting the woman in half. By the time anybody took the little girl seriously, she had launched herself at Caggiano and had most of his throat torn open with her teeth. Peters was first to react. He put the barrel of the pump to her left eye so there was no question of his missing and pulled the trigger. Her jaws were still in Caggiano’s neck when they pulled her off him. The rest of her head was gone.
It was then, Peters thought later, that some furious kind of panic seized them, because there was no real reason to kill all the others. Maybe it was seeing what the little girl had done to Caggiano and maybe it was all of it, the whole craziness of the attack in the first place (these were kids, weren’t they?) but something wild and treacherous passed between them and suddenly it was a different ball game altogether, suddenly there were no sane heads left among them, Peters’ included.
The girl—who was maybe eleven and pregnant, as the woman had been—was holding onto Charlie Daniels’ leg and trying her damnedest to bite him while Daniels screeched like a woman and started dancing to shake her off, like he’d just been bitten by a snake. They could have maybe pulled the girl away. Instead Sorenson broke her back with the butt end of his shotgun and then broke it again for good measure when she was face down in the sand.
The boy had his legs wrapped around Beard’s middle and his teeth were tearing away at his shirt and then they heard Beard howling as the kid ripped past the shirt into his chest. Probably they could have pulled him off, too, but it was . . . Peters didn’t know exactly how to put it . . . loathsome. Like the kid was some kind of huge leech. Sucking at him. And then with his teeth still in him, the boy began reaching for Beard’s eyes with those dirty little fingers, poking at him, trying to stab him blind. It was an ungodly thing to watch that hand scraping and darting at him, and Parsons, who had been a buddy of Beard’s pretty much all his life, must have gone a little bananas then because he grabbed the kid’s arm and twisted it back until all of them heard it snap and the boy howled in pain and tumbled free, and then when Parsons had him squirming on the ground, he just put the barrel of the shotgun into the boy’s mouth and pulled the trigger.
They did not stop to think what had happened to them or what they’d done—that it was more an execution than a police action. None of them did. Not even Peters. The fear was full and churning in them, and they raced up the hill to where the smoke was still drifting out of the entrance to the cave and that was where they found the rest of them and where they found the girl.
I knew there were men somewhere! thought Peters. It did not occur to him to notice that one of them was still wearing glasses. Nor did he recall that the scream they’d heard below had also been a man’s. He was busy. Being scared. Killing.
Nick bent low over her body. He’d been trying to get Marjie to her feet ever since the shooting started but she was in too much pain, and no matter how he did it he seemed to hurt her more. It looked like they had broken one of her legs because the first time she’d put any weight on it, she’d fainted. With his own leg the way it was, there was no possibility of carrying her. He had her awake again now but he was thinking that it was probably better just to leave her here, now that he knew there were people outside who had come to help them. He was thinking that the man