Jackals Page 17

  Chapter Nineteen

  She moved quickly along the wooded rim of the high clearing, pacing, not wanting to, not wanting them to see how agitated she was, how anxious. Through the wind-skittish leaves she could see fragmented lights winking coldly at her from the interstate, and from the gas station whose lights had snapped on automatically at dusk; in the opposite direction there was nothing but drifting black.

  Not that she seriously expected them to drive.

  They had done that to her once.

  That had been their first mistake.

  The wind nudged her, the woodland whispered to her, trees rattled their branch sticks at her like a ceremony she had once seen in the movies. Peasants warding off evil. Trying to make enough noise to frighten the spirits away. But there were too many leaves, the rattling was muted, and she may be a lot of things, but she was certainly no spirit.

  She inhaled the dry warm wind deeply, almost wishing the clouds would go away and bring home the moon. Bring her some light.

  She moved to the mouth of the trail road that led up here, peered into the woods, and moved back to the edge. If they were doing this deliberately, if they were trying to humble her by not responding right away to teach her her place, it wasn’t working. Momma sure knew how to do it. Willum sometimes, when he had the gumption, which was seldom. Not Ruthann, however, and definitely not her brothers.

  Funny how it was, she thought, casting back to the private funeral she had witnessed that afternoon; funny how they put so much stock in others and mourned them when they were gone. If a pack worked that way, it would be useless within a month, disbanded and scattered in less than a year. Protection was what it gave her, and life, and food. She had coupled as well, but nothing had come of it, and thus far she hadn’t much felt the urge to do it again.

  Later; maybe later.

  When the pack was hers.

  When they all were hers.

  Like Momma had done, like every pack leader, she would keep all the daughters and all the strong males. The weak ones would die. One way or the other.

  Her teeth clicked together, echoing the branches overhead.

  Where the hell were they? They didn’t have all night, and the Hunter most certainly wasn’t sitting around that pathetic little house, waiting for her to return. He’d be arming himself, arming the two others, and this delay was going to make things more difficult than they should be. Not impossible. Never that. Just damn difficult.

  Proof, as if she needed it, that Ruthann would never be anything but a mother.

  Birth and nurse, that’s all she was good for.

  She circled the perimeter a second time, and a third, cursing the wind when it strengthened and blew hair into her eyes; she considered calling them again, but didn’t want to overdo it. Once was enough. Ruthann was a child, with a child’s predilection toward spiteful disobedience. Even if she had balked the first time, Rachel counted on Bobby doing what was right.

  What was right was paying heed.

  What was right was listening to her.

  She yanked a dead twig from a stunted pine and tossed it angrily into the dark.

  A check of the road below when she heard a racing engine, but it was only someone heading away from the Junction. No doubt some drunk leaving that awful bar. They had been going by in both directions for over an hour, singly, and in groups like beetle caravans. Radios loud enough to hurt her ears, laughter like the tuneless cackling of geese.

  They made her sick.

  She returned to the spot where her car had been pushed over, and tried to find the damage Jim Scott told her was there. She couldn’t see it. Too bad. It would have been nice to see what she had managed to survive.

  It would have added to her conviction, born years ago, that this, this night, was the natural order of things.

  Suddenly she stiffened.

  There was something on the wind.

  She half closed her eyes, teeth clicking, and heard it, felt it again. Scattered. Behind her.

  She didn’t tum around until she heard the first footsteps leave the woods.

  Chapter Twenty

  Maurice was at the wheel, humming softly to himself, the car poised and idling at the mouth of the driveway; Jonelle sat in back, shoved to the edge of her seat, arms folded on the back between the preacher and Jim.

  “We could just go,” she suggested for at least the dozenth time.

  Jim shook his head.

  “We’ll be here all night.”

  He didn’t want them riding the road alone. If the jackals had any brains left—and they certainly would if Rachel was with them, if they hadn’t ambushed and killed her—they would be watching for loners heading home tonight. And a loner that suddenly vanished before reaching the highway was as good as a warning flare. But he understood her need to get on with it, get it over.

  The wait was driving him crazy.

  The wind didn’t help. It refused to blow steadily, only in several-minute spurts, sometimes strong, sometimes hardly worth it. It nudged the car. Leaves sailed in flocks over the hood and windshield, scratching at the glass, clinging to the wipers and quivering as if they’d been caught in a snare. Once in a while it carried the faint sound of music all the way from Dunn’s Place; more often than not the rush of its passing only intensified the silence.

  He sniffed, rubbed his eyes.

  In a way he wished the damn clouds would break. The way it was now, the night was too dark and too much of it moved.

  He rested his left hand on the shotgun braced partway over his lap. No rifles this time. There wouldn’t be much precision or distance shooting required. That’s why he hadn’t argued when Janelle, after thinking it over and remembering her brother, decided against the handgun.

  “You sure you can use one?”

  Her answer had been a look that made him wince and turn away.

  Maurice hummed. Janelle tilted her head to bump his shoulder. “Not much longer,” he told her, not realizing he’d been whispering until she asked him to repeat it. “The early crowd’s ready to break. The guys going in now, they’ll be there until Cider tosses them out.”

  “Hang out there a lot, do you?” She whispered too.

  “Observation,” he answered, not looking at her but smiling.

  “My ass.”

  He couldn’t help it: “That, too.”

  Maurice groaned, and after some muttering to himself, changed the car’s position, angling it slightly southward, flicking the headlamps on. Dust blew through the grey light, some of it sparkling.

  “I miss Peter.”

  He reached awkwardly across his chest, fingers stretched to brush across her cheek and nose. “You always will.”

  “So why doesn’t it hurt now?”

  “It will,” he said. “Believe me. It will.”

  She bumped his shoulder again, but this time didn’t move away. It was, for the moment, oddly comforting, and as a pickup whose radio was louder than its engine flared toward them and away, he had an equally odd thought—that in the few years he had known her, he had only kissed her once that he could remember. On her twenty-ninth birthday, when she met him at the door on the night of her party with, of all things, a sprig of mistletoe in her hand.

  Maurice hummed.

  The wind stopped.

  He looked down the road, wishing again for the moon. If it had been out, he would have been able to see the ragged outline of the Ridge. As it was, there was only his memory to impose on the night, and that made the hill far too high, far too wooded, far too treacherous for his comfort. It was much too easy to see things that weren’t there, and too easy by half to exaggerate the things that were.

  Maurice stopped humming.

  Jim looked across him toward the Junction. “Yes,” he said. “I think the wagon train’s coming.”

  Jonelle backed away.

  He missed the touch, but held the shotgun.

  Three, then four pairs of headlights swept around the hill, not traveling very fast.
One thumping stereo fought with another; a fifth car trailed half a minute later, trying to catch up, one of its headlamps out.

  Maurice pulled smoothly in behind it, keeping close without tailgating. He started humming again.

  “Oh boy,” Jonelle said.

  Jim deliberately refused to think more than one step ahead. He stared at the bleached trunk of the vehicle they followed, couldn’t make out how many riders were inside. One step. That’s all. Get to the Ridge in one piece.

  His right ann stretched out, his hand gripping the dashboard as if the preacher were speeding. He pulled it back a few seconds later, and a heartbeat after that began to rub the back of his neck. When he felt what he was doing, he dropped the hand into his lap where it recoiled from the touch of the shotgun’s cool barrel. The dashboard again, then a light scratching of his chest, two fingers inside his shirt.

  “You don’t stop it,” Maurice said without turning from the road, “I’m gonna cut that thing off.”

  Jim looked at him quickly, looked away to stare at the road’s shoulder as it blurred beside the car. Something in the man’s voice. It wasn’t fear, it wasn’t nerves, it was damn close to misgiving. It didn’t take him long to figure out it wasn’t about the hunt. Which immediately made him want to reassure him, to tell him he was going to be all right. This night was different. This whole damn week had been different. In just a few short days they had broken the back of a major pack, and were about to make sure it wouldn’t walk again for years. The in-fighting would be horrific, and the odds were, he’d told them earlier, the pack would finally scatter, remnants joining others who would move into the vacuum.

  Nature’s balance.

  There were respites.

  There were no endings.

  So why do you do it? Jonelle had asked; if you’re never going to win, why do you do it?

  That’s when he’d told them to get ready and get in the car.

  “Couple of minutes,” Maurice said. “The boy up front, the first one, he’s slowing down. Too drunk for the Snake.”

  It was almost too good to be real. Had the drivers decided this parade was too tame for Friday night, the road would have looked and sounded like a NASCAR rally, the center line ignored, taking even the most gentle curves as close to the inside as they could without falling into a ditch. Dropping out of something like that, something so noisy, would have been too obvious. This was damn near perfect, and as long as that guy up ahead didn’t wonder what had happened and stop when his follower suddenly vanished, something like this might almost be called a sign.

  “Coming up,” Maurice said, and reached for the light switch.

  No one responded.

  Jim wiped his eyes with the tips of two fingers, then cupped them around the door’s handle.

  Without warning, the night went black.

  The wind kicked again, harder.

  This time it carried the soft scent of rain.

  Maurice yanked the car over to the left shoulder as soon as he had turned the headlamps out, using gears and parking brake to stop them on the grass, well off the road in case someone else wandered along.

  Before the car stopped moving, Jim was out, shotgun in his right hand, left hand out to snare Jonelle’s wrist and pull her into the open. They hurried around the ticking hood and joined the preacher, who had already taken the first step on the narrow road that led up to the Ridge.

  They didn’t run.

  The surface was rough and clear enough of debris beneath their boots that veering into the trees wouldn’t be much of a problem as long as they didn’t take it too fast.

  A gust slapped his face.

  He held on to Jonelle’s hand.

  Maurice took the point, sweeping the way up for depressions and fallen branches that would trip them, or wrench an ankle, break a leg. The white of his suit had turned a spectral grey. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t.

  The woods found a voice, rustling and clacking softly, and the way the wind moved through it, it sounded as if it had also taken legs and was moving with them.

  They can’t see us, Jim thought, resisting the urge to kick aside a large stone; we can’t see them.

  Several minutes passed before he stopped straining his eyes to see through the black. That way lay blindness. What he had to do was see the way in daylight. Not perfectly. Just enough. Remembering that a short way ahead, the road dipped sharply and rose again, and beyond that it rose just as sharply for a good fifty yards before leveling to an easier grade as it made for the top. The anticipation was dangerous; even so, it was better than not knowing a thing.

  Dampness crawled down his face.

  A finger’s brush across his cheek told him a mist had begun to fall.

  He heard his own labored breathing and snapped his lips shut, steadying his lungs, telling himself to hang in there, there was no need to hurry. If the jackals were there when they arrived, it would be over, hard and quick; if they weren’t, if he’d guessed wrong, there were other nights and other roads.

  Jonelle gasped in surprise as she stumbled, and pulled her hand free.

  Great, he thought sourly when the wind shifted and blew at his back. But there was nothing he could do. Either they caught his scent, or they didn’t. Everything, tonight, was only one way or another. There was no third option.

  Into the dip, and he nearly lost his balance, ordered himself to stop thinking, pay attention, and hurried up the other side. Maurice waited for him, took his elbow and gestured quickly—he had heard something up there.

  Jim took the lead, slightly hunched over as the grade steepened and the wind pushed him harder, shifting yet again, this time from the left.

  The mist clung to his face. Strands of hair darted over his cheeks and forehead, feeling like spiders in a hurry. A pause, left hand stretched back to keep the others from colliding with him.

  He heard it.

  He heard voices.

  The left hand became a fist as his eyes closed tightly, tight enough for sparks, before he opened them and moved on. Maybe thirty yards more before the trees parted for the clearing. He could see brief outlines of foliage that caught the light from the gas station, and from the traffic on the highway. It wouldn’t be enough for him to see clearly once he got there, but it would give him a fair sense of where the open space ended and the drop-offs began.

  He stopped a third time, waited for the others, and when they reached him, they huddled, heads nearly touching as they used the wind now for cover.

  “Got them?” he asked Maurice.

  The preacher reached into his jacket pockets and pulled out three small flashlights just over six inches long. Though they looked like the plastic kind found in any hardware store, almost any supermarket, they were fitted with bulbs that were a good ten times brighter; but the batteries wouldn’t be able to hold all the power the bulbs needed, so the intense illumination wouldn’t last very long.

  Long enough, he hoped, to momentarily blind whoever stood in its way.

  They clipped them to their belts.

  “Left,” he told Jonelle. “Right,” he told Maurice.

  They nodded.

  The mist thickened.

  The wind crept into his shirt.

  Though there was no time for speeches, pep talks, final wisdom, he made a determined fist he held up and brandished twice. Maurice winked, and moved away. Jonelle stretched up and kissed his cheek, patted it, and moved away.

  Touching the light in his left hand to be sure it aimed forward, hefting the shotgun in his right, he did his best to stay in the center of the road. It was rutted here, used by the clearing for storm run-off, and several times he found himself wobbling to his knees. There was no mud yet, but the mist had already made the surface slick.

  Slow down, you idiot.

  He couldn’t do it.

  The wind brought voices.

  Lower, then, almost to his knees as the ground leveled, the wind stronger because the trees had finally fallen away.

/>   Voices in the dark.

  Two women, but he couldn’t tell whether they were arguing or not. Closer, slower, fighting to keep his breathing even. Closer still, and impatiently he blinked the gathering moisture from his eyes, unable to tell if this was prelude to a downpour or nothing more than it was.

  You’ve lost it, you know.

  He shook his head sharply.

  Couldn’t tell them when they weren’t even ten feet away. The shotgun’s stock slapped against his thigh. Couldn’t even tell when one of them was right in your own goddamn house.

  One of the voices rose in a single word, like a bark, and he recognized it at once—Rachel. Having trouble, maybe, getting the others to work with her to get rid of the hunters, or trying to convince them she had nothing to do with Ruby’s and Willum’s deaths.

  A point for his side: it didn’t sound as if they were in the embrace of filial cooperation. Still, it would be too much to ask that Ruthann had decided she might run the pack on her own, without help from her older sister.

  A stone darted out from under his right foot, and he went down hard on his knee.

  The voices stopped.

  The wind died.

  The only sound aside from his own breathing the muffled growl of a truck below on the highway.

  He waited.

  He listened.

  A man’s voice, then, perfectly clearly: “Y’all are wasting time.”

  “Shut up, Bobby.” Ruthann said.

  “Well, we ain’t got all night, and they ain’t sitting on the porch, rocking and smoking until we show up.”

  “This is stupid, I keep telling you. Why don’t you listen?” Another man, uncertain and uneasy. “We should be heading on, forget this, okay? We can bring the others, they know Scott, and we won’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Hush!”

  Jim started.

  It was Rachel.

  Still on one knee, he reached the road’s end, and saw them. Little more than stick figures, but he could see them. Rachel stood to his right, facing another woman that must be Ruthann. Two men sat on the ground, their backs to Jim. The faces were hidden, the occasional flicker of light from the road and highway less effective than decent starlight.