Trapped (50 page)

tatters, shredded below the knee by the blade-sharp grass.

Grass that can cut you to pieces, who invented this stuff?

Lawns are better. Roads are betters. Malls are better.

Run, Jane, run. Run for her life. You can do it. Anybody

in reasonably good shape can run a mile if they absolutely

have to. Ignore the blood running from your knees to your

ankles. You can bleed to death later, after you’ve found Kelly.

Alive or dead, she must be found. Alive or dead you’re

going to take her home.

Let her live let her live let her live,
that’s the song in my heart,

what keeps me running when my burning lungs beg me to stop.

No stopping. I won’t stop until we get home, both of us.

Alive or dead, both of us.

The mad mud ghost yanks back the tarp, exposing his

cache of weapons. First thing he loads up is the famous Breda

machine gun, draping a full belt of ammunition over his

shoulders. A thousand rounds. The weight of that alone is

enough to make an ordinary man’s legs buckle, but Ricky

Lang was no ordinary man even before full-blown psycho-

sis doubled then tripled his strength.

Next, the fully loaded AA-12 automatic shotgun with the

custom sixty-four-round drum magazine ready to fire, and a

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spare drum hooked to his belt. Thirty pounds of lethal fire-

power and he holds it in one hand.

Ricky slings the three remaining RPG launchers over his

left shoulder, a crushing load he doesn’t even notice. He

thinks about carrying a pistol for close work, decides his KA-

BAR killing knife will do. The KA-BAR can be held in his

hand or in his mouth, whichever gives him the most dexterity

when firing the automatic weapons.

A panting dog watches from the charred ruins of the house

he burned down six months ago.

“Get away!” he shouts, placing a shot at the dog’s feet,

watching it scamper away with a startled whimper. Calling

back over his shoulder, he says, “Tyler, you leave that puppy

alone! Girls, keep hold of that boy! Grab him by the ankles

if you have to! Daddy’ll be back soon!”

He follows a path familiar only to him.

Half a mile later, draped with bullets and lugging enough

explosives to bring down a fleet of 747s, Ricky Lang strides

into center of the Nakosha village. The native-style elevated

huts that are really perfectly constructed homes with every

modern convenience. The two-room schoolhouse open to

the air, so the children do not fester and mold. The clinic

where white medicines are dispensed, and herbal remedies,

too. The hospice where Tito Lang, once a hero to his son,

wasted away. All of it bought and paid for with the wealth

Ricky brought to his people, laid at their feet like a gift.

Love me, the gift said. Love me and we shall all of us prosper,

we shall all of us live forever, one people, forever and ever amen.

Ricky stands in the middle of the village, ammo gleaming

in the sunshine. If the devil designed a perfect killing

machine it would need to resemble Ricky Lang, part flesh,

part steel, all muscle, and fueled by the urge for death.

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“Joe Lang!” he bellows. “Show yourself!”

Not a sound from the village. They’re all hiding, he tells

himself. Under the beds, in the closets, hiding and ashamed.

“Joe Lang!” he screams. “You’re the big man now! Be

brave!”

A shadow moves on the porch of the biggest hut. Joe Lang

must be hiding. Too scared to face him.

Ricky hefts the grenade launcher, drops to one knee,

bracing himself. He fires. The blowback scorches the side of

his head, but all he cares about is the red streak followed by

the satisfying WOMP! of the fuel-air warhead detonating

inside the chickee hut, vaporizing it in a ball of howling

flame.

Ignoring the blowback, he fires the two remaining RPGs,

exploding the schoolhouse and the clinic. His right ear sizzles

and his black hair melts against the side of his skull, but he

feels no pain.

Ricky Lang smiles with the unburned part of his mouth

as he goes from door to door, blowing through the thin walls

of the huts with the twelve-gauge. Finger locked on full-

auto, barely any recoil, launching Frag-12 explosive shells

at a rate of three hundred per minute , ka-wump-ka-wump,

steady as a driving piston.

Having emptied the spare drum magazine, he drops the

auto shotgun, shrugs his big shoulders and continues with the

Breda M37 machine gun.

Raking the huts, the wreckage of school, with eight-mil-

limeter slugs.

In his head the machine gun is stuttering die-die-die-die-

die-die-die.

The M37, a real classic, is normally fired with both hands

from a tripod, not freehand. Wicked, bone-jolting recoil, and

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it heats up after less than a hundred rounds, but Ricky is having

fun, he’s getting into it, and when the machine gun finally jams

with a few hundred rounds still to go, he peels the glowing

metal stock from his boiling hands and drops it to the ground.

Where did he put the KA-BAR? Right, between his teeth.

Ricky figures most of his people died in the initial explo-

sions or the lethal gunfire that followed, but there may be a

few survivors and he doesn’t want them to suffer.

This isn’t about inflicting pain, it’s about getting things right.

Knife at the ready, he ducks into the smoking remains of one

of the chickee huts. With bare feet he kicks though the wreckage,

looking for bodies or parts of bodies. Looking for familiar faces,

frozen with regret for the great sin of banishing their leader.

Screaming wordlessly, he runs to the next hut. And the next.

Nobody. Nobody. The village is empty.

21. The End Of The World As She Knows It

When I stagger into the clearing Randall Shane is already

there, staring at the blackened remains of what must have

once been a house. He looks utterly defeated, and gazes at

me with an expression of such intense sorrow that I imme-

diately burst into tears.

In the distance another rifle shot, one of hundreds popping

off in the last few minutes. Another muffled explosion, then

a terrible, lingering silence.

“I’m so sorry,” he says.

“Where is she?” I blubber. “Where’s Kelly?”

“Not here,” he says. “I was so sure she’d be here, at the

place it all began. I was wrong.”

He does not flinch when I beat my fists on his chest. It

feels like I’m the rain and he’s a rock, and the world is

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ending, and nothing will matter ever again. Then I start

running in circles, splashing through the ash of the ruined

house, screaming her name.

“Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!”

Shane watches, doesn’t try to stop me. He looks like he

wants to die, and at the moment I don’t care if he does.

“Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!”

There is no echo in this place. The landscape is too wide

open, nothing to throw back my voice as I scream my

daughter’s name, again and again, as if saying it will bring her

back.

Something stops me in my tracks. A small sound, one I’d

recognize anywhere.

“Mom!”

Very faint. As faint as a memory.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Shane asks.

It comes again, smaller still. He can’t hear it, but I can.

“Over there, by the water.”

Shane glides to the shore, to a place where the ground

slopes gradually away.

“Oh my God,” he says.

He’s staring at the water’s edge and my blurry eyes finally

focus on what he’s seeing. A ragged pile of palm fronds scat-

tered along the shore, as if by the wind. Extending out from

under the green fronds, a long dark thing that seems to be

pointing toward the water. A tree trunk—no, it’s not.

The thing twitches.

A tail.

I dive at the fronds, ripping them away, and find myself

staring into the anthracite eyes of an immense alligator. It’s

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so close the pink wrinkles on its ugly, pebbled snout are

clearly visible. So close I can smell its rancid, reptile breath.

Startled, it roars. A bellow to shake the earth, ancient and

menacing. Its breath moist on my face. This time I really do

wet my pants a little. The beast shakes its great nobbed head

from side to side and then backs slowly into the water and

sinks, vanishing from sight.

Frantically I rip away the rest of the fronds and there they

are, spread-eagled and staked to the ground.

My daughter. Edwin Manning. Seth.

Manning is breathing, barely, but Seth looks dead.

Kelly locks eyes with me and tries to speak. Nothing

comes out.

Randall Shane, knife in hand and grinning like he’s just

won the lottery, helps me cut away the rawhide ropes binding

them to the deeply driven wooden stakes. We get Kelly’s

arms free, but something’s wrong, terribly wrong. It’s as if

she’s partially paralyzed, unable to move on her own. Is it the

effect of being staked down, held immobile, or is it something

worse?

Her beautiful blue eyes are trying to communicate some-

thing and her jaw is working, but no words come out. How

did I hear her calling me? Not that it matters. Nothing matters

but the fact that she’s alive.

“Some sort of powerful tranquilizer,” Shane theorizes,

sawing at the ropes. “We need to move her limbs, stimulate

her circulation. You do Kelly, I’ll work on him.”

He means Seth, who, although cut free, remains as still as

death, one arm and part of his face strangely swollen. Shane

starts to pump on the young man’s inert chest.

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“I’ll get to you in a moment,” he says to Edwin Manning,

who is struggling and failing to speak.

Manning’s tear-filled eyes blink rapidly. We both know

he’d want his son saved first.

Kelly’s eyes become frantic. Has she figured out that Seth

is dead or dying? Or is it something else? She seems to be

trying to look behind me. Wanting me to look, too.

I’m about to turn when a pair of huge, bloodied hands grab

Shane by the throat.

Before I can fully react, or understand what’s happening,

a muddy foot connects with the side of my head, knocking

me into the water.

There’s nothing quite so stimulating as falling into water

very recently occupied by a twelve-foot alligator. I’m out of

there like a scalded cat, but even so by the time I crawl back

onto the shore, Shane and Ricky Lang are rolling on the

ground, hands locked around each other’s necks.

Neither man speaks. Except for a few wheezing grunts,

the battle is conducted in total silence. Shane is taller, but

pound for pound his opponent is more muscular, and has the

uncanny strength of the insane.

Shane’s face is getting blue and his eyes are bugging out.

Find the knife, I’m thinking frantically, find the knife! But

there’s no time for that because the mud-covered madman is

pounding Shane’s head into the dirt.

Shane struggles, kicks at him, pumping his knees up into

Lang’s midsection to no avail.

I look around for something to use as a weapon. A rock,

a two-by-four. In the movies there’s always something handy.

But out here in the middle of godforsaken nowhere there’s

nothing but floppy palm fronds.

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No weapons available, so I do what any hundred-and-

twenty-five-pound woman would do in similar circum-

stances—I leap on his back and try to gouge out his eyes.

Bad idea.

With a roar that made the startled alligator sound timid,

Ricky Lang instantly leaps to his feet, whirls around and

throws me into the bushes. The whole move takes less than

a heartbeat and I land flat on my back with a force that

knocks the wind out of me and cracks a few ribs.

I can’t breathe and my ears are ringing, muffling the world

in silence, but my eyes are still functioning. I can see what

happens next.

Shane on his knees, drooling blood.

Ricky Lang methodically kicking away the palm fronds

and recovering a knife. Not Shane’s knife, something bigger

and uglier.

Then my ears pop and I can hear again. Birds chirping,

bugs buzzing, peepers peeping, and my heart banging against

my broken ribs.

Ricky Lang looks at me with eyes from another world. He

looks at Shane on his knees. He says, “Gator needs blood,”

and he strides toward Kelly, knife raised.

Shane lunges, grabs his ankles.

Lang grunts with irritation and is about to plunge the big

knife in Shane’s back when he changes his mind and slowly

sits down on the damp and bloody ground.

It’s like watching a sturdy building collapse. His huge

shoulders slump. He sighs deeply, the big knife falling from

his open hand.

He looks around, as if searching for someone.

“Kids?” he says, his throat gurgling.

Lang smiles and tries to lift his arms, as if to embrace an