Riders In The Sky Part 53

Not a quick stop.

That man was going to pay.

Lightning-and-thunder, and she held her breath until she could hear the rain once again.

That was all.

She frowned.

Something was missing.

"All right," she said aloud to give herself some company. "All right, think it through, Kit, think it through."

She c.o.c.ked her head, listened hard.

Then she said, "Oh, dear Lord."

The furnace had stopped.

The only good thing about the clinic is that the beds are soft, and no one bothers him.

Dub Neely rolls over and pulls the thin thermal blanket up to his shoulders. He's pretty sure he's alone now, that the snotty receptionist and that grumpy nurse who st.i.tched him up have gone. They didn't even bother to stick a head in, see how he was doing.

Yet that isn't the worst part.

What he's doing is sobering up.

He isn't sure exactly what had happened after the fiasco at the cottage, only that the next thing he knew after he saw Freck coming at him was the bright light in the ceiling, and a nurse saying, "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, yeah," Freck had said, his voice uncharacteristically soft. "You should have seen it, man, it was incredible, all that fighting and stuff. We were lucky to get out alive. This guy was clobbered with something, I don't know what, and the sheriff wants you to fix him, treat him right, put it all on the town's bill."

"Are you sure?" the woman asked again.

"Just do it, okay? Jesus H, lady, don't argue, just do it."

And she had.

And then she'd left him, and Dub hasn't seen her since. Which, for the most part, is all right with him. He doesn't want to figure out why Freck had done it, the hitting and the lying; he really doesn't care. The bed is soft, the building is warm, and if he could only find his d.a.m.n flask, he'd be in Dub Neely heaven.

"Then get outta bed, you dumb jacka.s.s, and go find it."

Torn; he's torn.

Fearful that this is, somehow, a function of his injury, he doesn't want to leave the bed because it might not be here when he returned; he might not even be in the clinic, but in someone's empty house, waking up to the aftermath of a binge.

But he's sobering up, and while that might be a good thing considering the weather outside, there would also be the inevitable shakes and hallucinations, the pain and self-recrimination.

Torn; he's torn.

And then: "Oh, what the h.e.l.l," and he tosses the covers aside, swings to a sitting position, and yells and grabs his head when the-pain lushes through his system.

No question about it now; he has got to find that flask.

Verna Dewitt drives slowly, using the powerful spotlight on the cruiser's roof to help her see through the gloom and the rain. Nothing terrible so far, and for such small things she's grateful. A few branches down. A broken window here and there. A couple of chairs wind-transferred from porches to lawn. Nothing terrible so far.

The power is still on, and that's a plus, although she knows that particular blessing won't last very long. A number of the houses she's checked seemed to be empty, either people stuck on the mainland, or people who left after Jordan sounded the alarm.

She hopes he's okay.

She's done her bit in the Tower, and doesn't envy him there tonight. Today. Whatever it was now. But she's still going to ream him a new one once this is over. There wasn't a panic, but he'd forgotten to call her first, so she could a.s.sist in coordinating the leaving, if leaving is what people wanted. That's the procedure, and he hadn't followed it.

Not that she doubts him.

He knows the sea far better than she does, and if he says there's a surge coming, then there's a d.a.m.n surge coming.

She just wishes he hadn't called it a monster.

The patrol car s.h.i.+mmies when the wind catches it broadside. She's past the bay shops and houses now, into a short stretch of woodland; no light but the lightning, and the spotlight on the roof. A few seconds later, the white beam picks up what looks to be a body, a sight that stops her heart until, closer, she sees it's just a dark plastic garbage bag.

"That's it," she tells the dashboard. She's been out here too long; she's seeing things now, so it's time to get back to the office and let Dwight drive for a while. But she doesn't speed up, because she still has a job to do.

It does not, however, include checking that garbage bag over there, the one poking out of that ditch practically filled with water.

"d.a.m.n people can't even use their garbage cans," she says angrily. "G.o.d, you'd think-"

She hits the brakes and stares.

"Oh ... s.h.i.+t."

It's not garbage; it's a body.

"Don't you think we should hurry?" Lisse asks from the backseat.

Reverend Baylor shrugs. "I can only go as fast as Mr. Bannock, ma'am. And he doesn't seem to be in a hurry."

Once again she's amazed at how calm he sounds. In the past few minutes he's been grabbed by a horde of what he must have thought were jabbering fools, convinced to take part in part of the end of the world, and found himself driving through the worst winter storm he can remember.

Calm, or scared to death.

The wind slaps them.

The rain tries to drown them.

She clasps her hands in her lap and hopes John is all right.

She does not, resolutely does not think about what's going to happen, because then she'd start to scream. Cry. And d.a.m.n Casey Chisholm for getting her into this mess.

Beside her, Cora s.h.i.+fts impatiently, murmuring tonelessly, but Lisse knows it's not praying.

She wants it over with, and over with now.

Lisse does too, but she can wait. She can wait.

Rick Jordan blinks his eyes free of the rain, takes stock, and decides that if he doesn't drown first, he'll probably be all right. The ladder has shattered and crumpled, and most of it lies across his legs. The Tower fell away from him, and as far as he can see in too frequent flares of lightning, the only damage it's done is take out some trees.

What he needs to do now is decide whether to find shelter in the Tower's ruins, or try to make his way down the Hook to a road and someone's house.

Danger in either choice.

Pus.h.i.+ng with elbows and hands in slippery mud gets him to a sitting position. Squinting against the rain, he tries to figure out which way is the right way down. He can't see any lights, so he figures the power's gone out.

Until lightning flares again, and he realizes he's facing south, toward the ocean.

A bit of luck, he thinks, until another bolt shows him the ocean again. It's moving.

Susan doesn't move when someone raps on her window.

"All right," she tells the others. "All right, he's here."

Three doors open simultaneously; no one flinches at the cold, no one complains about the wind and rain.

The great black steams and smokes, skittish, tossing its head, while Red holds the reins tightly and looks down at them with a smile. Quick, and done.

"There," he says, and nods toward the deserted restaurant.

"Well, well," Eula says with a white-tooth grin, and hurries across the slippery ground to a smaller black horse, who whickers at the sight of her and nuzzles her chest when she gets close enough. She strokes its neck, whispers something in its ear, and with the ease of a woman half her age, swings up into the saddle.

Joey whoops with joy and runs and slips to a palomino almost as big as the great black. "h.e.l.lo, boy, h.e.l.lo," he says a dozen times as he dances around it, patting it, checking it, before clambering into the saddle and grabbing the horn. "h.e.l.lo, boy, h.e.l.lo, I missed you."

Susan looks a question up at Red, who says, simply, "Your choice."

She smiles. "Not really."

Red laughs. "You're right."

A lift of her shoulders in a sigh, an impatient wipe of a hand across her face to clear her eyes, and she walks to the hood and looks down the length of the Continental. Shakes her head sadly. Then puts a hand on the head of the silver hood ornament and strokes it down to the tip of its tail.

"It rode nice," she says to no one in particular. "Like driving a cloud."

Another sigh, and her hand reaches up to stroke the neck of a white stallion that turns silver the next time lightning fills the clouds. Its mane and tail are black. When lightning streaks again, the black almost looks bright blue.

Red looks at them all-a smile, here and gone-and he touches his hat brim with the tip of a finger.

By the time he reaches the road, they're riding four abreast.

The marsh has risen and spills over Landward Avenue, ripples across its surface, waves in the making. The sodden body of a blue heron floats to the other side.

Kitra can't move.

The house has grown cold, but she can't move; she just can't.

The lightning is worse, the thunder louder, but she can't move because she's heard something else.

"Lyman," she whispers. "Dear Lord, Lyman, where are you?"

Deputy Dwight Salter frowns as he moves from the desk to the door. There's not much to see out there, just the rain and a few lights, and he doesn't want to open the door, not even a crack. Verna would kill him if any of the storm got inside, but he can't help it. He has to know. Because what he's just heard, he can't believe.

"What the h.e.l.l was that?" Cutler says, pus.h.i.+ng out of his corner and off the cot. "Did you hear that?"

"Hush, Norville," Cribbs says, with a slash of his hand. "Hush, I want to listen."

Hector Nazario throws up his hands and says to the ceiling, "I tried, Gloria, I tried, but the phones are still out."

She's gonna kill me, he thinks; she's gonna kill me.

So preoccupied is he that he barely reacts when Ronnie Hull slams through the door at a run, drenched through and puffing, using the end of the counter to stop her before she falls. "Hector, did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

Verna, on one knee beside the body, looks up sharply, instantly regrets it when the rain hits her gla.s.ses and blinds her. Angrily she yanks them off, lets them dangle against her chest on today's yellow cord, and turns her ear to the north. Trying to concentrate. Trying to hear.

"Stop the car," Casey says, and before it's fully stopped, he's out and in the road. The edge of the flooding laps at the front tires. Except for the vehicle behind, he can't see little else.

"What, Casey?" John asks, leaning over the seat. "What's going on?"