As soon as Daniel pulled his car into the garage, Andi leapt out and ran inside looking for Ossy. She wandered through the house, checking every room, even stood in the dark on the back deck, calling his name. Nothing.
“Looks like Ossy’s going to miss tonight’s bedtime story,” Daniel said, trying to sound cheery. He was actually beginning to fear something had happened to the cat.
Though they’d gotten home late, they still went through the whole routine. Andi took a quick shower and washed her hair. Daniel dried it as she sat on the bathroom vanity that was the right height so she could hold her head down and let her hair fall free.
Andi had shown him all this, of course. It was how Emily had done it.
Then he read her a story she could easily have read herself and she knelt with him beside her bed and said her prayers. They’d been a rote godblessmommy, godblessdaddy, godblessalltheanimalsintheworld litany before Andi had been shot and…died, flatlined—Daniel still couldn’t get his arms around exactly what had happened in the hospital the night Jack walked back into his life.
Now, as Andi unconsciously fingered her mother’s cross that always hung around her neck, she just talked to God. Daniel hadn’t “just talked to God” in a very long time.
With Andi trussed up snug in bed, Daniel went into the living room and turned on the television set—some talking-head show—just for the noise. He stepped out onto the deck, closed the patio doors behind him and began to furiously attack the deck furniture. He pounded his fists relentlessly into the cushions on the wicker couch, again and again, kicked a cushion across the deck and tossed others around until he was panting and the deck looked like a trailer house struck by a tornado.
Then he sank down onto the cushionless swing, put his head in his hands and tried to cry. But he couldn’t cry for Emily because he was so furious at her that if she’d been standing there, he would have screamed in her face: “How could you? How could you and Jeff Kendrick have…?”
It took all his strength to hold onto his temper whenever he was in the same room with the man. Daniel had almost started swinging at Kendrick’s sarcastic remark about “losing” the demon and ached to smash his fist into that pretty-boy face again.
The ferocity of his emotion shocked him. He hated Jeff Kendrick. He had never hated anybody—no, not even Chapman Whitworth—the way he hated Jeff.
And he wasn’t supposed to feel like that. He was a minister, a man of God and he wasn’t supposed to…
Daniel was suddenly very tired. He got up slowly and walked into the house, leaving the cushion mess behind him. As he closed the patio doors, the talking head on the television was babbling about the upcoming primary elections. The turmoil, set loose by the accidental death—Daniel knew it was murder—of Senator Thomas LaHayne, had unleashed a teeming horde of also-rans who had quickly sorted themselves out into four front-runners. Chapman Whitworth was one of them, a dark horse. He had burst on the national scene out of nowhere—thanks to the efforts of the useful idiots who had handed him the publicity he needed—and was gaining ground on the novelty factor of his candidacy alone. People were drawn to the “underdog” campaign. And then, of course, there was his voice.
The race was a dead heat at the moment with no clear front-runner.
Daniel was reaching for the remote to kill the show when the newscaster seamlessly transferred the program to a live broadcast from Minnesota. Terrorists had set off a bomb in a group of children in the Mall of America in Minneapolis. Daniel groaned.
Theresa should have gone to bed, but wasn’t no way she was gone sleep—not after what Jeff had told her as he was leaving. He and Emily Burke was having an affair. Poor Daniel! Theresa didn’t know Emily hardly at all. Other than the time at the hospital the day after Andi got shot—the day after Bishop died!—Theresa’d only spoke polite to the woman a couple of times when she’d come to school for somethin’ Andi was doin’. She was a looker, that one was. A knockout. Not surprising a player like Jeff Kendrick was attracted to her. Poor Daniel was grieving her death and her unfaithfulness, all tied up together at one time. And Jeff had said he’d loved her. Judging from the look on his face, maybe he had.
She shook her head and sighed audibly. When folks started breakin’ promises they’d made before God, wasn’t no limit to the pain and sufferin’ they was pulling down on they heads!
She’d ought to haul herself up out of this soft, comfortable chair now, go to the kitchen to set out food and water for Biscuit and then…Yeah, then what? Get into bed, close her eyes and watch the freak show she’d been viewing almost every night since…she tried but couldn’t even remember how long it’d been? Shoot, she couldn’t hardly remember nothin’, tired as she was from lack of sleep. The dreams had started after she’d spent the night in jail. In jail!
She had dreamed of being locked in a cage with demons, and the reek of it, the putrid rotting-corpse stench, woke her. She’d lain there trembling so violently Biscuit had sensed something was wrong and jumped up on the bed to snuggle in beside her. The comforting—though not pleasant, by no means—smell of his doggie breath had slowly eased the other stink out of her mind.
Now, it’d got to where she’d rather go to the dentist for a root canal than step through dreams into that cold, otherworldly fog swirling in eddies all around her. They was creatures in the fog, shapes twisted and distorted, circling her like jackals closing in on a wounded prey. When she’d try to get away, she’d feel wet, sticky fingers clutch her arm or dry claws scrape across her neck, and hear the demons’ grumbling roars—or their high, hysterical laughter. Eventually, she’d lurch awake, screamin’. If Becca heard her, she’d come runnin’, put her arms around Theresa and hold tight until she stopped trembling. Becca didn’t never ask Theresa what was wrong. She didn’t have to.
So Theresa sat in Bishop’s chair a while longer, reluctant to face the monsters in the fog/smoke place and equally reluctant to take a white pill that’d make it all go away. She’d finally broke down and got a prescription for sleeping pills. The only time she ever slept well and deep anymore was when one of them little white pills worked its magic. She’d close her eyes in the dark and wake up fresh in the morning without remembering a thing in between. Trouble was, sometimes there was things in between you’d might ought to remember. Becca once found her sittin’ at the kitchen table zombielike at two o’clock in the morning. Apparently, sleepwalking was a pretty common side effect of the drug.
Becca didn’t like Theresa wandering around the house in the middle of the night and was afraid she might fall down the stairs. So whenever she took one of the pills, Theresa locked her bedroom door. Then she put one of the two skeleton keys that opened it in her underwear drawer and left the other on a hook outside in the hall beside the door. She figured she’d have to be genuinely awake to find the key among her multi-X size panties—and if she wasn’t, the act of looking would wake her up. Still, she rarely took a pill, gutted it out most nights, waking in the gray dawn in sweat-soaked sheets with a scream on her lips, almost as tired as she’d been when she went to bed.
Theresa picked up the remote off the table beside Bishop’s chair and used it to flip on the television. Anything to put off actually going to sleep. She liked CSI, but it wasn’t on. It’d been replaced by a special news program about a terrorist attack at the Mall of America in Minnesota.
Only when he felt the drops of liquid strike his shirt did Jack realize his hands were shaking. He set the wineglass carefully on the counter. But he moved no closer to the television he’d turned on, didn’t go into the living room and sit on the couch in front of it. He was nailed to the spot with his back to the sink in the kitchen, staring across the width of the room at the images on the screen.
Terrorist attack.
Jack had become quite proficient at banishing thoughts and memories and images he didn’t want to deal with. Had a way of slamming the door in their faces and leaning with his back against it as their angry fists beat on the other side. He paid for that, of course. Paid for clamping his emotions down until he either couldn’t or wouldn’t feel much of anything for anybody. He’d paid for it with loneliness and the little-kid-with-his-nose-against-the-windowpane sense of always being on the outside looking in.
But the trigger of lights and smoke and fire and chaos on the screen was so powerful it slammed into the door and knocked it off the hinges, washing all the old images into his mind along with the new ones forming in front of him.
Lyla.
I don’t want to burn to death, Jack.
The red dress falling through the smoke. Holding hands with a man in a black suit. He had died with Lyla that day. Oh, how Jack had wanted to be that man.
“…exact number of casualties is still unclear,” said a man with a microphone who had an image behind him of bright lights, smoke and carnage. “Right now the number of confirmed dead stands at seventeen—all of them children. The injured, at least two dozen of them, have been taken to Children’s Minnesota Minneapolis Hospital, and an additional eleven have been taken to Abbott Northwestern Hospital. We don’t yet know the extent of their injuries.”
Jack reached out a trembling hand and picked up the remote he’d set on the counter. He punched a button and saw a newscaster with the same background behind him. He punched another button and saw the same scene.
The third button filled the screen with the image of Chapman Whitworth. Then Jack couldn’t punch the fourth button.
“Tonight the nation weeps with the devastated parents in Minneapolis. Across America, we stand as one. Tonight, all of us are Minnesotans.”
His voice was the sound of gentle fingers on velvet, smooth and flawless and melodious. His chiseled face with the burn scar snaking up his cheek like a piece of red barbed wire bore the right look of shock and sorrow and concern, coupled with a barely repressed anger and steely resolve.
“Whoever you are out there,” he said, staring straight into the camera, “know this. The fiery sword of retribution hangs heavy in our hands. We are a nation of law. Justice will be swift and sure. We will track you down. We will find you. And you will suffer for the cowardly, heinous deed you have done here today.”
Jack finally found the strength to push the mute button and the voice vanished. With it vanished the almost hypnotic spell that held Jack breathless in its grip. Without sound, it was possible to see that Chapman Whitworth was ordinary. The voice was the source of his charisma.
Words scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Jack had pushed some button somewhere that he couldn’t find anymore that set up the word scroll and he was embarrassed to call a repairman to come to the house for something like that. Andi would probably know how to fix it. Where was a ten-year-old when you needed one?
He was hardly aware of crossing the kitchen and sinking down on the arm of the chair that sat beside the doorway. Why had they stuck a microphone in Chapman Whit—?
But he knew why. Whitworth had become a media darling as soon as he’d tricked Jack, Theresa and Daniel into opposing his supreme court nomination. Daniel had derisively dubbed the three of them Whitworth’s Useful Idiots. The media doted on him, and Jack could come up with several explanations for that, none of which he liked. It didn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that the national media in the United States was riddled with people controlled by evil forces. Not far-fetched at all. The words on the bottom of the screen said Whitworth had been the keynote speaker at the Minnesota Bar Association in Minneapolis that evening, so he was the first “national figure” reporters could get to. How convenient.
With the sound muted, Jack was able to switch the channel away from Whitworth and learned from the other networks that the explosion had occurred while he and the others were gathered in Theresa’s living room, talking about stopping another evil. But maybe it was the same evil. Perhaps evil was evil. It didn’t matter much what container you put it in, you could still smell the stink.
Nobody knew—at least, nobody was saying yet—what terrorist group was responsible for the attack on the mall. There were, after all, a wide assortment of usual suspects out there to choose from. But clearly Whitworth was convinced it was domestic terrorism, likely pulled off by the isolationist group in Montana—Jack couldn’t remember the name—that had announced in a YouTube video their goal to create chaos that would bring the nation to its knees.
The group had sprung up almost overnight after FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents had raided a survivalist encampment. It hadn’t degenerated into anything like Waco. In fact, it ended more or less peacefully after the leader of the movement gave the obligatory paranoid spiel about the evils of government and then put a pistol to his temple and blew his own brains out.
Apparently, that act had been like puffing on the fuzzy white head of a dandelion. The seeds flew up into the air and came to earth in half a dozen locations that sprouted into enclaves of the Freedom Nation—that was what they called it—who were constantly rattling their sabers and threatening violence. But as far as Jack knew, they were all hat and no cattle. They’d never actually made good on any of their threats, and in his book, the ragtag troop of losers were the least likely to have pulled off something like this.
Jack’s money was on the big dog. Al-Qaida. Or maybe the terrorist group called ISIS, a new species of nutcase that had evolved while the US was pulling troops out of Iraq.
He watched the coverage for a few more minutes in silence, then flipped off the television and sat in the quiet of his living room. Theresa had called it, had said the world would grow darker and darker as it spun toward the end. Jack shook his head wearily, yearning with a physical pain for normal. No demons and fiery lakes, just an average, garden-variety existence. But when you were living in occupied territory, you didn’t get a say.