“Don’t,” David said as he brought the shotgun up with both hands, nestling the stock in his armpit.
This close, he had Spady dead to rights. But Jason had had a shotgun that night at the courthouse, and one shot must’ve hit Spady. Somehow, Spady survived it unscathed.
Spady held his ground. He seemed to be sweating, his body almost vibrating. His lips curled into a smile.
“It found me,” Spady said.
He lifted up the arm, which held solid as it cut the air. Behind him, David saw the spire rising up above the giant.
“This was its gift to me. It gave me my arm back.”
The blade straightened then, like a broadsword. Its shape echoed that of the spire. Except where the spire broke off high up in the air, the blade continued to a thin point.
“I can get you help,” David said.
It was a line from his training, muscle memory kicking in.
Spady laughed. His skin had paled enough that a map of veins and arteries was visible beneath it.
“You help me? You still don’t see it, David. All this time. What I’ve been doing. I’ve tried to help you.”
He swished the blade through the air, and it curved again, into a cutlass shape, as if by magic. He took a step forward, and David steadied, checking his aim. His finger moved inside the trigger guard. Keep him talking. Keep distance. David took a half step back.
“Help me how, Spady?”
“This is our home. Our land. All those sons of bitches . . .”
He waved the blade out, toward the city that now sprawled around them.
“. . . they’re invaders. An infection. Trying to take what’s ours away from us. You see it, too. I know you do. But you have your hands tied. You have that badge, just like Brooke. It keeps you from doing what needs done.”
Spady took another step.
“That fucking pilot, always buzzing his helicopter low right over our house. I didn’t know I was going to kill him at first. I just went to tell him to stop. Then . . . The next time I knew what I was doing. The guy who kept calling us, telling us to sell our place, he wouldn’t stop pestering. I could feel it. This was what needed done. To fight back. I thought you would see, when you couldn’t do anything about those drug dealers, I went and did it for you. I helped you.”
David’s skin crawled. All along, Spady had been following him. Watching him. Learning from Brooke what they were doing.
“What about Jason? And Jimmy?” David challenged. “They weren’t outsiders. And Charlotte, she’s basically family.”
Spady took another step.
“Jason betrayed us. He sided with those fucking rag heads. Once Brooke told me Jimmy was in the cult, I knew he’d chosen the other side. And Charlotte . . . She’s a monster. All of us face a choice, David. Our side or theirs. How about you?”
Another step.
“You cut them to pieces. The FBI agent—his name was Erickson—he was a good man. He was trying to help us.”
Spady smirked, proud.
“You don’t get it. They’re all bad. All the outsiders. All this time, I kept hoping you would see the pattern I made for you. The warning to the world, to leave us the fuck alone. I was doing your job for you.”
“Don’t fucking say that!”
David’s finger tightened on the trigger, but he stopped himself from firing. This was his best friend in the world standing across from him.
Spady pointed the blade toward the giant.
“It’s that thing. Don’t you see it? He’s poisoning us. Trying to turn this town into all the other cities out there, dirty and ugly and infested. It’s all his goddamned fault!”
Another step.
David held his ground.
“No. You don’t get to pass this off. All this blood, it’s on you.”
Spady’s smile vanished.
“That’s how you always saw it, David. Everyone makes their own fate. Work hard, keep your nose clean, things will work out. Awful goddammed easy when you grow up with everything.”
“My parents died.”
“Yeah. Well, my parents did something even worse. They stayed alive.”
The sun had lowered behind Spady. David angled to the side, stepping slow, trying to keep a clean line of sight.
“But the spire, David, that will be our savior,” Spady said. “It showed me. Oh, David, it showed me things you can’t begin to imagine. There’s a void out there, calling for us. You can’t imagine, the sound of a black hole.”
Spady licked at his lips.
“We have a destiny, and that’s it. That’s what the spire wants to show all of us. Except that goddammed giant went and got in the way. But now it knows, David. It knows all about us.”
Spady stepped forward again. Only twenty yards separated them.
“You think it was destiny that made you kill your wife?” David spat.
“I saved her! I saved her from this fucking misery!”
Another step.
David searched for something to say, something to forestall the inevitable. Then he remembered . . .
“Spady, what do you dream about, when you dream?” David asked.
Spady froze. His mouth began to twitch.
“I . . . I dream of cutting. Of piercing through. Everything. You. Everyone. The world. The giant. I need to stab. To pierce. And pierce. And pierce. And pierce. Pierce. Pierce. Pierce. Pierce.”
David inched closer. He’d put handcuffs in a side pocket, if Spady would stay still . . .
David took another step. And another. Still, Spady muttered. He was almost to him . . .
All at once, Spady’s head snapped back around, and he leapt forward.
David fired.
Thunder.
Spady fell.
And then, haltingly, he stood.
Spady’s shirt had shredded to almost nothing. Through it, his abdomen was red and peppered with black circles. But no blood. It looked as if he’d been battered, bruises forming. Bruises that moved beneath his skin.
Then David noticed Spady’s right arm.
The blade had shrunk, maybe six inches, receded back into his body. As the bruises dissipated, the blade stretched out again, as long as it had been before. On Spady’s abdomen, there was no sign of damage.
“Jesus,” David muttered.
Spady laughed at that.
Then he lunged forward again.
David squeezed off another round, but his aim went low.
The shot struck Spady in his left leg.
He twisted at the hip but held his footing.
Still Spady came, impossibly fast.
He swung the bladed arm.
The shotgun went light in David’s hands. The front half of it sloughed off, sliced cleanly through, just where the barrel met the chamber.
Spady was on top of him, blade raised.
David racked another shell and pulled the trigger, praying for the gun to fire.
It did.
The remainder of the barrel ripped apart as the shell erupted out, into Spady’s shoulder, driving him back, pushing the blade sideways.
The blade raked along David’s left arm.
David dropped the destroyed gun and ran.
He had hurdled an overgrown hedge and circled the destroyed house when suddenly his arm burned along the cut, so badly he bit his lip to keep from screaming. He turned into a row of cedars, the thick foliage offering some cover.
He stopped once, listening.
Nothing.
He kept moving, dried pine needles crackling underfoot.
The same tree row where the four of them had played army as kids, using sticks for guns. Now, David drew his pistol, steadying it with both hands.
The sleeve on his left arm had been ripped through from his shoulder to his elbow. Blood ran over his forearm onto his left hand, which trembled.
He kept moving.
There was no plan to his action. No thought. No destination. All he had left was instinct, some primordial mix of training and memories.
Tree to tree. Move. Stop. Wait. Listen.
Only the sound of sirens, still far off.
Then, a sound he recognized, though it had been long since he’d heard it.
Water. He was coming up on the creek.
He came out of the cedars into a low stretch of land, the ground spongy beneath him, sucking against his boots with each step.
The stream cut through ahead, some thirty feet across. And right beside it, the tree.
A massive cottonwood that had split ten feet up from the ground into thick branches that held the treehouse. The one the four of them had made.
Some boards had rotted and fallen to the ground, rusty nails jutting up from them. The structure hung crazily to the side, barely clinging to the tree, as if a breeze might blow it down. David stepped beneath it as he spun around, scanning everywhere for a sign of Spady. He brushed against the old rope ladder, frayed but somehow still intact.
Just then, at the edge of the clearing, a rustle, and a tree fell over, cleaved in half.
Through the sudden opening walked Spady, not even attempting to hide. He held the blade in front of him, pointed dead ahead.
“A lot of fun, up there,” Spady said, as if all was normal.
Then his face contorted, and it looked as if none of what made him human remained.
David backed up and felt the rope ladder. He coiled his left arm through it, steadying. His skin screamed where the blade had cut him.
“Spady. We don’t have to do this.”
It was too late. Spady came at him, charging with the blade lowered like a spear.
David jumped, then he pulled down with all his weight on the rope.
The treehouse groaned, then it gave a crack, unmooring from the branch.
The sound startled Spady, just enough for David to step to the side as the weathered boards came free like a calving glacier.
The treehouse rained down onto Spady, driving him into the ground, his yell swallowed by the roar of the impact.
And then silence.
Dust held in the twilit air.
David stepped back, never taking his gunsight from the debris.
The boards shifted. Then they rose. Then they fell away.
Spady stood.
The blade had shortened again. Black splotches covered Spady’s skin. Nails stuck out of his shoulder. A broken shard of board had stabbed into his side. He grunted and pulled it free with his human arm.
“David,” said Spady. “Don’t be scared.”
David returned his left hand to the gun. His arms refused to stay steady.
Spady’s eyes widened and turned dark. Around his body, the ink swirling beneath his skin congealed and traced its way back to the stump of his right arm. It looked like leeches swimming through his veins.
It massed there at the stump, and the curved blade grew out again.
“You can’t stop it,” Spady said. “You can’t stop death.”
Spady charged again.
David backed toward the stream as he aimed and fired.
Bullet after bullet struck Spady’s torso.
The blackness inside him raced to each wound. The blade shortened.
Spady staggered with each shot, but still he kept on.
David pulled the trigger again and again, counting. Five. Six. Seven. He was to the creek. There was nowhere else to go.
Spady slashed his right arm at David.
It cut the air and nothing else.
The blade was only a few inches long, so much of the dark matter receding, crystals hurtling through his body, rushing to protect it from damage.
They stood close enough to touch.
David and Spady looked at each other. In that moment, Spady’s eyes were clear. He seemed tired, sad, lost. Trapped by tragedy.
“I’m sorry,” David said.
“Me, too,” Spady said.
Spady lunged with the point of his arm.
David lifted his pistol and fired.
The bullet tore through Spady’s left eye and exploded through the back of his head.
The body stood, wobbling but balanced.
Beneath the skin, the dark substance raced into his face, pooling in the wound.
Then, all at once, the black liquid gushed out from his nose and mouth and eyes, pouring down his chest.
Spady fell forward then, his body stiff and ashen, as if already drained of blood. The top half of him landed in the stream with a splash.
The water lapped at the body, and the blackness oozed away. David could see it there, a dark cloud in the stream. And then it was gone.
What was left of Spady’s face rested just under water, his right eye staring up as the stream’s current nudged against him, too weak to wash him away.