Now
GIDEON YELLED, “WAIT, Beth, wait!” By the end of the driveway, when it was clear Beth either wasn’t listening or couldn’t hear, he shouted, “Stop!” Beth brought the ambulance to a skidding halt on Mallard Street and looked over her shoulder. Gideon said, “Maddy’s not here.”
“What do you mean Maddy’s not here?”
“She didn’t get in,” Gideon shouted. “She saw something in the woods. I think she went …” Oh Christ, he thought, recalling the man with the horseshoes he’d seen outside earlier.
“Went what? Gideon?”
He opened the back door and jumped out.
“Gideon!”
“Go,” he shouted. “Go on. Get Simon to the tunnel. We’ll meet you there. Go.”
Beth hesitated only momentarily. “God damn it, Giddy-Up.” He closed the door. She lurched the ambulance in gear and sped off.
Gideon ran in the direction he’d seen Maddy staring when she’d closed the ambulance doors. He entered the woods running, gun poised, recalling, as he ran, how Sully had yelled Hurry! from the other ambulance right before those doors had closed. Like they were over there holding a dam about to break. The door to Lalaland was about to burst open and there was little the Seers could do about it.
Gideon entered the woods. Birds swooped and another deer darted across the clearing behind him, but no matter where he looked through the surrounding trees now, the horizon was smoke filled and glowing from fire.
“Maddy!”
He slowed his pace, navigating over deadfall, using his cell phone flashlight, the trees more spread out than they were in the woods surrounding the tunnel. His eyes darted in every direction. He followed every sound. Something in the shadows moved. Sounded like an animal chewing.
Gideon froze when he saw something hanging from a tree twenty feet away. He pointed his light, approached it slowly. It wasn’t something but someone in the tree, a male, gutted from neck to pubic bone, suspended in the air by ropes at both wrists, arms pulled back and fastened to two limbs behind him, feet crossed at the ankles and tied to the trunk by more rope. The man’s open entrails had spilled out from the chest cavity and hung down in coils to the ground, where another one of those black deer feasted.
Gideon backed away but kept his light on the black deer, red antlers swirled with orange and glistening wet with someone’s blood. It watched Gideon as it chewed. Watched Gideon as he slowly stepped away, walking, walking, afraid that it he ran the deer would give chase. After he put fifty yards between them, Gideon took off in a sprint, slowing when he reached the outskirts of the trees and a dirt road flanked on both sides by recently harvested cornfields. Smoke swirls lifted from the field to his right, and he smelled fire.
Ten yards ahead he saw a horseshoe resting in the dirt. He picked it up and started running down the dirt road. “Maddy!” Calling her name as he surveyed both sides. And then he saw something in the harvested field to his right, a silhouette of someone forty to fifty yards in the distance. He veered off in that direction with a fully loaded gun. “Maddy!” He saw an arm raise in the air, holding a horseshoe. Bringing it down. “Maddy!” He closed in, fearing her dead, bludgeoned to death. He aimed, but then realized it was Maddy holding the horseshoe, standing over a massive man lying on the ground, unmoving. Giving no resistance as Maddy brought the horseshoe down upon his face, again and again. Gideon winced at the dull sound it made, colliding with his skull. “Maddy, stop.”
She looked over her shoulder toward him, crying. “Is he dead?”
Gideon approached. Saw the exit wound from a bullet in his chest. She must have chased him down, shot him in the back. His face was gone. Gideon said, “He’s dead. Maddy, he’s dead.”
She dropped the horseshoe on the man’s chest, said, “Good.”