When a firework of buckshot opened against Meredith’s back, something inside Thad came to life with horrifying intensity. So when he swung the shotgun to draw a bead on Julie, he didn’t even focus on his target. Thad looked through her and pulled the trigger, everything deafening with sound thereafter.
The ringing made it seem as if he were inside the resonation of some giant bell, his entire consciousness having been swallowed by sound. The report slowly hummed away until the only thing left was the absolute truth of it all, some sort of full-color enlightenment. He’d felt this the first time he fired and his life depended on it, the first time that shot wasn’t headed for a metal target down range, and the thing about it was he’d come to love that feeling, that adrenaline-fueled madness. He’d been missing and chasing that feeling ever since.
He stared down to where Doug Dietz was writhing on the floor. The gag Aiden had secured in his mouth capped everything inside of him, Doug’s eyes bulging, his face flushing red each time he seized. Thad knelt beside him, held Doug’s head as if he were going to scalp him, and forced him to face where his sister was lying. He wanted Doug to suffer. He wanted Doug to feel how he felt. “Look at what you’ve done,” Thad said.
Doug shut his eyes and shuddered with tears running like tiny wet fingers down his cheeks. He coughed against what had been shoved into his mouth and seemed to struggle more and more to find a breath.
“No, you’re going to look at her,” Thad yelled. He shook Doug’s head like a can of paint, then set the shotgun on the floor and used his free hand to pull back Doug’s eyelids. Doug’s eyes rolled back into his head until they were nothing more than smoothed pebbles as cloudy white as milk quartz. He was screaming now with all of that sound muffled, his flared nostrils blowing snotty breaths each time he ran out of air. Thad didn’t want him to suffocate before he finished what he’d started, so he yanked the tape from Doug’s mouth, and Doug spit the gag onto the floor.
“What the fuck did you do?” Doug screamed. He looked around the room and then directly into Thad’s eyes. The words were loud, but still hummed within the ringing. “What in God’s name did you do!”
“Don’t you mention God to me,” Thad said. He hammered Doug’s head against the floor. “God has no mercy for people like you.”
When Doug’s breathing slowed, Thad stuffed the wetted sock back into his throat. He grabbed the roll of duct tape from the floor and wrapped Doug’s head just as he had Julie’s a few minutes before. Thad didn’t want to question God right then. He knew he was right, that God didn’t have mercy for people like Doug Dietz. But sometimes he questioned if there was any mercy at all. Those questions that came afterward were what haunted him most, so it was best not to think during the thick of things.
George Trantham had dragged Thad to church all his life, but Thad never believed in God until he saw war. Pinned behind a rock with PKM fire raining down, everyone came to believe in something. Thad believed because, no matter how hard he tried, nothing else made sense. There was only one reason some made it and some didn’t. And ever since, Thad had been trying to imagine a God who would forgive the things he’d done.
With his hand clenching Doug’s hair, Thad turned him so that they were staring each other eye to eye. He pulled Doug so close that he could feel him breathing. “There’ll come a time when I ask forgiveness,” Thad said, “but it won’t be from any God who’d answer you.”