THE SHADOW OF THE MENDING SHROUD closed in on Wake County, and to Glenda it was like a vise closing around her soul. Her forehead was moist with perspiration. She was wearing her lightest cotton dress, material so thin it hardly weighed an ounce, but the heat now seemed to have a physical presence, a touch that was soft but insidious, and the temperature quickly drained a person’s energy.
She got up from bed and closed her hand around her cool rifle. Why didn’t they just get it over with? The sheriff’s brother drove by every couple of hours now, his rusted hulk of a vehicle bumping and rattling along the road like a mechanical ghost. She knew that they knew about the extra food, and she also knew that they were going to make a try, so why didn’t they just do it? She listened, but heard no vehicle. Outside, a phantom green dusk settled over the dead, brown land. The quiet was like the breath of an old man expiring at Cedarvale in the middle of a sleepy afternoon.
She left her bedroom and stopped at Hanna’s door. Hanna sat by the window, leaning into the waning light as if she were a plant starved for sunshine. She held a book in her hands, couldn’t use the electronic reader, which she so often preferred for her school texts, but held an honest-to-God book, made out of honest-to-God paper; and it wasn’t just any book, but one of Hanna’s old books, a children’s book. Hanna was holding it up to the remaining light with a far-off look in her eyes, and she looked so stoned on the medication from Cedarvale that Glenda was worried about her, and wondered if she was abusing the medication as a way to deaden her daily existence. When the medicine ran out, what then? Would Hanna literally cough herself to death? Would her body finally grow so weak from the racking coughs and lack of food that she would slip into a coma and die?
Day at a time, day at a time, day at a time—her mother’s mantra came back with an urgent and panicked clarity. “Hanna?” she said.
Her daughter turned in the slow and lugubrious way of a heroin addict riding the horse full speed. “Jake’s asleep. You know that, don’t you?”
“What?”
“He was sleeping when I went for a pee.”
“But it’s only eight in the evening.”
“He’s been sleeping a lot.”
Glenda hurried to the living room.
In the dim green light coming through the picture window she saw Jake sprawled on the sofa, his arm hanging over the edge so that it touched the floor. The gun was next to his hand, its barrel angled off toward the front door, a box of bullets open beside it with a few cartridges, like scattered gold nuggets, on the floor. Yes, sleeping all the time, fourteen to sixteen hours a day, like the depressed old people at Cedarvale. Maybe she should have raided the Cedarvale dispensary for some happy pills as well.
She walked over and shook his arm. “Jake? Jake, honey?”
His head shot quickly to one side, and he was insensible for a few seconds as he clutched wildly for the gun.
Once he had it, he sat up. “Are they here? Are they here?”
“No, Jake, no. You fell asleep.”
Jake cast an anxious glance out the window. “Is that Buzz’s truck I hear?”
She listened, her paranoia taking hold like a bad fever. All she heard was the quiet. Not even any gunfire up in the hills anymore, as if they had all killed each other.
Jake got up and walked to the window. The fear came off him like sparks from a pinwheel—fear only a kid of twelve could feel. She walked to the window and joined him. She looked at the sky. The light of an August sunset seeped through the ragged hole in the green thing up there, and the edges of the hole, as it closed up, weren’t so much green as turquoise, as if hailstones refracted the light. The road was empty. There was no sign of Maynard, Buzz, or Brennan—bastards, the lot of them.
“I’m going to one of the stashes to get some food,” she said. “You need something to eat. Eat something, then go to bed.”
“Which stash are you going to?”
“By the sycamores. Stash one.”
“Can I go?”
“You’ve got to stay here. In case they come.”
“You think they will?”
“They’d be fools to when it’s light like this. We’d mow them down. But then Sheriff Fulton’s always been a fool.”
“I’ll use the binoculars.”
“Don’t drop them this time.”
“Mom, that was an accident.”
“They’re your father’s good pair.”
“When are you going to learn to trust me?”
She walked to the kitchen and out the back door.
All the dead things in the forest—animals that had starved—were rotting in this heat, and the whole county smelled like roadkill up close. She trotted over to the fence, painfully aware that any of Fulton’s men could be taking a bead on her from up in the hills, and used the cover of the dead cedar hedge to make her way to the back.
She paused next to Leigh’s shed and looked into the woods. With the light coming down in this eerie way, and the shadows gathering in the lifeless trunks, it didn’t even look like Earth anymore, but like some weird and suffocated version of Earth.
She ventured more deeply into the woods. She came to stash one. She dug—and she dug and she dug until she had uncovered stash one. As she was hauling it out of the warm, dead earth, she heard the bump and rattle of Buzz Fulton’s truck coming along the highway, but only for a moment before it died at the top of the hill, to the east of the house. Her heart jumped as if with booster cables and her shortness of breath worsened, and she listened and listened, and tried to hear the truck, but the silence, after the usual signature cacophony of his vehicle, was like a death writ. He wasn’t passing by this time. He was stopping. Up at the top of the hill. And it couldn’t be good, oh, no, it had to be bad, because if he was stopping at the top of the hill, it meant he had plans.
She shoved the stash into its hole.
She ran out of the woods into the yard, conscious of the thump of her sneakers against the dead grass. She entered through the back door, and locked it manually because the console didn’t have power anymore.
The front door was open and, getting closer, she saw Jake standing on the slab of concrete they called the porch. He held the binoculars to his eyes and stared up the hill.
She stepped out onto the stoop beside him.
He took the binoculars away. “I think they’re here, Mom. I think this might be the night.”
“Did you make a head count?”
“Three for sure. But there could have been four.”
“So you remember what I said?”
“That the old rules don’t apply, and it’s okay to kill if I have to.”
“Just pretend it’s one of your Handheld Sport games.”
“Mom, it’s a little scarier than that.”
“I know … I know. Take up your position in the back. Don’t come forward unless I give you the signal.”
“I feel a little sick.”
“Are you going to throw up?”
“I’m just really scared.”
“Let’s get ready.”
They went into the house. Glenda walked to Hanna’s room.
Hanna had now put her book aside and was looking out the window. “Is it them?”
“Buzz stopped up the hill. I think you and Jake should go to the woods, like we planned.”
“I never liked Buzz. He was such an asshole at Marblehill. He actually came on to me.”
“He did?”
“I never told you.”
“But you were only twelve.”
“Like I said, he’s an asshole.”
They left Hanna’s room.
Jake and Hanna went to hide in the woods out back.
Glenda stayed alone in the house, on her knees at the front window, her rifle ready, scanning the highway, hoping Jake would give her a whistle if Maynard and his crew came from the back. She waited and waited, and slowly the hole in the sky got darker until finally it shone with the eternal blue of nighttime, a shade a hundred times darker than indigo, a ragged continent shiny with stars in the pitch-black of the shroud.
She crawled back to the coffee table and groped for her high-powered flashlight, glad Leigh had stashed away so many extra batteries. She struggled back to the window and looked out at the front lawn. It was now a shade brighter than it had been a moment before—and looking at that hole in the shroud, she saw that its edges were growing brighter as well.
After another fifteen minutes, a pale fingernail of Moon peeped out at her from behind the shroud, and she couldn’t help thinking of Gerry.
When Sheriff Fulton finally came, he didn’t show his face, but megaphoned from somewhere out in the dark.
“Glenda?” He waited for a response. “Glenda, we know you’re in there. And we know you have food. Why don’t you do the sensible thing and give it all up?”
She left the living room, went into the den, placed the flashlight on the high window ledge, turned it on, and shone it out at the front lawn. She left it there, beaming out into the dark, then retraced her steps through the dining room, then the kitchen, grabbed her second flashlight, moved quickly through the dining and living rooms to the other side of the house, and went into Jake’s room.
She put the second flashlight on the window ledge and shone it out at the front lawn as well. Its beam intersected with the one coming from the den. She paused to measure the effect. A pale glow now lit the yard. Fulton would be a fool to come in from the front. Which meant he was going to come from the back. At least she didn’t have to fight this war on two fronts. Not unless they shot out the flashlights, and she didn’t think any of them were good enough marksmen for that.
She left Jake’s room, feeling her way through the dark house until she got to the kitchen, carrying her rifle loosely in her right hand. She grabbed her extra purse from the top of the refrigerator, the one she kept all her rounds in now. She slung it over her shoulder and exited by the back door.
In the light of the Moon, she saw a ground-clinging mist creep over the lawn. She scanned the backyard. Her eyes strayed to the woods, and as the Moon clawed its way further out from behind the shroud, the poor dead things that used to be trees glowed as if from nuclear waste; not silver, not orange, but somewhere in between.
She leaned her rifle against the house. She heard Fulton’s megaphoned voice from out front, like a nasal and electronic ghost moaning out of the darkness, his words now unintelligible because the house blocked the way. How long before he gave up trying to convince her?
She hurried to the fence that ran between her lot and Leigh’s.
She got a ladder from the fence and carried it quietly to the back of the house. Made of Duratex, the ladder was light and easy to carry. She placed it against the mudroom, climbed to the top, put her rifle on the mudroom roof, dragged the ladder up, then leaned it against the side of the house so that it reached the top. Making sure the feet of the ladder straddled the mudroom peak securely, she climbed to the main roof.
She maneuvered around the low-pitched slopes with relative ease. She took up a position behind the satellite dish, and scanned the backyard. She had great lines of fire.
She got to her feet and moved to the front of the house.
The Moon was brighter now and she saw Buzz Fulton’s truck parked at the top of the east hill, and two police cruisers further down.
She waited.
After several minutes she saw men crossing the highway to the east and disappearing into the yard of the house beyond Leigh’s. Fear momentarily weakened her because up until now she had been hoping that they might never make a try for her food. She maneuvered back to her spot by the satellite dish and waited.
After about fifteen minutes, she saw two men at the back. They inspected the ground. Checking for buried food maybe? Then they came along the fence, crouched over. One of them was Maynard, the other Brennan. She had half a mind to let them break into the house and have their look around. When they found it empty, they might go home and never bother her again.
But then she decided it was best to end it once and for all.
“Maynard,” she called, “I’d stop exactly where you are. One step further and you’re going to have a bullet through your head.”
The two men stopped.
“You’re up on the roof?” called Fulton.
“Where’s your brother?” she called. “Are there other men?”
“Glenda, why don’t you come down from there and talk to us? We might as well try to be reasonable.”
“Why don’t you get off my property? You’re trespassing.”
“You know what we come for, Glenda,” called Brennan. “We know you been hoarding. Just give us your food, and we’ll be on our way. No one will get hurt.”
“I don’t think so, Brennan.”
“Why don’t you come down to the detachment office and join us?” said Fulton. “We’ve made quite a little place down there. I could protect you.”
“For what price, Maynard?”
“Glenda … Glenda, I’m going to give you to the count of three to come down. I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to hurt your kids. But I got to do what I got do. We’re talking survival here, Glenda. You know how it is. Don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning. One …”
And suddenly it made complete sense to her, in the way anything can possibly make sense after such a long time in the dark.
“Two …”
Fulton was the enemy. The county’s principal purveyor of death.
“Three …”
Yes, he was the heart and brains of the whole operation, and it was monstrous that he should have the county’s women under his “protection,” and it was up to her to stop all that…. Now careful, Glenda, are you thinking straight? Have you taken all things into consideration? You’re about to shoot a cop, and not just any cop. And yet … shoot him, and you shoot the whole works. Get rid of the head, and the body dies. Yes, it made perfect sense to her, in a fear-crazed way.
“Glenda, you leave us no choice but to—”
And before he could say another word she targeted the sheriff’s head—and it all came back to her, those weekends on the Smoky Hill River with her father, when the sun went down and the sky turned orange, and the partridges leaped into the sky. She took a bead on the sheriff’s head with automatic reflexes and hands as steady as iron, and caressed the trigger so that the rifle fired by itself, adding her own bit of Armageddon to the Apocalypse, the shot rocketing through the air with a roar that echoed in the hills, the bullet hitting its mark as if foreordained.
She heard the sheriff grunt, and he went down like a cow in a slaughterhouse, just so much meat thumping against the poor, dead grass.
Brennan did an odd little jump, his legs splaying, his arms jerking, like he was on thin ice and had just heard a crack. Then he ran toward the back, and she had the oddest sensation that she was floating, because she suddenly felt invincible—but so worried, so terrified for her children, because Brennan was running toward the woods where they were hiding.
So she shot Brennan too, and she must have got him in the spine because his legs gave out from under him, and his handgun flew off toward the shed, a speck of darkness in the gathering moonlight. He dragged himself along with his hands, grunting and groaning, until she lost sight of him in the woods.