Rusty felt his mother’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake. He’d dozed off reading a comic book.
When he opened his eyes, it wasn’t his mother standing in the room. It was Douglas Taylor’s mother, Claire MacFarland.
“Get up,” she told him. “You’re coming with me.”
“Huh?” He had to be dreaming. And it wasn’t surprising that he was having a nightmare about Mrs. McFarland. He had never seen anything like the look in her eyes when she had screamed at him this afternoon. It was like … looking into the eyes of a mad dog. There was no reason there. He’d asked his mother later if the woman was insane and she’d said no but he didn’t think she was right. He thought Mrs. McFarland had lost her mind.
The woman who was looking down at him now definitely looked crazy.
“Where’s my mom?” he asked.
He knew where she was. She was not home. She was at the veterinary clinic in the Middle of Nowhere.
“You get up out of that bed, young man, or I will drag you out of it by your ear,” Mrs. McFarland said. “Now!”
She had gone from zero to sixty in the yelling department in an instant.
“I … I got to get dressed.”
“You think I ain’t never seen a boy in his underwear. My Dougie …” She stopped, looked momentarily confused. Rusty was seized by the urge to shove her out of the way and bolt out of the room. He was sure he could outrun her. But stopping to consider it was a beat longer than he had and the window of opportunity slammed shut. “Dougie sleeps in pajamas, not in his underwear. I bought them for him. They have fire trucks on them. He loves fire trucks.”
No, he didn’t. Douglas didn’t give a rip about fire trucks but his mother thought they were cute so she’d bought him fire truck toys and hats and put pictures on the walls. Douglas just rolled his eyes when he told Rusty about it, said—
Douglas was dead.
The reality of that slammed into Rusty’s chest like a wrecking ball. He’d been bitten by a rattlesnake and he had died. Rusty had been so sick when he got to the Middle of Nowhere he’d been able to do nothing but vomit, barely aware of his surroundings. But he’d known when Douglas’s mother showed up. And he’d been sufficiently recovered when she started screaming that he’d murdered her son to understand what she was saying.
Suddenly, Rusty felt an iron grip of fingers around his upper arm, fingernails digging into his flesh. Mrs. McFarland yanked him up out of the bed and shoved him toward the doorway.
“Come on!”
He stumbled on purpose and went down on one knee so he could snatch up his jeans off the floor. He got back to his feet with her still holding onto him and danced on one foot while he stuck the other down his pants leg. She let him pull his pants on, but then shoved him toward the door of his room without letting him get a shirt or shoes.
As soon as she let go of him and pushed, he leapt through the doorway … and kept running, dashed down the hall to the kitchen and the back door.
He was a step away from it when the gunshot exploded like a bomb in the small room and a hole appeared in the wall a couple of feet from where he was standing.
“Stop right there or I will put a bullet between your shoulder blades.”
Where had she gotten a gun? She hadn’t had a gun when … or did she? She only grabbed him with one hand. In her pocket …?
He skidded to a stop in bare feet and turned toward where she stood, leveling a small pistol at him. She held it in a two-hand “cop’s grip” but she was doing it wrong, had her fingers in the wrong place. She had one on the trigger, though, and that was all that mattered.
“You’re coming with me. Out the door, walk slow to my car.”
Rusty’d thought that the sound of that rattlesnake and Douglas’s screams was scary. He’d believed at the time that nothing in life would ever be more scary than that. But he’d been wrong. He was so frightened now at the sight of the gun that he came very close to losing control over his bladder and peeing himself.
He put his hands up. She didn’t tell him to, but he did. She gestured with the gun barrel and he stepped up to the back door and opened it and then the screen. Her car was parked in his empty driveway with the lid of the trunk standing open.
“Get in the trunk.”
He looked at her as if to say, “Seriously?” and knew instantly she was … dead serious.
He crossed the yard, angling toward the back of the car across the lawn. He could feel the long grass with his bare feet. He needed to mow it. His mom had been telling him for days—
Then he screamed. Or made some kind of sound, a wail or a grunt … something.
He had drawn even with the car and could see in through the driver’s window. Could see what was in the front seat.
It was Douglas. Douglas’s dead body.
His mother had strapped him in with the seatbelt.