Clown in a Cornfield 2, page 26
And there was a line of blood running down Cole’s face.
Had it begun? Had the crowd waited long enough? Had Cole been shot?
No. There’d been no bang. No pop of gunfire.
“Peese,” Arthur Hill said, the word even smaller and more slurred.
Please.
Because there was something blocking his windpipe.
Something cutting through his vocal cords.
The arrowhead bobbed in front of him, so that he had to cross his eyes to see the glimmer of his own blood.
Arthur Hill fell forward on the steps.
His life was leaving him.
As he bled out, the last thing Arthur Hill heard was screams and gunfire.
I can’t die.
But he did.
Izzy Reyes took a deep breath. Under her feet the tin and steel of the marquee groaned, but nobody on the street below seemed to notice.
All attention was on the spotlighted stairs leading up to the Municipal Building.
And all of Izzy’s attention was on the guys with the flak jackets and long guns.
There were three of them out there that she’d been able to spot.
But the one next to the pickup, at the bottom of the stairs, would need to go first.
He was the one-man firing squad. It was becoming clearer that when this floor show was over, the woman on the bullhorn would drop her arm and the boys would be shot.
Izzy may not be able to save their lives. But she could delay their deaths.
And do some damage in the process.
But it wouldn’t save her from the hell she believed in, where she knew she was going.
Jerri was in the back of the truck. Once the executioner was taken care of, Izzy would try to pick off anyone who went for the girl. Hopefully Jerri would have the sense to run away from the action, hug the sidewalks, and move around the swirl of chaos that’d be kicked off, the second the gathering of clowns realized they were under attack, that there was someone up here shooting down at them.
It was thirty, maybe thirty-five, yards to the bottom step. And the angle was right, her being on an elevated platform like this.
She’d shot much farther and kept her accuracy. But she hadn’t been training, and her best shots had been in flat fields, target practice into bales of hay. Bales of hay didn’t move. And the wind down Main Street could do funny things, blow signage around, with gusts strong enough to take letters off the marquee she was currently standing atop.
Stop it.
You won’t miss because you can’t miss.
She lifted the bow. No maintenance. No restringing, no bolt tightening; she hadn’t even applied a dollop of bow wax. There hadn’t been time.
Izzy hadn’t touched the weapon in over a year. Didn’t even want to now. But she had to.
But as she tried to draw back the arrow, Izzy realized there was a new body on the steps. She looked up from her target and saw the new clown slip off his mask and try to say something into the stolen megaphone.
Arbor Heel?
No.
She knew that man.
Across the street and nearly a block away, his facial features had changed, but she knew him.
Arthur Hill.
The man who’d started all this.
The man who’d ruined her life.
“I’m sorry,” Izzy said. And she wasn’t sure who she was apologizing to: Cole, Rust, Jerri, Glenn, his daughter, the whole town, her past self.
All of them and none of them.
This was a mistake. She was about to make a mistake. She knew that. She should be nocking, pulling to full draw, and taking aim on one of the men with the semiautomatic guns.
Arthur Hill was a broken man. He couldn’t even speak. He was a low-impact target. Killing him wouldn’t help anyone. Wouldn’t save any lives or bring anyone back.
I am Frendo.
And that was it. His confession. His boast.
Izzy Reyes had to kill him now.
So she did.
She’d been aiming down the peep sight at his chest, but he’d turned at the last moment and she caught him in the back of the throat.
Izzy took another arrow from her bow-mounted quiver—she had four more—but couldn’t even nock before she’d been spotted.
“Up there! On the sign!”
She drew, tried to sight onto the man with the machine gun, now turned to look up at her.
He was too close to the back of the truck. She could hit Jerri.
“People. Please stay calm!” the voice came over the megaphone. “But . . . whoever’s firing isn’t one of us.”
Izzy stepped back. She stumbled on one of the anchors that held the marquee to the building, but stayed upright.
Pop . . . then a moment later two more: pop pop.
There were three distinct gunshots as Izzy let the tension off the bowstring and tried to move back so she wouldn’t be visible from the street. The woman on the Municipal Building stairs screamed a long “No!” into her megaphone, the word cutting off halfway, the end of the pained yowl still audible, though unamplified.
And then the semiautomatic weapons fire began in earnest. Shots pinging all around Izzy, neon tubes flickering and exploding. Sparks and redbrick dust, stinging her hands as she tried to dive back into the maintenance hatch that led out to the top of the marquee.
“Don’t let her get away!”
Oh god. They were going to get into the theater.
There was an even mix of screams and cheers as Arthur Hill fell forward with an arrow through his neck.
Some attendees were horrified to see a kind of violence they hadn’t been planning to see, and others sounded happy that at least some violence was finally happening.
Arthur Hill, his hair patchy and thin, scabs and sores on his scalp, dropped out of the way, allowing Quinn to see that there was a gout of blood on Cole’s bewildered face.
Cole’s evolving mix of emotions seemed to mirror what the crowd was feeling as their bloodlust turned to panic.
“Up there,” someone yelled, “on the sign.”
Quinn blinked for a moment.
Okay. This didn’t change anything.
She still had a target.
The clown with the AR had turned, his eyes searching Main Street for the mad bowman.
She pulled the pistol free from her pocket. It didn’t matter now if anyone saw she was armed.
Panic was overtaking the crowd. The man with the rifle must have found what he was looking for, because he raised the barrel.
That was all Quinn needed.
Here she was again. Shooting clowns.
She pointed her gun so that the bullet would enter his chin below the mask, blow his brains out the top of his skull.
She squeezed the trigger.
And the guy beside her with the beer breath ran right into her, knocking her aim off, sending her shot into one of the few unbroken windows at the front of the Municipal Building.
“Huh?” the man with the rifle said, voice muffled and confused, as he changed targets, sighting down the barrel at Quinn. He seemed to track the gun in her hand. He knew that it’d just been pressed flush with his skin, but still he hesitated, probably because she was dressed like one of them, had been standing beside him and the parked truck this whole time.
Lying back, elbow down on concrete to steady her shot, Quinn fired twice more.
The man’s eyeball exploded, and the white glare of the SUV headlights turned the gore into a strawberry-jelly burst of color. He was already weapons-free, though, so as he fell back into his death spasms, the muscles in his hands and arms tensed.
Two three-shot bursts of semiautomatic weapons fire strafed not only the crowd of bystanders, but also the side of the truck. Sheet metal punched through with several muffled thunks.
God. Please don’t have just shot a bunch of the people I brought here to help.
Quinn stood, gathering herself, trying to triangulate where the rest of the gunfire was coming from.
Deeper in the crowd, there were two more sources of muzzle flashes. But the clowns weren’t shooting at her. They were concentrating their fire at the Eureka’s marquee. Sparks, plastic, and glass rained down onto the sidewalk. Some of the braver clowns with bats and blades had already begun trying to kick in the heavy double doors of the theater. But there were plenty more people in clown costumes who were making a run for it, were trying to get the hell off Main Street. There was a series of overlapping stampedes as bodies were pushed into alleys and groups tried to stay together while running north or south.
Whoever had just put an arrow in Arthur Hill, they’d taken all the heat off Quinn. Probably saved her life. At least temporarily.
“Hey, what the hell did you do!?” The beer guy was on Quinn, shaking her, grabbing at her mask.
She couldn’t see, the brow of the mask slipping down over her eyes. But she felt rubber tearing as she pressed the gun into the meat of the man’s arm and fired.
He screamed so hard a cloud of stomach acid hit her in the face, the air hot and wet, the latex around her eyes snapping back as he let go.
She could see a little.
The man grabbed at the gunshot on his arm, yelling an unbroken string of “Owowowowow” like he could have been a runner-up on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Quinn looked down, finding some portions of her vision expanded by the mask’s eyeholes having torn wider, but, overall, her sight more obscured.
She found what she was searching for—the AR, its barrel still smoking.
“I saw what you did!” a woman wearing a “Search Baypen Cover-up” shirt said, clawing at Quinn’s mask. The woman stomped a sneaker down, crushing Quinn’s outstretched hand.
Quinn tried to raise her gun, but the woman slapped the pistol away, raking press-on nails across the fabric covering Quinn’s forearm, then across her face.
Quinn’s mask was in tatters now, a few latex strips lying across her face and shoulders, and the woman’s eyes went wide under her own mask.
The woman recognized Quinn.
“Hey. Everyone! Hey,” the woman started to yell, but the people around her weren’t paying attention. The crowd had either dispersed, some fighting with the teenage clowns among them, or was streaming into the Eureka.
“It’s her!” the woman yelled. “Help—”
The woman stopped yelling as a bottle was broken over the back of her skull. Her eyes rolled white, and she collapsed into the heap of bodies that was now forming beside the truck.
Quinn looked up. A neon-spotted clown with black-light paint on their jumpsuit gave Quinn a nod and a thumbs-up.
“Sorry, good luck,” they said as they ran up the stairs, trying to cross in front of the SUV to get as far from the gunfire and chaos as they could.
Whoever they were, Quinn didn’t blame them for running. She appreciated the help and she wanted to get out of here, too.
Quinn pulled at the strap of the rifle, trying to get it free from the tangle of bodies, then lifted it up.
Unmasked, Quinn started to climb up the stairs to the Municipal Building toward her two best friends.
Jerri only caught a glimpse of Izzy Reyes before she disappeared back over the lip of the marquee.
What the hell is she doing? Jerri asked herself, the answer coming the second before the first gunshot: Protecting me.
The bang was close, so close.
Jerri turned back in time to see the clown—Lawrence—shot in the face. He turned toward her, one of his eyes a ragged, jellied hole, but his one good eye seeming to see her. . . .
Oh no.
His weapon began to fire, the recoil of the unbraced rifle pushing the man’s arm up into the air as he squeezed off his death rattle.
Jerri was up and over the side of the truck bed so fast, she didn’t have a chance to protect her face as she flipped over and onto the asphalt of Main Street.
“This one’s getting away!” a man yelled. It was one of the guys in body paint. He pointed down at Jerri. Standing over her, he looked even bigger than he had when he’d been banging on the tailgate. He wasn’t all that tall, but still had to have been twice, maybe three times, Jerri’s weight.
She hadn’t done anything! This wasn’t her trial! What was she “getting away” from?
When the shirtless man realized that nobody cared, that most people around him were scrambling for cover, he splayed his fingers and grabbed a handful of Jerri’s short hair.
She locked onto his forearm, taking some of the pressure off her scalp, the cuts in her hands howling under the gauze.
No. She couldn’t have survived all this to let this guy hurt her. The very idea of this guy killing her made her furious.
“How does that make you feel?” Jerri imagined Ms. Slade’s voice. All those missed gym periods. All that reliving the past.
The shirtless man lifted Jerri aloft, her feet leaving the ground.
How did it make her feel? It made her feel like she wanted to live.
She kicked. And kept kicking until one foot found the fleshy patch under the man’s third painted-on button, the area below the curve of his belly button.
“Shit,” the man hissed, letting her drop a little. “You’ll get it now, little man.”
“Little woman,” a voice said out loud as Jerri thought the same thing.
And there was the satisfying wood crack of a grand slam, the man’s nose and mouth disappearing in a crunch of blood and cartilage as he was smacked in the face with a baseball bat.
The man was unconscious instantly, one ankle buckling one direction, the knee of the other leg going the opposite way as his hand unclenched and he dropped Jerri back onto the asphalt.
The clown with the baseball bat was somehow even scarier than her attacker had been.
How did this keep getting worse?
The clown stood over the man’s body, choked up on the bat, looking ready to hit the man again if he moved.
When it was clear he wouldn’t move again, the clown turned to Jerri.
“Don’t hurt me.” Jerri put her hands up, hating how quickly the fight had left her. She tried to inch backward from where she lay, but her shoulder hit the pickup’s rear tire and there was nowhere else for her to crawl.
“It’s okay,” the clown said. “It’s okay.” The voice was familiar. Kind. Friendly. A voice that Jerri thought about a lot. Sandra Wright took one hand off the bat, used a thumb to lift her mask enough to wink at Jerri.
The girl’s corpse-bride face paint was smudged but still beautiful.
Sandra replaced the mask and offered Jerri a hand up.
Jerri took it.
“Fuck. Get back!” someone in front of the Eureka yelled.
The clowns had the doors broken open now, but as soon as they began streaming in, they were tripping over themselves to get back out.
One person who fell away from the door had an arrow through their stomach, fletching bobbing under the half- extinguished lights of the marquee.
“Let me through, let me through,” one of the soldier clowns yelled, pulling people out of the scrum with one hand.
“Ms. Reyes,” Jerri said, looking over to Sandra, “we’ve got to help her.”
It was impossible to read the older girl’s expression through her mask, but Jerri could read the hesitancy in her body language.
“Please. She’s”—like a mom to me—“a good boss.”
Sandra nodded, wiped the blood off her bat and onto one leg of her jumpsuit.
“Okay. We can clear a path.”
And they did, Jerri staying low and agile in Sandra’s shadow, the bigger girl wielding the baseball bat like some kind of Amazonian warrior.
Did Sandra even play sports? Or was she just naturally this fierce? Jerri, who thought she knew everything about everyone, couldn’t remember right now.
There were minor scuffles around them, groups of teens disarming and beating the hell out of out-of-towners who’d come to Kettle Springs to make trouble, but mostly: the battle was over. And the clowns—the bad clowns, that is—had lost.
The crush of bodies trying to get out of the Eureka had slowed to a drip as Jerri and Sandra approached.
But then came the sound that Jerri had been dreading as they’d run across the street.
Three quick blats from an assault weapon. The darkened lobby of the theater flashing bright for a quick moment, then going still.
Jerri surged forward, but Sandra caught her by the arm.
“Don’t,” Sandra said. This close, Jerri could smell the rubber stink of Sandra’s clown mask, but also . . . the sweet-mint-and-smoke smell she’d noticed on the junior girl what felt like a lifetime ago, the last time they were both standing in front of the theater.
“I have to,” Jerri said.
And before she could push forward, or had even tracked that Sandra’s mask had come up, there was a quick kiss on Jerri’s lips.
It lasted one, maybe two, heartbeats.
“That was for luck. Not romance,” Sandra said.
“That’s cool,” Jerri said. And even though there were men and women bleeding and screaming all around them, she was blushing, ready to pass out from the sudden glow of her skin.
Jerri nodded and nodded and used that momentum, the heat of the kiss, to send her into a jog. She reached the front doors of the Eureka, one door completely off its hinges and laid across the front of the lobby.
She waited there for a moment and listened.
There were no more gunshots.
There were no voices. No movement of any kind, really. For all the activity that had been happening in here minutes ago, it was dead quiet now.
“Ms. Reyes?” Jerri said into the dim, smoky lobby.
No answer. She stepped over the doorway and inside.
The lights were off, except for the bulbs above the candy counter, which ran on a separate switch along with the glass window of the popcorn popper.
Someone in front of her moaned, and she stepped over broken glass to find the gunman she’d seen run inside.
He was alive, but wouldn’t be for long, the way he was breathing, sucking in air in big gulping “gak” sounds, but exhaling only blood.
The arrow was on the right side of his chest, probably straight through his lung, the arrowhead poking out where she couldn’t see it.
