Coming out of the upstairs half bath, Canker and Yessman heard Blackridge call to them from the far end of the hallway, but they didn’t hear what he said because they were still laughing about a diarrhea joke that Yessman had told. Yessman always laughed at his own jokes louder and longer than anyone, which was okay with Canker because they were usually damn funny. Besides, Yessman’s laugh was infectious.

As Blackridge disappeared into the master bedroom, which they had searched mere minutes earlier, the screaming started downstairs. It sounded like the girl, Amity, which was something of a surprise because both Canker and Yessman had thought Falkirk would have his fun with the woman. Canker didn’t care if the boss man got it off with the full-quart beauty or the half-pint, whatever turned him on. Vince Canker wasn’t judgmental. Wrong and right were just words. If it felt right, it was right. If it felt wrong, you were probably just confused, and if you thought about it some more, then it would feel right.

When Canker went into the master bedroom, with Yessman close behind, Blackridge was on the floor, either dead or waiting for a fast ride to the ICU. Coltrane had a pistol, and Harkenbach had a shotgun, and none of this made any sense to Vince Canker. They had ported out before the sedative gas got them. They were gone and free, and there was no reason for them to port back here fifteen minutes later. They wouldn’t have come back for Pellafino. Who the hell was he to them? Nobody. The woman was a looker, but the world was full of lookers. You didn’t put your ass on the line for any woman, and the girl was just a damn kid, in a world with too damn many noisy kids causing global warming and wasting government money getting useless college degrees in the literature of Fiji when those funds could better be used to increase the salaries for men like Vince who did the hard work that kept the country functioning.

Canker and Yessman had entered the bedroom with their pistols holstered. They didn’t raise their hands high like in old Western movies, but they acted suitably chagrined and respectful, waiting for an opening. Guns weren’t the end-all and be-all. They had knives and razor-sharp throwing stars and wicked retractable blades in the toes of their boots. Even at a disadvantage like this, they knew a score of ways to turn the tables and kill their adversaries, and they had done so before. The best thing they had going for them was that Harkenbach was a prissy professor scientist who wore bow ties and ran away from his troubles, while Coltrane was an antique geek with more books in his house than any real man would ever tolerate. Blackridge appeared to be in a bad way, true enough, but the two men who had done that to him were pale faced and sweaty and obviously sickened by the violence they had committed. They didn’t have the guts for this, and if you didn’t have the guts for the game, you were dead men standing.

“Let’s be reasonable,” Vince said. “A little negotiation, and we can all be winners here.”

The volume of gunfire came as a surprise to him.

96

This wasn’t just a fight anymore, this was a living nightmare; she was being attacked not by a freaking nutcase, but by a thing, a monster in a human disguise, such an alien creature that it wasn’t possible to know what it would do to her before it slaughtered her. Kicked in the butt, knocked flat, Amity tried to thrust to her feet, but Falkirk grabbed her by the seat of her jeans and the back of her T-shirt and plucked her off the floor and turned in place, swinging her in a circle, as her father once played airplane with her when she was little, though there was nothing fun about this. This was vicious, hateful. He was going to bash her head against something. There was no way she could strike out at him, nothing she could do to break free. In time to the two-beat slamming of her heart, she thought, Please God, please God, please God . . . This man, this diabolic thing, didn’t seem to be strong enough to do what he was doing, especially after enduring a nut busting. Rage and insanity gave him something like superhuman strength. As he swung her, he chanted, “Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch,” every repetition more explosive than the last. He was going to fling her, send her flying. She started screaming again, because if she landed wrong or slammed into a wall, bones were going to break. And he let her go.

Michelle wandered in a labyrinth with an undulant floor and stacked-stone passageways, catacombs poorly illuminated by candles on wall shelves. Reflections of flames licked the stones, and lively shadows slithered like salamanders over every surface.

The dead lay in niches, wrapped in browning bandages, their faces concealed. She roamed ever farther into the maze, deeper into the earth: seeking her mother, who died in childbirth; seeking her father, who was electrocuted in a transformer vault; seeking Jeffy, who died under the wheels of an Escalade, and Amity, who perished in her father’s arms.

Sometimes Michelle carried an oil lamp, although at other times it was a flashlight. She peeled wet strips of moldering cloth off face after face. Again and again, she discovered those dead loved ones whom she sought, and she also unmasked multiples of herself, preserved in death.

A quiet desperation overcame her as she realized that there would be no end of searching, that she would never find the final and true version of mother, father, husband, child, or self.

Just then the silence of the catacombs was riddled by a scream and its many echoes, a child’s scream, Amity’s scream.

Through the lapping light and tongues of licking shadow came the living girl, running for her life, terrified. She streaked past and away, and Michelle set out after her, probing the gloom with the flashlight. As passageways branched off in ever greater numbers, she opened her eyes wider and stared with increasing intensity into each stony corridor—until at last she blinked, blinked, blinked away the labyrinth and saw the kitchen.

Her eyes felt sunken, and tinnitus rang in her ears, and her tongue seemed twice as thick as it ought to be. She remembered the yellow gas gushing from the heating vents high in the walls.

Falkirk raging and capering like a demonic spirit. Amity on the floor, crawling away from him. Falkirk kicking at her and missing, kicking again and connecting with her backside.

Michelle closed her eyes and the labyrinth coiled away to every side, as before. No!

Panicked, she opened her eyes and saw the kitchen and the demon and the innocent girl. He swung the child around as if she were only a rag doll. Her head whipped past the refrigerator, missing the long steel handle by an inch. One of her sneaker-clad feet stuttered across a cabinet door.

Where was Jeffy? Nowhere in sight.

Gasping for breath, Michelle tried to press up from her chair.

She felt heavy and slow. Her legs wouldn’t work. The kitchen seemed to expand and contract and expand repeatedly, and darkness throbbed at the edges of her vision.

Falkirk flung the girl away from him.

Amity was thrown onto the breakfast table and slid across it, sweeping plates and coffee mugs and utensils to the floor. Momentum carried her after that cascade of debris. She crashed into a chair, toppling it, tumbling over it, rolling to a stop in the open doorway to the pantry. Her scalp burned from her hair having been pulled so hard, and her right shoulder ached, and so did her left knee. She’d bitten her tongue; there was blood in her mouth. She didn’t seem to have broken any bones or sustained any bad cuts, but her heart was knocking so hard that it seemed about to shake her joints apart—and here came Falkirk. He’d drawn his gun again.

The two thugs didn’t have weapons in their hands. However, they were armed, and surely with more than pistols. They were big, hard-looking men with stares as cold and merciless as those of robots.

The shotgun roared twice. Jeffy fired the Sig Pro ten times without hesitation or any expectation of remorse, blasting the two men even after they were down, because maybe they were protected by Kevlar and because, crazy as it sounded, there was something almost supernatural about their deadpan faces and their self-assurance when confronted with imminent death, so that maybe even two point-blank head shots weren’t enough to stop them.

Amity was screaming downstairs, and if there were a dozen more of these men between here and there, he would do the same to them if he could. The supreme evil kingdom of Mordor wasn’t just a place in Tolkien’s imagination. It was real. It always had been real. It was here and it was everywhere men sought absolute power over others. He ejected the empty magazine and snapped a fresh one into the pistol.

Harkenbach said, “Are you all right?”

“No.”