Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

Ten minutes later, Pete Green was back, white-faced as a kid whose Halloween has turned bad on him.

“Another guy dead up there!” he exclaimed, pointing to the hillside. “Stripped down to his underwear. Jesus, made me sick to look at him!”

The five men crouched down, scanning the darkness for signs of movement, alert to every rustle in the surrounding undergrowth, trying to shut out the sporadic unnerving moans which emerged from the burned-out structure of the hall.

“I better go take a look,” said Darrell Griffiths.

Pete Green went with him. Joe Quinlan kind of tagged along. They found the corpse right behind one of the outbuildings. He was a big guy, over six feet tall, with a long beard divided into miniature pigtails looped together with some kind of silver threads. A ring in one nostril dangled suggestively over the bloody ruin of his skull, which had been dismantled with a brute force that even Quinlan found sickening. Mostly because it reminded him of other times, other deaths.

“Looks like someone shot him from behind,” Griffiths remarked, as though this wasn’t obvious.

“From about a foot away,” Quinlan added.

Then they heard the siren of the first backup team to arrive, and returned to the others. Lorne Fowler was back. He’d found a body too, on the far side of the clearing. This one had been shot in the chest, just like the guy down by the pier.

An hour later, with overwhelming force on their side and all the equipment and backup they needed, they still hadn’t found the shooter. The cleared area around the burned-out hall had been searched meticulously, as well as all the smaller buildings that had survived the blaze. They had located the source of the unnerving moans, a girl in her teens with a broken leg and severe burns lying in the dirt to one side of the charred hall. She was airlifted to the hospital in Bellingham by medevac helicopter along with another woman and a man, both of them suffering from third-degree burns.

Other than that, the search yielded only corpses. Some had been hauled from the wreckage of the hall, burned beyond recognition. Others were scattered outside the doorway, apparently shot down as they had tried to flee.

None of the survivors was in a condition to fire a gun, and no weapons were found anywhere near them. The conclusion was obvious. The person who had loosed off those shots after Griffiths’s warning had slipped away into the woods and was still at large. It was impossible to search the whole island until daybreak, but the sheriff wasn’t worried about the delay. Members of the SWAT team had secured the perimeter of the clearing, preventing any further threat to the safety of the law enforcement personnel on the ground, and there was no place the guy could go. Let him shiver alone in the dark. They’d pick him up the next day at their leisure.

There might well be more bodies in the burned wreckage of the hall, but that too could wait. Helicopters cost money, and the taxpayers of the county were going to get a stiff enough bill for the night’s operation as it was. Griffiths had the site sealed off with tape, and arranged for the loan of a set of mounted floodlights and a generator from the state. The Coast Guard agreed to provide a vessel with sleeping accommodation and communications facilities. Everyone was pulling together, the way they always did when things got tough. Griffiths was just beginning to think he might get to bed that night after all when one of the SWAT personnel called in to report intruders.

“Is he armed?” asked Griffiths.

“One of them is.”

“How many are there?”

“Two. No, wait…”

Joe Quinlan stood beside the sheriff, staring starkly up at the helicopter spraying light like some deadly defoliant.

“Use your discretion,” Griffiths told the SWAT man curtly.

Quinlan was peering toward the edge of the clearing, beyond the water tank on its metal trestle, his eyes narrowed. The helicopter blades whopped monotonously overhead. Then he started to run.

“Hold your fire!” shouted Griffiths into the radio. “One of our guys is …”

He broke off. What the fuck was Quinlan doing? Sprinting up the trail as if his life depended on it, toward the figures who had emerged from the woods. He reached them, turned and walked with them down the trail.

“Joe’s with them,” Griffiths told the men scattered around the clearing. “Hold your fire.”

The policemen waited, looking toward the three figures moving toward them. No, four. A child had detached itself from the grasp of one of the adults and was walking between them, holding their hands. Joe Quinlan walked to the right of the group, a little apart. They came steadily forward down the trail into the scorching circle of light, staring at the semicircle of armed men, who stared back.

22

It was dark outside when we were awakened by a loud roaring noise, and a lurid glare which made our shadows revolve like a carousel. A moment later it had gone, leaving us in the dark. I got the automatic rifle I’d taken from Sam and crawled outside. I could hear a strong rhythmic pulsing, but nothing was visible from where I was standing. It took me several minutes to clamber back up the chute of fallen earth to the path, and from there to the top of the largest rock mass I could find.

At the eastern end of the island, a blinding glare shone down from the sky, an inverted wedge of brilliant light against which the tips of the trees between stood out stark and black. This also seemed to be the source of the noise. It was much louder here, a throbbing mechanical racket that came and went at intervals, ebbing and flowing.

“What’s happening?”

A figure had appeared in the darkness below. I recognized Andrea’s voice.

“It’s a helicopter! It must be the police. Get David!”

It seemed to take forever to get them both up the slope to the path. I had been astonished at how well David had coped with the extraordinary events of the day, but I knew that there would be a payback. Unfortunately he chose this moment to throw a major fit, screaming his head off and trying to wrestle himself away from both Andrea and me. Since her arm was out of action, and the terrain had been difficult to negotiate even in broad daylight, the timing could hardly have been worse.

I was terrified that the helicopter might swirl off into the night at any minute, its reconnaissance mission completed. Presumably someone must have been alarmed by the sound of gunfire and called the police, but I had no way of knowing what the situation was by now. Maybe Sam and Mark had patched things up, as Andrea had predicted they would, and would put on a united front to get rid of the cops. A few people smiling and waving might convince the helicopter crew that it had been a false alarm. If they flew off, we would be stranded there at the mercy of whoever had gained the upper hand.

So it was with increasing desperation that I hauled David and then Andrea up to the path, picked the boy up and started to run as fast as I could up the steep hillside. Everything looked different in the dark, but the knowledge I had gained of the island stood me in good stead and I was able to find the trail meandering through the woods to the clearing. I put David down. It was totally dark here, all light soaked up by the tall trees to either side. We tripped continually over roots and outcrops of rock. I fell heavily once, gashing my forehead on the branch of a tree and almost putting my eye out. I didn’t even feel the pain. Nothing seemed to matter except reaching the clearing before the helicopter abandoned us to our fate.

It was only when I at last emerged from the woods into the felled area above the compound that I realized that my panic had been unnecessary. As well as the helicopter hovering fifty feet above, there was a substantial force of uniformed men on the ground. The clearing looked bigger than I remembered it, more open and raw. It took me a moment to figure out why. The hall had completely disappeared. In its place lay a heap of ash and smoldering timbers.

“We’re safe!” I told Andrea, and kissed her impulsively.

“Dad?” said David. “Who’s that funny-looking man?”

I turned to look, and my elation vanished. A man in a blue uniform was crouched in firing position about twenty feet away, a large gun trained on us. For a moment I thought it was Mark. Then the man spoke into a walkie-talkie, and I realized that it was some kind of police sharpshooter.

“Throw down the gun!” someone shouted.

It was a man running up the trail toward us. It occurred to me for the first time that my sudden appearance, covered in blood and holding an automatic rifle, might be misconstrued. I tossed the rifle aside and picked up David. The running man reached us. He wasn’t in a uniform and I had never seen him before.

“Stay close to me,” he said. “They won’t fire as long as we’re together.”

I decided that he was crazy but friendly. We marched down the trail, David in my arms, Andrea at my side. As we approached the cleared space where the hall had been, a stout man wearing a khaki uniform and a Nelson Eddy hat advanced. He raised a bull horn.

“Put your hands on your heads!”

I looked at Andrea and smiled. It was all so ridiculous. But we did what he said, as one humors a child.

“Move away from the woman and the kid” said the fat guy in khaki.

I realized that he was talking to me. I started to explain who we were and what we were doing. Then I noticed that every officer present had a gun that was aimed in my direction. Everyone seemed very tense.

“Just do what he says!” shouted the man who had run up the trail to meet us.

I obediently took several paces sideways.

“Lie down on the ground,” continued the man with the megaphone. “Real easy now. No sudden movements. Just keep calm and nobody’s going to get hurt.”

Again I obeyed, sensing as I did so that I had already surrendered some considerable part of my constitutional rights. My arms were dragged behind my back and handcuffed securely together.

“Better Miranda him,” said a voice above me. “This one’s going to be huge. Watch some slick lawyer try and make a career by springing the son of a bitch on a technicality.”

Strong hands hauled me to my feet and patted every inch of my body while I was told I was under arrest and my rights were recited. I was not really paying attention, but I remember that the charges included assaulting a police officer. For the first time it occurred to me that this was not just a silly mistake which would all be cleared up in a few moments.

“This is ridiculous!” I said. “We’re innocent victims. They would have killed us if they could.”

The character in the hat cut me off.

“You can do all the talking you want back at the courthouse, son. No need to rush things. We’re operating on island time here.”

He turned to another man, also in a khaki uniform.

“Take him across, Lorne. Pete, you go along too. Keep him cuffed the whole time, and don’t take your eyes off of him.”

Other policemen surrounded Andrea and David as I was led away. I protested loudly that David was my son and begged them not to separate us, but no one paid any attention. It was as though I hadn’t spoken, as though I weren’t there. The man called Lorne gripped my arm and pushed me along. I noticed that there were dead bodies everywhere. I recognized Melissa, the blond woman who had kidnapped David. Her face and hands were badly burned and she had a terrible gaping wound in her back. As I surveyed the other corpses, strewn across the ground all around the burned-out shell of the hall, the full scale of what had occurred became apparent to me, and the gravity of my presumed involvement in it.

The two policemen steered me down the trail to the pier, holding me in a tight, impersonal grip. They kept up a bantering dialogue about the number of reporters and television people who would shortly descend on the islands, but neither spoke to me. I felt that I had been reduced to the status of an object to be moved from place to place, some large piece of furniture which no one wanted.

“Shit, it’ll be worse than a long weekend in August,” said the one called Lorne. “They’ll be crawling all over Friday. Show your ass on the street, someone’ll shove a microphone up it.”

“And the ferries? Forget it. Still, I guess it’s a two-way street. I was supposed to visit my sister tomorrow, over in La Conner, but now …”

“Looks like you got lucky, Pete. You might get over there with the car OK, but westbound? No fucking way.”

The scene at the landing was transformed out of all recognition. There were boats everywhere, some by the pier, others anchored offshore, maybe ten in all. Most had their engines running and their searchlights on, illuminating the scene in a weird pattern of intersecting beams. Two men in overalls and another wearing shorts and a polo shirt were bending over Andy’s body. The civilian nodded to the two deputies.

“What the hell happened here?” he asked in a shocked tone.

The one called Pete gestured up the trail.

“You think this is bad, wait’ll you see what’s waiting for you up there. This thing’s a regular massacre.”

“Guess I can forget about that cookout, then.”

“You get through here, Dick, you won’t want to eat charbroiled meat for a long, long time, I promise you that.”

We walked down the pier and boarded a launch marked SHERIFF. My handcuffs were fastened with another set to a guardrail support. The launch was lying between the pier and a red fire boat, and it took a few minutes to re-rig the mooring lines and back the launch out. Then we did a high-speed turn and scudded off over the dark waters.

Despite my humiliating and painful position, I felt an enormous sense of relief just to be off that island at long last. Whatever happened from here on in, the worst was over. It looked as though Mark and his two allies had torched the hall, maybe using gasoline from the generator shed. If one of them had approached the south end of the hall, where there were no windows, he would have had all the time he wanted to start a serious blaze. And since there was no source of water inside the hall, once the timbers caught there would be no way to put the fire out. If the people inside stayed put, they would be overcome by the smoke and flames. If they tried to leave, they would be shot down. Mark, Rick and Lenny would have had no compunction about this. Every killing validated their contention that they alone were fully human, empowered to mete out life and death.

We rounded a headland and turned into a sheltered bay with the lights of a town at the far end. As we drew closer, I saw that it was a sizable pleasure port, with a large marina and a loading dock where a car ferry was tied up. The police launch cut up the channel to the landward end of the marina. One of the two deputies unfastened the handcuffs securing me to the rail. We disembarked, walked up a gangplank to the street and drove off in a police car.