Robert Walker - Final Edge

"Exactly." Meredyth's knuckles had gone white with the grip she held on her table leg club.

"So…here we stand in the dark, and she could be anywhere out there, taking a bead on you at this moment, Lucas. She'd like nothing better than to leave me entirely alone, holding your bloodied body in my arms throughout this night of terror she has planned for me. So, if you please, can we take cover and decide what we do next?"

"What are our options?"

"We go back inside the house, huddle up in the dark in a center room without windows, and wait for daylight."

"Can we walk out of here?"

"Not another house or a road for several miles this side of the lake, and if she is watching, she'll stalk us and either kill us or turn us back."

"What about Jeff and Tommy's place, their mother's home?" he asked.

"God, I pray she hasn't been killed, and oh, God, if she is alive, how are we to tell her about her sons, Lucas? How do we explain their deaths?"

"As the senseless act of a madwoman, Mere. Their deaths are not your fault. You give into such guilt, and Lauralie wins. She puts you precisely where she wants you."

"Oh, you mean like now?" She threw up her hands, the flashlight in them sending up crazy circles of light into the leaves of overhanging trees. "Look where she has us! Drip-ping wet, freezing, trapped, and at her mercy!"

"Then we don't lay down for the bitch."

"What do you mean? Go after her?"

"Go after her, yes."

'Tonight?"

"Now."

"In the dark?"

"In the dark."

"With a lake between us and her?"

"Guide me to Candice's room and that telescope."

Meredyth took a deep breath and nodded. "Follow me."

"Douse the light first, will you?"

"Yeah, good idea." Meredyth's mind again filled with the image of Jeff and Tommy lying dead on her front lawn. This followed by the image of the dead in the Brody basement. This followed by the awful image of the worm-covered gardener at the bottom of the waterlogged rowboat.

She led Lucas back into the house through the rear door, both carrying their war clubs. He followed her inside, up the stairs, and to Candice's pitch-black room. Meredyth switched on the flash, but he grabbed it, covering it with his hand and shutting it off. "No lights! It'll tip Lauralie off to our plans!"

"Sorry…I knew that." The little light that guided him to the telescope came in the form of stars reflecting off its metal veneer where it poked through the open window. Balancing the table leg in his crotch, Lucas settled in at a chair before the telescope, realizing that he was in the exact position that Lauralie Blodgett had been in for most of the day. Had she planned this too? For them to be here in the dead girl's room eyeballing Meredyth's cabin on Lake Madera through the very telescope Lauralie had used?

How devious is this sick mind we 've locked horns with, he wondered, in this life-and-death competition?

From the condition of the Brody family bodies downstairs, he guessed the murders here had taken place as early as nine A.M., possibly earlier. He imagined that somewhere hidden in the surrounding woods they might find Arthur Belkvin's BMW, but stumbling about in the dark in search of the car would likely prove as futile as an attempt to walk out of here or around the enormous lake to Mrs. Famsworth's for a phone. The nearest contact opportunity remained the one he now stared at across the lake, his radio car, if she had not destroyed it.

He searched the grounds for any sign of Lauralie, imagining that by now she had shed the gardener's clothes for something out of Meredyth's closet. Behind him, he sensed Meredyth's growing trepidation.

"What do you see? Anyone on the water? Any movement up at the house?"

"No…nothing. She could be anywhere, like you said."

"Damn it, Lucas. What're we going to do?"

"The horses. If we could get to the horses, we could ride out of here."

"No, it's too risky."

"It'd be a piece of cake. We could upend the rowboat. It's still down by the pier, and we float quietly over to the boathouse. From there, we take that back path to the sta-bles."

"Don't you see, Lucas? She's planned it this way, every step of the way. She knows we'll go for the horses, because she's cut off every other alternative means of escape or communication with the outside."

"All right, say she is lying in wait at the stables. We at least know to expect it, and so we're tuned in."

"And she's tuned in at two hundred yards from the house with that damned gun of Jeff's. You don't stand a chance."

Frustrated, he swore and stood up, pushing the chair over and making her start and back up. When she did so, her back hit something solid in the dark-Lauralie Blodgett, her mind screamed even as she called out the name! And the dark figure swayed and returned to hit Meredyth a second blow, and she slipped and fell, her bare feet skidding as if still wet. On hands and knees, she was stung by an unmistakable odor of blood, bile, and decaying flesh as it filled her nostrils. She screamed again as Lucas pushed himself between her and the shadow in the darkness-the thing attacking her. He grunted with the power behind the blow he dealt Lauralie-defending Meredyth with the table leg, slamming it into the dark terror.

Meredyth, from the floor, flashed the beam on the assailant, hoping to help Lucas, expecting to blind Lauralie Blodgett, but instead, the light illuminated the dripping half-torso of Mira Lourdes. her legs and lower abdomen dangling in the blackness, each heel lashed to Candice Brody's white ceiling fan.

"Christ, my heart!" shouted Lucas.

"It's our final ration of fun with the Antichrist and her twisted miracles," Meredyth bitterly said. "Behold the beast cometh. Damn that ugly bitch child of evil wherever she is."

Lucas slipped now on the dank gruel below the half- corpse, and he instantly grabbed Meredyth up in his powerful arms, giving up any effort to regain his feet so he could lift her at the same time from the wet floor soiling their clothes.

"I'm going after her, Mere. You stay here, and I will track her in the night, comer her, and bring her pain and ours to an end."

"No, you can't leave me here alone, and you can't go after her alone, Lucas, no!"

"I can move faster and stealthier alone. Mere. Having you to worry about is more apt to get me killed, trust me. You remain here. I can revert to the old ways and blend in with the night. I can get close enough to break her neck before she sees me coming."

"She's got a high-powered rifle with a scope. I can at least help create a diversion."

"Doing so could get you killed."

"No, don't you see? She gets me in her scope, she won't pull the trigger. She wants me to survive and suffer your loss."

He took a deep breath and then began peeling off his clothing down to his black BVDs. 'Try to keep up," he told her, taking his table leg with him.

Even as she kept pace down the stairs, Meredyth peeled off her own clothes, beginning with her soiled pants, down to her Navy blue bra and panties. She'd not forgotten her war club, which thudded down the carpeted stairs with her. "Lake's going to be cold," she said, shivering at the thought.

"Cold is a state of mind. Hold on to that thought and you'll be all right."

Lucas turned on the flashlight and placed it on the chopping block so it would flash to the ceiling. It decoyed their whereabouts, as it would be seen clearly in the window in Lauralie's telescopic lens. They exited out the back, and belly-crawled to the water's edge down from the pier among the reeds where the. capsized boat had hung up. There they inched into the water and took hold of the waiting, upturned boat. They began to make their way across the lake, back toward Meredyth's home.

Once on the other side, they were masked by the boat- house, where they tied the roaming overturned boat to a mooring. They went into the boathouse by swimming under. Once inside, they caught a moment's rest. Meredyth was trembling and exhausted. He found a blanket and wrapped her in it. "My squaw," he said, smiling. Then, holding his table leg high, he asked, "Where is your war club?"