Bill Pronzini: Snowbound

The impulse was talking to him again, telling him exactly what he had to do because it was time now to finish everything.

Fire-bomb the church, it murmured. Fire-bomb the church!

Get material for Molotov cocktails from one of the houses and cross to the church from where the sharpshooting hick couldn’t see him and toss a couple through one of the stained-glass windows on the far side and maybe another to block off the escape route the two heroes had used, if it wasn’t a window, and then move to the front. When the hick heard and saw what was happening, his instant reaction would be to try to help the ones inside, forgetting everything else because that was the way these silly Eskimos always reacted and always would react, and he’d run up to the doors and Kubion would stand out and pick him off and then dump another cocktail on the entrance to make sure nobody broke down the doors and nobody got out alive.

He could imagine vividly the way it would be, he could see the bright burning flames and he could hear the screams; and when he backed away through the shadows to Sierra, he felt a sharp hurting in his groin and realized that the urge’s excitement had given him a stone-hard erection.

Within the church, balanced precariously on the edge of panic, the people of Hidden Valley waited for some indication of what was taking place in the storm and darkness outside-and for the bitter incongruity of the birth of a child.

At Webb Edwards’ direction, the pews forward and rear of the one where Ann Tribucci lay had been cleared immediately after he’d satisfied himself that her labor was not false. With the exception of Lew Coopersmith, who had taken up a listening post at the front doors, all the men and all the children had been grouped on or near the pulpit; most of the women were spaced in the pews between or along the walls. Edwards had taken the prayer cloth from the altar and draped it across the pew backs above Ann, to form a kind of awning that would offer a measure of privacy. Some of the heavier winter coats helped anchor the cloth. Sally Chilton had taken Rebecca’s place, holding Ann’s head in her lap, mopping perspiration from her paper-white cheeks, talking to her softly, soothingly. Once Edwards had removed some of Ann’s garments, he had placed his own soft fur-lined coat beneath her hips; then he’d gotten two heavy shawls from Judy Tribucci and Ellen Coopersmith, had unfastened the string tie he was wearing and divested it of its thin, metal, caduceus-shaped slip ring-swaddling clothes and umbilical binding and surgical cutting tool, all poor unsterile substitutes that would have to do because there was nothing else, there was not even any water for cleansing. Kneeling at the edge of the prayer cloth, he massaged her heaving abdomen gently and timed the frequency of her pains.

Rebecca stood against the south wall, hugging herself, not wanting to watch this grim enactment of what must ordinarily be the moving spectacle of childbirth, watching anyway because Ann was her friend and because it was as momentarily inescapable as their prison itself. Would there be complications? It was a wretched possibility. And if there were, would Webb Edwards’ simple medical knowledge be enough?

Would it matter to Ann and the baby even if there were no complications at all?

Minutes ticked away-empty, barren. Rebecca listened to the softly vocal praying of the Reverend Mr. Keyes, Ann’s muffled cries, the monotonous droning of Sally Chilton’s voice and that of Agnes Tyler crooning to her unresponsive daughter-and her nerves grew tigher, tighter, until they seemed on the verge of snapping like rubber bands stretched to the limit of their elasticity. She wanted to scream, to fling herself at someone, to run in circles until she collapsed: something, anything, to relieve the inexorably mounting pressure. She could not stand it much longer, she thought; none of them could stand it much longer. When she looked around at the others, she could see some of what she felt in their groping movements, in the way their eyes shifted from Ann to the front doors to one another, in the hollowness of their faces. It was like watching, being a part of, the beginnings of a collective nervous breakdown.

She swallowed thickly, thinking: I’ve got to get a grip on myself, I can’t let go now, there’s still hope-there is still hope. Cling to that, to faith in Johnny and in Zachary Cain, to faith. We’re not going to die. We’re not going to die…

And she remembered that Cain had spoken those same words to her earlier, remembered again the conviction in his voice and the new strength of him. Curiously, she had not been surprised when she’d learned he had gone out there with Johnny and what the two of them intended to do; her only surprise had been that they’d found a way to get out in the first place. Like Johnny, Cain-and this was something she now understood she’d seen in him from the first, dormant but perceptible-was a basically forceful, selflessly compassionate man: the kind of man who acted and reacted strongly to any given situation. The hell he had put himself through because of the death of his family was testimony to that, just as what he was doing now, for them, was testimony to it.

I wonder what Matt would have done if he’d been spared, she thought. For all his benevolence and professed love for the people of the valley, would he have volunteered to go out there and try to kill three men to save all our lives? She did not think so; no, she did not think so.

The entire nature of her relationship with Matt seemed to have become quite clear now. There hadn’t been anything left of their marriage or of her love for him; the last binding threads had unraveled a long time ago, and she had been living a foolish lie, hiding the debilitating ugliness of that lie behind the guise of weakness and self-pity-not fully understanding what it was doing to her as a woman, as a human being. And yet she had, slowly, been coming to an understanding of the truth, would have reached that understanding sooner or later. And when she had, the strength so long repressed in her would have manifested itself and she’d have left him and gotten a divorce. It was a simple matter of self-preservation: if she had stayed with Matt, she would have died spiritually, died inside, and for all her weakness and timidity and indecisiveness she would never have allowed it to happen. Knowing that, she knew herself: she had at last rediscovered her own identity.

Only now, bitterly, it might have come too late.

There you go again, she told herself; stop it now, stop it. It’s not too late, think about something else, think about anything else. Think about Zachary Cain; yes, think about him, and what he said, and the way he looked, and the way he was and is and will be when you see him again…

Fifty minutes after she had gone into labor, and mercifully without complications, Ann Tribucci gave birth.

From his position at the doors, Coopersmith saw Edwards lift the newborn infant by the ankles-long, finger-thick umbilical cord trailing down beneath the prayer cloth like a wet white rope, seeming to pulse faintly-and use a clean handkerchief to sponge away accumulated blood and mucus from mouth and nose; slap tiny buttocks sharply to begin normal respiration. The child’s cries echoed piercingly through the grim silence.

Ann said weakly, tearfully, “Webb… oh Webb…”

“It’s a girl, honey,” Edwards said. His voice was thick. “Normal in every way, and you can hear how healthy she is.”

He laid the baby down on one of the shawls, took up his string tie and bound off the umbilical cord, used the tie’s metal caduceus clip to saw through it. Then he wiped her dry and wrapped her in the other shawl and handed her across to Sally. His hands and clothing were spattered with reddish fluid as he knelt again to minister to Ann.