She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,239

her name?”

“Darby!” Cammie shouted out from somewhere above me. Possibly on the roof, maybe a level below. Unable to not answer him.

The barrel of a shotgun appeared from the coat of one of the people in white about ten feet from the GTO. He took aim and fired off a thunderous round. Glass shattered as a window blew out.

“Oh, they sure are trigger happy, aren’t they? The whole lot out here!” David beamed. “Everyone okay in there?”

From the roof, three shots rang out in quick succession. Two of the people in white dropped, large, red stains growing on their coats.

The rest of the people in white shuffled again. Faces hidden under the cowls.

David yelled, “That was impressive! Got to be Hobson, right? Burn-pain be damned, got to shoot the Pickford kid, right? Hey, Dewey, take a running leap from wherever you are—come on down here and say hi!”

I’m sure Preacher or someone else tried to stop him. I could picture a dozen people all grabbing at Hobson and trying to hold him back, but it happened too fast.

Dewey Hobson tumbled through the air and landed in the center of the concrete pad outside Blast Furnace #7 with a sound too horrible to describe. His right leg bent out at an angle that was all wrong. His rifle was still in his hand, a handkerchief wrapped around the trigger and stock.

Only one of the people in white turned to look.

Pickford.

I pulled the sleeve of my sweatshirt down over my hand and grabbed my Ruger from the ground, took aim, and pulled the trigger. I couldn’t hold the gun long enough to get a second shot off.

I missed.

The people in white shuffled again, David lost among them.

“What do you want?” I screamed out the window.

“For starters, I want all of you to stop shooting at us,” David said. “That’s no way to treat your guests. The next person to fire a weapon from that steel mill of yours will forget how to breathe, and I don’t want that. Suffocation is a horrible way to die.”

“You stop killing us, we’ll stop killing you!” I offered.

David, wherever he was among the crowd of white, simply said, “I want Stella.”

I glanced down at her, huddled in the corner near my feet. She was unconscious again, glistening with sweat, curled up in a tight little ball.

“She’s not here.”

David said, “Come out here, Stella.”

Stella twitched but didn’t move. She hadn’t heard him.

“Come out, Stella, come out, come out wherever you are!”

She didn’t move.

“We left her in North Dakota, after the seaplane. Someplace far away from you. Told her to run. Wouldn’t let her tell us where. We knew you’d follow the rest of us,” I shouted back.

“She’s five days overdue, Jack. She’s not running anywhere,” David said. “She’s sick, dying. You know she is. I can make her better. I can help her. We don’t have a lot of time, though. Is she so far gone she can’t come out on her own? I bet that’s it. I could tell you to carry her, Jack. I could order you to do that, and you know you’d have no choice, but I don’t want to do that. I want you to bring her out here all on your own. I bet she’s right there next to you. It must be agonizing watching her wither away so quickly. Such a beautiful girl, wasting away to nothing. If you want to save her life, all you have to do is carry her out here so I can help her. Let’s start there. And once I help her, I can tell you how I plan to help the rest of you. I’ve cleaned house, and I’m nearly done.” If it’s possible for someone’s voice to brighten, his did. “Oh! I nearly forgot! I brought a present for you!”

Thirty feet from me, from the center of the people in white, David Pickford reached up and took down his cowl. The large white and red burn scar on the left side of his face caught the light, and he made no attempt to conceal it.

I found myself looking down at my gun, wanting desperately to kill him, yet I knew what he said moments earlier would prove true—anyone else who fired a shot would forget how to breathe and suffocate. As much as I wanted to take the shot, I knew I couldn’t, and I hoped to God nobody else was trying at this very moment, either.

Stella stirred. Her heavy eyes opened.

David walked