By the Light of the Moon

41

Starting at opposite ends of the house but moving toward each other, gunmen fired bursts of heavy-caliber, penetrant rounds into the ceiling of the second-floor hallway. Bullets cracked through the plywood attic floor, spitting sprays of wood chips, admitting narrow shafts of pale light from below, establishing a six-foot-wide zone of death the length of this upper space. Slugs slammed into rafters. Other rounds punched through the roof and carved blue stars of summer sky in the dark vault of the attic ceiling.

Jilly realized why Dylan wanted to be in a corner, back pressed against an outer wall. The structure between them and the lower floor would be denser along the perimeter, more likely to stop at least some of the rounds from penetrating into the attic.

Her legs were straight out in front of her. She drew her knees in toward her chest, making as small a target of herself as possible, but not small enough.

The bastards kept changing magazines down below, reloading in rotation, so the assault remained continuous. The rattle-crack-boom of gunfire numbed the mind to all feeling except terror, precluded all thought except thoughts of death.

No shortage of ammunition in this operation. No reconsideration of the recklessness or the immorality of cold-blooded murder. Just the relentless, savage execution of the plan.

In the thin wash of daylight from the screened vent in the eave, Jilly saw that Shepherd's face was animated by a succession of tics, squints, and flinches, but that behind his closed lids, his eyes were not twitching as they so often did. The thunder of gunfire disturbed him, but he seemed less scared to distraction than focused intently on some enthralling thought.

The gunfire stopped.

The house popped and creaked with settling ruination.

In this certain to be brief cease-fire, Dylan dared to motivate Shepherd with the threat of what was coming: 'Gooey-bloody, Shep. Coming fast, gooey-bloody.'

Having moved out of the upstairs hall, into rooms on both sides of the house, the gunmen opened fire again.

The killers were not yet in the room immediately below the attic corner in which Jilly, Dylan, and Shep huddled. But they would visit it in a minute. Maybe sooner.

Although the brutally pounding fusillades were concentrated in two widely separate areas, the entire attic floor vibrated from the impact of scores of heavy rounds.

Wood cracked, wood groaned, bullet-struck nails and in-wall pipes twanged and clanked and pinged.

A mist of dust shook down from rafters.

On the floor the bird bones trembled as if an animating spirit had returned to them.

Freed, one of the few remaining feathers spiraled up through the descending dust.

Jilly wanted to scream, dared not, could not: throat clenched as tight as a fist, breath imprisoned.

Rapid-fire weaponry rattled directly below them, and in front of their eyes, swarms of bullets ripped through stacked storage boxes. Cardboard puckered, buckled, shredded.

As his eyes popped wide open, Shepherd thrust off the floor, stood upright, pressing back against the wall.

With an explosive exhalation, Jilly bolted to her feet, Dylan too, and it seemed the house would come apart around them, would be blown to pieces by the cyclone of noise if not first blasted and shaken into rubble by the shattering passage of this storm of lead, of steel-jacketed rounds.

Two feet in front of them, the plywood floor ruptured, ruptured, ruptured, bullets punching through from below.

Something stung Jilly's forehead, and as she raised her right hand, something bit her palm, too, before she could press it to the higher wound, causing her to cry out in pain, in shock.

Even in this dusty dimness, she saw the first drops of blood flung from her fingertips when she convulsively shook them. Droplets spattered darkly against the cardboard boxes in a pattern that no doubt foretold her future.

From her stung brow, curling down her right temple, a fat bead of blood found the corner of that eye.

One, three, five, and more rounds smashed up through the floor, closer than the first cluster.

Shepherd grabbed Jilly's uninjured hand.

She didn't see him pinch or tweak, but the attic folded away from them, and brightness folded in.

Low rafters flared into high bright sky. Knee-caressing golden grass slid firmly underfoot as attic flooring slipped away.

Sounding as brittle and juiceless as things long dead, clicking flitters of startled grasshoppers shot every which way through the grass.

Jilly stood with Shep and Dylan on a hilltop in the sun. Far to the west, the sea seemed to wear a skin of dragon scales, green spangled with gold.

She could still hear steady gunfire, but muffled by distance and by the walls of the O'Conner house, which she saw now for the first time from the outside. At this distance, the structure appeared less damaged than she knew it must be.

'Shep, this isn't good enough, not far enough,' Dylan worried.

Shepherd let go of Jilly and stood transfixed by the sight of blood dripping from the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand.

Two inches long, roughly a quarter of an inch wide, a splinter had pierced the meaty part of her palm.

Ordinarily the sight of blood wouldn't have weakened her knees, so perhaps her legs trembled less because of the blood than because she realized this wound could have been – should have been – far worse.

Dylan slipped a supporting hand under her arm, examined her forehead. 'It's just a shallow laceration. Probably from another splinter, but it didn't stick. More blood than damage.'

Below the hill, beyond the meadow, in the yards surrounding the house, three armed men stood sentinel to prevent their quarry from somehow escaping through battlefield barrages and through the cordon of killers that searched the bullet-riddled rooms. None of the three appeared to be looking toward the hilltop, but this bit of luck would not hold.

While Jilly was distracted, Dylan pinched the splinter in her hand and plucked it free with one sharp pull that made her hiss with pain.

'We'll clean it out later,' he said.

'Later where?' she asked. 'If you don't tell Shepherd where to fold us, he's liable to take us on a trip somewhere we don't dare go, like back to the motel in Holbrook, where you can bet they're waiting for us – or maybe even back into the house.'

'But where is safe?' Dylan wondered, momentarily blank.

Maybe the blood on her hand and on her face reminded her of the desert vision in which she'd been splashed by a wave of white wings and worse. Into the hard reality of this desperate day, the dreamy portents of imminent evil suddenly intruded.

Rising out of the wheatlike smell of dry grass came the sweet spicy fragrance of incense.

At the house, the muffled popping of gunfire rapidly declined, ceased altogether, while here on the hilltop arose the silvery laughter of children.

By one tell or another, Dylan recognized her condition, knew that she was surfing a swell of paranormal perception, and said, 'What's happening, what do you see?'

Turning toward the mirthful music of the children's voices, she found not those who made the laughter, but saw instead a marble font of the kind that held holy water in any Catholic church, abandoned here on the grassy hilltop, canted like a tombstone in an ancient graveyard.

Movement beyond Shep caught her attention, and when she shifted her focus from the font, Jilly discovered a little girl, blond and blue-eyed, perhaps five or six years old, wearing a lacy white dress, white ribbons in her hair, holding a nosegay of flowers, solemn with purpose. As the unseen children laughed, the girl turned as though in search of them, and as she rotated away from Jilly, she faded out of existence-

'Jilly?'

– but turning into existence and toward her, precisely where the little girl had been standing, appeared a fifty-something woman in a pale-yellow dress, wearing yellow gloves and a hat with flowers, her eyes rolled so far back in her head that only the whites showed, her torso pocked by three hideous bullet wounds, one between the breasts. Although dead, the woman walked toward Jilly, an apparition as real in blazing summer sunlight as any that had ever haunted beneath a moon, reaching out with her right hand as she approached, as though seeking aid.

No more able to move than if she had been rooted to the ground, Jilly shrank from the ghostly touch, thrust out her bleeding hand to ward off contact, but when the dead woman's fingers touched her hand – with a sense of pressure, coldness – the apparition vanished.

'It's going to happen today,' she said miserably. 'Soon.'

'Happen? What?' Dylan asked.

Far away a man shouted, and another man answered in a shout.

'They've seen us,' Dylan said.

The vast aviary of the sky contained just one bird, a circling hawk gliding silently on currents high above, and no birds erupted into flight from the grass around them, yet she heard wings, at first a whispery flutter, then a more insistent rustle.

'They're coming,' Dylan warned, speaking not of birds but of assassins.

'Wings,' Jilly said, as the whisking thrum of invisible doves rapidly grew more turbulent. 'Wings.'

'Wings,' said Shepherd, touching the bloody hand with which she had tried to fend off the dead woman, and which she still held out before her.

The chop-chop-chop of automatic gunfire, real to this place and time, was answered by the more deliberate crack of high-powered rifles that only she could hear, by shots fired in another place and in a time yet to come – but coming fast.

'Jilly,' said Shepherd, startling her by the use of her name, which he had never before spoken.

She met his lotus-green eyes, which weren't in the least dreamy, nor at all evasive as they had been in the past, but clear and direct and sharp with alarm.

'Church,' said Shepherd.

'Church,' she agreed.

'Shep!' Dylan urged, as bullets kicked up plumes of dirt and torn grass from the hillside less than twenty feet below them.

Shepherd O'Conner brought here to there, folded the sunshine, the golden grass, the flying bullets, and unfolded a cool vaulted space with stained-glass windows like giant puzzles fully solved.