Ricochet Joe

11 WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

Shaking with horror and grief, weeping as he had not wept since childhood, making the most pitiful sounds that he’d ever heard issue from himself or anyone, Joe Mandel backed away from the bullet-riven corpse, still holding the Heckler & Koch in a two-hand grip, the muzzle trained on the dead woman.

Like a lifelong shooter, he had drawn the weapon smoothly, taken an ideal isosceles stance, adjusted for the recoil, and done what he’d come there to do.

Portia spoke in memory: The host will die. Parasite has to come out of the host to find another—which might be you.

The blood. The awful blood. Her lying in it. Eyes open wide in a sightless stare. Blood climbing from the floor through her white hair, like oil rising in a lantern wick.

It can’t stay in a dead thing more than a few minutes. When it exits, you’ll know it.

The gun felt heavy, seemed to weigh ten times what it had weighed when Chief Montclair first put it in Joe’s hand. His arms shook with the burden of the gun, with the burden of what he had done, and the muzzle kept jumping off target.

A clock hung on the wall, within his line of sight. Perhaps a minute had passed.

He thought he heard the corpse move, and his attention leaped away from the clock, but the dead woman was in the same position as before.

Why? She had asked, Why? Why?

If she had been possessed and ridden, she would have known why. She would have known.

He struggled to calm himself, to stay ready.

Two minutes. Three.

How would it exit the body? How would it come for him? Out of her mouth that even in death hung open in surprise? Out of an ear? From one of the grievous wounds?

Never turn your back alone with it. And yes, you can kill it. Though it’s… hardy.

Five minutes.

Each minute had begun to seem like ten.

Eyes to the clock and quickly back to the corpse. Give the parasite no opening, no chance.

Instead of Portia, Grandma Dulcie spoke in memory: Men are often made stupid by love.

No. Joe knew what he had seen inside his grandmother. The hideous fat leech. Its ribbon of a tail twining through her spine.

Portia hadn’t described the thing to him. He hadn’t merely seen what she had told him he should see, would see. He had seen what was really there.

Six minutes.

He had been borne back in time to lie in his mother’s arms and hear her say she loved him. He had not imagined that. He had touched the dog, had touched Seeker, and it had taken him back in time. It couldn’t have been hallucination, some form of dream, produced by a drug in his coffee.

Seven minutes. Eight.

It can’t stay in a dead thing more than a few minutes.

A few might be three or four. Or might be ten.

The woman’s unblinking green eyes stared at the ceiling. A starburst hemorrhage in the right one.

The house lay in a dreadful hush. The silence felt sacred, as though this was a place where mourning would be done and prayers should be said.

Eleven minutes.

A noise. Not from the corpse.

Joe looked up and saw the back door opening.

Agnes Jordan, the next-door neighbor, stepped into the kitchen, carrying a plate of cookies in plastic wrap—her contribution to an evening of cards. She saw Joe and started to smile, saw the gun an instant later and did not smile after all, saw the dead woman on the floor and dropped the cookies.

Gray-faced, Agnes turned her eyes on Joe again. “What have you done? What have you done? Oh God, what have you done?”

He knew what he had done, or thought he knew, but he could not speak in his defense. Anything that he could say would sound like a demented, paranoid fantasy.

He backed away from the dead woman, to the hall door, which stood open. He reversed across the threshold and into the hallway as the neighbor lady asked for a fourth time, “What have you done?”

With doubt came panic and horror multiplied. He turned and hurried toward the foyer and the front door.