Chapter 24: Darby's Inferno

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The reason John Dillinger refused to rob banks in Terre Haute was that there were too many goddamn trains in the city, a point that became obvious when I was caught by one only three blocks from the Terre Haute House.

I stopped behind an old Escort and waited for the train to pass. Red lights flashed, the ground shook, and my ears rattled with the sound of the freight cars barreling by.

The blood that ran down my limp arm was starting to dry and the hand of the other one was sticking to the steering wheel. It was a good sign. At least the bleeding had stopped. Even though I needed it, the hospital was still out of the question. I thought about giving Heather a call but I was pretty sure my injuries were a bit out of her league.

My brain felt like it had been shrink-wrapped. I tried to think of what to do, where to go, but all I could come up with was going to Sarah's and giving her the box, or at the very least have her help me find a place to hide it. But I hated that idea. She didn't deserve to have this thing dumped on her doorstep. She did, however, deserve a serious dressing down for not giving me a proper heads-up about Eunice. When she told me that Eunice was 'evil' I just assumed she meant the hag liked to drown puppies in the tub or punch little old ladies in the neck, not that she was an actual minion of Hell.

Yeah, Sarah and I were going to have to have a little chat.

Out of my rearview mirror I could see blue flames in the windows of the hotel's top floor. And though I couldn't hear the sirens over the train, I could see flashing lights of fire engines and emergency vehicles reflecting off the windows of the lower floors. It made me nervous. I was suddenly worried about Cerberus and I didn't know why. If a dog can bake in hundred and twenty degree desert heat for three days and play Superman in front of a firing squad, a little fire and an old biddy with a squid fetish shouldn't be too much of a problem. Still, I hated to think of something happening to the dog.

There was a bark of tires on pavement as someone turned onto the street from the direction of the hotel about a quarter mile behind me. I could see their headlights closing in on me fast. Their unique design left no doubt in my mind that it was Darby in her truck.

I slammed the Jeep into reverse and backed away from the tracks. Darby came up so fast that my brain didn't have time to register what I needed to do and I just pressed on the gas not realizing I was still in reverse. I backed into a parked car so hard that two of its tires lifted off the ground.

Darby slid past, her tires locked up and screeching. She rear-ended the Escort and sent it sailing through the crossing bar. The wooden bar snapped and flew into the air, exploding into a thousand splinters when it hit the train. The car itself was pushed under the train just enough that the edges of the freight cars sliced into the hood, shooting sparks out like an arc welder.

As I was fumbling to find first gear, I saw the occupants jump out of the car and scramble to safety just before something hanging off the train caught the car. The front half of the Escort disappeared as its back end was tipped up and dragged to the edge of the intersection before spinning around and getting sucked underneath.

Then three things happened simultaneously. Darby spun her Ford around and started strafing my Jeep with an Uzi, the Escort burst into flames as a train car lurched over its shredded husk and jumped the tracks, and the entire top two floors of the Terre Haute House disappeared in a blistering blue fireball.

It sounded like God Himself was pitching a first-rate hissy fit.

I was able to drop the Jeep into first gear, press the gas, and slide down into the empty space where the passenger seat should have been. Bullets tore through the doors and shattered the windshield. If it wasn't for Cerberus' impatience earlier, I wouldn't have been able to get low enough out of the path of Darby's bullets. Problem was I couldn't see a damn thing and with the unearthly howl of the derailing train behind me, I couldn't tell if Darby had stopped shooting.

I took a chance and looked up just in time to see that I was heading off the road and onto the sidewalk. I pressed the brake with my left foot and my tires squawked like dying geese. My front tire hit the curb and buckled. The front end tilted forward like the vehicle had tripped then it hit a large blue mailbox, sending it careening through the air and into a large glass shop window.

The impact sent me into the dashboard. I hit the glove compartment with my shoulder and the side of my face, cracking the plastic molding. The glove compartment fell open and everything inside spilled out on top of my head. As I brushed it all away, I noticed that the box was underneath me, splintered and cracked into a dozen pieces. After wiping the blood from my nose, I grabbed the teddy bear and shoved it down my pants.

The hotel was now a full-on five-alarm inferno and the train was still dying in protracted agony. Several of the train cars were crashing into an abandoned gas station while several onlookers were having trouble deciding which tragedy to gawk at. Neither one interested me. The only thing that had my attention was the '59 Ford barreling down on me.

I reached down and found the gun, hopped up onto the seat then stepped on the roll bar with my good ankle. Darby was only twenty feet away.

And she wasn't braking.

Her face was split into an impossibly wide grin as she aimed the Uzi at me through the hole where her windshield should have been. It was amazing how much detail I noticed given the speed she was driving. The way the wind blew back her hair, the soft reflection of street-lights and glowing flames on her lightly glossed lips, the cute little vein on her forehead that only popped out when she was angry with me. Even now when she was off the rails and pursuing a scorched earth vendetta, she was heart-breakingly gorgeous.

She fired the Uzi just before the truck hit the Jeep. I jumped, kicking my legs overhead, and aimed the gun straight down. I saw her bullets ping off the roll bar, throwing out sparks and little black flakes of paint. When the front end of her truck hit my Jeep, I was directly overhead, aiming down in a zero-G handstand. I put two bullets through the roof before Darby went flying out through the windshield after the truck came to a dead stop. The Jeep, however, followed the mailbox through the storefront window.

I landed flat on my back in the bed of her truck. It felt like I was made of glass and that every part of me shattered into a million tiny slivers. My breath was gone and my vision was blurry. I could feel my face starting to swell. Blood ran down the back of my throat and started crusting inside my nostrils as I blinked away the tears.

When my vision cleared, I noticed stars overhead. The moon was a thin curve of light hanging directly above me. And for a moment, it was serene, like I had just parked in the middle of a field to do a little stargazing. But it didn't take long for the screams of terrified people to snatch that image away.

I was able to catch my breath enough to crawl over the side of the truck bed and fall to the street. A couple of bystanders ran over and helped me stand. Once I was up, I saw the full scale of what was going on. The train behind me had finally come to a stop, but there were freight cars everywhere. Several had plowed into nearby buildings, turning them into piles of brick and twisted steel. Smoke billowed out from behind one of the broken buildings as a woman across the street looked on, repeating the words, "Oh my God, oh my God," over and over again as if she were lost in a yogic chant.

The Terre Haute House was now almost completely engulfed in flames. I could hear the sirens now, coming in from every direction. People stopped their cars in the middle of the street and got out to look at the horror that was unfolding in their tiny city.

Bullets pinged off the back of the truck. The two people that helped me dropped to the ground and tried to pull me down with them, but I knew that if I hit the ground one more time, I'd never get up.

Darby was on the sidewalk trying to get her balance as she aimed the Uzi at me. She had a small gash on her forehead and a trace of blood trickled down her temple.

I shouted, "Stay down!" to the couple on the ground and then hobbled toward a back alley, keeping my head below a string of parked cars. More bullets chased me.

When I came out of the alley, I crisscrossed back through a parking lot and moved back toward the street. When I got to the sidewalk, several fire engines screamed past, followed by a phalanx of Terre Haute's finest with their sirens blaring. They disappeared around the corner toward the burning hotel.

Glass shattered as bullets ripped through the parked car next to me. I turned to see that Darby was only fifty feet away. She was walking down the center of the street, tossing out round after round like candy at a parade. People abandoned their cars in the middle of the road in a mad dash to get out of her path. She just ignored them.

I turned and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. The gun was empty. I ducked as she sprayed more bullets into the car.

It was difficult to see now that my face was swelling after doing that full gainer into the dashboard. I could tell by how hard it was to breathe that my nose was ruined and I was pretty sure that the lack of feeling in my left arm wasn't a good sign either.

The Uzi exploded again in short bursts, but this time the bullets didn't hit the car on the side I was hiding behind, but more toward the back end of the vehicle instead. Back where the gas tank was.

"Oh, puke." I kept my head down and limped away as fast as I could.

There were a few more gunshots then the car ignited in a blast that lifted the car completely off the ground. I felt a rush of hot air pick me up from behind and throw me against a lamppost. Something in my chest snapped. I slid down the lamppost and landed in an awkward heap, hunched over myself. I could smell burnt hair and there was a sharp ringing in my ears.

I was able to get on my knees and use the lamppost to stand up. When I breathed in, I almost fell to the ground again. I could only take shallow breaths. Anything more felt like an ice-pick stabbing me through the chest.

The ruined car was shooting flames forty feet into the air. Tires from other nearby vehicles blew out and street signs curled from the intense heat. Every car alarm in a five block radius was bleating in panic.

I tried to weave my way between the abandoned cars on the street but was having trouble navigating. My left eye was now completely swollen shut. The only way I knew where the burning car was at was by keeping the heat to my back as I moved. When I got to the edge of an empty intersection, there was a gunshot and something bit into my thigh.

The pain was barely perceptible among every other scrape, break, and gunshot I had. I was able to make it another twenty feet before my leg gave out on me and I fell to the pavement. My lizard brain kicked in and I crawled, mindlessly, as one bloody hand reached out and pulled the rest of my wasted corpse behind it.

And then I felt Darby's foot press against my neck.

She kicked me onto my back and stepped on my throat. There was something strangely erotic about a Riot Grrrl in a Catholic whore-girl outfit stepping on my neck with stiletto heels, but when Darby held her hand in front of her face to protect herself from the spattering of my skull fragments, the hint of my erection immediately disappeared.

"You don't want to do this Darby." My windpipe sounded broken. Hell, most likely was. I could smell the cold tang of her leather boots over the coppery scent of my own blood. I coughed up a gout of bloody phlegm and made a noise that sounded more mechanical than organic.

"Dingo," she said to me, "there's nothing in this world I want to do more." She put a little more weight on my throat.

From the periphery of the one eye that wasn't completely swollen shut, I could see flashes of light off in the distance. Red, blue, yellow. But there were no sounds. No sirens, no horns, no nothing. Wait. There they were. For a moment I wondered why I couldn't I hear them sooner, but the warm trickle down my neck answered my question.

"Promise me…"

She aimed the gun and peeked between her fingers. "Promise you what?"

"Don't give it to Eunice." My throat was on fire. "Anyone but her."

Darby stared at me through the sights of the gun and said, "Okay, but only if you answer something for me." She dropped the gun to her side. "Your little whore. Did you love her?"

My little whore. We'd talked about her dozens of times before, though it had been in the presence of half a dozen lawyers and never quite this violent. Close, but not quite. But that was one question she'd never asked me before.

Of course, she had been too busy threatening to pull my spine out through my nose to ask me much of anything.

I swallowed the blood that had pooled at the back of my throat. "No. I didn't love her."

I heard screeching tires and doors swinging open as Darby stood over me, silhouetted in a kaleidoscope of flashing lights. She looked down at me and sneered.

"I'm sorry, Darby." I tried to smile but my face was as stiff and swollen as a package of stale marshmallows.

Her sneer softened and she said, "Yeah. Me too." Then she raised the gun.

There were voices, all shouting, all screaming, all demanding she put the gun down. But Darby didn't move. The lights played off of her blue-black hair as she stood over me, her thick, heavy gun aimed at my broken face.

More voices, more shouts. But her whisper cut through them all like a razor. "This isn't over, Dingo. Remember, I have friends in Hell." She tightened her grip on the gun and winked at me. "You don't."

Her wicked grin was the last thing I saw before my eye finally swelled shut and the roar of police gunfire deafened my only good ear.