He staggers out into the blizzard and shuffles toward the back of the old slaughterhouse.
One step at a time through searing pain.
He blinks the snow out of his eyes.
It’s only fifty feet but it might as well be fifty yards.
He is reduced to crawling. His outbreaths are frothing blood. Definitely a punctured lung.
He reaches the rear door of the abattoir. The death entrance.
Red on the dirt. Red the handrail and the snow.
Breathing is hard. He has only one working lung and that is filling with blood too.
He climbs the last concrete step and peers over the lip of the back door.
The arc light is on and he can see everything.
There are his two beloved grandchildren dead on the floor. The kids he’d rescued all those years ago. The only ones who ever really loved him or understood him. Olly and Ginger in the world of red.
That woman is there, huddled with the two kids under a tarp. Marty and another man are lying on the floor next to them—both, apparently, still alive. Not for long.
Red raises the M16 and puts his finger on the trigger of the underslung grenade launcher. It is loaded with an armor-piercing high-explosive grenade that will kill everyone in the room. Probably including him.
That’s good, he thinks, and he pulls the trigger.
75
People talking from a long way off. Something cold and wet falling on his face.
Where is he?
Oh yeah.
Blacked out for a second there. Marty is talking to him. Trying to lift him up. Rachel is holding Kylie and Stuart.
Pete’s holding his .45. He looks along the line of the floor and sees Daniel at the back entrance of the abattoir at the same time that Daniel sees him. The old man has an M16 with a grenade-launcher attachment.
Rachel’s wrong. It is deep stuff. It is mythology. Old versus young, army versus navy, catharsis versus chaos. Clearly the god of war is keeping one of them alive just for his own amusement.
Both of them pull their triggers. The old man pulls his first and he has only the briefest moment of confusion when the metal trigger stays in place. Confusion and then realization: He forgot to flick off the manual safety on the M203 grenade launcher. The M203 is dangerous. You can’t have it going off willy-nilly. It needs to be armed and the safety switched off by hand.
Shit.
He fumbles for the clunky safety catch for a split second before Pete’s gun barrel flares a brilliant white and Daniel’s chest explodes in pain and fire and his soul is cleaved by a slug from a World War II .45.
76
Shapes. Sirens. Snow.
A blanket.
“I’m sorry, Pete, but this place is going up in flames. We gotta get you outside.”
Rachel, Kylie, and Stuart help Marty and Pete across the abattoir floor to the exit.
They stagger away from the burning building and collapse in the snow. Behind them, bottled gas tanks under the kitchen begin exploding.
“Come on!” Rachel says and carries and drags them farther away from the property.
Blue flames.
Snowflakes.
Flashing lights.
A Miskatonic River Valley fire engine is coming up the road. The word Fire is spelled out mirror-backward above a big yellow arrow.
Rachel nods.
Three dead foxes and the yellow arrow at last. Deliverance finally at hand.
Pete beckons Rachel close.
“Yes?”
“If I don’t make it, don’t let them cast some asshole to play me in the movie version of this,” he croaks.
She grins and kisses him.
“One more thing,” he says, but his voice dies in his throat.
“Me too,” she agrees and kisses him again.
77
No one is going to play Pete in the movie version of this. Pete is far too controversial a figure for a movie. After their confessions, Pete and Rachel are charged with felony kidnapping, false imprisonment, and child endangerment. For that alone it’s fifty years in prison.
And then there’s the little expedition to Innsmouth. Was that a vigilante rescue attempt or a home invasion?
It has taken a long time to sort everything out.
It has taken a team of federal agents weeks to fully analyze The Chain documents they found on Ginger’s hard drive.
It has taken the Dunleavy family to heroically step forward and tell the police that Rachel took Amelia with their consent because she told them that she was going to break The Chain. That explains the money too. The cops don’t believe a word of it, but it’s clear that the Dunleavys are going to be hostile witnesses for any prosecution.
By this time, the tide of compassion is fully with Rachel and Pete and all the victims of The Chain. The public is overwhelmingly behind them; Rachel and Pete are sympathetic defendants, and there’s a high probability of jury nullification. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office can see which way the wind is blowing. Rachel and Pete are released from custody pending further inquiries. And without the Dunleavy family testifying against them, with the public on their side, and with Ginger’s career of evil becoming more and more apparent, Rachel’s lawyers tell her that an expensive, unpopular trial now looks very unlikely indeed. Rachel has killed the monster. The Chain has been stopped forever and everyone who was a link in that chain has been freed.
The history of The Chain itself is being investigated by dozens of reporters. A journalist from the Boston Globe discovers its roots in a substitute-kidnapping scheme that began in Mexico.
There are hundreds of victims of The Chain but the fear of retaliation and the occasional brutal, bloody reprisal were enough to keep almost all of them quiet over the years.
That, anyway, is what Rachel has read in the press. That’s the Globe summary. There are more sensational accounts in the tabloids and on the internet. But for self-preservation, Rachel doesn’t read the tabloids and she hasn’t really gone on the internet since she’s been released from custody.
Rachel doesn’t give interviews; she avoids the limelight; she doesn’t do anything much but pick up her daughter from school and write her community-college philosophy lectures, and eventually, through these prudent un-twenty-first-century measures, she becomes old news.
Gradually she’s no longer a trending topic on Twitter or Instagram. Some other poor devil has come along to take her place. And then another one will come along after that. And then another. It’s all very familiar…
In Newburyport she’s still recognized—how could she not be?—but when she drives up to the malls in New Hampshire or into the Boston suburbs, she’s anonymous again and that’s the way she likes it.
A sunny morning in late March.
Rachel is in bed with her laptop. She deletes the twenty new requests from her e-mail inbox asking for interviews and closes the computer. Pete is next door in the shower. Singing. Badly.
She smiles. Pete is doing really great now on his methadone program and at his brand-new job as a security consultant for a high-tech firm in Cambridge. She walks barefoot into the kitchen, lights the stove, fills the kettle, and puts the water on to boil.
Upstairs, she can hear the occasional ping of Kylie’s iPad. Kylie’s awake and hunkered under the sheets, chatting with her friends. Kylie is also doing amazingly well. They always say that kids are resilient and can bounce back from trauma, but it’s still incredible to see how high she is bouncing back.