Relentless

Milo.

   In my arms, Milo tucked his face against my throat. I put one hand against the back of his head to keep him where he was. If he opened his eyes, I’d feel his lashes moving against my skin.
    Through the dining room, across the living room, around the three bodies, to the stairs, ascending. “All right, scout.”
    He opened his eyes and lifted his head. “What’re we gonna do upstairs?”
    “A Bruce Willis thing.”
    “Die Hard!”
    “A later Bruce Willis thing.”
    I put Milo down in the upstairs hall, and together we located the bedroom in which Truman Walbert had chosen to bunk.
    In the attached bathroom, I rummaged through the vanity drawers in search of his shaving gear. Because of Walbert’s heavy jowls and the deep lines in his hound-dog face, I doubted that he had used astraight razor, and I was relieved to find an electric, which would make this job go quicker.
    Using the sideburn trimmer, I cut a swath from my forehead, across the top of my skull, and down the back.
    Watching snakes of my strange hair spiral to the floor, Milo said, “Extreme.”
    “What if I said you’re next?”
    “Then I’d have to knock you flat.”
    “Totally flat, huh?”
    “I wouldn’t enjoy doing it.”
    “That’s nice to know.”
    Milo said, “But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”
    When nothing was left but short bristles, I switched from the trimmer to the standard shaver head and buzzed away the stubble.
    “How do I look?” I asked.
    “Slick.”
    “I’ll take that as a compliment. Let’s go.”
    Indicating the hair mounded like dead rats on the floor, Milo said, “Don’t we have to clean up?”
    “We’re desperate fugitives. We live by our own rules.”
    “Cool.”
    At the top of the stairs, I lifted him into my arms and told him to close his eyes until further notice. I carried him down to the foyer.
    In the hallway, around the three cadavers, Penny had laid a carpet of green-plastic trash bags to avoid getting more blood on the soles of her shoes. The scene wasn’t from a conventional TV commercial, but it effectively sold the point that the product was versatile, its many uses limited only by the consumer’s imagination.
    Penny came into the foyer with a smaller white-plastic trash bag containing what she had harvested from the dead.
    I thought of my uncle Tray’s methamphetamine-amped buddiesgathering wallets and purses from the many victims in Uncle Ewen’s farmhouse twenty-eight years earlier, and I wondered at the complex and often eerie patterns evident in every life.
    Seeing the new me, Penny said with dismay, “Oh, no. Where’s your wonderful weird thatch?”
    “Crawling around on the bathroom floor. Turns out, it has a life of its own, tried to attack us. Car keys?”
    She fished them out of the white trash bag.
    I said, “You drive us back to pick up Lassie while I make a phone call.”
    Outside, when I got a closer look at the dull-green sedan in which Rink and Shucker had arrived, I said, “Looks like standard government-issued wheels.”
    A three-inch-square sticker had been applied to the inside of the lower left-hand corner of the windshield, facing out to be read by security scanners. At the bottom were a number and data in the form of a bar code.
    The primary element of the overall-gray sticker was a white circle that enclosed a symbol: three muscular red arms radiating from the center, joined at the shoulder and forming a kind of wheel, each arm bent at the elbow, each hand fisted.
    “It’s a triskelion,” Penny said. “I’d guess the fists symbolize power, red endorses violence, and the wheel form promises unstoppable momentum.”
    “So you think they don’t work for the Bureau of Compassionate Day Care.”
    “They might.”
    I put Milo in the backseat and got in the front with Penny as she started the engine. “We have to abandon the Mountaineer. Besides Lassie, is there anything in it we’ve absolutely got to have?”
    “One suitcase,” she said. “I can grab it in ten seconds.”
    “Milo?” I asked.
    “That sack of special stuff Grimpa got me. I haven’t used most of it yet.”
    “What about the bread-box thing you wouldn’t let me carry out of the house on the peninsula?”
    “Oh, yeah. That for sure. That is monumentally
crucial
.”
    “Did I say you can open your eyes now?”
    “I figured it out back on the porch.”
    “My little Einstein.”
    “
‘Weird
little Einstein,’ he called me,” Milo remembered. “He