Kin

-1-

Elkwood, Alabama

July 15th, 2004

Everything is dead.

Naked, bloodied and stunned, the sun high in the cloudless sky and scalding her sweat-slicked skin, Claire Lambert nevertheless managed to note that the stunted, bone-white tree in the field to her right was the same one she’d commented on a few days, months, or years earlier, though what she might have said about it was a mystery now. She stopped walking—if indeed she’d been walking at all, for the sensation thus far was one of being still, spine bent, the road moving like a granite-studded conveyor belt beneath her torn and filthy feet—and squinted at the gnarled trunk, which looked like an emaciated mother with an elaborate wind-wracked headdress, twisted limbs curled protectively around its womb, knees bent, feet splayed and poking out from beneath the hem of a skirt that had been washed and worn a few times too often.

It fascinated Claire, and though she swayed as if she might fall on legs that had many miles ago ceased registering as anything but independent creatures burdened with her weight, she couldn’t look away. Fire licked with cold tongues at her groin; the blood in her hair hardened, and whatever vile substance now lay in a gelid, solidifying lump in the hole which had once contained her right eye, ticked as if someone had replaced it with a watch to measure the time she had left. But still she looked, still she stared, as the merciless sun turned her scalp pink and cooked the flesh on her back. Sweat, cooler in the scant shade beneath her breasts, fell like tears. At length, she twitched, and her legs shuffled her toward the barbed wire fence that separated the field from the road. Cotton whispered in the breeze as her stomach met the wire, the barbs pressing deep into the skin; she felt nothing but an involuntary shiver. A startled bird exploded from the cotton with a cry that dragged her attention to its whickering form as it soared high, then lost itself in the blinding blanket of the sun. Claire lowered her head, licked dry, cracked lips with a sandpaper tongue and pushed again against the fence, unable to understand why her progress was being halted. Surely no one would begrudge her a conference with that tree, a taste of the maternal comfort she felt it might offer. Again she pushed, and again she was withheld. This time the barbs pierced her skin. Troubled, she took a half-step back, the black wire thrumming like a guitar string strummed by the breeze. A single drop of her blood welled from the iron tip of a barb and hung, suspended in time, refusing the sun, before it plummeted and colored crimson a finger of grass. Frowning, she looked slowly from the wire to the tree, as if the blame might lay with that withered woman, and tried to speak, to beg. A thin whistle was all that emerged from her parched throat—Help me—and she swallowed what felt like a handful of hot stones.

A sound.

She turned, reluctant to look away from the tree, but drawn by the only other noise she had heard thus far not immediately attributable to nature, or that soft voice inside her chanting incessantly and with tireless determination that everything was dead. A strand of her hair snagged on her lower lip, and stayed there, held in a fissure where the skin had split.

Raging white light thundered toward her. Of this she was only dimly aware, for between that light and where she stood swaying, was a man with no face or hands. No, that wasn’t quite right. Daniel still had his hands, but they no longer had skin and looked impossibly dark and raw. This didn’t concern her, for rarely had he held her anyway—a lapse in affection of which she had once upon a time hoped to disabuse him.

Why won’t you hold my hand?

Because we’re not kids anymore, babe.

But at the sight of that flayed skull, a tear, like the blood on the wire, defied the sun and spilled from her one good eye.

“We can hitch a ride,” he told her, though his lips never moved. The raw ragged open wound of his face, topped by a nest of unruly brown hair, turned to nod at the glaring light behind him, which had grown closer still. The mirrored sun floated above shimmering metal, the wheels grinding up thick mustard-colored clouds.

She opened her mouth to respond, to tell her boyfriend that they really should wait for the others, but even had she possessed the voice to convey the words, a sudden bolt of dazzling pain tried to scissor her in half, forcing her to double over as she vomited into the dirt at her feet.

Everything is dead.

Her head swelled as she watched a dark red river flow from her mouth, turning dust to rust and spattering her ankles. The veins in her neck stuck out in thick cords, her ruined eye began to burn and throb, making it feel as if her brain was trying to force its way out of her, to distance itself farther from this confusing reality than she had thus far managed on her own.

Weakened, she dropped to her knees, felt the ground abrade the skin there. But there was no pain. Her flesh had become a thick heavy coat, and the many tears in the lining affected her not at all. Her palms slid into the dirt.

The sound of squealing might have been of old hinges in the doors of the earth opening to accept her; it might have been her own struggle to breathe against a torrent of vile regurgitated panic and grief, or it might have been the brakes on the car she’d seen coming because now a new voice, a strange voice, drifted down to her sunburned ears as a figure eclipsed the sun and a cool shadow was thrown like a blanket over her bare back.

“Jesus, Mary’n Joseph’n all the holy saints,” it said. “What happened, Miss?”

It’s them, she thought feebly. One of them come to take me back. To hurt me again. It was the same knowledge that had kept her going this far, the unmistakable feeling of being watched, stalked, hunted, meant to die but breathing still.

She shook her head to deny him. Opened her mouth to speak but only blood emerged, the river of sickness forcing her throat to swell. Still she tried to struggle, but when she raised her hands to protect herself, it happened only in her mind. Her limbs would not respond. The pair of dusty boots that had pressed into her field of vision moved away.

Good. Go. Leave me alone. You’ve done enough. Everything is dead. You killed them all.

“Christ, Pete, get me that ’ol dog blanket an’ the flask. Move!”

At last the dizzying current ceased and she found strength enough to raise her head. The man was a wiry knot of shadow under a crooked hat, a scarecrow with a golden halo, trying to deceive her into thinking him salvation. Dread pounded at her chest, igniting further knots of pain that seemed to radiate from the core of her.

Another shadow sprouted from the man’s shoulder, this one just as thin, but without a hat, just a fuzz of hair.

They’re here to kill me.

“Oh God, lookit her eye.”

“Shut your fool mouth, boy.”

“What happ’ned to her? She ain’t got no clothes on.” The voice was filled with nervous excitement.

The hatless shadow was elbowed aside. The thin one flapped its arms until its chest became wings descending around Claire, swaddling her.

“Help me carry her.”

She opened her mouth to moan at the sudden, terrible heat enveloping her and felt new warmth seep from between her legs. The dirt turned dark quickly.

“Pa she done wet hers—”

“Now.”

Before the arms could press their wings even tighter around her, Claire took a series of quick, dry, painful swallows, then drew in a breath that sounded like nails on a blackboard, and screamed for Daniel. But even as that tortured, awful noise poured out of her, and though she was surrounded by shadows that were lifting her up and carrying her back to Hell, she knew for the first time in her life that she was well and truly alone, and that no help was coming now, or ever.

-2-

The smell of burned flesh, though only a figment of his imagination, made Luke’s mouth water. He was hungry, his dinner having been interrupted not a full hour before by the sound of Matthew’s keening from the woodshed. It had reminded him of that day when they were kids, when Luke had observed his younger brother trying to skin a deer they had taken down with a bow and arrow. Luke had known the excitement and desire to prove himself would lead Matt to make a mistake, and he’d been right. With a wide smile on his face, and sweat on his brow, Matt had held up the fistful of pelt he’d managed to free from the deer, his other hand still digging that Bowie knife into the carcass as he sought approval from Luke. Told’ya I could. Before Luke could satisfy him, the pelt slipped free of Matt’s grip and the momentum made his other hand snap back. The blade cut a thin half-inch-deep groove through Matt’s bare side, just below the ribs. Luke doubted it hurt very much, but it was enough to send his brother to his knees, hands grabbing fistfuls of hair as he vented his shame and disappointment in that irritating singsong keening sound—the same sound he’d used earlier today after the blonde woman drove a wooden spur through his chest.

Anger made Luke forget himself and he rose from where he’d been crouching atop a grassy hillock. Up ahead, an old black man and his boy were helping his brother’s attacker into the back of a flatbed truck. Helpless to do anything but watch, he’d been tracking the woman on this road, which few folk ever traveled, biding his time before he closed the distance and dragged the woman back to make her pay for what she’d done. Rage had made him abandon the traditional rules of running down the quarry and he’d stayed on the road, in full view of the woman. She hadn’t seen him, and was moving slower than a crippled coon. Even if she had looked over her shoulder and spied through the heat haze his lean sinewy form striding toward her, there was no chance she’d get away. She was bleeding a lot, and he didn’t figure she’d get very far.

It should not have been a difficult task.

But damned if she hadn’t kept on staggering away, her pace even despite her obvious disorientation. It was as if, instead of just floundering blindly through the woods, she’d been drawn to the road like an iron filing to a magnet. Still, he hadn’t hurried. There was no need. He’d been confident despite the ache that throbbed steadily within him whenever it came back to him that Matt was hurt, and hurt bad.

But then Luke heard the truck, and noted the sound of the engine was not a safe, familiar one, and he’d quickly hopped the fence and ducked down in the grass, watching with queer, unfamiliar dread the red vehicle bearing down on the woman.

Claire, he remembered. One of the others had called her “Claire”.

No one ever got away. Not for long. To let someone escape was an unthinkable, unimaginable mistake they had managed to avoid for as long as Luke had been alive. Papa-in-Gray had showed them how and what to hunt, and why it needed to be done, and they had executed his instructions flawlessly.

But today…

Today an implausible number of distractions had left Matt alone with the woman. Even so, she’d been tied to a stake, her hands and feet bound behind her, her mouth gagged. His brothers had already raped her and blinded her in one eye, cut off most of the toes on her right foot, and stabbed her repeatedly in the arms and legs. There should have been little life and even less fight in her, but yet somehow she’d managed to free herself and skewer Matt with the spur. She’d been gone damn near half an hour before Luke, oldest of his five brothers, heard Matt’s pitiful mewling, and by then he’d all but bled out on the floor.

He knew it was not too late. He could still try to close the distance between himself and the truck before they got the woman settled and the engine running again, before they carried Claire out of their lives forever. If the two men he’d seen hefting her into the truck put up a fight, he’d deal with them. He had Matt’s Bowie knife, plucked from his brother’s hand with a vow to finish what the other had been denied the chance to do. Luke was quick. He could make it, and all their troubles would be over. All he needed to do was start running.

But then he heard the sound of the engine coughing, saw the dirty black plume of smoke puffing from the truck’s exhaust, and knew it was too late. Slowly, he started moving toward the fence, and the road beyond. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, tear at his hair, rip at his skin, but instead he hopped the fence, and raced in the opposite direction, away from the truck, and back the way he’d come.

When he’d left home, Matt had been conscious. Breathing. Alive. That Joshua, Isaac and Aaron hadn’t piled into the truck and come roaring down the road in pursuit of the woman told Luke that might no longer be the case.

Most telling of all, Luke realized, was that he hadn’t thought to take the truck. He couldn’t drive for shit, not with the way his fingers were arranged, but that was no excuse. Not now. He had always been an efficient hunter, and he knew the real reason his brothers weren’t coming was because they assumed Luke would handle what needed to be handled. But for the first time ever, they were wrong. He had lost them their prey. And he knew what that would mean when he returned home. He would have to answer to Momma-In-Bed, and she would not be at all pleased. And the last time she’d been mad at him, she’d gotten Papa-In-Grey to bust the fingers on his left hand and set all but the thumb and the middle one wrong.

Dispirited and fearful, he slowed, and whispered a small prayer to God that she would go easy on him. But as the sun rose higher, became a blazing eye in the center of the cornflower blue sky, he knew two things at once.

God wasn’t listening. Not to him. No more than Papa ever did.

And that today, there was every possibility that Momma-In-Bed would kill him.

“Stop starin’.”

“Sorry, Pa.”

“Watch the road.”

Pete nodded and righted himself in the passenger seat. They had covered the girl with a tarp, which was all they had, but just now, through the small begrimed window at the back of the cab, Pete had seen that a corner of the tarp had come loose, flapping madly at the billowing dust the Chevy was kicking up and exposing the girl’s right side, down to her hip. One small breast was visible and despite it being crisscrossed by cuts and scratches, the boy’s breath had quickened, his heart beating faster and faster the longer he looked. He didn’t even know if she’d been a pretty girl before whatever had happened to her. It was hard to tell because of her wounds, and the swelling, which made her face look like a beaten squash. He hoped she was, and that once she recovered—assuming she didn’t die right there among the tools and empty chicken cages—that she might take the kind of interest in him he’d thus far been unable to excite in members of the fairer sex; maybe as a thank you for rescuing her.

Of course, it had really been his father who had plucked the wounded woman from the road, but Pete would be in no hurry to dissuade any misguided gratitude she might choose to throw his way in the first few days of her convalescence. And it wasn’t like the old man hadn’t needed his help.

“What do you think happ’ned to her?” he asked his father again.

“Animals.”

Resisting the urge to glance back over his shoulder again, Pete focused on the road being sucked beneath the old Chevrolet’s grille. “Never seen an animal do that to someone,” he muttered. “D’you see her eye?”

“She’s gonna be all right,” his father told him, but he had the same look on his face he got on those days when the wind was high and the clouds above their farm were black and mean and boiling and ready to send whirling devils down to tear their place asunder. “You just sit quiet now. We’ll bring her to the Doc’s. He’ll fix her up.”

“Think he’ll be able to save her?”

Instead of responding, the old man reached out a withered hand and jabbed at the radio. Low twangy music and his father’s long low sigh infiltrated the silence. A moment later, the sickly sweet aroma of burning tobacco filled the cab as his father touched a flame to the tip of a crumpled hand-rolled cigarette. It was a smell that comforted Pete, a familiar scent that always seemed to drift through his skull and stroke some sense into the wild dog of his thoughts. He smiled slightly and went back to looking out the window.

He didn’t care if the wounded girl wasn’t pretty under all that blood and other stuff. He wasn’t much to look at either and didn’t think it fair to judge others by standards he didn’t meet himself. And he’d had a bad heart since birth, which he figured maybe explained why he was always so quick to hope that whatever wounded bird he encountered would view him as her savior and love him accordingly. Repairing his flawed heart was not a job he would ever be able to do on his own, which, in a town like Elkwood—comprised mostly of hard-faced, hardworking men—meant his chances of dying young were better than average.

He wasn’t afraid to die.

He was afraid to die alone.

At one time, Valerie Vaughn down at the grocery store had been the object of his fixation. She’d always been kind to him, and for a time, he might have loved her, until he summoned up the courage to confess as much and she’d folded in on herself like a deckchair with a bad leg, told him that was “nice” then went to great lengths to avoid ever having to talk to him again.

There were others, of course, all highly unlikely to ever give him the time of day, or stay around Elkwood long enough to see him as anything other than a not-so-bright farm boy with aspirations that didn’t stretch farther than the town’s borders.

Valerie had left, bound for Birmingham.

After that he’d quickly grown tired and discouraged by the amount of polite refusals or horrified rejections, the gleeful mockery and cruel teasing, and instead had taken his father’s advice and focused on work at the farm.

And now they’d found an outsider—hurt, lost, and in desperate need of help. Help he could give her if she let him.

A nervous flutter in his stomach reminded him that all he was doing was setting himself up for more disappointment, more heartbreak, more blows to his fragile heart. She’s a stranger. She’s prob’ly got a guy in some big city somewheres. She’s prob’ly hitched. You’re bein’ a damn fool.

As always, however, hope gave him the strength to ignore those warnings, and whatever reason or sense might have inveigled its way into them.

He smiled.

This one would stay.

He could feel it.

-3-

Luke knew there were three kinds of silence. There was the ordinary kind—when there was no one around to make a sound, like when he wandered down to the junkyard a half-mile from his home, where they flattened and crumpled up the cars they decided they had no use for, after flattening and crumpling up their owners. That was where he went for peace and quiet, to gather his thoughts, sometimes to pray.

Then there was the kind of silence you heard when it only looked like you were alone, when someone was watching you, hidden and holding their breath. That silence was different, heavier because it was unnatural, forced. And it never lasted long. Luke had long ago learned that no matter how clever, or scared they were, people were not good at staying quiet, even if it meant the difference between life and death. He had no idea how many of their victims might have gotten away, even for a little while, if they’d just held their breath a moment longer, or choked back a whimper or a sob, or watched where they were going.

The third kind of silence was when you were surrounded by people, all of them staring without seeming to breathe, none of them moving or saying a word because what they had to say was written in their eyes, and that message was not good. This was the worst kind of silence, the most dangerous kind.

This was the one Luke found himself faced with when he finally made it home.

A light rain had started as he’d crested the hill and started down the slope toward the house, as if God himself had chosen a side, and it wasn’t Luke’s. From his elevated position, he’d been able to see that the rain had not discouraged his brothers. Joshua, Isaac and Aaron were standing in a ragged semicircle in front of the house, facing him. Matt was a dark bundle lying in the mud before them, and there was no doubt that he was dead. He was on his back, shirt soaked with blood, eyes glassy and open, staring unblinkingly up at the rain coming down. Luke stopped a few feet away from him. “When?” he asked, as though it mattered. He was speaking merely to break the silence, which had already begun to coil like morning mist around him.

“Soon’s you was gone,” Aaron told him eventually, a hard edge to his voice. No grief at all, but plenty of swallowed pain. “Where’s the girl at?”

Luke shook his head, unable to meet his brother’s eyes. He did not want to see in them the disgust, the fear, and the relief that Aaron was not likely to suffer the same degree of punishment for letting the girl escape as he would. He almost expected his brothers to ask how she’d evaded him and where he thought she might have gone, but of course they didn’t. It didn’t matter now. Very soon they would have to uproot themselves and find someplace else to settle down, a task that, despite Momma-In-Bed’s insistence that they not tie themselves to anything or indulge in luxuries they couldn’t move at a moment’s notice, would not be easy. It would mean a lot of hard work done quickly, all the time looking over their shoulders and listening for the sound of sirens. It would mean a new kind of silence for their family: an absolute absence of sound that might at any moment be broken by the enemy, by the Men of the World, as Papa called them, threatening the only world they knew.

“Momma-In-Bed wants to see you,” Aaron said. “Tole me to tell you soon’s you got back. ‘Straight away,’ she said. ‘Don’t even stop to make water. I want ’im in my room, soon as you see his face,’ she said.”

Luke finally looked up, and his younger brother’s long narrow ashen face, made longer by the close cut of his dark hair, was grim. He couldn’t tell if Aaron was getting any satisfaction from being the bearer of such a message, nor did he thank him for it, for they were not given to gratitude. Acknowledging it only risked opening themselves up to empathy for their victims, who were so often uncannily good at trying to evoke it from them.

“I’ll go see her then,” Luke answered, and took one last look at Matt, lying there looking perfectly at ease with his death, the picture of calm marred only by the small rusty-red puddles forming in the mud around his body, the deep dark puncture wound in his chest, and the scarlet rivulets meandering their way toward where Luke stood watching. “You boys go start the fire.”

The twelve-year-old twins—Joshua, who could speak just fine but seldom did, and Isaac, who’d had his tongue cut out when he was nine years old for cussing at Papa-In-Grey—both nodded dutifully and hurried off toward the barn where they kept the stacks of old wood, a fragment of which the girl had used to end their brother’s life. In the rain, they were going to need kerosene to get the fire to catch, so Luke mumbled instructions to this effect to Aaron and watched his brother lumber off, shoulders hunched, toward the small ramshackle shed with walls of badly rusted corrugated iron where they’d hung and skinned one of the girl’s friends.

Then, with a shuddering sigh, he knelt briefly in a puddle of Matt’s blood, and said a short prayer, intended not solely for the dear departed, but for himself too. He asked for forgiveness, and courage, but didn’t wait to find out if either had been bestowed on him. Somehow he doubted it. Far too much had gone wrong for him to expect any mercy from God or anyone else.

Luke rose up and started up the steps into the house.

After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, Doc Wellman finally emerged from the bedroom he had once shared with his wife until her death in ’92. Nowadays he slept on a tattered sofa in his living room, and always with the TV on and the volume turned low. He couldn’t sleep without it. It was all he had for company. That, and the few patients willing to travel thirty miles outside of town to see him. He had witnessed much in his lifetime, not the least of which was the slow and painful decay of his wife in those endlessly long weeks before the cancer finally took her, but it was clear from the deathly pallor on his face as he stood before the old black man and his boy, that he had never seen anything quite like this.

Driven by equal parts excitement and impatience, Pete stood first, leaving his father sitting alone on the small wicker bench in the hall. “She alive?” the boy asked, searching but not finding the answer in the aged doctor’s expression.

Wellman was so thin his limbs were like broom handles snapped over someone’s knee, his chest a deflated accordion topped by a long face writhing with wrinkles in which small blue eyes, magnified by a pair of rimless spectacles, shone with surprising alertness. Those eyes looked troubled now as they found the boy’s face. Pete had expected to be ignored, that whatever the doctor said would be directed toward his father, and so was pleasantly surprised to find the doctor addressing him directly. “Yes,” he said in a quiet voice. “She is, but barely.”

“Will she make it?” Pete persisted.

“I think so, though she’s lost quite a bit of blood.”

The boy let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“Who did this to her?” Wellman asked, frowning. “I can’t imagine anyone…” He trailed off, and put a hand to his mouth as if censoring a line of thought that would yield answers he preferred not to hear.

“Animals,” Pete’s father said again, as if he’d been programmed to give that response whenever the question was put to him.

The doctor dropped his gaze from the boy to his father. “Not unless we got animals in this state can work a knife, Jack.”

Pete looked to his father to see how this news had affected him. It hadn’t, or if it did, he was doing a fine job of hiding the fact. In the dull gray light through the windows in the hall, all he saw on the old man’s face were shadows.

“No,” Wellman said, “Wasn’t animals did this. Poor girl’s been cut up something terrible. Beaten too. She’s got a concussion, multiple fractures, and a couple of busted ribs. Whoever took a blade to her used it to take out one of her eyes and lop off a few of her fingers and toes. If it was an animal, the wounds would be ragged, Jack. No.” He sounded as if he didn’t believe it was possible or didn’t want to believe it, but knew there was no other explanation. “Someone real angry wanted her to die, and die slow.” He shook his head and touched a pair of trembling fingers to the small silver crucifix that hung around his neck. Then he sighed and stepped away from the boy. “Either one of you called the Sheriff?”

Pete shook his head. “I guess we wanted to get her here ’fore it was too late.”

“Well that was the right thing to do, but we’d best give Hal a call now. Need to tell him he’s got some kind of lunatic out there running around chopping up women.” He started to move down the hall, but Jack stood and put a hand on his arm. Wellman looked at it like it was a strange species of exotic spider that had just dropped from the ceiling.

With a pained expression on his face, Pete’s father leaned in close to the doctor and said in a low voice, “You can’t. Not ’less you want more people in that room of yours tonight.”

Puzzled, Wellman slowly withdrew his arm from the man’s grip. “You know something I don’t?”

Jack licked his lips and nodded slowly. “I do, but might be better if you didn’t hear it.” His gaze, which Pete was shocked to see was one of fear, dropped to the floor. “Now if you’re sayin’ that girl’s gonna make it, I reckon me and Pete’s done about all we can and we’ll just head on home and leave her to you.”

Wellman studied Jack’s face. “What’s going on?”

“Leave it, Doc. Please. It’s the best thing to do.”

“The hell it is, Jack. Someone’s gonna be missing that girl and I don’t know where to start. That’s Sheriff’s work right there, and how’s he gonna help if he don’t know about it?” He glanced at Pete and a funny look passed over his face. “You boys didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?”

Pete felt as if he’d been punched. “Hell no, Doc. We found her just like that, honest we did. She was on the road, throwin’ up blood. I reckon if we hadn’t come along she’d be roadkill right now, or cooked in the sun. Me and Dad loaded her up and came right here, ain’t that right?”

“That’s right,” Jack said, his gaze still directed at the floor as if something down there was of fierce interest to him. “This wasn’t our doin’.”

“But you know whose doing it was?”

Jack said nothing for a moment, then raised his head and looked hard at his son. “Go on out to the truck.”

“But I want—”

“Now.”

Pete knew it would be unwise to argue. He’d been on the receiving end of the back of his father’s hand for less. But before he obeyed, he asked Wellman, “Can I come back’n see her?”

“If it’s all right with your Pa.”

“We’ll see,” Jack said, which Pete knew was as good as a “no”, and stepped aside to indicate the boy needed to get moving.

“Thanks for patchin’ her up,” Pete said to the doctor.

The old man nodded. “Wouldn’t have been a whole lot I could’ve done if you boys hadn’t picked her up. You saved her life, I reckon.”

“Will you tell her we was the ones brought her in?”

“Sure, son.”

Reluctantly, the boy did as he was told, passing between the men and through an invisible cloud of their intermingled scents: sweat, tobacco, and disinfectant. Once clear of them, however, he took his time making his way to the door, pretending to admire the sparsely furnished interior of the doctor’s house, hoping to hear just what it was his father knew, but they said nothing, obviously aware he was still within earshot. Aggravated by questions unanswered, he opened the front door and stepped out into the rain.

“You know I’ve got to report this, Jack.”

“I know.”

“Then you’d best give me a hell of a good reason why I shouldn’t or that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”

Jack was afraid. Good sense had abandoned him over the past few hours and all because he’d had the boy in the truck with him. If he’d just left Pete at home, he could have done what reason and common goddamn sense had suggested and just kept driving when he saw the girl in the road. Sure, the guilt would have weighed heavily on him later, but that was what whiskey was for, and it wouldn’t be the first round of it he’d had to deal with. After sixty-one years of hard living, he’d gotten pretty good at sweeping things under the rug and stomping them down until they were easier to walk over than study. But he knew the boy wouldn’t have let it go. He was too simple, too unaware that there was a great big gray area between right and wrong, especially when it meant putting yourself in harm’s way. He had not yet been educated on the kind of monsters who preyed on Samaritans.

Jack had spotted the girl before Pete, but had kept his mouth shut, even tried to distract the boy so he might miss it, told him it looked like a storm if those thunderheads coming over the hills to the left of them were anything to go by. He should have known the boy would catch on. He rarely said two words to his son unless he had to— in all his years he’d never truly learned how—and certainly wasn’t given to idle banter, so instead of looking out his window at the clouds, and away from the girl, Pete frowned and looked at his father instead. And from there, his eyes had drifted to the crumpled form at the side of the road. Even so, even when Pete had grabbed Jack’s arm hard and pointed at the girl, he’d considered just stepping on the gas and telling the boy what he was telling the doctor now.

“It’s just…trouble, Doc.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Jack searched for a way to say what he wanted without saying too much, but his mind was a jumble of unfinished thoughts and burgeoning panic. It needed numbing. He ran a hand through his hair and looked beseechingly at Wellman. “You got somethin’ to drink?”

The doctor nodded. “Come on into the kitchen.”

-4-

In the strained light of the ageing day, Pete inspected the rust-colored stains on his fingers, then held them out to the rain. It was strange to have her blood on his skin, something she would not have shared with him had the choice been hers. A secret she was not yet aware he’d been let in on, a part of her she might not yet know was missing. When they were wet enough, he withdrew his hands and rubbed them together, then wiped them on his jeans. It made him feel a little sad, almost disrespectful, as if her blood was of little consequence to him, like dirt he was anxious to be rid of. Nothing could be further from the truth. As he lingered before Doctor Wellman’s door, still hoping to overhear something of the discussion inside, but thus far unable to make out much over the grumbling of distant thunder and the hiss of the rain, he wished he were inside. Not with the men and their whispering, but in the girl’s room, if only so she would have someone there when she woke up. He hated the thought of her being alone, as she had been alone when they’d come upon her, as she must have felt when her attacker had done those horrible things to her. Alone, helpless, lost. It made his heart hurt to think of her that way.

Stepping out from the shelter of the porch, he narrowed his eyes against the rain and looked at the truck. It stared back, headlights dull, chrome fender long past gleaming.

Pete dug his hands into his pockets. You don’t even know her. He exhaled through his nose. He wondered how long his father would be inside. He was a man of few words, so Pete guessed it wouldn’t be long. Then again the way he’d looked in the hall, all wrapped up in himself, made it seem as if he had plenty to tell.

He glanced to his left, at the two windows at the front of the doctor’s house. The window to the girl’s room would be somewhere around back.

Leave her be.

Knowing he was probably making a mistake, and one that might get him in a world of hurt and trouble, he nevertheless ducked low and moved away from the truck, toward the corner of the house.

They sat facing each other at a small square table, which had once worn a lacy tablecloth, but was bare and scarred now. Since his wife’s death, Wellman hadn’t seen the need for those little touches that made ordinary things look pretty, not when the only thing he had ever considered pretty was buried in cold, uncaring earth. He offered Jack the bottle of Scotch and watched the man pour himself a half glass.

“Do you know who did this to her?” He accepted the bottle but did not take his eyes from Jack’s face as he filled his cup.

“Not for sure, no,” the other man said, before taking a draw from his glass that almost emptied it. “I mean…I didn’t see ’em do it, or nothin’, but…”

“Go on,” Wellman urged when it seemed the man had snagged on his own thoughts.

Rain pattered at the window. The single bulb above them, hooded by a floral glass shade that was the room’s sole concession to decorativeness only because the doctor couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to remove it without breaking it, made their shadows long and blurry. It was not yet night, but plenty dark, almost as if Jack Lowell and his boy had brought it with them.

“You remember those kids that went missin’ years back?”

Wellman nodded. “Backpackers. Couple of guys and their girls. I remember.”

“Yeah. You remember the big fuss around here at that time. Kids were rich. Once their folks found out that Elkwood’s where they’d last been seen alive, they came down here like an army, put the screws on the Sheriff pretty bad. Newsfolk and everythin’.”

“That’s right.”

“I saw those kids.” He joined his hands around the glass. There was dirt caked beneath his nails, his grubby fingertips touching.

Wellman sat back. “When?”

“Gave ’em a lift that day. Saw ’em all out there on the road, in that heat, sweatin’ like a buncha hogs. Felt kinda bad for ’em, even though no one in their right mind should be out walkin’ in that kinda heat. So I told ’em to pile in. Took ’em as far as the General Store, though it were closed. Even offered to take ’em farther if they wanted. They didn’t. Heard one of ’em say the truck smelt like cowshit. ’Nother one said I was like somethin’ outta Deliverance, whatever the hell that is.”

“A movie,” Wellman told him. “’About a bunch of hillbillies who hunt some city folk.”

Jack considered this for a moment, then smiled, but only briefly. “Yeah. Anyways, I left ’em there, and they went missin’ soon after.”

“So you didn’t see what happened?”

“No, but my place’s only about twenty miles from the store. Only other house ’tween here and there is the Merrill’s. Out there in the woods past the river.” At the blank look on the doctor’s face he said, “They don’t come into town much. Keep to themselves. They have a junkyard. Hunt their own food. Buncha brothers, far’s I know. Heard there used to be a sister too, but for all I know that might be just talk. Only one I ever seen in town is their old man, and he’s a scary lookin’ sumbitch. Has a way’a lookin’ at you…like he’s lookin’ inside your skull or somethin’…readin’ your thoughts or…” He trailed off, and drained the glass.

Wellman refilled it. “So you think they had something to do with those kids going astray?”

“I do.”

“But…why? They could’ve gone anywhere. Might even have passed your place that day and you just didn’t see them.”

Jack raised his glass a little, tipped it in gratitude, and took a sip. Then he smacked his lips and stifled a belch. “I called the Sheriff a few weeks later when I heard those kids’ folks was in town askin’ questions. Told ’im what I thought, even though there weren’t no good reason for thinkin’ it other than a bad feelin’ I got every time I passed that damn place. So McKindrey comes over, tells me he’ll go out there and ask some questions. See if the Merrills know anythin’.”

“And did they?”

“Dunno. He never went out there, or if he did, he pretended he didn’t. But the night after I called him tellin’ him what I knew, or thought I knew, I woke up to find Old Man Merrill standin’ in my room with a big rusty lawnmower blade to my throat.” He finished the drink, set the glass before the doctor, who filled it without hesitation and slid it back.

“Thought I was dreamin’ ’bout Death itself, I swear. He was wearin’ dark clothes: long coat, and one of them hats like the preachers used to wear.” He raised his hand and made a twirling motion with one upraised finger in front of his face. “Big hat. Couldn’t see his face. And he were tall. Least I think he was, but I guess anyone standin’ in your room at night with a blade to your throat with only the moonlight showin’ you he’s there’s gonna look tall, right?”

“Right,” Wellman agreed, and noted the other man’s hands had started to tremble.

“He says to me, and I’ll never forget it: ‘I don’t want to kill a good, Godfearin’ man like you even if you is just an old dirty nigger with a big mouth, but I won’t hesitate to cut out your tongue if you keep spreadin’ lies about my family.’ He told me his boys never did nothin’ they weren’t forced to do to protect themselves and the family, and never would. Said they respected our boundaries and we should respect theirs.”

Jack swallowed, eyes cloudy with the memory. He took a long drink of his whiskey, and it could have been water for all the effect it had on him. “I dunno what came over me, but I sat right up, despite that big ol’ blade at my throat, and I told him to get the hell out of my house. He stepped away, and raised an arm that looked like it belonged to a scarecrow, and pointed at my bedroom door. I looked, saw a boy standin’ there holding hands with Pete, who weren’t more than a little kid himself at the time. He looked sleepy, standin’ there in his underpants, wonderin’ what was goin’ on, and who this kid holdin’ his hand was. And I couldn’t tell him, couldn’t say nothin’ because that other kid, the Merrill kid, was holdin’ a huntin’ knife in his other hand and lookin’ at me like he knew exactly how to use it, like he wanted to use it.”

“Jesus…” Wellman said, and removed his spectacles so he could wipe a hand over his face. “Jesus.”

“Merrill asked me if we had ourselves an understandin’.” He shook his head slowly, and finished his drink. “I told him we did, and he left. Mussed up my boy’s hair on the way out as if he were nothin’ more than some ’ol kind uncle come to visit. I didn’t sleep for weeks after that. Sat up with my shotgun and moved Pete’s bed into the livin’ room where I could watch over him.”

“You tell the boy any of this?”

“Told him it were a dream. Didn’t see the sense in scarin’ ’im any worse.”

“They shouldn’t have gotten away with that, you know. No one should get away with that kind of thing. Not in this day and age.”

Jack looked up from his drink. “I ain’t never told no one what I just told you, Doc, but I’m tellin’ it now because you wanted to know why I didn’t want you callin’ the Sheriff. Even if you do, he’ll tell you he’ll take a look, but he won’t, ’cuz I reckon he’s just as scared of ’em as I am. Maybe they paid him a visit one night, told him what they told me. But if they find out, it might be you they come see. You understand now?”

Wellman nodded slowly. He wasn’t sure how much of Jack’s story he should believe. It was madness what he’d been told, but then hadn’t he witnessed firsthand the very worst kind of madness and desperation the world had to offer three years before when he’d been summoned to operate on Alice Niles, a fifteen-year-old girl who’d tried to burn her unborn baby out of herself with a blowtorch, believing it to be the spawn of Satan itself? That particularly frightening conviction had come courtesy of the girl’s mother, Lynn, after she discovered her own husband was the baby’s father.

What Jack had said scared him, even worse than the realization that had he not refused Alice Niles’ anguished request to aid in the abortion, she might not have felt compelled to take the torch to it. This scared him more, because something had occurred to him that he wasn’t sure he should say aloud for fear of terrifying Jack more than he already was. Assuming it hadn’t already dawned on him.

What if they saw you, Jack? What if they saw you taking the girl?

She was sleeping, but it was not a peaceful sleep. Even over the rain that sizzled around him and the wind that had risen, even through the thick glass, Pete could hear her moaning low in her throat. One hand was flung over her brow; the other twitched spasmodically every few minutes. Doctor Wellman had washed her cuts and bandaged her eye, or rather the hole where her eye had once been, and put icepacks on her cheeks to help ease the swelling. She looked a little better now, but not much. She was still naked—he could tell by the shape of her, and the raised points of her nipples beneath the material, the sight of which caused something within him to stir—but the sheets were pulled up to her chin, as if she was cold. There were bloodstained cloths, swabs, and a kidney-shaped metal dish full of dark red water on a stand by the bed. Next to these, laid out on a blood-spotted white towel, a variety of steel instruments gleamed like shiny letters surrounded by wild crimson periods.

As Pete watched, consumed with the sudden urge to go back inside and bring her another blanket, she slowly turned her head toward him, as if following the flight path of a bird in a dream, and he almost ducked down beneath the sill for fear she’d wake and see him peering in at her like some kind of peeping tom. But he waited a moment, then straightened, his face pressed to the glass.

Who are you? he wondered, smiling slightly as he cocked his head to see better through the rivulets of rain streaming down the pane. Where d’you come from? He pressed his fingers to the glass, wishing it were her skin he was feeling beneath them, knowing her flesh would be infinitely warmer. He closed his eyes, confused by this yearning for someone he didn’t even know, and not for the first time chided his foolishness. But the warmth inside him countered the uncertainty. She would wake, and she would need a friend, that was all there was to it. And if they forbade him his visits to see her, then he would sneak out. He had done it all the time for Valerie, even if she’d never learned that he’d been watching her, looking in on her from time to time like a guardian angel. On reflection, that had probably been for the best. She hadn’t loved him anyway.

He wondered if it would be different this time.

The rain hammered the glass and needled the back of his head like nature’s way of opposing such foolish thoughts, and he opened his eyes. The cold trickling down the nape of neck chilled him as he checked to make sure his father or Doctor Wellman hadn’t suddenly appeared at the door.

The coast was clear.

Thunder made a sound like barrels tumbling down a stairs.

Pete turned back to the window, saw that the girl was awake, and watching him, and his mouth fell open.

A split second later, he was surprised when the girl did the same.

Then she screamed.

-5-

“They’ll come looking for her, you know. Someone will come looking for the girl. If not the cops, then her family, and even if by some miracle they don’t, she’s going to wake sooner or later and she’ll want to go home.”

Jack nodded his understanding and wiped tears from his eyes. “I know that. When she’s able, you’d best just put her on a bus home. Though it might not be wise to keep her here longer than you need to. Take her to a hospital, soon. Tomorrow mornin’. Tell ’em you found her on the road and patched her up best you could. They’ll get the cops involved and figure somethin’ out for themselves.”

Wellman finished his drink. “And you don’t think it will all lead back here?”

“Doesn’t matter if it does. We won’t know nothin’.”

“I will, Jack, and I’m a lousy liar.”

“You won’t know more than that you found her by the road. Half-truth’s better than none, ain’t it? And the girl’ll be in good hands.”

“Then what? Think they won’t go poking around by themselves? And I’m only a doctor, not a surgeon. I can patch her up, but I can’t give her what she needs.”

Jack put his hands to the sides of his head and squeezed, as if hoping to compress the frustration. “Then drop her off somewhere. Drive into Mason City, leave her by the—”

A sudden terrifying shriek made them both jump. Jack’s right hand flew out and knocked over his empty glass. It rolled toward the edge of the table but he caught it in time, then looked in desperation at the doctor, who rose and swallowed.

Overcome by panic, nerves frayed, “Why?” Wellman asked. “After all you’ve said, why did you bring her here?”

Jack stared dumbly. He had no ready answer, only unspoken apologies for an act he knew had endangered them all.

Pale-faced and trembling, Wellman hurried down the hall.

A moment later, Jack quickly and quietly stood and headed for the front door.

The face vanished from the window. It didn’t matter. Whether or not she could see them, Claire knew they were close. She could smell their suffocating stink—a mixture of unwashed bodies, blood and engine oil. She screamed, and would not stop screaming, because despite what they had told her, despite what they had whispered lovingly into her ear, their noxious breath warm against her skin, someone would come. Someone would hear.

Casting a fearful glance at the window, empty now but for the rain, she felt a dazzling burst of panic and pain as she remembered being tied to the stake, remembered the feel of them taking turns as they violated her, tore her asunder, tried to reach the part of her she was keeping from them, the only part of her they still, after all their torturing, hadn’t yet destroyed.

Her soul.

As if on cue, her ribs seemed to tighten, her lungs cutting off the breath required to carry the scream, and it died, became an airless croak that drained her. Searing pain chewed on her extremities, as if despite the warmth that lay upon her like an invisible lover, she was suffering from frostbite. Her body jerked of its own volition; her teeth clacked together hard enough to send a bolt of fresh, clear glassy pain to her temples. In her right eye, through which she could see nothing, a smoldering ember ignited anew, and she tried to scream again, as her hands—wounded hands bandaged bleeding hands—flew to the burning epicenter of her suffering and found no blood, no damage, only a soft, slightly damp gauze. She began to weep, and felt consciousness reel away from her, then back again, as if she were on a swing. Slowly, like fires lighting in the dark, other sites of pain registered across the terrain of her body, reaching toward the surface of her skin with flaming arms. Her back arched and she opened her mouth, but the scream she could hear in her ears stayed trapped in her throat. Her skin felt scalded.

Madness danced through her, offering itself up as an alternative to the unbearable suffering, and she grunted, pummeled by invisible fists of pain, and tried to listen.

Any minute now, that soothing velvet voice told her. Any minute now they’ll be back with their knives and their ropes and their filthy things, ready to do to you what they did to…to…

She closed her eyes, opened them again. Darkness in one; light in the other. The room seemed to jump and jitter every time she tried to focus. The rataplan of the rain at the window was designed to distract her, to make her believe it was the dirty finger of one of them, eager to draw her attention, but she didn’t look, didn’t care. The pain was too much now, and even that didn’t matter because pain meant she was alive, and alive meant they hadn’t done to her what she’d seen them do to the others, to her friends, and she couldn’t understand why they hadn’t done the same to her, couldn’t—

And then she did.

She hadn’t let them.

She had escaped, survival instinct taking control of her, muddying her mind, narrowing her thoughts into one single inner cry of primal self-preservation.

Loosening rope burning her wrists. The dimwitted single-minded smile of her captor, as he tugged down his pants with trembling hands. Claire, arching her back away from the stake, spreading her legs, exposing herself more fully, watching his eyes drop to the raw wounded lips there. Come on, come take it you dirty fuck. Her fingers fumbling, tips jabbed by the sharp point of a sliver of wood from the haphazardly stacked pile behind her and to the left. Reaching, weeping, gripping…Come closer. Swaying her hips despite the pain, the degradation, watching his fascination as he approached, his stubby cock springing free from his shorts, the tip glistening. Come closer…The memory of her friends, of what had been done to them, the black fire seizing her, the pain, the anguish, the horror…the rage. Come on! Then he was there, leering at her, hands outstretched to paw her breasts and her own hands were suddenly mercifully free, the rope falling to the floor. His mouth opening, eyes reluctantly leaving her body, frowning as he realized what that severed snake of rope on the floor meant, then a moan, low in his throat as she snatched the wood, swung it around and…

She had fled them in a dream, and woken now to find that was all it had been, for wherever she was, it was no place she knew, no place she wanted to be. It was a bed, and had it been an earthen one she might have understood. But the sheets were clean where she hadn’t bled on them. The room was tidy where there were no instruments and knives.

Knives.

Squinting, hissing through her teeth at the pain, she raised herself up on one elbow, and like a barrel full of rocks falling on its side, the pain seemed to tumble through her, settling in one half of her body, adding weight to the arm she was using to hold herself up. She took a series of short painful breaths as the light grew hazy and spun away from her, then she slowly, slowly opened her eye fully, willing it to focus on the small metal tray by the bed.

Knives. Lots of them, some still wet with her blood. The tools they’d used to fix her, sew her up so they could tear her stuffing out again.

She tried to smile but her lips felt like taut rubber, so she settled for a huffed laugh and the momentary surge of warmth that almost dulled the pain in her chest at the thought of what she was going to do with that knife—a scalpel, she noted.

Any minute now…

Yes, any minute now, they would barge into the room, those dirty seething bastards, but no matter how fast or how strong they were, they would not get her again.

They would not get a second chance to kill her.

Because she was going to do it for them.

-6-

As he approached the girl’s room, Wellman heard the front door slam shut. Jack was gone, and that was good. His account had shaken Wellman, threatened to drain him of his resolve, imbuing in him the temptation to just drive the girl ten miles up the road and dump her somewhere, to avoid whatever her presence might call down upon him. But he was not going to do that, felt guilty for even thinking it. Once the girl was fit to be moved, he would put her in his car and drive her into Mason City, to one of the hospitals there, and once she was checked in, his next call would be to the police. The girl would have to be identified, her family told where to find her, so they could begin the long heartbreaking and arduous process of rebuilding their lives. He knew what that was like. He had been there himself. Hell, still was there, and he didn’t envy them the journey.

What he didn’t know was what would happen when he returned home after doing what he knew in his heart was the right thing. Would the Merrill clan be waiting for him? Would they simply demand to know what he’d done with the girl, or would they already know, having forced the information out of Jack? Surely, if they were indeed responsible for what had happened to the girl, wouldn’t they now be too busy uprooting themselves and moving elsewhere in anticipation of a major manhunt once she was found?

He couldn’t think about that now. He was old, and he was scared, and given too much consideration, the fear might consume him. All he knew was that he had watched a woman he had loved, still loved with all his heart, die in that room once and had never recovered from it, despite doing all he could to ease her suffering. He had prayed for Alice Niles’s forgiveness the night he refused her request for help, and she had died too. He would not idly stand by and watch another human being perish if it was within his power to prevent it.

The screaming stopped.

He hesitated at the door, listening. The silence in the wake of her scream seemed bottomless, and unsettling. After a moment, he gently gripped the handle of the door and eased it open.

“Miss?” he asked quietly, like a bellboy afraid of disturbing a guest, which was, now that he thought about it, not all that inaccurate, for until she decided whether or not to live or die, he was bound to serve her.

He stepped into the room.

She was awake.

Steel gleamed just above the covers.

Her body convulsed, just as he saw the scalpel in her hand, just as he noticed the fresh blood on the sheets.

Rain sprayed the glass as he hurried to her side.

She looked at him, frowned slightly, her face the same shade as the pillow beneath her bandaged head.

“My name is Doctor Wellman,” he said, struggling to keep calm as he sat down on the bed and gripped her wrist. He was relieved to see that she had not had the strength to make more than a superficial cut, but it was bad enough. “I’m here to help you. You’ve been badly injured.” A quick inspection of her other wrist revealed a deeper wound. It was from this the majority of the fresh blood had come. Still looking at the dreamy puzzled expression on her face, he reached blindly out and tugged open the nightstand drawer, fumbled inside until he found the bandages, and began to unwind them from the roll. As he wrapped her wounds, a flicker of pain passed briefly over her face.

“Am I dead?” she asked him in a whisper.

He summoned a smile. “You’re going to be fine.”

“I shouldn’t be. Don’t touch me.” The struggle she put up was child-like, and not hard to restrain without causing her further discomfort. After a few moments, the strength left her.

“Hush now,” Wellman soothed. “I’m a doctor. I’m not here to hurt you. I want to help you.”

“Are they here?”

“Who?”

“Those men. They took the skin from Danny’s hands. And his face. They pulled it off like it was a Halloween mask.” Her breathing caught. Her face contorted into a grimace as a tear welled in her uncovered eye. “They hurt me. All my friends are gone. Everything is dead. Make it quick.”

His smile faltered. “Honey, I’m not one of them. Listen to me now.” He gently stroked her hair. “I’m a friend.”

“All my friends are dead.”

“How many were with you?”

She didn’t reply. At length, she seemed to drift off to sleep, but whispered, “I have to die now. If I don’t do it, they will and I can’t let them.” Her eyelid fluttered. Wellman did not panic. She wasn’t going to die. He knew that. Her pulse, though weak, was constant. Her breathing was fine, her pupil no longer dilated. Unconsciousness was probably her only solace from the pain and the horror, and he permitted her the escape. While she slept, he wrapped her wrists and injected her with a dose of morphine in the hope that it would ease her dreams and numb the pain, at least for a little while. Then he set the tray with the instruments against the far wall, pulled a chair close to the bed, and listened to the rising wind trying to drown out the sound of her peaceful breathing.

He would wait a while for the bleeding to cease, before he sewed her up again.

Until then, he would pray.

And when he was done, he would take the girl to his car and head for Mason City.

We’ll get you home, he promised.

-7-

Her room was in darkness.

Luke stood by the door, fists clenched so she wouldn’t see them trembling, because even in the dark he knew it would not escape her attention. The room smelled of sweat and bodily fluids, but he did not mind. It was his mother’s perfume to him, and ordinarily soothing.

But not this evening.

Now he craved the smell of cooking meat and kerosene, of wood smoke and sizzling fat that would soon permeate the air outside as his brothers burned the bodies. It was a ritual he had been a part of for so long he had ceased to appreciate it. But he appreciated it now, would rather be drawing that pungent mixture of aromas into his nostrils than the smell of shit and piss and vomit that hung in the air in the small squalid room his mother called her own.

From the wide bed, shoved into the corner farthest from the window, where the darkness was thickest, he heard the sound of her moving, just slightly, maybe raising her head to look at him, to peer at him through the muddy gloom. The bedsprings did not so much creak, as whimper.

“Momma?”

“Boy,” she responded in her bubbling voice, as if she was forever gargling.

“Momma I—”

“Come ’ere.”

He pretended he hadn’t heard because it was safer by the door, and that in turn made him feel guilty because he knew if he stayed here she would not rise up and come get him. She couldn’t. In over two years she hadn’t left that bed, not once, and in daylight, when the clouds covered the sun and the flies obscured the window, it was hard to tell where Momma ended and the bed began. It was all darkness, with lumps of paler matter here and there.

That bed, like the woman in it, dominated the room. Papa-In-Gray had told them in the same reverential tone he used to begin their prayers every night before supper, that their Momma was a saint, a suffering martyr not yet found by the grave. Wires’n springs’n flesh’n fat, he told them, like it was the opening line of some long forgotten nursery rhyme. There was no Momma anymore, he said, not the way they remembered her. Now she was a mass of suppurating bedsores, fused to the mattress where old wounds had healed and the torn flesh and pus had hardened to form a kind of second skin around the material and bedsprings beneath. The mattress, once plump and soft, had been worn down by her weight to almost nothing, a wafer thin slice bent in the middle, pungent, soggy and stained by the fluids that had soaked down from her corpulent body over the years. The boys took turns washing and tending to her wound, grooming her, scooping out the large quantities of fecal matter that gathered between her enormous thighs, then giving the remaining stain a cursory, half-hearted scrub before leaving her to wallow in the vestiges of her own waste.

She complained endlessly, spoke to herself day and night, sometimes sang little songs in a voice barely above a whisper, and was quiet only when they brought her food.

Waves of stink rolled from the crooked sagging bed. He had long ago stopped suggesting that they let some air into the room. He didn’t even know if the windows would still open. Some kind of putrid brown grease had started climbing the foggy panes, like corrupted spirits risen from the heaps of dead flies, and had gathered in the cracks like glue.

But God, how he loved her, despite the fear she instilled in him, and despite all she had done to make him sorry for his sins. He loved her more than life itself, quietly believed that he loved her most of all, more than his brothers did, though he would never say so. He believed himself the favorite, even when she challenged that belief by hurting him.

“You hear me boy?” she said, and he licked his lips, felt his tongue rasp against the lack of moisture there, and when he drew it back in, he tasted something foul, something he had tugged from the air into his mouth.

“I hear you Momma,” he said, and took a few steps closer to the bed. Beneath his boots, the floorboards creaked and breathed miniature puffs of dust into the air. Shouldn’t be no dust, he thought, staring down at the dissipating clouds. Floor’s well traveled. And it was, but like the intricate but drooping black cobwebs that hung like dreamcatchers from every corner of the room, he knew this room held onto every particle of skin that fell or rose from his Momma’s body, then waited until dark to begin fashioning them into elaborate constructs to convince the world that time was passing faster than it really was, hastening his Momma toward her death. Trying to make her believe she’d been forgotten. Which of course was Momma’s only true fear. That they would abandon her. That one day she’d wake and find herself calling out to an empty house, listening to the echoes of her voice coming back to her with nothing to obstruct it. Listening to her frantic cries slithering out into the woods to get lost among the trees, to be heard by the deer, the squirrels, the jays, and ultimately, the coyotes, who would sense her panic and follow it to the source. Then, as she had told her sons a thousand times, the coyotes would eat her, and scatter her bones across the land so her spirit would never find peace.

“Sit,” she commanded, and he squinted down at the bed to be sure when he obeyed he didn’t end up pinning a flap of flesh from her arm beneath him. He sat and the bed hardly moved, but the stench from the damp mattress and the body upon it was strong enough to make his eyes water. Whenever Aaron and the others came to see Momma-In-Bed, they wore bandannas tied across their lower faces, but Luke refused to show such disrespect, and wondered why she let them get away with it.

In the gloom, Luke could only make out her eyes, small dark circles in a doughy face almost indistinguishable from the pillow.

“Girl got away, Momma. She tricked Matt’n kilt him. Then she got loose. Didn’t think she’d get far, not the way we had her cut up, but she did. Got to the road and someone picked her up.”

There was silence so deep that Luke, perched precariously on the hard metal edge of the bed, feared he might fall headlong into it and be devoured. Then Momma began to sing, a low growl that was not in the least bit melodic, and chilled him to the core of his being. The song had only a few notes as far as he could tell, but the way she sang them reminded him of the sound a fire truck made when it flew by, the way the song changed, grew lower and lower as it got farther away. He swallowed and his throat clicked. As if it had been a signal, Momma stopped singing.

“Someone picked her up,” she repeated. Then, “You ’member what happ’ned to yer pizzle, son?”

He felt his face redden and was glad she couldn’t see it, but couldn’t prevent his head from lowering, his shoulders from tightening at the mention of that horrible day he had tried so hard to forget but never would, not as long as he had to see the mangled thing that emerged from his pants every time he had to make water.

“I ’member.”

“You ’member why it happ’ned?”

Again, he nodded, but felt his throat constrict.

“Tell me.” He flinched as her hand, almost the size of his Papa’s hat, but white as fresh snow, found his knee. After a moment, he felt the damp from her moist skin seeping through his jeans. “Tell your poor Mama what happ’ned.”

“It—” he began, then tensed as her clammy fingers tightened on his knee. “It were my thirteenth birthday. You threw us a big party, with cake’n balloons’n streamers. You got the place lookin’ real nice, and Papa were home. I ’member he even took off his hat for a spell.”

“That’s right,” whispered Momma, lost in a memory she clearly enjoyed. “Go on now.”

“Me’n Aaron rode the horses through the woods that evenin’. Susanna were on the back of my colt, hangin’ on to me fer dear life. We kept goin’ faster’n faster, and ’fore we knew it, we was racing, Aaron and me. Racin’ like the wind, and Susanna screamin’, but a good kinda screamin’ like she was enjoyin’ herself.”

“She liked the horses, and loved you boys, didn’t she Luke?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“Tell me how much she loved you, Luke.”

The memory to this point was a good one. It had been, as far as Luke could recall, the most beautiful day of his life. The sun had been shining through the leaves, cooking the red clay so it was spongy under the horses’ hooves and flew in their wake. The air was warm, the sweat cooling on their faces as they flew through the woods, laughin’ and screamin’ at the top of their lungs, mimicking loons as bugs smacked into their faces and leaves caught in their hair. He remembered Susanna’s grip, her skin warm and slippery against his belly, her breasts soft against his back as he angled the colt toward the creek, then down the embankment. The horse, more machine than animal, like a series of cogs, pistons and hydraulics beneath a black tarp, muscles rolling fluidly, didn’t pause as the soft earth changed to rock and water. Instead it plowed straight through, head low, snorting as the cold spray soaked the children. Luke had never had such fun in his life, and he delighted in the look on Aaron’s face as he rode his mare a few paces behind. His brother was red from the exertion of trying to keep up, eyes wide from a mixture of fear at the breakneck pace and excitement that they dared go so fast.

“We came to a clearin’,” Luke said, his voice low. The stench of death and sickness abruptly filled his nose and tickled his throat, making him want to gag, but he resisted, and turned away, discreetly sucking in air that was not much cleaner. If he vomited, he knew he’d be no better than his brothers with their insulting bandannas. So he took small short breaths, cleared his throat, spat a sour wad of phlegm on the floor and continued. “The Lowell Creek clearin’ where Papa used to hunt rabbits, ’fore they was all gone.”

“Beautiful place in the summertime,” his mother said.

“Sure was.”

“Was?” she asked with mock surprise. “Ain’t no more?”

“We rested there for a spell,” he said, joining his hands and secretly chiding himself for the uncharitable thought that had just come over him. He had wished, just for a second, that his mother would take her hand off his knee. The weight of it was cold, and unpleasant, as if while dampening his flesh with hers, she was, at the same time, leaching something vital from him. He could almost feel it leaving.

“We rested there some,” he repeated, trying to regain the thread of his thoughts. “Played around for a couple of hours, till the sun started goin’ down. Aaron got bored. Wanted to go home, and Aaron, you know, he don’t like bein’ bored. Gets riled up real easy that way. So he started teasin’ Susanna somethin’ fierce when she says she don’t wanna go home yet, callin’ her names, peggin’ sticks at her. He even threw a dead possum he’d found that had all its guts hangin’ out. That was all she wrote right there. Poor Suze had all its insides stuck in her hair, maggots on her dress, and she went crazy. Damn near chased Aaron all the way home and ten miles farther.” He smiled, just a little. Then it faded as Momma shifted a little in her bed, those dark eyes gleaming like beetles in the moonlight.

“He stayed home; I stayed at the creek, feet up on a rock, in no hurry to go nowhere, not on my birthday, which the way I saw it, was the best damn day of my life so far. The horses was with me, and they seemed pretty satisfied too, standin’ in the shade as the sun went down. I might even have dozed some.”

“And where was Susanna?”

Momma-in-Bed knew the answer to that already. She’d heard this story a thousand times, but her eagerness to hear it again never waned. She was prodding him, impatient to get to the important part, the part where everything went wrong.

“Somewhere in the woods,” Luke said somberly. “I thought she’d gone home after gettin’ bored of chasin’ Aaron.”

“But she weren’t home.”

“No.”

“Where was she?”

“She were there, with me, only I didn’t know it ’till she stepped out from the trees and called my name.”

“Your sister had such pretty dresses, didn’t she Luke?”

“Yes Momma.”

“Made most of them myself. What dress was she wearin’ that day, Luke? I forget.”

“A pink one.”

“Of course, you got a good head for mem’ries, boy. And what was she wearin’ when she stepped out and called your name?”

Luke answered, quietly. “Nothin’.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Nothin’ Momma. She weren’t wearin’ nothin’.”

“That must’ve surprised you.”

“It did.”

“Say again?”

“It did, Momma. I didn’t know why she did that. Thought she might’ve been skinny-dippin’ in the creek like she done sometimes, maybe cleanin’ the possum guts off, and Aaron had stoled her clothes, or somethin’ because she were all wet.”

“Go on…” Momma urged.

“I asked her what were she doin’ without no clothes on, and she said it was too damn hot and her dress were ruined and she’d taken a dip to wash off. I told her if anyone came along’n seen her, there’d be trouble. She said no one was gonna bother us, and then she came over to where I was layin’ and started openin’ up my belt. I told her to stop, was she crazy or somethin’ and she wouldn’t. She just kept tearin’ at my clothes till she had my…” He swallowed again, the words lodged in his throat.

“Your what?”

“My pizzle, Momma. She had it in her mouth, and I couldn’t make her stop.”

“You couldn’t stop because you didn’t want to. Your Jezebel sister had her lips on your dirty thing and you liked it, didn’t you?”

Luke nodded. Truth was, and he’d never denied it because lying was something of which he seemed completely incapable, he had enjoyed it, and enjoyed it a great deal, despite knowing that he and his sister, who was older, but only by a year, were doing something that went against nature, and worse, against God himself. But he had been unable to stop the queer, frightening, but unstoppable current of sensation that her lips evoked as she sucked on him. It had felt as if she were drawing out all the bad things, all the fears, worries, and the pain he’d carried within him since he’d first come to understand the world into which he’d been deposited. And when his seed erupted, he felt as if dynamite had detonated in his balls and would blow him to little bloody pieces. He lay there panting as the incredible, terrifying sensation ebbed away and his member slackened. Then he stared, open-mouthed, as his sister stood and spat, then walked away toward the creek. He’d followed a moment later, intending to ask her what had just happened, and why. He was hurt, a little angry, but more confused, and it seemed to steal a little bit of the color from the world, darkening it with a mystery he needed solved. He found Susanna washing herself in the cool clear water, her back turned to him, her hair wet, but before he had the chance to put to her the burning question, she spoke first:

“I love you, Luke,” she said softly, sadly. “And I’m leavin’. I know you won’t come with me, that you can’t, but I gotta go, gotta get out. I’m not supposed to be here. There’s a big world out there for people like me. Yours is here, with Momma and Papa. I wanted to kiss you on the mouth back there, but I reckon that should be kept for my husband. What we did…Lorraine Chadwick at school told me she saw her mother do it to her boyfriend and he seemed to enjoy it all right. Said it was a secret kiss, and now we got a secret all our own.” She shrugged, cupped water in both hands and washed out her mouth as if she’d just eaten a bug. “I guess I were curious, and…maybe I didn’t know stuff like snot was gonna come out…but I ain’t sorry none…. It’s your birthday’n all, and I know I love you Luke. Maybe even enough to kiss you on the lips, but like I said, I reckon I gotta keep somethin’ for my husband.”

“The seed of incest is the devil’s milk,” his mother said. “And it poisons everythin’ it touches.” Her playful tone was now gone completely, replaced by bitterness and shame. “Your Papa stood a few feet away watchin’ the whole wicked thing. You were lucky he didn’t kill the both of you that day, right there and then. Maybe he should’ve.”

Luke had nothing to say. If Susanna hadn’t sinned with him that day, he would still have skin on his privates, and maybe his sister would still be here. Of course, for a long time, he’d borne his punishment well, consoled by the knowledge that she had made it out, was on her way to a new and better life somewhere, where no one would ever find her. He fantasized about growing up and finding her, or maybe not even waiting that long. Maybe someday he would end up possessed of the same wanderlust, the same certainty that life was better Out There, and he’d travel the same path, his beloved sister waiting for him at the end of it. He knew he wouldn’t care if she were married when that time came. He didn’t want her for a wife. He loved her as a sister, and as the best friend he’d ever known. And he had always envied how much different she was from the rest of the family. She was independent, headstrong, and defiant, all traits Luke admired greatly, but never dared try to learn.

“Tell me what became of her, Luke.”

For two years he had thought Susanna gone. It had cheered him and brightened his darkest hours, of which there had been many. He wondered what she looked like, whether she was rich or poor, still in the South or elsewhere. He dreamed of her voice, and waited for her to write him with details of her adventures.

It was another summer before he found her old blue suitcase half-buried in the barren field behind the acre of corn. It was the same one he’d seen tucked beneath her arm as her shoeless feet carried her up the dirt path and away from the house, bound for town, and the strange unfamiliar lands beyond. Inside that suitcase were her meager possessions: two dresses, a pair of socks with holes in the heels, two pairs of underwear, a cold roast beef sandwich wrapped in waxpaper, a small hunk of cheese, a notebook and a small stubby pencil, and a small pink purse with a brass clip in which she carried ten whole dollars to start her on her way.

All of these things were still inside the suitcase when he’d yanked it free of the dark red earth that day years later. Also inside were Susanna’s small yellow comb, a rusted switchblade, a doll with a cracked face, and Susanna’s badly decomposed head.

“Tell me about the note.”

Someone had shoved a rolled up piece of notepaper into his sister’s right eye socket. With trembling hands, and hardly able to see through the sparkling film of tears, a sob caught in his aching throat, Luke had withdrawn the scroll and turned his back on his sister’s remains to read it.

“Two pieces from Leviticus,” he told his mother now, his tone grave.

“You ’member them words?”

There was no way he’d ever forget them. They were branded in his brain, a signpost on the border of a part of his mind he seldom ventured into. “’None of you shall approach any who is near of kin to him to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD.’” He took a breath, slowly released it. “’The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover.’”

“Amen,” said his mother, serenely and he could tell from her voice she was smiling. “It was his message to you, son.”

She had said that more than once before, and still he wasn’t sure whether she meant that his father, or God, had written it for his benefit. At the time, and the years had only bolstered the conviction, he’d considered it a warning. A lesson, meant to scare away whatever latent strains of rebellion might have been subconsciously forming inside him in the wake of his sister’s desertion. He remembered the anguish, the suffering, somehow infinitely worse than the day Papa-in-Gray had strapped him to a chair in Momma’s room and used his razor on Luke’s privates. The pain had been excruciating, but it was pain of a different kind. In the fallow field the day he’d stumbled on his sister’s final destination, he had sat with Susanna’s rotted head cradled in his arms as the wind chased shreds of the sundered scroll away across the field, and he had felt as if her death had shoved him into a new world, a terrible place where no one could be trusted and the ground could swallow you and your dreams. And if the ground didn’t get you, the coyotes would, or Papa would see to you with his blade and carve the sin from your soul, the skin from your skull.

“Why did I ask you ’bout this today?” Momma asked.

Luke shrugged, his mood darkened by the memory of his sister.

“’Cause you poisoned your sister,” she answered for him. “And for that she had to be dealt with. Don’t you understand that if we’d let her go, she’d’ve been corrupted even further by Men of the World, and they’d’ve sent her back to us once they’d filled her with their wicked venom, and through her they’d’ve corrupted us, destroyed us, Luke.” Her hand left his knee, and found his fingers, enveloping his warm skin in a cold damp cocoon of flesh. “We’re the last of the old clans, boy. We stay together. We hunt and we kill Men of the World. We devour their flesh so they cannot devour us. We hold them off and resist their attempts to convert us to sinful ways. We protect each other in the name of God Almighty, and punish those who trespass, destroy those who would destroy us. We are the beloved, Luke, and once the light has been shown to those who are not of the faith, they must embrace it or be destroyed. All your life you have understood this.

“Today, you were lazy, and foolish. You let one of them get away. You sucked out her venom and showed her the light, but now she’s Out There again, with the light in her eyes and our fate in her hands. They’ll send her back again someday, Luke, and by then it’ll be too late. She will not come alone, and their numbers’ll be too great for us to survive. They’ll kill us and scatter our bones so our spirits cannot rest. Our work’ll be over, and it’ll all have been for nothin’. You and me, and all our kin’ll be left in the dark, far away from God’s grace.”

Luke was afraid. He believed her, knew she did not lie. And if the girl—Claire—came back with others, with Men of the World, he knew it would mean the end of everything. And it would be his fault.

“What do I do, Momma?”

“Talk to Papa. He knows the townfolk. He’ll know who owned that truck. Then you find ’em, and you’ll find the girl. Once you do, take her heart and bring it back to me. Burn the rest. We’ll share her meat, and save ourselves from Purgatory. But you ain’t got much time to waste now. You best move.”

Luke stood. But Momma’s grip tightened around his hand. She tugged him close. The stench was overwhelming, and he shut his mouth, hoping she couldn’t hear him gagging. “You find her, or we’ll take what’s left of your pizzle and eat it with grits for breakfast, you understand?”

He nodded, and held his breath until she released him. Then he turned and headed for the door. As his hand gripped the moist, grimy knob, her voice once more stopped him.

“Keep the skin,” she demanded.

“What, Momma?”

“My boy. My Matthew. Tell your brothers to eat whatever needs eatin’, to take what they need, but they need to keep the skin for me. Winter’s comin’ and I need all the heat I can get.”

Though Luke couldn’t imagine his mother ever being cold beneath the heaps of her own slippery rotting flesh, “Yes Momma,” he said, and opened the door to the rain and smoke and the aroma of cooking meat.

-8-

There would be no prayer. Not yet. Momma-In-Bed had made it clear that there was not enough time to indulge in giving thanks, not when Hell itself might already be gathering on the horizon. He’d been with her for what had felt like hours, a long slow walk through the sluggish waters of unpleasant times. And because of that inner sense of more time lost than they could afford to lose, the sense of urgency increased. Every minute that passed him by was more distance between him and their quarry, and closing the distance between him and whatever Momma-in-Bed would do if the girl was not retrieved.

Luke ducked his head as he stepped off the porch into the gloaming. The fire cast reddish yellow light, the flames sizzling in the rain and casting shadows on his brother’s faces as they looked at him, but he didn’t spare them a glance before moving off toward the wood shed. Still, he found it harder to ignore the smacking of lips, the clicking of teeth, the greedy swallows, the tearing of meat from bones, and the murmurs of appreciation as they sat around the smoldering corpse of their brother. It was even harder to resist the smell the breeze carried to him before whipping it away into the trees behind him, where animals with dark eyes would pause and look up, curious but not nearly enough to follow the scent to its source. Even the carnivorous creatures that existed in the premature twilight beyond the trees—among them, the coyotes Momma-in-Bed feared so much—knew the small series of cabins in the woods were best avoided, for they had seen few of their fellow scavengers return from there, and so their curiosity abated quickly and they wandered on.

Luke was hungry, his stomach hollow and aching, and he was as eager as the rest of them to feed on the meat, to savor both the taste and the feeling of their dead brother’s strength settling in his own body, Matt’s unspoken thoughts, dreams, and ambitions, however simple, weaving themselves into his own brain. But the flesh would keep, he told himself, as he sighed and felt his worn boots sinking into the moist earth. He knew the importance of the task that lay ahead. If they failed this time, if the girl had already found her way to a haven they could not reach, then there would be more than the authorities to worry about. Momma-In-Bed had threatened him, but it had been merely a formality, and not a true promise. What she would do to him, maybe to all of them, if the girl was not returned, would be much worse than simply skinning his pizzle with a rusty knife. She loved him, as he loved her, but that would not be enough to save his life if he didn’t make things right, no more than it had saved poor Susanna when she’d defied them.

Teeth clenched to force back the emotions that always tried to insinuate their way into the forefront of his mind whenever he remembered his lost sister, Luke climbed the small rise where the bare earth narrowed to a single trail that wound unsteadily through a short stretch of wild untended grass. The woodshed was narrow, and old, the wood bleached by the sun so it was a mottled white, with patches of gray. In the rapidly fading light, it looked leprous, with yellow light around the edges. The door bent outward at the bottom like a well-turned page, and as he approached, that splintered corner scraped dirt and the door swung wide with a sound like rocks tumbling down a hollow pipe.

Luke stopped in his tracks.

Though not a large man, Papa-In-Gray cut an imposing figure. In daylight, his skin was the same shade as the door that was now swinging away from him. In town, he was respected, but it was respect borne of fear. At home, among his kin, things were not much different. Now, in the gloom, beneath his angular, inverted triangle of a face, the chin topped with a peppering of silver stubble, Papa wore a dirty brown apron, which Luke himself had made for him from the skin of one of the men they had caught the summer before. Strands of blue nylon rope had been looped through holes at the top corners of the apron, the holes ringed by steel washers to stop the rope from sawing through, keeping the rough rectangle in place, and also, as was the case now, to conceal the wearer’s nakedness.

Grim-faced, Papa raised his right hand. In it, he held the head of one of the youths—the one the girl had called ‘Stu’, which the family had found amusing since they figured this was most likely going to be the way he ended up. His blonde hair, though matted with filth now, still managed to retain a healthy look death had denied the rest of his body. The tanned handsome face of which Luke had found himself mildly envious, was no longer so handsome, slackened now by the pain that had ushered it into death. The eyes were closed, pale brows arched, the thick-lipped mouth open slightly, as if starting a sentence that would forever remain unspoken. Papa-in-Gray very rarely did a sloppy job with the carcasses and this one was no different. The machete had made a good straight cut through the boy’s neck, and no bone or flesh protruded from the wound.

“A good’un,” Papa said now, in his gravelly voice. “Who took the girl?”

Luke couldn’t meet his gaze as he spoke, so instead he stared at the ground. “Big red truck came and picked ’er off the road. Two niggers—one old, one young it looked like. They made off with her. Headin’ east.”

Behind his father, Luke glimpsed the rest of the boy’s naked body, splayed out on the worktable in the shed underneath a single bare light bulb. His hands and feet were gone, and his chest had been opened and excavated, the organs collected in a rusty bucket on the floor. As Luke tried to get a better look, Papa surprised him by tossing the severed head in his direction. Caught off guard, it hit Luke in the chest and he was knocked back a step. With a grunt, he staggered, feet splayed, and quickly righted himself, grabbing with his crooked fingers a handful of the boy’s hair just seconds before it hit the ground, a development he knew would not have impressed his father.

As if anything ever would.

Exhaling heavily, Luke straightened and clutched the head to his chest. Papa-in-Gray nodded, but it was not a gesture of satisfaction, rather confirmation that his disdain for Luke was justified, and no one would ever convince him otherwise.

“Take it,” the old man said, wiping bloodstained hands on the apron. The flesh seemed to soak it in. “We’re bringin’ it with us. Tell the others to get themselves a piece of those kids each’n load ’em up.”

Though Luke wasn’t sure why they were bringing along pieces of the dead kids, he knew better than to question Papa’s instructions.

“All right,” he said, and waited.

“Tell Aaron bring the truck ’round, and make sure all you boys got yer knives.” He looked over Luke’s shoulder. “Get movin’.”

Luke started to say something, but Papa turned his back on him, and in two short steps was back inside the shed, the door swinging shut behind him.

As he stood there, the rain still pattering on his shoulders, the severed head gripped firmly by its hair, Luke felt overcome by bitterness toward the old man, who, ever since that day in the clearing with Susanna, had shown no affection, or respect toward him, not even a little. Worse, the old bastard had never once sat him down to explain why he’d done what he’d done to his sister, why they couldn’t have just let her go, or maybe tried to talk some sense into her. No, he’d left that task to Momma-in-Bed, and he suspected, at the back of his mind, that all she’d done was make excuses because she wasn’t rightly sure herself, no matter what she’d said about the poison in his seed. Neither one of his parents had grieved for her.

Luke turned away, and looked from the head to the semicircle of bodies huddled around the fire—his brothers, still eating, Matt’s skin draped like an animal hide across a battered old workhorse between them and the four ramshackle sheds they used for the Men of the World. Luke hadn’t given them the order to keep the skin for Momma. They had known, most likely because one or more of them had been listening at the window when Momma said it, and they’d worked quickly. For one brief moment, a flame ignited inside him, hot enough to make tears of shame and hurt blur his vision. He imagined them crouched down beneath that dirt-smeared glass, their heads bowed as they listened to the story of cold-blooded murder, his part in it, and the warning he was given. They would have heard the fear in his voice that only surfaced when Momma or Papa threatened him. They would have heard it all, and hurried to deny him the one command he could use to reinstate his authority over them. Then they’d watched him—he had felt their stares on his back as sure as the rain—through the smoke and heat from their meal, as he’d picked his way toward Papa’s shed. And they would have known he would find even less warmth up there, a fact confirmed by their father’s sudden tossing of the severed head, done, Luke guessed, to entertain his other, more faithful sons. In fumbling it, Luke had given them all exactly what they’d wanted.

As he approached them now, he forced a crooked smile. They looked up expectantly, blood and fat smeared across their faces.

“You been cryin’?” Aaron asked tonelessly.

Luke shook his head. Not crying, he wanted to say. Just ’memberin’ how much I hate that kin-killin’ son of a bitch. But he would never say such a thing, no matter how true it might be. To say it aloud would be to condemn himself, for he had no doubt that as soon as the words left his mouth, Papa would hear them. And a blade would cut those words in the same swing that took Luke’s head off at the shoulders. His brothers would mourn him without weeping, devour his flesh without hesitation, and promptly forget he’d ever existed, like they seem to have done with Susanna and now Matt, their gentle brother, who would be remembered only for today, and only when the taste of him rolled back up their throats. So instead he took a deep breath, watched as Joshua and Isaac stared curiously at the head in their brother’s hands, and delivered the instructions his father had given to him.

Immediately the boys moved into action, scrambling toward the sheds, propelled by the excitement of another hunt so soon, leaving Luke alone to stare at the gnawed remains of his brother, the smoke burning his eyes, the smell taunting his belly.

To anyone watching, the small shake of his head would appear to be a gesture of sympathy, or regret.

But it was none of these things.

It was anger, pain.

And envy.

“Pa?”

The old man sat in a chair by the fire, chin on his chest as if asleep, but his eyes were open and watching the door, one hand on the stock of the rifle he’d set across his lap, the other on the neck of a bottle of rye whiskey.

Pete, right ear still ringing from the blow his father had dealt him when he’d caught the boy looking in the injured girl’s window, wasn’t sure if he should head upstairs to bed, apologize again, or just keep his mouth shut. But he wanted to hear his Pa speak, because since they’d come home, the old man hadn’t said a word. This in itself was nothing unusual, but something about the silence tonight was different. It unnerved Pete, thrummed through his stomach until he thought he was going to be sick. Even the crickets and bullfrogs seemed to sing with less enthusiasm, the birds sounding tired and wary, as if eager to warn the old man and his boy of something bearing down on them, but unable to find a song they would understand. Night had come fast too, the unseen sun sinking down behind the trees at the edge of the property, sending out a low cold and steady breeze like a ripple after a rock has been dropped in a pond. Quietly, Pete moved to the table and took a seat, his arms folded on the chipped wood among the remains of a hastily thrown together rice and corn dinner, which Pete had cooked, and had seemed to have been alone in enjoying. From here he had a clear view of his father, whose sharp profile was silhouetted by the flickering flames, but should the old man erupt into a sudden violent rage, the table was between them, and would afford the boy protection, however briefly.

“Pa?”

Slowly, so slowly Pete imagined his neck should have creaked like an old door, his father turned his head to look at him. His eyes were like smoked glass, a cold fire flickering beyond them.

“You hush up now,” Pa said. “Need to listen.”

“For what?”

His father sighed, but didn’t reply, then went back to looking at the door with such intensity that Pete found himself checking it himself for something he might have missed all these years—a word, maybe, or a carving or engraving, something that might justify his father’s scrutiny.

“You scared’a somethin’?” he asked then after giving up on the door and focusing instead on his father’s taut, aged face.

He didn’t understand a whole lot about his old man, but figured himself a pretty good judge when it came to moods. Anger was the easiest one of course, given that it was, more often than not, a whole lot of blustering, heavy breathing and cussing, followed by a couple of open-handed smacks across the head if the fault was Pete’s, and a couple of kicks in the ass if it wasn’t. Sorrow was a tougher one, but over the years Pete had learned to recognize that too. He reckoned his Pa had never really gotten over Louise—who Pete considered his second Ma—leaving him, and the boy thought he understood that. Sometimes late at night when he lay in bed, Pete would watch the stars, untainted by city light and sparkling like shattered glass in the moonlight, and go over the constellations in his mind, summoning the memory of her, imagining her there beside him, listing off all the names. Sometimes he imagined so hard he could almost feel her there, could smell that scent which had always brought to mind images of spring flowers and clean laundry as she sat next to him on the bed, her fingers stroking his hair, her other hand on his wrist. There’s Cassiopeia, she would whisper in his ear, looks just like a double-u, see it? And there’s Orion, and those three stars right there, that’s his belt. Up’n the corner, see that one look’s red? And he would nod and wait for an answer that wasn’t coming, because she hadn’t stayed around long enough to offer it, and so there his imagination would falter and the loneliness would rush in like cold water through holes in a sinking ship. But there were always dreams, and in dreams she never left him, was still here cooking mouth-watering food for them, singing with that beautiful voice of hers, and messing around with Pa, who would scowl and look irritated but only because he was struggling not to smile.

It had been a long time since Pete had seen his Pa smile about anything, and he often wondered how much of that was his fault. He knew because he wasn’t all that smart, he wasn’t likely to ever get the kind of job that could give his Pa and him a better life. He wasn’t ever going to be mayor or President or an astronaut like his second Ma had told him he could. She’d said he could be anything he wanted, just like she aimed someday to be a famous singer, but he knew that wasn’t true now, and Pa knew it too, even said as much when he’d had a few days drinking under his belt and didn’t seem to know what he was saying, or that he was saying it out loud. Coulda been somethin’ boy. Coulda been a real man, but you ain’t never gonna amount to nothin’ more than a farmboy with cowshit on your shoes and straw in your head, standin’ at that door waitin for somethin’ better to come along that ain’t never comin’. Not for you, boy, and sure as hell not for me. Pete would listen carefully to his father’s words, and feel the pain that came with them, but told himself Pa was only saying those things out of disappointment and anger, and because it was better to throw mean words at the boy than at his own reflection in the mirror. Pa had wanted a better life too, but as soon as second Ma walked out, bound for Detroit with some man Pete had only seen once, and that by accident, the old man had given up hoping for a future. He had given up, period. The woman he’d loved had left him here with a son that wasn’t of his own blood, a dying farm, and plenty of time to sit and drink and wonder why she’d given up on them.

“I reckon I am,” his father said, in such a low voice that Pete had to strain to hear it, and even then he had to struggle to remember the question his father was answering. His thoughts had set him adrift from their conversation and now he had to search quickly for the thread. He found it as he watched the old man raise the bottle of whiskey and study the remaining dregs.

Pa was afraid, and as it was a state Pete seldom, if ever, saw in him, it had the effect of galvanizing his own discomfort. He stood, shoving the chair back with his knees, and came around the table to stand beside his father. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

The old man lowered the bottle, but kept his eyes on it as he spoke. “I don’t reckon I did much of a job by you,” he said. “Don’t reckon I could even if I tried. My own Pa wasn’t much of a man neither, and never treated me right, though I don’t expect that’s much of an excuse.”

Hearing his father talk of such things disturbed Pete more than the odd silence and the sudden sense that their house had shrunk around them, but he shrugged and forced a smile.

“S’okay, Pa. Don’t nobody know the right way to do everythin’.”

His father considered this. “Maybe that’s true, but there ain’t no excuse for not tryin’.”

“You did try,” Pete told him. “You looked after me pretty good. I ain’t wantin’ for nothin’.”

A small bitter smile twisted his father’s lips. “You wantin’ for plenty, boy. Some of that I can’t do nothin’ about. Some, I reckon I could’ve fixed.”

Pete frowned. “Well…it ain’t too late, Pa. We got time.”

At that, the weak smile vanished from his father’s face. His eyes widened as he glanced from the bottle back to the door. “That’s the trouble, son. I got a feelin’ we don’t.”

He had promised himself he wouldn’t scare the boy, but after a good deal of thought and a great deal of whiskey, Jack had realized there was no way around it. If the Merrill clan were coming, better Pete know, so he would at least have the chance to run. He set the now empty bottle down between his chair and the fire, and let his hands rest on the polished walnut stock of the rifle. He’d kept the weapon in pretty good shape all these years, better shape than anything else, his son included. Jack was truly sorry for that and he’d meant what he’d told the boy. There was so much else he wanted to say too before time ran out, but no matter what way he came at it, the words wouldn’t come. Even now, with the hounds of hell thundering a path to their door, he couldn’t tell his boy he loved him. And maybe that was because he didn’t. There was no doubt that he cared for Pete, and worried after him constantly, but years of disappointment, self-loathing, and resentment for the child he secretly held accountable for the only two women he’d ever loved abandoning him, didn’t allow those seeds to blossom into a full flower of adoration. In truth, he’d never wanted a kid, and had been doing just fine avoiding the whole problem until he’d met Annabelle, who been nurturing one in her womb. Even so, he’d figured he’d adapt just fine to the role of parent, even if she ended up doing most of the raising. But then she went and died on him soon as that child drew its first breath. For almost fifteen years he wallowed in self-pity and thoughts of up-and-leaving, reasoning that someone would find the kid and take him in, and to hell with whatever they thought of him for deserting it. He was no monster, and it would have been a bald-faced lie if he’d ever claimed he hadn’t taken a shine to the kid. But though on paper it would always say Jack Lowell was a father, he knew in his heart he wasn’t equipped to be one. Someday, he’d known, that kid would wake up and be alone. It would kill him to do it, but staying would be worse for them both.

Then he spotted Louise Daltry in town, being guided around Jo’s Diner in preparation for her first day’s work. Aside from waylaid vacationers, or guys from the forestry department, strangers were rare in Elkwood, so the arrival of Ms. Daltry, come all the way from Mobile and an abusive husband, was the talk of the place that whole summer. But from the moment Jack set eyes on her caramel-colored skin, high cheekbones, swept-back hair and soft lips, all of which were presided over by a pair of golden-brown eyes that paralyzed him whenever they strayed to his booth, he knew he’d never be concerned with her past. Only her future interested him, and in particular, whether or not she’d ever in a million years consider sharing it with him.

He smiled, just a little, and rubbed a calloused thumb over the rifle’s trigger guard.

“Who’s comin’, Pa?”

We’re moths in a killin’ jar, he thought as he tried to summon a smile of reassurance for the boy that felt more like an expression of pain. Just like your Momma said.

The best day he could remember in his sixty-odd unremarkable years started as the worst. He’d been hungover, his head stuffed with cotton. The sour taste in his mouth had resisted his attempts to wash it away with toothpaste, then coffee, and finally a breakfast of toast, egg, bacon and grits down at Jo’s. Even the presence of Louise, dressed as she was in an immaculate white blouse and blue jeans, looking as beautiful as he’d ever seen her, her skin radiant in the same morning light that skewered his eyes through the slats in the blinds of the diner’s plate glass window, couldn’t raise his spirits. He’d argued with the boy the night before, over what he couldn’t remember, but he remembered striking him, and more than once, so on that day, while the smells of fat and bacon on the griddle turned his stomach and the whiskey hammered his brain, guilt gnawed at his guts.

“Someone went a few rounds with a bottle and lost,” Louise had said, surprising him out of his self-pity and he’d looked up to see her sitting across from him, arms crossed on the table, head cocked slightly, a small smile on her lips.

He’d nodded and given her the usual perfunctory responses, and when he’d forced himself to look at her, he was struck, not only by her beauty, but by the sense that she was peering past his facade, into the dark turbulent sea of his guilt, as if she recognized it because she’d swam in those waters more than once herself.

“Wanna talk about it?” she asked, and though he’d thanked her and shaken his head—I ain’t much of a talker—she hadn’t left, or taken those incredible eyes of hers off him, and at last he began to speak, slowly at first, then with more ease, until that darkness flowed out of him in a torrent he feared might wash her away and out of his life forever.

“The boy ain’t yours?” she asked when he was done.

“He were already in the oven when I met my wife,” he told her. “She never told me who the daddy was, and I guess it didn’t matter. He was long gone when I showed up.”

“Where’s she at now?”

“Dead. She died givin’ birth to ’im.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

That day had broken down some barrier between Jack and Louise he hadn’t realized existed. It had been more than just the protective bubble that surrounds each and every man and woman when in the company of people they have no reason to trust. He got the feeling Louise had seen something in him he hadn’t known was there, something that appealed to her. Though in hindsight, he thought maybe suited her might be a better way of putting it.

“Pa, say somethin’…”

She’d loved him for a time, and they’d been happy, but if he was honest with himself now, he could admit that he knew from the moment she stepped foot into this house, and their lives, that she wasn’t going to stay. It wasn’t because she didn’t love them. She just wasn’t a homebody. After eleven years of living with a man who’d beaten her senseless with whatever object was close at hand whenever she dared sass him, she wasn’t willing to be owned again, or tied down to relationships that were just waiting to go sour. In walking out on that sonofabitch, she’d found her freedom, and though he’d sensed her restlessness right from the start, had known she would never stay, Jack had allowed himself to ignore the reality of it until it smacked him right in the face two years after the day she’d moved in.

We’re moths in a killin’ jar, Jack, she’d said to him when he’d come downstairs to find her with a single suitcase at the open front door, an unfamiliar car with a tall handsome black man at the wheel, engine idling, waiting for her. You leave that lid screwed on tight, we’re gonna die sooner’r later. Best just to set us loose while we still know how to fly. Then, without another word, she’d kissed him and walked out the door, leaving him with an eternity to think of all the things he should have said but didn’t.

Now he turned and looked at the boy who was not his blood, the boy he wanted to love but couldn’t.

Then he looked down at the rifle.

Set us loose while we still know how to fly.

“Somethin’ we gotta do, son,” he said, and slowly rose from his chair.

-9-

Deep night came and with it long shadows that crept inexorably toward the Lowell farm.

The Merrill clan was among them.

Aaron had parked the truck at the foot of the hill and killed the engine then joined his father and Luke in walking the long straight path up the rise to where the Lowell farm sat brooding in the dark. The twins stayed in the truck, along with the body parts they had wrapped in plastic, surveying the night for signs that the old farmer and his boy were fleeing, or that there were flickering lights burning the bellies of the clouds on the horizon, foretelling of trouble’s advance on them if it turned out they were too late.

Luke said a silent prayer that they weren’t.

He carefully scanned the wide open areas to their right, where nothing sprouted from the dead earth, and listened to the hissing of the corn in the field to their left. Those sibilant whispers seemed like voices, but he had heard such things enough to tell the difference should a human voice be among them.

Making no attempt to be quiet, Papa-in-Gray, now dressed in a frock-like gray coat—which the kids acknowledged as his preacher garb, for he had told them once he believed himself a messenger, despite his failure to be inducted into a legitimate order—led Luke and Aaron to the door, the fluttering light within assuring them that someone was home, even though the truck Luke had seen earlier was nowhere in sight. Its absence worried him. Where were they if not home? With the Sheriff? The doctor? Luke let his eyes fall to the blade gripped in his father’s right hand, the tip of the ivory handle a pale smudge in the dim light. As a child, he had watched his father sharpening that curved six-inch blade, had marveled at the craftsmanship, but had feared it also, and with good cause. Some years later it would be the instrument they would use on his genitals.

Papa-in-Gray stopped by the door, then turned his head and slowly stepped toward the window.

“He there?” Aaron asked.

Their father leaned his face close to the dusty glass, his shadow sprawling over his sons. His nose brushed the window.

“Papa?” Aaron asked, the nervous excitement in his voice infectious. The air grew taut between them; the temporary reprieve the rain had brought banished now. It was balmy, humid, their clothes stuck to their skin, and with the heat came short tempers.

The old man seemed to stiffen, his shadow flinching as if eager to be free of the tension that held its host in thrall. Luke felt something twist inside him. Something was wrong. Even if instinct had failed him, it was compensated for by the sudden rage radiating from his father’s body. Whatever he had seen in there had not agreed with him.

Luke swallowed. Was the house empty? Were they too late?

His father turned to look at him. At the same time, Aaron moved to take Papa’s place at the window. He drew in a breath. Luke did not hear him release it.

“What is it?” Luke asked. Now that Papa’s back was to the window, the warm light spilling out around him, his face was in shadow. Yet Luke could still feel his eyes on him, cold black things that reminded him of Momma’s glare from her foul bed in the dark. If there had ever been any question of Papa’s feelings toward him, there wasn’t one now. Pure unbridled hate contaminated the air between them and Luke would not have been at all surprised had tendrils erupted from the old man’s body and enveloped him, drawing Luke into his father’s body where he would burn in the fires of contempt. He squirmed in the glare, until Aaron stepped between them, quietly walked to the door, tested the handle, and opened it. New light carved the dark.

“C’mon,” Aaron said, and disappeared inside.

For a moment longer, Luke’s father pinned him with that raging and yet unseen look. Then he stepped close, his breath foul in his son’s face, and brought the knife up between them, the point pressed to Luke’s belly. When Luke tried to back up, Papa’s free hand clamped down on his shoulder.

“You best start prayin’ for salvation,” his father said, his eyes black holes. He dug the knife tip a little deeper, until it broke through Luke’s shirt and pricked the skin. “If’n you don’t get it, you gonna feel this blade in your asshole ’fore I cut you wide open and let your brothers feed on your still steamin’ insides. You hear me?”

The blade pierced the skin and the sting of it forced Luke to take an involuntary step back. This time his father didn’t stop him. Instead he straightened, sheathed the blade beneath the folds of his coat in a leather scabbard at his hip, and headed inside the house.

Luke stood there for a moment, staring at the open doorway, trembling. A circle of heat drew his attention down to his shirt, where a spot of blood was growing at his belly.

He put the knife away, Luke thought, his mind a confusion of emotions. There’s no one inside. Darkness that was not of the night edged into the corners of his vision. It was tinged with red. At length, when it became clear he was not going to be summoned inside, he followed, entering the warmth of the house and shutting the door behind him. Instantly, he saw he was wrong. There was someone here.

“Take a good look,” Papa sneered, and stepped aside. Beside him, Aaron watched Luke for a reaction, his face impassive.

Luke, head pounding, studied the man sitting in the chair by the fireplace. It was the farmer, Jack Lowell, the black man he had seen, with his son, loading the girl into their truck. Lowell was of no use to them now. A rifle lay on the floor, muzzle pointing toward the fire. The air smelled of gunpowder and singed hair. The old man’s head was lowered, as if he’d fallen asleep, but the angle allowed all gathered to see the gaping hole in the back of his skull through which the bullet and brains had exited and painted the wall and window behind them in gray and red. Blood had pooled around the chair, the old man’s checkered shirt soaked with it.

As Luke watched, heartsick, Papa dropped to his haunches by the chair and dipped his fingertips into the blood on the floor, brought it up to his nose, then rubbed it, as if testing the consistency of paint. Then he rose and looked at Aaron. “Still warm,” he said. “Ain’t been dead long.”

Luke felt himself being wrenched in two different directions at once. Part of him wanted to take his knife and cut the dead man to ribbons, punishment the farmer would never feel, but might sate Luke’s frustration. Another part of him wanted to turn tail and run, to get away from his father and the deepening sense of danger, to see how far he could get before they took him down. He did not want to be here, did not want to think about what they were going to do to him, and yet fear held him in place as surely as Papa’s blade had done.

He wasn’t going anywhere. They wouldn’t let him. God wouldn’t let him.

Aaron sheathed his own blade, shoulders slumping in disappointment. He looked up at Papa. “What now?”

Papa continued to study the blood on the tips of his fingers. “Luke said there was a boy, didn’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Find him.”

In the last days of Abby Wellman’s tortured life, her husband decided to kill her. He reasoned that the cancer was going to do it anyway, and in a decidedly less merciful fashion than he could with a needle and some morphine. As the only doctor within a thirty-mile radius, and being more or less a recluse since his wife had fallen ill, he doubted anyone would find her passing suspicious, or feel compelled to study too closely the means by which she’d found her eternal rest. If medical questions in Elkwood were raised, Wellman was the only one called upon to answer them, so unless someone went to the trouble of bringing an outsider in to confirm his story, there was nothing to stop him from going through with it.

And yet he hadn’t. Instead, he’d watched his beloved suffer, knowing it wasn’t right and desperate to save her. The morphine he administered was always the correct dosage, never too much despite how easy it would have been to increase it. He could even have told himself later that he hadn’t been paying attention, or was an innocent victim of subconscious mutiny, but nothing stuck. Every day he let his wife writhe in pain because he couldn’t take her life.

“It hurts…”

Presently, as he looked down at the young battered and broken girl in the same bed in which his wife had once said those exact words to him, the same look of pleading in her eyes, he wondered if it would be better to show her the kind of mercy he hadn’t shown his wife. If the girl died, it wouldn’t matter if the Merrills came. He would let them take the corpse if they so desired. Once the life was gone from the body, what remained would no longer be his concern. And with her dead, they would have no reason to hurt him, as long as he kept his mouth shut.

He shook his head and drew the fresh blankets up around the girl. He had disinfected her wounds, then stitched them, but it was not within his means to give her the attention she so desperately needed. The damage to her eye was serious, as were the severed digits on her fingers and toes, but other than cleaning them, and applying pressure bandages and tourniquets above the amputations, he was out of his league. There was a good chance that if he didn’t get her to a hospital soon, she would die.

She was awake, however, and apparently lucid, though given the trauma she’d endured, he didn’t know how much of it was genuine and not just a reaction to the painkillers. What he did know for certain was that the girl looking at him now was not the same one Jack Lowell and his boy had brought to him. She was still pale, and dazed looking, but her pupil had returned to its normal size and her trembling was not nearly as severe.

Slowly, he sat back in his chair. “How’re you feeling?” he asked.

“Hurts,” she replied, in the small voice of a child who has just scraped her knee. It was so heartbreakingly sincere, Wellman found himself wondering if she had receded into madness to protect herself from the pain.

“I know, but we’ll take care of you.”

She blinked. “Where am I?”

“My home, in Elkwood.”

“Elkwood?”

“Alabama. My name’s Doctor Wellman.” He offered her a warm smile, but resisted the urge to lay a hand on her, no matter how paternal the gesture was intended to be. After all she’d gone through, physical contact outside of the necessary medical ministrations might not be wise.

“Claire,” she told him. “Claire Lambert.”

“How did you end up here, Claire? I’m just guessing you’re not from Alabama.”

“Ohio.” She winced as the pain fluttered within her. “Columbus, Ohio.”

“You’re a long way from home.”

“I know. Can you call my Mom?”

“Of course,” he said, but didn’t think it the wisest idea. If he did, who was to say her family wouldn’t pile on the next flight down and be here right when the Merrill clan decided to pay a visit? As bad as leaving Claire at the hospital and driving away was going to make him feel, putting the rest of her family in jeopardy was not something he was willing to have on his conscience. But having her contact information would help the doctors in Grayson identify her and they could take it from there. This in turn triggered the notion that although Sheriff McKindrey might be useless, the State Police might prove more helpful. But would they make it here in time to counter the tide of violence that must surely be bearing down on them? He resolved at least to try. But for now, he could only concentrate on one thing at a time, and so fetched a pen and some paper and jotted down the girl’s address and phone number as she gave them to him.

“They tried to kill me,” she said afterward. “They killed my friends.”

“Who did?” Immediately, he regretted the question. The less he knew about all of this the better. But how was he supposed to play dumb when the victim of the atrocity had become his patient, and after Jack Lowell had told him his terrible story? “Never mind,” he added. “We can talk about this later. Most important thing now is that you get some sleep and concentrate on feeling b—”

He stopped. A rumbling sound registered from outside the house. It was coming closer. Wellman watched as bright white light spilled in through the window, washed over the ceiling of the room before crawling down the walls, then sweeping across them to the door and vanishing into the corner. Headlights. The rumbling sound stopped. He listened for footsteps and after a moment was rewarded with the sound of boots crunching gravel. Approaching the house.

“You just relax now,” he told the girl, alarmed at the quaver in his voice. “I’ll be back in just a moment.” He tried to think of something more to say, but his brain was scrambled, his thoughts lost in a fog of panic. He hurried from the room, bound for the kitchen and the cabinet where he kept his liquor, glasses, and an old tin box. Inside that box was a gun he hadn’t used in over twenty years, an old military issue Colt .45 a veteran had given him instead of payment one winter when it was clear the diagnosis he’d been given was a terminal one. Wellman hadn’t wanted the gun, but the look on the patient’s face had told him it was less an offer than the last command the retired Colonel was ever going to give, and therefore needed to be obeyed. The doctor had accepted the gift, stashed it in an old filing cabinet, and for over ten years had managed to keep its existence a secret from his wife until he retired and forgot the gun was in a box full of medical forms. To his surprise, Abby hadn’t demanded he get rid of it, but requested it be kept somewhere out of sight for the duration. He hadn’t thought of it again since shutting it up in its little tin box, but he was forced to think of it now.

It felt heavier than he remembered as he removed it and checked the magazine, which had been kept apart from the weapon at Abby’s insistence. She didn’t want that tin box tumbling down some night and blowing holes in the kitchen, or them. With five bullets still nestled in the clip, he slid the magazine home and cocked the hammer.

The footsteps stopped.

Wellman glanced toward the sound, or rather the complete absence of it, and held his breath.

Someone knocked on the door.

-10-

“He ain’t here,” Aaron said, and Luke felt his guts plummet even though he had reached the same conclusion almost as soon as he saw the dead man downstairs.

“Wait a minute, we ain’t checked the barns yet,” he protested.

“I did,” Aaron told him. “Nothing but a bony ’ol horse and a pig or two. Papa’s out there now, inspectin’ ’em, seein’ if they’re worth comin’ back for.”

They were in what might once have been a large bedroom, but was bare now aside from a small table in the corner, upon which stood a fancy looking but dusty lamp without a bulb. Next to that was a chiffarobe. Both boys had viewed it as an ideal hiding place for the kid they were searching for, but all they found was a few old moth-eaten shirts and one faded dress. A window looked down onto the yard below and faced the large red barn, the interior of which was cloaked in shadow. Security lights glared in at Luke as he tried to make out his father’s lithe form. But for now, there was nothing to be seen.

Behind him, Aaron stood tossing his knife in the air. Luke could hear the swish of the blade as it sliced up, then downward, the fall intercepted by his brother’s sure grip. He wished he’d stop. The sound of that blade only heightened his anxiety. But then he thought of something and turned, his shadow robbing the blade of its gleam.

“Papa said see if they’re worth comin’ back for?” he asked, and watched Aaron’s head bob in the gloom. “Why come back? Why not just take ’em now?”

Aaron shrugged, and concentrated on the gyrations of his blade. “Papa said we ain’t goin’ home yet.”

“Where are we goin?”

“He says that girl weren’t gonna last much longer, shape she was in, so if she ain’t here, then someone took her to get fixed up.”

Luke was almost afraid to hope. “That old doctor out on the edge’a town.”

Aaron grinned. “Yep.”

Luke felt a smile flutter over his lips.

His brother snatched his blade from the air, sheathed it and headed for the door. As he passed Luke, he said, “I hope she’s there.”

“Me too,” Luke agreed.

“Cuz if she ain’t…if she’s in some hospital somewheres, you’re as good as dead.”

Wellman was exhausted. The fear and adrenaline had drained him, and now all he wanted was to close his eyes and sleep like the dead. Twenty minutes had passed since the knock on the door, since he’d felt the kind of terror that threatened to disable him, leave him prone on the floor, victim of a heart that had taken pity on him and shut down, spiriting him away from whatever horrors lay ahead.

Now as he opened the front door and slowly eased himself down to sit on the stoop, the night air muggy and suffocating, he felt like a shadow of himself, the sad result of a life only half-lived. His bones creaked and popped painfully as he settled himself, ass on the wood, legs outstretched, heels dug into the dirt and scattered gravel of the driveway. In one hand he held the bottle he had shared with Jack Lowell, who he figured was most certainly dead now, or as good as. In the other hand, he held the small picture of himself and Abby, thirty years younger and beaming, not yet educated in the ways of suffering and death, their faces unlined, eyes not yet dulled by pain and the realization that there is no control, no dictating of how destiny will unfold, no real choices. Everything is preplanned, a fact that might not upset humankind as much if they were let in on the secret, if they were offered tantalizing glimpses of what the future holds. But no such previews exist, and so man flails blindly through the dark, hoping to avoid the holes through which he has watched so many of his fellow man fall.

The Colt was a cold unyielding lump against his spine, held in place by a waistband three sizes bigger than the one the younger, happier version of himself was wearing in the picture. Those forgotten youths, bursting with love and high on the promises they intended to fulfill together, as one, forever and ever amen, smiled up at him, attempting to convince him that happiness did exist, while at the same time torturing him with the truth that he would never know it again.

A droning sound echoed in the distance, bouncing against the hills and passing through the longleaf pines like gossip among old women.

The fear coiled inside him, but he was too weary to swim against its current, instead choosing to focus on the smiles from that handsome couple and their sepia world, as if wishing enough might enable him to travel back in time, to that place.

Headlights appeared on the horizon, twin moons punched in the canvas of night. The car was coming fast.

Wellman brought the open whiskey bottle to his lips, took a mouthful, swished it around to burn away the taste of bile, and swallowed. Then slowly, he rose and stepped outside. He monitored his breathing, regulating it in an attempt to steady his nerves. Then he reached behind him and untucked his shirt, letting it fall loose over the gun. In his left hand he still held the picture, the frame slick in his sweat-moistened grip. Give me strength, honey, he thought as he brought the picture up to his lips and kissed the dusty glass.

Then lowered it.

Give me strength.

Luke’s head felt like a honeybee’s nest. Ill-formed thoughts and paranoid suspicions bounced around his skull like smoke-addled drones protecting their queen. His palms were soaked with sweat, his brow beaded with perspiration, and not for the first time in his life, he cursed his lack of education. Papa-in-Gray had yanked his children out of what passed for a school in Elkwood as soon as Momma fell ill and was re-christened to suit her new permanent quarters. At the time, Luke hadn’t cared one whit about being taken away from that low-slung series of prefabricated shelters. They’d been too cold in winter, too damn warm in summer, and the other kids had treated them like they’d fallen off the back of a circus wagon that had passed through town. Since then however, there had been occasions and developments in his life that had made him regret not picking up his schooling, even if it was restricted to their home, and even if Papa taught them. But Papa, though plenty sly, wasn’t all that smart himself. He could trap a deer, a fox, or a man a thousand different ways, but when it came to things like numbers, or geography, he just scowled and spat and threw a fit to cover his ignorance.

Luke wished for smarts, especially now when he knew without a doubt they would help him sort out his thoughts, align them into some kind of orderly formation so they could be inspected, studied, and understood. So he could use them to engineer his escape.

But brains couldn’t save him now. The window of opportunity had slammed shut ten minutes ago when they’d left the Lowell farm burning behind them. Papa had set the lone horse free, but it hadn’t moved from its dark stable, so he’d left it there, figuring if it stuck around and burned, it was probably too dumb to be of much use to anyone anyway. And as stringy as the old mare looked, they wouldn’t be losing much of a meal even if it wised up and took off. The pigs were a different story. Lowell had kept them plump, but even if he hadn’t, swine are resourceful sonsabitches and will eat each other before they’ll die of starvation. A thin pig was about as common as balls on a scarecrow. With Aaron and Luke’s help, Papa had cornered the animals and deftly cut their throats. They were now bagged in burlap sacks and bleeding out in the bed of the truck as it reached the bottom of the hill and swung around a short hairpin bend. Doctor Wellman’s place, old as the Lowell farm, but a lot less neglected, was dead ahead, waiting at the end of a long ribbon of gravel.

“Someone’s there,” Aaron said, unnecessarily, for they could all see the man standing before the open door of the house, silhouetted against the golden light from within. He had something in both hands. Luke guessed one of them might be a small thin book. The other item caught the light from the house and mangled it, making the bottle seem like it held aggravated fireflies.

“Looks like he’s aimin’ for a fight,” Aaron said, and Luke looked at him, caught the relish on his brother’s face. Ordinarily he’d have shared his sibling’s excitement at the thought of what was going to happen here, but not tonight.

“Looks like he’s aimin’ to die,” Papa mumbled, as the headlights washed over the old man, forcing him to squint and raise the hand holding the bottle to shield himself from the glare. Papa eased the truck to a halt, but kept the lights blazing. Then he killed the engine, and sat for a moment, staring out at the doctor.

Luke could feel his heart roaring. Could feel where his bare elbows touched his brother’s. Aaron was trembling too, but for different reasons.

From the small space between the front seats and the cab window, the twins were electric balls of energy, their impatience making the truck rock slightly. Joshua’s fingers were clamped on the back of Luke’s seat. He could hear his younger brother’s rapid breathing in his ear.

“What’re we waitin’ for?” Aaron asked, sounding just a little annoyed.

Around them, the night was uncannily quiet.

Wellman stood bathed in the stark glow of the lights.

“Search the house,” Papa said at last, still watching the doctor, as if he knew more than any of them possibly could just from the look in the old man’s eyes.

Luke moved, much too slow for Aaron’s liking, and barely had the door open before his brother scrambled over him, knife drawn. The doctor may as well have been a cigar store Indian guarding a store full of free candy for all the attention Aaron paid to him as he hurried into the house.

“Go,” Papa grunted, and Luke flinched, then obeyed.

The twins slid over the seats and followed.

Luke took his time, and heard the truck door slam shut as Papa stepped from the vehicle and drew abreast of him. The doctor looked on as the twins shoved past him, their feet thundering against the wooden floor as they disappeared inside. Then silence fell, and to Luke, it may as well have been an axe descending on his neck. His brothers knew better than to waste time. If they’d found the girl there would have been whoops and cries of delight, their way of letting the others know the chase was over, the day—and Luke’s life—saved.

But now the quiet that held the night by the throat had infiltrated the house. The only sound was Wellman’s unsteady breathing.

Papa did not look at Luke as they stopped in front of the old man, and Luke was thankful. He could not bear to see what remained of his increasingly dwindling hope being swallowed by the cold in his father’s eyes.

“Where is she?” Papa said, and slowly withdrew his handmade blade from the lining of his preacher’s coat.

Wellman was trembling, and as they watched, he slowly dropped to his haunches and set on the ground what Luke now realized was not a book at all but a picture. He straightened and tossed the bottle into the darkness.

“Bring that here,” Papa said, nodding pointedly at the picture. Luke moved forward but Wellman shot an arm out, his palm mere inches from the boy’s chest. Luke looked from the splayed fingers to the doctor’s eyes, and what he saw there was not fear, or anger, but pleading. It was a look he knew well.

“Don’t,” Wellman said quietly. “Leave it alone.”

From inside the house came the sound of something heavy falling then smashing against the floor, but Wellman’s eyes stayed fixed on Luke.

“I said bring it here,” Papa commanded, and Luke bent to retrieve the picture. He had just managed to get his fingers around the edge of the frame, the gravel biting into his knuckles, and was starting to rise, when the old man’s bony knee loomed large in his vision. He lurched to the side just in time to avoid having his nose broken but caught the blow in the cheek before he rolled and got to his feet, face throbbing.

The old man was breathing heavily, shoulders forward, head low, as if he was waiting for retaliation. Behind his spectacles, his eyes burned with cold fire.

Papa laughed.

Luke, one hand massaging his cheek, didn’t find anything humorous in what had just occurred. Their prey fought, punched, kicked, scratched, and bit all the time. It was nothing new. But the prey was always young, and strong, sometimes stronger than all of the brothers combined, so when they fought back it became a welcome challenge, an accepted part of the process. Sometimes they laughed about it later. But this was a sad old man who looked like he could be snapped like a twig. The twins wouldn’t have trouble subduing him, and yet he’d taken advantage of Luke’s distracted mind, just as the girl had used her sexuality against poor dimwitted Matt. But Papa had not laughed at that. No, because it had cost Matt his life, and he had loved Matt. He’d laughed at the sight of the doctor driving his knee into Luke’s face because he didn’t care. Because he was going to take Luke’s life himself. Anything that happened between now and the moment he took his blade to his son’s throat meant nothing in the larger scheme of things. If the girl were found, they’d take care of her. If she eluded them, they’d pack up and move. But either way, Luke wasn’t leaving Elkwood. At least, not with all his parts intact.

“You’re not takin’ Abby,” Wellman said in a low growl. “You don’t have no right.”

Luke drew his glare away from Papa to reappraise the old man. Old, weak, he thought, and crazy as a goddamn loon. Why else would he be talking about a dumb old picture as if it was his wife they’d tried to steal from him? Far as Luke knew, Wellman’s wife was cold in the grave, but it didn’t seem as if the old doctor had been let in on the secret. Either that or he’d somehow managed to forget it. Crazy’s a shithouse rat, he thought. No wonder Papa found it funny. But justified or not, Luke felt the resentment colonizing him, and he took a step back from the doctor. To Papa it might have seemed as if the boy was doing nothing more than turning the show over to him, but for Luke it was an act of defiance, denying his father the opportunity to laugh at another thwarted effort to retrieve the doctor’s beloved picture. The humiliation ended here. Over the years Luke had said goodbye to whatever dignity he had come into the world swaddled in, but if nothing else he still had a sense of pride, the latter instilled in him by the same man responsible for the erosion of the former.

Off to the right of the house was Wellman’s old, green Volkswagen Beetle. Luke made for it, watched by the doctor, who made no move to stop him as the boy used his knife to jimmy open the hood, cut the cables and wrench out the plugs. Then he bent low, and slashed the tires. If by some miracle the old man managed to make a run for the car, he wouldn’t get very far now. Luke stood, brushed dirt from his knees and rejoined his father.

Aaron appeared at the front door, face grim. In his hand he held a bloodstained ghost. With a flick of a wrist he tossed the sheet out into the night. It settled at the doctor’s feet.

“She were here all right,” Aaron told them. “But she ain’t now.”

Something else was knocked over inside the house—the twins, having their fun, high on adrenaline and compensating for the absence of their intended victim.

Papa-in-Gray stepped close to the old man. Aaron remained in the doorway, the gleam of excitement returned to his eyes now that he was watching his father at work.

“I’m gonna ask you one more time, Doc, and then I reckon I’m gonna have to start cutting itty-bitty pieces of you off until you tell what needs to be told.”

Wellman backed away, toward the side of the house opposite the disabled Volkswagen where the darkness was heaviest. From there he had all of them in his sights. He stopped, swallowed. “She was here for a time. I didn’t know what had happened to her. The man who brought her here—”

“Lowell,” Papa told him, and Wellman’s shoulders dropped a notch, the light in his eyes dimming. “We took his head as a souvenir. Wanna see it?”

Wellman paled, and shook his head. “No…I don’t. I—”

“Clock’s tickin’,” Papa said.

“They brought her here, but I didn’t know she was… yours. I thought she’d been in an accident or something. Jack didn’t know nothing either. I did what I could for her, but she was too badly off… needed more help than I could give, so…”

Papa closed the distance between them. “So?”

The old man seemed rooted to the spot with fear. “So I sent her on her way.”

Papa smiled. It was a predatory look and though Luke wasn’t sure if the doctor knew it, it was also the telltale sign that the man’s time had just run out. “With Lowell’s ’lil nigger pup, right?”

Wellman said nothing.

Aaron let loose a frustrated sigh and stepped out into the yard but not before leaning back and calling out to the twins that it was time to go.

This was where it was all going to end, Luke realized. They had wasted too much time at home, with Momma’s little speech, then Papa’s display with the severed head for the boys’ amusement, then again at the farmer’s house, fucking around with the animals when he could have been in the truck, trying to make it here before the Lowell kid took off with the girl. If he hadn’t known any better, Luke might have thought Papa had delayed on purpose, might have come to the conclusion that his father didn’t give a rat’s ass about the girl and had done all this simply to get rid of the family’s one remaining rotten egg. To dispose of the kid he didn’t love. After all, why punish Luke for a mistake Matt had made? None of this would have happened if that simple-minded fool hadn’t fallen for the girl’s tricks.

The more he thought about it, the more he felt a terrible, repulsive affinity for the people they had hunted and killed over the years. For the first time in his life, he felt the sensation of the trap closing in on him, the jagged teeth descending to rend his flesh and snap the bone.

He was no longer kin.

He was prey.

His father’s voice jarred him from his thoughts. “Aaron.”

“Pa?”

“Scalp him.”

For one dazzlingly horrific moment, Luke thought his father meant him, that the execution of the mutinous plan had already begun, but then he saw the doctor back away as Aaron moved in on him, knife held with the point aimed skyward, and he let out a small inaudible sigh of relief.

“Make it fast, boy. We’ve got some catchin’ up to do.” Papa turned and headed for the truck, apparently uninterested in the torture that was about to be visited upon the old doctor.

He had one hand on the door when Aaron said, “Uh, Pa…”

Luke was surprised to see that all trace of fear had vanished from the old man’s face, as if it had simply been a well-rehearsed act to fool them into assuming him an easy target. But as it turned out, they were the targets now, for in the old man’s trembling hand was a gun, the muzzle looking as cold as the crooked grin on the face of the man aiming it at Aaron’s face.

-11-

Wellman had never been so afraid. His bladder felt explosively full, the valve responsible for keeping his urine inside jerking spasmodically every few seconds, threatening to release the dam if he didn’t remove the hand of terror that kept squeezing it. His knee ached fiercely from its collision with the boy’s cheek. But his concerns were not on his bodily functions at that moment. His perspective had whittled itself down until it was snugly focused on the tableau contained within the field of the Merrill patriarch’s headlights.

They had destroyed his car, but that didn’t matter. He hadn’t entertained any notions of fleeing. In fact, though they didn’t yet know it, in disabling the old Bug they’d inadvertently aided him in his cause.

The boy with the knife—Aaron—didn’t move, but there was no fear on his face, only hatred, dark eyes ablaze with contempt.

“You better put that down now,” he said, tilting his head slightly to spit.

Wellman waved the gun. “Back up.”

The boy ignored him and looked to his father, who still stood by the truck smiling as if eagerly awaiting the punch line of a joke, and asked, “What’re we gonna do, Pa?”

“Same’s we always do,” the man said.

The other boy, the one who had crippled the Volkswagen and whose face Wellman had caught with his knee, stared at him. Lurking beneath the grime and sweat and practiced callousness, the doctor thought he detected, not the anger he’d expected, but embarrassment, and perhaps the slightest trace of doubt.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked the boy now, the gun still trained on Aaron. “Why do you want to hurt folks who’ve never done anything to you?”

Luke, who seemed startled to be addressed directly, opened his mouth as if to respond then shut it just as quickly and frowned, his eyes moving from Wellman to the ground, then up again to his father, who answered for him.

“Because some people’re born to die, Doc,” he said and at last started to move. Wellman felt a surge of panic, his gaze flitting from the glaring Aaron to his father, uncertain now which one of them represented the bigger threat.

“You s-stay where you are,” he stammered.

Papa-in-Gray kept coming, his strange dusty frock-like coat brushing his heels and kicking up dust.

“You think you was born to die, Doc?”

Breathing hard, Wellman slowly shook his head. “Nobody’s born just to die.”

Papa smiled. He was now less than ten feet away, his narrowed eyes catching the golden glow from the open doorway, making them gleam with odd light beneath the wide brim of his hat. “You really believe that?”

“Yes.”

Finally, Papa stopped moving, just outside the reach of the truck’s headlights, but he was close enough now that if Wellman stretched out a hand, he could have brushed the man’s chest.

“You think me and my boys was born to die?”

Wellman considered this, but knew he couldn’t give the response that immediately suggested itself. Goddamn right. All you rotten bastards deserve to die for what you’ve done. Instead he shook his head. “No. I guess you don’t.”

“Then tell me somethin’,” Papa asked, chin raised slightly in the manner of a shortsighted man appraising a gem. “If’n you really believe what you’re sayin’… and with you bein’ a man respects life and all… tell me why we should be afraid of you when you’re holdin’ a gun you ain’t gonna use?”

Wellman started to speak, to tell the man to back the hell up and enough with his goddamn talk, but the words died in his throat when he saw Papa’s grin widen at something slightly to the right, something in the dark over the doctor’s shoulder. Too late Wellman turned and saw one of the twins standing behind him, stepping forth from where he’d been concealed by the dense shadows at the side of the house. He had time only to see the impossible mask of utter loathing on the begrimed face and the dull shine on the blade in his hand before the child lunged forward and buried the knife deep into Wellman’s thigh.

Pain exploded in his leg. The blade made a horrible sucking sound as the child jerked it free. Blood spurted outward, painting the boy’s face, and Wellman staggered, his free hand clamping down on the wound. His back hit the wall of the house and he struggled to remain standing even as waves of agony washed over him. The blood continued to fount, jetting from between his fingers, and “oh,” was all he could say as the strength started to leave him. Still, he kept the gun in his hand, the sweat beneath his finger on the trigger guard cold, but even though the temptation to turn that weapon on himself and end this now was greater than ever, he knew there was no need. Despite the unbearable pain, which felt to him as if someone had ripped wide the wound and were tugging on the nerves and muscles in his leg, he was aware of what had been done to him, and what he still needed to do before he bled to death. He willed himself to raise the gun, even as he slid down the wall. The figures in the yard had gathered around him, one of them laughing. Standing with the headlights behind them, they looked like devils come from Hell itself.

So much blood, Wellman thought, as he watched it continue to spurt from between his fingers in time with the beating of his heart. Little bastard got the femoral artery, most likely. Gives me about five minutes, if I’m lucky. But he had been given no reason thus far to think himself lucky, and so he shook his head to clear it of the clouds that were already starting to gather behind his eyes, and summoned every ounce of strength he had left to keep his head from nodding forward and pitching him into a darkness from which he was not likely to return.

“You got ’im good Isaac,” Papa said, though he didn’t sound entirely pleased. “But this ain’t how I wanted it.”

Wellman wasn’t sure what that meant. Had they been bluffing? Had they meant to just scare him into telling them what they wanted to know, or to warn him as they had Jack Lowell all those years ago when he’d stuck his nose in where it wasn’t wanted? No, there was no bluff here. Perhaps if he hadn’t seen the faces of those boys, the cold malevolence in their eyes, he could have told himself that this had all just been some kind of terrible mistake, a rash move perhaps from a boy too young, or too simple, to know what he was doing. But he had seen them, had felt the threat saturating the air the moment they’d arrived. These people had come to kill him, just as they had butchered those poor kids and God only knew how many before them, just as they would murder Claire if he told them where she was.

“You can end this,” he said weakly, his gaze directed at the tallest shadow now dropping to a crouch before him. “Hit the road, clear out of town and never look back. You’ve got time.” He let out a long low breath. Part of him seemed to escape with it. The pain was maddening, a raging itch deep inside his leg he would have to tear himself asunder to reach. His heart ached as it strained to compensate for the amount of blood he was losing. He could smell himself in the air, the urine and feces as his bodily functions gradually started to relax and void themselves, giving up before the rest of him. He could smell them too, their foul breath, the old sweat, the dirt and filth. These were not the scents he imagined would herald his death, but on some level he supposed it was apt. Abby’s death had been no more elegant.

“Ain’t about time, Doc,” said Papa-in-Gray.

“Then what is it about?”

They were closer now, or maybe that was just his own failing vision playing tricks on him, but the light penetrating their semi-circle seemed thinner, as did the air allowed to infiltrate the group. It was getting harder to breathe.

“We’re gonna get that bitch girl, then come back,” Pa continued. “And we’re gonna make it look like you kilt yourself, though that leg wound won’t help us none.”

One of the smaller shadows swallowed audibly and looked away.

“Then we’re gonna put your body right back in that house’a yours, get you all comfortable, maybe with that pretty picture of your wife. Make it look all peaceful.”

Wellman was fading fast, the ground beneath him warmed by his own life’s blood, the flesh above it growing steadily colder.

“Why’s he smilin’?” one of the boys asked.

“I expect he’s acceptin’ his fate.”

Get this one last thing done, Wellman told himself, but his own thoughts sounded distant, a voice heard calling from beyond the hills. Then: “One last…thing,” he said aloud. It was not until he drew in a sudden breath and forced his eyes wide that he realized they’d been shut. His vision wavered, the figures around him blurry and indistinct as if seen through billowing sheets of plastic. He clenched his teeth, and willed his hand to bring the gun up. Miraculously, for it felt as if it existed independently of him, it obeyed, though the gun seemed to have increased in weight and size.

“Well lookit that,” Pa said, and chuckled.

“Best step back, Pa.”

The man’s tone darkened. “And you best watch who you’re advisin’, Aaron.”

Wellman gasped as a bolt of pain shot through him. For a moment he thought he’d been stabbed again, but realized as it ebbed away that it was merely an involuntary spasm, his body protesting the systematic shutdown of its component parts.

Papa-In-Gray’s face was mere inches from his own.

Wellman straightened his arm and aimed the gun point blank at the man’s right eye.

Knives found his throat. The twins, he suspected, on either side of him, their hands small as they brushed his chin.

“Easy boys. He ain’t shootin’ nobody.”

“But Pa—”

“Get in the truck.”

Wellman drew back the hammer. The ratcheting click sounded impossibly loud. The only sound in the world. The boys tensed.

“You heard me, now get movin’ dammit,” Papa commanded.

Wellman felt their reluctance as they moved away, heard their footsteps crunching gravel, the truck doors opening and closing again. Then it was just silence, one shadow, and the gun.

“You change your mind, old man?” Papa asked. “Fixin’ to go out a hero?”

Wellman’s eyes were starting to close, the shades on his evening coming down to usher in endless night. He jerked himself back to consciousness and muttered a curse.

“Go ahead,” Pa told him, leaning in so the gun was pressed beneath his eye. “Pull the trigger. God might forgive you for doin’ what you thought was right while the pain had you addled. And I ain’t scared none. You might say I’m awful curious about what’s waitin’ for me up there.”

“Let her go. Please. She never hurt you.”

“She kilt my boy’s what she did to me.”

“She was… Just… let her go. She’s suffered enough.”

“Only reason you gotta stake in this is ’cuz you got in the way, ol’ man. What happens to her ain’t none of your concern. Shouldn’t’ve wasted your time on her.”

“You’ll burn in Hell,” Wellman whispered, his breath whistling from his mouth. Shuddering, he put as much pressure on the gun as he could muster, digging it into the flesh beneath the other man’s eye. “You’ll burn for what you’ve done. And someday… someone will stop you.”

“Oh?”

“People like you…” He grunted as another bolt of pain shot through him. “Monsters like you…don’t last long. Someone will put an end to this.”

Pa sounded as if he was smiling, but his face was nothing but darkness. “But not you?”

“No.” Wellman drew a breath he was afraid would be his last. He was wracked with pain, every muscle contracting, making it an effort to breathe, to think, to see… “No,” he said. “Not me.”

With the last of his strength, he swung his hand to the left and pulled the trigger. Pa jerked back with a grunt, one hand clamped over his ear as he spun away. The gun kicked in the doctor’s hand, sending a shock of pain up his arm and he almost dropped it. But he brought the weapon up one last time, tightened his quivering grip, and pulled the trigger again, and again, even after he could no longer see, and the sound of the bullets leaving the gun was a distant echo.

The truck bucked and dropped low on the right side, the headlights tilting, sliding away from their father and the dying doctor before coming to a halt at a crooked angle. The windshield shattered, scattering glass, and from the back seat Joshua gasped as a bullet sheared off a piece of his right ear and punched a small hole in the rear window, starring but not breaking it.

“That son of a bitch,” Aaron roared, jerking on the door handle. “He got the goddamn tire.” Then he was out and running, door swinging wide, the knife held at his side in a fist so white it could have been sculpted from limestone.

“You all right?” Luke asked quietly, his eyes on the mirror and his younger brother’s pained expression.

Joshua nodded, one hand cupping his bloody ear.

Isaac shoved the newly vacated driver seat forward and filed out with Joshua at his heels. They slammed the door hard behind them as if they had sensed Luke wasn’t going to follow.

They were right.

Instead he sat still, and watched, absently picking fragments of glass from his hair and brushing them from his clothes. The cuts on his face stung where the shrapnel from the windshield had punctured the skin, but he was only barely aware of them. The tender area on his left cheek hurt more, even though the pain was no more potent than the nicks made by the glass. Shame made his face fill with blood and throb with the impotency of anger. He should have lashed back at the old man, snapped his bones and torn his flesh. There had been time. But he had just stood there in shock, overwhelmed by the dawning of what this new development would mean to his family.

The old man caught Luke a good one, he imagined them muttering to each other as they grinned up at their father, who would shake his head in disappointment. Should’ve seen that comin’ a mile away. Boy’s gettin’ slower’n a dog in the summertime. And y’all know what needs to be done when a dog ain’t no good no more don’tcha?

Panic lodged in his throat at the image of them turning as one to look at him wherever he stood waiting for their verdict.

We do, Pa.

Doubt delayed him, one clammy hand slippery against the door handle. These people were all he had. They were all he knew, and maybe at the back of it all he was getting too far ahead of himself. There was no doubt that Pa had no time for him, but would he go so far as to end his life? Over this?

Out in the yard, Pa was rising. Like Joshua, who stood by his side, nudging the doctor with his foot, he had one hand over his ear. Luke had seen the doctor move the gun away from his father’s face and pull the trigger, shooting out the tire, and while Aaron had cursed and ducked, Luke had stayed where he was, watching until the moment the windshield exploded, hoping against hope that one of those bullets would tear through his brain, curing it of confusion and fear once and for all, or that the doctor would save at least one round for Papa.

It was a terrible thought and one he couldn’t help but feel guilty for, and yet up until Pa had risen just a moment ago, proving he was still alive, Luke had prayed the man was dead and out of their lives forever. Now he watched as Aaron plucked the gun from the doctor’s hand and checked the chamber. “Ain’t got but one bullet left,” he told their father.

One bullet, Luke thought. F’only he’d used it. F’only Aaron’d use it now. But his brother would never do such a thing. Aaron would forever be loyal to their father, whether out of fear or respect was unknown, and it hardly mattered. Aaron had watched Susanna die. Despite his apparent concern back at the Lowell farm, he would not intervene should Pa decided to kill Luke. It would be their father’s will, and that will was as good as God’s own for them. They served and did not question, and it was something Luke, despite his own years of faithful service, had never understood. If not for Momma-In-Bed’s words, he might never have comprehended why they did the things they did, and the confusion and inner conflict of emotions that had manifested itself in those days after his sister’s death might have driven him mad, or forced him to run away to escape them.

A farmer shoots the crows and sprays the bugs to protect his crop, don’t he? Momma had once told him. Shoots wild dogs and foxes and them sonofabitchin’ coyotes to keep ’em from eatin’ his chickens’n killin’ his herd, don’t he? Well, that’s what we do. We’re a rare breed, all of us, and what’s outside there in the world would love nothin’ better to destroy us because of what we believe in, because of our closeness to the Almighty God. To kill us outta jealousy because they ain’t never gettin’ so close to Him. They’re the predators, Luke. They’re the skulkin’ dogs creepin’ up on us, tryin’ to snatch you from my bosom, from God’s grace, like they did with your poor sister, fillin’ her head with sick thoughts and vile dreams, corruptin’ her till she was so diseased she went crazy and had to be put to sleep. Don’t let them do that to you, boy. Let your Papa show you how to protect yourself, and your kin.

“Luke,” Pa called. “Get your ass out here.”

It was too late. He could run, but they’d run him down. He could beg and they would ignore him.

He was going to die. Right here. Right now.

The warm breeze through the glassless window flowed over him, and still he did not move.

One by one, their heads turned to look at him. It was the scene from his worst imaginings come to life.

Y’all know what needs to be done when a dog ain’t no good no more don’tcha?

We do, Pa.

His father spat. Wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You hear me boy?” He was holding the doctor’s gun. The gun with a single bullet left with which to end a life. His life.

Trembling uncontrollably, Luke let his hand slip from the door handle.

“Maybe he got shot,” Aaron said. Then louder, “Luke, you shot?”

Papa stared for a moment, waiting for a reply, then started to walk toward the truck. “He better be goddamn shot,” Luke heard him say.

He had seen their victims piss themselves many times over the years, had even seen the old doctor do it tonight, but had never really understood the kind of fear that could make that happen, make a person forget their dignity, and reduce them to the level of scared little children. But as he watched the lithe shape of his father striding toward him, that gun gleaming in the light from the truck, the understanding finally came to him, manifesting itself as a sudden wet warmth at his crotch. And as if everything that had been holding him back had been flushed out in that hot stream, galvanizing him into action, Luke choked back a sob and quickly scooted over into the driver seat.

“Pa?” Aaron called, in a worried voice.

Their father said nothing, but stopped walking. “Whatcha doin’ son?”

Son. It was the first time Luke had heard the man call him anything but “boy” in years, but whatever power Pa wanted it to have over him was diluted by the fact that affection didn’t suit him, and never had. His father was trying to stall him.

With clumsy hands he reached down, praying that his fingers wouldn’t find only air down there in the dark beneath the steering wheel, the keys tucked securely in Aaron’s pocket. A slight jingle of metal and he allowed himself a breath, then quickly straightened in his seat and turned the key. The engine rumbled to life.

He looked up, out into the night, into his father’s face.

The eyes looking back at him almost sucked the soul from his body, leaving him a withered empty shell with his hands clamped on the wheel.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” his father said, and his right arm rose, knuckles tight on the trigger of the doctor’s gun. Behind him, the boys were frozen, pale faces making them ghosts in the headlights.

Time seemed to stretch, as if those dark tendrils Luke had feared earlier had finally burst from Papa’s eyes and mouth, and were anchoring the truck in place, crystallizing the breath in Luke’s lungs before it had a chance to reach his mouth.

When they were kids, Aaron had once surprised a backpacker who had stumbled upon the body of her friend. Before she had a chance to scream, he burst forth from the trees and wrenched her head around, breaking her neck. For Luke, who had been crouching on a branch above the scene, it was the first time he had heard the sound, and the memory of it had never left him. He’d heard it a hundred times since, but that first time had stayed with him because it had sounded like the hinges opening on a forbidden door, a door to a new and terrifying world he was preparing to enter.

This was the sound the gun in his father’s hand made as he slowly cocked the hammer.

“Was it the old man?” Pa called to him over the sound of the engine. “He say somethin’ that tripped the switch? Make you feel bad? Get you thinkin’ about your poor ’ol cocksuckin’ sister? Get you all choked up, wonderin’ if what we’re doin’ ain’t right?”

Luke cleared his throat, watched the exhaust fumes tumble out around his father’s feet.

“Maybe it was that pic-ture,” Pa said, mockingly. “You got a hankerin’ for some wrinkled ’ol cunt, that it?”

“Luke,” Aaron cried out, his voice unsteady. “What you doin’?”

“Fixin’ to run,” Pa answered. “Ain’t that it? He’s ready to turn his back on us. On God.”

Luke’s heart thumped so hard against his ribs he figured they could all hear it, even over the engine. His breath shuddered out of him, as he slowly brought his hand down to the gearshift and jerked it out of neutral, keeping his foot planted firmly on the brake. The vehicle rocked. The engine started to choke, and for one heart-stopping moment, Luke thought it was going to stall. But it coughed once and ran steady.

“You ain’t gettin’ far boy.”

Luke knew he was right. But then, he hadn’t far to go.

“Now why’nt you just cut that engine and step out here where we can talk face to face?”

His father’s eyes refused the light, but Luke leaned forward a little to peer into them for a moment. He had transcended fear now, the adrenaline in his veins burning through him, lapping at his brain, trying to force him over the border of that place he had kept away from all his life—the place where the truth, and his sister, were buried.

He pressed his other foot down on the gas, the other still on the brake. The engine whined, the sound deafening. The smoke from the exhaust rose like fog around the truck. When his father spoke, he did not hear the words, but understood the message on the lips that formed them.

“You ain’t leavin’ here alive.”

The faint trace of a smile faded from Papa’s face as if he too realized what was going to happen, what had to happen if he expected to maintain control of his children. Unlike the doctor, his grip was dead steady, the black hole of the muzzle targeting a point somewhere in the trembling oval of his son’s face.

From the light side of that secret place in his mind, Luke heard his sister whisper to him, and could almost smell her perfume assailing his senses. We was wrong, Luke. What he taught us was always wrong, and we are the sinners.

Swallowing back the tears, “Who said I was leavin’?” Luke said, and took his foot off the brake. The truck lurched forward, closing the distance between him and his father in a heartbeat. Just long enough for a whispered prayer, a plea for forgiveness, for Luke to shut his eyes, the image of Papa-In-Gray’s livid face made chalk-white by the lights branded onto his retinas as he pulled the trigger.

-12-

“You like to sing?” Pete asked, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel to some imaginary tune. “My Pa don’t. Second Ma—I call her that because she weren’t my birth Ma—was a great singer, and even my first Momma weren’t too bad, but Pa can’t carry a tune for nothin’. I ain’t so bad myself, though I always forget the words, so I don’t much like to sing. Prefer to hum. Don’t need the words to hum.” He smiled broadly, and wished he didn’t have to watch the road, but every time he stared into the mirror at the girl lying swaddled in blankets in back, he heard Doctor Wellman’s no-nonsense voice warning him, And don’t you keep leering at that girl like you’re doing now, you hear me? You’re not going to do her much good if you run yourselves right into a semi. So he limited himself to short glances and resisted the urge to pull over for a while, just to sit in the peace and quiet and listen to the girl’s breathing, just so the false breeze of their passage didn’t keep creeping in the window and stealing away the smell of her. But the cranky old doctor had warned him about delaying too, said the girl mightn’t make it if he dawdled, so he kept the truck moving steady through the night, the high beams picking nothing out of the dark but gray ribbon and yellow stitching, and the occasional mashed up bit of roadkill.

He couldn’t believe his luck.

He’d fully expected an earful from his father, especially after the old man had grabbed him and all but flung him into the truck after catching him spying on the girl. Then he’d watched him get drunker and drunker, which was never a good thing, and guessed things were going to get even worse. But to his surprise, his father had told him he was sorry for what he’d done, for the way he’d been to him over the years, and that he wanted to make things right while there was still time. Pete had listened, not entirely sure he wasn’t dreaming it all, but when his old man stood, put his arms around him and gave him a stiff awkward hug, he’d known it was happening for real. A change had come upon his father, as sudden and unexpected as snow in summer. Pete had stayed quiet, afraid if he opened his mouth he’d say something dumb enough to undo whatever had brought about the transformation. Instead he’d just sat by his father, and basked in the kind of attention and affection he’d only ever seen between other kids and their daddies, and had given up expecting for himself. He liked it a whole lot, so much so that, as overjoyed as he was to be entrusted with the girl, he couldn’t wait to get home again.

But for now it was just Pete, the road, and the girl, and he was plenty proud of that.

Go to Doc Wellman’s, his father had told him, a strange look in his eyes. He’ll know what to do. And tell him I’m sorry.

Pete hadn’t really understood what there was to be sorry about. They had, after all, done the sensible thing. But he didn’t want to ruin his father’s newfound kindness toward him, so he’d wordlessly accepted the task and hightailed it over to the doctor’s house. There he’d found Wellman a little nervous, as if he was expecting a tornado to come down and pull away everything he owned. He’d hustled Pete and the girl into the truck, hardly saying anything at all, except to give Pete some stern instructions.

Here’s her address. Listen to me carefully. You give that to the orderlies so they’ll know who to contact. Now get moving, and don’t stop for a goddamn thing, Pete. Not a thing, you hear me? She might die if you do.

At the memory of those words, Pete checked the speedometer and figured it wouldn’t hurt to pick up the pace a bit. Wellman had told him it would take him the better part of an hour to reach the hospital. They’d only been on the road for half that, and the last thing Pete wanted was for the girl to die. They’d say it was his fault, that he hadn’t driven faster, and his father would go back to being angry all the time again.

Pete had his own reasons for wanting the girl to survive. He wanted to hear her voice, to hear her say his name. When they’d loaded her into the truck, she’d been asleep, and still hadn’t woken up. He wished she would, if only just for a few minutes. So he talked to her, keeping his voice low, hoping she might grab onto his words like a drowning man might grab a tossed rope. He wanted her to see who had carried her away from whatever bad things had happened to her in Elkwood. He wanted her to see her rescuer and know his face so she would know who to look for when she was able.

It was not until later, when the road widened and split into four lanes, the sulfuric radiance of the sodium lights jaundicing the horizon, the stars erased from the sky and pulled down to form the glittering lights of the Mason City skyline, that the girl spoke. Slack-jawed by the sheer size of the sparkling canvas overlaid on a horizon he seldom saw uncloaked, Pete at first didn’t realize he was hearing a voice other than his own in the confines of the truck’s cab, but when at last he registered her soft whisper, he jerked in his seat and almost lost control of the vehicle. Forcing himself to be calm, he eased the truck back into the correct lane, held his breath, stomach jittering madly, and raised his gaze to the mirror.

She was looking straight at him.

Instantly, all moisture evaporated from his lips, and a strangled croak emerged from his throat. He had to remind himself to watch the road, but as hard as it had been before, it was next to impossible now that she was awake. He swallowed with an audible click. Hoped she didn’t scream like she had the last time she’d seen him.

“Hello Ma’am,” he said.

“Who are you?” she replied, and for the first time in his life, Pete had to think about the answer.

“Uh…I’m Pete. Pete Lowell. I’m a friend.”

Her voice was soft, so soft he had to strain to hear her over the droning of the tires, the hum of the engine. “Where are you taking me Pete?”

She said my name. The butterflies in his stomach caught fire, lighting him from the inside out.

“Hospital. You know…to get you fixed up and back to wherever you come to Elkwood from. Doctor Wellman told me to take you. Hope that’s all right.” He smiled, forgetting she probably couldn’t see it in the mirror. “We all want for you to get better.”

She stared for a moment, then her one uncovered eye drifted shut. She was silent for so long he thought she’d gone back to sleep, but then he heard her whisper, “I don’t like to sing either.”

Pete nodded, his smile threatening to split his face in two, and felt something like sheer, uncontaminated happiness settle like a warm blanket over his soul.

“I live in Columbus,” she said. “You know where that is?”

“No,” he said, and wished he did, if only to seem worldlier than he knew himself to be.

“Ohio,” she said. “When I’m all better, I want you…to come see me. So I can thank you.”

Pete didn’t think he’d ever felt such elation. What had previously only seemed like unattainable fantasies were rapidly evolving into possibilities, and he vowed to explore as many of them as she saw fit to allow him.

Her voice was growing softer, and he felt a pang of sadness that it might be the end of their talk. “Will you come?”

“Yes Ma’am,” he said, grinning toothily. “I swear I will.”

He went back to watching the road.