Hell's Half Acre

by Will Christopher Baer

  The flight bag is gone, also the groceries. I push open the doors and the Range Rover is gone. I forgot to take the keys from him. The sun has fallen, now. The sky is dark and getting darker and the sirens are so close they might as well be up my ass. I wish I could take Jeremy’s body with me and bury him properly somewhere but I can’t. He won’t be decomposing in a shallow grave next to Miller’s house, anyway. Goodbye kid, I say. Good luck in the next world. Then turn to run back through the store. I crash through the emergency exit doors and an alarm begins to whoop. Without hesitating I drop over the edge of the ravine.

  thirty-two.

  IT TAKES ME OVER AN HOUR TO LIMP BACK TO THE HOUSE. I am torn to pieces. There is blood on my hands and my left ankle is fucked up. The cops are cruising, slow and watchful, the sky splashed with search lights. I skulk through back yards, avoiding dogs. I breathe through my nose and maybe I’ve cooked my noodle with poison and drink over the past week, but I’ve never felt better.

  The house of Miller is dark.

  The Range Rover is parked crazily, on top of a bush. I smile, thinking of Hitchcock with one ruined eye. He must have been cursing at the sky like a mad sailor. I rest on my haunches, out of sight, watching the house. There is no sign of life and suddenly I have this horrible idea that Miller came home and slaughtered everyone.

  I limp through the living room, the kitchen. No one is about. I look in on Molly and she’s sleeping peacefully. I pick up a bottle of whiskey and head for the library. Jude is downstairs with a magazine, watching over the boy. She wears cowboy boots and a thin, sleeveless white dress. Her hair is loose and she’s not wearing the hockey mask. The bite mark has begun to fade.

  What do you think? she says. I borrowed some of Molly’s clothes.

  You look like a nice college girl.

  Don’t be nasty.

  I’m sorry. Your face looks much better.

  The mask seemed pointless, at this point. And it frightened him.

  How is he? I say.

  She frowns. He’s not good.

  I go to the bed and touch his face. Sam is feverish, breathing too fast.

  His lips, I say. They feel like sandpaper.

  He’s dehydrated, she says. I gave him some Gatorade earlier but he couldn’t keep it down. I gave him milk and crackers, more Benadryl. I gave him children’s Tylenol. But his fever won’t break.

  Miller is doing something to him, I say.

  What?

  I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me.

  Jude looks at her watch, worried. I don’t know what he needs.

  He needs a doctor.

  Yes, she says. He won’t get one tonight.

  Where is Miller?

  I’m not sure. He’s somewhere in the house, watching.

  Jeremy is dead, I say.

  I know. He told me.

  How is the bastard’s eye?

  Jude smiles. It’s fucked. I’m afraid John doesn’t like you anymore.

  That’s too bad, I say.

  What happened out there? she says.

  I am seething. Nothing. We jacked a convenience store.

  How many dead, besides Jeremy?

  The clerk. Miller shot him in the head.

  Jude sighs. He’s cracking. This will be over soon.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  What? she says.

  Are we on camera now, I say.

  What do you take me for?

  He’s playing you, Jude. He’s never gonna serve up Cody, okay. This whole thing is just a game of chicken designed to make you his bitch.

  Jude stares past me, blank. I can see she’s already arrived at this conclusion.

  I’m nobody’s bitch, she says.

  You have to deal with him, Jude. Deal with him, or I will.

  I will, she says softly. I will.

  I want to ask her again if it’s true, if she is truly married to the man. But her face is so ashen, her hands so unsure of themselves. It must be true and it must not be and either way I feel like it would be rude to ask her. Miller is her nightmare and Jude will talk about it if she wants to.

  Jude, I say. I’m going to take Molly and the boy and get out of here.

  No, she says. You don’t know where John is. And he’s got a lot of firepower.

  What do you suggest?

  Tomorrow, she says. I will take care of it tomorrow.

  Jude wants her voice to be cold, detached. She sighs and glances at her watch as if we are discussing the time and place for a lunch date tomorrow. But her voice is tinged with rust and her hand trembles.

  Are you sure?

  The art of hunger. Jude kisses me, a long penetrating kiss that pushes me to the edge of hunger and leaves me dizzy.

  I’m going to kill him, she says.

  Are you sure? I say.

  I will find a way to get him alone, she says. To distract him. And when I give you a look, you’ll know it’s time to get Molly and the boy and run.

  What kind of look? I say.

  I don’t know, she says. A look that passes between us that only you can recognize.

  The boy sleeps, barely. He is breathing so fast that he seems to rest on a fragile plane between unconsciousness and death. He sleeps in the velvet. My headache is soaring like a high-pitched sonic whistle that only dogs can hear. Blackbirds crash at the edge of my vision. Jude says that she wants to stay with him for the night and I agree.

  I resolve not to sleep this night. I want to watch the house and I would sorely hate to be surprised by Miller. I am bitterly tired, though. I need something to keep me awake and I slip into Molly’s room, remembering that she has a stash of pot and coke in her underwear drawer. I touch her lightly on the shoulder and she moans, dreaming. I open the underwear drawer and search it silently, stopping once to press something fine and silky to my face. The smell of rain, of a storm coming. I find a short plastic straw and a little yellow envelope of coke, a gram or so. I glide through the silver wings and merrily chop out four fat lines on the back of the toilet. I am in a dangerously good mood, for some reason. It was that kiss, maybe. Jude can tear my head off with a kiss, sometimes. I pause, considering. Four lines is too many, perhaps. Perhaps perhaps. I hoover two of them, then wash my face with cold water. I bend over the toilet with the straw and snort the third line.

  Phineas?

  Molly’s voice. It sounds like she’s talking in her sleep.

  Phineas. I’m bleeding.

  I push through the silver wings, my head a rage of white noise. I go to the bed and touch her. She’s wet, the bed is wet. This can’t be blood. There’s too much of it. I fumble madly for the lights and they snap on with a yellow hum. Molly sits up in bed, her face pale. I don’t believe what I’m seeing. Her nightgown is bloody from the waist down and the sheets are soaked red, almost black. The mattress is a river of blood. I bend over her but she is not wounded and soon I have blood up to my elbows.

  Where, I say. Where is it coming from?

  From me, she says. It’s coming from me.

  I fly downstairs to get Jude. I don’t know what else to do. The blood is too much for me. It takes me back to the amputees in Mexico City. The swinging shadows, the raw white light. The bloody plastic under my feet. The sponge in my hand, the bucket of blood. Jude in a white raincoat, wiping blood from her goggles.

  I hover behind the silver wings with a glass of whiskey while Jude checks Molly out. I am tempted to smash the mirror but I don’t want to make things worse. After what seems like an hour, Jude pokes her head into the bathroom.

  I need your help, she says.

  Molly lies naked on the terrible bed, bloody and unconscious. Her short yellow hair is like a ring of pale fire around her face and she looks like Ophelia, dead and floating on her back. There are several towels on the floor, red with blood. Jude’s hands are bloody.

  Don’t tell me she’s dead.

  Not yet.

  What happened? I say.

  I need to get her cleaned up, says Jude. And I�
�m afraid if we put her in the bathtub, she’ll start bleeding again.

  Who did this to her?

  Jude frowns. I think she’s done it to herself.

  What the fuck do you mean?

  It may have been a miscarriage, she says. But there’s so much blood. It’s unlikely she would hemorrhage like this, with an early miscarriage. I think she might have given herself some sort of coat-hanger abortion.

  You’re saying that Molly was pregnant.

  Apparently.

  It was John, croaks Molly.

  She can’t open her eyes or lift her head but twice she whispers that it was Miller who did this to her, no mistake. My skull is ringing, ringing. Peripheral vision all but gone and I feel like my spine is twitching. I can’t wait to kill the motherfucker, and it makes me happy to think of it. But I have a feeling I may have to defer to Jude on that particular job. She calmly reaches for the whiskey and I go to the bathroom to soak washcloths. Together, we wipe the blood from Molly’s arms and legs and belly and wrap her in a clean sheet. I carry her out to the living room and stand there in the dark, holding her while Jude arranges a bed of pillows in the bay window. I lay Molly down and she looks ghostly in the moonlight.

  Okay, says Jude. I’m going downstairs.

  Her voice is weary. I reach for her and she lets me hold her for a moment and I don’t need her to tell me this might be the last time we will touch each other like lovers.

  thirty-three.

  BLINK AND MORNING IS UPON ME. I am staring, unhinged. I feel like I’m waking from a dream. But that was no dream. Jude and I have a child, a boy named Everson. He’s with Jude’s sister, and who the hell would have thought Jude had a sister? I always figured she was harvested in a lab, with all the other genetically enhanced ninjas. She named our son after my brother, whom I mentioned to her exactly once, the brother I haven’t seen in a thousand years. There is a cigarette in my left hand, burned down to the filter. Ashes on the table, dirty snow. The sound of a tea kettle. I look around the corner and see that Daphne is in the kitchen, wearing snug little boy shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt ripped in half. I don’t want to talk to her. I hold my breath until she takes her tea and goes outside. I want coffee, now. My muscles make unpleasant popping noises when I stand.

  I have one complex objective now.

  Jude and I must get out of this place, alive. I want to meet my son. But I have to get Sam out too, and Molly. I may have to kill Miller to accomplish this. I’m uneasy because the last time I saw him, some twelve hours ago, I shot him in the eye and he’s bound to be angry about it.

  It’s early, maybe seven.

  I start a pot of coffee and go to check on Molly. Her face is pale yet from the loss of blood, but her pulse is strong and she’s breathing normally. Blood is strange. Donate a pint of it to the Red Cross and you go home lightheaded but otherwise feeling fine. The nurses give you a cookie. But you spill that same pint into somebody’s bed and it’s a fucking freakshow. I fetch myself a cup of black coffee and return to the window. I’m not feeling so insane as last night and I want to sit with Molly. I want to watch her sleep. Irrational, no doubt. Drug related. But I am weirdly cheerful. I feel like a guy who’s on his way to the airport, like a guy who’s going home. I feel high. Molly sleeps.

  I find myself floating around the house, peering aimlessly out the windows. On the west side of the house there’s a little Japanese rock garden overgrown with weeds and yellow wildflowers. There are a couple of wrought-iron chairs and a hammock. It looks like a nice place to think and I am about to go try out that hammock when Daphne walks into frame, carrying her tea. I immediately hunker down to watch her from the window. Daphne eyes the hammock, but I figure she’s afraid she will spill her tea because she sits in one of the chairs instead. She now wears the same gauze white dress she wore at the Paradise, thin and translucent and it clings to her in such a way that it could cause madness. I take a shivering breath and tell myself to banish evil thoughts.

  But it won’t hurt to watch her. I light a cigarette and make myself comfortable.

  Daphne isn’t doing anything interesting, though. Daphne is drinking her tea and daydreaming about the past, maybe the future. Daphne is smiling, watching a few birds hop around the garden and I am about to go back to the living room when Miller walks into view, carrying one of the spear guns I saw in the garage. He wears a patch over his left eye. The hair on my neck tingles but somehow I just sit there. I just sit there. I don’t know what I’m thinking. I tell myself he’s on his way to see me, to put an aluminum spear in my heart, and he’s just stopping to say hello to Daphne and after a few pleasantries, he’ll move along. Daphne stands up and her lips part in the shape of hello. Miller smiles and bows and she offers him her hand and now Miller moves very close to her. He violates her space. He kisses her hand and she laughs, as if he’s being silly. Miller says something to her but I can only see the side of his face and I probably couldn’t read his lips anyway. Daphne stands with the teacup in one hand, Miller holding the other. Daphne is smiling but the smile is fading, slowly fading. Miller shows her the spear gun and Daphne’s brow furrows politely, as if she is thinking yes, that is a very nice spear gun but why are you showing it to me. At which point Miller shrugs and shoots her in chest. The spear plunges deep enough to come out the back and the sound it makes is like smashing a pumpkin with a hammer and even as I run for the door I imagine I can hear the air and fluids hissing from her body.

  Through the kitchen and out the back door, running blind. Feet hammering like mad on the wooden deck and from the sound of it you would think there were three of me. I still have Miller’s gun, with two real bullets in it, and I would love to shoot him with one. I swing myself over the handrail to the ground below and because I’m high and deprived of sleep and something of a fool, I come down on that fucked-up left ankle from last night. The pain is electric and I roll into a fetal position. But not for long. I don’t want to be found like this.

  I pull myself together and come limping around the side of the house, gun in hand, listening for him, sniffing the air for Miller and automatically my eyes go to Daphne’s body. Twisted, unrecognizable, her body is contorted so that at first glance she appears to have one leg and two broken arms and no head. Her white dress is black with blood and now I see that the spear indeed stabbed though her just below the ribcage and came out the other side, and the words pig in a poke flash helplessly through my head. I stare at her for a long breathless moment, and then there is the crunch of gravel behind me and a baseball bat hits me in the right shoulder hard enough to break me.

  Oh, the way the brain functions.

  Because even while getting my ass kicked, my brain is happy to do some fast calculations and let me know exactly how Miller got the drop on me. He heard me coming. He knew I was watching, and killed Daphne for my benefit.

  Or maybe not.

  He has the bloodlust, no question, and maybe he killed her purely for the giggles but he probably heard me crashing through the kitchen and out onto the deck. He certainly heard me moaning and cursing over my fucked ankle, and so he went around the house to get behind me, stopping in the garage to grab his Louisville Slugger.

  Meanwhile.

  The right arm is crippled but somehow I’m still holding that gun and a kid could tell you I’m gonna shoot myself in the foot, any minute now. I try to transfer it to my left hand but Miller just shrugs and hits me with some kind of karate kick that spins me around like a toy soldier. The gun sails away and disappears into a yellow and brown carpet of fallen leaves.

  Fucked. Phineas is fucked.

  Miller is hellish pleased with himself. He dances away from me, bouncing on his toes. He sends another kick my way, this time at my head. I hobble sideways and manage to take it on the side of the head, instead of directly between the eyes. He seems annoyed that I haven’t fallen down yet, and frankly I’m surprised. He doesn’t say anything though, and I thank him for that. I hate guys who make a lot of wisecracks wh
ile they’re pounding on you.

  I back away from him, breathing hard. My vision is screwy and everything is on a diagonal. Miller hops toward me, grinning. And I move to his left, his blind side. He is not used to the eye patch and this gives me an opening to hit him square in the face with a little jab that causes his nose to bleed and pisses him off something awful, and Miller promptly hits me in the chest with one of those karate punches that I understand conceptually but don’t know how to throw, the punch that aims for a spot somewhere beyond the point of initial impact so that the fist punches through you like a lead ball and reaches maximum density somewhere behind you, knocking you four maybe five feet backward and in the meantime sucking all of the air out of your body. Then he follows it up with another savage kick to the head and baby I am down.

  The fight is over and I want to tell him to finish it. If your guy is down you don’t stick around for anger management. You snap his neck and move on. But Miller is just getting started. He has issues, and he wants to work them out. He kicks me mercilessly, again and again. I wish I could tell him that he’s wasting his time, that I can’t feel anything because I’m slipping into shock and one section of my brain is already experiencing a tasty in-flight movie in which Michelle Pfeiffer exposes some righteous flesh. And after a while, he just gets tired of kicking me. He picks up the baseball bat and takes a few swings, but his breathing is labored and apparently he doesn’t want to kill me just yet, because he suddenly loses interest and tosses the bat aside. Then he crouches down and sticks his vile tongue in my ear.

  The indignity. I’m going to kill him for that, if I ever walk again.

  I’m slipping down a black tunnel and the last thing I see is Miller, upside down and sideways and stuffing Daphne’s body into a red, white, and blue duffel bag and dragging her out of sight, presumably to deposit her in the grave dug by Huck and I reckon it’s handy to have a grave dug in advance.

  I wake on hard, cold wood, a damp T-shirt wadded into a pillow under my head. Bright cruel needles of sunlight and now there is a face looming over me, Molly’s face.