The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  * * *

  Kait struggled to stand. Her brain whirled like batter in a mixing bowl. Whatever had locked her limbs in place had melted away as quickly as it had taken hold, but her arms were still almost too weak to push her weight up from the snow. The road was no longer silent. The SUV’s engine had cut off, but she could still hear the idle ticking of the motor as it cooled, regular and rhythmic as the seconds on a clock, as well as the soft hiss of steam released somewhere under the vehicle’s hood. Her eyes first fixed on the road behind her—her gaze tracing the SUV’s careening tracks through the shallow snow. A ways up the hill, she could make out Alice’s limp form, lying beside the road, her shoulders rising and falling ever-so-slightly with every breath.

  Then she forced her eyes to follow the path the other way, towards the wreck. Here the tracks crisscrossed, and crisscrossed again, churning the snow into mush. It was white, then gray, then colorless, until it was bright scarlet under the glistening moonlight. Ben lay in a heap in the center of the road, not moving. She yanked her eyes away with a gasp of horror—his body didn’t look like a body anymore. His torso was whole, but somewhere around his midsection he seemed to go all to pieces. His legs kicked out at strange angles, one knee seeming to bend inward on itself. He did not move when she screamed his name. Nothing moved. Even the shadows refused to flicker, and the snow swallowed her shout like a whale gulping down a mouthful of fish.

  Again she tried to stand, but her legs refused to hold weight. She slammed her fists against the snow, slashing at it, throwing powder in the air and nearly blinding herself, howling in frustration and rage. The forest took that cry, too, unquestioningly. Finally she had to drag herself forward, pulling her weight along with the strength of her arms alone. She found the Model 94 halfway there, and clutched it in her fist as she crawled along, loping like a gorilla through the wet mush closer to the wreck site. There lay Ben, his eyes open under shattered glasses, one already swelling shut. She could hear him breathing, and hope boiled in her chest—but when he began to speak, it was like a light switched off inside of her.

  “I think…” he said in a voice as soft as a warm bath and a straight razor, “I think we better have that conversation now.”

  Kait’s insides twisted into knots. “No-no-no. Don’t say that,” she begged, stinging tears pushing under half-closed eyelids. She wrestled herself into a kneeling position beside him, and she pulled him towards her, though it took all the strength left in her body to draw him into her lap, ignoring the wet heat of the oozing blood sticking between the fingers of her gloves. “You’re gonna be fine, you hear me? This wasn’t… This wasn’t in the Goddamn deal ….”

  But Ben only laughed—or she had to assume that the moist hacking sound that bubbled up from his mouth meant laughter. Blood trickled down from one corner of his lips, and she wiped it clean with her glove almost angrily.

  “Don’t waste… a bullet… on me…” he croaked.

  “You son of a bitch.” She wanted to punch that idiot smile off his face. She wanted to lie down in the snow and die beside him. She couldn’t see. The world kept fogging up, flooding from the corners of her eyes. She wanted to pull the world apart around her until Lutz crawled out from under, where she could crush him under her heel and watch him squirm as he died. “Why’d you do it, huh?” she hissed through her teeth. “You big dumb idiot—why’d you do something like that?”

  Ben turned his eyes towards the hill, and the groan he let loose told her even this small movement nearly destroyed him. “Is she… all right?” he asked. Kait could only nod, her lips pressed together so hard that it nearly drew blood. “You need… to tell her—”

  Kait cut him off with a vigorous shake of her head. “We’re not doing that now, you hear me, you bastard?” she snarled. “I’m not gonna tell her shit. You’re gonna tell her yourself. That’s the deal. Everybody lives. Everybody goes home. Remember the plan?”

  Ben nodded, beckoned her closer. She leaned in, turning her head so that her ear faced his mouth. His breath was cold as it left his lips:

  “Take her… if you have to.”

  Kait almost dropped him. She sat straight upright, staring down at his sad smile.

  “I mean it,” he croaked. “Take her. Like him. If that’s… what it takes.”

  “You knew?” she whispered. Ben shrugged, the movement barely registering. “But when?” she demanded. “How? You never said anything. Even when—”

  “Jill Cicero,” he said. He pointed one trembling finger. “In my head. In yours.”

  Kait felt her blood go cold in a sudden flash.

  “You’re not… like him,” he told her in a shuddering breath. “Not really. Not where… where it counts. That’s all… that matters… now. You can… save her. Promise me, Kait… Promise me you’ll—”

  “I already made a promise,” she told him, shaking hair out of her eyes. “I told her—”

  “Promise me…”

  “But what if you’re wrong?” Now she was shuddering, her entire body wracked with uncontrollable sobs. “I don’t… I don’t even understand what I…”

  “Say it,” he insisted.

  What else could she do? She shook away her tears and nodded, feeling the trap close around her heart at last. “I’ll protect her,” she swore. “Whatever it takes. And I’ll tell her…”

  She sniffed, searching for the right words. Ben supplied them.

  “…Until the very end.”

  His mouth opened very wide in a gasp, looking above her head at something only he could see. His jaw flapped up and down several times like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “You…” he began to say, but then he refocused his watering gaze, looking her in the eye one last time.

  “You’re… a good friend… Kait Brecker,” he said.

  The forest was silent. The break in the clouds widened, and harsh, ugly moonlight pushed through, setting Kait and all the devastation around her awash in otherworldly radiance. Lit up under the moon’s gaze, the world around her looked like nothing more than an extraterrestrial landscape, the snow glistening like bright crystal on the road and across the lake and among the branches of the trees. She would have felt at home there, despite everything—an alien in an alien world. That was what they were. That was all they’d ever been.

  She held Ben Alden to her heaving chest. She held him a long time, and she wasn’t even certain when she stopped hearing the sound of his breathing.

  Chapter 21

  Game

  Jill Cicero watched Lutz heave the bedroom window open, and the cold night blew in, moving the thick curtains in billowing waves. The window stuck in its frame, and he had to struggle to push it up past the halfway point. But he was smiling. The moon leaned in through the aperture like a curious neighbor, and under its milky eye she saw his face in profile, grinning a hard, cold grin like the tip of a sharp knife. Kait was not in the apartment; before Jill picked herself up off the floor, the other girl had made her escape out into the hall, and the sound of her footsteps had been quickly engulfed by the heating system kicking into gear in the next room. Jill’s mouth still tasted like carpeting, but she could not wipe the stringy fuzz from her lips.

  Lutz crossed the room, moving towards her slowly, but with clear purpose. He didn’t really seem to look at her. His eyes slid away from her as if she wasn’t there. But when he stood before her, he raised his eyes to meet her gaze, and she watched that sharp, dangerous smile melt off his lips. He reached down, grasped her right wrist in his hand, and raised it to eye level. He dropped it: it flopped back to her side like a limp rag. He did this two more times, lifting her hand and dropping it, never taking his eyes off hers. His face never twitched.

  She was not looking at a human being now.

  Perhaps it had always been so—but now, under the peculiar effect of moon-rays and flickering streetlight, Lutz seemed... transformed, somehow. His flesh still cleaved to his bones in the usual way, but his movements were a half-step faster, a half-step longer. W
hen he crossed the room, his strides stretched and quickened like his limbs were really longer than they appeared to be. Like there was another, larger boy under the surface, peering through the soft, pale skin as if it were thin gauze. She could feel hundreds of eyes on her, none of them in his head.

  “What did you say to her,” he said, without really asking anything at all.

  Then he struck her hard across the face.

  The blow exploded across her cheek, but she didn’t fall this time. Her body took one quick step backwards to compensate for the impact, rocking back on some invisible axis like a buoy, and her face stung only for the briefest instant. The pain sucked down beneath her skin like water disappearing under dry sand, and Lutz withdrew his hand, wringing it out, sucking his teeth in discomfort. Then he laughed—she had grown to hate his goaty laugh, but this time the noise was like forks and spoons in an overfull cutlery drawer. Jill wondered if Kait had ever heard that laugh before. She wondered if she had ever seen her boyfriend scuttle across the floor as though he possessed twice the number of joints a human should possess.

  “All right,” he said, turning away from her. “All right, Jill Cicero.”

  He crawled onto his bed, plucking a cellphone off the filing cabinet he used for a nightstand. He tapped the screen a few times, then raised the phone to his ear. He waited: Jill could hear the soft, tinny purr of the ringing from where she stood. A cloud crossed over the moon. The streetlight beneath the window fizzed and popped, and abruptly switched off.

  “Where’d you go, Heart-Brecker,” Lutz said suddenly into the phone.

  He waited again. Jill could not hear what Kait was saying, but she was saying a lot of it.

  “Where’d you go,” Lutz repeated. His eyes had gone glassy. More tinny chatter—the voice on the other end of the line sounded frantic, like a tape on fast-forward.

  “I told you I would take care of it,” Lutz said, almost bored. “Heart-Brecker… Listen, you’re not making any sense. Now, I want you to come around under the window, the one by the back walk.” He glanced back at Jill, who stared at a point just above his left ear, unable to shift her gaze anywhere else. “I want to show you something,” he said.

  Maybe some time passed. Jill’s senses were deadened, her equilibrium drained away like the pain of Lutz’s backhand smash. The ticking of the clock could have been Lutz’s fingertips drumming the filing cabinet or water dripping into the sink in the kitchenette or any number of things. Her heart. Her imagination. The light outside the window did not change, and Lutz did not stir from his cross-legged perch on the bed.

  Then the tinny voice from the cellphone spoke again, startling Jill out of her reverie. Lutz held the device away from his ear, holding it at arm’s length, the speaker pointed toward her.

  “I’m here,” Kait said. “Now what.”

  “Stay on the line,” Lutz replied, that knife-point smile spreading across his face once more. Saliva on his teeth gleamed in the moonlight. “I’m coming to the window.”

  But he didn’t move—instead, warmth blossomed up from Jill’s stomach, and she began walking towards the open window. Before she knew it, she had placed one bare foot up on the ledge, leaning through, out into the frigid night air. Wind swept under her, and the hem of the borrowed robe beat the air like a broken wing. She looked down—she did not want to, but the warmth forced her eyes, and far below her stood a lone figure in a square of cold moonlight on the winding concrete walk, staring up at her.

  “Do you see the window?” Lutz asked. Seven stories below, the tiny shivering figure nodded slowly. “I told you to stay on the line,” he said evenly.

  “I see the window,” said the cellphone’s tinny voice.

  “And do you see me?” There was another pause. The figure on the sidewalk cocked its head. The tinny voice said nothing. “Heart-Brecker, are you there?”

  “Lutz, I… I don’t understand.”

  A snarl of frustration—then the heavy clatter of the smartphone crashing against the wall beside Jill’s head. Then the world whirled and tilted beneath her as she pressed against the windowsill, forcing her body through until she dangled over the edge, her weight supported by her outflung arms as she leaned over the maddening drop. She watched the figure on the ground press one hand to her mouth; the other still held the cellphone to her ear. Lutz’s presence moved behind her: she could feel him, like pressure in the air, as he stooped and picked up the cellphone. Jill heard a crackle of plastic as the frame flexed in his hand.

  “Still there?”

  More tinny silence. Then: “I’m still here.”

  Lutz heaved a sigh behind her. “Heart-Brecker, I’ve tried… I’ve tried so fucking hard to explain things to you. How things are for people like us. I’ve tried a hundred times. But… I don’t know. Sometimes I think you’re doing it on purpose. Not getting it just to spite me. You know how much this means to me—don’t you?”

  He took a deep breath, holding the phone down by his hip while he massaged his brow with the other hand. “I suppose you want me to think it’s my fault, then,” he began again, raising the phone to his mouth. “My fault you don’t get it. My fault you don’t understand. Well, all right. I can take this one on the chin for you.”

  The tinny voice chittered agitatedly, but Lutz ignored it. He ended the call with a swipe of his thumb and tossed the phone onto the bed. It bounced once and clattered into a wall before tumbling to the carpet.

  Outside, the winter wind picked up, buffeting Jill’s hair around her face. She wished she could feel the cold instead of this terrible, swampy, soporific heat that clogged her veins and lightened her limbs. She knew she should be terrified, but she could not manufacture the requisite panic, even when her eyes swung down to the ground seven stories below. Her brain purred along at half-power, like it had when Lutz first took her, her synapses clicking sluggishly, pared down to basic flesh-functions. Breathe. Shiver. Blink. Wait.

  Her neck craned forward, and her jaws moved: she heard her own voice come out, strange and stiff from disuse. “Are you watching, Heart-Brecker,” she called out, and far beneath her, Kait Brecker took a step backward.

  “Lutz…” she called out in a voice just as strange and stiff as her own. “What are you going to do with her?”

  A smile slashed Jill’s mouth open—she could only imagine that same knife’s-edge grin on her lips, showing teeth that were not her teeth anymore.

  “It’s New Years,” she said. “I thought we could watch the ball drop.”

  Then her foot pushed off the ledge, and the earth rushed up at her like a wave.

  * * *

  Jill felt the stock of the long hunting rifle punch into her shoulder, and the blast that followed seemed to crack the sky in two. She knew the shoulder would bruise—but in the moment, the pain was packed under layers of gauze as her heartbeat shuttled acid-hot adrenaline through and through her slender frame. Beside her, she heard her father’s breath catch in his throat with a small hup sound, a noise he would make whenever he heard a piece of news and had not decided yet how he would react. Jill knew she shouldn’t take her eyes off the valley, but she dragged her gaze away, looking at her father in profile. His thin, windswept hair tumbled out backwards beneath the flap of his rabbit-lined bomber hat, and his jaw was set like a statue of a jaw, rigid and angular and utterly inscrutable. He had the big field glasses pressed to his eyes, staring down into the tall scrub-grass at the bottom of the valley. For a moment he nibbled his lower lip, adjusting the focus on the binoculars.

  “He’s moving,” he said in a voice as level as the horizon. “He’s going to run, he’s—no. He’s down. He’s down, Jilly. You got him.”

  The two of them were nestled behind a slanting white boulder that looked down into the wide golden dell, dotted with patches of scrub and the drifting amorphous shadows of clouds. The land seemed to fall away beneath them, stretching toward the pale horizon in every direction Jill looked. There was another low hill off to the right, and the res
t of the herd was bounding toward it, heading into the low sun. Without the scope on the rifle, to Jill the pronghorn looked like blobs of cotton, bobbing only slightly with every long galloping stride. Their backs barely seemed to move as their powerful legs churned beneath them, bearing them to safety.

  Jill’s father rose slowly to his feet, adjusting his bomber hat atop his head. The field glasses hung at the middle of his chest. She waited for him to look at her, but his gaze stayed down-valley, his eyes shaded under the fringe of rabbit’s fur. “Get your pack and follow me down. We’re going to lose the light soon, behind that next rise. We don’t want anybody to twist an ankle, do we?”

  “No, Dad.” She looked down the slope, realizing she had lost track of the tussock where her pronghorn had toppled out of sight. In truth, she had not even seen the animal fall at all. She had been on dozens of hunts with her father and seen more than a few beasts fall, but this was the first time she’d been allowed to carry the big Winchester rifle, at least while they were off the practice range. She had been preparing to pull the trigger all week, but in that instant, amidst the clap of mind-shattering thunder, she had been afraid to watch the animal die. Or, if she missed, that the pronghorn would turn and look at her before it bolted. That it would remember her face. Remember what she had tried to do.