Hellbent

by Cherie Priest

  I chalked this up in the “win” column. Distant neighbors meant no one would be listening for trouble at his place. Then I wondered if there would be dogs. Horace had called Harvey a redneck, and rednecks—in my limited experience—were like dogs.

  I don’t like dogs, and dogs don’t like me, but that’s what the knockout powder was for, wasn’t it? I saw no sense in killing somebody’s pets in the course of robbing his house. That would be bad form. And it would also be risky. Dogs are shifty fuckers—faster than they look, louder than hell, and all kinds of nosy. Dogs also smell me, right away—which is to say, they smell that something is wrong with me. Some instinctive bit of their wee, primitive brains tells them that I’m trouble. Wee, primitive brains have their uses, but I’d rather not be called out by a Doberman, if at all possible.

  On my first drive-by, I suspected someone was home at the Harvey residence. None of the lights closest to the front of the house was on, but a glow from deeper within suggested someone watching television, or possibly sitting up reading. By now it was coming up on ten thirty, so it wasn’t atrociously late for your average law-abiding mortal, and this was fine. I was patient. I’d just wait for everyone to turn in for the night, then let myself inside for a look around.

  After doing some initial scouting, I parked my car at the bottom of the hill upon which Mr. Harvey’s neighborhood sat. As far as I could tell, it was really just one long road running the length of a ridge, with houses plopped along it and not much else worth noting. I made sure the car was inconspicuously stashed (it was, behind a closed and abandoned gas station), and started to hike toward my goal.

  It was a nicer night in Portland than Seattle. Not quite as windy, and not quite as cold. I’m led to understand that this is typical, and I’m sure it has something to do with complicated jet streams and weather patterns, but I don’t really give a shit about any of it. The point is, the night was cold, but not cold enough to be brittle. And it was breezy, just breezy enough for the rustle of trees and bushes to hide the sound of my footsteps.

  I spent fifteen minutes poking through the woods, squinting to catch every splinter of moonlight and praying I wouldn’t encounter any raccoons or anything.

  I don’t like raccoons. They look … shifty, with their little burglar masks and everything. Also, they carry rabies. Can I catch rabies? Probably not. All the same, it sounds gruesome—and I think we all know that cute, fuzzy woodland creatures are not to be trusted on general principle.

  I crunched through the dark in my boots that were frankly too expensive for this sort of thing, and I counted the backyards I passed until I knew for a fact—even before I made my way around to the front of the house—that I’d found Joseph Harvey’s place.

  Uninspiring from all angles, the Harvey place was a fifties ranch house too mundane to achieve the descriptor of “midcentury.” It was in relatively good repair, but it was also accessorized with an aboveground swimming pool full of slimy leaves, an ATV up on cement blocks, and a long front porch that had a motorcycle parked on it.

  Ugh. The things some people spend their money on.

  The interior glow I’d witnessed during my drive-by was still the only sign of life within, but something was bugging me. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I just had a weird, intense feeling that something was wrong, and I haven’t survived this long by ignoring those feelings.

  I stood still, up against a side wall of the house, hoping I blended into the shadows and listening for all I was worth. I detected a steady drip, like water off a rain gutter. I heard canned applause, and what was either a baby crying a long way away, or a kitten crying much closer. Hard to tell, but I was leaning toward a kitten.

  I didn’t smell any dogs, and I didn’t see any sign of dogs, either—no water bowls, leashes, or coiled piles of crap to be avoided.

  From this train of thought came another: the idea that I shouldn’t be listening. I should be smelling. My nose isn’t as good as a dog’s, but it’s better than a person’s—and it was working overtime to tell me to be on guard. All around me was a prickly, sharp, electrical odor like the smell of cooked air right after a lightning strike. It insinuated itself slowly, but once I’d noticed it I couldn’t un-notice it.

  I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but the skies were clear above and I could count the stars, so it wasn’t the smell of a storm. Something else, then.

  The kitten (yes, I was sure now, a kitten) upped its caliber of wailing, hitting that pitch animals make when something is very truly wrong and they’re in no position to do anything about it. This kitten was inside the fifties ranch home of Joseph Harvey who, if my ears could be believed, was inside watching television.

  Or was he?

  The longer I stood there, feeling my shoulder blades go numb from being pressed up against the chilly bricks, the more I thought this couldn’t be right. No one sits and watches television with a yowling animal—at least, not without telling it to shut up, or throwing a pillow at it or something. And I heard no signs of a serious deep sleeper. No snoring, no sounds of apnea horking through the bedroom or living room, or wherever the TV was located.

  Of course, I told myself, if this guy can sleep through Mr. Bigglesworth’s serenade, he can sleep through a gentle home invasion.

  Did I believe this? Only halfway. But the other half of me believed that no one was inside, and no one was asleep, and the smell was getting stronger, and I was getting tense, just hanging around outside like some common felon.

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. This wasn’t a jewelry heist, or Ocean’s Eleven out in bumblefuck. This was some dude’s house, and he didn’t even have a cheesy THIS PROPERTY PROTECTED BY … sign on any of his windows. He’d probably never considered the possibility than anyone would break in, not in a million years. This was most likely a guy who left his car unlocked.

  I shimmied around to the back door—it was built into a screened-in porch—and gave it a tug. It opened with a soft squeak, stuck slightly, and the handle came off in my fingers. Ah. Not a door that saw a lot of action. I breached it, stepped lightly to the door that would actually let me into the house, and tried it. The knob swiveled without so much as a click of protest.

  The kitten had stopped meowing. It’d heard me and was coming to investigate.

  Before I could even get the door open enough to let myself inside, there it was, paws grasping out through the crack. I nudged it back inside with my foot and shut the door behind me, holding a finger up to my mouth as if any eight-week-old critter in the world knows what the universal gesture for “shush!” means. The kitten was gangly and gray, with a white smudge on its nose and murder in its eyes. Or it might’ve been peevishness. Hard to tell with those things.

  It sat down at my feet and let out a silent meow that I would’ve mistaken for a yawn if it hadn’t been so insistent about it.

  Believe it or not, I knew what it was trying to tell me. I’d have known even if I hadn’t seen that the creature’s paws were dipped in something red and delicious, and I’m not talking ketchup. I smelled blood. And I could tell, when I gave my rudimentary psychic senses a little stretch, that (the kitten notwithstanding) I was the only living person inside the house.

  Throwing caution and quiet to the wind, I dashed away from the back door and toward the blood. It was easy to follow. The house wasn’t very big and there was a whole lot of it.

  I found Joseph Harvey (I assume) lying facedown on a keyboard in front of a big, flat-screen monitor. The screen saver refused to yield what he might’ve been watching, but the rows upon rows of video game boxes told me this was a playroom, not a workroom.

  Horace had been right. Joseph was a big son of a gun. His forehead had crushed the keyboard, sending keys flying all over the place, and his slashed throat had ruined everything within about six feet of the place where he still sat, having run out of extra lives for the final time.

  Poetic, really.

  Behind me the kitten squeaked. Trails of red paw-prints
crisscrossed the room, and when the little bugger sat down, it left a bloody butt-print, too. The poor thing had been climbing all over the dead guy, trying to wake him up. Or eat him, for all I know.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I told it. “I see what you were hollering about. Um. Sorry about your owner.”

  It narrowed its eyes and meowed again, with more vigor this time.

  “What?” I asked it. “What do you want me to do? He’s already getting cold.” Then I muttered, “My advice is to pray that your next owner is richer.”

  This reminded me I wasn’t just sightseeing. I was looking for a dusty old humidor filled to the brim with magical penis bones.

  My unease had not exactly lifted upon finding the bled-out corpse, and now to add to my discomfort I had the nasty suspicion that I was not going to find a dusty old humidor—and if by some amazing chance I did locate such an item, it was likely to be empty. The briefest glance around the premises told me that this guy didn’t own anything else worth stealing.

  And this was all kinds of problematic. I made a mental note to ask Horace who else knew about the penis bones, and began a systematic-but-speedy search of the place, top to bottom.

  I still couldn’t shake that other smell, the one I’d picked up outside, before the blood.

  Ozone, that’s what it was. The stink of electricity gathering, collecting, and … and … that’s when I noticed that the hairs on the back of my arm were standing up. A fast glance in the bathroom mirror revealed that the stuff on top of my head was likewise coming to attention, creating a fluffy black halo that was neither flattering nor comforting.

  Outside, I heard an incongruous rumble. I say it was incongruous because, as I already mentioned, the weather outside was clear as a bell not ten minutes previously. But I know thunder when I hear it, and it wasn’t a car backfiring, or the television—which, yes, was still playing in the living room. What a fucking waste. Turn off your TV if you’re going to hole up in the “office” and shoot zombies.

  I found the remote and turned the TV off to make doubly sure that the ambient noise wasn’t coming from the boob tube. No sooner had the last pixels imploded into a tiny blip of light than the thunder came again. And this time it was much, much closer.

  Storms weren’t supposed to move that fast, were they?

  In the kitchen, I opened all the cabinets and dumped their contents onto the floor. In the closets, I yanked all the coats and shirts and painfully tacky shoes out into the light and abandoned them. In the master bedroom, I fished under the bed and turned up absolutely nothing I wanted to touch, including a small wet hairball that the kitten had deposited with disgusting recentness.

  Nothing, nothing, and nothing.

  The humidor wasn’t hiding behind the rows of video games, and there weren’t any bookshelves upon which it might’ve been stashed. Not in the storage closet, not in the garage, which was virtually empty except for the stink of gasoline, paint thinner, and a lawn mower that hadn’t cut anything since Clinton was in office. A few tools were hung up on a pegboard; rusting containers of the previously noted smelly, flammable liquids were lined on unfinished wood shelves; and a washer and dryer were strewn with dirty laundry.

  More nothing.

  And although it was utterly irrational, at that point I knew a few things—none of them good. Call it that rudimentary psychic sense, call it woman’s intuition, call it a lifetime of bad luck and hard-earned learning experiences … but I knew that not only were the bones absolutely missing, but that whoever had taken them had killed Joseph Harvey.

  Okay, so that wasn’t such a leap of logic. But the next part was.

  I knew that I needed to get the ever-living fuck out of that house or I was going to die. I was pretty sure I was going to go up in flames, but that’s probably just my subconscious running the numbers: electricity plus flammable liquids, multiplied by the hypothetical possibility of lightning.

  I’m no good at math, but I know a very nasty word problem when I see it.

  Outside, the night was changing colors—deepening and darkening, and the rumbling from the clouds rolling in was less a crack of thunder than a constant, rolling rumble, increasing incrementally with every second I stood there considering my next course of action.

  Was it madness to assume that a freak thunderstorm was homing in on me? Oh yes, of course it was. But I’ll be the first to admit I’m more than a little crazy, and I’ll bet being crazy has saved my ass more times than I can count.

  So my next course of action was obvious: Get the hell out of that house.

  The kitten sat on the floor eyeing me with unsettling intensity. It was making a request—or trying to burn its little face into my memory, in the event I left it all alone in a house that was mere seconds from going up in a fireball.

  “Fuck it,” I declared to the house, the storm, and the kitten.

  I grabbed the animal under its belly and whipped it up inside my jacket as I ran.

  For something whose life was getting saved, the kitten wasn’t super-grateful. It wriggled and writhed against my left breast, leaving unsightly scratches that itched ferociously. But what was I going to do, leave it there? Not unless I wanted kitten flambé to haunt my nightmares.

  I could feel its wet little paws kicking, shoving, and pushing against my shirt. Good thing I was wearing black, though I still felt like this was an unfair coincidence. If I was going to ruin a shirt with blood, I ought to at least get a meal out of it.

  For a split second I considered sucking the blood off the kitten’s feet, and that’s when I realized it’d been a while since I’d eaten, and that sometimes I am honestly too gross for words when I’m hungry.

  Even a sense of imminent mortal peril cannot override my stomach, I swear.

  But the imminent mortal peril was making me paranoid and light-headed. I stumbled through the house, which was now almost entirely dark—since I’d turned off the television—and slipped in a trailing tributary of blood that had oozed out into the hall.

  I’d told the kitten that the body was getting cold, but that’d been an exaggeration, and I suppose we both knew it. The guy hadn’t been dead more than a few minutes. I had just barely missed something violent, by the skin of my teeth. I wanted to ask the small cat, “What happened here, anyway?” but my psychic powers don’t extend to animal ken. It’s not like it would’ve mattered.

  Finally I located the front door and fumbled with it until I had the dead bolt turned. I yanked the door open, except that there was one of those stupid dinky chains—so I ripped the door halfway off its hinges instead, breaking that dinky chain and flinging myself outside at a dead run.

  Above, the sky had sunk down low and close, and the death-black clouds weren’t just rolling, they were boiling. And the ozone … if that’s what it was … had grown so thick I could hardly breathe. It felt something like getting a hearty, inadvertent whiff of champagne bubbles, but without the happy promise of alcohol to follow. The air was sharp and hot, and heavy, as if the atmosphere itself were fighting me—trying to keep me inside, or keep me from running.

  I ran anyway, and when I’d barely reached the end of the driveway where the mailbox leaned at a rakish angle, a blinding column of jagged white heat snapped down from those boiling clouds and struck the satellite dish on the roof. The ensuing crack sent shrapnel of metal, plastic, and roofing tiles flying in every direction, and it made my ears ring all the way to my brain. I staggered and caught myself on the mailbox. I used it to right myself, and then to launch myself forward again—away from the sizzling aroma of tar and metal.

  The second strike took the garage, and the fireball that went up when the lightning met the paint thinners and the gasoline shoved me face-forward into a ditch beside the road—literally lifting me off my feet and throwing me. I landed on the other side, in the ditch, in a fetal-crouch roll, beside somebody else’s mailbox. I couldn’t hear much, but I could hear windows breaking and fire coughing. I hate that noise, that whooshing gasp fire mak
es when it’s so big it takes all the oxygen and turns it into a brilliant plume.

  Don’t tell me lightning never strikes twice.

  No longer dark and sleepy, the hill and its sparse neighborhood were lit up like lunch hour in the glowing red-and-gold strobe. The explosion was distilling itself down to an ordinary house fire—not that it mattered to all the blast-sheared trees within fifty yards. But hey, the fire probably wouldn’t spread since there was nothing close to feed it.

  My knees were shaking as I hauled myself up, using the across-the-street neighbor’s mailbox as a temporary crutch. I could see the fire licking up the walls, chewing on the roof, and gnawing into the interior of Joseph Harvey’s house, but I couldn’t hear any of it. I couldn’t hear anything but a high-pitched hum, and the dull, faraway chimes that I finally recognized as sirens. They sounded unreal and muffled, like toy police cars held underwater.

  I shook my head, which didn’t help. It only made everything hurt, in addition to the ringing and humming. Well, if I hadn’t tried it, I wouldn’t have known, now would I? And if nothing else, the action got me moving again.

  Sticking to the road would’ve been a bad idea. Emergency vehicles were on their way. I didn’t want to be spotted or, heaven forbid, assisted. I just wanted out of there, and back to my car, so I could flee for Seattle before anyone could stop me and ask what I was up to.

  I’m not sure what I was so afraid of. It’s not like anyone could’ve reasonably accused me of blowing up a house by striking it with lightning. Twice. I’m awesome, don’t get me wrong, but weather manipulation is altogether outside my sphere of influence. My roommate Ian can do it a little, but not (so far as I know) with the kind of laser precision that I’d just seen demonstrated.