Mountain Madness

by Daniel Pyle

  Walking past the table where they had shared their early dinner, Libby looked for the group of girls Trevor had been charming before she’d gone to get her refill.

  Jesus, if I lose him over sixteen ounces of Mountain Dew, I’ll never ever forgive myself.

  The girls clustered together near the back of the gathered onlookers, shuffling their feet and biting at their lips but looking otherwise undisturbed. One of them would have screamed if someone had jerked Trevor right out from under their noses, wouldn’t they? Kids these days weren’t that desensitized. She pushed through the crowd, ignoring half a dozen varying degrees of protestation, and grabbed the shoulders of the first of the girls she reached.

  “Please.” The word came out like the hiss from a broken steam pipe. “Where did he go?”

  The girl’s eyes bulged. “Wh…who?”

  “Trevor.” Libby gave the girl a quick shake and heard a woman somewhere behind her gasp. “My son.” Shake. “Trevor.” Shake shake. “You were just talking to him.”

  Libby looked left and then right, ignoring the non-responsive girl, staring past hairy legs and grungy sneakers to see if maybe her son had simply fallen or was kneeling on the ground and out of immediate sight. “Trevor!”

  One of the girl’s friends, a blonde-haired pixie, stepped forward and plucked Libby’s hands off her friend’s shoulders. “He left, ma’am.”

  It wasn’t only the ma’am that got through to Libby, it was the calm and rational authority in the girl’s voice. For a moment, Libby was looking at a negotiator or some sort of diplomat, a future world leader; then the girl said, “Just chill, okay,” and the moment passed. Libby ran her hands through her hair and gave the doe-eyed girl a quick apology before turning back to the pixie.

  “Did you see where he went? Any of you?” She scanned the rest of the girls and the crowd around them. “Somebody must have seen.”

  They shook their heads, all mute and sorry looking.

  “There’s a candy shop up that way a ways,” the pixie said, tilting her head away from the carousel. “He coulda gone there.”

  Libby’s gaze flicked in the direction the girl had indicated, and she shook her head. “But you were talking to him. He just got out of line and headed off without saying a word, and none of you looked to see where he was going?”

  The pixie shook her head and said only, “I’m sorry.”

  Libby wanted to scream. She’d had her back turned for a few seconds, maybe five, surely not long enough for Trevor to meander his way out of the crowd so casually that no one even noticed which direction he’d gone.

  At least nobody grabbed him—somebody would have noticed that. But she was hardly relieved. Kidnapped or simply wandering, Trevor was still gone, and she had an idea finding him this time would be harder than turning into the cereal aisle.

  She hurried away from the girls and the rest of the unhelpful crowd, too worried about her son to let the scene she’d made or the pity-filled eyes tracking her progress embarrass her.

  Libby rushed toward the candy store. Trevor wouldn’t have disobeyed her so deliberately, but she had no idea where else to look or what other alternatives to pursue. She’d come close enough to smell the licorice when another option, as sometimes happens, presented itself. The barrel-chested man standing stoically beside the cell phone kiosk cocked his head, and for the first time since setting down her soda, Libby felt her heart slowing down and her brain speeding up.

  Thank God. She turned away from the candy store and hurried instead for the cross-armed security guard.

  FIVE

  DAVE MOVED TOWARD the small house. You might have called it a lumber if he hadn’t been so surefooted, so eerily quiet. He stepped over the discarded tennis ball and across a long length of garden hose that had all but disappeared beneath the tall grass like a scar beneath an untrimmed beard. He’d never come this close; on his previous visits, he’d kept to the woods, stayed hidden even during nighttime hours, when it would have been easy enough to spy on the boy and his mother through their drooping window curtains. The place was even shabbier than he’d realized. Scaly paint hung from the siding like loose, dead skin, and a ring of grass and dirt stains around the perimeter spoke of careless weed-whacking and untreated rain and snow damage. Dave climbed a pair of craggy steps to the back door. The weeds growing from the cracked concrete exemplified the home’s pitiful landscaping.

  His own home wasn’t exactly a paradise, wasn’t really a home at all (over time he’d gone from thinking of it as a prison to considering it a sort of base of operations), but that was different. This house was meant for a family. Dave had no family. Not anymore. Not yet.

  He pulled on the screen door first, spied a simple disengaged hook and eye closure and reached for the knob of the inner door, which was likewise unsecured.

  He slipped inside. The knife in his right cargo pocket thunked against the doorframe, but the sound was faint, nearly inaudible even to Dave himself. His footsteps weren’t much louder. A two-person dinette set occupied a shadowy alcove on his left, the table covered in papers and bills, the front leg of one of the chairs splintered so badly it couldn’t possibly have supported an adult. From his place just inside the back door, he saw a sofa and one arm of a recliner in the adjoining living room, but he didn’t give any of those things much more than a casual glance. The dark-haired woman stood at the kitchen sink, not ten feet away, and he’d made it halfway to her before the muscles in her back so much as tensed.

  She’d been washing her hands. The splashing faucet sprayed the dish-cluttered sink and most of the countertop around it. A worn washer ring. Dave could have fixed it in a couple of minutes.

  The boy must have been somewhere deeper in the house, his bedroom or maybe a bathroom. Dave stopped in the center of the kitchen and watched the woman shut off the water and dry her hands on an incongruously fancy dishtowel. He hadn’t closed the door behind him—the wind blew it all the way open now, and it knocked against the wall with a single sharp tap.

  Whether the woman was responding solely to that sound or had also somehow sensed his presence, Dave wasn’t sure, but he watched her spin toward him with ravenous anticipation. He’d never come so close to her, never seen her face from less than a hundred feet away. He’d sometimes wondered if she would be clear skinned and beautiful, or heavily wrinkled and haggish. Blue eyes or green? Brown? He almost licked his lips.

  Her nose was a finely shaped wedge, pert with a pair of inconspicuous nostrils, like something out of a fairy tale, elfish. There had been fairy tales when he was very young. They were one of the things he remembered. One of the things he’d been allowed to remember.

  If she had kept her mouth shut, Dave would have gone to her for a closer look at the perfect little nose, might even have given it a friendly kiss.

  Instead, she screamed.

  Her mouth might have been the entrance to a strange miniature cave, her teeth pale, blunt stalactites and stalagmites, her scream the shrill squeal of a million flitting bats. Startled, Dave almost took a step back, but a more basic instinct took quick control, and he stepped forward instead and punched her in the eye.

  He’d meant only to shock her into silence, maybe knock her off balance a little so he could sweep in and steady her, soothe her, but his fist seemed to have the effect of something fired from a cannon, and she crumpled to the floor. Her head bounced twice on the cracked linoleum and then lolled. Dave heard footsteps and heavy breathing behind him and turned far enough around to see the boy, standing frozen in the doorway leading into the living room.

  “Hello, Georgie.” Dave smiled at the boy and knelt on the floor beside the temporarily silent woman. “Don’t you worry about me and Mommy—we’re just having a little talk.”

  The boy opened his mouth in an almost exact imitation of his mother, but the sound that came from his little cave was very different: a single short squeak like the hinge on a rusty gate. On the floor, the woman had come to and gotten herself up on her
elbows.

  “Run.” She didn’t scream it, just said it flatly, the way she might have told him to finish his broccoli.

  “Hey now,” Dave said, “let’s not—”

  The boy made a single clumsy move to the right, but Dave flew across the room in two giant steps and caught the kid by his slender bicep before the boy could do much more than shift his footing.

  “Zach!” The woman scrambled on the floor, trying to get to her feet, but Dave had definitely done more damage than he’d intended—she got halfway up twice and fell back onto her rear end both times.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Dave said to the boy, talking quickly, wanting to get the words out before the woman could stand, wanting him to understand. “I’m here to help you. I promise I’ll save you. I swear.”

  The look the boy gave him might easily have been confused for fear, but Dave recognized it for what it must really have been: awe.

  He led the kid into the kitchen, to the spot on the floor where his mother still lay squirming like a flipped turtle. “We’re all going to be all right now.”

  On the floor, the woman said something Dave couldn’t quite hear.

  “What’s that?”

  “My husband.” She spit the word at him. “Husband…in the other room. We’ve got a gun. He’ll—”

  Dave smiled and shook his head. “Oh, Mommy. We all three of us know that’s an outright lie.” He waggled his finger at her, still smiling. “If there was a husband,” he continued, “you wouldn’t need me here at all.”

  The woman stared at him blankly for several long seconds and then turned to her son and repeated, “Run,” this time with a little more conviction.

  Dave tightened his grip on the kid before he could think about obeying and frowned down at the woman. “I don’t think you understand what’s happening here,” he said.

  From the way she looked back up at him, Dave wondered if maybe she really didn’t.

  “It’s my birthday,” he said, shifting his gaze back and forth from mother to son, wanting to hug the both of them to his chest and weep into their hair. “Time to take my place. I’m going to make you whole.”

  The woman shook her head. The boy went suddenly slack, and Dave had to look to make sure he hadn’t fainted. Except for his single squeak, the boy hadn’t made a sound. He wasn’t a mute, Dave knew. He’d heard him mumbling to himself in the back yard many times, eavesdropped as he called in to an imaginary airfield from the corner of his tree house while he pretended to pilot his way to earth, listened to him back-talking invisible foes between jump kicks and punches. He looked away from the kid. He’d talk when he was ready.

  “I know you wish I could have got here sooner,” he said to the woman. “I’m sorry I couldn’t. I had things to do first. I needed to be ready.”

  He let go of the boy and reached down to take the woman’s trembling hand. The flesh around her eye had already darkened and puffed. She squinted at him.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “Who—” She coughed, shook her head a little, and tried again. “Who the hell are you?” His fingers brushed against her knuckles, and she pulled her hand away as quickly as if she’d stuck it into a blazing fire.

  Dave chuckled a little at this and leaned forward. He caught her fingers in his own and gave them a little squeeze. “You know who I am.”

  She stared and didn’t try to pull her hand away again.

  “I’m Daddy.”

  Something behind him moved.

  “Mom?” A soft voice, almost girly.

  Dave looked over his shoulder, saw the boy backing toward the cabinets, and started to say something to him, but a sudden, stinging pain on the left side of Dave’s face cut him off. His hand darted to his cheek and came away covered in shiny red blood. The woman’s hand streaked up for another blow, but Dave caught it deftly in midair despite blurry vision and pain so agonizing he wanted to scream. She’d scratched his eyeball, but she hadn’t blinded him. Not quite. Blood slid over his lips and onto his chin. It sprayed across her face when he said, “Why would you do that?”

  Her fingernails jutted from her hand like the talons of some wild animal, dripping his blood, the smallest of them broken off just above the cuticle but the rest still wickedly sharp and gleaming. He squeezed her wrist hard, heard breaking bones and squeezed even harder. The boy screamed now in a way that made it seem as if he’d been doing it all along. Dave let go of the woman long enough to punch her in the face again. This time, his fist connected with her perfect elf’s nose and drove it into her skull. Dave couldn’t hear the crunching cartilage over the boy’s continued shrieking, but he felt it. Her blood gushed across her cheek and mixed with the sprayed droplets of his own. He grabbed hold of her broken wrist again and used his other hand to reach into his cargo pocket.

  He wouldn’t tolerate disrespect like that. No, sir. Not for one second. He wrapped his fingers around the rubbery grip and brought out the first of his weapons.

  The woman opened her mouth. Beg, Dave thought, now she’ll beg. He would have. But when she spoke, she did so in a heavy gurgle that reminded Dave of a character he’d seen in a movie years before, a movie he could no longer quite remember, and she uttered just a single word.

  “Rnnnnnn,” she said, both her good eye and her bad rolling into the back of her head. “Rrrnnnnn.” The word was no more articulate the second time. She coughed out a blood-tinted wad of phlegm and then screamed, “RUN!”

  Behind him, Dave heard the back door slam. He ignored it. He knew where Georgie would run, and he could deal with him later.

  He held the knife between her face and his own, twisted it through the air like a hypnotist trying to put her under. “I don’t know what kind of a relationship you think we’re gonna have,” he said to her, still spinning the knife, “but if you think I’ll let you act that way in front of our son, you’re dead wrong.”

  She groaned and looked squarely into his eyes. “Fug you,” she said and spit into his throbbing eye.

  Dave grabbed hold of her by the blouse with his free hand and lifted her to her feet. The movement momentarily sandwiched her broken wrist between the two of them, and she howled even after Dave had pushed her far enough away to relieve the pressure. Blood, spittle, and sweat dripped into a puddle on the floor between their feet.

  “I was wrong about you,” Dave said. He wrapped his fist up so tightly in her shirt that two of its buttons popped off and fell into the mess on the floor. “I thought if the boy was right, you’d have to be right, too.”

  He held the knife up again and contemplated the perfectly honed edge. “You’re not,” he said, looking back at her dripping face. He saw the fear in her eyes, but also the respect hiding somewhere deep behind. She was right to respect him. He’d earned it.

  He pushed her to arm’s length with his clutching fist and jammed the hunting knife high into her midsection, just below her sternum. He twisted the blade once, forcefully, and then drew the knife down her abdomen to her pelvis. The mess of innards that came spilling across his hand felt warm and sticky and smelled like shit.

  She hadn’t screamed again, this woman whose name Dave didn’t know, but when he pulled the knife free and stepped back from her, she did make a long guttural sound in the back of her throat. Dave thought she would vomit, but instead she let loose a strange kind of snort that clouded the air around her face with a faint pink mist.

  The woman dropped to her knees and slid a little on the newly expanded mess. She clutched feebly at her eviscerated organs but succeeded less in reclaiming them than in tearing them to shreds with those razor-blade fingernails. Dave watched her struggle. This wasn’t quite the same as gutting a deer or a rabbit, where the thing was dead before you did your slicing and dicing. He stepped to the woman, grabbed hold of her hair, and wrenched her head back until she was staring up past his face and at the ceiling. She grabbed the cuff of his shirt with one of her wet hands, but then lost hold and slid again in the mound of her i
ntestines.

  Dave swung the knife, cut halfway through her neck, pulled the weapon free and swung again. This time it came out dripping on the other side, and the woman finally dropped dead to the floor.

  Backing away from the carnage, Dave looked down at himself. Christ. He’d ruined his clothes. That would teach him not to change into his good duds before he knew for sure the bloodshed had ended. Wishful thinking, he supposed. He wiped the dirty blade on his already soiled pant leg and deposited it back into his cargo pocket.

  He had been stupid to take the woman for granted. He saw that now. He’d been too focused on the boy, too single-minded. In the end, he guessed, this had all turned out for the better. A boy couldn’t grow up with such a disobedient harpy for a mother. Dave had come to save the boy; he hadn’t realized until now just how much he would be saving him from.

  He moved to the counter beside the sink and picked up the towel on which the woman had dried her hands for the last time. He swabbed the bulk of the blood from his hands and then rubbed at his face. The claw marks on his eye and cheek burned, one spot in particular near the corner of his mouth. He probed tenderly at the area with his fingertips and found something small and hard buried in his flesh. He pulled it free. Round at one end, jagged at the other, painted a subtle white: the woman’s missing fingernail. He dropped it to the floor and used the towel to stop up the freshly welling blood.

  There was no sense in getting completely cleaned up yet—that would have to wait until after he’d secured the boy—but he wanted to clear off at least the runny stuff. The feel of the stinking gore dripping down his face and neck sickened him. It felt like he’d been sprayed by a dying skunk. He ran his hands across his face one last time, decided he’d done what he could for now, and dropped the crusty towel on the floor beside the body.