Mountain Madness

by Daniel Pyle

  He heard the tailgate squeak back into place, and the leash went suddenly lax when the dog stopped ahead of him.

  “It’s okay,” said Zach. “It’s just the truck.” He reached down to pet the dog’s head, a barely visible gray spot in the dark. Manny relaxed somewhat at Zach’s touch, swished his tail a few times across the floor.

  Dave brought the smaller boy into the room with them and flipped on an overhead light.

  Zach saw the dining room table first. It was larger than their own table back home, but a little more worn, the legs curved and uneven. Zach could tell it was the kind of table that wobbled if you placed something on it, or bumped against it, or maybe even if you looked at it funny. The seats of the chairs bowed, and some of the spindles making up their backs were splintered or missing altogether.

  The linoleum was cracked in some places, bubbled in others, as if things had been buried beneath and a few of them had escaped. The walls had floor to ceiling vertical stripes every couple of feet that might have been old glue, like maybe wallpaper had hung there at one time.

  The man brushed against Zach, and the dog jumped up to its feet, tail motionless, tense. Then Trevor was beside him and taking his hand the way only small children will: without hesitation or embarrassment. Zach squeezed the younger boy’s fingers tight and wanted to whisper something reassuring, but he dared not speak. Talking in this place would have been like talking in church, but different in a way Zach couldn’t quite put into words.

  “This way,” Dave said, and he led them into a second dark room, not bothering with lights.

  Zach thought this guy must have night vision goggles for eyes.

  He sensed more than saw the hallway ahead, imagined it closing in around him as if he were trying to push his way through a small tunnel rather than an average-sized corridor. Except nothing touched him, nothing but the floor against his clapping sneakers and Trevor’s sweaty hand and Manny’s dog leash wrapped around his other set of fingers. The dog whined hard now, and Zach smelled something rotten, something like road kill.

  “I’ve got it all set up for you,” Dave said. He led them another few paces. Zach heard a loud clack and a click and then the sound of a door swinging open. He would have thought that in this sort of house, where everything seemed to be falling to pieces, all the doors would have creaked, but this one didn’t. It swung open almost silently.

  Trevor’s hand tugged on Zach’s. Zach tugged Manny’s leash, and they all moved forward until a sudden bright light blazed from inside the room. Zach supposed it probably wasn’t as blinding as he thought, that it was just a regular bulb in an overhead socket, but except for the truck’s headlights, he hadn’t seen a regular light bulb since Trevor Pullman’s porch, and looking into the room now, he might as well have been staring straight into the sun.

  “Don’t worry about the window,” Dave said, “You won’t have to deal with it for long.”

  Zach looked at the bare, windowless walls. A pile of blankets lay on the floor, and a second door to the right probably led into a small bathroom or a closet. A dirty glass beside the bed held an inch or so of some clear liquid that might have been water. In the corner of the room, a cracked and discolored bucket sat on the floor, surrounded by water rings and what might have been spots of rot. Zach wondered if the stink was coming from there but didn’t think so.

  “Either of you have to go potty?” Dave asked.

  Trevor let go of Zach and raised his hand like this was school.

  Zach didn’t have to go, although he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to the restroom. He hadn’t had much to drink today, and not anything since Dave had kidnapped him. This realization led to thoughts of food, and his stomach suddenly growled.

  “Okay,” Dave said to Trevor. “Make it quick.” He opened the bathroom door for the boy, and they waited in silence until the toilet flushed and a burst of water sounded from the sink.

  “I guess you feel almost at home here,” Dave said quietly, and Zach wasn’t really sure if the man had spoken directly to him or not. He didn’t reply.

  “It’s not a family home,” Dave said and stared at the ceiling. Zach couldn’t tell if he was planning something or remembering.

  Trevor came out of the bathroom, wiping his wet hands on his khaki shorts.

  “Your towel was icky,” he said, and the man stared at him for a long time. Manny whined a little, maybe impatient to be let off the leash, or maybe still worried about the stink.

  Finally, Dave turned away from Trevor and ushered the two boys into the lit room. “It’s bedtime,” he said. “Better give me the dog.” He held out his hand, and Zach let go of the leash.

  Dave swung the door shut on the two children while Manny stared in at them with huge, sad eyes. You’d have thought he was on his way to the killing room at the local pound. For all Zach knew, that wasn’t too far from the truth.

  “How about some food?” Zach said, thinking this might be his last chance to ask for God knew how long and that he probably ought to eat something whether he felt like it or not.

  Dave didn’t answer, just let the door click shut. Another sound had followed, a clacking Zach had heard when the man first opened the door, and he suddenly understood: the lock. Crazy Dave had just locked them inside. And with no food. And maybe for the rest of their lives.

  TWENTY-NINE

  DAVE WOKE UP that morning knowing this would be the best birthday of his life. He’d hung his new outfit from a crooked nail on the back of the door. The blue button-up shirt had a few wrinkles on the front, but nothing anybody would ever notice. The neatly folded cargo pants hung over an old wire hanger.

  The clothes were for later. Right now he wore only his too-tight underwear, his penis bulging against the thin material and one of his testicles peeking a little from between the seams. He was not exactly a muscle man, would never have been cast as the lead role in a film biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, but he was trim and well proportioned. At least, he thought so. He was certainly in better shape than Mr. Boots, who had a paunch and jowls and a pair of weak ankles.

  Before pushing himself off the pile of blankets, he stretched and twisted until his spine let out a series of rapid-fire cracks. He hadn’t gotten an especially sound night’s sleep—he hardly ever did—but he had spent his last night ever on the floor of the windowless room, and that made it all worthwhile. By the next morning, everything would be different.

  It felt early, and although he had no way of telling the time, no watch or direct sunlight, his mental clock was usually pretty accurate. He moved to his door and listened for snoring. He heard it, coming from across the hall through two closed doors, soft and unhealthy sounding. He smiled and turned to the closet. Inside hung both his current wardrobe and the outfits he’d worn over the years, some so small he couldn’t believe he’d ever fit inside. He guessed he could have thrown something on, one of the sets of clothes he no longer cared about, but this morning’s chore would be just as easy to do in his skivvies. He did, however, remove the item he’d hidden in the corner of the closet the week before.

  The long blade had little light to reflect, but it seemed to glow nonetheless. Dave resisted the urge to give it a practice swing. He’d practiced for two hours the day before, when Mr. Boots had been away, and a couple more swings this morning would only waste time and possibly give old Boots some early warning. He settled for squeezing the grip and smiling conspiratorially at the sword.

  He returned to the door and twisted the knob gently. The last time he’d tried to get away, he’d been twenty years old. Since that attempt, he’d pretended Mr. Boots’s mind games had sucked him in, pretended the idiot had brainwashed him, pretended and pretended and pretended. Years of good behavior had paid off: about a year ago, Mr. boots had stopped locking the door. Dave guessed he thought he had replaced the physical lock with a mental one, and Dave had been happy to let him believe it. It made his preparations much, much easier. As long as he
was home by the time Mr. Boots woke up, home and pretending to be the dutiful son/captive, he was free to do pretty much whatever he wanted. Whatever he needed.

  If he’d wanted to run away, he supposed it would have been easier now than ever, but he’d long since given up the hope of a simple getaway. Maybe Mr. Boots would catch him, maybe he wouldn’t, but it was too much of a risk. Dave had plans more important than mere escape. Plans that made it worth living in this prison of a home for just a little longer.

  With the long weapon swinging beside his hairy leg, he let himself into the hall. He’d taken it from a basement display case nearly a month earlier, along with a pair of twin knives. The basement had been a veritable armory, with guns of all calibers and blades ranging in length from several inches to nearly five feet in the case of one long, arced, decorative sword bolted to the wall. Dave had also found a single grenade, though he hadn’t known if it was usable or not. He’d left it only because it had been in a locked display case and he’d been pressed for time. Same with the guns, though he would have left those regardless of how secure they were. Up here, guns were easier to come by than pinecones, and if he’d wanted one he’d have had it a long time ago.

  The blade nicked him just a little on his right calf, enough to make him wince but not enough to maim him, maybe not quite enough to get him bleeding. He didn’t bother checking. The floorboards bent a little beneath his weight but creaked only occasionally and not nearly loud enough to compete with the snoring coming from the second bedroom.

  Dave stood outside Mr. Boots’s room for a long time, forcing himself to breathe slowly, to stay calm. He’d planned this day for almost ten years (maybe as long as twenty-three years, depending on how you looked at it); he couldn’t let a little nervousness ruin it. His muscles flexed beneath his tighty whities, and the sword grip shifted within his fingers.

  Twenty-three years of Mr. Boots. Ten years of serious planning. Only this one chance to get it right.

  He listened to be sure the snoring hadn’t stopped and then eased his way inside the bedroom.

  Mr. Boots slept with one leg sticking out of the covers, the limb a little pink and covered with curly salt-and-pepper hairs that gave the whole thing the appearance of a spiced ham. The blankets were not stretched out smoothly across the rest of his body but heaped on top of him. His face lay buried in the pillow so that, besides the head of gray hair, only one closed eye, an ear, and a little bit of beard were visible. Dave moved to the foot of the bed and rested the sword on his shoulder, a cross between a ninja and a big league slugger. Mr. Boots snored on.

  Dave had, of course, considered killing Mr. Boots hundreds or thousands of times. Probably, he’d had at least one homicidal thought about the man every single day since falling into his grasp. On more than one occasion, he’d stood in this very spot, holding one weapon or another, thinking about how the blood would smell splattered across the room, how the brains would look sliding down the wall and piling on the floor below. But he’d never gone through with it. In the beginning, he guessed he’d been too scared, too much of a sissy kid—he was adult enough now to admit it. In recent years, however, only his certainty that it wasn’t yet time, that he wasn’t ready had held him back. He’d needed to wait until he was prepared to step into his new role, and he’d finally realized that being ready was really only a matter of mathematics.

  Thirty years old. His birthday.

  He circled the bed and stopped near Mr. Boots’s head. His naked leg stood only inches from Mr. Boots’s own, which gave him a sick sensation in his stomach and a bad taste in his mouth and, for some reason, a slick feel on the tip of his ear. He cocked his head and stared at the old man one last time, and then he swung.

  The sword was a fine tool: light but not in a toyish way, maybe stronger than an ax or a baseball bat, and honed to a wicked edge. Mr. Boot’s leg came free from the rest of his body as if he were made of nothing more solid than mud. Blood sprayed across the room, the bed, and Dave, making different sounds when it splattered against the various surfaces but sounding in all cases a little like a lawn sprinkler. The leg slid first away from the body and then off the bed, its progress marked by a wet, dragging rasp. Mr. Boots’s sudden, confused screaming almost completely drowned out the thud of the dismembered appendage.

  Dave leveled the sword at the old man’s head, and when Boots turned to face him, Dave jabbed the weapon forward. It entered the man’s eye, which promptly disappeared, replaced by a streamer of vitreous fluid that oozed down his cheek like an overgrown tear. Dave moved, the other man’s spilled blood dripping down his naked chest and onto his underwear, across the flaccid but still bulging mound of his groin, along the contours of his thighs, knees, and shins, and onto the tops of his feet.

  Dave swung the sword again, this time over his shoulder like an axman splitting a log, and in a move that could not have had any thought behind it, Mr. Boots reached up to stop it with his hand. The sword descended between two of the man’s splayed fingers and sliced most of the way through his palm before it hit a tendon or a muscle or maybe a bone and stuck fast. Dave tried to jerk the blade free, but at the same time Boots pulled back his arm, wailing an old man’s gravelly scream, and the bloodied weapon slipped out of Dave’s hand.

  Mr. Boots stared at the sword with his remaining eye as if he had never seen such a thing. Perhaps he hadn’t. Dave reached for the sword’s handle, but Mr. Boots spun away, taking the weapon with him. His leg stump flapped across the bed sheets, still spraying blood, and Dave couldn’t believe the man was conscious, let alone fighting. Mr. Boots rolled out from under the bed covers, completely naked. His wrinkled skin twisted and folded, his flabby muscles wobbled. Suddenly, Dave wished he’d put on a set of clothes. He didn’t want to be naked with Mr. Boots, or even close to it, but it was too late. He had to end things now.

  Dave hopped onto the bed and kicked the old man hard in the side of the head. Mr. Boots turned back toward him, screaming and flailing, the sword still stuck in his hand and everything covered in blood. Dave reached for the handle again, got a grip on it this time, and stepped on the old man’s chest. He jerked, and the sword came free with a plop, bringing one of Mr. Boots’s fingers with it, curled around the blade like a skewered shrimp.

  This time, Dave didn’t swing, he chopped, over and over again, not aiming at anything in particular, just bringing the sword down and down again until Mr. Boots looked less like a man than a pile of raw ground chuck and the sound of the impacting weapon went from thumping to squishing to splashing.

  The blood seeped through the shredded sheets and into the mattress below. Dave stood there for a long time, breathing heavily, drenched in gore, the sword clenched in his hands, it’s blade quivering. Though not the first time he’d killed, it was the first time he’d killed a man, and it was not at all how he’d imagined it would be. He’d thought the smell would be similar to old, wet pennies, like when you cut your lip and couldn’t get it to stop bleeding, but this was thicker than that, more intense, and combined with the foul odors of feces and urine and vomit. He didn’t remember throwing up, nor did he think Mr. Boots had. Maybe the smell was simply spilled stomach juices, or maybe it wasn’t vomit at all but some similar-smelling combination of bodily fluids. Who knew? Who cared?

  Dave dropped the sword on the bed beside the vaguely humanoid pile of meat and looked at his crimson hands. He smiled.

  But he couldn’t let himself bask in the glory of his success for too long. He had a long day ahead.

  Dave crawled off the bed, stepped over Mr. Boots’s leg, and backed across the room. Today he was thirty years old, the same age his daddy had been on that rainy night twenty-three years ago. Today, Dave was the new Daddy, and he had a family to save.

  He left the bedroom and headed for the showers, thinking: Happy Birthday to me.

  THIRTY

  TREVOR SAT ON the pile of blankets with his arms wrapped around his knees, watching Zach go through the clothes in the closet and occas
ionally touching his forehead, which had finally stopped bleeding but still hurt worse than any headache Trevor had ever had.

  “Anything good in there?” he asked.

  Zach shook his head. “Some of this stuff looks like it’s a million years old.” He pulled out a funny looking shirt with stripes. A boy’s shirt, but too big for Trevor. Maybe it would have fit Zach. Trevor wondered if there was a kid living here with the crazy man, if maybe he had a son or a little brother or something.

  “Old clothes aren’t gonna get us out of here,” Trevor said and frowned at the shirt.

  “Nope.” Zach returned the shirt to the closet and closed the door.

  “Maybe you should try your mommy’s phone again.”

  Zach looked like maybe he thought that was kind of a dumb idea, but he reached into his pocket for the phone and pulled it out anyway. It was as red as a dodge ball or Superman’s cape. Zach turned on the phone and stared at the screen. The phone beeped once, and Zach’s eyes opened wide, but then it beeped again, and he frowned.

  “I had one bar for just a second,” he said. “It’s gone now.” He watched the phone’s screen for another minute, then held the power button again until the phone shut off. He flipped it closed and returned it to his pocket.

  “Maybe we should try and get outside,” said Trevor.

  “You think?” Zach said, rolling his eyes.

  “No,” Trevor said and touched his head. “I mean maybe the phone might work better outside.”

  “Well, yeah, it usually does.” Zach came over and sat down on the blankets near Trevor. “But how are we supposed to get out there? We’re locked in here, and there’s no window.”

  Trevor nodded and sat quietly for some time. “I’m hungry.”