Cold Heart

by Chandler McGrew

  She crouched deeper into the shadows of the alders and shivered, clutching Clive's radio tightly in her hands and praying that the demons in her head would leave her alone, as the four-wheeler whined away down the trail.

  2:25

  CLIVE WAS STILL WARM and his flesh was soft beneath his clothing. Dawn patted the cloth and discovered the keys instantly. But getting them out was another matter.

  His bloody face was only inches from hers and she was terrified that, just as she slipped her hand into his pocket, he would reach up and grab her in his dead embrace and pull her tightly to him. Goose bumps covered her entire body.

  She fought her fingers down into his pants pocket and weaseled at his keys with her fingertips until she snagged the ring and jerked and worried it out, backing hastily away from Clive's corpse.

  Clive never moved.

  But all the keys were much too large to fit the lock. She flung them across the room in disgust and went to find a hammer. But now it, too, had proven ineffectual. She dropped it back into the toolbox and stared at the hasp.

  Behind her, through the sliding door, she heard the distant sound of the four-wheeler and her breathing quickened. She had to get away. If she wasn't out of the clearing before El came down the trail again, she was dead. A gust of wind slapped her hard in the face as she started to step outside.

  A tiny voice came from inside the store and she nearly peed her pants.

  It was a nasal whisper and her first panicked thought was that it was Rita, that she was still alive and calling for help. Dawn stepped back into the shed and listened.

  “Rita? Clive?”

  The voice was scratchy and low, but it sounded like Micky Ascherfeld.

  Dawn stared into the store. The growl of the fourwheeler was getting nearer. She made a decision. Closing the big sliding door but not latching it, she slipped back into the store.

  The voice returned. “Rita? Clive?”

  This time Dawn recognized it as coming from a radio. She glanced under the counter and there, beside the cash drawer, found a small handheld transceiver. She picked it up and fumbled for the transmit button.

  2:27

  HOLDING THE RADIO AGAINST her cheek, Micky closed her eyes and tried to compose herself. Dawn chattered into the radio and Micky struggled to make sense of what the girl was saying.

  The teenager was hysterical. She wouldn't let go of the transmit button. But Micky understood enough to know that El had been very busy and that she had been incredibly lucky in her movements. If she had stayed home and not gone to visit Aaron, she would no doubt be dead. It appeared that just about everyone else was.

  Not only dead either.

  Not according to Dawn.

  The way Micky figured it, El had killed Aaron first. Then there must have been a very brief cooling-off period. El probably went back down the trail as far as Damon's place before crossing back over the creek.

  And if Damon hadn't been off in the woods with Marty or Stan, he'd be dead now too.

  That close.

  Then maybe, instead of crossing over to the Glorianus place, El might have gone straight after her. If he had walked up the path to greet her, she'd have been frightened by his sudden appearance. But not frightened enough to run for her pistol. He'd have killed her just as he had the others.

  It sounded as if Howard had just happened to show up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then El continued down the far side of the trail to the store. There he murdered Clive and Rita.

  “Dawn!” Micky shouted into the radio. “You have to get out of there. He's coming back. He's coming back right now.”

  There was an unwelcome stretch of silence. “He's already here.”

  Micky squeezed the radio even tighter.

  “Hide,” she said. “Hide now. I'm coming.”

  “Don't leave me.”

  The sound of the girl's plaintive voice cut Micky like a knife. She knew what Dawn was feeling. She knew exactly what she was feeling.

  “I won't,” Micky promised. “But you have to tell me before he gets close. I don't want him to hear me talking. And you don't talk, either. You understand?”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  Should she lie? The girl might hear that in her voice if she did.

  “No,” she said.

  “Then what are you going to do?” said Dawn.

  What the hell are we going to do?

  “We have radios. That's a start. Now we know where he is and what he's doing. Dawn, you need to hide.”

  Micky thought that she heard the throaty growl of the four-wheeler over the radio but it was probably just static as Dawn clicked off. Micky glanced up at her cabin and noticed a flickering light through the front window.

  Was there any chance at all that El had missed the Glock?

  She raced up the front steps and through the door. The stench of smoke and melting plastic assailed her. The light had not been a lantern as she had thought, but flames trickling down the table leg.

  Melted plastic created a violet liquid fire that dripped off the tabletop and puddled on the floor. Acrid smoke stung Micky's eyes. The smell was coming from her pistol, set in the center of her worktable. She pulled the collar of her shirt up over her nose and, squinting, rushed to the gun.

  What El had done to her pistol was bizarre.

  He had removed the gun's magazine. Then he'd used her propane torch, melting plastic glasses and bottles into and over the pistol, melting the gun itself—the Glock being mostly plastic resin—turning it into some kind of weird statuette. Micky's first instinct was to claw the misshapen pistol out of its plastic tomb but, even if the slight touch hadn't singed her fingertips, the gun was obviously useless.

  She grabbed her dishpan and slopped the soapy water over the table, stomping out the flames that remained on the floor.

  “He's coming in.”

  Dawn's staticky voice cut through the smoke. Micky wanted to claw her way through the radio to the girl.

  She knew the layout of the store. She'd had dinner often enough with Clive and Rita. She'd helped Rita ransack her one clothes closet, trying to decide what to wear, the day of her and Clive's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. There weren't many places for a sixteen-year-old girl to hide in the building. Under the bed. In that one narrow closet. Under the counter in the store or back in the workroom. If El made any kind of search, he was certain to find her.

  It was a miracle that she and Dawn had survived this long. If Aaron was dead and Terry and Howard, then El would surely have made certain of Marty and Stan before crossing the creek to the store. And he was destroying the weapons. That was what the popping had been about. He'd been destroying all of the ammo at the store.

  She threw on a jacket and slipped the radio into one of the pockets.

  But she needed a gun.

  And there was only one place she could think of where she might find one now.

  But the thought of going there chilled her to the bone.

  2:30

  MARTY AND STAN WERE arguing as they always did, standing in the middle of the trail with snowflakes the size of silver dollars whipping around them, facing one another with rifles across their arms. Neither smiled and both stood spraddle-legged across the narrow path.

  “If you want to go back and get your pack, then go get it,” said Marty, glowering.

  “So then I bring back all the supplies,” said Stan, his face reddening.

  “I wasn't going for supplies. I thought we were going down to see if there was trouble.”

  “We might as well make the trip worthwhile,” said Stan. That made perfect sense to him. Why waste all that energy, then come back empty-handed? The gunfire and the explosions were probably just El blowing off steam. They'd get down to the store, have a good laugh, then pick up enough supplies so that they wouldn't have to hike back down for a couple of weeks. That seemed easy enough for even Marty to understand.

  “The trip will be worthwhile if we get there and everyone is al
l right,” said Marty.

  “Why wouldn't everyone be all right?”

  Marty shook his head. “Are you an idiot?”

  “Don't call me an idiot,” said Stan.

  “I was just asking,” said Marty. “You want to go back, go back. I'm going down to see what the shooting was about.”

  Stan glared at him like a frustrated twelve-year-old. Marty turned around and started down the trail without looking back. Before he'd gone ten yards, Stan hurried to catch up.

  “Goddammit, Marty!” said Stan, huffing up behind.

  Marty shook his head and kept on walking.

  2:32

  EL KNELT ON THE floor inside the front door of Cabels’ Store. He had Clive's lever-action carbine in his left hand and his right was on the butt of the pistol. He glanced over at the boxes that he had tossed on top of Rita's shotgun. He'd taken a liking to the gun. Something about the age and wear. All his other weapons were shiny and new.

  But he hadn't wanted to leave it out in the open.

  What if Rita or Clive started moving around and found it?

  Meager sunlight filtered through the snow outside, gleaming silver across the ash on the wood floor. El studied the neat, half-moon form of the tip of a bootheel, in the very edge of the ash trail.

  He held his fingertips over it and it disappeared. It occurred to him that it might not be a print at all but something that had fallen into the ash. A jar lid perhaps.

  But there was nothing like that around and if there had been, then where was it now? The wind couldn't have carried it away and not disturbed the bed of ash.

  He glanced around the inside of the store and tried to remember exactly how he had left it. But when he had last been inside he had been in one of his cold funks and when one of them came over him he remembered little about them later. They were just collages of sound and light and violent heat that seemed to be inside and outside of him at the same time. Sometimes when he was in a state like that he seemed to experience things beyond the perceptive ability of normal human beings.

  But that didn't surprise him.

  He knew he wasn't like other people.

  He occasionally heard odors, for instance, or felt as though he was seeing sound. The touch of a rough-hewn tabletop could elicit long-forgotten tastes and smells, just as it always did when he was inside Micky Ascherfeld's cabin.

  Now, resting on his left knee, the front door nearly closed but wafting cold air across his face, he ran a finger along the edge of the imprint, and the soft dusty feel of the ash sent a shiver up his spine.

  It was only wood ash.

  Not soft and flaky and littered with bits of bone like the ashes of a human being. But it was so sensual to him that he lifted his fingertips to his lips and licked the ash off of them, savoring the dry, dusty grit against his teeth.

  He squinted at the impression in the ash and wondered what had caused it.

  His original plan was already half-completed.

  Although it had started suddenly and not exactly as planned, long before nightfall it would be done.

  Everyone who had to go would be gone and the valley would be purified. When the killing was complete he would return to each and every homesite and torch each of them to the ground. Only his cabin would be left standing. Of course, before he set fire to the store, he intended to strip it of everything that might be of value to him, since he had no intention of ever having contact with the outside world again.

  But now the print in the ash revealed a new facet that he hadn't given a lot of thought to.

  What if the original inhabitants of McRay could not be induced to leave, once they were dead?

  That might be worse than having them alive.

  Would he be forced to live in a valley surrounded by malevolent ghosts?

  El knew what ghosts could be like.

  He brushed the print away brusquely with his fingertips and stood, still holding the rifle by the barrel. He followed the trail of ash with his eyes, right up to the door of the phone room.

  He knew whose print it was in the ash. He just couldn't figure out how it had gotten there. A tiny tendril of fear ran from his gut to his groin. He leaned the rifle against the windowsill and pushed the door closed without taking his eyes from the telephone room.

  A thought flickered across his mind and he retrieved the shotgun and placed it beside the carbine.

  He stepped over the ash and edged around the woodstove, drawing the pistol and cocking it as he did so. There were six fresh shells in the gun. If he had to, he could cut Rita Cabel in half with it. But now he didn't know if that would be sufficient.

  She was already dead.

  If she was up and walking around, would a gun stop her?

  And if Rita was moving, then what about Clive?

  El glanced into the darkness of the workshop. And although he could not see anything in the gloom, he knew that Clive knew he was there.

  A whistling noise caused El to jerk to his left and sweat trickled down the back of his neck. But it was only the wind outside. He ran his tongue along his upper lip and tasted the salt and ash. The gun was heavy in his hand and he brought his left hand up to steady it.

  The fear, as it grew, excited him.

  He savored fear in a way that he knew other men could not. That was just one of the things that made him different. That and the fact that he knew—in a clinical way—that other men felt something when they killed.

  Pity.

  Sorrow.

  Elation.

  Release.

  El felt none of those things. What he did feel was sensory perceptions as acute as those of any wild animal. When he killed he smelled the blood. He tasted fear in the air. He had the same sensation that a hawk has when its prey quivers and then grows motionless in its talons.

  It wasn't emotion.

  It was a more feral sense. An animal feeling of security. Of domination.

  The only real human emotion that El had ever experienced was fear. And so he came to cherish fear the way other people cherished love or exaltation. He sometimes confused fear with these.

  El didn't long for fear, or place himself in situations where it would come. He wasn't a thrill addict. He was devoid of the need for any emotion. But when fear did come he didn't react the way a normal person would. He let the fear ride over him, enjoying the quivering of the skin in the middle of his back. Pleased by the pleasant dampness in his palms, the slight quickening of his heart and lungs.

  He let it build until he was full to bursting with it.

  The he began to draw strength from it.

  His hands shook. He was inside and outside of his own body at the same time, watching his fear the way a scientist observes the actions of a rat trapped in a maze.

  He walked slowly around the stove, keeping his eyes on the door to the phone room but his ears peeled for any movement behind him. He was still licking his lips but there was no moisture on his tongue.

  Rita lay on her side, against one leg of the table. There was ash around her on the floor and a thin dusting of ash on her pants, shirt, and face. Her eyes were gone. They had bothered him before. So he'd cut them out.

  He had to. He hated the thought of them looking at him. Mocking him. Following him. Hunting him. The first eyes El had ever taken had been his mother's.

  His mother had come back to haunt him too.

  Nasty slut.

  El had killed her in Texas. In the living room of the trailer they shared.

  But she'd kept staring at him. When he cut her eyes out he'd been able to end her tyranny forever. Because he left her in Texas. But he wasn't planning on leaving McRay and he couldn't allow Rita and the others to haunt him.

  He knew what to do about it.

  He pushed open the door and walked boldly across the ash. The fear was thick on him now and he reveled in it. He put the pistol back in its holster, reached out with shaking fingers and grabbed the sleeve of Rita's blouse.

  Why did she have to keep movin
g around?

  Did she and Clive know the store so well they could walk around blind?

  Could they find him and kill him in his sleep?

  There was only one way to be certain that no one would be able to come back and haunt him.

  Of course now he knew that he had to go back and finish the job on the others.

  2:40

  DAWN SLID ON HER belly along floorboards polished by years of abuse from booted feet. She knew she was crazy to leave her hiding place beneath the bed. But curiosity was driving her wild.

  After the motor of the four-wheeler died she lay there on her back trying to breathe naturally, gripping the bed frame to still the tremors that wracked her body. She watched the bedroom door like a hawk, waiting for El to return.

  She heard the front door open. Felt a draft stir the spread where it hung just barely covering the frame. She waited and waited but there was no sound from below.

  Finally, she heard him.

  He was talking to himself again but his voice sounded weird and amplified. She knew from the direction and the sound that he was inside the phone room with Rita. The small ceilingless cubicle acted as a megaphone, sending his voice up the stairs.

  He was talking to Rita again. “You're not going to follow me around.”

  Dawn stared at the dusty metal bedsprings inches from her face, listening.

  “My mother followed me. The bitch. But I stopped her. Now I'm going to stop you.”

  Dawn could hear him grunting and something scratching.

  “I should have known,” said El. “But you won't follow me now.”

  Dawn slid slowly out from under the bed, careful not to snag her clothes or make a sound. She crawled silently out the door onto the landing, dreading the open space. She felt like a mouse, crossing a wide kitchen floor.

  “That's one.”

  There was a nasty sucking sound and Dawn didn't really want to know what was happening. But a macabre hand pushed her forward. She slid along until she could just see the back of El's head over the balcony, between the raw spruce limbs that Clive had barked and then varnished and bolted along the landing as a railing. El was moving his head this way and that and Dawn bravely lifted her own head to see better.