Offspring

by Jack Ketchum

  He slashed furiously at the door, stroke after stroke thunder and lightning crackling in her ears as she steadied herself against the upper frame with one hand and clutched Melissa close and pushed off, her back scraping over the frame.

  She felt bright quick fire along her spine that was instantly absorbed by the sense of falling, an explosion of absolute freedom so stark and terrifying that her free hand clawed for control, her arm seeking balance as though she were falling through water, not air, and then just as suddenly instinctively returning to Melissa, holding her tight as the impact jolted them and she was on her back, knowing she had got it wrong somehow, and starbursts and night descended upon her all at once along with the scent of spruce and the still, warm air.

  David lay numbed with shock staring at the blank computer screen on the desk overhead.

  A phrase he recognized—he didn’t know from where—kept loping around in his head.

  The woods are dark. Are dark.

  He was aware of voices on the television and then of someone kicking it in, the smell of acrid electrical smoke almost familiar enough to evoke the memory of who he was and where—and who this surgeon was who operated on him now with naked bloody breasts in his anesthetic dream.

  He did not remember her opening his shirt but she must have, to get at what was wrong with him, because now she was tracing a thin red line with her scalpel from his collarbone down across his sternum to his stomach, a thin sound of tearing as she tugged the flesh apart.

  The anesthetic was amazing. His eyes flickered down and he could see his own organs beneath the film of welling blood, his lungs, his heart, and below them his diaphragm, stomach, liver.

  Yet there was no pain.

  He felt only an itch around his collarbone and a strange cold feeling, like drinking crushed ice in a tall summer drink—so cold you could feel it all the way down inside you.

  And it must have been a heart problem, a transplant, because he saw his surgeon reach in slowly and pull the heart free, the heart still beating firmly . . . and in his dream he saw the impossible, saw her raise it to her lips and bite down while her two assistants reached into him too, scrambling with dirty fingers for his liver.

  In his anesthetic nightmare he saw her chewing.

  His eyes went back to the computer screen—an empty blank—but it wasn’t a computer screen now, it was a heart monitor. So incredibly still and lifeless that he knew that he was dead.

  “Mommy! Wake up! Mommy!”

  Luke was shaking her. She still held Amy’s baby.

  She’d hit the pile and fallen against the side of the house, hitting her head, and she could not have been dazed for more than a moment because there was Melissa still held tightly in her arms.

  She looked up at the window and saw exactly what she had been afraid to see. The man staring down at them. Then suddenly gone.

  She got off the pile, grabbed Luke by the arm and started running through the grass.

  “I know a place!” he said.

  Melissa was crying loudly. There wasn’t a thing she could do.

  “Show me,” she said.

  The Girl had her knife to the mother of the infant’s throat and was going to cut when First Stolen raced downstairs, running for the double glass doors. The Woman stopped him. A questioning, angry look on her face.

  He has failed, thought the Girl. First Stolen has failed!

  It pleased her.

  He pointed toward the doors.

  “The child . . . a woman, a boy!”

  First Stolen was angry too, and confused. Gesturing wildly with the hammer.

  The Woman had not told them there would be any boy, nor any woman other than the one she held here by her curly red hair. Their presence had taken her by surprise.

  And that pleased the Girl too. That the Woman could be wrong.

  The Woman made a single gesture that encompassed them all—even Second Stolen, Rabbit and Eartheater who were feeding on the kill on the floor.

  Go! Follow.

  The Girl sheathed her knife and First Stolen was halfway through the doors—then he froze there like a deer paused in flight at the sudden bright lights that swept through the kitchen window, bathing the Girl and the captive woman in light, passing over them and pouring through the rear window to the other room, and they knew that they were no longer alone.

  Found it, goddammit! Steven thought as he turned left off Scrub Point Road onto the even narrower dirt road where the mailbox said Halbard. He’d been going uphill for a while and now he’d reached the top and was going down over a gentle rise. He could see the house a few hundred yards ahead, lights burning, Claire’s and another car in front. He pulled in behind Claire and set the parking brake against the incline.

  He turned off the ignition and then the headlights.

  The door opened and all he could see was a form in silhouette, followed by other, smaller silhouettes.

  His reception committee, coming out to meet him.

  What was this, a goddamn cocktail party?

  Because they just kept coming.

  They were moving around the other parked car toward the Mercedes but moving too fast, much too urgently for his liking, approaching him from both sides . . . and it occurred to him that maybe he was actually in some kind of trouble here, that maybe Claire had hired a few thugs to keep him the hell away from her and Luke. It wasn’t like her but with a woman you could never know.

  It didn’t fit though because if these were thugs then half the bastards were midgets. He couldn’t put it together. But he didn’t like the feel of it either one goddamn bit.

  He flicked the lock switch on the panel just in case. Then he turned on the headlights again. In time to see the last one running out the door.

  Carrying an ax.

  And he wasn’t any goddamn midget, either.

  He reached for the ignition. He doubted he’d ever really been scared in his life, not even seeing Marion’s body lying lifeless on the bed, seeing what he’d done to her and wondering what to do next, but he was scared now, adrenaline ripping through him like the Amtrak train to Washington, sphincter twitching dangerously. The Mercedes roared to life and he was set to put her into reverse when he remembered the emergency brake and reached down.

  He saw the woman—jesus! she was taller than he was!—reach for the ax and the man hand it over to her at the same time that he felt somebody else climb up on the trunk, the car rocking with the weight, and suddenly there were two explosions front and back that were almost simultaneous, and powdered, slivered glass everywhere, in his hair and on his face and all the hell over him.

  He grabbed for the gearshift. Through the glinting white webbing that was all that was left of his windshield he saw the figure of the woman raise the ax again and bring it down with the same terrific force a second time and as he threw it into reverse the windshield collapsed in on him completely. He screamed, hitting the gas so hard that the car shot backward, jolting him, rear bumper grinding against the rocky dirt incline, and the boy—he saw it was a boy now, some kind of boy—tumbled off the trunk beside him.

  Through the completely open windshield he could see the woman, the man and all the rest of them running, coming at him and he just kept shooting backward, hoping to hell there weren’t any trees behind him because he couldn’t remember and couldn’t see a thing through the cracked rear window and couldn’t take his eyes off them anyway, these people half-naked most of them—women with breasts bobbing as they ran and the boy who was on the trunk getting up with his dick erect, loving this, not a stitch of clothing and not hurt at all like some indestructible ghost or animal and running too. He just kept going, fuck the Mercedes, scraping over rocks, engine whining, realizing he’d been screaming all this time and was still screaming until finally he saw the headlights sweep the crossing onto Scrub Point Road.

  He hit the brake, with most of them, the ones he could see, a hundred yards away and not giving up, not by a long shot, coming on fast. He threw the
car into drive and felt her skid and tried to straighten her as the man tore out in front of his headlights, throwing something and diving, tumbling over the hood of his car at the same time and disappearing, and he felt the sudden jarring impact against his forehead over his left eye, the heavy claw hammer slashing past him and into the cracked rear window, lodging there headfirst, its handle pointing back to him like an accusatory finger.

  The dizziness was worse than any drunk he’d ever been on in his life and he barely missed a stand of white birch that seemed to appear out of nowhere, swerving around them by inches, the palms of his hands bleeding and dusted with glass, sticky where they clutched the wheel.

  He felt sick, his stomach rolling.

  He felt consciousness bleed away from him through his fingers, sliding down off his forehead and he fought it like he’d never fought before—harder even than Marion had fought him—because they were still behind him, not yet far behind him. And the damned black night loomed all around.

  10:05 P.M.

  They clocked the Mercedes at just under seventy, and though nobody exactly wanted to be bothered with a speeding ticket just then, there were enough hairpin turns along Route 6 so that it was either that or watch this joker kill himself somewhere on up ahead. Plus the car was all over the place, careening around like a wounded buzzard. Plus there was that cracked rear window.

  When they got to the flatlands past the closed dark mini-mall where Harmon’s General Store used to be, Harrison put on the flasher and siren and they pulled him over.

  He stopped so fast they nearly rear-ended him.

  Then he got out of the car.

  Peters felt his innards freeze when he did that. Because this was how cops got shot all the time, sitting ducks inside their squad cars while somebody blasted away at them through the windshield. Reflexively he hunkered down in the backseat and hoisted the .38. While Harrison and Manetti threw open their doors, got out of the car and drew on him, using the doors as protection. Which was what Peters would have done too if he hadn’t been too old and slow and fat.

  “Hold it right there!” said Manetti, and unless you could see the twitch in his cheek you wouldn’t have known he was scared to hell and back.

  “Turn around and place both your hands flat on the roof of your car. Now! Move!”

  The guy just stared at them.

  And for a moment it got pretty tense there.

  Manetti repeated his instructions.

  The guy looked bewildered for a second or two and then turned and did what Manetti told him.

  Everybody breathed again.

  Peters got out of the car. Manetti and Miles Harrison were already walking toward him.

  The guy had on a very nice suit but he looked like hell, blood off his forehead wet on the side of his face and staining the expensive shirt. There was some kind of powder all over him, and as soon as Peters got close to him he could see the blood on his hands as well.

  Blood on the hands was not the kind of thing you expected from a speeding ticket.

  Generally speaking, it was not a good thing.

  Manetti held his gun squarely on the man while Harrison patted him down.

  They could see what the powder was. The Mercedes had no windshield left at all to speak of.

  “You want to tell me what happened here, sir?” Manetti asked. But the guy was babbling. Total ragtime.

  It was a moment or two before they could figure out what he was babbling about, but when they did they got very interested in the guy indeed.

  Peters had picked up the spare pint bottle back at the house but he hadn’t touched it yet, and now he was sort of glad he hadn’t.

  “Hold on,” Manetti was saying. “You’re talking about kids here? Kids and . . . what? A woman?”

  “Some kind of fucking woman! She took out the whole fucking window!” He pointed to the windshield. “I’m telling you, there was some guy with a fucking ax and . . . god knows how many of them. They were all over me! I swear to god half of them were running around naked and they—”

  “And you were there for what reason, sir?”

  “To see my wife.”

  “Your wife was there? You can turn around now, sir. It’s okay. It’s all right.”

  The guy turned. White as a sheet.

  “I didn’t see her,” he said. “I dunno. I never even got out of the car.”

  “She lives there?” asked Peters.

  “She was visiting . . . people.”

  “Who? What people?”

  “Amy and David . . . what the . . . what the fuck’s David’s last name! . . . Jesus christ, I can’t . . . I mean, I’ve known them for . . . since . . .”

  Talk about jumpy. Like somebody had shoved a jalapeño up his ass.

  “Take it easy, sir,” said Manetti. “How’d the blood get on your hands?”

  “Glass! I’ve got glass all the hell over me. They took out the fucking window on me! Look at that!”

  He spread his hands. There weren’t any deep cuts that Peters could see so it must have been mostly powder. It would take some cleaning up. But there were other things that needed to get done first.

  The people in that house were in a world of grief.

  “Can you remember the name now, sir?”

  “Sure. Sure I can. David and Amy . . . jesus . . . shit! Shit!”

  “What’s your name, sir? Your own name.”

  “Steven. Steven Carey.”

  And can you remember their name now?”

  “I . . .”

  Peters didn’t like this. The guy was getting that glazed look in his eyes.

  “All right. Can you take us there? Do you remember what road?”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “It was back this way, right?” Manetti pointed back the way they’d come.

  “Yeah. Little dirt road. I can find it I think. But I . . . I don’t want to . . . go back there. You know?”

  He was almost crying.

  “Sir,” said Manetti, “your wife and friends might be in a lot of trouble right now. A lot of trouble.”

  “Yeah,” said the man.

  “Kid, too.”

  “You’ve got a child there?”

  “Yeah. Son. L-Luke.”

  “I think you should try to take us there, sir. For your wife’s and your son’s sake.”

  “Unh-unh.”

  “I think you should.”

  “Shit. I’m telling you. I’m telling you. I don’t want to go back there. You don’t know the kind of . . . bullshit . . . I don’t want . . .”

  The guy was shaking so hard Peters was afraid his knees would give way right then and there. He’d seen people go into shock over a whole lot less. This guy was getting close.

  He stepped forward.

  “Easy, sir,” he said. “Hey. Look. Look at me.”

  The guy looked. Peters showed him his .38. He talked to him softly, calmly.

  “We’re all armed. You see? You understand? Plus, we’re calling this in immediately, right away. We’ll have police in the area before you know it. Nobody’s going to hurt you. We’ll make absolutely sure of that. We’re police and that’s what we’re for. Okay?”

  The guy didn’t look too comforted.

  “Listen. Did you see any guns? Shotguns? Rifles? Pistols?”

  “No.”

  “Anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “There. You see what I mean?”

  “I saw knives. I saw axes. . . .”

  “But no guns, right?”

  The guy nodded.

  “Then you see what I mean? You’re safe.”

  He was wavering.

  “Come on, sir. Get in the car. Show us where the road is and we’ll go find your son. Come on. We’ll get some bandages for those hands too, and for your head, all right? We’ve got a first-aid kit right here in the car. Okay?”

  “I . . .”

  “Okay. Good. Come with me.”

  The guy was definitely hovering
close to shock. If he slipped into it all the way they’d never find the place. They’d damn well better hurry. For all Peters knew it might already be too late for these people.

  He took the man by the arm and led him to the squad car. He was moving like a sleepwalker.

  “In here, sir,” Peters said and opened the door. The man got inside. Peters got in next to him.

  Harrison and Manetti were set to go.

  Peters looked at the man sitting next to him, big and tall and scared.

  I hear you, he thought.

  They hit the siren and swung the car around, going back.

  10:10 P.M.

  The naked girl led Amy like a reluctant dog, tugging at the leather thongs that bound her wrists when she hesitated in the darkness.

  The path was narrow. Above them was a low natural arbor, a thick canopy. There was little light. It was like walking through a tunnel, a long black twisting tube that shape-shifted under the occasional shafts of moonlight.

  Everything was frightening.

  A branch brushing her cheek. Another tugging at her robe.

  The rush of startled wings in the brush ahead.

  Something soft, slippery—the feel of decay under her scraped and bruised bare feet.

  The smell of death drifting off their bodies.

  They had gone through the field and they were climbing now, a slight incline. Her legs felt unequal to the task. The night was warm but she was shivering, the breeze through her open robe prickling her skin, almost a torture to her.

  They moved on and the canopy opened up above them, flooding them with moonlight. They were in a small clearing near the woods. Just ahead the hill became steeper and she could see the black shapes of taller trees outlined against the sky.

  She saw her captors too. It was almost worse being able to see them. The dark was almost better.

  The naked teenage girl. The two twin boys who ran ahead of her as though this were a game, a pleasure.

  What are they going to do to me? she thought. With each step she walked the question seemed to recur afresh, pounding at her like a drumbeat, like a migraine.

  What are they going to do?

  There was only one other question now and that was for Melissa, and somehow it was impossible to ask herself that without becoming hopelessly scrambled. Melissa was with Claire. Melissa was not with Claire. They had found Melissa but not Claire. They had found Claire and Luke only—not Melissa. Any of these but the first, too terrible to contemplate.