Offspring

by Jack Ketchum

  She waited until he passed and then stepped out of the brush behind him into the water, drew her knife and even as he became aware of her and began to turn, slashed through the tendons in back of his left knee.

  The man looked at her astonished as he fell, clutching the wound.

  He stared at her, eyes glittering and cloudy with pain.

  The man would stay there. The man would not get far.

  He did not cry out but only lay there in the water, looking up at her in amazement as she waved Rabbit and Eartheater out of their warren.

  She gazed at the banks to mark the spot, then moved upstream.

  Only once did she look back, and that was just before they started running—when they heard the woman scream.

  He had dragged himself up out of the water to the bank, and he was listening too.

  She had seen a wolf once whose leg had been broken in a trap. The wolf was pulling, dragging the trap, had torn it from the ground, had dragged it to the top of a hill and stood poised there on three legs panting and howling furiously into the night sky, its jaws snapping.

  To her at this moment, man and wolf looked nearly the same.

  10:42 P.M.

  I’m too damn old for this, Mary, thought Peters. They were right, they should have damn well left me.

  His heart was beating like a Joe Morello solo, probably in 5/4 time at that, and he couldn’t have caught his breath if it sat there half an hour waiting for him. His legs felt shaky and his feet hurt like hell, but he was keeping up, almost, Manetti and Harrison only twenty feet ahead of him, except that they were going down the hill while he was just standing on top of the rise, trying not to quit.

  He glanced over his shoulder toward the house. They’d called in their position and where they were going but backup still hadn’t arrived—he saw no lights but their own.

  They’d spread themselves too thin, he realized. And part of that was his fault. They should have concentrated on the immediate area, kept the cars within a couple miles of the Kaltsas home, warning people there instead of going all the hell to Lubec and back. It would have kept them more together. But there was no way to have known that then. No way to know where these sons of bitches would be.

  He followed them down, his legs resisting the momentum that might have taken legs younger than his halfway up the second hill before tiring, his own legs scared of the momentum, scared of falling out from under him.

  By the time he reached the bottom Manetti and Harrison were halfway up.

  By the time he was halfway up they were out of sight completely.

  He felt like a boat in a trough on a stormy sea—you couldn’t make the horizon for the wave action. From here all he could see was treetops. He hauled himself up.

  Man against gravity.

  At the top his poor legs were shaking so badly his balance was off and he almost tumbled back down again. He stood there a moment puffing, trying to locate them up ahead and when his eyes started to focus there they were, stopped, looking back at him, standing at the edge of a dark stand of scrub pine leaning together treetop to treetop above the path like fingertips meshed in prayer, waiting for him to appear, waiting for the old guy to get in gear and catch up.

  And he guessed they saw him step forward a few steps, moving better now over the flat surface of the hilltop, because they gave him a second or two and then when he was about fifteen feet away started into the shadows, thinking that was close enough, they were pretty much together again. And he was coming into the shadows himself, his irises expanding to accommodate the dark, when he heard the first shot and felt something or someone ram him dead on in the stomach, knocking him flat, the .38 spinning out of his hand into the brush, the bottle bursting inside his jacket flooding the night air with the ripe stink of whiskey.

  He felt the invasion of steel in his chest and heard Harrison’s voice go teenage octaves higher in sharp bright squeals of pain.

  The Woman was as surprised as they were.

  But she was faster.

  Rabbit too, even faster than she was, running past the two men in front of her to the fat man behind and leaping, throwing his body across the man, knocking him down and stabbing with his knife.

  She saw this even as she herself reached for the gun hand of the younger, taller man, cracked his wrist and pulled him to her, the gun discharging once, her sharp knife slicing up through trousers, leather belt and shirt to his breastbone in a huge vertical slit that sprayed her body with hot blood while Eartheater hurled herself at the thinner man, her legs around his waist, her left arm over his shoulder as she slashed at his eyes with the three-pronged steel hand spade, the Woman aware—preternaturally aware, like a hawk swooping suddenly through their midst—of all her surroundings as the left eye burst in its socket and the man pressed his gun to Eartheater’s neck and fired.

  The young man in front of her fell to his knees, shocked, clutching at the gurgling spill of white intestines as Eartheater’s head slid sideways like a flower on a broken stem, the sound of her flesh like raindrops falling, pattering the leaves of brush and ferns and the trunks of trees. And Rabbit knew too what the man had done because he stabbed the fat man’s chest once more and then slid away, ran to where the thin man flung his sister’s clutching body off him, and leaped upon his back. Eartheater’s body turned, falling. Rabbit stabbed.

  The man fired into the trees as the Woman jumped and kicked him in the chest, whirled, stabbed him once through the neck, his windpipe cracking, withdrew the knife as Rabbit dropped off him and the man leaned forward to clutch his neck, his gun dropping away, and then took the knife in both her hands, turning the blade toward her, and stabbed him again through the back of the neck this time, shoving the knife deep, grinding up past the cervical vertebrae of the neck into the brain.

  The man trembled wildly, his mouth spewing fountains of dark arterial blood. Then fell.

  The night was silent.

  The blood across her face and breasts began to dry.

  For once, Rabbit was not smiling.

  The Woman gathered up their weapons, their guns.

  She could not find the fat man’s gun. She supposed it had fallen in the brush somewhere out of sight.

  She stood for a moment beside his body. She looked at him closely. Somehow he seemed familiar to her. A face glimpsed long ago. But the Woman could not remember.

  His jacket was soaked through where Rabbit had used the knife. She kicked him in the ribs for good measure. The fat man did not move.

  She looked again.

  The man was a mystery. His familiarity to her.

  But there were other mysteries.

  The infant child was one.

  She had heard the woman’s screams not far from this place and hoped that First Stolen had found them, all of them, the boy, the woman—but mostly the infant spirit who would remove the taint of unspilled blood.

  There had been no further screams.

  There was nothing to do now except go and see.

  She hauled the body of Eartheater up onto her shoulder. The Woman did not look at the gaping wound. It was not a good thing to dwell on how another died.

  With Rabbit silent behind her and Eartheater’s still-warm blood trickling down across her back to the earth that named her, she turned toward the sea.

  Luke hid behind the tree in the dark shadow of the treehouse platform above him, looking back down the trail. At the man and his mother.

  He could see them clearly.

  The man had one hand twisted in his mother’s hair, dragging her behind him at first—she was crying, trying to walk backward, stumbling—then thrusting her out in front of him, the head of his ax pressed flat into her lower back.

  A warning.

  The man would tug at her hair and the ax would dig into her back and make her gasp in pain.

  He was enjoying hurting his mother.

  Luke had never been so scared, watching the man hurting her.

  He remembered something he’d forg
otten for a very long time. He’d come downstairs one night awakened by loud voices and saw his mother backed up against the refrigerator, his father with one hand around her neck and holding a glass of something with the other. His father would alternately drink from the glass and hold it up to her face as though he were going to hit her with it maybe, and all the time he was yelling that she had no business telling him what to do with his time, that he’d be home when he fucking wanted to if he fucking wanted to and she could just go fuck herself and wait for him or not as she fucking pleased.

  He’d used the F word a lot and he was saying it in a mean way, not the kind of joking way the kids used it in the playground at school, and all the time he had her by the neck she was telling him to let go, please let go Steven—trying not to cry, he could tell. But Luke was crying, though he was hardly even aware of it, and they heard him and when his father turned and saw him he did let go finally, and his mother went over to him and brought him upstairs.

  The next night she had wanted to talk.

  He hadn’t.

  It was weird but he wished he had now.

  Now that he was so scared for her again.

  Melissa was making crying sounds and that scared him too. Not loud, but the man was going to hear them if he didn’t do something.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  They were getting closer.

  His mother had told him that you had to be real careful with babies, that when they were little like this you could hurt them by mistake without trying. If Melissa had been a kid his age he would have just put his hand over her mouth to shut her up . . . but what if he did that with Melissa and it hurt her?

  Oh, jeez, they were close!

  His mother was making gasping crying sounds from the man pulling her hair and shoving her and he guessed that was mostly what the man was hearing but they were too close and he had to do something with Melissa. He looked down at her and she looked so small almost like a puppy and he was afraid to hurt her and afraid to keep his hand off her because the man was going to hear them and find them and drag them too. There were tears running down his cheeks but he put his hand over her mouth because he had to he couldn’t help it and the sounds almost grew louder for a moment—he guessed Melissa must have realized what he was doing and started crying seriously, squirming and pushing at him as he thought, Please, Melissa, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, only just for a minute, please, and he increased the pressure because she was still too loud, afraid of hurting her all the while and feeling that he had to go to the bathroom bad and watching the man and his mother abreast of them now, passing, his mother’s voice shrill and thin as the man yanked at her hair and she almost fell, then moaning as they passed, her voice and their scuffling feet along the trail masking Melissa’s crying sounds—and knew that she had saved him a second time.

  He hardly dared breathe himself.

  He kept his hand there on her until they were over the rise, easing off on the pressure and easing his hand off her slowly, as gently as he could. Finally he took his hand away completely. And when she wasn’t hurt or dead, when all she did was look at him he raised her up and kissed her on the forehead a dozen times. He loved her as much as he’d ever loved anybody in his life right then.

  She looked at him strangely, as though wondering what this new game was supposed to be. And then smiled.

  And suddenly he felt the pull.

  She was getting away from him. His mother.

  She was going out of sight, over the rise.

  She’d be gone.

  Suddenly he was terrified—that if he didn’t follow he’d just never see her again. He knew he’d never see her.

  It was as certain to him as the fact that he was in the third grade and that his mother thought his room was always messy and that he had a bike and a skateboard back at home in the yard.

  He wouldn’t see her! He’d lose her!

  Mom!

  It was a pull so strong he shook in the wake of it.

  He was terrified of the man. The man was horrible. Worse than Jason, worse than Freddy Krueger—worse than anybody.

  But if his mother went away he’d be . . .

  . . . alone.

  His heart thumped harder now than when the man had passed, he was that scared, a raw panic that clogged his throat and he had to do something now, do something fast, he couldn’t wait for help because he couldn’t even see the man and his mother anymore, and help was all the way down there minutes and far away—and maybe the police were even gone already, disappeared, they could be. He had to follow and find them. Had to see her, know she was there nearby and keep her in sight.

  He almost started out across the path. And then he thought, Melissa.

  How could he take Melissa?

  Melissa would cry!

  Her diaper would get wet or something and she’d cry!

  He felt a moment of total confusion, almost cursed his mother for leaving this baby there with him . . . and then a kind of instant clarity that made him feel suddenly older, a whole lot smarter than he’d ever thought he was and maybe even up to this, ready for this, up to following and not getting caught and maybe even helping somehow.

  Helping her.

  He climbed the ladder again.

  He lay Melissa down in the center of the platform, bunched up one end of the comforter to form a kind of pillow and wrapped the rest around her, tucking it tight so she wouldn’t catch cold—though the night was still pretty warm.

  “I’ll be back,” he whispered. Melissa made a hiccupping kind of sound and flexed her fingers, reaching out to him.

  “Don’t you worry.”

  He climbed down and sprinted to the top of the hill.

  He felt a huge weight lift away as he saw them below, moving slowly through the clearing.

  The man was still pushing her, hurting her, but there she was, walking, standing, still alive.

  Staying in the scrub, in the shadows and only just close enough to keep them in sight, his lifeline still strung tight between them, he followed.

  A little later he heard gunfire in the hills.

  It sounded like firecrackers. But Luke knew it was guns.

  It might be help and it might not. He hoped it was. But it was far away by then and not his problem.

  His problem was to keep her somehow. To hold on to her. And by doing so, make them back into a family again.

  To that end he aged—and grew stealthy in the moonlight.

  11:15 P.M.

  Somewhere a baby was crying.

  It was dark in the cave and she couldn’t see beyond the dim glow of the banked fire. She heard moans and the rattle of chains and the baby crying and for a moment thought, Melissa? but the voice didn’t belong to her.

  She knew her baby’s voice.

  The girl pulled her inside and handed over the leather thongs that bound her to someone else, she couldn’t see who at first, and then a figure appeared before the fire, piling on first twigs and then sticks and logs, and as the fire rose up she saw that it was one of the twin boys at the fire and the other who held the thongs.

  She heard the girl drop the plastic mop bucket to the ground. The fire spread, light and shadow licking the walls of the cave, and she could see them now, the teenage girl covering her scarred and wounded nakedness with a man’s faded blue shirt that was much too big for her, pulled from a pile over three feet high that lay near the entrance. A mouse, startled, ran from somewhere within the pile into the shadows.

  She looked around the cave and felt reality dart away, too. Into the shadows, like the mouse.

  The walls were hung with skins.

  Some she could identify. Raccoon, skunk, deerskin.

  Others were unfamiliar. Pale and translucent.

  She refused them and looked away.

  She saw a rough order. Except for the clothing and a pile of tools and weapons their possessions were arranged according to size, not function.

  Small cooking pots, empty tin cans and full one
s, a small broken wicker basket, tarnished brass candlesticks and a dirty stuffed teddy bear were all thrown together. Smaller things—spoons, forks, spools of thread, keys and key chains, pairs of broken eyeglasses, wallets, coins, a corkscrew, and a cane chair from a dollhouse—formed a pile directly at her feet.

  Another pile rose halfway up the wall, a jumble of larger items. A pair of dented lobster pots side by side with an antique pine milking-stool, its legs corroded and caked with dirt, marked white by salt water. These beside a faded wooden checkerboard, a plastic five-gallon bleach container, and an empty screened cat carrier. These on top of a ghetto blaster—smashed—a suitcase, and a dented metal tub.

  There were piles of bleached white bones all along the walls of the cave.

  Jawbones. Skulls.

  Animal and . . . otherwise.

  She saw the boy with the clouded eye and the girl who wore the skin of breasts skewering wrists and ankles with rusted meat hooks tied by loops pegged to the roof of the cave. Legs and arms dangling, oozing viscous blood. Swaying.

  Not David’s anymore.

  To think of them as his was to open a door that needed to remain tightly shut, a door within and beyond the cave that opened up to pure blank light and emptiness.

  The baby cried.

  She saw it now, lying on a pile of pine needles and branches over which had been tossed a single stained blanket with frayed edges. No older than Melissa.

  Naked. A girl.

  She smelled it too. A thin trail of feces glistened between her open legs.

  The others ignored her.

  The baby was hungry. She could feel her breasts ache in automatic response.

  She had only this week begun to steer Melissa toward solid foods, starting with just the tiniest taste of Beech Nut rice mixed with formula.

  She still had plenty of milk.

  Soon her breasts would be leaking—that was automatic too. She felt a flash of frustrated rage. For her body to do that to her now would be a complete betrayal of itself. Of her.