Offspring

by Jack Ketchum

  Flies buzzed all around her.

  The naked man beside her shifted too, trembling, rattling his chains. There was a girl wearing some sort of skin strapped together behind her back standing in front of him, tugging at the raw flesh of his penis, totally involved with that and ignoring Claire completely.

  Claire hesitated, picturing Luke and Melissa huddled in the darkening woods. And then stepped forward.

  No one stopped her.

  She walked past the twin boys to the girl and even as she became aware of what the girl was doing, of the bone piercing the chained man’s scrotum, plucked the knife from the back of her belt.

  The girl whirled, snarling—but Claire was all clean motion, reaching up and severing the clothesline and reaching down for Amy in a single sweep of her arms, cutting through the lines that bound her wrists.

  Amy screamed and gasped in release and then Claire was holding her, her warm familiar body, barely able to stand at first, Claire clutching her to make her stand as the girl plucked the knife roughly from her hand and held it first to her throat and then to Amy’s—and suddenly the cave seemed to close around her. The man, the teenage girl, the boys, all of them appearing so fast and tight around her she could barely breathe with the stink of their bodies and their breath pouring over her like the heated breath of dogs. The man shoved her back against the wall. She clung to Amy’s robe, protecting her with her arm, keeping the connection, and felt the arm go numb as her elbow struck granite.

  She tried to ignore it. To ignore them all.

  The flies swarmed angrily.

  Amy looked up at her. She touched the bloody hairline. There was a film of pink in her eyes, a thin pink film of blood. Claire wiped them with the sleeve of her dress, wiped her friend’s face and lips and closed the robe over her body.

  The man stepped forward and reached into her hair. This time she resisted.

  “No,” she said.

  But the man wasn’t really trying. He was laughing at her.

  They all were laughing. Moving back, easing the circle, giving him room.

  The man shifted his hand to the front of her head and bumped it back against the wall, not hard enough to do her any harm but hard enough to hurt, bumped it over and over in measured cadences, the pain nothing at first and then cumulative, playing with her, until lights started flashing behind her eyes. She held tight to Amy and waited, waiting out the hurt, Amy her lifeline and Claire hers, listening to their laughter and somewhere, to a baby waking, crying, its voice harsh and echoing through the cave.

  She gritted her teeth and waited.

  Thump.

  And slowly felt something start to build in her, something she knew was dangerous to them both and barely under control but irresistible as they laughed and the infant howled and one twin boy reached out with one hand to pinch and twist her nipple and the other to poke her ribs.

  Thump.

  Laughter.

  Her stomach. Her ribs again. Poking.

  Bullies. Like Steven. Like all of them.

  Thump.

  Then a pair of hands reached across her to Amy’s shoulders, trying to pull her away—the hands of the girl who had deceived them.

  Claire clung tight, felt Amy’s cool fingers clutch her arms, the pressure inside her building, knowing that it was only a matter of moments now and they would separate them again, this possibly for the last time, possibly forever, that the girl was far stronger than she and could do that, not being able to bear that in any way whatsoever and aware of Amy sobbing and the sense of danger and anger and awful potential mounting until—

  Thump.

  Something ripped bursting inside her and she pushed back off the wall in fury and put all of her weight into the forward thrust of her knee, the sound of it loud as an ax chopping into him or into the trunk of a tree until he screamed full into the echo of the sound, drowning it, clutching at his groin and falling to his knees in front of her and rolled toward the fire, stopping just in front of the fire, rolling as though on fire, the fire licking at his balls, at his idiot brutal manhood.

  And as the teenage girl jerked Amy out of her arms and the twins and the girl with the skin grabbed Claire and threw her to the ground, as they kicked her in the ribs, in the head, in the back, as the pain raced through her and off her like a bird of prey skimming the ocean, she watched the man rolling by the fire.

  She watched and watched.

  12:05 A.M.

  Peters’ chest felt like a breeding ground for killer bees.

  It was the whiskey. It stung like a sonovabitch in the two shallow knife wounds near his sternum.

  But it was also the whiskey that had saved his life.

  Supposing he was going to live.

  Forget that he smelled like the floor of the Caribou the day after New Year’s Eve. He looked like a stuck pig. The stain went from his armpits to his belt buckle, all the way down his sides. In the dark it would be indistinguishable from blood.

  They’d have taken one look and thought, that’s one dead drunk lying there.

  There was blood all right but he wasn’t bleeding to death. Not yet. The kid had been in a hurry, though from the feel of it he suspected his knife had chipped a bone. The wound in his side was much deeper and there was more blood there than was running out of his chest but the kid had cut into gristle, nothing more that he could tell—it was what the old cowboy movies called a flesh wound, or at least he hoped it was.

  Bastard hurt, though.

  He knelt back on his heels and thought about things awhile, not wanting to move until he knew what he was moving to.

  There was no point checking Manetti or Harrison. He was close enough to see them and there was plenty of moonlight, and you got so you could recognize a dead man as easily as a dog lying dead in the highway, a kind of displaced emptiness hanging over them like a broken TV in a junkyard.

  Their deaths disgusted him like Caggiano’s had disgusted him. All brave good boys gone long before their time.

  Miles Harrison was their newspaper boy.

  Remember, Mary?

  There wasn’t time to mourn them. Any of them.

  The .38 was the first thing.

  It had gone flying when the kid hit him but it couldn’t have gone far.

  He took off his jacket, shook the broken glass out of it and brushed it off his shirt, then tied its arms over the wound in his side, knotted it and knelt in the brush, feeling with his hands to the right and left, moving slightly deeper, feeling again over the cool hard-packed earth and lightly around the thorny, woody stems of brush, deeper by a foot and then two feet and then three, being patient, cursing the sharp pangs in his chest and side but still patient, until finally his hand brushed the smooth barrel of the gun. He pushed his way slowly back through the brush and sat down.

  When his breathing was even again he stood up and holstered the gun and walked over to Harrison and Manetti. There was a sticky pool of dried blood a few feet away from Manetti that didn’t correspond to either his position or Harrison’s.

  So you got one, Vic, he thought. I almost would have bet you’d have managed that.

  And I’ll bet they took whoever you got home with them too.

  He could see that they’d moved quickly, while the body was still doing plenty of bleeding. It left a nice clean trail to follow. His vision wasn’t what it used to be but he’d done enough hunting in his day to handle this one.

  Got a head wound or neck wound here, he thought, judging from the amount of blood. Whoever was carrying it was swinging the body back and forth, probably hauled up on his shoulder, the body swaying with his gait. Blood not only spotted the path but also sprayed leaves in the brush beside him and farther on, the trunks of trees.

  He looked at his watch. An hour and a quarter or more he’d been lying there.

  Shit.

  He walked back to the rim of the hill. He could see the house lights below. There were squad cars down there now, seven or eight sets of headlights and red-and-
blue flashers. But nobody coming his way that he could see. It was tough to know for sure because the tops of trees obscured the field. They could be out there, maybe not far away. They might not.

  He considered his options.

  From here to the cliffs was basically flatl and, and that he could handle. Going down to meet them at the house or the field was going to be harder. A whole lot harder.

  Not the getting down—that he could handle, too—but the getting back up again. It had been bad enough when he wasn’t leaking blood all over the place.

  He could describe to the troopers with a good deal of accuracy where this had happened. But it was still going to take them time to find it.

  Time for him to haul himself down over the hills. Time for him to tell the story. Time to point the way.

  Time these people likely didn’t have.

  To hell with it, he thought.

  They had an hour and fifteen minutes’ lead on him. They might not be out of earshot yet, but it would still be safe to fire. There wouldn’t be any sense of immediate danger to them, nothing that would cause them to panic and start in killing people. They’d know that whoever it was was way back. Could be a hunter for all they knew.

  He pointed the .38 into the air and fired, waited until the echo died away and fired again, waited and fired a third time.

  The breeze was down considerably and the air was still. If there were any kind of cops worth their pay down there they should be able to take a rough estimate of his position.

  Anyhow, it was the best he could do.

  With all the activity the wound in his side was doing too much bleeding. It might just kill him after all. With a knife wound deep as that you never knew. He tied the jacket tighter.

  He dug into his pocket and filled the empty chambers of the gun.

  No more shooting till the shooting starts, he thought, and began to follow.

  12:12 A.M.

  The Woman entered the cave and let the man drop before the fire. By then the man was willing to drop.

  She took it in—the woman clutching her robe by the Cow in the back of the cave. The second woman lying on the floor, bruised, her face bloody, dress torn. Looking up terrified at the twin boys standing over her. The boys grinning red, blue and silver.

  And no infant except for Second Stolen’s, mewling by the wall.

  And no Eartheater. And no Rabbit.

  Who should have been here long before her.

  First Stolen approached the Woman cautiously, knowing she was angry. She could see that he had been hurt somehow and was mending. She did not care how or why.

  All she felt was anger.

  He had found the woman, but not the child. She could not understand why.

  She sensed the spirit of the other child, hungry for release.

  “Rabbit?”

  He shook his head, confused. Was Rabbit not with her?

  She pushed past him to Second Stolen. The girl was squatting by the fire. The Woman could smell what was boiling in the pot. The lungs, the kidneys, the liver.

  “Find Rabbit,” she said to the girl. “Eartheater is dead. Find Rabbit.”

  Second Stolen glanced down into the pot. That Eartheater was her daughter and was dead held no interest for her. She was hungry for the rest of her kill. The Woman knew this.

  “Now,” she said.

  She watched Second Stolen rise and step past the man at the entrance.

  The man did not respond or even raise his head.

  “Wait,” she said.

  She walked over to her and handed her the gun that had killed Eartheater in the woods and saw her face change, saw the sullen look disappear as this privilege became clear to her. The Woman knew that First Stolen watched and would be angry.

  It didn’t matter.

  First Stolen would be angry because she had brought the man here, too—the wolf—who looked up from his exhaustion now with eyes that only incompletely masked his hate and fear of her.

  “Steven!”

  The voice was a hoarse whisper, filled with pain.

  She saw his eyes shift to the woman on the floor. And in them, recognition.

  Nothing since he’d run from the police seemed exactly real to Steven. The shadowy woman behind him in the stream, the sudden detonation of pain and slack, broken uselessness of his ankle—and then her return, being helped almost considerately to this place by some scarred foul-smelling Amazon with a knife and a pair of pistols in her belt. . . .

  This place.

  This roost for chickens. This pigsty. Some goddamn armed medieval fortress. Hole in the wall.

  An outhouse.

  Hell, it was all of them.

  And it didn’t belong in the real world, he had dropped through some sick black filthy hole in space where human arms and legs dangled from the ceiling and the smell of something sweet and meaty in the pot mingled with the stink of shit and urine, where roaches the size of your fist scuttled across the floor across a naked baby sleeping on a filthy blanket and up the blackened legs of something with a penis chained to the back wall.

  And in the midst of all this was your wife, beat to hell and being guarded by a pack of kids. The ultimate playground fantasy.

  Let’s get teacher.

  “Steven!”

  He could have killed her.

  Jesus! The woman was a stupid bitch! You could bet the farm there was nothing to gain by acknowledging she knew him—and who knew what you stood to lose. Especially since it was pretty damn clear she was not exactly on their good side at the moment.

  “Shut the fuck up, Claire,” he said.

  Temporarily at least that did the trick.

  But the woman wasn’t stupid—the woman had got the message, all right. She was looking at him, amused and curious.

  But she wasn’t asking. Not right away at least.

  And now he saw Claire’s old buddy, Amy, hugging her knees in the back of the cave, almost unrecognizable at first with all that blood smeared over her face, and he wondered where her husband David was.

  Where Luke was.

  Luke was a pain in the ass but he wasn’t a bad kid, really.

  He hoped he’d gotten away, actually.

  And as for David . . . well, he hoped that David was out there too. For other reasons.

  He wasn’t being generous. They’d both had it in for him for a long time, David and Amy. The bastards. Loaning Claire money for a lawyer, to pay her bills, whatever. He couldn’t feel too bad for either of them if they dropped dead on the spot but the fact was that they were still like him, they were civilized people who at least were not living in a shit pile with bones and dead bodies lying around in a goddamn fucking cave. You could reason with them, you could get around them.

  But these people . . .

  Maybe David would get to the police.

  Jail didn’t seem so bad right now. Not even on Murder One.

  At least there were people inside.

  But these fuckers . . .

  These fuckers scared him.

  Like this girl, here.

  She was what? maybe ten or eleven years old and she was peeling off the skin she was wearing, unwrapping it and dropping it as she walked back to the guy in the rear of the cave, then grabbing a knife and poking him, cutting him until the guy started to shriek, high-pitched like the girl herself might shriek if she were the one getting jabbed with the thing, little rivulets of blood flowing—and this kid is fucking laughing. Amusing herself! And nobody else is paying any attention to them at all except for the baby, who is all of a sudden wailing.

  And Marion said he was sick sometimes.

  At least when he did what he did he had some reason for it. Some damn thing to be gained.

  Otherwise it was just craziness, wasn’t it?

  It wasn’t human.

  So like it or not what he had here were a couple of allies in Claire and Amy. People he knew. People whose strengths and weaknesses he could depend upon. Even if they were beat all to hell they
might still serve as allies in a way. They could help him get by.

  There was only one thing to do with your allies.

  You used them.

  Amy heard the baby cry and looked up angrily, instinctively at the man in chains and the girl who tormented him. Their noise had disturbed the baby, released its voice—sounds of hunger and distress that caused her breasts to ache again and her heart to pound, wishing for Melissa. She saw that the girl had somehow anticipated her, was already watching her, something dreamy and removed in her eyes yet calculating too, as though she were staring down the short dead-end road of her imagination and trying hard to see farther.

  The girl smiled and tossed away the knife and watched his body fall back exhausted against the wall of the cave.

  She turned to Amy. She stared for a moment and then turned away.

  She walked over to the baby.

  And she knew before she actually knew what the girl was going to do—her entire body said no to this—she knew because the baby was crying loudly and the baby’s mother was gone, sent away out of the cave, and she, Amy, was there instead with breasts filled with milk aching to betray her and to betray Melissa.

  She shook her head no and felt a deep anxious churning inside her as the girl dropped the screaming baby into her arms, into her lap, and the baby clutched her breast through the open robe and took it in a mouth smeared with drool, crusted with dirt, and bit and sucked, pulled deep, its eyes a cold fixed squint that reminded her of the eyes of snakes, its tiny jaws fierce, pulling, grinding, sucking not just milk but the strength and life from her and racking her body with sobs.

  She held the baby and cried and felt its pull like the tide, the surge of life. Violent, strange.

  Greedy.

  Rabbit crouched, poised in the blackberry brambles, the pupils of his eyes widely dilated, watching the rabbit forage for food.

  It was not the berries the rabbit was interested in but the tender leaves and shoots, gray in the moonlight. Unaware and upwind, it was moving closer to him all the time. In a moment it would be within striking distance. He would flick his finger, a tiny movement. The rabbit would hear. And then it would only be a matter of which way the rabbit would jump. The rabbit would give away its intent, tilt its narrow head to the right or to the left in that split second before its hind legs gripped and pushed, and by then Rabbit’s arms would be there, avoiding the powerful hind legs, ready to grip the ears and upper body and twist its neck.