by Jack Ketchum
The Woman was young then. Second Stolen was just a child.
She had not understood. She had cried and cried and the Woman had left her in the dark.
Sensation entered her more deeply than it did the others.
Her fingers could feel the heat inside her, the warm wet life, the smooth pulsing. The familiar pain that told her who she was.
Slowly, the memory faded.
The ghost had led him here for this.
To watch them below, to hear and smell the gunfire and watch Second Stolen fall.
To demonstrate its power by making him follow. And see.
He had imagined the idea was his own.
Rabbit hid in the shadows behind a ledge of rock and saw the man’s ghost stand over her, reach down and touch the base of her throat and then move on lumbering like a bear across the sand in the direction of the cave and thought, He has gone to hunt them all.
All of them.
It did not occur to him as strange that a ghost should use a gun or breathe so heavily.
He only felt panic at the lure of the ghost—strong enough to bring him here, to bring Second Stolen from out of the safety of the cave so it could kill her, as quickly as a snake striking a rabbit.
He turned and scrambled up the rock face.
He did not use the path the ghost had walked but ran instead through the woods, off the trail that bore its scent—and when he heard the voices of the men and realized that they were many, all coming toward him, all from the same direction yet spread wide across the hills, when he smelled them and the oil of their weapons, he could only hide again downwind in the thicket and hope that they would pass as the ghost had passed and leave him alone and free.
There was another, better place to hide if he could reach it. He and Eartheater and the Boy had used it often. Not far.
He could wait high above them all in safety.
He could watch from high above throughout the night and even the next day.
Not far.
“Here! Over here!”
Peters’ gun was ready—but this just wasn’t one of them.
This was a boy, just an ordinary boy, like the one he had shot eleven years ago and no way was he going to make that mistake again—a boy hunched in the tall grass at the base of the cliff, waving at him.
The boy was dirty and bloody, his face and hands scratched up bad, wearing wet pajamas and frantically waving, hissing at Peters in a bad excuse for a whisper and that close to crying.
The boy looked scared to death.
But he was alive.
Peters promised himself he was going to get to stay that way.
“Where are they?” he said.
The boy pointed. A slice of pure black in the rock above. A fissure.
A cave.
“Up there,” the boy said.
It was going to be a hell of a climb. The wound in his side was leaking him away. Worse than he’d thought.
“Who’s with them?”
“My . . . my mom. And Amy, maybe. I think Amy.”
“Who’s Amy?”
“My mom’s friend. Mrs. Halbard.”
“You saw them?”
“I saw my mom. And I think . . . maybe . . .”
“Who, son?”
The boy looked confused.
“. . . I think I saw my father,” he said. “There was somebody else. It was later. There was a man with a woman, and he was leaning on her and they were going up and it looked like . . . but my father’s in his apartment in New York I think so it couldn’t . . . I don’t . . .”
And he realized the kid had followed them. Then stayed there to keep an eye on the place. That meant he was looking at a pretty determined, pretty resourceful, pretty resilient kid. He was shaking like a leaf. It wasn’t his wet clothes. Peters didn’t blame him.
The boy’s confusion brought tears finally and Peters was damn near glad to see them. Tears were normal. Tears were right.
He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and squatted down.
It hurt like hell but he did it anyway.
“That’s real good work, son,” he said. “Now listen. I’m going up there and I want you to stay right here out of sight and watch for me. You hide out right in this grass, okay? And if anybody comes along that doesn’t look right to you, you stay where you are. You hide. You don’t need to worry about me for a second. You don’t need to warn me, you don’t need to do anything but hide. I’ll be fine. And if anybody comes along who looks like a policeman, you show ’em where I’ve got to. There are gonna be policemen coming and we’re going to get everybody out of here in fine shape. Okay?”
The boy wiped his nose and nodded.
“Now we just met but I get the feeling you’re a pretty brave guy,” he said. “You hang in there and watch for those uniforms and I’ll see you soon, okay? Go on, get down now.”
The boy nodded again and his eyes were dry.
It was good, Peters thought, to give the kid a purpose.
Hell, up until last night he’d probably needed one himself.
There were entirely too many strangers around these days.
See you, Mary, he thought. He started up the rock face.
He was only a quarter of the way up when he heard the woman’s screams.
12:35 A.M.
Amy heard Claire’s screams, and they pitched her out of her deep tidal fog into the unsteady light of the cave.
She saw herself holding the thing at her breast, cradling it in her arms while it squeezed and sucked. Her nipple an angry red.
She wiped the thick congealed blood from her eyes and saw Claire on the floor writhing, struggling, the children leaning over her like the black shapes of bats, their elbows askew.
She heard lapping, feeding.
She saw Steven watching passively, and the woman standing over them.
And saw the man crawl forward between Claire’s legs like some huge lumbering iguana, then raise his head and strike as suddenly Claire lurched to the side so that his teeth sunk into her inner thigh and the man began to shake, working free the flesh between his teeth while she screamed and pitched with all her strength, tearing free of the boy at her right arm, his metal teeth lodged in her shoulder and the blood pouring down while the man threw back his head and opened his mouth and swallowed—bolted her—and suddenly she was Claire and Claire was Amy, and the thing at her breast was all of them.
She pulled herself up against the back wall of the cave and tore its mouth away, felt filaments of spittle cold against her breast, and thrust the screeching thing high above her head.
“Stop! Stop it!” she screamed. She felt the caked blood crack along her face.
“What are you, fucking crazy?”
Steven was by the fire, trying to stand, his leg going out from under him. “Amy, put it the hell down for chrissakes! You do that they’ll kill us!”
But they had stopped. They were off her.
Looking at Amy.
Even the man had stopped and turned.
“Kill us?” There was the urge to laugh. The urge to hysteria. “They’ll kill us anyway, Steven. Look at her. Look goddammit! Look at what they’ve done to your wife you stinking piece of shit!”
“I don’t have a wife.” He shrugged, looked at Claire. “You mean this? Fuck it,” he said.
The woman stepped forward.
“Don’t!”
She raised the baby higher. It wriggled in her grasp. It wanted to get free. She felt a split second of guilt for using it this way, and the woman must have seen it in her eyes—something weakening for a moment, hesitant—because she took another step andthe others were slowly rising too and there was nowhere to go, no cards to play but the baby.
Don’t make me, she thought.
You don’t know me—and you don’t know me and Claire.
“Stay where you are,” she said.
She was aware of Steven half crawling, half stumbling to the entrance to the cave and Claire rolling over on her side
, weeping, as the others halted and then began to move again.
And it was slow, the tempo of a dream, a nightmare glide that brought them together as a pack, the children covered with Claire’s blood, the man’s chin glistening. She heard the snick of a knife pulled out of its sheath and saw it appear in the girl’s hand, saw a razor in the hand of one of the twins. She heard the rattle of chains and realized that she had edged nearer the naked man, was aware of him watching with interest and straining against his chains, grunting, caught fascinated in the wake of the wholly unfamiliar.
“Don’t,” she said.
The woman stopped, reached for the gun in her belt and Amy knew two things simultaneously—that it was exactly the gun she needed and that this was the single chance she’d ever get to try.
Forgive me, she thought.
And the baby seemed to know because it screamed as her hands tightened and her arms moved back. She threw it hard and blindly somewhere beyond the woman, somewhere into the pack and saw its limbs splay out, its body tumble as the woman whirled and the twins and the boy with the clouded eye reached for it and someone—the boy—caught it by one naked outstretched arm and pulled it roughly toward him.
The woman whirled again, snarling, but by then Amy was on her, diving clumsily into her midsection because that was where the gun was, staggering her only slightly but groping, searching for the gun, tugging it out of her belt as the woman chopped her down with a fist, then rolling dazzled by the blow toward the fire and bringing the gun up and pointing it at where she was. Except the woman wasn’t there anymore. She rolled and the woman was gone. The woman was on the far side of the cave picking up an ax, running toward her again and so was the man and the children and she didn’t know where to shoot, they were all coming at her at once so she just pulled and pulled the trigger.
The echoes pounded through the cave and she saw the man reach out for her and sway as the bullets impacted his chest like thrown mud, flesh and blood splattering the girl beside him. One of the twins had fallen, clutching his knee. The man lurched forward and she fired again and suddenly the gun was empty, the hammer falling on empty chambers as the woman raised her arms and the man gripped the sleeve of her robe and then its collar with his dripping bloody hands and bent her back, turning her, presenting her body to the woman and the ax.
There was poetry in here somewhere.
Peters recognized him instantly. Muddy suit and all.
The man looked pretty shocked, though, seeing Peters.
He was wasting neither words nor bullets by then.
He just let the man have it with the butt end of the .38 and watched him crumble.
He was walking a deer-path ledge fifteen feet from the crease in the rock that the boy had said was the entrance to the cave. It was right in front of him.
I’m going in again, Mary, he thought. Just like eleven years ago. Just like the night they got Caggiano, and I got the boy.
This is what kept us up all those nights.
This is what you had to suffer through just in order to stay with me.
You wish me luck, Mary. You give me a hand here.
Maybe this time, I’ll get it right.
He was a few steps back when somebody inside opened fire and he didn’t wait for it to finish. He just stepped on in.
The pain was brittle.
Each blast of gunfire seemed to fracture a bone in Claire.
She had been trying to rise when the man walked in. The pain almost sat her down again.
But she watched him pick his shots.
He seemed to size up everything in an instant, stepping around her, near her, crouching, the waves of tension pouring off him flooding her with a wild new joy of her own, that finally the nightmare was for them, not for Claire and Amy—for them!—and when he fired and she saw the man’s eye disappear, saw Amy drop from his grasp, saw the wide black hole where the eye was and saw his head jerk back and the gleaming wet wall behind him, she watched him fall and had all she could do to keep her hands off this grim old man with the gun, all she could do to not embrace him.
Amy was on her hands and knees. He fired again. The woman went down spinning beside her, the ax clattering against the wall.
He fired again as the boy with the clouded eye leaped across the fire. The children were everywhere now, scattered, moving fast. Even the twin with the shattered knee was dragging himself across the floor, slicing the air with his razor. And the man would have hit the boy, she thought, had not the boy’s foot caught the handle of the pot boiling on the fire so that he twisted in midair, fell beneath the bullet’s path, his left leg kicking up the flames and showering them with sparks.
The pot spilled across the floor, steaming. Gray broth scalded the soles of her feet.
She pulled herself up and away, standing, shaking. As David’s lungs and kidneys disgorged themselves from the pot in front of her and the man fired once again.
The leg of the boy’s pants was going up in flames but he didn’t notice, he didn’t care, the knife was raised and he lunged as the man fired point-blank into his face. She turned so as not to see and glimpsed Amy on her feet, staggering toward her—and between them the crippled twin with the razor, the one whose knee Amy’s bullet had smashed. Dragging the leg, trying to reach them.
The man shot again and she turned in time to see the second twin fall in a heap against the wall of the cave, but saw too that the man had not escaped him, saw the knife protruding from his shoulder as the girl lurched forward and stabbed him in the chest, twisting the knife one long agonizing moment and sinking it deeper until he managed to lift the gun and fire directly into her ear.
He fell to his knees, clutching the girl’s long blade, too weak to pull it away. His face was covered with her blood.
He looked over at Claire and she saw the warning in his eyes a split second before he toppled forward.
She whirled and felt something slash her arm—hot, almost painless—and saw the crippled twin raise his arm to strike a second time and Amy suddenly behind him, reaching into his dirty matted hair, her full weight pushing him forward facedown into the dense-packed embers beside her.
The boy struggled, sparks flying, his hair bursting into flame, and Claire felt Amy’s hands burning too, felt it as though her own were burning but she wouldn’t let go, she held him—it felt like they both were holding him—until the boy’s screaming struggles stopped and his face lay sizzling in the fire like charring meat.
Claire lifted her up.
But for the sounds from the fire and the rattle of chains the cave was silent.
From somewhere in the shadows she heard the baby cry.
Tears and the black residue of greasy smoke streaked Amy’s face. Her hands were black where they were not burned white. She held them helplessly out in front of her.
“It’s all right,” Claire said. “It’s over.”
She looked at the man who had saved them, his hands still gripping the handle of the knife. His eyes were motionless, half-open. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not.
She felt a pang of loss, of something almost like love for the man. The man was a total stranger. Among them for a matter of moments. She felt it anyway. That somehow his being here wasn’t by accident, that some deeply human impulse had drawn him here to help them. And maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe they could still return the favor.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “We’ve got to find someone.”
There was a pile of blankets behind her. She took one for herself and one for Amy. The blankets were crusted hard and smelled of urine but both of them were trembling uncontrollably and she knew enough to cover them to guard against shock.
The wound in her thigh was a constant agony and she was walking in her own streaming blood. For a while she had almost forgotten the wound.
She wrapped the blankets around them.
“Come on,” she said.
In the fire the boy’s face popped and sizzled.
She saw Steven lying on the path a few feet from the entrance to the cave.
She felt nothing at all on seeing him there, not even any curiosity as to whether he was dead or alive. She felt more for the man lying stabbed and bleeding inside.
Steven belonged with the dead now. In more ways than one.
Not Amy, though, she thought, and hugged her tighter. And not me. And not that man inside.
And when she heard Luke’s voice down the mountain—his bad stage whisper, and the men’s deeper voices hushing him—she felt something soar out of her like a nesting gull, and knew that what she lacked time would somehow endow again, and it was almost possible to smile.
12:45 A.M.
Do not try to escape the wound, thought the Woman. Make it welcome.
The trick had been taught to her far more years ago than she could remember. Once before it had saved her life—and it had always made her impervious to pain.
She took the wound into her—even locating and including the bullet that lay pressed to the back of her seventh rib—surrounded it, encompassed it. Until the invaded flesh was no more or less consequential to her than a fingernail or a follicle of hair.
And finally was able to rise.
She stood, the damp air thick with the smell of gunfire, and calmly surveyed the cave.
The children were dead.
First Stolen, dead.
She would have to begin again.
She kicked the fat man twice in the belly and saw the last of the breath in him huff out between his lips with the first sharp blow.
She looked down into his face as she had before on the path and knew him again, knew that whoever he was, this man had once inhabited her dreams.
Perhaps he would again, and perhaps the next time she would understand why.
The women, her captives, were gone. She would have to hurry.
The knife was secure in the back of her belt.
She stripped off the bloody shirt and gathered up Second Stolen’s child squalling on the floor. At her touch the child went suddenly quiet.
For a moment she noticed its eyes.
Its eyes unnerved her. As though they understood her intent, and approved. Not the eyes of an infant. The eyes had wisdom.
