Jared heard the other noise again, and he shook the nonsense from his head and shut his eyes, concentrating.
There.
A small smile of satisfaction crossed his lips. Beneath Seth’s soft snoring and the roaring wind and Henrietta’s crying he could hear someone’s labored, hitched breaths.
Corina? Marley?
Cody and Jared had decided that it was best for the mother and daughter to stay on the couch; better not to move them again. But this was coming from the other direction; not from the family room, but near the hallway leading to the stairs up to the loft.
Jared cringed; Oxford was staying in the loft.
He slowly rose out of bed, careful not to wake Seth.
It took several moments in the dark hallway before his eyes adjusted to the near pitch blackness. But even then—just standing there listening to the ratchety, wheezy, uneven breathing from the stairway—his heart sank; he had a sneaking suspicion of what had happened.
We should have searched him before entering the house, despite his claims of being clean.
Jared drew a deep breath of his own, wincing when the cold air hit his throat and then his lungs.
Come
He turned his eyes upward, searching; he wasn’t even sure that the wind had blown just then.
What the fuck is that?
Then he heard the hitched breathing again, and he shook his head and stepped to action. With careful steps, he made his out the door without waking Seth. Then he walked briskly down the hallway, keeping the fingertips of his right hand in contact with the wall for guidance. When he reached the stairwell, the darkness relented slightly as the moonlight flooded in from the tall windows in the family room.
There, half lying, half sitting on the stairs, was Oxford.
Jared shook his head, but rather than succumb to his disgust, he quickly dropped to one knee and began to strategize how to get his brother back into his room without waking the others.
Looking up at Oxford’s pale face, his closed lids so thin that he could almost see the man’s pupils through them in the dark, the phlegm rolling around his throat with every uneven breath, he could not fight the thoughts that entered his head.
What happened to you, Ox?
Jared brought his fingers to his temples and closed his eyes, trying to will away Henrietta’s wails and think. A moment later, he opened them again and drew a deep breath.
This time it wasn’t just the cold that hit his palate and the back of his throat, but there was an underlying funk there, too; the unmistakable thick and raw smell of human feces.
“Jesus, Ox,” he whispered, unable to stop himself.
As he reached out for his brother, a flashlight suddenly flicked on from down the hallway and shined directly into Jared’s eyes, blinding him. He shielded his face with the palm of his hand the way one might fend off a much taller attacker, and one thought entered his mind: Please be Seth. Please be Seth. Please be Seth.
But Seth didn’t have the flashlight.
Jared’s heart sank.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Cody demanded.
3.
Cody Felt His Anger about to bubble over like a tea kettle on the very precipice of boiling.
“You stupid mother—”
Jared hushed him loudly.
“Don’t wake anyone else up. Help me get him back to his room.”
The demands lacked conviction coming from Jared, who was crouched at the foot of the stairs, his squinted eyes barely visible between his outstretched fingers.
Cody took a step forward.
“Oxford,” he started, but he hesitated when Jared stood, blocking his path.
Cody eyed the man and saw that unlike before when he had taken charge with Corina’s broken leg, Jared’s resolve was no longer there; he was tired, beaten. Cody took another step forward, and as he predicted, Jared bowed his head and backed away from the stairs. Cody felt a flash of guilt seeing the fear on the man’s face, clearly remembering how he had pushed him earlier. This seemed to put a damper on Cody’s anger and he wondered, not for the first time, what the fuck was going on—with him, with them, with Henrietta’s screaming, and with this fucking storm.
“Oxford,” he hissed.
His eyes fell on his brother’s pale face with his mouth wide and his tongue vibrating with every breath.
Cody leaned in, and almost instantly something caustic hit his nose and he pulled his head back quickly.
“Oxford! Jesus fucking Christ, Oxford! Did you shit yourself?”
The man moaned in response. Cody turned to Jared, and the younger man averted his gaze, both embarrassed and ashamed of their youngest brother.
Come Come
Cody’s eyes narrowed to slits as he turned back to Oxford. To his surprise, Oxford was staring back at him now, and despite the bright light that was shining directly into his face, his pupils were so large that the iridescent green of his irises was invisible.
“Oxford,” Cody hissed again, trying his best to ignore the stench.
Then, inexplicably, Oxford chuckled, his tongue flapping about, alternating between smacking against the roof of his mouth and then the floor.
“Oxford,” the man repeated, his eyes rolling in his head like loose ball bearings. “I wassss doomed from th’ staahrt.”
He clucked his tongue.
“What a sssstupid fucking name, named after a dicthhhhhionary.”
His slurred words trailed off.
...or a city, or university, or shirt... Isn’t there a shoe named Oxford, too? Cody wondered.
It was such a strange comment, so unexpected, that Cody almost laughed. Ashamed at not being able to maintain his justifiably furious demeanor, he turned quickly, whipping the flashlight around, the light cutting through the darkness like a lightsaber, and saw that Jared was smiling too. Then he heard his eldest daughter moan in pain from the couch not thirty feet behind them, and his anger returned.
Oxford’s eyes had closed again, and Cody reached back and slapped him across the face. The sound—an amazingly loud thwap—reverberated off the darkness like an echo trapped in a copper pipe.
Oxford’s eyes rolled, but failed to open even when his head flung to one side with the force of the blow and smacked against the edge of the stairs. Without thinking, Cody reared back and slapped him again. When his youngest brother still did not open his eyes or cry out, he reached back and was about to hit him for a third time when he felt a cold hand grab his wrist. He turned and stared into Jared’s tearing eyes. The muscles in Cody’s arm suddenly went slack and his hand dropped to his side.
“Let’s get him off the stairs,” Jared whispered.
Cody swallowed hard and nodded.
4.
It Was The Damn voices. Or maybe the damned voices. Oxford did not—could not—know. They were always there, of course, the clichéd angel and devil, guiding—or misguiding, as the case were—his jilted morality. But now they seemed different, somehow. They’d been different ever since he had arrived at his mother’s place on Cedar Landing.
I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry. Just one more chance, that’s all I need. Just one more chance.
Come Come Come
Come Come
Oxford clenched his teeth.
Get the fuck out of my head!
The voices were more insistent, and the incessant nattering had recently become far more devil than angel. But it didn’t matter—he had silenced them, silenced them the only way he knew how. And it had felt good, so damn good, in the way that a stolen cookie was always sweeter and more tender than one bought or made.
Had.
Past tense; had felt good. But that was very different than how he felt now—very, very different.
Oxford coughed harshly, then winced at the acrid bile that rose up in the back of his throat like devil’s fingers trying to claw their way out of his esophagus.
A wave of nausea hit him next, spurred by the taste and sensation in his mouth and
throat. He rolled over onto one side, and for the first time since waking he was overwhelmed with the smell of shit.
Oxford groaned and, with great effort, he took his left hand—not the right; the crook of his elbow felt heavy and sore on that side—and snaked his swollen fingers down his side and to his boxers.
What the—?
Something rough brushed against his fingers. Momentarily forgetting his swollen head and burning throat, he sat up awkwardly, fighting the spins. He felt around his boxers again in the dark and this time, although he was able to identify the material, he was no less confused.
Toilet paper? Did I go to the bathroom and forget to remove the toilet paper after taking a dump?
But as he moved his hand around down there, it become as obvious as the increasingly pungent odor of human feces that his situation was far, far worse.
Disgusted with himself, he frantically searched the dark room for something to clean himself with. Finding nothing, he turned his attention to the toilet paper that was jammed into his underwear. Oxford shook his head again and looked away, the spins picking up in intensity. He felt hopelessly stranded on a teacup carnival ride, every movement making his head spin. No, the soiled strips of two-ply could not be used to clean up this mess. But he had to find something, because if Jared, or worse, if Cody, discovered him like this—well, he wasn’t sure what they would do.
Finally, there on the floor beside the bed, he saw it: a dark blue towel. When he shifted his hips to reach over and grab it, Oxford heard what sounded like crinkling plastic.
What the fuck?
Despite the overwhelming feeling of shame, he decided then to take a good look at himself to avoid any more fucking surprises.
He was naked from the waist up, but that didn’t bother him; no, it was the soiled, translucent brown of his once white boxers that made the vomit return to his throat, and this time he was very close to adding the smell of partially digested tuna fish sandwiches to the symphony of odors. For a moment, he steeled himself, closing his eyes tightly before snapping them open again, unable to deal with the spinning. The crinkling sound was a large, industrial-size garbage bag on which he sat, which was odd because he couldn’t remember laying on top of one when he had gone to sleep, or before he had shot up. No, that meant—
“Looking for this?” a voice to his right asked, and Oxford’s heart replaced the puke in his throat.
Slowly, he turned his body and noticed for the first time that Cody was sitting in the chair in the corner of his room, blanketed in shadows. In the brief moment that their eyes met before Oxford looked away in shame, he caught anger in his brother’s stare. Anger and disdain.
Cody tossed the small black case at Oxford, and unlike the wrapped baseball that Corina had thrown at him what seemed like weeks ago, he failed to react in time. The leather bag struck him in the collarbone and he winced. Instinctively, his left hand, fingers brown with shit, reached out and tucked it in close to his hip. Then he glared at his brother.
I hate you, he thought, trying to convey the message with only his rheumy eyes. I hate you for judging me.
But Oxford found it difficult to keep this face—this expression—not because he didn’t mean it, but because he hated himself more.
“I want you gone. Go do your fucking drugs as far away from me and my kids as you can, junkie,” Cody said.
Message received.
It might have been the shock of the bluntness of his brother’s words, or maybe the final, lingering haze of the heroin wearing off, but all of a sudden Oxford felt cold—freezing, in fact. His brother was wearing his cap and snow jacket, and his breath was coming out in puffs from between tight lips. Oxford, on the other hand, was clad only in his boxers, albeit the backs of his legs were covered in shit, which he guessed offered him some insulation.
Cody’s lower lip curled in utter disgust, his eyes fixated on Oxford’s shitty lower half.
“I—I—I think the tuna was bad,” Oxford remarked, but Cody didn’t laugh, didn’t even crack a smile. Oxford didn’t blame him.
“Jared and Seth are going to get help, and I don’t trust you here with my family,” Cody said flatly as he stood. “I want you gone.”
Oxford looked away and stared out the loft window. White—he saw only white.
Gone? Where am I supposed to go?
The wind howled again.
Come Come Come
Come Come
Come
Oxford closed his eyes tightly. Clearly, his attempts to silence the voices—and that one in particular—had been a miserable failure. The idea of going out there with whatever was calling him drove a shiver up his spine.
Leave me alone! Get the fuck out of my head!
5.
Deputy Bradley Coggins Almost made it to Mrs. Wharfburn’s house. At least he thought he was almost there; the blowing snow had transformed Highway 2 into a blanket of white. In fact, visibility was so poor that when Johnny braked suddenly, Coggins only barely managed to prevent his car from plowing into the back of him.
A minute or so later, a man’s face appeared at his window, a round pink sphere breaking the monotonous, snowy scene, trails of congealed snot hanging from each nostril. Johnny’s fur-lined hat was pulled down so low that it hid what Coggins knew to be thick, wiry eyebrows. Even though Johnny had walked no more than ten meters in the cold, it looked as if he had spent the night ice fishing without a hut.
No heat in your piece of shit truck, Johnny?
Despite the man’s obvious discomfort—he was now bobbing up and down, blowing air into his thinly gloved fists—Coggins turned to the radio and fiddled with the dial. It had been more than a half hour since he had been able to capture any signal, but he tried anyway—as before, the entire AM dial was dead. Just then, a blast of wind struck Coggins’ car, and it suddenly sounded as if Johnny were in the car with him.
Come
Coggins turned to the window and lowered it half an inch.
“What’d you say?”
“Can’t go any further on the highway,” Johnny huffed. The man’s round face reddened when he spoke, and Coggins wondered briefly how and when the man had gotten so fat.
Twice, Coggins had arrested Johnny for pushing pills, and both times the man had displayed all the telltale signs of being a user: mottled skin, flesh that seemed too small—too taut—for the bones beneath, and a discomforting way of darting his eyes when he spoke. Now, however, loose flesh hung from Johnny’s round cheeks, and his eyes were wide and frightened.
“Plow keeps getting jammed on—”
Coggins nodded briskly and closed the window before the man had a chance to finish. The wind howled, muddying whatever Johnny was saying from beyond the glass.
“...gas...wind...thick...”
It all sounded like descriptions of the man’s last bowel movement to Deputy Coggins, but he didn’t care; he had heard all that he needed to hear.
He turned back to Johnny once more, who was still flapping his pale lips, and Coggins nodded again.
Okay, I get it. Now get lost.
Johnny stopped talking, resigning himself to just standing there in the blowing snow. They locked eyes; then Johnny bowed his head, turned, and took two steps before being swallowed by the white.
A moment later, Coggins heard the man’s engine fire—remind me to get his emissions checked—and then he spotted his taillights, oddly pink and diffuse in the blowing snow. The two vehicles slowly inched forward in single file, Coggins following the plow onto the off ramp that he hadn’t even known was there. When they reached the stop sign, Johnny honked twice, a muffled sound that was barely audible through the wind, and turned right. Coggins watched him go.
When Johnny’s truck was out of sight, he turned his head in the opposite direction. The road was so covered in snow that it was indiscernible from the shoulder or lawn or whatever the hell was around these parts.
He looked back in the direction that Johnny had just driven, and was amazed t
o see that the trail that the man had made was almost already starting to disappear beneath blowing snow. In a few minutes, he knew, it would be all but gone.
I should follow him, go back to the station.
But something was telling him to go the other way, pulling him toward the sheriff and Mrs. Wharfburn’s house.
Deputy Coggins pulled his car as far onto the shoulder as possible, which was a task in and of itself because he had no idea where the road ended and the shoulder began. It was like holding a large sheet of white paper inches from his face and trying to figure out which way was north.
Annoyed, he crouched down and looked upward, trying to make out the green street sign. He thought it said Cedar Landing, but with the snow covering more than the top half of the letters, it could have just as easily been Seton Lane. Instinctively, he reached for his phone, but then remembered that the signal had been lost some time ago. He checked anyway.
Fuck.
Coggins sighed and picked up the radio.
“Whitey, don’t know if you can hear me, but I think—” He squinted up at the road sign again. “—I think I’m at Cedar Landing. Gonna have to continue on foot.”
What were the odds? The fool took me exactly where I need to go.
Coggins paused, listening for a moment to the static that answered him. He pressed the talk button again.
“If I’m at Cedar Landing, should only be an hour or two to hoof it out to the Wharfburns’, even in this snow. Just don’t wait up, sweetie-pie.”
Deputy Bradley Coggins put the radio back on its hook, pulled the keys out of the ignition, and took a deep breath. Then he adjusted his hat, zipped his coat up to his chin, and stepped out into the cold.
6.
“Just Fucking Go!” Marley shouted, her voice bordering on hysteria. “Her leg is getting gangrene! Just. Fucking. Go!”
Jared looked over at the couch and at Corina’s leg. She was being dramatic, of course, but the wound did appear darker even through the bandages—and this was from more than ten feet away.
Insatiable Series Omnibus Edition (Books 1-3) Page 11
