Deadweight

by Robert Devereaux

  Her free hand moved closer, her eyes on the key. A weight of exhaustion inside lured her down into sleep, but she fought it, resisted it with all her might, knowing she might not have such a chance again. She debated trying to kill him right then, shackled as she was. But she was not only awkwardly positioned, but drained as well from having taken Wolf’s life. She had to try to free herself first. Then if her attempt to kill him failed, she could at least make a run for it.

  Her hand shone like red brass as it moved, slim water moccasin sliding through moonlight, trying not to slither against the undulating riverbed of Danny’s chest. Tip of a finger found cold key, lifted off it when he registered movement, lowered to it again when his resumption allowed the new pressure to become part of undifferentiated night. An owl hooted far off in the woods. Karin pressed gently on the round bow of the key so that its blade angled from the bed of gory chest hairs and she could grip it between thumb and forefinger. Started to lift it, felt the tug of a hair, stopped, got new purchase, letting the pulled hair fall back and curl, marveling at the dexterity in fingers, lifting the key, watching the thong sinew up from Danny’s skin, knowing if she kept it steady he might not wake. A moment of panic as he shifted on his pillow, seemed about to turn, then gave the notion up and renewed snoring. It wasn’t going to reach, no way would it reach. Her cuffed hand tugging downward as if it could taffy-pull metal by mere wish, the key now at the end of its thong and an inch shy of engaging the lock. She didn’t have an inch, maybe a quarter of that; she took the quarter, felt the thong resist, knew it was exerting pressure on the back of the sleeping man’s neck. Hoping leather had enough give, she strained the key upward, a quiver to it like a divining rod, no chafe, just a wire digging into his skin, a wire perturbing his sleep. Metal touched metal. Come on, come on. Key tip teased keyhole. Halfway in, more, the key’s shoulder closing on lockbed. A twist, a snap that seemed to split the night, twist back and ease out. She had to let up on the downward pressure lest her hand fly out and hit him, had to lower the key, gently, slowly, onto his chest, let the hand drift away like she was playing pick-up-sticks, then bring it back to free its mate, tingling rush of blood from being suspended above her head for so long, and she was free!

  Now came the hard part.

  She debated leaving the bed, crossing the room to the door, opening it, walking past the horror beyond, leaving the cabin, driving off in the pickup. Fantasy. Mattress was a mass of creaky springs, the hinges of this door and the other hadn’t been oiled for ages, and she was simply too exhausted to outrun Danny, startled out of sleep and with the energy of the demonic coursing through his veins. Even if she were successful, Danny would still be loose in the world. He would hunt her down, her and Frank, and he was sure to torture and maim others along the way. She’d brought him back to life. She had the power to undo that now, if only she could summon strength and will enough to see it through.

  Slowly Karin shifted herself to a kneeling position beside him, careful to move lightly on the springs. His face and torso were out of the moonlight. It was easy to imagine, when his snores paused, that his eyes gleamed in shadow, watching her, that he’d seize her and finish her. Then the snores would resume and she knew she’d deceived herself. Her hands lifted, moving over him, seeking the connection and finding it. They felt like heavy weights on the ends of her arms but she struggled to keep them a foot above Danny’s body. When she began on the reversal, it cut into her, made her want to sob. He’d been a sick man while he lived, he was a depraved monster now, and it was up to her to stop him—and yet the removal of her gift of life, inadvertent as that gift had been, now felt ugly and wrong. Still she persisted, fighting against fatigue and choking back tears, her theft of his terrible energy a slow process. Battling Wolf, she’d felt a flood of power seize her. Now it was a mere trickle, a glove compartment light taking all night to drain a car battery. And yet, trickle though it was, each drop stung inside like acid. Please God, she thought, make it be swift, without pain for either of us. But though it was taking forever and felt like barbed wire being drawn through her, the first thin layer of Danny’s strength evaporated, then another, and another.

  The snoring stopped. Her hands moved over him, still several inches above. Not sylphid movement but arthritic earned undoings, slow penance for resurrecting him in the first place. Her eyes drifted to his shadowed face, saw a gleam there again, a slitted shine of black on black. Not so. He slept, surely. The agony of picking away, bit by bit, at his power, birdwing brushing mountaintop, had that advantage: She was not likely to startle him awake with the suddenness of her assault. On the other hand, she had no idea how long his sleep would last, nor if she would be able to sustain her efforts much longer without collapsing from exhaustion and loss of will, it felt so monumentally perverse to peel back his life this way.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” The voice stunned her so, she shook with the sudden fear of it. Her wrists he snatched from the air above him, tightening on them. She felt the connection shatter, tried to pull away. She knew she hadn’t weakened him nearly enough, and now she’d lost her one chance to escape.

  “Wolf!” he called, then again “Wolf!” When he got no answer, he let her go and bounded off the bed. He stooped in the moonlight, inspected his pet, his hands moving here and there seeking life. “He’s dead,” not believing it, a ghost in his voice. “You killed him, and you were trying to kill me.”

  “How could I possibly . . . ?” She heard her guilt, transparent as the night air.

  He straightened. “It’s lesson time, my girl. Long past due.” She stood now by the bed, but he came at her through the moonlight and without warning his open hand flashed across her face. She fell against the mattress, springs jouncing like a trampoline. Her jaw felt funny. Dislocated? No, but just short of it. She expected more but Danny began working at the cuffs, unlocking them from the bed frame, working frantically as if they would explode if he didn’t open them at once. He clutched them in one hand, grabbed her nearest wrist with the other and tugged her off the bed and toward the door. “Let’s see if Marcie is willing to lend us her couch for a few hours of fun and games, shall we?”

  “No, please, don’t.” She struggled futilely in his grip. But when he threw open the door and snapped on the light, the visual assault shocked her into silence.

  ***

  The El Dorado had power-everything and Frank floored it, just this side of losing control. His Honda, usually reliable, was him. It had taken him past Pyne’s cemetery with its cop ribbons around the dead caretaker’s house, on to I-80 and through Auburn to highway 49, then the winding miles of road to Cool, growing increasingly frantic as at last he turned onto Georgetown Road and ate up the miles to Greenwood and beyond. Now he had discarded the Honda, turned to theft, put on this alien metal wrap he’d forced from Hank somebody. Felt wrong, felt late, way too late, the vision of Karin dead awaiting him at the end of this mad hurtle, likely his own death as well.

  The cabins of Lively Pines Retirement Home zipped by on the left, the darkened Camp Virnir Grocery Store on the right. Fuck it all, Joe would never find him, not in this wilderness; he should have waited, should have called back and berated that cop, then come blazing in with the police by his side instead of charging off on his own. The crazy who’d abducted Karin would have had no chance against such a force.

  He saw Nona, a dog pelt stapled to her headless body, in the dark road flashing under his wheels. He went over a bump and the gun jounced on the passenger seat. There’s still time, I’m not too late, he tried to assure himself, but he didn’t believe it. And yet, what if he were at the wire without knowing it, what if a fraction of a second’s hesitation meant the difference between rescuing Karin or losing her. Letting up on the gas pedal might be exactly equivalent to killing her himself. He pressed on, trying not to imagine what might await him at the cabin.

  A bend in the road. The turnoff would be upon him in seconds, an unlit single-lane dirt road into the bullying darkn
ess that loomed on the right. Here I come, you sick son-of-a-bitch, Frank thought. For what it’s worth, here comes Frank Tanner.

  ***

  She’d dared to diminish him, had skimmed off some of his strength while he slept. But he still had plenty left and it was time to dismantle the bitch, slow and sweet; it was time to let his fists and his swords and his dick take revenge. If he had to endure the stings of the wasp-man for as long as he lived, so be it. She was too dangerous to trust, now that she could run her powers in reverse.

  He dragged her toward Marcie, her resistance picking up as they neared the couch. The dead girl’s arms—cold flesh tapers with fingered wicks—he tossed over the back of the couch, hearing them hit like beef against the tile. He grabbed the hilt of the rapier stuck through her head and pulled her up so that she looked as if her legs went straight through the bloody cushions to the floor, then toppled her forward so that her midriff hit the armrest and she pinwheeled over, her back hitting the floor first, then her buttocks, the clatter of steel mingling with the slap of naked flesh.

  “Lie down,” he said, and when Karin refused, all high pitched and frantic he said, “I told you to lie the fuck down!” He hurled her onto the couch so hard, her body twisted in the air, bloodspray lifting from the cushions as she landed on them.

  Danny regripped her hands, lethal weapons, though she was clearly too distraught to use them. He pulled out the cuffs he’d tucked into his pants and tried to put them on her, but she fought like she’d never fought before. “Hold the fuck still!” He set the cuffs on the armrest and Y’d her neck with his free hand, cutting off her air. “Listen up.” He shook her, getting her attention. “If you ever want to breathe again, you’ll stop struggling.” One last futile gesture at escape, and she stopped, looking up at him out of that reddening face. He could break her neck with one twist, finish her, then enjoy her. But getting there was always half the fun, and he wanted to take his time, to savor ever last one of the hurts he intended to inflict. One beat more and he released her, picked up the cuffs, tugged away the hand that had gone instinctively to her throat as she gasped for air.

  Then the door to the cabin burst open, Danny’s head whipped that way, and some fuck he’d never seen—ah, the photos on the wall, good old what’s-his-face, Frank, the new cock on the block—stood there pointing a gun at him.

  ***

  “It’s over,” Frank said. “Move away from her and raise your hands.” The sight of Ethan Bell’s torn body had sent him rushing into the cabin. The bloodstench hit him as he spoke. Then there oozed in—around his fix on the kidnapper and Karin—a vision of gore and mutilation, impalement and torture, typhoons of blood that had touched down and passed on.

  His wife’s skin, thank God, looked unbroken. But the kidnapper was bending to the hearth and Frank had to train his attention there. He moved in closer, almost past the woman’s hacked corpse. “Mister, you’ve got half a second to straighten up before I shoot you.”

  The guy came up with a sword, the El Rey d’Oro that had claimed the center spot on the study wall. “Frank, old buddy,” he said, “don’t you recognize me?”

  Shirtless, pants blood-soaked, chest and face crimson with gore, hair slicked back, he seemed hardly human. But the cast of his features, the grin, the eyes, screamed at Frank. And then all the photos he’d seen at the trial and afterward came rushing in, framed snaps on the wall, the scrapbook of his childhood, the proud hunter holding his crossbow and resting one foot on the head of a whitetail deer—the photo the Sacramento Bee had cropped and used—they flurried in on him, and meeting them, his denial of their composite effect. He faltered, and in that instant, Daniels himself rushed in, lunged, thrust a stiff tongue of steel straight through Frank’s belly, turned it so that the tang rotated like bug legs and the sharp pain darkened and bloomed in him, then tugged it straight out, pulling Frank’s thread of life with it.

  Frank fell to his knees. He heard Karin’s voice call his name, full of anguish, not reproach, but he had failed her, was leaving her at the mercy of this thing from the grave. Then he recalled the gun in his hand and bent all his efforts there, raising it, firing it, feeling the rude recoil whicker back his weak hand, seeing the hole open in the man’s chest, the grin drop away, the sword fall out of his hand, the impossible corpse, hands imploring, stagger toward him and begin to topple. But then the floor angled up to meet him, and Frank fell against the skewered torso, Daniels landing on him like a six-hundred-pound wrestler, and then the darkness swallowed him up.

  ***

  Karin watched it all, paralyzed. She was a helpless dreamer, witness to unstoppable events. The sword blade thrust into her beloved. The cloth-yield sound of a pin cushion being needled blent with his bluff grunt of pain. “Frank!” she said, but his eyes were already filming over. Then his arm came up, seeming not to be attached to the rest of him, and whipped backward in a buffet of sound. Danny’s skin, to the left of his spine, grew an eye that gushed red tears. Frank went down. Danny fell forward. And Karin felt the power take her: Frank could not die, she loved him too much, she would not let Danny take him away. But those thoughts spun out of a blur of instinct. She rose from the couch and, raising her red hands, let a stream of revivification shoot from her fingertips.

  It fused forth green as sunlight through emeralds, a bath of healing that pushed back the room’s ugly sheen of red, damped down the stench. Too wide a swath. Her mind was fixed on Frank but her uncontrolled surge of power did not discriminate in what it healed: Frank jolted back to life, though perhaps she’d pulled him away from the brink before death could take him; Danny’s bullet wound smoothed over like a gash of sand in the backwash of an ocean wave, and he began to regain his feet; and Marcie, clotted and crusted, legless and armless, opened her eyes, lifted her head, and screamed at what she saw and felt, the steel of half a dozen swords still stuck through her. Frank looked for the gun, found it behind him, dove for it. Marcie’s eyes locked on Danny, dazed beside her. Her teeth sank into his palm, not letting go, but Danny put his foot on her chest and grabbed her neck with his other hand and shoved it with such force that her skull snapped away from the top of her spinal column and her neckskin ripped like rotted crimson drapery. New-created blood splashed from her neckhole onto her face. Her body quivered, then grew still. Danny yanked a sword out of her belly.

  No! thought Karin, but this time she didn’t feel in the least paralyzed. She’d saved Frank. She had power in her, had always had it, buried at her center. It emerged now, and she felt strong and whole for the first time she could remember. She ran toward Danny, his back to her and his sword coming up, and leaped on him. Her arm clamped his neck in a choke hold. His free hand gripped it, began to wrench it away. Then Frank was on the other side of Danny, gun gone, both hands at Danny’s sword hand, trying to wrest it out of his grasp.

  Danny dropped it, came in toward Frank’s face. He’d caught Frank offguard and his hands tightened on Frank’s windpipe, ready to squeeze it off like a wet paper straw. But Karin kept her arm about Danny’s neck, using it more for leverage than damage, put her right hand flat on his back just to the right of his backbone, and concentrated her killing power on his heart. Connection. Palm-suck. The wrench inside, the cry that came from him, from her, at the doing of it, the skipped beat. He fell and Karin rode him down, jolting him again.

  Frank lifted her off him, danced her backward to her feet as Danny rolled over, hurt, and lay there gazing up at them. “Are you all right?” Frank asked her, his hands feeling for verification.

  She didn’t want to take her eyes from Danny, not sure he wasn’t faking. But she chanced it. “I’m okay. Did he hurt you?” She touched his face, soothed his throat. She could not believe how glad she was to see him.

  “I thought he ran me through with a sword, but I must have imagined it.” He tugged at his shirt, found the red rip there, looked bewildered. He looked at the floor. “I must have imagined a lot, and I guess I still am.”

  She opened
her mouth to explain.

  “Karin.” Danny called out to her where he lay. His other voice spoke, the one he would use after beating her, the one she had once loved him for: contrite, filled with sorrow and suffering, the lost boy devoured by the crazed man he’d become.

  “Please, Karin. Take away the pain in my head.”

  She looked at him, tears pooling in his eyes. “I don’t—”

  “Heal my mind. Forget about the rest of me, just fix me inside my head.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Karin. It’s a trick. Keep away—”

  She put a finger to Frank’s lips, felt them leave off talking, kiss her fingertip soft and warm. How lucky she was to know this man, to live with him.

  Kneeling behind Danny, she touched his temples. The connection was there almost at once, focused and sure.

  “Wait, you don’t know what you might be doing.”

  “It’s all right, Frank,” she said. “I know.” And she flooded Danny’s brain with healing.

  He cried out, short sharp cries again and again, not cries of physical pain but of recognition. Then they grew longer—drawn out, anguished groans that filled the cabin. “God, forgive me,” he said, not addressing her so much as the world entire. Again he begged forgiveness, and again. His fingertips touched the backs of her hands, not trying to stop her, not a threat, but welcoming in what she gave as he wept out his inner agony.

  But at last he lifted her hands off him and released them. “On the table.” He gestured. “Wakizashi.” His samurai sword, or rather the shorter of the two he owned. The longer one, the katana, arced now through the base of the dead woman’s breasts like an ornamental bone through an aborigine’s nose. Karin looked away from the terrible sight and went to the table, a thick oaken affair Danny had made and stained soon after the cabin had been built. She lifted the scabbarded samurai sword, marveling anew at how heavy such a small weapon could be, unsheathed it, and gave it to Danny. Frank again cautioned her and again she calmed his fears.