I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  “I won’t.” Kenway holstered the pistol and concentrated on running. The grass was wet with evening dew, which made for slippery footing, but somehow, he made it out of the vineyard, and the three of them burst from the trellis rows.

  Crossing the backyard, around a table laden with dirty dishes. Rounding the side of the garage, running across the tarmac, crunching across the gravel. The powder-blue Chevy stood vigil in the darkness behind the house, and Kenway plowed into it hard, using it to stop himself with a BANG! in the stillness.

  Pulling the door open, he pushed Robin into the passenger seat, then thrust an arm behind the seat-back and dug around for the medical kit he always kept back there. Beer can, empty rucksack, Frisbee—his hand fluttered across the smooth plastic of the emergency box. He dragged it out and opened it on the floorboard.

  The tourniquet was on the bottom, under the rest of the bullshit. He opened the webbing cuff as wide as it would go and gingerly slipped it under Robin’s severed shoulder, just above the belt, then started twisting the plastic rod. Cords inside the cuff drew taut until they bit into the flesh of Robin’s upper arm, compressing it, choking off the blood flow. He twisted it as tightly as he dared to turn it, then used two Velcro straps to hold the rod in place.

  “I got you, baby,” Kenway gasped to her, out of breath.

  He tossed his belt into the cab of the truck, slammed the door, and threw himself into the driver’s seat.

  To his credit, Wayne clambered up the rear quarter panel and flung himself into the bed of the truck without having to be directed. Kenway floored it, shredding gravel all over the garage, and rocketed down the dirt driveway.

  Halfway down, someone else was coming up. Headlights bounced and wobbled along the ragged road, filling the Chevy’s cab with halogen light. He squinted, blowing past into darkness, and the other car—looked like a Suburban—swerved out of the way, driving into the ditch and deep grass.

  As the Chevy reached the bottom of the driveway, he checked his mirror. The Suburban turned around, the headlights sweeping across the front of the Lazenbury. “Who is that?” he said to himself, turning off onto Underwood Road.

  Tires squealed underneath them as he gunned it onto clear asphalt, fishtailing the ancient Chevy, missing Cutty’s mailbox by a hair. Who gives a shit. We’ll worry about that later. Right now, we have more urgent things to worry about.

  As he drove, his eyes kept darting over to the girl sitting next to him, who had become a gray, ash-faced phantom in the soft dashboard lights, mottled with blood and dirt, her Mohawk plastered flat against her scalp. Robin’s mouth hung open, and her dark-circled eyes were thin slits through which he could see nothing but white.

  She looks fuckin’ dead she looks fuckin’ dead was all that ran through his vibrating brain.

  His mouth was as dry as a bone, his hands felt greasy. His skeleton was lightning. He blew through every stop sign and red light he came across, shooting through town like Chuck Yeager on a rocket sled. Caught air a few times. It was a miracle no cops came howling out of hiding to bust him for speeding; honestly, though, would he have stopped for them? Hell, no. Negative, Ghost Rider. They would have to chase him all the way to the hospital.

  Giant words blazed neon red in the dark: EMERGENCY ROOM.

  The Chevy shrieked into a fifteen-foot hockey stop in front of Blackfield Medical’s ER entrance, almost slamming into a parked ambulance. The boy in the back fell with a hollow thud.

  Pulling the parking brake so hard it nearly tore out of the floor, Kenway scrambled out of the driver’s seat and the pistol fell into the floorboard with a clunk, forgotten. He ran around to the passenger side and opened it. Robin was slumped against the door and her limp body fell out as soon as he saw her. Kenway caught her

  (god there’s so much blood)

  and pulled her out, dragged her into his arms again, holding her close, the tourniquet rod digging into his side,

  (I got you baby I got you)

  and he lifted her, ran into the ER.

  Just before the automatic door slid open, he caught a glimpse of himself in the Plexiglas. His face was smeared with her blood, his beard had soaked it up like a sponge, his shirt was red with it.

  People sat in rows of chairs in a waiting area, morose faces, news on TV. Swinging doors led into other rooms. Gurneys lined one wall, collapsed down like cots. An L-shaped counter spanned the back of the room, and behind it sat several women and one man, all of them dressed in green scrubs.

  One of the women looked up from what she was doing, and her eyes went wide.

  “Sir?” someone said to his right.

  Where to go? Where to go? Where was he going? He marched into the middle of the room, arms loaded full of mangled human being, and wailed, “Help! Somebody fucking help me! HELP!”

  Nurses and paramedics converged on him like a flock of birds. “Get her onto this gurney,” they were saying, “what the hell happened,” they were saying, “bring her over here,” and they were barking orders at each other, medical terms Kenway might have recognized if he hadn’t been jazzed out of his damned mind. He’d been cool as a cucumber right up until the moment he turned and saw Robin sprawled out in the ivy, lifeblood gushing out of her.

  “Car crash,” Wayne told them, breathless.

  They took her from him, put an oxygen mask on her face, wheeled her through a door, and she was gone.

  Of all the times, of all the places, Kenway’s cellphone rang. He stood there in the middle of the emergency room, shaking like a cold Chihuahua, watching the door they’d carried Robin through, ignoring it. He realized he was crying.

  “Hey, mister,” said Wayne. The vet looked at him. “Your cell-phone is ringing.”

  He took it out and checked the screen. Unknown number. He keyed the green button and put it to his ear, wandering through the waiting area. “Yeah? I don’t know who this is, but can it wait?” He stifled a sob. “This is probably the worst possible time.”

  “Joel’s been shot. I need your help.”

  “What? Somebody shot Joel?” Kenway paused. “Who is this?”

  “It’s his brother Fisher. I’ve got him at my comic shop. You’re a combat medic, aren’t you? You said you were. Can you help?”

  “I was, yeah. Why didn’t you take him to the hospital?”

  A sigh on the line. “Because it was a cop that shot him. And then he shot the cop. Fuckin’ blew him into a swimming pool with Mama’s duck gun. We’re afraid if we take him to the hospital, it’s gonna get back to the cops and they’re gonna try again.”

  “What? Why?”

  “He says the serial killer that strung him up in the garage at Weaver’s Wonderland is in cahoots with the cops—might even be a cop himself—and I guess some dude came to silence him because he made his statement to the department.”

  “Shit. Well. Goddamn, when it rains, it pours, don’t it?” Kenway combed his fingers through his rain-soaked hair and gave a shaky sigh. “I can’t really get away, man. I’m actually here at the hospital with Robin and Leon Parkin’s kid. Robin got hurt, like, fuck, real bad. The w—” He almost said witches, but after what Joel had said about his brother’s skeptical behavior concerning their mother’s paranoia, he wasn’t sure if mentioning them was wise.

  “The what?” asked Fish.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  As he considered it, he noticed the aforementioned kid standing there, looking up at him with a sympathy well beyond his years. Wayne saluted awkwardly. “I’ve been taking care of my dad for a while now,” he said. “If anyone’s qualified to stay here, it’s me. You go take care of Joel. He needs you.”

  “You sure?” He hated to leave a child by himself, even in a hospital.

  “Hey,” said Wayne, “if people can leave babies at hospitals, you can leave a kid that’s almost a teenager. I’ll be fine. You do what you need to do, okay? I been by myself before. Lots of times.”

  Reluctantly, Kenway told Fish, “Send your girlfrien
d Marissa up here to the hospital to watch Wayne and I’ll come down to the comic shop.”

  “She works there, actually. She’s a doctor, remember? She’s been on shift for the last three hours.”

  “Hey, kid,” he said to Wayne, “you got a phone?”

  “Yeah.” Wayne took it out of his pocket. It was an older phone, with one of the slide-out keyboards. Not quite powerful or new enough to browse the web, but enough to text.

  “Be there in a minute,” Kenway said to Fish, and he hung up his phone, jamming it into his pocket. “Hang out here in the ER waiting room, okay? Fish’s girlfriend is gonna come out here and check on you. She works here, she’s a doctor. Name’s Marissa. Keep that phone on you in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. In case one of us wants to find you.” He took Wayne’s phone and added Fisher’s and his own numbers to the kid’s address book.

  “Okay.”

  “Text me, keep me in the loop.”

  “Okay.”

  Out in the ambulance parking, Kenway jumped into his truck, slammed it into gear, and roared away from the hospital.

  Funny, he didn’t feel quite as terrified as he had a few moments before. The panic and helplessness had burned away, leaving only a sensation of purpose. Regardless of the circumstances, it felt good to burn the candle at both ends again. People needed him again. He wasn’t some asshole with a studio apartment full of shoe-gazey paintings in the middle of nowhere. He was Sergeant Griffin again. He was necessary again.

  Hopefully, he thought as he blazed down the road into the heart of Blackfield, Robin’s still got a candle to burn. The H&K 45 pistol lay on the floor behind his heels, slowly vibrating out of sight.

  14

  When Joel awoke, there was a silhouette standing in the doorway. Officer Bowker, aiming a pistol at his face.

  “Jesus God!” he shrieked, scrambling backward and off the end of the futon, tumbling to the floor. A rusty sawband of hot pain raked across his thigh. “Don’t shoot me! Don’t—”

  “Hey-hey-hey. Hey.” Bowker turned a switch—click click—and a lamp filled the room with a soft glow. It wasn’t the deputy at all, it was his brother Fisher, and he was holding out a cup of coffee, not a Glock. “It’s all right, man! You’re all right! It’s me.”

  The walls of the cramped room were lined with bookshelves, and the shelves were full of hundreds of VHS tapes: all the best and most obscure horror and fantasy movies of the last forty or fifty years. Nestled into a space between the shelves was an old Magnavox television/VCR. A bundle of clothes lay on the end table (a shirt and a pair of jeans, both folded as meticulously as a display in a clothing store) and the bedazzled baseball bat leaned against the end of the futon.

  Gauze was wrapped around his thigh in a thick band, affixed with a pair of tiny aluminum clips. Clean, but he didn’t know if that was because it was fresh or because he wasn’t bleeding too heavily. The stinging agony went bone-deep, as if he’d been shot with a nailgun and the nail

  (AIN’T NO WAY OUT OF THERE, PIZZA-MAN)

  was still in embedded in the muscle. Joel squinched his eyes until he could banish the mental flash of the Serpent shooting nails through the garage door.

  (BLOOD FOR THE GARDEN)

  Hangover pain ran laps around the inside of his head, the scratches on his chest were still sore, and his entire body was stiff and achy, but none of it could hope to compete with the gunshot wound in his leg. His hands shook too bad to hold a cup of coffee. “Put it over here, I’ll get to it.”

  Fish left the coffee next to the folded clothes and sat by his brother. “How’s your leg feel?” he asked, handing Joel a couple of pills.

  Extra-strength Tylenol. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do until he could get back to the stash at Mama’s house. He dry-swallowed the Tylenol one at a time. His mouth tasted like he’d been helping himself to a litter box.

  “Hurts.”

  “I bet. Luckily, it was just a graze. Cut a hole in the outside of your leg about the size of a quarter, but that’s all. Coulda been worse. At least he didn’t hit an artery or clip the bone.”

  Underneath the gauze was about twenty stitches. The night before was a haze of alcohol and pain, only broken up by memories of running from the police lieutenant and hiding in the park like a wino, finishing off a blood-slick bottle of Thunderbird. Fisher had picked him up on the back of his motorcycle, one of those sleek Japanese deals in cranberry red, and spirited him away. He vaguely remembered refusing to be taken to the hospital.

  “Who stitched me up?”

  A huge shadow stepped into the doorway with a metallic clunk. “Sounds like the patient is awake.”

  “Kenway?”

  “Yeah.” To his credit, the big vet had shown up with bells on. He was also about six feet tall and, fake leg or not, nearly sturdy enough to arm-wrestle a grizzly bear. Along with Fish, the veteran was plenty of muscle to hold down a struggling drunk with a wounded leg.

  “How you feeling?” he asked.

  “Like I been shot in the leg and like I need to be shot in the head,” Joel said testily. God-rays of morning sunlight shifting through the doorway around Kenway’s frame were sending glass shards into his brain. After his initial snap was met with silence, he added, “… Sorry. I’m just a little beat-up. Thank you for patchin’ me up.”

  “Anything for my friends.”

  “‘Beat-up’ is putting it lightly,” said Fish.

  Stepping into the room, Kenway sat on a milk crate with a creak of plastic. He rubbed his face with both hands, visibly exhausted. Looked like shit, to be honest. Looked like he hadn’t slept. “You said a cop shot you?”

  “Yeah. Said somebody called ‘the Serpent’ was supposed to have finished me off. Cop said they’re all workin’ together. Said Marilyn Cutty owns this town.” Joel tilted his head back and slumped down, pressing a palm against his eyes. Geometric shapes flashed behind his eyelids. “I’m guessin’ this ‘Serpent’ guy is the dude I met on the internet Friday night.”

  “A booty call.” Fish sighed. “You got to quit cattin’ around like this. You gonna end up with something they don’t make vaccines for.”

  “I got rubbers.”

  “Always what you say, ain’t it? A raincoat ain’t gonna keep you dry forever. Besides, you came within a hair of getting yourself killed by some looney-tune cracker with a knife.”

  “Livin’ on bacon and cauliflower ain’t gonna make you immortal, either. You can’t jog your ass away from Death, he don’t care how much you can deadlift.” Joel picked up his coffee and cradled it under his chin. “Complex carbohydrates ain’t what drove Mama crazy and pushed her into the grave, you know. They ain’t gon’ kill you, either.”

  Shaking his head, Fish walked out. A radio in the shop came on, obnoxiously loud, tuned to some local station in the middle of their drive-to-work morning chitchat. It snarled through a dozen stations before landing on classic rock. Guns N’ Roses wasn’t Fish’s forte, but this was how his brother dealt with turbulent conversations between the two of them: blocking it out with music. Any kind, it didn’t matter, as long as it was loud. This is probably why we ain’t never fixed nothing, thought Joel. He storms off into his bedroom and plays Kanye at top volume, and I go find something to smoke or drink. Kenway quietly watched him drink his coffee, his hulking body hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his hands slowly wringing each other.

  “You gonna give me the After-School Special too?”

  Kenway briefly opened his hands in a sort of awkward, blameless shrug. “I’m just glad to see you doing okay.”

  “What are you doing today, anyway? We didn’t pull you away from hangin’ out with that little witch-hunter with the perky ass, did we?”

  “She’s in the hospital.”

  Joel twitched in surprise. “What happened?”

  “She went and had dinner with the witches. They tried to make dinner out of her. One of ’em turned into
a giant hog and bit her goddamn arm off.” Kenway rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the floor with that thousand-yard stare.

  “Like, what the fuck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She gonna make it?”

  The vet shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope so. I called a couple hours ago. The doctors seem hopeful. She’s stable. She lost a lot of blood, and I did what I could. I drove her myself.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Joel sipped his coffee. Black, only sweet enough to take the bitter edge off. Hot enough to fog up his eyeballs. Oily. Vaguely salty. He sighed. “He put butter in my damn coffee.”

  “Gross.”

  “Yeah.” Joel stared at the cup, grinding his incisors together. “The cop came to my house. He knows where I live. I can’t go back there to lock up. They’re gonna leave my doors wide-ass open and I ain’t gonna have nothin’ left … if I can ever even go back.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be okay. I don’t imagine the cops would leave your front door unlocked.”

  “I didn’t imagine they’d show up out of the blue and try to shoot me, either.” Setting his coffee aside, Joel wallowed his butt out to the edge of the futon and braced himself on the armrest, trying to stand up. He hissed as the imaginary nail in his leg drove a little deeper.

  “Take it easy,” said Kenway. “I don’t want to have to take somebody else to the hospital this weekend.”

  “Take it easy and give it hard, that’s how I roll.”

  He put the clothes on, starting with the shirt. The jeans were a little harder. Every inch of denim drove the rusty nail in his thigh a centimeter deeper. “Damn. He said this hole in my leg was the size of a quarter. The French Quarter, maybe.” He blew through pursed lips and opened the door at the end of the couch, limping through. On the other side was a narrow stairway leading up to Fisher’s apartment over the comic shop. He put his good foot on the first riser and steeled himself for the climb.

  Taking a deep breath, he picked up his right foot and put it on the second riser. His thigh flexed, pulling at his stitches, grinding the denim against the bandage. Sharp, hot pain swelled in the muscle as if there were a lit cigarette trapped under the gauze.