Swift to Chase

by Laird Barron

  A wail rose and fell somewhere to the left. A trilling eee-ee-eeee that made my flesh prickle, made me bite my tongue lest I cry a response.

  The robot rabbit’s sobs described an arc that moved closer, then farther from my hiding place. I considered crawling some more once my arms revived. Too afraid to move, I pissed myself instead, counted down the seconds until the end came brutal as a tomahawk blow to my noggin. Had time to think back on a wasted youth, a life of misdeeds. I contemplated my possibly fatal morbid fascination with things better left alone. Sure, I was furious with myself. Two weeks playing chicken with dark forces, yet never truly admitting I was in over my head. I’d known, always known. The colossal scope of my pride and selfishness bore down to smother me as I bit hard on the flesh of my arm and tried to keep it together, tried not to whine like prey.

  The sky grew dim, then dark. Lightning tore the blackness and thunder cracked a beat or two afterward. The cavewoman running the show in my brain, the primordial bitch dispensing adrenaline and endorphins, knew what I’d listened to throughout the day hadn’t been any mechanical rabbit and that almost undid me, almost got the waterworks going.

  I sucked it up and stood. Every muscle in me complained and for a few seconds I couldn’t bring myself to actually breathe. What Dad and his hunting buddies told me back in the Alaska days was if I felt the bullet, it’d be like a heavy punch. A few seconds of that and it became apparent I wasn’t going to be smote from afar.

  The truck was gone, probably had been for hours. It began to rain.

  * * *

  Sonofabitch had my purse and knapsack with the spare clothes, the handful of knick-knacks and keepsakes I brought with me when I split from AK. All that shit was in a burn barrel by then, and no, I didn’t equivocate or second guess myself, didn’t say, Jess maybe this is a misunderstanding, maybe life has made you a wee bit paranoid. Maybe there’s a logical explanation. I was indeed a wee bit paranoid. Thank the gods.

  Saving grace was I’d dressed sensibly for the trip. I had my wallet, a pack of Camel No. Nines, and a lighter. I veered due east, walked until lights from a farmhouse appeared, kept going and the clouds rolled back and stars shined upon me. Dawn came and I crossed a rancid stream. Dunked my head underwater, drank until I was fit to puke and rambled on, came to a two lane road I hadn’t seen before and followed it back to the highway. Getting dark again. Cleaned up in a gas station john, then walked into a no tell motel one block down and rented a single. Room service pizza and two scalding showers, no booze, but that was fine. Cigarette burns in the carpet, broken box springs, and an ammonia reek was all fine too.

  Comatose for eighteen hours with the TV and air-conditioner humming white noise, a chair propped under the doorknob, Mr. Ka-Bar cool against my cheek. Dreamless sleep, except in those moments before I came fully online again and a misshapen shadow lunged, made a hissing, shushing sound as it trampled the grass. I stabbed it with my knife and poof. The fact I’d doubtless be haunted by that goddamned Varmint Suit until my dying day filled me with the white hot rage men are always being warned about. Could be that’s what changed my plans from flight to payback. An old high school enemy called me VH1. Vindictive Hoochie Number One, and she wasn’t wrong.

  Hopped a ride to the next town with a salesman going to Seattle for a conference. He politely declined to mention the gouges on my face and arms, left me at the off ramp and went his way. Thinking to hell with hitching, I haggled with a kid over the hatchback gathering rust in front of his house. The engine had a million miles on it and sounded iffy and the tires were screwed to hell. Good thing that jalopy only had to get me down the road a state or two. Better would come along. I paid three hundred cash and put a lie on the receipt. Kid was so stoned I doubt he even knew I was a woman, much less be able to ID me if it came to such a pass.

  As for where I got the dough, listen. Just because I enjoyed pilfering stores for sundries didn’t mean I was destitute. People Magazine once gave me sixty grand for an interview they pared to three and half sentences and a muddy headshot. I socked that shit away.

  I bought basic camping gear at a sporting goods store and spent four nights on the grounds of a state park, four more along a big river where it didn’t feel as if anybody would notice. On the ninth day I parked in a gravel pit a half mile from Hoyle’s trailer, sneaked closer for recon. He wasn’t around. I proceeded with caution, stealthy as any woodland critter, and let myself in. Forty-five minutes on the property was forty more than necessary. Did what needed doing and got the hell out and drove to another motel, a nicer setup, and treated myself to an evening on a soft bed and half a bottle of red wine.

  Swung back to check on him late the next afternoon. Hoyle’s truck sat in the yard. I glassed the property with a pair of binoculars, gave it an hour before moving in. My ex-lover lay behind the trailer, sprawled face down, stark staring naked except for his boots. Nearby, his bike was a crumpled mess of spokes and leaking fluids. The results were certainly more spectacular than I’d hoped for while sawing through the brake lines.

  I poked him with a stick, unsure whether he was dead or playing possum. Neither, as it developed. Rolled him over and he smiled at me, teeth stained with grass and dirt. His arms worked, but that was it. I didn’t see any marks beyond some bumps and abrasions. Whatever was wrong with him, I bet he’d be fine with proper medical attention.

  “Hi, darling,” he said. “You had me worried, runnin’ off like that.”

  I squatted and hooked under his armpits and lifted, began to shuffle backward. His legs bumped along lifelessly. Went a few steps, rested, and repeated. I dragged him into the nearer of the two corrals and propped him in a seated position, his spine braced by a post. He didn’t say anything the whole time except to ask for his Stetson because the sun was powerful warm on his neck. I fetched the hat and gave it to him. An ant climbed atop the toe of my boot, another clung to my pants cuff. I bent and brushed them aside, moved my feet to discourage the rest. Hoyle stared at the looming mound, its teeming inhabitants. The breeze stirred.

  “Why?” he said, as if genuinely curious.

  I strode to a dead dogwood and tore free the chimes strung in its branches, flung the mess at Hoyle. He snatched it midflight, glanced at the handful of dog tags —rabies vaccinations and ID platelets — and nodded. Dozens upon dozens more clinked in their constellations on bushes, posts, clothes lines, woven into the trailer vents, every fucking where. I let him think about it while I used a branch to cover my tracks, the grooves where I’d towed him.

  “Don’t you think the cops will put it together? They’ll catch you, Jess.”

  “I hear Sheriff Brunner is a dumbass,” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s true enough.”

  Daylight was burning and restlessness overcame me. I gave the old boy a sip from my water bottle and tried to think of the proper words, settled for a goodbye kiss, quick and dry. We didn’t say anything for the longest time and eventually I turned and walked away.

  I looked over my shoulder as I crested a rise that led to the road. Hoyle reached forward and passed the Stetson over his legs, back and forth.

  * * *

  On the way through town to wherever, I stopped bold as brass at Lonnie’s house. There was a bad moment where I worried Gunther and Leroy might’ve forgotten, had visions of getting rent limb from limb as I knelt to unleash them from the bumper of the truck. Not a chance. And when I popped the hatch, those bruisers piled into the back like they’d always belonged there.

  We hit the highway eastbound, ascended into the hills and then the mountains. Kept right on going, flying.

  The car eventually crapped out in Idaho. I spent a time with a reverend and his family on what had been a potato farm until the latter ‘70s. God works in mysterious ways, so said the right reverend. He’d lost a pair of mastiffs to old age and cancer respectively. His kids fell in love with Leroy and Gunther. I left the dogs in their care when I slipped away one night by the dark of the moon. Headed east across th
e fallow fields with a knife, backpack, and a pocket Bible I lifted from the reverend’s shelf. I’d hollowed out that good book. It’s where I stashed my possibles.

  Camped in the lee of an abandoned barn, I rolled over onto a black widow. Little bitch stabbed the living shit out of me. Sorry, so very sorry that I crushed her in my thrashing. Spent two days curled tight, my guts clenched into a slimy ball. In my delirium I chewed dirt and fantasized about being skinned alive. Laid my bottom dollar on dying out there in that lonely field.

  I didn’t die. Nah, I did what I always do. I got over it.

  Termination Dust

  Let be be finale of seem.

  --Wallace Stevens

  Hunting in Alaska, especially as one who enjoys the intimacy of knives, bludgeons, and cords, is fraught with peril. Politically speaking, the difference between a conservative and a liberal in the forty-ninth state is the caliber of handgun one carries. Despite a couple of close calls, you’ve not been shot. Never been shot, never been caught, knock on wood.

  That’s what you used to say, in any event.

  People look at you every day. People look at you every day, but they don’t see you. People will ask why and you will reply, Why not?

  * * *

  Tyson Langtree’s last words: “I tell you, man. Andy Kaufman is alive, man. He’s alive, bigger than shit, and cuttin’ throats. He’s Elvis, man. He’s the king of death.” This was overheard at the packed Caribou Creek Tavern on a Friday night about thirty seconds before bartender Lonnie DeForrest tossed his sorry ass out onto a snowbank. Eighteen below zero Fahrenheit and a two and a half mile walk home. Dead drunk, wearing coveralls and a Miners Do It Deeper ball cap.

  Nobody’s seen the old boy since. Deputy Newcastle found a lot of blood in Langtree’s bed, though. Splattered on the walls and ceiling of his shack on Midnight Road. Hell of a lot of blood. That much blood and no corpse, well, you got to wonder, right? Got to wonder why Langtree didn’t keep his mouth shut. Everybody knows Andy Kaufman is crazy as a motherfucker. He been whacking motormouth fools since ‘84.

  You were in the bar that night and you followed Langtree back to his humble abode. Man, he was surprised to see you step from the shadows.

  For the record, his last words were actually, “Please don’t kill me, E!”

  * * *

  Jessica Mace lies in darkness, slightly drunk, wholly frustrated. Heavy bass thuds through the ceiling from Snodgrass’ party. She’d left early and in a huff after locking horns with Julie Vellum, her honorable enemy since the hazy days of high school. Is hate too strong an emotion to describe how she feels about Julie? Nope, hatred seems quite perfect, although she’s long since forgotten initial casus belli of their eternal war. Vellum — what kind of name is that, anyhow? It describes either ancient paper or a sheepskin condom. The bitch is ridiculous. Mobile home trash, bottom drawer sorority sister, tits sliding toward earth with a vengeful quickness. Easiest lay of the Last Frontier. A whore in name and deed.

  JV called her a whore and splashed a glass of beer on her dress. Cliché, bitch, so very cliché. Obviously JV hadn’t gotten the memo that Jessica and Nate were through as of an hour prior to the party. The evil slut had carried a torch for him since he cruised into town with his James Dean too-cool-for school shtick and set all the girlies’ hearts aflutter a few weeks before Katrina leveled New Orleans a continent away.

  Snodgrass, Wannamaker, and Ophelia, the beehive-hairdo lady from 510, jumped between them before the fur could fly. Snodgrass was an old hand at breaking up fistfights. Lucky for Julie, too. Jessica made up her mind to fix that girl’s wagon once and for all, had broken a champagne glass for an impromptu weapon when Snodgrass locked her in a bear hug. Meanwhile, Deputy Newcastle stood near the wet bar, grimly shaking his huge blond head. Or it might’ve been the deputy’s evil twin, Elam. Hard to tell through the crush of the crowd, the smoke, and the din. If she’d seen him with his pants down, she’d have known with certainty.

  Here she is after the fracas, sulking while the rest of town let down its hair and would continue to do so deep into the night. Gusts from the blizzard shake the building. Power comes from an emergency generator in the basement. However, cable is on the fritz. She would have another go at Nate, but Nate isn’t around, he is gone-Johnson after she’d told him to hit the bricks and never come back no more, no more. Hasty words uttered in fury, a carbon copy of her own sweet ma who (before her ultimate vanishing act) ran through half the contractors and fishermen in the southeast during a thirty-year career of bar fights and flights from the law. Elizabeth Taylor of the Tundra, was Ma, though everybody called her Lucius. Nate, an even poorer man’s Richard Burton. Her father, Esteban Montgomery Mace, the man who put up with his wife’s humiliating exploits? Dad (like poor Jack and many Alaskan fishermen) died at sea and Jessica thought of him nevermore.

  Why hadn’t Nate been at the party? He always made an appearance. Could it be she’s really and truly broken his icy heart? Good!

  She fumbles in the bedside drawer, pushing aside the cell charger, Jack’s photograph, the revolver her brother Elwood gave her before he got shredded by a claymore mine in Afghanistan, and locates the “personal massager” she ordered from Fredericks of Hollywood and has a go with that instead. Stalwart comrade, loyal stand-in when she’s between boyfriends and lovers, Buzz hasn’t let her down yet.

  Jessica opens her eyes as the mattress sags. A shadow enters her blurry vision. She smells cologne or perfume or hairspray, very subtle and totally androgynous. Almost familiar. Breathless from the climax, it takes her a moment to collect her wits.

  She says, “Jack, is that you?” Which was a strange conclusion, since Jack presumably drifts along deep sea currents, his rugged redneck frame reduced to bones and sweet melancholy memories. All hands of the Prince Valiant lost to Davey Jones’s Locker, wasn’t it? That makes three out of the four main men of her life dead. Only Nate is still kicking. Does he count now that she’s banished him to a purgatory absent her affection?

  Fingers clamp her mouth and ram her head into the pillow hard enough that stars shoot everywhere. Her mind flashes to a vivid image: Gothic oil paintings of demons perched atop the bosoms of swooning women. So morbidly beautiful, those antique pictures. She thinks of the pistol in the dresser that she might’ve grabbed instead of the vibrator. Too late baby, too late now.

  A knife glints as it arcs downward. Her attacker is dressed in black so the weapon appears to levitate under its own motive force. The figure slashes her throat with vicious inelegance. An untutored butcher. It is cold and she tastes the metal. But it doesn’t hurt.

  * * *

  Problem is, constant reader, you can’t believe a damned word of this story. The killer could be anyone. Cops recovered some bodies reduced to charcoal briquettes. Two of those charred corpses were never properly identified, and what with all the folks who went missing prior to the Christmas party…

  My life flashed before my eyes as I died of a slashed throat and a dozen other terrible injuries. My life, the life of countless others who were in proximity. Wasn’t pretty, wasn’t neat or orderly, or linear. I experienced the fugue as an exploding kaleidoscope of imagery. Those images replay at different velocities, over and over in a film spliced together out of sequence. My hell is to watch a bad horror movie until the stars burn out.

  I get the gist of the plot, but the nuances escape into the vacuum. The upshot being that I know hella lot about my friends and neighbors; although, not everything. Many of the juiciest details elude me as I wander purgatory, reliving a life of sin. Semi-omniscience is a drag.

  In recent years, some pundits have theorized I was the Eagle Talon Ripper. Others have raised the possibility it was Jackson Bane, that he’d been spotted in San Francisco months after the Prince Valiant went down, that he’d been overheard plotting bloody revenge against me, Jessica, a dozen others. Laughable, isn’t it? The majority of retired FBI profilers agree.

  No matter, I’m the hot pick these da
ys. Experts say the trauma I underwent in Moose Valley twisted my mind. Getting shot in the head did something to my brain. Gave me a lobotomy of sorts. Except instead of going passive, I turned into a monster, waited twenty-plus years, and went on a killing spree.

  It’s a sexy theory what with the destroyed and missing bodies, mine included. The killer could’ve been a man or woman, but the authorities bet on a man. Simple probability and the fact some of the murders required a great deal of physical strength and a working knowledge of knots and knives. I fit the bill on all counts. There’s also the matter of my journal. Fragments of it were pieced together by a forensics team and the shit in there could be misconstrued. What nobody knows is that after the earlier event in Moose Valley, I read a few psychology textbooks. The journal was therapy, not some veiled admission of guilt. Unfortunately, I was also self-medicating with booze and that muddied the waters even more.

  Oh, well. What the hell am I going to do about it now?

  If you ask me, Final Girl herownself massacred all those people. What’s my proof? Nothing except instinct. Call me a cynic — it doesn’t seem plausible a person can survive a gashed throat and still possess the presence to retrieve a pistol, in the dark, no less, and plug the alleged killer to save the day. How convenient that she couldn’t testify to the killer’s identity on account of the poor lighting. Even more convenient how that fire erased all the evidence. In the end, it’s her word, her version of events.

  Yeah, it’s a regular cluster. Take the wrong peg from this creaky narrative and the whole log pile falls on you. Anyway you know. You know.

  What if…What if they were in it together?