by J. Thorn
"Jesus, Mary'n Joseph'n all the holy saints," it said. "What happened, Miss?"
It's them, she thought feebly. One of them come to take me back. To hurt me again. It was the same knowledge that had kept her going this far, the unmistakable feeling of being watched, stalked, hunted, meant to die but breathing still.
She shook her head to deny him. Opened her mouth to speak but only blood emerged, the river of sickness forcing her throat to swell. Still she tried to struggle, but when she raised her hands to protect herself, it happened only in her mind. Her limbs would not respond. The pair of dusty boots that had pressed into her field of vision moved away.
Good. Go. Leave me alone. You've done enough. Everything is dead. You killed them all.
"Christ, Pete, get me that 'ol dog blanket an' the flask. Move!"
At last the dizzying current ceased and she found strength enough to raise her head. The man was a wiry knot of shadow under a crooked hat, a scarecrow with a golden halo, trying to deceive her into thinking him salvation. Dread pounded at her chest, igniting further knots of pain that seemed to radiate from the core of her.
Another shadow sprouted from the man's shoulder, this one just as thin, but without a hat, just a fuzz of hair.
They're here to kill me.
"Oh God, lookit her eye."
"Shut your fool mouth, boy."
"What happ'ned to her? She ain't got no clothes on." The voice was filled with nervous excitement.
The hatless shadow was elbowed aside. The thin one flapped its arms until its chest became wings descending around Claire, swaddling her.
"Help me carry her."
She opened her mouth to moan at the sudden, terrible heat enveloping her and felt new warmth seep from between her legs. The dirt turned dark quickly.
"Pa she done wet hers—"
"Now."
Before the arms could press their wings even tighter around her, Claire took a series of quick, dry, painful swallows, then drew in a breath that sounded like nails on a blackboard, and screamed for Daniel. But even as that tortured, awful noise poured out of her, and though she was surrounded by shadows that were lifting her up and carrying her back to Hell, she knew for the first time in her life that she was well and truly alone, and that no help was coming now, or ever.
-2-
The smell of burned flesh, though only a figment of his imagination, made Luke's mouth water. He was hungry, his dinner having been interrupted not a full hour before by the sound of Matthew's keening from the woodshed. It had reminded him of that day when they were kids, when Luke had observed his younger brother trying to skin a deer they had taken down with a bow and arrow. Luke had known the excitement and desire to prove himself would lead Matt to make a mistake, and he'd been right. With a wide smile on his face, and sweat on his brow, Matt had held up the fistful of pelt he'd managed to free from the deer, his other hand still digging that Bowie knife into the carcass as he sought approval from Luke. Told'ya I could. Before Luke could satisfy him, the pelt slipped free of Matt's grip and the momentum made his other hand snap back. The blade cut a thin half-inch-deep groove through Matt's bare side, just below the ribs. Luke doubted it hurt very much, but it was enough to send his brother to his knees, hands grabbing fistfuls of hair as he vented his shame and disappointment in that irritating singsong keening sound—the same sound he'd used earlier today after the blonde woman drove a wooden spur through his chest.
Anger made Luke forget himself and he rose from where he'd been crouching atop a grassy hillock. Up ahead, an old black man and his boy were helping his brother's attacker into the back of a flatbed truck. Helpless to do anything but watch, he'd been tracking the woman on this road, which few folk ever traveled, biding his time before he closed the distance and dragged the woman back to make her pay for what she'd done. Rage had made him abandon the traditional rules of running down the quarry and he'd stayed on the road, in full view of the woman. She hadn't seen him, and was moving slower than a crippled coon. Even if she had looked over her shoulder and spied through the heat haze his lean sinewy form striding toward her, there was no chance she'd get away. She was bleeding a lot, and he didn't figure she'd get very far.
It should not have been a difficult task.
But damned if she hadn't kept on staggering away, her pace even despite her obvious disorientation. It was as if, instead of just floundering blindly through the woods, she'd been drawn to the road like an iron filing to a magnet. Still, he hadn't hurried. There was no need. He'd been confident despite the ache that throbbed steadily within him whenever it came back to him that Matt was hurt, and hurt bad.
But then Luke heard the truck, and noted the sound of the engine was not a safe, familiar one, and he'd quickly hopped the fence and ducked down in the grass, watching with queer, unfamiliar dread the red vehicle bearing down on the woman.
Claire, he remembered. One of the others had called her "Claire".
No one ever got away. Not for long. To let someone escape was an unthinkable, unimaginable mistake they had managed to avoid for as long as Luke had been alive. Papa-in-Gray had showed them how and what to hunt, and why it needed to be done, and they had executed his instructions flawlessly.
But today...
Today an implausible number of distractions had left Matt alone with the woman. Even so, she'd been tied to a stake, her hands and feet bound behind her, her mouth gagged. His brothers had already raped her and blinded her in one eye, cut off most of the toes on her right foot, and stabbed her repeatedly in the arms and legs. There should have been little life and even less fight in her, but yet somehow she'd managed to free herself and skewer Matt with the spur. She'd been gone damn near half an hour before Luke, oldest of his five brothers, heard Matt's pitiful mewling, and by then he'd all but bled out on the floor.
He knew it was not too late. He could still try to close the distance between himself and the truck before they got the woman settled and the engine running again, before they carried Claire out of their lives forever. If the two men he'd seen hefting her into the truck put up a fight, he'd deal with them. He had Matt's Bowie knife, plucked from his brother's hand with a vow to finish what the other had been denied the chance to do. Luke was quick. He could make it, and all their troubles would be over. All he needed to do was start running.
But then he heard the sound of the engine coughing, saw the dirty black plume of smoke puffing from the truck's exhaust, and knew it was too late. Slowly, he started moving toward the fence, and the road beyond. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, tear at his hair, rip at his skin, but instead he hopped the fence, and raced in the opposite direction, away from the truck, and back the way he'd come.
When he'd left home, Matt had been conscious. Breathing. Alive. That Joshua, Isaac and Aaron hadn't piled into the truck and come roaring down the road in pursuit of the woman told Luke that might no longer be the case.
Most telling of all, Luke realized, was that he hadn't thought to take the truck. He couldn't drive for shit, not with the way his fingers were arranged, but that was no excuse. Not now. He had always been an efficient hunter, and he knew the real reason his brothers weren't coming was because they assumed Luke would handle what needed to be handled. But for the first time ever, they were wrong. He had lost them their prey. And he knew what that would mean when he returned home. He would have to answer to Momma-In-Bed, and she would not be at all pleased. And the last time she'd been mad at him, she'd gotten Papa-In-Grey to bust the fingers on his left hand and set all but the thumb and the middle one wrong.
Dispirited and fearful, he slowed, and whispered a small prayer to God that she would go easy on him. But as the sun rose higher, became a blazing eye in the center of the cornflower blue sky, he knew two things at once.
God wasn't listening. Not to him. No more than Papa ever did.
And that today, there was every possibility that Momma-In-Bed would kill him.
*
"Stop starin'."
/> "Sorry, Pa."
"Watch the road."
Pete nodded and righted himself in the passenger seat. They had covered the girl with a tarp, which was all they had, but just now, through the small begrimed window at the back of the cab, Pete had seen that a corner of the tarp had come loose, flapping madly at the billowing dust the Chevy was kicking up and exposing the girl's right side, down to her hip. One small breast was visible and despite it being crisscrossed by cuts and scratches, the boy's breath had quickened, his heart beating faster and faster the longer he looked. He didn't even know if she'd been a pretty girl before whatever had happened to her. It was hard to tell because of her wounds, and the swelling, which made her face look like a beaten squash. He hoped she was, and that once she recovered—assuming she didn't die right there among the tools and empty chicken cages—that she might take the kind of interest in him he'd thus far been unable to excite in members of the fairer sex; maybe as a thank you for rescuing her.
Of course, it had really been his father who had plucked the wounded woman from the road, but Pete would be in no hurry to dissuade any misguided gratitude she might choose to throw his way in the first few days of her convalescence. And it wasn't like the old man hadn't needed his help.
"What do you think happ'ned to her?" he asked his father again.
"Animals."
Resisting the urge to glance back over his shoulder again, Pete focused on the road being sucked beneath the old Chevrolet's grille. "Never seen an animal do that to someone," he muttered. "D'you see her eye?"
"She's gonna be all right," his father told him, but he had the same look on his face he got on those days when the wind was high and the clouds above their farm were black and mean and boiling and ready to send whirling devils down to tear their place asunder. "You just sit quiet now. We'll bring her to the Doc's. He'll fix her up."
"Think he'll be able to save her?"
Instead of responding, the old man reached out a withered hand and jabbed at the radio. Low twangy music and his father's long low sigh infiltrated the silence. A moment later, the sickly sweet aroma of burning tobacco filled the cab as his father touched a flame to the tip of a crumpled hand-rolled cigarette. It was a smell that comforted Pete, a familiar scent that always seemed to drift through his skull and stroke some sense into the wild dog of his thoughts. He smiled slightly and went back to looking out the window.
He didn't care if the wounded girl wasn't pretty under all that blood and other stuff. He wasn't much to look at either and didn't think it fair to judge others by standards he didn't meet himself. And he'd had a bad heart since birth, which he figured maybe explained why he was always so quick to hope that whatever wounded bird he encountered would view him as her savior and love him accordingly. Repairing his flawed heart was not a job he would ever be able to do on his own, which, in a town like Elkwood—comprised mostly of hard-faced, hardworking men—meant his chances of dying young were better than average.
He wasn't afraid to die.
He was afraid to die alone.
At one time, Valerie Vaughn down at the grocery store had been the object of his fixation. She'd always been kind to him, and for a time, he might have loved her, until he summoned up the courage to confess as much and she'd folded in on herself like a deckchair with a bad leg, told him that was "nice" then went to great lengths to avoid ever having to talk to him again.
There were others, of course, all highly unlikely to ever give him the time of day, or stay around Elkwood long enough to see him as anything other than a not-so-bright farm boy with aspirations that didn't stretch farther than the town's borders.
Valerie had left, bound for Birmingham.
After that he'd quickly grown tired and discouraged by the amount of polite refusals or horrified rejections, the gleeful mockery and cruel teasing, and instead had taken his father's advice and focused on work at the farm.
And now they'd found an outsider—hurt, lost, and in desperate need of help. Help he could give her if she let him.
A nervous flutter in his stomach reminded him that all he was doing was setting himself up for more disappointment, more heartbreak, more blows to his fragile heart. She's a stranger. She's prob'ly got a guy in some big city somewheres. She's prob'ly hitched. You're bein' a damn fool.
As always, however, hope gave him the strength to ignore those warnings, and whatever reason or sense might have inveigled its way into them.
He smiled.
This one would stay.
He could feel it.
-3-
Luke knew there were three kinds of silence. There was the ordinary kind—when there was no one around to make a sound, like when he wandered down to the junkyard a half-mile from his home, where they flattened and crumpled up the cars they decided they had no use for, after flattening and crumpling up their owners. That was where he went for peace and quiet, to gather his thoughts, sometimes to pray.
Then there was the kind of silence you heard when it only looked like you were alone, when someone was watching you, hidden and holding their breath. That silence was different, heavier because it was unnatural, forced. And it never lasted long. Luke had long ago learned that no matter how clever, or scared they were, people were not good at staying quiet, even if it meant the difference between life and death. He had no idea how many of their victims might have gotten away, even for a little while, if they'd just held their breath a moment longer, or choked back a whimper or a sob, or watched where they were going.
The third kind of silence was when you were surrounded by people, all of them staring without seeming to breathe, none of them moving or saying a word because what they had to say was written in their eyes, and that message was not good. This was the worst kind of silence, the most dangerous kind.
This was the one Luke found himself faced with when he finally made it home.
A light rain had started as he'd crested the hill and started down the slope toward the house, as if God himself had chosen a side, and it wasn't Luke's. From his elevated position, he'd been able to see that the rain had not discouraged his brothers. Joshua, Isaac and Aaron were standing in a ragged semicircle in front of the house, facing him. Matt was a dark bundle lying in the mud before them, and there was no doubt that he was dead. He was on his back, shirt soaked with blood, eyes glassy and open, staring unblinkingly up at the rain coming down. Luke stopped a few feet away from him. "When?" he asked, as though it mattered. He was speaking merely to break the silence, which had already begun to coil like morning mist around him.
"Soon's you was gone," Aaron told him eventually, a hard edge to his voice. No grief at all, but plenty of swallowed pain. "Where's the girl at?"
Luke shook his head, unable to meet his brother's eyes. He did not want to see in them the disgust, the fear, and the relief that Aaron was not likely to suffer the same degree of punishment for letting the girl escape as he would. He almost expected his brothers to ask how she'd evaded him and where he thought she might have gone, but of course they didn't. It didn't matter now. Very soon they would have to uproot themselves and find someplace else to settle down, a task that, despite Momma-In-Bed's insistence that they not tie themselves to anything or indulge in luxuries they couldn't move at a moment's notice, would not be easy. It would mean a lot of hard work done quickly, all the time looking over their shoulders and listening for the sound of sirens. It would mean a new kind of silence for their family: an absolute absence of sound that might at any moment be broken by the enemy, by the Men of the World, as Papa called them, threatening the only world they knew.
"Momma-In-Bed wants to see you," Aaron said. "Tole me to tell you soon's you got back. 'Straight away,' she said. 'Don't even stop to make water. I want 'im in my room, soon as you see his face,' she said."
Luke finally looked up, and his younger brother's long narrow ashen face, made longer by the close cut of his dark hair, was grim. He couldn't tell if Aaron was getting any satisfaction from being the bearer of such a m
essage, nor did he thank him for it, for they were not given to gratitude. Acknowledging it only risked opening themselves up to empathy for their victims, who were so often uncannily good at trying to evoke it from them.
"I'll go see her then," Luke answered, and took one last look at Matt, lying there looking perfectly at ease with his death, the picture of calm marred only by the small rusty-red puddles forming in the mud around his body, the deep dark puncture wound in his chest, and the scarlet rivulets meandering their way toward where Luke stood watching. "You boys go start the fire."
The twelve-year-old twins—Joshua, who could speak just fine but seldom did, and Isaac, who'd had his tongue cut out when he was nine years old for cussing at Papa-In-Grey—both nodded dutifully and hurried off toward the barn where they kept the stacks of old wood, a fragment of which the girl had used to end their brother's life. In the rain, they were going to need kerosene to get the fire to catch, so Luke mumbled instructions to this effect to Aaron and watched his brother lumber off, shoulders hunched, toward the small ramshackle shed with walls of badly rusted corrugated iron where they'd hung and skinned one of the girl's friends.
Then, with a shuddering sigh, he knelt briefly in a puddle of Matt's blood, and said a short prayer, intended not solely for the dear departed, but for himself too. He asked for forgiveness, and courage, but didn't wait to find out if either had been bestowed on him. Somehow he doubted it. Far too much had gone wrong for him to expect any mercy from God or anyone else.
Luke rose up and started up the steps into the house.
*
After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, Doc Wellman finally emerged from the bedroom he had once shared with his wife until her death in '92. Nowadays he slept on a tattered sofa in his living room, and always with the TV on and the volume turned low. He couldn't sleep without it. It was all he had for company. That, and the few patients willing to travel thirty miles outside of town to see him. He had witnessed much in his lifetime, not the least of which was the slow and painful decay of his wife in those endlessly long weeks before the cancer finally took her, but it was clear from the deathly pallor on his face as he stood before the old black man and his boy, that he had never seen anything quite like this.
