Kin

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  The Merrill clan was among them.

  Aaron had parked the truck at the foot of the hill and killed the engine then joined his father and Luke in walking the long straight path up the rise to where the Lowell farm sat brooding in the dark. The twins stayed in the truck, along with the body parts they had wrapped in plastic, surveying the night for signs that the old farmer and his boy were fleeing, or that there were flickering lights burning the bellies of the clouds on the horizon, foretelling of trouble’s advance on them if it turned out they were too late.

  Luke said a silent prayer that they weren’t.

  He carefully scanned the wide open areas to their right, where nothing sprouted from the dead earth, and listened to the hissing of the corn in the field to their left. Those sibilant whispers seemed like voices, but he had heard such things enough to tell the difference should a human voice be among them.

  Making no attempt to be quiet, Papa-in-Gray, now dressed in a frock-like gray coat—which the kids acknowledged as his preacher garb, for he had told them once he believed himself a messenger, despite his failure to be inducted into a legitimate order—led Luke and Aaron to the door, the fluttering light within assuring them that someone was home, even though the truck Luke had seen earlier was nowhere in sight. Its absence worried him. Where were they if not home? With the Sheriff? The doctor? Luke let his eyes fall to the blade gripped in his father’s right hand, the tip of the ivory handle a pale smudge in the dim light. As a child, he had watched his father sharpening that curved six-inch blade, had marveled at the craftsmanship, but had feared it also, and with good cause. Some years later it would be the instrument they would use on his genitals.

  Papa-in-Gray stopped by the door, then turned his head and slowly stepped toward the window.

  “He there?” Aaron asked.

  Their father leaned his face close to the dusty glass, his shadow sprawling over his sons. His nose brushed the window.

  “Papa?” Aaron asked, the nervous excitement in his voice infectious. The air grew taut between them; the temporary reprieve the rain had brought banished now. It was balmy, humid, their clothes stuck to their skin, and with the heat came short tempers.

  The old man seemed to stiffen, his shadow flinching as if eager to be free of the tension that held its host in thrall. Luke felt something twist inside him. Something was wrong. Even if instinct had failed him, it was compensated for by the sudden rage radiating from his father’s body. Whatever he had seen in there had not agreed with him.

  Luke swallowed. Was the house empty? Were they too late?

  His father turned to look at him. At the same time, Aaron moved to take Papa’s place at the window. He drew in a breath. Luke did not hear him release it.

  “What is it?” Luke asked. Now that Papa’s back was to the window, the warm light spilling out around him, his face was in shadow. Yet Luke could still feel his eyes on him, cold black things that reminded him of Momma’s glare from her foul bed in the dark. If there had ever been any question of Papa’s feelings toward him, there wasn’t one now. Pure unbridled hate contaminated the air between them and Luke would not have been at all surprised had tendrils erupted from the old man’s body and enveloped him, drawing Luke into his father’s body where he would burn in the fires of contempt. He squirmed in the glare, until Aaron stepped between them, quietly walked to the door, tested the handle, and opened it. New light carved the dark.

  “C’mon,” Aaron said, and disappeared inside.

  For a moment longer, Luke’s father pinned him with that raging and yet unseen look. Then he stepped close, his breath foul in his son’s face, and brought the knife up between them, the point pressed to Luke’s belly. When Luke tried to back up, Papa’s free hand clamped down on his shoulder.

  “You best start prayin’ for salvation,” his father said, his eyes black holes. He dug the knife tip a little deeper, until it broke through Luke’s shirt and pricked the skin. “If’n you don’t get it, you gonna feel this blade in your asshole ’fore I cut you wide open and let your brothers feed on your still steamin’ insides. You hear me?”

  The blade pierced the skin and the sting of it forced Luke to take an involuntary step back. This time his father didn’t stop him. Instead he straightened, sheathed the blade beneath the folds of his coat in a leather scabbard at his hip, and headed inside the house.

  Luke stood there for a moment, staring at the open doorway, trembling. A circle of heat drew his attention down to his shirt, where a spot of blood was growing at his belly.

  He put the knife away, Luke thought, his mind a confusion of emotions. There’s no one inside. Darkness that was not of the night edged into the corners of his vision. It was tinged with red. At length, when it became clear he was not going to be summoned inside, he followed, entering the warmth of the house and shutting the door behind him. Instantly, he saw he was wrong. There was someone here.

  “Take a good look,” Papa sneered, and stepped aside. Beside him, Aaron watched Luke for a reaction, his face impassive.

  Luke, head pounding, studied the man sitting in the chair by the fireplace. It was the farmer, Jack Lowell, the black man he had seen, with his son, loading the girl into their truck. Lowell was of no use to them now. A rifle lay on the floor, muzzle pointing toward the fire. The air smelled of gunpowder and singed hair. The old man’s head was lowered, as if he’d fallen asleep, but the angle allowed all gathered to see the gaping hole in the back of his skull through which the bullet and brains had exited and painted the wall and window behind them in gray and red. Blood had pooled around the chair, the old man’s checkered shirt soaked with it.

  As Luke watched, heartsick, Papa dropped to his haunches by the chair and dipped his fingertips into the blood on the floor, brought it up to his nose, then rubbed it, as if testing the consistency of paint. Then he rose and looked at Aaron. “Still warm,” he said. “Ain’t been dead long.”

  Luke felt himself being wrenched in two different directions at once. Part of him wanted to take his knife and cut the dead man to ribbons, punishment the farmer would never feel, but might sate Luke’s frustration. Another part of him wanted to turn tail and run, to get away from his father and the deepening sense of danger, to see how far he could get before they took him down. He did not want to be here, did not want to think about what they were going to do to him, and yet fear held him in place as surely as Papa’s blade had done.

  He wasn’t going anywhere. They wouldn’t let him. God wouldn’t let him.

  Aaron sheathed his own blade, shoulders slumping in disappointment. He looked up at Papa. “What now?”

  Papa continued to study the blood on the tips of his fingers. “Luke said there was a boy, didn’t you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Find him.”

  * * *

  In the last days of Abby Wellman’s tortured life, her husband decided to kill her. He reasoned that the cancer was going to do it anyway, and in a decidedly less merciful fashion than he could with a needle and some morphine. As the only doctor within a thirty-mile radius, and being more or less a recluse since his wife had fallen ill, he doubted anyone would find her passing suspicious, or feel compelled to study too closely the means by which she’d found her eternal rest. If medical questions in Elkwood were raised, Wellman was the only one called upon to answer them, so unless someone went to the trouble of bringing an outsider in to confirm his story, there was nothing to stop him from going through with it.

  And yet he hadn’t. Instead, he’d watched his beloved suffer, knowing it wasn’t right and desperate to save her. The morphine he administered was always the correct dosage, never too much despite how easy it would have been to increase it. He could even have told himself later that he hadn’t been paying attention, or was an innocent victim of subconscious mutiny, but nothing stuck. Every day he let his wife writhe in pain because he couldn’t take her life.

  “It hurts…”

  Presently, as he looked down at the young bat
tered and broken girl in the same bed in which his wife had once said those exact words to him, the same look of pleading in her eyes, he wondered if it would be better to show her the kind of mercy he hadn’t shown his wife. If the girl died, it wouldn’t matter if the Merrills came. He would let them take the corpse if they so desired. Once the life was gone from the body, what remained would no longer be his concern. And with her dead, they would have no reason to hurt him, as long as he kept his mouth shut.

  He shook his head and drew the fresh blankets up around the girl. He had disinfected her wounds, then stitched them, but it was not within his means to give her the attention she so desperately needed. The damage to her eye was serious, as were the severed digits on her fingers and toes, but other than cleaning them, and applying pressure bandages and tourniquets above the amputations, he was out of his league. There was a good chance that if he didn’t get her to a hospital soon, she would die.

  She was awake, however, and apparently lucid, though given the trauma she’d endured, he didn’t know how much of it was genuine and not just a reaction to the painkillers. What he did know for certain was that the girl looking at him now was not the same one Jack Lowell and his boy had brought to him. She was still pale, and dazed looking, but her pupil had returned to its normal size and her trembling was not nearly as severe.

  Slowly, he sat back in his chair. “How’re you feeling?” he asked.

  “Hurts,” she replied, in the small voice of a child who has just scraped her knee. It was so heartbreakingly sincere, Wellman found himself wondering if she had receded into madness to protect herself from the pain.

  “I know, but we’ll take care of you.”

  She blinked. “Where am I?”

  “My home, in Elkwood.”

  “Elkwood?”

  “Alabama. My name’s Doctor Wellman.” He offered her a warm smile, but resisted the urge to lay a hand on her, no matter how paternal the gesture was intended to be. After all she’d gone through, physical contact outside of the necessary medical ministrations might not be wise.

  “Claire,” she told him. “Claire Lambert.”

  “How did you end up here, Claire? I’m just guessing you’re not from Alabama.”

  “Ohio.” She winced as the pain fluttered within her. “Columbus, Ohio.”

  “You’re a long way from home.”

  “I know. Can you call my Mom?”

  “Of course,” he said, but didn’t think it the wisest idea. If he did, who was to say her family wouldn’t pile on the next flight down and be here right when the Merrill clan decided to pay a visit? As bad as leaving Claire at the hospital and driving away was going to make him feel, putting the rest of her family in jeopardy was not something he was willing to have on his conscience. But having her contact information would help the doctors in Grayson identify her and they could take it from there. This in turn triggered the notion that although Sheriff McKindrey might be useless, the State Police might prove more helpful. But would they make it here in time to counter the tide of violence that must surely be bearing down on them? He resolved at least to try. But for now, he could only concentrate on one thing at a time, and so fetched a pen and some paper and jotted down the girl’s address and phone number as she gave them to him.

  “They tried to kill me,” she said afterward. “They killed my friends.”

  “Who did?” Immediately, he regretted the question. The less he knew about all of this the better. But how was he supposed to play dumb when the victim of the atrocity had become his patient, and after Jack Lowell had told him his terrible story? “Never mind,” he added. “We can talk about this later. Most important thing now is that you get some sleep and concentrate on feeling b—”

  He stopped. A rumbling sound registered from outside the house. It was coming closer. Wellman watched as bright white light spilled in through the window, washed over the ceiling of the room before crawling down the walls, then sweeping across them to the door and vanishing into the corner. Headlights. The rumbling sound stopped. He listened for footsteps and after a moment was rewarded with the sound of boots crunching gravel. Approaching the house.

  “You just relax now,” he told the girl, alarmed at the quaver in his voice. “I’ll be back in just a moment.” He tried to think of something more to say, but his brain was scrambled, his thoughts lost in a fog of panic. He hurried from the room, bound for the kitchen and the cabinet where he kept his liquor, glasses, and an old tin box. Inside that box was a gun he hadn’t used in over twenty years, an old military issue Colt .45 a veteran had given him instead of payment one winter when it was clear the diagnosis he’d been given was a terminal one. Wellman hadn’t wanted the gun, but the look on the patient’s face had told him it was less an offer than the last command the retired Colonel was ever going to give, and therefore needed to be obeyed. The doctor had accepted the gift, stashed it in an old filing cabinet, and for over ten years had managed to keep its existence a secret from his wife until he retired and forgot the gun was in a box full of medical forms. To his surprise, Abby hadn’t demanded he get rid of it, but requested it be kept somewhere out of sight for the duration. He hadn’t thought of it again since shutting it up in its little tin box, but he was forced to think of it now.

  It felt heavier than he remembered as he removed it and checked the magazine, which had been kept apart from the weapon at Abby’s insistence. She didn’t want that tin box tumbling down some night and blowing holes in the kitchen, or them. With five bullets still nestled in the clip, he slid the magazine home and cocked the hammer.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Wellman glanced toward the sound, or rather the complete absence of it, and held his breath.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  -10-

  “He ain’t here,” Aaron said, and Luke felt his guts plummet even though he had reached the same conclusion almost as soon as he saw the dead man downstairs.

  “Wait a minute, we ain’t checked the barns yet,” he protested.

  “I did,” Aaron told him. “Nothing but a bony ’ol horse and a pig or two. Papa’s out there now, inspectin’ ’em, seein’ if they’re worth comin’ back for.”

  They were in what might once have been a large bedroom, but was bare now aside from a small table in the corner, upon which stood a fancy looking but dusty lamp without a bulb. Next to that was a chiffarobe. Both boys had viewed it as an ideal hiding place for the kid they were searching for, but all they found was a few old moth-eaten shirts and one faded dress. A window looked down onto the yard below and faced the large red barn, the interior of which was cloaked in shadow. Security lights glared in at Luke as he tried to make out his father’s lithe form. But for now, there was nothing to be seen.

  Behind him, Aaron stood tossing his knife in the air. Luke could hear the swish of the blade as it sliced up, then downward, the fall intercepted by his brother’s sure grip. He wished he’d stop. The sound of that blade only heightened his anxiety. But then he thought of something and turned, his shadow robbing the blade of its gleam.

  “Papa said see if they’re worth comin’ back for?” he asked, and watched Aaron’s head bob in the gloom. “Why come back? Why not just take ’em now?”

  Aaron shrugged, and concentrated on the gyrations of his blade. “Papa said we ain’t goin’ home yet.”

  “Where are we goin?”

  “He says that girl weren’t gonna last much longer, shape she was in, so if she ain’t here, then someone took her to get fixed up.”

  Luke was almost afraid to hope. “That old doctor out on the edge’a town.”

  Aaron grinned. “Yep.”

  Luke felt a smile flutter over his lips.

  His brother snatched his blade from the air, sheathed it and headed for the door. As he passed Luke, he said, “I hope she’s there.”

  “Me too,” Luke agreed.

  “Cuz if she ain’t…if she’s in some hospital somewheres, you’re as good as dead.”

&n
bsp; * * *

  Wellman was exhausted. The fear and adrenaline had drained him, and now all he wanted was to close his eyes and sleep like the dead. Twenty minutes had passed since the knock on the door, since he’d felt the kind of terror that threatened to disable him, leave him prone on the floor, victim of a heart that had taken pity on him and shut down, spiriting him away from whatever horrors lay ahead.

  Now as he opened the front door and slowly eased himself down to sit on the stoop, the night air muggy and suffocating, he felt like a shadow of himself, the sad result of a life only half-lived. His bones creaked and popped painfully as he settled himself, ass on the wood, legs outstretched, heels dug into the dirt and scattered gravel of the driveway. In one hand he held the bottle he had shared with Jack Lowell, who he figured was most certainly dead now, or as good as. In the other hand, he held the small picture of himself and Abby, thirty years younger and beaming, not yet educated in the ways of suffering and death, their faces unlined, eyes not yet dulled by pain and the realization that there is no control, no dictating of how destiny will unfold, no real choices. Everything is preplanned, a fact that might not upset humankind as much if they were let in on the secret, if they were offered tantalizing glimpses of what the future holds. But no such previews exist, and so man flails blindly through the dark, hoping to avoid the holes through which he has watched so many of his fellow man fall.

  The Colt was a cold unyielding lump against his spine, held in place by a waistband three sizes bigger than the one the younger, happier version of himself was wearing in the picture. Those forgotten youths, bursting with love and high on the promises they intended to fulfill together, as one, forever and ever amen, smiled up at him, attempting to convince him that happiness did exist, while at the same time torturing him with the truth that he would never know it again.

  A droning sound echoed in the distance, bouncing against the hills and passing through the longleaf pines like gossip among old women.