by Lukens, Mark
Cole’s stomach churned at the thought of shooting a small child in the kneecaps.
“She’s just bullshitting with us,” Jose continued as he paced. “She’s just playing fucking mind games with us. There’s no monsters out there. There’s no devils. It’s just some people out there. And either Frank’s working with them or they’re making Frank work with them. I don’t know. I don’t care, but it’s just some people out there and it’s all about the money.”
“That’s enough, Jose,” Cole said.
Jose stopped pacing. They all watched him as his face scrunched in anger and hurt. “You’re still gonna stand by that bitch even after your brother was killed by those people out there, the people that she’s protecting?”
Cole turned and marched towards Jose.
Jose tensed his body, ready for a fight, but Cole walked right past him and into the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” Jose asked Cole.
Stella could feel David clinging to her arm; she could feel his quick breaths as he held on to her. He was so scared, and he had a right to be. It took a while before they wanted to kill David down in New Mexico, but here it would be happening much more quickly, she was sure of that.
Cole searched through the bottom cabinets until he found what he was looking for – a box of heavy duty black garbage bags. He turned and saw the expression on Jose’s face. “I can’t leave my brother out there like that,” was all Cole offered for an explanation. Cole searched other drawers and cabinets until he found a bag of rubber dishwashing gloves. He slipped his coat and leather gloves on. Then he slid the rubber gloves on over his leather gloves. The rubber gloves were a loose fit over his hands which might interfere with his fingers when he held his gun, but he had to take that chance. He needed to do this for his brother.
Cole grabbed the box of garbage bags from the counter and walked towards the front door.
“So that’s it?” Jose said as he followed Cole to the door. “You’re just going to let that bitch and that kid sit there on the couch while those people out there pick us off one by one?”
“I’m not torturing anyone,” Cole muttered. “And that’s it.”
You don’t know what you’re going to do soon, Stella thought to herself. You’ll do things you never thought you were capable of. But she couldn’t tell them that. She knew that between these three men, Cole was her best chance of staying alive, the only one who seemed opposed to the idea of either torturing or killing her and David, or just leaving her and David here in the cabin while they ran.
Stella knew what Cole would see next. She wanted to warn him, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t reveal how much she knew, how much she and David had seen. Not yet anyway. Their lives depended on it.
Cole was about to grab the door handle and open the front door, but he turned to Jose. “I’m going to get my brother off that porch and then I’m going to find those motherfuckers out there, whoever they are, and I’m going to kill them.”
Jose started to say something, but he didn’t. The look in Cole’s eyes stopped him. He wasn’t afraid of Cole, but he was wary of him. And there was a look in Cole’s eyes like he’d never seen before.
“Wait, I’ll help you,” Jose said and he rushed back into the kitchen for another pair of dishwashing gloves.
Cole opened the front door, about to walk out onto the porch. But he froze, he stood very still as he stared at the front porch.
Jose rushed up behind Cole and saw what Cole was looking at. Jose just stared. “What the hell?” he whispered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Trevor’s head and the pieces of his body were gone.
Cole stepped out onto the front porch, but only one step. He could hear Jose right behind him. “What the hell is this, Cole?”
Cole stared down at the floorboards of the porch. There were still puddles of blood all over the porch, some of the blood had turned a pinkish color as it mixed with the snow scattered across the floorboards. There were still splatters of blood on the front door and the front wall of the cabin where the pieces of Trevor’s body had pelted the wood from whoever had thrown them.
But those pieces were gone now. The pieces had been here, Cole thought to himself. They hadn’t been a figment of his imagination. Everyone else had seen them, too.
Jose rushed out through the doorway beside Cole. He took two more steps out onto the porch and looked around. “What the fuck?” he said. “What the fuck?!” he said a little louder. “How the hell …”
Cole looked around at the porch, then out at the snowy field and the trees in the distance. There was no one in the snowy field or the trees.
Jose looked around, his gun gripped in his hand that was sheathed in the rubber of dishwashing gloves. “Cole, somebody was out here just a few minutes ago picking up all of these pieces.”
Cole didn’t respond to Jose.
“How the hell didn’t we hear them?”
Cole still didn’t respond.
“How the fuck did they get up on this porch and take all of those … those pieces without us hearing them? Without us knowing.”
Cole hurried over to the edge of the porch and looked over the railing. He stripped off the yellow dishwashing gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of his jacket. He dropped the box of garbage bags on the floorboards; it landed with a dull thud. He pulled his gun out of the waistband of his pants and studied the snow below the porch.
“Who the fuck are these people?” Cole heard Jose ask.
Cole walked along the edge of the porch, keeping close to the railing, his gun ready in his hand. He searched the snow with his eyes all the way around the porch. When he got to the other side, he looked back at Jose. “There aren’t any tracks in the snow,” he said.
“That can’t be,” Jose said in a low voice. “How the hell can they be doing this?”
Cole walked back to the porch steps that led down into the snow.
“Cole,” Jose said. “What are you doing?”
Cole didn’t answer.
“Hey, man. Why don’t we just take the cases of money and walk out of here? We’ll leave that girl and her kid here in the cabin, and we’ll just walk on out of here. We don’t have to hurt them; we’ll tie them up and just leave them here.”
“They’ll die in there if we do that,” Cole finally answered Jose as he stood at the edge of the steps.
“So,” Jose spat out. “It’s her friends out here doing this anyway. I’m sure they’ll go inside the cabin and rescue her.”
Cole descended the steps quickly down into the snow. He walked a few steps out into the snow which came up to mid-calf on him. He wore calf-high boots underneath his pants legs, but he could still feel the cold on his legs, creeping through the cloth, creeping into his flesh, into his bones. It was so cold out here that he could feel his lungs ache as he took breaths.
Jose followed Cole down into the snow. “Just the two of us,” Jose said. “We don’t even need Needles to leave with us. It’s Needles’ fault we’re here in the first place.”
Cole still didn’t answer. He kept walking towards the corner of the cabin, away from the garage and Tom Gordon’s ruined pickup truck parked in front of the garage doors which were still partway open. The garage made Cole think of the snowmobile he’d seen in there. It stayed in the back of his mind. He didn’t want to tell Jose about it just yet.
You don’t trust Jose enough to tell him about the snowmobile, Cole’s mind whispered to him.
As if to prove Cole’s point, Jose continued following Cole through the snow, trying to convince him to leave. “Come on, man. Just you and me. We could split the money fifty-fifty.”
Cole stopped at the corner of the cabin and looked around at the fields of snow, at the line of trees that surrounded the fields. He didn’t see any movement, he didn’t hear anything. His eyes settled on the parting in the trees where the driveway began, the driveway that led back out to the county road.
God, it seemed like such a long
time ago since they had come down that driveway in Stella’s truck.
Cole took a step and then he took another step towards the driveway.
Frank’s voice echoed in his mind. “He won’t let you leave.”
But Cole was going to walk to the driveway in the woods – at least that far. He had his gun ready. He was ready for these people to reveal themselves. He was ready to shoot them. He was ready to kill them. For Trevor.
Jose fell in beside Cole, matching Cole step for step through the snow as they trudged towards the driveway in the trees. Jose had given up trying to convince Cole to leave with him.
Maybe I should just leave by myself, Jose thought.
*
Inside the cabin, Stella and David sat on the couch. David was drawing again. Always drawing. She thought about the drawings she’d seen in his notebook. She had to talk to him about it, but she needed to wait for the right time. What he was drawing could be the answer to what was out there in the woods. But she didn’t dare give herself too much hope.
She looked over at the recliner, at Needles. He had been hunched forward, his cross dangling down from his neck on the thin gold necklace as he stared down at the large Native American rug on the cabin floor. Something about the patterns and colors seemed to amaze Needles. He would spend hours staring at the patterns on the rug and rubbing the small cross on his necklace over and over again.
But now Needles looked at Stella and David.
And Stella realized that they were alone in the cabin with this lunatic. How long were Cole and Jose going to stay out there? She had seen that Trevor’s body parts were gone, she had suspected that. And now Cole and Jose might be out there searching the woods for Trevor’s killer.
They could be out there for a while, Stella thought. Maybe for hours.
Needles stood up quickly. He was a lanky man, but he was tall and all muscle, he had a wiry strength to him. But his eyes were the scariest part of him. They were lost, completely gone now. He had been going more and more crazy, and now he was all the way gone. Stella could see that; she had seen that same look in a man’s eyes before – she’d seen it in New Mexico.
Needles smiled at them. “I believe you,” he whispered to Stella. “They might not believe you,” Needles gestured towards the front door, “but I know that there’s something supernatural out there.”
Stella didn’t answer. She just watched Needles. She was ready to grab David and run from the couch to the front door if she needed to. The door was still ajar, letting the cold air into the cozy warmth of the cabin.
“It’s okay, Stella,” he said in a low voice, as a strange smile played at the corner of his lips. “I already know who’s out there. It’s the devil, isn’t it? The old man in the bank told me.”
Stella tensed and David stopped drawing as Needles took another step towards them with that insane smile still on his face.
Then Needles froze in mid-step when they heard the gunshots from outside.
*
Cole and Jose had only made it five more steps away from the cabin when the gunshots started. They ducked down, frozen for a moment as bullets whizzed past them and struck the logs of the cabin.
“Fuck!” Jose yelled.
They turned and ran as fast as they could through the snow as more shots were fired. Cole couldn’t tell where the shots were coming from, somewhere from the woods, but he couldn’t be sure exactly from where.
They made it to the steps of the porch and Cole turned and fired at the trees with his pistol, trying to provide some cover for them as they climbed the slippery steps up onto the porch that was still smeared with his brother’s blood.
Needles was at the door as they made it up the steps. Needles fired his gun out at the woods, providing more cover.
“You see ‘em?!” Jose shouted at Needles.
“No!” Needles yelled. He moved back into the cabin to allow Cole and Jose to duck inside as bullets pelted the thick logs of the cabin wall.
Cole closed the door and locked the locks, then he backed away from the door, his gun still in his hand. Jose hurried over to the window on the other side of the door that looked out onto the porch.
“You see anything?” Cole asked Jose.
Jose shook his head no. “Nothing.”
“What kind of gun was it?” Needles asked, but they all were pretty sure they knew, it was a sound they’d heard plenty of times before. “I think it was a .45,” Cole said, and then he uttered all of their thoughts. “It sounded like Frank’s gun.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Three o’clock in the morning. The half-full moon managed to shine some moonlight down onto the fields of snow and endless woods on the earth below, but clouds rolled through the night sky causing night shadows to glide across the trees, across the fields of snow, across the cabin.
Cole had downed at least ten cups of coffee. He’d made the coffee strong. He’d added a lot of sugar. He wanted to make sure that he was going to stay awake tonight.
Jose had opened the bottle of whiskey earlier in the night. He’d only sipped at it, catching a little bit of a buzz, not enough to make him drunk, but enough to give him some courage. And it was making him drowsy – Cole could see that. He could see that it was going to be up to him again to stay awake and on guard through the night.
David was the first one to fall asleep. He slept on top of his notebook, like his body was guarding it. Stella tried to pull it out from under his body, but every time she tried to move the notebook, David’s eyes would pop open and he would stare at her with his large dark eyes.
“I’m just trying to make you more comfortable,” she whispered to him.
But David held onto his notebook of drawings and slept on top of it.
Of course Stella could rip the notebook out of the little boy’s hands if she wanted to, but she wasn’t going to do that. She would talk to him about the things he’d drawn when it was the right time. In the meantime, her mind began to wander as she thought of different possibilities of what David’s drawings could mean. Her archeologist’s mind offered up different explanations, different scenarios, analyzing and studying.
Stella curled up next to David and eventually she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
Needles fell asleep next, curled up in an uncomfortable position on the recliner that he sat in all the time. Cole told him earlier that he might wake him up in the morning to stand guard. But he wasn’t sure if he was going to do that or not. He couldn’t trust Needles anymore. And he wasn’t sure if he could trust Jose either. He’d never been close to these guys; they were all criminals and their trust of each other only went so far. But Cole had trusted Trevor. And now the only person he really trusted was gone, the only one who would’ve had his back. His heart ached when he thought of Trevor. And a rage burned inside of him when he thought of Trevor’s body (pieces) out there in the woods somewhere. His remains desecrated, scattered among the snow in the woods.
Cole made himself think of something else.
Jose sat next to Cole for a while at the dining room table, a small glass of whiskey in front of him. No drinking – that had always been one of Frank’s rules when they were on a job together. After the job was done and they were about to go their separate ways, it was fine, but not while they were working. But Cole didn’t say anything to Jose about it. They were way past working right now, and if a few sips of whiskey calmed Jose down, then Cole was thankful for that.
“What’s our plan?” Jose asked in a low voice. The fire in him earlier was gone now. After they were shot at, Jose’s idea of just walking out of here didn’t seem so feasible.
“I don’t know yet,” Cole said and his thoughts turned once again to the snowmobile he’d seen tucked away under the blue tarp inside the free-standing garage. He could even feel the keys to the snowmobile in his pants pocket. There had to be some way he could get to it, see if it would start. There had to be some way to escape on it. But not right now. Not in the middle of the nig
ht.
“I’ll tell you something,” Jose said as he took another small sip of whiskey from his glass.
Cole didn’t respond.
“If I see Frank again,” Jose continued, “I’m going to get some answers out of him. I promise you that.”
Cole didn’t say anything.
Jose fell asleep a few hours later, stretching out on his blankets. He told Cole that he was just resting for a few minutes, but Cole heard him breathing heavily a few moments later, and then snoring lightly.
Cole sat at the dining room table and sipped his coffee. The only light on was over the stove, and the rest of the cabin was hidden in murky darkness. He glanced at the clock on the wall in the kitchen – three o’clock in the morning. He’d wait until dawn before he woke Jose up to take the next watch.
*
Needles woke up on the floor beside the recliner. It was late at night, he knew that, but he didn’t know exactly what time it was. He sat up and suddenly he felt vulnerable on the floor. He didn’t remember getting out of the chair and stretching out on the wood floor, but at some point in the night he must have.
Needles realized that something had woken him up, some kind of noise.
He looked back at the others. Everyone else was asleep. Even Cole and Jose were stretched out on their blankets on the floor, both of them breathing heavily. He was pretty sure that one of them was supposed to be standing guard through the night. But maybe they had given up on that, maybe they had realized what he had, that there was nothing they could do to fight back.
What kind of noise had it been that had woken him up? He tried to remember.
A thumping noise.
His eyes darted to the kitchen and Needles held his breath as he stared at the freezer against the far wall. The noise had come from the freezer, he was sure of it now. A thumping noise.
Thump.
The freezer lid popped up for a second, then it thumped back down, like someone inside was trying to push it open.
Like Tom Gordon was trying to get out.
Needles was frozen with fear. His throat had gone instantly dry, and all of his muscles seemed like they had turned to wet spaghetti. His lips trembled. He wanted to scream out to the others, he wanted to wake them up, but the only sound that would come out of his throat was a breathless wheeze.
