River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  He couldn’t even remember how they had started fighting. The simple pleasures of this day had already blotted it from his memory. It had been over the phone, and they’d each hung up on the other once. He had been tense for days because of the old man, and he had snapped at her when she’d said something perfectly innocent. “Me, too,” he said. “It sucks when we’re mad at each other.”

  “It does,” she agreed. “But when we’re not.” She turned to face him, pressing her palms against his upper chest. “Then I suck.”

  “You do?”

  “I could.”

  “What about your brother?”

  “He and his friends are playing games,” she said. “They’ll never even miss us.”

  “If you’re sure…”

  She didn’t speak, just lowered herself to her knees, running her hands down his body until they reached the waistband of his jeans. She had worn a tight cotton V-neck shirt and denim shorts, and all day he had stolen glances at her body, her long legs, the way her shirt exposed the upper mounds of her breasts. He couldn’t say he wasn’t ready. She had gone down on him a few times, tentatively and unsure of her abilities, and though he still wasn’t sure what to do with his hands while she did it (Rub the top of her head? Smack the bed? Clutch the sheets?), he was happy to be her guinea pig. He didn’t know if this was love, but it would do until the real thing came along.

  This time, kneeling out in the desert, him standing with his hands on his hips, elbows out for balance, she had her technique down and finished him quickly. When it was done, he had to sit down, his knees having turned to rubber about halfway through. She stroked his dwindling erection a few times, then tucked it back into his pants.

  “You liked that.”

  “I did. A lot. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.” She smiled to show that she really was pleased. “I like it. too. And I like when you do it to me.”

  “You want me to?” He’d be happy to reciprocate, as soon as his legs stopped quaking.

  “Not right now. Maybe later. How late can you stay?”

  He hadn’t told her anything about the nighttime rides, or his suspicions about his father. If Dad was the killer, then the fewer people who found out, the better—at least until he had enough proof to go to the sheriff. “Oh, you know. Nine or so, I guess.”

  “Sure you can’t stay later, Wade? Maybe tell your folks you’re spending the night at Byrd’s? I told Alan one of his friends could stay over.”

  He had rarely heard a more tempting offer. Maybe he could skip watching the old man, this one night. It might prove to be a night he would never forget.

  But if it turned out to be the night that the next kid got killed, he not only wouldn’t forget, he’d never forgive himself.

  He hated his father more than ever for putting him in such a stupid position. The offer of a lifetime, from an amazingly sexy girl, and he had to turn her down. Maybe he was secretly adopted, maybe his mom had been sleeping around even in those days and he was really the son of some other guy. Anyone else would be an improvement, anyone who wasn’t a killer and an abuser.

  “I can’t,” he said at last. “I have to be home.”

  “But, Wade! It’s our one chance. You always say you want to go to sleep with your arms around me, and wake up with me next to you. We could do it tonight!”

  “I know, Angela.” Wade was arguing against everything he wanted in life, at that moment, and it made him feel like an idiot. “Believe me, I know.”

  “Then just stay.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Wade—”

  “Angela, I just can’t!” He was getting mad, snapping at her again, even though she wasn’t doing anything wrong. “Don’t ask me why, okay? It’s just the way things are.”

  “I…I can’t accept that, Wade. If you loved me, you’d—”

  “I’d still do what I’m doing, Angela. I have to go home tonight. There’s just no way around it.”

  She looked away from him, and he saw the beginnings of tears welling in her eyes. This was not the kind of evening he had imagined or wanted. Okay, the first part had been, but not this.

  “Wade, I need to be with someone who’s really in it with me. Not just sometimes, not just when it’s handy, but all the time.”

  “Angela, I am—”

  Her turn to interrupt. “No you’re not! Even when you’re with me, you’re thinking about something else. I can see it. You drift away, into some other world. Sometimes I have to say your name three times before you know I’m talking to you. If I didn’t just suck you, you probably wouldn’t even know it now!”

  “That’s not fair, Angela,” he started to say. But he stopped, because it was fair. He’d been only half-present, if that, since this whole thing with his dad had started.

  Maybe if I tell her—

  He couldn’t tell her, though. Couldn’t risk it. If he told anyone, and it somehow got back to his dad, he would never get the proof he needed.

  “Wade?”

  God, it happened again. How many times did she have to say my name that time? “Yes, baby?”

  “Wade, I like you a lot. But I can’t do this with you. I just can’t, okay? We’re done, Wade.”

  “But…” But what? I can change? He couldn’t. Not yet.

  “I’m sorry, Angela.” Tears, hot on his cheeks. She was crying now, too. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  She stood up then and walked away from him. He sat in the dirt, his jeans unzipped, and watched one of the only things in his life that was good and true and pleasant disappear into the evening.

  And he watched the motion of her ass in the tight shorts, the way her red hair swayed and brushed her shoulder blades.

  And he felt the happy soreness of his cock, where she had taken pleasure in pleasuring him.

  And all he could think was, At least I won’t have to make excuses at night anymore…

  * * *

  That night, his dad went out again.

  Wade had been sitting around the house, feeling like someone had flung his partially detached guts around the bumper of a speeding car. After telling his mom, in the briefest possible way, that Angela had dumped him, he had retreated to his bedroom and played the Waterboys album This is the Sea over and over again, as if it contained some special message he might understand if only he had the key. He considered his musical tastes far more sophisticated than most of his friends, an attitude demonstrated by the poster of a broody Morrissey fronting The Smiths that he kept on the wall as a dartboard.

  A little before ten, he heard the front door close and his dad’s truck start up. He hurried to the phone, dialed the number his fingers could punch automatically. One ring, hang up. Call back. This time, the phone was picked up unexpectedly, and the angry voice of Byrd’s father shouted, “Who the hell is this?” into Wade’s ear. He hung up instantly.

  “Wade?” His mom stood in front of the door. She spoke with all the energy of a wet tissue. “Where are you goin’?”

  “Out,” he said.

  “It’s late. It’s after ten. You been out all day.”

  “Mom, I…I just have to ride around some. Angela broke up with me today, remember? I’m restless.”

  She gazed at him—an even, appraising gaze that assured him she wasn’t fooled. What about all those other nights? she might have asked.

  Instead, she simply said, “I’m sorry about Angela. She was a nice girl,” and moved out of his way.

  “Yeah,” Wade said. Outside, he ran to his bike. The light was on over the garage door and bugs clouded around it like the reverse image of a nebula being drawn into a black hole. But it hadn’t rained for a couple days and the ground was dry and packed and his bike seemed to roll effortlessly. He made good time across the field, and when he hit River Road’s paved surface, he was flying, gliding on air.

  When he reached the McCall place, Byrd was still waiting by the road with his bike.

  “Why aren’t you
following him?” Wade asked.

  “He hasn’t come by.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I got out here right after you called. My dad was yelling at you and didn’t even hear me leave.”

  “But…where else would he have gone?” McHenry Road was the last real road in town, and not many families with kids lived out beyond the Scheiners.

  Except for the Mills family. He’d told Mom earlier that the kids would be home by themselves tonight. If she told Dad…

  “Oh, fuck! Angela and Alan!”

  “What?” Byrd asked.

  “If he turned right on River instead of left, he might be heading for Angela’s!”

  “No way!”

  “Unless he’s going to some other town,” Wade said. “Come on!”

  He jumped back on his bike and started to pedal. He thought he heard Byrd coming along behind, but he didn’t bother to look back. With his head down he pumped his legs, and once again the bike seemed to fly along the roadway. At McHenry he made a sharp right onto the road, then a left into a field, cutting across it on an elevated path bordering an irrigation ditch. They’d be off-road much of the way now, but it was a shorter route than taking the pavement, and he knew it well from visiting Angela so often over the summer.

  He checked behind him once to make sure Byrd saw the route. Byrd was maybe a quarter mile back, and in the bright moonlight he could easily see where to turn.

  Behind him, another quarter mile or so, was Molly.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Part of him wanted to stop and send her home, but he couldn’t spare the time. Maybe Byrd would. They had agreed she could go along, but that had been under protest. She had been there and overheard and there was nothing they could do about it at the time. Wade had counted on her forgetting, or being asleep or involved in other things.

  Byrd raced toward him, though, seemingly oblivious to Molly’s presence. Wade plowed on into the field, bike wheels spinning across the dirt as if it offered almost no friction, only gravity keeping him earthbound. He flew toward a break in the fence, slipped through it and into another field. Past that came a mile or so of open land, low hills and scrub.

  Wade hit a patch of uneven ground and the bike started bouncing and lurching. On hills, his wheels left the dirt, sailed over open earth, landed hard and rolled on. His teeth clacked together and he tasted blood. He kept riding, eating up the distance to Angela’s house.

  Finally he reached River Road again, where it curved around toward the Mills’s driveway. It seemed like hours had passed, but really it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five minutes since he’d left home, thirty at most. He could get to her place in fifteen minutes when he pushed it, but he had detoured to Byrd’s first. And he had never pushed it like he did now.

  Somewhere behind him were Byrd and Molly—Molly probably way behind, which was for the best.

  Wade started up Angela’s driveway, then came to a screeching halt that kicked dirt up around his legs.

  His dad’s pickup truck was parked in the long dirt drive, its lights out. He couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. The house—blocked by a low, scrub-covered hill—was barely visible from where the truck sat. Lights glowed from the direction of the house.

  Wade hadn’t figured out what he would do in this scenario. He didn’t have any weapons, and he wasn’t as strong as Byrd. Plus, if his father had really killed all those people, he didn’t know if he could match the man’s ferocity, his sheer ruthlessness.

  But if the man threatened Angela, he would sure try.

  He had wasted too much time already. He stood up on the pedals, pressed down, started the bike in motion. He decided to confront his dad and see what happened. His route took him past the truck, and he was almost even with it when he realized his father was sitting behind the wheel, staring at the house.

  With his legs straddling the bike, Wade bent down and scooped up the biggest rock he could reach. Shaking with rage, eyes so wet he could hardly see, he hurled it at the truck. Missing the windshield, it bounced off the roof and landed in the open bed with a loud clatter.

  His father snapped his head around, hard eyes glowing white in the shadowy cab, and he stared at Wade with pure hatred. A line of drool on his chin shone silvery in the moonlight.

  “Get out of here!” Wade screamed. “Leave them alone!”

  His dad moved in the truck, and his window started to lower. “Or what?” he asked, his voice level.

  “I know what you’ve been doing!” Wade shouted. “I’m going to the sheriff!”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind, boy. You go home and I’ll deal with you when I get there.”

  “Fuck that. Fuck you! You’re a monster! By the time you get home, we’ll be gone. Mom and me, we’ll be at the sheriff’s office turning you in.”

  The blood was roaring so loud in his ears he almost didn’t hear the truck’s engine catch. Then the lights flared on, and the vehicle started to move. Not toward the house, but backward—backing up so that he could come out of the driveway…toward Wade.

  * * *

  There was a dream Wade had sometimes—not exactly a recurring dream, but it came around disturbingly often. He’d had one last night, and forgotten all about it until just now. The dream usually came during the late night or early morning hours, and once he got past the immediate terror, he was able to get back to sleep. By morning, its intensity had usually faded away.

  In the one last night, he had been down by the river, at a place he had actually visited in real life several years before. It was a little pond, a place to which the river had overflowed during a heavy storm. By the time he found it, the river had receded, leaving behind a boggy stew with thick grass poking up past the water’s surface. It had been a broiling summer day, sticky hot, and the water was cool so he plopped down into it. Sitting on the bottom, his legs were completely immersed but it was only about waist high. Refreshing. Until he realized that insects were crawling up his shorts, their tiny legs tickling his thighs. He leapt up and smacked them away, and that’s when he saw them: pale, wriggling things about an inch long, like big whitish cockroaches. Seeing those, he jumped onto the bank, peeled his wet shorts off to make sure he’d found them all, and then hurried home to take a hot shower.

  That had been real life. In the dream, he was back at the little pond—not inside it—just standing on the bank looking into the shallow water. The disgusting insects milled about on the bottom, a writhing mass of pale, soft exoskeletons, like flesh that had never seen the sun. As he watched, the water began to bubble. Wade realized that the ground under the water had opened up—a fissure had formed, and air that leaked from it had caused the bubbling. It seemed to agitate the insects, too. They moved faster, spreading away from the fissure with jerky, anxious motions.

  He stood on the bank as they emerged from the pond, streaming out in limitless numbers. When they swarmed around his sneakers, he tried to step away, but his feet might as well have been glued to the ground. They skittered up his legs, tickling the curly hairs on his ankles. He wanted to stomp, to run, but he was frozen in place.

  The water had started to churn, and he could see something pushing up through the crack in the bottom. An insect leg, white like the rest, but easily as big around as his own legs, and just as long. Now he really wanted to get away, didn’t have any desire to see the rest of that thing. The ground beneath the roiling surface was splitting lengthwise, and the once minute fissure was now several feet long and still growing). The water level dropped as water flooded into the open crack. And still the thing came, more legs shoving through.

  Wade tried to look away, tried not to see the thing’s head as it rose up through the earth, because from his first glimpse it seemed to have a human face.

  That was when he realized that he was in bed, dreaming. This realization didn’t help, though. He was in his bed at home, but he was absolutely paralyzed, as surely as if ropes had been wrapped around his arms and legs and tied off. The
thing was coming anyway—in bed, on the banks of the stream—and the small ones were climbing up his legs, up his pajamas, their legs like hot wires slicing his flesh. He couldn’t shake them off or run away, and when he tried to scream, all that came out was a strangled gasp, caught in his throat. He was dreaming, he knew he was dreaming, and it made no difference at all.

  The long, thick, pale legs of the huge insect touched him just below the knee, searing his flesh where it landed, rousting him from paralysis. He twisted and lurched in the bed, covers furling around him, eyes suddenly wide open, and he slapped his legs, knowing that the bugs weren’t there—never had been.

  * * *

  Released from a paralysis every bit as complete as during the previous night’s dream, Wade jumped on the pedals again. He raced down the drive, the way suddenly illuminated from behind. His shadow stretched crazily out before him.

  The end of the drive neared. Bracing for the shock when his wheels hit pavement, Wade leaned over the handlebars and bore down. He passed from the headlights’ glow for a moment, as the truck came over a low, curving rise, its beams spiking into the sky. Then they fixed him again, and before him, instead of just his shadow, were Byrd and Molly.

  “Move!” Wade screamed.

  Byrd moved.

  Molly stood there with her bike in her hands, frozen, probably exhausted. Her face was red and blotchy in the headlights, her eyes the size of softballs.

  Wade skidded past her, onto the road, over it, off into the ditch on the far side. He gained his feet and scrabbled up.

  The headlights stabbed at Molly. The truck bore down on her.

  Wade couldn’t reach her in time, and she wasn’t budging.

  The truck looked huge compared to her, its grille fearsome as a predator’s maw, its engine roaring like a prehistoric beast.