Red Hands: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  In the distance, she heard the thrum of a helicopter’s rotors. It might have been a news chopper, but Maeve felt sure whoever might be up there, they were searching for her. She focused on the thump of her old blue Sperrys on the hardened ground, creating a pace and a rhythm, and that helped her not think about the parade and the car, the baseball bat and the blood, and the look of relief in the murderer’s eyes.

  She hadn’t recognized it at first, but now the memory had crystallized. She could see those eyes, that last moment of his life, even after he’d lunged for her and she’d grabbed his wrist. He’d realized death had come for him and his rage had bled away, replaced by … gratitude? Maeve thought it might have been gratitude, yes. And she hated him for it.

  Her mother’s face swam into her thoughts, and Maeve pushed it away. Her side hurt from the effort of the climb, but she picked up her pace. Blood rushed to her head, heart pounding in her ears, and that helped her not think about the things she didn’t want to think about. Helped her erase the gray-eyed image of her mom coughing, of the panic etched into her features as she fell. As she died at her daughter’s hands.

  No. Maeve slowed her jog to a stiff walk, still hurrying.

  The snowshoe trail hit a switchback, and she turned left and followed. During the summer, most people would have had a difficult time locating the trail. In the early fall, downed trees would be cleared and overgrown brush would be trimmed back. The few markers were so faded they blended easily with the surrounding woods. But Maeve knew what she was looking for. In some places, the trail appeared to simply end, but she always found it again.

  A cough built in her chest, burst like a dog’s bark from her throat, and she blamed the pollen in the air even though allergy season had come and gone.

  To her left, twenty feet from the trail, she saw the pile of rocks that her granddad told her had been a forest chapel in the nineteenth century. Now the rocks served as a rustic fireplace for winter hikers and snowshoers. People who knew where to find it would gather ’round with thermoses of coffee or flasks of whiskey, sing songs or roast marshmallows or snuggle up against the cold weather and remember a time when the dangers of the wild mountain woods could not be so easily left behind. Granddad had taken Maeve and her siblings there one late afternoon as the sun had set, cooked hot dogs on sticks, and talked to them about bears and wolves and other things that might be found in the forest when people were alone and foolish. Then he had escorted them home along the nighttime trail, and Maeve had marveled at the array of unsettling noises from among the trees. She had listened with wonder and terror, and she had never forgotten.

  As she emerged from the trail into the grassy, rutted lot behind Granddad’s old cabin, she tasted the salt of new tears on her lips. Her phone buzzed again in her pocket. It had been going off regularly, vibrating with both calls and text messages. She knew she couldn’t hold on to it for long, but it remained a lifeline, a possibility, a way home if she had any hope of going home.

  “Oh God,” she whispered, putting her hands on her hips and taking a breath as she studied the back of the cabin.

  One of the back windows had been broken. Moss had grown thick on the roof. An old birch tree had fallen, white and thin and skeletal, against the south side of the cabin, but the leaves had kept growing and one of the branches seemed to have merged with the wooden structure. The mountain seemed determined to take back this piece of land, and with Granddad gone from the world, Maeve’s father hadn’t done anything to prevent it.

  She ached with a yearning stirred by memories. There had been a bed here once, a place for her to lay her head, to cuddle with Rose back when she had been little, to make blanket forts with Logan and play board games and read the books that Granddad pushed on her and which she nearly always liked a bit more than she let on.

  If only, she thought. If only she could go in there now and find Granddad waiting, find little Rose with a blanket, find Logan with the Scrabble board. If only they could catch fish down by the falls and fry those fish in a skillet with garlic and lemon and a pinch of this and a dash of that. If only Mom and Logan weren’t dead.

  Maeve looked at her hands for the first time since she had run from the parade. She studied her palms, wondering why they weren’t soaked with blood, why they hadn’t turned red or black or purple as an ugly bruise, anything to show that they were no longer ordinary hands.

  Her phone vibrated again.

  With a deep breath, she slid it from her pocket. The last text had come from her dad. I’m coming, Maeve. I promise I’ll find you.

  “Please don’t.” She whispered the words to herself, and perhaps to her father wherever he might be. Certainly not to God. If she’d ever believed in any sort of god, this had cured her of that delusion forever. What god would have stood back and watched such horror unfold?

  Shit. He would come here. She knew that as surely as she’d ever known anything. Her father would think of the cabin right away. Maeve stared at the broken window and wondered if her dad might already be inside waiting for her—she wondered if he hated her now, if he might be coming here to take her home or have her arrested.

  Of course he hates you. So does Rose. Of course they do. After what you did.

  “Get your shit together,” she said out loud. Closing her eyes, she imagined ice flowing down through her, freezing her veins, cooling the heat of shame and grief, hardening her muscles and bones.

  Maeve set off to the north side of the cabin. The pump had rusted, but it took less than a minute to get water flowing again. It began as a brown trickle, then spat and sprayed, and finally ran clear enough that she felt safe taking a drink. Hurrying around to the front of the cabin, she found the old key stuck between the step and the frame of the front stairs, where it had always been. The front door lock barely turned. The key jammed. Maeve put her shoulder in it, and the lock tore through rotted wood with a dry crunch. The door swung inward.

  From off in the woods came the sound of an engine. Maeve glanced over her shoulder, listening as the engine growled, coming nearer.

  A hunger gnawed inside her, and she had to fight the urge to stand and wait. If the engine signaled her father’s arrival—even if it was someone else on the hunt for her—at least she would not be alone. If they meant to punish her, hurt her, it would only be what she deserved.

  The engine rumbled nearer. She wanted so badly for her father to hold her. Just throw his arms around her.

  Maeve would touch him. Take his hands in hers. Rose would come, and Maeve would embrace her. They would cough, and black blood would drip from their eyes. They would jerk and seize and judder on the ground, in the dirt, and then they would die. She could see it happen in her mind’s eye, as if she had already lived those moments.

  Maeve couldn’t breathe. It felt as if her insides were being clawed out. No, no, no, she thought, because she would not allow herself to hurt anyone else, especially not her dad or Rose. She would never touch another person if that was what it took to keep from killing. Never touch anyone, not in love or lust, not for simple joy or comfort. The reality of it began to suffocate her.

  She coughed again, a new ache in her throat and chest. Her temples throbbed.

  It’s not fair, a greedy little voice said in her head. Just wait for them. They want to comfort you. They want to hold you.

  It didn’t sound like her own voice at all but like someone else, like a serpent whispering in a garden. Everyone had a selfish terror inside them, waiting for the worst moments of their lives to manifest. She told herself that she wouldn’t fall prey to it. Wouldn’t let fear make her small.

  She ran inside and rifled through the dusty kitchen until she found an old plaid thermos Granddad had always used for his coffee. In her pocket, her phone buzzed again, and she pulled it out and tossed it onto the rickety little kitchen table. They could track it if they wanted to, but they would only track it to the place they’d already have decided to search for her. It buzzed again as she ran from the cabin.
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  In the yellow grass of the side yard, she filled the thermos from the rusted pump. The car roared louder, clear and carrying across the yard, the woods no longer damping the noise. Whoever it was had arrived at the cabin, but they hadn’t found her yet.

  Maeve darted across the grassy lot and into the woods, rejoining the snowshoe trail. Every footfall sounded too loud in her ears, but by the time she heard car doors slamming shut back at the cabin, she’d already split off onto what Granddad had called the Jackrabbit Trail, and she knew nobody would find her here. Not quickly, anyway.

  Fifty yards along, she came to a tree that had been split by lightning before she was born, both sides continuing to grow. From the split in the trunk, she had a view down the slope and into the cabin’s small clearing. A blue-and-silver police car sat silently on the dirt road in front of the cabin, windows dark. Maeve’s heart thrummed like hummingbird wings, but she fought the urge to keep running.

  The driver’s door opened first. Chief Kaminski climbed out, gesturing to someone inside the car. He raised his voice, and some of the words carried on the breeze. “Stay put, Ted. I don’t need any more bodies.”

  Ted.

  The passenger door opened, and Maeve’s father stepped out. Her heart leaped. She could still see it in her mind, the moment the BMW had struck him, the way he’d jumped to avoid being hit and smashed into the windshield, been thrown up and over, landed on the pavement. But he was alive, and he was here. In pain, from the careful way he moved … but here.

  He slammed the door hard enough for the sound to echo up the mountain. Some of his words were lost, but Maeve heard fuck you and my daughter clearly enough. Her left hand shook as she lifted it to cover her mouth, to keep her from shouting for him the way her heart yearned to. How old had she been when she had stopped needing her father?

  Stupid question. Such a dumb fucking question. The child she’d been had not vanished but had been absorbed into the adult woman she’d become. Once, she had been a little girl who had climbed into her father’s lap every day when he came home from work. Those memories were fresh, and today they were sharp enough to cut her.

  “Daddy,” she whispered. Whatever he had become, whatever demons he’d faced, he was still the father she’d always known.

  His love for her would put him in danger, and she had lost too much today.

  Maeve began to turn away, but something prickled at the back of her neck, an icy pain that radiated up into her skull. Wincing, she staggered and braced herself against a tree, stifling the groan at her lips. A bird took flight from the branches overhead, and she breathed through her teeth until the spike of pain had subsided. Frozen, she listened for approaching footsteps, but when she managed to look down at the road again, she saw Kaminski and her father entering the old cabin. The front door hinges creaked so loudly Maeve could hear them from up on the hill.

  Her gut rippled with a sudden twist of nausea. She coughed and wiped at her mouth only to see a black smear on the back of her hand. It’s in me. The sickness he touched them with …

  Maeve heard the static of a police radio back down the hill, but she couldn’t make herself turn and look for her father this time. She knew what would happen if she touched him, but it felt as if there were two voices in her head, deeply at odds, like the angel and devil on the shoulders of a character in some old cartoon. Part of her wanted the comfort her father’s embrace would bring, but another part—a hungry part—wanted to hug him for another reason.

  An image flashed in her head of her father coughing and choking, of disease frothing from his mouth, of his throat turning purplish black as he fell to his knees, eyes rolling back in his head. Maeve cried out—she couldn’t stop herself, not with this horror in her mind. Tears burned at her eyes, guilt and grief and rage clawing at her.

  There’s always Kaminski, said the voice in her head. You could take him.

  Her hands itched with heat, fingers clenching with a need she refused to understand.

  The echo of her own cry lingered in the air. She blinked, wondering if they’d heard it down at the cabin.

  Maeve bolted, dashing up the Jackrabbit Trail, leaving her father behind for the second time that day, wondering if she would ever see him again, terrified of what might happen if she did. She hurled herself up the mountain, deeper into the wild wood. She coughed again, spat black sludge onto the underbrush, winced at the needles of pain in her skull, and wondered if what she was really looking for was a place to lie down and die.

  Either way, she wasn’t going to hurt anyone else. Not ever.

  No matter what the voices in her head might say.

  7

  Walker basked in the glory of the Buick’s air-conditioning, cranked as high as the vents would pump it out. His plane had landed at half past two at a small regional airport, where he’d been met by a typically nondescript DoD employee and handed the keys to a silver Buick Cascada convertible, seemingly fresh off the lot. Working for the SRC had accustomed him to rentals or beat-up loaners, dusty Jeeps and dented trucks. If the DoD guy wondered how Walker warranted this vehicle, he gave no indication, but Walker wondered enough for both of them.

  The sky had been half-blue and half–ghostly white when the plane was in the air, but by the time it landed, that misty cover had spread farther and begun to darken. On the video from this morning, the day had begun with a beautiful blue sky, but as the clouds moved in, the day had turned gray and heavy with humidity. As he drove, Walker glanced out the window and said a little pagan prayer for rain.

  A convertible. Jesus, these people.

  He kept the top up.

  The GPS took him winding along a valley, halfway ’round a lake, and through dense forest. Hawks wheeled across the darkening sky. Higher up, a helicopter sliced the air in unsettling silence. It should’ve made more noise, which identified it as either friend or enemy. Helicopters used for corporate or tourist purposes were never so quiet. They didn’t need to be.

  Garland Mountain Laboratories appeared on his left, half a mile earlier than the GPS indicated. Walker hit the brake and turned onto a narrow road that looked as if it might tunnel into the side of a wooded mountain slope. The road veered to the right, through a dense screen of trees, and he caught his first glimpse of the fence. A quarter mile later, he tapped the brake and brought the Buick to a purring halt at a high, barbed wire–topped gate replete with security cameras. Two guards stepped out of the shack by the gate, one of them wearing an assault rifle slung across his shoulder. It looked to Walker like a SIG 556R, a serious weapon, but it only spurred more questions in his mind.

  Who are you people? he thought as the guard approached.

  Walker rolled the window down. “I’m Dr. Ben Walker from—”

  “Global SRC,” the guard finished. “You’re expected, Dr. Walker. Please proceed to the end of the road, park in Lot C. Someone will greet you there.”

  Walker studied the man’s face, the lines at the corners of his eyes, the lean features, the way his stance created an illusion of ease until you looked at the tension in his jaw and the way his right hand never strayed far from the service weapon holstered at his hip. Military, no question about it. The training, at least.

  “Don’t you want my ID?” he asked.

  The guard smiled as if the question were adorably quaint. “No, sir. We’ve got it covered.”

  He signaled for the one with the assault rifle to open the gate, and a moment later it began to roll back with a metallic squeal. Walker drove through, keeping an eye on the two guards in his rearview mirror. Of course they had known he was coming, and presumably the SRC had sent some identification through, but still the guards should have confirmed his ID. Walker glanced back at the cameras by the guard station and wondered how many there had been on the road into the facility and how good Garland Mountain’s facial recognition software might be.

  Lot C awaited him at the road’s end, as promised, nearest to the main entrance, a small lot marked for visitors a
nd VIPs, but with fewer than half a dozen spaces occupied. Walker pulled the conspicuous Buick into the spot nearest the door. As he climbed out of the car, he saw a woman exit the lab and stride toward him. She wore a vest top, black trousers, and black boots that gave her away as something other than what she seemed. When she approached him, she did not offer a hand to shake.

  “Dr. Walker, I’m Cristina Vargas, one of the lab supervisors. I’ll be your escort while you’re here, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.”

  “I don’t want to waste your time,” Walker replied, studying her eyes. “But I do have questions. Honest answers will speed us along.”

  Vargas wrinkled her nose. “You think I’m going to lie to you?”

  “My past experience has left me ill prepared for honesty from people in your position.”

  “What position is that?”

  “People who are hesitant to let me through the door.”

  Vargas smiled at that. “All right, then. Come in, Dr. Walker. We’ll make this as painless as we can and get you on your way. You have more important things to do than hang around our lab all day.”

  She brought him inside, through security and past multiple cameras. The guards he saw wore sidearms and eyed him with a steel that said they had used those weapons before in some earlier life. Walker nodded to let them know the message had been received and also to give them the same message in return.

  The lab had been built into the face of the mountain. From the outside, it appeared to be only two levels, but when Vargas took him onto the elevator, the row of buttons confirmed his suspicion that the facility was larger than it seemed. Five levels in total, three of them underground. It must, he thought, have cost billions of dollars to build the place, and a lot of influence to do it quietly.