“Don’t raise your voice,” Leo warned, arms spread across her. “You’ll get it more upset.”
Jessica yowled with laughter outside the cabin. “Go get ’em, Wally. ’Atta boy.”
Glenda watched on and chewed the chrome off her nails in slow, hypnotic slivers.
“I don’t give two fucks if I upset the bear.” Mia bent down to grip a jagged stone from the earth. “That was my son!” She flung it at the grizzly’s face. It bounced off his nose so hard it hit the battered ceiling, sending showers of dead yellow moss down its face.
It eyes gawked and blinked at her. He stepped backward.
“No, no, no. Don’t you dare give up. Pizza, Walter!” Jessica’s laughter lulled and turned sour. “I said, pizza!”
The bear found its resolve and a growl chugged deep in its throat. Once again it stepped forward. It swiped a paw at them, slashing Leo’s bicep. Gushes of blood streamed down his forearm.
“That’s right. Kill them, Walter!” Jessica shrieked.
“No!” Mia screamed as the bear lifted its great paw again. It paused at the sound of her voice and tilted its head. Its eyes met hers and tilted its head. Slowly its paw lowered to the ground.
“I said kill them, Walter!” the old lady squawked in hysterical disappointment. “You idiot!”
But the bear hesitated and watched Mia as it put its paw on the ground and stood firmly, rebelliously on it, refusing to use it for anything more than standing.
Oh my god, Mia thought. Could he remember that I threw him my salmon? Do grizzly bears even have a reciprocal conscience like that?
The bear grunted and backed away, its rear out the door first.
“You stupid idiot!” Jessica stomped her feet. “How many times I have told you to stop having such a soft heart?” She reached into the inner pocket of her bathrobe and revealed a machete she was clearly planning on using on Mia and Leo later. She looked at the bear and then at Glenda. “I should have just slaughtered you when you were a baby.” It was not clear which of the two she was speaking to.
Walter finished pulling his enormous, bulky body from the cabin and turned around to face Jessica. With one swing of her frail, wrinkled arm, she plunged the machete into his muzzle.
“Mother, no!” Glenda cried.
The roar that ripped from the bear was like nothing Mia had ever heard before. It thundered through the earth beneath her feet and vibrated up to her scalp, where she was sure her own hair must be dropping out in clumps from terror. The bear stood on his back paws, howling a strangled cry of agony and betrayal at the sky, machete still stuck in his face. Then he landed hard on his feet. He stared at Jessica.
Mia clasped her hands over her face. Even though this was the woman who had murdered her son, she couldn’t bear to watch what was about to happen next.
The sound of grizzly claws hitting human flesh full-on was oddly guttural. Through closed eyes, Mia could see it all. Through Glenda’s screams of horror, the scene was painted clearly. Jessica’s grunts from the impact were followed by the sound of her being slammed to the earth. A few more slams, and then a ripping, wet noise, followed by Jessica’s last fading cries until she finally fell silent.
“Oh God…” Leo groaned in disgust and gripped his arms around Mia, who shook helplessly in his arms.
“Walter, stop!” Glenda cried.
Only for the sounds to erupt all over again. This time Glenda was the one crying out for help in agony. Mia sobbed as she heard her own daughter, her firstborn child, being slaughtered at the mercy of the powerful grizzly that had just crushed the corpse of her other child with one careless step.
Helicopter vibrations ground hard in the skies above. They were right above them now. Mia’s eyes flickered open in response to the promising sounds, against her better judgment. Instead of looking at the sky, her gaze was captured by the sight of two human torsos exploded open in front of her, their bloodied organs torn to chunks. She clasped a hand to her mouth and gagged into it.
After killing both Glenda and Jessica, the grizzly plopped down between the bodies and stared at Leo and Mia, as though mulling over whether or not to kill them too.
“We need to run now!” Leo ordered. “If we get up the hill in time, they might see us.”
“How can we just run away?” Mia said. “The bear is only going to chase us and kill us too.”
“We’ve got to do our damnedest. It’s gotten really dark now and there’s not much time left for them to see us.”
Mia nodded and took his hand. They eased their way back from the cabin. The bear stooped in front of the cabin, still nestled between its kills, lit by a yellow beam of moonlight trickling through the trees. It glared at them as they backed away. When they had retreated enough and were safely cloaked in the shadows of the encompassing trees, they turned and bolted down the trail toward the hill.
Mia’s feet slammed the rocky trail. Although the bear was not chasing, she couldn’t help but keep looking back to make sure it hadn’t changed its mind. After she checked for the fifth time, she saw someone else standing next to the bear.
Watching her.
Her hand slipped free from Leo’s as her eyes fixated on this person. Leo sprinted off, oblivious, into the darkness without her.
It was an adolescent boy. Shaved head. Shirtless. Holding a knife. His glare penetrated hard into her. His mouth crammed into a sneer.
She padded slowly toward him. Her throat caught in parched terror.
There he was.
“Brendan?” she whispered.
He was not dead at all.
He didn’t answer her, and as she got closer, she saw a new wiggly, diagonal scar that ran down his chest to his belly that had never been there before. But it was definitely him. Four years older and about a thousand and four years more aged from trauma. What the hell did these bastards do to him?
“Baby, it’s me,” she said. “It’s Momma.”
He tightened his grip on the knife and continued to hold his ground. The gaunt muscles in his face flexed as he grimaced at her. Mia gulped. Why is he not responding to me?
Mia looked back in the direction Leo had run. The helicopter was moving faster now and she doubted Leo could even make it there in time. Should she run to catch up with him?
Mia looked back at her son, who glared at her, gripped his blade with both hands now, and widened his stance. Ready for her. The bear lying near him didn’t take its eyes off her either. Only creepy silence flowed and choked her.
She ignored her instinct to flee and she walked toward him.
*******
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sunday, September 17: 7:04 p.m.
Leo raced up the hill with the boldness of a jaguar on crack. He reached the clearing at the top of the hill before he realized Mia had let go of his hand. He spun in circles, desperate to find her in the darkness around him. “Mia!”
The gray base of the helicopter scraped the treetops above the fog. It showed no signs of slowing and tilted as though to turn around and head back to town. Leo’s leg muscles spasmed into action and he bolted further into the clearing, leaping while thrashing his arms madly to signal for the pilot’s attention. Although he was as fit as any man could be, his thighs burned with the agony of his pursuit.
The helicopter slowed and twirled in one giant circle above him. Leo jumped and roared at it. It slowed to a twirling, hovering just ahead of him. Then, with an easy, relaxed grace, it descended onto the plains, the propellers slapping a pulsating whirlwind at him. Leo leaned into the pressure of air and pushed on toward the chopper.
The door opened and a man appeared in the doorway. Leo recognized him, although he was soaking wet in plain clothes and no longer wearing his uniform. It was the acne-faced kid who came with Constable Barter the night they inspected Mia’s home. The night they had humiliated her. Behind him, Constable Barter lay swathed in a thousand gray wool blankets, her eyes weakly held on Leo.
“Dude, you’re so lucky we saw you
,” Allan yelled over to Leo as he approached. “We almost passed right by.”
“Mia’s back at the cabin,” Leo shook his head. “She’s alone with a grizzly. We’ve got to get back to her now.”
“No way. We’ve got to fly back to town,” Mulaka warned. “Before this fog gets any worse. Or else we could crash into a mountain on our way out.”
“Go get her,” Constable Barter overrode Mulaka’s instruction with a wheeze that might very well have been her last words. She shivered deep within her swathe of blankets. Blinking feebly, she coughed up a lung, “Michaels, take my gun.”
Michaels turned inside the chopper, solemnly took the gun from her, and nodded, before grabbing also rope and supplies. Four times he put down the supplies and picked them up, as if not sure whether or not to take them.
“Hurry up!” Leo shouted at him.
Michaels jumped down from the chopper and Leo flew back down the hill into the fog, his heart thundering out of his chest.
He should never have taken his eyes off Mia, not even for one second. He should never have let her hand go. How could he have been so neglectful? So careless?
It was like the death of his son, all over again.
*******
“Stay away from me, lady,” Brendan jabbed his knife toward his mother while backing up in dips and bobs, looking like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to kickbox her or run away sobbing. His feet were bare and dirt-encrusted from what looked like years of never being washed. His eyes followed hers to his feet and then back at her face. “Stop staring at me, lady, because I will stab you in the face if I have to.”
“Brendan, don’t you recognize me?” she said. “It’s me…mommy.”
He tilted his head to one side, as though assessing her weird, foreign word she was presenting to him. But his stared blankly back with a coldness that startled her. “No, you’re not my mother. My mother is Jessica, the lady you just killed with my sister, Glenda.”
“Your mother?” Mia said. She couldn’t imagine that he would be calling another woman that name, let alone a woman as horrible as Jessica had been. Just the idea of it tortured her with a deeper layer of grief under the thousands of existing layers. “Is she the one who took you from me on your way to school that day?”
“What are you talking about, lady?” his voice triggered with frustration and sadness. Despite his yelling, she noticed he looked away ever so slightly and gulped, “Nobody took me from anybody. You seriously are crazy or something.”
“What did Jessica do to you?” What sick, disgusting damage she has done to my precious son? “Has she beat you? Has she touched you? Tell me, baby, what she’s done.”
An endless empty silence filled with pain and awkwardness clogged their air before he blurted back his response with the harshness of a rattlesnake striking, “Stop calling me that. How many times do I have to tell you I am not your son?”
“Brendan…”
“My name is not Brendan,” he said. “My name is Shawn now.”
“Now?” Mia grappled at the only hope she could find, her voice jingling with pangs of joy laced through terror and sorrow. “Your name is Shawn now? So you used to have another name?”
Brendan stared at her. She could see her logic was seeping into him. He shook his head, resisting her. His too-long filthy brown hair swinging side to side, shaking dirt loose.
“Do you remember when your name was changed?”
“Shut up!” But his voice turned high-pitched and strained, as though years of adolescence shaved away and revealed the frightened child stolen from his schoolyard that he was underneath.
But she refused to back down. She couldn’t.
“Shawn, do you remember when your name changed?”
“I remember my mother.” He stepped toward her and swept the knife warningly at her face. “And I remember how you tricked Walter to kill her.”
Helpless, she looked back at her child, trying to hold his gaze, but he refused to connect and looked away. His words hit her like a cold knife, cutting straight through her soul. Her heart hammered with immediate forgiveness and blind panic each time he swung the blade at her. Zero recognition and only hatred for her flickered in his eyes. Numbness spread like a sickening injury to her.
“The old lady you thought was your mother,” she said with tremendous sadness, “has passed away.”
Where was the cheerful elf of a boy who loved nothing more than providing comic relief to her otherwise drab existence? What stood before her now was nothing less than…she didn’t even want to think what she thought of him now.
“Impossible,” he said, almost laughing as if he was calling her bluff.
“She’s in the cabin,” Mia said. “Please don’t look, just believe me.”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he reluctantly walked to the cabin and looked inside. She wished she hadn’t told him to not look in the cabin. If she knew anything about the average twelve-year-old, telling them to not do something was practically the same as forcing them to do it. The last time she’d seen him he was only eight and not nearly as stubborn. She would have to grow accustomed to this new stubbornness. Among so many other things.
He stopped at the doorway and looked inside at the two bodies. His shoulders clenched and his mouth pursed. His eyes welled with tears. He looked back at Mia, accusation in his thunderous expression. “What have you done to them?”
What cowered before her was now a disturbed, gangly twelve-year-old, teetering on the brink between childhood and adolescence. Where his eyes had once held a sparkling charm, they were now drenched in a sadness. And fear.
“Their guts are all over the place, blood is dripping off the ceiling,” he said to her. Shaking. “My mother doesn’t even have a face anymore.”
She wanted to reach out to him. To cradle him in his arms and comfort him. To make him forget what he had just seen. To forget what had happened to him in those four years since he’d been gone. What had happened on that fateful day that he’d insisted on walking to school by himself? The day she’d let him out of her sight?
Did he forgive her for not predicting this outcome?
Did he forgive her for not teaching him now to think for himself?
For not understanding there were those who would hurt him?
She doubted there was anything quite as heart-wrenching as a child who wanted to murder the mother he used to adore but no longer recognized.
As if sensing the blossoming tension between mother and son, the bear pushed up and strolled over, the blood of the two women still dripping from his jaw. He regarded Mia with the same pleasant calmness he had when he’d first recalled the smoked salmon sandwiches. As if saying to her, don’t worry lady, you’re cool.
Until further notice, at least.
He didn’t see her as an enemy, although he’d just killed her first child like it was nothing. Maybe he would kill her second child and then her like it was nothing as well.
The bear sighed, bored, and lounged down beside Brendan. The expanse of his enormous hunchback came up to the height of Brendan’s waist. Through the murky darkness and soft glow of moonlight that pooled around the cabin, the bear watched Mia with bored eyes as globs of blood and flesh plopped from its teeth to the wet soil below.
But deep within the tedium of his eyes spoke of a viciousness that could explode to the surface again and forget all about the sandwich favor after one false move from her.
“You’ve murdered my family,” Brendan said to her. Coolly. Gathering up his composure again. The tears in his eyes had already evaporated. The muscles in his face gripped with a new, determined intensity. He clutched his knife harder and took one step toward her. “I can’t let you get away with that, lady. Because my mother didn’t raise me to be no sissy-boy.”
*******
'
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Leo flew back down the hill to get back to Mia. Thighs pumping, feet barely kissing the grass. He had no idea if Constable Michaels was fo
llowing anymore or if he lost him in a sea of fog. He didn’t even care.
He needed to get to her.
He burst back down the trail and saw the cabin pooled in a strobe of moonlight that shimmered through the fog. The bear was still there, draped in the shadows beside the cabin, its head down on its paws for a nap. As if the whole killing spree bored it. Mia was there too. But only now she was cornered by a young man wielding a knife who paced around her.
“Mia.” Leo ran into the clearing and pushed toward the boy with the knife. He held out a firm hand to him. “Stay back.”
“Wh-who-who are you?” the kid asked. “Are you one of them?”
“I’m Dr. Leo Lawson. No need to be scared, kid. Everything’s cool.”
“Leo,” Mia said. “This is my son. Brendan. The one who came to me in my dreams.”
“No, I’m not,” Brendan pleaded.
Leo did a double-take at the trembling kid. Knife clattering in his little clenched fist. This was Brendan? Mia’s dreams were correct all along? Impossible. This kid must be some trickster, someone involved with Glenda. He was clearly taking advantage of Mia’s vulnerable state of mind. “Is that what he told you? That he’s your son?”
“She’s not my mother,” he interrupted. “She’s just a lying psycho.”
“I know it’s him,” Mia said. “It’s Brendan.”
“What do you want from us?” Leo stepped toward Brendan and he backed up, keeping his knife in front of him. Leo took another step and Brendan another back. Leo stepped to the left, and Brendan mirrored him immediately.
“What do you want?” Brendan replied. “That lady killed my mother and my sister and ripped out their guts and everything.”
The kid look nervous. Like he was going to snap and blow at any point.
“We are sorry for your loss, but the bear did that.” Leo tried to speak as matter-of-factly as possible to keep him calm.
Kiss Her Goodbye: Thriller/Romance with a shocking twist Page 20