The Killing Jar

by Jennifer Bosworth

  I was all too aware of a growing hunger inside me, a gnawing sensation, not in my stomach, but everywhere. In every cell. Every pore. In my blood and my brain. This cavernous craving was familiar. I’d felt it seven years ago when I’d emerged from the forest, the state of euphoria I’d lived in for two days having abandoned me, leaving me empty and ravenous.

  Whatever I’d done to bring Erin and my mom back from the dead, it had also brought back my hunger.

  Two cops guided me to the kitchen and requested I stay there. I spotted the plate Thomas Dunn had used, still sitting on the kitchen table. He had, indeed, helped himself to leftover lasagna. An impressionistic pattern of red sauce and cheese had dried onto the plate. How insane had he become over the years since his son’s death that he could massacre a family and then eat comfort food? Maybe cruelty ran in his blood, and he’d passed it down to Jason.

  Our kitchen had one of those greenhouse-style windows over the sink, all glass, with two shelves where my mom kept an array of houseplants and potted herbs. As I entered the kitchen, I saw that the plants my mom cared for so meticulously had turned the color of ash, and drooped in their pots. Some had crumbled like ancient paper.

  “Did you place the 9-1-1 call?” a female officer asked me, striding into the kitchen. She might have been five two on her tiptoes, but she looked to be all muscle under her uniform. She had eyes like a boxer, squinty and darting. The kind of eyes that didn’t miss a thing.

  “I did,” I said, still studying the plants.

  She examined me, taking in my bloodstained clothes. “Are you hurt?”

  “No,” I told her, ignoring the throbbing pain in my head. If I said yes, someone would insist on examining me, and I couldn’t have anyone touching me right then. I didn’t know what I might do.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m fine,” I snarled, my tone so vicious it made the officer take a step back.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just … I need my inhaler,” I wheezed, and bolted past the officer, tore open the kitchen junk drawer, and found the inhaler Mom always kept there. Erin and I used the same one. I didn’t have a prescription because the doctor Mom took me to claimed I didn’t have asthma, that it was all in my head.

  I sucked in three inhalations of the bitter medicine and then stood with my hands propped on the counter, my head hanging as my airways relaxed.

  I looked up to find the officer studying me with those sharp eyes of hers.

  She took a step toward me. “Look, I’ve seen some weird things in my life, but never anything like what’s out there. I have to ask … what in God’s name happened here tonight?”

  I stared at her, confused, and her eyebrows went up.

  “You don’t know?” she asked.

  I was moving toward the front foyer before she could stop me.

  The door stood wide open, allowing the cops and EMTs to come and go. I slipped out onto the front porch and had to grip the wrought-iron railing to hold myself upright as I took in the sight of the land surrounding the house. It was a clear night, the moon high and luminous, allowing me to see enough so I understood immediately what the female officer had meant when she said she’d never seen anything like what was “out there.”

  It was dead. The lawn. The bushes that used to stand like sentinels around the house. Mom’s lush, unruly garden. The bullet-shaped evergreen trees. Everything that had been living within a hundred feet of our house appeared to have been scorched.

  “Kenna!”

  I heard my name shouted from across the barren land. A cop in uniform was busy cordoning off our yard with yellow police tape, but I spotted Blake and his parents on the other side of the perimeter, talking to another officer. Blake waved his arms at me.

  I remembered kissing Blake and thinking I wanted to keep going until the sun came up. What if we’d ignored the cry in the night and just kept on kissing? My family would be dead, and Thomas Dunn would still be waiting for me to come home so he could get his revenge.

  My feet found their way down the porch steps. The soles of my shoes crunched on the dead grass. It sounded as though I were walking on ice chips. Behind me, the female cop called my name, told me to come back to the house, but I ignored her command.

  I began to run through the dead world. It looked like what was left after a nuclear bomb had been dropped, after everything burned and then went cold.

  When I reached Blake, he climbed over the police tape, ignoring the cop who kept telling him not to. I threw myself into his arms, and he held me so tight I couldn’t breathe.

  The female cop caught up to me and insisted I come back inside, that she needed to collect my clothes as evidence. My clothes, covered in blood.

  Evidence of what? I wondered. The perpetrator of this particular crime was dead and gone. There was no one to catch.

  I ignored her and clung to Blake. Over his shoulder, on the barren side of the yellow tape, I caught sight of a scattering of tawny mounds that looked like piles of dirt in among the blackened trees. Fresh graves. It took me a moment to realize what they really were.

  Deer. A herd of dead deer. There had to be twenty of them.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the energy contained under Blake’s skin. I wanted to reach inside him and take a little, just enough to make my hunger go away.

  I released him quickly and stepped back.

  “What is it?” he said, his eyes wide with fear as he took in the blood soaking my clothes. “Are you hurt? Is your family … are they okay?”

  “They’re alive,” I told him. “We’re all … we’re okay.”

  But that wasn’t true. I, for one, was definitely not okay.

  CIRCLE OF DEATH

  “It’s simply not possible,” Dr. Wong, the senior emergency care physician, announced to me in his private office at the hospital.

  It was six a.m. Four hours that felt like four years had passed since I’d kissed Blake in the woods … woods that were now dead, along with every shred of life they’d accommodated. Fallen squirrels and birds littered the ground around the trees, as though they’d made some kind of spontaneous suicide pact. Rabbits, foxes, deer, even a bobcat had been found within the circle of death, their bodies stiff and desiccated. If you looked closely, you could see a powdering of tiny, lifeless insects on every surface, and larger ones—crickets and grasshoppers, spiders and beetles, and thousands upon thousands of moths—mixed in among them.

  Outside Dr. Wong’s window, half a dozen news vans lurked in the parking lot. I didn’t plan on leaving the building anytime soon.

  “I spoke with the police,” Dr. Wong went on. “They estimate there was around ten liters of blood in your basement, which supposedly originated from your mom and sister.”

  I swallowed hard, but there was a knot in my throat that wouldn’t go down, and a low, constant fluttering sound in my ears that was driving me insane. Worse was the empty, cavernous hunger inside me—not in my stomach, but in every fiber of my being. In my teeth. In my eyes. In my fingernails. Worse still was the sensation that I was dying as I sat here, that I was shriveling and shrinking as my body cried out for more … more of whatever I’d given to my mom and Erin to save their lives.

  “The average adult has between three and five liters of blood in his body.” Dr. Wong spread his hands and allowed me to do the math. “Your mom and sister were awake, aware, and walking around when the police arrived. With the amount of blood each of them supposedly lost, that isn’t possible.”

  Supposedly. Dr. Wong liked that word.

  My jaw was rigid. I could barely move it to make words. “So how do you explain it?”

  “I don’t,” Dr. Wong said, raising an eyebrow. He was one of those people whose age was impossible to guess. His hair was a solid mass, thick and black, his skin unlined. But he had an adult’s BS detector, and he wasn’t buying mine. “There is also the matter of the wounds. In essence, there aren’t any, which begs the question: Where did all that blood come from? And there is your fam
ily’s behavior, their enlarged pupils, and their tremors. We tested them for drugs, chemicals of some kind, but they were clean.” He took a breath and let it out. “And finally, there is your sister’s condition. Your twin sister, is that right?”

  “Yes.” A wave of chills swam over me, making my teeth rattle. I had changed clothes before leaving our house—my bloody clothes had been bagged as evidence—but I barely remembered choosing what to wear. I wished I’d brought a sweater, but at the time I’d felt feverish. Now I was freezing, and my skin was starting to crawl. I fought the urge to rake it with my fingernails.

  Dr. Wong consulted the chart in front of him. “I remember Erin. I treated her when your mom brought her in a few years ago. She’d fallen and broken several bones.”

  I winced as I recalled the incident in fifth grade, the last year Erin had attended school. Erin had disobeyed our mom’s strict mandate never to use the playground equipment, but she’d gotten tired of sitting on the sidelines with her books, watching the other kids swing and run and have a good time. It was my job to watch her, make sure she never did anything dangerous, and usually I did. But that one day, I turned my back for a few minutes and Erin ended up with multiple fractures in both tibias after dropping only a foot from the monkey bars and landing normally. Erin’s bones were not meant to withstand that kind of impact, and she’d spent the next few months in double casts and a wheelchair. My mom had been furious with me for not taking better care of her.

  She needs you, Kenna, my mom had told me while tears of guilt poured down my face. You’re the strong one. You have to protect her.

  I braced myself for bad news as I asked, “What about her condition?”

  The doctor spread his hands in a gesture that implied helplessness, but a ghost of a smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “I don’t understand what happened at your house last night, and maybe I never will. But as far as your sister’s afflictions are concerned … she no longer seems to have them. She’s perfectly healthy.”

  I swallowed and finally the lump in my throat went down. Tears stung the backs of my eyes and my breath hitched in my throat.

  I stood, my knees trembling. “Can I see her now?”

  * * *

  My mom and Erin had been relegated to a suite on the third floor, where they would be kept for observation and testing until Dr. Wong had satisfied his curiosity. I exited the elevator and walked quickly to their suite, but froze outside when I heard my mom’s voice. I cracked the door open slightly and peered inside. I caught sight of a broad-shouldered man in a suit, blocking the view of my mom. He held a pad of paper and was writing quickly. I guessed he was a detective.

  I stood still and listened, realizing my mom was giving a statement of what had happened last night. I needed to know what she said so I could repeat it.

  “We went to bed later than usual,” Mom said. “We’d been at a music festival near Portland, watching Kenna perform.”

  “Kenna is your other daughter?” the detective said. “The one who came home later?”

  “That’s right,” my mom said. “She was out with her boyfriend.”

  “Name?” the detective asked.

  “Blake Callahan.”

  “Are they talking about me?”

  I whirled to find Blake standing behind me. He looked exhausted and wonderful and worried. I wanted to throw my arms around him and bury my face in his neck. Instead, I took a step back from him and put a finger to my lips to shush him. He nodded, and leaned in to listen.

  “So,” Mom continued, “it was after midnight when we went to bed. My guess is Dunn was already in the house waiting for us when we got home. I woke up about an hour later with a gun pressed to my head. He … he had Erin. He told me he wouldn’t hurt her if I did what he wanted.” A choked sob followed. Tears sprang to my eyes and I had to press both hands over my mouth to hold back a sob of my own.

  “He lied,” my mom said, her voice bitter and cold. “We cooperated with him because he said he wouldn’t hurt us if we did. He marched us down to the storage room in the basement, probably because it was farthest from the front door. He didn’t want Kenna to hear anything if she came home while he was”—she paused—“while he was in the middle of things.”

  “What did he do once he had you down there?” the detective asked.

  “He was insane,” Mom said, not really answering the question. “We knew him, you know. He was our neighbor a long time ago, but after his son died he lost his mind. We tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen. He started screaming at us about Kenna, saying she had killed his son, which is ridiculous. Obviously he needed someone to blame.”

  I had to hand it to my mom, she was a good liar. I almost believed what she was saying even though I knew it was bullshit.

  “And then he … attacked you?” the detective asked, sounding cagey, like he wasn’t sure how to broach this subject. “I mean, he must have attacked you. Your blood was all over that room.”

  “Yes,” my mom and Erin said at the same time.

  “And then?”

  A pause, and then Mom said, “We don’t remember.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t remember?”

  “That’s all we can tell you. Thomas Dunn attacked us. He had a gun, but he didn’t use it, probably didn’t want to alert the neighbors. He used a knife instead, and while he was … while he was busy with me, I yelled for Erin to make a run for it. Sh-she—” Her voice cracked, and Erin cut in.

  “He caught me before I could get out of the basement,” she said in a tremulous whisper I could barely make out. “He hit me and broke my glasses and dragged me back to the room. I … I don’t remember anything after that.”

  “You don’t remember Kenna coming home?”

  “No,” Mom said.

  “No,” Erin said.

  “And you don’t know how Thomas Dunn died?”

  “No,” they repeated.

  “Or what happened to the land around your house? No theories? Aliens? Astrological event? Divine intervention?”

  “No,” my mom said firmly. “We have no idea what happened. We don’t know why we’re still alive. All we can do is be thankful that we are. I’m sorry, there’s nothing more we can tell you, Detective.”

  “Then I hope Kenna can fill in a few blanks. Thanks for your time.”

  The detective’s footsteps moved toward the door. I motioned Blake into the room next door to my family’s, which was thankfully empty. Blake and I hid behind the curtain, both of us breathing fast, until the footsteps faded.

  Then Blake looked at me. “You’re shivering.” He took off his jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. It smelled like him. Like brown sugar and cinnamon, honey and cedar. I wished I could press my face to his neck and breathe him in, let him put his arms around me. But I didn’t dare let him touch me. The hunger was getting worse, a raw ache. A cavernous emptiness that begged to be filled. Withering cells crying to be sated. The papery fluttering in my ears continued, louder now, and my skin prickled like I was being jabbed by a thousand acid-laced stingers.

  You’ve been through this before, I told myself. You made it through that time. You can do it again.

  But that had been different. I had been locked in a cell alone, not surrounded by people.

  “What are you going to tell that detective?” Blake asked. “You can’t avoid him forever.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said, but I understood what Blake was really asking.

  What happened to you last night? What did you do? What are you hiding?

  “I need to see my family,” I said to change the subject. “Alone.”

  Blake nodded, doing his best to hide his disappointment that I wasn’t ready to confide in him. “I’ll wait in the hall.”

  I started to turn away, but Blake caught my hand and pulled me back, holding on tight when I tried to pull away. I gritted my teeth behind closed lips so he wouldn’t know the torture it was to be so close to him, so close t
o what was inside of him.

  Life. So much irresistible life.

  “You can trust me,” he said, holding my gaze. “No matter what you tell me, it stays between us, okay?”

  “Okay. I know.” I slid my hand from his and breathed again. But even when I’d left him behind, I could still feel the pulsing seduction of life inside him, and I wanted it. Needed it. In an instant I went from shivering to sweating. My muscles cramped and my stomach roiled with nausea. It was all I could do to keep from doubling over and retching.

  I paused at the door to take a few deep breaths, which helped a little. Then I stepped inside.

  There were two beds in the suite. The curtains that would normally partition the patients had been pushed back, so the room with its peach-colored wallpaper and benign country art on the walls was wide open.

  I looked from my mom to Erin. For several seconds all I could do was stare. Whatever had caused their spasmodic movements had calmed. Both of them shone with health and vitality, their skin porcelain smooth and radiant, which seemed doubly impossible because no one looked that good under fluorescent hospital lighting. My mom’s and Erin’s hair fell in melted-ice-cream waves over their shoulders. Erin’s dishwater-blond hair had always been thin and brittle, but now it was the color of butter, and was so thick and satiny I had to wonder for a moment if she was wearing a wig.

  I stood there for a moment, not sure what to do. I couldn’t tear my eyes from my twin’s, couldn’t stop seeing the bruises that had blackened her face a few hours ago, the swollen lump of her eye and the blood soaking her pajamas. My sickly, frail twin who once broke both legs dropping a foot from the monkey bars, who was so tiny, so skeletal that Mom had to buy her clothes from the children’s department … my sister was transformed as though she’d spent the night in a chrysalis and had been reborn into a new body. A healthy, strong, perfect body.

  “Is it true?” I asked her. “You’re … you’re…”

  She beamed at me, her eyes filling with tears, and nodded. “So much for not living to see my next birthday.”