by Blake Crouch
“Absolutely.”
“But it’d be fun!” Katie whined.
“Another time, princess,” Rufus said. “We didn’t even bring our sleeping bags.”
The light had nearly reached them now, Luther watching it approach and listening to the oncoming footsteps in the sand.
“They’re coming over here,” he said.
Now Maxine sat up and looked back over her shoulder.
Luther held up his hand to shield his eyes from the firelight.
Saw a man’s legs standing ten feet away—hairy and thick—that ended in a pair of muddy work boots.
Rufus was struggling to his feet now.
Luther heard his father say, “Hi, there.”
Luther glanced up into Katie’s face, didn’t like what he saw—an intensity, a concentration he didn’t fully comprehend. He was missing something. Events unfolding on some frequency beyond his experience.
His father spoke again, “Evening.”
“What are you folks doing here?”
The man’s voice sounded strange to Luther—southern but not local. Not friendly either. It contained a hard-edged, metallic rasp.
“Just having a campfire,” Rufus said.
“You live around here?”
“We live on Ocracoke. How about you? You visiting?”
The man laughed as if Luther’s father had made a joke. “Yeah. That’s it. We’re visiting.” The man came forward three steps and turned off his flashlight. In the firelight, Luther studied him. He wore a heavily-stained white tee-shirt covered in a thousand tiny rips. The man’s substantial body odor was evident even from ten feet away. He hadn’t shaved in weeks, his jaw covered in a salt-and-pepper stubble. His eyes shone wild and glassy and they didn’t stay on one object for more than several seconds at a time.
“Well,” Rufus said, “we were actually just getting ready to shove off, so—”
“I didn’t say anything about you leaving.”
The man’s statement festered in the air for what seemed ages.
No sound but the surf and the crackle of driftwood in the flames.
Maxine came to her feet, stood behind Rufus.
“Ya’ll best sit down now,” the man said.
Maxine wrapped her hands around Rufus’s left arm. “Let’s go.”
Rufus shot a quick look over at Katie. “Get you and Luther in the back of the truck. Right now.” He turned back to the man.
Katie jerked Luther onto his feet.
“We’re gonna take off,” Rufus said. “I got my kids here. I don’t want any trouble with you. You understand that, right? We were just out here having a day at the beach, and now we’re going home.”
Katie pulled Luther toward the Dodge.
The man said, “You ain’t going nowhere.”
“What’s happening, Katie?” Luther whispered.
“I’ll tell you later. Hop into the—”
“Young lady!”
Katie froze.
“Did you not just fucking hear what I told your daddy? Get your ass back where you was sitting, or by God—”
“Don’t you dare speak to my—”
Luther saw the man swing his flashlight into the side of his father’s head.
Rufus’s knees buckled, hit the sand, blood streaming out of a gash above his left eye.
The man drove his knee into Rufus’s face, and when Maxine rushed forward he caught her with a right hook that snapped her head around.
His mother fell facedown in the sand, out cold.
Rufus climbed back onto his feet.
Luther realizing the warm sensation he felt was piss running down the inside of his legs.
“He hit mom,” Katie said, crying. “Why’d he hit mom?”
Rufus flung a handful of sand into the man’s face and rushed him as he clawed at his eyes, scooping the man under his massive thighs and slamming him down on his back in the sand.
Luther had never seen his father this consumed with rage, watching as Rufus hit the man six times in the face, his knuckles getting bloody.
Rufus finally rolled off him into the sand, gasping for breath.
The man lay moaning on his back, his face a purple wreck.
Maxine was sitting up now, holding her jaw which looked swollen.
Rufus grabbed her by the arms and hoisted her up onto her feet.
“My teeth,” she moaned, spitting a tooth out into the palm of her hand.
Rufus hawked a lugie of blood and helped Maxine toward the truck.
“Get in!” he yelled at Luther and Katie.
Luther grabbed the side of the truck and stepped up onto the rear tire.
Katie let out a brief scream, Luther on the verge of asking what was wrong when he saw the second man standing on the other side of the truck bed, grinning at him.
He was tall and wide-shouldered. Had eyes so vividly green Luther could see their color in the lowlight. Wore a blue linen shirt with a long number across the lapel pocket. Dark stains down the front of his shirt.
“Been watching you all afternoon,” he said. “That was some sand castle you and your daddy built.” His eyes cut to Rufus and he swung a pump-action shotgun toward him. “You can stop right there. I swear to God. You all right, Ben?”
The man Rufus had hit was trying to sit up.
“Motherfucker hit me.”
“I saw. That was embarrassing.”
“I’m gonna kill him.”
“Plenty a time for that.” The man with the shotgun stared at Luther. I want you over by the fire like you was.”
“Sir, we just want to go home,” Rufus said.
The man smiled. “I’ll bet you do.”
“Let my wife take our kids. They don’t need to be a part of any of this.”
The man laughed. “How am I supposed to fuck her when she ain’t here? That make any sense to you?”
The man named Ben rose to his feet, wiping blood out of his eyes.
“Ben, you hear this guy?”
“I heard him. Dumb fuck, is what he is.”
Luther stepped down off the truck and looked up at his father.
“Dad?” he said. “Is it gonna be okay?”
Rufus’s hands shook.
“No, little man,” Ben said. “It ain’t gonna be okay. Get your ass over there like I told you.”
Luther looked at Katie.
His sister had tears in her eyes.
“I’m scared,” he said.
“Come on, Luther.”
She took him by the hand and led him back over to the fire.
They sat in the sand.
The man named Ben started toward Rufus.
“There’s some rope in the truck bed,” his partner yelled.
“Bring it, Winston.” He stopped a foot away from Rufus and Maxine, and shovel-punched Rufus in the gut.
Luther’s father doubled over.
Maxine clutched his back, trying to soothe him.
Winston walked over with the shotgun and a coil of rope that Rufus had used just three weeks ago to stabilize a bureau he’d bought in an antique store in Hatteras for Maxine’s thirtieth birthday.
Winston stopped several feet away, leveled the shotgun on Rufus and Maxine, and tossed the rope at their feet.
“What’s your name, cutie?” he asked Maxine.
“Please,” Rufus said, still gasping for air, a tremor moving through his lower lip. “You guys can clearly do whatever you want. We’re at your mercy. I recognize that. And I am begging you to let us go. You have that power.”
Winston swept his long, greasy hair back behind his shoulders.
“But we been watching you all day, laying up there in the bushes behind the dunes. If you’d gone home with everyone else, our paths would never have crossed. But you didn’t go home like everyone else. You stayed. So you know what I think that means?”
“What?”
With the tip of the shotgun’s barrel, Winston slid the shawl off Maxine’s shoulder, and smiled at t
he yellow bikini underneath, at her washboard stomach.
“That this is fate. Now what’s your name, bitch? Don’t make me ask again.”
“Maxine,” she said. “Please don’t hurt my children.”
“Maxine, I want you to take that rope and tie your husband up. I’m gonna check when you’re done, and if it ain’t picture perfect and tight as fuck, there’s gonna be hell to pay. Even more than what’s already on the schedule.”
Luther watched his mother lift the rope.
Crying and trembling, she wrapped it around Rufus’s waist and started to bind his wrists together.
“It’s gonna be okay, Max,” he said. “Don’t cry. We’ll get through this.”
Winston tugged a pocket knife out of his pants and cut a ten-foot length of rope which he tossed to Ben.
“Tie them.”
With his knife, he motioned to Luther and Katie.
Ben lumbered over to the rope and snatched it up. When he smiled at Luther, there was still blood stuck between his teeth.
Luther watching, a sinking jolt of terror flooding through him.
A siren wailing between his eyes.
Knowing on some base level what he could not allow to happen.
The man was three steps away when Luther jumped to his feet and took off toward the trees at a dead sprint, his bare feet kicking bursts of sand in his wake, the men shouting as he scrambled up the dunes, Winston screaming at Ben to catch the little fucker.
Luther glanced back, saw Ben galloping toward him, Katie crying, his parents screaming at him to run, don’t stop, while Winston held them at bay with the shotgun.
Luther tore down the island-side of the dune and ran for the line of trees in the distance.
He could see the lighthouse a mile away in the village of Ocracoke , its beacon shining just above the treetops.
Another glance back.
Ben ten steps behind.
A sharp burn spread down out of Luther’s stomach and into his legs.
Lungs on fire.
He couldn’t keep running like this.
He punched through the treeline into a wood of live oaks, roots and thorns ripping at the soles of his feet, branches tearing at his bare arms and chest.
Much darker here in the trees with the starlight obscured, and Luther could only make out the profile of Ben pushing after him through the shrubs.
The boy veered off the straight trajectory he’d been running and shot up the low-hanging branches of a live oak.
Ten feet off the ground.
Panting.
His feet eviscerated.
For thirty seconds, he couldn’t hear a thing over the pounding of his heart and the desperate intake of oxygen.
When he finally caught his breath, he strained to hear the sound of Ben’s footsteps.
Sweat trickled down the bridge of his nose, burning his eyes.
He clung to a fat, knobby branch with one arm and plucked a series of thorns out of the back of his leg with the other.
There it was—forty, maybe fifty feet away—brittle leaves crunching under footsteps.
Winston yelled something from the beach.
Ben was moving toward Luther’s tree now—he could hear the man forcing his way through bushes, the occasional crack of a branch breaking.
“Boy!” he yelled. “I don’t hear your footsteps anymore. You ain’t that fast, which means you’re somewhere close by, hiding behind some tree, or in some goddamn bush.”
Luther spotted him—twenty-five, thirty feet away—standing absolutely still. A bit of moonlight had wandered in through the branches and it lit Ben’s face with a pale and ghostly glow.
“I’m gonna make you a deal right now, little man. You come out from wherever you’re hiding, I won’t hurt your sister.”
Luther squeezed his eyes shut with such a fierce intensity the tears could only leak out.
“But let me tell you what I’m going to do if you ain’t standing in front of me in the next thirty seconds. I’m gonna borrow Winston’s knife—you saw it right?—and go to work on her pretty little face. You’ll hear her screams all the way from the beach.”
Ben started walking again.
The sweat on Luther’s hands made it almost impossible to grip the bark, and he had to squeeze his thighs against the steep branch to keep from sliding.
“You’re a little chickenshit, ain’t you? Run off and hide to let your family suffer alone.”
Ben stepped directly under Luther’s branch and stopped.
Luther’s chest pounded against the bark, his muscles cramping, tears and sweat stinging in his eyes.
“Ten seconds,” Ben said. “Then I’m walking back out onto the beach. Come out right now like a good little boy, I’ll spare your sister. Won’t make no other promises about nothing else, but she’ll live. I am a bad, bad man, but I ain’t no liar.”
A mosquito wailed into Luther’s ear.
He didn’t flinch.
Let it land just inside the canal. There was a brief, cutting itch, and then numbness.
“All right,” Ben said. “You’re making this decision, little man. Nobody but you. Hope it haunts you the rest of your days. You change your mind, you know where to find me. Just follow the screams.”
Ben turned and started back through the trees.
Luther craned his neck to watch him go, the man passing in and out of patches of moon- and starlight until he reached the treeline and vanished.
For a long time, Luther clung to the branch and cried.
Mosquitoes swarmed him.
He asked God to stop this from happening.
Kept shutting his eyes and opening them again, telling himself every time that it was only a nightmare. That he’d wake up in his bed on the third floor of their stone house on the sound and none of this would be real. He’d walk down the hallway into Katie’s room, crawl into bed with her and snuggle close until the after-fear was gone.
Five minutes after Ben had left him, it started.
Three voices—his mother crying, his sister screaming, his father begging.
All merging into a cacophony of grief, pain, and terror.
Luther scaled down the tree and ran.
He could barely see through the tears, the thorns in his feet sending stabs of pain up his legs.
At last, he broke out of the trees.
Saw the bonfire in the distance, flames twisting in the wind like braids of orange hair.
The sand felt better than the forest floor. It still held some warmth from a day of baking under the sun.
Luther sprinted, the noise of his family getting louder.
He collapsed at the foot of the dunes and crawled through sea grass to the top, where he lay breathless.
The bonfire raged thirty yards away.
Katie was hogtied and writhing like an earthworm, screaming incomprehensibly, Rufus right there beside her, screaming, “Please! Please! Please!” in a guttural expression of absolute horror.
Maxine didn’t make a sound.
Luther couldn’t see anything but his mother’s swollen face, and he didn’t understand what Winston was doing to her.
The man’s pants were pulled down to his knees, and he was lying on top of Luther’s mother, moving back and forth, back and forth.
Maxine wasn’t even crying.
Her eyes were wide and she looked like she was someplace else entirely.
In a daydream.
Another world.
Years later, he would catch her staring off into space with that same catatonic emptiness, and wonder if she had returned to this moment.
“Mama,” Luther whispered. “Oh, Mama.”
The man who’d chased him into the woods stood over Rufus and Katie, pointing the shotgun at them, but watching Winston and Maxine, his meaty face sweaty and smiling in the firelight.
Luther grabbed a handful of sand and squeezed, his knuckles blanching, but it didn’t do a thing to temper the fire that had begun to smolder in his belly.