by Blake Crouch
Alex nodded. Her breath quickened, and her throat went dry. She brought the tips to her nose, but only smelled the faint traces of rubbing alcohol used to clean them. Unable to stop herself, she touched the tip of her tongue to the metal.
Cool and tangy.
“Keep ‘em,” he said.
Now Alex did hug him. So tight he grunted.
“Easy, Sis. You’re gonna break a goddamn rib.”
Alex eased off, but kept holding her brother’s hands.
“What if you get caught?” Alex said. She knew she was talking like Father, but the fear was real.
Charles smiled. “The cops will never catch me. Like that kiddie book. I’m the Gingerbread Man.”
He winked at her, then closed his suitcase and walked out of the room.
Alex fought down her sadness, but she couldn’t control her anger.
Storming through their ramshackle house, weaving through the stacks of garbage piled everywhere, she reached Father’s bedroom and threw open the door.
Father was sitting on his bed, naked, the sheets under him dotted with blood. He had a pin cushion in one hand. In the other, he held a needle, which he was sticking into his pale, flabby inner thigh.
“He’s gone,” Alex said.
Father stared at her, his eyes glassy, tears glistening in his stubble.
“I’m a sinner, Alex,” he said, voice quavering.
“Yes you are. You’re a very bad man, and you should be punished.”
Without being told, he assumed the position, getting on his knees, making a temple of his hands in some obscene parody of prayer. His back was a patchwork of old scars and new scabs.
Alex went to the cabinet, looked at all the implements, and chose a leather riding crop.
“I’m a murderer, Lord,” Father moaned. “Help me atone for my sins.”
Alex didn’t believe in God. Though part of her still feared Father, and the things he’d done to her and others, he was weak.
Their kind shouldn’t be weak. They shouldn’t be afraid or ashamed.
Their kind should rule.
But what, exactly, was their kind?
Alex had once heard a term in a movie that fit, that neatly described what she and Charles and Father were.
Serial killers.
Charles had embraced it. Father shunned it.
Alex wasn’t sure which way she’d go. But she was sure of one thing.
Hurting others was the best high in the world.
Father trembled.
Alex raised the riding crop.
The first slap of leather across flesh was exciting.
The fiftieth slap…ecstasy.
A Night at the Dinner Table
North Carolina Outer Banks, 1984
Christmas Eve.
Luther Kite watches as his mother, Maxine, carries the last casserole dish of candied yams up the staircase to the third floor cupola of the ancient house. The long table is candlelit, moonlit. Through the west wall of windows, a thin moon lacquers the sound into glossy black. Through the east wall of windows, the Atlantic gleams beyond the tangle of live oaks and yaupon. The tourists gone, the island silently twinkling, the evening is cold and glorious and more star-ridden than any night in the last three years.
Maxine sets the yams down on the tablecloth beside a platter of steaming crab cakes. Then she takes a seat at the end of the table, opposite her husband, and releases a contented sigh. “Mrs. Claus” is spelled out in rhinestones across the front of her bright red sweater.
Dressed up as Santa Claus, Rufus Kite occupies the head of the table.
At Rufus’s right sits Luther, who also wears a Santa hat, but isn’t happy about it.
“Beautiful,” Rufus says, addressing his wife, “I think I speak for everyone when I say this looks absolutely scrumptious.”
It’s a dream, Luther thinks.
But it can’t be.
Because it’s real.
Luther stares down the length of the table and sees…
Katie.
My sister.
His father called it the miracle.
Luther still remembers the flutter in his stomach when Rufus brought her home.
“We found her, son! We found her!”
Seven years older. Seven years lost.
But healthy.
And now…safe.
Fifteen and safe and finally home.
“I’d like to propose a toast,” Rufus says, raising a wineglass filled with sweet tea. “To my little girl. What it feels like to have you home again…” His eyes shimmer with tears. “…I am…at a loss to express.”
Tears are running down Katie’s cheeks, too.
They pass around the side dishes.
Luther fills his plate with raw oysters on half shells. He lifts one after another, shaking a few drops of Tabasco sauce onto the meat, and sucking it down his throat like a swallow of briny, spicy snot.
As Rufus tears into a hushpuppy, he glances at Luther, “Boy, I know it’s strange to have her back, but make her feel welcome. This is hard on her, too.”
“Katie,” Luther begins, twelve years old, and his prepubescent voice on the cusp of making the turn toward manhood. “How, um, does it feel to be home?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Tell her how much you missed her,” Rufus says.
Luther looks at his father, to Katie, then back to his father.
“Tell her!” Rufus roars, slamming a fist down on the table, silver and glassware trembling.
Luther turns back to Katie.
“Every day, I…I thought about you. I wondered if we’d ever find you.” His voice breaking. “I had forgotten what you looked like. I would think back to all the happy times, and I could remember your clothes and sometimes even your smell, but your face was always blurry.”
Luther stares across the table at his mother.
Seven years of grief have crept in and stolen away with her looks. Maxine has lost that striking softness he loved in his early years. Lost her perfect figure. Acquired those first few wrinkles near her mouth and hard edges and a gleam in her eyes that he’s learned to be wary of, to not set off.
“I don’t know what else to tell her, Mama.”
“Do you still love her?”
He nods.
“Why don’t you tell her that.”
Luther looks over at his sister, trying so hard to conjure the image of that eight-year-old girl who’d been his best friend in the most important years of his life.
Days they spent playing on the beach.
Or down on Portsmouth.
Or their favorite game of all…throwing chunks of stale bread to the cormorants who chased the ferry between Ocracoke and Hatteras.
“You were my best friend,” Luther says. “I loved you so much. Remember the time the hurricane hit and we lost power and it blew down the trees in the front yard, and we had to hide in the closet all night with the wind howling? And we pretended it was an army of ghosts trying to get us, but as long as we were in the closet, we were safe?”
“Boy,” Maxine says, “tell her you love her.”
He doesn’t want to say it, and he isn’t sure why.
Maybe because too many years have passed.
Because of the audience.
Because he’s been told to.
Because this is all very, very confusing to him.
Thinking it will be better to say it when he truly feels it. In a quiet moment when all is normal again.
“Goddamn it, Luther!”
“I love you, Katie,” he says.
“What a beautiful sentiment,” Rufus says, leveling his gaze on his daughter. “Anything you’d like to share, darling? We just laid our souls bare to you. I understand this is a difficult transition, but we always were an open family. Never held back our feelings. I happen to think that made us as strong as we were.”
Tears stream down her face.
She is visibly shaking.
“Please, Katie
. Talk to us.”
The teenage girl wipes her eyes.
“I wanna go home. Please.”
“Honey,” Maxine says. “You are home.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Katie screams.
“Katie, just listen, please—”
“That isn’t my name!”
The girl jumps to her feet and her chair topples back as she rushes past Maxine and Rufus and out of the cupola.
Her steps pounding down the squeaky staircase.
Rufus shakes his head.
“I told you,” Maxine says, “this is gonna happen every time if you don’t duct-tape them to the chair. Are the doors and windows locked?”
“No.”
“No?”
The girl’s footfalls growing faster but softer as she descends toward the first floor.
“No, Beautiful.”
“She’s gonna—”
Rufus smiles, “She isn’t going any—”
A scream explodes up out of the foyer and Luther hears something crash hard to the floor.
“OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod, oh…my….God!”
Maxine scowls at her husband.
“Rufus…what did you do?” She says it like she’s scolding a dog.
He plucks an oyster off Luther’s plate, sucks it down, and stands.
“Come see,” he says.
Luther scoots back in his chair and follows his parents out of the cupola and down the staircase.
The girl’s screams getting louder and louder as they descend.
The corridors of the House of Kite masked in shadow.
Lanterns mounted to the walls casting only the dimmest splotches of firelight on the old hardwood floors.
Every year since that day on the beach, the house had seemed to grow darker, to let a little less of the light of the world slip in.
Up ahead, Luther sees that his parents have stopped at the top of the flight of stairs leading down to the foyer.
By the light of the Christmas tree in the living room—strands of tiny, white lights—Luther sees the girl in three pieces.
Her legs below the knees still standing on the third step up from the bottom.
The rest of her crawling toward the front door, a wide puddle of blood expanding in her wake.
Rufus glances down at Luther.
Runs his hands across the boy’s head.
“Come help your old man get her stowed away?”
“Sure.”
“Make you a deal, Sweet-Sweet,” Maxine says. “You boys clean up that mess, I’ll clean the dinner table.”
“You got a deal.”
Rufus and Luther start down the steps.
The girl has gone quiet, lost consciousness.
“Now you watch yourself, son,” Rufus warns as they approach the bottom. “That string of razorwire runs over the third step up. You see it?”
Luther does.
Not the wire itself, but the blood glistening on the blades in the soft, white light of the Christmas tree.
Into the underbelly of the house, and down the dirt-floored passageways the Kites have only begun to explore, Rufus and Luther drag the girl into a musty-smelling room of old, stone walls.
“You already dug the hole?” Luther asks.
“No, I made her do it yesterday when I started to get the feeling she wasn’t going to work out. Here, help me. One…two…three.”
They swing her toward the hole and let go.
“From downtown!” Rufus says.
“What are you talking about?” Luther asks.
“Basketball? Like we just made a shot?”
“Oh.”
Rufus kicks her arms in and the one leg still hung up on the lip of the grave.
“You can finish this up, son?”
“Yes.” Luther tries to hide the sniffle.
“What’s wrong, buddy? You look sad.”
Luther wipes his eyes, nodding slowly as he stares at the other mounds of dirt that mark the three other graves. There’s only room for one more, maybe two if they make perfect use of the space.
“I miss her, Dad.”
“I know. Me, too. Tell you what. January first, we’ll take the ferry over to Hatteras and drive up the coast to Nag’s Head. Think of all the families vacationing over the holiday. Celebrating. Ringing in the New Year.” Rufus grabs the shovel leaning against the wall, puts the handle in Luther’s hand. “Look at me son. I promise you. We’ll find the perfect Katie.”
Cuckoo
North Carolina Outer Banks, 1986
“Hit him again, son.”
“Dad—”
“Right now. Hit him in the head.”
“But Dad—”
“Hit him in the head!”
Tears streaming down the boy’s face.
“What are you waiting for?”
Luther looked down at the man—bound, bleeding, gagged, his eyes begging for mercy.
He strained to raise the sixteen-pound sledgehammer.
“Hit him in the FUCKING HEAD!”
Luther hit the man in the head.
And liked it.
A Wake of Buzzards
Sublette County, Wyoming, 1991
Donaldson contemplated pulling over, but there was no place to pull over to. The desert road that ran straight off into the horizon as far as he could see was nothing more than two, faint tire tracks.
He pressed the brake pedal and eased to a gradual stop, not concerned about blocking traffic, because he hadn’t seen another car in over an hour.
The falling sun threw chevrons of red and orange over the burnt landscape, sagebrush fringed with light and glowing like they were ablaze.
A tumbleweed tumbled across the dirt road, thirty yards in front of the bumper.
Donaldson squinted at the fold-up map he’d bought at a gas station in Rock Springs, seventy miles south. He’d thought of it as a bumblefuck town at the time, but it was Manhattan compared to this.
The road he was on was represented by a faint, yellow dash—mapspeak for an unimproved piece of shit. He glanced at his odometer, attempting to judge how far he’d come, and wondering if he should turn back. Open spaces made him wary—and he’d never seen anything like this.
But the money for this particular job was good. So good, that Donaldson was suspicious about his cargo. Drugs maybe. Or guns. But he couldn’t check—they made you sign a contract upon hiring at the delivery service, attesting that you would never, under any circumstance, inspect the cargo you were delivering. A violation of customer confidence, they’d called it, or some shit he couldn’t have cared less about if there hadn’t been the implied threat of getting fired over the slightest customer complaint.
He eyed his rearview mirror, scoping the box in the back seat, sealed with yellow tape along every edge and corner to discourage tampering. It was maybe a foot long, a few inches in diameter.
He thought, for the hundredth time, about opening the box. But Donaldson liked his current gig as a courier, and didn’t want to lose it over something as stupid as curiosity. Being paid to travel was like having a license to kill folks nationwide. He knew that serial killers got caught because they left trails. But cops from different states didn’t compare notes. Hell, cops from different towns in the same state didn’t even talk to one another. Since taking the job six months ago, he’d disposed of bodies in four different time zones. No one would ever link his victims together, and Donaldson wanted to keep it that way.
Still, something about that box, and this job, was suspect. And it didn’t help matters that he’d been driving for almost four hours and still had no idea how close he was to his destination. Whatever was in that box must be worth a fortune. The delivery fee alone was almost three hundred.
He wiped his forearm across his sweaty brow—even the air conditioning couldn’t keep the desert heat at bay—and drained the dregs of lukewarm coffee from his thermos. Dispatch had instructed Donaldson to bring a jug of water in the event his car broke down, and Donaldson w
as beginning to realize he should have listened. Especially since he hadn’t been able to raise Dispatch since leaving Rock Springs. This place was so remote not even radio waves got through. Donaldson had considered investing in one of those cellular phones, but it probably wouldn’t have coverage way out here either. Besides, they were too big. He’d heard of a case in Chicago where a female cop escaped from a recreational killer by bashing him in the face with his own phone. Donaldson wanted to wait until the technology got better, and the phones got smaller.