Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Series

by Blake Crouch

  Pines crowded the banks. She could smell them.

  The creek narrowed.

  The boat slowed.

  Drifting now, a sappy branch passed overhead, and she reached up and pinched off a cluster of pine needles.

  The motor quit.

  Only the soft liquid rip of the bow slicing through the water.

  In the darkgreen distance, she saw where the creek ended. There was a small dock at the terminus, a rustic shack behind it.

  She slapped the side of her neck, came away with a bloodsmeared palm.

  The first mosquito had found her.

  Kim glanced again at the woman on the opposite bench, curious as to why tears meandered down her face, and her hands had begun to tremble.

  # # #

  Rufus tied the boat to the moorings and stepped down onto the dock. He offered a hand to the young woman, helped her out of the boat, and then her husband.

  "You two should go on ahead," he said. "There’s a slough back there."

  He waved toward the dense foliage behind the shack.

  "Straight through those trees. Tide’s out, so it’s dry now. You follow that a ways, and you’ll come out on a tidal flat. Trek across the flat for a mile and a half, scramble over the dunes, and you’ll find yourself on a deserted beach that’s just as pretty as a picture."

  "You going to show us—"

  "We’ll be right behind you, but you might as well get a head start. It’s quite a hike."

  "What about the ghost village?" Steve asked. "We really want to—"

  "We’ll take you there, too, so don’t you worry. It’ll be part of the loop we do."

  The young couple set out down the dock, past the shack, and into the pines. We all watched them for a moment, making slow progress as they bushwhacked their way through the brush, glancing back now and then to see if we were coming. When they’d disappeared into the thicket, Rufus looked back into the boat at Vi and me. Grinning, he reached into his pocket and tossed me a key.

  "Opens the shack," he said. "I think you remember it, Andy, but don’t worry—no grizzly trap this time. Just a pump-action Remington under the bunk bed and a box of shells on the table. On account of your limp, you might want to get a move on."

  I struggled to my feet.

  Vi was bawling again.

  "Let’s go," I said.

  She shook her head.

  Grabbing her under the arm, I tried to muscle her to her feet, but she collapsed across the deck. I knelt beside her and whispered into her ear, "Vi, walk off this boat with me. Whatever you have to do to steel yourself up for this, now’s the time. They’ll kill your baby."

  She wiped her eyes and looked up at me, then nodded, came to her feet.

  We stood there, gazing at Rufus.

  He said, "We’ll come help you carry them back when we hear the gunshots."

  I started toward the dock, but Rufus held up his hand.

  "Wait. Wanna tell you something. I’ve lived out on these barrier islands going on forty years now. Seen a few folks try to do what you’re about to do and fail. Let me tell you this. If you haven’t shattered those values, if you’re still seeing this world through good and evil glasses, it’s going to be hell out there. These are the Outer Banks. The fringe of America. Fringe of thought. Most people aren’t hard enough, pure enough to exist out here. It’s uncomfortable. They’d rather live inland. Safe from the sea. From themselves. But this is where the action is. I hope that isn’t lost on you."

  Rufus stepped forward and gave us each a hand down onto the dock. We could hear the doomed couple thrashing about in the thicket.

  I glanced at Luther. He stared at me, eyes black and smoldering.

  I started limping along up the dock.

  We reached the shack. I unlocked the door and stepped inside, told Vi to fetch the shotgun from under the bed. It was right where Rufus had said it would be, a twelve gauge with a twenty-eight inch barrel. She set it down on the table as I tore open the box of shells.

  "Double-aught buckshot," she said. "My God, this is going to be messy."

  I slid four shells into the chamber, the stench of gunpowder filling the shack.

  "Ever handled a shotgun?" I asked.

  "My daddy owned several. Taught me to shoot when I was fifteen."

  I handed her the weapon.

  "Part of me," she whispered, "wants to say fuck this whole business, head back down to the boat and just start blasting."

  "We’d die and your child would die."

  I glanced out the window.

  Luther was perched on the bow, aiming a high-powered rifle with a scope at me through the glass.

  "Look out there," I said. "We’d be dead the second we started for the boat."

  Vi sat down in a chair, sighed long and deep. She sweated through her thin white T-shirt.

  "Ever kill someone in the line of duty?" I asked.

  "Never even had the occasion to draw my gun. I don’t know how to begin to do this."

  I reached into the box, grabbed a handful of shells.

  "We better get going," I said.

  As we emerged from the shack, I looked back toward the boat. Rufus waved, grinning.

  I led us into the thicket, following the trail of broken limbs, trodden weeds. The island was brimming with birds and the whine of mosquitoes. They swarmed us—a mild but constant stinging on every square inch of exposed skin.

  In the unbearable humidity, we became drenched in sweat within five minutes, and crowded on all sides by curtains of varying green, I shunned the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in a sweltering, leafy cage. Little could be seen of the sky above. Only flinders of bleached blue through the ceiling of scrub pine.

  We could hear the young couple blazing the trail ahead of us, the woman growing increasingly vocal in her complaints.

  "Damn you for this, Steve!" I heard her cry out. From the way her voice carried, I estimated them to be just seventy-five to a hundred yards away.

  As we mushed on, my thoughts turned to Orson’s cabin in the desert and that shed and the things I’d done there. My insides warmed with an old, familiar numbness. I wondered if Vi felt it, too. I hoped.

  She stopped suddenly, said, "Listen."

  The woods had gone quiet.

  "They either stopped or reached the slough," I whispered. "Come on."

  Several minutes later, sweaty, mosquito-bitten, scratched and bleeding from briar pricks, we emerged from the thicket onto the banks of the slough. Marsh grass grew up out of the desiccated swampbed, and a breeze swept over us from the east. I gazed up the slough—a quarter mile from where we stood, it opened into a sprawling tidal flat.

  Two figures, scarcely visible, trekked across that coastal desert toward the sea.

  Vi sat on the bank. I eased down beside her. As she lay the shotgun across her thighs, I put my arm around her and pulled her close. She let her head fall on my shoulder and wept.

  "It doesn’t even feel real," she said. "We aren’t really going to do this. Are we?"

  "They’re already dead. You have to think of it that way. They were dead the moment they stepped on that boat."

  Despite the heat, Vi shivered.

  I said, "You know how much they’d suffer if the Kites ever got them into that basement?"

  "I know."

  "We’ll do it right."

  "I want it to be painless for them," she whispered, unable to find her voice.

  "Absolutely. They won’t know what hit them."

  "Oh my God."

  "Look, I’ll do it if—"

  "No. We’ll both do it. I can’t put this all on you."

  Vi wiped her eyes and stood.

  "There’s no other way, right?"

  "This is it," I said.

  "Tell me there’s no other way."

  "Vi, there’s no other way."

  She looked off into the distance and slowly shook her head. Then she lifted the shotgun and stepped down into the slough. I followed, a few steps behind.
Vi could barely breathe she was crying so hard, but she walked fast toward the flat.

  # # #

  Kim and Steve stopped to rest in the middle of the salt flat, with the dunes just a faint khaki ridge on the eastern horizon, and the pines of Portsmouth, a green wall in the west. Eerie black plants rose out of the alkaline soil—salt-sculpted formations, otherworldly and demonic, like the remnants of some nuclear apocalypse.

  "I’m so tired, Steve," Kim moaned again. "Please let’s just go back."

  "Are you kidding? I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. I mean, it’s a desert out here."

  "Well, you’re taking me out for a classy dinner tonight. Tell you that right now."

  "Fair enough."

  Steve wrapped his arms around Kim’s waist and drew her into him.

  "Love you, angel," he said. "Thank you for letting me do this."

  She kissed him.

  "Maybe I’ll buy something slinky to wear to bed tonight. Something lacy and sheer."

  "Buy something cheap."

  "Why?"

  "I want to tear it off of you."

  They giggled and kissed again.

  As they pulled away, Kim looked over Steve’s shoulder toward the interior of the island and glimpsed two figures moving toward them across the flat.

  "Look," she said. "They’re coming."

  Steve glanced back. "Want to wait for them?"

  "No, I like it just the two of us."

  Holding hands now, they continued on toward the dunes. But they hadn’t gone ten steps when distant shouting sounded across the flat.

  Kim stopped and looked back.

  One of those figures was waving at them.

  "I think they want us to wait for them," she said.

  Kim and Steve stood side-by-side watching the other couple move swiftly in their direction. When they were less than the distance of a football field away, Kim said, "I believe that woman’s carrying a gun."

  "You know, I think you’re right."

  "Could they be hunting?"

  "That’s a shotgun she’s got there. Maybe so."

  "What are they hunting out here?"

  "Birds probably. Quail. Yeah, I bet that’s what it is."

  The small blonde with the shotgun was now close enough for Kim to hear her breathless sobbing. A man with a severe limp trailed twenty yards behind.

  "She’s crying," Steve said. "Something’s wrong."

  The blonde’s footsteps became audible.

  Inside of ten feet, she stopped, pumped the twelve gauge, and aimed at Steve.

  His eyes went wide, and she blew him in half.

  Kim shrieked, then stood frozen, watching her husband try to put back what was falling out of him.

  The man with the limp arrived, took the shotgun from the blonde, and pumped it again. Then he stepped forward, trained the barrel on Kim’s chest.

  Another cataclysmic boom, and she was flung back into the sand.

  "They’re still alive, Andy. Come on."

  The groans of the young couple were softer and more intimate than the murmurs of lovers. Witnessing someone die is more intensely private than watching them fuck or even masturbate—the ultimate moment of vulnerability.

  The newlyweds’ eyes had glazed and they lie motionless when Andy rolled them over onto their backs and discharged into each of them another load of buckshot.

  The reports died away across the tidal flat, and there was no sound other than their shirtsleeves flapping in the sea breeze.

  # # #

  I dropped the shotgun and looked over at Vi. She wasn’t crying. Instead, a sardonic smile spread her wind-burnt cheeks. She tilted back her head and let loose a hideous bellow.

  "He’s right, Andy. Rufus is right. That," she pointed toward the slaughter, "is fucking meaningless! Isn’t it? Is that a fucking illusion?"

  She sat down in the sand, laid her head on her knees, and wept.

  "Vi," I said. "Vi, look at me." She refused. "You saved your son’s life. That’s all you did."

  "And I took his."

  "Yeah, and what was the alternative?"

  "There was none."

  "Ex—"

  "That’s what’s so fucking wrong with this. There isn’t any alternative."

  She stood up, wiped her swollen eyes.

  "I protected mine," she said. "That’s all I did today."

  "What else can you do?"

  "I don’t know. Here come the monsters."

  Rufus and Luther strolled toward us across the flat.

  Vi picked up the gun, said, "Toss me two shells."

  "You wanna get shot?"

  Her eyes burning, she took the shotgun by the barrel and slung it. Then she came over, stood beside me.

  "Tell Rufus what he wants to hear," I said, watching the old man and his son approach.

  "What do you mean?"

  "That value-breaking, good and evil bullshit."

  "How are you so calm?" she asked.

  "I just don’t feel anything."

  She cried out suddenly, "Oh God!" and sank down on her knees into the sand.

  # # #

  The living carried the dead across the tidal flat. Thirty miles west, over the mainland, the sound country of North Carolina, thunderheads were assembling. Heat radiated off the sun-baked flat, thick and wet, updrafts from hell. When it rained here, the ground would steam, but that stormy relief was hours away if it came at all.

  The smallest of the living fell and the body she bore crushed down on her. She screamed. There was hearty laughter. Then, lifting the body off of her, they all moved on again.

  # # #

  Vi and I sat across from one another as the boat traversed the inlet, the island of Ocracoke growing wider and more distinct, Portsmouth fading into a blurred-green suggestion of land in our wake.

  The young couple lie sprawled across the deck at our feet, their skin beginning to assume a plastic, yellow pallor. Rufus had wrapped their torsos in gauze so they wouldn’t bleed on his boat.

  Luther occupied the cockpit, his father beside him. They’d been conversing in whispers since leaving Portsmouth, and Rufus seemed to be growing increasingly agitated while Luther just piloted the boat and stared implacably into the distance.

  As we neared the House of Kite, Rufus stepped back from his son and spoke so loudly we could hear him over the motor: "You should’ve sat in Horace’s lap when you burned him."

  Then Rufus came over and took a seat beside Vi. It was the first time I’d ever seen him angry, though perhaps it wasn’t anger so much as fierce disappointment, the kind only a father can feel for his son.

  # # #

  We carried them through the back door into the house. Maxine toted little Max in an over-the-shoulder-baby-holder, and she smiled warmly at Vi as she held open the door to the basement.

  Rufus and I reached the bottom first. We dropped Steve on the dirt floor and leaned against the cold stone to catch our breath.

  Luther and Vi, following behind us, foundered halfway down the steps. Vi had nothing more to give, and she let the young woman’s head slide off her shoulder. The corpse tumbled down the staircase and would’ve knocked Rufus off his feet had the old man not stepped out of the way just in time.

  Vi fell back on the steps, head against the wall, taking in large gulps of air.

  When she could speak again, she called out, "I want my son!"

  "Hold onto your horses just one minute there, young lady," Rufus said, bent over, utterly spent, palms on his knees, forehead slick with sweat. "You’re going to finish this."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The ancient fuck means you still have to store them," Luther said.

  # # #

  Luther and I dragged the bodies behind the staircase, following Rufus into the labyrinth of lightless rooms and passageways. The old man wielded a lantern out in front of him, and I tried to keep track of our trajectory, but it proved impossible. The basement was quite a bit more extensive than I
’d first thought, so much so that it seemed to extend beyond the dimensions of the house.