The Town

by Bentley Little

  His father walked through the door.

  He swung hard, hitting his dad in the head. He swung with all his might, with a ferocity he had never been able to manage playing baseball during PE, and the blow connected, the shock wave passing through the metal into his hand and almost causing him to drop the flashlight.

  His father fell to the floor.

  “Thank God,” his mother cried. “Thank God!”

  He picked up the flashlight, turned it on, shone it toward her. She stood in the hallway, knife raised, both arms shaking, her knees practically buckling. She’d obviously heard the shots from downstairs and had come up here to save him, and though she hadn’t had to attack his father, the fact that she was willing to do so filled Adam with gratitude, relief, and a childish sort of happiness. It was a brave, selfless love that had brought her up here, into the mouth of danger, and at that moment he felt closer to her than he ever had before.

  His father was on the ground, bleeding, lying perfectly still, and Adam rushed over his unmoving body to give his mother a quick, hard hug. She squeezed back, but she was already moving away, bending down, checking to see if his dad was . . . what? Unconscious?

  Dead?

  He’d automatically assumed that he’d just knocked his father out. But what if he was dead? What if he’d killed him?

  The gun had fallen out of his father’s hand, and his mother picked it up gingerly. In movies, people always knocked out the bad guy, then forgot to pick up the gun, leading to another inevitable showdown, but his mom was no dummy, and there was no way that was going to happen here.

  She stood up, and he still didn’t know if his dad was alive or dead, but Adam assumed he was alive because his mother said, “We’d better get out of here.”

  The flashlight in his hand was bloody, but it was still working, and he wiped the bloody end on his jeans and waited while his mom quickly ran to Sasha’s room, went inside, then hurried back, her face white, blanched. She bent down again, dug through his dad’s pockets, looking for something, and finally withdrew a key ring. She stood, grabbed his hand. “Let’s go!”

  They practically flew down the stairs, and he tried to concentrate on the task immediately at hand—escape—but his mind kept going back to Sasha.

  There were tears streaming out of his eyes, down his cheeks, but he was not really crying, and he was able to speak clearly. “Where’s Teo? Where’s Babunya?”

  “Teo’s in her room.”

  Teo was in her room, crying, but she’d been smart enough to lock the door, and she did not immediately open it. Even when they pounded and yelled for her to open up, she did not do so right away. It was only after Adam said, “He’s just knocked out! We have to get out of here before he wakes up!” that she finally unlocked her door and came out.

  Adam grabbed his sister by the arm and the three of them rushed out of the house into the sandstorm. Dirt and grit sprayed into his face, needling his skin, little jabs of pain like pinpricks, causing him to turn away, squinting. The wind was tremendous, cold and powerful, strong enough to practically blow him off his feet, and he held tight to Teo’s hand.

  The van was parked in the drive, in front of the carport, but as he started toward it, his mom pulled him away, in the opposite direction.

  Where were they going?

  “The banya!” his mother yelled over the wind, as if reading his mind. “Babunya’s there!”

  He pulled ahead of her, in the lead, running down the path toward the bathhouse, dragging Teo with him, his feet moving from memory. The last thing he wanted to do right now was go out to the banya, but Babunya was probably out there praying or something, and they couldn’t just leave her. He thought fast. If they got her, brought her back, they could probably be in the van and gone before his father came to.

  They were like stupid movie people, he realized. They should not only have taken his father’s gun, they should have tied him up before they left so he wouldn’t be able to come after them when he did regain consciousness.

  But Adam didn’t know where ropes were or even if they had any, and he thought that maybe they had done the right thing after all. It might have wasted too much time had they stopped to figure out how to restrain him.

  Time, he suspected, was the one thing they didn’t have.

  They reached the boulders, ran past them. He could not see the banya, but he knew it was ahead and he led them straight to it, stopping in front of the open doorway, and shining his flashlight inside.

  Babunya was in there.

  She was standing in the center of the bathhouse with a whole bunch of old Molokans who looked like they were dressed for church. It was creepy to see them all inside the bathhouse, dressed in white, in the dark, while outside the wind and sand blew wildly, but . . . but somehow the banya didn’t seem quite as spooky as it had before. It was as if whatever had been in here, whatever had possessed this place, had fled, leaving behind only the eerieness of an ordinary abandoned building. Behind them, he noticed, the shadow on the wall had disappeared.

  He felt a small shove on his right side, and then Teo was pushing past him, running inside, throwing her arms around her grandmother.

  “He killed Sasha!” Teo cried. “And he tried to kill Adam!”

  His mother’s hand was on his shoulder, and then all of them were moving into the banya.

  “It’s Dad,” he explained. “I hit him in the head with this flashlight”—he held it up—“but I think it only knocked him out.” He cast a quick look out the door. “He’s after all of us. He’s crazy.”

  Babunya nodded. “I know.”

  They started talking in Russian, the Molokans, and he had no idea what they were saying, but the tone was easy enough to read: they were scared. He heard high, fast syllables filled with far too many consonants. He looked over at his mom and she was listening intently, but he had the feeling that even she was having a difficult time keeping up.

  Teo glanced around, frowning. “What happened?” she asked. “Is the banya dead?”

  She’d been here too, Adam realized, and the thought of that made his blood run cold.

  Babunya smiled at her, hugged her. “Yes,” she said in English. “We kill it.” She walked over to his mom and said something to her in Russian.

  His mother nodded.

  “Come on,” Babunya said. “Work here done. We have to go.” She moved forward, gently took the gun from his mother’s hand. “Others are waiting.”

  Like his mom, Babunya held the weapon as though it was a hand grenade about to go off. He realized that the gun was what his father had used to kill Sasha. It was what had murdered his sister.

  Murdered his sister.

  It still didn’t seem real to him. In some ways it seemed too real—the horrific specifics of it were imprinted on his mind and would be there forever—but at the same time, the knowledge was too large to grasp any way but intellectually. He knew Sasha was dead, but he hadn’t really felt it yet, not the full force of it, and he was afraid of what would happen when he did.

  “Oh, shit!” his mother said. “Oh, shit!” She started beating her rear end, hitting her pockets in the front. She looked at the ground around her, turning in a circle, then glanced up at Babunya. “The keys! I lost the keys!”

  Adam’s heart lurched in his chest. “The van keys?”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “There are cars,” Babunya said, nodding toward the other Molokans. “We go with them.”

  His mom sounded as though she was about to cry. “But—”

  Babunya put a hand on her shoulder. “We go with them.”

  3

  When Gregory came to, his face was stuck to the floor. His head had stopped bleeding, but the congealed pool of blood had cemented his hair and cheek and left temple to the hardwood of the upstairs hallway, and it felt like his face was being ripped away as he pulled himself free and stood up.

  He did not scream, though. He did not cry out from the pain.

  He welcomed it
.

  He thought of his family, smiled to himself. They were stupid. They should have killed him when they had the chance. Now they would have to pay for that mistake. And from somewhere down the hall he heard the voice of his father, agreeing with him. “Kill them all,” his father said. “They don’t deserve to live.”

  No, they didn’t, Gregory agreed. He put a hand up to the side of his face, it came back wet and red. His wound had been newly reopened, and it hurt like a motherfucker. Adam would pay for that. He’d been planning to dispatch the boy like he had his sister—quickly—but his plans had changed. Now the little shit was going to die a slow, horrible, painful death.

  He hobbled down the hallway, using his hand to guide himself along the wall because of his closed eye and the subsequent loss of depth perception.

  He used the handrail on his way down the stairs.

  “Kill them all,” his father whispered again.

  He did not even bother to answer. His father had become irrelevant, and Gregory was acting now on his own reasons, for his own purposes.

  The house was silent and the sound of the wind and sand outside was maddening. His head was aching, a sharp pain that seemed to run down the entire left side of his body, but the pain was good and he was grateful for it. It spurred him on, enabled him to remain focused on what he had to do.

  Hunt down his family and kill them.

  Bill Megan had been lucky. He’d been able to take out his family easily, with no difficulties or complications. Gregory wondered if he’d had a silencer on his gun. Maybe that had been the problem, not having a silencer, and he cursed his Molokan upbringing for not allowing him to be more familiar with firearms.

  His mother would pay for that.

  He staggered through the living room, reached the front door, pulled it open. The wind and sand stung his face, blowing into his wound and amplifying the agony tenfold. He looked down, steeling himself against the onslaught—

  And something caught his eyes.

  A key ring.

  He bent down. Smiled. The stupid bitch had tried to steal his keys, but she’d dropped them on the porch, right on the welcome mat, like a present for him. He laughed, the laughter spiraling upward, out of control, until he finally forced himself to cut it off.

  He walked through the stinging sand out to the van, got in.

  He could see out of only one eye, but there was not much to be seen in the sandstorm anyway, and he drove by instinct, drove from memory, heading up the drive, down the road, through the dirty black night toward the center of town.

  He drove directly to the gun store, and as he’d hoped, its doors were wide open. The place had obviously been looted, but there were still plenty of weapons available, and he chose a revolver exactly like the one he’d had. He was familiar with it, knew how it worked, and he wouldn’t have to waste any time adjusting to a new weapon. He walked behind the counter, grabbed a box of ammunition from the cupboard beneath the display case, loaded the gun, and put the rest of the ammo in his pockets.

  Outside, through the blowing dust, he saw what looked like Paul’s car parked in front of the café, and he smiled. He should’ve known that little pussy would be living in there now. He was probably crying himself to sleep. Or trying to hump the chalk outline the pigs had drawn around Deanna’s dead body.

  Or both.

  He was glad Deanna was dead. He’d never liked that bitch, and it served her right that she’d met her end in her husband’s café. He wondered what her last thoughts had been. He hoped they were desperate and despairing.

  He walked against the wind, keeping his head down, until he reached the café. The door was closed and locked, but he raised his revolver and held it against the door handle, pulling the trigger.

  There was a loud report that was swallowed instantly by the wind, and the door swung open, its lock and handle shattered.

  His night vision was still intact, and, out of the sand, he could see clearly, though there were no lights on in the café and no illumination filtered in from outside. He didn’t see any sign of Paul, but the café owner was a lazy fuck, and Gregory knew there was no way in hell that Paul would walk home and leave his car. Especially not in this kind of weather.

  Revolver extended, he walked along the side of the counter to the short hallway that led to Paul’s office. He kicked open the office door.

  Paul looked up groggily, squinting into the darkness. “Who’s there?”

  “Hello, Paul.”

  “Gregory?”

  “Who else?” He remembered what it had been like to see his friend’s hand shoved all the way down his wife’s open pants, fingers working on her, and he was filled afresh with rage and hate. “Didn’t expect to see me here again, did you?”

  “N-no.” Paul could obviously tell that something was not right, and Gregory smiled at the wary expression on his face, enjoying the slight hesitation in his voice.

  He thought of the last time they’d fought, the words that had been said. He advanced slowly. “ ‘Milk drinker’?” he said softly. “ ‘Faggot’?”

  His head hurt like a motherfucker, but the pain cleared his brain, sharpened his thoughts, and he was able to remember in vivid detail the particulars of the fight, the unfair way he had been kept from complete and total victory. Paul was going to get what was coming to him this time. There was no Wynona to save his ass now, no teenage bim who was going to arrive at the last minute and rescue him.

  Paul could still not see him, but the café owner stood, facing the direction of his voice. He walked out from behind the desk, and it was obvious that not only had he been sleeping—he was drunk.

  Good.

  “You called me a homo,” he told Paul.

  “Did I?”

  “You’re the homo.”

  Paul grinned into the darkness. “Then why’d your wife want to fuck me?”

  Gregory shot him in the knee.

  Paul went down screaming, a bloody spray of bone and cartilage flying out every which way, splattering against the wall and the desk, soaking the carpet. Gregory was surprised the shot had been so true. He could see perfectly in the pitch-black room, but it was out of only one eye and his depth perception was completely gone.

  God must be looking out for him.

  No, he thought soberly, not God.

  Paul was screaming nonstop, a piercing, agonizing cry that sounded more animal than human. It was an irritating sound, an excruciatingly grating sound, and he stared at the writhing figure on the floor, willing it to stop.

  He realized dimly that he and Paul had once been friends, but that seemed so long ago and so far back that it was almost as though it had been in another life, in another world, in an alternate universe.

  The screaming did not abate—got worse, if anything—and Gregory took a step forward, reached down, placed the barrel of the gun next to Paul’s Adam’s apple and blew a hole in his throat.

  Blood was gushing, spurting everywhere now, and he knew instantly that he’d made a mistake. Paul was thrashing around and was no longer screaming—he no longer had a voice box, no longer had a throat—but he was dying, and Gregory had wanted him to suffer longer, had planned to draw out his death and torture him before finally allowing him to give up the ghost.

  He stared down at his dying ex-friend. In a suddenly lucid moment, it occurred to Gregory that something was wrong. He was not the person he used to be, not the person he should be. He knew it, and he wanted it to be different, but his thought processes seemed to be overridden by an outside imperative, a will greater than his own, and the insight vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

  Paul died.

  And that made him feel good.

  He walked back through the café and out onto the street, bracing himself against the coldness of the air and the strength of the sand. He thought for a moment, then started down the cracked sidewalk toward the bar, the bar where his father had been humiliated and where for the past few months that smug prick of a bartender had
made it clear that he was doing him a big favor just by allowing him to drink here.

  MOLOKAN MURDERERS

  Whoever had spray-painted that graffiti gem had been more right than he’d known.

  And the bartender was about to find that out for himself.

  Gregory clutched the revolver tightly, holding it out in front of him. He didn’t know what time it was, but it couldn’t have been that late because through the sand and darkness he could see the glowing neon of a battery-powered beer sign, colors that he knew to be red and blue but that appeared to him as shades of gray.

  The Miner’s Tavern was still open.

  He walked inside. Candles were lit on the tables and on the bar, providing the only illumination save for the beer sign. The place was empty except for the bartender, and perhaps that was just as well. He thought of his father, humiliated here, degraded, cowed into being less than a man, and without stopping to confront the bartender or explain what he was doing, Gregory started shooting.

  He stopped only when the hammer clicked on an empty magazine, but the bartender was already long dead.

  He popped out the empty round, popped in another, then walked out of the bar.

  Playtime was over.

  It was time to get back to business.

  It was time to kill his family.

  4

  The Molokans’ cars had been parked on the road that ran by the burned house on the other side of the banya. It was closer and quicker this way, and they didn’t have to go anywhere near their own home and risk seeing his father again. Adam was thankful for that.

  He rode in a big car with his mom, Teo, and two Molokan men he didn’t know, moving slowly through the sandstorm. Babunya was traveling in one of the other two cars, and all three vehicles pulled up in front of the church together.

  The wind was still blowing crazily, but the downtown buildings kept the worst of the dust out, and at least they could see here. The cars pulled into the small parking lot, and they all got out at once.

  At the front of the church were the rest of the Molokans, twenty or thirty of them, old men and old women in white Russian clothes.