by Aaron Dries
Marshall could hear him breathing under the mask. He broke out in goose flesh and a urine stain grew on the sheet covering his crotch.
The fat man was holding an axe. Burnt into the wooden handle were the words THE PEACEMAKER. Blood dripped from its curved blade, leaving a spotty trail.
Marshall remembered the sensation that had overcome him earlier in the day—the feeling that tonight was the night it all came to an end. The sensation had returned.
The man in the mask looked around the room, tossing the axe from hand to hand in nervous jerks. His chest rose and fell in quick succession, his bulge making the plastic apron squeak.
The breathing. In. Out. In. Out.
Marshall didn’t mean to, but his own breathing rhythm had syncopated with that of the fat man. Their gasps were a strange, intimate sound.
Husband and wife, Marshall and Claire. Claire-bear. The two of them together in bed with Noah wedged between them. Their bodies blue in the moonlight. The window was open, the curtain billowing. Fingers of hot Australian air touched them while they slept. Except for Marshall. He was awake, listening to his loved ones breathing, each an echo of the other, never-ending and beautiful.
The fat man stood before him and stared. Marshall had nothing to say, nowhere to go. He watched the axe swing upwards, shattering the light bulb dangling from the ceiling. The room went dark.
Chapter Sixty
Joe Burnett’s day began like any other but ended in a way he never could have anticipated. As he sat with The Peacemaker by his side and his mother’s gas mask in his hands, he could see little relation between the man he’d been when he woke up that morning and the one he was now. But he’d always been the type of person to change. To evolve. Mutate. There had even been a time, not so long ago, when he’d been the kind of man who couldn’t conceive of doing the things he’d gone on to do. The people he had hurt.
A time before Guy Napier.
That first initial kill. The girl. She’d been an architect. They had followed her around for weeks and when the night had arrived, they hid under her bed. Joe had been a little thinner back then, but not by much. She’d screamed and bled just as Napier had said she would, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Joe had sworn he would never do it again.
The first time he’d tossed the dismembered body parts into the swine pen, he’d starved the pigs for three days. The sound of snorts. Snapping bones.
And before all this, before The Forgiveness, the night Napier had come to him in a drunken state and asked to buy four chickens from him. Joe didn’t find out what had happened to the hens until much later.
Yes, Joe could change. He had changed.
There was also a time when his wife had been well and not restricted to a bed, speaking in spastic moans and shitting her diapers. Joe had had to adapt—
(mutate)
—in that situation, too. His life had changed with a single phone call.
Change was never easy and never welcome, but it came upon him nonetheless. There was no way of cheating it, just like his arthritis.
Joe wasn’t the same person he’d been earlier that morning when his alarm clock had starting ringing.
He had tended to his wife and to his sows, to the hydro set up in the rear shed and after all this, to himself. As a farmer, he’d always put his stock before his skin. Such a mentality had been good enough for his father, so it was going to be damn well good enough for him. What disturbed him though, when he lay in bed at night with only his thoughts and the pain in his knuckles for company, was how he’d come to see his wife as stock too. Helping her had the same methodical nature to it as tending to a crop of corn in winter—essential and a fucking fight.
But stock or love, the fight was worth it.
Killing that girl…getting rid of all those bodies…all of it had been for her. The Forgiveness had been the ultimate challenge of his life, even worse than that initial phone call—
(“Joe? We got a mess down here. A right, royal mess…Joe, it’s your Marline.”)
—that had changed everything. In many ways, his faith in The Forgiveness had grown stronger than his faith in the God who’d taken away his wife’s ability to walk and talk.
“He can’t ignore His children for much longer, Joe,” Napier would say when Joe’s will grew weak. “The more they scream the better the chances of Him hearing. God will know our names, Joe. Soon. Soon.”
And Joe had believed him.
After showering and cracking open that new razor he’d picked up from Snoqualmie Market on Railroad Avenue Southeast, he’d pottered around the house for a while, watching Jerry Springer drinking orange juice straight from the carton. He ate a little, just some leftovers from two nights before. He’d cooked up a huge batch of casserole, full of steak and potatoes, and frozen the remains in individual Tupperware containers. It had tasted nice. Nice, but not great. Joe wasn’t much of a cook—that had always been Marline’s department of expertise. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a decent meal.
After leaving the container to drip dry in the sink, Joe climbed the stairs, went into Marline’s room, and found her dead on her mattress. It was a Thursday and the private nurse he employed to care for his wife wasn’t due until Saturday—he couldn’t afford full time help. Today was his responsibility. His and his alone.
She had felt so cold.
Joe climbed into bed with her and spooned her as they used to when they were young and he wasn’t carrying the extra weight. He ran his fingers through her hair only to discover that there wasn’t any life in that either. No, God had taken it all.
The pigs went without their afternoon feeding.
Joe kissed his wife goodbye and went downstairs. He looked at the crucifix on the wall, tore it down and took it outside where he snapped it against the tree he had cut down earlier in the week. The crucifix had been tough to break, but he managed with time.
He went to the pig pen and pulled the latch, setting the swine free. He watched them disappear into the trees, following the track marks that would lead them to an open quarry. At the bottom of the quarry there was a body of water, run-off from Mt. Si. In the water were the cars he had been instructed to dispose of… Some of the pigs ran onto the road out front, grew tired and settled in the shade. The rest mulled around the yard, lost and confused.
Joe kissed his wife for the last time, her face wet with his tears, and then put on his mother’s World War II gas mask. He swore that if God hadn’t heard the screams he’d torn from the throats of the people thus far, then by Holy Christ, the bastard would hear what he planned to do next.
Snap. Fizzle.
Joe hadn’t smoked a single cigarette since the afternoon of the first murder. It had been Napier who had offered it to him. Joe had longed for one since then. Today he indulged himself. He’d dragged himself into his pickup, wearing nothing but his trousers and the butcher’s apron, not bothering to take his wallet. Just his mother’s mask, feeling warm and safe behind it.
And the axe, of course.
Joe drove to Ken’s Gas & Grocery five minutes from his house. There you could buy milk, condiments, liquor, and the diesel was fairly priced. Everything else was hidden behind the counter—the smokes and skin magazines. A curly-haired woman of forty-five had been working. He split her open like a piece of rotten fruit. She’d been a spurter! Her screams had been hard to listen to—but necessary. He had to remember that. Always.
A man in a Seattle Mariners cap came in chewing tobacco whilst the woman was still kicking. And Joe had taken care of him too, cutting him down in full sight of the security camera above.
Joe held the cigarette with shaking fingers, drawing the smoke into his lungs. It was calming, far more so than the deck of cards he sometimes cut. He coughed a little, but damn, it felt good.
He recalled smoking with his wife in a cinema one time. It had been early in their relationship. She’d been beautiful—all curves, great hair. He liked that she could always mak
e him laugh, even when she was putting him in his place, which was a woman’s right to do. Joe couldn’t remember the name of the flick. It had been something with aliens in it. Marline liked that kind of shit.
Joe was sitting in the field where no flowers or grass grew, behind the house where he’d lived as a child. The old home stood vacant now. In many ways the land, which years ago had been doused with chemicals, had poisoned the house as well. No family wanted to live within sight of that barren lot. Some kids said the ground was haunted.
His mother hadn’t allowed him to come out here without the gas mask on. The soil had smoked when he shuffled his feet. A puff of grey shooting up into the air, like spirits escaping their graves, where the soil was hard and unforgiving. One day, he’d seen a bird with a broken wing among the ashes near the spot where the plane had come down. He’d killed it and cried later.
Joe wondered where that mercy was now.
The gas mask sat on the pebbles before him. It stared up at him. He finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the ground. He knew that the police would find him soon—it was inevitable. But he didn’t care. It was what happened in the next life that mattered. He and Napier had seen eye to eye on that one, at least.
And there had been no mercy so far that day. First the two people at Ken’s Gas and Grocery, and next, the man who had been riding along the roadside on his bicycle, racing the setting sun. Joe knocked him to the ground with the nose of his truck. The man’s right arm was twisted up in the wheel of his bike and when he tried to crawl away, he pulled the weight of twisted metal behind him. The man’s face was all torn away and there were pebbles under his eyelids. His nose was nothing more than a bloodied stump. Joe watched him shuffle across the gravel for a few seconds, saw the soiled, yellow shirt with the words TWEED’S CAFE! printed across the back and the scuffed name tag in the dirt next to him. JASON, it read. Joe grimaced as he gripped The Peacemaker and swung it down on Jason’s neck. It was hard, sweaty work. His arthritis gave him hell.
Then there had been the girl in Napier’s house—she’d been a nice surprise among all the corpses that decorated that foul-smelling place.
Joe touched his cheek and ran his fingers over the tender gash where the man—Marshall-so-and-so—had bitten him. He’d shown no mercy there, either.
Which was why Joe had let Marshall live.
Sometimes, it’s more cruel to survive, Joe mused, thinking about the phone call he’d received, the bed pans, the shit and the moaning. Joe understood suffering, cruelty. In fact, he considered himself an expert on the subject.
“The unlucky ones live,” he said to the mask, covered in swirling flakes of cigarette ash.
The moon was almost full and the wind had drawn away the clouds. The fog remained in the trees. An owl hooted somewhere. Everything was bathed in blue light.
“Help me,” came a voice to Joe’s left. He flicked his head towards the sound, a quick fox-like move. His eyes twinkled.
Chapter Sixty-One
A teenage girl drew closer, walking on unsteady legs from the woods on the other side of the clearing. Her face was skeletal and punctuated with dark stains. Joe had no way of knowing it, but she had been living off dead birds and squirrels for over a week. All of her clothes were brown and tattered, except for the oversized hoodie she was now slipping off her head. Joe saw her sunken, obsidian eyes.
A Jap, he thought. Jesus.
“Help me,” Jenn Kyoto repeated. Her voice was husky. She had little life left in her.
The woods had been deep and impenetrable. The trees had whistled. She’d never known such hunger or cold. There had been flares of light between the leaves, but they never brought hope with them. One of the nights a doe had approached her, but when Jenn sat upright it turned its tail and fled. It may have been a dream, she wasn’t sure. But being lost wasn’t a dream, not even a nightmare—it was very, very real. She had the mosquito bites and the poison ivy inflammations to prove it.
What got her through more than anything else were thoughts of her best friend, Brian. Or B, as she sometimes called him. She wished she’d told him how much she wanted him. Told him that she loved him, despite their promises to never fall for each other. Love ruined everything, as they had seen in school, at work.
Jenn had been so close to telling Brian how she felt that final night. The night that he had turned and walked away without looking back. And then there had been the two men who attacked him, leaping out of the shadows and forcing him backwards off the bridge. The sound of Brian slamming into the water had lingered with her in the woods. It clanged in her ears every time she thought she’d discovered a footpath, or the side of a log cabin—only to be disappointed when she saw nothing but more trees and pine needles trampled flat by animals.
There had been another splash too: the one she’d made as the ground vanished out from under her feet when the man chased her off the trail, that if she had she stuck to, would have led all the way back to her house. He had been very close to grabbing her, his fingers stretching out to snatch at her hair. And then she had fallen, cool air blowing over her ears, and the ground rushed up to meet her. No, not ground—water.
“…Help me.”
She’d given up hope, and even now, Jenn wasn’t sure if she was imagining the man sitting on the bald field. His face looked sad in the moonlight.
Like a candle that burns brightest just before it runs out of wick, Jenn surged forward and collapsed at Joe’s feet, unconscious. He cradled her with arms that had wielded an axe not so long ago. He listened to her pneumatic, staggered breath and sighed. Joe thought of the field. Of the bird with the broken wing.
He stood up, dragged Jenn to his truck and drove her to the North Bend Police Station. Her face was on a MISSING poster plastered to the door.
Chapter Sixty-Two
The light bulb was nothing more than a broken shell dangling from a wire. There was no draught to stir it or the mobiles anymore. The fat man had closed the door behind him on his way out.
Marshall Deakins sat in the dark, his head hung low. He doubted the girl had managed to call for help before she was caught. Marshall tried not to imagine how she must have felt when she saw the fat man upstairs, axe in hand—but he did nonetheless.
Marshall wished he knew her name.
No, he thought. No, she made it. You’ve got to believe that she did, Mars. She found her phone and called the police.
He coughed, spitting up a yellow wad onto his shoulder. They’ll come, he said to himself with a gentle nod.
They’ll come.
Sam’s blood had seeped across the floor and dribbled into the eye of the drain. It continued to drip through the pipes.
Moonlight fought through the window grime and drifted into the basement. Marshall longed for sunrise. The sun brought with it many things, but none were more important than its warmth, and he was colder now than he’d ever been. He shivered against his binds, his teeth clattering. This room had always been a swampy, humid space, but ever since Sam had pulled aside one of the mattress to expose the window—at his implied request—the atmosphere had turned icy.
Marshall sat alone in a house of corpses, the sounds of screams embedded in the walls. He thought of his son and hoped that Noah would visit him as he’d done so many times in the past. But Noah did not step out of the dark, nor did he feature in Marshall’s dreams on the few occasions he nodded off.
But in those dreams, which were feverish and blurred, he saw Claire.
He saw their old apartment in Vancouver running in rain-water shadows from where lightning burst outside the bedroom window. The room was cluttered with reminders of their life together. There were boxes full of trinkets that had belonged to their son piled in the corner. A pillow had been torn open in some undefined moment of anguish and feathers drifted across the floor like mist. Marshall saw his ex-wife strapped to a chair near the bed. Lightning flashed and he saw her nakedness—the gentle sag of her breasts, the mole in the shape of a heart, w
hich he had always loved to kiss, the dark V of hair obscuring her sex. Her body was covered in multiple cuts and bruises, blood tracing the curvature of her flesh until it pooled on the carpet. Marshall saw all this and panicked. He ran forward and dropped to his knees, crying out her name. But Claire turned her head away from him, her face defiant. Auburn hair fell over her cheeks, obscuring tears that had no end. “Leave me,” she whispered through clenched teeth, followed soon by the silencing code word. There was little more than a breath between the two sentences. “Cujo.”
Marshall awoke to his pains. He couldn’t tell the difference between the stench of the dead and himself—the smell of both had become one. He wondered if he would live much longer. Something told him that he would; the concept sickened him.
Marshall wasn’t a religious man, although he’d been surrounded by religion his entire life. James Bridge had been a God-fearing town and his parents had been terrified with the rest of the other parishioners. He had floated along, not sure of what he believed in, knowing only that he believed in something. I’ve got the rest of my life to figure it all out had always been his philosophy. He wished he knew what that something was and where it could be found.
Marshall Deakins wasn’t a religious man but he now found himself praying.
He prayed to God that the fat man would return and kill him.
He didn’t want to live with the knowledge of what he had done, the things he had seen. And worse, what he had to go home to. Although it wasn’t there now, he suspected that soon he would come to hate Claire for her lies, and Marshall wasn’t sure if he could live with that. It was hard to hate what you still loved, even when they no longer loved you back.
Marshall had fought so hard to survive. And for what, he no longer knew.
There were sounds in the dark but Marshall didn’t notice them at first. His mind had slipped into an alternate reality where everything was shot through a soft focus lens, where the soundtrack implied a happy ending.