The Storm King: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  But people were in his way. They’d poured from the woods and were closing in from the edges of the clearing. Tom ran, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  “Move!” he yelled, but no one paid attention.

  There was a flurry of movement ahead, and the crowd gasped as one.

  Tom knocked people aside to see. He shoved them and elbowed them and pulled them apart. He imagined Nate already on the ground in the mud, staring hopelessly at the sledges of Adam’s fists. Blood running with the rain down his face.

  A scream built in Tom’s throat.

  He slipped in the mud, and tore through the forest of legs ahead of him.

  The crowd recoiled at something Tom couldn’t see. An animal desperation threatened to swallow him whole.

  I can save you.

  He clawed his way past the last people who separated him from his friend. Nate was somehow still standing, though wildly unsteady. He shuffled from foot to foot as if the ground beneath him bucked like a wild creature.

  Tom gained an unobstructed view just in time to see Adam throw a hook at Nate. Somehow Nate managed to avoid it by leaning backward. This looked like sheer luck to Tom. His friend was so muddled that he barely kept his balance. Adam tried an uppercut, but the same thing happened.

  How had he missed?

  Adam began to look uncertain, and Tom realized that the crowd hadn’t been reacting to the hits Nate had taken, but the ones he’d somehow dodged.

  Nate staggered in a semicircle, and Tom saw his face for the first time. He no longer looked drunk at all. His lips were curled between smirk and snarl, and his eyes glittered like the lake at dawn.

  Adam whipped a haymaker at Nate.

  Tom watched as Nate ducked the mast of Adam’s arm and thrust his left palm upward into the lacrosse player’s face. Not missing a step, he landed a brutal jab to his opponent’s midsection. Adam was thrown off-balance, his hands reflexively going to his nose. Blood caught the firelight.

  Tom didn’t dare breathe. Adrenaline surged with the other chemicals he’d filled himself with, and rules of the world were suspended.

  He watched the predator realize that he was the prey.

  Nate darted to Adam’s favored side so quickly that Tom could not follow the motion. With a sweep kick, Nate knocked the man’s legs out from under him. Adam landed on his back in the mud, his face glossed in blood, grimacing in pain.

  Impossible.

  Tom had forgotten that while Nate was strong, his power didn’t come from his muscles. He’d overlooked the fact that while Nate was fast, his speed didn’t come from his reflexes.

  The blond giant was mass and calculation and patience, but Nate was wrath itself. Adam had come to fight Nate McHale, but this was the Storm King.

  Nate had once told Tom that he felt safest when the world quaked in a tempest, because that was when the true face of things was revealed. That’s where all illusions of munificence faded away, and the stone heart of the universe was laid bare.

  This was the transformation Tom witnessed in Nate. As he whirled and pivoted and punched, his friend shed before him any guise of boyhood he’d clung to. Beneath these things Nate had pretended to be, he was not just a storm, he was an apocalypse.

  A kick to the ribs. An elbow to the sternum. Nate broke Adam against the muddy ground and took him apart piece by piece.

  The Creature of Catastrophic Futures forgot himself and released the scream he held inside him. It wasn’t a cry of horror but a flare thrown into the burning night, because even he found beauty in this violence.

  Finally, every last rule and regret and obligation was stripped away under the raw truth of blood and dirt and storm. Here was something magnificent to feed that atavistic place that hungered for righteous carnage.

  When Tom and the others in the glade shouted into the storm they howled the screams of the free.

  Twelve

  When Nate returned to himself, he was sprawled across rough tiles of carpet and handcuffed to a desk.

  Tom sat on the floor across from him, his back braced against a wall. He looked exhausted in his filthy uniform. His eyes were red, and his hair was slick across his forehead.

  “He’s back,” Tom said.

  “Are you all right?” The chief came around Nate’s side of the desk. The man’s voice rasped like it’d been scoured. “I called a doctor.”

  “I’m fine,” Nate said.

  “Tom said you’d be.” Chief Buck leaned against the wall. His face was gray yet flushed. “You have a temper on you, son.” He rubbed his neck. “Hell of a thing to see.”

  “I’m sorry about—back there,” Nate said. He was almost certain he’d picked the chief up by his throat. “That wasn’t me. I don’t know where that came from. I guess I was upset. It’s been rough, the last day. I lost myself for a minute. After seeing those things, I just…I didn’t know where to put it all.”

  The contents of the chief’s files were burned in his mind: those high school yearbook photos of the children they’d been, the files pregnant with the bare facts, stark and unyielding in blue ink and Times New Roman. The pure shock of Lucy’s remains. He knew how decomposition worked. But to actually see it.

  He raped her then he killed her.

  Adam Decker had been at the station. Nate had rushed him before his world dissolved into blood and shadow. But his old enemy had to be long gone by now. Nate’s stomach clenched at the idea of his escape, and it was a battle to keep his face free of anything but puzzlement and regret.

  “What things?” Tom asked his dad.

  “Maura Jeffers.” The chief’s eyes didn’t waver from Nate’s. “Another dead girl, and with Lucy’s funeral in just a couple hours. Brought back all that old pain, didn’t it?” he asked Nate.

  The chief knew perfectly well that the news about Maura Jeffers wasn’t what had set Nate off. The man must still want to keep the files in the closet a secret from Tom.

  Interesting.

  “She was so young,” Nate said, deciding to play along. “It’s so senseless.”

  The chief nodded to him. “Talked to Father Stephen. Church lost power, and the burial will be pushed to next week, but the Bennetts want to go ahead with the funeral. Might not be much of a crowd, but they want it done with. Can’t blame them, can you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Hodges and Antonetti are on the Wharf, keeping the tourists away,” the chief told Tom. “It’s blocked off, but they caught a few taking pictures. One gust and they’d be in the drink and mush against the pilings. And I just got a call that a transformer went down at Goldfinch and Bobwhite.”

  “I’ll cordon the block.” Tom stood and stretched his back.

  Nate wondered how long his friend had been watching him. He wondered how long he’d drifted.

  “I got it. You get this one home and dressed. And take a shower,” the chief told Nate. He patted Tom on the shoulder and handed him a small key on his way out of the room.

  Tom watched his father leave, then turned back to Nate. Nate was sure the key the chief had passed to Tom was to his handcuffs, but his friend made no move to release him.

  “How’s Grams?” Nate asked.

  “The same. The doc thinks that might be a good thing, considering.”

  “And Johnny?”

  “He needs surgery.”

  “I should be there, too.”

  Tom shook his head. “The road to Gracefield’s closed. Downed trees everywhere, and they won’t start clearing them until this blows over. I barely made it back.”

  Nate digested this. He had competing obligations, but the requirements of the living had to outweigh the demands of the dead. He’d never forgive himself if Grams woke up and he wasn’t by her side. “You told me you’d stay with her.”

  “I planned to. But some downstate weekender caused a major incident at the station.” Tom sat back down across from Nate.

  “Was it bad?”

  “I’ve seen worse. Only caught the aftermath, though. Y
ou’d exhausted yourself by the time I got here. You’ve been out for almost an hour.” The lights overhead flickered. “We’re on generators now.”

  Nate thought of Grams and the impediments the universe had built between them. “What is it, ten, fifteen miles to Gracefield? You could drive me as far as you can then I can walk the rest of the way. Or maybe I could ride a bike. Would a bike fit in your cruiser?”

  It could have been the loss of his dog, a night of scant sleep, or the general stress of the day, but Tom looked different. His impassive expression was a hand-me-down from his father.

  “You can’t walk to another town through a hurricane. There’ll be downed wires everywhere. The road’s closed for a reason.”

  “Maybe I could follow the road, but walk inside the tree line.”

  Tom stared at him. “Yesterday, you were a husband, father, and surgeon, and now you’re concussed and cuffed to a desk on the floor of a police station. How about you take a second to figure out how that happened.”

  “What am I supposed to do, Tom?” He tugged at the cuffs and winced at the pain.

  “We have to go to the funeral.”

  Nate thought he might be able to convince Tom to help him get to Gracefield later. First he had to get out of these cuffs.

  “Fine, Tommy. You’re right. I can’t get to the hospital in this weather. That was crazy. I just—I just can’t stop thinking of Grams. I can’t get her face out of my head. You didn’t see her when they brought her in. You can’t imagine how—” Nate let his voice catch in his throat, hung his head, and swallowed hard.

  When he turned back to Tom his friend’s face had softened, but not as much as Nate would have liked. “So we have a funeral to go to. Are you going to unlock these? Or is this desk my plus one?”

  Tom seemed to wrestle with something, but he didn’t struggle with it for very long. The key remained in his palm.

  “Why’d Dad let you go?”

  “I’m handcuffed to a desk.”

  “Why aren’t you in a cell? Assault of a peace officer. Three counts, by the way. Destruction of government property. Then there’s Adam Decker.”

  Nate remembered Adam Decker’s bloated face and how his own vision had melted into black streaked with red. He couldn’t see his hands bound behind him, but the knuckles of his right fist felt peeled, the joints stiff to the wrist in an all-too-familiar way.

  Ten years without a brawl or bar fight. A decade without committing even a misdemeanor. People counted on him now. And they needed him. They needed Nate, not the Storm King. The Storm King brought holy ruin upon his enemies, but he never could protect the ones he loved.

  “Like your dad said, hearing about that girl dying and then seeing Adam was too much. He got it. Why don’t you?”

  “Two hours ago, my dad would’ve loved to charge you with something.”

  “Which would have been awfully useful to know, Tommy.” If Tom knew how hard the chief was going to come down on Nate, then why hadn’t he warned him?

  “You thought he was bringing you here to chat about the Yankees’ batting order?” Tom dismissed him with a wave of his hand.

  The gesture was theatrical. Overly practiced. A chime of doubt sounded from the back of Nate’s mind. The chief had been keeping secrets, but Tom had secrets of his own. Nate sensed this with acute certainty. He was suddenly very conscious of his own helplessness.

  “So why would he let you go as soon as he gets you where he wants you?”

  “I guess he got whatever he was looking for.” Nate shrugged as best he could and summoned the most guileless smile he had access to. “It’s not like he told me what he wanted.” It seemed like a good time to change the subject. “What was Adam doing here, anyway?”

  “Reporting damage. Someone broke into his house last night, stopped up all the sinks on the first floor, and ran the faucets full blast until the morning. His cellphone was a casualty, the storm took out the landline, and he’s just a block away.” Tom frowned at him. “You punched him pretty hard.”

  “He should be used to it.”

  “This is the part where a well-adjusted member of society expresses remorse.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “No. He’s married with two kids now, you know. He’s also a lawyer. Claims he won’t press charges as long as you stay away from him.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Neither is my dad or the two officers.”

  Nate wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “You could have killed him, you know. My dad.”

  “No way.” Nate scoffed and shook his head, but he remembered the feel of the man’s life in his hands. The sinew of the masseter. The ridges of each cervical vertebra. An iota more force and—

  “When’s the last time it happened?” Tom asked. “You losing control? I saw it in your eyes when you woke up. Just like back in high school. You drifted. Your eyes went blank and someone else was there.”

  “There’s no one here but me, Tom.” He realized that his jaw hurt, too.

  “You shouldn’t have let Dad see that side of you. You shouldn’t have come back here at all, Nate. This place is dangerous for you.”

  There was a menagerie of suffering in the cages of Nate’s soul, and this town held all the keys. But pain could be more than a curse. Sometimes it could be a blade.

  “I can be dangerous, too, though, can’t I, Tommy?” Nate felt the grin on his face twist into something less innocuous.

  Tom weighed the key in his palm, then finally unlocked the cuffs. Nate rubbed the blood back into his wrists. He pushed himself off the carpet and onto his feet.

  “I’m driving you home.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  They were in a back room Nate hadn’t seen on his way in. He followed Tom down a short hallway past the chief’s office. The office’s glass partition was shattered, and there were holes in the drywall.

  “We’ll invoice you for the damages,” Tom said.

  “That seems fair.”

  The lights flickered overhead as they walked past the front desk. The uniform stationed there flinched at the sight of Nate. The young man held a bag of ice against his forehead. He pulled it aside long enough for Nate to see a contusion ripening there.

  Outside, the world looked like the surface of an inhospitable planet. The trees were tilted at impossible angles, and the streets coursed with water. The wind was a roar that stripped away all other sounds. It was the height of morning, but might as well have been dusk. Above, the lead sky surged and boiled like rapids over rocks.

  Tom’s cruiser was parked close to the station’s entrance, but Medea made them feel every inch.

  A person wasn’t supposed to enjoy being wracked by the wind and rain, but Nate found that he did. The gale tearing at his hair, rain slapping at his face, and thunder shuddering his bones woke him up and made him feel alive.

  Once in the car, he struggled to shut the door against the torrents of the storm. “Nuts to have a funeral in this,” Nate said.

  “Says the guy I just talked out of walking to Gracefield.”

  Tom took the roads slowly, never going over ten miles an hour. Branches crunched under the tires, and the cruiser rocked in the swells of the gale. Trees lay vanquished across lawns with their root systems exposed for all to see. The sections of town that had lost power had the feel of utter abandonment.

  “When’s it going to let up?” Nate asked.

  “Supposed to be a lull around noon, then it’ll pick up again. Should be mostly faded by tomorrow, but the flooding’ll go on for days.”

  As brutal as the hurricane was, Bonaparte Street was several blocks inland, and Medea’s winds were blunted by trees and other structures. Nate imagined that things must be far more ferocious along the waterfront.

  He’d weathered dozens of storms in the glorious ruin of the Night Ship, but nothing close to a hurricane. He pictured the wreckage of the promenade churning in the tumult of the gale. He could almost hea
r the storm howl through the hundred broken panes of the glass ceiling and feel the pulse of the lake’s assault on the pilings like compressions to an inert heart.

  Some trees on Bonaparte Street had been lost, but apart from fallen branches scattered across the lawn, Grams’s house looked undamaged.

  “I’ve got to get ready, too,” Tom said. “I’ll text you on my way back.”

  “My phone’s dead. It got wet.”

  “Let’s say an hour. No need to be early.”

  Nate remained in the car, watching the dark house. Rain drummed against the roof, and leaves clotted the windshield wipers. “Is there anything else I need to know, Tommy?”

  “Like?”

  “Like anything. Your dad, Lucy—anything.”

  “Christ. I’m sorry I didn’t remind you you’re a suspect in an unsolved murder. Guess I figured you’d remember something like that.”

  “I’m not accusing you. What I’m saying is that I haven’t been here in fourteen years, and you have. You know more than I do. I’m trying to remember things I haven’t thought of in ages.”

  Tom made a scraping sound that might have been a kind of laugh. “Not all of us could run away, Nate. Even if we wanted to.”

  “Come on. I’m not trying to start a fight. You’re the last person I want to fight with.” He put a hand on Tom’s shoulder. He waited for his friend’s frame to relax. He waited for the conciliatory smile that heralded an apology. I’m sorry, Nate, Tom would say. Today’s been insane. Fighting with you is the last thing I want, too.

  But this didn’t happen. Nate saw that he needed to escalate.

  So he withdrew his hand, turned back to the window, and sighed. This exhalation wasn’t calibrated to convey the frustration of the put-upon, but to communicate the despair of the defeated.

  “I don’t think Grams is going to make it, Tommy.” He stared through the streaming glass at the unlit house. He allowed a silence to burgeon between them. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” He waited until the quiet rang in his ears. As loud as it was, he knew it would be ten times more deafening for Tom. Then he pulled the handle and left the car. He shut the door behind him and sank his feet into the saturated lawn.