by Max Wilde
Gene stood. “She’s no sister of mine.”
He took an envelope from his pocket and dropped it on the table before Skye.
“There’s the money. You get on that bus tomorrow morning, hear?”
She looked up at him through her fan of blonde hair. Then she nodded.
“You come near my boy again I’ll arrest you. Or worse.”
He turned and walked toward the door where Timmy stood watching, his face pale in the glare of the fluorescent.
“Daddy?”
“Quiet, Timmy. Quiet, now.” Gene opened the door and took Timmy by the hand and walked him to the Lincoln, where the giant frame of Drum loomed, the neon sign washing him in funhouse colors.
Skye watched the big black car start up and speed away, Gene and Timmy up front, the unmistakable shape of Sheriff Dellbert Drum in the rear.
Minty slid into the booth and took her hand. “Jesus Christ, honey, you okay?”
Skye nodded. “I’m fine.”
“That little bastard needs to be brought in line. I wish old man Lavender wasn’t busy dyin’ on us.”
“No, Gene’s right, Minty. I need to get away.”
“Bullshit. You’re the closest thing that boy has to a mother.”
Skye closed her eyes, shaking her head, back in the washroom with Timmy, pulling him close, the mad lust gripping her, the boy saying, “Skye! Skye, you’re hurting me!”
Timmy had fought to get out of the embrace but Skye was lost in the hunger of The Other, the smell of the child’s blood and flesh inflaming her.
Then she’d felt a searing pain in her chest and thought for a moment she was having a seizure. She released Timmy and pulled down her T-shirt, revealing the rosary given to her by the priest hanging from her neck. The silver of the crucifix was molten to her fingers and when she lifted it she could see the shape of the cross burned into the skin between her breasts.
Skye turned her back on the boy and crossed to the basin, splashing her scalded skin, wetting the crucifix to cool it. Not daring to remove the rosary. Timmy staring up at her, wide-eyed. After a minute she trusted herself enough to put a hand on his shoulder.
“I love you, Timmy.”
“I love you too, Skye,” he said and she almost wept when she saw how big and innocent his eyes were.
She washed her face, hiding the tears in the water, and dried herself, masking her torment with a manufactured smile as she took his hand and said, “Come, what you need is a hot fudge sundae with all the trimmings.”
They had walked out together and Skye had known she couldn’t be alone with him again.
Ever.
“Skye, honey, talk to me.” Minty said, tugging at her hand.
When Skye opened her eyes she didn’t see the waitress sitting opposite her, she saw Sheriff Dellbert Drum with his arms flung wide on the back of the booth, his pose a mockery of that long ago velvet Jesus. But there was no pain in his small skiddy eyes, just a glaze of dull malevolence.
“Skye? Skye!” Minty grabbing her arm.
Skye stood. “Minty, I need to borrow your car.”
Minty dropped the keys in Skye’s hand. “You go, girl. Go and fight for what’s yours.
Skye walked out, her nostrils filled with the ripe memory of Dellbert Drum’s sweat. She saw the unnatural scale of the man. Saw his giant limbs torn from him and his mile-long entrails coiled slick in her hands.
As she crossed to Minty’s car Skye lifted the rosary from her neck and dropped it into a trash can.
37
Gene drove into the expanse of nothingness that separated his town from Drum’s, a halo of light pollution leaking from the ghetto sprawl across the border. Timmy sat beside Gene, the presence of the bloody giant in the rear silencing him.
“Boy.”
A rasping whisper as Drum leaned forward, a blood-encrusted hand grabbing at the seat beside Timmy’s head, causing the child to cower against the side door.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Shut up,” Gene said.
“Now, I’m just makin’ conversation with the little fellah.”
Drum leaned farther forward. “Don’t see none of you in that pretty face, Martindale. Boy must favor his dear mother.”
“I said shut the hell up.”
Drum spat a laugh that became a groan as the Town Car hit a pothole and he settled back against the rear seat. Gene freed a hand from the wheel and laid it on Timmy’s shoulder. He felt the child trembling and longed for his dead wife with a force that brought a pain to his heart.
Marybeth’s emotions had been painted in vivid colors—quick to laughter, quick to tears. She had loved Timmy ferociously, hugging him, singing to him, engaging the toddler in conversations that were like a foreign tongue to Gene, but left mother and son in fits of uncontrollable giggles.
It had never surprised Gene that he’d fallen for a woman so different from himself. What had amazed him was that she’d returned his feelings, as if she could see beyond his coldness and remoteness, and was patient that her warmth would eventually unfreeze him. And there were moments when she was pregnant with their second child, Gene lying with her in their bed, his hand on her swollen belly, that he felt a shift within himself, a thaw, as if could learn to trust and laugh and love like his beautiful wife.
All that had ended in the roadside carnage, causing Gene to retreat deeper into himself. To limit even more what he felt. He loved his boy, but he wondered if his son knew it. He’d left it to Skye to try to reproduce some of the softness that had died with Marybeth.
And now Timmy had lost Skye too.
Gene slowed to a crawl as the Lincoln bumped up the ruined main road of Drum’s town. Derelict buildings, broken windows, the single traffic light a blind red eye. The sheriff was the sole inhabitant of the town now. It was as if he’d welcomed its end, the death of commerce and society leaving him free to couple his parched county to the lawless mass that sprawled below the border, with its drugs and its painted women and its fever dream of the north.
Gene stopped the car, headlights playing across Drum’s home. The sheriff lived in a stone house, the oldest building in the town. The roof of the porch, supported by four faux-Greek columns, listed to one side, the shutters of one of the two windows that flanked the door had broken loose and the pebble glass of the attic room was cracked, but the house’s brick structure was more resilient than its wooden neighbors who were slowly yielding to the dirt.
Gene cut the engine, reached across Timmy and pushed open the door.
“Come with me,” he said, leading the boy toward the Jeep parked in the driveway.
He hoisted Timmy up into the shotgun seat. “I’ll be back real soon. You don’t open for nobody, hear?”
The boy nodded and Gene locked the car. He turned and went to the front of the house in time to see Drum making his unsteady way up the pathway. The big man leaned against the wall a moment, gathering his strength before he found his keys and opened the door.
Gene followed him into a mess of dust and broken furniture, bathed in the sordid light of a naked bulb dangling from the stained ceiling. Drum lifted a bottle of Wild Turkey from a table and uncapped it, taking a long pull, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he sank into a torn armchair, a cloud of dust rising around him.
“What happens now?” Gene asked.
Drum shrugged. “Reckon there has to be some recalculating, which, given my wounds and inebriation, I’m in no fit state to do at this time.”
“Those people from the city won’t let this lie.”
Drum grimaced as he adjusted his arm in the sling. “My gut says they will. Our actions would have been in somebody’s favor. Reckon there’ll be a changing of the guard and chances are we’ll hear no more of the matter.” He looked up at Gene. “Unless, of course, I alert them to your involvement.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, Chief Deputy, that I still have plans for you. For your boy, too, if you don’t run when I g
oddam whistle.”
Gene felt the weight of the Glock up against his hip and in that moment he found himself wishing for something that he’d never believed he’d ever wish for: that he could be more like his father. That he could lift the gun and finish this thing.
Maybe, the heat of battle still in his blood, he could have shot Drum back in the city, but now, with his son sitting outside in the Jeep, cold-blooded murder was beyond him.
Drum favored him with a death’s-head smile. “So take your whelp home and get some sleep. I’m going to avail myself of the services of an unlicensed sawbones and a pliant whore and we’ll regroup in the morning.” Drum drank and ran a hand through his hair. “Just don’t go lull yourself to sleep thinking this is over. It ain’t even yet begun, Chief Deputy, our little alliance.”
Gene turned and left the house, Drum bolting the door after him. He stood a moment on the porch and watched a thread of lightning dance on the horizon. But the rain wouldn’t come, he knew. The clouds would flee eastward and the drought would continue scorching the borderlands.
As Gene went across to the Jeep, Timmy’s pale face staring at him from the passenger seat, he heard the soft slap of a car door behind him and the Glock was in his hand, ready for cartel assassins. But when he turned it was Skye walking toward him from Minty’s little Japanese wreck.
A different Skye, moving with a kind of strength and grace foreign to his foundling sister. Even with the weapon in his hand he found himself taking a step back as she neared him.
“You won’t need the gun, Gene,” she said quietly, her voice deeper and more measured than he'd ever heard it, “I’m here for him.” Pointing at Drum’s house.
He looked at her, nodded, and started walking toward the Jeep. Let her finish what he lacked the guts to do.
“Gene,” she said.
He turned. “What?”
“Go knock on Drum’s door. Tell him you forgot something. It’ll be easier that way.”
“I’m getting Timmy out of here. I don’t want him to be part of this.”
“He won’t be. Do as I say, then you can go.” He stared at her. “And once this is done I’ll leave and you’ll neither of you ever see me again. That much I swear.”
Gene nodded, walked up to the door and gave it a lawman’s knock.
“Yeah?” Drum said, his voice muffled and slurred.
“It’s me,” Gene said. “I need to ask you something.”
He heard the heavy tread of the sheriff’s boots and the door rattled open, Drum saying, “You’re like a goddam old woman, Martindale, with all your fussin’.”
Gene never heard Skye, just felt a wind pass his right shoulder, saw Drum look up as something hit him, lifted him clear off the floor and sent him flying back into the mess of his living room.
Skye walked past Gene and stood over the giant, who had broken into matchsticks a table made from an old wagon wheel. He was winded, groaning, trying to lift himself. Skye kicked him in the gut and silenced him.
“Stay a moment, Gene.”
‘I don’t have the stomach for this.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not about to feed just yet. There’s something I want to give you.”
She stood still, at first moving just her eyes, then her head in small, calibrated movements, before she walked forward and pulled open the middle drawer of a bureau. She tossed out a pile of old skin magazines until she came up with a ziplock bag.
Skye held out her broken and bloody eyeglasses. “Here.”
“How did you know where they were?”
“I just knew. Take them.”
He took the bag, slipped it into his shirt pocket and went to the door. Something made him turn and look back, and he saw her stripping off her clothes, folding them into a neat pile on the arm of a sofa.
Her body seemed to shift and change as he watched, her back cording with muscle, her neck sinking into her shoulders, her arms thick and powerful as she reached down and lifted Drum by his shirtfront. Lifted him as if he were a child, and dumped him on an old floral carpet.
When she hunkered down she was no longer the girl Gene had known since that day he’d found her in the box at the side of the road. What she was he couldn’t say, as she gripped Drum’s head with one hand, using the other to cause enough pain to his wounded shoulder for the giant to open his eyes and whimper like a child.
Gene closed the door and went to the Jeep and slid in beside his son.
“Was that Skye I seen?” Timmy asked.
“No, boy, that wasn’t Skye,” Gene said and he started the Jeep and drove into the night, the far away star of the Milky Way motel flickering like a broken promise.
38
This time it was different. There was none of the terror that Skye had felt when the men in the old car had pursued her, and no internal battle like the one she’d fought the night of the cross-border bloodbath. Then the actions had been entirely those of the hated invader within her, actions that were to be feared and repressed.
Erased.
But now, as she knelt over Drum, she felt that what she’d always called Skye had fused seamlessly with The Other. She was reborn. No more an unwilling observer, she was a participant now, marrying her sensibility to the brute power of the predator, ready to take her time and savor what was to come.
She looked at her arm, recognizing it as her own even though it was filled with a new power, her skin stretched taut across muscles that were hard and tight. Her fingers were thicker, the nails long and sharp. Glancing down at her chest she saw that her soft breasts had sunk into her pectorals, the nipples dark and erect, and her belly below was flat and caged in muscle.
Drum groaned and his eyes flickered and opened. “Jesus,” he said.
Before his arm even moved Skye saw him ball his fist and take a swing at her. She caught his elbow and wrenched it, the joint shattering with a brittle crack. He screamed—high and girlish—his arm falling useless at his side.
Pearls of sweat beaded his hairline and one of them flowed down to his right eye, where it hung from his almost feminine lashes like a tear, before it fell to the dusty floor with a smack that Skye could hear with perfect clarity.
She smelled the fear he wore like a coat, could actually see the fumes rising from his body like heat haze off blacktop. For just a second she marveled at her heightened senses, then she accepted them as part of what she’d become.
She freed Drum’s arm from the sling and tore his shirt from his body, revealing a huge torso covered in a pelt of black hair thick and sticky with blood from the wound in his shoulder. He tried to get up again and she hit him in the throat with the edge of her hand, just hard enough to make him gag and subside to the carpet.
Skye grabbed a leather boot in each hand and unshod the sheriff, his sockless feet ripe, the toenails curling long and yellow. Taking his belt by its ridiculous horseshoe buckle she broke it with one tug, the concertina folds of his pale belly revealed. She ripped his pants from him, tearing them along the seams, throwing them aside, until all he wore were piss-stained boxers, which were gone with the jerk of her index finger.
Drum’s penis, even in his state of fear, was thick as a club, and she knew he’d enjoyed using it to inflict pain.
What goes around, she thought, as she gathered together the things she needed for the performance piece that lay ahead. She tore his shirt into strips and used them to fashion tourniquets for each arm, tying them hard enough to bite into his flesh at the elbows, getting him groaning again. Ripping his trousers into lengths, tying off each leg above the knee.
Skye lifted the bottle of liquor from the table, uncapped it and poured some over Drum’s face. He blinked and spluttered.
“Fuck you, bitch,” he said.
She reached down and took the shattered arm in her right hand, her left gripping his bicep. With one easy twist she tore the limb free at the elbow, bone splinters, veins and arteries left dangling, the tourniquet allowing only a trickle of blood.
When Drum opened his mouth to scream she stuffed it with his boxers and all that escaped him was muffled weeping, a flow of tears and sweat tracing his cheeks and pooling in the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. He closed his eyes and whimpered.
She slapped his face with the hand of the detached limb and when he looked at her she saw the depths of his terror. A box of matches had spilled when he’d shattered the table and she had a sudden inspiration. She lay down his arm and snagged a couple of matchsticks, inserting them into his eye sockets, forcing his eyelids open.
She wanted him to see this.
All of it.
She laid the arm on his chest and reached across and tore off his other arm, easy as if she were ripping paper from a roll of kitchen towel. She placed the second limb across the first, leaving him in a mockery of an attitude of supplication.
She cocked a head and looked at her handiwork, adjusted one of the arms a little. Better. It was going to be beautiful, her little homage.
She seized Drum’s massive left leg just below the knee and for the first time felt a moment’s doubt. Then it evaporated and she knew she could do it. And she did: ripped the leg free, hearing the sharp snap of bone and the wet tearing of flesh. She lifted the leg to show him, his eyes bulging with agony. He passed out and it required more slaps and malt liquor to revive him in time for the other leg to be taken.
She arranged the severed limbs beneath his stumps, as if he were doing a little prancing jig, or a Morris Dance, and it so pleased her that she heard herself grunt.
Then she grasped the fat penis that drooped from the tangle of graying pubic hair and slapped it playfully against his belly, flicking his balls with a long nail.
His eyes glazed with terror behind the matchsticks, desperate not to see what was to come.