Savage Species

by Jonathan Janz

  Clevenger’s bald forehead was dotted with perspiration, the sparse black hairs plastered to his head here and there in exhausted curlicues. Red Elk crossed the kitchen, and momentarily, Jesse thought the man was heading out the back door. But Red Elk veered left and said something to Debbie.

  “What’re we doing?” Emma asked. Her face was still fish-white from witnessing Linda Farmer’s death.

  Clevenger shook his head, following Red Elk. “It doesn’t matter. We have to trust him.”

  Greeley’s voice rose to a petulant whine. “I’m not entombing myself in some half-assed bomb shelter…crawlspace, whatever he calls it.”

  “It’s not a bomb shelter,” Debbie said from around the corner. “It’s a tunnel, and it’s our only way out.”

  “What kind of tunnel?” Colleen asked.

  Jesse followed Red Elk and saw, in the back hallway, a section of the floor had been removed and propped against the wall. Debbie was standing in the opening, her breasts even with the floor, which indicated to Jesse that they were indeed entering a crawlspace.

  “Get in here,” Debbie said.

  Without comment, Colleen followed her, then Clevenger. Emma got an arm around Ruth’s back and descended into the hole.

  “So we just hide under the house?” Greeley said in that same plaintive voice. “That’s the plan?”

  Jesse moved past him and climbed in. Lowering to his knees, he saw that Red Elk had slid aside a square board in the far corner of the crawlspace and was swinging his legs into the opening. Muttering, Greeley got on his hands and knees behind Jesse.

  Clambering forward, Jesse noticed several white tanks positioned around the dark crawlspace gleaming at him like dying moons.

  They’d made it halfway to the trapdoor when Colleen, ahead of them, asked, “You guys put the floor back?”

  Jesse turned in the gloom and eyed Greeley.

  “No one told me I was supposed to,” Greeley said.

  Compressing his lips, Jesse scuttled hurriedly over to the opening and stood in the light of the back hallway. Moving in a near panic, he got hold of the section of floor, leaned it down, and fitted it into place from beneath. When he turned to locate the trapdoor, he discovered with dim terror that the crawlspace had emptied.

  Crawling fast enough to kick up a cloud of dust, Jesse scrambled over to the trapdoor, began the downward climb on an iron ladder that had been bolted to the wall, and stopped when he realized he hadn’t replaced the trapdoor.

  He’d let the wooden door close halfway when someone hissed, “Careful with it!”

  Jesse froze, looked up and noticed something he hadn’t previously. A slender plastic tube hung through the opening and continued all the way to the ground.

  “I’ll rig it,” Red Elk said. “Just get your butt down here.”

  Jesse did as he was told. He took in the dimensions of the tunnel. Eight feet wide and at least ten feet high, it meandered thirty feet or so before turning. It didn’t look manmade.

  At the top of the ladder, Red Elk reached through the gap, and Jesse heard scraping sounds. Then the big man took the tube and inserted it into a tiny notch carved into one side of the trapdoor. The tube, Jesse saw, ran along the floor several yards to where Debbie held the end of it pinched between her thumb and forefinger.

  Red Elk climbed down and said to all of them, “We don’t have time for talk, but here’s the situation: If they find out we’re down here, we’ll put a lighter to that propane tube and the whole house will blow sky high.”

  There was a brief, incredulous silence. Then Greeley said, “What?”

  Red Elk ignored him, moved to the opposite wall, which was overlaid with a sheet of plywood. Lifting the plywood section away and casting it aside, Red Elk revealed a pair of wooden shelves, on which lay a couple guns, a green backpack and a faded red gym bag.

  “Which one of you can shoot?” he asked, picking up a gun with each hand. One was an old-fashioned silver revolver. The other was a big, black pistol that looked to Jesse like it could blow a hole in an elephant.

  “I’m a daddy’s girl,” Colleen said, stepping toward him. “He used to take me to the range.”

  “You ever fire one of these?” Red Elk asked. He held out the revolver.

  “Dad had a Colt just like that one,” Colleen said, nodding to the big, black gun. “Why not let me use it?”

  Red Elk tilted his head and grinned. “The .45’s mine, honeypie. You get the Smith & Wesson.”

  Colleen took the revolver, looking pleased.

  Greeley went over, started unzipping the red gym bag.

  “What’d I tell you about touching my stuff?” Red Elk said.

  Red Elk’s stony gaze was enough to make Greeley put his hands up in a gesture of truce.

  “So what’s in there?” Greeley asked.

  “Twinkies,” Red Elk said. He got up, went over to the enclave. “Bottles of water, granola bars, flashlights. A cleaver.” Red Elk brought out an old bread bag that clinked metallically. “Batteries,” he explained. He reached a big hand inside the gym bag and came out with something red and cylindrical.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Jesse asked.

  “It’s old,” Red Elk said, “but if it still works, I’m told a stick of dynamite can turn a ton of rock to dust.”

  “Now what on earth would we use that for?” Greeley asked. “Lighting that down here would bring the whole cave down.”

  “What’s in that one?” Emma asked, nodding at the green backpack.

  Red Elk set the dynamite down, reached into the backpack. “A mining helmet. A couple more flashlights. Rounds for the Ruger, bullets for Grandpa’s revolver.”

  Colleen examined the revolver. “This belonged to your grandpa? The thing’s an antique.”

  “You don’t want it, I’ll take it,” Debbie said.

  “You know how to use it?” Colleen asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Frank can teach me,” Debbie answered. She extended a hand.

  “I’ll keep it,” Colleen said, stuffing the revolver down the front of her jeans. “It might blow up and take my face off, but I’d rather die that way than let someone like you kill me by accident.”

  Debbie’s expression didn’t change. “Who says it’d be an accident?”

  Red Elk said, “Glad to see you two’ve hit it off.”

  Charly had never bought into the notions of ESP, second sight, those kinds of things. But she didn’t entirely discount them either. For one, there was her unerring sense of direction. Even Eric, from whom compliments seldom came, had grudgingly conceded she was uncannily able to find her way through unfamiliar cities, choose the correct road even when their GPS told them to go another way, or navigate the largest airports without pausing to look at signs.

  Then there was the incident with the toad.

  One finger still hooked firmly in Sam’s belt loop, she stared sightlessly at his back and recollected the time Kate, a little over a year ago, brought a toad into the kitchen and asked if she and Olivia could keep it. Charly wasn’t averse to toads and bugs—not the way many women were—but she wasn’t fond of the way the bumpy brown creature leered at her with those ancient, distended eyeballs.

  She’d instructed Kate to carry the toad back outside and release it in the yard. Kate had promised to do so, but ten minutes later her husband had come home from practice and announced that the girls were playing with a toad in the driveway. Charly was immersed in making dinner and asked if Eric could call the girls in—with special emphasis on making sure they washed their hands. Eric had arched an eyebrow at her—any request on her part, no matter how reasonable, received this galled reaction—and told her, sure, don’t worry about it. The dangerous serenity in his voice, she supposed later, had been her first tip-off, but that didn’t explain what happened next, not by a long shot.

  The girls, hungry and emotional about leaving their toad behind, had eventually come in to eat. Eric followed a short while later.

  She a
woke that night at a little past one and stared at the ceiling.

  What, she wondered, had Eric done with Kate’s toad?

  She had a powerful urge to wake Eric up, but he’d been complaining about her restlessness quite a bit already. The fact that being pregnant with Jake was the reason she was uncomfortable—and why she also had to pee a lot—didn’t matter to him. If it affected his sleep, it wasn’t acceptable.

  So she stole out of bed and crept downstairs. She had no idea where she was heading, but there was a youthful deliciousness in sneaking out of the house, which was what she found herself doing despite wearing nothing but a saggy black tank top and a pair of pink underwear.

  She bypassed the driveway where Eric said the girls had been playing. She ignored the yard and the field across the road—the two places she herself would have dumped the toad had she been charged to do so.

  Instead, Charly ambled around the side of the house, relishing the crisp night air and the somehow exciting possibility that one of their neighbors might see her out here wearing next to nothing. Her skin prickling with goose bumps, she stopped next to an old window well that shielded the cracked windowpanes and also prevented water from rushing into their cobwebby old basement. Charly knelt before the corrugated metal curvature and braced her hands on its rounded lip. Kneeling forward, she peered into the pooled shadows and at first discovered nothing but a spill of dead leaves and a few scurrying daddy longlegs. She leaned lower.

  There, right up next to the cracked and dust-whitened glass, something was moving.

  Without thinking about it—had she been thinking clearly, she might not have done it at all—Charly swung her legs over the edge of the well and lowered herself down. The drop was about four feet, but the desiccated leaves from a nearby oak cushioned her bare feet enough to make her descent painless. Yet when she bent down—the top of her mostly bare ass bumping the cool metal ridges all the way—she was suffused with an alarming ooze of dread. On hands and knees, she lowered her face to what she could now see was Kate’s toad, or at least what was left of it. One side of its face seemed to cave in with each respiration, and a dark apostrophe of blood bubbled from the corner of its mouth. Forgetting all the conditioning of adulthood, Charly viewed the dying animal through her daughter’s eyes, scooted her fingers under it as gently as she could, and brought it close to her face. As she and the toad regarded each other, a wetness started between her fingers, and she thought, It’s pissed on me. I forgot they always do that. When she switched the toad to her other hand she saw the loop of guts dangling from its anus, a sinister horde of tiny black ants already teeming over the yellow-looking entrails. With a gasp Charly dropped the toad and immediately felt guilty for adding to its misery. Then she cast about feebly for a rock or something with which to end its suffering. But that too was denied her, the floor of the dank well comprised of hard-packed dirt. Charly swallowed and snatched up a handful of leaves. She scattered them over the toad and, moaning with sadness and an equal measure of revulsion, stepped on it. It squelched under her bare foot with a sound that reminded her of an old woman farting. When she lifted her foot, she discovered a good part of her heel was wet. Its blood is on your feet, she thought and had an insane urge to laugh.

  She climbed out of the window well and sat panting. Again, she felt something draw her gaze, and she followed an urge that wasn’t mere deduction but wasn’t quite psychic power either and found, at shoulder level on the white brick façade, the dark splotch of blood where Eric had smashed the poor toad.

  She pictured her husband reassuring their daughters that he’d make certain their little toad was safe. God, Kate had even named it, she now remembered. Elton John, because “Rocket Man” was one of Kate’s favorite songs. Her husband probably even talked to Elton John on the way to the window well, You’re a good little toad, aren’t you, Elton boy, you’re a nice little piece of shit. You want me to be your errand boy, Charly? Well here’s your fucking errand. And winding up like Nolan Ryan, Charly’s father’s favorite player, even if he didn’t play for the Cubs, Eric hurled poor Elton John toward the white brick wall like he was pitching a fastball in the World Series. Never mind that their daughters loved the toad, if only for a few hours. Never mind that the animal didn’t die on impact, had to suffer the indignity of having its guts eaten by ants. Never mind—

  “You hear that?” Sam asked.

  Charly blinked and stared up at him in the meager light of the cave.

  She listened, comfortable now with Sam even though their faces were very close. She didn’t hear anything but the dim roar of the storm outside. She told him so.

  “I thought I heard voices,” he said, and after a brief look of deliberation, he proceeded deeper into the cave.

  Charly shook her head. Now why, she wondered, had she thought of Elton John?

  Because you’re sleep deprived and because you’re walking in near darkness.

  No, she thought, that’s not all of it. I remembered the toad because I was looking for it, and I found it with some kind of sixth sense.

  Nonsense.

  And that wasn’t the first time either, she argued on, hope leaping within her. If I can use that ability, harness it somehow, it could lead us to Jake.

  If you wanted to find your son, sweetheart, you wouldn’t be underground.

  Yes, but—

  —so don’t give me this “Sam led us in here” crap—

  He did, he—

  —wants to get laid, and you know it. He’s been making eyes at you since the first time you met—

  So? Maybe I like him making eyes at me—

  Yeah, and maybe you’re a cheap whore.

  Charly sucked in a startled breath.

  “What’s wrong?” Sam asked, stopping to look back at her.

  “Nothing.”

  But it was something; it was indeed. Because she now realized to whom that voice belonged. That cutting, wheedling voice she’d been hearing far too much of lately, mostly when she thought about what an asshole she’d married, and was it really impossible for her to take the kids and start a new life?

  Oh yes, the voice belonging to her mother-in-law whispered, of course you’d like to start a new life. Get yourself a fat alimony settlement, make sure you don’t have to get a real job, and live the rest of your life touching men’s dicks and sponging off my boy.

  Charly crinkled her brow, deeply thankful Sam couldn’t see her right now, couldn’t watch her face twisting as she fought and lost a battle with her own mind. She knew that’s what it was, of course, for Eric’s mother didn’t really talk that way. Frieda Florence—God, the first time Charly had heard the woman’s name, she thought Eric had been joking, came perilously close to exploding into laughter—never said things outright, never condemned Charly in any direct way. It was how she operated: insinuating, suggesting, inflicting damage without ever lacing up the gloves.

  Now Frieda Florence’s voice assaulted her, manumitted from the mores that suppressed total honesty, free to wreak whatever havoc she could on Charly’s weary psyche.

  Down here huddled close to another man, Frieda clucked, while your husband is back at the house faithfully awaiting word on Jake. Why don’t you two kiss? That would be lovely. Have yourselves a nice little makeout session while Eric tries to hold your family together.

  You don’t know me, she thought, her eyes filling. Every single thought I’ve had since last night has been about Jake. My heart is breaking with the comfort I can’t provide him, and my breasts are about to burst with the milk I can’t give him. He can’t survive on his own, can’t go much longer without feeding. My God, I only started him on solid foods a couple weeks ago, how will he survive—

  Sam said, “You ever do this before?”

  As if rising from a great depth, Charly said, “Have I been alone with a man who wasn’t my husband in the dark before?”

  “I was thinking of spelunking.”

  “No way,” she said. “The idea of it always made me qu
easy.”

  “Me too. When I started working for a commercial construction company—this was in the summer between my sophomore and junior year at WIU—”

  “You went to Western?”

  She could hear the smile in his voice. “Sure.”

  “What year did you graduate?”

  “Uh-uh,” he said. “You’ll threaten to put me in the nursing home.”

  She was silent a moment before she said, “I didn’t know you went to college.”

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Blue-collar guy like me?”

  “That’s part of it,” she admitted. “But it’s more that you remind me of my dad.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your personality, at least. He was a lot taller than you.”

  “Ah.”

  She took a breath. “He was handsome like you.”

  A voice behind them muttered, “Isn’t that sweet.”

  Charly cried out, her hand darting away from Sam’s belt loop.

  Eric rushed toward them.

  Flashlight beams fluttered wildly around the corridor, the sounds of a scuffle. Sam brought his own beam around to illuminate the others. Charly distinguished Melanie Macomber with a hand to her chest and her mouth in a frightened O. Beside her, Robertson and Eric were wrestling, the sheriff endeavoring to put Eric in a headlock. But Eric was too quick and angry for him.

  “Don’t do it,” Sam said as Eric began to break free.

  “Stupid cocksucker,” Eric said.

  Charly wondered which man Eric was referring to. Maybe both.

  “Mr. Florence, I’m telling you—” Sam started, but Eric ripped free of the sheriff’s grasp and came spinning toward them, one fist already cocked high. Charly sidestepped him as he hurtled toward Sam. She watched Eric’s balled fist arc wildly through the air, the haymaker missing and bringing him right on top of Sam, who’d bunched in a tight crouch and immediately pistoned a fist up into Eric’s gut. Eric doubled over with an astounded oof, and Sam popped out from beneath him. Quicker than Eric could retaliate or even stand erect, Sam jackhammered the side of his head with two lightning jabs.