Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  As Robin went to ignite her sleeve, Chandler reached into the sink with her other hand and came up with a dirty carving knife. She hooked it at the girl, trying to stab her and spray herself with the sink hose at the same time.

  Robin jerked away. The plastic nozzle showered the witch’s head with cold water, soaking her hair and running down her face, washing away the blood and oil-slime. She maneuvered around, trying to spray the fire on her back, but all she could seem to manage was to half-drown herself and shoot water over her shoulder onto the floor.

  “Help me!” cried Chandler, water arcing all over the kitchen. “Why would you do this to an old lady like me? What have I ever done to yoooouuuuu?”

  Video-Robin flung the refrigerator door open. Condiment bottles and a stick of butter clattered to the floor at her feet. Reaching in, Robin grabbed the neck of a bottle of Grey Goose. The last fifth sloshed around in the bottom.

  Chandler shoved the fridge door closed, almost on Robin’s head. “HELP ME!” roared the slack-faced creature in the bathrobe. Her jaw had come unhinged, and two rows of tiny catlike teeth glistened wetly in the pit of her black maw. Her eyes were two yellow marbles, shining deep in bruise-green eye sockets. “HELP ME OR YOU’LL BURN WITH ME!”

  Pressing her ragged stinking body against Robin’s, Chandler wrapped her arms around the other’s chest in a bear-hug.

  Prickly, inhuman teeth brushed against the girl’s collarbone.

  Robin loosed an incoherent shriek and flailed, pushing and slapping at Chandler’s shoulders and face. Those horrible teeth scratched at her hands and the witch craned forward, her great moray-eel mouth clapping shut at empty air.

  Crash! Robin clubbed the hag across the forehead with the Grey Goose fifth, shattering the bottle. The liquor inside hit the flames and exploded.

  “EEEEEEE!” the flaming figure keened, fully engulfed now and stumbling blindly around the kitchen, leaving little puddles and clues of fire all over the cabinets and the little dining table with the checkered Italian-cafe tablecloth. Stacks of old books on the table caught, the grimoires going up in a whoosh. Robin fell back, escaping to a hallway which would have been too dark to navigate if it hadn’t been for the screaming bonfire.

  “KILL HER,” Chandler howled. “KIIILL HERRR!”

  Robin ran down the hallway and came out behind a piano in the living room. She pushed the cat out of the way and slid over the top of the thing on her belly, plowing through a feathery coat of dust and cat hair. Struggling to her feet, she shoved through the screen door and ran out into the front yard.

  A crowd of people had assembled in the street, thirty or forty neighbors in various states of undress. They stood stock-still and rigid, their hands dangling at their sides, staring at her, eyes shining green in the dark.

  “Mrrrrrr,” hummed a man in a hooded sweatshirt. “Rrrrwww.”

  Kenway was entranced by the action taking place on the screen. “What in the balls is even going on right now,” he said, leaning over the Macbook, eyes fixed on the video. “Is he—is that guy growling like a house cat?”

  “Her familiars,” Robin told him, not looking up from her salad.

  In the video, she juked left, running underneath the lemon tree and around the side of Chandler’s tract house, between the board fence and the clapboard wall.

  The pounding of sneakered feet made it clear that the familiars were chasing her. The fence ended near the back corner and Robin jumped the sidewalk, almost losing her footing, sprinting across the street. She opened the driver door of the CONLIN PLUMBING van and threw herself inside, wriggling into the seat.

  Through the window she could see half the neighborhood pouring out of the gap behind the fence like hornets from a nest, and just as terrifying.

  When she went to shut the door, she slammed it on the meaty arm of a fat man in an old Bulls jersey, the collar frayed around his hoary neck. “Mrrrr!” he growled. His eyes were green screwheads.

  Her keys were already in the ignition. She twisted it until she thought she would snap it off in the steering column. The van chugged a few times and turned over mightily, GRRRRUH!

  Crazed, yowling people clustered around the van and started hammering the panels with their fists, clawing at the windows and prying at the hood. Jersey Man’s arm flapped into the cab with her, fighting her hands, and he found her throat with the fork of his palm, pressing it against her windpipe.

  Her neck was pinned against the headrest. She couldn’t breathe.

  Thrusting her foot into the floorboard, she found the accelerator and put all her weight on it. The engine snarled, vibrating the van, revving hard, so hard that for a second she thought it would come apart, but nothing else happened.

  “Fffffk,” she choked out, fumbling for the gearshift.

  The passenger window imploded in a tumble of glass and someone reached in at her.

  Robin put the van in Drive and stood on the gas again. This time the machine leapt forward, catching hard and plowing low as if she was up to the headlights in water. The engine coughed once, twice, the drive-train rumbled, and then the crowd fell away and she was barreling down the street.

  Bodies fell in the headlights and the van clambered over them, bonk-badunk-clank-bang.

  She twisted the steering wheel this way and that, trying to shake off the two men halfway inside the cab with her, but only the one hanging out the window fell. The van hauled back and forth, teetering with the gravity of a Spanish galleon on the sea.

  “Rrrrrowww!” complained Jersey Man, his fingers still clamping Robin’s neck to the seat. She could feel her heartbeat in her face.

  “Here, kitty-kitty.”

  She jerked the wheel to the left and sideswiped a telephone pole.

  The wooden trunk slammed into the man’s shoulder and knocked him off, his fingernails biting into the skin under her ear. Her tires barked and wailed as Robin fought to keep the van under control. The telephone pole scraped down the side of the vehicle, beating on the hollow panels with a noise like thunder.

  She glanced at the side mirror. Two dozen men and women were running helter-skelter down the street behind her, looking for all the world like a midnight marathon.

  She did not stop. She did not slow down. She drove on.

  When the camera cut to a new shot the sun had come up, turning the sky a sickly dawn gray. A firetruck’s silent flasher strobed red across the side of Neva Chandler’s house, or at least what was left of it. Wet black pikes jutted up from shards of siding and electrical conduits. Robin crept into the back yard and lifted the silver dagger from the weeds, retreating to her van.

  “Good work,” said a voice from the back.

  The video ended and became a grid of links to related videos. Kenway clicked the link at the bottom that took him back to the main MalusDomestica page and then clicked through to the list of Robin’s video thumbnails.

  There were at least two hundred videos.

  8

  KENWAY SAT QUIETLY, SCROLLING through page after page of YouTube’s MalusDomestica videos. He didn’t watch any of them, but he was hunched over the computer like a Hollywood hacker, gazing intently at each thumbnail as if he could divine its contents by osmosis.

  Turmoil spun in Robin’s head like hot bathwater going down a drain, leaving her cold and empty and apprehensive inside. What does he think? Is he scared of me now? No, not possible. He’s a vet, his leg’s been…. Does he think I’m a flake? A fake? A nerd?

  Nerd. I can live with nerd.

  Finally, he looked up from the computer and regarded her with a wary, squinty eye. A battle was taking place in his head too, she could tell. She could almost hear the mental gears clanking.

  She couldn’t take it anymore. “Well? Did I scare you away?”

  “Hell no,” Kenway blurted, talking to the screen with a weird nervous chuckle. “That was bad-ass. That was the most badass thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube. Up til now I thought it was all just—just people falling down and animal vid
eos.” His eyes darted back up to her. “Now I know why you make the big bucks. You’re a one-woman production company. Do you do all your own special effects and everything?”

  Caught off-guard, Robin tilted her head. “Yeeeah, you could say that,” she said with a coy wince. Her mouth screwed up to one side. “Sure.”

  His mouth twitched, his face softened.

  “I hate to interrupt you,” she asked, reaching out to tug the Macbook in her direction with a finger, “but do you mind if I get back to work editing today’s video?”

  Kenway’s mental gears slipped. “Oh. Oh! Yeah. Yeah, here you go.” He turned the laptop around and watched her face over the Macbook’s lid as if he were waiting for some kind of tell. Does he think it’s an elaborate joke? She closed the web browser and pulled up the video-editing console.

  Noticing the sandwich on the table by his hand, Kenway seemed to remember that he had food and picked it up, eating and staring into the middle distance.

  “I want to be on your channel,” he said when he finished, startling her. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and wadded it up, shooting at the trash barrel from his seat. The balled-up napkin bounced off the wall and landed on the ground. “I want to fight witches too.”

  Robin was speechless. “You what?”

  “I’m tired as shit of hanging around doin what I do. Bein the starving-artist cripple that spends all his time up in his studio painting.” Kenway got up and went over to the trash, leaning against the wall to snatch the paper off the ground and toss it.

  When he came back to her, he leaned on the table with both hands as if he were about to make a business proposal. “It’s okay I guess. I mean, it’s better than sittin around with my thumb up my ass. But I do the car stuff because I’m good at it, not because I have a passion for it. And the paintings…eh. I thought I wanted to be a painter a long time ago. I’ll be straight with you, it’s wearin kinda thin.”

  Kenway thrust a hand at the Macbook. “Shit! Look at these videos! That’s passion!” Sitting down, he threw back the last of the beer in the bottle and busied his hands with squeezing the cap into a clamshell shape. “That’s different, man. I wanna do something different for a change.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  He sat there peeling the label off the bottle for a little while, just long enough to give her time to finish the final touches on the video. She went to YouTube and started the transfer. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth of why I came here, Robin. And why I stayed.”

  Cool anticipation trickled through her at recognizing the veiled pain on his face.

  “When I lost my leg, it was my buddy Hendry, Chris Hendry, that pulled me out of that vehicle and put a tourniquet on me. Combat medic. He was in the vehicle behind us, he was the first one to get there.” Kenway rubbed his nose, pulling on it as if he were about to take a deep breath and dunk himself. He massaged his whole mouth, the beard grinding in his hand like dry grass. “But he couldn’t save everybody in there. Just me. It really messed him up, that he couldn’t save the others. After we got home, he didn’t do so hot. He had a lot of nightmares that year. Hard Christmas.”

  The YouTube transfer was going rather slow. Way too slow for a twenty-minute video…she was going to have to find an alternative upload point.

  “The next summer I came out here to see how he was doing. He was living in Blackfield and working at the mill. Had a Vicodin habit he was trying to kick, said he hurt his back in the, ahh—the incident. He had a job but it was on the rocks. No girlfriend, as far as I know. I got the idea in my head to take him out on the lake for a week, see if I could get him straightened up, right? He wasn’t too bad off yet. Not bad enough for rehab, I think. Maybe I caught him in time.”

  As he spoke, he twirled the beer bottle on its butt, staring down at it. His voice was low, introspective.

  “We spent a couple days out on a pontoon boat, fishing, tellin stories, had a good time. He looked good. He was laughing and making jokes. I thought he might be leveling out. Then one morning—that Wednesday—I got up, made coffee, and I was making breakfast when I went in to wake him up, and when I put my hand on him he was fucking cold.”

  Ice ran down Robin’s spine. She didn’t know what to do, or what to say, and suddenly this enormous man seemed so vulnerable and dark. He became an emotional hot potato in her hands.

  “It was 95 degrees that morning, and it was like, almost noon when I went in there. He was cold, colder than 95 degrees. I remember the temperature because of that giant round thermometer on the cabin porch. How do you get colder than that? He felt like somebody stole him and replaced him with a ham. Right there, in that bedroom, I thought he was playing a prank on me and had put something under his blankets. And he was hiding in the closet, waiting to jump out and laugh at me.”

  The stupid visual made him smirk darkly, but then he retreated into himself again.

  “He brought the Vicodin to the cabin. Nothing left in the bottle.” Kenway shrugged slowly. “I reckon he had died during the night. Probably took it all before he laid down.” Closed his eyes, pressed the bottle against his mouth and tilted his head back, letting the very last drop of beer trickle down the glass onto his tongue.

  Kenway put the bottle down and licked his lips, holding the bottle in both hands and staring down at it as if it were a precious heirloom. “I made breakfast and drank coffee while the man that saved my life was dead in the next room. And I didn’t do shit about it.”

  “Oh my God,” said Robin.

  Kenway sat up straight and rolled his neck, squeezing his shoulder. “And I’ve been here ever since. …That was about three years ago.” He shot the bottle into the garbage with a bang and a rumble. “I don’t know, it just didn’t seem right to leave, you know? Felt like I was turnin my back on him. Walkin away from him. I couldn’t do it.”

  Thoughts of hugging him occurred to her, but actually doing it seemed inappropriate. Instead, she reached over and squeezed his hand.

  His eyes met hers and he smiled sadly.

  “I’ve been over all my woulda-coulda-shouldas,” he said, patting her hand. The palm of his bear-paw was rough, leathery. “You spend a lot of time in your head when you’re painting. I think—ahh hell, this…isn’t really great lunch conversation, is it?” Kenway’s hand slithered out from under her own and he wadded up the sandwich wrapper, pitching it into the garbage too.

  He was about to get up and probably say his see-ya-round when she reached out and took hold of his wrist.

  “No,” she blurted. “—I mean, yes, well, it’s not, but I—”

  He was nibbling the corner of his mouth, studying her face. In the sunlight, his eyes were the pale, dirty blue of a shallow lagoon, almost gray. He blinked and his eyebrows rose expectantly.

  “Look, okay,” she said, glancing at the progress bar on her video upload. Two percent. The battery in her laptop would die before it ever got to twenty. “Umm. You’re already in this video I’m trying to upload. You can be in the next one too. …You don’t have to leave.”

  Kenway visibly relaxed, settling into his seat. “I don’t know why I had to tell you that messed-up story. You… I dunno, you seem like a good listener.”

  She smiled up at him. “I do a lot of talking to a camera. I like having someone to listen to for a change.”

  “So what’s on the agenda for the rest of the day?” Fetching a deep, deep sigh, Kenway stroked his beard, smoothing it down. “Doing any witch-hunting?”

  “Not today. Right now I’m trying to upload this video, but it’s taking forever. And I don’t have forever.”

  “I live in the middle of town.” He tossed a thumb over his shoulder. “So my internet’s great. Fast as hell. You’re more than welcome to come over and use mine.”

  “Smooth,” she said, a smile creeping across her face. An enigma wrapped in pain wrapped in silk. “But first, I’ve got something to show you. And if we’re telling stories, I should probably tell yo
u mine.”

  ❂

  As soon as the back doors of the van came open, Kenway recoiled in surprise, his eyes wide. The swords hanging from the pegboard glittered in the sunlight. “My God, you’ve got an arsenal in here. Look at all this.”

  “Part of being a witch-hunter.” Robin gathered her power adapter and— “Actually…” She had planned on riding with him in his truck, but it made more sense to just take the van over there. No sense in leaving it here unattended. “…How about I just follow you to your place?”

  “That’ll work.”

  Apparently when he was alone in the truck, Kenway drove like a maniac. She had trouble keeping up with him in her lumbering panel van. The GoPro was mounted on the dash, facing out the windshield, recording the chase. One of these days I’m going to have to have an actual car chase, she thought, grumbling up Hwy 9. The subscribers will love that.

  Traffic was light when they got into town a few minutes later, the lunchtime rush winding down for an afternoon of work.

  At the end of his block, Kenway whipped into a parking lot on the corner and she slid into a slot next to him. A sign standing in front of her grille said PARKING FOR STEVEN DREW D.D.S OFFICE ONLY. One just like it was in front of his Chevy.

  “What about this?” she asked him as they got out.

  “I painted the mural in his waiting room for free. He lets me park here so I don’t have to use the parallel parking or the angled parking in front of the shop.”

  “Oh.” Robin gathered her Macbook and charger, put them in her messenger bag, and unhitched the GoPro from its mount.

  “Doing some filming?” Kenway asked, leading her up the sidewalk, along the storefronts. His art shop was four buildings down, past two empty shopfronts, a Mexican cafe called El Queso Grande, and a DUI driving course. As she walked, Robin panned the camera around, shooting B-roll of the street and all the buildings that they could see.

  “Yep. I like to get as much footage as I can. Makes for a lot of variety and plenty of videos. The more videos you have, the more visible you are on YouTube.”