Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  “All the single ladies…all the…single….”

  Reaching out of the spray, Joel turned off the water, squeak squeak squeak, listening intently.

  Coulda sworn he’d heard something outside the bathroom.

  “Hello?” he called, straining to hear over the sound of dripping water. The clock on the bathroom wall counted down the seconds. Click. Click. Click.

  His mama’s shotgun was propped up between the toilet and the vanity, a pump-action Weatherby Upland with a walnut stock. Joel whipped aside the curtain (relieved to find no one standing on the other side), wrapped a towel around his waist, and traded the cognac for the shotgun.

  “Yo!” He racked the action loudly, ejecting a good shell into the toilet. “Shit.”

  A plastic Dr. Pepper bottle full of rocks had been balanced upside-down on the doorknob. He took it down and left it on the sink. Snatching the door open, he leveled the shotgun at the hallway, his finger tensing on the trigger.

  Nobody out there.

  He relaxed, but only a bit.

  Someone banged on the front door, making him jump. Joel padded down the hallway to the front door, looking through the peephole. A man in a black uniform was standing out on the porch. Lieutenant Bowker saluted as if touching the brim of an invisible cowboy hat. “Bitch better found my Velvet,” Joel muttered under his breath, standing the shotgun behind the sofa. He opened the door.

  The autumn breeze that wafted in around the officer’s considerable bulk made Joel’s nipples hard. “Hi there,” said Bowker, saluting again. “Thought I’d stop by on the way home and check up on you. You doin all right, buddy?”

  Joel shivered uncontrollably. “Y-yeah, I’m aight.”

  “The hell happened to your chest?”

  He glanced down as if he’d forgotten about the scratches.

  “I fell.”

  “Christ Chex Mix, what’d you trip over, a freakin mountain lion?” The officer looked down at Joel’s towel. “Mind if I come in? Looks like this draft is cuttin you in half.”

  “Oh Lord yeah. Come in.”

  He stepped into the foyer and Joel closed the door behind him. When he turned around again, Bowker had pulled out what looked like a phaser from Star Trek and was pointing it at him.

  After Joel’s brain eventually settled on what it was an awkward three seconds later (a Taser), he recoiled, showing the man his palms. “I’m sorry,” Bowker said, stepping forward, pressing Joel backward into the living room. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. And I really hate to do this to ya. It’s probably the first time we’ve ever really had a problem like this. Normally he’s tidy enough that we can keep our hands clean.”

  “What you mean? Who’s tidy?”

  The edge of the coffee table bumped into Joel’s calves. His hands hovered at waist height, held open as if he were about to catch something. Bowker had walked him far enough that the cop now stood between him and the sofa, where the shotgun was hidden.

  The cop’s eyes wandered around the room, assessing the curtains. They were all drawn, the venetian blinds air-tight. Whatever happened to Joel would be between them and them alone. “You wasn’t supposed to live.” The beats of his speech stretched luxuriantly, like Foghorn Leghorn. “Blood for the garden, son, it’s the Serpent’s job to thin the herd. And it’s our job to keep people out of his business.”

  “The Serpent?” Joel let his hands drift downward to his sides.

  “Their man. He does what they need him to do, we keep them safe from prying eyes. In return they let us live.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “Don’t be coy with me, boy. You know who I’m talkin about.”

  “The witches?” Joel gaped at him. He surreptitiously tucked his thumbs into the towel around his waist like a ranchhand. “You in cahoots with them witches that killed Annie Martine? Marilyn Cutty?”

  “I don’t know about any ‘witches’, but they run this here town. They run everything. They always have and always will.” Bowker flicked the safety on the Taser. “And like I said, I hate to do this, but it’s got to be done. No loose ends, boy. Can’t have you runnin around tellin stories, you know.”

  “Cletus, you call me boy one mo goddamn time and I’m gonna break your leg off and beat you with the tender end.”

  “I doubt it,” said Bowker, firing the Taser.

  At the same time, Joel ripped off the towel, holding it out like a matador teasing a bull with a cape. The electric barbs tangled up in the terrycloth, tak-tak-tak-tak, and he charged forward, shoving with both fists. His knuckles slapped into Bowker’s Second Chance vest as if Joel were hitting him with shock paddles. The cop’s feet cycled, trying to find traction, and he stumbled backward into the foyer, slipping on a rug.

  Joel reached behind the sofa, scooped up the shotgun, and pirouetted away. BOOM! Bowker fired his Glock into the living room, shattering a window.

  Darting through the living room, Joel burst through the door at the other end and came out down the hallway from Bowker.

  BOOM! A mirror hanging on the wall shattered, spraying glass all over him. He yelped and kept running all the way down to the end of the hall. BOOM! The glass in the back door imploded all over his hands as he wrenched it open. “Ohh! Jesus!”

  The Glock barked again, flashing in the shadows. Joel shoved the storm-door open and something punched him in the right thigh, blood spattering the screen.

  Throwing himself out onto the back stoop, Joel’s knee gave out and he stumbled down the back stairs, dropping the shotgun in the dewy grass. Luckily, it didn’t go off.

  Cold air shrouded his wet, naked body, raising goosebumps and wracking him with shivers. The back yard was only a narrow strip of grass running alongside a paved alley, and another house loomed behind a board fence.

  Joel staggered out into the alleyway, dragging the Weatherby by the barrel, the gravel digging into his bare feet.

  BOOM! Splinters exploded from the fence. He threw up an arm to protect his face, running naked into the night. Dogs barked in the distance.

  “Police!” spat Bowker. “Stop!”

  The lights came on in the house across the alley, cutting the shadows and washing away the hiding spots. Joel kept sprinting, his bare feet slapping on the alley’s buckled asphalt.

  A gate in the fence. Joel hauled it open and BOOM!, a bullet thumped into the wood slats, almost tearing it out of his hand. He forged through into darkness again, this time watched over by squares of light on either side.

  An air conditioner grumbled in the shadows. Joel ran full-tilt across the gravel and grass, hurdling the AC unit. When he landed, he paused, turned, aimed at the gate he’d just ran through.

  As soon as Bowker pulled it open, Joel fired a shell at him. Buckshot roared through the gap. Bowker swore out loud, flinching. Joel racked the shotgun, cha-chak!, ejecting the empty casing against the side of the house.

  The gate came open again. He turned and ran, exploding from between two porches into the sickly blue glow of a streetlight, almost slipping in dewy grass. He ran catty-corner left, throwing himself across the hood of a car.

  Skrrrrrt! Naked ass won’t slide like Luke Duke. “Ow!” Joel flailed onto the street.

  BOOM-CRASH!, the windshield behind him collapsed.

  He half-ran half-crawled toward a house, the shotgun clattering across the road, the night wind curling around his shoulders and legs. Bowker’s pistol went off again, the bullet sparking off the driveway, close enough to bounce chips of tarmac off Joel’s ankles.

  Between the garage and the house was a wooden gate. He slammed into it at full-speed, throwing it open.

  In the last second before he turned and shut it, he could see Bowker hustling across the road in that shuffling middle-aged-cop way, mincing and huffing with his elbows up.

  Behind the fence was a below-ground swimming pool. All the lone security light in the back did was silver the surface of the water. Frantic and bleeding, Joel sidestepped into the corner between t
he fence and the wall.

  As soon as his back hit the fence, Bowker tore his way in and lumbered to a stop next to the pool. The gate flapped open in front of Joel’s hiding spot, covering him in shadow.

  “The hell you go?” demanded the cop, panting like a plowhorse.

  Cradling the Weatherby against his cheek like a bouquet, Joel tried to stop breathing so hard and stay as still as possible. The cognac in his system had all but burned off with the adrenaline, leaving him trembly but clear-headed. Cold blood trickled down his smooth shaved leg like a crawling spider.

  He was steeling himself up to shove the gate out of the way and ambush Bowker when the officer turned and closed it himself.

  “Ooo!” Joel screamed in terror, hipfiring buckshot into Bowker’s chest with a burst of light and a noise like a grenade going off. The black uniform shirt disintegrated in a blizzard of fabric and the force toppled the cop backwards into the pool. Splash!

  Blinking away the muzzle-flash, his ears ringing, Joel stood over the water with the shotgun pressed to his shoulder. The ironsight lined up on the man splashing and gargling in the water. Fish in a barrel.

  Click. Empty.

  Shit.

  The lack of recoil he’d braced for never came, making him wobble. He scowled at the shotgun in surprise as if it had offended him and flung the gate open. “That’s all, folks!” he said, running back the way he’d come.

  “I’m—gonna—get—” Bowker ranted with a mouth full of water, kicking and thrashing like a beached whale.

  Running across the street and ducking back down into the shortcut between the houses, Joel saw a lot more windows shining in the dark. The impromptu gunfight had disturbed half the town.

  He didn’t bother locking the doors when he got back to Mama’s house, Bowker would just kick the doors down and ruin the locks anyway. He ran into his bedroom, wriggled his way into the first outfit he laid hands on and a pair of boat shoes. Grabbed his cellphone, wallet, and keys.

  A sudden dilemma presented itself: shotgun or cognac? Shotgun or cognac?

  He left the Weatherby Upland lying on his bed and rescued the Alizé from the bathroom—no point in keeping the shotty, he didn’t have time to forage in his sock drawer for the rest of the shells or load them. But the cognac was fifty bucks a bottle and he’d be damned if he was going to let it sit around open until he came back. Besides, he needed the liquid courage. In the foyer, he noticed the handle of the Bedazzled baseball bat sticking out of the urn by the front door where Kenway had left it, and snatched it up.

  “Bubba, you gotta come get me,” he said when Fish answered the phone. Joel shut the front door, almost stopped to lock it, thought better, jumped down the front steps, vaulting the fence with the cellphone in one hand and the blue cognac and ball bat in the other. The officer’s gray-brown police Charger was parallel-parked on the street, one tire on the sidewalk.

  “What are—” Fish started to say.

  A splotch of blood was seeping through Joel’s jeans where the Glock had clipped him. His voice jiggled with every footfall. “I been shot. A cop came to Mama’s house and tried to murder my black ass. I’m runnin down the hill right now.”

  “I’m on my way,” Fish told him. “Why is—”

  “Because I was supposed to die,” Joel said breathlessly. The slope turned precipitous and he ran down the sidewalk past a row of townhouses, moonlight showering through the mimosa trees. “I got hemmed up by a mufuckin serial killer last night, and—”

  “A what?”

  “Dude drugged me, strung me up in a garage with another dude but the other dude was dead. Little boy saved me. I got out.”

  Fish was incredulous. “The hell? Why didn’t you call me?”

  Joel winced at the shock in his brother’s voice. “Didn’t wanna bother you. You got y’own thing goin on—”

  “Didn’t wanna bother me? Are you insane?”

  Thank God for cardio. He glanced over his shoulder, expecting the flashing lights of Bowker’s police cruiser at any moment. “Insane—that shit is debatable. Anyway, this killer is apparently on police payroll and a boy in blue came to my house to finish the job.”

  At the end of the block Joel cut right, running down the street. “I’m gonna hide in the park. The one down the hill where they do the farmers’ market. Come get me.”

  “What on Earth have you got yourself into, big brother?”

  “I’ll tell you more when you get here. Peace be on ya.” He slowed enough to slip the iPhone into his pocket and took off again, trading the Batdazzle to his free hand. As he ran, he tried to figure out how he was going to climb a tree with the bottle of Alizé without breaking it.

  20

  TO ROBIN’S DISAPPOINTMENT, THERE was no psychic blowback as she walked into her childhood home. The house had no aura of paranormal energy. To her eyes, it was what it had always been: a lonely, drafty gingerbread with memories hanging in the corners like cobwebs. Not that she had anticipated it. This strange extra-sensory perception she’d picked up since coming back to Blackfield was thoroughly new, and in fact she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a delusion. Regardless of what Kenway had insinuated, she had been dealing with schizophrenia for the majority of a decade. At this point she knew what was a hallucination and what wasn’t.

  In fact, in many cases the Abilify had helped overwhelm illusions induced by witches. The colony of newbie heartless that she’d encountered in Oregon last August—a backwoods death-cult commune led by a 110-year-old woman calling herself Susie-Q—had tried to trick her into believing she was in the middle of a roaring forest fire, but an emergency thirty milligrams of anti-psychotics had sufficiently untied her brain. Night-night for the newbies.

  Checking her own phone, she silently cursed herself for missing her medication deadline. She’d been so focused on getting the videos edited and put up and so anxious about going back to Underwood Road that she’d forgotten all about it. She asked Leon for a glass of water and Wayne led her to the kitchen sink, pouring some tap water into a Mason jar.

  TAKE 2 5MG TABLETS BY MOUTH EVERY DAY, the directions on the side of the bottle said. Her pill bottle only had a handful of doses left in it. She would have to pursue another prescription soon. She had been titrating down, rationing them at one five-milligram tablet a day, trying to make them last. The prescription was always hard to get, because she was so outwardly high-functioning, and to be honest, other than hallucinating the tall hairy thing again and the occasional voice,

  ( t h e r i n g r i n g t h e r i n g i n e e d t h e r i n g )

  she felt okay.

  What was that? she thought, reeling, the glass in her hands.

  The last doctor, the asshole in Memphis four months ago, he’d been an uphill battle. “I’m sorry, ma’am, the medication’s side-effects—ischemic stroke, seizures, the risk of anaphylactic shock…. I mean, two hundred and forty pills? I can’t advocate prescribing this much on a whim.”

  “Attention whore,” the nurse at the mental hospital had called her. “You just want the pills because they make you feel special. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re faking it; mental illness ain’t even a disability to you, is it? It’s a badge of honor. To you, it’s an excuse to be a shit.”

  Attention whore. And now she had a YouTube channel with five million subscribers. Pushing one tablet between her lips, she gulped it down with some metallic-tasting water.

  Wayne stared at her, his jaw set. “Are you okay?”

  When he went around to the other side of the kitchen it seemed like a preemptive gesture, as if he wanted to put the table between them. “I’m fine,” she said, pouring out the rest of the water and leaving the jar in the sink. “Have a headache, is all. Thank you for the water.”

  They regarded each other from across the room.

  ( t h e r i i i i n g )

  “You’re welcome,” said the boy, and he stumbled back into the living room, giving her the side-eye as he went.

  Robin hugg
ed herself, letting her eyes wander around the familiar-but-not-familiar kitchen. What she remembered as green was now blue, and next to the replaced appliances it gave her an odd sensation of Capgras delusion, as if she were talking to an old friend wearing a mask. Holding up her GoPro, she stared into the lens and sighed, giving it a meaningful look. The show wasn’t just about the things she faced, it was about her…that’s what the viewers were there for. Come for the demons, stay for the girl. But this time, she couldn’t find the words to encapsulate the way she felt in this alien home.

  So she capped off those bottled-up feelings with her ringmaster top-hat. “You guys out there in Internet Land ready for a show?”

  When she came back to the living room, the children sat on the sofa watching her raptly, as if Robin were a magician about to put on a show. Leon was propped against the bookshelves next to the television, his arms folded impatiently, and Kenway leaned in the foyer doorway.

  “The creature you saw in that shadow-version of your house,” Robin said, wringing her hands as she paced in front of the TV, “I’ve been seeing it off and on for a couple of years now.” She debated telling them about the schizophrenia, but the look on Leon’s face told her that it would erode his trust. “…I think it’s the same thing, anyway. Whatever it is, I’ve been seeing it more since I came back to Blackfield. Since this is my old house, I think it has something to do with me.”

  “What do you think it is?” asked Wayne.

  “I don’t know. But I’d like to try to find it and get a better look at it.”

  He shook his head emphatically. The expression of terror on his face was genuine. “Oh, no, you don’t want to see it. Owlhead is scary as hell.”

  Pete spoke up. “Your mother was a witch, wasn’t she, ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe it’s here because of her.”

  Robin was quiet for almost a full minute. She thought about asking the boy Why would my mother call down something like that?, but she knew he would have no answer. She wanted to be offended at the thought of sweet, demure Annie being responsible for the monster they were calling Owlhead, but it was pointless. “I don’t know,” she said again, and sighed deep. “Well, if we’re going to get on with it, there’s no time like now. Wayne, do you have your mother’s ring with you?”