Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  Cutty stroked the cat. “I’m sure they’re where Hammer stole the Osdathregar that you’ve been killing witches with. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been looking for him.”

  The ominous stormfront had faded while they were eating, revealing a deep violet sky hidden behind shreds of blue-jean clouds. The sun was setting somewhere to the west, throwing a warmth on the heavens like a great bonfire at the edge of the world.

  Kenway was probably worried about her, Robin decided, and she didn’t want to be here any later at night than she could manage. Not that daylight made the witches any less dangerous, but she preferred it to the darkness. “Before I go,” she said, finishing her drink, “I want to see my mother. I think I deserve it.”

  “I’m impressed,” said Cutty.

  “At what?”

  “At how civil you’re being.” Marilyn Cutty narrowed her eyes. “I’ve watched some of your videos. There is a determination to you…this past couple of years has made you ferocious, for lack of a better word. Damn near feral. Is it the memories holding you back, littlebird?”

  Robin wasn’t sure. What she said was, “No.” That hate was still back there somewhere, but in the intervening time between Then and Now, it had grown cold and smooth and dark, like polished obsidian.

  The reply to that was wry and reflective. “You’re such a bad liar. It’s a good thing you got into killing witches and not professional poker.” Cutty rose from her chair, unfolding herself. “Welp, come on. Who am I to begrudge a daughter a visit with her mother?” The cat leapt down and followed her as she walked toward the darkness at the edge of the torchlight, pulling up one of the torches as she went.

  The last of the sun was enough to paint the vineyard in a muted haze of red and purple shadows. Robin followed the silhouette of the robed witch through the trellis rows and the citronella torch in her hand. Were it not for the sickly-sweet aroma of rotting grapes, the soft darkness would have made it hard to tell that the vineyard wasn’t some labyrinth of Shining hedges.

  Footsteps in the grass behind her. Theresa and the Parkins had joined them. The bayou witch walked like a man, her pudgy fists driving back and forth with each stride.

  Leon was closest, walking in Robin’s shadow. “You ain’t leavin us alone.”

  This entire experience must have been a shock for the man and his son, even after the past couple of days. They’d showed up for a peaceful steak dinner and ended up in the middle of a slow-motion battle of will. Robin hated to see them embroiled in it, but it had been inevitable from the moment Parkin had signed the lease on the house, regardless of how careful she could have been to exclude them.

  “I won’t,” she muttered to him. “Stick close, okay?”

  His jaw was set in stone, his eyes a combination of fear and strength. She could see the man in him that had socked Kenway Griffin in the face.

  32

  THE CONSTANT FEAR OF stepping off into a vertical drop made Joel reluctant to run full speed. He was one-hundred-percent blind back here in the depths of the mine shaft, and had no idea what he was running toward. Fish, on the other hand, seemed to have no such reservations, and Joel could only track him by the sound of his sneakers clapping against the sooty stone ahead.

  Behind them, Euchiss was swearing at the top of his lungs, cycling through a thesaurus of every curse and epithet he could come up with, and threatening every conceivable form of death and torture. “I’m gonna rip your dick off and feed it to birds! You broke my goddamn nose!”

  Deeper and deeper they went, the air thickening to a warm soup. Joel didn’t have any kind of cloth to cover his nose and mouth with, so he settled for breathing through his teeth and spitting every so often. After twenty minutes of running, he slowed to a jog. The cop’s shouting had dwindled away, leaving them in a bone-chilling silence.

  His mouth tasted like he’d been eating cheese and his jeans were wet where his stitches had come loose. “Wait up, Mr. Goodbody!” he pleaded with the invisible Fish.

  “I ain’t waitin up for shit. Come on.”

  “You need to slow down before you run off in a hole. I ain’t carrying your carbless ass out of here with two broke legs.”

  “He’s done shot me once, I ain’t about to sit still and give him another try. This ain’t Chuck E. Cheese, Joel, he ain’t here to win tickets.” He pronounced it Johl instead of Jo-elle, which he only did when he was pissed off. Joel figured it was his version of calling him by all three of his names. “Now how about you shut up before he hears us?”

  “We ain’t exactly church mice.”

  “Well, you ain’t helpin!”

  The tunnel extended on and on, some three or four hundred yards, he guessed, or maybe a quarter mile. Who knew?

  His sight returned some ten or twenty minutes later and the darkness became a faint, dreamlike hint of gray rock as light bounced in from some distant nook. A colorless square loomed ahead of them, only a shade lighter than the black around it. Rough surfaces led them into a tunnel that ran perpendicular to the first one, and as Fish stepped into reflected daylight, Joel understood that they’d reached a branching path.

  The right-hand shaft led toward the source of the sunlight. He came out into the intersection and squinted at a point of fierce white. Wind whispered and the sound of the cicadas drifted down to his ears.

  Fish took off running and a gun thundered behind them. A bullet ricocheted off the cave wall in front of Joel with a flower of sparks.

  “I see you down there!” shouted Euchiss.

  The two brothers burst out into fresh air and found themselves in an enormous rock valley, occupied by a handful of dilapidated wooden structures—a tall coal elevator and several small cabins. Beyond the buildings was a pond full of orange water, milky and placid. From here, it resembled tomato soup.

  To his surprised horror, Fish stopped and put up his hands. “The hell you doin?” Joel asked, rounding on him in shock. “We gonna—”

  “You’d be smart to join in, buddy,” said a man standing next to a red pickup truck, pointing a revolver at them. He wasn’t dressed like Euchiss—he had on a pair of Wranglers, snakeskin boots, and a blue chambray shirt—but he had Euchiss’s head, he had the man’s beady eyes and Irish-red hair.

  Exhausted confusion hit Joel so hard it was like a physical blow to the skull. “What…?”

  “I’d like you to meet somebody,” said a voice from the darkness behind them. Owen Euchiss came out of the cave with his rifle tucked under his arm like an English fox-hunter, pale cave-dirt smeared all over his black uniform shirt and trousers. His nose was a starburst of blood in the middle of his sooty face.

  ‘Opie’ Owen smiled, joining his Marlboro Man doppelgänger by the truck. “This is my brother Roy,” said the cop, clapping his brother on the shoulder. He spat blood. “Say hi, Roy.”

  “Hi, Roy,” said Roy.

  Twins.

  “This here’s who you were talkin about when you were jabberin about the Serpent in the car earlier. I take it our dearly departed Lieutenant Bowker said something about him when he came out to your house yesterday.”

  Roy smiled.

  “It’s okay, people have been confusing us for each other since we were kids. It’s nice to see you again, by the way, Pizza Man.”

  “You’re Big Red?” Something inside of Joel crumbled. He wasn’t sure if it was his heart, but it left him full of shards of disappointment and shocked anger.

  “I should shoot you right now for breakin my nose.” Owen lowered the rifle in a sharp, disengaging way and leaned it against the side of the snake truck. “But before we kill you, I want to show you something I think you’re gonna find high-larious.” He opened the snake-truck’s camper shell and pulled out a steel pole as tall as himself, and then another, and screwed them together.

  On the end of the two-piece pike was an L-shaped hook. “We use these to catch snakes,” he said, putting on a pair of rubber gloves. He cut across behind his brother and sauntered toward the
pond. “Come on.”

  Roy urged them along with his own rifle. “You try anything, I’ll shoot your balls off and watch you bleed to death.”

  A boardwalk led from the base of one of the cabins and ran down the hill, becoming a narrow dock. Owen led them down it onto the rust-orange water, the polehook thumping along like a walking stick.

  Monster-movie fog hovered around them, and the water was cloudy with some blotchy substance that resembled vomit. “Them women we work for, Cutty and them, they must think we’re stupid or something. They like to be secret-squirrel about it, but we know they get up to weird shit. Devil-worshippin and black magic and whatnot.” Owen spat blood in the water. “They do what they do and we do what we do, and they do it when we ain’t there. That’s fine with me: I don’t want to see it. Roy here works for em part-time, so I don’t go up there much. I’m okay with that.”

  At the end of the pier were two cinder blocks, and on top of them was a plank with two beer cans and a bottle. Somebody’s shooting range. Owen turned the polehook over and dipped it into the water. “This little pond didn’t always look like this,” he said, lowering it hand by hand. “I understand it’s here because the shaft flooded when the miners hit a big vein of iron-sulfite and pyrite back in… 66? 76?”

  “65,” said Roy.

  “Thanks.” Owen manipulated the pole like a gondolier. “Anyway, mines below the water table usually flood if you don’t pump em out regular, but this baby is fed by a gee-oh-thermic source. That’s a hot spring.”

  “I know what geothermic means,” said Fisher.

  Owen scowled, but continued. “From what I’ve been told, the iron sulfite dissolves in the water to create sulfuric acid. The county clerk calls it ‘acid mine drainage’. That’s why it smells like the devil’s farts.” He gestured around the pond, coughing once, softly. “As you’ve probably guessed by now, sulfuric acid makes this little spot a fantastic place to get rid of things. Everything you throw in here sort of drifts toward the shaft in the middle and disappears into the mines underneath, never to be seen again. It can’t be dredged by divers because of the acid and the heat, and it can’t be drained because of the spring. It’s perfect.”

  The water stank in a caustic, chalky way, burning Joel’s eyes with the smell of rotten eggs.

  “Still want me to whip you?” asked Roy.

  Joel glared at him, pointing at the rifle. “If you’ll let me stick that gun up your ass.”

  “Kinky.” Roy laughed. “So how was that steak?”

  “I’ve had better.”

  “Sorry, it must have been the carfentanyl I injected into it after I cooked it. How the hell did you get out of that garage? That roll-up was still locked when I got the door open. I didn’t see a damn thing back there in the dark.”

  “Magic, bitch. I’m a witch too, you know?”

  Roy’s smirk was a suspicious one. Joel coughed, breathing through his mouth again. The rotten-egg sulphur smell was getting to be too much.

  What came out of the water wasn’t a cat kennel full of bones like Joel expected, but something that looked like a piece of tinsel. They stepped aside so Owen could lay the pole down on the dock and he picked up the metal with his glove.

  “It’s braces,” he said, holding it up.

  Roy nodded. “Neither of them two Witness boys last month had braces. Must have been the girl from Thursday. Cough, I don’t remember her having dental work, though.” He coughed again, into his sleeve. The fumes from the pond were irritating their lungs.

  “Who gives a shit?” Owen tossed it back into the acid water.

  Fisher’s fists tightened, his biceps flexing. He was covered in sweat, and he was so pale from pain he’d gone the gray-purple of a California Raisin. “This is where you assholes were takin the cats?”

  “Yup.” The cop twin made an inclusive gesture, waving his gloved hand. He seemed to relish talking about the pond, like a proud fisherman demonstrating his secret spot. “We been dumping cats in here for ages. Shelter fills up four or five times a year. Only reason there were so many in there today was—cough, cough—we been up north with the girls all summer. I’d say there’s probably a good two or three thousand dead cats down there.”

  Jesus Christ, thought Joel.

  He fought the urge to kick one of them into the red-orange-brown water. I wonder how fast it burns. I wonder if they’d scream. “Why are you showin us this? Why the science lesson?”

  “Because I want you to go down knowin ain’t nobody ever gonna find you. Nobody will ever go lookin for two dumb niggers, especially not at the bottom of a eighty-foot sulphur spring.” Owen smiled. His teeth were stained with blood. “That’s for the treadmill.”

  “Man, let’s do em and get out of here, I’m chokin to damn death,” said Roy, slinging the rifle over his back and drawing his revolver.

  “Sounds like a plan. My nose is killin me anyway. I got to get to the hospital or somethin.” Owen stepped on each of his gloves, pulling them off, and pulled his Glock out of his service holster.

  Joel’s heart surged. “Wait—”

  Pointing the pistol, Owen flicked the safety and shot Fisher in the head.

  Gray and red billowed across the air in a fine spray and the whip-crack of the shot whispered through the trees. Breathless and surprised, Joel watched Fisher topple over (he would dream of this very moment, forever and ever amen, on the eternal DVR of his mind, backward, forward, and in slow-motion) and crash into the rust-colored water, flat on his back.

  The two redheads turned away as the splash flecked their skin and clothes with acid-water. Joel squinted against the droplets, letting them dot his naked chest, arms, face.

  The acid should have hurt, he assumed, but he couldn’t feel anything because he’d gone numb from the inside out. His heart tumbled into the pit of his stomach; his legs gave way and he fell on his hands and knees, staring down at the shadow that had once been his brother.

  Joel slumped forward, his forehead on his fists, his fists on the deck. All those times they’d fought, it would all now go unresolved. All those years they’d drifted apart, Joel taking care of their demented mother while Fisher steered clear of the blast radius, afraid and stricken at seeing her deterioriate, they’d never get to fix that.

  It was gone, forever and ever.

  Desolation shattered his thoughts into a million pieces. All he could do was stare bleakly. The wound in his leg burst its stitches as he’d knelt, but it was a thousand miles away. His lungs were squeezed empty and he couldn’t fill them again, like the hand of God was around his chest. His eyes swam with dangling tears, turning the planks under his hands into a dark kaleidoscope.

  “I figured I’d do him first, in front of you,” Owen said, coughing politely. He spat into the water again. “That was for the bucket. Hah, comedians always get it worst.”

  “Cruel, brother.” Roy pulled the revolver’s hammer back and coughed. The grumble of an engine reverberated from somewhere far away, sounding for all the world like a bumblebee in a tin can. “Sometimes I think you’ve got a mean streak in you.”

  Joel turned his head and growled at the muzzle of the Magnum, as venomously as he could manage.

  Roy smirked. “Little late for gettin pissy, don’t you—”

  A voice echoed from the cave at the top of the slope. Freddie Mercury howled, “Who waaaants to liiiiive foreverrrrr?”

  “The hell is that?” asked Owen, looking up.

  A pickup truck barreled out of the mine shaft, bearing down on them with one headlight. Ashe Armstrong stared through the Frontier’s smashed windshield, blood streaming down his face.

  Even as the truck swerved toward the pond and the boardwalk, Owen fired three shots from the Glock, POP, POP-POP. The first sank into the smashed quarter-panel, the second and third punching through the hood and knocking the rear window out.

  Ashe slammed up onto the dock, his engine squealing, and drove toward them. The boards crackled and popped under the weight of tw
o tons of metal, threatening to collapse, leaning forward.

  Three things happened at once then:

  Roy flung himself into the water,

  Joel rolled over like a dog and lay flat on his back,

  and Owen fired one last panicked shot into the Frontier’s crooked grin, screaming “Police—!” as if that would work.

  The Frontier slammed into Owen, the murderer’s body clattering against the front like a bag of bowling balls, and its undercarriage roared over Joel’s face with barely an inch of clearance. He rolled over onto his belly just in time to watch the truck drive off the end of the dock into the acid pond.

  In a daze of adrenaline and fumes, he stood up and his eyes wandered giddily around the scene. The truck must have carried Owen away, because he wasn’t anywhere in sight. Roy thrashed around in the red water to his right, screaming incoherently, his green shirt turning black. Joel stumbled down to where the home-made shooting range used to stand. The Frontier’s ass end stuck up out of the water like the Titanic, air-bubbles gurgling out from under the body.

  It was sinking. “Aaugh!” shouted Ashe, as he ripped the frames and broken glass out of the cab’s rear window, wedging himself into the gap. “Jesus! Jesus Christ! What is up with this water?”

  “It’s sulphur acid.”

  The tailgate was a few feet away, and the bed only had a few inches of water in it toward the front. Joel stretched out and stepped on the bumper, one foot on the dock and one foot on the Georgia license plate. “Climb back here, man, come on, I’ll get you out.”

  Ashe hauled himself through the back window and out, flopping like a newborn rhino into six inches of acid runoff. “Oh, ahh, shit,” he hissed, scrambling onto his hands and knees.

  Soupy water gushed through the gap between the bed and the frame, soaking his shirt and pants in foul rusty patches. Taking the vet’s hands, Joel pulled backward with every bit of strength he could muster, and Ashe clambered up and over the tailgate, throwing his weight over onto the dock. He sat up and gave Joel a hand back across, and the two of them sat there coughing, watching the truck sink into the pond.