I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

A guardrail.

  As soon as Joel placed the sound, a tremendous noise—a great shuddering BOOM like the world tearing in half—told him the truck had broken through, and the entire cargo compartment capsized to the right. Joel and Fisher and a hundred and forty-two cats slammed into the starboard wall and free-floated for about two and a half seconds.

  Instead of crashing into water like he’d anticipated, the truck pile-drove itself into solid ground.

  Forward momentum threw every cage into the front of the compartment and tore the brothers away from each other. Joel cartwheeled backward into the pile of kennels, bounced, and fell on top of Fisher. The ceiling sheared open with a furious, ear-destroying roar.

  And then, silence.

  * * *

  Blood dripped on the back of his head, an insistent tap, tap, tap. Joel opened his eyes to find himself lying on top of his brother, his face pressed against Fisher’s chest, listening to a chorus of tuneless, defeated howling. He was pinned under a tangle of cages. Dead, dying, and injured house cats lay in slumped piles of hair all around him, suspended in a labyrinth of bent wires.

  Fish groaned. “What happened?”

  “We crashed.”

  A familiar chemical smell tainted the air, overpowering the cat urine. Gasoline. Diesel? “We gotta get out of here,” said Fish, and he tried to stir.

  Sharp pain needled Joel’s left shoulder. “Oww. Quit moving.”

  Fish relaxed. Joel tried to push himself up, but the cages were too heavy. A cat’s paw groped at his face.

  Adrenaline ripped through his core, his heart flaring, and he tried to push again. This time, the cage against his back snapped, and a wire bar twanged like a broken guitar string, scratching his side.

  “Hold on!” someone shouted from up the bank, feet thumping through dry leaves. “I’m comin’! Hold on!”

  Gazing through a galaxy of aluminum wires, Joel saw the back door was smashed open, and through it he could see the bridge they’d fallen from, and the guardrail they’d smashed through.

  A smashed-up Chevy was parked on the shoulder. Kenway Griffin ran sideways down the slope in an awkward loping gallop on his prosthetic leg. The big veteran took hold of the roof where it’d been peeled away and hauled on it, tearing it open further.

  “Hey,” he called over the howling of the cats, spotting Joel through the twisted bars. “I’ll get you guys out. Hold on.” He worked his way down the side, wrenching it down as if it were the lid of a tin of sardines, filling the box with sunlight. Reaching into the cargo compartment, he started grabbing at kennels and dragging them out onto the bank. “I need to retire from my goddamn retirement.” The cats inside the kennels complained, but right now, his first priority was freeing Joel and Fish.

  Fisher coughed in Joel’s ear. “You all right?”

  “Yeah.” Joel winced. “Got a wire jabbin’ me in my back and I got one foot in Hell, but otherwise, I’m aight. You?”

  “You had your tetanus shot, right?”

  “No, but it looks like I’m gonna need one.”

  “How did you find us?” Fish asked Kenway. “Was that you made the cop crash?”

  “Followed you guys all the way to Glen Addie, but I lost you at a red light.” Pulling on a cage, Kenway lifted it over his head and flung it into the weeds. The cat inside was already dead, flopping around limp and shapeless. “I was driving around the 1800 block, thinking of checking the animal shelter—since it was the only thing out there that made any sense—when I saw those two cops and followed ’em.”

  The next cage was stuck fast and the cat inside, a black shorthair with white patches, yowled pitifully. Kenway pulled until it let go with a twang and he gently set it aside. “I don’t know why I rammed the truck,” he said, grabbing another one. “It seemed like the thing to do. Those guys are shady as hell and I figured you were in the back.”

  “It’s a good thing you did,” said Joel.

  “Figured they were gonna try to finish the job they started last night. Take you somewhere and kill you. Guess it seemed safer to run the truck off the road and pull you out than try to stop ’em and get myself shot like they shot you.”

  “I’m glad you believed me.”

  “It’s hard to disbelieve a gunshot wound to the leg.”

  Fisher coughed again. “Come on, man, hurry up. We need to get out of here.” The smell of diesel fuel was growing stronger. “Those two cops. Are they out? Are they out there?”

  “I ain’t seen ’em,” said Kenway. “Looks like they’re still in the front.”

  Bracing himself against the wall of the compartment, Joel did a push-up and found the load on his back was considerably lighter, affording him a few inches of wiggle-room. “Almost there,” said Kenway. He laced his fingers through another kennel and paused.

  “What is it?”

  The veteran was staring into space, hunched over with his shoulders squeezed into the roof opening, frozen as if listening intently.

  “Why’d you stop?”

  “Nnnrrrrrrrr.” Kenway growled, a weird nasal growl like an impression of an airplane. Choking and snuffling, he shrank away from the opening, disappearing.

  Daylight poured through in his absence.

  Joel met Fisher’s eyes and the two of them struggled with the cages. Enough of them had been taken out, they had room to push the rest out of the way. Fish reached up over his head, shoving the last couple of kennels toward the gap. Dragging himself underneath them, he pulled his body through the hole and out into the grass.

  Orange light flickered from the back of the compartment. Through the chaos of wires, Joel could see a fire guttering somewhere deep in the pile of kennels. The diesel had leaked into the cargo hold and something had set it ablaze. The smoke was foul, thick and pungent. He shoved at the cages, crawling forward, and Fisher pulled them out from the other side, throwing them away.

  Finally, he was free. Joel dragged his legs out and lay exhausted in the churned-up dirt. The truck had come to rest on its right side at the bottom of a slope, next to a river. Above them was a vast white sky, mottled by charcoal clouds.

  “Rrrrooowwwwwrrrrll,” said Kenway.

  The vet was doubled over in a crazy Spider-Man pose on his hands and feet, crawling along the riverbank and staring at them.

  “The hell are you doing?” asked Fisher.

  Suddenly, Kenway lunged at him, slamming him against the back of the cargo box. Fish bounced off the aluminum sheet and the two men went down with Kenway on top, hissing and growling like a man insane. The vet’s hipster man-bun had come undone and his hair was a wild blond Tarzan mane. He tried to bite Fish and the smaller man pushed at him, fending him off with a bloody forearm.

  One of the cages lay next to Joel, bars twisted in every direction, the cat gone. He grabbed a bar and bent it until it broke free, then scrambled over to Kenway and stabbed it through his shirt, feeling skin give way.

  “ROOOOWL!”

  Flinching and screaming, the veteran rolled off of Fish and spidered backward. One of his shoes pried free of his prosthetic, stuck in gluey mud, the sock still inside, revealing a foot that looked like a car part. Joel stared, kneeling in a three-point stance, the wire jutting from his fingers like a knife fighter. That feeling of unreality came back.

  His brother snatched up a rock and threw it—“Bitch-ass bitch!”

  TOCK! Kenway blinked as the rock hit him in the forehead. He fell over and writhed like a crushed bug, holding his eyes, his heels grinding furrows in the dirt.

  In the fight, Fisher had been pushed backward on the ground, and his pants were shucked down off his hips, revealing one butt cheek. Joel caught a glimpse of the algiz brand on his ass. The cat sacrifice, he thought. The witches were trying to send Selina into me and turn me into a maniac, but it bounced off of my algiz, then off of Fisher’s algiz, and went into Kenway downstairs.

  “Hold the man down,” he told Fish, scooping his hand through the mud.

  “What?”

&
nbsp; “Just do it!”

  Fish clambered up and clapped his hands to Kenway’s biceps, pinning him down. Kenway snarled at the sky and twisted back and forth trying to free himself, a livid purple bruise rising over his right eyebrow.

  Grinding up mud in his hands, Joel ripped the vet’s shirt open. A tan, hairy belly glowed underneath. Joel painted Robin’s algiz on him with the mud, and then Kenway overpowered them, throwing Fish aside. Joel crawled away, using the side of the box truck to climb to his feet.

  Flames crackled inside the cargo compartment, and when Joel looked inside, he saw the beginnings of a roaring bonfire. He swore out loud and pulled out a cage with a howling cat inside, and another and another.

  God, there are so many, he thought, pitching the kennels into the weeds like a baggage-handler.

  “What’s wrong with him?” shouted Fisher.

  Thick spittle-foam collected between Kenway’s lips as he convulsed violently and thrashed his arms and legs like a man electrocuted. His eyes rolled back in his head. Struck by indecision and driven by the smell of burning cat-hair, Joel couldn’t figure out what to do—help Kenway? Save the cats? Yell at Fish to help him get the cages out of the fire?

  The dilemma was rendered moot when Kenway opened his mouth and the face of a cat pressed itself out between his teeth, eyes squinting, fur matted.

  “What the shit?” wheezed Fish. “Selina?”

  The vet’s face had become a livid lavender. He grabbed his neck with both hands as if he was trying to pull off his own head and rolled over on his hands and knees. He convulsed again—this time slowly, methodically, his stomach tensing the way a dog sicks. His whole torso inchwormed back to front, his shoulders bunched up to his ears. Selina’s head protruded from his mouth like a big hairy tongue.

  Reaching up with one hand, Kenway took hold of the cat’s neck with an A-OK gesture and pulled.

  The cat let out a strangled duck-squawk.

  Standing half-naked in the mud under a cooling overcast sky, black smoke billowing past, Joel lost his handle on real life. Somehow, the threads of reality had unraveled to the point his mind refused to put two and two together anymore, and all of a sudden, he forgot what his hands were for. The only thing he could do was watch helplessly as Kenway struggled with the cat, gagging and choking.

  “Stop screaming and go check on those two cops,” said Fisher, shoving him in the other direction. He had been screaming? Joel shook his head and a pang of dizziness almost sprawled him in the weeds. “I said go!” His brother went back into the cargo compartment and pitched a kennel outside.

  Smoke billowed out. A few seconds later, he emerged, barking hard wet coughs. He didn’t go back in.

  Staggering through the mud, Joel went around to the driver’s side of the truck and was confused to see a wall of black, dirty machinery. Then he remembered the truck had fallen over on its side; the door was now on top. He climbed the underside of the cab and pulled himself up and over the running board.

  Through the window he could see the two men inside. Euchiss was unconscious behind a deflated airbag, slumped against the passenger side door with blood trickling down the side of his face, but Bowker was dead. Extremely dead. The steering column had been driven backward, but the Second Chance vest he’d been wearing had prevented it from impaling him. Instead, it had caused the armor plates to squish his torso like a sandwich, breaking his ribs and pinning him against the seat. His eyes and throat bulged like a toad and his face was grape-purple, pink viscera flowering from his mouth. A starburst of blood flowered across the windshield in front of him.

  Luckily, the window-glass was smashed out. Joel reached into the cab and plucked the Glock out of Bowker’s hip holster, jamming it into the back of his jeans.

  Movement on the other side caught his attention. Euchiss’s eyes were open, and he was staring straight at Joel.

  Without a word, the cop pointed his Glock up at him.

  Joel recoiled from the window and jumped down into the mud, heading back to the rear of the cargo compartment.

  When he got there, Kenway was lying in the undergrowth where he’d fallen, cradling a blood-wet cat in his arms like a new mother and looking thoroughly wrung-out. “Uuuunnggh,” the big man grunted hoarsely, and closed his eyes, exhausted.

  By now, the fire was licking up out of the hole in the roof. Cats screamed inside in a great siren-chorus of panic and agony, consumed by the flames. Fish was on his knees in the mud, his eyes red and streaming down his face, though Joel couldn’t tell if it was because of the smoke or because of the cats.

  “I can’t save them,” Fish sobbed. “I can’t get in.”

  “We got to go,” said Joel.

  Fish got up, still weeping. Kenway lay in Roman repose, his head lolling back, his eyes closed. The newly reborn Selina wriggled out of his arms and shook herself, fleeing madly into the treeline. Fish watched the cat escape with dazed eyes, as if he couldn’t quite process it.

  Kenway opened his eyes. “My throat. Killing me.”

  “Come on,” said Joel, grabbing his hands. “We got to go. Get up. We got to go. Redhead still alive, and he armed.”

  The brothers helped the vet up off the ground and they headed up the slope toward the highway. Kenway’s pickup truck waited for them at the gap in the guardrail, the right quarter panel smashed where he’d driven it into the box truck.

  A sluggish, raspy voice echoed off the trees. “Where you goin’?”

  They all looked up. A blood-soaked Euchiss had climbed over his partner and was now standing up in the sidelong driver window as if it were a tank hatch. He pulled the rifle out of the cab hand-over-hand and cycled the bolt, chik-a-chik!

  Joel reached behind his back and came up with Bowker’s pistol, pointing it at the Serpent. It went off as soon as he tugged the trigger, firing with a paper-bag POP!, and the bullet kicked sparks off the side of the box truck. Euchiss slithered down into the window for cover.

  Reaching the roadside first, Joel went around to the driver’s side of Kenway’s truck. The highway was a lonely country two-lane out in the middle of nowhere, stretching toward the horizon in both directions. Soldier pines made an impenetrable wall on either side of the highway under a sky like stirred milk. There were no power lines or poles, which made the road look naked, unfinished.

  The Chevy’s door was open and the keys were still in it, but the front passenger corner of the truck was smashed in and smoke snaked out from under the hood. Joel twisted the keys and the engine grunted laboriously.

  The windshield spiderwebbed with a delicate smash, raining glass all over the dash, and Joel dove out onto the highway. Lying on his belly, it occurred to him Euchiss could still see him underneath the truck, but when he peered through the gap, he saw that the shoulder of the road and the remains of the guardrail concealed him well enough.

  Fisher and Kenway came bounding around the back of the truck and hunkered down behind the Chevy’s bed. “Wouldn’t start?” croaked the vet, wincing.

  “No.”

  “Now what?” asked Fish.

  Kenway’s fingers curled over the bed wall and he peered over the edge. A bolt from the blue exploded on the other side, whispering across the forest, and a rifle round pinged off the truck cab. He ducked and moved toward the front of the truck, and that’s where he paused in surprise.

  To Joel’s bewilderment, he laughed.

  “I been lookin’ for you, Betsy. Come here, baby.” He reached into the open driver’s door and grabbed something from under the seat—the handgun he’d dropped at the hospital.

  “Oh, y’all in for it now,” said Joel, elated. He elbowed his brother. “Soldier boy done got his peacemaker.”

  “You have a pistol too, idiot,” said Fish.

  Joel looked down at Bowker’s pistol.

  “Yeah, but he’s actually good with his.”

  Ejecting the magazine, Kenway checked the rounds inside and slapped it back into the weapon. Then he stood, braced his forearms
on the Chevy’s sidewall, and calmly started unloading on the man in the box truck at a measured, purposeful pace. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. The pistol’s muzzle nodded to a smooth rhythm, never off level. Shell casings popped out of the ejection port, tinkling to the asphalt at their feet.

  Eight rounds into the volley of gunfire, the slide locked back. Kenway turned the pistol to the side in confusion. “Shit, jam—”

  Thunder broke across the sky, echoing off the trees.

  A bullet fanned the vet’s hair back in a mist of blood.

  Both brothers swore out loud as Kenway toppled over backward and slapped against the asphalt.

  Crimson dripped from a wound at the crown of his forehead.

  “No!” shrieked Fisher. “No!”

  Joel looked away, squeezing his eyes shut and covering his face, trying to collect himself.

  Staring into the abyss behind his eyelids, listening to Fish curse over the dead man, he knew they had no other recourse but to run or be shot. He could hit a man point-blank with a shotgun, but with a pistol and a handful of bullets, Joel knew he had no chance against a trained cop’s scoped hunting rifle and what was undoubtedly a whole box of rounds.

  He tangled a hand in Fisher’s shirt and pulled him to his feet. “Let’s get out of here.”

  17

  At least the fire had taken care of the cats, which was what they’d come out there to get rid of, anyway.

  When Euchiss finally managed to get out of the overturned truck, he twisted his ankle jumping down. He sat on the tailgate of the big blond guy’s Chevy for a few minutes, massaging his ankle and waiting for someone to happen by with a vehicle he could commandeer, but the road to the quarry was a long and lonely one. Nobody came out this way except for the pulpwood trucks going to the clear-cut out on the ridge, and that had dried up a year before.

  No more traffic.

  They had only been six miles from the quarry when the big blond guy with the beard ran them off the road.

  He kicked the man’s corpse for good measure before he left.

  Tall pine trees crowded around him, and the ground was a carpet of rusty red needles. Four-fifths of a box of 6.5mm rustled softly in his pocket.