I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  To his surprised horror, Fish stopped and put up his hands.

  “The hell you doin’?” Joel asked in shock.

  “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 skinny throat and Irish-red hair. Gauze had been wrapped around one forearm.

  Exhausted confusion hit Joel so hard, it was like a physical blow to the skull. Did he teleport in front of us? Is this witchcraft?

  “I’d like you to meet somebody,” said a voice from the darkness behind them. Cop-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 splat of blood in the middle of his sooty gray face. Cop-Euchiss smiled, joining his arm-bandaged Marlboro Man doppelgänger by the truck. “This is my brother, Roy,” said the cop, clapping his brother on the shoulder. “Say hi, Roy.”

  “Hi, Roy,” said Roy.

  “Folks call me Opie on account of my hair, but my name is Owen,” said Cop-Euchiss.

  Twins.

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

  Roy smiled.

  Twin Serpents.

  “It’s okay,” said Roy, “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?”

  “The one and only.”

  “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.” 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. “These were made to catch snakes,” he said, putting on a pair of rubber gloves. “But sometimes, we use them to dredge the drainage if we ever need to.” He cut across behind his brother and sauntered toward the pond, snorting loudly as he went, as if building a loogie. He spat blood again. “Come on.”

  Roy urged the brothers along with his own rifle.

  A boardwalk led from the base of one of the cabins and ran down the hill, becoming a narrow dock. Owen led them down the dock 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. 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. They freak me out.”

  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 over hand. “Shaft flooded when the miners hit a big vein of iron sulfite and pyrite back in the day.” Owen manipulated the pole like a gondolier. “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.” He flashed them a smug grin over his shoulder. “You don’t want to swim in this shit, though. 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 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 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. Nobody can touch it. It’s perfect.”

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

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

  Joel glared at him, pointing at the rifle. “If you 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 carfentanil 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, cowboy. I’m a witch too, you know?”

  Roy’s smirk was a suspicious one. Joel coughed, breathing through his mouth again. The rotten-egg sulfur 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 a retainer,” he said, holding it up.

  “Neither of them two Jehovah’s Witness boys last month had braces,” said Roy. “Must have been the girl from Thursday.” He coughed. “I don’t remember her having dental work, though.” He coughed again, into his sleeve, and Owen tossed the retainer back into the water.

  “This is where you assholes were takin’ the cats?” 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.

  “Yup.” Owen 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, if not more.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Joel. “Why?’

  “Hell if I know. The girls want us to kill as many cats as possible. No skin off my teeth. I think it’s fun.”

  Joel stiffened. “They’re making cat-people zombies.”

  “Zombies?” asked Roy. “The hell you talkin’ about?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He fought the urge to kick one of them into the grotesque 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,” said Owen. “Nobody will ever go lookin’ for two soy-boy niggers, especially not at the bottom of a eighty-foot sulfur spring. You’re going into the acid and you’re gonna be down there until the Second Coming.” He smiled. His teeth were red 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 shot Fish in the face.

  Red brain-matter billowed across the air in a fine spray and the whip-crack of the shot whispered through the trees.

  Breathless and surprised, Joel watched Fish topple over

  (he wou
ld 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 dock. 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 deteriorate; they’d never get to fix that.

  It was gone, forever and ever.

  Desolation shattered his thoughts. All he could do was stare bleakly. The wound in his leg had 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.

  Looking up from the water, he saw a huge black dog.

  Joel’s blood turned to ice water. The dog stood on the opposite bank, watching intently, a whip-thin hellhound that seemed to shimmer as if it were a reflection set free from the acid lake. The Euchiss brothers didn’t appear to notice the emaciated animal, and if they did, they didn’t see fit to mention it.

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

  “Cruel, brother.” Roy pulled the revolver’s hammer back. 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 got a mean streak in you.”

  Anger unlike he had ever known in his life filled Joel’s heart and head and guts and fists. He turned his head and growled venomously at the muzzle of the magnum. He wanted to beat the living shit out of both of them, he wanted to pound them with his fists until his arms broke, until his body gave out, until the stars rolled up like sackcloth and the sun went dark. “I’m going to fucking kill you,” he said through his teeth. His face throbbed with rage.

  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 blue pickup truck barreled out of the mine shaft, bearing down on them with one headlight.

  Blood streaming down his forehead, Kenway Griffin stared through the Chevy’s smashed windshield. His face was a crazed mask of rage, teeth and eyes gleaming in his blood-caked face.

  Even as the truck swerved toward the pond and the boardwalk, Owen fired three shots from the Glock. POP, POP-POP. The first bullet sank into the smashed quarter-panel; the second and third punched through the hood and knocked the rear window out. Kenway slammed up onto the dock, his engine squealing, and drove toward them. The boards crackled and popped under the weight of two tons of metal, threatening to collapse, leaning forward.

  Three things happened simultaneously:

  Roy flung himself into the water,

  Joel threw himself flat on his back,

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

  The Chevy slammed into Owen, the murderer’s body clattering against the grille 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 to watch the truck drive off the end of the dock into the acid pond with an incredible splash.

  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 blue shirt turning black. Joel stumbled down to where the homemade shooting range used to stand. The Chevy’s ass end stuck up out of the water like the Titanic, air bubbles gurgling out from under the body.

  “Aaugh!” shouted Kenway 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 acid! Get out of there!”

  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.”

  Kenway 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 Kenway 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. Queen’s operatic howling slowly became a gargling chant until the radio shorted out with a crackle.

  Ripping off his ruined shirt, Kenway threw it in. His back and belly were mottled with patches of pink, raw skin. The mud algiz in the middle of his chest looked like half-assed war paint. “God, oh God,” Joel wept, shuffling back and forth on his hands and knees at the side of the dock, but Fisher had already submerged, fading away into the corrosive depths. “Where is he? I can’t see my brother no more, Jesus, he’s dead, fuckin’ dead, he’s dead.”

  “Where is he?” asked Kenway. “Did he fall in?”

  “They shot him. That son of a bitch shot him in the head. God help me, I saw his brains. He fell in and now he’s gone.”

  CLACK! The entire wooden platform shuddered and shifted, one of the boards coming loose and falling in. Kenway helped Joel to his feet. “Let’s get off this thing”—cough—“and away from this water before we end up in there too.”

  They hobbled up to the rocky shore and rested, coughing, trying to catch their breath. Roy Euchiss lay motionless at the edge of the water. Most of his hair had burned off, leaving him as straggly-bald as a baby, and his clothes were waterlogged tatters, everything stained vomit-brown. Blisters were forming across the back of the man’s neck and around his eye sockets, big pillowy blisters that were butter-yellow and translucent, like Dial soap. He was covered in angry red welts and it looked like he was sweating droplets of blood. But what struck Joel, and startled him so badly, was that Roy’s ears and nose and fingers had turned as gray as ash.

  The rotten dock finally collapsed, crashing into the water with a flat noise and a harsh clatter of nails and bits of wood. Concrete pylons jutted up from underneath it, as pitted as golf balls, and stained red. Joel scanned the other side of the acid lake, but he didn’t see the strange black dog anymore. Maybe it had been some kind of trauma mirage or something. That’s a thing, right? Sure.

  “I need to get back to the hospital,” said Kenway.

  The veteran’s blood-slimed face and the pink patches across his skin had begun to turn an angry red, and his jeans were smoking and had become like threadbare linen, fine and screenlike. His scalp was split in the middle, and it looked like he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

  Joel said, “Okay.”

  Climbing into Roy’s snake-truck, he sat in the driver’s seat and listened to his heart continue to break. He thought about the sight of his brother toppling backward into the water. The passenger door opened and closed. Kenway sat sprawled on the passenger
side, his head back and his mouth tilted open like a man already dead.

  The keys were still in the ignition. Turning the engine over, Joel grabbed the windshield-wiper lever in a fist and wrenched it down, almost breaking it off. “Oh, hell, this ain’t my Velvet.” He grabbed the gearshift jutting up out of the center console, then paused and swore again. “I can’t drive a stick.”

  “I think I might have a concussion,” said Kenway. His voice thrummed at the lowest register, a vocal fry muttering from the back of his throat. “You better fake it, buddy.”

  20

  Rain tappled restlessly on the hospital window. From time to time, the wind would rake a gust of water against the glass.

  Even though Robin felt like a mashed insect, the hospital bed and duvet were astonishingly comfortable. The mattress felt like something she could sink into, warm and deep. Her legs were more or less pain-free except for a dull ache in her right knee, but she was sensitive, and the rough linen felt pleasurably like burlap.

  A bandaged blond head was buried in a pair of folded arms, nestled into the duvet.

  She reached over and stroked his shoulder, and her abdomen howled in tormented chorus with the stump of her left arm.

  Kenway sat up slowly. “You’re awake.”

  “I’m awake.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “You know how they say hot dogs are made out of ground-up lips, foreheads, and assholes?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I feel like a hot dog.”

  Kenway smiled in exhausted sympathy.

  “What the hell happened to you?” she asked, focusing on the bandage around his head. One of his eyes was ringed in a purple bruise. “Hell of a shiner.”

  “It’s been a rough weekend. After I shot a witch and drove you to the hospital, I got in a gunfight and caught a graze across the top of my skull. When I woke up from that, I drove my truck into a lake made of acid.” He leaned in close. “I think I killed two, maybe three cops,” he whispered. “Also, I think someone hit me with a rock.”