The Cabin at the End of the World_A Novel

by Paul Tremblay

  Sabrina places a hand on Eric’s shoulder, like a friend might in a vulnerable moment. Leonard pokes and taps Eric’s other shoulder and asks him, politely, to let his daughter go. Adriane bounces between the two suggesting Leonard pull his arms apart and Sabrina grab Wen.

  Eric shouts at the others to leave them alone, to go away, to give them a minute, a minute more.

  With the others frantic and occupied, the time for Andrew’s escape has to be now. He doesn’t hesitate. He calmly shrugs and lifts his right shoulder, a movement as innocuous and ordinary as a breath expanding within his chest. As his shoulder rises, he slides his right hand up. There’s a pull, pinch, and burn on his palm and at the base of his thumb, and then his right hand is free. The rest of the binding sloughs off his left hand and wrist. The thud of rope hitting the floor is louder than he anticipated, but the others don’t react to it. Andrew brings his arms around to his front, careful to not stretch them out wide, confining them to the width of the chair and his torso. He rests his hands and forearms on his thighs momentarily and flexes his swollen, chaffed fingers and knuckles. His hands are unable to fully close into fists. Andrew bends and reaches toward his feet and ankles, making no sudden movements, nothing to catch the corners of eyes, nothing to alert the others to his Houdini act. He is composed and considerate as he goes about the serious business of untying the leg ropes. The knots behind his calves are thick and obvious, and they give away their secrets to his battered fingers. Andrew does not look up and to his left until after the knots are solved.

  The others are still struggling with Eric. His arms remain stubbornly locked around Wen. Not even Leonard is going to be able to simply pull his arms apart. Sabrina begs Eric to let go. Adriane has both hands on one of Eric’s wrists and forearms, yanking and trying to peel an arm open. Leonard argues with Adriane, telling her to calm down and to let go of Eric’s arm as he tries to snake his hands between Wen and Eric.

  Wen yells, “Go away!” and windmills her arms, striking out at Leonard.

  As Andrew gives in to haste and hurry while unwinding the never-ending loops of rope from his legs, he visualizes two potential paths to the SUV and the gun in the trunk compartment. The shortest path would be through the front door, but he’d have to wade through the others and take time to unlock the door, but if he could get outside, he’d be unimpeded to the SUV. The path of least resistance out of the cabin would be through the deck slider, but it’s a much longer run down those wooden stairs, around the cabin, and to the driveway. One or more of the others would most certainly be out the front door and to the SUV before he could get there. Maybe if he is stealthy enough, he can sneak out onto the deck without the others seeing. Andrew stands on the creaky, rusty legs of the Tin Man and readies for a dash through the back slider.

  Adriane points and yells, “Fuck you,” at Leonard. She shuffles into the center of the room and stands directly in front of Andrew. They share a surprised, head-tilted look. Adriane yells, “Hey!” and lunges at him.

  Andrew slide-steps and knocks his chair onto its side, then kicks it into Adriane’s legs. She stumbles and plunges forward, her hands pressing on the inverted chair back to keep from falling to the floor.

  Sabrina grabs Andrew’s left arm and he spins to face her with his painful, crumpled-paper fists raised. She unexpectedly grunts, winces, and collapses onto her knees. Eric is behind her, still sitting and with one arm around Wen, and he gives Sabrina another backhanded kidney punch. She crawls away from Eric’s reach, a hand pressed against her lower back.

  Eric switches the arm with which he holds Wen and throws left jabs at Leonard’s midsection. Leonard clumsily fends off the blows from Eric’s pistoning arm with open hands. One punch catches him in the groin and he staggers back into one of the bedroom doorways.

  Eric shouts, “Andrew, take Wen and go! Take her!”

  Leonard recovers and approaches Eric from his left. Adriane has already discarded the chair-in-her-legs obstacle, but instead of going after Andrew she renews her grappling with Eric.

  Eric alternates throwing quick punches at Adriane and Leonard while shielding Wen.

  Adriane yells, “Hit him, Leonard! Hit him in the head!”

  Leonard says, “We don’t want to hurt you,” and attempts to snare Eric’s left arm when it lashes out.

  Sabrina is upright now, too, has her weapon, and steps toward Andrew.

  Andrew can’t fight off all three at once. Not without his gun. He lunges for the front door, pulls the latch bolt to the right, turns the knob, and flings the door open wide all in one motion. With a rush of warm air and sunlight the door opens too wildly and the momentum of the pendulous swing almost sends him tumbling back into the cabin. He maintains his grip on the doorknob, leans all his weight forward, and stumbles outside, pulling the door shut behind him. His slow and heavy feet cannot catch up with his forward lean and he pitches down the small set of stairs, landing chest and face first on the grass.

  His breaths are painful and short, air squeezing out of the pinched end of a balloon. He blinks away the shock and unsteadily restacks himself onto shaky legs. Once upright he starts the forward-moving engine again.

  The cabin’s front door opens behind him. Sabrina yells, “Andrew, stop! Come back!”

  Andrew doesn’t stop and he doesn’t look to see if anyone else is with her. The SUV is ten to fifteen yards away. The driver’s-side front and rear tires are flat and the side walls have been slashed. He assumes the other tires have been slashed as well. That car isn’t going anywhere.

  His right hand goes into his shorts pocket in search of the familiar lump of his car keys. They’re not there. He remembers that he gave Eric the keys yesterday when the others were breaking into the cabin. If the car doors are locked, he won’t be able to get to the gun and he doesn’t know what he will do, what he can do.

  Andrew races onto the gravel driveway, the loose stones part and grind under his feet, spewing clouds of dirt. The stomped-on-gravel crunch is too loud, all encompassing, like a mob is sprinting across the driveway, but he won’t look back, can’t look back. Maybe Sabrina has caught up to him. Maybe she isn’t alone. He’s almost to the passenger-side door that he’ll open because it has to open, not opening is not an option, and then he’ll jump inside the car and lock the doors, which will give him time to crawl into the backseat and to the trunk—

  Something sharp and heavy crashes into the outside of his right knee, which buckles and sings with jagged, white-hot agony. Andrew falls and bounces off the car door, absorbing most of the collision with his forearms and hands, before landing on his screaming knee. He flips over into a sitting position with his back against the car and faces Sabrina.

  Sabrina stands over him and says, “You can’t leave them. You can’t leave us. We all need you. Come back inside. I’ll help you,” in an oddly detached, unearthly monotone. She lifts her weapon, raising the tapered edge of the curled-over and pointed shovel blade, appearing to reload for another swing despite her promise of help.

  Andrew scoops up a fistful of gravel and dirt and he underhand throws it into her face. With her eyes closed and head turned to the side, he scrambles up onto his left knee and punches her in the stomach. An almost comical oof plumes out of Sabrina and she folds in half. He tries to snatch the weapon away but she falls backward, landing on her butt, one hand over her midsection, the other on the weapon, holding it so as to ward off more blows.

  Andrew pivots and he flips up the car door handle. He grunts in triumph as it’s not locked and the door clicks open. He slithers inside the SUV, coiling himself into the passenger seat, shutting and locking the door behind him. The pain in his right knee has dulled some but is now focused on the inner side, not where the weapon contacted him. Already swollen to twice its normal size, the knee is wobbly and as loose as a door hinge when he puts weight on it.

  Sabrina rocks herself up into a standing position. She’s hunched over, still holding her midsection, and gasping for air. She shamb
les to the SUV and, in a matter of moments, she will smash windows with that goddamn nightmare stick.

  Andrew shimmies between the front bucket seats and worms over the center console into the back, dragging his right leg behind instead of relying on it to propel him. His right foot snags between the console and passenger seat and while pulling it free doesn’t exactly hurt, his stomach flips at how unstable and puttylike his knee is.

  Sabrina’s shovel blade clangs off the rear passenger window. The glass doesn’t break but there’s a gouge and crack dowsing a haphazard path to the window frame.

  Hand over hand Andrew scrabbles over the middle of the backseat, where there is no headrest. It’s still a tight, awkward squeeze to pull his torso over the seat back so that he can hang into the trunk area. The side panel storage is to his right. He paws at two black plastic knobs, turns them clockwise to six o’clock, and pulls away the plastic hatch.

  The window to his left disintegrates, and jagged little glass cubes sting his bare lower legs and a handful ricochet off the rear windshield and roll around in the trunk. Andrew spasms, ducks his head between his shoulders and behind raised arms. With the window gone, Sabrina’s rough and greedy gasps for air suffuse into the car. Andrew mule-kicks his left leg behind him. He yells and his body tenses up for another strike from Sabrina, anticipating the pain to come.

  Within the opened side panel is his handgun safe. Less than a year old and not much bigger than an eight-hundred-page hardcover book, it’s a the-future-is-now, aluminum alloy silver gadget with a sleek, edgeless design. Eric joked that it looked like a panini maker and asked if it could make him a tuna melt. The newest, lightest model he could find at the time of purchase, it’s biometric, opening after the sensor on the top reads the owner’s palm or thumb print.

  Andrew extracts the gunbox out of the interior darkness of the side panel, dumps it onto the trunk floor, and waves his palm over the sensor. The cover opens on its minihydraulic arms. Inside, splayed on the black neoprene lining, are his snub-nosed .38 special, loose bullets, and a small cardboard ammunition box, the top flap tattered and open, which must’ve happened during transport or as the unit was roughly jostled from the storage panel.

  Sabrina has the car door open. “Leave whatever it is you’re going after. Get out of the car and come back inside. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Can she see the gunbox or the gun? Probably not from where she is standing and with his body likely blocking her view of the trunk. Andrew snatches the gun with his right hand. It’s compact but solid, fitting purposefully into the folds of palm and fingers, which have lost some of their stiffness from the fight with O’Bannon and a day of disuse. With one hand he presses a thumb piece forward and pushes down on the cylinder until it swings open to the left. He shakily begins loading bullets into the five chambers.

  Sabrina jabs him in the left side, the rusty tip of metal digging under his ribs. Andrew yelps, twitches, and tries to curl away from the repurposed spade, but he’s bottled in by the adjacent rear headrest. He knocks the gunbox over, spilling the contents. The bullets scatter and roll to all corners madly eager for movement and to achieve their projectile apotheosis on their own. The jab from Sabrina hurts, but there isn’t much oomph behind it, as maybe she doesn’t have enough leverage given the constraints of the confined enclosing of the SUV interior or she’s hesitant and isn’t sure what to do to get him to come back inside the cabin and hasn’t fully committed to stabbing him with a bizarre, customized weapon as the solution.

  Andrew yells as though he’s in more pain than he is and kicks out behind him, connecting only with the back of the front passenger seat. He plucks one last stray, teasing bullet from the trunk floor and fills the fifth and final chamber.

  Sabrina says, “You have to come back inside, we don’t have time for this,” and jabs him again with the weapon and with more force, the tip prodding painfully between his ribs.

  He closes the cylinder and pushes off the trunk floor with his left arm. With both arms outstretched over his head he sinks back onto his haunches, like a dive into water reversed, pulling his chest over the seat back. He twists and sags against the other rear passenger door. Sabrina is crouched within the opposite doorframe, her hands slid farther up the length of the wooden staff, a Little Leaguer choking up on a bat.

  Andrew fires a wild, nominally aimed shot, the report ear-ringing loud. His aim is too high and the bullet chunks into the ceiling above the thicker metal of the SUV’s doorframe.

  Andrew and Sabrina look at each other for a beat, sharing in the surprise, lunacy, and possibility of the moment. Sabrina cowers and then looks over her head, as though the missed shot might bring the sky crashing down on top of her.

  Andrew points the gun and says, “Drop that thing and back the fuck up.”

  She says, “Okay, I’m sorry. Okay . . .” She doesn’t drop the weapon. She shuffles backward, and too quickly, so she’s far enough away that his view of her is obscured by the SUV’s interior and frame.

  Andrew shouts at her to stop moving and slides across the backseat, his bare legs scratched by bits of shattered window. His left side stings where he was jabbed twice and his shirt is warmly damp with blood. His swollen knee throbs with a low but constant ache and is already turning an inky, storm cloud purple. The pain is bearable, but he’s unsure if the leg will hold his weight. By the time he’s to the edge of the rear seat, his legs dangling over the gravel driveway, Sabrina is a blur, running away to the left.

  He shouts, “Stop! Stop right now!” Using the open door, he pulls himself up so that he stands on his left leg. He lowers his right foot onto the ground and slowly adds weight. His knee holds.

  Sabrina is twenty or so paces away, legs pumping, and her bulky weapon swaying side to side. She’s close to being able to duck around a corner of the cabin and out of his sight. He yells at her to stop again, and when she doesn’t, he steps to the right to avoid shooting over the car door or having to crouch to shoot through the smashed window. He takes a deep breath and aims low, for her legs, and as he unconsciously replants his right foot and fires a shot, his knee gives out, bowing outside his profile, insisting upon continuing in the lateral direction. The shot misses, the report echoing over the lake and within their little bowl of forest, and Andrew falls.

  Sabrina is gone, disappearing around the side of the cabin. Is she going to run into the woods and hide or is she going all the way out back and to the deck or up through the basement and then back inside to warn and help the others? Will the others come outside now after hearing the gunfire?

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Andrew thrashes about on the ground as though he is drowning until he muscles onto his feet. He decides he doesn’t have time to wait for the self-opening pneumatic rear gate to open or to crawl back inside the car and root around for more ammunition. He’s already left Eric and Wen alone with the others for too long. Will the others be more inclined to hurt Eric and/or Wen because they heard one if not both gunshots?

  He tests a forward step on his gimpy knee. It quivers, as loose as a Slinky, but he remains upright. He takes a second step, and then a third, and he makes a deal with his knee; it will continue to function as long as he walks only in a straight line and doesn’t move brashly to either side.

  Back on the front lawn and without the sound of gravel shifting under his feet, the abrupt silence is a new terror. The cabin, even with the benefit of the morning’s wholesome sunlight, appears worn, tired, and bereft. The paint on the door and trim is dulled and sun bleached. The wooden shingles are blemished with dots of mildew and are loose and as asymmetrical as crooked teeth. The cabin is now a haunted house, baptized by yesterday’s violence, and its passive accumulation of similarly vicious and desperate acts is as inevitable as dust gathering on the windowsills.

  Even with the windows locked shut and front door closed, shouts, grunts, and the wooden thuds and knocks of physical struggle emanate from inside the cabin. His hybrid run/limp across the grass to the f
ront stairs is as long and lonely as a doomed expedition. He passes Wen’s grasshopper jar; sunlight flares off the glass and aluminum lid (screwed on tightly) as though saying see me, see me. Lying on its side and sunk into the taller grass, the earth is already absorbing it, consuming the evidence of its existence. He oddly hoped Leonard wasn’t lying about setting the grasshoppers free. It’s possible he let them go and resealed the lid, but unlikely. That Andrew finds the jar glinting sunlight and most certainly containing the dead bodies of Wen’s seven named grasshoppers seems a cruelly mocking harbinger.

  Andrew clambers up the cement front stairs, loading both feet on one step before moving on to the next. Lifting and bending his right knee is exponentially more painful than when walking straight and on flat ground. Once on the landing, he hears Eric yelling inside the cabin, “Stay away! Leave us alone!” and it sounds like he’s on the left side of the common room.

  Andrew leans, pressing his shoulder against the doorframe, allowing his right leg to rest a moment. He wraps his left hand around the doorknob, and before turning it, he quickly attempts to work out what he’ll say or do or see after the door opens. He cannot open the door and start shooting indiscriminately. The rash first shot fired at/near Sabrina inside the SUV unnerved him as he doesn’t remember actively deciding to shoot. It just happened.

  Andrew closes his eyes and flattens his body against the door; he’s as close to being inside the cabin as he can be without actually being in it. Adriane yells about not wanting to die. Leonard tells Eric to stop swinging and let’s talk. He says, “Eric, let’s talk,” repeatedly. Leonard’s voice is muffled, an echo across the canyon of the common room.

  Andrew holds the gun up near his face so he can swing the arm down and instantly point it into the room. He takes a deep breath, turns the knob, and the door opens, the cabin greedy for his reentrance. Andrew lurches inside and he lowers the gun in front of him. No one seems to notice he’s there.