by Andrew Pyper
43
* * *
Lily spends the rest of the day looking out the front and back windows and confirming the safety is off on the shotgun a thousand times. She takes a long while deciding where to position herself to shoot if Michael tries to come in. She decides on a chair she pulls from the wobbly dining room table, setting it up between the carpeted living room and tiled entrance hall, so that she has a shot at the front door, back door, or bay window. Even if he gets in through a point of entry on the second floor she’s got the base of the stairs covered too.
What she hadn’t counted on was how hard it is to sit in a crappy chair for hours on end trying to remain ready to blow someone’s head off. It’s not long before her butt hurts, her head hurts, everything hurts.
Will would help. They could take turns keeping watch. Maybe they could do some other things together too.
She makes a mental note to make sure it’s not Will trying to get into the house before she blows a hole through his chest, and she’s etching this thought into the muscles of her arms that hold the shotgun against her like a swaddled infant—Don’t shoot Will—when Lily falls asleep.
* * *
SHE’S KISSING. BEING KISSED.
Her eyes open and she immediately searches for the shotgun on her lap or propped against her side.
It’s gone.
“Fuck. Fuck!”
She’s about to rush upstairs to get another gun from the closet when she sees a man holding the Mossberg sitting on the living room sofa.
“I let myself in,” Will says.
“You scared the shit out of me.”
“This place is remote, no question about it. But the locks? Not so great.”
Lily knew she would be happy if she ever saw Will again. But now that he’s here, she’s even happier than she guessed.
“Were you kissing me in my sleep?” she asks.
“No,” he says. “But it seemed like a good dream you were having.”
“It was.”
“Been a while since I had one of those.”
“A dream or a kiss?”
Will smiles at this but doesn’t answer, which is an answer in itself.
* * *
AFTER HAVING SOMETHING TO EAT Will tells her how he lost Michael soon after Romania and knew he would be after Lily, and that she was most likely to return to the States.
“Do you know where he is now?” she asks.
“No. But with you here—with the two of us here—we must be like a lighthouse for him.”
“So what do we do?”
“We make our stand. There’s no point in running anymore.”
The two of them sit looking at each other across the round dining room table, trying to guess the other’s thoughts.
“Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula,” Lily says. “They’re him. He’s where all of them came from.”
“That wasn’t in our file.”
“I think I’m the only person he’s ever told. Aside from my mother, I suppose.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because when we kill him, we’ll be killing history. Because part of those stories are true, and once he’s gone, they’ll just be stories again.”
Will leans back in his chair. “Are you having second thoughts? You need to tell me now.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“What are you saying, exactly?”
“That I’m the only one to know everything about him.”
“The world doesn’t have to know everything,” he says. “Most of the time the world is better off not knowing.”
She feels him then. A presence stronger than any previous twinge. He’s flying toward this place and will be here soon.
“You want to go upstairs?” Lily asks Will.
“Like the bedroom upstairs?”
“Yes.”
He stands, pulling the rifle off the table.
“Let’s bring both guns,” he says.
44
* * *
Afterward, lying on the bed in the otherwise unfurnished bedroom, they tell each other secrets.
For Will, it’s the people he’s had to kill in the service of his country and, more recently, for money. “People say stuff like that keeps you up at night,” he tells her. “But I sleep fine. The thing that bothers me is that it doesn’t bother me. Maybe I’m missing that part.”
“Maybe I am too,” Lily says.
She tells him about how she’s always felt estranged from others, as if she was studying people instead of being one herself. For a long time she supposed this was a side effect from her mother dying when she was so young, or the baby she lost after always being sure she never wanted one. But now, since meeting Michael, she’s not so sure about any of these explanations.
“That hole in my life—what if it’s who I am?” she asks, stroking the length of his arm. “What if that’s my father’s character? In me?”
It’s the first time she’s said any of this out loud. Before he can react, the doorbell rings.
“Stay here.” Will jumps out of bed and pulls on his jeans.
“We go together,” she says, putting on her clothes and picking the Mossberg up off the floor.
Downstairs, Will hangs back with the rifle pointed at the door. He motions for Lily to look out the front window.
“It’s the neighbor,” she whispers. “It’s okay.”
Will leans the rifle against the kitchen wall just out of sight and Lily does the same with the shotgun in the living room corner.
The doorbell rings again.
Lily unlocks it and turns the knob.
Jim Hurst stands on the front stoop. He’s as far back as the cement platform allows, so that he looks as though he wants to toss something inside before making a run for it. It also leaves him mostly in darkness, the light from the entry hall falling on his boots but not making it as far as his face.
“Jim?” Lily says, and the man steps forward.
He looks between Lily and Will. “Your husband made it,” he says.
Will comes closer and stands in front of Lily so that he fills the doorframe. He looks both ways down the empty street. “Can we help you?”
“Something’s wrong,” Hurst says.
“What is it?”
“I went to the market to buy some cigarettes and—oh Christ.”
Will holds the man by the shoulder when it seems he’s about to pass out.
“What about the market?” Will asks.
“It was Ella. The lady who works nights. She was . . . in pieces.” Hurst looks to Lily. “He said a bear did it.”
“Who said that?”
“The man.”
Hurst shifts nervously between the two of them, as if he’s failed in a way he doesn’t yet recognize.
“Was he a police officer?” Will asks.
“If he was, he wasn’t in uniform.”
“What did he say to you?” Lily asks.
“He told me to warn people about the bear. Go door-to-door. Asked if I knew any renters who recently came into town. Only person I could think of was you.”
Will steps around Hurst and gives the street a thorough look. The rooftops too.
“That man you spoke to isn’t with the police,” Will says, coming back inside.
“Who the hell is he then?”
“He’s on the wrong side of things.”
Hurst nods as if he understands.
“Go home. Get inside and lock the doors,” Will tells him. “Don’t come out again no matter what you see or hear.”
The man nods again, but stops at the bottom step, turns. “What’re you going to do?”
“Kill him,” Will says, and closes the door.
45
* * *
Lily retrieves the Mossberg and waits for Will to move away from the door.
“He’s here,” Lily says.
“Yeah.”
“He knows where we are.”
Will looks
at her. “It’s okay,” he says. “We want him to come.”
Will motions for her to sit on the floor. When she’s there, he sits next to her, so that they’re back to back.
“You’ve got the rear door. I’ve got the front,” he says.
“How long are we going to sit here?”
“Until it’s over.”
* * *
EVEN BEFORE JIM HURST TOLD them about the man at the Faro grocery store, Lily knew Michael was here. Not the monster in the cell in Romania, but the man-who’s-not-a-man. He’d been the man she’d known during their meetings together at least as long as it took to write the letter he’d left for her on the plane, but he’d changed back at some point in his pursuit of her. She knows now the line between the one and the other is unreliable, ready to give way in an instant.
She closes her eyes and reaches out to Michael, visualizing where he might be, but all she picks up is an ocean of black oil. He’s hiding from her. The thing beneath the surface, waiting to pull her under.
“Lily?”
“Yeah?”
“We do this right, I’m thinking a vacation.”
“Like a rest-of-our-lives, running-from-assassins kind of vacation?”
“Guess it better be one of those.”
“How about Samoa?”
“Why there?”
“You know Robert Louis Stevenson? Jekyll and Hyde? It’s where he—”
Something slams against the back door so hard it almost pops off its hinges.
“Do it, Lily,” Will tells her. “Do it now!”
Lily slips her finger around the trigger. Just how her mother taught her. Except she won’t hesitate this time. Once she sees it, she’ll take it down.
She’s setting her cheek against the side of the gun when she hears the scream.
A man. Outside the back door. A terrified wailing she recognizes as Jim Hurst’s.
“Help me! Please!”
Will is on his feet.
“It’s a trap,” she says.
“If it is, let’s set it off.”
46
* * *
Will rushes out the back door, following Jim Hurst’s screams, and is halfway across the parking area by the time Lily makes it outside.
She goes after him down an icy slope and slips, the shotgun flung from her hands. By the time she gets to her feet again and grabs the Mossberg she catches only a glimpse of Will as he passes through the space between another pair of town house blocks. She runs with her head down against the freshly falling snow, each flake biting her skin.
Beyond the town houses is the baseball diamond she noticed when she first drove into town. As she approaches, she sees three men in front of the backstop fence. Michael is holding Jim Hurst, his arm around his neck. Will is thirty feet away with his rifle raised.
Lily stops at the border between the frozen grass and hard infield. Michael sees her. Shows his silver teeth in a jagged grin.
“We’re all here,” he says.
He takes a long stride closer to her, the hold on Jim’s throat so tight he’s incapable of speech, of breath.
“Let him go,” Will says.
“I remember you,” Michael says, moving his gaze from Lily to Will. “Your sister too.”
Will’s fury freezes him. Every part of his body set to explode except his mind, held rigid on the man’s words.
“The younger the better, I’ve found,” Michael goes on. “Of course, it must have been awful for you.”
He moves closer. So relaxed it’s easy to forget how quickly he traverses the distance. Now, Michael is in front of Will. Then he comes straight and fast, his feet barely touching the ground as he flies forward.
“No!”
Will fires, but Lily’s voice is a distraction that, even at this close range, diverts the shot from where he’d aimed. The bullet travels through Jim Hurst’s shoulder rather than Michael’s face.
Lily watches as Hurst’s swollen lips move but no sound comes out. It looks to her as if he’s practicing a kiss.
Will fires again.
This time he hits Hurst in the leg, going through his thigh and Michael’s too, though only the former appears to feel it. Hurst is spasming now, the shock inducing a seizure that looks all the more unnatural because no part of him is touching the ground. A marionette held up by a puppet master who barrels both of them forward.
Hurst’s body slams into Will before he gets off another shot.
It knocks him onto his back, the rifle flipping end over end. When he tries to scramble to where the weapon lies, Michael drops Hurst on top of him, so that for a moment the two men are struggling to untangle their limbs. When Will gets an arm free he makes a move to pull the pistol from the holster at his waist. Before he reaches it Michael kicks his wrist so hard it breaks with an audible snap.
The shotgun, Lily tells herself. You’re holding it.
She raises the butt and aims at Michael. It’s dark, even darker in this moment than the one that preceded it, and her entire body is shaking from something other than the cold. But she’s armed the Mossberg with slugs to take out targets up close and she can’t get any closer than she is now.
Michael pauses to look directly at her, a gaze so unguarded and clear there’s no choice but to return it. He looks at her with the longing of a man memorizing his lover’s shape before he leaves her for good.
And then, before he speaks, before she can fire, he changes.
From Michael to Hyde. He to it.
The monster lifts Will up by his broken wrist and brings his throat to its mouth. The teeth clamp down. Pushing through the skin.
“No!”
Lily pulls the trigger but she’s stumbling backward and the shot goes wide. She pumps out the shell and brings another into the chamber.
Once. It only has to be once.
She aims square at the thing’s chest.
Even as she fires it’s moving, bending to avoid the slug. Untouched.
Lily pumps the used cartridge out again and takes in a new one. Only now does she see that when it moved to avoid her shot it brought Will up with it, holding him drained and twitching, his face a blank.
The thing waits until she’s looking at it again. Then it swings its clawed hand up to stick all five of its blades into Will’s side, throws him over its shoulder, and comes at her.
Lily turns. Tells her legs to move but they only half comply, the knees spongy, the thighs heavy. With every contact of her feet with the ground she expects to feel the blades slicing into her back.
She knows it’s a mistake even as she pauses to look back. But she looks anyway. The thing is so close she won’t have time to start up the slope before it reaches her. Even as she watches, it lurches forward, Will bouncing over its shoulder.
She brings the shotgun up. Fires.
The thing staggers back and Lily sees it: a semicircle of blood just above its hip. It touches its free hand to the wound. Looks up at her and utters a sound at once animal and mechanical. A wolf howl combined with the shriek of a chain saw.
Lily starts up the slope toward the town house’s parking lot. She’s almost at the top and thinks of shooting again but she’s not sure how many slugs she has left. Two. Maybe only one. Maybe none.
Get to the car. Get in and drive.
She makes it to the parking lot and glances back. The thing spits a wad of mucus and blood that melts a dark circle into the snow. Then it starts toward her.
Her keys. Where are her keys? She finds the metal loop in her pocket and unlocks the door.
The thing makes the top of the slope, drops Will’s body to the ground.
Lily jumps in the pickup and closes the door just as the thing slams against it, clawing at the door handle.
She starts the engine and jams it into reverse without looking, straightening to go out the driveway to the road. But the thing is with her the whole way. Scraping at her windshield, its clawed hand dragging along the door, a screech of metal like something ali
ve and suffering.
The truck jumps forward. Lily checks the rearview mirror.
The monster is there, swinging Will’s body by his ankles as if he weighed no more than a bag of laundry. Its teeth crack together before it erupts into a new howl of hysterical laughter, or fury, or grief. Except it isn’t any of those things. A sound empty of any human feeling at all.
47
* * *
Lily crosses the border from Canada into Alaska as the dawn appears like a gray ribbon behind the hills.
Other than presenting her fake passport to the customs officer she stops only to pour the extra jerricans of gas into the tank. The road is patchy with black ice, so that anything faster than forty mph risks spinning her into the ditch.
She figures she has a bubble of time to get where she’s going without the thing catching up with her. After she gunned it out of Faro, it would have had to find a vehicle and keys to match. That meant breaking into one of the inhabited town houses first. It probably meant more killing too. And though she knew her shot wasn’t direct enough to have brought it down, it would have at least been slowed by its wounds.
There would have been no way it could have caught up with her on the road out before she made the Klondike Highway. After that, there were any number of side roads she could have ducked down, places she could have hidden and waited.
She might have even had a chance of escaping altogether if it didn’t already know where she’s going.
* * *
THE MILES BETWEEN TETLIN JUNCTION and Dot Lake are so similar Lily is sure she’ll have trouble spotting the lumber road that leads to the cabin. Yet when she comes over another rise like the hundred rises before it she sees it right away: no signpost, no gate, just a cut into the stumpy trees to the south.
She takes the turn and, a few miles along, finds the trail still there: rough and so narrow the branches slash at her windows, but used frequently enough by moose hunters to still allow a 4x4 in.