Wanted: An Outlaw Anthology

by Lane Hart

  I close the cellar door.

  The screaming starts.

  I walk toward the spiral staircase, my leg on fire. “Are you going to flip the coin?”

  As if awakening, Makenna finally raises her head. In one hand, she palms the coin. In the other, she grips the knife. “We need to remove that bullet before you pass out.”

  “Or…” I kneel before her. “Heads, you make my death quick. Tails, you make sure Jennifer never leaves that room and you make my death quick.”

  A hard swallow forcibly works its way along her throat. She nudges the stack of files with her boot. “Heads, we find them all and make them a part of this cellar. Tails, we seal it closed and never talk about it again.”

  Makenna flips the coin. She catches it out of the air and slaps the coin to the back of her hand holding the knife.

  I cover her hand, preventing her from revealing the answer. Her eyes meet mine searchingly, and I drown in the depth of her dark irises before I remove the coin and drop it to the floor of the cellar.

  Epilogue

  Storm Chaser

  I can’t remember who said it, but the claim was made that cellar-door is likely the most beautiful phrase in the English language. Heard out of context, the two words paired together evoke a melancholy that settles deep in my bones. An echo of beauty that feels forbidden.

  I probably heard this in school, from some pretentious English teacher. There were a few of those. People who moved in and out of my world with no purpose.

  Pieces of my life filter in past the dark, shallow glimpses, the light finding the cracks. I place my hand to the cold floor and capture a splinter of the rays.

  Cellar door.

  Cellar door.

  Cellar door.

  I repeat the phrase over and over, trying to force my mind not to recognize the meaning of the words. I want to hear them with a foreign ear; I want to know what they might mean to another woman.

  His shadow moves across the light, blotting out the only warmth in the room.

  My lungs cease to breathe.

  I can’t inhale until the light returns.

  I used to hold my breath during storms, counting the seconds after the strike, waiting for the roll of thunder. But the storms vanished the moment he stole me. A beautiful monster full of anguish and wrath tore me from my life.

  Now, I’m his captive.

  A way out always exists.

  Only my mind rebels, insisting it’s the way in that must be found. A window to the soul. Through the eyes. I must’ve heard that in school once before, too.

  He watches through ice-blue stained glass.

  How does he see me?

  How do I appear out of context?

  Like the cellar door that conceals our secrets, if I repeat the truth enough, reciting it over and over, it loses meaning—becoming an obscure and distant version of our reality.

  There is more than one door. There is an infinity of doors. All leading to where the bones of our darkest secrets haunt. We all have a cellar door of our own design.

  My door is made of bone and ash.

  It lies below me, an inanimate object that has become as much a part of me as a part of this room. Easily ignored, numbed. Luke calls this the desensitizing process. I look at the door to the cellar every day, and I no longer fear what’s below the hatch.

  The sun peeks through the literal stained-glass window in front of me, and I pull in a lungful of air. I hear the drop of the hammer. The residual bang travels through the floor, the vibration sending a ripple effect across my skin. The feeling reminiscent of crunching bone as its beaten into dust.

  I force the thought back into the vault.

  In this room, surrounded by the veracity of who I am and what I’ve done, I’m every bit as sealed away from the outside world. I feel safe in spite of the gory details that infuse this space.

  Today, Luke is finishing the last addition to the house. I’ll move my investigation into the new office, where it will be hidden; out of sight. I’ve sat in this room for three months, walking around the hatch in the floor, knowing what we sealed down in the cellar.

  We welded the hatch closed.

  And we never spoke of it again.

  Instead, I leaped over the process and dove straight into a new obsession. There was no returning to the job as a detective, but that doesn’t mean I lost the fire, the passion to solve crimes.

  We are who we are.

  Luke has moved his projects to the garage, where he creates his art in peace, no longer enclosed by death and decay. His artwork is a disguise we use to conceal what we do. Another kind of door.

  Understanding how to move on was as simple as a toss of Luke’s coin.

  Taking revenge on the men who brutally harm and injure doesn’t bring back the lost lives of victims. It doesn’t change a damn thing. Even Luke admitted that there was no peace in the savage kill; his hunger only grew with each, more and more until the monster almost swallowed him.

  There’s another side to the coin that Luke’s pain wasn’t allowing him to see.

  I circle the name, then tap the window to draw his attention. He places the hammer in his tool belt, ready for this next part.

  Mariana is fifteen. She was taken four months ago. Her family has posted flyers all over their hometown in Venezuela. She vanished during the day. She vanished with no clues…except for the ones only Luke and I can decipher. Because we have inside knowledge of Phiser.

  For every name scrawled across the files, we focus not on retribution, but on finding what was lost.

  Recovering the lost girls is not atonement for the decimated bodies in the cellar. It’s not an offered amends to dodge hell, or whatever damnation Luke and I may deserve. It’s the answer to the riddle of us—of who we are.

  Jules was lost forever. Laura was lost forever. But their memory will live on with every life we recover and bring home to their loved ones. It’s the beauty found on the other side of darkness.

  And one day, when Luke and I are nothing but ash ourselves, this house will be tore to the ground and the hatch ripped open. The cellar doors will be unsealed and the remains of our darkest truth will be brought into the light.

  For now, in this suspended moment of time that belongs only to us, I walk through our house with the comfort that, I have no regrets. I circle my arms around the monster that haunted my dreams, stare into his crystalline blue eyes, and finally understand the seduction of power.

  Why run from the storm when you can control its destructive path.

  About Trisha Wolfe

  From an early age, Trisha Wolfe dreamed up imaginary worlds and characters and was accused of talking to herself. Today, she lives in South Carolina with her family and writes full time, using her imaginary worlds as an excuse to continue talking to herself.

  Learn more about Trisha Wolfe and her books at http://www.trishawolfe.com/