The fear coiled inside him, but he was too weary to swim against its current, instead choosing to focus on the smiles from that handsome couple and their sepia world, as if wishing enough might enable him to travel back in time, to that place.
Headlights appeared on the horizon, twin moons punched in the canvas of night. The car was coming fast.
Wellman brought the open whiskey bottle to his lips, took a mouthful, swished it around to burn away the taste of bile, and swallowed. Then slowly, he rose and stepped outside. He monitored his breathing, regulating it in an attempt to steady his nerves. Then he reached behind him and untucked his shirt, letting it fall loose over the gun. In his left hand he still held the picture, the frame slick in his sweat-moistened grip. Give me strength, honey, he thought as he brought the picture up to his lips and kissed the dusty glass.
Then lowered it.
Give me strength.
* * *
Luke’s head felt like a honeybee’s nest. Ill-formed thoughts and paranoid suspicions bounced around his skull like smoke-addled drones protecting their queen. His palms were soaked with sweat, his brow beaded with perspiration, and not for the first time in his life, he cursed his lack of education. Papa-in-Gray had yanked his children out of what passed for a school in Elkwood as soon as Momma fell ill and was re-christened to suit her new permanent quarters. At the time, Luke hadn’t cared one whit about being taken away from that low-slung series of prefabricated shelters. They’d been too cold in winter, too damn warm in summer, and the other kids had treated them like they’d fallen off the back of a circus wagon that had passed through town. Since then however, there had been occasions and developments in his life that had made him regret not picking up his schooling, even if it was restricted to their home, and even if Papa taught them. But Papa, though plenty sly, wasn’t all that smart himself. He could trap a deer, a fox, or a man a thousand different ways, but when it came to things like numbers, or geography, he just scowled and spat and threw a fit to cover his ignorance.
Luke wished for smarts, especially now when he knew without a doubt they would help him sort out his thoughts, align them into some kind of orderly formation so they could be inspected, studied, and understood. So he could use them to engineer his escape.
But brains couldn’t save him now. The window of opportunity had slammed shut ten minutes ago when they’d left the Lowell farm burning behind them. Papa had set the lone horse free, but it hadn’t moved from its dark stable, so he’d left it there, figuring if it stuck around and burned, it was probably too dumb to be of much use to anyone anyway. And as stringy as the old mare looked, they wouldn’t be losing much of a meal even if it wised up and took off. The pigs were a different story. Lowell had kept them plump, but even if he hadn’t, swine are resourceful sonsabitches and will eat each other before they’ll die of starvation. A thin pig was about as common as balls on a scarecrow. With Aaron and Luke’s help, Papa had cornered the animals and deftly cut their throats. They were now bagged in burlap sacks and bleeding out in the bed of the truck as it reached the bottom of the hill and swung around a short hairpin bend. Doctor Wellman’s place, old as the Lowell farm, but a lot less neglected, was dead ahead, waiting at the end of a long ribbon of gravel.
“Someone’s there,” Aaron said, unnecessarily, for they could all see the man standing before the open door of the house, silhouetted against the golden light from within. He had something in both hands. Luke guessed one of them might be a small thin book. The other item caught the light from the house and mangled it, making the bottle seem like it held aggravated fireflies.
“Looks like he’s aimin’ for a fight,” Aaron said, and Luke looked at him, caught the relish on his brother’s face. Ordinarily he’d have shared his sibling’s excitement at the thought of what was going to happen here, but not tonight.
“Looks like he’s aimin’ to die,” Papa mumbled, as the headlights washed over the old man, forcing him to squint and raise the hand holding the bottle to shield himself from the glare. Papa eased the truck to a halt, but kept the lights blazing. Then he killed the engine, and sat for a moment, staring out at the doctor.
Luke could feel his heart roaring. Could feel where his bare elbows touched his brother’s. Aaron was trembling too, but for different reasons.
From the small space between the front seats and the cab window, the twins were electric balls of energy, their impatience making the truck rock slightly. Joshua’s fingers were clamped on the back of Luke’s seat. He could hear his younger brother’s rapid breathing in his ear.
“What’re we waitin’ for?” Aaron asked, sounding just a little annoyed.
Around them, the night was uncannily quiet.
Wellman stood bathed in the stark glow of the lights.
“Search the house,” Papa said at last, still watching the doctor, as if he knew more than any of them possibly could just from the look in the old man’s eyes.
Luke moved, much too slow for Aaron’s liking, and barely had the door open before his brother scrambled over him, knife drawn. The doctor may as well have been a cigar store Indian guarding a store full of free candy for all the attention Aaron paid to him as he hurried into the house.
“Go,” Papa grunted, and Luke flinched, then obeyed.
The twins slid over the seats and followed.
Luke took his time, and heard the truck door slam shut as Papa stepped from the vehicle and drew abreast of him. The doctor looked on as the twins shoved past him, their feet thundering against the wooden floor as they disappeared inside. Then silence fell, and to Luke, it may as well have been an axe descending on his neck. His brothers knew better than to waste time. If they’d found the girl there would have been whoops and cries of delight, their way of letting the others know the chase was over, the day—and Luke’s life—saved.
But now the quiet that held the night by the throat had infiltrated the house. The only sound was Wellman’s unsteady breathing.
Papa did not look at Luke as they stopped in front of the old man, and Luke was thankful. He could not bear to see what remained of his increasingly dwindling hope being swallowed by the cold in his father’s eyes.
“Where is she?” Papa said, and slowly withdrew his handmade blade from the lining of his preacher’s coat.
Wellman was trembling, and as they watched, he slowly dropped to his haunches and set on the ground what Luke now realized was not a book at all but a picture. He straightened and tossed the bottle into the darkness.
“Bring that here,” Papa said, nodding pointedly at the picture. Luke moved forward but Wellman shot an arm out, his palm mere inches from the boy’s chest. Luke looked from the splayed fingers to the doctor’s eyes, and what he saw there was not fear, or anger, but pleading. It was a look he knew well.
“Don’t,” Wellman said quietly. “Leave it alone.”
From inside the house came the sound of something heavy falling then smashing against the floor, but Wellman’s eyes stayed fixed on Luke.
“I said bring it here,” Papa commanded, and Luke bent to retrieve the picture. He had just managed to get his fingers around the edge of the frame, the gravel biting into his knuckles, and was starting to rise, when the old man’s bony knee loomed large in his vision. He lurched to the side just in time to avoid having his nose broken but caught the blow in the cheek before he rolled and got to his feet, face throbbing.
The old man was breathing heavily, shoulders forward, head low, as if he was waiting for retaliation. Behind his spectacles, his eyes burned with cold fire.
Papa laughed.
Luke, one hand massaging his cheek, didn’t find anything humorous in what had just occurred. Their prey fought, punched, kicked, scratched, and bit all the time. It was nothing new. But the prey was always young, and strong, sometimes stronger than all of the brothers combined, so when they fought back it became a welcome challenge, an accepted part of the process. Sometimes they laughed about it later. But this was a sad old man who loo
ked like he could be snapped like a twig. The twins wouldn’t have trouble subduing him, and yet he’d taken advantage of Luke’s distracted mind, just as the girl had used her sexuality against poor dimwitted Matt. But Papa had not laughed at that. No, because it had cost Matt his life, and he had loved Matt. He’d laughed at the sight of the doctor driving his knee into Luke’s face because he didn’t care. Because he was going to take Luke’s life himself. Anything that happened between now and the moment he took his blade to his son’s throat meant nothing in the larger scheme of things. If the girl were found, they’d take care of her. If she eluded them, they’d pack up and move. But either way, Luke wasn’t leaving Elkwood. At least, not with all his parts intact.
“You’re not takin’ Abby,” Wellman said in a low growl. “You don’t have no right.”
Luke drew his glare away from Papa to reappraise the old man. Old, weak, he thought, and crazy as a goddamn loon. Why else would he be talking about a dumb old picture as if it was his wife they’d tried to steal from him? Far as Luke knew, Wellman’s wife was cold in the grave, but it didn’t seem as if the old doctor had been let in on the secret. Either that or he’d somehow managed to forget it. Crazy’s a shithouse rat, he thought. No wonder Papa found it funny. But justified or not, Luke felt the resentment colonizing him, and he took a step back from the doctor. To Papa it might have seemed as if the boy was doing nothing more than turning the show over to him, but for Luke it was an act of defiance, denying his father the opportunity to laugh at another thwarted effort to retrieve the doctor’s beloved picture. The humiliation ended here. Over the years Luke had said goodbye to whatever dignity he had come into the world swaddled in, but if nothing else he still had a sense of pride, the latter instilled in him by the same man responsible for the erosion of the former.
Off to the right of the house was Wellman’s old, green Volkswagen Beetle. Luke made for it, watched by the doctor, who made no move to stop him as the boy used his knife to jimmy open the hood, cut the cables and wrench out the plugs. Then he bent low, and slashed the tires. If by some miracle the old man managed to make a run for the car, he wouldn’t get very far now. Luke stood, brushed dirt from his knees and rejoined his father.
Aaron appeared at the front door, face grim. In his hand he held a bloodstained ghost. With a flick of a wrist he tossed the sheet out into the night. It settled at the doctor’s feet.
“She were here all right,” Aaron told them. “But she ain’t now.”
Something else was knocked over inside the house—the twins, having their fun, high on adrenaline and compensating for the absence of their intended victim.
Papa-in-Gray stepped close to the old man. Aaron remained in the doorway, the gleam of excitement returned to his eyes now that he was watching his father at work.
“I’m gonna ask you one more time, Doc, and then I reckon I’m gonna have to start cutting itty-bitty pieces of you off until you tell what needs to be told.”
Wellman backed away, toward the side of the house opposite the disabled Volkswagen where the darkness was heaviest. From there he had all of them in his sights. He stopped, swallowed. “She was here for a time. I didn’t know what had happened to her. The man who brought her here—”
“Lowell,” Papa told him, and Wellman’s shoulders dropped a notch, the light in his eyes dimming. “We took his head as a souvenir. Wanna see it?”
Wellman paled, and shook his head. “No…I don’t. I—”
“Clock’s tickin’,” Papa said.
“They brought her here, but I didn’t know she was… yours. I thought she’d been in an accident or something. Jack didn’t know nothing either. I did what I could for her, but she was too badly off… needed more help than I could give, so…”
Papa closed the distance between them. “So?”
The old man seemed rooted to the spot with fear. “So I sent her on her way.”
Papa smiled. It was a predatory look and though Luke wasn’t sure if the doctor knew it, it was also the telltale sign that the man’s time had just run out. “With Lowell’s ’lil nigger pup, right?”
Wellman said nothing.
Aaron let loose a frustrated sigh and stepped out into the yard but not before leaning back and calling out to the twins that it was time to go.
This was where it was all going to end, Luke realized. They had wasted too much time at home, with Momma’s little speech, then Papa’s display with the severed head for the boys’ amusement, then again at the farmer’s house, fucking around with the animals when he could have been in the truck, trying to make it here before the Lowell kid took off with the girl. If he hadn’t known any better, Luke might have thought Papa had delayed on purpose, might have come to the conclusion that his father didn’t give a rat’s ass about the girl and had done all this simply to get rid of the family’s one remaining rotten egg. To dispose of the kid he didn’t love. After all, why punish Luke for a mistake Matt had made? None of this would have happened if that simple-minded fool hadn’t fallen for the girl’s tricks.
The more he thought about it, the more he felt a terrible, repulsive affinity for the people they had hunted and killed over the years. For the first time in his life, he felt the sensation of the trap closing in on him, the jagged teeth descending to rend his flesh and snap the bone.
He was no longer kin.
He was prey.
His father’s voice jarred him from his thoughts. “Aaron.”
“Pa?”
“Scalp him.”
For one dazzlingly horrific moment, Luke thought his father meant him, that the execution of the mutinous plan had already begun, but then he saw the doctor back away as Aaron moved in on him, knife held with the point aimed skyward, and he let out a small inaudible sigh of relief.
“Make it fast, boy. We’ve got some catchin’ up to do.” Papa turned and headed for the truck, apparently uninterested in the torture that was about to be visited upon the old doctor.
He had one hand on the door when Aaron said, “Uh, Pa…”
Luke was surprised to see that all trace of fear had vanished from the old man’s face, as if it had simply been a well-rehearsed act to fool them into assuming him an easy target. But as it turned out, they were the targets now, for in the old man’s trembling hand was a gun, the muzzle looking as cold as the crooked grin on the face of the man aiming it at Aaron’s face.
-11-
Wellman had never been so afraid. His bladder felt explosively full, the valve responsible for keeping his urine inside jerking spasmodically every few seconds, threatening to release the dam if he didn’t remove the hand of terror that kept squeezing it. His knee ached fiercely from its collision with the boy’s cheek. But his concerns were not on his bodily functions at that moment. His perspective had whittled itself down until it was snugly focused on the tableau contained within the field of the Merrill patriarch’s headlights.
They had destroyed his car, but that didn’t matter. He hadn’t entertained any notions of fleeing. In fact, though they didn’t yet know it, in disabling the old Bug they’d inadvertently aided him in his cause.
The boy with the knife—Aaron—didn’t move, but there was no fear on his face, only hatred, dark eyes ablaze with contempt.
“You better put that down now,” he said, tilting his head slightly to spit.
Wellman waved the gun. “Back up.”
The boy ignored him and looked to his father, who still stood by the truck smiling as if eagerly awaiting the punch line of a joke, and asked, “What’re we gonna do, Pa?”
“Same’s we always do,” the man said.
The other boy, the one who had crippled the Volkswagen and whose face Wellman had caught with his knee, stared at him. Lurking beneath the grime and sweat and practiced callousness, the doctor thought he detected, not the anger he’d expected, but embarrassment, and perhaps the slightest trace of doubt.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked the boy now, the gun still trained on Aaron. “Wh
y do you want to hurt folks who’ve never done anything to you?”
Luke, who seemed startled to be addressed directly, opened his mouth as if to respond then shut it just as quickly and frowned, his eyes moving from Wellman to the ground, then up again to his father, who answered for him.
“Because some people’re born to die, Doc,” he said and at last started to move. Wellman felt a surge of panic, his gaze flitting from the glaring Aaron to his father, uncertain now which one of them represented the bigger threat.
“You s-stay where you are,” he stammered.
Papa-in-Gray kept coming, his strange dusty frock-like coat brushing his heels and kicking up dust.
“You think you was born to die, Doc?”
Breathing hard, Wellman slowly shook his head. “Nobody’s born just to die.”
Papa smiled. He was now less than ten feet away, his narrowed eyes catching the golden glow from the open doorway, making them gleam with odd light beneath the wide brim of his hat. “You really believe that?”
“Yes.”
Finally, Papa stopped moving, just outside the reach of the truck’s headlights, but he was close enough now that if Wellman stretched out a hand, he could have brushed the man’s chest.
“You think me and my boys was born to die?”
Wellman considered this, but knew he couldn’t give the response that immediately suggested itself. Goddamn right. All you rotten bastards deserve to die for what you’ve done. Instead he shook his head. “No. I guess you don’t.”
“Then tell me somethin’,” Papa asked, chin raised slightly in the manner of a shortsighted man appraising a gem. “If’n you really believe what you’re sayin’… and with you bein’ a man respects life and all… tell me why we should be afraid of you when you’re holdin’ a gun you ain’t gonna use?”
Wellman started to speak, to tell the man to back the hell up and enough with his goddamn talk, but the words died in his throat when he saw Papa’s grin widen at something slightly to the right, something in the dark over the doctor’s shoulder. Too late Wellman turned and saw one of the twins standing behind him, stepping forth from where he’d been concealed by the dense shadows at the side of the house. He had time only to see the impossible mask of utter loathing on the begrimed face and the dull shine on the blade in his hand before the child lunged forward and buried the knife deep into Wellman’s thigh.
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