KIN (5 page)

Madness danced through her, offering itself up as an alternative to the unbearable suffering, and she grunted, pummeled by invisible fists of pain, and tried to listen.

Any minute now
, that soothing velvet voice told her.
Any minute now they'll be back with their knives and their ropes and their filthy things, ready to do to you what they did to...to...

She closed her eyes, opened them again. Darkness in one; light in the other. The room seemed to jump and jitter every time she tried to focus. The rataplan of the rain at the window was designed to distract her, to make her believe it was the dirty finger of one of
them
, eager to draw her attention, but she didn't look, didn't care. The pain was too much now, and even that didn't matter because pain meant she was alive, and alive meant they hadn't done to her what she'd seen them do to the others, to her friends, and she couldn't understand why they
hadn't
done the same to her, couldn't—

And then she did.

She hadn't let them.

She had escaped, survival instinct taking control of her, muddying her mind, narrowing her thoughts into one single inner cry of primal self-preservation.

Loosening rope burning her wrists. The dimwitted single-minded smile of her captor, as he tugged down his pants with trembling hands. Claire, arching her back away from the stake, spreading her legs, exposing herself more fully, watching his eyes drop to the raw wounded lips there.
Come on, come take it you dirty fuck
. Her fingers fumbling, tips jabbed by the sharp point of a sliver of wood from the haphazardly stacked pile behind her and to the left. Reaching, weeping, gripping...
Come closer
. Swaying her hips despite the pain, the degradation, watching his fascination as he approached, his stubby cock springing free from his shorts, the tip glistening.
Come closer
...The memory of her friends, of what had been done to them, the black fire seizing her, the pain, the anguish, the horror...the rage.
Come on!
Then he was there, leering at her, hands outstretched to paw her breasts and her own hands were suddenly mercifully free, the rope falling to the floor. His mouth opening, eyes reluctantly leaving her body, frowning as he realized what that severed snake of rope on the floor meant, then a moan, low in his throat as she snatched the wood, swung it around and...

She had fled them in a dream, and woken now to find that was all it had been, for wherever she was, it was no place she knew, no place she wanted to be. It was a bed, and had it been an earthen one she might have understood. But the sheets were clean where she hadn't bled on them. The room was tidy where there were no instruments and knives.

Knives
.

Squinting, hissing through her teeth at the pain, she raised herself up on one elbow, and like a barrel full of rocks falling on its side, the pain seemed to tumble through her, settling in one half of her body, adding weight to the arm she was using to hold herself up. She took a series of short painful breaths as the light grew hazy and spun away from her, then she slowly, slowly opened her eye fully, willing it to focus on the small metal tray by the bed.

Knives. Lots of them, some still wet with her blood. The tools they'd used to fix her, sew her up so they could tear her stuffing out again.

She tried to smile but her lips felt like taut rubber, so she settled for a huffed laugh and the momentary surge of warmth that almost dulled the pain in her chest at the thought of what she was going to do with that knife—a scalpel, she noted.

Any minute now...

Yes, any minute now, they would barge into the room, those dirty seething bastards, but no matter how fast or how strong they were, they would not get her again.

They would not get a second chance to kill her.

Because she was going to do it for them.

-6-

As he approached the girl's room, Wellman heard the front door slam shut. Jack was gone, and that was good. His account had shaken Wellman, threatened to drain him of his resolve, imbuing in him the temptation to just drive the girl ten miles up the road and dump her somewhere, to avoid whatever her presence might call down upon him. But he was not going to do that, felt guilty for even thinking it. Once the girl was fit to be moved, he would put her in his car and drive her into Mason City, to one of the hospitals there, and once she was checked in, his next call would be to the police. The girl would have to be identified, her family told where to find her, so they could begin the long heartbreaking and arduous process of rebuilding their lives. He knew what that was like. He had been there himself. Hell, still
was
there, and he didn't envy them the journey.

What he didn't know was what would happen when he returned home after doing what he knew in his heart was the right thing. Would the Merrill clan be waiting for him? Would they simply demand to know what he'd done with the girl, or would they already know, having forced the information out of Jack? Surely, if they were indeed responsible for what had happened to the girl, wouldn't they now be too busy uprooting themselves and moving elsewhere in anticipation of a major manhunt once she was found?

He couldn't think about that now. He was old, and he was scared, and given too much consideration, the fear might consume him. All he knew was that he had watched a woman he had loved, still loved with all his heart, die in that room once and had never recovered from it, despite doing all he could to ease her suffering. He had prayed for Alice Niles's forgiveness the night he refused her request for help, and she had died too. He would not idly stand by and watch another human being perish if it was within his power to prevent it.

The screaming stopped.

He hesitated at the door, listening. The silence in the wake of her scream seemed bottomless, and unsettling. After a moment, he gently gripped the handle of the door and eased it open.

"Miss?" he asked quietly, like a bellboy afraid of disturbing a guest, which was, now that he thought about it, not all that inaccurate, for until she decided whether or not to live or die, he was bound to serve her.

He stepped into the room.

She was awake.

Steel gleamed just above the covers.

Her body convulsed, just as he saw the scalpel in her hand, just as he noticed the fresh blood on the sheets.

Rain sprayed the glass as he hurried to her side.

She looked at him, frowned slightly, her face the same shade as the pillow beneath her bandaged head.

"My name is Doctor Wellman," he said, struggling to keep calm as he sat down on the bed and gripped her wrist. He was relieved to see that she had not had the strength to make more than a superficial cut, but it was bad enough. "I'm here to help you. You've been badly injured." A quick inspection of her other wrist revealed a deeper wound. It was from this the majority of the fresh blood had come. Still looking at the dreamy puzzled expression on her face, he reached blindly out and tugged open the nightstand drawer, fumbled inside until he found the bandages, and began to unwind them from the roll. As he wrapped her wounds, a flicker of pain passed briefly over her face.

"Am I dead?" she asked him in a whisper.

He summoned a smile. "You're going to be fine."

"I shouldn't be. Don't touch me." The struggle she put up was child-like, and not hard to restrain without causing her further discomfort. After a few moments, the strength left her.

"Hush now," Wellman soothed. "I'm a doctor. I'm not here to hurt you. I want to help you."

"Are they here?"

"Who?"

"Those men. They took the skin from Danny's hands. And his face. They pulled it off like it was a Halloween mask." Her breathing caught. Her face contorted into a grimace as a tear welled in her uncovered eye. "They hurt me. All my friends are gone. Everything is dead. Make it quick."

His smile faltered. "Honey, I'm not one of them. Listen to me now." He gently stroked her hair. "I'm a friend."

"All my friends are dead."

She didn't reply. At length, she seemed to drift off to sleep, but whispered, "I have to die now. If I don't do it, they will and I can't let them." Her eyelid fluttered. Wellman did not panic. She wasn't going to die. He knew that. Her pulse, though weak, was constant. Her breathing was fine, her pupil no longer dilated. Unconsciousness was probably her only solace from the pain and the horror, and he permitted her the escape. While she slept, he wrapped her wrists and injected her with a dose of morphine in the hope that it would ease her dreams and numb the pain, at least for a little while. Then he set the tray with the instruments against the far wall, pulled a chair close to the bed, and listened to the rising wind trying to drown out the sound of her peaceful breathing.

He would wait a while for the bleeding to cease, before he sewed her up again.

Until then, he would pray.

And when he was done, he would take the girl to his car and head for Mason City.

We'll get you home
, he promised.

-7-

Her room was in darkness.

Luke stood by the door, fists clenched so she wouldn't see them trembling, because even in the dark he knew it would not escape her attention. The room smelled of sweat and bodily fluids, but he did not mind. It was his mother's perfume to him, and ordinarily soothing.

But not this evening.

Now he craved the smell of cooking meat and kerosene, of wood smoke and sizzling fat that would soon permeate the air outside as his brothers burned the bodies. It was a ritual he had been a part of for so long he had ceased to appreciate it. But he appreciated it now, would rather be drawing that pungent mixture of aromas into his nostrils than the smell of shit and piss and vomit that hung in the air in the small squalid room his mother called her own.

From the wide bed, shoved into the corner farthest from the window, where the darkness was thickest, he heard the sound of her moving, just slightly, maybe raising her head to look at him, to peer at him through the muddy gloom. The bedsprings did not so much creak, as whimper.

"Momma?"

"Boy," she responded in her bubbling voice, as if she was forever gargling.

"Momma I—"

"Come 'ere."

He pretended he hadn't heard because it was safer by the door, and that in turn made him feel guilty because he knew if he stayed here she would not rise up and come get him. She couldn't. In over two years she hadn't left that bed, not once, and in daylight, when the clouds covered the sun and the flies obscured the window, it was hard to tell where Momma ended and the bed began. It was all darkness, with lumps of paler matter here and there.

That bed, like the woman in it, dominated the room. Papa-In-Gray had told them in the same reverential tone he used to begin their prayers every night before supper, that their Momma was a saint, a suffering martyr not yet found by the grave.
Wires'n springs'n flesh'n fat
, he told them, like it was the opening line of some long forgotten nursery rhyme. There was no Momma anymore, he said, not the way they remembered her. Now she was a mass of suppurating bedsores, fused to the mattress where old wounds had healed and the torn flesh and pus had hardened to form a kind of second skin around the material and bedsprings beneath. The mattress, once plump and soft, had been worn down by her weight to almost nothing, a wafer thin slice bent in the middle, pungent, soggy and stained by the fluids that had soaked down from her corpulent body over the years. The boys took turns washing and tending to her wound, grooming her, scooping out the large quantities of fecal matter that gathered between her enormous thighs, then giving the remaining stain a cursory, half-hearted scrub before leaving her to wallow in the vestiges of her own waste.

She complained endlessly, spoke to herself day and night, sometimes sang little songs in a voice barely above a whisper, and was quiet only when they brought her food.

Waves of stink rolled from the crooked sagging bed. He had long ago stopped suggesting that they let some air into the room. He didn't even know if the windows would still open. Some kind of putrid brown grease had started climbing the foggy panes, like corrupted spirits risen from the heaps of dead flies, and had gathered in the cracks like glue.

But God, how he loved her, despite the fear she instilled in him, and despite all she had done to make him sorry for his sins. He loved her more than life itself, quietly believed that he loved her most of all, more than his brothers did, though he would never say so. He believed himself the favorite, even when she challenged that belief by hurting him.

"You hear me boy?" she said, and he licked his lips, felt his tongue rasp against the lack of moisture there, and when he drew it back in, he tasted something foul, something he had tugged from the air into his mouth.

"I hear you Momma," he said, and took a few steps closer to the bed. Beneath his boots, the floorboards creaked and breathed miniature puffs of dust into the air.
Shouldn't be no dust
, he thought, staring down at the dissipating clouds.
Floor's well traveled
. And it was, but like the intricate but drooping black cobwebs that hung like dreamcatchers from every corner of the room, he knew this room held onto every particle of skin that fell or rose from his Momma's body, then waited until dark to begin fashioning them into elaborate constructs to convince the world that time was passing faster than it really was, hastening his Momma toward her death. Trying to make her believe she'd been forgotten. Which of course was Momma's only true fear. That they would abandon her. That one day she'd wake and find herself calling out to an empty house, listening to the echoes of her voice coming back to her with nothing to obstruct it. Listening to her frantic cries slithering out into the woods to get lost among the trees, to be heard by the deer, the squirrels, the jays, and ultimately, the coyotes, who would sense her panic and follow it to the source. Then, as she had told her sons a thousand times, the coyotes would eat her, and scatter her bones across the land so her spirit would never find peace.