KIN (7 page)

"Amen," said his mother, serenely and he could tell from her voice she was smiling. "It was his message to you, son."

She had said that more than once before, and still he wasn't sure whether she meant that his father, or God, had written it for his benefit. At the time, and the years had only bolstered the conviction, he'd considered it a warning. A lesson, meant to scare away whatever latent strains of rebellion might have been subconsciously forming inside him in the wake of his sister's desertion. He remembered the anguish, the suffering, somehow infinitely worse than the day Papa-in-Gray had strapped him to a chair in Momma's room and used his razor on Luke's privates. The pain had been excruciating, but it was pain of a different kind. In the fallow field the day he'd stumbled on his sister's final destination, he had sat with Susanna's rotted head cradled in his arms as the wind chased shreds of the sundered scroll away across the field, and he had felt as if her death had shoved him into a new world, a terrible place where no one could be trusted and the ground could swallow you and your dreams. And if the ground didn't get you, the coyotes would, or Papa would see to you with his blade and carve the sin from your soul, the skin from your skull.

"Why did I ask you 'bout this today?" Momma asked.

Luke shrugged, his mood darkened by the memory of his sister.

"'Cause you poisoned your sister," she answered for him. "And for that she had to be dealt with. Don't you understand that if we'd let her go, she'd've been corrupted even further by Men of the World, and they'd've sent her back to us once they'd filled her with their wicked venom, and through her they'd've corrupted
us
, destroyed
us
, Luke." Her hand left his knee, and found his fingers, enveloping his warm skin in a cold damp cocoon of flesh. "We're the last of the old clans, boy. We stay together. We hunt and we kill Men of the World. We devour their flesh so they cannot devour us. We hold them off and resist their attempts to convert us to sinful ways. We protect each other in the name of God Al
mighty
, and punish those who trespass, destroy those who would destroy us. We are the
beloved
, Luke, and once the light has been shown to those who are not of the faith, they must embrace it or be destroyed. All your life you have understood this.

"Today, you were lazy, and foolish. You let one of
them
get away. You sucked out her venom and showed her the light, but now she's Out There again, with the light in her eyes and our fate in her hands. They'll send her back again someday, Luke, and by then it'll be too late. She will not come alone, and their numbers'll be too great for us to survive. They'll kill us and scatter our bones so our spirits cannot rest. Our work'll be over, and it'll all have been for nothin'. You and me, and all our kin'll be left in the dark, far away from God's grace."

Luke was afraid. He believed her, knew she did not lie. And if the girl—Claire—came back with others, with Men of the World, he knew it would mean the end of everything. And it would be his fault.

"What do I do, Momma?"

"Talk to Papa. He knows the townfolk. He'll know who owned that truck. Then you find 'em, and you'll find the girl. Once you do, take her heart and bring it back to me. Burn the rest. We'll share her meat, and save ourselves from Purgatory. But you ain't got much time to waste now. You best move."

Luke stood. But Momma's grip tightened around his hand. She tugged him close. The stench was overwhelming, and he shut his mouth, hoping she couldn't hear him gagging. "You find her, or we'll take what's left of your pizzle and eat it with grits for breakfast, you understand?"

He nodded, and held his breath until she released him. Then he turned and headed for the door. As his hand gripped the moist, grimy knob, her voice once more stopped him.

"Keep the skin," she demanded.

"What, Momma?"

"My boy. My Matthew. Tell your brothers to eat whatever needs eatin', to take what they need, but they need to keep the skin for me. Winter's comin' and I need all the heat I can get."

Though Luke couldn't imagine his mother ever being cold beneath the heaps of her own slippery rotting flesh, "Yes Momma," he said, and opened the door to the rain and smoke and the aroma of cooking meat.

-8-

There would be no prayer. Not yet. Momma-In-Bed had made it clear that there was not enough time to indulge in giving thanks, not when Hell itself might already be gathering on the horizon. He'd been with her for what had felt like hours, a long slow walk through the sluggish waters of unpleasant times. And because of that inner sense of more time lost than they could afford to lose, the sense of urgency increased. Every minute that passed him by was more distance between him and their quarry, and closing the distance between him and whatever Momma-in-Bed would do if the girl was not retrieved.

Luke ducked his head as he stepped off the porch into the gloaming. The fire cast reddish yellow light, the flames sizzling in the rain and casting shadows on his brother's faces as they looked at him, but he didn't spare them a glance before moving off toward the wood shed. Still, he found it harder to ignore the smacking of lips, the clicking of teeth, the greedy swallows, the tearing of meat from bones, and the murmurs of appreciation as they sat around the smoldering corpse of their brother. It was even harder to resist the smell the breeze carried to him before whipping it away into the trees behind him, where animals with dark eyes would pause and look up, curious but not nearly enough to follow the scent to its source. Even the carnivorous creatures that existed in the premature twilight beyond the trees—among them, the coyotes Momma-in-Bed feared so much—knew the small series of cabins in the woods were best avoided, for they had seen few of their fellow scavengers return from there, and so their curiosity abated quickly and they wandered on.

Luke was hungry, his stomach hollow and aching, and he was as eager as the rest of them to feed on the meat, to savor both the taste and the feeling of their dead brother's strength settling in his own body, Matt's unspoken thoughts, dreams, and ambitions, however simple, weaving themselves into his own brain. But the flesh would keep, he told himself, as he sighed and felt his worn boots sinking into the moist earth. He knew the importance of the task that lay ahead. If they failed this time, if the girl had already found her way to a haven they could not reach, then there would be more than the authorities to worry about. Momma-In-Bed had threatened him, but it had been merely a formality, and not a true promise. What she would do to him, maybe to all of them, if the girl was not returned, would be much worse than simply skinning his pizzle with a rusty knife. She loved him, as he loved her, but that would not be enough to save his life if he didn't make things right, no more than it had saved poor Susanna when she'd defied them.

Teeth clenched to force back the emotions that always tried to insinuate their way into the forefront of his mind whenever he remembered his lost sister, Luke climbed the small rise where the bare earth narrowed to a single trail that wound unsteadily through a short stretch of wild untended grass. The woodshed was narrow, and old, the wood bleached by the sun so it was a mottled white, with patches of gray. In the rapidly fading light, it looked leprous, with yellow light around the edges. The door bent outward at the bottom like a well-turned page, and as he approached, that splintered corner scraped dirt and the door swung wide with a sound like rocks tumbling down a hollow pipe.

Luke stopped in his tracks.

Though not a large man, Papa-In-Gray cut an imposing figure. In daylight, his skin was the same shade as the door that was now swinging away from him. In town, he was respected, but it was respect borne of fear. At home, among his kin, things were not much different. Now, in the gloom, beneath his angular, inverted triangle of a face, the chin topped with a peppering of silver stubble, Papa wore a dirty brown apron, which Luke himself had made for him from the skin of one of the men they had caught the summer before. Strands of blue nylon rope had been looped through holes at the top corners of the apron, the holes ringed by steel washers to stop the rope from sawing through, keeping the rough rectangle in place, and also, as was the case now, to conceal the wearer's nakedness.

Grim-faced, Papa raised his right hand. In it, he held the head of one of the youths—the one the girl had called 'Stu', which the family had found amusing since they figured this was most likely going to be the way he ended up. His blonde hair, though matted with filth now, still managed to retain a healthy look death had denied the rest of his body. The tanned handsome face of which Luke had found himself mildly envious, was no longer so handsome, slackened now by the pain that had ushered it into death. The eyes were closed, pale brows arched, the thick-lipped mouth open slightly, as if starting a sentence that would forever remain unspoken. Papa-in-Gray very rarely did a sloppy job with the carcasses and this one was no different. The machete had made a good straight cut through the boy's neck, and no bone or flesh protruded from the wound.

"A good'un," Papa said now, in his gravelly voice. "Who took the girl?"

Luke couldn't meet his gaze as he spoke, so instead he stared at the ground. "Big red truck came and picked 'er off the road. Two niggers—one old, one young it looked like. They made off with her. Headin' east."

Behind his father, Luke glimpsed the rest of the boy's naked body, splayed out on the worktable in the shed underneath a single bare light bulb. His hands and feet were gone, and his chest had been opened and excavated, the organs collected in a rusty bucket on the floor. As Luke tried to get a better look, Papa surprised him by tossing the severed head in his direction. Caught off guard, it hit Luke in the chest and he was knocked back a step. With a grunt, he staggered, feet splayed, and quickly righted himself, grabbing with his crooked fingers a handful of the boy's hair just seconds before it hit the ground, a development he knew would not have impressed his father.

As if anything ever would.

Exhaling heavily, Luke straightened and clutched the head to his chest. Papa-in-Gray nodded, but it was not a gesture of satisfaction, rather confirmation that his disdain for Luke was justified, and no one would ever convince him otherwise.

"Take it," the old man said, wiping bloodstained hands on the apron. The flesh seemed to soak it in. "We're bringin' it with us. Tell the others to get themselves a piece of those kids each'n load 'em up."

Though Luke wasn't sure why they were bringing along pieces of the dead kids, he knew better than to question Papa's instructions.

"All right," he said, and waited.

"Tell Aaron bring the truck 'round, and make sure all you boys got yer knives." He looked over Luke's shoulder. "Get movin'."

Luke started to say something, but Papa turned his back on him, and in two short steps was back inside the shed, the door swinging shut behind him.

As he stood there, the rain still pattering on his shoulders, the severed head gripped firmly by its hair, Luke felt overcome by bitterness toward the old man, who, ever since that day in the clearing with Susanna, had shown no affection, or respect toward him, not even a little. Worse, the old bastard had never once sat him down to explain why he'd done what he'd done to his sister, why they couldn't have just let her go, or maybe tried to talk some sense into her. No, he'd left that task to Momma-in-Bed, and he suspected, at the back of his mind, that all she'd done was make excuses because she wasn't rightly sure herself, no matter what she'd said about the poison in his seed. Neither one of his parents had grieved for her.

Luke turned away, and looked from the head to the semicircle of bodies huddled around the fire—his brothers, still eating, Matt's skin draped like an animal hide across a battered old workhorse between them and the four ramshackle sheds they used for the Men of the World. Luke hadn't given them the order to keep the skin for Momma. They had known, most likely because one or more of them had been listening at the window when Momma said it, and they'd worked quickly. For one brief moment, a flame ignited inside him, hot enough to make tears of shame and hurt blur his vision. He imagined them crouched down beneath that dirt-smeared glass, their heads bowed as they listened to the story of cold-blooded murder, his part in it, and the warning he was given. They would have heard the fear in his voice that only surfaced when Momma or Papa threatened him. They would have heard it all, and hurried to deny him the one command he could use to reinstate his authority over them. Then they'd watched him—he had felt their stares on his back as sure as the rain—through the smoke and heat from their meal, as he'd picked his way toward Papa's shed. And they would have known he would find even less warmth up there, a fact confirmed by their father's sudden tossing of the severed head, done, Luke guessed, to entertain his other, more faithful sons. In fumbling it, Luke had given them all exactly what they'd wanted.

As he approached them now, he forced a crooked smile. They looked up expectantly, blood and fat smeared across their faces.

"You been cryin'?" Aaron asked tonelessly.

Luke shook his head.
Not crying
, he wanted to say.
Just 'memberin' how much I hate that kin-killin' son of a bitch
. But he would never say such a thing, no matter how true it might be. To say it aloud would be to condemn himself, for he had no doubt that as soon as the words left his mouth, Papa would hear them. And a blade would cut those words in the same swing that took Luke's head off at the shoulders. His brothers would mourn him without weeping, devour his flesh without hesitation, and promptly forget he'd ever existed, like they seem to have done with Susanna and now Matt, their gentle brother, who would be remembered only for today, and only when the taste of him rolled back up their throats. So instead he took a deep breath, watched as Joshua and Isaac stared curiously at the head in their brother's hands, and delivered the instructions his father had given to him.