Malus Domestica (52 page)

Fish took off running and a gun thundered behind them. A bullet ricocheted off the cave wall in front of Joel with a flower of sparks.

“I see you down there!”
shouted Euchiss.

The two brothers burst out into fresh air and found themselves in an enormous rock valley, occupied by a handful of dilapidated wooden structures—a tall coal elevator and several small cabins. Beyond the buildings was a pond full of orange water, milky and placid. From here, it resembled tomato soup.

To his surprised horror, Fish stopped and put up his hands. “The hell you doin?” Joel asked, rounding on him in shock. “We gonna—”

“You’d be smart to join in, buddy,” said a man standing next to a red pickup truck, pointing a revolver at them. He wasn’t
dressed
like Euchiss—he had on a pair of Wranglers, snakeskin boots, and a blue chambray shirt—but he had Euchiss’s
head,
he had the man’s beady eyes and Irish-red hair.

Exhausted confusion hit Joel so hard it was like a physical blow to the skull. “What…?”

“I’d like you to meet somebody,” said a voice from the darkness behind them. Owen Euchiss came out of the cave with his rifle tucked under his arm like an English fox-hunter, pale cave-dirt smeared all over his black uniform shirt and trousers. His nose was a starburst of blood in the middle of his sooty face.

‘Opie’ Owen smiled, joining his Marlboro Man doppelgänger by the truck. “This is my brother Roy,” said the cop, clapping his brother on the shoulder. He spat blood. “Say hi, Roy.”

“Hi, Roy,” said Roy.

Twins.

“This here’s who you were talkin about when you were jabberin about the Serpent in the car earlier. I take it our dearly departed Lieutenant Bowker said something about him when he came out to your house yesterday.”

Roy smiled.

“It’s okay, people have been confusing us for each other since we were kids. It’s nice to see you again, by the way, Pizza Man.”

“You’re
Big Red?” Something inside of Joel crumbled. He wasn’t sure if it was his heart, but it left him full of shards of disappointment and shocked anger.

“I should shoot you right now for breakin my nose.” Owen lowered the rifle in a sharp, disengaging way and leaned it against the side of the snake truck. “But before we kill you, I want to show you something I think you’re gonna find high-larious.” He opened the snake-truck’s camper shell and pulled out a steel pole as tall as himself, and then another, and screwed them together.

On the end of the two-piece pike was an L-shaped hook. “We use these to catch snakes,” he said, putting on a pair of rubber gloves. He cut across behind his brother and sauntered toward the pond. “Come on.”

Roy urged them along with his own rifle. “You try anything, I’ll shoot your balls off and watch you bleed to death.”

A boardwalk led from the base of one of the cabins and ran down the hill, becoming a narrow dock. Owen led them down it onto the rust-orange water, the polehook thumping along like a walking stick.

Monster-movie fog hovered around them, and the water was cloudy with some blotchy substance that resembled vomit. “Them women we work for, Cutty and them, they must think we’re stupid or something. They like to be secret-squirrel about it, but we know they get up to weird shit. Devil-worshippin and black magic and whatnot.” Owen spat blood in the water. “They do what they do and we do what we do, and they do it when we ain’t there. That’s fine with me: I don’t want to see it. Roy here works for em part-time, so I don’t go up there much. I’m okay with that.”

At the end of the pier were two cinder blocks, and on top of them was a plank with two beer cans and a bottle. Somebody’s shooting range. Owen turned the polehook over and dipped it into the water. “This little pond didn’t always look like this,” he said, lowering it hand by hand. “I understand it’s here because the shaft flooded when the miners hit a big vein of iron-sulfite and pyrite back in… 66? 76?”

“65,” said Roy.

“Thanks.” Owen manipulated the pole like a gondolier. “Anyway, mines below the water table usually flood if you don’t pump em out regular, but this baby is fed by a gee-oh-thermic source. That’s a hot spring.”

“I know what geothermic means,” said Fisher.

Owen scowled, but continued. “From what I’ve been told, the iron sulfite dissolves in the water to create sulfuric acid. The county clerk calls it ‘acid mine drainage’. That’s why it smells like the devil’s farts.” He gestured around the pond, coughing once, softly. “As you’ve probably guessed by now, sulfuric acid makes this little spot a fantastic place to get rid of things. Everything you throw in here sort of drifts toward the shaft in the middle and disappears into the mines underneath, never to be seen again. It can’t be dredged by divers because of the acid and the heat, and it can’t be drained because of the spring. It’s
perfect.”

The water stank in a caustic, chalky way, burning Joel’s eyes with the smell of rotten eggs.

“Still want me to whip you?” asked Roy.

Joel glared at him, pointing at the rifle. “If you’ll let me stick that gun up your ass.”

“Kinky.” Roy laughed. “So how was that steak?”

“I’ve had better.”

“Sorry, it must have been the carfentanyl I injected into it after I cooked it. How the hell did you get out of that garage? That roll-up was still locked when I got the door open. I didn’t see a damn thing back there in the dark.”

“Magic, bitch. I’m a witch too, you know?”

Roy’s smirk was a suspicious one. Joel coughed, breathing through his mouth again. The rotten-egg sulphur smell was getting to be too much.

What came out of the water wasn’t a cat kennel full of bones like Joel expected, but something that looked like a piece of tinsel. They stepped aside so Owen could lay the pole down on the dock and he picked up the metal with his glove.

“It’s braces,” he said, holding it up.

Roy nodded. “Neither of them two Witness boys last month had braces. Must have been the girl from Thursday.
Cough,
I don’t remember her having dental work, though.” He coughed again, into his sleeve. The fumes from the pond were irritating their lungs.

“Who gives a shit?” Owen tossed it back into the acid water.

Fisher’s fists tightened, his biceps flexing. He was covered in sweat, and he was so pale from pain he’d gone the gray-purple of a California Raisin. “This is where you assholes were takin the cats?”

“Yup.” The cop twin made an inclusive gesture, waving his gloved hand. He seemed to relish talking about the pond, like a proud fisherman demonstrating his secret spot. “We been dumping cats in here for ages. Shelter fills up four or five times a year. Only reason there were so many in there today was—
cough, cough
—we been up north with the girls all summer. I’d say there’s probably a good two or three thousand dead cats down there.”

Jesus Christ,
thought Joel.

He fought the urge to kick one of them into the red-orange-brown water.
I wonder how fast it burns. I wonder if they’d scream.
“Why
are you showin us this? Why the science lesson?”

“Because I want you to go down knowin ain’t nobody ever gonna find you. Nobody will
ever
go lookin for two dumb niggers, especially not at the bottom of a eighty-foot sulphur spring.” Owen smiled. His teeth were stained with blood.
“That’s
for the treadmill.”

“Man, let’s do em and get out of here, I’m chokin to damn death,” said Roy, slinging the rifle over his back and drawing his revolver.

“Sounds like a plan. My nose is killin me anyway. I got to get to the hospital or somethin.” Owen stepped on each of his gloves, pulling them off, and pulled his Glock out of his service holster.

Joel’s heart surged. “Wait—”

Pointing the pistol, Owen flicked the safety and shot Fisher in the head.

Gray and red billowed across the air in a fine spray and the whip-crack of the shot whispered through the trees. Breathless and surprised, Joel watched Fisher topple over (he would dream of this very moment, forever and ever amen, on the eternal DVR of his mind, backward, forward, and in slow-motion) and crash into the rust-colored water, flat on his back.

The two redheads turned away as the splash flecked their skin and clothes with acid-water. Joel squinted against the droplets, letting them dot his naked chest, arms, face.

The acid should have hurt, he assumed, but he couldn’t feel anything because he’d gone numb from the inside out. His heart tumbled into the pit of his stomach; his legs gave way and he fell on his hands and knees, staring down at the shadow that had once been his brother.

Joel slumped forward, his forehead on his fists, his fists on the deck. All those times they’d fought, it would all now go unresolved. All those years they’d drifted apart, Joel taking care of their demented mother while Fisher steered clear of the blast radius, afraid and stricken at seeing her deterioriate, they’d never get to fix that.

It was gone, forever and ever.

Desolation shattered his thoughts into a million pieces. All he could do was stare bleakly. The wound in his leg burst its stitches as he’d knelt, but it was a thousand miles away. His lungs were squeezed empty and he couldn’t fill them again, like the hand of God was around his chest. His eyes swam with dangling tears, turning the planks under his hands into a dark kaleidoscope.

“I figured I’d do him first, in front of you,” Owen said, coughing politely. He spat into the water again. “That was for the bucket. Hah, comedians always get it worst.”

“Cruel, brother.” Roy pulled the revolver’s hammer back and coughed. The grumble of an engine reverberated from somewhere far away, sounding for all the world like a bumblebee in a tin can. “Sometimes I think you’ve got a mean streak in you.”

Joel turned his head and growled at the muzzle of the Magnum, as venomously as he could manage.

Roy smirked. “Little late for gettin pissy, don’t you—”

A voice echoed from the cave at the top of the slope. Freddie Mercury howled,
“Who waaaants to liiiiive foreverrrrr?”

“The hell is that?” asked Owen, looking up.

A pickup truck barreled out of the mine shaft, bearing down on them with one headlight. Ashe Armstrong stared through the Frontier’s smashed windshield, blood streaming down his face.

Even as the truck swerved toward the pond and the boardwalk, Owen fired three shots from the Glock,
POP, POP-POP.
The first sank into the smashed quarter-panel, the second and third punching through the hood and knocking the rear window out.

Ashe slammed up onto the dock, his engine squealing, and drove toward them. The boards crackled and popped under the weight of two tons of metal, threatening to collapse, leaning forward.

Three things happened at once then:

1. Roy flung himself into the water,
   
2. Joel rolled over like a dog and lay flat on his back,
   
3. and Owen fired one last panicked shot into the Frontier’s crooked grin, screaming
   “Police—!”
   as if that would work.
   

The Frontier slammed into Owen, the murderer’s body clattering against the front like a bag of bowling balls, and its undercarriage roared over Joel’s face with barely an inch of clearance. He rolled over onto his belly just in time to watch the truck drive off the end of the dock into the acid pond.

In a daze of adrenaline and fumes, he stood up and his eyes wandered giddily around the scene. The truck must have carried Owen away, because he wasn’t anywhere in sight. Roy thrashed around in the red water to his right, screaming incoherently, his green shirt turning black. Joel stumbled down to where the home-made shooting range used to stand. The Frontier’s ass end stuck up out of the water like the Titanic, air-bubbles gurgling out from under the body.

It was sinking. “Aaugh!” shouted Ashe, as he ripped the frames and broken glass out of the cab’s rear window, wedging himself into the gap. “Jesus!
Jesus Christ!
What is up with this water?”

“It’s sulphur acid.”

The tailgate was a few feet away, and the bed only had a few inches of water in it toward the front. Joel stretched out and stepped on the bumper, one foot on the dock and one foot on the Georgia license plate. “Climb back here, man, come on, I’ll get you out.”

Ashe hauled himself through the back window and out, flopping like a newborn rhino into six inches of acid runoff. “Oh, ahh, shit,” he hissed, scrambling onto his hands and knees.

Soupy water gushed through the gap between the bed and the frame, soaking his shirt and pants in foul rusty patches. Taking the vet’s hands, Joel pulled backward with every bit of strength he could muster, and Ashe clambered up and over the tailgate, throwing his weight over onto the dock. He sat up and gave Joel a hand back across, and the two of them sat there coughing, watching the truck sink into the pond.

Queen’s operatic howling slowly become a gargling chant until the radio shorted out with a crackle.

Ripping off his ruined shirt, Ashe threw it in. His back and belly were mottled with patches of pink, raw skin. “D’you think my insurance will cover acts of heroism?”

Joel went to his hands and knees again over the side of the dock, looking for his brother. “God, oh God,” he wept, shuffling back and forth on his hands like a fearful dog, but Fisher had already submerged, fading away into the corrosive depths. “Where
is
he? I can’t see my brother no more, Jesus, he’s dead, fuckin
dead,
he’s dead.”

“Where is he?” asked Ashe. “Did he fall in?”

“They shot him. That son of a bitch shot him in the head. God help me, I saw his brains. He fell in and now he’s gone.”

CLACK!
The entire wooden platform shuddered and shifted, one of the boards coming loose and falling in. Ashe helped Joel to his feet. “Let’s get off this thing—
cough
—and away from this water before we end up in there too.”

They hobbled up to the rocky shore and rested, coughing, trying to catch their breath.

The Serpent Roy Euchiss lay motionless at the edge of the water. Most of his hair had burned off, leaving him as straggly-bald as a baby, and his clothes were waterlogged tatters, everything stained vomit brown. He was covered in angry red welts and it looked like he was sweating droplets of blood, but what struck Joel, and startled him so badly, was that Roy’s ears and nose and fingers had turned as gray and dry as ash.