Offspring (23 page)

And when she heard Luke’s voice down the mountain—his bad stage whisper, and the men’s deeper voices hushing him—she felt something soar out of her like a nesting gull, and knew that what she lacked time would somehow endow again, and it was almost possible to smile.

Do not try to escape the wound
, thought the Woman.
Make it welcome
.

The trick had been taught to her far more years ago than she could remember. Once before it had saved her life—and it had always made her impervious to pain.

She took the wound into her—even locating and including the bullet that lay pressed to the back of her seventh rib—surrounded it, encompassed it. Until the invaded flesh was no more or less consequential to her than a fingernail or a follicle of hair.

And finally was able to rise.

She stood, the damp air thick with the smell of gunfire, and calmly surveyed the cave.

The children were dead.

First Stolen, dead.

She would have to begin again
.

She kicked the fat man twice in the belly and saw
the last of the breath in him huff out between his lips with the first sharp blow.

She looked down into his face as she had before on the path and knew him again, knew that whoever he was, this man had once inhabited her dreams.

Perhaps he would again, and perhaps the next time she would understand why.

The women, her captives, were gone. She would have to hurry
.

The knife was secure in the back of her belt.

She stripped off the bloody shirt and gathered up Second Stolen’s child squalling on the floor. At her touch the child went suddenly quiet.

For a moment she noticed its eyes.

Its eyes unnerved her. As though they understood her intent, and approved. Not the eyes of an infant. The eyes had wisdom.

Power.

She wrapped the shirt around it and tied the bottom corners together between its legs, then knotted the arms and slipped them over her head so that the baby hung pressed with its belly to her back behind her shoulders in a makeshift harness, riding high enough so that she could quickly get to the knife. The baby’s tiny fingers flexed against her naked back as though seeking purchase in the Woman’s flesh, opening and closing against her.

She walked quickly to the back of the cave.

She felt a chill. The body of the other infant, the one who had brought this upon them, lay leaning against the wall in the white plastic garbage bag to the right of the Cow. She could see the side of his face and one
shoulder pressed straining into the bag, as though the infant were trying to break free.

Its spirit unreleased
.

She had failed in this.

There was no hope for release now but she could still set its vengeance far away from her at least, she could set it into the drifts and deeps of the sea.

She picked up the bag, twisted it, and tied it into her belt.

She reached into the rusted yellow coffee can beside the Cow and found his tethers and his key. She removed the chains and left them dangling. She could find other chains. But the Cow could not be left behind. The Cow was necessary in order to begin again.

She tied the strong gut lines around his wrists, took the lines in one hand and the ax in the other and walked him to the entrance to the cave. Ordinarily she would have walked him backward—his wrists tied behind his back. The Cow had become very adept at walking backward, and it was amusing to watch him stumble. But the trail was narrow and she had no wish to lose him down the mountain or be delayed by his stumbling.

Outside the wind shifted and she smelled salt and tide off the sea. She heard voices. Whispers.

Not yet to the entrance, but close by.

She jerked at the tethers. The Cow grunted and trudged forward.

Outside she listened. She heard footsteps from below. But the path above them was clear.

The warm night air laved the wound at her side. The Cow shuffled to a halt behind her.

The man was sitting dazed in the path a few feet away. He looked up as they approached and removed his hand from the side of his head. The hand came away bloody.

She allowed herself a moment of regret. The man had been useful to her in a small way. Given time, he might have been much more so. She had known the wolf in him would turn ruthless in its own interests, in its own defense.

But the wolf was crippled, unable to escape the voices on the mountain.

It did not seem to know this. It held its hands palms upward to her in supplication and shook its head as it stared into the impassive mask of her face and tried to rise. It whimpered.

Perhaps it sensed her intention. Or perhaps it wished simply not to be left behind.

In either case this was only a man now—the wolf in him had fled.

The wolf was on the wind.

So that it was a kindness to the man to swing the ax, to break swiftly and cleanly through the ear and skull, to send half the skull sailing out into the night down the cliffside to the sand below. She watched the body stir, still sitting, as it slowly began to fall and smelled the sudden metallic smell of blood, tantalizing, intoxicating in the salt air.

The wound in her side wanted feeding
.

She realized suddenly that her entire body did. It had been many hours since the kill and feast of the night before, might be many more till it fed again.

She must act quickly.

The steep upward incline would hinder those below for another moment yet.

She caught the shoulders as they fell and brought the body upright, bent over and set her mouth to the broken lip of the skull and drank deep of the blood and fluid that drooled across the rim—rich, thick, salty—her hands holding the neck and chin to steady him, drinking from the still-warm cup of him, intent on this as the child began to wriggle in its makeshift harness and the Cow reached into the back of her belt and silently withdrew the knife.

The Cow stared into the open palm of his hand as though the knife had appeared by magic, not his own volition—as though some miracle had got it there.

In eight years he had seen so many. Knives for skinning and for scraping the skins, for cutting and sectioning meat, and then for feeding. For sharpening sticks or bones like the ones they used to torment him. He had seen knives heated to cauterize wounds or to dig for parasites. Used for killings of animals and men—fast and slow.

Yet he had never held one.

The years in chains had made him weak—all but one organ. And that was rising now as his hand closed over the carved bone handle and the Woman fed.

An image came to him of a man huddled for what must have been weeks in a dark narrow crevice, sealed off from all light and where it was impossible to stand or even kneel, living off the insects that crawled through his feces and the occasional scrap of meat that emerged from the sudden blinding light.

The man had a name. Frederick. He could not remember the rest.

But the Woman had put him there, and the Woman had delivered him.

And by then he was the Cow.

All the years in chains had made him weak. But not so weak that he could not take the knife in both hands now and drive it into her back, dimly aware of the child only inches from his hands struggling to crawl free of its harness, pushing forward on the knife with all the miserable weight of his flesh and bone, his erection driving too against the smoothness of her thigh in the most pleasurable sensation of his life.

He squealed, grinning, as she strangled him.

She shook him like a rag doll and soon his tongue protruded but he would not die, the light in his eyes seemed filled with pleasure and it would not go out, and she marveled that the power of the spirit of the dead infant was such that it had caused even this, had first torn the very structure of her world away from her and now even its sense, so that it was hardly even a surprise to her when the guns sounded and her flesh exploded in a dozen places and plunged them both spinning down the mountain.

And the last thing she was aware of was Second Stolen’s child torn away from her by the bullets’ impact and its eyes, gazing coldly at her and then into the empty night as it fell away. Unafraid.

A huntress
.

Rabbit climbed the tree to the platform.

He had waited until the woods were silent, until the men in the woods had passed by and he could hear their feet scuffling on the rocks below. And then he had waited further just to make certain and because he was still afraid.

He was moving through the brush when he heard the guns. So many guns. Then nothing.

He was sure his people were dead.

The important thing now was to stay hidden.

He was Rabbit. Alone now. Learning to be Fox.

He climbed cautiously, his knife between his teeth, aware of unfamiliar scents from above. Not his. Not Eartheater’s or the Boy’s.

In the stillness they drifted down to him on slow currents of air. It was almost as though they were visible.

He smelled fear.

Faint, distant. A residue.

But pleasing to him.

He smelled
innocence
—the blind security of hatchlings asleep in their nest.

He raised himself up, peered across the platform. His lips curled smiling off the blade.

It was what they had been seeking. Through all this night of amazements and destruction. And he, Rabbit, whom the others laughed at and would not listen to, whose smile had always been a sign for them that he was poorly made somehow, had found it. Asleep in a blanket where he had taken Eartheater and the Boy to play
. His
place
.

He could almost miss them now. There was no one to witness his triumph.

He rolled onto the platform lightly as a breeze and lay there. The infant beside him slept on. Its mouth was open. Its eyes were closed. He leaned in closer. Its breath smelled sweet.

He parted the blanket that covered her legs. The infant was a female.

The Woman had said they must use the infant’s blood to quench the spirit thirst of the dead child—and that this was for the good of all of them.

But there was no
all of them
now.

Only Rabbit.

He considered this.

In his mind he could taste its warm sweet blood.

And he could almost, but not quite, imagine the other. But time could make it real.

And he thought that the Woman would approve of his conclusion. That she would not think him quite so stupid after all.

The infant was female.

In her, in him, they could begin again.

He had only to wait and hunt and hide. Ten, eleven summers.

The Woman would approve.

He lay beneath a full moon darkened by clouds within the sound of the sea and claimed her.

He reached for the sleeping child, gathered her into his arms and she opened her eyes, knew who she belonged to now, then heard someone running, running hard toward the tree and a voice farther away call for the runner to stop. He listened to the footfalls and thought,
Older, yes, but only another innocent, the boy
, though the voice was a man’s voice and much more dangerous, and he crouched and drew the blade.

It wasn’t like he felt like a hero or anything, but as soon as Luke got them near the treehouse he started getting excited.

It was as though in all this horrible stuff, with all this going on that made him want to cry and
did
make him cry—his mom and Amy coming hurt so bad down the mountain, the shooting on the mountain,
those people falling so close to where he was standing he could hear them hit like great big sacks of dirt and even the baby falling so that he couldn’t look, he couldn’t, he just hid behind the policeman
, then asking about his father and nobody answering and the awful sick smell of the blankets his mother wore as she held him, the way she cried, the blood on Amy’s face—it was as
though in all this awful terrible stuff there was one good thing at least. And that was that Melissa was safe. Melissa was all right.

And he was the one who knew
where
she was because he had put her there. He felt good about that. So that when one of the policemen said okay show us and another said no wait, take care of these people here and we’ll call it in and then we’ll
all
go, he was glad his mom insisted that they find her right away, right now before something happened to her, that Luke should show them. He was glad even though it was hard to leave her and even though he thought,
What could happen?
These people, they were all dead, weren’t they? And Melissa couldn’t crawl yet. She couldn’t crawl and hurt herself. His mom had said she was still too young for that.

So what could happen?

Animals
, he thought.

Animals could get her. That scared him for a while. But he didn’t really believe it.

Sure it was possible but it just didn’t seem
right
somehow, to have gotten her all this way hidden real well and then have some animal get her. He didn’t believe it at all, he
wouldn’t
believe it and as he took the group of policemen up the cliff with him the scared feeling went away and he started to feel pretty good. His mom was safe. He was safe. And Melissa was going to be safe, too.

So he was excited when they got to the treehouse—not some hero, but excited.

And he didn’t really listen when the officer told him to stop.

“Up here!” he said.

And ran out ahead.

He climbed the steps as fast as he could.

And the policemen were behind him but they were adults and a whole lot slower and had a whole lot less to be excited about, so they hadn’t even got to the ladder yet when he was up, his head over the top of the platform and he was grinning, he could hardly wait to see Melissa there . . . when this dark sudden shape of something in front of him hissed and rushed forward, and even before he saw the glint of the knife he lost his footing and cried out and started to fall.