“She chose,” said Louise. “Ali was that strong. Never realized—”
The door slammed shut in their faces.
Blessed heat circled them.
Steve said, “She broke the first imperative: self-preservation.”
Louise shook him. “Focus on what you knew before! Self-preservation isn’t the first imperative! Remember? Sophomore biology and the first imperative, the first imperative is preservation of the species!”
“You’re just saying that because you want to have a baby.”
Steve stepped toward her.
Louise took a step back.
Like we’re dancing.
“We don’t need a baby,” said Steve.
He took a step toward her. She took a step away.
His voice came out flat. Hammered. Fixed.
As he said: “We need a story for outsiders. To make them let us stay.”
“You want to leave me!” Louise backed into the living room and he danced with her. “Please remember you want to fuck Ali and leave me!”
Blood on the floor tried to stick her shoes to the wood.
“Just need our story,” he whispered. “Could say . . . Bob, Bob went crazy when we found out his plan.”
Louise stepped farther into the blood. “How do you know his plan?”
“And then he . . . he killed Parker and . . . and hurt Ali, that’s the truth! Tried to kill me and that’s the truth! But we fought him off and they’re all gone now and it’s just us and we have to, we’ll say we won’t let Bob steal our dream to fix this place up—we’ll say it’s in honor of Ali. And Parker!”
“No!” Louise stepped backward out of the blood pool.
Steve cocked his head. “Fixing all this could be a one-person job.”
He smiled. Held out his hand to her as he had for their wedding dance. Stood in sticky the color of raspberry swirls in their chocolate wedding cake.
Louise slapped his hand away. His boots slipped and his legs flipped out from under him. His crash shook the house.
The hammer Parker’d used. Lying on the floor by the newly framed window—No: not lying, moving, as like a wave, floorboards rippled to surf the hammer toward the blood pool and Steve’s waiting hand.
Louise ran up the stairs.
“Wait!” she heard Steve yell. “We can fix this!”
His footsteps charged up the stairs behind her.
She made it to the second floor. Raced up to the third, past bedrooms where visions of her husband fucking Ali fueled her fear with rage. She ran beside the hallway railing around the open space drop to the first floor.
Looked across that gap and saw Steve running after her, his face twisted and his fist full of hammer.
Stopped, as if on command, both of them crouching near the rail to glare across the stairwell chasm centering the heart of this crumbling house.
Across the chasm, Steve smiled: “Easy, hon. We’re home.”
Blasts of dust blew from the corners flanking Steve. Floorboards snapped up to slap back down again with a machine-gun racket as two energy waves rippled toward him. They met with a crack! and the wood he stood on exploded in splinters. The railing in front of him blew apart and the hole suddenly made in the mansion dropped him into the chasm of its heart.
He fell three stories without a scream.
Louise shut her eyes. Heard him land. Opened her eyes to a mushroom cloud of dust. She peered over the railing.
Steve lay sprawled on his back on the first floor, homicide’s hammer by his limp right hand, a railing chunk driven into his chest as another crimson pool formed around his outline.
You owe me filled her mind.
She ran down the stairs.
Okay, it’s all okay now, you’re okay.
“No!” yelled Louise as she ran down from the second floor.
You were always the one.
“Oh God oh God oh—”
Whatever created us must want us here. This must be right.
“Stop it!” yelled Louise as she reached the first floor of the house with two dead bodies. “I’ve got to stop thinking so I can see what to do!”
Flashes. Bob’s calculations of probate problems after Parker’s death just need a good story and protracted conveyance keeps bulldozers away and might use who comes to clean up—No, Louise can do it. Say: Steve went stir-crazy, murdered Parker, raped Ali, killed Bob, crumbling house saved her I saved you keep the place, live in it, fix me up tell rescuers it’s like getting back on the horse. Could work.
Louise ran for the door before the house got what she realized.
She had the door halfway open when it snapped rigid in its frame.
But halfway was wide enough for her to fling herself out into the blizzard. Cold bit her as the door slammed shut behind her. Snow swallowed her legs up to her shins as she stumbled down the porch stairs. Cold so cold Oh my God yes wonderful because it’s real! Snowflakes wet her skin and tried to refreeze. Thick white afternoon light let her see Parker’s snowburied pickup. Its steel handles burned her bare hands, but the driver’s-side door swung open to her pull and slammed shut after she was in, behind the wheel. Parker’s corpse sat rigid on the seat beside her.
The dead man stared at the windshield as her shaking hands fished in his shirt pocket . . . Yes! Found his lighter, a half-smoked joint and a small plastic bag. Her trembling hands clicked open the metal Zippo lighter, thumbed a blue flame, lit and hoovered a deep hit.
“Staying stoned makes it harder for the thinking to get you,” the dead man beside her had said. Hope he was right about that.
She took another quick hit before she stubbed it out: So little left!
I am freezing in a blizzard-trapped pickup with a dead man.
She saw a bulge in the left front pocket of the dead man’s blue jeans.
Keys! She leaned the stiff corpse against the passenger window, wriggled her hand into those jeans. The chunk of wood jutted from Parker’s skull but she knew, she really knew, that out here, such wood had no power.
The pickup ground to life, blew heat into the cab.
A quarter tank of gas.
Even with the chains on the pickup, even with four-wheel drive, she’d need to rock the pickup back and forth to create tire tracks to follow. Even if she found roads in the whiteout, that vehicular effort needed a full tank.
Like an electric cloud softened other voices in her brain.
Can’t drive away. Can’t stay here. Enough gas to idle for a couple hours. Don’t look at the dead man, his open eyes. Don’t look at the board nailed to his skull. She searched his pockets, found a few bucks, coins, and in that shirt pocket, a plastic bag . . . with another joint! Could stay stoned for . . . maybe until dawn. She checked her watch: three fourteen P.M. Make that until midnight. If I come in and out of the house, run the engine . . . every three hours . . . My mind and I will make it to dawn, maybe to the end of the storm.
Told herself: It’s not what the house can do, it’s what I choose to do. Only junk in the glove compartment. Nothing on the floor but the thirty-foot orange extension cord Parker used to connect an old-fashioned headbolt heater in the pickup’s engine to any building’s electricity.
Three hours. Stoned enough, staying strong enough, I can survive three hours in there. I can keep me. Louise turned off the pickup, left the keys in the ignition: one less trick for the house to play.