Finch pulled the trigger. The woman’s head snapped back. The breeze spirited away the blood. She crumpled, fell backward. The silence roared. He lowered his gun. “You all right, man?” someone asked. He didn’t answer, and they didn’t wait for one. People were screaming, running away. His eyes moved to the boy, bleeding from the throat but dead, flies crossing the frozen lakes of his eyes. He’d thrown a rock, just a rock, but it had caught Finch by surprise and his rifle had replied. He could feel a burning now where that rock had hit him, a blazing hole in the center of his chest as he jerked abruptly.
Daylight faded.
The moonlight returned.
Finch tasted fresh blood.
“Gotcha,” said the boy.
-36-
“They ain’t here,” Pete said. “Ain’t nobody here.”
Claire ignored him, but knew he was right. Had she expected anything different? Finch had told her the Merrill clan would have moved, so why then was she surprised to find the place abandoned? There were no lights on in the house that squatted crookedly in the dark before her, the weeds weaving sinuously around its base like snakes caught under its weight. Nearby, Spanish moss hung from the palsied limbs of a silver birch, veiling the roof. The sheds, so terribly familiar to her, were empty, the doors hanging open, as if to invite her inside, back into the heart of the nightmare she had come here to put to rest.
She headed toward them.
“Wait,” said Pete.
She didn’t, kept walking until she was at the mouth of one of the sheds, the same one in which she had been tied to a wooden post, raped and tortured, the same one in which she had taken the life of a man, driven by panic and rage and self-preservation. And how shocked would the world be to know that killing that rotten fuck haunted her more than outliving her friends? But it was true. He’d deserved to die, had forced her to take his life, and yet the guilt that haunted her every waking moment was not alleviated by that truth. The realization of what she’d done, when it dawned on her in the days that followed, stunned her, shoved her over the edge of a precipice into a dark place where even the specters of those she’d lost could not reach her.
She stepped inside.
It smelled like dirt, sweat, and human waste.
The moonlight cast her shadow on the floor, a frail twisted thing trapped in an oblong of cold blue light.
She flicked on the flashlight.
Chains hung from the roof like roots in a subterranean cave. They clinked together in the breeze, the rusted hooks clamped to their tails appearing to move toward her, but she was not afraid. There was no further pain to be drawn from her by those hooks or anything else.
A shelf lined one end of the room. Atop it were canisters full of nails, and Mason jars with some kind of amber liquid inside. Next to these was a jelly jar filled with different kinds of feathers. Claire recognized the iridescent plumage of a bluejay, and maybe the tail feathers of a cardinal. The jars were book-ended by an identical pair of small, cheap looking plastic statues depicting Jesus in prayer, His lifeless blue eyes turned upward as if He was in the throes of death, his shadow reaching up from his skull to claw at the ceiling. A speckling of red paint or old blood colored the right cheek of the statue on the left. There were a few old suitcases and a garish-colored leather purse tossed on the dirt floor. Various work tools hung from nails on the wall. Here was an old two-handed saw with some of its teeth missing. Here, hoes of all sizes pinned to the wall by their throats. There, a row of sickles, some of them missing the upper part of the blade. A single sheet of bloodstained plastic was bunched in the corner beneath a three-legged chair that had been propped against the wall.
By her left shoulder was the stake, a rough-cut oaken log that had been wedged between floor and ceiling. The wood was stained in places with all that remained of the dead. Claire shook her head and reached out a hand. Again, she anticipated flashes of memory on contact with the stake, an assault of visions reminding her that once it had been her body pressed against the wood, her blood and sweat permeating its surface, her fear saturating it. But there was nothing, only the feel of rough bark against her fingertips. It was just a hunk of wood. Lifeless.
Behind it, the six-foot high cord of wood, stacked unevenly against the wall, long shards poking out here and there, intended to make the prisoner even more uncomfortable as they prodded into their flesh.
“Claire,” Pete said, from outside.
“What?” she muttered, her eyes drawn to the floor where once she had watched a man’s lifeblood soak into the dirt. There was nothing there now but old boot prints.
She had asked Pete to bring her here, knowing full well she wouldn’t find the Merrill family. They were long gone, and even now Finch and his friend were tracking them. Perhaps they would succeed in exterminating her tormentors, perhaps not. But such a vigil no longer seemed so pressing, or urgent.
They were alone here, tourists at the site of an atrocity, and it evoked little feeling from her.
“Claire,” Pete said again, and when she turned to look, the beam of her flashlight showed his brown eyes filled with alarm. “Someone’s comin’.”
Claire stepped outside and killed the flashlight.
Pete turned, looking toward the road.
She joined him.
A car was meandering its way toward them, flashers blinking red and blue, but soundlessly, shadows dancing in circles around the dark bulk of the vehicle.
A cop.
Claire shook her head. Goddamn you, Kara.
She looked from Pete to the brooding house behind him, then began to make her way toward it.
“Wait,” said Pete. “What are you doin’?”
“Stall him for me,” she called back, and broke into a trot. “I need to find something.”
The cruiser crested the hill, pinning Pete in its headlights.
Claire disappeared into the house.
With a sigh that sounded almost like relief, Finch dropped to his knees. He felt little pain other than the dull burning ache in the center of his chest from the second arrow the man—or rather boy, as he saw now—had shot into him.
“Ain’t feelin’ much yet,” said the figure standing before him. He could see that the boy was no more than eighteen or nineteen, but tall, his face in the moonglow possessed of a ferocity that was startling. Rarely, even in war, had Finch been afforded such a glimpse of concentrated malevolence. The boy was breathing hard, the adrenaline making his limbs jerk and twitch, his hands trembling as he held the bow up, an arrow nocked, the string drawn back, waiting to deliver the fatal shot. “Reckon if I let you you’ll start feelin’ somethin’ soon though,” the boy continued. “Papa had us put some stuff from the doctor’s house on our arrows. Said it makes your mind go funny, numbs you fer a while, makes you no more dangerous than a stunned possum. We even tried it on Luke, and he ain’t lifted a finger since.”
Finch was dying. He could feel it, the heat in his chest unable to compete with the rapidly encroaching waves of cold. His mouth was dry, his throat raw with the struggle to draw air.
“Maybe I’ll just wait and see if it wears off,” said the boy. “So maybe you can feel what I do to you next. But you might as well toss that gun now, as you ain’t got no more use for it.”