The gun had fallen out of his father’s hand, and his mother picked it up gingerly. In movies, people always knocked out the bad guy, then forgot to pick up the gun, leading to another inevitable showdown, but his mom was no dummy, and there was no way that was going to happen here.
She stood up, and he still didn’t know if his dad was alive or dead, but Adam assumed he was alive because his mother said, “We’d better get out of here.”
The flashlight in his hand was bloody, but it was still working, and he wiped the bloody end on his jeans and waited while his mom quickly ran to Sasha’s room, went inside, then hurried back, her face white, blanched. She bent down again, dug through his dad’s pockets, looking for something, and finally withdrew a key ring. She stood, grabbed his hand. “Let’s go!”
They practically flew down the stairs, and he tried to concentrate on the task immediately at hand—escape—but his mind kept going back to Sasha.
There were tears streaming out of his eyes, down his cheeks, but he was not really crying, and he was able to speak clearly. “Where’s Teo? Where’s Babunya?”
“Teo’s in her room.”
Teo was in her room, crying, but she’d been smart enough to lock the door, and she did not immediately open it. Even when they pounded and yelled for her to open up, she did not do so right away. It was only after Adam said, “He’s just knocked out! We have to get out of here before he wakes up!” that she finally unlocked her door and came out.
Adam grabbed his sister by the arm and the three of them rushed out of the house into the sandstorm. Dirt and grit sprayed into his face, needling his skin, little jabs of pain like pinpricks, causing him to turn away, squinting. The wind was tremendous, cold and powerful, strong enough to practically blow him off his feet, and he held tight to Teo’s hand.
The van was parked in the drive, in front of the carport, but as he started toward it, his mom pulled him away, in the opposite direction.
Where were they going?
“The banya!” his mother yelled over the wind, as if reading his mind. “Babunya’s there!”
He pulled ahead of her, in the lead, running down the path toward the bathhouse, dragging Teo with him, his feet moving from memory. The last thing he wanted to do right now was go out to the banya, but Babunya was probably out there praying or something, and they couldn’t just leave her. He thought fast. If they got her, brought her back, they could probably be in the van and gone before his father came to.
They were like stupid movie people, he realized. They should not only have taken his father’s gun, they should have tied him up before they left so he wouldn’t be able to come after them when he did regain consciousness.
But Adam didn’t know where ropes were or even if they had any, and he thought that maybe they had done the right thing after all. It might have wasted too much time had they stopped to figure out how to restrain him.
Time, he suspected, was the one thing they didn’t have.
They reached the boulders, ran past them. He could not see the banya, but he knew it was ahead and he led them straight to it, stopping in front of the open doorway, and shining his flashlight inside.
Babunya was in there.
She was standing in the center of the bathhouse with a whole bunch of old Molokans who looked like they were dressed for church. It was creepy to see them all inside the bathhouse, dressed in white, in the dark, while outside the wind and sand blew wildly, but… but somehow the banya didn’t seem quite as spooky as it had before. It was as if whatever had been in here, whatever had possessed this place, had fled, leaving behind only the eerieness of an ordinary abandoned building. Behind them, he noticed, the shadow on the wall had disappeared.
He felt a small shove on his right side, and then Teo was pushing past him, running inside, throwing her arms around her grandmother.
“He killed Sasha!” Teo cried. “And he tried to kill Adam!”
His mother’s hand was on his shoulder, and then all of them were moving into the banya.
“It’s Dad,” he explained. “I hit him in the head with this flashlight”—he held it up—“but I think it only knocked him out.” He cast a quick look out the door. “He’s after all of us. He’s crazy.”
Babunya nodded. “I know.”
They started talking in Russian, the Molokans, and he had no idea what they were saying, but the tone was easy enough to read: they were scared. He heard high, fast syllables filled with far too many consonants. He looked over at his mom and she was listening intently, but he had the feeling that even she was having a difficult time keeping up.
Teo glanced around, frowning. “What happened?” she asked. “Is the banya dead?”
She’d been here too, Adam realized, and the thought of that made his blood run cold.
Babunya smiled at her, hugged her. “Yes,” she said in English. “We kill it.” She walked over to his mom and said something to her in Russian.
His mother nodded.
“Come on,” Babunya said. “Work here done. We have to go.” She moved forward, gently took the gun from his mother’s hand. “Others are waiting.”
Like his mom, Babunya held the weapon as though it was a hand grenade about to go off. He realized that the gun was what his father had used to kill Sasha. It was what had murdered his sister.
Murdered his sister.
It still didn’t seem real to him. In some ways it seemed too real—the horrific specifics of it were imprinted on his mind and would be there forever—but at the same time, the knowledge was too large to grasp any way but intellectually. He knew Sasha was dead, but he hadn’t really felt it yet, not the full force of it, and he was afraid of what would happen when he did.
“Oh, shit!” his mother said. “Oh, shit!” She started beating her rear end, hitting her pockets in the front. She looked at the ground around her, turning in a circle, then glanced up at Babunya. “The keys! I lost the keys!”
Adam’s heart lurched in his chest. “The van keys?”
“Oh, shit!”
“There are cars,” Babunya said, nodding toward the other Molokans. “We go with them.”
His mom sounded as though she was about to cry. “But—”
Babunya put a hand on her shoulder. “We go with them.”
3
When Gregory came to, his face was stuck to the floor. His head had stopped bleeding, but the congealed pool of blood had cemented his hair and cheek and left temple to the hardwood of the upstairs hallway, and it felt like his face was being ripped away as he pulled himself free and stood up.
He did not scream, though. He did not cry out from the pain.
He welcomed it.
He thought of his family, smiled to himself. They were stupid. They should have killed him when they had the chance. Now they would have to pay for that mistake. And from somewhere down the hall he heard the voice of his father, agreeing with him. “Kill them all,” his father said. “They don’t deserve to live.”
No, they didn’t, Gregory agreed. He put a hand up to the side of his face, it came back wet and red. His wound had been newly reopened, and it hurt like a motherfucker. Adam would pay for that. He’d been planning to dispatch the boy like he had his sister—quickly—but his plans had changed. Now the little shit was going to die a slow, horrible, painful death.
He hobbled down the hallway, using his hand to guide himself along the wall because of his closed eye and the subsequent loss of depth perception.