She walked a few more yards down the track and stopped. She turned about, hands on hips, staring down both sides of the embankment. The little boy was still playing with his puppy.
“Hey!” yelled Mistie. “You see a little girl?”
“No!” called the boy. “And I said shut up!”
Mistie looked down at the trash barrels in the back lot of the cold storage building. Maybe Valerie was hiding inside one of the ones that was lying on its side. Back in the apartment, Valerie was always getting into the lower cabinets when Mama left them unlatched. Sitting on her butt, Mistie slid down the gravel with her hands pressed into the gravel so she would slide too fast. Her palms were cut on jagged pieces of the rock, and at the bottom she paused to spit on them and wipe the off. There were little bits of skin peeled up and little red lines of blood. It hurt, but not as bad as the whipping if she couldn’t find Valerie. Her shorts were traced in oil and tar.
“Valerie!” Her voice was wobbly now. She knew she was going to cry and didn’t want to. What she wanted was for her bratty baby sister to quit being a baby and hiding when she knew it was time to be home.
Mistie squatted down and peered inside one of the rusted barrels. There was nothing in there but spiders’ webs and a rat’s nest. She looked in another and found the same. “Yuck!” she said, shivering. She hated spiders.
She looked at the pile of old discarded clothes over by one of the upright barrels. Who would leave their clothes here? Daddy said some boys and girls did a dirty thing where people couldn’t see them. The dirty thing meant they took off their clothes. Maybe boys and girls took off their clothes here. But they would get spiders on them, Mistie thought. And the people on the train could look down and see them.
She walked over, her feet slowing as she got closer, because something was odd, something was wrong. Something was familiar.
There were jeans, yes, big old jeans from some man maybe, and a torn blouse and boys’ underpants. There was a blanket that was crusted with months’ worth of dried, dirty rain. And there was something else, lumped up, twisted and crumpled, a white shirt drenched in red; a pair of blue shorts.
Mistie began to breathe through her mouth, short, puffy breaths that hurt her throat and her lungs. She couldn’t blink. Her arms stung with dread.
Ah, no no….
She stopped at the pile and knelt. She touched the back of the tee-shirt and found there to be a body within, and the body was warm. She reached over for the little arms that protruded from the sleeves, and rolled the body over. Legs flopped like little rubber dog toys, and one of the sandals was gone from the foot. The arms and legs were raked with scratches.
Mistie stared. The air around her went dark and poisonous. She put her hands to her mouth, trying to cry, trying to speak, trying to shout to Valerie to get up get up now quit playing this stupid game with me!
Valerie wasn’t getting up. Her head was gone.
Mistie found the head in some brush near the embankment. The eyes were open; the neck was ripped and ragged. Mistie cradled it in her arm and crawled back up to the tracks. She took it home, hoping Mama could fix it. Mama could put it back. Mama could make it right. And that Mama wouldn’t spank too very hard.
54
Kate threw the ax as hard as she could across the barn, where it struck the wheelbarrow, turned it over, and skidded into oblivion in the far side shadows. She stared at what was before her, ebbing and flowing in the simmering light from the wood blocks.
The girl. The severed cat head. The screaming child covered in cat’s blood.
Kate’s fingers were locked in place, paralyzed into position as if around the handle of a demonic ax. Her body was coated in sweat, dream sweat, waking sweat.
She took a step forward, and the girl clutched the child more tightly. The child held the cat’s head to her as if it were the grail of God.
And she was screaming.
“I…,” began Kate.
The girl bared her teeth. The child stroked the head and wailed as if her soul was being raked over hell’s coals. The sound pierced the rafters and echoed along the dark corners of the barn.
“I don’t….”
And then there was a thunderous cracking noise, gunfire, and the voice of a man shouting outside, “Who the hell’s in there? Who’s in my barn?”
The girl leapt up in a single motion, dragging the child up with her. The cat’s head flew away. Kate spun about and stared in the direction of the shout.
“Chuck, go around the side! Watch the windows! Could be that gang of rail riders we heard about!”
“Hope so!” came a second voice. “Got a ‘ward out on them suckers!”
“Shoot first, questions later!”
“Yeah!”
The burning blocks had lit the nearby straw, and a small blaze was starting to spread its fingers across the floor.
“C’mon!” said the girl, hitching her head toward one of the open stalls. Kate grabbed one of Mistie’s arms and the girl took the other, and they carried her off the main floor and into the tiny room where there was a square, latched window. With her free hand Kate knocked the latch open, then shoved the trembling, still crying girl out and into the rainy night. Kate went next, wondering for the briefest moment if the girl might ham-string her as an added bonus, but then she was out, face down in the soaking weeds, and the girl was behind her.
Her breath in her ears, thundering in sync with the hammering of her heart.
Get up get up!
She was up, she had Mistie by the forearm, the girl had the other. They were bolting through the steamy rain, across the black waves of grasses and the confused and snorting cattle, toward a stretch of forest at the far side of the field.
Behind them, two shouts, on the heels of each other.
“Damn barn’s on fire! Get the hose, quick!”
“I see ‘em! Out there, out the window! In my sights!”
A strange moment of silence, stretching oddly out across the field behind them, reaching Kate’s neck, stroking it with cold nails.
Then a blast, an impact in Kate’s left calf, and she went down again into the sharp grasses. No pain for a moment, stretching like the silence, waiting for the precise moment to reveal its full self.
Mistie fell as Kate fell. The girl Tony skidded to a halt and turned about. “Get up, bitch!” she ordered. “Get up and run!”
Then the pain came. It erupted in the whole of Kate’s lower body, blowing apart like a grenade, fierce, powerful, hideously real. She threw back her head in disbelief and agony. Fire raged through her vessels to her brain.
“Get the fuck up!”
Hands grappling for Kate’s hand, tugging her to her feet where she tripped, went down, and was dragged back up again. Another blast from behind and a hoot of joy, “They’re outa here, by damn! They’re faster’n jackrabbits!”
“I can’t…,” Kate began.
“Hell you can’t, ‘cause I can’t carry you!”
Kate bore down with her teeth and her mind, and made her legs move. Out, forward, out, forward, out, forward. She didn’t have hold of Mistie anymore, but she could see the little girl stumbling along beside Tony. The child was no longer screaming.
It was a life’s time before they found the woods and the sagging wire fence that separated it from the cattle field. Tony pushed the top of the fence down with her foot and threw Mistie across. “Over!” she shouted to Kate. Kate crawled over the fence. Her palms came down in a rain-soaked thistle patch.
Back at the barn, another muffled shot, and distant, incoherent shouts. Kate twisted her head back on her neck to see a faint glowing through the window. It’s going to be a Yule fire, thought Kate. Poor cows. All that hay.