The Euthanist (37 page)

One more door remained at the darkest end of the hallway. This would have to Veda’s bedroom. My brain flickered with memories of medical calls, entering homes to find broken bodies on the floor and unique blood splashes. For just a moment, I flexed and released my muscles as if preparing for a terminus, anything to steel myself before I turned the knob and found whatever scene I would never be able to forget.

I pushed open the door. Veda’s room contained no humans. His running shoes had been kicked off on the gray carpet, one tipped on its side. A sweaty long-sleeve jersey had been dropped in a wad like a used tissue. The room was painted olive green, the same shade as the station wagon once owned by Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm. Unlike his parents, Veda drew his shades to block out the sun. The room stank with alkaline fumes from a young man who was sexually active with himself. Dresser drawers spilled out clothing. The posters on the walls featured graffiti art, one of which had been stylized to look like a vintage war propaganda poster featuring a monkey in a Mao hat. This wasn’t the bedroom of a young man, but a boy’s bedroom.

Above me, the ceiling groaned.

From upstairs, Leland let out a stifled scream, sounding as if he’d been holding it back for some time. A second voice barked something too muffled for me to understand. I ran back down the hall and scrambled up the steps.

The staircase to the office was coated in loose papers, and when I ascended to the landing, those papers littered the carpeting like crispy forest leaves. Maps had been torn off the corkboards so fast, pushpins still tacked up shreds. The files formerly stacked on Leland’s desk had been torn into confetti and cast across the floor.

I suspected that Veda had come up there and destroyed his father’s work when he came home, punishment for having kept his trauma so fresh for so long. At the top step I found a smashed photo frame. The frame had contained the paper from the post office, where years ago Veda had written his name and freed himself. Now it was lost among the rest of the debris.

The family gathered at the opposite end of the office, where the spare bed sat by the far window. Leland lay on the carpet, bleeding. Flat on his back, the same way I first met him in Clayton. His hand pressed against a large red wound in his abdomen. Tesmer kneeled by his head, and Veda stood over them both, a dark silhouette against the late afternoon sun.

In the corner, where the old spider webs clung under the eaves, stood Helena Mumm. Her nose crooked from when I’d broken it, and bruises hung under both eyes. Helena hadn’t seen a doctor to have it bandaged, or felt the need to cover up the injury.

She swayed from side to side, switching her weight from the prosthetic to the real foot. The floor moaned with each movement. Her left foot, the real foot, stepped on Leland’s semiautomatic pistol. She wore the same tropical dress she’d had on outside San Sebastián when she had visited her brother. I wondered if she wore it to keep her brother’s smell on her. Veda would be able to smell it too, but sallow as he appeared, I neither saw nor smelled evidence that he had vomited.

Helena Mumm held a revolver in her left hand and a chef’s knife in her right. The knife was slicked with Leland’s blood. Her chest heaved as she wiped the blade clean on her dress. She kept her chin tucked, and her eyes burned under her brows. She was both feral and mountainous.

Helena’s pliable expression cast loving looks at Veda and boiling rage at the rest of us. When she saw me, she said, “Scum,” and spat on the carpet. In her next breath she sweetened for Veda. “Is she related?”

Veda forced a reply. “Does she look related?”

“You can never tell these days. Distant cousin, in-law—”

“She’s not family,” he said.

“Family,” Helena said to herself. From her inflection, I guessed she had considered this word’s assorted meanings. Perhaps she and Veda had even discussed it before we arrived. She might have spoken to him in that wistful tone she used when I first met her.

Veda seemed too terrified to move. The whites of his eyes were as wide as the night he peed himself at the dinner table.

She pointed the knife at us. “I went to pick up Walter’s body. You know they went ahead and burned him without my say-so? Now all I got is ashes.” The knife point waggled loosely like a twiddling pencil, so light in her hands. “What, do you think I’m stupid? I wouldn’t know what happened? Trash, all of you. Thought you were better than us. Thought I wouldn’t find you.”

I eased my cell phone out of my pocket, but for a diabetic in a dark room, she had keen eyes. “Doesn’t matter if you call the police. It’ll be over by the time they get here.” She was drawn back to Leland when he gasped from the pain. “He was our son, you know. We raised him. That was my
man
…” She gestured to Veda Moon. “This boy’s real daddy.”

Tesmer’s eyes darted everywhere, searching for a weapon or a shield. I caught her eyeing the gun under Helena’s foot. Helena scolded us, “You couldn’t just let him be. You had put him down like an animal.” In her rage, Helena intentionally let slip her poised manner of speech, and spoke in a tough accent so she could throw her primal disgust in our faces. “Well, I come for you now. I’m
a-finish
it. You want to have it all out in in private? I’m
a-finish
it in private.”

She barreled toward Tesmer and Leland. Her hulking mass shook with each step, but she moved faster than I’d have predicted a woman her size could move. She didn’t choose to shoot them. She intended to use the knife, and she held it blade up at her waist.

I was too far away to rush her. If I tried to charge her, she’d probably shoot me as if shooing away a bug. I didn’t mean enough for her to want to cut me.

Veda stepped in front of his parents and straddled his father’s knees, and this intervention brought Helena Mumm to a shuddering standstill.

His face was calm and his voice easy as he said, “Come on, Mama.”
That voice
. That sickening, nightmarish baby voice he’d used at the dinner table. Tesmer grimaced when she heard it; the surreality of that voice coming out confused and horrified her. Leland’s agony consumed him too much for a strong reaction, but he winced too. But this was the tone that Helena wanted to hear, the sound of a young boy cooing to his mother.

Helena lowered the knife.

Tesmer gasped, fighting not to debase herself with sniveling.

The big woman was captivated by the entrancing stare of Veda Moon, and by his soothing, infantile tone. “Come on, Mama.”

I inched closer, until I’d entered the room too far to dive down the stairs if Helena decided to fire at me. The closer I got, the easier it would be for her to shoot me. She only needed marginally decent aim, and she likely had six shots to work with.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Veda myself, as he lifted his arm and touched the woman’s face. “It’s all right, Mama,” he soothed.

Helena gaped, her arms atremble at being so touched. She couldn’t stop from leaning her cheek into his fingers. Her face brightened. “I missed you,” she croaked.

“I missed you too,” Veda said in his baby voice. He drew her bulk into his arms. He was such a thin young man, but he managed to wrap his long arms around her easily and kissed the top of her head. She snuggled into his shoulder, whimpering with gratitude. Tears dripped onto his jersey.

“We don’t need this, Mama,” he said. He stroked the hand that held the gun.

I stalked two steps closer.

Helena had taken her foot off the second gun, which now lay unattended on the floor behind her. I saw Tesmer looking at the gun, and then looking at me, hoping one of us would seize the opportunity. If only it were that simple.

Helena lifted her head off Veda’s shoulder, and he smiled at her. I hadn’t seen him smile much, and never like that. She looked down at the revolver in her hand, shrugged and simpered, “Baby, we need to do this.” She looked down at Veda’s mother and father. “You want to come with me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.” Another few steps and I was as close to Helena as Tesmer.

“Then we need to do this. It’ll be quick, I promise.” A tear rolled down her frown line. “Lickety-split and we’ll be gone. We’ll go wherever you want.”

Veda’s fingers curled around her gun hand. The same fingers that had lovingly stroked her cheek now tightened on the revolver. “I need this,” he insisted. His voice dropped into a man’s tone, and his placating smile flattened into a sneer.

Helena was confused. “What are you doing?” My small steps couldn’t go unnoticed anymore. I was too close. Suddenly, she looked in my direction. “What the hell is this?”

The gun rose, but Veda steered it away from me as it went off. Glass tinkled. In the enclosed space, the shot shattered our ears, leaving a piercing whine in its wake. The bullet hit a glass pane next to them.

Veda struggled with Helena until he snatched the gun. For a moment, he held the revolver, scorching himself on the barrel before he controlled it by its grip. He only maintained control of the weapon for a moment.

A prehistoric squall came out of Helena. She came at him with arms flying and clawed at him until she’d batted the gun out of his hands. We all watched it fly out the shattered window.

Veda punched her, but he’d never been taught how to throw a punch. He landed a soft blow and yelped when he crunched his knuckles. If he’d caught her in the nose again, it might have been enough to stun her, but he just caught her on the fleshiest part of her jowl.

Helena did know how to fight, and she didn’t hesitate. She threw an elbow, catching Veda under his chin. He collapsed to the carpet.

Leland tried to kick her from the floor. His wound took a lot of the fight out of him, and he moaned when he tried to move his leg. Helena stayed out of reach.

Perhaps spurred from Helena knocking her son down, Tesmer lunged across the carpet for the second gun, but Helena kicked the Glock under the bed, swooped down, and slashed Tesmer across the back of the leg. She rolled aside to dodge the second stroke of the knife, and then cried out a few seconds later when the pain set in.

Helena blocked my path to the bed and the gun, so I stormed her.

She lashed out, and I barely avoided getting my stomach sliced open. Her movements were powerful and deliberate. If she cut me, there wouldn’t be any surface wounds—she’d dig in with the steel. But so long as I was a primary target, she wouldn’t descend on Leland or Tesmer and finish them off.

I kept some distance from her, but after a few misses, she was impatient to hurt me and lunged, giving me an opening. I sent a haymaker into her ear. I wanted to knock her out, but her bulk absorbed the hit. Instead of concussing her, I whipped up her fury.

She stumbled after me, tottering like a penguin on the plastic leg. The shiny metal knife tip darted here and there. I couldn’t predict how she would move, and it was happening too fast for me to consider fight strategy. I could only retreat.

The next time she stabbed at me, I pulled my hips back, and fell on my ass. I scrambled backward, crab-style, as she hurtled toward me.

I needed something to defend myself with, some kind of weapon.
Why couldn’t Veda have held onto the gun?
I thought. It could have all been over by now. But Helena had incapacitated the Moons. Veda had resumed his paralysis. Tesmer rolled in pain from her leg wound. And despite all of his FBI training, Leland lay bleeding out on the carpet.

My back pressed against the desk, so I couldn’t retreat any farther. With only a moment of decision afforded to me before Helena pounced, I remembered the bottom drawer. I tore it open. Loose metal jangled. I scooped out a handful of steel.

Helena raised the knife high above her head so she could plunge it deep into me.

I jabbed into her body. Helena yelped. The knife faltered, and she staggered back two steps. A fork dangled from her rib cage.

Instead of plucking out the fork, Helena marveled at it. Pumped full of adrenaline, she might not have felt it. If you plugged four prongs the size of nails into a tender spot below my left nipple, I’d probably drop. Not so Helena Mumm.

As soon as I climbed to my feet, she ran at me. I barely had time to toreador out of reach. As she passed, I sunk another fork into her upper shoulder. The prongs stopped short at the scapula. This time she screamed, and swiped at me, the blade narrowly missing my arm.

She cornered me by the desk, the equivalent of being against the ropes in a boxing ring. She swung her knife in the motion of an upper cut, intending to slice my neck; and by some miracle I dodged it and stabbed a fork into her deltoid. Her momentary disorientation allowed me to skirt around her to the open side of the room.

By the third fork, the pain didn’t surprise her. She just became incensed. Helena scowled at me and zigzagged the knife. I thrust my next fork low, and it landed in her thigh.

She groaned. The collective agony of the wounds was wearing her down. Helena was too charged up to remove any of the forks, so the flatware flopped off her like migration tags on a wild animal.

Veda moved behind her, although I’d been too preoccupied to watch him approach. Stepping behind her back, he scooped the remainder of the forks. With Veda behind her and me in front of her, Helena didn’t know where to focus. She looked over her shoulder at her would-be son, dumfounded. “Baby?”