First to Burn (29 page)

Screams filled his working ear, so he didn’t hear the third guy until an arm locked around his neck and jerked his spine into a bow. The confines behind the couch hampered the move. Half his body spasmed, as if the new man’s fingers were probing his nervous system from the hole where his ear should have been, and he knocked into the coffee table. Involuntarily, his one functioning hand clenched around something pointy and sharp as the guy whose knee he’d destroyed rolled toward him with a pistol—or two or three. Why couldn’t he see? The man’s four hands were raising two guns and two small things that looked like pens, so Wulf picked an eye in the middle and plunged whatever he held.

It was one of Jeanne’s fake carved starfish. The spike sank in until his knuckles jammed up to the man’s skull bone. Another one done.

The guy behind him tightened his choke hold. Blackness on the left of Wulf’s vision flowed closer to the darkness on the right, but he overruled his primitive need to grab the attacker’s arm. Instead he pulled the Benchmade knife from his thigh sheath, hunched his shoulders to shift the man closer and plunged the blade backward. It connected with muscle. The grip around his neck loosened enough to allow blood back to his brain.

Cleansing breath, sweet as paying his penance, and the spots disappeared from his vision. He stabbed again, but the other man had stumbled away to pick up one of the dropped pens. Wulf made it to his feet even though movement shot pain from the right side of his head. Despite the dark, his attacker contrasted enough with the remains of Jeanne’s white decor that he could see the man was his height, built like a Doberman and holding knives in both hands. So why hadn’t the guy sliced his throat in the first place?

They circled while Wulf’s vision cleared enough to give him an answer. The thing in his opponent’s left hand wasn’t a second blade or a pen. It was a syringe.

He stumbled back two steps, but the other man followed.

He tried to avoid the remains of Jeanne’s furniture and chunks of ceiling.
No retreat.

If he backed away again, his defeat would be certain. This time when his opponent stepped forward, Wulf pivoted and sprang. It took his last strength, but he rammed the bulk of his useless right shoulder to impale and immobilize the other’s knife while he thrust his own blade diagonally up under the edge of the man’s Kevlar vest. Then he twisted the steel tip. Blood, pints of it, darkened the other man’s pants and empty hands as he grabbed his gut and fell.

Where was the syringe?

Braced against the wall, Wulf slapped his functioning hand around his neck and shoulder. He found and removed the knife, but where was the drug? Panic clawed him until he stretched his arm around to the back of his right shoulder. There it was, snagged where the needle must’ve caught in the tiny hooks of his protective vest. He crushed it under his boot as the familiar itch started in his shoulder and ear. Injuries he hadn’t noticed during the fight squirreled to be scratched, but he had to sweep the rest of the house.

A shattered television screen presided over the media room. Carl’s son, nephew and an attacker lay on the floor, all dead. The invader sported a bronze fireplace tool through his gut like a harpoon. For all their slacker ways, Carl’s boys had managed better than Wulf would have expected.

Noise erupted in the hall—doors, boots, shouting men—then stopped, the abrupt silence of shock. Carl paused in the doorway.

“My boy.” Walking hunched like a much older man, he crouched by his son’s body. Four or five gunshot wounds had made Ray’s death fast, but ugly. Carl’s oversized fingers closed his son’s eyelids. “My son.”

The others spread through the house, cursing and searching. They left Carl and Wulf alone. Carl out of respect for his loss, but Wulf had seen the crew’s expressions when they glimpsed him. Respect didn’t cause the blood to drain from their faces and the whites of their eyes to show as they backed up, some with hands over their mouths. No, it wasn’t respect that kept them from Wulf’s presence. It was horror.

“We can’t stay.” With the men loose in the house, there were too many variables. Someone would call a buddy. News would spread; law enforcement would converge. They had to clear out, fast.

“He needs a priest.” Carl spoke without looking away from his son.

“If we call one...” Spreading his hands to indicate the room and the other bodies, he left Theresa’s stepfather to draw his own conclusions. Faith was faith, but this was a giant mess.

“I know.” The old man sank to the floor next to his son. “He won’t get a priest then, either. Just the feds.”

“Your son fought well.” Wulf didn’t have to exaggerate. “But we need to protect the living. Jeanne. Theresa.” With no idea what Carl would wish, he forged ahead. “My family has a custom. I would be honored to send your son to the next life with the respect due a warrior.” Maybe building a pyre would cleanse him too.

Carl seemed to nod, so Wulf tried to keep him focused on the future. He could mourn after the women were safe. “You prepared to disappear?”

“I got a backup plan.” His eyes had returned to Raymond.

“Use it now. These guys—” Wulf nudged the impaled body with his boot. “Their boss doesn’t give up. Your family has to disappear, deeper and further than you can imagine.”

Carl tried to brush aside his son’s hair, but blood gummed it to his forehead.

“Get the things your son loved.” After helping Carl stand, Wulf guided him into the hall. “I’ll move the boys to the dining room.”

By the time Wulf and one of the others had arranged Carl’s nephew alongside Raymond on the oak table, Carl had returned with a video game console, its plastic casing shattered by bullets, and a blue-and-white football jersey.

“We had season tickets to the Giants, me and Ray. Since he was nine and his mom and I divorced. Eighteen years.” Carl’s grief was the largest presence in the room, dwarfing even the bulkiest of his crew. “We never missed—never—” His shoulders shook too violently to continue.

Standing alone holding a wet dish towel, Wulf felt a startling amount of envy fill his chest. Grief like Carl’s came from love, a father’s love for his child, accumulated moment by moment over shared time. Even if it brought this kind of pain—and it always would because those he loved always aged and died—the yearning to feel what Carl had known devoured him. He’d tried. There’d been children he’d cared for when he had a place to stop, others like a boy from Mogadishu whom he’d helped because they needed it, but too many times he’d been forced to leave. Fate never allowed him to share anyone’s life for long. Fifteen centuries, but his life had nothing worth wanting nearly so much as Carl’s did.

He handed the father the towel to clean his son’s face, then left.

In the garage, the lawn mower’s grass-and-oil smells were like a sea wind after the house’s blood stench. He located a gasoline container, then stacked magazines, broken chairs and picture frames under the table to build a tribute for the warriors Ray and his cousin had been. Keeping busy was better than thinking.

The creak of the front door hit his good ear, and Wulf erupted into the entry with his knife low and ready. His blood pounded a snare beat in his head.
Not again
, it said.
Not Carl too.

“Wulf?” Theresa and her mother stood frozen in the brightly lit foyer, Jeanne’s hand at the light switch, as they stared into the destroyed living room. “Carl?”

A second before body-slamming the women, Wulf checked his rush by hitting the wall. The crash jerked Theresa and Jeanne from their trances, and they turned, mouths open in identical horrified circles. The shattered hall mirror reflected eight, ten, twelve versions of him, all with his stubby ear like a chunk of baitfish and fresh red muscle glistening through his shredded shirt like basted ham.

“Carl?” Jeanne covered her mouth and sagged onto her daughter. “Where’s Carl?”

Theresa turned her mother’s face to her shoulder.

“He’s fine.” Wulf jabbed off the lights. They had to leave before they saw more, but he couldn’t touch them with his bloody hands and he couldn’t send them into the darkness alone. So he deliberately stalked them, using his otherness to back them toward the door.

“What are you doing here?” Even with one ear, he knew his question was too loud.

“We waited, but I figured whatever happened was over. I told my mother you’d—” the hesitation in her whisper made him angrier, “—win.”

“Assumptions will get you killed.” If he didn’t unclench his fists, he’d scare them worse than he intended. “These men could have been like me.”

Theresa covered her mouth and nose, as if to block the odor of bodies, gunpowder and fear. That was the smell of his livelihood. His life stunk. He knew she’d never want any part of it, or him, again, but he’d die over and over to keep her safe. “Take your mother to the car.”

Outside, she helped Jeanne into the second row of the sport utility vehicle and then closed the door. Bracing herself on the dark metal, she turned to him. “Ray?” she whispered.

“Carl’s with him and your cousin now.” Her face lifted for a moment, a moth of hope that he regretted crushing with his next words. “They’re dead.”

She rested her forehead on the tinted window.

The arm’s length between them loomed wider than the Atlantic he’d flown over the night before, but comforting her would have to take a backseat to ensuring her safety. “What do you need to get out of here?” He didn’t expect an answer. She’d gone somewhere he couldn’t follow with his bloody hands and filthy deeds, so he said, “I’ll figure it out,” and hurried inside.

“You—” He pointed at a man carrying a propane canister into the dining room. “Guard the women outside in the car.”

In the pink bedroom he added a handful of clothes from each drawer to a gym bag and yanked what looked like a charger off the bedside table. Everywhere he saw books, lots of books, and he remembered Jeanne teasing her daughter about them at dinner. A lifetime ago.

He shoved a stack of science and nature volumes in the bag. The top cover on the second stack showed an iron dagger like he hadn’t seen in fifteen hundred years. Paper tabs stuck out from its pages.
Beowulf.
The title leaped at him. He threw it in, and an empty-eyed, gold death mask stared from the next. There was an engraving of a dragon’s hoard on the third, a mail-clad warrior on the fourth.
Beowulf
, all of them, as if Theresa had thought to understand his story.

Fear nipped his hamstrings like the hellhound Garmr as he swept the trove into the bag and fled down the stairs with its unzippable weight banging his thigh. Monsters were out tonight, not least him, and no one could stay here.

In the dining room, the men had finished stacking flammables under Ray and his cousin and propped the shattered
Last Supper
at the head of the table. As a group, they filed out of the house, Carl in the rear so he could leave the pungent trail of gasoline. It was his home to burn, after all.

“Wait.” Wulf’s command stopped Carl’s hand on the matches while he finished spray-painting words on the front sidewalk.

“Empty house,” Carl read aloud. “Good. I don’t need no dead firemen added to my balance sheet.”

Wulf saluted as the burning gasoline raced from the front door down the hall. Then it was time. Time for Theresa and the remnants of her family to leave, and time for him to abandon his idea of playing house. When everything he touched or wanted became as charred and ruined as the shell in the rearview mirror soon would be, he had to stop wanting.

* * *

Wulf drove. Maybe it was Theresa’s books that invoked the old language, but the words matched the rhythm of the tires.
Úre aéghwylc sceal ende gebídan worolde lífes.
Each of us must wait for the end of our life in this world.
If only that was true.

While they circled highways, while Carl boosted a replacement ride and even while they ditched the unlocked SUV in Newark, Wulf couldn’t stop phrases from surging like the bloodshot water of Grendel’s bog.
Hé þá fág gewát morþre gemearcod.
He’d started life as a man, but now he too was a branded monster, marked by murder.

By the time Carl directed him to a twenty-four-hour mail shop, Jeanne had dropped into the fog that passes for sleep after shock.
Sorh is geníwod.
Theresa’s eyes were closed, but he suspected her awareness lingered as Carl retrieved a stored duffel bag.
Sorrow comes again
.

He needed something new to think about.

“Here.” Carl slipped a folder onto the cracked dashboard. “Passport and license for my little girl. They’re clean.” His voice hadn’t risen from a monotone since they’d left the house. “Drop me and Jeanne near Port Authority.”

“You set for money?” Wulf followed signs for the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan.

“Yeah.” Carl pulled a marker out of his bag and humped around in his seat. “You got a number? So Jeanne can call to Theresa?”

After a sideways glance, Wulf glued his eyes to the red taillights in front of their car and recited a secure number.

“Nobody likes to check a fat man’s cojones.” Carl coughed, and Wulf heard the rustle of slick-fabric pants being readjusted. “I could write Federal Reserve codes down there.”

“You’re sure about leaving Theresa with me?” He kept his voice low.

“I don’t know how you’re still walking, after what I saw at the house.” Carl stared at the side of Wulf’s head. “And I’m not asking.”

Wulf gripped the steering wheel to prevent himself from touching his ear. His shoulder and face itched like a fire ant parade, so he knew he must have been nearly healed.

“I gotta keep my wife safe.” The engine rattle almost drowned Carl’s tired voice. “I can’t do that with Theresa riding shotgun. She’s...”

“Beautiful.” Wulf supplied.

“True, but I was thinking easy to make.”

Grimy tile flashed past in the tunnel’s blurred lights. A mother and daughter as vivid as Jeanne and Theresa drew attention. When one had a prosthetic leg, they drew more.

“If we’d gone to Switzerland like you offered—”