Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series (9 page)

She leaned forward and set the ring gently down on the saucer. “That’s a beautiful ring, Boyd,” she said, her voice rigid as she fought to control it. She was not certain if she was convincing or not.

Boyd shrugged. “You’ll probably find this surprising, but I’ve never been married,” he said. “I never needed to be. For most of my life it was just me and my mom. My dad died when I was a kid and I don’t really even remember him. My mom took care of me for most of my life.”

Alice tried to eat calmly, taking large bites, trying to shove in the calories. “You must miss her,” she said.

“Sometimes,” Boyd admitted. “She’d probably still be here if she’d continued to do her job and love me instead of turning against me.”

Alice felt a chill. She’d unwittingly steered the conversation into dangerous territory. Now she had to find a way to navigate back out.
Reflective listening
, she recalled. That’s what the counselors did at work when they wanted to acknowledge a person’s feelings without necessarily agreeing with them. “She turned against you? That must have been very hard for you,” she said, staring down at her food.

Boyd set down his fork and looked across the table at her. She could not meet his eye, instead focusing on the fork she was bringing to her mouth. “It was her job to take care of me. I was her son, her little boy, and she sent me away. We sat right here at this table and I looked at her just like I’m looking at you now. She went from loving me unconditionally to fearing me. What am I supposed to do with that? How can a person cope with the idea that their mother is scared to death of them?”

Alice was silent for a moment, carefully contemplating her answer. “I have no idea, Boyd. I don’t know what to say.” She reached for the peanut butter, hoping to get at least one spoonful of the calorie-dense food in her mouth.

Boyd suddenly grabbed her wrist and she raised her eyes to his. “You aren’t afraid of me, are you, Alice?”

Alice could not pull her eyes from his. She could not say anything. She felt totally exposed. Could he see it? Could he see the terror?

“My mother sent me away, Alice,” Boyd said. “She told the court that I was crazy and they sent me away. I had been sent off before, when I was younger, but this time was different. My mother had bought a gun, the same one I have in my pocket now, and she told me that she would use it to kill me if she had to. Can you imagine? Your own mother threatening to kill you?”

Alice didn’t ask what he had done to provoke that reaction from his mother. She didn’t want to know.

“Then she hid the knives,” Boyd continued. “Both to keep them away from me and to make sure she always had access to a weapon. I kept finding them taped behind doors, hidden in the laundry, under the couch cushions. She told me it was so I couldn’t use one to kill her and so she had one nearby if she had to defend herself against me. That’s a bunch of bullshit. I think
she
was the crazy one. If I was crazy, I inherited it from her.

“So they locked me up,” Boyd spat. “They sent me to Central State Hospital. I stayed there until the lights went out. When they had trouble getting food for the patients, they started letting some of us go. I was only considered at moderate risk to harm myself or others so I was released. I was on my way home from there when I met up with you ladies.”

Boyd let go of her wrist and Alice tucked her hands into her lap. She clutched them together tightly, wishing that she could wash his icy touch from her skin. It occurred to her that perhaps his mother had taped a knife under this very table, concerned that she might have to fight Boyd off. She casually brushed her hand along the underside of the table but found nothing taped there. What she did find, though, was a thick wire lever. She had seen these kind of tables before. The lever was for releasing the two sections of the table so that they could be pulled apart and a leaf added to the center.

“When I got home, my mother and I had to… work out our differences,” Boyd said.

Though he continued to talk, Alice paid no attention to his words but instead focused on the wire lever in a manner that would not allow him to notice what she was doing. While it was not as handy as a knife taped there and waiting for her, she wondered if she might be able to break it loose and use it as a weapon. She pushed it experimentally with a finger, trying not to let the effort show. The lever yielded to her touch, bending slightly.

That was encouraging. It meant the old steel was soft enough that she might be able to break it loose if she worked it back and forth a few times. While Boyd spoke, she continued to look at him, doing her best to look interested and conceal her movements. Beneath the table she bent the steel lever one way, then the other. Back and forth. When she felt the movements were requiring less effort, she knew that she had weakened it sufficiently and it was ready to come loose. She could only hope that what came loose was in some way helpful to her. It was all she had.

Alice could sense that when Boyd’s monologue was over, this dinner was over too. If he had sensed the fear in her, as she suspected, her whole trip home might be over. He would feel betrayed by her, as he had by his own mother. She needed to turn the conversation back to the future he imagined the two of them having together. She wondered, though, if that was the right step to take. If she calmed him down, she’d no doubt go back in that basement for another day and continue to live only at his whim. She could not let herself go back down there in the darkness. Gun or not, this had to end today. She would not spend another day at the mercy of someone so completely unhinged.

She continued to work the lever, the movements requiring less effort. The end had a loop on it that acted as a handle. She threaded her fingers through it, hoping that she would not drop it when it broke loose. That would be devastating. When she finally felt the thick wire sag into her lap, she knew she’d been successful. She could feel that it was about ten inches long. With her fingers threaded through the loop handle, she knew that she could stab with it if she had to. While it was not an ideal offensive weapon, it was something. She hoped it would be enough.

She thought about the weapons he had on him. There was the gun in his pocket, which he could not get to easily while seated at the table. There was also the sheath knife behind his back, which he could get to pretty readily. That could be her biggest problem, besides his strength. She had not fought anyone physically since she was a child, although she was raised with brothers and that toughened a girl. She had never killed, though.

Could she even do that?

There was not a single doubt in her mind.

Boyd violently shoved his chair back, slammed his fist on the table, and stood. “You’re not even fucking listening to me!” he shouted at her.

“I am, Boyd,” she replied, smiling and pouring as much honey in her voice as she could.

“You are not!” he screamed. “You think I haven’t seen that look before? That ‘humor the crazy man’ look!” He towered over, his face reddening, slobber spraying from his mouth as whatever demons lived in there rose to take control of him.

He was at her side in an instant. “Stand up,” he commanded.

“Boyd, you’re scaring me,” Alice said, trying to buy herself time to think. She didn’t know what else to do. Her mind was racing. His vital areas were too high with him standing and her seated. His throat, his heart, they were all out of her reach. Before she could get the wire that high, he would grab her arm and hold it while he drew his own knife. He would kill her then and that would be the end of her journey.

“You’re going back to the basement,” he said. “You need more time to think.”

“But what about the ring?” she asked desperately. “What about our engagement?”

His expression turned cold. He looked at the ring in the saucer, then back at her. “You want the fucking ring?” he asked. “You want it!”

He grabbed the ring from the saucer, turning over cans and knocking things from the table. Cold corn spilled into Alice’s lap. She recoiled from his rage. Boyd lashed out and grabbed Alice by the jaw, pressing his thumb into her cheek until her mouth opened. He shoved the ring into her mouth then closed it, pressing so hard to close her mouth that he pressed her head against the wall, mashing her lips hard against her teeth. She tasted blood.

“Swallow it,” he hissed. “You want the fucking ring, take it.”

Her hand clutched the wire she’d found. His hand over her mouth and nose made it difficult to breathe. She thought the pressure of his hand would crush her skull. The pain was intense, nearly blinding. She knew something was going to break. In the midst of this, trying to come up with a plan of attack, she somehow recalled her Uncle Howard, who bled to death at the sawmill where he worked. A large sliver of wood had shot out from the three-foot circular blade, penetrated his leg, and severed his femoral artery. She knew what she had to do then.

As Boyd mashed her face into the wall, screaming at her to swallow the ring, she grasped the wire and stabbed it between his thigh and groin, hoping beyond all hope that the broken end was sharp enough to penetrate clothing. Apparently it was. When Boyd froze with the shock of pain, she plunged the wire around, repeatedly jabbing and tearing, hoping that she had found the artery and somehow managed to cut into it. She was rewarded with a warm gush as his blood sprayed onto her body.

Boyd screamed and exploded upward from her, his face a mask of rage and surprise. Alice instinctively sensed that her only hope for survival was to latch onto him in a bear hug that he could not escape. She spat the ring from her bloody mouth, then wrapped her arms around his chest, locking her hands tightly behind his back, twisting her body to get her legs around him. Boyd still rose, trying to get his hands on his knife, but the manner in which she gripped him limited his range of motion.

Boyd lifted her from the chair. He staggered, his balance thrown off by the addition of her body weight. He crashed into walls, clearing them of pictures and knick-knacks. Realizing that he could not get to his knife, he began raining blows down on Alice’s head. He was attempting to drop his powerful elbows onto the top of her head, though with her body pressed against him he was not getting the effect he wanted. Still, with each blow, Alice saw stars and knew that he would eventually knock her loose. She would die when that happened.

Boyd staggered again and made a move for his gun but it was crushed between their bodies. He could not get his hand into his pocket. Alice felt him weakening, then he slipped in the growing puddle of his own blood and fell hard to the ground. Together they writhed on the blood-soaked linoleum, Boyd attempting with less and less effort to pry her from his body. As they rolled, she felt her grip giving way. The blood made her hands slippery and she couldn’t hold on much longer. Although weak, she was afraid he could still kill her. He pushed on her and she slid down his body. As she did, her hands fell upon the sheath of his hunting knife.

Without hesitation, she yanked the knife from its sheath and, with a yell, plunged it into his back, puncturing his kidney. Boyd moaned but there was little strength behind it. She plunged the knife again and again, the long blade nicking one lung and his liver. Boyd rolled onto his back, pinning the knife to the floor and not allowing her to pull it free.

“I’m going to kill you,” Boyd said groggily, reaching to slide his hand into his pocket for the gun.

Alice scanned the debris that their fight had knocked from the wall. To her left, she saw a cast iron skillet, a weapon of lore among housewives for centuries. While Boyd tried to untangle his hand from his pocket, she brought the heavy skillet down on his head over and over until he stopped moving. She slumped to the floor, exhausted and bloody. She noticed his chest still moving. She could not leave him alive. She pulled Boyd’s hand from his pocket and found the gun he’d been trying to reach. She clutched the revolver in her shaking, blood-stained hands, aimed for his face, and pulled the trigger.

Chapter 6

The Valley

Russell County, VA

Buddy sat at his kitchen table. There had been a time in his life when sitting at this table was the highlight of his day. It was the place where he, his wife, and his daughter reconnected at the end of a day of work and school. It was where he ate breakfast with his little girl before school. Those were some of the best memories of his life. Across from him, at the place where she always sat, his wife smiled at him from a framed photograph. When Rachel quit coming home and having dinner with him, he’d placed the photo there for someone to talk to.

Buddy had not slept that night. He couldn’t. To try to sleep with all that had happened seemed almost a blasphemy. Instead, he worked. Buddy had been a smoker for most of his life. His wife had also smoked up until she got sick that last time. When she quit, Buddy quit. He didn’t wean himself off. He just laid them down and never picked them up again. Since they both always bought them by the carton to get the best price, there were several dozen packs of cigarettes still laying around their house. Buddy had gathered them all last night.

Over the course of an hour, he sat with a razor blade, slitting each cigarette open and extracting the tobacco. When he’d done them all, he had what appeared to be about a quart jar full of tobacco. He’d dumped that into an old soup pot with enough water to cover it up and boiled it, adding more water when he felt like he needed more. After about two hours, he used a slotted spoon to scoop out all the tobacco into the trash. He threw the spoon away when he’d gotten it all. He boiled the mixture until all that remained was a dark, sticky syrup, then he set it aside to cool.

He went back to the kitchen table and dumped out some of the hundreds of pain pills that had been prescribed for his wife. There were a variety of tablets, all of strengths sufficient to bring rest to the pain-wracked and cancer-stricken. Buddy spread the pills into a single layer on a cookie sheet.

When his wife passed, Buddy hid the pills in a rusty old toolbox out in his storage building. His daughter had not started using drugs at that time, but he didn’t want them in the house. He was concerned that Rachel might use them to commit suicide because of her sadness at the loss her mother. That she would ever enjoy taking a pill designed to ease the suffering of a cancer patient had never occurred to him.

Over the last few months he’d seen indications that she had been looking for them. He would come home from somewhere and find things out of place, a drawer not shut completely, or the closet door left cracked open. He suspected that it was the pills she was looking for. Whenever he checked the toolbox, they were still there. When he realized she had started looking for them, he considered flushing them down the toilet just to keep them out of her hands, but he didn’t. He suspected that he hung onto them only because he wanted to maintain an easy way out for himself just in case his own suffering became too much.

He went to his garage and got the respirator mask he wore when he sanded paint and donned it, along with stout rubber gloves. He removed the soup pot from the stove and placed it beside the cookie sheet of pain pills. With a toothpick, he placed a single drop of the nicotine syrup on the back of each pill. That would be all it took. Buddy remembered folks he knew as a child getting the “tobacco sickness” from picking wet tobacco. What they were really suffering from was nicotine poisoning. In its concentrated form, which Buddy had spent the night producing, a single drop would produce central nervous system depression and eventually respiratory failure.

“Live by the pill, die by the pill,” he whispered.

Buddy set the pills aside to dry. In front of him lay a cleaned and oiled Colt 1911. Although the weapon had never been issued to him in Vietnam, he’d learned to maintain and shoot the weapon while in the Marine Corps. He’d bought one for himself when he returned to the world and got a steady job. Despite the fact he was not really a gun person, he owned several. To him, they were tools. He had no desire to collect or covet them. He just wanted them available if he needed them. In the America he knew, having a gun in the house was like having a car in the driveway, a flashlight in the junk drawer, and a Bible in the living room.

The yellow box of Western Super-X rounds was so old that that the paper felt like the worn leather of an old wallet. The 1911 had two seven-round magazines, which he understood to be a bit smaller than the capacity of more modern handguns. The only holster he’d ever owned for the weapon was a leather Bianchi shoulder-rig that allowed him to carry the weapon under one arm and a spare mag under the other. Buddy slid the holster on and spent a few minutes straightening everything out. Once he had the holster squared away, he shrugged on a flannel shirt over his t-shirt to see if everything was concealed properly. It was.

He picked up the handgun from the table, popped a magazine into the weapon, and chambered a round. Then he ejected the magazine and replaced the round that he just used from the clip, topping it off. He put the magazine back in the weapon again. He took his flannel shirt back off and slid the weapon in the holster. After snapping his spare magazine in the leather case on the other side of the rig, he dumped out ten spare rounds from the box and dropped them into his pants pocket.

Buddy wasn’t sure what he was going to do today. He didn’t care if he died, but he didn’t want to die until he had carried out his one objective. That was to kill the man who killed Rachel. He briefly wondered if he should take more weapons. The Marines had also trained Buddy to fight with a knife, and the only fixed-blade knife he ever owned was the one they’d trained him on – a Ka-bar fighting knife. He retrieved the knife from the top drawer of his dresser, removed the knife from the sheath, and examined the edge in the light. It would do.

He got a roll of electrical tape and taped the sheath upside-down against the pistol holster. It would not interfere with drawing the pistol but it would be readily available and concealed should he need it.

He went to the bedroom and stood in front of the dresser, looking at himself in the mirror.

“Son, you almost look like a fucking Marine,” he said aloud. “Almost.” Someone had said that to him a long time ago in another life.

That gave him an idea, and in fifteen minutes he looked a damn sight closer to being a Marine again. Buddy had been blessed with a metabolism that had kept him roughly around the same size for most of his life. Once he’d dug them out of his old footlocker, Buddy had been able to slip right back into the Marine fatigues he’d worn in Vietnam. The pants were olive drab, worn with an olive drab t-shirt when he’d been there. He’d assumed the pants would be dry rotted but they weren’t. He even had his jungle boots, although they were stiff from being mashed up in the foot locker with other stuff. If he was going to war today, he might as well dress the part.

Simply lacing those boots back onto his feet brought back a flood of memories. He’d been a single, young man in that war, unaware of where life would take him if he ever made it home. Had he known the pain that he would face with the loss of his wife and daughter, he wondered if he might have been better off dying there in the jungle mud. If he could have looked forward in time and seen the blackness that awaited him, he might have taken more chances and volunteered for the suicide missions, as some men had done. If he had done that, though, he would have never had the happy moments. Maybe there would be a day when the good times weren’t so bound to the sad times, though he couldn’t imagine how he’d get there.

Buddy looked at himself in the mirror, dressed again like the Marine he’d been nearly fifty years ago. He was startled, both that he was so old and that the war had been so long ago. Until he married, the war had defined him. It was his only story, his only experience. When they were with him, the presence of his wife and daughter had pushed the war further back into the past. He looked at his face and saw that he was an old man now. When he looked harder and met his own eye, he saw in those eyes that he was not
just
an old man today, he was also the angel of death.

*

The creature that had dumped his daughter like trash lived in a section of the county known as Macktown. He lived in an old white farmhouse that had once belonged to his grandparents, according to what Rachel had told him during a rare, talkative moment. The house was in ill-repair, with peeling paint and plastic-covered windows. The yard was waist-high with weeds that were never cut, despite three mowers sitting there idle. A muddy trail led from the driveway to the front door.

About a quarter-mile before he reached the house, there was a wide spot at an intersection. Buddy parked there on the gravel shoulder, not wanting to pull in the driveway and announce himself. He left the truck sitting there with the keys in the ignition. At this point, he didn’t care if someone stole the truck or the gas. He functioned with single-minded determination. There was only the moment and nothing else. The moment was about one thing. It was about death.

He walked the shoulder of the lined blacktop in his fatigues. The stiff boots rubbed his feet in all the wrong places. Though there had been a day when he’d done thirty-mile patrols through mud in those boots, those days were long gone. He’d been a tough bastard, made tougher by life in the jungle. The pain in his feet was lost in the greater sea of pain within him.

As he came upon the house, he could not immediately tell that it was occupied. In its overgrown condition, the stately old house loomed wild and unkempt on the roadside. The teal Camaro was there, as were several other beat-up vehicles. There were also a few mopeds and bicycles, the preferred transportation of those that had lost their driving privileges. He stood still by the road, listening. Some windows were open and he could hear loud talk that came unobstructed across the silence of the day. With no power, what else could people do? A month ago they’d have been blaring AC/DC from a stolen CD player. Now they just had to enjoy each other’s conversation.

He hoped that one of those people inside was the one he came for. His plan was a simple one. He walked from the road through the grassy parking area and to the muddy path that led to the door. Seeing no one in the yard or in the windows, he continued toward the front door, carefully placing each foot as he climbed the painted green steps so that he wouldn’t make too much noise and alert them.

Breaching the door was simple, since it wasn’t even locked. He turned the knob and he was in. Buddy had assumed that this might be the case in a house where people were constantly coming in and out, only staying long enough to get high or buy their drug of choice. He eased the door closed behind him and floated down the hall like smoke. Approaching the large, high-ceilinged room that had probably once served as a parlor, Buddy knew that this was where everyone was. All of the voices rolled from there and down the hall toward him. He pulled his pistol and stepped though the sliding pocket doors.

All conversation immediately came to a stop. The presence of a man with a gun could have that effect on people.

The man Buddy had come to see was sitting in a threadbare wingback chair across the room. He was smoking a joint and looked at Buddy with red, angry eyes. “Who the fuck are you? G.I. Joe?”

There was some laughter. Buddy considered replying with a gunshot, but he had a plan to follow and he was going to stick to it. He kept his pistol on the man, meeting his eye, waiting to see if recognition dawned on him. Buddy assumed there was no room inside himself for more anger, but he was wrong. The man’s lack of recognition made him swell with a cold fury.

“You don’t recognize me?”

The man leaned forward and set the joint in an ashtray. His forearms were roped with muscle. It looked like his preferred poison was steroids. He raised his eyes, slowly blew out smoke, and stared at Buddy again. A look crossed his face and he relaxed back into his chair like a king holding court from his decrepit throne.

“You that chick’s dad?” he asked.

The .45 boomed and the arm of the chair erupted into a cloud of bloody spray and wool padding. The man cursed loudly, hugging his damaged hand to his chest, blood pouring steadily from where the hollow-point round had severed two of his fingers.

“Wrong fucking answer,” Buddy said.

“
Rachel’s
dad,” the man corrected, grimacing and forcing himself to say the words clearly. He leaned forward and pulled a wadded bandana from the coffee table, gently wrapping his damaged hand. “What the fuck do you want with me?”

“I don’t have anything to do with this,” said a scrawny man, scooting forward on the couch. He wore a tank-top and was missing his teeth. “This ain’t my fight. I’m getting the hell out of here.”

“Stay where you are,” Buddy ordered. “Ain’t nobody leaving, yet. You move, you die too.”

“What do you want?” the bleeding man repeated, his voice louder.

Buddy sighed, fighting to control his emotion. He’d never voiced what he wanted. He didn’t dare. “What I want is my little girl back,” he said. “And you can’t make that happen.”

The man in the chair groaned, the shock of the trauma starting to wear off and the ache of his injury starting to move in. “I didn’t make her take that shit. She did it of her own free will.”

Buddy shook his head. “Does it matter? The end result was still the same. The part I cannot forgive is how you dumped her out at the ER like you were disposing of a deer carcass at a roadside dump. You’ve left me only one option.”