Offspring (19 page)

Bonnie and Clyde. Easy Rider. Sunday Bloody Sunday. The Wild Bunch. Medium Cool. The Graduate. Five Easy Pieces
.

Her father loved some of these movies until the day he died. She had loved them too.

Though her father had been a gentle man these films were often as bloody as the Vietnam War or the Chicago riots which in many cases formed their metaphorical and certainly their historical backdrops. Her father liked to quote the director Akira Kurosawa on the subject.

“To be an artist,” said Kurosawa, “means never to avert one’s eyes.”

Her father was no artist, though he did paint the occasional muddy watercolor on a Sunday afternoon. Nor was Claire. But it was the second part of the statement that stayed with her through the years, the wisdom in the notion of not averting one’s eyes. She had done exactly the opposite with Steven, had looked away, ignored his drinking, ignored what she knew to be true, and since had flogged herself for it a thousand times.

The statement counseled toughness, honesty, rigor—and she did not so much remember it now as know that somewhere deep inside her, her father’s exactitude of spirit moved in her, informed her, destroyed at first impulse that urge to retreat from what she saw that already wished to content her with mourning her friend’s fate and her own and blur her sight.

“Let her down,” she said.

Her voice was never very loud—not unless she was yelling at Luke—and it wasn’t now. But it sounded loud in the cave. More firm, too, than she would have anticipated. Almost a teacher’s voice. Almost like her father’s.

Claire shook, trembling. The voice didn’t.

No one moved except two of the children—twin boys—who gazed at one another in surprise and then sniggered. Behind her the man laughed too, his voice pitched higher than she’d expected from a man his size. Almost a giggle.
Idiotic
, she thought. Evil and idiotic.

“Let her
down.”

She saw the teenage girl, the one they had let into the house, her torn body covered by an old blue shirt, bent over a yellow plastic bucket, transferring something from the bucket to a rusted cast-iron pot. There was water in the pot.

The girl had her back to her, had turned when Claire entered and turned again now when she spoke, but only smiled and tossed her hair and returned to what she was doing.

At the back of the cave Amy groaned and tried to swallow.

Even that small motion caused her to sway, and the swaying caused her to moan.

They had cut away her bra and panties. Her robe hung open, dangling off her shoulders.

Thin rivulets of blood trickled down from her hairline across her face and neck, over the tops of her breasts, staining her robe at the collar.

Dozens of them.

Her body slowly turned.

Flies buzzed all around her.

The naked man beside her shifted too, trembling, rattling his chains. There was a girl wearing some sort of skin strapped together behind her back standing in front of him, tugging at the raw flesh of his penis, totally involved with that and ignoring Claire completely.

Claire hesitated, picturing Luke and Melissa huddled in the darkening woods. And then stepped forward.

No one stopped her.

She walked past the twin boys to the girl and even as she became aware of what the girl was doing, of the bone piercing the chained man’s scrotum, plucked the knife from the back of her belt.

The girl whirled, snarling—but Claire was all clean motion, reaching up and severing the clothesline and reaching down for Amy in a single sweep of her arms, cutting through the lines that bound her wrists.

Amy screamed and gasped in release and then Claire was holding her, her warm familiar body, barely able to stand at first, Claire clutching her to make her stand as the girl plucked the knife roughly
from her hand and held it first to her throat and then to Amy’s—and suddenly the cave seemed to close around her. The man, the teenage girl, the boys, all of them appearing so fast and tight around her she could barely breathe with the stink of their bodies and their breath pouring over her like the heated breath of dogs. The man shoved her back against the wall. She clung to Amy’s robe, protecting her with her arm, keeping the connection, and felt the arm go numb as her elbow struck granite.

She tried to ignore it. To ignore them all.

The flies swarmed angrily.

Amy looked up at her. She touched the bloody hairline. There was a film of pink in her eyes, a thin pink film of blood. Claire wiped them with the sleeve of her dress, wiped her friend’s face and lips and closed the robe over her body.

The man stepped forward and reached into her hair. This time she resisted.

“No,” she said.

But the man wasn’t really trying. He was laughing at her.

They all were laughing. Moving back, easing the circle, giving him room.

The man shifted his hand to the front of her head and bumped it back against the wall, not hard enough to do her any harm but hard enough to hurt, bumped it over and over in measured cadences, the pain nothing at first and then cumulative, playing with her, until lights started flashing behind her eyes. She held tight to Amy and waited, waiting out the hurt, Amy her lifeline and Claire hers, listening to
their laughter and somewhere, to a baby waking, crying, its voice harsh and echoing through the cave.

She gritted her teeth and waited.

Thump
.

And slowly felt something start to build in her, something she knew was dangerous to them both and barely under control but irresistible as they laughed and the infant howled and one twin boy reached out with one hand to pinch and twist her nipple and the other to poke her ribs.

Thump
.

Laughter.

Her stomach. Her ribs again. Poking.

Bullies
. Like Steven. Like all of them.

Thump
.

Then a pair of hands reached across her to Amy’s shoulders, trying to pull her away—the hands of the girl who had deceived them.

Claire clung tight, felt Amy’s cool fingers clutch her arms, the pressure inside her building, knowing that it was only a matter of moments now and they would separate them again, this possibly for the last time, possibly forever, that the girl was far stronger than she and could do that, not being able to bear that in any way whatsoever and aware of Amy sobbing and the sense of danger and anger and awful potential mounting until—

Thump
.

Something ripped bursting inside her and she pushed back off the wall in fury and put all of her weight into the forward thrust of her knee, the sound of it loud as an ax chopping into him or into the trunk
of a tree until he screamed full into the echo of the sound, drowning it, clutching at his groin and falling to his knees in front of her and rolled toward the fire, stopping just in front of the fire, rolling as though
on
fire, the fire licking at his balls, at his idiot brutal manhood.

And as the teenage girl jerked Amy out of her arms and the twins and the girl with the skin grabbed Claire and threw her to the ground, as they kicked her in the ribs, in the head, in the back, as the pain raced through her and off her like a bird of prey skimming the ocean, she watched the man rolling by the fire.

She watched and watched.

Peters’ chest felt like a breeding ground for killer bees.

It was the whiskey. It stung like a sonovabitch in the two shallow knife wounds near his sternum.

But it was also the whiskey that had saved his life.

Supposing he was going to live.

Forget that he smelled like the floor of the Caribou the day after New Year’s Eve. He
looked
like a stuck pig. The stain went from his armpits to his belt buckle, all the way down his sides. In the dark it would be indistinguishable from blood.

They’d have taken one look and thought, that’s one dead drunk lying there.

There was blood all right but he wasn’t bleeding to death. Not yet. The kid had been in a hurry, though from the feel of it he suspected his knife had chipped a bone. The wound in his side was much deeper and there was more blood there than was running out of his chest but the kid had cut into gristle, nothing more
that he could tell—it was what the old cowboy movies called a flesh wound, or at least he hoped it was.

Bastard hurt, though.

He knelt back on his heels and thought about things awhile, not wanting to move until he knew what he was moving to.

There was no point checking Manetti or Harrison. He was close enough to see them and there was plenty of moonlight, and you got so you could recognize a dead man as easily as a dog lying dead in the highway, a kind of displaced emptiness hanging over them like a broken TV in a junkyard.

Their deaths disgusted him like Caggiano’s had disgusted him. All brave good boys gone long before their time.

Miles Harrison was their newspaper boy.

Remember, Mary?

There wasn’t time to mourn them. Any of them.

The .38 was the first thing.

It had gone flying when the kid hit him but it couldn’t have gone far.

He took off his jacket, shook the broken glass out of it and brushed it off his shirt, then tied its arms over the wound in his side, knotted it and knelt in the brush, feeling with his hands to the right and left, moving slightly deeper, feeling again over the cool hard-packed earth and lightly around the thorny, woody stems of brush, deeper by a foot and then two feet and then three, being patient, cursing the sharp pangs in his chest and side but still patient, until finally his hand brushed the smooth barrel of the gun. He pushed his way slowly back through the brush and sat down.

When his breathing was even again he stood up and holstered the gun and walked over to Harrison and Manetti. There was a sticky pool of dried blood a few feet away from Manetti that didn’t correspond to either his position or Harrison’s.

So you got one, Vic
, he thought.
I almost would have bet you’d have managed that
.

And I’ll bet they took whoever you got home with them too
.

He could see that they’d moved quickly, while the body was still doing plenty of bleeding. It left a nice clean trail to follow. His vision wasn’t what it used to be but he’d done enough hunting in his day to handle this one.

Got a head wound or neck wound here
, he thought, judging from the amount of blood. Whoever was carrying it was swinging the body back and forth, probably hauled up on his shoulder, the body swaying with his gait. Blood not only spotted the path but also sprayed leaves in the brush beside him and farther on, the trunks of trees.

He looked at his watch. An hour and a quarter or more he’d been lying there.

Shit.

He walked back to the rim of the hill. He could see the house lights below. There were squad cars down there now, seven or eight sets of headlights and red-and-blue flashers. But nobody coming his way that he could see. It was tough to know for sure because the tops of trees obscured the field. They could be out there, maybe not far away. They might not.

He considered his options.

From here to the cliffs was basically flatl and, and
that he could handle. Going down to meet them at the house or the field was going to be harder. A whole lot harder.

Not the getting down—that he could handle, too—but the getting back up again. It had been bad enough when he wasn’t leaking blood all over the place.

He could describe to the troopers with a good deal of accuracy where this had happened. But it was still going to take them time to find it.

Time for him to haul himself down over the hills. Time for him to tell the story. Time to point the way.

Time these people likely didn’t have.

To hell with it
, he thought.

They had an hour and fifteen minutes’ lead on him. They might not be out of earshot yet, but it would still be safe to fire. There wouldn’t be any sense of immediate danger to them, nothing that would cause them to panic and start in killing people. They’d know that whoever it was was way back. Could be a hunter for all they knew.

He pointed the .38 into the air and fired, waited until the echo died away and fired again, waited and fired a third time.

The breeze was down considerably and the air was still. If there were any kind of cops worth their pay down there they should be able to take a rough estimate of his position.

Anyhow, it was the best he could do.

With all the activity the wound in his side was doing too much bleeding. It might just kill him after all. With a knife wound deep as that you never knew. He tied the jacket tighter.

He dug into his pocket and filled the empty chambers of the gun.

No more shooting till the shooting starts
, he thought, and began to follow.

The Woman entered the cave and let the man drop before the fire. By then the man was willing to drop.

She took it in—the woman clutching her robe by the Cow in the back of the cave. The second woman lying on the floor, bruised, her face bloody, dress torn. Looking up terrified at the twin boys standing over her. The boys grinning red, blue and silver.

And no infant
except for Second Stolen’s, mewling by the wall.

And no Eartheater. And no Rabbit
.

Who should have been here long before her.

First Stolen approached the Woman cautiously, knowing she was angry. She could see that he had been hurt somehow and was mending. She did not care how or why.

All she felt was anger.

He had found the woman, but not the child. She could not understand why.

She sensed the spirit of the other child, hungry for release.

“Rabbit?”

He shook his head, confused. Was Rabbit not with her?

She pushed past him to Second Stolen. The girl was squatting by the fire. The Woman could smell what was boiling in the pot. The lungs, the kidneys, the liver.

“Find Rabbit,” she said to the girl. “Eartheater is dead. Find Rabbit.”