Offspring (20 page)

Second Stolen glanced down into the pot. That Eartheater was her daughter and was dead held no interest for her. She was hungry for the rest of her kill. The Woman knew this.

“Now,”
she said.

She watched Second Stolen rise and step past the man at the entrance.

The man did not respond or even raise his head.

“Wait,” she said.

She walked over to her and handed her the gun that had killed Eartheater in the woods and saw her face change, saw the sullen look disappear as this privilege became clear to her. The Woman knew that First Stolen watched and would be angry.

It didn’t matter.

First Stolen would be angry because she had brought the man here, too—the wolf—who looked up from his exhaustion now with eyes that only incompletely masked his hate and fear of her.

“Steven!”

The voice was a hoarse whisper, filled with pain.

She saw his eyes shift to the woman on the floor. And in them, recognition.

Nothing since he’d run from the police seemed exactly real to Steven. The shadowy woman behind him in the stream, the sudden detonation of pain and slack, broken uselessness of his ankle—and then her return, being helped almost considerately to this place by some scarred foul-smelling Amazon with a knife and a pair of pistols in her belt. . . .

This place
.

This roost for chickens. This pigsty. Some goddamn armed medieval fortress. Hole in the wall.

An outhouse.

Hell, it was all of them.

And it didn’t belong in the real world, he had dropped through some sick black filthy hole in space where human arms and legs dangled from the ceiling and the smell of something sweet and meaty in the pot mingled with the stink of shit and urine, where roaches the size of your fist scuttled across the floor across a naked baby sleeping on a filthy blanket and up the blackened legs of something with a penis chained to the back wall.

And in the midst of all this was your wife
, beat to hell and being guarded by a pack of kids. The ultimate playground fantasy.

Let’s get teacher
.

“Steven!”

He could have killed her.

Jesus! The woman was a stupid bitch! You could bet the farm there was nothing to gain by acknowledging she knew him—and who knew what you stood to lose. Especially since it was pretty damn clear she was not exactly on their good side at the moment.

“Shut the fuck up, Claire,” he said.

Temporarily at least that did the trick.

But the woman wasn’t stupid—the woman had got the message, all right. She was looking at him, amused and curious.

But she wasn’t asking. Not right away at least.

And now he saw Claire’s old buddy, Amy, hugging her knees in the back of the cave, almost unrecognizable at first with all that blood smeared over her face, and he wondered where her husband David was.

Where Luke was.

Luke was a pain in the ass but he wasn’t a bad kid, really.

He hoped he’d gotten away, actually.

And as for David . . . well, he hoped that David was out there too. For other reasons.

He wasn’t being generous. They’d both had it in for him for a long time, David and Amy. The bastards. Loaning Claire money for a lawyer, to pay her bills, whatever. He couldn’t feel too bad for either of them if they dropped dead on the spot but the fact was that they were still
like
him, they were civilized people who at least were not living in a shit pile with bones and dead bodies lying around in a goddamn fucking
cave
. You could reason with them, you could get
around
them.

But
these
people . . .

Maybe David would get to the police.

Jail didn’t seem so bad right now. Not even on Murder One.

At least there were people inside.

But
these
fuckers . . .

These fuckers scared him.

Like this girl, here.

She was what? maybe ten or eleven years old and she was peeling off the skin she was wearing, unwrapping it and dropping it as she walked back to the guy in the rear of the cave, then grabbing a knife and poking him, cutting him until the guy started to shriek, high-pitched like the girl herself might shriek if she were the one getting jabbed with the thing, little rivulets of blood flowing—and this kid is fucking
laughing
. Amusing herself! And nobody else is paying any attention to them at all except for the baby, who is all of a sudden wailing.

And Marion said
he
was sick sometimes.

At least when he did what he did he had some reason for it. Some damn thing to be gained.

Otherwise it was just craziness, wasn’t it?

It wasn’t human.

So like it or not what he had here were a couple of allies in Claire and Amy. People he knew. People whose strengths and weaknesses he could depend upon. Even if they were beat all to hell they might still serve as allies in a way. They could help him get by.

There was only one thing to do with your allies.

You used them.

Amy heard the baby cry and looked up angrily, instinctively at the man in chains and the girl who tormented him. Their noise had disturbed the baby, released its voice—sounds of hunger and distress that caused her breasts to ache again and her heart to pound, wishing for Melissa. She saw that the girl had somehow anticipated her, was already watching her, something dreamy and removed in her eyes yet calculating too, as though she were staring down the short dead-end road of her imagination and trying hard to see farther.

The girl smiled and tossed away the knife and watched his body fall back exhausted against the wall of the cave.

She turned to Amy. She stared for a moment and then turned away.

She walked over to the baby.

And she knew
before she actually knew
what the girl was going to do—her entire body said
no
to this—she knew because the baby was crying loudly and the baby’s mother was gone, sent away out of the cave, and she, Amy, was there instead with breasts filled with milk aching to betray her and to betray Melissa.

She shook her head
no
and felt a deep anxious churning inside her as the girl dropped the screaming baby into her arms, into her lap, and the baby clutched her breast through the open robe and took it in a mouth smeared with drool, crusted with dirt, and bit and sucked, pulled deep, its eyes a cold fixed squint that reminded her of the eyes of snakes, its tiny jaws fierce, pulling, grinding, sucking not just
milk but the strength and life from her and racking her body with sobs.

She held the baby and cried and felt its pull like the tide, the surge of life. Violent, strange.

Greedy.

Rabbit crouched, poised in the blackberry brambles, the pupils of his eyes widely dilated, watching the rabbit forage for food.

It was not the berries the rabbit was interested in but the tender leaves and shoots, gray in the moonlight. Unaware and upwind, it was moving closer to him all the time. In a moment it would be within striking distance. He would flick his finger, a tiny movement. The rabbit would hear. And then it would only be a matter of which way the rabbit would jump. The rabbit would give away its intent, tilt its narrow head to the right or to the left in that split second before its hind legs gripped and pushed, and by then Rabbit’s arms would be there, avoiding the powerful hind legs, ready to grip the ears and upper body and twist its neck.

He had hunted these brambles many times at night and most often he was successful. They formed a thicket on top the cliff high above and to the right of the cave—well away from the easier, more traveled path the others took. But the others were not the hunter Rabbit was. They had never troubled to find this place.

He had brought Eartheater and the Girl here once, but neither could be content just to sit and watch and wait. They had made fun of him, of his grin, of his patient
crouch. They made so much noise that no game would dare appear, not even a stupid squirrel. He had waited all night long after they left and returned with nothing.

He wouldn’t make the mistake of asking them again.

He remembered that he could not ask Eartheater again, not even if he wanted to. Her body lay a few yards behind him hidden in the bushes beside the trail. He had been here for a while watching the rabbit, though he had only intended to stop for a moment just to see what was here, and he had not wanted the stink of death to frighten any game nearby so he had left it there, covered by sticks and tall grass to cut the scent. He knew it was much later now but he had little sense of time and the rabbit was near.

He felt immensely happy here amid the berries and their cane-like, thorny stems, smelling the woods smell and the rabbit’s hide, his feet dug into the earth and his weight distributed between hands and feet to give him balance and the fastest possible lunge. He knew exactly how far his spring would take him, in which direction the brambles would get in his way, and in which direction they would impede the leap of the rabbit. He knew the firmness of the ground, where it was soft and where it was stony, and waited for the rabbit to arrive at exactly the spot that was most to his advantage. These variables were not considered, they were calculated plus or minus in the flesh—in the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands, in his eye and ear. They ran in his blood.

And the moment was almost on him when the rabbit
started, nose twitching as it sniffed the air, and the boy heard behind him faraway heavy footfalls along the path, and heard a man panting. He knew from the sounds that it was not one of his kind. He remembered Eartheater’s body in the brush and heard the man stop for a long moment and knew that he had found her. Knew that he had delayed here far too long.

He saw the legs of the man pass by as he searched the path near the cliff and as the rabbit ran off deep into the brambles.

He heard him stop at the very edge of the cliff and then return to retrace his steps. He smelled the man and recalled the smell, knew it for the smell of death because he had killed the man only a while ago with his knife.

And yet he walked
.

He huddled shaking in the thicket, a Rabbit in truth now for the very first time, shuddering, frozen in fear, while the ghost went slowly down the mountain.

Through waves of throbbing pain Claire watched the tall scarred woman kneel down to Steven and search his eyes, studying him, her head tilted like an animal’s, inquisitive.

Like a cat’s.

She was aware of the twins and the boy with the clouded eye looking to the man for instructions, anxious for permission, probably, to go on kicking her and beating her again. She was aware of their mouths and what was in them. Very aware. But the man was watching Steven too, ignoring them.

She was aware of Amy crying.

She saw a roach crawl to the top of one of the rocks banking the fire and fall in, overcome by heat, crackling.

But mostly she was aware of the woman.

She could feel something in this woman that was missing in the others. She sensed it powerfully. A thoroughly dangerous oneness, a wholeness with what she was, like a tiger or panther feeding—a total concentration of energy that was completely
of the animal
, intent and undistractible.

The woman leaned close.

She saw that Steven could not even meet her eyes.

“The baby,” she said.

There was ferocity in the question. There was blood. Claire felt it like a cold blast of wind.

Steven looked puzzled.

“Hers,” said the woman quietly. She pointed to the back of the cave.

And now he understood.

“I don’t know,” he said.

And she could see that not knowing scared him.

She watched him look away from the woman, considering, and then after a while look back at her. Not once did the woman’s eyes blink or waver, though Steven’s roamed the walls, the fire, the ceiling, lingered for a moment on the twin boys and the one with the clouded eye, and even—however briefly—on Claire. But now when they returned to the woman Claire knew he had arrived at something, at some decision, he could meet the woman’s gaze now, if only for a moment.

She had seen that look before.

And she didn’t know which of them—Steven or the woman—was more to be feared.

He glanced at the boys again. At their smiling open mouths.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think you can find out.”

He looked at Claire.

“She doesn’t like,” he said, “to be bitten.”

Claire stared at him in shock.

The man had been her husband
.

They had made love night after night and it had been good, once, she had believed it was good.

They had made a baby together, had considered having another.

They had skied in Vermont and weekended at the shore.

She doesn’t like to be bitten
.

Claire heard the words. It was still nearly impossible to believe he’d said them—dead calm and dead serious, as though it were not her life and maybe Luke’s he was talking about, as though he were simply making a suggestion to a client who had a certain problem and this was the solution which, after due consideration of the variables, he’d come up with.

He nodded toward the boys. “You have all you need,” he said, “right here.”

So this is who you are
, thought Claire.

Beneath the panic, she hated him.

You know too much, damn you. About me, about the situation. And you have no soul. You will betray anything
.

He knew that Luke was out there somewhere, the only one they hadn’t found yet
.

He knew that Claire would never have abandoned Amy’s baby
.

So the baby was with Luke. And probably, Claire knew where
.

He was suggesting that they find Melissa through Luke, and Luke through her. He was suggesting pain. That pain would result in betrayal.

Of his son.

She doesn’t like to be bitten
.

Simple fact.