Cruel World (8 page)

Quinn hurried to the stairs and clambered down them, holding the unlit flashlight like a knife. He stopped at the base of the stairway and peered around the entry to the kitchen with one eye. The window over the sink was dark, nothing moving outside its glass. He took two steps to the middle of the living room and the same sound as before came from the rear of the house.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhik.

The image of the pistol came to him again and he turned, following the sound. It stopped as lightning flashed, immediately overlaid with a concussive blast of thunder so close it vibrated against his skin. In the brief flare, he spotted the heavy gun safe in the corner of the living room and crept toward it. Foster hunted deer every year, always taking a full two weeks off to stay at his cabin in Pennsylvania. But his guns he kept close to home.

Quinn found the safe’s handle in the dark and turned it, letting out a sigh as the door clunked open. He triggered the light and swept it around the inside of the steel box.

It was empty.

Of course Foster would have taken all his weapons with him. Why had he thought otherwise? Quinn moved back to the front door and looked out into the storm. Rain fell in sheets across the yard, obscuring the road that led to the main drive. The trees swayed and sawed at the sky, their branches bony, reaching hands. A thump came from the rear of the house and he grasped the knob, his muscles trembling like those of a racehorse moments before the horn. With a lunge, he heaved the door open and sped into the rain, its touch cold and instantly soaking through his t-shirt.

He left the door standing open and tore across the yard, not looking back, only running. The rain was a solid curtain that draped the driveway from view, but he ran in its general direction, his hand gripping the flashlight that he left off. The wind sang in his ears, his breath a jagged rhythm. The driveway materialized and his feet splashed through a puddle, the water icy through his pants leg.

A tree snapped behind him.

It wasn’t the creaking break of the storm doing its work on a branch. Something was following him.

He ran harder, pushing himself down the lane, rain filtering into his mouth. Quinn swiped at his eyes, trying to clear them. He gasped, sucking down more rainwater as he pelted on. He was drowning on land.

The lane widened and he almost launched himself across the main drive but managed to make the corner and keep going without breaking his stride. There was another crack somewhere behind him, but it was lost in a rattle of thunder as more lightning flared above the trees, giving him a brief view of the open drive ahead. The gun, he had to get the gun. Get in the house and get the gun. The words became a mantra in time with his steps. The air whistled past him and his feet splashed as he ran, arms pumping at his sides. The road curved, and he leaned into it, running faster than he ever had before.

Lightning flickered, illuminating the massive face of his home through the veils of falling water and a bright burst of warmth surged within him. He was almost there, another hundred yards and he would be inside. The wind shoved the trees into a fury, their tops bowing and snapping back as if trying to uproot themselves and chase after him. His feet hit the soft grass as he sped around the end of the house, and as he tried to make the last turn, his sodden shoes slipped and the world tipped to the side. Quinn fell hard on his shoulder, sliding on the soaking lawn. The air flew from his chest, pumped from his lungs by the impact. He rolled to his stomach and began to push himself up as he looked back the way he’d come.

Something tall and thin was striding down the driveway toward him.

Quinn felt his jaw unhinge as his heart stuttered. With arms he couldn’t feel, he pushed himself to his feet and ran up the back steps to the door. He’d lost the flashlight and generator manual when he’d fallen, but that wasn’t important. He needed the gun because what was that thing coming toward the house? It hadn’t been a bear. It had been tall. Much too tall.

His hand slipped on the doorknob and he let out a hoarse moan. It was right behind him, it had to be. Its hands, its hands were huge.

The door opened and he swung inside, slamming it so hard he expected the glass to shatter in its frame. His numb fingers fumbled with the lock and finally snapped it home. Lightning erupted above the house and flared the yard into a blizzard of light.

There was nothing there.

Quinn stumbled down the hall, afterimages dancing in the darkness. His feet tried to slip again on the wood floor as he went by the stairway and he latched onto the bannister to steady himself. Wind buffeted the house, its frame protesting in groans and pops that sent shocks through his nerves with each new sound. His hands shook as he opened the door to the solarium and stepped inside.

Rain pelted the half-dome of glass in a cacophony, splattering and running rivers down its side. Familiar shapes of furniture were oblong and strange in the darkness as he navigated around them, trying to hurry without falling. The table near the reclining chair was ahead, the XDM lying on its surface. Thunder rumbled again, very close, and Quinn groped in the dark for the table’s edge. He found it and ran his hands across its surface, searching for the hard polymer grip of the handgun. There was a horrifying second where his fingers met nothing, but then they closed over the heavy shape and he pulled it toward him as thunder became a war drum in his ears. His finger found the trigger and he stepped around the chair into the center of the solarium, freezing as the panes shuddered again. His skin prickled.

It wasn’t thunder vibrating the glass.

His thumb found the switch on the gun’s grip and pressed it. A lance of light shot from beneath the barrel and illuminated an enormous face staring down at him from the solarium’s roof.

Quinn squeezed the trigger and the gun bucked. The glass pane beside the face shattered and fell in shining pieces with the rain. There was a screeching hiss that fluttered his ringing eardrums and a hand the size of a hubcap shot through the hole on the end of a skinny arm that kept coming like a snake leaving its den. Its fingers were long and pale, their tips dark and scraped raw.

Quinn tripped over a chair and fell backward, his tailbone exploding with pain as his ass met the hard flooring. The XDM flew from his grip and clattered into the dark, its light winking out. A deep reverberation, like a bullfrog croaking, filled the room. It shook the center of his chest as if massive speakers were inches away with the bass on full volume. Cold, wet flesh brushed his face and something snagged his t-shirt, yanking him to the side. Quinn cried out, his voice high and airy. He was the rabbit now, its terror his own. Long fingers curled in the fabric around his neckline and pulled, drawing him onto his feet. Lightning cut the night, and in the brief flash, Quinn’s bladder released.

The thing’s huge head was human, but elongated and stretched as if made of taffy. Its mouth hung open revealing spaced teeth and a lolling tongue. It was naked, its torso skeletal and distorted by its towering height. It
leaned
over
the solarium, the top of its skull patched with discolored hair at least ten feet above the ground.

It adjusted its grip, releasing the hold it had on his shirt so that its thumb pressed against his breastbone and the rest of its fingers dug into his back. It squeezed.

All the air rushed from him, the vice on his chest unrelenting. The thing croaked again, an eager sound, one of anticipation and barely restrained excitement. It drew him upward toward the hole it reached through, its skinny arm hoisting him easily. Flickers of light gathered at the corners of Quinn’s vision and he thrashed in its grip, the last of his air leaking out of him in a squeal. The world was losing focus, like a film heating up before a projector bulb. His arms flailed and he struck the thing’s wrist, but it continued to pull him up, its mouth open and waiting. Something scraped his shoulder, and as it passed, he latched onto it, trying to stop his progress, but it came free in his hand. It was sharp and heavy and the pain that it brought as it sliced through his palm delivered a single frame of clarity that honed every detail to an edge.

Quinn raised the shard of glass and brought it down as hard as he could on the thing’s arm.

The glass cut through the pale flesh, unzipping it as if there had been a hidden seam there all along. The tip glanced off hard bone and ripped free, spewing dark blood onto the rain-soaked glass. A foul blast of air swept over him, reeking of old meat, and the baritone cry exploded inches from his face, sending an icepick into each eardrum.

Then the hand around his chest was gone and he was falling back to the solarium’s floor. He hit hard, the entire world jarring in his vision and there was a sharp pain in his ankle that eclipsed the burning cut on his hand. He gasped and drank the air in as rain and blood pattered around him. The thing roared again, its cry rising from the croak to a keening as it reached for him with its good arm.

Quinn scrambled back, sliding out of its reach as he searched the dark for the XDM. The sky fluttered with light, and he glimpsed the huge hand outstretched toward him, fingertips stabbing the floor as he pulled his feet away. Quinn spun and crawled to the far corner, his fingers knocking something away before latching onto it again. Glass shattered behind him and the thing bellowed, its sound filling the room, the world. Quinn turned and fired into the darkness.

It was there in the muzzle flash, hunched and striding toward him, reaching. The bullet took its index finger off its left hand above the first knuckle. The digit dropped free and fell to the floor like a worm hacked in two. Its massive face constricted in a rictus of pain and clutched its wounded hand, blood jetting free in thin spurts. Its eyes found him in another flicker of lightning, and there was something there in them, something familiar.

It leapt forward, long legs uncoiling, gapped teeth bared. Quinn fired again, the shot tearing out a chunk of flesh from its shoulder, but it kept coming. It hit him with the force of a car, sending the ceiling and floor into a spin as he flew across a table and slammed through a glass panel.

He somersaulted on the wet ground before sliding to a stop. His spine was crushed, he was sure of it. The storm bared down on him, forcing an icy whip of wind across his skin, bitter rain into his mouth and eyes. The gun, where was the gun? He raised his right hand and found that he still gripped the weapon, though he couldn’t feel it. The thing in the solarium punched out two panes of glass and climbed through, its snarling face there and gone in the storm. Quinn sat up and fired a shot that went wide, blasting the window above the monster. A large piece of glass slid free from the broken frame, as it tried to struggle into the open, and sliced into the thing’s back behind its jutting shoulder blades. Its cry cut the night and overrode the thunder that cracked in the sky. It flailed first one way and then the other, the heavy chunk of glass in its back snapping off as it hauled itself free of the building. Quinn steadied the gun with both hands, flipping the light on as he squeezed the trigger.

The pistol kicked, and the bridge of the thing’s nose collapsed inward. Matter flew free of the back of its head, spattering the remaining glass with bits of bone and flesh. It wavered there, wobbling on its stringy arms, nearly free of the solarium for a long heartbeat, and then tipped forward onto its side. Quinn kept the gun trained on its still form as he counted. When he reached a hundred he managed to stand, his legs barely holding him. There was a hornets’ nest buried in his back that sent a thousand stings up his spine as he took three shuffling steps forward then stopped. Training the light on the creature’s ruined head, he stood unmoving as the rain came down around him, stinging in scrapes and cuts.

The storm faded away completely as he stared, disbelief pressing down on him until his legs finally gave out and he crumpled beside the skeletal figure, the gun’s light glinting off the gold earring in the thing’s left ear.

Chapter 9

Revelations

He spent the night in his own bed with the door shut and locked, a chair shoved beneath the knob.

Sleep was fleeting, coming in short spans that he woke from shaking and clutching the pistol so hard his fingers ached. The storm continued to crash around the house, howling through the destroyed solarium with a hollow voice. Near morning it moved off to the east and burnt out over the ocean, leaving the sky clear enough to see the gray edge of dawn creeping up from the water like fog.

As the room lightened by degrees, Quinn lay on his side, his back throbbing, hand pulsing in dull strobes with each heartbeat. He stared at the wall, glancing occasionally at the painting his father had given him when he was twelve. It was a vibrant watercolor of a river valley filling with the first light of day. Rolling hills speckled with trees holding the orange and reds of fall on their branches fell down to a blue river, its surface cut by the heads of rocks peeking from its depths. His father had told him it was a real place, that he’d seen it firsthand. He’d commissioned an artist to capture it on canvas, saying that a photo wouldn’t have done it justice.
You have to feel it, Quinn, and the only way to feel something that you haven’t seen in real life is through art.

Quinn rose from the bed, his joints full of spiked rust. He hobbled across the room, his ankle flaring like a hot coal each time he put weight on it. He reached the painting and stood looking at it for a long time until the brushstrokes blended together into a haze.

He tore the painting from the wall and flung it across the room.

It hit the foot of his bed, the glass shattering and sprinkling the floor. The frame shifted and released its hold on the colorful canvas. The picture folded beneath itself and lay still. He breathed hard, each inhalation painful. He could still feel a giant hand squeezing his chest.

He made his way downstairs to find the sun coating the floor in the living room gold. A cool draft leaked from the direction of the solarium and he shivered, pulling on a sweatshirt hanging in the closet. He opened a can of smoked herring and sat eating it at the counter, staring into nothing. The XDM lay beside the warm can of pop, its grip in easy reach. He would never go anywhere without it again.

After choking down the last of the salty fish, he rinsed the can and threw it in the trash, which was almost full. It was starting to smell.

He stood at the kitchen window looking at the puddles shining on the drive. They were splotches of blue, reflecting the faultless sky. A chill ran through him. The puddles were the same color as the thing’s eyes outside. Graham’s eyes.

Dizziness swarmed him and the kitchen tilted. His briny breakfast made a leap for the back of his throat, but he gritted his teeth and breathed through his nose until it settled back in place. Fresh blood leaked from the makeshift bandage around his palm from gripping the counter so hard. He’d need to dress it properly. But first he had other things to do.

On the way out the kitchen door, he paused at the junk drawer and sifted through the contents. In the very back was a small tape measure with a maximum length of twenty feet. He held it for thirty seconds before replacing it and slamming the drawer shut and heading outside.

The day was cool despite its clarity. Quinn hugged the sweatshirt closer to him as he limped around the side of the house, waiting for the moment the solarium and the thing lying outside of it would come into view.
It won’t be there. It will have regenerated somehow and dragged itself off. It’s watching you right now
. The thoughts were enough to make him halt and bring the gun up from his side. He turned in a slow circle. Birds spoke somewhere in the woods, unseen in the branches. In the distance, waves crashed against rocks. When he managed to shuffle forward, the ends of pale fingers, upturned to the sky, came into view.

It lay where it had fallen; it hadn’t moved overnight.

Quinn approached it, going around its side to where he’d sat the night before. He’d lost track of time after seeing the earing hanging from its distended lobe and only come to when lightning struck a tree a hundred yards from the house, showering the ground with sparks that winked out like falling stars. He knelt, steadying himself with one hand on the ground as he took in the sight.

It was even taller and skinnier than he’d thought. Its legs were long, twice the length of his own. One was drawn up as if attempting to curl into a fetal position while the other was straight, locked in a line at the bulbous knee. Its arms were equally long and would easily reach its knees while standing upright. The hands. They looked bigger in the light of day than the night before. They reminded him of enormous, pale sea-crabs. The digits were a foot in length, except for the missing left index finger that ended in a gored stump. Its torso was emaciated, that of a starving animal, ribs pronounced like xylophone bars. The bones beneath the skin resembled bamboo, its skin almost translucent and drawn tight over them like a circus tent wrapped over poles. His gaze traveled up its unreal size and stopped on its face.

The features were nearly unrecognizable. The .45 caliber bullet had destroyed an area of its upper nose and forehead the size of a silver dollar, yet even before that its countenance hadn’t looked entirely human. Its head was oblong and slanted, the face stretched and uneven like a person’s visage reflected in a funhouse mirror. The mouth hung open revealing tombstone teeth, chipped and sitting at varying degrees within gray gums.

But its eyes. Its eyes were Graham’s.

They were half-lidded and bloodshot, but there was no mistaking them. How many times had those eyes smiled at him while slipping him a treat prior to dinner that his father had forbade? How many times had they studied a glistening sauce, seeking the exact moment to remove it from the heat? Even in death they hadn’t lost their character, their Nordic blue.

Quinn sat back from the corpse, letting the unreality wash over him. The wind coasted across the grounds, picking at his clothes. After a long time, he gathered himself and stood, then walked to the big pine tree where the shovel lay in the grass.

~

He spent the rest of the morning burying the body. He dug a long trench beside Teresa’s grave and pulled the thing that Graham had become into it. Dragging the corpse across the grass was like moving a pallid marionette; rigor mortis hadn’t set into the muscles and joints, and its head flopped on a limp neck. It was much heavier than he’d expected. When he’d covered the last of it, he began to speak. But no words would come, so he settled for cutting three rough crosses from a stand of slender willow. When the crosses stood at the head of each grave, he waited for the tears. The crosses were so fragile and sad. But he couldn’t cry. After the wind had chilled his face to the point of burning, he turned away.

~

The gate’s lock at the end of the driveway was ruined. The brothers’ hammer strikes had bent and twisted the box that housed the mechanism. Quinn started back for a length of rope to tie the gate shut but instead left it partially open. Maybe it was better to leave things broken now.

He found an old duffel bag in Foster’s house and filled it with what food the groundskeeper had in his pantry, which wasn’t much. Graham and Mallory’s homes didn’t yield any better since most of the food was stored in the main house. All told, he came away with a can of clam chowder, four bottles of water, two bags of salt and vinegar chips, three cans of stew, a bag of apples that hadn’t turned yet, some half dried marshmallows, and a package of Norwegian chocolates hidden in the back of Graham’s closet. He almost left these but at the last moment took them. Life, more so now than ever, wasn’t so sure that you could leave chocolate behind.

Quinn brought the bag back to the main house and then inspected the front door. There would be no fixing it from where Rick had kicked it in. In the garage he found an ice chisel that Foster had used on the sidewalks around the house in the winter. He brought it back to the front door, measuring its length while leaning it beneath the knob. After making a mark on the wood floor, he hammered the chisel into it, breaking through the gorgeous teak until he’d created a hole to the sub-floor. He left the sharp edge jammed there and then wedged the other end beneath the kitchen doorknob. It fit tight, and after yanking on the door several times, he nodded to himself and drank down half a bottle of water.

He cleaned the solarium the best he could, sweeping glass and piling the fallen framework in one corner. The pools of blood that hadn’t been touched by the rain had dried to a crusted black at the centers, fading to a deep maroon near the fringes. The rest of it had run like a monochrome painting doused with turpentine. The whole room stank of death. It smelled like a saltwater brine gone foul. He went to the bathroom to gather supplies to clean the gore but realized there was still no water. He settled for shutting the solarium door and nailing a length of two-by-four across it.

When the house was fairly secure, he gathered an armload of firewood from the garage and set it beside the hearth in the living room. In fifteen minutes hearty flames danced and sent smoke funneling up the chimney. The chill that settled over the house during the night and day without power receded from the living room, the fire’s heat creeping into the kitchen and hallways.

Quinn warmed a can of chowder beside the coals, waiting until it began to bubble before eating it directly out of the container. He sat staring out the window afterward, taking a sip of water now and then. The day had grayed over as if the sky were molding. The wind continued to blow, sounding like a distant foghorn in the chimney, and it lulled him into a stupor as he gazed into the fire. He set the XDM on the couch beside him and leaned back into the couch’s thick cushions. He would just close his eyes for a second. He couldn’t bear their weight anymore. Every inch of his body hurt, but if he sat still, he was outside of it, outside of the pain. It was someone else’s, and he was empathetic to them. But right now he was tired and needed to rest for a moment. Just a moment.

He awoke at nightfall, consciousness coming with the stiffening of his limbs and an explosion of pain in his ankle as he pushed himself upright. He blinked into the dimness of the room, the fire long since burned out.

There was something outside the kitchen door.

Awareness washed over him like a wave of ice water, his senses sharpening to needle points. The rasp of a footstep. The kitchen door shook gently and then harder before going quiet. Quinn snagged the pistol from the cushion beside him as he rose from the couch and almost sprawled in the midst of concussive pain. Every joint in his body was full of acid, but adrenaline was washing away everything but the hammering of his heart. He kept low and entered the kitchen, the XDM trained on the door. It was silent now, everything still save the wind. He moved to the window and peered out.

Evening had crept from the tree line, hemorrhaging shadows across the yard as it closed in on the house. But two darker forms moved against the wind, their shapes indistinct in the failing light. They were there, then fleetingly gone around the side of the house.

Quinn shoved away from the window and hurried down the hall to the back door. Maybe it was the brothers, back to take shelter after rethinking their situation. Or maybe it was more of the things like Graham. But they hadn’t looked tall enough. As he watched through the back door’s window, they appeared, merely deeper shadows against the dark. He would not let them come into the house again, no matter who they were. They wouldn’t take anything from him, not now, not ever. If it was the brothers, he would get his father’s boots back. With a yank, he pulled the door wide and crouched in the opening, centering the sights on the taller of the two figures.

“Stop right there.”

There was the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked and he nearly fired his own weapon, but paused as a voice, hard edged but feminine, came out of the darkness.

“I’ll fucking shoot you right now. Drop the gun.”

“Drop yours.”

“Look, we smelled smoke and saw it above your house and came looking. That’s all. We’ll leave and you can go back inside, but if you come out here or make another move, I will kill you where you stand.”

Quinn squinted, slowly taking in the woman’s figure. She was slight and fairly tall, but that was all he could make out. The person behind her was shorter and mostly hidden, but he could see small hands clutching at the woman’s waist.

“Are you alone?” he asked after a long pause.

The woman waited a long time, but the hand holding her weapon didn’t waver.

“I have my son. No one else.”

The little hands around her waist shifted and a small outline of a head appeared at her hip.

Quinn lowered the XDM and shoved it in the back of his jeans. He held up his hands.

“Come in. I won’t hurt you.”

The two shadows stayed where they were, the woman’s gun still hovering on his center mass.

“There’s no one else here, they all—” He let the last word fall away, and he dropped his eyes to the entryway floor. “Come in if you want,” he said, and made his way back to the living room. He knelt by the hearth and stirred the ashes. Beneath the feathery soot, a single ember glowed. Quinn rolled it to the center of the fireplace and began setting kindling over it. He blew into the hearth, ashes taking flight. The ember’s flare was the only light in the room, rising then falling with his insistence. After a few minutes, a flame sprang into life and began to lick at the small sticks of wood. As he was placing a larger piece of oak on the fire, the back door creaked and closed quietly. Quinn stood beside the warming fireplace and waited.