Cruel World (29 page)

“Hilton, I don’t know what’s going on, but you need to give me my gun back.”

The old man laughed. “Don’t act fuckin’ stupid. You know exactly what’s going on. Your shitheel dog over there dug up my last project, just when I was figuring out a plan for all of you.” He gestured in a semicircle, and Denver growled again, punctuating the rumble with a deafening bark.

“Shut up!” Hilton yelled, pointing the gun at the dog. Ty scrambled sideways and put an arm around Denver’s neck, but the dog continued to growl. Quinn searched the area around him. Save for a small rock near his left foot, there was nothing in reach.

“Hilton, please, let us go. You have no reason to hurt us. Just let us up the stairs, and we’ll leave you be.”

“Wrong again, sonny boy. I have every reason to hurt you.”

“Why?”

Hilton grinned, his missing teeth a black hole in his mouth.

“Because I can.” He turned and set the flashlight down before grabbing Alice by the hair, bringing her off the cot to her feet. She let out a strangled cry, and Quinn took a step forward. Hilton pressed the barrel of the gun against her temple and cocked the hammer.

“Don’t,” Quinn said, taking another step. He heard the desperation in his voice and so did Hilton who raised an eyebrow.

“We got some feelings for this pretty gal, do we? Okay then, now we have some ground to stand on. I’m going to kill all of you eventually, but I’ll let you decide who goes easy and who doesn’t, how’s that?” Hilton said.

Quinn tried to keep his hands steady as he raised them.

“You don’t need to do this.”

“Aww, enough of that bullshit. We’re past that. This is happening. Now are you gonna choose who gets a bullet and who gets the saw blade or am I?”

Quinn looked at Alice and then glanced at Ty who crouched beside Denver, the dog’s neck outstretched, muzzle full of fangs. He licked his lips, staring at the revolver, trying to remember.

Finally he let out a sob and dropped to his knees before Hilton.

“Shoot me. I don’t care about them,” Quinn said.

Hilton pointed the handgun at him. The barrel looked a mile long in the shadows cast from the flashlight.

“Well, I didn’t figure you for a coward, but there’s one inside us all. Sometimes he just needs some proddin’.”

Alice choked his name past her gag, eyes huge and full of disbelief.

“Quinn, what are you doing?” Ty asked as he lost his grip on Denver. The dog took a step forward, releasing another explosive bark. Hilton aimed the gun at the Shepherd, but when Denver didn’t come any nearer, he shifted his attention back to Quinn who let his face crumple with another sob.

“Please shoot me; I can’t stand pain.” Quinn brought his hands forward in supplication. “Please.”

He said the last word as a whisper and closed his eyes.

“Well, that makes it easier for me,” Hilton said, stepping closer. He placed the gun barrel against Quinn’s forehead. “The bitch and the little one will be more fun anyway. Night night, handsome.”

Hilton pulled the trigger.

The hammer fell. Nothing happened.

Quinn slapped the gun away from his head and jumped to his feet, slamming his fist into Hilton’s gaping jaw. There was a crack loud enough to resound in the dead air of the room, and the flashlight spun away on the floor. Quinn launched himself at the older man who grunted in pain as he fell onto the stairs behind him.

Ty screamed something, and Denver barked again.

Quinn found the soft flesh of Hilton’s neck and locked his hands around it, pressing his thumbs deep into the man’s jugulars. Hilton swung a fist up. Quinn’s ear detonated with pain and tears rushed from his eyes, blinding him. Instead of caving in to the impulse to let go, he held tighter and brought his forehead down on Hilton’s nose.

Blood spurted black in the low light.

Quinn let go with one hand and hammered a fist into Hilton’s shattered nose.

He hit him again.

And again.

And again.

The old man coughed out a spray of blood that speckled Quinn’s face and went slack. He slid down the stairs and lay still at their base.

Quinn stood back from the crumpled form, lungs heaving, blood dripping from his knuckles, his face. He reached down and plucked the revolver from the floor and holstered it before going to Alice and Ty who stood beside Denver. Quinn untied the gag and drew the filthy cloth from her mouth.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Oh my God,” she said, her voice raw. “Yes, I’m fine. What the hell happened?” She staggered, and he helped her ease to the floor.

“He’s a psychopath.”

“I can see that. I meant why didn’t the gun go off?”

“There was only four live rounds in the cylinder. Before I went to sleep, I set it so the hammer was on the first empty, just for safety’s sake.” Quinn grabbed the flashlight and shone it on the chain that bound Alice’s hands.

“But how did you know he hadn’t readjusted it?” she asked.

“I didn’t.”

He set to work on the bolt and nut holding the chain tight around her wrists. The chain came free, and Alice rubbed the ragged skin there, slowly trying to stand. Quinn steadied her on one side with Ty on the other.

“He hit me on the side of the head,” Alice said. “We were talking in low voices since you both were asleep. He was being really pleasant, even charming. I had the rifle. And then he moved so fast I couldn’t react, couldn’t even scream. He hit me, and I woke up on the cot a minute or so before you struck the match.”

Quinn shone the light on the shallow grave, the skull a dull yellow in the beam.

“How many more do you think are down here?” Alice asked in a low voice as she hugged Ty to her side.

Quinn shook his head and was about to answer when a heavy footstep thumped on the floorboards directly above them.

There was a deep croak that shook the air around them, and the trap door began to jump on its hinges.

Chapter 24

Royal

Wood groaned and splintered as the door was wrenched upward.

Quinn flicked the light off. He grabbed Alice’s hand in the dark and then managed to find Ty’s shoulder. Without a word, he led them around the perimeter of the cellar, stopping in the narrow space behind the stairs as the trap door was torn completely away and the stench of rotting fish filled the air. Denver began to growl but fell silent as suddenly as he’d started.

Quinn reached to the side, finding the edge of Hilton’s cot. He stretched, feeling with shaking fingers until he brushed the stock of the rifle near the wall. The base rumble came again, and a deeper shadow in the darkness glided down the stairs.

Quinn froze.

It was an arm. Thin and crooked with a long-fingered hand at its end. It slid down into the space like a snake hunting its dinner. With a jabbing motion, the hand encircled Hilton’s leg and drug him up from where he lay. The old man’s head bounced once on the top stair, and Quinn heard him mumble something incoherent.

They waited another moment, then Quinn grasped the rifle and pulled it close, leaning in to Ty and Alice.

“We have to move,” he whispered. “We’re trapped if it comes back.”

Hilton moaned somewhere above them and then began to scream.

“Now,” Quinn said.

He went first, climbing the stairs into the cool air of the open night. A half moon hung midway in the sky, the wink of some ancient, alien god. In the field, three stilts were tearing at something between them that writhed and rasped out words filled with agony.

Quinn helped Ty out of the cellar, holding his hand as Denver came next and Alice last. He motioned to the woods behind the shack, and Alice led the way, Ty trailing behind her with his hand locked to Denver’s collar. Quinn shot a final look back in time to see Hilton separate three ways, dark, ropy things falling to the turned earth at the creatures’ feet.

They ran.

They plunged as one into the woods, flying past gnarled pines, their feet cushioned by decades of fallen needles. The moon followed them, lighting their way. They traveled steadily down, the forest tumbling into a gully scarred by a silver stream. They splashed across it and paused on the other side, listening for sounds behind them.

Silence except for the chuckle of water.

Quinn took the lead, finding a side hill less steep than others that took them back up into a bramble before disgorging them onto a gigantic field. Its openness staggered him for a moment, and he stopped, each breath full of daggers.

“There,” Alice said, pointing to a tall, curved shape at the field’s far end. They ran toward it. As they closed in, it was revealed as a spine-broken barn, its sideboards hanging like loosened teeth.

The odor of old hay and decaying wood met them as they stepped through the open doorway on its closest end. The barn was mostly empty, an ancient tractor pinned beneath its roof near the center, leaning lumber at its sides, hay bales released of their bindings everywhere on the ground. They moved to the middle of the structure where a split door opened off to the field, its upper half swung wide. Quinn stopped and surveyed the expanse, no movement from the opposite tree line. He counted to five hundred and then turned away, sitting down on a rusted bucket near the others.

Ty curled next to Denver who sat rigid, head upright and watching. Alice rested beside her son, her hand stroking his hair.

“Everyone okay?” Quinn asked.

Alice huffed a laugh. “Peachy.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” Ty murmured. “That man was scary even though he was pretending to be nice.”

“We won’t go back,” Quinn said.

“I threw away his puzzle,” Ty said, and nuzzled closer to Denver’s dark coat. In less than a minute, he was asleep.

“It was an anchor for the chains,” Quinn said after a time.

“What?” Alice said.

“The hole in the block near Hilton’s cot. He unscrewed something out of it when we first got down there. It was an anchor to secure the chains to the wall.”

Alice shuddered. “What a sick fuck.”

“It’s like the damned were spared in all this,” Quinn said, gazing out through the open door to where the moon hovered. “We’ve only met a couple decent people, and they died almost immediately. It’s almost like God left them here to suffer.”

“We’re suffering,” Alice hissed. “My son is suffering, and he doesn’t deserve it.” She brushed Ty’s hair back again. “There is no God,” she said after a long time.

Quinn stared at the floor until Alice rolled onto her side, hugging Ty to her. He rose from the bucket and stood near the door again, watching the night rotate toward dawn.

Hours later, when the sky was beginning to lighten in the east, he noticed a quiet sound coming from inside the barn. It was a stuttering wheeze, like a light wind teasing the eaves of a house. It took him over a minute to realize Alice was crying.

He went to her and knelt down, placing a hand on her shoulder. She resisted for a moment but finally rolled toward him. Her face was streaked with tears, and she wiped her nose before shaking her head.

“I’m fine.”

“You always cry when you’re fine?”

She swallowed, letting out a long sigh as more tears coursed down her cheeks.

“I would’ve picked Ty,” she said.

“For what?”

“For that bastard to shoot first. Knowing what was coming, I would’ve rather seen him die quickly, and I feel inhuman for even having that thought.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that. Anyone would’ve made that choice in your position.”

“No. They would’ve found a way to get free. They would’ve bided time until they could escape. But my mind was blank, and my head hurt so much I couldn’t think of anything. All I could see was my beautiful boy being tortured by that madman, and I couldn’t stand the thought of it.”

Beautiful boy.
Alice saying his father’s words was almost too much for him. He rubbed her shoulder as she continued, her voice uneven.

“All my life I tried to be strong, to shove everything and everyone away that got too close. I let my guard down once and got burned. But when Ty was born, that was it. The wall I’d built crumbled, and even though I patched it, it was never as strong again.” She looked at the boy’s sleeping form. “I can’t lose him, Quinn, I can’t, and I feel like he could slip away at any time.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You can say that.” Her tone was suddenly venomous. “There’s nothing for you to lose.”

Quinn’s brow furrowed, and he looked down. “My father told me once that the greatest evil in the world was indifference, that until we sloughed off our apathy and replaced it with empathy, none of us were safe.” He looked up at her, lowering his voice further. “We’re not damned and we’re not dead and I still have a lot to lose.”

Alice sniffled. “You’re a fool.”

“Definitely. But I know one thing that’s stronger than your wall.”

“What’s that?”

“Hope.”

He stood and paced back to the door. The sun was sliding from beneath the land, its edge blood red. He watched it rise and tapped the rifle’s grip with a finger. Tomorrow was here.

~

They set off an hour later with empty stomachs. Their food was gone along with their water and first aid. Alice’s scalp was cut and bloody, but it had stopped bleeding and she was able to walk on her own without dizziness tossing her to the ground.

They followed an overgrown path away from the sagging barn that wound past an empty foundation that might’ve once supported a house. Now all that it held was an inch of black water and leaves from the prior fall. The day became humid as they walked, the air clinging to them like an extra set of clothing. The trail led through a stand of birch dressed with willow brush before emptying out on a county road. The lanes were barren in both directions, nothing but heat mirages wafting up in the distance like the land itself was boiling.

“How long until we get to Iowa?” Ty asked as they walked. His hand rested on Denver’s collar, the dog leading him solely now without the help of either Quinn or Alice. The transition had been seamless. The boy and the dog were a team.

“Pretty soon,” Quinn said.

“How soon?”

“Like really soon.”

“Today?”

“Not today.”

“That’s not really soon, Quinn. That’s really long.”

“How about tomorrow?”

Ty seemed to consider it. “Denver wants to get there today.”

Quinn and Alice laughed. “He does, does he?”

“Yep. Do you think I could ride him?”

“What? No, you can’t ride Denver,” Quinn said, unable to keep from laughing.

“I don’t think he’d mind. He’s big enough.”

“He probably wouldn’t mind, but I’m not sure he’d hold you,” Alice said, kicking a rock off the side of the road.

“Mom, he can’t hold me; he doesn’t have any arms.”

This made Quinn and Alice lose it again. He glanced at her, catching her eye for a split second and she smiled. It felt good to laugh after the night before. The sun warming their backs, the fresh air, the open road. It all culminated to a near giddiness inside him. They were alive, despite everything that had happened.

The road looped through a spattering of trees that grew on the edges of uncultivated fields. They came to a set of railroad tracks, and Quinn stopped, walking perpendicular to the road along the rails for fifty yards.

“What are you doing?” Alice asked, shielding her eyes from the sun. Quinn paused and bent down, picking something up from between the rocks that filled the gaps of creosoted timbers. He came back and flipped her a dull, flat object. She caught it.

“Flattened penny?”

“We haven’t seen any driveways for over two hours of walking. Kids usually put pennies on tracks. If there’s kids around here, there must be a house nearby.”

Alice gazed at the smashed penny and tried to hand it back.

“Keep it,” Quinn said, beginning to walk again. “It’s your lucky penny.”

“I could use some luck. And some coffee. And a steak. But mostly luck.”

Ty walked ahead of them, Denver’s nose dropping to the pavement every few minutes. The dog’s tongue hung out, a long strip of pink.

“You’ve seen me cry more than anyone else has now,” Alice said quietly as they followed the boy and his Shepherd.

“I should feel special.”

“Or worried.” She glanced sideways, studying him again, and he felt heat rise to his face that had nothing to do with the climbing temperature of the day. He fumbled for words that weren’t there, but then she’d moved past him, picking up her pace until she strode beside Ty. Their voices floated back to him, and he gazed up at the unbroken blue bowl above.

~

They came to the first house before mid-day. It was barely set off the road, a ramshackle patching of tin and plywood. A dead dog lay in the yard at the end of a chain, swarms of flies lifting from its body as they mounted the porch steps. Inside was a blotchy stain three times the size of a person beside a ragged EZ chair. The house smelled of rotting food and dirty laundry. They found half a dozen boxes of Mac-N-Cheese along with two cans of baked beans. Quinn procured a can opener from a kitchen drawer, and they ate the cold meal in silence at the cluttered table covered with bills and cigarette ashes.

In the leaning garage was a car covered by a huge, white drop cloth. A stack of wide tires encircling chrome rims stood in a corner. An impressive array of mechanic tools lined the wall with some strewn about the floor. Quinn walked to the edge of the sheet covering the car and tried to tug it free, but before he could really pull, the cloth began to slide toward him, gathering speed as it went. He stepped back, drawing the revolver as it fell to the floor.

“Holy shit,” Alice said from beside him.

The car sat on blocks, its empty wheel wells giving it a skeletal look. It was low and sloping in a powerful way that struck a bell inside Quinn’s chest. Shiny, black paint covered its entire length, polished to a sheen that reflected everything in the room. A spoiler grew from the long hood and bright strips of chrome shone from the bottoms of the doors and bumpers.

“What is it?” Quinn asked, approaching the machine.

“It’s a Dodge Challenger, either a seventy or a seventy-one,” Alice said, moving forward to run her hand along a fender. “My dad was restoring one when…” Her voice trailed off, and she moved around the front of the car. She cleared her throat. “Pop the hood, will you?”

Quinn opened the heavy driver’s door and found the hood release. Alice pushed the hood up and whistled.

“That’s a three-eighty-three big block. This is a brand new engine. Look at the exhaust and the plug wires. This thing hasn’t even been out on the road yet,” she said, her words a tone of awe.

“Didn’t know you were into cars,” Quinn said.