Offspring (16 page)

“Me first,” she said.

She wrapped Melissa in the comforter. The baby’s eyes flicked open and she smiled. Claire forced a smile back at her. Her foot found the first rung of the ladder. Carefully, she started down.

She glanced up at Luke crouched on the platform. He was watching her protectively, as though ready to
reach out and grab her if she missed a step. The breeze billowed her light summer dress.

There was only one board that had felt really loose to her on the way up and she was on it now, edging her foot over so that she was right on top of the double nails for maximum support. Melissa was regarding her seriously, brow furrowed, staring wide-eyed at her chin. She gave the board her weight. It squeaked and held.

She was down. She saw Luke silhouetted against the dark sky, peering over the platform.

“Come on!” she whispered.

He shifted under the railing to the ladder. She glanced right and left down the trail. She felt the insistent need to hurry, an irrational fear that for some reason the police and squad car wouldn’t stay, that they’d get to the house and they’d already be gone, leaving them alone in Amy’s empty home, still echoing with screams.

Luke dropped down beside her. Her right hand fluttered over his shoulder, across his chest. Needing the contact, needing to reassure itself that he was there, intact, all right.

Then they were moving down the trail together. Clouds across the moon defeated the urge to hurry. The trail was dark and narrow. They passed slowly through the shallow cut between hills and up the other side. Melissa began crying again, swiping with her tiny hands. Claire hugged her close, patting and stroking her back. She subsided.

At the top of the hill they looked across the dark
canopy of scrub and beyond that toward the house, obscured by trees. The sky was brighter there. She could see colored lights—the flasher.

The police. Safety.

They started down.

The clouds passed by and they walked in moonlight for a moment. Then the trees pressed close, leaning meeting at their tops above the trail, blocking out the light.

She stumbled. The path was rocky here. She caught herself immediately but Melissa began to cry in outrage and surprise. She patted her, stroked her, bounced her gently in her weary arms.

And now the trail opened up again. They were in moonlight again, the last stand of trees before the open field just yards away.

“Come on,” she said. “Hurry.”

Luke tried to edge ahead of her but something made her thrust him back—so abruptly that he almost fell. And she had time to regret this, to feel bad about denying him and pushing him and even to wonder for a moment why she’d done it before the man stepped out into the path, into the light from between the trees.

You son of a bitch
, she thought.
Get away
.

It wasn’t fair. In her mind she could see the lights and flashers below, imagine the gentle awkward arms of the policeman reaching for Melissa, see them running up the hill, guns drawn, after Amy
.

Fear and anger in conflict crawled across her flesh like red and black ants aswarm in battle. She swung at them crazily.

Get away
.

Fear of him—of his bulk, his excrement smell and his confident stance. Of the eyes like the eyes of dogs gone wild. Of his ax turning slowly in the moonlight
.

Anger at his arrogance that he should
dare
to frighten them. A woman, a boy, a baby.

Anger at his cowardice.

Fear of his power.

She wanted to run and attack him at the same time. She knew that neither was right, that neither would get her anywhere, that whichever one she chose would see her dead on the ground in front of him, she saw her body twitching at his feet on that very spot, and knew in an instant that there was only one way she could survive this and that was to do both these things at once, to split herself in two, to run from him and attack at the same time—and that was possible. Because she was not one. She had not been one for many years now.

She was two.

“Luke!”

He was frozen to the spot, staring.

She thrust the baby into his arms. The man stepped forward.

Her eyes scanned the ground. No sticks, nothing to swing to keep him at bay, but the path was still rocky there so she stooped and clawed at the rocks, clawed at them and around them, digging her fingers into the hard-packed soil, but they wouldn’t give, they were sunk too deep, the earth would not release its grip.

And he was coming. Swinging the ax.

She got down on her hands and knees and clawed, gasping, tears of frustration flowing.

She felt Luke take one step away behind her. Yes. That was right. She turned.

“Run!” she screamed.

Melissa was wailing.

“Mom?”

“Run!”

He was almost on them and she was starting to stand so that at least her body would be between them—at least that—when Luke turned and ran and she felt a sudden, release—a sudden sharp intake of breath as though she were running too. She stood up, prepared to meet him, to take the ax deep into her if need be. To hurt him somehow if possible
.

But the man only looked at her, a moment of confusion in his eyes. Then he looked after Luke. And she saw who was important to him and what he was going to do.

“Noooo!”
she screamed, and hurled herself forward, clawing at
him
now and not the unyielding earth. The man flung her aside but she’d thrown him off balance for an instant. He righted himself and she was on him again even as he turned to run, arms around his legs. He made a startled sound and fell, his body thudding to the ground and tumbling away from her, turning, coming up with the handle of the ax. She felt it slam the side of her face, tasted blood. Her grip on his legs weakened but he wasn’t free of her, not yet, she was holding on, giving Luke time, even as her vision swam and lights began to burst behind her eyes.

He kicked one leg free and pushed her away, pounded at her face and she swallowed blood this time and felt her back teeth splinter and something bore into her upper palate. She lost her grip. He pulled his leg away. Her hands came off him weak and smeared with mud.

She lay there and saw him stand, searching, looking for Luke. Listening. She struggled to her knees.

Luke was gone. He was nowhere in sight. The trail was an utter miracle of stillness.

Through the pain she felt pleasure, contempt for him, triumph.

They were two now. One of them free
.

She felt this even as he reached into her hair, her scream escaping into the silence, and pulled her to her feet.

The Woman crouched hidden amid ferns and brush.

She watched the man coming toward them, plodding upstream.

The man was tiring.

Behind her, deeper back, Eartheater and Rabbit watched, too—Eartheater only sporadically as she peeled the young horsetail shoot, munching on its sweet interior.

The Woman did not recognize the man and his presence in the stream disturbed her. For one thing he was dressed oddly: a coat that did not close over his body but instead flapped back and forth across his chest as he walked, sleeves so short his shirt showed through at the wrists, as though he had taken the coat from someone smaller.

From prey, perhaps.

For another thing, the man was smiling.

It was not the same sort of smile Rabbit wore—and was wearing now—not a fool’s exactly. But it had in common with Rabbit’s smile a troubling lack of reason. The man was breathing heavily, walking now on the bank and now through the water, his trouser legs thick with mud. He was alone, tired, walking in the night.

Yet the man was unafraid. The man was smiling.

She did not think she had ever seen him before. But the man was comfortable there. He looked like he belonged there.

As her people did.

For a moment she almost feared him.

As he drew closer to her she saw the hardness in the smile, the cold glittering eyes. Saw that he, too, had taken pleasure in the hunt.

Yet compared to her the man was soft.

She had only to watch him breathe.

Instinctively she saw in him a rival for the child’s blood. She needed no such rival. The man might have tricks, knowledge. Physical strength was not the only thing. But she watched him with a curiosity she had rarely known. Except for the Cow she had never stolen a man in full manhood, and the Cow was hardly a man, the Cow had never been. She watched him splash through the stream like a child. She was loath to kill him until the smile was gone—until she knew
why
he smiled.

She waited until he passed and then stepped out of the brush behind him into the water, drew her
knife and even as he became aware of her and began to turn, slashed through the tendons in back of his left knee.

The man looked at her astonished as he fell, clutching the wound.

He stared at her, eyes glittering and cloudy with pain.

The man would stay there. The man would not get far.

He did not cry out but only lay there in the water, looking up at her in amazement as she waved Rabbit and Eartheater out of their warren.

She gazed at the banks to mark the spot, then moved upstream.

Only once did she look back, and that was just before they started running—when they heard the woman scream.

He had dragged himself up out of the water to the bank, and he was listening too.

She had seen a wolf once whose leg had been broken in a trap. The wolf was pulling, dragging the trap, had torn it from the ground, had dragged it to the top of a hill and stood poised there on three legs panting and howling furiously into the night sky, its jaws snapping.

To her at this moment, man and wolf looked nearly the same.

I’m too damn old for this, Mary
, thought Peters.
They were right, they should have damn well left me
.

His heart was beating like a Joe Morello solo, probably in 5/4 time at that, and he couldn’t have caught his breath if it sat there half an hour waiting for him. His legs felt shaky and his feet hurt like hell, but he was keeping up, almost, Manetti and Harrison only twenty feet ahead of him, except that they were going
down
the hill while he was just standing on top of the rise, trying not to quit.

He glanced over his shoulder toward the house. They’d called in their position and where they were going but backup still hadn’t arrived—he saw no lights but their own.

They’d spread themselves too thin, he realized. And part of that was his fault. They should have concentrated on the immediate area, kept the cars within a couple miles of the Kaltsas home, warning people
there instead of going all the hell to Lubec and back. It would have kept them more together. But there was no way to have known that then. No way to know where these sons of bitches would be.

He followed them down, his legs resisting the momentum that might have taken legs younger than his halfway up the second hill before tiring, his own legs scared of the momentum, scared of falling out from under him.

By the time he reached the bottom Manetti and Harrison were halfway up.

By the time
he
was halfway up they were out of sight completely.

He felt like a boat in a trough on a stormy sea—you couldn’t make the horizon for the wave action. From here all he could see was treetops. He hauled himself up.

Man against gravity
.

At the top his poor legs were shaking so badly his balance was off and he almost tumbled back down again. He stood there a moment puffing, trying to locate them up ahead and when his eyes started to focus there they were, stopped, looking back at him, standing at the edge of a dark stand of scrub pine leaning together treetop to treetop above the path like fingertips meshed in prayer, waiting for him to appear, waiting for the old guy to get in gear and catch up.

And he guessed they saw him step forward a few steps, moving better now over the flat surface of the hilltop, because they gave him a second or two and then when he was about fifteen feet away started into
the shadows, thinking that was close enough, they were pretty much together again. And he was coming into the shadows himself, his irises expanding to accommodate the dark, when he heard the first shot and felt something or someone ram him dead on in the stomach, knocking him flat, the .38 spinning out of his hand into the brush, the bottle bursting inside his jacket flooding the night air with the ripe stink of whiskey.

He felt the invasion of steel in his chest and heard Harrison’s voice go teenage octaves higher in sharp bright squeals of pain.

The Woman was as surprised as they were.

But she was faster.

Rabbit too, even faster than she was, running past the two men in front of her to the fat man behind and leaping, throwing his body across the man, knocking him down and stabbing with his knife.

She saw this even as she herself reached for the gun hand of the younger, taller man, cracked his wrist and pulled him to her, the gun discharging once, her sharp knife slicing up through trousers, leather belt and shirt to his breastbone in a huge vertical slit that sprayed her body with hot blood while Eartheater hurled herself at the thinner man, her legs around his waist, her left arm over his shoulder as she slashed at his eyes with the three-pronged steel hand spade, the Woman aware—preternaturally aware, like a hawk swooping suddenly through their midst—of all her surroundings as the left eye burst in its socket and the man pressed his gun to Eartheater’s neck and fired.

The young man in front of her fell to his knees, shocked, clutching at the gurgling spill of white intestines as Eartheater’s head slid sideways like a flower on a broken stem, the sound of her flesh like raindrops falling, pattering the leaves of brush and ferns and the trunks of trees. And Rabbit knew too what the man had done because he stabbed the fat man’s chest once more and then slid away, ran to where the thin man flung his sister’s clutching body off him, and leaped upon his back. Eartheater’s body turned, falling. Rabbit stabbed.