grab.
Pam stood up, a bedraggled hen in her arms and mud on her dress. “Oh poor baby, Pammy’s got you now you don’t have to be afraid of those bad dogs no more there.”
“You’ve got me all turned around.” Athena shook her head, scanning the dreary stretches of pine growth. “Where’s the road?”
“This way,” Pam called. Carrying the chicken, she virtually skipped along. “The sky looks sorta like pancake batter, don’t it?”
“What?”
“All kind of yellow-gray and lumpy.”
“Oh.” The rain had gone, leaving the sky overcast and quiet. They hurried, Athena leaning heavily on the broomstick. Letting Pam pull farther ahead, she stopped and stared, her mind straining to make sense of what she was seeing. Was it some sort of carving or statue?
A broken figure sprawled on the ground. She blinked. It focused, became a prostrate human form, caked with sand. Focus sharpened.
“Oh dear God.”
The familiar face seemed to gaze back at her. Darkly stained, the clothing lay in shreds, and the contents of the pockets had leaked in a pathetic ring of meaningless objects. The thing twitched. She rubbed her eyes. It seemed to keep moving in tiny jerks, until she realized that crickets crawled all over it.
“’Thena?”
“Stay back.” The belly had been torn out, and cracked ribs protruded from the flesh. Intestines trailed in twisted loops.
“Whatchya lookin’ at?”
“Don’t come over here.” She looked away. The sands were endless, sodden nothingness, veined with rivulet marks, the pines a fatty gray. Hoping her tired eyes would blur, she took a step, then another.
“What is it? What is that over there? What?”
She heard a dull roaring, more substantial than the wind in the pines, and she hustled Pam toward the sound. They found the road and started across the bridge while the swollen creek thundered against the planks. “My fault. All my fault.” Athena peered down through missing timbers at black water. A leafy branch twisted madly, disappeared in the dark churning.
“What? Hurry up, ’Thena. What was that back there anyways? I mean, we gotta go see if Matty’s all right.”
Damp wind made a hollow whining at the walls.
The boy lay collapsed against the back door. He hadn’t moved in hours. Pammy was dead. He knew it. Face screwed tight in misery and exhaustion, he held his body in a rigid fetal position.
He’d heard it, heard Chabwok kill, felt it.
She was dead. He had no strength left even to cry.
The dog ran barking at them. Pam shrieked once, a reflex of abject terror, then kept her arms held tightly around the chicken, while Dooley circled and leaped. “Now you get out of here now! Go on!”
Something wasn’t right. Athena shook her head as the dog bounded back to greet her. Then she had it. The dog shouldn’t be outside. She had locked him in the house with Matthew. Suddenly and deeply frightened, she stood in the gentle mist and stared up at the house.
The porch had bloated, thickened boards protruding, bursting upward. Pam had her key out, and she yelled to the dog. When the back door opened, the boy tumbled out. Pam dropped the hen, which squawked around them while the boy lay there, blinking.
When his wordless cry rang out, his mother looked away, feeling like an intruder. Numb, she gazed at the morning woods. She didn’t see the boy’s gratitude, didn’t see the light in his face as he turned to her.
Marl brushed a chewed piece of field mouse out of the corner.
“You’re a good son, boy. Don’ know why she’d wanna run off tha’ way. Your mother. You’s justa baby.” Al stretched out on the wooden bench, and each time it seemed certain he’d finally fallen asleep, he’d raise his head and babble some more. Then he’d grunt, reaching for the jug under the bench. “A good son. But we don’ need ’er.”
Not listening, Marl swept the floor of the gin mill. Only a dusty sort of light drifted through the open doorway. It made everything seem peaceful. Curled on the counter plank, the cat licked at its paws with a bright pink tongue. And Marl kept sweeping, pushing clumsy-looking homemade cigarette butts ahead of him across the relentless sand, densely packed between the floorboards. Shoulder blades twitching, the cat furrowed its face in the direction of Al’s clogged snores. Then it rolled away, exposing all of the sharp teeth in a pythonic yawn. And the broom continued its rhythmic swishing, quiet, soothing.
At last, the boy leaned the broom against the wall and walked softly toward his father. For a moment, he stared down at the large, mottled face. Then he moved to the other end of the bench. He took hold of a boot and pulled, tugged it off. Al muttered wetly in his sleep.
Before he tossed the boots under the bench, Marl stared at the gray flesh of his father’s feet, at the long, curving toenails, jutting like black hooks.
The siren stayed silent, and the tires left a damp whisper. Staring out the window, Athena remained mute and unseeing. At the sides of the road, pines bristled and sagged, flowing past.
“Honey, I just feel so bad that I took so long getting here. The roads. I mean, I’m just so sorry,” said Doris, her voice raw with cigarettes. “I tried to call Larry. I even tried Siggy but couldn’t get hold of anybody. Half the phone lines are still down from the storm. I’m just so sorry.” Spray flaring up behind them, they swerved to avoid a downed tree in a sheet of water. All the roads were flooded, many impassable, forcing them onto winding detours that seemed to take them always farther from the highway. “I’m just afraid of getting stuck out here,” she muttered between her teeth as she wrestled the wheel. “We’d never get a tow.”
Athena shut her eyes. No matter how she tried to unfocus her thoughts, she couldn’t blunt her awareness of the sheeted form behind them. “Oh, don’t get stuck.”
Doris shot her a look. When she’d first picked her up, Athena’s words had tumbled out, hysterical and fantastic, but since then she’d retreated into silence. “Will you look at this!” The rig splashed around a turn. “What in hell’s going on up there?”
In the half-submerged road, several vehicles had parked haphazardly, and people milled around a bogged car. A uniformed trooper stood in the middle of the road, shaking his head. He looked very young.
“I’m sorry, honey.” Swaying, the rig slowed. “I just have to see what this is.”
Athena nodded, already jumping down. Though the water rose above her ankles—part of a sudden lake that stretched to cover the floor of the woods—the sands felt solid underfoot. With a dazed expression, she looked around. Pines stuck out from the wash as though caught by an incoming tide.
“’Thena? What are you guys doing here?”
Searching for a dry place to stand, she looked up to find Steve sloshing toward her.
“We tried to call you,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d be able to get through.”
She saw the confusion on his face as she moved away from him and walked toward the knot of people at the found ered car. Wind in the wet branches made a low whistling moan.
The car windows were crystal webs. It had sunk up to the axles, and through a forest of uniformed legs, she saw the crimson film on the soaked floor. She drew closer. She stared a long time, nodding, as though this were only to be expected. There was very little blood really, but she imagined that most of it must have been washed away. The body had been so badly savaged that it barely looked human anymore. The throat had been mauled out to the neckbone, and whitish segments showed through straggling veins. There was no face left.
“I tried to talk her out of coming along, but you know how stubborn she is.”
She recognized Doris’s voice. And soon she realized that other people around her were speaking as well, had
