Kin

“Where is she?” Papa said, and slowly withdrew his handmade blade from the lining of his preacher’s coat.

Wellman was trembling, and as they watched, he slowly dropped to his haunches and set on the ground what Luke now realized was not a book at all but a picture. He straightened and tossed the bottle into the darkness.

“Bring that here,” Papa said, nodding pointedly at the picture. Luke moved forward but Wellman shot an arm out, his palm mere inches from the boy’s chest. Luke looked from the splayed fingers to the doctor’s eyes, and what he saw there was not fear, or anger, but pleading. It was a look he knew well.

“Don’t,” Wellman said quietly. “Leave it alone.”

From inside the house came the sound of something heavy falling then smashing against the floor, but Wellman’s eyes stayed fixed on Luke.

“I said bring it here,” Papa commanded, and Luke bent to retrieve the picture. He had just managed to get his fingers around the edge of the frame, the gravel biting into his knuckles, and was starting to rise, when the old man’s bony knee loomed large in his vision. He lurched to the side just in time to avoid having his nose broken but caught the blow in the cheek before he rolled and got to his feet, face throbbing.

The old man was breathing heavily, shoulders forward, head low, as if he was waiting for retaliation. Behind his spectacles, his eyes burned with cold fire.

Papa laughed.

Luke, one hand massaging his cheek, didn’t find anything humorous in what had just occurred. Their prey fought, punched, kicked, scratched, and bit all the time. It was nothing new. But the prey was always young, and strong, sometimes stronger than all of the brothers combined, so when they fought back it became a welcome challenge, an accepted part of the process. Sometimes they laughed about it later. But this was a sad old man who looked like he could be snapped like a twig. The twins wouldn’t have trouble subduing him, and yet he’d taken advantage of Luke’s distracted mind, just as the girl had used her sexuality against poor dimwitted Matt. But Papa had not laughed at that. No, because it had cost Matt his life, and he had loved Matt. He’d laughed at the sight of the doctor driving his knee into Luke’s face because he didn’t care. Because he was going to take Luke’s life himself. Anything that happened between now and the moment he took his blade to his son’s throat meant nothing in the larger scheme of things. If the girl were found, they’d take care of her. If she eluded them, they’d pack up and move. But either way, Luke wasn’t leaving Elkwood. At least, not with all his parts intact.

“You’re not takin’ Abby,” Wellman said in a low growl. “You don’t have no right.”

Luke drew his glare away from Papa to reappraise the old man. Old, weak, he thought, and crazy as a goddamn loon. Why else would he be talking about a dumb old picture as if it was his wife they’d tried to steal from him? Far as Luke knew, Wellman’s wife was cold in the grave, but it didn’t seem as if the old doctor had been let in on the secret. Either that or he’d somehow managed to forget it. Crazy’s a shithouse rat, he thought. No wonder Papa found it funny. But justified or not, Luke felt the resentment colonizing him, and he took a step back from the doctor. To Papa it might have seemed as if the boy was doing nothing more than turning the show over to him, but for Luke it was an act of defiance, denying his father the opportunity to laugh at another thwarted effort to retrieve the doctor’s beloved picture. The humiliation ended here. Over the years Luke had said goodbye to whatever dignity he had come into the world swaddled in, but if nothing else he still had a sense of pride, the latter instilled in him by the same man responsible for the erosion of the former.

Off to the right of the house was Wellman’s old, green Volkswagen Beetle. Luke made for it, watched by the doctor, who made no move to stop him as the boy used his knife to jimmy open the hood, cut the cables and wrench out the plugs. Then he bent low, and slashed the tires. If by some miracle the old man managed to make a run for the car, he wouldn’t get very far now. Luke stood, brushed dirt from his knees and rejoined his father.

Aaron appeared at the front door, face grim. In his hand he held a bloodstained ghost. With a flick of a wrist he tossed the sheet out into the night. It settled at the doctor’s feet.

“She were here all right,” Aaron told them. “But she ain’t now.”

Something else was knocked over inside the house—the twins, having their fun, high on adrenaline and compensating for the absence of their intended victim.

Papa-in-Gray stepped close to the old man. Aaron remained in the doorway, the gleam of excitement returned to his eyes now that he was watching his father at work.

“I’m gonna ask you one more time, Doc, and then I reckon I’m gonna have to start cutting itty-bitty pieces of you off until you tell what needs to be told.”

Wellman backed away, toward the side of the house opposite the disabled Volkswagen where the darkness was heaviest. From there he had all of them in his sights. He stopped, swallowed. “She was here for a time. I didn’t know what had happened to her. The man who brought her here—”

“Lowell,” Papa told him, and Wellman’s shoulders dropped a notch, the light in his eyes dimming. “We took his head as a souvenir. Wanna see it?”

Wellman paled, and shook his head. “No…I don’t. I—”

“Clock’s tickin’,” Papa said.

“They brought her here, but I didn’t know she was… yours. I thought she’d been in an accident or something. Jack didn’t know nothing either. I did what I could for her, but she was too badly off… needed more help than I could give, so…”

Papa closed the distance between them. “So?”

The old man seemed rooted to the spot with fear. “So I sent her on her way.”

Papa smiled. It was a predatory look and though Luke wasn’t sure if the doctor knew it, it was also the telltale sign that the man’s time had just run out. “With Lowell’s ’lil nigger pup, right?”

Wellman said nothing.

Aaron let loose a frustrated sigh and stepped out into the yard but not before leaning back and calling out to the twins that it was time to go.

This was where it was all going to end, Luke realized. They had wasted too much time at home, with Momma’s little speech, then Papa’s display with the severed head for the boys’ amusement, then again at the farmer’s house, fucking around with the animals when he could have been in the truck, trying to make it here before the Lowell kid took off with the girl. If he hadn’t known any better, Luke might have thought Papa had delayed on purpose, might have come to the conclusion that his father didn’t give a rat’s ass about the girl and had done all this simply to get rid of the family’s one remaining rotten egg. To dispose of the kid he didn’t love. After all, why punish Luke for a mistake Matt had made? None of this would have happened if that simple-minded fool hadn’t fallen for the girl’s tricks.

The more he thought about it, the more he felt a terrible, repulsive affinity for the people they had hunted and killed over the years. For the first time in his life, he felt the sensation of the trap closing in on him, the jagged teeth descending to rend his flesh and snap the bone.

He was no longer kin.

He was prey.

His father’s voice jarred him from his thoughts. “Aaron.”

“Pa?”

“Scalp him.”

For one dazzlingly horrific moment, Luke thought his father meant him, that the execution of the mutinous plan had already begun, but then he saw the doctor back away as Aaron moved in on him, knife held with the point aimed skyward, and he let out a small inaudible sigh of relief.

“Make it fast, boy. We’ve got some catchin’ up to do.” Papa turned and headed for the truck, apparently uninterested in the torture that was about to be visited upon the old doctor.

He had one hand on the door when Aaron said, “Uh, Pa…”

Luke was surprised to see that all trace of fear had vanished from the old man’s face, as if it had simply been a well-rehearsed act to fool them into assuming him an easy target. But as it turned out, they were the targets now, for in the old man’s trembling hand was a gun, the muzzle