Kin

At last the dizzying current ceased and she found strength enough to raise her head. The man was a wiry knot of shadow under a crooked hat, a scarecrow with a golden halo, trying to deceive her into thinking him salvation. Dread pounded at her chest, igniting further knots of pain that seemed to radiate from the core of her.

Another shadow sprouted from the man’s shoulder, this one just as thin, but without a hat, just a fuzz of hair.

They’re here to kill me.

“Oh God, lookit her eye.”

“Shut your fool mouth, boy.”

“What happ’ned to her? She ain’t got no clothes on.” The voice was filled with nervous excitement.

The hatless shadow was elbowed aside. The thin one flapped its arms until its chest became wings descending around Claire, swaddling her.

“Help me carry her.”

She opened her mouth to moan at the sudden, terrible heat enveloping her and felt new warmth seep from between her legs. The dirt turned dark quickly.

“Pa she done wet hers—”

“Now.”

Before the arms could press their wings even tighter around her, Claire took a series of quick, dry, painful swallows, then drew in a breath that sounded like nails on a blackboard, and screamed for Daniel. But even as that tortured, awful noise poured out of her, and though she was surrounded by shadows that were lifting her up and carrying her back to Hell, she knew for the first time in her life that she was well and truly alone, and that no help was coming now, or ever.

-2-

The smell of burned flesh, though only a figment of his imagination, made Luke’s mouth water. He was hungry, his dinner having been interrupted not a full hour before by the sound of Matthew’s keening from the woodshed. It had reminded him of that day when they were kids, when Luke had observed his younger brother trying to skin a deer they had taken down with a bow and arrow. Luke had known the excitement and desire to prove himself would lead Matt to make a mistake, and he’d been right. With a wide smile on his face, and sweat on his brow, Matt had held up the fistful of pelt he’d managed to free from the deer, his other hand still digging that Bowie knife into the carcass as he sought approval from Luke. Told’ya I could. Before Luke could satisfy him, the pelt slipped free of Matt’s grip and the momentum made his other hand snap back. The blade cut a thin half-inch-deep groove through Matt’s bare side, just below the ribs. Luke doubted it hurt very much, but it was enough to send his brother to his knees, hands grabbing fistfuls of hair as he vented his shame and disappointment in that irritating singsong keening sound—the same sound he’d used earlier today after the blonde woman drove a wooden spur through his chest.

Anger made Luke forget himself and he rose from where he’d been crouching atop a grassy hillock. Up ahead, an old black man and his boy were helping his brother’s attacker into the back of a flatbed truck. Helpless to do anything but watch, he’d been tracking the woman on this road, which few folk ever traveled, biding his time before he closed the distance and dragged the woman back to make her pay for what she’d done. Rage had made him abandon the traditional rules of running down the quarry and he’d stayed on the road, in full view of the woman. She hadn’t seen him, and was moving slower than a crippled coon. Even if she had looked over her shoulder and spied through the heat haze his lean sinewy form striding toward her, there was no chance she’d get away. She was bleeding a lot, and he didn’t figure she’d get very far.

It should not have been a difficult task.

But damned if she hadn’t kept on staggering away, her pace even despite her obvious disorientation. It was as if, instead of just floundering blindly through the woods, she’d been drawn to the road like an iron filing to a magnet. Still, he hadn’t hurried. There was no need. He’d been confident despite the ache that throbbed steadily within him whenever it came back to him that Matt was hurt, and hurt bad.

But then Luke heard the truck, and noted the sound of the engine was not a safe, familiar one, and he’d quickly hopped the fence and ducked down in the grass, watching with queer, unfamiliar dread the red vehicle bearing down on the woman.

Claire, he remembered. One of the others had called her “Claire”.

No one ever got away. Not for long. To let someone escape was an unthinkable, unimaginable mistake they had managed to avoid for as long as Luke had been alive. Papa-in-Gray had showed them how and what to hunt, and why it needed to be done, and they had executed his instructions flawlessly.

But today…

Today an implausible number of distractions had left Matt alone with the woman. Even so, she’d been tied to a stake, her hands and feet bound behind her, her mouth gagged. His brothers had already raped her and blinded her in one eye, cut off most of the toes on her right foot, and stabbed her repeatedly in the arms and legs. There should have been little life and even less fight in her, but yet somehow she’d managed to free herself and skewer Matt with the spur. She’d been gone damn near half an hour before Luke, oldest of his five brothers, heard Matt’s pitiful mewling, and by then he’d all but bled out on the floor.

He knew it was not too late. He could still try to close the distance between himself and the truck before they got the woman settled and the engine running again, before they carried Claire out of their lives forever. If the two men he’d seen hefting her into the truck put up a fight, he’d deal with them. He had Matt’s Bowie knife, plucked from his brother’s hand with a vow to finish what the other had been denied the chance to do. Luke was quick. He could make it, and all their troubles would be over. All he needed to do was start running.

But then he heard the sound of the engine coughing, saw the dirty black plume of smoke puffing from the truck’s exhaust, and knew it was too late. Slowly, he started moving toward the fence, and the road beyond. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, tear at his hair, rip at his skin, but instead he hopped the fence, and raced in the opposite direction, away from the truck, and back the way he’d come.

When he’d left home, Matt had been conscious. Breathing. Alive. That Joshua, Isaac and Aaron hadn’t piled into the truck and come roaring down the road in pursuit of the woman told Luke that might no longer be the case.

Most telling of all, Luke realized, was that he hadn’t thought to take the truck. He couldn’t drive for shit, not with the way his fingers were arranged, but that was no excuse. Not now. He had always been an efficient hunter, and he knew the real reason his brothers weren’t coming was because they assumed Luke would handle what needed to be handled. But for the first time ever, they were wrong. He had lost them their prey. And he knew what that would mean when he returned home. He would have to answer to Momma-In-Bed, and she would not be at all pleased. And the last time she’d been mad at him, she’d gotten Papa- In-Grey to bust the fingers on his left hand and set all but the thumb and the middle one wrong.

Dispirited and fearful, he slowed, and whispered a small prayer to God that she would go easy on him. But as the sun rose higher, became a blazing eye in the center of the cornflower blue sky, he knew two things at once.

God wasn’t listening. Not to him. No more than Papa ever did.

And that today, there was every possibility that Momma-In-Bed would kill him.

* * *

“Stop starin’.”

“Sorry, Pa.”

“Watch the road.”

Pete nodded and righted himself in the passenger seat. They had covered the girl with a tarp, which was all they had, but just now, through the small begrimed window at the back of the cab, Pete had seen that a corner of the tarp had come loose, flapping madly at the billowing dust the Chevy was kicking up and exposing the girl’s right side, down to her hip. One small breast was visible and despite it being crisscrossed by cuts and scratches, the