Dismember

The woman dropped to her knees and slid a little on the newly expanded mess. She clutched feebly at her eviscerated organs but succeeded less in reclaiming them than in tearing them to shreds with those razor-blade fingernails. Dave watched her struggle. This wasn’t quite the same as gutting a deer or a rabbit, where the thing was dead before you did your slicing and dicing. He stepped to the woman, grabbed hold of her hair, and wrenched her head back until she was staring up past his face and at the ceiling. She grabbed the cuff of his shirt with one of her wet hands, but then lost hold and slid again in the mound of her intestines.

Dave swung the knife, cut halfway through her neck, pulled the weapon free and swung again. This time it came out dripping on the other side, and the woman finally dropped dead to the floor.

Backing away from the carnage, Dave looked down at himself. Christ. He’d ruined his clothes. That would teach him not to change into his good duds before he knew for sure the bloodshed had ended. Wishful thinking, he supposed. He wiped the dirty blade on his already soiled pant leg and deposited it back into his cargo pocket.

He had been stupid to take the woman for granted. He saw that now. He’d been too focused on the boy, too single-minded. In the end, he guessed, this had all turned out for the better. A boy couldn’t grow up with such a disobedient harpy for a mother. Dave had come to save the boy; he hadn’t realized until now just how much he would be saving him from.

He moved to the counter beside the sink and picked up the towel on which the woman had dried her hands for the last time. He swabbed the bulk of the blood from his hands and then rubbed at his face. The claw marks on his eye and cheek burned, one spot in particular near the corner of his mouth. He probed tenderly at the area with his fingertips and found something small and hard buried in his flesh. He pulled it free. Round at one end, jagged at the other, painted a subtle white: the woman’s missing fingernail. He dropped it to the floor and used the towel to stop up the freshly welling blood.

There was no sense in getting completely cleaned up yet—that would have to wait until after he’d secured the boy—but he wanted to clear off at least the runny stuff. The feel of the stinking gore dripping down his face and neck sickened him. It felt like he’d been sprayed by a dying skunk. He ran his hands across his face one last time, decided he’d done what he could for now, and dropped the crusty towel on the floor beside the body.

Before he left, he found a clean towel in one of the drawers and laid it on the counter where the old one had been. Perfect.

His footsteps echoed through the stillness as he left the kitchen, so much louder now than when he’d padded his way inside. He passed the questionable dinette without paying it any attention and let himself out the back door. Behind him, a line of red footprints led directly from the body to the exit, showing no deviation and no hesitation.

He stepped over the garden hose again, passed by the tennis ball and strode toward the woods, where he’d hid less than fifteen minutes before. The fork-trunked oak was the largest tree on the property, its lower limbs wide enough around that they nearly could have been trees of their own. Dave had never had a tree house himself and hadn’t seen enough of them in his life to fairly rate this one, but he could say with a hundred percent certainty that, as a kid, he would have given just about anything for this sort of hideaway. He could just imagine sitting in the shadows of a hundred breeze-blown leaves, sniffing the fresh air and listening to the birdsongs. It would be heaven to a nature-loving kid. Or at least it would have been to Davy. Maybe still would.

Except if Dave had built himself such a getaway, he never would have made the same mistake the maker of this particular one had: he wouldn’t have made it adult accessible.

Standing with one foot on the ground and the other on an exposed root, he gripped the rung closest in height to his chest in both hands and yanked at it with all his might. It didn’t budge. Holding on to the next highest one, he did a partial pull-up, not quite enough to get his chin over the board but enough to test whether it would hold his weight. Solid. He stepped onto the first rung and climbed.

The ladder didn’t lead straight up the trunk but spiraled around it instead. Knots and branches occasionally provided natural, supplemental footholds. Dave eased his way up, eyes on the hatch in the fort’s floor, constantly expecting one of the rungs to break off in his hands or splinter beneath his scrambling feet despite their apparent sturdiness. He winked his scratched eye every ten or fifteen seconds, trying to keep it moist and fend off the worst of the pain. By the time he got his head through the access hole, he was sweating. The wounds on his face throbbed in time with his heartbeat, and a series of tears dripped from his injured eye down the side of his nose and across his pressed lips.

If Dave hadn’t slipped a little at the last second, the rock would have hit him square in the teeth. Fortunately for him, he did and it didn’t. His head dropped just beneath the platform’s surface not half a second before the stone went sailing by, and he listened while it crashed through tree limbs and into the underbrush below. Rather than wait for another rock, he lunged up and into the tree house. The boy sat in the corner with his arm flopped out in front of him.

“Trying to bean me?” Dave said, pushing himself into a sitting position, not wanting to advance any farther until the boy seemed ready for him to do so.

“I—”

Dave waved a hand unconcernedly and forced out a little laugh. “Forget it. Georgie would have done the same thing.”

The kid said nothing. He looked away from Dave and over the edge of the platform. Thinking about a jump, Dave figured. The fall might leave him with a broken leg or a fractured skull, but it was a reasonable consideration. Dave wouldn’t have blamed him a bit. He remembered the way the kid had looked coming down from this tree earlier, like a bird gliding to earth. After such a display, it wouldn’t have surprised him much if the boy hit the ground running or flew off through the trees like a whooping crane.

He pulled another toothpick from his breast pocket and flipped it into his mouth. He wasn’t sure where he’d lost the first one, but it didn’t especially matter. He had plenty. He looked for a replacement twig while he waited to see what the kid would do.

After what must have been a full minute, the boy looked back up at Dave and slumped. It was perhaps the most physical and obvious act of surrender Dave had ever seen, and done without a single spoken word—but Dave wasn’t about to let down his guard. He’d seen plenty of opossum, had played it once or twice himself.

“You know,” Dave said after plucking the pick from his mouth, “that rock near knocked my head off. You ever play much ball?” He closed his good eye, saw the world momentarily through a watery haze.

The kid looked at the weathered boards between his legs.

“Georgie never played except for a year of tee-ball. Would it be all right if I called you Georgie?”

No response, but the boy did take another quick peek over the edge. Dave had to admire his pluck.

He started to reinsert the toothpick, then jammed it into the crease of his ear instead and folded his hands in his lap. “There’s something I guess you ought to know.” He waited for the boy to look at him but finally continued when he didn’t. “That woman inside there.” He nodded his head toward the house, though the boy still wouldn’t look. “I guess she’s dead.”

Finally, some life from the boy. His head jerked up, and the muscles in his body flexed and jumped. His eyes bore into Dave, showing first anger, then fear, and finally misery, the transitions between each lasting for only a blink apiece. The kid had gone from slack into an almost immediate hunch and now resembled a field cat ready to pounce. Dave didn’t move or react. He knew better than to show any fear.

“You—” The boy was almost shaking. “You lie.”

“Nope.” Dave shook his head once, slowly, to the left and then back to center. “I stuck her with a knife.” Dave pulled out the front of his shirt and looked from it back to the boy, saying here’s the evidence without saying anything. “But there’s something else.”

“No.” He shook his head, twitched a little, and shook his head again.

“There’s something else,” Dave repeated. “She wasn’t your mommy any more than she was my missus.” He took the toothpick from his ear. “She was a liar, Georgie, and she was all wrong.” He popped in the unchewed end and chomped down.

The boy changed position a little, got his feet behind him. No longer a hunched cat; now a sprinter waiting for the flat crack of the starting gun. “You’re lying,” he said in a voice much deeper and manlier than the one he’d used in the kitchen.

“Nope. Daddies shouldn’t ever lie to their boys. But I promise you this: we’ll find you your rightful mommy. I will make things right.”