Cruel World (7 page)

The man at the door reared back and threw a kick at the lock. The door shuddered in its frame.

Quinn ran.

He flew up the steps as the second kick hit the door and the sound of cracking wood filled the lower level. He turned in a stupid circle on the landing before opening his bedroom door. There was nowhere to hide. They would be sure to find him beneath the bed or in the closet. Another kick from the kitchen and then the sound of the door banging open against the wall.

They were inside.

Shaking, he shut his bedroom door and started for his father’s room, then turned to Teresa’s. Both of them were laid out the same as his own. Whispers came from the kitchen, floating up to him as if he were in a dream. The XDM almost slipped from his sweaty hand and his vision wavered. Footsteps came quietly into the hall and headed toward the office. Quinn retreated to the end of the landing and crouched, bringing up the handgun. The sights wobbled as he aimed at the head of the stairs.
Squeeze the trigger, never jerk it, otherwise you’ll miss every time.
His father’s voice spoke within his mind, calm, assuring. His finger tightened on the trigger as he heard one of the men speak.

“Check upstairs; I’ll look around the garage.”

Quinn’s vision teared up, and he blinked as his eyes landed on the linen closet door beside him. Without a sound, he stood and turned the knob, slipping inside and closing the door as he heard the man climb onto the landing and move into his father’s bedroom.

In the utter darkness of the linen closet, he ran his hands over the wide shelving. Rags and cleaning supplies on the lowest shelf, sheets and bedding next, extra towels and pillows near the ceiling. Quinn tucked the handgun into his pocket and found the rear of the closet and began to climb. In the hallway, the man cursed the smell and moved closer, blasting Teresa’s door open with a kick. Quinn gripped the topmost shelf and blindly began to shove stacks of towels to either side. With a heave, he flattened himself onto the shelf, pulling his legs up and over a column of pillows. The gun scraped against the board beneath him and he winced, listening. Footsteps crossed the hallway outside the door and entered his room. His breathing the loudest sound in the world, he rearranged the pillows and towels before him, trying to straighten them the best he could in the dark. He laid with his back against the wall, his legs straight out, stiffening as his bed was overturned in the next room. With a final movement, he picked up a towel and flung it toward his feet, feeling it cover part of his legs, but stopping short of his toes.

The closet door opened, flooding light inside as he drew the gun out of his pocket. Between two stacks of towels, he saw the man with the bandanna step inside and flip the switch on. The light bulb directly in front of where Quinn lay remained dark, and the intruder laughed quietly behind the handkerchief before stepping inside. The man’s head and shoulders were all he could see from the angle of the top shelf. Bandanna moved closer, and Quinn lost him from view completely. The man rummaged the shelves below, knocking cleaning supplies to the floor as he turned in a half-circle.

Quinn pushed the handgun through the small gap in the towels, steadying it so the grip wouldn’t rattle against the shelf as his hand shook. Bandanna moved back into view holding a large comforter under one arm. He paused and turned his head to the side, his profile dark against the light streaming in from the hallway. He stood there, a statue in the doorway, listening. Quinn opened his mouth, trying to breathe as quietly as he could. His arm was beginning to ache from holding it at the odd angle before him. The sights of the gun jounced across Bandanna’s skull. His finger tightened on the trigger.

“Hey Rick.”

The voice came from the base of the stairs. The man turned and stepped into the hallway.

“Yeah?”

“There’s a nice Tahoe in the garage. Wanna take it?”

“No, the truck’ll do better on the back roads. You find anything else?”

“Nope. Didn’t see any sign of anyone either. You sure someone was here?”

“The milk in that glass is still wet down there. Someone was here this morning.”

“Well, they’re not here now.”

Rick shot a glance into the closet once more, his eyes running over Quinn’s hiding place before he began to swing the door shut.

Quinn’s thumb touched the flashlight switch and a blade of light sprung between the towels and hit the closing door. He jerked his thumb away from the grip and the light disappeared.

The door stopped closing and then slowly re-opened.

Rick stepped back inside the closet, examining the place on the door where the flashlight beam had landed. He scanned the space once more, searching the darkness where Quinn lay.

“Rick?” The other man’s voice was closer now.

Rick cradled his shotgun, the blanket he was carrying now at his feet in a pile.

“What’re you doing?”

“Thought I saw something.”

“What?”

“A light or something on the door as I was closing it.”

“Probably a reflection.”

The silence became pregnant. Unbearable. Quinn shuddered, not believing they couldn’t hear his heart thundering. He held the sight as steady as he could on Rick’s forehead.

“Yeah, probably.”

“The pantry’s pretty full. You were right about this place.”

The two men turned away from the linen closet, Rick gathering the comforter once again. They moved down the stairs and out of sight, their voices funneling up from the lower floor.

Quinn drew his arm back and rested the gun on his chest. His entire body ran with sweat, and strange colors danced on the darkened ceiling above him.

“I can’t believe how that transformer went up when the car hit it. Fourth of July, man.”

“Dumbfucks shouldn’t have run. I wasn’t going to kill them.” Rick’s voice was lower but still discernable.

“I bet it knocked out power to half the county.”

“Probably.”

“See, I wasn’t kidding about the pantry. Fully stocked.”

“Get the cooler and we’ll take some meat from the freezer.”

The sounds of the men taking his food floated up to Quinn and he closed his eyes. A heavy weariness draped over him and unbelievably he realized he could probably fall asleep right there. He could drift away and maybe roll off the shelf. Maybe Rick would come back with his shotgun and end him. Maybe that was best.

“You know, you can probably take that handkerchief off. I’m pretty sure we’re immune. You look fuckin’ silly anyway.”

“Shut it, Dan. You have no idea if we’re immune or not.”

“I’m just saying, being brothers our genes are the same.”

“You don’t know the first thing about genes or immunity. We’re lucky, that’s it.”

“Well, whoever lived here sure as hell wasn’t. Saw a couple mattresses all tore up out in the woods. Person who was here earlier must’ve done that, huh?”

There was a long pause before Rick answered.

“Tore up?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get these last few bags packed up and get out of here.”

“Why? You think maybe—”

“Quit talking and grab that pack of water. Let’s go.”

There were several more bumps and a bang followed by a loud curse. Then booted footsteps trailing away. Then silence. The truck’s engine came to life and its low growl surged and then receded, its tires crunching on the drive.

Quinn lay still for a long time, and after what could’ve been a half hour or a day, he rolled over and pushed the towels and pillows off the shelf. He climbed down as quietly as he could and waited in the doorway, the XDM in front of him. When no sounds came from below, he made his way down to the kitchen.

It was a disaster.

Bags of sugar and salt were broken upon the floor with boot-prints tracked in them. A shattered bowl was scattered beneath the dining room table, its jagged points like curved teeth. All the cupboards and drawers had been pulled open, their contents rifled but not removed. The pantry door stood ajar, and when he pulled it the rest of the way open, the strength in his neck faded and his head sunk.

The pantry was picked clean except for his father’s smoked herring. A few cans were missing and some had toppled to the floor, but they sat mostly undisturbed. He picked up the fallen tins and straightened them as he swallowed against the dryness in his throat. The rest of the stores were gone. All the bottled water, all of the fruit and the canned goods. A single can of soda lay on its side at the very back of the pantry.

When he checked the fridge, he found that the brothers had taken everything from its shelves along with most of the frozen meats. There were two boxes of frozen peaches and four bags of green beans beside a half-empty container of chocolate ice cream.

Shutting the freezer, he moved like a ghost from the kitchen to the hallway and into his father’s office. The drawers to the desk were open and he shut them one at a time, carefully tucking papers and notes back inside that had been strewn on the floor. When he was done, he sat in the chair, placing the gun beside the dark computer. His blackened reflection gazed at him and he stared back. In one motion he shoved the screen violently off the desk. It flew halfway across the room and bounced once before coming to rest, unbroken on the thick carpet. Quinn stood and began to move around the desk, the smug glass of the monitor mocking him, but he stopped and sunk back into the chair.

With his face in his hands, he sobbed, the feeling of the twisted bones beneath his skin like a failed artist’s sculpture. The afternoon was so bright, the sun melting the very last of the snow. A blue jay called somewhere outside, its insistent cry so mournful, echoing inside him.

When he regained his composure, he gazed out the window and watched the trees sway in the wind while one of his hands found the pistol and began to caress its grip.

Chapter 8

The Cliff

He drank the afternoon away.

He took the crystal decanter in his father’s office that was a third full of whisky to the solarium and sat back on one of the reclining chairs, resting the XDM on the table beside him. The whisky burned his throat and bloomed like a hot explosion in his stomach. He’d drank only a handful of times in his life, all of them under the supervision of his father, most of them on holidays and then only a glass or two of beer.

The whisky was something else. It had a life of its own, plowing into his veins like hot oil. His skin tingled and the objects around him softened, their edges rounding more with each sip. A heavy weight was in the middle of his skull, pulling his head downward, but he fought against it, tipping it back to pour more of the amber liquid into his mouth.

When there was only a thin layer of whisky on the bottom of the decanter, he threw it aside. It didn’t shatter as he’d expected it to but cracked neatly in half. The booze leaked onto the tile looking like a watery bloodstain. Quinn watched it creep across the floor and slide into the channels between the tiles. His eyelids were dipped in lead, and the solarium rotated in a slow circle around him, stopping whenever he focused hard on one point. His eyes found the door leading to the backyard and the openness of the sea beyond. A lone gull cut the air and dove out of sight toward the ocean. He sat waiting for it to return, but it never did.

The air was cooler on his skin than earlier in the day, the wind more brisk as he stumbled across the yard. He didn’t spare a glance at the place where the mattresses lay in the woods, keeping his rocking vision locked on the approaching cliff. When he reached it, he slowed then stopped, his toes inches from the edge. He searched the sky and the sea but the gull was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it had plunged too far into the water and drowned or struck an unseen rock below the surface. Maybe some creature had eaten it whole without it ever knowing it was dying, gone from a world that no longer cared, had never cared.

Quinn wavered on the edge, his gaze traveling to the foot of the cliff some sixty feet below. The slabs of rock there were angled, not sharp exactly, but peaked, easy for a smart bird like the gull to drop a shell on them and expose the meat inside.

He tipped forward, the empty house behind him, all the ocean before him, and the waiting rocks below.

You’re ready for the world now, don’t be afraid.

Teresa’s words slid through his mind and then out again. I am ready, he thought. The wind came off the ocean, nudging him backward even though he leaned into it. The rocks below spun clockwise, the whole world on a dial.

The fear, it’s a thief. It steals from us if we let it.

He blinked, his vision hazing as he forced himself forward into the wind. He brought his eyes up. The last thing he’d see would be the ocean. The feeling of the breeze on his face became the same as when he and his father had taken the skiff out the last time. His father’s smile in the sun. Teresa laughing as they danced in the living room. Their graves beneath the tree. Quinn stepped forward and froze.

A gull coasted a hundred feet above the water, its wings unmoving as it glided. It turned its head, two black, beaded eyes finding him for a moment before swooping lower through a draft.

Quinn fell backward onto the sprouting grass, his legs not there anymore. They were numb and useless beneath him. A great wave of dizziness washed over him and he turned, vomiting on the ground. He heaved and heaved until he was sure he would suffocate, strangled by the compressions within him. When he finally was able to draw a breath, he fell to his back, the sky so blue and vast there was no telling if it was spinning or not. The ground beneath him fell away and he was there in the azure, floating upward, a freedom coursing within him beyond anything he had ever known.

~

He awoke before dusk, the sky above taking on the purple bruise of evening. Dead grass poked through his t-shirt and a leaf crackled beneath his shoulder as he shifted. Someone had taken a hammer to the back of his skull, and when he felt it with gentle fingers, he was surprised to feel it in one piece. Sitting up, he glanced at the pile of sick beside him and his gorge rose again. His arms shook as if he’d been climbing cliffs all afternoon.

He made it to his feet and moved to the house, entering through the solarium door. Without stopping he went to the bathroom, finding the small bottle of Tylenol in the medicine cabinet. He downed three of the caplets with a cold glass of water and waited over the sink to see if the pills would make a reappearance. They stayed down and he shuffled to the living room, slumping into the couch with a sigh.

He sat there with his eyes closed, fighting the twisting snake of nausea until it finally quieted. When he glanced around the living room again, the day had darkened further. Heavy heads of thunderclouds loomed over the trees in the west, and as he stood, a low grumble issued from their direction. He moved to the kitchen, flipping the light switch on and paused for a moment before huffing a laugh exactly like Rick had done when trying the linen closet’s light upstairs. Quinn went to the faucet and tried to draw another glass of water but the flow quit partway through and he groaned. The water pump wasn’t working either. Only the residual pressure had allowed him a drink in the bathroom. He leaned against the sink and looked out the window into the deepening evening. The clouds were closer and very dark.

He found a flashlight in the hall closet. The intruders had rifled through the space, so he had to pick up fallen coats and an ironing board that had tipped over before grasping the thin-barreled halogen off the top shelf. As he was leaving the closet, he saw his father’s favorite pair of hiking boots were gone. He slammed the door shut so hard it didn’t lock and rebounded open behind him as he stalked down the hallway and outside.

It wasn’t dark enough to use the flashlight yet, so he slipped it in his pocket as he walked down the drive. Cool wind slid through the trees, caressing their naked branches and sending dead leaves cartwheeling toward the sea. Quinn shivered and hunched his shoulders against the chill that ran through him.

He passed Graham’s empty house, catching sight of only the top-right dormer window, its black eye finding him before sliding out of sight behind the trees. The wind gusted and died as he walked, the sky muttering again, promising rain. Something moved through the woods to his right and he stopped, his hand finding the flashlight in his pocket as he pictured the XDM resting on the table in the solarium. There was another rustle in the underbrush and then quiet. Quinn flicked the powerful light on, passing it over the place where the noises had come from. It hadn’t sounded big, but maybe it was and simply light on its feet.

A rabbit exploded out of the trees and streaked across the drive.

Quinn lurched backward, his stomach already behind him, headed in the direction of the house. The brownish-gray form leapt from the left shoulder of the road and was gone among the trees on the opposite side. Its passage rattled for several seconds and then the wind rose once more, covering the sound of its flight.

He started walking again, his hand shaking as he shut the light off and returned it to his pocket. The drive bent, and on the corner, Mallory’s house came into view on the right. It was a narrow two-story painted a deep shade of red. There were no trees blocking it from the drive. The lawn, always lush and well maintained in the summer, was a mess of dead grass and fallen branches. Mallory said she’d picked that particular house because she was a snoop and always had to see who was coming and going.

He didn’t pause, the forlorn look of the housekeeper’s home driving him onward. The first arc of lightning lit the sky and he counted the seconds until he heard thunder. Seven. The storm was getting closer. Quinn picked up his pace and in another minute turned off the main drive onto the narrow trail that led to Foster’s house. The trees were very close on either side, their bases nestled in brambles of dead blackberry and wild raspberry vines. The path turned hard to the left and opened into a wide clearing.

Foster’s house was log construction, chalet-style, its interlocking corners sticking out past the rest of the structure. Beneath its highest peak, a large picture window looked out onto the cleared grounds. Foster had sat with him many times over the years in the loft behind the window, gazing out at the snow-covered ground or the burning beauty of fall leaves ready to drop. He’d told stories of his younger days in the Navy, tales of huge ships and massive guns that could lob shells at targets a mile away. Quinn had listened in rapt silence, sipping at the bitter cocoa the older man always made him, too polite to ever say he couldn’t stand the taste.

Quinn realized he’d stopped at the edge of the yard, his eyes locked on the house. He moved quickly across the clearing and mounted the steps, a sudden panic overtaking him as he reached for the doorknob. The door would be locked, and he would have to go back to the main house to look for a spare set of keys before returning here…in the dark. But when he grasped the knob, the door swung inward, the smell of stained logs and old food meeting him as he stepped inside. As he closed the door, he turned on the flashlight causing the darkness and shadows to break apart and flee the halogen beam.

Foster wasn’t as neat a bachelor as Graham. Blankets were flung over the back of the leather couch, untidy stacks of magazines covered the coffee table, and clothes hung from the bannister running up to the second floor. Quinn shone the light into the kitchen, illuminating a pile of dishes in the sink, food dried on each one. He moved to the stairway and climbed the steps, shining the light ahead of him.

The second floor of the house opened into the loft, its picture window looking out onto the yard and trees beyond. Wind whistled in the eaves and found cracks to hiss through. The storm was here, fat underbellies of clouds almost skimming the tallest trees in the forest. Quinn crossed the loft and entered Foster’s office through an open archway. The room wasn’t large and contained a small desk and rolling chair. A computer sat on the desk’s top and a file system was fastened to the wall holding various bills and receipts.

He sat at the desk, standing the light on end before opening the first drawer. Inside were rubber-banded stacks of photographs, curled and faded with time. Quinn shuffled through them, spotting Foster as a much younger man in several of them. In one particular picture, Foster held a smiling little boy in one arm, his other around a plump woman with a kind face. They were all squinting as if the sun were behind the photographer. On the picture’s back
Robert, Myra, and Fred
was written in looping script. Quinn placed the picture back amongst the others. He’d never known Foster had had a family. They’d never been in any of the stories the older man had told while sitting in the loft.

The next drawer held rows of hanging file folders, their sides bulging with paperwork. Lightning raced through the sky again outside the office window, igniting everything inside the house in a fluorescent white. He counted to five before the thunder crashed this time, the sound like massive waves hammering the coast below the cliffs.

In the second-to-last folder, he found the generator’s manual. He paged through it, the word ‘troubleshooting’ standing out in bold print. Maybe he could even get the generator fired up tonight if he hurried. Quinn closed the manual and grabbed the flashlight from the desktop. Outside, the first lashings of rain fell, streaking the glass in silver rivers that shone in the halogen’s glow. Stepping into the loft he paused, shining the light over the places that he and Foster had sat. Ghosts of memories trailing to him through the years were replaced with the image of the man sitting behind the wheel of his truck, waiting for Mallory to leave the house for the last time. Leave
him
for the last time. And there had been no goodbye.

A harsh scraping came from the far side of the room.

Quinn’s chest tightened and he shone the light to the furthest corner. Nothing moved but the sound continued. It was as if a tree branch were sliding along the outside of the house.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhik.

The sound cut off and he waited, breath suspended in his lungs, eyes wide-staring across the room. The seconds ticked by and the light’s beam shook.

Something moved past the picture window.

He spun, only catching the faintest hint of movement out of the corner of his eye, every hair on his arms and neck standing upright. Darkness had crept from the forest and surrounded the house, the yard barely visible through the hesitant rain. What had it been? A bird zipping past? Quinn swallowed and lowered the light before flicking it off. The window became more transparent without the halogen’s glow and he walked toward it, the floor creaking with each step. Lightning lit the yard, the flash far off and only providing a moment of ambient luminance. Something must have blown by the window, a piece of debris carried by the wind. Maybe it was the same thing that had slid along the wall. But it hadn’t looked like something untethered floating on the air. In the brief glimpse he’d gotten, it had looked steady and lithe.

Like something walking.

A thump came from downstairs in the direction of the kitchen. The direction
it
had gone.