KIN (11 page)

"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 looking as cold as the crooked grin on the face of the man aiming it at Aaron's face.

-11-

Wellman had never been so afraid. His bladder felt explosively full, the valve responsible for keeping his urine inside jerking spasmodically every few seconds, threatening to release the dam if he didn't remove the hand of terror that kept squeezing it. His knee ached fiercely from its collision with the boy's cheek. But his concerns were not on his bodily functions at that moment. His perspective had whittled itself down until it was snugly focused on the tableau contained within the field of the Merrill patriarch's headlights.

They had destroyed his car, but that didn't matter. He hadn't entertained any notions of fleeing. In fact, though they didn't yet know it, in disabling the old Bug they'd inadvertently aided him in his cause.

The boy with the knife—Aaron—didn't move, but there was no fear on his face, only hatred, dark eyes ablaze with contempt.

"You better put that down now," he said, tilting his head slightly to spit.

Wellman waved the gun. "Back up."

The boy ignored him and looked to his father, who still stood by the truck smiling as if eagerly awaiting the punch line of a joke, and asked, "What're we gonna do, Pa?"

"Same's we always do," the man said.

The other boy, the one who had crippled the Volkswagen and whose face Wellman had caught with his knee, stared at him. Lurking beneath the grime and sweat and practiced callousness, the doctor thought he detected, not the anger he'd expected, but embarrassment, and perhaps the slightest trace of doubt.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked the boy now, the gun still trained on Aaron. "Why do you want to hurt folks who've never done anything to you?"

Luke, who seemed startled to be addressed directly, opened his mouth as if to respond then shut it just as quickly and frowned, his eyes moving from Wellman to the ground, then up again to his father, who answered for him.

"Because some people're born to die, Doc," he said and at last started to move. Wellman felt a surge of panic, his gaze flitting from the glaring Aaron to his father, uncertain now which one of them represented the bigger threat.

"You s-stay where you are," he stammered.

Papa-in-Gray kept coming, his strange dusty frock-like coat brushing his heels and kicking up dust.

"You think you was born to die, Doc?"

Breathing hard, Wellman slowly shook his head. "Nobody's born just to die."

Papa smiled. He was now less than ten feet away, his narrowed eyes catching the golden glow from the open doorway, making them gleam with odd light beneath the wide brim of his hat. "You really believe that?"

"Yes."

Finally, Papa stopped moving, just outside the reach of the truck's headlights, but he was close enough now that if Wellman stretched out a hand, he could have brushed the man's chest.

"You think me and my boys was born to die?"

Wellman considered this, but knew he couldn't give the response that immediately suggested itself.
Goddamn right. All you rotten bastards deserve to die for what you've done
. Instead he shook his head. "No. I guess you don't."

"Then tell me somethin'," Papa asked, chin raised slightly in the manner of a shortsighted man appraising a gem. "If'n you really believe what you're sayin'...and with you bein' a man respects life and all...tell me why we should be afraid of you when you're holdin' a gun you ain't gonna use?"

Wellman started to speak, to tell the man to back the hell up and enough with his goddamn talk, but the words died in his throat when he saw Papa's grin widen at something slightly to the right, something in the dark over the doctor's shoulder. Too late Wellman turned and saw one of the twins standing behind him, stepping forth from where he'd been concealed by the dense shadows at the side of the house. He had time only to see the impossible mask of utter loathing on the begrimed face and the dull shine on the blade in his hand before the child lunged forward and buried the knife deep into Wellman's thigh.

Pain exploded in his leg. The blade made a horrible sucking sound as the child jerked it free. Blood spurted outward, painting the boy's face, and Wellman staggered, his free hand clamping down on the wound. His back hit the wall of the house and he struggled to remain standing even as waves of agony washed over him. The blood continued to fount, jetting from between his fingers, and "oh," was all he could say as the strength started to leave him. Still, he kept the gun in his hand, the sweat beneath his finger on the trigger guard cold, but even though the temptation to turn that weapon on himself and end this now was greater than ever, he knew there was no need. Despite the unbearable pain, which felt to him as if someone had ripped wide the wound and were tugging on the nerves and muscles in his leg, he was aware of what had been done to him, and what he still needed to do before he bled to death. He willed himself to raise the gun, even as he slid down the wall. The figures in the yard had gathered around him, one of them laughing. Standing with the headlights behind them, they looked like devils come from Hell itself.

So much blood
, Wellman thought, as he watched it continue to spurt from between his fingers in time with the beating of his heart.
Little bastard got the femoral artery, most likely. Gives me about five minutes, if I'm lucky
. But he had been given no reason thus far to think himself lucky, and so he shook his head to clear it of the clouds that were already starting to gather behind his eyes, and summoned every ounce of strength he had left to keep his head from nodding forward and pitching him into a darkness from which he was not likely to return.

"You got 'im good Isaac," Papa said, though he didn't sound entirely pleased. "But this ain't how I wanted it."

Wellman wasn't sure what that meant. Had they been bluffing? Had they meant to just scare him into telling them what they wanted to know, or to warn him as they had Jack Lowell all those years ago when he'd stuck his nose in where it wasn't wanted? No, there was no bluff here. Perhaps if he hadn't seen the faces of those boys, the cold malevolence in their eyes, he could have told himself that this had all just been some kind of terrible mistake, a rash move perhaps from a boy too young, or too simple, to know what he was doing. But he had seen them, had felt the threat saturating the air the moment they'd arrived. These people had come to kill him, just as they had butchered those poor kids and God only knew how many before them, just as they would murder Claire if he told them where she was.

"You can end this," he said weakly, his gaze directed at the tallest shadow now dropping to a crouch before him. "Hit the road, clear out of town and never look back. You've got time." He let out a long low breath. Part of him seemed to escape with it. The pain was maddening, a raging itch deep inside his leg he would have to tear himself asunder to reach. His heart ached as it strained to compensate for the amount of blood he was losing. He could smell himself in the air, the urine and feces as his bodily functions gradually started to relax and void themselves, giving up before the rest of him. He could smell
them
too, their foul breath, the old sweat, the dirt and filth. These were not the scents he imagined would herald his death, but on some level he supposed it was apt. Abby's death had been no more elegant.

"Ain't about time, Doc," said Papa-in-Gray.

"Then what is it about?"

They were closer now, or maybe that was just his own failing vision playing tricks on him, but the light penetrating their semi-circle seemed thinner, as did the air allowed to infiltrate the group. It was getting harder to breathe.