The Killing Jar (6 page)

In blood.

I sat up fast, blinking out the shadows and the skull-splitting pyrotechnics. The pain in my head blossomed, but my vision began to clear and my eyes to adjust. A narrow bar of moonlight shone under the door, enough light for me to recognize I was in the storage room, and there were two people in the room with me. Two people who were kneeling on either side of me in their own blood, and neither of them was Thomas Dunn.

My mom and Erin.

Alive.

Impossible.

My memory reversed, and I saw the moments before I blacked out. A figure staggering through the darkness. The phantom lights that came from everywhere and nowhere, filling me to bursting and then vacuumed out of me, cracking me open as they left. The bulb overhead bursting, showering slivers of glass. Thomas Dunn hammering at the door, and then … silence. He'd stopped trying to get in, perhaps startled by the light in the room, if that had even been real.

Was he still out there, lying in wait to finish what he'd started? What
I'd
started when I took his son's life.

My eyes, adjusting to the darkness now, scoured my family. Despite my aversion to physical contact, I reached out with a trembling hand and touched my mom. She was warm. I sensed the force of her vitality like static electricity, and her eyes … her eyes were black, pupils expanded to the size of pennies. Why, I didn't know. But who cared? My mom was alive, and so was Erin. That was all that mattered.

I pulled Erin into a hug, tears burning my eyes, and released her just as quickly. Something about her was different. She
felt
different.

I held her back and studied her face. Both of her eyes were open and black, the same as my mom's, even though when I'd first seen her in the basement, one of her eyes had been a mound of swelling, the lid sealed shut with blood.

“How?” I asked.

Mom shook her head, touched the slash marks in her nightgown, as though she were remembering how she got them, who gave them to her. Her head turned toward the splintered door and her upper lip curled to show her teeth. “Where is he?”

“I—I don't know,” I said. The door was barely a door anymore. If Thomas Dunn had wanted in, he would have been in.

Mom rose unsteadily to her feet, her movements disjointed, like those of a newly birthed foal trying to stand for the first time, gawky on unfamiliar legs. She crept in a herky-jerky style toward the door. She peered through the ragged hole he'd made, and then shoved aside the chest of drawers.

“Mom,” I said sharply, but she turned the knob and wrenched the door open, revealing an unmoving figure lying facedown on the floor outside. I saw that Thomas Dunn had a handgun tucked into the back of his pants.

Mom bent to grasp Dunn's wrist and checked his pulse. I braced myself for him to roar to life suddenly, pull out whatever knife he'd used to slay my family the first time around, and do it all over again. Or maybe this time he would use the gun.

There was a brittle, cracking sound, and then Mr. Dunn's arm broke off at the elbow like it was no more than a piece of old, charred wood. Erin screamed and clung to me. I would have screamed, too, but I couldn't find my voice.

Mom dropped Mr. Dunn's arm and it hit the concrete, shattering to dust.

When Erin's scream ended, I heard the sound of tires grinding to a halt on our gravel drive outside the house, followed by the upstairs door crashing open and footsteps pounding across the floor.

The cavalry had arrived, but I wasn't sure the old “better late than never” maxim applied this time. There were going to be questions, and, as had been the case when I ran from Jason Dunn's lifeless body, I didn't have any answers.

Boots thudded down the stairs and flashlight beams cut through the shadows.

“We're over here,” Mom called to the cops. She raised her hands so they would see she was harmless, but she couldn't seem to hold them still. That herky-jerky, wind-up-toy jitter continued.

The flashlight beams located her and froze long enough for the responding officers to take in the sight of a crazed-looking woman drenched in blood before one of them barked, “Lie down on the ground!”

“This is my house,” Mom said. “My daughters and I were attacked, but—”

“Down on the ground!” the same cop insisted. Mom did as she was told, lowering herself to her knees and then lying down flat. Erin and I did the same. I ended up next to Thomas Dunn's body, looking into his face, and I gasped, even though I knew what I would see. Thomas Dunn looked like he'd been dead for a month. Or a year. His skin was lizard gray and leathered, warping around the bones of his face and arms. His eyes, black and wrinkled like prunes, had sunk deep into their sockets. The fingers on his remaining arm were curled into raptor claws. Even as I watched, his hair continued to detach from his scalp and shed onto the floor around him.

He looked just like Jason had when I'd gotten through with him.

The police swarmed us, checking for weapons. When they were assured we were the victims, not the perpetrators, they refocused their attention on the dead man and his kill room.

I explained that I'd made the 911 call and that, despite the blood on my clothes, I was unhurt, and let myself be escorted upstairs. My mom and Erin remained in the basement. The police, assuming they were still injured, chose to restrict their movement. A part of me wanted to stay downstairs with them, to never let them out of my sight again … and at the same time, I wanted to distance myself from them.
Needed
to distance myself.

I was all too aware of a growing hunger inside me, a gnawing sensation, not in my stomach, but everywhere. In every cell. Every pore. In my blood and my brain. This cavernous craving was familiar. I'd felt it seven years ago when I'd emerged from the forest, the state of euphoria I'd lived in for two days having abandoned me, leaving me empty and ravenous.

Whatever I'd done to bring Erin and my mom back from the dead, it had also brought back my hunger.

Two cops guided me to the kitchen and requested I stay there. I spotted the plate Thomas Dunn had used, still sitting on the kitchen table. He had, indeed, helped himself to leftover lasagna. An impressionistic pattern of red sauce and cheese had dried onto the plate. How insane had he become over the years since his son's death that he could massacre a family and then eat comfort food? Maybe cruelty ran in his blood, and he'd passed it down to Jason.

Our kitchen had one of those greenhouse-style windows over the sink, all glass, with two shelves where my mom kept an array of houseplants and potted herbs. As I entered the kitchen, I saw that the plants my mom cared for so meticulously had turned the color of ash, and drooped in their pots. Some had crumbled like ancient paper.

“Did you place the 9-1-1 call?” a female officer asked me, striding into the kitchen. She might have been five two on her tiptoes, but she looked to be all muscle under her uniform. She had eyes like a boxer, squinty and darting. The kind of eyes that didn't miss a thing.

“I did,” I said, still studying the plants.

She examined me, taking in my bloodstained clothes. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” I told her, ignoring the throbbing pain in my head. If I said yes, someone would insist on examining me, and I couldn't have anyone touching me right then. I didn't know what I might do.

“Are you sure?”

“I'm fine,” I snarled, my tone so vicious it made the officer take a step back.

“I'm sorry. I'm just … I need my inhaler,” I wheezed, and bolted past the officer, tore open the kitchen junk drawer, and found the inhaler Mom always kept there. Erin and I used the same one. I didn't have a prescription because the doctor Mom took me to claimed I didn't have asthma, that it was all in my head.

I sucked in three inhalations of the bitter medicine and then stood with my hands propped on the counter, my head hanging as my airways relaxed.

I looked up to find the officer studying me with those sharp eyes of hers.

She took a step toward me. “Look, I've seen some weird things in my life, but never anything like what's out there. I have to ask … what in God's name happened here tonight?”

I stared at her, confused, and her eyebrows went up.

“You don't know?” she asked.

I was moving toward the front foyer before she could stop me.

The door stood wide open, allowing the cops and EMTs to come and go. I slipped out onto the front porch and had to grip the wrought-iron railing to hold myself upright as I took in the sight of the land surrounding the house. It was a clear night, the moon high and luminous, allowing me to see enough so I understood immediately what the female officer had meant when she said she'd never seen anything like what was “out there.”

It was dead. The lawn. The bushes that used to stand like sentinels around the house. Mom's lush, unruly garden. The bullet-shaped evergreen trees. Everything that had been living within a hundred feet of our house appeared to have been scorched.

“Kenna!”

I heard my name shouted from across the barren land. A cop in uniform was busy cordoning off our yard with yellow police tape, but I spotted Blake and his parents on the other side of the perimeter, talking to another officer. Blake waved his arms at me.

I remembered kissing Blake and thinking I wanted to keep going until the sun came up. What if we'd ignored the cry in the night and just kept on kissing? My family would be dead, and Thomas Dunn would still be waiting for me to come home so he could get his revenge.

My feet found their way down the porch steps. The soles of my shoes crunched on the dead grass. It sounded as though I were walking on ice chips. Behind me, the female cop called my name, told me to come back to the house, but I ignored her command.

I began to run through the dead world. It looked like what was left after a nuclear bomb had been dropped, after everything burned and then went cold.

When I reached Blake, he climbed over the police tape, ignoring the cop who kept telling him not to. I threw myself into his arms, and he held me so tight I couldn't breathe.

The female cop caught up to me and insisted I come back inside, that she needed to collect my clothes as evidence. My clothes, covered in blood.

Evidence of what?
I wondered. The perpetrator of this particular crime was dead and gone. There was no one to catch.

I ignored her and clung to Blake. Over his shoulder, on the barren side of the yellow tape, I caught sight of a scattering of tawny mounds that looked like piles of dirt in among the blackened trees. Fresh graves. It took me a moment to realize what they really were.

Deer. A herd of dead deer. There had to be twenty of them.

I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the energy contained under Blake's skin. I wanted to reach inside him and take a little, just enough to make my hunger go away.

I released him quickly and stepped back.

“What is it?” he said, his eyes wide with fear as he took in the blood soaking my clothes. “Are you hurt? Is your family … are they okay?”

“They're alive,” I told him. “We're all … we're okay.”

But that wasn't true. I, for one, was definitely not okay.

 

C
IRCLE
OF
D
EATH

“It's simply not possible,” Dr. Wong, the senior emergency care physician, announced to me in his private office at the hospital.

It was six a.m. Four hours that felt like four years had passed since I'd kissed Blake in the woods … woods that were now dead, along with every shred of life they'd accommodated. Fallen squirrels and birds littered the ground around the trees, as though they'd made some kind of spontaneous suicide pact. Rabbits, foxes, deer, even a bobcat had been found within the circle of death, their bodies stiff and desiccated. If you looked closely, you could see a powdering of tiny, lifeless insects on every surface, and larger ones—crickets and grasshoppers, spiders and beetles, and thousands upon thousands of moths—mixed in among them.

Outside Dr. Wong's window, half a dozen news vans lurked in the parking lot. I didn't plan on leaving the building anytime soon.

“I spoke with the police,” Dr. Wong went on. “They estimate there was around ten liters of blood in your basement, which supposedly originated from your mom and sister.”

I swallowed hard, but there was a knot in my throat that wouldn't go down, and a low, constant fluttering sound in my ears that was driving me insane. Worse was the empty, cavernous hunger inside me—not in my stomach, but in every fiber of my being. In my teeth. In my eyes. In my fingernails. Worse still was the sensation that I was dying as I sat here, that I was shriveling and shrinking as my body cried out for more … more of whatever I'd given to my mom and Erin to save their lives.

“The average adult has between three and five liters of blood in his body.” Dr. Wong spread his hands and allowed me to do the math. “Your mom and sister were awake, aware, and walking around when the police arrived. With the amount of blood each of them supposedly lost, that isn't possible.”

Supposedly
. Dr. Wong liked that word.

My jaw was rigid. I could barely move it to make words. “So how do you explain it?”

“I don't,” Dr. Wong said, raising an eyebrow. He was one of those people whose age was impossible to guess. His hair was a solid mass, thick and black, his skin unlined. But he had an adult's BS detector, and he wasn't buying mine. “There is also the matter of the wounds. In essence, there aren't any, which begs the question: Where did all that blood come from? And there is your family's behavior, their enlarged pupils, and their tremors. We tested them for drugs, chemicals of some kind, but they were clean.” He took a breath and let it out. “And finally, there is your sister's condition. Your twin sister, is that right?”