Kealan Burke - Kin

Free of the dark clouds, the moon shone through the thick canopies, limning the branches with silver, and turning the forest floor into a patchwork of light and shadow. Moths rose from the carpet of needles and mounds of deadfall, summoned by the celestial glow. Flies became silver lures calling to larger prey. Finch risked a glance around the tree, ready to withdraw at the sound of another arrow being nocked, and glimpsed a figure ducking behind a trunk not twenty feet away.

A moment later, he heard a voice. “You ain’t walkin’ out of here, coyote. More of us than there are’ve you. Might as well just step right on out and get it over with.”

Finch got to his feet, ensuring the tree was still shielding his body as he rose and extended his arm close to the trunk, aiming his gun in the direction of the voice.

They now shared the advantage the moon bestowed on them. If either of them moved, the other would see, so for now it was stalemate.

But stalemate wasted time.

Finch aimed a shot at the tree, hoping to see the man flinch, or better yet expose enough of himself to give him a clean shot. It didn’t happen. His arm like a lead weight hanging from his shoulder, Finch pressed his back to the tree, aware that Beau was out there somewhere, in the cabin most likely, alone or worse, surrounded. The fact that no shot had come from that direction in the last few minutes worried him. But he couldn’t move. There was nowhere to go. The man with the bow and arrow was blocking the route back to the vehicle and out of the clearing. If he headed out into the tall grass where there was no cover, he was as good as dead. That left moving toward the cabin and deeper into the trees as his only option and this too would expose him. He realized his relief at the moonlight had been premature. In darkness, he’d have had a better chance of making his way unseen.

He closed his eyes, and abruptly saw an image of his mother, sitting in her chair watching the news and seeing his face on the screen, the phone ringing incessantly but going ignored as she popped her pills and wept into her vodka. Or maybe she would see the story and feel nothing, secure in the oblivion she had sought out after Danny’s death. At that moment he envied that oblivion, thought that perhaps he should have taken a cue from her and found his own instead of seeking an end to the burning hatred that seethed within him for everything. A fire that could never be extinguished as long as he was alive but perhaps could have been tempered and controlled by drugs and alcohol. Too much time spent among the dead instead of the living…

An arrow slammed into the tree, startling him.

“Come on out,” the other man called. “Ain’t no sense in hidin’.”

Finch took a breath, held it, and released it slowly. His upper body felt strangely numb, as if the cold from the arrow that had been embedded in his flesh was spreading.

There was only one way this was going to end. Any minute now more of them might show up and he’d be surrounded, or dead with an arrow through his heart before he even heard them coming.

He stepped out, gun pointed at the tree, and started—

— shooting into daylight .

The ground shifted beneath his feet and he almost went down, a hot gust of air blowing into his face, carrying with it grains of sand to blind him. He blinked and the action took far too long, the gap between darkness and light taking forever. He slowed his pace, looked up in confusion at the searing watery orb of the sun. It seemed very close, the burning eye of a god inspecting him. He was aware that there were other men with him, aware that he was far too hot, wearing far too much clothing for the heat, when someone cried out his name and on impulse he raised his rifle—rifle?—and leveled it at the woman kneeling on the ground before him. Finch’s eyes widened; sweat trickled down between his shoulder blades. His knees were shaking. The eyes of the woman in the black abaya were impossibly large as she rose up, the pupils huge and ringed with gold like solar eclipses as she reached out with one quivering, bloodstained hand. Tears carved tracks in the dirt on her cheeks, her face contorted with grief and still she was coming, still she was rushing him and Finch shouted a warning only he could hear because it was inside his head, not meant for her but for himself— stop, oh GodJesus please stop —and now her other hand was falling, falling— no don’t no please —to her belt. Except, of course, there was no belt, no explosives, only her hand gripping the material to raise it above her feet to keep her from tripping as she ran, ran, ran to ask him in words he would never understand but would forever read in those eyes that were the whole world, why he had shot her baby boy.

Finch pulled the trigger. The woman’s head snapped back. The breeze spirited away the blood. She crumpled, fell backward. The silence roared. He lowered his gun. “You all right, man?” someone asked. He didn’t answer, and they didn’t wait for one. People were screaming, running away. His eyes moved to the boy, bleeding from the throat but dead, flies crossing the frozen lakes of his eyes. He’d thrown a rock, just a rock, but it had caught Finch by surprise and his rifle had replied. He could feel a burning now where that rock had hit him, a blazing hole in the center of his chest as he jerked abruptly.

Daylight faded.

The moonlight returned.

Finch tasted fresh blood .

“Gotcha,” said the boy.

“They ain’t here,” Pete said. “Ain’t nobody here.”

Claire ignored him, but knew he was right. Had she expected anything different? Finch had told her the Merrill clan would have moved, so why then was she surprised to find the place abandoned? There were no lights on in the house that squatted crookedly in the dark before her, the weeds weaving sinuously around its base like snakes caught under its weight. Nearby, Spanish moss hung from the palsied limbs of a silver birch, veiling the roof. The sheds, so terribly familiar to her, were empty, the doors hanging open, as if to invite her inside, back into the heart of the nightmare she had come here to put to rest.

She headed toward them.

“Wait,” said Pete.

She didn’t, kept walking until she was at the mouth of one of the sheds, the same one in which she had been tied to a wooden post, raped and tortured, the same one in which she had taken the life of a man, driven by panic and rage and self-preservation. And how shocked would the world be to know that killing that rotten fuck haunted her more than outliving her friends? But it was true. He’d deserved to die, had forced her to take his life, and yet the guilt that haunted her every waking moment was not alleviated by that truth. The realization of what she’d done, when it dawned on her in the days that followed, stunned her, shoved her over the edge of a precipice into a dark place where even the specters of those she’d lost could not reach her.

She stepped inside.

It smelled like dirt, sweat, and human waste.

The moonlight cast her shadow on the floor, a frail twisted thing trapped in an oblong of cold blue light.

She flicked on the flashlight.

Chains hung from the roof like roots in a subterranean cave. They clinked together in the breeze, the rusted hooks clamped to their tails appearing to move toward her, but she was not afraid. There was no further pain to be drawn from her by those hooks or anything else.

A shelf lined one end of the room. Atop it were canisters full of nails, and Mason jars with some kind of amber liquid inside. Next to these was a jelly jar filled with different kinds of feathers. Claire recognized the iridescent plumage of a bluejay, and maybe the tail feathers of a cardinal. The jars were book-ended by an identical pair of small, cheap looking plastic statues depicting Jesus in prayer, His lifeless blue eyes turned upward as if He was in the throes of death, his shadow reaching up from his skull to claw at the ceiling. A speckling of red paint or old blood colored the right cheek of the statue on the left. There were a few old suitcases and a garish-colored leather purse tossed on the dirt floor. Various work tools hung from nails on the wall. Here was an old two-handed saw with some of its teeth missing. Here, hoes of all sizes pinned to the wall by their throats. There, a row of sickles, some of them missing the upper part of the blade. A single sheet of bloodstained plastic was bunched in the corner beneath a three-legged chair that had been propped against the wall.