Kealan Burke - Kin

“Claire?”

She opened her eye. The room was filled with fog. The air was thick with dust. Nearby, through the haze she glimpsed an empty shoe. McKindrey’s. A few feet away, a foot without a sock, the leg bent over the cast iron frame of the overturned bed. Three rivulets of blood ran down the ankle. Dark against pale.

Hands found her and she flinched, felt new pain erupt but dismissed it. She squinted up at the lithe shadow bent over her, thought for a moment she saw the sun behind it as she lay on the road in the heat of the day, but it lasted only a moment.

“Pete?” she asked, then coughed.

He knelt down next to her. “McKindrey’s dead. Looks like he busted his neck. You all right?”

“I’m alive,” she told him. “That’s a start.”

He helped her turn over and put a hand on her back as she sat up. She dabbed at blood on her face, probed a tender spot at the side of her skull and winced.

“I’m sorry,” Pete said.

“You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” she said, and blinked. Took in the chaos in the room. The wall with the padlocked door was gone, only splintered beams hanging like crooked teeth in a gaping mouth, the tongue a vehicle with its front end parked inside the room atop a mound of rubble, one light glaring up at the far wall, the other shattered on impact. The fender was gone, the hood buckled so she couldn’t see the windshield. After taking out the wall, the car had plowed through the room, striking McKindrey. How it had missed Claire, who had been sitting astride him when the car had come through, was a mystery. Or maybe not. She recalled, in those now surreal and hazy seconds before the car plowed through the wall, McKindrey’s hands on her chest, crushing her breasts, forcing her away. Perhaps it had only been self-defense. Perhaps he had simply been trying to get her off him so he could scamper out of the way himself. She didn’t know, and never would, and thus found it easy to reject the repulsive notion that he had, in the final moments of his life, tried to save her.

“I was almost gone,” Pete said as he assisted her in standing. Her ankle hurt and there was a nasty gash in her right thigh, but she thought of these as nothing more than reminders that she was not dead.

“I know.”

“He lied to me,” he continued. “Told me all sorts of awful things, none of ’em true.” He guided her around the rubble, one hand braced on the buckled hood. “I believed him.”

“You didn’t have a reason not to.”

He nodded, but looked troubled as she wrapped an arm around his shoulders for support. “I know, but I would’ve left if it hadn’t come to me what he said. He kept sayin’ the Doc kilt your friends, but before I left, he said ‘the folks who done this to her are long gone.’ Didn’t realize it then because I guess I ain’t too quick, but soon as I sat in the truck and thought it over, I knew he was lyin’ and he said he ain’t never lied to me. But he did, and I had to come back.”

“It’s all right, Pete,” she said as they emerged into the cool night air. Above them, the stars shone bright and clear. Claire took a deep draw of the crisp air and felt it catch in her throat as the dust rolled around in her lungs. She coughed violently, then wiped her mouth and sighed. “Thank you for coming back.”

He shrugged.

“I mean it, Pete. Thank you for saving me.” She reached out a hand and touched his face, felt a slight peppering of stubble. “Again,” she added, and smiled.

He started to say something then, but she drew him close, slowly, mindful of the pain in every joint, and kissed him softly on the lips. When it was over, he said nothing, though he seemed desperate to find the words. She didn’t wait. Instead she leaned against him and let him put his arm around her this time.

“We need to burn it down,” she said.

“Hush now, else they’ll hear you,” the giant advised him, and at first Beau assumed that meant anyone who might come to his rescue— Shut up, or you’ll doom your friends too —but then he looked down at himself and realized the agony had come as a result of whiskey that had been splashed over the wound. Confused, he withheld further complaint until the man stomped off and returned a few moments later with an old-looking needle in one huge hand, a fistful of catgut in the other.

“What are you doin’?” Beau asked him.

“Puttin’ your stuffin’ back in,” the giant said in a low gravelly voice. He pulled a chair up to the table and sat, then gently threaded the fishing line through the eye of the needle, which was as big as a pencil. He started to bend down close to the wound, eyes narrowed as if he was poor-sighted, but then stopped and glanced askance at Beau, the point of the needle raised. “’Less you prefer it hangin’ out?”

Convinced now that he was delirious and imagining it all, Beau shook his head. “Naw. You go right ahead, as long as you’re not fixin’ to tie the wrong parts together.”

The giant frowned, as if he didn’t understand what that was supposed to mean, and went about his work, carefully easing the needle through Beau’s flesh.

“ Shiiiit .” Beau bared his teeth, clenched his fists, but the pain, though it was severe, didn’t last long. In what seemed like minutes, the worst of it was over, and this time when the wound was soaked with alcohol, Beau felt the burning, but considerably less agony. Afterward, he lay in silence for a long time, watching as the man lumbered about the cabin looking ill at ease, like a man unsure what to do next. Beau wanted to think of him as his savior, but other than the rudimentary stitch-job and the fact that he was still alive when he’d given the giant ample opportunity to kill him, it was too much of a stretch for the moment. He was, after all, still in enemy territory.

“Why’d you do this?” he asked, wondering if perhaps he’d been fixed just so he’d be in better shape when they tortured him.

For a long time, the man didn’t answer. Then he stalked across the room, grabbed the whiskey bottle from the table and shoved it at Beau, who took it with a half-hearted nod of gratitude and, eyes never leaving the giant’s face, drank deeply.

“You ain’t never done nothin’ to me,” the man said.

Beau waited, the whiskey burning a path straight through him, hewing a route to the pain. When it was clear that was as much of an explanation as he was going to get, he asked, “They won’t like that you did this, you know.”

The man sat, easing his great frame into a chair that seemed unlikely to be able to hold him. It creaked loudly as he settled himself and put a hand out for the bottle. Beau gave it to him.

“I don’t much care for ’em,” he said, and took a draw from the bottle. “Never did. They kilt my sister. She were all I had left in the world. But she didn’t never listen to me when I tried to tell her what she were gettin’ into, and now she’s dead. All because of them crazies. ’Sides, I ain’t scairt of ’em, and after tonight, I don’t reckon I’ll be hearin’ from ’em again.”

“I’m sorry about your sister,” Beau said, because it seemed, for now, about the only appropriate thing to say. They made an odd tableau, the two of them—a wounded black man lying on a table, overseen by a wild-haired giant. But gradually, Beau felt the tension and anxiety ebb from him. If it turned out to be a trap, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it anyway, so he figured it was best to just see where things went and hope for the best.

For the next ten minutes, they shared the bottle in silence. Though feeling a little better, Beau was exhausted. His eyes were drifting shut again when the screech of the chair legs against the floor jarred him back to alertness. In panic, he looked furtively around the room, half-expecting to find that the giant was standing there with a knife or a hatchet or a rifle getting ready to finish him off. But the man had simply pulled his chair closer to the table and was looking intently at Beau.