"KILL YOU," Ace promised through gritted teeth.
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Info
I'm Broken
Author:Kothardarastrix
Recommended Listening: Pantera
Content Warning: violence, bugs, parasites, disease, mentions (but not depictions) of child abuse and incest
Ace Cliff awoke to a thousand painful pinpricks. At first, it simply felt like his arms and legs had gone numb, robbed of circulation by the press of their bindings and the hard boards of the wagon. But then, as his bruised brain surfaced from the dark sea of blessed unconsciousness, he became aware of the piercing pain. These were proboscises, not pins, and the tingle that shrouded his body like a prickly blanket came not from cut-off capillaries, but from countless tiny skittering legs. He tried to scream but immediately choked on a mouthful of flies.
Kevin laughed. It was a wheezy sound, like a squealing pig. Hee hee hee hee heeee. Ace opened one eye, and in the moment before a gnat dive-bombed it, he saw his tormentor looming over him. Kevin's face was nightmare up close, a grinning skull wrapped too tight in sallow skin and twitching muscle. one hand scratched furiously at his greasy, matted hair, shedding a constant stream of fleas and lice onto Ace's face.
Ace writhed. He rolled. He wriggled. Tried to squash the bugs against the floor, the side, the stiff cold thing to his left that must have been a corpse. His bound feet kicked as one, like the tail of a beached whale. He bumped up against the dead body and rolled it towards someone else, who screamed. Ae didn't hear that, though, because something had crawled into his ear.
Then the constant biting stopped, and the reluctant swarm began to crawl and buzz away. They felt like the water that drips away after a swim, if water was made of needles. The thing that slithered in his ear wriggled back out, and the gnats that had been exploring his nose abandoned their expedition. Only when he could no longer feel anything moving near his face did Ace release the bottled scream from his mouth. Halfway through, he choked on the twitching bits of the crushed flies that had flown into his mouth before. His attempt to spit them out escalated into a spray of acrid vomit, which splashed off the side of the wagon and back into his face. Immediately, a cloud of flies turned the pool of half-digested slop into a seething, buzzing carpet of wings and gleaming eyes.
Ace started to groan miserably but was cut off by a kick to the face.
"That's fer Hiram!" Kevin screeched.
"Quit it!" Doug snapped. "Yer gonna bust his head."
Kevin grumbled unintelligibly, then hocked the nastiest imaginable loogie on Ace's bruised and bug-bitten face. Ace hoped he was imagining the feel of tiny worms squirming around in that thumbnail-sized glob of blood, spit, and snot. He writhed, trying to wipe it off on his shoulder, but only managed to smear it all the way across his cheek. It took all the will he had left not to puke again.
Laughing nastily, Kevin lifted his threadbare boots out of Ace's sight and turned away. Gazing up through blurred and watery eyes, Ace saw him settle down beside Doug on the bench seat at the wagon's front. Doug shot him a sneer over one crooked shoulder. The barrel of a coach gun poked over the other. His fading gaze lingered on that gun until, if only to escape from the myriad horrible sensations assaulting every inch of his skin and skeleton, Ace passed back out.
When he next resurfaced from unconsciousness, Ace's situation had not improved, but he was at least able to make himself fully aware of it. He was stuffed in the back of his family's worn-out wagon, the same covered prairie schooner that had first plagued the Lone Star State with Rory Flynn's presence. Its wheels were wobbly, its boards were rotten and full of gaps, and its moldy yellow cover was so full of holes and tears that Ace could still discern specific constellations in the night sky beyond it. But the damn thing kept on rolling nonetheless. Ace supposed that was the way of his whole wretched family — to keep limping and lurching on down the rocky road of life, though time and rot might take them body and soul.
His whole family, that is, except for Hiram. The stiff right shoulder of his cold corpse was digging into Ace's left shoulder blade. He tried to wiggle away, but there was nowhere to wiggle to; Ace's right shoulder was already jammed right up against the side of the wagon. From the way they pressed on his bruised ribs and aching ass, Ace could only assume that his numb arms were tied up and mashed under his cracked back. He tried to turn his head, and the cramped and cricked muscles of his neck screamed so loud that his voice almost did too. But that wouldn't do at all; if Kevin saw he was awake, some form of torture would surely follow.
Kevin. Ace's face twisted in a snarl, which only deepened when he felt the massive dried booger on his cheek flake away from the movement. He was gonna pull the legs off every single one of Kevin's pet bugs individually, then do the same thing to the rat himself.
Unfortunately, the thought of those bugs suddenly reminded the many bruised and confused parts of Ace's body that they were all completely covered in bites and stings, which immediately seemed to fill up with red-hot thorns.
Ace must have made some kind of noise, maybe by thumping his boots on the boards while ineffectually trying to scratch his whole body at once, or maybe just a general gurgle of incoherent awfulness. Whatever it was, it got Kevin's attention.
"Look who's awake," he whined, like a mosquito an inch from your ear. "Had enough yet?"
"KILL YOU," Ace promised through gritted teeth. Kevin laughed. It sounded like a cat trying to throw up. Ace heaved himself around onto his left side so he could glare up into the rheumy eyes of his tormentor. To his delight, Kevin's left arm hung uselessly in a bloody mess of improvised slings and bandages, all crawling with flies. That bullet wound would go gangrenous in no time. Ace's swollen lips curled halfway into a sneer at the thought. Like everything else, that pissed Kevin off. And anything that pissed off Kevin also pissed off his swarm.
Suddenly, Ace's entire world consisted solely of a monstrous horsefly. For a half a second, it seemed to be the size of a horse; then he realized that it wasn't actually a giant (no more than a normal horsefly already is), but perching on the right side of his nose. Its horrible little antenna waggled mere millimeters from the surface of his cornea. He could've counted the facets of its zigzag-patterned eyes, had his mind and body not been frozen solid by a million years of panicking primate instincts.
"You better watch your words, kid. Now that you ain't got guns my babies can take their sweet time with ya. Maybe lay some eggs in your eyes, see how well you can shoot with a socket full of worms. Maybe get the ears and nose too."
"You're sick," Doug muttered, with disgusted admiration. He didn't turn around.
"I'd get sicker, if ya'd let me. Got me some tapeworm eggs that —"
"Jesus, Kevin! Daddy won't want him if he's full of worms! It's bad enough that your pets already sucked so much blood out of him."
"Tastes pretty good," he said, plucking a fat tick from a crease in his clothes and munching it like an overripe berry.
"Quit that! You don't know what that'll do to you!"
"If it's good enough for my babies," he said, defensively, "it's good enough for me."
"God, you're disgusting."
"You're just stuck-up."
"You smell like shit."
"Better 'n that girly perfume you wear."
"At least it keeps your damn mosquitoes off me."
"Oh yeah?"
"Ow!" then Doug slapped himself, or rather, the mosquito that'd just bitten him on the cheek.
"Hey!" Kevin cried. "That was —"
"Out!" Doug shouted, pointing at the ground.
"What?"
"Get outta the damn wagon! Until you learn to behave yourself, you're walking!"
"But I'm hurt!" Kevin whined, pointing at his swaddled arm.
"If you're well enough to run your mouth, you're well enough to walk your feet."
"But—"
"Get!"
Kevin was no more susceptible to Doug's unnatural persuasion than Ace, but it still got the point across. Whining all the while, he awkwardly hopped down from the bench and out of sight. The monster fly followed him, and Ace sighed with relief.
Doug glanced back at him, with a lopsided expression that was almost pity.
"Sorry about him. He's still real mad about Hiram." Doug nodded at the corpse, toward which Ace was now facing. Its head had lolled towards Ace at some point, so he could see all the way through the bloody crater of its mouth to Uzziah's unconscious face on the other side.
Ace glared at his oldest brother. "Kill you too," he muttered, though with less certainty than he had the first time. Doug sensed the hesitation and shook his head. He was disappointed.
The next time Ace managed to fish an ounce of lucidity from his aching ocean of pain, he wasn't the only one. Uzziah had woken up, and he was using every breath he took to scream. Ace's bullets had reduced his smallest brother's guts to a seething mess of blood, shit, and infected tissue that would soon be turning septic. Of all the many ways Ace had learned to kill people, gut wounds were by far the worst. Headshots and heart-shots were quick, painless, and maybe even a little poetic. Like swinging from the gallows. A wound on the arm or leg, like Kevin's, was more painful, but you might stand a chance of survival if somebody sawed off the place you'd been shot. A gut wound, though? There's not a damn thing to be done for that, except to lay there in agony and wait for death — and all too often, it would take its sweet time. It was certainly in no hurry to claim Uzziah, who screamed and wept in a way he hadn't since they were all a whole lot younger. It hurt the black shell of Ace's heart to see his brother reduced to an even more pitiful state than his own. For a moment, he almost thought of Uzziah as a human.
Soon after the screaming started, the wagon stopped. Doug turned around and tried to comfort his dying sibling as best he could, but wet rags and quiet assurances that "You're gonna be okay, it'll all be over soon." did no more for Uzziah than a stream of piss might do for a wildfire. Kevin appeared at the back of the wagon, where he leaned on his good arm to catch his breath. The doom that stalked Uzziah cast a shadow on Kevin, too; Ace could see it in the sick sweat that beaded on his brothers' foreheads, and in the unhealthy colors that dyed their clammy skins. Uzziah was now so pale he almost seemed transparent, like he might just go straight from man to ghost without leaving a body in between. Kevin was instead turning yellow as, one after the other, the various plagues and parasites that infested him sensed weakness and turned on their master. And yet, Ace noticed, not so much as a single curious housefly had settled on Hiram's days-old corpse. Though he'd come up to check on Uzziah, Kevin's crusty eyes soon wandered to — and lingered on — the brother that was already dead. His scabby face sank into something that might've been sadness.
Then he saw Ace looking, and the frown twisted back into a scowl. Wisely, Ace pretended to pass out.
It was impossible to know how long the journey lasted, clouded as Ace was by pain and, soon, a miserable thirst that infrequent begrudged sips from Doug's canteen only seemed to sharpen. The best he could do was guesstimate from the state of Hiram's increasingly foul-smelling body. It watched him, that shell of the man he'd killed, staring constantly with clouded, shriveling eyes. A more sentimental man might've called those dead orbs "accusing," but Ace was not sentimental. He couldn't let himself be, not right now. Not like this, when he was already so close to breaking.
With only the bits of sky that sliced through the torn cover to guide him, Ace certainly couldn't tell what route they were taking from North Access to Montauk. Besides the noises made by his family and the wagon, about the only other sounds were the wind and the distant howls of coyotes; he never heard the rucks of a town or other travelers passing on the road. Maybe that meant his brothers were hauling him cross-country (that certainly would've explained the intolerably bumpy ride, if it wasn't just the wheels and axles wearing out), or maybe it just meant that everybody had the good sense to shut up and stand aside when they saw the Flynns coming. Or maybe they'd just already killed everyone between Ace and his daddy, on their way from one to the other.
During the hot and miserable days, when Hiram's stench grew almost intolerable and Ace found himself sweating almost as much as feverish, dying Uzziah, Doug and Kevin sat on the bench. Doug occasionally gave directions to Bob — pulling the wagon out front, where Ace couldn't see him — but even the dumbest brother still needed far less direction than a horse would. Instead, it seemed the main focus of the fellas up front was to keep an eye on Ace, as if he could do anything remotely threatening while aching, itching, thirsting, and hog-tied. He was no more dangerous in that state as the corpse beside him, or the other brother who was about to become one. Maybe they just liked to watch him squirm, in fruitless search of a position that didn't hurt his back, neck, arms, head, and pride all at once. Kevin certainly enjoyed the spectacle, when he wasn't half-snoozing in a sheen of sweat against the wagon's rickety frame. Sometimes Uzziah would wake up, but it never took long to scream himself back to sleep. After a while, Doug and Kevin stopped even trying to comfort him. The only thing that could ease his pain now would be a bullet to the head. Ace wondered why they didn't just provide one already (he'd certainly have been happy to), or dump Hiram's body for that matter. Maybe the reason was the same for each; they would rather be buried at home.
At night, things were marginally less abominable. The wagon stopped its ceaseless bumping and bouncing, and one of the brothers up front would wander off to sleep somewhere more comfortable. The other would still stay on guard. Well, Doug would stay on guard; though he kept his gun on hand and his eyes on Ace, he never touched him and — unusually — hardly ever had anything to say. Not that the pitying look in his eyes stung any less than words would have.
Kevin, on the other hand, saw guard duty more like his turn as torturer. He seemed to take it personally whenever Ace tried to sleep and would always dispatch a swarm of fleas or mosquitos to put a stop to it. He wasn't supposed to hurt Ace any further, of course, but that just meant he wouldn't do it when Doug was around. Ace didn't waste his breath trying to tattle on one jailer to the other.
There was one upside, though: when Kevin wasn't plaguing Ace with his legion of bugs, he had a hard time staying awake. Sometimes, when his tormentor drifted off into a feverish doze, Ace took advantage of the respite to get some sleep himself. More often, he simply found himself raging at the ropes that kept him too immobilized to exploit the opening it should've provided.
It was during one of these latter times that Uzziah finally died. Ace was stirred from his half-conscious haze of hate by a sudden burst of rasping breaths — his brother's attempts to scream, through a throat long since worn too ragged for such sounds. Ace watched him dispassionately, peering over Hiram's peeling head. Uzziah's paper-pale skin gleamed in the moonbeams that sliced through the ragged canopy. One fell on his eyes and set them glinting in the darkness. As Ace watched, those eyes rolled around to meet his own. Uzziah's heaving chest seemed to quicken, then slow. At first, Ace thought, or perhaps hoped, that this meant the pain was fading with his life.
Then he saw the knife. Long, notched, shining like a mirror in the moonlight. Clenched in Uzziah's left hand, rising slowly and shakily from the shadows by his side.
Then, in a final surge of terminal strength and lucidity, Uzziah lunged. With a terrible twist of his tortured torso, he heaved up onto his right elbow and swung the knife down at Ace's chest.
Any hunter can tell you that an animal is at its most dangerous when it's trapped, and any soldier knows that humans are no different. A body can't run for long on just pain and panic, but when it does, it runs fast and hot. With a strength that strained every one of his struggling muscles, Ace wrenched himself away. He rolled one way. The wagon rocked the other. Hiram's dead head bounced back and forth. But move as he might, there was simply nowhere else to go. As the blade bore down, Ace's last thought was this: better Uzz than Daddy.
The knife bit into his chest… then deflected off his collarbone. Uzziah's wrist slammed into Ace's shoulder. The twin shocks unclenched his weakened fingers, and the barely-bloodied knife clattered uselessly out of their bony grip. Uzziah might have fumbled for it, but that last lunge had sent so much pain through his ruined abdomen that he started to seize. Ace heaved himself the other way now, and shoved Uzziah's convulsing body off of Hiram's dead one with the same shoulder that'd blocked the fatal blow. As Uzziah rolled back into his original place, the back of his head hit the wood with a thump. He twitched a few more times, then was still. Very, very still.
Ace's eyes flicked to Kevin. He shifted restlessly on his seat… but, miraculously, did not wake. Only then did Ace allow a relieved sigh to pass his lips. He might've been a dead man — well, been one sooner — if that ruckus had been enough to drag Kevin from his sickly sleep. It was a good thing that Ace hadn't technically killed Uzziah (at least, no more than he already had during the gunfight); he doubted that any fear of their father would keep Kevin from killing him if Ace had murdered another brother under his watch. There'd surely still be hell to pay in the morning, but all the proof of innocence he'd need was the shallow knife wound on his own chest and the lack of any such thing on Uzziah…
The knife.
Carefully, Ace wiggled his right arm and shoulder, feeling for any lumps and bumps besides the wooden ones that had been digging into him since North Access. Then he found it, wedged between his right arm and the wall.
He grinned.
At sunrise, Doug ambled back up to the wagon to scold Kevin awake and check on the past, present, and future corpses in the back.
"Uzz's dead," Ace grunted. His voice was muffled by the boards, into which his face was currently smashed.
Doug frowned. "Kevin!" he snapped, startling the lax guard back awake. Kevin made some unintelligible, groggy noise and scratched absently at his bandages.
"Kev!" Doug shouted, louder this time.
"What?" Kevin whined, sounding as weak as tired. He opened one eye, dislodging a greenish eye-booger.
"Check his pulse." Doug pointed one crooked finger at Uzziah, in case his slack jaw, still chest, and open, empty eyes were not confirmation enough. The sight of it finally snapped Kevin all the way awake. Quickly, he placed his good hand on Uzziah's neck… then shook his head. Doug sighed.
"Was you awake when it happened?" he asked Ace.
"Ayup," he grunted.
"Did you kill him?!" Kevin accused. Ace made rude gestures with both hands, still clearly bound behind his upturned back. Kevin smacked him upside the head.
Doug sighed, this time with annoyance. "He killed him three days ago, Kev."
"And you, too," Ace muttered. Kevin boxed his ear again. Undiscouraged, Ace continued. "Maybe if you'd stayed awake you coulda— "
"Can it, kid!" Doug shouted, with uncommon fury. The shock of it stopped Kevin in the middle of another, even harder strike. Both he and Ace looked at Doug. His hands clenched and unclenched like dying spiders.
"I've just about had enough of you two! Ain't it enough that ya've done kicked each other's asses all across Texas and back, without having to constantly run yer mouths about it? For fuck's sake, fellas, shut up! I'll gag the both of ya, I swear."
Kevin looked like he was about to back-sass, but a meaningful grunt from Bob changed his mind real quick. Obligingly, Ace jostled his neck and shoulders around until his head was faced the other way, away from Kevin. He lay there in silence until Kevin was called away to help break camp ("Git down here, lazy-ass!"). Once he was sure no one was watching, Ace started fiddling with his bindings. The rough rope had rubbed his wrists raw after so many days of restraint. His fingertips, which had been ineffectually picking and pulling at that rope for most of that time, were in about the same shape. Nothing was safe from the ravages of time and sharp objects… not even that rope, now that Ace had had half a night to saw at it with Uzziah's knife. Experimentally, he felt around the place where he'd managed to cut about halfway through before the approach of dawn sent the purloined knife back into hiding. He felt it pressing on the dwindling softness of his stomach, in constant danger of poking an unpleasant hole if he wriggled around too much. That was still less danger than he'd be in if his brothers spotted it, though, or if they saw the bloody cut across his collar that he'd concealed (and applied a healthy amount of blood-stopping pressure to) by laying on his belly. It was hard to breathe like that, and what little air he did get was horribly fouled by the desiccating corpse by his side, but he'd just have to put up with that if he wanted to get out of this mess. It would only be a little while…
The next night, Doug lectured Kevin for a good fifteen minutes about staying awake and what'd happen if he caught him sleeping on the job again. Kevin didn't even pretend to listen. An hour after sundown, he was out like a light, and Ace got back to work. It was slow going; though razor-sharp, Uzziah's Bowie knife lacked the serrations that would have been ideal for sawing. The best Ace could do was press the nine-inch blade against the ropes with all the meager leverage his bound hands could muster and hope that would be enough to drive its fine edge through the strands. He felt, or at least thought he could feel, them snapping one by one. By the end of the night, he should be free. Then that knife would find something else to cut. Plenty of other things. The thought of it brought the same old grin back to Ace's itching face.
While he worked, Ace always kept one eye on his sleeping warden. Kevin had never in his life looked healthy, but now, in the pallid light of the gibbous moon, he looked as dead as his brothers in the back. If not for the constant involuntary twitching of his flyblown face, Ace might've thought he was. It might've been safer to save this escape attempt until after Kevin's infection finally finished him off, but every day he waited would be one more chance for that knife to be discovered, one more chance for a nasty infection of his own to take root in that cut on his chest, and one less day between him and his demon daddy… no, it had to happen now. Tonight. Biting his tongue at the aching tension in his twisted wrists, Ace resumed his work with double desperation.
He couldn't have counted the frenzied hours that passed in this way. His body had become one solid knot of pain, and his mind hadn't fared much better. He barely even noticed when the curved tip of the knife nicked his wrist, a hair's breadth away from the vital artery. All he knew was how much he hurt and how badly he needed to return that hurt to sender.
Then Ace was startled from his silent fury by a sound that sends any mammal scampering for cover: the roar of a grizzly bear. He froze like a startled deer; surely, if a bear had actually been charging him, he would have become its dinner. But no mauling claws or devouring teeth found him in the back of that wagon. Instead, the noise came again. The second time, it was… phlegmier?
Ace relaxed. He almost laughed. Bob was just snoring, was all.
Then Kevin opened his eyes, and all that frozen stiffness jumped right back into Ace's muscles. He'd had no time to stash the knife; if Kevin looked that way and saw it gleaming in the moonlight, Ace would be finished. He held his breath, as if that would help. Maybe it did, because Kevin's groggy gaze only watched him for a muzzy moment before it rolled over to the snoring hulk that'd startled him awake. As soon as Kevin's eyes were off him, Ace tucked the knife back between his side and the wagon wall.
"Dammit, Bob," Kevin groaned. He leaned forward and started poking the sleeping giant with the butt of his shotgun. At least, Ace figured that's what he did, since he still couldn't see Bob passed out in front of the wagon. The biggest brother gave a few snotty snorts of indignation, then (by the thumping sound of it) rolled over into a quieter position.
Ace hoped Kevin would go right back to sleep, but there was no such luck. Kevin turned back to Ace, once Bob was back to sleep. Ace thought about pretending to be out, but that'd just make Kevin want to hurt him back awake. Instead, they simply stared at each other. Brother to brother. Dead man to dead man.
Kevin blinked first. With a sigh of exertion and a grunt of pain, he swung his legs over the seat and settled himself over its low back, so his bare feet sat on either side of Hiram's head. They were cracked, scaly, and red, with nasty patches of green-yellow fungus between the toes. Some of the nails were black, and others were missing altogether. The right one was just inches from Ace's face, and it smelled even worse than the corpses. He scrunched up his face in vain defense from the odor, and Kevin took that the same way he did everything — personally.
"God, I hate you," he said.
"Mutual," Ace coughed.
"No," Kevin said, sounding more tired than angry. "No. You don't get it."
Ace waited, glaring.
"You're Daddy's favorite, you know."
"Not what I'd call it."
"Shut up."
He did.
"You ain't like the rest of us. Freaks and psychos. Monsters."
"I ain't no angel neither."
"No, you ain't. We's demons, all of us. Same as our daddy. But at least you look like a human, don'tcha? Almost."
"Almost."
"That's what I hate you for most, I reckon. That you ain't ugly, not like us. That you can pass for one o' them. That's why Daddy was nice to you."
"Nice?!" Ace spat, vision flashing red. "Nice?! You think what he did to me was nice?!"
"He didn't beat ya, did he? Didn't lock ya in the basement for a week? Didn't break yer damn fingers for tryin' ta get seconds?"
"I wish," Ace snarled. "I wish. I'd rather be beat. I'd rather be —" he bit off the last word, because if he let that slip out, then it would all come crashing down. The facade would fall to so many broken pieces, and Kevin just might grant that unthinkable request to whatever was left. Ace tried to choke the truth back down, but it just forced its way out his eyes instead. He slammed them shut against the burning tears. He didn't want to give Kevin the satisfaction.
If Kevin saw the crying, he decided not to say anything. Instead, he looked down at Hiram, whose sunken and shriveled eyes were as dry as the bones now poking out of his shrunken skin.
"Daddy was harder on us, after you left. Said it was our fault for lettin' you run away. It was our fault, what he did to us down in the basement. And every time we went out lookin', and came back empty-handed, it was our fault that we couldn't find you. Even after you ran, Daddy couldn't stand to blame you, not his perfect pretty boy. Not even when his blood started runnin' thin, and he needed you back to get young again. You're killin' him, kid, and somehow that's still our fault. My fault. For not stoppin' you from doin' the one thing that none of us ever could, and runnin' away."
Now Kevin rubbed at his own eyes, though no one could have said if he was wiping his own tears or just scratching at the pink-eye crusts built up in their corners.
"What do you want," Ace growled, quietly, bitterly. "An apology?"
"I want you fuckin' dead," Kevin snapped, pounding his good hand on one bony knee. "I want you to fuckin' pay for this. For him." Carefully, gently, Kevin brushed Hiram's sunken cheek with one fungoid toe. "But I can't even kill ya without killin' Daddy, too. And I'm dead either way."
Ace connected the dots a split second before Kevin did. He watched his brother's eyebrows — or at least, the angry red scabies-tracks where they'd once been — knit in thought, then rise with realization. His wide eyes darted back to Ace's, which had all of a sudden filled up with fear. Then, slowly, his wormy lips curled in a rotten yellow grin.
"Kevin — " Ace started.
"Shut up," he hissed, hefting the shotgun butt as a threat.
"Kevin," Ace continued anyway, thinking fast and desperate. "If you kill me here, Doug'll wake up, and Bob'll rip you in half."
Kevin paused. He hadn't thought of that. "I'm dead anyway," he repeated, uncertainly.
"Maybe. But you'd be better off doin' it yourself than lettin' Bob do it for ya."
"What?"
"There's two barrels in that thing, ain't there?"
Kevin looked down at the gun, and it was like the first time he'd seen it.
"One for each of us," Ace hissed. He grinned.
Kevin contemplated that, then scowled. "The hell you talkin' bout? You tryin' ta trick me?"
"I'm doin' you a favor."
"Why? I'm 'bout ta fuckin' kill you!"
"Cuz by doin' that yer also gonna kill Daddy. And sendin' that hellspawned piece of shit back where he came from will make me dyin' worth it. Won't it?"
Kevin rolled that around in his head for a bit. Ace hoped that he'd correctly guessed what was going on in there, between the fever and the hate and the just plain stupidity. He'd never seen Kevin think so hard or been so worried about it. Ace's heart was pounding so hard he feared the scabs on his chest might reopen. This had been a stupid argument to make; if he'd had one more second to think about it, Ace would've suggested that Kevin lead him off somewhere quiet and try to hide the body, pretend that he got away. But no, that would have seemed suspicious. Why should the victim care about his murderer's safety? And even then, Doug might still want to punish his brother, for letting Ace get away. Their father certainly would, by the sound of it. Dammit! There were too many ways for this to go wrong, too many cruel crazies and horrible deaths to account for. Now here he was, trying to talk his brother into blowing both their heads off. But that wasn't it, either, not really — he just needed Kevin to get him away from that wagon. Somewhere dark and quiet.
And soon enough, he got his wish.
"Get up," Kevin hissed, waving the gun at him again. Ace wiggled his feet, still bound together, to show why he couldn't. Cursing under his breath, Kevin climbed out of the wagon to sneak around to the back. In the brief moment he was out of sight, Ace acted fast. He snatched up the hidden knife with both hands, then quickly stashed it down the left side of his pants. The outside of his thigh got sliced something nasty, but he was in too much of a hurry to care. He'd just barely got the hem of his shirt back down over the protruding hilt when Kevin stepped back into view. He set the gun between Hiram and Uzziah and started working at the knot around Ace's feet. It wasn't easy, with just one hand and only the moon to see by. If he'd wanted to, Ace would've had plenty to time to plant a two-footed kick right in his brother's face. But that wouldn't do him any good right now; one scream from Kevin and Bob would be on him. This had to be quiet. The way Uzziah would've done it.
Eventually, Kevin gave up on the knot and just sliced the ropes with a knife of his own. Nothing like Uzziah's murder weapon, from what little Ace could see of it and such an awkward angle, but still something to watch out for. Then, with a tap of the shotgun barrel to Ace's hind end, Kevin ordered him out of the wagon. He got out carefully, inching on his knees and face like a backwards caterpillar, using his tied-up hands to hold his shirt down and hoping Kevin wouldn't notice the blood seeping through his sliced-up shirt or, now, the side of his pants.
It was harder than he'd expected to walk like this. Every muscle in his body screamed in protest, the sliced outer thigh most of all. His balance was all messed up, either by his useless arms or some bit of brain damage he'd picked up in one of the last week's many beatings, and he kept almost tripping on the rope that still hung between his feet from his bleeding wrists. It certainly didn't help that Kevin kept prodding him in the back with the shotgun, the butt of which he kept nestled semi-securely in the elbow of his unhurt arm. The kick on that thing would knock it clear out of that weak grip the first time he fired it, but that would only matter if that first shot didn't end up in Ace.
They hobbled so far like this that Ace began to wonder if Kevin had stopped looking for a good spot to die and had decided to start stalling instead. That suited him just fine; if Bob and Doug somehow didn't hear whatever was about to happen, they'd be a lot easier to deal with after. Assuming there'd be anybody left to do the dealing.
Under kinder circumstances, the desert night might have been beautiful. A million stars blinked overhead, and the moon's pale glow turned the rocky landscape of yucca and creosote into an eerie garden of sharp lights and dark shadows. The only sounds were the muffled shuffle of their feet in the sand, and the constant background buzz of Kevin's flies. That meant screams would carry a long way, and gunshots even farther. Much farther than their feet had carried them when Kevin told Ace to —
"Stop." His voice was quiet and shaky, even more than usual. He was having second thoughts, maybe even starting to figure out that Ace was playing him somehow. That couldn't be allowed to happen. On the step that Kevin had intended to be his last, Ace pretended to trip. First, his knees seemed to give out, quickly (but painfully) dropping him out from in front of the shotgun barrel. Then, while Kevin was still taking his own last step forward, Ace's left foot shot out behind him and slammed into his brother's shin. Kevin tripped for real and pitched forward onto Ace's bent back. This smashed Ace's face into the sand, but it was much worse for Kevin. His wounded arm got squashed between their two bodies, but the old pain that surged from there had nothing on the new pain in his gut — for Ace had deftly drawn Uzziah's knife and aimed its point behind him, just in time for Kevin to impale himself on it. Finally, and most importantly for Ace's purposes, he let go of the shotgun to try and catch himself with the one good arm.
Before his pain-stunned brother could react, Ace rolled left, throwing Kevin off him and onto a second harsh hurt-arm landing. The knife sliced another six inches across Kevin's stomach before it twisted out of both his body and Ace's hands. With no time to worry about that, he rolled the other way, swung his feet under himself, and sprung awkwardly to his feet. It took another ten steps of quick, random stumbling to regain his balance, but at least his scrambling feet kicked the shotgun a bit further away from Kevin in the process.
Unfortunately, while Ace was still trying to find his feet, Kevin recovered enough from the shock and the pain to let out a scream that was downright bloodcurdling. Doug probably heard it, even over Bob's snoring, but he was too far away to worry about just then. The real problem was the swarm. Kevin's pain, blood, and fury threw his army of parasites into a frenzy. Their hive mind held only one thought: Ace's blood.
The cloud of vermin engulfed him like an Egyptian plague. Their previous invasions of his personal space seemed like friendly tickles compared to this all-out assault. Every inch of exposed skin knew the bite of a mosquito, and every patch of hair felt the hunger of a hundred fleas. He couldn't breathe for all the gnats in his nose, but he dared not open his mouth, knowing it'd fill with flies if he did. He could hear nothing but the thundering buzz and skitter of unknown ear invaders, and he could see nothing at all through eyelids squeezed shut against the ravenous assault of probing proboscises. Every instinct screamed at him to drop, to roll in the sand until every last vile vermin had been crushed or suffocated, but there was no time for that. No, the best way to disperse this swarm would be to kill its king.
For all their innumerability, Kevin's bugs could still only be so big. No amount of tiny wings could slow Ace down as he lurched back toward Kevin. When the toe of one boot found his brother's squirming side, Ace raised the other and brought it down like a hammer on Kevin's slit belly. He struck again and again, through the burning of air-starved lungs, through the billion bites shredding his skin, through the scrabbling legs that assaulted every orifice, through the endless horde of starving vermin that devoured him alive and filled his senses until it seemed the whole world was one infinite seething mass of blood and chitin and constant, endless, all-drowning buzzing —
Relief. Like cold, fresh water after days in the desert. Ace opened his eyes and breathed. Where was he? On the ground. He must've fainted, exerting himself so much with his breath still held. He tried to exhale, but the breath snagged on the tiny movements that itched all through his sinuses and forced itself out as a sneeze. For what seemed like forever, every gasp he took had to exit through the nose with a wad of bloody, gnat-filled snot. Tears streamed from both eyes, washing away the stubborn mites that had dug into the folds of his eyelids. His ears burned and ached, but the persistent feeling of tiny legs scrabbling in them had to just be a vivid memory, because now he could hear. The nightmare buzzing was still there, but its quiet hum seemed positively gentle compared to the hungry thunder he'd just endured. It was also distinctly to his right. Ace twisted his swimming head that direction, and just a few feet away, he saw Kevin.
It seemed that, as soon as he'd died (shock, blood loss, organ damage… who could tell?), or maybe just as soon as he'd lost consciousness, all of the swarm's loyalty to Kevin had evaporated. His lifeless, gaping face was barely visible under a veritable carpet of fat, black flies. They roamed over every inch of him, already coating his cooling flesh with millions of microscopic eggs. They clustered thickest on the bloody ruin of his stomach, which Ace's stabbing and brutal stomping had reduced to revolting pulp. He imagined that he could see tapeworms writhing in the mess of slashed and smashed intestines, and had to look away before his eyes could confirm it. Then he threw up, just for good measure, and wriggled a few more feet away from the acidic puddle and brotherly worm-feast.
Ace's every inch itched, and he couldn't scratch any of it with his hands bound. The knife was still beside Kevin's corpse, but Ace would die before he started feeling around over there without a very good view of where exactly his hands were. To that end, he spent an embarrassingly long time rolling around in the dirt like a pig, trying to maneuver his restricted hands around below his behind so he could step over them. He damn near dislocated his shoulders before he managed it. Then, with his hands finally where he could see them, Ace shuffled back over to Kevin's carcass, picked up the knife with as much care and as little contact with bugs as he could manage, and shuffled as far back away as he could. A few more minutes of furious sawing, now with much better leverage, finally sliced the bindings the rest of the way through. What followed was the longest and most violent scratching session a man had ever endured, complete with knuckle-deep ear-probing and nose-picking. It left him miserable, exhausted, coated head to toe in blood and dirt, and still very, very itchy. Ace thought he might have to boil himself to ever really feel clean again.
"Kevin?" Doug called, somewhere in the distance.
But that would have to wait.
Doug hurled.
"Ugh," he groaned, "sweet Jesus."
Bob, on the other hand, was not disgusted. No, he was just plain outraged. He beat head-sized divots in the dirt with his furious fists, and howled his grief at the gibbous moon like a wounded animal. A third brother was dead, and now the man who'd murdered them all was missing.
Ace's footprints, the ones that had led his brothers to Kevin's grisly remains, continued away from them in a crooked line, away from the wagon too. Following them would be no trouble at all; even if Ace had had the sense to detour over some rocks, he'd still be leaving a hell of a blood trail through the night.
But that right there was the problem, wasn't it? The night. Though he had to be half-dead, Ace was now packing a shotgun and, apparently, Uzziah's favorite knife. That might not bother the indestructible Bob any, but Doug didn't fancy a chestful of buckshot one bit. Out there in the dark, with who-knows-how much of a lead, Ace could ambush them easy. He'd had enough time to circle around to any angle that tickled his fancy, find plenty of cover there, and get well-accustomed to the darkness that the others were still adjusting their eyes to. If the mood struck him, and if Bob didn't happen to be blocking his line of sight… well, Doug knew from the holes in his hat that his baby brother was a hell of a good shot. That's why Doug was sticking as close as he could to Bob's big back without catching any collateral damage from his tantrum.
"Bobby," Doug urged, cautiously poking him with one long finger, "we should go back to the wagon."
"ARGH!" Bob answered, vigorously shaking his head.
"Come on! It ain't safe for me out here!"
Bob wasn't listening. He started stomping off after Ace's tracks. Doug's long legs had no trouble keeping up with the lumbering hulk, but his insistent tapping and continual pleas to "Wait!" "Stop!" and "Turn around!" couldn't pierce Bob's focus any better than a bullet would pierce his hide.
Speaking of which,
BANG!
Doug jumped about three feet straight up. Bob spent about half a second frantically looking around for the source of the shot, then sprinted off in his best guess of its direction. Just before he got out of reach, Doug reached out and hooked his crooked hands around Bob's suspenders. Perhaps he had hoped to slow Bob down like this, but the bigger brother's momentum just dragged him off his flailing feet instead.
"Bobby!" Doug pleaded, "Stop, he's gonna shoot me!"
Bob still didn't seem to hear or care, not until a second shot thundered through the dark — was that from the same direction as the first? — and sent Doug leaping onto his brother's back like a scared (and mighty embarrassed) kid.
"Please, Bobby!" he wailed into Bob's lopsided ear. Doug didn't expect the extra power of his mind-bending voice to make the effect any stronger, but figured it still wouldn't hurt to try. "I don't wanna die!"
Finally, the possibility of losing a fourth friend and family member in as many days seemed to get through to Bob. He stumbled to a halt, then spent a second squinting into the dark all around. Bob turned around to look behind him, then realized that Doug was now exposed to the direction it seemed like Ace's shots might have come from, and quickly spun back around. But then there were the sides, and…
Bob's eyes paused on the fire, back at the campsite. Light meant safety for his squishy older brother, and that was what mattered. To keep him safe, Bob reached over his shoulder, grabbed the protesting Doug, and bundled him up like a baby in a protective embrace of tree-thick, bulletproof arms. Then he sprinted back toward the campsite.
Bob almost set his brother down as soon as they reached the little circle of light, but then a third bullet — which had definitely come from a different direction than the other two — bounced off the back of his neck. It no more hurt him than a thrown pebble would a normal person, but it would've snuffed Doug in a second.
"In the wagon!" he bleated, voice muffled by Bob's shirt. After only a moment of puzzling, Bob understood, and tossed his brother back into it. In the moment that it took Doug to untangle himself from the two bodies already back there, another bullet ripped through the covering and almost turned him into a third. With a yelp, he dove onto his belly, where the low wooden walls around the edges would hopefully block any more incoming bullets. Bob, not needing such shelter, instead paced around the wagon, watching for signs of Ace and howling challenges out into the dark.
Strangely, they went unanswered. No more bullets struck from the night. No taunts or curses vied with Bob's bellows for dominance of the air. Disappointed, he fell silent, to better listen for approaching footsteps, as if they'd be audible over the tromping of his own.
It had only been about half an hour of this when Doug began to cough. Bob peered in from the back to see what was the matter. He found his big brother stretched out in the spot Ace had once occupied, wedged as far the side as he could get. Doug had pulled his shirt up over his nose and clamped a hand over it, but that still couldn't stop his eyes from watering.
"It stinks in here," he half-whispered.
In answer, Bob gestured at the corpses.
"Exactly! Get them out of here!"
Bob frowned.
"Just 'til morning, when we can find the kid! I can't — " he paused briefly to retch " — lay in here all night with this stench." Even though Ace had been doing exactly that for almost a week, Doug had kept himself out front, where the air was somewhat fresher, and so was completely unused to the full, suffocating strength of the corpse-stench building up under that canvas cover. He was also having to swat flies away all the time now, since Kevin was no longer there to order them off of his dead brothers.
Bob hesitated for a little longer — he didn't feel too good about disturbing his brothers' bodies any more than they already had been — but a miserable, nauseous moan from Doug (played up only a little for drama) convinced him. As gently as his fat fingers could, Bob lifted Hiram out of the middle. Everyone felt fragile in Bob's hands, but Hiram's shriveled, stinking half-mummy felt like little more than paper and toothpicks. He trudged a few feet away, out to the edge of the firelight, and set the body down. This whole process repeated with Uzziah, and his nearly-weightless shell filled Bob with such sadness and rage that he wanted to cry. For a while, he just stood there over the laid-out bodies, wishing he could bring them back somehow… or failing that, that he could rip their killer's arms and legs off. Clenching his hands into white-knuckled fists did nothing to stop them shaking.
"Aw," Ace mocked, "is Bobby the Baby gonna cry?"
Bob spun around so fast that he almost fell over. There he was: the coward, the traitor, the murderer. The loathed and unworthy golden boy, despite all that. Dust and blood soaked his clothes a dirty red, and his face would have been unrecognizable under the moonscape of bleeding bug-bites if not for the evil smile that cut across it. Before Bob could even process it, the shotgun pointed at his face had gone off, and a leaden slug had beaned him right between the eyes. For a moment, they went crossed. He wavered, as if he might fall backward and crush the two bodies to pulp. But no — Bob was too full of anger and pain to be stopped so easily. He shook his head, rolled his eyes back to their usual lazy positions, locked one of them onto Ace, and charged.
Eyes wide with fright, Ace dove for the only cover he could find: the space beneath the wagon. Bob laughed; did his brother really think that ramshackle contraption would stop him? Bob had the strength to uproot trees. Lifting that rickety wagon off its back wheels was nothing to him. Doug hollered something as the wagon tipped vertical, but Bob didn't catch it. All he heard was his own triumphant roar as Ace lost his final hiding spot and —
— sprung catlike to his feet, thrusting the gun barrel upward like a spearman unhorsing a knight. It plunged straight into Bob's open mouth, gagging his cry of victory. For a moment, he was too confused by the sudden invasion to do anything but stare down at his grinning brother. Then Ace pulled the trigger. At the same instant, he let his knees buckle, just in time to not get crushed by the falling wagon. Bob had let go of it when the gun went off, and now he, too, fell broken to the ground. The full force of a gunshot applied directly to the roof of his mouth had really done a number on what passed for his brain. He'd get over that eventually, of course, just as he had Ace's first failed attempt to blast him unconscious, but temporary brain damage was the least of Bob's worries. The round that felled him had been birdshot, and the hundreds of pellets therein had carried more than enough momentum to force themselves down his throat and right into the lungs. Bob's insides were just as tough as his outside, of course, but even an indestructible man has to breathe, and that's pretty hard to do with a couple hundred lead balls in your lungs. Bob used the last of his air on a couple of ineffectual coughs, then wheezed himself unconscious. He'd be dead in five minutes.
Slowly, Ace crawled out from under the wagon and stood up. He made a show of dusting off his clothes, though they were too caked with dried blood for that to really do anything. Then, calmly, he turned to face Doug.
Doug had a gun — one of Ace's guns, in fact — pointed right at him. He stood about ten feet away, clutching the LeMat with both outstretched hands. They were trembling.
"Stop!" he ordered. Ace laughed. Doug looked ridiculous, all scuffed and dirty from his spill out of the upturned wagon and dripping with nervous sweat.
"Drop the gun!" Doug continued. Ace glanced absentmindedly down at the empty shotgun, now dangling uselessly from his right hand, as if he'd forgotten it was there. He let it fall, then took one big step toward his brother. Doug took another one back.
"I said stop, damn you!"
Ace didn't stop. He sauntered casually, with hands upraised in a gesture more sarcastic than submissive.
"Or what?" he challenged. "You'll shoot me?"
"Yes!" Doug said, waggling the gun for emphasis and taking some more steps back.
"No you won't," Ace dared him. "Cuz dear old Dad needs me breathin', don't he? Needs me back alive, or he soon won't be, that's what Kevin said. Means killin' me is killin' him, ain't it? And you wouldn't never kill Daddy, you spineless little shit."
"I'll shoot ya in the leg!" Doug warned, aiming the quivering gun accordingly. Ace doubted that any bullet from that thing would land anywhere near the spot Doug wanted it to.
"Will ya? Or will ya miss, and waste your only chance? Hell, even if you do get me, I might just bleed out anyway. How good're you with a tourniquet, huh? Or is bossin' the only thing you're any good at?"
"I… I…"
"Tell you what," Ace interrupted. "I'll cut ya a deal. Killin' those two put me in a real good mood, and honestly, I'm gettin' kinda tired. So how about this,"
Without even pausing, Ace lunged across the last few feet between them and snatched the LeMat from Doug's thin, weak fingers. Deftly, he spun it around to point at Doug's head.
"In exchange for you givin' me my guns back," with his other hand, Ace snagged the second LeMat from Doug's belt and returned it to his own.
"I'll give you ten seconds."
At first, Doug didn't get it.
"One," Ace said, helpfully.
Then Doug took off at a run, not going in any particular direction except away from Ace. He looked mighty funny with those spindly arms and legs flailing every which way. Ace watched his brother go, tracking him all the while with the gun barrel. Somewhere around the count of "Seven!" Ace decided it wasn't funny anymore and pulled the trigger. Doug yelped and fell on his face.
Ace took his sweet time catching up. He liked watching Doug try to crawl away. When he finally drew up beside him, Doug looked up with pleading, tearful eyes.
"Please, kid. We didn't wanna hurt ya! Daddy made us, just like — "
Ace answered with a swift kick to the face. He made sure to use the boot still completely drenched in Kevin's blood. A piece of intestine fell off the spur. With his other foot, Ace rolled his brother over. He leveled one gun at Doug's busted face.
Sniffling, Doug closed his eyes. He didn't want to see it coming, the coward. With a sneer, Ace holstered his gun. This rat didn't deserve a quick death anyway. He knelt, kneeing Doug in the gut in the process. His eyes snapped open, just in time to get blackened by Ace's fist.
It went on for a while.
By the time he was done, Ace couldn't feel his hands, and Doug's face looked more like ground chuck than anything human. Ace stood there for a while, admiring his handiwork. Then he put a bullet through it, just to be sure.
Briefly, Ace wondered why none of that carnage had made him any less angry.
Then the expended adrenaline crashed on top of every other agony he'd endured since North Access, and the best he could do was stumble into Doug's raggedy tent before he passed out.
Pain. So much pain that Ace's muddled brain couldn't even sort out all the signals coursing in from his abused body and just sent a severe sense of "itchy, exhausted, and sore" out in every direction. Just about the only distinct sensation he could fish from the sea of misery was an extreme thirst. It took three tries to stand up, and every step hurt in about ten different places, but he nonetheless managed to limp out into the warming morning in search of water.
Though the sun had not been up for long, the vultures had already found his brothers. Most were clustered around the spot where Bob had dropped Hiram and Uzziah, and three more picked at Doug, off in the other direction. A few were vainly pecking at Bob, but it seemed that he was just as tough in death as in life. Their eyes followed Ace, perhaps wondering if he'd be an easier meal, as he trudged from one body to the next, looting each one's canteen and whatever dried food they might've had on them when they kicked their respective buckets. After some consideration, he decided to let Hiram's canteen lie; it wouldn't be wise to put his mouth anywhere that Hiram's rotten pie-hole had been. He didn't bother with Kevin's body, either, since he could still see the cloud of flies that circled it like a black dust devil from a hundred yards away. It turned out that Doug had also been carrying Ace's own canteen, along with the guns and everything else of value that he'd been packing. Of course the big bully had taken all the spoils.
Now equipped with enough provisions for five people, Ace figured he could last at least as many days without a restock. After quenching his thirst and satiating the hunger that the water awoke, he decided to spend the first one asleep. Maybe some rest would stop him from hurting so much.
It did not. When Ace again awoke, sometime in the night, Doug's threadbare bedroll had done nothing but relocate some cramps from his legs to his back. He was thirsty again, too; blood loss will do that to you. Ace was still sipping when he heard something bark outside.
Gun in hand, Ace moved the tent flap just a smidge, wide enough for one eye. In the moonlight, that eye saw that nightfall had replaced the vultures with a pack of scavenging coyotes. One stopped trying to gnaw through Bob's indestructible finger to stare at him.
"Go on!" he shouted, rising out of the tent and up to his full height. "Get!"
The coyotes did not go on or get. He could hear them sneaking and sniffling in the shadows, and imagined a dozen hungry canine jaws creeping closer and closer, smelling his blood…
BANG!
One yote fell dead, and the others scattered, yelping in fear and surprise. If Ace was lucky, that one bullet would keep them away all night. But Ace had never once in his life been lucky, just smart, and the smart thing to do was get the campfire going again in case any more nocturnal scavengers started getting ideas about their next meal. He stayed alert as he could while starting it, and stayed outside for a few minutes to make sure it'd keep going and that the yotes were really gone. When he couldn't keep his eyes open anymore, Ace retreated back to the dubious shelter of his tent and the dubious solace of sleep.
At first, Ace thought he'd only gotten another hour or two. But that couldn't be right; the fire was cold. He stared up at the stars and, with uncharacteristic sluggishness, determined from their positions the time of day. How could it be earlier than it'd been when he first fell asleep?
Oh. With numb surprise and a bit of embarrassment, Ace realized that he'd slept for close to twenty hours. His stomach realized it too and immediately demanded compensation. At least all that sleep had finally eased his aching muscles a bit, and it had certainly helped with the exhaustion.
One make-up meal later, Ace got to work on re-starting the fire. He didn't see any sign of returning coyotes while he gathered sagebrush in the dark, but he did catch some glimpses of his brothers' bodies. They seemed to be showing a lot more bone than they had before; maybe that meant all the meat was gone, and the scavengers would go elsewhere in search of fresher pickings. Only Bob was still whole, but even he had started to rot on the inside, if the green creeping into his swelling skin was any indication.
Only when the fire was finally started did Ace begin to suspect that something was wrong. He'd been shivering in the dark, of course, but that was normal. It gets cold in the desert at night, when the crystal-clear sky steals all the heat from the sun-baked sand. But even now, sitting a foot from the fire, he was still shivering. And despite that, his bloody clothes were soaked with clammy, clinging sweat.
"Oh no," Ace groaned. A hand flew to the scabbed-over gash on his chest, and then to the one on his leg. Then, in the newfound firelight, he noticed a problem on the hand itself: an angry red rash that he shortly found over almost half of his body. Though that was certainly nothing to smile about, it still gave him a strange (but slight) relief. Mosquito-borne diseases were something he might stand a chance against, but a gangrenous chest wound? There'd be nothing for that but a merciful bullet to the head.
But then again, a fever and rash might not be the worst of it. He ought to try and find some civilization, someplace that might have a doctor, but he couldn't very well do that at night, not when he didn't even know where he currently was, much less which direction to go in. Maybe in the morning he could send up some smoke signals, see if anyone else was in the area. But that wouldn't work at night, so the best he could do for now was stay hydrated and give his body the rest that, even after the minor effort of building another fire, it was already aching for.
That was a mistake. The next day, Ace was almost too dizzy to walk, and he felt sure that the combined forces of his fever and the heat would fry him before he got to anything interesting, no matter which direction he went. He kept the fire going, at least, and made sure to feed it the greenest, smokiest stuff he could find, but if anybody saw it, they didn't care to investigate. The non-Bob bodies, even the dead coyote's, were mostly gone by then, and it looked like the flies had finally abandoned Kevin. Bob was getting badly bloated, though; Ace wondered if he might eventually burst like a beached whale. That was yet another good reason to relocate, but Ace was no longer sure he could even manage it. He was already sweating out so much water from the fever, and already having a hard enough time walking and seeing straight, that he might end up too depleted from breaking camp to put it back up again. Then he'd have no shade, no warmth at night, and nothing between himself and any hungry coyotes but a limited supply of bullets and an increasingly impeded aim. All he could do was sit, scratch, sip, and sleep.
This time, he couldn't even stand. He couldn't eat, either; the last of Doug's beef jerky came right back up, bringing with it entirely too much of his limited water supply. If that kept up, it might very well be a death sentence. Moving while he still could, Ace half-crawled back to what little was left of Kevin. The maggots had all died or grown their wings and flown away, leaving nothing but stripped bones and empty clothes behind. The water in his still-sealed canteen furnished a moment of hope, but both soon evaporated; he took one look inside, then it upended onto the sand. Half a dozen leeches shriveled in the sun.
For too long, Ace tried to rebuild his makeshift signal fire, which was quickly starting to seem like his only hope of salvation from whatever plague Kevin's last act had infected him with. Eventually, Ace's trembling limbs and spinning head forced him to just give up on lighting the fuel, even if he could have managed to gather enough of it. He laid in the tent and groaned. He choked down some food and water, then choked most of it right back up. And when the sun fell down once again, he faded into something too fitful to really call sleep.
Thirst. Hunger. Vomiting. Spinning, sweating, shivering. Spasming.
Something moved in his chest wound.
He awoke, for what he knew would be the last time. It was night, but what night, there was no way to know. The fire was out. The water was gone. The food was gone. His vision was starting to go; everything seemed to fade and waver, like he was looking through water. Two huge, black buboes pressed on either side of his neck. Maggots slithered in his chest. His right hand twitched uncontrollably. His left hand was numb.
He took one horrible breath, and it scraped his dry and burning throat like a sandstorm. He coughed, once and weakly. He couldn't move. He couldn't think. He couldn't even talk; all that came out when he moved his swollen lips and sandpaper tongue was a weak, strangled gasp.
But Ace Cliff was a fighter, and he was going to fight this, too. He sucked another dry inhalation, then forced it back out as a quiet groan. Again and again, he did this, pouring his last dregs of energy into the lungs that heaved inside his infected chest. Each cry was just a little louder, and each one was just a little more desperate. Perhaps there was a hint of anger there, at first, but it died in the desert air. What more could it do, when the soul it had once sustained was trapped in a body so utterly broken? Not for much longer, though…
Still, Ace labored. He would breathe his last breath wide awake, and he would make it a cry of hate, of vengeance, of pain. A rebuke of the man who'd broken him, of the thing that had called itself his father, of the whole cruel world of dust and blood that had hated him for his whole short life.
But for what? For who? There was no one here to hear it, no one but the coyotes howling outside his door, no one but the carrion-eaters that would feast on his flesh and gnaw his bones, no one but the wind and sand that would bury them. But he had to try, he had to… to what? Why?
A single tear, maybe the last drop of water in his whole ravaged body, appeared at the corner of one unfocused eye. It was too much. Too many years of violence. Too many masks, too many names. Too many lies. Too much blood. With one final, shuddering gasp, all of it broke at once. He screamed. Not a yell of defiance, not an angry shout. It was nothing more or less than the desperate, directionless, mindless wail of a frightened baby, alone and abused in a cold and evil world. The last cry of his dying body was just as painful, pathetic, and pure as its first.
And with that, Ace Cliff died.
But this was not the end.
He opened his eyes, slowly. Lazily, they focused, picking out one detail at a time.
First, there was the crackling fire. Tendrils of sweet smoke tickled his nose. The warmth felt good; homely and welcoming, like a blanket, not the cruel glare of the desert or the sick heat of a fever.
Next, he noticed his legs, crossed beneath him. He was sitting up, not dying on his back. There was no blood where his boot had plunged again and again into Kevin's ruptured guts. There was no pain in his bones, muscles, or skin. He licked his lips, and they were wet and uncracked. Without the agony to anchor it, this body felt unreal, insubstantial. He wiggled his fingers and watched them move.
Third, he began to wonder where he was, and looked up to see the walls of a wickiup, furs and hides spread over a wooden frame. They looked like bearskins. That thought reminded him of something…
Finally, his eyes came to rest on the other occupant of the shelter, and he could not imagine how he failed to notice her first. She was huge, probably the size of Bob, at least. A native woman, not at all young but not quite old. She sat across the fire from him, and its light cast deep shadows onto a face marred more by more scars than wrinkles. Her long, black-brown hair seemed to merge with the bear furs she wore… or maybe that was simply her fur.
She met his eyes and smiled. Her eyes were a deep, woody brown. Her teeth were long and sharp. That did not scare him; if the Mother Bear had wanted to eat him, she would have. Instead, she had brought him to her den… wherever it was, in this world or the next.
Remembering, somewhat belatedly, his past experience with desert goddesses, he averted his eyes.
"Who are you?" she asked. Her voice was deep and growling, but not unkind.
He opened his mouth. He closed it.
"You do not know?"
He shook his head. He knew full well who he was. He just didn't like the answer.
"You are my child."
He could not help himself; he looked up, eyes wide with hope and surprise. Then he felt ridiculous, and hung his head back down. This was not his mother, he knew that. His mother was a broken skeleton, and she was still in the shallow grave where his father had put her twenty years ago. This was the Mother Bear; everyone was her child, in a way.
"And when the mother bear hears the cry of her child, the hunter dies."
So that last pathetic scream into the night had not been for nothing. The thought should have comforted him, but instead it filled him with rage; who was this woman, that claimed to be his mother, but had only come for him in the lowest moment of his life? Who was she to claim the hunter dead, when the only killing ever done to the Flynn family had been by his hand or his father's? She was the Mother Bear, that's who she was, and that's why he choked down that anger and indignation instead of letting it fly, but the goddess still surely saw some of it on his face. The inscrutable grin of the late Ace Cliff had fled from there; he could no longer hide his pain behind it.
She grunted. He tensed.
"You wonder why I do not kill him," she said. "Why I do not break his bleeding crown and beat him to death with it." These were not questions. They were statements of fact. He began to feel very afraid; he hadn't meant to challenge a goddess, not in her own den. On an instinct well-honed by life in his father's house, he curled in, ready to be struck. He felt the fist approach before he saw it, a boulder-sized bludgeon of stone bones and oak-hard flesh, hurtling towards his chest with enough force to crack it like a walnut. He closed his eyes, and… opened them.
The Mother Bear's fist had halted, an inch from his skin. Smoothly, she turned it up, so he could see the claws on her fingertips. Then they unfurled, and he could see an egg, white as starlight, nestled in her scarred palm. She drew the hand — the paw — away, and his eyes stayed fixed on that strange and delicate egg. It seemed to shine brighter than the fire below it. As he watched, the goddess turned her hand sideways, and the egg rolled off it and into the heart of the flames.
There was a great flash of light, and a loud rush of air. The egg hatched in the heat, and from it grew a shining tree of white-hot flame. Its countless branches stretched up and out, twisting and forking until they almost touched the walls of the shelter, which they surely would have set ablaze. It was not a big tree, not within this wickiup, but he understood, as one sometimes does in dreams, that it was really the biggest thing in the universe… no, it was bigger than the universe. He was only seeing an image of it, like a photograph, if a photograph glowed and moved. All along the branches, he could see tiny figures of light and fire, moving back and forth like ants or beetles. Enraptured, he leaned closer to the nearest branch. At the far end, mere inches from his face, he saw one shape — tall, burning, red — standing tall, with six smaller ones standing before it. A little ways beyond them, he saw a seventh. It had the outline of a man, and that man was kneeling, in pain or in prayer, before the other figures. Somewhere behind him, close to where this branch met the trunk, he saw another shape, dim, flickering, feminine, and huge; taller than the red one at the end.
He looked more closely at the kneeling man.
So. This branch was the world, his world. The others, perhaps they were others. And all of it nestled in that egg, that the Mother Bear could crush in her fist. His eyes tried to trace the tree, up and up, and he felt his mind begin to reel. How could anything be so immense? Why was it being shown to him? Who was he, that it would… oh.
Gazing back now, he saw the shadow that he cast on the wickiup's wall, illuminated now by the tree of light. It was huge, far taller than him, and dark, dark enough to swallow him whole. From its head grew two twisted antlers, and even their shadows dripped with blood. It ran down the side in steaming rivulets, soaking the bearskins.
Looking the other way now, he saw that the Mother Bear's shadow was different, too. Through the twisting branches of the tree, he spied the shadow of a bear, a bear as big as a mountain. It raised its cleaving claws, and his shadow raised its own, and above his head they grappled. A bloody roar echoed from somewhere, like thunder on the horizon. The wickiup trembled; the tree shivered, as in tornado winds. Everything shook until he thought the whole structure might come down, smothering the light and him with it.
"I am killing him!" the Mother Bear shouted.
Then the shadows released each other, and the shaking ceased. He watched as they shrunk back down to the same shapes and sizes of those that cast him.
Now her voice was barely above a whisper. "By sending you."
He gaped at her for a long few seconds. Then he coughed out something like a laugh, and something like a scream, and very much like a sob. What did she think he was? She had scraped him up from an undignified death, and now wanted to send him off to kill not just his father, but the world-burning Devil himself? That was a joke. An insult. A farce. He closed his eyes again, expecting her to hit him for real this time, or maybe just send him back to his dying body from this ridiculous fever dream. That was easier to accept than world trees and cosmic shadows.
“It must be you, child,” the Bear urged. Her tone was firm, but not harsh… she almost sounded sorry. Almost.
“Just let me die, then,” he muttered, more quietly than he’d wanted to. “He needs me to live anyway. If I go, so does he.”
"No," she snarled, baring her fangs, "he does not deserve a slow and peaceful death. He must scream and suffer and bleed for what he has done. His flesh must be torn and his rotten bones snapped, his eyes gouged and teeth shattered, his body and soul clawed and bitten and broken until he knows one ounce of the agony he has inflicted."
“I can’t,” he whispered, voice crackling. “He’s too powerful. Too big. He’ll beat me and take my blood. He’ll…” he couldn’t finish, for the thought of what else his father might do to him, had already done to him long ago, hurt too much.
“You can, and you will. My paw will guide you and protect you from him. This I promise.”
He shook his head, violently. “No! Why does it have to be me? There’s other people that could do this, there’s gotta be! Why are you making me do this?!”
For a long time, neither said anything. He wept, head in hands, and she only frowned in silence. When the Bear finally spoke, it was in a whisper, almost conspiratorial. Almost… fearful?
“I did not choose you,” she said to the sobbing, broken man. “That… was your grandmother.”
Thunder cracked so loud that, at first, he thought he had been hit. His eardrums rattled as loudly as the wickiup frame. If he'd been standing, he'd have jumped high enough to bump his head on its ceiling. Instead, he fell unceremoniously on his back. Looking up now, he saw that a torrent of rain had poured through the shelter's smoke hole and extinguished the fire. The glowing tree was gone, and there was no sign of the mother bear on the other side of its steaming coals. Where she had been, he saw a doorway that her bulk had blocked. Through it, there was only darkness.
A bolt of lightning split the night! Again, the whole world seemed to tremble at its fury. In the blinding flash, he saw for a split second through the pounding rain outside. Out there in the dark, in a world almost invisible through the pour, he glimpsed someone.
He found himself standing. He walked, without knowing why. The rain soaked him to his core; it was cold, and the weight of it seemed to turn his clothes to chains, chains that grew tighter and heavier as they reeled him towards the woman in the night. And she was a woman, though as he staggered closer, he saw she was too small to be the Mother Bear. He called to her, some wordless question or plea that was swallowed up instantly by the stormy cacophony. Did she need his help? Did he need hers? Did it matter, in this drowning nightmare?
Lightning lanced across the sky, crackling back and forth across a storm cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon. In its flicker, he saw her clearly now: a small woman, with dark and tangled hair, wearing a dress soaked dark with something thicker than rain. She had her back to him, so he tried to call out again. The voice died in his throat, though, for it was then that he noticed her hands. As she raised them slowly to the sky, he saw… that they had no fingers.
The world exploded. Only when the sight returned to his scalded eyes did he realize what they'd seen; a bolt had descended from the heavens and struck the fingerless woman. The thunder around it had hit him like a train, and now he was on his back, staring up into the full force of the storm. Lightning cracked one more time, and even through the water that filled his eyes, he could see the clouds above twisting, swirling, coming together into the shape of an enormous, toothy maw. The whole sky was alive, a single primordial monster too large to understand, a Leviathan of water and darkness and fury. He screamed, then, but his terror was drowned by a greater cry, a resounding command woven from the howling wind, the pounding rain, and most of all the roaring thunder:
YOU ARE MY KNIFE
And with that, Xavier Flynn was born again. Without moving a single muscle, he could tell that he was healed. No pain burned in his rejuvenated body, and only one thought blazed in his clarified mind: he had to kill his father. In the same way that a bullet must kill what it is fired at, he had been launched from a gun forged of divine wrath, and sent screaming down a straight line toward destiny.
Some fearful part of him resisted — some part always had — but now there was another force moving his feet out of that tent and down the dusty road to Montauk. For every drop of fear that pulled him away from the horror that waited there, there was a gallon of rage. That final bolt of dream-lightning had pumped it into him, and though it had not always been his, it certainly was now. The time to run had passed. The time of fear had passed. Now it was time for vengeance. Vengeance, for himself and all his pain. For the dead brothers beaten down before him and turned into monsters like their father, by their father. For all the people that they had hurt and killed. For each of their mothers, broken and buried. And for their mothers’ mother, that fingerless woman in the rain, that shadow of the primeval storm. Xavier did not recognize his grandmother, for she had died — for his father had murdered her — long before his birth, but he felt her in the fury of that storm. He had taken it into himself. It made every muscle twitch in anticipation. His fingers were curling, ready to pull the triggers. His legs were almost jogging toward that doomed bastard’s familiar house. And his face, now freed from Ace’s eerie, empty grin, had become a scowl as deep as the sea.
With every step, something bumped against his chest. He didn’t have to look at it; he knew what it was. A bear paw on a leather cord, a parting gift from the Mother. Something that would protect him from his father. Its swinging weight counted his footsteps, counted the beats of his burning heart, counted the seconds that Rory Flynn had left to live.
They were not many.