Killers - Blake Crouch [32]
“Who?” I asked, but I understood the moment my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw Vi leaning over into the crib, shuffling through the blankets.
“Max,” she said.
“There’s no way he could have crawled out?”
“He’s four months, Andy. He can’t even roll over.”
I turned on a lamp and moved toward her.
“You put him down after supper, right?”
She nodded, wild-eyed, her pupils dilated, chest billowing.
“He went down fast. Ten minutes. Then I came down and we were talking by the fire for what? A couple hours?”
“Yeah.”
Vi was physically shaking. “This isn’t right, Andy. This isn’t right.”
I stepped around the crib toward the only possible exit from the loft—a two-by-two square foot window just under the pitch of the roof.
“Is it open?” she asked.
I knelt down, studied the hasps. “No. But it isn’t locked.”
“Was it?”
“I’m ninety percent sure it…fuck.”
“What?”
Vi hurried over.
I touched the floorboards.
“They’re wet.” A cold, sinking blast of panic ran through me. “Someone was up here while we were down there.”
She looked at me, her eyes flooding.
A lump swelling in my throat.
“He’s here, isn’t he? He found us and took my son.”
I headed toward the ladder.
Immediately, I could tell something was off—a softness in my knees that I realized was numbness.
“I don’t feel right,” I said as I reached the ladder and started down.
Through her tears, she said, “I’ve been getting more and more lightheaded. I thought it was the wine.”
I descended carefully, a tremor in my legs threatening to upend my balance. My mind redlined, the last sixty seconds such a nightmare I wondered if this was really happening. I’d had a dozen dreams in the last year that he’d somehow found us, and every time I’d wake sweating in the night, paralyzed by naked fear until that wash of relief would sweep over me, reality reinstated. I’d go to the kitchen sink, drink a glass of water, and wait for the nerves to recede.
My feet touched the floorboards at the base of the ladder, and Violet was still crying hysterically in the loft and the numbness in my legs still growing, and I was still in this horrifying moment, either unable to wake, or worse, there was no nightmare to wake from.
My knees hit the floor beside my bed, and I reached underneath it.
Pulled out the shotgun, but it was too light, too small, and it wasn’t black metal but orange and green plastic.
I stared at the Nerf toy in my hands and said, “What the fuck is happening?”
My voice sounded strange, as if it had been relegated to some alcove in the back of my head. I turned and the room moved slower than the swivel of my head, the firelight leaving trails across my field of vision.
Violet stood at the bottom of the ladder, swaying on her feet.
“He drugged us,” I said, and she responded but I couldn’t interpret her words which were lost in a swarm of echoes.
I staggered to the front door and pulled it open.
Rain fell through the sphere of illumination cast by the porchlight.
Pure, unflinching darkness beyond.
My breath steamed in the cold, and I could feel the chill on my face, but there was distance from it—a chemical apathy getting stronger by the minute.
I stumbled down the steps into a puddle, the freezing water seeping through my socks, realized I was still holding fast to the Nerf shotgun. I threw it down in the mud.
My CJ-5 stood just beyond the field of light and I moved toward it on rubber legs.
I kept a loaded hunting rifle in the back, had been hoping to shoot an elk that would feed us through the winter.
I collided into the door of the Jeep, fumbling for the handle.
It swung open and I climbed in, reaching back between the seats as the rain hammered the hard-top.
The Remington was gone.
He’d taken it, too.
I stepped back down into the mud and stared at the porchlight thirty feet away, blinding me through the rain.
My head felt heavy, fingers too, like they were trying to pull me down into the mud.
I could hear Violet sobbing in the cabin. It occurred to me that a loss of consciousness was imminent, and despite the effect of the drug,