Off Season - Jack Ketchum [30]
The cave was thirty feet down a seawall more than fifty feet high, approachable only via a small goat path from the shore. He had discovered it one day while searching gulls’ nests for eggs. From almost any angle its entrance—the entire right side of a cleft in the rock—was obscured by overhanging rocks. It was also sheltered from the winds. A natural chimney existed in a second, smaller hole in the rock above and a few feet beyond the entrance—though they used a fire infrequently, for fear that the smoke would give them away. Best of all, the cave was huge and relatively dry even in storms. It opened up to a space about twenty-five by twenty feet; and then to a second, adjoining space off the rear, nearly half again that size. In some places it was twenty-five feet from floor to ceiling.
They slept on skins or the browse beds, huddled by the fire in very cold weather, or in the second room when the temperature was milder. The second room they used mostly for storage. They had found the town dump early on, and now the cave was a mad clutter of random forage—a small plow with a broken handle, hoes, rakes, and pitchforks with splayed or broken tines. In one corner a mound of scrap reached halfway up the wall—an old harness, shovels, pokers, buckets filled with nails and keys, irons, doorknobs, window fittings, locks, pots and pans, pieces of broken china, a doll, a gunstock, rimless wheels, tire irons, whips, buckles, belts, knives, axes. They used almost none of it and kept nearly everything.
Beyond that was another pile, all of it items of clothing they had stripped from the bodies of the dead. It, too, climbed halfway up the wall. They would select an item from the pile, wear it until it was useless, and then select another. In the meantime the clothing at the bottom of the pile grew slimy with mold, providing homes for the horde of beetles, roaches, and flies that grew fat and bold in the cave’s ripe stew of refuse.
Beside this was a pile of bones, picked clean and yellowing in the damp, stale, fetid air.
And finally a pile of skins and tools for scraping and tanning. The skins varied greatly in shape and size. But many of them were long and thin and pale yellow in color.
The man considered all this with great satisfaction. He pulled on the tattered jeans and remembered what the woman had said. Now there were three and three of them. His people would fill the cage and make up for the losses of two nights before. He scowled at the thought of what the children had done. Never had the children been allowed to kill unsupervised and alone. It was wrong of them to try.
They had been punished, though, for their stupidity, and tonight they would obey. One by one they had been beaten, eldest to youngest, while the others watched, enjoying their brothers’ and sisters’ agonies but terrified of their own to come. Until all were bloodied.
As he put on the boots he had taken from the fat, red-faced fisherman long ago, his brothers emerged from the inner cave, four of the children following at their heels. He grunted at them in greeting and then finished strapping the boots around his ankles. He had a secret from them now. He enjoyed waiting to tell them.
The first man was huge, over six feet tall. He was completely bald, with no eyebrows below the highdomed forehead and not the slightest trace of hair on his face or naked chest. His shoulders were round, massive, with muscles that seemed to jump at the barest movement. In his neck the tendons articulated themselves like heavy fingers. His eyes were a strange