Red - Jack Ketchum [0]
A novel
by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2011 by Dallas Mayr & Edward Lucky McKee
Cover Design and copy-editing by David Dodd
Book Cover Photography By Chelsea Boothe - www.chelseaboothe.com
Pollyanna McIntosh from the feature film "The Woman," directed by Lucky McKee.
Photo Courtesy of MODERNCINÉ ©2011
www.thewomanmovie.com www.moderncine.com
LICENSE NOTES:
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your vendor of choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.
Buy Direct From Crossroad Press & Save
Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS – use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a one-time 20% savings! We have a wide variety of eBook and Audiobook titles available. Find us at: http://store.crossroadpress.com
ALSO FROM JACK KETCHUM & CROSSROAD PRESS:
NOVELS:
Ladies' Night
“You want to kiss her. I want to taste her. It’s just the same.”
— Issei Sagawa
“In every dream home
A nightmare”
-Joe Jackson
“I talked to god last night. She says that if she can ever get her cunt sufficiently clean again, she just might forgive you ignorant pricks who raped her.”
—Jerzy Livingston, THE STROUP STORIES
From Ketchum:
Thanks to Andrew, Bill, and my partner Lucky. To Brauna for the dream. To Paula for damn near everything. To Kristy — she knows perfectly well why. And to Pollyanna for direct and terrible inspiration.
From McKee:
To Ma and Pa for rearin’ me right, my sisters Boog, Jaye, and Angie for being great women, my brothers Kevin and Chris for not being like Cleek, and my partners in crime, Andrew, Bill, and Polly. And to you, Dallas, for showing a kid how it’s done.
PART ONE
ONE
The Woman has no concept of beauty.
She herself is not beautiful. Not unless power is beauty, because she is powerful, over six feet tall, with long arms and legs, almost simian in their lean strength. But her wide grey eyes are empty when they are not watchful and she is pale from lack of light, filthy, parasite and insect bitten and smelling of blood like a vulture. A wide smooth scar runs from just below her full right breast to just above her hip where eleven summers ago a shotgun blast has peeled her flesh away. Over her left eye and extending beyond her ear a second blast has left another scar. Neither her eyebrow nor her hair from forehead to the back of her ear has ever grown again.
She looks as though struck by lightning.
The Woman is not beautiful, and has no concept of beauty...
~ * ~
It is nearly dawn, the darkest hour behind her now and she has left the deep forest and the hardpack rocky trails she has walked for hours, for days perhaps, the fever bright within her, night to day and back again perhaps, all these trails so well known to her, for the beach at last. She is exposed here in the dawning but she has stopped and listened along the way and doubled back time and again so she is certain she is not pursued. They have given up.
If they have ever followed her at all in the dark. She has moved only in the dark.
Her wounds are graced with fortune — so close together this time at her left side. The knife and the bullet. The crescent moon and the full moon mere inches apart. She has staunched them with mud and wrapped them tightly with her belt. There will be little blood trail for them to follow.
Still, she must heal.
There is pain. Pain that pulses through her body from shoulder to knee. That beats at her body as the waves beat the shore. But pain is to be borne. This is nothing to the pain of birthing. Pain says one thing only.
Alive.
Still, she must heal.
She scans the rocky tideline and sees it right away. The exact shape and