Red - Jack Ketchum [56]
The dogs are sloppy eaters. There are bits of her scattered everywhere.
“Doesn’t even look real anymore,” Brian says, “does it, dad.”
He’s every bit as engaged as Cleek is.
“Does to me,” he says.
He doesn’t know particularly what he means by that but it has the ring of truth so he says it again.
“Does to me.”
The barn door slams open and at first he doesn’t believe what he‘s seeing. His mind is playing tricks on him. She’s standing in the waning sunlight. There’s blood smeared all along her face and neck and hands and staining Belle’s baby-blue dress. She’s holding something a foot and a half long, wide and flat.
“Jesus wept,” he says.
~ * ~
Peg glances out the window. Sees the woman striding across the yard toward the barn, taking her time, in no rush at all. Moving away from the house, which is very good. The woman’s back is straight. There’s an almost sensuous sway to her hips. Peg thinks of cats. Big golden cats.
She holds Darleen by the hand while with the other hand she’s searching through the open drawer for a spare set of keys to the Escalade but all she finds are the spares to her mother’s Toyota which are no good to her at all. The Toyota’s at the shop. Her father’s got the keys to the fucking Escalade in his pocket of course and there are no fucking spares in the drawer.
“Momma!” says Darleen. “I want Momma!”
No you don’t, she thinks. Not anymore.
You want me.
~ * ~
The Woman watches the man take an involuntary step back and go down stumbling in a shower of rakes and shovels. But the boy is frozen. Holding on to a dripping hose with his mouth open, staring at her. He looks like the stupid pig boy that he is.
The man is fallen so first it’s the boy.
She crosses to him in three long strides and brings the weapon down into the soft flesh of his lower belly just above the hip and just beneath the rib. It’s a practiced move. The boy shouts and drops the hose and leans instinctive into the bloody wound, grasping for it to stop the pain and the flow of blood and she tosses the blade into her other hand and brings it down on the corresponding side. The boy leans into that one too.
She tosses it again and strikes. Tosses a fourth time. Strikes again.
She is chopping him like a tree.
This tree is screeching now.
The man is trying to get to his feet so she rises up on one foot and kicks him back down amid the rakes and shovels.
Inside the cage the dogs are wild. Blood in the air. She can smell it too. Both inside the cage and out. It is the smell of conquest, of food, of life.
Twice more she tosses and strikes and on the second strike severs the spine.
The tree is felled — into two parts which drop away from each other.
And neither part knows that it is yet dead. The legs kick and tremble. The mouth and eyes open and close. The hands grapple with empty air.
Later perhaps she will eat of him. His penis perhaps. His nose. Perhaps the eyes that have watched her. But for now there is the man. Who is on his knees and reaching for something above.
~ * ~
Peg is going through Miss Raton’s purse looking for her car keys. She still has Darlin’ by the hand but Darlin’ is whining and crying, tugging at her, breaking her concentration. She dumps the contents of the purse on the living room floor.
“Goddammit, goddammit, goddammit!” she says.
They are either in her pocket or in the ignition. In either case she can’t risk going outside to look. She can’t risk having Darleen see her dead mother on the front steps either.
They’re going to have to walk on out of there.
~ * ~
The Woman roars, steps over to the man and tears open the shoulder of the garment they’ve forced her to wear. It falls away from her and pools at her feet. She is free of all trappings of the man.
~ * ~
Cleek is in a panic but his hand fishes across the shelf and finds the stockless short-barrel twelve gauge he keeps out there for varmints, a paper towel shoved in the end of the barrel against the dust and he brings it round. There is a moment of triumph as he swings it on her and fucking bitch! he shouts as