Red - Jack Ketchum [57]
He falls to his knees again and drops the shotgun and both hands go to his blasted ear and the side of his head rough and bloody with buckshot and he looks up at the woman who is smiling.
~ * ~
Peg and Darlin’ both hear the gun and Peg thinks, has her father shot her? Killed her? Can he somehow know that Peg is the one who set her free and is he coming for her next? For both of them? Her father is capable of anything, she knows that now. Darlin’ is crying so hard she can barely get her breath. The poor thing’s terrified. She needs a distraction. Anything.
Peg rushes her back into the kitchen. There’s a six-pack of liter Deer Park water bottles on the shelf. She snatches one up and shoves it into Darlin’s hands.
“Here. Don’t drop this,” she says. “Whatever you do, don’t drop it. Let’s go!”
It works. She’s got something to occupy her mind now. Don’t drop the water bottle. She’s not choking on her own tears at least. She runs down the hall headed toward the front door.
“Wait! Stop!” Peg says. Their mother’s out there.
Darlin’ stops on a dime and turns to her.
“Back door,” she says. “Come on.”
~ * ~
The man is howling in pain. He raises a bloody hand to plead with her. Please! he says. She understands that word. She has heard it many times before.
She hacks at the man’s wrist. There is not enough resistance and the blade isn’t sharp enough to break cleanly through so the wrist hangs there by fragments of bone and tendon spouting blood. He raises the other hand to grasp at the first. She swings on that wrist too and the result this time is better. The hand tumbles through the air and clangs against the metal cage in which the dogs are barking.
No no no he wails and she understands that word as well.
He screams like a child as she lowers the blade.
She slices him open from crotch to sternum. For this soft flesh the blade is quite sharp enough.
The man looks perplexed it’s so fast. The man doesn’t know what’s just happened. She shows him. She drops the blade and squats beside him and reaches to each side of the long wound and parts him as though the man were a stand of tall grass — pulls him open wide and buries her head inside him. Through the heat and wet of him she can hear him screaming.
She pulls out a length of intestine and spits it out immediately. The man’s intestines are foul. The man is still conscious, waving his arms, looking down at her in defeat and horror. The hand has dropped off and lies beside him now. She dips her head inside him once again and bites down on his liver, pulls it out with her teeth and chews. The liver’s foul too. She spits it out.
She reaches inside with her hand this time and wrenches out his heart.
And this she eats with pleasure. The heart is good.
She stands. The dogs have gone mad now, barking and clawing at the cage to get out, to get to two fresh piles of meat. There is also something very strange inside the cage. But this one is grasping at the cage, not clawing at it. It has no eyes and it is as bloody as the rest of them. But this one is human. A human child.
She remembers the voice she heard from inside the cellar. She hears it again now. Somewhere between a bark and a cry.
She goes to the cage and opens the door. The dogs rush out and fall upon the bodies. She sees that the dogs are not hungry — they’ve already fed — there’s a third body mostly devoured inside the cage.
The dogs aren’t hungry, they’re angry.
The child rushes out too but the Woman grabs it by the back of the neck and hauls it up. She sees that the child is female. She struggles in the Woman’s grasp and tries to bite. Socraigh, she says, socraigh. Be calm. But the child will not be calm. She howls and snaps. The Woman slaps her, hard and only once, then strokes her. Strokes her head, her back, her shoulders and haunches. Her struggling slowly stops. She walks the