Twenty-Two

“What’s his name?” Colleen asked. Their meeting with Niebolt had ended in a rush. Maxwell, the spirit and image of his father and his number one fan to boot, had interrupted them, his face stony. The two of them had gone outside for a few minutes, and then Huff had returned, his face now as stony as Maxwell’s, but his eyes wet with tears barely held in.

“We’ll finish this,” he’d said, eyeing Colleen. “Something has happened and I’ve lost another son.”

The women had looked at one another, and there’d been no need to feign surprise. Huff left, and now, nearly three hours since his hasty departure, Colleen sat on the couch, holding the infant to her chest.

“He doesn’t have a name,” Sally said, closing her book—a tattered paperback of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. Mathilda had gone to bed, leaving her child in their care. There had been no sign of Embeth at all for several hours, and Evie was in the other room, perched once more before her work. Colleen found the muffled whirring of the sewing machine somehow comforting.

“Why not?” Colleen asked, tracing her right forefinger along the child’s forehead and down to the tip of his nose. Not for the first time, she pressed her nose into his stringy brown locks and inhaled. There was something about the smell of a baby’s scalp—as well as the breath of a kitten, God help her—that she loved. As a child, she’d loved the smell of gasoline, and she’d told her mother that someone should bottle the smell, that it would make a wonderful perfume. She wasn’t so sure about that anymore, but kitten breath and baby head? Pure bliss.

“Why else? Huff.” Sally said, readjusting herself upon the chair. She looked like she was about to burst. Colleen wondered how she slept. “He usually names the kids right there on the spot—he’ll have two names picked out, a boy’s and a girl’s, and he’ll go with whichever one is called for. Doesn’t seem to bother him one way or another. Not this time, though.”

“What happened?”

“He took one look at this one and said that Ezekial was not his name,” she said. “It was a good name, but this child had no name. He’d have one before long, once he had a chance to establish his personality.”

“Oh,” Colleen said.

“Yeah,” Sally said. She opened her book and resumed reading.

It was a little after ten and Colleen could see moonlit shapes outside. The trees and the hills were so black and formless they drew you forward, made you want to lean forward and peer deep into them and see if anything was there at all.

“How is it?” Colleen asked following several minutes of silence. Sally held up her finger: give me a second. She turned a page, read on until what Colleen assumed was the end of a chapter, and, frowning slightly, looked up. “Hm?”

“The book. How is it?” In light of all that had come, in light of all that was yet to come, it felt good—asking a mundane question. A normal question: how’s that book you’re reading?

“It’s okay,” Sally said, staring at the cover, looking like a person who was looking for the right thing to say. “It’s a lot to think about. I picked it up thinking it was like the old movie. It’s not.”

“No,” Colleen said. “It’s one of the books I managed to not read in college, but I picked up enough to know it’s not like the old movie.”

“I started to put it down when I realized it wasn’t, but I decided to keep going. I guess I’m glad I did.”

“Huh,” Colleen, said, and she felt her one normal conversation of the day wither on her tongue. She and Sally looked at one another for a moment, and then Sally looked down at the book and picked up where she’d left off.

The child with no name stirred, grunted, its face contorting into something that looked like a smile. Colleen retrieved the pacifier from the small table beside the couch and pressed the translucent rubber nipple to the child’s lips. He took it eagerly and grew still. Looking at the child, Colleen felt something stir in her heart, a fluttering sensation that felt akin to love of some kind. Maybe it was just pity. Even before the dead had risen, the child’s world had been upside down, and the saddest part of all was that, growing up, he would never know better.

Niebolt was smart. The children were a part of whatever twisted Noah’s Ark repopulation fantasy he was feeding, but they were also a tool, a means by which he calmed and soothed his victims. A tool for which she was, at this moment, most grateful—she had not thought of her mother, down there in the dark, or of Guy. Or of her brother, her friends.

“Are any of them still alive?” Colleen said, repositioning the sleeping child, which belched once and briefly opened one of its eyes before settling down. Sally looked up from her book once more. The look on her face was answer enough, but she spoke anyway.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Huff lets his sons do what they want to the men. He tells them to make it fast and painless, but you know how men can be, especially in groups, feeding off each other.”

“How do you know?” Colleen said. “That they’re dead, I mean.”

“I don’t,” Sally said, shaking her head, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Not for certain, anyway. All I know is what Mathilda told me one night, after she had a few drinks and was actually talking about her time here, about her life before Huff. She told me that Huff lets the boys have the boys. Their job is to make them disappear, fast and clean.”

“What about Kimberly?”

“Kimberly?,” Sally said. “I didn’t know there was another girl. Who was she?”

“My best friend,” Colleen said. “Since we were little.”

“Oh.”

“You said was.”

“I did,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I never saw my husband again, Colleen, and I never saw my son again.”

She set her book aside, rose from the chair with nearly comical slowness, and sat close beside Colleen. They held hands.

“I never saw them again and I never will,” Sally said, her voice cracking. “You’re probably not going to see your man or your brother, and Kimberly is probably dead, too. At this point, you can only hope she is, because if Huff didn’t want her to live here, then he gave her to his boys, and that...”

Sally didn’t have to finish. She looked like a woman who’d said too much, anyhow—embarrassed and ashamed. “I’m sorry.”

Colleen’s anger returned. Suddenly she hated the child in her arms, this nameless bastard offspring of Huffington Niebolt—she wanted it dead as much as she wanted him dead. She stared at its face until her rage abated, aware only at the end that she was hurting Sally’s hand.

She stared at Sally, letting go.

“It’s okay,” Sally said.

Colleen looked down at the child, blinking away tears and feeling her heart beneath her ribs, pumping to burst.

“It’s going to be okay,” Sally said, dropping her voice to a whisper and leaning in close, like a lover. “We’re getting out of here.”

“Getting out of here,” Colleen repeated, with realization unfolding like a death letter in her mind.

“Yes,” Sally said. “We’re going to get away from this place.”

“And go where?”

“I, uh,” Sally said, looking around. Colleen watched the older woman’s face. She could see the light dawning there, as well.

“There’s no place for us,” Colleen said. “Not anymore.”

“It’s really over?” Sally said, on the verge of tears once more. “Everywhere.”

“Seems like it,” Colleen said, touching Sally’s hand. “This is the safest place. We just need to take it.”

“Huff’s losing his grip.” She sounded almost hopeful.

“I’m going to kill him,” Colleen said, maybe a little too loudly, surprised by her sudden thirst for violence. She saw herself cramming the bastard’s cock into his mouth with the knife she’d used to slice it off.

“I hope you get the chance, honey,” Sally said, letting go of Colleen’s hand and struggling once more to her feet. “And I hope I’m there when you do it.” She held out her hands, indicating the sleeping child. “Here.”

Colleen passed the nameless boy to Sally, who held him to her chest and slowly shuffled out of the room, her slipper-clad feet dragging across the deep carpet. Colleen stared into space, her mind racing, the images in her head overlapping into jumbled and bloody chaos. Is this what it felt like to go crazy?

The place where the child had been pressed to her chest felt empty and cold now, damp. She stood, felt the carpet beneath her bare feet and between her toes, and stepped over to the bookshelf. So much information, and so much of it conflicting and varied, not something she associated with cults. Not that she knew much about them, aside from what she’d heard about Manson and his bunch on the news.

She plucked a Poe from between Steinbeck and a book about the Wright Brothers, fanned its musty pages, and returned it to the shelf. She wasn’t in the mood for death, so she opted for Steinbeck. She’d read Of Mice and Men twice already, not counting the times she’d skimmed its contents or re-read her favorite passages. She was ten pages in when Sally returned.

“Tell me about the rabbits again,” Sally said, easing herself into the chair.

“My brother said that Lennie represented us. That we were all looking forward to some farm that we’re probably never going to have, and that we’d all be better off if we had a George in our lives. Someone with the balls to put a bullet in our heads.”

“Sounds like an upbeat guy,” Sally said, realizing her mistake. She frowned. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Colleen said. “It’s okay.”

“Goddamn dumb of me.”

“No, you’re right,” Colleen said, looking down at the opened book in her hands and staring through the words printed upon the pages. “He wasn’t the easiest guy to get along with sometimes.”

“But you loved him.”

“I did, the bastard,” she said, looking up at Sally. “What if he’s still alive, somewhere right out there?”

“I, uh,” Sally said, stammering. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Colleen.”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just thinking aloud, is all, wondering if maybe—”

She stopped, looked around. The sound of the sewing machine had stopped. Evie appeared, met Colleen’s eyes for a second, and then vanished into the kitchen. Colleen heard a cabinet open and close, heard the kitchen tap go on and then off, and Evie stepped into the living room with a glass of water in her hand.

“Can I get you two anything?” she asked, fidgeting, not making eye contact with either of them.

“No, thanks,” Sally said. “You finish up?”

“Yeah,” Evie said. “I finished those four I had going. They came out nice.”

“I bet.”

“Are we going to be okay?” Evie asked, and it took Colleen a few seconds to realize that Evie was talking to her, looking right at her.

“What, uh,” Colleen said, stumbling over her words. “What?”

“The things Huff said, are they true? You really saw them?”

“I saw them,” Colleen said.

“What’s making it happen?” Evie asked.

“I don’t know,” Colleen said. “The people on the radio and the television didn’t know. They didn’t know anything.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, Evie,” Sally said. “It doesn’t mean Huff is anything other than what he is.”

“And what is that?” Evie asked, somehow managing to sound both hopeful and accusatory.

“He’s just a man,” Sally said.

“Just a man,” Evie said, staring past them and through the window for a few seconds. “Yeah, okay. I’m going to bed.”

“We are too,” Sally said, holding up her book. “Just want to get a little more reading done.”

Evie nodded, looked down at her feet, and loafed out of the room.

“She knows,” Sally said. “She’s been here forever. When we bash in the bastard’s skull, she might cry a little, but you won’t get any resistance from her.”

“What about Mathilda and Embeth?”

Sally made a face. “They’re going to be a problem.”

They read for nearly an hour without speaking to one another. Colleen wasn’t sure how Sally was making out, but she was struggling. She’d read three or four sentences, and then the words stopped being words, really. Would she get another shot at Niebolt as perfect as the one she had today? And if she did, and if she was successful, what then?

They went to bed.

Wondering if, when, and how her chance would come—wondering if her brother was alive somewhere nearby or already rotting in a shallow grave or in the new and horrifying state that existed between life and death—Colleen fell asleep.

 

 

 

“Wake the fuck up,” a man said.

Nearby: muffled keening, and the creak of bedsprings.

Colleen opened her eyes, blinked. The bedside lamp was on. She tried to sit up and someone pressed her head into her pillow.

“Sally?” Colleen said. “What’s—”

“She can’t help you,” someone said, and a second later she realized who it was. Not a man, not by any reasonable standards, anyhow—just a boy no older than her brother. Samson’s breath was hot on her cheek; his hand slid away from her face, down her neck, and across her shoulder. “No one can.”

Fear burned away the fog of sleep.

“Samson,” she said.

She tried once more to sit up. A cold ring of steel pressed into her cheek.

“I’ll kill you,” he said. “I will. Just test me and see if I don’t, you dirty cunt.”

He rolled her onto her back and stood up, the enormous barrel of the cowboy revolver in his right hand pointed directly at her face. He wore the same shirt he’d had on when they first met him at Misty’s, and little more. His left knee rested on the foot of the bed, near her feet. His pale legs were covered in dark hair, and his massive erection pointed to the ceiling, bobbing, its thick head like a shaking fist.

“No,” she said, her mind tearing itself apart at the edges. She sucked in air, fuel for a scream that would awaken everyone in the house, consequences be damned, and it was the cold ring of steel against her cheek that pulled her back from the edge: if she screamed, she would die: if she died, she would not be able to kill Samson Niebolt or his goddamned father.

“No,” Samson said through clenched teeth, but she had already fallen silent.

Motion caught her eye, and she pulled her gaze from Samson’s cock to Sally, who writhed upon her bed, her lips stretched around the gag in her mouth, her left eye swelling shut, her hands bound behind her back.

“You too,” Samson said, swinging the gun toward Sally’s tear-streaked face. “I’ll shoot you in the stomach. You know I will.”

Again the barrel of the gun was in Colleen’s face, and it was such a small thing, really, such a small little empty circle. How could such a tiny thing be so terrifying, so all-encompassing? She yelped once, unable to stop herself, and then squeezed her eyes shut expecting to be blown into nothing.

“Open your eyes,” Samson said, and she listened. Sally wept around her gag, and Samson Niebolt spit into his left hand and worked his cock while leveling the gun at Colleen’s face with the other. “Take it off.”

She knew what he meant, and she did what he said, sitting up and pulling her formless red gown over her head and throwing it to the floor. She sat in her bra and panties, looking up at Samson.

“Keep going, keep going.” Wagging the gun.

She did. Samson sucked in air when she removed her bra, held it for a little too long, his eyelids heavy.

“More,” he said, releasing the held breath.

Her panties came away from her crotch, the cloth pad taped into them stained deep red. He passed the gun to his slick left hand and pressed his right hand between her legs.

“No,” she said, but it was useless: his fingers were already inside her, working her.

“My dad says we can’t touch a woman when she’s like this,” he said, holding up his hand. His middle and ring fingers were gloved in blood. Leaning over, he pressed them to her face, smeared the salt and copper of her own menstrual blood across her lips. “Now, I don’t mind blood.”

Sally struggled and screamed a muffled scream, rocking on the bed. Samson pressed his bloodied fingers into Colleen’s mouth, raking his fingernails across her tongue. He pulled free. She gagged and spat and palmed blood from her lips, but already Samson was moving forward, his free right hand seizing the hair at the back of her head, his left pressing the barrel of the gun to her right temple, his cock inches from her face, fewer still.

She opened her mouth and took him in, eyes clenched shut. One scene played out behind her eyelids: she seized it and held it to her heart and played it again and again and again. She retched and gasped, and Samson did not stop. He did not tell her not to bite down—the gun to her head was warning enough, but none of that mattered, anyway, because in her mind it was no longer Guy’s dick lying in the dirt, and the hand holding the bloodied knife was her own.

The head of his cock slammed into the back of her throat. She gagged, and he pulled out, unfinished. She leaned forward, choking.

He hit her with something—his fist or the gun, she did not know. There was a flash—light and pain—and then nothing for a while, and when she came to he was between her legs and ramming into her. He was thick, far thicker than Guy, who was the only man to have ever been inside of her until now, and there was pain, so much pain. She clenched her thighs and threw her arms up and over her face, biting the flesh of her right forearm, trying not to scream, trying not to scream, trying to hold on to that one image, that single sliver of hope in all of this—the hope that she would get her chance and that she would take it.

“God,” she said, mashing her face between her palms, and he pulled out of her once more, rolled her onto her stomach. She had a second to register that he’d used both hands to do so, and then the barrel of the gun pressed into her lower spine as his fingers once more slid into her, worked her, sliding out and up, slick with blood, and toward her asshole, which they massaged and probed and pressed into.

“Filth,” he said, working her ass with two fingers, maybe three—she could not tell. However many, they hurt her, and when he eased them out of her, there was little reprieve. Something else pressed against her, and she squeezed shut her eyes, balled her fists around the bed-sheet, bracing herself. “I’ll bet your fag boyfriend never did this. I’ll bet you wanted him to, though.”

She didn’t scream. The pain was everything, but it did not last.

“You dirty fucking bastard,” someone roared, and the head of Samson’s cock was no longer inside of her. His weight was gone from the bed. There was a crash, a thud—the sound of something heavy slammed against the wall, and Colleen rolled onto her back and sat up in time to see Huffington Niebolt stride toward his son, who sat in a crumpled heap against the wall, naked legs splayed, his rigid cock and tight balls a bloody exclamation point. There was a hole in the sheetrock roughly two feet above his head.

Samson lifted his arms and tried to shield himself from his father’s blows, but it did little good: Huff stomped and stomped, bringing his boot-clad right foot up and down, up and down, and then swinging it in tight arcs, its pointed tip connecting with Samson’s ribs and ass and head and thighs. He stomped Samson’s erection. Through it all, Huff was silent.

He delivered one final kick to Samson’s stomach and leaned over his fallen son, a hand on each knee. The braid hanging from his chin swung toward Samson, who writhed in pain. His dick was no longer hard.

“I should have expected this from you,” Huff said, panting.

Samson grunted something that wasn’t really words, looking up at his father, tears and blood flowing down his cheeks, his lips wrenched into a tortured grimace. His lips were split and bloodied, as were his eyebrows. He pulled himself into a sitting position, the wall once more to his back, the crumbled sheetrock halo positioned directly above his head. His head bobbed; his eyelids were puckered and swollen.

Somewhere nearby one of the children cried. Outside the bedroom, Evie lingered in the hall, eyes wide, one hand pressed to her mouth.

“Get going, Evie. Tend to the kids.” He closed the bedroom door and looked down at his son. “Filthy degenerate.”

Colleen moved to stand, looked over at Sally, and then Samson lashed out, seizing the old man’s beard. Huff tipped forward, and the two men rolled, legs and arms entangled, punching and clawing and growling like mad dogs. Huff drove his knee into Samson’s balls, and the kid screamed, a bright yellow stream of urine arcing from his flaccid penis and onto the carpet. Sam rolled onto his side, drew his knees to his chest.

During the struggle, Colleen slid from the bed and to the narrow strip of floor between the bed and the wall, where she knelt, pulling the sheets toward her naked reddened flesh. Across from her, still lying atop her bed, Sally struggled against her restraints but otherwise kept her eyes on the confrontation. Colleen leaned forward, eyes darting across the floor in search of Samson’s fallen gun.

Stumbling to his feet, Huff leaned against the window between the beds. He looked at Colleen, gasping, and though his eyes skimmed across her, his gaze was elsewhere, distant. His lips were sunken and mashed together like pink slugs, his false teeth having been lost in the struggle.

“Dammit,” he said, sliding a long serrated blade from the sheath at his hip and sitting at the foot of Colleen’s bed. The bedsprings creaked, the headboard rocked, tapped three times against the wall. He pointed the knife at his son. “Don’t make me do this, Sam.”

Samson lay curled upon the floor and whimpering.

“I’m losing too many sons,” Huff said, his voice distorted for lack of his dentures, moist and hollow. “Your little brother—I watched those things bite him. He screamed and he cried and he reached out for me, but there were too many of them. I couldn’t even put him out of his misery—I could only run.”

Huff’s chest heaved, and he cried, great muted sobs that rocked his shoulders and shook the bed. He buried his face in his left hand. The knuckles of his right hand were white around the hunting knife’s hilt. The blade quivered.

Sam mumbled something, rose to his elbows for one quivering second before his face hit the carpet. He seemed to tighten, his knees and arms drawing closer to his chest.

Colleen did not see the gun.

“Like a coward,” Huff said. “I ran like a coward while he screamed for me. I come home—I barely get home, dammit—to find that another of my sons is dead. Connor and Marcus, each on the same day, and now Jacob, the piece of shit.”

Colleen shot a puzzled glance at Sally, who shot one right back at her.

“He was a repulsive animal, and he’s probably better off dead, but he was my son.” Huff raised his arm, pointed at the wall. “He wasn’t theirs to kill. Sam?”

Samson stirred, mumbled.

“Samson?”

“Yuh,” Samson said. “Yes?”

“I knew this was coming, even before all of this. I knew you’d make a go at me, but things are different now. It’s just you and Max and the little ones now,” Huff said, gesturing with the massive hunting knife. “Don’t make me use this, okay? I need you. We all do.”

“Mnn.”

“Okay?” Huff said, rising to his full height and taking a step toward Samson, who rolled onto his back and looked up at his father. The gun clutched in his bloodied hand roared three times.

So close, the noise was deafening. The window behind Huff shattered and rained down in small glistening chunks, and it would not be until later, after the children had gone back to sleep and she had washed the blood from her hands, that Colleen would realize that it had been made of safety glass.

Dropping the knife and clutching his stomach, Huff took two steps backward and fell ass-first through the window. His feet rested in a V upon the low windowsill.

Face battered and swollen, Samson stumbled to his feet. He looked around, picked up his wadded pants. He fired another shot at his fallen father, but it went wild, striking the wall and sending up a small cloud of plaster dust.

Three more shots, each somehow louder than the others, like thunder right there in the room and inside of Colleen’s head. There was another puff of plaster dust, but this time behind Samson, who crouched and, having no other choice, opened the bedroom door and stumbled half-naked into the hall. Someone screamed, and Samson Niebolt was gone. Colleen thought she heard the front door slam shut, but she wasn’t sure.

Things got quiet, but just for a second. More than one child was crying now, and Evie appeared once more in the doorway, pale, eyes wild. There was a bloody handprint on her left shoulder.

Colleen rose to her feet, clutching the thin fitted sheet to her chest. She looked around for her fallen dress but did not see it. No longer caring, she stepped out of her safe little trench between bed and wall and, letting the sheet fall to the ground, stepped naked around the bed and toward Sally, who’d managed to sit up.

“Bastard,” Huff said, mostly outside, his boots sliding from the windowsill. Glass crunched, and for the first time Colleen became aware of the green scent of pine easing in through the shattered window to mingle with the 4th of July stink of gunpowder.

Colleen sat beside Sally, plucked the gag from her mouth, and tried to untie the twine encircling her wrists.

“The knife,” Sally said, nodding toward Huff’s dropped weapon, which lay on the floor amidst a scattering of pebbled glass. Colleen brought the blade to the twine, sliced through it. Sitting up, Sally massaged her wrists.

Huff stepped into the room clutching both hands to his bleeding stomach, his own pistol—a modestly-sized revolver, unlike Sam’s hand cannon—hanging from one of his fingers.

“Thilda,” he said, going first to one knee and then the other. The gun fell to the ground. He sat on his heels. “Get her. She can patch me up. Gotta stop this.” He held out one blood shiny hand, considered it for a few seconds and, cursing under his breath, pressed it to his stomach.

“I’ll get her,” Sally said, standing, kneading the air with her fingers. She reached the door and, turning to face Colleen, nudged it shut. The bolt clicked behind her. Eyes on Colleen, she reached back and locked it. Huff’s head hung forward—he had not noticed.

Understanding, Colleen bent over and plucked Huff’s gun from the floor. With the knife in her left hand, she pointed the gun at his head with her right. Poked him with it. He looked up. Realization dawned upon his pale face.

“What are you going to do with that, little girl?” He said, smiling his sunken old man’s smile.

She leveled it at his face.

“You’ve never killed anything,” Huff said, shaking his head. “Now be serious and put some clothes on, for God’s sake.” He leaned against Colleen’s bed.

Colleen stared down the barrel of the gun, shifted her focus from Huff to the gun, a gun that held only, what, three or four bullets?

Huff’s large eyes were weary and pained, tinged with amusement.

“If you’re going to do it, go on already.”

She tossed the gun aside, out of his reach. She passed the knife to her right hand, her strong hand. He smiled, shook his head once more: silly girl.

Colleen stepped around Huff, seizing the braid that dangled from his chin and wrenching it back across his face, exposing his neck.

“Gah,” she said, and slid the blade across his throat, pulling it toward her body and wrenching it to the right. The serrated edge skipped across his Adam’s apple, and she pressed her knee into his back and pushed him away from her. He hit the floor, blood jetting from his throat and onto the carpet. A scream came out, ragged and through bubbles.

The world went away. Colleen leapt onto Huff’s back, spinning his pony-tail around her left fist and bashing his face into the flowering pool of blood. He gasped and wheezed and gurgled. His feet kicked, he bucked between her naked legs, and his fingers pawed at the back of his neck, looking for purchase, as if they could hold his head in place. They could not.

Gasping through clenched teeth, she sawed and sawed. Blood flowed hot over her hand, loosening her grip on the knife and filling her nose with its metallic stink. She hit bone, found her way around it or through it, and she twisted Papa Huff’s head like a hangnail. It came away from his body with a tug, the final strand of flesh and sinew stretching and tearing and popping.

Panting, she stood, still clutching Huff’s braids. His severed head swung back and forth, tapped against her left leg. He lifted her arm and stared into Huff’s eyes.

She wondered if he could still see her, if the dead ever stopped seeing at all, even for a second, and then tossed his head to the floor. It bounced, gave half a roll and settled against the wall.

Dropping the knife, she looked at Sally, who stood staring at Colleen, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

Sally said half a word, pressed her hand to her mouth, and, leaning forward as much as her condition would allow, vomited onto her stomach and onto the floor between her feet.

Colleen sat on the edge of the bed, gasping and naked, her right hand gloved in Huff’s blood, her inner thighs tacky with her own blood. She pulled the blanket toward her and wiped the blood from her hands. The blanket wasn’t very absorbent, and for a second it seemed like she was just smearing the blood around.

“It’s not over yet,” Sally said. “Max will be here soon.” She squatted, picked up the knife. Wiped the blade on her own blanket. “Be back,” she said and left.

Raking her hand back and forth across her pillowcase, Colleen stared at the body of Huffington Niebolt, lying headless upon the floor at her feet. To her left, the shattered window was a black door leading into the night, and Huff’s neck ended in a puddle of blood that looked too bright, too red, pooled there on the thick carpet. There was blood and there was blood: Huff’s blood, and her own, stamped upon his back as she rode him. His severed head lay in the corner, eyes searching, toothless mouth working.

Out front, children cried. Sally spoke and Evie yelled, and someone else—maybe Mathilda, maybe Embeth—screamed. The tumbling sound of a struggle rolled toward the bedroom. Colleen dragged her gaze from Huffington Niebolt’s impossibly alive head to the door, where Evie stood, enraged, a small lamp from one of the living room end tables in her hand. She lifted it and lashed out, and the lamp spun end over end toward Colleen, the shade striking her shoulder.

“You killed him,” Evie screamed. “You fucking bitch, you killed him.”

There was motion behind Evie. She gasped, stumbling into the bedroom, reaching around and clutching at her back. Her hands came away bright red. She spun, and Sally, pregnant and massive, her lips pulled back from her teeth in an animal sneer, pressed the knife into her once, twice, again and again and again.

Evie hit the wall and slid to the floor, gasping and wheezing, sputtering and twitching and spitting crimson from five or six different holes in her back and chest. She slid to the floor, tracing thick red lines down the wall to her back.

Her lips glistening a whorish shade of red, Evie coughed once and looked up at Sally, who bent over and pressed the knife into her throat three times quick. Her hand was a blur. There was one last jet of blood, garishly bright, like a cartoon splash of red paint, and she fell facedown onto the floor, her head inches from Papa Huff’s neck stump. Their blood mingled.

“I guess I was wrong about her,” Sally said, dropping the knife and stepping over to where Colleen sat, shaking, a bloody wad of blanket clutched to her stomach. Sally grabbed Huff’s gun and left Colleen alone with the dead.

“Wait,” Colleen said, but Sally was gone.

“Thilda,” Sally cried. “Just stay where you are. Stay with the kids. Everything is okay.”

Colleen stood, her body wracked with the shakes, aware only that she had to get out of this room. Her eyes drifted across the blood, Huff’s and Evie’s—God, Evie, she was just finishing up some quilts, and now she lay in a bloody rag-doll sprawl, her mouth open and her blood unfurling, her eyes wide and dead, if only for a little while.

Out front, the door opened, and a voice boomed, and at first Colleen thought it must be Huff, but that couldn’t be right, could it? Huff was right here, his severed head lying on its side and gumming the air, his headless body facedown with dark menstrual blood smeared in a line down the middle of its back.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Oh, God, Max,” Sally said, hysterical. “He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Don’t go in there. It’s awful. Samson attacked him and he’s—”

“Shut up,” Max roared, and Colleen winced. She looked around, wondering just what it was she should do. Huff’s head stared at her. Her body quivered. She couldn’t feel her fingers. It had to be shock. Maxwell Niebolt stepped into the bedroom. He looked down at his fallen father, and his face contorted. He groaned. Sally appeared behind him and pressed the barrel of the gun to the back of his head. Another deafening roar, and Maxwell Niebolt’s forehead burst. He crumpled to the floor, his face a shining and spurting red mask, his arms flopping this way and that.

The place was silent again, but for the sound of one of the kids crying somewhere. Or maybe all of them.

“Get his gun,” Sally said. A gun identical to Huff’s lay near Max’s curled fingers. “Oh,” Sally said, pressed a hand to her stomach, and winced.

“G-guh,” Colleen said, standing, quivering, a woman lost naked in a blizzard. She expected to see her breath churning in plumes from her mouth. She tiptoed shaking through blood and retrieved the gun. She pointed a finger at Sally’s stomach with a question dangling on her lips.

“No,” Sally said, frowning. She gripped her large stomach in both hands. “Not now. But soon.”

Colleen leaned down to pluck her bra from the ground. It lay mere inches away from Huff’s blood, from Evie’s socked foot, which twitched.

“Jesus,” Sally said, taking a bowlegged step toward Evie’s corpse.

Colleen offered Max’s gun to Sally.

“I already have one,” she said, incapable of looking away from Evie’s stirring corpse.

Colleen looked up, and together they watched Evie’s corpse struggle to its knees. Its movements were labored and heavy and confused, like those of some thing moving for the first time after a life of paralysis. It didn’t look like the others Colleen had seen, hadn’t taken on the wan, waxy sheen of death. It looked alive, vital, if not for the eyes. Its pupils were massive; its irises thin blue circles.

Adrenaline shot through Colleen, burning her.

“Jesus,” Sally said, looking from Evie’s corpse to Huff’s head and back again, her gaze settling on Colleen. “It’s real.”

Evie’s corpse looked around, mimicking something like confusion, and when it found Sally, recognition of some sort replaced confusion.

“Ung,” it said, and tried to stand.

The final gunshot of the night. Colleen jumped and shrieked and dropped her bra, which she realized she had been twisting and kneading.

Evie slumped forward, the left side of her head misshapen, her brains spread in a thick line across her back.

“Get dressed.” Sally said.