“What’s that?” Black Shirt’s eyes jerked in her direction.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte whispered. Urine puddled onto the floor. She kept her head down, rocking back and forth. “I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry.”
Samantha took her sister’s hand.
“Tell us what you want,” Gamma said. “We’ll give it to you and then you can leave.”
“What if I want that?” Black Shirt’s beady eyes were trained on Charlotte.
“Please,” Gamma said. “I will do whatever you want. Anything.”
“Anything?” Black Shirt said it in a way that they all understood what was being offered.
“No,” Hightop said. His voice was younger-sounding, nervous or maybe afraid. “We didn’t come for that.” His Adam’s apple jogged beneath the ski mask as he tried to clear his throat. “Where’s your husband?”
Something flashed in Gamma’s eyes. Anger. “He’s at work.”
“Then why’s his car outside?”
Gamma said, “We only have one car because—”
“The sheriff …” Samantha swallowed the last word, realizing too late that she shouldn’t have said it.
Black Shirt was looking at her again. “What’s that, girl?”
Samantha put down her head. Charlotte squeezed her hand. The sheriff, she had started to say. The sheriff’s man would be here soon. Rusty had said they were sending a car, but Rusty said a lot of things that turned out to be wrong.
Gamma said, “She’s just scared. Why don’t we go into the other room? We can talk this out, figure out what you boys want.”
Samantha felt something hard bang against her skull. She tasted the metal fillings in her teeth. Her ears were ringing. The shotgun. He was pressing the barrel to the top of her head. “You said something about the sheriff, girl. I heard you.”
“She didn’t,” Gamma said. “She meant to—”
“Shut up.”
“She just—”
“I said shut the fuck up!”
Samantha looked up as the shotgun swiveled toward Gamma.
Gamma reached out, but slowly, as if she was pushing her hands through sand. They were all suddenly trapped in stop-motion, their movements jerky, their bodies turned to clay. Samantha watched as one by one, her mother’s fingers wrapped around the sawed-off shotgun. Neatly trimmed fingernails. A thick callous on her thumb from holding a pencil.
There was an almost imperceptible click.
A second hand on a watch.
A door latching closed.
A firing pin tapping against the primer in a shotgun shell.
Maybe Samantha heard the click or maybe she intuited the sound because she was staring at Black Shirt’s finger when he pulled back the trigger.
An explosion of red misted the air.
Blood jetted onto the ceiling. Gushed onto the floor. Hot, ropey red tendrils splashed across the top of Charlotte’s head and splattered onto the side of Samantha’s neck and face.
Gamma fell to the floor.
Charlotte screamed.
Samantha felt her own mouth open, but the sound was trapped inside of her chest. She was frozen now. Charlotte’s screams turned into a distant echo. Everything drained of color. They were suspended in black and white, like the bachelor farmer’s picture. Black blood had aerosoled onto the grille of the white air conditioner. Tiny flecks of black mottled the glass in the window. Outside, the night sky was a charcoal gray with a lone pinlight of a tiny, distant star.
Samantha reached up with her fingers to touch her neck. Grit. Bone. More blood because everything was stained with blood. She felt a pulse in her throat. Was it her own heart or pieces of her mother’s heart beating underneath her trembling fingers?
Charlotte’s screams amplified into a piercing siren. The black blood turned crimson on Samantha’s fingers. The gray room blossomed back into vivid, blinding, furious color.
Dead. Gamma was dead. She was never again going to tell Samantha to get away from Pikeville, to yell at her for missing an obvious question on a test, for not pushing herself harder in track, for not being patient with Charlotte, for not being useful in her life.
Samantha rubbed together her fingers. She held a shard of Gamma’s tooth in her hand. Vomit rushed into her mouth. She was blinded by tears. Grief vibrated like a harp string inside her body.
In the blink of an eye, the world had turned upside down.
“Shut up!” Black Shirt slapped Charlotte so hard that she nearly fell out of the chair. Samantha caught her, clinging to her. They were both sobbing, shaking, screaming. This couldn’t be happening. Their mother couldn’t be dead. She was going to open her eyes. She was going to explain to them the workings of the cardiovascular system as she slowly put her body back together.
Did you know that the average heart pumps five liters of blood per minute?
“Gamma,” Samantha whispered. The shotgun blast had opened up her chest, her neck, her face. The left side of her jaw was gone. Part of her skull. Her beautiful, complicated brain. Her arched, aloof eyebrow. No one would explain things to Samantha anymore. No one would care whether or not she understood. “Gamma.”
“Jesus!” Hightop furiously slapped at his chest, trying to brush off the chunks of bone and tissue. “Jesus Christ, Zach!”
Samantha’s head snapped around.
Zachariah Culpepper.
The two words flashed neon in her mind. Then: Grand theft auto. Animal cruelty. Public indecency. Inappropriate contact with a minor.
Charlotte wasn’t the only one who read their father’s case files. For years, Rusty Quinn had saved Zach Culpepper from doing serious time. The man’s unpaid legal bills were a constant source of tension between Gamma and Rusty, especially since the house had burned down. Over twenty thousand dollars was owed, but Rusty refused to go after him.
“Fuck!” Zach had clearly seen Samantha’s flash of recognition. “Fuck!”
“Mama …” Charlotte hadn’t realized that everything had changed. She could only stare at Gamma, her body shaking so hard that her teeth chattered. “Mama, Mama, Mama …”
“It’s all right.” Samantha tried to stroke her sister’s hair but her fingers snagged in the braids of blood and bone.
“It ain’t all right.” Zach wrenched off his mask. He was a hard-looking man. Acne scars pocked his skin. A spray of red circled his mouth and eyes where the blowback from the shotgun had painted his face. “God dammit! What’d you have to use my name for, boy?”
“I d-didn’t—” Hightop stammered. “I’m sorry.”
“We won’t tell.” Samantha looked down, as if she could pretend she hadn’t seen his face. “We won’t say anything. I promise.”
“Girl, I just blew your mama to bits. You really think you’re walking out of here alive?”
“No,” Hightop said. “That’s not what we came for.”
“I came here to erase some bills, boy.” Zach’s steely gray eyes turreted around the room like a machine gun. “Now I’m thinking it’s me that Rusty Quinn’s gotta pay.”
“No,” Hightop said. “I told you—”
Zach shut him up by jamming the shotgun into his face. “You ain’t seein’ the big picture here. We gotta get outta town, and that takes a hell of a lot of money. Everybody knows Rusty Quinn keeps cash in his house.”
“The house burned down.” Samantha heard the words before she registered that they were coming from her own mouth. “Everything burned down.”
“Fuck!” Zach screamed. “Fuck!” He grabbed Hightop by the arm and dragged him into the hallway. He kept the shotgun pointed in their direction, his finger on the trigger. There was furious whispering back and forth that Samantha could clearly hear, but her brain refused to process the words.
“No!” Charlotte fell to the floor. A trembling hand reached down to hold their mother’s. “Don’t be dead, Mama. Please. I love you. I love you so much.”
Samantha looked up at the ceiling. Red lines criss-crossed th
e plaster like silly string. Tears flooded down her face, soaked into the collar of her only shirt that had been saved from the fire. She let the grief roll through her body before she forced it back out. Gamma was gone. They were alone in the house with her murderer and the sheriff’s man was not going to come.
Promise me you’ll always take care of Charlie.
“Charlie, get up.” Samantha pulled at her sister’s arm, eyes averted because she couldn’t look at Gamma’s ripped-open chest, the broken ribs that stuck out like teeth.
Did you know that shark teeth are made of scales?
Sam whispered, “Charlie, get up.”
“I can’t. I can’t let—”
Sam wrenched her sister back into the chair. She pressed her mouth to Charlie’s ear and said, “Run when you can.” Her voice was so quiet that it caught in her throat. “Don’t look back. Just run.”
“What’re you two saying?” Zach jammed the shotgun against Sam’s forehead. The metal was hot. Pieces of Gamma’s flesh had seared onto the barrel. She could smell it like meat on the grill. “What did you tell her to do? Make a run for it? Try to get away?”
Charlotte squeaked. Her hand went to her mouth.
Zach asked, “What’d she tell you to do, baby doll?”
Sam’s stomach roiled at the way his tone softened when he talked to her sister.
“Come on, honey.” Zach’s gaze slithered down to Charlie’s small chest, her thin waist. “Ain’t we gonna be friends?”
Sam stuttered out, “S-stop.” She was sweating, shaking. Like Charlie, she was going to lose control of her bladder. The round barrel of the gun felt like a drill burrowing into her skull.
Still, she said, “Leave her alone.”
“Was I talking to you, bitch?” Zach pressed the shotgun against Sam’s head until her chin pointed up. “Was I?”
Sam gripped her hands into tight fists. She had to stop this. She had to protect Charlotte. “You leave us alone, Zachariah Culpepper.” She was shocked by her own defiance. She was terrified, but every ounce of terror was tinged with an overwhelming rage. He had murdered her mother. He was leering at her sister. He had told them both that they weren’t walking out of here. She thought of the hammer tucked in the back of her shorts, pictured it lodging into Zach’s brain. “I know exactly who you are, you fucking pervert.”
He flinched at the word. Anger contorted his features. His hands gripped the shotgun so hard that his knuckles turned white, but his voice was calm when he told her, “I’m gonna peel off your eyelids so you can watch me slice out your sister’s cherry with my knife.”
Her eyes locked with his. The silence that followed the threat was deafening. Sam couldn’t look away. Fear ran like razor blades through her heart. She had never in her life met someone so utterly, soullessly evil.
Charlie began to whimper.
“Zach,” Hightop said. “Come on, man.” He waited. They all waited. “We had a deal, all right?”
Zach didn’t move. None of them moved.
“We had a deal,” Hightop repeated.
“Sure,” Zach broke the silence. He let Hightop take the shotgun from his hands. “A man’s only as good as his word.”
He started to turn away, but then changed his mind. His hand shot out like a whip. He grabbed Sam’s face, fingers gripping her skull like a ball, slamming her back so hard that the chair fell away and her head clanged into the front of the sink.
“You think I’m a pervert now?” His palm crushed her nose. His fingers gouged into her eyes like hot needles. “You got something else to say about me?”
Samantha opened her mouth, but she had no breath to form a scream. Pain ripped through her face as his fingernails cut into her eyelids. She grabbed his thick wrist, blindly kicked out at him, tried to scratch him, to punch him, to stop the pain. Blood wept down her cheeks. Zach’s fingers shook, pressing so hard that Sam could feel her eyeballs flex back into her brain. His fingers curled as he tried to rip off her eyelids. She felt his nails scrape against her bare eyeballs.
“Stop it!” Charlie screamed. “Stop!”
The pressure stopped just as suddenly as it had started.
“Sammy!” Charlie’s breath was hot, panicked. Her hands went to Sam’s face. “Sam? Look at me. Can you see? Look at me, please!”
Carefully, Sam tried to open her eyelids. They were torn, almost shredded. She felt like she was looking through a piece of old lace.
Zach said, “What the fuck is this?”
The hammer. It had fallen out of her shorts.
Zach picked it up off the floor. He examined the wooden handle, then gave Charlie a meaningful look. “Wonder what I can do with this?”
“Enough!” Hightop grabbed the hammer and threw it down the hallway. They all listened to the metal head skip across the hardwood floor.
Zach said, “Just having a little fun, brother.”
“Both of you stand up,” Hightop said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Charlie stayed on the floor. Sam blinked away blood. She could barely see to move. The overhead light was like hot oil in her eyes.
“Help her up,” Hightop told Zach. “You promised, man. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”
Zach yanked Sam’s arm so hard that it almost left the socket. She struggled to her feet, steadying herself against the table. Zach pushed her toward the door. She bumped into a chair. Charlie reached for her hand.
Hightop opened the door. “Go.”
They had no choice but to move. Charlie went first, shuffling sideways to help Sam down the stairs. Outside the bright lights of the kitchen, her eyes stopped throbbing as hard. There was no adjusting to the darkness. Shadows kept falling in and out of her gaze.
They should have been at track practice right now. They had begged Gamma to let them skip for the first times in their lives and now their mother was dead and they were being led out of the house at gunpoint by the man who had come here to erase his legal bills with a shotgun.
“Can you see?” Charlie asked. “Sam, can you see?”
“Yes,” Sam lied, because her vision was strobing like a disco ball, except instead of flashes of light, she was seeing flashes of gray and black.
“This way,” Hightop said, leading them not toward the old pickup truck in the driveway, but into the field behind the farmhouse. Cabbage. Sorghum. Watermelons. That’s what the bachelor farmer had grown. They had found his seed ledger in an otherwise empty upstairs closet. His three hundred acres had been leased to the farm next door, a thousand-acre spread that had been planted at the start of spring.
Sam could feel the freshly planted soil under her bare feet. She leaned into Charlie, who held tight to her hand. With her other hand, Sam reached out blindly, unreasonably afraid that she would run into something in the open field. Every step away from the farmhouse, away from the light, added one more layer of darkness to her vision. Charlie was a blob of gray. Hightop was tall and skinny, like a charcoal pencil. Zach Culpepper was a menacing black square of hate.
“Where are we going?” Charlie asked.
Sam felt the shotgun press into her back.
Zach said, “Keep walking.”
“I don’t understand,” Charlie said. “Why are you doing this?”
Her voice was directed toward Hightop. Like Sam, she understood that the younger man was the weaker one, but that he was also somehow in charge.
Charlie asked, “What did we do to you, mister? We’re just kids. We don’t deserve this.”
“Shut up,” Zach warned. “Both of you shut the fuck up.”
Sam squeezed Charlie’s hand even tighter. She was almost completely blind now. She was going to be blind forever, except forever wasn’t that much longer. At least not for Sam. She made her hand loosen around Charlie’s. She quietly willed her sister to take in their surroundings, to stay alert for the chance to run.
Gamma had shown them a topographical map of the area two days ago, the day they had moved in. She was try
ing to sell them on country life, pointing out all the areas they could explore. Now, Sam mentally flipped through the highlights, searching for an escape route. The neighbor’s acreage went past the horizon, a clear open plane that would likely lead to a bullet in Charlie’s back if she ran in that direction. Trees bordered the far right side of the property, a dense forest that Gamma warned was probably filled with ticks. There was a creek on the other side of the forest that fed into a tunnel that snaked underneath a weather tower and led to a paved but rarely used road. An abandoned barn half a mile north. Another farm two miles east. A swampy fishing hole. Frogs would be there. Butterflies would be over here. If they were patient, they might see deer in this field. Stay away from the road. Leaves three, quickly flee. Leaves five, stay and thrive.
Please flee, Sam silently begged Charlie. Please don’t look back to make sure I’m following you.
Zach said, “What’s that?”
They all turned around.
“It’s a car,” Charlie said, but Sam could only make out the sparkling headlights slowly traveling down the long driveway to the farmhouse.
The sheriff’s man? Someone driving their father home?
“Shit, they’re gonna make my truck in two seconds.” Zach pushed them toward the forest, using the shotgun like a cattle prod to make them walk faster. “Y’all keep moving or I’ll shoot you right here.”
Right here.
Charlie stiffened at the words. Her teeth started to chatter again. She had finally made the connection. She understood that they were walking to their deaths.
Sam said, “There’s another way out of this.”
She was talking to Hightop, but Zach was the one who snorted.
Sam said, “I’ll do whatever you want.” She heard Gamma’s voice speaking the words alongside her. “Anything.”
“Shit,” Zach said. “You don’t think I’m gonna take what I want anyways, you stupid bitch?”
Sam tried again. “We won’t tell them it was you. We’ll say you had your masks on the entire time and—”
“With my truck in the driveway and your mama dead in the house?” Zach huffed a snort. “Y’all Quinns think you’re so fucking smart, can talk your way outta anything.”