The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

For a while I’d been wondering if he’d simply dropped by while visiting his great-aunt, and Shae had suspected him for what he was and followed him here, righteous and foolhardy thing that she could be.

I glanced at the gangly, buzz-cut fellow at his side. “Who’s that you’re with?”

“Him? Andy Ellerby.”

“Any more still inside?”

Ray’s fearsome beard seemed to flare. “You probably know as well as I do, cooking is a two-man job at most.” He scuffed at the ground. “Come on, Dylan, your roots are here. You don’t do this. What say we see what we can work out, huh?”

I looked at his partner. Like Ray, the edges of his face and the top of his forehead were red-rimmed where the gas mask had pressed tight, and he gave me a sullen glare. “Andy Ellerby, did I know you when we were kids?”

He turned his head to spit. “What’s it matter if you did or didn’t, if you can’t remember my name.”

“Good,” I said. “That makes this much a little easier.”

I snapped the riot gun to my shoulder and found that, when something mattered this much, I could again aim at something alive and pull the trigger. The range was enough for the twelve-gauge load to spread out into a pattern as wide as a pie tin. Andy took it in the chest and it flung him back against the trailer so hard he left a dent.

I’d loaded it with three more of the same, but didn’t need them, so I racked the slide to eject the spent shell, then the next three. Ray looked confused as the unfired shells hit the forest floor, and his hand got twitchy as he remembered the holster on his belt, but by then I was at the fifth load and put it just beneath his breastbone, where his belly started to slope.

He looked up at me from the ground, trying to breathe with a reedy wheeze, groping where I’d shot him and not comprehending his clean, unbloodied hands.

“A beanbag round,” I told him. “We use them for riot control. You can’t just massacre a bunch of guys with homemade knives even if they are a pack of savages.”

I knelt beside him and plucked the pistol from his belt before he remembered it, tossed it aside. Behind me, Gina had crept out of hiding with her arms wrapped around herself, peering at us with the most awful combination of hope and dread I’d ever seen.

“I know you didn’t mean to, and I know you don’t even know you did it, but you’re still the reason my little sister never got to turn twenty.” I sighed, and tipped my head a moment to look at the dimming sky, and listened to the sound of every living thing, seen and unseen. “Well… maybe next year.”

I drew the hunting knife from my belt while he gasped; called for Gina to bring me the bundle of hickory sticks that my grandmother must have sharpened years ago, and the mallet with a cast-iron head, taken down from the barn wall. It would’ve been easier with Granddad’s chainsaw, but some things shouldn’t come easy, and there are times the old ways are still the best.

I patted Ray’s shoulder and remembered the stocky boy who’d taken us to the fattest tadpoles we’d ever seen, the juiciest berries we’d ever tasted. “For what it’s worth, I really was hoping it wouldn’t be you coming out that door.”

If the family is to have Shae back again, there’s some things that need doing, and I warn you, they’re ugly business.

Dylan, if you’re reading this, know that it was only you that I ever believed had the kind of love and fortitude in you to take care of it and not flinch from it. Whether you still had the faith in what your summers here put inside you was another matter. I figured that was a bridge we’d cross when it was time.

But then you came back from war, and whatever you’d seen and done there, you weren’t right, and I knew it wasn’t the time to ask. Somehow the time never did seem right. So if I was to tell you that I got used to having Shae around, even as she was, maybe you can understand that, and I hope forgive me for it.

It never seemed like all of her was gone.