“Emma,” Earl is saying. “Emma!” I press my hands tight to my head and tighter still. I want to press so hard that my skull collapses, but I am weak and my eyes leak water. The baby’s cries get louder until I open my eyes, and there is Earl. The shape of him is blurry through tears and his mouth is changing, widening into a gaping hole, too big to be real, but the sound is real. That loud baby cry is crinkling his face, exploding out of him. He will swallow me.
“Stop!” I yell. “Stop! Stop! Stop!” I push at my ears. The sound does stop, and the absence of it is so peaceful and complete that I begin to weep. I speak again between gulps for air. “I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.” I say it so much that it doesn’t sound like a word anymore. Earl’s hands are on my arms, pulling my palms from my ears. I open my eyes and there he is. His sweet melty face looking at me.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“I just wanted to go to sleep, Earl.”
“Huh?” Earl asks.
I’ve said wanted. Past tense. I’m thinking of Emma and Ray. Ray and Emma. Of how hard those two tried to go to sleep. To cease to be awake.
“I’m so tired,” I say.
“You can’t go to sleep.”
“I wanted him to love me,” I say. My words slur. “A baby would have made us into something.”
“Stay here with me,” he says. “Don’t go away again.”
The crow woman is here.
I ask her: “How does this end?”
“Who told you it had an end?” she asks.
“Everything has an end. A beginning, middle, and end. That’s basic shit,” I say. “You’re born. You live. You die.”
“It isn’t like that. It’s cyclical.” She cocks her head to the right. “You begin, you begin, you begin. Or you end, you end, you end. Either way there is no stop. No go.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say. My brain is tired and sad and so, so foggy. I’m slogging through snow, dragging my feet from one deep hole into the next.
She does not answer but tilts her head the other way. I look at her tiny cuts, hundreds of them, all over her naked body suddenly budding with black, feathers peeking out from inside and coming to the surface like shoots of grass.
“I want to begin,” I say, swallowing bile.
“Emma,” Earl says, and wraps his arms around me.
He tilts his sweet face to mine. He is a thousand years old. Indefinite suffering sits in his ragged scars, his crooked teeth, but he is also a little boy. I want to keep him. Save him.
“What do I do?”
“He’s coming,” Earl says.
A bullet smashes into the Jeep.
Earl and I are at the cellar door. I pull the metal bar the rest of the way out and we swing the doors open together. In the dark, on the bottom stair there is a body. Curled into a ball. Only the hard shell of its back is showing.
“Lowell,” I call down into the abyss.
My mind is suddenly sober. I wipe blood from my eyebrow before it drips into my eye.
“We need a flashlight,” I say to Earl.
“It’s in the Jeep. You want me to get it?”
“Hell no. You stay as close to me as you can.”
“Lowell Smith! It’s Emma Powers. I need to hear you’re alive.”
Lowell uncurls slowly. The ridge of his back straightening out. Once he’s unrolled, he puts his back to the cellar dirt and covers his eyes to guard against the bright daylight we’ve shone down his hovel hole.
“Fuck you,” he says, his voice soft with hurt.
“Can you walk?” I ask.
“It’s so dark. I’ve been making my dying plans with the old lady and the others.”
“Jesus Christ. I have to go down and get him,” I say, and start down. First foot on the first step, but Earl grabs my arm. “Is he worth saving, Emma?”
“No,” I say without pause and then think but do not say, But maybe I am.
The climb down into the cellar seems short this time. Earl follows closely behind me. I can smell Lowell. That specific smell of him mixed with blood and piss and decay. At the base of the steps, there is darkness. I do not look around for the others. I already know they are there.
“I have a Jeep. It’ll get us out of here and off the mountain, but we have to move now.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he whispers.
“Don’t be stupid, Lowell. Why would I come down here just to hurt you?”
“Again. Hurt me again.”
“Whatever. As if you weren’t going to hurt me. As if you hadn’t already.”
“I was fucking nice to you. But you’re right. I do want to hurt you,” he says savagely, swinging for my ankle.
I step easily away.
“Too slow,” I say.
“There’s a body down here,” he says. “I can’t get close to it but I think it’s been down here awhile.”
“I know,” I say.
“Fantastic. I was just planning what position I’d like to be found in. Replaying Mother’s Milk song by song in my head. I can’t remember track three, but I got all the rest just about perfect.”
“Can you move?”
“I’m not as whole as I used to be. You shot me. That’s what started it off. You evil fucking cunt.”
“Don’t call her that!” Earl says, starting to move between me and Lowell.
“Ladies,” George says from the top of the cellar steps, blocking most of the light. “It’s nice of y’all to consolidate yourselves. I’ll ask you to sit tight and let me take care of what I need to. Should be over in no time.”
I rise to my full height and make a move for the stairs. He holds the barrel to my face. I have Lowell’s gun in my jacket pocket. No bullets, but it’s there. The threat of it could be helpful, but it’s zipped into my inside pocket and will take too long to reach.
“I can shoot you now if you want,” George says, thrilled with himself.
“Go for it,” I say. “I die down here now or you die later when I get out.”
My willingness to be shot in the face catches him off guard. Rattles him a little, and his trigger finger twitches.
Fuck it, I think, but not fast enough. He steps back and slams one cellar door shut and then the other. There is the noise of the pipe sliding into place right before the sound of my hand banging on the metal door.
“George!” I shout.
The fear is instant and full and real. The dark of the cellar so complete that it seems it’s all I have. The dark and the fear. Ghosts rise up from behind me, and they mean me harm. Ray. My dad. Earl’s mother.
A hand closes around my ankle. I scream and bang my head on the metal doors above me, hard. My already bruised brain softens a little more. The ringing in my head brings the baby cry back. So loud and close that I touch my belly to make sure the baby isn’t right here with me.
“Don’t worry. He’s locked me down here plenty,” Earl says.
The baby quiets to a whimper.
“That’s fucking nuts,” Lowell says, and releases my ankle. “I’ll kill you once we’re out of this mess.”
“Sure you will,” I say, and step past him.
Earl leads me carefully down the stairs farther into the dark past his mother. Lowell stays where he is at the foot of the stairs. The four of us tucked away in our new hell.
“I know how to get out. I’ve done it plenty of times,” Earl says.
“I’ve army crawled all over this place,” Lowell says. “There’s no way out except the doors.”
My eyes are adjusting to the dark and my hearing is sharpening. Earl is moving away from me, deeper into the cellar.
“Anyone locked up down here for very long is likely crazy,” Lowell whispers.
“No worse than either of us.”
“Well, that’s not saying much.”
“Earl?” I ask.
“I’m here.”
His voice comes through from a ways away. The space is not large but the darkness hangs between us like a wall. I know reaching him would take quite some time.
“There are loose bricks,” he says. “In the chimney. I know how to climb up.”
I walk back to Lowell but keep my distance. He’s crazy enough to change his mind and yank me down onto the dark cellar floor with him.
“I don’t want to leave you here. Let’s see if you can stand.”
He wheezes as he tries to sit and then gives up.
“Fucker bandaged my leg and fed me. Then he hit me over the head. I was down here when I came to.”
“How’s the leg?”
“Where you shot me, you mean? Bullet seems to have gone through.”
“We gotta go,” Earl says suddenly, right next to us.
“Help me get him up, Earl.”
“No point. He won’t fit up the chimney. Neither will you. There’s a patch of loose bricks at the base. It’s tight, but I can climb up the inside and come out the fireplace upstairs. I’ll go up and come around to let you out. And I don’t think you should go near that man. He wants to hurt you.”
“Kid has a point,” Lowell says.
“We’re not separating,” I say.
“Emma.”
“Earl.”
“I’ll be quick. As long as we get to the Jeep, we will make it out.”
“No.”
A smell comes then. Melting down from above. Something familiar and yet I don’t know what it is right away. A waft of it blows through the dark space and my father’s garage comes alive. The young men who used to work for him. Chris was the youngest and always wore a ball cap. The guy named Jacob who got fired for skimming the register but then rehired because my dad said he was too much like him at twenty to be held accountable. The oil-slick concrete. The noise of the lifts.
“Jesus, is that gasoline?” Lowell asks. George is above us, wetting the floorboards. I hear, but do not feel, drops coming down and hitting the ground around us.
“I’ll be back. Wait on the steps,” Earl says.
My eyes have adjusted enough that I can see Earl’s shape moving into the dark.
“I don’t like this!” I shout.
A few drops hit the top of my head. The boards creak under George’s feet, and I wish I could punch through the floor and drag him down with us.
“He gonna fucking burn us alive?” Lowell asks.
“Seems that way.”
“Holy fuck.”
“Holy fuck,” I repeat.
“You gotta move,” I say, and we set about the struggle of standing him up. We hobble up one step, two. Then rest.
“Why would you come back to help me?”
“Whisper,” I say. “He’s right up there.” We can hear George humming.
“He knows we’re down here. He put us here. Why’d you come get me?”
“I’m tired of running.”
Above us there is a thump, but over that George is hollering. Words I can’t make out, but he is definitely stomping his feet. Pounding on the floor above us. The smell of gasoline is getting stronger.
“Burn!” George screams. One distinct word and then a whoosh that reminds me of a furnace kicking on. The space around us brightens, a glow passing down through the boards above us.
“It’s lit,” Lowell says.
I resist the urge to call Earl’s name.
“He’ll come for us,” I say to Lowell. “He’ll open the door and we’ll get to the Jeep. It’s not far.”
“I can’t move. I can’t make it up the stairs.”
Smoke filters down. The smell of it stronger than the smell of the gas. Toxic. Thick.
“You can. You need to try.”
Lowell nods and together we get him up one stair, then the next.
“Press your face to the doors. The crack. Get air.”
I bury my nose and mouth in the elbow of my jacket. The chimney is visible now from where we stand. Bricks loosed from the base where Earl slipped in. His mother’s legs visible on the other side. I’m watching when she lights up. A small cinder drops onto her leg and what’s left of her catches quickly, burns fast, as if she’s been waiting for it. A new smell fills the room. Burning hair, skin, and fingernails.
“Holy fuck,” Lowell says, removing his face from the crack of air and pressing me to it. I take three gulps and move him back.
She’s lit up now like a bonfire. The lit gasoline and broken splinters of wood are otherwise dropping down and fading out in the cold, half-frozen puddles of the cellar floor, but she, Earl’s mother, is burning.
The cellar doors fly open. The world is bright and oxygen floods in. The flames behind us leap for us but miss. Lowell stumbles into the snow, and I follow.
“Hurry,” Earl says. “He knows I’m out.”
The Jeep is right where we left it. The glass is shattered but the tires are whole and full.
“He won’t make it,” Earl says, nodding at Lowell.
“Maybe I can drag him. Earl, turn on the Jeep. Get in and open the door for us.”
Earl does as I say.
The old house fully ignites, shoots up hot flames and George steps out onto the porch.
“Don’t you leave me, you fucking bitch,” Lowell says. Behind us I see George raising his rifle to shoot.
“Lowell!” I shout his name as one of George’s bullets rips through his skull. Lowell’s eyes are still on me when his body flops to the cellar stairs, his fingers are the last things I see as gravity pulls him underground and into the fire.
I turn to the Jeep and run.
“Shut the doors!” I scream to Earl and listen to them slam as I reach the driver’s side and slam my door too. I turn the Jeep on and it revs up.
George is coughing. The fire creeping up on him too. The smoke finding its way to his lungs. “Belt in,” I say to Earl.
For a second, I look out the shattered windshield and straight at George.
He raises his rifle before I press on the gas, turning swiftly away from him, and a bullet whizzes through the Jeep, close and fast.
“Go right!” Earl shouts. His hands clutch the dash. There’s a snowmobile trail the Jeep can handle, and we crash through brush and snow, rocks and pine trees coming close enough on either side to scrape the Jeep, but I drive on.