The small house sat at the end of a dirt lane on the line between acreages. It was painted canary yellow, a color Brooke had picked out after she and Spady bought the place.
David’s truck fishtailed in the sandy tracks as he sped down the lane. He’d been calling her ever since he got to his phone, but each time, it would ring and ring and ring and then go to voicemail.
The house sat in a ring of cedars, each about ten feet tall, their dark-green branches rusty, laden with reddish pollen. He slowed as he rounded the trees, pulling into the driveway. Both vehicles were there. Spady’s old car. Brooke’s truck.
He forced himself to breathe, to calm himself. He needed to go inside and act like everything was fine. Just some follow-up with the incident from last night. He needed to take Brooke outside to talk through the shooting—to get her away from the house. Away from him. Still, David hoped it wasn’t true. He would do his job, investigate the lead, find a way to clear Spady’s name, then keep hunting.
As he walked up the sidewalk, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. The shadow. The silhouette. Both times he’d seen it, it had two arms. The killer had two arms.
David knocked and waited.
No answer.
He knocked again. Louder. Then he called out their names.
No answer.
He forced another deep breath, then drew his gun. His bandaged hand ached at the weight of it. He ignored the pain and walked around the house, past the bench seat where he and Spady had sat and drank beers.
The back door was wide open. David stepped through into the silence of the house.
On the tile floor, he saw it. A bare footprint, heading toward the door, out of the house. A footprint stamped in blood.
More footprints, leading from the kitchen. David followed them, scanning the house. At the edge of the kitchen, a ceramic bowl lay shattered on the counter. Around it, spatters and handprints of blood covered the surface.
David almost stepped on her pistol as he came around the counter. It rested on the floor just out of the grasp of her outstretched, motionless hand.
He thought she was dead, but then Brooke’s eyes moved. He kneeled beside her, cradling her head. As he lifted her, blood pooled out across the white linoleum.
“Brooke! Stay with me. You’re going to be okay.”
“David.”
Her voice was a halting whisper. Just below her right breast, her shirt was cut cleanly. Beneath it, David saw a deep wound. He set down his gun and put his hands on the cut and leaned, applying as much pressure as he could. She didn’t even grimace. Her eyes looked like wet marbles. She was in shock, beyond pain.
“Hold on, Brooke. Hold on.”
He lifted a bloody hand and pulled free his phone, then dialed Andrea. He’d already called Priest from the truck. His fingers slipped over the numbers, blood smearing across the screen.
“Andrea! Brooke’s house! Send an ambulance! Now!”
He dropped the phone, leaving the line open. Now he used both hands to keep up the pressure while he looked over her body for other wounds. A small cut had started near her left armpit, but it ended only a few inches down.
“He stopped,” Brooke whispered.
“Quiet. Save your energy, okay?”
She looked up, and some of her life suddenly reappeared, her eyes wide and blue and beautiful. Then she started to talk, her voice clearer but still faltering.
“He said he had to do it. The thing. It’s making him. But he couldn’t . . . Not to . . .” she choked.
David kept up the pressure. Blood seeped up, over his fingers. He couldn’t feel her lungs rise and fall, could just barely feel her heart as it labored to keep pumping, the pace slackening.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice weakening. Whatever strength she had summoned was fading.
“No,” he whispered. “No.”
“I knew. Last night. I saw him. I knew. I think I knew before that.”
Her voice became a whisper.
“I didn’t want . . . I tried to talk to him. I tried.”
David willed the ambulance to move faster. Where was it?
Brooke glanced over, at her gun.
“I couldn’t shoot him. David, I’m . . .”
She said nothing else.
David held her for a time that felt like days. Finally, he let her go. It wasn’t done. He picked up his gun and stood. There, in front of him, were the footprints, leading outside. Now it was time to follow them. To end this.
Outside, the footprints quickly grew fainter, but they led unerringly north, into the row of cedars, where they disappeared among the scrub brush.
David didn’t need the tracks; he knew where Spady was going.
David went back to his truck. He tucked the pistol into his waistband, took his shotgun from the rack in the rear window, and loaded eight shells.
He resumed the trail, holding the gun in his right hand, barrel resting across his left forearm. Ready to fire in a flash, just the way his dad had taught him when they’d gone out to walk the fields, to hunt pheasants and quail.
A sudden gust of wind shook the cedars and freed them of their pollen, which came off in ghostlike sheets that held in the air, danced, and disappeared.
Spady never said it, but David knew Spady had wanted to buy this piece of land because of where it sat. Just down from the place where they’d spent so much time playing as children, the place that had been a refuge for the four of them: Jason, David, Ben Junior, and Spady.
It sat right beside David’s parents’ farm.
He crossed carefully over a half-collapsed barbed wire fence, never taking his eyes from the terrain ahead. He hadn’t stepped foot on this land since that day, all those years ago, when the sky opened, and death came for them.
He walked through rows of massive cottonwood trees that had rotted and fallen, lying haphazardly like the ancient columns of some once-great city. The bark had mostly sloughed off, and their trunks were bleached as white as bone.
Somewhere behind him, sirens shrieked.
Too far away to help Brooke. Or anyone else.
David came into a clearing. The years had changed it, but he knew instantly the landmarks. And there was the house. No longer a structure but a pile of broken lumber, grown over with vine and weed. A chill raced along the scar on his back.
“You haven’t been back, have you?”
The voice came from beside the house, by a little shed that had somehow gone untouched in the storm, though it now looked rotted enough that a gentle push could topple it.
Spady.
He wore a T-shirt and jeans but no socks or shoes. His clothes were streaked and splotched with blood.
“After we bought the place, I started walking over. I know you don’t like it. Me? I find it pretty peaceful. It was actually just over that way,” he pointed to the east, “that I found it.”
David’s hand gripped the shotgun.
“Found what?”
Spady grinned.
“Oh, I think you know.”
David lifted the gun just slightly, keeping distance between them.
“She’s dead,” David said.
Spady’s head jerked to the side. Then back.
“Goddammit, David. I didn’t mean—I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to hurt her. It . . . it’s this thing. This thing in me.”
Beyond Spady, the sun settled over the giant’s supine torso, casting the spire in a brilliant red glare.
“What? What made you kill your wife? Kill Jason? Kill all those people?”
David’s voice was growing louder.
Spady didn’t answer. Not with words.
His arm began to tremble, the one that ended just below the elbow. The stump of it seemed to pulse, like a squid straining to push out eggs.
The skin began to stretch, unfurl. Something black trickled out, like liquid mercury. Only it didn’t drip. It grew upon itself, longer and longer.
An arm, emerging from the wound. Only in the place where the hand should have been, the dark, metallic substance thinned and stretched farther, sharpening into a form that David recognized from the night that Jason died.
A blade, long and curved.