BLOOD AND SAND
LAST BRIDGE TOWNSHIP, MONTANA, 1933: TWO NIGHTS AFTER THE STAR FELL DOWN
“Boy!”
The shout is furious: the shout is always furious. Tommy doesn’t understand why they even have a rooster, since it’s not like it ever gets to wake anyone up. Aunt Mary always takes care of that, shouting high and loud and angry even before the sun is in the sky. Boy! Why haven’t the pigs been fed. Boy! Why hasn’t the fire been lit. Boy! Where’s that useless sister of yours; doesn’t she know the morning’s half-over already, and the chickens are still brooding on their eggs.
Boy, why are you here. Boy, why aren’t you good enough.
Boy.
She never yells at Annie the way she yells at him, and he supposes that might be better, except that Annie says it’s not. Annie says there’s something wrong with the way Aunt Mary looks at her, like she’s a prize sow being fattened for the market, and they’re both of them eleven years old, and they both know how to count. Ten boys their age, or near enough as to make no difference, on the farms within a solid day’s ride. Some of those farms are doing fair well, especially when compared to their own rock fields and empty hoppers. Some of those farms might pay for a dutiful daughter-in-law.
No girls. It’s like the gods of Montana know this is no place for girls. He said so to Annie once, when he was feeling particular blue, and she smacked him so hard his arm ached for a week.
“Girls aren’t better nor worse’n boys,” she’d said, voice hot and angry, as it so often was since they’d come to this awful place. “They’re just different. Easier to sell without feeling guilty on it later.” Then she’d been gone, off to do the mending for Aunt Mary—there’s always mending for Aunt Mary; she takes it in from those same neighboring farms, and claims every straight stitch is Annie’s, like that drives the bride price up just a little bit more.
“Boy!”
Tommy jerks himself out of his woolgathering with a start, suddenly terribly aware that he’s committed the greatest sin in all Montana: he has made his Aunt Mary— Aunt Mary, who took him and his sister in when she didn’t have to, didn’t they know their mama had been worthless and their daddy even worse; Aunt Mary, who is the only person left to love them and isn’t sure they’re worth the bother—he has made her call him twice.
He pulls himself out of the cubby in the kitchen where he’d gone to think, and he runs toward the sound of her voice, swift as the cat his mama used to have, that big stupid orange thing with a purr like rocks grinding together. He never would have thought he could miss that cat, which was sometimes mean and left dead mice on his pillow while he slept, so that he’d roll over and see death as soon as he opened his eyes, but he does. He does, though. He misses that cat like anything, dead mice and all, because that cat was a part of home, and this?
This is not home.
His Aunt Mary is standing on the porch, searching the red-tinted horizon like she thinks he’d go running out there, out in the big, unfamiliar desert, where near anything could come to snatch him up and carry him away. The sun is down low enough in the sky that the light has gone all funny and forgiving, and for a heartbeat, she looks almost like his mama. Then she hears his footsteps and turns around, letting him see her face, the way the lines of it have pulled into something petulant and mean, and she doesn’t look like his mama at all.
She’s his mother’s sister, though, the same as Annie is his, born on the same day, in the same bed, and sometimes that’s enough to scare him halfway to the grave. If his mama’s own sister, who she’d always spoken of fondly, can somehow turn into Aunt Mary, what’s going to happen to him and Annie? Is one of them going to get spoiled and twisted, worn into something so petty it can’t even find kindness for kin? And if that has to be—if that somehow can’t be helped—is there any way to make sure he’s the one who suffers?
Annie is good. Annie is maybe the only good thing left in his life. If one of them should be spared, it’s her.
“Where the hell have you been, boy?” she demands.
There’s no good answer here, not the truth and not a lie, so Tommy says nothing at all, merely looks down at his feet and waits to be told what’s expected of him. Silence has been a hard habit to learn. He’s done it, though. For his own sake, and for Annie’s, he’s done it.
“No matter,” grumbles Aunt Mary, sounding almost sorry that he didn’t challenge her authority. “Your uncle’s been out in the cow pasture a good hour past when he told me he’d be home for supper. Go out and fetch him, and be quick about it.”
Tommy looks up, naked fear in his eyes. Aunt Mary is frightening. Uncle Jack is terrifying. But the desert?
The desert is something altogether different. There’s nothing out there under that painted sky that doesn’t think a little boy would taste like heaven incarnate. Even the ground is treacherous, turning underfoot like a live thing, capricious and cruel. Tommy would sooner another session with the belt than go out to the desert.
“Mind me, boy, or I’ll send your sister instead.”
Annie might like that. Annie thinks the desert is beautiful, thinks the things that live there are worth admiring. Annie is wrong, but try telling her that. For a moment, Tommy is tempted to let Aunt Mary send her instead of him—but that’s a temptation that ends with another funeral, another headstone with a family member’s name written in the stone, where it can’t ever be erased.
“I’ll go, I’m sorry, I’ll go,” he says, and runs, almost tripping over his own feet in his urgency to show her what a good boy he can be, how well he can mind her. If she sees, she gives no sign, and when he reaches the edge of the light cast by their oilpaper windows and looks back, she isn’t there anymore. It’s only him, alone against the deepening dark.
No: not quite alone. There’s a scuffle in the rocks and shrub off to his left, the sort of sound that could be the billy goat broken out of its pen again, or could be a coyote, lean and hungry and looking for a little boy to swallow down whole. Tommy gasps and turns—
—and Annie smiles at him bright as anything, pretty as a picture and unafraid of the desert. “Hi, Tommy,” she says, and her voice, while cheerful, is pitched low to keep their aunt—who has ears like a bat sometimes—from hearing her. “Going walking? Mind if I come?”
“The desert’s not any place for a girl,” he whispers harshly back.
Annie shrugs, unconcerned. “It’s not any place for a boy, neither, but there you are, and here I am, and I guess if we’re together, it’ll be a little more of a place for both of us.”
“Why do you want to go to the stupid desert?”
“So I’m not alone with Aunt Mary,” says Annie, and his heart breaks a little. Then, with the careless bluntness of sisters, she adds, “And I want to look for my star, and if you’re with me, the cougars will have something to eat first.”
“Annie,” he hisses, and punches her in the shoulder while she giggles. “Go home.”
“No,” she says. She’s as stubborn as the night is long— and here in the desert, the nights go on forever. “I want the star.”
Tommy glares at her. Annie is unrepentant.
The star fell two days ago. It was like lightning running through the sky, so bright and blazing that it couldn’t be real. For just a moment, as they watched it fall, it had been like Mama had never died, like they were still in California, safe in their little house that had never been fancy, but had been theirs. It had been enough, and they had loved it.
Make a wish, my dearest ones, and see what you can see. That was what she’d always said, with her hands on their shoulders and her eyes on the sky. Make a wish, and maybe it would come true. So they had watched the star fall, and they’d made their wishes, and then Uncle Jack had come hollering for them to get their butts to bed, oil cost money, and the moment had passed.
Not for Annie. She’d been set on going out into the desert and finding that star ever since. She still is. Tommy can see how serious she is in the way she looks at him, the stubborn set of her chin and the narrowing of her eyes.
“You let me come, Thomas Warrington, or I’ll scream so loud Aunt Mary will come running.”
“She’ll smack us both upside the head if you do that.”
“Yeah, but I’ll have earned it.”
Tommy wants to argue, wants to stand here fighting her until the sun comes up or Uncle Jack comes back on his own, whichever one comes first. But he knows better. Maybe he didn’t, when they first came to Montana, but he’s a quick study, and he has to be the responsible one. It was the last thing his mama asked from him. He has to take care of her.
“Hush, then, and come on,” he says. “We have to find Uncle Jack.”
“And my star.”
Lord, but she’s stubborn. “And your star, but Uncle Jack first,” he says.
“All right,” says Annie, sweet and sly, and she slides her hand into his as they look toward the rapidly darkening vastness of the desert, which might as well go on forever. Side by side, they step over the border of their half-tamed farm, and into the wild desert that makes up the bulk of their family’s land.
* * *
Walking in the desert isn’t the same as walking in streets. Everything’s loose here, ready to trip a body up and knock them down. Stones and gravel and great brown sticks, which don’t make so much sense, since it’s not like there’s trees here for them to drop off of. Falling is even worse than it sounds, because half the desert seems designed to hurt. Cactus spines and scorpions, sharp rocks and rattlesnakes— nothing here knows how to be kind. Falling down doesn’t just mean skinned knees and bruised elbows. It means pain, more than Tommy would ever have thought existed.
None of that stops Annie, though. She’s roving ahead, far enough that if she hurts herself he’ll have to run to catch up, looking under stones and scuffing in the gravel, still chasing after her star. Tommy more than half expects her to break her leg.
Even so, it’s a shock when she stops and screams, the sound slicing through the night like a sawblade. All the blood in his body turns into ice in an instant, and he breaks into a run, racing to catch up to where she stands frozen, the remains of her scream held captive behind the wall of her left hand. Her right hand is pointing, jabbing at the air, and he turns to look, briefly unable to understand what he sees.
It’s a cougar, or it was, once, one of those big tawny cats that prowl in the high bluffs. They had cougars in California too, even if he never saw one. They were more common here, their screams breaking the walls of night. They always sounded like they wanted nothing more than to fill their bellies with boy flesh, which was sweet and delicious when compared to the stringy things that called the desert home.
This cougar won’t be screaming anymore. This cougar is recognizable only by the color of its pelt and the shape of its paws. The rest of the creature has been split open like some sort of ripe fruit, and its skull… its skull…
“Where’s its head?” asks Tommy, looking to Annie with alarm, like he’s afraid she has it tucked under her arm as a prize. She shakes her head, still silent. There are tears rolling down her cheeks, fat and sad. Annie’s always loved cats. She even loved that stripy old thing Mama had, even though it scratched and spat whenever she got near. What happened to that cat, Tommy can’t say. It didn’t get sent to Montana, though.
Lucky cat.
“Annie?” This time his voice is soft, hesitant; he’s not sure how scared she is. He can’t leave her here, but he can’t take her home either, not until he finds Uncle Jack. As soon as she followed him into the desert, she became an unsolvable problem.
“It’s not fair.” She lowers her hand. She’s still crying, but she’s angrier than she is upset. That should probably be a good thing. It will be, as long as she aims that angry at something that’s not him. “It’s just a kitty. No one should go killing kitties.”
It’s a kitty big enough to have eaten them both and gone looking for seconds: it’s a killer with whiskers. Tommy’s smart enough not to say any of that. He shakes his head and says, “I don’t think fair counts for much out here.”
“Tommy… what if whatever hurt the kitty is still hungry?”
That’s a new problem, and not one he particularly wants. Tommy swallows hard. “Guess we’d better move then. We need to find Uncle Jack before Aunt Mary comes looking for us. I’m more scared of her than I am of anything that might not be anywhere nearby.”
Annie wipes her cheeks with vicious swipes of her hand, and mutters darkly, “I hate them.”
Those are forbidden, fighting words, and Tommy can’t do anything but nod agreement and whisper, “So do I.”
They walk side by side into the desert night, leaving the slaughtered cougar behind them, staying close together and not admitting why, exactly, they feel like that’s a thing they ought to be doing. The desert sky grows brighter by the second as the stars come out, and the moon is so big it’s like a balloon on a string, floating just out of reach.
They pass a snarl of rattlesnakes on a rock, none of them moving, all of them split open like the cougar, their fangs and rattles missing. “Wolves,” says Tommy, and he doesn’t believe it, and neither does Annie, but words have power, and so they walk on, through the endless desert night, heading for the distant line of wooden posts and barbed wire that marks the end of their land. They have more rocky field than livestock or capacity to farm, but Uncle Jack won’t sell it on. Mama would have called him proud and senseless. Aunt Mary calls him forward-thinking, says Montana will be the next golden shore, just you wait for all those fools on the coast to realize that the real riches are in cattle farming and a sky that goes on the better part of forever.
Tommy thinks Uncle Jack isn’t the only one who’s senseless. But Aunt Mary is as trapped as they are, pinned down by a husband who won’t give up his land. Worse, she’s done what some animals in a trap will do: she’s turned mean. She might not have been, in the beginning. It doesn’t matter now. She’s mean, and she’s cruel, and she’s as bad as their uncle, in her own way. Even if they had a way to escape, she wouldn’t let them. She’d drag them back and holler to the heavens how the trap is the best place she’s ever been, and she’d never let them go.
“I don’t know where my star fell,” says Annie.
Tommy thinks they’ve got bigger things to worry about, things with leather belts and heavy hands, things that would see her married before she was anywhere near a woman. He keeps them to himself. Some things are better unshared.
In the distance, something howls. It’s not a wolf or a coyote; it’s not a cougar. It sounds like the lion they heard once at the circus, captive jungle fury packed into a steel-barred cage, fur that smelled like a kind of heat even the desert has never known. It sounds like Annie’s fallen star given flesh and thought and rage at the idea that the sky is no longer its domain.
It sounds like death.
They cleave together, two children clinging to each other underneath the desert stars. Tommy is shaking, and Annie is still as stone, like she used up all her tremors on the dead cougar. Finally, in a low voice, she asks, “Do you think Uncle Jack heard that?”
“I think the whole state heard that.”
“Come on.” Annie steps away from her brother, not letting go of his hand, and starts to tug him toward the boundary line. “Uncle Jack always has a gun when he goes to the fence. He wants to be ready for bandits. This sounds worse than bandits.”
Tommy wants to argue, wants to tell her that running toward Uncle Jack isn’t running toward safety, no matter what she thinks. But he wants an adult even more, wants someone who can make everything make sense, and so when she breaks into a run, he lets her pull him along with her. He doesn’t fight.
He just wants this to be over.
* * *
Silence greets them at the boundary line—silence, and broken barbed wire all along one stretch of fence, snapped like fishing line when a fish that’s too big catches hold of it. Annie stumbles to a stop, her feet suddenly leaden, her grip suddenly like a vise. Tommy digs his heels into the gravel, holding himself up, holding them both up.
“Annie?” His voice is too loud. It’s like a shout against the dark line of the cliffs. The desert has always been frightening. For the first time, he’s terrified.
“He’s like the kitty,” says Annie. She sounds much younger than she is, sounds like she used to when they were littles, still holding fast to their mother’s hand. There’s a note of wonder in her tone, like she can’t quite make sense of what she’s seeing. “How is he like the kitty?”
“What do you mean?” Tommy asks, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t strain to see. He doesn’t want to know. Annie shouldn’t be seeing this either—whatever it is isn’t meant for her eyes—but he doesn’t pull her back. One of them has to look. It’s already too late for her.
Annie turns, her face pale and drawn, her eyes wide and dry. “His head’s all gone,” she says. She sounds more confused than anything else, as if this is something unthinkable. “How can he be alive when his head’s all gone?”
She already knows the answer. Death is no stranger to either one of them: hasn’t been since they were babies, when their father caught sick and didn’t recover. Even then, death had remained a distant acquaintance until their mother— God rest her soul and all the angels keep her—had started coughing and not been able to stop, not until she’d stopped doing anything but getting slowly cold in her bed, not even breathing anymore. The undertaker had put her in a pine box and the priest had put her underground, and Annie and Tommy know better than anyone what death is. Uncle Jack is dead. Dead is all that’s left for somebody whose head’s all gone.
“We should go,” whispers Tommy, but his feet stay rooted to the spot, because where can they go? To Aunt Mary, who will scream and wail and blame them for the death of the man she married, who maybe she’d loved before Montana had ground all the goodness out of both of them? Aunt Mary isn’t a woman who stands idly by while the world does her wrong. She looks for people to blame. Tommy’s pretty sure that her sister’s unwanted orphans will be easy targets.
They could run away, just the two of them, fleeing deeper into the desert. It has to end somewhere, doesn’t it? Their mama had always said that their pa came from a place called “Boston.” That can’t be any farther from Montana than California is, and the train got them from San Francisco to here in just three days. Maybe they can walk to Boston in four, or five. Not so many. It should still be possible, a goal that can be achieved if they make it past the mountains. They can go to every house in the city until they find their grandparents, and then they’ll live happily ever after, far away from the desert, far away from men who haven’t got any heads, far away from—
“My star!” Annie’s voice is suddenly full of wonder, the body of their uncle clean forgotten as she takes off and runs. Tommy makes a wordless sound of protest as he turns to follow her, and then he sees it, flickering behind a rock in the desert ahead of them: a pale, heatless light, something that doesn’t belong here. It should be burning in the sky, not down here, where ordinary people are trying to survive their ordinary lives.
“Annie!” he shouts. But she’s faster than he is, she always has been. She ran into the world faster than he could, beating him by minutes, and she’s beating him now, running across the desert as fast as hope and fear can carry him. Those two together are a heady brew, and she’s standing by the stone before he can catch her.
The light is not coming from a star. The light is coming from a machine the like of which he’s never seen before, a jagged crack running along one side of it, like it slammed too hard against the ground and hasn’t yet been put back together right. It’s so small that he could hold it in one hand, and bright enough that it takes a moment for Tommy to see the other source of light, the pale green glow that tips some of the stones, pools on some of the gravel. If it wasn’t glowing—cold light, such a cold light—he’d call it blood. But it can’t be that. It can’t.
“Is this my star?” asks Annie, and reaches for the strange machine.
There’s a clicking sound behind them, something like a rattlesnake and something like a spring winding underwater. It’s wet. That’s the only word that fits the sound: wet, meaty, almost. Bowels frozen with his fear, Tommy turns.
The thing behind them is a man. It has to be, because it stands on two legs, wears clothes, has hands like a man’s hands and eyes like a man’s eyes, almost. Close enough. Nothing else has eyes like that, so they must be a man’s eyes.
But it has a face like a flower in the process of withering, a flower made of meat and bone and terror. It clicks at them, and that strange face pulses and rearranges itself, never still, never anything but vital and awful and alive, and Tommy damn near wets himself, because he knows what this is. It’s the Devil his own self, come to haunt the desert, to hunt for bad kids.
It has something in one hand, something red and sticky and segmented like the curve of a spine, and Tommy doesn’t want to see.
“Oh,” says Annie softly. “That’s where their heads went. The star took them.”
It’s such a small statement. It holds too much weight; it can’t possibly keep from collapsing inward on itself. Tommy moans. The thing—the man—the Devil makes that clicking sound again.
Tommy doesn’t decide so much as he just does, stepping between the Devil and his sister and spreading his arms as wide as he can. “You can’t have her,” he says, and his voice barely shakes at all. “She didn’t do nothing to you, and you can’t have her.”
The Devil looks at him, and he’d swear he can see confusion in those amber, almost-human eyes. It clicks again. Tommy shakes his head.
“No,” he says again. “She’s mine. Kill me if you gotta, but you can’t have her.”
The Devil reaches out with one clawed hand. Tommy can hear Annie breathing fast and hard behind him, sounding like she’s finally found the sense to be scared. You didn’t find it fast enough, he thinks. If she hadn’t wanted to come looking for her star, if she hadn’t run away—
You can build a whole palace out of “if,” but there won’t be a single wall thick enough to block the wind.
That was what their mama always used to say. Tommy closes his eyes and waits to die.
The clicking sound gets louder as the Devil gets closer. Tommy feels something brush his cheek, the barest whisper of a sensation, like a bee buzzing a little too near on a summer’s day. There’s a soft, descending purr, and then, silence.
Silence, until Annie whispers, “I don’t think he wants to hurt us, Tommy. He’s just… just looking at you.”
Tommy cracks open one eye. If Annie can stand to look at the Devil, he supposes he can too.
The Devil’s still standing in the same place, looking at the pair of them with an unreadable expression in those awful eyes. Slowly, it raises its hand again, fingers spread, and gestures away from the mountains, back toward the farm.
“Tommy, I think it wants us to go.”
Tommy frowns. This is the Devil. This is Satan, the trickster, the Lord of Hell, and they’re just two innocent kids who couldn’t win if they tried. Why isn’t the Devil hurting them? They should already have their heads off and their blood on the sand, like the cougar, like the rattlesnakes, like Uncle Jack. They should be dead.
“Tommy, come on. Let’s go.”
What do all those things have in common that they don’t? What makes those things the same, and them different?
“Tommy, please. I don’t like this.”
Cougars are dangerous, they’re all teeth and claws and hunger. They’re not mean, not like people can be mean, but oh, they’ll hurt you bad if you let them, or if you surprise them, or if they’re bored. Cougars are about the worst thing in the desert.
“Tommy.”
Rattlesnakes too. Those are some of the worst snakes in the whole world. If they bite you, you’re just as good as dead—that’s what Uncle Jack said when they first came to live here, and Tommy believed him then. Still believes him now. Rattlesnakes aren’t as bad as cougars, but they’re still bad.
Annie whimpers, and doesn’t say anything more.
Uncle Jack, now… Uncle Jack was worse than a cougar, because when a cougar hurt somebody, it didn’t mean it. Cougars hurt people for food and territory, to protect themselves. Uncle Jack, though, he meant it. He liked it when people were afraid of him, when he saw the bruises on their bodies to prove that he’d been there, and Tommy wishes he could be sorry that Uncle Jack is dead now, but he’s not, he’s not, he can’t be and he’s not. Dead is dead and alive is alive, and Uncle Jack is dead and maybe they can be alive a little longer.
Maybe.
He looks at the Devil, standing there all terrible and strange, and suddenly he knows what’s different about him and Annie; what makes them something to spare, and not something to slaughter. It’s about the only thing that makes sense.
“Annie,” he whispers, “I’m gonna need you to trust me, and I’m gonna need you to run.”
“What?” There’s a hitch in her voice, the kind of sound that comes right before she breaks down and has one of her big cries. Tommy can’t afford to let her get that far. She starts crying, they’re never getting out of here together and alive.
Maybe they aren’t anyway. What he’s about to do takes a whole lot of brave and even more stupid. He’s got plenty of the second—Aunt Mary tells him so every day—but he’s not sure how much he’s got of the first. If there’s enough of it to save one of them, he hopes it’s enough to save Annie. Whatever happens to him will be worth it, if he can just save her.
Please, let him save her.
“Run!” he shouts, and he grabs the Devil’s machine, not letting go even when the jagged edges bite into his hands, and he runs. He runs like his heels are on fire and the only bucket of water left in the whole world is back at the house; he runs like his life depends on it. He runs like his sister’s life depends on it.
Annie has always been faster than he is, and when she passes him, legs pumping like pistons and tears streaming down her cheeks, it’s all he can do not to waste his breath on whooping. They’re outrunning the Devil, him and his sister, running for the horizon. Running for their future.
He hears feet pounding the earth behind him, hears breathing that’s too harsh and too fast to be human, and he doesn’t look back. That would be a waste as much as whooping would. He needs to run like nothing on this world has ever run before. He needs to run like he means it.
He means it. Oh, how he means it.
The light from the farmhouse windows is visible ahead of them. The walk into the desert had seemed so long, but maybe it was never more than a few hundred yards; maybe it was fear that stretched the land out like a sheet, drawing it strange and tight and making it eternal. Panic and fear aren’t the same, and it’s panic that drives him now. Panic makes things shorter, smaller, narrower, like Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack have been doing to them since they came here. If they don’t get away now, before the panic crushes them completely, they’re never going to.
I love you, Annie, Tommy thinks fiercely, and runs even harder, toward the light that will change everything. One way or another, it will change everything.
* * *
Annie reaches the house first and runs on, heading for the barn, where her best hiding places are. Tommy doesn’t waver. He hits the porch like thunder and slams the door open, revealing Aunt Mary sitting by the fireplace. She looks up, lowering her knitting, already preparing to scold him for banging the door like that. Then she stops, face drawing in and turning even meaner than usual.
“Where is your uncle, you stupid, worthless boy?” she demands. “Do I need to remind you that you’re here at our sufferance?”
Tommy doesn’t have the breath to answer her. He doesn’t even try. All he can do is fling the machine at her as hard as he can. His arms aren’t as strong as he’d like them to be: it lands on the floor at her feet, rolling to a stop.
“Why, you insolent—” she begins, even as she starts rising from her chair.
Tommy is still moving. He dives beneath the table, putting his hands above his head, closing his eyes as tight as he can.
He hears the Devil enter, claws scraping on wooden floor. He hears the soft, purring click of the Devil’s speech, and Aunt Mary’s scream of terror and outrage and refusal. It’s the first time he’s felt like he understood her all the way down to the bone, because he knows that refusal, that denial that the world can possibly be this cruel.
He hears the shotgun she keeps next to the fireplace rack into place.
He hears her fire.
Then there’s only screaming for a little while—screaming that doesn’t last particularly long. Something warm and wet hits his cheek. He keeps his eyes closed, keeps them closed until he hears footsteps approaching, until something hits the floor in front of him.
Cautiously, Tommy cracks one eye open, and sees Aunt Mary’s shotgun in front of him. He opens his other eye and lifts his head, and there’s the Devil looking down at him, that strange meaty flower of a face pulsing as its petals open and close, open and close.
Everything is blood. Aunt Mary… isn’t, anymore. What’s left doesn’t really look like her. Not at all.
The Devil clicks, and nudges the gun closer to Tommy with its foot. He shakes his head, pulling himself farther under the table.
“N-no,” he says. “I’m not a danger. I’m not.”
The Devil looks at him thoughtfully. Tommy looks back, and waits.
Finally, the Devil says, in a voice that is no man’s, that sounds almost approving, “Gahn’tha-cte,” and turns, and walks away.
Tommy stays where he is, and cries.
* * *
Annie finds him there, he doesn’t know how much later. She puts her arms around him and pulls him out into the light, her tears falling on his cheek.
“It left,” she says. “It took its machine and it left. Tommy, what did you do?”
He set them free. He led the Devil to Aunt Mary, and saw her judged for her sins, and now they’re free. They can find some other family to live with, family that doesn’t hit, that doesn’t hurt. They can get out of this desert.
He killed her. As sure as if he’d been the one to hold the knife, he killed her. He’s a sinner now, like her, like Uncle Jack, and when the Devil comes back—the Devil always comes back—he’ll be fair game. He’ll be something to be hunted.
For now, in this moment, he puts his arms around his sister, and he doesn’t say any of those things. He holds her fast, and he says nothing at all.