Matt watched the gun bob and weave in front of him and wondered if Earl would actually be able to hit him. The large man looked as if it were taking every ounce of his willpower just to remain on his feet: his knees were buckled slightly and, even through the snow, Matt could see that there was a glassy haze to his eyes. There couldn’t be much life left in him: with the freezing temperatures, the arrow wounds scattered across his torso, and accompanying loss of blood, it could only be a matter of time before Earl collapsed. It seemed as if he barely had the strength to even hold the gun, much less pull the trigger.
Still… he’d somehow managed to dig the weapon out of the snow, haul his sorry ass through the woods, and make his way back here. Which meant that he had the heart of a survivor. A lesser man simply would have laid out there in the wilderness, closed his eyes, and allowed death to claim him. But this brute… he was something else.
In a way, Matt almost respected the man. He saw in him a lot of the same qualities that he’d recognized in Mona. You could teach a person to be a marksman; they could also learn how to stalk prey and not strike until just the right moment. If exposed to enough violence and bloodshed, the same person could even be trained not to so much as even blink as they watched the life drain out of another human’s body. But the innate hunger to persevere, to push your mind and body well beyond its limits for the achievement of a singular goal: that was something you had to be born with.
It was also what made Earl as dangerous as a hand grenade that may, or may not, have had its pin removed. Fate often had a way of watching over those with the drive for dominance. Maybe it was evolutionary or perhaps the person’s personality was simply so strong that events unfolded according to its influence. Whatever the reason, Matt had seen a time and time again. A bitch in the woods who took three shots to the head before she finally stopped stabbing Matt’s father with a broken limb. The husband in Roanoke who’d had a pistol fall right into his lap when the night stand toppled over onto his dying wife.
And these rare moments were what made it all worth it: everything else was nothing more than a passing amusement, the souls of the dead like tokens spent in the arcade of life. But times like this one, when Matt felt as if he were facing down a true contender, those were the instants when he truly felt most alive. Here in the snow, surrounded by the desolate wilderness and dilapidated farmhouse, he and Earl were like gladiators facing off in an empty coliseum. Only one would taste the blood of his enemy. Only one would emerge victorious.
“Let’s do this thing.”
With a battle cry that burst from his mouth in plumes of breath, Matt charged at his worthy opponent. He weaved through the snow, darting back and forth erratically as Earl tried to follow him with the muzzle of the gun. Closing the distance rapidly, he was ready to rip out the bearded man’s tongue out with his bare fingers if he had to. And that was when Earl squeezed the trigger.
Rather than a roar that boomed out like thunder in a snowstorm, however, there was only a soft click. Earl’s finger pulled the trigger again and again, but each time the result was the same. With a laugh, Matt stopped; still ten feet away from the other man, he shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he were seeing.
“What’s the matter, big guy? Out of ammo there?”
For a moment, Matt’s eyes flittered over Earl’s shoulder and his smile broadened until it looked as if he were shooting a dental commercial in the midst of a blizzard. When he next spoke, his voice was much louder as he squatted down and picked up a handful of snow.
“Killing your mother… that was something else. A real hoot, as you’d say. You should have heard her. The screams, the crying… the way she clung to me like a frightened kid just before I tossed her ass down those stairs.”
By this time Matt had stood again and he drew back his arm like a baseball player winding up for a pitch. Hurling the snowball at Earl, he continued talking, his voice loud and rapid.
“You should’ve stayed down out there in the forest.”
Earl tried to dodge the projectile but it splatted against his face squarely and exploded in a shower of snow.
“You should have just laid out there and let the storm bury you and then things might not have turned out this way. If nothing else, you could’ve hid out there in the woods. Let us think you were dead and then come crawling back home once we were on our merry way. But, no. You had to think you were Mr, Tough Guy, didn’t you? You had to have your revenge. How’s that working out for ya, sport?”
Earl staggered forward as if barely clinging to consciousness. He’d turned the useless gun over in his hand so that he now held it by the barrel and brandished it like a club. Matt, however, seemed nonplused by the man’s stop and go aggression. He continued scooping handfuls of snow from the ground, rolling them into loose balls, and lobbing them at his attacker. And the entire time his monologue continued in its rapid fire delivery.
“Your little plaything’s dead. Your mother’s dead. Your brother’s dead. And soon, you’ll be dead, too. See, me and Mona we’ve been at this a long, long time. That I-77 killer they’ve been prattling on and on about on the radio? Yeah, that’s us. You won’t be the first family we’ve killed, not by a long shot. But I can say this: you were certainly the most interesting.”
A snowball thudded against Earl’s chest as Matt hopped from foot to foot.
“You know what your downfall was, Goliath? Your anger. I had to teach my wife how to channel hers, just like my Daddy taught me. But you? You let it blind you. You let it lead you into my little trap out there in the woods. It’s the reason you’ve got more arrows in you than a flowchart. And it’s also the reason why you’ve been listening to me prattle on and on without every realizing that this was about to happen.”
Earl never heard the whoosh of the crutch as it cut through the air. Just as he’d never heard Mona making her way through the snow as Matt’s taunts covered the sound of her progress. One moment, he was simply trying to focus on the snowball tossing asshole in front of him; and the next, pain shot through the back of his skull as a flash of brilliant light exploded in his field of vision.
He fell to his knees and wobbled there as his hands touched the back of his head and came away bloody. Before he’d even had a chance to comprehend what this might mean, however, Mona swung the crutch again. This time, it thudded against his temple and, as the world went dark, Earl Gruber fell face first into the snow.
At first, he was only aware of muffled voices that sounded as if they were originating from somewhere in the back of his head. No real words. Just a lull that rose and fell in volume. Bit by bit, the sounds began to string themselves into words; with comprehension there also came a pounding pain in the back of his head that was ten times worse than any hangover he’d ever suffered through.
“… sit him up.”
“Damn it, Mona, I’m doing my best. He’s a big fucking guy.”
His body was being jostled. He could feel his rolls of fat jiggling as he was shifted and positioned and, somehow, he knew that was no longer outside. It smelled like home here. Slightly musty, a trace of Mama’s powder lingering in the air…
His eyelids fluttered open, but there were only blobs of color where detail should be.
Was he sitting up? It felt like he was sitting up….
“Shit, sweetie, he’s coming to. Be a dear and whack him again, okay?”
His head jerked to the side as something hard and unforgiving slammed into his cheek. Darkness overtook him again and when reality next reasserted itself, it did so with pain unlike any he’d ever known.
It’d taken a lot of work, but Matt and Mona had managed to drag Earl’s unconscious body into the house. By the time they’d made it through the front door, they’d both collapsed in the foyer and lay there, panting in each other’s arms and grinning like a young couple who’d just lost their virginity. Earl had moaned once or twice, but every time the large man had seemed to be coming around, Mona would swing her crutch with a well placed shot to the temple.
Dragging his fat ass up the stairs had probably been the hardest part. It’d taken close to an hour, with frequent breaks so that Matt could pant for air while he stretched his aching back. By the time they’d made it to the little hallway at the top, Mona had knocked Earl into oblivion so many times that the crutch was bent and the side of his face was nothing more than a swollen bruise.
Now the large man was propped in a chair with his arms stretched out before him. His head lay on a tabletop and the couple stood on either side of him, smiling at one another.
“You ready to do it?” Matt asked playfully.
Mona nodded her head so quickly that she looked like one of the bobble-heads people put on the dashboards of their car.
“Yeah,” she said, “I wanna see what it’s like. See what the big deal was.”
“Okay then, sweetie. One the count of three. One….”
“I love you, Mattie.”
“I love you, too baby.”
“You said two.”
Mona’s eyes sparkled and she winked at Matt, who smiled back.
“Did not. I said too, not two.”
“Same difference.”
“Two….”
“Now you’re just repeating yourself.”
“Three!”
The couple simultaneously swung the hammers that Mona had found in the shed behind the house after they’d killed Mary. The metal hit the heads of the spikes that their other hands held in position, but the metallic ting was overpowered by the bloodcurdling scream that blasted from Earl’s wide mouth. His eyelids flew open as the sharp tips of the nails rammed through his hands but by then Matt and Mona had already swung again. The nails thudded further into the same tabletop that they’d found Darlene Honnicker impaled to and Earl tried to yank his hands away from the torture that burned within them. But it was too late: he was securely staked to the butchers block table and the action did nothing more than send bolts of agony racing along his arms.
“So,” Matt asked as he stepped back to admire their handiwork, “what do you think?”
“I don’t know…. I mean, it goes with the room and all. But it’s just not my style, you know? I’m just not into the whole shabby-chic thing.”
Matt shrugged and picked up the red can that sat by his feet.
“Yeah, I can see what you mean. It seems… I don’t know, kind of like American Gothic meets The Scream. Interesting conversation piece, for certain. But, in the end, it’s just not us.”
As he spoke, Matt walked around the room, liberally splashing gasoline on the floor and table. He walked out of the room backwards, leaving a wet trail to mark his passing and continued through the bedroom and into the hall. When the can was nearly empty, he screwed off the little spout, returned to the windowless room, and doused the rest over Earl’s flailing body. The fumes were sharp and pungent and wavered in the air like heat in the desert. Almost immediately, he and Mona began coughing as their eyes watered with tears.
“Come on, Mattie… let’s blow this joint.”
Mona slipped her arm around Matt’s shoulder and allowed him to pick her up as if she were a bride being carried across the threshold. Kissing him gently on the cheek, she glanced down at her bandaged leg and smiled.
“If I’d known I would get this type of treatment, I would’ve got myself stabbed in the leg a long time ago.”
Matt carried her down the stairs, opened the front door, and set her gently onto the porch. Turning back toward the house, he removed a disposable lighter from the pocket of his parka while his wife handed him the container they’d prepared earlier. It was an old Coca Cola bottle from a time when they’d still been made from glass, and the couple had carefully siphoned the amber liquid from the gas can into it. Then it’d been stuffed with strips of rags and left to wait on the porch for them like a faithful puppy.
Flicking the wheel of the lighter, Matt held the yellow flame to the gas-soaked rags which immediately caught ablaze. As clouds of black smoke billowed from the improvised wick, he leaned back inside the front door and stared intently at the top of the stairs. Then, with an expression of grim determination he lobbed the molotov into the house.
It arced upward and smashed into the upstairs wall. Almost immediately there was a loud whoosh and a fireball shot down the staircase like breath from a dragon. A blast of heat washed over them, but by then Mona was already leaning against Matt.
“Mind if you use me as a crutch?” he asked. “My arms are pretty damn tired.”
“What? Are you saying I’m fat? Is that what you’re saying? That I have a fat ass?”
Her tone was light and cheerful as she leaned against her husband and draped one arm over his shoulder. Curling his arm around her waist, Matt helped Mona limp across the porch and down the front steps.
“You got to understand, I hauled that giant bastard all the way…”
“Oh, so now it’s a giant bastard, is it? I may have put on a little weight, but I wouldn’t go as far as to call it giant.”
“You dork.”
“I’m your dork.”
She pecked him on the cheek again and by the time they’d made it to the police cruiser, the air was thick was the scent of burning wood. They could hear the fire roar behind them as it hungrily devoured the old wood amid sharp pops and crackles.
“We’ll need to ditch this thing first chance.” Mona commented. “I’d say the cop who owned it is probably dead.”
From behind them came a shattering of glass that was accompanied by a yell that sounded like a tortured soul roasting in the flames of Hell. The couple spun around just in time to see a shower of window shards cascading to the ground. But, in the center of them was a huge fireball that hit the earth with a dull thud. The fireball rolled into the snow and Matt raised his eyebrows.
“I’ve heard of stop, drop, and roll before… but that drop was a bit extreme.”
Earl’s body hissed as the snow extinguished the flames and revealed the charred and twisted form that had hidden beneath them. Smoke curled from skin that looked like a burnt hot dog and pieces of broken shin bone jutted through the leg. But this hairless, burn covered thing still tried to claw its way forward. The nails that were still embedded into its hands plunged into the ground like a mountain climber’s pick and, inch by inch, it drug its smoldering hulk toward the young couple.
Matt let out a low whistle as he turned to look at his wife.
“I’ll be damned… he would’ve had to have pulled those nails right out of the table. sucker just won’t stay down.”
The couple watched for a moment as Earl crept across the snow like a crispy inchworm. His lips looked as if the fatty tissue had started to bubble and boil away and they could see patches on his body where it looked almost as if the clothes and flesh had melted into one another.
Removing her arm from Matt’s shoulder, Mona hopped through the drifts of snow until she was standing just out of the thing’s reach. This close, the stench of singed hair and charred flesh was so strong that a gag got stuck in the back of her throat.
Earl opened his mouth and gurgled something that could have been words had his tongue not looked so swollen that it almost filled his entire mouth. The tip of it was missing and Mona assumed he’d inadvertently bitten it off when his body hit the ground. This, however, didn’t keep him from trying to form words that, judging from the tone of the wet rasps, would have been none too kind.
Stepping around him, she rolled her eyes and squatted over his back like a sumo wrestler preparing for battle. When she spoke, there was no anger in her voice, only exasperation.
”Just shut the fuck up and die already….”
Her hand seized Earl’s wrist and the flesh seemed to shift and slough beneath her grip. This didn’t deter her, though, from lifting his arm from the ground and driving the nail that pierced his palm directly into his throat. An arc of crimson sprayed from the wound and pattered against the snow, reminding her briefly of the cattle she’d seen on T.V. who had their necks pierced by tribal spears.
“Hey baby… I don’t know how to tell you this. But I think I killed him.”
The fire had spread through the entire upper floors of the house and plumes of black smoke billowed into the morning air. Through the raging wall of fire, the supports and framework stood out like a skeleton of cinders and the couple could hear entire sections crumbling through the rush of the flames.
“Come on, babe… won’t be long until someone sees the smoke and phones it in. And I’d prefer to be somewhere else when that happens.”
She glanced up at Matt as a wry smile crossed her face.
“You sure know how to show a girl a good time. Hell of a honeymoon, Mattie.”
Matt smiled back at his wife while Earl’s blood slowed to nothing more than a trickle.
“You think this was something? Just wait until you see what I’ve got planned for our anniversary.”