When we got back to the farm, the yellow daylight was just starting to fade to gray. The barn door was partway open. I pointed it out to Darla, and she said maybe her mom was feeding the rabbits. We headed for the house regardless. We both wanted to get washed up and rest a little. Skiing through the ash had been hard work.
I froze as I stepped into the kitchen, shocked to immobility by the scene within. My right foot hovered over the threshold. My face felt suddenly cold.
Darla’s mom wasn’t in the barn. She was lying halfway on the kitchen table, face down. A small, wiry guy, filthy with ash, bent over her. He had a baseball bat pressed against the back of her neck, holding her down. Her face was turned toward us. Both her eyes were blackened, and a thin trail of blood leaked from her nose onto the table. His legs were between her knees.
Darla screamed. The guy took a step backward and pulled his sweatpants up.
I didn’t think, couldn’t think. There was nothing in my head but searing white rage. No room for anything else. My icy immobility shattered. I charged the guy.
He lifted the baseball bat, but I was on him before he could swing it. Left knife-hand to the wrist holding the bat. I didn’t feel the edge of my hand connect, but I heard something pop and then the clatter as the bat hit the floor.
His fist hit my right ear. A glancing blow I barely noticed. I cocked my right hand up by my ear and let it loose, spinning into the strike, my hips, shoulders, and arm all turning for maximum power. My knife-hand crunched into the side of his neck.
He slumped to the floor, twisting bonelessly on his way down. I’d hit him perfectly.
Darla quit screaming and ran to the table. “Mom?”
“Uh,” she moaned, as I pulled her skirt down. Darla took one of her hands and leaned close over her.
It occurred to me to check on the guy to make sure he wasn’t going to get back up. He lay on the floor, unmoving. There was a large, crude tattoo on the inside of his forearm-a rat or weasel or something. I bent and put my finger against the left side of his neck. A huge red welt marred his neck. Nothing. No pulse. I yanked my hand back in shock. I checked again, feeling his wrist this time. Same result: nothing. The room swam around me as I turned to Darla. “I think I killed this guy.”
“Good,” Darla pretty much spat the word. “Mom? Can I get you some water?”
“I… I didn’t mean to kill him. I wasn’t thinking.” The spinning room made my stomach heave uncertainly. My hand shook as I drew it back from the guy’s wrist.
Someone else spoke then, from the direction of the kitchen door. “Aren’t you that little snitchface from the campfire? Alex?”
I glanced up. Target filled the doorway. A filthy gray rag was wrapped around his head, covering his left eye. Part of his face and one arm were crosshatched with ropy scabs and partly healed burns. He held a double-barreled shotgun in one hand and a rabbit in the other. The rabbit’s head and shoulders looked like he’d started it through a meat grinder. He dropped the rabbit and lifted the shotgun to his shoulder, sighting down the barrels at me.
I thought about charging him, but he was ten or twelve feet away. He’d kill me before I got close. So I just stood there, staring at him. I felt numb, whipsawed by adrenaline and shock.
“Oh, this is rich-better than getting bunked with a fresh punk. I’ve been looking for you, you know. So you killed Ferret, huh? I knew you had potential.”
I glanced at the dead guy by my feet and shrugged. “Guess so.”
“I owe you big time. My goddamn eye isn’t healing right. I’ve been dreaming about you-dreaming about digging your eyes out of your skull with a knife and-”
“Whatever.”
“I don’t want to shoot you. Too fast-”
“Fine. Let Darla and her mom go. Then you can take your time with me.” I shrugged, trying to suppress the trembling in my shoulders.
“Darla, is it?” He smiled, a twisted thing that crawled across the bottom of his face. Then he swiveled the shotgun toward Darla, who was cradling her mother’s head in her arms.
“Darla!” I screamed and jumped. I hit her at about shoulder height in a flying tackle. I heard the boom of the shotgun and felt a sudden pain stab my ankle.
When I turned my head to look up, Target was standing over me, pointing the shotgun at my back. I swallowed bile and struggled to keep Darla underneath me, hoping my body would block the blast. My stomach was a leaden ball, weighting me down. Darla squirmed beneath me.
Target pulled the trigger. There was a soft metallic click.
I opened my eyes. I hadn’t remembered closing them. I’d never heard any noise quite so welcome as the click that shotgun made when it wasn’t killing me.
Target pulled the trigger three more times. Click, click, click.
I guessed what had happened. Target, the dumbass, had killed a rabbit by shooting it and hadn’t reloaded, so one of his barrels was empty. Why he didn’t wring the rabbit’s neck was beyond me. Criminals are stupid as a general rule, I figured.
I reached up and grabbed the gun barrel. It felt warm. Target tried to yank it away from me. I took advantage of his motion, letting him pull me to my feet. I launched a sidekick, using the gun for leverage and balance. I kicked him perfectly, right in the kidney. He grunted and sagged away from my foot-but only a little. Damn, but he was big and strong. That kick should have laid out a horse.
He held onto the gunstock with his left hand and stepped toward me. His right fist crashed into my side, hitting the spot where he’d cut me almost three weeks ago. I screamed and danced away, still holding onto the barrel with my right hand. I was afraid if I let go he’d use the gun to club me to death.
He tried to follow up with an uppercut. I swept it aside with my forearm and connected on a quick jab to his chest. He threw another punch. I blocked again and got in another solid body shot that seemed to have no effect whatsoever. He reached for the hatchet at his belt, so I threw a punch at his face, forcing him to block.
We traded blows this way four or five times. I blocked or dodged everything he threw my way, got in solid counterattacks to his body-and accomplished nothing. Neither of us would let go of the shotgun, and he couldn’t get at the hatchet on his belt without leaving his head open.
In a flash, it came to me what I was doing wrong. I was sparring with this gorilla. Hundreds of hours of training had taught me too well-don’t hit below the belt, no eye gouges, no groin strikes…
Darla reared up behind him with Ferret’s baseball bat. Target moved, and she missed his head. There was a meaty thwack as she clubbed his shoulder. He barely staggered. I lunged forward, trying to drive a spear-hand strike into his good eye. He spun, and my fingers hit his temple instead.
Darla wound up for another strike, but this time Target stepped toward her and grabbed the bat in his right hand as she started to swing. So now he was holding the bat in his right hand and the shotgun in his left, stretched between Darla and me.
That left him wide open for a round kick. I unloaded on him: one of those perfect, sweeping kicks that, on a punching bag at Cedar Falls Taekwondo, would have produced an echoing slap. But I wasn’t kicking a punching bag-I was kicking Target in the nuts.
He screamed and doubled over, dropping the gun and bat. Darla and I both began clubbing him. He spun and ran for the door with his hands up around his head, trying to protect himself from our murderous blows.
Outside, Darla started to chase him through the ash.
“Darla!” I yelled. “Your mom.”
She turned, ran back to the doorway, and pushed past me into the kitchen.
Target got fifty or sixty feet away and turned to stare at me. “You’ve got to sleep sometime. I’ll be back. I’ll slit your throat-and your girl’s.”
I stood silently and watched him. My breathing slowed, and my body started to hurt in a dozen places. Eventually Target got tired of shouting threats and disappeared into the ashy haze. I went back to the kitchen to check on Darla and her mom. Still shaking with the adrenaline aftereffects of one fight, I went to face another-one I couldn’t hope to win.
Mrs. Edmunds was still breathing, but that may not have been a good thing. The shotgun blast had hit her head. Her face looked like fresh hamburger. Her breath burbled in and out of her mouth, blowing little bubbles in the blood welling around her shattered teeth. Her eyes were ruined-she’d never see again.
Darla was kneeling beside her mom in the cold room, wearing nothing but jeans and a bra. She’d stripped off her filthy outer shirt. Her undershirt was wadded up in her hand, pressed against her mother’s neck. It wasn’t doing much good; the pool of blood from Mrs. Edmunds’s throat grew bigger as I watched. Already it surrounded Darla’s knees, soaking into her jeans.
I doubled over, hands on my knees. Spasms wracked my body as if I were sobbing, but no tears came.
Mrs. Edmunds said something, one word so low and distorted I could barely understand. It sounded like “love.”
Darla whispered, “I know, Mom. I love you, too.”
I stood nearby and watched them, feeling utterly helpless. All my fury washed away in a wave of despair. What could I do or say? Less than a month ago I might have dialed 911 on my cell phone, asked Mom or Dad for help, or run to Darren and Joe’s house. Now none of those options were available. Darla and I were alone with her dying mother and the corpse of some guy called Ferret. Alone on a vast plain of unforgiving gray ash.