They lived in a ramshackle cabin out in the woods,same as most of the rest of their kin. The wilderness surrounding Hopkins Bend was dotted with similar cabins, many of them more than a hundred years old. A few were even said to date to the time of the War of Northern Aggression, or earlier. Some of the oldest structures had rotted down to almost nothing. Abigail Maynard was thankful the roof of their own cabin sagged only slightly. No one would ever mistake the Maynard domicile for some goddamn
Beverly Hills mansion, but it was sturdier than most. And the Maynard clan was relatively prosperous by local standards. There was always plenty of food on the table and jugs of homemade whiskey to drink.
A young, towheaded Maynard boy came running through the open front door of the cabin as Abby rocked restlessly in her chair and stared at the dark, cracked screen of a television that hadn’t worked in almost ten years. The boy, a skinny little runt of about twelve, ran past her, shouting,“Grandma! Grandma!”
The boy’s voice grew fainter as he slammed through two more doors en route to the kitchen. The boy was Daniel. Abigail tried to remember whether he was one of the several birthed by her older sister, Ruth. Ruth had been dead a bit more than a year, the victim of some mysterious wasting disease. That had been a sad goddamn thing, her passing, but at least big sis had done her part in continuing the family line. Abby thought a moment, striving to keep the various bloodlines straight. Ruth had given them Daniel, John, Andy, Wilma, Angelina, Michael, and…let’s see…oh, yes, and Jack and Carl, the twins.
Eight young ones, courtesy of the much-missed Ruth Maynard.
Laura Maynard, Abby’s five-years-younger sister, had already popped out two additional brats, with a third on the way.
And her brothers had impregnated their various wives and mistresses multiple times.
Abby was odd girl out.
She had never been with child, though it wasn’t from lack of trying. She’d coupled with numerous local men on many occasions. Even Big Joe, a cousin twice removed, had failed to successfully plant a seed in her apparently barren womb, and he’d impregnated each of her sisters
at least once. Abby’s lack of success in this area shamed her. She hadn’t contributed properly to the welfare of the clan. The menfolk did the hunting and providing, and the women were responsible for everything else. It was her duty to bear children. If Abby couldn’t squeeze out at least one squalling little bastard, what good was she?
Her failure in this department had been weighing on her more heavily of late. She was getting older, having just celebrated her twentieth birthday the week before. Most of the women she knew, including her sisters, had given birth for the first time by no later than fifteen. Time was passing, and she was in danger of turning into a pathetic spinster. A lot of the local men were still hot to fuck her, but lately it’d come to seem barely worth the effort. To take her mind off it, she stared at the broken television and tried to imagine what TV shows would be like ten years since the last time she’d seen one. She would often dream up shows in her mind, conceiving fleshed-out characters and concepts in various scenarios similar to the cop shows and soap operas she remembered. These would become very vivid in her head, and it was easy for her to mentally project the imaginary shows onto the broken screen. Easy, but frustrating. She sometimes wished she could write her ideas down in a book to make them more permanent. But she couldn’t read or write very well.
She became aware of how tightly she was gripping the arms of the rocking chair and forced her muscles to relax. She drew in a calming breath, held it a long moment, then slowly expelled it. She then forced herself to rise from the chair and leave the room. She went the way Daniel had gone, toward the kitchen. She caught the scent of a stew simmering on the wood-burning stove before she reached the kitchen and felt a mild pang of hunger.
Her mother looked up from the big pot as Abby came into the kitchen.“There ya is. What you been up to, girl?”
Abby couldn’t meet her mother’s gaze.“Just sittin’.”
Carol Maynard harrumphed. “Just wastin’ away, ya mean.”
The words were like a dagger to Abby’s heart. Ma never missed an opportunity to remind her of her failures as a woman. And she couldn’t raise her voice in argument, or the big bull of a woman would beat her half to death with whatever was handy. She knew this from painful experience, so she didn’t say a thing in reply.
Carol made another sound of disapproval as she continued to stir the big pot. “You could be out lookin’ for the right man, but all you ever do is sit and rock in that chair. What good are ya, girl?”
“None, I guess.”
“You sassin’ me?”
“No, ma’am.”
“See you don’t.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Abby looked at Daniel, her little nephew. The boy was hunched over a bowl of stew at the kitchen table. He leered at her between sips from his spoon.“My mama used to say you should have your dried-up pussy sewn shut, for all the good it does.”
Carol came away from the stove in a blur of motion. The boy’s grin froze on his face an instant before she knocked him to the floor. The boy cried out as his spoon went skittering across the kitchen floor. Carol grabbed him by the back of his shirt and yanked him to his feet. “Don’t you disrespect your elders, boy. Apologize to your aunt.” When the boy hesitated, she swatted the back of his head and said,“NOW!”
The boy winced and spoke meekly. “I’m sorry, Aunt Abby.”
Abby’s voice was just as soft as she replied,“It’s okay.”
“The hell it is.” Carol swatted the boy one more time and said,“Now get on out of here. And don’t come back until you can act right.”
Abby sighed.“Ma, that wasn’t—”
Carol shook her head and went back to the pot, dismissing her by turning her back. “Shut up, girl. The boy was wrong to talk out of turn that way, but he was right.” Her voice was hard, devoid of even the tiniest detectable shred of compassion. “Why don’t you make yourself useful, and go check on the holiday catch?”
Tears formed in Abby’s eyes. She quickly turned away from her mother.“Yes, ma’am.”
She went to a closed door in the far-right corner of the kitchen and opened it. The door opened to a small pantry. There were shelves of canned goods and jars. She walked past these and opened another door. Beyond the second door was a set of rickety stairs leading down to the dank earthen cellar. Down here were more shelves stocked with cans and jars. A number of large jugs were set on the ground against the far wall. These were filled with the Maynards’ reserve of special ‘shine. The cellar’s interior was illuminated by two oil-burning lanterns.
The dinner was chained to an overhead rafter.
Abby approached the holiday prize and eyed it up and down.
She poked its smooth, flat belly with an index finger. “You still look a mite skinny. This rate, there won’t be enough of you to go around.” She made a clucking sound. “Too bad your fat little friend got took by the Colliers, or we’d have a helluva feast. Now tell me the truth—if I try to feed ya, you’re just gonna spit it out again, ain’t ya?”
The dinner nodded and uttered a muffled curse.
Abby smirked. “Not even if I was to stick your pretty
feet in a big pot of scalding water? That worked last time, didn’t it?”
The dinner whimpered and looked at her through eyes shiny with fresh tears. She thought of the incident upstairs and felt a new surge of self-hatred. She balled a hand into a fist and drove it into the dinner’s flat belly, causing it to scream behind its gag and flail away from her. But there was only so far it could go. Abby moved a step closer and drilled another blow into its stomach. She listened to it sob and felt a tiny portion of her frustration drain away. She knew the feeling was only temporary, but any relief at all was a blessing these days. So she kept at it, slamming her fist into its midsection until it ceased resisting and hung slack from the chain.
Abby watched it turn slightly in the flickering lantern light.
The dinner had long, tapered legs, a slim waist, and large, plump breasts. It had a nice face, too, with big brown eyes, a small, straight nose, and pouting lips. Its firm, creamy flesh glistened with sweat in the lantern light.
Abby placed a hand on its hip and caressed it. The dinner stared at her. Her hand moved from its hip, glided over its round ass, cupped its pert breasts, traced a slow, curving trail down its concave belly, and dipped between its legs.
The dinner arched its back and moaned softly.
Abby smiled.“You like that?”
The dinner looked at her and said something Abby couldn’t make out because of the gag. Abby tugged the gag away and said,“What’d you say?”
It heaved a big breath and looked her right in the eye. There was a surprising hardness in that gaze. A clear determination. This one’s spirit hadn’t been broken yet, which was kind of amazing. Usually they were gibbering
idiots by this point, stripped of their sanity through torture and recognition of the hopelessness of their situation. “I said, if that’s the way you like it, I can show you some things that’ll rock your fucking world.”
Abby chuckled. “I just have to let you down, right? Maybe sneak you out of here?”
The dinner’s hard expression didn’t change.“Yes.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
“No. I—”
Abby punched it in the stomach again, harder than before, throwing every last ounce of frustration and self-hatred into the blow. It blasted the air from the dinner’s lungs and left it gasping for breath. Abby put the gag back in place and hurried out of the cellar. She delivered a brief report to Carol Maynard—a stone lie about forcing several spoonfuls of gruel down the dinner’s throat—before returning to the sitting room and her rocking chair.
She rocked and stared at the broken television screen.
Her mind conjured new images for the empty screen, but these weren’t the usual cop-show and soap-opera scenarios. These featured certain acts involving herself and the outsider woman chained to a rafter in the Maynards’ cellar.
She gritted her teeth and rocked.
Jessica Sloan ran for her life. She dashed past the still-kneeling Hoke and the Falcon and plunged through the line of trees at the far end of the clearing. Taking her chances out here in the woods was likely tantamount to suicide, but it was the only even remotely viable option available to her. She heard a second boom of the shotgun and ignored it. There was a chance the big gun would cut her down in her tracks, but a backward glance would doom her just as surely. There was only time for forward motion, for flight.
She thought longingly of the Falcon for a brief moment, ached to feel the thrust of the roaring old V-8 engine carrying her swiftly from this place. But they would have taken her easily if she’d made a play for the car. She pictured it in her head. The convertible’s top was down. She could have leaped over the closed door. But then she would’ve had to get the key out of her pocket, put it in the ignition, start the engine, slap the car into gear, execute a three-point turn, and slam the gas pedal to the floor. The grotesquely deformed men had been no more than ten feet from her on both sides. There just wouldn’t have been time.
Damn it.
A low-hanging branch hit her in the forehead and shattered as she charged onward through the woods. She trampled thick undergrowth and was thankful she
was wearing sneakers rather than the heavy, high-heeled boots she’d worn on her first visit to Hoke’s house. She moved between the trees in a random zigzag pattern, darting a hundred feet to her right, ten or twenty more straight ahead, another thirty or forty to the right again, and so on. Her gaze was shifting all the time, rapidly scanning the area immediately ahead of her for impediments, and she managed to avoid numerous rocks and vines with astonishing nimbleness and an almost balletic grace. All that time spent training in the gym and running her daily miles was paying off in ways she never would have imagined. A less well-conditioned woman wouldn’t have stood a chance. She was further aided by the gentle downhill slope of the land in this direction, which allowed her to set a pace she was certain the big, lumbering men behind her couldn’t possibly match.
She heard the gentle trickle of water before she slipped through a thicker line of trees and saw the little stream winding through the woods. The stream was no more than three or four feet across. The water would come up to no higher than her knees. She could leap it easily or wade through within the space of a heartbeat or two. But the crystal-clear flow of water stopped her in her tracks. She stood panting at the edge of the stream for a moment and risked her first backward glance. There was no one behind her. She listened for sounds of pursuit and heard nothing. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. The men lived in these woods. They might not be able to match her speed, but they would be skilled at the art of stealthy tracking. It would behoove her not to linger long at the stream. If she stayed still long enough, they would eventually catch up to her. And if that happened, she doubted she’d be able to get away again.
She didn’t feel winded yet—the half mile or so she’d come was nowhere near the limits of her usual endurance
levels—but this could be her last chance for a cool drink of water for some time. It would be smart to take advantage of it.
Quickly, though.
She dropped to her knees at the edge of the stream and set the .38 on the rocky ground. She pulled her long hair back and tied it in a loose knot. She knelt closer to the stream, dipped her cupped hands into the cool, amazingly clean water, lifted them, and drank. The water tasted wonderful. She dipped her hands into the stream again and again, slurping water down with abandon for several moments. Then she shook excess moisture from her hands and sat panting. She felt refreshed and more than ready to resume her flight from the hideously deformed men. But now that she’d allowed herself this brief pause, some disturbing thoughts and questions began to catch up to her.
What
were
those things?
They were men, but not normal men. They looked like…mutants. Like a generation of feral mountain men who’d grown up in the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war. She thought of the area she was in and searched her memory. Were there any nuclear power plants operating in these parts? Say there was one somewhere nearby. Was it possible there had been a Chernobyl-style accident, only on a smaller scale? The government might have hushed something like that up, same way the Russians did with the Chernobyl meltdown. Another thing to consider was the dirty bomb supposedly detonated by terrorists in nearby Dandridge. But no, that was too recent an event to account for the kind of deformities she’d seen, which must have occurred in the womb. Another, more outrageous possibility occurred to her. Perhaps they weren’t human at all. Maybe they were demons or aliens. But she dismissed this notion as obviously ludicrous.
Aliens in overalls wielding shotguns. Unlikely, to say the least. Which brought her back to the more logical culprit being some long-standing environmental contaminant.
Oh, shit.
She glanced down at the stream, thought of the water she’d drunk, and felt her stomach twist.
Oh, shit
. She tried to stay calm. This was no time to give in to panic. So…assume the water was tainted. So what? On a rational level, she knew she hadn’t consumed anywhere near enough to ignite a tumor or some other awful illness. The mutants were the way they were thanks to generations of exposure to whatever had fucked up their gene pool. The water wasn’t going to kill her.
She began to relax, felt her breathing start to even out again.
But then a resurgent thread of anxiety began to wind through her.
Yes, the water wasn’t going to kill her.
But the mutants might.
She groped for the .38, felt her hand close over the handle, and began to stand up. Then she froze in a half-standing, half-kneeling position and scanned the line of trees on the opposite side of the stream. She didn’t see anything other than trees, but she was sure she’d heard something. Her head swiveled slowly left and right. Then she saw it, a little flicker of movement behind the thick base of one of the tallest and oldest trees. She surged to her feet and pivoted in that direction, swinging the gun toward the big tree.
She thumbed back the .38’s hammer.
The ratcheting of deadly metal was ominously loud in the otherwise-silent woods. The sound would scare anyone. Good. She relished the opportunity to make someone other than herself afraid. Keeping the gun aimed at the tree, she quickly waded through the stream
and came up dripping water from her shoes and jeans on the opposite side. She made no attempt at a quiet approach as she walked toward the tree, and the tactic soon produced the desired result.
A bare-chested young boy in a straw hat and jeans stepped away from the tree and began moving backward. He was scrawny and had a wiry build. Early teens, at best. But an exact age was hard to surmise, thanks to his deformed face. His lower jaw was slightly elongated. He had just one eye. The other eye wasn’t missing. It’d never been there in the first place. There was no second socket where the other should have been. His nose was too big and curved upward. Thick, throbbing veins pulsed at its sides.
Like the men back at the clearing, he looked like something from a nightmare.
Only this time the nightmare was afraid of
her
.
The boy’s chest was heaving. He was shaking all over. And he was trying not to cry. Jessica’s revulsion gave way to simple human compassion. She eased the .38’s hammer down, pointed the barrel upward, and moved a step closer to him, causing him to flinch.
“Easy, kid,” she said, striving to keep her tone even and nonthreatening. “I’m not going to hurt you, okay? I just need a little help, that’s all.”
Maybe she could reason with him. Perhaps persuade him to guide her out of the woods. After all, he wouldn’t know his older cousins or whatever were chasing her. If he could help her find her way back to Old Fork Road, she would at least stand a reasonable chance of making her way back to some semblance of civilization.
But the boy let out a high whine as she came another step closer.
Then he turned and bolted.
“Shit!”
Jessica shoved the .38 into her waistband and took off after him. She overtook him with ease, throwing an arm around his waist and driving him to the ground. She flipped him over and straddled him to keep in place. He let out a wail of anguish, and Jessica began to panic again. He was making too much noise. The bigger ones would hear him and get a fix on her location. Innocent boy or not, the little fuck was putting her life in jeopardy with all this commotion. She knew what would happen if those men managed to get their hands on her. Rape and mutilation.
Damned if I’m gonna let that happen.
She scanned the ground around her and spotted a solid hunk of rock that would fit easily in her hand. She grabbed it and lifted it high over her head.
The sound of a round being slotted into a rifle chamber stopped her.
A man’s voice said,“Wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Jessica looked over her shoulder and saw a man in overalls and a flannel shirt. A John Deere cap sat atop his head. He was aiming a hunting rifle at her head.
She dropped the rock. “I didn’t want to hurt him. I swear. I just had to stop him from making that noise. There are some fucked-up-looking people after me.”
This man wasn’t like her pursuers, at least not at first glance. He sported no obvious deformities. He looked like a normal hunter. Then he said,“Fucked-up-looking, huh? I reckon you’re talking about the Kinchers. That boy’s one of ‘em. They all look like that.”
Jessica frowned.“You know them?”
“We all know each other ‘round here, darlin’.”
“What’s wrong with them? Why do they look like that?”
The man moved a few steps closer to her, carefully keeping the rifle’s barrel aimed at the back of her head. “Ain’t none of your concern. You’re gonna need to come
with me, girl. Once you’re back at my place, the Kinchers’ll have no claim on ya.”
“No!” the boy exclaimed.“She’s for us!”
Jessica glanced down at him.
He was grinning now, no longer afraid.
She thought about what the man had said. And she thought about the boy’s comment. It all added up to a world of shit for Jessica Sloan. The Kinchers wouldn’t have a claim on her, but this man would, and she had a funny feeling he wouldn’t treat her any better than the mutants.
Jessica let the hand that had been gripping the rock settle over the butt of her .38. “My daddy always told me to never trust strangers. I should have listened to him better in the first place, or I wouldn’t be in this fucking mess today.”
She yanked the .38 from her waistband, and rolled away from the Kincher boy. The crack of the rifle resounded in the woods, but she kept rolling and the round missed. She quickly sized up a shot while the man slotted another round into the chamber.
She squeezed the trigger.
The bullet caught the man in the throat and flung him backward.
The Kincher boy got up and started to run.
Jessica got to her knees, sized up another shot, and squeezed the trigger again. This round took the boy square in the middle of his bare back, and he fell instantly dead to the forest floor. She felt a small pang of regret for killing the kid, but was comforted by the knowledge that she’d had no choice. She went over to the fallen hunter and retrieved his rifle. She searched the pockets of his overalls and found a folded Buck knife, as well as some extra shells for the rifle. She put the knife and extra bullets in her pockets, tucked the .38 back in her waistband, and stood up, rifle in hand.
She paused a moment, listened.
She heard something, a soft crunch of undergrowth.
Maybe it was a deer.
And maybe not.
She turned and started running again.
Running for her life.