Chapter 76: Hurt And Done
Looking at Nia, in my driveway, rifle in her hands, eyes red, and teeth clenched, I swore I’d kill her even if it was the last thing I did.
And the worst part is that some rotten little corner of me had been keeping a file on her for six years, and it opened right then and laid every page out in front of me, all at once.
The way she went quiet whenever Kara laughed at something I said.
The birthday she didn’t come to.
That look she gave the two of us across the fire at the Petersons’ place, three winters ago, when she thought nobody was watching her doing it.
I’d told myself I was imagining all of it, every single time, that I’d been wrong every single time, and I had let myself be wrong for six years while she stood in my life and waited.
My hands were shaking so hard I could see them doing it.
I couldn’t get a breath in, only the tops of them, one after another, none of them reaching anywhere. My chest was going up and down like something was sitting on it while the tears came down my face before I even understood they’d started.
Slowly, a sound came up out of my throat that I have never made in my life.
"Y-you-"
And I dashed at her.
"YOU KILLED HER!"
She turned the rifle over in her hands, bashed the stock into my face, and the whole yard tipped over sideways, as I landed on my back in the snow with the sky spinning above me and no idea how I’d gotten there.
"You couldn’t stand it!" I scrambled back up and swung at her.
The punch went past her ear as she dodged, and my own arm carried me straight around, and before I knew it, my boots once again went out from under me in the snow, and I went down on my face.
"You couldn’t STAND it, could you!"
Up again.
"You couldn’t stand her, you could never STAND her, you fucking- you fucking BITCH-"
She swiped a kick at my shin, folding me down like a deckchair, and I was still going down when the second one caught me across the mouth, and blood and spit sprayed out into the snow in a long red streak.
Everything went white for a second. But only for one.
"WHY?!" I couldn’t even get the word out properly, it all just came out of me, wet and cracked, and about three notes higher than my voice goes. "Why can’t you just- why can’t you UNDERSTAND?!"
She didn’t say one word.
She just stood over me with the rifle down at her side and her eyes bloodshot and her whole face coming apart, and she didn’t say one word, and that’s what did it.
"You’re nothing!" I spat, my eyes dripping just as much venom as they were dripping tears. "You hear me? You’re just a slut I slept with in moments of weakness! That’s all you ever were, and you did the same to me! There was never anything genuine between us. Not one day of it. Not one!"
And that froze her.
Every part of her, all at once, her shoulders, hands, and eyes, and for one whole second, her entire body locked up.
And a second was all I needed.
With a sweep of my kick, I took her legs out from under her.
She went down, and I leapt on top of her and shoved my fist into her face with everything I had.
"But no!" My fist barely came off her cheek when I shoved the other one into her face. "You had to! You just had to KILL HER!"
Half of them didn’t even land right, glancing off her forearms as she tried to block, some off her shoulder, off the ground beside her head, because I was crying too hard to see what I was doing.
"WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST GO AWAY?! Why couldn’t you have died in a ditch somewhere?! Why couldn’t you just have left us alone?!"
And then my left leg went up in flames.
It came on all at once below the knee, a dozen little mouths biting down into the meat of my calf at the same time, letting go, biting down again, tearing at my flesh.
I twisted around to look.
But there was nothing there.
Nothing on my leg at all, just my own trousers hanging off in strips and the blood coming through the wool underneath.
And before I could get a single thought around that, something hit me in the face.
I never saw it come.
It landed across my nose, and my eye, and it stayed, and my whole face came apart under it, hooks going into my cheek and my brow and the corner of my mouth, shoving me off her sideways and onto my back in the snow, screaming, both arms swinging at empty air but hitting nothing.
I was hitting absolutely nothing at all, over and over, while whatever it was kept opening my face up, and I could hear myself making a noise like a rabbit in a snare.
But then it abruptly stopped.
And out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Nia was already getting up.
That’s when something came low and fast out of the other corner of my eye, tackling her back to the ground.
They went down together in a heap of arms and snow, and it got on top of her and started tearing into her, and I saw brown hair.
"KARA!" The laugh roared out of me.
It came out wet and broken, and half a sob, and the relief that went through me was so enormous that I ended up back on my knees in the snow with both hands up in front of my mouth, laughing, watching my wife get her hands into Nia’s hair.
"That’s it! Get her, that’s IT-"
-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!
Six of them, fast, right up against her.
Kara came off her sideways and went stumbling back across the yard, hunched right over with her arms held in against herself, bleeding and backing away toward the treeline.
And whatever that still remained of my mind, ruptured all at once.
-AAAAHHHH-!
I don’t remember getting up, don’t even remember reaching her.
I just remember tackling her down while she was still halfway off the ground, and we went down again, and I started swinging with both hands and everything I had left in me, over and over, while the tears dripping off my jaw landed on her face.
And within seconds, her face stopped looking like a face.
Those invisible teeth came back into my hand, but I did not care, because my eyes landed on the pistol lying in the snow by her shoulder.
I picked it up, and I put the barrel in her mouth, shoved it in past her teeth, hard enough that the back of her head went into the ground.
"WHY?!" I snarled.
She was looking up at me.
"Why’d you come back? Why’d you have to come back and get in our way? I was HAPPY-"
Her eyes finally teared up.
"I was finally happy, I had a HOUSE, I had a KID, and you ruined it, you kept ruining it for six fucking years, you never let us have one single-"
"I hate you," I screamed to her face, voice cracking yet vicious. "I hate you so much!"
And slowly my finger started coming back on the trigger, and I felt the first bit of travel leave it.
That’s when the sunlight came off the yard.
Not clouds, nothing like clouds; it just slid away the way a sheet gets pulled off a bed, while the white under my knees slowly went a dark grey.
And slowly it hit me that I was kneeling on asphalt.
I instinctively tried to reach for it, actually reaching out with my free hand, trying to grab at the air where the driveway had been, trying to get hold of it, trying to pull it back over the top of everything, but my fingers closed on nothing.
The shed with the cows in it stretched sideways and thinned into trailers, a whole wall of them, corrugated and enormous.
My house flattened out into a storefront with the lights on and empty shelving standing in rows behind the glass.
The frozen yard went flat and grey, turning into a parking lot.
And the pile of snow I’d been shoveling all morning, the one that stood taller than I did, came apart at the edges and resolved into arms, legs... into dead, bloodied faces of both men and dogs.
I looked around fast, both directions, heart in my throat, but found Kara nowhere.
There was no treeline and no lake and no gate and no driveway and no small red boots by any door and no woman backing away toward anything, and the snow that had been landing on my hands and my neck and my shoulders all morning, I just realized, it had never once been cold.
I looked down. My finger was still on the trigger.
Nia’s face was still under me.
Her nose was broken flat and running, her lip split through to the gum, blood in her hair and blood down the side of her neck, and the barrel of her own pistol rammed into her mouth up to the trigger guard.
Both her eyes were swollen almost shut, and through the thin slits, I found her green eyes staring right into mine.
And for one heartbeat she was still the woman standing at my gate.
Then that came off her too.
And wrapped around my right hand, all four legs locked on, both sets of claws sunk through the glove and the jacket and into the meat underneath, biting down again and again into the webbing of my thumb hard enough to grind on bone, was Tikki.
Two and a half kilos of him, fighting me with everything he had.
My stomach dropped out of me, my hands went numb and stupid, and my ears filled up with a sound like water while everything at the edges of my vision closed in until there was nothing left in the world except her face.
"N-No..."
She wasn’t angry.
She didn’t look scared either, or hating, or begging. Any single one of those would have been a mercy to me.
And she just looked at me, tears rolling off her face... and she looked hurt and done.