Cruel World(25)

Quinn lay still for a long time, and after what could’ve been a half hour or a day, he rolled over and pushed the towels and pillows off the shelf. He climbed down as quietly as he could and waited in the doorway, the XDM in front of him. When no sounds came from below, he made his way down to the kitchen.

It was a disaster.

Bags of sugar and salt were broken upon the floor with boot-prints tracked in them. A shattered bowl was scattered beneath the dining room table, its jagged points like curved teeth. All the cupboards and drawers had been pulled open, their contents rifled but not removed. The pantry door stood ajar, and when he pulled it the rest of the way open, the strength in his neck faded and his head sunk.

The pantry was picked clean except for his father’s smoked herring. A few cans were missing and some had toppled to the floor, but they sat mostly undisturbed. He picked up the fallen tins and straightened them as he swallowed against the dryness in his throat. The rest of the stores were gone. All the bottled water, all of the fruit and the canned goods. A single can of soda lay on its side at the very back of the pantry.

When he checked the fridge, he found that the brothers had taken everything from its shelves along with most of the frozen meats. There were two boxes of frozen peaches and four bags of green beans beside a half-empty container of chocolate ice cream.

Shutting the freezer, he moved like a ghost from the kitchen to the hallway and into his father’s office. The drawers to the desk were open and he shut them one at a time, carefully tucking papers and notes back inside that had been strewn on the floor. When he was done, he sat in the chair, placing the gun beside the dark computer. His blackened reflection gazed at him and he stared back. In one motion he shoved the screen violently off the desk. It flew halfway across the room and bounced once before coming to rest, unbroken on the thick carpet. Quinn stood and began to move around the desk, the smug glass of the monitor mocking him, but he stopped and sunk back into the chair.

With his face in his hands, he sobbed, the feeling of the twisted bones beneath his skin like a failed artist’s sculpture. The afternoon was so bright, the sun melting the very last of the snow. A blue jay called somewhere outside, its insistent cry so mournful, echoing inside him.

When he regained his composure, he gazed out the window and watched the trees sway in the wind while one of his hands found the pistol and began to caress its grip.





Chapter 8



The Cliff



He drank the afternoon away.

He took the crystal decanter in his father’s office that was a third full of whisky to the solarium and sat back on one of the reclining chairs, resting the XDM on the table beside him. The whisky burned his throat and bloomed like a hot explosion in his stomach. He’d drank only a handful of times in his life, all of them under the supervision of his father, most of them on holidays and then only a glass or two of beer.

The whisky was something else. It had a life of its own, plowing into his veins like hot oil. His skin tingled and the objects around him softened, their edges rounding more with each sip. A heavy weight was in the middle of his skull, pulling his head downward, but he fought against it, tipping it back to pour more of the amber liquid into his mouth.

When there was only a thin layer of whisky on the bottom of the decanter, he threw it aside. It didn’t shatter as he’d expected it to but cracked neatly in half. The booze leaked onto the tile looking like a watery bloodstain. Quinn watched it creep across the floor and slide into the channels between the tiles. His eyelids were dipped in lead, and the solarium rotated in a slow circle around him, stopping whenever he focused hard on one point. His eyes found the door leading to the backyard and the openness of the sea beyond. A lone gull cut the air and dove out of sight toward the ocean. He sat waiting for it to return, but it never did.

The air was cooler on his skin than earlier in the day, the wind more brisk as he stumbled across the yard. He didn’t spare a glance at the place where the mattresses lay in the woods, keeping his rocking vision locked on the approaching cliff. When he reached it, he slowed then stopped, his toes inches from the edge. He searched the sky and the sea but the gull was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it had plunged too far into the water and drowned or struck an unseen rock below the surface. Maybe some creature had eaten it whole without it ever knowing it was dying, gone from a world that no longer cared, had never cared.

Quinn wavered on the edge, his gaze traveling to the foot of the cliff some sixty feet below. The slabs of rock there were angled, not sharp exactly, but peaked, easy for a smart bird like the gull to drop a shell on them and expose the meat inside.