The Road Out of Hell (24 page)

“Exactly.”

“Ah.” He smiled, just a bit too big, with feigned enthusiasm. “Good thing I have a clear record,” he added with a little laugh.

Jessie feigned confusion. “Are you in my vicinity?” She gave him a look so blank that her eyes could have been made of stone.

“Well!” he scoffed the word, trying to force another laugh but only managing a sharp exhalation and a smile that was getting a little sweaty. He had to be forty years old, she thought. There appeared to be a pale band around his finger where a wedding ring might go.

“My, it’s so brisk out here,” Jessie faked a yawn. “It’s making me drowsy.”

His face fell. It looked as if somebody switched off the power to all the little muscles. He stood up with a wan smile and gave her a mock salute, then stepped away without risking another word.

She turned back to her
Time
magazine, the new July 9 issue; and even though she had no interest in the cover story—something about an American baseball player named Hornsby—she pretended to study the first couple of pages and held her breath for a full count of ten before she ventured a glance along the line of the passenger deck. He was gone. Grateful, she exhaled and turned her attention back to the magazine and to the hypnotic roll of the waves.

She continued to absently turn Sanford’s most recent letter over in her fingers. Her brother was still alive, she knew that much; the handwriting was obviously his. The words, however, were the same maddening mix of strangeness and familiarity, forming a page of nonsense that she did not recognize. The only thing that would explain it was if Uncle Stewart had dictated them to Sanford. The thing that put the worst of the dread into the pit of her stomach was that after two years of schooling down in California, Sanford’s penmanship was still exactly as it had been before. There was a feel of wrongness to it that gave her the shivers.

Sanford stood in the unused storage shed where they had buried the Winslow brothers and felt the truth of it—he was done. Done with all of it, done with Uncle Stewart, done with this life in this world. The way he figured it, the end had actually arrived earlier that day, when Uncle Stewart ordered him to get another grave ready right next to where they had buried the Winslow brothers. At least he didn’t tell him to dig in the same spot, even though Uncle Stewart had dug up the boys’ remains months earlier and claimed to have reburied them in secret out in the desert. No matter. The ground there was still mixed with tiny bits of decayed flesh and smelled of death even with the odor of chicken droppings in the air. He would not have wanted to dig into that earth again.

But now he stood knee-deep in a four-by-six pit right next to that spot. He had surely just dug his own grave—because Uncle Stewart was likely to put him in it when Sanford refused to go along with him, as he intended to do.

Half an hour earlier, Uncle Stewart had driven up with an adult couple and their four sons, all packed into his big roadster. He had called Sanford into the house and introduced them as Jacob and Ella Dahl, from Los Angeles. Uncle Stewart began to explain that he was talking with this family about moving onto the ranch and taking over management of the place. It was all so vital and important that Stewart had required the whole family to come to the place to get oriented.

Sanford instantly recognized Uncle Stewart’s crap and lost interest. He had been about to leave when Uncle Stewart pulled Sanford aside and quietly ordered him to wait outside for a minute or two, and then come back in and take the four boys out with him to see the rabbit hutches. Uncle Stewart intended to ambush the parents without being defended by their sons.

But when Sanford went back into the henhouse to bide his time, counting down the moments until he had to go back inside the main house and help Uncle Stewart carry out his plan, he discovered that his legs were set in stone.

His legs simply were not moving. And as soon as he thought about it, he realized that he had no intention of forcing them to move, either.

A moment later Uncle Stewart came running up in the hot summer darkness. The waxy familiar sheen to his skin that came over him when he got overexcited was visible even by moonlight; and up close, Sanford detected that intense body odor. Uncle Stewart was moving into his kill mode. “Sanford, what the hell are you still doing out here? I’m holding them inside! They’re gonna get suspicious!”

“You never told me you were bringing six people here. Or anything about this at all. There are four sons! Doesn’t that worry you at all? Two of them are bigger than either of us!”

“Yes, and two are a lot smaller and that’s good news for you. Once I get them all nailed into place with nobody else left around here to bother me, they’ll keep me busy for a long time. I’ve been working this family for months, just as a back-burner project. But suddenly he’s out of work and I’ve got this chance. I told him to bring the whole family out here tonight so they could all be assigned jobs if they want the management position.”

“Managing what?”

“Idiot! I’ve got them! Now just do like I told you inside, and invite all four of the boys to come out here to see the rabbits.”

“I never heard you talk about this plan of yours.”

“Hey! You didn’t object when I gave you your instructions back inside.”

“They were standing right there! I had to wait until you came out.”

“All right, now I’m here and I am telling you to get back into the house. Say hello to the lovely Dahl family and then bring all four of those boys out here to see the rabbits. I need for you to keep them gone for three or four minutes, solid.”

“Then what?”

“Doesn’t matter. They’ll all four come running when they hear the shots. I’ll put Mr. Dahl down first, do Mrs. Dahl before she screams much. I’m a good shot and I won’t miss.”

“Jesus, that leaves four boys.”

“Why do you have to drag your feet about this? Are you more or less telling me that you think I am a
fool?”

“I just—I think those boys are really going to be heated up.”

“I’m expecting that. I’m also expecting the two biggest ones to run the fastest and get there first—which will make it easy to shoot them as they arrive. Get it now? After that, all we do with the little ones is, you scoop up one and I’ll grab the other. Easy as pie.”

“I’ve never heard you talk about killing four people just to get to two kids.”

Uncle Stewart grabbed Sanford’s shirt and pulled him up underneath his mouth. “There’s a lot I don’t tell you or anybody else, and that’s mostly for your own protection! Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know if I believe it or not.”

He laughed his smart-alecky girl laugh. “You shouldn’t.” And then his face was instantly serious again. “Now come on, they are going to come wandering out of there any second now.” He turned and started back to the house, paused, and turned back. “As soon as I’m inside, you come on up this time.”

Sanford felt the heaviness soak into him. “No.”

“What?”

“Urn, no.”

“Sanford, do not tell me that you are refusing to do your part. Do
not
do that!”

“I’m not refusing. I just—I can’t do what you want. I
can’t,
that’s all.”

Uncle Stewart screwed his face into an exaggerated image of a confused person. “You are telling me that you can’t walk into the house and get four boys to go out to look at some lousy rabbit hutches with you? You are telling me that there is something about that simple chore that you actually
can’t
do?”

Sanford’s voice came out in nearly a whisper. “Come on, Uncle Stewart. You know what I mean. You’re talking about killing a whole family of people.”

“Do you remember anything I told you at all about how we help Hollywood create a Utopia in this world?”

“I don’t know about any Utopia.”

“We can’t just wait for them to stop breeding!
Think
about it, will you? Hell, you’re the one who pointed it out to me: it’s the ones who are already here that present the worst problem! Besides, if we are completely honest about it, we will admit that no matter how bad Hollywood makes the ugly ones feel, it’ll never be enough to get them to stop breeding completely. They love it too much.
Eh?”

Sanford silently shook his head, then sat down in the freshly dug hole that he now figured was certain to become his grave. Oddly enough, while he waited for the inevitable blow to come, he felt the terrible heaviness that had grown with every passing day begin to drain back out of him. The sense of relief was real even in the face of his impending death.

His peripheral vision caught sight of Uncle Stewart’s shadow. Sanford could sense with every cell in his body that this life was over, for him. Of course it was over. It had to be. What else could possibly take place with a worthless idiot like him who had lived this nightmare life and never figured out a way to escape? He was too ashamed of himself to leave the stinking chicken ranch any more, anyway. Why live? In order to go where and do what? The only good thing that a piece of shit can do is to dissolve into the dirt and feed the damn plants.

For a moment, the knowledge that he was at the end gave him an odd form of power over his tormentor. It was such a relief to finally take one single unencumbered breath that dying seemed like a fair enough price.

“So.” Uncle Stewart’s voice was the malicious hiss of a riled-up snake. “You think you’re calling the shots here, do you?”

In response, Sanford just drew his knees up to his chest. He folded his arms around his legs. He still kept his eyes on the ground, but this time it was not because he felt any fear of his uncle’s reaction. Sanford’s last act of passive resistance was to deny his tormentor the satisfaction of knowing that he saw his death coming to get him. He would not watch.

He could see Uncle Stewart’s shadow on the plywood wall by the orange light of his oil lantern. He smelled that foul body odor while his uncle leaned over the pit to pick up the shovel that Sanford had just used to dig it. Sanford habitually tensed his entire body for a full-on blow. It was a technique that might have been helpful if Uncle Stewart had thrown a body tackle at him, but it offered no protection against a shovel cleaved into his skull.

The bodily stench fanned through the air again while Uncle Stewart’s shadow reared back, then swung the shovel low and hard in a horizontal arc along the ground until it collided with the back of Sanford’s head. The momentum of the shovel drove Sanford’s body forward with a shock wave that rang through his entire skeleton. In the next instant there was just enough time to notice that he was still alive before his forward motion drove his face into the soil and laid him flat. He never completely lost consciousness, but fell into a state of stunned helplessness where he perceived motion, light, and shadow dancing around him without any real sense of what was going on. There was no ability to stand or walk. He was helpless to resist.

By the time his rattled brain cleared enough for him to take stock of himself, he could tell that at least several minutes had passed, probably more. It had to have taken that long to drive a stake into the ground in the base of the pit and attach a chain to it that ran a short distance to Sanford’s neck. Uncle Stewart had again covered the pit with boards across the top just a few inches above Sanford’s face.
He must have been working fast,
Sanford thought—he could hear the voices of the Dahl family while they piled back into Uncle Stewart’s car. It was obvious from everyone’s tone that Uncle Stewart had not tried anything against these people. Those carefree voices told him that none of them had any idea how close they had all come to being killed, the entire family exterminated in the name of Uncle Stewart’s uncontrollable appetites.

Who could guess what sort of lies he employed to get them to leave? He might have told Mr. Dahl that he was “hired” to run the place or whatever the story was supposed to be, just to get them out of there. Clearly his uncle had been unwilling to risk the group murder on his own. Everybody sounded happy enough while the car doors opened and slammed and the engine roared to life.

Sanford lay supine in the shallow pit and reached his hands up until they pressed flat against the boards that once again covered him. He had learned that it helped to keep his hands pressed up flat against them as a way of physically reassuring himself that the ceiling really was not closing in on him. He listened to the car pull down the drive to the main road and then accelerate away.

That was when the revelation came to him. It was like the sun coming out at midnight. The Dahl family was never supposed to leave that place, but now, because of what Sanford had done, they were all going home for the night. He had saved two parents and four children. The feeling of affirmation in that was as powerful as an ocean wave. He felt filled with the wonderful possibility that he might have done something right this time.

He could stretch out his body in this hole, at least, so there would be less of a problem about getting stiff than there had been in the past. Sanford’s body had barely grown in height during his two years on the ranch. His insufficient diet had caused him to stall at just over five feet, two inches. Now as he lay trapped, he busied himself with mentally preparing for the long wait until Uncle Stewart returned and took out his demonic frustrations on Sanford.