Hail, man un-kind [Johnny ff., chapter 43]
Description: She knew she shouldn’t have come. She knew her best friend and boyfriend didn’t want her to be there with them. It was her why they stopped at that god-forsaken gas station. It was also her why they stayed. Either alive or dead. And Johnny also has a say in it.
Warnings: mental instability, slow burn, manipulative relationship, enemies to lovers, totally bizarre found family dynamic, obsession, murder, explicit sexual content, dub-con elements, schizophrenia, unreliable narrator(s), dubious morality, cannibalism, moral downfall
This is it, guys. Unbelievable. I have mixed emotions about wrapping up this enormous project. On the one hand: yay! We did it, we got here, after more than 500 pages, so many encouraging comments, artpieces, conversations, kudos and all. On the other hand: emptiness. TCM saved my artistic career. I fell in love with this world, all the craziness and the 70s Southern Americana threaded together with that charming absurdity. I am so happy and proud that you accepted my OC, Maud, with such enthusiasm! She is one of the most complicated characters I have ever come up with. Spending time with her and our beloved, nutcase Sawyer family gave me great comfort. Enjoy the finale! ♥
Chapter 43: Sour Switchblade
JOHNNY
His palm was bigger than Lele's footprint.
His teeth bit into the flesh of his lip until he tasted the filthy, metallic tang of his own blood. With his gloved fingers, he rubbed at the tiny print his son's foot had left behind, then let out a strangled growl and drove his fist into it. Earth burst upward. He clawed through the dirt around it, ripping free a mold-blackened plank half buried in the mud.
His boy ignored him. Maud was running loose. His mother might already be drowning in her own blood—hell if he knew what that airheaded Sissy had managed to do with her—and he was nothing but a fool tearing back and forth across the stage.
A fool who hadn't even been written into the damn play.
"Lele, goddamn it, get over here!" he roared, his fist crashing into the tunnel wall.
The damp stink of rot clung to the back of his throat—the smell he'd grown up with—and now it made his stomach turn.
"Where are ya... where the hell is everybody..."
Someone grabbed a fistful of his shirt. Among the smells slithered the alien sweetness of honey shampoo. The fist was small, but strong, hard as a rock striking the center of his chest.
"Johnny... you're a bad, bad man."
The redheaded girl from Granger Hill stood before him, the one who'd buried a knife in his back all those years ago. She wore nothing but a short-sleeved T-shirt and white-and-pink panties, yet she didn't shiver in the basement cold. Around her neck bloomed the purplish-black necklace left by his fingers, each bruise a gemstone shaped like one of his fingertips.
"You're all alone now." Another hand seized his hair. He'd smoothed it down so carefully that morning, and now it felt as though it were being ripped out by the roots.
Tammie stared down at him, her breath reeking of crack and stale blood, matted ashen clumps hanging around her face, the blood-soaked clothes on her full figure dangling in tatters.
He slashed at her with the skinning knife. The blade struck the tunnel wall instead, throwing sparks before spinning from her grasp and skidding between two barrels stuffed with shriveled limbs and rotting rags.
More hands.
More voices.
A vortex of them rose around him, voices he'd believed forgotten.
The first girl he'd ever killed was among them. She'd been eighteen when he strangled her after sex out in the desert. Lois had chased after him for years. He'd taken her virginity. Before it happened, they'd sat in the truck smoking cigarettes she'd bummed from her brother.
She'd worn little gold hoops in her ears. He'd removed them before sinking her into one of the slaughterhouse freezers.
Not because he wanted to steal them.
Because that was the hunter's due.
She and Kendra Liston—that nurse with skin white as disinfectant—slammed him into the wall together with far more strength than real women should've possessed.
They'd never even known each other. Lois had been dead for years before he'd lured the nurse into his truck in Sweetwater.
Why the hell had every filthy little whore he'd ever killed decided to gang up on him?
"You're a bad man, just like your daddy, Jonathan," Lois whispered.
In life she'd known nothing about his father. She couldn't have.
He'd never spoken of him.
"And you're insignificant."
Her blackened fingernails dug into the scar on his face. The Granger Hill sorority girls burst into shrill laughter.
They drove him into the dirt like starving hawks, shrieking as they tore at his clothes, sinking loose, death-softened teeth into the flesh of his arms, his neck, his face.
"Get the hell off me!" he bellowed. "How many goddamn times I gotta kill y'all?!"
He swung at Kendra, but his fist struck nothing solid.
The girls laughed.
Lois puckered her mouth into a kiss.
"Pretty Boy! Pretty Boy! You're ours!"
Ice-cold lips fastened through his jeans onto his thigh. One of the boys he'd killed with Hands.
He drank at Johnny's blood like a leech.
The girl from Pflugerville pried his jaws apart with crooked fingers while the others stuffed wet, blood-soaked earth into his mouth, packing it farther and farther down his throat until he could no longer scream.
Corpse wax.
Rat shit.
He couldn't breathe.
MAUD
Maud had long since begun to doubt she still possessed a heart.
When she'd been born, surely there'd been one beating inside her. By now, only a single piece of evidence remained that it had ever existed.
Lele.
The bonfire-hot devotion that flared inside her the instant his name spilled from Nubbins's drooling mouth. And the hope—however fragile—that perhaps he was telling the truth when he claimed to know where the boy was.
But if there had been any truth to his words, he wouldn't have been grinning like a man who'd found some shiny trinket washed into a drainage ditch.
Lele wasn't something bright and glittering.
He was frightened and dangerous.
She slammed her shoulder into Nubbins. He answered by trying to hook her legs out from under her. Their struggle sent them crashing into the full washbasin, filthy water exploding over them and soaking the legs of Nubbins's pants.
"Don't play games with me, Nubbins!" she hissed through clenched teeth. "If you really knew where he was, you wouldn't still be standing here. I told ya... if Nancy's gone... our family's together again... you... me... Lele... Bubba... Sissy... Grandpa... Johnny..." Her voice cracked around every other word. "Nobody's gotta do nothin' alone anymore."
Nubbins pulled away from her and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
In the crimson glow, his eyes looked even more feverish.
Maud's gaze dropped to the knife.
At any second, he might lunge. Might try to gouge her eyes out. Even though he loved her.
That was what it meant to be a Sawyer.
In name or in blood.
He crouched beside the puddle, staring at his own ragged reflection trembling on its surface.
"Everything's r-ruined..." he muttered. "I'm t-tired... tired o' livin' off scraps... waitin' for ever'thing to be l-like it used t'be. A-and I was good... I was the b-best..."
The sorrow twisted into a grin without warning. He slapped the water, splashing it everywhere.
Maud wondered if she should run, but she'd known Nubbins too long. He wasn't the kind of stray dog you could simply leave untied.
He'd hurt himself.
Or someone else.
She said nothing. Nubbins stared at her while water dripped from his beard.
"Liar." Splash. "Cain't believe a w-word you say... no more'n Nancy." Splash. "If ya kill Nancy... Grandpa ain't n-never gonna forgive ya. Ain't gonna be no family left." His breathing hitched. "You'll run off with the boy... j-just like before." His face contorted. "Liar!"
He sprang to his feet and began stomping through the puddle, water flying over both of them until they were soaked to the skin.
"Lyin' little pig!"
Knife first, he charged.
Maud ducked beneath the swing behind the railing and scrambled on all fours across the far side of Bubba's workshop. The butcher's cleaver nearly slipped from her bleeding, saliva-slick hand. Maria's blouse had become so stained that no one could've guessed it had once been white.
Using the edge of a steel table, she hauled herself upright.
Nubbins's next slash carved a burning red line beneath her elbow.
She caught the cleaver by its dry spine, spun on her heel, and drove the handle square into the space between his black eyes. His head snapped backward. He staggered wildly, flailing in every direction, but his knife found nothing.
She struck him again, this time on the crown of his head.
Blood seeped through his tangled hair, and his legs gave way beneath him. He stumbled backward onto the stairs in a cloud of dust.
"I d-don't wanna b-be alone..." he rasped. His eyes rolled in bloodshot circles, his hands lifted instinctively in surrender.
Under any other circumstances, she might've hesitated.
She tried wrenching the pocketknife from his hand. Even dazed, Nubbins clung to it with mad determination.
Maud dropped onto his sunken chest, pinning him against the bare concrete steps with her weight. She buried a hand in his soaked hair and slammed his skull against the stair again.
And again.
Each impact tore another hoarse, pig-like grunt from his throat. His legs jerked helplessly.
Even after consciousness fled him, his teeth were still grinding together.
Maud climbed off him on shaking legs, bleeding from even more cuts than before. Every bone in her body announced itself now, throbbing beneath her skin with hot, relentless insistence.
She limped into the pump room. The red warning light still glowed, feeding power to the house, though the enormous steel blast door sealing the room stood inactive.
She had lost too much time because of Nubbins - goddamn you, you rabid animal – and by now Nancy might've recovered enough to call for help.
What if Hands is nearby?
The very thought of the mountain-sized man charging onto Nancy's property nearly extinguished what hope she had left.
There was no bargaining with him.
No bedtime story convincing enough to slow him down.
He trusted his fists—the same fists that could erase a man's face—long before he'd ever trust an explanation.
Maud knew her limits, however hard they were to accept.
She couldn't even beat Johnny in a fair fight.
Hands would've torn her limb from limb.
With Bones there wasn't even room for hope that he might not arrive. He was always nearby. Always watching. Waiting for a chance to indulge his urges beside the family and buzz around the old witch's skirts.
With that bone-cutting knife of his, he'd slit her throat in seconds, then dragged her son back to Nancy on a silver platter.
Maud pried open the three electrical panels controlling the house's power with nothing but her fingernails and a broken wooden door handle. The system was ancient, clogged with dust and dead flies, wires knotted together like cold spaghetti and switches swollen with corrosion.
She had nothing safe to cut them with, so she tore the connectors apart with her bare hands.
Some spat sparks, cracked plastic housings shrieked beneath her grip.
Maybe it's not too late.
Where's Johnny?
Where are you, my little boy?
The first question answered itself almost immediately.
Johnny's voice erupted somewhere beyond the wall—not a shout but an inhuman scream. He was in the sewer tunnel, separated from her by a single wall.
During the storm of months they'd spent together, Maud had learned every shade of his screams. The frustrated one. The furious one. The one twisted by pain—like when Danny Gaines had blown that standing lamp into his face.
But this... This was new. It was threaded with panic.
With suffocation.
With desperation.
Exhausted, she wiped her bloody palm against her jeans to get a better grip on the cleaver and approached the doorway leading into the tunnel slowly, deliberately. She peered around the edge, trying to prepare herself for whatever she might see.
Even Johnny hunched over Lele, out of his mind, snapping and snarling.
Until now, she had never believed her husband would seriously hurt Lele, but she no longer trusted the soundness of his mind. He had betrayed her by bringing them here, by pressing the blade to her ear at Nancy’s command, by even trying to save the witch’s life.
And that scream…
It didn’t belong to the man who had smiled even with his shoulder torn from its socket. The man who had presented Maud with her ex’s head in a basket full of flowers. The man who had gutted that road punk Ada’s boyfriend like a grouse.
“Johnny?”
LELE
He locked his legs around Aunt Sissy’s thin waist.
Every second, his breath balanced on the tip of his tongue, threatening to turn into a cry. If it seemed like Aunt Sissy was taking him to Nancy, if they had tricked him. Her singing abruptly stopped when they reached the garage, as though the woman had forgotten the words.
Lele heard a buzzing, but it was far too loud to be wasps or bumblebees. Aunt Sissy surveyed the dirt road leading away from the garage and muttered something that sounded like “renerator,” though Lele couldn’t make it out clearly.
She let out a great sigh, making her freckled face puff up for a moment.
“I’m gonna get you outta here, sweet child. You ain’t got nothing to be scared of.”
“But Mommy…”
“Mommy’s gonna be all right. She’s a survivor. And she’s got a better chance if she ain’t gotta worry about you.”
She slowed her steps as she tightened her hold and began climbing the stairs behind the blue door. She was already breathing a little harder, her cool fingers gripping Lele’s thigh unpleasantly tight, but he held back his complaint. He concentrated only on being ready to scream if he had to.
The remains of the ruined lunch lay untouched in the dining room. The stew had stopped steaming, and the scattered silverware had dragged crooked lines across the tablecloth. Lele thought he would smell Grandma Nancy’s blood, but all he could smell was her food. His stuffed animal and the knife disguised as a pen, the one Mommy had given him, lay abandoned on the floor.
He heard Mrs. Lawson’s drowsy voice again and saw the yellowish glow of the black-and-white nature footage projected before them. The claws tearing into flesh.
Caracaras, buzzards, spotted owl.
I could be one of them, too. Then Mommy and I could take wing and disappear from here.
Aunt Sissy crossed the room and slowly pressed down on the front-door handle. Once she slipped through it with him, the sound of a raspy, wheezing breath struck their ears. Throwing caution aside, she pulled the door shut behind them and broke into a run through the flower garden.
“Gotta put you down, baby Lele,” she panted, fat beads of sweat gathering across her nose and forehead. It had soaked spreading patches beneath her arms too. Lele let her slide him down along her body until his feet touched the ground, then took hold of the mushroom-cap hand that guided him through the white garden gate.
“We’ll flag down a car and get the hell outta here.”
Lele glanced back when the front door flew open. He couldn’t see who had come out of it; Aunt Sissy was hurrying him along the freshly mowed grass of the driveway. He nearly stumbled, sweat breaking out across his own face and loosening the dried blood from Nancy on his skin. Sticky weeds clung to his pant legs, and a cocklebur had found its way into his sock.
He hissed at the sharp pain.
“Ya… You two, stop!”
They were only a few steps from the road. Aunt Sissy immediately pulled him behind her as they turned, but they still couldn’t see the hoarse, gasping monster behind the bushes. Every step came with a deep growl, heavy and wet, and if Lele hadn’t known what — who — it was, he would have imagined Frankenstein’s monster there, bolts on either side of his head, stitched-together skin, and hair standing straight up from an electric shock.
Nancy’s left shoulder sagged as though she were a dresser with one drawer yanked crooked. She clutched a garden hoe in her right hand, while her left pressed against the half-soaked bandage wound around her throat. Her hair had come loose from its carefully combed style, sticking to her face and the bandage, and her glasses had slipped to the tip of her nose. The whites of her eyes had turned almost entirely crimson.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” she forced out, swinging the hoe to clear the stubborn weeds from her path.
JOHNNY
The sour earth had lodged itself in his throat. He couldn’t spit it out, couldn’t swallow it down.
This wasn’t how he had imagined death. He hadn’t thought about it much, ironically — that was usually somebody else’s business. He was the one who brought it, not the one who experienced it. If it sometimes crossed his mind, usually when he was drunk and angry, that he could drive his car straight off a goddamn cliff, that was rock ’n’ roll. Something that suited him a whole lot better.
He didn’t even know exactly what wanted to kill him. The dead? Tammie, Kendra, the cosmetics saleswoman, and all those faces and names that had ended up in the papers or faded against weather-beaten lampposts because of him?
“Remember my earrings, Johnny?” Lois knelt beside him, her eyes like two shards of glass. Johnny’s chest heaved and strained, as though his heart were trying to bore a hole straight through him like a rat caught in a trap. “Those weren’t yours. We didn’t belong to you.”
“A Bad Man does what he wants,” interrupted the Asian girl from the sorority, the black blood still bubbling from the gash through her neck. “Were you happier after you were done with us? Did that bring them back?”
“None of what he does makes any sense.”
“He’s lying here buried with us while they play the game without him.”
“While his baby dies,” the redhead giggled.
He screamed again, expecting a tidal wave of mud and blood to burst from his mouth, but nothing left his body except the warped, terrified sound.
Pathetic.
Weak.
The intangible flock of birds above him suddenly scattered, dissolving into the air as though they had never been there at all.
Only one thing remained.
Maud.
“Johnny?”
He rolled onto his stomach and drew his knees beneath him. He clawed his knife out from between the barrels, his breathing easing only when the familiar handle finally rested between his fingers again.
“Stay where you are!”
The words didn’t come out the way he meant them to, forceful and threatening. His ribs constricted, still refusing to let enough air into his lungs to ease the breathlessness.
He spotted her almost immediately because she wasn’t hiding at all; she stood in the doorway leading from the pump room. Water dripped from the ends of her hair and from her filthy, torn clothes, wounds gaping across her arms and palms.
Johnny’s shoulder blade struck the wall. He nearly fell, and only Maud stopped him, stepping forward and grabbing the fabric of his shirt, the solid flesh of his bicep, to keep him upright. He had no doubt she was armed, and he was right: an old cleaver was tucked beneath her belt, though she made no attempt to use it against him.
Johnny headbutted her without thinking. Maud’s brow bone cracked beneath his forehead with a sharp sound.
“Fuck!”
“I said, stay where you are!”
His gaze darted from side to side, but the shadows were gone. There was no earth in his mouth, only on his clothes, proof that he had rolled around in the mud.
You really did lose your mind, old boy. Gone just as crazy as everybody else in the freak-show family.
Shoulda leave when you had the chance.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda, Jonathan.
Maud pressed the padded part of her palm against her eyebrow, hissing now and then, but otherwise did nothing.
She simply stared at him. Something resembling concern dwelled somewhere in the inscrutable tunnel of her dark eyes. “What now?” she finally asked.
The tip of Johnny’s knife pointed toward the scattered boards.
“Now…? Where’s the boy?!”
“I’d kinda like to know that myself,” Maud shot back. “But if you keep blindly obeying Nancy, we ain’t gonna be looking for him together.”
“I don’t obey nobody!”
“We don’t have time for this.” Maud lowered her hand from her face. Her eyebrow was beginning to swell.
“And yet here you are,” Johnny remarked, tucking his knife into his belt. “Why? I reckon you got the better of that bastard’s wits. Did you kill him?”
“No. But I would’ve, if he’d forced me to… because we do what we have to, don’t we? And you know why I’m here.”
It was not a straight answer, but it would have been surprising if it had been. When Johnny reached for her, she instinctively stepped back and eyed him suspiciously. Tense as a wire pulled to breaking point, she nevertheless let Johnny run his fingers through her hair, as though it were a lifeline amid the foam of a raging sea. He gathered her dirty strands atop her head and drew her closer, their noses touching.
This would be the time to kill her. Woulda, shoulda, coulda.
“Just don’t tell me it’s because you love me,” he muttered into her face.
Maud pressed her lips together, but then simply let her shoulders sag, as though her strength had left her. She leaned into him, her hand leaving reddish smears of blood along Johnny’s arm.
They both flinched when the squeal of a metal door broke the silence.
“Nancy?” Maud breathed.
Johnny shook his head.
“She’d be louder. That’s Sissy.” Maud asked if he was sure. “Which one of us is the better hunter?”
“You were screaming your head off a minute ago,” Maud reminded him, but she did not waste a second, already heading toward the service corridor. “You gonna tell me what happened?”
“They tried to kill me.” She glanced back over his shoulder, and she did not need to say anything; her face said it plainly. There was nobody else in the corridor but them. “Hell, I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
Johnny had never heard a sentence that desperate come out of his mouth in his entire life. And yet—strangely—Maud seemed somewhat relieved to hear it.
“If you’re talking about the shadows, they still want you dead. That don’t mean they’re real. Stay with me, Johnny, because I need you right now.”
She needed him, sure—to get what she wanted. Like always. How could she have trusted him for even a second, after she’d abandoned him for years, humiliated him, tried to blow his brains out with a goddamn shotgun, and raised their son to kill on command?
“You said Lele wasn’t like our kind. Didn’t look that way to me.”
“He did what he had to do, too. He did what I told him. That’s entirely different.”
His wife’s eyes reflected someone altogether unfamiliar.
Not Nancy’s obedient little weapon, not the cold-blooded killer who haunted the newspapers, nor the savage lover.
Just Johnny.
Johnny, who was fucking terrified that everything was slipping out of his hands, that he was going to fail.
The kid was his spitting image, so how could he ever have been a good man? He resisted, screamed, fought—and loved his mother. Johnny had loved his mother, too; once, a long time ago. He knew it. In his most intoxicated dreams, she sometimes surfaced: long hair pinned back with ribbons, arms pulling him against a soft chest. False memories, of course, conjured only by the photographs Nancy had hidden beneath her floorboards.
And yet somehow they belonged to Johnathan Gilbert, too—the boy he had been when Nancy’s claws closed around him.
Someone screamed: his son.
Screams had always had a powerful effect on him; they fired him up, flooded his veins with adrenaline, drove him to action. A stimulant, an incurable addiction, something he had already enjoyed during hunts with Hands, back when he was still a fuzz-cheeked kid. But Lele was different. This did not electrify him; it set every nerve in his body on edge, his blade appearing in his hand once more, and there was only one thought in his head: keeping the boy away from every danger.
Just like when he had learned that Maud was carrying him inside her.
LELE
He clung to Aunt Sissy’s skirt with both hands. The top of his head was hot beneath the pouring sunlight, the soles of his feet aching; the punctures from the cocklebur had drawn blood.
Turning toward the driveway, he looked from side to side, and though he did not want to, he stepped onto the concrete as they backed away. A razor blade dangled half-open from the wide pocket of Aunt Sissy’s skirt. A moment later, the woman’s bare feet reached the hot, even surface of the road too, but her narrow, poison-green eyes never left Grandma Nancy.
“Shame of the family,” Nancy spat, her voice distorted into a terrible croak by her wound. “That’s what you always were, Loretta. That little junkie slut’s bastard. They brought you here, dumped you on us… you spat in our faces, how many times, huh? Screwing hippies in the dirt, having orgies with perverts. A woman like you oughta never lay a hand on my grandson. Send him over here. Right now.”
Sissy did no such thing. She pulled out the razor, steadily backing Lele away with her.
“You don’t run me, old woman!” She laughed, so shrill and grating that Lele’s throat tightened. “If it weren’t for Johnny, if it weren’t for Grandpa, I’d’ve slit your throat a long time ago. You can keep on living if you want, but you ain’t ever gonna see us again. Ain’t nobody gonna protect you.”
“From whom?” Blood welled at the corner of Nancy’s mouth. She took her hand away from her neck to steady herself and staggered forward. “Maud? She’s always been helpless against me.” She drew a deep, heavy breath. “My son, my grandson… they’re the ones she used to hurt me, but she’s run outta tricks now. There’s nowhere left to go. Send Lele over here!”
“You know I ain’t gonna do that.”
“Ah. You were always a spiteful little c… creature. Like you don’t know what happens when you defy the family.”
“The family you’ve done everything in your power to tear apart?”
Nancy swung the hoe at her, but it fell short; she was still too far away. Lele clung so tightly to Aunt Sissy’s skirt that his knuckles went white.
“Come here, Lele,” Nancy wheezed. “Come here. I ain’t gonna hurt you. I know this isn’t your fault. You were protecting your mama. Come on, move.”
Aunt Sissy laughed again, then suddenly shoved Lele backward.
He tumbled into the thicket beyond the road. Fresh leaf litter and the fleshy leaves of a Texas mountain laurel broke his fall, and the world turned upside down before his eyes. Even so, he could still see the two women lunging at each other, and Aunt Sissy dancing aside from the swing of his grandmother’s weapon. The blade, rusted with old weed killer, missed her forehead by mere inches.
Nancy was grunting like a hog waiting for the killing floor.
Lele thought the trembling beneath him was only from the fall.
Then he saw the headlights.
They had little strength against the fierce afternoon light, but the enormous black tires and the blaring horn sent every small creature in the vicinity scattering. Sparrows, horseflies, stray cats.
Lele covered his ears.
All he could see was a black mass through the diesel fumes of the passing truck as it thundered past Nancy’s property, its horn blaring horribly. It did not slow, did not stop, though even above the clatter of machinery and road, the startled woman’s shriek could be heard just before the impact.
MAUD
Johnny turned off the generator, allowing them to make their way up the slope toward the driveway without having to take the long way around.
She had been right: Sissy had gotten ahead of them and taken Lele with her, and apparently, he had decided to trust her. Lele was distrustful by nature, so Maud knew it must have taken that blind panic, that horror brought down upon his head by her and Johnny’s decisions.
Beginning with the day in ’73 when she had persuaded Grant to stop at Drayton’s gas station.
She did not know what to expect when she hurried after Johnny out of the sunflower bed. They had heard the quarrel, the snarling, the inhuman panting. There was no way Sissy had been acting on Nancy’s behalf—she had hated Nancy for as long as she could remember. She had never made a secret of it.
What her plan had been, what could possibly have been going on in that mind full of songs and fairy dust, a mind with so little connection to reality and such a strong acquaintance with the ethereal, remained a question. It was just like her to run barefoot into the world, a child in her arms, and believe she could somehow make it. Perhaps she had only meant to get as far as Grandpa’s house with him.
Maud and Johnny reached the driveway at the exact moment the speeding truck passed straight through Sissy, burying her under the giant wheels.
For a moment, Maud didn't believe it. She saw her, how she turned her head and hear mouth formed a little sound of surprise. One instant she was there, barefoot on the road, her ruined dress whipping around her legs, the razor still clenched in one hand.
Then she was gone.
“SHIT, SISSY!” Both of Johnny’s hands shot toward the sky, his dirt-smeared face looking years older. “No, no, fuck, don’t fucking do that!”
The frightened Nancy wobbled backward toward the other side of the road, where a tousled child’s head peered out between the branches of the bushes.
“Lele, baby, I’m right here!”
There was no answer. Lele was too shocked to react. He seemed unharmed, and must have been pushed into the bushes before the truck appeared. Its passage was marked by bloody, ridged tire tracks and a twisted mass bulging against the concrete.
The mangled heap that remained of Sissy made no sound. Her limbs were barely distinguishable from one another, but one ankle had been torn clean off and lay beside one of the mile markers. The sole of Maud’s shoe made a wet squelch against a shredded piece of scalp as she ran toward her son.
“Daddy?”
“He’s here with me, Lele. It’s gonna be over now.”
Tears spilled from Lele’s eyes as he rose to his feet on trembling knees, and though Johnny told him not to, he could not stop himself from looking at Sissy’s body.
Maud soon realized why, too. As Nancy lunged toward him, Lele threw himself down beside the horrific carcass and tried to take something from it.
“Absolutely not!”
Unfortunately, Nancy had the advantage this time. She grabbed Lele by his thick hair, and he cried out in pain, dropping Sissy’s razor blade from his hand.
She breathed heavily, whistling through her teeth, and with the loss of pressure her bandage loosened. She dragged the child away from the corpse, not looking at it herself for any longer than she had to.
“Now we’re going inside,” she announced. “You two in front of us.”
“This can’t stay here.” Johnny stared toward the horizon, as though expecting the truck driver to turn around, but there was no sign of him. Had it only been the fear of responsibility that scared him off, or had the lunatic chaos he’d witnessed here convinced him there was no damn reason to stop? “If we leave it… like this… somebody’ll be knocking on our door in minutes.”
Nancy merely snapped at him to do his job.
Johnny spat at his feet, but for the moment he slid his knife back beneath his belt. He returned with a wheelbarrow and a shovel. Maud consistently turned her head away when he set to work. Not because of the sight.
Because of who that armful of flesh had belonged to only moments ago.
Her sister.
The woman who had wanted to get Lele out of here.
She could not afford the tears. It was enough to hear her son sobbing inconsolably. Nancy kept a merciless grip on him, the garden hoe clutched in her free hand—the very same one that had carved that terrible wound into Johnny’s face. She watched Maud one moment, then Johnny the next, who was displaying another symptom utterly unlike himself: his face had gone almost green, as though he were about to throw up.
Nevertheless, he quickly shoved the remains of his cousin into the wheelbarrow and took the lead, pushing it back into Nancy’s garden. Maud followed behind him, feeling the point of her mother-in-law’s stare between her shoulder blades. Lele just kept crying and crying, long past the point where a reprimand could have stopped him. His attempt to retrieve the razor had left him covered in blood from head to toe.
Maud stopped short when Johnny suddenly dropped the wheelbarrow onto the ground. Its metal legs sank into the dust.
“Now let go of my son,” he told Nancy in a voice that allowed no argument. “I ain’t saying it twice.”
The corner of Nancy’s mouth trembled, though it would have been difficult to tell whether from fear or desperation. Maud could not take any satisfaction in it—she knew the old bitch far too well. It only made her more dangerous, and like Maud herself, she did not surrender easily.
She slid the cold head of the garden hoe beneath Lele’s chin, forcing his little head uncomfortably backward.
“No, son. You can’t do this. Look what’s become of this f-family… Somebody’s got to hold together what’s left of it, somebody who still has their wits about them. I ain’t giving up my grandson. He’s not going back to that monster.”
“Take your hand off him, Nancy.”
Johnny gave every word a threatening weight and drew himself to his full height. He shook off the state he had been in moments before like a dog shaking off water.
This was not the man who sneered and waited smugly for the right moment either. Not the Pretty Boy.
The past six years that had deepened the contours of his face and yellowed his teeth. His rage, all those countless M’s carved into bodies to tell the world that he was the one in charge. Whatever he had seen down there in the basement—all these had used up the very last shred of his patience.
Flies began gathering above the wheelbarrow.
LELE
Mommy, Mommy, Mommy
JOHNNY
He felt nothing.
Not from the moment he saw the hoe beneath his son’s chin.
Before that, he had been nauseous, dead flies buzzing before his eyes, blurring his vision, and he had been afraid he was going to burst into tears like some damn infant.
Sissy was gone.
It made no damn sense, because his crazy cousin had spent years coming and going in that leather traveling coat, never giving him a moment’s peace with her constant singing. Always going on about that whoreson Charlie. Chasing Nubbins out of her flowers and rolling her eyes at his pussy-licking jokes.
And his mother—
No. Just Nancy. That walking corpse.
After all this, she still had the nerve to put a hoe in his son’s face.
Stupid bitch. Like poking a lion with a needle. Why the hell does she think she can get away with everything?
At least Maud knew I’d kill her for what she’d done. She didn’t push it any further.
He shot her a fleeting glance.
Maud’s hand hovered over the cleaver tucked into her belt, her lips pulled back from her teeth. She was filthy, dirt and scraps of garbage tangled in her hair, dried blood smeared across her palms, arms, and trousers. The wound he had given her showed beneath the hem of Maria’s blouse. After days of illness and being tied up, the sensible thing would have been for her to collapse, maybe even die.
But that wouldn’t have been his Blondie.
Johnny crossed the distance between him and Nancy in two long strides and grabbed her by the throat before she could get another word out.
Oh, she wanted to run that mouth.
Again.
As if there were anything left she could possibly say that would make him change his mind.
Every goddamn string had snapped.
There was nothing left for her to pull.
“Fucking die for me already.”
With his other hand, he wrenched the hoe from her grip and sent it clattering into the scorched grass.
Lele broke free between them and stumbled, falling as he went, his short legs fighting to carry him toward Maud.
Nancy spat a mixture of blood and saliva across Johnny’s face. Her knees were shaking; the wound in her neck had split open, a fresh, brilliant-red stream pouring down the front of her clothes and across her chest.
This time, Johnny did not let go.
He looked into her eyes, just as he had that day when he had demanded the truth from her—the truth about Judith, the flower bed, the lies she had stuffed into his mouth along with the brownie. I told you you had to let me go someday.
“P… please…”
“No.”
His glove had grown heavy with blood, and he squeezed Nancy’s throat with such force that he heard the bones crack. Her eyes bulged, two buttons brimming with blood and tears. Her palms slapped against Johnny’s broad shoulders, his chest, but he barely felt it. It might as well have been a breeze against his skin.
Nancy suddenly crumpled forward, as though she meant to embrace him, her body buckling at the waist. Johnny instinctively loosened his grip a little, and Nancy’s head slammed into his chest, all strength leaving her. Small, struggling noises escaped her, sounds that no longer managed to take the shape of actual words.
Johnny did not even see when the ridiculously short Maud stepped behind Nancy. But the blade of her cleaver sank deep into the woman’s back. The handle jutted from her like a broken bird’s wing, and nothing kept her standing anymore except Johnny’s body.
He gave one last stroke over those dark-brown curls that smelled faintly of baby powder before pulling away, letting her collapse.
Maud drove the sole of her boot against the blade, forcing it deeper into her back.
Johnny pulled it free and threw his gloves onto the ground. His fingers were slick with sweat, numb beneath them. He crouched down and opened his arms toward Lele, but this time he said nothing. He did not order him to come.
He let the boy see his exhaustion.
Lele hesitated, but eventually reached out and touched the rough hair on his arm. They were both dirty with blood. A small red mark beneath Lele’s chin showed where the hoe had touched him. Johnny touched it with his index finger, then exhaled and patted his son’s shoulder.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah.”
Maud joined them, searching Lele for any other injuries. Always-caring Mommy Maud, Johnny thought, and a hoarse breath escaped him. He would have done just about anything for a cigarette.
Nancy lay on her stomach, her stiff fingers curled around nothing. It was hard to believe it was over. Somewhere deep down, he expected her to spring back up any second and start cackling her usual nonsense. That the whole thing had been nothing more than a fever dream, teddy bears and dead men’s teeth and Sissy’s disfigured body included.
What he was looking at in front of him was his family.
Even if he had nearly gotten two of them killed.
MAUD
“Is she dead?” Lele asked.
For a moment, Maud did not know which one he meant, but the answer was the same either way.
“Yes. But it isn’t your fault, sweetheart.”
“Mmmm.”
Once she had established that Lele was sound, she let him go and allowed him to draw closer to his father. Johnny had just picked up the knife he had dropped while strangling Nancy and put it back in its place—only for his own miniature likeness to burrow against him a moment later.
“I was so scared you wouldn't change your mind,” Lele sobbed. “That you wouldn't listen to Mommy.”
Johnny looked almost bewildered for a moment, as though somebody had asked him to speak a foreign language. Awkwardly, he draped an arm around Lele's back and pulled him closer. The boy's little fists balled around the fabric of his shirt, pressing against him with such force that Johnny had to brace his feet against the ground.
After all, he had only been a father for barely ten days.
This really was a language no one had ever spoken around him—Rodney Gilbert certainly hadn't—and it wasn't a language meant for people like them in the first place.
And yet there they were. A degenerate fragment of the Sawyer family.
Maud sat down in the grass across from them, her knee knocking against Johnny's. The wind rose, sweeping dust from beneath the eaves, while lizards scurried through the blades of grass. The windows of Nancy's house stared at them like blind eyes; without its mistress, the place was nothing but a hide, stripped from livestock and tossed aside. It almost seemed ready to collapse in on itself.
“Johnny.”
“Hm?”
“You okay?”
“Dumb question.”
“If you say so.”
First, Maud bathed Lele and put him into clean clothes, then settled him into Johnny's car, which now carried a new license plate. Johnny hauled the still-unconscious Nubbins up from the basement and laid him out beside the gas tank. Together, he and Maud hurriedly gathered anything they thought might be useful: clothes, all the cash they could find in the house, Lele's belongings, toiletries. They changed clothes themselves, too.
Maud left Maria's blouse behind in the shack, crumpling it into the long-abandoned rabbit cage.
Before she closed the door to Johnny's shack, she also stuffed a few of the lipsticks and eyeliners piled up in boxes into her bag.
By sunset they were already on the road, heading north.
They slowed near Grandpa's farm, but ultimately did not stop. There would have been no point, only unnecessary trouble for Bubba. Maud regretted that she would not see him again—and most likely never would—but she thought it was better this way.
In the stories she told Lele, she could bring him back: stroking his chicken, trying out makeup products. Or the moment he had instinctively spared her when she threw herself in front of Daisy.
He and Nubbins would have to manage on their own now.
They stopped at a gas station near the Texas state line.
When Lele got out of the car, he shuffled around for a moment before blurting out that he needed to pee. Johnny patted his head, then steered him toward the shoulder-high sunflowers growing behind the stocky building.
Meanwhile, Maud bought water, sandwiches, and candy.
Lele and Johnny sipped chocolate milk. Johnny had one elbow hanging out the window, his black polo-shirt leaving his scarred arms bare. He turned on the radio, then glanced back. - “You like this one, little man?” . and at Lele's nod, he turned up California Dreamin'.
Maud applied her lipstick in the rearview mirror, then unwrapped a strawberry candy and dropped it onto her tongue.
EPILOGUE
The late Nancy Sawyer had always insisted that leaving the family, that willfulness, was the surest road to destruction.
And yet Maud, Johnny, and their little boy's journey to St. Louis, Missouri, passed without incident.
They had agreed on a big city, somewhere it was easy to disappear, where an average, white family like theirs would attract no particular attention. Somewhere a handsome man could easily find work, and no one would ask unnecessary questions. Where one extra, clever child would simply fit into the classroom.
They stopped twice at motels, paid for with Nancy's money.
After Lele had fallen asleep on the slightly lumpy double bed, and Johnny had lasted barely three minutes before coming inside her in the shower, Maud asked him why he hadn't killed her family.
“I wanted to. Would that have made you happy?”
“It wouldn't have changed anything,” Maud replied, wrapping one of the thin white towels around her body. “But I'm glad you didn't. Lele needs somebody if we fuck up.”
Her sisters were grown now. It was strange to think about. She couldn't picture them as anything other than three flighty, irritating nestlings. Tina had probably already flown the coop; she had always seemed the most likely to do it.
As for her...
Did they still talk about her?
Now that she no longer had to run, she finally had time to think about the life she had left behind.
Everything that had led them to where they were.
In St. Louis, Maud began working in the butcher department of a larger supermarket chain, where every employee wore a yellow-and-white uniform cap and apron. Johnny found work at a gas station, where nobody cared about his lack of qualifications. His practical hands and knack for vehicles, however, set him apart from the other applicants.
Their rented apartment on the second floor overlooked a playground, where Lele often spent his afternoons with the neighborhood children.
One day, Johnny came home carrying several potted plants. He didn't know what species they were, and he never said why—or for whom—he had bought them.
Maud put them on the bedroom windowsill and tended to them devotedly.
For Lele's tenth birthday, they bought him a headlamp, a modern children's telescope, and a butterfly net. By then, they could afford big presents.
Maud and Johnny sat on their marital bed, watching him unwrap the gifts from their red plaid wrapping paper.
They were not the only witnesses to the moment.
On the wall opposite their bed, hung six missing-person posters, pinned up with nails and knife blades.
Report by FORD, Holden (FBI) concerning the SAWYER–RAINES case
States involved: TX, ARK, MO, S.C.
(...) In the shared residence of Raines and Sawyer—or, as they referred to themselves at the time, the Gilbert family—direct evidence was uncovered of six additional murders committed between 1979 and 1984. (...)
MAUD E. RAINES and JONATHAN SAWYER (birth name: JONATHAN GILBERT) had already earned their places among the nation's most depraved offenders in their own right. However, the fact that they maintained a shared household and raised a minor together further increases the shock factor of the case. (...)
JONATHAN SAWYER was apprehended on August 19, 1984, near the scene of what investigators identified as his twenty-eighth successful murder. Agents and local law enforcement were profoundly astonished when, upon contacting his spouse, it became apparent that MAUD E. RAINES not only knew of her husband's crimes (…) there had been an active, though thus far unsuccessful investigation conducted against her too. (...)
During a search of the couple's residence, our forensic specialists identified a large quantity of evidence, including: a bracelet made from human teeth; the wedding ring of Harold Anderberg, who disappeared in 1973; the traveling case belonging to Whitney O'Dea, also reported missing in 1973; and an additional fifteen human remains concealed inside tin cans and napkins, the identities of which have yet to be established. (...)
RAINES—also surprisingly—did not deny her complicity whatsoever, consistently claiming responsibility for her own murders while denying that her husband had participated in them. Several murders were committed jointly. Whether the couple involved their minor child (L.J.G.) in any of these acts remains under investigation. (...)
Among the personal possessions belonging to SAWYER and RAINES, investigators discovered a 1972 edition of the biography CARY GRANT — A STAR IS BORN, between whose pages were concealed braids made from human hair.
According to RAINES's testimony, these belonged to victims from the wave of disappearances in 1973, specifically: ANA FLORES (18), LELAND MCKINNEY (18), SONNY WILLIAMS (18), DANNY GAINES (21), JULIE CRAWFORD (21), CONNIE TAYLOR (18), GRANT O. FINCH (23), and DAISY C. ANDERBERG (23). (...)
In the absence of bodies, the veracity of this claim remains disputed. (...) The families have been notified.
SAWYER likewise claimed responsibility for the disappearance of MARIA FLORES, a twenty-one-year-old university student from MUERTO County, TEXAS.
Both SAWYER and RAINES fit the “serial killer” profile established during the profiling research conducted beginning in 1972. Their methods of operation differ significantly; while SAWYER typically carries out his crimes in a deliberate, calculated manner, studying his victims—see the Granger Hill incident—RAINES's crimes are primarily impulsive and brutal, displaying comparatively little overt sadism.
(...)
The placement and guardianship status of L.J.G. (10) have yet to be determined. Raines has relatives living in Floresville, TX. The child remains subject to further interviews. (...) Thus far, he has consistently maintained that his parents are “good parents,” that they “love him very much,” and that he has never personally witnessed any wrongdoing whatsoever. (...)
The child is notably quiet. His intelligence is above average, and our child psychiatric specialists have thus far identified no indications of a personality disorder. (...)
At present, the public remains fixated on the upcoming trial of SAWYER, known by the nickname PRETTY BOY, while the booking photograph leaked to the press—showing him smiling—is being carried around like a torch. (...) flaring up public outrage but also bizarre interest (…)
October 1984
artwork: @valeska-twins
