Dave chuckled a little at this and leaned forward. He caught her fingers in his own and gave them a little squeeze. “You know who I am.”
She stared and didn’t try to pull her hand away again.
“I’m Daddy.”
Something behind him moved.
“Mom?” A soft voice, almost girly.
Dave looked over his shoulder, saw the boy backing toward the cabinets, and started to say something to him, but a sudden, stinging pain on the left side of Dave’s face cut him off. His hand darted to his cheek and came away covered in shiny red blood. The woman’s hand streaked up for another blow, but Dave caught it deftly in midair despite blurry vision and pain so agonizing he wanted to scream. She’d scratched his eyeball, but she hadn’t blinded him. Not quite. Blood slid over his lips and onto his chin. It sprayed across her face when he said, “Why would you do that?”
Her fingernails jutted from her hand like the talons of some wild animal, dripping his blood, the smallest of them broken off just above the cuticle but the rest still wickedly sharp and gleaming. He squeezed her wrist hard, heard breaking bones and squeezed even harder. The boy screamed now in a way that made it seem as if he’d been doing it all along. Dave let go of the woman long enough to punch her in the face again. This time, his fist connected with her perfect elf’s nose and drove it into her skull. Dave couldn’t hear the crunching cartilage over the boy’s continued shrieking, but he felt it. Her blood gushed across her cheek and mixed with the sprayed droplets of his own. He grabbed hold of her broken wrist again and used his other hand to reach into his cargo pocket.
He wouldn’t tolerate disrespect like that. No, sir. Not for one second. He wrapped his fingers around the rubbery grip and brought out the first of his weapons.
The woman opened her mouth. Beg, Dave thought, now she’ll beg. He would have. But when she spoke, she did so in a heavy gurgle that reminded Dave of a character he’d seen in a movie years before, a movie he could no longer quite remember, and she uttered just a single word.
“Rnnnnnn,” she said, both her good eye and her bad rolling into the back of her head. “Rrrnnnnn.” The word was no more articulate the second time. She coughed out a blood-tinted wad of phlegm and then screamed, “RUN!”
Behind him, Dave heard the back door slam. He ignored it. He knew where Georgie would run, and he could deal with him later.
He held the knife between her face and his own, twisted it through the air like a hypnotist trying to put her under. “I don’t know what kind of a relationship you think we’re gonna have,” he said to her, still spinning the knife, “but if you think I’ll let you act that way in front of our son, you’re dead wrong.”
She groaned and looked squarely into his eyes. “Fug you,” she said and spit into his throbbing eye.
Dave grabbed hold of her by the blouse with his free hand and lifted her to her feet. The movement momentarily sandwiched her broken wrist between the two of them, and she howled even after Dave had pushed her far enough away to relieve the pressure. Blood, spittle, and sweat dripped into a puddle on the floor between their feet.
“I was wrong about you,” Dave said. He wrapped his fist up so tightly in her shirt that two of its buttons popped off and fell into the mess on the floor. “I thought if the boy was right, you’d have to be right, too.”
He held the knife up again and contemplated the perfectly honed edge. “You’re not,” he said, looking back at her dripping face. He saw the fear in her eyes, but also the respect hiding somewhere deep behind. She was right to respect him. He’d earned it.
He pushed her to arm’s length with his clutching fist and jammed the hunting knife high into her midsection, just below her sternum. He twisted the blade once, forcefully, and then drew the knife down her abdomen to her pelvis. The mess of innards that came spilling across his hand felt warm and sticky and smelled like shit.
She hadn’t screamed again, this woman whose name Dave didn’t know, but when he pulled the knife free and stepped back from her, she did make a long guttural sound in the back of her throat. Dave thought she would vomit, but instead she let loose a strange kind of snort that clouded the air around her face with a faint pink mist.
The woman dropped to her knees and slid a little on the newly expanded mess. She clutched feebly at her eviscerated organs but succeeded less in reclaiming them than in tearing them to shreds with those razor-blade fingernails. Dave watched her struggle. This wasn’t quite the same as gutting a deer or a rabbit, where the thing was dead before you did your slicing and dicing. He stepped to the woman, grabbed hold of her hair, and wrenched her head back until she was staring up past his face and at the ceiling. She grabbed the cuff of his shirt with one of her wet hands, but then lost hold and slid again in the mound of her intestines.
Dave swung the knife, cut halfway through her neck, pulled the weapon free and swung again. This time it came out dripping on the other side, and the woman finally dropped dead to the floor.
Backing away from the carnage, Dave looked down at himself. Christ. He’d ruined his clothes. That would teach him not to change into his good duds before he knew for sure the bloodshed had ended. Wishful thinking, he supposed. He wiped the dirty blade on his already soiled pant leg and deposited it back into his cargo pocket.
He had been stupid to take the woman for granted. He saw that now. He’d been too focused on the boy, too single-minded. In the end, he guessed, this had all turned out for the better. A boy couldn’t grow up with such a disobedient harpy for a mother. Dave had come to save the boy; he hadn’t realized until now just how much he would be saving him from.
He moved to the counter beside the sink and picked up the towel on which the woman had dried her hands for the last time. He swabbed the bulk of the blood from his hands and then rubbed at his face. The claw marks on his eye and cheek burned, one spot in particular near the corner of his mouth. He probed tenderly at the area with his fingertips and found something small and hard buried in his flesh. He pulled it free. Round at one end, jagged at the other, painted a subtle white: the woman’s missing fingernail. He dropped it to the floor and used the towel to stop up the freshly welling blood.
There was no sense in getting completely cleaned up yet—that would have to wait until after he’d secured the boy—but he wanted to clear off at least the runny stuff. The feel of the stinking gore dripping down his face and neck sickened him. It felt like he’d been sprayed by a dying skunk. He ran his hands across his face one last time, decided he’d done what he could for now, and dropped the crusty towel on the floor beside the body.
Before he left, he found a clean towel in one of the drawers and laid it on the counter where the old one had been. Perfect.
His footsteps echoed through the stillness as he left the kitchen, so much louder now than when he’d padded his way inside. He passed the questionable dinette without paying it any attention and let himself out the back door. Behind him, a line of red footprints led directly from the body to the exit, showing no deviation and no hesitation.
He stepped over the garden hose again, passed by the tennis ball and strode toward the woods, where he’d hid less than fifteen minutes before. The fork-trunked oak was the largest tree on the property, its lower limbs wide enough around that they nearly could have been trees of their own. Dave had never had a tree house himself and hadn’t seen enough of them in his life to fairly rate this one, but he could say with a hundred percent certainty that, as a kid, he would have given just about anything for this sort of hideaway. He could just imagine sitting in the shadows of a hundred breeze-blown leaves, sniffing the fresh air and listening to the birdsongs. It would be heaven to a nature-loving kid. Or at least it would have been to Davy. Maybe still would.