The Woods are Lonely, Dark and Deep
2. Squeal Like a Pig Trouble
Missy and Jared just haven't seen eye to eye since he started sneaking into her bedroom in the dark, so she takes advantage of the fact her brother's out cold by taking an ax and giving him forty whacks, just like that poem Lee loves so much.
But she doesn't have to give her Pa forty-one, because it doesn't take a genius to work out that he isn't going to be dancing the polka again any time soon. She roots around in his jacket pocket for his chawin' tobacco, since he won't be needing it now and she knows it soothes Lee when it all gets too much for him, and pulls his blood-spattered cap down tight on her head as a souvenir.
It takes a couple of buckets of water to bring Lee round, Missy knowing full well that the half-wit of the family might be of some use to her simply because of his brawn. Lee stares, wide-eyed, at the mess that used to be Pa's face and shakes his head, muttering for a few minutes about how that just don't beat all before Missy scolds him to his feet, "We ain't got time for grievin', Lee!" and chivvies him on outside the barn and up into the house to get Pa's black bag from the dresser.
"What about the bitch?" Lee says, giving the cop a shove with his boot as he walks by her.
And darnit if Missy hadn't gone and forgotten all about that cop, sprawled in the dirt next to her car.
Sam hates woods of any description, keeps flashing to chases through woods, werewolves in woods, wendigos in woods, wendigos that grab his brother when he isn't looking and hide him away where Sam can never hope to find him. What might seem peaceful, restful, tranquil in dappled sunlight, oozes with malevolence and bleeds evil in the dark, and trees conceal way too much, he thinks morosely as they trudge along the muddy trail that should take them off the property. And woods are way too quiet, his inner voice adds - well, except for the noise of running water in the distance. Good white-water rafting in these parts, he muses, by way of taking his mind off the whole trees-fuck-where-is-my-brother? train of thought.
Dean is all-eyes, darting here, there, everywhere, at every possible trajectory that might be the source of incoming. "Timber fuckin' wolves, Sammy," he announces grandly. "We have the unbefuckinglievably bad luck to be afoot smack in the middle of wolf central. Christ, we should find some big sticks or something, huh?"
Dean, always unsettled without something he can use for killing, Sam thinks fondly, and he feels one of those sudden, overwhelming surges of affection that catch him by surprise when he least expects it.
They've been walking maybe twenty minutes or so according to Sam's wristwatch and his brother is flagging already, shivering in the cold. "Kid wear you out in there, dude?" Sam mocks.
Dean snorts and mutters something under his breath. Then all of a sudden he stops and very clearly says, "Gonna hurl," before stumbling off the path and proceeding to do just that, falling to his knees in a series of dry and not-so-dry heaves into the undergrowth. "Fuck," he snaps out, coughing whatever's left onto the ground, panting and spitting. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve, stares at the puddle of vomit for a minute, considering it, before flopping back onto his haunches in the dirt and taking a shaky breath in.
"Sammy, we are now officially fucked. Because the friendly neighborhood timber wolf has a sense of smell one hundred times greater than a man's. That chunder smells pretty ripe to me. Which means that we are shaping up to be main course in the biggest feeding frenzy since that night of the giant man-eating rabbits movie."
Sam gags himself, swallows it back down.
And Dean is now officially rambling. Because, "Man, that's a great movie. All those bunnies coming up over the crest of the hill, all slo-mo, and all fuckin' teeth. God. Rabbits really creep me out. You know their teeth never stop growing? I seen it on Animal Planet - you have to take them to the vet to get them cut. Fuckin' awesome special effects in that movie, dude. Remember?"
"No Dean, can't say as I do," Sam says, rolling his eyes because, random, much?
Dean stares owlishly up at him in the moonlight, nods sagely. "Could have sworn you were there. They weren't like fuckin' Thumper, I can tell you that. Though it isn't as good as that giant ants movie where they have to torch the sewers to kill the fuckers…"
Dean just doesn't ramble without a reason, a fact confirmed for Sam when he leans down to heave his brother up and Dean lets out a strangled yelp as soon as Sam grips his upper arm. And come to think of it, Dean's perspiring an awful lot considering it's forty degrees, if that. So Sam leaves him to slump back down into his spot, to the accompaniment of a sharp intake of breath and then a mournful, "Jesus. You'd think she could have given us a ride."
Sam sits down next to his brother, suddenly feeling it himself. "You going to tell me where it hurts?" he says quietly.
"Skillet in back of the head," says Dean, before rushing out something else at the tail end that sounds like brnmerehopker.
"Dean," Sam prods, world-weary. "Come on, I need to know if you're likely to faceplant any time soon."
"Burned me with a red hot poker."
"Jesus," Sam cries, rounding on his brother. "Where? Shoulder? Jacket. Off. Now."
Dean huffs annoyance as he eases off the jacket, exposing torn, charred fabric and Sam hisses out between his teeth as he peels it away from the wound. He frowns in sympathy as his brother winces away from his probing fingers. "Christ, it's filthy. You should have said something."
"Well, I was real busy at the time fighting off that freakin' wildcat kid of theirs," Dean snaps back. "And how clean are your hands? You just fuckin' stuck them in there. It was you sacked out in the barn in all the cowshit, not me. You've probably just left God knows what in there… mad fuckin' cow disease, knowing my luck."
Good point, Sam concedes, putting a liberal application of antibiotic ointment on the very top of his mental to-do list if they ever get out of these damn woods, as his brother stares at him with bleary eyes. "Am I going to have to carry you?" he sighs.
Dean blinks slowly, doesn't seem to hear him. "That fucker," he murmurs. "That old guy, her Pa… I keep seeing him."
He reaches up, dips his head into his palm, and the reference has Sam shivering himself with the memory of the old man in glorious technicolor hi-definition close-up, the stench of unwashed sweat, liquor and worse, his amused grin, the gleam of satisfaction in his eyes, all run through with the power that came with aiming, firing, severing that fragile hold on life.
As if Dean is reading Sam's mind, he slurs on. "I keep seeing his eyes, Sam. The look in them. Thrill of the hunt, joy of the kill." He comes out from behind his hand. "I've felt those things myself, seen them in my own eyes when I look in the mirror. Seen them in dad's eyes."
Sam swallows, replies dryly. "We're not like them." He doesn't like how unconvincing it sounds, but the flashing lights of Kathleen Hudak's patrol car illuminating the sky back down the trail is a welcome distraction. "I'll flag her down," he says, as he gets up. "She didn't know you were hurt. Look pathetic."
He walks stiffly into the middle of the trail, knowing the moonlight means she should see him clear enough as the car grinds towards them, starts raising his arms to wave them.
The cry from behind him is rasping and urgent, and surprisingly alert.
"Sam! It's not her! Truck! Truck! It's not her!"
And Sam has to really squint but yep, tucked right up behind the car is an old jalopy, lights off but now suddenly flashing on as the door opens and there's a crescendo of baying and buckshot… and in that split second, it occurs to Sam that no self-respecting backwoods nutjob comes complete without a couple of pitbulls and a rifle powerful enough to take down a moose. Probably a fucking Winchester rifle at that.
Sam pirouettes gracefully at the same time as he sprints back to his brother, who's already crashing off the trail and in between the trees. His longer legs catch him up fast. "Are you going to make it?" he yells over at Dean, who's already gasping from the exertion and looking none too steady on his legs.
"River… throw off the dogs," Dean shouts back between labored breaths as they race pell mell between the trees, barely able to see, arms windmilling to fling branches aside, Sam now grabbing his slower-moving brother's arm to help him regain some momentum. And Sam prays to all that's holy for the water to be just there beyond the crest of the hill as he hears the awful frenzied, shrieking din of the dogs getting closer and closer, and he can't help flashing back to Bobby Singer once telling him that a pitbull's bite force was two thousand pounds per square inch, boy, and imagining that on his injured brother's leg, because the fuckers are right behind them now and-
-They plunge into the river and it feels like a thousand icy needles penetrating Sam's body as the water takes their feet from under them and catapults them downstream. It's only when he hears frantic whimpering that he realizes the dogs followed them in, but the threat is over as the smaller animals are swept ahead of them and he and his brother toss and tumble in the water, desperately trying to keep their heads above the flow long enough to draw breath before being sucked into the maelstrom again.
Sam manages to get his feet under him, haul Dean along in his wake, closer and closer to the safety of the shallows, and for a few precious moments it's going to be okay. But his hands are already numb with cold and it's impossible to keep his grip on his brother. Dean is carried away, thrashing about, eyes frantic with fear, Sam screaming his frustration at the trees as he scrambles up onto the shore. He leaps to his feet, whirls around, and knows the all-consuming relief of seeing his brother wearily drag himself out of the water roughly fifty yards further along the riverbank.
The other side of the riverbank.
But alive and in one piece, nonetheless.
In some far-off corner of Sam's mind an alarm bell is ringing, alerting him to the fact that he's totally lost his bearings and has no idea if he's on the same side of the river as the fuglies or his brother is. But for a moment he collapses on his butt, sucks deep, shuddering breaths into his aching lungs, coughs up at least a couple of shot glasses of brackish river water.
Then he pushes himself up onto his feet, groaning with the effort, and starts making his way down the riverbank so he'll be opposite his brother, just now on his hands and knees and coughing up his own lungs. Sam feels bruised all over, is sure he smashed into more than just a rock or two as they were pitched along in the water, and he rubs his sore ribs and winces as he coughs again.
He glances along and over at Dean and just there in the corner of his eye he sees something moving, dark, small, crouched. Moving stealthy and fast, fast and faster towards his apparently dazed brother, and now in some far-off corner of Sam's mind klaxons sound and emergency flares rocket up into the sky, trailing smoke and sparks in their wake.
"Fuck! Dean! Dean! Jesus, Dean!" he hollers, desperately trying to attract his brother's attention over the rush of the water, waving his arms wildly, jumping up and down, bending to pick up a rock and hurling it as hard as he can, seeing it splash into the raging foam a good six feet short of where he needed it to hit. He wades in thigh deep, already feeling the water's ferocious tug, knowing that swimming against the current just isn't an option.
And he's horrified.
"Dean! Dean!"
And it all slows down into the same appalling slow motion from that fucking dire night of the giant man-eating rabbits movie that Sam does remember watching with Dean, all snuggled up safe from monsters against twelve-year-old big brother warmth, feeling secure and knowing nothing would ever get past Dean to get to him and-
-Dean is oblivious as the dog streaks through the air and slams into his back, but he rouses enough to roll over and force his arm as far as possible into powerful jaws that-
-scissor from side to side, Bobby had said, as they grind down, shredding skin and muscle and snapping bone, all too easy with two thousand pounds of bite force per square inch; and Sam is screaming, and tears stream down his face as he sinks to his knees in the mud and screams and screams his brother's name and-
-Dean is fighting for his life and he knows it. The dog looses his arm and great gobs of blood and saliva splash in his face, and then it grips his upper leg just above the knee and worries and shakes him as if he were feather light. Red hot lightning bolts of pain race up his thigh, and he can hear screaming but for some reason he's sure it isn't him, that this grim battle for survival is going on in silence on his part even as the dog snarls its enjoyment and-
-it suddenly falls silent, and Sam, knowing what the silence must mean, doesn't want to look, can't bear to look because he knows it will be his undoing, wants to just stay face-down in the mud with his arms around his head and his ass in the air for the rest of time, so he won't ever have to look. But he can't, because he hears gunfire, and stones ricochet up and away from where the bullet hits, just a few feet away.
He looks up.
Dean, unbelievably, is using the arm the dog didn't mangle to push up from a belly-down position and crawling blindly away from the animal, now sitting some way off to the left. The last time Sam saw the man on the river bank was when he hauled him into the cage back at the Bender place, he thinks, as another bullet pings close by. He rockets upright, launches himself into a clumsy stagger, and ducks behind a tree, because as much as he wants to launch himself at his brother he knows damn well he can be of no use to Dean with a bullet - or pitbull - buried in him.
"Dean. Dean. God, Dean." Sam peers out from his hiding place, knows tears and snot are trickling down his face, but nothing matters. He only just got his brother gifted back to him after the rawhead debacle. "Dean," he whispers. "No. No."
And his agony is complete as the kid, the girl, who can't be much more than twelve or thirteen, walks up behind his tattered, bloody, confused wreck of a brother and delivers the coup de grace, pistol-whipping him with gusto.
So purty, thinks Missy, as she looks down on her angel boy. She knew he'd look even purtier once the dogs had a chance at him, all covered in slippery-slick blood and ivory bone glistening through ripped jeans like the mother of pearl inlay on her Ma's dressing table.
She pulls out a picture she took the time to tear from Pa's bible before they hauled out, unfolds it, holds it out to Lee to inspect: the Angel Gabriel in all his golden, heavenly beauty.
"Look," she says, wisely. "Like I said."
Her brother studies it for a moment before nodding in agreement. "Sure is a good likeness, Missy," he says, and expertly spits a mouthful of tobacco over at the dog. "Bullseye."
Missy reverently folds the picture back up and pushes it deep down into her pocket, nods to herself.
"I'm keeping him."
Next
Missy and Jared just haven't seen eye to eye since he started sneaking into her bedroom in the dark, so she takes advantage of the fact her brother's out cold by taking an ax and giving him forty whacks, just like that poem Lee loves so much.
But she doesn't have to give her Pa forty-one, because it doesn't take a genius to work out that he isn't going to be dancing the polka again any time soon. She roots around in his jacket pocket for his chawin' tobacco, since he won't be needing it now and she knows it soothes Lee when it all gets too much for him, and pulls his blood-spattered cap down tight on her head as a souvenir.
It takes a couple of buckets of water to bring Lee round, Missy knowing full well that the half-wit of the family might be of some use to her simply because of his brawn. Lee stares, wide-eyed, at the mess that used to be Pa's face and shakes his head, muttering for a few minutes about how that just don't beat all before Missy scolds him to his feet, "We ain't got time for grievin', Lee!" and chivvies him on outside the barn and up into the house to get Pa's black bag from the dresser.
"What about the bitch?" Lee says, giving the cop a shove with his boot as he walks by her.
And darnit if Missy hadn't gone and forgotten all about that cop, sprawled in the dirt next to her car.
Sam hates woods of any description, keeps flashing to chases through woods, werewolves in woods, wendigos in woods, wendigos that grab his brother when he isn't looking and hide him away where Sam can never hope to find him. What might seem peaceful, restful, tranquil in dappled sunlight, oozes with malevolence and bleeds evil in the dark, and trees conceal way too much, he thinks morosely as they trudge along the muddy trail that should take them off the property. And woods are way too quiet, his inner voice adds - well, except for the noise of running water in the distance. Good white-water rafting in these parts, he muses, by way of taking his mind off the whole trees-fuck-where-is-my-brother? train of thought.
Dean is all-eyes, darting here, there, everywhere, at every possible trajectory that might be the source of incoming. "Timber fuckin' wolves, Sammy," he announces grandly. "We have the unbefuckinglievably bad luck to be afoot smack in the middle of wolf central. Christ, we should find some big sticks or something, huh?"
Dean, always unsettled without something he can use for killing, Sam thinks fondly, and he feels one of those sudden, overwhelming surges of affection that catch him by surprise when he least expects it.
They've been walking maybe twenty minutes or so according to Sam's wristwatch and his brother is flagging already, shivering in the cold. "Kid wear you out in there, dude?" Sam mocks.
Dean snorts and mutters something under his breath. Then all of a sudden he stops and very clearly says, "Gonna hurl," before stumbling off the path and proceeding to do just that, falling to his knees in a series of dry and not-so-dry heaves into the undergrowth. "Fuck," he snaps out, coughing whatever's left onto the ground, panting and spitting. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve, stares at the puddle of vomit for a minute, considering it, before flopping back onto his haunches in the dirt and taking a shaky breath in.
"Sammy, we are now officially fucked. Because the friendly neighborhood timber wolf has a sense of smell one hundred times greater than a man's. That chunder smells pretty ripe to me. Which means that we are shaping up to be main course in the biggest feeding frenzy since that night of the giant man-eating rabbits movie."
Sam gags himself, swallows it back down.
And Dean is now officially rambling. Because, "Man, that's a great movie. All those bunnies coming up over the crest of the hill, all slo-mo, and all fuckin' teeth. God. Rabbits really creep me out. You know their teeth never stop growing? I seen it on Animal Planet - you have to take them to the vet to get them cut. Fuckin' awesome special effects in that movie, dude. Remember?"
"No Dean, can't say as I do," Sam says, rolling his eyes because, random, much?
Dean stares owlishly up at him in the moonlight, nods sagely. "Could have sworn you were there. They weren't like fuckin' Thumper, I can tell you that. Though it isn't as good as that giant ants movie where they have to torch the sewers to kill the fuckers…"
Dean just doesn't ramble without a reason, a fact confirmed for Sam when he leans down to heave his brother up and Dean lets out a strangled yelp as soon as Sam grips his upper arm. And come to think of it, Dean's perspiring an awful lot considering it's forty degrees, if that. So Sam leaves him to slump back down into his spot, to the accompaniment of a sharp intake of breath and then a mournful, "Jesus. You'd think she could have given us a ride."
Sam sits down next to his brother, suddenly feeling it himself. "You going to tell me where it hurts?" he says quietly.
"Skillet in back of the head," says Dean, before rushing out something else at the tail end that sounds like brnmerehopker.
"Dean," Sam prods, world-weary. "Come on, I need to know if you're likely to faceplant any time soon."
"Burned me with a red hot poker."
"Jesus," Sam cries, rounding on his brother. "Where? Shoulder? Jacket. Off. Now."
Dean huffs annoyance as he eases off the jacket, exposing torn, charred fabric and Sam hisses out between his teeth as he peels it away from the wound. He frowns in sympathy as his brother winces away from his probing fingers. "Christ, it's filthy. You should have said something."
"Well, I was real busy at the time fighting off that freakin' wildcat kid of theirs," Dean snaps back. "And how clean are your hands? You just fuckin' stuck them in there. It was you sacked out in the barn in all the cowshit, not me. You've probably just left God knows what in there… mad fuckin' cow disease, knowing my luck."
Good point, Sam concedes, putting a liberal application of antibiotic ointment on the very top of his mental to-do list if they ever get out of these damn woods, as his brother stares at him with bleary eyes. "Am I going to have to carry you?" he sighs.
Dean blinks slowly, doesn't seem to hear him. "That fucker," he murmurs. "That old guy, her Pa… I keep seeing him."
He reaches up, dips his head into his palm, and the reference has Sam shivering himself with the memory of the old man in glorious technicolor hi-definition close-up, the stench of unwashed sweat, liquor and worse, his amused grin, the gleam of satisfaction in his eyes, all run through with the power that came with aiming, firing, severing that fragile hold on life.
As if Dean is reading Sam's mind, he slurs on. "I keep seeing his eyes, Sam. The look in them. Thrill of the hunt, joy of the kill." He comes out from behind his hand. "I've felt those things myself, seen them in my own eyes when I look in the mirror. Seen them in dad's eyes."
Sam swallows, replies dryly. "We're not like them." He doesn't like how unconvincing it sounds, but the flashing lights of Kathleen Hudak's patrol car illuminating the sky back down the trail is a welcome distraction. "I'll flag her down," he says, as he gets up. "She didn't know you were hurt. Look pathetic."
He walks stiffly into the middle of the trail, knowing the moonlight means she should see him clear enough as the car grinds towards them, starts raising his arms to wave them.
The cry from behind him is rasping and urgent, and surprisingly alert.
"Sam! It's not her! Truck! Truck! It's not her!"
And Sam has to really squint but yep, tucked right up behind the car is an old jalopy, lights off but now suddenly flashing on as the door opens and there's a crescendo of baying and buckshot… and in that split second, it occurs to Sam that no self-respecting backwoods nutjob comes complete without a couple of pitbulls and a rifle powerful enough to take down a moose. Probably a fucking Winchester rifle at that.
Sam pirouettes gracefully at the same time as he sprints back to his brother, who's already crashing off the trail and in between the trees. His longer legs catch him up fast. "Are you going to make it?" he yells over at Dean, who's already gasping from the exertion and looking none too steady on his legs.
"River… throw off the dogs," Dean shouts back between labored breaths as they race pell mell between the trees, barely able to see, arms windmilling to fling branches aside, Sam now grabbing his slower-moving brother's arm to help him regain some momentum. And Sam prays to all that's holy for the water to be just there beyond the crest of the hill as he hears the awful frenzied, shrieking din of the dogs getting closer and closer, and he can't help flashing back to Bobby Singer once telling him that a pitbull's bite force was two thousand pounds per square inch, boy, and imagining that on his injured brother's leg, because the fuckers are right behind them now and-
-They plunge into the river and it feels like a thousand icy needles penetrating Sam's body as the water takes their feet from under them and catapults them downstream. It's only when he hears frantic whimpering that he realizes the dogs followed them in, but the threat is over as the smaller animals are swept ahead of them and he and his brother toss and tumble in the water, desperately trying to keep their heads above the flow long enough to draw breath before being sucked into the maelstrom again.
Sam manages to get his feet under him, haul Dean along in his wake, closer and closer to the safety of the shallows, and for a few precious moments it's going to be okay. But his hands are already numb with cold and it's impossible to keep his grip on his brother. Dean is carried away, thrashing about, eyes frantic with fear, Sam screaming his frustration at the trees as he scrambles up onto the shore. He leaps to his feet, whirls around, and knows the all-consuming relief of seeing his brother wearily drag himself out of the water roughly fifty yards further along the riverbank.
The other side of the riverbank.
But alive and in one piece, nonetheless.
In some far-off corner of Sam's mind an alarm bell is ringing, alerting him to the fact that he's totally lost his bearings and has no idea if he's on the same side of the river as the fuglies or his brother is. But for a moment he collapses on his butt, sucks deep, shuddering breaths into his aching lungs, coughs up at least a couple of shot glasses of brackish river water.
Then he pushes himself up onto his feet, groaning with the effort, and starts making his way down the riverbank so he'll be opposite his brother, just now on his hands and knees and coughing up his own lungs. Sam feels bruised all over, is sure he smashed into more than just a rock or two as they were pitched along in the water, and he rubs his sore ribs and winces as he coughs again.
He glances along and over at Dean and just there in the corner of his eye he sees something moving, dark, small, crouched. Moving stealthy and fast, fast and faster towards his apparently dazed brother, and now in some far-off corner of Sam's mind klaxons sound and emergency flares rocket up into the sky, trailing smoke and sparks in their wake.
"Fuck! Dean! Dean! Jesus, Dean!" he hollers, desperately trying to attract his brother's attention over the rush of the water, waving his arms wildly, jumping up and down, bending to pick up a rock and hurling it as hard as he can, seeing it splash into the raging foam a good six feet short of where he needed it to hit. He wades in thigh deep, already feeling the water's ferocious tug, knowing that swimming against the current just isn't an option.
And he's horrified.
"Dean! Dean!"
And it all slows down into the same appalling slow motion from that fucking dire night of the giant man-eating rabbits movie that Sam does remember watching with Dean, all snuggled up safe from monsters against twelve-year-old big brother warmth, feeling secure and knowing nothing would ever get past Dean to get to him and-
-Dean is oblivious as the dog streaks through the air and slams into his back, but he rouses enough to roll over and force his arm as far as possible into powerful jaws that-
-scissor from side to side, Bobby had said, as they grind down, shredding skin and muscle and snapping bone, all too easy with two thousand pounds of bite force per square inch; and Sam is screaming, and tears stream down his face as he sinks to his knees in the mud and screams and screams his brother's name and-
-Dean is fighting for his life and he knows it. The dog looses his arm and great gobs of blood and saliva splash in his face, and then it grips his upper leg just above the knee and worries and shakes him as if he were feather light. Red hot lightning bolts of pain race up his thigh, and he can hear screaming but for some reason he's sure it isn't him, that this grim battle for survival is going on in silence on his part even as the dog snarls its enjoyment and-
-it suddenly falls silent, and Sam, knowing what the silence must mean, doesn't want to look, can't bear to look because he knows it will be his undoing, wants to just stay face-down in the mud with his arms around his head and his ass in the air for the rest of time, so he won't ever have to look. But he can't, because he hears gunfire, and stones ricochet up and away from where the bullet hits, just a few feet away.
He looks up.
Dean, unbelievably, is using the arm the dog didn't mangle to push up from a belly-down position and crawling blindly away from the animal, now sitting some way off to the left. The last time Sam saw the man on the river bank was when he hauled him into the cage back at the Bender place, he thinks, as another bullet pings close by. He rockets upright, launches himself into a clumsy stagger, and ducks behind a tree, because as much as he wants to launch himself at his brother he knows damn well he can be of no use to Dean with a bullet - or pitbull - buried in him.
"Dean. Dean. God, Dean." Sam peers out from his hiding place, knows tears and snot are trickling down his face, but nothing matters. He only just got his brother gifted back to him after the rawhead debacle. "Dean," he whispers. "No. No."
And his agony is complete as the kid, the girl, who can't be much more than twelve or thirteen, walks up behind his tattered, bloody, confused wreck of a brother and delivers the coup de grace, pistol-whipping him with gusto.
So purty, thinks Missy, as she looks down on her angel boy. She knew he'd look even purtier once the dogs had a chance at him, all covered in slippery-slick blood and ivory bone glistening through ripped jeans like the mother of pearl inlay on her Ma's dressing table.
She pulls out a picture she took the time to tear from Pa's bible before they hauled out, unfolds it, holds it out to Lee to inspect: the Angel Gabriel in all his golden, heavenly beauty.
"Look," she says, wisely. "Like I said."
Her brother studies it for a moment before nodding in agreement. "Sure is a good likeness, Missy," he says, and expertly spits a mouthful of tobacco over at the dog. "Bullseye."
Missy reverently folds the picture back up and pushes it deep down into her pocket, nods to herself.
"I'm keeping him."
Next