Noah was in the dooryard, setting up a tent. It was a stupid place to put a tent. He wouldn’t have visibility or hear what was coming from the other side of the house. He should have picked a spot up near Sacrifice Rock. He was in the tent, coughing, as she approached.
She should have known.
Noah crawled out of the tent and stood before her.
He looked her in the eyes.
“I’m dying,” he said.
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Madelyn rolled her eyes and let out a frustrated grunt.
She turned and stomped back up the steps to her porch. She ducked inside to fetch her grandmother’s smoking can and then came back out to flop into the rocking chair.
Noah brushed the cobwebs out of the other chair before he sat.
“I didn’t expect you to rush to my side or anything, but I thought you’d have a little sympathy,” he said.
Madelyn smacked the pipe against her armrest before she began packing in a fresh wad of Cherry Apple Blend.
“Maddie?”
Her hands stopped when she looked up at him. “Of course you’re dying. You were always doing something horribly cliché and dramatic. Like that time you fell in love with that girl and she turned out to be the daughter of dad’s bitter rival.”
“That was a movie,” he said.
“Or that time you paid the popular kid to be your friend so you would be considered cool, but it all backfired.”
“That was also a movie.”
“That’s my point,” she said. She puffed the pipe as she held one of her matches to the bowl. The Cherry Apple smoke smelled sweet. “You can’t even do anything original. You have to show up here and announce you’re dying? So predictable.”
“I didn’t come here to live out some movie trope,” he said. “I came here because I’m dying and I wanted to come to the last place that meant something. Honestly, I didn’t expect you to be here.”
She pulled the pipe from her mouth and looked at him, a little stunned. “Where would I be?”
“I thought you would be dead by now,” he said.
“Me?”
No words passed between them for a dozen or so puffs of the pipe.
“Listen,” he said. “I need to ask you a favor.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You didn’t know I was here, so you couldn’t have come all this way to ask me a favor.”
“If you hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t have needed to ask.”
She looked at him. It wasn’t worth trying to figure out what he was saying. If it was important, he would say it again. He always did.
“Your tent is stupid,” she said. “You can have Grandmother’s room.”
“No, thanks,” he said.
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Normally, Madelyn slipped into sleep easily. She put her head down and then opened her eyes again at dawn. That night, sleep was elusive. Madelyn tossed and turned like she had a fever. The same dream played again and again through her mind.
When she was a little girl, her father had taken her and her brother to a wedding reception. While her father was dancing, Madelyn had found the buffet. She had gorged herself on warm shrimp that were floating in a pool of melting ice. All night long, she had vomited.
While her brother was outside in his stupid tent, Madelyn dreamed of vomiting warm shrimp. She woke up stinking of acrid sweat and feeling nauseous. She dropped to the floor of her cabin and put her mouth right to the faucet to drink until her stomach felt like it was going to burst. Full of water, she used the toilet and then finally got cleaned up.
She took her tea out to the porch and thought about maybe just skipping the day entirely. She could go back to bed and sleep the clock around, hoping for a better result tomorrow.
She looked at her brother’s stupid tent and sighed. He was still inside—sleeping late like he had done when they were kids.
“Hey, Two by Two, rise and shine,” she said. Madelyn walked down the steps and approached his tent. She took a sip of her tea.
“Get up.”
She kicked one of the poles and the whole tent jiggled for a second. It brought a smile to Madelyn’s face. It didn’t last long.
“Oh, no,” she said, as the premonition took shape. She threw her mug of tea behind herself and bent for the zipper on the tent’s door.
She knelt as the fabric drifted down to reveal the inside.
He was in there. She saw dried vomit on his face. His chest was still.
He was dead.
Madelyn fell back to her butt.
“Damn it.”
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It took her almost an hour to dig up the square patch of sod and winch the big slabs of stone out of the way. When the sunlight reached the bottom of the hole, she took a minute to reflect on the bleached bones and dust down there. They weren’t people anymore. Bodies went in, were burned up, and then the memories wafted back out the next time she opened the incinerator.
She dragged Noah from the tent and looked at his waxy face in the sun. She used a damp rag to clean away the vomit.
It smelled like warm shrimp. Of course it did.
Madelyn took his tent down and dropped it in the hole.
She walked back over to Noah and looked at him for the last time.
There was nothing more to do.
She grabbed his feet and began to pull him towards the hole. His body was much too light. He wore such baggy clothes. She hadn’t noticed how thin he was.
Madelyn stopped. Someone was watching her from the woods. She let one of her brother’s feet drop and reached around for her gun. Her hand remained empty—she wasn’t wearing a gun. Why would she be? She dropped her brother’s other foot. Madelyn ran for the cabin.
S
HE
SLAMMED
THE
DOOR
, slid the bolt, and ran for her guns.
Madelyn started loading the scattergun and listened for sounds of someone trying to get in. The male was young—he would likely try to bash his way in. That would bring a lot of noise. Either from the young male or whatever his noise attracted, she would need the scattergun.
Young males had quick triggers and turned violent.
Madelyn had married one once.
She remembered waking up in the hospital and seeing her neighbor chewing a fingernail near the window. Madelyn had explained, “Young men have quick triggers. He will grow out of it.”
The neighbor had spat her chewed fingernail towards the trash and narrowed her eyes.
“It was my fault anyway,” Madelyn had said. “I’m a bully.”
Madelyn remembered the way her neighbor shook her head. She never said a word, but her head shake spoke volumes.
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With the scattergun loaded and her rifle slung over her shoulder, Madelyn slid open her spy slit.
She ducked away from the shaft of light. Cautiously, she angled her head so she could see out to the yard.
The young male was hovering near Noah’s body. He didn’t appear to be armed, but it was tough to tell with the baggy shirt he wore. Madelyn moved towards the door. She took a breath and let it out before she slid open the bolt. She came around the corner with her scattergun leading the way.
Sidestepping, she said, “Step away and get your hands up.”
She gestured with her eyes. The gun stayed pointed at his chest.
He stood up. He was taller than she was. He was taller than Noah had been. Aside from the height, he might as well have been Noah. His face was a window into her childhood.
“You didn’t have to kill him,” the young version of Noah said. “He was going to die anyway.”
“Pay closer attention, Young Noah,” she said. “He died in his sleep. Put him in the pit or get lost so I can do it.”
The young male shook his head. “We bury our dead two meters down. He doesn’t go in the pit.”
“That’s the city. Can’t do that out here. Have to burn him and fold his heat down into the ground,” she said. “And I’m done asking.”
She couldn’t fire a warning shot. He might be a city kid, but he should still know that she couldn’t risk firing two shots. One was bad enough. That much noise would carry a long way.
He seemed to sense his options and he made a choice. The boy who looked like a young version of Noah bent and picked up Noah by the ankles. He dragged Noah towards the pit. Madelyn followed him with the scattergun.
“Just drop him?” he asked.
“Step down in if you want,” she said. “I won’t double cross you.”
As soon as he climbed down into the incinerator pit, she knew that she was indeed going to double cross the young male. It was too easy. She could burn up Old Noah and Young Noah at the same time and her problems would be finished.
What then?
Young Noah pulled at Old Noah’s pant-leg to pull him down into the pit. Madelyn’s eyes drifted over to Sacrifice Rock. She thought about her father’s city gun. After taking care of the Noahs, she would be back to the gun and the rock.
Young Noah was holding a skull that he had picked up from the ashes.
“Put that down,” Madelyn said.
He threw it at her face.
Madelyn’s free hand went up to block the skull from hitting her. She barely registered how quickly the young male leaped from the incinerator pit and came at her. She didn’t have a chance to aim and pull the trigger. He knocked the gun from her hand and stripped the rifle from her sling. He moved like lightning.
The young male checked the chamber, flicked off the safety, and sighted her down the barrel.
Her problems were over. She looked down at her hands. She had caught the skull somehow. Its empty eyes were looking back at her. She tossed it towards the house. Madelyn brushed the dust from her hands.
“Lower my dad into the pit,” the young male said. “Gently.”
“Just shoot me,” she said.
“I don’t know how to operate your incinerator,” he said. “I would bury both of you, but you seem to think that it’s a bad idea.”
Madelyn chewed the side of her cheek and considered her options. She moved to Noah’s body. Turning her back on the young male, she bent and rolled Noah in. When he landed, the air was expelled from his stomach in a dead man’s burp. Madelyn looked up at the young male—Noah’s son—and saw the horrified surprise on his face. He was well trained. He hadn’t lost his aim.
He wasn’t going to make an easy mistake.
“Now shoot me and move on,” she said.
“This is my home now. This is my family’s place. You have no right to it.”
Madelyn looked up towards the sky and sighed. “You’re an idiot. I called you ’Young Noah’ and you must have seen your dad talking to me. You should have figured out that I’m your aunt.”
“Family is the people you trust, not the ones who share your blood,” he said.
“Yeah. Okay,” she said. The cable for the winch was over on the far side of the rocks. Madelyn moved without regard for the gun that was tracking her every step. She hooked it up on the other side and activated the winch. The only sound was the grinding of the stone slab over the base. She unhooked the cable from the ring.
“Tell me how to work that,” the young male said.
“There’s nothing to it,” she said. She knelt as she attached the hook to the second slab. “Motor is buried, like everything else. This switch releases it and this switch makes it pull. You look like you think you’re smart. You can figure it all out, I’m sure.”
She started the winch and the second stone slid into place. The pit was covered, but she would put the dirt and sod back to insulate it even more. Also, it would make the young male’s job harder when he went to incinerate her.
Madelyn grabbed her shovel and started to work. Young Noah backed up and sat on a rock. The gun remained aimed.
“What’s your name?” she asked between breaths.
He blinked and thought about it before he answered.
“Jacob Clarke,” he said.
“That’s my father’s name,” she said. She resumed shoveling.
“Not really,” he said. “He was Jacob Mason Clarke. I’m Jacob Riley Clarke.”
“Your mother’s maiden name?”
Jacob shook his head.
Madelyn shrugged.
“And you grew up in Narsaq?”
He shook his head again.
“Where did you grow up?” she asked.
“Oslo,” he said.
“That’s a hell of a walk from here,” she said. “How long did it take you?”
He shrugged again. She thought that he wasn’t going to answer.
Eventually, he did.
“A few years, I guess,” he said.
“And your father was dying the whole time?”
“No. He only started dying a few months ago. But we knew.”
Madelyn scraped the last of the dirt over and then leaned on the shovel.
“So you two started walking a few years ago because you thought he was going to die? And then he dies on the day you got here? That’s either an amazing coincidence, or the best planning ever.”
“It wasn’t like that,” he said.
Madelyn began to move the sod over. She had to get down on her hands and knees to roll it back into place.
“Yeah? Tell me what it was like,” she said.
He didn’t answer. She looked up and saw three eyes—the two on Jacob’s face and the black eye of the end of the rifle barrel. Two of the eyes were crying.
“How about I tell you a story about when my father died?”
He didn’t answer.
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Many years earlier…