The Cabin at the End of the World Read online

  The metal is cold and, instead of emboldening, it feels as useless as a handful of sand. He looks around the room for something, anything else but sees only the brittle museum-piece skis and poles and other useless kitsch on the walls.

  Eric retrieves the tin mesh basket of fire logs and drops it next to the staircase.

  “What are you doing with those?”

  “We can—I don’t know—hit them with the logs?” He points at the bin like the log defense is self-explanatory. He mimes throwing logs down the stairs and then tries to hide a dawning sheepish smile.

  “Right. Hell yeah, we’re gonna hit ’em with logs.”

  Andrew and Eric fall into bright, quick bursts of we-shouldn’t-be-laughing laughter. Tears ring Andrew’s eyes as fear and the numbness of this irreality momentarily give way to absurdity.

  Eric wipes his face and composes himself quicker than Andrew does. “Hey, Wen. Come on over with us, okay, honey?”

  She doesn’t ask what is so funny and she walks mechanically across the room, her eyes focused on the furniture-topped basement stairs.

  Andrew pulls Eric close and whispers so that Wen won’t hear him. “If they really try to come in here, I say we make a run for the SUV. Right out the front door. I’ll go out first and hold them up so you and Wen can make it. If I don’t get to the SUV with you, you two leave anyway and get help.” Andrew reaches in his pocket for the keys.

  Eric says, “No. Stop it. Don’t give those to me. If we leave, we all leave together.”

  Wen tugs on Eric’s arm and asks, “Daddy, can I have something to hold, too?”

  The back deck reverberates with footsteps. One of the four is walking loudly, purposefully.

  “Daddy, can I have something, please?”

  “Yes. Yes, you can.” Andrew quickly goes to the woodburning stove and returns with the minishovel.

  Wen holds it like a softball bat and takes a practice swing. She spins around on her back heel and Andrew has to sidestep to dodge being inadvertently hit in the knee. Neither Andrew nor Eric tells her to be careful.

  Andrew twists the poker in his hands. There has to be something else they can do. He says, “What about the knives? In the kitchen. We should grab some knives.”

  Eric sighs. “Are we really going to—”

  “Yes, we really might have to.”

  “Have to what—”

  The screen door slider to the deck that too easily jumps out of the track (Wen has already knocked it out of the doorframe twice) whooshes open.

  Redmond calls out, “You really should get someone to fix the screen, guys! Wouldn’t want you to lose any money on your deposit. Be good boys, let us in, and we’ll fix it for you, yeah? Won’t even charge you.” The blue curtain obscures the view of the deck and Redmond, but it is not enough to keep them hidden and safe.

  Wen shouts, “Go away!”

  “That’s what I thought.” Redmond knocks shave-and-a-haircut on the glass door.

  There’s the unmistakable sound of movement in the basement: sliding and shuffling across the cement floor and the creak and low-frequency taps of feet trying not to be heard on wooden stairs.

  Redmond says singsong, “That’s supposed to be the signal knock. No matter.” Something crashes and protrudes through the glass slider, bowing out the curtain away from the deck and over the barricade couch, a large blue fist thrusting defiantly into the kitchen before disappearing. A second then third blow pulls the curtain and rod off the wide doorframe. Sunlight flashes atomic bright in the cabin and Redmond is a hulking shadow in the Oppenheimer glare. He hacks at the rest of the glass door with the sledgehammer end of his makeshift weapon. He grunts, crouches, and rams shoulder-first into the couch, shoving it into the kitchen. Broken glass crackles and grinds under his heels and under the couch’s stubby peg legs.

  Andrew does the math: Redmond is almost fully inside the kitchen and there’s at least one of them in the basement, so there are only two of the others, at most, outside. He and Eric can take them on or get past them and to the SUV. He believes they can. They have to.

  Andrew fishes the keys out and stuffs them into a pocket of Eric’s shorts. “Come on, let’s go!”

  Eric doesn’t argue and scoops Wen up and holds her so that they are chest to chest. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and buries her face into the side of his neck. Eric’s left arm coils under her butt. He brandishes the not-all-that-threatening woodstove tongs in his free hand.

  Andrew runs to the front door and there are more instant calculations and considerations and variables. How long before Redmond is inside the cabin and across the common room and to them? Does Andrew try to stop him, or waylay him long enough for Eric and Wen to get out the front door? Should he instead focus on the door, opening it quickly, smoothly, without hesitation, and then running outside to clear a path for Eric and Wen? If Andrew were first to the SUV and first to his gun, then he wouldn’t have any trouble keeping the others off them as they drove out of here. But what if he can’t get to the SUV and what if Eric and Wen can’t make it, either? Do they sprint madly down the road or scatter into the woods like spooked rabbits? Maybe they could run out behind the cabin and to the lake. The others wouldn’t expect that, would they? He and Eric are both excellent swimmers. They could swim across the lake with Wen in tow if they had to. They could make it—

  Andrew only has eyes for the door and the latch bolt and twist lock in the doorknob. He is not looking at Redmond and doesn’t know if that man is past the couch obstacle. He does not look back to Eric and Wen, who are at least two steps behind. Andrew is running too fast to stop and he crashes into the door, knocking the poker out of his hand and to the floor. He picks it up.

  Eric shouts from behind. “Andrew!”

  The woman in the off-white shirt looms in the bedroom doorway to his right, holding her long-staffed weapon and its bizarre and curled-over shovel head pointed out into the room. Andrew has an Escher-esque view beyond her, into the bedroom he and Eric are sharing, and to the wide-open window through which she gained entry.

  She says, “Please stop. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  Still barreling toward the front door, Eric pivots, opening his right shoulder, and swings the tongs at the woman. His first swipe makes solid contact, pinging off the pointed blade of her weapon, which she drops. He teeters and almost falls but follows up with another swing and hits her left shoulder. It’s a glancing blow but enough to make her cry out, drop to her knees, and briefly clutch her arm. She quickly recovers, picks up her weapon, and jabs it at Eric’s legs. There isn’t much oomph behind her strike but it’s well placed. She connects, somewhere below his knees and then the odd blade and wooden handle get caught up between his ankles. Eric trips and as he falls he twists his face and chest away from the floor, presumably so he doesn’t land on top of Wen. With the added torque, his fall speeds up, he lands awkwardly on his back, and his head bounces off the floor, making a nauseating soft and hollow sound. His body goes limp, arms twitching and open. Wen rolls off his chest and slides into Andrew’s feet. She scrambles back to Eric and screams his name. Eric’s eyes are closed, his empty arms retracted so his elbows are on his chest, his forearms hovering above him, and his hands wilt inward, looking gnarled, arthritic.

  Andrew yells Eric’s name and yells Wen’s name, too, and then he’s just yelling. His back is against the front door and get the gun get the gun get the gun is an emergency-broadcast-system alert in his head but he can’t open the door and he can’t leave.

  He tightens his grip on the poker and swings wildly in the direction of the woman in the white shirt. She creeps along the floor closer to Eric and Wen.

  The woman holds her weapon out in Andrew’s direction, but defensively. Her hands and arms shake as though the thing weighs two hundred pounds. She says, “Let me help him. I’m a nurse. He’s hurt.”

  “Get the fuck away from them! Don’t touch them!”

  He lunges at her and strikes the b
lade of her weapon with the poker. Metal on metal clangs like a blacksmith’s strike and vibrations run up through his hand and numb his forearm. He keeps swinging and she scoots away, backward toward the bedroom.

  Andrew drops to a knee next to Eric’s head. Eric’s eyelids flutter and he drunkenly moves his arms and attempts to sit up, rolling and rocking like a turtle flipped onto his shell.

  Wen has both arms wrapped around Eric’s right arm, and she pulls him, saying, “Get up! We have to go, Daddy!”

  Everything speeds up and collapses in on Andrew.

  The kitchen table and love seat bubble up from the suddenly volcanic basement stairwell and spill out into the common room. Leonard follows, an ash cloud billowing into the cabin. He’s enormous, bigger than a god. Unlike the others, he carries no weapon.

  The sun shines mercilessly through the shattered glass slider doors. Redmond is a squat, silhouetted goblin, holding his bulky staff like a picket sign. He grunts and giggles his way past kitchen chairs and the end table, knocking over the little yellow lamp, snuffing out its weak light. He says, “Sorry about the mess. We’ll clean it up. Promise. Now let’s take it easy there, Zorro, yeah? Stop waving that thing around before someone gets—”

  Andrew launches at Redmond. He swings the poker high, aiming for the man’s head. Redmond is slow to react but he manages to duck behind the mass-of-shovel-and-trowel-blades end of the weapon. The poker gets caught in the spaces between the irregularly arranged hand tools. Redmond drops that end of the weapon, holding the wooden handle parallel to the floor, levering the poker out of Andrew’s grasp. It clangs to the hardwood and skitters out of reach.

  With Redmond’s hands down by his waist, Andrew doesn’t hesitate. He throws two quick punches. The first, a right hand, connects with Redmond’s fleshy nose and draws a squirt of blood. The second jab, a sharp left, slams into his jaw, and Andrew cuts open the skin of his knuckles on teeth. Staggered, Redmond drops his weapon, checks his nose for blood, and his eyelids flutter like moth wings. Andrew doesn’t let Redmond create space or opportunity to get his hands back up. Andrew goes in tight and works the body, punching Redmond in the ribs with two rights, and a left to the stomach, which goes soft like a sail with no wind, and an uppercut to the bottom of his chin that clicks his jaw shut. A hard punch to the solar plexus whooshes the rest of the air out.

  Redmond is roughly the same height as Andrew, but he’s a thick, beefy guy, probably outweighing him by more than fifty pounds. As many shots as Andrew is expertly landing, he knows it’ll take a lot more to get Redmond to go down and to keep him down. So Andrew keeps hitting him.

  Redmond has his arms up trying to protect himself, but he’s either too slow or has been knocked into being too slow to fend off the blur of blows. Blood gouts from his nose and leaks from his split lip but he doesn’t go down. He absorbs the punishment as though in atonement.

  “Daddy, stop hitting the man! Stop it! Stop it!”

  Andrew stops and he backs away on sea legs, exhausted and gasping for breath. His knuckles are swollen and bloodied.

  Redmond takes a shaky backward step and sits heavily on the couch he pushed away from the slider doors. The springs inside the couch reprise their dissonant chord.

  Leonard stands in the middle of the common room, holding Wen in the crook of one arm. She looks so small, she could be a ribbon on his chest. Wen has her hands balled up in fists that way she does (with the thumbs inside) and she holds those fists against her mouth. She isn’t wearing Andrew’s hat anymore.

  The woman in the black button-down shirt stands next to Leonard and Wen. She reaches across Leonard and pats Wen’s leg and says, “Shh, you’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.” Andrew doesn’t know where she came from or how she got inside the cabin.

  Eric is on the floor, sitting up. His eyes are wide in what would be a hammy pantomime of surprise if there were any life or light in his blank stare.

  The woman in the white shirt kneels before Eric. She peers into one eye and then the other, examining him. She has a hand resting on his shoulder and she talks in a low voice. He responds with slight nods and confused, pained looks.

  Leonard says, “Wen is right, Andrew. That’s enough. That’s enough.”

  Let’s Make a Deal

  Three

  Eric

  Eric was a striker for his high school soccer team. He wasn’t the most skilled player but his coach always made it a point to praise him for being fearless when going after headers, particularly off corners and direct kicks. Most of the team’s set pieces were designed to get Eric a free run at volleys into the box. In mid-September of his senior season he knocked heads with a burly defensive back as they both went for a ball bending toward the far post. He doesn’t remember the forty minutes of game play preceding the collision. The collision itself he remembers as a snapshot, a still photo of the green grass and chalk lines and other players frozen in athletic poses staged by some secret hand and the blue sky decorated with bright, cartoonish, white stars. Eric missed two weeks of practice and games after the concussion. He forced his way back onto the field before he was ready with the hope that he could help the team earn a trip to the state tournament. They didn’t make it. For the rest of that season, after each header, Eric had a high-pitched ringing in his ears that would fade over time like the volume was slowly turned down but not all the way off.

  His ears are not ringing now. His headache isn’t a sharp pain and is instead an insistent pressure radiating out from the back of his skull, lodging against his forehead, throbbing in sync with his heartbeat. The sunlight pouring through the shattered slider doors is an assault under which he withers and cannot escape. Eric lowers his head and turns away from the light despite how much it hurts to move his head in the slightest. Even squinting is painful as it feels like he’s pushing his eyes back into his head where there is simply no more room for anything. The damned light finds its way through closed eyelids, anyway, creating a blotchy red mapping of his torture.

  The woman in the white shirt is behind him, cleaning up the cut on the back of his bald head. She says, “Try not to move. Almost done.”

  The light in the cabin mercifully dims as the late-afternoon sun hides behind clouds. Unable to walk out onto the back deck, Eric has no way of knowing how long the cloud relief will last. Waves of nausea rise and fall and his view of the cabin has a haze, as though he’s looking through a dirty window.

  Eric is sitting in a kitchen chair. His legs are tied to the chair’s wooden legs with white rope about a quarter inch thick. His hands and arms are bound behind his back, and by the feel of it, they used the same rope or cord with the wrapping thickest around his wrists. He wiggles his fingers and attempts to flex and bend his wrists, but it all somehow increases the pressure in his head.

  Andrew is similarly restrained in a chair offset to Eric’s right. Andrew’s head is down and his long hair obscures his face. His chest rises and falls evenly, straining against the loops of rope that affix his torso to the chair backing. Eric cannot remember if anyone struck or attacked Andrew, and he does not remember how they got to be anchored to the chairs. He remembers running for the door and falling and then seeing the ceiling from an impossible distance below.

  He doesn’t know if Andrew has already begged and pleaded with the others to leave them alone, to let them go. He doesn’t know if Andrew and the others have come to some sort of bargain or agreement. Did Andrew give in, surrender? Andrew hasn’t surrendered to anyone or anything in his life and it’s a big part of why Eric loves him. He remembers jagged pieces of the whispered conversation they had by the barricaded basement stairs and laughing at hitting the others with logs and how Andrew was willing to stay behind in order to get Eric and Wen to the SUV. Eric wants to ask Andrew a question, but he’s afraid to ask the wrong one.

  Wen is unrestrained. She sits on the floor between Eric and Andrew, her legs crossed atop a pile of pillows and blankets scavenged from one of the bedrooms. The three of them fill th
e area where the couch had once occupied the common room.

  The couch is now up against the far wall, below the flat-screen TV. Redmond is the gargoyle of the couch, perched, slouched forward, grunting and muttering to himself. He dabs his nose and swollen lips with a white kitchen hand towel, checking for blood.

  The woman in the black shirt is on the deck, readjusting the screen door slider in its frame. It won’t stay in the track and she says, “Goddammit,” each time it falls out and in an accent that is not of New England.

  Leonard is in the kitchen, sweeping broken glass into a metal dustpan. He dumps the debris into the garbage. The high-pitched frequency of grinding and breaking glass is as loud as a crumbling skyscraper, and the noise overstresses the hardware in Eric’s head.

  Wen’s favorite show, Steven Universe, is on the TV, playing a few feet above Redmond’s head. The TV’s volume is too much for Eric. He has asked multiple times that they turn it down, and Leonard did as was asked the first two times but has since only pretended to turn down the volume, picking up the remote and pointing it at the TV, but no red volume bar then shows on the screen.

  The woman in the white shirt finishes taping a pad of folded-up paper towels to the back of Eric’s head. She says, “I don’t think you need stitches, but it’s a pretty nasty cut back there.” The scalp on the back of his head is numb. He wants to feel the dressing with his fingers, verify its physical existence, but cannot.

  With the sunlight still cowering behind clouds, the pressure in his head lowers out of the code-red range. Eric looks down at Wen. He wants her to talk to him, to say something, anything. He says, “Hey, Wen. I’m finally a match, you know?” He twists his head and shows off the bandaging. “Like I belong with you guys now. This isn’t like, um, me shaving. It’s going to be real now.” He isn’t explaining himself well. He means to say he’ll now have a scar on his head just like Wen and Andrew have on theirs.

  Wen doesn’t speak and she keeps her eyes on the TV. Scooting over closer to Eric, she leans her head against his legs.