She stepped back, toward the machinery, planting her feet wide, shoulders rising to protect her neck. Then she came at me again, and though I saw it coming, the punch landed on the right side of my face. My eyes widened and I shook my head, straining to focus.
To conserve energy, I waited, studying her shoulders, watching her hands. When she took another swing, her shoulders fell away from her neck, leaving it exposed. I drove my fist into the side of her neck, toward her carotid artery, and she shuddered. She tilted slightly, wobbly now, and I hit her again, this time in the base of her throat. She crashed against the conveyer belt, and it was only the support of the machinery that kept her off the floor.
She straightened and grabbed her neck, gasping. I swung for her kidneys again, my aim truer this time. Her body went slack, and she crashed onto the ground, her head landing hard.
She wiped away the blood that seeped from a cut on her forehead. “You can fight, I’ll give you that,” she said, her words slurred. “Which kinda surprises me, since you’ve never had to fight for anything your whole fuckin’ life.”
With that, she got up. How the hell was she still able to stand?
I swung again, but it lacked power and aim. Brooklyn charged, her head tensed, her shoulders squared to take the impact, but I twisted, throwing my elbow toward her throat. Missed. Stumbling but somehow still on my feet. Staring into the face of the woman who had killed my husband, I surrendered to rage. I didn’t intend to stop Brooklyn. I wanted to destroy her, until she was nothing more than a sack of snapped tendons and broken bones.
Her eyes burned, her intensity matching mine, but I had the reach. When she swung, it fell short, leaving her exposed. I exhaled—one small, sharp breath—focusing all of my energy into my fist. I snapped my elbow. The blow landed with a crunch.
As she stumbled backward, she grabbed the machinery for balance.
I took a step, but her next question stopped me. “Did you know there was a second grave?”
She smiled then, a mirthless smirk as cool as the air but not nearly as cold as her eyes. A recent memory returned—at the grave, I remembered a scratching I thought came from animals.
“Close to yours in fact, though on the other side of the tree,” she said. “Even if Sam wasn’t dead earlier, he certainly is now.”
My heart shattered into a thousand jagged pieces. The skittering I’d heard. The scratching I’d ignored. Had it been Sam?
New grief settled in my chest so it became a chore to breathe. But I wasn’t done. I felt a simmering, quiet rage still there.
Brooklyn had meant to distract with her revelation, and it worked. For a second, I couldn’t move, torn between pursuing Brooklyn and running to my husband’s grave. By leaving Sam behind, I was as much a killer as Brooklyn.
In that moment, I wanted to choose Sam, I should’ve chosen Sam, but adrenaline and anger wouldn’t allow that. I stumbled forward, and Brooklyn’s arm shot out, a rusty knife nicking my right side. So she hadn’t been holding on to the machinery for balance. She had been looking for a weapon she had stashed. Growing up as she had, it made sense she had weapons hidden here.
Pain surged, and with it, anger. I blocked Brooklyn when she came at me again. My toe rammed a piece of metal that jutted from the ground, but it was just another ache I was beyond feeling. I grabbed the hem of her T-shirt, balling it in my fist and pulling her toward me.
Brooklyn thrashed, fabric tearing, but I held on, trading shirt for arm, twisting until she dropped the knife. Something popped. Shoulder or elbow? Didn’t matter. It was hers, not mine. We fell sideways, my shoulder ramming a stack of rotting crates.
But Brooklyn took a harder hit, her head bouncing off the metal edge of the machinery. She lay there, as she had that night on the trail. I had saved her then. She tried to sit up, and my hand twitched. Even now, I wanted to offer it to her. But I couldn’t. She might come for me, for my family. I had to make sure. The gun might’ve failed me, but years of youthful brawling wouldn’t. When Brooklyn started moving again, I kicked her, my side throbbing in unison with my shoulder, until she stopped.
I shouted for Leo as I stumbled from the creamery, but I was really just shouting into the wind. Leo might have made it to the road, or he might be hidden somewhere that muffled my shouts. I could only hope he would hear me and follow to the centuries-old valley oak at the property’s perimeter, because I wasn’t certain I had enough strength to dig Sam up by myself.
My hair whipped my face as I returned to the gardening shed near the house, found a shovel, then set out across the property as fast as I was able. When I pulled to a stop beneath the old oak, I welcomed the wind’s chill but not its force, which flicked leaves and the occasional acorn from the branches overhead.
As I ran, I had prayed to find the second grave empty, mounds of dirt beside it, Sam waiting at its edge. But when I reached the grave, it remained undisturbed.
Beneath the tree, I started digging. Even with the meager shovelfuls of earth I managed, my arms burned. I listened for sirens, prayed for them, but I didn’t slow, even as my heart rattled inside my chest.
A hand pressed against my back, and I jumped, reminded of the last time I had been touched in the same way at this place. My throat clenched, and I brushed away imaginary dirt.
This time, it wasn’t a man pushing me into my grave. It was Leo. My beautiful boy.
I had been so focused on my task, I hadn’t heard his approach. His face was slicked with sweat as if he had been running.
“The police?” I asked, and he nodded.
I handed him the shovel and fell to my knees.
Though he didn’t know for certain why he was digging, Leo worked with an intensity I could no longer match. Even on my knees, I felt wobbly, but I scraped dirt from the grave as best I could. I noticed my fingers were raw, but they didn’t hurt. Other parts of me were numb, too, including my head, and I fought the urge to vomit.
Sam’s grave was even shallower than mine had been, and Leo quickly expanded the hole I had made, exposing the wood.
I pointed at the box, too weak to stand, let alone strike the wood myself. Leo understood. He brought the shovel down on the makeshift coffin’s lid, the wood splintering more with each whack.
I bowed my head over the rim of the hole to listen, sweat dripping into my eyes, but I heard nothing. Blackness bled into the edges of my vision, followed by flashes of light. Blue and red light. I thought I heard sirens, too, but the wind whistled loudly against my ears.
Was Sam alive? Or were we too late?
There were men and women surrounding us now, in uniform mostly but some, like Detective Ray Rico, wearing suits. I’d been so focused I had not seen them arrive.
Earlier that night, Red had told me how Natalie had nearly perished beneath a tree the night she’d given birth, saved only to die later in that grave. Now, they were all dead. Natalie. Dee. Carver. Probably Brooklyn. With so much blood soaked into this land, how could anything but tragedy come to those born here?
Detective Rico loomed beside me, his brown suit streaked with dirt a shade lighter as he helped Leo and a uniformed officer pry at the lid. Strange to see Rico disheveled like that. No tie, either. Stranger to see the concern on his face.
Then together, they grabbed the lid and pulled. We could see him now—Sam.
I noticed Sam’s left hand. His ring finger. That was the part of him that moved first. Then I saw the stretcher, and the paramedics who brought it, before finally succumbing to the void.