Killabout

Chapter One

Emily Anderson grabbed the back of a kitchen chair and tried to pull herself up from the floor. Her eyelids were glued shut by something hot that stung her eyes when she rubbed her sticky face. Intense, throbbing pain painted the world red, and she tasted burning iron in her mouth and running down her throat. She rubbed her face again and staggered to her feet, hitting the granite counter with her hip.

Pain blossomed around her and she swayed, dizzy and nauseated by the agony raging through her body.

“Get me a beer, bitch!” a thin man with the twisted face of a vicious ferret said before hitting her shoulder with the barrel of a gun.

She blinked at him and glanced down at her shaking arms, disoriented. Her fingers stuck together, cemented by blood, and she could hardly recognize her own arms. Her hands were streaked with dirt and blood and clutched the counter, seeming to belong to someone else. She couldn’t even feel the cool, smooth surface of the granite counter.

When she remained hunched, swallowing to keep down the nausea and control the flashes of agony flaring behind her eyes, the man prodded her again with his weapon, harder. “I said, get me a beer—now!”

Obeying automatically, she grabbed the handle of the refrigerator door and yanked it open, weaving as the sudden light set off another pounding bass-drum roll in her head. She glanced away toward the gloomy hallway and blinked in an effort to focus.

Two slender feet, streaked with red, lay in the doorway. A white running shoe hung off the toe of one foot. The other was bare and the vulnerable sole of the foot was black with dirt. As Emily watched, a rivulet of blood seeping over the heel halted halfway down the sole, congealing at its final extent into a dark, crimson tear-drop in the center of the arch.

The feet didn’t move.

Emily stared at her daughter-in-law’s bare ankles and the only thing she could think of amidst the drumming beat of pain in her head was: I should have hugged her once. And meant it. Alicia had been pregnant, carrying the last, surviving piece of Emily’s son. Now they were all gone. Everything was gone.

Anger twisted her mouth. Emily had never liked Alicia, she wanted Stephen’s child, her grandchild. A baby might have made life endurable, even after losing her son and husband to a driver high on cocaine who walked away from the accident swearing at the morons he’d smashed into as they quietly drove between the lines on their side of the road.

Maybe “endurable” was optimistic. But she’d been able to live with Alicia and hope for a healthy child for the last three months. She’d gotten through the grief and bitterness, or at least she pretended she had.

When the thin, scraggly-haired man behind her stirred, she grabbed a long-neck beer out of the fridge and turned to hand it to him. She glanced at the counter, feeling like a stranger in her own home.

Her twelve-inch cast iron skillet sat on the counter. Alicia had left it there that morning and bacon grease and bits of scrambled eggs still covered the black surface. She had promised to wash it, but as usual, she expected Emily to clean up after her, using the excuse of her pregnancy to avoid work.

Deep inside, Emily felt something break—literally heard the snap. Intellectually, she realized she didn’t feel anything except the cold wash of fear and confusion slowly filling the deepest caverns inside her. Part of her watched her dispassionately, as if she watched a hapless heroine face an insane killer a not-very-good horror movie. That distant fragment of her consciousness felt concern over her hollowness, her emptiness, but she couldn’t force herself to care when the burning agony crushing her cheekbone and temple prevented her from thinking.

To hell with it. It’s over, anyway. I’m done. Dead.

She grabbed the frying pan by its handle and swung it around just as the stranger tried to grab the beer out of her other hand. Oddly enough, before the pan connected, she noticed he gripped a half-eaten chocolate cookie in his left hand.

Bastard! Raping and killing Alicia hadn’t been enough. He’d been eating the cookies, too. She’d made those cookies for Alicia because Alicia had cravings. Emily clenched her jaw and put more muscle into the swing.

Thwack!

The pan connected with the thin man’s head with a sound like a watermelon falling off the tailgate of a truck and hitting a cement curb—solid and yet satisfyingly splooshy.

When he dropped the cookie and fell sideways out of the kitchen chair, Emily straddled him and raised the skillet again. She hit him in the face until she couldn’t raise the heavy skillet one more time. Her shoulders ached and with the last strike, the pan shook with the slightly wooden sound of cast iron going crack-sploosh.

She dropped the pan and called nine-one-one. Then she spent the next twenty minutes alternating between clutching her throbbing head and vomiting into the kitchen sink and cursing her dead daughter-in-law. The steel sink was filthy and the odor of stale food made Emily throw up again until there was nothing left in her stomach except grief.

Damn Alicia. Emily stared at the congealed eggs. Alicia hadn’t rinsed the breakfast dishes the way she had promised and now she was dead. So once more, she’d left Emily to clean up the mess.