Steps by Eric Trant Read Free Book Online

dug Shelly Lynn from beneath the blanket. Amalie grasped them by the hands, led them through the bedroom door, and closed it behind her with the soft, resolute manner of absolute finality.
    Nothing else moved inside the room, and it was then that Edwin noticed the hole in the windowpane from one of the shots fired at him and Perry. Somehow the bullet had not shattered the glass, but had created a small, neat punch-out the exact diameter of the round, or about the size of a child’s pinky finger. The bullet penetrated at Edwin’s shoulder, or Perry’s head, on the side of the porch where his son had been standing.
    He touched the glass and searched for the other bullet hole. He found it in the wood siding of the cabin at the same height as the other, but aimed toward his side of the porch. The hole was larger than the one in the window, and it seemed to him that this must be from the pistol, from the boy, a large, slow-velocity round which flattens and expands on impact. He stared at Dale Lincoln. The man had been aiming at Perry.
    Edwin’s feet could not be trusted, but he pitted them against the porch steps anyway. He moved into the driveway, kept a safe distance away from Dale, Precious, and Jake. Edwin listened as Dale panted. It should have been a torturous sound to hear a man die, but it felt no less disturbing than the hissing of air from a bleeding tire. Dale’s bullet hole in the window, aimed at Perry’s head, changed everything. Edwin waited until the panting stopped, and then he stepped a wide berth around the dead ones.
    His eyes panned through the trees for the boy who ran. Edwin wasn’t sure what he would do if he found the boy, or if he had a choice in the matter. It was like deciding to breathe or hold his breath at the bottom of the ocean. It didn’t matter what decision he made, because the end result remained the same.
    As he stalked down the driveway, a yell pierced the darkness, followed by the absolute silence of an Arkansas mountaintop. Edwin thought it might be Dale’s other son, but no human throat could have withstood such strain.
    He raised the shotgun as Dale’s truck emerged from the darkness. The camp looked as if a windstorm had swept through, tossed out the goods from the back of the truck, and slung aside the lawn chairs and cooking supplies. Edwin swept the shotgun around him wishing he would see nothing. He received his wish. He lowered the gun and walked to where the driveway met the mountain road.
    A quiet darkness crouched over the road, all of it abandoned and still as the dirt at his feet. He found himself on a different planet than had existed two months ago. He turned, marched back up the hill to the cabin, kept a safe distance from the dead ones, and mounted the porch.
    Edwin tapped on the door. He tapped again, tried the handle, locked, and then moved to the side of the cabin, checked the back door, locked. They must have gone upstairs.
    “Amalie!” he hollered.
    She didn’t answer, of course she didn’t answer, and so Edwin made his way to the front porch and sat on the steps. While he thought, he plucked a round off the stock sleeve and shoved it into the shotgun. Seven rounds were not many, and he had to make them count, if the big man or bigfoot heard the racket and came to investigate.
    “Red eyes,” Edwin said, because that’s what Precious said. If the bug was airborne and contagious as they claimed, Edwin might be infected. His whole family might be infected. He could only do one thing, something inconceivable a few hours earlier, and it wouldn’t wait until morning.
    He stepped into the woods and found a large branch the width of his thigh and twice his height. He dragged it to the driveway and used it as a lever to push the bodies together. He parted the guns from their owners, shoved the weapons a safe distance, dropped the branch on top of the bodies, and searched the woods for smaller branches and limbs.
    Dawn came before he grew satisfied with his