Incarnate Read online

  She didn’t dare turn around to see if Holt was gaining on them. Kim had been following the slope upward, knowing that if they could just reach the ridge, they would have more options: circling back around the rock slope on the other side toward the northeastern end of town, or heading farther into the cover of the woods.

  “Wait,” Scarlett gasped, pausing in a small sunlit clearing, bent over with her hands on her knees, gasping for breath. Kim, too, needed to let her heart slow for a moment. She realized that she had a gash above one eye, blood smeared across her forehead. Or maybe her stitches had torn back open.

  Kim held on to a tree trunk while she mopped up her face and attempted to dislodge a stone from her shoe.

  A few yards away, Scarlett was turning around, looking confused and disoriented. She started shaking her head, panicked. “We ran past this. We were here.”

  Kim shook her head, moving closer to calm the girl. “No, we’ve been running toward the ridge. It’s okay.”

  Scarlett’s head was shaking, almost uncontrollably. “No! I’ve been here!”

  Kim remembered that she wasn’t speaking to Scarlett; she was with Izzi. Maybe Izzi had been here.

  Scarlett pulled away from Kim and sprinted toward a huge cedar, her fingers moving toward a section where the bark had been recently torn away—dislodged by Isabel’s careening head. The bark was stained red where the blood had cascaded out of Izzi’s forehead.

  Scarlett started shaking uncontrollably as she sidestepped the tree and moved several yards past it. Her terrified gaze refocused on the ground.

  Kim stepped behind her, peering past Scarlett to figure out what was spooking her.

  It took Kim a moment to understand why the leaves and branches in the small clearing looked so peculiar. It was their color. A sickening circle of deep red.

  Scarlett dropped to her knees and clutched her head, as if trying to keep it from falling off. She started to hyperventilate. Kim dropped down next to her and held on to her tightly.

  “It’s okay, Izzi, it’s okay—breathe. Please, just breathe.”

  But over Scarlett’s sobs, in the distance, Kim heard the sound of crackling brush and snapping twigs. Holt. How had he found them so quickly? How had he caught up? She froze, Scarlett looking at her in silent terror.

  “Girls!” came the chief’s voice, barely sounding winded.

  Kim hastily covered Scarlett’s mouth with her hand and stared into her eyes. Willing her to be quiet. Scarlett struggled to take control over her faculties.

  Again, the sound of Holt’s singsong voice rang out, this time closer. “Oh, girls.”

  Kim held Scarlett’s face in her hands while looking deep into Izzi’s frightened, dazed eyes. She whispered, “Isabel. Please. You’ve got to let Scarlett come back now. Isabel, go back into the room, please, and let Scarlett come back. Scarlett—think about Heather. Think about your dad. We’ve got to keep you safe for them. Help me!”

  She felt Scarlett’s muscles suddenly tense for the briefest second. And then, her eyes came into focus.

  “How did we . . . what’s—”

  Scarlett whipped her head around and took in the scene; the woods, her doctor’s bloody face, her own scratched hands. Kim again established eye contact, whispering, “Shhh. He’s close. We have to run. Do you understand?”

  Scarlett nodded once and took off running, grabbing Kim’s hand. She was back. Somehow Kim had managed to convince Isabel to let Scarlett take over—or maybe Izzi had been so frightened that she’d retreated back inside Scarlett’s psyche. Either way, Scarlett had returned with a vengeance. She ran hard, holding on to Kim’s hand tightly.

  Holt’s voice cut through the woods. “Where do you think you’re going?” Somehow, he sounded even closer than before they had started running.

  As they weaved between trees, Kim realized that she had lost all sense of direction. They might be running right back toward Holt. Stumbling along blindly, Kim looked frantically around for somewhere to hide. Up ahead stood a pair of ancient pines whose trunks had fused and, over the course of time, formed a sort of hollow. Kim shoved Scarlett into the space, watching as the girl wedged herself tightly so that she was completely hidden by the lowest branches and the trunks. Kim darted past her another dozen yards to a tall hemlock with a thick trunk and evenly spaced branches descending almost to the ground. She grabbed a sturdy branch and swung herself up, barely noticing as she scraped her skin on the rough bark, and grappled her way up the interior of the tree until she was almost twenty feet high, hidden by neighboring trees, as well as the branches below her.

  Her breath was coming hard and fast, but she forced herself to stay calm. She was crouched painfully next to the trunk in order to stay both balanced and out of view, her arm hooked into another branch for support. She was slowly, carefully adjusting her body on the branch when she heard the chief’s voice again.

  “I know you’re nearby,” he said. “I’ve hunted these woods since I was eight years old. Want to know your mistake?”

  His words seemed to echo in the silent woods, answered only by the chattering of a chipmunk somewhere in a neighboring tree.

  “You girls circled back on yourselves,” he said. “Common problem up here. You think you’re following the land, but it’s full of these tricky hollows and turns. Only real way to stay on track is to use the sun to keep true. Too bad you all didn’t have a compass.”

  He chuckled to himself. While he talked, Kim could hear his voice moving slowly as he searched, but she couldn’t tell if he was getting closer to her hiding spot—or to Scarlett’s.

  She didn’t know if he was telling the truth, or lying in an attempt to force them to give up and show themselves. But they had another problem now; they were separated. One of them might be able to escape if the other kept Holt occupied. Kim could yell, and force Holt to come after her, drawing him closer and closer until she’d put enough distance between him and Scarlett that the teen could make a dash for it. Surely he’d take the quarry up in the tree, the one with nowhere to run, over the one who was moving.

  But she also knew that Scarlett wouldn’t leave her behind.

  She had to do something, though, other than simply wait to be sacrificed.

  “I’ve suspected it was you since the start,” she yelled out, a lie calculated to anger him. His calm was his greatest asset, but if she could chip away at it, he might start making mistakes.

  She watched him turn, testing the wind, trying to calculate the source of her voice. She knew that Holt wouldn’t be able to pinpoint which tree she was in right away, and she held on to the faint hope that Scarlett would see her opportunity and escape.

  “That’s a load of bull,” Holt said. “You may have a fancy medical degree, but you don’t know the first thing about me.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she called. “You’re a classic narcissist. Utterly transparent, if one knows what to look for.”

  Holt whipped around, but he miscalculated, and as he crept forward, he put distance between himself and Kim. However, now he was getting dangerously close to Scarlett’s hiding place.

  “You crave power,” Kim shouted, willing him to turn around. His head came up and he seemed to sniff the air. “But like all bullies, you only prey on the weak. Old men. Defenseless women. If you ever confronted someone who could fight back, you’d probably retreat like a scared little girl.”

  “God damn it,” Holt muttered, cradling his rifle. “You got it all wrong.”

  She’d angered him—it was working. She’d challenged his core identity, and he’d taken the bait.

  “You want to know why I do what I do?” he demanded, as he advanced through the tall brush. He was growing careless, not bothering with stealth. If they were lucky, maybe she’d make other mistakes as well—something that might allow them to escape. Kim forced herself to breathe evenly as she listened, watching and waiting for any opportunity. “Twenty-five years ago, when I was just a new recruit to the force, my wife met me at
the door one day with a big smile and told me we were gonna have a baby. I was so damn excited, I told her to put on her best dress and I’d take her out, even though we didn’t have two nickels between us back then.”

  Kim spotted him approaching through the leafy branches, losing sight of him only to see glimpses of his dress shirt as he drew nearer.

  “Went down to Stuart’s—little place on the west side of town, it’s not there anymore—bought Betty a Shirley Temple and had myself a beer. Bought a round for the house, too, because I was itching to share our fortune. Only Betty asked me not to tell anyone yet, because it was so early—and this—this—son of a gun took issue with me, thought I was just showing off. He wasn’t local; I knew that much, and I just ignored him. My mistake. You don’t give a worthless cuss like that what he wants, it just lights him up. But what he wanted was a fight.”

  Holt had warmed to the story, as though he’d been dying to tell it for years. “Now I’ve gone over what happened next about a million times. Could it have gone another way? I don’t know. But that bastard pulled out a .38 when it became clear he was on the losing end of the fight. I didn’t see it coming and neither did anyone else in the place. I tried to take it from him, but it went off and—and it hit Betty. She died in my arms.

  “Then that drifter saw what he’d done and decided to go for broke. Put one in my chest. Came damn near close to killing me. Time I got out of the hospital, Betty’d already been buried and he was long gone.”

  Holt was facing away from her now, and Kim cast around carefully for something she might use against him—some way of distracting him, or taking him down—but came up short. He continued his tale as she inched her way farther out onto the branch, hoping to find something, anything.

  “I took my grief and I stuffed it away. Signed up for the service and did a couple tours in Iraq. Saw things and did things I never would have done before I lost Betty and our baby. . . . Didn’t care if I came back or not. Didn’t care if I died there. But that wasn’t God’s will for me, I guess, because I found myself back in Jarvis. On the force.

  “One day, about ten years after Betty died, I stopped in to get coffee at the filling station out by the middle school late in my shift. That same drifter—he didn’t have the sense to steer clear of my town—he was there. I saw him stealing a Hostess pie, but I didn’t say anything. I waited twenty minutes and then I drove real slow and found him about a mile down the road. Offered him a lift. Didn’t recognize me, either, even after I drove him out to the old slaughterhouse. I worked there when I was just a kid; I knew how to get in by the old loading doors. Sat him down on that dusty old killing floor and told him how it was going to be. How he was going to have to come up with a good reason why I ought to set him free. How he was going to beg for his life the way I begged God to let Betty live.”

  Kim wondered what Scarlett was thinking, listening to this tale. What was it like to hear about the evolution of the killer who was responsible for at least one of her alters’ deaths? The thought of Izzi lurking beneath the surface, trying to break free . . .

  “And the crazy thing was, I never did plan to kill him. I was going to deliver him up for the justice system to deal with, just as soon as I had the satisfaction of hearing him admit it all. See, I still believed in people back then, at least a little. But when he opened his mouth and all manner of hate came spewing out—vile things, about Betty and her honor and—well, there’s no sense telling any of that. Because next thing I knew he was dead. I’d taken my hand to the back of his head and smashed it down on that cold floor, over and over until there wasn’t anything left but mess.”

  A branch snapped almost directly underneath Kim’s tree, drawing her attention back to her dangerous position, and away from Holt’s horrifying tale. Grief had broken him; the war had twisted what was left. Then pure chance had delivered him an opportunity to begin his killing spree, and Holt—in his fury and his madness—had mistaken that opportunity for God’s will.

  Another twig snapped, and Kim held her breath. She hadn’t heard a single sound from Scarlett’s hiding place. She prayed the girl could stay still and silent long enough to give her a fighting chance. This man she’d once seen as so kindly, as Zack’s beloved mentor and friend, wouldn’t hesitate to kill her or Scarlett.

  The thought of Zack tugged at Kim. Zack would never know what had happened to her, would keep coming to work each day right down the hall from Holt, the man he loved like a father. He would accept the version of events that Holt gave him. He would believe that he’d been wrong about Kim, about Scarlett, about everything.

  Her despair caught the spark of her bitter anger and coalesced into something else, something sharp and dangerous. Yes, she had almost no chance of surviving. But no—she wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

  “Who else, Holt?” she yelled, knowing he was almost directly underneath her. Run, she telegraphed to Scarlett with all her might. Maybe, just maybe, Scarlett’s mind—already having proved itself open and receptive enough to host the alters—might be able to pick up on her message intuitively. Run as fast and far as you can.

  “Who else?” he repeated in his booming voice. “Well, that would take me a while, Doc. See, once I decided to take care of my town, all kinds of troublemakers seemed to pop up. Oh, not all at once. Sometimes years would go by and I’d think I’d finally cleaned up the place. But evil has a way of coming back. It’s just the nature of the human race. Some folks are made to do wrong—and some folks are made to stop ’em.

  “Way I see it, it’s like a garden. You do your best, amend the soil and mulch and fertilize, make sure there’s water and sun to suit your plants. But you do all that and you’re gonna attract the weeds, too. Weeds thrive on the same things as any other plant, see, just like human trash thrives on the same things as good folks. A town like ours, it’s beautiful, prosperous, growing. You think it gets that way by accident? Let me tell you something . . . in order to keep a well-maintained lawn, you gotta pull out a few weeds. And that’s what Albert Sullivan was. He was the worst kind of weed, preying on the innocent, on the young.”

  A flash of movement caught Kim’s eye, and she glimpsed Holt’s silver hair below her, his bulky frame moving gracefully between saplings.

  But he was turning away from her. He’d pivoted slightly, maybe alerted by a sound from Scarlett, maybe by an animal or bird. If Kim didn’t do something, he was going to walk directly into Scarlett’s hiding spot. Kim realized then that she’d made a terrible miscalculation. He knew she wasn’t going anywhere, that he could kill Scarlett first and come back to finish her off. She looked frantically around for something to use to draw him back. But there was nothing, not even a dead branch. She had nothing with her; Holt had even destroyed her phone, the only thing she could think to throw at him.

  With no other ideas, she slipped off one of her shoes, a plain canvas sneaker with a rubber sole. She whistled sharply, and when he turned back toward her, she shouted, “Over here!”

  His head tilted up, searching the trees. He knew she was nearby, and she had only seconds to act. It was a long shot—all she could hope to do was strike him with the shoe and confuse him long enough to get out of the tree and run—and pray that Scarlett was running, too.

  Holt disappeared under the shady canopy of a young hemlock for a moment, and Kim cocked her arm. When he reappeared, not five feet from the base of the tree, in a shrubby open space, she threw.

  The shoe hit him on the side of the head, glancing off his ear. He cursed and put his hand to his face, but didn’t falter. She’d barely slowed him, and he was coming straight for her. And now, even if she could somehow get by him, she had only one shoe.

  “Scarlett, you’ve got to run!” she screamed. “Now!”

  Holt reached her tree and ducked under the lowest branches. He peered up along the trunk, and their eyes met. He was sweating, and a lump was already forming on his scalp above his ear, but there was a calm, crafty smile on his face.
r />   “Well, look at you,” he said.

  Then he aimed his rifle directly at her.

  “I do like a fair fight,” he said conversationally. “Well, somewhat fair, anyway. By the time someone crosses me, I figure they’ve already stacked their own deck. But I never take anyone down without giving them a shot. Guy who killed my wife—all he had to do was repent. Isabel, well, I let her run just like I let you run. Not really my fault she stumbled on that trap. Though I would have got her in the end.

  “Now you two, if you would have gone right along the ridge, you might have made it to Ted Willoughby’s cabin. Maybe he would have been home, maybe not, but at least you had a chance. It’s only sporting, way I see it.”

  He put a hand on the low branch, testing its strength. “But unfortunately for you, you turned left. And now, I’m afraid to say, it’s time to finish this up.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  It had taken Zack less than five minutes with the bartender from the Outpost Grill in the tiny town of Seward to realize it was a dead end, but he let the man rattle on with his theories about the missing hunter for a good half hour, and left him a twenty for his club soda, to boot. The idea of getting straight back in his car exhausted him. At least the drive had been a beautiful one, up into the dense forests of northern Ukiuk County, the little crossroads so remote that there was no cell service, as quaint and unspoiled as a scene from a classic film.

  The Outpost Grill was one of only two businesses in town, the other being a combination gas station/general store, tucked in among a couple dozen shacks and cabins. The bartender figured that George DeWitt might have met up with the Senator, an enormous brown bear that’d allegedly terrorized the northern part of the county for several years. The Senator had gotten its nickname because its muzzle supposedly had gone gray in a fashion that called to mind former Alaskan Republican Senator Frank Murkowski’s distinguished silver hair. The bear was rumored to be nearly ten feet tall and more than nine hundred pounds, and had supposedly killed a prize hound and treed a hunter a few years back, clawing through nearly half the trunk before getting bored and wandering away.