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They were deep in the woods, but not so deep as to be in the shadow of Moloch. Hunter couldn’t bring himself to go back there yet.
After returning from his eye-opening foray to the tophet, Hunter had prevailed on his father to go on a hunting trip that afternoon. John had agreed wholeheartedly. Things had been tense lately.
They parked the truck on the old, washboard road and walked into the woods, not speaking. Brown leaves fell through the wasted tree branches, clacking dryly through them like a game of Plinko. Dried brush crackled beneath their feet. John stopped, suddenly feeling his son’s eyes on his back.
“Were things that bad, dad,” Hunter asked quietly. “So bad that you had to resort to murder?”
John turned around slowly, his hand tightening on the stock of his rifle. Hunter stood ten yards away, his rifle trained on John’s chest.
“Don’t bother with the rifle, dad. I took the firing pin out.”
John’s grip on the rifle stock relaxed.
“How did you find out,” John asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Hunter answered, his eye never straying from the rifle sight.
John spoke slowly at first.
“I’d seen too much working for Bob Coleman, Hunter. I knew too much. Trundling them kids to his ranch, standing watch by the woods while the fires burned. If I didn’t do it, all of us would be dead. This way, if I gave them what they wanted, the rest of us would be taken care of. We’d be part of the golden circle and never want for anything again. And how much time did Jesse really have? What kind of life would it have been? It’s the way the world works, son. I had no choice.” He still believed that he could talk his way out of it; that his son would never raise his hand against him.
Hunter remained steady as he cocked the hammer.
“You let them burn him alive. You let them seal his charred bones in a drum. Jesse and who knows how many others. My brother. Your son.”
John saw his chances cashing out, his greatest sin uncovered and unforgivable.
“It was never me, Hunter,” he whined. “It was your mother that put the idea in your head. She knew you would go. It was always her!”
Hunter thought back to that moment, he lying helpless in a stupor while Leonard Pitts operated the clanking, grease-clogged pulleys that let the mechanical arm lower his crying brother into the flames. He recalled the bitter taste of some kind of drug he had been forced to drink. A dozen or so of the town’s leading citizens had watched in a dreadful fascination. He remembered his father standing there, crying, yet doing nothing while his mother stood by with dry eyes and a hard look on her face. It was beyond medieval, blackly hearkening back to days of ancient paganism.
Giving not a moment of consideration to his father’s pleas, Hunter dropped the hammer. The rifle boomed and John fell backwards, the light fading from his open eyes like a glowing wick dimming to nothingness. Hunter took a deep breath as he stared at his father’s opaque eyes. It had been far easier for him than it had been for Jesse. And it might have been only wishful thinking on his part, but Hunter almost believed he saw relief in his dead father’s eyes. The world was a cold and evil place, a much darker place than Hunter would have ever believed. He had to be colder. After all he had seen, he left nothing to chance. He pried open his father’s lower jaw and placed the Silver Eagle coin he had carried faithfully for ten hears beneath his tongue, his fare to the toll-taker Charon to carry him across the River Styx.
He had already decided. His sisters would be spared, but the rest would pay.
A reckoning was nigh.