Story: Blood Pact

Not to overgeneralize or anything, but as a rule, a knock on the door in the middle of the night can’t mean anything good.

Especially on this night.

I swung upright and hunched on the edge of my borrowed bed for a minute, then pulled on the worn cowboy boots I’d kicked off a few hours earlier. When the floorboards outside the guest room creaked, I waited a few seconds, then followed. At the other end of the hall, the old man wielded a shotgun and a flashlight, but it was still hard to make out much else in the darkness.

“Sam?” I asked quietly.

He stiffened, turned creakily around to face me. The flashlight found my face like a searchlight; I flinched despite myself.

Maybe I shouldn’t have used his name. Maybe I should’ve stuck with sir—but now didn’t seem like a good time to remind him that we’d only known each other for several hours.

That he didn’t really know me at all.

“Problem, boy?” he said gruffly, turning back down the corridor and starting again. I glanced back at the tiny guest room he’d let me use—this place was more hermit cabin than vacation home, though the two were probably synonymous to the old man—then sighed and trailed after him.

“I thought I heard something.”

“Probably nothing,” he said. The shotgun in his hand begged to differ, but I didn’t. I hesitated at the top of the stairs, watching him pick his way to the front door at the bottom of them. “You go on back to bed. I’ll take you into town in the morning, see if we can get your truck looked at.”

“Thanks,” I said. But I hovered there at the landing, watching as he zipped his ancient canvas jacket over his plaid pajamas.

There was another knock at the door, sharper this time.

I left before the old man could open the door. No point sticking around to see who it was when I probably already knew.

There had only been ten of us in the transport truck, after all.

***

It had been almost eight last night when I’d finally left the soggy marshland outside and approached Sam’s cabin. When I’d been the one knocking at his door.

I hadn’t gotten the shotgun treatment, but that was probably because it’d still been light out. Just enough for him to glance out the window by the door and look at me. I was sixteen and looked younger—a thin face and round eyes will do that for you.

The old man had paused, and I’d stood there on the tiny stoop of his cabin, chilly in my leaking boots. Or the transport truck driver’s boots, anyway. They were a couple sizes too big, and between that and the oversized sweats I’d found in driver’s overnight bag, I looked ridiculous.

But at this point, I figured anything was better than escaped juvenile delinquent.

***

The old man had said he had this, and I tended to believe in guys like that—grizzled and rough, mean when they had to be. I tended to believe in shotguns, too.

Still, I hated leaving him alone. He clearly liked being alone—there was a reason a person retired to an isolated cabin, without even a TV or telephone. And that had seemed like a godsend when I’d realized he hadn’t heard about the transport truck crashing, the escaped teenagers.

But now it just made Sam seem vulnerable. I hated to think of one of the other guys jumping him.

Especially Fisher.

As much as I liked to pretend otherwise, Fisher would do whatever he felt like.

My big brother had been born with a whole lot of impulse where his heart should’ve been.

***

I paced around the guest room, wondering if I should just split. Ease open the window and climb to the ground below, disappear now instead of later. I’d always planned to leave before Sam woke in the morning—before he tried to take me out to find a broken-down truck that wasn’t there.

Not a broken-down pickup truck, anyways.

That sold me. I cast one last glance back and headed down, almost falling when I heard someone hiss my name in the darkness.

“Greyson!”

My stomach dropped.

Fisher. Crouched several yards away, hiding.

“There you are,” he said, voice hushed, grin glinting white in the moonlight. His blond curls looked downright angelic, which was painfully ironic. “I looked everywhere for you.”

And the thing was, I believed him. He was wild and reckless and sometimes I doubted he even had a soul, but he was loyal. We were blood.

I tried to ignore the fact that I’d been trying to leave him behind.

“Who’s around front?” I whispered, coming to join him.

“Philip. He's got an axe.”

I jolted up at the name, already heading towards the door. He called after me—when I didn’t stop, he hurried to catch up. “What the—”

“He’ll kill the old man.”

“So? That’s between them.”

“Fisher,” I snapped. “We can’t let him, okay? The old man was good to me. He was going to help me out of here.”

He hesitated. “I looked everywhere for you, and you were going to leave me?”

The thing about having a mostly heartless brother is, it’s pretty hard to insult him. “Yeah.”

He studied me, face expressionless in the darkness. Then he grinned again and shrugged, slung an arm around my shoulders. “Fine. We’ll save your geezer, then leave. But we stick together this time. Deal?”

I stared at him. It felt a lot like agreeing to get dragged into his crap for the rest of my life, which had landed me in juvie with him in the first place. Like making a deal with the devil.

But I guessed that fit. Rumor had it the devil had looked pretty angelic himself, once upon a time.

I clasped my hand over the back of his, still around my shoulder. “Deal.”

Author's Note: I loved Tom Gauld's "Map of the Area Surrounding Our Holiday Home," so I gave the holiday home to an old man and decided to write about it. From the key, I incorporated an escaped convict, a bog, and a (loosely interpreted) axeman.

Bibliography. "Map of the Area Surrounding Our Holiday Home," a cartoon by Tom Gauld from his book ROBOTS, MONSTERS Etc. Web source.

Image Credit: "House in the Woods at Night" by Ryan Thomas. Source: Flickr.