Through the kitchen window, Kendrick had seen something move—antlers, it turned out—and Grandpa Joe grabbed his rifle when Kendrick motioned. Before the shot exploded, Kendrick had seen the buck look up, and Kendrick thought, It knows. The buck’s black eyes reminded him of Dad’s eyes when he had listened to the news on the radio in the basement, hunched over his desk with a headset. Kendrick had guessed it was bad news from the trapped look in his father’s eyes.
Dad would be surprised at how good Kendrick was with a rifle now. He could blow away an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can from twenty yards. He’d learned how to aim on Max Payne and Medal of Honor, but Grandpa Joe had taught him how to shoot for real, a little every day. Grandpa Joe had a roomful of guns and ammunition—the back shed, which he kept locked—so they never ran low on bullets.
Kendrick supposed he would have to shoot a deer one day soon. Or an elk. Or something else. The time would come, Grandpa Joe said, when he would have to make a kill whether he wanted to or not. “You may have to kill to survive, Kendrick,” he said. “I know you’re only nine, but you need to be sure you can do it.”
Before everything changed, Grandpa Joe used to ask Mom and Dad if he could teach Kendrick how to hunt during summer vacation, and they’d said no. Dad didn’t like Grandpa much, maybe because Grandpa Joe always said what he thought, and he was Mom’s father, not Dad’s. And Mom didn’t go much easier on him, always telling Grandpa Joe no, no matter what he asked. No, you can’t keep him longer than a couple weeks in the summer. No, you can’t teach him shooting. No, you can’t take him hunting.
Now there was no one to say no. No one except Grandpa Joe, unless Mom and Dad came back. Grandpa Joe had said they might, and they knew where to find him. They might.
Kendrick put on the red down jacket he’d been wearing the day Grandpa Joe found him. He’d sat in this for never-ending hours in the safe room at home, the storage space under the stairs with a reinforced door, a chemical toilet, and enough food and water for a month. Mom had sobbed, “Bolt the door tight. Stay here, Kendrick, and don’t open the door until you hear Grandpa’s danger word—NO MATTER WHAT.”
She made him swear to Jesus, and she’d never made him swear to Jesus before. He’d been afraid to move or breathe. He’d heard other footsteps in the house, the awful sound of crashing and breaking. A single terrible scream. It could have been his mother, or father, or neither—he just didn’t know.
Followed by silence, for one hour, two, three. Then the hardest part. The worst part.
“Show me your math homework, Kendrick.”
The danger word was the special word he and Grandpa Joe had picked because Grandpa Joe had insisted on it. Grandpa Joe had made a special trip in his truck to tell them something bad could happen to them, and he had a list of reasons how and why. Dad didn’t like Grandpa Joe’s yelling much, but he’d listened. So Kendrick and Grandpa Joe had made up a danger word nobody else in the world knew, not even Mom and Dad.
And he had to wait to hear the danger word, Mom said.
No matter what.
By the time Kendrick dressed, Grandpa was already outside loading the truck, a beat-up navy blue Chevy. Kendrick heard a thud as he dropped a large sack of wrapped jerky in the bed.
Grandpa Joe had taught him how to mix up the secret jerky recipe he hadn’t even given Mom: soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce, fresh garlic cloves, dried pepper, onion powder. He’d made sure Kendrick was paying attention while strips of deer meat soaked in that tangy mess for two days and then spent twelve hours in the slow-cook oven. Grandpa Joe had also made him watch as he cut the deer open and its guts flopped to the ground, all gray and glistening. “Watch, boy. Don’t turn away. Don’t be scared to look at something for what it is.”
Grandpa Joe’s deer jerky was almost as good as the lumberjack breakfast, and Kendrick’s mouth used to water for it. Not anymore.
His jerky loaded, Grandpa Joe leaned against the truck, lighting a brown cigarette. Kendrick thought he shouldn’t be smoking.
“Ready?”
Kendrick nodded. His hands shook a little every time he got in the truck, so he hid his hands in his jacket pockets. Some wadded-up toilet paper from the safe room in Longview was still in there, a souvenir. Kendrick clung to the wad, squeezing his hand into a fist.
“We do this right, we’ll be back in less than an hour,” Grandpa Joe said. He spit, as if the cigarette had come apart in his mouth. “Forty-five minutes.”
Forty-five minutes. That wasn’t bad. Forty-five minutes, then they’d be back.
Kendrick stared at the cabin in the rearview mirror until the trees hid it from his sight.
The road was empty, as usual. Grandpa Joe’s rutted dirt road spilled onto the highway after a half-mile, and they jounced past darkened, abandoned houses. Kendrick saw three stray dogs trot out of the open door of a pink two-story house on the corner. He’d never seen that door open before, and he wondered whose dogs they were. He wondered what they’d been eating.