by Adam Dark
"That's not true," Tripp said through the raging sirens behind him and the crying baby.
"You know it is. They won't think otherwise. They'll find the old man..."
"I hid the body," Tripp said.
"What will happen when they find him?"
"They won't."
The voices slid through Tripp's mind to the other ear.
"You know you need us," they said.
"I've been fine without you for thirty years," Tripp said. "I know what you did the first time."
"He was an accident," they said.
"You killed my uncle and those other boys," Tripp said.
"A necessary sacrifice to protect you," they hissed.
Tripp spun the truck out of the neighborhood toward the highway.
"You won't get away. They'll have the roads blocked off..."
Tripp ignored the voices in his head. All they had ever done was hurt him. They couldn't be trusted. The hospital was only five miles away. If he could get there, then they could save her. They could help him. But he never made it. The police had the road blocked off up ahead. He slammed on the brakes and reversed.
The police in pursuit swerved to block his retreat. Tires squealed as Tripp peeled down a side road into the trees. The old graveyard hadn't been used in years. The tombstones shined like silver orbs as his headlights crossed their paths.
The police converged on the dirt road and followed him in. There was a creek at the far end of the cemetery. Tripp left the truck running and hopped out. He carried the baby in both arms as he ran. There was no hope for his wife. She was gone.
"What are you going to do now? You've cornered yourself," the voices said.
Tripp blocked them out and splashed into the creek. The cold water sucked the breath out of him as he plummeted under. His head broke the surface gasping for breath, the baby still clutched in his arms. He swam to the other side just as the police began to make their way down the slope.
"Stop or we'll shoot!" they yelled.
They had flashlights beamed on Tripp's face, guns drawn and ready.
"I didn't kill her!" Tripp yelled.
"Come with us and we'll talk about it," one of the officers said. It was the same one that Tripp had nearly decapitated.
Tripp looked behind him. The police were scampering through the water to surround him.
"You're running out of time," the voices said. "Kill him and we'll save you."
"I'm not killing my child," Tripp said.
"You'll die if you don't," they said.
"Put the baby down and place your hands over your head," the officer said.
The others had crossed the creek and were maneuvering into position. He didn't have much time before they surrounded him.
"Last chance," the voices said.
Tears streamed his cheeks. He glanced down at the child in his hands. The blanket was covered in blood and soaked through. The baby's skin was turning purple from the cold. Its crying had stopped.
"Do it..."
Tripp's hands were shaking, not from the cold. He brought the infant to his face and kissed the child on the head. His lips creased the scarred tissue and deformed face.
"He's not your son. Give him to us," the voices said.
The police were behind him now. They were pressing in from all sides, guns drawn. They'd gun him down on the spot. He was out of time.
Tripp did the only thing he could do. He fell to his knees and shoved the baby under the ice water. He screamed as he held his child.
"Yes..." the voices encouraged.
The police opened fire. Flashes of bright light flickered through the night as bullets whipped through the humid air. They tore through Tripp's body in waves.
"Cease fire!" the officer in charge yelled.
The police stopped shooting but did not holster their weapons. The lead officer, the one Tripp had nearly killed, crept into the water. The dark liquid went up to his thighs as he shuffled through. He held his pistol at the ready as he lifted Tripp's limp body from the river and flopped him on the dirt.
His eyes were black orbs staring into the sky.
The officer holstered his weapon and plunged his hands into the icy water. He pulled the baby out and sat him on the riverbank. The child wasn't breathing and his skin was blue.
"Call an ambulance!" he yelled.
He ripped off his jacket and wrapped the infant in it. He was preparing to do CPR when he froze. The thing that lay before him was more creature than human. He glanced over at the dead body, then back at the child.
He wrapped his jacket over its face to block the hideous sight and stood to face his men.
"They're dead," he said.
3
30 years later.
Summer break was the best time of the entire year. The only downside was it only lasted two months and then it was back to slave driving in school. But for now, we could enjoy our freedom and the sun.
I sped off down the street. The guys would already be there. I hoped they didn't go without me. My mother had insisted I eat something before leaving. I managed to choke down a piece of jelly toast and half a glass of orange juice before I stole out of the front door.
It was a hot summer day. Just like all summers in Oakwood Valley. It seemed the mountains surrounding the valley acted as a magnifying glass and the valley a sponge for the sun's heat. I was sweating by the time I got to the edge of the driveway and hopped on my bike.
The hot air rushing across my face as I pedaled only dried the sweat. It did little to assuage the unremitting heat. And it was only eight o'clock in the morning! It was going to be a scorcher today. Good thing we were going to the river.
The Styrofoam lunchbox attached to a sling bounced against my back as I sped down the streets. The river was three miles from our house. Mother was weary of me crossing the main street, but father said it was what boys did. I was glad she relented on my twelfth birthday. The summer would have been torture if I couldn't go to the river with my friends.
I had only been able to go last year when my mother or older sister drove me. That was never fun. The other boys made fun of me having to be babysat and chauffeured around. It hurt, but at least I was there and not stuck at home listening to my mother watch Soap Operas all day. The jabs always stopped pretty quickly the moment we jumped in the water.
We forgot about everything else when we were in the water. Even time. Once, we had stayed out by the water all night. When the sun came up the following morning, our parents and the police had come looking for us. They found us curled up in our tree fort.
My mother didn't allow me to come back for a month. And by that time, summer was nearly over. But I was older now. Twelve meant I could bike on my own, so long as I was back when the streetlights came on. I told myself it was because I was older, but the truth was my mother was just more preoccupied with the new baby to worry about me.
This served me well. Though my sixteen-year-old sister didn't see it the same way. She and my mother fought nearly every day. The arguments usually ended with one or both slamming their bedroom doors and crying. I'd passed my sister's room on more than one occasion to hear her sobbing and telling her best friend, Susie, how she hated it here and couldn't wait until she was eighteen.
I never understood why she'd want to leave. We had everything we could ever need. But Rachel, my sister, said I would understand when I got older. “You're lucky,” she said and told me not to grow up too fast. “You lose out on all of the fun when you do.”
I just shrugged and carried on my way. That's how you handled things at the Robinson home. You just shrugged, screamed, or pretended everything was okay. Father was gone most of the time. If he wasn't traveling around the world, he'd be at the office late, eat a cold meal, then be back in his study for the remainder of the night.
I didn't see him much these days. When I was ten, he and I would do everything together. We'd play catch, go fishing, and even pretend to be warring pirates on the river, or flip
the couch cushions on the floor and build forts and pretend the carpet was hot lava.
Mother always chastised us for the mess, but the big smile on her face always told a different story. She liked us playing as much as Dad and I did. That stopped when he got his new job as a lead consultant for a legal firm. I overheard him telling my mother one night that it was a good thing for us. That the pay was nearly twice what he was making and came with lots of benefits.
My mother didn't look too convinced but conceded to my father's wishes. He would have done it anyway even if she hadn't agreed, but by her siding with him, it made the family more cohesive and happy. I could tell my mother wasn't happy. She had lost that glimmer about her that she used to wear like a scarf around her neck.
When my father was out of town, my mother would go out. She said she was with friends, but she always wore really nice outfits and had her hair and makeup done. She looked beautiful. This wasn't one of those mornings. Mom was in the kitchen telling my dad what needed to be done around the house while he sat oblivious to the world reading his newspaper.
They were arguing when I had left. They did a lot of that these days.
I wheeled my bike to the right and hopped the front tire over the curb. I continued for another half a mile on the sidewalk before I got to the front entrance of our neighborhood. River Oak Road was as main a road as you could get in our area of town. It was a two-lane, back country road that led into the city.
Mother wanted a home in the suburbs with some land, while father wanted to live close to the city life. They met somewhere in the middle and here we were. Riverdale. It was a nice neighborhood with at least a thousand homes full of families like my own.
Three of us lived in Riverdale, the others lived in neighborhoods or trailer parks within a five-mile radius. That's also where the river was. And how we had all met.
I waited at the crosswalk for a truck full of chickens to pass by before pedaling to the other side. My tires slid down the steep embankment and splashed through the shallow puddle in the drainage ditch. I biked the rest of the way along the side of the road. The tall trees blocked most of the sun from view. Cars speeding by by would blow gusts of cool air in my direction. Already my body temperature was dropping.
It was a good day.
The guys were already in the water when I arrived. Henry was sitting on a stump reading a book while Nico was trying to get Ian to jump off the rope swing. Peter was already in the water, encouraging Ian to jump. I skidded to a stop and jumped off my bike before it stopped.
"Hey guys! Sorry I'm late," I said.
Peter glanced over his shoulder.
"Hey, Ben. Did your mother make you eat her famous porridge again?" Peter asked.
Porridge was an inside joke that never made sense. I don't even know how it originated.
"Every last bite," I said.
Peter chuckled.
"What's going on here?" I asked.
Nico shouted from the tree house.
"Max is being a scaredy-cat and won't jump off of the swing," Nico said.
"Come on, Ian. It's a lot of fun," Peter said.
He splashed in the water.
"Look! It's nice and cool," Peter said.
"It's too shallow. And we're too high. I don't want to go," Max said.
"Come on, Max. Stop being such a wimp," Ian said.
"If it's so easy then why don't you jump?" Max said to Ian.
Ian made a face but didn't speak anymore. He was just as nervous as Max but hid behind his fake bravado. I yanked off my shirt, pants, and shoes and tossed them in the dirt and dove into the water. My skin immediately cried out in relief. I submerged under the dark water and let the water rinse the heat from my face. I burst through the surface and wiped the water from my eyes.
"Come on, Max. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's only a short fall and the water is deep here," I said.
Max 's hands were white from clenching the banister on the tree fort. Nico was standing behind him with his hands on Max 's back.
"I'm going to push you in if you don't go," Nico said.
"No!" Max shouted and shoved away from the railing. He disappeared inside the fort. Nico yelled after him.
"Fine, be a baby! We're just trying to have fun," Nico said.
Nico took hold of the rope and drew it all the way back to the doorway of the fort before rushing forward and leaping as far out as he could. His body went skyward before he began to plummet. Then the rope went taut and snapped him forward into the air. He released his grip at the apex of the climb and tumbled down next to Peter and me.
Nico's head bobbed out of the water with a chorus of shouts. He swam over to us.
"Good of you to join us," he said to me.
Nico wasn't my favorite, but he was one of the guys. We didn't much like each other either, but if things went down, we'd defend the other to the death. That was one good thing about Nico, he was loyal. And standing nearly a foot taller than any of us, he was like our bodyguard with the older kids at school.
We were an odd bunch.
Henry was the smart one. He wasn't your typical nerd. He didn't wear glasses and he dressed in gothic clothes whenever his mother wasn't around or was too drunk to notice. His father had been in prison for something none of us knew since he was five.
Other men came around from time-to-time, but they only stayed in his mother's room for a few minutes to an hour before they left. Men came and went every day. It was only when his mother was on her period or sick that they stopped coming by. His mother was nice to be around when that was the case.
Henry was smart as I said, but not your average smart. He was a bona fide genius if I ever knew one. He'd whip out facts as if he were reading them from an encyclopedia. He had an answer for everything and could always explain any situation with statistics, details, and percentages.
I rarely understood what he was saying, but he was nice enough. We let him hang with us because he let us cheat off of his homework in math.
Nico was what people called a party animal, though I wouldn't fully grasp the meaning of this until I was older. He was the cool kid at school. Everyone liked him and wanted to be his friend. And though he didn't play sports, he had every cheerleader on a leash. He was the least serious out of all of us. He never seemed to be without a smile or some kind of adrenaline-seeking adventure. That's how we had found this spot to begin with.
Nico found all of the good spots for us.
Max was our worry wart. He was even more paranoid than Abigail at school. The weird girl with the lazy eye who always talked to herself at lunch and wore the same yellow stockings every day to school. The kids would walk by during lunch and clap their hands behind her just to see her flinch. If you got the timing just right, she'd snort her milk up her nose and send her tray flying through the air.
Max's favorite line was always, “I have a bad feeling about this.” He was gripping the railing of the tree fort like his life depended on it. It was more so due to his incessant clumsiness than the fear I imagined. Or maybe he didn't want to get his father's pistol wet. He wore it everywhere he went.
It was never loaded as far as I could tell, but he never left his house without.
Ian was a cross between Max and Nico but a little less awkward. He hid his fear with big talk. He was the one who would rush into a burning house to save a cat while the rest of the neighborhood stayed on the street thinking about how hot it was.
He once climbed a thirty-foot streetlamp pole to rescue a stranded cat. How it managed to get itself stuck up there will remain a mystery. While he could climb a tall pole above concrete, he had a hard time swinging from a rope out of a tree nearly half the height and into water.
It didn't make sense. I concluded long ago that his nervousness and anxiety were all self-imposed. Perhaps they were a self-defense mechanism to hide some other insecurity. I'd learn more about that in psychology my senior year in high school.
Peter was a mix of everything. He was br
ave like Ian, fearless and outgoing like Nico, wary like Max, and smart and withdrawn like Henry. He took lots of medicine and was always sick. I was actually surprised to see him here today.
It had been a month since I last saw him at school. The doctors said he had a disease that made his blood thin and fail to clot. He wasn't allowed to play during recess for this very reason. He had been hospitalized for a week once when he had gotten a tiny paper cut.
It nearly killed him.
He came back the following week wearing gloves and long-sleeved clothes. It took some convincing, but his parents finally allowed him to join us at the river. He just couldn't be too rough and had to be extremely careful. Of course he said, “Yes mom and dad, I’ll be careful,” but the moment he was outside with us, he shed every care in the world.
He once told me, “What's the point of living if you can't live?” I never forgot that. Everyone may love Nico, but I admired Peter. He had every reason to give up on life and be angry with everyone, but he chose to live his life to the fullest, even if that might only be another week or thirty years.
Besides hemophilia and the worry that he might have internal bleeding in his knees, ankles, or elbows at any given moment, Peter also had asthma, which caused him to wake up a lot during the night. His insomnia was worse than my own ever since we had first gone to the house on the hill.
It was last summer when we first went, and I had never wanted to return since. The place gave me the heebie-jeebies. But the boys were itching to return, I could tell. The summer was almost over, and we wouldn't have another chance if we didn't go now.
And the other kids at school had bragged about how long they had stayed on the porch before they all ran. The record was two minutes. Nico had sworn he would break it. So far, we had talked him out of going and distracted him by hanging out by the river and our tree fort.
As for me, I'm nothing special. I'd like to think of myself as brave like Ian or Nico, but the last thing I would want to do is go ding-dong-ditch the haunted mansion on the hill or swing off a twenty-foot tree branch on a rope that looked twice as old as we were. Of course, I had swung from that rope more times than I could remember, but it was terrifying every time, right up until the moment my body hit the water and I came up alive.