The Summer I Died: A Thriller

by Ryan C. Thomas

  Without thinking, my hand went to the ax he was swinging and stopped its descent toward my neck. My other fist pounded his eyes, pounded his mouth, pounded his broken nose. His punches landed square on my face, though I barely took notice of them. In the melee, my teeth sank into his neck and tore out a chunk of flesh which I spit back into his face. Blinded and choking on his own blood, he flailed like an overturned beetle in a puddle, punching me and trying to get the ax free of my grip, trying to reach with his other hand for the gun which had slid to the curb. Another headbutt dazed him and I wrenched the ax free from his hand. He put both arms over his head to protect himself, and I saw that he was no longer laughing—he was terrified.

  Our roles had reversed.

  I got off of him and took a step back and just watched him for a few seconds. He took his hands away from his face and looked up at me, the gaping wound in his neck wet and wide like a second mouth.

  “What are you gonna do, boy?” he said as blood bubbled out from the hole near his Adam’s apple. He forced a smile I knew was wreaking havoc with his nose, the same stupid grin he sported in the photo upstairs. Upstairs where something else had been with us. “You gonna kill me, here, in the middle of the road?”

  I looked around at the surrounding forests. The odds of anyone coming through here were slim. People were already at work, summer school buses had come and gone. We were alone.

  “You fucking mama’s boy. You fucking loser. What do you think you can do to me?”

  I didn’t even care enough to listen to him; I just kept seeing Tooth and Jamie lying in pools of blood. Those images would be with me forever, ruining my life until the day I died. Would I ever sleep again? Would I ever be happy? No matter what happened in the next few seconds, I would never be the same. I knew I was about to go somewhere I had never dreamed possible. All because of this man, and his sickness, his twisted insanity that had turned me inside out.

  Let’s go to California.

  Tooth’s one and only goal in life: to get away from the shitty hand he’d been dealt and start fresh. Now he wasn’t in California; he was in a shallow grave in some lunatic’s backyard. I had to do this for him.

  “Look at you, crying like a pansy. Shit, you can’t hurt me, you’re coming back to my place whether you like it or not.”

  True, I was still crying, but it wasn’t out of fear anymore—it was for what I had lost, what I would never regain. What I had been made into, like so many comic book heroes I had hung on my walls growing up. I was crying because I was now a monster.

  Roger Huntington was dead.

  With tears dripping into my bleeding lips, I reached into my pockets and pulled out the dice that Skinny Man had been so fond of.

  “We gonna play a game? That’s good, I like games,” he said.

  I held them in my hand, two red dice that seemed at home in the smears of blood in my palm. Skinny Man was on his feet now, one hand over the hole in his neck, the other a fist by his side. He turned and saw the gun he’d been reaching for and began to hobble over to it. It was empty, but I didn’t care. I squeezed the dice against the ax handle and cleared my mind of anything and everything. Except California—I would go there one way or another.

  I limped over to Skinny Man and waited while he bent down to pick up the gun. With a triumphant, “Ah,” he grabbed it, spun around and pointed it at me. And that’s when I swung the ax.

  With a crunch, it wedged into the right side of his face, splitting open his cheek, lodging in his jawbone and exploding his teeth out toward the lawn. The thick blade locked his upper and lower jaws together so that the gurgle of surprise came straight from his throat. Both his body and the gun fell to the ground, bounced on the cement. I put my foot on his face and yanked out the ax, which came loose with a squeak. A fountain of blood spit up around the white, exposed bone. He reached up for me, but I grabbed his hand, placed it on the road, and swung the ax at it. The blade went straight through with one clean cut. I tossed the hand out toward the middle of the road. The only sounds he seemed able to make were grunts and blood-filled coughs. I grabbed his other hand and swung the ax down on it, taking it off in two chops. He was looking at me with more fear than I had ever seen a man convey before, and I wanted to end him right there, but I owed something to Tooth and Jamie. So I swung the ax at his bare chest and it sank into his breastplate with a thud. His body lurched, and he tried to grab me but his stumps couldn’t get a hold. I pulled the ax out and watched blood ooze from the fissure in the bestiality tattoo covering his chest

  “You did this!” I screamed. “Why! Why did you do this!” I was crying so hard it was like looking through saran wrap.

  Something over my shoulder caught his attention, and I spun around as a brown station wagon drove down the street. It came at us slowly, as if it was concerned about hitting us. Maybe it thought we were a couple kids wrestling or something. But then I saw recognition in the driver’s eyes, a small old lady with pearl white hair. She slammed on the gas and sped away.

  I looked around me and saw the forest and the street, but at the same time I was having those flashes of California—the beach, the palm trees, so free, so warm, beckoning for me to stay, to never go back to New Hampshire. But I wasn’t finished.

  Skinny Man sat up waving his arms like two snakes, his half-butchered head tilted to the side. My tears were stinging my eyes now, I could hear myself crying. I swung the ax again, swung it into his shoulder and began to take his arm off of his body. I had to pull it out and repeat it several times before I got through the bone, before the arm actually came off, after which I tossed it out into the street near the hands. His eyes glazed over and I knew he was near death, so I swung the ax at his head and sank it into his forehead over his right eye. The skull split wide open, the eye fell out. He fell back to the ground with the ax still protruding. His legs kicked a little, and he blinked at me with his left eye while his mouth tried to form words. I dropped the dice onto his chest and screamed. At first no sound came out, as if I’d forgotten how to use vocal cords. Then, in one giant rush of air, my scream erupted into the heavens above. I screamed so loud it hurt my own ears. I screamed until my muscles burned with exertion. I screamed with everything I had in me, purging myself of every ounce of sanity. I screamed for so long I tasted blood. I was still screaming, my head thrown toward God, when the police car pulled to a stop several feet down the road.

  CHAPTER 25

  “Get on the ground right now!”

  I kept screaming, my tears dripping on the cement like rain. The cop was ducked behind his car door, arms outstretched, with his gun aimed at me. He clicked the radio receiver on his shoulder and spoke quickly, “Officer needs assistance, now! I’ve got a ten-fifty . . . uh . . . a ten-thirty-seven . . . fuck, I don’t know what I got! Somebody just get to Highridge Way right now!”

  “Teddy? That you?” came a static-laden reply. “Hold on, I’m on my way.”

  “I said lay down, motherfucker!” he yelled, turning his attention back to me. “Don’t make me fucking shoot you. Get on the ground and kiss the fucking dirt or I will empty your brains onto the road. NOW!”

  He could have started firing for all I cared. I was somewhere else. I was in California eating ice cream and drawing superheroes.

  Again he called over his radio. “I need an ambulance out here right now. And somebody tell the chief.” Slowly, he came around the door with his gun still trained on my head. Probably he wanted to shoot me, get a medal for his bravery, win a trip to the capital to meet the governor. “Stop fucking screaming and lay down, I will not tell you again!”

  Did he really think I was listening to him? Hell, did I even care if he shot me at this point? Yeah, I guess I did. Truth was, part of me was just tired, both physically and mentally, to the point I’d been seeing things for a while, but the other part of me knew that Tooth and Jamie would want me to live. I didn’t want to die; I was just too messed up to do anything about it.

  He stopped a few fe
et away from me, leaned forward and took a long hard look at my handiwork. “What have you done? What the flying fuck is that? You sick fucking maniac. I ought to shoot you right now. Oh, my God, what did you do? Where’s his arm? Where are—” He had finally noticed the body parts in the street. He clicked on his radio again. “Hurry up! Now!”

  Finally, all my voice ran out, and I sat with my mouth gaping open, saliva dribbling down my chin, not making a peep. The officer could see that his threats were useless; he could tell I wasn’t right. For a moment he just stared at me muttering “What the hell,” and I stared back, and he didn’t know what to make of me. I think he was starting to put something together though, like he could see the difference in age between me and Skinny Man, could see the disgusting tattoos on his torso, could see the piss stains on my shorts, the dried blood on my body and the leg irons on my ankles. His angry expression turned to confusion and caution. I think he was adding it up.

  Suddenly, Skinny Man’s body jumped. I don’t know if it was nerves or if he was still alive or what, but the officer screamed, “Holy shit!” and sprinted back to his car. His hands shaking, the gun trembling, he hid behind his door once more. But Skinny Man didn’t move after that. Maybe it was his soul trying to escape toward heaven, and the movement had been the devil yanking it back through his ass toward hell.

  “Sir?” Officer Teddy called. “Sir, are you alive? If you can hear me, make a movement, anything to let me know you’re alive.”

  My savior, the cavalry, trying to save the corpse of the bad guy.

  “Sir? Sir?” he kept goading the cadaver. Then he looked at me and asked, “Is he dead? Did you kill him?”

  I don’t know why I responded, but I nodded my head. Maybe I was trying to sin as little as possible at that point, not make it any worse than it was. Maybe I was proud.

  “Do you have any weapons on you?” he asked me.

  I pointed to the ax sticking out of Skinny Man’s head.

  “Are you hurt?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, I want you to lie down on the ground. I’m going to come over and put these cuffs on you—”

  I lost it. I slammed my fist against my head, punched myself in the chest, swearing that if he came near me I would kill him. I would never wear handcuffs again.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, in some lame effort to calm me down, “but you gotta lay down for me, you gotta give me that. Otherwise I can’t check and see if he’s alive. Can you do that for me?”

  Before I knew it, I was sprawling out on the ground on my stomach. My chin plopped into the puddle of blood running out of Skinny Man’s body.

  “Now don’t move. Do you hear me, don’t move. I’ll still shoot you if I have to.”

  He came back, full of trepidation, and went to place his hand on Skinny Man’s neck but stopped before he touched him. Then he mumbled something soft, put a hand over his mouth and backed away, disgusted.

  “Is anyone in the house?”

  I nodded.

  “Are they hurt? Did you hurt them? Are they dead?”

  I kept nodding, though I was only answering his first question. Once I remembered Jamie was downstairs I just wanted him to go in and save her.

  “Don’t move, you hear me, I will shoot you dead on the spot if you so much as lift a finger.”

  He walked up the grass to the front door, his gun at the ready, his head swiveling side to side in case anything surprising came at him. When he reached the door, he glanced back at me and saw me still on the ground. Satisfied, he grabbed the doorknob and opened the door.

  Butch exploded out like a cannonball and caught Officer Teddy by the throat. His gun went flying into the bushes beside the door as the dog hauled him to the grass and tried desperately to rip open his neck.

  I thought, no, this can’t be happening. Butch is dead, I stabbed him. Why is this still happening?

  For a long time after, I wouldn’t remember what happened that day. I spent several years not thinking of anything much. No matter how many treatment wards I stayed in, or how many psychiatrists tried to open me up, I pretty much shut that day up in the back of my mind and threw away the key. I spent a long time in California, without ever going there. My dad, strong as he was to take care of me and my mother for the next several years, even went so far as to buy me a surfboard and put it in my hospital room in the hopes I would answer the doctor’s questions. Still, no matter what anyone did to unlock the door I had sealed in my mind, I more or less refused to remember it.

  But one thing about that day I never forgot, through all of my self-induced fugue, was what I had seen in the hallway upstairs when I had rushed Skinny Man.

  I had seen Tooth.

  Now I know I was tired, and losing my mind, but there was something odd about that vision, something that told me I wasn’t just seeing things. I’m not sure when I worked it out exactly, but eventually it hit me, and it kept me carrying on through life.

  He wasn’t wearing his Red Sox hat.

  I know that might sound stupid, but whenever I had thought of Tooth up to that point, it was the Tooth I had always known, the Tooth never to be caught dead without his Red Sox hat. And it wasn’t like he was just standing in the hallway with us—he was down on all fours. When Skinny Man fell backwards, I could have sworn he had done so over Tooth’s body. I had seen Tooth again in the living room, telling me to kick Skinny Man in his leg wound, and it had freed me. Again, he wasn’t wearing his hat.

  And as Butch hauled officer Teddy to the grass with the knife still sticking out of his furry, red shoulder, I could have sworn I felt hot breath in my ear as Tooth’s voice whispered, “Roger, I told you, always check the chamber first.”

  I lay motionless for what seemed like an eternity, though it was probably a very short blink-of-an-eye second, until I understood what I had just heard. I rolled over in time to see a shimmering blur that kind of resembled Tooth, and yet kind of resembled heat wave. But it was gone so quickly I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t imagined it.

  For some reason I reached for the hat in my back pocket and it was gone, which didn’t mean a whole lot since I’d been rolling about with Skinny Man. Probably it was on the stairs inside or on the living room floor. It didn’t matter anyway. What mattered was I had never checked the chamber of the gun.

  I flung myself toward the 9mm resting against the curb and picked it up just as Butch tore the radio handset off Officer Teddy’s shoulder. The man was screaming, bleeding profusely, probably pissing himself. I had seen it all before, and I hated that dog for continuing it. When I slid back the chamber of the gun, a small bronze bullet stared back at me.

  “Tooth.” I looked for the heat wave again. It was gone.

  Quickly realizing his mistake, Butch dropped the radio on the ground, freeing the cop from his bite. Not wasting any time, the cop began crawling to me. When he saw me pointing the gun his way he opened his mouth in disbelief, threw his hands in front of his face. He thought I was going to shoot him. Butch, seeing his meal scuttling down the lawn, gave chase, saliva whipping out behind him like a kite tail. I had one bullet, and I wanted it to count. I remembered shooting beer cans with this gun, how it shot slightly to the left, how if you could compensate correctly the shot was pretty accurate.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the second police car come screeching to a halt, the door flying open, a cop shouting, “No!” Butch was running at Officer Teddy, eyes mad and hungry. Officer Teddy was screaming.

  There were two gunshots.

  The first went in between Butch’s eyes and exploded bits of brain out the back of his head, throwing his body into a gyrating heap of black fur that crashed full on into Officer Teddy. The second went whizzing under my chin and took a nick out of my throat. Searing hot pain spread across my Adam’s apple, and I fell backward and dropped the gun.

  With a sudden rush of realization, Officer Teddy pushed Butch’s heap of dying flesh off of him and ran over to me. “Whoa! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!�
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  “Get out of the way, Teddy!” screamed the other officer.

  “No, put the gun down! It wasn’t him, it was the dog! He shot the dog. Look, he shot the dog. It was attacking me.”

  “You’re bleeding! Get out of the way!”

  “The dog! He shot the dog! Put the fucking gun away!”

  The second officer lowered his weapon and looked at the dead dog on the grass. Utter confusion spread across his face, and he looked back at Officer Teddy a couple of times and tried to speak but couldn’t think of what to say. He walked over to us as Officer Teddy put a hand on my throat and asked, “Where did the bullet go?”

  I pointed to my neck, to the scratch the bullet made. He sat back on his ass and wiped his brow. The dog bite in his shoulder looked like roast beef. “Thanks,” he said. “Don’t know if you deserve it yet, a thanks that is, but I got a feeling there’s more going on here than meets the eye.”

  Cop number two was standing over Skinny Man’s corpse, waving flies away. “Teddy,” he said, nice and calm like he was trying to rationalize what he was seeing, “what the hell happened here?”

  CHAPTER 26

  Two ambulances arrived shortly after, and the paramedics put both me and Officer Teddy on gurneys and ran around like beheaded chickens trying to figure out the best way to stop our bleeding. As they laid me down, the second cop suggested cuffing me but Teddy talked him out of it, relaying his already-failed attempt to do the same thing. A third, fourth and fifth cop arrived on the scene, then a county medical examiner and a meat wagon. Finally came the chief, who went about waving orders to his men and making sure more ambulances were on the way.

  First thing they did was close off the street and cover Skinny Man’s body with a sheet, after which they covered up the body parts I had tossed about. Together, with guns raised, they entered the house and searched for persons unknown that Teddy had told them I said were inside.