At the ruined window through a frame of jagged glass and masonry pocked by our gunshots, I looked out onto a slaughterhouse. A state police cruiser sat on the gravel, battered, with its windows smashed. The remains of the men, along with the remains of Bucky Minden, littered the tiny pebbles. They had been stripped and devoured. A party of flies was already in full commencement, dancing and dipping in the cool dawn air. The insects were the only things that moved out there.
I wandered down the hallway along the front of the building, back toward the lockers, the showers, the restrooms and the shooting range, turning on lights as I went. Splashes of blood dappled the floor and shards of glass from the smashed window, but no bodies.
By the time I reached the door to the firing range, my heart was beating harder than a hummingbird’s wings. But I opened the door and found the concrete alley empty.
Back in the office, I called for Duke, letting him know the coast was clear.
I took a step forward to meet my deputy and my daughter.
That’s when the alpha struck.
I don’t know how he got behind me, don’t know what he used to crack my skull, but the scene before me blew apart, desks floating up and out of my vision, the ceiling warping downward to meet the floor. Filing cabinets bulging outward as if expanding with tremendous breath. All in a second. All in shades of gray. Then black.
I fell to the floor, unconscious.
—
When I woke, the first thing I noticed was the pain. I tried to lift my head and it felt like my skull was lined with shards of glass, tearing my scalp and brain with equal ferocity. Closing my eyes against the agony, I pushed myself off of the floor, got my shaky legs under me and nearly crashed back to the floor. I fell against the divider for support, touched the wet wound on the back of my head and tried to figure out why I was in the police station.
Why were dead people littering the floor? What the hell was going on?
It wasn’t until I saw Duke, lying facedown by the holding area door, that the information I needed returned. The entire night before rushed back like a train boring through my skull, intensifying the pain in my head and the panic in my chest.
Dru?
In a fit of desperation, I searched for my daughter. I stumbled into the holding area, looked through the bars into each cell. Viv Mayflower was on her feet, holding Maggie and Gwen to her, looking terrified.
But Dru was not with them. The alpha had left me a message to that effect. I just hadn’t noticed it.
I found the note pinned to the back of Duke’s shirt just above a bullet hole and a smear of blood. The two words written on a scrap of paper worked their way into my head, at first making no sense. I stared at the neat block letters, my mind so consumed with fear for my daughter’s life that I couldn’t understand what the note was telling me. As I tried to reason it out, a bolt of pain shot from the base of my neck over my crown to the bridge of my nose. Its intensity was startling, made the world go gray. But in its aftermath, my head cleared and the two words suddenly made perfect sense:
The park.
—
Driving across Luther’s Bend, painful emotions—terror and premature feelings of loss, and even guilt—took my mind away from the pain in my head. Around me, my neighbors, the people I had known all my life, went about their mornings. They made and drank coffee. Cooked and ate breakfast. Read the newspaper. Made love. Played with their kids. My head was not with them,;I drove, as if through a tunnel carved in a desolate mountain. There was nothing but the entrance and the exit, and all in between was cold and impenetrable, ultimately meaningless because it could not be changed.
I thought of how I might handle this situation, wondered what the alpha (because I was certain he was behind my daughter’s abduction) would say when confronted. Maybe I was driving into a trap, but if the alpha wanted me dead, he would have seen to that back at the station, murdered me the way he’d murdered Duke.
No, he wanted something from me, and he was using my little girl to instigate the bargaining.
I turned onto Whitehall Road, my pulse tripping hard and fast as the park opened up on my right. I touched the butt of my service revolver, and then grasped it tightly. I held on as if it were the only real thing in the world, believing it could somehow keep me buoyed, save me from sinking into a black sea, churning with hateful emotions.
I stopped in the exact spot I’d parked the night Maggie was taken. Frantically, I searched the area for Dru, my eyes sweeping back and forth over the tree line, the grassy field and the lot of sand blanketing the playground. But she was nowhere to be seen.
Which is not to say that the park was empty.
As I’d suspected, the alpha was still in command. He stood by the merry-go-round, dressed again in his casual businessman’s attire: a navy blue polo shirt; khaki slacks. His white hair was combed and neat, but his handsome face and muscular arms carried a number of lacerations. He wore a serene, nearly pleasant expression. The icy calculation was gone from his eyes.
I walked over the grass toward the sandy playground, my hand again locked on the butt of my gun. The distance between us diminished quickly. With only a few steps left, I unholstered my weapon and aimed it at his brow.
He spread his arms wide and said, “Please.”
“Where is she?” I demanded, sighting down the barrel at the man’s brow.
“There,” he said, lifting his left arm higher, pointing to The Den and the forest beyond.
I kept the gun against his head and looked to the wood. His pack was in there, with my daughter. I so badly wanted to pull the trigger and put an end to this monster. But I couldn’t. The remainders of the pack might retaliate against Dru if I shot their leader down.
“Take me to her.”
“That was always my intent,” the alpha said, dropping his arms and turning slowly toward the forest. “My name is Bristol,” he said. “You’ll need that for your report. Tobias Alan Bristol.”
“Duly noted,” I said, barely able to control the trembling of my voice.
“I’m very sorry about what happened to your men.”
“Sorry? I don’t fucking believe you. You say you’re not responsible—say you hate yourself. Well, if that’s true you could have blown your head off years ago when you realized what Sykes had done to you. But you didn’t. You lived and your murdered and no one’s to blame but you, so don’t throw your apologies at me. They aren’t worth shit.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Dozens of times I picked up a gun, a razor, or stood on the edge of a skyscraper looking down. But the beast resists. I want to die, but it doesn’t. I’m not like Sykes, Sheriff. I haven’t enjoyed a minute of this hell.”
“Just shut up and take me to my daughter, and I swear to God, if she’s hurt, I will bury you and every one of those sick fucks with you.”
“I assure you, Sheriff, that won’t be necessary.”
But I was the one deciding what was necessary. Once I had Dru safe and away from this place, I was coming back with a hunting rifle. None of these monsters was ever going to hurt another human being. I would hunt them down one by one if I had to. Whatever Sykes had begun, I was going to end.
We walked under the shadow of the tall pines, the cool morning air turning crisp and chill in the darkness. I reached out and grabbed the fabric at the alpha’s shoulder, held tight while I pushed the muzzle of my gun into the thick white hair on the back of his head.
“You’re a good man, Sheriff,” he said. “I suspected that all along, but I knew it when you didn’t shoot me on sight. You still have a strong sense of justice, of right and wrong. I regret the loss of these traits in my own character, but I’ve had to become far more pragmatic.”
The forest fell in around us, dropping the temperature another couple of degrees. My ears were alert for any sounds in the wood, any indication that the pack was positioning itself for an attack.
“This has to end, you see,” he said. “I’d hoped that Sykes
’s death would release us, and god knows how many others, but as you witnessed, that wasn’t the case. Over the years, we’ve killed dozens like him, like ourselves. When we hunted, we killed cleanly so no more like us would rise and hunt.”
“Quiet,” I said. “I’ve heard more than enough.”
We stepped into a narrow clearing, maybe two hundred yards into the wood. Lying on the ground were the remains of the pack. Four bodies, including that of the Asian boy, lay shoulder to shoulder on the ground, arms crossed over their chests. Long and ragged wounds were drawn across their throats. The arterial discharge painted their naked chests and shoulders crimson.
“You can see my sincerity,” he said. “When we failed with Sykes, I saw no other choice. They fought me, of course, but I was resolute. They’re at peace now.”
“And that just leaves you.”
“Yes, Sheriff…just me.”
“Well, why don’t you take me to my daughter, and maybe I can help you find some peace of your own.”
The alpha nodded and continued into the woods.
“It’s the maybe that worried me,” he said.
I wasn’t paying attention to him, rather scanning the forest for any signs of Dru. I didn’t understand how important what he had just said would be in the moments to come, how it would change my life forever.
“As I said, you’re a good man. As a law enforcement officer, you’re trained to apprehend. You only kill when threatened. How could I be certain that when the time came, you would release me? You see, I needed to be certain, Sheriff. I couldn’t take the chance that you’d simply arrest me and let justice take its course. Because, as I said, this has to stop.”
The alpha paused on the trail. He turned to me with a weak and pained grimace.
“Move,” I shouted.
He nodded slowly, pushed aside a weak, brown sapling and showed me my daughter.
Dru lay on a bed of pine needles. Her eyes were closed but her face was taut as if haunted by a bad dream. Like the members of the pack, her arms were folded over her chest. And her neck was opened and painted with blood.
“I assure you she didn’t suff—”
He never finished the sentence. I shot Bristol in the head, sending him onto a large, dead pine limb. Walking forward, I shot again and again. My body hummed with an energy that I thought would tear me apart, would burst forth exploding from my chest to disassemble me amid the woods. When I reached his body, I fired into his handsome face until my clip was empty. Then I used the butt of my weapon, beat him with it. Only violence distracted me from grief. In those moments, the world didn’t exist. I didn’t have to think about anything except lifting my arm and slamming it down with all the force I possessed. There was no family, no Dru, no deputies, no Les Mayflower, just the gun in my fist and the skin it tore, the bones it smashed and ultimately, the pulp it sank into.
Eventually there wasn’t enough left of him—nothing recognizable remained above the man’s neck—to assuage my misery. My shoulders ached and my palm was bleeding, and my daughter waited only a few feet away.
I went to Dru, knelt down, imagining that perhaps the man had tricked me, had merely knocked her unconscious and made her up to look murdered. I reached for any and all fiction, any soothing lie that would make my daughter alive and well. The whole time the energy in my chest built and built until I felt certain it would explode and kill me where I knelt, but there was no such relief.
I cradled my daughter in my arms. Tears burned along my cheeks, but I couldn’t make a sound. Emotion clotted in my throat, paralyzed my chest. My mouth was open, trying to vent sobs and screams, but no such release was granted. Cruel imagination taunted me. Twice I thought I felt a pulse coming from Dru’s motionless body, and I pressed my fingers to her wrist, only to realize that the only heart beating in those woods was the one that strained, broken and aching, in my chest.
9
How do you go on when something like that happens to your child?
That was one of a dozen questions that played in a barbed loop through my thoughts in the days and weeks and months that followed my daughter’s death. The other victims hardly concerned me, even Les. I was close to those men, considered them an extension of my family, but only an extension. Dru was my family, and she was gone, and how do you go on? I can’t tell you. There are no words of wisdom here.
I woke up, wandered the house in a daze, and tried to protect the daughter that had survived, maybe tried too hard. Even Gwen’s mother struck me as a threat, so I stayed home and close whenever I could. Lisa sank deeper into her addictions for a time. I suppose that was to be expected. We should have turned to each other for comfort, but the flimsy ropes and planks that bridged us emotionally had frayed and rotted long ago. Existing in the same house, united only by misery and our remaining, bereft child, we barely spoke to each other. What words we did exchange were often unpleasant.
We stuck it out together for eight months, and one morning I noticed that Lisa’s eyes were clear and sharp. She did not go to the bottle upon waking, but instead went to the coffeepot, poured herself a cup, and sat down at the table across from me.
“I hate you for what happened to Dru,” she said. Her voice was calm and even-tempered. She said it in the same way she might tell me the lawn needed mowing, or we were out of milk. “I don’t want to, but I do. Some nights, I think about killing you for what you did. And then I think about why you did it, the way I was, and I think about killing myself instead.”
“Lisa, I can’t keep apologizing.”
“You don’t have to, Bill. I’m leaving. I should have done it a long time ago, long before the night she died. I don’t know what you’ve been hiding, and right now, I don’t want to know. I don’t need to hate you any more than I already do.”
And that was it. Later that afternoon, Lisa packed up the SUV and drove away, headed east to stay with her sister in Atlanta. She said goodbye to Gwen, kissed her and hugged her, and then raced around the vehicle. She sped away, leaving our daughter sobbing in front of the house.
Gwen was to stay with me, and I was grateful. Lisa intended to enter a rehabilitation clinic when she reached Atlanta and didn’t think she could manage being a mother during that time. She promised to call when she got settled and would send for our daughter when she was on her feet.
I haven’t heard from her since.
As for the secret Lisa mentioned: Well, it isn’t much of a secret, is it?
Everything Sykes suspected was, of course, true. Which meant that what Lisa thought was also true. She just didn’t know the details.
I was with Les Mayflower for three years before the night our lives changed. We met at his shop for lunch or took weekend trips, told our wives we were fishing or hunting. So many times we talked about ending the relationship, especially early on. Days and weeks would pass, both of us struggling against it. Then one of us would call the other or we’d run into each other in town. Invariably we ended up on the cot at the back of his shop, needing each other in ways no one around us was likely to understand. Amid the shame and the guilt and thoughts of family and God, we found it impossible to let go of what we had.
Before Les…Well, that doesn’t really matter. He wasn’t the first.
Sykes knew what I was going through. The monster was indulging in far darker needs than I, but he still understood the fundamental duality of my life.
I don’t believe that I’m a monster, but I have lived like one. Secrets. Lies. The bitter emanations, drifting from a splintered soul, enveloping any and all close to it. For all of that, I’m guilty. The lunatic, Sykes, had little choice in the way he lived. But I do. I can recognize what lives within me and embrace it, casting off the façade, perhaps to ridicule, or I can go on as I have been, with the mask intact, bound in deceit.
You’d think it would be easy. I want it to be easy.
But I cannot claim an epiphany, can’t tie things up nicely with a moral or a lesson learned. For now, I remain as I was.
/>
Scared.
Ashamed.
Torn.
About the Editors
RICHARD CHIZMAR is the founder and publisher/editor of Cemetery Dance magazine and the Cemetery Dance Publications book imprint. He has edited more than a dozen anthologies, including The Best of Cemetery Dance, The Earth Strikes Back, Night Visions 10, October Dreams (with Robert Morrish), and the Shivers series.
richardchizmar.com
Facebook.com/richardchizmar
Twitter: @RichardChizmar
BRIAN JAMES FREEMAN is the managing editor of Cemetery Dance Publications and the author of several novels and novellas, along with four short story collections, including an eBook-only exclusive that hit #1 on Amazon.com in the US, UK, Germany, Spain, and France in the short story categories.
brianjamesfreeman.com
Facebook.com/BrianJamesFreeman
Twitter: @BrianFreeman
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Dark Screams, Volume 9 Page 17