The neighbor’s fist lashed out and punched Sarah in her mouth, knocking her back onto the bed.
“I told you to be quiet. Since you won’t cooperate, I’m just gonna have to kill you first.”
The neighbor climbed over her husband’s corpse and straddled Sarah’s stomach. He drew the knife across Sarah’s throat, cutting through both her jugular vein and carotid artery and lacerating her windpipe all in one clean cut. Sarah watched her own blood spray out over her breasts. She was struggling to breathe, lungs filling with blood, drowning, as she watched the neighbor begin to undress. When she saw him remove his erect penis from his pants she hoped that she would be long dead before she felt that puny uncircumcised thing inside of her.
The neighbor was fondling her bloodied breasts and stroking his ugly little cock. Her blood squished between his fingers as he squeezed her breasts and pinched her nipples. Sarah was beginning to lose consciousness. The neighbor slid his cock between her breasts and was using the blood from her severed throat as lubrication as he fucked her tits. When he finally came, his cum splashing onto her neck and face and mingling with the blood in a sickening mess of red and white, Sarah had already begun to convulse. By the time the neighbor was hard again, she was already dead, sparing her from feeling his cock between her thighs and in her mouth.
It was still dark when Sarah woke up in her bed with the taste of blood and semen on her tongue. Josh was snoring quietly beside her. The sheets smelled fresh, like they had just been washed. So did Sarah. Even Josh smelled unusually clean. He smelled like Irish Spring and ammonia. Sarah screamed.
She kept screaming even when Josh woke up and wrapped his big, strong arms around her. Even when he began to rock her back and forth and stroke her hair and tell her that everything would be okay. She was still screaming as he kissed the tears from her eyes. His eyes were half closed and he was still blinking the sleep from his eyes and trying to clear his head but even half-asleep his first priority had been her.
“It’s okay, Sarah. It was just a bad dream. Everything’s okay.”
Sarah checked Josh’s neck and chest. Then she checked her own. There were no wounds, no blood. She dropped her head onto Josh’s shoulder and began to weep.
“That sick bastard. You don’t know what he did to me. He killed us. You were dead. We both were. The new neighbor…that guy…uh, Dale…he murdered us!”
“It was just a dream.”
“No! He stabbed me! He stabbed you and…and he raped me! It wasn’t a dream!”
“Baby, you’re okay. You’re not dead. I’m not dead. It was a dream. That’s all. A bad dream. Now go back to sleep. You’re safe. I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Sarah laid her head down on the pillow and pulled Josh’s arms around her. He snuggled up against her back, spooning with her as she slowly drifted back to sleep. He didn’t notice the door across the street open and the porch light click off, but Sarah did. Sarah shivered and began to weep again. She buried her face in the pillow and shook her head back and forth.
“No. No. No. No.”
It was a long time before she fell asleep again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When Sarah woke the next morning she didn’t remember anything that had happened the night before. Her mouth still tasted like pennies and the smell of soap and disinfectant still permeated the air, tickling the fine hairs in Sarah’s nostrils. She stretched, looked over at Josh, who was already dressed and ready for work, and smiled.
“Good morning, lover.”
“Good morning. That must have been one hell of a dream you had last night.”
“What?”
“You woke up screaming in the middle of the night. You said you had a dream about that guy who just moved in across the street killing both of us?”
“That little skinny guy? I’d probably kick his ass.”
“You said he raped you and stabbed us both to death.”
“Wow. He must have really creeped me out the other day. I don’t remember any of that.”
Sarah looked over at the clock on the nightstand. It was seven thirty in the morning.
“Aren’t you late for work?”
“I’ve got a few minutes. I just wanted to make sure you were okay before I left.”
“I’m fine. Go ahead and get to work. I’ll let you know if the neighbor tries to break in and kill me.”
Sarah winked coyly and draped her arms around the back of Josh’s neck and gave him a light kiss on the lips.
“You sure you don’t want me to stay?”
“Not unless you’re going to spend the day fucking me. But honestly, I’m still sore from yesterday. I need a few hours to rest up.”
“You are incorrigible.”
“Maybe dreaming about the neighbor all night made me horny.”
“Dreaming about Santa Claus makes you horny.”
“He does look good in those big leather boots and he carries a whip.”
“You have problems.”
“And you have fifteen minutes to get to work.”
Josh bent over and kissed Sarah again.
“Good-bye, sweetheart.”
“Bye, lover.”
Sarah rolled back over and snuggled up against her pillow as she listened to Josh’s footfalls descend the stairs and walk out the front door. The door closed quietly with just a slight click and then the garage door rose as Josh pulled the SUV out of the garage. Sarah squeezed the pillow and a small red dot appeared on the pillowcase. She threw back her sheets and the indentation of her body was outlined with blood that had seeped up through the mattress.
“What the hell?”
Sarah climbed from the bed looking at the bloody mattress and pillow. Vague, dreamlike memories, nightmarish flashes of blood and meat and pain drifted into her head, then fled almost as soon as they appeared, leaving terrifying afterimages and a horrible feeling of unease. Images of Josh with his throat cut open, the neighbor’s face grinning at her, her own breasts splattered with blood. Bile rose in her throat, burning her esophagus.
“Oh, God. Oh, God. What’s going on? What the hell is going on?”
Sarah ran into the bathroom and regurgitated into the toilet. The image of the neighbor fucking her blood-soaked breasts with his oily little cock invaded her mind and she vomited again and again until green stomach bile was the only thing that would come up. Sarah sat by the toilet, trying to catch her breath, the nightmares receding from memory. She stood up, walked into the bedroom, and began stripping the sheets from the bed.
The mattress looked like an abattoir. It was saturated in red. There was a small red puddle where she had lain. The blood had soaked through the sheets and stained the bottom of the comforter.
“What the hell?”
Sarah flipped the mattress, then took the sheets downstairs along with the stained comforter. Her hands shook and tears ran down her cheeks as she shoved them into the washing machine. She dumped a scoop of detergent into the machine, turned it on, and ran out of the room.
Scooping up her cell phone, she dialed Josh’s number. There was no answer. He must have already been on the casino floor. The voice mail picked up after six rings.
“Josh? I think something’s wrong with me. I’m bleeding. I mean…I think I am. There’s blood all over the mattress. I don’t think I’m on my period, but there’s blood everywhere. And I keep seeing pieces of that dream, that nightmare. It just feels so real…and…and all the blood. Call me back. Please call me.”
Sarah hung up the phone and sat down at the kitchen table. She tried to remember the dream from the night before but the images were growing increasingly faint. By the time she took the sheets out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer, the dream had been completely forgotten. She started the dryer, then piled the comforter into the washer. She dumped a scoop of laundry detergent into the machine and shut the lid.
Sarah gradually convinced herself that she’d simply started her period early and e
xperienced an unusually heavy flow. She thought about going to the doctor’s office. It couldn’t be healthy to bleed that much but she supposed that that was the reason they made the jumbo-size tampons for “heavy-flow days.” She’d never had a heavy-flow day before. It looked like someone had bled to death. Sarah tried her best to ignore all the elements of her menstruation theory that didn’t fit. She walked into the kitchen and popped a multivitamin and an iron pill.
While the sheets were drying, Sarah decided to go for a run. She needed to clear her head, to get away from the house, to think about anything but blood and death and nightmares. Feeling the wind in her hair, her heart pumping hard in her chest, the steady rhythm of her own breaths synchronized with her footfalls always made her forget about everything else.
Sarah put in a panty liner just in case she started to bleed again; then she pulled on a pair of running shorts and a dry-fit tank top. Sarah grabbed her iPod and her Garmin GPS navigator and headed out the door. She went through a quick routine of stretches on the driveway, staring at the new neighbor’s front door as if she expected him to burst out of the house and attack her on the front walk. The vertical blinds on the front window parted slightly and Sarah hit the play button on her iPod, squeezed the tiny headphones into her ears, and took off jogging down the street faster than she’d intended just as “Kerosene” by Miranda Lambert began to play.
“Light ’em up and watch them burn, teach them what they need to learn…” She sang out as she pumped her legs at nearly a full sprint. She was breathing hard after only three blocks. Sarah checked her Garmin and realized that she had just run three blocks in less than three minutes. She had to adjust her pace. It took her another two blocks to calm herself down and steady her breathing. She hated the fact that the guy freaked her out so much. She wanted to go knock on his door and kick his scrawny little ass just to get over it.
Sarah jogged briskly past rows of for-sale signs lined up like tombstones. Nearly every third or fourth house was abandoned. It had never occurred to Sarah before how deserted the neighborhood was becoming. When she and Josh had moved in the community was still under construction. New couples and families had been moving in daily. Then construction had slowed to a halt and a mass exodus had begun as home values plummeted and people began defaulting on their loans. Now, half the homes in the neighborhood were in foreclosure. Her morning jog had grown increasingly depressing as every day she noticed a new house with a for-sale sign in front of it. Most of the signs contained the ominous sub-caption BANK-OWNED.
Miranda Lambert clicked off and Revolting Cocks came blaring through Sarah’s headphones screaming, “Let the bodies hit the floor!” Sarah had to resist the urge to start sprinting again. Something about that song always got her blood pumping and it struck her as oddly appropriate as she jogged through her dying neighborhood, which was turning into a ghost town little by little.
There was an elementary school a few blocks away and Sarah felt a stirring of her maternal instincts at the light, airy, high-pitched squeals of children’s laughter. She stared at the joy-filled faces climbing on the jungle gym and running in reckless circles on the rubberized playground. Every time she passed the playground she reconsidered her decision to wait to have kids. She wanted to have Josh’s babies. She just wasn’t sure that she wanted them right now. She wasn’t sure that she was ready to give up her carefree lifestyle, her freedom, and most of all, her figure. Sarah continued jogging past the school and soon the laughter faded into the background.
After another mile, Sarah passed an active-adult fifty-five-and-older age-restricted community that was also half built. Construction had been ceased once funding had run out and the real-estate market had frozen after only a quarter of the houses had been built. Finished homes stood interspersed with dirt lots. Yesterday, there had been an ambulance in front of one of the homes and Sarah had seen a gurney being carted out with a body covered in a white sheet. In this community, a for-sale sign didn’t always mean a bank foreclosure.
Sarah checked her pace on her Garmin compared to yesterday’s run. The little computer screen showed where she had been at this time the day before and she was nearly half of a block ahead of her previous run. She picked up her pace, trying to put a full block between herself and the imaginary runner in her device, racing against herself.
An hour later, when Sarah made it back to her house, she was drenched in sweat. Josh had always told her that she sweated like a man. Her dry-fit tank top was completely soaked. She checked her Garmin and saw that she had shaved a full minute off her run and burned 620 calories. She looked across the street and the vertical blinds in the new neighbor’s front window were swaying back and forth as if someone had just closed them. Sarah hurried into the house.
The dryer had stopped. Sarah gathered the sheets and dumped them into her laundry basket; then she wrestled the big down comforter into the dryer and set it on high. She was walking up the stairs with her laundry basket when the phone began to ring. Sarah ran up the last couple of stairs, dropped the laundry basket on the bed, and snatched up her phone.
“Are you all right?”
“Well, it’s a good thing I wasn’t passed out on the floor bleeding to death.”
“Are you on your period?”
The way he asked the question infuriated her for no reason she could articulate.
“No. I just woke up in a pool of blood…my blood…I-I think. Maybe my dream was real. Maybe the neighbor really did stab us both to death.”
“Are you serious?”
“No, I’m not serious. Do I sound like I’m dead?” Sarah shot back in an irritated tone. She couldn’t explain why she was so annoyed with him today.
“Do you need me to pick you up some…um…some feminine products on the way home?”
“No, I’ve got plenty of tampons at home. Thanks. Next time answer the fucking phone.” She hung up and sat down hard on the bed. She knew that she was wrong for lashing out at Josh but she also knew that in minutes he’d be so wrapped up in his work, laughing and joking with his customers, that he would have forgotten all about it. He was good that way. It was one of the things about him that annoyed the shit out of her.
CHAPTER NINE
They had just come upstairs after washing the dinner dishes. Tonight, Sarah had cooked dinner. She’d made Josh’s favorite, a big, fat, juicy porterhouse from Omaha Steaks with cracked pepper pounded into it and blue cheese on top. It was her way of apologizing for acting like an asshole earlier.
Sarah sat on the edge of the bed reading a book. The light on the nightstand and the TV were on. Josh was lying beside her with a pillow over his head, trying to block out the light and noise.
“Will you please go to sleep? Are you still tripping about that dream?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I just can’t sleep.”
Conan O’Brien was making fun of the audience for not laughing at his jokes. It was an odd sort of comedy that Sarah couldn’t get into. She switched the channel to Spike TV and began watching an old replay of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Matt Hughes was getting his ass kicked by an out-of-shape B.J. Penn. Sarah usually loved that type of blood sport but tonight she just wasn’t in the mood. She turned to Comedy Central, then lay back on the bed as the gang from South Park pranced across the screen.
She opened her book, a novel about zombies on an old battleship written by a relatively new author named Brian Keene. Normally she loved a good horror novel, and Brian Keene was one of her favorites, but it was just too gory for her tonight. She looked at an Edward Lee novel that sat unopened on her nightstand with a picture of a winged devil on the cover. No way, she thought. Instead, she picked up a book about the people you meet in heaven after you die. After only a few pages, she fell asleep with the television still on, Cartman and Stan singing about Christmas poo in the background.
Sarah slept fitfully, horrible images of knives and blood dashed through her mind, of Josh screaming in pain, herself being raped, mutilate
d, and abused. She woke up twice, exhausted and drenched in sweat. When she woke up in the morning she was convinced that there was more to these dreams than just her subconscious overreacting to a creepy neighbor.
“Josh? Wake up, Josh.”
“Is it time for work?”
“No. I just need to talk to you…about these dreams I keep having. They’re really starting to freak me out.”
“You had another one? Like last night?”
“I think so. I can’t really remember. But I think it was bad. Really bad.”
“Do you want to see a psychiatrist or something?”
“No, Josh. I think something is really going on. I want to go to the cops.”
“You can’t call the cops because of a dream.”
There were tears in Sarah’s eyes when she looked over at Josh.
“But what if it isn’t a dream? What if he’s really doing things to me in my sleep?”
Josh turned over and faced Sarah. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and gave Sarah his full attention. He stared into her eyes for a long moment before he spoke, reading her expression as if he were trying to solve a complex equation.
“Then you wouldn’t need to call the cops because I’d kill him myself.”
Sarah smiled halfheartedly and hugged her husband tight.
“What time do you go to work today?”
“I work the swing shift today, four to midnight.”
“I don’t want to be here alone tonight.”
“I made some extra money in tips last night. Some dot-com millionaire younger than my little brother tipped me three hundred dollars before he started losing. Why don’t I take you to buy a gun? With the way the neighborhood is changing it’s probably not a bad idea anyway.”
“Are you serious?” Sarah lit up at the idea. “What kind?”
She swiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands and sat up in bed.
Josh looked at her with a bemused expression on his face. He reached out and brushed the hair from her face.
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