Bad Games- The Complete Series

by Jeff Menapace

  No one remembered, yet the recipe for the atrocity was not difficult to make out for those who arrived on the scene and ultimately subdued Caleb, ultimately saved the lives of Beet and Swan.

  That recipe reading something like:

  Take one exceptionally pissed-off PFC Caleb Lambert.

  Add one habitually line-stepping PFC Derek “Beet” Johnson.

  Add one too-nice-for-his-own-good PFC Jacob “Swan” Burns.

  Mix with years of psychological torment and anguish.

  Pop in the oven and set to disturbing levels of rage.

  Wait (but not too long, never too long; if you don’t pull it from the oven in time, the strength of the primary ingredient will overpower the others, essentially ruining them beyond repair).

  Voila! Dinner is served. Enjoy your PFC Beet with multiple face and neck lacerations, courtesy of a broken whiskey bottle, a PFC Swan with a broken jaw and orbital bone, and a PFC Lambert with a one-way ticket home on a less-than-honorable-discharge casserole.

  5

  Kutztown University

  Kutztown, Pennsylvania

  Carrie Lambert lit the bong, sucked, pulled the slide, inhaled deep, held it, and then exhaled towards the ceiling. She then passed the bong over to her roommate, Jody, AKA “Jay.”

  It was only Carrie who insisted on calling Jody “Jay.” Throughout her childhood, Carrie’s treasured doll was named Jody. Serial killer Arthur Fannelli had persuaded Carrie to trade him the doll for a mere piece of candy well over a decade ago. Later, that same doll would be used as a pawn in abducting both Carrie and her younger brother, Caleb, bringing them to meet their equally abducted parents in what can only be described as a house of horrors.

  And sadly, unfathomably, that had only been the beginning.

  Carrie could even remember receiving her roommate assignment the summer before her freshman year. She’d called her mother in to see it. They’d both laughed. It seemed the thing to do. Then they stopped laughing and stood silent, staring at the laptop screen for a moment, Amy Lambert eventually rubbing her daughter’s shoulder, saying, “It’s only a name,” and then leaving the room. Both mother and daughter were left dazed for the remainder of the day, with Carrie going so far as to consider requesting a roommate change.

  Only she didn’t. Something inside her had suggested—no, actually risen up and insisted—that by changing roommates, it would allow the memories of the past to win. Such inner strength on her part had been admirable at the time.

  Too bad it was fleeting. And unbeknownst to Carrie, the cell phone vibrating on the pillow next to her, the screen requesting a FaceTime with “Mom,” was ready to drive that truth home.

  “Oh shit, it’s my mom. Do I look high?”

  Jay, tight lips and a puffed chest from holding in her recent hit, could only shake her head no.

  Carrie tapped her phone, and Amy Lambert’s face filled its screen. She looked neither happy nor angry. Very even. Businesslike. Carrie knew the look well. Did not care for it in the slightest.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, Carrie.”

  Carrie, yet. When it wasn’t honey, or sweetheart, or even Care, but her full name, it was the siren alerting all to get to safety—storm’s a comin’, and her name is Hurricane Amy.

  Carrie did the dance anyway, hoping her eyes were not red from the weed, her voice not slurry from the vodka she and Jay had been drinking. Hard to project credibility to your mother when you were stoned and drunk at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.

  “What’s up?” Carrie asked. “Why you calling so early?”

  “I just received a call.”

  “Oh yeah? Who from?”

  “Why are you in your dorm room?” Amy said instead. “Don’t you have class?”

  Oh, how Carrie loathed the dance. Her mother was prom queen of the fucking dance. Prom queen of not coming straight out with it, but instead posing baiting questions with the dreaded tone and lilt that plummeted the gut and reddened the cheeks of every child who’d known a mother since the dawn of time. Questions that really asked: Is there something you want to tell me?

  Whether it was the booze or weed or just good old youthful defiance, Carrie danced right on back, making her mother work for it. “Done for the day. Jay and I were just about to study.”

  “Studying during the day, huh? Wow. What were you about to study?”

  Hesitate and you’re done for. “Jay?” She looked towards her roommate, giving her mother her profile. “What are we going to study first?”

  Jay looked back with wide eyes. Then: “Theology.”

  Carrie closed her eyes and sighed. Jay’s major required a prerequisite class in theology. Carrie’s did not. Amy knew this.

  “Theology, huh?” Amy said.

  Carrie gave Jay a look. Jay winced and mouthed “I’m sorry.”

  Carrie brought her full face back to the phone for her mother. Defeated and without even trying, she simply said: “Yup—theology. I signed up for it yesterday. They make special midterm registration exceptions for people who doubt the existence of God after all the shit they’ve been through.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Amy said. “Don’t you dare go pulling that card every time you’re backed into a corner.”

  “Well, why don’t you try telling me what corner I’m backed into first, Mom? Fuck, you can never just come out with it, can you?”

  “Oh, your calling me on my methods gives you the justification to curse now, does it?”

  “What’s on your fucking mind, Mom? What the fuck did I do this time?”

  “It’s what you didn’t do, Carrie. You don’t think I know you haven’t been going to class?”

  “Fucking Pam…”

  Pam Reynolds. Daughter of Professor Avery Reynolds. Pam and Carrie went as far back as grammar school. Pam too was a student at Kutztown, her father a professor of world lit. Pam and Carrie seldom spoke, and not for lack of trying on Pam’s end.

  “Don’t you go blaming Pam. Pam had nothing to do with this. I got a call from Avery. Professors talk, you know. One might hear—one who has pulled an exceptional amount of strings to get you back into school after you failed out the first time—that you never, I repeat, and with no pleasure whatsoever, never attend class.”

  Carrie rolled her eyes, stood—Mom coming along for the ride on the phone—grabbed her cigarettes from the dresser, lit one, and exhaled demonstratively.

  “Still smoking too, I see,” Amy said with clear disgust.

  “Yeah, Mom. Just like Monica Kemp and Kelly Blaine—” She widened her eyes and made a spooky wooOOoo noise. “Maybe smoking will turn me into a psycho too.”

  Amy’s face changed. It was not anger or hurt, but an almost exhausted look of loss. “You’re unbelievable,” was all she said.

  Carrie felt a twinge of remorse. A moment of palpable silence followed.

  Carrie dropped her cigarette into a can of Coke and struggled to make eye contact with her mother. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll go to class, okay?”

  “Do what you want, Carrie. If you don’t go, I’ll know soon enough.”

  The twinge of remorse left. Now a twinge of annoyance. “Oh, yeah? How? Mr. Reynolds will tell on me again?”

  “No—because they’ll kick your ass out again…and then you’ll be back home with your brother.”

  Carrie was certain she heard wrong. “What?”

  “It’s the other reason I called, Carrie. Caleb’s back. For good.”

  Carrie’s head swam. She instantly imagined the worst, courtesy of her mother’s habit of not getting right to it. Caleb was back home for good? What did that mean? Back for good? For a fleeting moment, weed- and booze-induced paranoia had her entertaining the worst beyond reason. Back home for good. Dear God, back home in a box? Dead? No—no, of course not. Caleb had yet to be deployed. She cursed the paranoia, its ability to blunt reason. Besides, if her little brother had died, say in some tragic accident stationed out in—North Carolina? South Carolina?
One of the Carolinas—her mother would have phoned in tears, hysterical. Still…

  “What do you mean, ‘home for good?’ Why? What happened?”

  Amy explained everything.

  “Oh my God…” Carrie whispered. Then: “I told you he was a time bomb, didn’t I? I told you the last thing my brother needed to be was a trained killer.”

  “Carrie, are you seriously going to start this now?”

  Another long pause. “No,” Carrie finally said. “Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s asleep. He’s been sleeping a lot since he got home.”

  “Tell him I love him.”

  “I will. Please start going to class, sweetheart.”

  Back to “sweetheart.” Always a good sign. Remorse tugged at her once again. “I will, Mom. Tell Allan I said hi.”

  “I will.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you back.”

  Carrie smiled. A genuine smile. At that moment, she wanted her mother next to her. She wanted a hug and a kiss and to curl up into her mother’s lap, her mother absently stroking her hair as she always did while the two of them watched some terrible reality TV show together.

  More than anything, she wanted those memories alone, just once, without all of the others creeping their way in.

  6

  Doylestown, Pennsylvania

  Amy hung up and stood silent and unblinking in the kitchen. The phrase casualties of war kept repeating in her head.

  Casualties of war, all of them. Every damn one. And Father Time had not been their ally. No, he was proving to be a vindictive son of a bitch, the wounds of the past not scarring over as Amy had hoped, but ebbing their way towards infection. Towards infection no matter how much treatment they continually threw at it. And, oh, the treatment they threw—perhaps the only thing the Lambert family hadn’t tried yet was electric shock therapy.

  “Hey.” Allan Brown, Amy’s partner for the past eight years, their relationship forged from the hellfire they both endured at the hands of serial killer Kelly Blaine, stood behind Amy, gently placing a hand on her shoulder.

  Amy blinked it all away and faced Allan. “Hey.”

  “You okay?”

  “You hear all that?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t listening.”

  “Liar.”

  “Okay, I heard.”

  “She was high as a kite. Drunk too, I think.”

  “It is college, Amy.”

  Amy shot him a look and walked away. Went to the tea kettle and filled it in the sink.

  “I’m not justifying her behavior or anything,” Allan said.

  Amy set the kettle on the burner, a little harder than necessary. She spoke while pulling a mug and a box of tea from the cupboard. “Really? It sure sounds like you are.”

  He held up his hands. “I’m not—honey, I’m not. I’m just saying—”

  “So, by your logic, Jamie and Janine are getting wasted in Rhode Island right this minute, and that’s okay; Daddy’s cool with it.”

  He splayed a hand. “Are my girls experimenting? Probably. And yeah, I am cool with it. Isn’t that the whole point of the college experience?”

  Amy dropped a tea bag into her mug and put the box away. “Your girls get good grades. They’re on the dean’s list. They could be doing fucking heroin and spreading their legs for every frat boy who comes calling, and it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Whoa, who said anything about spreading their—”

  “My stellar child managed a zero-point-seven grade average her first time around. If it wasn’t for Avery Reynolds and his sympathy for Pennsylvania’s own Addams Family, she’d be sleeping in our basement right now, ditching class at community college instead of getting a second chance—a second chance that she seems keen on fucking up all over again.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “Don’t say Pennsylvania’s Addams Family.”

  The kettle whistled as though underlining her contempt. “Sorry—you prefer The Munsters?” She poured her tea.

  “Would you stop?”

  “What? It’s true, isn’t it? Our history, and now your history—welcome aboard, by the way—is hardly a secret to anyone.”

  A deep voice in the kitchen doorway: “Don’t seem to mind profiting from it, though, do you?”

  Amy and Allan spun Caleb’s way. He stood unkempt—tee shirt and sweatpants. Two inches shy of his father’s six-three, Caleb had still inherited Patrick’s broad shoulders. His dark eyes were another dead match for his father’s, with the notable exception that Amy always recalled her husband’s filling any room he entered with light. She could not, in all honesty, recall a time in the past decade that Caleb’s had projected anything but darkness. Today was no exception.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Amy said. She put on a big, fake smile, as though the conversation she and Allan had been having, the one she knew Caleb had overheard, hadn’t occurred. It felt sad and wrong, yet for Amy Lambert, co-dependency for her kids these past ten years had joined taxes and death—no escape. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Don’t seem to mind profiting from it, though, do you?” Caleb said again.

  Co-dependency had numerous detours at its disposal when brutal honesty lurked. One of the more traveled routes being the ever-popular “don’t make waves lest we rock the unstable boat” detour. The 2008 version of Amy Lambert, the one who had yet to encounter Arty and Jim Fannelli and the multitudes of hell that followed, would have flared her nostrils in disgust at such behavior. A straight-shooter from birth, Amy was now learning the myriad of ways that grief remolded one’s personality out of what felt like survival, but that—in her private moments—she had to confess was nothing but good old fear.

  “Honey, let’s not get into that right now,” she said, the detour sounding cheap to her own ears for the split second before it was stuffed down to join the growing pile of suppressed truths that only knew freedom in her dreams—check, nightmares. “How about a nice cup of tea?”

  “I’ll take whiskey, if you’ve got it.”

  Amy and Allan exchanged a look, Caleb being under the legal age to consume alcohol clearly not the cause of their shared concern. It was the apparent want for it upon waking.

  “Kind of early for whiskey, isn’t it, champ?” Allan said.

  “Says who, ‘champ’?” Caleb replied flatly, Allan’s blatant try at camaraderie a big swing and a miss.

  “How about some coffee instead, honey?” Amy asked.

  “Fine.” Caleb walked into the kitchen and took a seat at the table.

  Amy looked at Allan, then gestured towards the coffee maker. He nodded back and began making a pot.

  “Sleep okay?” she asked her son, standing over him and rubbing a gentle hand over his short dark hair.

  He pulled away from her hand. “So, you’re not going to answer my question?”

  Amy took her time retrieving her tea from the counter before taking a seat across from Caleb, all of it seemingly innocuous, yet the brief delay a calculated act to prepare. She wondered whether the detours she’d become so fond of in recent years would demand a direct route now faced with the brooding young man seated across from her that still resembled her baby boy in appearance only. As for what stirred underneath that shell was anyone’s guess, including his own mother’s. That knowledge pierced her heart.

  “You want to know why I did what I did,” she said to Caleb. “The talk shows, the lectures, the novelization rights to our story…”

  “You did it for the money,” he replied point-blank. “What I want to know is why you act as though it’s some kind of burden. You open yourself up to the world, you can’t expect anonymity.”

  “I opened myself up. Me. Not you and your sister. You two were always off limits.”

  “Right—and your stipulations kept them all at bay. Christ, Mom, the media practically walked me and Carrie home from the bus every day.”

  Amy looked away.

>   “In time, people would have forgotten about us,” Caleb said. “No one ever remembers the victims. Just the killers.”

  “Except we weren’t victims.”

  “Oh no? Dad’s gonna be pretty pissed off being in a coffin all this time.”

  Amy frowned. “Cheap shot, Caleb.”

  “You left the net wide open, Mom.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get that,” Allan said quickly, hurrying to the door.

  Amy sipped her tea, swallowing heartache and frustration along with it. Caleb stood and went to check on the coffee Allan had been making.

  From the kitchen, Allan could be heard answering the door, greeting what turned out to be a solicitor, Allan then politely refusing, the solicitor not taking no for an answer, Allan growing increasingly frustrated, the solicitor growing increasingly rude.

  Caleb left the kitchen and started for the front door.

  Amy kicked back her chair and hurried after her son, just in time to see Caleb with a hand around the solicitor’s neck, running him backwards across their front lawn, sweeping his legs out from beneath him, the solicitor landing hard on his back, Caleb’s vise grip on the solicitor’s neck staying put, and then Caleb not pummeling the solicitor with his free hand as one might assume was to follow, but instead snatching the dangling, laminated badge that hung from the solicitor’s neck, the badge that—as the solicitor had smarmily informed Allan—stated that he had “a legal right to be at their door,” ripping the badge free, and then jamming it into the solicitor’s mouth, insisting both physically and verbally, that the solicitor eat the fucking thing.

  Both Allan and Amy finally managed to pull Caleb off, the solicitor scrambling to his feet seconds after, taking off down the street, only to return a short time later with the police.

  Caleb was taken away in handcuffs, appeasing the morbid curiosity of the increasing crowd in the neighborhood.

  • • •