aterovis_bleedinghearts.pm6

by Arlene Chance

  “I don’t know, you just passed out or something.”

  I sat up. “We have to go.”

  “Killian, no, we can’t! Call the police, they have guns and training...”

  “I can get a gun!” I said.

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “My dad has a gun.”

  “No way, Killian! No fucking way!”

  I stood up and opened the front door, then turned to face Asher. “You can stay if you want. I’m going and I don’t have time to argue.” And with that I was gone, running towards my car. I was in it with the engine running when Asher slid into the passenger seat.

  “This is totally crazy, but there is no way I am letting you go there alone.”

  I practically flew to my old house and was very relieved to see that no one was there. It would make breaking and entering so much easier. I jumped out of the 268

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  car, leaving it running, and ran to the front door. Without even pausing, I grabbed the brick we kept there to use as a doorstop and smashed in the door window. I reached through and unlocked the door. I raced up the stairs two at a time and into my parents’ old bedroom.

  I yanked open the bedside table drawer and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the gun was still there. I took it out and looked at it carefully. It was loaded, just as I’d hoped. My dad had made me take shooting lessons the year before in the futile hope that it would make me manlier, and I was very grateful for them now.

  I passed Asher on the front step in my race for the car and was already moving as he jumped in. We peeled out of the driveway with screeching tires and tore off down the road at very unsafe speeds. Asher held onto the dashboard with white knuckles and clenched teeth, but he knew better than to say anything. We got to the Sheridan house just before our 20-minute deadline.

  I parked under the security light as instructed. I picked up the gun and checked to make sure the safety was off before tucking it into the waistband of my jeans.

  “Oh my God! Ohmygod! Ohmagod!” Asher whispered,

  “Please, please don’t do this.”

  “You don’t have to go inside. Just get out of the car and walk up to the house. You can stay outside. It’ll be safer that way anyway.”

  Asher started to cry. “I have never been so scared in my entire life,” he managed to say, “but if you think I am going to let you go into that house alone, Killian Travers Kendall, then you don’t know me very well.”

  A cold fury had taken over me that was made me feel detached from everything, as if it was happening to someone else and I was only watching from a distance. Not even Asher’s heartfelt outburst seemed to penetrate it. I was filled with hatred for this person who had killed Seth and made my life a living hell in the 269

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  months since. I wanted that person dead, and I wanted to be the one that killed them.

  “Let’s go,” I said in a deceptively calm voice.

  I stepped out of the car and stood for a moment, staring defiantly at the house. I couldn’t see anyone, but I knew the killer was watching us from one of those blank windows even as I stood there. I began to stride purposefully towards the house with Asher right at my heels muttering “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” with every step. There wasn’t a single light visible in the entire house except for an odd, dim flickering in the window of the door.

  The door was unlocked when we reached it, and it swung soundlessly open when I turned the knob. There wasn’t even an ominous creaking hinge. The source of the flickering light turned out to be a small oil lamp sitting in the center of the floor. I stepped cautiously inside and looked around but couldn’t see anything outside of the small circle of light cast by the lamp.

  Asher grabbed my arm, making me jump slightly.

  “There’s something under the lamp,” he whispered. I looked closer and saw a scrap of paper tucked under the base. As I leaned down to pick them both up, the security light we had parked under suddenly went out, so that the only source of light we had was in my hand.

  The meager illumination that it provided suddenly seemed to be less than adequate. I felt a little of my bra-vado slip away, and a tendril of fear begin to creep into the space left by its departure.

  I looked down at the slip of paper and the three words written on it, “HIDE-AND-SEEK.”

  “What does that mean?” Asher whispered.

  “It means the bastard is playing games with us. He wants us to find him.” The fury rushed back in with a vengeance. This little game might have been meant to scare us, but it only served to make me more determined 270

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  to see the killer die before the night was over. I patted the gun and thought that the game should have been tag...and I was it.

  “Let’s call the police,” Asher hissed.

  “No,” I said loudly, my voice sounding unnaturally loud in the complete silence that surrounded us. “No, let’s find him.”

  I tried to picture the house from the few times I had been in it as we began to search the downstairs, but everything took on a different perspective in the dark.

  Doors I thought were close by seemed so far away when I searched for them in inky blackness. It was a nerve-wracking process made worse by the fact that the oil lamp kept threatening to gutter out and leave us in total darkness. The not knowing of every game of hide-and-seek in the dark was intensified by the life and death situation at hand.

  With the exception of the kitchen, which we couldn’t get into because the door seemed to be blocked, we finished the downstairs with nothing more than jangled nerves and then it was time for the second floor. We climbed the stairs cautiously to find every door along the upstairs hallway closed tight. The game of hide-and-seek suddenly took on a sinister feel of the old game show Let’s Make A Deal, except we’d be losing much more than money if we chose the wrong door.

  I was trying to gather up enough courage to open the first door when Asher grabbed my arm again. He pointed to the crack at the bottom of one of the doors.

  A very dim light shone through.

  As I stood there looking at that sliver of light, I felt all my courage drain away. All I wanted to do was get out of that house, more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life. Such a sense of horror and fear washed over me that my knees actually buckled. It took every ounce of strength that I had not to run screaming out of the 271

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  house. I took a deep, shaky breath and tried to summon some of the courage I’d had just moments before.

  I handed the lamp to Asher, whose eyes widened even more than they already were. His shaking hands caused the light to jump and bounce eerily around the hall.

  I drew myself up as straight as I could, threw back my shoulders, and drawing another deep breath, stepped forward and threw open the door. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the lighting in the room, but when they did I couldn’t hold back the cry that escaped from my throat.

  All the furniture had been pushed to the outer walls, clearing a sizable space in the center of the room. In the center of that space sat Jake, bound and gagged and tied to a chair, lit only by the single candle at his feet.

  His chin rested on his chest and his eyes were closed as if he were asleep. A thin trickle of dried blood ran down from a cut above his eye. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not in the uncertain flickering of the candlelight.

  “He’s not dead, at least not yet,” said a voice from the shadows, almost as if it had read my mind. When he stepped forward, the weak light from the candle revealed a familiar figure from my dreams. He was dressed all in black, just as he had been the first time I saw him, even to the ski mask. The sudden flash of silver in the candlelight brought back an even more vivid memory. The last time I had seen such a flash had been right before I was stabbed. I wondered if it was the same knife; I’d read once that people who killed with knives often use the same one over and over, as a kind of lucky talisman.

  “This really must be my night,” he rasped with an evil-sounding chu
ckle, “I had planned on killing Jake, but I must have been a very good boy if Santa’s brought me my Christmas presents this early. You two are just an added bonus.”

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  “You said you’d let Jake go if I came,” I said, trying my best to keep my voice steady.

  “I lied. I do that a lot. Never trust someone who’s tried to kill you, Killian.”

  “Look, you can have me. Just let Asher and Jake go.”

  “I can have you? Oh how generous. Here’s a newsflash for you; I already have you. And Asher. And Jake. It’s just a matter of who wants to go first? Let’s see, I have so many options. You first while Asher watches in horror, Jake first just because it’s the easiest, Asher and Jake first while you watch it all...ooh, I like that last one. Don’t you?”

  “You’re insane,” I whispered.

  “Probably, but I’ve always thought that sanity was highly overrated.”

  “Why? Why are you doing this? If I’ve hurt you in some way, I’m sorry.” I was trying to stall more than anything — it’s not like I really cared at this point, I was beyond caring — but I couldn’t shoot him because so far he’d kept Jake in between the two of us, and I wasn’t a good enough shot to risk hitting my friend.

  “Why? It’s really very simple, even for your little mind. You’re an abomination in the eyes of God. You deserve to die. You and everyone like you. You deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth. You see, Killian, I did everyone a favor by killing Seth, and I’m about to do them an even bigger favor by killing the three of you.”

  The more he spoke the less disguised his voice became and the more familiar it seemed to me. I had to keep him talking.

  “Then why Zack? He wasn’t gay. He hated us as much as you.”

  “I killed Zack because he was an idiot, and idiots are dangerous. He saw me smash your windshield and leave the note, which he read after I left. The stupid fool 273

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  actually had the nerve to try to tell me what he’d seen and demand that I pay him to stay quiet. He’s quiet now, isn’t he?” He laughed that cold laugh again and I felt a chill run down my spine.

  “It all started when Seth moved here. He was like a virus, spreading to those who were weak, like you. I tried to stop it but it was too late — he’d already corrupted you, and you spread it to Asher and my brother, like a disease. I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

  His words rang in my ears over and over: my brother.

  Everything he said after that was lost in the impact of those words. I knew who it was. I knew who the killer was.

  I drew a deep breath and steeled myself to make my voice as calm as possible. “So this is all a holy war? A vendetta on God’s behalf? How noble of you, to take it upon yourself to purify the world like this. I never thought of you as a particularly religious person,Todd.”

  His body tensed at the mention of his name, and then he reached up and pulled the mask off, revealing his beautiful face. He was grinning broadly now, delighted that I’d figured out who he was. I’d read somewhere once that Lucifer was God’s most beautiful creation, and standing here now looking at Todd I could believe that evil could wear the mask of beauty very easily.

  “Very good,” he said, as if to a particularly slow pu-pil who had finally figured out a math equation. “You finally figured it out. I admit it ruins a little of the fun of the situation, but in some ways I like this even better.

  Now you know who is going to kill you.”

  “You’re going to kill your own brother?”

  “He’s not really my brother, you know?” he looked down at the still-unconscious Jake. “Not my whole brother anyway. I hate him. I found out the truth about him a few years ago. I overheard my parents fighting.

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  They do that a lot, you know. Usually about Jake. Never about what they should have been fighting about.”

  I tried to maneuver myself so that I could get a clear shot at him. He didn’t seem to notice, he was so caught up in his narrative.

  “Everyone thinks we’re such a perfect family. They don’t know the real story, what goes on behind closed doors. Dad’s a deacon at church, Mom volunteers at every church function. No one knows how Dad beats the shit out of us every time we sin. No one knows how my father is an adulterer. No one knows that Jake here is the fruit of his adultery. No one knows how my father has raped Gilly so many times she doesn’t even fight it anymore. It has to stop. They all have to be punished. God has said they must die.”

  In my horror, I had almost forgotten what was happening, but his last words snapped me out of the trance I had fallen into. “Todd,” I said softly, “you’re right, they need to be punished, but let the law handle it. You don’t have to be the one. The killing has to stop. This has to stop.”

  “Enough!” Todd screamed, “The killing will stop. It will stop when all the sinners have been punished for their wickedness. I have been anointed to carry out the punishment.” And with that he grabbed Jake by the hair, yanked his head back, and quickly raised the knife.

  “No!” I screamed. I pulled the gun out, aimed, and fired in one smooth motion. Everything went into slow motion, each detail permanently engraved into my memory. The sound of the gunshot was deafening. The bullet struck Todd just as he brought the knife down, but the impact slammed him backwards, causing the knife to rip into Jake’s shoulder instead of the tender flesh of his exposed neck. I fired a second shot as I heard the sound of shattering glass from behind me. During the exchange with Todd, I had almost forgotten Asher 275

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  was behind me. Todd’s body jerked as the second bullet ripped through his chest. He stared at me with a look of total disbelief, his mouth open as if screaming but no sound was coming out. I raised the gun slightly and fired off a third shot, right between his eyes. And then it was over. Todd was lying dead on the floor in a growing pool of blood, and my ears were still ringing from the shots. It had all happened in less time than it takes to tell it, and now that it was done, I seemed unable to take it all in. I had just killed another human being...and enjoyed it. I felt an immense sense of satisfaction that I had removed this vile person from this world. And that scared me. I stood there with the gun still in front of me for an immeasurable amount of time. It may have been seconds, it could have been minutes, it could have been hours. Slowly I became aware of a crackling sound from behind me and a steadily increasing heat at my back. I dropped the gun and turned slowly around.

  Asher lay on his side in the hall. The oil lamp that he’d been holding had shattered and the oil had caught fire. The flames were only a few inches from Asher’s face.

  “Asher!” I screamed as I leaped over the flames. I dragged him away from the fire and shook him to wake him up. His eyes fluttered open and he focused on my face. “There’s a fire,” I said urgently. “We have to get Jake out.” I pulled him roughly to his feet. Once I was sure he was steady, I jumped the flames, which were already a little higher, and rushed to Jake’s side. I fumbled with the knots for several precious minutes before Asher appeared at my side, holding the bloody knife in his hands.

  “Cut them,” he said softly.

  I looked up at him, then grabbed the knife and quickly sawed through the thick ropes. Jake was slippery with blood from his shoulder wound, and by the time the 276

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  two of us got him out of the chair and propped between us the flames had completely engulfed the doorway.

  “How’re we going to get out?” Asher said, a note of panic creeping into his voice.

  “The window,” I suggested. We dragged Jake to the window and I looked out. There was no way; we were on the second floor and there was nothing below us but a concrete driveway.

  “We can’t!” Asher wailed. The smoke was growing steadily thicker and it was becoming harder to breathe.

  “Break the window. I need air,” Asher said, before bursting into a fit of coughing. I lowered Jake to the floor where the air was a little clearer, the
n grabbed the chair he had been in and smashed the window outward. Cool air rushed in, allowing us a few precious breaths. Then, with a deafening whoosh, the fire behind us suddenly burst into a raging inferno fed by this new source of oxygen. Asher screamed and shielded his face as a blast of superheated air washed over us. We both dropped to the floor next to Jake.

  For a minute all I could think about was the pain.

  Slowly my mind began to function again. So we die anyway, I thought. Please, God, don’t let us die.

  “Killian, do you hear something?” Asher asked me, interrupting my prayer.

  I listened intently and thought that maybe, just maybe, I heard a voice calling over the roar of the fire.

  “Is there someone there?” I screamed.

  “Killian?” There was definitely someone there.

  “Please, help us!” I called back, “It’s me, Asher, and Jake. We can’t get through the fire.”

  “Is the bed on fire?”

  I looked over at the bed. It was against the same wall we were and the flames hadn’t yet reached it.

  “No.”

  “Get the comforter and wrap it around yourselves, 277

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  then run through the fire as quickly as you can.”

  “Are you sure?”

  There was a pause. “There’s no other choice.”

  Asher already had pulled the heavy quilt off and crawled back to me and Jake. We got into crouching position and draped Jake between our shoulders. Then we draped the quilt over our head and wrapped the loose ends tightly around our bodies. The heat was almost unbearable by now, and the light from the fire even penetrated through the think material of the quilt so that I could see Asher’s face quite clearly.

  “Asher, I love you,” I sobbed, “If we don’t live...”

  “We will,” he cried.

  “But if we don’t, I want you to know that I’ll always love you and I’ll see you in heaven.”

  “I love you too, Killian. Always and forever.”

  “Let’s go!” I screamed.