Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  She screamed with the impact, but also seized the moment. Spun and let loose with the flamethrower. The Killer barely managed to get his right arm in front of the sizzling tongue of flame. He screamed as his arm alighted, then he rolled along a wall, trying to put the flames out.

  The wall caught fire.

  But now the fire on the Killer’s arm was out. He rounded on Sheri. She tried to blast him again but this time the cigarette lighter didn’t even spark. Out of juice? Malfunctioning?

  It didn’t matter. The Killer hit her again. Hard. She didn’t go down at first, but rolled backward as though she had been hit by a vicious riptide at the beach.

  Jerry was still struggling to get to his feet, still failing. Reaching out, wondering why his hands weren’t working either.

  Sheri rolled back toward the Killer, and Jerry thought the man was going to hit her again. He didn’t, though, and after a second Jerry saw why as his daughter dropped both lighter and hairspray and her hands went to her chest and she crumpled to the floor.

  No, no, no, not now she lasted so long not now, not now.

  The Killer loomed over her.

  She was helpless. Jerry thought the man might stamp a foot on her neck, might break her back or simply chew through her throat like the animal he was. And Jerry would simply have to watch it happen, drunkenly maneuvering as he was through the hall.

  But the Killer did none of that.

  Instead, he pulled something out of his pocket.

  A remote. A TV remote.

  He pushed the button.

  85

  Click.

  Such a small sound, but to Jerry it had come to represent the sound of a world crumbling down, piece by piece. It was the sound of atoms crashing, the sound of fission in the moment before oblivion.

  No, not oblivion. Oblivion would be a gift. This is something worse. This is what Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden for seeking. This is the damnation of knowledge.

  And Jerry understood why God might have taken such a tack, understood why knowledge might have turned Eden into nothing more than a pile of weeds. Contrary to the saying, knowledge was not power.

  It was dissolution.

  The TV came on.

  Brian. Alive and –

  “No,” he breathed. “Please, no.”

  – healthy and whole. Darkness in the background. Jerry couldn’t see where the boy was.

  Then the darkness around his son seemed to leap from the screen, seemed to wrap itself around Jerry’s sight and create a dark tunnel with nothing but a pinpoint of light at the end. He hissed, realizing that he was falling, and managed to right himself in the last instant before gravity would have dashed him to the floor.

  The pinpoint widened. Became a smile. The Killer.

  Jerry realized he had never seen the man’s face before. Not really. And he was startlingly… ordinary. Just a man, brown hair that was receding a bit at the temples. Five o’clock shadow that clung to a chin that was rather weak.

  But there was nothing weak about the mad light in his eyes.

  The tunnel that had encircled Jerry’s vision widened more, and Jerry saw the television again, where his dead son was standing, looking down at something. A paper.

  The scene widened, an invisible cameraman allowing Jerry to see that Brian was standing on top of the family’s home. The roof of the dream house.

  Brian looked at the paper one more time, as though he had secluded himself on this manmade mountain so as to find the perfect spot to memorize the words he found there. Then he held his arms out wide. The paper fluttered in his hand like a bird, wishing to be free.

  And he jumped.

  He hung in the air for eternity, arms out, legs together. He looked like an artist’s vision of an angel. Then he crashed to earth, slamming headfirst into the deck beside the pool.

  There was a sickening thud and his body crumpled into itself, then lay at length, feet hanging out a few inches over the water of the pool.

  The body twitched.

  The camera shifted, the angle lowering. Being put down. And the Killer walked onscreen.

  Brian was dead. He had to be. And yet… his arm moved. Not just a post-mortem spasm, he was reaching. Like he had changed his mind, like he was repenting of his decision.

  Help me, the gesture said.

  Jerry tried to look away. He saw Sheri, clawing her chest. Gasping. Saw the Killer. Smiling.

  He looked back at the screen. The angle had widened a bit, sharing the screen equally between both Killer and suffering penitent.

  The Killer on the TV picked something up. The paper that Brian had been holding. He read it. Glanced at the teen….

  And then he turned Brian over and began administering CPR.

  Nausea reached greasy fingers into Jerry’s stomach. The sight of the madman, mouth to mouth with his son, was almost an abomination. That Brian should commit suicide was one kind of horror. That he should be murdered would have been shattering in a different way.

  But to see this murderer trying to save his firstborn? It was wrong. Not just wrong, it was… blasphemous.

  Jerry tried again to stand. To walk. He still couldn’t.

  Sheri. Gasping.

  The Killer. Smiling.

  And on the TV, the same Killer – the then-Killer – stopped breathing life. Brian was motionless. The Killer watched the spreading blood around the youth. Then the boy himself.

  Then he held up the note and Jerry realized he was seeing something that had been cut out of the version he had watched earlier. Like the Killer was showing them only a bit at a time, only what he judged them ready for, like a teacher of a macabre subject bringing his students to understanding as fast as he believed them able to handle it.

  The Killer read the note aloud to the camera, as though recording a last will and testament for posterity.

  “Dear Mom and Dad. I’m sorry. The house is empty. We all live in it, but it’s empty. No one knows what anyone’s really doing. No one but me.” The Killer’s voice broke, as though he were trying not to weep. “But I’ve heard Dad talking to Socrates about what he did. I’ve come home early from the movies that Mom sent us on so that she could have her… visits. I know how Sheri makes money, and what Drew does for fun.” Again the Killer paused. He drew a trembling hand across his eyes, then finished, “I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. And you’ll never know me.”

  The Killer stood in front of the body. Then he folded the paper, put it in his pocket, and walked away as blood dripped off Brian’s feet and reached long red tendrils into the perfect green of the pool.

  The TV turned off, and in the room the Killer, the real Killer, the one of flesh and blood they had to fight now, turned to face them. He said, “You killed him.”

  And Jerry’s heart clenched.

  Because it was true.

  86

  The Killer’s eyes bored into Jerry, as unfocused and unsteady as Jerry felt himself. Then the murderer looked back at the still-dark television as though looking for the secrets of a suddenly confusing universe.

  Sheri’s gasping turned into a light panting. She didn’t have much time.

  Jerry forced himself to take a step.

  He thought of Brian. Flying. An angel.

  “Your secrets,” said the Killer.

  An angel coming down.

  “Your secrets killed him.”

  Crashing down.

  “They destroyed him, then they killed him.”

  The Killer reached for Sheri, who was now almost completely still.

  “NO!”

  Jerry felt his feet moving under him. Felt like he had felt through all of this: like he wasn’t controlling himself. Like he was a puppet. But now he was a puppet in the hands of someone he was grateful to dance for. Because this puppet master wanted what Jerry did: for the Killer to pay.

  He reached out. The knife he had stabbed into the Killer’s shoulder was still there, and he twisted it. The Killer screamed and fell. Jerry
went down as well, his strength subsiding as suddenly as it had risen.

  But at least he fell on top of the madman. He felt like an ant taking on a lion. All he could do was hold onto the knife and twist it and turn it and grind it against the bone of the Killer’s shoulder.

  He saw Sheri in the tumult. She was staring at him. It didn’t look like she was breathing.

  The Killer stood and now Jerry was hanging onto him like a man riding a rogue tiger, hoping that the beast would tire and fall before he did. Knowing that was an impossible hope.

  But still, he held.

  Smoke started to billow through the room. The fire the Killer had set. It was growing. It pushed its way into the kitchen. Parts of the hall.

  The Killer slammed Jerry into another wall, and he felt a pair of ribs crack. His head flipped into the wall as well, and everything went sideways again. Not just his sight, but his thoughts.

  He thought of Ann, bringing a lover into the bed he had shared with her for twenty years.

  Of Drew, shooting up in the room while Jerry stood in the hall.

  Of Sheri, dancing naked for pawing perverts who paid to see her body.

  Of Brian… the angel brought crashing to an earth that would not bear his existence.

  Each of the images flashed in his mind as the Killer crashed through the room, slamming Jerry against walls, onto the floor, battering at him in an effort to dislodge him. Each of the images speared through him. Each of the moments sapped what strength Jerry had.

  But they brought something with them. Not the strength that he had been relying on for so long. Not the lie. The something beyond it. The truth that was all that was left, the honesty that was awful, but somehow sustaining.

  He hung on.

  And suddenly the Killer fell.

  Jerry rolled on top of the man. Grabbed his head. Slammed it into the floor. Once. The Killer bucked at him. Twice. The Killer tried to turn away.

  Three times.

  The Killer was still. Silent. The rogue tiger slept.

  87

  Jerry looked at the man. He was a surgeon. He had extensive medical training. He was almost certain the Killer was out cold.

  He had also seen too many movies where the bad guy came lurching to life to trust what he saw.

  So he grabbed the Killer’s head and bashed it against the floor again a few more times. He didn’t want to kill him, but wanted him jumping up and attacking them again even less.

  Jerry looked at Sheri. She was quivering, tiny shivers running up and down her frame. She didn’t have long.

  And he just… looked. At his daughter. The girl he’d known all her life, but never known at all. He felt like he was taking a test, not a school test, not his licensing exams. Something much more important.

  He saw his daughter. Not his Princess. Not the fiction she told him, not the things he had always hoped or believed.

  Just her.

  He crawled to Sheri and cradled her head. He rubbed her shoulders, trying to calm her down. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “We got him.” He rubbed her temples, drew his fingers through her tangled hair. “We got him, Sheri. Calm.”

  He kept whispering, keeping an eye on the motionless figure of the Killer as he did so, until finally Sheri stopped shivering. She started breathing more regularly, then closed her eyes a moment after he whispered, “It’ll be okay, Sheri.”

  She opened her eyes again, and he thought she might be looking at him, just like he was looking at her.

  They smiled.

  Jerry held the moment as long as he could, but finally had to look away. He felt stronger. Strong enough to do what came next.

  He sensed Sheri tracking his gaze. Looking at the fire that had made its way into the kitchen. “We’re going to burn alive if we can’t get out of here,” she whispered. But she sounded calm. Like the worst had already happened, the storm had already passed.

  Maybe it had.

  Jerry helped Sheri up. She was wobbly, so he leaned her against the wall before going to the Killer’s still form.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Sheri.

  Jerry felt his countenance harden. He wondered if he would actually be able to do what he was thinking about.

  He thought so.

  “We’re going to get as far away from the fire as we can… and we’re going to make him tell us how to get out of here.”

  88

  Jerry tossed the Killer to the floor of the master bedroom and looked around as the madman moaned and Sheri, still feeling the aftereffects of her near-brush with cardiac arrest, leaned against the wall.

  Smoke filled the room. He knew that conventional wisdom was to go under fires since smoke and heat rose, but the flames Sheri had set and the Killer had spread had gone into the kitchen, cutting off the basement and the garage. The master bedroom was the farthest they could get from the flames’ leading edge; and gave them the most time to do what they had to.

  Can you do this, Jer-Jer?

  Watch me.

  The Killer moaned again, more stridently this time. Jerry strode to him and yanked the knife out of his shoulder. A gout of blood and some dark clumps of clotted gore came rushing out and the monster’s eyes fluttered.

  “Dad…,” Sheri said, her tone indicating clearly that she had seen the movement and was worried about the man’s impending consciousness.

  The monster was wounded, and would wake angry.

  “Watch him a sec,” said Jerry.

  “What do I do?”

  “The second his eyes open, kick him in the head.”

  “How hard?”

  “Break your foot.”

  Then he turned to the bed. He didn’t look back at Sheri, trusting she would do what had to be done. Indeed, she was already stumbling over to the man and he had no doubt a glance in her direction would reveal her getting herself in field goal position with the Killer’s cranium for a ball.

  Jerry used the Killer’s bloody knife to cut the sheet on his bed into strips. The cuts were ugly and irregular, and for some reason that bothered him immensely, as though all could be forgiven save the sin of slipshod craftsmanship. He didn’t know if this represented a newfound pride in self or a continuing trip into lands darkened by madness. Perhaps both.

  Regardless, though, he had a few long strips of cloth in moments, and he hurried back to Sheri. As he had imagined, she was standing next to the Killer, one leg actually cocked back for a kick.

  He smiled at her.

  She smiled back.

  Jerry flipped the madman over. The world swum as he did it and he prayed that his reserves of strength and/or adrenaline wouldn't run out before he finished his work. He tied the Killer’s wrists and arms tightly behind him.

  He heard crackling as he did it, and thought for a moment he must be breaking bones. But no, the sounds were too small, the sounds of a squirrel’s bones perhaps. Not those of a grown man. Then he realized that the noises were the sound of the fire, slowly consuming the house around them.

  “Wake up,” he shouted. The Killer moaned again. Jerry punched him in the mouth. It was the first time he had ever punched someone in his adult life and he thought he did it wrong. Maybe broke a finger. But at least the Killer woke.

  Jerry realized he was sweating, wetness slicking his forehead and cheeks and running down the back of his neck. Nervousness? Pain?

  Or the heat of the fire?

  The Killer made a noise. Not a moan or a groan. Jerry couldn’t place it, then realized: the man was giggling.

  “My turn is so much fun this time,” rasped the Killer. He spat at Jerry’s feet, and Jerry was absurdly proud to see blood trickling from the madman’s mouth: his punch had done some damage.

  “How do we get out of here?” Jerry demanded.

  The Killer laughed again. Spat once more. This time a tooth came with the blood, but Jerry felt no pride this time. The room was definitely getting hotter and starting to grow hazy with smoke.

  He stared at the Killer.
Gearing up.

  Just do it.

  This is not what I’m about.

  You’re about survival. Do it.

  I can’t.