by Kyle Harris
The elevator dinged and bumped to a stop.
“I hope you understand.”
The doors opened. Chaz put the mask up to her face and snapped the elastic band around the back of her head to keep it snugly in place. She couldn’t see much through the two tiny holes in the eyes, but she didn’t have to. Like the Greeks in the Trojan War, she just had to get through the gates.
When she was within a couple meters of the entrance to the Pruitt residence, the doors emitted a soft chime. They swung open, and Chaz walked inside.
Thanks, Libs. She put the mask back inside her coat.
Soft ambient music was playing: a peaceful piano tune. The chandeliers in the quasi-foyer area were dimmed down to mimic a dusk light level. Around her, the smug faces of Pruitt’s forebears and relatives watched from the walls. Even the women in the family had the same doughy, lumpy complexion. Bags under the eyes, jowls, the whole works. Libby was set up for doom, had she made it that far. Or maybe not. Maybe she would’ve taken after her mother in old age.
Chaz moved on.
Down a sloping bend, then past the dining area. She stepped slowly and softly on the laminated stone floor, circumventing a long table. She watched ahead at the doors on either side, the shadows, anything that might announce where they were. She listened for sounds. Footsteps. Voices. Anything that wasn’t her own heart beating or the soft music.
The gun came out.
She didn’t have to go far; there was an orange glow spilling out of a doorway to her left—a study, if her memory wasn’t shot. Might be where Pruitt was. She veered left and hugged the wall, slowing down as she neared the light. The sweat from her palms made the gun’s grip slippery. She squeezed it tighter.
Distant noise to her right. A clatter, like something made of ceramic or porcelain. Then a faucet running. That nulled about every possibility but the kitchen. Around the same time, there was a cough in the room just ahead of her.
Number one, and number two. Thanks.
Chaz took one last deep breath to calm her nerves, but the inclination didn’t loosen any of the million knots in her stomach. But she had to act immediately—if more time passed, her targets would move. The advantage would be lost. Perfect moments didn’t exist, but this was as close to one as she could’ve hoped.
Now, it was on her.
She turned into the study, leading with the loaded .357 revolver.
He was seated behind a basic wood desk, the orange glow of a lamp lighting the left side of his face. He wore reading glasses and was currently consumed in the sheet of paper in his hands. Completely unaware.
Chaz was halfway across the small room when he finally looked up, seeing the barrel of the gun aimed at his forehead. Then the person holding it. The shock was subtle, but it was there. He dropped the paper and calmly removed his glasses.
Yeah, that’s right. Boo.
Pruitt regarded the gun again. “He has assigned you with one last responsibility, has he?” He grimaced. “God will judge him as an inalienable coward for this. And you.”
“No one sent me,” said Chaz, matching up the revolver’s sights on the bridge of his nose.
“My wife as well?”
She nodded.
“Hm.” He seemed to consider various items on his desk. Maybe anything that could be improvised into a defensive weapon. But papers and desk lamps were not known for their bullet resistance.
She had him by the fucking balls.
He looked up at her, at the gun again. “I can still recollect my earliest lessons from Sunday school, the very first Bible I was entrusted with and keep to this day, the sound of the bell summoning us to our assigned seats. Did you know that we were not taught about God first? We had just sat down and finished prayer, and my teacher instructed us to open to a page in our book—and there was this frightful monster with crimson skin, immense wings, glowing eyes, encircled in flames and darkness and standing a great height above these little specks, the people, the sinners, that were no more than the size of ants to him. And as I felt my insides shrivel a little from this image, my teacher told us, ‘This is your enemy.’”
Come on, do it.
“As I got older, I realized the Devil is not that illustration. He is not the monster, not a bogeyman that dwells under your bed and makes noises in the night. No. The real Devil works unperceived.” He brought his hands together into a tight ball. “Look at the homosexuals and the transgenders. You see, the Devil is so skilled at his craft that any agent infested with these perversions of the mind will attest that he or she was born as such, programmed by whatever combination of nature and nurture. And by accepting this blight, they have forever shunned God and taken the Devil into themselves. You want further testimony?” The features of his face shifted, hardened. “The thrall who removed my daughter from this world is a transgender.”
“I didn’t do shit.” Chaz cocked the revolver. The click of the hammer was loud in her ears, reverberating. “You want facts, asshole? I didn’t kill Libby. I cared about her. Unlike her fucking parents. Unlike you.”
Pruitt straightened in his chair, his shoulders tightening. “This coming from a homosexual and an improvident teenager. And a heathen.” He was talking louder, as if he thought the volume of his voice decided truth. “A devout father loves his child by guarding them from sin. Twice a day I was on my knees, praying for Lilibeth to gather the strength to step into God’s light, to discard the filth she had chosen to wallow in. Is that not caring for her? I stood by her side to see that the infection in her mind did not worsen. I protected her against the darkness. I attempted to guide her back when she was lost.” His eyes narrowed. “God is my witness. If it weren’t for my love, the Devil’s delusions would have twisted her mind until she was no longer my daughter.”
“You motherfucker.” Chaz had to bite her lip to not scream it. “And the fucking tabloid pictures, the dirtbags you hired to humiliate her in public, those must be your love too, right?”
“Yes. Because God’s Mind is no playground for queers. These were attempts to discourage her from further iniquity, to draw her away from the Devil’s fashion. Away from creatures like you.”
Almost. The trigger moved back—a hair more and the forensics team would be picking up fragments of skull off the floor and prepping a body bag. It seemed like too much dignity.
“Is that what you tried to do to me?” The fucking bastard probably had no idea she had gotten pregnant. If she told him, he would just ascribe it to God’s will. “I want to kill you. I want to hang you by the neck so every gay person in the city can take a fucking bat to your fucking corpse. And when you’re dead, and all that remains are your ashes, everyone takes a liquid shit on you.”
“Then you are a Godless creature. Beyond salvation.”
“Yeah. Sucks.”
Footsteps approaching outside the study. Then a woman’s voice: “Matthew? I just got an alert about the front door—”
Juliet appeared in the doorway, the white glow of her tasker illuminating the bottom of her face. When her eyes met Chaz’s, she froze. Red wine sloshed in the glass she was holding. A pair of slightly bloodshot and watery eyes tried to make sense of the scene.
“Matthew! She’s holding a gun! Should I do something? Should I…call the police?”
Pruitt threw his hands up. “No, Juliet. The police aren’t necessary. Please. Everything is fine. Chaz and I were just engaged in a discussion, and we have a conflict of opinions. Please.” His eyes flicked to Chaz. “No one is getting hurt tonight, isn’t that right?”
Chaz felt her head nodding, but the gun stayed aimed at his face.
“But Matthew, she’s—”
“It’s okay, Juliet. We are safe.”
Juliet nodded as if under a spell, and she backpedaled from the room with her tasker and wine. The sound of her footsteps tapered off after a few seconds.
Chaz focused on Pruitt again.
“One of the most dishonorable acts a man in service to God can do is fabr
icate lies to his own wife,” he said, folding his arms on the desk. “Whether what I said was a lie or truth is a power that has been bestowed to you.”
She said nothing.
“So it was not he who sent you?”
“Who are you talking about?” asked Chaz.
“Your employer.” Then, after she didn’t respond: “My brother.”
“I don’t know your fucking brother, or what he has to do with this.” Keeping in line with family traditions, he was probably a fucking psycho.
Pruitt squinted like he was trying to read through her. Then the line of his mouth widened into something almost like a smile. “I found something in my bedroom,” he said. “A little camera, high above my computer. I removed it and contacted an expert who could tell me more about it. It is a very concerning thing to find a camera in your home and have no idea of how it came to be there, wouldn’t you say?”
She said nothing.
“He was able to access the drive and extract all the data. He said that your intention was to record me typing my password, and then use that information to steal whatever contents you were after. But you inadvertently also recorded yourself and my daughter examining the files—”
“Because of that fucking thing you implanted into her neck, you pathetic shitbag.” To be honest, she had completely forgotten about the Panasonic subdermal until now.
Pruitt raised his hands in a placating gesture. “I understand. The revelation that you were working for someone else came to me at that moment, when I watched you return into my bedroom and duplicate the photos of my mother onto your tasker. Because why would you be after them? And then God enlightened me with the truth: you were fetching them for my brother.”
Chaz ground her teeth together. “Like I said, I don’t know your fucking brother.”
“Do you not? You do not know a man who is about my age, who has probably expressed an abstruse resentment of me? A man whose sexual deviancies are like yours? A man likely desperate to get what he sought?”
She was shaking her head—not in denial, but because she was an idiot. A colossal fucking idiot. “Israel Kennedy.”
“Yes,” he said. “Born Israel Pruitt, until he rejected the wisdom of God. My mother’s heart was large enough to accept him even after his transgression of morals—and it seems he still clings to those memories. But the rest of my family would never consent to a homosexual sharing their surname. So he was excommunicated. And he arrived on Trident with a new name of his choosing.”
All this fucking time. Of course, it might have been Pruitt spewing bullshit. People would say anything to ward off being shot in the face. But how else would Pruitt know? Only a handful of people knew about her business with Kennedy.
The embarrassment she felt was the blow to her credibility. To her research. Something should have popped up in the pile, but she must have glossed over it. Or—ignoring the thorn of shame in her side—maybe the information didn’t exist. Because she had found obituaries for Kennedy’s alleged parents; neither of them had been named Pruitt, though.
Which meant one thing: Israel Kennedy’s name had been scrubbed. All traces of his connection to the Pruitt family nulled, a fictional narrative installed so no one would ever know. He detested his family so much that he never wanted to have any association with the Pruitt name ever again.
His niece. His own fucking niece.
“He killed Libby,” said Chaz. Pruitt’s doughy face looked up at her. “Yeah, I worked for him. He paid me to steal those photos. But we were done. And then he sent one of his bodyguards to…” The revolver was starting to tremble. “I couldn’t do anything.”
“I believe you,” said Pruitt. “I apologize for the accusation. But I ask you to reassess your actions. You confess affection for my daughter, as sinful as it may be, and claim her murder was not your doing. Yet why are you pointing the gun at the person who helped bring her into this world and not the person who removed her from it?”
The revolver started to dip. She couldn’t do it. Pruitt deserved a bullet to the head for what he had brought upon her. He deserved a hell of a lot worse. But she saw Libby’s face again. Heard her voice.
—Please. Don’t hurt him.
The gun fell to Chaz’s side. This wasn’t what Libby would’ve wanted.
“If you ever lay a hand on me again,” she said, wetness in her eyes, “I will cut you into thousands of pieces and feed you to homeless dogs.”
“Go now,” urged Pruitt. “We will never see or speak to each other again.”
A peace treaty. It wasn’t quite the resolution she’d had in mind.
She left the study. She left Pruitt alive.
On the way out, she approached the partition of glass separating the path to the exit from the dining area where the blow-up had happened a couple months back. The table was the exact same one. Juliet was seated in the chair at the end, opposite from where Pruitt had been sitting that night. She was fiddling with something: a small wooden cross. The glass of wine was close by. Bottle too.
She had finished a sip when Chaz walked over to her.
Juliet’s gaze immediately fixed on the revolver. “You don’t intend to use that on me, do you?” There was worry on her face, but her tone was almost sarcastic.
Chaz shook her head. But she kept it out and visible just in case. No telling with these people.
Juliet blurted: “Has anyone ever said you look like a boy?” Her head briefly lolled to the side, like she couldn’t be bothered to hold it up. “I think it’s the hair. No, the figure. You don’t have much in the way of hips. Or are you a boy? Do you tuck it back? Isn’t that what they do when they dress up as girls?”
Chaz ignored her and nodded to the wine. “There are quicker ways to get wasted, Mrs. P.”
“You work with what you have.” To prove her conviction, she poured the rest of the wine down her throat and unsteadily refilled the glass. She suddenly looked to be on the verge of tears. But smiling about something. “It was always punishment, Chaz. And I knew better to not see it coming.”
“What was?”
“Lilibeth.” Juliet scooped up the cross with both hands and looked over at her, those bloodshot eyes and sad smile making the woman look like someone at the end of life’s plank. “I have a secret to share with you. Just between us girls. It is such a secret that not even my husband knows about it. Isn’t that exciting?”
Chaz shrugged. Her interest was in the cross—it was exactly like the other six hanging in the master bedroom.
Juliet went on: “Matthew wasn’t Lilibeth’s father. He thinks he was, and he’s supposed to, but he wasn’t.” She shook her head. “He wasn’t. I wouldn’t let him.”
Chaz initially passed it off as drunkenness, but she had never known alcohol to make people into spontaneous liars. If anything, it was more the opposite.
She pursued: “Then who was Libby’s father?”
“I am her father.” Another sip of wine. “Medically. Scientifically? One of those technical words they use. The doctors can make a sperm cell from my DNA. Just one little sperm cell with my DNA, and an egg with my DNA. And I was biologically—that’s the word, I think—biologically her mother and her father at the same time. I was both her parents.”
What the fuck. “Libby was your fucking clone?”
Juliet shook her head exaggeratedly. “Not a clone. I was her mother and father, but she was still her own person.” Her smile had disappeared. Her head turned abruptly to look up at Chaz. “From one woman to another, I pray you never have to watch your own children die in your arms. Watch their little eyes close and never reopen. Feel them stop struggling. Because I did. I had to watch them die over and over. And over. And over again.” She sniffled. “My husband refused the vaccinations for our children because immunity wasn’t supposed to come from a syringe. If the child died, it was a fault of their own weakness. So our children were weak—that’s what he thought.
“When he became infertile, I knew it was God int
ervening. He wouldn’t allow our cruelty to continue. But Matthew insisted that we weren’t praying hard enough. So we prayed, and all we did was pray. And kept trying. So, I gave him the child he prayed for. A child that was secretly immunized in the womb so she could live.” She turned the wooden cross over. On the back was a number. The year of death: 0047. “Lilibeth was lucky number seven.”
Silence. Then Chaz said, “I don’t get it. What’s God punishing you for?”
Juliet stared at the sliver of red wine at the bottom of the stemmed glass. “That our daughter was not from the union of man and woman. It was a tremendous, tremendous sin, what I did. When the Devil’s influence began to work on her, God wasn’t there to put a stop to it. He knew what I had done. He knew that she wasn’t a real child of ours. I had to remember my mistake each time I looked at her. And I have. I have never forgotten—”
“You fucking people,” interrupted Chaz.
Juliet looked up, traces of her familiar disdain showing through the intoxication.
Chaz gripped the revolver. There were still six bullets. It wasn’t too late to change her mind, do what she had come to do. “You think Libby was a mistake just because she was gay?”
“It isn’t natural,” said Juliet, simply. “God does not allow it, and the Bible denounces it.”
“How original.” Chaz ran her fingers through her hair—she had to do something with her hand, and it was either that or choke the woman. “You know what Libby said before she died? She told me I was strong. But she was stronger. She had to be to put up with you. And I still can’t figure out how she did that. She smiled so much, and yet she had to come home every night to this shithole.”
“We tried to help her—”
“Help her?” Chaz’s forehead throbbed. “If you really cared about helping your daughter, you would’ve accepted her for who she was. Any mother should.”
“We would’ve accepted her if she hadn’t chosen to be—”
Chaz raised the revolver and pressed the barrel between the woman’s eyes, which had grown huge. “You need to shut the fuck up,” said Chaz. “I don’t want to hear you say that fucking word again. Choose. The only thing Libby chose was to be a good person. No thanks to you or your husband.”