Hobbled

by John Inman

  This part of the house was even darker than the kitchen. Bushes outside the windows blocked the streetlight off in the distance completely. And the moon was straight up in the sky now, ducking in and out of a passing bank of clouds, so it wasn’t much help either.

  Luke’s house had a banistered staircase, not unlike Danny’s. Thank God, this part of the house was carpeted so Granger’s toenails were silenced.

  Luke took a firmer grip on the baseball bat with his right hand. With his other hand, he grasped the newel post and cast his eyes toward the well of shadows leading up to the second floor. If this was a horror movie, it would be at this point right here when Luke would scream from the back row, “Don’t go up there, asshole!” And then he would watch as the idiot on the screen went up there anyway.

  Just like he was doing. Boy, people never learn.

  Luke took it slow. One step at a time. Granger wasn’t being much help, lurking at Luke’s back the way he was doing, the chicken. Next time Luke got a dog, he’d get something butch. Like a Rottweiler. Or a pit bull. Something with balls and an attitude. Well, maybe he wouldn’t. He sort of liked Granger the way he was, even if he wasn’t the bravest thing on four legs.

  Luke heard a sound that stopped him cold. Just the tiniest sound. Metallic. Then he placed it. It was the rattle of a venetian blind and it was coming from behind him. Downstairs! With his heart doing a real tap dance now, Luke turned on the stair. He was about halfway up. Granger was two steps below him. Granger didn’t seem to have heard the sound at all since he was still looking up instead of back the way they had come.

  Now Luke didn’t know what to think. Had he heard a sound or not? Should he go back down, or keep going up? Before he could decide, he heard another sound. It was the sound of a floorboard creaking. Just one little creak. Like a hesitant footfall. And this time it was definitely above him.

  Oh, man.

  Luke wiped a dribble of sweat off his forehead, straightened his glasses, regripped the baseball bat, and kept climbing up. Granger followed along behind him, occasionally bumping the back of Luke’s bare leg with his ice-cold nose and making Luke jump every time he did it.

  With one more step to go, Luke suddenly felt the air and light change around him. A sound like thunder rumbled toward him. Footsteps. Pounding footsteps. They were headed right for him!

  Granger started barking. It startled Luke so badly he almost fainted.

  Luke raised the bat in front of his face to ward off whatever was coming at him. He felt Granger rush between his legs with a growl, then a pair of hands came out of the shadows and gave Luke a shove. Luke windmilled his arms for a second, teetering, trying to regain his balance, but he didn’t manage it very well. The next thing he knew, he was falling backward down the stairs, sailing actually, and he was hitting every single step along the way. With his head. With his ass. With his elbow. The bat went flying out of his hands and clattered across the floor below. Luke had just enough presence of mind as he tumbled down the stairs to tear his glasses from his face and clutch them in his fist to protect them.

  He hit the foyer floor with a whump that knocked every whiff of air out of his lungs. He lay there for a second, taking stock. Flexing his fingers. Wiggling his toes. Nothing seemed to be broken. “Ouch,” he whispered, not because he was hurting so much, but more because he just wanted to see if he could still talk. That way he’d know he was alive.

  He was just about to pull himself to his feet when the thundering footsteps returned. A tall shadow came flying down the staircase right at him once again. And once again, Luke crossed his arms in front of his face to ward off the danger. A pair of long legs sailed over him where he lay all crumpled up on the bottom step. A second later, another shadow sailed over him. A smaller shadow. It was Granger. He was really barking up a storm now. Snapping, snarling, growling. Acting all protective and gutsy now that the bad guy was on the run.

  In the distance, Luke heard a door bang against the wall, and footsteps clattered down the back steps. Granger’s bark grew more distant, then it stopped altogether.

  “Fuck,” Luke murmured, dragging himself to his feet. He slipped his glasses back on and immediately took them off again and wiped them on his T-shirt. They were smudged from having been held in his sweaty hands while he cartwheeled backward down the stupid stairs.

  Standing, Luke took stock of his injuries. There weren’t many. His elbow was skinned, as was his knee. He had a kink in his neck where he’d landed on his head at some point as he tumbled down the stairs. And his ear hurt like a mother. When he touched it, it felt wet. Blood. Must have taken some skin off there too.

  It took Luke a minute to realize that maybe he really wasn’t out of danger after all. The guy could come back. Or there could be someone else inside the house. He squinted through the shadows until he located the baseball bat. He scooped it off the floor with a groan, and hearing a new sound directly behind him, he whirled around with a good tight grip on the bat, holding it at eleven o’clock, ready for bear, when he saw it was only Granger grinning up at him.

  “Well, shit, boy,” Luke said. “Scare me to death, why don’t you?”

  He squatted to take Granger’s head between his hands and listened to the darkness around him, not sure what to expect. Judging by Granger’s attitude, the danger was gone. But Granger wasn’t exactly combat-ready, so Luke thought he’d do better to trust his own instincts rather than the dog’s.

  Bat still poised to take off the first head that came along, Luke stalked back the way he had come, down the hallway and through the kitchen to the back door. It was standing wide open, but there was no one there, and no one anywhere in sight. The driveway was clear of all humanity and the yard was empty.

  Luke pulled the door closed and locked himself inside the house. Then he thought maybe that might not be too good an idea, so he unlocked the door again and left it ajar, in case he had to beat a hasty retreat.

  Then he switched on the kitchen light and headed back to the staircase, flicking every light switch he came across along the way.

  The first floor looked okay, so he put one shaky foot on the first step of the staircase, then another shaky foot, and finally just said “Fuck it,” and raced up the stairs with a war whoop, hoping to scare any intruder away if there still happened to be one around.

  He peeked around the edge of his bedroom door, switched on the ceiling light, and heaved a sigh of relief. The room was empty.

  Someone had certainly been there, though. No two ways around that. The room was a mess. Even more than usual.

  The first thing that caught Luke’s eye was the dresser drawers. They had all been pulled open, his underwear yanked out by the handfuls and scattered across the floor and over the bed. Luke stepped closer, and once again, he removed his glasses and wiped them clean with the tail of his shirt because he really couldn’t believe he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. Then he bent over his bed and looked closer.

  When he suddenly figured it out, he jerked upright and felt a chill creep up his back like an icy finger being scraped along his spine.

  The underwear the intruder had flung across Luke’s bed was splashed with semen. Jism city.

  Jesus, Luke thought. What a fucking pervert.

  His fear and his stress and his raggedy, jangled nerves suddenly got the better of him. He made a mad dash for the bathroom and landed on his knees in front of the commode like a base runner sliding into home plate.

  Hugging the toilet bowl like it was his new best friend, Luke barfed up everything in his stomach.

  Granger sat patiently at his side, whimpering, until he was finished.

  Finally, Luke lifted his head and blinked back tears. Christ! Grabbing at the toilet paper, he peeled off a fistful and wiped his mouth. When he was finished, he glanced in the bowl.

  Man, he thought, twenty dollars’ worth of pizza looks a whole lot better going in than it does coming out.

  Then he barfed again.

  Chapter 12


  LUKE hissed. That alcohol burned.

  “Sorry,” Danny said. “Almost done. Bear with me.”

  Luke watched as Danny finished wiping the crud and blood and carpet lint off of Luke’s skinned knee with a humongous wad of alcohol-soaked cotton. Danny was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor in front of him, and Luke was parked in the dining room chair sipping at one of Danny’s dad’s beers to calm his nerves. Danny had already finished treating Luke’s skinned elbow and his poor scraped ear. Now that the excitement was winding down, Luke thought Danny actually looked more scared than he did. Somehow that realization made Luke love the guy all the more.

  They were both in wrinkled shorts. Nothing else. T-shirts had been totally forgotten what with the drama and all.

  “You couldn’t see who it was?” Danny asked for the third time, oh so carefully plucking a strand of cotton away from Luke’s wounded knee with his fingertips. “You couldn’t see his face at all?”

  “Nope.” Luke pushed the beer away. He didn’t like the taste, and he was afraid it would make him barf again. Danny watched him, then reached up and grabbed the bottle for himself. He poured what was left of the beer right down his throat. Watching him, Luke almost smiled. Danny’s eyes were as big as silver dollars. Luke supposed his were too. Wow. What a night.

  Danny stopped what he was doing and cupped both hands behind Luke’s calves, loving the fuzzy warm feel of them in his hands. He also loved the way Luke looked down at him with a gentle smile when he did it.

  “I’ll call the cops if you want,” Danny said. “Maybe now we should. Dad will just have to understand.”

  Luke reached out with a fingertip and pushed a tress of Danny’s long hair away from his eyes. That movement caused Danny to lean forward and kiss Luke’s knee, the uninjured one, before sitting back on his haunches and once again looking up into Luke’s face.

  “No,” Luke said. “What are they going to do? A DNA test on the sperm? Those tests take weeks. That’s if they’ll do them at all. DNA testing is expensive as hell and police forces are always hard up for money. I watch CSI. I know how cops think. No, we’ll just keep our eyes open for a few more days. When our dads get back, we’ll tell them what happened and let them decide what to do. I don’t want to get you or your dad into any trouble. And it’s not like the guy really hurt anything. A box of laundry soap and about a dozen cans of spray disinfectant will fix it right up. My come-splattered underwear will be as good as new. And it’s not like it hasn’t been splattered with come before. Tee hee.”

  “Yeah, but that was yours! This is just so damned sick. And how did he get in, Luke? You locked the doors, right?”

  Luke shrugged. “I thought I did, but who the hell knows? My brains have been so centered on your dick lately, I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. Not that I mind, you understand. It’s just the way things are.”

  “Thanks,” Danny said with a grateful smirk. “Knowing you’re thinking about my dick makes it better. As long as you don’t walk into a bus or anything while you’re thinking about it.”

  Luke grinned, then the grin turned to a grimace when he flexed his leg to work the kinks out of his injured knee. It would be sore for a couple of days. At least until the skin healed. His elbow and ear too. Overall, however, Luke figured he had got off pretty easy. The night’s adventures could have resulted in considerably worse injuries.

  Danny was still stroking Luke’s calves and thinking out loud. “I couldn’t believe it when you woke me up and told me what happened. I didn’t even hear you leave the house. I guess it’s just as well. I couldn’t have gone with you anyway.”

  “No,” Luke said, “but I wish I had woken you up. Maybe if you had been watching from the bedroom window, you could have seen who it was that ran out my back door after knocking me ass-over-teakettle down the stairs.”

  “Yeah,” Danny conceded. “Maybe.”

  Silence fell around them as they thought about all that had happened. Granger snoozed in the corner, worn out from all the excitement. Frederick was God-knows-where. The kitchen clock was ticking away the seconds on the wall above the Mr. Coffee machine, sounding really loud in the wee small hours of the morning when the rest of the world was pretty much conked out. Except for them and the pervert, of course. They were still up. Luke supposed it had been quite a night for all three of them.

  Finally, Luke asked the question that had been preying on both their minds. The question they had managed to avoid, so far, but couldn’t avoid any longer. He figured it was time somebody asked it, and it might as well be him. Get all the bad shit out in the open: that was his motto. Or it seemed to be.

  “Danny, do you think this has anything to do with the killings? Do you think those kids are right? About the killer living in the neighborhood, I mean. Or was this just some sicko numbnuts pervert out on a mission to whack off on somebody else’s Fruit of the Looms?”

  Danny didn’t answer. Not directly. But he did ask the second question they had both been avoiding. “So—what do you think? Was it Childers?”

  Luke had been considering that very question. It was all tangled up in his mind. It was like someone had tossed snippets of memory from all the night’s events into a hat and stirred them up. Tumbling down the stairs bass-ackwards. Hearing the baseball bat clatter on the landing below after it went flying out of his grip. Hearing Granger growl like an enraged wolf when he was really just a pussycat and even the bad guy probably knew it. Listening to his own brains bounce around inside his brainpan after hitting that last step as hard as he did with the back of his head.

  Luke tried to sift through all those memory bytes to get to what really mattered. He saw again the two hands shooting out of the shadows to shove him down the stairs. He saw long legs flying over him as he lay twisted in a pile at the foot of the stairs, stunned. He heard someone gasping for breath and muttering curses as they threw themselves through the back door.

  Was it Childers? Could it have been him? Luke wasn’t sure.

  Luke was hesitant when he spoke, still trying to sort it all out in his mind. “I have an impression in my head that the guy was taller than Childers. But I was on my ass at the bottom of a flight of stairs, so maybe that’s why the guy looked taller. I don’t know, Danny. If you were a cop and you were asking me if I could identify the intruder in a police line-up, I’d have to say—no. Not in a million years. It could have been Childers. It could have been you. It could have been Santa Claus. I just don’t know.” After a moment, Luke added, “Well, maybe not Santa Claus. This guy wasn’t fat.”

  A third question suddenly popped into Danny’s head. It stopped him cold. It was a question which had not occurred to Danny until this very second. He didn’t like this question at all, but he had to ask it. So he did, although it made his blood run cold just to hear the words coming out of his mouth.

  “Luke, if it was really the killer who was in your house tonight, do you think that means he’s after you now? Do you think you’re his next intended victim?”

  Luke gazed down at the seriousness on Danny’s face. A deadly fear burned in Danny’s eyes as he looked up at Luke from where he was still squatting on the kitchen floor between Luke’s legs. Danny’s big gentle hands were still cupping Luke’s thighs, and Luke loved feeling them there against his skin.

  “I love you so much,” Luke said, unable to stop the words from pouring out. “And—I don’t know the answer to what you’re asking me. I hope the hell not. I don’t want to be anybody’s next victim. What do you think?”

  Danny stroked the back of Luke’s legs as he spoke. His words were so softly uttered Luke could barely hear them. They were softly uttered because Danny didn’t want to say them. But he knew he had to. There was no getting around it.

  “I think you look a little like that blond guy on the news. The one that’s missing. I think if this asshole has a thing for young guys, he would sure as hell come after you because you are without a doubt the most gorgeous young guy I�
�ve ever seen in my life. I also think we have to assume he is coming after you, just to be on the safe side. I think we should barricade ourselves inside this house until our dads get back. That’s what I think. That’s exactly what I think.”

  Luke opened his mouth to say—what? For one of the few times in his life he found himself truly speechless. His brain was sure in hyperdrive, though, for all the good it was doing him.

  A tentative tap at the back door made them both whirl around. That wasn’t the sound of Frederick bumping his way through the pet door. That sound was made by a human hand.

  In tandem, Luke and Danny gazed back into each other’s faces with wide, startled eyes. Then they turned toward the clock to see what time it was. It was almost three in the morning. Who the hell would knock on their door at three in the morning?

  Danny’s first instinct was to turn the lights out and hide. His second instinct was the one he decided to run with. He took a deep breath, grabbed the baseball bat from the kitchen table where Luke had left it, and strode bravely to the back door on his clompy-ass cast and flung the damn thing open.

  It took Danny exactly four seconds to do all that. While he did, Luke didn’t move from the kitchen table, although he did catch himself looking around for another weapon, just in case.

  But he didn’t find one. Not before he heard Danny say, “Oh! It’s you! I—I—well, shit, oh, excuse me, didn’t mean to say shit. Well, please, don’t just stand out there in the dark. Come on in.”

  And Luke found himself rising to his feet. He had always been taught to rise to his feet when a lady entered a room. Even at three in the morning. And even if the lady was wearing fluffy pink house slippers with fluffy pink rabbit ears poking up off the toes.