by David Beers
“I don’t know, sweetie.”
She nodded against his cheek, tears swelling again.
They released and both looked at Daniel. “You coming?”
He nodded.
Everyone faced the door then, and Alex reached for the handle.
Brittany Valdez looked out the door, standing behind her husband. She wouldn’t change her last name for anything, not even for the peace that had eluded her since she adopted it. She wasn’t ready to walk outside the room, to venture from the only place that seemed somewhat safe, to put Alex in danger again. She would never be ready and she doubted he was either; but, he had opened the door and she was going with him. She wasn’t following him with a blindfold over her eyes; she loved Alex and believed in him. Her husband was no liar, no escaped lunatic in need of a cage. He was right in this, and if they couldn’t stop what waited outside this room, she didn’t want to live without him anyway.
Alex went first, Brittany behind him, and Nayek bringing up the rear. The door closed behind them with a finality that Brittany felt in the deepest tissue of her organs.
Alex stopped for a moment, looking down both sides of the hall.
“Doesn’t really matter which way, does it?” He looked over his shoulder at Brittany, a smile on his face.
She didn’t smile back, not because she didn’t see the humor, but because she was frightened. Of dying. Of never seeing him again.
“Don’t look at me to pick. I don’t want you resenting me when bad shit starts happening.”
Alex laughed, turned around and kissed her. “Want one too?” he asked, looking at Nayek.
The smile Daniel wore in the room, the smirk of The All Knowing, had vanished. His lips were thin lines and his face growing pale. He gave Alex no answer.
“To the right then,” Alex said, beginning to walk.
Brittany reached for his hands and their fingers intertwined. They walked shoulder to shoulder, passing doors on both sides.
“What happens next?” she asked as they rounded a corner.
The answer came from the hall they looked down rather than the lips of her husband. What they saw was grotesque by any standard, but the purpose—or meaning of the act—was lost on Alex and Brittany.
Daniel’s body tensed, though, and a small gasp escaped his mouth.
27
Childhood
Daniel
“Did you lock the door?” Daniel’s father asked him.
Lying in bed with covers to his neck, Daniel nodded. He thought he might be getting too old for his father to tuck him in, that if the kids at school knew about this, he would instantly turn into a pariah (although he thought of the word loser). Still, he liked his dad sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapping Daniel in blankets, and talking for a few minutes. His mother came too, sometimes, and he liked that too.
“Good.” His father pushed the blankets tightly around Daniel, smiling down at him. “How was school?”
“Was okay. I have a test on Friday.” Daniel didn’t worry about grades, and his parents didn’t seem to either. Simple expectations existed, pretty much unspoken at this age—one was that he would make appropriate grades and anything else was beneath him.
“You ready for it?”
Daniel nodded, smiling. The rest of his eleven-year-old crew would hate him if they saw him like this, make fun of him for his entire life, but he couldn’t help smiling.
“I’m sure you are. Want to know what I’ve planned this weekend?”
Daniel nodded again, his eyes widening a bit with the underlying promise in his father’s voice.
“Six Flags opens.”
Daniel burst from the covers, unwrapping the tight cocoon his father had enclosed him in. His smile was now a flat-out grin. “Are you serious?” His dad was talking about the amusement park an hour away. Rollercoasters, water rides, shows, cotton candy and funnel cakes. His test was forgotten and the rest of the week with it.
His dad nodded. “Yup. You, me, and Mom. Waking up early Saturday and heading over there.”
Daniel hugged his father, his brain not sending a single impulse about the unacceptability of such an act from someone his age.
“All right, don’t get too excited. You still need to sleep tonight.” He pulled Daniel away, easing him back down.
“I’ll see ya in the morning, okay, kid?”
“Love you, Dad.”
“Love you too.”
His father left the room, flipping the lights off but leaving the door open.
Daniel locked the door every night, was one of his chores—taking out the trash, cleaning his bathroom, a few others. When his father asked him about it, the answer came easy because the act was habit now. It wasn’t as if their neighborhood was criminal, far from it actually. Daniel thought he knew what rich meant, and didn’t think his parents had that kind of money, but he knew they went on vacation every year and both his parents drove nice cars. Those things didn’t happen when you were poor, and certainly none of Daniel’s friends had been in any real trouble like Daniel sometimes saw on the news. Daniel understood the terms, in the most primitive and perhaps accurate way possible, of haves and have-nots. They were haves.
So going to bed with the door unlocked—as it was that night—would not have made Daniel’s father lose sleep.
His father’s suspicions had been on target; Daniel had a tough time falling asleep. His mind was already on the roller coasters, keeping adrenaline pumping through him.
When sleep finally came, it took him whole and deep—which played into his thoughts for years. The what-ifs that plagued everyone when looking into the past, when trying to figure out how things could have been different.
The gunshot sound cracked through Daniel’s sleep like a hammer on a walnut. It broke through the black fabric that cradled him, bringing him to the surface like he had been thrown into a pool of ice water. His eyes flashed open, and though he had never heard a gun outside of media, his mind had been trained to recognize something of that magnitude as only one possible thing. Years of news reports on guns, public speakers at schools, and even his parents discussing the dangers—something that boomed as loud as the sound waking him could only be that dreaded cancer of society—a gun.
He heard his mother then, screaming, but not his father. Things were moving, falling, crashing down the hall in his parents’ room. His mother’s shrieks rose above it all.
Daniel’s heart beat harder than it had in his entire, short life; his body seemed to have electricity running through it—each vein wired to a nuclear facility. Daniel scooted from his bed as the crashes stopped; his mother still screamed—which was somehow scarier with the rest of the house silent. His father, too. Daniel took his blanket, clenching it close. It fell away from his back, leaving his underwear visible. He shuffled forward, stepping on the blanket, trying not to trip as he walked to the open bedroom door. He didn’t want to look outside, didn’t want to leave his room, but his mother was hurting.
Where was his dad? That might have been what drove him outside his room; that with all this going on, his father didn’t utter a sound. Something very bad was happening to his mother and his father’s silence made Daniel think something worse had already happened.
He reached the open doorway and peeked into the hall, the front of his body still covered by the blanket he held. The door to his parents’ room stood open; he could see that much but no more—the darkness too deep. He still heard his mother, but the sounds were muffled now, not as ferocious or frantic as Daniel had heard from his bed. He left his room, knowing he was walking into danger. He went though, slowly, to see what was happening—what his mother screamed at and his father couldn’t speak on.
He looked inside his parents’ room and the image he saw wrote itself forever into his memory. It would never leave; Daniel could recall it with a single thought for the rest of his life, almost involuntarily. It wasn’t the worst part of what happened, but maybe the longest lasting.
His
mother—on the floor, on her back. He could see her face, her arms, but not her chest. Her arms were cast to her sides, like she lay on an invisible cross. Her teeth bit into her lower lip, her eyes closed—squinted hard, like her whole face wanted to keep her eyes from opening and witnessing what was on top of her. The man’s pants were down, just below his ass. He still wore his shirt. He held a gun in his right hand and the barrel against her temple. His ass moved up and down as he grunted.
Daniel turned his head, knowing instinctively it wasn’t his father heaving up and down on the floor. Where was his dad? Why wasn’t he stopping this?
The bed held the answer. Moonlight from the window shone across the mattress, giving the image in front of Daniel a grizzly, black and white feel to it. The covers were thrown from his father like he had been trying to get out of bed, only to realize he was better off lying down. His chest lay open, bone and skin no longer covering it, but baring his organs to the world. It struck Daniel as odd that his father should appear so naked. His penis showed, which his father would never have allowed to happen. He should have been covered, wearing underwear, and his chest sewn shut; he should have kept all this private.
The hole in his father’s body was massive, like an asteroid had hit rather than a bullet. It looked like oil covered him, but Daniel knew if the lighting had been different, he would see red. It smeared his father’s face and neck; his torso appeared to be made from the stuff.
Daniel cried out as he understood why his dad lay naked and quiet while his wife was raped below him.
The cry was more Daniel sucking air in than expelling it, but noise came anyway.
His mother saw him first, seeing him with wide open fear. The man turned around then—his ass still raising and lowering, God forbid he stop humping—and his lips rose in a snarl.
“RUN!” his mother screamed. Her arms stretched upward toward him, trying to grab him as her mouth told him to escape.
He looked to her, pulling his eyes from his dead father. The rapist began rising, finally stopping his incessant pumping. He kept almost falling as he tried to pull his pants over his ass and gain his feet at the same time.
“GO!” his mother raved again.
Daniel dropped the blanket but only stared on as the man came to his feet, just to realize the gun remained on the floor. His mother reached for it, her entire body scrambling for the weapon. The man bent back down and swung—his fist like a cannon ball in Daniel’s mind—and connected with her nose. Daniel heard the watery scream and nothing else—he ran. Running in his underwear, his sockless feet colliding with the floor and propelling him forward.
Down the hall. The door stood ajar and he slid through the crack, thinking of nothing—not his mother, his dead father, or where he was going—only terror forcing him onward.
The gun shot, the second of the night, brought him to a stop. He stood in his neighbor’s lawn, dew and grass sticking to his feet. His chest heaved up and down; his legs and knees shook. He turned around slowly, not seeing the lights in the neighborhood finally coming on. He looked back to his house, his parents’ house. The door stood wide open.
The man came to the door, pants on, gun securely in his hand. He looked across the lawns, his eyes finding Daniel.
The man started walking.
Daniel watched death approach without a single thought of running; the gun shot and the man coming toward him, those two things meant his mother would never walk out that door again. That she wouldn’t kiss his cheek or cut off the crust of his sandwiches—while lecturing him that the crust was the healthiest part. His mother and father wouldn’t leave their room, not on their own, not ever.
The man drew closer, raising the gun to chest level as he walked.
Daniel heard the shot, just as he had the other two. It echoed into the night, across houses, across the entire neighborhood. Daniel thought that funny, that he could hear the echo as he died.
Daniel fell to his knees. Tears ran down his face and a scream broke from his mouth, but he knew none of that. He only knew death as darkness took him.
Paul heard the noises and realized what they were immediately. Not because of movies or television or any other type of second hand knowledge—Vietnam came and went years ago for the world, but for the ones who had ‘served’ (whatever the hell that meant, thirty-something years later and Paul still didn’t know who or what he had been serving) it never truly left. Paul held war with him, in his bones, his dreams. He held it in his heart. The gunshots had simply strummed a chord across Paul’s soul, one not played for some time. A chord he never wanted to hear again, but one he had pulled across his heart and set himself.
He rose from his bed at the crack of the first shot; his wife’s eyes just opening.
“Where are you going?” Her words seemed to stick in her mouth as she spoke.
Exactly where was he going? What did he think he would do once he was standing?
“Was that a gun?” she asked. Her gray hair finally rose from the pillow.
Paul reached for the light on his nightstand, turning it on. “Yeah, it was.” He didn’t know where the shot came from, only that it wasn’t in his house.
He looked down at the skin on his hands. Just what the fuck was his old, black ass doing?
The second shot rang out.
His wife jumped, grabbing her pillow and pulling it to her.
Paul stared at his hands.
“Was that from the Nayek’s?” Fear ran through her voice. Her grip stayed tight on the pillow.
Paul nodded. Two shots, three people living in that house. Three damn good people. “Call nine-one-one.”
He went to his closet and reached for the storage up top. He pulled his rifle down—
“What are you doing?” his wife asked, her voice rising.
—and checked it for ammunition.
“Call the police,” he said. He gripped the gun, left hand on barrel, right on butt. He liked the Nayek’s, and more, that string across his soul was singing now; his age didn’t matter, the years since his last pulling a trigger didn’t matter—he had spent a decade training to kill. He’d done it too. Mowed plenty of people down that he didn’t know and would never know and he had only been there doing it because the color of his skin made sure his draft number came up first. Now at seventy-three, a family next door needed his help. Maybe more help than he had in him, but that was no reason to sit out, to wait on the police.
Paul Clover left the room without another word, wearing pajamas and a t-shirt, holding a rifle.
The sun didn’t care about Paul’s age, how bad his vision was, or what was happening in his neighbor’s house. At two in the morning, the sun hid just like it did every other night. Paul paused just outside his door and took in the scene on his lawn.
The kid, his name…David, or Daniel, or something else biblical, stood in Paul’s yard. He was breathing hard—his small chest heaving up and down—and watching a man approach from his house. That man was not Adam Nayek, the kid’s father. Paul moved, his feet bare but sturdy as they went over the wet grass. He couldn’t run, couldn’t alert the man that they were heading to the same point. Couldn’t yell at the kid to run, duck, or any-fucking-thing. He could only walk forward, hoping he made it in time.
Paul brought the rifle to his shoulder, still walking. The other man was entering Paul’s yard now but the gun still pointed at the ground.
The nerve of this cocksucker. Just going to walk on my goddamn property and kill someone, cool as night.
The man raised his gun and Paul’s thoughts fled.
Paul pulled the trigger.
The gun recoiled and Paul’s eyes snapped shut and reopened automatically. The man was falling, his head pulverized by the bullet—the right half of his skull was no more. He looked at the child, dropping the barrel of the gun as he did, and felt his heart stop beating. The kid, in only his undies, fell to his knees.
“No, no,” Paul said, dropping the gun.
He rushed to the
child on the ground before him.
Daniel looked at his grandparents. His grandfather held a suitcase in each hand. His grandmother smiled and it stretched to her eyes…but sadness lived there too. Daniel sat on his bed—the room a small thing with a sink and a window. Nothing hung on the walls, although the staff told him it was okay to do so.
He saw his grandparents every day for the past six months. He had only seen the suitcase the first day, though. No smiling then, from anyone. Daniel knew what today was, what the bags meant—everyone knew. He was going home.
“Where’s home?” he had asked his grandparents when they told him.
“With us. To our house,” his grandpa answered.
Daniel said nothing then and wasn’t saying anything now. He looked around the small, white room, wondering if he would ever miss it. The place had given him solitude, daily. Not peace, that couldn’t be found anywhere—but it did allow him to cave away for hours.
“Are you ready?” his grandma asked.
He looked at the floor, the white linoleum that always felt cold on his feet. Ready for what? To go somewhere else that he would never see his parents at? Ready to sleep in another bed and see that man on top of his mother? No, not ready for that.
He nodded anyway and stood.
His grandma came and took his hand. She bent down and kissed his cheek; Daniel could smell the shampoo she used as her hair passed his face. “We’re glad to have you. We love you.” She hugged him, but his hands only hung at his sides. “We’ll get through this,” she said, and Daniel could hear the tears through her voice.
He didn’t cry. His parents couldn’t cry anymore, so what right did he have to?
28
Days Past
Alex, Brittany, & Daniel
Alex’s stomach seized up, clenching like he would vomit. He understood what he saw; his brain tried to push him away, to make him quit watching—he looked on though, unable to turn away. He couldn’t even look to Brittany, the sight held him so enraptured.