by Chuck Wendig
A homeless dude in Hawaiian shorts and a grungy polo sits nearby. Head leaning back against a brick wall, snoring. A skinny dog slumbers in his lap.
Across the street, two kids with skateboards scream obscenities and threats at one another: fuck you, no fuck you, you piece of shit, suck my dick if you think I’mma—
Whatever. Cason hates this town. Always has. Always will.
He flags a cab and gets in.
“WHERE TO, CHIEF?”
Big black dude driving the taxi; looks too big for the car. His accent is—well, Cason doesn’t know. African, if he had to guess.
“Uh, hold on,” Cason says. He pulls his wallet. Fishes through money—not much else in the wallet besides that—and feels a cold spike of panic lance his heart. He can’t find it. It’s not here. It’s not here.
But then, it is there. Tucked in the fold of a fiver.
He goes to hand the little piece of paper across the seat, but the cabbie’s behind a Plexiglas divider. Instead, he reads it off.
The cabbie laughs. “That’s... that’s not in the city, my man.”
“I know. It’s up in Bucks County.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I don’t drive there.”
“Please. You have to.”
“No. No. This isn’t—this isn’t what I do, chief. You find another cab. Okay?”
“Not okay. Here, look—” Cason starts pulling out money. “Hundred bucks. Fifty now. Fifty when I get there.”
The cabbie turns and stares at him through the scratched up Plexiglas. Guy’s got a stare that could make a tiger show its belly. “Seventy-five now. Seventy-five when we get there. That’s it. That’s the deal, man.”
“Fine. Yeah. That’s the deal, then.” Cason fishes out money. Counts it. Pops it in the little drawer and pushes it through.
The cab pulls away from the curb.
THE CRACKLE OF fire.
Windshield glass on asphalt.
Blood on the road.
Cason tries to get his hands under him, but it’s they’re like rubber bands without any tension and everything feels slippery and melty and scorched like burned butter—
He rolls onto his back. His head feels ten times bigger. A medicine ball on a broomstick. Feeling like a dozen kids are kicking it all at once. Whoomp whoomp whoomp whoomp.
Smells smoke.
Oh, god. God, no.
Alison. And Barney.
No, no, no, no, NO.
He sits up—whole body feels like he’s been in the ring with all the fighters he’s ever fought, Muay Thai and Jeet Kune Do and Greco-Roman motherfuckers all at once—but somehow he hinges his body and pushes through the pain to sit, then stand.
His car, the Honda, is off to the side of the road. The white SUV that t-boned them—a Yukon full-size—has a crumpled front-end but otherwise looks fine. No driver there.
But the Honda is on fire.
Cason runs toward the vehicle that’s bright and hot like the tip of a flare.
Alison starts to scream.
It’s not a horror movie scream, it’s not a just-saw-a-mouse-in-the-kitchen scream. It’s a jagged, jerking thing, as alive a thing as it can be—it’s the scream of someone burning to death.
Alison is burning.
And Barney—
“HEY, MAN, YOU from Philly?”
Cason shudders awake like a man rising out of cold water. He sucks in a hard gasp of air and looks around. The cab. Plexiglas. Torn-and-taped seat. Big dude driving.
“What?” Cason asks.
“You asleep?”
“What? No; well. Was.” He shakes his head, pushes the sleepiness back to the margins. Still hears the distant echo of that scream in the back of his mind. “What’d you wanna know again?”
“I didn’t mean to wake you, chief. I just ask: you from the city?”
“Kenzo. Kensington.”
“Yeah, man. I know Kensington.”
“I don’t live there anymore. Area turned to shit. It’s all drugs and jailhouse tats and—it’s trouble. Everything there is trouble.”
Outside, the sodium lights of the turnpike whizz past as they head north.
“You got family back there?”
Cason blinks. Family. “A brother.” A useless insane fuck of a brother. “You?”
“Got a big damn family, man. Big damn family. Brothers and sisters and cousins and my mother and more cousins and—you know. Big damn family. Right? Still live with them over in Gray’s Ferry.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Cason says, regretting the words as soon as they tumble out of his mouth, like so much ash. “Wait, hold up, I don’t mean anything by it—”
“No, chief, you’re right. It’s shit there. It’s all shit. Everybody mad at everybody else. Last week a woman got stabbed there, you know? Right on the corner. Drug corner or something. They don’t know if one of the dealers did it or one of the white-boy Catholics who are mad at the dealers, but it doesn’t even matter. Because a woman is dead.”
“That’s Philadelphia.” That’s why I hate this town.
“My brothers all want to pray, you see? They want to pray it all away.”
“They church folk?”
“No, no, Islam. Nation of Islam.”
“You’re Muslim?”
“Not me, man. Not me. I don’t believe in made-up fairy tales, right? That’s all bullshit, man. It’s all bullshit. You believe in that?”
I just saw a man turn to a skin-suit filled with feathers. A man who made me his indentured servant for the last five years because of a ‘bargain’ we made. A man who had a power over other people like I’ve never seen before and will hopefully never see again.
He says none of that. Instead he just says, “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
“That’s the truth, man. That’s the truth of it all.”
“Truth.” Cason rubs his eyes. “Yup.”
“Where we going, anyway?”
“I told you. Bucks County. Doylestown. You need the address again?”
“No, man, I got that, I mean, what you got there? Who you got?”
“Family.”
“Not the brother.”
“Different family.”
“Parents?”
Cason shakes his head. “Both dead.”
“Wife? Kids?”
“I, ah, don’t know.” It’s an honest answer, but not a good one.
“Okay, okay, that’s cool, chief. That’s all cool.”
CHAPTER THREE
Homecoming
DOYLESTOWN. SUBURB OF Philly. Tree-lined streets. Little boutique shops. Old movie theater still up and running, the marquee bulbs pushing back the night. A town for nice people. A town for people with money.
The cab sits at a light. A gaggle of white kids comes out of a corner Starbucks, lingering and loitering in the middle of the street. Laughing. Playing grab-ass with one another. The cabbie blows the horn, rolls down the window, yells at the kids: “Hey! Fuck this, man! Move, move! Move your shit-cans!” Way he says shit-cans it almost sounds to Cason like chickens. The mob of kids break apart, mopey and indignant.
The car eases through the intersection. Turns down a residential street.
The closer they get, the more anxious Cason feels. He gnaws at a thumbnail. Chews the inside of his cheek. Feet tapping. Knuckles popping. He wants to punch something. Kick it. Slam his head into it. Every nervous habit built up over his thirty-five years of life come back to haunt him; ghosts of the body lured by the séance of a reunion he never thought would—or could—happen.
“This is it up here, man,” the cabbie says. No way to pull into the curb—too many cars parked on the street—but there’s no traffic, so he just pulls the car up and stops.
Cason stares. The house isn’t a big one—just a little white square plopped between a pair of old and mighty Victorians, each of those probably a mansion containing mansions. But the little white house is nice in its own way—flowers out front, a big tree giving the patch of lawn
some shade, shutters slapped with a fresh coat of barn-red paint. Even a little house like this in a town like this probably cost bank. Money that came from where, he doesn’t know. And is afraid to ask.
“Hey,” the cabbie says, snapping his fingers. “I see what this is now.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You’re seeing a lady. Your lady. But you have not seen her in a long while. And you worry she does not want to see you. Maybe you two, separated. Maybe a divorce. Do I have this right, man?”
“Separated,” Cason says. True enough.
“I tell you what. I drive around a few times. I give it ten minutes. If you don’t come back out inside ten minutes I know your lady still likes you and you don’t need a ride.”
“All right. I appreciate that.”
“My name’s Tundu, but people, they just call me ‘T.’”
“Cason. Cason Cole.”
Tundu—‘T.’—continues to stare at Cason. Unblinking.
“What?”
“Still gonna need that money, my man.”
Right. Cason thumbs another seventy-five bucks out of his wallet, and into the drawer it goes.
“Good luck, chief.”
“I’m gonna need it.”
And with that, Cason steps out of the cab.
HE HASN’T FELT this way in a long, long time. Hell—he hasn’t felt much at all in a long, long time. Being with E. was like what he heard happens to meth-heads: the first high is the best high and everything after that is just diminishing returns as the dragon you’re chasing flies further and further away. Worse, it blows out your brain’s ability to make dopamine, and so the only way you feel anything resembling joy or happiness or excitement is by—drum roll please—smoking more crystal.
Being around E. was the high—everything brighter and shinier, all the sharp edges rounder, all the hard surfaces softer. All is glitter, all is gold. But then he’d go back into his room or into the basement or out to some club and it’d be that magic trick where someone pulls the tablecloth out from under the place settings, except here the trick fucked up and all the shit fell to the floor—silverware clattering, plates breaking, wine spilling on once-nice carpets.
But this, this...
Cason feels alive again.
Giddy and sick and nervous.
Like a kid on Prom night about to see his date in her dress for the first time. No! Like a kid asking a girl to Prom—and not knowing how she’ll answer. That sour pit of battery acid in the gut. The shallow breathing. The heart doing laps.
He walks up to the front door. It’s just past nine and the lights are still on inside—squares of golden glow like portals in the blue-dark.
Cason holds his breath.
Says a small prayer to whatever saint is listening.
Then knocks.
Footsteps on the other side. Thump thump thump thump.
Little feet. Quick succession.
The door opens and there stands his son.
Barney. Now seven years old. Cason feels like he’s looking in a mirror—a circus mirror, maybe, a mirror that takes off his age and vacuums up all the excess paunch he’s built up over the last few years, but they share many features. The mop-tangle of black hair. The dark little eyes. Strong nose above thin lips.
“Hey, buddy,” Cason says. Eyes burning with tears that he blinks back.
Barney just stares. Takes one step backward.
He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t remember. Jesus, how could he?
A flutter of curtains at the window.
Then—
Alison.
Red hair pulled back in a ponytail. Pale as a swan with a long neck to match. Long and graceful and thin as a reed, and even the floppy yellow latex dishwashing gloves that go to her elbows and drip soap suds can’t cheapen her beauty.
“Al,” he says. He can’t say her full name because his voice is about to crack and he knows he’ll sob, and this moment can’t be all blubbering bullshit tears.
She sees him.
She recognizes him.
Her eyes narrow—
She takes a half-step back into the kitchen. He hears something—metal on metal.
Then she’s back. And she’s got a stainless steel skillet in her hand.
Alison moves fast. Says something to the boy, who retreats into the hall as she pushes past, coming at Cason with the speed and determination of a starving cheetah—he backpedals off the stoop and back down to the walkway, almost tripping over a couple of solar lights stuck into the grass.
His reflexes are like boots stuck in mud. He hasn’t been in a fight—hasn’t been a fighter—in years. He throws up his arm but between almost tripping and straight-up not-believing this is even happening, he’s too slow.
The skillet cracks him across the head.
Fireworks flash behind the dark of his eye—he staggers backward, falls onto his side, onto his hip. “Alison! Alison, it’s Cason—”
Wham. The skillet comes down between his shoulder blades. Once. Twice. A third time. Hard, too—she’s stronger than she looks. She always was, maybe, but this is different. This is power a human does not normally possess. He turns, stops the next attack by catching her wrist—
“Alison,” he pleads.
But her eyes are wild. Frenzied. Barely even human.
This isn’t anger. Or bitterness. Or lost love.
She wants him dead. Genuine bonafide grade-A dead.
The spell. The curse. Whatever the fuck it is, it’s still ‘on.’ Still active.
And then the frozen wall slams down inside his head and a terrible thought is captured there in the ice: You’re not free at all, Cason.
Alison bares her teeth and hisses. He gives her hand a twist and the fingers open—the skillet thuds into the grass. She screeches like an owl. Mouth open. Hungry teeth ready to bite. Cason’s muscle memory kicks in; he’s older, slower, sloppier, but written into his body are reflexes that cannot easily be deprogrammed—
Her anger, hot and present, still falls against the old ghosts of his training. Cason twists his body beneath her, reaches up, flips her onto her back—the air blasting out of her lungs, her eyes losing focus.
“Al, please, don’t do this.” Maybe if he can just—get through to her somehow? Clear the fog, move the clouds, pull her back down to earth. “It’s me. It’s Case. Baby, c’mon, think, think—”
Suddenly—there’s Barney. Standing next to him. Face the very model of placid, child-like innocence. The undisturbed waters of a mountain lake.
Moon eyes and pursed lips.
And a glint of gold. A ribbon of window-light caught in a small blade.
A paring knife, by the look of it.
“Hey, buddy,” Cason says, and he’s about to ask, Whatcha doin’ with that—
Barney stabs the knife into Cason’s back.
Pain blooms like a bloody rose.
Cason cries out. Tumbles off Alison with the knife still stuck. Gets his feet under him—starts to run, but then the dewy grass is slick under the soles of his boots and he goes down again. She’s on him. Fists beating into the sides of his head. One hand grabs the knife, starts yanking it like a lever.
The boy hurries over to the skillet, picks it up with a mad, empty gleam in his eye.
Cason’s mind is a pinball machine on full tilt. But through it all, a single thought screaming louder and louder: Don’t hurt her don’t hurt her don’t hurt either of them—
Run.
He grabs her arm, shifts his weight and twists—
Alison flips over his shoulder onto her back.
Barney’s mouth opens. A keening wails from the back of his throat—not a human sound, but the sound of storms and wind and rain tearing through an open window.
Everything’s a blur—Cason’s back up, feet planted on the lawn, then on the sidewalk, careful not to trip on concrete buckled by tree roots swelling underneath. Barney’s after him, skillet spinning in the child’s grip. Before Cason knows what’s
happening, he’s slamming hard against a yellow car door in the street—
Big black hands grab his shoulders, pull him into the passenger seat through an open window. His feet still dangling—a skillet cracks hard against his ankle. It’ll bruise, but the thickness of his boot saves it from anything worse than that.
“Holy shit, man!” Tundu cries, then steps on the gas like a man trying to break another man’s neck just by standing on it—
Tires squeal.
The car moves and Cason tumbles inside.
THEY SIT IN the car for a while. Nobody saying shit. Tundu occasionally gives Cason a look—an incredulous and expectant whoa-what-the-fuck look—but Cason just tries to keep his eyes forward. He leans forward, plants the heels of his hands on the cab’s dash. As if doing that will steady the world and force it all to make sense.
Tundu pulls the cab south out of town. Back on the highway, heading toward the turnpike. Finally, Tundu speaks: “Yo. Man. You got a knife sticking out of your back.”
“Uh-huh,” Cason says.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Yeah.”
“On my seats.”
A hard swallow. A sniff, a blink. “Sorry.”
“You need a hospital.”
“I’m good.”
That does it. Tundu topples off the ledge, and with him falls any sense of calmness or propriety: “You got a fucking knife! In your fucking back! Hey! Man! Some little kid was hitting you with a frying pan! Some crazy bitch beating you up on the lawn! What the hell, man? What the hell was all that about?”
“She’s... not a crazy bitch.” Cason’s jaw sets tight. “Something is wrong with her.”
“Yeah. She’s crazy like a crazy bitch.”
“I said she’s not a bitch. And she’s not crazy, either. She’s got a, a...” He wants to say, she’s got a spell put on her, but he bites those words in half before they get out of his mouth. “She’s my wife, okay? That was my wife and son.”
Tundu’s gaze darkens. Eyes narrow to suspicious slits. “What’d you do?”
“Huh?”