Past The Patch

by Brian Fatah Steele

  “The children are adopted,” Mrs. Mears said. She was flustered and embarrassed and angry.

  “Sarah,” Lomax said softly, “Don’t say any more.”

  Brenda pointed the gun at the ceiling. “Liz, Marisa, check upstairs.

  Find those kids. Patty, take a look outside, and if there’s a basement check that.”

  When they were gone Brenda sat silently for a while, then she chuckled. “Lomax. Strutting through the courtroom, swinging those big fucking balls around and twisting every jury to think just like you. You and your teams of little secretaries or paralegals or whatever they were. Were you banging them, Lomax? You always had pretty ones with you taking notes and carrying your cases of files. I bet you did. I bet you made them blow you.”

  He had done just that, but Lomax considered that his old life, something he was trying to make up for.

  Brenda got up and got a glass of water. When she sat down again, she brought edge of the gun butt down on Lomax’s left knee. He wasn’t expecting it, and he let out a yell.

  She laughed her raw, throaty laugh. “Hurts, huh?”

  Lomax said nothing. He wanted to tell her she was just a raw-boned ugly dyke with no brains, thinning hair and eyes that looked like the lids had been peeled off, cold, ignorant reptile eyes. But he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want her going off on Mrs. Mears.

  Mrs. Mears asked, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Sarah,” Lomax said. “Be quiet.”

  Mrs. Mears cocked a defiant eyebrow at him.

  Brenda looked at Lomax a moment and then punched him in the gut again, putting her considerable weight and muscle behind the blow. “She’s got a right to speak. Every woman has a right to speak. Guys like you don’t want a woman to speak. Guys like you just want to fill a woman’s mouth with cock.”

  Lomax couldn’t say anything. One more hit like that and he was going to puke.

  Brenda got up and stepped close to Mrs. Mears. “Why am I doing this? Because that fucker Lomax has to be taught a lesson. And because I can.” She touched Mrs. Mears braid, looking at the colors within those red and gold strands. “Figures that even out here in the middle of fuck all Lomax would find himself a babe.” Brenda cupped Mrs. Mears’ cheek, and then bent quickly, kissing her on the lips.

  “You dis gust ing woman,” Mrs. Mears said, as she turned her face away.

  Brenda’s face colored, becoming a dull red, like sun-bleached brick.

  She jammed a hand up under Mrs. Mears skirt. “If I wanna—“

  “What the fuck is this?”

  Brenda turned and saw Marisa standing by the door to the hall. She shrugged. “Just playing around, mi niña.”

  Marisa came into the kitchen, followed by Liz. “We didn’t see any kids upstairs,” Liz said.

  Patty appeared a moment later. “Brenda, I checked outside like you asked, but the basement . . . It’s crazy down there, all dark, and there’s all kinds of weird twists and turns.”

  “For fuck sake,” Brenda said. She got up, crossed the hall to the basement door, and fired a single shot down into the darkness. She shouted, her voice rolling like thunder. “If you kids aren’t up here and in the kitchen in five minutes I am going to shoot your daddy dead!” Lomax opened his mouth to tell the children to stay hidden. Marisa was ready for him. She had a rag from the kitchen sink in one hand, and she stuffed it in his mouth.

  Before the five minutes were up Claire, Lyle, Annie, Shae and Gary came into the kitchen. Gary and Claire were crying. Lyle was quiet and clearly angry. Annie was white with fear. Shae hugged Gary to her.

  “Geez,” Brenda said, gesturing with the gun toward Shae and Annie.

  “Those two are getting ripe. You poking them, Lomax?”

  “Shut your filthy mouth,” Shae said. Marisa slapped the girl so hard she fell to one knee. Gary started crying.

  “Fucking Christ, I need a drink,” Brenda said. She got up and started opening cupboard doors. At the back of a high shelf she found a bottle of bourbon. She took a deep swallow as if it were water and then sat by Lomax again. “You kids, sit on the floor. Now! ” They did as they were told.

  Brenda looked them over. “Christ, Lomax, you got girls, boys, a couple of whites, a half-breed with a big mouth,” that was directed at Shae,

  “and a nigger and a chink.” Brenda didn’t see Marisa and Liz frowning at this. “It’s a hell of a collection. Is this everyone?” Gary looked toward the kitchen window.

  “Who’s missing?”

  No one said a thing.

  Brenda leaned close to Lomax. She unzipped his fly and reached into his pants. “I’ll tear your daddy’s pee-pee off and eat it if you don’t tell me who isn’t here,” Brenda said.

  Lomax’s face burned red with shame and he bellowed, “You psychotic bitch!”

  “Eddy,” Gary said. “He’th my big brother. He’th ten and when he theeth you he’th going to be really mad!” Then he started crying again. Shae hugged him and tried to calm him down.

  “Well,” Brenda said, zipping up Lomax’s fly and taking another drink. “Eddy.” She looked at Mrs. Mears and grinned. “He got hard when I had my hand on him.”

  “Bullshit,” Mrs. Mears said with utter contempt. “I know what it is to arouse a man. One look at you tells me you do not.” The older kids, who understood what Mrs. Mears was saying, gaped in astonishment.

  “You’re gonna get yours,” Brenda said to Mrs. Mears. Then she smiled at the children, and her smile was mean. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. Each one of my friends here is gonna tell your daddy how mean he was to them, and you’re all going to listen. I’m gonna give him a piece of my mind too. When we’re done, we’ll decide if he should live, or die.” She looked at Mrs. Mears. “And I’m personally gonna fuck up that pretty face and that big mouth.”

  The children started crying again, even Lyle, who had tried to act like a grown-up.

  One by one the women stood before Lomax and railed at him, detailing his offenses against them and the legal system.

  It was just past six in the evening when they finished. The sun had set outside, and a cool wind was blowing around the house.

  Brenda had been the last, screaming at Lomax and blaming him, and men like him, for everything that had gone wrong in her life. When she was done she straddled her chair again and spoke softly.

  “Do you have anything to say, Lomax?”

  “Yes,” he said. He looked at Brenda with pity, and regret. “It’s dark outside. It’s dinner time. And Eddy is coming home.” There were five things Eddy loved. In truth there were more than five, but when he tried to count beyond that number things grew hazy, and became just one more vast and hazy thing he loved.

  Eddy loved running. He ran for countless hours in every season, ranging to the far limits of the Big Sky Estate. In the spring he chased thunderstorms and in the summer he ran with the horses. In the fall he chased the wind, and in the winter he chased rabbits and deer. In the summer he often took a break in the heat of the day, sleeping under the porch in the spot Father had cleared for him while Father sat in his chair overhead, reading a book or just watching the big sky or the shadows of clouds moving across the world. Sometimes Father read aloud from his books, and sometimes Eddy understood the words, but usually he just napped, with Father watching over him.

  Eddy loved hunting. Father had told Eddy not to take down any big animals. No deer or wolves or horses. He chased them anyway, pretending to hunt, and when he hunted for real, giving in to the urges that drove him, he would hunt prairie dogs and other small creatures. He always left them on the back porch for Father.

  Eddy loved family. It took him a very long time to accept the scents of Father and Mrs. Mears and his brothers and sisters, but now they were a part of him. Father smelled strong and Mrs. Mears smelled warm and the children smelled of chocolate and chalk and grass stains and Kool Aid, and they all had their own special smells too, like Gary, who smelled of his little writing sticks. He loved them all.
>
  Eddy loved home. Home was the smells of the kitchen and the soap Mrs. Mears used to scrub him down in the big bathtub every night while saying, “Honestly, I don’t know how one little boy can get so filthy in one day.” Home was his bedroom, which he rarely used, but it was his, all that space was his, and home was his favorite spot under the back porch. Home was the place Eddy protected, his den, his safe place, his pack.

  Most of all Eddy loved Father. His old life was receding to a blur now, but sometimes he remembered it and those memories made him love Father even more. He remembered how he’d been beaten and kept in a basement, as long as the checks keep comin, a man who smelled like whiskey and cigarettes used to say. He remembered chains on his legs and being hit with a broom handle. He remembered seeing Father for the first time and feeling a big warm hand on his face and hearing why he’s just a little boy and you need a bath, young man, and room to run and then Father had taken him home. He remembered the Rules of Father; don’t take down any big animals, don’t go beyond the far fences because people wouldn’t understand you, love your family, protect your brothers and sisters, be a good boy.

  The things Eddy loved went through his mind in a flash as he stood on the grassy veldt Lomax called the back field. He stood and breathed deeply of scents carried on the rising wind; fear, from his family, especially his brothers and sisters, and anger, from strangers. Strangers in his home.

  Strangers making his family feel afraid.

  He could smell blood. Father was bleeding.

  Eddy looked up at the silver sliver of moon high in the sky and shook his shaggy head. Then he broke into a loping, easy run for home.

  Brenda knew there was a big back porch on Lomax’s home because they had all circled the house once before coming up the front stairs. They were looking for dogs, which Brenda would have shot dead if she saw them.

  There wasn’t much in life that intimidated her, but dogs, big dogs, scared her.

  “Patty,” she said, “Go to the back door and see if anyone is coming.

  Liz, you check the front. You don’t have to stand outside and freeze your tits off, just keep an eye out the window.”

  Liz and Patty left the kitchen.

  “You adopted six kids, Lomax? Trying to make up for all the bad shit you did?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Lomax replied. “But I do not count my treatment of your quartet of reprobates among my sins.” Brenda didn’t do a slow burn this time. That dull red brick color filled her face instantly. She pressed the barrel of the gun against Lomax’s left shoulder and pulled the trigger.

  The sound of the shot was muffled and before the children started screaming Lomax heard splinters from the back of his chair and his own bone fragments striking the floor and the wall behind him. If the punches to the gut and getting pistol whipped were trips to the second or third floor of a house of pain, the gunshot that shattered his shoulder was jet-propelled trip up to the observation deck of a skyscraper. The pain was immense, and it rolled over him like a black tsunami.

  “You killed him!”

  Brenda looked at Mrs. Mears and then back at Lomax. “Nah, he’s still breathing. He—“

  A stabbing pain flared in her left thigh and she looked down. A number two pencil was sticking out of her leg and her blue jeans were turning purple as they soaked up her own blood. Gary was standing at her side, defiant.

  “You little cocksucker!”

  Brenda backhanded Gary and he fell to the floor crying. Lyle took a step forward and Brenda stood and kicked him in the gut. He fell on his side and vomited on the floor. Shae tried to stand up and Marisa grabbed her by the hair and threw her back down to the floor.

  “Stop it,” Lomax said. He wanted it to come out in a roar. Instead it was a pathetic wheeze. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Eddy is coming.”

  Brenda pulled the pencil out of her thigh and said, “Fuck Eddy,” and then raised the gun when she heard a metallic squeal, the clatter of wood, and a long, wavering scream from Patty at the back of the house.

  “Marisa,” Brenda said, easing herself into the chair again. “Go see what the fuck Patty’s doing back there.”

  “Okay,” Marisa said. She didn’t sound as sure of herself as she had earlier. Holding her switchblade in one hand, she crept down the hall.

  In the half light from the kitchen she saw Patty huddled by the back door. The door was open. The exterior screen door had been torn from its hinges and was lying on the porch. Patty was making shivery, gabbling noises as she hunkered down the dark.

  “Patty, what the fuck are you doin, bitch?” Marisa grabbed Patty’s shoulder and shook her, and pulled her to her feet, and when Patty turned around it was Marisa’s turn to scream.

  At the front door, Liz saw the doorknob turning. She pulled the door open, thinking the sooner she grabbed this ten year old boy and had everyone accounted for, the sooner they would be done and out of here, and she dearly wanted out of here.

  She only had a moment to register something orange coming at her and then the carved pumpkin from the porch struck her on one hip and burst open.

  She shouted, “You little brat!” and stepped onto the front porch just as someone, some thing, leaped up the stairs and came at her, teeth bared, jaws wide.

  Marisa ran into the kitchen screaming, “Her face, her face, something took her face,” and before Brenda could even begin to calm her, Liz appeared and took one last unsteady step through the kitchen doorway.

  Rhythmic jets of blood sprayed from Liz’s ravaged throat and her last breaths were released as small and wrenchingly sad piping sounds, like a breeze blowing on a broken reed. Liz dropped dead onto the kitchen floor, and Marisa screamed again.

  Brenda looked at the children, and Mrs. Mears, and Lomax. They weren’t screaming now. The younger children were grinning. The half-breed with the scar on her lip looked triumphant. Mrs. Mears head hung down, and she might have been whispering a prayer. Lomax said, “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Bullshit,” Brenda said, standing. “This is bullshit and if you think I’m going to be scared—“

  Something darted by the door to the TV room. Brenda fired a shot at a blur, naked flesh, shaggy hair, and then the mask of a woman’s face, it had to be a mask, slapped the floor at Brenda’s feet.

  There was movement in the hall doorway again. Brenda turned and shot at it with a barking laugh and saw a thing without a face, a thing wearing Patty’s blood-soaked clothes. It staggered and fall against one wall.

  Marisa said one more word, “No,” and then ran out into the hall. She was crying as she pulled the car keys from Patty’s pocket, hearing guttural, barking laughter from outside the front door. She ran down the hall in the opposite direction and jumped off the back porch. She almost made it to the side of the house when she felt twin flares of pain in her ankles and fell hard, her Achilles’ tendons slashed in two. She began to crawl, only realizing that her pants and panties were ripped away when she felt the cold night air on her skin. There was another burst of pain from one cheek of her ass and she rolled onto her side to see a slender, shaggy-haired shape outlined by the light from inside the house. The thing was holding her buttock in both hands and biting into it and chewing. Marisa was still convinced she could crawl around the house to the car as slender, boyish hands twisted her head with incredible strength, shattering the bones of her neck.

  Brenda stepped onto the back porch and saw the thing, whatever it was, let go of Marisa. Her niña’s head lolled loosely. Brenda fired a shot and was sure she hit it, but the thing leaped to one side, out of the light. She saw a dark blur and fired again and again, until pulling the trigger produced nothing but a dry click. She threw the gun away.

  “Fuck this, she said. She went back into the kitchen, took a big knife from the dish drainer by the sink and then grabbed the smallest kid, that little fuck Gary, and dragged him out onto the back porch. “I don’t know what the fuck you are,” she shouted, standing tall, her fear giving
way to confidence,

  “but I’m walking outta here in one piece or this kid—“ The old boards of the porch exploded between her feet and a shaggy head shot up. Brenda saw red eyes above a narrow muzzle and jaws gaping wide. Sharp teeth clamped shut on her crotch and she dropped the knife, letting go of Gary as those teeth sank deep, tearing denim and flesh. The head twisted back and forth, pulling at a meaty plug of skin and muscle and ripping away her very center. A torrent of blood spilled out of her and she felt light-headed.

  Brenda took a step, her face as white as the moon, and then she fell down the porch steps, the last of her blood rushing out of her as the shaggy-haired thing stood over her and sniffed at her in curiosity.

  Lomax felt relief when Gary ran into the kitchen, running right into Shae’s open arms.

  Eddy padded into the room a moment later. He was covered in blood and pawing at a wound on one arm.

  Lomax saw a gleam of light on metal and realized Eddy was holding the key to the handcuffs. Eddy licked one of Mrs. Mears’ hands, and then gently set his head in Lomax’s lap.

  “Daddy,” Eddy said

  “Good boy,” Lomax said, scratching behind one of Eddy’s ears and realizing they had one hell of a cleanup job ahead. “That’s a good boy.” INFECTED, YELLOWING MOMENTS

  Brian Fatah Steele

  Brian Fatah Steele, a member of the indie author co-op Dark Red Press, describes the majority of his work as "Epic Horror with lots of Explosions." Along with having written multiple books, his articles and stories have appeared in various e-magazines and online journals. Steele lives in Ohio with a few cats that are probably plotting his doom. Surviving on a diet primarily of coffee and cigarettes, he occasionally dabbles in Visual Arts and Music Production. He still hopes to one day become a Super Villain.