by Billy Wells
The gamer scrambled from his seat and pounced on Barry, sending him to the floor. Like a wild man, he pummeled him with vicious blows and screamed, “You’ve killed us all, you moron!”
He broke Barry’s nose and pounded his face into a bloody pulp until he finally realized what he was doing wouldn’t make a hill of beans worth of difference now. Pushing back on the carpet and leaning against the seat behind him, the gamer picked up the bottle of champagne from the floor and took a swig of the bubbly left inside. The passengers and the flight attendants paid no attention to the outburst behind them. Each of them had their own personal losses to deal with, and nothing else mattered.
A voice resonated from the speakers throughout the plane, barely recognizable as the pilot, “We have just received word that China and North Korea have been obliterated by unidentified nuclear weapons in response to their mounting an additional attack on the United States. Russia has initiated a similar attack, and their warheads will enter our airspace at any moment. I am told there is little hope that our military in its current state can prevent the impending incineration of our country. May God have mercy on our souls.”
Barry looked at the battered laptop on the floor with a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. The last thing he saw was a great white light, and then there was nothing.
WHO’S YOUR DADDY
The wake and the funeral were over, and Cecil was alone in the house where he’d grown up. His mother, Katherine, had died of a heart attack at the age of 70.
As he sat on the sofa nursing a warm beer in the old house, he kept looking at the pictures of his mother and him at different stages of his life. Conspicuously, the father he had never known was not among them. His mother had said he died in an automobile accident just before he was born. He wondered what his old man was like, and why no one ever wanted to talk about him.
Somehow, the loss of his mother had affected him more than he thought possible. He had broken into tears several times that day which was something he had never done as far back as he could remember. The sense of being totally alone in the world with no one he could count on to be there no matter what had rocked his world more than he had thought possible. He had made casual friends at work, but no one he had ever confided in like his mother. She knew everything about him. Things no one else would ever know. He actually felt a need to be with another human being on this fateful night. The old house seemed extremely creepy without his mother in it.
Since he had left the neighborhood thirteen years before to take a job 700 miles away in Atlanta, he couldn’t think of anyone to call except the couple next door who’d helped him with the funeral arrangements. Where were the old friends he used to know? Why had he made no effort to keep in touch? His best buddies and the crazy things they’d gotten into in high school lingered on his mind but only as nostalgic memories.
He went to the kitchen, and finding the telephone number in the address book near the phone, he called the elderly couple. After three rings, the lady next door answered, “Hello. This is the Phelps’ residence.”
“Hello, Margaret, this is Cecil next door. I wonder if I could come over and talk for a while. I’m feeling very lonely in this big house by myself, and there’s no one else I know to call, but you.”
After a muffled word to someone else, and then a lengthy pause, she replied, “Why, sure, Cecil. I’m preparing dinner for Abe and me. You’re welcome to join us, but keep in mind, it’s been a long day, and we were planning to turn in early.”
“I understand. I’ll just come for a little while.”
Cecil put down the phone and made a beeline out the door. Margaret seemed less friendly than when he’d arrived, but he agreed, it had been a long day for all of them, and she had lost a dear friend.
Abe greeted him and ushered him into the dining room. The aroma of the hot food brought back fond memories of his mother’s home style cooking. After making small talk during dinner, helping them with the dishes, and cleaning off the table, the three of them settled on a sectional in the living room. The TV was on, but the volume was barely audible.
Cecil was first to speak, “While I was sitting in the living room, reminiscing the pictures of my mother and me on the wall, it occurred to me, I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of my father. Living next door for forty-six years, I assume you got to know him to some extent before I was born. What can you tell me about him?”
Margaret and her husband exchanged glances, and after clearing her throat, Margaret said, “As I remember, he was about six feet tall and of medium build. To be frank, he looked a lot like you at your age, much more so than Katherine.”
“What did he do for a living?”
Margaret looked at her husband nervously, and replied, “As I recall, your father had quite a few jobs. He was kind of a jack of all trades.”
“Master of none, I suppose?” Cecil remarked with a laugh.
“I don’t know about that, but most of the time we knew him, he was a traveling salesmen. He was on the road so much of the time, we rarely saw him.”
Cecil tossed this piece of information around in his head to see if it corresponded with what his mother had said. He didn’t remember anything about his father being a traveling salesman.
“My mother said my father’s name was Phillip.”
Abe fielded the question, “That’s right, Phillip Blevens.”
“Blevens? That can’t be,” Cecil blurted. “My name is Williams. You must be mistaken.”
“What am I thinking about?” Abe said nervously. “I must have been having a senior moment. Of course, his name was Phillip Williams.”
When the TV news commentator mentioned almost imperceptibly that a homeless man had been found in an alley off of Lincoln Avenue with his face partially eaten, Margaret’s almost dropped the coffee cup she held. Regaining her composure, her expression returned to normal as if the news flash meant nothing to her.
After an uncomfortable pause, Cecil asked Abe, “Did you and Margaret get together with my parents socially before I came along?”
Margaret answered quickly, apparently trying to speak before Abe replied, “Not really. I did things with Katherine… bridge, mahjong, but Phillip was always a loner when he wasn’t on the road.” She paused, and looking weary said, “Cecil, I’m really sorry, but I’m developing a migraine. I hate to cut your visit short, but I’m going to have to turn in.”
“Would it be all right if I come back tomorrow and talk with you before I return to Atlanta?”
Margaret responded immediately, “I’m sorry, but we’re going away the next few days. Why don’t you call us next week if you think of anything else you’d like to know.”
The three of them stood. Cecil thanked them for the dinner and the company and returned to his home next door.
Something about the entire conversation with the next-door neighbors didn’t sit right with him. He couldn’t understand how they could live next door for twelve years before he was born and know so little about his father. He suspected they’d been lying about him all evening. Abe getting his father’s name wrong was really suspicious. After that, it was obvious Margaret didn’t want him to answer any more questions.
With nothing else to do that evening and without cable on the TV, Cecil decided to box up his mother’s personal items and put them in his car. To his amazement, he found the house peculiarly free of personal items. Had someone come into the house after his mother died and taken everything that pertained to the past? The house didn’t have a basement, but he remembered his mother had stored boxes in the attic when he was growing up.
Climbing the stairs off the kitchen to the attic, he didn’t find any boxes of photographs and memorabilia. In fact, a box of extra ceramic tile pieces for the kitchen, and two old curtain rods were the only items stored in the huge space. Afterward, he looked in the garage. At first, he thought it too had no personal items, but on a high shelf tucked away in a corner, he found a small box with twelve pictures f
rom his childhood.
How could his mother and dad accumulate so little? He couldn’t remember any fires or floods to explain why their personal items would be missing.
The day had been a nightmare, so he decided to turn in early, but in spite of his exhaustion, the mystery of the missing items weighed heavily on his mind.
The next morning, he called Margaret. He was surprised she answered on the first ring, until he sensed her considerable agitation when she recognized his voice, “I know you’re going out, and I won’t detain you, but after searching the entire house, including the attic and the garage, I only found twelve pictures of me growing up. I remember photograph albums, scrapbooks, files of tax returns, and boxes of my teenage stuff my mother stored in the attic. All of it’s missing. Do you have any idea what could have happened to these things?”
The silence on the line was maddening to Cecil as if every word was like pulling teeth. For a moment, he thought he’d lost the connection and was ready to redial when Margaret said, “I’m sorry, Cecil, but I don’t have any idea where she kept such things. The pictures on the wall in the living room are the only ones I’ve ever seen.”
“Really?” he muttered. “I just wondered. Well, thanks anyway. I’ll see you the next time I come to town.” Cecil put down the receiver, exasperated by the obvious cover-up. Margaret and Abe knew something they weren’t telling him.
Cecil decided he had to solve the mystery of his past before returning to Atlanta as he’d planned. He headed for the local newspaper office that printed their first edition in 1896. He asked the elderly lady at the front desk with the stick up her ass if he could see back issues of the paper from 1976 through 1978. After hemming and hawing, she indicated the older issues were only on microfilm and had to be referenced with a reader. After a deep sigh, the silver- haired woman led him to the dilapidated looking machine and gave him a tray of microfilm rolls of the years he’d requested.
Placing the first roll of 1976 into the reader, he started searching for anything that might tell him something about his father, with a particular emphasis on the obituary section. After two hours of tiring scrutiny, he found something he wasn’t looking for. The headline on the front page read, “Mass Murderer and Cannibal, Phillip Blevens, arrested in Raintree County.” The article went on to say Blevens had allegedly raped and murdered thirty-eight young women. Several as young as fourteen years old. The signature of the serial rapist and murderer was the eating of flesh from the face of his victims. Some of the bodies had no lips, nose, or ears when they were found.
Shocked by this startling piece of information, Cecil reread this part several times and then continued reading. The article went on to say the one woman who escaped Blevens’ clutches after being brutally raped with a razor at her throat was Miss Katherine Underwood, who conclusively identified her assailant in a police line-up. The police were holding Blevens without bail at the county lockup. If convicted, he would be put to death by lethal injection.”
Cecil sat dumbfounded by the unbelievable write-up. It wasn’t hard for him to put two and two together. His mother was raised a strict Catholic, and her parents didn’t believe in abortion. He was likely the illegitimate son of the mass murderer, Phillip Blevens, and this was why his mother and the next-door neighbors wouldn’t talk about the past.
Cecil often wondered why he’d been born so fucked up, and now he knew. He mused at the old cliché that came immediately to mind. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The most significant difference between his M.O. and his father’s was that most of his victims had been homeless men. He’d never wanted to have sex with a woman since he’d always been a homosexual. He had no problem chewing off lips, a nose, and sometimes the cheeks of a man or a woman. If he was really hungry, a tongue with a scoop of vanilla ice cream made a delightful dessert. In terms of cannibalism, he’d always been a switch hitter. He could eat men or women.
After his eyes were about to pop out of his head from hours of looking at the reader, he thanked the woman at the front desk and drove to the library. Finding a computer, he found that Phillip Blevens had been put to death by lethal injection in 1988 when Cecil was ten years old.
Reading about the death of his biological father was the same as reading about someone he’d never known from Podunk, USA. It meant absolutely nothing. He never understood why some people get all teary eyed when they discovered an unknown relative actually existed. The concept made no sense to him. Just because a person is related doesn’t mean you have to like them. After all, they could be a child molester or someone who likes to eat flesh off of faces. Who could get sentimental over a person like that?
The trip home had been extremely productive, it had answered the mysteries that had plagued him all his life. Too bad it had taken the death of his mother, the one person he’d loved more than any other, to make it happen.
He’d planned on giving the keys to the realtor and returning to Atlanta yesterday, but now, a loose end had developed he had to deal with before he left. He had a bad feeling about the next-door neighbors. He was certain they knew all about his father but had promised his mother never to tell him. They had probably removed all the personal items from the house to comply with his mother’s wishes when she died. To make matters worse, the looks on their faces when the news anchor reported the details of the homeless man’s death confirmed they suspected he might have murdered him.
He’d promised himself before he left Georgia he would not kill anyone in this hick town. Atlanta was a big city, and the death of a homeless person wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar, but here in Pottsville, it was front-page news. Even a police chief, who primarily handed out parking tickets, might suspect him since he was the only new visitor in town. He knew killing the homeless man was a risk he shouldn’t have taken, but he was so goddamned hungry after the long drive, he couldn’t control himself.
He was certain Margaret and Abe suspected him, but the one thing that contradicted this idea was they had not called the police after he left their house last night. Margaret had also answered her phone when he called this morning. Maybe his worries were unfounded, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t take a chance on them turning him in to the police.
Margaret had said they were going away for a few days, but when he pulled into his driveway and saw their car parked in front of their house, he heaved a sigh of relief. He decided to wait until after dark to go next door. His appetite would be greater then. It helped to be overly hungry when old meat was on the menu. It was so much harder to chew.
At dusk, he saw their lights come on in the kitchen and the living room. At 8 o’clock, the kitchen went dark, and at nine, all the lights went out.
Allowing plenty of time for the old codgers to fall asleep, Cecil left his house through the laundry room and crept silently around to the neighbors’ back door. His credit card worked perfectly; one swipe, and he was in.
Standing in the kitchen, he smelled the sweet aroma of a cake Margaret must have baked that day. As he passed the counter on his way into the living room, the guilt of slaughtering his mother’s best friend and eating her face for dinner unsettled him. Old Abe had also been a sweet old guy; he didn’t deserve to die. His victims were usually people he didn’t know. Murdering someone he’d broken bread with weighed heavily on his conscience.
As he inched forward in the darkness, he thought he heard someone whisper further down the hall. He tightened his grip on his Crocodile Dundee hunting knife in his left hand and the baseball bat in his right. The circumstances would dictate which method he would use. He thought a couple of good whacks to the head would do nicely until he tied them down.
Suddenly, a bright light blinded him, and a woman’s shriek that sounded like a scalded hyena had burst from the portals of hell disoriented him. His body quaked from a debilitating electric shock from both sides of the hallway that sent him slumping to the floor as blackness enveloped him.
* * *
Sometime later, Cecil�
��s mind cleared, and he heard an unfamiliar voice say, “Dominic, I think he’s coming to.”
He opened his eyes and saw two men standing over him. He tried to move his hands, but immediately found his arms and legs strapped down. The chair he’d been tied to was slanted backwards like a dentist’s chair. A bright light assaulted his eyes, and he found his jaws were clamped open so he couldn’t close his mouth. “Who’re you,” he mumbled.
“I’m Dominic, Margaret and Abe’s son, and this is my friend, Guido.”
“Wher’m I?” Cecil struggled to speak.
“Somewhere no one will ever find you,” Dominic said with a cruel smile.
Cecil grimaced with his most puzzled expression, and Dominic slapped him in the face hard and bloodied his lip.
“Hey, this doesn’t take a rocket scientist, Cecil. Your father mutilated and tortured my little sister, Charlotte, and we’re going to do the same to you to get even. Now that we know you murder people, too, we don’t feel so bad.”
Dominic placed a tool chest on the chair in front of him and withdrew a pair of pliers. “My parents thought about turning you in to the cops but decided to call me instead. I convinced them my kind of retribution could help ease their painful memories about Charlotte’s death better than having you rot behind bars for the rest of your life. I’m the guy people call when killing someone quick is not good enough to compensate for the crime they committed.”
The big man started working on his front tooth, and Cecil screamed and struggled to free himself, but Guido held him down with powerful hands.
Dominic continued, “I’ve never had the opportunity to work on someone where I had a personal stake in the degree of pain. You’re the first, and I plan to soar to new heights. Guido and me never went to dental school, but over the years, I’ve become an expert with various types of pliers, and Guido is a master with a drill. After I make an extraction, he makes sure the nerves are completely raw with his drill. Yeah, when we get through with you in a month or so I guarantee you won’t be eating any meat.