by J. T. Warren
He started to climb through the window but it was more narrow than he thought. If he went any further, he’d get stuck at the shoulders. He might be able to force his way through, but then how was he going to escape? He backed out of the window.
The large woman grunted loudly and then fell back flat on the carpet next to Tyler. The younger one leaned over her for a moment and then turned around. It was a teenage girl, her hair a mess, her face streaked with dirt and blood. “Mr. Williams,” she cried, “Please help me, please!”
He had never seen this girl before. How did she know who he was? Was she Tyler’s girlfriend? Why was she wearing a black robe, too?
The handle of a knife stuck out from the larger woman’s gut. This girl had just stabbed someone. Not someone—her mother.
The girl ran toward the window, her face bent at weird angles and her teeth like arrowheads. Anthony stumbled backward into Paul.
“The police?”
Paul snapped his cellphone shut. “Yeah. Where’s Ty?”
The girl was at the window, which was set up high on the downstairs wall, so she could only get her forearms across the ledge without help. “Mr. Williams, save me. I’m pregnant with your grandchild!”
“Who the fuck is this girl?” Anthony asked.
The girl’s hands flayed for something, someone, to grab. “She’s fucking nuts,” Paul said.
Tyler screamed, loud and forceful. The shock of his sudden scream froze everything, though only for a second. He was alive. Tyler was alive.
Anthony reached down, grabbed one of the girl’s arms and told her to push. After a moment, Paul grabbed the other arm and together they pulled her out through the window and onto the grass. She was breathing frantically and mumbling words Anthony couldn’t understand.
“You have to get my son,” Anthony told Paul. “I can’t fit through the window.”
Paul didn’t hesitate; he dropped to his knees and dove headfirst through the open window frame and crashed to the floor. Anthony waited with both hands stuck through the window while Paul ran to Tyler, tried to slap him completely awake.
But he’d just screamed. He was just awake. Why the hell wasn’t he awake now? What was happening to his poor boy?
Paul wedged one arm under Tyler’s shoulders and the other under his knees. He stood on unbalanced legs and walked with heavy, slow steps toward the window. He squinted his eyes and clenched his jaw against the pain.
“Come on,” Anthony spurred him on. “A few more feet.”
The sliding glass door shattered.
Paul stumbled, drop to one knee, and Tyler spilled out of his arms onto the floor. They were only a few feet away. If only Anthony could wedge through the window.
From somewhere behind Anthony another loud bang ricocheted, but Anthony recognized this one immediately. A gunshot. Ellis and Dwayne had killed Brendan.
Paul had Tyler in his arms again, lifting just beneath the shoulders this time and letting his legs drag across the floor.
A police siren floated in the distance.
Tyler’s arms flapped against the wall. Paul raised him higher with a grunt and Anthony grabbed both arms. With Paul pushing, Anthony dragged Tyler out through the window to rest flat on the ground. His head lolled from side to side.
Don’t be dead, he begged, please don’t be dead!
He only had to help Paul for a moment before the kid was able to climb out on his own. The heat from the two fires was spreading around the house like the arms of the Devil.
Or the arms of Misery.
Anthony dragged Tyler away from the house to the line of trees separating the property from the neighbors’. The heat was still strong but tolerable. The peak of the fires had crested the top of the house. Within minutes, the whole place would be destroyed.
The girl pounced on Tyler and hugged him close. Her large eyes warned he and Paul to stay away; they were the eyes of a raccoon protecting her young. “My baby,” she said, “my baby, my baby.”
And my Brendan did this, Anthony thought and then immediately he was running back toward the cars thinking, the gunshot, the fucking gunshot.
The hatchback was gone. Ellis was on the ground with a bullet in his neck and blood pooled all around his head. Another man lay on the ground, half his head smashed to pieces from the Craftsman hammer that lay next to him covered in blood.
Dwayne and Brendan were gone.
12
“We should leave now,” Ellis said.
Dad and Paul had run off to the burning house and Brendan was left as a frozen statue. He said Tyler was in the house. That couldn’t be. God wouldn’t do this to him. Delaney he could understand; that was God’s warning for worshipping false deities, but Brendan had completely devoted himself to God’s cause. God could not have his brother. No, no, no!
Brendan almost ran for the house, but Dwayne’s hand gripped his shoulder. “Tyler will be fine,” he said. “Your father will save him. But this means that the mission has failed.”
“You knew Tyler was in there?”
The faintest trace of a smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. “Of course not. These are not things for us to answer. Leave these things to God. We can only do our part.”
“But you said that everything would be good again, that this would bring my family back together.”
“Enough crying,” Ellis snapped. “We have to get out of here now. Someone probably called the police already.”
He turned back to his car and stopped. A man in jeans and a ratty T-shirt stood at the bottom of the driveway, gun in hand, lit cigarette in mouth. “That’s right,” the man said. “I did.”
Ellis tried to assess the man quickly. He put his hands up. “That’s good, then. We don’t have our cellphones or we would have—”
“Shut up,” the man said. His hair was a ruffled mess and deep-wrinkled creases marked his face. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re behind whatever is happening next door and you’re all going to jail.”
Dwayne’s hand brushed Brendan’s arm. His fingers gestured to the hammer Dad had dropped. It was a foot away.
The man stepped off his driveway, close to Ellis, turned toward Dwayne. “I saw you murder Cody Karras. I gave the police a full description but here you are. I’ve been waiting. I knew you’d come back to kill the crazy mother, too.”
A police siren cried nearby.
“I don’t know who you think we are,” Ellis said, stepped forward.
“I never killed nobody!” Dwayne yelled.
The man turned full on to Dwayne, gun poised. Ellis charged and crashed into the man; they tumbled to the street. Dwayne pushed Brendan aside, snatched up the hammer. He ran toward the scuffle and arrived as a gunshot exploded. Dwayne paused for a second and then came down with the hammer again and again. And again.
Brendan slowly approached. Ellis lay on his back, rolling side to side, hands clenched against his throat and blood spurting out between his fingers. His eyes darted all around, registering nothing, or maybe everything.
Dwayne stood, admired his work, dropped the hammer. He had smashed in the side of the neighbor’s face. Only one eye remained and half of his jaw. The blood and brain matter had splattered across his driveway.
Dwayne went to Ellis, knelt next to him. “You saved me and I wish I could do the same for you, but God has other plans.” He grabbed Ellis’s hands and pulled them off his throat. A fountain of blood spurted out. A moment later, Dwayne released Ellis’s hands and they dropped to the street. He stood and stared at Brendan.
Would he kill him now, too? Was this what God had been planning all along? What kind of fucked-up ending was this?
“Get in the car,” he said. “We’ve got to get away.”
“But my father, my brother.”
“Get in the car or I’ll walk over there and kill them both right now.”
“No,” Brendan said. “Leave us alone.” He tried to sound strong but he wanted to cry.
Dwayne smiled, even
released a small chuckle. He bent over, picked up the hammer; when he turned back, Brendan had the gun in both hands, barrel poised on Dwayne.
For a moment, Dwayne said nothing. The police were nearly here. “Your hands are shaking.”
He stepped toward Brendan.
“Put down the hammer.”
Dwayne let it clatter to the street, stepped forward again.
“Why did God let this happen?”
Dwayne shook his head. “Why would you ruin everything now? God has a plan and we might not like it, but we must do His will.”
Another step.
Brendan’s index fingers rested on the trigger.
“Fuck His will. Fuck God!”
Another laugh, an adult amused at a silly child. “You still haven’t put it all together, have you?” Another step, just over an arm’s reach away. “Dr. Carroll. That stupid book he gave you. You were chosen. Selected. God wants this for you. This is your path.”
“Don’t move.”
“Give me the gun, son,” Dwayne said. “There’s a whole new life for you. We only have to search for it and God will guide us.”
“No.”
Dwayne took another step. Brendan clenched his jaw, tried to close his ears, narrowed his eyes. Was this what God wanted? Was God even involved at all? Was there any plan, any fucking plan at all? Tears muddled his vision. “No,” he said again, almost a whisper.
“God will deliver you as he does all his disciples.”
Dwayne’s hand reached out, cutting through the air in slow motion. What would Bo Blast do? What would Dad do? Why had he killed Delaney? Why?
Dwayne’s hand cupped the gun and Brendan released.
* * *
Dwayne drove them quickly away from the burning house and bloody bodies. Two cop cars sped past them. Brendan thought again of Bo Blast and his endless search for the dark villain. He wouldn’t have to look any further. Brendan had found the Darkman right here.
EPILOGUE
1
On Christmas Eve, Tyler was in the delivery room holding Sasha Karras’s hand as she endured a particularly painful birthing. Large beads of sweat speckled her forehead and her cheeks turned white from grinding her jaw. She squeezed his hand as hard as she could and breathed heavily through clenched teeth with spit rolling down her chin.
He was only doing this because Dad said it was the right thing to do. He wasn’t going to be Sasha’s lover or this baby’s father, but he had an obligation to be here for the product of his making. Dad wanted him to adopt the child, but Tyler talked him out of that, thank God. Tyler would never survive that. He couldn’t take care of a baby. Dad certainly wasn’t in any condition to do so, either.
And definitely not Mom.
When the child was born and first placed in Sasha’s arms, a strange wave of heat filled Tyler’s body and he wondered what it would be like to take responsibility for this baby, to raise him as a son. She asked if he wanted to hold the baby but Tyler declined. Holding the kid would be too much.
Later, in a hospital room of her own, baby still in her arms, Sasha cooed to the newborn and smiled when he gurgled back. “He’s beautiful,” she said.
“Yes,” Tyler agreed.
“I”m going to name him Brendan.”
When Tyler left, he sat in his car in the parking lot until his nerves settled. She wasn’t going to name the baby Brendan, or anything for that matter. The baby was immediately going up for adoption. The paperwork had already been taken care of, but Sasha had forgotten all about it.
She’d forgotten about a lot of things, though the doctors and the police never fully believed her. She needed a lot of treatment, they said. She was seriously deranged and possibly violent. Tyler thought of her smile when the baby reached for her with its chubby arm and then he thought of the restraint straps dangling from her bed and the swollen bruise in the crook of her elbow where the staff had to constantly inject her with sedative. He thought of Sasha’s mother and spells and curses. He thought about all of this and wondered if it meant anything.
2
Anthony had gotten rid of the pills. All the pills. The house now held only one bottle of vitamins and he didn’t even take them. When he suffered headaches, he suffered through them. What was a headache in the grand scheme of things?
Still, Chloe managed to find something, always something. The last time she was released, she drank two bottles of Listerine and stabbed herself in the thigh with a butter knife. He thought that was going to be it for her, but the paramedics arrived and shoved a big tube down her throat, pumped out all the fluid and stopped the gushing wound in her leg.
Now the house was bare. No alcohol. No drugs. No sharp objects. There was nothing she could use to hurt herself, to try to return to her comatose splendor. She would try, Anthony knew that. She’d get creative and maybe even manage to kill herself.
She had been in rehab three times since Easter and even a short stay at the Psychiatric Center. The doctors told him it was his decision. So, he took her back and straight to the bed she went. She refused to eat anything but a piece of bread or two every other day and an occasional sip of water.
He spent most days in bed with her, petting her hair and talking about the time Before Everything Went to Hell. They had once been a happy family, one full of love and noise. Now the house was quiet and cold.
He tried to stay away from the bad memories. When the dark images tried to invade his mind, he pushed them away, mostly. Every now and again, however, they’d grab hold and trap him.
“I hope he’s okay,” Anthony said to her. She had fallen into a restless sleep. Her eyelids twitched as did her arms and legs. She woke with a gasp, grabbed the pillow so hard her knuckles threatened to break through the skin. He petted her. She bit the pillow and screamed until her face turned red and she passed out.
“I hope he’s at least happy and safe. That’s all I want for him. Safety and happiness.”
That wasn’t completely true, of course; what he wanted was to find Dwayne and use pliers to rip out every one of his teeth and then slice off his eyelids and piss on his face and then slowly cut open his chest from neck to crotch until his guts spilled out and he finally died. That’s what he really wanted.
The police had searched the First Church of Jesus Christ the Empowered, taken numerous testimonies, but it added up to nothing. They never even found Dr. Carroll, though Anthony never mentioned him, either.
The world rarely gave you what you wanted and when it did, it was quick to snatch it away. The world was a cruel place filled with cruel people. Most nights, Anthony figured it would be better if everyone just died. Then he would think of his son and hope Brendan was laughing somewhere.
The hope of his son laughing, more than any other thing, kept him alive. Once he let that go, he’d let everything else go, too. Brendan had vanished on Good Friday, the day Jesus was crucified. Easter had brought no ascension.
Christmas eve, Anthony lay in bed next to Chloe and hoped that when he got up in the morning, he’d discover Brendan asleep in his bedroom. If God really existed, if there was any truth to any of that Bible shit at all, Brendan would be there in the morning.
Anthony dreamed of Brendan’s laughter and woke up crying in the dark.
3
The Christmas Eve Mass had been lit completely with candles. It reminded Brendan of The Empowerment Temple. This new church had its own Jesus on the Cross behind the altar but this one wore regal gowns and a golden crown and stared out at the parishioners with hopeful eyes. Brendan would see the Giant Jesus with its huge, sorrowful eyes and soiled rags whenever he went to bed. In the darkness, it would be there, waiting for him.
Dwayne held Brendan’s hand as they exited the church into a chilly night. They were staying in a house with four other people, all members of the old Church of Jesus Christ the Empowered. The one woman was pregnant with Dwayne’s child. Brendan wondered what would happen after the child was born. Would Dwayne still talk to him? Would he
still love him?
“You seem sad,” Dwayne said when they were in the car.
“I never knew God would want so much from me.”
Dwayne was nodding.
“I lost my entire family.” Tyler and Dad seemed like distant relatives now and would eventually drift into small memories that were so faded they couldn’t be recalled. He wondered every so often if they missed him. Did they even spend time searching for him? “I’ve done everything God asked.”
“You have.”
“So why does He keep taking from me?”
Dwayne took a moment to respond. “God brought you to me. God has given us a new life here in this town. God wants us to do good. He has a plan for us. We will start a new church, regroup, and continue to do His will. You may feel like He is taking from you, but if you really look at it, you will see that when He takes, He gives back tenfold.”
Lying on an air mattress in a spare bedroom that night, Brendan thought of Dwayne’s words. God had not given him anything tenfold. God had only taken and taken. This was not a new home; this was banishment from his real home. These people were not his new family; they were impostors. God was a thief who would eventually take all Brendan had.
Dwayne crept into the room much later. Brendan pretended to be asleep, as he always did when Dwayne made these night trips. He sat next to Brendan’s bed and breathed slowly. The rhythm of his breathing almost lulled Brendan to sleep.
“You’re such a special boy,” Dwayne said. “It’s so amazing how God has blessed you.”
Brendan pushed his face into the pillow to stop his tears. He had accepted God’s way, but he had never expected it would be so painful.
THE END
Thank you for reading,
J.T. Warren
J.T. Warren born on Halloween, a few months after his mother saw Jaws at the movies. His affinity for horror can be traced to an early age when he built a coffin out of cardboard and pretended to be a corpse, much to the concern of his parents. He can still be found in a coffin on Halloween when he gets into the spirit of the season. He is a public school teacher and has successfully lured thousands of students into literary waters through works of horror. He hopes his writing will further encourage people to discover the wonder (and dread) found in the written word.