The Toymaker

by Sergio Gomez

  Who did the police call in the case of an emergency?

  Certainly not a slightly overweight doctor whose days of Tae Kwon Do were behind him by over fifteen years.

  Even still, it was the human part of his mind—the part of the mind that responded to empathy or something, that compelled him to get out of the car rather than turn around and drive as fast as he could in the other direction.

  “Oh my God,” he said, putting his hand up to his mouth. Somehow seeing it without a windshield between the scene and himself made it all worse.

  But besides that, it actually was worse than he realized because from this angle he could see there was more carnage behind the first dead body.

  His stomach lurched, threatening to spew the scrambled eggs and toast he had that morning out of his mouth.

  No, no Gary. You’ve seen blood like this before.

  Of course, he had. He’d sat in on many surgeries throughout his career, seen countless videos during med school, all that. This was different, though. This was the real thing in the raw. This was a murder scene.

  It’s only the abstraction that makes the difference. Blood is blood.

  The thought helped to ease him and to refocus.

  First thing’s first, make sure the man isn’t still alive.

  He marched toward the first body. Before he even crouched down to touch for a pulse he knew the man (Officer Humboldt according to his nametag) was dead. He was laying on his back with his eyes peeled open like he was watching the sky falling. The policeman’s gun was missing from the holster, but that wasn’t the weapon that had killed the man, because his throat was slashed open wide enough you could file envelopes in it.

  Doctor Brown grabbed his wrist to confirm what he thought. No pulse.

  He got up and scanned the scene again now that he was actually in it. There were copious amounts of blood on the asphalt that didn’t add up, not even when he factored in the slash across the officer’s thigh (which, in his professional opinion, had been irrelevant to the man’s death).

  Then he realized why it didn’t make sense. There’d been another attack here, but the second body had—

  “Oh shit.”

  The second body had moved, and all the evidence he needed of that was in the pattern of the second patch of blood. It wrapped around to the side of the building like a gory snail trail.

  He knew he shouldn’t have been doing this, that this was the work of the police, but he couldn’t help it. It was that damn empathetic part of him that needed to know—and maybe some morbid curiosity, too—if there was indeed another dead body.

  Doctor Brown moved along the side of the blood trail, away from it so as to not step in it, until he was facing the side of the building.

  A scream almost escaped him when he saw the second body underneath the awning, even though he’d expected it, but he was surprised that the body wasn’t laying on the ground. The person was sitting up, their back against the wall.

  Most likely dead, too, but there was always a chance. Years of being in the medical field taught him there was always a chance.

  Doctor Brown ran closer, deciding that he’d already messed up by tampering with the scene this much, he may as well check on this person too.

  As he drew closer to the body, he saw movement in the chest, the rise and fall of a slow, laborious breath.

  My God.

  Despite that his innards were hanging outside of his body, by some miracle, the man—who he was now close enough to see was a county deputy—was alive and breathing.

  Doctor Brown crouched down, touched his wrist, and felt a pulse. It was slight, and seemed to be weakening by the second—but he wasn’t dead.

  “I’m going to get help. Stay with us,” Doctor Brown said.

  The man’s eyes fluttered open, and Doctor Brown nearly jumped out of his skin, thinking he’d just encountered patient zero of the zombie apocalypse. Then the man’s eyes closed.

  No such thing as zombies, Gary. Get it together.

  The patient’s (someone in his care was always a patient to him) muscles were simply responding to the sound of his voice.

  There was no more time to waste. He jumped up to his feet and ran back to his car as fast as he could.

  First, he’d phone the Dutch County Hospital, then the PA police, and let the professionals handle it from there. Maybe too little too late, but there was always hope.

  Chapter 17

  “You…you killed him.” Jack muttered.

  As if that were the magical phrase to unsuspend the scene, everyone started to move.

  Lucas pivoted on his heels and started running for the trees that surrounded the neighborhood.

  Victor hopped off his new bike, forgetting to put the kickstand out, and let it drop behind him, not caring if it’d just gotten scratched up. He ran to Jack’s side.

  Twist, Gina, and Tommy ran down the street to do the same.

  Jamie, coming from the other end of the street, ran toward them to check up on his brother.

  Jenna and Maria both ran down the driveway to where Scott was to see if he was truly dead.

  Maria and his mother got to him before anyone and crouched next to him, hugging him. There was a mixture of sobbing and asking him if he was okay over and over and over.

  His friends crowded around him next, and he only knew this because of the shadows that fell over him. His eyes were still glued to his father’s dead body, still trying to will him back to life.

  Jack felt hands on his back trying to comfort him, and the murmur of words that sounded sympathetic. But he couldn’t understand them, because he wasn’t sure he could understand anything in this moment.

  Someone—Maria, he thought—was telling someone else to call 9-1-1.

  Jack wiped the surprisingly few tears that welled up in his eyes with the back of his forearm and let go of his dad. Then, he stood up. The hands that had been touching him fell away as everyone waited to see what he’d do.

  Jack saw Mr. Gibson’s cursed dummy—Lucas—now a blotch of colors in the distance, disappearing into the trees.

  He looked deep into his heart and found there was no sadness in it, because it was filled with a yearning for revenge.

  He’d have the rest of his life to mourn his father’s death, right now, though, all he wanted was to destroy this evil thing.

  PART FIVE

  MOMMA

  Chapter 1

  The funeral for her ex-husband would come after the Thanksgiving. She and Maria had pooled money together (with Jenna taking most of the cost) to cover it. At the end of his life, she and Scott had been on bad terms. Shoot, they’d been on such bad terms she’d driven over an hour just to argue with him—an argument that in hindsight had amounted to a petty squabble that didn’t matter one bit.

  Jack still deserved to see his father properly honored and buried, though. Even if his diet had been the subject of their latest disagreement, it wasn’t really. He was just a teen boy caught in the middle of two people who had trouble settling their differences.

  These thoughts had been dominating her mind since the incident on Dudley Street, and they continued to dominate even as she checked the oven to see if the turkey she’d made for Jack was finished. She’d decided to let him decide if he wanted to eat meat or not, and he said he did.

  Now why, she asked herself over and over, couldn’t she have just done that while Scott was still alive?

  For the moment, they were back at her home, together. Dinner was almost ready, and life could start to get back to some semblance of normal.

  The button had popped out the side of the bird telling her that it was done. Jenna turned the heat off, grabbed the oven mitts hanging on one of the walls, and took the turkey out of the oven. She set it on the stove, smelling the delicious aroma, and let it cool so it could be placed in the middle of the table.

  The turkey was a small ten-pounder that she found in the corner of a Path Mark after hunting all around the local stores for almost tw
o hours. This whole dinner had been a last-minute operation considering Jack was supposed to be spending it with his father. But Jenna didn’t mind, because another thing Jack deserved was to have a Thanksgiving dinner like everyone else.

  “Jack,” she said, walking into the living room where he was sitting in a chair by the window playing his Gameboy. He paused the game and put it down when he saw her coming from the kitchen. “Turkey’s done. Want to help set the silverware while we wait for Leslie?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, getting up. “Sure, Mom. I’ll be right there.”

  “Great, sweetie,” Jenna said, and turned back into the kitchen.

  If there was a silver lining in any of this, it was that Scott’s death had brought her and Jack closer together. He’d been quieter than usual, yet somehow less aloof.

  The reason for that, she had no way of knowing, was because he had his mind on one thing and one thing only: Returning to Dutch County, getting his friends together, and hunting down the dummy.

  Leslie showed up at their house a few minutes after the silverware was set. She hugged him and his mom, giving them her condolences of his father’s death. Then they sat down and the three of them had their rinky-dink of a Thanksgiving dinner.

  Jack tuned in and out of their conversations, only paying attention to hear if she’d mention the dummy.

  She never mentioned it, though. And Leslie never asked who’d shot Scott.

  It was like his mom’s memory of the event was stored on a VHS tape, and someone had written over that part.

  But if he looked carefully into her eyes, he could see that she did remember, and just didn’t want to say it. And if he looked carefully into Leslie’s eyes, he could see that she knew his mom was leaving out an important part of the story (like for example, who the gunman was), but didn’t want to ask.

  Because if they didn’t mention it or bring it up, they could pretend that the world was still normal.

  But of course, that wasn’t how things worked. Lucas existed whether they acknowledged him or not.

  Jack reached out and served himself a hefty helping of mashed potatoes onto his normal Thanksgiving plate.

  Normal. Yeah, sure. Jack thought. He decided to pretend like his mom and her friend, too.

  For the duration of dinner, anyway.

  One-hundred-fifty miles from Philadelphia, in New York, Victor was with his mom and dad visiting family. Just like Jack, he was barely invested in the conversation going around the table.

  Some of that had to do with him being sat at the kid’s table (even though he was thirteen) and that he didn’t care about his little cousin’s arguing about who the best Pokémon was, but the majority of the reason was that his mind was back in Dutch County.

  On Dudley Street, to be specific.

  The police hadn’t come out and said anything about Mr. Gibson’s magical dummy. Every paper and news channel reported the incidents as being committed by an “unknown gunman” or an “unknown killer” in the case of the two policemen at the county jail.

  “You okay, sweetie?” his aunt Meredith asked him. She’d come over to the kid’s table to scold Richie, his eight-year-old cousin, for flicking green beans at his six-year-old brother Donald.

  “Hm?” Victor said, reeling out of his thoughts.

  “Are you okay? You’re looking a little pale there.”

  “Oh, yeah. Just indigestion,” Victor said.

  A terrible lie. She glanced down at the plate of food in front of him, which was untouched except for a bite out of the turkey breast and a nibble from the dinner roll. He could tell she knew he was lying from the look on her face. He’d never been a good liar.

  She let it slip by, though, because the whole family knew he’d been at the scene of one of the murders that happened in Dutch County last weekend. They’d all been expecting him to be behaving weird.

  If they only knew how weird, Victor thought.

  Aunt Meredith smiled and said, “Okay, let your mom know if it gets any worse.”

  “It’ll pass, I’m sure,” Victor said, and forced a smile back at her.

  Aunt Meredith nodded to him and started back to the adult table—the real table, he thought, as he watched Richie load up some mashed potatoes on his spoon to flick at his little brother as soon as his mom’s back was to them.

  Sitting at the kid’s table sucked. And not even being at a murder scene made him respectable enough to sit with the adults.

  Chapter 2

  Cassandra Lynn Rogers stepped out of her trailer park wearing a crop-top that didn’t fit her anymore, but it was unseasonably warm this year and the trailer didn’t have air conditioning. There was a cigarette in one hand and the remainder of the Colt 45 beer she’d accompanied Thanksgiving dinner with in the other. Now that she was out here, away from Ricky and Glenn, she let out a whopping belch.

  She sat down on the squeaky lawn chair in front of the trailer. From the side of the mountain where her trailer was she could see her hometown, and the other towns that made up Dutch County. It was what people may have called “civilization,” but she sure was glad to be out of there.

  It’d been the best decision of her life to save up enough tips from the diner to buy a cheap trailer, and move up into the mountains after high school, where she was alone without anyone to bother her. Except for the rednecks, but still.

  That was better than having people whisper things behind her back when they saw her around. Things about how she was a “murderer”. Sometimes they didn’t even need to whisper things to each other, sometimes just the look in their eyes was enough.

  As she’d told Hannah Lynch (the one friend she still had after the trial) the only ones allowed to judge her were her parents, her son, maybe her man, and God himself. And since the people in town weren’t any of them, they had no right to talk about what she’d done in the past.

  The justice system found her innocent in the death of Megan Hamilton, but people still judged her for years after that.

  Two decades had passed since, and people in the town forgot all about the teenage girl who died in the tunnel at Myers Park. Megan became nothing but a faded memory. The other girls all moved away soon after Cassandra did, which helped to further quiet down talks of the incident around town. Eventually, it became nothing more than a legend teenagers whispered to one another over campfires.

  She had to make trips downtown when they were low on food or Ricky needed tools from Harry’s to repair something in the trailer, but these days Cassandra had been away for so long she could go into town without being recognized. The pot belly and thinning hair she got over the years helped to disguise her, too.

  Even still, that didn’t change what she felt every time someone stared at her too long or she heard whispering around her. In her mind, the rejection and judgment continued. And what good was a “civilization” if they ignored what their own systems proved?

  None. That’s what. Cassandra thought, reassuring herself that it’d been a good move to move up here into the “wilderness” as she’d grown up calling it.

  A chilly breeze blew by that reminded her it was still November, no matter what the thermometer said. She brought her knees up to her chest and rested her feet on the end of the chair seat.

  Then she started to wonder why she was thinking of this stuff seemingly out of the blue. It was a big part of her life, of course, but she only really thought of it when she started to get depressed. And right now, she was far from that. They’d just had a good Thanksgiving dinner, she was out here amongst the trees enjoying a fine cigarette with beer, and everything should feel right.

  Something was off, though. Had been since the weekend. Since the people had been murdered down there in “civilization.”

  Killin’ each other, so much for civilized huh? ’Least mine was an accident. She felt bad about the people who were dead, but she smirked as the thought reinforced her decision to come live up here.

  Before she could sit on these thoughts any longer, the
trailer door opened behind her. Her son Glenn, a 13-year-old boy who was as scrawny as an 11-year-old, poked his head out. The sides of his head were shiny from where she’d shaved it to give him a quasi-military cut.

  “Momma,” he said, through buckteeth. “Can I have another slice of pie?”

  Cassandra took the final drag on her cigarette and crushed it against the grass to put it out. “Yeah, go ahead, honey.”

  The kid said thanks and retreated back into the trailer with a smile.

  Cassandra got up, grabbing the empty beer bottle off the grass and heading back into the trailer.

  Once at the door, she stopped and turned, thinking she’d heard something behind her. She was expecting to see a deer (they were plentiful this time of the year) or one of the hillbillies she’d caught staring into her bedroom window and masturbating while she was undressing last week, but there was nothing there.

  Must’ve been the wind blowing the trees, she thought, and went inside.

  Chapter 3

  He’d been wandering around, with no direction since he’d gunned down the last plague (however long ago that was) through the trees.

  So many trees, Lucas thought.

  And he didn’t have the slightest idea of how to get out of here. The thoughts evoked feelings out of him that reminded him of being trapped in that other, dark world.

  The big difference was that life surrounded him here in the form of plants, deer, birds, trees and whatnot, but the feeling of being alone and lost were the same.

  Those children had brought him back only to force him back into a trap.

  His body was becoming more human after ridding the world of plagues, and with that came flaws he hadn’t expected. One of them was fatigue. The other, the biggest one, was pain.

  The arm that had been shot by the policeman’s bullet back at the jailhouse didn’t magically heal itself, and without Father to fix it, he had no idea what to do about it. So, he’d just tried to fight through the pain, but it’d been getting worse and worse.