The Toymaker

by Sergio Gomez

  He didn’t, actually, but he couldn’t afford to sit on those feelings right now. Even an ounce of doubt would be enough to cost them their lives.

  Whatever happened next would rest on luck and his risky plan working out in their favor.

  Cassandra clutched Ricky’s shirt. “I don’t know if I can kill the people coming…but I suppose I already killed Megan…so I’m already a murderer, right?”

  Looking at her misery, it was difficult to keep his actual plan from her, but he couldn’t let her in on it. If what she said was true, that Lucas could read her mind, it was best she not know.

  As much as he wanted to tell her that no one was going to die—except that fucking doll if his plan worked out—he couldn’t take the risk.

  So, he simply said, “Let’s get into position and get this over with.”

  Cassandra wiped her eyes with the back of her palm, sobbed a few more times, then nodded.

  They both started off to their designated hiding spots.

  Meanwhile, Glenn took his position behind the tree Lucas told him to hide behind. To “ambush” the traitors.

  It was a few feet past the bear traps. Lucas had ordered him to stab anyone closest to him, over and over until the person stopped moving. It didn’t matter how many times he had to do it, “just keep stabbing” he’d said.

  Glenn took out the knife in his pocket and looked at it. He’d seen Momma cut up veggies and steaks plenty of times with it, but never used one himself. It looked easy, though, the way Momma used it to prepare the food she was cooking.

  “Pretend until I’m given the signal,” He repeated to himself

  Those were the orders from Ricky.

  But then there were Lucas’ orders. And Momma didn’t know they were pretending, so she would be mad if he didn’t do what Lucas had told him to do.

  Out here, alone in the trees (in his position) without anyone to tell him what to do, he was lost.

  He stared down at the knife, hoping the answer would come to him soon.

  Chapter 24

  Jamie was positive they’d foiled these people’s one plan of attack as they came up the hill, and that the ‘traps’ Buckethead had warned Gina about were waiting for them at the top. So, they marched up the path in single file.

  As they did so, the earth began to shake underneath their feet. They all stopped and looked at one another to make sure the others had felt it too.

  No one needed to say anything; the answers were written on their faces. And they were all just as puzzled as the other because Pennsylvania wasn’t known for its earthquakes.

  The ground trembled again, and some pebbles shook loose and rolled down the path.

  “Is that your mom rolling over in bed, Victor?” Twist whispered.

  They all laughed at the lame joke. They were all scared, and the humor helped.

  “Alright,” Jamie said, trying to get them to refocus. “We’ll laugh later. Right now, let’s keep alert. Stay sharp, you hear me? We’re about to go into the enemy’s territory.”

  With that, he turned, and led them onward.

  The rumbling they felt was the gate opening as the children drew nearer to Lucas.

  As if someone had taken a giant, invisible box cutter to the thin air several feet behind the trailer—and as if the air was made of solid matter—it sliced open, revealing the doorway into another world beyond this one.

  The force of what caused the rift created a vacuum-like effect between the two worlds, so that objects in the vicinity were being sucked from this world through the doorway into the other world.

  The vacuum tore the clothesline out back of the trailer right out of the dirt, with bedsheets and shirts and underwear and all. It pulled in pebbles, rocks, twigs, cigarette butts, beer bottles, cans, and anything else lighter than these objects that wasn’t nailed down or too far away, but then spat everything back out again, as if it didn’t like the taste of any of them.

  Because the portal had opened up for one reason. And one reason only.

  Ricky was standing closest to the portal, and his mouth hung open as he stared into the bright world beyond the one he existed in.

  The arrow he was loading into the crossbow was pulled from his grip (for whatever reason, the vacuum wasn’t affecting him). He watched it fly through the air, disappear into that bright light, and then shoot back out moments later. It struck against the side of the trailer, not two feet from him, stuck and quivering.

  The thought that crossed his mind was absurd, but in that moment, it made all the sense in the world: If you threw a pig in there, it really would fly.

  Lucas was atop the trailer, waiting for the gatekeepers, but he turned around when he heard the dimensional rip behind him.

  He was perhaps the only one who knew what it was, and the one to be most nervous about it.

  He’d been wrong earlier, when he told the others the battle had already commenced. It hadn’t commenced then. That was just the pregame.

  The gate was open, and the children intended to send him through it.

  It was time for the real battle.

  “Father, I will make sure that you did not die in vain,” Lucas said, speaking to Raymond Gibson’s spirit. “True Father, please give me the strength to defeat my enemies.”

  They thought the forest was on fire when they first reached the top of the cliff, and they all wanted to turn and run until their minds processed that that orange flare in the distance wasn’t flames. In fact, it wasn’t anything any of them had ever seen.

  Not in real life, anyway.

  “It’s the portal,” Victor said. “The portal to another world.”

  They all turned to look at him.

  He shrugged. “I read a lot of science fiction.”

  Gina would have called him a nerd, but the time for joking had passed. She turned back to the orange glow.

  It was so bright, like it could have been a weaker relative of the sun. Except, there was no heat emitting from it, only light.

  “That’s the gate the book talked about,” Twist said.

  “Yeah,” Jamie agreed. “Everyone, turn your flashlights off.”

  They all did, because they didn’t need them anymore. The glow from the portal was bright enough, even from where they were standing. It made it feel like it was daylight out.

  “So, we send Lucas through there, and we win?” Gina said, trying to wrap her mind around it.

  “Exactly,” Victor said.

  “Then what’re we waiting for?” Twist started to move forward.

  Jamie stuck his arm out to stop him. “Hold on.”

  As exciting as it was that things seemed to be going in their favor so far, life could turn on a dime. If there was one thing he had learned from being in the Army, it was that.

  One mistake, one misfortune, and suddenly the enemy had you pinned down.

  “What? What’re we waiting for?” Twist repeated his protest with more desperation in his tone.

  Jamie ignored him, and instead scanned the area ahead of them. Looking for the traps that Buckethead had warned them of, he noticed the leaves up ahead. There was something unnatural about them…

  Of course there was.

  “Vic, hand me the launcher and a potato,” he said, putting the safety on his gun and sticking it in the back of his waistband.

  Victor handed him the modified Nerf launcher, and then dug through his bookbag for a potato.

  Jamie loaded the launcher and took aim at the spot that looked most suspicious. He pulled the trigger.

  There was a clink of metal as the potato hit its target, followed by the sound of a beartrap snapping shut. The trap’s teeth smashed the potato, sending pieces of spud and juice flying in every direction.

  “That could’ve been one of our ankles,” Jamie said to them, then to Victor, “Another one.”

  Victor handed him another potato.

  They all watched as Jamie shot the ground. This time it didn’t hit anything except a pile of leaves. He asked
Victor to hand him another potato.

  This next one activated a second bear trap.

  “How many more do we have?”

  “Eight,” Victor said.

  “Alright, I’ll shoot three more. That should be enough,” Jamie said, reviewing the area.

  Small pieces of things were flying through the air, being sucked toward the bright light of the gate opening. They could all feel the tug of it against their skin.

  Leaves rustled and got pulled along the ground as well. Jamie looked for places where other traps might be hiding.

  He shot the next series of potatoes, but there was no other trap.

  The rest of the area up ahead until the trailer looked natural enough.

  “Okay, take it back, Vic. Keep it loaded,” Jamie told him.

  Victor took the launcher without saying anything.

  “They’re going to have more tricks for us up ahead.” Jamie said. “I’m moving forward, you guys stay close to me. And remember the rules!”

  Jamie drew the pistol, took the safety off, and charged ahead.

  What to do…what to do… I’m too dumb to figure it out myself—

  Glenn was trying to decide on what the right thing to do was when someone blurred past him, heading to the trailer.

  Lucas had told him to stop anyone from doing that.

  You messed up, Glenn. Big time. Now Momma and Ricky are going to die—No. Don’t think. Act!

  He missed the first person, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t stop the others and still make Lucas (and more importantly, Momma) happy with him.

  Besides…

  Glenn looked over to the trailer, to see if Ricky was there to give him the signal to stop pretending. He wasn’t.

  Ricky had told him to pretend they were on Lucas’ side until he was given the signal.

  I’m good at make-believe. I’m the best.

  Chapter 25

  He put the burden of baiting out whatever the enemy had planned for them on himself, because without the others the portal would close. But more importantly, because he felt it was his duty to protect them.

  It was crazy that he was putting his life for what some dumb book at the library said, but there was no denying that it at least got the portal part of the story right.

  Jamie stopped running when he got close to the trailer, and stood in firing position, ready to shoot at anything that moved. “Come on out, Lucas. Don’t be shy.”

  It was falling apart before his very eyes. The timing was all off. He should’ve shot Lucas by now and given Glenn the signal, but he hadn’t accounted for—couldn’t have accounted for—a portal to another dimension to appear out of thin air and steal his arrows and take away the time he had to save his family.

  Now someone was on the other side of the trailer, taunting Lucas. He could see the dummy getting up from his crouch on top of the trailer, no doubt getting ready to shoot at who was over there.

  Ricky had to act quickly. He aimed the crossbow at the back of the dummy’s head, careful that the arrow stayed in place, and he was about to pull the release on the bow when he heard the front trailer door slam open, followed by Cassandra’s scream.

  No, not a scream. A battle cry.

  This was for everything; For Glenn, for Ricky, for repentance, for the ability to move on. All of it depended on this.

  Cassandra burst through the door, kitchen knife in hand, and charged at the boy standing a few yards in front of her mobile home.

  He had a gun, but that didn’t matter. It was too late to turn back.

  Jamie saw movement above him, on top of the trailer, as Lucas rose out of a crouch. At the same time, he heard metal slam against metal as the front door opened. A woman with wild hair and makeup running down her face came charging out at him, a knife held ready to stab him.

  He had a nanosecond to look into her eyes and see that what was pushing her forward was pure terror.

  That was all the time he took to consider who was coming his way.

  The next moment he shot at her.

  The bullet tore through the woman’s chest, squirting blood everywhere as she fell.

  Lucas watched Momma fall forward onto the grass, her arms and legs splayed out everywhere. He screamed in fury.

  Both Father and Momma were dead now.

  He looked at the person who’d shot her. It was Oliver Harper’s brother. After he’d let him out of his jail cell, here he was, standing before him as a plague and an enemy.

  “This world… it makes no sense,” Lucas muttered, feeling a heavy sadness fall over him.

  He started to wonder what his motivation even was anymore. Why did he want to become human if this was what it meant? Why did he even want to belong to a world that was filled with such cruel creatures?

  No matter what he did to make them happy, they still turned on him.

  Plagues. All of them were plagues.

  His motivation for why he was doing this all changed in a flash. He didn’t want to become one of them, he wanted to eradicate all of the humans in this world. He would wipe this Earth clean and please the True Father.

  Starting with Jamie Harper.

  Lucas took aim at him, and was about to fire a bullet, but this world had one more surprise for him.

  Ricky fired the bow at Lucas’ head.

  Distracted as he was, Lucas never saw it coming. The arrow pierced through the wood and came out the other side of the dummy’s head.

  The impact knocked Lucas off balance, throwing his aim off. The gun in his wooden hand fired, but the bullet only struck the ground. Inadvertently, Ricky had saved Jamie’s life.

  Ricky took another arrow from the quiver slung over his back, loaded the crossbow, and was about to take aim at Lucas when he saw the dummy pointing the gun at him instead.

  “Buh-bye,” Lucas said, and shot him in the face.

  As soon as Jamie pulled the trigger to shoot the woman coming at him, he saw Lucas standing on the top of the trailer, aiming a gun at him.

  Then he heard a gunshot. For a moment, he thought his life was over.

  But he was fine. The bullet had missed.

  Jamie looked up. An arrow stuck through Lucas’s head at an angle. Something on the other side of the mobile home had Lucas distracted.

  This was his chance.

  Maybe he couldn’t kill the dummy—or the demon that inhabited it or whatever—but he sure as hell could obliterate its limbs to keep it from moving.

  Jamie was about to take aim and do as much damage to the dummy as he could when out of his peripheral vision he saw the woman getting up from the grass. She was shot, and she was bleeding, but she still had fight in her.

  The woman grabbed the kitchen knife, which had only dropped inches away from her hand, and sprinted toward him. Meanwhile, the blood from her chest continued to spread across her shirt.

  Since Lucas was distracted, Jamie could afford more time to think about this.

  This woman was probably doing this against her will, like Buckethead and the other guy. There was no reason for him to kill her.

  So, he wouldn’t.

  As she came close, the woman swiped the knife up through the air. Jamie ducked under her and lifted her up onto his shoulder and slammed her to the ground. Not as hard as he could, but enough to rattle her up.

  He put his weight on top of her, grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the knife, and ripped the knife out of her grip. Then he pinned her hand down against the grass and drove the kitchen knife through her palm.

  The woman screamed in agony as blood sprayed everywhere.

  Jamie hesitated for a second, then switched his brain over to the place he went into when he was in combat. In life or death situations, there was no time for sympathy.

  The woman reached up with her free hand, her fingers curled to scratch at his eyes. Jamie caught the wrist of that arm as well, struggling with her, even though she should be weak from blood loss and have the good sense to stand down. He couldn’t stop Lucas if he h
ad to keep fighting her, but he couldn’t just let her get up and attack him again, either.

  Jamie reached into his pocket, and pulled out the screwdriver—one of the dollar store weapons Twist had bought—and just like he’d done to the woman’s other hand, he drove the blade of the screwdriver through her palm and deep into the ground.

  She let out another howl of pain.

  Before she could kick at him, Jamie hopped off of her.

  “Stay down this time,” Jamie spat. “For the love of God, stay down.”

  Chapter 26

  Glenn heard the others sprinting close to him.

  Stab whoever is closest. And keep stabbing. Lucas’ words echoed in his thoughts.

  Glenn jumped out from behind the tree just as another one of the kids was about to run past him.

  Stab. Don’t think, dumb-Glenn. Just do it. He thought, and brought the arm with the knife back, then swung it through the air.

  Stab. Stab. Stab.

  “Eye of the tiger… it’s the thrill of the fight…”

  It was the only part of the song he knew, so it was the only part of the song that played in his head as he dove at the kid attempting to stab Gina.

  Victor wrapped his arms around him and dragged the kid to the ground.

  The kid didn’t let up on his grip, though, and kept hold of the knife. As they rolled around on the ground, with Fall leaves crunching underneath them, Victor wrestled with the kid for control of the knife.

  When their momentum stopped, Victor wound up on top but there was blood all over both him and the boy. At the moment, he didn’t much care about where or who it was coming from. He was focused on one thing; taking this kid out.

  Victor pinned the kid down by his shoulders, then titled his head back. Throwing all of his weight into it, he brought his head forward to headbutt the kid.

  There was a heavy thud as the top of the football helmet slammed into the boy’s jaw. Victor felt the boy’s arms stop pushing against him as he went unconscious, and he rolled off him.