The Devil's Playground, Vol. 1: 20 Tales of Terror to Keep You Up at Night
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Horror
Description: Get ready to enter The Devil's Playground, a chilling collection of horror stories that will make your skin crawl and your heart race. In these 20 tales of terror, you will encounter unspeakable creatures from the deep sea and the darkness under the bed. You’ll find serial killers, demonic possessions, and paranormal entities bent on destruction. And you’ll meet characters who are pushed to the brink of sanity as they face their deepest fears and darkest desires. From the depths of Hell to the dangers of the Dark Web, The Devil's Playground will take you on a journey through the most twisted a
Publisher: Independently Published

The Devil’s Playground

20 Tales of Terror to Keep You Up At Night

Matthew Doggett

Five Brothers Publishing

Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Doggett

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Contents

A Note From the Author

Get a Free Horror Novella

1. The Devil’s Playground

2. Born Again for Death

3. Terrors of the Salton Sea

4. Earn Your Money

5. Killer Clown Crooks

6. I Think my Neighbor is a Serial Killer

7. If You’re Going to Do a Job, Do it Right

8. Have You Seen Yourself?

9. Normal Everyday Killers

10. A Terrifying Secret

11. The Sinkhole

12. Dead All Day

13. Cheating Death

14. The Greater Good

15. Never Take Drinks From Strangers

16. Escaping the Loop

17. The Suicide Cave

18. Never Prank Someone Through the Dark Web

19. The Game Bug

20. Patricide

A Peek at Volume 2

Also By Matthew Doggett

A Note From the Author

The stories in this book were originally written for the Dr. NoSleep podcast. If you’ve listened to that horror podcast, you’ve probably heard these stories. Many of them also aired on the Dr. NoSleep YouTube channel, accompanied by animations. I have made minor changes where necessary to enhance the reading experience. Enjoy!

Get a Free Horror Novella

Head to MatthewDoggettAuthor.com to sign up for my email list and get the free horror novella, The Rise of the Vampire Merek!

The Devil’s Playground

Delirium and confusion mix as consciousness fades in, replacing the bleary black void that I only now recognize as sleep. I open my eyes and my blurry vision slowly clears as I look around. My surroundings are so foreign and my mind so sluggish that I can’t help but think I’m having a particularly vivid dream.

I’m lying on a bed of hay on the floor of a wooden stall. The musky smell that fills my nostrils is one of animal feces, decaying organic matter, dust, and old, unfinished wood. There’s a lantern hanging from the wooden wall to my left, the flame inside flickering slightly.

“What the hell?” I say to no one, my mouth dry and my tongue thick. As I sit up, my head spins and I feel momentarily nauseous. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, which serves to calm my stomach. I open my eyes again, moving my head slowly to avoid another bout of nausea. Gathering my bearings, I notice that I’m wearing strange clothes. My gray pants are of a stiff and scratchy wool. I’m wearing a heavy long sleeve shirt made of thick cotton, also a dark gray in color.

Instead of buttons down the front of the shirt, there’s a thick zipper. I feel up to the neck of the strange shirt with my hands and find that there’s some kind of lock fastened there, keeping me from unzipping the garment. I notice with a sense of growing panic that I’m not wearing socks or shoes.

The lantern and the clothes and the design of the barn all tell me that I’m in some kind of reenactment. I went to sleep in my apartment in the 21st century and woke up sometime before the industrial revolution. I shake my head in disbelief, smiling at the absurdity of it.

“If this is a joke, it’s a really bad one,” I say, getting to my feet in the stall. No one answers. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice tells me that this is no joke — that I don’t know anyone who would play this kind of joke on me — but I ignore it. Best to take things as they come.

I walk over to the wooden door of the stall, able to see over it easily at my six-foot-four-inch height. There are three more stalls across a small central aisle from me, all of which are closed. I reach down and undo the ancient latch, swinging the door open on creaky hinges. I step into the central aisle, noting the change underfoot from straw to dirt.

I look into the stall directly across from the one I just left and find it empty. I move to the next one in line and have to do a double-take. There’s a girl in there — a woman, really. She’s unconscious, her eyes closed, lying on a pile of straw.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey, wake up.”

She doesn’t move.

I open the stall door and step in next to her, noting that she, too, is barefoot and dressed in strange, old-fashioned clothing similar to mine.

“Hey, miss? Are you awake?”

Nothing.

Crouching down next to her, I’m unsure whether I should touch her to try and wake her. I’ve never seen this woman before in my life, but I’m hoping she has some answers. She has small features, a downturned nose, and light brown hair pulled back into a bun. There’s a slight crease in her brow, as if she’s thinking hard as she sleeps. I peg her for no older than twenty-five.

The top of her shirt catches my eye, and I bend down to inspect it. Sure enough, there’s a small metal lock at the collar. From what I can tell, there’s a stationary metal ring sewn right into the top of the shirt collar, and another affixed to the zipper. When the zipper is all the way up, the two metal rings line up. So the only reason for the lock is to keep us from taking our shirts off. Why?

The shirts are thick, and the stitching is reinforced. It would take some serious work to rip them.

“What the hell is happening?” I whisper, dread knotting my stomach.

A loud thump sounds from above me, followed by a long scraping sound like a metal implement being pulled across wood. I snap my head up, looking at the imperfect boards that make up the ceiling about eight feet above me. There’s another level to the barn. And there’s something up there.

A short, guttural bark issues from above, the inhuman noise making the hairs on my neck stand on end.

My heart beats like an alarm in my chest, but I can think of nothing to do but stare up at the ceiling, frozen in fear.

I stay like that for a long moment, crouched next to the unconscious woman, straining my ears for any more threatening noises. When I think that no more will come, I turn my head back down to the woman — who strikes out at me with her hand.

Her fingernails dig into my left temple and scrape diagonally down my face, one of them narrowly missing my eye.

I throw myself back, slamming against the stall’s wall.

“Get away from me!” she screams, scrambling back into the far corner of the stall.

“What the hell, lady?” I ask, bringing my hand away from my face. “You’ve got some nails there. I’m bleeding.”

“Where am I? What did you do to me?” she asks, holding her right hand out in front of her like a claw to ward off an attack.

“I didn’t do anything,” I say. “I just woke up in another one of these stalls, just like you. I saw you in here and came to check on you. I don’t know what the hell is going on. I was hoping you would know.”

She looks at me with disbelief, and I can’t blame her. If I woke up with some strange guy standing over me, I’d probably do the same thing. Especially if that guy looked like me — I’m tall and thin and a little hunched. It tends to intimidate people when they first meet me. An ex-girlfriend once described me as “looming.” I begrudgingly admit that it’s a pretty apt description.

“Look — What’s your name?” I ask.

The woman doesn’t answer, and she still looks wound up as tight as a rabbit that has wandered into a wolf’s den.

“Give me a fake name for all I care,” I say. “I just don’t want to have to call you ‘lady.’ Know what I mean?”

I see her defenses lower slightly before she speaks again. “Brianna,” she says. “I’m Brianna.”

“Great. My name’s Kurt. Now, Brianna, what’s the last thing you remember before you got here?”

Before Brianna can answer my question, a sound like liquid being poured onto dirt comes from nearby. We both hear it and instinctively get very quiet. I put up a finger to keep Brianna where she is while I get into a crouch and move toward the stall door. The sound is definitely coming from nearby. I slowly stand up out of my crouch and look over the door into the aisle.

I swallow hard and turn my head toward the sound of the liquid. What had started off as a steady pouring sound is now a steady drip.

I see it, off to my right: a pool of dark liquid in the middle of the dirty, hay-strewn floor in the central aisle. I look up at the ceiling to see an open trapdoor there, but all is darkness beyond the threshold.

“What is it?” Brianna whispers.

I gesture for her silence and open the stall door slowly. Despite my efforts, it still creaks on its old hinges. Three cautious strides take me to the pool on the dirt floor, a pool of what is unmistakably blood. It’s still drip, drip, dripping from the dark trapdoor in the ceiling.

I step over to a nearby kerosene lantern hanging from an old rusty nail on a post. I grab the lantern and step back over to the hole in the ceiling, lifting the lantern as high as I can to try and see what’s up there.

A dark form moves in the deep shadows, seeming to lunge toward me. I throw myself back away from the hole as the figure emerges, falling to the ground with a bone-breaking thud.

It only takes me a moment to realize that it’s an animal, and a dead one at that. It’s a black goat, lying dead in a pool of its own blood. Its throat has been sliced open. Its tongue lolls from its mouth, its eyes stare blankly past me.

The trapdoor in the ceiling suddenly slams closed, causing me to jump.

“What’s happening?” Brianna says as she steps out of the stall behind me. The fear in her voice is unmistakable.

“I — I don’t know,” I say.

“What the hell is that? Is that a goat?” she asks, her eyes wide. “Is that real?”

“Yeah. It’s real,” I say. “Someone is trying to scare us. They’re messing with us. Maybe this is a prank show or something. Look around for cameras.”

Even as the words come out of my mouth, I know how hollow they sound. This is no prank. It’s no show. And the worst is yet to come.

I look up toward the near end of the barn and locate a door. Then I turn the other way and do the same. I think about hanging the kerosine lantern back up, but the heaviness of it in my hand feels good. Like a weapon. Which gives me an idea.

“Look around for farm tools. Anything we can use as weapons,” I say.

“Weapons? Didn’t you just say this is a show? Why do we need weapons?”

“Listen,” I say, turning to Brianna. “I don’t know what this is. I really don’t. If you do, then please tell me. Otherwise, we need to be ready to fight.”

“I don’t understand, Kurt,” Brianna says. “Where the hell even are we? I live in the city. What is this place? I remember going to bed last night and then I woke up here. How is this possible?”

“You live alone?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says. “Why, do you?”

I nod.

“Oh, god. This isn’t some Halloween prank, is it?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t think it is. I think we’re in serious trouble.”

I quickly open the other stall doors, looking for anything I can use as a weapon. They’re all empty save for the piles of hay on the ground. I skirt the bloody goat and look around at the front of the barn. Nothing.

Brianna is following behind me as we approach the door. I half expect to find it locked, but it’s not. I lift the latch and open the door slowly, cringing as its hinges creak.

“What the hell?” I say, looking out.

Arrayed before me is a small farming village straight out of the 1700s. There are small houses and other buildings made out of unpainted wood, complete with roofs covered in straw or some other kind of dried vegetation. Torches burn along the main thoroughfare of the small village, providing some light. I look up at the night sky and see slow-moving and dense cloud cover. Weak moonlight illuminates the clouds but does little to provide light on the ground.

“This is insane,” I say. Brianna makes a small noise behind me and then pulls me back into the barn.

“Someone’s coming,” she whispers.

Sure enough, I now hear fast footsteps growing closer.

Brianna and I run and duck into the nearest stall. I close the door behind us just as I hear the front door of the barn open. The sound of footfalls and hissing breath fills the space. I turn to Brianna and put a finger to my mouth. She nods.

I still have the lantern in my hand as I move slowly back to the stall door and raise my head to see over it. There’s a young woman there, stepping around the dead goat in the aisle. She’s dressed the same as both Brianna and me, even down to her bare feet. As she passes by the stall, I notice that there’s a number painted on the back of her locked-on shirt. It’s a big white number three.

She’s clearly trying to be quiet, but her breathing is too fast, almost as if she’s fighting off a panic attack.

The front door of the barn creaks and the young woman whips her head around. She screams and takes off running toward the other side of the barn. From where I am, I can’t see to the front door — the stall wall blocks my vision. But I can hear heavy footfalls. I stay put, eyes wide, as a hulking figure moves past, stepping in the puddle of goat blood as he goes.

He wears a black jumpsuit and a mask that looks like it’s made of rotting flesh. He has a claw hammer in one hand. He’s a big man — at least six feet tall and upwards of 200 pounds.

The girl is still screaming as she bangs against the other door at the far end of the barn. Apparently it’s locked. I can just see her from where I am, looking at an angle down the aisle.

She stops screaming as the masked man approaches.

“Please,” she says. “Please, don’t do this. I don’t even know you. What did I do? What did I do? Oh, please, God, don’t do this.”

The man raises the hammer as he approaches.

I look down at the lantern still held in my hand and then back up at the girl, who is clearly about to die. I heft the lantern, wondering what kind of damage it would do if I hit the man with it. The sound of blood rushing fills my ears as adrenaline floods my bloodstream and my heart works overtime. I open the door to the stall and take a step out, but Brianna grabs ahold of my shirt from behind. I look back at her. There are tears streaming down her face. She mouths the words “Don’t leave me.”

I shake my head and pull her hand off my shirt. But as I turn around to leave the stall, I see the man slam the hammer down on the pleading girl’s forehead. Her eyes cross briefly and she stumbles back a step, a large drop of blood forming where the hammer struck her.

The man flips the hammer around and brings the claw end down onto the girl’s face, hitting her in the bridge of the nose. Blood sprays forth as bone crunches. I step back into the stall, trying not to vomit as my stomach heaves in revulsion.

Brianna clutches me as I crouch down next to her, the sickening image of the claw sinking into the girl’s nose stuck in my head. I look into Brianna’s eyes as horrific sounds fill the air — the sounds of the hammer coming down on flesh and bone again and again.

Brianna is silently crying and clutching me, but her eyes never leave mine. Something passes between us as we wait, hoping the murderer won’t find us. It’s a promise to each other that we’ll stick together to the end, no matter what. I try to pass some of my strength to her through my eyes and my presence, but I have so little to give.

After what seems like hours but is probably only ten or fifteen minutes, the terrible sounds stop and we hear movement as the man leaves the barn. I wait for another five minutes before standing up and looking over the stall door. There’s a pile of gore over where the girl was killed, and drag marks along the floor. He took her body out to do God-knows-what with it.

“What are we going to do?” Brianna whispers.

“Run,” I say. There’s nothing else to do. Then something occurs to me. I tell Brianna to turn around. She looks a question at me but does it anyway.

There’s a large white number two painted on the back of her shirt.

“What’s on my back?” I ask, turning around.

“A number one,” she says. “What about mine?”

“Two.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But that girl had a three on hers and they clearly don’t want us taking these shirts off… I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, anyway. We’ve gotta get out of here.”

We move out of the stall and toward the front door, pausing to listen every few steps. I hear nothing, save an owl hooting off in the distance and crickets chirping.

“When we get out there, we’re going to turn left and run,” I tell Brianna. “We’re not going through the village. No way.”

“Why left?” she asks.

“Because it was dark that way. Maybe there’s a forest we can go into and hide out until daylight.”

Brianna nods, then she grabs my arm and looks up at me. “Don’t leave me,” she says. “Please.”

“I won’t leave you,” I tell her.

“No, I mean, can we go out the door together? Run together? Will you hold my hand as we go out and as we run?”

“Sure,” I say. “Of course.” It’s clear that she’s battling a complete breakdown. I like her for keeping it together.

We get to the door and I swing it open slowly with my left hand, keeping the lantern in my right. I notice with dismay that all the torches that were lit earlier have been put out. It’s so dark that I can barely see the shapes of the buildings. I think about saying something, but I decide not to. It doesn’t change anything. We still need to run.

As soon as I swing the door open, Brianna grabs my left hand and holds on tight. The doorway is just big enough that we can both step through at once.

“Ready?” I ask her.

She nods.

“Okay, let’s go.” I step forward and over the threshold. Beside me, Brianna does the same.

Something comes flying at me through the dark, and I instinctively jerk my body back, trying to dodge the blow.

A sickening wet thunk sounds just as I realize what the thing is: a machete, swung by someone waiting just outside the door.

Brianna makes a small sound, and I turn my head to look at her. The machete is lodged in her throat — when I dodged back, she was still stepping forward. She’s looking up at me as blood pours around the mottled, discolored blade. Her hand drops from mine and her eyes roll down to look at the hand still holding the handle of the machete.

A man about my height and build steps into view from beside the doorway. He’s wearing a burlap sack on his head with dark holes for eyes. He wears a brown jumpsuit and brown work boots.

I can’t see his eyes, but I’m sure he’s looking at me. He yanks the machete out of Brianna’s throat, and she collapses to the ground, half in and half out of the barn. Blood pours from the gaping wound in her neck.

The man takes a step toward me and I react before I know what I’m doing. I lash out with the lantern, smacking him in the head with the sturdy metal bottom. He stumbles and trips over Brianna’s legs, sprawling out on the ground just inside the barn door.

I’m on him in a second. I smash the bottom of the lantern on his face, using both hands this time. I feel his face smash inward with the blow. He brings the machete up at me, but I’m ready for it. I grab his wrist and wrestle it out of his hands easily. I can feel him growing weaker.

I yank the burlap hood off his head, revealing a swelling and bloody face. His right eye socket has collapsed and his nose is a mess of cartilage and blood. With a little imagination, I can tell that there’s nothing unique about that face. Nothing that would tell you he was a murderer if you saw him on the street.

One look at Brianna is all it takes for me to do what I need to do. I plunge the machete deep into his throat, hitting his spine with the tip.

I pull the machete out and stand up and watch him die as he flails and gasps and kicks, trying and failing to hold on to his life.

Then something occurs to me.

There’s at least one other killer out there — the one who killed the girl with the hammer. These two couldn’t be the same.

I size up the man on the floor, now dead or close enough to not matter. He really is my size and build. And there’s no lock on his jumpsuit.

I pull Brianna into the barn and shut the door.

I then undress the man I’ve just killed and get into his jumpsuit. The collar is wet with blood, but I’m not worried about it. This is my best bet to get out of here.

His boots are a little small, but I make them work. Hopefully I won’t need to wear them for long. The hood is itchy, and it smells like bad breath and sweat. It’s hard to see out of; no wonder the guy hit Brianna when he was aiming for me.

I walk to the other end of the barn and take a lantern off the wall and then smash it into the ground, breaking the glass and causing flames to spring to life on the hay and the wooden wall. I do the same three more times on my way out. With any luck, the flames will obscure what happened in the barn long enough for me to get out of here — wherever the hell here is.

As the flames grow around me, I step out into the night. I walk away from the burning barn and into the dark village, carrying the bloody machete in my right hand.

I hear tortured screams coming from two of the buildings in the little village, but I keep walking. I pass an old decrepit church on the far side of the village. The doors are open and there’s a soft glow coming from inside. As I pass by, I look inside, seeing a man wearing a black hood and dressed in an old-time preacher’s outfit. He’s taking slices off a young man that has been nailed to a cross. The crucified man makes ineffectual noises, and I can see why: his mouth has been sewn shut with thick black thread.

The torturous preacher turns and looks at me as I pass, nodding slightly before turning back to his unholy work.

I follow the dirt path out of the village for about a quarter-mile before coming to a large brick wall that stretches off in both directions. It’s at least fifteen feet tall and topped with razor wire. There’s a heavy-duty, windowless metal door set in the wall just ahead of me. There’s a little camera set just above the door — the only evidence of technology I’ve seen since I woke up in this nightmare.

I walk up to the door and bang on it, looking up at the camera through the eyeholes in the burlap hood. After a long moment, the door buzzes and I hear the click of a sliding deadbolt. I reach out and open the door.

I walk into a concrete building. I pass a locker room, showers, and a room with tables and vending machines. I hear voices up ahead as I work my way through the building. Men’s voices, laughing, cursing, and sounding like they’re having a good old time.

My hand tightens on the machete.

There’s a doorway up ahead on the right of the concrete hallway I’m walking through, and I can tell that’s where the voices are coming from.

I slow down as I approach it, my heart beating so hard I’m afraid it will give me away. I decide to walk right past the doorway without looking in. I’ll keep on going until I’m home free. Then I’ll call the cops and tell them what’s going on here.

I pick up the pace again, my palms sweaty and my breathing labored. I come abreast of the doorway.

Just two more steps until I’m completely past it.

One more.

“Hey, Reaver,” a voice calls out from inside the room. I can tell the greeting is directed at me. I freeze.

“Where you going, Reaver? Come on in here. Join us.”

I turn to look into the room. There are three men, each wearing different gruesome masks, sitting around a wooden table scattered with cards and beer cans and ashtrays. Two of them are shirtless, but still wearing their masks. The other’s clothes are stained with blood.

I stand there, staring at them, unsure what to do.

“Aw, leave Reaver alone,” one of the other guys says. “He’s not much for words. I was here with him last year. He didn’t say a word until all the killing was done. Then you know what he says to me? Keep in mind he’s all coated in blood and his hood’s all messed up and he’s wearing this kid’s guts like a scarf. Anyway, he says to me ‘This is the most fun I had since killing my Daddy.’ You believe that?” The man slaps the table and laughs, his demon mask seeming to laugh with him.

“Well, shit, Reaves,” the first man says. “I don’t care whether you say nothing to us at all. Long as you pay your way like everyone else. This shit is expensive.”

“You’re goddamn right about that,” says the third man, who then lifts up the bottom of his mask to chug a beer. “Getting more expensive every year,” he continues. “But it’s worth it. Goddamn worth every red cent. Another reason to look forward to Halloween.”

It’s some kind of sick hunting retreat for serial killers, I realize. I turn and keep walking, the only thought in my mind one of getting out of here alive.

There’s a door ahead of me, and it looks identical to the one I came through on the other side of the building. It’s an exterior door. I can just walk out and keep walking until I find someone who isn’t a murdering psycho.

I step up to the door and try the knob with my left hand. It’s locked. I look for a locking mechanism but don’t find any. There’s a keypad on the wall next to the door.

My heart sinks.

“You didn’t think it’d be that easy, did you?” a voice says from behind me. Another voice chuckles. I know without turning around that the three killers are arrayed behind me in the hallway.

“Old Reaver,” the voice continues, “was trying to kill you — a number one — but he accidentally killed a number two, which is my number. I guess that means you’re mine, kid.”

Before I turn around, I make sure I have a tight grip on the machete.

It’s all the hope I have left.

Born Again for Death

I’ve spent a lot of time surfing the web over the course of the pandemic. Even after the restrictions started lightening up, I found that I didn’t really want to go out much anymore.

I’ve made some good friends in chat forums over the course of the lockdown. One person, a guy named Sean, has become one of my best friends. We share the same dark sense of humor, we feel the same way about most people, we like the same music and movies, and we both feel we can’t be our true selves around most others. Like we have to put on a polite mask in public.

He just gets me. He’s a better friend than any I’ve made in real life, that’s for sure. Or, at least I thought he was a good friend. That didn’t turn out to be true.

But my relationship with Sean is important to explain how I got to this point. How I came to the crossroads that I’m at now. I’ve got a decision to make, and I don’t have long to do it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me go back to after Sean and I first started chatting online.

We’re both big fans of computer effects. In fact, we met in a forum discussing the Blender software that many people use to make computer-generated videos.

We hit it off right away, exchanging email addresses and phone numbers. Then we started sending videos to each other to see if we could guess by looking at them whether they were real or fake.

I’d try to stump him, and he’d try to stump me.

At first, it was pretty easy. If you know what to look for, you can spot telltale signs of computer graphics.

But it got pretty hard after a while. It became a kind of obsession. I would spend hours searching for a video that would stump Sean.

And my search brought me to the dark web. I can’t remember whether it was me or Sean that started sending gory videos, but pretty soon that’s all we were sending to each other. I would search for graphic videos of people dying that had been altered by a computer graphics program. Or created entirely with computers.

Of course, I would come across videos that looked super real. And I realized that many of them actually were real. Actual people getting killed in all kinds of nasty ways.

And pretty soon, we weren’t sharing videos to try and stump each other anymore. We were just trying to gross each other out.

Like I said, we share a dark sense of humor. Plus, there’s something about seeing people die on video that makes you feel alive. Call it morbid curiosity if you like. I just call it human nature.

Anyway, this went on for a few months before Sean sent me a link to this dark website where you can pick what happens to a computer-generated character. Pick how they die.

The graphics are amazing on this site. They’re so good it’s hard to tell they’re even fake sometimes. But there are some signs that a keen eye can pick out.

The first one I participated in was of a young woman on an overpass. It showed a shot of her standing on the sidewalk on the bridge while traffic rushed by a few feet away.

Three options popped up on screen for her death. The first was for her to jump off the bridge and hit the highway below. The second was for her to just walk into traffic on the bridge. The third was to have someone come up and mug her, killing her in the process.

There were about twenty of us voting on the website. You had to spend a few dollars worth of Bitcoin to cast your vote, but that was fine. The website had to make money somehow. I voted for the mugging, but most people wanted to see her jump.

So when the voting was through, she climbed up onto the railing and took a swan dive off, splattering as she landed on the pavement and then getting run over by a truck.

It was pretty wild. It looked very real. The physics of the simulation were great. It was almost as if I could see her skull cracking and bones breaking.

Crazy stuff.

After about a month of regular visits to that site, Sean sent me a link to a different site. Only this one was the real thing.

My hands started shaking as I realized what the site was all about. Not only was it completely illegal, but it also felt wrong. And that was part of the appeal.

According to the site, all the people on it were terminally ill and agreed to take part for the payday. To be sure, this site was much more expensive than the other one. It was several hundred dollars to even watch. And more to vote.

But apparently, 80% of the proceeds went to the person’s family. Better than dying and leaving your family in debt, I thought.

I couldn’t pass it up, even though it was a little out of my budget. I said screw it and paid them what they wanted.

The victim was an older man — maybe in his early sixties — who had a brain tumor. They had him on camera in the corner of a small room, the walls and floor of which were coated in clear plastic. He was just sitting on a seat in jeans and a t-shirt.

The options were a little different for this one. The first was to have him beaten to death with chains. The second was to have him stabbed to death with kitchen knives. The third was death by machete.

I voted for death by machete.

Lucky for me, machete won.

I watched with a sick feeling in my stomach as two men in black masks came into the room carrying machetes.

Apparently, they had several cameras set up, because the angle changed just before the men started in on him, shifting to a closer look.

The old man lifted his hands up to ward off the incoming attacks. The first hack sliced into his forearm and snapped the bone.

I stared in disbelief as the masked men sliced the old man apart. I listened to his screams in my headphones. I watched the blood drain out of him as he struggled feebly on the floor.

The feed ended shortly after one of the masked men chopped his head off.

I sat back in my chair, my heart hammering in my chest, palms sweaty and eyes wide. I’d just watched a man brutally murdered in real-time.

I didn’t get back on the dark web for a while after that. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, replaying it in my head over and over again. I felt sick about the whole thing.

I couldn’t believe that I’d actually paid to watch the man die. That I voted for him to die.

I never thought of myself as a cruel person. But did watching a man die like that — a man who would have died a slow and even more painful death — make me a bad person?

I struggled with this question for a while. I started seeing the world a little differently. I went and saw my parents for the first time in nearly a year. We live in the same city, but I just never made it over to their house during the pandemic.

We’ve never been all that close, but I guess I had kind of used the pandemic as an excuse not to see them.

So when I went over after watching the man die on that website, things were different. It was like I saw them in a new light.

I saw them as humans, whereas before they had kind of been larger than life. Even if I’d known logically that they were just as mortal as anyone else, I still held onto the childish notion that nothing bad could ever happen to them.

But I knew that wasn’t the case any longer. Things had changed. I had changed.

It wasn’t long after visiting my parents that Sean messaged me again.

“Round 2!” his message said. “Even better this time!”

I was intrigued. I followed the link he sent and was greeted with an offer to come to a party hosted by the website. It would be a watching party, the invite said.

I thought it was a joke at first. I messaged Sean and told him as much. But he insisted it was no joke. He said he was going to the party and that I should come.

It was tempting. I’d never met Sean before, and I was curious about the people running the website. I wanted to know where they found these terminally ill people.

A day later, I got a message from the website’s founder, Felix Ferdinand.

“I’ve been talking to Sean,” his message read. “He says you’re reluctant to come to our little party. Ours is a small community and we need to stick together, so I’m willing to waive the fee in your case. However, if you don’t feel comfortable coming, I completely understand. Maybe next time.”

The party was still a week away when Mr. Ferdinand messaged me, and I didn’t answer right away. I had to think about it. It was definitely a step out of my comfort zone. I had grown so used to staying at home, keeping to myself, working from my computer.

But as the days went by, I slowly warmed to the idea. It would be good for me to get out of the house and interact with people for a change.

Plus I was curious about the watching party that the invitation promised.

Two days before the party, I messaged both Sean and Mr. Ferdinand to tell them I would be there.

The night of the party, I took an Uber to the address they provided on my encrypted invitation. It was a large house in a part of the city I’d rarely been to. All the homes had gates and were set back from the main road. Some of them even had security officers sitting in small buildings.

The house my Uber pulled up to was one of them. I gave my name to the gate guard and he scanned the QR code on the invitation I had pulled up on my phone. The gate opened and the Uber driver dropped me off in front of the large white house and drove off. It was three stories tall and immaculate. The front yard was a work of art that included perfectly landscaped bushes and shrubs.

I walked up the stone front steps and raised my hand to knock when the door opened. A portly and acne-scarred middle-aged man bumped into me as he rushed out, nearly knocking me down. His eyes were wide with fear, and his breath came in gasps. He paid me no mind, scrambling down the steps as fast as his short legs would carry him, mumbling under his breath in a high-pitched tone.

A tall man in a black-and-red suit stepped into the doorway and watched the portly man make his way down the steps. He had a faint smile on his face.

“You must be Samuel,” the man said, turning toward me. “I’m Felix Ferdinand, your host for the evening.”

I nodded in acknowledgment. “Sam is fine,” I said. “What was that all about?”

“Oh, there’s one every year,” Mr. Ferdinand said. “Don’t you worry about him.”

He extended a long arm around my shoulders and ushered me inside. As he closed the door behind us, I heard some kind of commotion out on the front lawn. It sounded like a muffled scream followed by a rustling sound. But the door was closed by the time I turned back to look. Mr. Ferdinand pulled me along with him into the house.

“Is Sean here yet?” I asked.

“Yes and no,” Mr. Ferdinand said as we walked deeper into the house. The place was decorated in red-and-black velvets with expensive furniture and paintings placed strategically throughout.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Let me ask you a few questions first, Sam,” Mr. Ferdinand said. “Then all will become clear about Sean.”

I nodded, but I had an uneasy feeling in my stomach.

“When you were young, did you get in trouble much?” Mr. Ferdinand asked.

“Well, some, I guess. I don’t think it was any more than other kids.”

“You got into fights with other kids? And you were accused of being involved in the disappearance of a cat, is that right?”

“Yeah, but the cat thing I never—”

“And you believe others are unworthy of your presence?”

“What?” I said, shocked at how much this stranger knew about me. “No, I don’t believe that. What is this, anyway?”

Mr. Ferdinand sighed and looked at me with half-lidded eyes. “Sam, I’m not here to judge you. I know you. You and I, we’re the same. It’s okay for you to admit these things. Because I already know. For instance, I have several conversations you had in forums where you said that most other people weren’t ‘good enough’ for you, or something similar.”

“You have these conversations?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

“Listen, Sam. The person you know as Sean is not a person at all. He’s an AI program that I spent many years writing and perfecting. And do you know what his job is?”

My mouth was suddenly dry, my tongue seeming to swell. “No,” I managed. “What is it?”

“To find people like us, of course. To match up certain attributes. To uncover those people that are a little different from the general population, like a pig sniffing for truffles in a French forest.”

Mr. Ferdinand put his arm around me again and led me deeper into the house. I started to object, but it was a weak objection, and he knew it as well as I did. He was hitting a nerve with me, and, despite the voice in my head warning me to get out, I wanted to see where it was leading.

“Don’t be scared, Sam,” Mr. Ferdinand said as we stepped into a room coated with plastic sheeting. Two men in black clothes and masks had a hold of the portly man that had nearly knocked me down. There was an exterior door on the opposite side of the room. The masked men must have caught the portly man and dragged him around the back of the house and into this room.

“This is Marcus,” Felix Ferdinand continued. “I’m afraid he’s an example of the limitations of my AI program. I can’t get them all right, it seems. Some people show all the signs, but they just can’t accept their true nature. But that’s not you, is it, Sam?”

I looked at Marcus, held on his knees by the two masked men. He had tape over his mouth, but he was still making small animal sounds. He was crying.

A wave of revulsion swept through me as I looked at the man. How could he be like me? I thought. We’re nothing alike. Nothing.

Mr. Ferdinand left my side for a moment and came back with a crowbar, which he placed in my hand. I looked down at the tool and then back up at him. He gestured toward Marcus.

I looked around and noticed for the first time the cameras positioned around the room, pointed at Marcus and the two masked men. Mr. Ferdinand smiled. He pulled a black mask out of his back pocket and handed it to me.

Now here I am. You’re all caught up.

I’ve got a decision to make.

Do I put the mask on, and in so doing, essentially take off the mask I’ve been wearing for years without even realizing it?

Is this who I am? Who I want to be? Is it even a choice?

I think of how I felt when watching the man being sliced apart by the masked men with machetes. Probably the same men holding Marcus down now. I remember how I felt, the nervous excitement in my stomach. Were the emotions I felt true disgust and shame? Or were they just byproducts of the uncomfortable realization that I’m a killer? I look deep inside myself for an answer. Who is the true me?

I pull the mask on and take a step toward Marcus, the crowbar heavy in my hand. I feel a sense of lightness like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. All the natural instincts I’ve been trying to suppress my whole life seem to flood through me, and I want nothing more than to feel this little fat man’s skull crack beneath my blows.

“You don’t have to be scared,” Mr. Ferdinand says from behind me. “You can be yourself here.”

I continue on, stepping up to within striking distance of Marcus’s head. I bring the crowbar up. But before I swing it down to fracture the man’s skull, I turn back to Mr. Ferdinand.

“I’d like to invite my parents here,” I say in a voice that’s both my own and brand new. I feel like I’ve been born again to the life I’m supposed to live. “I would like that very much.”

Mr. Ferdinand laughs. “You’re going to fit in just fine here, Sam. Just fine.”

Terrors of the Salton Sea

I’m starting to get used to the smell. But not the feeling of being watched. I don’t think I could ever get used to that.

Luckily, I won’t have to get used to it. If I can just find my car.

The desert dirt crunches under my shoes as the foul wind whips past me. My girlfriend’s words from hours earlier rattle around in my brain like the occasional empty beer can blown past me by the wind.

“One of these days, you’re going to run into serious trouble,” she said as I was leaving the apartment. “You’ll get lost and won’t be found until it’s too late. I don’t know how much more of this I can take, Charlie. It’s like I’m dating a cop or a soldier, and it’s too much damn stress.”

I’m not a cop. I’m not a soldier. In fact, I’m a screenwriter who has never sold a script, working part-time at a gym and part-time taking freelance photographs for sites like Depositphotos. Ever since I got lost in the San Bernardino National Forest on a photography excursion, Beth has been stressing.

When we had the argument, I thought she was being silly. Now, I’m not so sure.

I look over my shoulder, seeing dark splotches of night move in the distance, unsure if it’s my imagination or not.

I had been hoping for a clear night. The weather report I read before setting out said that it was supposed to be cloudless. But as I stand among the ruins of a once-thriving community, I can’t see a single star above me. Of course, there’s no moon. I knew that. It was one of the reasons I came out to the Salton Sea today.

I wanted to use my new camera to take some photographs of the stars. And I knew that without the light from the moon, I’d be able to get clearer shots of the stars. Maybe even some time-lapse photography.

But of course, the clouds rolled in as the sun abandoned this side of the world, busting my plans to hell.

Still, being the stubborn man I am, I decided to stay around for a while, waiting to see if the clouds would clear on the desert wind.

In the meantime, I wandered into the nearby ghost town to take low-exposure pictures of the abandoned homes and trailers and the graffiti-strewn urban art all around the place.

I didn’t think the place was all that big. But now I’m turned around. I seem to be walking in circles. And I swear someone is following me. Stalking me from out in the darkness, among the ramshackle structures that seem swollen with the ghosts of their previous occupants.

You’ve probably heard of the Salton Sea. Maybe you’ve read the news stories about it. Or maybe you’re only vaguely aware of the California lake and the abandoned towns around it.

It’s called a sea because it doesn’t drain. There’s no outlet. Which is one reason it’s now a massive ecological disaster.

The Salton Sink, which now holds the Salton Sea, has been filling with water and drying up again for thousands of years. Of course, this happens on a large timeline, making the average human lifespan seem like a ten-second YouTube commercial.

The last time it filled up was when the trouble started.

Back in the early 20th century, the Colorado River was accidentally diverted, and the water had to go somewhere. For two years, it poured into the Salton Sink, creating what’s now called the Salton Sea.

For a while, things were good. Nearby farms let agricultural runoff flow into the lake, keeping it filled and preventing it from drying up. People flocked to the sea from the 1930s to the ‘60s. Fishermen and vacation goers alike headed to the beaches. Real estate developers started building. People moved here to seek work on the farms or to cater to the vacationers.

But the water keeping the Salton Sea filled contained pesticides, heavy metals, and other toxins. In the 1980s, fish started to die off in droves, their carcasses washing up on shore and emitting the stench of rotting fish.

It was just the beginning.

Now that farmers use their water more strategically, the lake is drying up. And since it has no outlet, its salt levels are rising. Not to mention the selenium and heavy metals that have collected in the lake.

As the lake shrinks, it exposes the lakebed. The desert wind kicks up the contaminated dirt, causing everything from asthma to increased cancer rates in those who live in the area.

But most people left the shores of the lake in the last three decades, leaving ghost towns in their wake. Those that remain have to put up with the sulfur smell of rotten eggs thanks to the high levels of hydrogen sulfide in the water. But the relatively harmless smell of rotten eggs is nothing compared to the toxic dust they breathe every day.

All this to tell you that the place is creepy enough in the daytime. At night, it’s something else.

I’m not using the flashlight on my phone because I don’t want it messing with my night vision. I have my camera on a strap around my neck, holding it with my left hand so it doesn’t sway as I walk. In my right hand, I clutch my pocket knife.

I want to think I’m overreacting, but every minute I don’t find my car is another minute that increases this terrible feeling in my stomach.

Most of the surrounding houses are one-story. None of them are occupied. None of them have windows and most of them are missing doors. I walk in the middle of the road between the homes. The asphalt only shows in patches. Most of it has been covered in dirt brought in by the desert wind. Dirt that’s sprinkled with toxins from the nearby lake.

I come to the end of the houses, the edge of the road, and look off into the desert. It’s too dark to see very far, but I make out a couple of shrubs and what I think is a larger desert bush. They’re not much more than shapes outlined in the darkness.

I look left and right. I parked my car near the main entrance to the little neighborhood. So if I’m on one side of the neighborhood, I only have three more to check. Or so I tell myself.

Looking back out into the desert, the hair on my neck bristles. The big bush seems to have moved.

I take a step forward, squinting at the plant. I swear it moved.

A distant scream floats on the wind, coming from behind me. It sounds like a man, screaming in pain. I turn around and look back into the abandoned neighborhood, seeing a glow from one of the houses I’ve already passed. A house that was dark when I passed it.

Some kind of primitive alarm goes off in my head, urging me to turn around. I spin on my heels, looking out at the desert landscape.

The bush is still there. But has it moved again? Or am I losing it?

Letting my camera hang, I pull out my phone and shake it to turn on the flashlight. I shine the light around, seeing nothing but khaki dirt, pale green shrubs, small piles of trash, and a large desert bush. Just a regular bush.

The light makes me feel a little better. I swipe my thumb up my phone and look for bars. No signal. But then, I already knew that. It was why Beth and I had gotten into an argument before I left LA. I told her I wouldn’t have a signal out here. She didn’t like that.

Now I really don’t like it.

I leave the light on as I turn around and walk back the way I came. There’s still a glow coming from the house up ahead, but I don’t think I want to check it out. Not when there are people screaming around here. I need to find my damn car.

I take a left onto a street I haven’t been down yet. My car is on one side of this neighborhood, and I know I’ll recognize the area once I get close.

As I’m hurrying down the street, I start to feel exposed with my light on. I can’t see shit out near the houses flanking me. And if anyone’s stalking me, I’ve just made things really easy for them.

So I stop and turn off my phone’s flashlight, plunging myself back into darkness. I stay stopped, straining my eyes as I look around into the dark, willing them to adjust.

A house just ahead of me and to the right suddenly emits a glow from inside. Like someone has just lit a candle or a lantern. I swallow hard, my throat thick.

Something tells me not to go past that house. But I don’t have a choice. I have to find my car. There’s no way I’m staying out here all night. No fucking way.

Walking again, I stray to the side of the street opposite the house, keeping it in sight. The two windows and the door in the front seem to stare, taunting me. I see no movement from within the house. Just a glow coming from a hidden source.

A scuffling sound from the darkness to my left seizes my attention. I turn as if in slow motion, already knowing someone’s there. I lift the knife in my right hand just as a dark figure bears down on me. Something cracks me in the head. My feet become immediately heavy, refusing to work with me. I stumble and fall to the toxic-dirt-covered street. My last thought before everything goes black is incongruous; I worry I’ve damaged my expensive camera in the fall.

***

“…is only fifty feet deep at the most. The average depth of the sea is twenty-nine feet. You’d be surprised to hear that the Navy lost at least one nuclear bomb here during World War Two. Never recovered.”

It’s a man’s voice. He has a professorial tone tinged with the mad scratchy voice of a conspiracy theorist radio personality. Someone sobs nearby and I open my eyes. I see a dirt ceiling with beams at irregular intervals across it, like a mine shaft. I’m clearly lying down, and it feels like I’m on hard-packed dirt. Pain shoots through my head and neck as I look around. The first thing I notice is a woman in the corner to my left, arms hugging her bare knees to her chest. She’s sobbing softly, her short pink hair mussed up and her face smudged with dirt.

I look to my right and see I’m near a wall of bars. It’s some kind of cell. There are two electric camping lanterns hanging on the opposite side of the bars, providing the room with illumination. The walls of the rectangular room are dirt, with wooden beams placed around, corresponding with the beams across the ceiling.

On the other side of the bars sits a wiry man with a bushy black beard. His skin is tanned and leathery, starting to go loose over the kind of sinewy muscles you get from a lifetime of labor. He wears dark, dirty clothes and black tennis shoes. He’s the one talking.

“… used depleted uranium as ballast to make the test bombs heavy…” He’s looking directly at the woman, but his wide blue-gray eyes swivel over to me when he sees I’m awake. “Welcome to the Underground,” he says, then cackles loudly. He’s sitting on a crate, and his right leg bounces up and down as if powered by a perpetual motion machine.

I look over at the woman as I sit up. I feel numb. There’s no fear, only confusion. Her eyes meet mine for a moment, then they flick over behind me, to the only wall I haven’t seen.

I wince as I twist my head around to see there’s a man in the cell with us. He’s positioned in front of a three-foot-diameter hole in the dirt wall, his back to the circle of darkness. His wrists are in shackles up above and to either side of the hole. The shackles are fixed to metal anchors set in circles of concrete in the hard dirt wall.

The hole is near the ground, and the man sits on his legs. He’s clearly unconscious, but his shackled arms keep him upright.

I notice smears on the wall around the hole. They’re dark, like mud. Or dried blood.

“What the fuck is this?” I say, the fear coming on strong now.

“This is a California party ‘cause a California party don’t stop,” the bearded man says in a sing-song voice. His side of the dirt room is littered with items. Most of them look like useless garbage, but there are a few things that look as though they still have some value. Like my car keys, a machete, and a battered first-aid kit. Too bad they’re all out of reach.

I don’t have to check to know that my phone is gone. And I can see my new camera sitting on a wooden crate next to my car keys. The camera looks dirty, but not broken. I also note a narrow doorway on that side of the room. The way out.

I stand up and face the man. “Let us out of here,” I say, trying and failing to sound authoritative. Instead, I just sound like a whiny kid.

“You’re free to go. Through the hole!” the man says, still half-singing. “You’re free to go! Through the hole! You’re free to go! Through the hole!” He cackles loudly again.

I grip the bars, shaking them. They don’t budge. They’re set into the ceiling and the floor. I look at the cell door, seeing that there’s a big padlock on the other side. I rattle the door, banging it against the locked hasp.

“Look out!” the woman shouts.

I look up in time to see the machete coming down at my right hand. I yank the appendage back, but I’m not fast enough. The blade slices through my index and middle fingers. I pull my hand up, staring in shock at the nubs just beyond the top knuckles. It takes a moment for the blood to come. A moment in which I can see bone and muscle. My insides.

Then the blood is there, pouring out. I grow lightheaded and stumble back, hitting the wall and sliding down to sit on the ground as I grip my two fingers with my other hand.

The woman moves next to me, looking at the wounds with hazel eyes set in a petite and pretty face. She grips the hem of my t-shirt and tugs on it, trying to tear it. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “You’re okay.”

I look blankly back at the bearded man. He has the tips of my fingers in one hand. He stares down at them as if they hold all the secrets of the universe. Then he throws them underhand against a wall. When they come to rest, he shouts, “Sevens! I win!”

“What the fuck is this?” I say in a drowsy voice as the pink-haired woman rips a strip of my shirt away.

“I don’t know. My boyfriend and I were staying here in our camper van. Perry went out to take a leak and when he came back, that guy was holding the machete to his neck. He told me if I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d kill Perry. Then he blindfolded us and led us down here.”

“So you don’t know where we are?”

“No,” she says. “But I think we went into a structure. Maybe a house. And then down some wooden stairs.”

She wraps my fingers with the t-shirt as I look away and grit my teeth against the pain. She says her name’s Delia. I tell her my name’s Charlie.

The man continues his ramblings as Delia finishes up the makeshift bandage. Then she moves over to her boyfriend and sits next to him, stroking his cheeks and asking him to wake up. He has close-cut black hair and tattoos on his pasty arms. He’s wearing a black punk-rock band t-shirt, black jeans, and Chuck Taylors.

I lean my head back and think. Although it wouldn’t be all that difficult to squeeze past her boyfriend, Perry, it’s clear the bearded man wants us to go through the hole. Maybe he has some friends down there. Or there are traps. Or snakes. Whatever is through the hole, it won’t be good.

I realize that the man has stopped his incessant chatter. Opening my eyes, I see him standing near the bars, looking through at Perry. He’s smiling, looking like a child on Christmas Eve.

A sound like heavy breathing comes from the hole, getting louder and louder. Delia hears it, and she stops what she’s doing, turning to look into the darkness behind her boyfriend.

The bearded man moves over and turns off the lantern hanging from the ceiling nearest the hole, cutting the illumination in half and making it even harder to see into the hole behind Perry.

“Get away from the hole,” I say, getting to my feet.

She doesn’t move.

Before I can say it again, four arms shoot out of the darkness and grab Perry’s torso, each with three long, pale claws like that of a sloth. The skin on the stubby tri-fingered hands is bumpy and black with shades of dark blue. Another two arms emerge and grab Delia by her right arm and shoulder. She screams as the claws sink into her skin.

Perry regains consciousness, screaming in pain as he’s pulled back against the hole. But his hands are still shackled, and his arms are being pulled and stressed. I can hear his joints separating even over the screaming and the urgent, high-pitched growling sounds now coming from the hole.

I move over and grab Delia’s other arm, trying to yank her back with both hands, ignoring the pain in my fingers. As Perry’s legs and lower torso are pulled into the hole, the two claws grabbing Delia let go, leaving behind deep gashes in her flesh. I stumble back, pulling her with me by her left arm.

Perry is still screaming, pleading with his eyes for us to do something, anything. But there’s nothing we can do.

His right thumb dislocates, and his hand slips through the shackle. But the left shackle seems to be tighter. The unseen creatures continue pulling. His left shoulder pops out of its socket with a loud crunch. Then a hand shoots out from the darkness, the claws scraping along the shoulder joint, cutting through the stretched skin and muscle there as blood sprays out. After a few moments of this, they yank his body down into the hole, leaving behind his severed arm, swinging from the shackle and streaming blood onto the ground.

I look over at the bearded man, a wave of hate and revulsion hitting me as I see the look on his face — and the bulge in his pants.

He absently reaches down to his crotch with one hand, then he looks over at me, shamefaced. He scurries out the doorway, one hand still held to his crotch, no doubt headed to indulge himself.

I look at Delia, who stares at the hole in the wall. At least she didn’t see what I just saw. It’s a small mercy.

There’s nothing I can say to her that would make what she just saw okay, so I don’t even try. Instead, I move over to the bars and look for a pair of keys. The only keys I see are mine. Those won’t help us get out of this cell.

My keys, along with my camera and the machete, are on a small wooden crate some five feet from the bars.

While none of the items will help us unlock the cell, they’re better than nothing. The rest of the stuff on the ground is less than useless. It’s mostly trash and bric-a-brac.

I sit down and quickly pull both my shoes off. I then tie the shoelaces together at one end. I lift the chained shoes together, confident that I can reach the wooden crate with them.

“What are you doing?” Delia says.

“Just watch the hole. Tell me if they come back.” The images of Perry getting pulled down into the hole play on repeat in my head. I try to make them stop, but it’s no good. I try to quell the fear I’m feeling, but that’s no good, either. My hand shakes as I put it through the bars, holding onto my shoes with a shoelace.

I swing them gently, back and forth, toward the crate. Then I reach out as far as I can, letting the bottom shoe drop. It hits the back end of the crate, shaking it and making my car keys fall off the edge. I curse under my breath.

I crouch and then pull gently, using the shoe as a hook to tilt the crate up slightly. Once I know it will work, I yank on the shoe hard enough to knock the crate toward me, but not so hard I’ll knock the camera and machete off to the sides.

It works. Both the camera and the machete tumble toward me as the crate tilts over.

I then use the shoes to drag first the machete over to me and then the camera. I pull the items through the bars and turn around to show them to Delia. But I forget all about them when I see the state of her.

She’s gripping the gashes on her arm as best she can, but they’re still bleeding profusely. She looks sickly and pale.

What the fuck was I thinking? I knew she’d been cut. I should’ve helped her right away, like she helped me.

But then I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to get the machete and camera. Maybe.

After determining that the first aid kit is too far to reach with my shoes, I kneel beside her and rip my shirt more, then I reach out to put the strip of cloth around one of the gashes. She pushes me away with her other hand. “No,” she says. “Don’t. Let me be.”

“You mean let you die?” I say.

She nods.

“Fuck that,” I say, pushing her hand away and bandaging her cuts as best I can. She mutters while I do it, but doesn’t put up more of a fight.

As I’m finishing up, I hear movement behind me. I turn and snatch the machete from the floor, then stand up and look into the bearded man’s insane eyes. He’s grimacing at me, his eyes flicking between my face and the machete grasped in my left fist. I half expect him to pull out a gun and shoot me. But when he doesn’t, it emboldens me.

“Come on, motherfucker!” I shout. “Come get your machete.”

The man’s eyes are hard for a long moment, his grimace showing a mouthful of rotting teeth. But then he smiles, showing me even more of his disgusting mouth.

“You’re free to go! Through the hole!” he shouts. “You’re free to go! Through the hole!” He dances an insane jig, then spouts facts about the Salton Sea again, laughing occasionally.

I glance at the hole in the wall, then down at Delia. I crouch, swipe my camera up, and check to make sure it still works. It does. Still plenty of battery life. I ensure the settings are all where I want them, then press the shutter release button to take a picture with the flash. Light erupts in the room, illuminating the area for one brilliant moment. The bearded man suddenly stops talking.

I peer at him, trying to read his face. He glares at the camera, the crooked wheels turning in his head. He seems to realize I’m trying to read him, and he goes back to spouting facts again, sitting in his spot in the corner of the room.

I look up at the lantern he turned off just before the attack, then back at him. He pretends like he’s not studying me. But he is.

It’s my turn to smile.

The lanterns are too big to fit through the bars, so I’ll just have to make do with the flash on my camera.

Delia looks at me through half-lidded eyes as I crouch next to her.

“Let’s go,” I say. “We need to move.”

“Where?”

“Through the hole.”

Delia shakes her pink-haired head. “We’ll die. Those things are down there.”

“We don’t have any other choice,” I say. “Those things don’t like light. With my camera flash and this machete, maybe we can make it.”

Delia shakes her head. I don’t know how much blood she’s lost, but it’s no small amount. She looks pale. “I don’t think I can,” she says, her chin shaking as tears fill her eyes. “I don’t think I can.”

I study her for several long moments before speaking again. “Okay. Keep this,” I say, offering the machete. “If he tries anything …”

Delia’s eyes go wide and hard, despite the tears still spilling out of them. “No. You get out. Come back and get me if you can.”

I smile. “He’s still got my car keys,” I say. “I’ve gotta come back.”

Delia lets out a short laugh. We look at each other for a moment, then I nod and move over to the hole.

“You’re free to go! Through the hole!” the man shouts.

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” I say. I hold the machete in my non-dominant hand thanks to the injuries on my right hand. The camera hangs on its strap around my neck, and I position my right thumb over the shutter release button. I inhale deeply and then press the button, lighting up the inside of the hole with the flash.

Nothing but a dirt tunnel.

I get on my knees and crawl in a few feet, then hit the flash again. Dirt tunnel.

As I repeat this process, moving down the shallowly tilted tunnel, the smell of putrefaction wafts up to me. The cloying stench of death increases as I move. As does a faint sound ‌I can’t place at first. But as I approach the origin of the sound, I recognize it as the rending of flesh — much like the sound Perry’s arm made as it was ripped from his body.

I press the shutter release button again, lighting up the tunnel. Something dark flashes past not five yards ahead of me. I flinch back and hold up the machete. I can’t see anything ahead of me now, but when the flash was on, I saw that the tunnel I’m in opens up.

Listening hard, I try not to breathe. Something moves ahead of me, and I slash down with the machete, hitting nothing but air. I take another picture, the flash illuminating no monsters, only the five yards of tunnel before it opens up — either into a larger tunnel or a cavern‌.

Trying to ignore the throbbing pain in my fingers, I move forward on my knees, machete still up and thumb resting on the shutter release button.

Stopping every few feet to listen, I note that the ripping sounds I heard moments ago are now gone. The stench of dead meat is very much still with me.

When I think I’ve gone about four yards, I hit the button again. What I see in the quick flash of light paralyzes me with absolute terror. I see no creatures in the shallow cavern. I only see the remnants of at least four people besides Perry, whose body has been ripped apart, pieces dragged to all sides of the vaguely square area.

I also see other holes in the walls — presumably other tunnels.

Pressing the button, I view the scene again, seeing the same things — but this time paying more attention to my immediate vicinity. Maneuvering out of the tunnel to stand in the dark, I take picture after picture, each time seeing a flash of movement just on the edge of the illumination, in the other tunnels.

I step over Perry’s shredded leg, making my way to my left, toward a tunnel that looks like it’s angled upwards. It takes my camera’s flash two seconds to recharge, and I press the shutter release button every two seconds, shifting the camera around to keep the monsters at bay. I can sense them out there, creeping in as soon as the light is gone. As long as I can keep pressing the button, I might just make it out of here.

Flashing into the tunnel, I see that it does, in fact, go up. For all I know, it goes back down again after a few yards. But it’s worth a try.

Turning around, I flash again, this time seeing a couple of them skitter back into tunnels. Fear thickens my throat and makes my breathing shallow. It looks like they each have four arms and two legs. They remind me of jumping spiders, the way they move and how they look. But they’re the size of small humans. And there’s something wrong with their faces. I can’t really tell what they look like since I’ve only caught glimpses of them. But they strike me as wrong. Somehow in defiance of nature.

I crawl into the tunnel and flash ahead of me. All clear. Then I flash behind. There’s movement across the mouth of the tunnel, just a couple of feet behind me.

Losing patience, I start to hurry. I flash ahead and behind again, seeing nothing ahead and dark figures just beyond the light behind.

Confident that there aren’t any of them ahead of me, I flash behind twice. It’s hard to tell, but I think the tunnel is full of them. They’re smart, staying just out of the light.

As I turn forward again, something smashes into me, knocking me against the tunnel wall. My right hand comes away from the camera as claws sink into my right arm and shoulder. I scream and slash out with the machete, slicing into something in the dark and causing whatever it is to let out a shriek and scurry off.

Claws stab into both my legs from behind, slicing deep into my calves. I scream in pain and twist around, hitting the flash and seeing the tunnel crowded with long arms and terrible, dark, deformed faces and colorless eyes that reflect the light back at me.

I hit the button again as soon as I’m able, and see only my injured legs and a collection of black figures just beyond the light.

As I whip around forward, I hit the button again, glimpsing roots in the tunnel ceiling just ahead of me.

Moving forward, I shove the machete up into the roots. I work the blade around while flashing ahead and behind me every two seconds. Dirt falls down into the tunnel after I work at it for a minute. And as I widen the hole, I feel wind and smell the rotten-egg stench of the Salton Sea.

I’ve never smelled anything so good.

I keep up my flashing while widening the hole. My legs and right arm throb, and with each movement, I can feel the wounds gape. But I keep working. Soon, the hole is just big enough to fit me. I position myself under it, taking my time and keeping the creatures at bay with my camera. Then I flash behind me again and jump up as fast as I can, squirming through the hole without dropping the machete.

I scramble away from the hole but refrain from using the flash. The clouds have thinned, and there’s enough starlight that I can see the vague hole in the desert floor I’ve just emerged from.

I wait a minute or more, but none of the creatures venture out.

So I wait another two minutes to be sure.

I can see the abandoned houses in the little neighborhood. They’re not far. I limp over to them, trying to figure out where that underground room would be based on how I got out. I don’t have the best sense of direction, but I determine that it’s likely in the basement of one of the houses at the nearest edge of the neighborhood.

So I decide to check them, one by one.

The first one has no basement. Neither does the second one. The third one doesn’t either. I don’t know how much more I can do. I feel weak. But as I work my way around outside, I see a shed in the backyard.

I open the double doors quietly, looking into the dark shed. There’s a rectangle of soft light in the floor in the middle of the twelve-by-sixteen shed, but it doesn’t immediately register what’s causing it.

Then, something obstructs one side of the rectangle, and it all clicks in my head. I backpedal as fast as I can with my injured legs. The shovel arcs down out of the darkness, the blade missing my face by an inch or two. Almost on reflex, I press the shutter release button on the camera, illuminating the bearded man as the shovel he’s swinging finishes its arc.

His eyes wrench shut against the bright light. I lunge forward, swinging the machete — his machete — down at his head. It’s my non-dominant hand and I’m feeling woozy from blood loss, so it’s a weak swing, slicing down and taking off his right ear and a chunk of his cheek.

He screams in pain and drops the shovel, putting both hands up to the side of his head.

I grit my teeth and swing the machete again, diagonally from my right shoulder this time. The blade sinks into the left side of his neck where it curves up from the shoulder. He grabs the blade with both hands, trying instinctively to keep it in, to keep his blood from pouring out. But I yank on the machete, pulling it out of his neck and slicing his hands open‌.

Blood rushes out of the gash as he stands there, looking at me through the gloom.

“You’re free to go,” I say in a growl. “Through to fucking hell.”

He stumbles past me and out of the shed before collapsing. I wait a moment to make sure he’s dead, then search his pants for the keys, which I find in his front left pocket.

The dirt room under the shed was probably started as a bomb shelter but never finished. Or maybe the bearded man built it himself. It doesn’t really matter. I open the door in the floor of the shed and go down a set of wooden stairs. Delia is still alive. She’s surprised to see me. I’m surprised to be seen.

I grab the first aid kit and use the keys to unlock the cell. I bandage her up. Then she does the same for me.

I grab my car keys on the way out.

She gazes down at the dead man outside the shed as we move past. Just as we move beyond him, she turns her head and spits on his dead body.

We help each other down the street toward where I’m now sure my car is parked. The starlight makes all the difference.

“Where are we going?” she says, dazed.

“I’m taking you to a hospital,” I say.

“What about you?”

“If I don’t die of blood loss first, I’m going to come back here with a couple of cans of gasoline and a match,” I say.

And I mean it.

Earn Your Money

I flipped on the lights in the hallway of my apartment after getting home from the gym. As I took off my jacket, a smell came to me — something foreign to my apartment. But it wasn’t completely foreign to me. It was familiar somehow, I just couldn’t place it.

The rest of the place was dark, just like I’d left it when I headed to the gym. But something had changed. I thought of my brother, Dekker, who was the only other person who had a key.

“Dek? Are you here, man?” I said.

No answer. But it didn’t feel like an empty apartment. Something deep in my reptilian brain was putting me on edge. So I stepped over to the closet and put my jacket away, leaving my gym bag where I’d dropped it by the door immediately after coming in.

I reached into the corner of the closet and retrieved the wooden baseball bat I kept there, resting it on my shoulder as I closed the door with my other hand.

My living room was on the left, and I stepped into it quickly, flipping the lights on in hopes of surprising anyone who was there. But the only one surprised was me.

Dekker was sprawled on the couch, his eyes open and looking straight ahead at the blank television mounted on the wall. His neck had been sliced open, the raw meat and cartilage still glistening with moisture.

“What the fuck?” I shouted. “Dekker?” Running up to him, I forgot about the bat momentarily, setting it against the couch. I reached out and grabbed my brother’s arm through his black hoodie. I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish. Nothing probably. I was disbelieving, hoping that my eyes were playing tricks on me.

But they weren’t. Dekker’s head lolled as I jostled his body. The faintly wet sound the wound made sent a sick pang through my stomach. He was dead. He was really dead. My little brother.

A shadow fell over me from behind, and I turned in time to see an elbow coming at me, slamming into my forehead. I fell back onto my brother’s body, then onto the floor at his feet.

“What the fuck was that?” a scratchy voice came from further in my apartment.

“He turned,” the guy standing over me said in a New England accent, his tone defensive. “I was tryin’ to hit him in the side of the head.”

The man who’d hit me was big — probably about two hundred and thirty pounds of muscle packed onto a frame just over six feet tall. He had orange hair and a short beard of a slightly darker shade of orange. He had the freckled face of a born ginger.

Another man came into view, this one older, with a dark complexion that I thought was maybe part Italian or Greek. He was bald, his head shaved to the skin, but he had a big bushy black beard with streaks of gray in it. He wore a suit while the other one wore jeans and a sweater.

“You owe us $418,200,” the bald man said.

My eyes whipped between the two men. “What?” I managed.

“Your brother owed us $418,200. Now you do, since your dumbass brother went and got himself killed.”

“I — I don’t even know you,” I said, stammering, my mind racing.

“Oh, how rude of me,” the bald man said. “I’m Sledge and this is Hammer. Now you know us. I’m giving you a month to get us the money.”

“A month? No way. This doesn’t even have anything to do with me! I don’t know what my brother was into with you, but this is his mess, not mine.”

Sledge leaned down to look at me. “Are you really as stupid as your brother? I thought you were the responsible one. Don’t you have a good job at a bank or some shit?”

“It’s impossible,” I said, moving to get up off the floor. Sledge kicked me in the chest with one sharp derby shoe, sending me back down.

“We’ll keep going up the line,” Sledge said. “Hammer here can slit your throat just as easily as he did your brother’s. So if you don’t get it, we’ll go for the next family member. Your parents, they’re still around, right? In Florida or some such place? And if they don’t get it, we’ll slit their throats. There’s not a throat Hammer can’t slit, I’ll tell you that right now.”

“Unless they’re wearing armor,” Hammer said, helpfully.

“What?” Sledge said. “Armor? How many people you see walking around wearing armor around their necks? Jesus Christ.”

“I was thinking like a knight. You know? Or like Iron Man.”

“Sometimes I wonder about you, Flannigan,” Sledge said, turning his attention back to me. “One month,” he said. Then he pulled a business card out of his pocket and tossed it at me.

“Hammer here will be hanging around. Some other associates of ours will be coming up to take care of your dumbass brother. Can’t have the police getting involved with this. And if I hear you go to the police, well, I won’t wait to slit your throat. Nor will I wait to visit your parents. You understand me, Victor?”

I nodded.

“Good.” With that, Sledge walked out of the living room and then out of my apartment.

Flannigan stayed where he was, looking down at me. My head was pounding and my stomach hurt from where Sledge had hit me, but I was still sitting on the floor at my dead brother’s feet.

“Can I get up now?”

“Hey, man,” Flannigan said. “It’s your place. Do what you want.”

I got up slowly, then leaned back down to pick up the business card off the floor. It was blank, aside from a phone number. I slipped it into my pocket.

Flannigan reached down and grabbed the baseball bat I’d leaned against the couch. “I’ll be hangin’ onto this,” he said.

“I need to use the restroom.”

“Go ahead. Don’t mind the mess,” he said.

I walked back to the hallway bathroom and stepped inside, closing and locking the door behind me. I threw up in the toilet, my hands shaking as I emptied my stomach.

It was only after I threw everything up that I saw the bit of blood in the bathtub. I realized that there wasn’t very much blood on my brother’s clothing and I certainly didn’t see any on my couch. They must have forced him into the bathtub before slitting his throat. How conscientious of them.

I stayed in the bathroom, shaking with fear. I heard men’s voices after a little while, and then some activity. Still, I didn’t come out. I couldn’t.

Sometime later — I don’t know how long it was — a knock at the door startled me. “All done, Victor,” Flannigan said from the other side of the door. “I’d get to counting your money. You got a month.”

Footsteps faded down the hallway, followed by the sound of my front door closing. I waited another ten minutes before stepping out of the bathroom and inspecting my apartment. It was as if nothing had ever happened — aside from the little bit of blood in the bathtub.

As I sat down on the couch where my brother’s body had been, I thought about how I’d always figured I’d be able to stand up to danger when it came. I thought about how people in movies are always facing up to their demons, overcoming their weaknesses to dispatch the bad guys. But I hadn’t done any of that. I’d been scared shitless. I still was.

My actions weren’t that of a hero. They were that of a coward. At my first chance, I ran to the bathroom to hide. And I knew that I’d do the same thing again in the same situation.

Suddenly, I realized I was crying. Mostly for Dekker, but also for myself. And for my parents. There was no way I could get that kind of money together in a month. I had a decent job at an investment firm, but my yearly salary wasn’t even six figures. I only had about $80,000 in savings, much of which was in an IRA account.

Exhausted from the experience, I fell asleep on the couch. My nightmares paled in comparison to my new reality.

The next week passed in a blur. I asked a few friends for loans, even securing another $50,000, but it wasn’t going to be close enough. Not at all.

After getting together all the money I could, I was still nearly $200,000 short. I even called the number Sledge had given me and asked if they would accept half. The man on the line — who sounded like Sledge — simply laughed and then hung up on me.

I spent the next several days researching ways to make quick money. This is what led me to the dark web.

I’d never been on the dark web before, but I quickly tried to get acquainted with it, getting on forums and looking at what other people were offering and at what price.

A couple of things that came to mind were selling drugs, stealing, and contract killing. I had no idea how to get into selling drugs — it wasn’t like people were advertising “drug dealer wanted” on the dark web. Most of the listings I saw were for drugs already for sale. So that was out.

Stealing was something I could do, at least in theory. But to steal the amount that I needed, I would have to include at least one more person while simultaneously developing special skills that would take years to cultivate.

A smash-and-grab job would likely get me arrested, and I had no doubt that these men could get to me in jail.

Contract killing wasn’t really a serious consideration. I didn’t have it in me, and I didn’t want to. Besides, putting up an ad for that kind of thing, with all I knew about the dark web, would probably just get the FBI to my door.

But as I was scrolling through a black market website, I saw some ads that gave me an idea. They made me realize that I did have something to sell: my body.

I admitted ‌I wasn’t underwear-model handsome, but I figured I was good-looking enough to demand a fairly decent price from rich lonely women. I stayed fit, and I was in my early thirties — young enough to be attractive to older women.

Maybe I could even steal some jewels from some rich widow and sell them. Or make one of them fall in love with me and convince them to loan me the money.

I could be charming when I wanted to be.

It was a long shot. But it was the only chance I had. So I took an emergency leave of absence from work and dedicated myself to becoming a male escort.

Honestly, it wasn’t that hard. I found a classy-looking market website on the dark web that specialized in male escorts, and I constructed a profile. I put my price range close to that of other men on the website. The next day, I got an email through the website asking for my services.

The way it worked was, the client sent you a picture of them and an address, along with how many hours they wanted you. If you wanted to accept the job, you contacted them through the email provided and set up a time.

I was surprised to see that the woman in the picture was very pretty. She looked to be in her early forties, with blond hair and a beaming smile.

Maybe I’ll actually enjoy this a little, I thought as I replied to the email.

When I showed up at the place — a hotel in the downtown area — I was wary of any signs that it was a setup. But the hotel was nice, and I doubted anyone looking to rip me off would drop several hundred dollars on a room. Besides, I didn’t bring anything with me aside from a little bit of cash, my car keys, and a small bag with clothes and other items I thought I would need. Anyone looking to rip me off wouldn’t get much.

I went up to the room and knocked on the door. The woman from the picture answered, greeting me with a smile.

Several hours later, I walked out of the room exhausted and a few thousand dollars richer. I checked my phone and saw that I had another email from a potential client.

For the first time since Sledge told me about the debt, I started to think that I would actually get through this. It would be a close thing, but if I kept getting clients, I might just make it.

The next week was a blur of women. Some of them were beautiful and accommodating like that first one, but most of them were ugly in more ways than one. Even some of them that were outwardly beautiful were abusive and twisted. But this, I learned, was a good thing. I could refuse to do whatever BDSM stuff they wanted until they agreed to pay me more.

Many of these rendezvous left me feeling dirty and shameful. But I was working toward my goal. I was fighting for my very existence. So I did what I had to do.

But apparently, word started getting around, because one client changed everything for me.

The location was a mansion, and there would be a small party going on. The woman who’d contacted me through the dark web, Lorena, told me it was a masquerade party and I was to wear a mask.

I specified that my services were for women only, and were for one-on-one time, not group time. She agreed, giving me assurances that she was the only one who would require my services. I told her I’d be there.

When I arrived, a large man in a suit waved me through the gate. I drove up to the mansion past strange statues lining the driveway. They looked like some twisted take on Greek gods or something. Many of them were eerie, but I didn’t pay it much mind. I’d come to learn that rich people have very strange tastes.

There was a small parking area with fancy cars there, and I parked my decidedly average sedan among them, then donned my mask and got out of the car. I straightened my black suit as I headed inside, my little bag held in one hand.

The door opened before I could knock, and an older woman who introduced herself as Lorena answered the door. She wore an extravagant golden mask and a sleek golden dress.

“Come in, come in, young man,” she said, stepping back from the ornate wooden door. I stepped into a large foyer with marble floors and a small fountain in the middle. Two curving staircases ascended to the next of three levels, the banisters immaculately shined and the white marble steps like something from an Italian castle.

Lorena led me into a nearby room where six people stood and sat around chatting — all of them wearing masks. There were four women and two men, and they perked up at my entrance. Lorena introduced me as “her latest fling,” telling them all my name was Chester. I went along with it, although I was starting to get a bad feeling about this.

The room was large, with elegant furniture in the middle arrayed on a large and expensive-looking rug. A low table between the chesterfield sofas, divans, and chaise lounges held piles of drugs. One woman sniffed a line of white powder before standing up to greet me. She had chosen a mask that left her nose exposed for easy access. In fact, all the people had. They’d clearly done this before.

There were candy trays filled with pills of all types, vape pens for smoking, and there were even some syringes for shooting up god-knows-what.

Another table against the wall held liquor bottles and buckets of ice and mixers.

“Help yourself,” Lorena said, gesturing to the drugs.

“Oh, no, thank you,” I said.

“Oh, you’re no fun,” she said in a playful tone. Then she sat down and patted the cushion next to her. I sat down and listened to the people talk and laugh and argue as they consumed more drugs than I thought possible. Lorena didn’t partake in the drugs, but she did have several cocktails.

More than an hour passed while I made small talk and tried to get comfortable. Something about this didn’t seem right, and it wasn’t just the massive amount of narcotics that could send us all to jail for a very long time. I just couldn’t get into the rhythm of the party. I was waiting for something to happen the whole time.

Lorena got up and poured herself another drink. It was only when she sat back down next to me that I noticed she had two drinks in her hand — one of which she held out to me.

“No, thank you,” I said.

She leaned over to me, smiling, and whispered, “You’re supposed to show me a good time. If you want to get paid, loosen up and have a drink. Talk. Laugh. Earn your money.”

I looked at her for a long moment, then took the drink. It was a green liquid that tasted a bit like Midori, only with a strange undertone to it. I just assumed it was mixed with some other liquor‌.

But soon after I finished the drink, things started to get strange. Lorena got up and left, saying that she’d be back shortly.

Then … I blacked out.

***

I woke up screaming. For some reason, I was on my hands and knees, looking down at the intricate designs of a rug. A rug that someone had spilled red wine on. My vision swam, going in and out of focus.

My scream faded to a whimper, my lungs expanding and contracting as if I’d just been running a race.

I felt sticky for some reason, and a glance down at my arms told me that I was no longer wearing my black suit jacket. Or the white dress shirt I’d had on underneath. My vision went blurry as I tried to look closer at my skin. Something was wrong with it. It seemed lumpy.

My entire body felt sore, like I’d done a two-hour full-body workout.

I licked my lips and tasted copper.

Sitting back on my feet, I straightened my upper body and looked ahead. Someone — a woman — was passed out on the floor about ten yards away. I recognized the room as the one from the party, but I couldn’t recall the last clear memory I had.

Rubbing my eyes, I tried to get my vision to clear. My stomach was queasy, and I needed a big glass of water.

As I stood up, the whole room seemed to shift around me, and I almost went back to my knees. I closed my eyes and stood there, counting to twenty in my head. Then I opened my eyes and turned my head to look around. I saw the liquor table nearby, and a man’s severed head sitting among the bottles.

For some reason, that made sense to me at first. Like that head was supposed to be there. But then it seemed to compute, and I looked back. The man’s sandy brown hair was sticking up, and I somehow knew that a bloody hand had grabbed a handful of his hair to put his head on the table. He was no longer wearing a mask, and his eyes were wide, although pointed in different directions.

I swung my head back to the woman I thought was passed out and immediately saw that her arms were missing. The stains at my feet weren’t from spilled wine. They were from spilled blood.

Turning slowly, I took in the rest of the room — and the other body parts littering the place. Another head — this one a woman’s — was on the drug table, her nose pushed into a pile of white powder. The other man’s body was lying across the divan, his chest a mess of stab wounds.

The chesterfield sofa nearest me held a woman that had been skinned from the waist up to the neck. A large knife was sticking out of her face where it had been jammed into her left eye.

I couldn’t breathe, looking at all this gore and destruction, but it was almost as if I was experiencing déja vu. Every mutilated body I looked upon was at once unsurprising and a fresh horror.

I stumbled toward the back of the house, calling out for help. Passing into a smaller sitting room, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. I screamed, realizing that I was wearing a dead woman’s skin on my chest and arms like a smock. I reached up and pulled it off, tossing it to the ground. Bits of flesh clung to my blood-covered skin.

I found the kitchen and turned on the sink, scrubbing my arms and hands with dish soap to get the blood off.

“You did so well!” a voice called from behind me. I spun around to see Lorena and two large, besuited men standing in the kitchen. “Marvelous,” she said. “Worth every penny.” She gestured at one of the large men, who removed a thick envelope from his suit jacket and placed it on the marble countertop.

“What the hell did you make me do?” I screamed. “What was that drink you gave me? Why would you do this?”

“Oh, dear, you won’t remember a thing. Don’t worry about it. Just take your money and go home — after you get cleaned up, of course. And remember, we’ve got it all on camera. So don’t think about going to the police. It wouldn’t be good for you.”

I stared at her for a moment, resisting the urge to lunge at her. The two bodyguards wouldn’t let me get anywhere near her. “Why? Those people were your friends.”

“Ugh, no they weren’t,” she said. “Disgusting hangers-on. They were fun for a while, but things are more fun this way.”

“You’re fucking sick,” I said.

Lorena smiled. “I’ve been called worse.” She started to walk away, then said to one of the men, “Show him to the downstairs bathroom, will you? He’ll be forever trying to clean himself at the sink.”

The one she’d spoken to stayed in the kitchen while the other one followed her deeper into the massive house. I looked at the wall clock and found that it had been about four hours since I’d blacked out, give or take twenty minutes or so.

“This way,” the guy said. “There’s a shower.”

I stood there, dripping bloody soap suds onto the floor, staring at him.

“You want to do this the hard way?” he said after a moment. “Because I’d rather not. And I’m sure you’d rather not, either.”

I turned off the sink and followed him to the downstairs bathroom to take a shower.

When I left the house thirty minutes later, I was starting to feel better about things. The envelope in my pocket — the one from Lorena — was considerably lighter than it should have been. But that was okay with me.

***

The phone rang as I called the man I knew only as Sledge. The deadline was at its end, and Sledge sounded amused as he picked up the phone. “I hear you’ve been busy, Victor. Making a lot of rich women very happy. So, please tell me you have all my money.”

“I have it,” I said. “Come over and get it.”

Sledge paused for a moment before speaking. “No. You come to me. I’ll text you an address. Come alone and bring nothing but the money.”

With that, he hung up. A moment later, I got a text with an address in the warehouse district.

I got everything together, carrying the bag of cash as I went down to the lobby. It was sprinkling slightly as I hurried across the parking lot to my car. There were massive thunderheads on the horizon, moving toward the city, making it prematurely dark at thirty minutes before sunset.

It took me fifteen minutes to get to the address, by which time it was pouring. I ran to the door of the warehouse, carrying the canvas travel bag with the money in it. Flannigan opened the door after I banged on it a couple of times. He beckoned me inside and shut the door. Then he told me to stop. I was in a reception area, but the desk didn’t have a computer or any normal office supplies. I could see an open door to the warehouse area ahead.

“Put your arms up,” Flannigan said. I dropped the bag, hoping he wouldn’t open it, and put my arms up.

He frisked me for weapons, pulling a metal object out of my jacket when he came to it. “What’s this?” he asked.

“What do you think it is?” I asked, giving him a look. If he took it, I was screwed. But I didn’t think he would. And sure enough, he shrugged and gave it back to me.

Finding nothing else of interest on my person, he led me into the warehouse proper, where there were cars parked on the far side and a lounge area on the near side.

Sledge and two other men were seated on a couple of leather couches, watching a soccer match on a television set. Sledge was smoking a cigar, so a cloud of smoke hung over the men. The sound of rain pounding the metal roof high above was a constant but not unpleasant sound.

“Boss, Victor’s here,” Flannigan said.

“Yeah, no shit. I know,” Sledge said, turning his head to watch me approach. “You got it all?”

“Check it,” I said, tossing it down on the couch beside him.

Sledge glared at me and then picked the bag up. “Flannigan, count it,” he said. The two other men — large but not as large as Flannigan — seemed focused solely on the soccer game.

Flannigan sat down next to Sledge and put the bag on the wooden coffee table between the two couches. As he opened it up, I pulled the metal object out of my jacket.

Sledge noticed the movement and looked up at me. “Oh, did I drive you to drink?” he said, chuckling.

I unscrewed the cap on the flask and upended it.

Flannigan started pulling stacks of money out of the bag.

I drank all the liquid in the flask, screwed the cap back on, and held it down by my thigh in my left hand.

A strange feeling came over me within minutes. But instead of completely blacking out, I was somehow able to experience much of what happened next. Maybe it was because I’d had the drug before — whatever the hell it was. Or maybe it was because I actually wanted to kill these men, unlike those people at the party.

Whatever the reason, it didn’t really matter.

Right about the time Flannigan was realizing that the money in the bag wasn’t enough, a seething rage was spreading through my limbs, expanding capillaries, causing blood to rush to my muscles and adrenaline to flood my bloodstream. My amygdala started working overtime, telling the rest of my brain that these four men in front of me were the ultimate threat to my existence. But there was no question of fight or flight. No doubt about what had to be done.

Suddenly, I was jumping over the couch, slamming into Flannigan and knocking him to the ground. Sledge was yelling beside me, and the other two men were getting up off the opposite couch. I reached into the bag I’d brought, batting aside a couple of stacks of money and pulling out the sharp kitchen knife I’d hidden at the bottom.

Flannigan brought his fist up in a wide roundhouse, hitting me in the chest and knocking me down onto the couch. I slashed out with the knife, slicing the ginger man’s face open. He screamed and jerked away from me.

To my left, Sledge was getting up off the couch, pulling a pistol from a shoulder holster. I reached out and slammed the bottom of the metal flask into his gun hand, the force of the blow breaking several of his fingers.

The two other men were drawing pistols of their own, but one was in front of the other, making only the one in front the immediate threat. I threw the flask at his face, buying myself enough time to lunge off the couch and shove the blade into his chest, pushing him back into the other man.

I blacked out for a moment, losing time, coming to with both of the men dead — one of them smashed with the television, the other one with knife wounds on his face and chest. I was crouching over Sledge, hacking his left hand off at the wrist as he screamed and tried to hit me with his right arm, which was broken at the elbow. I looked over and saw Sledge’s lit cigar on the ground. I leaned over and grabbed it, then shoved the burning tip into his eye, making the man scream even louder.

Flannigan was crawling away toward the front door, leaving a streak of blood behind him from wounds in his legs.

Before I blacked out again, some part of me decided to finish up with Sledge before going for the man that had actually slit my brother’s throat.

When I came to again, Flannigan was pleading for his life as I sliced him down the chest, digging the knife up under his skin to separate it from the muscle below. Somehow, I’d dislocated both his arms so he couldn’t fight back.

Everything went black again, that feeling of single-minded fury — the need to kill and maim and torture — disappearing along with my conscious mind. And when I came out of the drug-induced trance, that fury was gone. And I was sitting on the floor of the warehouse, wearing Flannigan’s skin.

I looked around, not surprised to see Sledge’s head lying on the floor several feet from his body.

Pulling Flannigan’s skin off me, I stood up and walked carefully across the blood-slick concrete floor to gather up the money I’d earned. I packed it all in the bag and brought it to the door. Sheets of rain wet my feet as I opened the door. The storm was still raging.

Before I stepped out into the downpour, I thought about how easy it was to convince Lorena’s bodyguard to sell me some of the drug. The thought had occurred to me while I’d been showering, and I offered him half of what Lorena paid me. He refused. So I offered him three-quarters.

That did it. He even threw in the flask for free.

I was grateful that I couldn’t remember killing those people at the party, but part of me was happy to have been conscious while I did away with these criminals who had killed my brother.

I stepped out into the night, letting the pouring rain wash the blood off of me as I headed to my car, bag of money in hand.

Killer Clown Crooks

The loud banging on the door stops suddenly, the sound replaced by the whimpering and sobbing and outright crying of many of the students in my classroom.

“It’s going to be okay, guys. It’s going to be okay,” Mr. Cooper says. He seems oddly calm to me. Despite this, his words seem like blatant lies. There’s no feeling in them. No reassurance.

I hear muffled voices from outside the room. And I know that they’re figuring out a way in. When they do, there will be nothing to prevent them from doing whatever they want to the nearly thirty students in the classroom. Even if Mr. Cooper had a weapon, it sounds like there are three or four men out in the hall. No way he’d be able to take them all on.

The lockdown started not even five minutes ago. I heard one faint gunshot shortly after the lockdown announcement came over the intercom. But then there was nothing until the banging at the door started.

Mr. Cooper is the closest to the door, while all of us students huddle against the wall. We’re all just waiting for these men to come in. Waiting to die.

Pieces of the wooden door blast into the classroom with the sound of a gunshot. There’s another shot, and more wood pieces fly across the front of the room. Hinges blasted away, the door falls back, and several men in clown masks rush into the room.

I’m surprised to see Mr. Cooper attack one of them, knocking the guy’s rifle away and hitting him twice in the face in quick succession. One of the other clown guys goes to hit him with the butt of his rifle, but Mr. Cooper blocks it, then kicks the guy in the crotch.

A third guy moves forward and does what the second couldn’t — he hits my teacher on the back of the head with his rifle butt. Then the fourth guy comes forward and punches him in the face. Mr. Cooper goes down hard.

“Son of a bitch,” the first guy says, one hand straightening the rubber clown mask ‌Cooper knocked askew with the two hits.

The guy that took the crotch shot is doubled over, moaning in pain.

They’re all wearing the same cheap clown masks, but their clothes are all slightly different. One of them has olive pants and a black long-sleeve shirt. Another one is dressed completely in black. The other two have flannel shirts and jeans on. They all wear tactical vests and have pistols attached to their hips. Two of them have backpacks on. One of them carries a shotgun and the other three have semiautomatic weapons.

“Bozo, you good?” one of them says.

The doubled-over guy straightens up. “I’m good.”

“How about you, Krusty?”

The guy that got hit in the face lifts his mask up to his nose and spits blood onto the ground. “I’ll be good once I take it out on this motherfucker,” Krusty says, gesturing to Mr. Cooper.

“All in good time.”

All four of the clowns look at us where we sit huddled against the wall.

Most of my classmates are crying, looking at the floor.

A couple of us look up at the clowns.

“My name is Pennywise,” says the guy who has been doing most of the talking. He’s the one with the olive pants and the black shirt. “We’re not here for you. We’re here for your teacher here. But if any of you feel the need to run out of the room or attack us or make any sudden moves, we will shoot you.”

The cries from the students grow louder at this proclamation.

“Shut the fuck up!” Pennywise yells, scaring everyone quiet again. “That’s another rule,” he continues in a normal tone. “You need to be absolutely, positively silent. If you need to take a piss or throw up or take a shit, you just hold it. Got it?”

No one answers.

Pennywise lifts his rifle and fires two quick shots into the ceiling over our heads. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I say. “We get it!”

Pennywise turns to look at me. After a moment, he says, “Good.”

Bozo wheels over the teacher’s chair from behind the desk, and the four men get Mr. Cooper into it.

“Ronald, you have the duct tape?” Pennywise asks the fourth clown.

Ronald sets the shotgun against the wall under the blackboard and slips his backpack off. He quickly pulls out a roll of duct tape, handing it to Krusty, who starts taping Mr. Cooper to the chair.

I can’t help but wonder what these guys want with our teacher. I’ve never given much thought to any teacher’s private life. I always just figured Mr. Cooper had a wife and kids he went home to every night. But now that I think to look, I notice he doesn’t have a wedding ring. He looks like a normal enough guy, although seeing the way he moved when he attacked the intruders makes me think he has some kind of special training.

He’s one of the newer teachers in our high school, and if I had to guess his age, I’d say late thirties. Whatever he did, it looks like he pissed off the wrong people.

Once Krusty is done, they try to wake Cooper up. One guy — Bozo, I think — brings out smelling salts, breaking the pack underneath Cooper’s nose. This works immediately, causing Cooper to jerk up and look around in confusion.

Krusty brings his boot up and slams it down on Cooper’s crotch, causing our teacher to cry out.

“Where the hell is it, Parker?” he asks. “Or should I call you Cooper?”

“I don’t know,” Cooper cries. “I don’t know. I don’t have it.”

“Bullshit,” Pennywise says. “We know you do. It’s somewhere in the school, isn’t it?”

Krusty leans forward, putting more of his weight on Cooper’s crotch.

“No! Stop! I don’t know!”

Most of my classmates have their eyes cast down to the floor, but I watch this interaction with interest. I suspect I know what comes next. And it won’t be good. Not for any of us.

“Give me the shears,” Pennywise says. “Move out of the way, Krusty.”

Ronald goes back into his bag and brings out a pair of garden shears, handing them to Pennywise.

“Where’s the fucking money?” Pennywise asks once Krusty steps away.

“I don’t know!” Cooper screams.

Pennywise shakes his head and grabs my teacher’s left hand. They taped both his wrists to the arms of the chair, so his hands are easily accessible. Pennywise puts the shears into position around his pinky finger while Cooper pleads with the men to stop.

I expect Pennywise to ask him again, but he doesn’t. He closes the shears, cutting Cooper’s pinky finger off.

I hear a student vomit behind me over the sounds of my teacher’s screams. I stare at the bloody severed finger on the floor like it’s a prop. My brain doesn’t seem capable of registering that this situation is real. Maybe I’ve been ruined by violent movies. Or maybe this is just how I react to real-life violence. Either way, I can’t bring myself to look away.

“Tell me where it is,” Pennywise says.

“Carlton has it!” Cooper screams. “Carlton’s the one who hid it. I don’t know where it is.”

Pennywise shakes his head again, and goes for the ring finger, cutting it off quickly and efficiently. The smell of blood and vomit permeates the room.

“We already talked to Carlton,” Pennywise says. “How do you think we found out you were hiding here? We know it’s here somewhere. Just tell us where, and this all stops.”

“You’re just gonna kill me,” Cooper says between racking sobs. “Why should I tell you?”

“You know what? You’re absolutely right,” Pennywise says, standing up. He looks over at Krusty and nods.

Krusty nods back and then moves out into the room, toward us. Screams erupt from the students, along with rushed pleas. Krusty yells for quiet. Once he has it, he scans the students, then moves forward and grabs a girl named Beverly by her blond hair, yanking her up. She screams and kicks her legs, but Krusty is a big man; he has no trouble dragging her to the front of the classroom.

Beverly’s boyfriend, Trevor, dashes out toward Krusty. He makes it two steps before he’s shot in the chest. The kids behind him get splattered in his blood. His body crumples to the ground. I look over to see that it was Bozo who shot him.

The room is silent except for Beverly’s redoubled screams. The rest of us stare at Trevor’s dead body as it leaks blood all over the floor between desks.

“You think this is going to make me tell?” Cooper shouts. “I don’t give a shit about any of these kids. Kill them all. I don’t care.”

Krusty shoves Beverly down on her knees in front of Cooper.

“Beg your teacher for your life,” Pennywise says to her, pulling out his pistol and aiming it at her head. She’s a blubbering mess, but she gets some words out.

“Please, Mr. Cooper,” she says. “I don’t want to die. Tell them where the money is. Pleeeaasssee.”

Mr. Cooper tries to stay stoic, but tears drop down his cheeks. He shakes his head.

Pennywise pulls the trigger, blasting Beverly’s brains all over the floor. Her body folds over.

Oh, my God, I think. But that’s it. I don’t cry. I don’t vomit. I don’t feel much of anything. I start to wonder if something’s wrong with me. I think about dying here today, but even that doesn’t bring about a strong emotional reaction.

“I know you,” Pennywise says. “I know you’re not like us. So how many lives are you willing to take on your shoulders? Huh? I can do this all day. Can you?”

Cooper grimaces, his eyes streaming tears. It looks like he’s gearing up to say something. To tell them where the money is. But just as he’s about to open his mouth, another clown runs into the room and whispers urgently to Pennywise.

“What?” Pennywise says, incredulous. He stands up and walks out of the room with the new clown, then he gestures to Krusty to come with him. The three of them head out, leaving Bozo and Ronald behind.

Bozo kneels in front of Cooper and starts trying a different tactic with him, talking like they’re old buddies. Maybe they are old buddies.

“Come on, man,” Bozo says. “You know him. You know how he is. He’ll kill this whole fuckin’ school to get that money. None of us want that. These are just kids, man. But you put them in this position. You did this.

Ronald paces nearby. His shotgun is still propped under the blackboard, but he has his pistol in hand.

When Cooper doesn’t answer, Ronald kneels next to Bozo, and they both start talking to the guy, convincing him to tell them where the money is.

This puts their backs to the classroom.

Before the thought can cross my mind to do something, a kid named Juan books it straight out the door. Both the remaining clowns jump up and run after him into the hallway.

I don’t really think about moving, I just do. I run up and grab the shotgun just as shots sound from the hallway. I quickly locate the safety and click it off, remembering all the times I’ve gone hunting with my dad and uncle.

Stepping out into the hallway with the gun ready to fire, I come face-to-face with Bozo. Ronald is coming back toward the classroom behind him. And down the hall, I can see Juan on the floor, blood pooling around him.

Bozo has his semi-auto rifle held across his chest, not ready to fire. Ronald has his pistol in his hand, down by the thigh.

“You move those guns, you die,” I say. I’m surprised at how steady my voice is.

“Hey, come on, kid,” Bozo says. “You trying to get yourself killed? Just put the gun down and go sit back with your little friends.”

Behind Bozo, Ronald takes a slow, small step to the side, trying to get behind Bozo so I can’t see him.

I pull the trigger, the recoil smashing the butt into my shoulder. I don’t know what kind of shells are in the shotgun, but the one round takes down both men, probably because I aim at Bozo’s neck, above his tactical vest. The shot essentially takes his head off and continues on, smashing into Ronald behind him.

Only I quickly realize that Ronald isn’t dead. He’s injured, but he’s still moving, trying to aim his pistol up at me. So I quickly chamber another shell with the pump slide and fire at Ronald before he can fire at me. There’s no way he’s alive after the shot. Like his buddy, his head is pretty much gone.

I hear footsteps coming from the far end of the hall. Looking up, I see Pennywise, Krusty, and the other clown rounding the corner at a run. I spin around and run the other way, ducking down a nearby hallway as the bullets fly behind me.

I know all the classroom doors are locked — at least all the ones with people in them. But I also know that the stage entrance to the auditorium is down the hall. I think of the storage area behind the stage, with all the props and costumes. I duck toward the door, thankful to find that it’s unlocked. Once inside, I go down a short hallway and duck into the storage room.

There’s all kinds of stuff in here, and plenty of places to hide. So I wedge myself behind some stacked wooden cutouts, pulling a nearby costume rack toward me to block the entrance. I rack the slide on the shotgun, loading another shell into the chamber. And I wait.

The door slams open after only a couple of seconds.

“Where did he go?” I hear Krusty say.

“I don’t know,” Pennywise says.

I assume they left the other clown — the fifth one — back in the classroom with Mr. Cooper.

“Fuck!” Pennywise shouts.

“He’s just a kid,” Krusty says. “We need to get the money and get the hell out of here. How’s the diversion setup going?”

“Fine,” Pennywise says. “Mackie’s on it. He’ll have the kids loaded on the bus and the explosives in place. The cops will think we’re getting on it. By the time it explodes, we’ll be gone.”

“You don’t think they can see with their helicopters and drones?”

“Just fucking relax. It’s fine. He pulled the bus right up to the doors. And there’s an awning blocking the view from overhead. With the school doors propped open, they can’t tell who got on or off. I’ve already told the dipshit negotiator we’ll be leaving with a bus full of hostages.”

“So we just need the money,” Krusty says, sounding relieved.

There’s a moment of silence from Pennywise. I assume he’s looking around the room. Then he sighs and says, “Let’s go.”

I wait several minutes to be sure that it’s not some ploy to get me to come out of my hiding spot. Once I’m sure they’re gone, I shove aside the costume rack and crawl out.

Having no idea how many shells the shotgun holds, I pump it once and eject an unfired shell. Pumping it again yields nothing. Only one shell left.

I load the shell back into the gun so it’s ready to fire. Then I creep back out of the storage room and then into the hallway, moving slowly and looking all around.

My first thought is to get people out of classrooms. But I quickly realize that no one will open a classroom door for me, a teenager carrying around a shotgun. Even if I didn’t have the gun, protocol is to wait for police to show up and escort people out. And since this is a hostage situation, I don’t think the police will be coming anytime soon.

Instead, I think of what Pennywise was saying about a bus parked next to doors with an awning. If they’re going to blow up a bus, that should be my priority. If I go running out the nearest exit and tell the police what’s happening, I doubt they’ll be able to stop it.

The only exterior doors that have an awning and an area big enough to pull a bus up to are the ones next to the gym. There’s a big stretch of concrete in front of the main gym doors that a bus could drive up on easily. Plus, having the gym doors propped open would block any side views. Just like Pennywise said.

The only problem will be getting there. As I approach the hallway with Juan and the dead clowns in it, I hear footsteps and voices coming toward me. I run back the other way and slip into a recessed doorway as they pass, going down the main hallway.

Once they’ve passed, I creep down the hall again and poke my head around the corner, seeing Ronald, Krusty, and the nameless clown escorting Mr. Cooper down the hall. He must have talked.

I wonder briefly how many of my classmates are now dead in the room. How many it took for Cooper to tell them where the money is.

Again, that numbness is pervasive. And I realize that ability — which seems to be inherent — is the only reason I’m able to push my fear aside long enough to do what I’m doing. So maybe there is something wrong with me. But if there is, I’ll take it. As long as I can use it to stop these assholes, I’ll take it.

I watch the four people move down the hallway, waiting until they pick a direction. There are two ways they can go — right toward the gym or left toward the old section of the school.

They go left.

This is good for me because I need to go right to get to the bus and try to warn the people on it. So I sneak down the hallway, taking it slow, listening for signs of movement. I get to the intersecting hallway and look down it, seeing that it’s empty. The interior gym doors are at the very end of the hall. They’re closed. I just hope they’re unlocked.

I move down the hallway, gun up and ready to fire, but make it to the gym doors without incident.

The gym door slams open just as I’m reaching down to open it. It smacks into my hand, but I manage to step back. Standing in front of me is another clown I’ve never seen before. With a pistol. A pistol that he’s raising to point at me.

My shotgun is no longer in a firing position, and I’ll have to take a step back to get it back into position. But I’ll be dead by the time I do that. So I do the only thing I can do. I swing the butt of the shotgun at the guy’s gunhand, knocking the weapon away just before he fires.

He backhands me with his other hand. My head snaps sideways, and my body follows. As I turn, I accidentally depress the trigger on the shotgun. The gun fires, the recoil ripping it out of my hand and jamming my finger as it goes.

I hit the ground hard on my right side, the empty shotgun clattering against the floor behind me.

Expecting to take a bullet any second, I whip my head back around to look at the clown. He stands over me, looking down. But he’s no longer holding his pistol. Only, that’s technically wrong. He is holding the pistol. But that part of his arm is no longer attached to his body. I must have accidentally fired the shotgun just when the barrel was pointing at his right arm, directly at the elbow joint.

Blood pours out of his wound and onto the tiles. He moves, causing me to scramble away. But he’s not moving toward me. He reaches down and picks up his arm. Then, without another glance in my direction, he walks down the hall. I figure he must be in shock, but I’ll take what I can get.

Getting up off the ground, I run into the gym, sprinting across the basketball courts toward the exterior doors. Busting out the doors, I see the bus driving through the parking lot toward the exit. There are police cars everywhere on the street outside the school, but they’re moving out of the way, apparently to let the bus pass.

“Stop!” I scream, running after the bus. “Stop the bus!”

But it doesn’t stop. What it does ‌is slow down to take the ramp out of the parking lot, allowing me to catch up to it. I bang on the back glass door, yelling for them to stop. Scared students look out at me, their faces all screwed up with fear.

The bus keeps going. Maybe these guys told the driver they would shoot kids inside the school if he stopped. Maybe they threatened his family. Whatever the reason, he’s not stopping.

I grab the rear bumper with one hand as the bus bumps down out of the parking lot and turns right. I’m keeping up now, but when the bus gets going faster, I won’t be able to.

But I still hang on as it gains speed down the residential street. Cops outside their cars watch it go, yelling to each other as they see me at the back.

“Stop the bus!” I yell at them. But I know they won’t be fast enough. The bus could explode at any moment.

My legs are getting tired, and my feet get tangled up. As I fall, I shoot my other hand out in a desperate attempt to hang on. My grip stays strong, but the bus is now dragging me down the street.

I look up toward my hands, and my eyes pass over something stuck to the underside of the bus. It’s the bomb. Four pipes tied together and attached to what looks like a simple timer. I don’t know much about vehicles, but I’m guessing the tank-like structure it’s next to is the gas tank.

The bomb is about four feet away from me under the bus. I think I can reach it if I do this right. The bus is only going about twenty-five miles an hour. I switch my right hand from an overhand grip to an underhand on the underside of the bumper.

I flip my body over, supporting all my weight with my right hand for a second as I do it. I almost slip, but get my left hand in position under the bumper just in time. Finally, I bend my knees, bringing my feet up. The soles of my shoes slide along the asphalt like I’m skiing backward.

And I start dragging myself under the bus, the street passing about a foot under my back. I can feel the soles of my shoes getting hot from the friction.

Almost there.

Unable to see how the bomb is attached, I decide to just reach for it, realizing as I pull it that it’s attached with magnets next to the gas tank. It comes off fairly easily.

My arm muscles are just about done, so I let go, scraping along the ground until I come to a stop. I sit up at the waist and look around for a place to throw the bomb. There’s a house to my right and police lining the street to my left. So I just put the bomb in the middle of the street and run.

“Move! It’s a bomb!” I shout at the police standing nearby. I run at an angle away from the bomb, jumping over the nose of a cop car as the police get the message and scatter.

The bomb explodes behind me.

The sound is incredible and deafening. I hear shrapnel smashing into the police car I’m hiding behind. And I look down the street to see the squad car nearest the bomb go airborne. It comes crashing down on its roof. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like anyone was inside.

I don’t waste any time. Once I’m sure I’m okay, I turn to the nearest cop and tell him that the clowns aren’t on the bus. That they have some other means of escape.

It doesn’t take them long to think of the tunnels built under the old school. Tunnels that lead to the old sewer system that’s no longer used. Apparently, they called one of the old principals in when it was clear they were dealing with a hostage situation. The old woman told them about the tunnels, so they had guys waiting at the likely exits even before I came out.

So I hang out with the cops until we get the word that the SWAT teams covering the tunnels caught five guys trying to escape — with over five million dollars in cash. Apparently, these guys had been robbing banks all over the US for years, saving the money until they could get out of the country. Then the guy I knew as Mr. Cooper and another member of their crew stole the money.

It takes them hours to sort through everything, but my mom and dad come down and keep me company through all the questions. I have to repeat my story about a dozen times. I can tell my parents are kind of appalled that I killed three guys. Oh yeah, the one whose arm I shot off died in the school of blood loss.

But they’re glad I’m alive. Obviously, I’m glad I’m alive, too. The police say that I saved a lot of lives. And I guess I did.

But I learned an important lesson during the school lockdown. I learned that I have nerves of steel.

So I guess I should become a cop.

But the more I think about that, the more I think that it may not be the best career choice.

I think crime will pay better.

I Think my Neighbor is a Serial Killer

A summer wind stirred the trees outside my window. The leaves rustled in the darkness, the cool breeze coasting through my bedroom, bringing with it the potent aroma of plant life in full splendor.

Face-up on my bed, lying with my eyes open, I thought I could see the currents of wind and the tendrils of molecules that rode upon them. Sometimes, I thought I could see things other people couldn’t. The hidden splendor of the mundane and uninspiring. I thought I could see breathtaking beauty where others saw only wretched ugliness.

And if I thought I could see those things, maybe I could.

The sound of a car engine rolled through the window and into my ears. The familiar sound of tires shifting from asphalt to concrete followed. I reached over to the nightstand and picked up my phone to check the time, seeing that my mother answered an earlier message about what to watch on our weekly movie night.

It was 2:13 in the morning. And my mother wanted to watch Rear Window. A classic.

I swung my feet off the bed and padded over to the side window that looked upon my neighbor’s house. I still wore my comfortable house clothes, consisting of sweatpants, a blank three-quarter-sleeve baseball shirt, and black socks. The red glow of brake lights went out just as I reached the window, but the running lights on the big blue SUV were still on.

My neighbor got out of the SUV and walked up to the attached garage, holding out a small black rectangle. It was his garage door opener. And he was pressing it repeatedly, but the door stayed stubbornly shut.

As he turned back around, clearly frustrated, he looked up at my window. I stepped back from the glass, my heart suddenly thudding away in my chest.

Percy Douglas was an imposing man who lived alone in the house next door. He had the square jaw of an action hero and the body of an aging college football lineman who didn’t have any energy left for exercise.

Even under the dark shelf of his brow, I could see his bright and intelligent eyes gazing up at my window. He wore a dark purple polo shirt and black slacks with black shoes.

His arrival home had caused the motion sensor light to come on at the side of his house. With this illumination reflecting off the window, I was confident he couldn’t see me. The window was only open a few inches; not enough for him to see in past the screen.

Percy stood perfectly still, making me realize what he was doing.

I stepped further back from the window just before the motion sensor light timed out and went dark. I could no longer see Percy, and I knew he couldn’t see me, either.

I’d started to notice his strange behavior about a week ago and wondered what he was up to. He’d always been a strange, off-putting kind of man. We were around the same age but only had one or two things in common. And sometimes I got the feeling that he didn’t like me very much.

Standing ‌still, I waited for the motion sensor light to turn back on. My heart was still hammering away, and I didn’t dare step back to the window until I knew he couldn’t see through it anymore.

I listened, counting the seconds. After a minute, I assumed that he had somehow moved without setting the light off again. Maybe he knew its radius well enough to move around it. But why would he need to do that?

Still, I stood, listening, counting, unmoving.

At two minutes and forty seconds, the light came back on. I moved quickly, looking out again to see Percy walking around the open door of his still-running vehicle. He leaned in, replacing his garage door opener on the sun visor. Then he turned the vehicle off, shut the door, and tracked around the back. He locked the vehicle with his remote before walking up the path to his front door.

I stood there for a long time after he went inside, wondering what was going through his head as he stood in his driveway for over two minutes and forty seconds, not moving a muscle. It was a long time. And thinking about him staring up at my window for those long minutes gave me chills. But there was excitement in those chills.

When the light turned off again, I moved away from the window, although I could see that the shades were all drawn on the side of Percy’s house that faced mine.

I went back to my bed and lay down, although I didn’t think I would sleep. I’ve never been much of a sleeper. My mother used to call me her little night stalker when I was a child.

I listened to the wind through the leaves of the hickory tree in my front yard. I heard the occasional nightbird singing and the lonely echoing bark of a faraway dog. I wanted so badly to hear a distant train whistle, to round out the sounds of the beautifully melancholy night.

Instead, I heard the opening of a car door. From Percy’s house.

Quickly, I was out of bed and several feet back from the window overlooking his driveway. There was no light on this time; he’d turned it off. I caught a glimpse of him moving hastily along the path to his front door, something heavy in his arms. Since his back was to me, I moved closer to the window, trying to glimpse what he was holding. Whatever it was, he had it wrapped in dark blankets. Soon, he was through his open front door and out of sight.

The back of his SUV was still open, and a circle of color against the dark upholstery in the cargo area caught my eye. It was a bright pink scrunchie.

Percy’s dark figure moved out of the house and down the three wide wooden porch steps. I moved back into the darkness of my bedroom just as the dark hollows of his eyes lifted to my window.

His eyes only shifted away from my house when he came to the SUV. He froze, looking down at the bright-colored scrunchy. Then his head whipped back up to my window. I didn’t dare move. I thought I was far enough back in the room that he couldn’t see me, but I knew that movement would give me away. So I stayed, unable to take my eyes off him. Long seconds passed before he turned and shut the cargo door on his SUV quietly. Then he glanced back up at my window before heading inside.

It was only when he was inside that I realized I was holding my breath. I pulled air into my lungs and went over what I’d seen. What I thought I’d seen. The thing he carried into his house could’ve been a person. It certainly could have. A small person. Maybe a teenager or a small woman. But I didn’t actually see anyone. I wasn’t sure.

It was the scrunchie that made me think he’d gone out and kidnapped someone. Maybe even killed them already. Someone who’d had a pink scrunchie in her hair.

I realized I needed proof. I needed to know exactly what I was dealing with before deciding on a further course of action.

I couldn’t go jumping to conclusions or lobbing accusations. And I knew Percy. Maybe not all that well, but I’d been inside his house. I knew the layout.

If there was a woman or a girl in there, like I thought there was, then I had to do something about it. I couldn’t let him do something to her — if she was even still alive. I could never live with myself if he did something to her and I let it happen without lifting a finger.

And although I was frightened, I knew it was the right thing to do. And that pinch of excitement inside was growing a little bigger.

So I pulled off my baseball shirt and pulled a light, black long-sleeve shirt on. I left my dark sweatpants and socks on. I wouldn’t need shoes. Better to not have shoes on for sneaking around at night.

Putting my phone in my pocket, I went downstairs and headed out the back door, turning my own motion sensor light off before doing so.

I didn’t want to chance tripping Percy’s motion sensor light, in case he turned it back on, so I scaled the wooden fence our yards shared and landed softly in the grass in his backyard. The back of his garage was directly to my right, the rest of his house further on.

Clenching my jaw, I tried not to pay close attention to the fact that the grass in his backyard looked healthier than the grass in mine. I moved beyond the garage toward the slightly raised back deck.

The shades were all drawn at the back of the house, but I could see light around a couple of the downstairs windows. A shadow moved across a window I knew corresponded to the living room. Then it moved back, stopping. I ran forward as fast and quietly as I could, getting underneath the window just as two fingers cracked the wooden blinds and Percy peered out.

He certainly was a paranoid one.

He dropped the blinds and his shadow moved away, then he turned off the light. I waited several minutes before moving over to the deck and going up the stairs to the back door. I was certain it would be locked, but I had to try it anyway.

Sure enough, it was locked.

I tried a window next to the door. Locked too.

Then I moved back down to the ground and headed over to the garage. There was a back window to the garage. The inside of the pane was slightly dusty and featuring a few stringy cobwebs. Before I even pushed on it, I knew it would open. And as I pressed my palms against the cool glass, I felt a thrill of excitement course through me. There was fear there, too, of course. If there was one thing I knew for sure — one thing I’d learned during my lifetime — it was that fear and excitement went together like blood and slaughterhouses.

I pushed up with my hands, and the garage window moved, just like I knew it would. Going in through the back door or one of the windows would have been better, but the garage would work just fine. I was sure Percy wouldn’t have locked the door between the garage and the house.

Lifting the window all the way up, I saw that a low shelf obstructed my path with old cans of paint, varnish, and other typical garage items. Reaching through the window, I moved them, committing their original positions to memory. Percy’s prize possession was in the garage, obscured by a car cover. It was a 1979 Dodge Challenger, dark blue with a white racing stripe. It was in pristine condition, and I’d never seen Percy drive it.

I climbed through the window, stretching my leg over, feeling the cool concrete floor through my sock. As I brought the other leg in, I pivoted, knocking down a can of Armor All, which clattered loudly against the floor.

I winced at the sound, freezing for only a second before snapping out of it and springing into action.

When the door to the garage opened, I was underneath the muscle car, lying against the smooth concrete floor and looking toward the wooden steps that lead up to the house. The smell of new oil and the tang of well-tended rubber filled my nostrils.

The window was closed and I was confident that I’d gotten everything back in its place, but I still held my breath, waiting as the long seconds ticked by. I could see that the door to the garage was still open, spilling a thick beam of yellow light down the stairs and over the empty spot in the garage. And in that beam of light, Percy’s shadow loomed. He stood there, motionless for so long I thought it was a mannequin or that he’d fallen asleep standing.

Soon enough, he stepped back and closed the door, leaving the garage.

I forced myself to breathe in slowly, knowing that if Percy was pressed against the other side of the door, he could hear me draw in a gasping breath.

After waiting five minutes just to be sure, I slid out from underneath the Challenger, somewhat reluctant to leave the smooth and comfortably cool concrete floor that had pressed against me like a lover.

I thought he would’ve been stupid not to lock the door after that. But when I crept up the wooden steps and turned the knob slowly, I found ‌it was unlocked. I didn’t like that. And I realized ‌I had no way of protecting myself from him. With the blatantly unlocked door, I sensed the true danger I was courting.

I knew there was a girl in there. Deep down, I knew it. I also knew Percy was dangerous. Of course, every man is dangerous. So is every woman. And, to a lesser extent, every child. But some men are more dangerous than others. This I knew very well indeed. I’d lived my life keenly aware of that danger.

But where it had seemed abstract as I’d made my way into his yard and then his garage, it now seemed real. I knew Percy. And what I knew about him led me to believe that he was more dangerous than most. Capable of more than most.

So instead of opening the door to the house, I moved back down the stairs and searched for a weapon. I chose a hatchet that was hanging from a pegboard over a workbench adjacent to the stairs. Its heft was a comfort, its black rubber grip-textured handle felt perfect in my hand.

Back up the stairs and to the door. I turned the knob slowly with my left hand, feeling the latch bolt slide out of the hole in the strike plate. The whisper of the mechanism hidden within the wood seemed loud in the dark garage.

Holding the hatchet up with my right hand, I eased the door open, revealing a laundry room redolent of detergent. Pristine white appliances hunched to my left, gleaming darkly. Moving into the small room, I eased the door shut behind me, keeping one eye on the open doorway ahead.

Stepping up beside the doorway, I stood and listened hard for any sign of Percy or the girl. The hallway beyond the laundry room was dark, and I knew that it led to the kitchen, the living room, and the front of the house. Had there been a light on downstairs anywhere, I thought I would’ve seen some evidence of its illumination.

I heard nothing but the silence of an empty house. Only I knew the house wasn’t empty.

That thrill of excitement was still pulsing through me, putting my senses on edge. It was tinged with more fear than I would’ve liked, but there was little I could do about that. I had a job to do. A girl to get to.

I took a deep breath and stepped into the doorway, looking down the dark hall. About three feet ahead and to the left was the doorway to the kitchen, which in turn opened onto the living room. Beyond the kitchen doorway, the hall led to the front of the house, where I knew there was a sitting room and an office.

I crept toward the kitchen doorway, hatchet still held up in my right hand. As I craned my head to look into the dark kitchen, I saw a piece of paper hanging from a string affixed to the top of the doorway.

I leaned in close to read the words on the paper in the limited light from the kitchen appliance displays. “Hello, Saul,” the paper read. The two words sent my heart rocketing into my throat. Percy knew I was in the house.

A loud pop sounded behind me, followed in quick succession by two vicious pinches on my back, and then searing pain. My muscles locked up as currents of electricity shocked my body, feeling like thousands of bees had crawled under my skin and all stung me at once.

My grip tightened on the hatchet as the muscles in my hand contracted. No longer able to control my legs, I fell sideways, hitting the doorway and then crashing to the kitchen floor face first.

Suddenly the pain stopped, but a foot jammed down on my right hand, and something sharp pricked the side of my neck. Then Percy sat on my back and wrenched the hatchet out of my hand.

Consciousness faded slowly as whatever he’d injected me with took effect.

***

At first, I thought the whimpering sound was coming from me. But as my grogginess cleared in fits and starts, I realized it was coming from the young woman Percy had abducted.

I opened my eyes, looking at the unfinished ceiling in Percy’s basement. I was strapped to a chair with duct tape, facing the wooden staircase that led upstairs. The walls were covered with sound-insulation foam, and there were sheets of plastic hanging here and there. My arms and legs were secured to the wooden chair, but my mouth and head were free of tape. I could hear the girl behind me, but I couldn’t turn enough to see her.

Percy stepped in front of me, his bright blue eyes looking forlorn. “Oh, Saul,” he said in a high-pitched voice that didn’t match his body. I had always found it weird. It was almost as if he was doing it on purpose, changing his voice for some reason known only to him. “What are you doing, sneaking into my house?”

My heart slammed around in my chest, but my voice was unwavering when I spoke. “Did you see me in the window?”

“Of course,” Percy said.

I knew he was lying. He was a bad liar.

“Let me go and nothing will come of this,” I said. “Things can go back to normal.”

“Sure,” Percy said, waving a hand theatrically. “And what about her?”

“She leaves with me.”

“But I worked so hard to get her,” Percy said, cupping an elbow in one hand, the other hand stroking his action-star jawline. He pretended to mull it over.

I shook my head. “You don’t want to do this.”

“You’re right. I didn’t want to do it like this,” Percy said. “But you’ve left me no choice, Saul. But look at it this way: at least you’ll get to watch her die before I kill you. Won’t that be nice?”

“Percy, I’m pleading with you, don’t do this. Let me go. Please. From one friend to another: don’t do this.”

Percy smiled at me, shoving his big hands into his pockets. “I always knew this was the real you. Pleading for your life like some teenage boy. You put up a good front, but I always saw through it. Pretty sad and horribly unattractive.”

He stepped behind me, causing the girl to scream through her gag as he did something to her. Whatever it was, it didn’t last long. I figured he was just messing with her to piss me off. He stepped back in front of me and smiled again. “I must get changed,” he said. “It’s nearly three in the morning already!”

Percy walked upstairs to change. As soon as I knew he was gone, I smiled.

I wiggled in the seemingly sturdy wooden chair. It had padless wooden armrests and legs. The pads on the seat and back of the chair were dark maroon faux leather. I had sat in the chair many times before. I knew it wasn’t part of a set.

I increased my side-to-side motion until I felt the joints at the armrests start to loosen and crack. Then I switched to a forward and backward motion, pressing my back hard against the seatback repeatedly until I felt it start to give. Then I stopped moving and listened for footsteps from upstairs. I heard none, which told me that Percy was still up in his bedroom, changing.

Inhaling deeply, I flexed every muscle in my body, pushing out with my arms while trying to stand up with my legs. The chair creaked at the joints, then cracked. Then the armrests broke, and I stood up, the wooden armrests still strapped to my arms with tape.

I reached back and down, grabbing the seat with both hands and yanking it up. It cracked and broke away, leaving only the legs attached to my calves.

Turning around, I saw what he had done with the girl. She was a beautiful young blonde with creamy white skin and wide green eyes. She had on colorful pajama pants and a plain white v-neck t-shirt. And she was fixed to a kind of medical table propped at a forty-five-degree angle. Her hands, feet, hips, and shoulders were all secured to the heavy-duty table with straps. I whispered, telling her to keep making her distressed noises. She nodded, the hope in her face sending a rush of elation through me.

I moved the broken chair into the corner of the wide basement, then grabbed a large knife from a plastic-coated workbench arranged with all kinds of nasty tools and implements.

Walking on my toes so the wooden legs wouldn’t touch the ground, I stepped underneath the stairwell. It was a skeleton staircase, so I would be able to see Percy’s feet as he walked down them. I just had to make my move before his head got low enough to see down into the basement.

I waited less than a minute before I heard his footsteps in the hall upstairs. Then I heard the basement door open. His bare feet appeared at eye level on the staircase. I positioned the knife, waiting until he stepped down two more stairs.

His right foot landed. And I slid the blade along the back of his foot, severing the Achilles tendon. Percy cried out and tried to retreat, but I reached up with my other hand and grabbed his left foot to keep it there. I reached around with the knife and dragged the blade across the tops of his toes.

Percy cried out again, and, with both feet injured, collapsed on the staircase. I ran around and up the stairs, easily dodging his ineffectual kick and stabbing him deep in the left thigh with the knife. Grabbing his feet, I yanked him down the rest of the stairs and into the middle of the floor as he blubbered and struggled.

He was dressed in frilly white lingerie, his hairy body bulging around the thin articles of clothing. I wiped my bloody hands on my sweatpants as I stood over him. He gripped his leg around the protruding knife, making choking noises and small, high-pitched whines.

I quickly grabbed another tool from the workbench — this one a large cleaver — before stepping back over to him.

“How?” he gasped, his face pale and soaked in sweat.

“A few well-placed cuts on the chair. A bit of tampering with your garage door opener. And making sure the garage window was unlocked,” I said. “You’re too predictable.”

“How did you know I’d go after her?” he said, gesturing at the girl.

I looked up at her, a thrill of anticipation running through me, as it had every time I’d looked at her over the last two months. “How could you not?” I said. “I mean, look at her. The minute I brought you along to follow her that day, I knew. You’re a terrible liar, Percy.”

The girl’s eyes were swimming in tears. She whipped her head back and forth, crying and bucking against the table.

I looked back down at Percy, and at the brilliant blood flowing out of his wounds. “I told you she was mine. I found her first. But I knew you couldn’t resist. I saw it in you.”

“Why didn’t you just stop me, then?” he cried. “Why go through all this trouble?”

“You’re joking, right? If you don’t know the answer to that, you don’t know me at all. And you never have.”

I waited, looking into Percy’s eyes. He didn’t understand.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “This is the most fun I’ve ever had! The risk of being killed or caught. The danger of it all. My God. Nothing like it.” I took a deep breath. “Nice job with the note and the taser gun, by the way. I didn’t expect such theatrics!” I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Please, Saul,” Percy said. “Please don’t do this. We can share her, like we have all the others.”

I shook my head. “Too late.”

The feeling of the meat cleaver striking Percy’s flesh was exquisite. As his insides spilled out in all their intensity, I thought I could see his soul escaping from the flesh, riding on unseen currents like sparkling dust motes. Like stars in the night sky, moving so fast as the galaxies rush past each other, but seeming so slow.

When Percy was in pieces, I turned toward the girl — the main event. I was so excited I could hardly contain the feeling of gratitude, of wonder. I wanted so badly to see what her soul looked like when it left her body. I wanted to smell the blood and guts. I wanted to experience those things that other people couldn’t. The hidden splendor hiding inside her, waiting to come out.

I wanted to see breathtaking beauty where others would only see wretched ugliness.

If You’re Going to Do a Job, Do it Right

The darkness races in on me as Tommy and Bryce slam the boarded-up door shut. As the late afternoon sunlight disappears, the black seems to push the air from around me, making it hard to breathe.

I bang on the door, whimpering, pleading with them to let me out. I hate the whining tone in my voice. I hate that I’m too weak to stand up for myself. I hate that I’ve let these guys push me around since day one of freshman year, going on a year and a half now.

I hate them. I hate Tommy and Bryce and I especially hate Tatum.

But I hate myself more than all of them put together.

I hear them laugh outside, making fun of my whiny tone. Then their slapping footsteps fade out as they run away.

“The only unlocked door is on the other side,” Bryce had said, guffawing like a horse in his stupid way as he shoved me inside the derelict and long-abandoned mall.

I kick at the wood panel in the door weakly, sobbing and blubbering as my ineffectual kicks barely make a sound against the sturdy wood.

Get it together, you pussy, a voice in my head says. A voice that sounds exactly like my dad.

What I wouldn’t give for my phone right now. But, of course, that was the first thing they took away from me when they ambushed me as I walked home past the crappy mall that closed when I was still a baby.

I turn around to face the dark abyss of the mall, wiping the tears from my cheeks and the snot from my upper lip.

My eyes are adjusting, which gives me a little confidence. I can see the shape of the inner doors. No one bothered putting wood on them, even though the glass has been broken out of them, just like the outer doors behind me.

Past the doors, I can see dull shapes on the floor. Small things. Trash, probably.

I step forward, my dad’s angry voice egging me on.

Thinking about the unlocked door on the other side of the mall, I step through the inner doors, my feet crunching on a few errant pieces of broken glass.

I can see a little better now. But I still can’t see the walls on either side of the wide mall hallway. At least I don’t think I can. It’s just darkness to my right and left.

I try not to think about what could be surrounding me right now. What heinous, bloodthirsty creatures could be salivating at the smell of my flesh. I force myself to walk, looking down both to watch out for sharp objects and to keep my focus anywhere but on the darkness surrounding me.

I need to find the unlocked door on the other side of the mall.

A thought occurs to me. A wonderful, magical, unbelievable thought. A memory, really.

I swing off my backpack, which has two textbooks and three notebooks inside, and open up the main pocket. I shove my hand down past the books, rummaging around, searching for the shape I hope is there.

It was over two months ago now when I went on a camping trip with my friend Chris and his dad. I’d used my school backpack to bring my own supplies, including a little pocket knife with a four-inch blade.

I remember getting home from the trip when all was said and done. I was putting away the camping stuff and putting my school stuff back in. But I paused when I saw the knife. I decided to leave it in the backpack, a serious violation of school policy.

I’d had silly fantasies about using the pocket knife to scare off Tatum, Tommy, and Bryce. But, eventually, I’d forgotten all about it.

My hand touches the cold metal of the folding knife, and I suck in a triumphant breath. I yank it out of my backpack and pry it open, holding it in front of me and jabbing it in the air with a smile on my face.

Ha! Come at me now, monsters.

You’re such a fucking loser, my dad’s voice says in my head. My smile falters, but I still feel better for having the knife.

I close it and put it in my pocket while I put my backpack on. Then I take the knife back out and unsheathe the blade again, holding it as I continue my walk through the mall.

Soon enough, I sense a big space in front of me. I’ve come to the center of the mall, where the ceiling is tall and there are escalators and an elevator. There’s a little sunlight coming through a half-covered skylight way above me. I look up to see that they’ve covered the skylights with boards, too. But one of them has been partially torn up or broken, which is where the light is coming from.

I’d heard stories about kids in here with BB guns, shooting up at the old windows. According to one story, an unlucky (and pretty dumb) kid stood right under the one he was shooting at. When it broke, a big chunk of glass came right down and chopped his head off. Kids say he haunts the mall to this day.

Probably not true, but it’s the absolute last thing I want to be thinking about right now.

I move through the central area, thankful for the bit of light. I have the knife down by my leg, ready for action if anything comes at me.

As I step into the darkness past the central area, I see people ahead of me in the dark. I freeze, looking at them, waiting for them to move toward me. There must be five or six of them. It’s hard to tell. They look like they’re bald, for the most part, but a few of them have hair.

“Hello?” I call out, wincing as my whiny voice comes back to me off the walls. They’re too tall to be my teenage tormentors. They don’t move a muscle. They’re all just standing there in the dark.

I want to bolt, to run the other way, but some deep part of me tells me to keep going. I step forward, my eyes readjusting again, and see that they’re mannequins. Moving forward little by little, I squint into the darkness with my knife out in front of me. The entire hallway is filled with posed mannequins. Some of them are naked. Others have old clothes and wigs on them. A few are headless and others have Halloween masks on their heads.

“You’re kidding me,” I say, knowing that this is the way I’m supposed to go. I can imagine Tommy, Bryce, and Tatum laughing their stupid, evil laughs as they set up the mannequins, knowing that they’d shove me — or some other wimpy kid — into the mall and scare me half to death.

Thinking about this — and about all the other terrible things those kids have done to me in the last year and a half — causes a flood of anger to rush through me.

“Fuck you guys!” I shout, vibrating with rage. I grip the knife tight in my right hand as I move forward with a purpose. I knock down the first mannequins I come to, reveling in how easy it is, wishing it were so easy to knock down real people. Real bullies.

I think I see one of the mannequins move up ahead of me. I freeze, the sudden silence deafening and compounding the fear I’d just managed to push deep down inside.

Pussy, my dad’s voice says.

This inner voice snaps me out of it, and I move forward again, dismissing the movement as a product of my imagination.

I knock down more of the mannequins as I move past them.

A shorter one wearing baggy, ratty clothes looms out of the darkness to my left. I put a hand out to push it when its arms move, hands grabbing me and twisting my arm.

I scream and swing the knife at the figure, driving it through the ratty clothing twice before the thing lets go of me and falls to the ground.

A voice shouts from behind me — a familiar one — and an arm snakes around my neck from the darkness. I’m still shaking, still vibrating. The fear in me has all but taken over.

I know what’s happening even as I jab the knife awkwardly into the figure behind me. I know, but I don’t stop. When Tatum screams and releases me, there’s no more question about what I’ve done.

But, for some reason, I still turn around and plunge the knife into his chest three more times, feeling the warm blood splash my hands as it spurts out of his wounds.

A light comes on, creating long shadows of those mannequins still standing. I look over at the light, squinting.

“You stabbed them,” Bryce says in a voice that has the same whiny tone mine does when I’m scared. The light shakes as he starts to cry. I can see Tommy lying on the ground, wearing an old wig and tattered clothing. He clutches a wound in his neck with one hand and another in his upper chest with the other.

Tatum is lying on my other side in a pool of blood. His eyes are wide and there’s blood coming out of his mouth.

I look back up at Bryce. His face, backlit by the light from his phone’s flashlight, contorts with fear.

He turns around and runs.

I run after him, feeling more alive than ever before. I feel powerful. But most of all, I don’t feel scared.

I know it’s wrong. I know these guys don’t deserve this. No matter how much I hate them. No matter how miserable they’ve made my life. They don’t deserve this.

But that doesn’t change things. And if there’s one thing my dad did teach me — through the belt and the switch and the fist — it’s that you need to finish the job you start. I may not have started this one on purpose, but I’ll finish it.

You won’t be able to catch him, you coward, my dad’s voice says in my head.

I decide, as I close in on Bryce, that I’ll head home after this to deal with dear old dad.

If anyone has it coming, it’s him.

Have You Seen Yourself?

Before I tell you what happened, it’s important to mention that Central Park is a pretty safe place. Many people think Central Park at night is dangerous. Mostly, the people that think this are tourists, and they can’t be blamed for not knowing the details about the park or the surrounding city.

Central Park, and New York City in general, used to be a very dangerous place back in the 80s and 90s. But things have changed since then. And while no place you’ll ever go is 100% safe, if you stick to the lighted paths in Central Park at night, you’ll find that most of the people around are runners and cyclists, not drug addicts or criminals.

I’ve lived in New York City since 2003, and Central Park is one of the places I came to run regularly. I’d never had any issues or felt unsafe in the park. Until one night two weeks ago.

I was out for my nightly run, bundled up against the winter chill in my warm running gear. Since it was so cold out, I was one of the few people in the park that night. Only the diehard exercise freaks come out in freezing temperatures.

I manage a restaurant, so it was late by the time I got off work and made it to the park, and before I knew it, one o’clock in the morning was creeping up. The park would be closing at one, and I’d lost track of time, so I decided to break my cardinal rule and take an unlighted shortcut back to West 77th Street, from where I could get home quickly.

Cutting off the main running path and onto a smaller path through some woods, I checked all around for people, not seeing any. Granted, it was dark on the path ahead, but I was confident that I would see someone if they were lurking in the dark.

I came to the Oak Bridge and slowed down to catch my breath as I started to walk across. Here, out in the open, the clear winter sky provided a sickly illumination. I noticed movement on the other side of the bridge, seeing a man about my size coming toward me. We were wearing similar exercise clothes, and we both slowed for a moment on our respective sides of the bridge, looking warily at each other.

There was no one else around, and I just figured this guy for another runner like me, so I kept on going. I kept my eyes up, but not fixed on the man. My mom had always told me that staring is impolite. But as we grew closer to each other, I noticed that our clothing wasn’t just similar — we were wearing the exact same getup.

There was something eerily familiar about this man, and a sickening feeling constricted my throat and made my palms sweaty in my gloves despite the cold weather.

I couldn’t keep my eyes averted any longer, the feeling of déjà vu simply too strong. And when we were about twenty feet away on the bridge, I glimpsed the man’s face — and I froze.

My mouth opened and closed, my brain trying and failing to give me a reason for what I was looking at.

The man had my face. He looked back at me with eyes I knew from every mirror I’d ever looked into. But it was more than just my face. He was wearing my clothes. He had the exact same build as me. He even walked like me.

Whereas I had stopped on the bridge near the halfway point, the man kept coming. If he was shocked to see someone who looked exactly like him, he didn’t show it. He kept his eyes — my eyes — fixed on me as he approached.

I leaned against the bridge railing, still trying to say something, anything, that would lessen the shock of the encounter.

The man walked up and stopped, the toes of his running shoes two or three inches from touching mine.

“Wh—What?” I managed, my voice cracking, the effort of speaking pushing smoke-like water vapor into the air.

The man looked into my eyes for a long moment, and a small smile came to his face. But it wasn’t a happy smile. It was a look of disgust, poorly disguised by the twitch of his lips. He looked me up and down, then his right hand shot out and gripped my throat.

I gasped, more water vapor erupting from my mouth and into the man’s all-too-familiar face.

With his left hand, he produced a knife — one that I recognized. It was the first real pocket knife I’d ever owned. It had a three-inch folding blade and a stylized drawing of a black widow on both sides of the handle. I got it when I was thirteen at a truck stop while on a family road trip. It was the very same knife I always carried in my pocket for protection whenever I went on a run. I could feel its weight in my pocket even as I looked down in shock at the identical knife.

The man flipped the knife blade out and then plunged it into my chest, just over my heart. The pain was immense, and I could feel my heart struggling inside my rib cage, thudding irregularly as the knife pierced it.

Leaving the knife in my chest, the man turned me, bending me down over the railing of the bridge. I could see our reflections in the water below. But the man’s reflection was no longer identical to mine. Instead of my face on his body, there was a bare skull, the eye sockets empty and black, the teeth a permanent grin.

The man flipped me into the river, and my own face met that grinning skull as I plunged into the frigid waters of Central Park Lake. As the cold enveloped me, sucking away my breath, I struggled to swim, the knife in my chest making every movement an exercise in agony.

As I sank, I was vaguely aware of a large splash and a shifting of the water around me. Then everything went dark, although the pain stayed with me, even as my consciousness faded away.

I awoke in a hospital bed, gripping at my chest for the knife I thought was still there. I touched where the blade had been but found no bandages, not even a tender spot on the skin.

“Babe?” my wife, Jeanette, said from a chair beside my bed, startling me. “It’s okay, Anthony, it’s just me.”

“Someone tried to kill me,” I said, looking crazily around the room, expecting to see the man — my doppelganger — lurking in the corner.

“What?” Jeanette said. “Tony, you had a heart attack on your run. You fell into the lake, but a passing runner saw it happen and risked his life to save you.”

“No,” I said, pulling down the neck of the hospital gown to look down at my chest. “No, he stabbed me.” But there was no wound there. No marks at all.

“Maybe that’s what it felt like, but you weren’t stabbed. You had a heart attack, but the doctor says you’re going to be okay. Although you’ve got to make some lifestyle changes.”

My mind reeled. It seemed so real. I could almost still feel the grip he’d had on my throat.

It took a while for me to accept that I hadn’t actually been stabbed. But that didn’t mean that what I experienced didn’t really happen.

Now, two weeks after the incident, I realize what it was. The grim reaper doesn’t come for you in a dark robe holding a scythe. He comes for you as you.

So if you ever see someone that looks just like you — down to the clothes and everything — turn around and run. Run the other way as fast as you can.

But I doubt it will help. After all, death waits for us all. And you can never outrun yourself.

Normal Everyday Killers

The plane was packed. Not an empty seat anywhere.

It was a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to New York. I’d just spent the week working on a story about a little town in Southern California whose water had suddenly become undrinkable. It was an ongoing story, but there was a supposed investigation going on, and I’d interviewed all the people I could.

My editor wanted me back on the East Coast for another investigative story about a corrupt small-town sheriff in upstate New York.

I’m only sharing this because it’s important to understand that I’m a trained journalist. I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve developed an excellent memory for names, faces, and conversations. Sure, I use a recorder sometimes to make sure I don’t mess anything up, but it’s really just for backup. Most of the time, I get everything right without listening to the recordings I’ve made until I’m done, using them to fact-check my stories.

So I found myself on a packed plane in an aisle seat as we pulled away from the gate at LAX. I could see one of the flight attendants toward the front of the economy section talking animatedly to one of the passengers.

She was flustered, to say the least. Although I couldn’t hear the words she was saying over the constant hum of the airplane’s running systems, I could tell from her body language that she was getting angry.

I didn’t know whether she was talking to a woman or a man because I couldn’t see them. Passengers in the area were whispering to each other and looking around the plane with exasperated looks on their faces.

A male flight attendant came back from the business class section, joining his coworker. He seemed able to calm the passenger down, and the two of them took up positions to explain how the seatbelts worked and what to do in the event of cabin pressure loss.

I shrugged it off, feeling for the poor flight attendants and what they had to put up with during their work. I put my neck pillow in place and got comfortable, closing my eyes as we taxied for takeoff.

I felt the plane take off: that familiar feeling of being pressed back into the seat and the stomach-dropping sensation as the plane left the tarmac.

I didn’t doze for long before the shouting started. I opened my eyes and looked at the three flight attendants standing in the aisle, facing the troublemaker’s seat. The two original attendants were there, along with a third one, a man.

“You need to stay in your seat, Mr. Carnell,” the female attendant said loudly, clearly losing her cool.

As I watched, I glimpsed the unruly passenger — Mr. Carnell — as he tried to stand up from his aisle seat, shouting something about being screwed over by the airline. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, with messy brown hair and a few days’ worth of untrimmed beard growth. He wore a tight black t-shirt and had a silver chain around his neck. He looked like a fit man, although not particularly tall, as far as I could tell.

“Just sit down and shut up!” one passenger yelled at the guy.

“Fuck you!” Mr. Carnell shouted.

“We’ve all got places to be, sir,” a woman called out from the row ahead of me. “Please, just drop it. We’re already in the air.”

A chorus of agreement went up from many of the passengers.

But Mr. Carnell wasn’t having it. As he tried to stand up from his seat, one of the male flight attendants put his hands out and gave the man a gentle shove — if such a thing as a gentle shove is possible — saying that he needed to stay in his seat.

This was a mistake. I could tell right away because the man went quiet, and all three of the flight attendants leaned back as if from a dangerous animal. After the pregnant pause, Carnell’s hand struck out, hitting the male flight attendant in the stomach. The man doubled over, gripping his stomach. The hand shot out again, hitting him in the face, knocking him back into the row of seats across the aisle.

Frightened sounds erupted from nearly the entire plane as the other male flight attendant moved in to try to subdue the man. Carnell’s foot kicked out, hitting the attendant in the crotch and knocking him up the aisle.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and stepped into the aisle. A few other men and a couple of women were doing the same. We bottlenecked in the aisle behind the female flight attendant who, I realized as we got closer, was being choked by Carnell.

A guy coming the other way down the aisle from business class leaned in and punched Carnell in the face. Carnell let the female flight attendant go and the rest of us moved in while the flight attendant ran up to the front of the plane, no doubt to tell the pilot.

Carnell managed to get up from his seat, attacking the man who’d punched him. I was crowding in with other people in the aisle, and Carnell’s movements struck me as those of an animal. He was fast, savage, and seemed full of endless energy.

I moved in to try to get him in a headlock, but somehow he sensed me coming and threw an elbow into my head. I stumbled back, momentarily dazed. The other proactive passengers in the aisle moved in all at once, each grabbing a limb and wrestling the man down to the floor.

We felt the plane turn just as the pilot’s voice came over the plane’s PA system. “I apologize, everyone,” the pilot said. “But, as you’re no doubt aware, we have an unruly passenger on board that we need to deal with. We’ve been given priority to land back at LAX. We’ll get you back underway as soon as humanly possible.”

I had moved in and was leaning down on one of Carnell’s legs to keep the impossibly strong man from kicking out when the announcement finished. Angry shouts and grumbles erupted throughout the whole plane.

I was angry too. I looked down at Carnell’s red-tinged face, at the look of savage fury there, and felt a loathing like nothing I’d ever experienced before — and one I hope to never experience again.

As I stared at this man, a hand slipped down over his mouth. I followed the arm up, looking into the eyes of the man it belonged to — the one that had come from business class to help. The guy looked at me and then looked around at the other people surrounding Carnell.

I could be imagining this, but I felt there was some kind of understanding that passed between several members of our little group of good citizens who’d got up to help subdue this crazed man.

Another hand — this one belonging to a woman that came to help — reached out and covered Carnell’s nose. A third hand came down and covered the other two on the man’s face.

Carnell’s eyes went wide as he tried to suck in breath, finding little to be had.

I made a little sound in my throat. It was the beginning of an objection, but my fellow subduers all looked up at me, their eyes hard. This may be me justifying what happened, but in that moment, I felt that they would’ve turned their wrath on me had I done anything to stop what they were doing.

Suddenly I felt sick.

Carnell’s eyes were bulging now, and he was trying to whip his head around to get it clear of the hands pressing down on him. A man next to me leaned forward and placed his knee on Carnell’s chest, then used his hands to help hold the suffocating man’s head steady.

I tried to back away slowly, but I felt a hand grip the back of my neck. I turned my head to see one of the flight attendants behind me — the one that Carnell had hit in the stomach and then the face. He shook his head just barely, keeping his hand on my neck to prevent me from moving away. His dangerous look of determination made me realize we were all in this together. I was part of this, even if I didn’t want to be.

I turned my head back, watching as Carnell’s face went from red to blue to purple. I felt the life leave him; the leg I was still holding onto went limp, along with the rest of his body. But his eyes stayed open, staring up at his killers.

The hands came away from his face and were wiped on shirts and pants. Carnell’s sneer stayed frozen on his face as we all moved back to our seats.

As I looked around the plane, I knew that all the passengers were aware of what had just happened. Every pair of eyes I sought turned away from me, and a pervading sense of shame seemed pungent in the recycled air.

We left Carnell lying in the aisle while the plane landed. No one said a word the whole time.

No one said a word to the police, either, as far as I knew. We were all delayed and questioned, our information taken by the police. But none seemed willing to tell the truth. I didn’t get home until late the next day, at which point I read about the incident online. The story said that authorities believed the man died of a heart attack, but that an investigation was underway.

As far as I know, no one was ever arrested for it. I was never questioned again.

But I still see Carnell’s face sometimes, late at night. I still feel his leg go limp under my hands.

And I still remember that sick elation I felt when I realized what was happening.

A Terrifying Secret

“Stop!” I said, talking to Vic. “You hear that?”

“Oh, shit,” Vic said. “They’re home. They’re fucking home, Dale. They’re not supposed to be home yet.”

Without a word, I moved to the stairs and listened hard. We were on the second floor, busy going through the jewelry boxes and looking for expensive watches and electronic gadgets. The sound we’d heard was their garage door opening. Now I heard the door from the garage to the house opening. I moved back to the bedroom and looked at Vic, who stood there, eyes wide.

“Put everything back,” I said. “Quickly. Then we hide.”

While Vic dumped the jewelry he’d taken back into the boxes, I headed to the bedside table and put the tablet back. Then I went to the closet and put the two expensive watches back where I’d found them.

I heard voices from downstairs — a man and a woman. They seemed to be arguing about something. There was a loud thump from down there, and then what sounded like a muffled cry of pain. Something struck me as strange about the thump and the outburst, but I wasn’t sure what it was. In my mind, I pictured the man of the house stubbing his toe on something and then crying out, but that didn’t explain why it sounded muffled — more muffled than the voices I’d heard just before.

I padded out of the walk-in closet and grabbed Vic. “You done?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s not perfect, but hopefully they won’t notice.”

“Okay,” I said. “We hide until they go to sleep or leave again. Then we get the hell out of here.”

There was momentary silence from downstairs, which put my hair on end. I stood there next to Vic, listening hard.

“Where are you going?” the woman downstairs called.

“I’m making sure everything’s locked up,” the man called back. But he was closer. It sounded like he was halfway up the stairs.

I yanked Vic’s sweatshirt, pulling him back toward the walk-in closet. There was an attic access panel just above the built-in shelves at the back of the closet. I pointed at it and signaled that Vic should climb up. He nodded and went over, using the shelves as a ladder to get up there. Meanwhile, I closed the door to the closet and listened.

There was a child’s bedroom between the stairs and the master bedroom, and it sounded like the man stopped in there. I heard him open the door to the room. Presumably, he walked in and made sure everything was locked up, whatever that meant. But I couldn’t hear anything else until he closed the door again about fifteen seconds later. I looked over my shoulder to see Vic’s sneaker-clad feet disappear into the attic.

Turning from the closet door, I heard the man step into the room.

“What the hell?” he said. My heart jumped in my chest, and I guessed the closet door was normally left open. Moving as quickly and as quietly as I could, I climbed the shelves and lifted myself into the attic. I heard the closet door open just as I got the panel seated in the frame. Vic and I didn’t breathe. We heard nothing. I pictured the man standing in the closet doorway, his brow furrowed, looking around and trying to remember if he closed the closet door. After a few long moments, I heard him doing something in the bedroom, and I finally took a breath.

It was early in the afternoon on a spring day, and the attic was warm. There was some sunlight filtering into the place through vents on either side of the house, giving us some illumination to see by. We’d watched the couple for a week and had never seen them come home this early before. It wasn’t good. We had a long wait ahead of us.

I wondered if it was because of the child. When I’d first opened the door to the bedroom — a little girl’s bedroom judging by the decor — I was surprised. I’d never seen them with a kid. Not once during the week we were casing the house. Maybe the kid was at camp or something. Or a boarding school. And today she was coming home.

“Hey,” I whispered to Vic. “Did you ever see a kid when you were watching the house?” We took turns, so it was possible I’d just missed it on my shifts.

“No. Never.”

I nodded. It was strange.

I figured if we needed to we could overpower them. But that was a last resort. We never wanted to hurt anyone. We just wanted their jewelry and cash and expensive trinkets. Stuff an insurance company would reimburse them for.

So violence was to be avoided unless it absolutely couldn’t be.

The man went back downstairs. I could tell because the bedroom went silent and a minute later I heard his voice downstairs. Then I listened as both the husband and wife seemed to go into their basement.

We sat in the attic for several minutes, listening and sweating. Both Vic and I were wearing normal, comfortable clothes, aside from the gloves, which were the only items that would have made us look out of place. I wore a long-sleeve blue-and-black flannel shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Vic wore a dark gray sweatshirt, black jeans, and sneakers. We also both had baseball caps on.

Still, the attic had trapped much of the day’s heat in, and I was starting to worry that we’d end up with heat stroke if we had to stay for hours.

So when I didn’t hear anything else from downstairs for several minutes, I decided we should try to get out of the house.

I climbed down first, carefully, listening hard for movement from the floor below. I heard none.

Leaving Vic up in the attic watching through the access hole for me, I made my way about halfway down the stairs before I could even hear the couple in the basement. It sounded like they were working. Maybe on some kind of remodeling project. I heard lots of taping and figured they might be getting ready to paint a room down there or something.

Figuring now was the best time to leave, I headed back up to get Vic.

We made it down the stairs and were creeping toward the front door when we heard the sound of an electric saw whirring to life followed by a scream coming from the basement. It was a man’s scream, long and terrible and full of pain.

A wave of fear traveled up my spine and I froze at the noise. I looked over my shoulder to see Vic’s wide, terrified eyes staring back at me.

I rushed to the front door and tried to open it, but it was locked. And the deadbolt required a key to unlock it from both sides. I looked around frantically for a key set nearby or a bunch of them hanging from a keyring. But I didn’t see any keys.

The door was solid wood, and there was no way to break through it easily. It would’ve taken an ax and an hour of work.

Vic looked over my shoulder and saw the dilemma. “What the hell, man?” he said, moving over to a nearby window and fumbling with the latch. He got it undone, but when he tried to lift the window, it moved about a quarter of an inch before stopping. He pulled on it again, but it wouldn’t move.

“Out of the way,” I whispered. “Let me try.”

Vic moved and I took up his position. I tried, but I couldn’t get it to move either. Then I realized why. There was a small metal mechanism affixed to the track just above the window. It stopped the progress of the window simply by blocking it, effectively locking the window down unless you had the key to take the mechanism off.

“Look,” I said, pointing at the mechanism.

“What the hell is this place, man?” he said.

As if in answer, another terrified scream rang up from the basement. I moved to the next window in line, tossing the curtains aside only to see another of those locked mechanisms.

When I moved to the next window, I bumped into a chair there, lifting it off the ground about an inch. It came back down with a dull thump. Vic and I froze, hoping they hadn’t heard it from downstairs.

A whimper from the basement was suddenly cut off. Like a hand had been slapped down over the guy’s mouth. The whole house went silent. They’d heard the thump and were listening for further movement.

Then I heard the barely audible sound of harsh whispering.

I mouthed “move” to Vic and tiptoed away from the window, toward the garage where we’d come into the house. We had a friend that could hack into phones and duplicate the garage door opener apps that many rich people had on their phones. It was how we got into all the houses we robbed.

So if we could just make it back to the garage, we could make it out. But the problem was that we had to pass the stairs to the basement to get to that side of the house.

As we moved through the hallway that traversed the house, heading toward the garage, I could hear someone coming up the steps. The door opened just as Vic and I turned out of the hallway and into the kitchen. We made it into the pantry and closed the door without producing much noise.

Since the hallway ended at the door to the garage, we would have been spotted easily. So once again, we had to wait it out and hope they didn’t find us.

“Who’s there?” the husband’s voice called from the hallway. “I’m calling the police.”

The words sounded hollow, and I knew he wouldn’t make good on his threat. Not when they were torturing someone in their basement. So we kept quiet in the pantry.

“Is there someone here?” the woman’s voice said. I hadn’t heard her coming up the basement steps; she was light on her feet.

“I don’t know. Let’s check the windows and doors again.”

“What if it’s their friends?” the woman said. “What if they followed us?”

“No one followed us. It’s probably nothing. We’re just a little keyed up, that’s all. I’m going to check the windows in the living room.”

“Okay. I’ll check the dining room windows.”

I heard the man walk off, back toward the side of the house we’d just been on. I didn’t hear the woman, but I figured I wouldn’t. Maybe she wasn’t wearing shoes or something.

Turning the knob on the pantry door slowly, I opened it a crack and peered out, looking at a slice of the kitchen.

Suddenly, the woman came into view, nearly causing me to cry out in surprise. She was wearing old, paint-spotted clothes, and her sandy brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her hands and forearms were splashed with blood. She stepped to the sink, turned on the water, and started scrubbing her hands, the water coming away pink.

I didn’t dare close the pantry door again, fearing she’d see the movement out of the corner of her eye.

All that blood … these people were sick. A pair of serial killers. Maybe they’d even killed their daughter — if they’d ever had one.

Just beyond the woman, a portly bald man in his underwear stumbled into the kitchen. This time I did make a sound, but it was lost over the woman’s cry of surprise. The man was covered in blood and his right hand was missing at the wrist. The gory wound made me sure that he’d just suffered it recently. There was a thick, black zip tie just under the nub, acting as a tourniquet to staunch the flow of blood. His pair of white underwear was stained with blood at the crotch, and the red liquid was dripping steadily through the fabric. I didn’t even want to think about what they’d done to him down there.

“Preston!” the woman screamed, stepping with dripping hands over to a knife block on the counter.

The injured man was clearly delirious. He stumbled toward the woman, saying “Please, please, please.”

The woman grabbed a large knife out of the block and threw it at the man. The blade stuck into his upper chest, but its momentum took it out again. It tumbled over his shoulder and fell to the floor behind him, leaving behind a gash in his pale skin.

He barely reacted to the wound, but he did turn and look at the knife on the ground. Meanwhile, the woman was grabbing another one out of the block. And when the injured man bent over to pick the knife up off the floor, the woman lunged at him, stabbing him in the back three times.

This time the man did cry out, and he fell to the ground, his bulk hiding the knife. The woman screamed out and stabbed him several more times before the husband — Preston — came running into the kitchen.

“Are you okay?” he asked the woman.

She was sobbing, but she nodded.

“How did he get out?” Preston asked.

The woman shook her head.

Preston came around and helped his wife up. She left the knife embedded in the man’s back. I doubted she would need it again; the guy looked dead.

“Stay here,” Preston said to her once he got her leaning against the counter. “I’m going to check on the other one.”

He walked out of the kitchen and I heard his footsteps fading away as he went down the steps. There was another person down in the basement. And if these sickos caught us, we’d be dead, too.

I knew we didn’t have a choice. We had to make a move. And now was our chance.

Turning around, I found a large can of peas on a pantry shelf. Vic watched me grab it with a question in his eyes. He didn’t dare speak. And he hadn’t seen what I’d seen through the gap in the door. He’d only heard the commotion.

I put a finger to my lips before turning around to face the door again. Taking a deep breath, I gripped the can tightly in my gloved hand, rehearsing what I was about to do in my head.

I shoved the door open and lunged out at the woman, who turned to face me just as I reached her. Her eyes were wide with surprise as I brought the can down on her head. The heavy can made a dull thump as it caught her on the curve of her forehead, immediately splitting the skin open. She stumbled back, blood pouring down her face. I moved with her. And just as she was about to open her mouth to scream, I slammed the can down again, hitting her in the face this time. I felt the left side of her face cave in under the blow. Her body went limp and she fell back, smacking her head against the tile floor hard enough to make a crunching sound.

“Come on!” I said to Vic, who looked with sickening fear at the two bodies lying on the kitchen floor.

We ran through the hallway toward the garage, no longer worried about being quiet. I still had the dented can of peas in my right hand, so I used the left to twist the doorknob and pull. The door didn’t open. It was locked. And, like the front door, it required a key to unlock.

“Fuck!” I shouted. “We need to break a window. Move!”

Vic and I turned into the nearby dining room, which had windows in two walls. The sound of running footsteps coming up the stairs sent an electric fear through my body.

Vic picked up a wooden chair from the dining room table, but I knew we’d never make it out in time. Not before the husband got up here. And who knows what kind of weapon he’d have with him.

I moved quickly to the wall by the doorway from the hall; the most likely place for the husband to enter the room. Holding the can up, I waited for him there, listening hard. Just as Vic smashed the window with the chair, the guy rushed into the room.

He yelled out at Vic, rushing past me without a glance. He had a machete in his right hand, which he raised as he moved directly toward Vic. I stepped up behind him and slammed the can down on the back of his head, causing him to stumble forward, tripping and falling headfirst into the smashed window — right onto a piece of jagged glass sticking up out of the bottom frame.

He dropped the machete and stood up, pulling the glass out of his neck. He put both hands to his neck, which was pouring blood. His hands did little to stop the flow.

He looked at Vic and then turned to look at me, his brow furrowed as if he couldn’t understand what was happening.

Then he fell down and emptied the rest of his blood onto the plush carpet of the dining room floor.

“Oh, my God,” Vic said, putting his gloved hands to his head. “Oh, my God, we just killed two fucking people. We need to get the fuck out of here. I’m gonna be sick.”

“Go,” I said. “Get out of here. I’ll meet you back at the car.” I felt like I was going to be sick, too. But I didn’t say so. I was trying my best to keep it together.

“What are you gonna do?” Vic asked.

“They have another guy downstairs. I can’t just leave him. These sickos probably have him tied up. He might die if I don’t let him go.”

Vic looked at me for a long moment, then he turned to the window and started kicking the pieces of glass — including the bloody one — out of the frame so he could escape.

I tossed the can of peas on the ground and rushed down the stairs and into the basement. There was plastic sheeting all over the unfinished main room, and a medical table in the middle of the space with built-in restraints. The table was coated with blood. It looked like one of the wrist straps had broken, which was probably how the guy managed to get out and go upstairs.

A workbench sat to the side, covered in medical instruments and construction tools. There was an electric saw there, its blade covered in blood.

There were two large dog cages in the corner of the room, one of them empty and open. The other one contained a man, who looked up at me with fearful, pleading eyes. His mouth was covered with silver duct tape, and his hands were similarly bound. He had long stringy hair and an average body type. His jeans and t-shirt looked filthy.

I ran over to the cage, noticing that it was fastened with a large padlock that required a key. The guy pointed at his pocket and then pointed upstairs. It wasn’t hard to figure out what he was saying.

I found the keys in the husband’s pocket and used them to let the guy out. Then I used some scissors from the workbench to cut the tape.

“Thank you. Thank you, so much,” he said. “These people are fucking crazy, man. They were going to kill me.”

“I know. I’d call the police if I were you. Now. They’re both dead.”

Relief came over the guy’s face. He nodded.

“If you do call the police, I was never here, okay?” I said to him. This meant he’d have to take the blame for their deaths. But it would be self-defense, surely.

“I think it’s best if I just leave,” he said.

I nodded.

We headed upstairs and I used the keys to unlock the front door. The guy thanked me again and then ran off. I ran the other way and got into the car parked a couple of blocks away. Vic was there, waiting. As soon as I got in, he put the car in gear and we drove off.

Vic and I got back to my apartment on the other side of town. I turned on the news immediately. I knew it would probably be a while before anyone found them, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d leave the news on for a day if that’s what it took. I wanted to ensure we got away clean.

As we were sitting on my couch, unsure what to do with ourselves, a news story came on that caught our attention.

“Today marks a year since eight-year-old Lilly Shaw went missing last spring,” the bland male newscaster said. The picture of a smiling little girl came on the screen.

“The young girl’s parents, Preston and Leslie Shaw, had this to say shortly after their daughter’s disappearance:” A video of the husband and wife whose house we’d just been at came on the screen. They were huddled together, arms around each other, sitting on a couch in their house.

“Please, we just want our daughter back,” Preston said. “If the people who took her are listening, we just want her back. That’s all we care about. So if anyone has any information on her whereabouts, we’re offering a $500,000 reward, no questions asked. We just want her back.”

The newscaster came back on the screen. “Eyewitnesses to Lilly Shaw’s disappearance identified two men, who police say are known sex offenders: Tim Duke and Kelvin Reynolds.” Two mugshots came on the screen, both faces I recognized immediately. One of them — Tim Duke — was lying dead on the Shaws’ kitchen floor across town. The other one I’d set free barely an hour ago.

“Anyone with information on either of these men should call the crime stoppers hotline immediately.”

This time, I couldn’t keep the sickness down. I leaned over and vomited on my floor.

“What did we do?” Vic said. “What the fuck did we do?”

The Sinkhole

“Are you okay, Mom?” I asked, sitting down in the front passenger seat. I’d just loaded my stuff in the back of the Volvo station wagon.

My mom smiled weakly. “Yes, of course. I’m fine, honey.” As she spoke, I noticed the inside of her mouth looked dark. Like she’d just been drinking some kind of inky liquid. But I didn’t think much of it. Her face had changed in the two months I’d been away at camp. At least, I thought it had. I looked at her intently as she faced forward in the driver’s seat, putting the car into reverse.

I couldn’t put my finger on how she’d changed. The word that came to mind was “ashen.” She looked ashen. Like she hadn’t been out in the sun all summer.

She looked older, too. Of course, she was in the middle of divorcing my father, so I figured it was wearing on her. My dad was a real piece of work, and I hadn’t missed him at all during the summer. I’d missed my mom a lot. About as much as a sixteen-year-old boy could miss his mother, I supposed. I’d also missed my dog, Dallas, who I was excited to get home and see.

“Mrs. Terrison was asking about you. I thought you’d get out and talk to her,” I said.

“Oh, that’s nice.”

It was a strange response. I studied my mom as I sat in the front seat, wondering if I should ask her what was wrong. Her right eye shifted over and looked at me. Then, mechanically, jerkily, her head turned toward me while her eye stayed in place, fixed on me. Something about the movement sent a lighting blot of terror through me. It was as if she was a piece of malfunctioning machinery, her neck in need of oil or new bearings.

As her left eye came into view, I jerked away from her. “Mom! Your eye!”

She blinked and the black cloud that had been there, spreading through her left eye like blood in water, was gone.

She turned away from me, startled, looking into the rearview mirror. She was no longer moving strangely, no longer jerking around.

“What, Jamie? What is it?” she said, looking at herself in the mirror.

“I — I don’t know. I thought I saw something … black in your eye. It scared me.”

“By George, it scared me too,” she said, looking back at me again. Her eyes were clear, normal, if not a little faded by the premature aging she’d done since the divorce started. Yeah, that’s what it is, I thought. Premature aging.

My mom drove carefully through the camp parking lot as all the other kids were getting loaded up, some of them saying tearful goodbyes. Many of their parents were chatting with each other, not in any rush to get going.

That’s what my mom usually did. Last year, I remembered going nearly insane with boredom as my mom talked with Mrs. Terrison, my friend Travis’s mom.

But not this year. This year, something was up with my mom. And the atmosphere in the car quickly darkened.

We turned out of the camp and onto the small highway road cutting a valley through tall conifer trees. The sun was in such a position that it was shining down at a shallow angle on my side of the car, leaving mom in shadow on the other side.

Despite the warm sunshine on my skin, I grew cold in the car. The air conditioner wasn’t on very high, and I didn’t understand why it was so cold. Even after closing the AC vents, I had goosebumps.

Usually, my mother was the one to initiate conversation, but she said nothing for several miles. Finally, the silence was too much for me.

“So how’s dad?” I asked. I didn’t really care whether he was sleeping in a ditch every night. Maybe I should’ve, but I didn’t. I was asking because I needed to prepare myself for facing him if he was in one of his moods.

“Your father is dead,” my mother said in a low whisper.

It was as if the words struck me. I jerked, rocking in my seat, pressing against my seatbelt. “What?” I said, sure that I’d misunderstood her.

“Yes, your father is dead,” my mother said from her shadow on the other side of the car. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the road.

“Wha — How? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to ruin your time at camp,” she said, punctuating the sentence with a little sigh. Like we were discussing the regrettable but minor death of a goldfish.

“How did he die? Was he drunk? Did he hurt anyone else?”

“Oh, not now, honey,” she said. “Not now. When we get home, I’ll tell you all about it.”

I was speechless. I just looked at my mom, mouth half open, as thoughts of my dad flashed through my head like a kaleidoscope of painful memories.

But they weren’t all painful. They weren’t all bad times.

It had always seemed that way … until now. Now that he was dead, the good memories surfaced, tauntingly.

I still didn’t believe it, though. I couldn’t.

So I sat in silence all the way home, shivering in the inexplicably cold car.

It was late afternoon as we drove into town. At first, I thought ‌it was the shock of the news making the town look strange to me. I thought ‌I was seeing it darkly, through the eyes of a teenage boy with a dead father. But I quickly realized there was something else happening. Or not happening, rather.

There were no kids playing basketball in the park. No old couples walking their dogs. No children running around in their front yards while their parents watched from the porch.

Window shades at a couple of houses parted as we passed, unseen people looking out at us, but that was about all the movement I saw on the way to our house.

“What happened?” I said, looking out the window at our town of twelve hundred people — not one of whom was outside on a sunny late-summer afternoon.

“Things have changed while you’ve been away at camp,” my mom said. “It’ll take some getting used to.”

“Does this have something to do with dad dying? Did a building collapse or something? Did the old Horseshoe Pub finally fall down the hillside?”

My mother’s laughter was brittle, cynical. It seemed to make the car even colder. “Nothing like that,” she said.

We pulled up to our small one-story craftsman house, parking around the back, in front of the old separate garage. A garage filled with yard tools and an old Jaguar XJ6 that my father bought but never got around to restoring.

And now he never would.

I stepped out of the car and stared at the garage for a moment. It was a rusty red in color, its two leaning doors meeting off-kilter in the middle. The familiar weather-beaten chain and padlock securing the two doors together seemed to be the personification of my father. He’d always been locked away from us, it seemed. And like the padlock on the garage, he was the only one that held the keys. The only one that could let my mom and me in. But he rarely did.

Soon enough, I felt about him like I did about the old garage. I just wanted to tear it down and get a new one. One with an automatic door. One that wasn’t locked all the time, seeming to hide secrets from us. One that I was welcome inside. Welcome to help with whatever project was going on in there.

But now that dad was gone, those thoughts seemed callous and wretched. I began to wonder if my halfhearted hopes for a new father — a better one — had played a part in his death.

A whimpering bark from inside the house swelled my heart. I turned from the garage and went up to the back door. As always, it was unlocked, and as soon as I opened it, Dallas bounded out and jumped up on me, his tail whapping the doorjamb and his pink tongue lolling in excitement.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, bending down to hug and pet the black lab. I’d missed Dallas all summer, but my mother’s strained appearance and then the news about my father had taken precedence over thoughts of the dog. Dallas licked my face, his paws on my thighs and his body shaking with excitement.

I got down on my knees and stuck my head out toward him. At first, I thought he wouldn’t do it. But then he seemed to remember. He reached his own head up, placing the bottom of his jaw on the top of my head. He was still, his excitement paused as we shared our special greeting. It was our version of a hug, and we had been doing it since Dallas joined our family when I was ten.

The moment passed, and I got up off my knees, and Dallas was once again shaking with excitement. For a moment, Dallas buoyed me, making me forget the worries that had been swirling through my head during the drive.

Then I felt a chill wind from behind. Dallas must have felt it too because he whined and moved back into the house with his tail tucked between his legs. I sensed movement, turning to see that my mother had come up the four stairs to the small back porch.

“Don’t forget your things,” she said, moving past me into the house. Once she was inside, that chill wind seemed to disappear.

Wondering what had gotten into Dallas, I went back out to the Volvo and got my gear. When I brought it inside, I was met with a strange smell. Previous trips, when I’d been away from the house for days or weeks, I’d come back in and smile at the familiar smell of home. But this time was different. There was something foul in the air. Like a sewer line had backed up.

I thought ‌Dallas had left us a smelly surprise, but a quick look around the house told me that wasn’t the case. And it wasn’t overpowering, like dog poop in an enclosed space often is. This was more subtle. And it seemed to be everywhere in the house. It didn’t get stronger near the bathrooms or weaker in the bedrooms. It was everywhere.

The interior of the house looked the same as when I’d left it. But it certainly didn’t feel the same. What I once found cozy and welcoming was now cold and depressing. I just shrugged it off, thinking that it would take some adjustment to get back into the feel of things after being away for two months.

I took my bags up to my room and found Dallas cowering under my bed, which was totally out of character for him.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” I said, getting down on my hands and knees. He looked up at me, shame and joy seeming to fight on his face. “Why are you acting so strange? Do you want to go for a walk?”

That little word got him out from under my bed, tail wagging raucously.

I smiled. “Okay,” I said. “Just let me get my phone.”

We weren’t allowed to have our phones at camp. One of the counselors would call our parents if something was wrong. And while a lot of kids hated this, I actually enjoyed being disconnected for a couple of months. There was always stuff to do at camp, so I was never bored. But it also meant that I’d been missing out on what my friends in town had been up to.

I found the phone right where I’d left it in my bedside table drawer. I powered it on as I walked downstairs, Dallas sticking by my side.

“Mom, I’m taking Dallas for a walk,” I called up the stairs, assuming my mom was in her room. She didn’t answer, but I heard her moving around up there. Strange.

I got Dallas’s leash hooked up and, with the roll of small poop bags in my pocket, we were out the back door. Dallas usually liked to sniff around the backyard first before we went to check out the wide world of fascinating smells in the neighborhood.

He led me down the stairs and into the grassy backyard. The sweet smell of the blossoming Greenspire Linden tree in the yard quickly filled my nostrils, replacing the low-key foul smell from inside the house.

Suddenly, Dallas stopped, his hackles raising and a low growl issuing from deep in his throat. He was looking straight at the old garage.

“What is it? There a raccoon in there again?”

He moved forward stiffly, still growling as we approached the sagging doors. And as we got closer, I could smell that same foul stench as inside the house — only it was worse next to the garage.

There was a low vibrating sound coming from the simple wooden structure. I felt it in my chest when we were a few feet away from the doors.

Barking, Dallas jumped, putting his front paws on the doors, causing them to sway on their old hinges. The vibration intensified as a cloud of flies poured out of the garage where there was a gap at the top of the doors. I ducked down as they swarmed around me, smacking into me and bouncing off. Dallas continued barking and growling at them.

It seemed I was trapped in a cloud of the insects for a good ten seconds before I couldn’t take it anymore, and I ran down the driveway toward the street, my mouth sealed shut against them but my eyes open slightly so I could see. I dragged Dallas along with me, and by the time we reached the street, the worst of it was over.

Looking back toward the garage, I watched as thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of flies moved up into the sky like a flock of birds. They created a dark, swirling formation that moved off through the sky, over my house and down toward the other side of town.

I’d never seen flies act like that before, and couldn’t imagine why they’d been drawn to the garage. There were so many of them.

Our house was‌ near the crest of a gently sloping hill. At the top of it, you could see much of the small town. On some impulse I didn’t understand, I ran with Dallas up to the top of the hill and watched the cloud of flies. They angled down toward a strange gap in the trees on the other side of the Methodist church some mile and a half from my house.

The church backed up to the woods, but something had changed there. Like someone had gone in and chopped down a group of trees beyond the church. But that didn’t seem likely. There was no road leading back there. I’d played in those woods after church my entire childhood, and it wasn’t an ideal place to collect lumber.

A whine from Dallas got my attention just as the last of the cloud of insects disappeared from view into that strange gap. I looked down at my dog, who was looking across the street. I followed his gaze, my heart lurching in my chest at the ghostly figure I saw there, gazing at me. It took me a moment to realize that it was Mrs. Faulk, standing on her porch in an off-white nightgown.

Dallas whined again, still looking at her. I raised my hand in greeting, but Mrs. Faulk didn’t make a move. She just stared at me.

“Are you okay?” I said, thinking of all the times my dad had grumbled about the “kookie old couple up the street.”

Mrs. Faulk still said nothing. Although my heart had calmed considerably after first seeing her, the unwavering gaze she held on me was fast making my cardiovascular system ramp up again.

I looked left and right to make sure there wasn’t any traffic, then I crossed over despite my uneasy feeling. I thought maybe she was having a stroke or something. I wondered where her husband was.

“Mrs. Faulk? Are you alright?”

Her eyes followed me as I moved toward her, but she made no answer. Like my mother, Mrs. Faulk looked older than when I had last seen her. I had no idea how old she really was, but her wrinkles seemed to have multiplied. Her skin seemed washed out, and her stoop more pronounced.

“Let’s get you back inside,” I said, moving toward her but stopping when the leash went taut. I looked over my shoulder to see Dallas hunkering down, refusing to get any closer to the woman. There was a low whine coming from him, and his eyes were frightened, fixed on Mrs. Faulk.

“Come on, Dallas,” I coaxed, pulling gently on the leash. He wasn’t having it. There was a speed limit sign nearby, so I led Dallas over to it; he had no problem moving further away from the woman. I secured his leash there and turned around to see Mrs. Faulk standing right behind me. Her hands came up, freezing cold as they clasped my head. Her yellow-tinged eyes were wide, her papery skin lined with dark veins just under the surface.

“Heeeeellll,” she said in barely a whisper, her hands squeezing my head, her breath foul. I was grabbing her wrists, trying to pry her hands off, but her strength was immense. “Heeeelllllllp.”

I heard a growl and felt something bump the side of my leg. A moment later, Mrs. Faulk let me go. All the intensity was suddenly gone from her face. Both she and I looked down to see that Dallas had bitten her just below the hem of her nightgown. He’d had just enough play in the leash to strain past me and take a chunk out of the side of her calf.

The blood was a dark red — almost black‌. And it was strange that a single bite could take a chunk out of her like that. The small bit of flesh was lying in the grass next to my feet. Dallas was licking his chops fervently, like he was trying to get a terrible taste out of his mouth.

Other than dropping her hands and looking down, Mrs. Faulk showed no signs that she’d even felt the bite. I looked up at her face, shocked at what had happened, but she was already turning around, walking with her uneasy gait toward her porch.

“I’m sorry,” I said, following her. “Do you want me to call an ambulance? Maybe I’ll get your husband. Dallas doesn’t usually bite. I don’t know what got into him.”

She just kept walking, not saying anything.

“Mrs. Faulk? Do you …” I trailed off, unsure what to do. I quickly decided to find Mr. Faulk, so I ran ahead of the old woman, moved up the porch steps, and knocked on the door. “Mr. Faulk? Are you in there? There’s been an accident.”

I heard nothing, but there was that familiar miasma, clearly coming from inside the house. The same smell from my own home. And from the garage.

Opening the door, I leaned inside and called for Mr. Faulk again, but there was no answer. Behind me, Mrs. Faulk was shuffling forward at the top of the steps. I moved out of the way so she could pass, which she did without a word.

She glanced at me once she was inside, one hand on the door. I couldn’t meet her emotionless gaze for long, and my eyes flicked down to the wound on her leg. As she went to close the door, I noticed several flies already around the wound, shifting position, beating their wings, and rubbing their front legs together. By the time she closed the door, there were a dozen flies at the oozing bite.

I backed off the porch in a daze, suddenly aware of the utter silence around the neighborhood. There were no radios playing, no lawnmowers humming in the distance, no children hollering and laughing as they played. There wasn’t even the hum of a faraway car engine.

Walking distractedly back to Dallas, who was now rubbing his snout on the grass and pawing at it, I took another look at the town stretching out before me. I didn’t see a single car moving down any of the streets visible from the hilltop. Nor anyone walking or biking or skateboarding along.

A deep and intangible fright burgeoned inside me, expanding like oil from a wrecked tanker spilling into the ocean. The sun would go down soon, and the very idea of darkness descending made me want to scream, although I didn’t understand why. Just that something terrible had happened while I was away. And it wasn’t over. It was still happening.

I untied the leash from the speed limit sign and ran home with Dallas, seeking a comfort in my childhood home that was no longer to be found. The house, like the town, had changed in ways I couldn’t begin to comprehend.

Leaving Dallas downstairs, I moved quietly up to my mom’s room, some cautionary voice inside telling me not to make noise, not to alert her to my presence.

Her door was closed, but I turned the knob, feeling that it was unlocked. I opened the door a couple of inches and peered inside, seeing my mother sitting at her vanity mirror across the room, putting lip gloss on. Her back was to me, but I could see her reflection in the mirror as she put layer after layer of lip gloss on, with the same mechanical motions again and again.

I must have watched her for two whole minutes before the insanity of it got to me and I barged into the room. “What’s going on?” I said, nearly screaming. “What’s wrong with you? What happened?”

She paused and turned and faced me. “Nothing’s wrong. Would you like some dinner? I know it’s a bit early. I’ll make some dinner.”

“Mom, talk to me,” I said. But she just passed me, heading downstairs. Pretty soon, I heard the sounds of dinner being prepared.

I went to my room and pulled out my phone. My hands were shaking as I typed a message to my friend Brandon, asking him what had happened while I was away.

When Brandon didn’t answer after a couple of minutes, I texted Daniela. She didn’t text me back either.

I navigated to Instagram and to Selina Perth’s account. I wasn’t friends with Selina, but she was always active on Instagram, constantly posting pictures — mostly selfies — from around town. Her most recent post was from a month ago, in late June. And, for a change, it wasn’t a selfie. It was a picture of a big hole in the ground surrounded by woods.

“Sink-holy shit!” her caption read. It was a sinkhole. Navigating through my friends’ accounts, I saw other posts from around the same time. Many of them were pictures of the sinkhole.

It wasn’t a bottomless pit. Rather, a roughly circular patch of ground about two-hundred feet in diameter had fallen down some twenty or thirty feet. The trees that had fallen with the ground were leaning at sharp angles or were resting on the ground, having been completely uprooted.

Since the sinkhole was on a slope, a cliff face had been created on the up-slope side. And in that cliff face was a dark hole. A cavern of some kind. The entrance looked wide enough to walk through with room to spare. But that was about all I could tell from the pictures I saw.

I visited several accounts belonging to people from town. And in every one of them, the most recent post was a month old, give or take a few days. Many of them were about the sinkhole. Suddenly, the gap in the trees behind the church made sense.

Had there been millions of flies living in the uncovered cave? Had the flies been spreading disease throughout town, making people sick?

I had a terrible feeling that flies or disease couldn’t explain whatever was happening to my town.

Setting my phone aside, I looked up at the wall in my room, thinking. As I did this, I realized it was getting dark outside. Standing up to turn on the light, I realized that there was no more noise coming from downstairs. The house was completely silent.

Moving to my open door, I called down. “Mom?”

I padded to the top of the stairs, looking down to the dark first floor. Why would she be cooking in the dark? Why would she be doing anything in the dark?

“Dallas, come here boy,” I called down. There was no response. No jingle of his collar. No tapping of his nails on the floor. Nothing.

I rushed downstairs, flipping lights on as I went. Raw chicken breasts sat in a glass pan in the kitchen, flies alighting on them. The oven had been turned on, and the preheat indicator was off.

My mom was nowhere to be seen. Neither was my dog.

I headed to the back door, pulling it open and stepping out, thinking that she’d just taken Dallas out. After all, he hadn’t had a chance to do his business with me earlier.

There was no sign of them.

As I looked around, I saw ‌the garage had been opened. The chain and padlock were sitting in a heap on the driveway. From where I was, I couldn’t see into the garage; the right door was blocking my view.

The sky behind me was red and purple with the sunset as I made my way toward the garage. Despite this little bit of light remaining in the sky, I couldn’t see far into the dense shadows of the garage as I stepped onto the driveway and looked inside. The old Jaguar hunkered there under its dusty car cover, seeming to cast off shadows in every direction. I could see the edge of the hard-packed dirt floor on which the car sat, but all was darkness beyond that.

“Mom?” I whispered, stepping to the threshold and pulling out my phone. I turned on the flashlight, shining it around at chest height, seeing nothing but normal garage stuff. Then I moved the beam down. My heart and stomach seemed to pull away from each other as I saw Dallas’s limp hind legs sticking out from under the Jaguar.

“Dallas!” I cried, reaching down and trying to pull him out. He wouldn’t move. As if he were caught on something underneath the car.

I got down on my side next to him, shining the light under the car. What I saw there shook my vision and caused an unconscious cry to issue from some faraway cavern inside me.

Dallas’s eyes bulged, and it was obvious right away that he was dead. There was a rotting hand with a viselike grip around his neck. A hand that was connected to an arm that seemed to come out of the dirt under the car. The skin was blackened where I could see it. But mostly, it was covered in plump yellow maggots that crawled and writhed and moved in and out of the holes in the flesh of the arm. But at the wrist was a watch I knew. A watch I’d seen all my life. It was my father’s watch.

I tried to pull Dallas out again, managing to move his body a couple of inches. But then the arm moved, yanking my dog back into place.

I lost it, scrambling up and running out of the garage toward the street, feeling like I was going to vomit.

It was almost fully dark now, but the streetlights were on. I looked around wildly. Not knowing what else to do, I ran up to the top of the hill and looked out across the town. I guess I was looking for help. But there was none to be found.

Movement down the hill caught my eye, and I immediately recognized my mother and Mrs. Faulk. They were walking away from me. My mother was carrying some kind of knife that glinted in the orange light from the street lamps.

I looked back toward my house, tears filling my eyes as I remembered Dallas’s bulging eyes and crushed throat. Cursing under my breath, I walked down the hill, determined to follow my mother wherever she went. But I had a pretty good feeling I already knew where she was going…

***

My mother and Mrs. Faulk moved stiffly down into the sinkhole using a gentle slope opposite the dark cavern. I watched them for a moment from behind a tree, then turned back to look at the church. Someone had busted the stained glass windows out, and the corner nearest the sinkhole was ‌being torn apart. It was an old wooden church, and much of the white siding had simply been torn off.

There were strange markings on the areas where the church hadn’t yet been disassembled. It looked like they’d been painted on with mud.

I glanced back at my mother and Mrs. Faulk, picking their way through the fallen and tilted trees, and then moved over to the front of the church. The small parking lot was empty, save for a loose pile of the removed wood.

The church doors were open, and it was clear as I stepped in that the interior had also been vandalized. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness outside, so I was able to see the most obvious damage to the pews and the walls. The cross on the wall behind the pulpit had been ripped down and smashed into two pieces.

I stepped toward the pulpit, not sure what I was looking for or why I’d even come into the church.

Movement from behind one of the half-smashed pews caused me to jump. A skulking black figure moved out from behind the pew, approaching me. I froze.

“Dallas?” I whispered. In the darkness of the church, the dog approaching looked like Dallas, minus the collar. It was also slightly smaller than my dog. But the two could have been from the same litter.

The dog didn’t growl. Its hackles weren’t raised. It came toward me with its eyes up, fixed on me. I noticed it had something in its mouth. A piece of wood.

The dog lowered her head — I knew, suddenly, that it was a she — and dropped the piece of wood at my feet. Then she backed away several steps, turned around, and disappeared behind the pew.

I reached down and picked up the piece of wood. It was about the size and shape of a stake. About a foot long. The point was sharp but not thin. Looking back up at the broken cross, I saw where the chunk had come from. There was a piece missing right where the two bars came together. A piece that was the exact right size and shape of the large splinter I held in my hand.

I took a few steps forward and glanced around the pew, looking for the dog.

It was gone.

The same instinct that had led me to the church guided me back out into the night and down into the sinkhole. My mother and Mrs. Faulk were both already inside the cavern. As I came to the ragged mouth of the cave, I gagged at the rotten smell emanating from it. My hair stood on end as I stepped inside. Suddenly, it was five degrees colder than it had been outside. And with every step I took in, it got even colder.

I didn’t dare use my flashlight, but as I came to a curve some fifteen feet into the cave, I saw a dim, flickering glow coming from around the corner. Moving cautiously, I peeked around and saw that the tunnel widened out ahead. I saw my mother and Mrs. Faulk, illuminated by an array of candles placed on rocky ledges. Beyond them, the cave opened up so wide that I couldn’t see the walls or the ceiling beyond the ring of illumination provided by the candles.

Whereas the ground of the tunnel where I stood was pale brown, it seemed to darken suddenly just beyond where my mother and Mrs. Faulk were.

There was an outcropping of rock about fifteen yards away — halfway between where I stood at the curve and where the two women stood.

I got on my knees and crawled, staying low until I made it to the outcropping, where I knelt and peeked my head out.

My mom had grabbed a wooden bucket from nearby and was carrying it over to Mrs. Faulk, who was lowering herself down into a shallow recess in the ground. I could see the wound Dallas had inflicted as she propped the leg up on the rock, hiking the hem of her nightgown up past the knee.

My mom tilted the bucket, pouring some kind of chunky black liquid over the lower portion of Mrs. Faulk’s leg. She then put the bucket down and stood back up with a meat cleaver in her hand — the one I’d seen her carrying.

My stomach roiled as my mother brought the cleaver up and then chopped it down onto Mrs. Faulk’s knee joint. Blood flew and Mrs. Faulk closed her eyes, making a long, drawn-out sound that wasn’t quite a pained scream. Then she started speaking in tongues, babbling incoherently but with purpose.

My mother slammed the cleaver down again and again and again, the sound of rending flesh and cartilage making me nauseous.

One final chop separated the lower leg at the knee. Mrs. Faulk stopped making noise. She opened her eyes and looked down at her nub.

My mother set the leg and the cleaver aside, then reached down to help Mrs. Faulk up. The older woman leaned on my mother, hopping as they moved deeper into the cave, toward where the ground turned black.

A great buzz filled the air and the ground seemed to levitate as they stepped from pale brown to black. I quickly realized that the ground itself wasn’t black — it was coated with flies. Curtains of the insects flew up and buzzed around in the darkness near the unseen ceiling. And what they revealed underneath was worse than a billion flies.

The ground wasn’t there at all. Instead, it was a carpet of rotting flesh and maggots. What I had thought were rocks were actually people, melted and fused into each other, making a mound of discolored skin and limbs. There were heads sticking out here and there, maggots writhing in open sores, wriggling out of nostrils and ears. Bodies jutted from the mass at the waist or the arms or the legs. Those whose heads were visible to me, I recognized. They were people from town. My math teacher, Mr. Bemis. A kid from school, Joe Enzweiler. Dozens of others. And I couldn’t even see all the way back. I had a feeling that half the town had been … assimilated.

The heads blinked, seeming to come awake as Mrs. Faulk and my mom stepped onto the flesh. Their eyes were pure black as they jerked their heads around as much as they were able. The mechanical movements reminded me of how my mother had moved when picking me up from camp hours earlier. I recalled the black cloud I thought I’d seen in her left eye before she blinked and it was gone.

Legs and arms jerked, too, where they stuck out of the mottled and bumpy skin.

I watched in paralyzed terror as Mrs. Faulk sat down, my mother helping her. As the old woman put her bleeding nub down to the conglomeration of flesh, the skin morphed, reaching up to envelop the nub, seeming to fuse with her in a matter of seconds. Her head jerked up, mouth open and eyes wide. Then blackness swarmed from the edges of her eyelids, turning her eyes completely black.

I looked down at the stake in my shaking hand. What was I supposed to do with a single stake? It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t. What did I think I was going to do down here?

My stomach twisted. I turned to the side and vomited, the sound of my retching lost underneath the buzzing of the flies.

My mother walked back onto solid ground. As soon as she did, the flies landed again, coating the unholy conglomeration.

Still shaking, I watched her pick up the severed leg and the meat cleaver. She walked toward me, and I ducked back behind the rock, pulling myself into a ball. She walked past, not even glancing in my direction.

The limbs were important, I realized. The one in my garage had proved it. Maybe they were totems. Or they were diseased with whatever black stuff my mother had poured over the limb before chopping it off.

They extended this thing’s power beyond the cavern. They infected the town, forcing people to come down here and join it. My mom was off to put the limb somewhere, to expand this thing’s reach. I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t let it keep growing.

The stake in my hand felt warm in the abnormally cold cave. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I was the wrong person for this job. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, half to myself and half to whatever ‌had guided me into the church.

I stayed curled in a ball, eyes closed, unable to move. I tried to drop the stake, but I couldn’t open my hand. I could picture nothing but the maggots writhing in the mouths and nostrils of people I’d grown up with. People I cared about.

The world seemed to slip away, my despair growing with every passing moment, feeding the fear that gripped me like the dead hand around Dallas’s neck.

I felt something press gently against the top of my head. It was a familiar feeling, sending warmth through my body. I didn’t have to look to know that it was my dog. Giving me our version of a hug.

Dallas.

I opened my eyes and lifted my head to see the dog from the church backing up, looking at me.

Suddenly, she turned and ran deeper into the cave, toward the flesh creature.

“No!” I said, reaching out for her but missing. She barked as she ran, leaping onto the flesh as the flies swarmed up again. Before I knew it, I was on my feet, running after her.

As soon as I set foot on the creature, a terrible screaming sound erupted from all around me. All the heads sticking out of the flesh were crying out, their black eyes fixed on me. A hand grabbed at me as I ran, but I yanked my foot away from it and kept moving, determined to get the dog.

I was soon out of the ring of illumination, but I could see‌. There was a glow coming from me, and I quickly realized it was the stake in my hand that was lighting the way.

The flesh creature was enormous, reaching far back into the cavern. I jumped over legs that tried to trip me and kicked at hands that tried to grab me.

I could see the dog ahead. It was barking at a giant tangle of jerking legs and arms jutting out from what looked to be the end — or the beginning — of the creature. As I approached, the tangle of limbs separated down the middle, the flesh ripping apart to reveal a large and grinning skeletal face.

My eyes went wide, and I faltered, allowing a hand to snag my right ankle, tripping me. The hand squeezed. I screamed, feeling the joint stressing, sure the hand would crush it in a matter of moments.

I twisted around and stabbed down with the stake, puncturing the arm. It immediately let go, the screaming sound getting louder.

Scrambling away, I soon found myself in a cloud of flies, all buffeting me, flying into my mouth and nose and ears, blocking my vision. I screamed out and ran toward where I thought the grinning skeletal face was. I could barely hear the dog barking over the buzz of the insects. It was enough. The dog was telling me where to go. I jumped forward, slamming the stake down, although I couldn’t see anything.

The tip of the wooden weapon crunched into something, and the screaming got louder again. I pulled it out and stabbed again. Fists and feet came at me from both sides, knocking me back. But I still had the stake. I held onto it as if it were a part of me. And I rushed forward again, stabbing and stabbing despite the blows I took to my face and body. But the blows were already weakening. And I kept stabbing until the blows stopped, and the screaming stopped, and the flies were no longer attacking me.

I dropped to my knees, exhausted. I spit flies out of my mouth and looked at what I’d done. The skull was destroyed, black goo oozing out of it. The limbs were shriveled, half their original size.

I looked around for the dog, but it was nowhere to be seen.

It didn’t surprise me.

The stake was still glowing, and with it, I could see the heads sticking out of the massive creature here and there were limp and silent, their eyes closed.

I stumbled back out of the cave, walking over the flesh. None of the limbs moved this time. They were smaller, lifeless.

My mother was about halfway back to our house, on all fours on the sidewalk, a black puddle between her hands. Mrs. Faulk’s severed leg was nearby. It, too, looked shriveled.

“Mom?” I said.

She turned and looked at me. Then she lurched to her feet and wrapped me in a hug. “Oh, Jamie,” she said.

Lights were going on in several of the surrounding houses. A few people walked out of their homes as if waking from a daze.

There was no bringing back all those that the creature had assimilated. But there were still some of us left. And that was something.

My mom and I walked home. She gripped my left hand in her right. My other hand still held the stake, although it wasn’t glowing anymore.

As we approached our house, I heard the familiar bark of a dog coming from somewhere off in the distance.

Dead All Day

Before the lockdown even started, I knew something weird was going on. And I wasn’t the only one.

It was my senior year, and I had a pretty easy schedule. It was spring, and I could see the end of high school on the horizon. But that day, a Tuesday, my concerns turned from the mundane to the insane.

At first, I shrugged off the strange feelings I had. I thought the teachers were just having an off day. Or maybe it was me who was having the off day. I told myself to forget about it until lunch came around and I went off campus to get a burger with my buddy Tom.

“What’s up with the teachers today?” Tom asked as we sat in the fast-food drive-thru, waiting to pay and get our food.

I turned, surprised at Tom, who was usually about as observant as an octogenarian with failing eyesight. “You noticed that, too?” I asked.

“Yeah, man. They’re acting really strange. Mr. Beemus was just staring at me during first period. His eyes were all wide and blank. It was creepy as hell. Then, during second period, Ms. Delia forgot how to spell the word algebra. She just stood there at the board, her hand up, with the A and the L written. I swear, she stood there for a full minute before Courtney Miller asked her if she was alright. It was weird. Maybe they all got together and smoked a blunt this morning or something.”

I laughed at that, thinking about the teachers hotboxing one of their minivans. But the laughter didn’t last long. Tom was right. Something funny was going on.

“Yeah, Mr. Lu walked super slowly up and down the aisles while we were taking a test today,” I said. “He never does that. He always sits at his desk and reads or something while we take tests. And how slow he was walking? You’d have to try really hard to walk that slowly. Plus, I caught a whiff of him as he walked by one time. He stank. He was wearing cologne or something, but I could smell something nasty underneath it.”

“You know what?” Tom said. “That made me remember something. You know how Ms. Delia is always so prim and proper? She’s a neat freak, right?”

I nodded. I had Delia in one of my afternoon classes.

“Well,” Tom continued, “she looked kind of sloppy in class today. Her hair was frizzy, her makeup a little — I don’t know — sloppy or something. It didn’t connect until you said that about Mr. Lu stinking.”

Our conversation stopped as I pulled up to the drive-thru window to complete the transaction. Then I drove to a nearby park where we sat on the hood of my Camry and ate, enjoying the spring day.

We got back to school just in time for class and went our separate ways. About twenty minutes into class, the lockdown started.

I was in Mrs. Santiago’s class when the alarm went off. Mrs. Santiago smiled as if she’d been expecting it, which made me think it was just a drill. Although every other time they’d done a drill they’d told us beforehand.

“Alright, class,” Mrs. Santiago said. “We’re doing something a little different today. Half of you are going to stay here in the classroom like a normal lockdown drill. The other half will follow me to another location. It’s something new we’re trying to see how it works.”

I looked around, furrowing my brow. I didn’t see the logic in it. Why would half of us leave the classroom to go somewhere else if there was a threat out there? A few other kids in the class seemed to share my concern, but most of them didn’t care. They were simply willing to do what the teacher said.

I waited for more information from Mrs. Santiago, but she didn’t do anything for several minutes. After turning the lights off and locking the door, she just stood at the front of the classroom, hands clasped behind her back, looking at us with a small smile on her lips.

Finally, just when I was about to ask her what was going on, she split the class in half down the middle, telling those of us on the left side to come with her and those on the right to stay in the classroom. I stood and lined up with the other kids on the left while those on the right got against the wall.

We followed Mrs. Santiago out of the classroom, taking a right. I was three kids behind her, peering around them to watch her, thinking about the strange ways teachers had been acting. She was in her fifties, with hair that had mostly gone from black to gray. She wore a floral print dress with frilly short sleeves. As we walked down the hall, I saw a drop of blood crawl down the back of her arm from under the sleeve. It stopped just above her elbow.

A bad feeling seated itself in my stomach as we reached the doors to the gym. Mrs. Santiago stepped aside and opened one of them to usher us inside. It was dark inside the gym because all the lights were off. As soon as I walked through the door, I stepped aside while the other kids walked past me into the darkness. I could hear some of them murmuring — they knew something was wrong.

One of the students pulled out a phone and turned on the flashlight. The illumination revealed other people in the gym. Teachers, just standing there in the dark on either side of the doors, making a wide corridor in which the students now stood. There must have been a dozen of them, and as the flashlight came on, they moved in on the students.

Screams bounced around the gym as the teachers attacked the students with knives and cleavers from the school kitchen. The sickening sound of metal piercing flesh and blood spilling to the glossy gym floor unleashed a deep fear inside me.

Since I’d stepped aside to the wall when I’d entered the gym, I was still in the dark. I stumbled back toward the door, watching in abject horror as knives plunged into my fellow students. Clammy cold hands grabbed my shoulders. I panicked, throwing an elbow behind me and connecting with what felt like a nose and mouth. The hands came off of me as I turned around, seeing Mrs. Santiago standing there staring at me, her mouth split open and her nose bleeding.

I shoved past her in the doorway, trying to get away from the gym, but she grabbed my left arm with her right hand. At eighteen, I was much bigger and stronger than her. I shoved her as hard as I could. Something ripped, and she fell back against the gym door. But her hand still gripped my left arm above the elbow. I scrambled, pulling at her severed arm, ripping it off of me and throwing it at her feet.

I ran, looking back over my shoulder as Mrs. Santiago stood there, seemingly unaware that she’d just had her arm removed, staring at me as I sprinted down the hallway. I ran for the nearest exit through the empty hallways, past dark classrooms. The lockdown alarm was still blaring, but I barely noticed it. The sound of my heart beating seemed louder than any alarm could ever be.

I slowed as I passed Tom’s classroom, clarity coming into my thoughts. I’d wanted to run out, but thinking of Tom and my other friends made me think of all the students that would be in danger if I just ran away.

I approached Tom’s classroom slowly, glancing through the slender window into the dark room. I thought I had seen Tom’s fifth-period teacher, Mr. Pelham, in the gym. So when I didn’t see anyone in the classroom, I banged on the door. “Tom,” I whispered loudly at the door between bangs. “Tom, it’s me, Nate,” I said.

Tom appeared out of the darkness. “Nate?” he said through the closed door. “What are you doing? It’s lockdown, man.”

“Where’s your teacher?” I said.

“I don’t know. He left like five minutes ago. Told us to stay put.”

“Open the door. We’ve gotta go,” I said. “The teachers, they’re killing people.”

“What?” Tom said, smiling. “Don’t mess with me, man. This is serious.”

I stepped back from the door and glanced both ways down the hall. I didn’t see anyone. “I am serious,” I said. “Everyone needs to leave. Come on!”

Tom reached for the door handle, but a voice from inside the classroom stopped him. I couldn’t hear exactly what they said, but Tom’s response gave me a clue.

“I know we’re not supposed to open the door,” Tom said. “But this is Nate. He’s no school shooter.”

Tom opened the door and let me inside. I closed it behind me and looked into the darkness at the students sitting against the wall. “We need to go,” I told them. “Now. Something is seriously wrong.”

“We’re supposed to stay here,” one girl whose name I didn’t know said. “That’s what the drills are all about, remember?”

“I’m telling you,” I said. “The drills didn’t have this in mind. It’s the teachers. I watched them kill some of my classmates. There’s something wrong with them. Haven’t you noticed anything strange today?”

I could see in their eyes that many of the students had noticed. But none of them moved.

“Alright, fine,” I said. “I’ll go get help. Tom, you gonna stay here or come with me?”

“I’m with you, man,” Tom said, looking scared.

“Okay,” I said to him. Then I turned to the other students. “Someone call 911 if you haven’t already.”

“We have,” someone said. “They have police on the way.”

“Lock the door behind us,” Tom said to the nearest student as we turned to the door.

It was tempting to hunker down and wait for the cops to show up, but seeing what I’d seen, there was no way I could do it. The teachers had keys to the classrooms, after all. We’d be sitting ducks.

I checked the hall before stepping out. Tom followed, shutting the door softly behind us.

We booked it to the nearest exit and pushed on the metal bars to open the doors. They came open a few inches and stopped, the telltale rattle of chains coming from the outside.

“They locked the doors,” I said in a harsh whisper.

“What the hell is going on here?” Tom said.

I looked around. “Let’s try the faculty area,” I said, noticing that we were near the admin offices. “Maybe they left one of those unlocked.”

Tom nodded.

We moved cautiously through the halls toward admin, listening hard and keeping our eyes peeled. We ducked through the doors denoting the faculty area and saw a flickering orange light coming from the teacher’s lounge. The door was closed, but, like most of the doors in the school, it had a thin rectangular window off-center through which the flickering light shone.

I crept up to the door with Tom behind me. Taking a deep breath, I looked through the window. I saw a figure in the middle of the room, staring right at me. I pulled my head back down. “Shit.”

“What?” Tom said.

“There’s someone in there,” I said, then stopped. The image of the figure in the room took a moment to solidify in my mind. I stuck my head up again and looked through the window.

The vice principal, a man named Ben Sheridan, was floating in the middle of the room, his legs and arms outstretched to make an X with his body. He was naked, and there was a short wooden spear jammed through his chest. The orange light was coming out of his eyes, nostrils, and wide-open mouth, flickering as if from an inner fire.

There were also red glowing words and symbols written on the floors and walls of the lounge, pulsating in time with the brighter light coming out of Sheridan’s face. He floated just above a glowing circle on the floor, the edges of which were surrounded by strange symbols and words. I couldn’t read any of the words because they were in another language, but the symbols looked like they’d been taken right out of a horror movie.

“How is this happening?” Tom said, and I realized he was standing behind me, looking over my head through the window. He sounded on the verge of tears. “This isn’t supposed to happen,” he continued. “This isn’t possible.”

“We need to get out of here,” I said. “Now.”

We moved past the vice principal’s office and the principal’s office, and past the admin office to the doors used by the faculty. I pushed on one of the doors, my hope disappearing as it, too, only opened partially before it was stopped by exterior chains.

“The principal’s office,” I said. “Maybe the windows open. Or we can break one.”

Tom nodded, following along, wringing his hands.

As soon as we got into the office, I could tell that the windows weren’t designed to open. I started looking around for something heavy I could use to break one of the windows. I located a heavy teaching award on the desk and picked it up. It was the shape of an apple attached to a wooden base. It weighed maybe ten pounds.

I glanced down at the desk blotter, noticing that it was a calendar. I looked at yesterday’s date, reading a note there: Faculty Meeting - 5:30 pm.

Something fell together in my mind. I was about to tell Tom about it when he spoke.

“Someone’s coming,” he said in a harsh whisper.

We ducked behind the principal’s desk as a figure moved through the hall outside the office. I heard the door to the office open, and I clutched the award in my sweaty hands, mentally preparing myself to use it.

“Nate Oshman?” a woman’s voice said. “Is that you?”

I stood up quickly, holding the heavy award over my head. It was Christina Henry, a pretty twenty-something art teacher I’d had my junior year.

“We need to get out of here,” she said, holding up her hands. “I don’t know what’s happening with the other teachers, but they’re killing students.”

“Yeah, no shit,” I said. Tom stood up, eyeing Christina nervously.

She looked normal, and she sounded genuinely scared, but I wasn’t about to let her near me.

“Were you at the meeting yesterday?” I asked her, taking a shot in the dark.

She looked at me with open curiosity. “The meeting? What are you talking about? Why is that important?”

“Because I’m guessing that’s the last time all the teachers were together in one room,” I said. “Whatever happened to them, someone did it on purpose. You walked past the teacher’s lounge. You must have seen it.”

“I was sick yesterday,” Christina said, apparently seeing the logic in my thinking. “I missed it. Now, can we please get out of here? Whoever chained up the doors had to be able to get back in here somehow. I have a key to all the exterior doors. We can find the one and get out of here!”

I glanced at Tom, who looked at me with wide eyes, which he shifted down toward the desk. He was trying to tell me something.

“Let me think,” I said to Christina, then looked down at the desk. Tom leaned down and put his hand on top of a clipboard on the desk. I glanced at it, seeing it was a list of names. Teacher’s names. At the top of the sheet, it read: Faculty Attendance. And right next to Tom’s index finger was the name Christina Henry. Next to her name, a check mark.

I looked back up to see that she had a gun in her hand.

“I like you guys,” she said, dropping the scared tone. “I really would have let you go. You’re both respectful students. You’re not disruptive. I really wish you would’ve believed me.”

She raised the gun.

I threw the heavy award at her, ducking as I did so. She fired the gun but missed as she dodged out of the way of the teacher’s award. Tom dove over the desk and tackled Christina, slamming her against the wall. They both fell in a tangle on the ground. Tom scrambled on top of her. She brought the gun up, but Tom caught her wrist with his left hand. With his right, he reached out and grabbed the award, then slammed it down on her face once. That was all it took.

Seeing what he’d done, he clambered off of her as if she were hot to the touch.

I stepped over to her and felt her pockets for the keys she spoke of. I found them and darted out of the office.

“Where are you going?” Tom cried.

“We need to stop this,” I said over my shoulder.

I froze when we got into the hall. I could see through the doors to the faculty area that the hall was filled with teachers. They all had sharp implements in their hands, and they were all coated in blood. They stared at me blankly as they hurried down the hall.

I ran toward them, stopping at the teacher’s lounge. The doors to the faculty area were about fifteen yards to my right. The teachers were five yards beyond that.

I tried the knob to the teacher’s lounge door, unsurprised to find it locked. Trying to calm my shaking hands, I fiddled with the keys, trying two of them before the doors opened to my right. I had time for three more, out of the dozen on the keyring.

To my left, Tom came out of the principal’s office. “Oh, shit, man,” he said, looking at the dead-eyed teachers bearing down on me. “Run, Nate!” he cried.

I slid a key into the knob and turned it, amazed to find that it actually worked. I’d found the key. I stepped into the room and picked up a chair from the wall just as the teachers crowded the doorway behind me.

I stood outside the glowing circle on the ground and used the chair to shove the floating vice principal. I had to put all my strength into it, but it worked. As soon as he reached the opposite edge of the circle, he fell to the ground. Immediately, the glowing lights in his face disappeared, leaving only scorched black holes. The foreign words and symbols all over the floor, walls, and ceiling stopped glowing, too.

Behind me, I heard bodies falling to the floor. I turned around to see that all the teachers crowding the hallway were now sprawled out. I knew instinctively that they weren’t unconscious. They were dead.

They’d been dead all day. At least now they weren’t trying to kill us.

Behind us, outside the school, the sound of approaching sirens was like music to my ears.

Cheating Death

“That’s a lot of blood,” I say, squatting on the bare concrete floor next to the pool of hemoglobin.

“That is a lot of blood,” Terry, my partner of seven years, says from behind me.

The apartment building’s super stands in the doorway off to our left, fiddling with his wedding ring.

On the opposite edge of the pool of blood, there are smudge marks and footprints. There’s a blood-coated towel sitting against the concrete wall in the room’s corner that used to be white. Two barred windows near the ceiling lead to the sidewalk outside, letting a limited amount of natural light into the dank and copper-smelling room. A bare incandescent light bulb hanging from the ceiling directly over the blood adds to the dreary feel of the place. Even without the pool of blood, it would not be a pleasant room.

“Looks like someone took a shower in blood here in the middle of the floor,” I say, then turn to look at the super. “You have blood in the pipes here?”

He looks at me with wide eyes, taking the question seriously. He doesn’t get the joke. Cop humor. I wave a dismissive hand at him.

“How much blood in the human body?” I ask Terry.

“In an adult human, about a gallon and a half,” he says. Of course, I already know that. But this is the way we work cases. It’s a give-and-take, a rhythm that helps us think and puzzle out the crime, from exsanguination to the closing of the holding cell and the last page of paperwork.

“Does this look like more than a gallon and a half to you?” I ask.

“Oh yeah, Richter. It sure does.”

“I’m thinking three bodies’ worth. Maybe four,” I say, standing up. “But that means whoever drained those three bodies was either doing a particularly messy exchange transfusion, or had help. I see footsteps, but no drag marks.”

“Lots of different footsteps,” Terry says.

He’s right. Several different sets. Which means multiple perps.

“You say you never saw anyone down here in the last couple of days?” Terry asks the super.

“No. Like I said, I was down here yesterday and this room was clear. It floods sometimes, so I keep it clear in case it rains. Then I come down here today and find all this blood.”

“You got a back door that leads to the basement?” I ask.

“Yes,” the super says. “Follow me.”

We walk out of the room, leaving the pool of blood to its own devices.

The basement is mostly used for storage; unfurnished rooms filled with dusty boxes, old furniture, bikes missing one or both wheels. The only things that look like they’ve been used recently are the tools placed haphazardly around. I kick a screwdriver out of the way as we walk. The super glances back at me, a “don’t-touch-my-shit” look on his face. Terry picks up on it.

“Nice place you got here,” my partner says, stepping over the power cord to a circular saw. The super ignores him.

We come to a short set of concrete stairs leading up to a door. The super steps up as if he’s going to open the door.

“Don’t do that,” I say. “You might smudge someone else’s prints.”

He stops. I move past him, pulling a latex glove onto my right hand. I push the door open and step out into the alley beyond. I don’t see anything that rings alarm bells. Just the normal stuff you’d find in any low-rent apartment alley. The door closes behind me, but Terry stays on the other side of it, in case it won’t open from my side. But it does.

“Is this supposed to be locked from the outside?” I ask the super. He nods.

“Might want to fix that,” Terry says. “You’ve got the tools.”

The CSI team arrives, and we give them the rundown. Test the blood. Dust for prints. Eliminate the super’s prints. And so on.

Terry and I exit through the alley door, as it’s closer to our car and also because we want to get a good look at it. Neither of us thinks we’ll be lucky enough to find a body lying under rubbish, but we look anyway. Nothing.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I say to Terry as we step up to the car.

“You do? Damn, you’re good, Richter. I didn’t even think you knew about my first wife.”

“I’m laughing on the inside,” I say. “You’re thinking, ‘No body, no crime.’”

“No shit,” Terry says.

“So while we wait for forensics to come back, let’s see if we can get some patrol officers to check the usual spots,” I say. “See if we can find a head or an arm. Hell, I’d even settle for a leg.”

Terry nods and opens the passenger door, but his phone rings before he can get in. I can tell by how he answers it and his tone that it’s his wife, who’s slowly dying of leukemia. I get into the driver’s seat and start up the car, giving him some privacy.

He opens his door and gets into the car after a few minutes. Once he’s settled I drive away without a word, having learned long ago that asking him how she’s doing only makes things worse. Silence is better. For both of us.

Days pass, and our focus goes to other cases — ones with actual bodies. We wait to hear back from forensics, at which point we’ll be able to determine how we should proceed with the case. But before the guys in the lab can get back to us, we get a call from a patrolman, heading out in response to a 911 call.

“You guys had that case with all the blood and no bodies, right?” the patrolman says over the phone.

“That’s right. What do you got?”

“I’m answering a 911 call that sounds similar. The caller said that she was passing by this old abandoned church and heard some strange sounds. Anyway, she looked inside one of the windows and saw a group of people standing around, watching a woman in a big puddle of blood who was, apparently, bleeding out.”

“Sounds promising,” I say. “What’s the address? We’ll head there now. And for Christ’s sake, don’t do anything until we get there.”

I hang up once he tells me the address. Terry, who had been listening to my side of the conversation, is already pulling on his suit jacket as I hang up.

The church is fairly close, and morning rush hour is over, so we get there in just over ten minutes.

We see the cruiser parked up on a side road flanking the disused church. I pull up alongside, rolling down my window. “You the one that called me? Delamond?” I ask the officer.

“Yeah, that was me, Richter. I’ve worked a couple of your crime scenes,” he says.

“Well, you’re about to work another one,” I say, then pull ahead and park in front of him.

The three of us meet on the sidewalk. “Okay,” I say, mainly talking to Delamond. “We’re going to take this nice and easy. None of that door-kicking shit you guys like so much. I want to get a glimpse in that window. Then we’ll make the call about backup. This could just be some bullshit, for all we know.”

Terry nods. So does Delamond.

I creep down the side of the church, Terry behind me and Delamond behind him. Most of the windows have been papered over on the inside, but I see that the paper is peeling up at the bottom of one window’s corner.

I hear the murmur of voices from inside even before I get to the window. When I do, I look inside to see exactly what the 911 caller described. There’s a group of about fifteen people — a mix of men and women — standing in a wide circle around a puddle of blood even bigger than the one in the apartment building’s basement.

Instead of a woman in the middle of the puddle, there is a young man. He’s completely still, and I can see the wounds slashed up both of his wrists. The blood coming out of them is only a slow trickle. He’s already dead.

I’m quickly calculating our odds against fifteen people, looking for evidence of weapons. If the caller saw a woman, then there’s at least two victims. But by the look of the blood, I’m guessing there are several more that have already died by exsanguination.

While my thoughts are racing, I’m still looking through the window. And just when I’m about to stand up and talk to Terry and Delamond, the dead man moves.

A twitch, I could understand. A convulsion. A fluttering of the eyelids. Dead bodies move in all sorts of ways. But they do not sit up, open their eyes, and look around with big smiles. And that’s just what the man does.

At first, I think this is some kind of sick cosplay thing. Fake blood, horny weirdos who get off on death, special effects makeup. But a look at the man’s wounds tells me this isn’t so. The gashes are deep. There are no practical effects that can do that.

As the man stands up, sending ripples through the large puddle of blood, the rest of the people raise their hands as if in an evangelical fit. Their voices undulate, making noises that shouldn’t be possible from human throats.

I back away from the window, stand up, and turn around.

Terry immediately sees the look on my face and knows something’s wrong. “What is it?” he asks. “What did you see?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I turn to Delamond. “You can kick the shit out of the door now.”

We run around to the front of the church. Delamond tries the door before kicking it, finding that it’s unlocked.

We run into the church, weapons out, and shout at the group of people gathered in the empty space.

They all turn to look at us, even the young man with the slit wrists who has just stepped out of the pool of blood. They put their hands up like we ask, and make no move. Many of them have the same strange look on their faces. It reminds me of how hypes look when they’re doped to the gills. Three of them just look scared, but the others don’t. They show no fear. I notice that several of the people’s backs are coated in drying blood, as if they’d been lying in the blood recently.

“Delamond,” I say, “find us some bodies, would you? Search the whole place.”

A man dressed in a tailored suit with slicked-back hair and a vulpine smile steps forward from the circle, hands still raised. “You won’t find any bodies, sir,” he says to me. “We’ve committed no crimes here, aside from trespassing, of course.”

I see a large cooler in the corner of the room. “What’s in the cooler?” I ask him.

“Freedom,” he says. “Salvation. True sight.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” I say. “Terry, check the cooler, would you?”

“I assure you,” the man says, “it’s nothing illegal.”

I cover the group while Terry moves to the cooler. He opens the lid carefully and then flinches back when he sees what’s inside.

“What is it?” I call to him, thinking it’ll be body parts.

“I don’t know,” Terry says, staring into the container. “Black dirt with bugs in it? It’s moving, whatever it is.”

“There is no name for it,” the man in the suit says.

Delamond comes back in from checking the rest of the church. “Nothing,” he says.

“We’ve moved beyond death, officer,” the man in the suit says to me. “We can see the nature of things, and it is beautiful.”

“It is beautiful!” the other people say in unison. It sends chills up my spine.

Terry moves toward the group of people, looking at their arms. He beckons to the young man with the fresh blood on his back. The young man steps forward. Terry gets up close and inspects the wounds on his arms.

“You should be dead,” he says. “How are you not dead?”

“We are beyond death,” the man in the suit says.

“What, you’re zombies? Tell me how it works,” Terry says.

“Do zombies walk around, talking to people? Do they experience life in a way that the living never can? Do they see infinite joy in every speck of dust? Every rock? Every leaf?”

“I’m listening,” Terry says.

“Terry? What are you doing?” I ask, an edge in my voice.

“There’s no crime here,” he says to me. “If they’re telling the truth, there’s no crime here. Last I checked, suicide is no longer against the law in this country.”

“It’s simple,” the suited man says. “You consume some of that,” he points at the cooler, “and then you kill yourself. It doesn’t take long to come back. And when you do …” he trails off, but he holds his arms out wide and spins around, as if gesturing to the whole world.

“You’ve all done this?” Terry asks.

Many of the people nod and smile, but there are a couple of them — the frightened-looking ones — that do not.

“You’ve interrupted us before all our members could finish,” the man in the suit says.

“And where does this stuff come from?” Terry asks, gesturing at the cooler.

“I don’t know. All I know is that it was passed on to me and I’ll pass it on to as many people who want it. It never runs out. Somehow, it keeps appearing. You blink and the container is full again. This is just the beginning, don’t you understand? We can all live like this. We can all see the beauty.”

“You’re not really buying this shit, are you, Terry?” I ask.

“Look at their arms,” Terry says. “Look at their fucking arms! What if this can save Alice? What if it can save my wife?”

“This isn’t right,” I say, unable to think of anything else. I look over at Delamond, but his expression tells me he’s buying into this thing, too.

“Take some to her,” the man in the suit says. “There are cups in the cooler. It doesn’t take much. Two mouthfuls will do it. But she must kill herself immediately after ingesting it. We’ve found that the wrists are the best way. The inner thighs work, too, if you cut deep enough.”

“It really does work,” one woman from the group says, lowering her arms. “I can’t explain how amazing it is. How special. It’s how I always wished life would be.”

Terry looks over at me. “I’m taking some to her. I’ll at least give her the option. If you won’t stand by me with this, I’ll do it myself.”

“This is crazy,” I say. “You don’t know if this guy is telling the truth. She could just die.”

“She’s already fucking dying!”

“Fine, fine,” I say. “You’re right.”

Terry scoops some of the strange, squirming black stuff out of the cooler in a red Dixie cup.

“Get their information,” I say to Delamond. “But don’t let anyone kill themselves while you’re here.” The words sound so strange to my ears, but I’m at a loss. This all seems so wrong, but there’s really nothing I can do about it. I think about calling my captain, but what if it is real? What if it really does work? If I got the brass involved, this stuff would be taken away, sold to the highest bidder. Regular people like this would never be able to get it. It would be a tool of the rich.

I grab a cup of the stuff for lab analysis before we leave the church, heading to the car.

As usual, I drive. I keep going over and over it in my head as we head to the hospice care center where Terry’s wife has been living.

Terry screams at me, noticing the truck veering into our lane just a second before I do. But it’s too late.

The head-on collision is chaos, all shattering glass, rending metal, and screeching tires.

We come to rest crushed inside the mangled car. It’s hard for me to breathe, and blood keeps pouring into my eyes. I try to lift my right arm, but the pain is too great. Something sharp is sticking into my chest.

I look over at Terry, immediately seeing that his skull has been split open. The haze of death envelopes me slowly, giving me time enough to think about what might have been. I think of Terry’s wife, dying slowly in a hospice bed. And suddenly I know that it would have worked. She could have lived.

We could have lived.

The Greater Good

“C’mon, Tyler,” I said, holding my hand out toward my son. He had paused at the ramp onto the plane — that little step that they put over the gap between the passenger boarding bridge and the plane’s doorway. Tyler stood looking down at it with open curiosity, his wide brown eyes scanning and measuring. He looked up, glancing around the doorway at the body of the plane.

I smiled politely at the people behind Tyler, waiting to board. Some of them smiled back, but a few gave me a look that said, “get your kid out of the way, pal.” I tried my best not to show my anxiety, and I knew full well that yelling at Tyler or yanking his hand would draw more attention to us than we could afford.

So instead of losing my cool, instead of breaking down, instead of letting the anxiety I’d been carrying with me for the past two days get the better of me, I simply adjusted the backpack on my back and reached back to take Tyler’s hand and guide him aboard.

At only four years old, I couldn’t blame him for being curious. The whole world was new to him, and he didn’t understand the danger we were in — the danger he was in. I wanted nothing but to protect him, but if someone recognized us, I wouldn’t be able to do that.

I pulled him along to our seats, going slow so his little legs could keep up. He glanced at all the seated people, smiling and saying hi every so often. I knew I should have picked him up to take him on board. In fact, I had tried once we had our tickets checked, but Tyler was having nothing of it. He’d started screaming, so I’d put him down.

I located our seats and got Tyler buckled up in the window seat while I sat in the middle. I opened the window shade so he could look out. It was late afternoon and sunny out, and I hoped he would keep his attention out the window for the duration of the flight.

There wasn’t anyone in the aisle seat yet. I hoped there wouldn’t be, but my luck had never been that good.

I looked over at him and he looked up at me, smiling with his tiny little teeth showing, his curly brown hair dangling over his forehead. It’s hard to describe what I felt at moments like these. There was a swelling of pride and unconditional love. I couldn’t believe I’d made something so precious, so adorable, and so … powerful.

I reached over and pulled up one errant strap from Tyler’s overalls that had fallen down his shoulder.

“Thank you, Daddy,” he said.

“You’re welcome, buddy,” I said, holding back tears. I could never let them take him. Never.

Movement to my right alerted me to someone’s presence, and I looked up to see a pretty blond woman in her early thirties putting a bag in the overhead bin. When she was done, she looked down at Tyler, and then at me, smiling.

I smiled back as she sat down in the aisle seat. I immediately regretted the automatic and polite smile, thinking I should have just ignored her or frowned, turning my attention away. A smile was an invitation to talk, which was something I really didn’t want to do.

The blond woman settled in next to me while the flow of passengers into the plane slowed to a dribble.

“Is that your son?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” I said, without looking at her. I was hoping she’d get the picture and leave us alone.

“He’s a cutie,” she said. “How old is he?”

“Four.”

“Oh, how fun. I’m Megan. What’s your name?”

“I’m David,” I lied.

“And what’s his name?” Megan asked, leaning forward in her seat so she could look at Tyler.

I thought about lying, but I didn’t think Tyler would be able to go the whole flight without saying his name. He’d been happily telling anyone he met what his name was lately. So I told the truth.

“His name is Tyler,” I said.

“Hi, Tyler,” the woman said.

“Hello,” Tyler said. “I’ve never been on a airplane before.”

“Is that so? Well, there’s nothing to worry about,” Megan said. She paused, her expression changing slightly. My heart dropped as I thought I saw recognition there. Her eyes flicked from Tyler to me and back again, her smile seeming forced.

Tyler went back to looking out the window, mercifully quiet for a change. He was too enthralled with the plane to worry about talking to new people at the moment.

“It’s nice to meet you two,” Megan said, her smile seeming genuine again. She sat back in her seat and faced forward while the flight attendants prepared for takeoff.

Did she recognize us? I thought. And if so, what, if anything, would she do about it?

Not that it mattered. They had already closed the plane door. And even if they hadn’t, getting off now would draw more attention to us, anyway. There was nothing I could do but sit and wait and hope.

Tyler asked me questions every so often as we taxied, but the feeling of the plane roaring to life and taking off made his eyes go wide and his questions cease. He stared out the window, watching as the trucks and cars on the roads below shrank until they were the size of his toys.

I sensed movement from Megan a couple of times while the plane got up to cruising altitude. I thought she was sneaking glances at us, but that could have been my imagination.

Megan got up to use the restroom just after we reached 37,000 feet. I sat back in my seat, resting my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, there was a man sitting in Megan’s seat, staring at me. I didn’t have any idea how much time had passed, but it couldn’t have been much.

The man had short black hair parted on the left and a clean-shaven face. He wore a blue button-up shirt under a black jacket with matching black slacks. He had a serious, controlled expression on his face. When he saw I was awake, he spoke.

“Mr. Salinas,” he said. “I need you to remain calm. My name is Joseph Trulino. I’m a Federal Air Marshal. I’m going to need to put these handcuffs on you.” He lifted a pair of handcuffs in his right hand, holding them up for me to see.

I looked over at Tyler, who was staring up at me with scared eyes. He’d watched the whole thing. I opened my mouth to speak to him, but nothing came out. The dread of the situation paralyzed me as the entire range of worst-case scenarios ran through my head.

“Who’s that man, Daddy?” Tyler asked.

“Listen to me,” I said, finding my voice. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be fine. I need you to be good. Do you understand me?”

Tyler looked at me and then at the Air Marshal.

“Tyler,” I said in as stern a voice as I could muster. “I need you to tell me that you’ll be good. Please.”

“Sir?” Marshal Trulino said. “I don’t want to cause a scene and frighten these nice people. So let’s do this the easy way. There’s nowhere to go, anyway.” He reached over and clicked the cuffs on my wrists.

I never took my eyes off Tyler. I watched as recognition dawned on his face, followed by a look I knew all too well. A look that I’d hoped never to see again.

“No, hey,” I said. “It’s okay, buddy. It’s all going to be okay. Don’t worry. This man is nice. He’s a friend.”

I knew Tyler didn’t believe me.

I felt the air grow cold around me as Tyler’s face closed in on itself, his eyebrows coming down and his mouth coming up in a sneer. Tendrils of swirling black smoke shot out of his nose and mouth, slamming into the Air Marshal faster than my eyes could follow.

Two of the tendrils attacked the Marshal’s eyes, pulverizing them and shoving them back into his head, while the third went into the man’s mouth as he convulsed against his seat. The people in the row across from us shouted in horror as they looked on.

“Stop, Tyler!” I shouted, even though I knew it was useless. It was as if he couldn’t hear anything when he was in this state.

The Marshal’s head split apart like a rotten Jack-o’-lantern with a firecracker inside, some of his smoldering skull and brains spilling onto my shoulder.

People were screaming all around now.

“Oh, my god! He killed him!”

“It’s the man and the little boy from the news!”

“Oh, Christ!”

“Someone stop them!”

“What the hell is going on?”

A man in the row in front of us stood up and turned around, looking at the mess that was once the Marshal. He looked at Tyler, at the strange smoke pouring out of his face, and screamed, “Satan! He’s Satan himself!”

The smoke shot out, hitting the man in the chest and slamming him up into the ceiling of the plane, then ripping him in two lengthwise, splattering everyone around with blood, guts, and bone fragments.

People didn’t know what to do. Some of them ran away from us, while others rushed toward us, thinking they could subdue or kill Tyler.

“No!” I screamed at these attackers. “Just leave him alone! He’s sick. He doesn’t know what he’s doing!”

The attackers paid no mind. They didn’t know what I knew: that if they attacked, we’d all die. Their hands reached toward us, grabbing for me and Tyler.

I screamed at them to stop and turned to plead with Tyler just before someone hit me in the head. Everything went black.

***

The world seemed to scream suddenly, a cold wind ripping around me, pulling me against my seatbelt, trying to yank me out of the seat. I found I could hardly breathe, and that gravity was shifting around me, tugging at different parts of my body. My stomach flipped and tumbled as I forced my eyes open, seeing the ground racing up to meet me as I fell.

I closed my eyes again and waited for an impact that never came. Instead, there was a gradual slowing, like I was attached to a bungee cord that was coming to the end of its stretch.

I opened my eyes to see tendrils of that dark smoke reaching down to the slowly approaching ground some fifty feet below. I looked over and saw that Tyler was still sitting in the seat beside me. Somehow, our three-seat row had stayed together on the way down, although the seat the Marshal had taken was empty. Likely because he hadn’t been buckled.

The smoke coalesced as we reached the sparsely wooded field. It set us down gently and then disappeared back into Tyler’s head.

It was approaching dusk, but I could still see far enough around to notice the clusters of other seats from the plane and the pulverized bodies that had been living, breathing people.

Off in the distance, toward the horizon, I saw the unmistakable silhouette of a plane missing its tail streaking toward the earth. It impacted, and a faint booming sound reached my ears several long moments later.

“Where are we, Daddy?” Tyler said, his voice as innocent as ever. I looked at him, seeing that he was back to his old self.

“I don’t know, buddy,” I said, my voice cracking.

“Did something bad happen again? Like when we went to see the doctor?”

“Yes,” I said, the tears flowing freely now. “Yes, it did.”

“I’m sorry,” Tyler said.

“Me too.” All those people, I thought. All of them died because of me.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and stood up because I didn’t know what else to do. Tyler fiddled with his seatbelt for a moment before he unlatched it. Then he climbed down, sat on the ground, and started doodling in a patch of dirt with his fingers, humming to himself.

I watched him for a long time, unable to square the power that was inside him with the sweet and innocent kid that he was most of the time.

I looked around again, seeing the dark shapes of the dead passengers still strapped into their seats, and the bodies of those who had been out of their seats when Tyler tore the plane apart.

I noticed a rock next to my left foot. It was about the size of my fist. I crouched and picked it up, hefting it in my hand.

I thought about the first time I’d learned that Tyler was different. My wife, Jessica, hadn’t been trying to hurt him. She hadn’t even touched him. But he’d been crying for so long. We were both so tired. And he just wouldn’t stop crying.

She hadn’t even yelled, really. It was a growl more than a yell. A plea for him to stop crying as she leaned over the crib. But it was enough.

It had thrown her against the wall, breaking one of her arms.

A month later, she was gone. She had wanted to give him up. To give him to people that would experiment on him for the rest of his life, and I had refused. So she left.

Maybe I should have done something about it back then. But I couldn’t bring myself to. I couldn’t.

But now … there was so much death.

I hefted the rock in my hand as I stepped up behind Tyler, looking down at his still-developing skull.

One, maybe two blows and it would all be over.

I’m the only one that can do it, I thought. He trusts me. He wouldn’t expect it. The smoke wouldn’t come out to stop me. Or would it? Would it know?

I lifted the rock in my right hand, holding it over my head, aiming at the crown of his skull. With my other hand, I wiped the tears from my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I love you.”

Never Take Drinks From Strangers

The bright Mexico sun beams down on my shoulders, warming me and melting my memories of the frigid Northeastern landscape I’ve left behind. It’s winter, but it feels like summer here in Cancun.

The aquamarine pool water sparkles as Kimberly slips in. There are a few people around the pool, but it’s nowhere near crowded. Not on this Monday afternoon.

Kim looks up at me from the water, smiling and squinting behind her sunglasses. “You coming in, silly?” she asks. “The water’s perfect.”

“Yes,” I say, smiling down at her. I turn to see that she’s put her stuff on one of the lounge chairs behind me. I dump my bag, towel, and book down on the chair next to hers. I don’t have my phone — it’s back up in the room — which feels both weird and awesome at the same time.

I slip into the water and release a sigh as it cradles me, the near weightlessness putting ever more mental distance between me and the troubles I’ve left behind to come on this vacation.

I’ve got water, sun, a good book, and no work for the next week. Not to mention Kim, looking amazing in her pink bikini. What could be better?

Nothing, that’s what.

Yeah, it’s gonna be a great vacation.

There’s a swim-up bar on the other side of the pool, and I’m tempted to head over there now. But it’s a little early for me to start drinking. Even if I am on vacation.

Soon enough, though, the choice is taken out of my hands. A couple who had been lounging on the other side of the pool walk up, smiling and carrying four drinks.

“Hey,” the guy says. “You’re Americans, right?” I can tell by his accent that he’s American — or maybe Canadian.

“Yeah,” I say. “We’re from Buffalo. You?”

“Cincinnati,” the guy says, kneeling. “Here, have a drink with us.” He extends one hand to me with a blue tropical drink in it, and the woman does the same to Kim.

Kim and I look at each other. She shrugs. “Let the vacation begin!” she says, taking the drink. I take one from the man and raise it in salute.

“Salut,” the man says. He takes a drink and then sits down, dipping his legs into the pool.

“Thanks,” I say. “I’m Andre and this is Kim.”

“I’m Devon and this is Claire,” the guy says.

“Hi,” Claire says with a smile and a wave. She slips into the pool and starts chatting away with Kim like they’re old friends. I’ll never understand how women do that.

Devon and I talk, mostly about what to do in Cancun. He and Claire come down every year, he tells me. I tell him it’s our first time, and he gives me the lowdown on all the best spots.

By the time I finish that first drink, my head is swimming. I suddenly realize that I’ve lost track of Kim.

I look around, scanning the pool for her.

“What’s wrong, bud?” Devon asks.

“Kim?” I say. “Where’d she go?”

Devon chuckles. “You’re not much of a drinker, are you?” he says. “She and Claire went inside to order some food from the restaurant. They came by and said so about ten minutes ago. You really don’t remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” I say. But the truth is, I don’t remember. I’m just trying to hide the embarrassing fact that I can’t handle my alcohol.

“Those drinks were doubles,” Devon says.

The world is fuzzy, and every time I move my head, my vision has to work to catch up.

“What was in those drinks?” I ask, struggling to lever myself out of the pool. The sun is setting, but that can’t be right. Kim and I came out here just after two.

“I don’t know, man,” Devin says. “It’s a Blue Hawaiian or something like that. Not sure what’s in ‘em. Are you okay?”

“No,” I say, finally getting out of the pool. I try to stand up, but the world tilts and my legs don’t seem to work. I crawl over to my lounge chair and lie down. “Water,” I say. “Please.”

“Yeah,” Devon says, “I got it.”

While Devon’s gone getting me water, Kimberly comes back out to the pool with Claire. As soon as she sees me, she knows something is wrong.

“Are you okay, babe?” she says.

I try to focus my eyes on Claire behind her, to see how far away she is. “I think he drugged me,” I whisper to Kim.

“What? Who, Devon?”

“What did he say?” Claire says, just a hint of indignation in her voice. I guess I wasn’t quiet enough.

“He doesn’t drink much,” Kim says, apologetically.

“What happened, Devon?” Claire says, looking up at Devon, who approaches with a glass of water in his hand.

“I don’t know. I think that drink was too much for him,” he says. “Here you go, buddy.” He hands me the glass of water and I take a sip, then immediately spit it out.

“What the hell is this?” I ask, slurring my words. “That’s not water.”

“What? I asked the bartender to give me filtered water.” Devon takes a sip and spits it out. “You’re right,” he says, then dumps it out on the ground. “That must be tap water.”

“I want to go back to the room,” I say to Kim. “Let’s go back to the room.”

“Okay,” Kim says. “Can you walk?”

I sit up and pause, waiting for my vision to catch up with the movement. I stand up and then immediately sit back down hard on the chair.

“I’ll help you,” Devon says.

“No!” I say. “Not you.”

“Andre!” Kim says to me. “I’m so sorry,” she continues, talking to Devon and Claire. “This is so embarrassing. I would — we would greatly appreciate your help. You’ve been nothing but good to us.”

I can barely keep my eyes open now, so I let Devon help me up to our suite. Kim unlocks the door, and Devon guides me over to the couch, setting me down. He grabs a bottle of water from our mini-fridge and sets it next to me.

“Sorry about this, bud,” he says. “I wish I could do something for you. I’ll be sure to talk to the front desk about this.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Kim says. “We’ll take care of it when he’s feeling better.”

“I hope he feels better soon,” Claire says as she and Devon leave.

I’m able to keep my eyes open long enough to watch Kim shut the door. I want to tell her to swing out the little metal plate that will stop anyone from opening the door more than two inches, but consciousness falls away from me as soon as I see we’re both safely in the room.

***

Whimpering sounds scratch at my unconscious mind, pulling me from sleep little by little.

I open my eyes, and all they want is to close again. I force them open and pick up my head, seeing that I’m still on the couch.

That whimpering noise sounds every few seconds. And do I hear someone whispering?

I sit up, rubbing my eyes, trying to dislodge the terrible headache from behind them.

I notice that it’s still night out because the shades for the sliding glass door to our third-floor balcony are open.

Whimpering and more whispering reach my ears. What the hell is that?

I stand up, happy to find that my legs are working much better than they were whenever we left the pool.

The noises are coming from the bedroom. There are double doors there, and one of them is open about halfway. I stumble up to the open door and look inside to see Devon kneeling on the floor, leaning over a bloody and beaten Kimberly. It looks like someone has taken a baseball bat to her. She’s still wearing her bikini, and I can see bloody cuts all over her body. Both her eyes are swollen shut, and her lip is split.

The scene seems so unbelievable that, for a moment, I think I’m dreaming. Kim whimpers and Devon whispers something in her ear.

My suspicions rush back at me, the memories of my near-blackout at the pool clicking into place. And along with those memories comes a wave of anger that seems to swell me to twice my size.

I don’t say anything. I don’t ask questions. I just rush into the room and grab Devon by the neck, pulling him up with a strength I never knew I possessed.

He fights back, and we stumble through the door into the living room of the suite, bumping into the coffee table in front of the couch.

I redouble my efforts, choking and shoving him at the same time. His eyes are wide with disbelief and terror — he probably thought the drugs he slipped me should have kept me out for longer.

He swings his right fist up, hitting a glancing blow off my left temple, which only serves to make me angrier. I dig my heels into the floor, straighten my arms, and push with all I have.

Devon backpedals, losing his footing, which simply makes us go faster. We’re practically running when his back smashes through the sliding glass door leading to the balcony. Glass rains down on my shoulders, but I pay it no mind. I keep pushing until Devon’s back hits the balcony railing. And I keep pushing, only letting go with my left arm to hook it under his legs, flipping him up over the railing and watching him fall to the concrete walkway three stories below. The wet crunch his body makes on impact is immensely satisfying. So is how he comes to rest, folded in ways the human body isn’t supposed to go.

I rush back into the room, noticing for the first time that the door to our suite is open. I hear running from the hall, then the door is shoved open, and a couple of paramedics run in.

“¿Dónde está ella? Where is she?” one of them says, translating his own words for my sake.

I bring them into the bedroom, and they immediately begin working on Kim, who is, thankfully, still alive.

“I’m here, baby,” I say to Kim. “I love you.”

“Please, step back, sir,” the same paramedic says. “We’ll handle this.”

“Is she going to be okay?” I ask. “Is she?”

“Most of the wounds look superficial, so I think so. We’ll know more in a few minutes. Please, step back.”

My room phone starts ringing, and I walk over to pick it up, thankful for something to do.

“Hello, sir? This is the front desk,” the man on the line says.

“Yes?” I say. “What is it?”

“Is this Andre Burton?”

“Yes. What is it? There’s been an assault here.”

“Yes, I know, sir. That’s why I’m calling. The man. We have him. He’s in police custody. I just wanted to let you know. Your property will be returned to you as soon as possible.”

“What? What man? What are you talking about?” I ask, growing nauseous.

“I’m sorry to say that it was one of our employees, sir. A bartender. But we’ve caught him. Your friend — Devon? — he caught him coming out of your room. I thought you knew this? The two men fought, but the bartender got away. Devon, he called us from your room. Told me to get an ambulance. They should be up there now. Are they—”

The phone slips out of my hands as I recall the look on Devon’s face as we struggled. The surprise there. The terror.

I sit down on the bed. My hands grab fistfuls of my hair, seemingly of their own accord.

He was trying to help her. To keep her company until the paramedics arrive.

That’s all.

And I killed him for it. Dear God, I killed him.

Escaping the Loop

My boss’s face goes slack, the emotion leaving his eyes like a breaker has blown somewhere in his mind. His unseeing eyes stay fixed on mine. We’re standing next to the large picture window in his massive fourth-floor office, looking out over the forest of tanks, vessels, pipes, and towers that comprise Burleson Chemical’s production facilities. My boss, Jerry Vickery, holds two glass tumblers with brown liquor in them.

I know something is wrong as soon as I see the life go out of Vickery’s face. But I don’t have time to mull it over right now. As if on cue, I hear a commotion from the other side of the office door.

They’re coming for me.

Vickery’s corner office has a balcony. Judging by the sound coming from the other side of his office door, it’s the only way to go.

I move past Vickery to the French doors that lead to the balcony, opening them up as the inner office doors slam open. A glance over my shoulder reveals a half-dozen police officers rushing into the room. One of them — a woman — I think I recognize. Doesn’t matter. No time for that now.

All the upper management offices on the top floor have balconies, although none of them are as big as Vickery’s. Each balcony is separated from the one next by two-foot steel I-beams. As the cops run out onto the balcony, I’m already reaching across to the next one in line. There’s a sheer drop below me, making my palms sweaty, but it’s not hard to get across.

Now on the other balcony, I keep going, knowing that the cops will just run around inside and meet me. I move across the third balcony and onto the fourth. It’s the last one on this side of the building, so I swing over the railing, yanking open the door and running past Himes, who sits at his desk, his face as slack as Vickery’s was when I left him.

I make it into the hallway and the cops immediately spot me from down the hall. I book it away from them, heading for the stairs as heavy footsteps follow me. They don’t shout at me to stop. They don’t say anything, which is always unnerving.

I yank open the heavy metal door to the stairwell to see a burly cop standing there. I shoulder-check him, but he’s too big. He gets his arms around me and subdues me for the three seconds it takes the other cops to get to me.

Now that I’m no longer running, the fear comes on with full force. I can’t do it. I can’t take it. I plead with them to let me go, tears running down my cheeks as one of them cuffs me. “Please,” I say. “I haven’t done anything yet. Please, just let me go. I can’t do it again. Please.”

I look for the female officer I thought I recognized earlier, but all the stern faces that look back at me are foreign. There is something there at the back of my mind. Something about that face. If I could only see it again, I feel it would unlock a door in my memory. It seems important, in a distant sort of way.

But what’s more important is getting away from the police. That’s my number one priority.

They take me out of the stairwell, clearly heading toward the elevator. I can’t run away if I’m in a metal box.

There’s a window at the end of the hallway, right next to the door to the stairs. I know what lies on the other side of that window. I know every inch of this place. I’ve worked here for many years.

One cop has a hand on my right arm, just above the elbow. Another is walking behind me. The rest of them are ahead.

It’s now or never.

I yank my arm away, turning around as I do. I shoulder-check the cop behind me — this one is smaller than me, and he goes down.

My eyes on the rectangular window, I run, gaining as much speed as I can. When I’m about a yard from the window, I throw myself at it, turning so my shoulder hits the window first. The glass shatters as I fly through, sailing out into the quickly dwindling four-story gap between me and the parking lot below. I kick my legs as I fall, turning my body all the way around. I see the asphalt race up at me just before I shatter against it in one brilliant moment of immense pain, followed by serene nothingness.

***

The insistent buzzing of an alarm clock prods me back to consciousness. I open my eyes, revealing a wall in my bedroom. My phone vibrates on the nightstand as the alarm sounds. I reach my left hand out to turn it off.

As I sit up on the edge of my bed, something drips onto my thigh just beyond the hem of my boxer shorts. It’s only when I look down that I realize I’m crying. I don’t have to look at the phone to know what day it is.

It’s the same day I’ve been living repeatedly for so long I’ve lost count. It’s the worst day of my life. And not just because I have to live it over and again. It was the worst day of my life the first time I lived it.

I know what deviating from my original schedule will get me. That’s why the cops showed up outside Vickery’s office a couple of minutes before I killed myself. I deviated from my schedule. I did things differently. Every time I do, they come for me.

I don’t bother wiping the tears away. Instead, I get in the shower. Then I get dressed and leave the house with a thermos of hot coffee. I stop at Dunkin’ Donuts because it’s my Friday to bring in treats.

I’ve learned that I can change small things without consequence, as long as they don’t affect the original trajectory of my day. So instead of listening to a Michael Connelly audiobook on my way to work — which is what I did when I originally lived this day — I listen to nothing. I think about the movies or shows I’ve watched where people are stuck in a loop like I am. There are quite a few. No one does any original stories anymore.

There’s Groundhog Day. There’s Palm Springs, Boss Level, and Russian Doll. There are several more that I’ve never seen. But I can tell without seeing them that they all have one thing in common: the main character always finds a way to end the loop and make things right.

This usually involves some kind of revelation. Like learning to love or some bullshit like that. So there must be a way for me to end the loop. And I think I know how. But every time I try by doing something different, the police show up out of nowhere and capture me.

And what comes at the end of the day, after I’m captured … well, avoiding that is more important than anything. But if I do nothing, I have to live the worst day of my life over and over again. And each time I do, it makes things worse. The memories build on each other like weights stacked on my shoulders.

There must be a way out. There has to be.

I get to work, parking in my normal spot, and bring the donuts for everyone on my floor at the office building. I go through the motions, doing my job, not deviating, but always thinking. Thinking about what I need to do to make this stop.

Around four-fifteen in the afternoon, Vickery calls me to his office. As I step inside, I know I won’t deviate now. It didn’t work last time, so why would it this time? I have something else in mind. Something for later.

Vickery congratulates me on the quarterly numbers from my department, handing me a glass of scotch as we stand by the window. This time, I accept the scotch and drink it, just like I did the first time I lived this day.

We move over to the couch, Vickery doing most of the talking, as he always does. He pours me another drink, and I can tell that he’s already had a few. His pour is heavy, and he insists I finish it. So I do.

I look at my watch at four-fifty-three, knowing what comes next.

Vickery’s secretary, a woman named Raney, knocks on the door and pokes her head in.

“Excuse me, Mr. Vickery. Mr. Basham has a visitor.”.

Vickery looks at me, his eyes struggling to focus under his bushy black-and-gray eyebrows. “Oh, yes,” he says. “You’re little brother. Your volunteer work.” He says this half-mockingly, like volunteer work is beneath him. It’s something I never noticed before. Not until the second or third time I lived the day.

“That’s right,” I say. “His mom is dropping him off. She works nights at St. Francis. So, I better go. I’ll see you Monday.”

Vickery throws a mock salute as I get up off the couch. I want to smack him, but I don’t. That would be deviating from the original. But it would probably be worth it.

As I head back downstairs, I fish a packet of mints from a pocket and pop one of them in my mouth. Awaiting in my third-floor office is Ms. Darza and her twelve-year-old son, Gabriel. One time, I didn’t suck on a mint before, and Ms. Darza smelled the booze on me. She refused to let me take her son anywhere, Big Brother or not.

As soon as she dragged Gabriel out of the office, the cops came up. I couldn’t get away that time. And those … things got to me in jail.

This time, everything goes as it should. Ms. Darza gives me a strange look before she leaves. It’s a look she gave me the first day this happened. I just didn’t realize what it was. Now I know ‌she smells the booze on me, but probably thinks she’s being paranoid. The mint masks it just enough to make her second-guess herself. And she heads out of the building, leaving Gabriel with me.

“How’re things?” I ask him.

“Okay,” he says, simply. He’s a shy kid, but he’s slowly opening up to me. Or he was, before.

I never found time for a wife and never really wanted kids. But once I found some success in my professional life, I decided ‌I wanted to give a little back. And I also started to regret not settling down and starting a family. So I signed up for the Big Brother program.

I’d only been doing it for a few weeks when the day I’m stuck in happened for the first time.

As I look down at Gabriel where he sits in a chair in front of my desk, I get a flash that’s half memory and half premonition. I see his bloody, mangled body lying amid bits of glass on the road. I feel the glass and asphalt scrape under my useless legs as I crawl toward him after dragging myself out of the car. I know by the blood and the angle at which his head sits that he’s dead, but I crawl toward him, anyway.

The cyclist I swerved to miss runs up, talking on his cell phone to 911. The streetlight I hit creaks as it shifts toward the ground back behind me.

If I wasn’t drunk, I would have noticed that Gabriel never put his seatbelt on. If I wasn’t drunk, I would’ve seen the biker earlier. I could’ve slowed down or taken some other action instead of just jerking the wheel to the right.

But I was drunk. And I killed Gabriel.

And by the time the day was over, I was in the hospital, dying myself while doctors and nurses tried to fix me. At least, I think I was dying. For all I know, I’m in a coma now, reliving the day over and over. Maybe I’ll wake up. Maybe not.

“Are you okay?” Gabriel says from where he sits in my office. “You’re crying.”

“Fine,” I say, turning away and wiping my eyes. My heart jumps into my throat and I listen hard for the sounds of boots in the hallway, unsure if this is enough of a deviation to bring them. After a few moments, I compose myself and tell Gabriel it’s time to leave. We’re going to see a movie and hit an arcade. Gabriel is excited as we get into my car.

After fifteen minutes of driving, we’re approaching the stretch of road where it happened. My hands are sweaty, gripping the steering wheel tight. My eyes fill with tears again as I grit my teeth.

Not much further now.

“No,” I say, pulling over into a fast-food restaurant’s parking lot. “I can’t do it.”

I look at Gabriel, who sits with a slack expression.

Police lights swirl behind me. A cruiser has appeared out of nowhere. Police officers quickly approach on both sides of the SUV. I can see the one on the right in the mirror, and I think I recognize her. There’s something about her face that’s frustratingly familiar. I just can’t place it.

A knock on my window startles me. I step out of the car, putting my hands behind my back. The cops say nothing. One of them cuffs me and the other one comes around, her face no longer familiar to me.

They transport me to the police station without a word. They’ve left Gabriel in my SUV. It’s not like it matters. Everyone but me seems to be an NPC in this world. For all I know, they disappear whenever I’m not around them.

The jail cell is small and smelly and uncomfortable. There’s no mattress, just a concrete slab for a bed. They’ve taken my belt and my shoelaces and anything else I could possibly use to kill myself. And they’ve left the cuffs on.

I could try to smack my head into the wall or the concrete slab, but doing it hard enough to make it count would be nearly impossible. I’d have to do it repeatedly. Cracking my head open before the cops came in to stop me would be the trick. And it’s amazing what your body will do to keep you safe. Believe me. I’ve tried.

So I sit in the jail cell, waiting. I spend the time thinking about what I could do to stop the cycle. The loop. There’s a reason I’m living this day over and over again. There must be something I’m missing. Something I did or didn’t do on the day that would make all the difference.

I’ve tried ensuring Gabriel wears his seatbelt. I’ve tried canceling with his mother. I’ve tried calling in sick. I’ve even tried hurting myself at work on purpose, so I have to go to the hospital. I’ve tried not drinking one or both drinks. I’ve tried taking a different route, driving slower, and even having an Uber pick us up from the office.

None of it works.

I’ve brutally analyzed myself and found that I am sorry for killing Gabriel. Of course I am. It tears me apart.

I’ve been selfish most of my life. I realize that. But every time I change my day to do something for other people, the cops come after me. I gave all my savings away to a charity one day, but it made no difference. We still crashed. Gabriel still died.

There’s no woman in my life. No relationship in which I could find true love. I’ve called everyone I’ve ever conceivably wronged in my nearly forty years of life, apologizing and asking for forgiveness.

Most of my trespasses are little things. I’m not a great guy, but I’m not a bad guy either. I’ve led a pretty normal life. I had some wild times in college, but who didn’t? I can’t think of anything that would make me deserve such a hell.

I’m missing something. It’s the only answer. Something right under my nose.

I grow drowsy thanks to the booze and the constant strain I’m under. Sitting on the concrete slab and leaning back against the wall, I close my eyes. That hauntingly familiar woman’s face floats in my mind’s eye. She’s important somehow. That I’ve seen her face every time the police have grabbed me — or attempted to grab me — is important. But I’ve looked for her, thinking that I passed her on the street on the way to work. Maybe I had a chance to stop something terrible from happening to her, but I didn’t. Or she works at Burleson Chemical and I somehow influenced the course of her life.

I’ve explored these possibilities before, to no avail. Yet I know I’ve seen her face before. She’s young and pretty, probably in her early twenties. She has an innocent face, big brown eyes, and a petite nose over a perpetually smiling mouth.

I know her. Somehow.

A snarling sound erupts. My stomach knots and I become nauseous with dread. My eyes shoot open, and I find that I’m not in the jail cell any longer. I’m in a circle of dim light, surrounded by inky, preternatural darkness. I’m still sitting on a concrete slab, my feet on a concrete floor, but the rest of the cell is gone.

“No, it’s not midnight yet,” I say. “It can’t be.”

But it is.

Another snarl sounds from the darkness. Two glowing amber eyes appear, moving as the creature approaches through the lightless curtain around me.

A grinning snout appears in the circle of light, its leathery skin scarred with different shades of gray. The amber eyes join the snout in the light, followed by the rest of the creature’s head. Two curving horns come out of the beast’s head where ears would normally be. The rest of the demon comes into the light. Long, contorted arms with overly large hands drag across the floor. Its torso is peppered with knife hilts, the blades buried deep in its flesh. Foul-smelling yellow fluid seeps from around the knives. Its legs fold backward at the knees, and then forward again at the ankles, the muscles there bulging against the skin. Bone growths emerge here and there across its body. The clawed feet look like they belong to a dinosaur.

The creature’s snout falls open and a whiplike tongue rolls out on a wave of putrid breath. The tongue splits near the end, like a snake’s. I look up at the demon, unable to do anything but breathe in shallow gasps. The tongue shoots out at me, the two tips piercing my eyes like thick needles. I scream out at the blinding pain just as one of its hands comes up and grabs me around the waist, lifting me up and squeezing, shattering my hips like poorly made pottery.

The most terrible images flood my brain. Images of a billion people tortured by this creature, interspersed with the vision of Gabriel lying broken on the road, and the occasional flash of the young woman’s face. I can feel all their pain, their fear, their regret and guilt and dread, even as my own pain builds to a crescendo and stays there for hours or days or weeks. Other demons move like wraiths from the blackness, taking their turns with me, feeding off my screams and my whimpering pleas for respite through death.

Time becomes a joke. There’s only never-ending pain. Nothing else.

Nothing else but the regret that I didn’t kill myself this time. I should have.

***

The insistent buzzing of an alarm clock pulls me out of an eternity of torture. I open my eyes, revealing a wall in my bedroom. My phone vibrates on the nightstand as the alarm goes off. I let it continue buzzing, only reaching a shaking hand out once I realize it isn’t some cruel trick. The torture is over. For now. I get another chance to live the worst day of my life over again.

This should seem like a well-earned vacation after what I’ve been through, but it doesn’t. A different sort of dread constricts my bowels. I have to get up and go through the motions again. So I do.

I’m driving to work, going over and over the same thoughts and memories I’ve gone over countless times. I’m coming up on a bridge over a busy highway when the futility of it all presses down on me. My foot slams down on the gas pedal and the needle quickly creeps up toward seventy miles an hour. I jerk the wheel to the right, aiming directly at the edge of the concrete barrier where it curves up from the ground. My SUV runs up the side of the barrier, launching into the air and spinning slowly on its axis as it sails out toward the traffic rushing past below. I come down roof-first onto the cab of a semi-truck in a blast of shattering glass and rending metal.

***

I wake up in my bed to my buzzing alarm. I shut the alarm off and close my eyes, wishing it all away. Sleep crowds in.

I wake up to the sound of tires screeching outside my house. I’ve slept in long enough to mess with the important parts of my day. My front door smashes in just as I scramble out of bed and into the bathroom, slamming the door. I grab one of my disposable razors and start struggling to get one of the tiny blades out. When I hear them getting closer, I realize there’s no more time. I punch the mirror as hard as I can, shattering the glass. I grab a large shard with my bleeding hand and drag it across my throat.

They bust the bathroom door open, but it’s too late. Blood pours out of the wound in my neck, soaking my torso and making me warm from the outside as I get cold from the inside.

***

I wake up in my bed to my buzzing alarm. You would think killing yourself would get easier the more you do it. But it doesn’t. If anything, it gets harder. It takes emotional and physical energy. I can’t do it again. Not yet.

So I get out of bed and take my shower. I drive to work, getting donuts on the way. On my lunch break, I decide to continue searching for people I might have wronged. I’ve covered all the major ones, but maybe there’s someone else. Maybe the young woman whose face I keep seeing isn’t a person I’ve interacted with in recent years, but one I knew back in my college days.

I quickly find a website that offers to find college alumni from any university for a fee. I pay the fee without a second thought and fill in the information. The website does its thing and then brings up a list of my graduating class. It also lists a bunch of news stories from NAU around that time.

I scroll through the names first, seeing if any of them jump out at me. I recognize several names, but they’re people I’ve already contacted or those I had little interaction with.

When I scroll down to the news stories, my heart jumps as I read the fifth one down. “Police Charge Two Men with the Rape and Murder of a Young Local Woman.”

There’s a flicker of memory that surfaces with the headline. My hand is shaking so badly I have to concentrate to hover the mouse over the link. When I do click on it, I’m taken to an old archived news page from the Flagstaff Sun newspaper. The piece features a full-color picture of a pretty young woman with big brown eyes, an innocent face, and lips that curl up naturally, giving her a happy look. The caption underneath says her name was Shelly Warburton.

After reading the headline, seeing her photo brings it all flooding back.

I was at a house party off campus toward the end of my senior year. The house was off in the woods on the outskirts of town. The long driveway was packed with cars, and there were a ton of people dancing and drinking and talking and acting a fool both inside and outside. It was late, and I’d been drinking pretty heavily when I stumbled away from the house and into the woods, thinking I was going to vomit.

I soon found myself far away from the house, heading to where I thought the residential road was. There was no reason for me to be out there. I was just wandering around, stupid drunk. But when I pushed through some bushes near the road, I saw some movement off to my right, down in the wide but shallow drainage ditch that was hidden by bushes on both sides.

There were two men and a young woman there. The woman — Shelly Warburton — was on her back in the ditch, with one man leaning over her on his knees. The other man was standing to the side, looking down. Both their heads moved to me as I stepped through the bushes.

I looked at them, and right away I knew something bad was happening. Even through my drunken haze, it seemed wrong. The men were considerably older than the young woman. Nothing inherently wrong with that, I guess, as long as everyone’s legal and consenting. But then I saw Shelly’s face, and she didn’t look like she was in any state to consent to anything. She was rolling her head slowly from side to side, mumbling. Her eyes were half-closed, her lips pursed together when they weren’t moving.

I wobbled there, looking at the two men. “Woah,” I said, stupidly. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t mind us,” the man standing said. “We’re just trying to get our niece home safely. She’s had a bit much.”

I just stared, trying to compute his words through my reduced IQ.

“Come on, Dave,” the guy said to the man on all fours. “Let’s get her up.”

They each took an arm and lifted her up. I noticed ‌she was wearing a skirt and that it fell back down over her legs when they lifted her up. I wondered why it had been up in the first place. A bad feeling took hold, adrenaline shooting through my body. I walked across the shallow drainage ditch and through the other bushes to see that the men had a car there on the road. They were struggling to get the limp girl into the car while she murmured at them.

The two men kept glancing back at me. I knew ‌they weren’t her uncles. I knew ‌they were about to rape her when I came through the bushes. And I knew ‌I was the only one who could stop it. There was no one else around. No cars passing on the road. No people wandering out this far from the party.

I stood there, frozen with a combination of fear and drunken stupidity. And when they finally got her legs into the car and were shutting the door, Shelly seemed to have a moment of clarity. She said “No!” just before they slammed the door.

One of them looked at me, then got into the front seat. The other one tracked around the back of the car and opened the driver’s door. He looked back at me. And he smiled.

As the car started away from me, I saw Shelly’s head pop up in the back window, big eyes wide as she looked back at me. Then the man in the front passenger seat reached back and yanked her head down.

I stood there in the road until a car coming up behind me honked, the driver yelling at me to get out of the road. I walked back to the party, still drunk in body but sober in mind.

And I never told anyone about it. This was 2004, and I had my first cell phone. But I didn’t pull it out to call 911. I didn’t share what I’d seen with anyone. Ever.

I was ashamed. I’d been too shit scared to do anything about it. And those two men knew it. They took one look at me and knew that I didn’t have it in me to stop them.

As the days passed, I convinced myself I’d seen it wrong. It really was a couple of caring uncles helping their niece out, I told myself. Purposely avoiding the news until my graduation wasn’t difficult. Smartphones weren’t around then, so it was easy to avoid the headlines.

Soon, I was gone from Flagstaff. Gone from that campus and those people. And I managed to bury the memory, the shame. I buried it deep. But now it’s back, making me sick.

I can’t bear to read the article. Instead, I close my eyes, wondering what I can do to help myself out of the hell I’m in. I’m not reliving that night over and over again, so how am I supposed to break the cycle? What am I supposed to do? It makes no sense.

“You’re not supposed to do anything,” a woman says, her voice sweet and angelic. I open my eyes and see that I’m no longer in my office. I’m still sitting in my chair, but in a bright white room that seems to go on forever. Shelly Warburton stands across from me, wearing the same black skirt and white halter top she was wearing the night I saw her.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I really am. I should’ve done something about it. I should have stopped them.”

“Yes,” she says. “You should have. Why didn’t you?”

“I — I — I don’t know. Because I’m a coward. I’ve always been a coward.”

Shelly nods. She stares at me, smiling and not saying anything for a long time.

“So, is that it?” I ask. “Is that why I’m here? To remember that I wronged you?”

Shelly smiles. The white room suddenly goes dark. All except for a circle of light encompassing Shelly and me. “No. You really don’t understand this, do you? You’re not here to change anything. You can’t change anything. There is no secret key to getting past this. No epiphany that will set you free. This is hell, Jerrod Basham. You get to live the worst day of your life over and over again. But now, we’ll be able to use this memory — your memory of me — to make things a little worse for you. We’ll continue to dig up your guilt, your worst fears, and your greatest inadequacies. There is no escape. Your choices in life have brought you here. And here you’ll stay.”

“No,” I say, feeling the little glimmer of hope I had dwindling away. “I don’t deserve this. I didn’t kill you. I didn’t rape you. And killing Gabriel was an accident. I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean any of it!”

Shelly’s face cracks open as she steps toward me, the craggy, terrible face of a demon ripping through her skin. “And what about all the good work you’ve done during your career?” she says, her voice changing just as her body does, going from angelic to demonic. “What about all the cancer? The poisoned water? The birth defects? What about your testimony to Congress? Your lies? How much money did they pay you to uphold their lies? Did you think you wouldn’t have to pay for all the lives you’ve helped destroy?”

Now fully transformed, the creature pins me down, pressing me against the concrete slab that’s suddenly there. It digs into my right arm with its razor-sharp claws, then proceeds to rip out the bones in my arm, one at a time, as I scream.

Pain becomes all. Memories of that night play over and again in my head, taunting me, while the demon rips my bones out of my body with agonizing slowness. Time becomes a joke. I teeter on the edge of insanity, never quite able to plunge over the cliff.

And I know, with unassailable certainty, that this is just the beginning.

The Suicide Cave

I arrive in New York City on a bus. Walking through the Port Authority Bus Terminal, I glance around at the surroundings, walking to find an exit. The terminal is a large sprawl, a mixture of sleek modern architecture and utilitarian design. People rush all around me, surrounded by the muted colors of the terminal, living lives that, from the outside, seem better than mine in every way possible.

I only carry one bag, but the most important possession on my person is a small .22 Ruger pistol that I stole from my father’s closet. I keep the pistol in the right pocket of my large olive-green military jacket.

At eighteen years old, I know the few people that glance at me see only another young person. A tourist, maybe. Or a bum.

Back in Iowa, I’d watched movies set in New York City. I’d read articles, watched interviews, and stayed apprised of news reports from the bustling metropolis.

When I finally made the decision to come here, spending almost every penny I’d saved on the bus ticket, my only hope was that I could get lost in the streets. I wanted to become just another face in a crowd until I got to my final destination.

Now, as I step outside of the terminal and onto 42nd Street, I’m not disappointed. The impersonal nature of the city is unmistakable, and the people walking past me only see an object to dodge so they can be on their way, unimpeded by such an inconvenience as another person in their path.

I pull up a map on my phone and orient myself. I see that Central Park is about seventeen blocks away, so I start walking. I take a left on 8th Avenue and let my feet carry me, my backpack secured on my shoulders and the gun in my pocket bouncing gently off my hip with every step.

As I walk, I think about putting the Ruger’s barrel in my mouth. Or maybe I’ll just put it to my temple. I’ve heard that it’s possible to survive when shooting yourself through the mouth. But the temple is pretty much a sure thing. And with a .22, the bullet should bounce around inside my skull, destroying my brain.

I smile at the thought, but it’s a forced smile. Deep down I know that, and I realize that I’m grimacing, so I let my face go slack. After a while, I look up from the sidewalk and see trees beyond a roundabout ahead. It must be the park.

I make it across 59th Street and find a path into the park. There are plenty of people out on this early spring day. I see a little boy and a little girl playing, chasing each other on the grass and screaming delightedly. Two adults sit on a bench nearby, chatting. They glance up at the kids occasionally.

What if a little kid finds my body? I think. It would traumatize them for life.

This thought terrifies me, and I stop walking. People weave around me. The image of that little girl stumbling across my dead body fills me with dread.

That’s why we’re going to the cave, a silky, snakelike version of my inner voice says.

That was always the plan. It still is the plan. Go to The Ramble, find the sealed-off cave, and put a bullet in my head.

I force myself to walk again, trying to ignore the happy screams of the children.

I look at the map on my phone, zooming in on Central Park. The Ramble isn’t too far ahead, so I keep going. I know that the cave I’m looking for was sealed off in the early 20th century after a few people committed suicide there. Some even call it the suicide cave.

It was also a place where robberies and sexual harassment were common, but I don’t think of those things.

I’m here. I made it to New York City and to Central Park. Now I’m going to do what I came here to do.

My legs are getting tired as I make it to the Bow Bridge, passing a young couple kissing as I cross it. I put my head down, grumbling at the public display of affection.

More walking brings me near the suicide cave, and it takes some wandering around to find the semi-hidden path down. I have to climb over a path railing near a boulder and push through some tree branches to uncover the old stone steps.

Going down the steps, I see the old brick wall where the cave entrance used to be. The realization that I’m really here brings with it a little ball of excitement. Or is it dread?

I duck around a rock overhang and see a little shoreline sandwiched between two big boulders where boats used to be able to park so people could explore the little cave. Hearing a giggle, I turn my head to the left, seeing a couple about my age sitting on a little blanket. I’ve clearly interrupted their private time.

I realize I’ll have to wait for them to leave before I kill myself. This thought brings both relief and trepidation. I move out of their line of sight, throwing my backpack down against the bricked-up cave entrance. I lie down and put my head on my pack to wait for these people to leave.

It doesn’t take long for my eyelids to grow heavy. What little sleep I managed to get on the bus out here wasn’t quality sleep by any means. I don’t resist the urge to sleep, instead letting the anxiety of my pending death melt away, at least for a few minutes.

***

Little bugs are falling on my face, squirming around on my cheeks and trying to get under my closed eyelids.

I jolt up, rubbing at my face with both hands, feeling little bug bodies fall away. More of them fall onto my head, and I brush them out of my short hair, realizing that they’re not bugs at all. It’s dirt or grit that’s falling on me.

I look around, finding that I’m still next to the old bricked-up cave in Central Park. It’s dark out now, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone around.

More dirt falls on my head, and I look up to see where it’s coming from. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but it looks like there’s a ragged hole in the brick wall, as if someone has been removing bricks.

Suddenly, darkness pours out of the hole, and it takes me a moment to realize that the darkness is really cockroaches. Hundreds of them.

I scramble up to my feet, backing away as the cockroaches disperse into the night.

Looking harder at the brick wall, I see that there is a hole there. It’s at about head height, and big enough for a person to fit through easily.

I step closer, wondering whether I should pull out my phone and use the flashlight feature. A ghostly white hand emerges from the darkness of the hole, grabbing one of the bricks and pulling it into the hole.

“What the fuck?” I whisper, stepping back. “No way this is real.”

I pull my phone out, holding it at my side, not yet shaking it to make the light turn on. “Hello?” I say. “Who’s in there?”

There’s no answer. All is silent. The hand doesn’t appear again.

I step up to the hole, shaking the phone to turn on the light. I shine the light inside the cave.

The eyes of a dozen or more people reflect the light of the flashlight. I can tell they’re all dead by the pallor of their skin. Most of them are men, but there are a few women there, too. Their fatal injuries still shine with moisture, reflecting the light as if off of tiny irises.

I jump back, hitting my head on the rock outcropping behind me and dropping my phone. The light shines straight up, illuminating the hole in the brick wall.

I back away, rubbing my head absently as my mind tries to process what I’ve just seen. Maybe I’m still asleep, still dreaming. But the pain in my head feels so real.

A man’s head emerges from the hole, upside down. I realize as the rest of him moves through the hole, crawling like a spider, that his head is only attached to his body by a thin strip of flesh near his severed spine.

He stops his spider-like crawling as he reaches the ground, standing up to his full height, his eyes never leaving me. His head seems to shift on its own, keeping his gaze fixed on my face. I notice his old clothes, a dusty brown suit that would have been in style a century ago.

I back up toward the lake, my whole body shaking with fright.

The back of my foot runs into something that shouldn’t be there; I can tell by the feel. It’s not a rock, not a branch, but it is organic. I risk a glance behind me and let out a long gasp that turns into a low, desperate scream at the end.

There are bodies floating on the lake as far as I can see. The moon shines down on them, allowing me to see them packed together on the surface of the water. Some wear clothes, and others are naked. Some look like they belong in this century, while others are clearly from the distant past.

But they all have one thing in common: their eyes are open, heads are turned, and they’re all looking at me.

The one I hit with my foot, just where the shore meets the water, reaches up and tries to grab me. I back up, immediately feeling impossibly strong hands grip me. I catch a glimpse of my assailant, seeing his nearly severed head staring at me with furious determination. Then he’s lifting me off the ground, my struggles doing nothing to hinder him. He brings me back to the hole in the brick wall and shoves me through. Hands reach out as I’m pushed inside, grabbing me and pulling me down.

I’m on my back in the cave, surrounded by the dead. They all look down at me, their eyes wide, and I can tell they want something. I just don’t know what it is.

Their mouths all open at the same time, and a black liquid sludge pours out, coating me. It’s freezing cold, immediately soaking through my clothes as I struggle and scream. Their wide eyes all turn black at once and then liquefy as more of the black sludge pours out of their eye sockets. I’m immersed in the liquid now, and I can feel it paralyzing me, squeezing the life from me, stealing my breath.

Suddenly, I remember my father’s gun in my jacket pocket. I reach through the thickening black sludge with a numb right hand. My fingers feel like sticks, the joints nearly impossible to move as I manage to shove the hand in my jacket pocket. I feel the gun there and manage to get my fingers around it as the sludge reaches my chin.

I try to hold my head higher, straining my neck upward, but the dead try to push me back down.

Pulling the gun out of my pocket requires all the strength I have left. The sludge reaches my mouth. The taste of it is somehow everything foul I’ve ever smelled or tasted and the absence of taste all at once.

It forces its way into my mouth, and I can feel it sliding down my throat and into my lungs, erasing everything I am and replacing it with endless pain and darkness.

Choking, I pull the gun up out of the tar-like substance, forcing my numb index finger into the trigger guard.

The sludge reaches my eyes, and I have to shut them or lose them forever.

I pull the trigger, but nothing happens. The safety is still engaged. I feel for the safety catch with my thumb as the liquid comes up to my forehead. I can no longer breathe, and the need for air is nearly all I can think about.

I feel the click as the catch moves, and I pull the trigger again. The gun fires and I feel hands release me. I shift the gun and fire again. More hands release me.

I fire again and again and again, emptying the clip within only a few seconds. The hands are no longer holding me down, and I manage to get my heavy legs under me.

Emerging from the sludge, I take a deep breath before scrambling through the hole in the brick wall and falling out onto the hard ground outside.

I snap my head around, expecting more corpses to attack, but I’m alone.

I look down at my body, which is slowly regaining feeling. The sludge moves off of me, slithering back through the hole in the brick wall, leaving me dry but shivering.

I grab my phone and my backpack and run back up the stone steps, jumping over the railing at the top. I realize I still have the gun in my hand, so I put it back in my pocket while I run.

I find a lighted part of Central Park and sneak into some nearby bushes, suddenly exhausted. I don’t know what time it is, but I can still hear the occasional runner or cyclist pass by on the path as I fall asleep.

It’s light outside when I wake up. Morning joggers and walkers are in the park. A woman looks at me strangely as I stumble out of the bushes, reliving last night’s events in my mind.

Was it just a nightmare? The product of an overactive imagination belonging to a depressed young man?

I find my way back to the cave, the morning sunlight giving me the strength to investigate.

The hole is no longer there in the brick wall. There are no bodies floating in the lake. Everything looks as it did when I first came down yesterday, minus the young couple.

“It was just a nightmare,” I say, then turn to leave. But I see something strange on the brick wall. Where the hole had been, it looks as if the bricks are loose. As though someone broke all the bricks out, but then put them back up without mortar.

I push on the bricks with a hand, and they tumble inside the cave. My heart speeds up, but I force myself to look through the hole in the wall. There’s nothing in the cave but the fallen bricks — and something else. Something shiny. I pull my phone out, shining the flashlight into the dark cave. There are shell casings on the floor of the cave. Shell casings from a .22 pistol.

I pull the gun out of my pocket and eject the clip. It’s empty.

For the first time in a long time, my smile is genuine.

I head back up the stone steps and away from the cave.

On my way out of the park, I toss the pistol in a trash bin.

Never Prank Someone Through the Dark Web

I don’t know what to think of the video at first. It’s just a guy smiling and staring at a computer screen. And whoever took the video is at an angle where I can’t actually see what’s on the screen.

The guy watching the screen is really no more than a teenager. As his smile fades, the person taking the video giggles, causing the footage to shake a bit. The laugh makes me think it’s just a kid behind the camera.

Seconds pass. Nothing happens. The blank-faced guy just stares at the screen like he’s watching a Zoom lecture about accounting.

“What the hell is this, man?” I ask my friend Tony, who brought the video to my attention.

“Just wait, Ben. Just wait,” he says, a smile in his voice. He’s standing behind me while I sit at the desk in my bedroom.

I put my full attention back on my laptop, realizing it’s actually pretty meta. I’m a guy sitting in a room watching a screen, on which there’s a video of a guy sitting in a room watching a screen. If Tony were filming this thing, it would complete the meta-ness of it nicely.

Suddenly, the guy in the video stands up from his computer and walks out of the room, looking like a zombie. The kid recording giggles again, following the guy out.

The guy walks down a hall and turns into a room, which I soon see is a bathroom. Unceremoniously, he gets down on his knees in front of the toilet, lifts the seat up, sticks his head in, and starts slurping the water up like a dog.

“Ugh,” I say, but I can’t help but laugh. “Nasty.”

Meanwhile, Tony is chuckling behind me and the kid taking the video is dying with laughter. After about a minute of watching this kid drink out of the toilet, the video cuts to black and the words “Fifteen minutes later” appear on the screen.

The toilet drinker appears on screen, seated at the same computer once again. Only this time, the shot is over his shoulder, showing us that he’s watching the video of himself going into the bathroom and slurping toilet water.

“What the fuck?!” the guy says, looking up at the kid with the camera. He proceeds to get really pissed off, and the video ends after he knocks the phone out of the kid’s hand while the kid laughs uncontrollably.

“Oh, man,” I say, turning to look at Tony, who has a huge grin on his face. “If that’s real, it’s perfect.”

“I know,” he says. “It’s amazing.”

“Do you think Silva has seen it?” I ask Tony.

“I doubt it, but even if he has, it’s not going to make a difference. We can still use it on him. Eventually, anyway.”

“Wait,” I say, my logical mind tamping down my excitement. “There’s no way that’s real, right? I mean, how could it be?”

“Dude, this isn’t on the regular internet. You can search for it, but you won’t find it. I had to open up your Tor browser and get on the dark web to access the site.”

“So?” I say. “That doesn’t mean anything. It could still be a hoax. Maybe they cleaned the toilet super well before the guy agreed to do it.”

“I’m telling you,” Tony says. “It’s real. I’ve done my research.”

“Okay,” I say, humoring him. “How do we get it, then? It’s like some sort of hypnotizing video, right? Do we have to buy it off some asshole on the dark web?”

“Well … maybe,” Tony says.

“Of course. How much do they want for it?”

“Just five hundred dollars,” Tony says, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Five hundred dollars?! Dude, we’re college students. I work ten hours a week in the university’s call center. I don’t have five hundred dollars to spare. Do you?”

“No,” Tony admits. “But there is another way.”

“What is it?”

“If we promise to upload the video to the website on the dark web, they’ll give us a discount.”

“What kind of a discount?” I ask.

“Half,” Tony says.

I’m silent for a moment, thinking that half could be doable. I think of the look on Silva’s face after we pull this prank on him. He’ll never be able to top it, no matter what. I will be the prank master. And he will bow to my awesomeness.

“Maybe,” I say, thinking.

This whole prank war started when we were seniors in high school. At first, it was an April Fools’ Day thing that I pulled on Silva. With the help of his younger sister, I got into his house and stashed a handful of Hershey’s cocoa powder underneath his shower drain. It’s a pretty basic prank. You just put the cocoa powder in a small plastic bag and secure the open bag under the drain so the water backs up into the shower. And as the powder mixes with the water … well, you suddenly think you’re standing in some pretty nasty water.

When Silva got into his shower, I was hiding downstairs, and I ran upstairs to listen to the ensuing screams and curses.

That was how it started.

A few weeks later, Silva put a sign on the back of my car that said “honk and give me the finger.” He knew I never walked around the backside of the car to get in. The drive to school was especially frustrating, and I nearly pulled over to fight one guy who kept honking and laughing at me.

It was a pretty good prank.

By the end of senior year, we’d gotten two of our other friends involved: Tony and Pierce. Tony and I formed a team while Pierce and Silva formed one. That summer after graduation was the summer of pranks — some of the best times of my life.

Tony, Silva, and I all got into our local in-city college while Pierce decided he wasn’t going to do the whole college thing. He got a job at a restaurant in town, allowing all four of us to keep the prank war going.

Now, Tony may have come across the best prank of all. And if it’s legit, $250 and uploading the video to the Dark Web seem like small prices to pay.

“I’ll PayPal you the money tomorrow,” I say to Tony. “But if we get ripped off…”

“I’m 90% sure this isn’t a ripoff, Ben,” Tony says.

I smile, hoping he’s right.

Once we get the video, the hard part will be setting up to record Silva. So Tony and I come up with a plan.

Tony and Silva have an English class together, and they sometimes study together, which we’ll take advantage of. Tony will tell me when to send the video, making sure Silva is at his computer. Then Tony will be there to record after sending me a text, telling me to come up to the fourth-floor apartment. That way, I’ll get to see it firsthand and record it.

Tony buys the video, but there’s no way we can test it — not without risking drinking out of the toilet ourselves. And a week passes as we go about our busy college lives.

On the night that we’re set to do the prank, I’ve convinced myself it won’t work. It’s too good to be true, I realize as I pull up outside Silva’s apartment building. Technology like that wouldn’t be used for pranks. The implications of its existence would be staggering.

Still, I wait outside the apartment for a few minutes before Tony texts me, telling me to send the video.

I send it to Silva and Tony, hoping that it will keep Silva from becoming suspicious. The message along with the attached video is simple: “You guys have got to watch this video. Hilarious!”

Once it’s sent, I get out of my car and head inside, taking the elevator up to the fourth floor. I stop down the hall from Silva’s apartment, waiting once again for the word from Tony. I figure he’ll text me to tell me it doesn’t work and we’re out $250.

So I’m surprised when his message says, “It’s working! The door’s unlocked.”

I jog down the hallway and open the door to Silva’s one-bedroom apartment, stepping quietly inside. Pressing the record button on my phone, I walk down the short hallway and into the living room. Tony is standing up, recording Silva, who is sitting on the couch, staring at his laptop screen. He’s across from me, so I can’t see the screen, but he seems to be enthralled.

“Holy shit,” I whisper. Tony nods his head, a huge smile on his face.

Silva moves, leaning forward to set his laptop on the table. His eyes are blank, his face slack, but I don’t dare say anything for fear I’ll break him out of the trance.

He stands up and walks stiffly out of the living room and into the kitchen. Tony is closer, so he follows him. I hang back, recording the scene from the other side of the room. The kitchen is open to the living room, with a long countertop separating the two rooms.

That’s not the bathroom, I think as Silva walks in. He opens a drawer and pulls out a pair of scissors, and I realize that we’re the ones being pranked. Somehow Silva got wind of our plan. Or he’d already seen the video we watched. I know he’s going to walk up to Tony and pretend like he’s going to stab him. Then we’ll all have a good laugh about it. Onto the next prank.

Tony seems to think the same thing. “Haha, okay, you got us,” he says as Silva walks up to him. “I really thought it might work,” Tony says, turning his head to me.

But Silva’s face is still blank, and he’s still advancing on Tony, the scissors held in his fist.

“Tony—” I say, but it’s too late. Silva jams the scissors into Tony’s neck, then pulls them out, allowing a jet of dark red blood to spurt out. Tony looks at Silva with a face so shocked that it doesn’t seem to register the pain. Then Silva jams the scissors into his neck again before I can reach the two of them.

I drop my phone and grab Silva’s right hand, shouting for him to stop. His hand is covered in Tony’s blood from the second stab, and it slips out of my grip, allowing Silva to take a stab at me. I put up my left hand in defense, and he stabs the scissors through it. I recoil, exclaiming in pain. The scissors come away, stuck in my hand.

Tony falls to the ground just outside the kitchen, his blood emptying through his two neck wounds.

Silva turns and walks toward me, and I back away, holding my left wrist in my right hand to staunch the flow of blood. But Silva walks right past me without so much as a glance. He takes a left into his bedroom, and I follow him, telling him to snap out of it.

He heads to a window and opens it. And then, without hesitation, he tosses himself out, headfirst. I hear him impact the ground four stories below, but I can’t believe it. I just stand there in his bedroom doorway, the pain in my hand and the shock of the last thirty seconds clouding my thoughts.

Finally, I walk over and stick my head out the window, looking down to see Silva’s smashed body in the bushes bordering the building.

***

The police and ambulance show up around the same time. I’m standing outside Silva’s apartment, still holding my wrist. The pain in my hand is worse than anything I’ve ever felt before. But the memories going through my head make me think I deserve the pain.

I haven’t removed the pair of scissors yet, because the second I take it out of my hand, I’ll start bleeding a lot. In fact, the paramedics don’t take it out, either. After seeing that both my friends are dead, they take me to the hospital for care, leaving the pair of scissors for a doctor to deal with.

When I get out of surgery — which is the first of many, the doctor tells me — there are a couple of cops waiting for me. They both interview me at first, but one of them leaves as I’m wrapping up the story. The remaining cop’s name is Baxter. And I tell him the whole story. I don’t leave anything out. I tell him about the prank war, the site on the Dark Web, and the video.

I can tell he doesn’t believe me, but I warn him not to let anyone watch the video on Silva’s computer.

Baxter says that I shouldn’t leave town and that they’ll want to revisit my story later. Then his partner comes in, looking all pissed off.

“The fucking feds took the scene,” his partner — whose name is Delany — says.

Baxter looks at me and then ushers his partner out the door. I immediately jump up from the bed and get close to the door, listening to their conversation.

“What do you mean, feds? Who were they?” Baxter asks.

“I don’t know. That was Captain Billingsley. She said to drop everything. Uncle Sam’s big-ass boot has just been shoved up our asses.”

“What the hell?” Baxter says. “Maybe the kid’s right. Maybe there are mind-control videos out there.”

“Yeah, maybe. Probably a CIA experiment or something. Anyway, we want to keep our jobs, we drop it.”

“Fuck it. Let’s go,” Baxter says, and they walk off down the corridor.

As soon as they’re out of sight, I duck out of the room. I’ve seen movies; I know what a cover-up looks like. So I head down the hall toward the elevators. But before I can get there, I see two guys in dark suits and buzzed haircuts walk up to the nurse’s station. I’m too far away to hear what they say, but I can guess it’s about me, so I duck into a nearby room, startling an old woman who’s sitting up in bed, watching Family Feud.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’ll be out of here in a minute.”

“I just had a heart attack. I don’t need another one!” she says, then cackles.

There’s no window in the door, so I count off the seconds in my head and then crack the door when I estimate they’ve gone past. I need to time this right so I can get to the elevators before they see that I’m not in the room.

Sure enough, I see them heading down the hall toward my room. So I slip out of the woman’s room, leaving her to the game show.

The elevator ride is mercifully fast, and I walk out into the night, my hand throbbing. I spot a bus stop and head over to it, hopeful that I won’t have to wait long.

Ten minutes pass before the bus comes. I pay my two dollars and get a transfer, knowing that I’ll need to take more than one to get back to my apartment.

As I sit down, my phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s a text from a number I don’t recognize.

It says: “Do not run. We will find you.”

What the hell have I gotten myself into? How did this go from a simple prank video to a manhunt with government spooks?

I’m the only loose end. And I don’t know what they’ll do to me, but I can’t imagine it’ll be good. So I pull the yellow cord to request the next stop and I get off the bus. But not before leaving my phone tucked away under the seat.

It takes me over an hour to walk to my friend Max’s house. Although we were never close friends, we always got along well in high school. And Max was a whiz with computers. I even heard that Max was making five figures a month writing code for some Chinese tech company.

Yet he’s still living in his parent’s house. I’m thankful for this ‌as his mother shows me up to his room and knocks on the door.

“Yeah? Is it dinner time?” Max says.

“Dinner was an hour ago, Max,” his mom says. “You missed it again. No, your friend Ben is here.”

“Ben?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I say. “Can you open the door?”

I hear a lock disengage, and then Max opens the door. He’s one of those guys that always dressed up as Dracula on Halloween because he has the face for it. He has jet-black hair, a slight widow’s peak, prominent cheekbones, and sunken cheeks. The fact that he spends all day in front of a computer doesn’t help his pale complexion.

“Wow,” he says. “What a surprise. How are you, Ben? What happened to your hand?”

“Well, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.” I give Max a look as I say this, and he seems to get it.

“Well, come on in. Thanks, Mom,” he says. “I guess I’ll be skipping dinner tonight.”

His mom just shakes her head and heads back downstairs.

“Tony and Silva are dead,” I say as soon as he shuts his door.

“What? You’re messing with me, right?”

“No. I wish I was.”

We both sit down — me on his bed and him in his desk chair — and I tell Max about the video we showed Silva, and explain what it did to him. I don’t know why, but I leave out the bit about the two men in suits at the hospital and the text message I got on the bus. He sits in silence when I’m done, staring at the wall just past me.

“It can’t be true,” Max says.

“Well, I’m telling you it is.”

“No. I mean, I’ve been reading about this for the last week or so,” he says. “I even saw a video of some kid drinking out of the toilet after watching some video.”

“That’s the one that gave Tony the idea to do this,” I say. “We watched it the other day.”

“I thought it was a hoax.”

“Me too. At first. But it was just too good a prank to pass up if it worked,” I say. “So we bought it off the dark web. At least, we thought we were buying the same video, but clearly we weren’t.”

“What’s the site you bought it from?” Max says, spinning to his computer and opening a Tor browser.

I tell him the site address.

“Let me see what I can find out about this site,” he says.

I lie back on his bed, holding my left hand up to keep it from throbbing now that the local anesthetic is wearing off. I haven’t realized how tired I am until now. The sound of Max click-clacking on the keyboard is comforting, and I start to drift off.

“Woah,” Max says, pulling me out of my stupor. I open my eyes and look up at the ceiling.

“What? What did you find?”

“This is some serious shit, man,” Max says. “I’ve followed the trail, but I’m stuck up against this seriously encrypted firewall. This is like government-level shit.”

“You can’t get past it? See who set up the website or posted the videos?”

Max shakes his head. “Sorry, man. This is beyond me. I don’t know what to tell you.”

I should get up, but I don’t. I just stay where I am, staring at the ceiling.

Max clicks his mouse and types on his keyboard for a minute. Then he says, “What the—”

“What is it?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer.

“Max, what did you find?”

No answer. But I see Max stand up out of the corner of my eye. I lever myself up onto my elbows and watch as he grabs a pen from a cup on his desk. He turns toward the bed and slashes down at me with the pen, but I see it coming and roll out of the way. I stand up and back away as Max turns around to face me. His eyes are blank, just like Silva’s were when he killed Tony.

“Max!” I call, trying to snap him out of it. It’s no good. He lunges toward me with the pen, but I dodge out of the way, yank the door open, and run out of his room.

I take the stairs two at a time and bolt out the front door. And I run until my lungs hurt and my legs burn. I duck behind a strip mall and squat behind a dumpster to catch my breath. Max must have accidentally come across a digital tripwire of some kind. They knew it was me.

I thought about where I could go and quickly realized that Pierce’s restaurant was nearby. I knew he was supposed to work tonight. So I headed in that direction, trying to hide the white bandages on my left hand as I walked; they were a dead giveaway.

I spot Pierce through one of the restaurant windows as I approach, watching him deliver food to a couple at a window table. The place is mildly busy, with about twenty people sitting at the tables, many of them on their phones.

As I walk in, the hostess begins to ask me how many, but I tell her I’m here for Pierce. My friend disappears into the kitchen, and I follow, unwilling to shout and draw attention to myself.

Pushing through the flimsy kitchen doors, I nearly knock down a waitress carrying a tray full of food. She exclaims loudly, and Pierce hears it, looking over his shoulder and spotting me.

“Ben? What are you doing here? And what the hell happened to your hand?”

I’m about to answer him when everyone’s phones start buzzing — like an emergency alert. Most of the kitchen staff reach for their pockets or their phones set nearby. I can hear the buzzing tones coming from the dining room, too. Even Pierce reflexively pulls out his phone and looks at it. And he keeps looking at it.

A sick feeling seats itself in my stomach. I suddenly realize that this has all been some kind of experiment gone wrong. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. No one else but the government has the power to do things like this. To target phones in a particular area.

The toilet-drinking video was just the beginning. And the video we showed Silva must have been one of the next steps in the experiment. But something went wrong, and Silva didn’t finish the job. He didn’t kill me.

So now they’re trying to rectify that.

I back out of the kitchen, freezing as all the staff and customers look up from their phones at once, staring at me with blank eyes and slack faces.

Everyone stands up together, grabbing forks and knives off the tables. The waitress I almost knocked over picks up a plate of steaming food, although I’m sure it’s burning her hands.

I judge the distance to the front door, but it’s too far. There are too many people in the way. I’ll never make it.

I turn around, thinking about the back door that every restaurant has, but the members of the kitchen staff are standing there, knives in their hands. Pierce has a meat cleaver held up by his shoulder.

Bolting for the front door is my only option, so I do it, screaming as I run. I plow into the small group there, falling to the floor on top of a couple of diners.

And before I can even try to scramble up, the crowd closes in on me.

Overhead lights glint off the steel implements as they slash down. The dull faces behind the kitchen tools and eating utensils hold a blank urgency that’s somehow worse than anger or fury or loathing.

I scream again as the knives and forks slice through clothing and skin.

But I don’t scream for long.

The Game Bug

The shot was good. The guy’s body jerked and then fell down like he’d been hit by a hammer. Smiling, I moved my position and looked for my next target, the sense of accomplishment like a drug all by itself.

Suddenly, bullets came out of nowhere, smashing into me. I came out of my body to see it lying on the ground for a few seconds before I respawned. I was playing Black Ops One on my Xbox One console. I’d been at it for a couple of hours, although it didn’t seem like much more than fifteen minutes.

There were plenty of other games available, but I liked the older Call of Duty games the most. Maybe because they’re what I grew up playing. I didn’t mind the outdated graphics or the fact that not many people play them anymore. There were still enough players like me shooting each other in Team Deathmatch.

Glancing at my phone, I realized that my girlfriend Bethany would be over soon. I hadn’t even showered yet or anything, and my apartment was a mess. So I shut off the game and got up to get ready for Netflix and Chill time.

I cleaned up the takeout boxes and the beer cans and the empty snack bags I had lying all around the place, filling up my kitchen trash can. This was the routine. Both Bethany and I were pretty busy with work, so we only got together once or twice a week — usually Fridays and Saturdays. So when I’d get home from work all the other days, I’d usually plonk down in front of the TV, fire up the Xbox, and play Call of Duty while drinking some beers and chowing down on some snacks.

Then, when Friday came around, I’d clean up the apartment. I really didn’t think Bethany would mind if my apartment was a little messy — hers always looked like a tornado had rolled through — but it was an excuse to clean my place up once a week. Really more for me than for her.

It was just so easy to get sucked into the routine of video games, sleep, and work during the weekdays. But I was trying to be a responsible adult. Kind of. So cleaning the place up seemed like a good idea.

I pulled the trash bag out and headed out the front door to take it to the dumpster. It was about nine o’clock at night, and my little apartment complex was pretty quiet. The orange lights and the humid summer night gave the air a kind of heavy feeling. It was a feeling I usually enjoyed — kind of peaceful, like I was the only one around. But tonight it was unnerving for some reason.

The nearest dumpster was in a little concrete U at the edge of the parking lot. There wasn’t a light near it, so I stepped out of the orange illumination and into the darkness around the dumpster. A horrible smell came to me — and not just the kind of nasty dumpster smell that the area always had. This smelled like death.

I gagged and covered my mouth and nose with one hand, but it did little good. As soon as I tossed the bag in the dumpster, I turned to head back. But something moving in the dark space between the back of the dumpster and the concrete wall caught my eye.

Whatever was moving was low to the ground, and I thought it was a rat or something at first. But as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I made out the back feet and tail of a dog. Even though I could only see this fraction of the animal, I knew by the way it was lying that it was dead. There was an unmistakable slackness to it.

Keeping my left hand over my nose and mouth, I stepped closer, turning my body sideways to fit between the wall and the dumpster. Lots of my neighbors had dogs, and I wanted to see if I recognized the poor animal. I’d left my phone inside my apartment, so I had no flashlight to shine on the area.

I stopped and peered down into the darkness, seeing a mass of writhing maggots on the dog. I gagged again and looked away for a moment.

Then I looked back, thinking that the dog was familiar to me. It was a brown-and-white beagle, so skinny that its ribs showed through its ragged fur. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that it had died of starvation.

I realized I didn’t actually recognize the dog, but it didn’t make me feel any better about it. Of course, I wasn’t about to touch the thing. Not without some serious precautions.

Taking one last look at the dog, I noticed ‌its ear was moving. The ear was lying flat against the side of the dog’s head, and it looked as if something small was under it, moving it in little jerks and starts. I suddenly realized that something was coming out of the dog’s ear canal.

Sure enough, something small and strangely shaped darted out from beneath the ear and scurried under the dumpster. It didn’t look like any insect I’d ever seen. In fact, it didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen. Of course, it was dark, and I’d only caught a glimpse of the thing.

I turned around and headed back to my apartment, trying not to think about how that poor dog had died.

As I stepped up the curb from the parking lot to the grass around my apartment building, I felt something snag the back of my right pant leg. I stopped and looked back over my shoulder, but didn’t see anything that it could’ve snagged on. So I shrugged it off and headed back inside.

With my apartment somewhat clean, I headed to the bathroom to take a shower. As I dropped my pants, something darted out from them, scurrying along the bathroom floor and disappearing behind the toilet.

I jumped back and made a noise that I never would’ve lived down if any of my friends had heard it.

“What the heck was that thing?” I said to myself. It was about the size of a small cricket but with too many legs and the shiny body of a slug. I was almost sure it was the same thing I’d seen come out of the dog’s ear.

I hurried out of the bathroom and grabbed one of my shoes, then went back in, shoe held up and ready to strike. Crouching down next to the toilet, I contorted my body to see if I could locate the thing. It was nowhere to be found.

After a few minutes of searching, I gave it up and took a quick shower. I was getting dressed when Bethany showed up with delicious-smelling Indian takeout from a nearby restaurant. The amazing food and the company made me forget about the dog and the weird bug.

We went to bed around one in the morning. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep, and once I did, I had a very strange and vivid dream.

In the dream, I stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom, shutting the door and slapping at the light switch. It felt like I was drunk, my vision swimming, my eyes seeming to go out of focus. I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself. My skin was shiny with sweat, and a vein in my temple was pulsing.

The walls around me swelled and bubbled before they transformed. Ragged white-and-brown fur replaced the walls of my bathroom. And on the fur, football-sized maggots squirmed, their yellow-white skin glistening from the lights above the mirror. My eyes tracked around the room as these maggots seemed to grow bigger while the fur-covered walls closed in, the pungent reek of death suddenly overpowering.

I looked back at myself in the mirror, only to see that my face was no longer my own. It was a dog’s rotting head. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t.

I put my hands to my head and shut my eyes, willing this nightmare to go away. But when I opened my eyes again, the walls had closed to the size of a phone booth. I looked down to see that I was standing in a pile of these huge maggots — up to my knees and rising. The stench of dead flesh was all I could breathe.

I closed my eyes again and screamed — this time I could. And suddenly I was sitting in my living room, playing Call of Duty, and everything was fine. More than fine, actually. A sense of euphoria settled on me as I made a headshot. I laughed and whooped and kept playing.

Next thing I knew, I was waking up in my bed, the dream fading away like the ephemeral thing that it was. I could hear Bethany in the kitchen, and I could smell coffee. Checking the time, I saw that I’d slept in. It was eleven o’clock already. I’d slept for nearly ten hours — which was definitely out of character for me.

Stumbling into the kitchen, I saw Bethany sitting on the couch reading a book with a steaming cup of coffee at hand. She had dark hair and a small smattering of freckles on her face under light brown eyes. She was a knockout, and incredibly cool. We’d been dating for about eight months, but we’d known each other for several years.

“How are you feeling?” she said with a knowing smile.

“I’m good. I overslept. Why?”

“You don’t remember getting up in the middle of the night last night?” she asked.

I furrowed my brow and shook my head. “What did I do?”

“You had some kind of nightmare,” Bethany said. “I woke up to you screaming in the bathroom. It kind of freaked me out, actually.”

I remembered my dream and shuddered at the thought of all those maggots and the stink of that dead dog.

“When I tried to wake you up, you said something about playing video games,” Bethany continued. “That’s when I remembered hearing somewhere that you shouldn’t try waking up someone who’s sleepwalking, so I didn’t try again. I just watched you as you came out here and started playing your Xbox. I figured you’d fall asleep on the couch, so I went back to bed. You don’t remember any of that?”

“No,” I said. “Well, I mean, yeah, I do. But I thought it was a dream. I didn’t realize I was actually up and walking around. That’s crazy.”

“Yeah. Have you ever sleepwalked before? Like when you were a kid?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. That’s really weird.”

“Yeah. Well, it’s no wonder you’re tired. I woke up to use the bathroom at five this morning, and you were still playing video games. I said your name, but you didn’t respond.”

I shrugged and stepped into the small kitchen to get a cup of coffee. The kitchen was divided by the living room by a bar-type counter, so it was easy to talk to someone in the living room from the kitchen. So while I got my coffee, I told Bethany about the dog I saw by the dumpster. Then I told her about my nightmare.

She seemed to care more about the dog than about my freaky nightmare. But I guess I was still alive, and the dog had died what looked like a terrible death. So I couldn’t blame her. But I felt uneasy about the whole thing, and I thought about the dog many times throughout the day.

It was Saturday, and we went over to a mutual friend’s house that evening for a chill get-together. There were a few of our regular circle of friends around — Drew, Taylor, Mandi, and Dylan. Most of them were hanging out in the backyard around a fire pit, drinking beer and shooting the shit. It wasn’t cold out, so the fire was just for the hell of it.

There were some other friends — people I’d met but didn’t know too well — hanging around in the house. Two of them were Jose and Reggie, and they were both playing Xbox on the big screen television in Drew’s living room.

They were taking turns playing Halo Infinite on Big Team Battle mode. The living room was right next to the front door, so it was the first thing I saw when I walked in with Bethany. I stopped behind the couch and watched for a little while.

Suddenly, the sound of Bethany’s voice faded in, and I looked around.

“What’s going on with you, Chris?” she was saying. She seemed mad about something. And while Reggie was still playing, Jose had turned in his seat on the couch and was looking up at me with a confused look on his face.

“What?” I said to Bethany. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” she said. “I asked you to come with me and say hi to the others like three times. You were just staring at the television.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Just tired, I guess.”

We went out and said hello to the others, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was starting to worry that something was wrong with me. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember Bethany asking me to come outside with her. All I could remember was watching the game. And I thought I had been watching it for about ten seconds. But according to her, it had been closer to two minutes.

I sat in a camp chair next to the fire for a while, just staring into the flames. Dylan offered me a beer but I refused. I was starting to feel sick.

As I stared into the flames, the world around me seemed to lose its solidity. Everything but the flames looked fake and two-dimensional. I started getting chills.

“Sorry,” I said, standing up and rushing inside to the bathroom. I made it to the sink and started dry-heaving, unable to throw anything up. I looked at myself in the mirror, half expecting to see a dog’s rotting face in place of my own. Instead, I saw my own head, but it was bulging out here and there, as if something inside my skull was pressing out. The middle of my forehead bulged out, followed by my left and then right temples.

Something scratched at the back of my throat, and I opened my mouth to see some insect with long pointy legs retreating down my throat.

I shoved a finger down there, trying to get the thing out, causing me to gag. I hacked and coughed and spit, obsessed with getting the bug out of my throat. Pretty soon, people were knocking at the door, concern in their voices.

Ignoring them, I continued spitting, but nothing came up.

Finally, I looked up into the mirror and jerked back when I saw that my eyes were bleeding. No, they weren’t just bleeding — they were full of blood. And it just kept spilling out.

An unbearable pain seated itself in the middle of my head, like a spike being shoved deep into my brain. I clenched my jaw as my fists balled up into stones.

Suddenly, something shifted somewhere inside me, and I closed my eyes. The pain disappeared as quickly as it had come.

When I opened my eyes again, I looked normal. There was nothing wrong with me. Nothing at all.

I opened the door to the bathroom to see Drew, Bethany, and Dylan all there.

“Dude, you okay?” Drew said.

“I’m good,” I said. “Must be a stomach virus. I just need to sit down on the couch for a little while.”

“You want to go, babe?” Bethany said.

“No. No, really, I’m good. I just want to sit down for a while.”

The three of them followed behind me, silent with concern, as I made my way to the living room and plopped down on the couch next to Reggie. Jose was sitting in a chair over to the right, Xbox controller in hand. They were still playing Halo Infinite.

After hovering around behind the couch for a while, Bethany went back outside to join the others. I’d already asked if I could play, and once Jose died for the second time, he handed me the controller. That was how they were doing it — two deaths and your turn was up.

As soon as I started playing, the world seemed to fade away. I no longer cared about the strange hallucinations or the dead dog or pretty much anything. I focused all I had on the game. It was as if I entered it, and there was no other life for me.

Every hit dodged, every surprise I worked my way out of, every time I captured the flag, and every kill just pulled me further in, the sense of accomplishment and well-being boosting me up into the clouds.

I only came out of the trance when someone shoved me. “What the hell?” I said, looking to my right at Reggie. “Why are you shoving me?”

“You’ve died six times, man,” Reggie said, clearly pissed off. “Don’t try to tell me you haven’t heard us talking to you.”

Jose was staring at me from his chair, looking at me like I’d just taken a dump in the middle of the floor.

“Sorry,” I said, handing the controller to Reggie. “I didn’t realize.”

“Bullshit,” Reggie said. “You’re just a fuckin’ asshole.”

Before I knew what I was doing, I stood up and slapped the controller out of Reggie’s hands. I felt something raging inside me. Something I’d never felt before. It was primitive, deeply embedded in my lizard brain — as if my food or my woman or my very existence was under threat. And I didn’t even try to fight it. I just let it take over.

I punched Reggie in the face twice before Jose got up and pulled me off. He was shouting at me to stop, but I didn’t. I elbowed him in the side of the head, knocking him down. Then I turned back to Reggie, who was standing up from the couch, coming at me, his face covered in blood. I kicked him in the stomach, sending him back onto the couch. Then I hit him in the face again.

“What the hell are you doing?” Bethany screamed. She’d come in from outside, drawn by the shouting. Everyone else was behind her.

I looked at them, not really seeing them at all. They didn’t seem real, their feelings and all their social constructs seemed as flimsy as wet paper.

Seeing that Jose and Reggie weren’t going to fight anymore, I picked up the controller from the floor and sat back down on the couch to resume my game. My hand was slick with Reggie’s blood, so I wiped it on the couch before playing again.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Drew come into the living room and start messing with something on the wall near the TV. The screen went blank, my game disappearing into oblivion.

I jumped up from the couch and got in Drew’s face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said. “Plug it back in.”

“You need to leave,” Drew said. “Now.”

I looked around at all the wide eyes staring back at me. Jose was still on the floor, gazing fearfully up at me. Reggie seemed only half-conscious on the couch.

“Fine,” I said, tossing the controller down. “Fuck you.”

As I went out the front door, I heard Bethany apologizing to everyone, telling them she didn’t know what was wrong with me.

Nothing, I thought. Nothing’s wrong with me.

I got into the car and started it up, putting it into gear just as Bethany opened the passenger door. “What are you doing, Chris?” she asked, venom in her voice. “Were you planning on leaving me here?”

“You’re in the car, aren’t you?” I said.

“Just drive,” she said. “As soon as we get back to your place, I’m going home. You need to see a psychiatrist or something. Your behavior tonight has been insane. I wouldn’t be surprised if those guys pressed charges.”

As we drove home, I felt that primitive urge to fight fade away. Instead, my mind turned to sex. It was like the urge to fight was replaced by the urge to fuck. Suddenly, that became my goal. But I knew ‌it wouldn’t happen if Bethany was mad at me.

So I started talking to her in a soothing voice, apologizing for my behavior and begging her to forgive me. I said anything I thought would help me get her into bed. I lied, saying I would go see a doctor on Monday. I’d never been much of a salesman or a smooth talker before, but now it was as if I was Don Juan himself.

And by the time we got to my place, Bethany had cooled considerably. She promised she would stay the night, which I took as a good sign.

I put a movie on in the living room and we got settled in. Then I made my move.

But she wasn’t having it.

“No,” she said, pushing me away. “I’m still mad at you. You’re not getting laid tonight. We need to talk about what the hell happened tonight, okay? But I’m willing to wait until tomorrow. So let’s just watch this movie and then go to bed.”

Clenching my jaw, I leaned forward and grabbed the Xbox controller. I turned the movie off and started playing Call of Duty Black Ops.

“Wow,” Bethany said. “Okay. I’m out of here.”

This time, I let her go, not bothering to say goodbye.

I don’t know how long I played that night, but I don’t remember sleeping at all. In fact, a week went by, and all I did was play video games. I ignored phone calls from my boss, Bethany, and my friends. I only left the house to get food — usually sweets and sodas and snacks.

When Friday night rolled around, I heard a knock at my door. At first, I ignored it, expecting them to go away. But when they didn’t, I paused my game and got up to answer it. Bethany rushed in as soon as I opened the door.

“Chris, I’m worried about you. I think—” she stopped talking as she looked around my trashed apartment, wrinkling her nose up like she smelled something terrible. “Have you gone to work once this week?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“And when was the last time you took a shower?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been busy.”

“Doing what? Playing video games.”

I sighed and stepped around the discarded soda bottles and candy wrappers, sitting on the couch and resuming my game. Bethany kept trying to talk to me, but I just ignored her.

A few hours later, something made me stop playing. I just paused the game and stood up, looking around for something — but I didn’t know what.

Something compelled me to go to my bedroom. I pushed open the door and saw that Bethany was sleeping on the bed, fully clothed. Suddenly, it clicked. She was what I was looking for.

It was time.

I went over and leaned down, opening my mouth about a foot above her head.

I felt something crawl down the back of my throat from my nasal passages, but I didn’t move. I kept my mouth open, breathing as little as possible.

The thing crawled out of my mouth and dropped ‌onto Bethany’s forehead. It looked like a tiny slug with legs. A lot of little legs.

It crawled around on Bethany’s face before disappearing into her nose. She snorted and coughed, but didn’t wake up.

Suddenly, a kind of clarity came to me. I don’t know what caused it — maybe seeing that thing disappear into Bethany — but I had a flash of knowledge that I recognized as my old self. It was only with this flash did I even register that there was an old self — until then I hadn’t realized I had changed. But I had. And there was still a part of me somewhere deep inside.

That old self had put the pieces together, and it was screaming to get out. It was me — the core of me — and it had been scratching at the surface for a week, only I could not hear it. Whatever was inside me was too powerful.

It was all about dopamine. The thing inside me — the thing that had taken over — fed off of dopamine; that pleasure chemical released during sex, eating sweets, and even when playing video games. For me, especially when playing video games. That was how I’d been getting dopamine release before, and the thing burrowing in my brain somehow knew this. It was the biggest reward for the least amount of effort.

And in that flash of clarity, which didn’t last much more than a minute, I realized that the thing — the creature — had been living in the dog. Somehow, I knew that. Because the creature had brought some of that dog with it. Some consciousness or memories or essence had been transferred to me.

And after a week, I had provided the thing with enough dopamine for it to reproduce. And the creature that slipped into Bethany was its offspring. This, more than anything, got me moving.

I ran out to the kitchen and grabbed a knife out of a drawer, flipping the sharp point around toward my face. It was in there somewhere, behind my eyes, hunkered down in my pleasure center. The hallucinations, the erratic behavior, the violence — it was all the thing’s doing. The creature. The organism. The parasite.

I had to get it out. And a knife would do it. A knife would get it out.

Holding the tool in both hands out in front of me, I readied to plunge it into my right eyeball. I took a deep breath and jerked my hands toward my face, closing my eyes on reflex. But there was no pain. In fact, there was no more panic. No more despair. I opened my eyes to see the point of the knife there, centimeters from my right eye, my hands rock-steady.

What was I thinking? There was nothing wrong with me. Nothing at all.

I put the knife back in the drawer, chuckling at the absurdity. A parasite feeding off of dopamine in my brain? How crazy can you get?

Sitting down on the couch, I picked up the controller and resumed playing my game.

In the early hours of the morning, I heard Bethany screaming in the bedroom. But it didn’t last long.

And a little while later, she came out and sat next to me on the couch.

“Can I play?” she asked.

I reached down and grabbed my other Xbox controller from a basket under the coffee table. I handed it to her without a glance.

That was eight months ago.

We’ve been using credit cards and loans from our parents to survive without jobs. At least, we had been until they started refusing to give us more money.

I’m not exactly sure when Bethany died, but it must have been recently because her body is only just starting to stink.

The apartment is littered with fast food trash, candy wrappers, and two-liter soda bottles. I can’t even see the floor anymore. I think that’s how Bethany died — she tripped on a half-full bottle of Mountain Dew when she got up to use the restroom. She hit her head on the countertop that divides the kitchen from the living room.

She may have been alive for a day or two after that — she was making noises, now that I think about it. But she’s certainly not alive now.

As for me, I’ve gained about fifty pounds, but it doesn’t really matter.

As long as I can keep playing, everything will be okay.

I wonder briefly where all the offspring we produced over the months have gone. Probably to the neighbors. It certainly is much quieter here than it used to be.

But even if there were parties going on every night, I wouldn’t care.

No, I have everything I need right here. Just so long as my Xbox keeps working.

Patricide

The blood squirts out of my father’s neck, its warmth on my hand a sharp contrast to the cool night air. He makes a surprised, choking sound and reaches back toward me.

My eyes are wide, seeing what I’ve done thanks to the little bit of moonlight that filters through the pine trees we’re standing under.

I recall everything that led up to this, a rush of memories and emotions. Mostly fear. And desperation.

My father has never been a good man. He’s never even been what you probably think of when the word “father” comes to mind. Unless, of course, you’ve had a childhood like mine.

I’m seventeen years old, and I’m surprised I’ve survived this long.

My earliest memory of my father is from when I was perhaps a year and a half old. I remember walking up to him where he sat in his recliner, the lurking presence in my life that I knew instinctively was supposed to protect me. And care for me. And love me.

The excitement I felt while walking on my chubby, wobbly legs was total, and I wanted to share it with him. I think it was my first time walking, but when I brought it up to my father years later, he insisted it wasn’t. He was probably lying. I doubt he even remembered the incident.

I walked up to him, arms out to keep my balance, giggling like the excited toddler I was. I grabbed at his legs, which extended down from his impossibly long body that was folded into his recliner.

I laughed, leaning on his legs for balance, looking up into his face. His gaze was fixed on the television. He didn’t even move his eyes down to me as he kicked out, launching my little body across the living room. I narrowly missed the coffee table, hitting my head on the carpeted floor.

My bawling brought my mother into the room, who scooped me up into her arms. The memory grows blurry here, disappearing in a haze of yelling while my parents fought. It was a sound I grew accustomed to over the years, although not one that I ever fully accepted to be normal.

As the years went on and I grew older, I realized that my father wasn’t a person. Not really. He didn’t have the characteristics I associated with other people. He had no empathy. No remorse. He was full of indifference that sometimes morphed into hate, which often turned into violence.

I knew that one day he would go too far and I would have to do something about it. It was a realization I’d had when I was thirteen or so. Now, four years later, it has finally happened.

And it all started with my dog, Cooper. My parents had agreed to get him for me three years earlier, for my fourteenth birthday. Cooper is a black lab, smart and loving and loyal — three traits that had always been lacking in dear old dad.

Maybe that’s why he decided to turn him from an inside dog to an outside dog, for no apparent reason. Maybe he was jealous. Or maybe he lacked any sort of logical reasoning at all.

We’d been eating dinner, not an hour ago now, when my father made the announcement.

“We’re going to be keeping the dog outside from now on,” he said, not using Cooper’s name. It was always just “the dog” to him.

I froze with my fork halfway between plate and mouth. “What?” I said. “Why?”

“Dogs shouldn’t be in the house. They’re animals. They belong outside.”

“After three years?” I said. “You suddenly decide this after three years of him living inside, sleeping in my room?”

My father hadn’t looked up from his plate, even when he’d first made the announcement. He did now, bringing his vacant gaze to my face. “This is not a discussion. I’ll be putting him outside after dinner. And there he’ll stay.”

I looked to my mother for support, but I could see that she wasn’t in any condition to join the fight. The bruises on her neck were evidence enough for me.

Not for the first time, I wished I had a brother. Someone to help me stand up to my dad so it would be two against one — three against one on those increasingly rare occasions when my mother was feeling up to the task.

But I didn’t. It was just me.

My dad kept his promise, putting Cooper outside after dinner. We didn’t have a fence around the backyard, and the woods our house backed up to went on for miles. So he strapped Cooper to the railing at the foot of the deck stairs.

He didn’t even bring his food and water dishes outside. I did that when I went to check on Cooper once my father was in his room.

I took the dog for a walk, passing the two sawhorses set up in the backyard. They supported a rusty saw and two rotting two-by-fours my dad had bought to repair a portion of the deck but had never finished.

We walked for an hour around the dark neighborhood, and I spoke to Cooper, trying to make him understand. I vented my frustration to him, and he glanced up at me every so often, ever the patient listener.

By the time we got back to the house, I decided to wait until my father went to sleep and then sneak Cooper inside to my room. But I never got the chance.

When he’d been left outside alone for about forty-five minutes, Cooper started to bark. It was a “let me in” bark. I sat in my room and listened to him for a little while, staring up at the ceiling, stoking the anger I felt toward my father.

A pained yelp got me moving, rushing out of my room to investigate. I came to the top of the deck stairs just in time to see my dad punch Cooper in the head. My dog yelped again, and this seemed to enrage my father further. His shoulders bunched up, his fists clenching as he walked over to the edge of the yard, grabbing a stick from the ground. He stalked back over to Cooper.

I stood on the deck, frozen with fear, wondering if this would be the time I did something to stop him. My heart beat wildly and my breathing became shallow.

My father raised the stick, but before he swung it down, I yelled for him to stop.

He turned his head, his right arm still raised, and spoke in a growl. “Go back inside.”

Cooper looked up at the club, his eyes wide with fear, tail tucked between his haunches.

I launched myself down the stairs, taking them two at a time. My father turned toward me, a small smile on his face. But that smile faltered when he realized that I wasn’t going to stop. I ran into him with my shoulder, sending him backpedaling until he fell and landed on his butt in the yard.

Rage clouded his features, making his eyes grow into bottomless pits, his mouth convulse, his nostrils flare.

He got to his feet, the club still in his hand, and ran toward me without a word. I knew he meant to kill me.

I turned to run, glimpsing the rusty saw lying across the two warped two-by-fours on the sawhorses. Running past, I grabbed the saw and headed into the woods, my father’s footsteps loud behind me.

It didn’t take me long to increase the distance between us. An old college football injury slowed him down. But I could still hear him behind me.

There was a clump of bushes up ahead, and I ducked behind it, catching my breath.

“You’re dead!” he called out in a sweet voice that I’d only ever heard him use when he was truly angry. “Where are you?” he called, like we were playing hide-and-seek.

I watched him through the bushes as he stomped around, searching. I held the saw down by my right thigh.

After a few minutes, he stopped searching, and he started laughing. “Fine,” he called. “When you come home, I’ll be waiting. But your dog and your mother won’t be.”

He turned to head back to the house, and I knew he meant to make good on his threat. If I let him go, he’d kill them both.

“Wait,” I said, stepping out of the bushes. “I’m here.”

He turned, that lifeless smile still on his face. He walked toward me at a casual pace, his club held out from his body.

“Listen,” I said as he approached. I searched for words that would make everything all right. But deep down, I knew there were no words that could change my father’s inherent nature.

I started backing up as he got closer, unsure what to do.

He swung his club at me, but I saw it coming and ducked out of the way. He growled and swung again, hitting me in the shoulder, knocking me off balance. I fell to one knee and swung out with the saw, tearing through his jeans and nicking his leg.

He paused, looking down at the wound as if in disbelief. I tensed, preparing for what would come next. He raised the club in both hands and scythed it down, but I jumped, rolling out of the way and coming up behind him. I swung the saw as hard as I could at the side of his neck as he straightened up to turn around. The rusty blade embedded itself there with a wet thunk.

He moved slightly, causing the blade to come out a little. Blood squirted onto my hand, somehow making everything real. He made a choking sound, reaching back toward me.

He moves again now, dropping his club and reaching up to the blade. I yank it out, marveling at the amount of blood that follows.

He puts his hand to the wound and turns around, looking at me with eyes that are still filled with hate. The blood pours around his fingers, soaking his shirt. He reaches out to me, and I step back. Then I think better of it and step forward, kicking him in the stomach and sending him to the ground, much like he did to me so many years ago.

I watch him bleed out, waiting until he’s dead before I head back to the house to find a shovel and let Cooper back into the house.

While I dig the hole next to my father’s body, I think about how everything has led up to this. I picture a different life, a different childhood. One where my father was a pleasing, supportive presence instead of a dark shadow whose wrath I had to fear.

I think about how nice it would be to work on a car or talk about football or discuss dating with my dad. How it would be to get a hug on my birthday, and to hear the words, “I love you, Son.” Words I’d never heard spoken by my father.

I finish the dirty job just after midnight, and I creep back into the house. My mother’s habit was to lock herself in her office-turned-bedroom after dinner because that was when my father hit the bottle hardest. A wrong word could send him spiraling out of control.

So I’m not surprised to find the house quiet, my mother none the wiser.

I pack up my bicycle in my father’s pickup truck and drive to a Walmart about five miles away. I park the truck, leaving the keys in and the doors unlocked, hoping someone will steal it. I ride home, focusing on the expanding feeling of freedom in my stomach. A burden has been lifted.

I finally get to bed around three in the morning. My conscience is clear, and I fall asleep with no trouble, Cooper curled up on the floor next to my bed.

A rumbling sound wakes me. It’s still dark outside, and it takes me a moment to realize that the rumbling is Cooper growling. I click on my small bedside lamp and see Cooper, his head down and the fur on his back bristling. He’s looking at my bedroom door, which opens slowly, silently.

My father steps into the room, coated in clumps of wet dirt and drying blood. I can see the wound in his neck clearly, but his eyes are shadowed as he steps closer. Cooper backs up whimpering. I sit up, sure I’m having a vivid nightmare.

He lunges for me. As his cold hands wrap around my throat, I look into his eyes. In them, I see hell.

“I love you, Son,” my father says, choking the life out of me.

And the worst part is, I know he means it.

***

That’s it for this volume, but keep reading if you want a sneak peek at Volume 2. But first, if you liked The Devil’s Playground, Volume 1, please take a moment to leave a review. Honest reviews really do help a lot, so a minute or two of your time would be a big help!

***

Short stories can be rewarding, but sometimes you just need to dig your teeth into the flesh of a novel. Check out the zombie apocalypse book that one reader called “A work of genius.” Undead Annihilation is a zombie apocalypse novel — with vampires. I like to describe it as Zombieland meets What We Do In The Shadows, but with more gore. Check it out on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited!

A Peek at Volume 2

The gate rolls shut behind me with a clatter. I take a moment to turn around and flip the guards the bird as they head back into the prison.

“Screw you!” I scream.

One of the guards, Shillard, stops and turns to look at me. He smiles from the other side of two razor-wire-topped fences. “See you again soon, Penzance!” he shouts. “We’ll be right here waiting.”

I flip him off again and shake my head. I’m never coming back. Never. But I don’t tell him that. Just in case.

Turning to face the parking lot again, I scan the cars for a familiar Buick.

She said she’d be here.

I allow myself to feel some kind of relief that she’s not here to greet me. Maybe she’s gone for good. Maybe she’s taken up with some other ex-con. Maybe she’s forgotten about me in the month since I talked to her. Hell, maybe she’s fucking dead.

A guy can hope.

It was the middle of a sweltering summer when I got my ass tossed into this prison. Now it’s a bitter January day, and I have no warm clothes. I’m wearing a pair of black jeans with holes in the knees, my Red Wing work boots, and a thin Hawaiian shirt.

I hug myself and look out past the parking lot at the road lined with barren trees. A crow perches on a branch across the street, cawing sporadically. Patches of dirty snow sit in divots and around tree trunks amid the rugged brown grasses that struggle to survive in the frigid temperatures.

My breath comes out as vapor, and I feel the residual warmth from inside the prison whisking away in the wind. The gray sky presses down close, as if trying to suffocate the land. It gives me more than a little claustrophobic anxiety. Which is funny, considering I’ve just been living in a tiny cell. Familiarity breeds contempt, I guess. And I’m not familiar with wide-open spaces and horizons stretching out before me. Not anymore.

I look at the ground and turn my mind to other things. There’s seventy-six dollars in my wallet, which means there’s seventy-six dollars to my name.

Stamping my feet as I head out to the road does little to warm me up. I walk about a hundred yards before I see the sign for the bus stop.

I think of all I’m going to do when I get back to town. First, I’m gonna buy me a couple of McDonald’s burgers. Then, I’m gonna buy me a pint of whisky. And a motel room, all to myself.

Then what the hell am I gonna do? I’ll be out of money.

I shake my head, telling myself to leave tomorrow for tomorrow.

Motion catches my eye, and I turn away from the road to see a rabbit twitching in the ditch. It’s a little cottontail rabbit, and it looks like it’s been clipped by a car. Its right leg looks to be broken.

The cry of a far-off bird puts me on edge, and I move in to swoop up the little rabbit before a raptor can come get it. The poor little guy’s barely bigger than my hand, and he’s truly terrified.

“I’m not the guy for you,” I say to the rabbit, his wide black eyes staring up at me in terror. “No. I don’t think so. I can’t. I’m not the one.”

The rabbit doesn’t seem to understand. So I run back to the prison gate, cradling the furry creature against my chest as I move. I bang on the gate and yell.

“Open up! I got a rabbit. I can’t take it with me. Please, come take this rabbit!”

There’s no answer for a long time. Then a voice comes blasting out of a loudspeaker, telling me to back away from the gate or they’ll call the police.

I flip them the bird one last time for good measure.

“You didn’t want to go in there, anyway,” I say to the rabbit as I hurry away from the gate. “Bunch of bastards in there. Believe me. I was one of them.”

Unsure what else to do, I head back to the bus stop. I’ve just added “Locate a veterinarian” to my list of things to do when I get to town. Then I’ll get the McDonalds and the whiskey and the motel room.

I hold the rabbit to my stomach as I wait for the bus. So far, life on the outside is just as shit as it was on the inside.

I suffer through several more frigid minutes before the bus comes around the bend on the two-lane road, chugging along with a cloud of vapor behind it. The vehicle comes to a loud halt, the hiss of hydraulics working as it lowers to let me on. The driver, a large woman in an unflattering blue uniform, looks at the rabbit like it’s growing out of me. “No animals on the bus,” she says.

“Come on,” I say. “Look at him. His leg’s all busted up. I just want to find him a vet. He won’t be any trouble. I swear.”

I can see the woman’s defenses break down as she looks at the little bundle of fur. “Fine,” she says. “It’s three bucks for a single trip and five for a transfer.”

I pay the five and get a flimsy bus card in return. The ragged few already on the bus glance from me to the prison and back again. They know I’m a criminal, freed on the world like a plague accidentally slipped from a lab on the bottom of someone’s shoe. They don’t seem to notice the rabbit. Maybe it’s a scene that doesn’t make sense to them. A hardened ex-con and a harmless little rabbit.

Whatever. I don’t care what they think.

At least it’s warm on the bus.

I sit as the vehicle pulls away from the stop.

We travel under watery gray skies, approaching the distant low buildings that denote the town’s outskirts. But before we get halfway there, a car pulls up alongside the bus in the wrong lane, swerving and honking.

“Oh, Christ,” I whisper to myself, recognizing the car. It’s a boxy old Buick half eaten with rust. The paint that’s left is more gray than black. The wheels are all missing hubcaps, and the tires are all bald.

I hear the bus driver cursing, unsure what to do about the crazed motorist. She picks up her radio — probably to call the police — but I jump up and run to the front of the bus before she can get more than one word out.

“Wait!” I tell the driver. “I know her. She’s trying to make you stop for me. So just pull over and I’ll get off.” The rabbit moves against my stomach, squirming and twitching.

The driver looks at me for a moment before pulling over to the side of the road and yanking the door open. The Buick pulls diagonally ahead, blocking the bus’s path.

I pause and look out the windshield, dreading what’s waiting for me in that car.

“Well, go then!” the bus driver says.

I step off the bus, then turn around just as the driver’s about to close the doors. “Wait,” I say, holding up the bus pass. “Can I get my five dollars back?”

“No!” she yells, pulling the door shut, making me jump back out of the way.

I trudge to the Buick and open the passenger door, tossing myself gently onto the threadbare maroon upholstery so as not to jostle the rabbit too much. Missy Telard sits in the driver’s seat, grinning at me with her perfectly straight, tobacco-and-wine-stained teeth. She’s a skeletal figure, with skin so tight it seems like she’s made of clay. Her stringy blonde hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and her red lipstick stands out against her mottled white skin.

“Willie!” she says, reaching across with one hand to pull me into a kiss. Her mouth tastes like a strange combination of ashtray and gasoline. Her tongue is the rough texture of a cat’s as it reaches in and drags across mine.

The kiss lasts an eternity before the bus driver starts honking, and Missy pulls her lips away. “Fuck you!” she screams toward the bus, thrusting her left hand out the window in an obscene gesture. She then turns her attention to operating the vehicle, hitting the gas and causing my side of the car to drop down off the road as she rights the Buick and tears toward the town.

“You didn’t wait for me like I told you,” she says.

“You weren’t on time like I told you.”

“Oh, aren’t we a little testy today? What’s wrong? You miss your boyfriends?” Missy cackles even as she lights a cigarette.

I grumble, holding the rabbit against me with both hands again. I look down at it, wanting to voice some words of encouragement, but knowing that it would only draw Missy’s attention.

Cigarette in mouth, she reaches across the bench seat and digs the fingers of her right hand into my thigh. “Missed you, babe,” she says.

I look out the window. “You got any money?”

“‘Course I got some money. What you think I been doing out here while you abandoned me?”

At least it’s one of her good days, I think. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

“We need to find a vet,” I say.

“What, like a soldier? Why? You got something planned?”

“No, like an animal vet. A veterinarian.”

“What the hell for?” Missy says, pulling her hand away from me to take the cigarette from her lips. She swerves out around a farm truck, doing twenty over the speed limit.

“I found an injured rabbit,” I say, reaching back to pull on my seatbelt.

Missy’s head swivels toward me with the exact look on her face I didn’t want to see. It’s the kind of look I’ve come to associate with ruthlessness. The kind of look she uses to ferret out weakness and exploit it for all its worth. Her pupils seem to overtake her irises as she looks at the rabbit in my hands, noticing it for the first time.

Instinctively, I turn my body away from her, shielding the rabbit from her gaze.

“Later,” she says after a moment. “First, we’re gonna have some fun.”

***

Want to see how this story turns out? Grab The Devil’s Playground Vol. 2 on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited now!

Also By Matthew Doggett

The Undead Trilogy

A zombie apocalypse series with a dash of humor and a whole lot of blood. All three books are available on Amazon and free on Kindle Unlimited.

Praise for Undead Annihilation

“A ‘Must Read’ for end-of-the-world, we’re-all-gonna-die, zombie apocalypse story lovers!” -Reedsy Reviewer

“A work of genius. I’ve read hundreds of zombie books and this is now in my top 2.” -Amazon Reviewer

“This book is a MUST!”

“Not to be missed.”

“Undead Annihilation starts off fast and just keeps on going.”

***

Horror Short Story Collections

3 Volumes with 20 spine-tingling tales each. Available on Amazon.

***

Hole: A Small-Town Horror Novel

A teenage boy and his dog face a gruesome evil in this coming-of-age horror novel.

***

The Trouble Series – Gritty Action Thrillers You Can Read in Any Order

Too Much Trouble

When a robbery gone wrong lands him in the middle of a cartel war, Trouble starts running out of options fast. And when these operatives cross the line and go after Trouble’s friends, only death will stop him from righting the wrongs and making the cartels pay for what they’ve done. Available on Amazon and free on Kindle Unlimited.

The Death Dealers

When he prevents a murder, Trouble is thrown into a twisted conspiracy that points to the most dangerous gang in Los Angeles. Available on Amazon and free on Kindle Unlimited.

The Deadly Divine

Trouble’s a one-man wrecking crew. When he crosses paths with a charismatic lunatic, can he blow away the murderous brainwashing? Available on Amazon and free on Kindle Unlimited.

Dead Man’s Hatch

Trouble works alone, busting heads and bashing bullies. But when he joins a crew of trained professionals, he becomes a target in a deadly revenge plot. Available on Amazon and free on Kindle Unlimited.

Kill Squad

Trouble infiltrates a domestic terrorist ring, posing as a white supremacist. The clock is ticking as he races to thwart their plot to destroy America.

Trouble

When Trouble stands up for what’s right, he finds himself in the crosshairs of an insane small-town sheriff with one goal: kill Trouble. Available for free when you sign up for my email list at MatthewDoggettAuthor.com/Trouble

Table of Contents

- A Note From the Author
- Get a Free Horror Novella
- 1. The Devil’s Playground
- 2. Born Again for Death
- 3. Terrors of the Salton Sea
- 4. Earn Your Money
- 5. Killer Clown Crooks
- 6. I Think my Neighbor is a Serial Killer
- 7. If You’re Going to Do a Job, Do it Right
- 8. Have You Seen Yourself?
- 9. Normal Everyday Killers
- 10. A Terrifying Secret
- 11. The Sinkhole
- 12. Dead All Day
- 13. Cheating Death
- 14. The Greater Good
- 15. Never Take Drinks From Strangers
- 16. Escaping the Loop
- 17. The Suicide Cave

- 18. Never Prank Someone Through the Dark Web

- 19. The Game Bug
- 20. Patricide
- A Peek at Volume 2
- Also By Matthew Doggett