These Unquiet Bones

by Dean Harrison

  Ah, my favorite tool of the trade.

  He picked it up, inspected the blade, and recognized it as the one he used to skin that fat piggy boy a few nights ago. He never forgot a knife.

  He remembered how the boy squealed as he peeled the flesh from his bones like bacon, and cooked the strips in a roaring fire. He remembered how he tasted, that fat piggy boy.

  Very porky.

  But Zero wasn’t hungry. He just wanted to have a little fun.

  Gripping the knife, Zero stepped around to the driver side of the Mercedes Benz the Pathfinder had rear-ended and peeked at the dead girl inside.

  Looks like she would’ve been fun to play with. A pity she’s already dead.

  He turned away and scanned his surroundings.

  In the not-too-far distance, a scarecrow of a man held a knife up to the throat of a naked girl bound to a tree.

  That game looks exciting.

  Zero wondered if the scarecrow man was the person who stabbed him.

  He decided to go tap his shoulder and ask.

  Chapter 92

  Before Adam could slice the thirsty blade across Eve’s throat, the sound of a snapped twig caused him to perk up his ears.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  Adam whipped around and beheld that meddling teenage boy he’d stabbed in the stomach. Oddly, the kid walked casually over to him as if nothing unusual were happening.

  There was something else wrong with him. There was something strange about his eyes and the way he grinned as he pointed to the bloody hole in his shirt.

  “Is this your handiwork?”

  Furious at this second inconvenient interruption, Adam turned away from Eve and snarled, “Yes. I’ll be sure to finish the job this time.”

  Chapter 93

  When the scarecrow man advanced on him, Zero’s grin widened. He revealed the knife hidden behind his back.

  “Bring it,” he said, welcoming battle.

  Chapter 94

  Amy— what was left of her— watched in a trance-like state of confusion as Ned and someone who looked like Layne went at each other like two dogs fighting over a chunk raw of meat.

  Ned lunged for Layne like a jungle cat, knife raised. But with an eerie smile and gleaming eyes Layne sunk his own knife deep into Ned’s stomach.

  A holler of agony escaped Ned’s throat. Amy felt a little satisfaction at hearing the pain in his cry. His knife fell from his hand. He folded over.

  Bringing Ned to the ground, Layne tore into him with his blade, stabbing him again and again with a ravenous zeal that Amy had never seen in him before.

  “The scarecrow man bleeds,” he said, cackling like a hyena as blood splattered his lunatic’s mask. “My how he bleeds!”

  Her best-friend had gone insane. Amy couldn’t believe what she was witnessing.

  Layne plunged the knife into Ned’s chest, right into his heart. He looked like a kid at an amusement park. The violence clearly entertained him. But it chilled Amy, watching him twist the blade and bask in the shower blood.

  With a depraved smile, Layne wrenched out the knife and stood up from the carnage. he howled in triumph. It was an inhuman sound. Amy felt her skin prickle, her heart sink.

  Still gripping the gore-laced knife, Layne glared at Amy, his sinister smile only growing in wickedness.

  “Layne,” Amy moaned, not understanding. “Please… h-help me.”

  “I’ll help ya baby,” Layne said in a voice not his own. “I’ll help you in ways that make ya go ‘oh, oh, oh.’”

  He stepped toward her. “And then, I’ll open ya up and watch ya bleed.”

  Chapter 95

  Zero licked the blood and gore clean from the silver blade and approached the girl tied to the tree.

  “Please,” she said again. “Layne.”

  “I’m not Layne, sweetie-pie,” he said. “I’m your lover man.” He raised his knife. “You’re gonna love my steely dick up your cunt.” He indicated his crotch. “Gonna love both of them.”

  With the knife, he sawed through the rope binding her to the tree. “But let’s get you off of here, shall we. It isn’t fun like this. You can’t fight back. It isn’t fair. I always give my prey a fighting chance.”

  When Zero freed her, she collapsed to the ground, weeping.

  “Oh, how unfortunate,” he said with a shake of his head and a click of his tongue. “You’re making this game so one-sided.”

  “P-please, Layne,” the girl whimpered, curling into a fetal position. “Don’t hurt me. I l-love you.”

  Zero suddenly felt a wave of weariness crash into him. The knife fight might have used all the energy he had left. He was, after all, bleeding to death. He only had so much will-power, and he felt something pulling him down. Some force deep down within him, a force that contradicted his own nature.

  A force of good? How can that be?

  “Who is this Layne?” Zero asked himself, swaying weak-kneed over his fallen prey. “And why won’t he let me have my fun?” He raised his knife. “Well, I’ll just take him to hell with me. Let’s finish this dance.”

  Chapter 96

  Patrick was the first at the scene in the woods. When he climbed out of his unmarked cruiser, he spotted three things.

  First, a Nissan Pathfinder smashed into a Mercedes Benz. The girl behind the wheel of the Benz was dead.

  Second, a man lying dead in a patch of bloodstained grass and forest refuse. From where Patrick was standing, it looked like the deceased had been torn apart by a wild animal.

  And third, a deranged-looking kid with a bad looking stab wound. He stood over a naked girl who looked like she had been put through the wringer.

  Of course, Patrick knew who she was, and he knew he was partly responsible for getting her in this mess. If he hadn’t given that case file to Richard Barrett, this might not be happening.

  He pulled out his service revolver and hoped this would make up for not only betraying his ethics, but for letting an innocent girl— Ellen’s girl— get hurt by his long-held grudge.

  Chapter 97

  A loud firecracker pop resounded in the woods, disturbing the small creatures nestled in the treetops above.

  Zero felt his shoulder explode in a burst of white-hot agony. He screamed.

  Who brought a gun to a knife fight?

  Cringing in pain, he dropped the knife, clutched his wound, and collapsed on the girl he’d planned to carve like a jack-o-lantern.

  “No fair,” he groaned, closing his eyes. “No fair.”

  Epilogue

  Them Bones Move On

  Several months later…

  Gray clouds gathered in the sky. They cast grim shadows over the solemn headstones, statues and mausoleums scattered around the cemetery.

  Crouching down with a bouquet of roses, Hank caressed the tombstone marking his loved one’s final resting place. He laid the roses down.

  Rising, he slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans and locked his eyes on the words engraved in the stone.

  Beloved Wife. Beloved Mother.

  The word beloved, he felt, should be substituted with the word betrayed, for that’s how it turned out in the end.

  Ellen Barrett Snow had been betrayed by her husband, a man who once promised to love and protect her as long as they both should live.

  He did neither.

  He abused her. He treated her like dirt. And he did the same to their daughter.

  He always tried to make things right but failed her again and again.

  Richard Barrett had been right about one thing: Ellen had deserved better than him.

  And so did his daughter.

  After the events of last October, Amy spent far too much time locked in her bedroom. The trauma she had sustained was critical. She had more nightmares and crying spells than ever before. He had no choice but to send her back to see her old therapist, Dr. Rachel Massie.

  It helped a little. Once spring came around, Amy slowly started to show signs of her old, extrover
ted self. For that Hank was thankful.

  He didn’t want her to become like him. He sought solitude and booze as a means of escape. Thankfully, Amy was beginning to find a method of her own that wasn’t as self-destructive. It still worried him though. While he enjoyed listening to the music she played in her room, and felt good knowing she was home and safe, she didn’t need to isolate herself as he had. After all, she was her mother’s child. She wasn’t meant for captivity.

  Even though she’d finally started to come around, she still didn’t socialize with her friends as much as she used to. Especially since the two she cared for most had died that horrific Halloween night.

  Hank was there at the county morgue when the sheets were pulled over the bodies of Catherine Adair and Layne Hardy. He was relieved, of course, that Amy wasn’t among them.

  Afterward, he joined Joe MacCallum and Patrick Keene in another room to see what remained of his long, lost nephew. Hank was stunned to see how much Ned looked like Hannah. Anything he inherited from Bubba Ray Busby was clearly psychological. But he didn’t care to mourn his death. He did, however, mourn the fact that he lived, and was given the opportunity to wreak hell on his daughter’s innocence

  After what Ned did to her that night, the doctors didn’t think Amy would be able to have children of her own.

  That fact really took a toll on Hank. Not only did he fail to save his daughter from the gnarled and ugly limbs of his twisted family tree, but he lost the chance of having any potential grandchildren as well.

  Police confirmed later that Ned was responsible for the deaths of Amber Frey, Laura Sullivan, and Richard Barrett.

  Jessica Lewis, they later found out, had eloped to Las Vegas with a boyfriend who was twice her age. Case closed on that disappearance.

  What happened to Bubba Ray Busby was still a mystery, as was the life story of his son.

  The expired licence in Ned’s wallet turned out to be a fake. And his fingerprints showed up in no local, state, or federal databases.

  “How is that possible?” Hank had asked.

  “Boy probably stayed out of trouble,” Joe suggested. “They both probably did. Hell, they probably even went under different names, stayed under the radar of law enforcement, and lived like hermits.”

  Out of sight from society, and in the wild.

  A few things bothered Hank, one being the fact that he might’ve murdered an innocent man— Steve Goodwin might actually have had nothing to do with Ellen’s death.

  Another question that he couldn’t get out of his mind: if Bubba Ray Busby had killed his wife, how did he find them? How did he even know about Amy? And what were they doing during the years following Ellen’s murder? Bidding their time for the right moment to strike again?

  There were so many unanswered questions when it came to the Busbys. He just hoped that Bubba really was dead.

  And that it all truly was over.

  Hank was shocked to learn about Layne’s so-called dual-personality disorder. He was shocked by a lot of things he learned about that boy.

  After raping a girl from a private school he had attended in Mobile, he received a slap on the wrist by a friendly judge. He was given probation, and transferred to Pine Run High where nobody knew him or what he had done.

  When Amy found out, however, she simply said, “It explains a lot.” She said no more about what happened that night, but he could see it haunted her, and probably would for years to come.

  Frank Hardy went out of his mind after finding the bodies of his wife and daughter stuffed like dead fish in the garage freezer. He rightfully assumed it to be the work of his son’s second personality, a demented lunatic named Zero.

  Hank still found that concept hard to get his mind around. But Amy was oddly quick to accept and forgive it.

  “Layne never would’ve done a thing to hurt me,” she told him. “It’s not in his nature. That’s why I love him.”

  Those words struck a blow to his heart, even though it wasn’t her intention to slap him with the fact that her own father would hurt her before someone with a Jekyll and Hyde personality.

  Hank hardly left Amy’s side during her stay at the hospital. He also never forgave himself for what happened to her. Amy repeatedly asked him to forgive himself, but he couldn’t.

  Guilt and regret was a part of him, like drinking.

  Some demons you just couldn’t slay no matter how many times you stabbed them through the heart.

  He fell off the wagon shortly after he hopped aboard, but made sure Amy never found out. It was hard to hide it from her. Sometimes he worried that she already knew and played dumb with the hopes that he would come clean. But he never would. And just as he did with his wife, he would betray his daughter.

  I’m sorry.

  No amount of whiskey could drown his sorrow. Perhaps he would get back on the wagon. Perhaps he’d finally take Joe’s advice and join a program. Maybe it would be for the best.

  Hank checked his watch and glanced across the cemetery to where Amy stood— over the grave marker of her friend, Layne. The late spring air wafted through her hair as she paid her respects, which she did at least once a month. Hank wondered if she’d ever move on.

  Hank sighed and glanced toward the looming structure of St. Michael’s church. He hadn’t been there since his wife’s funeral. Maybe he could pay it a visit, kneel down and pray for forgiveness to the God he turned his back on.

  Could there be redemption for a man like him?

  Hank doubted. His list of sins was so long that any priest in a confessional would tell him there was no hope. That he was damned.

  He continued hearing that voice in his head telling him that true redemption began with self- forgiveness and letting go of all the burdens that held him down. Sometimes the voice sounded like his wife’s, sometimes his daughter, but the message was always the same. It repeated itself over and over like the Serenity pray.

  One day he might listen to it. One day he might step into that church and have a long overdue discussion with the God he hated, but maybe not.

  He distrusted organized religion. It was created by man, not God, and Hank knew all too well the fanatical lengths to which man could take religion.

  Making peace with a supposedly benevolent God would have to wait for later. Today was reserved for the only one left in the world who mattered to him, and she was leaving for college, leaving him alone in that house in Pine Run, leaving him to his ghosts.

  But I have to let her go.

  With one last goodbye to his beloved wife, Hank turned away from the tombstone and joined his daughter.

  I have to let her go free.

  One day later…

  Amy dropped the last box of her belongings on the floor and smiled at her father. “I believe we’re finished.”

  Hank looked around the small dorm room with a disapproving frown.

  The white cinderblock walls were grim and bare, the gray tile floor was dirty, the bed was nothing more than a Naugahyde cot. A bookcase crouched beneath the only window in the room.

  “You sure this is what you want?” He peered into the tiny bathroom. “Place is a prison cell. Wouldn’t you be happier at home? It’s only a forty-minute drive.”

  “It’s fine,” Amy said, wiping the sweat from her brow after thirty minutes of unloading the pickup truck in the August heat. “I’ll have plenty of time to fix it up. No worries.”

  With a heavy sigh of resignation, Hank dropped a hand on Amy’s head and raked his fingers through her hair. “All right, peanut,” he said. “House is gonna be pretty lonesome with you away.”

  “That’s why you have the dog,” Amy said, hugging her father tight. “Pistol Pete will keep you company.”

  “What kind of name is Pistol Pete for a bulldog?”

  “The kind I gave him.”

  Hank hugged Amy just as tight and released her. “Well, I’ll let you get settled in. I’m gonna head off for a bit.”

  Narrowing her eyes suspiciously, Am
y asked, “For what?”

  Taking hold of her chin, Hank tilted her head up, leaned in and kissed her on the lips. “Just have to run a few errands, and get you a few things for this place. That’s all.”

  “You’re about six months sober, Daddy,” Amy reminded him. “I’m proud of you. Don’t go slipping on me.”

  “You ain’t got to worry about that,” he assured her. “A promise is a promise. Be back later to take you to dinner. A’ight? Love ya.”

  ~

  Watching him depart, Amy felt skepticism tugging at her brain. What errands did he have to run in Mobile? Indeed he promised her that he’d lay off the booze, but—

  He wouldn’t. Not after everything that had happened. He swore he wouldn’t go back to that life. He promised me.

  But could she trust him? Could she ever again believe a word he said? He’d lied to her plenty in the past.

  I’ll have to learn to trust again. God give me strength.

  After he left, Amy unpacked the things she took from home and gradually she made the room look less like a prison cell. Once she got that portable fridge, everything would be perfect.

  It was going to be interesting, living on her own. She had the option of a roommate, but opted out. For the last year, she had grown accustomed to being by herself, and she enjoyed it.

  The solitude was comforting.

  After organizing her clothes in the dresser and closet, she found a corner to set up her keyboard. She opened more boxes filled with books, picture frames, and other personal things.

  The first frame held the picture of her and her mother that she had always kept on her bedside table at home. She put it on the corner of the bookcase nearest to her bed, and touched the heart-shaped locket that rested against her chest.

  She was thankful Patrick Keene, the sheriff investigator who saved her life, found it at the crime scene. She wanted to forever keep her mother’s memory something Ned Busby could never sully or take away, close to her heart.