Dear Tragedy: A Dark Supernatural Thriller (House of Sand Book 2)

by Michael J Sanford

  Another explosion, this one far closer, sounded. It was followed by shouted commands and the slap of combat boots. Jake had only a few moments.

  Dani flinched and dropped her head.

  “I know you’re in there, Dani,” Jake said. “Look at me. Listen to my voice. Dani, please.”

  Dani said something, but it was too soft to hear.

  “Dani?” Jake asked.

  “I… I can’t,” Dani said.

  Jake stepped toward her and knelt. He lowered the shotgun to the floor and tried to catch Dani’s gaze. She looked up with two lines of tears carved into the blood on her face.

  “Baby, it’s okay, I’m here.”

  Dani took a slow step toward Jake. “It hurts,” she said.

  Jake extended his arms. Reluctantly, Dani stepped into them. He embraced her fiercely. “I got you now,” he said. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  Dani rested her head against his shoulder, filling him with warmth. “It’s we,” she said.

  “What’s we, baby?” Jake asked, squeezing her tightly enough to make the rest of his world fade away.

  DS Grimly shouted something, but it didn’t matter. Jake had what he came for.

  And like a wave crashing over a sandcastle, it all washed away, crumbling to pieces as a spark of white-hot pain lanced his lower back. His body wanted to fall, but Dani held him tight, lips pressed to his ear.

  “I’ve been trying to tell you the whole time. It’s we, Daddy,” she said. “We are Tragedy.”

  She let him go then and he fell onto his side. DS Grimly shouted again, but so too did other voices he didn’t recognize. They dragged DS Grimly’s voice away. He was left looking up at Dani’s blood-stained face, split in a wide grin, and Aza’s as well. Aza leaned forward and showed him the tip of a blood-drenched knife. It dripped onto his cheeks. Drip, drip, drip. His own blood spilling.

  “It was never about me,” Aza said.

  “It was never about me,” Dani said.

  And together, they said, “And it was never about you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Time Unknown

  Jake reached up a hand toward Dani, with tears in his eyes, and blood pulsing from his severed spine. As his fingers touched Dani’s chin, her face dissipated like smoke. Jake recoiled and shifted his attention to Aza, who still stared down at him, grinning.

  “Where’s Dani?” Jake asked. If he was still alive, he still had a mission to complete.

  “Shh,” Aza said, holding a finger to her lips.

  “You bitch!” Jake shouted.

  He could no longer feel his legs, but he lunged for Aza as best as he could. He clawed at her face, but it vanished like a passing fog, leaving him breathless and alone, face down against a bloodstained floor. He sputtered in what must have been his own blood for a few moments until he thought he could move again. His legs still wouldn’t budge, but using his elbows and hands, Jake spun around to face the open door of room 13.

  A mass of black-uniformed soldiers looked at him from behind bulletproof masks, but the longer Jake stared, the less solid they became. After a pair of panicked breaths, the soldiers were gone altogether.

  “It’s not real,” Jake said, looking down at his own hands in horror, expecting them to vanish as well.

  Someone groaned from the opposite side of the single hospital bed. It was enough to get Jake moving again. Dragging his lifeless legs behind him, Jake crawled toward the sound. On the floor, bent awkwardly into the corner, was DS Grimly. Her face was smashed and bloody. Her swollen eyes fluttered for a moment and then closed again.

  Jake pulled at her body, dragging both of them towards each other. He laid an ear across her face and fumbled to find a pulse at her neck. She was still breathing. Her heart was still beating.

  “Bekah?” Jake asked.

  She didn’t stir. Jake prodded her face, pulled on her uniform, and tugged on one of her hands. She felt real enough. Solid and warm. But he couldn’t trust it.

  How many lies had he lived through? How many things were nothing more than the infectious insanity of Aza? He should have expected it, realized it, planned for it. He had only his own hubris to blame, thinking himself stronger than Aza’s father. Thinking himself stronger than her.

  Jake rolled away from DS Grimly and propped himself into a sitting position against the bed. Reaching behind himself, he found his lower back sticky with blood. On the floor next to him was DS Grimly’s switchblade. It, too, was coated in blood. Jake picked it up and poked at his thigh with it. Nothing. He jabbed at the other leg. Nothing.

  “Fuck me,” Jake said.

  Drip, drip, drip, answered the darkness.

  Jake grabbed at his ears and lost his balance, falling sideways back onto the floor. There, he braced against the echoing drips and drops, eyes staring out the open door, along the floor.

  After a moment, the sounds stopped and Jake saw something he hadn’t seen before. Footprints. But not impossible-to-exist flaming footprints. Small, barefoot prints of blood, leading out of room 13.

  Jake couldn’t be sure how much of the last couple of days was delusion. He couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a Federation Response Team waiting to raid the hospital. All he could be sure of was that he was still alive. Death, he figured, wouldn’t be as maddening.

  So he crawled. The blood on his hands was tacky and enhanced his grip on the tile floor as he pulled himself after the small set of footprints. The hallway was still and half-lit, the few functioning lights flickering like they could go out at any minute. But Jake was focused on the footprints, staying close enough that he smudged more than a few with his body as he dragged himself along. His arms burned, his head was pounding, and he still couldn’t feel his legs. But none of that mattered.

  The footprints led to an elevator. There, blood had pooled just enough to tell Jake that the body it belonged to had waited for the elevator. Jake reached up and slapped at the button, ignoring the fact that the elevators shouldn’t have been working amid the hospital shutdown. But, then again, he could have imagined that, too.

  Inside the elevator was more blood, smeared on the floors and walls. Not enough to suggest a body, but more than was healthy. He should know. Looking behind, Jake saw he had left quite the swatch of red down the middle of the hallway. A red carpet to his main event.

  With a roll, Jake got into the elevator before the doors closed. It was still and silent. It couldn’t have been less reassuring.

  Luckily, there was a smudge of fresh blood on the button for the 6th floor. With an awkward lunge and slap, Jake hit the button and sent the elevator slowly plummeting. A proper plummet would have been faster. Instead, Jake was faced with doing nothing as the elevator dinged at each floor. He tried to make a quick assessment of his injuries. A stab wound in his lower back and a gash along his right forearm. He’d bled plenty, but he couldn’t tell how much. He was lightheaded to be sure, but he had been for what felt like forever. And with the new coat of blood in the elevator, he couldn’t separate his own gore from that of his prey.

  Ding.

  The sixth floor.

  Jake scrambled out into the hallway, immediately picking up the set of footprints. The air smelled of blood and must, shit and smoke. Jake could taste it, growing stronger the further he crawled. He could have called out. He could have quit. He could have simply died if he’d had the mind to. But he did none of those things, much as he wanted to. Instead, he kept his eyes glued to the footprints, pulling himself along with the desperation of man that just wanted to reach the end. Any end.

  The footprints passed through a set of security doors, propped open by a pair of blue and yellow sneakers. Jake had bought them for Dani at the beginning of the summer. It had gotten a passing smile from her, making it worth every dime. Jake stopped long enough to dip into the memory, but not long enough to fall.

  After another short crawl, Jake passed by an empty waiting room, full of uncomfortable and horribly upholstered furniture. He recogn
ized it, having fallen asleep in the corner chair some nights ago. The time of it was all fuzzy, but he knew where he’d been led. And now, footprints or not, Jake knew where he was going.

  Drip.

  A single drop of unseen blood—for what else could it be?—increased Jake’s pace.

  At the nurse’s station was a body, cut to ribbons, missing a head. Jake looked only enough to be certain it wasn’t anyone he knew. Any other time in his life, it would have elicited a stronger, more caring response. Some combination of old age and having his family stalked by a supernatural monster had shifted Jake’s priorities.

  Jake ignored the bloody footprints as he crawled straight for Peter’s hospital room. It was the last room on the last hallway, closest to the operating room. The door to the operating room was held open by a corpse. Unrecognizable. Another body lay slung over the operating room table, dripping blood onto the floor. Jake didn’t even look, knowing it wasn’t what he sought. Death was everywhere. He wanted something more.

  The echoes of dripping blood followed Jake until he had dragged his mangled body to the door of room 66. Blood was smeared on the handle. Jake added his own as he grabbed it and awkwardly fell into the room. He landed on his side, half in the room, door resting against his chest.

  It was all Jake could do to roll, look up, and say, “Dani.”

  Dani, who was sitting on a tall-backed chair, looked down and smiled. “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

  Jake reached for, but she was too far away. He pushed at the floor but slipped in a shallow pool of blood and hit his chin on the tile floor. Dani laughed.

  “Clumsy one, ain’t ya?” Dani asked.

  Jake remembered the bloody footprints. He remembered the muzzle flash as Jaina had shot his daughter in the foot. “Dani, are you hurt?”

  Dani scrunched up her face. “Hurt? I’m perfect. No, better than perfect.”

  “But Jaina…”

  “Shot me in the foot, you turd,” Aza’s voice said from behind him.

  Jake contorted and spun around. Aza was sitting cross-legged on a matching chair to Dani’s, on the opposite side of the lone hospital bed. Aza stuck a bare foot out toward him. It was painted completely red and dripped blood, strangely silent for how loud it had been prior. Jake shook his head. It wasn’t right.

  “Don’t be…such bitches…girls,” a ragged voice said from the bed. “Help him…up.”

  “Fine,” Dani and Aza said in such perfect unison that Jake felt nauseous.

  Too weak to fight and too stunned to speak, Jake did nothing as Dani and Aza seized hold of his arms and dragged him into the room. The door slammed shut as his legs cleared the opening. It jolted Jake enough that he helped the girls get him into a third high-backed chair, seated closest to the hospital bed, next to Dani’s.

  After a fair amount of cursing and grunting from all parties, Jake found himself mostly upright, legs cocked lifeless at what would have been painful positions if he could feel them. Even with both hands gripping the armrests, he wouldn’t be able to stay in place for long.

  “Now I see why you’re such a giant,” Aza said as she hobbled back to her chair.

  “Oh, stuff it, pipsqueak, my mom’s big too,” Dani said.

  Jake hardly heard the banter. It should have electrified him to be seated next to his daughter in the same room as Aza, but he couldn’t tear his eyes from Peter.

  “Not much of a…looker anymore, am I?” Peter asked.

  Peter was positioned on his back, and remained stock-still as he spoke to the ceiling. Only his eyes moved, looking in Jake’s general direction. The majority of his body was a mix of gauze and braces. Cloth and plastic. Aluminum and blood. The small bits of visible skin on Peter’s face were puckered and oozing. Jake could smell fire and taste hot metal in the air.

  “Peter?” Jake asked. He’d never gotten around to seeing his son after he’d gotten out of surgery. They hadn’t let him in. And then Aza had gotten her claws into Jake and he hadn’t seen straight since.

  “In a matter of…speaking,” Peter said.

  “What do—” Jake stopped as a flicker of dark movement in the corner of his eyes broke his trance.

  It hung around the headboard, too black to be called black and too endless to be quantified. Dark and twisting, the thing moved around Peter. Bits of it lapped at his exposed flesh, though the more directly at it that Jake looked, the less he saw.

  “You’re not my son,” Jake said.

  Peter sucked in a deep breath past charred lips. “No,” he said.

  “And you’re not my daughter,” Jake said, turning to face Dani.

  Dani bolted out of her chair and slapped Jake nearly hard enough to knock him from his chair. She then stomped around the bed and alighted on the armrest of Aza’s chair.

  “You are so selfish,” Dani said.

  Jake ignored the comment and narrowed his eyes on Aza. “You did this. Whatever it is.”

  Aza cocked her head to the side but said nothing.

  “I am your daughter,” Dani said. “Though I wish I wasn’t.”

  Jake shook his head. “No, you’re confused. Aza has you confused. She…gets in your head and scrambles your mind. Makes you do things you don’t want to do. Makes things that aren’t real seem real.”

  “Turns lies into truth?” Peter asked.

  Jake stared straight into Aza’s eyes. If she wanted to control him, let her try. “Let my family go.”

  “Let them go from…what?” Peter asked. “Aza and Dani are as they are. What you’re getting from them may be an amplified and unencumbered version, but it’s still them. Their words. Their actions. Their desires.”

  “And what?” Jake said, still watching Aza. She was at the center of it all. “You’re just Peter, amplified and unencumbered?”

  Peter made a gasping sound that could have been laughter or death, Jake couldn’t tell. “No, Peter is different,” Peter said. “He wants nothing more than to die, filled with such anger, resentment, and sorrow. Pain, too, of course. That’s the best part. Twists his soul in agony, but for me…well, it’s almost orgasmic, if it could be such a thing.”

  Jake leaned back and wrested his eyes off Aza. Maybe he had been wrong. He looked at the shell of his son, wholly unrecognizable in every manner. The mix of burned flesh and astringent in the air burned Jake’s nostrils, but might have been the only thing keeping him conscious. “So, it’s you,” Jake said. “Tragedy.”

  Peter smacked what remained of his lips. “As much as I can be a you, I suppose you’re right.”

  “Why?” Jake asked.

  “That is a question without an answer,” Peter said.

  “Sometimes bad things just happen,” Aza said.

  “And some people are just born broken,” Dani said.

  Jake shook his head and scratched at his ear. “You’re still inside my head.”

  “Oh, come now, Jakey,” Peter said. “I’ve never made anyone do anything they didn’t want to do. I can’t break free will. That’s God-given. Isn’t that right, girls?”

  Dani nodded emphatically. Aza smiled and crossed her arms.

  “Can I be blamed if the greatest desires of man are of violence and pain?” Peter asked.

  “It helps us get what we want!” Dani shouted. “Aza got rid of her parents, I got revenge on Peter. And you. It feels so good to be powerful!”

  “You don’t mean that,” Jake said. “Dani, you have to fight it. Please, be strong.”

  “I am strong,” Dani said. “And Peter’s right. I pushed him because I wanted to. The thing only helped.”

  Jake shook his head, displacing tears that he hadn’t known were welling in his eyes.

  Dani sneered. “I’m glad I did it. You always liked Peter more than me. I’m your kid, too! You were always with him. And Peter! I told him things that were just between us, but he’d come running to you. I guess Peter liked you more than me, too.”

  “That’s not true,” Jake said. He wanted nothing more than to wrap
Dani up in an embrace, even if it wouldn’t change anything.

  “You hunted my family like some wild animal,” Aza said, leaning forward over her still-bleeding foot. “And when they were dead, you stalked me! What kind of pervert are you? I knew you were watching the whole time. Your friend, Jaina, told me.”

  Jake faltered and almost fell out of his chair, forgetting he had no control over his lower body. He tried to speak, but found the words gone. In the face of pure evil, what good were words?

  “She was the easiest to crack,” Aza said. “She hated being used by you, you selfish prick. Her words, not mine.”

  As Aza spoke, movement in the corner of the room caught Jake’s eye. Jaina was leaning in the corner, eyes directed at Jake. She said nothing.

  Jake pounded against the side of his head.

  “For what’s it’s worth, you’re the strongest of them all,” Peter said. “If not for your own proclivity toward delusion and obsession, I might not have gotten any reaction out of you at all.”

  Jaina reached behind her back and pulled out a pistol.

  Jake pointed at her and looked back at Peter. “This isn’t real. You’re in my head. And I want you out!”

  Something heavy hit Jake in the chest and dropped into his lap. Reaching down, he felt the cold embrace of polished steel. He looked at the corner. Jaina was gone, but the pistol she had produced was in his hand now. Out of habit, he ejected the magazine. It was empty.

  “Just one in the chamber, it seems,” Peter said. “Always one for the dramatic.”

  Jake pointed the pistol at Peter.

  “The only thing tying your son to this world is me,” Peter said.

  “It would be a mercy, then,” Jake said. It was stupid how much confidence he stole from holding a pistol.

  Somewhere nearby, Jake heard the unmistakable snap of gunfire.

  “Tick, tick, tick,” Aza said.

  Dani laughed. “I don’t get it, but it’s funny.”

  Jake turned the pistol on Aza. It’d been his initial goal, after all, and he’d learned to never doubt his gut. “It started with you,” Jake said. “You’re ground zero for whatever freak show this is.”