The Scream Catcher

by Vincent Zandri

  “More eggs,” he gleams.

  Assembly Point Peninsula

  Thursday, 9:10 A.M.

  His second breakfast devoured, Jack retires to PS3-land.

  While electronic squirts, screams, and blasts filtering in from the game room, Jude pours himself a second cup of coffee. Steak knife in hand, he sits himself back down at the kitchen table. For a fleeting moment, he thinks seriously about taking the package outside, opening it up far away from the house. But then, that’s what the old, demon-tormented Jude Parish would have done.

  Lennox is dead.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.

  Slicing open the FedEx envelope, he pulls out the box. Just a small, nondescript gray cardboard box with no writing on it. Placing it in the palm of his hand, Jude bobs it up and down, getting a feel for its light, but somehow solid weight.

  He opens the box, a bit tentatively, peeks inside and using his fingers, pulls out its contents. He recognizes the little machine immediately. It’s a Game Boy Advance identical to the one his son plays whenever he isn’t preoccupied with his more elaborate television or computer video game systems.

  Jude thinks about how strange it is that someone should send him a hand-held gaming system. But then, as an author, he’s received more bizarre presents than this (once, a woman from San Francisco sent him a blow up doll with her name tattooed across its belly). Picking up the empty box, he holds it up to his face, searches inside for a note or an explanation of some kind. But, like the first time he checked, there’s nothing. Just the game and that’s all.

  Jude turns the translucent gray, plastic machine one way, then the other until he notices that a game has been preinstalled. Flipping the switch, the screen immediately begins to fill with electronic light, the word NINTENDO appearing in full 3D. The pleasant chime that follows indicates that the preinstalled game is now locked and loaded.

  Jude stares down at the screen, at the animated caricature of a muscular bald man dressed in a too-tight black T-shirt with the sleeves exploded off by fully flexed muscles. The muscle man character is holding a long, kind of black, futuristic pistol in his right hand. In the place of a gun barrel, however, mounted to the gun’s housing is a long shiny needle. He is raising the weapon up high, aiming it at the video game sky, revealing at the same time a black dragon tattoo planted on his right interior forearm.

  Maybe it’s the force of the instant recognition, but Jude’s head becomes a hive of buzzing adrenalin. He also discovers it’s not required of him to press any buttons or controls on the little machine. The game operates by itself in demonstration mode.

  A second character appears.

  Unlike the first one, this man character has short cropped, salt and pepper hair. He wears a white T-shirt and dark pants. The words SCREAM FOR ME suddenly flash across the narrow screen in big blood red letters.

  Level One begins with what obviously is the Jude Parish character standing all alone inside the dark interior of a split-level home. There is a stone vestibule, a living room, a dining room and a kitchen. Even a writing study. As the game proceeds, Jude Parish starts to run along the top floor hallway when suddenly the Black Dragon bursts forth from out of the shadows. Black Dragon raises up a fisted hand that contains an oversized needle and syringe. When he thrusts the needle into Jude’s chest, his eyes go wide and he lets out a scream.

  It’s Jude’s real voice.

  His actual recorded screaming voice.

  When the screams stop, Jude drops to the animated floor with a distinct dead-weight thud. A short melody of sappy descending chords plays while the words “Game Over” flash across the small screen.

  The real Jude Parish’s eyes are glued to the electronic screen.

  He doesn’t feel an ounce of pain.

  No shortness of breath. No dizziness.

  Instead, he begins to sense that he is living a dream. He knows for certain that he’s seated at the kitchen table. But at the same time, he swears he’s levitating off the plank floor. He swallows and stares at the game while it automatically forwards to Level Two.

  Now the setting changes to a dark, forested landscape. There is a jagged mountain on one side of the game screen and a cliff face on the other. A stream running heavy with whitewater cuts a jagged horizontal line across the middle connecting the two opposing parcels of landscape. The Jude character is running through the woods away from a Black Dragon who scores rapid hit points by shooting Jude with multi-colored pepper-balls from a pepper-ball launcher. The score tallies in the upper right hand corner of the screen while Jude runs past pits and traps, past safety clearings marked by yellow flags, past snakes that slither into view, exaggerated white fangs exposed. The gray rattlesnakes snap at Jude, manage to rob their occasional bit of flesh and, at the same time, increase the HP. It’s all too much for the Jude character as he suddenly drops into a whirlpool before being sucked down and spit out a culvert that empties itself off the cliff face.

  Jude screams and falls never-endingly into a black, bottomless abyss, the words “Game Over” once more appearing on the screen.

  Then begins Level Three.

  The setting is a wide open, interior elevation of a courthouse building; the bottom floor a parking garage that houses a van. The white van carries a homemade bomb or I.E.D. fabricated from the same stacked fertilizer and nitroglycerin charge as the real life explosive that took out the Warren County Courthouse. Inside the van, Jude is trying to free himself from his duct-taped bondage in order to diffuse the I.E.D. At the same time, a digital sequence of numbers counts down rapidly on the screen of a laptop computer. When the counter descends to zero, a spine tingling scream erupts only a split-second before an animated white-hot blast fills the screen. Once again comes that sad tune.

  Game Over!

  Heart pounding, breathing quick and shallow, the real Jude sets the Game Boy Advance back down onto the table. He recalls the FedEx package, the P.O. Box coming all the way from Paris; recalls the young FedEx man who stood outside the door of his house only moments ago; recalls the young man’s nice smile, dark mustache, and goatee. In his mind, Jude sees the man’s strong-shouldered build. He knows that Lennox can disguise himself to look like anyone. Because, after all, creating characters is a part of his M.O. as a video game designer. Jude also remembers something Agent Lino told him a little less than a month ago: that it was possible Lennox survived the fall from the courthouse’s eighth floor; that he might have managed to get away via the still erect and undamaged northeast portion of the courthouse; that in all the chaos and confusion, he might have gone unnoticed. And from there he might have hidden himself inside the forest, made his way up to Canada.

  Pulling himself up, Jude stuffs the crutches under his arms, stumbles his way out the front door across the porch floor, down the steps to the middle of the gravel drive. He directs his gaze towards the white L.G.P.D. Jeep Cherokee parked on the far side of the driveway by the stand of tall pine trees, the uniformed officer assigned the job of protecting his home seated behind the wheel. The uniformed cop seems to be steadfastly maintaining his position like not a thing is wrong, no amount of the property’s security breached.

  Without thinking, Jude makes a three-sixty on the hard-packed gravel.

  In his brain he’s screaming, Lennox, you stay away from here!

  But in reality, he’s making no noise whatsoever. Not so much as a faint whisper.

  He turns to his left, peers down past the grass towards the garden where Rosie’s been working and beyond that, the dock.

  Rosie isn’t there.

  At least, if she’s still there, he has no way of seeing her behind the two-bay garage. But out on the lake he spots a pleasure boat cruising past. Then another. Two matching red, green, and white Danzi power boats. From where Jude stands on the driveway he can make out the faces of the people riding in the boats. Kids, maybe nineteen or twenty, dressed in almost nothing, drinking beers, whooping it up. One of the kids he knows by name. Or by h
is handle anyway. He’s a tall, gaunt, bald-headed kid who on occasion secretly snitches for Mack. His name is Thoroughbred and the kid is glaring at the ex-cop through a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses.

  Jude shifts his gaze away from the lake, plants his eyes on the dark pine forest.

  “Lennox,” he whispers. But the effort feels like skin tearing off the roof of his mouth.

  The beast is nowhere in sight. There’s only the wind and the birds that fly from tree to tree and the living things that fill the dead silences of Assembly Point Road. But there is still an L.G.P.D. officer in charge of security.

  Jude goes to him.

  Not two feet separate the ex-cop from the open driver’s side window when he spots the arterial blood spatter that stains the windshield.

  Assembly Point Peninsula

  Thursday, 9:40 A.M.

  Jude hobbles, trips his way back across the drive towards the log home, his broken body throwing off an electric jolt of pain each time he pounds down on his right cast-protected leg.

  Making it up onto the porch, he barrels his way through the already open door. Having crossed over the vestibule, he makes his way down the short flight of stairs that leads into the game room.

  He spots Lennox immediately.

  The tight all black clothing he wore for the August 14/15 kill game has been replaced with the phony FedEx outfit. Lennox is standing in the middle of the narrow room, left arm wrapped around Jack’s neck while kneeling before him on the floor is Rosie, her head down as though staring at the floorboards, hands apparently bound behind her back. Neither Rosie nor Jack make a sound as Lennox presses the barrel of a silenced .22 Cal. up against the child’s right temple.

  From the open door of the game room, Jude stares into the face of the beast—the blue eyes now disguised with brown-tinted contact lenses, the now repaired broken front tooth, the thin tight lips. Jude knows then Lennox must have entered the room through the back, ground floor door; that he must have made his way around the back of the house, took hold of Rosie and simply let himself in.

  Jude shuffles three or four steps into the room, leans his broken body atop the crutches, attempts to locate a proper center of balance. Broadcast on the Plasma television mounted to the far wall is a paused PS3 game—a Karate man caught in midair, his two legs thrust out at his opponent: a black robed, sword-wielding Ninja warrior.

  Is Jude afraid?

  The fear does not disable him, more than he already is. But the demon is awake, and it’s poking at the walls of his stomach, just enough to let him know it’s still there. He thinks back on his cop training. He knows how to handle a hostage situation.

  Bait your enemy by inviting him to come at you. Immediately shift your body perpendicular to his own. Raise your right leg, side-kick the gunman’s right knee . . .

  It’s exactly the maneuver Jude might have applied on Oscar Burns all those years ago. It’s exactly the move he might pull on Lennox. But then, Jude is a physical train wreck. His leg is broken, his ribs cracked, his head still pounding from a concussion barely healed.

  Jude peers into his son’s brown eyes. Although the boy is positioned maybe ten feet away from his father, Jude can feel the boy’s fear. It enters Jude’s body, lodges itself up against the inside of his sternum, in the exact place where his own demon once festered.

  Slowly, he begins to lift his shoulders up off the two supporting crutches. He feels the pain shoot up from his leg like a jolt of white heat. His eyes locked on Rosie and Jack, he has no choice but to ignore it. Because at that moment, Lennox breaks into a smile, pulls an iPhone from his pocket, places it in front of Jack’s mouth while manually cocking the .22.

  “Scream. For. Me.” says the Beast.

  “Jack,” Jude shouts while swinging both arms out, flinging the aluminum crutches towards Lennox’s head . . . at the same instant a pistol shot rings out.

  The dime-sized hole instantly appears directly above the orange and black FedEx pocket logo. For a quiet, almost peaceful moment, Hector Lennox stands poised, perfectly still, the barrel of the silenced .22 cal. now aimed at the floor. The expression on his tight-jawed face is neither happy nor sad nor indifferent. The slight grin, the scrunched brow, the startled eyes suggest a kind of wonderment. As Jude balances himself on one good leg, he senses that Lennox has finally gotten something he’s wanted all along. Because his face screams, now I know what it’s like to die.

  Then, just as sudden and unexpected as the gunshot, the pistol comes loose from the fingers on his right hand, the iPhone from his left. Both the pistol and the phone drop to the floor. Knees give out from beneath his own deadweight. In that manner, Lennox falls flat on his face, left arm slapping the PS3 game controller on his way down causing the video game to resume.

  It’s also the cue for Mack to holster his smoking service weapon. The old captain reaches out with his left hand for Jack and with his now healed right arm for Rosie.

  “Who’s hurt?”

  He pulls the tape from Rosie’s wrists before she collapses into him and cries.

  “I’m okay, Grandpa,” Jack volunteers. No tears.

  “Good old, Jack,” Mack says while exhaling a clearly relieved breath.

  Mack’s eyes connect with Jude’s.

  The ex-cop knows that his father is looking for a personal status report. Jude is hurting all over. But he never says a word about it. He couldn’t speak if he wanted to. His eyes are still glued to Lennox’s fallen body. In his mind, he can’t help but think that at any moment the bleeding beast will resurrect by the power of the underworld bound back up onto his feet for yet another round of killing.

  But then resurrection occurs only in video games.

  The dark monster is dead, the scream catcher silenced.

  Sirens.

  Jude can hear them clearly enough coming from the direction of Lake George Road. Then, the clatter of boot heels descending the steps outside the home’s first floor game room.

  Daniel Lino appears inside the open door. Gripped in his hand, the .9mm Glock.

  The FBI agent hasn’t left town, after all.

  “I came across the lake as fast as I could. I ran the plates on the FedEx van on the way.”

  Jude realizes then that the agent must have been scoping the place on his own, knowing that Lennox would return—sooner, as it turns out, rather than later.

  Mack runs a hand over his short, gray-haired scalp, peers at the agent while pressing both Rosie and his grandson against his sides.

  “It’s all over,” he says. Still eyeing Lino, he adds, “Get your FBI on the horn, Danny. They’ll want to know how all this ended; how you came to our aid.”

  Jude shakes his head as if to wake himself from a daze. He pulls his eyes away from the dead man and goes to Rosie. Slowly he slips her away from his father and into his own arms. His pain doesn’t matter anymore, so long as Rosie is alive.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Jude says, running his hand down across her pigtails. “It’s okay.”

  She cries and trembles. But Jude holds her as tightly as he can. Behind them, the PS3 game continues unabated, running on its own, the grunt and kick sounds of a karate man and a Ninja engaged in electronic hand-to-hand combat. Until a loud, smacking chop followed by a short, sharp scream signifies death to the Ninja man.

  “Game over,” speaks a deep, computer-generated voice.

  “Game over,” Jude whispers as he dries Rosie’s tears with the back of his hand.

  Assembly Point Peninsula

  Tuesday, November 28th, 2006, 4:05A.M.

  It’s one o’clock in the morning and Jude is dreaming

  In the dream, he’s raising his head up off the pillow to focus sleepy eyes on the foot of the bed where he makes out the images of a mother and her young daughter. They stand before him, the fair-haired mother dressed in pajamas, exit wound in her cheek, red and purple where the broken skin flaps over itself; the smaller daughter still wearing blonde hair in pigtails, the wound in her forehead dripping
fresh blood.

  The expression on their tight, unblinking faces is both sadness and confusion. Despite the wounds, they don’t seem injured or in any pain whatsoever.

  They just seem lost.

  After a time, the mother raises her hand, reveals a thin, pale wrist. That’s when Jude notices that the hand on her watch reads 6:00 o’clock in the morning.

  “It’s okay, Jude,” the mother whispers. “You couldn’t help what happened.”

  Jude is not afraid.

  He is calm and relaxed. He knows that what he is experiencing is just an imagined thing, even if for the moment it feels real.

  “Go home,” he says.

  That’s when something wonderful occurs: the wound on the mother’s cheeks fades to a healthy, peach flesh, disappears completely. Likewise, the wound on her daughter’s face also spontaneously heals itself, as though touched by God’s fingertips. No more blood or bruising. Just two perfect faces.

  The mother smiles, turns to her little girl, takes her by the hand. Behind them now, a great white light is just starting to glow. The light begins pinhead small but quickly expands until it surrounds the mother and daughter like a full body halo.

  “Thank you, Mr. Parish,” whispers the mother.

  “I’m glad you’re not afraid anymore,” adds the daughter with a bright smile. “I’m happy the demon is gone.”

  Together, the two turn away from the bed, walk out of darkness, enter into the light.

  Jude Parish opens his eyes to the night and the sound of the windswept lake splashing up against the docks. He stares up at the darkness. In the late Fall, there are no more crickets strumming, no more dogs barking, no more loons wailing sad songs from the lake. There is only the lake waves and the beating of his heart and an unusual lightness in his chest.

  Sitting up, he presses an open hand against his face and breathes. When he hears the rustling of a down comforter, he knows for sure that Rosie must be awake too.