The Darkness To Come

by Brandon Massey

  Bates stood over him. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “What . . . what do you want?” Joshua asked, in a thin voice.

  Bates knelt. The inmate photo didn’t do him justice. Gazing into Bates’ dark eyes was like staring into the depths of the grave in which you would one day be buried.

  “Where is she?” Bates asked.

  “I don’t . . . know,” Joshua said.

  Bates seized Joshua’s ring finger on his left hand, adorned with the titanium wedding band. He savagely bent the finger back. Joshua shouted, tried to pull away, but Bates didn’t relinquish his hold. Joshua’s finger broke like a pencil, and Joshua thought he was going to black out from the agony. Blacking out would have been a blessing.

  But it didn’t happen. He remained wide-awake. Entire left hand feeling as if he had soaked it in a flesh-dissolving acid. He cradled it to his chest, scooted backward down the hall.

  In the act of breaking Joshua’s finger, Bates had removed Joshua’s wedding band. He glanced at it with disgust, dropped it into his jacket pocket.

  “Where is she?” Bates asked again, like a robot programmed to speak only one sentence.

  The laundry room was at the end of the hall, behind Joshua. Joshua clambered to his feet and made a run for it.

  Bates didn’t chase after him. He had a bemused expression, as if this were a game.Joshua hustled into the laundry room, slammed the door behind him with his shoulder.

  It was a small, shadowy room, the majority of the space taken up by the washing machine, electric dryer, wire shelving packed with detergents, laundry sheets, and cleaning agents, and a plastic basket on the floor heaped with towels that needed to be laundered.

  Murky light sifted inside through a tiny window on the wall opposite the door. The window was much too small for Joshua to squeeze through.

  He also might have pushed the washing machine against the door, to bar Bates from entering, but he needed the use of both hands to move the heavy machine, and with his broken finger, such a strenuous task was all but impossible.

  He unclipped his cell phone from the holster, thinking of calling the cops. But when he saw the “Network Busy” signal on the display, he dropped the phone on top of the dryer. Bates was coming, and he couldn’t waste his precious time waiting to squeeze a call through a network that was probably overloaded due to the inclement weather.

  But running from Bates seemed the only viable option for survival. He had been insane to think he could deal with him. The man was a stone-cold killer. Joshua struggled to even stand up to his mother.

  Bates’ footsteps creaked toward the door.

  Squinting, Joshua surveyed the items on the shelves. He spotted a cleaning agent in a spray can; the formula contained ammonia. He twisted off the cap, nearly fumbled the can to the floor.

  The door exploded inward.

  Gripping the spray can in his good hand, Joshua surged toward Bates. He mashed the button.

  The jet of spray found Bates’ eyes. He roared, raised his arms to shield his head.

  Joshua charged through the doorway and smashed the blunt bottom edge of the can against the man’s skull. Bates slid to the floor, cursing, wounded and temporarily blinded, but not out of the fight. A guy like him would never give up.

  Joshua raced past him, back into the main hallway. He squinted.

  Bates had trashed the house. Broken glass was everywhere: ceramic figurines, framed photos and artwork, vases. Furniture was overturned. Ripped cushions spilled their stuffing like disemboweled corpses.

  There was a landline in the kitchen, mounted on the wall beside the refrigerator. Joshua avoided the glass glittering on the floor, and grabbed the handset.

  The line was dead.

  Bates had already thought of that, had cut off that option. Now what?

  Bates emerged from the hallway. His eyes were red, nostrils crusted with snot. But he now held a long knife with a nasty, razor-sharp edge.

  They circled slowly around the kitchen table, like boxers in a ring. Joshua wanted to get upstairs, to get the gun and his back-up pair of glasses. Bates seemed to intuitively sense Joshua’s goal, and barred the way.

  “Where is she?” Bates asked, a third time. He twirled the knife in his fingers.

  “I wouldn’t tell you if I knew, you crazy motherfucker.”

  “You can’t protect her from me,” Bates said. He snarled. “No one can. Not after what they’ve given me . . . the power I have. I could’ve knifed you and you wouldn’t have known a goddamn thing about who did it.”

  His words made no sense; it was like listening to the babblings of a drunk.

  “But I wanted you to know that her husband was the one who killed you,” Bates said.

  “She divorced you, asshole.”

  Growling with rage, Bates grabbed a chair and flung it toward Joshua. Joshua moved to dodge the object, but as he did, Bates tossed another chair at him, heaving them as if they were as weightless as tennis balls, and the second chair hit Joshua in the chest. As he staggered backward across the kitchen, Bates came at him, murder in his eyes.

  Joshua grabbed the door handle of the freezer and jerked it open. The door smashed into Bates’ face.

  Bates bellowed, dropped down as swiftly as if a trapdoor had opened beneath his feet.

  Joshua sidestepped, to rush past him. On his knees, Bates swung the blade in a wide arc. The knife tore through Joshua’s calf.

  Howling, Joshua stumbled against the counter. Pain had further impeded his vision, had turned his own house into somewhere alien and dangerous.

  Behind him, Bates was getting up again.

  Joshua lurched out of the kitchen, and into the family room.

  Bates had swept all of their wedding photographs off the walls and smashed them. In some of them, Joshua’s face was torn out. He’d knocked over the Christmas tree by the fireplace, crushed all of the multicolored ornaments. They lay scattered across the carpet like broken eggs.

  At the sight of the destruction, fresh anger renewed Joshua. This man had arrogantly shit on the life that he and Rachel had created together, and he wasn’t going to let it stand. No way.

  Joshua reached the staircase. In his pain-wracked condition, climbing the fifteen steps seemed as daunting a task as scaling the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.

  Bates was stalking across the family room. Blood poured from his nose, which was probably broken, but he seemed oblivious to the pain.

  Joshua grabbed the railing, and started ascending the steps. He used his long legs to take them three at a time, risking a nasty fall if he lost his balance, but he didn’t slow, and miraculously, didn’t fall. He made it to the second floor.

  Bates had wrought destruction up here, too. Smashed photos and artwork covered the hallway carpet, and black smears and deep dents marred the walls.

  Bates was halfway up the staircase. Coming fast. Knife gleaming.

  Joshua ran into the master bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it. He braced his back against it.

  He expected Bates to attempt to kick the door down, as he had done in the laundry room, but after a few seconds, nothing had happened.

  Warily, Joshua moved away from the door.

  * * *

  The bedroom was trashed, too. Shards of glass from the mirror covered the dresser and floor. The dresser drawers had been pulled out; clothes were everywhere. The mattress was torn and gouged, stuffing leaking out. The television tube had been smashed, the DVD and cable box dented.

  Bates had battered the nightstands, too. Had dumped their contents on the floor and taken his weapon to them. Joshua found the gun case on the floor; the lid was dented, but it had not been opened. Bates clearly hadn’t known what was inside, and in his blind fury hadn’t bothered to pry it open.

  Joshua knelt to retrieve the box, wincing at the pain that fanned through his body. He heard a soft whimper from underneath the bed. He looked, squinting.

  It was Coco. She cowered far under the bed, large eyes twi
nkling in the shadows. She looked fine, just scared.

  “You stay under there, okay?” Joshua said softly. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Joshua also found his back-up pair of glasses in a case beside one of the dumped drawers. The lenses were intact. He slid them on. The world came back into vivid view.

  He opened the gun safe. He began to load the revolver. It was a challenge: his broken finger hampered him, and his hands were shaking. But he managed to plug all of the cartridges into the chambers without dropping any of them. In the heat of battle, with his pumping adrenaline, he’d discovered a dexterity that he hadn’t known he possessed.

  He disengaged the trigger lock, rose into a shooter’s stance.

  Rachel had foreseen that he would need this gun. Somehow. What else had she predicted?

  The future lay beyond the bedroom door. Bates hadn’t tried to break in, but that meant nothing. He wasn’t going to leave the house. He was waiting Joshua out.

  Carefully, Joshua opened the door, stepped backward.

  The hallway was full of shadows. And empty. He didn’t hear Bates, either. He heard only the plinking rain.

  Remember how he materialized from nowhere before. He might pull the same trick again. I don’t know how he did it the first time, but he did. He could do it again.

  Joshua swallowed. He crept down the hall. Finger poised on the trigger. Tensed for the slightest noise.

  He moved to the guest bedroom, on the right. A glance showed no one inside—just more chaos, courtesy of Bates.

  He looked in Rachel’s study. Bates had destroyed the printer and scanner, swept the photos off the bookshelves and crushed them. But he wasn’t inside.

  “Where is she?”

  Joshua whirled to see Bates coming at him with the knife. Impossible. But he was there. There was blood on his lips. Hatred in his cold eyes. He was leading with the big knife, thrusting the blade at Joshua, intending to deliver a fatal wound, and he would have succeeded, would have gored Joshua right there in the hallway of his own house, if Joshua’s reflexes had not been faster than his.

  Joshua squeezed off three shots at point blank range. The first round punched through his shoulder. The next two hit Bates squarely in the chest.

  Bates’ eyes widened in apparent surprise. He lost his balance and tumbled down the staircase behind him, rolling all the way to the bottom. He lay there, immobile.

  Joshua’s ears rang from the gunfire. His wrists tingled from the weapon’s recoil.

  Aiming the muzzle downward, he descended the steps on watery knees.

  Bates lay on the floor, eyes glassy and unblinking, lips parted, legs twisted like taffy under him, one arm contorted behind his back. Blood soaked his jacket and shirt. He wasn’t breathing.

  Joshua felt his gorge rising. He clapped his hand over mouth, but he couldn’t stop the building tide of nausea. He stumbled into the kitchen and vomited into the sink.

  He’d never seen so much blood—blood that he had spilled with his own hands. That Bates had pushed him to do it didn’t make him feel any better. This day was going to haunt his dreams for a long time.

  He turned on the faucet, ran cold water to wash his face and rinse out his mouth.

  He returned to Bates with a wad of paper towels. Covering his fingers with the towels to keep the blood from getting on them, he reached into Bates’ jacket pocket, and removed his wedding band.

  “I’ll be taking this back,” he said in a ragged whisper.

  He washed off the ring in the sink. He couldn’t put the ring on his broken finger, so he slid it onto a finger of his right hand.

  Then he went to get his cell phone, to call the police.

  * * *

  Joshua had left his cell in the laundry room. He holstered the gun in his waistband and plucked the phone off the dryer. He dialed 911—he didn’t get a “Network Busy” message this time—and calmly reported that he had shot an intruder in his home. He ended the call without answering any further questions.

  When he came back into the kitchen, the patio door was swinging open, rain pattering inside. A trail of blood droplets led from the doorway, across the family room, and to the bottom of the stairs.

  Bates was gone.

  Chapter 47

  Ten minutes later, the police and an ambulance arrived.

  Feeling lightheaded, Joshua explained to the cops what had happened. He gave them Bates’ name and showed them his inmate record. The officers noted Joshua’s bruises and wounds, and the destruction wrought in his home, and told him that he was lucky to be alive.

  He knew that he was, but the enormity of his battle with Bates hadn’t yet sunk in. He guessed that he was suffering a mild case of post-traumatic shock.

  The paramedics treated his injuries, applying a splint and a bandage to his broken finger, and an ice pack to his swollen jaw. They encouraged him to seek further medical care from his physician. He promised that he would, only to get them off his back. He had no intention of wasting time in a doctor’s office until this was over.

  Although he had shot Bates entirely in self-defense, the police forced Joshua to ride with them to the station. There, he gave an official account of what had transpired.

  The cops wanted to know where Rachel had gone, of course. He told them he didn’t know—but that he did know Bates had committed other murders, in Illinois, Missouri, and perhaps Georgia, too. They said they would issue an APB on Bates, and would notify area hospitals to be on the lookout for anyone matching his description seeking treatment for gunshot wounds. With these action steps in place, the police felt assured of collaring Bates soon.

  Joshua wasn’t so confident. He couldn’t forget how Bates had twice materialized, literally from thin air. It seemed Bates had found some way, as impossible as it seemed, of concealing himself from view.

  He remembered what Bates had said: You can’t protect her from me. No one can. Not after what they’ve given me . . . the power I have. I could’ve knifed you and you wouldn’t have known a goddamn thing about who did it . . .

  At the time, Joshua had assumed Bates had been babbling like a madman. But on retrospect, he wasn’t sure what to believe any more. Who were the people that Bates had referred to, the group that had given him his “power?”

  None of it made any sense at all. Perhaps Joshua had been suffering from stress-induced delusions during their battle. The episode had such a surreal, loopy quality that he wasn’t quite certain which explanation was most likely.

  Yet Bates had undeniably gotten up from three rounds delivered at point blank range. Had he imagined that, too? The cops told him that Bates was likely wearing body armor . . . but Joshua vividly recalled the quantity of blood that had dampened Bates’ jacket. Bates hadn’t been wearing any protective gear. He had taken three rounds at close range, fallen down a flight of stairs, and a few minutes later, gotten up and walked out of the house.

  Like some kind of supernatural killing machine.

  Unfortunately, the police confiscated Joshua’s revolver. In spite of his claims that Rachel probably had a license for it, since he couldn’t produce the permit, they took the gun away.

  Joshua decided that he would purchase his own firearm as soon as possible. The gun had saved his life, as Rachel had predicted it would. He wasn’t going to be caught defenseless again.

  * * *

  It was mid-afternoon when the police released Joshua to go. He called a taxi to pick him up from the station and take him home.

  The rain had abated, and the clouds had cleared. The storm that had pummeled the city only a short while ago was only a bad memory—like everything else that had happened.

  As the taxi approached his house, Joshua spotted a car parked in the driveway beside his Explorer: a smoke-gray Cadillac sedan with a bumper sticker that read, “I’m Saved. Are U?”

  “Oh, no,” Joshua said.

  It was his mother. She had dropped in for one of her unannounced “inspections,” probably because he had been
avoiding her lately. She would not be ignored.

  This had to be the worst possible time for him to see her. If she saw him looking like this, bandaged and bruised like a punished boxer, she would throw a fit. And if he dared to let her inside the house, and she saw the devastation Bates had wrought inside . . .

  He couldn’t stand to think about it. He was tempted to tell the cab driver to turn around and drive away, to drop him off at Eddie’s. Eddie’s house was across the city, but he’d rather pay a fifty-dollar cab fare than face his mom.

  No, I’ve gotta go home. I have too much to do, and I can’t let her get in my way.

  The taxi parked in front of the driveway. Joshua paid the fare, and slowly climbed out of the car.

  As the cab sped away, the Cadillac’s passenger door opened. Joshua saw his father’s small head behind the wheel, but his father wouldn’t get out of the car and participate in this conversation. During his mother’s inspections, Dad served as little more than her chauffeur.

  With much effort, Mom rose out of the vehicle. She wore a long, black woolen jacket, a scarf, gloves, and a dark hat with a floppy brim. A gigantic purse dangled from her shoulder. Although the rain had passed, she gripped an umbrella like a walking stick.

  “Where you been?” she asked. “We been waitin’ out here in the cold for half an hour!”

  In his previous life as a bachelor, Mom never would have waited outside his apartment. She’d possessed a key to his place and would enter and make herself at home. Rachel, however, had refused to give anyone a key to their house, and though it had enraged his mother, Joshua was thankful that his wife had refused to bend.

  “I’ve been taking care of some business, Mom.” He went to the mailbox and removed the day’s mail: what looked like a holiday card from Eddie and Ariel, credit card offers, and advertising circulars.

  Mom slid on her glasses and shuffled down the driveway to get a closer look at him. Shock widened her eyes.

  “What the hell happened to you, boy? Your face is all swoll, you got that bandage on your finger—”