WARPED: A Collection of Short Horror, Thriller, and Suspense Fiction

by Jeff Menapace

  Summoning what might have been the last of his strength, John lifted the boy off his feet and slammed him to the ground. The boy let out a groan and a hiss, his breath leaving him. John immediately scurried towards the gun on all fours. He could see the boy trying to find his legs in his periphery. He snatched the gun, wheeled around, pointed and fired a shot at the boy’s feet. The boy froze. They both froze. Remained like that for almost a minute: the boy standing, hands raised, panting; John on his knees, gun pointed, panting harder.

  John eventually waved the boy away from the exit with the gun. The boy obeyed. John did not get back to his feet. Instead he slumped backwards onto his butt and started to cry.

  17

  “2006,” John said. “That’s when it happened. It was all a joke. We thought it was real, but it was all a joke. I should have known…” He wiped his eyes. “My daughter wasn’t a popular girl.”

  Still breathing hard, the boy took a cautious step forward. “A joke?” he said.

  John nodded. “That guy—Josh—never showed up.” He took a deep breath. “Tammy insisted the boy was lost or had broken down or run out of gas or some other slice of denial that fed her daily life.” John picked a stone up off the ground and flung it away. “So Sam called the boy, and he answered, and he started laughing. Started laughing. Sam said you could hear his friends laughing in the background too.” John clenched his teeth. “The kid then tells Sam that he’s going to the prom with someone else. Starts ripping into my daughter, and God help me for saying this, but there was plenty of ammunition for the son of a bitch. My daughter was…well she was…let’s just say she was a product of my wife. Need I explain what that means?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Now—you’d think that after such cruelty, after such…such fucking cruelty, my daughter would be entitled to some sympathy, yes? To put it mildly?”

  The boy nodded.

  John Kearns flashed a look of disgust, looked like he wanted to spit. “Wrong. My wife knew no gray—her world was black and white; winning and losing; beautiful and ugly.” Now he did spit. “She destroyed my daughter that night. Told her she was stood up because she wasn’t pretty enough; wasn’t thin enough; was second-best to some other girl. Was a loser.”

  John felt his throat tightening, cleared it so his voice wouldn’t crack. “Sam ran out of the house. I went to go after her but Tammy stopped me. She told me her words to our daughter were harsh but necessary. That Sam needed some time alone to process them.” John gave a pathetic chuckle. “And I obeyed. I obeyed like I always do. Like the pathetic…” His upper lip curled in disgust as he searched for any word but ‘man.’ “Like the pathetic waste that I am.”

  “Where is she?” the boy asked. “Where’s Sam?”

  “Dead,” John said matter-of-factly. “She ran in here.” He gestured to their surroundings, then pointed to a wooden beam near the entrance. “Hung herself there.”

  The boy swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his skinny neck.

  John wiped away more tears. “Tammy found her…and from that day on…” He let out a short bray of laughter that made the boy flinch. “If I thought things were bad before, yeah? Yeah?”

  The boy nodded quickly, showed a quick smile that wasn’t a smile.

  John hung his head. “I saw the way you looked at the dress when she first came down the stairs.” He cleared his throat again, head still down. “She never washes it. Seeing as how meticulous my wife is you’d think she would, but she doesn’t. She never washes out the food and drink stains because each time is the first time. She never irons out the wrinkles because each time is the first time.” John lifted his head and stared at the boy. “And she never washes out the soil stains because I never had to cut my daughter down from that beam over there and watch her fall to the earth in a lifeless heap.”

  The boy gnawed at a fingernail, his gaze never leaving John.

  John shrugged helplessly. “Her eyes see what they see, and her mind accepts what it accepts.” He then hung his head again. “I miss my little girl so much.”

  The boy said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, sir. I can assure you, if you let me go, I won’t say a word…out of respect for your daughter.”

  John lifted his head and locked eyes with the boy: the boy’s blue looked desperate and hopeful; John’s brown were assuredly dead.

  “I give you my word,” the boy added.

  John Kearns chuckled softly through his nose. He looked at the gun in his hand.

  18

  John Kearns walked into his daughter’s room. Tammy Kearns was sitting in a chair reading a fashion magazine. The mannequin was in bed.

  Tammy held a finger to her lips, mimed a hush gesture to her husband, then used the same finger to point to the mannequin under the covers. “She’s asleep,” she whispered. Tammy Kearns then set the magazine aside and placed both hands across her chest as though her heart might burst. “She had such a magical time, John.”

  John Kearns didn’t respond. He strolled past his wife and towards his daughter’s dresser.

  “Did you take Josh home?” Tammy asked.

  His back to his wife, John said, “He’s gone.”

  “Lovely boy,” Tammy said. “For Sam to even think he wasn’t going to show…”

  John said nothing. He picked up a picture of his daughter from the dresser. He remembered it well. Their first trip to Florida. Samantha was four. She stood by the pool in a pink bathing suit, grinning, deliriously happy. No practiced smile. No flash, no glamour. His little girl being a little girl—and loving it.

  John started to cry. He faced his wife. Held up the picture. “I miss her so much.”

  Tammy Kearns returned a curious look. “Miss who?”

  John dropped his head, turned back to the dresser and set the picture down. When he faced his wife again, he shot her three times. He then stuck the gun into his own mouth and pulled the trigger.

  THE END

  Jeremy’s Loss

  1

  Jeremy met Bret Fallon for the first time in a bar right after his mother’s funeral. Despite condolences, Jeremy made no attempt at pleasantries with the stranger. He questioned if he could ever be pleasant to anyone again. His bedrock, his one source of unconditional love and support had been taken from him in a tragic car accident, and right now Jeremy had but two goals—to hate the world and to drink himself into oblivion. Until Bret Fallon told him his mother was murdered.

  * * *

  “What do you know about my mother?”

  The man moved a bar stool closer to Jeremy. He leaned in and spoke in a whisper. His breath was foul.

  “She treated me at the hospital,” he said. “A good nurse. A good woman.”

  So you’re a veteran, are you? Jeremy thought. He studied the man’s face. His hair was dark and ragged, eyes deep and sullen. Yet these features were unavoidably diminutive, lost in the surroundings of the man’s most dominant feature—his complexion. It was horrid. The man had what appeared to be abnormally deep acne scars scattered throughout his face, some old, some raw and weeping. Jeremy had seen this in some unfortunates before and usually found the scars limited to areas around the cheeks and forehead. A second, sneakier glance showed Jeremy that this man’s entire face and neck were drilled with these flesh-pits. Even his ears.

  There was something else too—a familiarity about the man like he had seen him before.

  The day after his mother’s death Jeremy had desperately tried to occupy his mind with his school work. He would stare blindly at the pages of his medical books, highlighting random text indiscriminately as though the simple act of pushing the yellow marker was therapeutic.

  When school work failed as a distraction, he resorted to pacing throughout his mother’s home. He walked aimless routes, head down, palms mashed over both ears to stop the walls from crying out. Seconds later he saw the man.

  Just as Jeremy felt the breath of madness whisper its threat into the nape of his neck, he li
fted his head and spotted someone from his bedroom window. The man was standing and staring from the street, his image a dim silhouette traced by a nearby lamppost. Still, despite this lack of clarity, one thing was certain: the man was watching the house. He was watching Jeremy.

  The next morning the memory of the man at his window—no less ingrained, no less unsettling—was forcefully demoted to nothing but paranoia; Jeremy’s bastard grief taunting him. Yet when he stopped at the newsstand that morning to buy a paper, the paranoia’s return was like a winter blast shaking his body to the core. There were eyes on his back, he was sure of it.

  Jeremy spun and he was there, across the street, watching. Was it the man from last night? Jeremy couldn’t be sure. He appeared to be. Jeremy turned and tossed the paper back onto its pile, whipped back around. The man was gone. Vanished completely, almost impossibly, like something out of a ghost story.

  And now? Was the man who Jeremy believed to be following him this same man approaching him in a bar? No. Not with this man’s complexion. Despite the feeling of familiarity he was sure he would have remembered the complexion. But then…on both occasions he had spotted him from a distance, one of those two occasions the middle of the night.

  Jeremy sipped his bourbon and winced from its bite. His status as a drinker was amateur at best. “So what do you want? You just giving condolences?”

  The man leaned in closer. “Your mother’s death? That was no accident…” He made the sign of the cross on his chest and sighed. “It was murder.”

  Jeremy was not a fighter. But those words, the audacity of them, from a stranger. Jeremy was seconds from hitting someone for the first time in his life.

  The man seemed to sense this and leaned away. “This is no joke, Jeremy.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Your mother—she confided in me. Told me to find you if anything happened.”

  Jeremy squinted. “Who are you again?”

  The man held out a hand. Jeremy didn’t take it. The man didn’t appear offended when he retracted it and said, “Fallon. Bret Oliver Fallon. And you’re Jeremy Marsh. Your mother, Anne Marsh, was buried today after a car accident. I’m here to tell you it wasn’t an accident.”

  Jeremy tightened his fist. “If this is your idea of some sick—”

  “I already told you it wasn’t.” The man’s eyes were stone, no longer wary.

  Jeremy jabbed at Fallon’s claim. ”Well then if what you’re telling me is true, then I assume you went to the police already?”

  Fallon smiled a row of rotted teeth. “No way, kid. There are higher powers involved here. Powers that supercede any authority the police might have.”

  Jeremy scoffed. “Higher powers?”

  Fallon stayed firm. “I’m telling you this in order to save your life.”

  “My life? You’re telling me my life is in danger?”

  Fallon nodded once.

  “Why?”

  “Your mother was killed for what she knew. For what she found out. You’re her only son, her only family. No husband, no relatives, just you. You might have been her only confidant. That makes you a liability.”

  “You just said she confided in you,” Jeremy said.

  Fallon snorted. “Yeah, that’s true—and it’s also why I’m here, away from that place and running for my own life.”

  Jeremy was still numb from the funeral and the whiskey was proving an efficient catalyst in expediting that feeling, but what this man was saying, the intensity in his eyes. Was he a shell-shocked veteran talking gibberish? Or was he someone who really did know something crucial about the death of his mother? The accurate details he had divulged thus far were certainly solidifying his claims as a resident in the VA hospital where his mother worked, however anything beyond that was fantastic—a story whose authenticity needed more than mere words for acceptance.

  “Well she never mentioned anything to me,” Jeremy said.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Well, I’m a med student and she’s…” He swallowed hard. “She was a nurse, so yeah; of course she talked about her job. But it was just clinical chat about medicine and psychiatry and such. Never anything…” He held up both hands and made quotation marks. “Top secret.”

  “You don’t have to believe me, kid. Hell, after what you’ve just been through, I’d be shocked if you were anything but skeptical. However, with or without me, you’re gonna find out on your own.”

  “Find out what?”

  Fallon didn’t lean in and whisper this time. His posture was straight, his expression ice. “That people are looking for you.”

  Jeremy shook his head slowly, an incredulous smile on the side of his mouth. He finished the remainder of his drink, refused to wince, then waved the bartender over with a writing gesture. “Well then I’ll have to find out on my own,” he said.

  The bartender brought over the tab. Jeremy slapped two twenties on the bar, pushed back his stool and stood up.

  “You’re making a big mistake, kid. I can help you.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I am. I don’t doubt my mother treated you at the hospital, but this other stuff you’re selling is just a little too X-Files for me. Have a nice night.”

  Jeremy walked past Fallon towards the exit. He half expected Fallon to make a desperate grab as he passed him, or perhaps call out one final plea as Jeremy reached the door, but he did not. Fallon let him go peacefully.

  2

  Jeremy stopped cold just as he was about to put his key into the car door—all four plastic thumbs in his Toyota were tall and unlocked. He frowned. Had he forgotten to lock his car? Maybe. After all, he certainly had a solid excuse for carelessness after leaving his mother’s funeral. But all four locks on all four doors? And in a neighborhood like this, outside a bar that catered to men who were more adept at swinging their fists than their dicks? Jeremy was admittedly a fish out of water in such a place, but that was precisely why he sought it out. He wanted anonymity, not condolences from people he hardly knew in some yuppie bar. There was even a part of him that silently wished he’d get into a fight here; have someone break his goddamn nose just so he could taste a different kind of pain, no matter how fleeting.

  “Something wrong?”

  Jeremy spun. It was Fallon—a cautious five feet from Jeremy and the car. The lot was fairly dark save for a giant lamppost that flickered and buzzed from above like a nest of metallic bees.

  Fallon stepped out of the dark and into the iridescent glow, highlighting his pock-marked skin; Jeremy questioned if it was actually getting worse by the minute.

  “My car’s unlocked,” Jeremy said.

  Fallon said nothing.

  “I didn’t unlock it yet.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Fallon said.

  “What?”

  “They were here.”

  “Who?”

  “The ones who took your mother from you. The ones who are after you now.”

  Jeremy turned his torso away from Fallon and looked over both shoulders. There was no activity in the lot. “There’s no one here,” he said. “I probably left the doors unlocked by mistake. My mind was on my mother.”

  Fallon nodded. “Fair enough—if you want to believe that.”

  “So what are you saying? Someone went through my car?”

  “Yes.”

  Jeremy turned back towards the driver’s side window, cupped a hand over his brow and peered inside. His CD case lay on the passenger seat. His phone charger was still plugged into the lighter. “Looks okay in there to me. Nothing missing.”

  “You don’t know what they were looking for.”

  “Do you?”

  Fallon said nothing.

  Jeremy shook his head and opened the driver’s side door. “Goodnight, Bart, or Bret, or whoever the hell you are.”

  A car pulled into the lot some fifty yards away. It moved slowly and deliberately towards the two of them, its high beams on.

  Jeremy squinted and muttered, �
�Assholes.”

  Fallon did not squint through the glare. Instead he pivoted like a slammed door, his back to the approaching lights, his face projecting fear.

  Jeremy thought he looked like a boy caught stealing. “Ohhh…” he hummed with a smirk. “Is that them?”

  Fallon didn’t reply, just kept his back to the high beams.

  The car eventually stopped, yet remained idling twenty yards back, its high beams still on, obscuring the details of its model.

  Jeremy’s mocking wit faded. He shielded his eyes to the high beams and frowned. “What the hell is their problem?”

  “We need to go,” Fallon said.

  “We? You can do whatever the hell you want. I’m going home.”

  Fallon still kept his back to the headlights but spoke loud and with a purpose. “Goddammit, kid, I can help you!” He moved to the unlocked passenger door and opened it.

  “Whoa!” Jeremy said. “No way. Get out.”

  Fallon seemed not to hear, his attention was now fixed curiously on his own feet.

  “What?” Jeremy said.

  Fallon bent down. When he stood upright he showed Jeremy a cell phone. “What’s this?” he asked.

  Jeremy pecked his neck forward. “That’s my cell phone. How did you get that?”

  “It was on the ground.”

  Jeremy shot Fallon a look. “Well can I have it back, please?”

  Fallon held the phone like it was a hollow wafer, slowly turning it over in his hands for fear it may break apart. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he said.

  “What? Why? Give me my phone, man.”

  Fallon ignored him; all of his attention was on the phone.

  Jeremy looked up at the strange car in the distance again. It was still there, its idle purr loud and clear behind its blinding eyes.