Jem peered at the house he and Brandon had visited not an hour earlier. The door to the house was wide open.
“You don’t happen to have another, do you?” Grant asked, nodding to Jem’s handgun.
“No, I don’t. But I’ve got a plan,” Jem said. “I’ll draw him out and distract him. You grab your boy and get him out of there. I’m leaving the keys in the ignition. If something goes wrong, take the car and drive. Get out of Decker.”
Grant nodded and they exited the vehicle together.
CHAPTER 31
CHRIS | 10:15PM
THE LITTLE BOY sat on the floor, leaning against the wall next to the bedroom door, sobbing. “I want my daddy,” he said. His hair matted to his head and stuck out in other places, little cowlicks giving him a peacock spray of brown locks in the back of his head.
Chris didn’t answer the boys cries. He sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for answers. The fog had showed him this room. The spirit of the woman, the one Chris followed home from the bar, full of fear and determination, whose body had long been taken by the police to the coroner’s office, still lingered in the room. Chris could feel it. He could still smell her on the bed though the sheets and bedding had been taken as evidence.
Finally, Chris turned to the little boy, who shrank as Chris faced him. “Tell me, tell me what you saw.”
“Bad man,” the boy whimpered, and then began bawling, wails long and loud. Tears and snot streamed down his red cheeks.
Chris looked down at his hands, still spotted with blood from his father who he’d shot in the back of the head on the front lawn of this house. He couldn’t believe it. He was finally free. From the years of inadequacy, of distance, of it all.
He looked at the child though, unable to do the same to him. In this moment, after all he’d done, he didn’t have it in him to kill the kid.
But it wasn’t just a kid. Chris argued with himself both silently and audibly. No, it wasn’t a kid. It was a demon. A demon with red eyes that burned into his brain, that caused the fog to spill from the dead woman’s orifices and cause all the women to vanish in the middle of the night.
The little boy continued to sob as he sat on the ground. “I want my daddy,” he said.
Not a demon, Chris thought. Just a little boy.
But he had no choice. This is what the vision showed him. This is where it had to end. Finally, he made up his mind. Standing up from the bed, Chris stepped toward the child, cowering against the wall, and placed his hands around the boy’s neck.
CHAPTER 32
JEM AND GRANT | 10:17PM
THEY APPROACHED THE open door of the house slowly. Jem looked up at the camera mounted to the corner of the porch, facing the front door. Though it wasn’t recording them now, Jem gave it a half-salute. That camera, with Brandon Owens’s technological genius, had solved this entire case. And, by the looks of it, exonerated an innocent man, who now followed close behind him.
Inside the house it was completely dark, the only light filtered through the miniblinds in the windows in the living room. As Jem walked in he let his eyes adjust for a moment. Whispering, he said, “Back in the bedroom, where she slept. That’s where he is.”
The men crept down the dark hallway, led only by the light of the cracked bedroom door at the end. At the door, Jem stood off to the side and, with one hand, gently pushed it open.
“Don’t come in here,” Chris McMillan’s voice cracked the silence. “I’ll kill him.”
Before Jem could even register what was happening, Grant rushed the door, shouldering it open. Jem held his weapon up and turned into the door to see Grant wrap his arms around McMillan and throw him to the ground in a bearhug.
“You,” he started as he pummeled his fists into McMillan’s face, “took my son! Murdered,” a fist with every word, crushing into the man’s nose, eye socket, anywhere that would connect, “my sister.”
Inside the bedroom, Grant’s son was sitting on the bed, wailing at the top of his lungs. Jem grabbed the kid in his arms and carried him out of the room and sprinted to the Jeep outside. He placed the kid in the backseat. “Wait here, okay?” he said to the boy. “I’m going to get your dad and get out of here.”
“Bad man,” the boy said between sobs. “Bad man hurt Aunt Catherine.”
“I know,” Jem said. “But it’s okay now. Bad man isn’t going to hurt you.”
“Bad man brought the cloud,” the boy said.
Jem cocked his head. “What did you say?”
“Bad man hurt Aunt Catherine and brought the cloud,” he repeated in his quiet and small voice.
“Stay right here, okay? I’m going to get your daddy.” Jem shut the rear passenger door and went back inside the house.
He could still hear Grant whacking at the McMillan kid’s face. As he went to the room to pull Grant off McMillan, he heard the unmistakable sound of a gunshot and his heart sank in his stomach. The sound reverberated through the empty house.
Jem lifted his weapon to the ready, finger on the trigger. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he called out in the hallway. “I just want to get the kid out of here.”
In a blur, Chris McMillan tumbled into the hallway, the light from the open door of the bedroom reflecting off the weapon in his hand. Jem immediately pulled the trigger, the recoil shaking his body. He watched as McMillan slunk to the ground, blood pouring from his nose and eye socket and a new wound spreading on his chest.
Approaching slowly, gun still raised, Jem kicked the young man’s weapon from his hand, the thing coming loose from his grip.
From inside the bedroom, Grant was on the ground, his hands pressed to his shirt, soaking in blood. “He got me,” he let out.
Jem fell to his knees beside Grant and examined the wound. Though he was no doctor, he knew the wound was grave. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get you and your boy out of here. You need a doctor.”
“No,” Grant said. “I want to leave Decker.”
Hoisting the man up on his feet, Jem wrapped an arm around Grant and led him out the door into the hallway. Grant took one last look at Chris McMillan on the ground and spit at him. Then, he let Jem lead him out of the room and back outside to the vehicle, idling and ready to receive them.
◆◆◆
The Jeep idled in front of the hovering fog, the cloud rolling and boiling. It had been nearly eight hours since Jem came to it and saw the vision as his head pounded.
Jem had helped Grant into the passenger seat and the man pressed a t-shirt to his wound. It had begun to clot though he kept pressure to it.
“Your son, back at the house, said that McMillan brought this,” Jem said as they stared at the seemingly impenetrable fog.
“What does that even mean?” Grant said. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know, but all of it—the murder, the vanishing, the fog—it’s all connected together.”
The boy in the backseat was sprawled out on the surface, conked out and almost snoring.
“He can see things,” Jem said. There was a part of him that still disbelieved any of it. But, despite racking his brain, he couldn’t come up with any other reasonable explanation for all that had occurred over the course of the day.
There was no explanation.
Grant nodded without saying a word.
“Ready?” Jem asked.
Grant looked at him out of the side of his eyes. His hands, bloodied and bruised, sat in his lap and he looked down at them. “I’m ready. Let’s leave this place.”
Jem pulled the shifter and the Jeep rolled, without his foot on the pedal and letting it coast, into the fog.
-THE END-
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew J Brandt is the Amazon bestselling author of The Treehouse and The Abduction of Sarah Phillips. He resides in Texas with his wife and children.
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