by Mike Miller
A hushed clicking and scraping came from the front seat. Metal on metal.
The boy knew the punishment for disobeying now might not be as bad as listening to the sad, angry man.
He cautiously peeked an eye open.
A gun was pointed at his nose.
“No!” he screamed. “No, don’t!” He thrashed around in his seat, but the harness kept his torso perfectly jailed. His little fingers clawed the space a few inches from the weapon. “No, please!”
The father had his head turned away and bowed. One hand covered his face shamefully, the other trembled slightly as it pointed the pistol. “I’m sorry,” he whispered softly.
“No!” shrieked the boy.
The small gun fired with a big pop.
Jim had sunk down in his seat while kicking his leg up in defense. His sneaker knocked the hand aside as the muzzle exploded.
The child felt the shot’s heat race across his left cheek. After deflecting off his headrest, his window turned into a thick web of shattered glass from the ricochet.
Lucy’s eyes popped awake at the noise from her brief nap. She looked around in spacey confusion.
“You fucking--!” The crazed man leaned into the backseat to hammer at the boy with the gun.
With ears ringing from the explosion, Jim still ably defended himself from the attack by shielding his head with his arms. The front headrest between the two combatants impeded each swing to protect the boy.
“God!” grunted Dad. He steadied the small pistol again for the next shot, but at a safe distance from the flailing limbs of his target.
“No, Dad, please! I’m sorry!” howled Jim. Now, he voluntarily shut his eyes and turned his head, holding his hands before his face in surrender. “I’m sorry, Dad, don’t!”
The gun’s snub barrel quivered like the next bullet was itching for release, like a beast rattling its cage.
The father puffed his cheeks in and out rapidly, further reddening his face.
“Please don’t! Please!”
Jim caught his sister’s confused gaze. She did not understand his pleas for help, and smiled giddily at him.
“Please, Dad, no!” he cried.
“Fuck!” the man finally screamed and whipped the pistol away. Now he pounded his own head with the weapon. “Can’t do them both with just one bullet!” he muttered to himself between the blows. “What to do, what to do with just one fucking bullet left?”
The father froze. His tantrum had stopped so abruptly that it also made Jim pause. Lucy’s little whimpers now filled the silence.
The father raised the gun to his mouth.
For as long as Jim could remember, he had always secretly wished for something to happen to his dad. At his most optimistic, the son imagined the man transforming into a kind, loving father. The horridness of their general existence almost implied that he was due some sort of joyous fairy-tale ending.
Yet Jim knew this was an unrealistic fantasy and would happily settle for less. The boy did not know what efforts it might take, but he really only yearned for his father to simply cease being bad. His father needn’t become a virtuous superhero, just someone who stopped yelling and hitting him so much.
But on the darkest days of their time together, Jim scared himself by the fiendishness of his own daydreams. He imagined many different disasters befalling his dad, ranging from the whimsical to the horrific. Jim never enjoyed the methods involved with these scenarios, but he never minded their shared outcome: a world without his father.
So now that Jim was confronted with that very moment to remove his father from his world, the child was surprised to find himself blurting out, “No, don’t!”
The father opened his eyes to study his tear-stained son. The man sniffled some snot back into his skull, then spoke calmly for the first time the entire day. “There are mystical forces here today that don’t want you kids to die. I see that now. And have to respect that. So now it’s on you, boy. You have to grow up and be the man now.”
The pressure was crushing the boy. “I don’t wanna,” he cried.
“Too bad,” said the weary man.
Then he slid the gun back between his lips and pulled the trigger.
Jim watched the black cave of the mouth flash with light. Compared to the original shot that was fired towards him, this new pop was largely muffled. Red viscera splashed across the windshield with a violent sneeze.
The dead body fell back against the steering wheel as the pistol thudded to the floor mats. Smoke wafted from his mouth like a soul bound for heaven.
Both children began to sob.
Lucy’s tears lasted only a few minutes. Then the exhausted child slipped back to sleep quickly, as if placed under a spell.
But Jim could not stop wailing. His cries were long, primal howls which scraped his throat raw. He kicked and fought in his seat for escape to anywhere else but here. “Let me out!” he cried repeatedly between raw screams. “Let me out!”
His hands tried to push the straps of his prison away. Working the shoulders, the chest connector, the buckle at his crotch - nothing he did loosened its hold. The belts were all normally quite comfortable, but they suffocated him now like a straitjacket.
As fatigue set in, so too did reason. Jim realized the panic was getting him nowhere. He stopped screaming to concentrate on his release.
He grunted now as he attacked the buckle. He’d seen the adults do it hundreds of times. Just a synchronized squeeze at the bottom and top would free him. They made it look so easy.
His hands turned pale from the pinching. Beads of sweat trickled down his already wet cheeks.
Jim’s body begged for surrender, but his will refused. He went to crush the clasp again from a different angle.
Next, he went to the connector over his waist. A separate buckle akin to a seatbelt. He pushed mightily on the red button to snap its release.
A tiny roar rose from his throat to bolster the efforts.
Then he remembered how to slacken the straps. A small catch and strap between his knees could be used to loosen all the bindings. While they would not unfasten the clasps, the extra room could easily allow him to slip out from its confines. But with his chest pinned back against the seat, he barely had the ability to depress the switch. Nor did he have the position to pull the loosening cord outwards as only a grownup outside the car could.
The newest failure upset him further. He fought hard to make the damned devices to follow his wishes, but they stubbornly refused.
His frustration became rage as he clawed at the harness.
Suddenly he changed tactics. It was not a conscious decision, but a feral impulse. The boy stooped his head and gnashed his teeth at the defiant binding like a wild animal. No matter how his neck craned, however, he could not get close enough to bite the pieces. His tongue lashed out and licked the fibers.
Beneath the sounds of his own straining, he heard a new sound. It was an eerily close shuffle.
He stopped and first glanced at his sister. She remained silently asleep.
He looked out his shattered window. The world existed in a fractured, murky haze. Yet there were no more movements or sound from outside the vehicle that he could discern.
Then Jim saw his father sitting up and staring at him. Or rather, it was some thing that had his father’s form, but not his soul. Black blood dripped from between its teeth and down its chin. Its head bobbed slowly on an invisible current. Its eyes did not blink together at the same time.
“I gotta…” it muttered, spit popping from its lips. “I gotta…”
“Dad!” the boy yelled. The rebirth of the corpse was gruesome, yet it still instilled new hope in the kid. “Let me out, Dad, please! Please!”
The thing looked around in a daze. While its head swept back and forth a few times, its glassy eyes never made contact with its son.
“I gotta…” The dead dad collapsed its weight onto the door. Its limp hand clawed at the handle. The lever finally popped open
from the meek scraping. The interior light popped on to better illustrate the wound out the back of its head.
Jim shifted his eyes away from the nightmarish scene, but continued his calls for assistance. “Dad, help!”
The bloodied man fell onto the street. It pulled itself back to its feet on the side of the car. When it braced itself on Jim’s broken window, the glass cracked and tinkled, yet held firm.
“Dad! Come back! Please!”
The thing shuffled away from the car, leaving only a red handprint on the window.
Now the door drifted close with a soft click, seemingly shut by an invisible force bent on trapping the children in the car. The light obediently turned off.
The latest defeat slumped the kid’s chin to his chest. The onset of tears sent a sniffle out his nose. But the child was too fatigued to do anything more. Sleep soon pulled him into black oblivion.
3
Jim next awoke from a distant clatter. His groggy senses snapped into sharpened alert when he recalled his predicament.
He instinctively battled his car seat to escape, but his struggling was still futile.
Sister Lucy remained quietly asleep.
The boy peeked around for what made this newest sound. Like the scraping, rattling, shrieking of a hundred metallic creatures dragging themselves along the concrete, the noise slowly and steadily grew in volume.
He tried to convince himself that just because the sound was unknown, it did not necessarily spell trouble. But Jim’s entire body tensed in apprehension nonetheless.
The city was now hidden in the night. The plain building fronts became sheer blank faces. They were uniform black blocks in a row. Besides the streetlights, the only other source of illumination was a lone window on the third floor of a building across the way. The moon had not risen that night, and there were never any stars above the city.
The approaching storm of metal seemed to be to his left, but the fractured glass beside him prevented any view of the street. The front windshield was also obscured by his father’s gore. But through the streaks of viscera, Jim spied a little something.
The angle and streetlight only permitted a fleeting glance, but this mysterious thing was long and rectangular. It slid stiffly along the ground. Its bottom was squared, but odd shapes sprung from the top in sharp angles like bedhead. Unlike the rest of its rigid mechanical body, the tail of this beast lurched and shifted with life as it followed behind the rest.
As the figure disappeared from sight, Jim realized he was looking at someone pushing a shopping cart. Or so he hoped.
Between the darkness of the car and broken window, Jim was likely completely hid from view. But still he nervously listened as the stranger slowly rattled along on the sidewalk opposite him.
But then the sound stopped.
The boy focused his peering through the webbing of the glass shards, but could detect nothing.
A murky figure loomed into view just feet from their car. It stooped over for a better look, its round head obscuring the limited illumination with an even darker shadow.
Jim’s head shrunk into his neck like a turtle. He fought for silence, but his heaving chest defiantly pumped out wheezing gasps of fear.
The silhouette shifted back and forth for a better view. Its head was now less than two feet from Jim’s own with but the opaque, fractured barrier between them.
The boy was too terrified to look away. The unknowns of either doom or salvation paralyzed him in place. He found his mind trying to move the person along, shaping a hand to push them down the street.
The stranger departed. The rattling metal of their vessel resumed as before, but now quieting as it vanished.
Jim exhaled deeply in gratitude.
A scream shattered the silence. Jim would have leapt through the roof had the buckles not hugged him tight.
Lucy had awoken with typical grumpiness, bellowing her displeasure to the universe.
“Lucy, no!” he shushed. “Stop shouting!”
He heard the grinding metal cease. The sound of running footfalls immediately filled its void. They rapidly approached the vehicle.
“Stop, please stop.” His begging made no difference. At this point, he did not even know to whom he was speaking.
The driver’s door clicked open. The resulting overhead light momentarily blinded the boy.
Once the white haze melted from his vision, he did not see anything out of the ordinary. The front of the car was still empty.
Then he watched a head dip in through the opening.
The face had bulging eyes with tiny pupils. Bundled in thick, dirty clothes, the person’s body was skeletal, covered in spotted flesh and bruises which looked painted onto the bones. The soft plainness of the features made it hard to classify as either male or female. The stench was so nauseous that it actually hurt Jim’s nose.
“Well, well, well, we have kids here,” cooed the stranger. “Hello, kids.”
Jim’s eyes were glued to the person. He was too afraid to even blink.
Lucy continued her wailing, oblivious of the intruder hovering just behind her.
“You don’t know how to say hello?” Its eyes inspected Jim with desperate hunger. “You’re a big boy. You can talk, can’t you?”
“We don’t talk to strangers,” he announced in as proud a tone as he could muster.
“Oh, that’s a good rule, it is.” The person’s lips flickered in and out of their mouth as it spoke. “Well, they call me Birdy Boo. So now we’re not strangers no more.” Birdy Boo giggled heartily. Its wide eyes closed to thin slivers as its head machine-gunned back and forth from the laugh.
Jim still would not speak.
The silence made Birdy Boo’s disposition grow colder. “You know it’s rude not to talk to adults, boy.”
Jim did not have to cooperate, but could find no advantage to silence anymore. He decided to push back.
“My dad’s coming back. And he’s not going to be happy with you in our car when he gets back.” Jim tried to growl the words at the invader.
“Oh, mercy,” laughed Birdy Boo. “That’s rich. Not only are you rude, but you’re a liar too.”
Jim began to sweat at the accusation. “I’m not a liar,” he croaked.
“Oh, really? So that dead man laying on the sidewalk across the street over there. With a trail of blood leading back here. And who looks like an old you and with your picture in his wallet. He ain’t related to you?” Short on breath from the rambling statement, the creep wheezed hoarsely as it cackled in delight.
Jim was speechless.
Birdy Boo clapped its fingers together with a little jig. “It’s a good thing your poor ol’ dad ain’t around to see what you become. Of course, maybe that’s why he killed himself in the first place.”
Tears of pure anger dripped out the corners of Jim’s eyes. The boy fought for a stiff lip through a series of low whimpers.
Jim had heard his father say his next two words on many occasions, but was always too afraid to ever use them himself. It was as if invoking their dark power might blowback and hurt the small boy. But now Jim had no problem releasing them.
“Fuck you,” he sneered coldly.
Once the shock subsided, Birdy Boo shook its head back and forth in disapproval. “Rude, liar and a potty-mouth too. Oh, I don’t know how much I can get for that, but someone somewhere will pay. And I will take it, yes, I will.”
Lucy’s wailing had softened from the constant exertion, but continued through the conversation.
“Now this one here,” purred the stranger. Birdy Boo leaned over the back of the infant’s seat to inspect the baby. The creature moved unnaturally, like a liquid pouring into a space. “Yes, yes, this one is a little angel. Got her whole life before her. A world of infinities.”
The creep brushed its fingers along the wet cheek of the child. A smidgeon of black filth rubbed off on the little girl.
”Who knows what could happen with this sweet one? Maybe I keep her myse
lf.” It spoke with the pleasantness of a daydream.
“Leave her alone!” commanded Jim. He became berserk again in his efforts to escape his cage.
Birdy Boo turned its attention back to Jim. “You bark and bark, but I can see you’re a cutie pie too. Even if you’re a mean, dirty liar, I can tell.”
When the intruder raised its hand to playfully pinch the boy’s cheek, Jim suddenly bit its fingers. The skin had the taste and consistency of sour dirt.
Birdy Boo howled in pain, clutching the injury to its chest. Dark blood flowed from the wound. “Oh, you animal! You damned monster!” It sucked on its sore fingers like a child.
Then the thin stranger struck Jim across the face. “You’re going to pay for that, you will!” The thing hit Jim again even harder.
Birdy Boo retreated back to the front seat. Its big white eyes were pinched with rage. “I’m coming back for you animals with my friend. You just wait right here. My friend always knows what to do.”
The cretin slithered back out of view. Soon, the rumbling clank of Birdy Boo’s junky cargo sped off into the horizon.
Fear and sorrow tried to retake the boy again. But now he let rage fill his vessel.
He punched at the smashed window with a fist. It crinkled faintly from the blow.
“Ow!” he cried, retracting his hand back instantly.
His left ring finger was cut just above the knuckle. The glass window he had struck appeared flat, yet he saw the shard that protruded outward to catch his hand. A tiny dot of bright blood was its trophy.
As the lad nursed the finger by sucking on it, an idea struck him.
He reached back out to the glass and began to pick at the jag. When he first touched the tiny shard, it bit him again. He winced, but did not retreat.
He kept struggling to grip the tiny point, repeatedly poking and slashing himself in the process. Eventually, his index finger became so torn, that he switched to his middle finger.
The problem was that he could not get a hold on the point. Even his tiny fingers could not squeeze onto the miniature extrusion.
The boy realized the girl had stopped crying. When he looked over at her, she was transfixed with curiosity by his endeavors. A string of drool hung from her agape mouth. Her eyes were large with suspense.
