The Butterfly Forest (Mystery/Thriller)

by Lowe, Tom

  “Glenda! It’s real! Call them! I’m outta change. I’ll be home in a few minutes.”

  Billy saw the reflection in the phone glass. A dark figure leaping from the truck-bed. Billy dug for his pistol as two bullets shattered the glass and slammed into his chest.

  “Billy!” The tiny voice came through the receiver. “Billy! Dear God, no!”

  The man stood next to the phone booth and fired a third shot into Billy’s stomach and then ran. He jumped in the truck and drove away while Billy slid down the back wall of the booth. He sat in the broken glass and blood, nausea and bile rising in his throat.

  Billy lifted a bloodied hand toward the phone hanging by the cord just out of reach. “Billy! Billy!” His wife’s cries sounded far away. He wanted to speak, to tell Glenda how much he loved her. To tell her goodbye…to have her put the phone on her stomach, right where he’d felt the little kick, to whisper his love to his unborn child. “Glenda…” He coughed the taste of blood like pennies in his mouth, his wife’s cries so distant now. Darkness covering him.

  Billy heard the explosion of a mortar above Company C. The blast was the whitest white he’d ever seen, and he saw his wife’s smile somewhere in the absence of color. Felt the gentle kick of his baby on the tips of his fingers. The ringing in his left ear was now silent, the sound of the pounding surf across AIA the only noise in the night.