by Isaac Thorne
Following a few cautious steps to test his pain threshold, Lee rounded the corner of the house. The skinny cuckold and his little black girl were in a white pickup that had a topper on it. It sported some butt-ugly Channel 6 News decals. The skinny man was on the passenger side, cradling his forehead in a hand that was propped on an elbow against the window. His brown sugar sat in the driver’s seat. Figures. She had her head turned away from him, craning her neck out the driver’s side window so that she could see to back up. Were they trying to get away? The little old bat who’d violated him was nowhere to be seen. Either they’d tucked her in the back of that pickup, or she’d already bailed on them under her own power.
In front of the white Channel 6 News pickup sat a shiny maroon double-cab truck with what Lee thought were somewhat feminine curves on its front end and over its fender wells. The words Toyota Tacoma were clearly visible on the passenger’s side door facing him. It sat on thin-tread street tires and silver star-pattern wheels that no respectable Southern man would be caught dead installing on his ride. He glanced down at the fob in his left hand and noted the Toyota logo again. It was his son’s pickup, sitting there overnight with the windows down. Of course it was. Figured.
Neither of the Channel 6 assholes had noticed him yet. Lee hobbled forward, searching the key ring for the pickup’s key. He found one with the Toyota logo on its black rubber bow and held it apart from the rest of the ring. The Channel 6 pickup was already reversing its way down Hollow Creek Road. He would not have time (or the pain threshold) to chase after them on foot. A car chase it was, then. He no longer had access to his hunting knife—God knew what his stupid kid had done with it after murdering him—but he’d make sure this one ended in some way similar to the way his last car chase did: with the pursued dead and their pursuer off scot-free. Not an easy task, for sure, but he was now the duly elected constable of Lost Hollow, was he not? He at least looked the part. If cops around here were anything now like they had been when he was alive, they’d believe him over the rantings of the lying news media any day of the week and twice on Sunday. If they survived long enough to tell their side of the story, he could just claim temporary insanity from spending the night in the cellar and their failure to rescue him. Isn’t that how people were always getting away with shit on television? The insanity defense? Was it still a thing? The old bat who might have escaped him on her own was another matter, but one he’d have to deal with in due course. The little black girl and her cuckold were within his reach right now and had to come first.
He had taken only a few more hobbling steps toward his son’s girly ride when the skinny man looked up from his palm and noticed him. Shit. Lee tried to hurry, but the friction of his legs against his sack shot a fresh bolt of electricity through his balls. The world swam in front of him and, the next thing he knew, the Channel 6 News pickup was closing the distance between him and its front end. It screeched to a halt just shy of his knees and shut off. Before he’d had time to process that he wasn’t going to be run down, stars exploded in his vision. The black girl and her skinny cuckold had leaped simultaneously from the pickup and launched themselves at him. He felt Graham’s bottom lip rip open anew in the spot that he’d busted in his fall from the cellar stairs. He went down fast and hard, striking the back of his head on the ground. That pain combined with a new lightning strike from his scrotum caused a wave of nausea. He felt the acid emptiness of Graham’s stomach rise in his esophagus and choked it back down in a single large gulp.
“You’re not going anywhere,” a voice from somewhere above him said. Most likely the black girl. “Pin his arm. Like this.”
Lee felt weight crash down on top of his right forearm, pinning it to the ground. He tried to resist it, to raise the arm, but it was no use. His son Graham’s bicep was too stretched out and was of no use as leverage against the black girl’s knees. Following her lead, her cuckold crashed down on his left forearm, causing that hand to thrust open. The Toyota keyring fell from his palm. The late morning sun was blinding from this supine position, but he could make out the shapes of the skinny man and the black woman who knelt on top of him against the unseasonably blue Southern sky above them.
“Get off me,” he managed. Blood from the reopened bottom lip trickled into his mouth as he spoke.
“No can do, buddy-roo,” the cuckold said. “The ambulance and the sheriff’s department are on their way here. Patsy’s waiting for them at the mouth of the road over there. We can’t have you wandering off after we just now found you, can we? Especially after you attacked us.”
Lee’s eyes rolled back in his head. He could feel Graham struggling to free himself from the stream again. With his arms pinned this way and pain firing shots at his consciousness from both ends of his body, it was getting harder to hold the little son of a bitch under. He felt the boy sending words to his mouth, tried to clamp down against them, but it was too late. He heard himself say “Athia!” The girl heard it, too, because she responded.
“What, Graham?”
“He’th trying to kill you.”
“Who is trying to kill me?”
“My father.”
“Your father is dead, Graham. Just like mine. Did your father have something to do with my dad’s murder?”
“I told you. Yeth. He killed your father. He killed your mother. He killed my mother. He killed a stripper. Now he wants to kill you too.”
Lee Gordon yanked on his son’s consciousness then, pulling on him, trying to drag him back down into the stream. It had been a pleasant few seconds, even a restorative few seconds, to be away from the excruciating pain in his son’s testicles for a little while, but the more he let the little asshole ramble to the black girl, the more likely it was that they’d start to believe his ramblings and try to help him. On the surface, Graham Gordon’s body began to twitch and jerk beneath the weight of Staff and Afia. The boy was fighting hard to stay out front. Lee countered his efforts by letting him go. At first.
He felt his boy’s body relax almost immediately after he released his grip on his consciousness. Lee could even feel the cords in the forearms deflate a little against the pressure being applied by the black girl on one side of him and the skinny man on the other. He held himself back for a time, pressing his own consciousness into the folds of an elastic bed at the bottom of their shared stream. He stepped back into those folds, stretching the bed beneath him, pulling it taut. So taut was the strain that the fabric of the stream had begun to pull together around him, nearly closing him inside a bubble.
“Your father can’t kill me, Graham,” he heard the black girl saying. “Your father’s dead. Patsy told us. He’s buried in a cemetery on the other side of town.”
“No,” he heard his son’s voice insist. “He’th inside me. He’th possething me. Controlling...”
Lee Gordon loosed his hold on the bed of the stream, allowing the tension he’d created against it to catapult him forward, distorting the bubble that had been forming and turning his own consciousness into a missile, a projectile that he could use to smash through Graham’s takeover and regain control of the physical body. With luck, the force of the blow and the element of surprise might be enough to cause the boy’s body to tense up again, perhaps catch his captors by surprise, finally throw them off him.
He was not wrong.
He smashed headlong into the consciousness of his son, or what he perceived as headlong anyway, and wrapped his phantom arms around him, choking him, yanking backward on him. The forward thrust shocked Graham’s body in a way akin to that machine in the doctor shows on television, the ones with the paddles that the operator always screams for everyone to stand clear from. Graham’s torso lurched upward, pulling his shoulders and arms along with it. On the right side, his forearm slipped from beneath her knees and out of the black girl’s loose grip. Her conversation with Graham and the relaxing of his muscles beneath her had had the unintended consequence of relaxing her too. She rolled off him and onto the ground.
With the right arm loose, Lee Gordon was able to turn the forward momentum of his son’s torso into a one hundred eighty-degree arc that ended with him wrapping both arms around the waist of the skinny man. He heaved the little asshole who had reopened his son’s busted lip off his feet and then threw him to the ground. He crashed to earth on his right side and curled into a fetal position there. Lee thought he’d probably landed on his elbow, thereby punching himself in the gut and knocking his own breath out of his lungs. Good.
The black girl was off the ground and running at him from his left. He swung his left arm outward from the center of his body and caught her across the cheek with the hammer of his fist. There was a time in his life when he would have considered pulling that punch, or not even striking out in the first place. His dad—Graham’s grandfather—had always told him that a real man never hits a woman, that men are naturally stronger than women and hitting one made you look like a cuckolded fool who’d been emotionally overpowered by the weak. But Lee’s dad had apparently never encountered that bitch Grace Afton or her uppity daughter Afia. In these cases, Lee thought, he was acting in self-defense. Besides, they were both black women. They might have the right to vote or own land, but no one gave them the right to interfere in his life.
There was an audible crack of flesh against flesh, and the woman cried out in both pain and surprise: pain because of the hit itself, and surprise because she’d probably been thinking she was somehow above being punched in the face. The blow stopped her in her tracks. Her hands went to her face, dabbing at it, checking for blood as tears streamed from the corners of her eyes. Lee didn’t see any evidence of bleeding, and that was too bad. He was sorry that he hadn’t broken the skin, but she was at least very likely to have a swollen cheek before the end of the day, a perfect look for her face on the nightly news, he thought.
On the ground, the skinny man had begun to stir again. Lee gave him a swift kick to the back of his head with his son’s steel-toed Wolverines. Again he felt that fatherly surge of pride that he’d at least managed to teach his boy one thing throughout his miserable life: loyalty to a man’s brand. Maybe if Graham had followed his lead with Budweisers and Winstons as well as work boots, their relationship would’ve been a hell of a lot closer. It was too late now, though. If Graham survived this, Lee would not. If Lee survived, Graham would be gone. No two people could occupy the same physical body without one eventually overpowering and destroying the other.
The skinny man howled in pain and tried to roll away from him. Lee took the opportunity to kick him again, this time connecting with his chin. He realized a second too late that he’d turned his back on the black girl in the process. She leaped on him from behind and landed on his back like a squirrel skipping from tree to tree. She wrapped her legs around his waist and tied her arms around his neck, hugging his windpipe, cutting off his air. Pain and hot blood exploded from his left earlobe as she leaned into him and bit down on it. Lee screamed, although it came out as more of a groan because of his empty lungs, and tried to shake her off him, clutching at her taut and wiry arms around his throat as he did. He spun her in circles and thrashed against her with his elbows, but she would not budge.
From their spot in front of his house, Lee could see the window into the living room that his trusty old Sylvania television used to occupy, where he’d spent so many Saturday nights drinking Buds and watching Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper go at each other on the WWF’s World Championship Wrestling show. He remembered how so many WWF wrestlers released themselves from choke holds in the ring. Lee sprung backward on the heels of his son’s boots and fell flat on his back, crushing the black woman beneath him. He heard her breath leave her with an “uhhhff” when she hit. Her hold on his throat was loosened, and he rolled free, landing in a crouch on his hands and knees and gasping for the return of his own air.
He couldn’t afford to wait for it. As soon as the world slowed its rotation in front of his eyes, Lee scrambled to his feet. He teetered, nearly collapsing when he was hit with a fresh wave of nausea that caused him to hang his head in expectation of a regurgitative blast, but managed to steady himself and swallow it down instead. He blinked away the tears that had welled behind his eyelids after that wave and caught a glint of sunlight off the Tacoma’s key that lay where he had dropped it when the girl and her cuckold had taken him down. He stumbled over to the keyring and snatched it from the ground. He had no weapons. The Maglite lay on the other side of the house near the crawl space access and his dumbass son had apparently accepted the constable position without demanding access to a handgun. The girl and her boy were both still lying in the overgrown clumps of grass in front of his house, each of them nursing their wounds and trying to recover their strength. The bitch was already starting to make motions as if she was trying to pick herself up. If he was going to end this, it had to be now. Fuck the consequences. They knew he was not Graham—even if they didn’t yet realize they knew—and like the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, that knowledge was going to cost them. Instead of their eyes being opened, Lee Gordon meant to close them forever.
The key with the Toyota logo on it was a long one. It created a perfect pocket knife-length dagger when squeezed between the second and third knuckles of his right hand. After he used it to gouge out the black girl’s eyes, he’d turn it on her cuckold and do the same. Blinded, they had no advantage over him. Neither of them would be able to fight him. Neither of them would be able to see death coming for them if they even survived the gouging. Was the key long enough to allow him to stab their brains when he went in through the eye socket? Part of him hoped it was. Lee didn’t know much about anatomy beyond what he’d learned by experimenting with his own son’s nervous system earlier that day, but he knew he had grown tired of these two and their need to obstruct his access to his new life above the ground.
He straddled the black girl, ignoring his own mind’s warnings that this could be a mistake. She was not yet in any condition to assault his testicles the way the old bat had done. Just in case, he planted his knees in her ribs, squeezing them the way a rider kicks a horse to make it move, forcing whatever air she’d managed to retrieve in her downtime out of her lungs. He gripped her throat with his left hand, using the leverage of his fingers to straighten her chin so that it pointed up at him. Her eyes were closed, squeezed shut against the pain she was in, he thought, but it shouldn’t matter. If he jabbed hard enough, the key should penetrate her eyelids as well as the softer organs beneath them. With a grimace, he raised his right arm into the air, cocked at the elbow so that the dagger he’d fashioned from the Tacoma key pointed down from his knuckles, toward her face. He needed a single accurate punch, just hit the nail on the head. A good steady inhale and an exhale with the thrust and—
That was when he heard the low growl coming from somewhere in front of them. He missed his mark and plunged the length of the Tacoma key into the ground beside Afia Afton’s right ear instead of into her eye. He cussed the distraction and swiveled his head around to confront it.
Then he felt the teeth.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Staff’s pain subsided. He was breathing easy again. He sat up just in time to see the animal with the continuously transforming face leap over his legs and lunge with bared teeth at Graham Gordon, or what everyone had previously believed was Graham Gordon. The man, whoever he was now, yelped in pain and surprise when the creature sank her (human) teeth into his right thigh. He’d been squatting on top of Afia, planning God knew what. The forward momentum of the creature bowled him over and sent him rolling across what used to be a driveway and into what used to be the front yard. The beast remained with him, snarling and biting as opportunities presented themselves, while the man jabbed at her with something that he was holding between the knuckles of his right hand. Staff thought it might be the key to Graham’s Tacoma.
When the two combatants had rolled far enough away from her, Staff crawled to Afia, who was lyin
g motionless on her back. He scrubbed the palms of his hands on his cargo shorts to clean off the dirt and then leaned over her, gently cradling her face. Her eyes were open, and she cut them to look at him. He saw her fear there. She gasped for air. Staff crouched behind her head and raised her to a sitting position, supporting her back with his hands and forearms. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Her muscles were tight as drums and uncooperative.
“Relax. Try to relax your neck and your shoulders, at least.” He felt her loosen a little. Good. She was responding and, even better, trusting him to help. “The wind’s been knocked out of you. I want you to close your mouth and inhale through your nose, ok? I’m going to count to two. I want you to inhale as long as I’m counting. Let the air fill your whole belly, just like when we were kids and tried to make ourselves look fat. Understand?”
