Tequila's Sunrise

by Brian Keene

  Then he went home.

  The police knocked on the door a few hours later. Three teenaged boys found Jack’s body. One of them, Seth Ferguson (who was no stranger to juvenile detention) immediately fell under suspicion. When the police cleared him later that day, they questioned the local registered sex offenders, even though Jack’s body had shown no signs of sexual abuse. In the weeks and months that followed, there were no new leads. The case was never solved.

  The murder weapon was never found.

  ***

  Daddy…

  Gary sat up and wiped his eyes. Steadying himself on his son’s tombstone, he clambered to his feet. His joints popped. He hadn’t aged well in the last two years, and his body was developing the ailments of a man twice his age, arthritis being one of them.

  Daddy?

  “Oh Jack,” Gary whispered. “Why couldn’t you have stayed home that day?”

  Daddy…

  His son’s voice grew louder, calling to him, pleading. Sad. Lonely.

  Slowly, like a marionette on strings, Gary shuffled towards the water tower.

  “Where are you, Jack? Show me. Tell me what I have to do to make it up to you.”

  Daddy… Daddy… Daddy…

  The voice was right next to him. Gary looked around, fully expecting to see his son’s ghost, but instead, he spied the rabbits. A dozen or so bunnies formed a loose circle around the water tower. They’d been silent, and had appeared as if from nowhere.

  Penning him in.

  Daddy. Down here.

  Gary looked down at the ground.

  Jack’s voice echoed from inside a rabbit hole.

  The same hole he’d thrown the rock into.

  Gary’s skin prickled. Despite his fear, he leaned over and stared into the hole. There was a flurry of movement inside, and then a rabbit darted out and joined the others. Then another. Whimpering, Gary stepped backward. More bunnies poured themselves from the earth, and he felt their eyes on him—accusing.

  Condemning.

  “What do you want?”

  Daddy.

  Gary screamed.

  ***

  They found him when the sun went down. He’d screamed himself hoarse while pawing at the ground around his son’s grave. His fingers were dirty, and several of his fingernails were bloody and ragged, hanging by thin strands of tissue. He babbled about bunnies, but no one could understand him. The police arrived, as did an ambulance.

  From the undergrowth, a brown bunny rabbit watched them load Gary into the ambulance.

  When he was gone, it hopped away.

  ***

  ***

  This story first appeared on the Horror World website, and was reprinted in my out-of-print short story collection Unhappy Endings. It takes place in the same town as my novels Dark Hollow and Ghost Walk (as does the end of Take The Long Way Home and several other short stories), and alert readers might recognize a few familiar places and people. The water tower exists much as I described it here, but it is far less sinister in real life. My oldest son and I used to play there when he was little. The mishap with the rabbits and the lawnmower is also based on something that happened in real life. I was mowing my lawn and accidentally hit a hidden nest of baby rabbits. It was horrifying and terrible and I felt guilty about it for months afterward. I channeled some of that into the story.

  THAT WHICH LINGERS

  Sarah awoke to the wailing alarm clock. Blurry-eyed and still half asleep, she went for her morning run—from the bedroom to the bathroom. Three seconds later, she knelt, retching as she’d done every morning for the past two months.

  Finished, she collapsed onto the couch and lit the day’s first cigarette while the coffee brewed. A dull ache behind her temples was all that remained from the night before. Sarah frowned, trying to recall the exact details. She remembered arguing with the bartender. He hadn’t wanted to serve her, commenting on her condition. After some flirting, she’d managed to hook up with several men who were willing to buy a girl a drink in exchange for a hint of things to come.

  At least she hadn’t gotten completely smashed and ended up bringing one of them home. Her empty bed testified to that. She hadn’t shared it since Christopher walked out on her four months ago. She inhaled, letting the acrid smoke fill her lungs, and fought back tears.

  Sarah showered, trying to wake up as the water caressed her skin. Trying to lose herself in a flood of happy thoughts. Trying not to notice the swell of her abdomen as she lathered her lower body. Trying to cope.

  She wrapped her long, chestnut hair in a towel, and cinched another around her waist. Then she grabbed breakfast. The coffee was good, but a single bite of the granola bar made her stomach nauseous again.

  She let the towels drop to the floor and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. This too, reminded her of Christopher.

  They’d dated for three years. The pregnancy had been unplanned. Christopher had been ecstatic—and crushed when he learned that she didn’t feel the same way. She’d tried to explain how she felt. How the timing wasn’t right. She still wanted to go back to school and get her bachelor’s degree. She wanted to do more with her life than working as a waitress. Having a baby now would jeopardize all of that.

  What she hadn’t told him was that she worried about his drinking and of how he was turning out to be just like the father he hated. She didn’t express that she had come to seriously doubt their relationship.

  Christopher was completely opposed to the abortion.

  Sarah noticed how her breasts were growing fuller while echoes of Christopher’s pleas rang in her ears.

  The abortion had devastated him, killing whatever chance of love they’d still had. A part of both of them had died that day.

  That was four months ago.

  Collapsing onto the unmade bed, she began to cry. How could she possibly deal with what was happening to her alone? She needed Christopher.

  She’d considered having an ultrasound, but knew that nothing would show up during the procedure.

  She wasn’t crazy.

  She was haunted.

  Deep inside, Sarah felt something kick.

  ***

  ***

  The original version of this story appeared in my very first short story collection, No Rest For the Wicked, which is long out-of-print. I touched it up a bit for its appearance in A Little Silver Book of Streetwise Stories (also out of print), but left most of it intact. This is one of the first short stories I ever sold for publication, and it remains a personal favorite. When it was first published, it caused a minor stir on early internet message boards among both pro-life and anti-abortion readers. That surprised me at the time, but the internet was young and new then, and things like flame wars and trolls hadn’t been invented yet. Rest assured, I had no political agenda with this tale. I just thought it was a pretty cool ghost story.

  TWO-HEADED ALIEN LOVE CHILD

  Kaine worked for the government. This was not something he revealed when meeting women or starting conversations. These days, with all of the paranoia and conspiracy theories, it was best to keep silent. When meeting women and starting conversations, Kaine introduced himself as an appliance salesman from New Jersey.

  He’d served the department for thirty years, watching it grow from a tiny office into a sprawling bureaucratic monstrosity with buildings in every city of every state. He’d watched administrations rise and fall, witnessed cover-ups and exposures. He’d seen other divisions like the CIA and NSA hide their tracks repeatedly, but his division had never been covert. It worked with and among the civilians it was designed to help. True, in recent decades it had become slower and less efficient, but it still never failed to get the job done.

  Getting the job done was something Kaine took very seriously. That was why he sat here tonight, listening to Neil Diamond while the rain beat upon the roof of his non-descript sedan. Sitting on a quiet suburban street in Idaho. Sitting outside the home of Sylvia Burns, a woman who, like thousands of
young, unwed, or divorced mothers before her, was burdened by evil.

  A blinding flash burst silently above the house like a miniature sunrise. Kaine glanced at the dashboard clock. 12:47 a.m. Right on schedule. Then the clock flashed zeros as ‘Sweet Caroline’ dissolved into static. Outside, the streetlights dimmed, plunging the housing development into darkness. Kaine knew from experience that the neighbors would sleep undisturbed throughout the occurrence.

  A ball of light appeared, soaring down from the sky and hovering just off the ground. A ramp descended and six diminutive figures walked out of the sphere. They approached Sylvia’s bedroom window, and vanished into the house. After a few minutes, they reappeared, carrying a comatose Sylvia between them. The gray-skinned beings disappeared into the craft. The ramp began to recede.

  Pausing only to smooth his tie, Kaine crept through the darkness, clutching an unregistered semiautomatic pistol in one hand, and a black briefcase in the other. Swiftly, he leapt onto the platform. The figures had retreated into the depths of the vessel. Kaine shuddered as he recalled Sylvia’s description of the craft’s interior.

  The hatch closed behind him. Kaine examined the dimly lit corridor. A distant humming reverberated off the walls and floor. A bluish-green glow emanated from a doorway at the end of the hall. He examined the strange symbols scrawled across the door. Kaine placed the briefcase at his feet and touched the cold metal. It throbbed from deep inside, as if it were a living thing. Seconds later, the door slid open, revealing a nightmarish scene.

  His client lay naked on a table, surrounded by dozens of the alien beings. They were vaguely humanoid, with two arms and two legs, but their heads were much larger than the rest of their bodies and their eyes were huge, dwarfing their almost nonexistent noses and mouths.

  Kaine had seen them before. His mind flashed back to a supermarket tabloid from ten months ago: WOMAN IMPREGNATED BY ALIEN ABDUCTORS. Beneath the garish headline had been a photograph of Sylvia. Two weeks later, Kaine became her caseworker.

  “Nobody move.” He raised the pistol with one hand and unlatched the briefcase with his other. Kaine pulled a stack of papers out of the briefcase. The aliens cringed, fear flashing in their black eyes. Kaine held a document before him like a shield. “My name is Kaine. I am a Domestic Relations Officer, as well as the caseworker for the young woman you have strapped to that table.”

  He flung the paperwork toward the tightly clustered aliens, and undid Sylvia’s straps. She clung to him weakly, as if waking from a dream.

  “This, gentlemen, is a court order for child support. You are hereby ordered to appear in domestic court one month from today for a child support hearing. My client claims that you impregnated her; therefore, you are financially responsible for part of the child’s welfare. Bring whatever pay stubs and supporting documents you may have with you. Also bring a copy of your most recent tax return. If you can not afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you by the state.”

  Still brandishing the gun, Kaine backed Sylvia towards the exit.

  “The next time you decide to abduct and impregnate someone in my state, gentlemen, I suggest you remember that we do not go lightly on deadbeat dads. Good evening to you.”

  The door hissed shut behind them, leaving the aliens to stare at one another in bewilderment.

  “Shit,” said one. “We haven’t fucked up this bad since Roswell.”

  ***

  ***

  The original version of this story appeared in my first short story collection, No Rest For the Wicked (which is long out-of-print). I revised it considerably for its appearance in A Little Silver Book of Streetwise Stories. I’m not sure where I got the idea. I think it stemmed from drinking a six-pack of beer while watching The X-Files.

  GOLDEN BOY

  I shit gold.

  It started around the time I hit puberty. I thought there was something wrong with me. Cancer or parasites or something like that, because when I looked down into the bowl, a golden turd was sitting on the bottom. When I wiped, there were gold stains on the toilet paper. Then I flushed and went back to watching cartoons. Ten minutes later, I’d forgotten all about it.

  You know how kids are.

  But it wasn’t just my shit. I pissed gold. (No golden showers jokes, please. I’ve heard them all before). I started sweating gold. It oozed out of my pores in little droplets, drying on my skin in flakes. It peeled off easily enough. Just like dead skin after a bad case of sunburn. Then my spit and mucous started turning into gold. I’d hock gold nuggets onto the sidewalk. One day, I was picking mulberries from a tree in a pasture. There was a barbed-wire fence beneath the tree, and to reach the higher branches, I stood on the fence. I lost my balance and the barbed-wire took three big chunks out of the back of my thigh. My blood was liquid gold. And like I said, this was around puberty, so you can only imagine what my wet dreams were like. Many nights, instead of waking up wet and sticky, I woke up with a hard, metallic mess on my sheets and in my pajamas.

  Understand, my bodily fluids weren’t just gold colored. If they had been, things might have turned out differently. But they were actual gold—that precious metal coveted all over the world. Gold—the source of wars and peace, the rise of empires and their eventual collapse, murders and robberies, wealth and poverty, love and hate.

  My parents figured it out soon enough. So did the first doctor they took me to. Oh, yeah. That doctor was very interested. He wanted to keep me for observation. Wanted to conduct some more tests. He said all this with his doctor voice but you could see the greed in his eyes.

  And he was just the first.

  Mom and Dad weren’t having any of that. They took me home and told me this was going to be our little secret. I was special. I had a gift from God. A wonderful, magnificent talent—but one that might be misunderstood by others. They wanted to help me avoid that, they said. Didn’t want me to be made fun of or taken advantage of. Even now, I honestly think they meant it at the time. They believed that their intentions were for the best. But you know what they say about good intentions. The road to hell is paved with them. That’s bullshit, of course.

  The road to hell is paved with fucking gold.

  My parents started skimming my residue. Mom scraped gold dust from my clothes and the sheets when she did laundry and from the rim of my glass after dinner. One night, they told me I couldn’t watch my favorite TV show because I wouldn’t eat my broccoli. I cried gold tears. After that, it seemed like they made me cry a lot.

  Everywhere I went, I left a trail of gold behind me. My parents collected it, invested it, and soon, we moved to a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood with a better school. Our family of three grew. We had a maid and a cook and groundskeepers.

  I hated it, at first. The new house was too big. We’d been a blue-collar family. Now, Mom and Dad didn’t work anymore and I suddenly found myself thrown into classrooms with a bunch of snobby rich kids—all because of my gift. I had nothing in common with my classmates. They talked about books and music that I’d never heard of, and argued politics and civic responsibilities and French Impressionism. They idolized Che Guevara and Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. I read comic books and listened to hip-hop and liked Spider-Man.

  So I tried to fit in. Nobody wants to be hated. It’s human nature—wanting to be liked by your peers. Soon enough, I found a way. I let them in on my little secret. Within a week, I was the most popular kid in school. I had more friends than I knew what to do with. Everybody wanted to be friends with the golden boy. But here’s the thing. They didn’t want to be friends with me because of who I was. They wanted to be friends with me because of who I was. There’s a big difference between those two things.

  So I had friends. Girlfriends, too.

  I remember the first girl I ever loved. She was beautiful. There’s nothing as powerful or pure or unstable as first love. I thought about her constantly. Stared at her in class. Dreamed of her at night. And when she returned my interest, my body felt like a coiled spr
ing. It was the happiest day of my life. But she didn’t love me for who I was. Like everyone else, she loved me for who I was.

  So have all the rest. Both ex-wives and the string of long-term girlfriends between them. My happiest relationships are one night stands. The only women I’m truly comfortable with are the ones I only know for a few brief hours. I never tell them who I am or what I can do. And before you ask, yes, I always wear a condom and no, I can’t have children. There are no little golden boys in my future. I don’t shoot blanks. I shoot bullets.

  I’ve no shortage of job opportunities. Banks, financial groups, precious metals dealers, jewelers, even several governments. Of course, I don’t need to work. I can live off my talent for the rest of my life. So can everyone else around me. But that doesn’t stop the employment offers from coming. And they’re so insincere and patronizing. So very fucking patronizing. They want to invest in my future. Just like my parents and my friends and my wives, they only want what’s best for me. Or so they claim.

  But I know what they really want.

  And I can’t take it anymore.

  I’m spent. My gold is tarnished. It’s lost its gleam. Its shine. I can see it, and I wonder if others are noticing, too.

  Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to put this gun to my head and blow my brains out all over the room, leaving a golden spray pattern on the wall. The medical examiner will pick skull fragments and gold nuggets out of the plaster. The mortician can line his pockets before embalming me. You can sell my remains on eBay, and invest in them, and fight over what’s left.

  I want to fade away, but gold never fades. This is my gift. This is my legacy. This is my curse.

  I have only one thing to leave behind.

  You can spend me when I’m gone.

  ***

  ***

  This story first appeared in A Little Silver Book of Streetwise Stories. The first and last sentences came to me one day, and I liked them so much that I wrote a story to tie them together. A friend of mine, fellow writer Kelli Owen, read this prior to publication and said it was a metaphor for my current place in the genre. But Kelli is quite possibly mentally ill, and says that about all of my work. Plus, I’m fairly certain she was drunk when she read it. Take from “Golden Boy” what you will, but I just think it’s a quirky and kind of fun fable. Not a metaphor, and (hopefully) not a prediction of the future.