by William Cook
I flicked the safety off the Colt automatic and chambered a round inside a thick coat, successfully muffling the barely audible noise of metal on metal. My heart briefly paused for a second as the click of the round being chambered seemed to echo inside the wardrobe. I heard the latch on the door squeak as I had predicted and I knew I had the drop on this motherfucker, as I peered through the crack in the door. I had a direct line-of-sight to the entrance when I saw the gloved fingers wrap around the edge of the bedroom door. I waited a second and sure enough the masked figure slipped into the room and dropped to a crouching stance as he scoped the room with the long-barrelled shotgun. I deftly squeezed the trigger. The blast from my military-issued pistol blinded me for a second, I dropped to one knee and squeezed off another two quick rounds in the direction of the intruder. The acrid smell of burnt gunpowder made me repress a sneeze as my eyes focussed in the dark again.
There was nothing there, just the black shadows of the open doorway to my bedroom. I braced the automatic across my forearm and left the wardrobe, making my way to the bedside table where I took the mag-lite from the drawer. My sight never left the doorway, as I closed one eye and thumbed the switch on the torch, revealing two black sneakers lying prone in a dark pool of blood. I switched the light on to reveal shredded gore splashed across the wall of the hallway. I could smell shit so I held my cupped hand over my nose and mouth as I looked at the nearly decapitated body. It looked like my first shot had hit him square in the side of his skull and as he fell, my two low shots had slammed home under his chin, effectively taking the top of his head off. The remains of the black ski-mask lay shredded around his eviscerated throat like a noose.
I drew a few deep breaths and assessed the situation. I turned the light off again and made my way to the window. My nearest neighbours lived half a kilometre away and it was not uncommon to hear gunshots in this rural area as night hunters bagged nocturnal pray. Despite the distance between the old farmhouses on these rural lots, I could see my easterly neighbour’s porch light come on. In fact, the neighbour’s house was the only other house in the area for at least twenty miles. I peeked through a crack in the blinds and could clearly see old Del Boyd button his jacket, then light a cigarette, before sitting on the wooden bench he made last spring. I had sat on my porch, sipping cold beers, as I watched him work on the bench until sun-down. I remembered how he’d finished up and turned and stared in my direction, his face shadowed under his cap and the waning light, obviously aware that I had been watching him as he worked. That had been the start of our troubles. When I say ‘troubles,’ I mean real trouble – we’d had words in the past, in fact over two years ago on the very first day that Mary and I and the kids had moved in, he’d made himself known by stopping his rusted old pick-up outside our house and staring at us as we struggled up the porch steps with our belongings.
I had waved out to him as he sat there in his idling Ford – he’d promptly spat out the window a stream of black tobacco juice and planted his foot on the accelerator, the Ford growled and spewed out behind it a plume of dust and gravel, as it sped up the dirt road and disappeared over a hump before appearing minutes later up the long dirt driveway that ran along our fence-line, heading towards his ramshackle farm-house. I brushed it off, not really giving a damn about an unfriendly neighbour – the return to my hometown had been anti-climactic to say the least. All my old friends had shifted away, even my old school had been levelled and replaced with a characterless barn of a shopping mall. We were living off my V.A. pension for a while but luckily enough we were mortgage free for the first time in our lives, due largely to my long service pay-out and Mary’s exceptional savings skills. The kids had settled in to the local school and had started to make some new friends. Mary had eventually found a job in town, working at the garden centre where she was able to earn a small income and engage her love of plants and landscaping. She had been due a promotion when the accident had destroyed our lives, leaving me to exist alone in the depths of my depression and grief. I had spent my days walking around the house in a daze, lost in a world alternating between bitter-sweet memories and violent psychologically jarring combat flash-backs. I cannot count the times I sat on the edge of our bed, my service pistol in my mouth, my finger trembling on the trigger . . .
I thought about the creep lying on his back with his brains plastered to the hallway walls and ceiling. Fuck! I thought about calling it in but I knew there would be questions. The last time the cops had been here was after the accident. It had been nearly nine months ago now but Mary and the kids’ memories still burned a hole in my heart every time I thought of them. I thought of them lying in their coffins in the funeral parlour – three coffins, one large – two small, lined up neatly next to each other, Mary in the middle and the girls flanking her either side. I tried to push the memory of the car accident aside and considered my options for a moment.
I could call the cops but I knew what to expect, it could swing one of two ways: either they’d let me off with self-defence or I’d be charged with ‘voluntary manslaughter.’ Either way, I decided that I didn’t need any more grief in my life and that this was the last straw. I thought of various scenarios – I could clean up the mess and get rid of the body in the sink-hole on the vacant lot that backed on to the nearby creek, then I could pack what I needed and torch the house, hopefully able to make a claim on the insurance to buy something small back in town. Rural life had been a disaster for my family and I had regretted every minute of our time spent here, thanks largely to our neighbour and his brood of three maladjusted teenage boys who loped around the farm like morose simpletons. I wished that I were a younger man – I’d re-enlist in a heartbeat and take my middle-eastern posting with glee, if it weren’t for my discharge papers and the doctor’s assessment of PTSD as the reason for my decampment.
I tried to focus on the task at hand and went downstairs. I opened the back door and stepped outside to get some fresh air before cleaning up the mess inside. I stood on the porch and looked across the farmland towards the Boyd’s house. The night had closed in and the old man had been joined on the shadowed porch by two of his sons; all three of them stood in a row, shoulder-to-shoulder, facing my property, ominously silhouetted against the porch-light. I stepped back inside the house and closed the door behind me. I leaned against the door, my mind working furiously as I started linking things together in my brain. I thought of Mary sitting in the dining room with the sewing machine, carefully stitching the pieces of material together into one of her beautiful hand-made quilts. I walked quickly into the kitchen and grabbed a roll of extra-large plastic trash sacks and some duct-tape from under the sink. I filled a bucket with cleaning products and climbed the stairs, pausing to flick the light-switch on as I entered the bloody hallway.
The yellow glow of the low-wattage bulb flooded the hallway with a sickly light, illuminating the gruesome scene before me. I waited for a flinch or a turn of my stomach, a tinge of nausea even, but none came. The blood spilled in the mountains of Afghanistan and on the streets of Iraq, had hardened me to the sight of death and bloody carnage like that which lay before me. Ironically, it was probably my military experience and my fractured psychological state of mind that had also allowed me to deal with, or at least compartmentalise, the death of my family.
I put the cleaning products and the trash bags on the floor next to the headless corpse and retrieved a small tub of Tiger Balm from the bathroom, rubbing a generous smear on my top lip, my eyes slightly watering as the liniment burned my skin. The body was cold now and the blood caked like mud on the upper torso, I pulled the corpse away from the coagulated pool of blood and quickly patted the body down, removing a beat-up thin brown wallet and a folding buck knife from the pockets. I opened the wallet and sucked in a mouthful of the body’s stench as I read the name on the driver’s license. Damn! Del Boyd Junior. Del Boyd’s oldest lanky inbred son had been in our house with a gun. Whatever his intentions were, I was sure that his Pa had some
thing to do with him being on my property. Even for a kid as stupid as Del Boyd Junior, this was a new level of idiocy. If all he’d wanted to do was to break into the house and steal things, all he’d had to do was wait until I went to town or left the property – both houses being in plain sight of each other. But the gun and the sight of Boyd Senior on the porch watching our house, led me to believe that his presence in my house was of a more sinister (if no less stupid) nature.
I quickly opened a trash bag and manoeuvred the top half of the corpse inside, followed by the bottom half in a separate sack and then two more trash-sacks duct-taped around the middle of the bundle. I looped coils of duct-tape around the length of the corpse until it was completely secure and then dragged the dead-weighed corpse on a rug, down the steps to the ground floor, and then to the back door. The tiger-balm worked a treat, all I could smell was the hot tang of the liniment; no bodily fluids or loosened bowels – a useful old trick I had picked up when I worked the body count detail in the Marine Corps. Some guys smoked cigars to help dilute the stench of death but I has asked Mary to send me a small tub of the balm on the good advice of an older sergeant. I climbed the stairs again and looked back down the hallway at the dark stains that were splashed up the wall and across the floor and took a minute to decide what I would do next. I could clean up the blood and viscera first, or I could get rid of the body while there was still a bit of evening light left . . .
The unmistakeable sound of Del Boyd’s rickety old shitbox Ford crackled across the distance between our two houses. I heard the engine fire and cough to life and then the receding rumble as it tracked down the dirt driveway away from the Boyd’s place, as it wound its way onto the main road that connected our two properties. I paused for a minute, listening to the fading sound of the vehicle and then the switch in direction as the old engine grew louder as it approached our property. Shit! I had hoped that he wouldn’t venture onto our land but somehow I knew that was exactly what he would do. I left the body where it lay and switched all the lights off, retrieving my mag-lite torch from where I’d left it on the stair balustrade. I moved quickly and opened the trap-door in the washhouse floor that led to the cellar, careful to close it above me as I descended the steps into the darkness below.
I cleared my lock-up tool box from under a pile of old linen and folded cardboard boxes, left over from our shift. After retrieving the key, which I kept in a small sardine can on the top shelf of an old book case, the padlock came away easily as I turned it in the chamber. I heard the sound of the pick-up get louder as it accelerated up the front slope of our driveway a few hundred metres away. I held the mag-lite between my teeth, my heart beating evenly despite the sweat beading on my forehead, and opened the lid of the large metal toolbox. Green camo-gear and a folded flag sat in the top of the tool-box but it was what lay beneath that I wanted; I pushed the top layer to one side and took out a large hold-all bag. I heard the skid of wheels on gravel as Boyd’s ford pulled to a halt at the end of my driveway. The M4-Carbine was in perfect working order, once every six months since my last tour of duty, I had stripped it down, oiled it, and wrapped it in rags. I took a ski-mask, a set of Night Vision Goggles (NVGs) and four pre-loaded magazines in a belt pouch from another lock box inside the larger tool box. I quickly pulled the balaclava over my head and adjusted the focus and light-settings on the NVGs, the basement now illuminated before me in an eerie green glow through the goggles, and strapped the mag-pouch to my belt. Two car doors slammed shut and I heard a whoop and a holler from the remaining Boyd brothers as they leapt out of the pick-up. I loaded a magazine and chambered a round into the Carbine. My mind raced as I planned my next move. I quickly opened the fuse-box located beneath the cellar steps and flicked the main switch off. The sound of wood splintering echoed through the empty house above me, as one of the boys kicked the front door in.
“Hoover, you sumbitch! You hear me you peckerhead motherfucker! Where you at neighbour? Me and the boys wanna have a talk wit’cho!”
I heard Del Boyd senior’s coarse voice above me as they trio stumbled around in the dark above me.
“Fuck paw, cain’t see nuttin’ in this shithole . . .”
“You bring a torch Paw? These goddamned lights ain’t workin’ none too good . . .”
“Keep yer traps shut ya knuckleheads – lemme me think fer a minute.”
I heard a match-strike and silence for a minute.
“Bingo! Gimme that candle on the windowsill there boy.”
Another match strike.
“Jeeesus! What’s that god-awful stink Paw?”
“I don’t know, now shut the fuck up and stay behind me, we’re goin’ up the stairs – he must be hiding up there somewheres.”
“Holy . . . What the hell is that black thing over there paw?”
The footsteps paused and then made their way across the living room to the back door.
“DEL JUNIOR! My gawd it’s Del Boyd Junior, I’d recognise those boots anywhere.”
Del Boyd Senior started screaming somewhere above me.
“HOOVER YOU MOTHERFUCKER! I’M A GONNA KILL YOU GOOD AND PROPER, JUST LIKE I DID TO YER WIFE AND KIDS!”
I froze, the cogs in my head whirring as I digested his words in my brain.
‘ . . . kill you good and proper, just like I did to yer wife and kids!’
The accident had been reported as just that. As Mary took the kids to school one fateful morning, the brakes on the Cherokee had failed on a notorious bend on the way into town. How could he have killed them? I thought – my brain still trying to process what he’d screamed out moments before.
“I cut the brake-lines on yer jeep, Hoover. Just like I’m a gonna cut yer throat. Ya hear me?”
Blood pulsed in my temples as rage boiled inside me. It was obvious now – the brakes had failed, but what caused it was undetermined. The coroner had ruled the deaths due to ‘misadventure, with no suspicious circumstances,’ despite the lengthy questioning I’d received from the local Sheriff immediately after the accident. Could he really have done that to Mary and the kids? The way he stared at us and the inhospitable welcome made me think he had. The times in town when people had found out we were neighbours with Boyd and the almost unbelieving looks we got as a result. It was no secret that Boyd was a grade-A creep who hated having to put up with us ‘city-folk’ who didn’t farm, but who liked the rural lifestyle of a large section and clean country air. Our property had been purchased through a real-estate office in town, but apparently it had been owned by the Boyds back when they had a successful corn-farming operation. With a bit of digging at the public records office, I discovered that our house had been intended for the oldest Boyd offspring, but they had forfeited the property when the bank had threatened foreclosure on an outstanding mortgage on the farm. In retrospect, it was no surprize that the house had been on the market for years before we purchased it, and that the amazingly cheap asking price was a reflection of the potential issues that any prospective owners might face with the previous owners.
The more I thought about it, the angrier I became – more with myself for not having seen this coming, for not seeing Boyd for the dangerous inbred he was, for putting my family’s lives at risk . . .
I braced my shoulder against the underside of the trapdoor and readied myself to exit the cellar. I quickly checked the sights on my carbine through the NVGs then paused again as I reconsidered my options. I could go up, guns blazing, and take them all out without too much difficulty, although my previous advantage with the NVGs now seemed redundant if they had candle light to see by. The carbine had no noise suppression also and would result in the element of surprise being lost if they split up.
Fuck it, I thought, as I descended the stairs once more and swapped the carbine for a Ka-bar combat knife and a stun grenade from the tool box. I kept the NVGs on and once again made myself ready to exit the cellar. I knew what I had to do and how it would all go down. The scene rolled itself out in my head like a movie as I
pushed the trapdoor open and stepped up into the laundry. The knife would be better than the carbine – less mess, less noise, less evidence.
“Come out ya sumbitch!” The old man had a hint of desperation in his voice now. More bangs and crashes from upstairs as they stumbled around in the dark, guided only by the waning light of a small candle.
“Maybe he ain’t here Paw?”
A short sharp slap resonated down the stairs.
“Owwwww! Why’d ya do that for?”
“If I have to tell you idiots to shut up again I’ll tie ya up to the whippin’ post when we get home! Now you two look fer that fucker – he’s gotta be here someplace. I’m gonna check downstairs again.”
This was too easy. I thought about the militant renegades in the Middle East that I had fought against, with their guerrilla sensibilities and fighting ability – these punks had nothing on those guys. I waited silently, my back against the wall at the foot of the stairs. I could see the flickering glow of the candle getting brighter as Boyd senior limped his way down the stairs.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
The shotgun blasts rang out in quick succession directly overhead.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Boyd Senior paused on the third-to-last step and looked back up into the darkness of the first-floor hallway.
A whimpering moan could be heard now. The sound of scuffing on the floor-boards above signalled someone trying to move across the hallway.
“Paw! Paw! I think I got him Paw. Come quick, I’m hurt real bad . . .”
Boyd Senior only took two steps back up towards the sound of his mortally wounded son, before I ran my knife-blade deeply across his throat – one arm wrapped around his upper torso securing his arms, as he gurgled and bucked against me while I lowered him down the remaining stairs. The shotgun dropped from his grasp and clattered to the floorboards, as his hands floated like injured birds mid-flight. I felt his hot blood soak my shirt sleeve as his life pumped out of him – I quickly dragged him to the back door and let him slump forward onto the dead body of Boyd Junior. I wiped the blade of the Ka-bar on his filthy jeans and stepped on the sputtering candle that he’d dropped on the bottom step. As I quietly ascended the stairs I could hear rasping breaths coming from the dark hallway up ahead. The NVGs illuminated the bizarre scene as I looked down the corridor at the head of the stair well.
