The Next God

by MB Mooney

  Here in the dark and with fear in his heart, Andrew thought about leaving. He pictured himself just running, dashing across the front lawn as fast as he could and getting to the gate, not twenty yards away. The man was in the house, obviously, and maybe the way out and beyond that wall was open and free. There would be plenty of places to hide and wait until the police and ambulances came. Then he could show himself, somehow getting to his father and getting the hell out of the country.

  He thought about his family, upstairs alone and upset and vulnerable. But surely this man wouldn’t hurt them. He wanted Andrew. And Andrew would be gone.

  Maybe he would hurt them instead, taking what revenge he could get in Andrew’s absence, but Andrew didn’t think this man would settle for that. Andrew thought maybe his family was worth the sacrifice anyway, to allow him to survive.

  But he couldn’t leave them, couldn’t leave his little boy, his little girl.

  He turned and the club came swinging from around the corner and caught his right arm in the upright position, slamming it against the wall. His arm broke immediately, and he knew it, hearing the snap of both bones in his forearm as the 9mm clattered to the ground. The tall figure rushed at him from his blind side, a shadow here in the cold, dark house, and he felt the club glance across the top of his head while trying to avoid the blow.

  He fell to the ground, blacking out for a moment, his arm bending at an angle that wasn’t natural. The pain from his arm hit him, bringing him somewhat out of the blackness, but replaced it with nausea at his flopping limb. He held it close to him and curled up in the fetal position. The man grabbed the collar of the sweater and began to drag Andrew out of the doorway, across the floor, and up the stairs. The sweater ripped a little at the collar while every step evinced a moaning, desperate sound from him.

  His head began to clear halfway down the hall, and he struggled, only to be met with the club on the top of the head again, dizzying and clouding his vision, debilitating his movement along with the pain in his right arm. He was thrown against the wall, and he looked up to see he was at the master bedroom. It was dark still in the house, so the man’s face was draped in shadow as Andrew attempted to see who this was.

  The man pulled a pistol of his own out of his coat pocket, a 9mm model Andrew wasn’t familiar with. The shots ripped through the door around the doorknob, and Andrew could still hear his family scream in the distance even though the pistol had been at his ear, deafening him.

  He couldn’t move his left hand from clutching his right arm, however, and just turned his head to protect his ears as best he could. The man kicked in the door, the screams coming again, with more intensity and renewed vigor. Andrew was picked up again, this time by his left arm and thrown forcefully into the room.

  Looking over to the bed, he groggily noticed his family crying and weeping, his wife gazing fearfully into his eyes with a touch of anger and hate in her face. The man standing over him spoke. “I think I found something you lost, Mrs. Franklin,” he said.

  “Don’t ...” Andrew began to speak himself, but the energy was draining from him. He held on to his own consciousness the best that he could.

  The man bent down to look into his face. “Don’t what? You have to speak up, Andrew. I can’t hear you.” The man shook his head, standing and looking over at Bonnie. “Communication problems are at the core of every relationship, wouldn’t you say, Mrs. Franklin?” Andrew stared at his wife. She nodded her head slowly, confused at the man who threatened them. “I’m sorry about the mess. I truly like what you’ve done with the place.” He looked at a watch on his wrist. “The lights will be back on soon. We don’t have much time.”

  And just as he said it, the lights came on, blinding all of them in the room. “Who are you?” Andrew mustered to speak, his eyes squinting against the light.

  “I’m the Postman,” the man said lightly. “Don’t people read the newspapers anymore? Just news on the internet, I suppose.”

  “Don’t ... don’t hurt the children,” Andrew managed to say. “Please.”

  “Oh, I can’t promise that. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. But I can promise there will be pain. A lot of it.”

  His family was quiet, sobbing and shaking in fear and shock. The Postman still held the pistol in his right hand. How many shots had he fired at the door? How many shots did he have left? “What do you want?” Andrew asked of the Postman. He could see the man now, about thirty and tall, and he didn’t recognize him.

  The Postman grinned at him, an eerie countenance. “Revenge. Pure and simple. The ancients were right. It is sweet, you know, so very sweet. But first, I want you to tell your wife why I’m here. She seems a bit confused.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. You wouldn’t have had all that protection if you didn’t know why I was here. Now, tell your wife.”

  Andrew was quiet, looking into the Postman’s eyes with as much defiance as he could envoke. How could he tell his wife about these things? He was having trouble keeping his eyes open, much less begin to explain something that happened ten years ago. “I don’t know.”

  The Postman sighed and strode over to the bed. Andrew watched his family squirm and struggle to get away from him, this madman in the long coat with his taste for revenge. The Postman reached out and grabbed Ann, Andrew’s daughter, and picked her up with his left arm, walking back over into Andrew’s view. The Postman put the pistol to her head, against the long, straight, silken dark hair. “Kevin Stuart, Andrew. Tell her what you did.”

  Bonnie began to cry uncontrollably, holding on to Tommy, who was strangely silent. Ann was sobbing, too, her face constricted in fear. “Do it, damn you!” she screamed at Andrew, clasping her arms around the four-year-old boy. “Tell me.”

  Andrew began. “We ... had been drinking that night, and ... we’d had a little bit of coke, too. Actually, we’d had a lot of coke. We picked this kid up because my dad said he needed a good scare, just to get to him and scare him, you know. His dad was a cop, you see, and had been getting way too close, snoopin’ around. We picked him up around nine o’clock. He was a little guy, probably thirteen or fourteen, and we took him to a warehouse on the north side of town. It was a place where we loaded drugs, smuggled goods, that kind of shit.” Andrew spoke, once or twice finding the words coming without his command, rambling. “We started roughing him around a little bit, you know, but then things got out of hand. Doss started getting a little too rough, but we didn’t care. We were pretty high and out of it, you know, and we … killed him.”

  “Ah, Andrew!” the Postman cried, spinning in anger with Ann in his arms, the pistol close to her right temple. “You’re leaving out the best part, aren’t you? Did you forget the most fun that Kevin gave you? Did you? And be honest, Andrew. Children can bleed endlessly. Oh, yes, I forgot, you know exactly how much children can bleed, don’t you?” The Postman rolled his eyes, crazy eyes wide and alert. “Now tell her.”

  “Kevin was a ... street kid. He got ... paid to have sex with men. Doss thought this was kind of funny, and he ... raped him.”

  “But Doss wasn’t the only one, correct?”

  “No.”

  “Who else raped him?”

  Bonnie looked at Andrew. She had asked him, time and time again she had pressed him with what this was about, why is this person after you, what did you do to deserve this? She asked him in bed, at the dinner table, pressing and pushing until he had hit her, slapping her and demanding that she shut up, shut the hell up, everything would be okay.

  The disgust and fear in her eyes bore down on him. He wanted to die right then and there, but he succumbed instead, hoping that he could talk this Postman out of killing his family. He wasn’t ready to die.

  “We all did. Everyone but David and Andrea. They wouldn’t do it. Before we knew it, the kid was dead, and we hadn’t meant to. I swear it, it was an accident. We put him in the dumpster about two in the morning.”

  The Postma
n’s eyes were closed, as if in pleasure. “Yes. Very good, Andrew, very well done.” And then, without opening his eyes, the Postman pulled the trigger on the pistol, and Andrew saw his daughter’s head explode in a rush of red and black hair.

  The Postman dropped the dead child and turned his opening eyes on a screeching Bonnie.

  “Daddy?” Tommy said.

  The Postman emptied the clip into Andrew’s family, the bed a mess of blood.

  “No!” Andrew cried, seeing the bullets riddle through his son, his only son, and his wife. Andrew began to weep, the tears rolling down his cheeks. “No!” His eyes closed, turning his face away from his dead family.

  The Postman began to yell. “He was just a kid, you bastard! He was just a kid! A goddamn kid.”

  Andrew’s eyelids parted, and he stared into the Postman’s face. The Postman stood over him, crying as well, shoving the pistol into Andrew’s face.

  “And he was my brother, damn you,” the Postman said.

  -----

  “I’m not gonna tell you again, lady,” the man said at the gate to the Franklin estate, the sun setting behind him. “Get the hell out of here.”

  She looked the man over again. He was dressed in black, layers of clothing hiding more weapons than even the submachine gun he held in his hand.

  “But I’m a cop,” she said. She had shown him her badge several times already today. Could once more hurt? “I need to talk to Andrew.”

  “I don’t friggin’ care who you are and I don’t know who you’re talkin’ about,” the man said as he pushed her back and closed the gate in her face, the submachine gun leveled in her general direction. “You ain’t got a warrant, get the hell out of here.” He glared at her before walking away.

  She gaped for a moment before she cursed loudly, mostly in frustration. Most of her day was spent trying to get a warrant from her Captain, to no avail. No judge would even talk to her. All her Captain would say is, “The FBI is on this now. Let them take care of this.” But where was the FBI now? She hadn’t been able to get a hold of them, either, and Bill Young had disappeared. She was being removed from the equation, and it pissed her off. So she decided to come to the Franklin house herself and damn the consequences at this point.

  Valerie was on dangerous ground. She had probable cause, sure, but after orders from a superior, a tip that she had bent – broken? – a few rules to get, and armed mobsters surrounding her target, she should go home.

  She should.

  Her car was parked down the street, two houses down, which in a normal neighborhood wouldn’t be that far, but these were mansions, and so it was a long walk back to her Toyota. With the naked eye, she couldn’t see them with any detail at all from this distance, and she broke out the binoculars to keep the gate in sight.

  The hours passed, and Valerie’s eyes began to ache as the sky began to turn from gray to black. She had to pause more often to rub her eyes until she only looked through the binoculars once in a while.

  She wanted sleep now, but she knew that her second wind would kick in pretty soon. She tried her best to bear it until then. Valerie realized, in what should have been a moment of clarity, that she had become one of those obsessed cops that you see on television or the movies, where it becomes the most important thing they would ever do. What the TV and movie writers would never understand about her was that she always felt that way.

  Noticing some type of movement down the street, she pressed the binoculars against her sore eyes. After orienting herself to this new perspective, it seemed to be a vehicle that was parking itself near the gates of the Franklin home. She picked up her cell phone with a free hand, trying to dial the station with her thumb. It was hard to tell the type of vehicle ... some type of pickup …

  Then the lights in the neighborhood went out. But it was more than just a regular power shortage, and she knew it, turning off the Toyota and stepping out of the car while calling the station on her cell. She stood beside her car now, in the cold, looking for movement in the dark that she couldn’t see. Making sure her sidearm was under her arm, she began to run down the street.

  “Hello?” the Detective at the station said …

  She saw the explosion before she heard it, and the wave of heat reached her as the sound thundered in her ears. Crying out helplessly, she turned and fell on the ground to protect herself from the blast. The street was lit for a moment by the fireball, but she buried her face in the street and between her folded arms. Valerie sat up, realizing that in the foray, she had lost her phone, and looked around for it aimlessly, seeing it finally a few feet down the street from her.

  Rising, she went to pick it up. It was broken, the power off and the phone unresponsive. She turned and threw the phone angrily, hearing it crash against a nearby tree in the front lawn of a house. Walking back to her car, she thought she should just get in her car and leave, go to another phone and get help, backup, a whole SWAT team if she had to, anything to get this guy, because he was here. Here and killing people.

  The sounds of gunfire reached her.

  She opened the trunk of the Corolla and pulled out her vest, strapping it around the back and through her legs as quickly as possible. They would know to come. Some of the neighbors were probably calling the police as she stood there.

  Meanwhile, people were dying.

  She heard more shots, put on her coat over her vest, and ran down the street.

  It was reckless, stupid, she should wait until more units and backup arrived; it was just too dangerous.

  But she had to stop him. Her tennis shoes slapped the pavement as she sprinted from her car to the front gates of the Franklin home, and when she stopped in front of them, her breath was short, coughing in the cold. She withdrew her .38, straightening her arms away from her, holding the revolver with both hands. More shots echoed from the house, an exchange of gunfire. Valerie could see flashes of yellow and white in the house through the windows. She walked quick and alert through the front gates, a mess of destruction and twisted metal and hanging white bricks. Moving, she looked for the security men who had been there earlier today, and she saw no signs of them. But it had been a big explosion, if they had been standing here when it went off …

  No telling where they were, and she didn’t worry about it. She had to get to the house, get inside, that’s where he would be, would want to be, where Andrew Franklin and his family would be. How much time had passed? A minute? Two minutes? Enough time for a unit or two to get here, she thought. She crossed the open space of the lawn, slowing to look around her. She saw a figure lying in the grass not far away from the front door. She went up to the body and leaned down, her left hand feeling for the pulse. My God, there was a lot of blood.

  She touched his neck and immediately slid her fingers over a deep cut on his throat. Pulling her hand away in disgust, she wiped the blood on her hand on the thigh of her jeans. He was dead.

  Swallowing back the nausea through clenched teeth, she rushed into the front door, waiting there in the doorway. She looked around the corner and then up the staircase. Did the Postman have enough time to get upstairs? She didn’t know, but she decided on instinct to check the downstairs area first. She took a right from the front door and made her way down the short hall to what became a nice dining area. Aiming her revolver out in front of her, she opened the door into the kitchen. Just past the kitchen, she could see an exit to the pool on the side of the house, another body, his throat cut, lying across the open door.

  She didn’t check to see if he was dead. She didn’t have to.

  She heard movement behind her, back down the hall towards the front door, a small cry and a struggle. The sounds of something on the stairs reached her next, and she moved back through the house, making sure she checked around the corner of the dining area, stepping lightly and quickly, the .38 exploring all space and the unknown before coming back to the front door. She looked up the winding staircase.

  There were more shots and screaming, children
screaming, a door being kicked open. Valerie took a few steps at a time, and she was halfway up when the lights kicked on. She knelt, blinded for a moment, the light seeming to flood her every sense, and she almost cried out herself, close to losing her balance on the stairway. But she righted herself and blinked repeatedly until her eyes adjusted to the light. She took more stairs, this time a little cautious, slowly making her way, one step and then another.

  The carpet was soft as she reached the landing, and her movement was a little quicker down the hall. She heard whimpering, sobbing, talking, low and down at the very end of the hall. Her eyes searched, preparing herself for anything. He must have them in the room at the end, she thought. Where are those damn units? Where are the sirens?

  Nearing the end of the hall, she immediately saw the door that had been kicked open, and she raised her sidearm, clearing her head of every thought she possibly could.

  When she heard the shots, she knew she had been too late; she heard a woman scream, and she knew they were dying. She reached the door, hearing the loud voices, the yelling, the crying, and she pushed the door in to see a tall man in a long coat standing over a man in jeans and a cashmere sweater. In her peripheral vision she saw a bloody body of a child on the floor beside the tall man, and she could see bodies in the bed against the far wall. The taller man held a gun to the injured man in the sweater, and for a moment she wondered, who was who? Which one is the Postman? The one in the sweater looked more like the pics of Franklin she had perused over the last day or so.

  But she didn’t have time to think anymore because the taller man with the gun turned on her, noticing her immediately, and she aimed her pistol at him.

  And she fired.

  The slug hit the tall man in the shoulder, spinning him around. He lost his balance and fell down, pointing his own pistol at her. He pulled the trigger again and again, but nothing happened, only clicking sounds that made Valerie blink. He fell back against the window and smiled at her. “You’ve caught me, officer,” he said softly, reaching to grab his bleeding left shoulder.