by Lee Thompson
Blood spray.
Setting sun.
Steady hand.
The cry of a baby.
The cry of a mother.
On the bank. His sigh of relief. Body trembling.
The call of a siren closer than he’d ever expected to hear one. The ground was uneven. His heart felt like it’d only beat another dozen times before it gave out and left him there, staring at the slow-moving clouds, the rising stars.
And then they ran. They left the broken baby on his grandmother’s doorstep and disappeared into the north or the west, they never said. They were gone three years, every day expecting someone who had worked with Jimmy to find them. But only Luther came, came to them after a hot, sweaty night in Mexico City. They wanted to see Herman, they wanted Luther to know his brother.
They went home.
They were arrested.
The broken baby taken by its grandmother had harbored her anger, although she had never expected to see her son again. She disowned him. They were incarcerated for a triple homicide. Moria made things worse on herself by breaking under the strain of losing her two babies, by losing her man. She tried to steal them from her grandmother. She tried to break Luther’s dad out of prison and failed horribly and only ended up there herself.
They’d written their sons a lot. They didn’t wish for any of it to happen. They only wanted to love each other, to be left alone.
Luther folded the last letter and wiped his eyes and stared at the unmarked graves. Herman’s. Their dad’s. He swore he’d find where they buried his mother. It didn’t seem like it’d be that much of a task. Someone had to have a record of her name, of her remains chunked in some potter’s field.
He would take her prayers and forgiveness and flowers.
He would take her his brother’s love and their dad’s. And he would listen for the sound of her voice and hope he had the same unbreakable spirit inside him that others had demonstrated from a distance.
He passed Hazzard’s grave on the way back to his car. Someone had stuck a small American flag in the packed dirt. It ruffled in the breeze. Maybe it was an ironic joke, but he didn’t like it, so he pulled it free and carried it away, wanting to weep, surrounded by ghosts.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee Thompson is the bestselling author of the suspense novels A Beautiful Madness (August 2014), It’s Only Death (January 2015), and With Fury In Hand (May 2015). The dominating threads weaved throughout his work are love, loss, and learning how to live again. Visit Lee’s website to discover more: www.leethompsonfiction.com.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.
