Lost Rights

A detective worked late. Most left the department, so he decided to smoke in the office. He opened a window, and turned on the fan. He held the match to his cigarette when the phone rang.

He checked the time. 3:40 am. He picked up the receiver.

"Elkhead police." he said.

"Look into the disappearance of Loren True-Shadow. There is an unopened folder." A weeping voice advised, humming engines in the background, then hung up.

The detective listened to the dial tone, and let the phone fall to his desk. The name sounded familiar, and he thought that maybe it pertained to his current case. He went to the file room; A catacomb of boxes containing unanswered enigmas. He turned on the light, and scanned shelf after shelf. He found the "Missing Persons" files, and went down the shelf until he saw the name "Loren True-Shadow".

He took the box to his office. It felt light, and he heard the exhibits within knocking against the boundaries of the cardboard. He set it on his desk, and pulled off the lid. He found some documents, interviews with Mrs True-shadow and those that saw him last, and not much else. He found no unopened folder, and put the lid back on. Another comedian prank calls the police... he scowled.

He decided to go home and come back to his case at 5:30 after some rest. He put the box back, and shut off the light to the room. He locked it tight, and returned to his office once more to put on his coat and take his things. He closed the window, shut off the fan, and when he reached for his desk lamp switch he heard a shush as clear as a vulture's welcoming.

He turned to his door. An envelope lay beneath. The detective opened his door and looked down the halls but saw nothing but the dimly lit stairwell at the end. No sounds other than humming of air ducts. He looked down and found no writing on the envelope. He opened it, and found it addressed to "Mrs True-Shadow" in shaking hand writing. Pages of a letter stuffed the envelope. The letter had been photocopied multiple times. Chills went down his spine.

The detective locked his office door and took the letter to his desk. The ink inscriptions matched the shaking cursive handwriting. The detective took a pen and paper from his desk and started transcribing the letter. Once done, he felt more confused than before.

His transcription read:

"Sorry for killing your husband. I hope your life is back to normal. I'm not trying to disturb you or stir you up. You probably came to terms with Loren True-Shadow’s death twenty or more years ago. I did not. I wish I could tell you that he didn’t suffer. His death was not painless. I did not rob him, and I did not molest him.

Don't try to give this to the police. I am 87 years old and dying in assisted living. By the time the police find me, I’ll be dead anyway. I write to share the secret I've kept for 44 years to you and inform you of Loren’s death and of his final resting place.

The army kicked me out because I was too good at my job. I started to wonder if I still knew how to severe spinal cords with coffee mugs, pull out beating hearts through armpits, or suck the air from someone’s lungs with a pixie straw.  I got bored of my new job. The year was 1975- a year you know.

I sat in the lobby of Burger World. That's where I first saw him and you riding in a red Grand Am- those cars don't have the personality that they used to have. I didn’t decide to kill him until I saw him again in the Rusty Spigot drinking White Dog moonshine some time later. He made that abysmal substance himself in the basement. His dressing amused me. He wore a nice dress shirt, combed his hair back. I decided to kill him because I recognized him, but on a subconscious level it was because he looked tougher than most. Killing is pointless without a challenge and I was trained to kill the most badass fighters in the world. Other killers would’ve targeted you or a child because women and children are the easiest to kill, but I wanted to be on another level.

I sat before him. He acted shy at first but I asked about his motorcycle. That got him talking. I lied about being in a motorcycle club and invited him to a meeting. This intrigued him, but he didn’t take it seriously. However the lie  made him want to be my friend. He told me about you, and the kids. He told me that his real name was “Loren” not “Larry” but he thought Loren sounded like a girl name. I agreed to call him Larry for the night. I tried to get him away by inviting him to a fight between two members I invented. I intended to drive Loren away from town and tie him to a tree, but he refused my offer and said he had a date with you and wanted to “be on my best behavior.”

Understand that I couldn’t let him go at that point. He saw my face, knew my voice, and I already gave him a name. So, I offered him a fraudulent job. “I'm listening” he said. I told him I’d call him the next day, and wrote down his phone number. I didn’t want him telling you or anyone else.

The job offer was to pull junked cars from the car graveyard in Milton County. A treasure chest of scrap wanting to be harvested awaited enterprising minds. I assured him we’d each make five thousand dollars at the least. I knew this number from your phone calls with him. He needed that money. I saw the looming fear of destitution howl in his eyes.

I never intended to actually pull out those junked Chevies but when I  came to the gravel road that lead to the car graveyard, I found Loren waiting in a self- loader tow truck before the gate. He told me he borrowed it from his cousin. We broke through the gate. The chain gave slow then popped to pieces, and we shot down the gravel. The hill dropped like a test pilot. The wench clanged against the rear. Loren rolled his window down. Traces of dry, late autumn dry timber filled the cab. The gravel wore away to stalks of feral rye. The green foliage turned sunset red, and Loren spread his fingers out to catch the falling leaves.

The slope declined steeper. Loren hit the brakes but still the tow truck slid down. Loren p bit his tongue and wiped sweat from his eyes. He looked like a dog with its face out the window.

The truck broke through the brush into wooded overgrowth. The forest came as us like a dragon’s mouth. Bush and foliage crushed in twin trails behind us. The air tasted like dirt. The trees changed the closer we came from  rail thin trunks and broad but light branch cover, to wild rooted trunks that twisted and wove around other nearby trees.

Loren whistled. Sweat soaked both of our shirts.

“We start with the closest, and work our way down”. He told me,  getting back into the truck. The wenches spun, and the hook dipped. I needed to think because I couldn't kill him like I planned with the hand I drew. So I took the line and slid down with the hook to the first car. I slid the hook around a shiny bumper. The wenches retracted. I jumped off. The slack in the line tensed. The wheels of the tow truck spun slots in the fallen foliage. The back of the withered car lifted from the pile and smacked the walls of the ravine, dragging ups pieces of the car beneath it.

Once out of the ravine, I had the idea to kill him with his own truck. It's not what I had in mind, but I never crushed anyone with a tow truck in the war. Loren looked confused, and a little pale, when he climbed out from the tow truck.

“Hear that?”Loren perched over the edge, and listened through the rain of shifting forest noise. “Someone’s down there. I can hear them!”

“Who?”

“I don't know. Just listen.”

I stood besides him and listened. A mislead soul, one that echoed from the bottom like incense, reached out to us with vocal ropes. At first I thought it was the metal frames being bent or perhaps  just ringing from water trapped in the cars, but as the sound penetrated the narrows of my ear drums I stood in the same pale confusion as Loren. We heard the unmistakable call for help. A gasping, impaled cry rose over the ravine. Those dire notes strained under wounded vocal chords, distorted by metal confinement, and by the rupturing of flesh.

Loren jumped down and frantically searched the cars. He tried to pry open trunks and doors, and asked me to give him the crowbar from the truck. I took it out, and slid down the slope. His face reddened from dehydration, his hair wet and wiry with oils and sweat. His neck muscles expanded as the rusted metal sliced into his palms. I held the crowbar in one hand, and dropped it onto the trunk he tried to open. He grunted and leaned on the crowbar with his massive body. the door  used it to pry open the trunk, but despite the ringing voice, he found no one inside.

“They’re underneath all of this”, he told me, bounding back up the slope. He moved the tow truck around the trashed car, and lowed the hook again. I took it, and slipped it around the front bumper. The wheels smoked. The car lifted. Once it hovered ten feet in the air, the wenches popped, and the truck slid backwards. I jumped out of the way. The shriveled car crashed back into the heap. The truck thundered as it landed on top, and rolled down.

I landed in the mud of the stream and when I looked from the ground I saw the tow truck on its side, waffling on the heap of cars, wanting to capsize on top of me. Pieces of metal adjusted and fell. The tow truck tipped over and rolled down the heap on top of me. Leaves shook from the trees.

I thought I was dead. The truck landed on my upper body. I kicked my legs freely, but my arms and head were beneath the vehicle. No air to breath. Freezing mud flowed into the back of my shirt. I felt the weight of the truck plow my mouth mud into my mouth. I tasted dirt for months afterwards.

Your husband took a piece of metal and used it to shovel the dirt out from under my legs, and he slid me out. He looked at me like a monster. Half of my body was covered in mud with a layer of fresh blood. Open wounds on my forehead and right temple bled profusely. My ear hung by a thread. My nose knocked crooked. One arm crushed to milk powder. I looked like a whole new person to Loren who shook his head, and begged me to get out with him. I barely had strength to stand, so he propped me up, and only then did I understand the danger we found ourselves in.

The voices belonged to the trashed vehicles. Each one whispered to us, and they moved in unison, clanking and shifting, as organs in a body, each connected, but without bones or muscle to keep them in one serene form. Yet they crawled towards us with the broken headlights blinding us with their blue hot beams.

The edges were too steep to climb up with me on his shoulder, so he carried me to the retaining wall. I scooped mud from my eyes, but blood blinded me further. We pressed against the old slimy stones, liquid streaming like molasses from between the blocks soaking our clothes. I know that after wiping the blood from my eyes, I saw in the moments between more blood seeping into my eyes and the lights flooding the ravine with their nova luminescence the monstrosity lurching toward us.

The heap of cars compressed in the middle, tighter and tighter, swelling up like a pregnant uterus, then as the swelling depressed, the horrible grinding and twisting of metal stabbed knives into our ears. The blood filled my eyes again, but Loren’s heavy hands took me by the hips, and I left my feet lift from the ground as the heap of interwoven steel reached out to consume us. I took hold of a crack in the blocks as Loren pushed me up by the thighs. I reached to the drainage holes, two of my fingers clinging to the drain as the other fingers pressed against the smooth stonework.

I didn’t feel him take his hands away, but once I felt relief at the top of the retaining wall, I reached down to take him, but all too late. The heap of cars pressed against the wall, and all I saw of your husband was his hand reaching out from the merging bodies of steel. Of all the things I saw back in the war, I don't think I ever saw anything that haunts me so. In nightmares ever since not only do I see those desperate fingers reaching out to me, but I hear every crunch of his bones, I hear the forsaken screams over the horrid concert of industrial tidal waves. You’ve never heard such a gruesome sound. There’s little worse on earth- or in hell.

I tried to get him out. The car heap filled so much of the ravine that it looked like I might reach him. When I took hold of his cold fingers, the heap pulled my arm in. I squeezed the wall with my thighs, and came loose only because the heap clasped on my wrist and severed my hand- the hand that was trained to use a combat knife with.

I walked up the wooded slope, through the weeds back to the gravel, one arm hanging like a broken crane, blood dripping from my wrist. I wanted to remember the war, but all I remembered was the armless bodies of boys I blew up.

I never returned, and I promise this is where his body remains to this day. In this envelope, please find metal shards and a set of keys. Though they look like nothing the metal fragments were embedded in my flesh from the cars, and until I removed them I felt the persistent compulsion to return to the car graveyard. The injuries never fully healed, and they reopened when these innate desires awake me from sweat drenched sleep.

The keys are to your home. I decided not to use them that day.

Even in your sleep, I hear his screams.

To this day, as devils watch over my shoulder at my writing, I swear, I still hear his voice echoing against steel jaws."

The Detective finished and dropped his pen. The sun rose. Warming light brightened his window. He took his car keys and left. He drove from town to Milton county. He asked a local in a gas station about the "car graveyard". The local tilted his head like a hound.

"Didn't know we had one," He said.

The detective then went to the county courthouse and inquired if any depositories for junk cars existed in the county. They searched for him, and he waited for nearly two hours before they came back empty handed.

The detective mentioned the name "True-Shadow". The secretary looked old enough to remember, and she scratched her white hairs trying to recover a memory. She said someone with that name might've gone missing as a small girl.

"Any family still around?" The detective asked.

The secretary told him to check the cemetery.

The Detective located Milton County cemetery between the trailer parks and the luxury apartments overlooking the bluffs. He walked among the rows. The grass hadn't been cut yet. The wreaths of withered flowers still rested over the merciful inscriptions. He came to a statue of a headless angel. "Nora True-Shadow. Beloved Mother". The inscription read.

The detective lay the letter in its envelope on the tombstone.

That night he worked again into the dead hours of morning, when no gods are awake. At 3:40 the rang phone again. Arty let it sit, but it rang longer than any series of rings he heard before. He took the receiver.

"Elk-"

"Thank you for delivering the letter." A woman's voice uttered, then hung up.  

Bitter Remains

Dallas awoke at 6am. He’d been free for five days.

He lay, wanting to dream. He never conceived dreams so pleasurable before. He wanted to let them embrace him further.

Abhorrent air suffocated the room. Flies buzzed around his ears. One the size of a quarter landed in the palm of his sleeping hand. They crammed through a gap in the window frame. The screen fell off. The fly hopped to the wall and stuck. Dallas swatted at it, but the fly didn’t flinch.

Climbing from his pillow nest, he found his glasses on a nightstand. He looked out his doorframe where the flies darted. The odor germinated the room with the permeance of compost.

He opened the curtain. The pale blue spikes of early morning stabbed over the dark trees. An owl still hooted outside and locusts sawed. The flies clustered together like a sponge caught in the window. Their flickering wings buzzing against the glass.

Dallas opened the window, carefully peering out into the dark the woods around him for the violating eyes of watchful hunters or wires from their traps. Cold air rushed his bones. He stuck a bar of soap into the sill to prop the window up, and turned away to face the mirror. Another new day. He awoke in clothes not his own. Dallas carefully stroked the fabric. Soft, pressed, new...  He wiped yesterday's clothes off, and started pulling the drawers from the dresser to the floor, and ruffling through, picking out the items his size. He found socks, dress slacks, shirts, and a jacket to wear.

He made breakfast, listened to birds sing. Then went to see if Dad needed anything.

He dropped the habit of knocking, but still opened the door with a gentle push, peering through the narrow space to watch his old man lay still under the cover. The flies swarmed the bedspread. The reek of leaking fluids gassed the room. From his ears, nose, and lips a fine stream of yellow liquid drained. The body bloated.

Dallas kept close to the floor, and watched until the door knob clubbed the wall. He stood up. Dallas looked at the bedding and sheets. Moist with reeking fluid.

He scrubbed dad extra that morning, and washed and changed the bedding. then bathed himself in the tub. His hands smelled of hyper sweet honey, like decay, and no matter to what degree he scrubbed himself, the odor stuck to him throughout the day.

Before he left, he knelt besides dad, the still, cold body under a fresh change of sheets. Dallas breathed from his mouth, and promised his old man he would return and fix the smell, and left for Tech school.

Dallas locked the door. He stepped out onto the porch. The truck waited before the driveway- a dirt trail leading down the hills to the road. The planks knocked under his feet. Birds sang morning minstrel lays. Dallas looked among the branches. He pointed his finger like a gun at one red winged visitor, but even in pretend his heart quivered and he failed to fire the imaginary bullet.

Dad took Dallas hunting only once. In that pitch twilight, Dallas pointed his rifle at the crunching of November leaves. A doe stepped through a misty clearing into the rocks of a stream and lowered its head to drink. Dad ordered him to pull the trigger. Dallas watched through the lenses, the cross hair above its white chest. Dad seethed at Dallas, grabbing him by the ears. Dallas felt like a tunnel fell  in around him. The tunnel tightened, his vision failed, and his consciousness became indistinguishable from dream. But he knew when the dream ended, for it felt like velcro strips torn free.

His waking wind came out of a benumbed state,  drooling, his forest camouflage covered in blood, the knife in his hand wet and red with dark streaks in the tiny folds of razor. The doe hung from its rear feet. His father pulled its guts out and dropped them in a bucket.

Dad did this trick many times. With a flash of his eyes and a heavy touch.

Dallas’ senses always restored at the finish, but never back to normal. Each time a part of his brain stayed behind the in the floating state. Each time he saw more of the wires between the wall, and the shadows of ghosts standing in the property. Sometimes they stood and burned in place. Other times they pressed against his window and watched him sleep.

Dallas still remembered the day dad died. He danced and drank the whiskey stash in relief. A black widow bit the old man, and the bite spread an infection that caused the old man’s skin to turn purple.

Dallas watched his dad suffer for days, the old man cursing him and those that he remembered. “I’ll return.” He chanted until his final heartbeat.

Once the flies gathered, Dallas felt the chains on his wrists and ankles drop to the straw. A cage door opened. He moved into the room he wanted. He took the car, and started paying the bills. He hated his Dad. Never knew his mother, “I saved you from her” Dad liked to say- but never said how.

Dallas disassembled dad’s guns and while  rummaging through dad’s the bedroom closet. He found a vanilla envelope with photographs inside. The first one looked like a woman beaten and bound- he closed the envelope and burned the contents in the stove.

He suspected since boyhood that dad’s hungry hands and his glowing spell inflicted onto others.  Dad brought home strange women sometimes. They smelled bad and made loud noises. They never left in the morning.

Dad knew the damage the spell caused. Dallas understood as well. The night he let Dallas out of his bindings and let him drink beer. “You’re fifteen, and they have you taking apart engines and putting them back together… If anything, it makes you smarter.”

Dallas looked back into the dark curtained window in which his father lay, and longed with iron pressing his heart down to ask his dad to take him hunting again. Or fishing, or just building something new. A quandary of questions occurred he wanted to ask the old man, things about the family, his mother, the old man’s life in the army or as a truck driver in Alaska... These concerns dug shrapnel of remorse in his chest, and the wounds bled.

As he turned from the hill trail to the road to the city, the radio broadcasted a feature of the missing out-of-staters. He heard small things about them, so he turned up the radio to listen. The Orchard family drove from Anton, Missouri to Elkhead, Nebraska. A husband, wife, two daughters, a dog, and a jeep Cherokee. They left their house in missouri, neighbors said, to take a trip to Nebraska to look at land to buy. Teenagers found the Cherokee stranded in the middle of a country road. The dog barked at them from within its overheated containment. They let the dog out, who looked emaciated and near death. The family nowhere to be found, but the police recovered a suitcase containing ten thousand dollars in cash inside of the car.

Elkhead carried a notorious reputation among the rest of the state for being a haven for meth markets. The trees he looked out over when he awoke concealed several makeshift labs. Sometimes he stumbled upon their remains, the valuable components stripped away- leaving only an empty propane tank and several empty antifreeze bottles.

Dallas shut off the radio. The story confused him. He thought it about the whole drive to the city, considering every angle from which to view it. He wondered about where the Orchards wound up. The husband and wife he accepted as likely dead, but the two kids Dallas wrestled with their fates. What kind of sinful things would bring their young with them on something so dangerous… he pondered. Traffic on the road condensed. The rises and overpasses of the city emerged from layers of cloud. The sun rose, and golden red rays burned away the clouds. Huge homes with plastic texture, taupe colored siding garbled up pieces of the rural landscape. As the buildings came nearer together, more and more pairs of feet filled the sidewalks.. With all the people around him in their speeding cars, texting or looking forward with drowsy, dope fiend eyes. Dallas kept on edge. Anyone one of them could slip up, take their eyes from the road for a second, and god knows they take them away for longer than that. Each person on that road presented a real, grave threat to Dallas’ safety. Even the bums laying against buildings with their legs out in front of them to block the sidewalk. Dallas stopped at a light. A nice young man in a black coat walked out of a restaurant, and gave a homeless man on a bench the food he purchased. The homeless man, dark skinned, wispy strands of black facial hair, he opened the container. Steaming, uneaten food. The homeless man took one sniff, and immediately asked for money.

Suddenly, four lives didn’t matter so much.

He parked in front of Tech school. He still smelled the adhesive strength of liquefying flesh. It made his mouth water. Every bit of his skin felt sticky. He tugged at his clothes and tried to clean himself with a napkin from the floor, but nothing worked.

He walked to his classroom. Eyes peering from every direction. Some glances went through him, some impaled him to the wall. Each dark corner, cracks in the flooring and walls, Dallas needed to be careful not to cross. Watchful eyes dare dissent from these cracks to observe with purpose, with intent, the manor and nature of Dallas Waters.

Against the current of subliminal scowls and elusive warnings from the potted plants, Dallas made it to the classroom. He sat in the back corner from where no one could ambush him. Slowly they filed in, a dozen or more white faces, male and female, taking seats and waiting for the time to come and pass. The good students wore suits and ties to class. They took notes as if to delay some precarious disaster, writing every detail they heard. Dallas hated this class. He leaned back and wished for the next class when he got to show off the engine he’d been working on. But something- a fatal static- filled the air, and riveted his spine with sharp bullets of fresh fear. His breaths became heavy. Sweat trickled down his brow. The teacher hadn’t come yet. He checked his watch. Five minutes past the hour. His peers began to chat among themselves, shyly giggling, playfully pretending to be interesting in befriending each other, the loosening few feigned the potential companionships, anything to save themselves from the silence.

Dallas didn’t want to wait. He sat up from his seat, nearly dropping his glasses, and walked with his back bent to the door. His hands hovered over the handle. Hooks of trembling alarm pulled his hand back. The door opened, and the teaching lady smiled at him. An older woman, gray hair, but dressed in colorful silky fabrics. Embarrassed, he tried to explain to her that they all needed to leave. A miscommunication only worsened. Dallas spoke his thoughts, but soft so that the others heard nothing he spoke of. The teaching lady caught some of his uneasy feelings, but she smiled warmly.

“I think we all feel that way sometimes. Have a seat, please.”

Dallas felt something fierce. A wolf watched him, all of them, from a high place. It came from outside the room, from the door he and the teacher stood before. Smothered footsteps pattered down linoleum floors. The ducts shook as musty, warm air spilled in from the vents overhead. Dallas walked backwards, taking open mouth gasps as his heart raced. He took his seat, a drill winding within him.

The teacher took books from her purse. Idle chatting persisted. a loud bang exploded in the hallway. Everyone stopped chatting, straightening their backs, attentions narrowing on the door. Two people started a brief argument- two more bangs and then silence. Lumbering jack boots echoed. Everyone sat still. The teaching lady gestured for them all to be quiet. She stood from her desk in front of the room, her heels ticked on the tile, and the classroom watched as a herd does a storm from the safety of the barn. Her head hovered against the glass, her hand slowly locking the door. A bolt broke the glass and sent her flopping to the floor. Dallas saw no blood. Looked nothing like in the movies he’d see, but the pus leaking from her skull, and the blood pouring her her nose, and mouth told him that this was no movie.

A pale arm reached in and opened the door. The kids started to panic. Dallas sat still as wasp caught in a web. The clamour and screams fell to a quick end when someone carrying an mg42 stepped in and fired a round into the ceiling. He demanded silence, pointing the weapon at the class. He stood at 6’7’’. Wore a dress shirt under a tactical vest. His red hair tied back into a ponytail under a cowboy hat. under the few free wires of hair was an ageless, pudding soft face. Pale, with peach fuzz under his chin. Two holsters on either side of his hip, pistols in them. A long knife in a sheath above his rear hip. Clips of ammo stuck from the vest, ready to be used. Dallas remarked on the kid's expression. Not one of anger nor a twisted sense of revenged. He looked like a lawyer with his mind searching deep within text of crumbling law tomes. His boots tapped the floor as he filed through each person, with a discriminating finger pointing, and crossing at the throat of each imprecise identification. A burly bear of a man took no chances. He was heavier, stronger, and willing to gamble. When the shooter came to him, he flipped the table over and grabbed the intruder, wrestling with the gun, the man would’ve had the weapon if not for the precautions the shooter took to hide blades over his body which he used to strike his challenger while he fumbled the MG42. In only a few short brisk motions, the knife drew blood from the burly man and he dropped to the floor holding his wounds. The shooter rubbed the blood off on his pants, and put the knife back. He finished his assessment, pointing at each person, grabbing them by the chin, and moving their face either side before dismissing them. He rested one arm on the machine gun as he did so.

“There you are. You. In the glasses.”

Dallas shook, and said nothing as the gunman approached until the gunman came so close that he could smell cologne and gunpowder. Looking into his eyes, Dallas saw that the intruder had no corneas. Only pupils the size of pin tips behind a white haze of red veins. Acne dotted his nose and forehead. His breath reeked of eggs and smoke. His teeth had been rotting from his head. Before he said anything he let his jaw hang open, revealing rows of yellow and black stubs on pink-white gums. Reaching back into his pocket he produced a tan envelope.

“You're the lucky one today. Take this.  It's yours, its very important, but if I see you toss it away, you're dead. Give it to the police, you’re dead. Capische?”

“Capische...”

“Good. Now stay in your seat.” His expression melted into transparency, though his skin, muscles and veins, to the very cogs of his brain, to the pure hate flexing his tongue.

Dallas fell back against his seat. Some kids began to cry, others just stood still, some held their hands in prayer. The gunman took the sight in like a majestic view over a valley. He marched to the front of the class, took a big, refreshing breath. Then by snapping his fingers, a cigarette appeared in his hand, lit and smoking. He took two drags from it, then dropped it, and smashed it with his boot. He pointed the gun at the class and had everyone lay on the floor, except for Dallas.

His glasses kept fogging. He trembled so hard that they dropped from his ears and into his lap. All he could see was a dark blur processing through the room. Two or three heavy boot steps, then BANG. Two or three more. BANG. Two or three more. BANG. BANG. Bang-Bang. The dark blur stopped, and the clicking of a magazine being taken and out replaced. Then BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.... Then the distant sound of police sirens. The shadow stopped, then moved like a ghost to the windows. He drew the blinds, and with the butt of the gun broke the glass. BANG- BANG-BANG- the firing continued until Dallas only heard a static ringing. When the police stormed the building, they found him sitting in his seat, frozen in infectious anguish. The envelope lost among scattered papers, its contents safely in his pocket, a dreadful secret he decided to keep because the watchers in the dark cracks wanted to know it.

An investigator sat down with Dallas after they escorted him away. Dallas told the police the story over and over again. He told them, and he had counted, that there had been thirty shots in total. Some had been fired out the window towards police. He didn't count the shots fired back from the police. After the last shot, the shadow dropped, and only then did Dallas put on his glasses. All the desks had been tipped over. Everyone lay in a twisted, wet mass. Including the gunman. A cellphone rang and rang. Then a second cell phone, and third. The rectangle lights glowed in their pockets.

The investigator eyed him in suspicion.

“You're story... doesn't explain why he let you live.”

“I told you everything.” Dallas lied.

“Know what I think? Off the record.”

“No.”

“Usually when these things happen we find a few guns on him, and some ammo. Then we go to the trunk of his car, and find an entire arsenal. This was no exception. In the back of his honda, we found two ak-47s. Three automatic pistol, four machetes, five grenades, and two pump action shotguns. And enough ammo for each one. Why is this, Mr. Waters?”

“They're crazy. Who knows?”

“Insanity certainly has something to do with it. But I think they don't go in alone. Someone encourages them, helps them, even tells them that they'll act together. However, the second man doesn't show. Their plan to take lives, and escape, is foiled. He then kills as many innocent people as he can, and then takes his own life.”

“I've never met this person...”

“No. He had no I.D. His car was stolen, and most of the guns he had aren't even legal in Texas. His DNA is no good, no family, not even a cellphone or a computer. Which is why I find it so hard to believe that he singled you out for no reason.”

Dallas asked to be sent home.

Once he came home, the stink of dad met him. He coughed and coughed, parked the car and got out. The dark home thick with the smell of sweet decay. Dallas covered his nose, and wandered through the dark. Something scratched at wood. He looked around, striking matches against the candles he had on the tables. A rat crawled beneath dad’s door. Dallas screamed and rushed in. A family of rats piled at dad's side, scratching and nibbling their way into his abdomen. Dallas left and come back with a heavy, sharpened axe. Swing after swing the rats flew from the bed in pieces. One baby rat hid inside of dad, its tail dangling from a hole beneath his rib. Dallas took it by the tail and flung it out the window.

Dallas knelt before the bedside, and wept. He apologized to dad, leaning on his soft, gooey chest, sobbing and begging forgiveness for leaving him there, instead of burying him as he promised. He brought a tarp into the room, and lay it besides the bed on the floor. He took dad by the arms, and hugging the corpse tight, he lifted his body up, taking the corpse with him, until a lapse in strength brought dad to the floor in a crumpled mess that fell on the tarp. Tremendous shame shook Dallas’ heart. He rolled dad up in the tarp and dragged it out the front door to the truck. He lugged dad into the bed by pulling him by rope up a few boards leaning against the tailgate. This work wiped him out. Dallas sat and panted, his asthmatic breaths short and wheezy. He went to the cellar, and took out a shovel. He stored it in the back with dad, and drove the truck to where dad said he wanted to be buried at. The backyard. But Dallas took one look at the trees, and saw a hundred wires dangling from the branches. He didn’t dare.

He drove the body into the woods, stopping and carrying it to where the men in the trees can not see. He dug until sundown, ate something, then pushed Dad down, and scooped up is first shovelful of dirt, but dropped it back in the pile. With the shovel he hopped down into the hole. Too short, and too wide. One of dad’s arms hung out from the tarp. Both ends of him propped up by the earth. His head bent over his chest. Dallas unfolded the tarp, and gave dad’s pale, lifeless fish face once last glance, before having the shovel downward and decapitating the head.

Dallas climbed out with dad’s head. He set it down on a rock to watch him. The head fell over a few times, but he held it up by placing rocks and sticks under the chin and around the base. Dad’s eyes sunk in, and his mouth unhinged to expose his teeth and tongue. Dad looked dead, but Dallas knew better. He felt better already. Like dad never left. He filled in the grave, cradled the head like a ball, and walked back.

The enriching, writhing pain of hard work toughened his hands, tightened his shoulders and back. He never felt so hungry or thirsty in his life. A bed, and a hot bath. Dirt and filth covered his body so much that he blended in with the substance of night.

He walked towards his truck, but paused as the darkness around it lifted and moved. Someone leaned on the vehicle. Someone tall, reeking of smoke. Dallas stood still, then slower than the changing color of leaves, he slipped backwards- easy, without making the slightest noise. But he saw, and said nothing the whole time, instead filling his hunger for humor with the futility of endeavour. The gunman trotted through the bush and foliage like fog. The moon brightened. The same kid with peach fuzz and acne, and pupils. A hole in the bottom of his jaw and top of his head.

“You didn't look at the device I gave you.”

“Something… came up. Who are you?”

“A friend of your dad’s Wish you would’ve said something. I would’ve loved to see him sink into the dirt.”

“No- no- You killed those people.”

“I wanted to make sure you got the message.”

“I don’t have a computer. I can’t open it.”

“Say no more-” he produced a crate from the dark. “property of Public Library” the crate read. The gunman dug his fingers into the lid of the crate and pried the nails out. Inside lay stacks of laptops. “Take one. Go on now.”

Dallas took one out. The crate sank back into the dirt.

“You’ve got to get with the times, Dallas Waters. The world is a changing place.” The gunman bowed to Dallas, exposing the hole in the top of his head, and sank into the dark after the crate.

Dallas went home, where he asked his dad what to do, to no answer. Dallas lit candles. He stopped paying the electric bill. No water ran either. He collected water from a stream.

He undressed the head, peeling away the drooping leather over the skull, drained the soup of brain tissue out into the sink, pulled out tongue and eyes and dropped them in the trash, and let the skull dry on the open window sill. He took fast food from the fridge and ate it old. He stuffed his cheeks, pausing only to glance at while the skull watched. The radio came on from the back of the kitchen. Dallas put his food down. He hit the off switch, and muted the device, but the radio continued with the broadcast. The searches continue. No remains found. Orchard family still missing.

The skull stared at Dallas.

Dallas set the laptop down, and inserted the usb. The device didn’t open a starter program, or anything other than take him to a desktop with one icon. The usb- he opened it, and looked through the files. No suicide note, no manifesto, but instead maps, files, and directions to the areas indicated on the map. One red circle marked where the Orchard’s SUV was abandoned. A long red trail spread from there, across the county, to small farm plot… and something more. A list of names. Waters, Simmons, Dyre, Cook, King, Kettie, Johnson, Millard, Northwind, Summer, Feldman, Silver, Rougne… Then a black and white mugshot of a man, no doubt his father, but younger with jet black hair and and scowl like someone punched him in the jaw. The identification around his neck read :Halle County PD- 0165-12-79. Rougne, Howard R. Charged handwritten read, “attempted abduction”- suspected in disappearances in 1985, 1988, 1993.

Then he found the last article in the file. A headline read:“Infant Boy Taken From Home”.

Dallas closed the windows. The computer froze with the headline burning into the screen.  jolting whine emitted from within the machine as the screen strobed to a white screen, smoke rising from the sides, the smell of melting plastic spread by the fan on the ceiling. The usb- he pulled it free, but its tooth remained jammed in the smoking computer, the plastic melted and its reek filled the kitchen. He hurled it outside where it burned to a melted disk on the porch.

Dallas looked to the skull.

“I pretended to believe it for a long time, but I always knew. Why didn’t you kill me?”

The skull stared back at him.

“of everyone… why take me?”

A locust crawled into its nostril and out an eye socket.

“It’s going to be more than “sorry”. There’s nothing you can do for me now.”

Cracks widened along the skulls brow. The radio came on. Another report on the missing family- police officially searched for bodies.

“We can’t help them. Even if we found them…. How can I trust you…. No, you’re the only father I ever knew… But after, you tell me where I came from….I think you will remember.”

Dallas grabbed the skull, and they left the kitchen, stomping through the leaves towards the truck. Dallas drove with the skull seatbelted into the passenger seat.

They came to a modest property in the country. A place that Dallas drove by every now and again. He recognized it by the dense stacks of clutter and rusted machines left on the lawn, but knew nothing of the occupants. The USB contained files on the farm house, and those living inside. Though the owner lived alone, Dallas counted six cars in front of the house. He saw three people move in and out of the house. None of them looked like the owner. A one story ranch house. No barn, but a long metal shed next to the house. Chained up dogs stood on their toes, smelling the air, and barking at Dallas.

“I’m afraid... “ he shivered in the chilling evening. The sun remained in the sky, but under a heavy cover of gray clouds that filled in the sky from the south. His nerves froze, and like ice they picked at his bones and muscles,strength draining, and warmth bleedin away. The last time he felt like this, dad took him hunting. He looked into the dead pits of the skull, and in a spark the tunnel fell over him once more. He held the skull out, his eyes sinking into the back of his head, and his tongue rolling to the back of his throat. The ear, eyes, and nostrils of the skill lead him.

He held it out like a lantern, and approached the vicious rottweilers. The skull grew heavier. Red smoke spilled from the eye sockets after blinding flash ignited within the skull. The dogs stopped barking, pulling against their chains until the bolts bent and the dogs fled the property.

Dallas opened the front door to a dark living room. Someone slept on a coach. Serialized infomercials filled the room with a pale static. An old man wandered in through the dark doorway, wandered in and shut off the tv, leaving Dallas in the pitch of dark. The old man groaned, weary and bent backed, and turned to leave, grumbling about sorrows, with Dallas following behind, ready to smash him with the skull, but the old man didn’t seem to mind. He stopped in the hall, and asked “another one of Samantha’s friends, are you?”

Dallas said nothing. the old man’s mind wasted away. Dallas stepped aside, and let the old man wander into the dark of the hall.

Dallas went down the hall, opening each door, examining the closet, the bathroom, a couple of bedrooms, and even a trophy room with black and white photographs framed between them. Dallas came to the end of the hall. He heard the sounds of boiling and the tapping of glass through a door unlike the others. More like a slab of wood than a door. It came undone with the pull of a rope, and Dallas cracked it open.

Saw three people sitting in plastic chairs sharing a glass pipe filled with substance in an oil stained garage. One light dangled above their heads. One of them female, far older than all the others. She looked just like the old man, but her flesh welted, and broke open with scabs and open sores. They stared at a man with a head shaped like an hourglass, his ears twisted into bow shapes. One eye partially shut, a scar around his bald cranium, and a tattoo peeking from his plaid collar. He gave money to the woman. She counted it and told him to “Find them in the shed.” She handed him a key, and he turned away.

Dallas shut the door, and went around the corner to the kitchen. A brick jawed meth head stood outside the door, smoking a cigarette. Dallas moved through the kitchen. The skull carried him, and he made no sound. He crawled to the window, opened the frame and rolled out. The meth head heard something rustle in the grass, but in the dark he saw nothing, and went back inside.

Outside, the evening darkened to a deeper, colder depths. A band of purple bled away to black across the horizon. Dallas wasted no time slithering through the grass. He came to the aluminum walls of the shed. He peeked into the windows, but saw nothing. He heard feet, and so he lowered himself, digging his knees into the dirt and letting the weeds and unclipped grass consume him in the dark edges as the tonsured man murmured threats in a joyous manner under his breath. Dallas stuck to the slick surface, following him to the door of the shed. The stranger unlocked opened the door, and Dallas went in after him.

He followed the stranger through found the farm equipment, machinery, the accessories and other tools. The stranger stopped at a section gated off by black chain links. He used the key to unlock a padlock. The door scraped against the floor. He groveled as if warm soup filled his starved stomach. He smiled with a wicked mirth bubbling from his mouth.

Dallas crept. The shed smelled like any shop, but as he came to the gate he smelled something stronger than ammonia, fouler than sulfur. The stranger entered the back, but Dallas followed the smell to a section of the shed behind a door with concrete walls. Empty jugs of chemicals lay in falled stacks. Inside, an acid vat with a layer of gray and orange foam sat. Dallas peered over it. Partially melted bones floated inside.

The stranger got to all fours, and peered into the kennel doors with searing yellow eyes, and the vicious hunger of a wolf- his own stomach the size of a muskrat's. He heard the steps behind him, and turned away.

“They’re mine now, what do you want-” then he saw in the dark, not Dallas, but the skull lit up by a spark and the rolling of red smoke. The stranger got to his feet, and pulled a small gun from his waist pocket, but the skull vanished. The Stranger shook, but found a light switch. Fluorescents came on, illuminating the layers of dust and pieces of fallen ceiling. No skull. The stranger laughed at his own foolishness, putting his gun away. He looked back into the kennels. The two girls looked like animals. They wore the same clothes as the day they pulled down the dirt road. Both sat in the kennels for the entire time. Both reached out, their fingers poking through the cage rings. Covered in filth, stinking like a stable. Emaciated, and with their legs in vices to weaken their growth and prevent escape.

A combine roared to life. The stranger jumped back as did the assets he purchased. He came back hands on hips, business on mind, but it became horror two combines he walked between came to life, and closed in around him. Both engines stopped once his skull popped like a can lid.

Dallas went back outside. He stood where the power lines entered the house. The skull sparked, and the line came down. The power across the house died.

The tall meth head with a flashlight, Sam behind him. The methheads gasped at the intent- to them, the line appeared to be cut. He barked at her to get into the house, and he ran to his truck, nervous that his dogs were nowhere to be found. In his truck, a shotgun hung in the back window. When he turned around with it, his rottweilers growled at him, approaching with haunched legs. The meth head didn’t see or want to believe the vicious madness poisoning their eyes with the red glow, their teeth grew longer, and their drool foamed as they kept, taking their owner apart claw by claw. His screams weakened. Once dead, the mutts fled into the night, their patter lingering through the grass and between the heaps of junkyard waste.

Sam ran inside. Her chest heaving, horror alarming her eyes, and her ears filled with the choking and gagging of the tall meth head outside. She peekd out the window once to see one of his dogs standing with meat bleeding in its mouth.

She told the other meth heads, and to her utmost despair, they jumped up and rushed to their vehicles. She chased after them but they drove off into the night.

Silence came over the farm. Sam looked everywhere, but saw no impending danger. Things, ideas, a gatling gun of thoughts fired through her imagination. Things around the farm, strange noises, sudden disappearances, all things that seem minor, no, perhaps she wondered, a malicious force is present…

She stood before the mauled body of her friend. Not much left of him, the animals chewed his face clean to the bone- only his eyes and some flesh on his chin remained. She took the gun laying in the dew streaked grass. Something entered the shed. The door swung open. The lights, despite the powerline burning in the grass, came on.

She wandered in, the gun on her broad hip, her fat arms shaking under its weight. The two tractors looked normal, but both combines… she didn’t remember them being so close… she inspected, and gasped at the carnage. Heap of tissue and copper-reeking organs drew flies from under the crumpled remains of the stranger, suspended between the teeth of the two machines.

The door behind her shut. Someone nailed it shut. The lights went out. One by one. Until only one remained on above her head. A skull floated before her eyes. She fired her weapon, but the skull remained before her, closer and closer, until a sharp blade flashed from the dark land under her armpit. She dropped the weapon as her body lost strength, and she hurried, away towards the back. Past the gate, past the acid bath room, to the workbench where the two kennels sat with pairs of shimmering moonlight eyes within.

Their abductor begged for saint's mercy. The smoking red cloud entered her breath, and her blood. The pits of the skull narrowed into her eyes. She struggled with three more clumps. The chemical room door opened behind her. The bottom of the door scraped against the grating with the zip of a honing steel. Closer, closer. She swept at it, and her fluttering fists swung across empty darkness. The chemical pool sat in the corner in a corner tarped off- like a shower, with a drain in the floor, a faucet with cold and hot water- and a tub used to make chemicals. In this case, make acid that melts people. The abductor tried to shut the door on the skull but she caught her foot in the doorway, pulled it free, slammed it shut only to find someone’s fingers in the doorway. They do not scream, but pry the door open. Someone in filthy clothes, looking like someone that crawled from the grave, held the skull. And with exterminating footsteps, the kind that stomp anthills to the cracks of the earth, he came towards the abductor. Lowering the skull towards her, dropping a cursed cloud over her head, until her swiping hands took hold of it.

She dropped her hands, and like a beached manatee, she took her last advances across the floor, bleeding into the shower drain as she pulled herself over the lid of the acid bath and dropped her upper body in.

The skull and its wielder wound back out the door. His light footwork swept across the spilled blood dripping below the grated floor. The two missing children watched him in the dark, the shifting figure stood in place and sprawled out like a star on the floor.

The two girls in kennels feared feared for lives when the darkness collapsed. But they both heard clearly as the moonbeams cast across the blood woven floor the haunting jolt of their captor’s vocal chords strained to crackles and voiceless gasps. The woman looked to them not like a methhead, they didn’t know what one was- to them she looked to be a raven in the decomposing skin of a woman retrieved from where the dead goldfish and things the doctors take out of you go.

This horrid bird woman crawled across the floor, one wound bled under her armpit. Her talons hooked into the grating on the floor. Her splitting eyelids shrouded by spilling blood from the slash on her forehead. Her ditch work hair now flattened and matted on one side. Her bloated layers impeded her escape to gasping chokes. Her narrow facial bones contorted into the shape of the back of a winter boot. She pleaded in gibberish, her language erased by the eradication of her understanding of the natural world. Nothing made sense to her anymore. Drink the sun from the sky with a straw. Jump on a dog and ride it to town… A skull floated towards in her from the dark. Red smoke perfuming from its mouth pit and spilling to the floor in an evaporating cape.

Dallas felt the tunnel free him. The sun rose. Pale light bled in through a window, but not his window. He felt cold, wet, and dirty. He lay on something stiff. His bones hurt. All of them. He no longer wore his glasses. Cuts and bruises covered him once more, and his clothes looked like they were stripped from a corpse.

He stood up, remembering faintly… someone wanted me to come here… but he recalled no face, and no name. The whole week seemed to be a dream now. He still held the skull. He turned around. Two kennels sat on a work bench. Two pairs or blue eyes glimmered within. He recalled.

Dallas felt chills up his spine. A half melted body lay in the doorway, a body lay crushed between two combines, a man lay mauled by animals, and two girls… Dallas entered the house. The old man still wandered, his eyes drowned in the feeble tides. He said, “Hell of a storm we had last night.”

Dallas ignored the old man, and came to the telephone on the wall. Old, still attached by a tan, curled cord. He dialed 911- but something came over him. He didn’t dare speak to them, after all… he understood. Once again, he caressed the skull, his dad came through.

The receiver answered, “Nine One One. What’s your emergency?”

Dallas let the phone dangle from the cord, and held the skull to the receiver.

Dallas set fire to the cabin, and drove out of state. He drove all night and all day, until he found a tiny town of two thousand people in the west of California. He recognized it from the news article about the kidnapped infant. He smelled, his clothes looked black not from dye but from days worth of filth. He worried. What if the family doesn’t live here anymore? What if they don’t believe me? What if it isn’t even true… He approached the door. He rose his fist to knock, but something locked his spine. It felt like when he aimed at the deer, stronger even, stronger than when he trespassed onto the farm. He felt the tunnel compress around him. The breath down his neck, drawing away the vision before him. The world sank, and Dallas stood drowning. The skull in a bag on his back. It pulsed and whispered, horrendous images of carnage and the electric probing transfused before him. Dallas took the bag from his shoulder, walked to the street, opened a manhole and dumped the skull down. It splashed at the bottom. Dallas closed the sewers. The voices, and the invisible eyes still coming and going, but the tunnel relaxed from around him. He went back to the door of the quiet house. He knocked three times. The door opened.

“Hello…” Dallas said.