Allan Leverone - Mr. Midnight

BOOM!

The entire house shook on its decades-old foundation as the front door was blown off its hinges. Instantly Milo knew he had been played for a sucker. There was no pizza, there was never going to be any pizza, the pig cops had been playing him just as he thought he had been playing them. Goddammit!

He rushed from the kitchen back into the living room, vaguely aware as he crossed the end of the hallway of the ruined door lying flat on the floor and a cluster of SWAT team members, suited up and armed for bear, gathered on the small front landing in the process of storming the house.

This sucked. He was not going to get to finish skinning the little bitch alive, but if he was going down, he would make good and goddamned sure he took her with him. Undoubtedly the rescue pigs would exercise at least a modicum of caution; hopefully that would give him the few seconds he would need to finish the girl.

She wouldn’t go in the way he wanted, slowly and in excruciating pain, but at least he would still have the opportunity to end her miserable life. With any luck, perhaps they would meet up again in hell and he could properly finish what he had started.

Milo rushed into the living room, knife clutched securely in his right hand. The little bitch lay half on the couch and half off it, her feet still securely taped to the armrest, her body flopped off the cushions, her bare shoulders, arms, and head lying on the floor. She was still unconscious, which represented another disappointment because Milo had hoped that he would at least get the satisfaction of knowing the bitch had seen it coming: terrifying a sweet, innocent little thing beyond her endurance as he pulled the knife blade across her throat from ear to ear, severing the jugular, would have been the perfect way to spend his last few seconds on earth.

No matter. It was time to get to it. He could hear the heavy clomp clomp clomp of SWAT Team boots on the bloodstained hardwood floor as they came to get him. He smiled. They would be too late. Maybe he could even finish off the little bitch and then leap across the room and dispatch Dear Old Mom before they came around the corner with guns blazing.

Mr. Midnight skidded to a stop in front of the prone body of his greatest conquest. She still hadn’t moved. Her head rested on her mutilated right arm, her left hand curled under her chest. A strip of bloody skin lay on the floor surrounded by tiny flecks of the bitch’s blood, apparently the result of her falling off the couch. It served the annoying pain-in-the-ass right.

He leaned over the motionless body and lowered his knife. It would take just a fraction of a second to draw the blade across her throat and end her life. He couldn’t wait.

There it was again, that relentless push, the feeling of a Flicker trying to force its way into her head, the very same sensation she had fought off time after time over the course of the last couple of hours. Cait’s eyes fluttered open and she tried desperately to focus, but she just couldn’t manage it, and then her eyes closed again of their own accord. She felt groggy and woozy and somehow oddly disconnected from her body. From somewhere far away came the sensation of millions of pins and needles being shot into her arm at the same time out of some hellish weapon.

Or maybe her arm was on fire. Yes, that was it, her arm was on fire. She was so very tired and all she wanted to do was sleep but she couldn’t because her arm was on fire, it was burning and blistering and the extreme unrelenting pain was keeping her awake.

And now came that infernal push and at first she tried to repel it one more time. But why? Why bother trying to resist it? What would be the point? Why had she tried to keep it out in the first place? There must have been a reason, maybe even a good one, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember now what it might have been.

So her eyes fluttered and her vision wavered and her arm burned horribly and finally she relented. She stopped trying to resist the push. She was too exhausted to concentrate that hard, anyway.

The moment she gave in, the Flicker flooded her brain, filling her senses with the sights and sounds and smells of a confrontation. It felt hyper-real. She could smell the stale pungent odor of sweat and adrenaline and fear; especially fear. Cait was inside Victoria’s body, she was inside her long-lost mother’s body, and her mother was trying to escape from…she was trying to escape from…oh, God, she was trying to escape from Milo!

She was on the floor, she was flat on her back on the floor and she began scrabbling backward down the hallway in an attempt to buy some time, she needed to buy enough time to reach into the pocket of her sweater and pull out her gun, the one she had hidden away in her pocket. It was a little Smith & Wesson Model 40 handgun that she had owned for decades and had never used but had kept for protection because sometimes Everett could get a little dangerous and you could never tell when you might need to defend yourself.

She scuttled backward, trying to open up a little room between herself and this young man who had barged into her home with bad intent written all over his face. He wanted to hurt her, she could tell he wanted to hurt her and somehow she knew he wanted more than that. He wanted to hurt the daughter she had just met for the first time in thirty years, she knew that, too, and she was not going to allow it to happen. She would crab-walk away from him and then she would pull the gun out of her pocket and hold it on him, she would hold it on him to stop him from doing whatever he was planning on doing and then she would call the police and—

—and she slammed into the hallway wall with her back. She slammed into the wall because after all it had been half a century since she had crab-walked and what had seemed natural and easy when she was ten years old wasn’t quite so natural or easy anymore. She slammed into the wall and the impact jarred the little S&W out of her pocket and the intruder saw it on the floor and his eyes widened in surprise. She reached out and grabbed the gun and flicked off the safety and prepared to blast him to hell, but he wound up and kicked it before she had a chance to pull the trigger. He kicked it and it skittered away across the floor and into the living room where it disappeared under…it disappeared under…it disappeared under…

And then Cait understood.

Despite her near-unconsciousness and her wooziness and the fire burning in her arm and her fear of Milo and what he was doing to her, despite all of it, she finally understood. The Flicker disappeared, vanishing from her head like the popping of a soap bubble in bathwater.

She understood it all with a clarity that bordered on mystical. It wasn’t a typical Flicker she had been fighting off all afternoon. Typical Flickers were random and held absolutely no meaning most of the time. They were pointless snippets of people’s lives.

This had been different. Cait realized now that this Flicker had come from Victoria purposely, it was something she had been trying desperately to force into her daughter’s brain because it was something she needed her to see, but in Cait’s determination to concentrate fully on fighting off the monster that was her brother Milo, she had forced it away, time after time.

But now she understood. She understood Victoria’s desperation. Because when the monster had seen the gun fall out of Victoria’s sweater pocket and had kicked it away, it had sailed down the hallway and skittered into the living room, eventually coming to rest under the couch.

This couch.

The couch currently serving as Cait Connelly’s combination prison/torture chamber.