Joel Arnold - Fetal Bait Apocalypse - 3 Collections in 1

But my son. My two-year old son…

Here’s one of his parlor tricks. He falls asleep in our bed, yet I hear him moving around a bit later while my wife and I watch TV in the living room below. Soon, all is quiet again. When I go upstairs to check on him, an unpleasant odor greets me. I know what’s making the smell, but when I look into the dim light of our room, I see Davey asleep, arms at his sides, but—

Something darkens his hands, and—

Something darkens the sheets around him, and—

As I turn on a lamp to see more clearly—

That same darkness is smeared across the nightstand, the dresser, swirled onto the walls in circles and curlicues. His diaper is still on, and he has merely reached inside for the ammunition, the medium of this art.

I choke back a cry and brace myself. Freaking out will do nobody any good.

I start a bath. Gently shake Davey. “Wake up, hon.” I pick him up, holding him away as much as possible from my body, but then I realize it’s just shit and it’s going to get on me, anyway, so…

He wakes slightly and I strip off his pj’s and set him in the tub, scrub the crap off of him, drain and refill the tub to let him soak and play while I strip the bed, use bucket and sponge and Lysol to clean the furniture, the walls, until it’s all gone, and Davey plays in the tub like nothing’s happened, it’s just another night in the Kendall household.

But the night the intruder came…

Jenny ran to Davey’s room, a mother bear protecting her cub. I got out of bed, the journey from bed to doorway seeming like a thousand miles. Heavy, labored breathing came from somewhere on the steps. I heard a groan as I peeked around the corner. The child gate remained shut. “Who’s there?” I called again.

The stairway curves from foyer to upstairs hallway, taking two small turns, each punctuated with a small landing. I forced my eyes down the steps until they came to a shape huddled on the landing six steps up from the tiled floor.

Jenny called from Davey’s room, “What is it? What’s going on?” In her rush to his room, she hadn’t even glanced at the man on the stairs.

I kept my eyes on him. Black shirt, black pants, black skull-cap. There was something odd about his shape. His leg — bent at an odd angle. He clutched at it, his face twisted in anguish. Jenny gasped behind me.

“Go back to Davey’s room,” I said.

“What’s going on?”

“Stay with Davey,” I insisted.

“He’s asleep.”

“Please.” Then I asked the man below, “Who are you? What do you want?”

He looked up at me. A cowl of sweat covered his face. “Call an ambulance.”

Jenny remained frozen behind me.

“Please,” I said to her, my eyes stuck on the intruder. “Stay with Davey.”

“I’ll call the police.”

“No. Stay with him.”

“Someone needs to call the police.”

The man below said again, his voice strained, “I need an ambulance.”

When the intruder climbed our steps, he came to the child gate. In the dark, unfamiliar with it, he couldn’t get it open. He tried stepping over it, but my voice must’ve startled him. He tripped, lost his balance, and ended up there — leg twisted behind him on the landing six steps up from the foyer floor.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

The man grimaced.

“Answer me.”

“What do you think I was doing here?” he gasped.

“You were going to rob us? Kill us?”

He shook his head. “I needed some money.”

“So you thought you’d just break in here and take it?”

“Please.” He looked up at me, anguish casting furrows across his sweat-slicked brow. “I’m begging you. Call an ambulance.”

Jenny called from Davey’s room, “What’s going on?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said.

The man’s back was against the wall, and he clutched at his twisted leg. A patch of blood stained the wall behind his head. He must’ve banged it on something on the way down. I scanned the carpeted steps, then the handrail.

There — blood on the handrail, halfway down. The rail was cut at angles to follow the flow of the steps, and some of the angles produced sharp corners. I’d meant to sand them down in case Davey fell, but like so many household projects, still hadn’t gotten around to it.

The handrail.

I stepped quickly into our bedroom and threw open the top drawer of my dresser. The junk drawer. Full of odds and ends, a place to put all the crap accumulated over the years of living in the same place.

I grabbed an old Phillips screwdriver and stepped back to the top of the stairway. The man’s eyes narrowed on the screwdriver. “What’s that for?”

I opened the child gate. Just a squeeze of the latching mechanism was all it took.

“What’s with the screwdriver?” he asked again, panic rising in his voice.

I stared at him a moment, then sat down on a step next to the bloodied corner of the railing. I began to unscrew the railing supports.

“What the fuck are you doing? Call an ambulance!”

I ignored him and let the loosened screws fall to the carpeted steps, let the supports fall, too, as they separated from the wall and railing.

“Everything okay?” Jenny called in a singsong voice, valiantly trying to conceal her nervousness, not wanting to scare Davey.

“Yes,” I called to her. “Stay with him.”

“He’s waking up,” she said.

The man on the steps said, “Please. What are you doing?”

I lifted the railing, balancing it in my hands. “Why did you come here?” I asked. The railing felt solid, the wood smooth, the weight good.

“I told you.”

“Why our house?”

He closed his eyes. Tilted his head, pain twisting his features. “Your window was open.”

“What if you’d made it upstairs?”

“I just wanted money. Jewelry.”

“What if me — or my wife — woke up?”

“Come on, man.”

My grip on the railing tightened. “What if my kid woke up, walked out of his room and saw you?”

“I’d never hurt a kid.”

“It’s dark. Maybe he surprised you and you reacted.” Something caught the corner of my eye. A black, obscene object on the white tile below.

The intruder’s eyes followed mine. “It dropped out when I fell,” he said.

My pulse quickened. “You brought a gun into my house?”

He didn’t answer.

“You brought a gun into my house?” I asked again, my voice rising.

I heard Jenny’s voice, gentle now, singing softly to Davey. I heard the creak of the rocking chair in his room.

“What if my son woke up and surprised you? And you pulled out your gun…”

The man on the stairs shook his head. Fresh pain shot across his face. I heard Davey’s voice, now. No words, but a sweet babbling mixed with Jenny’s soft, kind voice as the rocking chair creaked out its familiar rhythm.

What if he’d come into our room? What if something — any number of things — had happened to turn a simple robbery into the slaughter of a family? What if he…

What if…

My grip on the railing tightened. I changed the directions of my thoughts.

Okay . What if he’d fallen down the steps in a slightly different way? What if he hit his head hard on the stair railing I now held? Maybe hit it at a slightly different angle, hit it hard enough to split his head open.

I slowly lifted the railing up to my eye level and studied it.

Would the police even question it? What sympathy would they give a man who broke into our house while we slept, while my wife, my little boy, slept peacefully, and with him — him , the man lying twisted on the stairs — carrying a gun? Would they even notice the inconsistencies? Would they study the forensics of his fall? The fact that maybe, just maybe the angle of blood splatter was inconsistent with my version of events? Besides, it would be my word against—