Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

The sheriff’s deputy.

Mom stepped out onto the porch, didn’t turn the light on.

The sheriff’s deputy guided his door shut, just one click deep, and followed her back inside.

I told my dad not to look, not to listen.

No lights glowed on in the house.

I rolled onto my back, stared straight up.

The football just hung there on its string.

I understood. Lying there then, I patted my pocket for the superhero I was just remembering, from the day all the dogs died. It wasn’t there, had been too long, and these were the wrong pants anyway.

What I’d wanted to do, it was hold it up against the backdrop of all the stars so its silhouette could fly back and forth.

Except I wasn’t a kid anymore.

I was the man of the house, at least until Dad got solid enough for Mom and Dino to see him too.

I stood, my hands balled into fists by my thighs.

I walked back to the house, my line taking me to the front door so I could open it, let it squeak and squeal, but then I stopped at the sheriff’s deputy’s truck.

The driver’s side door opened easy, with no sound at all.

I sat there behind the wheel, my hand cupped over the dome light.

There was the siren switch right there.

I smiled, was slow-motion reaching for it and all the excitement it would bring to this night when I remembered how the sheriff’s deputy had guided Dino’s hand there, instead of to the glove compartment Dino had been going for, because, in our car, that’s where Mom let him keep his road toys.

After checking the front door and all the windows again—nothing—I opened that glove compartment myself.

Tucked way back there was a short little revolver.

I held it in wonder, careful of where the barrel pointed, and then I looked to the front door again. And then I went in through the back of the house, testing each step again, because I was one pistol heavier now, plus however many shells it held.

This time I didn’t have to be asleep, or just waking from it, to see Dad.

I’d had the pistol held low, pointed at the ground, and had only looked in Dino’s room to be sure he was there, and not shaking under the covers.

What I saw nearly made me pull the trigger, shoot my foot off.

Dad—my years-dead father—he was leaned over Dino, had maybe been listening to his heart or whispering into his mouth. His fingertips were to either side of Dino’s sleeping shape, and he had one knee on the bed, one foot on the ground. And he was looking across the room like an animal, right into my soul. His eyes shone, not with light but with a kind of wet darkness. The mouth too—no, the lips. And curling up from them was smoke. From the cigarettes and ashes I’d funneled behind the skirt.

My breath choked in my throat thinking about that, that taste, and I wavered in place there in the hall, caught between a scream and a fall, and when I sensed a body behind me, in the back door that was just a doorway because I’d left it open, I knew it was because I’d looked away from Dad in Dino’s bedroom. That I’d broken eye contact just long enough for him to step around the rules of the physical world come out here with me for a little father-son discussion.

And—just because he couldn’t get whatever he needed from my neck, that didn’t mean he didn’t still have hands.

The big pistol jerked up almost on its own, my arm straight behind it, and my finger was already pulling the trigger over and over into the middle of that darkness, that body.

What I was saying inside, if anything, it was to stay away from my little brother. That you’re not helping anymore. That I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but—the shots cracked the world in half, then quarters, then slivers of itself.

The flashes from the end of the barrel were starbursts of orange shot through with black streaks, and they strobed the inside of the hall bright white. And my shots, because of the recoil, because of the way the barrel jumped up each time I pulled the trigger, they were climbing from the midsection, higher and higher.

Five.

I shot five times.

And the sound—I heard the first one deep in my head, and felt the other four in my shoulder, in my jaw, in the base of my spine.

I know it’s too fast for tears to have come, but the way I remember it, I was crying and screaming while I shot.

It was the worst thing ever.

It was my dad.

I was killing him again, wasn’t I?

He’d clawed and fought his way back to us, and he’d come back better, he’d come back in the regalia he’d been supposed to wear, before everything else found him.

And he danced. He was dancing now, with each shot.

First his right side flung out, his arm following, and then his left, from the next bullet, and then, for just an instant, there was a clean hole right through the middle of the front of his head. Through his face.

Just ten minutes ago, we’d been playing catch with the football.

When you grow up with a dead father, this isn’t something you ever expect to get to do. It had felt like cheating. It had been the best thing ever.

But now it was over.

Because—I had to say it, just to myself—because he’d been feeding on Dino, I was pretty sure.

The wet lips. The empty eyes.

Dino’s seizures had started before I’d seen Dad walking across the living room, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been making that trip for three or four weeks already, then, did it?

Dino was never going to set any math records, but his counting, it had been going all right, anyway. He was last in his class, was on special watch, was a grade or two behind. But whatever Dad was drinking from him, whatever Dad needed from him in order to get whole again, to come back, it was something Dino needed.

It made me hate him.

That fifth time I pulled the trigger, the last shot?

It was the most on-purpose of any of them.

I was holding that revolver with both hands by then, a stance I knew from TV. I was trying to get the front of the barrel to stop hopping up.

The fifth shot, it went center mass. That was a term I knew from the cop shows, too.

Dino, he knew all about dinosaurs and fairies and talking cars, from what he watched.

Me, I knew about justice.

And, thinking back on it now, we’re lucky not to have all blown up that night, from one of my shots hitting the propane tank.

I was shooting at someone taller than me, though. That was the thing. It meant my shots were more or less pointing upwards, and climbing, once they splashed through.

All that was behind us was empty pasture.

One with a few more ounces of lead in it now. A few shards sprinkled down, coated in blood for the bugs to crawl over and lick, if bugs even have tongues.

All this in maybe three seconds.

A lifetime, sure. But an instant, too.

The world was so quiet, after all that sound. And because I was deaf.

I let the pistol thunk to the floor.

It hit on the barrel, tumped over into my bare ankle. I flinched away, took a step forward to see what I’d done.

Lying on his back just past the back stairs was the neighbor, who’d come for me just like he’d said he was going to. A different shotgun was clamped in his hands like if he just held on to it, he couldn’t fall back through whatever he was falling through, because its length would snag, would hold him up.

It didn’t.

He had no face, had a mass of bubbling red for a body.

My chest sucked in, my whole body kind of undulating, and when I looked up, it was because the sheriff’s deputy was standing beside me, naked.

A lot of grown men would have simply backhanded the upstart twelve-year-old punk who had taken a gun, unloaded it out the back door like that, just for attention.