Slashback

4

Niko

Twelve Years Ago

Hell.

I’d wondered off and on if the monsters came from Hell. But I didn’t believe in Hell. I never had. It seemed too easy. Do whatever you want, say you’re sorry, and then you’re lifted unto Heaven. Do whatever you want, don’t say you’re sorry, and be cast down into Hell. The people in Hell probably didn’t think it was easy, but I had more problems with the Heaven part. If you did wrong, no matter how sorry you were, you still should pay . . . not burning in hellfire. That was over the top.

But you should pay somehow. Learn your lesson and learn it well. That’s why I leaned toward Buddhism. I borrowed books about it from the library. If you did the crime, you still did the time, but you learned from it and in another life you’d be a better person. Then better and better again in each new life—if you were capable of learning. That made sense—the same as physics made sense. There was a balance to it. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As energy is never lost, you are never lost . . . only improved.

Then I saw the Grendel and I didn’t think Hell was that unbelievable after all.

It was under the car parked in front of the house across the street. The flame-red eyes, skin so transparently pale it almost glowed at night, a fall of white incredibly fine tendrils masquerading as hair and an inconceivably wide stretch of sly smile filled with a thousand metallic needles. If Lovecraft and Clive Barker had collaborated to come up with a soul-eating Cheshire Cat, that was what its smile would be. Not of this world and more effective than a wood chipper at stripping flesh from bone.

I’d searched every mythology book I could find and hadn’t found a description that came close to matching our pale shadows. As I couldn’t find their real name I’d ended up calling them Grendels from the first time I’d read Beowulf. Grendel, one of literature’s most well-known monsters. It was good enough for our own. And it helped to label your nightmares.

I pulled the faded curtains and was grateful it was across the street and not peering in the window as they often did. This was the first one I’d seen since we’d moved here two months ago. Sometimes we’d go four months without seeing one. Five months one time. But never longer, not since I’d seen my first one when I was seven. Cal had seen his when he was five.

They didn’t do anything. They didn’t try to get in the house. They didn’t come up to us if we were outside at night. They only watched. And although I’d been seven when I’d first seen one, I imagine they’d been watching all of Cal’s life. One of them was what Sophia said she’d whored herself to for gold and a child. Sophia had sold herself to a monster—a human monster for a genuine monster. Cal had been the result. Proof that two wrongs could make a right.

And he was as right as they came.

Not that Sophia saw it that way. She’d called Cal a monster all his life, an “experiment” that didn’t pay nearly enough, but Sophia was Sophia: a drunken liar on her best day. So Cal took it with a grain of salt. He didn’t believe her then . . . not completely. It wasn’t until he saw his first Grendel that he knew for sure.

What he saw that day, leering through the glass . . . that was in him. It was half of him. Sophia didn’t always lie. When it hurt worse, she would tell the truth. Cal lost his innocence at the age of five and for six years I’d been trying to get it back for him. But innocence wasn’t like a lost dog. Once innocence was gone, it wouldn’t find its way back home again.

“Grendel?”

Cal was already in his pajamas, lying on his stomach on his mattress, and reading a comic book. He’d lost his innocence, but he’d lost his fear too. For six years he’d seen Grendels watching him. If it doesn’t hurt you, it’s funny how quickly you can get used to anything—no matter how horrific it appears. If you were going to rank them, Sophia was far above the Grendels in the cruelty and caution categories.

“Just one.” I said it as if it were no big deal because that let Cal believe it was no big deal. At least on the surface. Deep down, he knew the same as I did. Monsters don’t watch you without reason. Monsters don’t make certain that a little boy, half human–half not, was born without a bigger reason. One day they’d let us know what they wanted with Cal. Given a few more years of training, and I’d be ready for that day.

Whatever they wanted from my little brother, they weren’t going to get.

I changed into sweats faded and worn thin. Like my coat, they’d come from the Salvation Army, but one state away. I took the second mattress, the one between Cal’s and the bedroom door, just in case. Thieves, Sophia in the mood to spew her spite, monsters who’d changed their minds—it paid to be ready for everything. Sophia didn’t bother to buy us beds, used or not. I could have with money from my part-time jobs, but mattresses were enough when I could save that money for getting Cal and me out of here someday. And no separate rooms. The places Sophia rented didn’t have more than two bedrooms. Sometimes they had only one. It wouldn’t have mattered if there had been five bedrooms. Cal and I always bunked together. Another “just in case.”

As I was sitting down, I spotted a black plastic handle tucked tightly against the bottom of Cal’s bed, the blade hidden between the mattress and the floor. “Is that the butcher knife from the kitchen under your mattress?”

I’d taught him knives weren’t for playing, but I’d also taught him how to use them. I’d taught him everything I learned, not that he was the best student. Discipline and hard work were a worse nightmare to him than the monster outside. But I kept trying and pushing to make certain he did pick up some. Where Sophia dragged us, there were predators other than Grendels or movie-style murderers.

“Uh-huh.” He turned a page in his comic. “For the serial killer. He’s probably not stupid enough to kill people who live right next door, but you don’t know. Lots of people are all kinds of stupid.”

There was no arguing with that. I didn’t bother trying. But tomorrow, finding proof that this guy scraped roadkill off the asphalt for a living was my number one priority.

“Enough with the comic book. Lights out.” I waited past the grumble and toss of the comic book to one side before I reached up and flipped off the switch. I pulled up the blankets and it was time for the nightly ritual. “All right, Cal, tell me one good thing that happened to you today.”

There was an aggravated groan followed by the sound of a pillow being turned over and smacked. They were actually good pillows. New. Most everything we had was used several times over, but I’d learned that with sheets, blankets, and pillows, Cal couldn’t tolerate anything used. It was a fact I hadn’t much thought about, but found to be sadly true, most of those things came to the Salvation Army or Goodwill via family members whose relatives had died on them. And before dying on them they’d been sick on them for months if not longer. No amount of bleaching could get rid of the smell of terminal illness for Cal. With his sense of smell, which had to come from the nonhuman part of his biology, he’d vomit until he dry-heaved at a stench I could only imagine . . . not detect myself. I spent my savings on the cheapest they had at the nearest Wal-Mart.

Of course that didn’t stop him from pretending the pillows were lumpy.

Kids. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been one, but they were an interesting stew mixed of annoying and amusing. If there was a God, he was playing with fire with these recipes. “I’m listening,” I prompted. “One good thing.”

He gave a sigh so exaggerated that only an eleven-year-old could’ve pulled it off. “I didn’t get chopped up by the serial killer next door?”

“Cal.” Despite myself, I smiled in the dark. He was such a smart-ass. I couldn’t imagine the living hell my life would be when he hit his teen years. “Tell.”

There was more rustling of covers and flopping of the pillow before he finally settled down. Cal was a restless sleeper. In the morning he’d be so wrapped in his blankets he would look like a human burrito. Or the blanket would be hanging from the nonworking ceiling fan. Mornings were not dull.

“Okay. Okaaay.” There was a moment of silence, then words small and self-conscious. “I saw a mother pushing her little boy on a swing. He was four, I think. One big snot-ball, but he was laughing. It was like when you used to push me when I was little. I’d forgotten about that. Stupid kid stuff, but it was . . . fun. You know, then. It was like flying.”

One good thing a day. It wasn’t much in the face of the monsters inside and outside the house, but it was something. One stone in a protective wall that grew taller every night. “I remember. It was fun. We could still do that, you know,” I needled. “Go to the park . . .”

I wasn’t given a chance to finish. “Nik!” A serial killer next door was worth mentioning, although not worth fearing as long as you had your butcher knife. But having someone see him on a swing at his age, that was horrifying.

Smiling again, I said, “’Night, little brother.”

“You’re pure evil.” Another pillow thump, but he still said it because we always did. “’Night, Nik.”

I slept deep. I did when Sophia was gone. It wasn’t unusual for her to stay up until three or four, shouting at nothing and no one. Throwing glasses to shatter against the walls. I studied those nights and Cal read too many comic books. The quiet was nice.

When morning came, with the first ray of sun, I was already at the window. I hadn’t seen a Grendel in the daytime yet, but better safe than sorry. There was nothing but rusty cars and houses covered in peeling paint. I looked over at Cal. He was a mound of blankets. You could guess there was a kid under there, but that’s all it would be—a guess. “Cal, up. Time for a shower.”

The covers were tossed to the side and Cal got up in stages. There was the “five minutes more,” the “no,” the whiny enhanced “nooooooo” with the “go away,” and finally the “you’re rotten” followed by him sitting up with a gloomy huff of outrage and despair. This morning his pajama top was gone. I looked up instinctively at the ceiling fan. There it was. That’s when it hit me . . . what I’d seen.

The bruise.

It was just below his left collarbone, velvety black, and as big as an orange. “Cal,” I said, using enough care to keep my fingers from breaking when my hands folded into tight fists. “What happened?” Guilt instantly washed over his face and he tried to cover the bruise with his hand. “It’s too late to hide it, little brother. Tell me what happened.”

I managed to unclench my hands and sat on the mattress beside him. I cautiously moved his hand away and touched the bruise. I examined it gently with fingers as careful as I could make them. With five years of daily different martial arts training, I’d felt a cracked rib after a sparring gone wrong before. I’d know it if I felt it again, but nothing seemed broken. I knew he hadn’t fought at school. Cal had punched a bully’s teeth down his throat when he was in the fourth grade for trying to take his backpack and sneakers. I’d made sure he knew he couldn’t do that again, no matter how much the bully had deserved it. It was one mistake that wasn’t fixable. The school might call in Social Services.

One surprise visit to Sophia and it would be foster care for us, if there was room, a state institution if there wasn’t. Either way we would most likely be split up. It was a thought I’d had hundreds of times. Sophia was bad, worse than bad—especially for Cal, and I knew that. I also knew Cal without me beside him, knowing how special he was, wouldn’t survive. He might live, but he wouldn’t survive. And telling anyone else how special Cal was would make sure I wouldn’t see him again. That no one outside some government bunker full of medical equipment and autopsy tables straight out of The X-Files would see him again.

“Cal, tell me what happened,” I repeated. “Now.”

He ducked his head stubbornly. “It’s no big deal. Just a bottle. Sophia wasn’t as drunk as I thought she was. I can’t believe I let her hit me.”

Let her. Let her . . . as if it was his fault.

Last evening I’d told myself that I did the best I could in a bad situation. Now here was my best in vivid black and purple, showing me . . .

My best was worthless.

I bent my head, doubled over, linked my hands on the back of my neck, and stared blindly at the floor. Bile scorched the back of my throat. That’s the cliché I’d always read. Over and over. But it wasn’t bile that burned. It was vile. This was a thing so monstrous and vile that flesh should sear to ash at its touch.

When Cal was younger, he’d been quiet and careful around Sophia when she was drunk, the same amount of time she spent breathing, but by the age of seven he didn’t care anymore about triggering her temper. Instead he put his energy into dodging. He was reckless, quick, careless, and brave. He was so brave it hurt me to see it. Bravery comes only with that loss of innocence. There’s no need to be brave unless you’re pushed to that line and Cal had been forced to find his line far too young.

This was the first time Sophia had managed to hit him.

This was the last time she would try to hit him.

I’d warned her although she hadn’t ever come close to hitting me or Cal with her alcohol-blurred vision. I’d warned her often. She didn’t listen and she didn’t care. There was one thing to do.

Give her something to care about.

When she came back, I would break Sophia’s arm.

There would be no coming back from that, not for me, but now it was my turn to not care. It was my line and, like Cal, I had to cross it. That would give her six weeks to think over the consequences of leading a one-handed life. And when the cast came off and if she wasn’t convinced, if she threw a bottle at Cal again, I’d break her other arm. Anger like this, it wasn’t good and what I was thinking wasn’t right. But sometimes necessary was more important than right. It was a lesson I’d been slow to learn, too slow, but for my brother it was time to learn it. And hadn’t he tried to teach it to me before, since he was four years old? Seven years, but I finally saw what he’d been trying to tell me.

Practical. Like Cal. It was time to be practical.

There was an old Rom saying I’d once heard Sophia mutter: teach a dog to bite once and it will bite a hundred times. When you cross your line, that line disappears. You couldn’t retreat back behind it again if you wanted. You cross it, you erase it.

A hand patted my back, a patch of warmth. “It’s okay, Nik. It is. I promise. I’ve been bruised worse when I used to play dodgeball.”

That was a lie. As deep and purple-black as the bruise was, the bottle that hit him must have been heavy. Full. Sophia didn’t throw full bottles of any alcohol no matter how drunk she was. She must have been furious. I straightened and wrapped an arm around Cal’s shoulders. He was eleven years old. He was a child. If she’d hit him in the head, she could’ve killed him. She would be lucky if I broke only one of her arms. She would be lucky if I didn’t break her neck. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, opened them again, and tried for the discipline I’d been learning in dojo after dojo, gym after gym. Tried for calm.

It wasn’t there.

I needed a distraction. “Why exactly was Sophia so angry?” Not that she needed much of a reason.

Now he flushed red, not guilty anymore; he was mad. Furious. “She was stealing your college money. You need that money. It’s yours. So I called her a c—” His eyes slid sideways. “A dirty word. Like I said, she wasn’t as drunk as usual or she wouldn’t have tagged me.”

“Cal, you don’t provoke her. She’s insane.” She wasn’t. She was worse—evil, the Old Testament kind. Grendels and Sophia, they did their best to change my mind about the Fire. “It’s not worth it,” I said, touching a light fingertip to his bruise. “This isn’t worth it.”

The rest of what he said caught up with me. “And you don’t use that word. I know you’re getting older and hearing words like that at school. I know you’ll start using them sooner or later whether I like it or not, but never that word. Girls and women don’t like it and I don’t blame them.”

He leaned his head against mine with an unconscious affection Sophia hadn’t yet managed to tear out of him and considered. “I guess I could’ve called her what the old ladies down the street do. See You Next Tuesday.”

I swallowed an unexpected laugh. “No.”

See You Next Tuesday. That was as bad as when he’d bitten another kid in the first grade. The note he brought from school had said that was often a sign of acting out over issues at home—of which we had more than our fair share. A very unfair share in fact. When I’d asked Cal why he’d done it, he’d answered all innocence, “Because I wanted to know what he tasted like.”

All right, we had different issues from most people. When I broke Sophia’s arm, we’d have more, but that was life.

Our life anyway.

“Back in bed. I’ll get some ice for your bruise and get Mrs. Spoonmaker to call us in sick. No school for us today.” Whenever we moved, I made friends with the older ladies on the block starting the first day. They all ended up hating Sophia, but Cal and me, they felt sorry for us. And if I paid them five dollars, they’d pretend to be our grandmother and call us in sick if needed as Sophia was passed out most mornings.

He was back under the covers as quick as a cat finding a patch of sun and already yawning, looking forward to a lazy morning. “Mrs. Spoonmaker? She smells like kitty litter and Vaseline, but I like her. She always has Oreos. Bring me back some.”

“If anyone can teach me to find the silver lining, it’s you,” I said. Cal didn’t stop surprising me with his ability to bounce back from anything. And, yes, his ball bounced in strange, wild directions compared to everyone else’s, but what did that matter? “Cal, this won’t happen again. I’ll take care of Sophia. I promise.”

“I know that, Nik.” He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, with faith unbreakable in every word. He then pulled the covers over his head, blocking out the pale morning light and the chill that came with it. It made his next words muffled. “And it’s the chocolate lining. Look for the chocolate lining. It’s better than silver.”

I snagged his pajama top off the fan and stuffed it under the covers with him. “Thanks for the lesson, grasshopper.”

My instructors had given Cal the nickname when I’d first talked my way into free lessons at the age of ten. Whether it was karate, jujitsu, Krav Maga, kickboxing . . . every master took one look at a six-year-old Cal tagging along with me and he was grasshopper from then on. I picked up the habit. I even knew where it came from. It wasn’t as if we could afford cable. They played a whole lot of shows made before I was born on the four channels our Sophia-boosted TV received.

I gave Cal ice wrapped in a ragged dish towel, locked the door behind me, and headed across the street. Mrs. Spoonmaker was sympathetic about Cal’s “flu” and quick to take the five bucks. Cal had been right. Sophia had taken my money, but only some of it. I had several stashes. Sophia could smell money. I’d be an idiot to put all my eggs in one basket. Mrs. Spoonmaker also gave me Oreos without my having to ask. Cal was hitting her up hard and often. I should warn him not to take advantage, but if we didn’t—if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have made it this long.

I was walking back, plastic bag of cookies in hand, when I spotted our neighbor. Cal’s serial killer. He was picking up his paper from the tiny scrap of front yard. He was in sweats like me and a ragged terry cloth robe, but slightly blue bare feet. It was going to be full-on winter in another month or so. No bare feet then.

I seized the opportunity. “Excuse me, sir.” I didn’t believe he was a killer, but there was no harm in being polite. Just in case. He lifted his head from the paper and blinked at me. He had soft brown eyes, drooping at the edges, like a tired old hound dog. Friendly and happy, but ready to leave the running to the pups while he lay on the porch. In reality he was likely in his mid-thirties. It didn’t matter. Most people in this neighborhood looked at least ten to twenty years older than they were. They were either honest and worked far too hard for far too little or they were into drugs and nothing aged you like that, selling or buying.

This tired old dog also had a bit of a beer belly or fast-food flab and a receding jaw to match his receding hairline. He also had a small silver cross around his neck that looked like it had been worn to the brightest of shines from frequent fingering. He gave me a tentative smile that showed a gap between his two front teeth. “Can I help you, son?” He had a slight stammer, his eyes blinking more often as he spoke. Embarrassment, he hadn’t outgrown. Obvious signs and easy to read. Sophia was no kind of mother, but watching her work taught you things that were helpful. Since I didn’t use those things to steal, I didn’t feel guilty for using it for other things.

“Yes, sir. I was wondering where you worked. I’ve been looking for a job.” Not true. I had two part-time jobs already, but a harmless lie was the best way to bring Cal around to the truth.

“Sir?” He blinked again, more of a hound dog than ever. “I ain’t sure anyone’s ever called me sir. You can call me Junior.” He turned the paper over in his hands. His accent was a little Southern. We’d been all over the country. His wasn’t as far south as Georgia, more like Kentucky somewhere. His watery eyes looked me up and down, wary. While Cal looked younger, I looked older. I could pass for seventeen easily. And seventeen in this neighborhood was more than old enough to force you back in your house, take everything not nailed down, and stab you with a rusty five-dollar switchblade. I tried to look harmless, another trick I’d learned from Sophia—who was anything but.

Junior seemed reassured. “Well, son, I work in the hospital cafeteria. No openings there, sorry ’bout that. But if you go by human resources, they post pages and pages of jobs on a bulletin board outside the office. Might find something there.”

“Thank you, sir . . . Junior.” I gave him a friendly smile with no thought behind it. My mind was already elsewhere as I moved the fifteen feet over to our rented house. I didn’t think orderlies took a shortcut through the cafeteria to the morgue with the deceased patients, but hospitals were all about the sick and the dying. Maybe Cal’s nose had picked up on that. Or the smell of blood passing from a surgeon to this guy dishing up his mashed potatoes and gravy.

It was possible.

Cal didn’t agree.

He’d already wolfed down a cookie while telling me with a full mouth that was bullshit at the same time I was telling him eggs first, dessert later. No teacher could instruct you in multitasking and how to fail at it spectacularly as raising a preteen. Cal had deserted his bed to follow me to the kitchen. Followed the bag of cookies rather as I started scrambling an egg. “So why is it bull . . . I mean, not true? And I told you about the bad language.”

“You’re such a grandma. It is bullshit.” He shrugged, eyes fixed on the Oreos I kept close and safe while I pushed the egg around with a spatula. “I smelled dead people.” Then he forgot about the cookies and grinned. “Hey, I smell dead people. Why don’t I get a movie, huh?”

I snorted but didn’t discourage the humor. It wasn’t often Cal laughed about his other side. “You’re too talented for your own good. Hollywood is jealous.”

“Probably.” His eyes went back to the cookies and his mind to our neighbor. “I didn’t smell sick people. I smelled something, a lot of somethings rotting in his basement. Hospitals don’t let dead people hang around their cafeteria and rot, do they? Even I might have trouble eating through that. Hey, can I have onions in my eggs?”

“We’re out of onions. We do have half a piece of cheese left. How about that?” Junior, damn it, why couldn’t your hefty, religious ass work at a funeral home? It would make convincing Cal much easier. And it would allow me to stop the internal cursing while getting Cal to stop his outer cursing.

“Cheese is good,” he agreed. I looked at the ice pack lying on the table and when that didn’t work, pointed at it with the spatula. Cal sighed but put it back up to where his shirt covered the bruise.

“Your ‘serial killer’ neighbor is also religious from the looks of the cross around his neck.” I stirred the egg again, then scraped it onto a plate I’d set in front of him. “How many serial killers are devout Christians?” I was really hoping to slide this one past him.

“The Spanish Inquisition?” he said promptly.

“I’d be impressed if I thought that was from your history class and not Monty Python reruns.” I handed him a fork. “He also has a gut on him. I doubt he could catch anyone if he tried.”

“If lions are fat it means they’re the best hunters.” He took a bite of cheesy eggs.

I could not win. “You’re not suggesting he’s eating them?”

“Nope. If he did, his house would smell like barbeque, not roadkill. I just like lions. They’re cool.”

Absolutely could not win.

I sat down with my own plate of three pieces of toast. The last egg had gone to Cal. I couldn’t keep him away from the SpaghettiOs when I was at work or school, but I could make him eat one healthy thing a day when I was home. “Cal, give me the benefit of the doubt on this one, would you? He’s a flabby, churchgoing man who stutters. He’s not a raging homicidal maniac. He is not storing dead bodies in his basement. It’s simply not likely. Just trust me on this, all right?”

“I always trust you, Nik. But sometimes you’re not practical,” he said matter-of-factly. He also said it frequently. He didn’t know as of thirty minutes ago when I’d first seen the spill of dark blood under his skin I was a true believer of the concept.

Cal’s definition of practical had always both covered and absolved many sins. As he’d committed them on my behalf when I’d twice been sick enough not to be able to take care of myself, I had trouble getting him to see that his practical was most people’s criminal. As my little brother came first with me, his big brother came first with him. I thought I was smart, but in some ways Cal was far more so than I’d ever been.

He popped in the last bite of eggs. “Just remember, don’t get laid until we move again. Stay a virgin and everything will be okay. I told you, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers wouldn’t lie.”

Watching the fake butter refuse to melt on the bread, I lost any appetite for the toast or life in general . . . if only for a second.

Laid.

Sophia had gone from verbally to physically abusive. The first inevitable Grendel had shown up. The serial killer issue still hadn’t been solved, and now my eleven-year-old brother had just told me to not get laid.

Why me?

Honestly, why me?