Calamity

from one part of his body to another in search of the best angle of attack. He shouted for help but the people along the walls remained still, fixated. If anyone was in The Temple, they’d be out any second. Anthony was enjoying this, watching Ellis writhe beneath him. Ellis’s hand found Anthony’s throat and squeezed. Ellis gritted his teeth, air pushing from his nose like he were a bull and stared Anthony dead-on with eyes that dared him to do something.

Anthony brought the hammer down into the floor an inch from Ellis’s head. The reverberations of the hit spiraled up Anthony’s arm as pieces of tile pelted his face. Ellis’s hand relaxed.

“Next time,” Anthony said, “it’s your skull.”

Ellis dropped his hand. The woman who had opened the door gasped a desperate “No! ”

“What do you want?”

Anthony smiled. Have I gone crazy? “Where’s my son?”

6

Dwayne drove them to Trailer Trash Town where Sasha Karras lived. Instead of the big black car in which they had taken Brendan during Delaney’s wake, they were in a grey two-door hatchback. “Easier for people to miss,” Dwayne had said. The car smelled of cigarette smoke and ash speckled the dashboard. They parked before Sasha’s neighbor’s driveway. The neighbor’s house was dark except for one light in an upstairs window. Sasha’s house was similarly dark, save for a flickering red light in the downstairs windows.

Dwayne used his cellphone to make a call. He waited through several rings and then said, “Yes, I’m calling from Information Securities. Is the head of the house available?” A second later, he closed the phone, dropped it in his pocket, smiled.

“That’s the basement,” Dwayne said, pointing. “That’s the key to this whole thing, and the front door, of course. There’s a sliding glass door in the basement that leads to the outside. There’s no sure way to blockade that door, so you need to be sure that the most gas gets pooled there.”

Brendan nodded. Dwayne had given him work gloves that Velcroed on but the pair was too big and so he kept peeling the Velcro strips open and trying to make them tighter. The ends of the straps dangled from his wrists like extra fingers.

“The front door is the same thing. Don’t worry, the logs will make it much easier. Once the two exits are taken care of, they might try to get out a window. That’s when you have to be ready. I know you’d rather not have to do it, but it may be necessary.”

Brendan’s clothes felt too big. The car seat was two sizes too large; he felt like a little kid trying to play grow-up. He didn’t want to do what Dwayne was now suggesting. He was okay with the first part, with the logs and the fire, but he didn’t want to stand guard at the windows. Couldn’t do it.

From the glove compartment, Dwayne removed a small, black gun. “This doesn’t look like much but it’ll do the job. One shot and they’ll retreat back into the house. All you have to do is pull the trigger.”

He held it out butt first to Brendan.

Like dropping a bowling ball, he thought.

The gun was heavy in his hands. Could he really shoot someone? Would he have to? He was willing to be part of this to protect his brother, help unite his family again, but shooting someone was an impossible task like swimming across the ocean without stopping. Did he have the courage to do this?

“They might just freak out and breathe in so much smoke that you don’t have to do anything, but you have to be ready,” Dwayne said. “This is a test, you understand?”

Brendan waited. A test?

“If you are truly dedicated to serving God, you won’t hesitate to pull the trigger. If you fail to do this, you will lose God’s favor and your path will forever be altered. God wants this family to pay the ultimate price. He wants you to be his messenger.”

Executioner.

Brendan swallowed something hard in his throat. “When?”

“Now.”

7

Tyler thought of how he and Paul had joked that Sasha kept a collection of severed penises in jars in her basement. That had seemed so ridiculous and yet here he was drugged and there she was coming at him with a knife.

He tried to stand and couldn’t. His legs had turned to rubber. His arms still worked enough to drag himself backward, but his hands slipped repeatedly on the carpet and he made it only a foot or so before Sasha was squatting in front of him.

The innocent expression had gone from her eyes. Something dark had taken its place. When she smiled this time it was a smile full of power and vehemence. “I know you don’t really love me,” she said. “Don’t bother saying you do.”

“But …” He had nothing else to say.

“I liked you but you took advantage. You raped me.”

“No, no.”

She pressed a finger to his lips. “Shh. Yes, you did, Tyler. You had to get some action for your little pecker and you ignored my screaming, my cries. I begged you to stop and you refused.”

“I’m …”

“Sorry?” she finished. She shook her head. “No, you’re not. You wanted me to drug my mother so she’d get arrested and I’d get put in a foster home. You wanted to get rid of me because you had only wanted to fuck me, not make love with me, not have a baby.”

Tyler was going to drug Sasha, too, and then call Paul and have him show up as a witness so when the police arrived—

Paul. He was waiting for Tyler’s call.

Tyler’s arms turned to rubber as well and he could no longer hold himself up; he slipped slowly flat onto his back. Sasha moved closer, stared down at him. Her hair hung past her face and for a moment she resembled her crazy bitch of a mother.

“I must confess, Tyler,” she said. “I was never pregnant. I just didn’t want you ignoring me. I wanted you to face what you did to me and, maybe, find a way to love me.”

The sedative was numbing his face and mouth but he managed to squeeze out one word: “Bitch.”

She sighed, pressed a hand to his face. It was her injured one and was still warm with blood. “It’s okay. You see, I’m ovulating now. Mom says that the Earth Goddess wants me to be filled with life. In two weeks, if I don’t get my period, I’ll know it worked. We will have created a love child.”

Tyler’s eyelids started to droop. He desperately needed to keep them open. He willed them to stay up. He had to see what was happening. He had to fully register the insanity of this psycho. She had completely tricked him with her innocent, crying victim routine. Paul was right; he should have threatened her life when he had the chance, maybe even bashed her head in with the baseball bat.

“Mom’s a little nuts, I know, but she means well. I don’t know if the Earth Goddess cares or not or if any of her spells actually worked, but here you are, so she must be on to something.”

The bitch had cursed him.

Sasha turned the knife before him. A drop of blood ran down the blade and dropped onto his chin. He barely felt it. “I gave you a powerful dose, so you shouldn’t feel a thing.”

Feel? What was she going to do? Ah, shit, she should just kill him and be done with it. Don’t cut off my dick, please, not my dick.

She smiled as if she had heard his hysterical thought. “I’m not going to cut it off, so don’t worry. What would be the sense in that? If I’m not pregnant yet, I’ll still need you and your prick. But I do need some insurance.”

What did that mean?

“You’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ve been reading up on the Internet. I know right where to cut and we’ll stop the bleeding really fast.”

Her mother stepped next to her. She held her knife in one hand and a candle in the other. The blade was turning yellow.