Calamity

A cruel one.

And lo, did Misery, the god of all, lay waste to everything Anthony loved, for Misery is a mean and angry god, and cares not for justice and peace, but for pain and ruin.

Tyler lay half-naked on the floor of this house, dead. He’s not dead, he can’t be. He wore a black robe of some kind, but it had been pulled up to reveal his crotch. Next to him, a large woman and a younger, smaller woman were clawing at each other’s faces, screaming.

Anthony knocked away pieces of jagged glass remaining in the window frame. One of the pieces sliced into his knuckles but he barely felt it. “I’m coming!” he shouted to his son.

He started to climb through the window but it was more narrow than he thought. If he went any further, he’d get stuck at the shoulders. He might be able to force his way through, but then how was he going to escape? He backed out of the window.

The large woman grunted loudly and then fell back flat on the carpet next to Tyler. The younger one leaned over her for a moment and then turned around. It was a teenage girl, her hair a mess, her face streaked with dirt and blood. “Mr. Williams,” she cried, “Please help me, please!”

He had never seen this girl before. How did she know who he was? Was she Tyler’s girlfriend? Why was she wearing a black robe, too?

The handle of a knife stuck out from the larger woman’s gut. This girl had just stabbed someone. Not someone—her mother.

The girl ran toward the window, her face bent at weird angles and her teeth like arrowheads. Anthony stumbled backward into Paul.

“The police?”

Paul snapped his cellphone shut. “Yeah. Where’s Ty?”

The girl was at the window, which was set up high on the downstairs wall, so she could only get her forearms across the ledge without help. “Mr. Williams, save me. I’m pregnant with your grandchild! ”

“Who the fuck is this girl?” Anthony asked.

The girl’s hands flayed for something, someone, to grab. “She’s fucking nuts,” Paul said.

Tyler screamed, loud and forceful. The shock of his sudden scream froze everything, though only for a second. He was alive. Tyler was alive.

Anthony reached down, grabbed one of the girl’s arms and told her to push. After a moment, Paul grabbed the other arm and together they pulled her out through the window and onto the grass. She was breathing frantically and mumbling words Anthony couldn’t understand.

“You have to get my son,” Anthony told Paul. “I can’t fit through the window.”

Paul didn’t hesitate; he dropped to his knees and dove headfirst through the open window frame and crashed to the floor. Anthony waited with both hands stuck through the window while Paul ran to Tyler, tried to slap him completely awake.

But he’d just screamed. He was just awake. Why the hell wasn’t he awake now? What was happening to his poor boy?

Paul wedged one arm under Tyler’s shoulders and the other under his knees. He stood on unbalanced legs and walked with heavy, slow steps toward the window. He squinted his eyes and clenched his jaw against the pain.

“Come on,” Anthony spurred him on. “A few more feet.”

The sliding glass door shattered.

Paul stumbled, drop to one knee, and Tyler spilled out of his arms onto the floor. They were only a few feet away. If only Anthony could wedge through the window.

From somewhere behind Anthony another loud bang ricocheted, but Anthony recognized this one immediately. A gunshot. Ellis and Dwayne had killed Brendan.

Paul had Tyler in his arms again, lifting just beneath the shoulders this time and letting his legs drag across the floor.

A police siren floated in the distance.

Tyler’s arms flapped against the wall. Paul raised him higher with a grunt and Anthony grabbed both arms. With Paul pushing, Anthony dragged Tyler out through the window to rest flat on the ground. His head lolled from side to side.

Don’t be dead, he begged, please don’t be dead!

He only had to help Paul for a moment before the kid was able to climb out on his own. The heat from the two fires was spreading around the house like the arms of the Devil.

Or the arms of Misery.

Anthony dragged Tyler away from the house to the line of trees separating the property from the neighbors’. The heat was still strong but tolerable. The peak of the fires had crested the top of the house. Within minutes, the whole place would be destroyed.

The girl pounced on Tyler and hugged him close. Her large eyes warned he and Paul to stay away; they were the eyes of a raccoon protecting her young. “My baby,” she said, “my baby, my baby.”

And my Brendan did this, Anthony thought and then immediately he was running back toward the cars thinking, the gunshot, the fucking gunshot.

The hatchback was gone. Ellis was on the ground with a bullet in his neck and blood pooled all around his head. Another man lay on the ground, half his head smashed to pieces from the Craftsman hammer that lay next to him covered in blood.

Dwayne and Brendan were gone.

12

“We should leave now,” Ellis said.

Dad and Paul had run off to the burning house and Brendan was left as a frozen statue. He said Tyler was in the house. That couldn’t be. God wouldn’t do this to him. Delaney he could understand; that was God’s warning for worshipping false deities, but Brendan had completely devoted himself to God’s cause. God could not have his brother. No, no, no!

Brendan almost ran for the house, but Dwayne’s hand gripped his shoulder. “Tyler will be fine,” he said. “Your father will save him. But this means that the mission has failed.”

“You knew Tyler was in there?”

The faintest trace of a smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. “Of course not. These are not things for us to answer. Leave these things to God. We can only do our part.”

“But you said that everything would be good again, that this would bring my family back together.”

“Enough crying,” Ellis snapped. “We have to get out of here now. Someone probably called the police already.”

He turned back to his car and stopped. A man in jeans and a ratty T-shirt stood at the bottom of the driveway, gun in hand, lit cigarette in mouth. “That’s right,” the man said. “I did.”

Ellis tried to assess the man quickly. He put his hands up. “That’s good, then. We don’t have our cellphones or we would have—”

“Shut up,” the man said. His hair was a ruffled mess and deep-wrinkled creases marked his face. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re behind whatever is happening next door and you’re all going to jail.”

Dwayne’s hand brushed Brendan’s arm. His fingers gestured to the hammer Dad had dropped. It was a foot away.

The man stepped off his driveway, close to Ellis, turned toward Dwayne. “I saw you murder Cody Karras. I gave the police a full description but here you are. I’ve been waiting. I knew you’d come back to kill the crazy mother, too.”

A police siren cried nearby.

“I don’t know who you think we are,” Ellis said, stepped forward.

“I never killed nobody!” Dwayne yelled.

The man turned full on to Dwayne, gun poised. Ellis charged and crashed into the man; they tumbled to the street. Dwayne pushed Brendan aside, snatched up the hammer. He ran toward the scuffle and arrived as a