The December Editor's Pick Writer is R. J. Spears
Please feel free to contact R. J. at: rjspears@gmail.com
THE DARK CHILD
by R.J. Spears
The car fish-tailed when John whipped it off the paved road and onto the gravel lane. He got the car under control quickly and continued down the lane that led to the house they had only moved into three days ago. It really wasn’t much of a house. More of a two-story shack with a leaky roof and paper-thin walls with little insulation. But it did offer privacy as the next house was a quarter mile away.
From inside the house, the sound of the speeding car was Jennifer’s first notice that they were in trouble. She jumped out of her chair in the tiny living room and bounded out the front door just in time to see John push the driver’s door open.
She stood still a moment, her hand held to her mouth as he fell out of the car onto the driveway clutching the bag. Something in her felt the fear rising, but another part knew relief because he had made it out the hospital with what they needed.
When John tried to stand, his ankle gave way and he sprawled across the driveway. Jennifer jumped off the porch and ran to help him up.
“We have to get out of town,” he said. “Now. As fast as we can.”
Jennifer protested, “We need some time. Kerry has been screaming upstairs for the last fifteen minutes. We have to get her…”
He cut her off. “Twenty minutes. Get the laptop and whatever you can pack in one bag.”
“But Kerry…”
“They’ll come for us. We might have half hour—at most.”
A look of panic came across her face. “What did you do?”
He stood shakily, his ankle throbbing with pain.
“What did you do?” she asked again, her voice on the edge of panic.
“I had a tussle with a security guard.”
“A tussle! You can barely walk and you’ve got a cut above your eye. And what’s wrong with your hand?”
“There’s no time,” he said. “Help me inside.”
Jennifer wasn’t a strong woman, but she eased under his arm and helped inside where he collapsed on a broken down sofa. He wasn’t on the couch for five seconds before a nightmarish scream came from the second floor. He looked up to the ceiling.
“How bad is she?” he asked.
“Worse than I’ve ever seen her.”
She reached to the couch to where he left the bag and grabbed it. “I’ll take care of her.”
He covered his good hand over hers and said, “No, I’ll do it. In a minute. You need to start packing.”
They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment and a myriad of emotions flashed between them—fear, guilt, appreciation, trust, grief, and even love but the all other feelings were dominated by resignation. They were in this together and would do whatever they had to do to protect their family.
John closed his eyes, but it was hard to rest knowing he had to go up those stairs. Fatigue fell on him like a heavy blanket and he let his mind drift back to when they had a normal life. Before his sabbatical to Europe. Back to when they had been happy.
A scream rocked him back to reality. The scream was a equal parts intense desperation and blood red fury.
He looked to Jennifer for a moment and he saw her fear. He mustered an unconvincing smile, grabbed the bag, and hopped to the stairs.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to do it?” Jennifer asked.
“No, I’ve got it. Keep packing.”
The ankle made the stairs challenging, but he hobbled his way up. He was down the short hallway in two hops and outside the bedroom when another piercing scream javelined through the door boring into his ears. He closed his eyes and gripped the doorknob for a brief moment, steeling himself. He had read somewhere that ten deep breaths clears the mind. He made it through five before the next scream.
There was no more time to wait. He turned the knob and entered.
*****
The police made it to the hospital in less than two minutes. The story came together quickly. Someone had broken into the pharmacy. A security guard was unconscious in the E.R. A man dressed in hospital scrubs had been seen speeding out of the parking lot in an older Buick.
A tall officer with a pot belly named Potts was first on the scene. He was, at best, a middle tier officer but had to take the lead with the chief out of town. After checking in with the station, he pieced together the report of a car driven at a high rate of speed out of town on Route 60. He played a hunch and called the highway patrol post south of town to see if they had pulled anyone over for speeding tonight. It took a minute, but he learned that one of their patrolmen had been sitting three miles south of town for the past hour and had seen nothing.
Potts was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he pulled the men he at ready together and laid out a plan. He would send patrol cars to head out on 60 and check each of the side roads for a car that matched that description. When it was identified, they would call for backup. These type of suspects were probably meth-heads or some other type of druggie and “Who the hell knew what they’d do.” He told his officers to approach with caution and be ready to shoot if it came to that.
*****
His child, if that’s what she was any more, strained at the chains that held her fast to the bed. Her face no longer had the fresh peaches and cream complexion of her childhood. Instead, it was nearly obsidian. For some reason, John thought of the Dark Elves of Norse mythology, the Dokkalfar. But she certainly wasn’t an elf of any kind. Far from it.
She was hungry. She hadn’t fed in almost two days and the longer she remained hungry, the darker she became. Darker in color and darker in mood.
The chain clanked against the metal bed frame as she pulled with all her strength. John was confident the chains would hold, but he wasn’t sure about the frame.
“Kerry,” he said softly, trying to calm her.
Her red eyes held him fast. The hunger was taking away all that made her human, if any of her humanity was left at all.
He stumbled towards her and sat the bag down at the foot of the bed. Again, she strained forward, pulling the chain to its full length, trying to get to the bag.
“I have it. Give me just a minute,” he said as he slowly sank onto the bed. His right hand was so swollen that it was almost unusable, but he fumbled with the bag until the zipper finally cooperated. Her attention was completely focused on the bag, as if the meaning of life were in it. And to her, it was probably was.
He removed the first blood packet and she started to thrash about.
“Kerry, please,” he said. The usual procedure was to put it in a cup or something, but there was no time so he held the bag out to her, not really wanting to look, but forcing himself to because this was his daughter and if she had to go through this, he would walk on that dark road, too.
She lashed out and grabbed the packet, bringing it to her mouth, sinking her fangs into it, drinking deeply. The contents drained out in seconds and she tossed it onto the floor, looking to him eagerly for more. He saw some of the primal wildness drain away. Or he thought he did. She was always more feral when she was hungry, but when she became sated, she seemed more human.
He handed her another packet and she slowed down rather than draining it in one quick pull. It was like a man after a long sweaty day of work. He’d put away the first beer as fast as he could. But the second one, he’d want to savor that one. There were plenty more to come.
Her black complexion lightened more and he thought he saw a glimmer of what she used to be before his sabbatical in Romania. It was supposed to be a retreat for the whole family. He would get his research done and the family would tour around the country—a getaway on the college’s dime.
His research focused on European folklore and mythology. Romanian folklore reached deep into the darker side of human nature. The giant sobolan was used by many mothers to keep their young children in at night and out of trouble.
Don’t do anything bad or the sobolan will get you.
This giant rat worked its magic on the youngsters, but their mothers never spoke of the moroi. The moroi was kept in the back of the closet, a dark and frightful creature not to be joked about or made light of.
His colleagues at the university teased him, telling to stay clear of the blood sucking moroi at his going away luncheon. As a joke, one even brought a pair of wax vampire teeth for Kerry to wear on her trip. At twelve, she still could pull it off, wearing those goofy teeth.
There was nothing funny about it anymore. No, not after something attacked them one night on a back country road after their car broke down. It was dark thing. It was powerful and it was fast. The three of them were standing around the car wondering how in the hell they’d get someone to help them out in the middle of BFE.
It was on Kerry before either of them could even react. John tried to pull it off her, but it knocked him ten feet across the road with an effortless but merciless backhand. Jennifer tried too, but the creature nearly broke her back.
When John came to, he found Kerry lying in the ditch beside the road, her throat partially ripped out, but still alive. Barely. John carried her to the car and dragged an unconscious Jennifer over too for shelter.
Kerry drifted down so low several times that night he thought they might lose her but she held on. Between the fear of losing her and the terror that they thing that attacked them might return, the night seemed like an eternity. It was that night that the hair at his temples went from black to dusty gray.
As they waited, he and Jennifer talked about what had happened. Their rational minds could only play with what it could accept. What attacked them must have been a crazy person or an escaped convict. But at their innermost emotional core, they knew what had happened— what had attacked them. They skirted the truth for as long as they could.
Just after daybreak a farmer came along with a back-firing dilapidated pick-up truck and took them in town. The doctor’s did everything they could but Kerry kept ebbing further away from the shores of life. A specialist was brought in but did no better than the local doctors.
Somehow word slipped out of the hospital and into the community. One night when John stepped out for air, he found himself surrounded by a small group of local men. He couldn’t understand a word they said, but he didn’t need to. It was clear they wanted him and his family out of their town. He convinced the doctors to transfer Kerry to Bucharest, but her condition didn’t improve there.
Life wasn’t any better when they got back to the states. The doctors ran batteries of tests, but Kerry progressively worsened. After three months, Kerry teetered on brink, standing at the threshold of death. Then she went through it.
Two days later, she came back through that door, the door of death.
*****
Officer Potts found the Buick by dumb luck on the second road he checked.
When he spotted Buick in his high beams sitting against the side of the porch of the house at the end of the lane all he could think of was a promotion. If not that, at least he’d get his name in the paper. He keyed his radio notifying that he had located the car and requested back-up. He told them to come in quiet.
After that night, no one used the ‘luck’ whenever they recounted what happened. The most commonly used word by the town’s people was ‘tragedy.’
*****
“Thanks, daddy,” she said after finishing off the third packet. Her complexion had lightened even further and she looked to John even more like the twelve year old he could never let go of. She would be eternally twelve.
“You’re welcome, kiddo,” he said. “You feeling better now?”
“Much better.”
They sat in silence as John considered giving her another packet. He had only taken eight and was concerned about when he’d be able to get any more. They’d be on the run again and he’d need time to scope out the hospital in the next town they would land in.
His thoughts were interrupted when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs fast. Jennifer burst into the room a moment later and said, “There’s two police cars down at the end the lane.”
There were actually three, but one was hidden behind a large pine tree. The two arriving officers were Davidson and Rothwell. Davidson was as green as they come with only three months on the job, but he was a brute of a man. He could come in handy if it came to physical force. Rothwell had been on the force longer than Potts but because of penchant for laziness, had never moved up the ranks.
Davidson was doing pretty good navigating in the dark until he tripped over a small shrubbery, falling face down in the wet grass. When he finally reached a good observation point behind a large oak just forty feet off to the left of the house, he let Potts and Rothwell know over his portable radio that he was ready.
Potts and Rothwell hit their red and blues and slowly came down the gravel road. As they got closer to the house, Potts made a gentle turn to the left and Rothwell stayed dead center. Potts slid out of his car, pulling his handset with him, and peered at the house. Rothwell popped on his spotlight, training it on the front door of the house.
All three men had their guns out and ready. The air was moist with a slight chill. Potts had goosebumps as he brought the handset to his mouth. He prepped himself to say the line he had waited his whole career to utter.
And when he was finally able to say the line of his career, he bumbled it. “You, inside the house. Come out with your hands up.”
It was supposed to have been said in all together, but he choked and hesitated. Finally his voice boomed again from the amplified speakers on the car, and he finished, “If you have any weapons, throw them out before you.”
They didn’t have any weapons. In their quick bug-out from Wisconsin, John forgot to bring their lone gun. Jennifer hated guns so she allowed to him to have only the one—a necessary evil she allowed him as a compromise. But she’d never let him use it.
“What are we going to do?” Jennifer asked.
John always had the answers. He got them from town-to-town. He had been the one to get Kerry what she needed from the hospitals. He was the one with “the plan.”
Except this time, his plans were all used up. They couldn’t make a run for it even though there were miles of deep woods behind the house, because they knew his ruined ankle wouldn’t carry him twenty feet.
“They’re going to come in here any minute,” Jennifer said.
As if on cue, the blare of the bullhorn cut through the thin walls of the house. “We need you to come out of the house. Toss out any weapons and come out with your hands up.”
“You guys can make a run for it out the back,” John said. “I’ll break out the front windows and make a ruckus. Keep them distracted as long as I can.”
They were interrupted by their daughter. Suddenly Kerry appeared behind them, still wearing her pink flannel nightgown. They turned to look at her, to see that her face was once again darkening. Her hair was matted and damp with sweat.
“No,” Kerry said, her voice low, almost guttural. “We’re a family. A family sticks together.”
She was using John’s line against him. A line he had used over the past four years a thousand times. A mantra that kept them moving; kept them alive and together.
“We may not have a gun, but we do have a weapon,” Kerry repeated, but this time she smiled allowing her fangs to show.
“No. That’s out of the question,” Jennifer said.
“What’s the alternative?” John asked. He glanced at Jennifer with a lost look, a man adrift without any options. “They’ll take us into custody. They won’t even know what do with Kerry. Maybe they’ll move her into the sunlight without knowing what the hell they’re doing. Maybe they will know and experiment on her. Find out what makes her tick. And you and I will be off in some prison while they hurt our daughter. Is that what you want?”
“But there’s got to be an alternative,” Jennifer said.
“Like what?”
She was silent as their options ran out.
“This is your last warning,” Potts shouted, channeling lines from all the old bad cop shows he’d ever seen. “If you do not come out, we will be forced to come in and we will not hesitate to use lethal force. The choice is yours.”
If the whole situation hadn’t been so damn sad, John might have laughed at the corny lines. The choice was theirs. A single choice. The devil’s choice.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key chain with a single key. A silver key to the master lock that held Kerry in check. The key twinkled in the moonlight streaming through the window.
“No,” Jennifer said, moving towards him. “There’s got to be another way.” Her eyes started to redden.
“It’s this or the end of this family,” John said. Jennifer knew it, too. She stood, silent, tears streaming down her face. “Help me out here, Kerry. Lift the lock.”
Something eager danced in Kerry’s eyes as she lifted the lock for her father. He slid down the bed toward her, inserted the key into the lock, pausing before turning it, and looked into Kerry’s eyes.
He saw behind the eagerness. It was hunger. It was darkness. It was evil. But it was necessary.
He started to pull the key out of the lock, but she shot her hand out on top of his, and turned the key. The lock snapped open and fell out of the chains onto the floor with a loud clunk. He reached forward trying to undo what had been undone but she was faster. Much faster. As fast as the thing that had attacked her in the back country of Romania. And just as powerful.
Maybe she didn’t mean to or maybe she really didn’t know her own strength, but she shoved John off the bed with such force that he shot across the room and into the wall. He slumped over, stunned from the impact.
Jennifer stood, swaying back and forth, unable to decide who to go to—Kerry, to stop her, or John, to help him.
Kerry took away any choice and flashed out of the room and down to the first floor. Jennifer could swear that she never heard Kerry’s feet touch the stairs. It was as if Kerry were flying.
Davidson saw the movement first. Something dark was moving fast inside the house.
A window on his side the house blew out sending glass flying thirty feet across the yard. Something or someone came out the window with the glass. In the darkness, Davidson couldn’t make out who or what it was. Whatever it was, it moved with unimaginable speed. It passed in front of him, unaware he was he was hiding behind the tree, and headed toward the two cars in the yard. In the moonlight he got a slightly better look at it and he could swear it was a young girl. A girl with a black face and glowing red eyes.
Rothwell sat in half-kneeling position, his arms braced across the hood of his car, his pistol trained on the front of the house. He caught movement out of the corner of his vision. A black object coming at him quickly—like a blur.
He pivoted, moving his aim to intercept the thing coming at him, but it crossed the ground between the house and him faster than he had ever seen anything move on two legs. When it was about fifteen feet from car, he pulled the trigger, but he had moved too slowly, like a hitter swinging way too late to catch that 100 mile per hour fastball. The bullets flew into the dark, hitting the side the house.
The thing vaulted over the car, clearing it with ease and landing beside him. As he rose and
turned to face it, it shot out a hand like a talon and raked it across his throat, tearing out the
trachea and all the major blood vessels running up his neck. He dropped his gun and fell to his knees, bringing his hands up in a futile gesture to stop the bleeding. Rothwell tried to talk, but all he could do was make a gurgling sound as his throat filled with blood. He had thirty seconds to live. Maybe a minute at best. With his lights dimming quickly, Rothwell slumped to the ground and lay on his side.
Potts should have been shooting whatever had just attacked Rothwell but instead he stood, mouth wide open, and the handset still held up to his mouth, unable to move. The thing that attacked Rothwell lowered itself to his neck. Even twenty feet away, Potts could hear the sucking sound.
The handset fell from Potts’ hand, snapping his trance. He brought his gun up and targeted the thing that lay over Rothwell.
“Get away from him or I will shoot you,” Potts shouted but his voice quavered.
He stepped from behind the car to get a better angle. The thing on Rothwell was human.
He took two steps closer to it and he now could see that it was a girl. A young girl. Something stopped him from pulling the trigger. He couldn’t shoot a little girl. He had never fired his gun in the line of duty. Yeah, he figured he could shoot a man, but a little girl? No way in hell.
That was his mistake.
He closed the gap between them down to ten feet when Kerry raised her face up to look at him. It was the first time he saw her face. Her skin was now fully black with no hint of any other pigment. Her eyes blazed red like embers. From her mouth down there was nothing but blood. Rothwell’s blood. It fell from her chin in big globs onto the ground and Potts felt his stomach turn in a full revolution.
Kerry jumped to her feet and Potts changed his mind about shooting a little girl. This wasn’t a little girl. This was something from hell.
Despite his fear and incompetence, he was a good shot. His finger squeezed the trigger four times and all four bullets hit home in a circle in the center of Kerry’s chest. The impact of the bullets took her off her feet and drove her backwards across the gravel driveway. She slid about a three feet and lay still on her back.
The door of the house burst open and someone came out fast.
“Kerry!” Jennifer said as she came out the door, her attention focused on her daughter.
Potts swiveled and without hesitation fired three more times, each shot hitting home. Jennifer spun from the impact and fell off the porch, dead before she hit the ground because one of the bullets passed through her neck, cutting her spinal cord and turning off all her lights, forever.
Kerry pounced on him before he even knew it. She knocked the gun away and grabbed his arm, wrenching it with such force it dislocated from his shoulder. She pivoted her body, using the motion to sling him across the driveway and into a police car face first.
He slumped to the ground, semi-conscious and she was upon him in milliseconds. She slowly lifted his face to force him to look into her eyes.
“You killed my mother,” Kerry said in a voice that was not her own, a voice not quite human. There was a cold fury behind it. She twisted his head in her hands, snapping his neck like it was made of balsa wood.
John came out the front door in time see Kerry release her hold on Potts. The cop’s body fell backwards against the car with a metallic thud.
During the melee Davidson had only moved to the corner of the house and remained in a state of shock during the carnage, his gun held down at his side. John caught Davidson swaying unsteadily out of the corner of his eye. For now, the car blocked Kerry’s view of Davidson. As much as walking hurt, John moved towards him.
It took a moment, but Davidson finally saw John coming at him with his hands up in a gesture of surrender. In a slow movement, as if he were half-asleep, Davidson raised his gun to point at John.
“You don’t want to do that, “John said in a low voice. “She’ll be on you before you can pull the trigger,” he added, pointing his thumb over his shoulder to Kerry who had now risen to see the two men.
Davidson got it and lowered his gun. “What is she?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter. If you want to live, you better run.”
Davidson didn’t need any more convincing. He turned and ran into the woods.
Kerry went over to her mother and knelt next to her. Her blood lust and fury had abated. Her face no longer was black, returning to what she had looked like before anything had ever happened. Before the thing in Romania got her.
John limped over to her and placed hand on her shoulder.
“We’ve got to go. There will be more coming.”
Kerry acted like she didn’t hear him.
“Kerry, please.”
She looked up to him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I think I could help her. Make her come back. Like me.”
“She wouldn’t want that.”
Kerry shook her head and said. “No. She wouldn’t.”
She stood and leaned into him and he put an arm around her shoulder, a father and daughter mourning together.
*****
They crossed the state line from Ohio to Kentucky as the sun peeked over the edge of the world, suffusing the horizon with a pink glow. John had kept all the nagging thoughts at bay, pushing them down, functioning on auto-pilot. Just get out of there. Just drive. Don’t think. Drive.
He gripped the wheel with his left-hand, while his broken right hand lay in his lap. She was in the trunk of the car to protect her from the sun. His mind was well past fatigue drifting along in a near trance-like state.
He began to ask himself the obvious questions. He wondered if Kerry would ever let him enter another hospital for the Red Cross bags of blood. She now had a taste of the real thing—fresh blood from a live human. Would she take it from a plastic packet ever again?
He considered pulling over. He could open that trunk, ending it all with the sunrise.
He pushed those thoughts away. His daughter was all that was left of his family and nothing was more important than family.
R.J. Spears is a filmmaker and award winning mystery and horror writer who lives in Columbus, Ohio. His short story “Skeletons Out of the Closet” placed second in the Indianapolis Murder and Mayhem short story contest and he had stories recently published on the websites Shotgun Honey and A Twist of Noir. He is currently working on a zombie apocalypse novel set in Ohio.