Body of Immorality (5 page)

A heavy crash issued from the front door, and everyone jumped. Cathleen screamed, along with Michael, no longer brave. Dottie wailed.

“Sam,” Michael whispered, inching closer, eyes riveted to the door.

“It’s only Mom and Dad trying to scare us,” Cathleen said with impudence.

Michael ignored her. Samantha exchanged a worried glance with Hector. He shrugged and shook his head, no longer telling stories.

Frightened, yet defiant, he stood up to investigate.

“What are you
doing?”
Samantha asked.

“I’m gonna check it out,” he told her, his voice barely audible over the lashing rain.

“Please, don’t,” she told him. Suddenly, she was very afraid. “Stay here, Hector. Please.”

Hector ignored her and went to the door. He wrapped his fingers around the knob, hesitating. Taking a deep breath, he turned the knob, pulled it open, letting in the rainy night.

Little bits and pieces,
Samantha thought…

*

“No one ever found the killer,” Hector whispered to himself. Did he believe that nonsense? It wasn’t as though he’d heard it before. He was just telling a story. Why did it seem like someone or something else had spoken? As if the words hadn’t been his own.

“What did you say?” Samantha asked.

“Nothing,” he said. He leaned outside, looking one way, then the other. The porch was empty, only the noisome downpour, the neighborhood drenched in sleet. Seconds later, he shut the door.

“There’s nothing there,” he said.

“Is that as good as you’re going to
look?”
Cathleen asked.

“If
you’re
so sure it’s Mom and Dad,” Hector said, “why don’t
you
go?”

“I
will,”
Cathleen said. She stood up, determined to prove them wrong.

Samantha, however, was quick to put her in her place: “I’m not telling you again,” she said, jaw set.

“But it’s just Mom and Dad!” Cathleen said. “You guys are so
stupid
.”

“Cathleen,” Samantha said, her voice like steel, “if you don’t sit down and shut-up, you’re going to bed right now. Is that clear?”

Cathleen stomped to the blankets and plopped back down. She crossed her arms, sticking out her bottom lip.

“I want Mommy and Daddy.” Dottie said.

Samantha cooed in her ear, “Soon, baby.”

“Sam?” Michael said, his eyes on the door, but Samantha wasn’t listening.

Another crashed slammed into the door, and everyone screamed. Dottie wailed in terror, her face streaked with tears.

Samantha went to stand up, but something kept her down. Michael was digging into her thigh; Dottie’s arms were tight around her neck.

Would her parents really play a prank like this?

Lightning flashed. Peals of thunder, a stentorian crack ripped through the clouds. Dottie continued to wail, and something banged into the door again.

“Hector, make it
stop!”
Michael yelled.

Hector didn’t move, only stared at the door.

“
Damnit,”
Samantha said, losing patience.

They were her responsibility! If she didn’t get up and get them to safety, what would Mother think?

A crash hit the door again, valmost tearing it from its hinges. The youngest three filled the air with screams. Hector sat motionless, hypnotized…

A portion of the door exploded inward. Splinters of wood sailed across the living room. A double-headed axe clawed through the door with a life of its own, bringing shadows of night.

Samantha screamed. She tried to get up, but Michael was still clawing at her, drawing blood. Dottie’s grip made it hard for her to breathe.

They had to get out! Couldn’t they see that? She wasn’t
that
much in charge!

A monster of shadow stood in the doorway, the size and shape of a linebacker, holding an axe. Motivated by a deadly decree, it cocked its head, registering the children.

Screams pierced the rainy darkness, and the shadow took a menacing step within.

Samantha shook her head, her eyes wide, mouth hanging open, as though denying the sight would make it disappear. Mom had never told her how to handle this…

*

It was still raining when Jonathan and Margaret returned to the house on Humboldt Street. Margaret didn’t care so much for these ‘get-togethers.’ Jonathan always left her alone to mingle while he and his buddies argued politics. If she didn’t go, however, she’d never hear the end of it. She’d spent the evening hovering around the buffet, painfully aware of the clock’s slow progress. Despite how many
hors d'oeuvres
she had, she was still hungry. There might be some leftover chicken if the kids hadn’t devoured it…

Fat chance,
she thought.

Jonathan pulled the car into the driveway, wipers going mad against the windshield, and shut off the engine. They got out, holding their jackets over their heads as they hurried to the porch. The downpour was violent. She couldn’t remember the last time it had rained so hard.

Margaret bumped into her husband when he paused on the porch. The door was ajar. Not ajar, she noticed in the gloom, but ravaged. Destroyed. A thick, unpleasant aroma drifted toward them. Something fresh. Something…
wet.

Jonathan took a step forward.

“Kids—?” Jonathan said, his voice weak, barely audible.

“Jonathan—?” Margaret said, her hands on his shoulders, peering around him.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said.

He pushed open what was left of the door. Murky shapes were visible, huddled in the gloom.

“Oh…dear God…” Margaret said, and put a hand to her mouth.

Jonathan would regret it later, looking for the light switch on the wall. For years, they would terrify him, the way they hung there in mocking solitude, the feel of them under his fingertips. He’d wish lights switches existed nowhere in the world.

As though sensing the future, his fingers hesitated when they found it, but he turned the light on.

Blood-splashed walls flooded his eyes. Horror pummeled him like a cannonball. These were not his children. Not
their
children. What he saw were dismembered, bloodied heaps, bearing no resemblance to the children he’d raised, scolded and loved. Lifeless, severed frames; bleeding hands and feet; haunting, dead eyes stared in soulless accusation, a filmy, milky blue. The sight changed him, scarred his brain.

Margaret screamed, her voice splitting the rainy night, hands covering her face.

The shock was too great. If he turned the light off, the sight would disappear…

Wouldn’t it?

Candles sat burned to nothing, Coke bottles lay scattered about, bloodied blankets, tortured limbs. Even the coffee table had been destroyed.

But nothing compared to the blood…He couldn’t grasp the amount of blood. It splashed the walls and ceiling. It thickened the carpet in a widening pool of shimmering scarlet.

He shook his head. The scene was too morbidly horrifying to take place in any home.

My home,
he thought.

He was staring at a scene his brain simply failed to grasp.

This is how people go crazy,
Jonathan thought.

He might’ve even laughed once while his wife stood screaming beside him.

*

It held the axe close, like a lover. Drifting through this strange, bewildering existence, it managed to smile through its tears. Silence, at last. There was refuge in silence, a quiet harmony—if not for all the screaming.

It did not want to be unleashed. From one doorway to the next, it slipped between the spaces, wanting only to extinguish the reason for its entry.

Through its long and tortured existence, the screams had always been there, the cause of all its tears…

The axe was merely a tool to silence them.

The Truck Driver

Henry Rohrey didn’t have many friends, but that would change…

The road in front of him (and behind him) was limitless. The road had no end, the one thing on his mind lately. The road went up; the road went down…

And don’t even touch a hair,
he thought.

Henry chuckled, thinking of a sailor’s song.

The road—should he drive it forever—ceased to end. Henry imagined it wrapping round and round the earth like Superman reversing time to save Lois Lane.

“It’s the
interminable
road,” Henry said, aloud.

He smiled, proud he knew a five-syllable word. Not every truck driver had
that
kind of vocabulary. Rohrey reminded himself (in the next second, in fact) not to get cocky because he knew a few long words.

Say that out loud and someone’ll kick your ass,
he thought.

The road was Highway 91. He was hauling the entire Bender Lighting system to the Alaweis Building in Boise, Idaho. He’d picked up the lighting system in New Mexico earlier that week. He had to be in Boise by 11:30 pm to make the deadline, but Rohrey was making good time. It was only 3:30 now, and he would be there in four hours tops. He had endless time to spend at a local dive if he wanted, get to know the locals.

Henry Rohrey enjoyed Idaho, especially during the summer, unlike New Mexico’s brutally, painful heat.

The truck hummed loudly under him as he cruised along. The landscaped unrolled, revealing sagebrush and surrounding hillsides (not that he liked sagebrush; it was the hills and surrounding farmlands Henry Rohrey loved). Barbed wire ran along both sides of the road. Every so often, a quaint town, a bar, or several houses came into quiet, bucolic view. The towns disappeared quickly behind him, the patriotism of freeborn America, neon Coors and Budweiser signs. Henry grew nostalgic seeing these small towns and heaved a sigh.

In southern Idaho, the road traveled up and down and from side to side, it seemed. It was a roller coaster. At the rate he was going, maybe he
wouldn’t
make his deadline. Henry wondered why the road didn’t flip up on its side the way the landscape unraveled. Driving any faster, however, threatened the possibility of an oncoming vehicle he couldn’t see over the next hill, or around the corner…

He wondered if the barbed wire wrapped round and round the earth as well…

“Like Superman,” he said to himself, and chuckled.

The surroundings, however, provided a lush, quiet ease to the drive. A hawk circled in the pristine blue sky to his left. Sometimes, a chipmunk bolted daringly across the road. Few cars passed him along the way. Highway 91 seemed virtually non-existent, cut-off from the rest of civilization. Highway 91 was a universe all its own.

Henry had just passed Felt, a small town a few miles back. He thought about how appropriate that was.

A town with only one syllable, the size of your fist,
he thought.

Rohrey easily overlooked towns like Felt. By the time he voiced the name aloud, the town was already behind him, disappearing in the side mirror.

“Gives new meaning to ‘small town.’ Literally,” he said, to the empty cab.

Henry Rohrey had been driving across America’s interstates for nineteen years now. He got his Class A driver’s license when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t the calling for most, he thought. It wasn’t stardom, but once he investigated—studied for the test, and was on the road—the bliss of truck driving strengthened his earlier beliefs. Truck driving
chose
him.

This is it,
he’d thought at the time.
I can do this.

He was happiest when he was on the open road, no ties, no commitments but the deadlines, destinations, and hook-ups. He loved seeing new places and meeting new people. Paul Anderson Trucking paid well, too, and the benefits were generous. Henry didn’t object.

Ties were nonexistent on the open road as well. Ties were bad. Ties were the worst. The job did not allow a tie of any kind. Unless, of course, you
wanted
to bring a tie with you and not the kind you wore with a brand new suit. Rohrey thought of ties as wives or dogs. Some truckers brought cats to keep them company. Henry heard about a trucker who’d brought his pet parrot along, feeding it crackers as it perched on his shoulder. Before too long, Rohrey began to think of ties as chains.

“There’s another one rollin’ with the chains,” he’d say, seeing a dog bounce from the cab and across a parking lot, his master calling his name, or the wife ambling from behind, eager for apple pie at one of those famous interstate diners. He supposed if it were decent company, maybe it
wasn’t
a chain. Henry never needed the companionship. He had no gaps in his life. He owned a small house in Northern, Utah, another reason he enjoyed Idaho. To him, this drive felt like home.

The truck he was driving now was not provided by Paul Anderson Trucking. Seven years ago, Rohrey put in a loan for his own rig, a scarlet, long-nosed diesel. It still looked brand new. Rohrey called it, Baby, because it was his and his alone. He was sensitive when it came to Baby. If you touched Baby, you’d better watch out. If you mistreated Baby, then prepare to be mistreated. When Rohrey saw,
Maximum Overdrive,
he’d been rooting for the trucks. Henry understood and loved trucks. Driving a truck, he thought, was similar to controlling a massive vessel. Nothing could stop him on or
off
the road. Baby was his tie to life and civilization, he supposed.

“Captain Rohrey,” Henry said as he drove, and smiled.

The windows were down. A gust of cool wind brushed his face and danced—hectic—through the cab. His baseball cap was on the seat beside him, the purple one reading, Utah Jazz on the front. Henry liked the Jazz. He was still steaming about their losses in the championship games years ago. Michael Jordan wasn’t invincible, he knew, yet the man—to the rest of the NBA—was a superhero.

“Might as well have a cape,” Rohrey said. “Talk about Superman.”

It drove Rohrey crazy.

“Quit retiring already and just
retire,”
he said to Michael Jordan, and smiled.

Rohrey liked to imagine himself still living in the past when Michael was playing and retiring off and on. Jordan’s indecisiveness drove him crazy. Now Brett Favre was doing it. A different sport every year, it seemed.