Apex Book Company

Daddy was home.

Screaming away and pounding on his desk, he could be heard across the little two bedroom ranch home. Two children, one six, the other eight, pushed the remnants of their Thanksgiving dinners around their plates, flinching at every noise. They were nervous, they new Daddy would be into eat soon.

It could be said that Daddy–Gerald Malcolm Linden-gave them plenty to be nervous about. Gerald had been drafted in the year 2046, the third year of the American-Asian war, at the height of the Pacific conflict. His first assignment was a cozy spot as a logistics officer, hidden safely behind the lines and helping the real men, the generals, map out important battles. The job treated him well, that is, until he messed up. Four thousand marines dead in six hours, recognized as the worst slaughter of American lives in the history of the country. The generals thought him a spy, tortured him for information. When none was forthcoming, they placed him in the frontlines of the battlefields, in the jungles of Vietnam, fighting a resilient enemy the Americans had lost to seventy-years before. Let the Vietnamese get rid of a problem they didn’t want to deal with.

The youngest child, tiny Michelle Renee, balanced a shriveled pea on her thumb and sent it flying across the table with her index finger. Michelle was proud of her pea sharp-shooting skills, and her talent didn’t let her down this time. The pea found its target, plinking harmlessly, but effectively, against her brother’s forehead.

“Ouch!” shrieked Mark, as he laughed, scooping up a portion of mashed potatoes with his hand, readying a counter-attack. Mark felt it was time for a full-fledged food fight, especially before Daddy came to the table.

“Don’t you dare, Mark Gerald Linden!”

Mark wanted to argue, but one look into his mother’s authoritative cloudy blue eyes emptied his mouth of rebellion. In the background, Mark heard his father screaming at the video-phone in his office. The screaming was punctuated by the sound of crashing furniture and plenty of swearing.

Another pea bounced off Mark’s forehead.

“Hey!” he said to Michelle. “I’ll get you for that.” Mark jumped from his chair. He made monster noises as he rounded the table and grabbed his sister in a bear hug, tickling her. Michelle squealed with laughter. The pair wrestled, giggling and wrestling, prompting their mother to join in the fun.

The office door opened, and Daddy sulked into the dining room.

“Goddamn it!”

A man in his forties, crew cut, sharp blue eyes, that wore a patented military man bulldog sneer stormed into the dining room. Mark narrowly avoided running into his father, as he scampered for his place at the table. Nobody dared say a word. They knew Daddy was angry.

“What’s wrong, Gerald?”

“We’re fucked, that’s what’s wrong.”

“Gerald, the kids…”

“It doesn’t fucking matter. They should hear this.”

“Hear what?” asked Lydia.

Michelle began to wail, as she often did when Daddy was mad.

“The psychologist refuses to sign off on my papers. Says I have to find real work, not draw a pension. Six goddamn years in the jungle and not one fucking penny.” Gerald pounded the table with his fist. One eye tended to drift during his mad spells. Right now it stared at Mark while the other looked to the ceiling in exasperation.

Mark cleared his throat. “Daddy?” The eye glared at him, broadcasting a threat of physical violence for his insolence that interrupted his father’s thoughts.

In a flash, Gerald swept his arm across the dining table, sending bowls, plates, and glasses smashing against the dining room wall behind Mark. Mark ducked the shards of shattering glass and crockery. He didn’t know what to think. He’d only seen his dad three times in the past few months. Daddy stayed at the bars till late at night, and often went to the doctors during the day. This man was not Daddy, but a scary stranger.

“There’s only one thing left to do.”

“Gerald, you’re scaring the kids and you’re scaring me,” Lydia said. She reached her hand out to Gerald’s now bleeding wrist, using her most consoling voice.

“They always think they’ve got me,” Gerald mumbled, this time smacking the tabletop with his open right palm. “But they’re wrong. So very wrong.”

“Gerald?”

Outside, a freak November thunderstorm brewed over the marine base. Mark could hear the wind picking up, pelting their house with sand and grit.

Gerald hunched over the table and placed his head in his hands. Mark knew Daddy had a temper, but this was different. An ill-defined danger surrounded his father.

“Who are you, little girl?” Gerald asked.

“Mommy?” Michelle asked. “What’s wrong with Daddy?”

The family sat quietly around the dinner table.

“Mommy?”

“Nothing Michelle. Daddy’s just tired, that’s all.”

Gerald smiled at his daughter. He stood up and hugged her tightly where she sat.

“You know Daddy loves you, right?”

“Yes. I love you, Daddy.”

Gerald walked over to Mark, who leaned away from the man, Daddy, suspicious.

“Mark, you know your daddy would always do what’s best for you?”

Mark peered over to his mother. She nodded “Yes”.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Outside, a brilliant flash of lightning crackled nearby. For a brief moment, the power flickered off. Without anyone at the table noticing, Gerald had disappeared.

Lydia jumped to her feet and gathered her children in her arms. She pushed them in the direction of their bedroom. “Go on, get in your room. Mommy needs to find out what’s wrong with Daddy.”

“Mommy,” cried Michelle. “I’m scared.”

“It’s ok, sweetie. Daddy is a little upset and Mommy is going to find out what is wrong. And besides, Mark will protect you, right Mark?”

Although on the verge of tears, Mark nodded silently and put his arm around his little sister.

Mark recognized the sound of his father’s shotgun being loaded with shells from within the office. Quickly, he herded Michelle into their bedroom and locked the door. They huddled together in the corner next to a giant plush Winnie-the-Pooh that had been an early Christmas present from their aunt and uncle in Orlando.

“Mark, what’s going on?” Michelle asked. Her tears rolled down her face onto Mark’s arm. They tickled as they made their way to his fingertips.

“Daddy has a bad headache, okay? The army doctors told Mommy it’s because he’s been away from his family for so long.” He felt Michelle nod in his arms. “Mommy wants us to play ‘hide and go seek’ until he’s not mad anymore.”

Through the thin plaster walls of the house, Mark heard an argument raging over the sounds of the building storm.

“They think they got me, but they don’t; the sons of bitches.”

“Gerald, put that away.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. I’m a goddamn corporal.”

“Put the gun away, Gerald. Let me call Dr. Fiesler.”

“Dr. Fiesler? He told me all the sick shit I’ve done; it’s in my head. In my head, Lydia.”

“I don’t think Dr. Fiesler understands,” Lydia said, her voice calm and modulated.

“I think you’re trying to confuse me.”

Silence ensued, followed by some muffled pleas.

“On your knees.”

“No.”

“Don’t make me shoot you in the face.”

“Gerald, no! The kids.”

“On your goddamn knees!”

“Fuck you.”

A second later, a gunshot blast rocked the house. Then another. Then nothing, absolutely nothin. The only sound Mark could hear was the pattering of rain on the rooftop. Michelle sobbed silently in his embrace.

Footsteps.

Mark’s eyes narrowed. They were attentive to every movement inside the bedroom and around the doorframe. Quietly, he placed his hand around Michelle’s mouth and placed a finger to his lips, indicating for her to remain quiet. Then he walked her over to the closet, slid the door open and shoved her gently inside. Once again, he motioned ‘quiet’ and shut the closet door.

Outside the room, in the hallway, he heard the shotgun reload.

Mark slid underneath Michelle’s bed, one of the two twin sized beds the siblings shared. Kissing his face was Michelle’s favorite baby doll. It stared at him an inch away with those faraway, empty black eyes.

The doorknob rattled.

“Open this door, Mark.”

Silence.

“Your father orders you to open this door.”

A few seconds passed, then a shot rang out. The middle of the door and part of the frame disintegrated.

“I promise not to hurt you.”

Horrorstricken, Mark watched his father’s boots stomp through the door. Gerald knocked the debris aside and entered the room.

“Your mother is hurt, real bad,” Gerald said. “She needs you to help her.”

Mark eyed the closet, praying that Michelle wouldn’t fall for this obvious bit of trickery. Enraged, his father upended the mattress and frame of Mark’s bed. Bedding and pillows fell all about the room. The boots moved into the bathroom and yanked the shower curtain off the rod. Cursing, Gerald ripped the linen door off its hinges.

“She’s bleeding from her eyes,” Gerald yelled. “Like those goddamn Viet-Cong when I tortured them. Their eyes bled, too.

The boots marched to the bed that hid Mark. They paused. The barrel of the family’s Winchester made black smudges against the white carpet floor. Mark could smell the fresh cordite. The doll’s plastic face became warm and alive, transforming to the face of his mother. “I love you,” it whispered, before exploding in a spray of blood and brains. Mark stifled a cry, blinking away the tears and the horrible image. When he looked again, the doll’s head was normal, with the black eyes and plastic body.

Without warning, the boots rushed toward the closet. Acting on instinct, Mark sprang out from under the bed and threw his body into the back of his father’s knees, sending him tumbling to the floor. For now, the closet door remained closed.

“Son of a bitch!”

Gerald grabbed Mark by the ankle and tried to pull him closer. With his other hand, the man reached for the shotgun. Mark twisted onto his back and sent the ball of his right foot into his father’s shin. Gerald howled in pain, grasping for his left leg, allowing Mark the split second he needed to slip free. He jumped up and found himself in the hallway.

His father grabbed the shotgun and stood. Behind his dad, he saw Michelle peek out of the closet. Her sad, round eyes were filled with tears. Mark’s only thought was to get his father out of the room before he found Michelle and killed her, too. Picking up a vase from the hallway end-table, he threw it, and it shattered across his father’s ducking broad shoulders.

“You stupid motherfucker,” Mark said. The swear words felt funny coming out of his mouth. Had Mark ever swore before? And even now, he felt a ridiculous instinct to respect his father, this crazy man he called ‘Daddy.’

“What did you say to me, boy?”

“Fuck you. You ain’t killing me, you crazy fuck-tard.”

Gerald rushed the doorway and Mark darted left, toward the living room. He sprinted to the foyer and rushed out the front door.

Lightning crashed, momentarily highlighting the ancient oak in the front yard. Mark splashed through the slippery desert mud and took cover behind the tree. The rain blew in from all directions, as the storm grew angrier and louder.

Gerald followed, splashing loudly through the puddles of rain that now flooded the grassless front yard. The halogen flood lamp at the end of their driveway flashed on.

“Run all you like, but I’m not going to let you live. Not a single one of you mother fuckers ever got away from me? They thought they had me, but I was on to their ass.”

Gerald stalked across the yard holding the shotgun ready in front of him.

“Bet you ain’t ever been shot, have you son? The pain, oh Christ, it will make you puke your guts out.”

A moment of nothing but the rain falling.

“I’ll shoot you in the head, you’ll never feel the pain, I promise.”

A whistling sound passed overhead, above the clouds. For nearly a minute, the father and son listened. Mark knew the sound to be a military jet making a landing at the base airfield a mile away.

“You hear that, boy? That’s the first of the bombs. That’s the Asian Alliance. I told the generals they were coming. We’re all fucked.”

Mark strained to listen through the rain, the jet landing, his father’s ranting, trying to ascertain from which side of the tree Dad approached. He crouched and placed both feet against an exposed portion of tree root for better footing.

“Come on. Hiding behind a tree? You want to hide, your ass had better be dug down into the mud, under the water. You can do better than that.”

When the nose of the shotgun appeared, Mark grabbed it with both hands and pulled backwards as hard as he could. He made sure to keep the barrel pointed away from his body. Knowing he wouldn’t have the strength to pull the gun from his father’s military-trained and well-muscled body, he only tried to create enough leverage to cause Gerald to topple face-first in the slick mud.

Gerald did topple. Mark managed to escape by leaping over Gerald’s flailing arms. Miraculously, his feet ran true through mud, so he made a dash for the back of the house. He crashed through the back door, and ran straight to the bedroom closet where he had left Michelle.

“Where’s Dad…”

Mark put his hand over her mouth and once again made the motion for silence.

He pulled her out of hiding and tugged off his muddy wet shoes and socks and stashed them in the closet. Grabbing her hand, he crept to his father’s office. The place was in a shambles. The desks were flipped on their sides. Office supplies and computer equipment littered the floor. Everything had been torn off the wall in Gerald’s last fit of rage. Everything except for a trophy 9-iron his father had won years ago at a Camp Pendleton Base golf tournament.

Mark heard his father kick the front door open. The man walked straight into the children’s bedroom, following the wet, muddy tracks Mark had left behind. Gerald slid open the closet door only to find a pair of wet tennis shoes and socks.

“Son of a bitch,” Gerald said.

Mark raised the club overhead and brought it down with all his might, connecting squarely with the back of his father’s head. Gerald grunted and stumbled against the wall. Again, Mark swung the 9-iron. This time, Gerald slumped to his knees. He dropped the shotgun across his lap and rubbed a spot on the back of his head. He brought his hand back to his face, the hand covered in blood. Rage emanated from the soldier.

A whistling sound, like the first one, but much louder and closer, shrilled overhead. Lighting erupted. A few seconds later, the thunder shook hard enough to rattle the house.

Mark grabbed the shotgun.

“No…” Gerald gasped. “The bombing has started.”

For a moment, he lifted it and thought about pulling the trigger, wanting to pull the trigger. But he walked away. Back into the office. Mark kneeled before his little sister and took her in his arms.

“It’s ok, Michelle.”

Mark propped the shotgun on the edge of the desk, aiming it at the doorway. He put two of his small fingers lightly around the trigger.

And together they waited for Daddy to enter the room.

END

Jason Sizemore is the managing editor of Apex Publications. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Surreal Magazine, Aberrant Dreams, and Murky Depths. He lives in Lexington, KY.