Fran sniffled, and John wasn’t sure what else he could do to convince her that she was a good person; that she deserved to be alive. What he finally did was a product of instinct; an action he wouldn’t have taken had he thought about it: he pulled down his shirt and showed her his scar. It was an eerie parallel to her own. She touched it. "How?"
"My father died when I was young. A man shot him. Just like the ones who shot your husband." He sighed. "I know about death. And I know that those who seek to steal lives need to be stopped."
"Were you there?"
John nodded, for a moment sinking into that long-past memory. He felt as always the wall at the far side of that memory, that implacable and blank buttress that kept him from seeing what had happened after his father was killed.
"What did you do?"
He did not know exactly how she meant him to take that question. Had he thought about it, he may have realized that she was likely asking how he dealt with the grief and the loss that followed; how he grappled with life without his father. But he did not think about it, for in that instant the wall that had held him back from understanding for so very long suddenly crumpled like cheap aluminum siding. It folded before him, and in a single, dizzying instant he could see what lay beyond.
He hissed sharply, inhaling like a drowning man clawing desperately for breath. He was drowning, fallen into a deep pool of memory, engulfed by a torrent of remembrance that had been held back by the dam of his memory-wall for decades.
Dimly, he was aware of Fran shaking him. "John?" she asked. "John, what's wrong?"
He heard his own voice and it sounded strange and thin as an echo in his ears. It was as though he were hearing his own voice from across the Grand Canyon or some other gulf of titanic proportion. He had to strain to hear his own voice, to comprehend his own question as he asked, "Did the men who killed your husband - did either of them have a cross shaved in his head?"
Fran stared at him dumbly, and though she did not respond affirmatively, he knew her answer was yes. Terror and unbelief flared in her eyes. "How did you know?" she whispered.
"Because that's what the man who killed my father had," he answered quietly. And the thought ran flitted his mind, as it had earlier in the evening, while they were running from Gabe's house:
Daddy, why you walkin’?
Only this time it was different. This time he knew what the thought meant, and the devastating fact of that knowledge slammed into him like a mountain, as though the mine had suddenly collapsed and buried him beneath it. His breath hitched again, then once more. He felt bile rise up in his throat and choked it back, only to have it replaced by equally traumatic hammer blows that seemed to rain down on him from everywhere at once and only gradually could be identified as the suddenly devastating pound of his own heart.
"John," said Fran, and now it was her turn to hold him, cradling him in her arms like a baby. She rocked slightly, trying to soothe him with those comforting motions that seemed to be hardwired into the human brain as acceptable calming methods.
For John, however, the embrace and the rocking did not have the power to take his mind off of itself; to turn his thoughts away from memory and focus instead on the pleasant effect her touch might normally have on him. Instead it thrust him deeper into the morass of memory that threatened to overwhelm him, each sway of her body taking him back a day, then a month, a year, whole decades, until he found himself reliving that day, that awful day.
He remembered the day vividly now, and he spoke as the details flooded through him, recounting the events of the day to Fran as each moment surfaced from subconscious to conscious understanding. She continued to rock him, but he was unaware of that fact. In fact, he was not even cognizant of the fact that he was speaking to her and recounting the events that unfolded themselves in his mind. He could not feel his lips moving, nor hear his own voice. All he could feel and hear were the fear and blood and death of that day. The day the man with the cruciform pattern shaved in his scalp had shot his father.
His father lay beside him, one eyelid ripped off, the other eye gone, along with half of his head. Johnny, too, was wounded, shot still lodged in his shoulder, blood pooling below him and one arm useless, but he did not feel that. He just felt horror at the sight of his dead father.
The sight was all he could think of until his father's killer moved, bringing his weapon to bear on little Johnny as he said, "For my God and my Redeemer."
Johnny knew in that instant that he was going to die. There was no way to avoid it. Daddy was dead, and no one was close enough to save him from the shot that was coming to end his life. But then Johnny's father moved. He was dead -
had
to be dead - but he moved. Too fast to see, but the killer shrieked and clutched an arm suddenly broken at the wrist.
The shotgun fell near Johnny and he scooped it up with his good hand, running to the back of the kitchen. He had no thoughts of using the weapon, only of getting it away from the gunman. Getting it away, and then getting himself away from the strange, impossible events that had invaded his house.
But he couldn’t move far. His young mind froze as he watched his father. Daddy had been dead, Johnny was sure. Positive. But he was moving. Half his head gone, how could he be moving? But he was. Moving fast, with jerky motions that were nonetheless quick as those of a praying mantis.
His father reached the gunman, who had fallen and was scrabbling backwards like a crab, his hands finding little purchase on Johnny's mother's antiseptically clean white linoleum floor.
Johnny’s father reached out his hand and caught the man’s leg. Pulled it. Twisted. Wet-dry snaps shattered the air as the man’s leg broke. He screamed.
Johnny’s father grabbed the other leg. Pulled. Twisted. This time there were no snaps, but a sucking, ripping noise that was a thousand times worse than the shrieking splinters of shattering bones. The gunman’s shriek grew high pitched. It climbed in volume until it was too loud to bear. Johnny dropped the gun at his feet and clapped his hands on his ears.
His father continued twisting, and the noise kept echoing painfully off the shining white floor as the gunman’s leg slowly but inexorably separated from his body. It pulled out at the upper thigh, where the leg met the groin, and Johnny heard a high-pitched mewling that he gradually realized was coming out of his own mouth. Two great splashes of blood pumped out of the leg socket, now empty and wet. Then the gush slowed to a steady pumping, which in turn became only a trickle that beat rhythmically forth, keeping time with hollow cadence of the dying man's heartsong.
The man kept screaming. Kept screaming until Johnny’s father stood and with a surgically precise movement reached out and crushed the man’s trachea.
The scream cut off, instantly transforming to a whisper of painfully compressed air passages. The man grabbed Johnny’s father’s leg. Johnny’s father stared at the would-be assailant out of his remaining eye. Then he kicked the man. The man’s neck snapped backward with the force of the blow, blasting into a ninety degree angle. Another kick, and the head
popped off
, like an overripe watermelon being kicked off its vine.
At last, the gunman was still.
Johnny’s father stood there a moment, then turned to his son. Johnny was crying, weeping, wanting to know what was happening, but not wanting to know what was happening. He did not understand what could be going on, but knew that he did not like it; that he would be forever changed by it. Nothing was the same now, nothing would ever be the same again. Johnny felt a wrenching sensation in the pit of his stomach and knew that it was the feeling of his childhood withering and dying before its time. Daddy, why you walkin’? he thought, and the question squeezed the last traces of life from his youthful innocence.
His father smiled, and two of his teeth fell out of the side of his mouth that was permanently open, because of the fact that he had no cheek and only half a lower palate.
"Shokay, shon. It’sh all right," said his father's corpse, his voice mushy and strained through flesh that hung off what remained of his lips.
He stopped. Johnny could see the one eye moving back and forth. Back and forth in what would have been confusion if the rest of his head had been there.
His father moved to the refrigerator. A mirror hung on the side of the appliance, where his mother had hung it. She said it was a joke, something that she put there because she was so busy cooking and cleaning that the only way she could find time to do her hair would be if she could do it in the kitchen while making breakfast.
Johnny’s father looked in the mirror. His blood-covered hand went to his face. To the half that was left. Touched ruined mouth, disintegrated jaw. Then dipped inside the head, where the brain had been and where perhaps a bit of the brain still hid.
Johnny screamed when his father put his hand in his head and felt what was inside. Or what wasn’t.
But as loud as he screamed, it was nothing to match his father. His father opened his mouth, and out spewed a sound of anguish and terror like nothing Johnny had ever heard.
His father screamed, and at first it was a wordless, mindless squeal, but it soon resolved into words. Into three words, over and over. The same words as his father advanced on Johnny.
Johnny shied away, pressing into the cupboard at his back. His father was dead. Had to be dead. And yet he still moved, so he must be a monster. Something that had killed one man and now would kill Johnny. And Johnny didn’t believe the words the monster screamed. Not for one second.
But the monster wasn’t about to touch Johnny. Wasn’t about to pick him up and eat him. No, instead it took the shotgun Johnny clutched with white hands.
It looked down the barrel with one good eye.
Pulled the trigger.
Johnny renewed his screams. Screamed until he was hoarse and there was no screaming left in him. Screamed until he couldn’t even see anything but the scream. Screamed until he couldn’t hear his father’s last words.
"I’m not real."
DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
7:00 AM TUESDAY
***ALERT MODE***
Fran held John for long after his story ended, murmuring wordless nothings into his ears, pure sound modulated to provide comfort, caring, and love. She held him as he sobbed upon reaching the point where his father was shot, and kept holding him when he cried out in telling of the moment his father stood up and began walking again. She held him through the entirety of the strange tale that burst forth from him and must have purged him of a lifetime of self-doubt and mystery, while at the same time raising new and perhaps even more deadly questions for them both.
His sobs and cries gradually petered out, and he held her tightly to him, as though afraid she would disappear if he loosed his grip even slightly. But she would not disappear. She would stay for the duration of this nightmare, until they either both woke up or were claimed by death. She would not disappear.
At last, he spoke again, in a voice that was calm and composed, quavering only the slightest bit at the edges. "Time travel," he said.
"What?" she asked, surprised at his sudden speech after long minutes of silence.
"Time travel," he repeated. He gently touched her arm, still wrapped protectively around his chest, and she felt warmth wherever he touched the skin, as though he were somehow branding her. If he was, she discovered that she didn't mind. Whatever this night held, she would not disappear. She was his, if he wanted, and she suspected that he was hers, too. Nothing else could draw two people closer than passing through a nightmare together. Pain and fear were strong ropes, tying them tight to one another with unbreakable cords, and Fran was glad to be in this kind of bondage.
But that realization had to be set aside for a moment. Had to be left for another time, after their mysteries had been resolved and answers had been divined. Survival lay in understanding.
"What about time travel?" she asked.
***
"I saw the Skunk Man the day my dad was killed." John said. "Again in Iraq."
"That's when you said he - Skunk Guy - was killed."
"That's right. But in spite of that fact I saw him again just the other day. The only way that could be possible is through time travel."
"What are you talking about?"
John smiled at the question. He was a computer science teacher. That meant that at heart at least he was something of a nerd. Not in the stereotypical sense, of course. He had no particular penchant for white socks and floodpants, nor did his ensemble include pocket protectors or Scotch-taped glasses. But John felt a deep desire to know how things worked, to understand the ways things were put together and how they could be taken apart. He lived at least part of his life in the virtual world of computers, and that led him to be a dreamer of sorts, a man who could stare out a window one day and see the view, and then the next day he might see only imagination, entire vistas of questions and possibilities that bore little or no relation to what actually lay before him.
Also similar to most nerds - stereotypical or not - John had a tendency to become lost for days at a time in a good science fiction yarn. He had never actually planned on finding himself
in
one, of course, but the fact was that he had spent countless hours preparing himself for just such an occasion as this. He had studied devoutly at the feet of Professors Asimov and Heinlein, had feverishly pored through texts by Clarke and Card. He had even spent some time with adjunct faculty like Koontz and King, who though not exactly renowned as sci-fi authors, could rightly be counted as such for the alternate realities found in some of their books.
So John knew about time travel. Knew that if it were real, it would allow a man - the Skunk Man, for example - to skip across the ages without showing any sign of aging or wear. "Heck," he told Fran after explaining this to her, "it would also explain how he died and came back. Maybe he lived - or is it lives?" Fran shrugged, showing she, too, was at a loss. Proper grammar fell by the wayside when discussing time travel. John continued, talking as much to himself as to Fran, turning over his hypothesis as he spoke. "So he lives in the future. And on day one he goes back in time to my boyhood for some reason. Then returns to his time. Day two, he goes back in time again, this time showing up in what we think of as the last few days. Then returns again."