In the Language of Scorpions. Charles Allen Gramlich

knees, throat heaving but nothing running out. Keller sat his flashlight on the floor and took a step forward to kiss the 12-gauge to Dena’s forehead. The metal was cold. “Guess I’ll have to adopt Jeremy,” he said. Then the door behind him blew open and wet leaves and rain swirled in on a rushing wind. Chimes rang and Morgan turned halfway around in surprise. Dena hurled herself into his legs.

      Keller fell backward, the shotgun discharging, spraying the ceiling with pellets. Chimes shattered, and Dena came to her knees and smashed the Maglite across the man’s face with all her might. Glass popped and the bulb winked out, but Keller’s flash still burned and its light showed the man’s head snap to the side from the blow. She would have thought it was enough to knock him out. It wasn’t. The ex-marine lashed out with his left leg, his booted foot crashing into her chest with enough force to knock her loose from her air. She fell back against the wall, throat aching as she tried to draw in just a little of the wind that raced all around her.

      Keller started to lift the shotgun and Dena kicked out as hard as she could, knocking the gun from his grasp and sending it spinning against the wall. As he lunged after it Dena’s hand found something angular and cold on the linoleum. The pistol!

      She grabbed the automatic by the butt and swung it around, starting to fire before the barrel even aligned with her target. Two shots walked across the wall; the rest began to hit meat. The 9mm cartridges weren’t very powerful, but the gun held fifteen of them, minus the two misses and the three she’d used earlier. The other ten bullets kept snapping and snapping and snapping, and Keller kept jerking and jerking and jerking. He was dead before the last shot took him in the throat.

      But Troy might still be alive, Dena thought, as she picked up Keller’s flashlight and ran for the stairs.

      Behind her as she ran, the house seemed full of the hurricane’s boom and roar, full of wild chiming, but Dena ignored it all as she stepped into her son’s room and listened for the sound of breathing. She heard none, and Keller’s flash lit up a space that was empty of her husband’s body. Then the front door slammed downstairs and the house fell still.

      Dena turned, listened, the empty gun useless in her fist. She heard movement downstairs, heard a sound like cloth ripping, and a moment later footsteps came up toward the second floor. Dena wasn’t surprised when Troy walked into the room. She didn’t run into his arms, though.

      Her husband had removed the mask and wig, and Dena could see dried blood on his face where one of her shots had creased him. She figured the other two slugs had hit the bulletproof vest Troy was wearing beneath his now opened shirt. Covering the front of that vest was a badly tattered symbol that dripped red mucous. Morgan Keller’s tattoo didn’t look much like a heart and a cobra anymore.

      Dena lifted the flash slightly, light spattering off the knife in Troy’s hand and then falling into his eyes. The pupils constricted but the lids didn’t blink, and the face behind the eyes was a pale oval etched in white wax. A phrase came to Dena from a college class in abnormal psychology, “flattened affect,” no facial expression at all. Her husband was over the edge, long gone into a Freudian landscape from which there would be no easy return.

      “Troy.... Troy!”

      Dena’s voice seemed to hot-wire Troy’s emotions and he looked at her with hatred dripping from his lips. “You watched him didn’t you?”

      “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Troy. You’re hurt. You need a hospital.”

      “You watched him use me! I know you did! Maybe you and him were doing it together yourselves. Is that right?”

      “You’re talking crazy, Troy.” Dena fought the tears that wicked toward her eyes. “You’ve gotta calm down and let me help you.”

      “Where’s Jeremy?”

      The abrupt change of subject startled Dena but she quickly recovered. “That’s right. You’ve gotta think about Jeremy. He needs you.”

      “Don’t play with me, bitch. I want my son. We’re going away from here. I won’t let him stay another day in this house with you.”

      Dena felt wetness on her cheeks and realized she had lost the fight against tears. “Stop it, Troy,” she shouted. “Can’t you see it’s over. We’ve got to—”

      “I said don’t play with me!” Troy’s eyes went wild in the light. His shoulder lurched against Jeremy’s dresser, tipping it over and spilling toy trains and Little Critter books onto the floor. Then he was coming at her, swinging the knife from side to side. Dena threw the emptied pistol at him, saw it bounce off his chest. She tried to dodge around him but he caught her with one arm and threw her back onto Jeremy’s bed. He stabbed at her, missing, and she swung the flashlight at his head only to have it batted from her hand. She watched it flying, saw it hit the wall. The light went dark.

      Dena slapped out, fingers curled as she tried to find Troy’s face in the pitch black room. Instead, her hand found the knife blade coming down and she screamed as it went through her palm and drove her arm into the mattress.

      Troy straddled her chest, pinning her, screaming with her. “Do you know what he did? Do you know? I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch. I’ll kill you.” And Dena knew that Troy wasn’t talking to her anymore, wasn’t feeling his wife struggling beneath him. He was feeling Morgan Keller raping him again.

      Abruptly, the knife was wrenched free of Dena’s hand, wringing another scream from an already raw throat. She couldn’t see the blade lifting, but she could feel it. And she could feel Troy’s legs tense as he readied the knife for another plunge. She bucked the lower half of her body upward, her feet finding precarious purchase on the side of Jeremy’s bed. Troy’s balance was poor and Dena’s desperate lurch threw him off onto his side. She slipped from beneath him and bolted for the door, slamming her shoulder into the frame as she went past. She heard Troy coming after her and knew there would be no reasoning with him now. She could think only of getting away, of getting to Jeremy and protecting him.

      The stairs loomed and Dena went down them in a stumbling, sliding lurch, grabbing at the handrail in desperate hope of keeping her balance. Somehow she managed it. Troy didn’t. Dena heard him curse and felt his weight as he pitched forward to strike her in the back. She fell, landing on elbows and carpet-burning her cheek. Troy rolled over her, smashing hard against the door, blocking her exit.

      Dena’s thoughts danced away from the door, tripped over the 12-gauge that Morgan Keller had dropped in the hall. For a moment she shoved the thought aside—Troy was still her husband—but then she felt the knife again as Troy spun around onto his stomach and slashed through the dark with the blade. A line of agony scorched across her ankle and she threw herself backwards. Her scooting hand struck the shotgun, sent it sliding further down the hall. She scrambled for it, tears on her face, her mouth filled with a steady keening. Troy’s knife slapped into the linoleum where her foot had been an instant before.

      Dena’s hands found Morgan Keller, and lying just beneath him was the long length of the shotgun. She grabbed it and spun around, back to the soft wall of Keller’s body. She heard Troy coming, sounding huge and alien in the darkened hall. She screamed at him to stop, screamed that she had a gun. Yet she could hear what he was saying, like a litany. “Kill you kill you kill you.”

      She pulled the trigger into the blackness, felt the slam of recoil and heard the awful chunk-thud of a hit. And then she was just shrieking, just shrieking, feeling the horror like a wind swirling over her. Insanity was a hurricane, full of roaring chimes that rang like hyena laughter. She wanted it, could feel her need for it. How easy it would be to fly away. Only one thought stopped her:

      Jeremy.

      DEATH TURNED AWAY

      Was it midnight yet­?

      Would it ever be­?

      The thoughts whispered in his mind as the wind whispers through ruins, and they rattled around in his skull like dried peas in a bowl that had been shaken up. Needing answers to the thoughts, the young man in the bed looked up at the ceiling where the time was