He looked over and saw that his fingers had landed on the Case’s throttle. He shoved it open and the tractor’s engine roared behind him. The PTO lever was in his hand again, and his father was furiously yanking at his snagged appendage. Anthony’s eyes narrowed in hatred through the heat of the day and the fumes from the engine. There was no pleading there, but something else. Something like a promise. I’ll get you.
Lance’s arm shoved downward and the shaft adjoining the two machines spun fully into life. The beater bar turned and sucked his father off his feet and out of sight. A scream met Lance’s ears so piercing that he felt his eardrums flutter with its strength, and then he realized he was screaming as he felt his father’s icy fingers release his face.
His vision exploded into spots of pulsing light, which ebbed into his view of the room and the two ghosts still standing before him. His breathing came out in hitching gasps, and he shook his head to clear it of what he had seen.
“You got me, you little shit, I’ll give you that,” his father snarled. “Had my back turned for a minute and then you were there behind me.”
Lance felt vertigo assail him and he feared he would pass out. “No, that’s not—”
“Oh, you did it all right, boy. There’s no changing what I showed you.” Lance felt the cold fingers squeeze into the meat of his shoulder, bringing him back to full consciousness. “You’re a murderer,” Anthony whispered. He released his hold on Lance and stepped back.
“You deserved to die,” Lance said. He raised his head and met the dead eyes of his father’s ghost. “You hated me because your father hated you.” Lance shifted his sight to his grandfather’s ghost, which merely grinned wider.
Anthony’s mouth opened, revealing blackened teeth and a decaying tongue. “I hated you because you were weak. I hated you because of who you were, even though I didn’t fully know yet. I hated you because you weren’t my own.”
Lance leaned away, physically pushed back by what the ghost’s words implied. “What do you mean?” Lance heard his voice, but it sounded far away and not fully his own.
Anthony’s face was a contorted mask of loathing as he stepped closer to him. “You ain’t my flesh and blood. I’ve never called you son, and I never will. Molly was barren, couldn’t have kids herself. We went to the doctor when we were young and she wanted a family. Fucker said it was my sperm that was the problem, but I knew. I knew deep down she couldn’t carry life. I could see it in her eyes. She was broken and worthless even when I first met her.”
Lance’s mind reeled at what he was hearing. His mother hadn’t given birth to him? The thing that stood in the room hadn’t fathered him?
“I was …”
“Adopted. Yeah, she wouldn’t let it go. Said a baby would make us happy. Turns out you were just a curse.”
“Fate is just a circle,” Erwin said, moving closer. The words were garbled, and Lance could see the bloodless scars where he had removed a portion of his face. “What was set in motion that day at the end of the war was a loop that had to be connected.”
“What do you mean?” Lance asked. His eyes felt like they were going to fall from his skull as he shifted his vision back and forth between the stinking revenants.
“We never met the person we adopted you from,” his father said. “Else I might’ve figured things out and killed you on the spot. I never knew until the moment that packing arm cut me in two. Death showed me who you were. Your mother was a young girl from Iowa. Had a baby out of wedlock. Shame drove her from her hometown. Shame of knowing that the man who fathered her child was a murderer. The same man who killed my father.”