“One thing you gotta remember. No matter what, you always come home.” Lance didn’t know if his father was speaking to him or his mother, or perhaps just talking out loud. Lance’s heart pounded in his chest as he walked, and he feared he would pass out from the rush of adrenaline that was coursing through his veins. Time seemed to reach an incongruent level as each step he took was a year in falling, and each breath was faster than the last.
Even though he was bracing himself for it, when his mother’s high-pitched scream of “Run!” broke the calm of the silence around them, he started and nearly tripped on his own feet. Before he began to run in earnest, he risked a look back at where his mother and father stood in the pale glow of the moon.
They were locked in a strange dance on the gravel of the driveway. His mother had her back to him, and both of her hands grasped the twelve-gauge, one on the barrel and one on the stock of the gun. His father was trying to wrestle the firearm away from her, his face lost in shadow with his back to the moon. They twisted and turned as if they were a single piece of sail caught in a tempest. As she tried to gain control of the gun, Molly glanced over her shoulder at her son, who was locked in place, roots of shock holding him firmly to the ground.
“Run!” she screamed again, and this time Lance didn’t hesitate. He spun on legs that felt like rubbery strips of jerky, and pelted away from the drive as fast as he could. Before he rounded the edge of the house, he heard a sharp crack, like the sound of a dry tree branch breaking, and couldn’t help but look back one last time.
His mother was lying, curled, at his father’s feet with one hand pressed to the side of her head. His father stepped over her body as she reached weakly toward one of his legs.
Lance turned his vision back in the direction he was traveling, just in time to see the house’s downspout catch the tip of his left sneaker. He went sprawling headlong onto the frost-covered grass. His breath whooshed out of his lungs like the air from a bellows, and his vision bounced as his chin connected with the ground. For a moment all he could do was gasp for oxygen, a fish flopping in absent surf, as he lay on the cold blanket of dead grass. But soon another sound overrode the thudding of his heart.
Footsteps stalked closer and closer, until he thought his father would walk right past him. Perhaps he would overlook the small boy-shaped shadow on the ground and continue on to search for him in the nearby patch of woods that led to the river.
All hope of his father failing to notice him in the gloom cast by the house was forgotten when the footsteps stopped a few feet away. Lance lay unmoving, as the frost from the grass melted and began to soak through the front of his jacket and pants.
“You can’t outrun me yet, boy, and I don’t think you ever will.”
Lance began to move to regain his feet when he felt something solid connect with the back of his skull, and then the darkness surrounding him became a deeper shade, and he knew no more.
Cold light poured through the nearby window, dappling Lance’s face as his eyelids eased open with the grace of a rusted set of shutters. At first, the room didn’t make sense. Not because he didn’t recognize it or the objects therein; it just had a terrible sense of wrongness about it. It was as though he had been away for years and had unexpectedly returned home to visit, spending the night in his old bed, his childhood years plastered across the walls in decorations of an innocence he had never truly known.
Pain spooled forth from the base of his skull, so thick and whole it was a solid hot stone nestled there waiting to hatch into something even more monstrous. Lance moaned and rubbed the back of his neck, which felt upraised and lumpy to the touch. As he massaged the swollen area, the memory of the night before came flooding back to him, and suddenly he knew why he felt strange in his own bed. The last memory he had was of lying, splayed out, on the ground in the darkness at the feet of his father. Then there was pain. Then darkness.