Blood Ever After

9

A knock sounded on Tyler's door.

"What is it?" Tyler asked, placing another shirt into his backpack.

Beside him, on the bedside table, sat a list. Scrawled in pencil were the words pants, shirts, briefs ... so on and so forth. A Blue Jays poster showing Tanner Roark throwing a pitch hung from the bedroom door. Brett walked inside, the yellow glow inside the room highlighting a serious look upon his face. He didn't meet Tyler's eyes.

"I ... I wanted to say...." The boy could hardly speak. He soon took a seat on the bed. He'd been holding his tennis ball, throwing it now and then against the wall, catching it each time. Tyler looked a moment, then sat also. "I hate that it happened," Brett continued. "I wanna blame someone, but don't know who to blame. Who do I blame, Tyler? Who killed her?" The boy broke off into sobs, throwing the ball again and again against the wall.

"It's ... it's okay, Brett. It's okay, kid." Tyler clasped his shoulder, wanting to give the boy some comfort, but Brett whipped Tyler's hand away. "Get away from me. You didn't help, you know. Because you got all ... all ..."

"Scared?" Tyler finished, his gaze falling.

"Yeah, scared," Brett said, looking at the wall again, throwing the ball a couple more times. Brett's J-Sole T-shirt almost covered half his legs, that messy hair deliberately splayed in as many different directions as possible, or so it seemed. "Because you got all scared, it didn't help save my sister, you know?" The boy frowned at Tyler. "What's wrong with you, anyways? How you get the way you got?"

Tyler peered back at him. He tried smiling, but in his mind saw the hanging body, the birds pecking at its face. The missing eyeball.

"Ain't nothin' wrong with me, kid. Nothing I can't fix, anyway," he said, giving Brett a swift nod.

After lunch, Nelson led Tyler downstairs.

"Check it out. The Savior. It's nearly ready to go. You like it?"

Nelson turned the lamp on. There in the middle of the garage sat the ATV, two solar panels attached to the role cage. They glimmered a greyish black in the dull light. Behind the quad rested a trailer on a slight angle. The engine was running, a low humming noise sounding. It appeared quieter than a normal motorbike, and Tyler believed that big round silver thing attached to the exhaust was to blame for that.

The walls of the garage sat dusty and dim, paint tins and boxes of tools and old boxes of records sitting on the ground.

Nelson took with hands on waste, shoulders back. He turned to Tyler, reached out, and slapped the boy's hand. "We're getting outta here, bruh, finally. To new adventures ...," he said, once more slapping Tyler's hand. His clasp felt like a small shark had eaten Tyler's hand.

Tyler still managed to grin. "To new adventures."

***

Once more those odd moans came from Luke's bedroom.

Tyler rolled over, trying to ignore it, but soon sat up, clicking on the bedside light.

I need to stop them.

He grasped a Blue Jays jacket, putting it on as he moved out into the dark hallway.

Tyler crept toward the door. Whispers, loud, intimate ... promising....Yes, definitely Charlotte and Luke in there. Tyler's eyes stared into the darkness. He tried remembering what was most important, but his mind felt blank, felt like it didn't belong to him at all, in fact. And all he could think of was who those voices belonged to and what those people were doing.

He grasped the handle of the door, shifting the hood of his jacket over his head. He eased it open, started leveraging the door, then peeked inside.

Just a look, that's all.