Lineage (5 page)

A shape began to take form on the road ahead of them, the headlights nudging the darkness away. It was oblong and dull. Recognition started to emerge like a form beneath dark waters when his mother flipped on the high beams and let out a shriek.

An old Chevy pickup sat blocking both lanes of the deserted highway, and Lance’s father leaned easily against the front fender.    

Screeching rubber filled the night air as Molly pressed both feet down onto the brake until she thought she would snap it clean off. The
Caravelle
slid to the right but careened back to the center of the road as Molly wrenched the wheel around in a death grip. Lance’s fingers dug painfully into his own thighs, and an involuntary moan escaped his mouth.

All the while, Anthony Metzger kept his relaxed stance against the truck. His arms were crossed over his chest, and a bored expression blanketed his thin face. Only when the car stuttered to a halt a mere fifteen yards from the perpendicular truck did he move. He reached casually through the open window of the Chevy and drew out a long black object. As he walked toward the car, his shadow beginning to grow and distort behind him, Lance recognized the shotgun he held in his left hand. It normally stood behind the porch door, and with a dawning horror, Lance realized it hadn’t been there when he and his mother had left the house.

Molly gaped out of the driver’s window at her husband as he approached, her breath hitching in her chest as panic began to wind up inside her like an old distress siren. Anthony lifted the muzzle of the twelve-gauge just enough to tap on the window, and then dropped the gun’s gaping eye back out of sight.

Slowly, as if in a dream, Molly rolled the window down, and a sheet of cold air assaulted them, though neither felt it. Anthony knelt down beside the car and stared into his wife’s face. His gaze was as cold as the night air around them, and his knife-like blue eyes pinned Molly to the seat. Unmoving, she looked back at him and began to mouth some half-whispered word that could have been
please,
but was lost before it truly formed. After what seemed like an eternity, Anthony looked over at his son. Lance just stared back, and realized he was no longer afraid to die. If this was the moment for him to leave this world, he was ready.
At least the shotgun will be quick,
he thought with a note of thankfulness.

“How?”
Molly’s voice finally made its way from her throat and into the open.

Her husband broke eye contact with his son and turned his gaze back upon her disbelieving face. “I know shortcuts, darling, and I know you. Now turn around.”

Without another word, he stood and walked back to his truck while Molly rolled up her window. Lance looked at his mother as she grasped the shifter and put the car into reverse. There was no emotion on her face; it was as if it had been wiped clean with some sort of solvent.

As Molly turned the car around back the way they had fled, Lance remembered something he had once read in a book about death and dying that he had picked up on one of the few occasions he had been allowed to accompany his mother to the local bookstore. It had said something about the steps that a person took when dealing with death. First, there was denial, then anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. It seemed his mother had gone through all of these steps in the last several minutes since the Chevy had loomed into view before them. The acceptance he now saw on her face—because it wasn’t just blankness there—was the worst. She had given up, and even though he had made his own peace with death not five minutes before, he still felt the urge to remain alive deep within his chest.

As the miles passed, neither of them spoke. Lance looked out of his window at the moonlight-dappled fields of cut crops. He tried to pretend that they were just out for a normal drive and that he didn’t see the one headlight that rode close behind them. He tried, and failed miserably. His imagination, which worked overtime in the best of situations, rocketed along at breakneck speed. It was like he was trapped in a locomotive running on jet fuel as it screamed down the tracks of his mind. Through every window he looked out he saw a landscape of suffering where he and his mother were being maimed and cut to pieces by his grinning father.

The
Caravelle’s
decrease in speed and turn to the left brought him out of his morbid reverie, and his heart began pounding out of control once again. They were home. In a few seconds they would pull to a stop in front of the house, and then it would be time to finally pay for their little excursion. All Lance could hope was that his father would not release all his anger at once; he doubted he or his mother would survive if that happened.

Molly pulled into the
Caravelle’s
regular parking spot near the garage and shut the car off. She sat in the seat for a moment before looking over at Lance. Her face remained impassive, but the words she spoke to him were urgent and clear.

“When I tell you to, you run. Do you understand?” Her eyes stared into his, and he felt the weight of what she had asked settle over him like a lead shroud, but nonetheless he felt his head nod. The Chevrolet then pulled up even with them on Lance’s side, and his father stared down at them. “You run until you hit the river, and then go south; you’ll find a neighbor’s house along the way. Don’t stop for anything.”

Without another glance or word, Molly pulled the handle on the driver’s-side door and stepped out into the cold darkness of the night. Lance pulled his notebook close to his chest, and then did the same. When he had shut his door, he felt the eyes of his father upon the back of his neck like two blunt fingers, pushing into the soft flesh and the bones below. When Lance turned, Anthony stood just a few steps behind him; he still cradled the shotgun in the crook of his arm, and his eyes seemed to shine in the light of the moon. Lance walked between the car and truck and turned toward the house some fifteen steps away, his mother falling in behind him and his father bringing up the rear.

“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.

Lance tried to sit up but was immediately overwhelmed with dizziness and nausea. He leaned forward and grabbed the trashcan that sat near his bed, and vomited convulsively into it.

When his stomach tired of trying to turn itself inside out and a tentative calm settled into his core, he released his hold on the soiled wastebasket and lay back down in his bed. Sleep nudged at his mind and pulled him closer. There was something he needed to check, but the urge was fading along with his vision. Soon the only sounds in the room were soft snores and the occasional rustle of clothing as he twitched in his sleep.

When he woke again, his window was a dark eye gazing out at the night dappled with stars. A full moon shone in the silence-filled room and coated everything with a silvery glow.

Lance breathed heavily as he looked about his room for the second time that day. Each object he inspected threw deep shadows and the only other illumination came from the horizontal slit at the bottom of his door.

He blinked several times and picked the cutting grains of sleep from the corners of his eyes. When his vision cleared, he sat on the edge of the bed, recalling the pain and dizziness that had assaulted him so viciously earlier in the day. At least he thought it was the same day, but for all he knew a week may have passed. He waited for over a minute for queasiness to rear its ugly head, surprised when none came. A thought sprung into his mind, and his eyes searched for the familiar shape of his notebook. He breathed out in relief when he saw it lying half on, half off his desk. He got to his feet and took several unsteady steps across the threshold until he was able to grasp the gold door handle.

A glow emanated from the kitchen at the end of the hall, and although the light was dim, Lance still squinted into it. His head felt as if it had been put in front of a semi’s tire and run over violently, but he continued to make his way toward the light.

When he entered the kitchen, his thoughts had cleared enough for worry, his ever-present friend, to settle into its regular place in the base of his stomach. The room was empty, as he had feared it would be. His mother wasn’t there. He had hoped she would be sitting at the far end of the table, maybe bruised and beaten, but there. Perhaps sipping out of her worn coffee cup that said in bold letters
Dance in the rain, revel in the sun!
But there was only silence that met him, unhindered in the small room.

Lance hobbled over to the entry, scanned it quickly, and made his way back down the hallway to his parents’ room. He reached out and grasped the knob, the memory of the last time he had entered their room floating to the surface of his mind.

He’d been doing almost the same thing that he was now, looking for his mother. He’d come home from school early, the trundling yellow bus that so often left him at the foot of their long drive over twenty minutes late had been sparsely populated that day. The stops had flown by until it was Lance’s turn to step down the three long steps onto the brown snow that coated the edge of the road.

When he had entered the house and looked into the kitchen, he was surprised at the absence of his mother. She was always there, waiting with a small treat for him when he arrived home. It was their ritual. One of the things he looked forward to on the weekdays when it was just the two of them in the little house. His father picked up odd handyman jobs with a local contracting company most days of the week and he rarely came home before suppertime most nights. That hour or so after each school day was precious to him. There was no yelling. There were no cold fingers gripping his arm as he was reeled inexorably closer to a mouth that breathed foul air and threats. There was only his mother, a cookie or two, and the silence between them. At times Lance wished that his mother would speak to him as she sat at the far end of the table, sometimes puffing mindlessly on a Virginia Slim, the smoke dancing around her blank features as it wove pictures before her that only she could see. But he knew it was fruitless to try. This was what they had. An
hour,
and a sugary sweet.
Nothing more, nothing less.