Bad Games - By Jeff Menapace Page 0,98

her head back down to the pillow.

They checked Caleb’s room next. He was fast asleep; Carrie’s screams hadn’t woken him.

“He could sleep through an earthquake,” Patrick whispered as he shut his son’s door.

The two walked into their bedroom where Amy sat on the bed and put her face in both hands.

“You okay?” Patrick asked.

She looked up, sighed. “Yeah. I just want it all to be over. I want the bad dream to end.”

He sat beside her. “I do too, baby.” She leaned in and rested her head on his chest. He kissed the top of her head and started running his fingers over her back. “Tell you what, why don’t you go get ready for bed. I’ll go downstairs and clean up.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll come down and help.”

He pulled her in, squeezed, and kissed the top of her head again. “I insist.”

She took her head off his chest and kissed him. “I love you.”

* * *

Patrick had cleared the dining room table, and was now elbow deep in suds at the kitchen sink. He thought about Jamie’s question:

“How did you do it? How did you manage to…do what it was that you did…to come out alive?”

He set the plate he’d been holding back into the sink and shut the water off. How had they done it? How had he done it? That man who did those things. That man who shot, stabbed, and mauled like a savage beast. Was that him? Standing here now, safe in his suburban kitchen, knowing Jim was dead and that Arty was locked away, he felt as though he hadn’t done those things—that someone else had. He felt a vague connection to it as though it were a scene in a film he had seen more than once. Now, in retrospect, he felt removed from the blood lust that had surged through his veins during that horrific moment.

A tingle began at the base of his spine, and then tickled ice cold all the way to the top of his head…because he had done those things. My God. He had.

And to answer your question, Jamie, I have no fucking idea how we managed to do it. No fucking idea at all. I guess when it comes to family…

Patrick thought of the nose he’d bitten off Jim Fannelli’s face and immediately filled a glass of water. He gargled with it then spat. He repeated the process, and then set the empty glass to one side. He placed both hands on the sink’s ledge to steady himself, his head down.

“This is going to take awhile, isn’t it?” he said quietly to the sink full of dishes and water and soap. “A hell of a lot longer than Amy and I think it—”

A second scream that night cut him off. It was not Carrie’s this time, it was Amy’s: a short, painful cry.

Again Patrick found himself sprinting up the stairs. In his bedroom he found Amy sitting on the floor, clutching her right foot with both hands. Her left foot was covered in a bedroom slipper; her right was bloodied and dotted with silver thumbtacks.

“What the hell?” Patrick said.

Amy continued clutching her foot with both hands, rocking back and forth in pain.

Patrick dropped to his knees and began examining her foot. “What the hell happened?”

Amy kept a tight grip on her ankle with her left, and began slowly plucking the tacks free with her right, wincing after each withdrawal. “My slipper,” she said.

Patrick spun on both knees and spotted the solitary slipper. He picked it up and turned it over. A dozen silver thumbtacks spilled out. “What the fuck? Who did this?”

Amy continued working on her foot. “How the hell should I know?”

Patrick hopped to his feet and immediately went to Carrie’s room. She was in the same position they had left her earlier, fast asleep. He closed the door and went to Caleb’s room. His son was turned on his side away from him, lying still. Patrick called his name. Caleb didn’t answer. His tiny torso beneath the blankets rose and fell with each breath. He was asleep.

A wave of panic swept through Patrick’s head. Had one of their friends done it? No. No way. Even the hardest of practical jokers would have found such a gag awful even under normal circumstances.

Jim was dead. He was sure of it. He was dead. Dead. He saw it. Dead.

Arty was locked away. Locked far away from them. Had he gotten out? Tracked them down? No. Impossible. It was absolutely