Animosity Read online

  We stood there glaring at one another. Unmoving.

  “Don’t you even think of goin’ anywhere,” he said. “This ends today.”

  “I know it does,” I said, gripping the hammer so tightly my knuckles turned bone-white.

  Floyd swung his leather strop as hard as he could. With every ounce of strength in his skinny frame.

  I brought the hammer up to block his attack, but he got me in the ribs.

  I yelped in pain, and he hit me again across the neck.

  “Get ’im!” I heard Sal Friedman cheer Floyd on. “Whip the shit outta that sumbitch, F.B.!”

  I lunged forward, striking Floyd with the hammer. It got him in the chest. He squealed like a little girl, recoiled, but only for a second or two.

  “You’re dead meat,” he said.

  I moved to hit him again, but suddenly he had help. A sharp rock struck me in the center of my chest. I staggered back. Another bounced off my collarbone. My left arm. My hip.

  “Daddy!” Samantha wailed.

  I dropped the hammer. It clunked down the porch steps like a fairweather friend trying to distance itself from me and my dilemma. I held my arms in front of my face, crashed into my storm door as a blizzard of pain pelted me from every direction.

  “Stop it!” Samantha shrieked. “You’re hurting my daddy!”

  “Go, Sam! Jason, get her out of here now!” I screamed again as another sharp stone carved a deep gash across my left cheek.

  And then, even as their jagged missiles tore my flesh, as Floyd Beecham’s leather strop thrashed again and again at my shoulders and his liquor breaths exploded in my ear with every lash, I was aware of Samantha moving toward me, through the crowd.

  “Sam, no!”

  “Please… stop it!” she cried.

  Blood filled my eyes. I fell to my knees, wiped it away…

  . . . and I saw their hands on my daughter.

  Samantha’s terrified wail reverberated across my property: “Daddy!”

  In the middle of the yard, Donna Dunaway’s hands were entangled in Sam’s long blond hair. Sam kicked at the bitch’s shins, struggled to get away. Sal Friedman gripped her left arm in one gnarled, liver-spotted claw.

  I knew I was outnumbered. Knew there was no way I would ever make it through that roiling mass of bodies alive.

  But they had my daughter. Dear God… they were going to hurt Samantha…

  At the rear of the mob, Jason Burke fought to reach Sam, but Joe Tuttle slammed an elbow into his face. A fountain of bright red blood gushed from Jason’s nose, and he collapsed against his SUV with a startled yelp.

  “Jesus… oh, my Lord,” I heard him babbling beneath the river of gore streaming down his face.

  Through the blood in my own eyes, I watched Jason fumble through the pockets of his fancy suit-coat. He pulled out his cell phone, nearly dropped it. Flipped it open with hands that trembled worse than those of a man twice his age.

  But before he had a chance to use it, the phone was torn from his grip.

  It flew into the air above the mob, and a second later—BANG!—it clattered into the street and exploded into a hundred pieces, batted like a home-run softball off the end of Darren Pruitt’s lawnmower blade.

  Jason tried to stand, but someone’s heavy black boot collided with his abdomen, and again he went sprawling against his Jeep Liberty.

  “Samantha,” he cried.

  At last, Floyd Beecham ceased flogging me with his leather strop.

  The leather squeaked as he wrapped it tightly around his left wrist.

  “What comes around goes around, Short Eyes,” he whispered in my ear, before punching me in the face. I noticed a big, hairy wart sprouted from one of his knuckles. It had busted during our one-sided melee, and its tiny black seeds were smeared across the back of his hand.

  Then Floyd was gone. He left me alone with my pain, leapt over my porch railing to join the bedlam in the yard.

  “Let’s see you write a book about this!” raved Donna Dunaway, and she looked nothing like herself now. As she glowered up at me, her dirty brown hair hanging in her wild eyes, her stretch-marked belly hanging half out of her rumpled maternity blouse, Donna resembled something swollen and possessed, alien and obscene.

  “Get your fucking hands off my daughter!” I roared.

  I dove headfirst into the crowd, into that swarm of murderous faces and flailing limbs and deadly, swinging weapons.

  “Die, motherfucker!” someone screamed in my ear.

  “Get the pervert! Don’t let him get away!”

  “Watch out! There he is!”

  “Stop him!”

  “Kill him!”

  “Save some for me, goddammit!”

  Hands slapped and punched and clawed and scratched at my body. Fingers stabbed into my throat, gouged my eyes. Pipes, crowbars, rolling pins, and fireplace pokers crashed against my skull and banged into my spine and pummeled my torso. A rusty bicycle chain lashed across my chest, ripping open my T-shirt as well as my flesh. My collarbone cracked beneath the splintery handle of a broken pick-axe. Francine Beecham’s metal cane slammed into my face with the impact of a small pickup truck. My mouth filled with blood, and bright bursts of color danced before my eyes like Fourth of July fireworks spiraling out of control. Still, I pushed onward, onward, with every last shred of strength I could find within myself. The sour stench of perspiration, of bodies gone unwashed for days, filled my stinging nostrils as I swam through that sea of animosity, fighting to reach my daughter. The agony my neighbors inflicted upon me during those few seconds when I dared to plunge into the horde brought back awful crimson memories of the beating I had suffered at the hands of Bridget Prescott’s father and her two brothers almost twenty years before. But I did not stop. I wouldn’t stop. Not for anything. The bastards would have to kill me first. I could focus on only one thing now—saving Samantha. Bleeding and bruised, I forced myself to keep moving, because I knew if I slowed down for even a second my assailants would crush me beneath their overwhelming numbers. They would rip me apart. I collided head-on with their weapons, absorbing the impact of each as best I could, taking the offensive in order to drive them back…

  Somehow, I made it through.

  When Donna Dunaway and Sal Friedman saw me coming, they slung Samantha aside. She crumpled on top of Jason Burke as if she weighed no more than one of her beloved dolls.

  Friedman pointed his crooked golf club at me. “What are you gonna do, boy? Huh? What are you gonna do?”

  Donna stepped back, made a ghastly, unladylike sound in the back of her throat, and spat a thick green wad of phlegm my way. It landed in the grass at my feet.

  “Daddy!” Sam cried. “Oh, Daddy!”

  She ran to me, threw her arms around my neck. Her face glistened with tears.

  I held her tight, sobbed, “It’s okay. Shh. I’m here now. D-Daddy’s here. I’m not gonna let them hurt you anymore—”

  A shard of searing, white-hot pain lanced through my left shoulder.

  I screamed.

  Sam’s mouth fell open in a horrified “O.”

  Protruding from my chest, just two or three inches below my heart and even less from my daughter’s right eye, was a long silver crochet needle.

  It wiggled in its place, rotated in a twitchy circular motion as whomever had stabbed me with it churned the needle around in my flesh. Widening the hole. Trying his or her damnedest to push it all the way through.

  “Gahh! Aghhh, Jesus! Jeeeeezusss!!!”

  Nothing in my life had ever hurt this bad.

  Samantha fell back, out of my arms.

  “Daddy!” she wailed, staring at the gore-streaked spike in my chest.

  I tried to rise to my feet, stumbled.

  “Daddy, get up! Get up!”

  “Go, baby,” I told her, through clenched teeth. “G-go to… Jason. Hurry…”

  “Dad, no! Please! Please come with me!”

  “Go, Samantha!”

  The crochet
needle withdrew from my shoulder. I watched it melt into my left pec, shrinking into me in reverse as if it had never been there at all, and then it exited out my back with a brief, final tug and a sick wet slurping noise.

  Something heavy smashed into my spine.

  My vision blurred. The world tilted, spun.

  This was it, I knew. They were finally going to end it. Any second now they would finish me off, while my daughter watched…

  And that was when the gunshot ripped apart the dusk.

  I ducked, covered my head.

  The crowd gasped.

  The shot echoed through the street for several long seconds, like multiple explosions detonating up and down Poinsettia Lane.

  At the edge of my driveway, Jason Burke stood with one trembling hand held high above his head. The passenger-side door of his Liberty hung open, and inside I saw his glove compartment had puked a rainbow of papers onto the vehicle’s floorboard, where he had gone searching for something moments ago…

  Obviously, he had found what he was looking for. It wasn’t the Bible on the front seat.

  A thin wisp of smoke drifted heavenward from the barrel of the gun in Jason’s hand.

  I didn’t know what kind of gun it was. I didn’t care. I just knew it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could not take my eyes off of it.

  “Get in the car, Samantha,” Jason said, trying his damnedest to sound calm. But an audible tremor lurked within his voice.

  He pointed the gun at my neighbors.

  “Move away from her. Let her through. I’m not kidding.”

  The mob obeyed. Slowly, hesitantly, they backed away from my daughter and me…

  Jason stepped forward, helped Sam to her feet with his free hand.

  “I want my Daddy,” she cried, as he shoved her into the SUV.

  Jason turned back to me. He held the gun on my neighbors, but in his furiously quivering hand the weapon resembled little more than a silver-black blur.

  He wiped his bloody chin on the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Time to go, Andy,” he said.

  I nodded weakly, stood. My legs felt as if they had turned to liquid. My countless cuts and scrapes and bruises screamed in silent agony as I limped toward Jason’s vehicle.

  But the second I stepped onto the blacktop, a bulky arm wrapped tight around my throat.

  “Not so fast,” someone growled in my ear.

  “Break the fucker’s neck!” a man shouted.

  “Die, Holland, die!”

  Jason’s Jeep sat less than six feet away. But I could not move.

  I kicked at my attacker’s shins, tried to slam the back of my head into his face. With every move I made, I felt the hole in my chest grow wider, dribbling its gore down my abdomen.

  I watched, helpless, as Jason slammed the Liberty’s passenger-side door. He glanced back at me before quickly rounding the vehicle. Moving for the driver’s side without wasting a second. He tripped once on his way, but did not fall.

  Sam’s pale hands batted and squeaked against the window, her frantic sobs muffled behind the glass as she witnessed these last few seconds of my life…

  “Daddy!”

  “J-Jason,” I wheezed. “Please…”

  Again, he glanced back at me. His lips parted as if he were about to say something, but nothing came out. The expression on his face was that of a man forced to make the most important decision of his life, against his will.

  “How’s this for a hair-o story, you twisted son of a bitch,” Sal Friedman said, stepping between us and rearing back with his golf club to sink it into my face.

  My eyes locked with Jason Burke’s.

  “Jason,” I rasped. “T-take care of Sam… m-make sure she knows how much I love her… how much her mother loved her…”

  The vice-grip on my throat let up then, but only to allow Sal Friedman to have his way with me.

  “Fore!” Sal shrieked at the top of his lungs.

  Jason threw the gun to me. A weak, underarm toss.

  Somehow, I caught it. Barely. It bounced off my chest, would have landed in the grass at my feet if my right index finger had not looped through its trigger guard at the last second, trapping it against my thigh.

  The pistol felt warm in my bloodstained hands. Like something sentient. Alive. Hungry.

  The crowd gasped again in unison, recoiled from me.

  Sal Friedman’s eyes went wide with terror. He dropped his nine-iron.

  “Now, Mr. Writer Fella, you know I didn’t mean it,” he said, and a nervous little laugh followed the senior citizen’s words.

  But the big man behind me did not shrink back with the rest of the mob. His arms wrapped around my neck again, and he hauled me violently off my feet. He squeezed tighter than ever. Colored spots danced before my eyes, and I felt consciousness slipping away bit by bit like a ridiculous pipe dream.

  “ ‘When defeat is inevitable, it is wisest to yield,’ ” an all-too-familiar voice whispered in my ear. It belonged to a man I once considered a friend, a man with whom I had shared many an ice-cold beer on countless warm summer nights. A guy who kept a clever quotation on hand for any scenario.

  “ ‘I wanted you to see… what real courage is,’ ” he grunted as we struggled, “ ‘Instead of getting the idea… that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked… before you begin… but you begin anyway… and you see it through no matter what.’ ”

  A massive, sharp-knuckled fist rammed into my kidney.

  “That’s from To Kill a Mockingbird, Andy. I’m sure you’ve read it. And one might argue that the words of Edmund Burke are relevant as well to what’s been happening in our neighborhood of late: ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ ”

  He almost sounded as if he were about to cry as he finished.

  “I’m sorry, old friend. I can’t stand by and do nothing. You know that’s just not me.”

  He wrenched my skull violently to one side, as if trying to snap my neck. His breath was hot on the back of my head. It smelled like boiled cabbage, and during those next few seconds, in spite of my predicament, I found myself wondering if that was what my former friend had eaten for dinner earlier this evening. Boiled cabbage. I imagined him plopping down at his dining room table just like every night… perhaps saying Grace as quickly as possible ’cause tormenting the writer next door sure did build up a man’s appetite… I imagined him digging in, somehow living his life as if there were nothing out of the ordinary happening in our fair neighborhood… and then, after he finished with his dinner, he would compliment his wife on another wonderful meal… he would kiss her in that safe, hurried way old married couples kiss, and perhaps he would carry his dirty dishes to the sink, helping her wash them and rinse them and put them away so they could waste no time rejoining the fray next door… until it all led up to the here and now… to this bear of a man with his silver-haired, U.S. NAVy-tattooed arm curled around my throat, breathing his boiled cabbage breath onto the nape of my neck as if it were the hot, rank breath of Lucifer himself and he had come to claim my soul…

  Tighter, he squeezed. Tighter. Crushing my windpipe…

  “Nuh-oh,” I fought for air, “Gggkkk… B-Ben… Ben, plea—”

  Suddenly, I remembered the gun in my hand. Dangling from my fingertips.

  It was my last chance, I knew. My only chance.

  I brought it up. Slowly. Tilted it back, blindly aiming over my shoulder for the man strangling me. For a second or two, I stared down into the pistol’s pitch-black barrel, but I did not stop to consider the possibility that I might shoot myself.

  When the gun was parallel with my temple, just inches from my right ear, I pulled the trigger.

  The world seemed to explode.

  Something hot and wet splashed against the nape of my neck.

  I stumbled forward, free at last from my neighbor’s deadly clutch.

  Sucking in sweet, exhilarating l
ungfuls of oxygen, I whirled around to see Ben Souther holding both hands to his throat. Dark blood bubbled up between his fingers, gushed through his wiry gray chest hair in an endless river of red.

  He gawked at me as if I had just insulted his entire family tree.

  Then he collapsed on my lawn face-first.

  I turned, pivoting on one foot. A foot that felt broken in several places. In the corner of my eye, Marianne Souther ran to her husband, fell atop his body, and started trying to shake him awake.

  I pointed the gun at the circle of enraged faces surrounding me.

  “Step back,” I told them, as I rubbed at my bruised Adam’s apple with my free hand.

  I could not hear my own voice. I couldn’t hear anything. The gunshot had deafened me.

  “All of you… get back right now… I’m not fucking kidding! Goddamn you, get back!”

  Sal Friedman came at me with his golf club.

  I shot him in the crotch, and he went down in a spray of crimson.

  The old man writhed in the grass at my feet, holding himself through his tattered pink golf pants. I smelled piss, shit, blood, cum, smoke, gasoline, and gunpowder. But mostly blood. So much blood. Sal’s agonized yowls no doubt filled the neighborhood. But his suffering was silent to me.

  I nearly dropped the gun when I saw what I had done.

  But then I quickly regained my composure. I knew they had given me no choice…

  “Let me through!” I shouted, holding my free hand to the wound in my chest.

  The crowd wanted to tear me apart. I could see it in their eyes. But they obeyed, begrudgingly. They stepped back several feet, slowly clearing my path to Jason’s Liberty.

  “That’s right,” I spat. As I limped toward the vehicle, wincing with every torturous step, I turned in a complete circle, covering my neighbors with the gun, making sure none of them could get the drop on me again. “Don’t come any closer… don’t even fucking move… or I swear to God I’ll—”

  When I again faced Jason’s vehicle, I squinted through the blood caked in my eyes to see Donna Dunaway standing in the SUV’s open passenger-side door, dragging Samantha out by her hair. From his place behind the wheel, Jason engaged in a furious tug-of-war with the pregnant woman, fighting to keep Sam inside with him, but his awkward, one-handed grip on her wrist proved no match for his opponent’s vengeance-fueled strength.