Page 24 of Tenebrous

“You were just a kid, man.”

I bark out a laugh, eyes still on the floor. “Twenty-four. Old enough to know better.”

“Still a kid.” He moves closer and bumps my leg with his own as he perches on the armrest of my chair.

"I've spent the last two years wishing I could go back, thinking ‘What if I’d just stayed in bed?’ Or left the house. Or called somebody. Anything." My hands start to tremble, and I clench them into fists. "But life doesn't work that way."

Manny swallows hard. "No."

The word bounces around the empty room. I have so many regrets in life, and what I did to my family—the pain I put my older brother through—is at the top of that list. I wish I knew the reasons why I do the things I do, but there's always been this… thing inside of me, something pissed off and wild and impulsive as hell.

Seems twenty-four months inside a mental health facility wasn't enough to ‘cure’ me, because here I am. Still making poor life choices.

After several more moments of silence, headlights sweep across the windows. A vehicle crunches over the gravel outside, and Manny lets out a sigh of relief. "That'll be Earl."

I wipe quickly at my eyes, pushing myself to my feet with a groan. "Fantastic. Hope he brought his sexy wife.”

That earns me a genuine laugh, the first one I've heard from Manny all night, and we grin at each other.

A car door slams. Boots thud over dirt as the sheriff steps up to the door before pounding on it. Manny gets there first, that cocky smile back on his face as he twists the handle.

“Thank god, Sheriff. We thought we'd be sitting ducks out here with whatever that thing is running around⁠—”

The blast of a rifle echoes off the shack walls.

I flinch, ears ringing, blocking out all other sound. The world moves in slow motion as my brain tries to comprehend what just happened. Past and present tangle together.

My mother's body flickers in and out of my vision, like a broken TV screen, here one moment and gone the next. Manny's bleeding corpse lies crooked on the floor.

Blinking rapidly, I tear my gaze away from the gaping gunshot in his chest to find the barrel of the rifle aimed right at me. And holding it steady with a grim expression is the sheriff, his finger on the trigger.

“Turn around,” he barks out. “Before I put a hole in you, next.”

Chapter

Ten

Benji

I can't move. My body simply refuses.

Manny lies crumpled on the floor between us, a dark pool of red blood spreading beneath him. Copper and gunpowder sting my nostrils, taking me back two years, and suddenly I'm twenty-four again as crimson pools around my knees while my mother chokes on her own blood.

Beneath the ringing in my eardrums, I can still hear my brother's screams.

"Boy, don't make me tell you twice.” Earl’s voice cuts through the fog in my head, and I snap back into myself. His rifle follows the movement. “Turn around. Now.”

My pulse pounds so hard I can barely hear him, but I obey in a daze as bile climbs up my throat. Manny… Manny was just there. He was right there.

"What the fuck just happened?" The words scrape their way out of my throat. "Sheriff, what did you just do?”

Once again, Earl clamps cold, metal cuffs around my wrists. “I didn't do anything. Keep your mouth shut.”

Harshly, he yanks me over Manny's body and out of the shack. My clothes soak through immediately, but I don't even feel the icy rain on my skin. It doesn't even register that we're marching toward the trees, because all I can think about is the sound of my coworker’s laugh not even five minutes ago.

How he saved me from some murderous creature, and now he's gone, just like Mary said would happen.

Everyone comes back here to die.