“Who?”

  I stared at him, the pain growing as my drunk wore away. I blinked as headlights from a cross street flooded the interior. Rain pocked against the windshield and beat a tattoo on the roof. The wipers went on.

  “The gun for me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How’s that working out for you?” O’Malley said, and the driver laughed.

  “Laugh it up, asshole. Your suit looks like a diaper stain.”

  “What’s that?” Brown Suit said. I saw his eyes shift my way in the rearview mirror. “Sounds like someone busted your jaw.”

  “You bring that gun for me?” O’Malley asked again, but I didn’t answer, just looked out the window at the empty storefronts and occasional bit of neon. O’Malley asked a few more questions. Did I owe him money? My father, did he owe some dough? My jaw hurt too much to talk.

  “River?” I heard Brown Suit ask, and O’Malley sighed, the vinyl seat squeaking as he settled back in and looked out the rainy windshield. He nodded. “Cuyahoga River is the dirtiest river in the country,” he said, I guess for me. “You’ll be with your own kind.”

  The schwick-schwick of the windshield wipers sounded like an insect rubbing its hind legs together, and I had a thought. I think I smiled, but with my mouth the way it was, who could tell?

  “Hey, Dad,” I whispered.

  “Something to say, dead man?” O’Malley spoke to the windshield, to my father, to me. I laughed.

  “Diaper stain, I’m talking to you,” I said, watching the rearview mirror until his eyes shifted over to meet mine and instead met my father’s.

  The driver screamed and so did the brakes, and the crash rattled my bones.

  * * *

  Brown Suit was halfway through the windshield, big arms spread across the crumpled hood like he was hugging the car. I felt the rain cleansing me as I grabbed his wet hair in my left hand and cut his throat with my right. Low rent asshole hadn’t looked for the razor in my boot.

  Steam was billowing from under the hood and I imagined it carrying his soul heavenward. I made the sign of the cross with the razor and smirked. No one was going to heaven.

  I glanced into the front seat and saw my .45 in the foot well, but no O’Malley. I took my gun and limped around the back of the car since the front was piled against the bricks of a corner store. There was a bright flash and clap of thunder as something punched me in the ribs. Then I was sitting down, lifting my own thousand-pound weapon to fire at the weaving back of O’Malley as he made his staggering getaway. His London Fog billowed like a balloon injected with hot air and he went down, skidding on his face, ass high.

  The rain was cool on my face as I stood, but the blood running down my belly beneath my shirt was warm. Hot. It smelled like a soldering iron.

  O’Malley was whimpering as he pawed for the bullet hole like a wounded animal. I kicked him in the ribs until he rolled over, crying out, a little more curious now about who and what I was.

  “You destroyed my father,” I said, and he shook his head.

  “I swear I didn’t. I don’t know him, I don’t—”

  My bullet took him through the heart and shut him up.

  I knelt next to him, not feeling great. It took forever, sawing away with my straight razor as the downpour thickened and wrapped us in privacy. Eventually I had to brace my feet on his collarbones and rear back, pulling with both hands locked onto the fat of his chin.

  When it was done I laid there on the sidewalk, panting and bleeding, eyes blinking against the raindrops.

  “Get up.” I think I said that. So I did and found O’Malley’s head had rolled into the gutter, his eyes still open with fright. I picked it up and nearly shit myself when they blinked, so I banged it on the road.

  “Enough out of you,” I said, staring into his dead eyes. I stole a car and drove back to my motel, what was left of O’Malley face down on the passenger seat.

  * * *

  We drove out to the empty field I’d selected. My father rested on the back seat with The Loose curled on his chest. All four O’Malleys were banging around in the trunk. I parked and shined my headlights on the dead oak I needed, breathing oddly. It took two tries to get out of the car, and the seat I left behind was soaked with my blood.

  I worked under a blue moon and the colder wash from the headlights, each swing of the pickaxe threatening to tear my ribs apart. I was spitting blood and more ran down my leg as if I had wet myself. The shovel work was harder, and then it was done.

  My father was light and The Loose nothing but a twig, but I struggled to carry them to the grave, streaking my face with tears even hotter than my spilling blood. I set my beloved cat on the ground and my beloved father into the hole with care, although he thumped at the bottom. The O’Malleys I threw in like trash, pausing only to carve the name they’d follow on the forehead of the last of them.

  The headlights were dimming, and the moon hid its face behind clouds as I shoveled in the dirt, or maybe it was just my eyesight sneaking away. Enough light remained for me to see the cloud of red mist come out with the words I spoke. Not English, not even Egyptian. Even dizzy I could remember them all, so often had my cellmate repeated them. The sound of them hurt my ears, and I sensed the scuttle of beetles fleeing away from me in all directions, the grass bending outward.

  When the hole was filled I stretched myself across the soft dirt like a crossbar and pulled The Loose onto my chest, with my .45 and straight razor resting across my mid-section. Her breath was hitching and so was mine, but in a show of strength she opened her eyes, just as the mad Egyptian had predicted.

  The night became quiet, its own breath held.

  Hoarse and ugly, I said the last awful words and she blinked at the sprayed blood. I added a few more of my own, things I used to say to her, hoping the powers wouldn’t mind.

  My father’s murderer would serve him in the afterlife. The extra O’Malleys could wander lost forever for all I cared. The Egyptian hadn’t covered that.

  The Loose would guide my father to his new home, because cats can see the Doorway to the Other, even in life. I was going along as muscle.

  The clouds parted and I spoke my father’s name to the blue moon just as The Loose let out her last breath.

  “Good girl,” I said, picked up my straight razor, and followed her.

  John C. Foster credits his love of horror to his haunted birthplace, the historic town of Sleepy Hollow, New York. As a result, Foster has been afraid of the dark, and writing about it, for as long as he can remember.

  An author of both taut thrillers and dark fiction, often mixing the two genres into a dread-filled stew, Foster spent many years during his early career in the ersatz glow of Los Angeles, California where he worked in the entertainment and marketing industries before relocating to the relative sanity of New York City where he now lives with his lady, Linda, and their dog, Coraline.

  Foster’s short stories can be found in Shock Totem #8 as well as the anthologies Under the Stairs and Big Book of New Short Horror. His dark tale of horror and espionage, “Mister White,” is featured in Dark Visions: A Collection of Modern Horror - Volume Two, published by Grey Matter Press. He has written two novels, Dead Men and The Isle.

  The boys, Nate and Gabe, hide small plastic Easter eggs. Or rather, they hide things in the eggs. They seal the plastic cages with clear tape and stash them around the house. Finding the eggs becomes a game, like cat and mouse or hide-and-seek.

  They are good boys. They play outside with friends and walk through the house like ghosts, quiet and only-sometimes-seen good. They are good even as they start to fill plastic eggs and play a game of fooling each other. Can my brother find the eggs before the prizes rot? What about Mom? Can she? But not everything in the eggs will rot. Some prizes are rotten before hidden in the eggs.

  Their father, Charlie, died exactly two years, one month, and twelve days before their mother finds the first bones in an egg.

  * * *

  Nate is eight and Gabe six, well-spaced and timed with logic and precision. Things went as planned with both pregnancies, and the boys arrived in June, each of them, avoiding complications with Beth’s university position. Tenure waited for no one’s biological clock. Charlie, her now-dead husband, had painted both boys’ nurseries to Beth’s specifications: pale blue—Summer Sky, eggshell finish, from Home Depot—upon learning the sex in-utero. For Beth, these were things to manage, details to sort and for which to prepare.

  Charlie had smiled and painted and smoked marijuana in the shed after cleaning his brushes. He continued smoking on occasion until he died. Once, when Nate was five, he caught his father with a tiny stub glowing red between roach-clip pincers. Nate had gone to the shed looking for a lawn sprinkler so he and Gabe could cool off in the sun. He’d never seen his father smoking and wondered for a moment why anyone would use a binder clamp to hold a cigarette.

  Charlie had laughed, tussled his hair, and helped him find the sprinkler.

  * * *

  Beth lectures at the university, three classes a semester including Introduction to Archeology and two sections of Physical Anthropology. She understands bones and knows how to remove them from the earth. She drinks red wine, at least one glass a night, and complains about pain in her lower back. If she drinks three glasses, the headaches derail her the next day. Two glasses bring sadness and bad memories. One is enough.

  She killed Charlie with her bad back, indirectly at least. He died in a car accident, a hit-and-run after midnight, early on a Wednesday as he drove to Walgreens. Beth’s back was especially bad that night, and she needed more Aleve. The red wine came after his death.

  Now she spends half her days on campus, gathers the boys from school, and shuts herself in her office for the rest of the afternoon. The boys are free to fill eggs and hide them.

  She is the world’s foremost expert on the M’busai people, a vanished tribe from the lower Congo. The M’busai are one of those groups you haven’t heard about until a story in National Geographic, or a nature documentary on satellite television. Only, there are no stories or documentaries. There are no desert digs in the Congo, no favorable climate to keep human artifacts packed away in sandbox preservation for millennia.

  The M’busai are a mystery, a Big Mystery.

  During her investigations she learns things people shouldn’t remember about the M’busai, like how they cut the little finger from the left hand of each boy when he turned nine. This is a puzzle she’s pieced together from bits of folklore—what little remains—and one interview with the great-grandson of a Frenchmen who had direct contact with M’busai tribesmen before their assimilation or extinction. She knows the M’busai, whatever their fate, winked away like the Roanoke Colony but left no “Croatoan” messages to decipher.

  They left no plastic eggs with surprises for future generations.

  * * *

  The boys fill the eggs with things they find in the garage, trinkets and tidbits found in boxes and behind shelves: screws, broken wristwatches, grandpa’s service ribbon from Vietnam, a .22 cartridge, an empty rolling paper folder, nail clippers, a small cellophane package filled with candy hearts. They hide items from the refrigerator: grapes, strawberries, bits of cheese and leftover sausage bites. They hoard treasures in the eggs. They play a hide-and-seek game, challenging each other with instructions like “they’re all blue this week” or “look for the colors of the rainbow.”

  Empty eggs wait in a cardboard box in Gabe’s bedroom closet. The box dates to the move—shortly after Charlie died—and wears the words “kitchen/dishes” in black marker.

  Nate likes the blue eggs, but Gabe prefers green.

  Gabe hides eggs under couch cushions, nestled in potted plants, and on high windowsills where they are visible but must be knocked down with a broom handle. Nate is more selective. His eggs sulk behind the couch with clumps of cat hair and dead spiders. He buries them with the houseplants, sweeping away loose dirt afterwards. He pulls back baseboards and sneaks them behind the walls. Nate’s eggs become secret things, incredibly hard to find unless he wants them found.

  The boys argue about where they find their treasures, especially the bones. Nate scares Gabe one afternoon by saying, “Dad gave them to me.” He rattles an egg.

  “Stop.”

  “He did,” Nate says.

  Gabe blinks. His six-year-old stomach feels like too much marshmallow fluff. “Dad?”

  “Yes. In the yard.” Nate shakes his egg again. His eyes narrow. “He was with the others.”

  * * *

  When he died, the local paper described Charlie as a “good father” and “caring husband.” What’s true is this: Charlie always made midnight trips for anything Beth needed. He’d fallen in love with her in undergraduate school because she looked good in jeans and liked to hike. Her blue eyes and the little wrinkles flanking them helped. He stayed in love with her with little notes every Saturday morning, messages detailing what he would do for the house and family that day, not because he needed the reminder or list, but because he knew she did. He loved her. He cooked for the boys four nights a week and any other time Beth’s job pulled her away from home. His cheeseburgers were legend.

  What the paper printed—“good father” and “caring husband”—rang true, but truth-truth has meat on its bones. It can be broken into pieces, details, things easily hidden inside plastic eggs and buried, but not buried by history. Beth learned about love from Charlie. What Beth has yet to learn is that the M’busai fingers were a sacrifice to ward off evil, and a wish to have full, happy lives. They were a promise to the mother of a M’busai boy’s future children that he would make similar sacrifices for them as their father.

  When Charlie was alive, Beth slept curled in a ball on the left side of the bed. He would pull his body close to hers and his heartbeat lulled her to sleep. She still sleeps curled in a ball on the left side of the bed, her elbows and knees hanging slightly over the edge. She sleeps but does not sleep well.

  Charlie is dead, and Beth tries to solve dead mysteries.

  * * *

  At first, Beth didn’t’ realize she was part of the egg game. The boys gave her no formal invitation, only eggs she stumbled across during her routine: blue one on the bathroom counter after a shower, a trail of three—all pastel green and filled with shiny roofing nails from Charlie’s workbench in the shed—a pink one in her slippers. The boys, neither talkative, were communicating. She interpreted the eggs as communication, at least.

  Now she wants the game to stop. She tires of missing rolls of tape and broken bits of plastic when she steps on an egg, always by accident. She wonders where the boys find their treasures and where they find the eggs. There can’t be so many left in the plastic tub marked “Easter” with masking tape and marker in the garage, but Beth doesn’t look. Maybe she doesn’t really want to know.

  What she knows is simple: when she found the bones in a yellow egg—two years, one month, and twelve days after Charlie died—she was scared. She now knows fear tastes like metal. It makes her head feel like it’s full of mud. Fear makes her fingers tingle.

  That’s what they were. Finger bones. Phalanges. Small ones.

  * * *

  She looks in the mirror each morning and tries to tell herself she is naturally pretty because she is afraid. She’s afraid of normal, right-now things: being alone, failing her two sons with no father, never finding the breakthrough magic bullet to put her and the M’busai on the academic map.

  Two dates fell flat in the last year. The first was a blind date with a red-faced accountant who drank too much and tried to grope her on the way back to his car after dinner. The evening ended with a cab and ten dollar bonus to the babysitter because she was embarrassed about crying and didn’t want to answer questions. The second, coffee with a new instructor in the department, a man named Ben—seven years younger and hair graying in a suave, sophisticated manner—ended with “I’ll call you” and he never did. His easy, cool, rumbling voice left her wishing she was prettier.

  When her back hurts at night and she can’t sleep, thoughts pinging between Charlie and Ben and the red-faced accountant, she sometimes looks from her bedroom window into the yard. On one of these nights, Beth sees them in the yard, like branchless trees in rows. She sees them but doesn’t see them like anyone confronted with impossibilities.

  Warriors, she thinks.

  M’busai warriors.

  No lightning comes, no dramatic flash or full moon to see the whites of their eyes or flint-sharpened spear points.

  Just shadows. Impossible shadows on which it is impossible to see if the left hand still has five fingers or four.

  * * *

  Gabe wakes after midnight with his heart careening around his ribcage. He doesn’t want to look outside, but he does. His body is frozen, locked in combat, a war against his brain. The fear he feels is real, and what Nate says about the yard, about Dad, can’t be. The war continues, but he fights his way out of his bed. He stands next to the window and peeks through the blinds. What he sees sends him to his mother, his face pale and Mario Kart pajamas soaked with sweat.

  Her light is on. She’s at the window, too.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He mutters and stumbles over words. She hears “outside” and knows.

  She holds her son for the first time in over a year and tries to whisper sweet, mothering things, but her voice no longer sounds pretty to her ears. She wishes it did.

  * * *

  Nate keeps the bag of human fingers under his bed. The fingers are just bones and look like they could be made of plastic, but when he holds them, when he feels how light they are and how the smooth surface feels, he knows. His father brought the fingers in a cotton sack, small and stained like an old pillowcase. The ghost left the bone fingers on the back porch and then woke Nate to let him know.