Nightmare Ballad Read online

  Luke scrambled among the umbrella tables and burst through the side door. Petunia was long gone. Vanished. Like so many other things, Luke didn’t bother to question how that could be; he just ran down the street, the concrete under his bare feet rough and burning. He headed for the black curtain in the sky, his only point of reference in the glittering dark madness around him.

  A growl came from directly behind, he didn’t want to turn and see what the massive frogman could be changing into. It was destroying the road with its flippers. He heard concrete and dirt crunching. Road shrapnel struck his neck. Looking back would be too much, so he just ran as hard as he could, the truth more apparent with every step.

  This frogman thing wanted him dead.

  Chapter 2

  Luke didn’t recognize the lime-green house.

  But as the tip of a frogman’s claw sliced through his back, he turned toward the end of Maple Street and rushed in its direction. Fifteen minutes of running without a destination in mind and he’d wound up in an unknown neighborhood. He’d never been to this side of Maple before, and all the unfamiliar houses began stacking up on each other. A lime-green house caught his eye, but really, he didn’t know any of these track homes; his way back from work never took him through this neighborhood.

  Sounds of the snarling creature faded as he took this new course, so he didn’t doubt himself. Just ahead, the heavy black curtain he spotted earlier hung like theater drapes from the heavens. There wasn’t time to stop and he barreled straight through it.

  The fabric parted for Luke, then vanished.

  And on the other side, the music fell to the back of his mind, colors enlivened, and the sun shone brighter. He stopped in the road for a second before crying out in pain from his burnt feet. He ran onto some stranger’s lawn.

  “Holy—aye!” The toasted, tight feeling in his feet made him cringe.

  After he composed himself, he looked up the road. The concrete was disturbed, uprooted, like a major earthquake had occurred. “The hell?” he whispered.

  He looked down to the next block. A middle aged woman in a bikini top and jean shorts ran a hose over the roof of a mini-van. Two ducking and weaving boys played with water-guns on the nearby lawn. Several houses down from them, a goggled gardener edged around a flower mound.

  Why weren’t they running over to see what happened to the street?

  For that matter, why wasn’t everybody outside their houses right now, investigating the upheaval?

  Luke nodded as an easy resolution popped into his head. They must be used to this kind of thing. Doubts dissolved. Or rather, were pulled away, by something external, forcing him to accept the reality before him. Regardless, fragmented memories still nagged at him. He couldn’t explain what had happened—he must have been out for a jog and didn’t wear his shoes. But what kind of a dumb ass thing was that to do?

  He considered maybe he’d gotten dehydrated and become delirious. Maybe he took his shoes off somewhere? Oh great, Dara’s going to chew my ass out for this. I probably have second degree burns on my feet.

  He smelled like chlorine.

  Of course! This was swim-class day. So he’d been swimming earlier. He could hardly recall anything from today’s class. Jogging on such a hot day had been a massively idiotic thing to do.

  A bead of sweat ran down his back. He intercepted it and felt a stinging pain at the spot where his finger touched the wetness.

  Blood.

  He rubbed his fingers together and inspected the maroon stain on his fingertips.

  “Can I help you?”

  A teenage boy stood on the front porch. He looked as though he’d been heading out. The faded green van in the driveway must have been his.

  “Hi.”

  The teenager blinked impatiently. “Hi.”

  “I’m uh…kind of in some trouble. I lost my shoes. Wouldn’t be able to give me a lift, would you? I live in town, not far.”

  The teen raised an auburn eyebrow and looked halfway between intimidated and irked. “You can use my cell, but then I have to go. How’s that sound?”

  “Sure. I appreciate it.”

  He tossed a cell phone in a blue case at Luke. Surprised, he dropped it onto the grass.

  “Sorry,” muttered the teen.

  “No problem. It’s me who is sorry.” Luke had only one phone number memorized and surprisingly, it didn’t belong to either of his wives. He recalled the number because of how often he’d avoided it on caller ID. Today, however, finding himself in swim trunks on some stranger’s lawn, the soles of his feet feeling like barbequed steaks, the only person who wouldn’t scold him happened to be Alberto Cruz, or as he insisted on being called—

  “Johnny?”

  Static crackled and somebody mumbled on the line.

  “Johnny? You there? Hey man, I’m in some trouble here. I really need you to come pick me up.”

  “Who the fuck is this fucking shit?” The voice blared through the tiny speaker.

  With a nod of reassurance, Luke smiled at the teen, who folded his mole-spotted arms.

  “It’s Luke.”

  “Luke?”

  “Luke Rhodes, you jerk.”

  “Calm down, just bustin’ your beebees.”

  “I’m kind of in a…I need help, man.” Luke checked the number on the curb across the street. “I’m at 255 South Maple Street. Can you come pick me up?”

  The teenager stood on the curb and surveyed the destroyed north end of the street. It looked like a gigantic rabbit had burrowed through with ten-foot claws. The young man’s face had a placid indifference that made him appear robotic until annoyance creased his features. From the look of things, this major disruption in the road hadn’t awed him in the least, just superficially pissed him off, like a bad traffic jam might piss off a late-to-work commuter.

  “Johnny, you there?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m kind of busy on my bike mods,” Johnny replied. “When do you need me over there?”

  “Can you come now? I’m really screwed here, man.”

  A jaded laugh rattled in the speaker. “How? Did both your old ladies kick you out?”

  “No jokes right now. Please?”

  Johnny breathed noisily through the phone and groaned. “I’ll need to gas up first.”

  “255 South Maple.”

  “I remember the address shithead,” Johnny snapped.

  “I’ll be here.” Luke ended the call.

  The teen walked over, hand extended. Luke dropped the phone onto his palm. Without a word, the young man went to his van, wiping his phone against his shorts.

  “You mind if I wait here?” Luke asked. “Please? I don’t have any shoes.”

  An ugly frown creased the boy’s face. “Yes I mind. So would my parents. Go across the street. That place is foreclosed. Nobody cares if you’re over there.”

  Luke glanced at the street, still glazed with the white-hot shine of the afternoon sun. “Right.”

  The teen smoothed back his hair, checked his palm, and opened the van’s driver-side door. Luke, trying his damnedest to delay his fire-walk across the asphalt, piped up, “Weird about the street, huh? How did it get that way?”

  With a shrug, the teen shook out his wad of keys, then said, “I don’t know why it’s like that. All I know is I’ve got to go down Sycamore now to get to the freeway and that street has like a million friggin’ stoplights.”

  “Has it been torn up like this way for a while?” Luke asked the question, but the frenzy of dust particles still suspended in the sunlit air told him otherwise.

  “Nope. Just happened. Maybe an earthquake did it.”

  “You’re taking this kind of well, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “It’s one of those things that can happen. Hey, are you leaving my yard or what?”

  “I’m gone.”

  The teen got in the van, and a second later the old engine coughed to life. It revved a few times to signal Luke to get walking.

  Lu
ke waved a thank you to the asshole and sprinted across the asphalt. He didn’t feel the short trip, thankfully, but the lawn on the other side wasn’t particularly refreshing: mostly dead and yellow, full of bald spots. The heat from the exposed dirt and brittle grass aggravated the painful blisters on his soles, so he retreated to a square of cool shade near the dirty front porch and sat.

  He put his hands on his head. What will my two wives think of this? That I’m drunk? Screwing around? Shit…

  His hair had the telltale starchy texture from chlorine. He’d been at the pool recently then…but why was it so difficult to remember? It was like trying to recall the events from a dream, but it couldn’t have been a dream, because this was clearly reality. The aching in his feet and back were too persistent not to be real.

  Luke recast his mind to this morning, and a chill ran through him: Dara, fretting over her job interview, had silently made them breakfast; Maribel, busy with her lesson plan but otherwise in her usual good spirits, had flown around the house, room to room, corner to corner, picking up the messes they’d made. Regardless of the shitstorm Luke had faced the past week at work, this day started as good as it possibly could have.

  After breakfast, giving each of them a full kiss, Maribel left to get her classroom in order for a new batch of students this week. Taking a chance, Luke had shared a moment with Dara. See, I think you’re worrying too much. She’s fine. Just worry about your interview—I mean, don’t worry. Just prepare, okay?

  Dara seemed to marginally agree, if not take it to heart. Too bad it wasn’t what Luke had really wanted to tell her, which would have been more like, “Why are you getting a job all of a sudden? Years have gone by. Years, Dara. And you choose now of all times. Why couldn’t this interview have taken place before every middle-management jerk-off elected me as their favorite fall-guy? My career is on the line and even if GeoGreen hires you, you won’t last long—that’ll be my fault, too. Everybody is learning about us and Maribel, and it’s only going to get worse. You’re going to be smack-dab in the middle of it! Christ! I thought you were happy keeping house and taking care of us.”

  He hadn’t said that.

  Any of that.

  Hell, no.

  The Luke of old would have buried himself in emotional fallout. It’d been a while since he had made Dara cry, although it used to be a norm for him. No, the reinvented Luke had done what his second wife, Maribel, taught him to do; he tried to imagine the most reassuring thing for Dara to hear before he said anything. The result was magic. It almost always worked. Dara had hugged him, smiled her best smile, tweaked his chin, and told him to go shave.

  Now, sitting in a strange neighborhood, on the porch of a foreclosure, Luke felt his face. He had shaved this morning. He remembered doing so because he was on his last razor, and it had reached that irritatingly blunt, but still usable, stage. What had he been thinking about in front of the mirror? A song…a song from a dream. He couldn’t recall the tune anymore but it’d really bugged him this morning, all the way to the pool.

  Yes.

  He’d gone to class.

  Alice Stedding had put the moves on him right in front of her husband. Their daughter, Petunia, was at the bottom of the pool, but she hadn’t drowned. The events were vaguer than vague.

  Men in scuba suits?

  Frogmen.

  Luke grimaced at the recollection and watched a wasp do circuits around a lopsided bush before flying off. Had he suffered from head trauma? He checked his scalp and found nothing. There were, however, tiny scrapes on his neck and one razor-thin scratch down his spine, but none of those even qualified for a Band-aide.

  He swooped his fingers around his face and clasped his chin. Had he been drinking? When he was a teenager he’d woken up drunk on a kitchen floor, even once on a front lawn, but this was altogether different. The memories he struggled to recall were real, but they couldn’t be.

  A rush of anxiety flooded his guts. Is this what a breakdown is?

  That last thought stayed with Luke until he heard the rumble of a Harley Davidson up the street. Johnny Cruz struck the curb as he pulled over and the motorcycle tipped a bit. His old friend had lost a little weight this summer, but still looked well into the three-hundred-pound range. Pulled tight in a ponytail, his long, black, Native-American-looking hair stressed his widow’s peak to the limit. From behind the fish-aquarium lenses of his glasses, his magnified eyelashes clashed together.

  “Luke?” Johnny leaned off the bike a little, squinting. Half of a Swisher Sweet cigarillo poked out of the side of his mouth, an inch from setting his bandito mustache ablaze. “I can’t tell if that’s you? Oh shit, it is.” A grin crossed his wide, stubbly face.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “What the fuck did you do? Look at you. What a sorry piece of shit.”

  “Nice to see you too, Johnny.” Luke waded out of the shadows. “I don’t have any shoes…it’s…. I’d like to say a long story but I don’t even know what the story is.”

  “Say no more! Hop up.” Johnny snapped his fingers. A coil of sweet smoke framed his face for a moment as he watched Luke climb on. “Grab the helmet, fucker.”

  Luke took the black soup-bowl helmet off a hook on the side and placed it on his head. “Ouch,” he said, curling his toes at the diamond plate runner board.

  Johnny glanced down. “You can put your feet on top of my boots. People will talk anyway. You already got one of those haircuts from some gay-boy salon poster.”

  “I’ll take it over looking like a two bit Hell’s Angel version of Hurley from Lost.”

  “Aye cabron….”

  “Guess you didn’t notice the street?”

  “Duh, I noticed it. Big deal.”

  “Something must have happened right?”

  “You think?”

  “An earthquake?”

  Johnny shrugged his giant shoulders. “I didn’t feel nothing. Then again, I’ve been drinking all morning. Ah, weekends!” He poised to take off.

  “I thought you worked at the plant on Sundays?”

  “Fuck those people. Let that mouse-faced doofus take care of that stupid fucking shit farm.”

  “Yikes, sorry I asked.”

  Mouse Stedding. Luke recalled him diving into a pool filled with reddish-brown water. Going to save his daughter Petunia. The man had all his clothes on. His rodent face was tight, stricken with fear.

  “Does Ralph even work Saturdays?” Luke asked.

  “Ralph don’t ever work. Ralph just bitches about floating holidays and pay increases and how he’s not getting any overtime like the rest of those useless village idiots. To answer your question, I don’t really give a fuck.”

  The Harley roared from underneath and Johnny took them on a sloppy trajectory to the nearest stop sign.

  “You really are drunk off your ass today, aren’t you?”

  “Silver Petron, all the way, son.” Johnny punched it, and Luke grabbed his friend’s broad back.

  “What about your real son? How’s he doing?” Luke asked over the motorcycle’s trilling roar.

  “Beltran’s fine. Who wouldn’t be? Living it up with that fuckbucket stepdad of his at that big-time university.”

  “Did you call him on his birthday like Maribel asked?”

  Johnny glanced back, an agitated knot of skin bunched between his eyes. “I didn’t ask anything about why you’re alone in swim trunks in some weird neighborhood. Do we really have to go through this discussion again?”

  “No,” he said simply. Luke realized then he’d probably just tried to dredge up Johnny’s problems to mask his own. “Sorry.”

  “Forget it. Only one person in this world is unlucky enough to have me in his life and that, my friend, is you. Speaking of which, are you coming over and tying one on tonight, or what?”

  “Say that again?”

  Johnny shouted in a pseudo drill-sergeant staccato. “Are. You. Gonna. Get. Fucked. Up. With. Me. Tonight. Mother. Fucker?”

  He p
ulled up to a stoplight at the corner of Sycamore and Pine. A police cruiser stopped beside him. Two cops, both looking straight out of the academy, sat there, eyeing them with unprovoked disdain.

  “Don’t say anything,” Luke told him. “Please.”

  Johnny leaned back. “Not even the pork sandwich joke? Those fuckers’ balls haven’t even dropped yet.”

  “Just don’t.”

  “Oh fine.” Johnny blew them a kiss as the light changed.

  During the rest of the ride through town Luke held on for dear life. Johnny blew through stale yellow lights and two reds. He stopped painfully close to a jacked-up pick-up truck and leaned against its door while he lit another cigarillo. The man in the cabin rolled down his window and glared, as though that would accomplish more than heated words, but Johnny ignored him completely.

  When they arrived to the house, Luke started formulating a way to tell Dara what had happened. The motorcycle came to a stop, and as it did, Johnny gently extended his leg and kicked over the neighbor’s recycle bin.

  “What the hell, man?”

  “It was in the way. Why doesn’t that jackass put it closer to his property?”

  “You’re…out of control.”

  With a wheezing cough, Johnny bent forward, into his handle bars, like he wanted to take a nap right there. “So you’re not coming over?”

  Luke placed the helmet back on its hook and stepped onto the lawn. “I would be afraid of what would happen, tell you the truth. Thanks for the ride, I’ll text you later.”

  “You calling me reckless, then? Hey, fucker, answer the question.”

  Crossing his yard, Luke replied, “Yeah, Johnny, I’m calling you reckless.”

  “Well ain’t that a load of shit. You think I’m reckless? Reckless! Me?” Johnny stood on the running boards of his Harley, watching Luke go. He raised his fist like a Mongol conqueror.

  “You’re the dumb asshole with more than one spouse.”

  Chapter 3