There were only two people left to find, two very little people—one with hair and eyes just like her mother, and the other not yet old enough to resemble either of us, but I’d hoped as he grew older he’d take after me.
Placing my fiercely shaking hand on the closet’s door handle, I turned it and pulled open the door. The first thing I saw was the blood. There was so much blood. And in the midst of all that blood was a pair of fading blue eyes blinking up at me. Next to her, curled up on his side, covered in blood, his eyes wide and unseeing, lay my son.
“Daddy,” Sarah whispered, her small voice a mere croak. Blinking up at me, her fingers twitched while the rest of her was eerily still.
I dropped to my knees. With my heart in my throat and my hands shaking, I pulled her from the closet. Cradling her against my chest, I pressed a kiss to her forehead.
“Daddy’s here,” I whispered, tears in my eyes. “Daddy’s here, baby girl.”
“Mommy,” she croaked out. “Mommy bit me. And Jeffy ... he won’t wake up.”
Unable to breathe, let alone speak, I simply nodded and held her tighter. The rancid stench of death, bitter and rotten, was coming off her in thick, stomach-churning waves. Her eyes, once a bright blue, were cloudy now, and her once pink lips had turned a sickly grayish white. She’d be dead in minutes, and there was nothing I could do but hold her.
Cupping the side of her cheek, I pressed her face against my chest and let my tears fall. I wanted to say something to her; I wanted to sing her a favorite bedtime song, or even lie and tell her that everything was going to be okay, that Daddy would fix this, just like I’d always fixed everything. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but sit there, with my dead son mere feet from me and my dying daughter in my arms, and sob.
I wasn’t sure how long it took, maybe minutes, maybe hours, before she took her last shuddering breath and her little body fell utterly limp. Time had ceased to exist for me; not even the incessant pounding on the door from the monster who’d once been my wife could have pulled me out of the cloud of grief surrounding me. Nothing could.
Nothing except the moment my son began to twitch.
Carefully, I laid Sarah out on the floor and picked up my rifle. No longer crying but feeling sluggish and strange, as if I were drunk, I aimed it with shaking hands and pulled the trigger. Then I turned around and aimed the weapon at my daughter, and pulled the trigger again.
The bedroom door burst open and Jeffers fell inside the room, dragging my wife with him. Still snarling and snapping, she attempted to free herself, but his grip on her hair was solid.
“What the fuck did you do?” he shouted, his eyes wide and wild as he took in the bloody scene around me. “You killed them! You killed them!”
Lifting the rifle, I took aim one last time.
“No!” Jeffers screamed. “Not Jenny! Adler, no, she’s my sister, my baby sister!”
But she wasn’t his sister anymore, and she wasn’t my wife. She was a goddamn monster.
So I pulled the trigger.
• • •
As the horror faded from my subconscious, I found myself on my knees on the floor, staring up into the face of my wife. Long red hair, bright blue eyes, pink lips twisted into a familiar adorable smirk.
“No,” I said, breathless, my watery eyes wide with shock. “No, you’re ... dead.”
“No, silly,you’re dead.” She smiled widely, the same smile I’d fallen for, the smile I could never bring myself to remember. Her hand lifted with my gun in her grasp.
Confused, I blinked, my gaze going from the gun to her smiling face and back to the gun.
“You’re dead.” She pressed the barrel to my forehead. “You’re dead, Adler!” she screamed, and the skin on her hand holding the gun began to undulate. It rippled all the way up her slender arm, leaving a trail of pustules in its wake.
I watched in horror as one by one the pustules burst, allowing blood and rot to seep free. Shaking, I glanced up and found her face had gone gray, her blue eyes now white, her dry and cracked lips pulled back to reveal a set of snapping teeth dripping with blood.
“Do it,” I choked out, my chest heaving with sobs. The barrel pressed down harder against my forehead, with enough force that the skin on Jenny’s rotted arm split open, revealing black, ravaged muscle and the yellowed bone beneath.
Dizzy, I closed my eyes. I had nothing left. No one and nothing, not onefucking thing. And it only made sense that the woman I promised to protect, but failed to do so, was the one who would end it all.
“Do it,” I whispered. “I killed them ...”
Moments ticked by. As I held my breath, the pounding of my heart was damn near deafening. How funny, I thought, that they say that your life flashes before your eyes right before you die. Not for me. All I could think about was the silence I craved, the silence that kiss had given me. The silence I hoped death would bring me.
But death never came. After several agonizing moments of waiting, I opened my eyes only to find that Jenny was gone. I was alone in the store, aside from the hanging rotter, and still on my knees with the barrel of a gun pressed to my head.
Only the hand around the gun ... was mine. My hand trembled violently, the gun rattling against my head. Dropping my arm, I sank down onto my heels and surveyed the room. A shaking, stuttering breath fled my lungs.
