Lineage(85)

Lance felt his fists clench as the inner door opened before him and John’s sleep-addled face peered out. The screen door was suddenly open and Lance was through it. John stumbled back from the thrust of Lance’s outstretched hands, his old legs unable to keep up with the velocity of the shove. John cried out as he hit the wall behind him and began to slide down it like a wet sponge. He wore only a pair of flannel pants and his pallid flesh sagged with age above the waistline, but Lance felt no pity or regret. Rage of the kind he had never experienced before coursed through him, a thrumming energy that tingled in his muscles and propelled him effortlessly through space.

“Lance, what—” John began, but then Lance’s hands were around his throat, pulling him into a standing position and pressing him against the wall. Garbled sounds rasped from John’s open mouth as Lance leaned closer, hissing through clenched teeth that his anger refused to unlock.

“Shut the f*ck up! You knew my father! You knew who I was the moment you laid eyes on me!”

John blinked and tried to suck in a choked breath, but Lance pushed harder on the soft skin at the other man’s neck. He could feel the power in his hands, the urge to crush the life out of the man before him, the anger building exponentially. An image of his father pushing his mother against the wall flashed across his mind. His father’s teeth bared in exactly the same grimace that pulled at his own face now.

Instantly, he felt his hands go slack and fall to his sides.

John dropped, gasping, to the floor, knocking over a flowerpot and spewing its black dirt across the kitchen in a fan. Lance stumbled back until his shoulders met the opposite wall and he crumpled into a ball. He put his face in his hands, smelling John’s after-shave, and felt tears leak out of his eyes as a sob racked his body. John retched weakly onto the floor, the liquid mixing with the dirt there, and sucked in great bellows of air. Lance continued to weep, unable to look up at the man a few feet from him. They stayed that way for some time, both men trying to quiet themselves, until John’s voice, ragged and wet, murmured.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes squinting through broken blood vessels. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I …” His voice trailed off and he shook his head, whether to clear it from the attack or from his thoughts Lance couldn’t tell.

“Why?” Lance finally managed. He sat up and stared across the dimly lit kitchen, his eyes red and raw from the tears.

John breathed in and out for a while, the air still rattling across the inside of his ravaged throat. “I lost so much. It’s my fault, couldn’t see it then, but I do now,” John said.

Lance pushed himself to his feet. He felt utterly empty as he crossed the space to where John rested, the anger having drained, leaving him a frail husk held together by his skin. He knelt beside the old man and spied the red marks left by his own hands on the drooping skin around John’s neck. They would be black tomorrow, evidence of something terrible barely avoided.

Lance reached out a hand and held it before the caretaker. John’s head rose until he looked Lance in the eye.

“Tell me everything. I need to know.”



They sat at the kitchen table, a bottle of whiskey and two glasses filled with the amber liquid and ice rested between them. They had cleaned the kitchen together, mopping up John’s vomit and dirt. Lance had begun an apology that John stopped short, his hand held out and his head turned to the side. The expression on the old man’s face read no need, and Lance held back the urge to continue regardless of John’s guilt.

I nearly killed him, Lance thought as he watched John sweep up the last vestiges of dirt from beneath the counter. I almost became him tonight. The thought brought a fresh bout of trembling, which he tried to calm by downing the first half of his drink as John settled into a chair at the other corner of the table.

John sipped the whiskey, and then regarded Lance before he finally began to speak. “Like I said before, when May and I moved here, we had a rough go of it. There wasn’t much work and we were thinking of going back south when your grandfather moved here and built that place you’re living in now. It was funny, the way he came to town. For a while there was only the old shipping bay, and then there was a house there, like it’d been plopped down out of the sky. I went up there on a hunch that he’d need some sort of help, and I was right. Your grandmother led me in and introduced me to Erwin—that was your grandfather’s name.”

“I know, found out tonight from Harold in town,” Lance said.