Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Read Free

family gets cancer a lot, so you probably have it by now, huh?”
    David lost the power to speak. Finally, rage made him fast enough to catch the boy.
    But not strong enough to hold him. The arm in his grasp seemed to deflate and slip free like a wet silk stocking. “Dad said you have too much of your mom in you.”
    He squirted up the stairs and down the hall, but David was right behind him, and there was nowhere to lose him. This was his goddamned childhood home! The hall was narrower than he remembered, lined with bookshelves jammed and spilling out notebooks onto the floor. The boy danced through it, but David kicked up a storm of books and papers in his wake, still gaining on the little bastard, when his left foot snagged a tripwire and the shelves caved in on him.
    He dove, hands over his head, through a downpour of books and junk. Something like a bowling ball smashed into his lower back, and it was raining jelly jars filled with pennies and marbles and jacks. He scrambled to his feet, gasping, and through tears of pain, he saw the boy just a few yards away, doubled over, laughing with his lips clamped shut.
    David threw an encyclopedia, but the boy ducked it and shut a door to block David’s next shot with a shoeshine kit. David heard bolts slamming home on the other side.
    David was locked out of his own room. He studied the door, trembling when he didn’t find the growth marks his mother had made with Magic Marker on the frame. The marks had been painted over. On the left side of the door, there were new growth marks in Dad’s writing. The last one, at age eleven, was smeared and faded. Above it, he wrote, MY BOY .
    “You open this goddamned door!” David threw his shoulder into it.
    Wood splintered and the boy gave a girlish shriek. “You break it, you buy it!”
    David pounded the door like a speed-bag. “This is my room! You better let me in…”
    “Or what? You left it, now it’s mine! Finders keepers, douchebag !” The boy’s whinnying laugh rose up and up into a squeal of ecstasy. He’d been waiting to do this, bred for it. Whatever he was, Dad had raised him to torment David, to hurt him, to—
    What would he do next? David had him cornered. He could go and get someone, but the freak would leave, or burn the house down…
    “Alright,” he shouted, stomping down the hall, “screw you, you little bastard. I’m gonna call the cops and the social workers, and you can go live in an orphanage, for all I care.”
    Backtracking silently to the bedroom door, he practically hugged himself for his cleverness, but the boy was silent.
    He heard a thump directly above his head, a scrape of something heavy being dragged, in the attic. So the little shit wanted to play hide and seek. David knew the house, too.
    He went to the linen closet and got out the metal stepladder, quietly set it up beneath the trapdoor in the hall. He took a mop handle and, more or less balanced atop the ladder, jabbed it at the door. It flopped back and David cowered, but nothing dropped on him.
    He planted his hands on the frame and jumped off the top rung just as the trapdoor slammed back down.
    It cracked him squarely on the crown of his skull and he fell, hands still gripping the doorframe when the attic door smashed them.
    For a moment, he hung there by his mangled fingers, his legs kicking the stepladder over, his screams ripping his larynx so blood sprayed from his lips.
    Pure galvanic spasms launched David up and into the attic, where he flopped on the creaking floor. He sobbed and hugged his hands, frantic dying birds, against his chest. His vision was trashed. One eye saw only TV snow, lava flows and Jacuzzi bubbles. The boy—
    “Gee, David, you look pretty bad.”
    David looked up. The boy knelt on top of an antique mahogany wardrobe with a rusty red Craftsman toolbox held high over his head. David threw up his arms and rolled, but he was trapped between mildewed cardboard boxes of Dad’s junk. His hands rained blood