Page 12 of Confessions of the Dead

No response.

“Mr. Martinez? You’re seriously delinquent on your—”

“I told you if you called me again, I’d come to your house and gut you like a pig. You remember that?”

“We’ve never spoken, Mr. Martinez. I’d like to—”

“You’d like to what?” he spoke in a low drawl, the hint of a Southern accent. “How ’bout this? How ’bout I pay you a visit? You know how you people spoof the caller ID? I bought this gizmo that gets around that and gives me your real number. You’re in … where the fuck is Hollows Bend, New Hampshire? Huh, lookie there, it ain’t that far. I can be there in a few hours. Maybe I’ll do that, and you and I can have ourselves some time together. How you like that? Bet you’d like that lots. You ever take it in the—”

Lynn tore off her headset and dropped it on the desk, ran her hand through her oily hair.

New message box:

Congratulations! You earned $0.29! 41 calls in queue ready to talk to you!

Her hands were trembling. Heart pounding like a hammer. Her pajamas clung to her skin with sweat. Whatever she thought she felt from the pills, that was gone. This was something else, and it wasn’t good. Overdose? No. Not from … how many had she taken? Just give it a minute. She’d be okay. Pins and needles crawled over her skin, the room swooned, and Lynn closed her eyes as dizziness washed over her. A light show of pinks, reds, and purples against the inside of her eyelids. It all passed in amoment, but it didn’t go far. The feeling lingered like a stranger standing on the opposite side of a closed door waiting for the lock to click open.

How long did she sit there like that? Lynn wasn’t exactly sure, but her children had gone oddly quiet in those moments. That was either really good or really bad, and she was leaning toward the latter.

She leaned her head back and shouted,“Josh!?”

No answer.

“Gracie and Oscar—what are you two doing?”

Nobody answered. If she’d heard them yelling, they certainly heard her.

She shouted again. Still nothing.

Forty-three calls in queue now.

A new message box:

Moving a little slow today? Feeling stressed? If you’d like one of our mental health specialists to call you back, click HERE. Don’t let the negative people of the world get you down! We’re in this together!

“Fuck you.”

Lynn rose, and the fact that she had to hold on to the edge of the desk to pull herself up wasn’t lost on her. She stood there for a moment, long enough for the room to go steady. Her nerves felt like tiny firecrackers, pins poking at every inch of her skin. It only grew worse as she stepped out into the hallway, the silence slapping at her.

7

Lynn Tatum

LYNN OPENED THE DOORof her daughter’s room to find both her children on the floor covered in red.

Red everywhere.

Their clothes. Hair. Skin. The carpet. Gracie’s walls and bedsheets—the quilt her grandmother had made her sat in a heap on the floor with her pillow, stained, ruined.

Unmoving and horribly pale against the crimson, they looked up at her with petrified stares.

Gracie’s upper lip twitched. “Oscar wanted to paint a dog. I told him not to.”

Still dressed in his Paw Patrol pajamas, Oscar’s face twisted from fear to rage. “That’s not true—I wanted to watch TV!” He somehow stretched the wordIinto no less than four syllables.Eyeeee.“Gracie said she wanted to paint.”

“He’s lying,” Gracie quickly fired back. “He got the paint down from the pantry shelf even when I told him we weren’t supposed to. Then he opened the red, even though dogs aren’t red,and when I told him he had the wrong brush he used his fingers, so I tried to put the blanket down and he wouldn’t let me, and when he got it on the floor he tried to mop it up with clothes from my hamper—he used my favorite Elsa shirt, Mama!”

The shirt was in the corner of the room, covered in so much paint Lynn could barely make out the faded image of Elsa fromFrozenstanding in a field of ice. The shirt was a 5T, too small for a seven-year-old, but Gracie wore it several times each week anyway.

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