Page 33 of Deadly Obsession
“What the fuck!” I screamed. “You tiny-dicked fuck, you couldn’t even let me come!” Before my brain could process what was going on, I felt something cold spread from one side of my throat to the other. “Wha…?”
His hand cocked my head back, then violently slammed it forward against the tailgate again but much harder this time.
With a crack, one of my teeth broke apart and tumbled out. My eyes saw it. My mind comprehended each bounce of my broken tooth as it made its way across the tailgate. The rest of me, however, was too distracted by the sensation of something tearing along my throat.
I looked down at the image in front of me. My vision had worsened, but I could clearly make out the splashes of red against the chipped black metal beneath me. The weirdest thing was I was growing so sleepy. I was about to give Mustang a piece of my mind and make him eat me out till I got off. Now, though, all I wanted to do was sleep.
My hands reached slowly up towards my throat, and panic gripped me when I held my arms out to look at them. Covered in thick, red blood.
I wanted to scream. I felt like I had the ability. He hadn’t cut deep enough to hit my windpipe, just severed an artery.
I could still survive this!
I opened my mouth but before I could even make a peep, a sharp, hard, piercing pain traveled just below my rib cage and then shot downward, followed by the wet sound of meat on a cutting board. My body was tugged back hard, and inthat moment before things went dark, I saw what the source of the sound was.
Beneath me, partially on the tailgate but mostly on the ground, was a growing pool of red. Surrounding a fleshy hose-like object coming out of me. My vision went black, my last thought a dying whisper in my mind.
I never even got to come.
TWENTY
JAMES
Something clanked against the sliding glass door to the patio deck. My first thought was that perhaps it was my imagination, but then I heard it again. Something small and hard bouncing off the glass. Sera was still asleep on my chest. Neither of us had moved the entire night. Reaching over and picking up my phone from the nightstand, I checked the time. It read 0636 hours.
The sun would be coming up soon.
With great care, I slowly began to work my way out from under Sera, moving my pillow into my place so that she still had something to cradle her. Then I made my way over to the patio door, scanning left and right before opening it quietly and stepping outside. Doing a continuous 180 while searching for the source of the disturbance. Nothing seemed out of place as I moved closer to the railing, my vision shifting downward to where my truck was parked.
Something was off.
The first thing that caught my attention was the fact that my tailgate was down.Ask anyone who knew me, and they’d tell you I’d never leave my tailgate down.It was one of the things I justcouldn’t stand. Like the sound of people chewing or odd numbers on a volume display. My friends said it was a compulsion or that I was just plain crazy, but any three of those things really threw my mood.
To add to my frustratingly-growing suspicion that something terrible was going on was the pool of liquid on the tailgate that appeared to be dripping onto the ground. Thanks to the color of my truck and darkness outside at present, it was impossible to tell what it was, though.
Moving back inside, I pulled on a pair of black sweatpants from the floor and grabbed my oversize hoodie off the door hook and threw it on. I was about to step out the door when the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Or maybe it was my PTSD-fueled paranoia. Either way, I turned, slid my hands under the mattress, and grabbed the shotgun I’d hidden there when I first arrived.
I then pressed a finger on the action release and pulled the slide back just enough to see into the chamber.Empty.I knew it would be, but I always checked. Drawing a buckshot from the extra four rounds on the side of the weapon, I dropped it into the empty chamber with the palm of my hand and slid the action forward. Quietly but firmly enough to ensure I heard the click.
I took one last glance at Sera before stepping through the bedroom door, locking it from the inside. The moment that door shut behind me, it shut on James too.
I was Mustang again—the nickname my buddies gave me back in my unit.
We’d all been dumb kids when we first met, with fresh memories of cool callsigns strong in our minds. It was during our first night in country, while we were all sitting around the smoke pit on the FOB, that we decided to pick callsigns for our personal usage on the squad. It was nothing we’d ever use on the radios for fear of being hazed but a little brotherly morale booster for us.
PFC Johnson - Scarecrow
LCpl Sanders - Reaper
LCpl Hollister - Goliath
LCpl Smith - Mustang
Scarecrow and Goliath never returned home from that deployment. The former had been mowed down by enemy fire and the latter had stepped on an IED.
On the next tour, it was just Reaper and me, each of us Sergeants at the time in charge of our own separate squads. After that second deployment, we both took our honorable discharges, shared a beer, and boarded separate planes to never see each other again.
Until a year later, when I was standing in a state I’d never been to before, watching as the last of my best Marine Corps brothers was lowered into his grave. The simple white coffin pinned with the Sergeant chevron I’d punched into it a few minutes before. Beside me, a sea of other Marines from our old unit. The asshole had to have a closed casket 'cause he’d suck-started a shotgun.
