The first time I met Dana at the bar I had no idea I would end up killing her and framing my buddy for it. Life is funny.
The night we met, my buddy, Rod, was flirting with Dana because she was a pretty brunette with big blue eyes and a fine figure. Dana’s burly ex-boyfriend barreled into the bar and immediately attacked Rod. Rod never saw the chucked punch that crunched on his cranium or the second pitched fist that clipped his chin, jackhammering his jaw and flinging him to the floor. Dana’s boyfriend, named Don, then jumped to pump more punches down on Rod.
I stepped in. I nabbed Don’s neck in a jujitsu rear naked choke on his throat and the hold made him go slow as he grew groggy in my grasp as he thrashed a bit. I choked him out and let him drop like a rock on the floor to snooze a bit in dreamland. I helped Rod up
“We should probably go,” I suggested.
We left and Dana came with us.
***
Rod and Dana ended up in a whirlwind romance. Rod and I were roommates, so I saw a lot of Dana and I knew she was bad news. Not good girlfriend material.
But she was so damn hot.
I’m not proud of it, but I started having an affair with Dana.
Rod came home early one day and caught Dana and I having sex. No words were spoken. None were necessary. Rod attacked me in a frenzied flurry of flashing and smashing fists. We crashed into combat, banging bodies and lashing limbs in a savage struggle of hits, kicks and grips. I secured a jujitsu guillotine chokehold on his throat, but he bulldozed us backwards and we fell down the stairs.
When I got up I discovered that Rod was dead. I’d accidentally snapped his neck during the fall.
Dana panicked, screaming that we had to go to the cops. I knew due to my muscular size, MMA background and criminal record that the cops would definitely charge me with manslaughter at the very least. I tried to calm Dana down, pointing out that we would both be in legal trouble because of the situation. But she just insisted she had to go to the cops and tried to barge by me. I tried to grab and stop her. She slapped my face and from her purse she pulled out a narrow knife she swiped near my neck. I gripped her wrist to rip it from her grip and she stamped on my foot and kneed at my nuts.
During our short struggle, she fell and split her skull wide open landing on a stone corner of our fireplace. Her brain was maimed because she didn’t die right away. She lay there mewling through her mashed mouth with her lacerated lips begging me to get her help. I knew if she ever left that house I would be going to prison for life, likely.
I told myself it was self-defense as I put on gloves and grabbed Rod’s baseball bat. Dana was incapacitated by her head wound, but understood the situation and pleaded with me to stop. In response, I used the bat to whack and crack her cranium. Explosive blood spray spattered me.
Dana was quite dead with a caved in head.
I put the bat in Rod’s hand.
I showered up and left the scene. I later came home with another friend and pretended that I’d just discovered the bodies with him. The cops wanted to question me, but I insisted on having my lawyer present. My lawyer protected me from being interrogated and making any stupid statements.
The district attorney and cops greatly suspected me of the killings, but just couldn’t prove it. Rod and Dana had physically fought before and cops had shown up, so there was a documented history of violence between them. My DNA was everywhere because I lived there. I legally got away with it.
But Rod’s brother was a gangster and took street vengeance. I was getting out of my truck when he struck. He was wearing a mask pointing his pistol. The pistol popped some shots that clocked and rocked me as slugs plugged my pectoral and railed through ribs to lacerate my lung. I dropped dying as he fled.
Next to me I saw a swirling dark wormhole appear and from it stepped several immense, dark, shadowy creatures with glowing red eyes and horns hooking from their heads. Spikes bristled from their bodies and down their spines and long barbed tails. They had huge claws and maws filled with terrifying teeth. They rumbled and seemed to chuckle in some bestial alien language as they reached into my body and yanked out my glowing human soul. Their claws felt like fire searing my soul and I screamed helplessly in their gargantuan grasps.
Abruptly I was sucked back into my body. EMTs were working on me bringing me back from death. They had saved my soul from the demons.
Doctors later told me that people dying or briefly dead often have strange hallucinations, but I knew better. Those demons had come for me. I’d damned myself.
It’s been ten years now since I died and saw those demons. I’ve tried to live right by going to church and doing good deeds, volunteering and praying for forgiveness. I have a brain tumor killing me now, doctors think I only have a few months left to live.
I pray every day constantly that those demons aren’t waiting for me again.
The End
Bio:
Tom Kropp’s work has appeared in Chiron Review, Churches, Children and Daddies, Down in the Dirt, The Horror Zine, Freedom Fiction Journal, Short-Story Me, Dark Harbor, Blood Moon Rising, Flash Phantoms, Phantomania, Lowlife Lit, The Listening Eye, J Journal, Evening Street Review, Conceit, Spotlight on Recovery, Muscle and Fitness, Outdoor Life and many other magazines. His play Jailhouse Confessions was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in 2019. You can find more of his writings at tomkropp.wordpress.com. He has many novels available free in audiobooks and eBooks at Google Play Books.