“No,” Dylan protested.
The last butterfly, saved because it had hidden in Dylan’s mouth, flew out on the word and lit on his cheek, and he was home, little and in bed, a kiss like a butterfly warm from the sun, brushing across his cheek. A gold cross on a fine chain caught the light. The sweet cherry taste of syrup was on his lips, but wrong, the kind of wrong that lets you know there’s medicine under it and the cherry is supposed to fool you.
Dylan wasn’t fooled. It’s hard to fool an eleven-year-old boy, but he’d taken the medicine with good humor to please his mother, and because he knew if he didn’t get over “the dread blue mucus” as his dad called the colds and flu that tormented Rochester ’s citizens from October until April, he wouldn’t be allowed to skate in Saturday’s hockey game.
The medicine made him sleepy. His mom sat on the edge of his bed and sang to him like she had when he was little. He let her, so as not to hurt her feelings. Her voice was okay, kind of deep and skritchy, but she couldn’t carry a tune for sour apples and just sort of made it up as she went along. It reminded him of the Japanese singer they had to listen to in class to prove nobody was still mad over a long-ago war. For some stupid reason, she decided to sing a second song, “Hush Little Baby.”
Singing it to Lena, who was two, was one thing, but his mom was slaughtering it and he was eleven for cripe’s sake. What was he supposed to do? Start sucking his thumb and stroking his blankie? He was about to tell her to go sing to Lena, or pester the dog, or do some other mom thing, when Rich stepped into the doorway and started “dying” all sorts of ways that cracked Dylan up: pulling up a noose and lolling out his tongue, shooting himself in the head and sliding down the door frame.
Every time Dylan laughed, his mother turned, but there Rich would be looking innocent, like he was just enjoying the music. Finally, she gave up, kissed him, and left.
That kiss was the last normal thing that happened to him. The last good thing. A warm butterfly on his cheek, someone who didn’t think he was a monster.
Next, there was yelling and bright lights, men with radios-cops. Sirens screamed from outside and more of them screamed in his head. His head was huge and broken, a piece of jagged glass slicing through his brain. Rich, limp and dead looking, his face the color of the zombies they laughed at in the old movies; but it wasn’t funny. Rich wasn’t goofing around. He was dying. One of the cops, a huge cop, like a giant with hands bigger than Dylan’s face, had Dylan by the back of the neck. He felt warm and wet and wondered if he’d wet the bed.
He’d pissed the bed and his parents had called the cops. Rich had fainted because he’d peed in the bed. He laughed because it was too weird to be real. When he did, the cop’s hand tightened until he thought his head would pop like a ripe pimple, his brains squirting out like puss. “You fuck bastard,” the cop shouted.
“Take it easy, Mack,” said somebody.
“You crazy fuck bastard,” the giant shouted, his face so close Dylan could smell the stale coffee on his breath and see the bristly hairs on his cheeks.
He raised his hands to push the man away, and they were red. Red-red and sticky. He was covered in the cherry medicine. Too red. Blood, he was covered in blood. His chest was smeared with it. The covers on his bed were soaking in blood. It was on his face and his arms. Vomit choked off the laugh.
“Let’s go take a peek at your handiwork, you sick little prick.”
“Mack, back off!”
But Mack didn’t. Dylan felt himself being pulled from the bed by the scruff of his neck like a cat. The pain in his head brought down black around the edges of his eyes, and his legs didn’t work right. The cop, Mack the Giant, was dragging him from the room. Two men had taken Rich into the hall and were doing things to his crotch, or that’s what it looked like.
“Is he dead?” Dylan managed.
“Not yet, you fuck,” said Mack, and Dylan wondered if they were going to kill him, if maybe they weren’t real cops but men dressed as cops who’d come to kill them. They’d killed Rich, and now Mack was going to take him someplace and kill him too. They must already have killed his parents, or his dad would have gotten his double-barreled shotgun from behind the dresser and blown them into tiny pieces.
“They’re dead,” he screamed to Rich, to get him to wake up and run or fight, to let him know there was no help coming. “Momma and daddy are dead!”
“Aren’t you a proud piece of shit,” the cop said and hauled him out of the bedroom and into the upstairs hallway. All the lights were on, glaring and cold, and there was a man with a camera that flashed and burned the back of Dylan’s eyes. “Look, you lousy fuck.” The cop pushed him to his hands and knees in the hallway.
Lena, little Lena, lay face down in the middle of the skinny rug that ran down the hall to protect the hardwood. Her head was in two pieces, like in the cartoons when somebody unzipped somebody else and they fell into halves.
“Happy?” Mack yelled and shook him. “Lots more to see.”
He was lifted by the neck again. His feet tried to keep up so the cop wouldn’t pull his head off. Mack, the cop giant, was taking him to his parents’ room. Dylan didn’t want to see what they’d done to his mom and dad. With a strength born of sheer terror, he began to kick, and bite, and scream. He did wet himself then and didn’t even care. The world had gone insane.
But it hadn’t. Dylan had.
“No!” he screamed.
“Look,” Kowalski insisted. “Look. I found it for you.”
Dylan looked hard through the falling colors, through the blood in his eyes, through the dark from the walls leaning too close. Kowalski had something across his knees. He was holding it in his lap like a child.
“Look what I brought for you,” the doctor said. “I brought this to help you remember. This is the axe. The one you used to hack your family to pieces. Look at it. Look at the axe. Remember the axe? Here it is. See the axe. I brought it for you.”
Dylan looked. The axe. Blood poured from his eyes; he could feel it hot on his face. Panic clanged in his ears so loud he couldn’t hear anything else. The axe lay there, alive, waiting. Dylan looked at Kowalski’s face. It changed again. No judge. A cop. Mack, the giant cop, the fake cop, the bastard cop who had dragged him from his bed. This time he wouldn’t be afraid. This time he wouldn’t stop. This time he would get them all.
With the power of the snake in his brain he rose from the couch on a clear, cold wave of revenge, rose like a god, shooting up. His hands caught the axe from Mack the Giant’s grasp. It weighed nothing. He was a man now, not a little boy. He was strong. The axe swung high over his head, the blade glittered. The butterflies were coming back. He could save them.
With an exultant cry he brought the blade down onto Mack the Giant’s skull.
15