Blood Pond

By John Wm Beckner

Zack and Pam. Young lovers in their first romantic involvement make for the perfect love. Until she crosses paths with a gang leader having a bad day. What happens to her that day is indescribably horrible. Zacks insane grief drives his quest for vengeance leading to an unbelievable climax.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 1, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469702445

John Wm Beckner

Born September 26, 1959, the son of James Edward Beckner, Jr., a career soldier, and Pauline Beckner, musician and songwriter. Two children, Elizabeth Anne and Joseph. Currently a software developer and owner of Beckner Software Innovations. Contact [e-mail].

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PRELUDE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For my beloved daughter, Elizabeth Anne Beckner.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A writer can never create without the help and support of many people.

Elizabeth Anne Beckner, for your love and support. This book would never have been started had it not been for you. When are you going to write some more of your book, Daddy? became the phrase I learned to hate. Thank you for it! Without that occasional kick in the pants, the book would have never been completed. And thanks for naming Zack.

Althea Maylor-Lewis and Lou Ann Gentry, for your friendship and support. You know why I had to write this book.

Steve Scott, an excellent amateur editor in his own right, who extols the virtues of my grammatical accuracy while derogating my overly pedantic loquacity.

PRELUDE

All is blackness. I am one with the universe, for I exist in a dimensionless place, a place devoid of light or sound. I want to move forward, but I can’t. How can one move amongst total nothingness? There is no ground and no sky. I do not feel the pull of gravity nor its absence. I am the totality of the universe. It is as if I was so far outside our galaxy that no light from the furthest rogue star could reach me.

Even so, I am being propelled. I know that I am moving, though I don’t know the means of propulsion. A sense of foreboding creeps into my senses as this knowledge signifies that I am not alone in this universe. There is another.

As an epiphany from on high, I realize where I am going. It is with this knowledge that trepidation creeps into my soul. I hope that the culmination of my journey will not be The Pond, but I also know, with a sinking feeling in my heart, that The Pond is always the fulfillment of this particular journey.

I still feel no indication of momentum as I detect a point of light in the distant darkness. Suddenly my world is filled with a dim, reddish light. I see The Pond ahead of me. I feel I am bound like a train to a track that can have only one destination.

With no feeling of movement, I am approaching The Pond. Or perhaps it is coming to me. In either case, I suddenly find myself standing at the edge of The Pond.

The Pond is not filled with water, but a thick, bubbling, dull-red soup. I know the content of The Pond is not actually tomato soup, but hot, coagulating blood.

A revelation invades my thoughts. This is my existence. It has always been my existence, and always will be my existence. I have never been anywhere but here. As I watch the random bubbling begin to coalesce into a figure in the center of The Pond, my fear mounts.

Slowly, a figure appears and begins to slowly ascend from the center of The Pond. I see the feminine outline covered in the thick blood of The Pond. All of her features are hidden by the massive amounts of blood covering her form. Even with the thick amount of blood, caked to her as if it were mud, I can see that she is a young, shapely woman.

Her ascendance complete, she stands upon the top of The Pond. Her arms slowly reach up from her body towards me, beckoning. I have no will and cannot refuse her silent call. I am mesmerized, knowing that I must go to her, yet also knowing that it will mean my death to do so.

Suddenly I am in her embrace. She is holding me as we begin our descent back into the burbling pool. The blood from The Pond takes on a life of its own as it reaches up to cover me even as I am descending into its depths.

No longer am I in anyone’s embrace. I take one last gasp of air just before the hot blood finally covers me completely.

A crescendo of fear envelops my body and soul as my breath is halted by the influx of The Pond’s blood into my lungs. I know that here is where I will die. My brain sends signals that it needs oxygen and my lungs try to accommodate, yet oxygen cannot be siphoned from this congealing blood that is in my mouth, throat and lungs.

My brain finally realizes that my lungs cannot supply the oxygen it needs, causing an all-out panic to consume me. I know that death is but a moment away. The light that is my soul is but a fragile flame that is being extinguished. Death, not so welcome as countless poets have spouted so eloquently, is to be hated and feared.

***

I awaken in a sweat. The Dream has happened again. While its tentacles have gripped me less and less as the years have passed, I have yet to receive surcease from The Dream. While waking memories fade with time, The Dream never changes.

I am forty years old now. The trauma that caused the onset of The Dream happened when I was still a teenager, over twenty years past. Yet, after awakening from The Dream, the events that led to this haunting manifestation of my subconsciousness come back clearly to the forefront of my mind.

CHAPTER 1

Hi, Zack! I’ve missed you so much, Pam started, with emphasis on so. Her words were just what I needed to hear, and my heart was filled with love. Are we ready to make the arrangements yet?

I’ve missed you too. God, it’s good to hear your voice, I responded, Are you in Killeen yet?

Pam lived in Colorado, but visited her Grandmother in Killeen, Texas, when she could. It gave her much more time to talk to me, as she normally wasn’t allowed to speak to me by telephone. Her parents didn’t want Pam dating until she was eighteen years old, and especially not a non-Catholic person. While she had just turned nineteen, I was still very non-Catholic.

Just arrived, and Grandma said I could call you. Pam’s grandmother was the only one in her family that knew about us. Pam trusted her grandmother greatly, and while she was very close to her parents, especially her mother, she couldn’t reveal our secret to anyone but her grandmother.

We spoke the usual inanities for a while, and then I said, I think it’s time we told your parents about us, and announced our engagement.

I was sixteen and a half years old at the time, a senior at Glenvar High School in Salem, Virginia. It was Saturday, May 1, 1976, when Pam arrived in Killeen. Pam had graduated high school the year before, and was taking a year off before going to Texas A & M. It was one month before my graduation from Glenvar, and then I was going to attend a technical school for computer programming. We wanted to announce our engagement, and fill in the details of our relationship these past years. Our engagement was planned to last the four years that Pam attended college, while I established a programming career.

We would then both work for the next five to eight years, putting away as much money as we could, and finally have our first child. Pam wanted to be twenty-nine when she first became pregnant. Then we wanted to have three children. Pam was an only child, and I was the middle of five children, so three was a compromise on what we each wanted. Pam would be a stay-at-home mom.

As you can see, we had planned a great deal of our lives already.

We agreed that night to wait until Pam returned home the following Saturday, May 8, when she would let her parents know our decision. I could find no way that I could actually travel to Colorado for the announcement, but she would have me get on the telephone immediately after telling her parents, both to tell me their reactions and to let me meet her parents. I was also to inform my parents that same night, and introduce Pam to them by telephone.

I had been saving money from my evening job as a dishwasher at a local restaurant so I could take the bus to see Pam right after graduation in the second week of June, just before I was to begin my courses at the technical school. We were going to try to talk her parents into letting me stay in their guest bedroom. If not, then I would get a cheap motel room and Pam would help with the cost (she had lots more in savings than I did at the time). She had a car, a graduation gift from her parents, and she would drive me around.

We also discussed what we would do if her parents totally rejected me. I wasn’t concerned about what my parents thought, as I would do whatever I wanted. I felt fairly sure that my mother would support me, and that my dad wouldn’t care one way or the other. My mother might be concerned about schooling, but once she understood that Pam and I planned a four-year engagement, her trepidations should be allayed.

Pam was very concerned about her parents’ reaction, but was standing fast in our plans. As a backup, in case her parents became totally unreasonable,

Pam would make plans to stay with her grandmother until she went to college, and my bus ticket could easily be for Killeen, Texas, instead of Security, Colorado.

Our telephone conversation ended as it always did, with the hope of a bright future, knowing that we could overcome any obstacles as we confessed our undying love one to the other.

All week I looked forward to her call on Saturday, May 8. Our plans were that she would call me first at 6:00pm my time, to let me know that she was preparing to tell her parents and that I could tell my parents. She would call afterward to let me know what happened and, hopefully, for our introductions to each other’s parents. I prepared that day, practicing my speeches to my parents about our engagement. I was so excited by the time 6:00 rolled around that I could scarcely contain myself.

When 6:00 finally arrived, I was in a cold sweat. But I received no call. 6:05pm. I checked the telephone quickly to make sure there was a dial tone. I heard the dial tone, so I hastily hung up and hoped she hadn’t tried to call while I had the receiver off the hook. I became increasingly nervous. Finally, 6:30pm rolled around, and still no call. Had she chickened out, I wondered? It just wasn’t like her to not keep a promise to me, especially one so important as this.

When 7:00pm rolled around, I was extremely concerned. I felt that something tragic must have happened to keep her from calling me as planned. All sorts of wild and bizarre scenarios