Anybody Want to Play War?

By Tommy B. Smith

Brutal injuries can leave scars.

As the teenage survivor of a savage dog's rampage, it's a lesson Bryce Gallo will never forget.

Struggling to cope with his damaged appearance, along with a newfound fear of dogs and mounting anxieties at home and school, he flees his suburban home into the moonlit streets of St. Charles.

Along the roads of suburbia and through the shadowed heart of the city, he encounters Wheels, a maintenance worker for a series of apartment buildings; Paloma, known to some by the moniker of Lady Luck; and a woman in a dark house who is, as far as Bryce can fathom, like no one else he has met before.

His new life is not without obstacles or enemies, he learns. The future is a battlefield. Fire and smoke loom on the horizon, and his dangerous course may see the lives of his family and friends forever changed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seventh Star Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781948042819

Tommy B. Smith

 Tommy B. Smith is a writer of dark fiction, author of The Mourner’s Cradle, Poisonous, and the short story collection Pieces of Chaos, as well as works appearing in numerous magazines and anthologies throughout the years. His presence currently infests Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he resides with his wife and cats. More information can be found on his website at http://www.tommybsmith.com.

Book preview

1.png

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright Information

Dedication

1980 Day of the Dog

The Detour

Wheels

Games

Questions

Anxiety High

Trapped

Escape

Loveless

A Special Trip

A Dark House

Finn

The Job

Foolish Notions

Sevens

Tabby

Meltdown

Gasoline

A Place Without Cause

Going Nowhere

1981 The World Outside

Return

Paloma

About the Author

Anybody Want to Play WAR?

Tommy B. Smith

Copyright © 2019 by Tommy B. Smith

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without express written consent of the publisher or author.

Cover art and design: Olivia Pro Design

Cover art in this book copyright © 2019 Olivia Pro Design & Seventh Star Press, LLC.

Editor: Stephen Zimmer

Published by Seventh Star Press, LLC.

ISBN Number: 978-1-948042-81-9

Seventh Star Press

www.seventhstarpress.com

[e-mail]

Publisher’s Note:

Anybody Want to Play WAR? is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are the product of the author’s imagination, used in fictitious manner. Any resemblances to actual persons, places, locales, events, etc. are purely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

Dedication

In memory of Christopher Daniel Morphis

1980

Day of the Dog

Sunlight blinked between the clouds one fair Saturday afternoon as a yellow-eyed hound tore a man’s throat out behind a gas station.

A woman with a mane of dark, fluffy hair, walking along the broken sidewalk with her eight-year-old child, saw the dog charging up the street. When the sight of the creature’s bloody muzzle registered, she hastened from the street and yanked her child away with her.

An elderly man now stood in the dog’s path. He too saw the blood in its fur and teeth, as well as the keen savagery in its strange yellow eyes. He scrambled for the imagined safety of a nearby home.

Instead of pursuing, the dog’s brown head turned. Its eyes locked on another individual at the side of the street, a teenager. Their eyes held.

For several seconds, Bryce Gallo stared back at the dog until it shot toward him and lunged.

It drove him to the street on his back. With a flurry of spittle, its teeth latched into his face, digging in deep. The beast fought to rip the flesh away.

Bryce’s senses spun. He struggled for survival, pummeling the dog with his arms, pushing against the daze consuming him. Grinding its teeth in, the hound wrenched its head back.

Bryce’s flesh tore. He gasped. Blood, tears, and canine saliva leaked down his face.

It required a true effort of will to cram his hand into his right pocket, withdraw the pocketknife, and unfold its four-and-a-half inch stainless steel blade. Desperate, he stabbed it deep into the dog’s rage-quivering neck.

The dog reeled, grunted, and squealed. Its jaws slipped free. The canine staggered aside and darted across the street.

With a screech of brakes and a blasting horn, a white Cadillac struck the dog and smeared it across the street in a mess of red, white, and brown.

The hound’s death broke the fog of fear stalling everyone around. A woman screamed. Her boy stood transfixed.

A diminutive older man shouted, Call an ambulance!

Bryce pressed his hands against his bleeding face. It hurt, it burned, and that was his base assessment of the pain through his shock. Blood seeped between his fingers. He couldn’t restrain a choked cry. Wild dizziness consumed him.

The hard street, the blood, and the pain fell away in another instant, swallowed by minutes and hours of incomprehension.

Bryce lay in a white hospital bed. Bandages wrapped his face. He tried to speak, but it came out garbled. Medications coursed through his bloodstream, rendering him woozy and lightheaded.

Bryce? Can you hear me?

He wasn’t sure who had spoken. A nurse in white with short, blond hair stood at his bedside. Some distance past her stood his mother and stepfather.

For his initial waking moments, his mother approached and remained close, murmuring faint reassurances in the aftermath of the dog’s assault.

It had followed him into his dreams. Over and over, he fought for his life against it, but the dog kept winning and no one would do a thing to help him.

His mother pleaded with the nurses and the doctor until Richard said, Elaine, please.

Crossing her arms, she fell into a quiet huff. When her eyes returned to her son on the hospital bed, her irritation melted into concern. Bryce could see it on her face, but she said little. She just kept looking at him.

It didn’t get much better when the bandages came away, when the medical bill arrived, or when the stitches were out. Bryce had fought for his life and won, but not without cost. A stark red scar ran beneath his left eye and down to the bottom of his jaw.

The Detour

I

Every time he looked into the mirror, Bryce saw the fresh scar twisting down the side of his face. Others would see it as they passed. Everyone would stare as those bystanders had when he fought for everything against that crazed dog.

People would ask questions. They would ask him why he looked the way he did, what was wrong with his face, whether it hurt, and an assortment of other questions.

Bryce didn’t care to confront the hundred stares or the thousand questions, but he was due back for classes today, and that was all he could think about. He hadn’t slept much.

After a warm shower, he ran a comb through his wet, dark-brown hair. He skipped looking in the mirror this time and revisited his room to snatch his navy-blue jacket from the closet. He threw it around his shoulders and sat on the rumpled red-and-blue comforter of the bed until his mother came to his door.

She leaned in. Her curly brown hair fountained down around her head like she had stabbed a fork into a light socket. Bryce. Don’t be late.

Agitated, he raised his head, wondering why she was bothering him when he still had more than enough time. She stared at him, as if waiting for some form of an answer.

Fine, Bryce said. He stood, walked to the door, opened it wider, and walked past her into the hallway.

Why are you taking your jacket? his mother asked, following him. It isn’t cold outside.

Just in case, he said, and headed toward the door.

Don’t you want a bowl of cereal? she asked.

I don’t want to be late, do I?

But it’s early.

Then I’ll be early.

He stepped outside. He expected her to follow him out but heard nothing else from his mother as he crossed the bumpy front yard to the road.

Under a dim, cloudy sky, he turned left, following the road. Bryce felt better wearing his jacket today, even if it wasn’t cold outside. It made him a bit more comfortable, as did the folded knife in his pocket.

After what happened with the dog, he didn’t think he would ever leave his pocketknife behind again. Without it, he might be dead.

At its end, this road met Dartmoor. The bus would stop at the corner. He was early, and none of the other kids were there. Good. He didn’t feel like encountering any of them today, especially Nate, the annoying skinny kid with the blond bowl-cut and gapped front teeth who always walked around with an idiotic smirk on his face.

A different road branched to his right. This one curved back to the left to intersect with Dartmoor at another point. Bryce glanced around to verify the road was clear, crossed the street, and took the other road instead.

So, I got a little lost, he murmured to himself. Missed the bus today. Oh, well.

He rounded the curve to approach Dartmoor, a busier street with traffic speeding by in both directions. When Bryce found an opening, he ran across. On the other side, he slowed and proceeded down the next adjoining street into another neighborhood.

At the end of one driveway, a large man with tufts of graying hair circling the top of his otherwise bald head hunched in front of a black mailbox. With a handful of mail, he lifted his eyes toward Bryce. To Bryce’s discomfort, the man watched for some time, but when Bryce neared, the resident closed his mailbox and ambled back to the front door of his house.

Bryce passed the house and continued along the squiggly suburban road. Once he had the opportunity, he turned onto another road. This road, bordered on each side by houses mostly brown and maroon, continued for a while.

Violent barking upended Bryce’s heart into machine-gun panic. A white German shepherd charged across a dying lawn at him. Bryce jammed a hand into his pocket for his pocketknife.

The dog’s chain snapped taut. Straining, the canine barked and lunged against the chain.

Bryce took a slow breath and fumbled to escape the monster tension that had seized him. His heart hammered.

He forced his steps away from the chained dog but watched it as he walked. Even down the street with the dog out of sight, he still heard it barking and kept his hand on his pocketknife.

II

In the middle of west downtown suburbia, the white facade of Bryce’s house was a painted-over image of pristine contradiction. They had moved into the place shortly after his mother had married Richard, but Bryce remembered another home and a time when things were different.

It had been Bryce and his mother in those days in the old neighborhood, along with his Uncle Jax. Uncle Jax had been out and around, seen some things, knew a few things. He had seen war.

One night, vandals shattered one of their bedroom windows and threw Bryce’s mother into a panic. She had called the police, but they were late to arrive and never found anyone on the premises.

She was afraid the vandals would come back. She mentioned it to Jax in a hushed voice.

I’ll look forward to it, he replied over his glass of Jim Beam on ice. The way I see it, if you’re going to start something, you’d better be ready to finish it or else somebody else is going to finish it for you.

When he looked over and noticed Bryce standing there, he added, Am I right, buddy?

Jax tossed back the last trace of whiskey in his glass. Visibly uncomfortable, Bryce’s mother said to her son, Honey, why don’t you go on to bed? It’s late.

Meanwhile, Uncle Jax helped himself to another glass of whiskey. Bryce remembered his mother hadn’t liked Jax’s heavy drinking, but there were worse things—at least until cirrhosis of the liver got him.

The memories of his earlier youth trailed to the back of Bryce’s mind as his attention fell onto houses of peeling paint and frames in disrepair. Trash littered a few front lawns. Dirty diapers decorated the lawn of one splotchy brown house with a plastic-sheeting window.

Another dog, a Doberman, barked from the front of a fenced-in property. Bryce tensed again. He wondered if the dog could leap over the fence. He returned his hand to the pocket where his knife rested.

Keeping the dog in his clear sight, he considered cutting back through an unfenced property. He could reach Hatch Street by that route.

When he made the attempt, a man with a patch of gray hair on his bumpy head confronted him from a green stool at the side of the property’s carport. He wore an ugly gray-and-green-striped collared shirt and an even uglier sneer.

What are you doing here? the man asked.

Trying to get up to Hatch Street, Bryce said. I thought this way would be faster.

Go around, the man said. And don’t ever set foot on my property again.

Annoyed, Bryce returned to the road and continued his walk.

What a jackass, he muttered.

When he came to the next four-way stop, he took a left and directed his course toward Hatch Street. The buzzing traffic here made him nervous. He hoped his mother or Richard, or anyone else he knew, wouldn’t see him out here walking when he was supposed to be at school.

Cars and trucks shot by on the busy street. Bryce kept his head down as he walked. Ahead, on his right, he saw Tuck’s Corner Store.

He had a few dollars in his pocket and decided to stop in. When he opened the