“Damn telemarketers!” Gordon yelled, after listening to three recorded messages.

A beep, then the final message.

“Gordon. This is your father. Call me. I’m at—hey, bartender, what’s the name of this place? Did you say ‘bitter?’ I’m at The Bitter Brew. Can’t see the phone number. Look it up. I’ll be here until they close. Call me, or I’ll break your bones.”

Gordon froze. Then his stomach churned so badly he dashed to the bathroom and threw up.

When he recovered, he dialed 911.

“Help,” he yelled, “I just got a threatening call.”

“What kind of threat?”

“That he’s gonna break my bones.”

“Did you say bones?”

“Yeah. All of them. One at a time, so that it’ll be horribly painful.”

“Did he say how he was gonna do it?”

“No. He never explained how the other times.”

“You mean he threatened you before?”

“Lots of times. Especially when I was a kid.”

“Then you know this person?”

“Look, Lady. It’s my dad. But he’s…dead.”

“I see. I’m gonna connect you with the Mental Health Hotline. Tell them what you just told me. They’ll help you right away.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“I know. And they’ll notice that the moment you call, just like I did. Hold on, I’m gonna transfer you. Understand?” Suddenly, the woman’s voice dropped two octaves. “If you don’t, I’ll break your bones.”

The phone went dead. Gordon froze. Then he got nauseous all over again.

I better get outta here. She’s the third person to threaten me today. When I accidentally put the company president’s mail in the wrong box, my supervisor said if I ever did it again, he’d break my bones. My dad called and said the same thing. And now the 911 operator.

Walking fast in the night helped dissipate his anxieties. Meandering here and there, muttering to himself, Gordon didn’t recognize where he was. Fog and darkness made things worse.

Turning a corner, he was confronted by a red neon cocktail glass. Flashing underneath were the words: The Bitter Brew.

That’s where my dad said he’d wait for me. Maybe I should go inside and end his threats once and for all.

Spotting a beer bottle in the curb, Gordon grabbed it by the neck and smashed it against the pavement. Holding the jagged remains against his coat, he went inside.

“I’m here, you bastard!” he yelled.

Four mangy guys and a toothless hag almost jumped from their bar stools.

“Who’s a bastard?” the bartender shouted?

“My dad.”

The bartender spotted the broken bottle. Grabbing a baseball bat, he hollered, “Anybody here this guy’s father?”

“I am,” the hag yelled.

The place exploded in laughter.

Gordon lunged at her. A split-second before the broken bottle pierced her face, the bartender swung hard.

Gordon was so pumped from adrenalin, he didn’t feel the blow that shattered the bones in his forearm. Rushing out, he raced down the street.

The moment he stopped to catch his breath, pain overwhelmed him. He did it. Like he promised. Falling to the ground, he moaned, “Daddy, why did you break my bones?”

“Because you killed me,” said a voice in his head.

“No. It wasn’t me. It was mom,” he yelled so loudly he didn’t hear the arrival of a police car.

Approaching on foot, the cops saw Gordon’s bloody hand.

“Hey Pal. You’re under arrest.”

“But I didn’t do anything. Damn this hurts bad. Look what a mugger did to my arm. I wanna make a complaint. I was standing here minding my own business, and—”

“You can come quietly, or do it the hard way,” one cop said, drawing his nightstick.

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ll break your bones.”

Gordon thought he saw his dad rushing toward him with a tire iron. Gordon threw a wild punch at his dad. The cop dodged the blow and swatted Gordon’s kneecap. The pain was tremendous. Falling to the ground, his intact wrist slammed against the police car. Even the cops heard the crack.

Gordon screamed in agony from his busted forearm, smashed kneecap, and broken wrist.

The cops took him to County General.

While nurses rushed him to a treatment room, Gordon saw his dad trip one of the nurses. The gurney flew out of control and hit a wall. Gordon crashed to the floor so hard his left ankle broke.

Pandemonium erupted. Many rushed to help.

Gordon slid in and out of consciousness.

They put him in a room, and placed him on an examination table. Gordon saw blackness, edges of heads, blackness, a nose close to his face, then blackness.

Intense overhead lights penetrated Gordon’s skull, bringing him around. That’s when THEY arrived to fix him. His boss, the 911 operator, the bartender, the cops that brought him to the hospital, and his dad. All walked slowly toward Gordon with sledgehammers.

“We got some serious bone breaking to do,” his father said, as they raised their sledgehammers in unison. “On the count of three, let him have it!”

The coroner, who examined Gordon’s corpse, wondered why he couldn’t find a single unbroken bone.

—
©2004 Michael A. Kechula

Michael A. Kechula is a retired tech writer.  His fiction has won first place in seven contests and placed in six others. He’s also won Editor’s Choice awards four times. His stories have been published by 103 magazines and 30 anthologies in Australia, Canada, England, India, Scotland, and US.  He’s authored a book of flash and micro-fiction stories:  “A Full Deck of Zombies–61 Speculative Fiction Tales.”  eBook available at www.BooksForABuck.com and www.fictionwise.com. Paperback available at www.amazon.com.

“This is Late-Night Lenny, keepin’ you company on a Monday night with great tunes all night long! Now here’s another one from tonight’s spotlight band, Thunder Foot!”

Lenny pushed the start button on the CD player and “I’m Sky High Over You” by Thunder Foot went out over the airwaves of 97 KSAW. Lenny cut the mic and pulled his headphones off. He was glad his shift was almost over. He had been fighting a horrible headache since starting his nightly spotlight hour, where he picked a band and played nothing but their music.

Bruce McFarley (aka The All-Nighter) relieved Lenny at 1 a.m. As usual, Bruce walked in smoking a joint.

“Hey, Lenny! What’s happenin’, man? Wanna hit?” He held the joint out to Lenny, who shook his head.

“No, thanks, man,” Lenny said. “I just wanna get home. My head’s killin’ me.”

“I can dig it,” Bruce said. “Hope you feel better.”

“Thanks, I hope so, too.” Lenny drove home and went straight to bed.

****

Lenny was munching on some frosted cherry toaster pastries the next morning when a news story on the radio froze him in mid chew.

“Witnesses say they saw flames coming from one of the engines as the jet plummeted to the ground. The FAA has a team on the scene working to identify the cause of the crash. But again, all five members of the band Thunder Foot are confirmed dead, along with the two pilots. In sports, the Stensonville Monarchs blanked the…”

Lenny didn’t hear the rest of the report. Thunder Foot was gone? He had just spotlighted them last night! Lenny felt light headed, and was glad he was sitting down. Otherwise he might have fallen to the kitchen floor in a dead faint.

****

Lenny put his headphones on and clicked open the mic.

“I’m sure you’ve all heard the news by now about the plane crash that claimed the lives of the members of Thunder Foot early this morning. I thought I’d start off tonight’s show with a musical remembrance of a band that left us much too soon.”

Lenny played a three-song set from Thunder Foot and then introduced that night’s spotlight band.

“In the 97 KSAW spotlight tonight, it’s Morning Glory. We’ll kick things off with ‘I woke Up, and There You Were’.”

Lenny turned the mic off, removed his headphones and rubbed his temples. Damned if that headache wasn’t back! By the end of the spotlight hour Lenny could hardly keep his thoughts straight. He rushed past Bruce on his way out of the building without so much as a word.

****

The sun pouring into his bedroom woke Lenny up. He rubbed his eyes and looked at his alarm clock. It was almost noon! Lenny climbed out of bed, took a shower and got dressed. He didn’t really have anywhere he needed to be, but it was unlike him to oversleep.

Lenny turned on the TV and flipped through the channels, searching for the all sports network. He passed a news channel on the way and caught a brief glimpse of news footage of what looked like a bus that had rolled down into a deep ditch. He stopped on that channel and turned up the volume.

“…for some reason failed to stop at the red light and crashed into the bus, which then tumbled several hundred feet down the ravine. Despite heroic the efforts of some of those who witnessed the crash, the accident claimed the lives of the members of the popular band Morning Glory. Police don’t believe alcohol…”

Lenny dropped the remote control, and his mouth hung open. What the hell? Now Morning Glory was gone? Lenny backed up and collapsed into his recliner. He held his face in his hands and sobbed.

****

After a tribute to Morning Glory, Lenny decided to part with tradition that night and spotlight a band whose members were already dead.

“In the spotlight tonight it’s Shock Factory!”

Shock Factory had died in a mass shooting at a mall on the outskirts of Los Angeles a couple of years ago.  By the end of the spotlight hour Lenny felt better than he had all week. He didn’t even have a headache. When Bruce offered him a toke on his joint, he accepted.

****

The following night, Lenny spotlighted another long-gone band.

“Tonight it’s Bazket Kase in the 97 KSAW spotlight!”

Bazket Kase’s members had died ten years ago in a fire at a nightclub near Austin, Texas. Again, Lenny’s shift ended without a headache.

Friday night came along, and Lenny put Los Alamos in the spotlight. The band had been killed when a party boat they were on capsized off the coast of Nantucket six years ago.

When Bruce relieved Lenny at 1a.m. and asked him how he was doing, Lenny could truthfully tell Bruce that he was doing really well.

Lenny smiled as he walked toward his car. Suddenly, an excruciating pain shot through his head. He buckled over, dropped his car keys and grabbed his head with his hands.  The pain was unlike anything he had ever felt. He almost didn’t hear the shuffling on the gravel around him.

Lenny looked up, and through vision blurred by tears he saw several dark shapes coming toward him. Into the parking lot lights the bloated, waterlogged bodies of the members of Los Alamos stumbled. Next to them came the charred corpses of Bazket Kase. And next to them, Shock Factory, whose bullet-riddled bodies oozed blood and pus with every shuffling step. Lenny turned to run, and blundered into the mangled corpses of Morning Glory and the unrecognizable remains of what could only have been Thunder Foot. Lenny’s head felt as thought it might actually split from his agonizing headache, but he soon found that there was worse pain than that, after all.

—
©2009 Robert C. Eccles