I took a shaky step backward, hardly even realizing I was moving. Ollie stood in place, unable to keep his eyes off the severed arm on the ground, dried blood oozing from the cut and pooled around the limb itself. The arm had a chunk bitten out of it, letting parts of the bone poke through. In fact, a good portion of the arm was bone at that point, thanks to the vultures, but I could still see each individual, dirty, greying finger that made it extremely clear as to what I was looking at.
“Ollie, we need to g—”
Before I was able to continue, a deafening blast came from the lower floor and a spray of wood erupted right in front of us, a fair-sized hole forming in the floor. I screamed and Ollie immediately grabbed onto my arm and pulled me forcefully to the other side of the room, hopping over the hole in the ground.
“You little bastards need to get the fuck out of my house! I’m gonna blow your brains out all over the walls!” A strong, raspy male voice called from downstairs. I was shaking at this point and I wanted to vomit, but I was completely frozen and unable to do anything other than stand huddled up against Ollie behind a pile of crates in the back right corner.
The smell coming from this area was impossibly strong and I knew it had to be the source of the stench. Ollie held onto my shoulder tightly as he panned his flashlight down to our feet, which is when we noticed we were crouching in what looked like a pool of thick, fleshy blood. I screamed again and leapt forward, crashing into the boxes and sending them flying across the floor. I scratched my elbows pretty badly, and the pain mixed with the panic made me start crying. I sat up and shined my light at Ollie and noticed the top half of a body laying across the floor, the stomach gutted open like a fish, and two bloody stumps where the arms were supposed to be. The head was caved inward, like the person had been bashed in the face with an anvil. Nothing about the body looked human anymore. Ollie covered his mouth with his hand and I watched his chest rise and lower sporadically as he started to hyperventilate, and he stood up in what seemed to be the mauled remains of the corpse’s legs. He stumbled over to me and landed on the ground beside me, staring wide-eyed at something. I flung my head over my shoulder and saw that the crates had broken open when I fell into them, and they were filled with brownish, rotting bones. Hundreds of bones, now scattered across the ground, making up more area on the floor than wood. I let out another wailing cry and hugged Ollie’s arm tightly, thinking that this nightmare couldn’t get any worse than it already was.
That was when we heard the sound of pounding footsteps making their way up the stairs.
“April, we have to jump out the window,” Ollie said, his voice strained. I could tell he was crying at this point, too. “It’s gonna hurt, but we don’t have any other option. You go first.”
“Ollie—” I started, before I saw the dark figure of a man arrive at the top of the stairs. He was huge, definitely above six feet, and he had a sort of beer gut. His eyes were bugged like a madman, open wider than I thought was humanly possible. He had a scruffy beard that had flakes of grey in it. It was definitely the neighbor, but somehow he looked like a totally different person at this point in time. He smiled when he saw us, his teeth long and yellowed. He aimed the gun at us.
“My vultures are gonna have a feast tonight,” he growled.
“Go!” Ollie screamed, pushing me as hard as he could. He ducked down and laid on his stomach as he shoved me, and I landed hard on my already hurt elbows. Another shot rang out, louder this time, and I felt wood splinters rain on my side from the wall to my left as another hole was blown into the house. I picked myself up and, using nothing more than pure adrenaline, hurled myself toward the window. I grabbed the top of it and hopped onto the bottom of the frame before I slipped my arms outside. I looked over my shoulder inside the house one last time and saw Ollie making a mad dash for the window as well, only for his foot to get caught in the hole that was shot in the floor. I was already pulling myself back into the house when the neighbor cocked his shotgun again. Ollie looked up at me desperately. “Please go!” His scream ripped through his throat and planted itself into my brain. I took his words to heart and repositioned myself to where I was before, with my hands against the soft, brittle wood of the outside of the building, looking out into the night on the edge of the window frame. I pressed my hands against the side of the house and pushed off, falling to the ground below me. I landed a few feet away from the crate I used to get into the house, feeling my ankle twist from under me. I cried out in pain, my throat scratching and burning. All I felt was a blinding pain in every part of my body at that point, but I was quickly pulled out of my daze when I heard another gunshot, followed by a blood-curdling, ear-piercing scream come from Ollie.
It was a sound that was so foreign to me; he had never sounded so terrified, so hopelessly scared and hurt in my entire time of knowing him. There was a lot of loud banging coming from inside, and lots of grunts and struggling. I curled up into the fetal position where I had landed and cried silently to myself, staring with an unblinking gaze at the window I leapt out of. I cried even harder, so hard that no noise came out and my chest spasmed as it forced every last tear out of my body when I heard another gunshot, then a thump, then silence. I squeezed my legs tightly and pushed my eyes into my knees, not being able to process what I had just heard. Drool poured over my lips and my nose was running like crazy, but I didn’t care enough to wipe any of it away. I had given up at that moment, which is why I also didn’t move when I heard footsteps make their way to the window. I sat there and waited for the neighbor to shoot me, for everything to go dark and for my brain to shut off in an instant. At that point, I was ready for anything if it meant not having to go on without my best friend. My brother.
“The hell are you doing? Get back to your house, dipshit!”
My head bolted up when I heard that and I was met with the sweaty, pale, blood-splattered face of Ollie, leaning weakly against the window frame. He was panting like a dog, but I saw him try to play his lips into some semblance of a smile. I felt like such a crybaby, because I couldn’t stop myself from crying out of relief. I forced myself to stand, almost collapsing from how badly my legs were shaking.
“Are you okay?” I yelled, each word I spoke making me cry harder.
“He shot me. He shot my foot. It hurts. A lot. But I’m gonna be okay, I’ll go down the stairs and bust the front door open. Go inside and call the cops. Get an ambulance too.” He looked down for a moment, presumably inspecting his injured foot. He lowered a little, seeming like his body was about to give out on him. “Fuck, I’m gonna puke.”
“I’ll go get help,” I said, then turned around and sprinted towards my house. My ankle hurt like a bitch, but more adrenaline kicked in as I ran, so I quickly forgot about the pain. I was crying, yet smiling at the same time as I ran. All the terror I had just experienced melted away into incredible comfort knowing that Ollie was okay. He even called me a dipshit, so I knew he was still sort of himself, even if he was badly hurt. I laughed to myself when I thought about that. There was nothing I wanted to do more than hug Ollie; I wanted to sit on the couch and just hold onto him like I was going to lose him. Because I really thought I had lost him. But first I knew that he needed help with something that I couldn’t help with, so I dragged myself out of my mind and focused on reality again.
I burst through the backdoor and was met with my mom putting paper grocery bags on the kitchen island. She looked at me with a slight smile, which quickly faded when she realized the state I was in.
“April? Honey, what’s wrong, what happened?” She asked quickly, releasing the bags and jogging over to me. She held my face with her hands and paled faster than I had ever seen anyone go pale. I was still breathing heavily with tear stains on my face and blood caked on my arms. I would be terrified if I saw my child run through the door looking like that, too. I could hardly bring up the right words to say.
“Police… call the cops… the police… Ollie needs amb- an ambulance.” I stretched my arm out and pointed out the backdoor. “The house. The neighbor, he’s killing people. Us, he almost killed us.”
“What’s going on?” My dad said as he came around the corner, lifting his reading glasses onto his head. My mom looked back at him and moved her hands to my shoulders.
“Call 911. Get an ambulance. The neighbor did something.” She spoke matter-of-factly, despite her voice wavering heavily. Not waiting another second to question the situation, my dad nodded and raced over to the landline on the other side of the kitchen. As he talked to the police, my mom held onto me tightly and caressed my head, trying to help me calm down. I was shaking like a leaf, and despite my mom’s calming words and shushing, I just couldn’t sit still. I was like that until the backdoor swung open forcefully and I saw a beat-up, bloody, utterly exhausted Ollie stumble in.
“Ollie!” I said, breaking free from my mom’s hug and running over to him. I hugged him tighter than I had ever hugged him before, letting his curls dance around my fingers and the beads of sweat come off on my hand, the heavy rising and falling of his chest and he panted into my ear. I didn’t care how gross and dirty he must’ve been. I was just happy he was alive.
“April, hi,” he said, his voice hoarse and weak. He returned the hug, thereby letting off most of his weight onto me. “I need to sit down.” I looked down at his foot, remembering what he said, and had to bite my tongue to keep myself from screaming. His foot was nothing more than a bloody stump with the hoodie he previously had around his waist tied as tightly as it could go around it. I nearly let go of him, but gained composure again when I felt him start falling. My mom rushed over and helped me get Ollie to a chair at the kitchen table, and my dad, having been done with the call to the police for a few minutes now, ran off somewhere else in the house. I didn’t know what he was doing until he came back with a box of gauze and a bottle of antiseptic.
“This won’t hold up for long, but it should help, at least until the ambulance gets here. You’ll be alright, son, just hold on for a minute.” He crouched down in front of Ollie and untied his hoodie, grimacing at the sight the piece of clothing was covering.
His foot was still there, sort of. He had three toes left and a giant chunk of the side of his foot had been taken off, and you could see a bit of bone sticking out, but you could tell it used to be a foot. I had to look away and was only able to offer the comfort of my hand to hold when my dad said “This is gonna hurt, kid,” before pouring the antiseptic onto the wound. My mom rubbed Ollie’s back as he screamed, the sound coming out gritty and rough, as if his voice were already gone completely and he was forcing some foreign exclamation of pain out of his torn-up throat. He squeezed my hand so hard that by the time my dad had put the gauze on, I could see clear fingernail prints in the palm of my hand. It hurt, but I knew I was in nowhere near as much pain as Ollie was. When I looked back at him he was crying, holding his free hand up to his face. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and cried again with him, but I didn’t have any more tears left.
The cops came pretty quickly, but then again I wasn’t really keeping track of time at that point. They ushered Ollie into the ambulance as soon as they saw the state he was in, and they brought me in there with him as well, letting me sit on the edge of the car with my feet dangling outside the open doors. The paramedics did a quick check-up on me and cleaned up the scratches on my elbows, placing two big bandaids over them. Once they were done, I hopped out of the car and watched as they sped off to the hospital with my best friend, who I thought was bleeding to death at the time. The cops remained and asked me a bunch of questions about what we had been doing and what we saw in the house, and I hold them the whole truth about everything, from the moment we decided to sneak into the house to when I saw Ollie get stuck in the hole in the floor before jumping out the window. Unsurprisingly, the cops immediately left to go investigate the house, and when they came back they reported what they found to us. The neighbor was lying on the ground, his head — or what was left of it — resting on the first step of the stairs. It was clear that his cause of death was being shot by the shotgun at quite a close range.
“Ollie,” I muttered. “Ollie got him.” I looked up at the cops. “But he had to! He was going to die if he didn’t!”
“We know, sweetheart,” one of the cops said. He was tall and had pasty skin with a handlebar mustache, and he looked vaguely preoccupied with the note he was writing. “We aren’t gonna punish him for that. The only thing we care about right now is making sure that foot of his gets patched up.”
“When will I get to see him? When will he come home?” The officer clicked his tongue and shook his head.
“Not sure yet, honey. His foot got pretty messed up, so it’s gonna take awhile to help fix him up.”
“But he’s going to be okay,” a lady officer with light brown skin and dark coily hair pulled up into a bun said, placing her hands on my shoulders gently. “He’ll be back to you in no time. And I’m sure he’d love a visit from you at the hospital.” She smiled at me, and I somehow managed to smile back.
The investigation concluded not even a week after the initial incident, but I wasn’t allowed to learn anything super in-depth about it, which I thought was sorta bullshit. But essentially, the neighbor had several bodies hidden around his old barn house that he never tore down, and all those crates, including the ones outside and the ones I stood on to get inside the building, were full of the leftover bones from his victims. Everyone involved believes his main motive was simply to feed his “pets” he had gathered, aka the vultures. It’s such a screwed-up situation, and I hate that we couldn’t get any deeper detail about the whole ordeal, but I guess I’m just glad all that shit is over.
Ollie stayed in the hospital for eight days before he was released. I visited him every single one of those days. His wound hadn’t gotten infected, which was incredible, considering the cleanliness of the old house. He ended up having to get his foot amputated at the ankle, and he was given a prosthetic one to replace it. Naturally, he wasn’t very happy about it, but I tried my best to cheer him up, saying he’d look like some kind of cool cyborg superhero. That made him smile, and throughout the duration of his stay we made up a story about the boy with a bionic foot who now had incredible kicking strength and beat up a bunch of bad guys. He also told me what went down after I had jumped out the window. Basically, the guy had shot the foot that was stuck in the hole, which sort of helped him out by letting him get the rest of his leg out of the floor. Before the guy could shoot at him again he grabbed the barrel of the gun and pointed it at the ceiling, repeatedly punching the man in the stomach, then in the throat, until he was able to make the neighbor lose his grip on the gun. He fell back to the ground and aimed at his head and shot blindly, killing him instantly. I was so taken aback by the story, and all I could do was tell him how awesome he was over and over again. By the time he was released, he gained a little bit of himself back and started making jokes about his foot, which always cracked me up. He was taking a very positive outlook on it, and I was proud of him for that.
Not everything was peachy again, though. He quit wanting to do taxidermy because it reminded him of the event too much. He also had days where he’d just sit quietly for a few minutes, staring at his artificial foot. He was very open about his feelings with me, however, and would tell me that he just felt off. He felt different and thought he was some type of freak.
“Freak? Ollie, you’re the coolest fucking kid I know,” I told him once, about a week after he was released. He laughed.
“I thought you didn’t like using language like that.”
“I don’t care! I don’t know how else to express just how cool of a person you are. You’re different now, sure, but you’re still you. You’re Oliver Hartford, the kid who shot a guy in the face and escaped with a blown-off foot. You’re Ollie, the guy that saved my life, and the guy I’ll never be able to thank enough for still being here with me.” Ollie smiled genuinely for the first time that whole day and looked at me.
“Thanks, April. I’m really glad to be here with you too.”
Now that taxidermy wasn’t his thing anymore (which I ended up quitting, too, though I still occasionally helped my dad with it when he would work on a project), Ollie switched to poetry. I guess those English classes really did rub off on him. He was shy to share his poems at first, but he eventually got to the point where he would be so excited to read them to me that he’d sit me down and make me listen right then and there, no matter what I was doing. And I did listen. I listened to every word he said and appreciated it, not just because he was actually an incredible writer with great description and emotion in his work, but because I just liked hearing his voice. I liked hearing him excited and like himself again. I liked hearing him alive.
Here’s a poem of his that he read to me and gave me a copy of:
“You are the green in the trees
The blue water flooding the pond
The yellow beams of sun
The one that makes the blood spill worth it
And even through the darkest, inkiest nights
And the cloudy, sunless days
Your caring hands hold me close
All of my flesh and all of my metal
And it makes all the blood spill worth it”