Read Online Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke - Free Book Online

smile, her
laughter on the phone, all the nights they’d lain in bed together
talking about the future…all gone, all stolen from him.
    Sour candy trumps
chocolate.
    “ Well, wait…did you want to
get a coffee or a sandwich or something?”
    “ Some other
time.”
    “ Okay, well, please take
care of yourself.”
    “ I will.”
    He waved a hand at her without looking
back and scurried away, his face turned toward the strip mall
storefronts in a feeble attempt to dissuade the attention of the
woman currently cruising up alongside him in her car.
    As he feared, it had the opposite
effect.
    “ Mr. Pendleton?” Detective
Marsh called to him. “Might I have a word?”
     
     
    9. Prison
     
     
    Four months to the day he first
encountered the boy at Walmart, the last of Phil Pendleton’s teeth
fell out. He watched the blackened incisor rattle in the sink and
tumble down the drain and felt nothing. There was no blood. His
hair had thinned to the point where he could see his scabrous pate
but this had also ceased to disturb him, for he had, after the
latest foiled attempt to escape, decided on a course of action he
was sure would work.
    Today it would end, either for him or
the boy or both, but either way, here the nightmare stopped.
Because despite the torture he’d been put through, the pain and
loss he did not believe he had done anything to deserve, he had
tried to be a decent person, tried to stay within the confines of
morality. And all it had gotten him was more suffering.
    He raised his face to the mirror and
saw a hollow shell of a man, little more than a bleached-out husk.
He was almost dead, whatever cancer the boy and his guardians had
given him rotting him from the inside out, which meant that soon
he, like Mrs. Bennings, would be of no more use to them and they
would send him off to die. And once he was gone, they’d find
another host, another poor helpless soul to destroy.
    Phil was fine with the first part. He
longed for death now. The second part? No. With the last ounce of
his energy, he was going to do everything in his power to make sure
this never happened to anyone again. A feeble part of him was
driven by the notion that maybe, just maybe if he succeeded in
killing the child, it would end the cycle and reverse all that had
been done to him. At night, in what fitful sleep his addled body
and mind allowed, he fantasized about waking up to find himself
lying in his own bed, Lori’s arm across his chest as she slept. He
would run to the mirror and find he looked like his old self again,
never dashingly handsome, but no dog either, and my God how content
he’d be to be just average again. The pictures on the walls would
show his family and friends and Lori and no towheaded Amish-clad
spawn of Satan, and the collective memories of everyone he knew
would be restored. He would return to work, get that goddamn
promotion and save up just enough money to marry Lori.
    Maybe they’d even have a
child.
    This last thought always woke him with
a snort of laughter on his lips that never lasted long before it
devolved into weeping. With the return of cruel reality came the
hate and desperation, and the thoughts of murder.
    Five times he’d tried to escape the
house and the boy. Each time he’d been caught. The first three
times, Marsh had brought him home after being alerted to his
absence by the boy (“panicked to find his father gone”), or else
some concerned neighbor or storeowner who didn’t like the look of
“some vagrant guy” wandering around town. That it was hardly a
detective’s job to round up vagrants didn’t matter. Phil Pendleton
was a special case. Special enough for the universe to bend around
him in order to stop him from getting away.
    The fourth time nobody had stopped
him, at least not in person. He’d managed to make it out of the
house and down the driveway, this time in the dead of night, when
his legs abruptly quit working and he dropped like a stone to the
pavement, chipping two