Retribution by Guy Riessen

Release date: June 20, 2017

Subgenre: Horror

About Retribution: 

 

Brian Lockewood grew up knowing the pain of abuse and loss, but his own turn toward hatred and violence will teach him that retribution is a dish best served cold...and wet...and filled with rats.

A Dark Psychological Supernatural Horror Novelette

Excerpt:

 

His flashlight beam caught hints of rats scurrying into the shadows as he stepped into the room.

Goddamn rats! Fucking creepy-ass shit.

He shuddered as he shined the light back and forth to make sure none were waiting to leap on him. Using the head of the flashlight, he pulled one of the hanging cabinet doors open. Inside were moldering piles of soggy cereal. Rats had chewed holes in the boxes and their contents had leaked and turned to viscous sludge in the humidity. Cockroaches scuttled back into the cracks as the light fell across them.

Only thing worse than disease ridden rats are nasty, swarming cockroaches.

The sink had a slow drip. Plink. Brian was sure the porcelain basin had been white at one time, but now a green slime had grown up from the drain and around the faucet. The rest of the bottom of the basin was brown with minerals from the water slowly dripping into it. He stared into the sink, watching a drip grow slowly larger, hanging to the lip of the faucet like a transparent bulbous sack. Plink.

***

Just a month after Brian’s ninth birthday, which his mom celebrated by baking him his absolute favorite, chocolate cake, Brian stood next to their kitchen sink. There was a slow drip from the faucet. Plink. Mom had cleaned all the dishes and neatly stacked them on the drying rack.

Dad said the kitchen must always be clean enough to eat off the floor.

Or he’d goddamn make them eat off the floor.

Plink. Another drip landed in the clean, white porcelain-enameled basin.

On the table where Brian ate breakfast every morning before school, there was an empty bourbon bottle. It was tipped on its side. A glass was next to it, a slick of bourbon on the bottom.

It was warm that day, but since it was Fall, there was a stiff breeze blowing outside. The windows of the kitchen were open and the cool air moved across the room. A shadow moved slowly across the table, cast from the sun coming in through the screen door.

Twisting slowly, his mom’s feet dangled above the clean linoleum floor. There was a belt looped through the metal light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. It was one of his dad’s belts.

Her face was black and purple, lumpy, and her left eye bulged out like a grotesque caricature of someone surprised. But her right eye just peeked out through a slit where her swollen eyelids didn’t quite meet. She had her makeup up on, like dad always wanted, but her lipstick was smeared on the right side and made it look like her mouth was stretched out. Her lips were puffy under the red lipstick and her tongue was a dark purple and lolled from between her teeth. There was a pool of fluid under her feet, one of the kitchen chairs was tipped over, and the room smelled of bourbon and urine.

The police found his dad down at the bar two blocks over. He said he didn’t know anything about what happened. He’d been at the unemployment office all morning, sat in the park that was on the way home for maybe a few hours, then went to the bar. He said he hadn’t been home since 9am.

They ruled it a suicide. Said his mom took her own life.

Brian knew there was no lipstick on the glass slicked with bourbon. But he couldn’t tell anyone. His dad would know.

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About Guy Riessen:

Guy Riessen is an American author of contemporary dark fiction spanning the science fiction, horror, fantasy and crime genres. Born in 1967 in South Dakota, he grew up in the Southern California beach town of Huntington Beach. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1985, graduated with a degree in English from UC Berkeley, and has been living in the wild lands north of San Francisco ever since. After nearly two decades of creating artwork in the visual effects industry for feature films, he returned to his first passion: writing speculative fiction.

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