Elliott Read online

  Elliott

  A Vampire Hunter’s Tale Book 3

  ID Johnson

  Copyright © 2018 by ID Johnson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  To Danielle

  Thanks for all of your support!

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Also by ID Johnson

  Chapter 1

  Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1944

  The tinkling of glass fragments against the linoleum floor mingled with the incessant wailing coming from the bassinet, and even though one cracked eye proclaimed it was not yet dawn, Elliott Sanderson pulled himself from a troubled sleep to investigate. Tripping over a Tonka truck with three wheels he’d left on the floor next to the bed, he shuffled his feet in an attempt to reclaim the big toe on his left foot that insisted on poking out through the hole in his sock as if it might arrive at the problem first and offer a solution so that the rest of his five-year-old body could go back to sleep.

  Most of the commotion was coming from the kitchen, which wasn’t too surprising. He couldn’t tell time, but the black hands on the clock over the cigarette burn covered couch weren’t pointing anywhere near the numbers they usually did whenever his mom yanked him out of bed in the morning, so he thought it must still be nighttime. Also, the only light in the living room came from the bare bulb on the chipped lamp next to said couch, the shade having met its demise the last time his mother threw something at Bob—maybe not the last time if the sound of glass shattering was any indicator, maybe the time before this.

  There was a fine line between investigating and being “nosy,” and Elliott did not want to be accused of the latter, so he stepped lightly, which was hard for him as he was a hefty boy. His mom called him "chunky” but he preferred to think of himself as a logger, a lumberjack, who needed to be big and strong like the trees he chopped down. His mom said there was a difference between being big and strong and being fat and lazy, and the sooner he learned he was the second choice, the quicker he’d accept he wasn’t ever going to amount to anything either. Just like his father. Whoever that was.

  “God dammit, Arlene,” Bob’s angry voice shouted from the kitchen. “I don’t know how you live like this. You’re a goddamn drunk!” The slur in his voice let Elliott know he was either a hypocrite or had taken too many of the Army issued pills he’d been prescribed to fight the pain in his leg, the one the Germans had nearly taken off, the one that had sent him home before the war had ended. When he wasn’t around, Mom often said he had shot himself because he was a lazy coward, just like every man she’d ever met. Elliott had asked if that included him, and she’d assured him it did. He had wondered how she knew so much about the type of man he would be when he wasn’t even in kindergarten yet.

  The sound of his mother’s angry voice shouting back caused his brain to ache. She was definitely drunk again. There was another screech of glass and then the sound of Bob’s uneven footsteps as his cane clunked against the black and white linoleum tiles, and then his mother started to make that half-scream, half-crying sound she always made when Bob was hurting her.

  Torn between going to make that man stop hitting his mom, even though he knew he’d catch the raw end of the deal when his mom realized he was sticking his snotty nose where it didn’t belong, and going to see what was wrong with his baby brother, Jimmy, Elliott stood in his indecisive state for long enough that another clatter came from the kitchen and the thumping of someone hitting the floor broke his irresolute state. Bob had pushed her again. The sounds of her shouting at him, throwing dishes or whatever she could get her hands on, rang through the air as Bob’s step-thump, step-thump drew closer to the living room.

  He rounded the corner and spotted Elliott standing there, halfway into the room but still in the shadow from the unlit hallway near the two bedrooms. The anger rolled off of Bob as his narrow eyes searched the room. He grabbed at his hat off of the bureau and then stared directly into Elliott’s green eyes. The boy took a step back. “You hear that baby crying?” he snarled.

  Elliott’s head bobbed up and down, his dark, curly hair flipping around like a mop in its unkempt state.

  “You take care of my son, boy,” Bob demanded as he settled his hat on top of his thinning blond hair. “God knows your ma won’t.”

  Once again, Elliott nodded, his hands folded in front of himself, as he tried to stay as small as possible. Unlike Mom’s last boyfriend, Gill, and the three or four before that, Bob Baker had never hurt Elliott, but there was a first time for everything. The first time Gill had punched him in the face for asking for another piece of chicken at dinner, he hadn’t seen that coming either. He learned. He learned real quick.

  Bob took another look around the living room. “What a shithole,” he muttered. Elliott’s eyes followed Bob’s over the discarded newspapers, broken furniture, and worn orange carpet covered in enough trash-confetti one of those tinker day parades may have just passed through. He’d never noticed before, but Bob may have had a point.

  Lumbering off toward the door, Bob didn’t look back as Elliott’s mom staggered into the room, tripping over her own feet and grabbing at the bureau, shouting for him to come back and that she was sorry. A picture of Elliott’s grandparents slipped from atop the desk and shattered on the floor, causing his mom to say that really bad word she had slapped him in the face for saying last week, demanding to know where he got such a filthy mouth. She wasn’t cursing the broken picture, though. She was clutching at her foot, more swears coming out of her mouth than Elliott had heard in as long as he could remember. The couch was in the way, so he couldn’t see what the problem was, but he imagined she had cut herself on the broken glass.

  “Do you need any help, Mommy?” Elliott asked, taking a few steps toward her, though he was leery of cutting himself as well. That big toe wasn’t well protected out on its scouting mission.

  “No, I don’t want any goddamn help, not from you anyway, Chunk!” she muttered, releasing her foot and stumbling into the sofa, another curse filling the air. “Will you shut that goddamn baby up!”

  The sound of Jimmy crying had become such a part of Elliott’s existence the last six months, he hardly even noticed it anymore. When he woke up in the morning, Jimmy was crying. When he ate his breakfast, lunch if he was lucky, and maybe some dinner (or tore through the cupboards and found whatever was edible once his mom and Bob were passed out) Jimmy was crying. When he crawled under his thin, moth-eaten blanket at night, Jimmy was crying. The noise had become the background music of his life, much like the old records he’d once heard his grandfather play on the Victrola when they’d visited his big house in Tulsa three Christmas’s ago.

  But now, he realized Jimmy’s crying probably wasn’t supposed to sound so shrill or be so constant. He wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to reach over the top of the crib, but he scurried into the bedroom Mom shared with Bob—well, had shared with him anyhow—to check on his baby brother.

  A big black bug with long antennas climbed the side of a bottle on the dresser, the same one Elliott had seen his mom pu
t there last Tuesday. Jimmy’s screeching was even louder in here. The dim nightlight across the room illuminated the crib, and he could see Jimmy had shit himself something awful. It covered his pajamas and stained the clown sheets on his mattress. The baby blanket the lady from the donation place had brought for him was kicked down to the end of the bed, but it looked like it had not escaped the shit storm.

  “Jesus, Jimmy,” Elliott muttered, gagging from the smell. “What happened?”

  Jimmy’s only answer was to continue to shriek.

  “Mommy, he pooped! A lot!” Elliott shouted.

  “Then change his goddamn diaper!” came her slurred response.

  Elliott had never changed a diaper before, and something told him he’d have to do more than just change Jimmy’s diaper under the circumstances, but his mother wasn’t going to be any help. Muttering under his breath about how gross this situation was, Elliott reached into the bed and found his fingertips couldn’t quite reach the wiggling, red-faced baby. He said that word he’d gotten in trouble for saying before, quietly enough he knew his mom couldn’t hear, and looked around for a solution.

  His mom’s stool, the one she sat on to put her makeup on every day, whether she was going out or not, seemed like a viable option, so he dragged it across the room and climbed on top of it. Carefully, he reached into the bed and plucked the baby up, holding him at arm’s length. Jimmy’s head flopped backward slightly, but then he began to scream again, and his body became so rigid, it came back forward.

  “Why you gotta scream all the time?” Elliott asked, taking his baby brother over to his mom’s unmade bed and laying him down on the sheets, shit and all. Once his hands were empty, he inspected them, grossed out that some of the poop had gotten on his thumb. He looked around and saw one of the cloths his mom used to wipe the baby whenever she did this herself and scraped the offensive goo off on it. Then, he grabbed a clean diaper and some pins from where his mom kept them and set about changing the baby’s diaper.

  It took him several minutes just to get the old nappy off, to clean his brother up the best he could without leaving to get water, and to get a new diaper on him. Several pokes in his thumb had taught him how not to use the pins. Elliott had been hopeful that changing the diaper would’ve gotten the child to stop screaming, but that was not the case. Putting him in new clothes hadn’t helped either.

  By the time Jimmy was cleaned and dressed, Elliott was about out of ideas. He looked around the room and spied the bottle. The bug was long gone, so he thought maybe that might make Jimmy feel better. Elliott went to pick it up, but it stuck slightly to the dresser, and he had to pull it off.

  Remembering what his grandpa had told him about spoiled milk, he took a whiff of it and nearly threw up. This bottle wasn’t going to work. “I’ll be right back, Jimmy,” Elliott said, looking at the squirmy baby on the bed. Realizing he was managing to work his way close to the edge, he went over and scooted the baby back to the middle of the bed and then took the stinky bottle into the kitchen.

  His mom was still sitting on the floor next to the broken picture, which she was clutching to her chest and sobbing. He knew she’d been really sad when his grandma had died a few years ago, and now that grandpa couldn’t really remember his daughter’s name anymore, they didn’t go and visit. Elliott’s mom looked less scary and more like a broken porcelain doll as blood dripped from her foot onto the orange carpet. She was twisting the ring on her finger, the special one her mother had given her. It was gold with a pink flower on it, and she wore it all the time.

  Careful of the glass, Elliott dropped to his knees next to her for a minute, the worn knees of his flannel pajama protecting him against any tiny bits he may not have seen. “Mommy?” he asked quietly, “is there anything I can do?”

  Arlene Howe didn’t say anything, only continued to cry.

  After a moment, Elliott patted her lovingly on the arm, took the stinky bottle into the kitchen, and tried to remember how to make a new one. Even though the lights were on when he walked in, there was a scurry of those same black and brown bugs across the counters when he entered the room, and Elliott shouted at them to, “Get!”

  He’d seen his mom make bottles lots of times, but he wasn’t sure how much water to put in and how much of Jimmy’s special milk. He wished he knew how to read so he could look at the can, but since he couldn’t, the words on the label didn’t help. He did his best to mix it so it looked the same as he remembered it. Turning on the stove to heat it wasn’t easy because the gas in the burner didn’t always catch. His mom cursed the burner almost as much as she cursed her children. It finally caught, though, and he poured the liquid in. He remembered you had to stir it the whole time. The one time Bob had made a bottle, his mom had screamed, “God dammit, Bob, you have to stir it, or it’ll burn!” So Elliott stirred the whole time until the milk seemed warm.

  Then, he had to find a clean bottle. The sink was full of bottles, but none of them were clean. He checked the cupboards but couldn’t find any there. With a sigh, he turned the water on in the sink, and holding his breath, he dumped the lumpy contents of the bottle he’d carried in with him into the sink. It smelled rancid, and the scent made him gag again, but he didn’t throw up, and for once he felt lucky there was nothing in his stomach. He used some soap and the bottle brush to clean out the bottle the best he could, but like the shit, there was only so much he could do. Once it was clean-ish, he carried it back over to the stove and poured the warm milk in.

  He’d watched his mom burn her arm lots of times checking to see if the milk was too hot. He really didn’t want to do that since it seemed to hurt, but he also didn’t want Jimmy to burn his mouth. Hopefully, cleaning the bottle had given it enough time to cool down. Scrunching up his face and peering at his wrist with one eye open, he shook a little bit of milk onto his arm. It was warm, but it didn’t hurt. Satisfied with his work, he double checked he’d turned the burner off and headed to the bedroom.

  How anyone could scream as much as his baby brother without losing their voice was beyond Elliott, but Jimmy was still screeching when he entered the room. He had worked his way back over to the edge of the bed, and one of his scrawny legs had kicked over the side. “Just in time, Jimbo,” the little boy muttered. Careful to avoid the shit spot on the sheets, Elliott, skootched the baby back toward the middle of the bed, which was big enough for two full grown people, even though the springs poked through in a few places, and popped the bottle into Jimmy’s mouth.

  The baby began to suck furiously on the nipple, as if he hadn’t eaten in years. “Good grief, Brother!” Elliott muttered. “You’re skinny now, but you keep eating like that, you’ll be a little piggy soon. Mommy will be calling you chunky, too.”

  Jimmy’s only answer was to suck down more of the milk. With one hand on the bottle, Elliott tucked his other arm under his head and let out a loud yawn. He couldn’t hear the sounds of his mom crying from the living room anymore and thought she might’ve passed out again. Elliott didn’t know what he would do when Jimmy needed another bottle or a clean diaper, but he thought he would probably be the one to figure it out. His head was full of worry as his eyelashes flickered down over his weary eyes a few times, and he finally nodded off, still grasping the bottle for his baby brother.

  Chapter 2

  Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1947

  “Jimmy, do your best to keep your Cheerios in the bowl,” Elliott scolded, picking up a wayward piece of cereal that had been flung across the table and tossing it back in.

  “Don’t matter anyway,” Jimmy protested. “This place is a mess anyhow.”

  Elliott resisted the urge to argue. It was futile. Besides, there was a chance Jimmy was right. As much as he tried to keep the place straightened up, there was only so much he could do. He wolfed down the last few bites of his own cereal, ignoring the fact that the milk was spoiled—as it had been yesterday and the day before—and took his bowl over to the sink, rinsing it before setting it inside. He�
�d have to wait until school was over before he could wash them. The bus would be here any minute.

  “You gotta hole in your knee,” Jimmy’s three-year-old voice sang out with a giggle.

  Elliott looked down. Of course, he knew these jeans had a hole in the knee. Both of his pairs of jeans had a hole in the knee and had had holes in the knee when the lady from the thrift store had brought them over. They were also too tight in the waist. But… he made due. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said grabbing his books off of the counter and shoving an apple in his jacket pocket. It had a bruise on it, but it would be better than nothing. Hopefully, it would tide him over until he got home, and then he could figure out what to make him and Jimmy for dinner. If there was anything. He’d worry about that later.

  “When’s Mommy getting up?”

  “Hell if I know,” Elliott replied.

  “You’re not supposed to say that word!”

  “Hell, hell, hell!” Elliott shrieked as he headed out of the room. As much as he did for his little brother, the least the boy could do was show a little bit of respect. He didn’t, though, not most of the time.

  “I’m telling Mommy!” Jimmy shouted at Elliott’s back. He crossed the living room and pushed open the screen door, slamming it behind him. It was hot outside, and it would do just as well for the front door to stay open.

  “Like she’d care,” he muttered under his breath. He could hear the school bus heading up the road and made his way to the bus stop where a couple of other kids were already standing. The snickering started well before he joined them.