Tears always failed to capture true sorrow, for they would eventually run out. Gage's eyes ached, and he wiped at them. Bloody light still washed over them, indifferent to him pain as his parents. Moxie, he thought, and his stomach twisted. I have to protect her. How do I tell her?

"Dad," he muttered, and his lips pressed together.

Brian's face rose in his mind. Slack, stupefied features still held the directionless anger, which always fell on others. No matter his failure, it was someone else to blame. He did this to Mom, us, Gage cursed. Momma found her freedom: she is gone.

I should tell Dad, Gage thought, and knew nothing could save him from his fists today. "He can go to the Devil," he muttered, but clamped his hands over his mouth; wide eyes searched the room. Cheri offered no word of reproach, and his father was still in the master bedroom. Brian's prophetic, apocalyptic proclamations seeped through the walls though were unintelligible. Although his body quaked, he felt a bitter ease.

He told Cheri he loved her, and he slipped out into the hall. The hall was empty. Moxie sprang about in another part of the house, while swearing to uphold justice. Below her words, the house creaked and popped under the weight of ice. Last of the day's sunlight splashed across the hall's end. From orange red, it died to black. "I killed and killed," Brain swore, and the words drifted over the still air.

Gage shivered, slowed, but drew closer to the door. He raised his arm, paused, but he let out a long sigh. His hand shook, when he knocked, so knuckles scrapped the wood. He rolled his eyes, but a shiver pranced up his spine. The next knock was still low. Nothing, blasphemous utterances mangled the silence in return. As he raised a hand to try again, a liquid laugh bubbled through the wood.

"Dad," he gasped. Gage wallowed. "Dad, I have something to tell you," he said, and tears rose.

"Farley," Brian growled, lost in the desert. Red lines raced over his skin, though no blood dripped from the razor thin cuts. They sealed shut. Bruised purple light was cast across the ceiling everywhere he looked. Something slithered across his vision. His eyes no longer ached, but they roamed of their own volition. Brian gazed out on the desert, yet the sniper eluded him. "That shooter is out there," he observed in a slow, measured tone, "just waiting."

"Dad," he stammered, "it is Mom." He sounds like he is gargling with a throat full of worms, Gage shook off the image.

Brian frowned, and looked about the empty land. Corporal Farley smiled, held out the pack of cigarettes, and shook one out. He took it, and Jessie lit it for him. Although his body was in the master bedroom, his mind was in the arid lands. "It was never for oil," he said, and considered his hands. "I killed and I killed," he looked at the Corporal, "and it was for opium." The words squeezed out of his throat, pinched off by his lips.

Gage stared at the door, lip jerked up in a twitch. It doesn't even sound like him. "I…Dad, it is Mom," he willed himself to be still.

"It flooded the streets," Brian said, swore he heard someone talking. "They flooded our land with cheap opioids!" he laughed at the confession. Corporal Jessie Farley smiled, nodded, but by then, he was long dead. "We got Star Spangled eyes, wanted vengeance," he wailed, "and they sent us to the meat grinder. Came back, called us baby killers and fascists, but they broke us! I escaped! BUT, I didn't, they got me too. All of Lear County rotted down to the foundations, the roots, Man, and those Grays still live at the top. They look down on us! He looked at Jessie, whose face leered like a skull.

"Dad," he pleaded pale skin ghastly.

Brian's skin pulled from muscle. He frowned, but only the desert remained. A flash of the sun on a lens glittered in the distance. He moved, yet like all nightmares, it was always too slow. Farley's right side of his head exploded in a fantastic spray of bone, brains, and hair. Like a bloated, long dead animal on a road fill with gases, it blew apart. Inside of the rotted skull were nasty, little things that squirmed, which glowed with an eldritch, bruised purple light. Blood splattered across Brain's face, though it was too thick, congealed. The Corporal fell back, yet his body stopped inches above the hot earth. Like a puppet on strings, Farley stood back up. Purple light blazed out of his one good eye, as he clamped a companionable hand on Brian's shoulder. With the dead man's laughter, strange maggots fell to the earth with too human screams. "The Gallows King comes," Brian muttered, "the Riotous of Violet."

Gage recoiled. This low utterance from Brian profaned the air. Goosebumps broke over cold skin, and gray brushed across his vision. He pinched his arm, and felt the world grow solid. "I," he pleaded, looked for Moxie, but she was still in her playhouse. Please, this one time, Gage thought, let someone help me.

Skin held Brian above the bed, and veins were hooked in the veiling. Muscles crept over the bed. Little eyes stared out in hate from the flesh upon the mattress. Mouths opened in the meat to whisper mad blasphemies. His eyes melted, and the bruised purple flame flowed out in a tendril of eldritch light. Inside of the glow was the word, which he had tried to recreate. The paper already crumbled to a plum-purple ash.

Into the floor flames and flesh crept, grew and expanded. Veins pulled a loose board open, so it could squeeze into the house. The house groaned as Brian's body clung to it. Through the walls and spaces the cosmic utterance crawled in a baptism of bruised purple brilliance. Gage looked about the hall, as the house shifted and groaned. The man became the house, flesh melded with timbers. Meat bit into metal, and the alien glow spread into every corner.