Seven Deadly Tales of Terror by Bryan Smith

found himself in the heart of Murfreesboro. He was jittery and his nerves kept yelling at him to go faster and get this over with, but he kept a lid on his fear and mostly stuck to the posted speed limits. Occasionally he went a little faster than that, especially on side streets, where the posted limits were often absurdly low. The key here was in not doing anything to arouse the suspicion of any law enforcement types. Yeah, speeding was a bad idea, but if you went too slow in certain areas you could get mistaken for an overly cautious drunk driver.
    Luke navigated his way through a maze of familiar streets and neighborhoods, bittersweet memories from a lifetime ago assailing him in the process. He had grown up here. Driving through the area in the dead of night—something he hadn’t done in a very long time—was a strange experience. It was like traveling through a haunted museum of the past. His mind easily conjured images of his youthful self, flying down these streets on his Schwinn. The memory was so vivid he could almost hear the flapping sound made by the baseball cards wedged into the spokes of his bicycle’s wheels.
    The Wilhoite home was at the end of a quiet street in one of the town’s older residential areas. The houses here mainly one-story ranch-style houses built many decades earlier. Many of the families who lived in the neighborhood had been entrenched here for generations. Luke cut the truck’s headlights and slowed down as he neared the house, approaching it with an abundance of caution. He heaved a sigh of relief when he realized there were no lights on inside, making it likely no one was up awaiting young Calvin’s return. It also meant Calvin’s excursion to his place tonight had probably been a lone-wolf act on his part unsanctioned by Stump or anyone else in the family. It would make doing what he had to do a lot easier.
    He pulled into the gravel driveway, eased the door shut after getting out of the truck, and let himself into the house with Calvin’s key. Once he was inside, he snapped the flashlight beam on and performed a careful search of the premises. It didn’t take long. He found Stump Wilhoite and Wilma, his wife, sound asleep in the master bedroom. They were the only people in the house. Everything was falling into place with such shocking ease it was almost possible to believe it was all preordained. Like it was God’s will. It was an idea he seized upon with pathetic desperation. These people had unjustly persecuted him for a thing he hadn’t done for a long, long time. Looked at in that light, this was just a regrettably brutal way of setting things right again.
    Stump began to stir as Luke came into the room, making sleepy, half-aware sounds without coming to full consciousness. Luke shoved the flashlight into the waistband of his jeans, jerked the pillow out from under Stump’s head, and jammed it down over his face. The old man did wake up then, uttering a startled, muffled shriek from beneath the pillow. Luke pressed the barrel of the gun against the pillow and said, “You did this. You made it happen.”
    He squeezed the trigger.
    Stump stopped moving.
    Wilma came awake then and sat up with a terrified gasp. Luke climbed onto the bed and drilled a gloved fist straight into the center of her face. Her nose broke with an audible snap and she flopped backward as blood erupted from her nostrils. Luke grabbed her pillow and pressed it down over her face. Rather than firing the gun again, he straddled her and held the pillow down until she stopped moving. He then tossed the pillow aside and checked her pulse. When he was satisfied that she was truly dead, he went back out to the living room and peered out at the front yard through a parted curtain. Nothing was happening out there. He nonetheless stood there an additional several minutes to be certain police weren’t on the way.
    When he was sure no one had called in a report of the single shot he had fired, Luke went out to