Sins of the Family Chapter Twenty-Three

I gotta go.” Mike shifted with discomfort in the back seat, pressing against Bob and Jill. He belched.
“Me too.” Randy’s dull eyes glanced away from the yellow line down the middle of the highway through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Harold watched John’s shoulders tense. Stopping at the request of the brothers must be a frustration. Perhaps he would be able to use this wedge to tear them apart before something else terrible happened.
“Later. We must find Pharaoh,” John said.
“If we don’t stop I’m gonna go all over myself.” Mike’s face twisted into a childish pout.
Hunching his shoulders and pulling his legs up, Randy glared at John.
“It’s mean not letting us go.”
As the car rounded a corner, its headlights shone on the empty parking lot of the New Found Gap overlook which straddled the border between Tennessee and North Carolina.
“I gotta go,” Mike said again.
“Very well.” Sighing in resignation, John pulled into the parking lot. “Rest rooms are in a building down that path on the left.”
“Oh boy.” Mike laughed as he tumbled out of the car, followed by Randy. In a few moments they returned. “The door’s locked.”
“Go behind the building,” John said, leaning his head out the window.
Harold eyed John, wondering what he could say to make him return to the hospital.
“You look tired.”
“Why did you say that?”
“Because I care about you.”
“No one cares about Moses but his own people.” He gazed at a large stone terrace overlook with a plaque commemorating its dedication by Franklin D. Roosevelt back in the nineteen forties.
“And God?”
“Of course. Yo He Wa.”
“But Yo He Wa is god of Cherokee. Yahweh is God of Moses.”
“You can’t fool me by playing word games.” He shook his head.
“You really want your father to care about you.”
John ignored him.
“If you let me take you back to the hospital, I can help you with your feelings about your father.” After an extended silence, Harold glanced in the back seat at Bob and Jill, deciding it was time to stop reasoning with John and instead concentrate on escape. He never lost hope with a patient before, but John transcended his role of pitiful victim of childhood head trauma and of unstable parents to a new identity of crazed messiah, bent on destroying anyone who crossed his path. In this hour of darkness and isolation, escape was his only answer.
“May we stretch our legs?” he asked.
“Wait until Joshua and Caleb return,” John replied, still not turning his head to look at Harold.
A few minutes later Mike and Randy, laughing and punching each other, ran up the asphalt path toward the parking lot.
“You want to stretch your legs too, don’t you?” Harold looked into the back seat, peering into Bob’s eyes.
“Yeah. Sure.” Bob looked at Jill. “You want to stretch your legs?”
She squinted in bemusement and then nodded.
“Yes, I need to walk.”
Harold opened the door and slid out as the brothers, still trying to zip their pants, bounced up.
“You gotta go, too?” Mike said with his usual open, smiling face.
“No.” John leaned over to look out the door. “The doctor wanted to stretch his legs.”
“Oh yeah?” Randy stared at Harold.
“Yes,” Jill added, stepping from the back seat. “We’ve been on the road a long time.”
Harold surveyed the group before him, an innocent couple and three escaped mental patients, all thrown together because of his incompetence. He could not shake the words from his father’s lips that night many years ago in his Long Island home.
“Do as you wish. You always have. But mind you, one day you’ll make a fatal mistake in a diagnosis, and you’ll remember what I told you this night.”
His memory was as sharp as that crystal shard which pierced his finger. The red of the blood drop glistening in the fireplace blaze and the ice blue of his father’s disapproving disdainful eyes crowded rational thought from his mind. His thoughts compelled Harold to throw himself against Randy, who fell into Mike, crashing them into the car’s fender.
“Get out of here!” he ordered Bob and Jill.
They stood there frozen in shock, as though they had become inured to the violence they had witnessed in the last few hours.
“Run!”
Bob grabbed Jill’s hand and ran down the asphalt path to the restrooms and threw her down the gentle slope down into trees and underbrush, following her as she tumbled through the shadows. John scooted across the seat and out the passenger door.
“After them!”
Harold stumbled to his feet and turned to shove Randy, who sprang like a young panther, back into the larger, leonine Mike. Harold sprinted out of the parking lot and spotted flickering headlights rounding the knoll from the North Carolina side of the mountain and scurried for the highway.
“I hate him,” Randy muttered as he tried to untangle himself from his brother’s flailing arms and legs.
“Get up!” John kicked both teen-agers. “Don’t let him escape!”
Wildly waving his arms, Harold situated himself in the middle of the New Found Gap road, but the approaching automobile veered off around him and plunged into the darkness of the twists of the mountain highway, winding its way to Gatlinburg. Before he could move again, he sensed his legs being pulled out from under him, his face smashing the cold hard asphalt tasting the briny blood gushing from his ruptured lip.
“Gotcha,” Randy said.
“It’s useless to fight us, doctor.” John huffed as he caught up with them.
Rolling over, Harold thrust his foot into Randy’s head, bloodying his nose. As the boy squealed in pain and grabbed his face, Harold jumped up, pushed John back into Mike, who had at last arrived, and turned to dash in desperation after the vanishing red taillights. Perhaps, Harold told himself, if he ran fast enough he could lose himself in the mountain’s shadows.
Randy struggled to his feet, wiping blood on his shirt, and made another flying leap at Harold, this time landing on his shoulders, dragging him down. His boney tailbone jabbing into the doctor’s lower back, Randy reached over the smooth top of Harold’s shaved head, stuck two fingers into his nostrils and violently yanked backwards, exposing his neck. With his free hand, Randy pulled out the hunting knife and with a swift motion slashed Harold’s throat.
Struggling against Randy’s grip, Harold could only burble before his body wilted, his consciousness going blank, no longer haunted by the visions of his father’s ice cold, disapproving eyes.

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