Chapter 2. Unwanted Guests.

Silas tried to stand, but his knees refused to answer his demands, and he fell back to the bed. Pain jolted through him, but with the aid of the cane propped up near his nightstand, Silas managed pull himself to his feet. After steadying himself, Silas opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out his old Colt 1911 pistol.

He had turned in the one he had been issued to him in the Army all those years ago but had bought this one once back in the civilian world and had kept it for over half a century. Silas knew it was loaded, but he pushed back the slide slightly just to make sure a round was chambered, the safety was off, and that it was ready to rock. He had seven rounds plus the one in the chamber to work with.

Out of habit, he pulled two other loaded magazines from the back of the nightstand drawer and stuffed them into the pocket of his jacket that he pulled on. It was fall and starting to get colder once the sun went down. During the day it was still nice, but once the sun set, or the wind was blowing, Silas and his dog retreated to the warmth of the house.

Buster began to whine as he walked down the pet steps to get off the bed. Silas felt a pang of sadness for the poor dog as each step caused Buster some pain. His pooch was about as old as he was in dog years, and had trouble moving, especially after just waking up.

“You can stay here, Buster, I’ll deal with whoever is stealing our stuff. They better not have messed with my car,” Silas vowed, walking slowly toward the front door, taking care to not automatically turn on lights that would announce that he was awake as he moved through the house. Turning on far too many lights was a habit that had developed in his civilian life, especially as his sight started to go downhill.

Carefully opening the front door, Silas stepped out and moved toward the detached garage off to his right. His property was in a more rural area of Michigan, and normally, they didn’t have to deal with thieves or vandals. Tonight, someone was targeting his place, and they weren’t being quiet about it. A bluish light glowed through the garage windows, which was odd since he just had a couple of fluorescent light fixtures installed inside that shouldn’t look blue.

Nobody showed themselves as he approached the side door to the garage. It didn’t appear to have been forced open, and the main garage doors were also down. He wasn’t sure how the intruders had made it inside, but they had covered their tracks afterword. Taking out his key, Silas slowly unlocked the deadbolt, cursing under his breath as he listened to whoever was in there tearing the place apart.

The noise was helping to cover up Buster’s low growl that he had kept up the entire time. Silas had to hush him more than once to keep the Cocker Spaniel from barking up a storm. His hand began to sweat around the well-worn grips of his pistol, and despite his anger, Silas had no desire to take a life tonight if he could help it. That part of his life was in the past, and he wanted to keep it there.

“Here we go,” Silas whispered more to himself than Buster, who refused to leave his side.

Slowly, Silas turned the handle and opened the door, waiting for some reaction from the burglars. They didn’t seem to notice him, but as soon as the door was wide enough, Buster burst through, unable to contain his barking. Silas was hot on his heels, not wanting anyone to hurt his dog.

He made it two steps into the garage before stopping and staring at the unbelievable scene in front of him. Buster also shut up and ran behind Silas to cower. There in the middle of his garage floor, was a swirling blue circle of light. Pulling himself from the glowing circle of light was a small man, only about four feet tall. He was dressed in dirty coveralls and wore a ridiculous, oversized conical hat on his head.

If the man didn’t have a grey beard to match Silas’ own, he would have thought it was a rather burly kid, not an adult. The man hissed out a few words in an odd language that Silas didn’t understand as he finished pulling himself onto the concrete garage floor. From a sheath at his waist, the man pulled out a rusty knife that despite its corroded condition, had a razor-sharp blade.

“Put the knife down, or I’ll shoot you,” Silas warned, standing his ground. He was too slow to run away from whoever this was, and even if he could run, he wasn’t going to abandon Buster to the knife wielding weirdo.

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“Khass habas na,” the small man muttered in his strange language as he began to slowly stalk toward Silas. In the background, he could spot two more of the little creeps, all dressed identically. One, standing on the hood of Silas’ Mustang, had taken a pickaxe from Silas’ tools and had apparently been using it to punch holes in his precious car.

“Last warning, I don’t play around,” Silas warned a final time, lining up the pistol’s sights on the diminutive man and slowly taking up the slack on the trigger. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, but even with a bit of a blurry sight picture, Silas was sure he would hit his target at this close of range.

From the corner of his eye, Silas could see the other two burglars walking toward him. The one with the knife was getting closer, unafraid of the gun wielding homeowner in front of him. The man’s face distorted into an evil grin that Silas wiped away with a .45 caliber hollow point. He had been aiming at center mass, but he hadn’t been to the range in years and had yanked the trigger instead of a smooth press and hold, causing the shot to rise and hit the man in the face instead of the chest.

Whoever this guy was, his friends weren’t happy about Silas blowing a hole through his head. The one with the pickaxe charged screaming, but Silas shifted his aim a bit and with proper trigger control this time, landed a shot dead center on his chest, knocking the man back. His final attacker had a familiar knife in his hand, it was a bayonet for an M-16, probably the one that Doc had shipped in the footlocker.

“That’s Doc’s little thief,” Silas growled as he fired two rapid shots into the small man. One hit his gut and the other his chest.

Silence reigned inside the garage as Silas stood there, still unsure of what had just happened. The old, familiar smell of gunpowder and spilt blood filled his nostrils. Silas had expected to find some meth head from the trailer park that wasn’t too far down the road, not a trio of shank-wielding Oompa Loompas. All at once, the three bodies disappeared, turning into a vapor that was pulled into the glowing hole in the floor, which disappeared and turned back into his normal garage floor.

To Silas’ shock, some of the vapor rushed toward him and Buster, disappearing as it hit their bodies. He stood there shaking as the adrenaline slowly bled off in its normal, unpleasant way. Memories that Silas had long wanted to forget resurfaced. Those days of death and violence in the jungles of Vietnam were behind him, but having a shootout with the trio of odd burglars made them seem less distant than they had been the day before.

Seeking calm, Silas thought about the one thing that had saved him when he had come back from the war. It was his wife, Lisa. He had been living in California then, staying in a spare bedroom at Doc’s place while he tried to piece his life back together after being discharged from the Army. Instead of getting his life together, Silas was spiraling in the opposite direction, turning to booze and getting into fights at the slightest provocation.

He was well on his way to getting incarcerated or killed, when Doc and his family dragged Silas to a church social. It was there that he met his wife, Lisa, and she was probably the only reason he was still above ground and not behind bars today. He fell in love at first sight, and Lisa seemed to take a shine to him as well.

She was the first woman he had met after the war that tried to understand him. Lisa was patient with all that Silas was dealing with after the war. They had been married for over fifty years, and the pain of her passing less than a year ago still refused to abate.

His thoughts snapped back to the present. Drifting off into old memories was something he was doing more and more lately, and he worried that it meant his mind was finally going. With what just happened, he should probably be more worried about the present. He had killed those three burglars, but their bodies were gone. Did he call the police, or chalk it up to his mind playing tricks on him?

“Shit…sorry Lisa, I’ll try to watch my language,” Silas muttered to the memory of his wife as he took in the state of his garage. His beloved Ford Mustang GT, a 1991 model that Silas had personally built the engine for on the Ford assembly line where he had worked for over 30 years. Its Oxford White body had been the victim of countless blows from the pickaxe wielding madman, as well as deep scratches from their rusty blades.

That was another weird part. The intruders and everything they had on them were gone. The only exceptions were the bayonet from Doc’s footlocker, and Silas’ pickaxe. Upon closer inspection he found something else. Where the bodies had fallen, he found the bent and deformed rounds he had fired. Each had the flower-mushroom shape that hollow points deformed into when they hit flesh.

A wave of tiredness hit Silas as the adrenaline finally ran its course. He wasn’t going to solve the mystery now, when his mind was still foggy from lack of sleep. On instinct, Silas fished out one of the loaded magazines from his jacket pocket and swapped it for the partially empty one in the pistol. If this turned out to be something other than bad dreams getting the best of him, Silas wanted his weapon to have every round in it he could manage.

His next steps could wait until the morning. He had no physical evidence of a break in, and to call the police now might land him in the loony bin for shooting at phantom tiny murder people. Buster seemed to agree, giving a whine and halfhearted woof toward where the glowing hole in the floor had been before following Silas out of the garage.

“Come on buddy,” Silas called to Buster. “Let’s get some sleep and deal with this in the morning.