Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

DIRK RICHARDS

Anton kicked the barrel away as soon as I reached for the trigger. A sharp light cracked into my vision. It was too bright for a fraction of a second, but color returned to balance. I hadn't even realized, but it was completely silent.

Then with the saturation of the basement came a ringing.

Not like an alarm next to the bed which one dissuades themselves to forgive and forget. More like my eardrums playing catch up with the overbearing sounds, so it creates its own horrible noise to drown it out.

But the ringing can barely be interpreted by me. It came and went to disrupt the sweet sound of silence.

The hunting rifle is taken from me once more. My senses are not cooperating with my body and I shut down, slumped against the wall...

"Please! Please - please - please!"

My wife is pleading for her life. I wake as if it's an emergency, as if being switched off has become a dangerous thing. My heart beats fast and there is a buzzing left in my brain and together they panic with jump-leads.

My body is bound by duct tape to my wife's. Our backs touch. I feel her closed hands, and she closes them further.

I am lying on my side upon the dinner table, facing the kitchen bench.

Irene wailed: "Look! Look - he's awake - you can ask him! Just please don't kill me!"

Slow footsteps rounded the table. A man in a trench coat emerged with a superimposed dice mask on his head. He had a sword gripped in one hand, possibly a katana. He had a belt with pouches, containing God knows what.

The Dicer was in our kitchen.

And to think Anton was under that mask scared me the most. Or a piece of his psyche. Finding out the identity of the Dicer came to me when I was researching Anton Berlique, down in the basement and on my laptop earlier.

Just by searching up the surveyor's name and doing some extensive digging, he had sessions with a psychologist and there were records of it on his psychologist's departmental web page.

They stated that he suffered from a split personality disorder which turned out to be true. A weird note by the psychologist also, was that he had an obsession with board games and dice, to cope with the loss of his brother.

Now - everybody knows the Dicer. San Fran's vigilante in black and white.

So I thought about the connection and thought it was absurd that I had thought of something so... so utterly straightforward. That Anton was the Dicer. And there are tabloids in the newspaper about the Dicer almost every day and they're always talking about how he might be doing what he's doing to cope with a trauma of some kind.

Sure, there might be others that are damaged mentally and play with dice, but none that used to work for Bechtel, the first corporation that the Dicer tore down with his own hands.

Maybe he saw something that he shouldn't have whilst working and he chose to do something about it. Maybe it was to get back for "accidentally" killing his brother.

And now he has moved on from corporations to families.

"Ask me," I said to Irene, "what?" The Dicer pointed his sword at my face.

"If your wife is involved -"

"I was talking to my wife!"

"And you better listen to me." At this response, I concluded that this was someone different within Anton. He clearly wasn't nervous about killing us, but he also wasn't outright viciously stubborn. It was an individual of preciseness and focus. Of walking the walk and talking the talk. At the same time. Evidently, efficient enough to cut us up into equal measures.

"Where are my children?" I asked. Irene wiggled so she could speak into my ear.

"He sent them to go to -"

"And you better listen to me," the Dicer repeated. He sheathed his sword and began to loosen up. "I sent them to the police station and told them to report their father and mother to the authorities. They're also bringing Zheng to them."

"What?!" I exclaimed. "You let that dangerous boy victimize my children?"

"Affirmative. By the time they get there on foot with a body..." He checked a pretend watch on his wrist. "And taking into consideration the response time of the police, I'll be done here. That is set in stone. Now what I have not been able to judge yet is - who will be set in stone with you?"

I pounced forward, stretching the duct tape and offsetting its bind. Hopefully cubehead didn't notice or hear my fingers beginning to claw at the tape between us.

"Who? My wife? Don't you dare lay a finger on her! If you so much as - "

"You are not in a position to be making demands," he said. "And if you lie to me..." Out of the periphery of my vision, I saw him unsheathe his sword and swing it down at both of our feet, but stop ever so close to our ankles. "Both of you will be on the chopping block."

The clean blade was inserted back into the scabbard hanging off his waist; this action left a chipped bight on the edge of the table.

"Now, I return to the question of which I was about to ask before I was so rudely interrupted. Is your wife involved in the physical abuse of this boy, Zheng?" I tried to turn around and look at Irene who I had met at that summer party on that hot night under that moon and those stars we were to be forever entranced by. And we were to forever be under together.

It seemed that the moon was facing the other way tonight as was my love and that the stars had been our children who were now louse, tethering onto that malevolent boy's skin.

Then and there, I could see none of them. The Richards were no more.