Your backyard camera. Check it immediately. Calling police. Your son.
My knees threatened to buckle. My six-year-old boy, Jamie—who had clung to my pant leg at the airport, hot tears streaking his flushed cheeks—had begged me not to take this trip. Don’t leave me with Mom and Grandpa Walter, he had whimpered. I had foolishly dismissed it as standard separation anxiety. Now, that fragile whisper echoed through my skull, deafening as a siren.
With trembling fingers, I booted up the home security application. We had installed comprehensive surveillance following a burglary two years prior in our leafy Richmond suburb. The live feed from the backyard camera buffered with an agonizing, taunting slowness.
When the pixels finally sharpened into reality, my heart stopped beating.
My son was buried in the earth up to his chin. He was positioned in the far corner of the yard, beneath the sprawling shadow of the old oak tree. Dirt was packed mercilessly tight against his slender throat. Jamie’s face was mottled with a terrifying, purplish-red hue, his mouth distended in a silent, agonizing scream.
Standing around him, arranged in a casual, grotesque circle, were nine human beings. I recognized every single one of them.
My father-in-law, Walter Hamilton, stood closest to the freshly dug earth, casually nursing a beer. His face was contorted into an amused grin that I knew would haunt my nightmares until the day I died. My wife—Miranda Garcia Mullen—the woman whose charm had captivated me at a university party a dozen years ago, was idly glancing between her smartphone and our suffocating child with the mild interest of someone timing a pot roast.
The rest of the gallery of monsters consisted of Miranda’s mother, Barbara Mills; her brother, Wade Hamilton, and his pill-addicted wife, Sonia Wheeler Hamilton; Wade’s adult children from a prior marriage, twenty-three-year-old Austin Hamilton and twenty-one-year-old Marlene Hamilton; and Miranda’s younger sister, Chelsea McKenzie, alongside her husband, Les Murphy.
My mind violently fragmented. I rewound the footage. The digital timestamp confirmed the horror had commenced thirty-seven minutes ago. Walter had excavated the pit while Wade physically restrained a weeping Jamie. They had stripped my boy down to his underwear. Wade and Walter shoved him into the gaping maw of the earth, ignoring his thrashing, desperate limbs. They shoveled the soil back in, compacting it around his tiny legs, his waist, his chest.
