Tommorow isn't Promised

Tomorrow isn’t Promised

The Red Pine Section of Oak Heights

The Newnan Residence

July 18, 2026

11:41 PM

CHAD TANNER!?! Son of a-

Bryce Newnan reclined on his back porch’s new hammock. He’d quit smoking years ago, but good God did he want a cigarette now.

A scene of striking night played out in front of him. He could just make out the dark silhouettes of frogs sitting on lily pads in Red Pine Lake. Their small bodies expanded, ballooning up in that strange way, before belching out loud ribbits and satisfied croaks afterward. Invisible owls shot out pounding ‘who whos’ off in the distance. Crickets cricketed somewhere in the great space of his well-lit backyard. There were sounds of scampering animals in the wooded area just beyond his backyard fence. The night had become a shrouded rhythm band, and each member was playing their best. These things, coupled with the moon, would have acted as a perfect reward after a hard week’s work, but now they only pissed him off. The fact that he couldn’t enjoy the moment only added to the frustration.

Emelia might be cheating on him.

On top of dealing with that new pipsqueak asshole manager at work, his wife up and decides to start an affair.

Come on Bryce. You don’t know that.

“Chad Tanner…”

He’d heard the name somewhere before, not at work for sure, but he couldn’t place it with a face or a time. He’d been replaying bits and pieces from neighborhood gatherings and events since he saw that name on his wife’s phone at seven. For some reason, his mind was fixated on a specific gathering that happened about a year ago.

“AH!” he snapped his fingers at the sudden realization. “The Oak Heights Summer Movie Night!”

That was the first time he’d ever heard the name Chad Tanner.

The Tanners were a kind of wunderkind family. Young, blonde, college educated, and wealthy enough to afford a place in one of the northern sections of Oak Heights.

They seemed like the type of group that had enough on their plate already. He remembered that Chad’s wife -her name escaped him- had quite the baby bump at the time.

“Would some well-to-do youngblood like Chad Tanner fuck his life up by having an affair with mother of two in her late forties?”

He shrugged before dismissing the question.

“He’s a young guy. Of course he would.”

Emelia was good looking for a woman that had lived the life she had. But she wasn’t giving any younger woman any competition. He recalled Mrs. Tanner looking pretty good despite the bump. She almost reminded him of…

“Dammit!” He threw his hands up in the air, scaring away some of the gnats buzzing around his back porch fluorescent lights.

None of it made any sense. Too many questions with no answers. He considered calling one of his sons or reaching out to his parents, but he had nothing to go on outside of an out of place text on his wife’s phone. She got those normally, she was still an assistant head nurse after all, but to see a neighbor’s name on it at 7:00 pm on a Saturday? And then there were the words in that text. “Need to talk to you.” It said right under Chad Tanner’s full name.

Oh, they’d need to talk alright. About quite a few things. But all that would need to happen later. Emelia was ‘out’. She didn’t explain where, but Bryce had a decent idea she was still in Oak Heights somewhere, perhaps in a northern section…

“Later on, yeah…”

But what are you going to do about it RIGHT now?

He considered that question for a time. His eyes had glazed over as they stared off into the picturesque night. It was 11:45 pm by the time he was imagining the process of splitting his assets and what looking for a new place would be like.

Moving back into an apartment wouldn’t be so bad. It’d be cheaper for one, and there wouldn’t be an annoying HOA breathing down my neck. And then, well-

During his mental catastrophizing, the ribbit, croak, ribbit, croak of the frogs had become a thrumming background noise that helped his mind go from point to point. This mental laxative was halted when one smooth, long croak became a startled, high-pitched whine that he had no idea frogs could produce. What started as one became two. Two became three. That three became too many to number. That horrible noise ended after ten seconds turning into numerous explosive splashes.

That pulled him out of his head.

Just after, the crickets ceased their cricketing, the owls stopped asking their rhetorical questions, and the invisible pitter-patter scurrying became an avalanche of unseen pounding paws as each member of the night band called it quits and scattered to each point of the compass.

This had been interesting enough to make him forget about filing divorce papers, but what got him moving was the pounding torrent of howls, flapping wings, and bird cries. It had been so loud that it made the frogs’ squealing outburst seem like a mouse fart. He covered his ears as he fell off his hammock seat into a kneeling position. His wide eyes darted all over, trying to make out any sign of oncoming disaster. The only thing he noticed was the dark rustling of tree leaves.

Odd considering he neither felt nor heard any wind.

He looked up at the moon to check and see if a freak storm had come. There were no angry black clouds with flashes of lightning. Instead, he’d looked up just in time to see it blotted out by a black mass of shapes that flapped, bounced, and glided off into the night. The mass took the screeching, piercing cries with it.

“JEEZUS! That had to be every bird in the area!”

Every bird and anything else that could fly. Even…

Curious, he looked at both of his fluorescent lights. It was hard to make out at first, but sure enough, all the flying brown dots surrounding his bright orange lights were gone. Once the ringing in his ears ceased, it struck him just how silent everything had become. The only noise he heard was the soft blowing of a light breeze.

“What in God’s name-

He nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard a powerful dog bark some feet away. It was muffled by space and walls in between, but he recognized it immediately.

It was the Levington’s ironically named Saint Bernard, Mrs. Minnie.

He rushed to the left corner of his back porch as it faced the Levington’s house. All seemed normal. Their house was still an all-white two story that pissed him off as much as awed him. The outside lights were on. The windows were closed and dark save for the kitchen light. Their side of the fence seemed untouched. He turned around to look at his other neighbor’s house. All was normal there as well.

Okay. Maybe I imagined the whole-

He heard Mrs. Minnie’s powerful bark again. This time he heard just how aggressive it sounded. There was also a series of them as well. He turned, looking at their kitchen window hoping to see something, but the Levington’s had tinted windows on their house. He thought he heard the fourth bark cut off. Muffled growls. A loud whine. And then something that may have been a woman’s scream although it was hard to tell.

That shook him.

He waited on the back porch for a moment, trying to hear anything else.

There was nothing.

He went into his own house then. Locked the sliding back porch door behind him and grabbed his phone off the kitchen counter. 11:48 PM, it said. It showed no emergency alerts or texts from anyone.

Did I really hear a scream? I’ve got to check on them.

Before he did, he logged in and checked local news apps to find out what the hell was going on. There weren’t any stories of an alien invasion, Christ’s second coming, or a terrorist attack. Not even anything about a freak fire or a sudden tornado. The weather was clear, and the only top story he could see was a newly discovered string of murders that had happened about ninety miles south in central Indianapolis.

That sucks and all. But it doesn’t help me any.

What was first and foremost on his mind was what was happening next door.

There could be a goddamn murder going on right across my yard. While I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs, the Levington’s could be lying in a pool of their own blood. Frank, Marcy, their little girl Diane, not to mention that annoying dog. Christ Bryce, you were shooting the shit with Frank only two hours ago!

He considered his options.

I could call 911 or the neighborhood security. But what if I imagined the whole thing? Or what if Frank is over there watching some horror show or something? No, no. That was Mrs. Minnie. I’d know that damn bark anywhere.

“Okay, fuck it. Go get that fucking gun. Walk over there. Knock on the door. If Hannibal Lector or Michael Myers answers, then-

He shrugged, practically throwing the idea in the trash.

He did have a gun -a beretta 9mm that he’d gotten as a birthday gift- upstairs in his office drawer. But he was a software engineer, not the fucking Terminator. He didn’t even have a holster for the thing. What would he do? Put it in his belt loop? Or his pocket? He’d probably shoot himself with it before he got out of the house. Not to mention what it would look like if he strode out onto his front lawn at midnight, knocking on his neighbor’s door with a gun in his hand.

“Christ on the cross…”

Maybe that’s what he needed to do. Just get down on his knees and start praying. But that was a laugh. He’d probably pissed around with that gun more recently than he’d messed with God and Jesus above or the holy ghost within. “OH!”

The thought hit him then.

I don’t need to call on Jesus or the cops, at least not yet. I could just give them a ring. Waking them up with a call would be better than the cops waking them with a knock on the door.

He called them and wasn’t surprised when no one answered.

He looked over at the digital clock above his kitchen stove. 11:53 PM, proclaimed the bright little digits. Without thinking, he tossed his phone on the island, left the kitchen, and went out onto his front porch. His eyes went wide. His jaw went slack. He was sure that for the first time in his life, he felt his heart fall out of his ass.

“What the fuck…?”

He lived on the last cul-de-sac at the end of Red Pine, the last section of Oak Heights. This was the selling point for him, as his house overlooked Red Pine Lake and was connected to a descent chunk of the surrounding forested area in greater Palms County. It was his love of nature that made him grit his teeth and deal with the costs, travel time to work, and the suffocating HOA rules brought on by the gated community of Oak Heights.

In the two years he’d lived here, he’d become used to opening his front door and seeing the pleasant mundanity of suburban life. One of his neighbor’s mowing their lawns or cleaning their car’s. Kids walking home from school. Someone taking out the trash. Women, younger or older, strutting their stuff up and down the street in their bright colored, painted on yoga gear. Even on the few occasions he’d opened his front door around this time at night, he’d at least seen a moment of some stoic, lonely beauty that his architectural mind could appreciate. On Saturdays like this, it was possible to see some neighborhood kids or adults out for a late-night stroll.

But now, his blood ran cold.

Along with his own, the cul-de-sac had five other houses, each of which were the two-story homes one would see in a TV commercial or in an ad brochure.

On each of them, even some of the houses he could see further up the street, he saw that their front doors were left wide open.

The Andersons right across from his. The Petersons to their left. The Winslowe’s next to theirs. On and on it went. Through each open front door, he could see lights left on. Furniture toppled over. The swaying shapes of broken, swinging door handles dangling from torn pieces of metal. Through one house, it might’ve been the Wilson’s, he saw and heard the bottom portion of a big screen TV playing something.

A massive white shape in his peripheral pulled his attention to the right toward the Levington’s house. While he couldn’t see inside, he saw that their big, white front door stood wide open. It faced him, seeming to float off the ground like a giant square ghost that swung in the slow breeze behind the freshly painted white banisters on their front porch.

It creaked on its hinges.

Chilled, he turned from the door and looked farther up the street. He hoped to see someone walking outside or maybe an oncoming police cruiser. There was nothing. No people. No police. Not even any oncoming cars.

Only a night as still as the grave.

He swallowed, feeling a sharp click in the back of his drying throat. A strange sensation overcame him then, one that he hadn’t experienced since middle or elementary school. It was that queer feeling he had when being the last one standing in a game of tag or dodgeball.

All eyes on me. We’re IT.

He backed up, slammed and locked his front door, and ran back into the kitchen. He grabbed his phone off the center island and was startled to see that it was only 11:57 PM.

Call the cops then grab the gun. Call the cops then grab the-

Before he even unlocked his phone, he heard the squealing whine of straining metal. This was followed by an exploding POP like a gunshot.

He turned from his center kitchen island so fast that his phone flew out of his hands. He caught the briefest glimpse of his sliding back porch door being thrown open before he heard the cacophonous CRASH of shattering glass. He flinched, jumped back a step, slammed his eyes shut, and even threw his hands in front of his face out of fear of flying glass.

When he looked down, he saw two other eyes staring up at him.

In that fraction of a second, all he made out were the colors he saw. There was a lot of white, red, and two glinting orbs of yellow. Had it killed him then, he may have thought that a giant white dire wolf had somehow made its way south, broken in his house and mauled him to death.

But then he registered the rest.

Big. Bald. Its skin the blueish grey hue of a frozen corpse.

It was a man. A dead man.

It crouched on its haunches, barefoot and seemingly unbothered on top of the mass of shattered glass from his back porch door. Its two big, yellow eyes stared up at him, seeming to glow in his bright kitchen lights.

It never blinked.

His gaze, pulled to the ground by the bright shade of red, trialed down its long and powerful arms. He noticed the red handprints on the tan tiles of his kitchen floor. Above that he noticed the blue-grey paleness of the thing ended slightly above the elbow. From that point down was mixed shades of slick reds that even covered the grime filled fingernails of its big and veiny hands. It could’ve been mistaken for paint. If not for the potent cocktail of stink.

Rot and decay on top. Underneath that was the musky smell of an animal’s cage. Beneath that was the thick, coppery smell of one million melted pennies crammed under his nose. Underling it all was something he could only describe as just plain wrong.

He knew that this thing was the cause of it all.

The screams. The open front doors. The animals fleeing for their lives. He wouldn’t have been shocked if it was the cause of those murders some ninety miles south too.

God above it killed them all and I’m next it killed them all and I’m-

He felt himself backing up. He heard a low moan that was coming out of his throat. He had no idea what he might’ve been trying to say.

GET THE GUN GET THE GUN FUCK THIS THING RUN UPSTAIRS AND GET THE-

He noticed it move for the first time.

It flashed a grin at him on its big grey lips that spread on that pale face like a giant crack across a frozen lake. Then, it leapt at him. The next thing he knew, he was numb from the waist down and aware of flying, flailing, and screaming an airless scream.

This sensation ended when they both collided with his living room floor.

His ears rang. His vision was blurred. He was numb all over.

Above him, about a million miles away, he saw the thing’s big yellow eyes and toothy grin looking down at him. Through a haze, he saw its right-hand rear back.

Through his pain, a cold clarity overcame him. He thought about the last twenty minutes of his life.

I guess I had this coming. Hating Emelia even though I was the one who fucked that intern two years-

The last thing he ever saw was a giant red hand rushing towards his face.