Silent Is the Pull [A Cliff Burton FanFiction]

Chapter 1: Clouded Sun

The vibration came first, trembling upward through the hollow coils of her mattress before the sound actually registered. Mallory stirred, shifting against the scratchy, pilled fabric of a duvet that had lost its warmth four and a half winters ago. Another noise came. It was the sharp snap of an argument; muffled yet roaring from downstairs, it vibrated the floorboards beneath her head.

Slowly, in the damp cold of her bedroom, Mallory sat up. She dragged the heels of her palms across her eyes, trying to scrape away the crust of a restless sleep, but she couldn't scrape away the routine.

'Whore.'

The word punched beneath her door, clear as a bell.
It was her stepfather's voice—thick, gravelly, and already slurred by an early dawn bender.
He was accusing her mother of using him for money again.

Mallory stared at her poster-flourished walls, her jaw tightening.
To a point, the bastard was right.
Her mother had treated Rick like a financial life raft from the moment she brought him home.

Whenever Mallory tried to scream at her to leave, her mother would pull her usual desperate, tight-lipped defence: "I'm doing this for us, Mallory. I'm keeping a roof over our heads."

Sitting in the dim mid afternoon light, Mallory wondered for the thousandth time if living in a cardboard box on the sidewalk might actually be quieter. At least on the street, she could see the crazy coming. In this house, she constantly has to be able to predict her stepfather's next erratic mood, which would often explode like a bomb.

Her mother used to be better at managing men.
Back in Mallory's freshman year, after her biological father had died in a car accident and left them in a crater of debt, her mother had bounced between local bars, drowning her grief in cheap gin and pool games.
That was how she'd snared Rick, her stepfather.
She'd crushed him in a game of straight pool at a dive bar in Oakland. Her rebellious attitude drew Rick, and she enjoyed his projecting confidence. Later that night, they slept together. And in the morning, he asked her if she would be willing to go on a couple of dates with him.
Within two months, they were married. Within three, the boredom had set in, and her mother started slipping out into the night to find other beds.

Rick had found out through the neighbourhood gossip pipeline.
Mallory still remembered the sound of that first strike—the hard, heavy crack of his hand across her mother's jaw.
After that, her mother learned a simple survival trick: never come home until Rick was passed out face-down on the living room recliner.

    But her mother wasn't the one who had to walk home from the bus stop in terror.
Her mother wasn't the one who had to open the front door with trembling fingers, holding her breath to see if Rick's anger at his wife had curdled into a desire to break her daughter instead.

A sudden, sharp crack echoed from the kitchen downstairs, followed instantly by a heavy, structural thump that made the glassware in Mallory's vanity mirror rattle.

A body.

    Mallory vaulted out of bed, her bare feet hitting the cold floorboards. She threw her bedroom door open and came hurtling down the narrow staircase.
Her mind was a panicked, repeating prayer: Don't make me call the cops. Please.

She skidded into the kitchen, her soles sticking slightly to the yellowed linoleum.

Rick was standing by the sink, his chest heaving under a stained undershirt.
His grimy, calloused fist was veiled in a slick coat of crimson, the knuckles already splitting open into raw, purple wheals.
Mallory's gaze dropped instantly to the body at his boots.

Her mother lay crumpled on her side, completely motionless.
A curtain of messy brown hair had fallen over her face, but it couldn't hide the dark pool of blood thickening against the floor beneath her temple.