Chapter 7: A Father's Sin

Chapter 7: A Father's Sin

The shot was an act of pure, incandescent rage. The bullet screamed from Anya’s pistol, not aimed to kill—how do you kill a walking junkyard?—but to blind. It struck the antique gas lamp with a sharp ping, spiderwebbing the glass. The flame within sputtered violently, casting the grotesque tableau in a strobing, chaotic light before it was finally snuffed out by a gust of wind.

The world plunged into absolute darkness.

The creature let out a chittering shriek of grinding metal, a sound of fury and surprise. It was enough. "Marco!" Anya screamed, scrambling forward, her hands outstretched in the blackness. Her fingers brushed against his wet jacket. She grabbed a fistful of the fabric and pulled with all her strength. Marco was a dead weight, but adrenaline gave her the power of two. The creature’s appendages thrashed wildly in the dark, one of them slicing through the air inches from her face with a lethal whoosh.

They stumbled backward, tripping over roots and vines. The sound of the Taga-Bakal crashing through the grass behind them was a relentless, metallic heartbeat growing louder and louder. It was gaining on them. They would never make it.

Just as a rusted pipe-arm burst through the wall of grass beside them, Anya’s foot slipped in the slick mud and she went down, dragging Marco with her. Her head hit the ground hard, and for a moment, the world was a swirl of pain and roaring static. This is it, she thought. This is how it ends.

But her fall saved them. The metal limb scythed through the space where they had been standing a second before. Lying on the ground, Anya saw the faint outline of the path, a slightly less black strip against the utter blackness of the field. Marco’s SUV.

With a final, desperate surge of will, she got to her feet, hauled Marco upright, and half-dragged, half-carried him the last fifty feet. She threw him into the passenger seat, the sound of his head thudding against the dashboard making her wince, and scrambled behind the wheel. Her hands, slick with rain and mud, fumbled with the keys.

Clink, scrape, CRUNCH.

The creature was at the edge of the field. She could feel its presence, a palpable wave of cold malice. The engine turned over, coughed, and died.

"No, no, no, come on!" she hissed, turning the key again.

A metal claw, a twisted rake of rebar and bolts, smashed through the rear windshield, showering them with glass. The engine roared to life. Anya slammed the gear into drive and stomped on the accelerator. The SUV fishtailed wildly in the mud, tires screaming, before finding purchase and launching forward down the gravel track, leaving the shrieking, thrashing silhouette of the Taga-Bakal receding in the rearview mirror.

The town clinic was a small, cinderblock building lit by a single, flickering bulb. The on-duty doctor was a man well into his seventies, with hands gnarled by arthritis and eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by anything. He took one look at the gash on Marco’s head and Anya’s frantic state and simply nodded, getting to work without a single question.

As the old doctor stitched Marco’s wound, Anya stood under the leaky awning outside, the storm having softened to a steady drizzle. Marco had a severe concussion and two broken ribs. He was alive, but he was out of the fight. Guilt gnawed at her, a bitter, acidic thing. Her reckless plan, her obsession, had done this. He had been her anchor to the rational world, and she had let the monster take him.

But beneath the guilt, a colder, harder thought was taking shape. The image of Joshua’s hand—the small, pale hand with its perfect, crescent-shaped scar—was burned into her mind. It wasn’t a memory anymore; it was evidence. Hard, tangible proof that this creature had been here fifteen years ago.

Lola Elara had said the Taga-Bakal was ancient, born of the wars. If it was that old, Leo and Joshua couldn’t have been the first. There had to have been others. And for thirty years, the chief of police in San Isidro, the man responsible for every investigation, every missing person, had been her own father.

A cold dread, entirely different from the fear she’d felt in the field, began to creep up her spine. She got back in the SUV and drove, not to the barangay hall, but to the one place she had been avoiding: her childhood home.

The house was a tomb of memories, thick with the dust of abandonment and the lingering scent of her mother's jasmine soap. She went straight to her father’s small, cramped office. His official files had been transferred to the municipal building years ago, but he was a meticulous man. He never threw anything away.

In the bottom of a wardrobe, beneath a stack of yellowed newspapers, she found it: a heavy, metal footlocker, secured with a small, rusted padlock. She didn't have the key. With a grunt of effort, she retrieved a tire iron from the SUV and pried the lock open with a screech of protesting metal.

Inside, the air smelled of old paper and secrets. There were personal effects, photographs, and several thin, manila folders, separate from any official filing system. Her hands trembled as she sifted through them. And then she saw it. A folder with no name, just a date written in her father's neat, precise hand: October 1983.

She opened it. The report inside was typed on an old manual typewriter. It detailed the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy named Ricardo Jimenez. Last seen playing near the cogon field at the edge of the old Delos Santos property. Her blood ran cold. It was the same field.

The report was sparse, but the details were unnervingly familiar. The boy’s friends spoke of a "metal man" they thought was a game. A search party had found nothing but a few scraps of the boy's clothing and what the report described as "unusual metallic debris of indeterminate origin."

Then she saw the blacked-out sections. Entire paragraphs, the core of the findings, were redacted with thick, impenetrable black ink. It was a clumsy, brutal act of censorship. But her father, in his haste, had been imperfect. Holding the brittle page up to the dim light, she could just make out a few words that hadn't been fully obscured.

"...local superstition..." "...refuses to speak..." "...Taga-Bakal..."

And at the very bottom, above his signature, was the final, damning sentence, left untouched: Case closed. Ruled as probable runaway. No further action recommended to prevent widespread public panic.

The paper crumpled in her fist. This wasn't just a cover-up. This was a blueprint for her brother's death. He knew. Her father, the man of law and order, the man who had taught her the inviolable importance of the truth, had known about this creature forty years ago. And he had buried it.

She pulled out her phone, her fingers numb and clumsy as she dialed his number. He answered on the second ring, his voice warm and familiar, a sound from a life that no longer existed.

"Anya? Is everything alright? You shouldn't be calling so late."

"I'm in your office, Dad," she said, her voice flat and dead, stripped of all emotion. "I found the Ricardo Jimenez file."

The silence on the other end of the line was a physical thing, a heavy, suffocating weight. It was all the confirmation she needed.

"That was a long time ago," he finally managed, his voice strained. "A tragic case. The boy ran away from home."

"Don't lie to me," she whispered, the words trembling with a cold, rising fury. "Not anymore. The report is redacted. You blacked it out yourself. It mentions the Taga-Bakal. You closed the case to 'prevent panic.' You knew. You knew what was in that field."

Another long pause. Then, a ragged sigh, the sound of a man surrendering a secret he had carried for a lifetime. "I was young, Anya. Ambitious. I saw… something I couldn't explain. I heard the stories from the old folks. It didn't fit. A monster doesn't fit in a police report. I made a judgment call. I chose to protect the town from fear, from hysteria. I convinced myself it was the right thing to do."

The excuse was so hollow, so pathetic, it barely registered. Anya’s mind was locked on a single, horrifying trajectory. "So when Joshua was taken," she said, her voice dropping to a near-inaudible whisper, "from the exact same place… you knew what it was. You stood there at his funeral and you let everyone believe he was just gone. You said nothing."

His voice finally broke, cracking with a grief that was forty years too late. "I prayed I was wrong, Anya. Every day for fifteen years, I told myself it was just a story, that I'd imagined it. I couldn't admit that my silence… that my decision…"

"It has him," Anya cut him off, the words like shards of glass in her throat. "It's still here. And it has a piece of him. I saw it, Dad. I saw Joshua’s hand."

She ended the call, the silence of the dusty room rushing in to replace the sound of her father’s weeping. The monster in the field was a thing of rust and rage, a force of nature corrupted by violence. But she now understood there was another monster in her story, a more human one. A monster made of fear, pride, and a father’s unforgivable sin. The truth hadn't been lost; it had been buried. And her own family had been holding the shovel.