Pigs

by Daniel James

  Wyndorf.

  The pair of them locked stares across the battleground. Roach, Grace and Fitzy ignored the seemingly helpful big guy with the cannon and hopped off the porch steps, blasting at the Audi blockade to the north. Fitzy was about to jump into the Mercedes when he noticed it was squatting lower than normal. The tyres had been slashed.

  Wyndorf smiled at Isaac and pointed his quiet iron, firing and laughing joyously like each round was a sharp punchline. Isaac ducked low beside one of the parked cars, sliding his gun hand over the roof and praying that one of his shots would give Wyndorf a sucking chest wound.

  Over the sounds of mechanical destruction, Isaac heard Wyndorf curse when his gun dry-fired. Then racing footsteps slapped south along the concrete, away from the deadly mob blockage. Isaac wasn’t sure if the wolf had more on the way, maybe planning on blocking the south side too, but he couldn’t allow Wyndorf to slip away again. This could be his only chance. He spared a quick look to his right. Roach and Grace were running rapidly through their limited ammunition, giving Fitzy time to attempt hot-wiring another getaway car. Roach caught his glance, deciphering Isaac’s psychotic intent in his wild eyes. Roach shook his head at him. Isaac didn’t say anything. He broke from his cover and ran.

  The two rear assault pigs stepped out from the smoky murk of Monahan’s conquered garrison, surveying the scene from the porch. They didn’t go for kill shots; rather, they tried to hit Isaac in his sprinting legs. Two shots chipped the pavement before Roach spun back around from the northern beachhead and emptied a clip into their torsos.

  Isaac didn’t look back, not even when Roach screamed his name over the sky of hot leaden hornets.

  Wyndorf was getting away, sprinting down the street and cutting through an alley between two houses. A part of Isaac hated himself for leaving Roach back there. They might all die at the hands of these lunatics. Then, Isaac knew he too might die at the hands of the lunatic he was pursuing into a dark backyard. That was fine. No matter what the night had left in store for him, he would at least cure the world of this frothy-mouthed animal before the wolf chewed his throat out. Wyndorf’s life was forfeit.

  Up ahead in the murky light, he heard Wyndorf gasp and heave, throwing himself over the rickety wooden fence into the yard. Isaac was possessed, utterly incapable of exercising caution, feeling the spirits of Maggie and Will speeding him on. He clambered over the fence, his hands slick on the damp and flaking wood. Several pulsing shots punctured the boards, wood chips erupting and scraping past Isaac’s fingers and left shoulder.

  A motion-sensor light unexpectedly flooded the garden, illuminating Wyndorf on the yellowing grass. Isaac swung his leg over to straddle the high gate and fired back from his perch, aiming to sever his spine. Wyndorf feinted left and right to prove a more difficult target, Isaac’s shots bleeding soil from the tufts of grass and bark from the rough trees. As he scaled the chain-link fence, Wyndorf looked back to throw Isaac a look of raw hatred.

  Isaac noticed the noise of urban warfare seemed to be dying out. And not a moment too soon. A soft thud came out of the darkness at his back. Choking on a lump, Isaac glanced down at the inky movement of a silhouette slinking through shadow below him. A blue spark appeared in the Stygian shroud like a crackling firefly, and the wolf leapt up out of the darkness, swiping at Isaac’s dangling leg with the cattle prod.

  Whipping his leg out of the way, Isaac compromised his balance and fell off the fence onto the stone flagging of the backyard, the jarring blow to his ribs stealing his breath. On his back, he ripped a few shots through the wooden barrier separating him from his hunter, hoping to hit him in his legs. Isaac glanced over his shoulder and panicked, seeing that Wyndorf was gone, each passing second putting more and more distance between them.

  He pushed himself up and pounded across the grass, sucking in air despite his aching ribs, and going so fast he looked as though he might be attempting to shoulder-charge the chain-link fence off its post. Instead he practically hurdled the obstacle, and walked out into the wide, poorly lit division between the backs of the houses. Over his rushing blood he imagined footsteps: the wolf on his tail; Wyndorf preparing to pounce out at him from behind a rubbish bin or a tree. Isaac cleared his head of them and focused on the real sounds, his pupils dilating to drink in the meagre light from distant street lamps or the odd rear window. A bottle smashed off to his right, and Isaac’s weapon sprang up, ready to kill. Wyndorf seemed to lunge from out of nowhere, knocking the gun away and tackling him to the gritty path. Strong hands closed on Isaac’s throat, thumbs crushing his Adam’s apple.

  Ambient light played tricks across Wyndorf’s spectacles, flashing white lenses mixing with the demented rage lurking within his dead eyes. “I could have killed them sooner, you know,” he snickered wetly. “I watched that fine piece of snatch pay you your little visits for months. Dragging along your little brat to the market and the movies, baseball practice and the planetarium. Almost made me want to play big papa to the both of them. Remind her what a man feels like.” His breathy voice heaved.

  Hearing the enjoyment in his voice did something to Isaac. The war drum of his heart and the surge of hot blood fully unleashed his grief and black rage.

  Isaac jammed the knuckles of his two fingers into Wyndorf’s metacarpals, grinding them against the bones and ligaments until the strangler gritted his teeth in pain, loosening his choking grip. Isaac coughed and grabbed the back of Wyndorf’s head, pulling it down into his rising headbutt. Clutching his nose, Wyndorf attempted to drive a fist into Isaac’s face but the shorter man was quick, managing to writhe away. The dropping fist missed Isaac’s ear by an inch, smashing into the hard ground instead. Isaac thrust his legs out, kicking Wyndorf in the chin and toppling him into an awkward heap. Surrounding homeowners were cautiously peering out of windows now, and a couple of distant neighbors had poked their heads over their fences, having no doubt called the police during the mass shootout.

  Back on his feet, Isaac was wary of the bigger man’s longer reach. Wyndorf didn’t fight with any particular technique other than an enthusiastic desire to inflict pain and damage. He swung a haymaker, connecting with Isaac’s cheek and sending him staggering backward. Through the white concussive haze, Wyndorf became a shimmering penumbra, wrapped up in the gloomy ambience and the heavy blanket of night. Isaac circled about to clear his head, putting steel in his legs to hide the buckle in his knees, and stepped into Wyndorf’s next overly ambitious swing, beating him to the punch by slamming him in the jaw with a powerful right cross. The blow stilled Wyndorf’s momentum, his brain processing the hit and giving Isaac time to step in and go for another swing.

  The hit didn’t land for some reason. One second Isaac was mid-swing and the next he was a quivering mass of jelly, falling to the ground, with Wyndorf mimicking his dance right beside him.

  Through squinting eyes Isaac saw the wolf step over him, eyes shining through the mask’s eyeholes. Human eyes which lacked humanity. The wolf regarded Isaac for a moment, then looked at Wyndorf with more interest.

  “Michael Wyndorf, or is Clark Kent now?” The wolf’s voice was deep, like gravel churning in his throat, a charming devil in a smoking jacket. “Alfred Jensen was delighted when I told him you were back in town.”

  The electrical shocks had stopped but the news hit Isaac just as hard. His muscles were cramped from charged tension, leaving him like a bundle of wet noodles on the dirt. He felt the probe darts of a Taser being yanked out of his back when an Audi slowed to a stop about ten feet away. Hearing police sirens closing in from the distance, Isaac saw several pigs quickly loom into his peripheral vision.

  And everything went black.

  Déjà Vu in Digital

  The scene unfolded the same as the time before, and the time before that, and so on, and so forth for Dr. Alfred Jensen. The details of the scenario couldn’t truly replicate the worst moments of his life, but they were accurate enough to dry his throat and squeeze his innards.

&nb
sp; To an outside observer, the former surgeon would appear to be exploring a sterile empty room. What Jensen saw, though, with the VR helmet covering his eyes and ears, was the digital mimicry of his psyche’s scar tissue. He was now back in the wainscoted hallway of his old home, his once safe and secure abode locked away in the beautiful gated Kane County.

  The doorbell rang again, its evening intrusion summoning him from his easy chair. His wife and daughter were ensconced in the living room.

  The beeps of Alfred’s heart rate monitor gradually accelerated.

  The white front door seemed to reel him in, as if his feet were on a conveyor belt, but Alfred knew he was in complete control of this re-creation. If he wanted, he could simply stop right there, turn his back on the door and what waited behind it, and return to his loving wife and promising teenage daughter, keeping that hell barred and bolted away from his family and himself. It wouldn’t mean a damn thing, of course, retreating back to an artificial comfort like a coward, an imagined happy ever after. Would it have turned out differently if he had chosen that course of action in reality? Knowing what was politely ringing his bell? He knew it wouldn’t have. And hiding behind alternative histories and what-ifs had done very little to help him so far.

  The bell rang again.

  He pressed on down the hall toward the vestibule, and, remaining faithful to his naïve former self, once again didn’t bother with the door’s peephole.

  The heart rate beeper sped up marginally, while the blood pressure monitor and other machines attached to him like industrial veins pinged and blipped in a smooth, controlled ascent. The controller in Alfred’s clammy palm used to make him feel as if it would open a trap door beneath him, dropping him right back into his six-year coma. His holiday in Hades. Now the controller was a supportive confidante, eagerly pushing him through this endurance of the soul. Strength through suffering. He pulled the trigger, opening the front door, and the nightmare which had redefined Alfred Jensen’s life for the past decade spilled forth into his home and his mind.

  The heart monitor plateaued at seventy-one beats per minute, and for Alfred, each one seemed to have downgraded from chest-bursting jackhammer to the dull silver discomfort of a lump hammer’s tapping.

  At the end of it all, in the aftermath of all that pixellated blood and the artificial screams of his family’s off-screen avatars, the image of the rubbery pig-mask looming over his heaped, helpless body froze mid-frame. The distorted voices of carnage cut off and the virtual reality program paused and faded out.

  “Mr. Jensen?” The headset was gently removed, the controller pried from his grip.

  The final impression of the three little pig-masked assailants ransacking his home faded, returning Alfred to the empty room. Dr. Marianne Velez, one of the lauded pioneers of medical virtual reality therapy, began to pack up the VR equipment, storing it in the adjoining observation room whilst Jensen’s personal physician, Dr. Steinway, unclipped the heart rate monitor secured around his subject’s thin chest, the flesh of his torso and protruding ribs as pale as his white undershirt.

  “Your tachycardia is lower than the previous session,” Dr. Steinway said. “Your blood pressure looks a lot better, too.” He smiled warmly beneath his bushy gray brows and glasses. His demeanor projected a deep care and support for his long-time colleague and friend, but Jensen knew that at his core, the personal and explicit nature of the radical treatment still upset him.

  Velez returned, pleased with the latest data but disquieted by the more human aspect of her results, for Steinway wasn’t the only one who found the re-enactment ghoulish. Even after a year’s worth of their patient-doctor relationship, Velez still sounded queasy when referring to Jensen’s prescribed computer program.

  “Very encouraging, Mr. Jensen. I’d dare say you have officially conquered your swinophobia. That stimulus, played at the highest stress setting to such a moderate physiological response, proves the trauma has significantly depreciated in potency.”

  Alfred’s mouth remained a tight line, just another slash to match the rest of his sliced-up putty face. He nodded distastefully, not particularly proud of the fact that he had finally learned to overcome a counterfeit rendition of his life’s most traumatic event. It couldn’t undo the physical and familial damage. “I’ve been getting some extracurricular exposure.”

  Dr. Velez leaned against the door frame of the chamber, hands in the pockets of her tan corduroys, and regarded the white patchwork of scars holding Jensen’s countenance together. “That’s good. Now, truthfully, I don’t see much use in persisting with this treatment, but I’m willing to continue if that is what you’d prefer; although—professional opinion—I think you’re ready to close the book on your trauma.”

  Jensen began to button up his shirt, a distinct absence of relief on his face. Velez continued to look slightly troubled at this detachment. Having watched Alfred Jensen dedicate himself to overcoming such a debilitating phobia, she didn’t like the way he continued to behave like a living phantom, a void with a pulse and purposeless eyes.

  “Mr. Jensen, when you first came to my office a year ago, you made me give you the hard sell on virtual reality exposure therapy. And I went on at great length about the tremendous results it has yielded in curing everything from battlefield PTSD to arachnophobia. Now, I can’t imagine what it must have been like, having gone through what you did, but you’ve come out the other side now. Yet despite your commitment and courage, and all the suffering and vast improvements you’ve made in overcoming your fears …” She gave a dispirited sigh and crossed her scrawny, birdlike arms across her chest, a few loose bracelets jingling. “Your success doesn’t seem to have offered you much in the way of comfort.”

  Alfred remembered swimming up from the eye-crusted, disorientating depths, screaming and panting in delirium, limbs dead, the tendrils of a never-ending nightmare coiled about his blazing neurons, trying to pull him back, deep into the horrors of his coma. He had awoken, a husk in a gloomy hospital bed, dried out, confused and lost to time. He remembered the private doctors scrambling around him, and little by little some of their faces began to conjure up memories from his professional past.

  Dr. Terence Steinway had been one of them, a benevolent visitor from some blurry epoch of his life. Steinway had completed his residency at the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont alongside Jensen, and after parting ways during their fellowships they had eventually crossed paths again here in Chicago. It was he who’d had the atrocious task of walking Jensen through his last memories, reconnecting the dots of what had led him to the hospital bed. Steinway had held him, staving off inconsolable tears and screaming rage. He had been forced to tentatively show him his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He had tried in vain to promise him everything would be okay, but there was no sedative or magic pill which could mend a fractured soul.

  And it wasn’t long before the pig-men started to stand in the corners of his room like sinister statues, waiting for him to fall asleep. Nobody, not even Steinway, had ever been able to see them. It got to the point where he would insist on sleeping with the lights on, a cold sweat soaking him into a paranoid shiver. Even in the bright and safe light of day, the forms would occupy the periphery of his vision, following him, darting from sight and hiding, trying to get behind him to finish the job.

  After some dark, ungauged passage of time, Jensen began his physical rehabilitation to strengthen his atrophied muscles, and valiantly he got out of bed every bleak morning on slightly stronger legs. He wanted his awakening to remain out of the gossipy circles of the medical profession, worried that some snooping journalist might think it would make a tragic but inspiring human interest story, so had himself declared dead. His body finally giving up the fight. In actuality, with his body slowly rebuilding itself, it was time to contend with the fever dream stalkers lurking around him. With a little research he learned of Dr. Marianne Velez from MIT and contacted her with shaky resolve, desperate to overcome the demons that hounded him
. Underneath it all, he knew the names of two of these devils: Isaac Reid and Michael Wyndorf. He just needed to learn the names of the others involved in dismantling his life.

  Jensen snapped out of his trance and skewered the short, ponytailed doctor with a look. “I paid you and your squeamish team to construct a program that simulated the attack.” He gestured at his ravaged face with one dispassionate hand. “But I never said it was purely to remedy my phobia.”

  Velez raised an eyebrow suspiciously. “Then what was the point?”

  Jensen couldn’t tell her it was to keep his hate alive and strong. He began to calmly fasten the buttons on his cuffs, parrying the question. “There is no more comfort for me, Marianne. But at least I can come to terms with what happened without falling into a piss-soaked panic attack.” He walked Dr. Velez into the adjoining room, where Steinway was finishing his latte.

  “I don’t believe that, Mr. Jensen. And I don’t think you do. Nobody bothers to make such an effort as you did because they’re throwing in the towel. I’ve personally dealt with many extreme cases where patients have been through absolute hell, similar to you. Assaults, acts of terrorism—they all lost people they love. And the majority of them managed to rebuild what they lost. There can be a silver lining; you just need to be open to the possibility of seeing it.”

  Jensen hung on her words, ever a polite listener, but inside his head he was already shutting down the optimistic sentiment.

  Velez checked her slim Rolex, surprised by the hour. “If you do wish to continue the sessions, I’m willing to oblige, but honestly, I think at this stage you would benefit more if you spoke to somebody about your perspective. I can put you in touch with a great psychiatrist who could—”

  Jensen softly halted her with a firm handshake, allowing her to escort him and Dr. Steinway out to the building’s lobby.