Small slivers of brain matter and unidentifiable pink stuff leaked from the ruination of his head, dripping onto the resplendent and ever-so-tidy desk. A little puddle was forming, almost a perfect circle. Its colors repulsed and fascinated Lennon as he took it all in.
He peered at the bloodied muck and wondered if thoughts had a color.
Lennon wiped the softly trickling tears from his cheeks. He tried not to think of the times they’d spent together. The years of tutelage he’d been blessed with working under Harry. The trust that they’d built, strong as castle and steady as a rock.
The friendship.
Old Harry had been like a second father to him.
Lennon pulled his eyes from the old man’s corpse, leaving it sat there in that comfortable chair, holding the shotgun close, as though hugging a loved one. He would now rot, slowly but surely, until maggots feasted in the fetid flesh.
It’s how things are now, he told himself.
It’s how they have to be.
Lennon took a deep breath, and unfolded the note.
He began to read it, making it only so far as ‘Dear Lennon’, before he closed his eyes tight, gritted his teeth and crumpled his old mentor’s final thoughts in his balled fist. The blood-spatter that peppered the letter stained his fingers. He tossed it in the wastebasket, where it sat atop a copy of this morning’s New York Times. A half-eaten Butterfinger had been dropped atop the newspaper, but Lennon could still make out the headline.
He’d rather he couldn’t, things being as they were.
The headline was day’s old. It read – Hope Is Failing.
Accurate, Lennon thought, sadly.
Amazingly, considering the condition of the rest of Harry’s office, the wastebasket had remained unscathed, unmarked by the boss’ brains as they burst from his head. The wall behind Harry had taken the brunt of the viscera, of course, but that shotgun must have packed a mean punch, because it seemed like the inside of Harry’s skull had managed to cover almost the entire rear half of the office. It looked to Lennon like the room had undergone a drastic redecoration; the primary color…red.
Just for a moment, he questioned tossing the suicide note, but it passed quickly as a flash.
There was no point.
In the last forty eight hours, he’d read no less than twenty notes of a similar fashion.
Maybe more.
After a while, they all blended into one another.
And they all said the same basic things.
I’m sorry.
I love you son/daughter/mom/dad.
I hope I’m going to a better place.
I hope we meet again on the other side.
They lost their potency, if not their inherent tragedy, when a person began to predict their author’s intent as easily as one would predict a cheap horror flick.
Lennon glanced again at the half-faced, dead and mangled thing that had been Harry Bettany.
Horror movies, he thought.
An old David Cronenberg movie popped into his head – the one with the psychics and the telekinesis. He turned away once more, quietly pondering just how accurate the effects had been.
Pretty damn accurate.
Turning his back from the woeful scene, he made his way to the window.
Quite a view.
The old man had loved this office, and in no small part due to the view out there. It was spectacular. Central Park shone green and vibrant thirty one stories below, and on all sides stood towering, magnificent skyscrapers – testaments to man’s indomitable spirit.
Man’s once indomitable spirit, Lennon thought, rubbing his eyes as the mid-June sun shone bright enough to blind.
Not any more, he mourned.
A bird flew by the huge panoramic window, its wings beating in time with Lennon’s fluttering, ailing heart, and he wondered at the creature’s carefree nature.
Wondered at it, and envied it.
What he wouldn’t do to be free, soaring through the clear blue sky with no place to go but no place.
Lennon pushed his face to the thick glass and looked down. All the way down to the empty streets below, where up until recently, traffic had thrived, horns honking and engines burring. Now the streets that framed New York’s most celebrated park were all but dead. A few cars littered the streets, unmoving. They merely added to the sense of isolation.
He focused on the tarmac, so far down below.
He thought of flying.
Not a bad way to go, when the time comes.
You could go now.
You could open the window, you know how. The latch is right there. You could open the window and take one small step and fly. Fly for all your worth and leave this world and all its blues behind. You could be free. Every bit as free as that bird. One short, glorious trip, thirty one stories south, and then…nothing.
No more pain.
No more sorrow.
No more hopelessness.
Lennon reached for the latch that opened the huge window. He rested his hand on the warm metal of the handle and began to turn.
It’ll all be over soon.
He turned the handle, pulled, and felt the cool summer wind caress his face like a lover’s gentle hand. He breathed in the good, clean air – purer now in the city than it had even been – and closed his eyes.
Do it.
Climb up on that sill and let yourself fly.
He almost did it. He got as far as lifting up his right leg onto the metal rim of the windowsill, before unwillingly climbing down.
I can’t.
Not yet.
I have to take care of Darren first.
And not just Darren,
There’s Bill and Kerry, too.
None of them are strong enough to do it alone.
Perhaps Darren, but even Darren had his limits.
They need you right now, like they’ve never needed anyone before.
Go to them. Deal with them first, and then you can fly all the way to oblivion.
Slowly, Lennon closed the huge window, leaving the latch loose.
He reached into his pocket, felt the cold steel of the Colt .45 tickle his fingers, and then made his way into the office proper.
He closed the door behind him, shutting Harry up in his tomb, with his gun and his note and his half blown-off head.
He started with Kerry, though the decision was not his own.
On re-entering the office, Lennon felt his will begin to break. Those three faces, people he’d known and worked alongside for years, through thick and thin, through glories and bitter defeats, all sat in a line in the centre of the room.
They shifted uncomfortably in their seats, eyes bright with fear and pierced with sorrow.
Now the greatest defeat of all awaited them, and each and every one of them would embrace it, with broken hearts and scorched souls.
Lennon wasn’t sure if they’d sat in any particular order. On hearing the shotgun blast, he’d immediately gotten up and left his place among them, the conversation already over. His workmates had watched him make his way to Harry’s office, with worn down acquiescence wrought deep in their expressions. The gunshot had come as no surprise, but it had felt like a death knell. The first deafening exclamation of what would come to pass in a short time.
And now, that time had come.
Lennon had difficulty meeting those eyes. He had steeled himself and without speaking, had raised the .45 and pointed it at the first in line – Bill.
That’s when Kerry spoke up.
“Can you start with me?” she asked quietly. She sounded like a child in that moment, small and timid and so unlike the strong, sassy girl he’d admired all these years.
He didn’t respond with words. Instead, Lennon nodded. He fought back tears as he stepped toward her and stood over her form with the gun held up. Her eyes never left the barrel as she spoke.
“I’m ready, Lennon. As ready as I can be.”
He wanted to ask if she was sure, but he knew the
answer.
She was sure.
They all were.
Sat directly to her right, Bill shifted his chair a little to the side, probably not wanting to get any of the mess on him. He looked deeply uncomfortable as the chair scuffled on the hard wooden floor. For a guy like Bill, manners were the alpha and omega. He held good etiquette above all else. His cheeks flushed red as he lowered his head and closed his eyes.
“I want to be with them.”
Her mother and father.
They’d left the world only yesterday, and Kerry’s heart had broken in the knowledge that they hadn’t waited for her.
Lennon understood that they couldn’t. For some, the need to cut ties to the world was just too strong.
He honored Kerry’s wishes.
The bullet cleaved a small hole in her temple, and the life left her eyes even before the back of her skull erupted. It all happened outside of time. He never even heard the gunshot. It never registered.
Finally at peace, Kerry’s head dropped forward to rest on her chest. Blood flowed from her nose and mouth as though from a downturned cup. It poured down her yellow polyester cardigan and blossomed like a red rose in summer.
When Lennon realized it was not likely to stop flowing any time soon, he stepped to the side and stood before Bill.
The once proud father of three never lifted his head. His cheeks remained red, as though his shame outweighed the most natural instinct that man possessed.
The death instinct.
The fear of that final moment.
“I’m ready, too.” Bill said, barely above a whisper.
Lennon placed the barrel of the .45 gently against his temple. Bill flinched at its heat, but quickly leaned forward into the warm steel.
Lennon waited.
“Bill?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Is there anything you’d like to say before I do it?”
Bill’s lips turned up in a grimace, as far removed from any joviality as Lennon could imagine. It looked horrific; desolate and cynical and devoid of the man’s previous luster.
“You mean a prayer?” Bill asked, his eyes still closed. “No, Lennon. No prayers.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m done with prayer, Lennon. We all are.” A single tear loosed from Bill’s eye and silently ran down his cheek, “Everyone.”
Lennon said nothing. Just as with Kerry’s wishes, he understood.
In life, Bill had been a devout Catholic. A good man, not prone to the judging of others but to the sanctity of all mankind. He’d been a man who found in his religion a sense of love, kindness and compassion. He’d been one of the good ones.
That was then.
That was before.
That was during that sweet, impossibly fragile dream that had been living.
Now, all life had fled, and all sense of a benevolent creator had nestled under its dark wings as it departed.
There was nothing else to say.
Lennon pulled the trigger.
This time, he heard the gunshot as he fired. Time moved according to its proper nature. Bill died every bit as unceremoniously as Kerry had done. There was no exit wound. The bullet must have lodged in his skull. As his head fell backwards and his dead gaze fixed upon the slatted office ceiling, the small hole bubbled with blood, then overflowed; a red tear to meet and meld with his last real one.
Lennon considered leaning forward and closing Bill’s eyes, but stopped himself.
That was an act of respect better suited to the old world. It meant nothing in the here and now.
It was as empty and hollow as the dying world.
Lennon took a deep breath and steeled himself as best he could for what would come next.
Darren sat up straight, proud and defiant even now. Hopelessness had ripped away the man’s will to go on, but still some small spark of his best friend’s luminance remained. Not much. Just enough to afford the man a little dignity in his final moments.
“Don’t fuck around, Len, just do what you gotta do.” He said, looking Lennon straight in the eyes. “I’ll see you on the dark side, brother.”
Lennon put the gun against the soft brown skin of his best friend’s temple. Briefly, he closed his eyes.
Images played out in the fog of his mind. Distant memories all coalescing, merging, forming into something that could only be love.
He saw them as kids, nine or ten years old, pedaling hell for leather though the local cemetery as the nameless caretaker ran in chase, for all he was worth, face red and huge belly hitching.
He saw them playing Dungeons and Dragons – two boys on the cusp of puberty, yet still enraptured by worlds born of imagination and wonder. Lennon’s other childhood friends were there, too, though their forms were dimmer - time and the weight of life washing away the finer details of their features.
And he saw himself crying in Darren’s arms, sixteen years old, when his parents had thrown him out of their home with a suitcase and a barrage of harsh words after learning of his dabbling in marijuana. Darren’s folks had taken him in. Darren himself had become every bit the brother he never had.
Together, both boys had made their way in the world. All the way from simple living in Louisiana to the bright lights of the Big Apple. Together.
A team.
Unstoppable.
Almost.
Lennon opened his eyes, the ghosts of his past fading into oblivion as he met his good friend’s eyes.
“Love you, bro.” Darren said.
“I love you, too.”
Lennon pulled the trigger with his eyes shut.
No one really knew when the world ended.
There was no stopping of clocks as the gears of creation ground to a halt, to rust over forever more, and no great wave swept aside the societies of the world and all within. The forewarnings of global warming never had their time, nor ever would. The prophets of old would go forgotten, and the evangelists of the present never got to ruefully proclaim they told everyone so, with rubbing hands and fevered hearts. No god or gods descended from the heavens to smite the unworthy and lift on high the self-proclaimed righteous.
The world ended without as much as a whisper.
Maybe the human race had really just died in its crib, dreaming a dream that could never be. Its lights turned off in its infancy.
News from around the planet never heralded the coming fall. Instead, all news just stopped. Overnight, the airwaves fell silent. The radio waves emitted a deafening silence and the internet simply froze in stasis with countless passions and vices and moments eternally locked in cyberspace, like thoughts caught in time.
No one knew the moment that the heart of humanity finally ceased to beat, not precisely, but all around the world, from Scotland to Russia, Lebanon to the Unites States, the people collectively felt it.
The lights in people’s lives simply went out.
Humankind finally reached its limit, and without fanfare or any sense of panic, its heart just…broke.
Withered and gave up the fight.
Looking back, Lennon wondered that it had taken so long.
There was good in the world. Acts of kindness and giant leaps towards illumination as science and man rose in union to reach their potential. The human race’s capacity for love and its unceasing search for meaning had been a wonder. A beautiful, brittle flower that could never withstand the coming winter.
For all mankind’s accomplishments, for all its brilliance and compassion and ingenuity, it just wasn’t strong enough.
The human heart, Lennon now understood, had beat as one. Despite the wars over religion, the desire for wealth and greed’s ever-clutching claws, it turned out in the very end, that we all were one.
We just didn’t know it till it was too late.
People stopped going to work. Kids stopped playing in the streets. The birds still sang their sweet melodies in the treetops, but brought no joy to any human soul.
After all the endless
wars and the mindless slaughter of innocents from one continent to another, the mistrust of our fellow man and the hatred that festered deep in our species’ collective psyche all became too much to bear.
We finally, utterly, just…
Quit.
Like the sunlight unable to penetrate the darkest of clouds and illuminate the lands below, love, hope and mercy too were eclipsed, lost amidst the gathering dark.
People still loved, though. Perhaps too much, Lennon thought.
Maybe that was what finally caused the bow to break and the mass suicides to begin.
We were bombarded by scenes of horror by our media. Witnessed abominations against innocence. Man pitting himself against man over skin pigmentation. Brother turning on brother to fight and die for whatever deity happened to rule the minds of whatever geographical location each individual was born into. The pursuit of wealth suffocated the need to support and share, as corporations bulldozed businesses, crippled world economies, inspired wars for profit and saw man’s inherent desire to protect his fellow people overtaken by a sick sociopathic greed.
Children blown to pieces; obliterated indiscriminately by bombs financed by the 1% in their endless lust for oil, power, and profit. Veterans left to rot after killing and sacrificing in other men’s wars. Big Pharma withholding cures because there was no money to be made in a healthy society. Men and women, young and old, rotting in jail because they stood for freedom in countries where freedom was a dirty word.
Yeah, it had only been a matter of time, Lennon thought, gazing once more out Harry’s window at the city beyond.
And we deserved it.
We were the devil we feared. We were the monster under the bed. We were the hell that blackened out the heavens above.
Us.
People.
Ending the lives of his workmates and his friends had been hard, but Lennon understood the necessity. As the people of the world finally cast aside hope, and the species stumbled in its unified despair towards the cliffs of oblivion, death had become the only absolute.
There were no news reports of the world choking and dying, because those who would report it had, or soon would, end their existence, willingly and with great relief. The world, for all its beauty, had not been enough.
Consumed- The Complete Works Page 27