by Paul Cleave
He has stabbed her in the same place Charlie stabbed him. It’s not fatal, not yet, but it will be. Already he can feel her life slipping away. The satisfaction he feels is meager. Meeting this woman and meeting Charlie and meeting Frank are the worst things that have ever happened to him. As he takes his hand away and touches the side of his burned face, he knows life will never be the same. He looks into her eyes and he can see her dying, he can see her slipping away. He clamps a hand over her mouth to feel her dying breath against his skin. It gives him strength. It makes the back of his neck tingle, it makes the muscles in his arms and legs quiver, but it doesn’t make the pain go away.
He stares into her eyes. He keeps his hands on her mouth. Her breath against his skin is weak and warm. He steps away. The knife is sticking out of her the same way it stuck out of him on Monday morning. Welcome to my world, bitch.
He turns toward Feldman. Feldman is reaching up toward the rope. He has something in his hand. A pocket knife?
It’s something sharp, because a moment later Feldman is hitting the ground. He’s landed on his front. He’s getting to his feet.
Cyris points the Glock at him.
He has this covered.
He steps forward and uses the zippo to set Charlie on fire.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The fire is on me and there isn’t a thing I can do about it. There has to be something I can say to stop all of this, to take all of this back, to make it as if it never happened, but it seems. . seems that isn’t going to happen.
The flames chew my jacket, rising hungrily upward, and I reach out to wave them further away from me. Jo is forgotten now, and Kathy and Luciana, and Landry. The fire has taken me to another world, and this world looks a hell of a lot like Hell. I know Hell is other people, but it’s not-it’s just two people, Cyris and me. I flap my arms and pat at the flames, burning my fingers. The handcuffs keep digging into my wrists.
I drop to the ground and start rolling. I tear at the jacket. I manage to pull it upward, sliding it and the fire over my head. It singes my hair and I force my eyes shut as the tears inside them seem to boil. Then the jacket’s off my head and on my arms where I’m able to push it only as far as the handcuffs. I start kicking at it, stomping it into the ground, the flames finding the lighter fluid on my jeans. I push my feet at the jacket. The fire has weakened it enough to tear apart. It leaves me with gloves that have huge tassels on the ends. Tassels of fire. I kick at them, smudging them into the dirt. The technique works and the flames disappear. Red embers flicker from the material.
I get to my feet. Cyris is laughing at me as if I’m the funniest thing in the world. Perhaps I am. But it’s hard to concentrate when you’re laughing, hard to stay focused. He fires the Glock. It’s loud. I don’t feel any pain, but I feel something tugging at my chest. I look down at my vest. My binoculars have been shot. I turn and run. There’s another gunshot, this time another tug, this one somewhere in my back. All that tugging and I lose balance and strength, and I make it a few yards into the darkness before falling over.
Cyris comes in after me. There’s pain in the side of my chest from the impact of my binoculars being shot, and the side of my back hurts from a bullet. Cyris grabs my ankles and starts dragging me.
“I prefer it like this,” he grumbles, but I don’t think he does. I think he preferred back when he hadn’t been stabbed in the stomach or set on fire.
He starts dragging me back the way we came, probably so he can kill me in front of Jo. I dig my fingers into the dirt, looking for something I can use to fight him with. Leaves, twigs, moss, grass-nothing helpful. No branches, no rocks, just a whole lot of nature and. .
My fingers wrap around a cold, solid item, something L-shaped, something heavy and metal with a socket at one end. As I tighten my grip on it, the Real World shimmers and darkens, then darkens some more, but doesn’t disappear.
I’m not going anywhere. Fuck that. Right now, I’m all out of failing.
At the edge of the clearing Cyris lets go and leans down over me.
“I’m going to enjoy this, partner,” he says.
I doubt that he will. I swing the tire iron as hard as I can.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Something hits him hard. An iron bar of some type. It gets him in the jaw. Right in the front of the mouth. It plows through his teeth, turning them sharp and ragged. He feels his burned lips split open. Bits of shattered teeth are stabbed into his gums and tongue. He fires the pistol and knows the bullet goes astray.
Then the same thing hits him again. This time in the side of the head. His head snaps back and his view of the world changes. He can’t help himself, but he lets go of the gun and brings his hands to his mouth, his fingers probing and assessing and trying to repair the damage. He can feel blood rolling down the side of his face. Can feel his mouth filling up with the stuff. He spits some out. Teeth come out with it. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t think he’s anywhere. But if he had to guess-he’d guess this was death.
The forest pulses. Its expands, it shrinks, it’s there and then it isn’t. Same for the sky. The stars get bigger, they get smaller, they get brighter, they disappear. The pain in his head pulses, it gets bigger, it doesn’t get smaller, it grows. So that’s not pulsing. It’s just increasing.
He closes his eyes. He can hear a beach nearby. Seagulls. The waves crashing against the shore. He’s lying down. He can’t remember how he got here, but he loves the beach. It’s his favorite place in the world. Once, when he was a kid, he ran away from home because his dad used to beat the shit out of him, and he stayed at the beach for four days until the police found him and took him back to his dad so he could be beaten some more.
He gets to his feet. He doesn’t recognize this part of the beach. There are a few trees nearby. The sun is out. It’s incredibly bright, as if it’s only a few feet out into the sea rather than a million miles away. Like the forest before it disappeared, the sun is pulsing too. No, not pulsing, but disappearing then reappearing, like somebody is hanging a dark sheet over it and pulling it away every few seconds and then putting it back.
He starts walking. The sun is getting annoying, and he lifts his hand to shield his eyes. There are people here. He’s not sure who they are. People from the army, maybe. He walks toward them and they seem happy to see him, but they seem unhappy about the sun. He starts shaking hands. There’s some back slapping and a lot of people saying How have you been. His wife is here too.
“Babe,” he says, and he wraps his arms around her.
“I love you,” she tells him.
“Your legs-they’re back,” he tells her.
“The hedgehog gave them to me,” she says.
That makes him happy. He hugs her tighter, then lets her go and holds her hand. She leads him away.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
“We’re going on a journey,” she tells him.
“A mission?”
“Something like that. Here, I got you something,” she says, and she hands him a flashlight.
“What do I need this for?” he asks.
“To light our way.”
The flashlight is on. He turns it off. Then he turns it on again. At the same time he does that, the sun fades, it appears, it fades. The flashlight, somehow, is connected to the sun. It makes him smile. Smiling hurts. There’s something wrong with his mouth. He cries. Crying makes his head hurt. There’s something wrong with his head.
“I have the world’s worst headache,” he tells her.
“You have the world’s worst headache,” she tells him.
“That’s what I just said.”
“That’s what you just said,” she says.
He doesn’t know why she’s doing that. It’s annoying. The world’s worst headache is getting worse.
“I need to sit down for a bit,” he tells her.
“Not yet,” she says. “Let’s just keep walking. There’ll be plenty of time for sitting down later.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
I pick up the gun. Cyris is walking in a slow circle. He’s holding the flashlight. He has it pointed at his face, and he’s flicking it on and off. On and off. I keep the gun pointed at him as I move over to Jo. She’s still alive. I pull the tape off her face and blood comes out of her mouth.
“Hang on, Jo, please, you have to hang on.”
“I. . I want you to, to. .” she says, and she sounds out of breath, and I know what she’s going to say. She wants me to shoot him.
I put my hand up to my lips in a shushing gesture.
“Charlie. .”
I reach into one of my pockets. My cell phone is in there. I pull it out. Then I switch it off.
“Charlie?”
“I called the police earlier,” I tell her. “They’re on their way. The phone line has been open the entire time. They’ve heard everything,” I say, but I don’t want them to hear what’s going to happen next.
“Then where are they?”
“They can’t be far,” I say.
“Shoot him. Please, Charlie. Shoot him.”
“He’s done,” I tell her. “Look at him.”
“This isn’t like it was six months ago at that bar, Charlie. You need to shoot him. I won’t hold it against you.”
Cyris starts patting the trees. And talking to them. I can’t hear what he’s saying. Then he smiles at one tree more than he’s smiled at the others. It must be his favorite. Not that it’s much of a smile. Dark blood falls from his mouth in hanging clumps. Some teeth are on angles, some run flat against the roof of his mouth. Others are split, most are completely gone. But he keeps smiling. He hugs the tree. He wraps his arms around it and talks to it, and then when he pulls away he keeps one hand on the tree and the other on the flashlight, on off, on off. Over and over.
Then he starts walking. He doesn’t go anywhere because he keeps holding on to the tree, but his legs are going up and down, going through the walking motions. He tells the tree something, and I’m guessing he might be talking to his own personal ghost.
“Help will be here soon,” I tell her. “Just focus on staying with me. Please.”
“I’m not. .” she says, and she coughs for a few seconds and I think she swallows down some blood. “I’m not going anywhere,” she says.
I want to unhook the wire from around Jo’s neck, but I also don’t want to take my eyes off Cyris.
“Charlie,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“He’s a bad man,” she says. “If anybody deserves to die, it’s him.”
“I know.”
“There’s no way the police will send you to jail. He killed one of them,” she says. “They’re probably going to give you a medal.”
I’m not so sure about that. In the distance I can hear sirens.
“Charlie. .”
“I know,” I tell her. “I know.”
Action Man, do your thing.
I point the gun at Cyris. My back is hurting. I can feel blood dripping down my side. The wound back there is starting to feel like it’s on fire. I adjust my aim. Cyris’s head is moving side to side slightly in his mock walk. He looks as happy as a man can whose mouth has been shattered and whose face is burned. He seems. . well, strangely, he seems at peace.
I pull the trigger.
My arm bucks upward from the recoil. The bullet catches Cyris in the side of the head. His head snaps to the side and blood arcs out from the wound and then he drops like a rock, breaking his grip from the tree. I feel no pity for him. Only revulsion. He lurches upward, his throat gargling as blood bubbles from his mouth. He starts to convulse, one hand flipping from palm up to palm down over and over two or three times a second. I fire another shot into him, this one also into the head. The convulsing stops.
I lower the gun. This is how it feels to kill a man. I’ve played my part in the deaths of four others this week, mostly through bad decisions and being a fuckup, but not this-this is cold-blooded, calculated, not even self-defense. I’ve killed Cyris and if the game-show host came and asked me to sum up how I felt in one word, I’d say fantastic.
I think Jo is feeling the same way. Or close to it. She remains silent the whole time. The game show is ending. The purple light of the killing hour is here. Evil has gone. He is not dead, but he has forgotten my name.
Remembering all too clearly the mistake I made the other night, I keep the gun pointed at Cyris. I walk up to him. He looks dead. I don’t doubt it, just as I don’t doubt one more shot into his head isn’t going to hurt. So that’s what I do. I can sense Kathy and Luciana watching me, but what I can’t tell is whether or not they approve. I would hope they do.
Jo looks scarily pale as I walk back over to her. I drop the gun. Cyris won’t be coming back from the dead this time. I move behind the tree and loosen the wire, and Jo manages to stay on her feet for a few seconds before slumping down. The sirens are getting closer. They’re almost here. The knife is sticking out of Jo and that’s where we leave it. It’s probably the only thing stopping her from bleeding to death.
“You’re going to be okay,” I tell her.
“We’re going to be okay,” she says, and she grabs hold of my hand and tightens her grip on it.
I can see lights flicking through the trees. Help is here. I keep holding my grip on Jo’s hand as the voices get closer, and then they are here, guns being pointed at us, somebody is shouting, but I don’t let go of Jo, not until I’m pulled away. I’m pushed facedown into the ground and I’m put in handcuffs and the wound in my back brings me close to checking out for a bit, but I hang on. I’m able to turn my head toward Jo and watch as they help her. There are more voices, then paramedics arrive, and they tell us the same thing me and Jo told each other a few minutes earlier-that we’re going to be okay.
A guy introduces himself to me. His name is Detective Schroder. “Want to tell me what happened here?” he asks.
A couple of officers get me to my feet. Suddenly they seem to realize I’ve been shot too.
“Not until I talk to a lawyer,” I tell him, and Kathy and Luciana would be proud, and Landry wouldn’t be. Still in cuffs, I’m carried to an ambulance on a gurney, and from there it’ll be a trip to the hospital. And then to the police station. It’ll sure as hell make a nice change from all this nature I’ve been seeing lately.
We travel through the Real Word, and Jo’s words travel with me-We’re going to be okay, she said. And after all we’ve gone through, there’s no reason to doubt her.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-dd1b8c-ef35-a14a-8388-371a-8b14-5420ff
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 11.09.2013
Created using: calibre 1.1.0, Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Paul Cleave
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