Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

  They reach into their jackets simultaneously. I aim the fuckhead’s gun at the nearer of the two and pull the trigger.

  The hammer clicks but nothing happens. I pull the trigger again. Another click. Within two seconds I’ve tried all six cylinders, and the trigger is starting to bend. It’s not the bullets, it’s the firing pin or something.

  Fucking cheapie bullshit gun. I throw it at them and reach for the knife taped to my thigh.

  Apparently they Taser me.

  I wake up.

  I’m in a checkered linoleum hallway, face down. The two guys holding my arms know what they’re doing: at least one of them has a foot on my back, so I can’t roll forward to escape. The knife is gone. Most of what I can see are shoes. Most of what I hear is laughter.

  “Just fucking do it,” someone says. “This is making me sick.”

  “It’s a precision job,” another guy says, and there’s more laughter.

  I look around wildly. On the wall to my left there’s a brushed aluminum door. A walk-in freezer. I’m still in the hospital.

  Over my shoulder I can just see a guy crouching behind me with an enormous plastic syringe that’s full of some brown fluid. “We heard you got stuck with something nasty earlier, but it didn’t kill you,” he says. “So we thought we’d stick you with something even nastier.”

  “Please don’t say it,” I manage to say.

  But he does: “If you weren’t full of shit before, you will be now.”

  Hilarity. Meanwhile I’m still in the fucking hospital gown, which is untied at the back and lying open. The guy jams the syringe into my left buttock and injects the whole burning mess. At least he flicks the air bubbles out first.

  “You’ll be good and ready by the time Skingraft gets here,” he says.

  Apparently they Taser me again.

  22

  Magdalena and I left the Aquarium in the shark-feeder guy’s green Subaru hatchback. I had to lean on the steering wheel with my chest to drive. I couldn’t extend my arms.

  Magdalena was in one of the yellow raincoats from the metal cabinet. She had her legs under her on the passenger’s seat. She was keening so hard, her entire face red and wet with tears, that when she first spoke I didn’t realize she had, or understand what she was saying.

  Which was, over and over, “Stop.”

  “We can’t,” I said. My gums were hot and fat where I’d lost a tooth and ground down the socket.

  “We have to tell my parents.”

  I thought about this. Her parents needed to leave. Once Skinflick found out we were still alive, he would go after them. They had to be warned.

  But they also had to stay calm. If they called the cops before the Feds had protection in place, Skinflick would just find out sooner.

  “You can’t tell them about Rovo,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Magdalena said. Both our voices were hoarse. Parody voices.

  “You have to tell them to leave. To get out of New York. Get off the East Coast. Go to Europe. But if you tell them Rovo’s dead they’ll freak out, or they’ll stay, or both.”

  “They deserve to know,” Magdalena said.

  “Baby, you can’t,” I said.

  “Don’t call me baby,” she said. “Never call me baby. There’s a payphone. Pull over.”

  I pulled over. If she hated me, which she was right to, there was certainly nothing else worth worrying about.

  I think she did lie to her parents about Rovo, though. Because she was crying while she talked to them, but silently, with her chest jolting in and out.

  Whatever she said, she said it in Romanian.

  For which I am eternally grateful.

  It was night by the time we crossed into Illinois. There was a restaurant pretty high above the highway in a long strip of widely spaced motels. It was Somebody’s Pies or something. It was a chain.

  Magdalena came in with me to order, shivering the whole time. It was stupid to be seen together, but I couldn’t let her out of my sight. I felt rootless to the point of nonexistence.

  What Skinflick had said about my grandparents, I knew, had been right. It explained too much: all those years of avoiding other Jews, their silence about their families before the war, the wrong tattoos on their forearms. I didn’t know what to make of it, or of their attempt to live their lives as other people, but I knew I had only one connection to humanity now, and that was Magdalena.

  The restaurant we stopped at I don’t remember much about. I’m sure it was orange and brown, like all highway restaurants. We ate in the car. Then Magdalena fell asleep in the hatchback with the seats folded down, and I snuck out and called Sam Freed, and told him we were ready to come in.

  “This may take a little while,” he said. “I don’t know who I can trust with this.” He thought for a few moments. “I don’t want to call anybody I don’t have to, but we may not have a choice. I’ll get a few people and fly out there myself. It shouldn’t take more than six hours.”

  I woke up in the back of the Subaru, with Magdalena curled away from me.

  It was still night, but the shadow of someone’s head had jumped onto the fogged-over back window, because whoever it was was backlit by the streetlight behind the restaurant parking lot.

  The head was not wearing a police hat. I heard no radios, and saw no flashlight. The owner of the head was doing his best to move as quietly as possible as he worked his way around the car. When the shadow was outside the right rear door, I kicked the door open and into the guy’s stomach, then launched myself out after him.

  The guy stayed on his feet for about five sideways steps, then went down, and I was on him. His nylon coat hissed on the asphalt as I dragged him behind the dumpster, out of the light.

  I didn’t recognize him. He was early twenties. Thin, glasses, white guy. I slammed him face-first into the side of the dumpster.

  “You with the Feds?” I said. He was too nerdy to be a hitman.

  “No, man! I thought that was my car!”

  “Bullshit.” I slammed him again.

  He started crying. “I just thought you guys were effing,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I wanted to watch!”

  He was sobbing. I searched his pockets, but there was nothing there but a velcro wallet. His driver’s license was from Indiana.

  And his fly was open.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  I leaned out to tell Magdalena it was all right. She was sitting up in the back of the Subaru.

  Then, suddenly, she was lit up by headlights, and I heard the squealing of tires.

  The SUV’s windows must have already been down. The broadside of submachinegun and shotgun fire they vomited out, lighting up the Subaru all over again, came too quickly for them not to have been.

  Then the SUV leaped forward and out of my way, as if I had brushed it aside with my hands. I heard it sideswiping cars behind me as it rocketed from the lot.

  I reached the Subaru. It looked stepped on, the whole side of it crushed in by gunfire. The air was filled with glass dust and the smells of cordite and blood.

  The door came off in my hands. Magdalena’s head lolled as I pulled her out and spun with her to the ground.

  Her right cheekbone was caved in, smashed like the side of the car and filled with blood. Both eyes were completely red, the left one with a seam across it that oozed perfectly clear jelly all the way down the side of her head.

  When I grabbed her face up to mine, I felt bones I couldn’t see shift beneath her skin.

  When God is truly angry, He will not send vengeful angels.

  He will send Magdalena.

  Then take her away.

  23

  I wake up. It’s difficult. It takes a couple of tries. I’m so incredibly cold that staying asleep seems preferable to finding out why.

  Eventually, though, I try to turn over, and the fact that my dick is stuck to the floor wakes me all the way up immediately. At first I think my dick has been n
ailed there, since it’s so numb it feels like a piece of leather that’s tethering me in place. Then I touch it and decide it’s been glued there. Then I realize it’s frozen to the steel floor.

  I spit into my left hand—I’m rolled over on my right arm, and I don’t want to lie on my stomach again, even for a moment, to free it—and use the spit to de-ice my dick. It takes a couple of applications. It’s kind of like whacking off.

  As I’m doing it, though, the blindness-panic sets in. Because I cannot see anything. Between spit applications I grind the knuckles of my free hand into my eyes. Those weird pixilated multicolored blossoms appear, which I decide means that my retinal nerves are still functioning. Also that, since my eyes themselves feel fine to the touch, it’s just completely dark in here.

  Which is where, exactly? The moment my dick is loose I jump to my feet. My hospital gown, which has been bunched up around my chest, falls back down to cover the quarter of my body it’s supposed to. The bandages from my hand and neck, though, are gone.

  I reach forward. Touch a steel wall a couple of feet in front of me. Step toward it and bash my front teeth on something hard and metal. The pain and surprise make me jump back, and I hit another bunch of metal things. Shelves. I move my hands over them like they’re a large-print version of Braille. Find dozens of bags of ice in the shape of blood units for transfusion.

  I try the other side, then the back. Same thing. The front is a metal door, the handle of which doesn’t move at all.

  I’m in a walk-in freezer about the size of a jail cell. A blood freezer.

  Why?

  Obviously I could die in here. I could also get brain damaged, like a sous-chef I once treated who had spent a full night locked in the deep-freeze of the restaurant he worked at. But for someone to use a deep-freeze to try to do either of those things intentionally seems absurd. It’s like the Joker leaving Batman in a sno-cone machine, then not sticking around to watch.

  Though injecting feces into someone’s butt cheek seems a little odd too, when you think about it.

  I do think about it for a moment, because it’s so disgusting. Then I move on. If I was going to die from toxic shock I already would have.* And in terms of long-term consequences, should I live to find them out, I’m already on every kind of antibiotic there is. Thank you, Assman: I have no idea what’s wrong with you, but I do stand by your treatment protocol.

  Then I realize why I’m here.

  They’re not trying to kill me. They’re trying to weaken me, like the six different kinds of assholes in Ferdinand who stab the bull half to death before the matador even enters the arena.

  So that Skinflick can come in and kill me himself.

  With his knife fighting, presumably. Where was it Squillante said Skinflick had been training? Brazil? Argentina? I try to remember if I’ve heard anything about the styles of knife fighting in either of those places. I can’t.

  I do know that there are really just two underlying philosophies of knife fighting: the Realist School, which holds that any time you fight someone who knows what he’s doing you are going to be cut, so you should prepare for it (these are the guys you see wrapping their leather jackets around their left forearms before a fight), and the Idealist School, which believes you should devote as much energy as it takes to keeping yourself from being cut at all. By never, for example, having a nonstriking part of your body be forward of your blade.

  Both schools follow a couple of basic rules. You have to remember to kick and punch if you get the opportunity, because knives are so scary people forget about the rest of you. And as long as you have a knife with an edge on it, you should never try to stab someone. Stabbing is a sucker move. It exposes too much of your body for too little possibility of damage. Slashing, meanwhile, should be done to any target that presents itself (such as the knuckles of your opponent’s knife hand), but ideally to the insides of his arms or thighs, where the larger blood vessels run. So your opponent bleeds to death, like animals attacked by sharks in the wild.

  On principle—and because I have a tiny hospital gown instead of a leather jacket—I lean toward the Idealist School. Of course, I also lean toward having a knife, which at the moment I don’t. So I set about trying to change that.

  First I explore the freezer. Naked socket, no bulb, in the ceiling. A lot of shelves of blood products.

  Maybe I can build a blood-product snowman, and nauseate Skinflick to death.

  The shelves themselves are useless. They’re welded to their framework, which is made of thick iron L-bars that are in turn welded to square iron plates, about the size of coasters, which are bolted onto the floor and the ceiling. The bolts are all too tight to fuck with, particularly since I’m quickly losing sensation in my fingertips, even the ones I didn’t spit on, and my hand that got cut is starting to stiffen at the palm. Hammering on the shelves, which is hard to do because there’s barely any room to raise my fist above them, makes more noise than is probably wise and doesn’t even dent them. The door handle doesn’t break off even when I put both feet on the door and pull.

  I consider what it would be like fighting with just my hands and feet, both of which are starting to feel like steaks tied to the ends of my limbs. I think about strategy: whether I should stay near the door or not and so on.

  But thinking without moving starts to shut me down again. I do another sweep of the room. It’s hard to be sure I’ve checked all of every shelf when I can’t see and my sense of touch is so bad, so I start using my forearm to feel with. The nerve density is lower, but the better circulation makes up for it.

  Eventually I discover that the plate at the base of one of the bars has a sharp edge. The plate’s about six inches square and a quarter inch thick. If I could pry it loose with the bar still attached to it, I’d be holding a fairly awesome weapon. I try the trick with the feet against the wall again. No dice. Just a reminder that I’m weaker than I was half an hour ago.

  I lean against the shelves to catch my breath. Fuck the fact that the metal is leaching heat out of me. I need to figure out what to do.

  Or whether to do anything.

  What difference does it make? If I get out of this, David Locano will just find me again, and kill me. And it’ll be while I’m working as a gas station attendant in Nevada. Standing around all day because nobody uses gas station attendants anymore, they just swipe their credit cards at the pump.

  Whereas if I die here, there’s always a chance that Magdalena was right about there being an afterlife. Then a chance someone fucks up and lets me in, and I see her again.

  I’m starting to get both loopy and morose. Things are starting to seem abstract, and to not matter. I’m losing it.

  I must stop losing it.

  I must think of a plan.

  I bang my head against the edge of a shelf. The pain wakes me up. Enables me to think, at least, of something.

  Something so crazy and stupid, so incredibly unlikely to work, that I would never even try it except for one small promise that it makes.

  That the attempt will make me suffer magnificently.

  So much so that, if it works and I survive, I may even deserve to.

  If you keep your heel on the ground and lift your foot toward the ceiling, then spread your toes apart (not that easy, I know—it makes you admit you’re a primate), you create a distinct channel along the outside of your lower leg, between the muscles of your shin and the muscles of your calf. This is the channel I’m hoping to cut into.

  I drop to my knees by the floor plate, and press my right shin onto it so that the plate’s sharp corner jabs into the skin just below my knee. I would prefer to be doing this to my left shin, but that would be too hard to get to with my right hand. So it’s my right shin I push down and forward against the corner.

  It doesn’t work. I’ve barely scratched myself. I must have let up on the pressure at the last moment, subconsciously preventing myself from raking the skin open.

  I numb my shin out with an ice pack of
blood, and this time when I run it over the sharpened corner I push down on my calf with my right hand, to keep the leg from bucking. Yeah, the leg tries to buck. But this time it’s too weak, and the skin rips.

  The pain makes me roll over onto my back and grab my knee up to my chest while doing everything I can to keep from screaming through my eyes. But with my foot in that position I can feel that the top of it has turned instantly, completely numb except for the webbing between my big toe and the next one over. Which is great news: I’ve cut so deep I’ve severed the nerve that runs just above the muscle.

  I wait a minute or so to see if I’ve also severed the artery that runs alongside the nerve—i.e., whether I’ve just killed myself, and can relax for the last few moments of my life—then I gingerly feel along the gash to make sure it’s long enough. It is: it runs about three-quarters of the way down to my foot. So I roll and press it against the icy floor to kill the pain a bit, and slow the bleeding. I can’t really tell if that works.

  Anyway, there’s no time like the present. I sit back on my ass. My scrotum, which was already tight, yanks tighter so fast it feels like it’s going to sling my testicles up into my skull. I sink the fingers of both hands into my leg wound.

  A whole new type of pain rips into me, this one reaching up into my hip, and I realize: I will not be able to try this again. So I force my fingertips down between the hot and ropy muscles.

  Which, as slippery as they are, contract like steel cables, almost breaking my fingers. “Fuck you!” I shout, and pull them apart by force, working the fingers of my right hand in deeper. I can feel the pulsation of the artery against my knuckles.

  Then it happens: I touch my left fibula.

  The fibula and tibia, as I believe I’ve mentioned, are the equivalent of the two parallel bones of your forearm. But, unlike in the forearm, the smaller of the two—the fibula—doesn’t do nearly as much as the larger one. Its upper end forms a minor part of the knee, and its lower end is your outer ankle bone. The rest of it is totally useless. It doesn’t even bear weight.