Reggie, wallowing in his own selfish grief, just hadn’t given a shit.
Now, however, he definitely gave a shit. When the killer – sick, paranoid, and frantic – racing across the desert towards the border fence, shiny-slick with infection, feverish again and pulling Reggie in tow, inexplicably turned, pointed towards the police and border patrol, and started shooting … Reggie gave many shits.
At the same time the yellow eyes to the west drew closer, the thudding of its enormous girth across the earth like a colossus striding upon the land. Reggie turned to it, saw not the giant demon-cat risen again, but a Humvee jouncing across the pitted, uneven landscape. Men in the passenger seats leaned out of windows, holding rifles.
One long barrel lowered in Reggie and the killer’s general direction.
Moving before thinking, Reggie did a crazy little pivot-dance, barrelled sideways into the killer, and sent them both tumble-tripping through a tangle of thorny bramble. An instant later a small thunderclap cracked in the night, and a sharp, hot breeze buzzed past Reggie’s head.
Yanking him back on course, the killer turned towards the jeep, emptied the pistol at it, reached in his jacket, found another magazine and jammed it home into the stock. The Humvee careened off to one side, dipped fast and hard into a divot in the earth and rolled over in a plume of dirt. Men shouted out in surprise and pain.
None of this had been necessary, Reggie thought, running. Not Ivan’s shots at the border patrol, and not the officers’ return fire. They’d been halfway to the fence, unseen, and Reggie thought they’d have made the other half likewise undetected.
Looking at it all from this perspective, out of the woods, seeing the entire range of it, the depth and breadth of it, the fire the two of them had started was immense. It was impressive and frightening to realize he’d helped start such flaming chaos. The tips of the conflagration reached the firmament and reddened the star-speckled heavens, so that the very sky itself was like a great tapestry catching fire.
No one had initially seen them because everyone was watching this inferno dance and leap across the land.
Yes, Reggie thought, they would have reached the border just fine.
The killer would have made it through the fence with the help of his friend on the other side, Reggie would have been free of him, started the trip back home, and it would all be over. He would have climbed in his bed, pulled the covers around himself, and slept as long as sleep would have him. Then he’d wake up, go downstairs, and give his mom a hug, maybe not let go of her for awhile.
But then the killer had turned, pistol in hand, and pulled the trigger. Whether out of fevered paranoia and confusion or pure malevolence, Reggie would probably never know. Yet even feverish the killer was a deadly marksman. Telling himself only to run, Reggie nevertheless turned to watch.
He saw the headlights and flashlights and the helicopter’s searchlight criss-crossing the desert and forest. He saw the muzzle flash of the killer’s gun. He heard the shouts of pain even above the whup whup whup of the copter’s blades.
There were curses and more shouts. And then the night erupted in gunfire.
As the first Humvee skittered and rolled, two others broke through the night, headlights glaring, to take its place. More heads, arms, and rifles leaning out windows. More coughs and barks of fire as the men pulled the triggers.
The earth pockmarked about Reggie, torn and bitten by the snatching bullets. He heard a smack nearby, saw the killer stumble, regain his footing, turn and fire again, even as he lurched towards the border fence. It was a strange dance the killer performed – pirouettes, leaps, flourishes – as they raced towards the fence line.
Something struck close to Reggie’s foot. He felt something like a pebble knock against his shoe. He wanted to shout at them. He wanted to wave his arms. He wanted to give some indication that it wasn’t he who’d shot at them. He wasn’t the killer. He was just a boy that wanted to get home.
And yet he was deathly afraid that any move he made other than running would single him out as a primary target. Following that blunder, instead of shooting somewhat wildly in their general direction, all the bullets would be coming right at him.
But he couldn’t just stand in the way of such a flurry, either. He couldn’t just hope he’d not be hit. So Reggie dove, hitting the ground with a forearm-and-knee-shredding slide to put any bottom of the ninth World Series game winning runner to shame.
He heard another smack as he crawled. Ahead of him he saw the killer stumble and stagger again, only to regain his footing, turn, and return fire. Reggie kept his face to the ground. Dirt was in his face, in his nose, in his mouth, and he didn’t give a shit.
In fact, if there was shit on the ground he’d gladly keep his face in it as well. He didn’t want the bullets to hit him. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to get back home again. He wanted to see his mom again. And if he did it with a mouthful of shit, that was just fine by him.
Ground level, feeling like a bug looking up at the land of giants, he saw Ivan reach the fence. There was indeed someone on the other side. The myriad lights of the police and border patrol were now flashing in their direction, scanning the desert for them. By the outer reaches of these lights Reggie caught flashes and vague details of the figure on the opposite side of the fence. It was large and it was working on the fence with a V-shaped device like tree limb clippers.
Then a portion of the fence was pulled and drawn back. The killer stepped through. Killer ahead, would-be killers behind, Reggie struggled to his hands and knees and followed, scuttling through the opening like a roach into a trap.
2.
Passing through the opening in the fence it was as if they’d passed from one world to another. The bullets stopped flying immediately. Even in his young mind Reggie knew about national borders, but the change was so fast, so immediate, it was startling. As if someone had thrown a switch that turned the insanity on and off.
But the officers were still racing up behind them; the angry, persistent stomping of booted feet, and the clatter-thud of the vehicles over the uneven, unforgiving desert ground a discordant rhythm. The lights followed Reggie and Ivan through the fence and into Mexico, tracing their path.
Having the strange notion that being identified would somehow further entrap him in the situation – like an aborigine frightened of the camera that would steal his soul – Reggie covered his face with his forearms, staggering forward after the killer and his guide, and away from the searching, prodding lights. Radio crackle and shouts faded behind him.
After a time they dropped into an arroyo. The decline was steep and though Reggie tried to manoeuvre slowly and cautiously, he ended up on a slide down it on his ass. At the bottom Ivan was sitting, breathing hard. The guide had a flashlight out and was aiming it at the killer. Reggie followed the pointing light and gasped.
Ivan’s left leg was in shreds at the thigh. Strings of flesh and meat hung like bits of cheese hanging from a grater. His left arm was dipped in red like he’d immersed it in a deep can of paint. The guide, though Mexican, spoke in English.
‘You did not say you’d have half the state of Arizona after you,’ the Mexican man said in thickly accented yet finely enunciated English. He spoke in a whisper, staring at Ivan’s wounds in an awestruck terror. ‘You don’t look well my friend,’ he said, sounding like Reggie felt. Dark terror and tired resignation jostled for position on the Mexican’s face.
‘Just get me to the safehouse,’ the killer muttered. His face was pale and gleamed with a sheen of sweat so that he seemed a melting wax figure of a human, and not a man at all.
‘I can do nothing for you, my friend,’ the Mexican said. ‘This is beyond me.’
With a sad, slow shake of his head, the Mexican turned, started to walk away.
‘Don’t,’ the killer said, raising his gun. ‘You’ve been paid. You have a job to do. You’re going to do it.’
The Mexican turned, having heard the threat in the killer’s v
oice. He eyed the gun, his flashlight spotlighting it as if to validate that it was pointed at him.
‘You would really kill me?’ the Mexican said, his expression and tone again mirroring Reggie’s own silent thoughts. What the man was really asking was What did I get myself into? And maybe Why am I here?
Ivan pointed the pistol towards the Mexican’s feet, pulled the trigger. There was a flat click and nothing else. The Mexican gave a wan smile, turned, and continued walking. Beside Reggie, the killer fumbled in his jacket for another clip. He found one, ejected the spent magazine from the pistol with shaky hands, and slid the new one in. He pointed and aimed with a wobbly, uncertain arm.
A distance away, the Mexican scaled the wall of the arroyo and was gone, taking his light with him, leaving Reggie and the killer alone in the night, in their hole, all the dark, silent world about them.
***
‘This wasn’t how things were supposed to be,’ the killer told him in the darkness.
After the hail of bullets and the roar of engines and the stomping of pursuing boots, the quiet in the ditch was a stark contrast. From such clamour and chaos to such silence was a startling thing, like stepping from a bustling lobby into an empty elevator cab, the doors shutting off one world from another. In the dark silence Reggie could hear a wet patter, a steady drip, and he realized it was the sound of Ivan’s blood smacking the dry desert ground.
The killer’s hand found Reggie’s, and he didn’t pull away.
The man’s fingers were wet and slippery. There was a soft squelch when the killer’s hand squeezed Reggie’s, and a warm moisture seeped between his own fingers, crept along the lifeline of his palm.
‘I want you to know that,’ the killer said, his voice hoarse and gruff. His breathing was slow and laboured and Reggie thought of a huffing bear settling in for the winter’s hibernation. ‘I just couldn’t go to prison,’ he said and coughed. The coughing was short-lived but moist and harsh. ‘So I got away from them, and found you.’
‘That’s a lie,’ Reggie said, surprised at his own boldness. ‘You knew that people might get hurt when you escaped. You knew you might hurt me when I found you in the woods. You hid in the tree house because you thought it was safe. But if the time came when it wasn’t safe anymore, and you had to do something about me, or my mom, you’d have done anything you had to, to save yourself.’
The killer didn’t answer, and Reggie didn’t give him a chance to anyhow.
‘You chose to be what you are,’ Reggie said. ‘Maybe the way your dad treated you had something to do with it. Maybe your mom dying had something to do with it too. Maybe being on the streets, and then getting picked up by the old man, played a part. But I don’t think any of those things did it by themselves.’
Without their own flashlight, lost at some point in the gunfire, the night was at first thick between them. Then the black veil between them lifted a bit as Reggie’s eyes adapted to the dark.
He could see the walls of the arroyo, rising crater-like in the night. He could see the scattered weeds and growth about the ground. And the killer beside him; a silhouette, a shape, humanlike but vague in form. Like an afterimage of where a man used to be, steadily fading.
The killer was watching him – that Reggie could also see. The whites of the man’s eyes hung in the night like ghostly orbs. The eyes were desperate, though still holding a hint of their old ferocity. Reggie waited for the bullet or the strangling hand. When neither came, he kept talking.
‘Because you freely gave yourself away,’ Reggie said. ‘It was your choice. You got in the car because you wanted to. You do what you do because you like it. Anything else is just excuses.’
In his mind it wasn’t Reggie speaking. In his head, for some reason, the voice he was hearing sounded like his dad’s. He could even imagine he was sitting on his bed, and his dad was sitting there too on the edge of the mattress. His dad was telling him these things. Reggie’s mouth was moving, doing the speaking, but he was really just taking dictation and then reciting what he heard.
‘When you hurt people because you like it,’ Reggie said, ‘you become something less than human. You’re an animal.’
The wet, bloodied hand holding his tightened and Reggie thought, Here it comes, here it comes. There’d be a firecracker pop, maybe, when the gun fired, just before the bullet shattered his skull. Or the squeezing bloody hand would leave his, and rise like a cobra before finding his throat, striking and choking.
But neither of those things happened. He wasn’t shot or strangled.
After a few moments, the wet hand let go, withdrawing. Though they could see each other vaguely now, there was another veil settling between them. A wall rising, or a gulf opening, separating one from the other. Reggie felt it, and knew the killer did also.
It was Reggie at the dials and knobs, now, controlling the frequency between them. Finding the station he wanted, and turning up the volume. Drowning out the former that the killer had dialled them into.
They were no longer in this together. Whatever had happened between them only a few short days ago when Reggie had stumbled upon the gut shot man in the woods, whatever had developed over their talks together, was fading.
‘You’re evil,’ Reggie said. ‘I hate you.’
And with those five words spoken there was a new understanding between them, a new deal negating the old. Signed, sealed, delivered, each awaited their just due.
3.
There was a stillness to things when the killer lost consciousness. Reggie thought perhaps the man was dying when he started to cough and the man’s body wracked with chills and shivers. Hearing such distress and pain, Reggie’s first thought was still Get him to a doctor! He needs a doctor!
Then he thought of the people the killer had murdered. The ones he’d told Reggie about: the woman running with her son from her husband; his own sister; the dozens of photographs showing the multitudinous dead, like a demented child’s flipbook. Those he’d witnessed: Deputy Collins; the second deputy in the woods, hogtied and helpless. And the undoubted many others – dozens, hundreds? – that the killer had never told anyone, much less Reggie, about. Those unnamed that would never be missed by the world at large, though maybe, perhaps, missed by a husband or wife, a son or daughter.
In this suspension of all things Reggie thought of his dad, shot and killed in a parking lot. The criminal’s vast potential heist of sixteen dollars in change scattered about the asphalt, forgotten in a drug-induced panic. Somehow that was as insulting as the sum itself: the money forgotten, left there like change tossed to a hobo in passing.
With these thoughts what last remaining compassion rattled about inside him for the killer faded away. The man trembled, the man moaned, and Reggie sat by not giving a damn. The killer pissed himself in his shakes and shudders, the astringent smell bitter and sharp, and Reggie smiled to himself at the man’s indignity. Soon after, the killer’s tremors slowed and stopped, his moans quieted, and for one frightful yet intoxicating moment, Reggie thought him dead.
He leaned over, listened for breathing. He thought he felt or heard the slightest exhalation, like the briefest of breezes through a slightly parted window. He set a hand on the man’s chest, felt or thought he felt the slightest of risings and fallings.
Then the killer was still, dying but not yet dead; unconscious, sleeping, but not the last Big Sleep.
Reggie’s eyes settled on the gun in the man’s right hand. The hand flopped like a landed fish on the ground having breathed its last. Or a dead spider upturned, legs bent and lifeless. He reached out slowly.
His fingers touched the pistol, and he sucked in a breath. They curled around it, and he let the breath out. He lifted the gun and brought it to himself, and his heart hammered.
The killer didn’t bolt awake. Didn’t even stir.
Reggie settled back down with the pistol, examining its shiny black surface. Held it close to his face to see it in the deep night. He tested its weight in one hand, then
the other. It was both lighter than he remembered from the first time he’d fired it in the woods and heavy at the same time. It’s very purpose it seemed to Reggie was what made it heavy.
He remembered firing at the water bottles. He remembered them being yanked out of existence by the slugs. He remembered the absence of the space where the bottles had been.
Reggie held the pistol, considering these things, and waited.
***
When the killer finally stirred, then awoke, he felt among his jacket pockets, like a man trying to locate his wallet. But it wasn’t anything as benevolent as a wallet he was looking for. Looking up, he saw Reggie standing above him, and found the object of his searching.
‘Always mind the details,’ Reggie said.
The killer stared at the pistol in Reggie’s hands with intent interest.
‘It’s after midnight,’ Reggie said. He didn’t whisper the words, but his voice was soft and lowered, as if he were speaking in a library, centuries of the knowledge of man bound in shelves around him. ‘Like when you killed that woman and her son.’
The killer, despite his wounds, despite his already waning life, was alert. He didn’t try to stand, but he manoeuvred himself to a more upright position.
‘That was a long time ago,’ the killer said.
‘You know who else was killed after midnight?’ Reggie asked. ‘My dad,’ he said after a pause.
‘I’m not the one that killed your dad,’ the killer said.
‘No,’ Reggie said. ‘But it was someone like you.’
The killer didn’t say anything in response to that.
‘And if he had been a target,’ Reggie said. ‘If someone had paid you to kill him, you would have, wouldn’t you?’
The killer nodded.
‘Yes,’ the killer said. ‘I would have.’
Are You Afraid of the Dark? Page 22