by Brett Savory
You couldn’t just pump shots into yourself—that was seen as suicide. And like many other religions, kept you from the divine. The hunters wouldn’t shoot if you stood there and waited for their shotguns to blossom, their handguns to light the night; you had to run, you had to be sport, or they wouldn’t play the game. And this was the only arena in which the game was played. No time for common murderers; no time for cops: Jail time held you up, kept you from The Run. Kept you from the goal.
As for shooting each other, that was nearly as bad as shooting yourself. This was and always had been about ceremony. Tradition. The hunters hunt; the runners run. The path to enlightenment—to further evolution, some thought—was paved with bullets.
Tonight, shadows moving quickly against a backdrop of random white, like the snow on a TV screen. Same running crew as always. Same hunters, too, save for a few new faces on both sides. Young faces—fathers teaching their sons.
Different parts of town attracted different kinds of runners and hunters. But with one thing in common: All operated below the collective conscience. For most intents and purposes—invisible.
Everyone in this Run thought the gas lamps in this part of town—north of the railway tracks that cut through the town’s middle—made for the best ambience; the electric streetlights to the south side of the tracks were too garish. Too modern. The game was old, had history; it deserved respect.
Henry and Milo sprinted side by side, two swaths of black cut out of the fabric of the storm. Henry had brought his Magnums this time—to present a danger. To keep interest up. Prevent boredom: hunters’ flesh was not nearly as bullet-friendly as runners’.
Ashotgun blast cracked nearby. Three hunters spread out, settled in behind dumpsters in the alleyway Milo and Henry had entered, coming in off a main street. The wind cut to a minimum here. Henry recognized the area—it was the same part of town he’d fallen in last night. He and Milo hunkered down behind some trash bins, caught their breath, listened for movement from the dumpsters.
“Fuckers hemmed me in last night,” Henry whispered, pointing behind them to the corner where he’d gone down in a quick-flash spray of red.
“Tired of the chase?” Milo said.
“Must have been, yeah. Though I like to think I provide a reasonable challenge, you know?”
Another shotgun blast crisped the night, lit up the graffiti-strewn brick walls around them.
“That’s why tonight,” Henry said, cocked his Magnum, “we piss them off a little.” He stood up fully, in plain sight, popped off a round in the direction of the closest dumpster, where one of the hunters’ feet was visible through the blowing snow. Henry’s shot pulped it.
The hunter fell to the side, propped against the wall. Screamed his lungs out. Henry ducked behind the trash bin again, leaned to his right, just enough to see his target’s head through the heavy snow.
Fired.
A clump of bone and gristle slapped against the brick wall, silencing the screams.
Words of anger filtered out from behind the other two dumpsters. It wasn’t often that the runners fought back.
“That did it,” Milo said.
A shotgun exploded from behind one of the dumpsters; machine gun fire opened up from the other. Anguished wails and screams of hate filled the thin spaces of silence between metallic staccato.
Hearing the bullets whistling above his head from where he crouched behind the trash bins, Henry realized his opportunity, took a quick breath, closed his eyes . . . and popped his head up.
Three bullets in quick succession whistled into his cranium. The first two slammed out the back, but the third stuck hard. Two more sliced through his neck, butted up against several others already lodged there. Henry fell backward, exposed to the gunfire, unconscious. One more found its home in his chest as he lay there, then the firing stopped.
Milo, grinning, moved to pick Henry up. The two hunters ignored Milo—he was too easy a target now—and shuffled to the dumpster where their friend had fallen. Low, muffled curses whipped by wind found Milo’s ears.
The hunters picked up their dead friend—each to an arm—and dragged him backward out of the alley, his booted feet leaving trails through the snow.
“Good haul, man,” Milo said, hoisting Henry up and over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “With any luck, I’ll take a few in the back on the way outta here.”
Milo trudged through the deep snow of the alley, past the three dumpsters where the hunters had been, walking in the grooves left by the dead hunter’s boots. He squinted against the wind, was nearly blinded by the street lamp’s glaring reflection off the crisp, fresh snow. At the mouth of the alleyway, down and to his right, Milo spotted a dark shape, a man, lying on the ground, most of his head pulverized, a misshapen, bleeding lump in the darkness.
Oh fuck, he thought. He looked up from the hunter Henry had shot, saw the man’s two friends coming toward him. Scowls under hoods.
The closest one stopped in front of Milo, blocking his way; the other one stood behind the first, at his shoulder, glaring, stone-faced. The first one spoke: “This ain’t how the game is played, friend.” Then he pointed to Henry, a dead-weight sack slung over Milo’s shoulder, still out cold and leaving a trail of blood in the snow behind them: “He killed my friend; now I’ll kill his.”
“Whoa, now, hang on a minute, fellas,” Milo said. “Henry was just trying to liven things up a little, you know? Keep you interested. I’m sure he didn’t mean to—”
Something metal glinted in the whitewashed gaslight, catching Milo’s eye. He looked down. The hunter had pulled a machete from a sheath.
Milo backed up a step, shook his head once.
The machete swung, slicing through snowflakes, through air, through Milo’s windpipe, his vertebrae.
Three crumpled heaps now, lying still in the dark.
Bleeding.
Three hours later, when the sun tinged the sky dark red, a passerby noticed the three bodies in the street. Only one was still breathing. The passerby called 911; an ambulance picked Henry up, took him to the closest hospital. Upon examination, the paramedics quickly figured out what he was, had seen a few of his kind during the course of their job, but since there was no clear directive about how to handle them, they just treated them like they were normal people in need of assistance. Let someone else worry about them once they got to the hospital.
Henry started waking up a little during the bumpy ride. And even though he was barely conscious, he still felt the paramedics’ stares, their hatred, their fear, flowing from them in waves.
He wondered briefly what his percentage was like now—was it enough? He guessed not, because if it had been, shouldn’t . . . something have already happened? He wondered, too, if maybe Milo had been taken in another ambulance. Maybe Henry would see him at the hospital.
Henry closed his eyes, wished he were outside again, feeling the night’s fat snowflakes falling gently on his lips.
Again—hospital green.
And again, the same nurse. Only this time warmer, due to familiarity.
“You here again?” she said, smiled a little, leaning over Henry, fluffing his pillow.
Henry’s mouth felt stuffed with cotton; his head, packed with burnt chestnuts. “Sure looks that way. Not for long, though, I suspect, once the doctors get wind of it. I’ll be trotted out again, just like last time, security guards and all.”
The nurse said nothing, just kept smiling.
Looking up at her pretty face, Henry suddenly remembered something Milo had said on the phone last night: You need a woman’s touch over there, my friend. Someone to bring some fucking life to that shitty little hole you call home.
And he decided to give it a shot . . . before his head cleared some more and he was capable of talking himself out of it.
“What’s your name?” Henry said, blushing, feeling like a complete fool. “Mine’s Henry.”
“I know what your na
me is,” the nurse said. “The chart, remember?”
“Oh . . . oh yeah. Forgot,” Henry said, shuffled his hands and feet uncomfortably under his sheets.
A few seconds passed, then Henry asked where Milo was; he couldn’t stand the unanswered question hanging in the air—like it always did whenever he actually worked up the nerve to talk to a woman.
“Who?” The nurse’s brow furrowing.
“Milo. There wasn’t another guy with me when I was found on the street? Tall guy. Skinny as fuck. Long black hair.”
“No one else came in. I can double-check, but as far as I know, they just found you out there—the two others they found near you were . . . dead.”
The nurse waited a beat, swallowed, averted her eyes from Henry’s. “I’m sorry, Henry.”
Inside Henry, metal shifted. Bullets and shot moved slowly, piecing themselves together. Like a puzzle.
“I, uh . . . I have to go now,” he said. Some base instinct taking over. A need to be home. To be warm.
Henry swung the sheets back from his legs, got to his feet. Staggered, nearly fell. The nurse caught him, steadied him.
“Henry, your head. Jesus. You can’t just walk out of here with—”
“Goddamnit, you know I’ll be fine!” he shouted in the nurse’s face. “You know what I am, that I’ll heal in a handful of hours, and be back out on the street, running through back alleys, eating bullets, chewing shot, lucky if they take off my head and end it for good, hoping that it all actually fucking means something!”
Henry took a breath, put a hand to his head—the walls swam and rippled. “Only now I’ll be running alone,” he said quietly, pushed the nurse away from him.
Walked out the door.
The nurse followed him, trying to convince him to go back to bed, stay and talk for a while. Just until he calmed down. But he kept walking. Wouldn’t even look at her.
She gave up at the front door, where it was clear she wasn’t going to stop him, no matter what she said. She watched Henry from the hospital’s window. Watched him stumble slowly out into the blowing snow. Trip. Fall. Collapse on his side.
She cursed under her breath, threw her coat on, ran through the double doors, across the parking lot. She knelt down, tried pulling him to his feet, but he was too heavy.
“What’s your address, Henry?” she shouted over the noise of the wind. “Come on, Henry! What’s your home address?”
He mumbled it between ragged breaths.
The nurse stood up, left him lying in the snow, ran out to the sidewalk, flagged down a cab. The cabby pulled over; she approached the driver’s side and explained the situation. The cabby put on his hazard lights, jumped out of the car, moved to help the nurse.
Together, they lifted Henry to his feet, shuffled him through the snow and ice to the back door of the cab. The nurse ran inside the hospital, fished around for some bills in her purse, came back out, paid the cabby, told him Henry’s address.
The car pulled away from the curb, soon lost in a white sheet of snow.
It snowed for another three days straight, then cleared up suddenly to usher in sunny, blue skies. But colder now. Much colder.
Henry shivered in his apartment. Not only had the temperature dropped, but his bedroom radiator had given up, shut down. He was too tired to move out into the marginally warmer living room, so he wound the blankets around him as tightly as he could to keep in the heat. But no matter how many blankets he curled around himself, or how snugly he wrapped them around his frame, the cold still got in.
The cold of ice on steel.
His teeth chattered. He swam in and out of consciousness. Several times he had hallucinated the nurse from the hospital coming to see him, stroking his brow, telling him it would be alright. He just needed to rest to get through this. Just needed to sleep a while longer.
Sometimes in the night, he dreamed of Milo: Milo standing at the foot of his bed, smiling. Just smiling. Snow in his hair. Then he’d walk out of the room, disappear, and Henry would wake up. Cold and alone. With pieces of the metal puzzle inside him still shifting around. Faster than at the hospital, steadily picking up speed.
In the chill of dawn, when the apartment seemed at its coldest, Henry felt he knew what the pieces of the puzzle were doing. They were moving within him to touch each other, form something. But what—and for what purpose—he had no clue.
He believed in nothing. Expected nothing. God was something that Milo had been after, not Henry.
The only thing Henry wanted now was to close his curtains. Since the storm had subsided, the sun streamed through his bedroom window. Too bright for Henry’s eyes, which now glinted in the light. He didn’t know it, couldn’t see it, but they’d turned from deep brown to metallic silver.
The day after the storm had passed, Henry felt the puzzle inside him slowing, calming.
Milo came to visit him one last time, late that night. He stood at the foot of the bed, as he always did. Only this time, before he left, he walked over to Henry’s bedroom window and closed the curtains.
The nurse knocked on the door.
No answer.
She knocked harder. Still nothing.
She fretted about whether or not to keep trying, questioned why she was even there at all. Decided to forget about knocking again and just try the knob.
It turned, clicked. The door swung open gently.
The apartment air was frigid. The nurse shivered and pulled the gray scarf around her neck tighter.
She walked in slowly, called out, “Henry? Henry, you home?”
Silence.
“I knocked, but—” she poked her head around a corner, looked in the kitchen which branched off from the living room. Nothing. “—there was no answer, and the door was unlocked, so I came in. Hope that’s okay . . . ”
The bathroom light shone bright in the relative gloom of the apartment.
“Henry?”
No one in the bathroom. Only one more room in the place.
The bedroom door stood slightly ajar. The nurse pushed on it softly, peeking inside. The curtains were closed. It was hard to make out anything but shadows layered on shadows. The nurse whispered Henry’s name once more as she walked through the door, but her stomach had already begun to sink. It was so quiet. No hiss from the radiator. The sound of the refrigerator running didn’t make it to this side of the apartment.
No breathing sounds came from the bed.
“Oh, God,” the nurse said, putting a hand to her mouth. “Henry . . . ”
He lay still on the bed. Bundled in blankets. Only his head uncovered. His medium-length dark hair, threaded with gray, hung in strings to the sides of his face. Unwashed for days.
For a brief moment, the nurse thought maybe he wasn’t dead. His cheeks seemed rosy in the dim light. She moved forward, tentatively put a hand on his forehead. He was warm. Not only warm—burning up. But somehow there was no life in him. No breath. Just this wall of heat, emanating from his body.
The nurse’s heart sank.
And that’s when she noticed his eyes: Steel gray. Wide open, staring at the ceiling. His face expressionless.
A tear slipped from one of her eyes. Dropped to Henry’s bed, sank into the fabric.
She stood like that for a long while, looking down at him, feeling the warmth still coming from his body in waves, as if something inside were generating it. Gears spinning. Clockwork winding itself up.
Then she told him her name, and quietly left his apartment.
The following morning, a dark, heavy shape, unlike anything this world has seen before, rose from Henry’s bed, moved around the room as if waking from a deep sleep.
Outside Henry’s bedroom window, a single snowflake drifted down, stuck against the pane, melted.
Vanished.
The first of a new storm.
MARCHING THE
HATE MACHINES
INTO THE SUN
My wif
e says: “Come on, Cam, we’ll be late.”
I say, “What’s the damn rush? Fashionably late and all that, right?” Fiddle with my tie. My socks droop around my ankles under my suit pants. Not tight enough. Can’t stand that feeling. Never could.
My wife, you don’t need to know her name, she says, “Not to this party. Can’t be late. You know how these people are.” Straightens folds in her thin black dress, smooths down wrinkles. Presses her lips together in the bathroom mirror, evening out glossy, dark red lipstick.
These people, she says.
These people are rich. These people are wealthy beyond compare. These are our kind of people.
When our limo arrives, we’re still in the house, fussing about with our clothes. I lean out the window, call to our driver (can’t remember his name) to wait, we’ll be down in a few minutes.
The driver nods, leans against the limo, lights a smoke.
My wife stands in the bedroom doorway, head cocked to one side. Impatient.
In my rush, I wrench my tie up too tight around my throat. Choke for a second, loosen it. Shake my head side to side, trying to get comfortable inside the stiff Bloomingdale’s shirt.
“Come on, come on,” she says.
“Yes, I’m coming, I’m coming. Christ.”
She says nothing, just walks down the spiral staircase. The front door opens, slams shut. High heels crunch gravel. I hear her talking to the limo driver. Her sibilants drift up to me through the bedroom window.
Hike my socks up, put on my shoes. Halfway down the staircase, the socks start to pool again.
The limo driver sees me emerge through the front door, drops his cigarette, mashes it underfoot. I slip in the backseat next to my wife.
“Are we going to have fun tonight, dear?”
“We’re going to have a great time tonight, darling.”
I can’t remember who says which sentence.
Jeremy Hapstead rattles on about his golf game. Whiskey sloshes around in his glass as he speaks. I nod appropriately. When he’s finished impressing me, he wanders off, corners someone else. Whiskey sloshes around some more, this time flying out over the edges, dripping on the plush carpeting. The man Jeremy’s trying to impress wears the same disinterested expression I wore moments ago. But Jeremy doesn’t care. He only needs to feel as though he’s doing his best to impress. He is a Hapstead after all.