“Why?” Huffington Niebolt said, crouching. His knees popped, though he did not seem to notice. His braided beard hung between his legs. He tilted his head sideways. “I’ve seen a lot of people die, son, and the one thing they always ask in the end—the ones who get to see death coming, of course—is why. Why?”
He smiled again, his face beaming, and looked at each of them, in turn, except for Daniel, who was awake and alert and watching. To Richard’s back, Guy writhed, agitated.
“Why, why, why?” Huffington Niebolt shook his head and laughed, garrulous and genuine. Once more he met Richard’s eye. The old man’s smile vanished. The humor bled from his eyes. “Why is all there is. Why is all there ever was.”
He stood up. “Jacob,” he said, his voice as devoid of humor as his face. The taller one, Jacob, stepped over to him, looking like a child in need of instruction.
“Cut them loose,” Huffington Niebolt said, indicating Richard. “Put him over there. And don’t let that one bite off your fingers, Jacob, because I will blow your head off before the damned thing has a chance to swallow your pinky.”
“Come on, Huff,” Jacob said. “I’m not—”
“You’re not talking back to me, son, is what you’re not,” Niebolt said, showing Jacob the back of his hand. “I’ve seen these things at work with my own eyes. You haven’t. I watched them rip your little brother’s belly open and fight over his guts while he screamed for me to help him. So shut the fuck up and be careful, okay?”
“Okay.”
Jacob, related to the other after all, leaned over, reached into the hollow between Richard’s and Guy’s lower backs, where their bound hands touched, and seized the ropes. They gave with little effort.
Large hands seized Richard beneath his armpits and lifted, dragged him over to a nearby tree.
“Sit,” Jacob said, leaning Richard’s back against the tree trunk. Richard’s lower spine seemed to have fused in the night. A barbed spike of pain twisted between his shoulder blades. He stared down at his bound ankles, wriggling his toes within his shoes. They tingled.
Richard looked up. Jacob glowered, the muscles in his thick neck standing out, his jaw clamped tight, his small dark eyes fixed on Richard. Behind him, the other two looked from Daniel to Richard to Guy’s writhing corpse. Each of them held a shotgun.
“This is not something that I ever anticipated,” Huffington Niebolt said, looming over Guy’s writhing corpse. Using one booted foot, he rolled the dead man onto its back, pinning it with a well-worn heel to the breastbone. Guy’s corpse opened its mouth and gnawed on air. Niebolt smiled once more. Like his voice, his smile was warm and inviting. “Unanticipated and terrible, but much deserved.
“Yes,” he said, took his foot off of the living corpse, and turned to face Daniel. “Terrible, but much deserved.” He brushed a square fingertip across the scabbed cut on Daniel’s breastbone. “Who did this?”
“Me,” Max said.
“Hunh,” Niebolt said, picking at the cut until it glistened with fresh blood. Daniel jerked left and right, as if maybe he could wiggle all the way around to the other side of the tree. “Impatient.”
“Whu,” Daniel said.
Niebolt looked back at Richard. “I think he was trying to ask why,” he said. Richard held his gaze until he looked away, faced Daniel. “Okay. Let’s make this happen.”
Richard sat at the base of the tree and did the only thing he could do: he watched.
Daniel kept his eyes on the ground. Somewhere inside, the child he once was, the one who believed his mother’s words to be nothing less than the gospel, the truth, cowered and prayed. Begged the God who was not there to save him, to take this cup from his lips. There or not, God’s response was as it had been when His own Son had wept for a way out of pain and torment: He didn’t do shit.
“Why? I’ll tell you why, son,” Huffington Niebolt said, once more clutching Daniel’s hair in one large fist and pressing his head to the tree. “Open your eyes. Good.
“Because I can, that’s why. And because it is what you deserve.” He released Daniel’s hair. Eyes closed, Daniel did not have the strength to hold up his head. It hung forward, and he became aware for the first time of the stench. He’d soiled himself in the night.
“Let me tell you something, all of you,” Niebolt said, his voice swelling with pride. Daniel would not set eyes upon the man ever again, not if he could help it, but he saw him nonetheless, leering and prideful, his chest puffed out. “Most of you know this story. At least two of you don’t, so.
“I was twenty-two years old,” Niebolt said, “Not much older than you, I think,” tapping a finger against Daniel’s bare chest, “I killed a man with these hands.”
Daniel did not lift his head, did not open his eyes, yet he knew: the old man’s tight fists hovered in the air between them.
“Nineteen thirty-one, if I’m not mistaken. I killed him in the ring in a smoke-filled joint outside of New Orleans while the rabble screamed for more. Harry Cordeaux. The poor bastard called himself Harry ‘The Hammer,’ and I humiliated him in the third and took his life in the fourth.”
A hand closed around Daniel’s throat.
“I beat a man to death with my hands, boy,” Niebolt said, his voice shot through with awe and fascination, the voice of a convert. “I beat him until he was nothing, no more. Just an empty body with a stupid look on its face.
“I’m sixty-five years old, and I don’t feel a day over thirty, son, and I want to beat you to death against this tree. I want to snap your ribs and tear your organs. With these hands.”
Niebolt drove his fists into Daniel’s stomach three times, maybe four. Daniel gasped.
“I want to, but I’m not. You remember me telling you about Charlie, Max?”
“Yeah,” one of the others said. Shotgun in hand, he took a step forward. He was built like the old man, but his skin was darker, olive-skinned. His dark eyes were set wide in a round and unpleasant face.
“His name was something Gui, but we all called him Charlie, just like our boys call the gooks over there in that useless war. Charlie Gui.”
“Gah,” Daniel said, coughing. His stomach muscles were loose and hot. Colors swirled behind his eyes. God continued to do nothing.
“He was a Chinaman,” Niebolt said, and Daniel could tell that he was talking directly to him once more. “An old yellow thing made of wrinkles and bones. He lived in the same building as me and my mom in San Francisco. This was a few years before I hit the road and saw the country and figured out just what it was I was supposed to be doing while the planet grinded its way toward death.
“God, I guess I was fourteen. Charlie used to sit out in front of the building on this little folding chair, just looking off at whatever, and he and I got to talking one day.” Niebolt laughed. “He got to talking, I should say. I just listened. His English was pretty good. I understood just about everything he said, except for the times he’d launch into some lightning-fast Chinese, of course. He told me all sorts of things I really didn’t hold onto. Things about his time spent working on the train tracks or logging out near Mendocino. Things about his time in China.
“But there’s one thing I never forgot: When he was a child, I think he said ten or twelve, he attended a public execution. His father made him do it, told him that he had to know what happened to those who spoke out against the dynasty. You know anything about Ling Chi?”
Daniel lifted his head, opened his eyes, looked at the old man despite his vow to himself. His eyes were dry, and his vision was blurred. He found the old man’s face and held it.
“Just kill me,” he gasped.
“Oh, look at you, educated boy,” Niebolt said. His cruelty notwithstanding, Huffington Niebolt was an honest man. He was impressed.
The last of his strength depleted, Daniel could no longer hold his head up. It swung forward. He licked his lips with a tongue that seemed to have been fashioned from sand. His mind turned away from those two words, Jesus, God
, Ling Chi, the Death of a Thousand Cuts, the Slow Slicing, and retreated into the darkness, far, far into the darkness, but not so far that the old man’s words did not reach him. And not so far that he could escape the pain that would soon define his final moments alive.
“Charlie told me he kept his eyes closed for most of the execution. He said it was bad. I saw some pictures of the act, once. From just before I was born, actually. Right before it was banned. Charlie was right—it was bad. And I saw it again, with my own eyes, in a Chicago basement in 1942. That was worse than those black and white photos. You can see the pain in the photos, but you can’t hear it—the sound of blade slicing through flesh. The whimper coming from the poor bastard’s throat. Like a baby.”
“Jesus,” someone shouted. “Stop this!”
It took Daniel a moment to realize it was Richard, the asshole who was fucking Kimberly.
“Shut up,” someone else yelled. Richard gasped, the wind crushed from his lungs.
“So last night,” Niebolt said, “after I came out here and introduced myself to you, I went back to my home and fell asleep wondering how I was going to kill you. On the one hand, I’ve got these.”
Another volley of fists to Daniel’s stomach. He gagged and felt his bowels empty down his thighs in a hot liquid rush.
“And I’ve got this.”
Cold steel pressed to the flesh above Daniel’s right nipple, just beneath the rope. Daniel tensed, preparing himself for the pain, struggling to retreat deeper into the darkness. He’d reached the wall—he could go no further. He waited, eyes clenched, lips drawn back from his teeth, far too weak to struggle. There was no pain. The blade withdrew.
“The world you and your friends come from is not the real world, and you are not human beings. Not as history defines them, anyway. Humanity, like life, is cruel. Nothing is true but pain and blood, and your flowers and your happenings and your protests and peace marches flail in opposition to that truth. And one does not oppose truth.”
For an immeasurable moment, Daniel thought that maybe Niebolt had splashed ice water onto his chest. Then the pain hit and he opened his mouth and screamed.
Samson Niebolt’s words washed over Richard. In one ear and out the other, as his and everyone else’s mom used to say. His words did not matter. What did was the fillet knife in his hand, and the way he waved it so close to Daniel’s bare chest, brandished it inches from his face. The way he punctuated his sentences with it and described arcs in the air while speaking to Daniel, slicing deeply into nothing, inching closer and closer to Daniel until—
The strip of flesh curled away from Daniel’s chest with shocking ease. It hung from his stomach like an elongated and bleeding tongue. Daniel screamed. Richard screamed, too, and Samson muttered something while the one named Max laughed.
Richard closed his eyes, squeezed them shut and begged for death, just a quick death, please God, a heart attack or a stroke, and Daniel’s screams soon disintegrated into wet, choking gasps.
“Come here, you,” the old man said. “Hold his head.”
Daniel no longer sounded human.
Richard opened his eyes. He didn’t want to but he did. He opened his eyes and he screamed and he screamed and Daniel wheezed and gurgled and choked on his own blood.
Niebolt stepped back, admired his work. Max stood beside him, wiping his bloody hands on his shirt. Daniel’s nose was gone, just two bloody skeletal slits now bubbling blood. His lips were gone. So too was one of his ears, maybe both of them—Richard could not tell. So were his eyelids.
“Wait,” Niebolt said, stepping once more toward Daniel. Richard stared at the ground while the old man scalped Colleen’s brother, wincing at the wet-towel sound of Daniel’s flesh being peeled away from his skull. He looked up when he knew it was over, unable to do otherwise.
Daniel shook, gasped and bubbled, his face raw and glistening, a surprised and grinning skull pouring blood down his naked body. His scalp was draped over his shoulder. The old man wiped the knife clean on one denim clad thigh, slid it into its sheath, and pumped another left hook into Daniel’s abdomen. The tongue-like flap of meat hanging from Daniel’s chest waggled. Richard leaned forward, his stomach twisting itself into an acid tangle.
“Get back,” Niebolt said, waving his sons away. Plucking the scalp from Daniel’s shoulder, he strode over to Guy’s corpse, rolled it onto its stomach, and untied the ropes securing its arms and legs.
“Here, here, you filth,” Niebolt said, waving Daniel’s dripping scalp above Guy’s mouth. The bound corpse clamped its teeth onto the offered treat. The dead thing tugged on the scalp like a dog trying to pry a saliva-soggy scrap of rawhide from its master’s hand, and the old man wrenched it away. A hairy scrap of flesh hung from between Guy’s lips.
The old man circled Guy’s corpse, cut the ropes binding its wrists. He placed Daniel’s scalp onto its head, an oozing and bloodied wig, Daniel’s bangs hanging into its eyes like a parody.
Daniel whimpered and gurgled and wheezed. Blood flowed from his head and from the long wound on his chest, and the flap of flesh glistened in the morning light and rocked gently back and forth, slapped against his stomach. No one said anything. All eyes were on Guy’s corpse, which struggled to its feet. It fell three times, right onto its face.
“Holy shit,” one of them said. Another laughed.
At last, Guy’s body found its feet. It tottered, Daniel’s scalp dripping blood into its eyes, the bloody pants falling to the ground and revealing the wadded underwear dangling from its crotch, glued in place with caked-on blood.
“Ur,” it seemed to say, stomach gases passing over its vocal cords. Its head wavered. Its fingers worked the air. It seemed confused.
“Hey,” Samson said, loud, and Guy’s corpse looked in his direction. Its eyes widened, and it took a step toward him, its bare ass facing Richard.
Huffington Niebolt stepped behind the thing that was Guy and seized the back of its shirt in one fist. “This way.” He guided Guy’s corpse toward Daniel, who had slipped beyond the realm of screams. His shiny butcher-shop head hung low, and if not for Daniel’s heaving chest, Richard would have thought him dead.
“This way, you piece of shit,” Niebolt said.
“Don’t touch it,” Jacob said. “Who knows what kind of diseases it has.”
“Shut up,” the old man said, pushing the dead thing closer to Daniel, closer, closer still. It swayed from left to right, and for a moment Richard thought it was going to pitch sideways and sprawl once more upon the ground. It steadied itself, its wavering head growing still, its groping hands descending toward the crimson swath dangling across Daniel’s stomach, seizing it in both hands and tugging.
The meat came away with little more than a moist whisper. Daniel did not respond. He quivered and gasped and wheezed, but there would be no more screams. Stumbling backward, Guy’s corpse pressed the dripping strip of meat to its mouth. It took a few drunken sideways steps, its jaw working. Smacking like a child, it sank to its knees.
Niebolt took one tentative step toward the dead thing and its meal. Daniel mewled once.
“Stay back,” Samson said.
Richard struggled with his ropes, falling at last onto his side, where he grew still and hopeless.
“Shut the hell up,” the old man said, easing himself toward the feasting corpse, standing at last within its reach.
“It’s got food,” he said. “It doesn’t care about me.” He clenched his thick right hand into a fist and drove it into the side of the dead thing’s head. It toppled, the remains of its meal trailing from its mouth.
Niebolt stepped back, watched as it struggled onto its knees and pawed at its bloody mouth. The remains of the strip of flesh sliced from Daniel’s chest lay on the ground. The dead thing grabbed it, brought it to its mouth once more. Nibbled once, and then tossed it away. Its eyes settled on Niebolt, who stepped to the side, revealing Daniel, bloody and naked and warm.
“God,” Richard said. “Enoug
h. Kill him, at least, you bastard.”
“Shut up,” one of the shotgunners said, waving his weapon toward Richard.
Guy’s corpse stood, stumbled up to Daniel, and threw itself upon him like a lover, its eager mouth exploring his throat. Daniel’s breath came and went in blood-choked whistles through the ragged hole in his windpipe.
Guy’s corpse slowly spun in place, face and hands slick with blood and little wads of flesh. Richard did not close his eyes. He did not look away, could not shut out the horror simply because he did not want to open his eyes and find it moving toward him, inches away, its lips peeled back from blood-streaked teeth. Because of this simple fear, he watched Daniel die.
There were no final screams. Daniel went slack, utterly and completely slack, a rattle working its way from within his chest. A watery surge of vomit issued forth from his mouth and onto the ground, and he was done.
Guy’s corpse didn’t bother returning to its meal. It took a few steps away from Daniel, probed its mouth once more, and looked down at the length of its body. It grabbed the blood-stiff briefs clinging to its crotch and peeled them away, revealed the circle of open flesh where its penis had been. It dropped the underwear and looked around once more, its heavy-lidded gaze finding Richard.
“Uur,” it said, the left side of its mouth twitching into something that would have looked like a half-smile on someone alive.
“No,” Richard said, turning a pleading face to the old man. “Don’t let this happen, man, I’m begging you.”
Huffington Niebolt stared at Richard with unblinking eyes. He folded his arms across his chest, tight, like he was trying to contain himself. His muscled forearms rested atop the shelf of his gut, pinning his braided beard to his shirt.
Guy’s corpse tripped on its own feet and stumbled once again to the ground. It struggled for a few seconds, gained its bearings, limited as they were, and once more settled its eyes onto Richard. Like it knew he was helpless, and that to make a play for the others would be pointless. They had guns and fists. They could fight back.
Pray To Stay Dead Page 14