Worlds of Hurt

by Brian Hodge

  Breakthrough. By the look on his face, she had him.

  “You didn’t just pick someone at random this time. Or get a feeling that the time and place were right. Something alerted you to these people, something you couldn’t fully understand. A letter with no return address, a call that sounded from very far away…”

  “E-mail,” he said. “I got their e-mail.”

  “Really.” That was a new one. She hadn’t heard of this before. “Well, you know what they say: God is in the details. What could be more detailed than the Internet?”

  “You know, up to a point, I could write this off as good guesswork, but…” He knocked back coffee as though he needed to feel it burn. “How do you know all this?”

  “I’ve come across several of your kind. I have friends and allies who make it a point to kill your kind.”

  Bruce straightened and squared his shoulders, a subtle fight reflex. “That’s what this is about? Then take your best shot.”

  “Put your weenie back in your pants,” she said. “With me, the situation is more complicated.”

  “Then why are we here? What do you expect to get out of this little tête-à-tête?”

  “I want you to leave Andrei alone. Leave him be. However many days he has, and I hope it’s a lot, let him live them out without having to worry about you.”

  A laugh rumbled in his throat. “Why would I consider that? If you’re so tuned into what I am, why would you even ask?”

  “I’m not making the mistake of thinking that I can appeal to your better nature. You don’t have one. I would guess the only reason you didn’t kill Janika and Corey earlier is because you didn’t want a more involved investigation getting in the way of your real plans.”

  “At last—a woman who understands me.”

  “But I do think I may be able to appeal to your self-interest. And I would guess that impulse in you is very powerful.”

  “Like I said.” He started to relax again. “What would my self-interest get out of such a rare display of mercy and dereliction of duty?”

  “Me,” she said. “I go with you, to wherever home is for you.”

  He sneered with blatant contempt. “There’s ass there too, if I want it.”

  “Which probably isn’t very often. You’re kind of freaks that way, but I can see the wisdom in it. It makes you people not very prone to entanglements.”

  “This is getting annoying.” Now he looked peeved, his not-so-dirty little secret found out. They weren’t without pride, in Manon’s experience, sometimes even feeling pangs over what made them different. “So what good would you be, then?”

  “I can help you better understand what you are, and where that’s taking you. You’ve been left on your own for that. No one else is going to show up for you.”

  “And what is it that I’m supposed to be, exactly?”

  “A long time ago, a priest who learned about your kind named you the Vindices. It’s as good a label as any. It’s Latin for someone who punishes, or avenges, but there are undertones of making a claim on something, too. Does that sound about right?”

  He didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to—she could see in his eyes that the pieces had clicked. It seemed clear enough that he already understood his wretched business was with those who had died and revived, coming back from what they’d been gulled into believing would be their paradise…and who then, by some fluke of mind and soul perhaps, remembered what they weren’t supposed to.

  “So far, I’ve been doing a pretty good job of figuring things out for myself. What do I need you for?”

  “Everything you’re going to wonder about and your god will never tell you. What do you think is waiting for you after all this—have you never stopped to wonder? And have you looked in a mirror lately…I mean really looked? One can’t do what you do without it leaving traces. I’ve only just met you, but I think it’s started already. One day you’ll look in the mirror and you won’t even know yourself.”

  This touched a nerve, she thought, and was perhaps the best leverage she had against him. He was not without vanity, she could tell, his hair shorn immaculately close, and his face looking fresh-scrubbed and shaved even late in the evening, as though he aspired to appear as pristinely clean as he could.

  “It’ll only get worse,” she went on. “The outer man starts to resemble more and more what he is inside…the things he’s done. There’s no hiding it. It eats through and writes itself on him like a cancer. In another place and time, mobs that didn’t know any better used to chase down old vindices and tear them to pieces, or burn them alive, because they didn’t believe them to be human…just some degenerate creature that aspired to be human, or maybe started out that way and fell. One way or the other, they were probably right. Now, even if you’re fortunate enough to live in a time when people won’t do that to you—most places, anyway—what kind of existence do you think you’ll have? You’ll be lucky to live in sewers.”

  Bruce sat a few moments, digesting this and clearly not liking the way it settled. “What can you do about it? Assuming it’s even true.”

  “I can take you to a place where you won’t be alone. Where they’ll call you ‘brother.’” She finished her coffee and dropped the spoon into the empty mug, louder than it needed to be. “Good luck finding it on your own.”

  “So…all this can be mine, just for Andrei’s life. What is he to you?”

  “How could I explain something to you that you’re incapable of feeling?” She could tell that this wasn’t good enough, that Bruce wanted more. “A few years ago, I came here for one thing. I came too early. It was a mistake. We’ll leave it at that. You haven’t earned more of an answer than that yet.”

  “And what the fuck are you? Period.”

  “Same maker, different side. Except we happen to have some common interests after all.”

  Manon looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter. Eighteen minutes they had been here. She’d told Andrei to give her twenty, then go on if she hadn’t come out. Of course he would wait. He would wait until his hope withered or his toes turned to ice, whichever came last.

  “Bruce…?” she said. “Who am I leaving with tonight?”

  “Just like that, you want an answer?”

  “What’s so difficult about it?”

  “If you have to ask that, then you don’t know me half as well as you think you do.”

  He sat quietly for a few moments, as though debating with himself, trying to decide whether or not she was lying about his ultimate fate. No one would ever have talked to him this way before, and had he not been such a monster, she might have found it poignant the way his fingers slid up to his face, an unconscious move, seeking evidence of change.

  Bruce yanked his hand away from his cheek and pushed away from the table and to his feet. “I guess you’ll know what I decide pretty soon after I do.”

  She wrote her phone number on a napkin and slid it across the table. “A little advance warning would not go unappreciated.”

  He pocketed it and left, and Manon didn’t try to stop him. She wondered, though, if it didn’t go as hoped, when would be the best time to try to work out the consolation prize. One didn’t live as long as she had without learning the value of alternatives, no matter how much they might hurt.

  XI

  Now that the threat had declared itself, Janika had moved back home, and Corey with her, clothes and toiletries and CDs and video games and all. For the first time since Corey had started spending a few nights each week here, it no longer felt awkward to Andrei, as if the house weren’t big enough for the both of them. Admit it—Corey truly was family now, and more family to him than most of those who wore the title through blood.

  Maybe it was because Corey no longer seemed quite like the same man, eager to see him gone. His belly was still big, and his heart too—his ferocious will to keep Janika safe was ample evidence of that—but now he seemed smaller somehow. His mouth would freeze into a determined pout and he wo
uld stare ahead at something that wasn’t there for anyone else to see. The crack on the skull that he’d sustained was a rude pink line showing through the close-cropped millimeter of his hair, and within a few days it became apparent that Corey was trying to render it invisible, leaving his electric clippers untouched so that his hair would grow out and eclipse the scar.

  He really believes me now, no more doubts, Andrei thought. He believes me and I wish he could go on thinking it was all in my head.

  And so went the days, work and waiting…waiting for the world to change again for the worse, or to wake up one morning and realize that the worst was over; that he really did have a long life ahead of him, and that he could make of it, and what might lie beyond it, whatever he wanted. Bruce and Manon had made contradictory promises the other night, but only one of them could be right in the end.

  At home and shop and restaurant, they all felt protected, the police a visible presence, or at least just out of sight. A two-officer stakeout was going on across the street and one door down, in the same house that Bruce had used to watch him. They knew which of their neighbors they had lost now—Mrs. Hanrahan, a widow who must have given her killer no trouble at all, her neck broken and her body folded into her refrigerator after its shelves were removed. Her sons had given the Pittsburgh P.D. permission to use the house for however long they needed, and Andrei knew how terribly he was going to miss her, the fact of her, like an anchor for the neighborhood, and the flowers she tended each spring that turned her small front yard into the block’s brightest splash of red and yellow and purple.

  Assuming he was still around by then.

  The threat, if it came again, would not come through anyone’s front door this time, nor the back. Rather, it would lure him out where they could not follow. If he hadn’t told the police everything about what was going on, it was only because he didn’t know how to make them believe him any better than his own family had all this time. So let them think the danger wore another label altogether. Online predators, psychopathic ex-boyfriends of women halfway across the country…they understood things like this. On the one hand, it made Andrei feel guilty that he was wasting their resources…but then again, he supposed it really would prevent Janika and Corey from being used as pawns again.

  He knew where it would begin.

  He still had the cell phone that Bruce had given him on the street, down the block from Globville. His pager, a line to the next life in case it decided it wanted him back at all costs. It had rung on three occasions already, false alarms all, but each one had given him a whiplash of dread as he answered, only to hear an accented voice asking for Sanjeet.

  “He must have changed his number. They just gave me this one,” Andrei would tell them, and found it more repugnant each time because he was lying to the friends of a dead man that, in all likelihood, no one had found. What was he like? Andrei wanted to ask them, something he would never know and maybe it was better that way.

  One thing he did know, though: The phone would not stay active forever. He looked up the model on the manufacturer’s web site and found that in standby mode its battery was good for a fraction over seven days. It had been in his possession for nearly four already. Three and change to go, at most, then the phone would be dead in his hand. Would Heaven’s claimant know this? He probably did, and the countdown was one of his subtler tortures.

  Andrei made an attempt to extend its life, trying it with the charger for Janika’s phone, and the phone she’d retired before that, and Corey’s too, but it fit none of them. Rather than keep trying, shopping for the proper one, he gave it up to fate. Perhaps, if Bruce were to accede to Manon’s mysterious deal, whatever it was, that would be the sign—the phone’s death telling him that his life was spared.

  And so they waited, and with Corey here, Andrei inevitably began to remove himself from his own picture, wondering what the house would be like without him, without even the possibility of him setting foot inside the place again. What would they do with his room, and how long would they wait? Would the house ever know children, who might, before they got too old for superstition, sense his ghost wandering mindlessly in from time to time, a spectral sliver of him that Heaven hadn’t managed to digest?

  Mostly, though, he wondered what the future held for Janika, who had taken him in when there was nowhere else for him to go. Good things, he hoped. Nothing but good.

  One evening she let Charlotte close the shop for her and they stayed in, movie night, at opposite ends of the couch with their feet in each other’s laps and bowls of popcorn and M&Ms on the table in front of them, sugar and salt, and it was better than a time machine, just like being kids again. They’d never gone through a phase back then when they’d hated each other for more than a day.

  She thought it odd that he wanted to watch The Return of the King all by itself, without leading up to it with The Lord of the Rings’ first two installments, but didn’t press the issue, and that was just as well. How could he tell her that he needed to see the end, or near enough, one more time…see Frodo and Sam on the rock, the deed done and lava climbing toward them in a thick red tide, and to think that perhaps it wouldn’t matter after all if Gandalf had never brought the eagles to carry them away, or even if Gandalf had never returned from the dead in the first place? Another morning would come, and more babies would be born with all their better promises intact.

  He was swapping the first DVD for the second when Janika started laughing, for no good reason it seemed, and he joined her without knowing why because, well, that’s what you did when your sister got the giggles.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  “Just the way you were walking. Creeping, actually, almost.” Another outburst, and he still didn’t understand. “You looked like you did…remember the time Mom and Dad left us alone overnight, one of the first times, I guess, and they’d left us the money for a pizza?”

  He remembered at once. It had been late in the year, the way it was now, night falling early, and while he couldn’t recall which spooky movie they’d been watching, sometime between when they’d phoned in the pizza order and when it was delivered, they had managed to scare themselves stupid. She’d lost the coin toss over who had to open the door, and as she had done so, nearly paralyzed with fright, he’d crouched just out of sight with the biggest butcher knife the kitchen had to offer, ready to pounce.

  “That poor dork never knew how close he came,” she said, and wiped her eyes.

  “Why don’t we order one tonight and trade places?” Andrei said. “You could jump out at him with your vibrator.”

  She threw an M&M at him, and another, and another, her aim getting worse every time, until he thought she might never catch her breath, and yeah, this was what happened when you’d had no idea how much you needed to laugh. He returned fire with popcorn, and as she squished herself back into the couch cushions, Janika in her most comfortable sweats, he caught her in a moment when she tucked her head back and down, the pale skin of her throat squashing into a momentary double chin, and now it was no longer about revisiting the past. Instead, it felt as though he were glimpsing an older Janika, more matronly perhaps, or catching up with Corey, and he returned to the couch and held the remote but was in no hurry to push any buttons. How could he tell her that while he still had no idea what was going to happen to himself, he knew, just knew, that she was going to be fine?

  Maybe the moment meant nothing. Or maybe it was a gift from something that watched from afar and cared enough to grant him this small bit of encouragement.

  Either way, he would take it…take it all the way to his grave, if it came to that.

  * * *

  Later, with their movie night over and Janika already turned in while Corey was brushing his teeth, he caught a late local newsbreak, and learned of the slaughter.

  XII

  Is this the way it starts? Is this the way the end looks when it begins?

  Is this his way of saying no?

 
He brought these questions to Manon because no one else could answer them, although Andrei supposed the answers were clear enough already, and all he needed was to hear it confirmed, because she might hold his hand when the verdict turned official, and he wanted to be with her when she admitted that she had failed.

  “I’m sorry,” Manon whispered, once she seemed to get over the surprise of him showing up unannounced. “I really thought he might…”

  She left her hands at her sides when he touched her cheek, studiously not looking him in the eye, then finally she laid a palm over his chest, his heart, but whether it was meant to comfort him or keep him at arm’s length he couldn’t tell.

  “You look like you’ve been up all night,” she said.

  He nodded. She would know that look very well.

  “Are you hungry? Have you eaten breakfast, anything?”

  “No and no.”

  “Humor me. Let me get something for you.”

  He didn’t refuse, following her from just inside her front door, through the living room, to her kitchen—a clean place, a spacious place, bright with lots of tall windows and the morning sun glowing off well-buffed wood. He wondered if this was why he and Janika had never been invited here, come to think of it, this morning or ever: She lived in the ‘burgh neighborhood known as Friendship, and there was no way Manon was making nearly enough at Global Village to afford an apartment like this, part of a sectioned mansion built by some early steel baron. Dress-up boho living another life at the end of the day. He wouldn’t even have known his way here if he hadn’t let himself into the shop before it opened, looking up the address on file.