Dying to be Free

by Sutherland, Michael

  "No," Jimmy sighed. "I just don't."

  "But you said you had a change of heart."

  "And I have," Jimmy said.

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means you're a dead man," Jimmy said sawing the wire through the old man's neck as if it were a dried twig.

  "And no one would ever believe me about the evil shit that you have done."

  Jimmy sawed the wire through the last of the bones.

  "They wouldn't believe how some of the fine upstanding citizens of our country took the law unto them and killed and killed again, taking their own twisted frustrations out on innocent kids born on the wrong side of the tracks. None of you would even see the inside of a court never mind a cell."

  The old man's body sagged into crumpled heap.

  And his head went tumbling after.

  The old lady stood leaning over a promontory looking down the rocky face. She got an even closer look when Jimmy took a flying drop kick at the middle of her back and sent her over the edge.

  Ralf, the boat man with the handlebar mustache, got it in the eye from his own bale hook.

  The vet got careless with his crossbow and ended up with an arrow through the neck.

  The Geiger counter went into overdrive when Jimmy walked past it on his way to find the old judge.

  The judge turned around, infrared goggles on, and saw a specter of blue approach.

  He went for his gun.

  Jimmy whipped out a rifle he had hidden behind his back, took aim and blasted the judge's right kneecap away. The second barrel blew his shooting hand away with his gun still attached.

  "Kangaroo court time," Jimmy said ripping the goggles off the gasping judge's face.

  He crouched down to the bleeding old crone

  "She told me all about it, you know," Jimmy said. "You're own grandchild. How could you? She knew no one would believe her. That's why she ran away, Judge. Not even her mother or her father, your own son, would believe her."

  "She was a lying little bitch."

  "But you knew she tried to tell them," Jimmy said, "didn't you? Then you found out she was seeing me,. And that's why you set up that robbery job. I knew it was too easy. The vet killed her and you hoped that either me or Tommy would be accused of her murder.

  "Tommy got jailed, and then he got let out, on a technicality with your help. And that's because you needed someone like him on the outside.

  "I've got a message from the old priest for you. He says be sure to tell you that you're going to hell because you raped your own granddaughter. She told me everything, Judge, but I still loved her. We were going to run away after that last perfect crime. The one you set up.

  "But that was nothing compared to your little trade in little lead lined pills stuffed with bits of fissionable material that could be sold to the highest bidder. Only problem was, how to get it past those border controls, airport checks? I mean, how did you get away with it for so long, Judge? Do you really hate other human beings that much?"

  The judge started crawling away, bleeding stump and all.

  Jimmy stood up, jumped on the judge's back. Then picked up a big flat rock high over the judge's head "ego te absolvo" and crashed it down.

  #

  Tommy sat in the living room and waited.

  He kept looking at the window.

  Still nothing.

  It was dark outside.

  The old lamp standard in the corner glowed with a nicotine hue.

  He twiddled his thumbs, sweated.

  "What's taking so long?"

  He was waiting for his reward. And he wanted cash this time, not another head.

  Something wasn't right.

  It was taking too long.

  And looking at his watch didn't make the time pass any faster either.

  Something was wrong, he could feel it.

  "Served Jimmy right though. The evil…"

  The lights went out.

  Not even plink of glass like a bulb had busted.

  Just… out.

  Tommy didn't dare move, didn't dare take a breath for fear of making a noise.

  The silence came at his ears like a hiss.

  As quietly as he could he moved himself to the edge of his battered old armchair, then stood up.

  His knees cracked like a gunshot.

  He winced.

  He turned around.

  The door was open to the hallway.

  Why can't I hear anything?

  Was he the next for one of their fun hunts for that bunch of evil freaks? Was that it?

  Money was good.

  Pickled body parts of victims even better.

  Maybe his new pals thought that he'd become a liability. Maybe he had served his purpose.

  A cold sweat trickled down his spine.

  His T-shirt bloomed wet patches under his armpits.

  There was one door and only one window.

  I need a way out. Can't go down the hall…

  "Tommy?"

  The voice sounded weird, echoing, like long distance from a third world landline.

  "Tommy, it's me?"

  Tommy screwed up his eyes. The freak must have pulled a fuse out of the box under the stairs.

  He heard rumbling, deep and getting closer, right there, from the hallway.

  "Jimmy?" Tommy said leaning to the side, not daring to take a step, trying to see round the open door.

  "Tommy."

  "Jimmy? Pal? Is that you? You sound hurt."

  Tommy reached down for the hammer on the floor, gripped hold of it and stood up.

  "Do you need some help, Tommy?" he said. "Let me come down…"

  "No, Tommy, stay where you are," Jimmy said. "I just need to tell you something."

  God, what's wrong with his voice?

  He could smell something, like paper, just before it starts to burn.

  "Are you hurt bad?" Tommy asked holding the hammer high. "Do you need me to call a doc or something?"

  "I've seen all the doctors I've needed to see, Tommy. I know you didn't kill her. And I know it wasn't me either. But after she was murdered I sort of gave up inside, Tommy. I got cancer, left it too late. I looked okay from the outside but I gave up on the chemo and radiotherapy. It wouldn't have changed anything anyway. It's terminal."

  "Gee," Tommy said stepping closer to the back of the door. "I'm sorry to hear that, Jimmy."

  "They're all dead now, Tommy."

  His heart lurched.

  "What?" Tommy said..

  Fist to his mouth, Tommy bit into it… stoopid stoopid…

  He pulled his hand away from his teeth. The skin was dry as a bone. Saliva all dried up.

  "I mean, who's dead?" he asked.

  "All those killers, Tommy, the ones you were helping out. I got to them all. It took me a long while to figure it out. But the thing was, I never could have believed that you were involved in it too. That's what took me so long."

  "What are you talking about, Jimmy?"

  "I know I'm going to die soon anyway, Tommy. I've known that for a while. But I got them all in the end. All of them except for one."

  "Why don't you come in here," Tommy said lifting the hammer higher, "and talk to me about it like pal to pal?"

  The burning smell was getting stronger.

  Tommy backed away from the door.

  And that's when he saw it.

  A pale blue glow oozed past the edge of the door. The paint on it started to blister. Wisps of smoke rose up.

  "Jimmy?" Tommy said stepping back into the middle of the room.

  The smoke from the edge of the door mixed in with the blue glow making it even brighter.

  Tommy screwed up his eyes when the glow moved into the room and stood there.

  "Jesus Christ!" he cried out.

  Tommy stumbled back.

  "Not quite, Tommy," Jimmy said, closer now.

  Tommy could see right through Jimmy's shirt and jeans, even his boots, a blue-white light glowing right through them. He co
uld even see Jimmy's teeth glowing behind his closed mouth. His skull shone through a mush of flesh. The bones of his hands and his legs were like fuzzy neon tubes shining through a smoke filled nightclub.

  Tommy raised his hammer.

  "It's still me, Tommy," Jimmy said. "Only I've decided to see the light. Ever hear of drug mules? People acting as couriers to smuggle drugs? Well, it wasn't drugs this time, Jimmy. I was desperate, Jimmy. I know I shouldn't have done it but I was desperate as all those other guys with a record. So I did it. And that's how I got cancer, just like all those kids sent there up on the hill. It was a win-win for your friends. They got the kids to smuggle the stuff, then the kids got contaminated because of what they smuggled, but before they got sick they were murdered it become obvious.

  "Only they didn't get to kill the one that mattered.

  "I swallowed what they had left, Tommy. Their little stockpile of plutonium pellets. That's what they got the kids to smuggle.

  "The pellets glow when they get to close to each other. Did you know that, Tommy? They don't even have to be touching each other. Nobody ever looks for tiny little pellets of bomb-grade plutonium when he's swallowed just one pellet.

  "And I'm reprocessing them now right inside my own body. I'm a walking, talking, nuclear bomb, Tommy. I'm what Long Island would have been like all those years ago. I'm your very own China Syndrome right in your own front room."

  Jimmy glowed brighter.

  The walls started to look fluorescent like green and blue glass and Tommy hid his face with his hands.

  When he peeked between his fingers the radiation streaming out of Jimmy prickled at Tommy's eyeballs.

  Jimmy went from white to green, to orange then a brilliant plutonium-blue.

  He stepped closer to Tommy.

  Tommy stepped back.

  The skin on Tommy's hands blistered into fluid filled blisters that popped.

  He dropped the hammer on his foot.

  But he didn't feel a thing.

  The radiation felt like a soft fuzzy comfort blanket sweeping right through his brain.

  Tommy's hair burst into blue and green flames. His teeth shattered and his left femur splintered inside his thigh with a dull crunch as he slithered down wall.

  "All those innocent kids, Tommy," Jimmy said. "You betrayed them. You led them to their deaths and you didn't care. I wanted to find them, to help them, to tell them how I'd gone through what they had; that there are people, real people, who are out there to help them.

  "But when I went searching for them all the threads led back to the same web, and there was a king spider sitting right there in the middle it, you, Tommy, the king of the spiders. How could you do it to them, Tommy?"

  Jimmy started to glow a magnesium-white, until he disappeared into a cylinder of brilliant light.

  "I'm no angel, Tommy," he said "But at least I tried to do the right thing in the end."

  Jimmy's flesh hadn't just burn away from his bones, his entire body sublimated straight into a nuclear vapor.

  And Tommy's voice box exploded before he had a chance to stop screaming.

  THE MESSAGE

  Let me tell you about how she appeared, though you’ll probably say that I was asleep. But that doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change the reality of it.

  It’s true that I was tired, stressed out by her sudden death, her funeral and all, and this being a blistering hot summer’s day. I couldn’t help letting my head rest back because my eyes were stinging from so many sleepless nights. But when I opened them again I saw that she was sitting right next to me on the arm of the couch, dressed in her white polo neck and black slacks I’d seen her wearing when she’d been alive, and with her hands resting on her lap.

  She was as fifty as she was when she had died three weeks’ previously, but there was something new about her. She hadn’t lost weight that’s for sure, she was still as big as she had been that day she’d passed on, but her hair was shorter, more full bodied and somehow sleeker. There wasn’t a line on her face either, as if she’d gone through her former life without weathering or worrying; not by sun or rain, nor frost nor pain.

  She never talked to me as she sat there on the arm of the couch, and she never looked directly at me either.

  And as soon as I caught sight of her I sat up and said, “What are you doing here? You’re dead.”

  It sounds harsh now but that’s exactly what I did say.

  I wasn’t scared.

  I wasn’t even startled.

  Don’t ask me why.

  I mean, I knew she was dead, but there she was, sitting there as relaxed as could be right at the side of me, not like a ghost or a spirit, not see through or wispy, but full-bodied and solid.

  I’d never gone to see her body after she’d died, and I’d never wanted to. I’d never wanted to see her lying in her coffin neither. And that’s because I wanted to remember her as she had been when she’d been alive.

  Yet there she was now, not looking at me or saying a word, just staring straight ahead as if she was in some kind of dream state, or maybe like someone who’s sleepwalking, with the sunlight falling upon her as it cut through the glass of the window on my right.

  Suddenly I noticed her left hand rise up a little then sweep over in my direction.

  I thought at first she was trying to give me a postcard because all I could see was the underside of the thing. But when I took it and looked at it, I saw that it was a picture, full of green and trees and grass, and lush and alive, all pure and natural looking, and everything fresh and clear the way everything looks after a storm has passed over the land and lightening has cleared the air.

  One after the other she kept handing me picture after picture of this place all grass and green and trees.

  And I recognized it.

  “I know this place,” I said to her with me still looking at them. “Why are you giving them to me?”

  But she didn’t answer. She still didn’t look at me.

  She just kept this far away look about her; kind of emotionless. And before I knew it I was there.

  There being that place in the pictures she’d handed to me.

  I’d been to that place all right. In fact I’d been to it countless times before ever since I was a kid when I’d get this compulsion to sit down and flop back wherever was convenient, as this feeling of acceleration swept through me, and I’d end up in that very place. It’s been happening like that since I can remember, since a kid.

  This isn’t any kind of ordinary sleep though. This is when all opposites come together and yet mean the same thing – when there is time and there is no time, no up or down, no sideways, and no feeling of space or direction, a place where past and future seem to come together in the present moment and become the same thing. It’s weird to tell it to you now, but it all makes sense when you’re there.

  Most times I’ll be aware of the room around me when I’m in that place, still aware of the place I’m sitting or lying as this is all happening, connected to it. But at other times, like this time I’m talking to you about, it’s connected and disconnected at the same time. Reality turns into the illusion. It’s this other place that’s the real deal. And I’ll tell you this for nothing too. You would never want to come back from it if you went there either.

  So I was there in that place and looking around but she wasn’t there. And I kept thinking, Where is she?

  In truth that place is more like someone’s backyard with Clumps of grass, a few trees, air fresh and clear like a summer morning, even a few washing poles.

  No washing though.

  But there’s this little house, cottage maybe, with whitewashed walls and cross beamed windows and I was standing at the back of the thing.

  I kept looking around still wondering where she was.

  So I started to walk down by the side of the little single story house, my feet whipping through the grass all the while me looking around, feeling this fresh breeze almost like it was passing straight t
hrough me.

  At the front of the house the garden, if you could call it a garden, sloped down the way and I stopped, turned and looked back at little whitewashed house.

  Something caught my eye then. Something I’d never seen before in all the times I’d find myself there.

  Just under the eaves was this piping, except it wasn’t pipes. But whatever it was there was one and then there was two, one on top of the other, just under the eaves and running right around the outside of the house.

  One of them was pink, the top one, and the other one was blue.

  Not any ordinary pink or blue mind, but with a sheen to them, almost like they were made out of shiny clear glass, almost like they were made from the same kind of clear sugar candies they make for kids. But it wasn’t that either. It had a shine to it like I said, a shine that you could see through, but it was like they were made from pure crystal. That’s the best way that I can describe it.

  So then I turned to look where I was going and I went down the grass verge, through clumps of grass, some higher than other, and down toward a stone wall at the bottom.

  And when I got down to that stone wall there was a road on the other side of it, and it was white.

  What’s going on?

  Is it snow?

  It was bright white like snow but it didn’t feel cold.

  Now I was really confused.

  It got me scratching my head.

  So in the end I climbed over the wall and stood on that white road.

  It was all quiet, not a bird or an insect buzzing, and by now I was sideways on on that white road with the house behind me on top of that grass verge.

  I didn’t know what was going on.

  Felt all right to me though, and definitely not cold.

  So I turned around to my left until now the white road is stretching out in front of me for eternity and all I could think of then was Oh my God.

  Now I’m not religious, never have been, and neither were any of my family. But there I was with this road stretching into the distance forever and all I could think of at the time was, It’s a battleship, a pure white battleship.