I’ve only felt pain like this once before in my life, and then, I was in a hospital bed with a button for morphine any time I wanted it. Now, I’m in a warehouse that stinks of industrial grease, in a shopping cart. Dignified me, in so much pain my body can’t even register it. I’m numb.
After Joe left the room, the others filed out a few at a time. I’m alone in the dark, and I’m thinking to myself how much this should hurt, but I feel nothing. Only the steady pulse of blood in my forehead and neck. Ten minutes in the dark with nothing but my thoughts is enough to make my brain wash out with the tide. I forget why I’m angry or hurt or why I’m even here. I only feel the shopping cart biting into my ass, poking my back, the rusty rails itching against my hands.
Joe, my supposed bigger brother, father figure, whatever. He lied to me, said he knew what was best, supported my cause. What does he know? He said he cared about what I was doing. I guess that wasn’t a lie. He knew he was number three. How could he not care?
The last guy out of the room told me that Hooded Jack would be waiting for me on the other side of my detox. I know that’s a lie. Joe doesn’t care. He saw the track marks on my arm when we used to meet, and never said a word.
These questions and accusations and thoughts and ideas and pain and yearning and sweat and shit…it’s enough to drown me. It’s not the drugs, it’s not coming down. This is the last support beam under my mind finally giving way. This is the weight of the world becoming too much. This is the realization that trying to put order to things is useless. Trying is useless.
Then the feedback starts.
A noise that sounds like a faint whistle at first, a hiss on the verge of nothingness. Like a bathroom faucet left open just enough to let a thin stream of water out. The pitch changes and it vibrates up and down, growing louder until it’s the sound of a TV test pattern.
And it grows. And grows.
And soon, it’s the sound of tires screeching. It’s an electric guitar whistling a note that would make Hendrix cry. It’s a jet engine three feet away getting ready for takeoff. It’s the sound of every damned soul in Hell screaming in my face.
To match this, my body starts to feel like it’s melting through the holes in the shopping cart. Like I’m oozing down onto the floor, and I feel the metal scrape and pick at my flesh on the way through. The taste of bile fills my mouth and every muscle in my body cramps, releasing long enough to let me draw breath before they seize again. It has to be the Sweet Death, because morphine never made me feel this way.
I need something now. Something something something! My head feels like it’s connected to a car battery. Everything shakes and burns. I shout and scream at the walls, I want to kill someone now. I want to bite throats of every last Jack here, watch the blood soak through the hoods, chew their faces until they don’t need hoods to stay anonymous.
The room is still dark, but above me I see pale figures sitting on the rafters, staring down at me. If I close my eyes, their faces glow on the insides of my eyelids. As long as I don’t blink they stay on the rafters.
Vasili is the first among them to speak.
“You are lucky shot,” he says in his thick accent, miming a pistol. “Made me spit out piece of my spine. You feel better about things now? You know I deserve what I got, but you don’t know why…”
Grace Brooks is up there, arms folded, scarf tied around her head. “What did I do?” she asks. “I don’t even know you. I’ve never seen you before in my life. What did I do? What did my daughter do?”
When I open my mouth to reply, a thick geyser vomits forth. Black gold. Texas tea. It bubbles and pops on the floor, smooth and shiny, the surface painted like an oil slick. Maybe I’m just supposed to lay back and take this.
Caligula looks satisfied with his lack of being. “Couldn’t sell your daughter…‘swhat this was all about, right? You want answers? I ain’t givin’ you shit. Still nothing better than a whore to me. I don’t know what the Doctor saw in you. Why he chose you. I’ll choose you now. Got a lot of people that want to go stumpy. And they would pay big.”
Shakes totters next to Susan Schrader, and in the corner I can see Gavin.
“Thethethe fuck. I tole you I din’t do nothin’ do. Shitfuck. Din’t do nothin’. Your girlgirlgirl came to me. Me. I din’t make her do nothin’. She wanted it and more and more and more.”
“I’m not sorry,” Susan says, throwing a glance at Gavin.
“What’s your name?” I try to whisper at him.
His is the only face that doesn’t get closer when I blink. The room is a vacuum, no sound, no light but what their bodies cast. I blink and they all scream. Not a scream like they’re trying to scare me. It’s an eternal thing, the sound they didn’t get to make when I took their lives. The sound that they would have made if the bullet had passed through them in slow motion.
Charles Baldacci shakes his head at me. “She was selling to me. Not the other way around. She sold to me. You never think of them as people, you know. Never see them as…feeling…I got feelings too…”
I don’t berate them, because I don’t want to validate their existence. I want them to go away.
Wonder what Delia put in the drugs. She’s not up there. Pity. I was hoping she’d be up there to finish her thought about Veronica…
When Grace Brooks tumbles from the rafters and falls with a wet slap next to my shopping cart, the detached part of my brain wonders if it’s me or her screaming. My body moves on its own, pushing hard against the sides of the cart, vaulting up and out onto the floor. Crawling with my arms towards the door.
Joe, I scream.
Gavin.
Anyone.
Grace Brooks pulls herself along next to me as I race for the door. She tries to speak, but every time her mouth opens, a gush of blood pours out. Little flaps of skin float on the tide, each one like the face of Little Debbie. Grace’s head wobbles, the severed tendons visible in her neck through the puckered exit wound. I did that. I did it. I can’t crawl away fast enough. She’s there, and I have to look at her.
By the time I get to the door, my palms are raw and bloody. The front of my body feels sanded by the rough floor. I knock on the door and scream for help, and a voice yells back at me.
“Shut up.”
It wasn’t a voice of a gruff man. Not a killer, not a Jack. It was a Jill. A young girl.
“Stay in there,” she says. “Stay in there and rot, you bitch!”
I hear my voice ask for help, pathetic and cracking. Just some water, I try to say. Just something, just help.
When I close my eyes, I see a basement. Just for a flash. There’s a stool lit by the thin shaft of sunlight fighting its way through the grime on the window.
When I blink again, it’s the warehouse. The voice on the other side of the door says, “I called the cops.”
Why? I ask.
“Fuck you, Mom,” the voice says. “Rot. You open that door and I’ll kick your head in, I swear.”
Mom? Instead of fainting, or screaming, my brain thinks: When did my daughter become a member of Hooded Jack? And I remember this, sitting in the basement, coming down like this. The last good thing my daughter tried to do before she gave up on me. She didn’t give up. She couldn’t beat me so she joined me. I remember this much. I was coming down, and she was supposed to flush everything, and instead, when she got to the last vial, she took a little taste…and…
She…
She can’t be out there now. But even still, I can’t stop myself from talking to her.
“I love you.”
“We’ll see,” she says.
Then a seizure of biblical proportions takes my body, and I bounce across the floor like water on a hot wok. My body twists and turns, my head bounces off of the pavement a few times, and soon enough, I’m next to the shopping cart staring up at the ceiling.
All of my targets standing above me. Circling my body. Dripping on me. Shakes with his limp from where I ankled him, his body like freshly s
hredded beef. Vasili with his open skull. Caligula and his blue strangled face and cut throat. Charles Baldacci, the middle of his face missing. Grace Brooks with her long-distance tracheotomy. Susan Schrader, her guts hanging out. They look at me with something close to pity, bordering on anger. High above me on the rafter, Gavin stands up and looks down at me.
Then he falls, and the last thing I see is his face, contorted, mouth open and teeth glaring, rocketing straight at me, and if this were slow we would kiss. But it’s not. He’s falling, and when he hits me it’s going to hurt.
He’s darkness, just the darkness of my past, something I let out a long time ago, struggling, clawing to get back into my body. Maybe it never left me.
And I can’t help but thinking I deserve whatever pain he gives me.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Hell of a ride, huh?”
The voice comes from a hundred miles away or just over my shoulder, I don’t know. When I open my eyes, light rips into my head hard enough that the muscles in my calves cramp. My teeth clench and my breath comes ragged. Someone’s pouring little drops of water onto my lips like they do in the movies when you’ve been rescued from the desert.
It’s when the cramps relax that I remember that I don’t have legs. I feel a wet washcloth pressed over my eyes and I crack them open again. Even here, in the cool damp darkness, the light hurts. Maybe I’m blind now. Maybe my pupils have dilated and exploded.
“Took me three days to come down off that shit. You broke my record, did it in two. Know what they put in there?”
“Whrrs mm dogga?” I whisper.
I hear the person draw in a breath. “Where’s…?”
“Dogga,” I whisper. “Dogga,” I yelp. I heard her voice. I heard her voice.
This last part I spoke, so I know he couldn’t understand.
“I don’t know,” says the voice, and I don’t know if he’s talking about her or just saying he can’t understand me. It could be Joe out there, but I don’t have the strength to look.
More water is offered, and I swallow as fast as I can. Then something small and solid bounces off my teeth, lands in my mouth, and my next swallow hurts bad, like I took down a wooden building block. More water follows, and my body is on autopilot, taking it in, making my raw throat crack like a mud flat.
There’s a long pause as water drips down my temples. Like a fool, I keep trying to look around every few seconds. There’s too much light and I have to screw my eyes shut. The colors swim and dance and move from side to side, bleeding away in a fresh blast of light every time I blink. Greens and purples and oranges slide across my vision. This is what they call a retina burn. It only changes the way I see things. The colors shift and swim and mutate, and I wonder if I’m still flying. A cramping pain stitches up my side, my body crying out to get high again.
“Formaldehyde,” the voice breaks the silence. “We knew she was giving you Sweet Death. A combo platter. Marijuana and PCP soaked in formaldehyde. Delia throws a couple of other little treats on there too, we don’t know what. Opens your brain up. Makes you highly suggestible. If someone’s guiding your trip, you’ll see whatever they tell you to see. There was nothing our agent could do to help you.”
Somewhere, a switch in the back of my brain kicks over and a little engine turns on, draining all of the heat and pain from my head.
“I gave you some Vicodin. Just promise me you won’t sue if this fucks you up even worse.” He laughs at his little joke.
I try to sit up and promptly vomit onto my chest. He rolls me over to keep my face sideways until the heaves stop.
“Guess we’re not out of the woods yet,” he says. “Looks like the pill came back up, too. This is going to be rough for you.”
Somewhere in the distance I hear the echo of a girl’s voice, and she’s not happy with me.
* * *
No more visions. No more dead bodies. Just me, lying on top of a hill in the desert, watching the clouds fly by in fast forward, watching the sun jump up to high noon and stay. Baking me. Cooking me alive. To call me dehydrated would be an understatement. I’m powdered. I’m dry papyrus. There’s no blood left in my vessels, just a long series of windswept, echoing tunnels.
I have legs. I have legs! I lift them up a fraction, a hair’s width, and I feel my heel make contact with the floor, feel it in my jaw. My tongue is perfect. My mouth is there. If I could move my arms I could feel my hairline. But I can’t because I’m empty.
I’m the ant on the sidewalk and God is up there with his magnifying glass. My stomach starts to smolder, then smoke. I raise my head just in time to see it burst into flame. I mix with the sand, become the dust, and every particle of me knows only pain. When the sun sets, the wind comes to scatter me, and I lose myself in the breeze.
* * *
The room is black. My headache is gone. My body feels stiff and sore. Someone is sitting on the ground next to me.
“I think we can move you out today,” he says. He strokes my hair once, the way a father would touch his daughter. “I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
The room is bisected. To my left, the warehouse looms dark and empty. To my right, a small white room, no more than fourteen feet wide. Clean and white and devoid of smells and sounds. There’s a man on either side of me, sitting in identical poses. In the white room, it’s a doctor, but I can’t see his face. In the warehouse, it’s Hooded Jack, but his face is in shadow, too.
I hear them shift and get up. The doctor glides, making no sound. But Hooded Jack, when he walks, I can hear the spring mechanism in his leg click and straighten. I can’t find my voice to call his name.
“Your legs are just across the room. You put ’em on when you feel like it. Come find me. All of the boys know where I am.”
He looks at me for a minute, then shakes his head.
And Joe walks out.
He rigged a drip up to my right arm, and by my side is a little bottle of Vicodin. I pop one and close my eyes and wait. The pain I feel now is miniscule, but I want it all gone, I want a clear head before I stand again.
When I roll over to look at the white room, it’s gone, and the other half of the warehouse is back.
* * *
Turns out that I needed a little more time. It felt like a short nap, but must have been a good two days of sleep. It’s high noon outside and the warehouse is hot as Hell. It doesn’t hurt to look around anymore. There’s dried blood on the floor, probably some vomit and other things I’d rather not think about. My rusty shopping cart on its side. Faint white shapes ghosting in my peripheral vision, up there on the rafters. But I’m not going to look up.
I armwalk across the room to my legs. It takes me a minute to get them on properly. I’ve wasted away here. The thigh cups are loose, sliding enough that I have to cinch the buckles extra tight. There’s a black cloth tied to my left leg. I pick it off and unroll it. It’s one of the armbands of Hooded Jack, marked for sergeant. A decent starting offer, but I’m not wearing it.
When I feel comfortable enough, like I could run if needed, I check the rafters. Empty. The dead have left me.
I look through the big square of light on the wall, out into the open sun and the heat. The men are all there, working, only now none of them are dressed in drab. Nobody sports an armband. They’re all normal-looking dockworkers for some front company. They wear identical smocks, the same jackets and boots. Joe’s military influence in everyday working life.
One of them gives a shrill whistle that could stop a hundred New York cabs. “She’s up!” he shouts.
The other men give me a quick look and redouble their efforts, polishing and moving and cutting and loading. One of the workers hustles in and hands me a note. He notices the armband I’m clutching, takes a second to count the stripes, then decides I’m not worth saluting. He gives me a friendly nod instead and runs back to work.
The paper is tiny, plain old lined notebook paper, every other word in someone else’s handwriting. Definitely Joe’s s
tyle. Wouldn’t want anyone tracing him.
Moving my eyes takes effort. So does blinking, breathing, thinking. If this is being clean, I don’t like it. The fact that I’m still alive means one of two things: Joe has a guilty conscience and he doesn’t think I’m a threat, or he needs something from me. Or a little of both.
His note:
Mrs. Robinson,
Promise not to kill me and I’ll explain everything.
Joe’s idea of humor.
Details will be shared in person.
I look around the warehouse for something that might help me. A pipe. A screwdriver. Any kind of offensive weapon. No luck. I kick at the dirt and it hits me. My legs. The release button near my shoe. I hit it and the shoe springs off. The blade is still there, tinged brown with Shakes’s blood. I hustle the shoe back on before anyone sees me.
I walk through the doorway into the light and TrevorJack is there to greet me. His hair is shaved close now. He walks with his chin up, chest puffed out. And I laugh. He asks me what’s so funny and I laugh harder. I’d never be able to tell him what it is. But the angrier he gets, the more I laugh. He’s the guy from the courthouse, the angry American with a pocket knife. TrevorJack’s in the Army now, always has been. Good for him.
He falls a half step behind me. “You want the brief tour of our facility? Look up. Two crane towers for moving cargo. Snipers on both with a full field of vision. Outdoors, you’ll have one of them watching you at all times. Indoors, I’ll be your shadow. We’re a half mile from the nearest exit, and there are over four hundred of us on base at any given time. You can’t get out. So for your sake, keep the shoe on. I helped him make that leg.”
I set my jaw and walk a little faster, think a little harder. I can still do this.
“Don’t know what the big deal is about you,” his voice is low, he knows he’s breaking protocol, “but I’ve been undercover in Delia’s yard for over a year. Deep-cover stuff. I had the whole thing worked. There was shit about to go down like you wouldn’t believe. I would have been the linchpin to bring it all down. Put Hooded Jack over the top. But somehow, you were deemed more important. I had to pull your ass out of the fire. I wish to God I could throw you back in. You’ve been nothing but dead weight so far. I don’t like anything about you. Not your face. Not your legs. Not your helpless cripple routine.”
Miss Massacre's Guide to Murder and Vengeance Page 19