by L C Barlow
"You said you wanted Alex to kill. Well, this is the best we can do," Asher says, and for a moment I do not understand.
I see weapons of all sorts being brought into the room, tables being moved, and those weapons laid out in a line.
"You get the chance to fight Julian fair," he says, but he grimaces when he states this.
"What?!" I yell at him. "What do you mean 'fair?'"
Asher shakes his head. "This is how it runs. You choose one weapon. He chooses one weapon. No guns. You fight."
I looked at Julian's tall and muscular figure. "Look at me!" I scream at Asher. "I'll die. I can't fight him."
Asher raises his hands, will look at me no longer. "That's what Jas has bought tonight." He walks away from me. I stand there stunned, my heart racing, my blood coursing, and then the two men close to Julian pat him down and move away, leaving him in the center of the room. Julian smiles, and the two men come to me. They search me as well, and they take my black jacket from me.
"How is this fucking fair?!" I yell to them. "Look at me!" They say nothing.
They want me dead, I realize. This takes it off their hands, gives them a show.
I watch the chanting crowd and realize that I am done for. I am shaking. And I consider slitting my own throat as soon as I can grab a knife.
I try to step to the man who first abducted me, first took me to that room, showed me that file, called me interesting - this man they call "Jas" - but the bouncers will not let me, and they usher me to the line of weapons across from Julian.
I eye hatchets, knives, maces, katanas, all manner of items. But of course, there are no equalizers, no guns. I pick up a medium-sized knife. Julian picks a katana. When we both leave the stand of weapons, one of the bouncers looks at my knife like, "Really?" but I don't respond.
We stand fifteen feet from one another, our weapons in our hands, and Julian does not look supremely sure of himself, but I am fairly certain he will win. Yes, he will win, I know. I am too small, but I will try, swim forth into the fray, and die. This is the night. I try to make it feel wonderful.
A man I've never seen before steps between us. He is shirtless, but wears a tuxedo jacket and jeans. His hair is long, brown, and straight. He looks electric. He takes a microphone into his hand and says in a dramatic voice, "On the count of three, you begin. You have thirty minutes for one to kill the other, or both of you die." He smiles.
He raises his hand into the air, holding a three up with his last three fingers of his hand, and I steady myself. I know what I will do.
"Two," passes, "one," and then just as his arm drops down, I hold my breath, swinging the knife in my hand sweetly into the air and catching it, just like I was taught. It feels just like the old days.
I grab it by its tip, tilting it slightly to the right, delving deliciously into comforting habit. I hold that tip tightly, almost tight enough to cut me, and then my arm is back and chucking it forward, just like the night with the rapists in the woods, when they rose into the branches as though God took them from me, but Julian does not rise, no. He does not expect the first blow so soon.
The knife sticks deeply in his stomach, right below his chest, where the xyphoid processor lays. Yes, I know. I've cut many bodies there before.
The katana waivers, nearly falls from his hand, and I'm unzipping my jeans now. I'm ripping them off ferociously, and now I have them. I wrap them around my left arm, grasping them with my hand like a shield, and I move towards him. The crowds call, I think, but I do not hear them. The lights above us shine, showing Julian to me in a heavenly light. It is just me and him in a bright world, and he is faltering already.
I am upon him, like a wolf in the night, ready to consume him, rip his arm from his body, gnaw through it, bury him.
He tries standing, but his eyes are wide, and I know what that means. The shock has set in. As I approach him, he swings the katana quickly, but I hold my hand up with the jeans wrapped round, and though the impact makes me gasp in pain, I know that he has not pierced me. I stand and kick the knife further in, and Julian falls to the ground. I drop on him. I pry the katana from his fingers and pull it away.
I rip my knife from his flesh, wrench it free from the skin as if from stone, and I hear him scream. He is reaching for the katana again, but he is too slow! I have the knife. It's in both my hands, and I am bringing it down! I'm about to slam it into his throat and kill him. It will be...!
But as my arms are swinging upon him, I'm pulled back. There is something holding me, slowing me, stopping me, and I feel them pull. I cannot swing. Julian grabs the katana and swings it at me, and I feel its tip slice into my stomach as I'm wrenched from him. I scream!
Blood pours from my wound, and I am dragged across the floor. With my scream, there are hundreds of other voices, threading, intertwining, dangling with me, and then I'm being dragged, pushed, pulled across the room and into an elevator, and a voice whispers at my ear, "We need him. I'm sorry. You can't kill him."
I am hitting and kicking and strangling the man who owns this voice, but then he flips me around and holds me close until the elevator stops and the doors open.
My stomach hurts too much for me to continue the fight. I can feel things inside me threatening to slip through. He pushes me into another room, and then in a few seconds more I'm atop a table, and he's yelling at me.
It's the young one, I see. Not Jas, but Asher. He bends over me and yells, "Shut up and listen! You've got a second chance, if you play it smart! The boss may not kill you! Shhhh. Listen! He needs Julian. He's interrogating him now! But he will come for you, and he will question you, and if you answer correctly, if you give him what he wants!, he will let you live. He is impressed." And then this boy snaps his fingers, and there's an older man there with a smile in his eyes, and he begins to inspect me.
"This is Doctor McElroy," says the young man with black hair and blue eyes. "He will help you." I fight this Doctor off until I realized the amount of blood pouring out of me.
"Mmm, yes," he says. "Needs stitches."
And slowly, as the young man forces bitter pills down into my mouth, the Doctor sews me up, and against my will, I am calmer and still again. My muscles relax, my head swoons, but I am still aware - calm, but inside still bright, as bright as the room had been where Julian was.
Suddenly, I am clothed again, and sitting on a couch, and soon there are other men around me talking, whispering, drinking, laughing.
I fear, more than anything else, that when this boss arrives he will be Cyrus.
I worry as well that the gash in my stomach has killed what the bright man placed inside me, and when I see in the corner of the room a dead moth, I crawl to it quickly. I touch it, wait, watch, and finally its wings flutter, and I feel utter relief as it crawls along the floor. I slip back to the couch and lay there, waiting amongst the men.
The young one comes to me and whispers, "The boss is here. Sit up." But I continue to slouch, inattentive on the couch, and then someone is in the chair opposite me, and I barely look up to take him in.
This man is not thin, nor heavy. He is of average build and thickness, but well toned, like they all are. He is older - in his forties, perhaps. He does not have a mustache. His face is clean, and he smells of cologne as he nears me.
All about him seems a movement of air, and when he breathes, the atmosphere breathes with him. His clothes are trim and rich. His hair dips below his ear in length, and it is wavy, slightly gray. His face is fairly flat, and his eyes are almond in shape. His skin looks thick, not soft, and his lips are large.
I refuse to say anything to him, and he looks me up and down as someone brings him a cool drink. He sips it and sets it on the coffee table between us, and still he says nothing until, finally, with a voice so smooth it almost sounds inhuman, he asks, "Where did you come from, that you learned to do that sort of thing?"
"A man," I say, but that is all.
"Mm?" he questions me, and again is that breath that moves the v
ery air about him.
"A cult leader," I said. "That took me in when I was young."
"And he taught you these things?" he asks.
I nod.
"Did he frighten you?"
Nobody has ever asked it quite like that. "In the beginning."
"Did he beat you?" he asks.
I nod again.
"Did he torture you?"
"Some."
"Well, that is not what we do here. At least, not to our own."
"I've heard that before," I say, but this man does not respond.
He points to a man at my right shoulder in the room. "Jasper, here, has read about you. He said you talked for a while with your psychologist as though this man who raised you had powers. Julian, when I interrogated him, said the same thing. Did he?"
I shake my head. I know what I am going to say before I even say it. "No."
The man looks at me as though he does not believe me and changes the subject.
"I apologize for taking your kill. It was rude, but I needed him. I did not think I needed you, but these recent events have changed my mind. Something about you is... intriguing." He opened his mouth as if to say more, but instead he smiled. "As for taking your kill and causing you injury, I can repay you for your troubles in plenty."
My stomach swivels uneasily like a fish suddenly awakened.
"Jacqueline, is it? Or Jack?" he asks.
"Whatever you prefer," I say.
He inhales deeply. "I will let you live for three reasons, Jacqueline." He numbers these on his fingers as he says them. "You did not lie to me, you did not die out there, and... I am curious to hear about you. You are... new in my line of work. That doesn't happen often. But..." he draws this word out with a weighty breath, and he moves forward in his seat. "You see these men in this room?" he asks, motioning around. I glance at them. "I hire them out. All of them. They kill. And they get quite rich. That is how they work for me. It is the only line of work I deal in.
"It's hazardous, of course, but lucrative. Would you be interested? It seems, at least for now, you have skills worthy of such an enterprise."
From my left I see the barest of movements, and it is Asher - the boy with dark hair - giving me the smallest nod. This is my hint.
"I swore I'd never work for another maniac."
"I am not a maniac," he replies. "I'm a businessman." I sit, uncertain, amidst the quiet group and do not know what to say.
"There are a few conditions, if you decide to concede," he continues with an edge to his voice. "I require all of my hires to be clean. You'll be drug tested weekly, for a while. You would have to move, of course, eventually quit school. But, in just a short time, you will be making enough money to where that won't matter."
"The state still keeps an eye on me," I say.
The man nods his head. "I am aware... Eventually, though, and maybe sooner than you think, they are going to remove themselves from your life."
He motions with his hand to the man who sewed me up just an hour before. "Quitting your line of drugs can be difficult, and Dr. McElroy would help you with that. He has legal prescriptions that you can take instead, and these would be monitored." He breathes deeply again, "They are safer."
I watch a moth flutter over him, bumbling like a butterfly, and it lands on the knee of his suit. I know what moth that is.
Though the man stares at it, he does not brush it away.
"Tell me," he says. "What is your answer, Jacqueline?"
* * *
I am told that my reward is one free kill any time I return to the club. Any person I choose at any time.
I stand at the balcony, watching the pulsing crowds, feeling disgust crawl through my bones and muscles. The music is going again, but it does not move me. They have hung Julian's body from a post within the hallowed space, and as I see it dangle, I feel sorry for him. This is not the reverence due to death. This is pandemonium.
I realize now that were it not for the things I fear, these Cyrus years, their boss may not have kept me. It is these things he wants to know. It is for these things, at least in part, that he has kept me alive.
But now, something catches my eye. It seems as though there is a show on stage, where a young man with platinum hair sits in a chair, bound, and another man croons over him, touching him here and there, massaging him, pushing his gloved thumbs into the boy's mouth, and there is someone I do not know beside me telling me how much he admires my gall. He asks if I enjoy watching the show with the young man as much as he does, and then he touches my hand. In anger, I lash out. Before I can blink, Asher is there fending him off, and like a vulture, the stranger swoops away.
Asher hands me a drink and says, "They flock to power because they don't have any of their own." Then, "This is not where we normally work. Just so you know, we're better than this. Professional. Quiet. Hidden."
I tell him I understand, but I barely do, I am so tired.
"Come," he says. "It's time to go."
Chapter 31
TRUTH
I stand outside Patrick's loft as he unlocks the door. I am dressed to the nines.
It is still cold outside, but we have decided to speed this process along, and by we, I mean I have.
We're back from a banquet, and Patrick is in his glistening tux. He smiles at me secretly, and then opens the door. We both step inside from the cold, into the warm, hot living room. The curtains are red now, and they stand like gorgeous giants at the far end, catching my eye. I slip off my jacket, lay it on the couch.
He approaches me tenderly and kisses me, running his hands along my silk dress. My gown is dark green with specks of gold, and he counts those specks in some foreign language, kissing them as he goes along.
He steps away from me, still holding my hand, and on the couch we sit.
I smile at him and my eyes graze over his red hair, dimples, his tall, thin frame. I take a deep breath. I take two.
Is tonight the night?
Yes.
Tonight is the night.
I love him. I have loved him ever since the night I met him - that night so long ago - one that I know Patrick does not remember entirely. I think back to that first party with the fireworks and the stripping and the dancing and the pills - after which he had invited me to his loft and, being too drunk to drive, let me take the wheel.
I reminisce on how, when we arrived at his loft, he mixed pills with alcohol, and then meth with heroin, and how, when I had woken in the morning on only the second day that I knew him, Patrick's heart was stopped, his body cold, and the rigor had set in.
I had been forced into the decision before I ever really knew him or could have appropriately judged what my choice should be. I had sat beside his body in the very same room that we are now, thinking, questioning, wondering, and feeling so weary of all the corpses in my life, all the death, all the pain, all the terrible things that invaded my world. And in this hatred of death and coldness, I looked at his face and knew.
My desire for love overrode me. My want of laughter, happiness, and human kindness - everything I had seen in him in just one day - drove me to my decision. I had knelt close to his collapsed form. I had touched him gingerly and kissed his cheek. Then, I brought him back to life.
I remove my hand from Patrick's, and I know I must tell him the truth. Not of resurrecting him, no. He will never know that tale. It is rather of the other things, the Cyrus years, the stories the court and online articles can tell him. He must hear it from me before he hears it from anyone else. It was never a question of if, but rather when and from whom.
I tell him outright, "I have murdered." I begin to say it all, from beginning to end. Then, I realize it's too long, and so I hit the high points and the lows, leaving out all the magic, all the curses, all the impossible figures that he would never believe. I reduce it all to what's normal. I keep it sterile.
I see his smile, how it drifts down. I see his sparkling eyes, how they dull. I see his warm face cool to stone. I see
his open frame close tight. He does not look at me anymore, but he listens.
He listens.