by Corey Brown
Flashes of creation, life in other galaxies, the sound of a million voices calling out in unison burst into Cody’s imagination. But their protests----or is it singing?----fall silent as a low rumble of thunder shakes the universe.
Wondrous and exciting, Cody understands it all without grasping the meaning. Words from unknown languages race through his mind. In the center, where he is, visions and knowledge seem to come from a wellspring of water that glistens like liquid diamonds. He is entranced and yet knows these images, these sights and sounds, are not intended for his consumption. The knowing, the understanding of other-world secrets sends a tremor of fear rippling through Cody’s soul.
Then the stranger turns away and Cody’s mind empties, the visions crash to an end. It is like a tub full of water draining away, water swirling down, disappearing. It is as though life itself is being emptied out of his body. But Cody knows this emptying will not end his own life, but rather he has experienced something new and now it is fading, draining out of him.
“I….I know you,” Cody says, in a hoarse whisper. “You saved Jamie, didn’t you?”
The man turns back, looks at Cody. In the stranger’s dark eyes, Cody sees a kind of sadness. And then it is understood: Cody is part of it now, connected. To what Cody doesn’t know, but he is most certainly connected. Worse, Cody knows he has seen too much, he is too involved.
“Thank you,” Cody says. “Thank you for Jamie.…and me. You saved my life.”
“I have not saved your life, Cody Briggs. I have simply postponed your death. Only God can save you, and only faith can lead you to God. Find your faith, rediscover it. That is your only hope.”
Once again the man turns away and starts walking.
“Wait,” Cody says, “I don’t understand. I---”
“Rediscover your faith.”
Cody senses he is being pulled away, as though being dragged backwards through a narrow tunnel. Or is it the other way around? Is the man being drawn away from him? The stranger becomes gauzy, like a translucent sheet has slipped between the two of them. He looks for the stranger, but the man is gone.
One hand on the car’s rear fender for balance and Cody’s strength evaporates, he drops to one knee. Breathing heavily, his mind swallowed by confusion, Cody stays this way for a long moment. Closing his eyes, Cody wipes the perspiration from his forehead.
“What the hell was that?” Cody says. “I must be losing my mind.”
Slowly, he stands, glancing back and forth, half expecting the man to reappear. Now, both hands are on the trunk and Cody leans over the car, his head tipped forward. Large drops of sweat fall from his face, his sprained shoulder burns, pain consumes his entire body. Cody feels thin, weak. He starts to retch.
“Briggs?” The voice is both tentative and in command.
Swallowing the bile climbing his throat, Cody spins and snaps up his weapon, pointing it at the sound.
“No, don’t,” The cop shouts, holding out his hands and stepping backwards. “Be cool. Hey, it’s just me.”
For one second Patrolman Dennis Schaeffer sees a distant, almost feral look in Cody’s eye.
Behind patrolman Schaeffer, a blue and white NOPD squad car idles quietly, the crescent star insignia on the car door a match to the badge pinned on Schaeffer’s uniform.
Cody blinks once, twice then focuses. “Oh shit,” he says, holstering his gun, understanding what is happening. “I’m sorry, Dennis. I didn’t...you surprised me. Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Schaeffer says, still moving backward, making sure Cody isn’t going to shoot.
Schaeffer looks at Cody. His partially un-tucked shirt is stained with perspiration and his face is haggard. His eyes are tired and sunken, his hair is stringy and out of place. There is sense of desperation about Cody.
“I heard about your shooter,” Schaeffer says. “You all right?”
Cody coughs and nods. “Yeah, I’m fine. Did you see, uh, anyone else?”
“See who? What do you----?”
“Never mind,” Cody says, waving his hand, dismissing the question. “It’s nothing. Look, I’m beat. I’m gonna….” Cody sighs, measures the weight of this day and says, “I just need to get home.”
“Okay by me. Why don’t I drive? You can hitch a ride with a squad car in the morning.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Cody says. “What’re you doing out here anyway?”
Schaeffer points to an overhead security camera and says, “One of the guards saw you, said you were acting funny. They called us.”
“Oh, shit.” Cody sighs. “Sorry about the gun. I was startled, that’s all. I just need a shower and a stiff drink, you know?”
“Look, Briggs, I’m not sure you should drive.”
“Hey, I’m fine. I can drive myself, really.”
Schaeffer shakes his head in disapproval then shrugs. “Have it your way.” He climbs back into his squad car, lowers the side window and says, “Take it easy, okay?”
Staring at nothing, Cody replies. “I will.”
Watching, waiting until Schaeffer has driven away, Cody slides in behind the steering wheel of his own car. A quick twist of the key and the engine comes to life. The idle of the motor gives Cody a strange feeling, as though just the sound might carry him home. From an inside pocket, Cody pulls the ZZ Top’s Greatest Hits CD that had fallen from Jamie’s purse. He smiles, his favorite band. Then he frowns, looks at the label. Why would she have a ZZ disc, and a pirated one at that?
“I need to go home,” Cody says to himself.
But at this moment home seems a lifetime away, almost unreachable. Silently, the tiniest sliver of doubt pricks Cody’s heart.
“Maybe I should go away,” Cody says, his eyes becoming moist. “Maybe Jamie would be better off without me. Maybe she should be with Lucas. She loves him more, anyway. I should just leave.”
Even as Cody speaks the words, a part of him, something just below the surface, is protesting this idea. Cody knows it isn’t true, he knows Jamie loves him with all her heart. But a cloud seems to have drifted across Cody’s mind. It is ninety-five degrees in the car and sweat trickles down his face but despite the heat, Cody feels a chill shiver through his body.
“Todd hates me, too,” Cody says, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Who needs him? Who needs all the shit I get?” Cody buries his face in his hands. “Who needs it?”
Tears, not bitter or angry but as if in surrender, leak from Cody’s eyes. His thoughts become cluttered, bits and pieces spinning around in his head. Bits and pieces of whole thoughts, none related but all connected, scatter through his mind.
Then something occurs to Cody, an idea that makes perfect sense. Abruptly, he stops crying. Cody wipes his face, sniffs, and rubs his nose with the back of his hand. Yes, he thinks, it makes perfect sense. With deliberate motion, Cody unsnaps the thin strip of leather that holds his gun in place.
With the pistol in his open hand, Cody looks at the handgun. It seems unusually black—blacker than it should be---and heavy, like it weighs a hundred pounds. He stares at the weapon for a long, long moment, gently turning it from side to side.
“Who needs this shit?” Cody whispers, talking to the forty-caliber, bringing the gun to his mouth.
The barrel feels strangely familiar between his lips, almost comforting. Eyes closed tightly, Cody presses the gun to the roof of his mouth and feels his finger tighten against the trigger. He imagines the bullet tearing through his head. He can taste the gunpowder in his mouth, dry and sharp.
Goodbye Jamie, I love you.
Jamie?
Cody thinks about that word, thinks about her name, the sound of it working into his mind. He thinks about how much he loves Jamie and, to his surprise, takes the gun out of his mouth. The move isn’t fast or sudden but rather it is slow, almost hesitant. Cody extends his arm, starts to drop the firearm onto the passenger’s seat but doesn’t let go.
Cody stares at the pistol and, once again, starts to turn it back and forth, examining the weapon, approving its simplicity, admiring its purpose.
A trickle of sweat runs down his forehead, the perspiration catching in his eyebrow but Cody ignores it. He feels a tingle in his fingers, the black Smith and Wesson seems to vibrate in his hand. Cody grips the weapon hard, trying to steel an imaginary tremor and feels a familiar weakness filling his soul.
Cody sighs, he knows this feeling. During those months after he’d taken down the Skulls every night was the same, Jamie would ask, cajole, even tempt him to come to bed, but Cody would find an excuse to stay up. Tonight it was paperwork, tomorrow night he wasn’t sleepy, the next night it was whatever Cody thought of at that moment. In the end his beautiful wife always lay down alone.
Jamie would go to bed and Cody would go out on the gallery. Sitting in the stillness of the night, he would think about what he had done, reviewing, moment by moment, everything he did on that day right down to the five times he’d pulled the trigger.
Without exception, Old Number Seven would be there, keeping Cody’s company. He’d settle into a porch chair and pour a drink, putting the bottle on the floor next to his right foot. On the gallery, the hour slipping well past midnight, Cody would consider his role as executioner, reliving the pop of each shot fired, remembering the recoil after each measured squeeze of the trigger. Splashing the amber anodyne into his glass over and over, Cody would sit by himself getting drunk and think about how he had ended five young lives.
At first, Cody wanted to resist the tug of alcohol. He would take just a few sips, tell himself it didn’t mean anything, that he just needed something to take the edge off. But starting with that first solitary vigil, the whiskey seemed to talk to him, tell him everything was all right and in the warm numbness of a growing drunk, Cody was able to convince himself that he had done the right thing.
Now, in the car, weapon in hand, it is the same. Only instead of the gentle reassurance of Jack Daniels, Cody can almost hear the gun whispering to him, coaxing him, telling him to do it.
Cody’s trembling hand twitches in a final spasm, he feels his arm muscles flex, grow tense. Then he brings the weapon back to his mouth. Why not eat a bullet, if not for being a shitty father and husband then how about for wasting five kids? The forty-caliber semi-automatic is an inch from Cody’s lips, the smell of gun oil reaches his nose but he stops.
Cody thinks about the weakness flooding his heart, feels it swell, it overflows like bath water breaching the tub but then something else works its way into Cody’s thought process. This new feeling startles Cody and, once more, he takes the gun away from his mouth. He looks at the pistol, considers what the Skulls were doing.
Two decent kids just happened to cross paths with five others who had no sense of right or wrong. Cody thinks about the two of them, complete strangers, a boy and a girl. He knows how much they suffered and how he rescued them, or at least ended their immediate pain. Cody thinks about Jason Booker and Sally Tate, reminds himself that after what they had been through nothing could mend their souls.
Another feeling traces through Cody’s mind. He remembers overcoming the nightly need for drink, remembers telling himself those Skulls needed to die. Looking down at the pistol, Cody remembers giving up the whiskey, and at that moment he feels the weakness inside hesitate, it falters.
“What are you doing?” Cody says, tossing the weapon onto the passenger’s seat. Then with a sideways glance, he says, “Goddamned gun, stay away from me.” Cody eyes it a moment longer then looks at his reflection in the rearview mirror. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he says, “Are you out of your head? Jamie loves you. Go home, she’s waiting for you.”
But Cody does not go home. He knows he should put the car in reverse and get out fast. Instead he leans back against the headrest, exhales hard and feels his eyelids grow heavy. Cody does not go home, he just closes his eyes and listens to the gentle hum of the idling engine.
Disguised as anxiety about his place in Jamie’s heart then masquerading as guilt about stepping over the thin, blue line, something had pushed Cody to run. Not to run from his life, but to run from life itself. It had tempted him to make that final move, the mother of all decisions, of choosing death over life. Still, some other thing resisted those feelings of doubt and fear and death.
So it tries again.
Quietly it turns from doubt and anxiety, turns to confusion and fear. Eyes closed, almost asleep now, Cody breathes slowly, deeply. In the distance he hears a rumbling, some kind of whooshing sound.
Time passes, it slides by, and when Cody opens his eyes darkness wraps around him. Cody’s face feels tender, almost raw. Cody touches his cheek, confused by the mild sting his fingers create against his skin. What time is it? Why is it so dark, what happened to the lights?
The parking garage must have lost power, Cody thinks. But it occurs to him that this isn’t really a night time kind of dark. It is something else, like turbidity, like a swirling dirty fog.
A powerful sense of isolation surrounds him, but it is not quite like being alone. Cody decides the feeling is more like not belonging, like not belonging here. Wherever here is. As his eyes become accustomed to the strange murkiness, Cody realizes he is not in his car anymore. Hell, he isn’t even in the parking garage. He reaches for his gun, it is not there. Where the hell am I? Cody wonders.
“Nowhere, an outland. Forget it.”
The idea is troubling. An outland? Where is that, what is that? What happened to New Orleans, what about the state of Louisiana? But that is only one problem. Just as pressing, more worrisome is the knowledge that Cody never opened his mouth. The voice was real and disembodied. Cody heard someone speak, but saw no one.
On the edge of it, whatever that means, out there on the edge of nowhere Cody sees something moving, coming toward him, running at him. It is obscure at first, becoming clearer, coming closer. Then it breaks into view, it rages, stunning his senses.
A mass of formless, distorted images stretch across the horizon. There is a burst of black energy, and Cody sees the atrocities committed by every life form in every universe splayed out before him. In a way, the visions feel like memories. Cody experiences places and worlds never visited, he witnesses creatures bound in mortal combat, remembers what he did to the Skulls.
Through it all, like a backdrop to these images, Cody sees a man drowning in brown water, a serpent coiled around his chest, a pair of bite marks on the man’s neck. But this impression is fragmented, bits and pieces of thought, like shards of glass, swirl around slicing and tearing through Cody’s mind.
His eyes feel white hot, as if fire is consuming his sight. Echoes of despair and triumph scream in his ears. The screaming turns to crying, the sound of a million voices wailing. The air around Cody thunders and the change in barometric pressure stuns him, he feels like his lungs have been flattened. Struggling to breathe, Cody bends forward, putting a hand to his chest.
Trailing the thunder is a new sound: the rumble of hoof beats. Looking left, Cody sees something fantastic. He watches as four horsemen are loosed across the earth, upon everything, everyone. In that moment, as the riders charge across forever, the millions of wailing voices fall silent. In the silence, Cody understands they have been slaughtered, an untold number of unknown lives have been ended.
All of it, the sights, the sounds, the feelings stream through Cody’s consciousness like a single ray of light traveling across the universe, a linear Armageddon leaving a trail of bodies and death against a vast, black chasm.
Seizures ripple through Cody’s body, coming and going with each beat of his heart. He grabs his head and presses hard, trying to squeeze out the nightmare. Dizziness and nausea overtake his senses, intense pain jabs at him like a thousand needles pricking his skin, like a thousand stinging insects swarming his body.
Cody sinks to his knees, feels something crunch beneath his weight, feels the pain of something hard grinding into
his skin. He is tipping forward, falling. Blindly, Cody reaches out, trying to assuage the impact.
And Cody cracks his forehead against the steering wheel of Jamie’s Dodge Intrepid.
The blow sends a volley of painful, white hot sparks through Cody’s brain, jolting his senses.
“Jesus,” Cody says. “What the....?”
Out of instinct, one hand takes the wheel and the other touches his forehead. Instantly, Cody wishes he had not rubbed the knot forming above his left eye.
He is back in Louisiana, back in New Orleans, in the Tulane parking garage.
“What the hell?” Cody says then he catches sight of his Smith and Wesson laying on the passenger’s seat. Cody draws back and for a moment, feels an unexpected, confusing sense of fear. He is afraid of the gun, afraid of what it can do.
Something is climbing Cody’s throat. A foul, acidic taste reaches his mouth and Cody pulls frantically at the door handle. He spills out of the car and starts to vomit even before reaching the pavement.
On hands and knees, barely able to support his own weight, Cody’s stomach convulses repeatedly. Each time he opens his mouth, Cody expects a gush of body fluid to explode from his throat, but nothing ever comes. Straining hard with each spasm, Cody thinks his face is going to tear itself from his head. After three or four powerful dry heaves, his mind begins to clear. One final attack and Cody can hardly remember why he is sick at all.