Nigh

by Zachary Leeman

  Three seconds

  Maybe

  Her body and mind leaving the world she’d entered, her lungs begged for air, but she could give them nothing.

  She looked up to see the ceiling and felt a screaming electricity twirling in her back. Her world spun wildly before she had the thought to tear off her vest, split and frayed from a shot he’d managed to get off. Feeling shadow crawl to the edges of her eyes, she grappled with the sides of it, losing her gun before managing to rip it off.

  Breathe, breathe, she told herself, weakly tossing the vest. She lay there gasping for air which came with much resistance, like she was breathing through a straw. She felt like a large rock was lodged in the middle of her chest, the ridges and edges cutting at her insides with every attempt at an inhale.

  She managed to push herself to her knees, body screeching in agony. She saw the bottoms of the feet of the assailant and his shotgun a foot or two away from him.

  Pain shooting through the tips of her fingers and the edges of her eyes and through her neck, she lifted herself to her feet. More used to the clawing tightness in her chest now, breathing was slightly easier. She grabbed her warm weapon off the ground and guided herself using the walls of the room.

  She stopped, her knees weak and shaking. She was breathing underwater, the world suffocating her.

  Her stomach was thick and rough and her chest knotted. She bent over, a new rush of excruciating pain introducing itself through her legs. She released the eggs and toast she had for breakfast onto the floor.

  Pushing herself against the wall again, she felt lighter.

  She moved closer to the man, sharp bursts of pain going off like landmines everywhere from her feet to her chest.

  Her feet heavy, she stopped a foot away from him, his gurgling and weak voice barely audible through the ringing ripping her ears apart.

  His eyes were gone, off somewhere else, away from this room and the small world of violence they’d inhabited for a short time together. She lifted the still smoking gun, it dangling in her weak hand like a loose cigarette.

  The lower half of the man’s face was stained with a pool of red spurting from his throat. He didn’t reach for the gun next to him. He didn’t move at all. He just stared off into the unknown and instinctively fought for breath that would never come.

  She tightened her hand’s grip around her weapon. She raised it over the man’s head. Her wrist shook. She thought she might miss. The gun silently dropped to her side again and she turned away from the man.

  She moved herself to the kitchen and there she saw what must have been the wife, the son, the daughter, and even the dog. They were all together, huddled into a corner.

  She turned back and walked to the man with more force this time. His eyes were still off in another world and his body shuddered through the last moments of life. She lifted the pistol straight above his head once more, feeling a last jolt of adrenaline steady her nerves for one perfect moment. The moment was all it took to split the man’s face in two and turn his eyes to nothing.

  Her hand dropped, the gun nearly being lost to the ground. She began walking toward the doorway to Stone and the rest of the world, moving her mountains for feet, each step more and more difficult. She passed the destroyed vest, the frayed wall, the broken table.

  Using the same wall that had protected her from the first shot for guidance, she made it to the door.

  The sun nearly brought her to her knees, stinging and burning her eyes, poking at her skin like dozens of small needles.

  “They alive?”

  Stone stood midway between the road and the house.

  “No.”

  “Wife and kids?” he asked.

  “Dog too,” she said.

  “I fucking told you to wait.” She heard the words, but they didn’t mean what they meant before. They were just words. She could hear for the first time the tremble beneath everything he said. She could smell his fear and it repulsed her.

  Ignoring the seductive urge to lie down and die, she made her way to the car, opened the door, and collapsed in the passenger seat. She looked around and took in the surrounding neighborhood for the first time. Stagnant. Empty. Unaffected. Stone’s door opened and then slammed shut.

  “I told you not to go in there.”

  “I heard you,” she said, turning her attention back to the house, the door open, the world inside now able to release its poison into the air. “You call the wagon?” she asked.

  “Ya, it’s going to be a little while.” She turned away from the house and closed her eyes.

  “Drive,” she said.

  “Hospital?”

  “I don’t care. Just drive.”

  8 days left

  There it is again. I can practically see it in front of me, laughing at me. I push the pedal to the floor and let the engine rumble and scream, but it’s no use. When it comes, it doesn’t leave until it damn well pleases.

  Maybe it was always there, on the outer edges of whatever I called reality, waiting for its moment to seep in and begin its seduction.

  It managed to swallow me whole once before. It’s tempting now thinking about those days, the mad days. There’s an alluring quality to them now. Maybe it’s because the end is so near or maybe it’s just because I’m so damn tired.

  I nearly lose track of where I’m going when the dashboard begins beeping letting me know of the car’s hunger. I look around at the nothingness outside and curse myself for not finding gas before leaving the city.

  After passing a handful of barns that appear to be empty, I pull into a dusty spill-off with a rusted pump and small wooden station that appears unattended. I sit in the car for a moment alone, listening to the engine wind down and then rest.

  There’s a comfort to the nothingness. Everything is noise now, constant hammering against your skull. It’s quiet and empty out here.

  Walking closer to the station, a rancid smell begins swimming through the air. Moving up the steps, it becomes bad enough that I need to remove a handkerchief from my back-pocket and tie it around my face. It does little good.

  It’s a moment before the mess of organs and bones can be identified as the remains of a dog. Besides what’s left of the animal in the doorway and the habitat of bugs feasting on it, the place is bare. I dig around the shelves until I find a granola bar and a half-eaten bag of chips.

  “You look like one of them robbers from the old western movies.” My gun nearly makes an appearance before I see how feeble, old and hunched over the creature is before me.

  His eyes appear permanently closed and his knees shake with every small adjustment. A smile is scrawled onto his face, almost fixed there.

  “Guess that makes you John Wayne, old man.”

  “Who?” I chuckle for the first time in a long while.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I need gas.”

  “Not many looking for gas these days.”

  “I am.” The shaky old man looks me over briefly and then turns and begins walking away.

  “I got some cans back here,” he says. I follow him behind the counter where two small canisters sit.

  “Might be the last of it,” he says.

  “It’ll do. I don’t have much farther to go.” I go to reach for both containers, but the man’s skeleton hand grabs one first. We make our way outside, the man following behind me at his own slow pace. I’m already filling my tank by the time he makes it to the car and sets his container on the ground.

  He looks at me and glances at the nothingness surrounding us without a care in the world, the same pasted smile on his face. His eyes shift from the sky to the car to the empty road to the station and then back to the sky. His face suggests he sees something, but there’s nothing there for anybody to see.

  “Going to rain today,” he says.

  “It rains almost every single day, old man.” I finish off the second container and then throw the empty cans in the backseat of the car, along with the food.

  “Tod
ay will be harder,” the old man says, his face and eyes fixated straight above him now at the clear blue sky. “Diamonds will fall from the sky.”

  I want to ask him how he knows this or thinks he knows this, but I know there’s no answer and even if there was, it wouldn’t mean much of anything to me. I open my car door, but feel an uneasiness twist through me when I begin to enter.

  “Thanks for the gas. I can pay you or trade,” I say. He says nothing, his eyes and face still in the sky.

  “No use in trying to make hay anymore,” he says. I begin to leave again when another twist in my guts hits me.

  “You know if there are any Hills left at their farm?” He lowers his head back down to our reality, but his eyes and smile don’t change.

  “Not many still around here.”

  “You’ve seen them leave?”

  “I haven’t,” he says, “but then again, I don’t see much anymore.” I want to say thanks again, but think better of it. Before I can fully lower myself to the driver seat, I hear the shaky old man say, “They always say stay away from the Hills. Hills nothing but bad blood and bad news.” I drop myself to my seat and close the door. The engine comes alive and I peel out of the station, leaving the old man in a cloud of dust. From the rearview mirror, I see his head pointed upward to the sky again.

  303 days left

  The outside world reached in and shook our little snow globe.

  In that instant, I could feel the return of time mangle my insides.

  Prison has a way of turning your previous life into a dream, a fading memory, and then eventually just a thing that rolls through your head on occasion, like a movie you remember bits of every few years.

  You become frozen in place. What mattered before matters little after the clinking of the bars behind you. Survival doesn’t care for time or memories and survival is the mother bitch that grabs your throat inside and never lets go.

  Who knows the exact moment it really started. To try and bring sense to snowballing violence inside is moot and foolish.

  I was in the laundry room when I could feel the concrete floors shake. Then a scream echoed through the air. Then a loud bang. I looked to the person next to me and as our eyes met, I knew we were thinking the same thing.

  Before he could make a move, my knuckles were piercing his cheek and he was on the ground. He tried to shake the dizziness away and lift himself up, but I thrusted my foot into his head with all my weight behind it. I was still turning the man into pulp when a handful of prisoners ran by. They glanced into the room, approved of the chaos and moved on.

  I stopped pounding on the pile of a man when they were gone. He wheezed and shook, attempting to breathe. I thought about killing him, ending him mercifully, but decided against it.

  Movement is always necessary to survival. I ran out of the room, my head on a constant swivel, and into the stale hallways I’d previously needed supervision to move through.

  It didn’t take long for the lunatics to have control of the asylum. I pushed myself through the hallways and empty rooms, seeing others hiding and dead guards and prisoners littering the ground. I passed one guard tied to cell bars with bed sheets. He was hung in a way that oddly looked biblical, save for the insides spooling out of him.

  I just kept moving and kept hiding. I did what I’d always done — I survived and I became invisible.

  I’d experienced one riot before while serving my time. Chaos ensued, a group took charge, demands were made, but it didn’t take long for the walls to come tumbling down and for the air to claw and peel at your nostrils as order came back with force.

  There were no leaders this time, no demands, no negotiating. I was surprised all of us weren’t shot and thrown into a hole. When the familiar sting of gas touched my nose, and began to fog the air, I thought we were dead. After all, what use was there for us in this new world?

  They came in fast and they came in hard. They moved like they were military. Anyone who wasn’t on the ground was shot square in the chest and left to die choking on polluted air.

  Lockdown became law for weeks, the longest I’d ever heard of one going for. While we ate, shit and jerked off in our confined cells, the world must have been debating on what to do with us. Or maybe the world didn’t care.

  The National Guard took over prison security. My bunkmate, a squirrel of a man named Lemmy, said the military had taken over all the prisons, but I don’t know how he could have ever known that.

  It took nearly a month before prisoners started walking by my cell, accompanied by the new security. Some of them never came back. Word was they were seeing the warden. Word was some were getting out.

  The men who did return talked of pardons and transfers to new prisons. Despite total confinement for most of us, word spread fast. Rumors are one of the only things you have inside and they will find a way to spread like diseases one way or another.

  One day, they walked into my cell and took Lemmy with them.

  Lemmy never came back.

  I was glad to be rid of his nervous yakking. The soldiers returned to pack his belongings and left without saying anything to me except for “stand against that wall” and “move.”

  It must have been weeks that passed watching orange jumpsuits pass my cell, some returning, some not, before two soldiers stopped in front of my humble home again and informed me that the warden wanted to see me. After years of being a number, an inconvenience and sheep among an unwanted flock, you learn to stop asking useless things like, “why?” I went with the two men without a single objection or word on my part.

  I’d been in the warden’s office four times since being locked up. Once was our pleasant introduction, two times were about fights and another was about a smuggling operation I got mixed up in. He spoke soft, but with authority. He acted like a dove, but one look at his eyes and it was easy to tell why the man belonged at the gate of a palace of corrupted men.

  I sat across from him, the two guards behind me silent. The warden took a minute or so to shuffle through papers while ignoring me. He looked like he hadn’t been home in days, maybe a week, unshaven in sweat drenched clothes.

  “Here’s how it’s going to go,” he said, still shuffling through papers, his eyes too busy for mine, “in light of recent events, there has been a decision made high up that the current prison system cannot sustain itself. Your case is one that has been reviewed and you have been deemed fit to re-enter society depending on how this meeting goes.” He signed a piece of paper and pushed it in front of me. “All that paper requires is a signature from you at the bottom there.” My eyes fell to the line that needed my scribble. “However,” he said, regaining my attention, “I have the pen,” he held up the ink pen like it was a gold bar, “and you’ll only get this if I want you to.”

  It was a dream. It had to be. From the single sheet of paper to his hand wielding the pen. A dream, I thought, until an image of the man’s crushed tomato face from the laundry room ran through my mind reminding me that this was all somehow real.

  “What do you want?” I asked, my clothes becoming drenched in sweat.

  “I want to know why I should give you this pen,” he said, still holding the thing in the air. I sat for what must have been a full minute trying to slow my frantic mind, trying to think of something, anything to say.

  “I don’t know,” I finally said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, I don’t. I can’t think.”

  “Get him out of here.” The pen dropped from my sight and I felt hands gripping my shoulders and lifting me out of my seat.

  “Wait,” I said, the guards’ hands ceasing to lift me. The warden looked up from his desk, “I felt time again. I felt time again after I heard what the people said on the television. It was for just a few seconds, but I think it felt good. I want to feel it again. I don’t want to die in here. Not in a place where there’s no time.”

  A flicker of something unidentifiable passed through the warden’s eyes and the
guards let go of me and I crashed back into the seat. The warden walked around his desk and put the pen on the paper. I read nothing and signed.

  I was then led to a room with a shower and a razor to shave. I did both. I was handed plain civilian clothes that were tight fitting and my personal belongings from my cell were brought to me in a box. There was a journal, an incomplete chess set and a few years old magazines.

  The two guards then brought me to the front gate. It was a heavy walk. At one point, one of them needed to put a hand under my shoulder to keep me moving in a straight line.

  Once there, I was handed an envelope with fifty dollars and a brochure with a map inside. The front page announced in bold letters: FREE ZONE.

  As the gate creaked its way open, I waited to wake up. I waited to be shot in the back of the head. I waited for anything to happen other than me taking my next few steps.

  “Move it,” one of the guards said.

  I turned to say something back, but my throat was dry and nothing left my lips.

  “Go,” he said, impatiently, giving my back a push. My head went numb and light as I walked, each step awkward.

  The gate grinded to a close behind me as I stood there in the street, no walls around me, no guards beside me. I took in a heavy and deep inhale. The air was scratchy and thick as it worked its way through my lungs.

  I walked for a while, my steps sloppy and childish.

  I stopped and sat on a curb, trying to get used to the air, hoping my mind remembered how to be free.

  I walked for a long time after that. It must have been miles. I walked and walked just to see if somebody would stop me.

  I guess the world was different. I wasn’t the best judge for how it was before. People seemed odd. Some held bibles and screamed at me, some wandered mindlessly and there were even two separate people that each offered me an “early,” whatever the fuck that was. One was for two hundred and the other for fifty. Both people told me they were great prices.

  I dropped myself onto a bench when my heels began screaming. Watching everything and everyone while I sat there, I was reminded of being inside.