He looked to his hands, dripping red and black, and he felt thirsty again.
8 days left
Jody Hills. Twenty-seven years old. Five foot ten. His last official job was cutting lumber for a hardware store. Engaged to —
I tick off the facts even though I know they are etched into my skull like cave drawings. I can recall the scene, the blood and the details of both of their lives without cracking open a file or glancing at a piece of paper.
I catch myself reaching for the fresh pack of cigarettes and pull my hand away, pushing it to the ring in my pocket to keep it distracted. The ring isn’t much. Hills had bought it with her at a pawn shop for two hundred dollars. Everything about it was small and simple. At the time, they didn’t think they’d need much more than simple. They were in love and that was supposed to be enough.
It was easy to empathize what she had seen in him. He was handsome as all hell. He looked like he belonged on a movie screen. He’d somehow hit the gene pool jackpot, which was even more impressive considering where and what he had come from.
He was charming too. Or maybe people just thought that because he was handsome.
What I’m not able to grasp is what he saw in her. He was a thrill seeker and popular among plenty of local woman, many more conventionally attractive than the person he ended up buying a ring for.
She had a simple beauty like the ring. She exuded nice, according to everyone that had known her. Someone like Jody was nowhere near sophisticated enough to appreciate that kind of beauty.
The ring bounces around my fingers, its details as memorized and catalogued as every other detail about the person who wore it. After a few moments, it brings back a flood of jumbled memories that provide a good enough distraction to keep my mind off the cigarettes and off the itch peeling at the inside of my skin.
Jody had almost been first on the list. Out of all of them, he was the one who made my teeth ache the most when I dreamed about the ways I could hurt him.
But he was going nowhere. The Hills family were creatures of a certain habitat. No bird left the flock too long. Anyone with half a brain could have guessed where he would be for the end.
He was also the most likely to survive. People had a lot to say about the Hills when there were still investigations and asking questions mattered. They were the drunks, the clowns, the black sheep of their town, burrowed into a significant piece of land that made it hard for anyone to completely ignore them. They were as part of that town as any historical building or public park.
Jody may not have looked like them because his blessings in the genes department, but he was one deep down and that meant he would stick around. The Hills family were not success stories, everything from scrappers to bloated local drunks to bank robbers to rapists. But there was one thing you could say about them — they were survivors.
I knew deep down if I was going to make it to the end that he would need to be there, waiting for me.
The first ended up being David Strause. That was back when the voices were louder and the ringing in my ears couldn’t be silenced. He was a simple man, a grocery store manager once upon a time. He’d put a buckshot into his wife’s head and then another into his son’s chest.
This was all after David had met a nineteen-year-old cashier that smiled at him named Jane. Jane was desperate and kindly enough to sleep with Strause and he showed his appreciation by maxing out credit cards for her. He’d even taken to stealing from the store at one point to keep up with her expensive tastes.
When the loans got big enough that no grocery store manager could hope to pay them off in two lifetimes, Strause staged a robbery that proved he’d either seen too much TV or too little. It wasn’t difficult to tell what had happened. Before the ink dried on the insurance policies, Strause was gone.
After everything, after the madness and the list and the ring and Sarah, I started after him, thinking for some odd reason that I’d find him holed up with Jane, but she was too smart a girl for that. She’d told me he’d left an address for her.
Strause was half insane, pacing around a Maine cabin when I arrived. He hardly noticed me and rambled to himself about things I couldn’t make out. I watched him for a while, wondering how much of a mirror he was to me only weeks before.
Before I could find too many similarities, I had my hands around his throat and I watched as his confused, panicked eyes drained of what little life they had left. He didn’t put up much of a fight.
Finding people became harder from then on. Without much of a system left to rely on, it was mostly instinct and luck.
The Gogin brothers had retreated to their birthplace of Mississippi where it was next to impossible to find the person you were looking for in the mud and the sludge and the grime.
I found them nonetheless after a couple weeks of sweating and searching. The shack was buried deep in the woods, the kind of place where mosquitoes outnumber people and any step could drop you into a swamp.
Kyle, the oldest, was outside skinning a deer. He was the strongest, the smartest, the ringleader of the other two, so I crept up behind him and jabbed my knife into his throat and held him while he quickly bled out, never able to glimpse my face.
The other two I wanted alive. Clyde was inside in an upstairs room with his pants down looking at a magazine where women still had bushes. I beat him until I couldn’t recognize his face.
Young Walter managed to stick me in the shoulder after hiding in the bathroom, but he was the easiest to bring to the ground. He was scrawny, weak and confused without his brothers around to tell him what to do.
I tied Clyde and Walter to separate chairs. Neither said much of anything. Clyde mostly bled from his mouth and Walter cried and wet his pants, his legs shaking uncontrollably.
I wanted to ask them how they felt about it now. What they had done. I wasn’t under the illusion they would have a moment of salvation or redemption; what I wanted to know was whether it still mattered to them, whether raping a 12-year-old black girl, killing her father and brother and spray painting “nigger” on the side of their house meant much of anything to them anymore.
I almost asked them, but then thought better of it because explanations like that don’t matter anymore. No matter how badly we want them, they are only bound to disappoint.
I let the brothers sit there, Clyde marinating in his own blood and Walter in his piss and fear, while I mapped out where I was going next. They never said a word, which I liked. Clyde stayed quiet through the end. Walter managed the beginnings of the word “please” before he was gone.
Through them all, Jody never left me and the rings never left my pocket. I nearly bumped Jody up the list a handful of times, the temptation of him dampening some of the enjoyment of the others, but he was like the cigarettes. He needed to wait.
The hardest to find had been Jade. I scoured three different states and two Free Zones to find her. Jade was an impressive human being. She’d lived two incredibly successful lives simultaneously for nearly two decades. One as a respected neurosurgeon with a loving husband and two children — she even had a white picket fence around her house.
The other was as a sociopathic murderer who enjoyed hiring male prostitutes and then expertly slicing their parts in scummy hotel rooms. They’d all be laid out in the end, nearly entirely drained of blood and placed on the bedspread like a nearly solved puzzle, a leg where an arm should be, the head where a leg should be, etc.
The day of The News, she’d poisoned her husband and two kids, Sophia was eight. Jeremy was nine. They were found dead at the mahogany dining room table. In Jade’s home office, in a collection of books about the human mind and the philosophy of leadership was a diary where she detailed every gory crime she’d committed over the years. In many ways, the accounts were as impressive as the rest of her life — she was an exquisite writer.
I first thought the diary was left behind because she didn’t care, but when I began reading it and following the scent of the good doctor,
I started to realize the book may have been her inquiring as to whether anybody still cared about her and her work.
She got the answer when I found her hiding out in the one place I originally thought I would have never found her.
She was upstairs in what appeared to be a young girl’s room. She didn’t move when she saw me. My presence was hardly acknowledged. She was on the bed, her eyes out the window, taking long drags off a cigarette, ashes periodically dropping to the bed. Her hands were painted in blood that could have been days or even weeks old.
She looked to me with glassy eyes and offered me a cigarette, which I somehow managed to refuse despite my lungs barking for one. Seeing her in person, I realized then how beautiful she really was. From the case files and family photos, I could always tell she was well put together and disciplined, a woman who prided herself on her body.
Now, with the facade of it all gone and no cameras around, she was truly stunning. Things erupted in my body I hadn’t felt in a long time and I averted my eyes from her.
We sat there for a while together, me switching my 1911 from hand to hand and her with her cigarette. By the time she talked, she didn’t have much to say.
“I tried to keep going,” she said, her eyes moving back to the window. “I tried so hard.”
She was still the impressive intellectual killer and doctor I read about. The fact that she knew who I was and why I was there proved that. Or maybe she just didn’t care who I was and just needed someone to tell those things to, anyone that would listen.
I thought about leaving, my hand loosening its grip on my gun, my mind feeling doubt for the first time in months as I watched her. She had done horrific things, likely had no goodness in her, yet I could understand her disappointment then. Trying to do the one thing you are good at and finding out it doesn’t matter and never mattered is not an easy thing to wrestle with. Watching her made a piece of me want to return to my apartment in the city, return to the madness until it or the gun swallowed me whole.
When she put her cigarette out on the nightstand and her eyes caught mine again, hers mesmerizing and desperate, I knew there was only one way she wanted this to end and only one way I needed it to.
I moved forward, lifted the pistol and pushed it to her skull. My arm absorbed the aftershock of the shot like it had so many times before and I watched a beautiful woman become nothing but splattered blood and bones and brain. I left the room as fast as I could and let out everything I had eaten in the last couple of days. Jade was the hardest.
238 days left
Eyes crack open. Fear. Panic. I can feel my heart punching the back of my throat.
After a few moments of hyperventilation, my body and mind realize where I am and my damp hand loosens its white knuckled grip on the nine-millimeter and moves to my fiery temple.
My eyes close again and in the dark, I listen and try to focus on the nothing around me, mind still calming from the racing and jumping.
When the sound of thumping against the front door echoes into the room, everything slows.
Scratchy and hard breaths pass before I force myself up and switch the lamp on. Squinting at the quick onslaught of light, I peer through the gaps in my fingers and catch the time on the clock: three a.m. My hand drops and I wonder if I should begin panicking again. There’s no one left in the world that would want to visit me at three in the morning. Come to think of it, there was no one before The News who would want to visit at such an hour either.
I shuffle to the door, still making my way through a daze of slumber. I turn on the light in the kitchen as a few more loud knocks thunder their way inside. Through the curtain covered window on the front door is the outline of a man. I turn back to my room, wondering whether I need the pistol. Another couple of knocks split their way through this thinking, and I move to the door, shrugging away any fears.
Through the black of night, I recognize a friend.
My name is uttered by another for the first time in a long while. We say nothing for what feels like a small lifetime. I try to greet the man, to say his name in return, but my throat is ice cold.
“You going to invite me in?” A moment or two passes before my mind can shake the awe of what is happening, and I finally feel a smile crack across my face. I step aside and let my visitor in and close the door behind us.
“One shithole for another, huh?” Sergeant Renks says entering, then turning and shooting me a friendly grin.
“It’s home, I guess. Beer?” He doesn’t answer, but I’m already walking to the fridge when I ask because we both know the question is rhetorical. I grab two domestic, watered down cans and hand one to Renks. He eyeballs the room more, taking in the smallness and plainness of it all, before sitting across from me at the kitchen table. He takes a long few gulps of beer and then shoots me another grin.
“It’s good to see you,” he says.
“You too.” Renks holds up and tips his beer toward me. I return the favor, our cans clinking off one-another. He takes a big swallow and deciphers the room some more, like I’m not even there. I want to ask why he’s here, but even out of uniform, something won’t allow me to speak to him in such a blunt fashion.
“You’re wondering why I’m here then,” he says, his attention darting to me, his mind a step ahead of mine precisely as it had been so long ago. He takes a last run of his beer and then shakes the empty can in the air. I reach behind me and grab another from the fridge and hand it his way, the chill of the metallic can feasting its way through my knuckles and fingers and stopping at my wrist, killing whatever sleepy cobwebs are still in my body.
“You talk to anybody?” asks Renks, whose eyes are caught in a framed picture turned away from me on the table. I immediately know what he’s asking and wish he hadn’t.
“No reason to. You?”
“Sure. Of course. Talked to everyone,” he says, his eyes peeling themselves away from the picture and back to me.
“Everyone?”
“Sure. Everyone I could. Want to hear about anybody?”
“No,” I hear myself quickly say.
We finish our beers and repeat the ritual.
“You can still throw them back,” Renks says, smiling again. He puts another can to his lips, and there’s something that passes through his eyes I don’t recognize. I tell myself it’s just the way things are now. Nobody really knows anybody anymore.
“I thought we’d be there forever,” he says, “and when I say forever, I mean forever. I thought we’d just wither away, days hot as hell, nights colder than fuck-all. I had this nightmare over there, except it didn’t go away when I woke up. It was like an itch I couldn’t ever scratch. The world moved on and went ahead and ended without us. Even after it was all said and done, we were still in that fucking desert. The heat, the cold. Nothing changed.”
“I guess a lot of us felt like that,” I say, not knowing whether I even mean it or if I even fully understand what Renks is trying to say. I want to ask him how he found me, but I swallow the question into the pit of my stomach.
“Ya,” he says, finishing another beer and chuckling to himself, “you know, those first weeks were scary. I mean, a new kind of scary I’d never felt before, but thinking back, I miss it. I miss all of it. The chaos, the exhilaration, the guys. Took me leaving to realize how much I wanted to stay.” Renks rolls the empty can around in his fist, pretending to read its details, his mind traveling. I reach behind me into the fridge and hand him another. “Never knew what you’d wake up to,” he says, his eyes still gone as he grabs the fresh beer.
Watching Renks drink and reminisce, an uneasy realization creeps through me. I’m looking at a stranger. Our history together, however significant to our fiber, is like a fading memory to me, like a film seen as a child I have trouble remembering the exact details of now.
“I hear some of those fucking camel jockeys are still fighting,” he says.
“I hear a lot of things.”
“Sure, sure. Nobody ever know
s what’s going on anymore. We should have joined one of those special units, whatever they’re called. The ones in those cities —”
“Free Zones,” I say.
“Ya, ya. at least that would have been something.”
“I hear a lot about those places too,” I say, pushing my beer away from me. Renks nods his head, lost in the details of the can again as if it’s a projector displaying flickering images of a better, easier time. He quickly drowns it and looks to me again.
“One more?” he asks, pushing out another smile, one that is forced and unnatural this time. I nod and shift behind me to the fridge. Turning, I feel something biting in the air I haven’t felt in a long time and hardly recognize. I feel an instinct so lost to time, so buried in memories it’s like an atrophied muscle, tucked away in some corner, convinced it will never be needed again.
None of that stops my stomach from tying itself into a bow or my throat tasting like sand.
The table flipping, losing my balance to gravity, our eyes lock for the briefest of moments. I can see a glimmer I’ve seen in men before. I accept that I’m going to die tonight.
Bile reaches the tip of my lips. My head bangs and scrapes like a premature hangover. My eyes catch Renks pulling something from his back. I move my hands to the ridged edges of the table and push it upward.
I make my way to my feet, Renks dashing around the table. Adrenaline electrifies through me and pushes me past him into the living room. I leap to the couch and crash to the floor, away from Renks’ eyesight.
A burning sensation moves through my stomach and chest, images of my nine-millimeter in the bedroom running through my head. Renks’ echoing cackling from the other room reminds me I’m going to die tonight. He laughs like a predator on the hunt, surrounding his doomed prey.
Why didn’t you take the fucking gun? My head screams. Why didn’t you run to the bedroom? My shoulder begins to feel the sharp impact of the fall.
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