by Brian Hodge
Stillness. Couldn’t spin forever.
Equilibrium was trapped in a slowing whirlpool. As the two cars sat cockeyed across the bridge in an effective barricade, Justin tried his door, found it wouldn’t open. April wrenched hers open with a metallic groan, and once he’d undone his seat belt, Justin crawled after her and they both spilled onto the bridge. The stink of burnt rubber and antifreeze and hot metal reeked in the air. He stood, shakily, momentarily using the AK-47 like a crutch, and propped himself against a crumpled fender. Saw Tony emerging from the Lincoln some thirty feet back.
Beyond, the cars that had trailed them were slowing, stopping, giving them plenty of distance. Horns were starting to blow already, out here in the middle of the sea, of all places for a traffic jam. In the greater distance, sirens, and the telltale red wash of their beacons. Good luck to the boys in blue, then, because there was no longer room enough to bring up their cars.
“End of the line, numbnuts!” Tony yelled. The victorious glee in his voice was richly unmistakable.
Movement beyond Tony, furtive, the approaching clatter of shoes on pavement. Justin saw blue shirts and badges and a shotgun and figured a couple of the earliest arrivals had abandoned their car to sprint the rest of the way on foot. Passengers in civilian cars ducked into seats, and the cops were planting themselves behind the cover of fenders. Yelling orders. Throw down weapons, faces down on the bridge, all that.
Suicide, Justin thought.
They opened fire on Tony before he’d gotten all the way back into the Lincoln. He was hit at least twice, then popped back out with something lethal of his own, firing full automatic. The firefight was brief but intense, and glass flew all around the cops, and Justin saw a revolver twirling in the air from a dead hand. Mendoza was shouting, no, laughing, laughing as he stalked across open space with a rain of shell casings at his feet, and Justin dared not fire yet for fear the surviving cop deem him as hostile as Mendoza. And not nearly as resilient. A moot point, however, as the next of Tampa’s finest was blown back onto the hood of a sedan missing half its windshield.
Tony turned, charged, leaped atop the Lincoln’s ruined hood, and jumped down on their side, narrowing the gap.
“Now!” Tony called. “Where were we?”
The skullflush. Where was it? He’d meant to bring it—
Still on the dashboard. Miracles do happen.
Justin socked the assault rifle into his good shoulder, twitched the trigger enough to blow out the Dodge’s windshield. He reached in and plucked the kilo from a litter of safety glass. The fragments sprinkled away like cheap jewels.
He held the kilo aloft at arm’s length. And Tony stopped, frozen, homing in on it as sharply as a bird dog onto a pheasant.
“Last one in the free white world!” Justin cried. “What’s it worth to you?”
The peal of Tony’s laughter could probably be heard on both shores. He tossed the submachine gun to the bridge, and it clattered behind him as he passed it by. Bloody and utterly unfazed.
“I can be a sport,” Tony said. “Fight you for it!”
“Justin!” April cried, tugging at his arm. “You can’t make deals with him!”
“Go with it, I know what I’m doing,” he whispered to her. Then, to Tony, “Come on, last one! What’s it worth?”
Mendoza was all forward motion, confidence, and hunger. Burning. You could read it in his eyes from twenty feet, eighteen…
“Better believe her on this one,” he called. “Guess what. I think you just played your last ace in the hole.” Closer still.
Justin brandished the rifle, aimed it along the bridge. Tony stopped. Smiled, his burned and battered face still handsome in its own demented way. There was no denying the charisma. The hekura living inside him was probably the greatest single asset to ever agree so totally with him.
Smiling at the muzzle, Tony lifted both hands, displayed the webbing beginning to fill in between his fingers. He ripped apart the remains of his tank top, stood in a cocky pose. Black folds of fabric, tearing over his already perforated chest. He puffed it out, slapped it with both hands in open display of a clear target.
“Be my guest.” His voice was starting to roughen.
Justin backed over to the retaining wall, leaned his hip against it. Watched Tony let the hekura out, and then April snarled and tried to wrench the AK-47 away, sweaty hair swinging in her face. He twisted the rifle from her grasp, pushed her behind him. Waited until the change was complete, and Tony was ready for hunting.
Justin gripped the assault rifle by the barrel, spun his body like a discus thrower. And with a grunt and a heave, he sent the gun hurling out over the bay. Far as he could throw. It dropped, and they all heard the splash.
“You bastard, you just killed us,” April said bitterly.
Tony was surprised, so far as Justin could tell. It didn’t do much to slow him though. The gap closed by the second.
Justin hopped onto the retaining wall, balanced on the top with the kilo still in hand. He looked down at the choppy gray water, foaming and sudsing against the bridge’s supports fifteen or twenty feet below. The schizophrenic sky above, a riot of contrasting colors. In between, the earth burned, steamed, Justin suspended in the midst of it all.
“Justin, don’t, the water!” April cried. “The water, it’s what he wants, he’ll kill you down there!”
He ignored her. And from his perch, gazed down at Tony, now coming in for the final charge. The kill. Twin rows of teeth looking like the world’s most formidable weapons.
Justin held the kilo high.
“Follow your dreams,” he said.
And jumped.
He curved his body into a dive. Let go of the skullflush as soon as he began to drop, plastic-wrapped green falling alongside him. His eyes were open, and he watched the water swell and roll beneath him. Shut his eyes, hoped for the best. Entered the water like a dull knife.
A slap of water, crisp at first, then muffled as it sealed over him. All was dark, cool and wet, and the salt water wasted played havoc with the raw wounds on his cheek and shoulder. They burned, the cleansing salt scouring them, a harsh astringent that swallowed him whole.
He was thrashing in darkness to reverse his plunge when he heard the second muffled splash from above. He felt Tony atop him like a living shadow, the grappling of hands and feet, and for one terrible lung-bursting moment he wondered what if he was wrong.
But he wasn’t.
He knew it as soon felt the gushing bubbles and heard a warbling roar so tormented, it couldn’t possibly be human. Half human, he’d give it that benefit of the doubt.
The feet, the webbed hands — they felt feeble all of a sudden. No trouble to push away. The struggling body beside him grew weaker by the second, and when a single triangular tooth grazed his arm, it made nothing more than a small scratch. The saltwater sting almost felt good.
He kicked to the surface, broke water with a choking cough. Burned his nose. Well, he’d live.
Not so, Tony. Justin knew it the moment Mendoza bobbed up beside him. Head canted to one side, limp and boneless. Justin saw a blood-dappled gill.
As the salt stung his own wounds, he couldn’t deny it was unpleasant. But how much more magnified must it have been for Tony? A hundredfold? A thousand? Salt. Cleansing, cauterizing, abrasive. Freshwater gills just weren’t meant to deal with it. Almost instantaneous death, painfully so.
At least he hoped it was painful.
Justin kicked for the rocky shoreline a few dozen yards to the west, his shoulder aching to the bone. Overhead, the sky darkened toward night, and he contemplated this liquid world he’d immersed himself in. This tiny part of three-quarters of the earth’s surface.
Maybe Tony hadn’t died by jungle, by rain-forest justice, or restored balance of all things natural from that world. Born of the primal, die by the primal, though? Okay, that much he had managed. What was more primal than the sea? This vast cradle that had given spawn to everything — land, pl
ant, and, eventually, animal.
There could be no more fitting a grave.
He kicked the last few yards, and finally pulled himself onto the rocks, saltwater bubbling down his face, streaming from his hair, its taste upon his lips. Soaking his clothes from top to bottom. He sloshed up to his feet, rose beneath a sky whose crimson nodded its quiet approval.
Rebirth.
April had climbed down from the bridge, perhaps over the retaining wall to lower herself from the outer lip. The drop would have been reduced to a few feet then. She stood on the rocks near one of the concrete pillars. From above and behind, the air was filled with the sound of a city of idling engines, blaring horns from nameless strangers who had places to go, things to do, people to see. Let them wait. Their lives wouldn’t self-destruct.
And the sirens, always the sirens. This time coming from St. Petersburg, the traffic lanes clear and unblocked across the bridge.
Justin picked his way carefully along the rough rocks, most the size of his head or larger. He turned around without knowing why, just in time to see Tony’s lifeless form slip beneath the water. Almost as if it were sucked down by something that craved it, craved it badly. For whatever reasons. Sometimes the universe dispensed fitting justice after all.
April didn’t say a word. And when they came face-to-face, at last, neither did he. Five seconds, ten. Finally, he walked past her. St. Pete was miles ahead, but it was no impossible goal. If he kept under the bridge, maybe he could even make it without encountering the police. When he reached into his pocket, he almost laughed when he felt his wallet still there. Another miracle. Green currency may have suffered from the plunge, but plastic was always intact.
He gave a momentary thought to their cars, up topside. What they held. The Beretta in the Aries. And the Lincoln, that bag stuffed with twenty grand. Blood money. Probably be kicking himself tomorrow for not trying, at least — but leave it. Leave it all. He didn’t want any part of that anymore.
St. Pete. His shoulder needed stitching, but maybe that could wait, he wouldn’t bleed to death. He hadn’t endured all this to run dry. No. Sleep, then. Sounded like the best medicine of all. Find some dirtbag motel where his appearance would not be questioned. Hole up, sleep forever. Hope like hell the police wouldn’t come knocking at the door until he was at least rested. What to tell them, what to tell them? Start with Rene Espinoza, get her in on the aftermath. He’d work it out, somehow.
Justin must have gotten a good twenty yards past April when she called out his name. He shrugged it off. But couldn’t do it a second time. Had to turn back to at least acknowledge that voice. But was two weeks of love enough to undo that knife from his back?
He wasn’t sure he could ever answer that one.
“I’m sorry,” she cried out, and he watched her drop to her knees. Ritual posture of atonement. “Sorry I didn’t … didn’t believe.”
Crossroads.
He searched his soul, open wound that it had become, found the file marked forgiveness. A good deal fuller than it had once been. He’d finally learned to forgive himself for the mistakes that had sent his life on its downward spiral. Maybe it was time to branch out.
Maybe.
The sea, at the rocks near his feet. Splashing, eternal and constant and utterly without constraint. He watched it for a long while.
Forgiveness was such a chancy proposition. And it wasn’t fair to nail someone into a position where your resentment of their mistakes could eat you both alive. For the wounds ran so very deep.
He felt a trickle of saltwater from his eye, and this time it had not come from the sea.
Justin took that first step toward her, and when it went okay, another. Scales were tilting inside him, one way, then the other. Maybe he couldn’t do it. Maybe he wasn’t that healthy yet.
But maybe he could. Taking it one day — and one sin — at a time.
Maybe…
Nineteen yards and counting.
He’d know when he got there.
About The Author
Called “a spectacularly unflinching writer” by Peter Straub, Brian Hodge is the award-winning author of ten novels of horror and crime/noir, over 100 short stories, novelettes, and novellas, and four full-length collections. His most recent collection, Picking The Bones, from 2011, became the first of his books to be honored with a Publishers Weekly starred review. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was listed by critic Stanley Wiater as one of the 113 best books of modern horror.
Recent and upcoming works include a lengthy novella, Without Purpose, Without Pity; a collection of crime fiction, No Law Left Unbroken; and an updated hardcover edition of his early post-apocalyptic epic, Dark Advent.
He lives in Colorado, where he’s currently engaged in a locked-cage death match with his next novel, as well as other projects. He also dabbles in music, sound design, and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
Connect with Brian online through his web site (www.brianhodge.net), his blog (www.warriorpoetblog.com), or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).
Table of Contents
PART I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
PART II
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
PART III
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32