by Martin Rose
But Niko had cast me out of her life. Exiled me from the underworld. And she had every right to. I was not a good man, and sometimes, this is how the fates draw us. Life destroys us and makes us into unrecognizable shapes; and we have no other choice but to continue on as best we can, as neither good nor bad, but eking out existence in the terrifying in-between.
Niko deserved someone better. Someone not tainted by so much pain and bad choices.
I grabbed hold of the rail on the gurney. Embalming machines pumped in tandem. Corpses at the end of the room with their faces covered by long, white, plasticine sheets. Groggy, my body moving at triple time with my brain playing catch up.
I tried to hoist myself up and failed. I swallowed back a cry. I must get used to pain, I thought. Pain is what living is all about. But I never had to feel pain when I’d been a zombie. I had grown spoiled—mistaken numbness for strength and courage. I’d never felt fear because I was already dead, never shed tears because I lacked the mechanics of crying. But now I felt everything. It made me wonder if I had been capable of things like compassion and love before. If maybe I’d been too desensitized to really know the difference; made psychopathic by the very nature of my unnatural biology.
They gave me bodily life in an instant, but my soul was taking longer, coming back by degrees.
What would be the cost when I was human all the way?
I had to get off this gurney.
I tried again and leveraged the gurney rail with trembling fists. Spiderwebs of agony cascaded through my middle and, when I sat up, my sweat gone cold with the pain, I groped my abdomen. Feverish and healing. Beneath the fabric of the shirt I wore, someone had stitched out the equator. How long had I been here?
Long enough to endure surgery and recover while the wounds themselves were still knitting together.
Every sound echoed into infinity and bounced back from the dim corners. Swabs and scalpels laid out as though someone had stepped out and would return any moment. Beside me, a push cart with a stainless steel top beside twists of wire and medical tape, a pair of medical scissors, an orange prescription bottle.
Atroxipine.
My breath caught in my throat and I snatched the bottle up in my hand. Pills bounced back and forth in a rattle with satisfying fullness. I held it up and read the label. It was written out for Lionel. The date on the side indicated it was from last year. Lionel was taking Atroxipine?
But Lionel wasn’t a zombie. What use would he have for Atroxipine if he wasn’t dead?
I turned the label around. SIDE EFFECTS, it read, followed by mouse print detailing a laundry list of the many agonies that will prevail upon you should you dare use this medication without the advice of a medical professional—all the sort of shit you don’t worry about when you’re dead anyway.
I stuffed it into my pocket. I didn’t have time to puzzle over why Lionel was mainlining Atroxipine like a twenty-year-old smoking bath salts. I had more pressing concerns involving my survival. Was Elvedina still here? Did she have Niko? I cursed.
I hauled myself up with every sense and nerve stretched out and open to the world around me. Listening for voices and sounds, confirming distant traffic beyond the mortuary doors. I reached a hand out across a lab table to stand straighter and knocked over a pair of scissors, sheets of paper, the sound like a subatomic explosion in the frozen and silent atmosphere. I stared down at the bleached paper and stepped on it with my naked toe, examining the sloppy scrawl beneath:
Beware the echoes and specters!
I must have been saying it in my sleep. Someone wrote it down, puzzling my brother’s last words. I kneeled, taking a pen from the gurney, and uncapped it. I should have been looking for my boots, should have been picking a scalpel as a weapon from among the instruments, but the sight of that final line that I, as yet, could not decipher, held me with more efficiency than any cage.
I wrote the same line beneath the original scrawl in my own hash mark of illegible writing:
Beware the echoes and specters!
I frowned. I scratched out the first word, pared down the line until all that remained was a skeleton of the phrase:
Beware the echoes and specters!
I circled the last three words.
echo and specter
“The Echo Inspector,” I whispered.
A wind filled my ears, pummeled me with ocean noise until I dropped the pen and it skittered across tiles and ground, beneath the gurney legs and under the shadows of waiting corpses, until the silence returned once more; left me on the verge of understanding at last what Jamie had been trying so hard to tell me.
“Beware the Echo Inspector. Beware the Echo Inspector!”
In my rage and my anger, I had not truly heard him, misinterpreted the line until it came out sideways and buried what last truth he tried to impart to me, killed him and forgot about it. But I did not forget. I heard it in my head, listened to my ferocious Id mock it, and screamed it even when I was put to sleep.
Lionel, I decided, and Lafferty—they would know what to do about this. It was Lafferty, after all, who knew before I did that Elvedina was not all she appeared. I could count on my friends.
I wheeled a gurney over to the basement window and climbed on top of it. I moved fast and yanked the window open, punching out the cursory screen. I considered my size and took a breath and I knew if I thought about squeezing through the opening, my thin courage would fail me and I wouldn’t do it.
I gripped the window frame and pulled myself through with every muscle in my belly rebelling and screaming defiance and testing the limits of its stitches.
I don’t know if you’ve ever truly swallowed a scream. But it tastes a lot like blood.
*
I went crashing through backyards and past angry barking dogs through chain-link fences. The world took on a funny haze in the hundred-degree heat. Blood began to spot my shirt as my breath hitched in and out. I held the wound together with my palm plastered flat on my bloody belly and took each step with gritted teeth. I heard fluttering wings and the scream of a hawk or raptor and realized it was the scavenger bird that had taken such a liking to me—the turkey vulture, shadowing me in wide and fractal circles from above before he finally descended, digging his insistent talons into the meat of my shoulder. I did not possess the strength or will to shrug him away. You and me again, my friend? And he seemed to wrench me back true when I drifted in the wrong direction or sagged and slowed. Every windshield, window, and metal fence linking stabbed spots of blinding light into my eyes before I finally stumbled up my own driveway and burst through the door.
Lionel sat at the table with a cup of tea at one hand. A file spread open when he stood up from the table, shaking with his old man’s quiver. Lafferty took a seat beside Lionel at the table, his hair wet, slicked back fresh from a shower, doing his best imitation of a mob boss’s hired help. Only his glittering intelligence nestled in his eyes gave Lafferty away because, hell, you have a lot of time to read when you’re recovering from a spinal injury and you can’t leave a wheelchair. A cigarette dangled from his—no, dear lord and god Christ almighty, it was a vapor cigarette.
This must be hell, I thought.
“When did you start smoking?” I asked Lafferty.
“Fuck my habits,” he said and jabbed a finger at me. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you! Wondered what shit from your past finally caught up to you and good riddance,” Lafferty sneered. “Tell him all about how we were planning his funeral.”
Lionel cleaned his glasses off with the edge of his shirt, as fastidious old men are prone to do, with his fingers beating a devil’s tattoo on the air in his state of agitation.
“I’d thought the worst,” Lionel said grimly after he perched his glasses on his face. Moisture glimmered there, threatening tears as he turned away, unable to look at me. “I could not stand to think of what I would tell your father.”
The vulture at my shoulder squawked once
and flapped his wings. No response offered itself at this display of worry and concern. I had forgotten, after so many years of being a lone wolf with nothing but a gun to keep me company, that people fall into the bad habit of caring for you.
“I’m here now,” I sputtered and pulled one bloody palm away from my bleeding middle. Drops of blood spattered on the ground between my bare and blistered feet. The vulture screeched.
“Help?”
*
“Elvedina is here to kill me,” I snapped.
My shirt sat in a sad puddle of blood where I’d thrown it on the counter. The vulture wrestled with it, darting in to stab it with his beak and then dancing backward with his wings raised, as though he expected it to take on life and fight back.
“My boy,” Lionel said, and his voice took on the lilt of a tired but concerned parent, “I thought we agreed Blake Highsmith was the one with diabolical designs upon your well-being.”
“Him, too,” Lafferty agreed around a mouthful of surgical thread.
I laid on the kitchen table. The ceiling fan spun shadows ’round the room while he mopped up my blood with a coffee filter. We’d run out of paper towels. A pleasant numbness settled around my middle where he’d injected a local analgesic, and even better, the unnamed pill he’d passed me that made my head float around like a cork in the ocean. Because if there was one thing Lafferty knew, it was his drugs.
My Atroxipine bottle rattled like a pocketful of cobras. I dared not part with it.
“And your supposition is that Highsmith wishes to kill you for sport and amusement, and Elvedina wishes to kill you for…” Lionel let the thought float on the air, unanswered.
“Because the government has no other use for me,” I said.
Lafferty snorted and began his first stitch. “They ain’t the only ones.”
“Don’t you think that motive’s a bit thin? After all, why not send me for that task? If that logic holds, surely, someone would have informed me and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, I’ve been asked to kill for my country a time or two as the occasion calls for it. Do you think they would have hesitated to ask me to get rid of you, instead of sending Elvedina?”
I bit my lip to keep the demarcation between my thoughts and my tongue. I did not want to say that he was too old to be running these dangerous games. I did not want to say that not only did I think him—the old man with tears in his eyes to think me dead—too old, but too weak, too useful as an information collector, to serve as a collector of bones.
“Elvedina came with you. Who is she? This government’s got drones and pills, enough weaponry to blow up the world, and no one knows who the fuck she is?”
Lionel sank into the chair beside my head. He picked up a wet rag, and from the corner of my eye, I watched him pat the sweat from my brow before sighing and sitting back in his chair as though all of this pained him so, and most of all, to watch me suffer. The vulture squawked and I heard the tinny rattle of his beak as he missed the bloody shirt and hit the sink. Lafferty bit off the thread with the sharp edge of his teeth and began a new stitch.
“Maybe Highsmith’s a part of it. Good Lord, does being living make you obtuse?” Lafferty asked.
“Spell it out for me like I’m stupid,” I snapped.
“I regret to tell you, but Elvedina is here to investigate Jamie’s death,” Lionel said.
“I know that. Wasn’t the police report enough?”
“Maybe she ain’t here just for you, prima donna. Maybe you’re not the center of the fucking universe,” Lafferty jeered and jabbed the needle into me. With all the drugs pumping through this body, I could not feel it.
“Highsmith?” I asked. “You think she’s here for Highsmith?”
“All due respect, Mr. Lionel,” Lafferty said as he unspooled more surgical thread and tossed a wad of bloody coffee filters to the floor, “but maybe they didn’t tell you about Elvedina. Maybe that’s why Vitus’s dear old dad sent you. Because he knows what people like Elvedina are sent for, and he wanted an extra pair of his eyes on his dear and sainted son.”
The tremor in Lionel’s hand seemed then to increase. His eyes lost a fraction of their vibrancy in the face of this new disenchantment.
“To be cut out,” Lionel whispered, “just like that. So quickly, our time passes and eclipses, and then, we are discarded.”
I sneered. “Some sooner than others.”
“Hey,” Lafferty said, “she ain’t here to kill you, Lionel. But if I were a betting man, I would say she’s killing anyone and everyone that was Jamie’s brainchild. Government has enough scandals between torture sites and whistle blowers, they don’t need more. So she’ll kill each one, and then anyone who knows about it. And like the tool you are, you gave the confirmation she needed, and now she’s gonna go around and clean the slate in her own good time, and just circle back around to Vitus, like a person does when they’re going down a shopping list.”
The bottom dropped out from beneath my spine as though there were no table beneath me, and beneath that, no floor, and beneath that, no ground. I could sink and subside into a great yawning emptiness until I came flooding back to myself at the thin edge of Lafferty’s stitch, gasping.
“Niko,” I husked. “She’s got Niko.”
*
Ever watch a spiderweb? A fat, juicy wood spider hanging in the center of it like a berry. It’s a story as classic as boy-meets-girl. A hapless insect falls across a thread and jiggles the structure. Struggle ensues. It seems like a straightforward operation—get caught in the net, and the spider swiftly smothers you in his version of Saran Wrap to seal in the flavor. Y’know, for that midnight snack.
It’s a bit more complicated than that.
If you pay attention, it isn’t falling into the web that kills you. It’s the struggle. The more you thrash, the more threads you pick up, binding you to your ultimate end. It’s not really the spider that does you in—it’s you.
Niko fell into the web. A chance misalignment of the stars. She happened to be working the shift at Pleasant Hills Funeral Home when she took in the dubious remains of my wife and son. From there, the first thrashing was Jamie presenting her with a government nondisclosure form forbidding her to discuss me only to discover later, that contract served double duty as a CIA recruitment form.
Taken to the logical conclusion, if Elvedina was here to clean up after Jamie’s messes and his loose threads, Niko would be farther down on her shopping list—sandwiched somewhere between myself and Highsmith, after rolls of toilet paper and kitty litter.
*
“Because you’ve been so good to her up to now, you’re gonna wave your hand and make it all better. That’s gonna be a challenge with your guts falling out of your stomach.”
Lafferty leaned into my face, wheeling his chair to stare at me laid out on the table. He loomed wrong-side up with my head screwed on upside down. White spots in my vision, creating a snow globe. Lafferty had the last remnants of surgical thread between his fingers.
“Picture this.” Flecks of blood caught in the hairs of his knuckles. “You show up, and instead of doing her any good and playing Billy Bad-Ass, you get her killed. Isn’t that some great relationship?”
“She doesn’t want me anymore.”
“Like I haven’t been singing that song since Selina left. Cry the blues with me, brother. What makes you so sure Elvedina didn’t just drop you off at the funeral home and leave? She could be over at the prison, creeping up on Highsmith as we speak. Ever think of that? We got two potential targets spread across town and the last time I checked, there’s only one of you.”
Lafferty set his roll of medical tape and gauze on my chest. A noise funneled out of me similar to what a sheep makes when it’s caught in barbed wire. A spiderweb of agony rippled through my skin, forming tendrils of fire. His wheels rapped against the hardwood as he rolled back my way with a Glock 19 in his lap.
“You’ll go to the funeral home?”
“No, I like to s
pend my spare hours square dancing at the local dive—yes, I’m going! Do I look like your fucking sidekick? I’m gonna save the damsel, who probably doesn’t need the help of trifling fools like us, and you go get Highsmith before Elvedina dusts him.”
He stuffed the magazine into the gun. I realized it was one of mine that I’d been searching for. Was everybody but me allowed to be armed? Or were they afraid I’d shoot everything I saw in a temper tantrum? He weighed the benefits of my Glock over his battered rifle, and abandoned one in favor of the other, giving the Glock to Lionel and ensuring it would remain out of my reach.
“You can’t drive,” I pointed out.
“Like hell I can’t. You haven’t seen my horse.”
*
My greatest range of movement was remaining prone on the table while Lafferty wheeled his way to the door, shrugging off Lionel’s hand with anger.
“I can do it myself, watch the fuck-up on the table, why don’t you.”
He knocked open the door with the snout of the rifle and rolled himself out onto my porch. His wheels racketed down the steps like a sack of bones gone a’clatter. I tracked him through the kitchen window, his shape receding as he tucked the rifle beneath the seat of his chair and out of sight.
“He can’t go down the main drag in a wheelchair,” I protested.
Thunder rumbled. A roar engulfed the house and shuddered the window panes. Lafferty’s empty wheelchair was turned on its side on the pavement, one wheel spinning and sending rainbows of light off the spokes. The roar continued on, and I heard a healthy yell of exalted triumph when the sound multiplied and followed a streak of black and red past the kitchen window—a modified motorcycle painted in flames with Lafferty riding solo and his useless legs strapped to the side. His hands rotated the grip. He shot forward with a grin. He and the machine united, as he leaned into the speed. I stared, mouth open, tracking his motion from window to window until there were no more windows as Lafferty broke the speed limit and whizzed out of view.