by Martin Rose
“Maybe if I’m nice he’ll let me ride on the bitch seat,” I groaned.
The vulture squawked in response and flew over to the table, stalking around the profusion of medical supplies, dropped medical tape, and coffee cups, and swayed over me, alert. I wondered if he would try to take a swipe at me, but he stared at Lionel with livid and atavistic eyes as though the old man would suit his appetite just fine.
The last of the lidocaine ebbed through my blood. I rolled to my side. Deep prickles inside my skin and stabbing fathoms beneath. Tears issued from the corner of my eyes as I set two feet on solid ground and lurched to a standing position. I longed for the fatty padding of a hard-won beer belly.
Lionel watched me, his eyes ringed in dark circles, magnified by his glasses.
“Have you dreamt of Highsmith?”
“Not this again,” I sighed and rubbed my eyes, clasping both my hands over my face as though I could corral the darkness and hold it. Never come out from under it.
I opened the dish cabinet over the kitchen counter to the indignant squawking of the vulture. The bird sought to find a comfortable position at my shoulder and I let him. I reached up and searched the inside of the cabinet.
“We stripped the house, Vitus,” Lionel said. He kept his voice amiable as I cursed and smashed my fist on the counter. Plates stacked on one side clattered.
“This is my house,” I snapped. “I need a weapon. Going with nothing and running into Elvedina on the way, how should I defend myself? With hopes and dreams? Government forms?”
“The decision has been made,” Lionel said. “It just means you should stay here. You’ll be safer. We don’t need your muscle, Vitus. We need your brain.”
“Zombies need brains,” I muttered.
I thrust a hand into my pocket. The familiar rattle of the prescription bottle stabilized me with its siren song. The bird nuzzled against my head as though it could give comfort through feather and skin.
“No one seems interested in my opinion. No one wants to hear that out-of-body experiences are fairy tales, and as menacing as Highsmith may be, there has to be a better explanation.”
Lionel spread his hands. His fingertips vibrating as though on strings.
“And that would be?”
“Someone else.”
“And yet, it is true we ran such OBE programs.”
“That proves nothing.”
“Stay,” Lionel said and approached me with his arms out. “You need sleep. You need to recover. Don’t take on Highsmith or Elvedina without taking your badly needed rest. The man I retrieved from prison is not the same man before me now. You look like you’re ready for the vultures.”
“No,” I said. My skin felt hot and taut against my skull, taking up all this unneeded space between me and the rest of the world. “No!” Again, louder. Frantic. “Where’s my gun? Why have you taken my weapons? Are you afraid I’ll hurt you? That my judgment’s been compromised?”
I made a tight fist around the bottle. My throat burned for a taste.
“You’re a part of it,” I whispered.
“Vitus,” Lionel said, his voice pitched soft and his gaze struggling to hold my stare. “Be reasonable; you’re too sleep deprived to take this on. Can’t you see I’m trying to be sensible, to take care of you—”
“No, no, no! You want me to go to sleep! Go to sleep and then it’ll be Highsmith, no, not Highsmith, that thing, that… Inspector,” I hissed.
“Vitus, what are you talking about? What’s wrong? We can solve this together, but you need to stay here and recover—”
“You need me to go to sleep and die,” I hissed again, but the hiss became a long moan. Fire buried in my bowels, every breath a stabbing pain. A nest of pit vipers lazing in my belly and rattling their tails. “Sleep and die!” I yelled.
The entire world took on a frenzied quality. The same delirious haze I’d experienced earlier as I stumbled home. I no longer knew if Lionel was a friend or enemy, with his bulging grenade in one pocket and his helpless, fragile hands opening to take mine.
“You said yourself that you don’t believe in out-of-body experiences, there’s nothing to fear—”
All my thoughts jumbled together and disintegrated. Nothing made sense. Only when Lionel touched his gentle hand to my shoulder did I explode. The vulture squawked and muttered. I stumbled away from Lionel with my hands out and my teeth bared, brandishing a coffee spoon.
“Stay away from me.”
I dropped the spoon and sped through the kitchen, tripping over a chair and kicking it away. I moved to the door, through the bleached hot square of blinding light, and outside into the unforgiving sun. I reached into my pocket for my car keys, blood in my mouth. When I opened my hand, the bottle of pills sat there instead.
Exhausted. Groggy with lidocaine and the ether they pumped into me at the funeral home. I could barely stand on my feet and Lionel was right—I needed to stay and recover. Everything in my guts and my senses pointed me in the other direction. I could trust no one in my vulnerable state, and the space of my dreams was forbidden to me—it was the single place I was most in danger. Highsmith or no, OBE or no, someone stuck a knife into my guts. Dream killers did not exist, but the wound in my middle was real, the only concrete fact I had.
Elvedina. She had been there that night and every night. She had access and opportunity while I explored nightmares with a made-up villain. She had stabbed me, conveniently spinning my fantasy and reality in contrary directions, until I could no longer tell which was which. How could I fight if I could barely stand?
I popped the top off the bottle. A satisfying rattle sent my salivary glands singing and filling my mouth with wet. Like a drunk breathing in the spirits. Beloved poison. I closed my eyes and tipped the bottle back, pills pinballing a path of fire down my throat. I swallowed as though at the brink of some holy transubstantiation.
*
Events then and the events now swapped places like spokes on a spinning wheel. I’d been in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, served in those broken lands. Nights in a foreign country where I stood watch for hours upon hours with no sleep, consulting with Jamie with no understanding that very soon I would not be alive, but not all the way dead, either. That Jamie would press a needle into my arm delivering Virus X and all the consequences to me.
Present-day Jersey was no Balkan country, but my car looked like it’d been through war. Dented, the fender hanging on like a crooked thumbnail. I pressed my foot to the gas and lurched through the streets, my focus broken and distracted between the mundane details of operating heavy machinery, the hot blazing sun, and the struggle to keep straight in my mind my mission, my goal.
Highsmith, I reminded myself. Elvedina’s going to kill Highsmith.
In my old zombie days, I could have made an argument to let Elvedina take her pound of flesh and leave it be. She’d eliminate Highsmith without qualms or quibbles, hit the street again, and go on to her next bucket-list item. This idea was not without an element of attractiveness—didn’t it take care of all my sticky problems?
Except, I wasn’t a zombie anymore, being a death machine was no longer my primary business, and now that I was human, all my problems were sticky. Everything was sticky. Everything came with morals and ethics and complicated questions of law and justice. Highsmith had been tried for murder—he was serving out justice as the law dictated, by judges expected to do good by the public. If I let Elvedina stomp into the prison with all her Frankenstein charm, knowingly let her kill Highsmith—this would be a corruption. My job was thug work: apprehend the real killer and turn them over to Lionel. And odds were good the killer was Highsmith.
What happened to him after that could be Lionel’s burden, I decided. Until then, I had a responsibility to make sure Highsmith was alive for it.
Above me, the vulture tracked a black shadow back and forth over the car. His scavenger presence comforted me. Who could hate the lowly bottom feeder of all the birds? This animal who takes from the dead
when no others will? Who is to say his occupation is less noble than any raptor or bird of prey? He became a pinpoint of midnight to lead me on, to keep me steady and my direction true. Slowly, my thoughts and wrecked cognition straightened out.
It’s the pills, my Id breathed as the car rocked to a stop at a red light. I grabbed the bottle on the seat beside me and held it up to the light above the steering wheel.
SIDE EFFECTS: MAY CAUSE SLEEPLESSNESS, IRRITABILITY, HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE, HEART PALPITATIONS, RACING THOUGHTS, PARANOIA, DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, NERVOUSNESS, VERTIGO. SHOULD ANY OF THESE SYMPTOMS BECOME A PROBLEM, CONTACT YOUR PHYSICIAN OR GENERAL PRACTITIONER.
I dropped the bottle down to the floor where it rolled back and forth with each turn of the car. My drunken weaving steadied, I gripped the wheel with renewed intensity. The world around me stood out in hyper contrast and high definition, so it seemed I could penetrate the pore of every leaf hanging from the trees, differentiate every blade of grass from their fellows. I casually committed to memory the license plates of cars I passed, reeling off their makes and models for my own amusement: Chrysler, Volkswagen, Ford, another Ford, Chevy Silverado, and on and on I went.
Giddy and euphoric.
I looked down at the bottle.
If Atroxipine had kept me functioning when I was a zombie, what the hell was this shit doing to me now that I was alive?
I grinned and pushed the car faster down the asphalt.
*
I passed through the gate of the county prison. Employees smoked by the entrance doors with their identification tags dangling around their necks, vehicles parked in orderly fashion and none of them the Ford Crown Victoria Elvedina might be in possession of. A knot formed in my chest, beating like rapid-fire gun shots. Oh, that’s just my heart, I remembered, and it picked up speed as the medication gripped me in full swing, turning my life into a hyper-speed carnival ride.
I nodded to the employees in the front and entered the cinderblock building. I logged in, signed my name on the form, and extracted my keys. Spilled loose change into a dish. They yanked me through the detector and slapped a visitor’s pass on my chest, sending me to the next room. I’d wait there until they fetched Highsmith from his hamster wheel and then we’d both meet with a pane of glass between us, a telephone line.
“You.”
I turned around as the door snicked shut behind me, closing out the hustle and bustle of the prison administration.
McSneer.
He overfilled his uniform and had the vague pastiness of mild ill-health—staring down the road of heart disease. A few too many beers at the bar? Or maybe a coke habit to get him through the interminable hours until he could escape his soul-crushing job of herding two-legged rats all day? It made for an unpleasant, hot-tempered individual. A square of a bandage in the spot where Elvedina had broken his nose gave me a thrill of satisfaction. In his eyes, I discerned every green shade of envy. I had gotten free of this place. Why hadn’t he?
“How’s it hanging?”
I even managed to sound jovial. I wondered what Atroxipine would be like if I tapped a vein? How much faster if I eliminated the time-release pill coating and went straight to the brain?
“Maybe you. Maybe you’ll be hanging soon.”
Well, that’s more sinister than I’m used to.
“Can hardly wait. Lead on.”
McSneer beckoned me. I’d been through this routine before, though usually from the opposite angle. This would be the room where I would normally be strip-searched if the visit was more personal, but now it would serve as a waiting room.
Except, that’s not quite what happened.
He held open the door to wave me through with a weary gesture. The room awaiting me plunged into ominous, teneberous dark. A footstep in, and McSneer pushed me from behind. I stumbled into the cold concrete holding cell. I spun with my hands out. The door slammed shut and McSneer flicked on the overhead light.
In the corner of the room, Elvedina sat in a chair. But I wouldn’t call sitting what she was doing. Not when your feet are duct taped to the chair legs and your wrists are cuffed behind you, your mouth gagged into a terminal smile. Sweat plastered her forehead and her eyes glittered like a resentful snake’s.
McSneer hit me from behind. I sank to my knees. Reality wobbled along with the horizon. Seconds of time went missing in the darkness but those fractional seconds cost me my freedom as I came to, my skull a cracked egg shell rolling on my popsicle stick spine. Fire stapled through my belly where the stitches tested the limits of stretching flesh. Fresh flowers of blood dotted my shirt once more.
Knuckles pounded into my face, mashing my features into new areas. I spat blood onto the concrete, turning red to black, the floor so cold my blood danced like water on a griddle. My wrists were jammed together and bound, forcing my joints to snap and strain.
McSneer cut a silhouette above me, backlit by the bulb. He slapped a square of duct tape over my mouth. I tasted plastic and glue. Elvedina listed into view, collapsed in her seat and her eyes half-lidded. But she did not look defeated, though her cheek sported a split purple knot, her swollen eye becoming a persimmon. Her wound amplified her into sinister dimensions. Though her hands were cuffed behind the chair, she was moving them in circles as though she believed she could work free of the high-tensile steel with will alone.
I returned my gaze to McSneer.
“Two for the price of one. This bitch here, would you believe it—came in here packing. And we know she came with you. Was here when that old man sprung you out. And now both of you are here together.”
I didn’t even bother to speak with my lips sealed together with the tape.
“Ain’t found where she’s hiding her piece yet, though. That’s troubling us quite a bit. She comes here, goes through the detector, and rings for metal. She gives us keys. Goes through the hoop a second time, rings for metal again. Turns out, she rings every fuckin’ time. So we get her in here where we can make a proper examination.”
McSneer’s lips oozed into a greasy smile. The stitches in my belly turned cold. I imagined, with delicious clarity, what it would be like to break every bone in his body. I’d start with his nose, since Elvedina had done such a good job there first.
“And then you show up. So now you can watch me, eh?”
McSneer leaned down and put his hands on my knees. Hot lightning bolts poured into my bones from his palms. His fingers gripped with alarming possession. This was the prelude to some greater indignity. It wasn’t as if there were any secret about the rumors and lawsuits that surrounded the county prison. Allegations of withheld medical treatments, run-of-the-mill rape.
This didn’t feel run-of-the-mill to me.
I blinked to force McSneer’s face into focus. When I had him firmly dead center, I jerked my entire body. The chair rocked forth and sent scissors of pain through every wound. I pounded my head into his nose.
McSneer screamed. I laughed in muffled hyuk hyuks behind my duct tape. Though I couldn’t tell from the way her lips were twisted out of shape by the gag, I’d like to think Elvedina was grinning.
McSneer cupped his broken nose and swiped a handful of blood off his face so it spattered to the floor. I could cross that off my bucket list.
“If you wonder why later on,” McSneer said, toneless and dead, “it’s just because I can.”
McSneer pushed aside the pin of his belt and whipped it from his pants with a slap, letting it fall to the concrete like a limp snake. I smelled old sweat, mingled aromas of day old food and blood, his overwhelmingly bad breath.
He turned his back on me, toward Elvedina.
I stopped laughing.
From where he’d trussed me in the chair like Elvedina’s forlorn shadow, I could see the line of his back blocking my view of her. He pulled up his shirt so it ballooned around him while he unbuttoned his pants. Rustling cloth. He kneeled to the concrete to huddle between her legs. I contorted as though by magic, some deus ex machina might desc
end from the heavens and set us free. Our eyes met above McSneer. It was Elvedina who stabbed me in the middle of the night, Elvedina who’d probably been gunning for me on the basis of some executive order but all lost urgency. Her attempts to kill me seemed not to matter now. Afterward, we could go back to killing each other.
I rocked the chair in protest. I called him dirty names reduced to garbled muffles from behind the duct tape. Drops of blood formed on the floor and I tracked them back to Elvedina, back to her black and illimitable eyes and her busted lip and split cheek. One of her heels smeared in blood, tracking ghostly footprints around the room where he’d beaten the blood from her.
She did not look away. McSneer tugged her pants, reaching out to unbutton them, moving the zipper down. Pulling at the fabric to free her hips with a grunt. The clothing came loose as though what he did was of no more consequence than shucking an ear of corn. I looked away.
As he bent over, stared down at what he must have considered to be his prize—his right to take, his right to control—he rocked backward.
“What the fuck.”
The atmosphere in the room shifted, humming electric. I leaned in my chair but saw nothing beyond the shadow of McSneer’s bowed head. I heard the syncopated creaking of Elvedina shifting her weight, saw her arch her back and curve her spine at an angle that stretched the limits of the human body. Her trapped fingers strained and waved in the air like jellyfish tendrils.
Bones in her hand broke and gave way. Her elbow jerked as she freed one hand and then the other and gripped McSneer around the face to bring him forward so she could stare him in the eyes. He didn’t move—pinioned and paralyzed by fear and awe.
I did not see so much as hear the sound of her pressing her thumbs into his eyes. Heard him suck in a breath and heard the rattle in his throat as she continued to push and push until his eyes popped. Her thumbs found his gray matter and she lobotomized him with surgical precision.