My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart

by Martin Rose

  This was what my own father had faced when the man had pulled the pin and thrown the grenade. Like him, I had only several seconds. On the surface, you believe time is the problem. If only you had more time. But that wasn’t it; the problem was no outcome could be favorable.

  Except for one.

  Lionel stretched back his hand to lob the grenade.

  And in that second, I reached out and put my hand over his.

  “What are you doing, boy!” Lionel roared. His entire body shifted so he could stare at me, his mouth pulled down into a clenching jaw transformed by rage and frustration. “Let go!”

  “No,” I said. I heard myself speak from fathoms of distance. Heard Lafferty yelling as he pushed his velocity to the limit, heard the steady slap slap of Polly’s shoes on the ground as she ran. Fly, I thought. Fly, Polly, fly. And Lafferty, leaning for her with one open arm, to take her with him and sling shot them far away from here.

  Lionel struggled as I counted down in my head. His grip was iron and his entire body tried to shake me out of his grip, but I held it there, tighter, tighter through my sweat until I thought his hand was a sheet of tissue paper through which I could feel every ridge of the grenade beneath. Squeezed his knuckles until the cartilage cracked beneath the burden. Could feel the expanding metal as the final second counted down and the explosion began.

  Everything disappeared into a white-out blast and rendered me deaf. A buzzing drummed through my ears. One second, I’d been standing with Lionel’s hand clutched in mine; and then I was jolted into the air and on my back. The sky above spat intermittent rain into my face. The trailing silhouette of a huge black bird drew lazy circles through the clouds. A vulture. Distant screaming. The belching of the motorcycle exhaust arrowing away from me and Polly with it. Unharmed. Sound whinnied and warped through the air and I realized that it was Lionel and me. We were screaming and the screaming stopped when I shut my mouth.

  Well, that wasn’t so bad, I thought and sat up as though the entire lawn I found myself in was my bedroom and I’d awoken from a terrible dream. I looked around the driveway where Lionel and I had been standing, but now there was only Lionel on his back, spread eagled on the lawn some distance from me. He, screaming and holding aloft his obliterated arm that had been mashed and splintered into an unrecognizable limb. Like a tree branch shoved through a wood chipper and then yanked out.

  That looks pretty bad, I thought. I guess I just got lucky.

  I climbed to my feet and my vision swam. Nausea simmered through my belly and I hiccuped once before I kneeled to vomit into the grass. I reached up to wipe the scrim of bile from my lips but I missed. I tried again.

  And again.

  Each time I missed.

  I looked down.

  There was no hand to wipe it away. Blood spattered out from the termination point where I could see each particular tendon and ligament and vein, blood spray casting a weak rainbow in the half-light. Mesmerized.

  My arm stopped midway between wrist and elbow.

  “Oh, fuck,” I whispered and fell back to my knees.

  This is bad, I decided. I think I’m just going to stay here for awhile. Maybe take a dirt nap.

  Good idea, my Id agreed.

  Lionel kept screaming. The door to the house burst open and a huge shadow dominated the threshold, then down the steps. Each step an earth-shaking lurch. Light slanted over her shoulders, crosshatched her rigid and expressionless face, the place in her chest where she’d been stabbed with a carving knife.

  The gun gleamed in her hand. Lionel rolled and rollicked on the grass, spurting blood into a red arc like a garden hose. He reached his good hand out to her, his mouth open, supplicating.

  She looked past Lionel. Her eyes tracked the blood and then tracked it all the way to me. I could not guess what dark things lurked inside of her. What wires and microchips. What secret programming. How much of her was human and how much of her was machine.

  I held my stump out into the air. It did not seem like mine. It belonged to someone else, someone else on their knees in this ragged lawn holding up this destroyed version of myself.

  She lifted the gun. Lionel screamed and screamed and then she shot him once, twice.

  His screaming silenced and his body fell back onto the lawn.

  She stepped over him. Grasshoppers whirred out of her path as she stopped before me and her half-shadow fell over my face, drowning her in black.

  “Gonna kill me now,” I whispered.

  Didn’t I deserve it?

  The gun in her hand seemed a part of her as though she was polycarbonate plastic down to her bones. Her fingers tightened around the grip and her face sent me careening back to childhood memories of my mother, of my father reading Oedipus Rex to us and then, the statue of Mother Mary on his desk. A nonsensical stream of images. Lady Liberty, raising her lamp over Ellis Island. The terror of this steel giant.

  “Do it,” I whispered, and I was quaking. Shaking through and through. The shock reeled through me. I craved Atroxipine. Wanted it shot straight into my blood stream to dull the scathing pain. Pain I could not yet feel but only sense the edges of.

  “I killed Jamie. Isn’t that what you’re here for? Do it!”

  But she did not do it.

  Instead, she reached out with her free hand and snatched at the chain around my neck. She pulled, the chain cut into my neck, and then it snapped off. Stared at the skeleton key in the palm of her hand and her mouth parted with visible animation, eyes wide in the imitation of human surprise. Could she feel? Did she have that capacity?

  She wound the chain around her wrist and held the gun with it.

  “You’re her,” I whispered.

  That’s what Jamie had meant. Take care of her.

  The key had been for Elvedina.

  She reached out with her free hand and grabbed my stump. I made a noise with no language. She cut off the spurting arc of blood with her grip and squeezed.

  A sun flare of agony drove through me, from spine to crown; crucified me with raw nerves.

  I screamed and writhed and flailed. She anchored me in place with a vise pushing unmeasured pounds of pressure on my wretched and crippled wound. She grinned and squeezed harder until the blood spurt became a thin trickle and then even the trickle stopped—saving my life.

  I howled and then whimpered into silence when I could scream no more, pinioned in her grip. I could smell motor oil on her. I gasped and wheezed and prayed to stop the pain. And in those seconds before the pain and shock sent me skyrocketing into unconsciousness, I heard her voice.

  “Oh, Vitus. Look at what a mess you’ve made.”

  PART 7

  REDACTED

  The man, from here, looked as though he were dead.

  The room’s layout contained in a four by six-foot prison cell. The dim outline of a prisoner slept in the top bunk and another on the bottom: Blake Highsmith. I’d think he was dead, but his chest rose and fell in steady rhythm. His mouth pouted out puffs of air, snored on the inhale, and swallowed and smacked his lips. Blake Highsmith slept like the dead, slept like… well, like he’s innocent.

  A dark fog collected through the bars of the prison door. Seeped in, like tendrils, smoke curling and uncoiling along the floor to gather in harmony in the center of the room. As the smoke intensified, it deepened and took on an identifiable shape. A man in a suit who collected the darkness to him in a teneberous corona, sucking the ambient light as a black hole in space. The figure rose up out of folds of darkness to occupy his full height, eyes aglitter, sunken in the space where his head should be.

  He took a step forward, approached the sleeping man with one hand outstretched. Desecrated the air between them and the stone underfoot, and then, a second figure, knocked away his hand, pushed him backward into the stone.

  Vitus, the Echo Inspector said.

  “Not yours,” I answered.

  His employment is ended. This is not your department.

  “If you think yo
u’re going to be able to get your way, you’ve got another thing coming. Kill me if that’s what gets your rocks off, but I’m from a new department. The Department of Go Fuck Yourself.”

  The figure shook, heaved with laughter.

  Kill you, Vitus? Oh, why on Earth would we kill our most valuable employee?

  “I don’t work for you.”

  In the silence, I thought about it. Blake turned in sleep, scratched his chest and hugged himself with a whimper, before subsiding.

  “Okay, I guess I kinda sorta work for the government, if that’s what you mean, but I don’t take orders from you.”

  Oh, you don’t understand. You’ve misunderstood this whole time. You, of all of them, remain our favorite monster. Of course you don’t take orders from us. We take orders from you, Vitus.

  “But you’d kill me with no problems, right? Is that supposed to make sense to me?”

  Not kill you. Grow you. Change you. Test you. Transform you. But never kill you, King of the Flesh Eaters, Master of Monsters.

  And then, he was gone. Left me alone to grow cold with the sound of the Inspector’s voice in my ear, an insidious terror buried in his reverent naming of me. Blake’s snores beat out time and awoke me to myself. He, at least, would be safe.

  *

  “Gimme the arm.”

  I opened my eyes.

  I’m laid out on the kitchen table and I detected her shadow, serpentine, with lips sealed as a sphinx, a mythological and forgotten idol. She could kill me without a second thought, without reservations or conscience.

  Instead, she pulled up a chair and pretended to be human by sitting down. I opened one eye to look at her.

  She set the needle aside and helped me into a new shirt. She folded my sleeve down over the gutter tracks on my arm. The nice side effect of Atroxipine is how it dulls the pain of one’s healing amputation.

  She didn’t give the arm to me so much as she strapped it on herself, with one hand on my chest, as though I were an unruly animal that would go charging into the wilderness without her pinning me in place, and I let her. Her dead fingers pushed in the tender spots and I wondered what they were made of. Rubber? Plastic? Did they make her skin at a fucking toy factory? Beneath the layer of skin, was it metal? Or poly resin?

  All these months of convalescence later, and I still didn’t know; feared to look her in the eyes and ask. Afraid of how she’d answer, and what I would say.

  She fitted it snug against the nub of me. I closed my eyes and let her. Can she intuit comfort, pleasure? The moment should remind me of Niko when she once did the same, insinuate the heartbreak of our severed union—but it did not.

  “What now?” I croaked.

  But I knew what it was she wanted, wanted me to do. It was time to get a move on. Time to see where we stand on my father’s chessboard.

  She gripped me by my false hand and forced me to sit up. A blood rush carried Atroxipine away from me and thudded through my heart where it recycled and pumped back through me. Clear and intense. Every sense collaborating in controlled fire and tingling. The distilled essence of all I’d known and seen and done, perfected and mastered.

  My fake hand held her robot hand, her fingers tickling at the sensitive and still healing meat of me where it strapped into the prosthetic.

  Everything about her made my skin crawl.

  I loved her for it.

  *

  Elvedina drove the car.

  The vulture followed the car from above and now and again his shadow swung over us. I was getting tired of having talon tracks in my shoulder to match the gutter marks on my arms. In a couple hours, I’d crave another hit of Atroxipine as my mind slowed, but that was part of the fun. The ritual of addiction was as important as the addiction itself.

  She wound through these destroyed streets. The landscape like the abandoned set of a dystopian movie, but it was not a movie. All the players had left. Houses blown out from the center and collapsing from the inside. Cars forgotten and raised on concrete blocks. Old gas pumps from a station that stopped being functional in the seventies. Classic cars, piled up in junk yards.

  She turned down the side roads and skirted the edges of the town. I smoked with my good hand, and finally the car came to a stop on the parking lot. We remained in the car, listening to the engine cool and the scavenger at my side, shifting his wings and preening before I finally flicked the butt and stepped out.

  Elvedina rose beside me, my living shadow.

  “I’ll meet you inside,” I told her. “I’m going to make a phone call first.”

  She nodded and headed there with her determined and steady gait. Automated and exact. I stared at her and thought she looked different to me now than she did before, when I thought she was trying to kill me. Now that I knew and understood other forces between Lionel, the Inspector, and my father had been at work trying to snuff me out and the only thing standing between them and me had been Elvedina—everything about her was changed.

  I brought out the brand new cell phone. I thumbed over the screen. I was tempted to turn it on until I decided to hell with it and tossed it into the brush beside the parking lot. It hit the curb and bounced into the air and landed in a dense thicket of weeds. The vulture, ever present, squawked once and subsided into silence. Like my false appendage, the bird had become a part of me now.

  Uncomfortable and not quite seamless, but getting there. Learning to acclimate. I’d been dead once before. This would be a cinch.

  I headed into the police station. Several of the officers working the desk already knew who I was. I’d been in and out since the accident and they all knew I was friends with Lafferty, the evidence room troll. I made my greetings with a stiff nod of my head and some even made it over the counter to shake my good hand like they weren’t ever going to see me again. They had no idea that not that long ago, I’d been the misanthrope called Vitus with the bad skin condition. Now I was Amos to them, protected from on high by a mystical and unseen hand, a murderer walking free—oddly familiar, but if they suspected, they kept it to themselves.

  I picked up the pay phone by the desk and dialed the number without dropping change in. This was a number that worked for anyone who had it. I listened to dispatch try to calm down a woman who’d been in a collision while the phone clicked and rang on the other end. A television behind the desk stayed on CNN. The news ticker flashed by in a word salad while a nice-looking man with a fake plastic haircut conveyed a serious message about deaths in the Middle East.

  After a minute of ringing, the line picked up.

  There was no sound on the other end. There wouldn’t be. It wasn’t that kind of line.

  He guessed who it was, just the same.

  “Vitus,” the old gray fox said.

  “You don’t send another errand boy to kill me, and I might just forgive you,” I said. I nodded and smiled to a passing police officer dragging a juvenile delinquent behind her and kept my voice light and conversational, my smile tacked in place.

  “We know Lionel is dead. Your handiwork?”

  “Something to do with a grenade,” I answered. “But I’m sure a certain muscle-bound weight lifter who left the scene must have kept you informed. I wonder how he’s doing. Maybe I’ll see his face on a milk carton soon.”

  He fell silent. I wondered if he remembered all those times he and Lionel had been close, had been shoved into quarters and sleeping in barracks. Running missions on the sly and being mercenaries. Heads bent over school books as they studied political science together and memorized administrations, doctrines, and atrocities. Read aloud the ancient Greek classics and studied Latin.

  “You should come to the capital and visit me soon, son. I was always fair with you. I always rewarded good work when I saw it. And you always were a hard worker. You just never showed an interest in those games that prized discipline and intellect.”

  “I’m not a child anymore,” I said. “You remember Oedipus Rex.”

  “He lost his eyes, Vi
tus. You’ll have to give up more than a partial limb to take my place. Have you visited your mother lately?”

  “I’ve been meaning to.”

  “Tell her I love her. And do visit me sometime, Vitus. I have to be going now. I’ll be late for the State of the Union address.”

  Click.

  I held the phone a moment longer before I hung it up. Past me and beyond the desk where a policeman filled out paperwork and a police woman trained him, I could see the television relaying an endless stream of news and propaganda. The program cut away to the House Chamber with Congress spread out before the central hub. A man stood up to take the lectern with the flag and the presidential seal behind him. An older gentleman smiling wide for the cameras and the news networks, his hair gray. His face, a wily fox’s.

  “You sure do look at lot like him,” the younger cop said, pointing his pen at the television.

  “I get that all the time,” I said.

  Elvedina touched my sleeve; it was time to get going. We went in tandem while Fluffy hung on for the ride. Officers and staff spared the spectacle of a vulture being escorted into a police station a wayward glance or two, but they had seen stranger occurrences. If no one was bleeding, they weren’t interested, and all their paperwork wasn’t going to do itself.

  Down the hall to the last door. Down a series of steps and into the cellar lit by industrial bulbs. Lafferty moved from shelf to shelf down below in his wheelchair. When I got to the bottom, I heard his voice, booming and jovial as he turned to greet me. Elvedina leaned against concrete blocks before the first row of shelving, so still she seemed a part of the structure itself, immovable and anchored in place. Seeing her resolute and unbreathing invested in me a sense of rightness in the universe. I knew nothing about her, but I knew her machinery and algorithms were absolute. Incorruptible. She could not be seduced, persuaded, coerced. She could be tortured, beaten with rubber hoses, and never betray.

  “Look who it is,” Lafferty smiled and wheeled to me.

  His time spent with Niko did him well. Bright and glowing like a teenager with his first steady. He might even have gained a pound or two in this happy bloom of romance. I wondered who would break their hearts first, him or her. In the end, it didn’t matter.