My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart

by Martin Rose

  “Vitus.”

  Niko.

  I turned. When I’d been dead, it had been nothing to control the urges of the flesh. Seeing her alive set my belly on fire, the blood pounding through my veins and my heartbeat, tenderizing the underside of my chest. I remembered she and I together. The kitchen counter. Soap and foam.

  “He told you,” I said.

  She came from between the crooked shelving, out of the darkness and into the light. Tapping over concrete with her black pumps. She painted her cat’s eyes on today, hands thrust into the pockets of an indigo hooded shirt.

  I hesitated. “I meant to tell you—”

  “Bullshit you did. But rest easy. It’s not as though you owe me anything, and I’ve given up having expectations. Throw a pretty woman into the world,” she laughed, her teeth white like a crescent moon beneath her blood red lips, “and you all scramble over yourselves like lost children. Now, if that’s not power, I don’t know what is.”

  Self-conscious and confused and embarrassed, I’d forgotten I could blush now. Blood tingling the cheeks. I turned to Lafferty.

  “I’m here for the evidence from my woe begone murder trial.”

  “I gave you the gun—”

  “The other evidence,” I said quietly. I looked pointedly at Niko and back at him.

  He was silent. Elvedina absorbed it as though she were a black hole sucking in all the light around her, adding to her gravity. Niko stood with her hands on her hips, waiting.

  “I wondered when you’d ask,” he said. He wheeled back to a stack of shelves and opened a drawer beneath. He rooted through it with one hand and found it, dug it out, the brass key stuffed in his fist, and held it out.

  I took it from him and stared at it in my hand. So small. This was all that stood between the world and what it kept locked away. I cleared my throat and looked at Niko and no one moved. As though we occupied a stage filled with props from old plays, waiting for the next narrative to play out.

  “Maybe we should give him a moment alone,” Lafferty said and gestured to Elvedina, but I reached out with my false hand without meaning to, restraining Elvedina.

  “Stay with me,” I asked her. I didn’t want to beg or to plead but all my art fell away and I was naked as a newborn and raw with feeling, the Atroxipine reducing as much as it gave. Niko’s eyes on me added a brand new, uncomfortable pressure. “Don’t let me do this alone.”

  Elvedina nodded.

  “I’ll hang back,” Lafferty offered. “Just shout if things get out of hand.”

  “Thanks.”

  Lafferty rolled to the counter with one determined spin of his wheels and shifted papers from one envelope to another. Niko did not move and though Elvedina remained close by, she no longer seemed beholden to all the rules and privations of human life—transhuman, and like myself, occupying a station in life to which normal laws did not apply.

  “So now you know,” I whispered to Niko.

  I could see no trace of anger or betrayal in her any longer, leaving behind her smooth, unsmiling face, as serious as a tragedy mask. I cursed myself and wondered if this is what happened farther along down the Atroxipine spiral—those moments between one dose and another when the brain speed lags, or thoughts twitch and jump with too much power. Leading the way to confusion, missed signals, false flags.

  “He loved Selina, very much. He was heartbroken to lose her. Not all men are like you, saving up their man-pain for a rainy day drunk. Why couldn’t you have told me, Vitus?” Niko asked.

  “Would it have mattered?”

  She drew closer and I didn’t move until her breath was at my ear, her hand on my shoulder. Both of us warm. The memory of our brief coupling, buried in that thrumming tension in the skin.

  “If you were the type of man who didn’t hesitate to ask questions like that, yeah, it would have. It would have mattered a lot.”

  I caught my breath and let it go. And when I did, I let her go with it.

  “I’m sorry, Vitus. You don’t need me. You’ve never needed me. Someone else needs me, now.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “You’re taking care of him, aren’t you? After everything he’s done.”

  “I take care of the dead. It’s what I do, Vitus.”

  I looked at Elvedina but her gaze was faraway, scanning with ruthless efficiency the darkness and the concrete all around her.

  “Yeah,” I said. Unbothered and absorbed in the new mystery before me. I didn’t know what it meant; I didn’t know if I was changing for better or worse or Elvedina was insinuating her way into my every thought now. But you find with the advent of time and experience, letting things go becomes easier, not more difficult. Until every grudge and resentment burns off like impurities from a forge, leaving behind gleaming cold steel.

  “Go on now,” Lafferty said, and I realized then they were all waiting for me. Waiting for me to do what I knew I had to. The vulture snuffed at my hair and I jerked my head away and he resettled. I held the key out.

  “Let’s do this.”

  *

  Through the heart of the evidence room, endless lines of shelves laid out like dominoes. A library of objects used in crime scenes proliferate toward the back. The bigger and more awkward the object, the more buried it becomes in the no man’s land past the files and the rolls of money and the heaps of drugs.

  But beyond all this is a door to the basement beneath this basement.

  I punched the key in and once more looked at Elvedina. I doubted she had any sensation or capacity to feel. She intuited with her unearthly intelligence that I needed something more than silence to push me on.

  “Get it done,” she hissed.

  I bore down on the lock. The tumblers clicked and the door swung wide into dark.

  A single bulb on a bare chain swung from the center. A circle of light gave hint to bare and sweating walls where the room temperature was a steady sixty four degrees without the aid of air conditioning, the temperature of deep earth.

  I stepped forward, every sense seeking the light. Elvedina spilled out behind me, our steps amplified in the balmy dark. The vulture on guard beside me. I made my way to the center of the room and wondered if I had taken a wrong turn. If there were more rooms and basements hidden away and I had stumbled into the wrong one.

  Elvedina grabbed my collar in her fist and drew me back several inches. The vulture furiously flapping as a creature leaped from the shadows, grunting and rasping into the center. The figure snapped back at the end of his chain and drew it taut as he leaned to get at me. A straightjacket kept his arms pinned in the most terrible self-hug man can devise. His eyes bugged from their decaying sockets and his mouth opened, sucking in anaerobic air like a septic system. His skin peeling and rotting off his bone structure.

  Elvedina released me. If she had not pulled me back, I would be standing where his jaws snapped and bit the air.

  “Thanks,” I swallowed.

  I could not look away, but continued to stare at him before I jerked the bottle out from my pocket. I shook out two pills onto the palm of my false hand, balancing them there, and looked at Elvedina.

  “Just… keep an eye on things, will you?”

  Her silence was reassuring, when before it had been sinister. She nodded, once.

  I leaned forward into the circle with the zombie, his eyes slowly turning sour, filming over with fungus and decay. I thrust my prosthetic forward and gripped him by the shoulder. He snapped and snarled and yowled but went in the direction of the hand like a carrot dangling from a stick. I guided him to it while he gnawed on the old plastic, tipping the pills into his mouth. He choked and swallowed. Red foam formed at his lips in a pink circle as I stepped away until I was back beside Elvedina.

  She lifted her hand into the light and bared a wrist watch. The hand raced around the numerals as we counted down the minutes, the seconds. In increments, the pre-deceased individual began to quiet, his salivary glands shutting down. His eyes refocusing and his face
gaining the familiar range of expression.

  Had I looked like this, all those years? Walking backwards from death to life?

  I shuddered.

  At last, he lifted his head and stood erect.

  “Vitus? Is that you?”

  “Hi, Jamie.”

  He jerked his head back and forth in the darkness to assess the area and understand his situation. He blinked several times and then retreated within himself, becoming still as though he could summon dignity out of his situation and retain some portion of control out of his own personal catastrophe.

  “I came here today to ask you,” I said, “about the Echo Inspector.”

  Jamie blinked.

  And he began to laugh. And laugh. And laugh.

  EPILOGUE

  FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF H.E.A.

  “Take it off,” she said in a whisper.

  I unbuttoned my shirt with one hand. It’s a skill I acquired during my convalescence, the art of being one-handed. I shrugged out of the shirt and let it drop to the floor. I unbuckled my belt and my clumsy fingers slipped; I cursed until she came forward and took it in hand. I searched her eyes for an emotion and wondered if she felt anything at all behind cogs and clockworks. I pretended her hands were somewhere else, that this was cold and impersonal. Just business.

  The belt slipped away from me and snapped tight in her fists.

  “Like this?”

  “Yeah. Just like that,” I whispered.

  “Lower?”

  “Mmmm, lower. Go lower. Yeah, just like that, right there—”

  “Here?”

  “Ye-ess, put it in…”

  “You want this? You can stop, any time.”

  “I can’t, do it, do it now.”

  A network of interlaced veins ran like rivers beneath the skin of my one good arm; my hand made into a fist, the belt held taut by Elvedina’s reliable hands around my upper arm. Blood swelled with no place to go and the syringe balanced her hand, bending light and space through the glass. She set the needle against my arm. The skin formed a divot, and then punctured.

  Five minutes before this, I was cooking Atroxipine with a Bunsen burner that used to be Jamie’s. The lab beaker foamed up with a satisfying, yellow tint. I held it with my good hand, the only one I have that’s real.

  The other jutted out from my arm and stopped inches from where a wrist should be. When I’d been a zombie—or pre-deceased—losing pieces of myself was a condition I’d gotten used to, though it unnerved me regardless of how much I steeled myself for the inevitable decay. I took solace from the fact my body was so rotten that a butcher wouldn’t keep it around to sell as shark chum, but here I’d been wearing a brand new one, and I had a head start on righteously fucking it up.

  Chemical stench filled the confines of the ranch. While Elvedina depressed the needle and sent pure Atroxipine sky rocketing through my hungry blood stream, I paced back through a landmine of memories: Jessica and I had been married here and my son had learned how to walk here. And then afterward, I remembered, the tragedy. When I was dead and could not be coaxed back to life and every day was one long funeral in which no one came to bury me. The ensuing troubles when Jessica came back from the grave. Meeting Amos, who went by his alias and pulled me deeper into the conspiracy. The maggots that consumed me. And Jamie, stitching me into Amos’s skin so I could live in the body of my dead nephew.

  Falling back onto the mattress and trusting myself to the steadfast arms of a heartless, beautiful machine, feeding me this illicit honey through the vein. When I wanted to leave my body, I could, whenever I chose, as long as my refills on Atroxipine were endless. For now, I was satisfied to let it take me to a place where I could forget the past and metamorphose without pain; to curl up like a child in a place beyond sleep, where no Echo Inspector could follow me into the abyss, where I could be safe in my private inferno, and awaken on the other side, truly human as if for the first time. Cast away the psychopathy of my zombie years, leaving me hollow. Leaving life meaningless without something to numb it, to fill it, to control it.

  Atroxipine. Let’s ride out into the sunset together.

  Forget everything, long enough to recover and start over again. This white out, this raw heat, enough to sustain me while I gather my strength.

  Because in the shadows, the Inspector waits. My father waits. Medals on his chest, his ring on his finger that scratched my face a thousand times. And the monsters my brother made, forming an invisible army. Polly far away from here in a South American country. I wished her well. Hoped her nights were dreamless.

  The only thought I have, as I fell back onto the table with Elvedina holding my belt in her hands, is this is as good as life gets.

  I white out, riding an Atroxipine haze.

  This is my happily ever after.