The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller

by Richard Long

  What a bitch! Martin thought. His reaction was equally appropriate for expressing his unabashed awe, admiration and gratitude for her courageous intervention as well as his utter frustration with her attack plan. Had Rose simply confined her support activities to more of the same ear-splitting screams she previously contributed, he would have already planted three slugs into Carlos’s vital organs. Now, as Rose and Carlos twisted together like chicken fight partners in knee-deep guacamole, it was impossible to get a shot off that didn’t risk hitting her.

  Holding Dopey’s writhing bulk between himself and Carlos like a full-body-armor shield, Martin realized they were more or less on equal footing. One pull of the trigger would jeopardize the life of either shooter’s partner. Surprisingly, Carlos was the first to abandon all loyalty in favor of pure survival instincts. He started blasting. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!

  Martin had done a terrific job of positioning Dopey’s body in such a way that the first three shots were safely absorbed into his upper torso. The fourth shot missed him entirely, ricocheting harmlessly off the concrete steps. The fifth one got him. ZZZZZZZZmzzzzzzzt Martin could hear and even smell the whizzing bullet as it tore into the muscles below his left ribcage. The painful impact, combined with his depleted strength, made it impossible for him to support the junkie’s now literally dead weight. Martin collapsed onto the steps, trying to keep the bleeding body draped protectively over him like a lead x-ray blanket.

  Martin knew what bullets do when they enter your body and wondered whether he was already dead. For those of you who don’t know what happens when a bullet hits a fleshy, bony object—like Martin, for instance—it doesn’t necessarily travel in a straight line. More often than not, it twists and turns in the most surprising ways. For example, on one occasion, Paul shot a man in the wrist and the bullet, quite remarkably, made it all the way up his arm and over into his bronchial tubes. Paul called it, “Extra mileage.”

  Martin paused to determine where his own private missile might have wandered and groaned with relief when he saw a blob of flesh and blood on the cement directly beneath the bullet’s entry site. Good, a nice clean shot. He’d survived a few of those.

  He didn’t have time for further celebration. When he looked up, he noticed two remarkable new developments: Carlos had leveled his pistol sight squarely on Martin’s forehead, and Rose had her nail file pointed right at his focusing eyes.

  Thuck! That might have been the sound Rose made if she stabbed the gleaming tip of her file directly into Carlos’s squinting eye. Yet even with Martin’s life at stake, she couldn’t bring herself to commit an act so basely horrifying. Instead, the sound was more of a ZZZZZZT as she raked the filing edge across his exposed corneas just as he was squeezing the trigger.

  “Arrrrrrrggh!” Carlos bellowed, raising his pistol-toting hand (much too late) to protect his eyes. BANG! The gun fired, but not into Martin’s head. The bullet streaked into the air, landing a few seconds later with a harmless plop into the potato salad bowl of a midnight rooftop picnic party one block farther east.

  Upon realizing he’s been blinded, Carlos became as frantic as he was enraged, indiscriminately emptying the remaining bullets in his magazine while he rotated in circles with the vague hope of hitting Rose or Martin or maybe even one of his useless compadres.

  Rose jumped off Carlos’s back as soon as she delivered the fateful slash, quickly somersaulting across the pavement as Carlos twirled and fired. All the remaining shots slammed into the brownstone buildings or smog-deadened trees, with the exception of one lonely slug that shattered the shinbone of another of his meathead minions. The poor guy went down hard, breaking all of his front teeth as his face smashed into the curb right next to where Rose was lying. Rose, who liked the sight of blood more than most people, almost heaved as his cracked teeth bounced into the street like a pack of Chiclets.

  One of the three surviving goons assumed Rose’s former position behind Carlos’s back trying to wrestle the pistol away from him, or failing that, at least make sure he was safely behind the firing line. Another hopped behind a row of garbage cans to escape the whizzing bullets. The last thug ran away.

  The instant Martin heard the first echoing click of Carlos’s firing hammer hitting an empty chamber, he stuck his head out from behind his protective cover and started shooting. Bang! Bang! Bang! Plop. Plop. Plop. That was it. Three shots, three dead bodies. Rose was shrieking in fear at the sound of even more bullets spraying around her, but when she saw what Martin had done, her mouth shut and her eyes widened.

  Fuck! He just killed those guys, she thought, both awed and horrified. No, we just killed those guys, she added, even more disturbed. A cascade of raw emotions swirled around her head, pushing each other out of the way, struggling for recognition. Fear. Loathing. Excitement.

  Martin watched all those expressions flicker on her face and remembered the smile of a seven-year-old boy shooting his first rat…and an eight-year-old boy holding a smoking Beretta. Shit, he thought with a sad shake of pity. Then the switch clicked right on cue.

  Good. He’d wasted too much time already. Martin looked at her for one lingering second before he broke the silence.

  “Could you get this body off me?”

  Rose groaned with disgust and the effort of pushing the splattered corpse off Martin. After she helped him up, he put his arm around her, looking in all directions for any sign of witnesses. Nothing. This is weird. After all that shooting, there must be someone. Then, assuming they were all alone, he did the most unexpected thing. He bent his head down and kissed Rose tenderly on the top of her head.

  It was a beautiful sight. Even I had to agree. Tony, the fifth young punk, didn’t find it the least bit endearing. As it turned out, he wasn’t that big a coward after all. Yes, he ran away, but not very far. He was catching his breath at the far end of the street, tucked under his own shadowy stoop. And surprise, surprise: Tony also had a gun, which he was now pointing squarely at the crown of Martin’s lowered, kissing head.

  If Martin had known, he might not have waited so long before raising his head again. Even that little movement might have saved his life. Because that little punk Tony had him dead in his sights. And to make matters worse, he was a really good shot.

  Tony squeezed the trigger long, slow and even, just like he’d been taught by Carlos, the very man Martin had just delivered from a lifetime of white canes and Braille Hustler magazines. His aim was perfect. Martin lingered with his kiss to make it even easier. Nothing in the world should have been able to save Martin from that long, slow squeeze and the speeding bullet that followed.

  Nothing at all. Except, just maybe, for a little bit of luck.

  Tony couldn’t see him. Neither could Rose or Martin.

  Paul was coming like a great shrouded ghost, his long, white hair glowing under the streetlight. He was moving fast, but there wasn’t the slightest sound from his footsteps. He snapped the sickle open and it locked into place, its chrome, engraved death’s head emblem gleaming under the street lamp. Tony turned around at the sound, knowing it had to be some kind of knife or switchblade, guessing the newcomer must be in league with the tall guy and his rabid girlfriend. As he turned, he continued the slow squeeze of the trigger, his gun thrust out at eye level, gripped tightly in both hands for steady support.

  Tony decided he would start firing as soon as he fully turned around. At this range, any hit will slow him down. Then I’ll have time for a follow-up shot. And that’s exactly what Tony would have done. If he still had a head.

  “C’mere! C’mere! Quick!” Paul hissed at Michael, trying to remain unobserved by Martin and Rose long enough to delight in one of his most treasured indulgences. When Michael didn’t move fast enough, he grabbed his hand and dragged him over, under the shadow of a barren tree.

  There it was. It could have been mistaken for a half-deflated soccer ball, if it weren’t for the ears. “Look!” Paul hooted, practically bouncing with excitement. It was still alive.
“Quick! Bend down, there isn’t much time,” Paul commanded, squatting in front of the…thing. He pulled Michael down with him. Up close and personal. The eyes blinked. Paul raised a finger between them and moved it from side to side. When the eyes followed the movement of Paul’s finger, Michael shivered so strongly his head shook.

  “Neat, eh?” Paul said, nudging Michael in the ribs. “Go ahead, ask him a question!”

  Strangely enough, Michael didn’t hesitate. It was as if the question had always been inside him, waiting for the opportunity to be asked. “Did it hurt?”

  Michael almost shit himself when the mouth opened horribly, struggling to reply. Thankfully, no sound followed, except a barely audible gurgle accompanied by a pool of black blood spilling onto the asphalt below. Bean took an involuntary step backwards when the mouth moved again, slowly, maybe even calmly, mouthing out the words. Michael was no lip reader, but even he could make out the message.

  “Not much,” said the head.

  “Whoa!” Michael’s Whoa! seemed to shock the head formerly known as Tony into a state of confusion, or perhaps despair. He closed his eyes and blinked them slowly open again, hoping his intrusive audience had lost interest and gone away. When he saw Michael was still gawking at him, he closed his eyes again. They didn’t reopen.

  “Well, that’s it, kid. Show’s over,” Paul said happily, slapping Bean on the back, shaking his head with a rapturous sigh of pleasure. “Pretty impressive, eh?”

  Michael was so overcome with the madness of the moment that he didn’t know whether to nod or faint. Paul understood. It was, after all, his first time. Paul looked down the street to see whether Martin and Rose were out of earshot. He watched as they approached an apartment building more than fifty yards west, and satisfied that he and Michael had some measure of privacy, he picked up the headless body and stuffed it into an empty trash can as easily as he was tossing out an oversize bag of kitty litter. He shoved another plastic bag of garbage from a neighboring can on top to cover the crumpled legs, then pushed down the lid so tightly that the lazy sanitation workers would have to screw it off when they carted the trash away two or three days later.

  Michael’s legs were so wobbly he almost collapsed in the street. Paul walked over and gave him a hug that almost brought him back to the edge of sanity—then he robbed him of that fleeting equilibrium by picking up the head by its blood-oiled hair, speaking to both the head and Michael like an anatomy professor.

  “Here’s a little-known fact…little known, that is, to anyone who wasn’t around during the Reign of Terror,” Paul began, sucking in a huge draft of air while he planted his oak-thick legs a yard apart. He cradled the head gently, then tossed it softly from one hand to the other as he continued. “There’s enough oxygen left in the brain after a particularly swift decapitation, let’s say from a guillotine during that aforementioned terrible time, or my own modest invention here, that the poor lad’s head remains not only conscious for a considerable period, but also acutely aware of his surroundings. You can look into his eyes…and they look back. Better yet, you can even ask him questions, as you’ve just witnessed yourself.”

  Paul chuckled, then opened Tony’s eyelids with his thumbs. With this latest desecration, Michael felt more giddy than nauseous. He was beginning to acclimate himself to the Dada-esque absurdity of his circumstances.

  “And here’s another little secret about vacationing heads that I daresay you couldn’t learn from any other person on the planet…” Paul paused and Michael’s heart might have stopped beating in response. “They almost always answer you.”

  “Whoa!” said Michael. What else could he say?

  “Oh, the things that I could tell you, m’boy,” Paul said, shaking his head in wonder. “The things that I have learned!” Then he drop-kicked the head across the street and over a chain-link fence into a vacant lot.

  Michael half expected Paul to yell out, “Goaaal!” but he casually wiped his bloody hands on his overcoat, wrapped a burly arm around Michael’s panicked shoulder and whispered, “And you know something else, Michael?”

  “What?” Bean gulped.

  “No matter how many times I’ve been lucky enough to witness that little miracle, I just never get tired of seeing it.”

  They say ignorance is bliss. Rose’s case was a mixed bag. If she’d known Tony was pointing a gun at Martin’s head, she wouldn’t have wanted the kiss to linger for quite so long. That would have been a shame. On the other hand, if she’d seen Paul slice off Tony’s head with all the aplomb of a master sushi chef, she might have wisely abandoned Martin and his benefactor right on the spot, sparing herself all the suffering to follow.

  So, quite oblivious to the danger still surrounding them, and anxious to remove herself and Martin from the crime scene before the police sirens began wailing, Rose wrapped her arm around Martin’s waist and led him toward the stairs of their apartment building.

  Usually one to forgo any assistance, Martin draped an arm across her shoulder. Surprisingly, he was also unaware of Paul’s presence, though for completely different reasons. Part of Martin’s lack of awareness could be attributed to all the trauma he had experienced in the last few hours. But the biggest reason for Martin’s decline in observational prowess was due to the fact that he was practically deaf from all the close-range shooting.

  I, on the other hand, was all too aware of my surroundings. Okaaaaaay, I thought after Paul decapitated Tony as happily as someone else might dislodge a champagne cork. I didn’t mind being a fly on the wall with Martin and Rose, but I was definitely not in the mood for an encounter with Paul. I put my hands in my pockets and eased down the street as quietly as I could, trying to stay in the shadows until I was cleanly out of sight. As I reached the deli on the corner of Avenue B, I finally dared to sneak a peek over my shoulder…and ducked inside.

  Paul was running down the street. And man, that sucker was fast.

  “He’s been shot,” Paul said to no one, watching Martin struggle to climb the stairs.

  Michael thought the comment was intended for him. He was formulating some lame response like, “How can you tell?” when he realized Paul was already gone, zooming ahead in that silent “Ghost Riders in the Sky” gallop. He tried to catch up.

  When Paul’s voice cut through the muffled numbness in Martin’s ears, it sounded more like a songbird than a full throttled yell. “Hey!!!” the voice peeped. Martin turned to see where the “Hey!!!” was coming from. He was only mildly surprised to see it was Paul. What was he doing here? “Following you home,” said a little voice on Martin’s shoulder. It sounded a lot clearer than Paul’s bellowing yell had. “Yeah,” he agreed, “but why?”

  Who cares? Martin thought, grumbling that he could have used his uninvited company about six minutes earlier. Right now he didn’t care much about what Paul wanted. His primary objective was stuffing some gauze into the ragged wound in his back.

  Quickly approaching, Paul assessed Martin’s injuries (“He’ll live,” he concluded at fifteen yards and closing). He would have continued at his same hurtling pace nonetheless, were it not for the glare Rose gave him. A glare that asked: “Who the fuck are you?”

  Paul froze in place, no small feat considering the speed he was traveling, and stared at the young woman, her face gleaming with metal.

  Rose was expecting a similar unspoken retort, communicating something like, “No, who the fuck are you?” What she never would have expected was the look of recognition she received, followed by a bemused, contemptuous sneer Paul voiced out loud. “Hhmph!”

  She wasn’t sure how to react. Did this guy know her from someplace? No way. She would have remembered a face like that.

  Martin reacted to Paul’s look much differently. He couldn’t see the recognition in his eyes. Just the hate. Martin had seen that look so many times it wouldn’t have registered as even a blip on his radar screen were it not for the fact that he was directing it at Rose.

  Unlike Martin, who knew all
too well who they were dealing with, Rose was determined not to let the sneer go unanswered, and kept her fuck-you expression locked in place for a few more beats until Michael finally caught up to them. Bean held on to the railing, trying to catch his breath, much to the further disgust of Martin and the added confusion of Rose, who replicated her “who the fuck are you?” look to no avail, because Michael had his head lowered, sucking in lungfuls of air. After a few more anxious seconds, all three of them opened their mouths to speak, but Paul cut them off at the pass.

  “Well then, Martin,” Paul sighed, completely disregarding everyone else. “Would you be needing a hand with that exit wound?”

  Martin thought about it. The bigger wound was in his back, not the best place for self-administered care. Paul certainly had his bad points—in fact, almost all his points were bad—but when it came to emergency medical care, no one was more qualified, except perhaps the head of triage at Mt. Sinai. On the other hand, did he want Paul coming inside his home? With that punk? With Rose? With the look he was giving her? Did he want Paul in his life at all anymore? Given his recent experience with the nail and the knife and the kid, he would have to say no. Absolutely not. And yet…

  When he saw Paul in the park it felt like an old wound had opened, or maybe his heart. It was hard to tell, they felt so much the same. Pathetic as it was, Paul was the only person besides Norine who ever told him he was special, who thought he mattered at all. Paul taught him how to survive. Protected him. Maybe even loved him. For all those years. When Martin finally left, it was Paul’s idea, not his.

  They were huddled under an interstate highway overpass where they had taken refuge from a thunderstorm. It rained for hours as they sat shoulder to shoulder in the shelf-like alcove directly below the heavy, green steel beams supporting the crossroad. Their pickup truck had broken down shortly after they stashed their loot from Firth. It began raining almost immediately after the engine seized up, which Paul, of course, interpreted as another omen. An omen about the two of them.