Borderlands 6
Page 5
It was about a girl, as such tragic wasteful endings often are. Not that the girl was the one to blame; she hadn’t bought the beer nor had she glued her ex-boyfriend’s foot to the floor. If she hadn’t been involved, they surely would have found some other excuse to get wasted and go joyriding at Mach 10. But she should be mentioned, if only to add a hint of sexual tension to Chuck and Eddie’s short and reckless adventure.
Chuck’s girlfriend of two months had started seeing another guy and had laid the whole “just friends” trip on Chuck, a trip that most people would rather not take. Sheila was a nice girl and that was the heart of the problem really, because nice girls wouldn’t continue to let themselves be forced into committing the type of acts that Chuck routinely forced Sheila to commit in the two months of their “relationship”. Especially nice girls with choices, and Sheila was a girl with choices. Her latest choice was Brock Davis, the defensive tackle for the Oakvale Badgers, so Chuck was robbed of the opportunity of delivering the vengeful ass kicking that most of the new boyfriends got. No sex, no violence—time for a Golden Anniversary.
Eddie was the logical choice to go get bombed with in the aftermath of the dumping. Eddie had never had a girlfriend. Eddie also possessed the third largest collection of pornography in Oakvale. Besides, it was Saturday night, and everyone else in town was busy trying to get what Chuck had just lost access to.
So Chuck bribed a friend’s older brother, with a twenty and two skin mags, to get them a case, and then he fired up the Nova and set off for the less-than-mean but darker-than-hell back streets of Oakvale.
As the first lukewarm can of Golden Anniversary (‘Gee-ay’ to the faithful) was cracked and placed in his hand, Chuck began to express his dismay at being dumped, the doleful strains of AC/DC loud enough to rattle the windows, serving as the soundtrack to his tale of woe.
“Whore,” he said. “Probably been doin’ him the whole time.”
“Whore,” Eddie agreed, taking a slug of GA. He pronounced it “ho-uh”.
Drunken logic, as opposed to deductive logic, proceeds from the specific to the general, and Chuck’s slow burn tirade grew in scope, taking in friends, classmates, girls from the neighborhood, girls who worked at the mall, girls he had seen in the thumbprinted magazines on the seat between them, until it was large enough to include all of womankind rather than just his ex-girlfriend. His list was all-inclusive by the fourth beer.
“’R all bitches ’n sluts anyhow,” he said, gripping the wheel with his left hand and cradling a beer in his right, his knuckles white on each. “Do your best fuckin’ friend on you . . . you don’t watch out.”
“Ho-uhs,” Eddie added.
Chuck squinted at him as though he might have suspected Eddie of a dalliance with his ex. Eddie, who was half Chuck’s size and for whom “liquid courage” was more like bottled cowardice, caught the look and stared sullenly out the side window. Chuck smiled, remembering that the only dalliance Eddie had ever had was with his right hand.
His smile grew wider as he recalled the last time with Sheila. Even then, pushing the back of her head down after he’d yanked her behind the rendering dumpster in back of the school. He was rough but he hadn’t thought he’d been that rough, not rough enough for it to be over. Even the look she gave him when it was done—he thought that look would fade with time. Why couldn’t he ever see where these things were going?
Deep down, down to the bottom where all true feelings lie, he knew he was at fault. But if God wanted accepting responsibility to be easier than getting drunk, he wouldn’t have invented three-bucks-a-six-pack beer. His smile flattened with a mouthful of said beer and did not return.
Drunken logic held sway and intensified with each sip and soon Chuck set about proving that not only women but all of humanity was worthless and all people wretched, hateful monsters intent on spreading malice and despair wherever they went.
“Damn slut,” Chuck said.
“Damn,” Eddie parroted.
Chuck stopped preaching the Gospel of the Broken Heart as he began his eleventh beer. Not normally loquacious, he hunched over the steering wheel and stared abjectly through the windshield as the roads spread out before him like a deck of cards fanned in the hands of a squinting man. Eddie was halfway through his ninth beer and took advantage of the silence by expounding at length why he thought anal sex was preferable to more traditional forms, and went on to mention that when he got a girlfriend she damn well better be prepared to swallow.
“Bitsh gotta be ready at all the time, know? All fu’ time, man. Don’ wan’ nothin’ bitsh don’ wha’ . . . ”
But Chuck was far beyond questions of mere aesthetics at this point, even though Eddie was striking perilously close to deep truths. He was locked deep within himself where reasons ceased to matter. The bitterness remained, but its causes were fading, if causes they were and not just passkeys to doors of hatred deep inside the dungeons of his soul.
“Fu’ bish gots to gotta . . . ”
Chuck saw the railing the instant before the thick front wheels of the Nova trampled over it. He fell silent as the moon suddenly filled the windshield.
The feeling was quite beautiful, the pleasant drunken weightlessness, the sensation of being on a slow boat cruising towards the luminescent disc far on the horizon, coasting on a beam of light across the spanning sea of black velvet.
The feeling was gone as the moon dropped out of their orbit and they smashed both of their skulls on the windshield when the car hit the dark water.
The heavy car plunged into the lake like a knifing diver, capsizing without tarrying on the surface. The corpses—for both Chuck and Eddie had been killed instantly by the harsh impact—were pressed back into their seats by the water as it streamed through the starred windshield. The windshield imploded as the car sank to greater depths, sending a spray of safety glass that lodged in leather and flesh.
Dead Chuck opened his eyes. He found that death had cleared his head, in a manner of speaking. Sure, his vision was more than a trifle impaired, but once he wiped the blood and brain from his eyes, his sight was no blurrier in the dark lake water than it had been when he was sitting crocked behind the wheel up on the surface.
The best part of being dead was the absence of bitterness. The feeling was gone. All of it, gone. He inhaled the lake water until it filled him, a smile returning to his broken face.
I hadn’t expected that, he thought.
Eddie was a little worse for wear than his friend. His scrawny neck had snapped twiglike when they hit, and he couldn’t lift his head from where it lay cheek down on his shoulder.
“Shouldn’t we have hit bottom already, Charles?” Eddie asked, the words bubbling out of his waterlogged lungs.
“I don’t know, Edward,” Chuck said, staring at the greenish darkness, which was scarcely illumined by the Nova’s headlights.
“What’s that up ahead?” Eddie asked.
It was a fish, a small, flat fish about five inches long. It regarded them for a moment as though transfixed, deerlike, in the Nova’s headlights.
Two, three more joined it, staring calmly at the swiftly sinking automobile, before swimming on past the car. The three fish multiplied into a cloud-like school that lingered, basking in the ghostly light. Some fish tapped like rain on the bonnet of the Nova; others swam in through the jagged hole where the windshield had been, to brush against the dead.
“Fish,” Eddie said, laughing a stream of bubbles.
“Like snowflakes,” Chuck said, willing his lifeless hand to touch one of the tiny swimmers. “We’re in a snowstorm, a living snowstorm.”
The school did look like a snowstorm through the smashed windshield, a quick, darting flurry that would leave the ground dusted with a clean, pure whiteness as one watched it through the frosted windows of a warm, safe home.
“Charles,” Eddie said, “look at that.”
“Whoa,” Chuck said as he watched a squid undulate through the stream of fish. A pair of manta rays flapped like bats over the hood of the car; a catfish the size of a large dog bumped into Eddie’s door.
“This is weird,” Eddie exclaimed, his dead eyes opened wide. “Look at that thing.”
The “thing” was a small plesiosaur whose gentle but persistent swimming knocked clusters of fish off their course.
The beast, showing it rows of sharp teeth, like icicles in the mouth of a cave, eyed a dugong
The variety of creatures increased as their steel coffin descended. Dolphins, sharks, elasmosaurs, killer whales, coelacanths; all manner of water dwellers drifted by in an endless stream of motion.
Chuck glanced out his side window and immediately regretted doing so, as the formlessly vague, lazy shapes he spied drifting in the gloom beyond filled him with an unspeakable dread. He returned to gaping at the creatures straight ahead, unease furrowing his shattered brow.
Eddie spotted the first human floating out of the depths.
“Look!” he shouted.
A small boy floated into the twin beams of the headlights, clad in only a bathing suit whose drawstrings trailed behind him like the tails of a kite. He gazed blankly at Chuck and Eddie as he cut through the scaly throng, showing no more recognition than did the lowliest minnow. Perhaps less.
“Damn,” Chuck said.
“Look, Charles. There’s another one.”
And there was—a young woman in a bikini, a long, deep crease along the top of her skull just visible beneath the long hair fanning out behind her. To her left on the other side of a small cluster of sparking electric eels was an overweight man whose padded fishing jacket, hip waders, and boots did not seem to impede his progress through the dark water.
“Whoa,” Eddie said as another woman floated past their headlights at a sharp angle.
“We’re in the deep water, Edward,” Chuck said as two young men who could have been brothers passed over the hood, one of them turning his head for a moment to regard them.
“And dropping still,” added Eddie.
Bodies continued to float past them like bubbles from a fountain, so many bodies that the water was choked with them. Fish and other creatures could be seen darting or diving in among the human throng; a huge sperm whale appeared suddenly from the stream of bodies and bumped the right front quarter panel, pushing the car off its current trajectory, before veering away into the darkness. The headlight on that side blinked rapidly three times and then went out.
Not all the bodies were pleasant to regard. Many bore wounds or marks as grievous as those sustained by Chuck and Eddie once their brief flight into the night sky had ended. As they descended, the school of corpses that crossed their sights was in a greater state of disrepair, their flesh hanging loose from visible bones and trailing behind them or billowing around them. A sea snake the size of a subway train cut through the corpses bursting putrid bodies that left clouds of blood in the serpent’s wake.
A body, no more than a skeleton wearing a few fleshy rags, changed direction to come at them. The effigy swam through the broken windshield and pulled itself into the backseat. Chuck looked over his shoulder and saw a white skull thrown back as though in laughter.
A blue whale shot up from the water below, the force of its wake spinning the Nova like a top. An immense suckered tentacle cleaved through the teeming bodies.
“Charles, I’m . . . ”
Another tentacle appeared from the darkness and curled towards the Nova, reaching in and plucking Eddie from his seat like a clam from its shell and then he was gone, dragged down into the darkness.
Chuck squinted against the gloom trying to catch sight of him, but he was gone. More tentacles, massive appendages like thick tree trunks, swayed before him like the hands of the faithless. And thinner, whiplike ones, as well, that lashed and snapped against the side of the Nova. He turned to look over his shoulder once again. The corpse had not moved; its expression of mirth had not changed as it sat reclined against the leather seat, cans of GA floating around a fleshless head.
The other headlight cut out. The Nova was dropping towards an eerie luminescence far below. Chuck could make out movement in the darkness beyond, nothing more. Something quick and corded brushed against his cheek, possibly laying it open, he couldn’t be sure. A moment later something struck the back of the car from below, with a dull clunk, tipping the car up just as something Chuck imagined was a huge anemone pressed itself against his face before withdrawing into the darkness.
Something landed on the hood with enough force to crack the metal. Another invisible thing slammed into the passenger-side door.
Chuck was calm throughout, even as cold hands touched his skin and then withdrew. A sense of languid ease had overtaken him as he sank through the black waters of Oxoboxo Lake, a peace unlike he had ever experienced while alive, except through the oblivion of alcohol. His bitterness, his hatred, all of his many negative emotions had drained from him the moment his head smashed against the windshield of his car, and flowed from him with increasing speed the deeper he went. It wasn’t Sheila’s fault. All women were not whores; all humanity was not worthless. He turned again to smile at his silent passenger, who was now completely invisible in the inky water of the backseat.
The car gave a sudden lurch, as though something was tugging on one of the axles. Chuck thought he could discern a sea of waving tentacles, a great forest of them, sprouting from the weird glow which must be hundreds of fathoms below.
There was a second tug and the car began to move with purpose, the speed increasing as the nose of the vehicle pointed at the source of light intensifying below. The illusion of drifting in a peaceful fluid haze was wiped away and replaced by the unwelcome sensation of being snared by something that would not let go. Death, like life, lost all appeal for Chuck the moment he sensed another pulling his strings.
The sudden jolt squeezed out whatever chemicals were left lingering in his adrenal glands. His first thought was to escape the plummeting vehicle, but the pressure of swift descent pushed him back against his seat. He tried to call out but his cries would not rise up from his throat.
The curtain of tentacles parted as he was reeled in with increasing velocity. The car was bathed in an ethereal greenish light, a light that was the light of wolves’ eyes, of the fungal phosphorescence of tomb walls, of radioactive ooze. Whatever its source, the illumination cut through the darkness like a beacon and filled his vision with a sickly glow.
Chuck could see that the vehicle had begun to rapidly oxidize; flecks of paint and rust were lifting from the dented hood and peppering his skin like a swarm of gnats. The corrosive effects of the light weren’t limited to the metal of the vehicle, as the plastics coating the dash and the steering wheel had begun to dissolve like sugar in water.
Chuck lifted his hand and watched his skin and then the flesh beneath burn away. His metacarpal bones were fizzing, wispy contrails of grayish smoke trailing in the water as his skeleton began to melt. His jaw lolled open in surprise and then unhinged entirely, separating from his skull with a muted snap. The greenish light, a warm invitation from miles below, now looked septic and dangerous. He felt as he did when the Nova first jumped the rails, lost and out of control, unable to slow his momentum or even hold himself together.
He was moving faster now, faster than he had ever traveled in a car, and the speed made it difficult to keep his newfound love of humanity in the forefront of his mind. The rate of descent brought also an acceleration of the rate of decay—the front of the car was a skeleton of rusted metal, the layers of engine stripped away and atomized in the swift drag. There was nothing for Chuck to hold on to, but soon there would be nothing to hold on with
; his remaining hand came loose at the wrist and dispersed in the slipstream as his body succumbed to the acidic effect of the deep water.
He felt a brief touch, the whisper of a kiss, at the base of his neck and he remembered his silent companion in the backseat. He shivered, imagining a rotting tongue licking away the pieces of him that were flaking off his dissolving body. He tried to turn but could not; the vertebrae of his neck softened and then liquefied. He plummeted another four fathoms in the blink of a disintegrating eyelid and then his body was gone, just gone, a vague swirl of consciousness left in its wake.
The tentacles tugging his car disappeared and all that remained was the pulsing light that pulled him in like a magnet. Chuck saw forms flickering in the edges of the light; they glittered and danced like sunbeams on the surface of the lake on a clear July day, burning with a greater concentration than the light surrounding them.
He tried to tell himself that he was falling towards heaven, but even his thoughts were shrill and panicked. Even as he imagined the heaven below and all its wonders, he was trying to will himself to stop sinking, to put the brakes on his headlong descent.
I see angels at play in the light of a submerged sun! he thought, but as with most of the thoughts he had clung to in life, there was no real belief behind the concept.
The angels turned towards him, as a school of piranha will turn towards a thread of blood in the water.
They were too close, Chuck thought. Too fast. There was an anchor chained to his spirit and fear was a freezing current that flowed through what was left of him as he saw what the “angels” really were. He understood in ways he had never understood a thing while on the surface.
Dozens of them were reaching, rushing towards him in a geyser of radiance. They were smiling and reaching with glowing arms that lengthened into points like the shadows of trees that reached across Lake Oxoboxo at dusk.