Tomorrow I Will Kill Again

by Matthew Allred

  Paul easily followed the trail made by Jen dragging Clare’s body behind her through the fresh snow. They’d made it about three hundred yards. Jen had collapsed from the cold, exhaustion, and a loss of hope. Sean had told Paul she hadn’t been eating well the last few days, partly as a way to avoid unnecessary (and unpleasant), bathroom trips. Under-eating plus the weight of the junkie had made an already improbable escape impossible.

  “What are you trying to do?” he yelled as he got closer to the collapsed bodies. Once he got there he realized Jen was in no condition to answer.

  “Deeny! Sean! I need your help!”

  They appeared, not exactly out of thin air, but more quickly than Paul had expected. He couldn’t explain exactly how they had come, and thinking of it made him nauseous.

  Sean grabbed the women by their waists, one on each arm, and carried them with ease back to the tent. When they got there both he and Deeny went into the tent with Paul, to curiously watch. Deeny should not have actually been able to fit inside, but somehow, he did.

  “Baby,” Paul said to his almost catatonic, discolored wife. “What is wrong with you?” He crouched down and touched her chilled cheek. He almost smiled, but his face was all sadness.

  9

  Jen still could not see Deeny, but she began to feel his presence in a very real way. She could see the flickers in the air, where Sean and Paul addressed him. The flickers reminded her of heat-shimmers rising off summer asphalt. She could not speak or think clearly as they talked in hushed tones, probably about her and Clare. Their words rolled off her like water on a tile wall.

  Sean: “How did they get loose? Didn’t you secure these?”

  Paul: “Of course I did. Do you think I wanted my wife walking out there in the freezing snow? Do you think I want her dead?”

  Sean: “Well, if you had tied them up better, they wouldn’t have gotten free.”

  Paul: “I didn’t want the bindings to hurt them.”

  A pause.

  Paul: “I understand that. I know, I know. I’m sorry.”

  Sean: “Oh well, It’s not like they can go anywhere.”

  A pause.

  Paul: “How long do you think they were out there?”

  Sean: “I don’t know. It couldn’t have been too long; they look okay.”

  Paul: “The girl’s drooling.”

  A pause.

  Sean: “It’s heroin withdrawal.”

  A pause, longer this time.

  Paul: “It’s a drug… something people use or take to make themselves feel or think differently, and this girl is addicted to a drug called heroin. She is sick because her body wants more, but she hasn’t had any since before you killed Donald Harmon.”

  A pause.

  Paul: “Yeah, sorry. Before we killed him.”

  Jen sort of tried to mumble. She wanted to ask what Paul meant, exactly, by we.

  Paul, crouching at her side: “Jen, take it easy, okay? You got yourself into a lot of trouble this morning.”

  Then he asked Deeny and Sean to leave, and soon he and Jen were alone with the sleeping girl. At least, Jen hoped she was asleep and not dead.

  Her lips still felt numb and frozen, but she tried to open them. She was feeling a bit more cognizant.

  “Jen, honey… what happened?”

  “What?” She turned her head stiffly to one side. She felt sick. She said, “She wads habing a seesur.”

  He cradled her head in his hands. “I’m sorry. Baby. Honey. I can’t understand you.” He had rarely spoken to her so affectionately. She looked up at his face, not old or young, handsome in an academic way. Seeing him this way, crouched over her—worried and kind—made her heart ache for him. Yet he seemed more distant than ever.

  Jen wanted him to understand why she had been pushed to the edge of such a drastic escape. Perhaps absurdly, she wanted him to know she didn’t leave because her love for him had grown cold. She forced the words out, “She was having a seizure.”

  Paul frowned.

  “So I got her untied… and we ran.”

  Paul shifted so that his rear was on the tent floor. He leaned over and hugged Jen’s head to his chest. She was reminded of the way things used to be between them when they first started dating. He had been romantic, though never in public and rarely alone, but he had been. She wanted to reach up, to embrace him back, to hug so tight that everything bad just disappeared. But it didn’t work that way. X’s and O’s weren’t going to make her husband sane. Maybe nothing would.

  She was glad Sean and the shimmering shape had exited the tent. Ludicrous as it was, she wanted to enjoy this rare moment of closeness with the man she loved. Somewhere in her abused consciousness she realized that “Sean and the Shimmering Shape” sounded like the title of a children’s book.

  Paul was still waiting for an answer. A powerful, unquestionable jolt of need, longing, love, and desire ran through her cold- and stress-warped body, and she realized how much she had always cared about him, how she had—secretly, hidden even from herself—believed that they would be together in whatever was after death. She also thought about how much she had wanted to have children with him, the ultimate amalgamation of their love.

  Unbidden, a snatch of lyrics from some old song sounded in her head: You’re the other half of what I am, you’re the missing piece.

  He said, “Jen, honey… where were you trying to go?”

  “I was trying to get away from you,” she said. The words sounded—to her, at least—worse than treason.

  One tear rolled down his cheek, and then, as if waiting for its turn, another went down the opposite cheek leaving a wet trail on his cold, wind-burned flesh. “I understand,” he said. “I know why you want to get away.”

  He looked toward the tent flap for a few seconds, then leaned in and kissed Jen briefly and passionately. The unexpected presence of his lips on hers was so intensely sensual that she felt for a moment they were back home, ready for another round of attempted conception. As sudden and clear as the sensation had been, it then departed. He withdrew his hands from her face, sat up straight, and the cold reality of where they were returned.

  He said, “I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but can’t you feel the power that’s growing beneath us?” When she only stared at him he grew visibly impatient, “Please honey, do this for me. Talk to me.”

  She had reason to believe that there was some force behind these events, and she had certainly, in the days spent sleeping on the ground, felt some sort of presence within it. Almost as if she could sense the mounting forces of an earthquake brewing deep inside.

  “I’ve felt it,” she said. “That doesn’t mean it’s good.”

  “Close your eyes for me. Focus on it.”

  So she did.

  †

  As soon as her eyes were closed, she realized she was seeing more than the inside of her lids. There was a limitless expanse of darkness. She tried to open her eyes, but the vision did not change. She no longer felt as if she were in a body.

  In the blackness she saw a large, multi-colored intrusion, something like a soap bubble. It was a huge half-dome shape. It rested on the ground (for now there was ground, green and brown). The half-dome bubble grew like a balloon. It grew not only in size, but in tensile strength and thickness. She saw now that the ground was actually the forest they were camping in by the lake. The bubble expanded out, a wonderful, ethereal green light pulsing softly with alternatively dim and bright lightning shooting off inside. Reflections began swimming in the chemical colors of its surface, a face that was Paul but also not Paul, glided along the bubble shell. She saw the cities and towns around the Wasatch mountains being swallowed up and disappearing within the bubble. Now it was not just Paul’s reflection on the surface, but the bubble was taking the shape of his face. The colors slowly stopped swirling and the walls grew fleshy and opaque. His face overtook the state… the country… the world. The scene should have looked ridiculous, but instead—his face hanging t
here, grinning in the endless, starless void—it instilled in her a sense of awe-filled greatness. In the throes of this vision she had become insignificant in every way. She felt as if she were worshipping. There was no one to tell Paul what to do, nothing he would need to submit to.

  He was Mayhem, a new god.

  He was God.

  The only God.

  †

  She open her eyes and her husband, the one that was—and could not be—Mayhem, stared down at her with delicacy and love.

  “I see,” she said, hollowed-out, barren of sharpness.

  “That’s what I am trying to turn away from even as I race toward it.”

  “What is the green light?”

  “It is a necklace that we have buried in this forest.”

  “But what is it, really?”

  His gray eyes locked onto her green ones. He said, “Promise me you won’t run away again. I can’t bear to lose you. Not now.”

  “I won’t run,” she said. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “Don’t just stay here because you have to.” He grabbed one of her hands in both of his. She must have warmed up, because now he was the one who felt cold. Like an ice-man. “Stay here because you love me.”

  “This girl needs help, Paul. I don’t know if she’ll die from this, or if she would under normal circumstances, but she doesn’t even have medical attention. Seizures alone can leave you with brain damage. Can’t you just dump her in front of a hospital or something?”

  “No,” he said, retracting both hands. He looked at the tent wall in much the same way Sean had when he’d first told her the name, Mayhem. “She knows what we look like. She knows what we’ve done. She must stay with us.”

  “Are you willing to let her suffer permanent damage for you, for your plans? Maybe even die for them?”

  He stood up as if to leave. A shadow from a coat lying near the lantern obscured his face.

  Suddenly he looked like another man, a stranger.

  He said, “I may be willing to do much more than that. We will just see how things turn out.”

  He left, zipping down the flap almost all the way behind him. Soon after, Cards squeezed into the opening Paul had left, panting and playful, hoping to snuggle with Jen. She wondered if Paul had sent the dog in to her. Clare’s breathing had stabilized enough that Jen could faintly hear it, so she let herself sleep, giving in to the merciful, dreamless nothing. She pretended Clare’s metered breaths were the tides coming in, going out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DETECTIVE MATTHEWS WAS GETTING WORRIED that he’d misread Miller. He’d been sitting at his table in Ruby Tuesday’s for almost an hour. He’d thoughtfully picked through his appetizer, and had twice deflected his waiter when he hinted that whoever he was waiting for probably wasn’t coming. But then, while he was studying an interesting young family two booths down from him, Miller appeared.

  The waiter brought Miller over, and Matthews bit back some rude remark he wanted to make to the impatient server. Just being right was enough. It was important to be right when you were a detective.

  “Sorry about that,” Miller said rather sheepishly. He picked up a menu, but promptly set it down again.

  “It’s on me,” Matthews said.

  “I’ve got money.”

  “I’m sure you do, but I have a personal policy to pay when there’s information I need. I don’t want you to feel like you’re getting nothing for something that’s actually quite valuable.”

  The old man, whose personality Matthews still couldn’t pin down, looked at him with his piercing, youth-sharp eyes. He said, “I don’t even know what’s good here.”

  Matthews made some suggestions, and soon they had ordered. Once the waiter left again, orders scribbled on the pad, Matthews said, “That is what’s happening here, isn’t it? You’re giving me information I need, or at least, that’s going to help me with this case.”

  Miller sipped from his heavy glass of water. It obviously took some amount of effort to keep the water from sloshing out the sides. Matthews wondered if the shake was due to age, or if it had more to do with the man’s nervous state.

  Just as Matthews was about to ask again, Miller said, “That’s right. I don’t expect you to believe me, exactly, but I have reason to suppose you might. Whether you believe me or not, I can tell you what’s happening here. Some of it. I can even tell you where they are.”

  This kind of statement was the detective equivalent of finding a Benjamin blowing slowly by in an abandoned street. Now, Matthews just needed to see if it was the real thing, or simply lifelike play money.

  He said, “It probably goes without saying that you have my attention.”

  2

  Sean drove the stolen Bonneville in silence, and Paul, in turn, had nothing to say to this half-real extension of the necklace and Deeny and whatever else. The last of Deeny’s power would (hopefully) keep the police from spotting the car, even if it had been reported. Deeny had assured them both again that this was, indeed, the end of his abilities if Paul failed.

  Paul tried to think nothing. He did not try to envision the great bubble Jen had seen; he did not try to remember the feel of the .380’s recoil in his hand when he (Deeny, Deeny pulled the trigger) had killed Donald Harmon; he did not even try to remind himself that the man he was going out to murder that night was a killer in his own right. There was no point in thinking that; it didn’t help. There was no point in thinking anything. Instead he would let the events transpire and wash over him and feed Deeny. The thought he tried hardest to avoid was this: What’s next? Kill this man, but then what?

  A plastic-and-yarn crucifix hung from the rearview mirror, and Paul watched it sway as he listened to the sound of the road. They passed trees and cars and houses, but through it all Paul focused on the cheap-looking craft. He could imagine it had been made by a child or a person with special needs. He felt no guilt about the stolen Bonneville; at worst the person it belonged to would be without a ride for a couple nights. They had no plans to permanently possess the vehicle. Sean had even promised Paul that he would fill the tank before returning it.

  The journey took over three hours. The whole way Paul fondled and caressed the .380 as if it were a sick pet, as if it were anything but a gun. Less than a thought, more like the nag of a deep pain, the words Paul Kenner will kill a man he has never met seemed to rest uneasily in Paul’s stomach like too much raw garlic.

  About thirty minutes before reaching the trailer park, Paul picked up an orange paperback New Testament that had been stuffed into the space between the seat and the center console. Absentmindedly he thumbed through the first few chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, until his eyes happened to catch on one verse. The letters were blood red, indicating they were the words of Christ:

  Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

  “Good advice,” Paul grumbled.

  Sean did not ask him what he meant.

  †

  Once they reached the street where Kyle Weaver lived, Sean dropped Paul off and drove away. He had no cell phone, and Paul’s was no longer functioning anyway, but Sean seemed certain there would be no trouble in finding each other once the deed was done. He explained how elated he’d been when, miles away, Paul had succeeded with the murder of Donald Harmon.

  Paul walked in the evening light down North Center Street, which looked far from being the center of anything. Alternating lawns that would be green in the summer and empty lots of dirt stared at him as he passed. A few houses were lit, but most were dark. He didn’t know the address, but he didn’t need it. The first seeds of what he was trying to become had been sown; he could see more than a normal man.

  The glittering sunset sparked a fire in the air, and Paul felt, despite everything, as if he were a connoisseur of fine art, escaping in the delicacy of the day. But as he walked into the trailer park where Deeny’s vision had dire
cted them, the sun’s flame went out, and darkness overtook the world.

  Paul found the address easily; it was the only traditional building in the trailer-park. It was saggy and rundown. Paul guessed it was perhaps seventy years old. Sooner, rather than later, it was going to have to be demolished.

  The accusing gaze of Kyle Weaver’s second floor windows was almost enough to turn Paul back the way he’d come, but he soldiered on, not feeling the fear he had expected, not feeling much of anything. A gigantic gray cloud, slightly lighter than the rest of the sky, drifted past him overhead, and he wondered what it might be like to sleep on such a cloud, for he had become tired.

  Approaching the paint-forsaken home, Paul could hear the fake POP POP sound of Hollywood guns firing in the television. He walked up three wooden steps in poor repair, but at the front door he did not know what to do. Eventually he knocked.

  There was no response.

  Paul knocked again, loudly this time, and he heard a man curse to himself. Four or five seconds later the creaking door revealed a man who looked much older than his fifty-eight years. A wispy lock of hair rested on the man’s head like a gray rodent. His too-tight suspenders pulled unevenly at the right and left sides of his khaki pants, bunching up his plaid cotton shirt at the shoulders.

  The man, whom Paul could feel was Kyle Weaver, said, “What?”

  Paul felt as if he were in a dream. Unfortunately, it didn’t feel like a nightmare. He said, “Ten years ago you killed your brother because of a woman.”

  The man’s face first looked pained, almost repentant, than a pure and vile hatred clutched him like a pain spasm. He launched his frail body through the door, both hands clutching Paul’s neck in a powerful vice grip his appearance belied. Their bodies flew down the steps, splitting the bottom step in two. The man screamed profanities, some of which Paul was unfamiliar with, but he didn’t really feel as if he were hearing them. At least, not with his inner ear. This inner ear, this center of perception, heard instead a placid silence, as if he were floating in the center of a motionless ocean, with no wind or waves.