“You waiting for some white knight here, Barbie?” J.D. taunts me from a dark, shadowed corner of the room. “You best get a move on if you thinking to make it out of this mess.” His eyes watch me with the same twisted sense of humor he held in life.
“You’re dead,” I whisper to him with the numbness and shock starting to climb into my mind like wisps of calming clouds.
He laughs and it touches my skin like static electricity. “Join the club, Barbie. Where are those balls of yours? Twice today you done rolled over for these things like one of those sheep out there. Did you become a sheep on me?”
“No.”
“You sure? Cause you ain’t doing a whole lot right now, are you?” He is standing over me, watching my death like a science experiment with the same interest over the outcome. “Why don’t you take that elbow of yours and see how well it fares against that skull of his? Unless you want to be cored like some deer for slaughter.” He stands, shrugging as he does. “Don’t matter to me. I’ll be seeing you soon, either way.”
“…not today.”
He smiles at me the same smile that used to chill my blood. The same blood that now pools hot around me like a fountain. “…not today?” he asks me.
My body is limp and heavy. Living in some dream-like state, my mind has detached from my body with efforts to block the pain of the gnawing. Now, I am demanding that it accept everything that it is trying to hide from like a parent dragging a child to a dark room. It’s dragging its feet and refusing to look, but we both have to. We both have to walk through that fear-filled doorway if we want to live.
My arm is the weight of a giant’s. It moves with the same grace as I drag it up, allowing gravity and the sheer limpness of it to collide my elbow with the skull that nuzzles back-and-forth into my stomach like a slurping lover. Each collision brings my mind to the brink of the doorway with small steps of avoidance until we both crash through it. It leaves me screaming again with the pain.
The screams fill me with life and the desire for his death. I have done enough damage to him that he is aware of me again. With my elbow bleeding from my broken skin, and dripping black from the remains of his wound, he turns to lock those hazed eyes on mine.
His face is smeared in crimson-black shades and it takes me a moment to realize that he is wearing me. Against my own desire, I look to where he has lifted his head and I see that he has torn open my lower stomach like a medieval cesarean. My eyes grow as wide as the wound and he smiles at my reaction to my horror.
I wondered earlier how many licks does it take to get to my spleen? We aren’t finding out, not today. My leg closest to his head bends, striking my knee against his temple and ricocheting his head from side-to-side. His hands slip on the now blood-slick tiles and falls back into the ruin of my stomach he made. It slows us both for a moment until I can clear the black spots from my vision. I roll, dumping him onto the floor and scream with the burning fire of pain the movement brings. He is locked in his mental prison with the sudden change from meal to fighter as he watches me drag myself away from him. His eyes roll to the projected path I have put myself on, but he does not see me as a threat. I don’t blame him. I am smearing blood and tearing myself further open with my escape. I can feel every raised edge of the bathroom’s tiles like they are serrated knives. They steal my breath and my vision with my self-mutilation for survival.
I know what I have to reach. My vision is tunneled on the pile of my discarded clothing. They beckon to me from the depths of my darkness with whispers of hope. I can hear the pleading of the words they holds for me. All I have to do is reach them and it will all be okay, but they seem to escape further from me with each drag that I use to pull myself forward. They aren’t beckoning me. They are taunting me.
“Come on girl, get that ass moving.” J.D. is squatting by the pile, putting voice to the words that it lacks the ability to do to the event. “Oh shit, he’s coming for ya’ now, Sweetheart. You better move.” J.D. laughs as he looks over my shoulder and I too look.
The Risen has grown bored with the delay. He is crawling towards me with a jerky one-armed motion without eagerness, but with patience. He has already fed today. I am just the late morning snack he was craving; warm, alive and squirming in his mouth. Seeing him moving makes me move.
“Oh, it’s on now. Look at him move. He wants your ass harder than Law does!” J.D. is shouting with amusement. His crude laughter weaves with his words.
“Fuck you,” I say between my gritted teeth.
“Oh, watch out. She’s got her bite back. What you going to do, Barbie? You going to pull that limp body of yours over here and shut me up? You going to come make me?”
My anger claws back against the pain. I use it to push my body the last few inches even as it fights back to succumb to death.
“Come on, Sweetheart. Come on. Come get it.” J.D. is filling the room with his boisterous voice as he claps, cruelly encouraging me to reach the pile and it drowns out the growling from behind me.
I reach for it. The “it” that J.D. was taunting me to find. The “it” that I stole from Lawless when he kissed me good-bye. The “it” that he pretended not to notice missing from his back. The “it” that now rests firmly in my hand with its loaded weight of welcoming satisfaction.
I roll onto my back and the Risen pauses, staring into the barrel of the gun. His face contorts to rage and he screams at me. The trigger slides back and the skull disappears with a black spray from the many shots I fire. I fire until the clip is empty and with the body now a headless, soaked mess, I fall back to the tiles. I am exhausted, wracked with pain and fighting to control my breathing between my silent sobs, but I am alive. So far, I am alive.
“Stay dead, J.D,” I whisper to the memory and he laughs. It floats around the room like a phantom dancer flirting with the shadows. “Just stay dead.”
The room explodes with shouting and movement. My name is in the jumbled mess of sounds, but it’s Rhett’s voice that I recognize first from my drifting torture. “When I pictured you nude, wet, and waiting for me on your back, it was always a little less gory.”
“Liar,” I barely whisper to him with my mind crawling back into the safety of oblivion from shock.
“Maybe,” he tells me and I feel something warm drape across my body.
“Take a deep breath,” Lawless coaxes me from behind my closed eyes. At least I think they are closed. The blackness could be from my lack of desire to see anything, anymore.
“Why?” I ask him with half-hearted interest. My mind is already gone, refusing to put any pieces of conversations together. I won’t force it back to the doorway, again.
“I’m going to move you.”
“That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.”
Rhett laughs his deep male chuckle of danger. “Looking around here, your sense of fun worries even me.”
Lawless lifts me, sending fire and ice scalding through my body. I swim between screams and nauseating white noise. I choose to skinny dip into the lake of white noise, letting it over take my senses. It locks my voice and lulls my body into thick limpness.
“Is she - ” I hear Chapel start to ask but Lawless clips his question short.
“No,” he says with conviction to spare and share with the rest of the room. “She wouldn’t do that to me.”
Just like a man to make my death all about his needs.
“You wouldn’t do that to me,” Lawless says again and I know he is speaking to me as I feel us running to Paula. I know that he is trying to convince himself as well as me the need to believe in it. Personally, hanging limp and floating somewhere between the present and the past, he may be the only one.
There has to be that moment when you accept that your luck has run out. I have been balancing on the edge of death since it started, daring it to take me with my self-hatred spurring me into every fray under the false banner of bravery. It wasn’t bravery that encouraged me to lure the crowd from Aimes; it was the fact I didn’t
deserve to live and she did. It wasn’t boldness that allowed me to step up to J.D.; it was the lack of caring what happened. It isn’t confidence in Law’s words that keeps me clinging to the thin veil of conciseness now; it’s my defiance to let the laughing devil that now haunts me be correct. I’m not a heroine or a leader. I’m flawed, moody and stubborn and that’s all the luck that has kept me alive so far. Everything else, that’s just Fate’s cruel twist of my life for her amusement.
I know when we reach Paula’s infirmary. The lights brighten the hue of darkness my eyes hold from pitch to silver. I know the moment he places me upon one of the tables as the white-hot pain eats my body, opening my eyes. Everything is hazy and blurred as if looking through a window of dirty glass. I can make out who-is-who only from my understanding of what their outlines should hold. My voice is still locked and already my head is starting to swim back into the darkness.
I feel more than I see as Lawless places himself near me amid the dark shadows and shapes. “Don’t do this. Not after how far we have come. Don’t you do this to me.” His voice is crumbling, trembling with the same force as the hand that rests on the side of my face.
“Let her go.” Paula’s steady voice comes from across from him. Lawless must have shared some look of confusion because I hear her say, “You don’t want her awake for what I am going to do have to do. She is missing tissue. I’m going to have to pack this wound before I can stitch it. This is not going to be easy. It’s best if she just went under on her own. I don’t have anything here for pain.”
“Nothing?” It’s Chapel now that speaks somewhere from the void.
I can almost picture Paula shaking her head in the long pause of her answer. “Nothing for the amount of pain that I am about to cause her,” she says and it’s a rousing endorsement. I just can’t wait to get started.
“…but she is going to make it?” Marxx, my personal super-hero, is somewhere to my left. I wonder if comic book heroes ever grow annoyed with having to keep saving the same female counterpart over-and-over again? Do they ever just want to shout, “Jesus Christ, when will you learn, woman?”
“…skin is greying. Her heartbeat is irregular. She pretty much bled out in there and if you don’t let me get started, she may very well finish in here,” Paula says and I have lost some of the conversation with my mental debate. Am I going to make it?
There is a gentle kiss placed on my forehead. It stalls with the need to stay connected in some way. It’s the same kiss Lawless gave to me before he walked away and it is the same that he gives me now. “You like to prove people wrong. I think you do it just to piss people off. Do it now. Prove her wrong now,” Lawless whispers to the skin he left his mark on before I feel the heat of his body leave me. The missing warmth chills me in more ways than one.
“I know you’re still here. You’re a fighter to the end, but now, you have to give up. You need to let go, Helena. I’ll do my best to keep you alive, but right now, you need to let go.” Paula’s voice is already slipping away.
I try to fight to hold onto it as if it held mass but my mental fingers slide through it, falling like Alice into the hole. I am chasing white rabbits again and they have led me back into the darkness; right back into the same pitfall of irony.
“Helena? Helena, come play.” It’s Lilly’s voice. It precedes the same scent of innocence that has become her perfume like a haunting record.
I’m back on the grassy field, but this time it is J.D. who is sitting on the hill waiting for me. He is chewing on one of the blades of grass, unaware of the razor-like edge that has sliced his lips. He is oblivious to the blood that is flowing from the corner of his mouth, and when he smiles at me, it only flows faster. It drips down his chin onto the leather vest that I know waits for me in another world. A world I have left behind with my rabbit hole of hell.
“I thought you said you weren’t coming to see me today, Barbie?” He laughs with his joke and all I can do is cry. If Marxx saw through the gate of my secrets, J.D. will destroy the vault that holds them.
As I stand with the grass already breaching the flesh of my feet and legs with each wind that sways the blades like saws, I watch the children and I listen to the laughter. I have to wonder, do the ghosts of my past haunt me or am I haunting them? Do I cling to them for fear of forgetting them or do they cling to me with the fears that I will forget what I have done to them? When J.D. stands with his bleeding mouth to come to me, I know it doesn’t matter. We are all bound together now, through hell or paradise, we are together. The saints, the sinners and myself, like a collection of broken toys for the gods’ amusement in our purgatory.
CHAPTER 14
Time slips from me like sand in an hourglass or the hours wasted watching a predictable soap opera on television – whichever suits the situation better. Sometimes I can catch the fragments of conversations and I imagine what the words mean with comical glee. In the trapped darkness of my mind, I picture them dramatically acting out the things they are saying with forced emotions. Chapel and Paula have quite the romance, at least in my mind, anyway.
Sometimes there is just the shuffling silence of someone sitting next to me like a shadow that just hovers and watches the show. The shadows sometimes speak. They whisper encouragements to open my eyes or to give them something to let them know I can hear them. They tell me about what is going on and what moments I have missed. No one speaks of Aimes and I take notice of that. Does she lie beside me in her own dark well of dreams or has she escaped them to find security somewhere else far from any of us? Is she somewhere I seem to always be denied?
It’s Dolph’s shadow that is speaking to me now. He is telling me something that I know should be important, but my mind is already drifting back into the undertow of bliss. The harder I fight to stay in the long tunnel of his voice, the faster the current pulls at me.
“…know how much longer. They don’t even pretend…” I hear him and a wave of nothing crashes over me, drowning him out. “It won’t last much longer if…” Another wave before he starts again. “Lawless and Rhett won’t back down. They both…” Like the rocking of the sea, his voice ebbs and flows around me. “It’s going to shit, Helena. Simon said it was J.D. that held all of you together. Without him, they are just fighting with…”
I don’t need to hear anymore. If I could roll my eyes, I would. Let me guess, the boys are being naughty and you want me to bring them into line, again. End of the world, killing “zombies”, I’m one thread from a complete mental breakdown and I still have to muck through the miles of male ego. It’s just another day in paradise and me without my fruity drink with its matching umbrella.
I have lost time again. The last time I left Dolph was speaking to me like I was an effigy of a holy relic with the powers to save mankind. Now, there is shouting. Angry male voices reverberate though the room. Instantly the part of me that has a romance with my middle finger starts to dive back down again, but the humanity side of myself that has to look at the car wreck stays awake with curiosity.
Lawless is shouting about something someone has done. I can hear things being thrown around the room with metallic clamoring when the objects land. Chapel and Marxx are trying to talk him down from the steep cliff he has climbed in his rage.
“This is what they want. You are playing right into their hands with this temperamental bullshit of yours,” Marxx’ gravel voice demands Lawless’ attention. “You can’t keep taking the bait.”
“No, I’m just supposed to be spoon fed their shit?” The objects have landed, but Lawless hasn’t climbed from the cliff yet. It sounds more like he is ready to jump.
“You’re supposed to walk away.” Chapel weighs in from somewhere deeper in the room. He is letting Marxx do the subduing. I can’t really fault him.
“He would never back down to them.” Lawless stresses the word hinting at the one we all know he speaks.
“He isn’t here and you are not him.” Marxx doesn’t back down from the man Lawless viewed as a
father. “Don’t become him. You won’t like that road.”
Stay dead J.D. Why can’t you just stay dead? I’m almost afraid he will answer me shrouded in the darkness of the chamber I mentally occupy.
“You saying I don’t have what it takes to be him?” Lawless asks.
“I’m saying you won’t like being him. You’re going to have to find your own way now, Brother. You don’t have to live in his shadow anymore,” Marxx says.
I put together the pieces of what is going on in the drawn out silence. I imagine Lawless standing there with his hands in the vest pocket rebuilding the layers of his brick walls while Marxx and Chapel watch motionless, afraid to break the fragile mortar that holds him together. I can feel the weight of Chapel’s eyes with how well trained they are to see into the corners of your soul that you either try to hide in or from him. I can feel them so well because it takes me a moment to realize that I am staring into them. My vision expands from the one pinpoint of his face to include the whole room. It’s like wiping away the film from a window before you stare through it. You just never expect anyone to be staring back at you when you press your face to the glass.
“Hells?” Chapel calls my name with more question than hello.
I blink, trying to keep him in focus and all the give-a-damn I can muster is, “What?” It’s very lackluster, but somehow feels perfect.
“It’s about time.” Marxx chuckles seeing my eyes swing to him. “Thought you had finally checked out on us.”
“If only you were so lucky.” I wince trying to sit up and reluctantly admit defeat from the pain. Chapel rushes with a mini-skip like movement to get to me when he sees my curiosity over the wound.
“You don’t want to do that,” Chapel tells me. Marxx and Lawless are avoiding my gaze. It’s bad. It’s very bad.
“She’s going to have to.” Lawless looks to me with pity and yet a moment of guilt crosses the shadows of his eyes.
The Risen (Book 4): Courage Page 10