The Summer I Died

by Ryan C. Thomas

  He stopped a few feet away from me, leaned forward and took a long hard look at my handiwork. “What have you done? What the flying fuck is that? You sick fucking maniac. I ought to shoot you right now. Oh, my God, what did you do? Where’s his arm? Where are-” He had finally noticed the body parts in the street. He clicked on his radio again. “Hurry up! Now!”

  Finally, all my voice ran out, and I sat with my mouth gaping open, saliva dribbling down my chin, not making a peep. The officer could see that his threats were useless; he could tell I wasn’t right. For a moment he just stared at me muttering “What the hell,” and I stared back, and he didn’t know what to make of me. I think he was starting to put something together though, like he could see the difference in age between me and Skinny Man, could see the disgusting tattoos on his torso, could see the piss stains on my shorts, the dried blood on my body and the leg irons on my ankles. His angry expression turned to confusion and caution. I think he was adding it up.

  Suddenly, Skinny Man’s body jumped. I don’t know if it was nerves or if he was still alive or what, but the officer screamed, “Holy shit!” and sprinted back to his car. His hands shaking, the gun trembling, he hid behind his door once more. But Skinny Man didn’t move after that. Maybe it was his soul trying to escape toward heaven, and the movement had been the devil yanking it back through his ass toward hell.

  “Sir?” Officer Teddy called. “Sir, are you alive? If you can hear me, make a movement, anything to let me know you’re alive.”

  My savior, the cavalry, trying to save the corpse of the bad guy.

  “Sir? Sir?” he kept goading the cadaver. Then he looked at me and asked, “Is he dead? Did you kill him?”

  I don’t know why I responded, but I nodded my head. Maybe I was trying to sin as little as possible at that point, not make it any worse than it was. Maybe I was proud.

  “Do you have any weapons on you?” he asked me.

  I pointed to the ax sticking out of Skinny Man’s head.

  “Are you hurt?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, I want you to lie down on the ground. I’m going to come over and put these cuffs on you-”

  I lost it. I slammed my fist against my head, punched myself in the chest, swearing that if he came near me I would kill him. I would never wear handcuffs again.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, in some lame effort to calm me down, “but you gotta lay down for me, you gotta give me that. Otherwise I can’t check and see if he’s alive. Can you do that for me?”

  Before I knew it, I was sprawling out on the ground on my stomach. My chin plopped into the puddle of blood running out of Skinny Man’s body.

  “Now don’t move. Do you hear me, don’t move. I’ll still shoot you if I have to.”

  He came back, full of trepidation, and went to place his hand on Skinny Man’s neck but stopped before he touched him. Then he mumbled something soft, put a hand over his mouth and backed away, disgusted.

  “Is anyone in the house?”

  I nodded.

  “Are they hurt? Did you hurt them? Are they dead?”

  I kept nodding, though I was only answering his first question. Once I remembered Jamie was downstairs I just wanted him to go in and save her.

  “Don’t move, you hear me, I will shoot you dead on the spot if you so much as lift a finger.”

  He walked up the grass to the front door, his gun at the ready, his head swiveling side to side in case anything surprising came at him. When he reached the door, he glanced back at me and saw me still on the ground. Satisfied, he grabbed the doorknob and opened the door.

  Butch exploded out like a cannonball and caught Officer Teddy by the throat. His gun went flying into the bushes beside the door as the dog hauled him to the grass and tried desperately to rip open his neck.

  I thought, no, this can’t be happening. Butch is dead, I stabbed him. Why is this still happening?

  For a long time after, I wouldn’t remember what happened that day. I spent several years not thinking of anything much. No matter how many treatment wards I stayed in, or how many psychiatrists tried to open me up, I pretty much shut that day up in the back of my mind and threw away the key. I spent a long time in California, without ever going there. My dad, strong as he was to take care of me and my mother for the next several years, even went so far as to buy me a surfboard and put it in my hospital room in the hopes I would answer the doctor’s questions. Still, no matter what anyone did to unlock the door I had sealed in my mind, I more or less refused to remember it.

  But one thing about that day I never forgot, through all of my self-induced fugue, was what I had seen in the hallway upstairs when I had rushed Skinny Man.

  I had seen Tooth.

  Now I know I was tired, and losing my mind, but there was something odd about that vision, something that told me I wasn’t just seeing things. I’m not sure when I worked it out exactly, but eventually it hit me, and it kept me carrying on through life.

  He wasn’t wearing his Red Sox hat.

  I know that might sound stupid, but whenever I had thought of Tooth up to that point, it was the Tooth I had always known, the Tooth never to be caught dead without his Red Sox hat. And it wasn’t like he was just standing in the hallway with us-he was down on all fours. When Skinny Man fell backwards, I could have sworn he had done so over Tooth’s body. I had seen Tooth again in the living room, telling me to kick Skinny Man in his leg wound, and it had freed me. Again, he wasn’t wearing his hat.

  And as Butch hauled officer Teddy to the grass with the knife still sticking out of his furry, red shoulder, I could have sworn I felt hot breath in my ear as Tooth’s voice whispered, “Roger, I told you, always check the chamber first.”

  I lay motionless for what seemed like an eternity, though it was probably a very short blink-of-an-eye second, until I understood what I had just heard. I rolled over in time to see a shimmering blur that kind of resembled Tooth, and yet kind of resembled heat wave. But it was gone so quickly I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t imagined it.

  For some reason I reached for the hat in my back pocket and it was gone, which didn’t mean a whole lot since I’d been rolling about with Skinny Man. Probably it was on the stairs inside or on the living room floor. It didn’t matter anyway. What mattered was I had never checked the chamber of the gun.

  I flung myself toward the 9mm resting against the curb and picked it up just as Butch tore the radio handset off Officer Teddy’s shoulder. The man was screaming, bleeding profusely, probably pissing himself. I had seen it all before, and I hated that dog for continuing it. When I slid back the chamber of the gun, a small bronze bullet stared back at me.

  “Tooth.” I looked for the heat wave again. It was gone.

  Quickly realizing his mistake, Butch dropped the radio on the ground, freeing the cop from his bite. Not wasting any time, the cop began crawling to me. When he saw me pointing the gun his way he opened his mouth in disbelief, threw his hands in front of his face. He thought I was going to shoot him. Butch, seeing his meal scuttling down the lawn, gave chase, saliva whipping out behind him like a kite tail. I had one bullet, and I wanted it to count. I remembered shooting beer cans with this gun, how it shot slightly to the left, how if you could compensate correctly the shot was pretty accurate.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the second police car come screeching to a halt, the door flying open, a cop shouting, “No!” Butch was running at Officer Teddy, eyes mad and hungry. Officer Teddy was screaming.

  There were two gunshots.

  The first went in between Butch’s eyes and exploded bits of brain out the back of his head, throwing his body into a gyrating heap of black fur that crashed full on into Officer Teddy. The second went whizzing under my chin and took a nick out of my throat. Searing hot pain spread across my Adam’s apple, and I fell backward and dropped the gun.

  With a sudden rush of realization, Officer Teddy pushed Butch’s heap of dying flesh off of him and ran over to me. “Who
a! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  “Get out of the way, Teddy!” screamed the other officer.

  “No, put the gun down! It wasn’t him, it was the dog! He shot the dog. Look, he shot the dog. It was attacking me.”

  “You’re bleeding! Get out of the way!”

  “The dog! He shot the dog! Put the fucking gun away!”

  The second officer lowered his weapon and looked at the dead dog on the grass. Utter confusion spread across his face, and he looked back at Officer Teddy a couple of times and tried to speak but couldn’t think of what to say. He walked over to us as Officer Teddy put a hand on my throat and asked, “Where did the bullet go?”

  I pointed to my neck, to the scratch the bullet made. He sat back on his ass and wiped his brow. The dog bite in his shoulder looked like roast beef. “Thanks,” he said. “Don’t know if you deserve it yet, a thanks that is, but I got a feeling there’s more going on here than meets the eye.”

  Cop number two was standing over Skinny Man’s corpse, waving flies away. “Teddy,” he said, nice and calm like he was trying to rationalize what he was seeing, “what the hell happened here?”

  CHAPTER 26

  Two ambulances arrived shortly after, and the paramedics put both me and Officer Teddy on gurneys and ran around like beheaded chickens trying to figure out the best way to stop our bleeding. As they laid me down, the second cop suggested cuffing me but Teddy talked him out of it, relaying his already-failed attempt to do the same thing. A third, fourth and fifth cop arrived on the scene, then a county medical examiner and a meat wagon. Finally came the chief, who went about waving orders to his men and making sure more ambulances were on the way.

  First thing they did was close off the street and cover Skinny Man’s body with a sheet, after which they covered up the body parts I had tossed about. Together, with guns raised, they entered the house and searched for persons unknown that Teddy had told them I said were inside.

  A couple of minutes after they went in, bitching about the ghastly smell in the living room, one of the officers came running out and threw up on the lawn. He started screaming, “Oh my God, oh my God.” Then the other cop, the one who’d shot me, came running out behind him with his shirt over his face and his eyes shut, and sprinted to the EMTs.

  “Forget them, forget them,” he said, pointing at me and Officer Teddy. “We need you down there right now! She’s still alive. She’s still alive. Hurry!”

  The EMTs grabbed their toolboxes full of needles and bandages and took off like they were on the front line. The puking cop walked over to me slowly, and with chunks of half digested food on his chin grabbed my chest and said, “Who is she?”

  “Jamie.”

  He squeezed my shirt in his fist so hard I could see his arm shaking from the strain. “Why?” he said, his face red from throwing up. He was crying, tears running down his cheeks, though it could have been from losing his breakfast and not the sight of the butchered girl in the basement. “Why?”

  I didn’t know why. Because everyone has a purpose, right? Because we’re all part of God’s master plan, a master plan that lets evil men take away the lives of innocent people, that lets some of us live while our friends and loved ones die before our eyes. Or maybe because God’s just up there rolling some dice, using us as tokens in a universal board game. Or maybe it’s bad luck, or maybe it’s good luck, or maybe shit just happens and you deal with it. Or maybe the dice are loaded so your number never comes up, or maybe the game is fixed. Who knows?

  Jamie was cut to pieces, chained up in a basement, and I had no answer.

  The cop let go of me and walked back toward the house to do what he could. The chief came back and questioned Teddy for a few minutes. I heard them talking about gunshots and bullets and who did what. Teddy pointed to me a lot and pointed to Skinny Man and the dog corpse on the lawn. Then the chief came over to me.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Roger.”

  “Roger what?”

  “Roger Huntington.”

  “You want to tell me what the hell is going on here?”

  I told him as much as I could, as I much as I would allow myself to remember, which didn’t amount to a whole bunch. I was mostly non-responsive, my mind still wandering around the West Coast. Teddy finally asked the chief to call it quits and get me to the hospital. But first the EMTs came out with something on a stretcher, something that resembled a giant cooked marshmallow wearing a Jamie mask, all done up with oxygen tubes and IV drips. One of them was carrying a medical cooler, and out of the top of it flopped a hand with painted fingernails. They were moving that stretcher as fast as they could, lifted it up into the other ambulance and sped away with screeching tires.

  The medical examiner came out with the other EMTs, the ones who’d been busy bandaging me up, with the kind of stares you see on men who’ve just walked away from a six-car pile up. He came over to the chief and said, “We’re going to need forensics down here, and tell them to bring some shovels.”

  Jamie would die two days later in the hospital with my parents at her side, both of them weeping and cursing God. I stayed in the same hospital, but didn’t see them as much, or so I felt. Eventually the story came out about what really happened. Skinny Man’s backyard was dug up and nine bodies were uncovered, though it took several days to match some of the bones to the correct bodies. They found his wife and daughter among them, as well as Mystery Woman, two in hiking gear, some others. They found bones: adult bones, kid bones, lots of bones they couldn’t match up to any bodies. They also found Tooth.

  They showed me photos of all the corpses and asked me to identify whoever I could, though aside from Mystery Woman the only one I said I knew was Tooth. I told them how Mystery Woman died and they confirmed the story with the M.E. Then they too left me alone. The only time I left the hospital was for Jamie’s and Tooth’s funerals, which were closed casket. Then I had to come back to the psych ward for more “counseling.”

  My dreams were filled with the ghosts of the dead, and I had a lot of trouble sleeping without jumping every time I heard a nurse walk by jingling keys. Many nights I would just lay awake and try not to remember the carnage I had seen, try not to think about Tooth and Jamie. How far away my parents’ bed seemed, or any safe haven for that matter.

  I guess to believe everybody has a purpose in life, you’ve got to believe that there’s even a cosmic plan to begin with. Which means you’ve got to believe in God, or some other higher power, something that is working toward an ultimate goal, or at least working toward the continuation of life. And if each person does have a purpose-like those people buried behind the house, like Skinny Man himself-to what end does it serve? I lived, unharmed save for a couple of bruises and some dog bites and cuts, though my mental state was the stuff of comic books. But if my whole purpose in life was to kill the man who murdered my sister and friend, what was left? Was the rest of my life meaningless? Or had I yet to fulfill my true reason for living? Of course, like I said, all this introspection only mattered if you believed in something higher.

  This is what I thought about as I lay in that hospital bed, day after day after day. This is what I still think about, as I fight to stay awake most nights, as I try to avoid the nightmares of that summer, pinching myself to ward off sleep. My purpose. All of our purposes. The afterlife. God. Why I am still alive, and why the dice never rolled my number, and why I had even taken them to begin with. I think about superheroes and villains, about good and evil, about strong and weak, always wondering what it means for me. And I think about that other thing, which makes it all the more confusing and urgent. And yet, makes it all make sense, somehow.

  When they dug up Tooth’s body, he was wearing his Red Sox cap.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: fbd-cdbdea-88c8-c54a-13a8-04b6-92e2-a54cbe

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  Document authors :

  Ryan C. Thomas

  Cody Goodfellow

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