by Andrew Post
“Ninety beats a minute. Looks like you’ve calmed down a bit,” the man said, finally lifting his fingers away. “I’m really sorry, Michael, but we can’t have that. We need you more in the hundred-twenty, hundred-thirty range. Here, I’ll help.”
Twisting side to side and flailing his arms and legs as little as he could under the bindings, Mike tried screaming but couldn’t, he couldn’t do anything but watch as the man held a gun in his face, his finger on the trigger. The man’s face, behind the gun, had fallen absent again. Dead eyes. Getting nothing out of this, it seemed, but doing it anyway.
Then the man, with his free hand, raised a fist and brought it slamming down onto the bandage wrapping the bullet hole in Mike’s leg.
The pain was enormous. The view of the nicotine stains on the ceiling above Mike went blurry as his eyes filled. He screamed but, again, around the sock in his mouth, could only let free this muffled, corked-sounding blat.
The man hit Mike again, then again, with enough force to make Mike leap on the mattress bodily, the plastic tubes lashing this way and that, Mike’s head cracking against the bed’s headboard.
“My friend said that we should refer to this process as leeching,” the man said, as casually as if they were discussing the weather, last night’s sports scores, as he brought his round fist up and crashed it against Mike’s perforated calf again, then again. “And the people who do the leeching are called leeches, which I guess is what I am now, in addition to my other roles. What do you do for a living, Michael? I never asked.”
Mike was too preoccupied with his agony to respond.
The man stopped hitting Mike and turned to look over his shoulder at the machine. “Almost there,” he said. “Another quart and a half and we can be done. You’re doing such a good job, Michael.” And resumed hitting him again.
Drowning in pain and blood loss and fear, Mike saw the room around him seemed to become intangible, the walls softening and melting away. His equilibrium spun and it felt like he was in the bowels of a boat on thrashing waters. He saw moments from his life, fast-forward and rewind, happy days flickering past in soundless snippets and blurred explosions of faces and places and homes he’d lived in and people he’d woken up next to in bed and the smiles of his parents and his grandmother, who would never know what happened to him, why he never made it to her house. “I am so proud of you,” she’d said the day he graduated, holding both of his hands in hers, that papery skin, so full of warmth and love. “You’re going to do so many amazing things, I just know it.” It might have been kind of a cliché thing for a grandmother to say to her grandson, but it was all in her delivery – how much she really, truly meant it, what she said. You had to be there maybe, but her words made him tear up right then and there. Her love for him was so huge and given so freely it hurt to receive it. He almost felt undeserving. He was going to miss her so much.
Then, backing up further, Mike saw that girl whom he had a crush on in college. The fall of her hair, the way the sun bathed the side of her face one day he was talking to her in the hallway that one time and hoped she couldn’t tell he was so nervous and so excited to just be standing in front of her and having a few seconds of her attention and how fast his heart beat and how much he just wanted to come out and say it, I like you, I really, really like you, but never did.
And then all of that fell away and he was back in the motel room again.
Strapped to the bed, lying on a plastic sheet.
And this man who was going to kill him hitting him and hitting him and pointing a gun in his face and talking to him but Mike couldn’t feel or hear anything anymore.
Mike watched the ceiling heave closer then away again and again as he was being struck, lifting and falling, lifting and falling, mired helpless in the knowledge he was going to be dead soon and that what he’d experienced a couple seconds ago must’ve been his life flashing before his eyes – and like his life itself, the flashing review of the whole thing, too, was far too short. He wanted that to be the last thing he saw, to go immersed in good memories, not be here, even if this was his reality, for as bad as it was, to not have this person be the last thing he ever saw.
But it seemed that’s how things were going to be.
And behind the man hitting him, every time he bent forward at the waist to bring the bottom of his fist hammering down, Mike could see someone standing in the shadows in the corner of the room. No, not just one person, two. A man with most of his head missing, and a second man, this one more like a boy really, neck bent, and eyes filled with white cataracts. They were looking at him, the headless man and the white-eyed boy. They could see him.
And Mike’s fear rekindled, but not because of what was happening to him but those two people in the corner of the room were looking at him and he knew they were dead people and if he could see them that meant that the end of his life was near, that he would soon join them, be just like them.
The man stopped hitting him. “Thank you being so generous, Michael,” he said. The gun in his hand moved and there was a flash of light and then—
Chapter Ten
The mark had an awful bed. After a week of sleeping on it, it’d done the kink in Brenda’s neck absolutely zero favors.
She lay there, opening and closing her hands. They ached like she’d been doing yardwork. It made sense. She’d been using very similar tools for, at this point, nearly a week straight.
It was snowing outside again, she noticed, the light tinged blue.
She went to the window and looked down at the parking lot, seeing the rental car was still there. It was going to be a real pain in the ass getting out later because it looked like the snowplow driver had boxed her in, the asshole.
Brenda pulled on a sweatshirt and padded on bare feet into the next room, leaving the lights off for now, passing the man tied to a chair, and pulled on latex gloves before handling anything in his kitchen and got the coffee started. All the mark had was that instant crap that tasted like soy sauce but now, the morning of day seven, she’d started not minding it so much.
She took her steaming cup back into the living room to look at the blood puddle, and the mark sitting slumped in a chair at its center, naked and bound and gagged, the worst of his wounds patched – though he was still leaking some. She’d cauterized the stumps of his fingers and toes, slapped a patch of gauze and some duct tape over where he’d formerly had a left ear and a right eye, and arranged along the edge of the coffee table what she’d cut away so he could see them, those gray pieces of himself.
She leaned across the blood on the floor to put two fingers to his neck. He did not react to the touch. He had a pulse. Slow, weak, but hanging on.
“How are we doing this morning, chief?” she said. “Sleep well?”
The mark let out a small grunt, started to lift his head but let it fall again, unable.
“It’s okay. Save your strength. It’s almost over.” Brenda knelt in front of him to look up into his face. His remaining eye was open but it just stared down at the floor. Brenda could only imagine how existential that’d be, how every morning he kept waking up in this nightmare, his dreams, probably quite stress-abstracted, providing no true escape. She had him. He was hers.
She removed his gag, sticky with blood. Though now free to, he did not speak. He just looked at her, no longer with question or fear. Blank with acceptance.
Hushed and tenderly, she said to him, “Well, it’s been fun, but I’ve got to get going soon and so do you. Can I ask you something?”
He just stared at her.
“Did you have any pets growing up?”
There was a delay, but the mark managed to nod.
“When they’d die, where would your parents say they went?”
The mark said nothing. Unable, or unwilling.
“I can’t promise you’ll see them,” Brenda said, “but I hope you get to.” She didn’
t mean it. “I really mean that.” That either.
The mark said nothing.
“No hard feelings, all right?” she said, stood, and stuck the needle in his arm. She racked the slide on the pistol and placed the business end of the silencer against his forehead. She pushed with just enough force to tip his head back, to make the mark’s eye look up at her. He was already gone. Blinking, breathing, but there was no pleading, no blubbering request for mercy.
“He’s making us all—” he said.
A clap of muffled sound. A snap of suppressed muzzle flash. A hiss of pink mist. His final words ringing unfinished.
Her heart fluttered, as if it knew something ahead of her brain.
She looked at him as he was now, a result, an object. Whatever he was going to say would never be completed.
He’d had time, earlier in the week when she’d started laying into him, to say something. Plenty of chances. The gag went on only after she was afraid his neighbors would hear his screaming. But before that, it’d just been the regular stuff – the, Please don’t do this to me; the, I didn’t do nothings. Why wait until now to speak up? To hold something like that back, it must’ve had some gravity to it or something that if he did say it, dying immediately afterward would be preferable.
She’d only caught some of it, but it felt like a warning, an omen. One she might’ve benefitted from hearing. For the first time while on a job, she felt regret. Not for having killed a man, no, but for not letting this one finish a thought.
He’s making us all…what?
Who’s making us all…what?
And other assorted questions that she knew she’d never have answered. Movements made languid with a head so full of questions, she picked the casing off the floor and put it in her pocket and watched the plastic tube connected to the spike in his arm and the red line racing along inside, his blood dribbling into the bag. A steady flow. She didn’t think he had it in him, to give that generously. It kept coming, giving the bag two more inches until finally the stream slowed, and then stopped altogether. The questions, however, remained. He’s making us all….
Telling herself she didn’t care one way or the other, she lifted the lid on the cooler, a wash of steam rising. The dry ice she’d poured over the kitchen sponges and dish towels was still holding. She carefully lowered the bag in and closed the lid, and sighed. All that was left now was the drop-off and she could, at long last, go home.
He’s making us all….
On went the sweater and slacks, the clothes that almost felt like they didn’t belong to her anymore after wearing sweatpants and baggy T-shirts for a week straight – things that fit, that were expensive, and because of that, made her feel real and alive on purpose. She went downstairs and breathed deep the fresh morning air, cold enough to burn her lungs and make her eyes water, but it beat the stuffiness of the mark’s apartment. The ever-present smell of blood had started getting to her.
She checked her phone. Whoever she was to drop the blood off with had yet to text the address. She didn’t like being made to wait. Because, naturally, that’s when you end up with an unhealthy amount of time to think.
He’s making us all….
It doesn’t matter, she told herself. Most people don’t say a single interesting thing their entire lives, so why would this mark be any different? Still, there it was, never to be completed: he’s making us all….
Already, she knew this one was going to be hard to shake. She already saw herself at home, doing the laundry, making dinner, playing with the girls, fucking Steve, watching TV as a family, and in the background, dim but on a loop nonetheless, that incomplete statement. He’s making us all….
When she walked up to her car, she saw someone was trying to break into it.
How quaint.
She didn’t sneak up on them; she just strode in her usual long-legged gait, ice crunching under her boots, and stopped three steps away from them, one hand curled around the gun in her pocket.
“Can I help you?”
Chapter Eleven
Now
Brenda had Melanie Latisha Williams take the ramp off the interstate and park outside a Mega Deluxo Super Store. They sat there in silence, snow accumulating on the windshield, Brenda watching the families, all bundled up, go inside the store, duplicates of them emerging, the store eating and spitting out people over and over. She thought about Steve, naturally, and the girls. Though they would never be caught dead anywhere near the likes of a Mega Deluxo, the families put them in her mind nonetheless. She considered whether she should call home and tell them to go somewhere, to hide. But she didn’t want to scare them, not until it was apparent it’d be necessary to do so. She listened to the girl breathing next to her, holding the wheel at ten and two even though they were no longer in motion. Both of them were scared now, not just the wannabe car thief.
“How do you know Felix?” the girl said.
“Shut up.”
Brenda had spent a week with the mark in his awful, cramped apartment. And his final words, now, though they’d been incomplete, were becoming a fraction clearer, like she could hear the end of that statement, the one she’d interrupted with a bullet.
He’s making us all….
Kill each other.
Felix is setting us all up. Putting us in places to encounter strangers who’d never identify each other as, well, coworkers for a lack of a better word. Types that’d be likely to shoot first and never ask any questions then, later, or ever.
Felix probably expected Brenda would open fire the minute she saw Melanie breaking into her car. So, that’d be one down for Felix, one box checked. All right. But what about Brenda? Who’s going to be sent after her? She watched the monolithic store eat another family, spit out another, carts heaped with Christmas presents to wrap, and thought about a cartoon she saw as a kid where a little fish is swimming happily along and gets swallowed in a single gulp by a slightly bigger fish – and before that fish can wipe that smug, self-satisfied look off his face, another even bigger fish comes along and swallows him. On and on. It was apparently intended to be funny, but as a child Brenda – even one such as she, who liked squishing baby birds with bricks – thought that the cartoon’s sequence of devouring was somewhat morbid. What lesson was it trying to instill there, anyway? What did that mean?
Don’t worry about someone bigger than you fucking up your life because it’s inevitable? If so, shit, maybe it was a lesson for right now. Clearly you’re thinking about it, so your brain must’ve put together some kind of association between that cartoon and your current predicament.
The girl said, “Are you going to kill me?”
Brenda blinked back into herself. “I already told you.”
“Actually, all you said was that you’d keep me posted, which isn’t really an answer.”
“I still haven’t decided. Be quiet.”
For a few minutes, the girl was. Then she said, “Did something happen? Is Felix pissed at us for something? Because I don’t know about you, but I was just doing exactly what he told me.”
“Please shut up.”
“What are we even doing here?”
“I’m thinking, that’s what we’re doing here, and you’re not making it easy. So, for the third time, shut the fuck up.” Brenda’s thoughts would only loop – oh shit, oh shit, oh shit – nothing new, nothing constructive, only an unfilterable static of panic. She checked her phone, then the burner the client was supposed to text the morning of day seven. Which they had yet to do.
“So you know Felix?” the girl asked, voice small, afraid to ask but desperate to know, chancing setting Brenda off again. Showed resolve, Brenda thought.
Breath steaming, Brenda sighed and turned to look at the girl. “Yes. I know Felix.”
“Then what’s going on?”
Brenda put her two phones away and looked across at th
e girl. “You tell me. What is going on?”
“Look, I was just told to come to Minneapolis, look for this car, and—”
“We’ve covered that. Felix didn’t give you a gun?”
“What? No.”
She was the target then, Brenda thought, the littlest fish, the start of the sequence of devouring.
“No,” the girl said, “Felix did not give me any gun and he did not tell me to hurt anybody. Even if he had, I wouldn’t do it.”
“Do you want your merit badge now or later?” Brenda said, flat. “What else did he say?”
“Nothing. He just gave me a bus ticket, said he’d text me the car’s plate and the address where I’d find it—”
“And he sent this text to you when? Yesterday, this morning?”
“Sometime late last night.”
“When exactly?”
“I don’t know. Late. If you hadn’t chucked my fucking phone out the goddamn window, I’d be able to tell you that.”
“When did Felix first tell you that you’d be coming here?”
“I don’t know. A while ago.”
“Put your thinking cap on, shithead. This is important.” Brenda refrained from pulling the gun on her again, knowing it’d do little to help jog the girl’s memory, not after being this shaken already. “When did Felix tell you he’d be shipping you out here?”
“I guess like almost a month ago.” She looked at the cast on her arm as if it whispered to her the precise date. “Yeah, about a month ago. But then he said I would have to come out here earlier than expected.”
Brenda’s blood ran cold. The girl had been sent here earlier because Brenda had told Felix she could do the Minneapolis early. And a month ago, Brenda had been in Florida when Felix had first brought up the job – one that, if accepted, for a whole week she’d be stuck in one location she was not to leave giving the mark ‘round the clock attention’, as specified.