by Andrew Post
And now Mel was outside, alone with him. She could hear Brenda inside the house thumping around, bashing into things. And she could also hear the squeak of someone walking through the snow, the driver crossing the yard to approach the house. Mel pulled back from the corner of the house and slapped a hand over her mouth, to muffle her labored breathing.
The footsteps in the snow stopped. A half second of silence then a spray of gunfire, no longer in three-round bursts but in a continuous stream. With her back to the house’s siding, she could feel every impact as bullets ripped through the face of the country homestead, windows shattering, objects toppling. The driver expended the entire magazine with what felt like an entire minute of constant rapid-fire shots.
Mel turned, hoping she could get to the rear of the house and get inside. But in the silence that hung after the driver had drained his automatic gun, the crunch of her trying to step through the snow without making a noise was about as loud as a gunshot itself. She went still, afraid to move again, afraid to breathe. She listened for the driver but heard nothing around the corner of the house. But he wasn’t making any sound. It was like he had vanished. No sounds came from within the farmhouse either. Mel wondered if Brenda had gotten hit, if she was now dead and Mel was left helpless. She looked out across the surrounding fields. There was nothing to see but darkness. Nowhere to run, nowhere else to hide.
Squeaking snow. The hollow knocks of someone climbing up onto the front porch. A long pause. Then the slam of a door being kicked or shouldered open. An immediate exchange of gunfire. The window above Mel fell to pieces. She ducked, but she felt shards of glass strike her on the top of her head, the back of her neck, some falling in her sweatshirt and tumbling down her back, jagged and sharp.
The next brief silence was broken by heavy steps inside the house, now much more audible with the window above Mel without its glass. Another exchange. Some of the bullets now pierced the siding, scattering dust and clots of shredded insulation. Before this exchange had ended, knowing she would not be heard by either of those inside shooting at each other, Mel pushed off from the house and forded the knee-deep snow back toward the road. She reached the open door of the driver’s car – but hesitated before leaping inside.
The interior, every square inch of the upholstery to the dashboard to the steering wheel and even the rearview mirror, was covered in blood, all save for a clean swath in the driver’s seat that roughly described his general shape.
She had no choice. A car covered in blood or death. She got inside, stomped the brake and dropped the car into gear – but it didn’t move. The headlights were still on but the engine wasn’t running. She tried turning the ignition, but the key was gone.
She looked up at the house. Gunfire was only slightly hushed by the wind. One window lit up from within, then a second window, then both fell dark. Brenda was still alive; she and the driver were still trying to kill each other.
In the car’s headlights, Mel could see her bag lying in the ditch ahead. She slipped trying to get out of the car and fell hard on her knee. She pushed through the pain, charged over to her bag, snatched it up out of the snow, and came back with it to the car, rifling through her changes of clothes and toothbrush, all these things that seemed so silly and pointless now, trying to find her multitool and lockpick. She had never hotwired a car before but knew the general idea of what performing one would require, what each cable under the steering column corresponded to. She hoped she could still pull off a hotwiring, even if her hands were shaking and numb, even if failing to do this meant certain death.
This has to work. I have to get away from here. I refuse to die in fucking Wisconsin.
Without a flathead screwdriver, she stuck her lockpick in the keyhole and slammed it in deep with the flat of her hand and twisted it, tripping the ignition cylinder. The car did not respond, the engine did not turn over.
Though the smell of blood was even more overpowering when she twisted herself to see under the dash, she breathed through her mouth and prized open the plastic housing and found the battery and starter wires, the two thickest ones, identifying them by feel. She flicked open the knife of her multitool and with a sharp pull, severed the battery wire and began twisting the exposed copper ends around each other. The door-ajar alarm started to ding. After cutting the starter wires, she touched the ends together and the engine coughed once. Touching them again, she saw a pop of blue sparks and smelled ozone – the engine grumbled to life.
Mel looked up at the house. It had been a few seconds since she heard an exchange of gunfire. The driver was approaching the car, fewer than five steps away from reaching the driver-side door. Mel dragged the door shut and slammed her hand on the lock. She dropped the car into reverse and pounded the accelerator. The engine screeched in response, but the car didn’t move, slush and gravel flying out ahead of her.
The driver was at the window, a shotgun in one hand, what looked like an Uzi in the other, barrels bleeding thin ribbons of smoke. He lowered himself to look in at her through the single pane of glass separating them.
Behind his broken glasses, the whites of his eyes were entirely bloodshot and they moved in different directions, chameleon-like, trembling in their sockets with a feverish, frenetic assessing of all before him. And under the mask of half-dried red covering his face, she recognized him, the creep at the truck stop. And it seemed, at that exact same moment, he recognized her as well.
He smiled. Every tooth pink. Fogging the window, he said, “It’s you. The gal who’s not a fucking hooker.”
Over his shoulder, Mel saw a window on the house’s second floor light up. A muted clap. A spray of red on the car’s window. The man screamed and stumbled away from the car, one hand over the left side of his head, blood pouring out from between his thick fingers. He lifted his gun and fired up at the house, running a line of bullets forward and back to cover the whole of the upstairs. A dark shape slipped out the front window, hit the roof of the covered porch, rolled off its edge, and splashed with a puff of white into the snow in the front yard.
The man took his hand away from the side of his head to reload, ripping the spent magazine out of the submachine gun and shoving in a replacement. Mel saw in the headlights that his left ear was mostly gone, only a gnarled piece remaining. He seemed to realize where he was standing. He might’ve heard his car’s engine roar. Mel felt the car find traction and grab to the road and felt herself sink into the seat with the forward momentum. The man turned and raised his gun, sent one bullet in through the windshield, but not a second – the bumper crashed into his knees and he was flattened to the hood and then tumbled into the windshield, pushing it in at Mel’s face. A series of thuds across the top of the car and then she saw his bulky shape in the rearview as he tumbled off the back and landed in the road.
Mel, as she did when unnerved while driving, held the wheel at ten and two. The hood was wrinkled and dented, one of the headlights was now pointing far off to the right. The man in the road behind her did not rise. She turned and looked toward the house. Some of the disturbed snow on the porch’s roof was still falling. The dark heap that lay in the yard moved, and started to rise in hitches, struggling. Mel watched as Brenda got back on her feet, snow-stained and bleeding, and came limping toward the road, falling twice. Mel remained in the car, looking out at her – now reaching toward Mel, blood running off the ends of her fingers, a broken look in her eyes. Then Mel looked forward, at the road ahead.
“Melanie,” she heard, through the wind. “Please.”
The car idled hard; it had sounded rough before but now something sounded seriously wrong inside, a bent fan blade, the belt slipping. If she wanted to get away from here, away from these people, it should be now. But her foot hovered over the accelerator.
Brenda hobbled into the road, coughing and holding her stomach. She still had her gun. Her arm swung as if broken, dangling from her shoulder, threatening to come l
oose and drop off. Her words were slurred; blood ran fell out of her mouth when she said, “Melanie. Wait.”
Mel pushed the button to unlock the doors but did not get out to help Brenda get in. She watched as Brenda limped, steam lifting from her bloody clothes, as she came around the front of the car to the passenger side, and fell into the car. Mel did not help her pull the remainder of herself inside, only watched her struggle, gasping in pain, letting out a short scream when she had to manually lift her right leg into the car. She blended in with the interior, covered in red. It dripped off her chin, from her hair, the portion of her sweater covering her abdomen broadly stained and running in thick drops.
Brenda pulled the door shut and sat looking forward, her head rolling loose on her shoulders. It dropped forward as if she were on the verge of unconsciousness before she snapped it up again, her blinks slow and slowing further. The car was not moving, but she didn’t seem to notice or mind. She hissed to turn herself in the seat to look over at Mel in the driver’s seat – the same arrangement it’d been when all of this first started yesterday morning.
Brenda’s eyes dropped to the cast on Mel’s arm and knocked on it with her gun’s silencer. “Don’t just take what they give you. Give it right back to—”
A flare of light. Shattering glass. Brenda’s head blew apart.
Mel stared at the shredded neck, at the empty space above it. Mel had been speaking only a second ago to someone who’d been present, whole, alive. Blood drummed against the roof of the car, rocketing from Brenda’s torn-open arteries. Brenda still sat upright, headless, as if she might manage to continue on without it, but then her corpse slumped forward. The blasted neck slapped against the dashboard and the geyser of blood doused a second coat across what was already covering the console and the radio, the inside of the windshield, some of it getting in Mel’s mouth, her eyes.
And some of the blood must’ve landed on Mel’s temporary rewiring because the car lurched forward and let out a crack of backfire and went still. She tried stomping the gas, but it wouldn’t move. The instrument panel was dark. And the door ajar-alarm did not sound when the driver-side door was pulled open.
He didn’t say anything. Only reached into the car and let his shotgun’s barrels touch the side of Mel’s head. They were still warm.
Chapter Eleven
After Now
Mel picked up the revolver from the table and put it to her head. It was still warm. Though she was barely remaining conscious and she’d been supplied with many examples of why it’d be pointless to try to have hope in this place, she ripped the gun away from herself, pointed it at Felix’s face, and pulled the trigger.
Click.
As before, he did not so much as blink.
He stared at her over the revolver, a slow smile creeping across his drawn and leathery features. “For that,” he said, “you get to have a second turn.”
Mel lowered the gun, let it fall onto the table with a heavy thud. Only the bandaged man flinched, the broken chain hanging from his wrist jingling.
The mosquitoes and leeches and bats were gone from the room. The dance music continued to bleed that horrible, incessant throbbing through the wall. It was like some massive vivisected creature lay in half-death in the basement, its chest butterflied, the pounding of its great, exposed heart quaking the floor and walls. The dead man with his open mouth full of maggots remained as he’d been posed when he died, whoever had killed him. Nobody in the house could probably recollect. The painting of the man in the shiny armor on the wall, it felt, was staring down at her.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Felix said. “An engraved invitation?”
Mel was looking at your fucked written on her cast. Putting her nose to either end of the plaster encasing her arm, a few weeks ago, she’d started to detect a bad smell. But now, the reek could be smelled all the time, no matter how close her nose was to it. She imagined cracking open the cast to find her arm eaten to the bone, the graying skin occupied with tiny, squirming life.
She remembered Felix had said something to her and lifted her head, blinked at him.
“You do it this time,” Felix said, still grinning rabidly, dull-eyed. He sent the gun skidding across the table toward her. “Open it like you saw me.”
Mel opened the revolver.
“Now spin the spinny part.”
She spun it, watching the brass bottom of the one bullet occupying the cylinder go round and round, trying to track it, game it, though it was as impossible as trying to predict the fall of a roulette marble.
“Now close it.”
Mel tried to watch what position the loaded chamber would be in as she snapped shut the cylinder, but couldn’t tell. The gun was well made, everything enclosed. For safety. She also didn’t particularly care if this round for her would be fatal. Let them drink me until there’s nothing left. Let them tear each other’s throats out over who gets to have the last lick.
“Point it to your head, Melanie, not mine,” Felix said, “and pull the trigger.”
Mel put the gun to her head. She did not want to have his face be the last thing she saw, but it did not seem, if this was how things were to go, she had much option. She pulled the trigger and only she, not Felix and not the invisible man, flinched when it went click.
Felix snatched the gun away from her and said, “Buckley. You’re up. Ready?”
The bandaged man didn’t say or do anything.
Felix opened the revolver. Spun the cylinder. Snapped it shut. Put it to the side of the man’s head. Felix did not so much as blink when it went bang.
Very much awake now, Mel hyperventilated, her vision going dark around the edges. Framed in the fuzzy darkness of what was likely an imminent passing out or a possible life-ending stroke, she looked through the drifting gun smoke at the invisible man with the left side of his head cracked open. The bandages flared out on the exit’s side, particles of cotton wrap drifting like confetti. The cotton mask quickly turned red moving away from the impact site until he looked like a match head.
Felix looked at the dead man lying slumped in his wheelchair, half spilling over the one armrest. “Well, that lacked suspense.”
There were some new strokes added to the painting of the man with the shiny armor. His face did not change, but the alterations to his scene, the scraps of skull, the blown-apart clumps of brain now marring his polished plate steel, seemed to complement his detached expression. Badges of honor.
The dance music did not abate; she could still track its pounding rhythm despite the ringing in her ears, feeling it through the chair under her, in her spine, in her skull. No matter what horrors got thrown into its devouring gears, the unstopped machine of this place could not be even temporarily slowed.
Mel had to consciously turn her head to track Felix as he moved across the room, his pale skin against the dark background of the shadowy room leaving tracers in her eyes. She could count the bumps of his spine. She watched him return to the mantel from where he’d gotten the gun but he didn’t put it back. Instead he tucked the gun into the back of his tracksuit pants and then got up on his tiptoes to take a crystal bowl down from the mantel.
He came back with it, cradling it with both hands, reminding her of something she’d seen on a show about long-suffering monks who made the long journey from their temple every day, on foot, to prostrate themselves in the marketplace for pittances. But Felix, it would seem, would not be receiving leftover pieces of food or near-worthless coins. What he came to collect poured freely from the bandaged man, a generous offering that runneth over, his cornucopia a bullet-split head.
“I didn’t want to embarrass him so I decided to save this until after he was out of earshot, but Buckley here was talking to the FBI. Some of what he said we wanted him to pass along, like stuff concerning Brenda, but then he got it in his half-melted peanut to start telling – or writing, as it w
ere – details about myself. Which was not part of the agreement. So, we sprung him out of the hospital and had him shipped here, to have a little fun before we sent him hurtling into the great whatever.”
Felix didn’t take his eyes off Mel and never blinked as he held the bowl under the bandaged man’s head until it filled to the rim. Then, with care, placed it on the table before her.
She looked into its bottomless redness. A stray hair turned and curled on its surface. A bobbing pink bead that might’ve been a pellet of ripped skin, a piece of brain.
When she looked at Felix again, dragging her eyes over to him, he had the revolver open and was going about the mundane task of filling each of the six chambers in the cylinder with a bullet fished from the pocket of his sagging pants.
“When you were a kid,” he said, “what food would you refuse to eat? Mine was brussels sprouts.”
“Green beans,” she mumbled. Someone else’s life. A factoid plucked from the ether.
“That’s interesting,” he said.
She looked at him and might’ve said why, or meant to but didn’t. It didn’t matter to her.
“Yesterday,” he said, “you told me broccoli.”
She looked into the bowl before her, nearly overflowing with red, and said to it, “We’ve done this before.”
“Yes,” the bowl of blood said with Felix’s voice or he, standing over there, had said it. This didn’t matter either. “It wasn’t the same bowl or the same contents taken from the same source, but there was you, there was a bowl, and it was full. Same as it is now.”