We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories

by C. Robert Cargill

  “I’m a marker. I choose who dies. I don’t know shit about what’s . . . after. Except for this part. This is kind of the between part. I know this part really well. I’ve been doing it a long time.”

  “Since the beginning?”

  “Hell no. Since the thirties.”

  “The 1930s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not a long time to be dead.”

  “You tell that to me once you’ve put in eighty years doing this.”

  “Wait. Are you telling me I’m a marker?”

  The stranger nodded. “You will be. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. You’re going to die today, and when you do, you’re going to take my place.”

  “Your place?”

  “It’s a limited-time gig. Each marker has to pick one million people to die. That’s it. That’s the job. You walk up to them, you touch them, and that’s it. They’re marked. Then you move on to the next one and try not to think too much about it.”

  “You just touch them? That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And the Grim Reaper shows up and kills them?”

  “The collectors, yeah. They don’t . . . they don’t take too well to the whole reaper thing.”

  Brian shook his head, folded his arms, sticking his lower lip out in disgust. “That’s stupid. God wouldn’t do that.”

  “But he’d put a guy on a train with a bomb to send a message to America that its values are out of whack? Buddy, are you in for a rude awakening when you get to the other side.”

  “I’m not dying. Not today.”

  “It’s already done.”

  “I could jump.”

  “The fall would most likely break your neck. Or you’d bang your head on a rock. Or whatever. Collectors are devious little fucks. Once somebody is marked, they’re like the Mounties. They always get their man.”

  “I’m not marked yet.”

  “I told you. I’ve touched everybody on this train. Everybody.” He pointed for a moment at Brian, as if surprised by something. “That’s a nice suit. Is it a Bell and Thompson?”

  “You already—” Brian’s jaw went slack once more. “You’re full of it.”

  “So here’s the rules. One million. Any one million will do.”

  “I’m not listening to this.”

  “You’d better. Otherwise you’re gonna be lost when your ticket gets punched. One million souls. That’s the debt you owe the world. The millionth soul, that’s the one who replaces you. You’ll feel it when it’s coming. The minute his or her time is up, you’re off the hook and on your way to whatever reward you’ve earned. Everything else you’ll be able to figure out on your own.”

  “How many have you touched?”

  “Including you?”

  “Yes.”

  “One million. Haven’t you been listening?”

  “Wait! You chose me?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t like you.”

  “You don’t like me?”

  “No,” said the stranger, disgusted. “Why would I like you? You’re a Jesus freak without the Jesus part. You hate more than you love. You believe that a bomb will teach people a lesson. And you’re stupid enough to listen to a group of church elders who told you that this was all going to work out okay, but didn’t bother to check on any of the details yourself. You are a bad person. And that’s before we even get to the way you treat waitresses—women in general, really—and the terrible stuff you look at while touching yourself. You’re lazy and boring, you insult strangers, and you believe anyone who doesn’t buy into your own brand of fundamentalism is destined to burn. But worst of all, you were willing to walk onto a train with a bomb without having the common decency to die along with everyone else. Simply put,” said the stranger with a shrug and a limp finger, “you’re an asshole.”

  “You’re gonna kill me for all that?”

  “No. The bomb will kill you. The collector will see to that. I just marked you. And once you’re gone, my million chores are up.”

  “But you chose me. That’s as good as killing me. How can you live with yourself?”

  “Ah! Now there’s an excellent question. You’re going to be asking yourself that a lot over the next few years. Decades, really. You’ll figure it out. We all do.” He paused for a second, trying to find the words. “Look, it’s a shit job. I’ve had to mark an awful lot of good people. Nice people. People who deserved better than they got. But people have to die. I was choosy at first. Got to know people. Only marked the ones who really had it coming. But that could take you forever. You could go days without really finding someone deserving. I’ve done this for eighty years. Eighty years, Brian. You know how many people a day that is?”

  “No.”

  “Thirty-four. On average. I took some days off here and there. Other days you’ll make up for it. You’ll find it hard to mark people on Christmas or on particularly sunny days in spring. So you’ll give some folks a pass you probably should have marked. And man, do the collectors get pissed.”

  “Why would they be pissed?”

  “They’ve got a million souls to deliver too. Only they’ve got to wait on you. The collectors start nagging, time starts dragging, and the next thing you know, BAM! You’re marking a guy for leaving a shitty tip and snubbing a homeless guy on his way out the door. You’ll start to invent reasons. Then eventually you realize that the world isn’t supposed to be fair. If it was, you wouldn’t be spending your afterlife deciding who lives and who dies.

  “Once I spared someone only to watch another marker come by and tag her ten minutes later. The first time something like that happens, you realize the futility of what you do. It’s all so random. This whole world, this whole system, every last bit of it. I was making decisions based on my own judgments while another guy was running around touching his daily quota of a couple hundred people just to get it all over with. There’s no rhyme or reason to it all. Then one day, without even realizing it, you’re marking your first kid.

  “Brian, the first time you watch a kid you marked die changes you forever. Don’t stick around if you can help it. Never stick around. You’ll see some eventually. Collectors will take to following you when they’re caught up on things. They’ll kill someone seconds after you tag them if they can—run them down in the street with a bus or pop an artery in their head if they have to. Watching it is the worst thing. It makes you feel connected. Responsible. You’ll try to give people a death with meaning, but it will rarely pan out. You’ll just feel bad.”

  Brian glared at the stranger, starting, for a moment, to believe him. “Were you an asshole?”

  “What?”

  “Is that why the guy before you chose you? Did he hate you too?”

  “Me? No. He liked me. Felt sorry for me. I’d just walked in to find my girlfriend in flagrante delicto with her neighbor. She told me it had been going on for a while and she was glad I knew. I was going to toss myself off a bridge. Damn myself right to Hell. He talked me out of it. Patted me on the back. Told me about my million souls. Told me he had been watching me, thought I’d make a good judge of character. He posited that someone with a kind soul might choose the right people and leave a world filled with the just and righteous. Slipped on the ice on my way home, cracked my skull right open. And that was it.”

  “So why don’t you choose someone kind?” asked Brian, sweat soaking all the way through his shirt and now seeping into his jacket.

  “Because this is a special kind of hell all its own. There’s no goodness to this job. You don’t leave behind a kind and righteous world. You spend all of your time in war and hate and poverty. You mark children as they come into the world. You mark their mothers so they die on what should be the happiest day of their life. You mark fathers on their way home from work and lovers on flights home to be reunited with their one and only. You mark hopeful people looking forward to tomorrows you don�
�t allow them to see. And you’ll do all of this at a brisk enough pace to make sure you don’t spend more than a century doing it.

  “Thank the maker—or whatever machine-tending thing is waiting for us on the other side—that it had the foresight to split it between two jobs. Could you imagine, even for a minute, having to choose who lives and who dies only to have to kill them too?” The stranger looked down at the briefcase still gripped tightly in Brian’s hand. “That’s how you were going to sleep at night, right? You were just the guy who brought the briefcase. You didn’t choose these people. You didn’t choose this train. You didn’t make them get on it. You didn’t even make the bomb. You just delivered it, like God told you to.”

  Brian nodded.

  “We tell ourselves a lot of things to make what we have to do palatable. We find a way to justify it. To make it through the day. And that’s why I chose you. You’re an asshole. A real cocksucker. You don’t deserve to live. And you don’t deserve a quick death either. But you’re willing to do what God wants you to do. You’re willing to kill for Him without question. And that, my friend, makes you perfect for this job.”

  “But I don’t want it.”

  “No one wants it. That’s the point. At least I hope it is. I hope I didn’t do this all for nothing. I hope the people who have gone on before me, the people I shipped off, I hope they can forgive me. That they understand.”

  “What about me? I won’t forgive you.”

  “Shit, Brian. After today, after that bomb goes off killing two hundred and thirty-eight other people, after you wake up to find that no one recognizes you and that you can walk unseen through the world if you want to, after you see the devastation you caused and the pain and suffering you inflicted, you won’t even be able to forgive yourself. And all that is before you realize that the fact that you chose to do this is why I picked you in the first place. And once you come to terms with that? You’ll realize you have to do it all over again a million more times before you can see what’s on the other side—to see if you even get into Heaven or Hell. So ask me again: do I give a shit if you forgive me? No. No I don’t. And that’s why I picked you. My last selfish act in this world. Hopefully you’ll find it easier to mark your million than I did mine.” The stranger took a deep breath and looked at his watch. “Four more minutes. Four more minutes and you get to find out whether or not I’m full of shit.” Then he closed his eyes, relaxing, and settled in as if ready for a midafternoon nap.

  Brian looked at his own watch, panicked. The man was right. It was 4:43. The train was five minutes late to the station, and though it was beginning to slow, it still wasn’t quite slow enough for him to jump off. He looked up at the stranger, holding the briefcase a few inches off the floor. “How do I turn it off?”

  “You don’t.”

  “But I want to. I want to stop this.”

  “You can’t,” said the stranger, eyes still closed. “It’s already done. Everyone’s already been marked. All that’s left is to wait for the collectors to come.”

  Brian set the case gently back on the floor and sighed. “What was your name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Why the hell not? It’s your name, not a locker combination.”

  “This job is easier when you forget yourself. You’ll remember the big stuff, but it’s hard to remember a name when nobody else ever bothers to call you by it.”

  “Are you a religious man?”

  “Was I or am I?”

  “Are you?”

  “There’s no use for religion in the afterlife. There’s only truth in death. You either go on to your great reward or you stay here for a spell as one of God’s pencil pushers. Belief is the wrong word. It’s a knowing without really knowing. You know what I mean?”

  “No. I’ve always believed.”

  The stranger smiled, opening his eyes, laughing a little. “A few nights doing this and you’ll begin to question everything. Even that.”

  “Never.”

  “Trust me. Bomb-briefcase Jesus won’t be there on the dark nights when you stagger into a children’s cancer ward. He won’t be there when you find out about the awful oil heater fire a collector used to take out a whole family you touched the week before. And he sure as shit ain’t gonna be there when you realize you’ve got decades left to serve before you meet your quota. When this job is done with you, there won’t be a thing left you believe in. You’ll be lucky if you even find any hope left to cling to.”

  “Did you?” asked Brian.

  “Did I what?”

  “Find hope?”

  “Only that this would all make sense one day.”

  “Does it?”

  “I’m about to find out. Like I said, it’s a big day for both of us. I hope you like that suit.”

  Brian looked down sadly at his jacket, pulling the lapels away with his sweaty hands. “I hate this suit.”

  “It is a terrible, terrible suit. Eighty years of that will be a punishment all its own.”

  The door to the small sleeper compartment opened, and a balding, bespectacled man in a tie-dyed T-shirt and blue jeans loomed over them with a wry smile. “Is this the new guy?” he asked, looking at Brian.

  “Yep,” said the stranger.

  “Two hundred and thirty-nine,” said the strange little man, smiling queerly. “I could take the rest of the week off if I wanted.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “Of course I won’t. But it’s nice to think about.”

  “It really is. You’re a bit early, don’t you think?”

  “Nah. The timer in his case is off by two minutes.”

  “Oh!” said the stranger, caught entirely off guard. “I thought we had a little mo—”

  Hell They Call Him, the Screamers

  He cuts. It’s what he does, what he always has done. First the long blade across the neck to spill the blood. Then with the paring knife, down the spine, across the upper buttocks, through the love handles and back up the sides; down the leg and through the ankles, back up and around again. Then with the hooks, in just beneath the skin, peeling it back away from the muscle with a firm tug. He’s timed it just right, learned when their reflexes will jerk them away, giving the extra force needed to peel it off in clean, perfect sheets.

  They scream. It’s what they do. It’s what they always have done. First with the protests. The No! The Don’t! Then with the swearing. Always the swearing. Even the churchiest of them—the blue-haired old biddies with crosses around their necks and knuckles bleached white from gripping their Bibles too tight, blurting out the foulest “cuntfuckingmotherfucker” when the knife goes in. Then comes the begging. The pleading. The bargaining. They offer houses and cars and riches beyond imagining. The young ones offer blow jobs, then fucks, and when that doesn’t work, all manner of depravity. “Please. You can fuck my ass. No one’s ever fucked my ass. It’s yours. Just don’t cut me. Don’t hurt me, please. I’ll like it, I promise. It’ll be so tight for you. You can shit on my tits if you like. Shit on them and then cum. You look like you’d like that.” But he doesn’t. Next they beg for their children. “Please, I have children,” they say. Some of them actually do.

  Then there’s the Why? They always ask why. “Deargodplease, why are you doing this?” The butcher doesn’t say a word. He just cuts. Just as he’s always done. He tried at first to explain it. But it never took. It doesn’t make sense until the end. He would talk over their screaming. Their pleading. Their offers of ankle-grabbing ass-fucking. First eloquently, then bluntly, but it never took. The fear. It stoppers the ears and twists the stomach, making the brain useless. He’d try to tell them that. But they scream more than they listen.

  He is nine feet tall, with slabs of pallid flesh dripping down with hairy-nippled mantits over half a ton of solid muscle, a thick layer of musky sweat, and a useless skin-leather apron dangling from his thirty-two-inch neck. His eyes vacant, black without a speck of white. His mouth ever yawning a voiceless scream.
His teeth narrow, filed to points, and a square jaw powerful enough to snap bone. Hell, they call him, the screamers. He is The Butcher of Fleshtown. One of a thousand. The one with the steadiest hand. The cleanest cuts. Able to hold down the strongest man with a single meaty mitt, carving him apart while he struggles and screams. There are many butchers, but he is the only one they call The.

  Fleshtown. A grim, cavernous concrete box, fifty carving tables wide, twenty deep. The floors stained a permanent red; the walls a flat, blood-peppered gray. Drains set in the floor every ten feet. The granite carving tables scarred by knives, their centers polished to a slick sheen from all the writhing bodies. A thousand butchers hacking away at once, their screamers howling, their attendants handing them freshly honed blades or trundling bins off to the furnace. And in the back, nearest the exit, stands The.

  At his feet blood congeals, hundreds of gallons of it an hour. It sprays out the neck onto the growing pile of crimson pudding, thick, dark, the bottom turning black before day’s end, when the sweepers come by with hoses to spray it down the drains. In the morning it rises to his ankles, by noon to his waist.

  After the flensing comes the carving, the slices deep, down to the bone, down the left side of the leg, then up the right, again on the other leg, the arms, deep along the muscle of the torso. The cuts nicking bone, slicing sinew, loosening its grip on the flesh. Then he digs in, his fat fingers tearing, fingernails worn down to the nubs, pulling the meat off in chunks. He peels the flesh away, the light sprinkle of remaining blood spattering against his apron, his arms, his cheeks. And still they scream, their voices shrill and heavy—loud despite the meat absent from most of their bones.

  He casts stray pieces behind him, the bones, the muscle; whatever comes off goes into the large gray plastic bin, streaked crimson with blood. And when the bin is full—after two dozen or so screamers—it is wheeled away to the furnace, dumped, the pieces scattering at once to ash in fires as hot as the sun.

  Then when all the meat is gone, and only the chest and head remain, out comes the cleaver. He swivels the torso around, holds the blade high above his head, brings it down in a single mighty swing. The head splits in two, cracked open like a coconut against the stone table. Raising the cleaver again, he brings it back down into the sternum. Then he slips fingers the size of pop bottles into the chest, prying the rib cage open with a single crack, his hands quickly scooping out guts and brains, tossing organs sloshing with shit and piss back into the bin.