I locked that part of me away for a reason, a voice in his head answered. And yet, part of him knew that the “old Victor” never would have allowed that stranger to get so close to their cabin. He would have guessed Dante’s dissatisfaction and found a way to engage his mind with the task at hand. He would have given him the chance to build something, a future they could both believe in. He wouldn’t have settled for merely surviving.
But that’s not me anymore…is it?
Somewhere deep in his pysche, he sensed a locked box not unlike the briefcase he had kept in the basement of the house. This box was secured with far more than a combination. A series of chains looped across it, held in place by a large padlock. That padlock was a promise he had made to himself years ago, a vow he held sacred.
As sacred as the bond between brothers?
The cold was settling on him. His body began to shake in uncontrollable shivers. His mind was losing its grip on rational thought as a steady fear began to mount.
What would the old Victor have done?
He imagined unlocking the padlock and untwisting the chains. He imagined his fingers on the lid of the box as he gently pried it open, wanting only to peek inside. As the glow of light began to wash across his face, he remembered what he had hidden in the box all those years ago.
Himself.
Chapter 27: Savior Complex
The only consolation as he waited to die was that Jenny must have escaped. Otherwise she would have been thrown in beside him. Her chances might not be much better out there even if she escaped the tunnels, but at least she was free and didn’t have to imagine becoming someone’s dinner.
Victor clung to this small victory as the cold wrapped around his body like the coils of a boa constrictor. The hairs on his arms straightened as if by static electricity. The hair on his head, damp from his sweat, began to harden in patches, slowly transforming him into a statue as he crouched by the wall of the freezer, his mind turning over memories long forgotten.
He remembered middle school and the kid who had taken Dante’s lunch. He remembered pushing the kid down a flight of stairs, watching with satisfaction as the kid’s elbows struck the concrete, his bones bouncing as if plucked by a puppeteer. A warmth had filled Victor’s chest—not at the ability to cause pain, but to set right something that had been wrong. It was the satisfaction a father feels when the gavel falls, sentencing the drunk driver who killed his daughter. A righteous satisfaction.
Then he was looking at a door with a reflective metal shield across the lower half, knowing that behind that door his mother’s final hours were seeping away. He looked sidelong at his father, who sat hunched forward as he contemplated his fingertips, trying to keep them from trembling. And Victor knew, as clearly as if a sign had flashed across the sky, that everything was changing. He was no longer a kid, no longer free to pick and choose his own future. As the colossus of a man who had for so many years been his guide, his example, his idol—as that man began to crack beneath the weight of their shared misfortune, Victor realized something with a clarity that would startle him for years to come.
He was the man of the house now.
It was not something he and his father would ever talk about. But as the months rolled on in the wake of Maria’s death, Victor’s father proved this revelation as he steadily withdrew from his sons, working as many hours as he could and hitting the bottle when he was home. Just when Dante needed help most, their father was least able to help him.
At the time, Victor had thought he was helping Dante. He’d advised him to return to college, even offered to help pay for the first semester. But instead, Dante had taken a page from his father’s script and turned his grief into drugs.
That’s on you, Victor told himself. He needed you—not your money, not your advice, but you. And where were you? Busy saving the world.
Victor’s breath formed a cloud and drifted away. He tucked his hands beneath his armpits, fighting the cold inch-for-inch.
You thought Dante needed you then. Just imagine how he needs you now.
He knew he possessed what a psychologist might term a “savior complex,” the need to sweep in and save the day. Maybe he felt that need because he didn’t know any other way to stay in control. Or maybe, even before he pushed that bully down the stairs, he had known he was born with a calling.
Victor lifted his head. He pushed himself to his feet, turning his gaze to the glass door that separated him from a group of people whom he owed a world of pain—and a man who needed Victor to save him one more time.
Because there were wrongs to be set right. Because Victor had failed Dante once, but he would not do so again.
_____
Oswald was sitting near the glass door, reading the back of a newspaper, when Victor tapped on the glass.
Oswald looked up. His eyebrow arched in a Can I help you? expression.
“What’s that you’re reading?” Victor said, his breath leaving a cloud of steam on the glass.
“Funny pages,” Oswald answered, looking down at the newspaper again.
Victor thought of Reginald and Ellen. He thought of what he had said, and how far he had gotten before the cattle prod stung him. He thought of how long it had taken Oswald to shock him, and an idea occurred to him.
“Is this really what you want? Selling yourself short a bit, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?” Oswald said without looking up.
“I mean there’s a huge world out there ripe for the taking. I mean you’re stuck in here, still working for mommy and daddy, still playing by the rules. I guess I just assumed anyone with a pair of balls would— What’s the expression? Seize the day?”
Oswald shifted, and though he didn’t lift his gaze from the newspaper, Victor could tell he had his attention. Oswald’s eyes no longer moved back and forth across the lines of type. He was hooked.
“You ever think about it?” Victor said, trying to keep the shivering out of his voice. “How you would do it if you had to?” He waited, and it paid off. Oswald looked at him.
“Do what?” Oswald said.
“Not what. Who.”
Oswald ruffled the newspaper and shifted his legs. Victor’s words were getting to him, but he still needed a little push.
“You know what I would do?” Victor said, his voice taking an almost sleep-like tone. “If I wasn’t busy chasing my brother across this country, I’d find a nice location to set up shop. Heck, all you’d need is some ground for farming and some defenses. Of course you’d need people, but people can always be convinced. You just need to give them a vision.” He took a deep breath and released it slowly, as if this idea had been living in his subconscious for many years and he was just now acknowledging it.
“This operation here?” he continued. He waved his finger to indicate their surroundings. “This is smalltime shit. This is like the gang of teenagers who decide to rob liquor stores, thinking it’s an original idea. Anybody can run a snatch-and-grab business. You gotta think bigger.” He paused.
Oswald’s voice entered the silence—tentative, searching. “So, what would you do?”
Victor held back a smile. “I’ll tell you what I’d do. The first thing I’d get my hand on is some weapons. Food is currency, sure, but if you’ve got guns, you can always take what you can’t barter for. I’d look for a military arsenal—find a map, start with local bases, go from there. Then I’d start hiring.”
“And then? When you had your guns and your manpower?”
This time Victor did smile. “Then I’d build a kingdom.”
Oswald looked at him for a long time. He stood and set the newspaper on the chair, then walked to the glass door of the freezer. He stared directly into Victor’s eyes. There was something intimate in the locking of their eyes, and Victor sensed that, were this not just a ploy to manipulate Oswald, the two might have something in common. Oswald had something of the wolf in him beneath that phony, almost child-like façade. Victor knew his kind. People
like Oswald were always just passing the time until the right opportunity came along for the caged monster to come out.
At last, Oswald’s face broke into a grin. He stubbed his finger against the foggy glass. “Gotcha! You thought you had me!” He laughed and danced a few steps in place like a mechanical monkey. “You think I’m just gonna let you out? You think it’s that easy?”
Victor just stared into Oswald’s eyes, trying to keep any emotion from his face. He had thought Oswald was cracking. Now he began to second-guess his intuition. Maybe this guy was not as predictable as most.
“What a joke!” Oswald said. “Wait till I tell the others! We’ll have a few laughs over this one, I promise you. Thanks for the comedic material.”
“My pleasure,” Victor answered dryly. The cold was slowing his thoughts, and he was about to slink deeper into the freezer when Oswald’s expression hardened into a stern frown.
“Two conditions,” Oswald said. “First, we have to make a pact and you have to swear to it. Understand?”
Victor blinked a few times before answering. “A pact, sure. What’s the second condition?”
“We’ll get to that. Here’s the pact.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the two of them were alone. Whether this was for show or in earnest, Victor could not tell. Oswald leaned closer to the glass and lowered his voice. “From here on out, it’ll be you and me, thick and thin, no matter what. This kingdom you’re talking about building? We build it together. Understand? I’m your right-hand man from here on out. You hear a better offer, you ignore it. We do this thing together.”
“Okay,” Victor said.
Oswald shook his head. “No, you gotta do better than that. Say what I said. Repeat it.”
Victor tried to create a bullet-point list of Oswald’s speech. “It’ll be you and me from here on out. We’ll build this kingdom together.”
“And I’m your right-hand man. Say it.”
“You’re my right-hand man.”
“From this day forward and forever.”
Victor hesitated.
“Say it.”
“From this day forward and forever.”
“No matter what happens, you got my back and I’ve got yours.”
Victor repeated the line.
“And this understanding,” Oswald continued, “trumps all other loyalties—friends, family, you name it. Nobody else is in the picture, just you and me.” He waited. His eyes gleamed with a greedy light.
Victor thought of Dante, his only remaining family. These were just words, but it disturbed him even to profess such a betrayal.
“If you hesitate one more time—”
“This understanding trumps all other loyalties,” Victor finished. “All of them.”
A slow, satisfied smile leaked across Oswald’s face. “You made the right decision,” he said.
“What about the second condition? You said there were two.”
“Oh, that,” Oswald said with a dismissive wave. “I just need you to kill my parents on the way out.”
Don’t do it, a voice deep in Victor’s subconscious said. Don’t— and then the voice was gone.
“Just get me out of here,” he said. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
Oswald stared closely at him. “If you cross me, you know what happens? I’ll cut off your balls. I’ll pickle them and feed them to you. I’m good with a knife—meat tenderizer, too.”
All at once, like the sun coming from behind a cloud, his frown transformed into the charming smile of a kid whose grandparents have just given him his first baseball bat. “Aww, shucks,” he said. “You don’t need to hear all that, do you? We’re pals now, right?” He wagged one finger between them, indicating the invisible connection they now shared.
“Where are they?” Victor began. “Your…” Your parents, your fucking parents whom you want me to kill because you’re a sociopathic little shit who can’t even—
“In the shop, same as they were.” Oswald thrust his hands into his pockets. “You need a…gun or something?”
“Just get me my things,” Victor answered. “Then you should find a quiet place to hide. You don’t want to get caught up in this.”
“You want me to scram, huh?” There was a mean glint in Oswald’s eyes. If not for the rest of the face, Victor might have thought he was staring into the eyes of a hardened convict. “Naw, I don’t think so. If I buy the tickets, I watch the show.”
Victor nodded, looking past him. It was not what he saw in Oswald’s eyes that bothered him. It was what Oswald might see in his eyes.
“Alright, then,” Oswald said. His hand withdrew from his pocket, holding a small key. He thrust the key into the padlock, turned, and paused to look at Victor. “You ever think life’s one big joke?”
Victor looked from Oswald to the padlock, then back again. He shrugged.
Oswald continued, “I mean, you and me, here, like this? What are the chances? I feel like I know you already, like we were meant to do this. Know what I mean?”
“Sure.”
Oswald flashed that innocent smile again. “You’re just saying that. But I’ll grow on you. Just give me time.”
Like mold on rotten fruit, Victor thought.
Oswald twisted the padlock and pulled it through. With a squeak of rubber, the door opened and Victor felt warmth on his body. He stepped through, thinking he now knew how it felt for a person to be buried alive and then saved at the last moment. As the door closed behind him, he turned to face Oswald.
Oswald was already watching him with the look of a child who likes to smash things just to see how the pieces will fall. He said, “Why don’t you stop thinking about wringing my neck and remember who just did you a favor?”
Had Victor’s hands not been so cold, had his heartbeat not been slowing for the past half-hour, he thought he might have pounced on Oswald. He needn’t have wrung his neck. He could have knocked him unconscious, tied him up and left him in a closet—anything to stop those beetle eyes from watching him.
“Of course not,” Victor said, breathing on his hands.
“And remember,” Oswald said. “We’re on the same side from here on out.” He smiled. “I’ve got your word on that, after all.”
_____
Victor could smell the barbecue before he entered the room. Despite knowing it wasn’t chicken he smelled, his mouth began to water. Maybe there was a cannibal inside everyone, just waiting for the right set of circumstances to bring it out.
He waited by the door for Oswald to bring him his things. Even though Oswald had just released him from the freezer, part of him worried the lunatic was going to betray him to the others. Maybe this was just another joke, like the rest of the game they’d been playing since Victor entered the town.
They won’t capture me a second time, he thought grimly. If they want to eat me, they’ll have to put a few bullets in me. I’m not going into that freezer again.
He was leaning against the wall, listening to the murmur of conversation from the other room, when Oswald returned, holding Victor’s backpack in one hand and the Winchester in the other.
Victor took the backpack and slipped the straps over his shoulders, then took the rifle. “I’m serious about what I said,” he told Oswald. “You should get scarce. There’s no telling how this will go.”
Oswald crossed his arms. “Would you want to know the ending of a movie before you walked into the theater? Didn’t think so.”
Victor wanted to tell Oswald that this wasn’t a movie. But what was the point? Would it have mattered if someone had given Victor that speech a few decades ago? It all came down to one central question: Do people really change? Everyone liked to see themselves as being capable of change, and the rest of the world as static. The truth was that no matter how far you ran, no matter how many mistakes you covered over with good deeds, you could never really escape yourself.
“How many of them are out there?” he asked.
“A few. But they have no
idea what’s coming.”
Neither do you, Victor thought.
“Just remember,” Oswald said, raising a hand as Victor moved toward the door. “The man and the woman go. Got it? Blow ‘em out of the water, Skipper. I don’t want to see their ugly faces again.”
Victor paused. When he looked at Oswald, he imagined how different the world might have been if Hitler had been smothered in his cradle, how much suffering would have been avoided. Was there forgiveness for a man who commits a damnable act in the name of the greater good? Could such deeds ever be mended?
“You won’t see them again,” he answered.
Oswald rubbed his hands together. “Good, good. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”
Brothers (The Last Colony Book 1) Page 20