by Martin Rose
I lifted the sword again. My left hand flopped uselessly. I forced it up with a grunt, taser in hand, and held the sword tip out for the first eager child to lay his hand on it and clutch it with a straining fist, slicing skin against metal, before I lifted the taser and applied the shock.
I cried out again. My heart beat once, then fell dead. Leftover embalming fluid spurted from my vena cava like a disconnected garden hose with the water pressure cut; the muscle remembered ancient things, things like flesh and skin and capillaries and veins, things I no longer possessed but had been stolen from me, eaten away into a thousand small insects.
Some of those maggots ate you, Vitus. Those flies are more than Jessica. They are you.
I paused at the thought, waiting for the next line of children to advance upon me, stepping over the bodies of their comrades, trampling on their delicate toes, their fingers, even their faces. They looked like cherubs sent to sleep in the poor light, flies toppling and tumbling from their lips alongside maggots.
Perhaps my enemy had never been Jessica.
With each fly electrocuted and sent off to meet its maker, I was destroying a thousand pieces of myself animated in a thousand insects. After all—had Jessica truly hated me? Disappointed in me, rejected by me—but in all that time, she had only ever loved me, wanted me to stay by her side.
No one hated me as much as I did.
I cried out, a desperate wail from my blackened lungs. The sound shuddered the armor like chimes, plates vibrated against each other, and I waded into the fray with renewed energy, advancing on the last strand of children left. I was brutal in my purpose, connecting the sword to a child’s cheek and lighting up his face with an explosion of blue electricity. Patterns jumped through the metal and into his flesh. For an instant, his eyes lit up with blue flame, and then turned dark again.
I killed the last of my children, the final humming buzzzz silenced in the altar room. They lay like spent roses in their red robes, the odd remnants of a strange cult, one that would never be found. These were all someone else’s sons, someone else’s children kidnapped and taken away. For a short time, Jessica had loved them in her damaged way, before poisoning them in the underground chamber. At least they did not live long enough to experience the indignity of their parasitic violation and, with resignation, I breathed out a small sound of regret. The sword tip hovered over the ground, the taser limp and useless at my side.
“Vitus.”
I did not turn around. His voice was overwhelming in the silence. I had not realized how constant the hum had been, how it had filled and obscured every soft and quiet space. The emptiness that followed was like the silence in space.
“Let’s get out of here. It’s over. I’ve got lighter fluid. Get on your way and I’ll follow. I’m going to raze this place. No one can ever know what happened here.”
I thought about telling him about the flies. That Jessica was the force that animated them, that delivered this terrible onslaught; but it had also been me all along.
“Jessica—” I began.
“There was nothing left,” he answered. “I found her skeleton.”
There was a rustling of fabric, and his hand tapped a cylindrical object against my shoulder plate, a metallic ting!
I reached up and took it with clumsy fingers. The wedding ring suspended in my orange prescription bottle.
“Oh,” I said simply. I turned and brushed past him, heading back for the ventilation shaft.
Zzzt.
I felt the hairy body, heard the buzz of the wings brush past my ear. In a second, my fingers closed over the fly. It beat itself against my bony fingers. Easy enough to kill it, but I hesitated. I have known many men given to destroying anything and everything in their path, but I have always hesitated for the lowly spider, the ugly beetle; it was the persistent feeling that this fly would be the last of its kind, the last to escape from this place. I pondered that, and with a grunt, I emptied the bottle of my wedding ring and shoved the fly into it, where it buzzed in outrage at its new captivity. A fraction of both myself and Jessica, in the body of a fly.
Before I left, I threw the ring into the shadows, where it bounced into concrete darkness, and then into nothingness.
*
Owen and I traveled back in silence.
The sun broke over the gray skyline, bursting into a half-light dawn known as the “blue hour,” coaxing indigo shades from every shadow, bathing us in impressionist light. I watched the passing scenery through the slit in the metal, protected and enveloped in the elemental coldness of the armor. Pavement disappeared beneath us in a winding line of yellow, white, and black, comforting in its familiarity.
Owen smelled like lighter fluid and smoke. I smelled like metal, lead, and burnt blood. He had cast a final coating of accelerant over the toppled bodies of the children and the scattered flies before lighting a match and setting it ablaze. He made sure it was roaring before he headed to the ventilation shaft, and I helped him through the final passage with my good hand, pulling him up out of the dirty, dusty duct work.
I had stood there for an instant, with my metal hand pressed up against his forearm, until he turned to look at me and I at him. I observed the curve of his face, the clarity of his eyes. Something about him was so familiar, it was like staring at a ghost I couldn’t identify. I wanted so badly to believe he was mine through and through, that my blood flowed through his veins and deep in his marrow, that we shared a fundamental bond. And he wanted to be my son; to fill the role. For what purpose? So he could replace his missing father? So we could lead each other deeper into a fantasy that did not exist?
A motion in his face, a twitch in his jaw revealed his discomfort.
“Does it matter?” he asked.
I said nothing, and we trudged out through the shop, past empty cardboard boxes and disused inventory, old spilled tarot cards and broken glass. The linoleum looked tired and worn, the gypsy garb an empty sham, a front for a woman who never existed. All the Rogers, the guardians and watchers, came here to receive instruction from their god-like mistress. I wondered what they would do now that she was gone. Like abandoned children, would they cry and mourn and weep before picking up their lives, or just elect a new damaged leader to replace the last?
I decided it didn’t matter.
Owen silently took the driver’s seat of the Thunderbird. I was glad to be in my own car again, this last familiar thing. I drew up the helmet visor so I could clamp a cigarette between my teeth. After a few minutes, Owen coughed, and I kept on smoking. He didn’t ask me to stop, but I would have. I didn’t ask where he was driving; but I knew at the end of the road, Niko would be waiting for me.
“Do you think she knew? I mean, do you think she understood anything that happened?” he asked after a moment.
Silence. The engine rumbled and I appreciated how the sound filled the void between us. The faint ticking of my bones vibrating with the car. He didn’t say her name, but I knew he meant Jessica.
“Would it make you feel better if I said she didn’t?”
“Do you think she had a choice?”
Now there was a question to ponder. I hoped he wasn’t going to continue to ask these sorts of questions for the whole ride, like a caffeinated three-year-old in the midst of an existential crisis. Why? Why? Why?
“A choice in what?” I asked.
“To act the way she did. Do you think if she knew better, if she understood what was going on, she still would have . . .” he swallowed hard, and I could hear the sound it made in his throat. There was the ghost of stubble on his neck, and I was fascinated by the individual hairs making their way out of the flesh. I missed my flesh. I never knew a person could miss something so elemental, or even survive without it.
“Taken all the kids that she took? Still have brainwashed them, earned their love, then discarded them like trash?” I snorted. “A zombie is kinder than that, Owen. What she did took years. What I did to her took minutes . . .”
; The observation hurt, but I made it anyway, hoping that, at least for his benefit, it meant something, mitigated the pain of having been stolen away like a changeling child and then forced to love another, only to be rejected once more. And watch the only mother he ever had reduced to a mass of flies. All come to this.
“If there was a way to fix it all, would you have wanted that? I mean, if there was a cure?”
“Atroxipine? That’s no cure. I could have offered it to her, I suppose; for what purpose? To prolong her agony? No, I would have killed her, one way or another.”
“No. I mean, a real cure. But it would have cost you your life?”
“I never knew you were philosophical, Owen.”
I cast a glance over at him, and he was studying the rearview mirror with fixed intensity, as though the traffic patterns were a vexing puzzle he was determined to figure. I thought it was a strange question to ask, yet another in a long line of Why-Daddy-Why, right up there with Are-we-there-yet? Perhaps he’d ask me the meaning of life next.
I hoped to evade the question. It brought up conflicting emotions in me, and as each second passed, I found myself hating him for asking it, for refusing to meet my decomposing eyes. I hoped he would drop the subject all together as I blew out smoke through the armor’s open faceplate and mashed the cigarette into the ashtray.
“I’m serious, Vitus. What would you do?”
I sighed. “There’s no going back, Owen. You don’t go back after . . .”
I shifted uncomfortably before continuing, almost desperate to make sure he understood.
“After . . . after. Your world is a divided between the way it was before . . . what happened, and what happens afterward. And you spend afterward dreaming of the time before. It’s a fall from grace, Owen. If I had the power to restore her, it wouldn’t matter. She would forever only be half of what she was. A limping, damaged thing.”
Like me, I thought, but did not say.
“Even so,” I admitted, “if I had the opportunity, I think I would give it her. Yes, I think I would because, even as damaged as she was, she had the right to make the choice. And I would give my life to her out of gratitude.”
“Even though you didn’t love her?” he asked, sharply. I didn’t think he had cared so much for these interior questions, these introspective leanings. Any other time, I would have told him to shut up and drive or ignored him; but I considered that this conversation could be our last, the last time I would have to tell him my story. His last connection with the only father he would ever have, my last connection with my only son.
“I didn’t love her. But I owed her. She suffered greatly for what I did. And that alone would have been reason enough to forfeit my life. It’s about being human.”
Owen shifted gears as we slowed down and turned into the funeral home driveway. I flipped the visor down over my skeletal face, not desiring to be seen by anyone, even by Niko. I hated to think that this was the last thing she would see or know of me, this empty skeleton creature, as we rolled to a stop.
“Thank you,” Owen said, and his face was drawn, his jaw flexing as I viewed him through the narrow visor. “Thank you for helping me understand.”
I opened the door, a squeal of metal as I got to my feet and stepped outside the car. I looked back at him through the window as he stopped the engine. I wanted to ask him what he was going to do—I presumed he had no particular place to go. The Cult of the Flesh Eaters was all he knew, and then I realized he was waiting for me, of course. Waiting for me to talk to Niko, let her know we were all right, and then I was supposed to play my part, come back out and take us home, like a father with a son would.
I memorized the slanting blue light of the rising sun across his hard-angled features, casting us both in light and dark. It was all the more precious knowing this was the last time I could do this, watch him through the visor slit and keep him burned on the inside of my eyes just one last time. My patrimony would be made complete with my final abandonment.
I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t be leaving the funeral home. And that’s where I left him, waiting in the ticking of the cooling car engine, the warming pavement under the morning sun, waiting for a father who did not exist, and who had no intention of ever coming back.
*
I came in through the back door of the funeral home; I did not know the owner of the funeral home or its other employees. I had gotten the impression, considering the time she had kept me there while maggots were busy skeletonizing my body, that the owners were a hands-off bunch, and allowed her to oversee to the day-to-day operation of the intakes. All the same, I didn’t want to run into anyone and have to explain why I was dressed in their decorative furnishings.
Silence was impossible. I clanked into the back, between the lines of empty gurneys. There were still no corpses. The room was stark and pulled me back in with the comforting smells of formaldehyde and menthol. The gurneys dressed in clean sheets, covered in foggy plastic, and I fondly remembered our brief make-out session with a thin barrier of polyurethane between us. If I had a mouth left, I would have been smiling, and just as quickly, that smile would have disappeared.
I was not here to remember her or to love her, though I would have liked to have lived long enough to know that sensation. To be a whole man, through and through, with blood and guts and a pumping heart.
I walked down the line of gurneys and chose the one closest to the door. I’d only just settled in with my legs dangling over the side, trying to figure out the best way to start taking off the armor, when the door swung open, and Niko stood there.
She looked paler than usual, and in disarray, as though she had not slept in a long time. Her hair was unkempt and out of place, lending her the atmosphere of a witch set loose with black magic, as though she had just come from a graveyard gathering ingredients for a cauldron. For all that gothic atmosphere, her exhaustion and stress did not lessen her; in fact, her distress intensified everything about her, her glittering eyes, and I could only sit back and watch her, mesmerized. She possessed so much life. I had not felt life in so long, and I felt it keenly now that I was approaching the end of my own.
This was what I remembered most about life, I thought. The rise and fall of my chest when I breathed out, and the accompanying beat of the heart. The pulse of blood through my veins, eating greasy fries at a greasy boardwalk burger joint. The smell on the ocean, the rank salt woven into your clothes and even on cold November days you could still taste it on the rain as though the ocean poured out of the sky. I watched a curl of her black hair resting against the delicate place where her neck and her shoulders met. I missed that tender anatomy, sweeping the hair away and touching it with the back of my hand.
I had none of that now.
I sighed and looked away. I listened to her footsteps as she approached, until she was standing before me. I waited for her protests, her outrage, even her tears; but there was nothing, and the silence terrified me the most. I turned back and stared at her from behind the visor, all the world reduced to a horizontal line.
She studied me with one plump lip caught in her teeth, as though in an agony of indecision. The moment passed. Her features smoothed. Finally, she reached out with both hands to touch my head and then she was lifting the helmet away, baring my skull before the surgical light.
“How can you stand it?” I whispered. “You look at beauty every day. And then you look at this.”
“I work with corpses,” she said, setting the helmet aside on the gurney beside us.
“But you wake up in the morning, and you look in the mirror. And every day, you wear that beautiful face.”
She said nothing. There was nothing left to say.
I thought of all the things I could say as she knelt down and began to undo the metal plates that covered my feet, the calves, and on up to my thighs, exposing the sad bones that made my body, their porous, ossified surfaces, as though I had been picked clean by ravens and left to bleach in a desert sun. I want
ed her with a fierce stab of desire. If I could not have her with my body, I wanted to take her with words, fuck her, saturate her with as much sex as I could violate my vocabulary with. But I did not have the words, only the silence. And it stretched out between us as thick as blood and tissue and membrane.
One by one, she shed me free of my metal casing. The bits of armor came away reluctantly as though they had found a monster worth calling master. I missed it in my own way, for the safety it afforded me, for the comfort it had provided against the harsh elements, shielding me from wind and light and fire. Even from the flies.
When the last plate of armor had yielded and she set it aside with the others on the gurney, she returned. Her jaw clenched as though that were the linchpin holding the rest of her face together. If she lost that, everything would collapse into a wound, a vulnerability that could not be repaired.
“Lay back,” she whispered.
I struggled to do it, to brace myself with my skeletal arms, and she came to my aid, reaching behind me and taking my weight in measures until I lay flat against the gurney. I wished I could feel the warmth of her touch, as I would have with skin, but there was nothing but the hardness of bone, and it is unforgiving against her tenderness.
I listened to the sounds of her moving as she set up the pump beside me. I reached out suddenly, a desperate grab, and caught the thin material of her dress in my carpel finger bones, pulling her toward me.
“Let me listen,” I croaked, pulling her down toward me. “Let me listen one last time.”
She didn’t understand right away. And then I had my skull pressed up against her chest, with her ample breasts fringing my vision, and I could have wept in gratitude that she suffered it, allowed a monster to kneel at her body, for the grace it could bestow.