by McBain, Tim
Just in nick of time, too. He was close now. Erin could hear his feet scuffling along the pavement.
Erin’s eyelids fluttered closed, and she slumped forward in a motionless heap.
Baghead
Little Rock, Arkansas
9 years, 128 days after
His shoulder blades pressed into something soft. That was the first thing that bobbed to the surface of his consciousness, those sharp bones slicing at a cushion of some type. It wasn’t a mattress, he somehow knew, but it felt pretty good.
A soothing feeling ran the length of his spine. All of those weary muscles finally allowed some rest, some relaxation. All of the tight places given a chance to loosen a little. To let go.
He must be sprawled out somewhere, reclining on his back. He pictured himself on a cot, maybe in some kind of makeshift hospital or doctor’s office, people bustling past, glancing away from their clipboards to check on him before jotting down a few notes. He could hear the sound of the pen scribbling on the paper, little swirls and lines. Dotted I’s and crossed T’s.
But no. That couldn’t be right. All of that was over. No pens. No clipboards. No cots or nurses or doctors. Not anymore.
Something lay against his right side, too. From shoulder to foot, it was there. Solid. Straight. Like a wall closing him in.
And in his mind’s eye, he no longer saw himself on a cot. He saw himself laid out in a coffin. He wore a suit and tie, but he still had the filthy canvas bag over his head, pennies placed inside the eyeholes to cover his eyes. The thought disturbed him. Not enough to wake him up, but it disturbed him, made a nausea creep over him.
The breath rushed in and out of him, and he listened to it. The wind whistled just a little through his nostrils, and there seemed a long gap between exhales and inhales. But it was the sound of life he knew. Respiration. The faintest heartbeat keeping time somewhere below that. The sounds of life, not death.
Other sounds joined those of his breathing eventually. Metal scraped asphalt, and then smaller metal tinkles and taps followed that. There was a hum and a hiss. A machine? It seemed so unlikely. It almost sounded like a coffee machine without the gurgle. All but his breathing sounded far away. He wondered if they were even real.
After a time, he slept again. He did not dream.
“Please, I had no choice,” a voice said.
The sound stirred him, the fear it conveyed somehow contagious. He opened his eyes, blinked a few times, but he saw only blackness.
Was the voice real? He thought so. It was hard to be sure, but he thought so.
All was quiet for a long stretch, and the warmth of sleep crawled back into his cheeks, eventually reaching his eyelids and coaxing them back toward slumber.
Just as his eyes drifted closed, a beam of light flickered above him for just a second and was gone. Confusing. He couldn’t make sense of what little he saw.
“You don’t understand. He was going to kill me. I had no options.”
The voice sounded muffled. Congested. On the other side of a window, maybe.
“I helped you. I helped you carry him, helped you carry the tires, helped you get them on the rims. Doesn’t that count for something? Doesn’t that make us even?”
The smell bloomed around him all at once just then like his nose woke up a touch slower than everything else. He placed the odor right away. He was in the Delta 88. Sprawled in the backseat, most likely.
Even though he was certain this was the car by smell alone, he moved his legs a little, trying to determine by feel or by sound if that metal cooler lay beneath them. He couldn’t really muster enough movement to tell for sure.
He clawed at the surface instead, his fingernails catching on that shitty blanket Delfino had draped over the upholstery back here. Yep. This was it.
The chatter outside had continued while he focused on these little tests, though he hadn’t paid it much mind. He knew without really thinking about it that the stranger had been pleading for his life. He also had a pretty good feel for how that request was likely to be met.
“I’m begging you. Please. Show me the slightest mercy.”
Delfino’s voice murmured something. Baghead couldn’t tell for sure, but it sounded like he said, “Look away.”
A single gunshot cracked, and he heard the metallic ring of it echoing off the car, off the windows, a high pitched tone that seemed to hang in the air for a long moment. The body flopped to the ground a beat later with a heavy sound like someone dropping a forty-pound bag of potatoes on a tiled floor.
Teddy
Moundsville, West Virginia
266 days after
Surveying his traps once more, he’d thought the voices were just the wind, just his imagination. That happened sometimes. He was sure there were people out there, yelling and carrying on, but it was only in his head. He whistled to make them go away. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
He was still whistling when he saw her – a scrawny thing knee deep in one of the Apache foot traps. She lay motionless, the free leg crumpled underneath her.
He hustled up and then slowed once he was near. He needed to be careful. They fought sometimes. Clawed and gouged and screamed.
He looked down into the muddy hole, saw the way the pointed stake speared her calf all the way through. It had gotten her pretty good. She must have passed out from the pain.
Now he took tiny steps forward, inching closer and closer. He extended a foot and jabbed it under her armpit. She didn’t move.
He fought the urge to kneel right then and brush the hair back from her face to get a look at her, but he liked what he could see. He needed to do this right.
He waited a moment, stuck his toe into her ribs again. Still nothing.
Now he squatted and reached his hands down into the opening to grip her calf. Her muscles were firm. Toned. She seemed different from the others. Special.
The opening in her leg made wet noises like a mouth when he pulled it away from the stake. It seemed to go on for so long, the penetration so deep.
She moaned as it came out, and he recoiled, readying a fist to subdue her again if need be. She stayed out.
He fished a rag out of his jacket pocket to tie around the wound. He’d let one of the girls who stepped in the bear trap bleed out once. He knew the result was the same either way, but that one never sat right with him. It felt like a waste.
With the leg free and the wound wrapped, he cupped her under the armpits and started to lift, the dead weight hanging free from his hands.
Then she bucked, flopping free from his grip. Suddenly the ragdoll wasn’t a ragdoll anymore.
She wheeled around and lurched at him, fingers latching around his wrists, nails piercing his flesh. He jerked back, tripping over his own feet and falling on his ass.
The girl hobbled the other direction, but she was too slow. He fiddled at his belt and caught her within a couple of steps.
The hatchet rose up to head height and plummeted, one little tap on the skull that knocked her out for real this time.
Ray
Outskirts of Washington D.C.
360 days after
The audience’s chatter cut out as soon as Ray set foot on the stage. He stood there before them now, motionless. Frozen. He went lightheaded, a tingle prickling over his scalp. It wasn’t stage fright. He didn’t think he was capable of that. Blood roared in his ears.
“A man does funny things when his soul is sick,” he said. He’d meant to say something about tolerance, had tumbled around a loose sermon about it all day in his thoughts, but something else blurted out instead. The words didn’t really register until he’d said them aloud. Now he had to make them work.
“A man loses pieces of himself when his soul is sick from bad decisions. Sometimes the pieces are small. Sometimes they’re bigger than what’s left. One bad choice is all it takes sometimes. One bad choice can send a man on a dark path. It’s how a good man becomes a common thief, even a murderer. He doesn’t just g
o bad one day. It happens in stages. He makes a bad choice, maybe a series of bad choices, and he finds himself on that path without even realizing it, progressing toward things he never thought himself capable of, pulled that way as if by a magnetic force.”
He bit his lip a little bit on purpose, hoping the pain would pull him out of this sleepy lightheadedness a bit. He couldn’t tell whether or not it worked.
They’d set up a bigger tent, but it wasn’t enough. The crowd stretched out into the sunlight beyond the place where the canvas ended. The people out there shielded their eyes with cupped hands, waiting to see what miracle would transpire when the talking ended.
“When the world got sick, and when the mushroom clouds sprouted from the land, and when the dead rose up to walk the Earth, we all made choices, didn’t we? Soul wrenching decisions. Life and death decisions. There were no good choices in many cases, no good options. We tried to make the best of the bad choices available to us, most of us, the lesser of two evils if you prefer, the best we could do at the time, in the moment.”
The dizziness still shimmered in his skull like electrical current, and yellow static flickered in the corners of his eyes when he blinked. It was a strange faint feeling, almost like that itch one gets in their nose before a sneeze but deep in his skull instead.
“Maybe our souls are sick even still. Even now. But we can heal. If we want it, we can heal.”
He didn’t choose these words. They just poured out like the sweat draining down his forehead. It felt like they were beamed to him from somewhere else.
“Damnation is the fate worse than death. That’s where the dark path leads, but we still have choices to make, opportunities to right ourselves, to correct our paths. The healing starts tonight. If you want it.”
He signaled and the music kicked in. A tambourine accompanied the banjo and guitars this time, sizzling out a beat that almost sounded like an angry insect keeping the meter of the music, Ray thought. Still, the sound seemed to wake him up some. The tingle along his scalp subsided if only a little.
The line of fake sick stretched out a little longer than last time, and the clapping and dancing seemed to carry on with greater gusto. He clapped along himself between placing his hands on those people passing him by.
They’d set up in the same spot as last time. Several of the council members had suggested they move to another city or at least another location, but Ray insisted a second show here. Let people come back a second time and bring friends, and they’d really have a platform for word of mouth. Next time they’d set up elsewhere. More than two viewings, and some people might start to get skeptical enough to voice it, but he thought one more show here made the most sense.
Louis estimated the crowd at over 1,000 this time, maybe as many as 1,500, so Ray’s instinct seemed likely to have paid off. If this transition resulted in a coinciding spike in the people showing up at the gates, they’d probably need to use this big tent for temporary housing.
It was a huge circus tent held up by a steel frame, but it was damaged. Patching the canvas was no problem, but about a third of the structural frame had been sheared off or otherwise damaged to the point of uselessness. Louis managed to throw together a fix with a couple wooden support beams in the dodgy places. Not perfect, but it made the tent functional, which seemed to be good enough for the time being.
Ray was always impressed with Louis’s woodwork, too. Very neat.
The people all seemed in motion now when he looked out at them. Even among the areas without dancers, heads bobbed and hands flicked up to rub eyelids and scratch chins. A teeming multitude of humanity thrashed before him, a writhing wild thing. He could almost imagine them crawling over each other like crabs trying to escape a bucket.
When he’d finished healing the line of fakers, Phyllis made her entrance. She was a heavyset woman who wore pastel sweaters and clunky glasses. To Ray, her expression always looked deeply sad, even when she smiled. He thought maybe it was because of her down-turned eyes, but he wasn’t sure.
Just like that moment before the wheelchair gag, Ray felt his Adam’s Apple wobble. It seemed to climb higher in his throat. Again he felt that pang of misgiving, that jolt of desire to call this thing off. He ignored it.
The guitars cut off, then the banjo. The tambourine rang out a few solo jingles before it too went still.
Phyllis was the first to emerge. She helped two men wheel the hospital bed through the canvas slit that led backstage. They struggled a little to navigate the ramp, everyone needing to change positions midstream to coax the wheels over the raised lip. The small figure occupying the bed jostled with each bump and swivel, but he remained motionless.
A hush fell over the crowd as they watched this scene unfold. The voices reduced to whispers and then to silence. All dancing subsided.
The boy lay motionless on the bed, his neck slumped forward all the way so his chin touched his chest. His eyelids looked swollen and dark, the skin beneath them bunched into raised bags as purple as plums. The shade stood in glaring contrast to the pale skin of his cheeks. Ray didn’t know who did the makeup, but he found it convincing and quite striking.
They wheeled out to center stage and turned the bed so the slouched boy faced the audience. His head shimmied along with the bed’s final rotation, revealing how limp the child’s muscles were.
The men who’d helped with the move walked back down the ramp and disappeared once more into that gashed spot in the canvas.
This was it. Just Ray, Phyllis and the unconscious child remained on stage, and any opportunity to back out of this had passed.
“What do we have here?” Ray said.
“This is Sam,” Phyllis said. “He turns nine in September. He’s been in a coma for months – just over seven months.”
She’d stumbled there but caught herself. His only note to her going in was to be specific. “Seven months” has a lot more authenticity than the vaguer “months.”
“I see. And is this your boy?”
She shook her head, smiling that sad smile.
“I’ve been taking of care of him, but his parents are… they’re……”
“His parents didn’t make it.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you know how this happened? Any medical explanation you can give?”
“I’ve consulted multiple doctors, and they couldn’t tell me much in terms of what might have caused his condition.”
“What about brain function? Sometimes in a coma, the body is still alive, but the brain isn’t.”
“Without access to all of the equipment, we just don’t know. But the doctors all told me that he’s very unlikely to ever walk or talk again.”
Ray nodded and let the silence linger again. The atmosphere struck him as graver than last time, which made sense. A coma with no end in sight was a more dire fate than a wheelchair. He knew he needed to play up the hopelessness a bit.
He turned to the audience.
“This kind of things is… I… I don’t know if this will work, but I’d like to try. This will require a great deal of concentration to stand a chance, and I’d ask for silence if you would. Like I said last time, pray along if you’d like. Way I see it, it can only help.”
Phyllis stepped back, standing off to the far side of the stage with the musicians.
Ray kneeled next to the bed, his head bowed in reverence. He remained motionless in that position for a long time, just discerning the rise and fall of the boy’s chest along the edge of his vision.
Finally he lifted his head, and his left hand drifted to the child’s forehead in slow motion. His fingers cupped the temple and the edge of his brow, and the curved front of the skull nestled into his palm. He pushed the head back, lifting the chin from where it rested on the chest and settling the boy back into the pillow.
With his hand still attached to the forehead, Ray leaned back like he did last time. He faced the ceiling, his eyes closed. A deep breath filled his lungs in slow motion,
once more inflating his torso, seeming to lift him off the floor.
He froze at the crest, at that moment when it felt like his lungs may be about to burst. He held it, ribcage quivering just a touch, and then he released.
His head sank as the air rushed out of him, and he let his hand slip from the boy’s forehead and tumble to his side as limp as a falling power line. He stayed hunched over, breath puffing in and out of him.
In slow motion, he lifted his eyes to look at the sick child who remained totally still. He grimaced, and then he put his hand on the metal handle on the side of the bed. The people in the audience probably couldn’t hear the sound of his ring tapping that round piece of steel, Ray figured, but the kid did. That was the signal.
The boy’s eyes snapped open. He stared straight ahead for a long moment, and then he blinked a few times.
The crowd gasped all together, that frightened scraping sound of air sucked in too quickly times a thousand. Ray had to fight off a smile. Whispers followed the gasp, hushed, exasperated sounds.
The child’s eyeballs swiveled to take in his surroundings, and he cleared his throat a couple of times. His lips moved. He was about to talk. The whispers in the crowd swelled into shushes and then stopped. The preacher’s shoulders still moved as though breathing heavily, but he pantomimed it soundlessly now, not wanting to interrupt the atmosphere.
Silence rang out for a long moment before the boy spoke.
“Can I get a chocolate milkshake?”
The hush held out for a split second, and then everyone laughed. And laughed. They gurgled out that chaotic laughter only possible just after a reverent moment. It seemed out of control but still had an undertone somehow more relieving than unpleasant.
Ray stood, and he looked upon the faces. Mouths opened. Fingers smeared tears away from eyelids. Another miracle served up just as planned.
He glanced at the boy who now scratched at the back corner of his head. The only direction they’d given the boy was to say his line loud enough for everyone to hear and to pretend the audience wasn’t there. He’d nailed it, of course. They’d debated the joke quite a bit. It was Ray’s idea, and he had to insist on it. The council didn’t get it.