Sociopath

by Victor Methos

  I saw Jon Junior. He was coming home from work and his wife was there and she was drunk again. He was upset and they were yelling at each other. Then without provocation he reached back and slapped her hard across the face.

  The slap felt like it had hit me, and was so pronounced I woke up. I was lying on the forest floor. The moon had shifted and was somewhere near me and the light was coming down and speckling the trees with white spots.

  I sat up. My boys … my boys. I had abandoned them, neglected them. I’d left them to the whims of their mother and her new husband without considering what it would do to them. I told myself it was for their own good, that she was a better mother than I was a father. But it wasn’t true. The boys had bonded to me early. They would never recover from this. From the headlines they would read online about the ex-Homicide detective who had been found dead in a random forest, without ever having said goodbye to anyone.

  My boys needed me as I had needed my father. He had never been there and I had chosen a path in my life that I wasn’t sure I would have chosen had he been there. Had I chosen this life just out of spite? Did I know that nothing would drive an aristocratic intellect more crazy than a son who worked a blue collar job? I hoped that wasn’t it. But I couldn’t be sure.

  I pulled myself to my feet. I would live. Or at least try to.

  Walking until my feet were so bloodied and achy that I had to sit down, I saw the canopy thinning out and could see more now in the light of the moon. The soles of my feet were black, as the blood made everything on the forest floor stick to them like glue. I tried to pick off some of the pebbles and twigs as best I could.

  As I rose, I saw what looked like an indentation. I walked to it and looked down. It was a trap of some sort. Dug maybe five feet down. Or maybe it was a natural phenomenon? But I didn’t think so. It looked like a pit meant to catch a bear or wolf or deer. It was manmade.

  I glanced around at the tall trees and then to the pit again.

  Working quickly, I began ripping down branches and laying them across the hole. It took four to cover it. Then I took dirt and leaves and spread them across the branches until it was difficult to tell it apart from the ground. I glanced back and then forward again. My head was spinning and the shirt wrapped around my arm had been completely soaked through. I was bleeding to death.

  I walked around the hole and lay down on my side, and waited.

  2

  Looking out into the darkness, all I heard was my own breath, though the sounds of the forest were loud. They quieted a little farther out and I knew that meant something large was moving through that area.

  My eyes were open from fear and anticipation and I tried to control my breathing. I could hear it clearly now, the soft sound of leaves crunching. Maybe twenty feet out and coming closer with each step. I was trying to tell if it was large enough to be him or if it was just some forest animal, but I had no frame of reference.

  The soft crunching was near. Maybe ten feet behind me. I closed my eyes, convinced that I could hear better that way, and heard the footsteps stop a moment. They were deciding whether to keep moving forward.

  They started again and I heard an unmistakable click: an arrow locking into place. Maybe five feet now. He wanted to see if I was dead or he had something to say to me. Some last jab before he took my life. Or he wanted to see me scream. He wanted the screams so badly that he was reckless.

  A few more steps and then….

  A surprised shriek and the tornado of branches breaking as he fell through into the hole. I twisted around in time to see his hand grab my leg for something to hold on to. The force pulled me down and I clawed at the ground with my fingers but they slipped through the soft dirt like air and I fell hard onto my back.

  He was in front of me now and didn’t have the crossbow. He ran up and with a grunt kicked my face and sent my head flying back. He tried again and I caught his foot and twisted it enough to cause pain and he pulled it away.

  I got to my feet and saw him put his hands up in a boxing stance. He came at me with a jab that connected to my nose, and then jabbed again. He was too fast for me to see and he connected with at least five other blows before I kicked into his knee and slowed him down.

  “How’s the arm?” he said with a chuckle.

  He flew at me and kicked into my groin and came up with an uppercut as I dipped down. It sent me back but he didn’t stop. He hooked me so hard in the jaw I felt bits of teeth loosen in my mouth. Then he did it again and sent me sprawling onto my back. He was younger and faster.

  My vision spinning, my arm feeling like it was about to be ripped away from my body, I saw the shadow stand over me. He seemed monstrously tall and he reached down from that height and struck me again in the face. Then he bent down.

  “I have to say, if nothing else you’ve entertained me quite a bit.” He sat down in the dirt. “You want to know something? Something funny? You were expecting to find the devil, weren’t you? Well, I’m not the devil. I had a normal childhood, I had parents that loved me, I was never deprived of anything. And still, the first time I wanted to kill someone I was four years old. It’s just something that’s part of me. How do you expect to stop that, if it’s just a part of people?”

  “I have something for you,” I said, feeling bits of teeth in my mouth with my tongue. I spat them out.

  “Oh, yeah? Some great insight, huh? Well, Detective, let me hear it. What do you have for me?”

  I swung my arm with all the strength I had left. The arrow tip sticking out of my forearm latched into his eye and he screamed. As he instinctively jerked away the barbed tip tore out the eyeball and some of the stalk it was connected to.

  He screamed so loud it was deafening. He fell to his back and rolled over in pain, his hands covering half his face like that would bring the eye back. I crawled over to him. He hit me in the face and I nearly blacked out. I fell on top of him and he was writhing so badly he didn’t even notice.

  He grabbed my throat with both hands. Anger was making him froth at the mouth and he was grinding his teeth loud enough to hear. I lifted my arm and swung down. He let go of my throat and caught my arm with one of his hands.

  Putting all my weight into it, I pressed toward his throat, but he was much stronger. He was pushing me off. I lifted my other hand and thrust my fingers in his eye socket. I grabbed something slippery and soft and pulled as hard as I could until it ripped.

  He screeched and let go of my arm and tried to get to his back. The arrow in my arm, the eyeball still attached, entered the side of his neck. I don’t know how far it went because the pain was so intense I vomited. I only heard movement as he grabbed the rock and bashed it into my head. I was awake only long enough to look at the sky one more time before blackness overtook me.

  EPILOGUE

  Emma Smith was on the beach in a lounge chair watching some surfers when she got the call. She had never come out to watch surfers before and wondered if she did it now because she missed him. It’d only been a few days, but she missed him and she hated herself for it.

  The sun was reflecting off the cell phone in a way that she couldn’t see the caller and she didn’t care to. She knew who it was. She had known the moment Jon had flown to the mainland chasing ghosts of dead friends.

  Reluctantly, she answered it.

  “This is Emma Smith.”

  “Ms. Smith? This is Sheriff Wendy Cannon at the Heber Sheriff’s Office. I have some bad news….”

  The flight was a long one and she tried to sleep and then tried reading and finally two shots of vodka with orange juice calmed her enough that she slept the final hour. A promise had been made to him that she wouldn’t drink, that she would respect his Mormon beliefs, but he wasn’t here now and she sure as hell didn’t agree that she would refrain under this kind of stress.

  It was a simple matter to rent a car and drive from the airport to the hospital but it took her nearly two hours. The canyons were ominous in the fading daylight and the forest
closed in around the little road like a hand closing around a stick.

  The GPS led her directly to the hospital without issue and she parked in the ER parking though he wasn’t in the ER anymore. She took the elevator up to Intensive Care and a guard, a portly policeman with a button missing on his shirt, was reading a Sports Illustrated in front of the room.

  “I’m his fiancé,” she said.

  The officer let her in with a quick check of identification and she pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed. He was on a ventilator and the low rhythmic rasp made her uncomfortable. The intubation tube running down his throat was clear but it stretched his skin in an odd way and made it look like plastic. In fact, his entire face looked surreal, like a mask that had been placed on a skull and then painted over.

  She stayed well into the night, until the nurse came and offered to let her sleep in the room next door. She declined and stayed there. At one point, at around three in the morning, she couldn’t sleep from bad dreams and so she took out her iPhone and opened the Kindle app and read Les Misérables out loud. It was his favorite book.

  By six in the morning she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer and she took up the nurse’s offer to sleep in the next room. All the noise of a hospital was there, including the patients moaning about the pain they were in and the doctors and nurses talking about how annoying they were behind their backs. This was all taken in by her on an unconscious level, absorbing bits and pieces of a conversation here and there when she was woken by too much noise.

  The rest of the days were not much better. The hospital food was atrocious and she would walk the streets of the town and try every diner and restaurant and dive bar there was. Anything but the hospital cafeteria.

  Days turned into weeks and the doctors began telling her that the chances of a comatose patient awakening after forty-eight hours were slim. It was an exponential decline, one of the doctors said. Each day increased the odds that he wouldn’t wake up the next day.

  He had suffered a severe head trauma and skull fracture. The musculature of his left forearm had been torn away so violently they had to perform reconstructive surgery on the muscles and tendons connected to his ulna. He had lost so much blood they’d pumped it into him that first day and his body had drunk it like an endless pit.

  But she didn’t leave his side. She stayed there every day and read to him and fixed his hair and clipped his nails and helped the nurse with a sponge bath once a week. She’d never believed in a God and found she didn’t have a tongue for praying, but she knew how important it was to him. So she took out the Bible or the Book of Mormon and read passages to him at night in a quiet voice.

  And one day, as she was reading in Matthew about Chirst resisting Satan in the wilderness, he talked back.

  *****

  Jon Stanton wrestled with a shadow. For a moment he was terrified that it wasn’t real, that it was all in his mind and that chilling instant he had been dreading his entire life was here: when the mask of sanity slipped off and madness revealed itself.

  The shadow caused pain and he remembered the taste of blood in his mouth and didn’t know if it was his or not. He remembered darkness, like a long hallway with a mirror at the front, and he caught a glimpse of himself.

  The hallway was dark on both sides and it filled him with dread. He was on a path and it seemed like maybe it led somewhere but he wasn’t sure as he walked it. His stomach in knots, a general uneasiness came over him. The darkness around him wasn’t comforting and there were no lights but he knew he needed to keep walking.

  He heard a voice behind him and stopped. He turned to it. Monotone, like it was reading something, sweet with a tinge of pain to it. It sounded vaguely familiar and he shouted for it but no words came out of his mouth. He ran toward it and came to a place where the tunnel ended and dim light was coming through. He looked back to the tunnel and didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t pleasant but what was out there was even more terrifying.

  He heard the voice again, and then a new one: it was his son.

  Looking back one more time, he walked into the dim light and then remembered hazy outlines of people in front of him. A nurse, though he didn’t know her name. His sons were sitting next to the bed, their mother out in the hallway speaking to the doctor as Emma sat in a chair and read to him, the boys listening intently but staring at the floor.

  His voice, cracking and weak, he quietly said, “And angels came and attended to him.”

  His son Matthew was the first to touch him. It hurt in a way touching had not hurt before and he felt nauseated. Emma sensed his pain and gently pulled Matthew away, but Jon Junior gave his father a hug. Emma reached down and held his hand, a weary, melancholy smile coming over her face.

  *****

  Later that night, Stanton was alone with his ex Melissa as a physical therapist was stretching his limbs. Tendons shrink during inactivity and many coma patients would curl into the fetal position as their limbs shriveled around them.

  “I want the boys,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s very important to me, Mel. I can give them a good life. It doesn’t have to be permanent, but I want them for a while. They’ll have a lot of fun on the island.”

  She glanced out the window in the despondent way she always would when she had to do something she didn’t really want to do. “We’ll talk about it,” she said. “You nearly got killed. I don’t know if I can expose them to that. That … whatever it is that you have. It’s not a gift, Jon. And everyone around you is exposed to death because of it. That’s why I left. That’s why she’ll leave you too.”

  The words stung and as Emma came back later after Melissa left, Stanton knew it was true.

  They sat quietly a long time and Stanton listened to the hiss of the bed next to his adjusting behind a curtain. A man had been brought in that wasn’t there before and he couldn’t remember when that had occurred.

  Finally he asked, “What happened to him?”

  “Car accident I think.”

  “No, not him.”

  “Oh. He was dead on arrival due to blood loss,” she said.

  That was the extent of their conversation and all Stanton could think to say to her. Both of them had a sense of what was coming but neither wanted to articulate it. It was an awareness that destiny had played its hand, that no matter how much they wanted to stay together and grow old together, it was impossible now.

  “You should leave,” he said.

  “Leave the hospital?”

  “No, Emma. You should leave.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, standing and adjusting his sheets.

  “You won’t leave now, or this year or maybe two years, but you’ll leave. You’ve already made up your mind. You think it’s inappropriate to leave now because I was injured, but you’ll leave. Please just do it now. I can’t stand to watch you slowly withdraw from me.”

  Tears filled her eyes and she continued adjusting his sheets though they didn’t need it. When she was done she held his hand and bent down and kissed him and then turned and walked out of the room.

  *****

  As the physical therapy brought strength back to him, Stanton would spend his days walking the halls in a slow gait that reminded him of the old Frankenstein movies he watched as a kid. He met an elderly neurologist in the bed next to him. His name was Herb and he was recovering from a broken hip caused by an automobile accident. They spent time together every day watching the History Channel or Discovery Science.

  Stanton was in his room as they watched an old science-fiction TV show on a cable station. He stared blankly at the screen and wasn’t engaged in the movie at all, but he liked the flickering pictures. It was movement. Something about the movement comforted him and he didn’t know what.

  “I couldn’t help but overhear the other day,” Herb said. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For her. It’s one thing when they leave or you leave, but it’s something
else when you both just know it’s over and it’s nobody’s fault. That happened to me and my wife. You know what that saint of a woman did? She stayed with me. She didn’t love me, she knew it was over, and she stayed with me because she didn’t want to hurt me. She would rather spend her life in a loveless marriage than hurt me. I wish I’d had the guts to do what you did. I think if I truly loved her and I wasn’t a coward, that’s what I would have done.”

  “I don’t feel much like a hero right now.”

  “When heroes do something heroic I bet they don’t either.” He looked to Stanton. “If you really want her though, when you get out from this bed you’ll go after her and try and make it work.”

  *****

  Stanton was in his room preparing to leave on one of his walks when he saw a man in a black suit and dark tie enter. Kyle Vidal looked like he stepped out of a television show and his skin was tan and smooth. He smiled as he shook Stanton’s hand and sat down in the chair near the window where Emma had sat all those weeks.

  “I came and checked up on you when I was out here for Melissa’s funeral,” he said. “It was odd seeing you that way.”

  “Wasn’t much more pleasant from my end,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and using a cane for balance.

  “How’s the recovery?”

  “It’s good. They think I should be out of here in the next few days.”

  “You going back to Honolulu?”

  “I am.”

  He glanced out the window. It was dawn and a frosty mist hung over the city and gave the trees a damp look that made him think of Virginia. “I’m sorry as hell this happened.”

  “You lost two agents, Kyle. They took the brunt of this.”

  He nodded. “David told me once you were the best detective he’d ever seen. He said he bugged you constantly about applying to the Bureau.”