Through The Valley

by Yates, B. D.

  "Hiya honey," Emmit said, and smiled.

  Kelly leapt from the chair and lunged for him, pausing at the last second to avoid hurting him. She wrapped her slender arms around his bandaged midsection, lightly squeezing. Emmit wished she wouldn't have been so careful. He wanted her to break his ribs.

  "You stupid, stupid fuck," she said through sobs, holding his stubbled face in her hands. "What the fuck were you thinking? What the absolute fuck were you thinking?"

  She kissed him again and again, sometimes hitting his mouth and sometimes landing wide. He slid his hands under her arms and up over her shoulder blades, pulling her to him. Showing her he wasn't as fragile as he appeared to be.

  "I was thinking..." he began, pausing to search for the words. Even with his memory restored, his brain was still a sack full of cats. It was like he had lived another lifetime in the span of one day. "I was thinking, I had no options left—"

  "No options left?" Kelly demanded, her cheeks flushing, and her eyes filled with lightning that shamed the previous day's stormy show. "So you decided you would just rob a fucking bank and get shot?"

  "In my defense, getting shot wasn't really part of my plan," Emmit said, a pitiful attempt at a mood-lightening joke. Kelly did not laugh. She was waiting for an explanation that they both knew she deserved.

  "Kelly, I was out of options. You hated my neighborhood. I hated it too, but it was the only place where I could find an apartment that I could almost pay for. And even then, with COVID shutting everything down, I couldn't pay my rent. I was about to get evicted. I was using my fucking boss's truck to deliver pizzas, I didn't have a way to travel and find a decent paying job. I could apply all I wanted; I wouldn’t have been able to show up for the first day. I couldn't save enough money to even buy a clunker. And you..."

  Kelly looked hurt already, assuming his next words would be an attack leveled at her. Her lip quivered as she waited for the blow.

  "You and I weren't speaking much, and you were already fed up with me failing all the time. I knew if I asked you to give me rides to work and back, you'd just get madder and I'd see Deacon even less. And you know… all these mega corporations and billionaires getting tax cuts, the President spending more time on vacation than he did in Washington... I just felt like nobody gave a shit. Nobody cared what happened to me or my family. So I just snapped. I lost it. I had nothing left to lose, and if you wouldn't let me see Deacon..."

  Kelly's shimmering eyes fell away from his, finding the bulging lump of bandages wrapped tightly around his chest. She placed her palm against it as though she could heal him with a miraculous caress. Emmit placed his hand, trailing IV lines, on top of hers. She was healing something, even if it wasn't his physical injuries.

  "I just want what's best for him, Emmit."

  "That's all I want too, and I'll do anything. Anything."

  She laughed a little at that, grimacing at the brown bloodstains flowering his bandages.

  "I think you've demonstrated that, but if you died... Emmit, they told me you died, and the bastard cop in the hallway wouldn't let us in, and—"

  She began to cry hysterically, her words jumbling together until they became a continuous wail. Emmit pulled her closer to him, pressing their bodies together and sharing warmth. She hugged him with both arms and both legs, burying her face in his neck. Emmit could smell the clean scent from her hair, the same shampoo and conditioner he'd smelled a thousand times before when they had showered together, or when he had tantalizingly kissed his way down her flat stomach. It was a smell that reminded him of home, and he ached for the days when he knew she was his.

  Deacon stirred in the chair at the sound of his mother's sobs, then yanked his hood up and curled back into a ball. An action figure of a zombie riding a skateboard, its body poised and lively despite being rotted almost to the bone, tumbled out of his backpack and clattered onto the floor. Emmit stared at its grinning face for a long time as Kelly cried it out, soaking his hospital gown with hot tears.

  "So this is what I gotta do to make you miss me," he said sarcastically. "Take a bullet while committing armed robbery?"

  "I should shoot you myself, but then... then I'd miss you more than I already do," she replied, and then leaned in to kiss him again. This time she didn't stop, and neither did Emmit.

  For that night, there was no impending trial, no threat of imprisonment, no more worries about death or Deacon Mills finding himself caught in the cruel limbo of a hostile divorce. Emmit and Kelly Mills settled their differences in the best way possible, and as Emmit helped her out of her jeans, he only had two things to be worried about: Deacon waking up, and his elevated heart rate alerting the nurse.

  Chapter 14: Through the Valley

  Emmit had been throughly terrified as he was wheeled into the courtroom and parked behind the shiny wooden table, staring up at the mile high bench and the bulldog of a judge who sat behind it. After six months of healing and physical therapy, he had been more than capable of walking. But his court appointed lawyer (who was a lanky and somehow mortician-like man named Danforth Bentley) had suggested the wheelchair, to maybe inspire sympathy from the jury. The presiding judge, however, the honorable William Hughes Newland III, was not known for his mercy.

  Judge Newland had looked like a gargoyle hovering behind the bench, his snow-white hair slicked back into a Dracula style hairdo and his black robes stretched over a hunched back and broad shoulders. His eyebrows, permanently stuck in an expression of angry concentration, were bushy and busy having private parties separate from one another. His eyes were coal black, and as they had peered over the various documents laid before him, his jowls had swung and jiggled with the bird-like movements of his head, threatening to make Emmit giggle despite his nervousness. When he felt like he couldn't control it, he had forced himself to think of the time he had spent on the other side. Any hint of a smile immediately died on his lips.

  I have literally fought the living dead, Emmit had thought to himself, pouring a glass of water he didn't want and fidgeting with his glasses. I have killed people who were going to eat me. Why should I be afraid of this old man?

  But the first time the gavel had rapped against its wooden block, echoing across the socially distanced and safely masked courtroom, Emmit had jumped off of the wheelchair seat like a frog on a hot plate.

  He had sat quietly with his hands folded over a blank legal pad and a pen, watching the lady prosecutor storming back and forth like a caged animal. Her red hair flew, and her smart little heels clicked and clacked. He had never cared to remember her name after listening to her describe him as an out-of-control bank robber with an itchy trigger finger. Mr. Bentley had laughed and smirked at her ridiculous character judgments, putting on a nice show for Judge Newland.

  Hank O' Brien, the overzealous security guard who had shot Emmit, had taken the stand first. Although he kept his beady eyes trained on Emmit with every word he said, he testified honestly; although he had decided to use lethal force, he had never actually seen the gun. He claimed he had believed whole-heartedly that Emmit was moving to draw on him and had fired in self-defense. Even to Emmit, it didn’t sound unreasonable.

  Betsy Shaw, the traumatized bank teller, had also been called to testify against him. To Emmit's shock, she had seemed to be on his side. Of course she had cried, destroying her makeup once again, but she told the disinterested-looking jury that Emmit had seemed just as terrified as she was, and that she, too, never saw a gun. Emmit had been carrying, but technically, he had never pointed it at anyone at all.

  The EMS team of James Bopp and Kate Jaques, who had responded to the crime scene (and ultimately saved Emmit from his sentence in Hell), both testified that they had been the ones to remove the gun from Emmit's waist band. James Bopp had still seemed as shaky as he had been in the ambulance as he approached the witness both, but he was loosened as he told the irate prosecutor that he had inspected the gun personally and found it to be unloaded, the bullets themselves stashed in
one of Emmit’s cargo short pockets. Dan Bentley, who had spent most of the trial drumming on his briefcase with a pencil and pen, tapped out a quick drumroll and leaned over to whisper in Emmit's ear.

  "Their witnesses did more for us than they did for them," he said pridefully, nudging Emmit's arm and winking as if sharing a juicy secret.

  When Judge Newland had called for all to rise for the jury to read their verdict, Dan had stood and rested his hand on Emmit's shoulder to make sure his wheelchair gimmick stayed afloat. Emmit had clenched his hands together in his lap and closed his eyes, waiting for them to decide his fate. Again, he had felt like he was caught in a time warp where the clock moved so slowly that it was almost rotating backwards. In the end, he had been found guilty of three crimes— disturbing the peace, attempted robbery, and unlawful possession of a firearm.

  Now, sitting at the table in the tidy, sun-filled kitchen of Kelly's apartment (and, as he was still reminding himself, his apartment) Emmit sipped a steaming mug of coffee and scratched the itching flesh around his ankle monitor. House arrest really wasn't such a bad punishment, Emmit thought, given what he had done. He could still hear Judge Newland's stern voice booming down at him.

  "While I don't condone your decision," he had said, his rat's nest eyebrows lowering, "I can't say that I don't understand it. Desperate times make desperate people. It hasn't escaped me that you have an exemplary record, and from what I've heard from the witnesses’ testimony, you were a... reluctant bank robber. Considering that sentiment, and given the suffering that resulted from your actions, I hereby sentence you to one year of house arrest and two years’ probation. While serving your sentence you are ordered to wear an ankle monitor at all times."

  He had slammed the gavel down and then added, "Sort your life out, son. I wish you the best."

  Emmit was allowed to apply for jobs, and he had even been granted the privilege of traveling to and from work if he got one— but strictly nowhere else. It was, after all, his punishment. Emmit took it gladly. Truthfully, after the atrocities he'd seen in Hell and the butchery he had been forced to commit himself, there was nowhere else he wanted to go anyway.

  He had just finished filling out an online application for the Precision Cut steel mill on the outskirts of town when he heard Kelly's keys jostling against the apartment door. She came in carrying a plastic shopping bag, which she held up proudly for Emmit to inspect.

  "Vegetarian sausage and some black bean burgers for you," she said, beaming. In the months since leaving the hospital, Emmit had become a vegetarian. Kelly had understood the decision once he’d finally opened up to her about Pup and the "Providers".

  This morning had been their new typical. Deacon had had another emotional meltdown because he didn't want to leave his father again, not even to go to school. Emmit had finally convinced him to go by promising bloody video game battles and a scary movie before bed, ignoring the disapproving stare his wife was shooting at him. It killed him that he couldn't be the one to drive his boy to the front walk of the elementary school and walk him to class hand-in-hand, but for now, that was one of the prices he had to pay. He was grateful just to be alive and sharing his new life with the family he’d almost lost.

  "So," Kelly said, pouring herself a cup of black coffee and sliding into the chair next to him, "I've been listening to some podcasts about N.D.E's, and I think that's what you had. Although no one I've heard so far has told me a story like yours."

  Emmit snorted.

  "You don't say."

  She narrowed her eyes at him over her mug.

  "I'm just trying to understand what happened to you, it's... it's scary, Emmit. You really think you went to Hell?"

  He shrugged, digging at his ankle again and feeling unease eating away at his morning appetite. He had found it therapeutic to tell someone his story, but now that it was told, he was finding it increasingly difficult to relive it again and again. Sometime soon, he planned to ask Kelly to never mention it again. The recurring night terrors would ensure he never forgot it, but he could control their daytime conversations, to a certain extent, anyway.

  "I died doing a bad thing, Kel. Maybe it's not the Hell of the Bible, but it definitely was not a place I ever want to visit again. Roy… I think he was like, an anomaly. I think you're supposed to be lost there, scared and freezing and suffering, until those things come to claim you. Claim your soul. But Roy was different, he was smart enough to make a life there. A glitch in the design, I guess. It seems that God isn't so perfect after all."

  "Roy," she said, shivering at the mention of his name. It was a short and simple moniker, much like the man’s brutal mindset had been. When Emmit had told her the story, describing the hulking murderer with his black handprint for a face, she had thought Roy was the scariest of them all. Even scarier than the dead things or Poke. "These people, you actually think they were real? Even the ones you—"

  Emmit waved his hand, slicing her words off mid-sentence.

  "I don't want to think about what I had to do. It bothers me how badly I wanted to... hurt them. But yes; Roy, Poke, Muddy... The Rev, Pup. I think they were all lost souls like me, who just got lucky enough to find a safe place. If you could call it that."

  Kelly looked thoughtful for a moment, then gestured to Emmit's phone lying on the table.

  "Let's find out then. Maybe if you search for their names or obituaries, and add in some keywords, you might be able to find out if they really were real."

  Emmit was stupefied. Why hadn't he thought of that? He had expected Kelly to at least doubt the validity of his claim, he was still struggling to believe it. But now he might have a way to back it up. He wasn’t completely sure he wanted concrete proof. Sometimes, late at night when the dreams woke him and he found himself bawling and clutching Kelly like a life preserver, he could still lie to himself that it had all been a hallucination brought on by his trauma.

  He opened his phone's web browser and typed "Roy Hitman Death", then pressed GO.

  It took some scrolling to get past the initial listings of irrelevant articles, most of them pertaining to some video game he'd never heard of and a few others linking to scenes from mob movies. He'd all but given up when he finally saw something promising:

  Alleged Hitman Royce "Roy" Shirk Killed In...

  Emmit clicked the link and was redirected to the website of a small newspaper in Tampa Bay, Florida. He turned the phone around to show Kelly what he'd found, and the color drained from her face. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end as he read it out loud in a papery voice.

  "Alleged hitman Royce "Roy" Shirk killed in explosion," he read. "Roy Shirk, the man accused of being the notorious contract killer known as 'The Shark', was killed late Saturday night when an improvised explosive device detonated beneath a vehicle near the intersection of Drayton Street and Grant Avenue. Tampa Bay Police refused comment, citing the defamation lawsuit Shirk and his associates had filed following his arrest in 1996 for the murder of casino mogul Patrick 'Patches' Thiel. An anonymous source told this reporter that Shirk's body had been found beneath the vehicle, and that Shirk may have been arming the vehicle to explode when it detonated too soon. Royce Shirk was never convicted of any crimes, although the evidence presented against him was compelling."

  Kelly looked like she was going to be sick. There was no photo, but something told him he had found his man.

  "It goes on to talk a little about who he was," Emmit said, dragging his finger up the screen and scanning the rest of the article. "It says he had a master's degree in engineering. See? I told you he was smart."

  "And you're sure that's him?" Kelly asked, her face hopeful that maybe Emmit was wrong. He shrugged.

  "I can't be sure, but it sounds pretty damn similar. He never told me anything about himself, but I think a homicidal engineer would be the sort of person to figure out how to build a cabin and weapons from nothing but wood, rocks and old clothes."

  Emmit felt a sudden heaviness in his heart, hit
the "back" button a few times, and tapped the blank search bar.

  "I'm gonna see if I can find Tim," he said, and typed "Reverend Tim Barnette killed". This time, the search results were much easier to navigate. The article he found even had a picture of the Rev attached to it, and seeing his handsome smile again tore all the fresh scabs open. However brief his relationship with Tim had been, Emmit had considered him a good friend, almost like an army buddy, their bond forged in battle. Watching him die, suffering what now seemed to be his second death, was a mind scar he would never forget.

  "Found him," Emmit said somberly. Kelly looked terrified, as if she had been dreading any more evidence that his journey through Hell had actually happened. If Emmit had just been experiencing his brain shutting down, firing on all cylinders as it fought for oxygen, what were the odds of him knowing the identities of two other people he'd never met, also dead, whom he was able to locate in real life? It had suddenly become very real to her, and as she tried to place her cooling coffee mug back on the table Emmit could hear her shaking hands rattling it against the tabletop.

  He showed her the article, the headline of which read:

  Disgraced Reverend Timothy Gene Barnette Killed In Car Accident

  "Jesus, Emmit," Kelly said anxiously, her hand covering her mouth. "You told me he was a drunk driver, you knew that."

  "Because I met him, babe," he said, and began to read the second article.

  "The Reverend Timothy Gene Barnette, who was excommunicated from his congregation two years ago following a drunk driving incident, died Tuesday in a second automobile accident. Barnette served a 16-month sentence in Mansfield Penitentiary following an accident in which he failed to stop at an intersection, striking a vehicle driven by 38-year-old Stephanie Corcoran, who survived. Her daughters, 3-year-old Stacia Corcoran and 5-year-old Kimberly Corcoran, were pronounced dead at the scene. Tuesday night, Barnette was heading south on U.S. 23 when his vehicle left the road and crashed through the guard rail. His vehicle was found by highway patrolmen, partially submerged in a small pond. Barnette was pronounced dead at the scene. Toxicology reports indicate that Barnette's blood alcohol content registered as .16."