by mike Evans
“Oh my god, leave. Please leave now. Please leave now! Tell them I need some bandages for my ears, I’m quite confident that they are bleeding.”
Two doctors came back, Aslin and Clary, both looking like they’d been racing others to get there first. Jack looked at them a bit strange when they bum-rushed the door. Melinda came in a minute later, resuming her place by the side of the bed. “I told you I wouldn’t be gone for long. I was sure there wouldn’t be a big issue finding someone that wanted to take a look at you.”
“Nice being a celebrity, huh?” he quipped.
She smiled and the two doctors held out their hands to lift him, but saw that the restraints they’d had on him were making that impossible. Doctor Clary said, “So, you are confident that you are stable? You aren’t going to have another one of your episodes, Mr. Gray?”
“You can call me Jack, and I’d say you guys must’ve given me some good shit, because I can’t remember any of my special episodes. Am I going to be back to a hundred percent or not? It would seem that I still have someone left to go after.”
Dr. Aslin whispered aloud, not actually meaning to. “Mother fucker gets out of an induced coma only to wake up, find out he’s okay, and wants to go right back to hunting that son of a bitch. You realize you’re like the thing of movies, right?”
Jack shrugged, not caring. Clary reached in, undoing his wrist restraints. He said, “Yeah, you’re going to be okay. You might need a cane for a bit while things heal; we had to repair part of your abdomen. The Stranger buried that knife blade until it hit the handle. He missed all of your major arteries though.”
“Yeah, I think he was in a rush. Things hadn’t gone the way he’d wanted that night. I don’t think that he was even in that diner to kill people. I got a feeling something made him snap. He’d been good for a while, but I don’t think that it takes much to make someone thirsty for a kill ready to do it again.”
The two doctors smiled nervously at each other. Aslin pushed him forward murmuring, “Do it, do it, now.”
Jack held up his hands, ready to knock one of them out if they were there to harm him for any reason. He’d seen people who glamorized the killers he’d chased and had never understood it himself, but there were a lot of fucked up people in the world and he’d come to terms very early in his career with that.
Clary cleared his throat and held up his hands, trying to get Jack to calm down. Both of them together probably weighed as much as Jack on his own. The last thing they wanted was to have to be admitted to the hospital themselves for freaking out a patient. “Nothing to be alarmed about.”
Melinda snorted nervously, worried for both of the doctors health.
“You see, we have a friend that works at Lionsgate, and we have been getting like ten calls a day,” Clary continued.
Aslin interrupted. “Asshole never calls us unless he needs something.”
“Shut up, please, Dr. Aslin. Anyways, he wants ten minutes of your time once you are up and moving around.”
“For what?”
“For what?” Aslin said, laughing. “For your story. You realize you’re like, one of two people who have seen him and not become a victim, and I am confident in my figures. You wouldn’t ever have to work again. You’d be loaded, and we wouldn’t take more than a twenty percent finder's fee. He pitched it as a-”
“Get out,” Jack snapped.
“I don’t think you understand, sir. We could change your life.”
“It was changed when my wife was murdered in front of me. It was changed when that bastard went on a killing spree that I couldn’t stop and still haven't. It was changed when I was stabbed and threw myself out of a second story window; and yes, that hurt quite a lot, thank you for not asking. And now you are trying to change it again? The last fucking thing that I want in my life is to get to relive all the details in my life, so some Hollywood douchebag can do his best to try to recreate it. I don’t need a personal memory recorded on DVD and Blu-ray, do you understand me?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sure this wasn’t the best time to bring something like this to you. But every asshole in here knows someone in the movie business, and they always want the next big story. We wanted to make sure that-” Aslin made the mistake of leaning into his reach, which was pretty much anywhere within three feet of his bed, because his arms were not only massively large, but his reach was long too. He got a hand on Aslin, pulling him forward, off balance and onto his bed.
“Unless these two want to be patients here long term, you might do best to go get me a doctor, Melinda, with no Hollywood ties. I’m sure there’s one or two. I know we are in California, but some people might be doing their jobs for the love of it and the huge salaries.”
Melinda smiled, getting back up. She slapped his hand to get him to let go of Aslin, whose legs were flailing in the air, and looked down at the floor a little embarrassed, shaking her head. “I guess we are going to need someone to come in here and mop that up; looks like someone had a little pee-pee accident.”
Aslin’s face went five different shades of red and the two doctors sprinted out of the room, never happier to leave somewhere in their lives.
***
Dr. Scott Peters walked into the room, knocking lightly. Jack looked up and Melinda smiled. “Oh, Scott, I’m so glad that you were able to make it. What a surprise that you stopped by,” she said.
“You called me and let me know the minute that he was awake. I told you that I was coming,” Scott responded.
“Would you look at my coffee cup! I need to get out of here and get a refill. I’m sure you two boys are going to find something that you can talk about. I’m sure that there are all kinds of things that you need to discuss and not have me here for.”
“I really don’t mind if you stay,” Scott said.
Jack looked to her, shaking his head. “You aren’t even close to being good at faking it Melinda. You go get me some coffee too. Don’t tell the nurses.”
“I’ll get you a Gatorade, you could use the electrolytes.”
“I could use a fucking beer, waking up to all of this news.”
Scott said, “Sorry, what does a beer mean?”
“I know it means that nothing is going to get better, but I haven’t had a cold one in at least three weeks.”
“Well, you can go ahead and add a few more days to that, buddy, because there’s no way in hell you are going to get one while you are a patient of this hospital.”
Jack said, “You want me to check myself out right now? Because I can.”
“Yeah, and then three feet outside the doors, you are going to fall on your ass and they are going to need six guys to lift your stubborn ass up and get you back into your bed. If you’d listen to what the people around here are telling you to do, then you’d probably get better a lot quicker. I mean, isn’t that what you want?”
“You know, so far my best medical advice has been to sign movie rights, immediately. As far as what I want, I used to only want that piece of shit drug dealer Lund dead.”
“But now what do you want?” Scott questioned.
Jack ran his hands through his hair, looking around the hospital room, and all he could see was himself walking over the dead bodies of Lund and Hardin. “I’d love to wrap my hands around Hardin’s neck. But you know the funny thing, Scott?”
“What is that? Will I actually find it funny?”
“Probably not. But if I had the chance to let him live so that I could stick him in prison with Lund, I would, and I’d let him do the absolute most horrible things that he could think of while he was in there. I mean the worst things. Maybe if I let him know what he’d done to get in there, some of the horrible things he did, maybe Hardin would take pity on me and regret what he’s done, so that he could go to kill him. He’d be the scariest son of a bitch in the prison.”
“Yeah, I think he’d probably be safe for a good amount of time.”
“Is it wrong to still want revenge this long after her death?
” Jack questioned.
“It doesn’t get easier for everyone. It isn’t a done deal just because she’s gone. You don’t get better; you don't always heal. Sometimes a person just stays fucked up. I know that isn’t what you want to hear, but any good doctor is not going to sugar coat it.”
“No, that isn’t what I wanted to hear, but it is something that I needed to hear, because it is the truth. Let the truth set you free, right?”
“You are going to be fine. It is going to take you a while to heal, and not just physically. You are under a great amount of stress and you have demons in your closet. You get a desk for a while, and it isn’t going to be optional. I mean that; you take the desk. You do what you can to keep ahead of those demons. You are going to get another chance; a second chance at life.”
“Well, I think we are up to like, the third second chance, aren’t we?”
“Then I want you to make the most of it. You do what you need to. You come see me three times a week,” the doctor ordered.
“Then I need you to do one thing for me, and I mean it.”
“Shoot, Jack.”
“When the time comes, and when they realize that he didn’t die, that he went away for a while… when that time comes, I want to be put back into the cycle of agents. I’m the one who hunts him. I’m the one who is after that son of a bitch. I can’t imagine him dealing with anyone else. It isn’t fair to them.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Jack. You never do anything but your best. There’s nothing but maximum effort being put out by you.”
“Maximum effort? I think I puked a little in my mouth, Scott.”
“Fine, you make it through everything without losing your shit, and you can count on my signature on your get-off-the-desk papers. But until that time comes, you’ll be behind a desk. Do all the research that you want to; all you can.”
Chapter 6
North Woods
Three Months Later
Matt was walking around the small cabin, pacing back and forth. His dad was watching him and didn’t like what he saw. “Why don’t you go out for a hike? Maybe you can burn off some of that aggression you seem to have boiling in your insides.”
“I don’t think that it is going to do a lot, if I don’t get to wrap my hands around something.”
“You were in control for years, Matt. You need to be able to flip the switch or you aren’t going to see old age. Don’t you have anything left that you want to do?”
“You mean besides killing every single person that I see? No, I don’t have much of a bucket list. For years, the fact that I could go kill, and then use their homes as a place to go back and revisit what I’d been so fortunate to do, and get paid on top of all, that was a little slice of heaven.”
“I don’t understand why you can’t use more control.”
“Luckily, we are up here to stay off the radar for a while. Eventually, things will be cool enough for me to leave. Someone, somewhere will do something horrible and free up the world for me to enter it again. The media was only so heavy on it because no one seemed to care about anything else.”
“Could that be because literally no state was safe? You made quite the drive to get to California.”
“I had thought I had it under control that night, until I saw that god damned Leslie Bryant bringing up all of my old kills.”
“A television show was enough to set you off, Matt?”
“That, mixed with a sixteen-hour drive and a waitress who had said that I was nothing to fear.” Matt walked to the fireplace, opening a large box that held a knife he’d used for as long as he could remember, along with his mask. He lifted it out, looking at it for a moment, staring at all the speckles of blood and thinking how many people had bled on that mask. It sent shivers down his spine.
“Keep the mask put away, Matt. You are bigger than killing; there’s more to life. You might find peace living in the woods. You need to give it some time.”
Matt was trying to calm himself down, but his dad’s unaggressive manner and tone were only doing the opposite for him. “I don’t want peace and happiness daily. I want to set this fucking world on fire. It only gets worse the older I get. I don’t know what to do, but I do know it can’t be fixed. It’s normal, and I feel like I’m being suffocated because of it!”
“Then choke for a little longer, please. I’d hate to see you taken before your time. There’s still millions to kill, Matt, but you need to patient. There are more animals in these North Woods than you could imagine.”
Matt took in the small cabin feeling like its small wood frame had a pair of hands firmly placed around his neck. “You know what? Maybe I will take a walk. I’m going to take a few things with me in case I see some animals. Maybe I can find a nice deer to strangle. That might be nice.”
“Try not to ruin the sirloin, please. I love those. We need to teach you about processing an animal.”
“It isn’t that I don’t know, it’s that I don’t care, Dad. I’m not hunting for food, not ever; I’m out for blood.”
His dad picked up one of the new books that he’d gotten from Zeke and tried not to make eye contact. He didn’t want to do anything to set Matt off. He knew he was trying, but was fearful that it would not be able to be put in a box. He felt like there was a spring in the boy and that the longer it stayed coiled up, the more pressure there was placed upon it.
Matt selected a recurve bow and some arrows, and took a knife, machete, and a hammer, hooking everything but the bow to his belt. His dad tried imagining him out in the woods and almost went with him. He’d settled his beast long ago and been okay with that. He’d never wanted to stop out of guilt, but rather felt that he’d had enough kills for two lifetimes.
Matt grabbed a rain slicker on the way out and a pair of leather gloves. “See you tonight, maybe, Dad.”
“You are coming back, right?”
Matt pointed to the box. “I’d never leave that behind; it’s the most cherished thing I own.”
“All right. I’ll get some venison cooking and rice while you’re out. You look like you’ll need something to chew on, from the look in your eyes.”
Matt nodded, shutting the door, and made his way down the path. He took his time, knowing that was all that he had.
Chapter 7
Washington, Same Day
Paradise Inn Hotel
Tim sat in the hotel room, drinking a cup of coffee and staring impatiently at his girlfriend Shelli’s chest rising up and down slowly. He checked his phone, still not seeing a text from Jason. Tim spread the light-blocking shades open, seeing the sun just beginning to kiss the earth. He’d been looking forward to this trip for a year, pinching pennies so that they could afford to come up. The women had wanted to go shopping, but he had told them that if he could have one day of hiking, he would walk around like a little bitch for the rest of their four-day week with a happy smile on his face.
When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he sent Jason a text, punching the keys like he hated him.
Hey, asshat, are you awake yet? If we don’t get the girls up, we are going to have to piss this entire day away waiting for them to get moving. If you’re screwing, you get a pass. Hurry up though, you don’t need foreplay.
Two minutes later a text came back.
She said that if I try to wake her up again that she’s going to kick my balls into my throat. - Jason
Grow a pair. - Tim
It’s that pair that I’m worried about. - Jason
I will leave you behind. - Tim
Don’t do it man. They’re bound to wake up eventually. What does it matter if we go later in the day or in the morning? - Jason
Because then we are only going to go out hiking for a few hours. I’ve read they have some great landscapes here; if we take a lunch with us we can spend the entire day out there. There’s a spot that I’ve read about that they’ve had closed off for years. We can spark up out there without anyone giving us issues. - Tim
H
ave you woken up Shelli yet? - Jason
No, but if you wake up Joyce, then I’ll go get Shelli up right now. - Tim
I don’t believe you. - Jason
I’m going to hurt you very soon. - Tim
I hate you. - Jason
***
Jason put the phone down, walking slowly into the bedroom and crawling into bed. He put a hand around Joyce’s waist and started rubbing her stomach. She gripped his hand, seeing that it was still dark in the room, not thinking that there was any reason to get out of the bed. “No sex, just go back to sleep, honey. Maybe you can get a quickie later. I’m sleeping now, and I don’t want to get all sticky today. I’ll do it later; I know how quick you are,” she said sleepily.
