Hell's Vengeance

by Max Jager

  "We wouldn't have to have this conversation if you just listened to what I said early on. Don't get too attached." Ajax puffed. "Vicars with big hearts always become big targets. Caring too much can kill you."

  "It's what makes life worth living."

  "It's also what makes life short-lived."

  "I'd rather live a short life with my big, boring, cumbersome heart that live with whatever you have."

  "It's called logic." Ajax said. "I'm telling you what to do because I was like you, once. I know it's hard to believe because I'm a younger man, but it's the truth. I know what makes men and I know what breaks them, after all, they're the same thing."

  Darr looked at him and the forlorn expression on his face, the gaunt in his eyes and the shadows the hollow parts of his face made. Ajax looked as if sinking into himself, disappearing into a singular spot, his event horizon.

  "Those words sound loaded. You have something you want to tell me?"

  "I know what caring too much means. I wasn't born callous, I was made callous. I've seen plenty of men who thought they had that true and honest courage. But as well know, a true and honest courage is only one that has been tested and unbested. Most people don't have that." Ajax said. "Not me and I think, not in you either, no. I just want to keep your little mind safe."

  Darr felt insulted. Betrayed of his expectation of what Ajax was, he sneered and spat and denied all at once. His annoyed jerking, coughing, fidgeting ended with a dishonest laugh.

  "Well if you care about me so much, why don't you explain what all this mumbo-jumbo means. What hurt you so badly? Hmm? Or are you saving it for your date with your psychotherapy friend. How Romantic."

  "Shut the fuck up."

  The air went silent. The birds stop chirping and the wind ceased its howling and turned to whimper. Time to stopped and Darr lost track of the hour in that moment. He sat still, put his head down and waited for some kind of movement. Ajax did not move. He looked forward, into the streets and the buildings half-empty and now murmuring life like some diseased patient in the ward. There was a woman cleaning a carpet, wacking it against the wall from outside her window. There was a couple, screaming at each other. Otherwise, it was still and lifeless and Ajax carried that silence. Like Atlas, all the earth's weight in awful, awkward silence. And he carried it. Did not protest, only looked out.

  It wasn't until they heard a paramedics truck scream out that Darr finally breathed. Two cars followed the truck, they both crashed into each other. The harsh clang of metal like armored horses forced to butt into each other disturbed Darr who stood up. But they were alive, both drivers, uninjured even and he just watched, with Ajax. And he found himself more disturbed in Ajax, who stared at the angry people. He wondered if he saw something different. Darr nodded his head, annoyed, that he was even curious, for a second, at his partner's frame of mind.

  Ajax stood. He looked to Darr and said: "We're scouting tonight, every night, until we find them. Alright?"

  It was the only thing he had said all day that made any sense. Darr turned to him and in that same solemn silence, shared his answer. Yes, of course. We'll catch him.

  6:33 PM

  Jeronus

  August 1st, 2017

  6:33 PM

  Jeronus had been there when his partner, Officer Harde had been stabbed through the abdomen and sent flying to the wall and he was there to stare, to open his jaw wide and gloat his eyes upon the scene of blood coming down from the wall in streaks, bleeding bark. The plywood breaking, Jeronus breaking. His eyes falling upon the monster, a run and then darkness.

  Jeronus had been there for the bid his partner had made in the comatose room, on the bed, tranquil and steady. The son who watched from a distance, the wife who came every now and then to share her hand. He had watched the family come together and around the machinery and body. Jeronus shared some of that pain, too much he probably would have said. For it collapsed him like a star and left him dwarfed by the emotion. The son, the wife, both looking at Harde every day for the last few weeks, hoping and brushing away growing hair from atop of his head.

  Jeronus had been there for the blue comet. The bullet Darr had shot out, though, without the knowledge of the shooter, he thought it the wild gunslinging of the great almighty Himself. Just a comet from space, an act of God. The plastic donut man atop of a food shop had collapsed on the front of his car, melted plastic and melted metal mostly. It had blown his car to pancaked cinders and it was hard to explain to the insurance woman behind the line (some days after the fact of the 'accident') that a comet had destroyed a building and that the sign or face of the building (he exaggerated) had fallen on top of him like some booby trap of a temple in the forgotten Amazons.

  The insurance woman thought it was just arson, honestly. He thought it was God. They were both wrong, it was just a man who had gone insane some miles off and who had nothing to lose in his anger.

  He never got the full claim on his car.

  Now, he was car-less. A few days later he turned in his badge and pistol, some part by the hand of the commissioner who had done his duty in hiding the details of Jeronus's testimony of the transpired attack on Harde. The commissioner thought about it, what could have happened; hallucinations, insanity, foul play.

  In the end, he (the commissioner) decided that the unruly trash (Jeronus) had gotten drunk on the job and that on that certain night, in that particular place of the town, a group of gangsters had taken their turns at beating and stabbing Officer Harde and Jeronus was too disabled to do anything about it.

  And no one questioned the changes the commissioner made because no one accepted Jeronus's claim, that it was the work of a monster or a demon or a thing.

  Who would?

  No one. The next logical step was then to exile Jeronus, the act of which exonerated Officer Harde, who truly did deserve the honor of the medals and ribbons pinned to his hospital gown on his brain-dead body. Though, really, what merit of pride did any badge from the city of Horston command? After all, respect is relative. Trash begets trash and the respect of thugs and murderers was not something anyone should ever be in want of.

  That's why it hurt so much for Jeronus when Harde died on July 24th, at around 5:56 AM. Interestingly, after a visit by the commissioner and after the doctor had made the claim that it was probably 'Colby Harde would survive the coma.'

  Well, he was wrong. Or right, so right in fact that the idea of a conscious, now dignified man, might have ruined the scheme the commissioner had made on behalf of Aleistar.

  And so the scheme finally distilled here, reader, and I know it to be a bit of a stretch but you must understand then when you get into the heat of the plan, the details become finicky and messy. I won't describe the death (it involved needles and an IV bag), but I will say it happened.

  Here we are then, the plan funneled down to its natural, as the natural end of everything, at a cemetery.

  The bagpipes were loud and the men were playing with puffed and reddened faces. Jeronus stood from afar at a healthy distance only describable as, cordial to Officer Harde and his family but not necessarily to the officers and their loud bagpipes.

  He was behind a tree. With a his coat so long as to be confused for a trench coat, and with one eye peering out from the side of the birch as he looked onward to the ceremony. A graves keeper came around with his leaf blower, he brushed his feet and shot the lawn clippings onto his shoes and pants. It stained and the mild dew carried the scent up his pants so that even his groin smelled of fresh grass. The rest of the family of officers or of blood were out on folded chairs, either weeping, pretending to weep, or wondering why they were here in the first place with narrowed eyes. Jeronus stared at them and in small intermediate breaks of the congression, took pinches of sunflower seeds from his one of his many pockets to eat. All he ate were seeds and whiskey like a drunk squirrel. Though that might be an insult to the vermin itself, Jeronus was worse than a mess. He was a dying mess, a landfill refuse burning a hole th
rough the dirt. Burning of guilt and of anger and of shame.

  "I don't owe you anything." He said, lips barely parted for the flask. He was looking at the falling coffin of Harde. Then he looked at his child, the autistic boy. He wanted to take back what he said. That and many more things.

  He leaned back a bit and slipped upon a tombstone, its name faded out and a long crack running through the middle of the stone. This all we are, Jeronus thought, bones and stone and dirt on top of dirt on top of dirt until the last tick-tock of recordable time comes to put a stop to the spade.

  "What am I doing here?" He asked. No one answered, not the Priest staring from afar, not the graves keeper and certainly not Harde. He stood up and wiped himself of dirt and stood like a pygmy, half-hearted with his spine curved and neck bent. His eyes were heavy, watering. The ceremony was coming to its end and the people were standing, strangers and friends and fiends, all grabbing dirt and pouring it over the body of Officer Harde, Colby Harde, or to his family, Colby "Kobe" Harde. The jersey went down with the coffin. Jeronus remembered buying him that number, forging the signature of the famed NBA player too. He always thought himself clever. Harde probably knew though, he always knew things and Jeronus had always looked curiously and his factoids and strange love of hobbies and sport, he'd ask, "Is there anything you don't know?"

  And Colby would say, "Well, my wife says I don't know when to shut up." And they'd laugh.

  The silence hurt now.

  But he didn't know what to say, only watched as everyone around him left. He stopped hiding after a while and learned it didn't matter, he was a leper to the force now and perhaps out of pity, they ignored him. Or respect, or the appearance of respect to Officer Harde.

  There were only three real people at the funeral by dusk hour. The son, the wife, and Jeronus. And it was the son, of all people, his small black suited body, that came forward to Harde. His pants were stiff and it was obvious he outgrew them two years ago. It made him wobble. A small penguin, pale-faced and black feathered. He came to Jeronus and took raised his hand. He was holding a small bundle of dirt, his mother came up immediately after the reveal.

  She smiled at Jeronus.

  "He doesn't know how to act around people." She said and tried with that I-want-to-appear-all-together-but-really-this-is-too-stressful smile to convince him the kid wasn't trouble. He wrestled out of her hands and threw out the fist again.

  "Stop it." The mother said. "Stop it, Berok."

  He didn't stop. He threw the dirt onto Jeronus, Jeronus who instinctively strafed back.

  "Apologize. Right now." The mother said then. She slapped him on the bottom. He didn't cry. He was pouting and his face was scrunched. His lips were shut and his eyes would stare up to Jeronus. When he looked back though, the boy turned his head though tried to keep his glare from the corner of his sockets. Jeronus smiled. He looked like those painting in the spooky houses, though malfunctioning. More hokey than haunted.

  "Your dad named you after a song. You know that?" Jeronus laughed. The boy eased, his shoulders leaned out. "I asked him what the band was, he said he forgot. He only remembered the song being good. Your dad was that kind of man, a little too free. Though you wouldn't know it from the way he worked."

  Jeronus leaned down. His eyes were still overbearing, his face was still drooping and he felt vacuous. His skin was pale and the dimples on his face looked like small puncture wounds. But he tried to smile.

  "I saw your dad run two miles just to catch some guy who stole some playing cards, tackled him into a palette of dishwasher soap bars and napkins. He was always like that, free and honest and hard about what was right and what was wrong."

  The mother loosened her grip on her son. Their heads fell as they mourned in unity and after a while when the sun had fallen completely and the white-beige light posts around the winding brick road lit up, did he bend over and scoop the black dirt. It was moist and gritty, it clung together like play dough and he morphed it into a ball as he walked towards the mound. To the side were the tracks of a wheel loader now gone. In front, the round mound. He dropped his handful of dirt and closed his eyes.

  He didn't see the boy running down the hill and the mother failing in stopping him. He skipped across, his pants ripped around his waist and his undersized white shirt stuck out from the hole like extra pockets. He came to Jeronus and slapped his hand. He awoke.

  "Tell me more about my dad." The boy's eyes were looking down. His face was struggling, Jeronus couldn't tell in what way it molded. The tectonic plates of emotions within him were moving and he did not know how to express them. The boy moving back and forth in a rocking motion as if in the cradle. A sedation for his troubled heart. A distraction, that went up and down. The mother ran down. Jeronus stared and put on that face of the boxer with the mouth guard, prepared with a squashed face for the incoming impact of a hook.

  Berok went flat. He struggled, his head fidgeted away. His mouth stuttered, but he said at last, what was fighting for his will the last few seconds.

  "I want y-you to tell me what happened to my d-d-dad. How did he d-d-d-d-die?"

  9:22 PM

  Aleistar

  August 4th, 2017

  9:22 PM

  Aleistar stopped the routine flagellation and let his son catch his breath. He watched Itrus, clinging to pipe with the tight grip of both his hands as if hanging over a cliff. The desperation in his breath sounded heavy, a deep winding.

  Itrus's shirt was torn into pieces on his backside, skin clung in small centimeter long tears of flesh at the bottom of each of his lash wounds. His back was red. Swollen and Aleistar watched the blood ooze out. The right side of Itrus's face was mutilated, bulged, as to appear as a second head altogether. It looked like an aborted Siamese twin clung to him and it weighed his head down.

  "Just give it up." Aleistar pleaded. His breath was worse than Itrus's, his legs struggled to lock. His eyes darted and his grip was lazy, the threads and ends that now had fresh blood on them spilled into the gaps of wood and wet themselves in the lake.

  His son couldn't answer. He had his face to cold pipe that iced his bruises and wounds. Aleistar could see him licking his teeth, what remained of them.

  "Talking never did anything for you. You'd nod your head, you'd pretend to listen but the minute I turn around you'd always backstab me." Aleistar threw the whip. "You said you'd be a doctor, you became an artist. I swallowed my pride. You said you'd always work hard, you dropped out. I had to force you to go to school, to get a job, to do anything. You lazy brat. But that's not your greatest offense. You said you'd love me, that you'd love mom. I've never seen you once at her grave. Not once! Not for her birthday, not for yours. Not once after the fact."

  "It hurts." He spat blood. His eyes were shaken, a ship lost at sea swaying course-less to the rhythm of the waves. "All of it hurts. All of me."

  "That's no excuse. It hurt me too. You know that? I lost a daughter that day, you lost a sister. I lost a wife, you lost a mother. You never mourned them like I did, you never cared. And it's because of that, that I can't say I was surprised to find you ratting me out."

  "I wanted to understand you." Itrus wheezed. "Mom would have done better with you. She worked day and night with the rapists and the pedophiles, in prison asylums like this, hoping and squeezing what humanity they had left. Like fucking toothpaste."

  "Don't compare me to those degenerates."

  "You're right." Itrus coughed. "That'd be an insult to the sick. No, you're worse. Some people can't help their nature, but you? You became this, you made this out yourself. Whatever you are. Child killer, murderer."

  "You think it was easy for me?" He kicked Itrus's legs. They were purple and no longer worked and he had no energy to move them, only flinched a bit at the sharp pain. "Faith is never easy. I've worked for a promise, do you think that's easy?"

  "That's what makes you worse, doesn't it? I can say a psychopath has no choice in how he was made, but you? You do it out of love." He
looked up. "What great fucking love you have. Can't say you ever showed any to me."

  "Everything is out of love." He kicked his stomach and winded Itrus, Itrus who clinched and who laid out on the floor. "I'm doing this to save you, you fucking idiot. Ungrateful bastard. I don't care what you think of me or what I've done, I just need you to make a promise. Promise to stay by my side, to never snitch. A promise to be quiet for the rest of your life. You can live any life you can so long as you do it in silence. You hear me? Change your name, change your background. I don't care. Just shut your fucking mouth."

  He was prodding his son with the tip of his boots, stabbing his elbow with the curiosity of a child and his stick.

  "I can't promise that." Itrus sniffed. "I tried it for a week, let it happen more like it. I can't ever do that again."