by Max Jager
"You disgrace." Aleistar raised him by his shirt, all that remained of it at least. It resembled a scarf.
"I feel the same way," Itrus said. "If you ever let me out I promise I won't just rat you out, I'll fucking kill you."
Aleistar held him close. He felt his son's breath on him, it was shallow and rapid. He could feel his eyes swell with the anger he saw in his kin.
"You'd rebel? Against your father?"
"What father?"
"You have no idea how hard it is keeping you alive or how close you are to the end of the rope. I can't keep the others at bay so if I can't convince you, no one can. And if I can't convince you, then…" Aleistar felt his legs shake.
"It's hard to convince someone when you argue as the sinner pretending to be the saint. How you convinced anyone is above you." Itrus said. "I don't think you ever loved anything. I think you loved mom the same way you loved work, with that calculating, cold, obsession. It wasn't only after you lost her that you even started caring."
"Obsession is love."
"A corrupted love. A narcissistic love."
"Well, it's the only olive branch you'll ever get from me. I want you to live, even if just to satisfy my ego, I'd like it for you to have a family one day too. Maybe then you'd have context about all of this."
Itrus laughed. His throat hurt, it felt caved in but he laughed with that crackled, agonized howl and filled the room with the noise. His face extended out, his whole body was still and the moonlight broke through the small interstices of wood planks to hit him. It looked like his face was being cut in two as the moonlight scarred him straight down the middle of the face.
"Whatever is in you must exist in me. The genetic curse. Why in the fuck would I ever pass that on to anyone else?" He said. "I was so afraid a few weeks back when I first saw the killing, the stabbing, the bleeding. But I lost that in here."
He shook his hands and the sound of chains hitting and rattling broke silence.
"I don't fear much anymore but one thing, having to live with the fact that I never disobeyed you. That I let you run amok."
Aleistar snapped, his eye twitched and he swore he heard from the darkness of the room, past the boats that jumped calmly on top of the water line, he heard the voice and the words: kill him, do it now. The son disobeys the father, kill him.
"Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up." He roared.
"Talking to your imaginary friend again? What was his name? Stix? Ass?" Itrus said. He was forcing the laughter from his broken mouth, licking loose teeth, snorting blood and snot to lubricate a warm pain in his throat.
"Shut up, you fucking asshole." Aleistar screamed. He was slapping at the air, at the circus of sound. A carnival of noise wanting one thing, saying one thing. He pulled his hair, knelt and yearned for the black leather whip now camouflaged with the lacquered wood. He kicked it, heard it fall with a plop into the water and shouted again.
"One last chance, do you hear me, Itrus? One fucking last fucking chance." He went out, through the door. Went past the hallway, past a bathroom and the sounds of fornication, four maybe five. He went further, through an intermittent room where two of his worshipers laid on the couch with their tongues out and their heads slanted. High on quaaludes or perhaps so involved in the illusion of their acid induced journey that they were lost.
He knocked the couch with his imposing walk. They fell further back. He made it to the small room. A janitors closet once now re-purposed into a place of worship, an unholy confessional stall. To the front was the skull of a cow laying on its side, to his right was a metal table that rattled with the closing of the door. Everything shook. The beads, the bone, the pictures and most of all, Aleistar. He was finding candles, finding pink salt, painting the floor with insignia and rubbing out the rough edges of his lines.
"Tell me. Tell me what to do, please." He pleaded. Everything fell, the sand, himself. He lay in prostration. His hands dragged to his face to gather tears. He could hear knocking behind him and the collection of breaths waiting for him.
"Is everything alright?" One of the voices said.
No, no, most definitely not. And Aleistar held himself.
"Is it wrong to do bad for an ultimate good?" He asked quietly. And from the corner of his eyes, he could see the light shining and answer forming through the skull of the cow. A fantasy, maybe. Or perhaps, a vision of a better time.
And Aleistar smiled. With those crocodile tears, he smiled. He grabbed his chest and shouted: "Of course, of course, that's it!"
6:58 PM
Ajax
August 5th, 2017
6:58 PM
"How long have you been up here, Batman?" Darr asked. He looked down to the streets where the crooked lampposts flickered into seizures of yellow lights. It was not dark out, only just beginning.
"It's the best place to get a view." Ajax held a pair of binoculars to his eyes, he was sitting on his hams and to the side of his boot lay a book, 'The Corrux: The Fools Guide to Demonology and Veron Culture First Edition, Vol. 1', half opened and bent on its spine. His eyes were set like a sentry, hovering across the horizon and scanning with those cold red eyes.
"Have you found anything?" Darr walked up. He used his hand to slant against a giant poster board where a car insurance firm had been painted over with penises and breasts, by children, both of them presumed.
"Or are you just spying on people?" Darr's voice was muffled and distorted behind the mask.
"No, I stopped doing that when you finally broke up with that girl. Aurela, was it?" Ajax looked down.
Darr's mouth was open but could not say anything. He coughed and choked on words, anger and shame and surprise.
"It's not right to spy on people, you're breaching our trust."
"I don't trust anyone." Ajax said apathetically. His neck was outstretched as he checked the corners and the small alleys.
"A woman had her purse stolen, there" He pointed to what looked like a small crack in the map of the city, there was a trash on the very entrance of the alley, it was pushed over and spilling into the gutter. "Another man was mugged some miles off, right in front of his job as he was about to get into his car. There was also a fight in front of the police office up in Central Street. One of them cheated on the other's girlfriend, some such other. Both of them lost when the tasers flew."
"And you didn't help, I'm guessing?"
"No one died. Nothing of value was really lost. You have to treat the streets like the Amazon, with abject curiosity. Don't touch anything and let nature take its course. They weren't our targets after all. They're not the pathogen, the disease we're chasing after."
"I think you should have been hugged more when you were a child. Want one, buddy?"
"No, you're too loose with love. A bit of a manwhore, if you ask me."
Darr exhaled in quit intervals and stood upright.
"Whatever, jerk. What about the cultists?"
The sky was setting maroon across the rows of clouds. The sun bled out and washed over them like the cut veins of a wrist. The light drizzled down, warm red. But it was not hot, not to the touch, at least. Darr pulled up his suit close to his neck.
"I haven't spotted anything. They've been quiet." Ajax said. He turned his gaze to Darr and put down the binoculars. "But they're still here. I can taste the iron in the air. It's like my mouth is rusting over."
"I know what you mean, I can feel it too." Darr said. Ajax looked at his partners mask and how he could not keep that straight gaze, how Darr turned and looked around and fidgeted with his hair. How his arm twitched, how he flicked his ears and scratched himself red on his crocodile-skin elbows.
"Have you considered what I said? About letting them live?" Ajax stood, he could feel the trapped air in between his knees pop. He picked up his book and set it behind his belt. "I can pull some strings with the Vatican. I'm sure they'll be more than happy to send more capable people to arrest these disease people. FBI, probably. More capable people, at least."
"It could hold most of them. Aleistar, we'll put him in a strapping chair. Maybe cut off his fingers, dress him in holy charms. Douse with so much holy water he'd wish he was in Guantanamo bay."
"Good. Serves him right. No one should enjoy the pleasures of life, he who acts in selfish desire and ruthless ambition." Darr crossed his arms and laid back on an exhaustion pipe. Steam was coming out, they could smell Dim Sum and Chinese five spice. But they couldn't hear guests, or any noise from the streets. Only a mild rustle.
"All desire is selfish, Darr." Ajax rubbed his chin. "Don't be so vengeful. It's easy to throw the stone, it's much harder to imagine yourself as the man being thrown at."
"Some people don't deserve empathy."
The red circles of Ajax's eyes narrowed as if laser scanners, going up and down and searching for Darr. Ajax closed them at last, seemingly having found an answer or evidence that he'd never have an answer to Darr's aggression. He stretched his neck and could feel more pressure points pop and crack across his body. Four hours had done this to him, had cemented his joints and left him still and aching. He was only just beginning to feel the blood through his limbs and it felt like sand coming down his legs and to his toes and filling him, a giant hourglass of a person waiting and sitting for danger that never came but felt like it was always here.
Ajax faced down, by the edge, where the threads of white mist were beginning to fret and leave, a giant drainage that went eastward. He did not know what it meant, but would.
"You know, the offer is still on the table, you're free to leave if — "
They both felt it on their wrists, they moved their sleeves and felt with their fingers the constant shuffling of their threads. The burning glow of yellow, the way the string tugged and suffocated their left arms. It was reacting to something, something in the air and in the direction where the mist had funneled towards, out in the forest and the lake that he could barely see and only knew because of the flicker and glimmer of blood red light. It was coming, something.
"Let's go." Ajax said. They both got ready, put their feet on the building cornices, felt the concrete crack behind the power of their kick. And suddenly, they stopped.
"What the hell." Darr looked out.
"What are you waiting for?" Ajax asked. And for a while he did not get an answer, no, he had to look to where Darr looked. Eastward. There was a fire, a pillar of smoke that wrapped up and contaminated the air like an inverse whirlpool, spitting out darkness, death, and anarchy. It was an explosion in the direction of the police office. And the paramedics? The firefighters? Who ought have been racing across the lanes? Gone or confused. Scared, maybe, as they scattered. There was more fire. More smog. It was ten miles off but they could hear the chaos, it finally crashed on their ears. A loud bang like an invisible hard barrier had been working itself towards them and upon hitting them, had ran off, bearing the message to all willing to hear; death has come.
It was the sound of screams. Of glass and of concrete blown and destroyed, a demolition. Soon it smelled of it too, gunpowder, gasoline.
"What do we do?" Darr asked. Ajax gulped and look at both ways, he looked at Darr's quivering hands and how they shook and unconsciously moved to his waist and his coat. The cowboy, reading up. And he thought, immediately, which terror would design more violence. The lake house from where the thread of life quaked and quivered or the burning bodies, the scared townspeople evacuating from the fire-licked streets, where he could hear the civilians, the police, and the help all screaming in a union; spare us. Spare us, please.
"Go to the fire. I'll handle myself." Ajax said.
"Are you sure? I can fight."
"You can also help." Ajax jumped to the second rooftop, granite flew. "Helping isn't my nature, anyway. Go on, Superman. Do your job."
Darr nodded and left opposite. Both unaware, ignorant, that in their adrenaline, in the reckless planning, they had never predicted the third attack.
5:43 PM
Itrus
August 5th, 2017
5:43 PM
It was the last chance Itrus would get to live, he knew it, he read the silence in the room and the rattling of his shackles around his leg and his arm and his neck. They had been added throughout the days after every tantrum he threw periodically and now, half of his body was immobilized, bulging red from the chafe of the metal or from the bruises of his beaten flesh. He put his ear to the pipe, it carried the sound of the store. He could hear mild chatter like the chirping of songbirds out. Then there was a shuffling of feet like the rolling thunder. Then a curious tone, a debate and finally a conclusion. They spoke with an understanding and said; hmm, yes, of course, we'll do that.
The meeting was done and it made the beads of sweat on Itrus roll down. The door opened.
Aleistar walked into the room. He shut the door behind him, soft with the precision of a concerned father afraid to awake his infant son. There were no babies here though, only beaten bodies. Itrus looked up, there was a swordfish with pale blue flesh right above Aleistar and it stared down at Itrus with its pointer.
"It's time to make a choice," Aleistar said. "And no one else can make it for you, it's a choice that's been waiting for you for twenty-one years now. You've been making it all your life but now, not tomorrow, nor the day after, now. Now, you must make it. And please, make the right choice."
Itrus looked at him, with the only eye he had that worked. Half of his face was heavy and bloated with purple or yellow flesh. He looked like a leper and felt like a defeated boxer, still fuming but knowing it was all for naught. His head sat on an incline, his chin rested on his bent knee, his whole body against the wall. It was a position best described as morbid laziness. He just didn't want to stand. He tried moving his tongue to lick chapped lips but couldn't work it through his swollen lips, the bruised balls of blood planted underneath his nostrils.
And yet. With his lethargy and his hopelessness, Itrus still found a way to summon his strength. It was strength born from anger. And anger? Anger can cure any kind of malaise. Itrus's head rose. He sniffed, he could feel blood travel through his nasal passage and down his esophagus. It tasted like metallic mud.
"Mom used to make me admit to the wrong stuff when I did when I was a kid. When I stole. When I got in fights. She always made sure I admitted the crime or at least gave my case. And she made sure to do it before the punishment came." Itrus's knees buckled. "She said it was important for a man to admit to the crime before the fact. Not after. Because it's what makes the answer genuine. So if you want an honest answer, I want to be treated like an honest man. Remove the chains."
The cronies arrived and they looked stiff at the front door, their white veils sucking in and out of their mouths. Aleistar looked at his son, he swallowed spit and from his back pocket felt a key. He tossed it to one of the guards who held it with cupped hands and who went around to the pipe and the chain to find the pin to fill.
"I have to be reasonable, I hope this is good enough." Aleistar rubbed his eyes. They were swollen, bulging and dried. "I want that answer. Will you join? Will you leave? Or will you stay? Those are good odds, Zac. Two out of three keep you alive."
Itrus walked forward and the felt the pull of the man behind him, holding his leash. It was a stern yank, it reminded Itrus to be gentile, to behave. He went forward anyway, shoulders pronounced like bullhorns, the hair growing on his sides and his neck falling down like a mane.
"What odds did I ever have? This isn't a coin toss, this is my life." Itrus said. "You made your peace a long time ago. I can see it in your eyes, you knew the answer before you entered the door."
"No, I don't." Aleistar said. "You have to make it, right now, Zac. Say it. What do you want me to do."
"What do I want?" Itrus looked around and rubbed his chin and his face and stretched them, so his eyes looked
bigger than they were as he pulled down. His body felt heavier though he was sure he had lost weight, having starved in his enthrallment.
"I wanted what mom would have wanted, to move on. That'd be normal, wouldn't it be?"
"We didn't get normal circumstances." Aleistar said.
"Of course we did. Death isn't special, there's no conspiracy to it. No superstition. Sometimes it just happens."
"Her death didn't just happen. It was organized by a tyrant who stopped caring about His creation a long time ago." He spoke with flamboyant hands as if wafting away dust from the air, though there was none. His hands were twitching. The flesh was ruined, bleeding, cut open at the knuckles. It was the injured hand of a man who had spent a good few days beating his son. Aleistar noticed the wounds immediately. He put his hands behind his back and looked for a pair of white-leather gloves in his pocket.
