by David Beers
He leaves school at two in the afternoon. Mark does not come with him, as he still has another hour of classes, and another hour of study hall after that. He isn’t slow by any means, but Luke insists he stay for all after school programs that can assist with grades.
Luke heads to work. He flips chicken at a fast food restaurant every day when he finishes at school. He does this from 2:30 until close at 10:00. From there, he catches a bus back home, usually bringing his brother something to eat. He doesn’t like feeding him fast food fried chicken, but even with his job, money is always tight.
Luke thinks the hard parts of his life are over. What happened in Mexico didn’t happen to a different person; Luke remembers everything and no matter how much he may want to, he can’t simply wish it away. However, he is moving beyond it. He focuses on his brother and the small life they have in America. That helps, some. He still has nightmares of his mother, and isn’t sure whether those will ever disappear.
The tough part is over, though. Or, at least, that’s what he thinks. He tells himself nothing that happens in the future will ever be as bad as what happened in the past.
He tells himself that, but part of him doesn’t believe it. Later in life, Luke will understand that he controls his destiny, but at seventeen, he doesn’t believe that. A part of him says that life, or the universe—or more probably, God—isn’t done with him yet.
He feels this most strongly when he wakes up from nightmares of his mother.
Luke wakes up covered in sweat, having seen that old priest having his way with her. Tears are in his eyes and he’s breathing heavily, though he quickly gets it under control so as not to wake Mark.
It’s then, in the early morning hours, that fear washes over him. Something is going to happen. Another one of those moments that he can’t control, but will only be able to make a decision about it.
That time is nearly here, the moment nearly arrived.
The church killed Luke’s mother, but it is God that kills his brother.
Moments define Luke, just as they do us all, and what came next was the final defining one. The moment that turned a troubled, but good kid, into someone the world would come to fear.
Luke doesn’t see any of the signs and that’s because he’s working too much. He won’t carry that weight forever—in the end, Luke sheds guilt and responsibility like a serpent does its skin.
There are signs, though, and Luke sees them when he thinks about it later.
His brother’s appetite should have been the first clue. It’s subtle, though, and that’s part of the problem. Had it been severe, Luke would have noticed regardless of how many hours he was working.
It wasn’t.
He first starts by not asking for an extra chicken sandwich at dinner.
Then, he’s not finishing his own sandwich. Luke is tired. Exhausted really. He will, much later, be able to go days and days without sleep while still functioning at extremely high levels. Now, he’s 17, and his body is still growing. He forces through each day, but a constant cloud of exhaustion rests over him, ready to drench him with water if he allows it.
Luke doesn’t notice what is happening until he finds his brother passed out next to the toilet.
There’s blood. A lot of it. It covers the inside of the toilet bowl and leaks from his brother’s mouth onto the white tile. It’s bright red and Luke is frightened at first. He feels a panic threatening to settle in, because this is his brother—his last connection to this world. His only connection.
Luke doesn’t shove the panic away—that might not have been possible. He doesn’t touch the panic, though; he would have been lost in it. Instead, he ducks it, maneuvering away like a boxer shirks an opponent that is getting too close.
Luke goes to his brother, dropping down on his knees and smearing blood both on himself and across the floor.
He picks up his brother’s head and places it in his lap, petting him and saying, “Mark, Mark, wake up, Mark. Wake up, buddy.”
His voice is calm at first. Gentle. But he slowly picks up the urgency until he screams in the small bathroom.
“MARK!”
His brother doesn’t respond.
Luke gets him to the hospital. He doesn’t even think about calling emergency services, but instead steals a car from the street below his apartment—he taught himself how to hot-wire years ago. He hops the curb at the emergency room, quickly runs to the other side of the vehicle, and pulls his brother from it. He carries his 15 year old sibling in without realizing how easy it is for him. Those around him do, though—however, they will chalk it up to adrenaline and not Luke’s underlying skeleton and muscle mass.
Nurses ask him about his mother as they take his unconscious brother. They strap Mark to a gurney and are trying to pull Luke away, but he won’t go. He stands right where he is and watches as they wheel his brother down the hallway.
“Where are you taking him?”
The same calmness that will frighten Charles Twaller so badly later in life is in his voice now. It’s as if his emotion has died and left only a shell there, one that understands the crucial business at hand and will handle it regardless the cost—but will do so without emotional investment … because the shell has none to give.
“Sir, they’re taking him to run tests and make sure he’s comfortable. He’s going to be fine, and you’ll be able to see him soon. I need to ask you some questions, though, so if you’ll come with me over here, I would really appreciate it.”
Luke stands for another second looking at them wheel his brother away, and then he decides to go with the woman. They walk to a small check-in desk, and the nurse goes to the other side, sitting down and pulling up something on her computer. Luke looks over the entire endeavor, his mind memorizing the intricacies of what is around him.
Moments.
His mind, at least some part of it, knows what is happening to his brother. It is already beginning to prepare him for the inevitable. It is beginning to change into the force that the world will find hard to reckon with, doing so by observation and categorization.
Which he does in the hospital waiting room.
The nurse asks him questions about his parents and Luke doesn’t respond at first. He knows what this means, and that it will create problems. He also knows it has nothing to do with helping his brother.
“I will tell you about my parents when you tell me what is happening with Mark.”
The nurse looks at him with shock across her face. She quickly gets it under control, but as she stares at the young man, she sees something much different. There is someone barely older than a child standing in front of her, but that isn’t what it feels like. She thinks, for a second, that she’s looking at something timeless—and that freezes her to her core.
She tells Luke she’ll be right back, but she doesn’t return. She goes to a colleague and says, “You’ll have to get him checked in. I’m not doing it.” And she meant it. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged her back.
Luke ends up giving them some information, though not all they want. It creates more questions that will be answered later, but that doesn’t bother him now. He just wants to be next to his brother, and four hours later, he’s allowed to.
Mark is unconscious and a doctor stands at the foot of his bed. Luke is to the right, looking down at his sleeping kid brother. His skin is pale but there isn’t any blood on his lips or smeared across his cheeks, and that is good.
“He has cancer,” the doctor says. “It is a rare form and I won’t say we’ve caught it too late, but it is in the latter stages.”
“How late?” He doesn’t look away from the bed.
“Stage four.”
“There is no stage five,” Luke says.
“No, there isn’t.”
Luke turns to look at the doctor. “Is my brother going to die?”
“I can’t say for certain. No one can. There are options, though not a lot.”
“Best case scenario?” Luke asks, witho
ut tears in his eyes.
“He beats it.”
“Worst case?”
“He dies within the month,” the doctor says.
Luke and his brother fight. They fight hard. They begin chemotherapy and Luke forgets about school and work. The hospital figures out he has no parents, though finding records on what happened in Mexico is nearly impossible. Luke invents lies that take care of the details, but he isn’t concerned with any of it.
His life consists of helping his brother live.
Luke prays. He prays almost constantly, even when he’s feeding his brother or helping him walk to the bathroom as his strength fades. He prays and he asks God for grace, for mercy, for anything that might give his brother life.
God doesn’t answer, not in words and not in action.
His brother’s cancer continues growing and spreading, the chemo doing virtually nothing to slow it down.
The doctor sits with Luke and tells him the truth, cold and harsh.
“There’s nothing else we can do.”
“What do you mean?” Luke says in that same oddly detached tone. He may be eating himself alive inside, but to the world, he’s a machine. The doctor finds it frightening, but says nothing.
“We need to focus on making sure he’s comfortable as he goes.”
“No,” Luke says. “There must be more.”
“There isn’t, Luke,” the doctor says. “You and your brother are two of the most courageous kids I’ve ever seen, but there is nothing we can do. There are a few options as to how we can make sure he leaves without any pain. Do you feel like discussing them now, or do you need a bit of time?”
Luke discusses them but hears nothing.
His brain is on autopilot, answering questions while the core of his mind focuses on something else.
Luke goes to God. To that singular creature his mother taught him to believe was all loving. All knowing. All everything.
Even when the conversation with the doctor ends, Luke doesn’t stop seeking God. His mind is rapidly running through calculations about the universe’s size, speed, and expansion capabilities. He is trying to understand if there is a heaven, where it might exist. At the same time, he is praying harder than he’s ever done before.
He finds himself in the hospital’s cathedral. It’s the first time he’s been in a church of any kind since he helped rebuild Marquez’s. He kneels at the cross’s foot (no Jesus hung on this one, as the hospital was clearly protestant).
He prays and prays with his eyes closed. He prays without any thought of quitting. He will continue this search for God until he finds an answer.
An hour passes.
And another.
People move through the small cathedral, but Luke doesn’t look up or change position.
He prays.
And finally, something happens. Luke will go to his grave with only one belief: God could no longer deny the force of will banging at his door and ultimately answered it. Luke will know that others would call what happened a hallucination. They will say he was under tremendous pressure and finally his mind snapped.
Luke will never care one bit what these other people might say. He knows the truth.
The room ceases to exist. Luke ceases to exist in any real sense of the word. There is only nothing, and that nothing stretches forever. It is a concept that cannot be understood unless it is experienced, but in the moment, Luke doesn’t care.
He does not question where he is, not even for a second.
He is in the mind of God.
And he does not pause in awe or respect. He is raging. Luke is beyond the realm of right and wrong, beyond morality. He is in a place of such complete hate that the mind of God is simply a post that he will beat with his whip until his anger is abated.
“Make him live.”
There is no answer.
“MAKE HIM LIVE,” Luke commands.
What happens is something that Luke will only share with one person, a man named Christian Windsor that he meets years and years from this moment. He will keep what he sees, hears, and feels to himself, but the moment defines him in a way that the others never could. It changes not only the course of his life, but the course of history.
“Who is this that commands me?” Words are spoken, but there is no voice that speaks them. They are simply there.
“MAKE HIM LIVE!” Luke screams again.
“Simple child, leave me be.”
All of Luke’s rage and hate pours out into that nothingness. It spreads and fills and he somehow watches it approach this God figure, this creature that is supposed to care. To love. To show mercy.
“YOU MAKE HIM LIVE!”
And Luke looks on, his words singing out across a space that doesn’t exist.
“No.”
Luke wakes up hours later.
He remembers everything, but says nothing to the preacher that finds him lying in front of the cathedral’s cross. Luke says nothing to anyone. He understands what he saw and he understands the meaning. His mother lied because someone lied to her.
Luke met God and understands that it cares nothing for its creations. God cares only for its own wants—is a supremely selfish creature. Later, Luke will further refine his belief, but when he wakes up in the cathedral, he simply knows that his brother will die and he can do nothing about it.
He spends some time with the doctor and decides it’ll be best if his brother dies at home—though that place is quickly changing too, since the authorities understand no parents live with the two minors.
They grant him space during his brother’s death, however, and Luke is by his side as it happens.
He holds his hand as his brother takes his last breath, gasping in short little heaves. And then, he’s simply gone. His body is still there, but whatever made Mark, Mark, isn’t. The body is thin and frail and looks like something that had never been alive at all.
An undertaker is called and the body is removed.
Luke decides against a funeral. The body is cremated and Luke does not need the ashes. He saw the body in the bedroom and knew that there was nothing left of his brother, ashes or not.
The church took his mother, but Luke knew God took his brother. God, who holds the world, could not spare time nor a moment’s peace for Luke. He, this creature who Luke’s mother believed was humanity’s creator and savior, had taken the last thing Luke had in this world.
God left Luke nothing and so, at 17, Luke decides he will take everything from God.
Chapter 22
“And that means I’m going to die?” Charles asked.
Windsor nodded.
“What’s his brother got to do with it?”
“I’d like to say I don’t have time to sit here and explain this to you, but that’s really all I do have,” the FBI agent said.
“Do I have to hit you in the face again?”
“I ….” Christian smiled, though his fat lips hid most of his teeth. “I have a problem. I’m sorry.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. You’re gonna have more problems soon. A lot more. Now why does that story mean he’s coming to kill me?”
“I never said he’s coming.”
“Then who would?”
“I don’t know,” Windsor said. “I only said Luke means to kill you somehow.”
“Fine. Fucking fine. Why does that story make you think so?”
“His brother ….” The FBI agent paused and looked up into the air, as if some answer might come from the ceiling above. Charles stared at his battered, blood crusted face—the blood painting dark wrinkles on it. “I didn’t know this before, but when his brother died, that was the last time Luke was human. I don’t mean that facetiously. There’s something inside us ….” He looked down at Charles and seemed to consider his next words. Charles knew what he was thinking of saying, something along the lines of Charles not being human either, but the agent got control of his tongue before he caught another fist across the face. “There’s somethin
g inside us that separates us from animals. It separates Luke from us, too. Because he doesn’t have it. It died with his brother. That … that ability to see the other and understand they’re like you. To respect what’s in them because you respect that it’s in you, too. Luke lost that when his brother died. There is no one like him, in his mind, and maybe he’s right. There is only him and this war he’s created.”
“What war? This one? The one we started?” Charles asked.
Windsor’s one good eye met Charles’s. “How much do you know about Luke?”
“I know what he hired me to do. That’s it.”
“And you thought it would be wise to halt what he hired you to do? To take me and my partner, and then try to kill Luke once he was angry?”
Charles said nothing. He wanted to slap the man again, but something in his voice kept Charles’s hand at bay. Amazement. That was the emotion he heard. Windsor was truly amazed, but not at Charles’s bravery or courage. He sounded amazed at his stupidity.
“I’ll make this simple. Luke declared war on God after his brother died. And now, he’s just declared war on you.”
Luke wondered if Mr. Twaller had gone to Christian and asked about his brother.
He hoped so. He knew Christian’s honesty would help Mr. Twaller understand what was coming. Which was important. Luke wanted the man to anticipate his own death. To worry about it.
Luke did not have time to dwell on his mistakes here. Christian’s (and to a lesser extent, Tommy’s) life was in a very precarious position and Luke’s actions had to be perfect to ensure neither died. He could tolerate Tommy’s death, but not Christian’s. Not yet.
Luke waited in a hotel room, with one leg crossed over the other. A glass of water sat on the table in front of him, a pistol next to it. He wore black, leather gloves, but not to avoid any finger prints. He planned on driving after this, and had purchased the car he wanted to make the drive in. A Tesla, of course.
