Left to Darkness

by Craig Saunders

  “Paul,” said the old guy. The old guy was smoking, comfortable, even though he was a stranger who was naked in a child’s bedroom.

  “Paul…”

  Paul blinked, and he was in a hospital hallway.

  Next to him, on his bench? An old guy wearing no clothes.

  No. Not an old guy. The old guy.

  “Paul,” he said. “I’ve lifted the veil. Praise be!”

  The old man laughed until he started coughing.

  I can see? thought Paul, realizing that he could, of course he could, because the old guy was so naked he couldn’t be a part of Paul’s imagination. He was too naked, too detailed. Paul saw every pore, every gray hair, the man’s nipples, puckered up in the chill air within the hospital.

  “I can see?”

  The old man’s cough dried up before he answered.

  “I always liked you, Paul Deacon. Always did.”

  “Do I…do I know you?”

  “We’ve met,” said the old guy. “Might be we shared a cigarette, some time ago. But that’s by the by. Hear that? Huh?”

  Paul did. The wailing of a child amid a chorus of screams, screams from all over the hospital.

  “That, my friend, is the last child. Hearty babe, as it should be. We made a deal, long time ago, but the kind of deal that can never be broken.”

  Paul shook his head. The old man looked sad, but not angry. Never angry.

  “Don’t fight it, Paul. I gave you your sight because you’ve a job of work left to do.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Few do, brother,” said the old man, mirth dancing in his eyes. “But that’s by the by by the by…”

  “What?”

  The old man laughed. “Bugger, ain’t I?” he said. “Paul, Paul…remember that old piece of tripe about footsteps in the sand?”

  Paul was struggling to keep up, but he remembered his mother had the verse framed on the kitchen wall. The power of the memory rocked him more than the sudden return of his sight, or the fact of the naked old guy, smoking beside him on a hospital bench. That verse, framed on the lemon-painted kitchen walls and his mother, standing before it, reading it compulsively, after her son’s funeral, and again, after her husband’s.

  “I see that you do. Well, that’s how things stand, Paul. The radio call that shouldn’t, couldn’t have been? The ties that didn’t bind? Frank—bless him, soft spot for him—turning up when you couldn’t see a damned thing and were pissing yourself in fear? All this time you saw only one set of footprints, that was when I carried you, brother.”

  Paul couldn’t keep up with the old man. He kept switching tracks, changing lanes…almost like he was trying to confuse Paul, keep him guessing, keep him one step behind.

  But he knew, instantly, that the old man lied. Because, when he’d seen only one set of footprints? It wasn’t this old guy that had carried him.

  It’d been Frank. No doubt in Paul’s mind. But he didn’t say so, because the old man switched again and Paul lost his train of thought.

  “Wanna see a trick?” said the old guy, not letting up.

  “No,” said Paul. He didn’t want to see any kind of trick this man could do, but he knew the smoking man was going to do it anyway.

  The guy took the cigarette he was smoking from between his lips. Then, like a magician pulling streamers from his sleeve, the man began tugging on the end of the cigarette.

  Pulling and pulling, until the cigarette was much, much longer, fatter, and, at some point, not a cigarette anymore, not at all.

  It was a shotgun. The shotgun should’ve had Berretta written on the side, but no longer. There was a red band between the breech and the stock. Benson and Hedges was written there.

  “Here,” said the old man. “You’ll be needing this in…oh…three…two…one…”

  A haunted scream from within the theater. Paul’s head snapped toward the sound.

  He looked to his side for a second. The old man wasn’t there. The shotgun was.

  “My baby!”

  Such terrible pain and fear in those two little words, Paul knew all he needed to know. All his doubt, all the old man’s words, the sorrows of his youth, the agony of his blinding and his torture, his duty as a policeman, the end of the fucking world…gone.

  Paul pushed himself to his feet, easy now that he could see. Not tired anymore, or hurting, or afraid of the dark. Leading with the shotgun now. Walking toward the theater.

  There was a short lever on the side of the shotgun for picking which barrel to fire.

  No safety. No time to check if it was loaded.

  Of course it’s loaded, thought Paul.

  The devil doesn’t deal in empty weapons.

  He kicked open the door to the theater and stepped inside with the stock firm in his shoulder.

  68

  Something hideous held the woman’s baby. For a moment he wasn’t even sure it was a man. His mind shied away from the extent of the mutilation. Done to him, thought Paul, rather than to himself. There was no way…no way a man could bear that pain and still stand, still seem so…strong.

  The monster was fucking huge, almost a giant, pierced in a hundred places with blood-rusted steel and cut through with wire. Nails and staples and studs, nuts, bolts…Jesus…he was practically held together by steel…he shouldn’t be standing.

  He shouldn’t be alive.

  And yet, still, he moved, grinned (could do nothing but grin, with wire through his cheeks) and held the baby above his head.

  Don’t miss, Paul. Don’t hit the baby…

  He fired one barrel, flicked the small lever, and fired the second.

  The man-monster had two massive holes right the way through him. Big holes. Smoke drifting from the gun and blood spray hanging in the air. Screams and blood and smoke, filling the air like fog. The stench of rot and gunpowder and shit and blood and fear.

  A giant with two huge holes where his chest (his heart, his fucking heart) should be.

  And still he stood.

  The baby, still held over the man’s head. The woman (the mother. The mother) wailing. Frank, motionless—unconscious, drugged, dead?—beside her on another table. A dead woman with no head on the floor.

  The giant’s still fucking standing. Jesus, fuck me, what’s he made of?

  Paul began to shift his grip on the long gun to use it like a bat, but then, that thought again.

  The devil doesn’t deal in empty weapons.

  Paul put his finger back on the trigger and pulled.

  The gun fired. Fired again. Paul walked closer and closer each time, each shot taking pieces of the man away so that when he got close enough, Paul saw the steel that pierced the man ran right through him, so that even as Paul blew away flesh, the man’s steel skeleton held him upright.

  Even so, he should have been dead…but he wasn’t.

  Paul fired again and the shot went high, taking off the man’s biceps completely in a mess of skin and bone and blood.

  He didn’t, not once, cry out in pain, or give any indication that he was even human, but this time, with barely any arm left, he dropped the child right on top of the screaming mother. She snatched the child to safety, rolled from the table to the floor with a heavy thump.

  Paul pulled the trigger again and he hit exactly what he wanted. The man’s head exploded, leaving some jaw, his neck. Nothing but flesh and a little bone, some teeth.

  He didn’t fall. There was barely anything left, and he didn’t fall. Instead, the grotesque flesh-and-steel shell grabbed Paul with its one remaining arm and pulled him in. Paul couldn’t move, couldn’t use the gun. He was caught in a death embrace with a creature of death, maybe even Death himself.

  He thought, oddly, that hoary old cripple lied with every word. He thought a million things in the instant of pain, and amazing universe of exploding pain in his head.

  I’m dead, thought Paul. I’m dead.

  His baby brother was there. The old guy wasn’t, and Paul smiled at
his baby brother.

  His brother said, “You can bounce, too, you know?”

  Paul nodded. It did look kind of fun. They bounced on their beds a while.

  Then, nothing. Nothing at all.

  69

  Dawn tried to hide beneath the table with the one-armed man on it. She knocked Debbie’s head out of the way and crawled over Wayne’s body to find some, any, shelter from the madness, but the gunfire and the blood carried right along.

  A hand grabbed her ankle on one side of her—strong enough to hurt tendon and bone. Someone else grabbed her boy.

  Fuck, there are two…

  “No!” She lashed out, but some grinning thing, mutilated just like the man had been—a woman, once, Dawn thought—yanked her baby from her.

  She couldn’t stop it. One hand, immensely strong, held her ankle tight and she couldn’t get up. The woman was leaving. Dawn wasn’t strong enough, fast enough, mother enough. The woman, full of spikes, walked away, an odd, stilted walk, but calm enough. Like the threat, any threat, was gone. Dawn watched her go while the headless, tortured corpse of a giant man held her fast, then began to pull her in. Her ears rang from the shots and from her own tortured screams.

  The blind man on the floor. She’d thought he’d meant her end, her child’s end, and yet it was him, with the shotgun, that had taken the giant’s head from his shoulders.

  Where’s the gun, Dawn? Where’s the gun…?

  Blind man was dead, for sure. He had a massive, filthy axe buried in the back of his head. He’d died trying to save her.

  The giant, headless, torn in so many place that he was little more than bone and sinew (and steel?) pulled her toward him, slowly, but with such power, such strength, she was dragged despite holding to the table above, despite kicking at his hand with her free foot. She might as well have kicked concrete…or steel.

  As suddenly as his hand had grabbed her, it was ripped loose. She’d been so intent on fighting the man’s grasp that she hadn’t seen the other man in the theater stand. The man with one arm was there, between Dawn and the dead thing. The dead thing pushed itself back to his feet.

  The one-armed man held the shotgun. It clicked on empty.

  Not meant for him, thought Dawn, hazy in her grief and her pain. It was never meant for him, but the blind man.

  How many shots did he fire?

  More than two. Even on the cusp of her mind breaking, Dawn understood this.

  But the one-armed man seemed calm enough.

  He stepped to one side, put his big foot on the blind man’s back like he was nothing, and wrenched the axe free. In Dawn’s eyes, in that moment, something happened. Something she could not explain, never could.

  She imagined (of course she imagined it, because it never really happened, did it?) a sudden, glorious light filled the man. She saw no burly cripple, no stained axe, but a knight, a paladin, pulling forward a shining sword from a slain foe. For one instant, the light in the theater hit that sword and it gleamed, pristine, more perfect that mere steel could or should ever be.

  But then, in the next instant, he was a man again. Large, heavy, and swinging that huge axe again and again, tireless despite his wound. A man, she thought, born to murder.

  The one-armed man took the dead thing apart, piece by piece, like a man doing a job.

  All the time, Dawn lay beneath the table, screaming, among the bodies and the pieces of bodies, surrounded by the stench of death and gunpowder, and the sound of metal on meat.

  But louder still to her ears was the sound of her mind breaking, shattering with every step the mutilated woman took with Dawn’s stolen baby in her arms.

  XI. After the Storm Comes the Rain

  70

  Frank stood in a sea of blood, swaying like a sailor in a heavy blow. Blood splashed the walls. From ceiling to floor. His chest heaved and his head hurt.

  He felt better, though. Like a man doing what he was built to do.

  Naked but for an operating gown, too, he noticed.

  Someone was sobbing beneath the table.

  The woman, he remembered. His thoughts were dim. He was groggy. Infection, operation, anaesthetic. Probably blood loss, shock, malnutrition, dehydration. He was grinning, though, and when Frank grinned, he knew he’d be just fine.

  He turned to find the sobbing woman. She was right there in front of him.

  She looks insane, he thought.

  Wonder what I look like?

  He noticed she had a scalpel in her hand. Probably what one of the people on the blood-soaked floor had used to trim his dead flesh from his useless arm.

  She’s going to kill herself…she’s going to cut her own throat, he thought, but lazily, not so he particularly cared one way or the other.

  They took her baby.

  Frank didn’t care, either way. She died, the baby died, nothing mattered to him.

  But if it doesn’t matter, why am I still standing here?

  “We’ll get your baby back,” he said, surprising himself. He didn’t care.

  He didn’t say that to her, because it didn’t matter if she understood him. It wasn’t important. Nothing was important.

  But he was a sucker for lost causes.

  And for revenge. A man’s got to have a purpose, he thought, and knew that, for him, it was the truth. He saw Paul, the policeman, dead. Two real people and the thing that had been held together, once, by steel.

  He remembered a man, naked, smoking. Offering him a deal. There’s a fella in need of a friend, he’d said. Frank wasn’t slow or stupid, though he might, to some, look it. He stared at the woman, swayed some more. He thought about how he might look to her, covered in blood, holding his axe (my axe, he thought—he owned it now).

  But above all, he thought about how that smoking man had used the policeman (Paul. His name was Paul) and used him up.

  He thought about what a cunt the devil was, and he thought about revenge, and a job that needed doing.

  “We’ll get your baby back, okay? I’ll get him back.” Hope’s a tricky thing, but Frank thought hope, right here, right now, might just save the woman’s life.

  She pushed herself up, and out from under the operating table, still holding the little scalpel.

  But she wasn’t going to kill herself.

  She stuck the knife in his stomach before he could react. Fast, like a crazy person. Faster, in that instant, than Frank could react. If he had, she’d be dead. Instead?

  Fuck, he thought, rather than hitting her with the axe. He wasn’t angry at her, he wasn’t sad. It hurt, but only a little. Probably just into his layer of fat and not doing all that much damage even though it was a wickedly sharp blade. She screamed at him, something incoherent and unimportant. Flecks of her spit hit his face and neck. Screaming, but not like words or anything he could make sense of…just screaming rage and insanity into his face.

  The woman who’d lost her baby stabbed and stabbed. Maybe four or five times. Real crazy rage, but not piercing anything important other than the hospital gown, and Frank wasn’t all that attached to it anyway.

  Frank wondered how long he could stand there while she stabbed at him. Wondered if it would help fix her, or if he’d bleed out, or get bored, or if it’d maybe start to hurt too much to let her keep doing it.

  He figured he’d had enough when she stabbed him a sixth time, and that he wasn’t that curious after all. With about half his strength and the haft of his bloody axe, he hit her in the side of the head.

  She crumpled to the floor, loose-limbed, a marionette with her strings cut.

  Frank looked at the bloody spots—large as fried eggs—on the front of his gown.

  He looked at his dead arm. It was shorter than he remembered, but tidy.

  He looked at the naked man standing in the corner, sipping vodka from a frosted shot glass.

  “Take that drink now, Frank?” said the man.

  The devil looked like he was enjoying the vodka.

  Now or later, you and me ar
e going to have words, thought Frank.

  Probably later, though. He was weak, tired, bleeding. He had his axe, but he was damn near spent.

  Got to have a hobby, he thought, with a wide grin like a bastard who didn’t care if he lived or died. But the truth was? He did. He cared. He wanted to live, and the naked man?

  He’d keep.

  Frank was tired, more tired than he’d been even in the grip of his delirium and his infection. He was still in a bad way, but he’d live. He’d make sure of it.

  Tired, injured, full of poison, yes, but Frank still managed to heft the unconscious woman onto his good shoulder. He kept hold of his axe, too.

  “Fuck you,” he said to the devil, and walked right on by.

  71

  It took a few trips to get done what needed to be done. By the end of it, Frank was stumbling, tired, hurting.

  But the woman was still in the cab of the truck when he dragged himself into the driver’s seat. There was a space behind the cab for the driver to sleep, but he couldn’t risk it. He wasn’t worried he wouldn’t wake up. He was worried she’d wake up before him.

  He looked at her. Head slumped, a big welt over her temple.

  He’d bound her hands, just to be safe. He was under no illusions. Right now, she was fucking crazy. Wouldn’t be able to take his eyes off her. Next time it wouldn’t be a little scalpel. Crazy people could still learn just fine.

  He couldn’t trust her at all.

  Maybe later, he might be able to, but right now?

  “She’s insane,” he said softly to himself.

  Maybe he was, too. But he didn’t feel insane. Just tired.

  He wasn’t bored, at least. Not bored at all.

  Frank Liebowicz figured out, in his head, how to drive a big rig like this with one hand. It wasn’t easy, but he managed it well enough. Even managed the wipers when the sky lightened a little with daybreak and the rain began to fall. They were big fat drops and it was a hot rain that sizzled on the windshield, like it was nothing more than a summer shower, washing the world until it was clean and new.