No Less Days

by Amanda G. Stevens

“What do you say?”

  A flame licked to life in David’s hollowed core. His jaw clenched. He turned his head. “If I did agree, it would not be for you.”

  His Adam’s apple dipped. He took one step back. Something far behind his eyes cooled. “It’s for Zac and Moira. Spare them the decision.”

  “For your victims, Colm. No one else.”

  No.

  It wasn’t a voice in David’s head, but the sense of something wrong was nearly as strong as that word. He tried to find the source of it. He tried to see what to do.

  Colm was nodding. Unperturbed by David contradicting him. Any reason of David’s would work for Colm if it achieved his purpose.

  David’s right hand twitched as he quashed a reflex to press it against the growing pressure in his chest. No sign of weakness. His stomach roiled. Danger was sparking in the air now, not for him, but for the civilians who passed them no more than fifty feet away. For anyone in the future who crossed paths with Colm if David didn’t do this. Aye, Colm was manipulating him and likely knew David knew it. But what did that matter if this was the path God meant for him to walk anyway? Still, some muted warning was trying to get through to him. He trudged deeper into the trees. Grass rustled behind him as Colm followed, and he angled his body to keep Colm in his peripheral vision. At last David halted. Drew a tight breath.

  Lord, help.

  It was a flailing reach, but it was met with a Hand that would never slip. The nausea eased. David wasn’t alone. And the weight of this decision—not his to carry.

  He faced Colm. “No.”

  The man grew still. “I thought … if anyone would …”

  “Maybe you thought right, if anyone would. But I won’t.”

  A slow smile spread over Colm’s face. “You won’t.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not really. I had to present it to you just to see. To see, you know?”

  Calm, assured. No concern in the green eyes. David shook his head. Colm didn’t make sense.

  “So this is what you do, David. Go back to them in a few hours; tell them I asked you to and you agreed. Tell them you drained me and cremated me. The problem’s taken care of. They’ll believe it because they’ll want to believe it.”

  As long as he’d known them, as long as he’d been their touchstone if Zac were to be believed—Colm would deceive them without flinching. It wasn’t only mortals he considered himself above.

  “No,” David said.

  “You still don’t get it.”

  “I’m not convinced there’s anything to get here.”

  His eyes glinted. “No one who values humanity spends a century at arm’s length from them. Don’t try to tell me we have nothing in common.”

  Cold enveloped David from the inside out. “How do you know …?”

  “You told Zac you had no one waiting for you here. He’s glad to have found you. Says you need us more than he expected.”

  “And?”

  “And I want to know if you’ll join me. I think it would be interesting.”

  This, finally, was why Colm had come. Not to offer himself up. Not to beg an alibi. This.

  “Join you.” The words choked in David’s throat.

  “If you want to be the cautious one, the principled one, cool with me. You won’t have to take anyone you don’t want.”

  David tried to respond. Couldn’t. No words for the skewed vision through which he suddenly saw himself. A broken voice inside asked if Colm was so far off, really; hadn’t David done as Colm accused, and didn’t it prove how little he valued the crown of God’s creation?

  Oh, Lord.

  But no.

  A blaze kindled in him. He had failed in many ways, but he was not what Colm said. He would take Colm back to the others. To justice. In the silence that truth became plain between them, a final understanding that scorched the friendliness from Colm’s face.

  A sizing up of the other man. A stepping to one side, each of them circling toward each other. Colm shaking his head—You don’t want to do this, David, and he was right; but David would do it anyway, for it had to be done.

  They surged into motion at the same moment. Their bodies collided, locked hold of one another. Hands gripping the other’s arms, restraining, grappling. They both skidded as Colm shoved David, tried to knock him off his feet. He dug his heels into the grass and leveraged Colm toward the ground and ducked one punch, but the second snapped his head back and he tasted blood. He knocked Colm’s head into a tree trunk and the man staggered, dazed for only a moment, not time enough for David to put him down.

  He punched Colm’s ribs, stomach—fall, why wouldn’t the guy fall?—Colm’s knee came up, the target obvious, and David dodged that blow only so Colm could land one to his chest. His lungs tried to spasm with the impact and the memories—weapon lost, combat up close, hand to hand and head to head, teeth and nails and boots, mud and rain and blood. Fight. Not kill or be killed. Worse. Kill or be taken. History for David, present reality for Colm.

  The past was choking him. Kill or be vivisected, discovered, used. He bent the terror to his will and held nothing back. Knuckles throbbed as he hit again and again, took hits himself rather than let go. The man fought not with trained finesse, not with brute strength, but with resourceful desperation, every possible strike attempted, any soft area of David’s body attacked—belly, kidneys, throat—and then Colm kept trying for his eyes. If he escaped, if he murdered again because David lost this fight—

  Sweat and blood in his mouth. The reek of both in his nostrils. Colm’s fists and knees and booted feet. The blows and the shoves sent both of them staggering, tipping over to the ground. There was a near scent of grass and pine needles, a scramble up again, and then finally David’s arm dropping over Colm’s head, Colm’s neck in the crook of his elbow. David squeezed. Colm’s blunt fingernails tore his forearm. He kicked the ground and arched his back, trying to leverage David off balance. At last he went limp. David kept the pressure on his windpipe another thirty seconds and then let go. Colm flopped to the ground at his feet.

  David dropped to a crouch. The shortness of breath came only half from bruised ribs and fight-or-flight. He fell forward to his hands and knees. Beside him Colm lay on his back, eyes closed, one cheekbone swelling and faintly purple, blood on his lower lip. His chest rose and fell.

  Finish it.

  David shut his eyes against the animal inside, but it was roused now from a sleep of decades. Awake and shaking.

  He’ll come to in a minute. He’ll attack. He’ll drag you to the Germans. To the Koreans. To the Viet Cong. You’ll be an experiment. A dismembered mess that just keeps on breathing.

  “No.” David lowered his face to the ground. American pine trees. Soft Michigan grass. Crisp northern air. His lungs filled. His voice shook, but he had to speak aloud. Regain his reason, shut down the violence that fed on the fear. “It isn’t real. It’s the twenty-first century, and I’m no soldier anymore.”

  Tiana. The soothing smokiness of her voice and the acceptance in her eyes as she spoke words of correction, words of kindness. How he wished her here now.

  “Lord,” he whispered. “Take care of her. And please help me.”

  Beside him Colm stirred. David hauled him to his feet and decked him as hard as he could. Colm sagged to the ground again.

  David hoisted him over his shoulders and peered out from the shelter of the pines. No one around. He carried Colm to the Jeep, laid him down on the back seat, and bound his hands behind his back with a discarded plastic grocery bag rolled lengthwise and knotted at the handles. Hardly secure, but Colm couldn’t get free without a lot of rustling. At his wrists, especially the right one, the skin had been chafed and torn in his work to get free of the twine. He must have worked heedless of pain once Zac had fallen asleep. Well, that opportunity would not come to him again.

  David nearly ran the stop sign in front of the little hote
l. He passed the bookstore and turned his face from it, shame burning his gut at what he’d considered doing, what he’d wanted to do, under the pine trees scant minutes before. Colm would face a jury of his peers—essentially a legal trial. The closest they could get, anyway.

  His hands squeezed the wheel until he pulled into his driveway. Moira burst out of the house, worry creasing her face. David parked and got out, and she froze halfway to him.

  “David, what happened?”

  “See for yourself.”

  He opened the Jeep, grabbed Colm under the arms, and hauled him out. Colm’s feet bounced off the door and flopped to the ground as David dragged him from the vehicle and up the porch. Silent and pale, wearing a hoodie and lounge pants she must have slept in, Moira held the door open and followed him into the living room. Zac strode in from the kitchen and stood still in the entryway. Both of them watched David lower Colm’s body and lift his legs to the couch.

  They didn’t say anything, do anything, offer anything, which was fine. Not much they could contribute at the moment. David straightened and blinked hard against the stabbing in his side. One thing he’d say for Colm, the man knew how to hit.

  He went to the kitchen and rummaged through the catch-all drawer beside the stove. Black nylon zip ties. He knew he’d bought a package sometime, though he couldn’t remember the reason. Aha, here they were. He shoved the drawer closed a bit harder than he’d meant to and returned to the living room.

  Moira stood over Colm, her hazel eyes glossy. She stepped back as David turned him onto his side and nodded at Zac. “Come here.”

  Zac crossed the room to him. “Yeah?”

  “Hold him.”

  “Is this really necessary?” Moira’s voice quavered.

  “I hit him hard,” David said, “but I’m not Muhammad Ali. No way he’s still unconscious. He’s waiting for me to untie him.”

  Zac took hold of Colm’s arms. One of the bound hands twitched. Zac met David’s eyes, nodded.

  Moira hid her hands in the pockets of her hoodie. “Waiting for what? To run away?”

  “What else?” Zac said and shook the still body. “It won’t work, mate. Give up.”

  Colm’s eyes snapped open, glaring, and he gave a thrash like a fish just landed on a boat deck. While Zac held him down, David loosened and removed the plastic bag from his wrists and snapped the zip tie around them instead, just above the raw twine burn.

  “David?” Moira said quietly.

  “It’s necessary.” With Colm on his back again, David used the other tie on his ankles. Colm didn’t bother to kick him.

  “You could have spared all of us this next part,” Colm said, his face flat. “Just keep that in mind.”

  David tested the zip tie around his feet with a tug. Good and secure.

  Colm was restrained. No threat to anyone at the moment. Strength poured out of David’s limbs, seeming to drain into the floor and away from him. He crossed to the chair and sank into it, hunching a little though he tried not to.

  Across the room Colm watched him. “So that was interesting.”

  “Aye.”

  Moira looked from one of them to the other. She shook her head. The agelessness of the gesture, a little girl baffled by the boys scuffling in the dirt, brought the ache back to David’s chest. This day was going to break her heart.

  Zac was standing in one corner. His gaze held David’s, and David got the surreal sense that their thoughts had just mirrored each other’s. Zac’s silence was more somber than that of guys who didn’t talk much. He glanced to Moira, but Moira was looking at Colm.

  “This can be made right,” she said quietly.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “You know what my role was.”

  “Moira.” Colm’s voice softened. “Do you think that’s going to matter?”

  She closed her eyes, turned away from him. Looked to David. “We need to call Simon.”

  They had to talk away from Colm. In the absence of a proper cell, David removed the bathroom doorknob and reinstalled it on the door of the guest bedroom closet, reversing it so it locked from the outside. Then he and Zac hauled Colm to the bedroom. David emptied the closet of boxes, and Zac unscrewed the lightbulb. They turned to find Moira standing in the doorway.

  “Any reason he can’t be in the dark?” David asked. Half sarcasm, but if Colm was going to panic as soon as they shut the door, Moira would be the one to know.

  She shook her head.

  Zac tossed the lightbulb a foot into the air and caught it. “Not sturdy enough to cut zip ties, but could be used as a weapon.” Her nod was stiff.

  “How long do you think this will take, your deliberation?” Colm said. “More than thirteen hours?”

  Moira left the room.

  David and Zac didn’t bother to answer him. Colm lay on the floor while they finished preparing his makeshift cell, watching everything, but he said no more. When the closet was safely bare, David dragged him inside then shut and locked the door.

  He and Zac joined Moira in the kitchen, and for the first time, the house seemed to have shrunk. Too many people wasn’t the real problem. It was too much strain, too much history, and a fierce need welled up in David to have his space back, his solitude. Loneliness with peace or companionship with turmoil? He was too wrung out to choose the latter, but the choice had been made already.

  The growing hurt in his body didn’t help. He dropped onto a kitchen stool and propped his elbows on the counter. Moira leaned into the right angle between the sink and the stove.

  “How much does Simon know?” David said.

  Zac paced the length of the island. “I called him.”

  “Is he coming?” Moira’s whisper might have held hope.

  “He’s available for a conference call.”

  “Now?”

  “Whenever we are.” Zac was already pulling his phone from the pocket of his jeans. He dialed Simon, put the phone on speaker at full volume, and set it on the table.

  David positioned his stool in a corner of the kitchen that faced the hallway to the guest bedroom and gave him line of sight to the front door. If Colm somehow got loose, doubtless he’d try to escape through the bedroom window rather than the front door, but David should hear that given Colm’s zip-tied hands were likely to be clumsy. Right. Zip-tied hands. Locked in. The man wasn’t going to escape.

  The ringing line was cut off by Simon’s snapping voice. “Now what?”

  “We’re all here,” Zac said. “Me, Moira, David.”

  “I told you what needs to happen. There’s nothing left to say on the subject.”

  “We need to hear it from you, Simon. All of us.” Moira twisted a dark curl around her index finger.

  “He’s not the person you think you know, Moira. He’s a monster, and we need to kill him.”

  She pushed away from the counter and approached the phone. “What happened to ‘crime fighting isn’t a hobby’ and ‘leave it to the authorities’ and—?”

  “Oh, come on, honey.” Simon huffed. “This is the one thing we can’t leave to them, and you know it. Any outcome is a disaster for Colm, not to mention us. Life in prison. Lethal injection. Think what happens to him in either scenario. Detectives would dig into similar cold cases and might very well find links to Colm, maybe even links between him and us, not only in this decade but all the way back before we should have been born.”

  “So we kill him because he can’t serve a life sentence.” She stared out the window as if Zac and David weren’t in the room.

  “No, Moira, we kill him because more innocent mortals will die if we don’t.”

  “He says it’s what he wants,” Zac said, still in motion, his strides eating the length of the room again and again. “He doesn’t want to live with it anymore.”

  “So?” Simon said.

  “So the last thing he should get is what he wants.”

  “We do this because it’s right. What Colm wants isn’t a factor either way.” />
  “Simon.” Moira’s voice shook. “We could buy a house—a fortified house. With a panic room. We could lock him in.”

  “For a hundred years?” Simon had to be shaking his head.

  Moira still hadn’t looked away from her fixed gaze out the window. “Rotating guard duty. A few months a year for each of us. I’m willing to do it.”

  “I’m not. It’s too risky.”

  “Prison is risky?”

  “When the inmate is one of us, yes. He’d have lifetimes to find a weakness, create a way out. Escape would be inevitable even if you put him in a straitjacket. It might take him seventy years, but he’d get out, Moira, and by then he might be driven to make up for lost time. He could kill a dozen people or a hundred people before we were able to stop him.”

  As he spoke, Moira’s head bent lower and lower. By the time he was quiet, her forehead rested against the window. Her breathing grew sharp.

  “I’m sorry,” Simon said, and he seemed to mean it.

  “We’re voting, aren’t we,” she said in a tone barely loud enough for the phone to pick up. “We’re his jury.”

  “That’s the point of your call, isn’t it? To get my vote?”

  “And to hear your reasons,” Zac said.

  “Well, you’ve heard them.”

  “Don’t you want to hear ours?” Moira said.

  “You mean things I already know about you two? No, thanks. But I’d like David’s vote before I hang up.”

  Zac didn’t stop pacing. Moira didn’t lift her head. The silence lasted.

  David leaned into the corner and folded his arms across his bruised chest. “One thing we need to determine now, before we continue. How many votes are needed for a decision? And if we’re two and two, what happens to him? I think we can all agree now that releasing him isn’t one of the options.”

  He hadn’t meant to glance at Moira, but she wasn’t looking at him anyway. She stood bent with her forehead against the window.

  “So there are two possible outcomes for him,” David said, looking from her to Zac. “Imprisonment by us. Or execution by us.”

  “Yes,” Zac said.

  Moira was silent.

  “For execution, we need a majority,” Simon said, and Zac nodded.