Highways to Hell

by Bryan Smith

  And Jack felt ill.

  Very, very ill.

  Not at all as he’d felt in the midst of creating the carnage before him. There had been no thought process involved in what happened, no conscious decision to kill and mutilate. He’d acted on brute instinct, blind rage consuming him as he butchered their flesh and wallowed in blood. The animal primitivism of the act had affected him another way, triggering an arousal that was only now beginning to fade.

  But now he was shaking. His teeth chattered and he felt feverish, like a person coming down with the flu. Sweat streamed from his pores, gluing his starched white shirt to his back and armpits. He coughed and loosened his tie so he could breathe. Looking at the strewn parts of his dead love’s body, he realized he’d crossed an important line, from human to monster.

  Numbness gave way to sobs and tears.

  He removed his tie and shirt and covered his face with his hands.

  “Jesus, forgive me.”

  But Jack wasn’t really a religious man. Beseeching Christ now was a pitiful joke. How could there be forgiveness for his awful deeds? He felt vile, like something gross you wipe off your shoe. Like fresh dogshit. The memory of the erection he’d sported while chopping Lorene’s limbs off shamed him.

  Jack had always considered himself a moral man, a good man. He’d gone out of his way to live right and treat others with respect and kindness. He’d never so much as raised a hand to a woman. Jesus Christ, he donated money to shelters for battered women every year! So he couldn’t understand why he’d so easily surrendered to murderous fury. Maybe hitting the guy once would’ve been acceptable. It was what guys wanted to do when confronted with a situation like this.

  But to kill him?

  To kill Lorene?

  To butcher them?

  These were not the actions of a sane man.

  How could he live with this?

  Well.

  The answer to that question, at least, was simple.

  He couldn’t live with it.

  He thought again about his wish to take it all back. It didn’t seem fair that a few minutes of unthinking violence should so irrevocably alter everything. He should be able to reverse this insanity. Erase the whole regrettable episode from his memory banks. Remembering his thought about life not having an ‘Undo’ button, he now thought a more desirable option would be a ‘Reset’ button, like the ones on video game systems—you used them when you didn’t like the way the game was going and wanted to start over.

  If there is a God, he thought, He needs to enter the goddamn digital age.

  Come on, God, bestow upon humanity the miracle of the holy reset button!

  Grief-choked laughter bubbled out of Jack.

  And he thought, I’m going insane, yes I am, la de da de da.

  “You’re not insane, Jack.”

  Jack jumped at the sound of the other voice in the room.

  “Okay, so maybe you flew off the handle here a bit, but you’re not insane.”

  The voice was behind him.

  Jack whirled around and gasped at the incongruous sight of a smirking, leather-jacketed thug leaning against a wall. The dark-complected man’s shaggy hair was greasy and he had what looked to be a perpetual five o’clock shadow. He wore boots, faded jeans, and a t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of a beer bottle and the words “Salvation Ale”. A halo and wings logo fluttered above the bottle.

  Despite the substantial guilt he felt, Jack nonetheless panicked at the notion of a witness to his crime. The tip of his right foot nudged the embedded cleaver blade. Indignation flooded his senses, overwhelming the guilt and remorse. This person was an intruder in his home! He was violating Jack’s privacy. He was a threat, a danger clear and present.

  Jack knelt and pried the cleaver out of the floor.

  The thug chuckled. “You really don’t need to do that, Jack.”

  Jack snarled and leapt toward the intruder. The man just kept smiling as Jack bore down on him, and he didn’t so much as flinch when the cleaver blade slammed into his shoulder.

  Jack wrenched the blade out and whipped it around again, this time burying it in the grimy fuck’s neck. The force of the blow was nearly enough to fully decapitate the stranger. Jack pulled the blade free and finished the job with one more swing of the cleaver.

  The man’s head tumbled off his shoulders.

  And he caught it in his outstretched hands.

  Staring up at him, the head said, “You have some serious anger management issues, Jack.”

  Jack screamed and ran out of the room.

  He raced into the bedroom he’d shared with Lorene for so many months and barricaded the door by pushing the dresser in front of it. Then he stepped back and stood staring at the blocked door while he huffed and puffed. Then he cursed himself for continuing to behave like a fucking moron. He’d made the mistake of every bubble-headed bimbo in every dimwitted slasher movie ever made. He’d trapped himself in another room inside his home instead of fleeing the goddamn place.

  Jack seized handfuls of his hair and shrieked.

  “Severed...heads...don’t...TALK!”

  Of course they didn’t. And Jack dismissed the notion that he’d actually seen this happen. This was just added confirmation that he’d suffered a psychotic break. Something in him had snapped when confronted with the visual evidence of Lorene’s infidelity, a crucial component of his soul that was just irreparably broken.

  I need to kill myself, he thought.

  I can’t live like this.

  He heard a sigh behind him. “Jack, if you kill yourself, you’ll burn in the lake of fire. And you don’t want that, trust me. But them’s the rules, buddy.”

  Jack remained where he was.

  Why bother confronting a stubborn hallucination?

  “You’re...not...there. You...don’t...exist.”

  “Jack, look at me.”

  There was some steel in the intruder’s voice now. The jovial quality was gone. Jack felt helplessly compelled to obey it.

  He swallowed hard and turned around.

  The stranger was sitting on the edge of the bed. He was still cradling his head in his hands. The stern expression on his face sent a shudder through Jack. It should have been an absurd tableau: a still-sentient decapitated head and a still-mobile headless body.

  But Jack didn’t feel like laughing.

  He cast his memory backward several moments. He saw the cleaver blade entering the stranger’s neck again. Then a second time. And he remembered the lack of spurting blood. There’d been no blood at all.

  Jack cleared his throat and said, “What are you?”

  The stern expression melted, giving way to a grin. The hands lifted the head to its former spot between the body’s shoulders, set it down, and wrenched it into place. There was a bit of grunting and the stranger grimaced. The hands came away from the head and the head stayed in place.

  It looked to have been seamlessly restored, the skin perfect and unbroken.

  The stranger made a sound of relief. “Aaaaah! Much better.”

  Jack swallowed another lump in his throat.

  He was starting to feel sick again.

  The stranger rubbed his hands together briskly, then clapped them once, like a door to door salesman about to make a pitch. “So, Jack, you wanted some personal info?”

  Feeling like Alice falling through the hole, Jack nodded once.

  The stranger grinned. “Jack, I’m your guardian angel.”

  Jack grunted. “Really.”

  “Yep.” The grin gave way to a more solemn expression. “Look, I understand that you’re skeptical. Guardian angels don’t show up every day, otherwise you’d hear about it, right? We’re just in old movies, right? Wrong. Thing is, not everybody has a guardian angel. It’s sort of a spiritual reward, Jack. You get one assigned to watch over your soul if you’ve done something truly extraordinary in a past life.”

  Jack frowned. “Yeah? So what did I do to make me special?”

&n
bsp; The angel smiled and shook his head. “I can’t tell you much, Jack. It’s just not allowed. You did a great thing in a past life, a truly extraordinary, selfless act of rare heroism. And you died in the process.”

  Jack liked the sound of that. Thinking of himself as a hero rather than a maniacal murderer was infinitely more pleasing to the soul. “I was in a war, huh?”

  Saying it out loud, Jack knew it was true.

  No hidden memory from his former life emerged through the fog of the past, but he felt the truth of the statement in his bones. It was an immutable fact. Somewhere on the other side of the earth, and in another body, he’d died on a battlefield.

  A noble, honorable death.

  Tears welled in his eyes.

  The angel shrugged. “I can neither confirm nor deny that, Jackie boy. I can’t tell you anything other than what I’ve already said. On that subject, that is. I’m here to make you an offer, my friend.”

  He started walking toward Jack.

  Jack’s knees began to shake.

  The angel placed his hands on Jack’s shoulders and gazed at him with sympathetic eyes. “Jack, I’m gonna offer what amounts to a heavenly get out of jail free card. You have a choice. You can do as you wished. You can reverse what’s happened. You can undo it. Or...” He glanced away a moment, appearing to hesitate. His gaze came back to Jack. “Or you can say no and face God’s judgment now.”

  Jack swallowed a lump. “What, and go to hell?”

  The angel shrugged. “That’s not for me to say, Jack. You can ask God for forgiveness, but it’s up to Him whether He grants it. And I can’t tell you what he’d do, because I honestly don’t know.”

  Jack grunted. “So my choice is obvious.”

  The angel cocked an eyebrow. “Is it?”

  Jack laughed. “Isn’t it? I can put things right. Lorene and that coffee shop asshole can live again.” A tentative smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as he thought about the possibilities. “And I can atone by living a better life, an exemplary life. I’ll do good deeds and do what I can to make the world a better place.”

  The angel’s eyes crinkled and he sniffled. “That’s beautiful, man.”

  Gentle mockery.

  Jack rolled his eyes. “I’m serious.”

  Some of the humor faded from the angel’s eyes. “I know you are, Jack. And I respect you for it. So I’m going to do this thing for you. I hope you make the best of your second chance, my friend. Be forewarned, however—you’ll be cursed with the memory of what you did. Undoing the deed will not free your conscience of this burden. It will haunt you.” He sighed. “I’ll leave you with a piece of advice—keep your head down and your powder dry.”

  Jack frowned.

  The words seemed familiar and resonant, like some dimly recalled bit of dialogue from a long-ago movie. For a moment, he was transported beyond this time and place, and his senses were clogged with an omnipresent stench of death and the sputtering cough of machine gun fire.

  The memory snap passed in a nanosecond.

  Like a firefly darting in and out of his field of vision.

  The angel stepped back. He smiled. “Let’s do this, man. Kinda in a hurry here, pard. There’s a Salvation Ale with my name on it, and I’m feelin’ mighty thirsty.”

  He clapped his hands.

  Said something in a language Jack didn’t recognize.

  And disappeared.

  Jack blinked.

  He experienced a jarring sense of displacement. He was standing at the door to his apartment. He had his overnight bag slung over his shoulder and the key to his apartment in his right hand.

  He hesitated.

  He placed an ear to the door and listened.

  He heard heavy breathing.

  Lorene moaning.

  So it was true. Not that he hadn’t been presented with enough incontrovertible evidence already. Still, it was disconcerting to find his desperate wish granted. Lorene was alive on the other side of this door, getting passionate with the coffee shop stud.

  Jack experienced a brief surge of his former anger.

  He suppressed it.

  He keyed open the door, drew in a calming breath, and stepped inside to confront the unpleasantness awaiting him. The shirtless stud reacted as before, yelping and grabbing his shirt. Jack clenched his fists tight as the mumbling, blushing kid stumbled by him.

  The fists remained at his sides.

  Jack released the breath he’d been holding and went to the sofa, where he sat down next to Lorene. Lorene didn’t say anything. She picked up her blouse, shrugged it on, and calmly started to button it.

  Jack said, “I forgive you, Lorene.”

  And then she began to cry.

  He took her in his arms and held her.

  After several months of soul-searching and many counseling sessions, Jack and Lorene got married. Jack impressed her by becoming a more sensitive man and a better, more attentive lover. He did the good deeds he’d promised the angel, donating significant portions of each paycheck to a variety of worthy causes.

  All was well in Jack’s world.

  Well, not quite all.

  He did have nightmares about what he’d done prior to being granted his second chance. Mostly he didn’t remember them, but there’d been one so lucid it had almost seemed real. In this dream, he went further than he had in reality. In the dream, his state of intense arousal was not to be denied.

  In the dream, he did...things...unspeakable, awful, sick things to Lorene’s limbless, headless torso.

  Jack awoke from the dream feeling ill, barely making it to the bathroom in time to vomit his steak dinner into the toilet bowl.

  Thankfully, that dream had not recurred.

  And his waking life was filled with joy.

  Then one night he went out for a walk. He stopped at a street corner to dig change out of his pocket for a newspaper. While he was counting out his change, a compact car with tinted windows rolled up beside him.

  The passenger side window rolled down.

  A vaguely familiar voice called out to him: “Mr. Roth!”

  Frowning, Jack turned around.

  For the slightest fraction of a moment, he perceived the muzzle flash of a pistol. Then he gasped as the first of three slugs slammed into his chest.

  He fell dead to the sidewalk and the car peeled off.

  Lorene snatched up the phone on the first ring.

  A shivery sensation of pleasure snaked through her as she heard the beloved voice: “We’re free, baby.”

  Lorene squeaked with delight. “Yes! You did it? You really did it?”

  Jeb Marshall laughed. “Of course. You know I’d do anything for you. You should be hearing from the police soon.”

  Lorene gasped. “Oooh! Let’s not talk about it over the phone.”

  Jeb laughed again. “Gotcha. Listen, when it’s all over, we’ll celebrate our freedom at Mondo Java. Meanwhile, I hope you’re prepared to face the music.”

  Lorene smiled and twisted the phone cord in her hands, wishing it was Jeb’s hair. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

  “Coolness. Better go now. Hang in there, babe. I love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Lorene returned the phone to its cradle.

  The prospect of facing the police made her a little nervous, but that wasn’t enough to dampen her excitement; she was beside herself with unalloyed joy. She was so glad she’d gone through these months of agony. All those stupid counseling sessions with Jack had been so worth it. Christ, to think they’d almost blown it when Jack came back from the airport that time.

  It was a good life lesson.

  When you get another chance to do things right, grab the fucker.

  Lorene poured herself a cup of French roast, sipped from the steaming mug, and began practicing grief-stricken widow faces.

  My best friend growing up was this guy named Mark Angel. Mark flaked out in college, ran away with the circus, and eventually dropped off
the radar screen. I got postcards from him for a while, mostly from points south. The postmarks were from backwater burgs in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. The postcards arrived intermittently over a period of several months, then they just stopped coming.

  That was fourteen years ago.

  Mark was just a memory—a long-forgotten one.

  Until Resurrection Week, that is.

  Check this out.

  Saturday morning. The alarm was trilling inches away from my ear. I reached for the snooze button, then it dawned on me the sound I was hearing wasn’t the alarm—it was the telephone. I rolled onto my side, blinked away the last vestiges of sleep, and stared at the blatting monstrosity.

  Then I looked at the clock.

  “Aw, shit.”

  The time was 9:07 a.m., too early by far for a sleep-in Saturday.

  But the insolent device kept on ringing. Fucker.

  “Jesus Christ, Craig, pick up the goddamn phone.” A pillow thumped the back of my head. “Or I’ll be forced to wrap the cord around your neck.”

  The assailant was Jenny Hollis. Her presence there was a sign that a sort of sea change was underway in my life. Jenny was no dubious barroom conquest. I’d known her nearly half my life. She was the second girl who ever consented to have sex with me, when I was barely nineteen. We were together intermittently over the next several years. We experienced periods of great passion, and I suppose she should have been the great love of my life. It just didn’t happen.

  Now, however, we were together yet again. Reconciliation No. 123,000, give or take.

  I picked up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “Is this Craig McTavish?”

  My first thought was, Bill Collector.

  “Ah...”

  Remember, I hadn’t heard Mark’s voice in over a decade. The caller paused a moment before speaking again. “Um...McT?”

  I almost dropped the phone. “Mark?”

  No one else would call me “McT.”

  Mark chuckled. “McT. I knew it was you, man.”

  I glanced at Jenny. “I’m think I’m talking to Mark Angel.”

  “Only I’m the one doing all the talking,” I heard Mark say.