Worlds of Hurt

by Brian Hodge

  Good, he thought as he reached his car. Please let that be a prediction.

  XIV

  When it happened again that night, it came as no surprise this time, only with the weight of sorrow and inevitability and a crushing sense of blame. Make sure you keep up on the news, had been Bruce’s counsel. Another night, another slaughter, another family lost to the world and all who knew them.

  “This is him, isn’t it,” Janika said. “Both of these.”

  “We don’t know that,” he lied, because there were things he would discuss with Manon that he saw no point in bringing up with his sister.

  And yet, she knew: “Then why are you sitting on the edge of your fucking chair watching this like your life depends on it?”

  A moment later, she looked as if she regretted the tone of voice she’d taken with him—words in anger, misplaced and poorly timed. When she started to apologize he shook his head, and if he’d been sitting close enough he would’ve touched a shushing finger to her lips. Instead, he was close enough only to the remote, and shut the TV off. There would be nothing more to learn, and, after a second night of news like this, you didn’t just change over to a channel more to your liking, find something better suited for amusing yourself to death. There were so many more conscious ways to die.

  “I’m going out for some air,” Andrei said.

  From the tidy little closet in the entry hall he grabbed his jacket, its pockets still heavy, and from across the room Janika watched him, and Corey from a million miles beside her, everybody knowing what each other was thinking and not a one of them saying a word about it. That was the beautiful thing with people you loved: the shorthand, when it really mattered.

  As he walked past where she sat fatigued on the sofa, he rested his hand on her shoulder and squeezed, and her hand clapped over his and held tight. Something wet and warm trickled across his wrist, and her lips pressed tight against the back of his hand. He felt a choppy, halting breath drawn past the bones and the freckles and the fine pale hairs, and he remembered an old photo he hadn’t seen in too long: himself, a few days old, in a soft blue blanket and Janika’s arms, a big sister but still a little girl, caught in a blissful smile as she pressed her nose to his fuzzy head. Their mother had later explained how much she’d loved that clean baby smell.

  She let him go.

  Hands in his pockets, he kept it together while he moved through the house, although moments later he heard footsteps coming from behind, heavier than Janika’s ever were, the same footsteps he recognized in the mornings when Corey went plodding for the bathroom. Corey caught up with him at the back door landing.

  “Not going out the front,” he said in his softest, deepest rumble of a voice, and Andrei shook his head no. “Cops can’t see you leaving from back here. Ain’t a good idea, man.”

  “I guess that depends.”

  “On…?”

  “I’m just going out for some air, look at the stars.”

  “Plenty air and stars out front. All you want.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But I don’t think I’ll ever get all I want.”

  If he’d had a kind of premonition last night, seeing Janika older in a good way, tonight he was seeing Corey older in a bad one, his round face marked by the aftermath of worries and woes. He would probably make a great father, if Janika—or some other woman in some other picture—gave him the chance. He would sacrifice everything for them, and it would be either his salvation or his complete undoing.

  “You coming back in?” Corey asked.

  “I’d like to.”

  “That ain’t what I asked.”

  “Then…let’s just sleep on it…see where we stand in the morning.”

  Corey nodded and stepped forward to hug him, hugging him in a way he hadn’t been hugged in a long time, arms around him like an inner tube and big hands slapping his back so hard it was like getting worked over by a chiropractor. He stepped back and would look only at the floor now, then turned and shuffled away in his stocking feet.

  Outside, Andrei wandered past empty flower gardens and across the flagstones and dormant lawn, wrapped against the chill and tipping his face to whatever stars there were to be seen from a city, where there was no such thing as a total absence of light, and it seemed wrong that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d left everything behind to stand on wilder ground and look up to confront his tiny place under infinity.

  Even if he couldn’t see it, he knew it was there, and while it may not have cared, he found that it strengthened him just the same.

  He flipped open the cell phone, its display a rectangle of clean light in the darkness. Good strong signal, four bars and climbing, although the battery indicator had edged back just millimeters from the dead zone. He flipped it closed again to conserve whatever juice was left.

  With his vision limited, his ears took over, every small sound there was to hear from the neighbors and the earth and trees and the crisp rattle of wind through parched leaves. Not so long ago, almost any sound from down the street or up the alley spooked him, the known and unknown alike announcing another potential threat, but they had all come to nothing. If he had one regret, it was the countless days he’d given up to fear, like an offering.

  Knowing now what was out there, just not where it was, or what it was thinking, or if it even thought at all, and merely obeyed, he waited for the phone to ring.

  Eventually the lights in the house cycled on and off, a bedtime sequence from one room to another, until the last windows went dark—all except for the dim stovetop light in the kitchen, burning throughout the night if he needed it.

  He gave Janika and Corey half an hour to fall asleep, and with the phone still marking off its countdown to a conversation he didn’t want to have in front of either of them, he crept back inside—quietly, but not too quietly, in case anyone was still awake and listening for his reassuring tread on the stairs. In the dark, he groped his way to bed, and slept in his clothes.

  * * *

  It jolted him awake like an electric shock ripping through his chest and shoulder. His mind still muddled, he wondered if this was what it felt like to have a heart attack.

  He peered at the clock, blue-green digits floating in the gloom: a little past two.

  When going to bed, he had turned off the cell phone’s ringer and set it to vibrate, then tucked it into his armpit so he wouldn’t lose it. He fished it out from under his T-shirt and flipped it open.

  “Are you ready to resume that conversation now?”

  He rubbed at his eyes and kept his voice low, remembering what a light sleeper Corey could be. “Do I have a choice?”

  “You’ve always had a choice. Still do. That’s what this has all been about.”

  “What kind of choice did you give those families?”

  “They were just variables in the experiment. You’ve got to take a firm hand somewhere,” Bruce said. “Did you stop to consider they were born to serve? And now, they have?”

  With eyes closed, through gritted teeth: “I am not. Worth. That.”

  “Maybe you’re not in the best position to judge. Haven’t you ever heard there’s more rejoicing in Heaven over the one lost sheep coming back into the fold than there is over the ninety-nine already there?”

  “It doesn’t mean it like that.”

  “There’s some room for interpretation.”

  Andrei wondered if Bruce hadn’t just let a clue slip. Playing out a ratio—was this what was going on, under the surface? He did the math: Seven the first night and five more last evening makes twelve. Subtract them from ninety-nine and that leaves eighty-seven. He was prepared to kill eighty-seven more innocent people? To prove some psychologically or cosmically twisted point?

  Yet he still had a choice, Bruce insisted. Conceivably he could snap the phone closed and go back to sleep and that might be the end of it, at least where his own fate was concerned. Could he really do that? As he lay staring at the ceiling, lines floated in from
memory. From George Carlin’s list of things you never hear: You can do what you want to the girl, but leave me alone. From somewhere else, maybe many somewheres: Killing’s easy. It’s living with it that’s hard.

  He tried to imagine a future full of newscasts and their orderly collages of faces gathered from family portraits, friends’ snapshots, school photos. He’d already seen the first seven; tomorrow would bring another five. Slain. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  Maybe there was a Hell after all, and he’d just envisioned it.

  “Please stop this,” he whispered.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. But you’re going to have to ask me to my face.”

  * * *

  Back out in the chill again, although this time he had purpose. He had direction.

  He had orders and a conscience.

  Andrei had suspected earlier, and now it seemed all but confirmed, that Bruce knew very well that he could leave through the back of the house without being seen by the police across the street. Had to wonder if they weren’t about ready to pull the plug on the stakeout anyway, nearly a week of inactivity while families elsewhere died on their own floors. Maybe they had made the connection and maybe they hadn’t, but there wasn’t much point in cueing them in, not when Bruce had already offered to put himself in their hands and they’d turned him down, seeing him not as he was, but as someone they couldn’t even take seriously.

  Andrei eased down the alley that ran behind their house, leaving their block behind, and then another block, and kept on going, figuring that Bruce would let him know when and where to stop. He had no clue what lay ahead, sure only that he wasn’t going to be clubbed from behind and that would finish it. Bruce may not have had any one distinctive style, but that wasn’t like any of them.

  He kept his footsteps slow and measured, crunching a layer of gravel and grit as he passed through a gauntlet of the backs of houses and garages, darkened except for an occasional light in an isolated room burning lonely after midnight. In spite of the cold he was sweating, trickles of ice water coursing down his ribs. When he heard a clunk, he swung up the flashlight he was carrying, stabbed the beam through the dark and, with a ruby-red flash of eyes, it fell upon a possum crouched atop an open garbage can, all scrappy fur and scaly tail like something reptilian grafted onto its haunches. Its pointed muzzle dropped open to show twin rows of needle teeth as it hissed at him.

  He hadn’t even relaxed before the flashlight was gone, plucked from his grip from behind. He spun around into a fist that cracked him on the cheekbone and staggered him toward the cans, and after a couple of tottering steps, off balance, he sprawled onto his backside.

  “They serve, too, even the ugly ones,” Bruce said, and shined the light past him at the ground, where the possum was scuttling into the darkness.

  Andrei went for his pocket. He yanked the revolver free and thrust it outward, at the suggestion of a mass to the side of the white nova shining at him. The flash winked out, leaving only moonlight, profoundly dark after the glare, and he tried to track Bruce by the crunch of his shoes. A shadow against shadows, raised and whipped forward—instinct sent him rolling to his left just as the hurled flashlight smashed into the ground beside his neck.

  He came out of the roll and steadied his aim again, vision adjusting just enough to let him better see the shape rushing at him, and he went for it dead center —

  A flash of moonlit face froze his finger, only for an instant, Andrei forced to remind himself that it was a trick, but even eternities could hinge upon instants. Time only for one shot when he’d hoped for more, two in the chest and one in the head, just as he’d mentioned to Manon. You could pick up all sorts of useful tips from films when you were too frightened to leave home.

  He pulled the trigger, and overlapping the shot was a grunt, then the mass bore down on him before he could do it again. A revelation: This was the least scared he’d been in half his life, since before finding out one winter night that he was mortal after all. Now he knew what savagery was really like. He wanted blood, to feel it pouring from the hole he’d just put in his enemy, wanted to savor its taste on his tongue, wanted to reach into the hole and widen it with his fist, find the heart and yank it out and feast on that too.

  “Knock it off, you dumb little shit.”

  Knees bore into his chest like pylons, then the gun left his grasp almost as easily as the flashlight had, a wrenching twist and it was gone. A moment later, it was probably what he felt again, the butt brought down like a mallet into the middle of his forehead, and he went boneless. Bruce shifted, sitting on him now, and groaned in discomfort that should have been a lot worse.

  “Who did you see?” he asked. “Or what?”

  Andrei waggled his head, loose and disoriented. “Nobody I knew.” Had no desire to amuse the guy by telling him that it was Corey’s face he’d seen coming at him, even though he’d realized this couldn’t be. Logic had lost the race, a close second to knee-jerk instinct.

  “I never get to ask.” Bruce laughed a little, or tried to, the sound something between a laugh and a wheeze and a grunt.

  Andrei felt his wrist grabbed and yanked upward, puppeted in a back-and-forth motion that slapped his hand against a hard shell underneath Bruce’s clothing: a vest, body armor, no doubt lifted from somebody, somewhere, as a contribution to the cause. After a moment, his hand was flung back to the ground.

  “Still like getting hit with a hammer.” Bruce seemed to need to catch his breath. “Gotten it out of your system? You ready to start cooperating?”

  “God sends possums now, is that it?”

  “God sends opportunity. I’ve been flanking you for over two blocks. It was only a matter of time before something spooked you.” He coughed, spat to the side. “You’ve never figured this out, have you? I can tell.”

  “You just said it on the phone, I thought. Ninety-nine to one. You’ll kill eighty-seven more in place of me.”

  “Eighty-seven?” Bruce appeared genuinely startled, then amused. “Since when did you back down and start thinking so small?”

  Andrei couldn’t do much more than blink at him.

  “Your chat transcripts with Kimmy—I read them all. This one exchange I read so many times, I’ll never have to read it again to repeat it word-for-word. It was right after you’d told her what happened in the river. How it was eight years before you started to remember the rest. Here’s what she wrote you: ‘And you haven’t blown your brains out yet? Paradoxically, it’s been known to happen. Or screamed your throat raw until they sedated you? Pretty impressive, Andrei. You may be one of those that make it.’ Do you remember how you answered her?”

  Ancient history, it felt like he was talking about. “Not really. No.”

  “You disappoint me. Well, here’s how you set her straight: ‘No matter how great my despair might get in this life, no way would I ever surrender to the next one. I’d never commit suicide.’ Is it coming back yet? Now here’s the good part: ‘I’d sooner kill the rest of the world first.’”

  Silence, loud as thunder.

  “Those were your terms. All I did was accept them.”

  Andrei shut his eyes, listening to the night over the roaring of blood in his ears. His words. His own words.

  “How do you like it so far? Because I can keep doing this till the cows drop dead,” Bruce told him. “Eighty-seven more…all that’d be is a good start.”

  There had been a time when he would have disputed that anyone could build a prison out of words. Could he have been any more wrong? Speak, write, and it shall appear.

  “What’s it gonna be, Andrei? We stay here much longer, all it’ll do is complicate things, and probably rack up a few more casualties. Unless that’s what you want.”

  Bruce had the gun—what was he waiting for? “Just finish this right now.”

  “Leave you here like garbage in an alley—you don’t think you’ve earned better than that?”

  Andrei thought he would prefer it, yes. Their ideas
of better were undoubtedly very different. Although he supposed he’d been ready for this moment, too, as surely as he’d hoped for the music of Bruce’s lungs bubbling with his own blood…this fulcrum of surrender, with each day bringing him another step closer to what he would have thought impossible a week ago.

  I did promise your sister something earlier —

  “Then what are we waiting for?” he said.

  — that I wouldn’t hurt you—

  He would not run. He would not beg. He would not cry. Above all, he would not risk another life in place of his own.

  — unless you asked me to.

  “Do whatever it is you think you have to do.” But he wasn’t too proud to spit into the face above him. “Just as long as you make it hurt.”

  XV

  Along the way, he thought of prison busses, lifers going away for the rest of their natural spans—some of them in denial, probably, but others accepting without dispute that it would be the last time they saw anything on this side of the walls.

  Having spent so much of his life in Pittsburgh, Andrei realized how much he had come to take it for granted, and the role that place plays…how it had shaped him, how it had centered him. Until now, he’d forgotten how much he loved it. To buildings, billboards, and boulevards, he nodded goodbye.

  As Bruce drove in silence, he rode alone in the backseat of a four-door sedan, a rental or something stolen from someone who might never report it, but either way, the car felt chosen for precisely this trip. Easy in, easy out. There was still no trust, though. Even before they’d gotten up from the ground to leave the alley, Bruce had cinched his wrists behind him with FlexiCuffs, those plastic bonds that were favorites among riot police everywhere. After Bruce had led him to the car, parked along a shadowed stretch where the streetlight was out, another set went around his ankles.