"You don't remember?" this new Amanda asked with damp eyes, "Richie, it's us. We're here to help."
"We came to find you, Richie. We've been walking for weeks to find you."
Buddy held his fist up in front of his face, never letting his eyes stray from Richie's, and rippled the closed hand. It was like watching dominos topple, one finger loosening after another, until something fell from the weakest grip. It was on a string, but should've been on a chain. Richie had always thought that.
"How?"
"You couldn't find it, Richie. You remember? We tore the camp apart and you couldn't find the watch, but I saw it after you left. I grabbed it up, thinking about how happy you'd be after you saw that we still had your charm," Amanda explained, though she couldn't be Amanda.
Richie's Amanda hadn't reappeared for some reason, but the voices kept rattling things off at him. It wasn't pleasant, having dead people's personalities in your scrambled mind, but Richie wondered how he would feel if they left. It had been a long time since Elvis had felt so near. His thoughts were wandering in and out of the dream and the night.
"You're not real," Richie murmured, "Amanda's been with me for a month. We were stuck in the feeder's camp."
"What are you talking about?" Buddy asked, “You had a couple of others with you, brother, but Amanda stayed behind with me and the rest.”
"We left and got picked up by the feeders. Amanda wanted to go and find medicine, but you didn't want us to."
"That never happened," his Amanda spoke up from behind him, “I didn’t really go with you. That’s why you didn’t remember me being there.”
Richie whirled to see her. She was dressed as she'd been only moments ago, so different from the woman who stood with Buddy. Richie's head cocked to the side as he considered. His thoughts were a jumbled mess, but he was still a smart man, far beyond most. He could work this out if he had the time.
Put it down, Richie.
"Just put the gun down, Richie. We'll talk about everything, man."
Put it down, fuckface!
Just put the gun down.
"Put the gun down!"
"Let it drop, Richie!"
Every voice was screaming the same message, telling Richie that he was wrong in wanting to shoot, to kill, but he refused to listen. He wasn't wrong in wanting to end a life. He just needed to end the right one.
Richie turned the weapon away from his friends, whether they were real or fantasy, and pressed the barrel to the underside of his chin. He knew that this was the right thing, that he could end the suffering, for himself and all of them. Richie took a deep breath and closed his eye in preparation.
The gunshot rang out in the night, allowing the silence a moment of rest.
<><><>
"Will you hit the air conditioning?" Benny asked, leaning against the edge of the kitchen counter, "It's like a fucking oven in here, man."
Richie turned his head toward the voice, hoping that hell couldn't be so unscrupulous as hanging around Benny for eternity. He saw his friend and could say nothing. Benny looked as he had on that last night in Miami, but something about him didn't quite match up to Richie's memory. It wasn't obvious, but Richie was sure he'd be able to figure it out if he had all of the afterlife at his disposal.
"You're supposed to say something here," the leaning man told him, "Hold up your end, one-eye."
"Quit bein' a dick, Benny," Elvis said from his seat at the kitchen table, "Richie's pretty messed up."
"Screw off, Elvis."
"You screw off, Benny the Dick," Elvis replied, his grin obvious by the tone.
Richie looked to Elvis, whom he'd wanted so badly to see for so long. He was here, now, but Richie knew that this couldn't be real. He might believe that he'd been sent to hell if Benny showed up, but not Elvis. The King of Rock n' Roll had surely been taken into heaven. He looked back and forth between the two dead men in the same way he might've watched a tennis match. His interest wasn't really in the volley, but in the point.
"Am I dead?" Richie asked.
"Don't think so, Richie. If you were, then we couldn't be here."
Richie stood from the table, his chair clattering to the floor behind him. He twisted his head upward, toward the ceiling, and raised both hands to shoulder level. He barked a single laugh, but left the humor out of it.
Richie walked around the table, passing between the figments of his distraught imagination, and went to the refrigerator. He opened the door, almost shoving his head into the cold air inside, and came back up with a bottle of beer. Richie twisted the cap from its home and tossed it toward the trash can. His comrades watched him with amused looks as Richie swallowed half of the bottle's contents at once.
"You've got to be kidding me," Richie said, holding the beer out so that he could look at it, "I'm crazy as a frigging loon. I'm hallucinating. I have voices in my head. All of these things suck, terribly, but nothing about this sucks more than the fact that even in my psychotic dream, the frigging beer comes out warm!"
Elvis guffawed, as he'd always been known to do, while Benny grinned.
"I'm serious, man. I probably just shot myself in the head and screwed the pooch on it, leaving myself a vegetable that's even more of a burden on Buddy. And now I'll be in a coma, or something, with my two dearest dead friends and a refrigerator full of warm beer. I used to think of this place as the dream, but I now know that it's a nightmare from which nothing good can come."
"You done?" Elvis asked.
"For the moment," Richie said with a sigh, "Where's Amanda. I was imagining her, too, wasn't I?"
"Yeah. She's still alive, though," Benny answered, sipping his own dream-brew.
"So there are rules to my insanity. That's good. Shit."
"You don't act crazy now," Elvis pointed out, "That's weird."
"True. Other than having conversations with dead people, I'm totally not batshit crazy. Wait. I think that actually makes me even more crazy."
"What he means, Richie, is that you aren't confused or scared. You aren't ranting like an idiot and whining. Maybe you're a little pissed, but that's not really unusual."
"Thank you, Benny the Dick."
"Why do you guys keep calling me that?" Benny asked with a note of exasperation.
Richie looked to Elvis, who shrugged his shoulders. He mimicked the motion to Benny.
"I'd ask Buddy, but I'm a little busy," Richie cracked.
"It's 'cause you know it's not real," Elvis told him, "When you know, you're okay."
"That watch helped," Benny told him.
"Well, if I'm not dead then I'll remember that. As long as I'm not too brain-damaged."
"You know, Richie, we should've called you the dick."
"You might have, but it wouldn't have worked as well. I wouldn't have cared."
"You're gonna wake up soon, Richie. I think so, anyway," Elvis told him, "Me and Benny can stay, but you can't."
"Because I'm not dead?"
"Yep."
"Yeah. That about sums it up," Benny said.
Richie drank more warm beer, sipping the stuff even though he didn't care for the taste. He could actually watch his friends and the room he'd dreamed up fading away. Richie had no idea what was going one, but was sure that he'd find out momentarily.
Elvis was smiling as he disappeared, which touched Richie's heart. The pain of leaving Elvis behind again was monumental, but not nearly as painful as the screaming agony that hit his right arm upon waking.
<><><>
Richie opened his eyes to a dark world of agony and Buddy's laughter. He reached for the source of his pain and felt the damp sleeve of his shirt and a fresh wound on his right triceps. His eye went wide at the exact moment that his fingers found the wound.
"You shot me!" he shouted at this friend.
"Nope," he said with the chuckle still holding onto his face and voice, "Amanda shot you."
"What the hell?"
"You were gonna shoot yourself in the head, Richie. I
t surprised the shit out of me, but I'm pretty sure she made the right move on this one."
"I was?" Richie asked before remembering, "I was. I don't know what I was doing."
"Here," Buddy offered the pocket watch to his disturbed comrade.
He reached for the watch, its string dingy and worn, and felt something course through his arm. He changed to the left, the pain receding once he'd dropped his right. With the watch in hand, Richie's heartbeat settled a bit. The muscles in his jaws stopped tensing. He filled his cheeks with air and blew it outward in a torrent. His talisman had been returned.
"Do you remember where you've been?" Buddy asked, his laughter replaced by a stern silence.
"Yeah," Richie told him, "But it's screwed up. Amanda was with me, Buddy."
"She's been with me at the camp the whole time you've been gone. I haven't spent a day without her, man."
"Where is she now?"
"Took a walk. She feels pretty bad. I really did almost shit my pants when she shot you. I was so tuned in on what you were doing that I didn't even see her raise the gun."
"I went into the dream," Richie admitted, "With Elvis and Benny."
"The one thing about you, one-eye, is that you don't lack for company."
"I'm crazy, Buddy. Something's wrong with my brain and it's getting worse."
"So what else is new?"
"Bite me," Richie replied flatly, “Where’s the cat?”
Buddy grinned at him, his eyes wide behind the lenses of his glasses, and started laughing again. Richie, who hadn't possessed a true reason for laughter in quite some time, joined him. By the time Amanda came back to them, the tears wiped away and the shakes quieted, they were rolling around on the ground giggling like a couple of idiots. Amanda watched with crossed arms, her head shaking slowly. She rolled her eyes to the sky with a questioning smirk.
"What is wrong with these two?"
No one answered her. The pavement and dust were quiet on this night, but her two odd companions were not.
Chapter 8
Valdez, AK
September 2, 2021
2:39 AM 76*
After bandaging Richie's arm and calming down a bit, the three of them walked toward home, in the same direction that Richie had been traveling. It was like old times in a way, minus a few companions and a lot of anxiety. The one-eyed man tried to stay quiet through the miles, but the four-eyed man refused to let him. Amanda, particularly, wanted to know what had been happening.
"I don't remember everything," Richie lied, "But it all scares the hell out of me."
"Since I was 'there' you need to give a little, Richie. You've been gone for a month and we've been all over the damned state looking for you. Do you have any idea how big Alaska is?"
"Well excuse the hell out of me for being a basket case. I couldn't help it."
"Right. We've already established that Richie's crazy as a shit house rat, Amanda. What I'd like to know is why he was talking about eating people and trying to shoot everything up."
Richie's head drooped, the ground seeming safer to watch than his friends. After a while, he talked. Once it was all out, the terror of his last month, he felt less frightened of it and more drained by everything. His throat was dry and his head ached dully. The wound on his arm had quieted, but Richie knew that the torment would return when they stopped for the day. He would likely roll over on the thing and wake himself up.
"So you really had to do it," Buddy said quietly, "I don't know if I could."
"I don't know. I think so. It all seemed real, but you know my grip on reality, these days."
Amanda said nothing, caught up in her own interpretation of his story. She couldn't know if any of it was true, not that he would lie about such things, but Richie's mental state left more questions than answers for her.
“The two that left with you?” Amanda asked with little hope.
“I don’t know,” Richie told her, “But I didn’t see them as I was leaving.”
All was quiet for a moment. None of them had really known the people who’d gone with Richie, but they deserved that moment of silence. No one remarked on how easily they accepted those deaths. People were either there, or gone. That was a part of living for them in the skeleton of their world.
"So you're a one-eyed people eater?" Buddy asked, suddenly breaking the silence, his eyes bright in the frame of dirty, cracked glasses.
"Fuck off, Buddy," Richie said, trying not to grin.
"Dude. You have to let me paint you purple."
"Buddy! What could ever make what you just said alright?" Amanda asked, stunned and laughing despite the chagrin.
"Think about it!"
"I swear to God, Buddy. Everyone thinks that I'm the crazy one. That's just messed up, man."
“It was a one-horned, one-eyed, flying purple people eater,” Buddy sang, trying not to giggle.
They were hooting, again, which was the only way to face all of it. Without that happiness, that humor, they'd have lost what little humanity had remained inside of their souls long before. Many things are said and done in horrible taste, but if those things can help people to keep moving, to keep fighting in the face of any adversity, then they're worth saying. Laughter, though begotten from pain and grief, saw them through for the rest of the night.
<><><>
When the sun rose, the three travelers were hiding from it in the basement of some random building along the highway. Two of them were long asleep before sunrise, but the damaged one lay awake, his left hand wrapped around the shape of a beaten pocket watch.
Richie had opened the timepiece many times, studying the picture he'd folded into its blank cover and reading the message below it, but it seemed less important to read the words that day. The time and the picture were enough to calm him. The watch alone had anchored him, almost instantly upon its reception, and acted like a sort of switch. He was sane when holding the thing, lost when without it.
There was an absence, though, and Richie felt it in his bones. He knew that his days of running along the deserted road were long past. His friends would surely keep him in sight at all times, now. It was a comfort, a blessing, and a curse. He wouldn't miss the torture he'd gone through. Richie wouldn't miss the confusion that seemed to wrap around him like a woolen blanket on a too warm night. He was going to miss his friend.
He closed his eye, blacking out the world and everything left upon it, and let the watch fall from his fingers. It lay beside him on the sleeping bag he'd been given. The anchor was set to see, unattached for a moment in time, and Richie could actually feel the weight of it falling away. He waited. He waited.
I'm glad they found you, Richie. I was gettin' worried.
"Yeah. Me too, little brother," Richie whispered into the gloom.
Don't go runnin' away again.
"I won't. Where's Benny the Dick?"
Dunno. It's just me and you right now.
"Good. I want you to tell me something, Elvis," Richie said, his voice barely coming off of dry lips, "Tell me how you learned to play the guitar."
Elvis laughed, in that warm and happy voice that everyone had always loved. It was the true definition of a guffaw and Richie remembered thinking that on so many occasions. When Elvis began to tell his story, the one about the guitar, Richie listened until sleep overtook him.
The End
Author’s Note:
Wow. I’ll bet you were expecting a bit more story. Honestly, I was too. I even thought about trying to flesh this one out more in order to match The Dark Roads, though I don’t believe I could’ve beaten what will be the length of Book 3. It’s going to be a doozy.
The thing I’ve been finding out about writing books is a very simple truth. The book doesn’t always want to be a monstrous tome. A great writer has used that old phrase about a cigar just being a cigar and a story just being a story more times than I can count. The story wants to be let out, to be transcribed as what it is, not what I want it to be.
They
’re living things, you know. I’ve been writing for most of my life, but was never able to truly grasp what any of it meant until recently.
At risk of being one of those annoying quote folks, a good friend balked at the idea of putting a steroid needle into this one. She said that I should never risk the story for word counts. I have to admit that she had a damned good point and I’m following her advice on this one. Thanks Lee!
So here I sit, atop my throne as the guy who wrote this book and the one before it, and am in the midst of writing the one after. All of that could get really confusing if we aren’t careful. Either way, I’m glad I got to walk around with Richie and the guys again. I’m, in fact, doing a bit more traveling with them as you’re reading this.
Hopefully you enjoyed the trip as much as I did. Don’t forget to leave a review and Like My Facebook Page so that I can buy fresh bacon and don’t have to purchase a slingshot. You know what I mean.
Alas, I must go.
The day will break again, soon enough, and the night will wait for my walkers.
So many roads to stride with these insomniac transients.
Oh, yeah… One more thing on the next page if you want a sneak peek at the next one. Happy reading.
Wayne Lemmons
April 14, 2016
Other Works by Wayne Lemmons
The Dark Roads
The Story’s Writer
Not This Thursday
Wayne Lemmons
One
I woke up this morning without a clue as to where I was, why I was there, or what day it was. I was, of course, freaked out for the first fifteen minutes after waking, but that is also normal. Apparently, it's something that I deal with every day of the week. That was a perfectly normal reaction to a very routine chain of thoughts. Sounds awful, doesn't it?
Walking Back (The Dark Roads Book 2) Page 8
