Dark Duets

by Christopher Golden

  Funny though, the girl’s never come right out and asked the kid to kill Ricky. She doesn’t seem to hold too firm a grudge against Ricky, despite the horrors and the slicing and the chewing and the rest of it. The feds, even with their top forensic scientists working the evidence, only got about half the story right in the end. The girl has explained to the kid in excruciating detail exactly what happened to her and the others.

  The kid stands and knocks gently on the glass, then shoots the Nazi the finger. The Aryan sneers, reaches under the mattress, and holds up a little triangular piece of glass with a taped handle.

  “No wonder he got shanked,” the girl says in his brain, pressed to the metal, sweating, beautiful as always. “That shit couldn’t protect anybody.”

  The kid searches for a way past the glass. The doc is in his office area, chatting with a nurse, laughing, the doc reaching out to touch the nurse first on the shoulder, then the elbow, then the hip. The doc is oblivious to everyone in here. The doc is oblivious to the cons, to Adolf, to Ricky’s voice still humming, almost cooing, making the kid’s hands feel electrical, like there’s lightning in his fingers, and there is. The door is locked, but the girl was observant and picked up on the keypad code. The kid doesn’t even have to press the numbers, he just touches the pad and the lock pops and the door opens an inch. He slips inside.

  Another door, another keypad, another code, another time that he doesn’t have to do anything but let his fingers touch the pad. The other door pops.

  The Aryan is watching him enter. Adolf is watching him enter. The girl says, “Use his own shiv. Gut him.”

  The Aryan tries to climb out of bed. There are other cons in the infirmary, some of them hurt bad, some just faking and keeping an eye out, like they’re planning a crash-out. One opens his mouth and says, “Hey—” to the kid, and the kid spins and brings his elbow across and down into the con’s collarbone.

  The snap is so loud they hear it in hell. The girl tells him so.

  The con hits the floor like a bag of wet sin. The kid continues on. The girl talks on. Ricky whispers on. The Aryan starts to mewl. Adolf starts to give a speech, his weird swipe of hair flopping across his forehead. The Aryan climbs out of the bed and holds his little piece of glass up in a defensive pose, jabbing at the air. He holds the weapon all wrong. Ricky knows the right way. He murmurs how you hold the blade out flat, low, so you can stab or slash or slice, forward or backhand. The Aryan hobbles forward and the kid leans in, blocks the shard of glass coming in toward his kidneys—these guys, they think the secret is to puncture the kidneys, forgetting it takes weeks to kill a guy that way—snaps his fist against the Nazi’s wrist, slaps the blade from it, and then goes to work.

  Adolf is smiling now, getting a kick out of all this. His speech has moved on to the Jews, to destroying the Allies, to purifying the nation, and a hundred thousand Germans are Sieg Heiling in the square, going fucking crazy. The girl points up. American planes are flying overhead. Who the fuck knows what year it is. It doesn’t matter. Ricky says it’s 1941. The girl says it’s closer to ’43. The kid has no idea and doesn’t care. He jabs the Aryan’s gut, especially the area where he’d been stabbed before. After three or four hard shots, his fists are covered with blood. It’s a fine feeling. Ricky loves it. The kid doesn’t mind it.

  Everyone loves to talk about the smell of blood, but it has none, not at first. Blood has to oxidize first, and then it grows copper colored, dries into a powder like rust, and then it has that acrid scent the morbid poets sing about. The girl bled a lot. She was kept around dying by inches for a long time. Ricky used to talk to her endlessly. He did things to her that still make the kid tighten his arms across his belly. The girl doesn’t care anymore. Why should she? She’s dead.

  So’s the Aryan. The kid went too far, or maybe it was the girl, or Ricky, or Adolf, or all of them. In any case, there he is on the floor, his ribs shattered into splintered knives that have torn his organs to pieces. There’s a deep blue tinge to his flesh beneath the ink. It looks like his lungs are punctured. It looks like his heart’s impaled.

  The other cons watch. The other cons take notice. The other cons do not fuck with the kid. The pregnant woman on the other side of the glass is staring wide-eyed. So is the little boy. The little boy’s mother is still absorbed in her daydreams. Her eyes are full of handsome bankers with huge swimming pools who give her diamond necklaces. The doc is feeling up the nurse. The nurse is being felt up.

  The girl’s parents are chanting along with the other capital punishment fiends, trying to drown out the protesters who are singing some hymns that strike sparks off the metal in the kid’s skull. All of it is starting to get to be too much. He backs away from the corpse and bumps into the footboard of another bed, pulls off the sheet covering the legs of another con, some guy faking a fever so he get out of punching license plates or chain-gang roadwork or whatever it is they do here. Kid wipes his hands as clean as he can on the sheet and drops it.

  Ricky hums along with the protesters. He was raised in a very religious household by deeply believing parents. He doesn’t blame his upbringing for the way he turned out. His parents were nice, good people. It wasn’t their fault. Neither was it his pastor’s or the congregation’s or his neighbors. He doesn’t hold God accountable. He doesn’t hold himself accountable either. He takes one of those views that say you are what you are, you are what you are meant to be, what you are fated to be. The girl says it’s an excuse. Nobody was meant to be what Ricky is. Ricky counters with the fact that there are more like him every day. Maybe it’s evolution. Maybe it’s the natural order.

  Time to move. The kid slips back through the door. The doc is going full blast on the nurse now, finger fucking her right there, practically out in the open. She’s rubbing him through his trousers. Ricky’s getting a little turned on, but not as turned on as he was when killing the girl or helping the kid kill the Aryan.

  The kid makes it back to the waiting room, and the pregnant woman sees the dried streaks of blood on his hands and knows, knows in her pregnant heart, what is pregnant inside of him. She crosses herself. The gesture somehow soothes the kid a little, calms him, even while the girl snorts and scoffs in disgust. She hears her parents too. She hates them. She hates all the living now, but that’s not her fault. All the dead hate the living. It’s just the way it is, just like Ricky is the way he is, just like the kid is welded between them and to them.

  The kid washes his hands in one of those old-fashioned shitty drinking fountains, the water arching about a half inch. The boy has forgotten about his skinned knee now. The pregnant woman isn’t about to give birth. The mother of the boy takes him by the elbow and calls for a guard. The guard shows and everyone moves off together. They’re escorted down the corridors and out the front door, down the long sidewalk, past the main gates and the gatherers. The kid is recognized at once. There’s an even louder buzz. People grab at him. They question him. The girl’s parents smile at him. He smiles back. The girl doesn’t. She’s still slightly offended her parents couldn’t ID her body, but the kid doesn’t blame them for that, not at all.

  “How are you?” her mother asks him.

  He should answer fine. That’s the only answer anybody really wants or expects. He should say fine. He should embrace them and share in their sorrow. He should let one of them or both of them pat his back and rub his shoulders and stroke the back of his head. It’s what they did the last time he saw them. It made him feel better, a little, for a second. It took away a little of the lightning pain.

  Reporters call him by name. Reporters jump in his face. Reporters jam microphones against his mouth; they jab at him with cameras. The protesters want him to sing with them. The yahoos want him to seethe and spit venom.

  The kid walks past them all. Some follow. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t speak. He finds his car. He gets in and drives home slowly, Ricky’s voice dulling the intense traffic noise. The girl is sitting in the passenger seat, looking out th
e window. She’s got something to say about almost everything. The kid doesn’t remember her being so chatty, but death is apparently very boring. He isn’t looking forward to his own.

  They cross a toll bridge and she says she misses the tollbooth guys who used to work there. Now you drive by and you catch a bill in the mail a couple of weeks later. She is nostalgic for the things that have changed since she’s died. TV shows that have gone off the air, songs played by bands that are no longer together. She asks him about things he doesn’t give a shit about.

  “Are you listening to me?” she squawks.

  He is and he isn’t. He’s really thinking about the ocean. He misses it. He hasn’t gone swimming since Ricky caved his head in. Hasn’t walked in the shallows, hasn’t even dipped his feet in off a dock. He still remembers lying on the shore with the waves pushing him up into the sand and then pulling him out again while the girl screamed and Ricky chased her down. He remembers Ricky talking then too, endlessly talking, keeping up a steady stream of chatter that didn’t make any sense, at first, not until it got in deep and festered and could be examined at length.

  Ricky talking about his nightmares, his fears, his honest hopes, his games, his skills, his twists, his kinks. Explaining what he was going to do, and when, and how it would go down, and why it had to happen like that to one girl or another. He killed as many guys as he did girls but nobody focuses on them because they usually went quick. He brained most of them when stealing the girls. He left them dead in their beds, in the parks, at the beaches, at the drive-ins. Ricky was at the drive-in when they caught him, sitting there watching the end credits roll, with popcorn in his teeth.

  The kid was the only one to survive. He doesn’t know why. No one does, not even the dead. People made a lot of jokes about his hard head, but they should try it now. If anybody ever hit him with a rock in the back of the skull again the stone would crumble into dust. Ricky once asked him if he was bulletproof now. Some asshole comes up behind him with a .22, a .32, maybe even a .38, would it get through or would the bullet shatter the way it sometimes did off bone? The kid didn’t know the answer. Ricky suggested he ask the doctors. He should know these things.

  The girl harbors deep resentments. For Ricky and the kid, and her living friends, her sisters, her dog. She remembers the way Ricky pulled her away down along the beach, the kid’s body lying there in the sand, not even struggling, not even fighting to get up. Not climbing to his knees, not getting to his feet, not screaming, not coming to save her. The kid half in the water like he was just body surfing. The kid thinks she’s being unreasonable as hell, but she counters that it’s her right to be irrational. She’s dead.

  You can’t argue with logic like that. He lets her try to pry up the plates and worm guilt into his brain. It doesn’t really matter. He’s already as guilty as he can possibly be. She knows this but she can’t help herself. She rages still. She cries still. She shrieks still, the way she did when she was Ricky’s prisoner and he brought out the tools that first time. At the moment she thought she was all alone, but afterward she learned that many people heard her anguish. They all mistook it for something else. Cats fighting. Babies crying. Dogs prowling. The neighbor’s TV too loud. Her screams echoed on the wind for miles and miles, up canyons, down the beaches, over distant fields.

  When the kid gets back to his place, a new letter from Ricky is waiting for him. Ricky will never run out of things to say. The letter goes on and on, page after page, and Ricky, who often tells the same stories over and over, still finds a way to make his missives interesting, exceedingly readable. Ricky’s voice reads Ricky’s letter aloud in the kid’s mind. He finishes the letter and puts it with the others in the box in his closet. It’s the fourth box he’s filled. The other three are sealed away in the crawl space.

  The girl hisses at him, “Why do you keep that insanity so close at hand? Do you want to be crazy? Is that it?”

  Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s not. He hasn’t figured it out yet. Maybe it’s his nature, his fate. He doesn’t expect to ever figure it out. He only expects that the letter writing will end with Ricky’s hot shot. He knows Ricky’s voice is with him forever.

  It’s a familiar story—

  The kid lies on the couch and the girl crawls over him the way she did when she was alive. She liked being on top. She liked being close, as close as she could get, and would tell him to hold her tight, tighter, tighter than that, crush the breath from her lungs. He would grip her tightly and she’d yawp and go, “Not that hard! That hurts!” He’d ease up. They’d watch the news together. She’d comment on the ugliness of the world. He would watch quietly. She would ask him over and over again, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” He would stare at her and have no answer. He never had an answer to any of her questions, and still doesn’t.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  He could respond at length. She has time. She has nothing but time. He watches the news and sees her parents out in front of the prison and listens to the warden give a canned statement, and listens to the leader of the protesters discussing God and forgiveness, and he listens to the yahoos yahooing. He listens to a couple of cats fighting, a baby crying, and wonders if someone like Ricky has grabbed someone like the girl and someone like the kid is lying with his skull in fragments at a lakeside or on a beach or at the drive-in. He wonders if he should investigate. He gets to his feet. He starts for the door.

  She asks, “Where are you going?”

  Ricky’s voice tells him it’s nothing, it’s nothing. It’s nothing to worry about. And it isn’t. He opens the door and sees the cats fighting near the trash cans where the apartment manager has left them.

  He shuts the door, he sits again, she sits on his lap, he flips the station, he holds on to her tightly, he looks at the tattoo on her ass. He presses the side of his face to her back. She’s in excellent shape, every muscle and tendon hard and well defined in her flesh that is only memory.

  Sleep comes the way it has come since the attack. It comes like a rock to the head. It comes like a voice under the metal welded to the skull. It comes like murder. You can’t prepare for it. You can’t get comfortable first. You can’t make room for it in your life. It descends and owns you.

  THE KID WAKES up and it’s morning. Reporters are at the door, calling his name. He goes to the window and pulls the curtains aside. The group is suddenly lively, active, like a gathering of pigeons that have spotted a cat. They call to him. They wave. They’re like a mob of Japanese tourists. They aim cameras at the window. The prettiest journalists preen. They try to draw him out with their moist lips, their heated gazes, the arcs of their breasts and asses.

  The kid knows he is only news because he is alive.

  The girl is there with some of the other girls, girls just like her, that Ricky tortured and killed. Some of the boys have come along too, lost, mostly forgotten, unwanted, uninteresting. They all look the same, the same as the kid did five years ago. They’re young, soft, without much character to their faces. No worry lines, no gray, cheeks buffed to a healthy, rosy glow, a golden hue, bursting with life and stupidity. They fill the room, smiling, laughing, like this is a frat house and they’re preparing for a kegger.

  The dead boys and dead girls reminisce. The kid wonders if any of them have any burning messages they want to pass on to friends or family. Or for the world to know before Ricky finally goes down. He turns and faces them but they’re dancing now. They’re playing a song that was popular a few years back. The girl moves up behind him, gets close, puts her lips to the back of his neck, reaches around him and grinds slowly. Ricky has things to say about dancing. Ricky has things to say about everything.

  She reaches down. She tries to rouse the kid. The others are doing their thing. The song plays on and on. He wants to smash the CD player, the MP3 player, the iPod, but he doesn’t own any of that. They’ve brought the music with them from the darkness, from the past, from the place where you go when you do not go all the way
away. The pretty reporters bend their knees a little and sway. The girl becomes more grabby. She’s not holding on to the kid so much as she’s holding on to life. Whatever life she can still get her hands on.

  The others moan. The others say what they need to say. They keep trying to make their peace but can’t quite do it. There’s no peace left to be made. They’re angry that the kid is friendly with Ricky at all. They’re angry he made it. They hound him the way they’ve hounded him for years. They cluster. They breathe his air. They try to peel up the metal plates and lie down under them, inside his blood and bone. They want him to give voice. They’re keenly aware of the reporters out front. They have messages for their parents. They have messages for Ricky.

  The reporters are getting a little more aggressive now. They press the doorbell. They knock. They call the kid’s name. They peer in the windows. They shout out large amounts of money.

  “Twenty thousand for an interview?” one of the dead boys says. It’s an impressive number, even after you’ve been croaked. It only serves to infuriate the dead boys and girls. If they had lived, they would’ve taken the money. If they had lived, they would be eager to tell their stories. If they had lived, and it was the kid’s ghost that was annoying them, they would listen, they would help him however they could, they would pay more attention.

  “You do like having us around, don’t you?” the girl asks.

  The answer is no, but he can’t tell them that, especially since they’re already inside him, in his marrow, in the marrow of his mind. They’re as welded to him as the plates to his skull, as Ricky. He wants them gone, but he doesn’t know what he would do without them. The thought of losing Ricky fills him with a sense of dread he doesn’t understand on any level. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s going to do when Ricky dies. He fears Ricky’s voice will leave with his life, and the kid will be left with nothing but these other dead.

  “Thirty thousand?” the dead boy says, repeating a number hurled from outside. “What would you do with thirty thousand bucks?”