Purgatory

by K M Stross

  “He ain’t responding!” Schmidt’s flashlight faltered, then righted itself to follow the two women as they reached the end of the cactus field, just yards away from where the ground began to slope upward gradually.

  The air around Cross’s left ear seemed to burst into flame, an intense heat matched only by the deafening explosion that sent a high-pitched ringing through his brain. One of the large cacti a few feet away from Maria exploded, sending chunks of needles and plant flesh in every direction. Maria fell back onto Luone, who lost her balance and sent both of them to the ground at the base of the hill.

  “What the fuck are you doing!” Cross screamed, rolling over and reaching up for Ray’s gun. Ray pulled back, shrugging off one of Cross’s hands but the other was clutching Ray’s wrist. Ray dropped the knife, trying to regain control of the gun with both hands, clawing at Cross’s skin with short nails.

  “Get him off me Schmitty, goddammit!”

  “Fuck!” Schmidt said, dropping the flashlight. “Ray, you son of a bitch you’re gonna get us all arrested!”

  Cross felt one strong, sweaty arm wrap around his shoulder. He leaned in closer to Ray, keeping the gun from turning toward him. Schmidt’s other arm wrapped around Cross’s other shoulder, reaching for a grip on the gun as well. Cross could feel his hands getting sweaty, slipping along the metal clip. He could feel Ray’s clammy hands, trying in vain to maintain a grip on the handle and keep one finger near the trigger. Schmidt’s hands were hot, dry, squeezing Cross’s wrists.

  “Schmitty get him the fuck off me!” Ray screamed, shrugging with his entire body and kicking wildly in the direction of Cross’s midsection. He fell back on his haunches, and Cross could see his face reddening in the path of the flashlight beam as he struggled to maintain a firm grip on the gun and aim the barrel in the direction of soft flesh. Cross managed to shake free his other hand and wrap it tightly around the gun, using every ounce of his forearm muscle to keep the barrel pointed away from his face. “Get him off me, or I’m gonna shoot him right in the goddamn gullet!”

  “Just stay—”

  Cross felt his ears ring again. For a brief second, the struggling stopped. Cross felt Schmidt’s hands cool, their grip loosening. Cross felt no pain, nor blood—he could see the look on Ray’s face change, softening as he watched Schmidt’s limp hands flop onto the ground. His body was still hanging over Cross’s, weighing on his knees.

  Neither of them spoke. As the ringing in his ears began to cease, Cross could hear Maria’s crying at the foot of the hill, crying for Cross over and over and then calling for God over and over. He tightened his grip, hardening the muscles in his arms to try and somehow force the gun around with some unseen Godly blessing of strength. Ray was staring at him through dark eyes, his head shaking uncontrollably and breaths whistling out between his clenched teeth.

  Cross’s muscles began to strain, and he briefly wondered if the power of God might just be on Ray’s side. His mind reeled furiously as the barrel of the gun slowly began to creep toward the left side of his torso. There was no way he could turn it around—he couldn’t die like this, not after being so close. Not after seeing the shadow of Morrissey, not after all of the years wasted following every lead, every dead end, every hunch. He looked down at the gun and saw it moving up toward his chest, only one of his hands still locked in the struggle. The other hand was clutching three of Ray’s fingers, preventing them from wrapping around his neck. He let go, feeling the webbing of skin between Ray’s thumb and pointer finger tightly grasp his neck below the Adam’s apple. Cross reached next to Ray’s bent leg to grab the knife and brought it up.

  Ray’s face hardened. His muscles tightened further, then relaxed. He groaned between his teeth, his dark eyes bulging out of their sockets, the warm alcohol-soaked breath brushing against Cross’s face. Cross wrapped his fingers tighter around the handle of the knife and twisted it between two of Ray’s ribs. Ray screamed between his teeth. Cross pushed the gun away from his body, keeping a tight grip on the hilt of his knife while the warm blood began to flow between his sweaty fingers.

  Cross pressed his body onto Ray, keeping them both on the ground in a missionary position, holding the gun away from their bodies and keeping his face next to Ray’s tear-stained cheek; he could hear the man’s frantic breaths.

  “I’m sorry,” Cross whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  The quiet prayer-like groans died out first, replaced instead by slow, systematic breaths over which no control could be made, the kind that precedes only reflexive muscular movements. The muscles in Ray’s face loosened. The moist breath sliding along Cross’s neck slowly ceased.

  Cross lay on top of him, breathing hard and still keeping his hand tightly on the gun. Slowly, he pulled the knife out from between Ray’s ribs, causing a vacuum between the hole and the blood so that the extraction sounded like a child sucking the last drops of slushy from the thin straw. It reminded him of the man who had called himself Phil, only this time the blade had been extracted from muscle, not fat, and Cross could differentiate between the two sounds, and the knowledge of those two sounds brought bile up his throat.

  “Cross!”

  Cross let go of the gun, glancing one last time at the still body before turning and hurrying as fast as he could down the steep hill. He fell in front of Maria, helping her pull up Luone’s semi-conscious body. Luone’s eyes were half open, her mouth mumbling something in Spanish that seemed to be directed only to herself, her bare skin glistening with sweat.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” Cross said, wrapping one arm around Luone’s thin stomach to keep her propped up.

  “She was walking fine for a while,” Maria said between choking sobs. “She needs a hospital. A good one. Please, Cross.”

  “It was something in the wine,” Cross said. He pressed the palm of his hand against Luone’s forehead. The only place on her body he noticed that was warm. Her icy fingers slid around his back, under his shirt, gripping his flesh. “She didn’t drink enough to die.”

  Maria gently placed a hand on Cross’s right eye. “You’re hurt.”

  Cross touched the soft skin around his eye, immediately pulling back upon the smarting pain around the tender flesh. “It’s not bad. Come on,” he helped lift under Luone’s arm, “we need to keep her on her feet. Whatever’s poisoning her can’t work as fast if she’s not lying down.”

  Maria lifted under her sister’s other arm, and they slowly pulled Luone to her feet. Cross leaned her on Maria’s shoulder. “Stay here,” he said. “They mentioned an ATV nearby.”

  Maria adjusted her sister, so the two of them were leaning against each other. “Please hurry. Please.”

  Cross turned and made his way up the hill, stopping at the top to check the pulses of both the bodies. Schmidt had taken the bullet squarely in his jaw, tearing away a large portion of his face and leaving only a bloody clump of broken teeth and wet red flesh in place of his face. The body of Ray remained on the ground, face-up, his eyes open as if examining the constellations in the sky.

  They were both dead.

  Cross grabbed the flashlight from Schmidt’s cold hand, avoiding shining it on the bodies. He scanned the northern darkness for any large objects. Already, the sun was beginning to show its first signs of rising by casting a dim, bluish glow over the eastern horizon. It made it easier to see, but with the pressure blinding his left eye, the concept of depth was now lost on Cross—the only bulky, vehicle-shaped object sitting anywhere nearby looked too small to be anything other than a child-sized boulder, yet when he began walking down the hill toward it, he realized it was much farther away and much larger than he’d anticipated.

  At the bottom of the hill, Cross broke into a run, racing across the last fifty flat yards in a handful of breaths and reaching the go-kart shaped ATV. A single silver key stuck out of the ignition. The vehicle had a black metal frame like a car’s, without doors, its camouflage exterior caked in mud. He sat down on the front seat, usi
ng the flashlight to locate the parking gear by his feet. He shifted it into “Forward” and stepped lightly on the gas pedal. The cart slowly, silently rolled across the dry dirt. Cross let his foot slowly apply more pressure onto the pedal, allowing his good eye to adjust to the moving surroundings that all seemed to come toward him at once and then just as quickly pulled away; he was driving toward a painting of a dry Arizona landscape licked by the morning sun.

  He slowed at the top of the hill, letting the cart coast down the other side where Maria and Luone were still standing, Maria still sobbing, Luone still gazing out into the emptiness through two half-opened eyes that looked glazed over with a thick coat of clear Jello.

  “Come on,” he said, pressing down on the parking brake. He stepped out of the cart and helped Maria slide Luone into the middle of the long front seat. Maria took the driver’s seat, and Cross didn’t argue.

  “Where are we going?” Cross asked.

  “Out of here,” Maria answered. “The people in the hills will blame us for this. When they find the bodies.”

  Cross leaned hard on steel roll cage. The cart briefly lost control as its right wheel thumped over the body of one of the vigilantes.

  “I don’t have a phone,” Cross said. “We can get to the gas station outside of the park and call an ambulance from there.”

  Maria nodded, dry-hiccupping to stifle a fresh sob. Cross tried to avoid looking at her, but his right eye seemed drawn to her face as if his peripheral vision was his main line of sight.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Yolanda’s home.”

  “He killed George,” Maria said. She began to sob again, bumping the vehicle into a cactus and crying out in surprise. “George wouldn’t wake up like Luone. I shook him as hard as I could!”

  Cross reached around Luone to rest the tips of his fingers on Maria’s shoulder.

  The low beams caught something flickering along one of the empty patches of dirt where the ground was barren. Maria slowed upon reaching the empty folding chair. It sat next to a small cooler, closed, a gray handheld radio resting on top of it. Cross got out and grabbed the radio, hefting its weight in his hand. It was cold, hadn’t be touched in some time. Without his left eye functioning, he had only taken in a fraction of the scene, but Maria’s scream told him enough. He turned his head fully, grabbing the flashlight sitting on the seat and shining it at the dirt. There, laying on the ground, was the body of a young man, his bloodshot eyes staring up at the bluing sky, the front of his neck slashed haphazardly with something less clean than a knife—a sharp rock, maybe, that cut through the skin after several attempts.

  In his mind’s eye, he pictured Morrissey taking one of the jagged rocks lying on the ground and taking pleasure in every awkward, frantic second that passed. The skeletal, freckled facial features of the deceased young man, the thin shape of his body, all of it looked like it belonged to the voice that Cross had heard over the radio.

  “Can we go,” Maria whispered. “Can we go, Cross!”

  Cross couldn’t turn away from the body. The murder, so brutal, committed by the man Cross had dedicated so many years to find. In his years of searching, Cross had almost succeeded in convincing himself that no murder had ever taken place, that it was all a figment of his imagination and that Morrissey himself had been little more than a dream. A waking dream that Cross had never escaped from, a place to hide from his own demons until they materialized and he could destroy them once and for all.

  “Can we go, Cross!” Maria screamed.

  He shook his head, clearing the thoughts away. “Yes,” he said, using the flashlight to pan in every direction until he was sure the area was empty. The sunlight was now beginning to cut across the horizon, enough for him to make out enough of the ground ahead of the cart to notice the path the vigilantes must have carved earlier in the day, a thin trail of dirt leading north and back into the heart of the national park.

  Maria pressed her foot down on the gas pedal, steering the cart onto the path and picking up more speed as the light continued to peel away more layers of darkness.

  “Call the sheriff,” she said.

  Cross kept his good eye on the path. Despite the growing light, his vision seemed to be getting darker and more blurry. He reached up and lightly touched his cheek, wincing when the sharp pain radiated from the soft skin around his right eye.

  “Do not chase this man,” she said.

  Cross said nothing.

  “Please,” she said. “Sheriff Taylor will see the murders, and you can vouch for us. He will understand. Put your faith in your system.”

  “My system?” Cross asked. “The same system that lets racist piles of shit patrol the border like they’re all the offspring of Dirty Fucking Harry? The sheriff? The same sheriff who’s willing to export a geriatric in order to keep his town’s dirty secrets from seeing the light of day?”

  “You will put all of us at risk,” she said.

  “Don’t you see?” Cross asked. “If I find Morrissey… if I right this wrong… if I kill him… God can lift this curse. I’ll be able to see again! Don’t you see?”

  “God has not cursed you. He will kill you, Chandler.”

  “Who?” Cross asked, laughing. “Morrissey or Sheriff Taylor?”

  “You’ll never find him,” she said. “Not in this park. It is too large. You don’t know where he is now.”

  “I’m not looking for him,” Cross said. “Go right up here. Follow the gravel path out of the park. We’ll place a call to Cantrell to get you to a hospital so no one can connect you to all this.”

  “And then you’ll come back,” she said. “To search for him.”

  “No.” Cross shook his head. “Not anymore. No more chasing him. All I need to do is find Yolanda’s grave, and then I’ll have enough evidence to cast doubt over the entire canonization.”

  “Then what?” Maria asked.

  “Then Morrissey has to find me.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Cross watched Cantrell carefully load Luone into the backseat. His eye met with Maria’s just before Cantrell shut the door and the image stayed in his mind like an afterthought: her glossy brown irises reflected the rising sunlight, the dark puffy skin hanging over her cheeks and rudely aging her beautiful face.

  Cross grabbed Cantrell’s thin arm before he could get back to the driver’s side door.

  “They’ll be safe?”

  Cantrell shrugged. “Safe enough.”

  Cross watched the taxi pull onto the highway, already his mind beginning to look ahead beyond the morning. He figured the vigilante patrols could last anywhere between two and six hours, giving him some time before anyone came across the bodies and noticed one of the ATV’s was missing, and longer still before they found it tucked away behind the small hill south of the gas station. It would take time for word to spread across the radio channels. If no one saw them riding the ATV to the edge of the national park, no one would connect the murders to Maria or him.

  He tucked his shirt into his pants and loosened the bent white tab around his collar. He walked over to the water spigot sticking out from the bricks on the lower half of the gas station and turned it on, wetting his hand and running it quickly across his face, carefully around his right eye where the bruise had begun to enflame his flesh. He walked into the gas station, stepping up to the counter and watched the white clerk’s blue eyes examine him.

  “Pack of cigarettes,” Cross said. “A cigarette lighter too, I suppose.”

  The man furrowed his bushy black eyebrows but said nothing, setting a hard pack of cigarettes and navy blue lighter on the counter.

  Cross reached into his pocket, using his middle finger to dig into one of the hidden pockets he’d sewn into the denim, then another. Empty. He reached into his other pocket and fingered for the nearest piece of paper. He pulled it out, surprised that it was a twenty, or maybe a fifty, and set it on the counter. He remembered the dead mother and daughter in Cantrell’s old h
ome and his stomach churned.

  “Ice?” the man said.

  Cross glanced up at him. “Excuse me?”

  “For your eye,” the clerk said, motioning with his pudgy finger to Cross’s right eye.

  “Oh.” Cross reached up and gently touched the tender flesh. He fought back a wince. “No, thank you.”

  The clerk smiled, content not to ask any more questions, trusting of the religious figure with the swollen eye. Cross took his change and left the store, wondering how much time he had left before someone connected the dots.

  Or severed the line. How quickly, Cross wondered, could Sheriff Taylor silence the entire incident? Would he try to pin it on Cross, who still had ties to the Church? Or would he pin it on an illegal? How many skeletons had he found in the closets of the other vigilantes that he could use to force them to cover up the deaths of their own friends, maybe their own family?

  He crossed the highway and followed it north, sure that the clerk was still watching him from the gas station. It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was the time window, the distance he could cover before the sheriff could intervene and fuck everything up.

  He walked north, watching the morning sky turn blue, watching the last stars disappear. There would be a reckoning for all of this.

  “Thank God,” Cross said, eyeing the yellow car heading south down the highway. The top of the cab glistened in the morning sunlight, reflecting on what little metal on the TAXI sign wasn’t covered with rust.

  Cross stepped onto the dirt, waiting for the cab to pull onto the shoulder next to him. Cantrell rolled down the passenger’s window. He kept his gaze on the highway road in front of the car, scanning it through his large, dark aviator glasses, smiling slightly under his thick jet-black whiskers.

  “Thanks for coming back,” Cross said.

  Cantrell shrugged, lighting a cigarette.

  Cross opened the rear door and stepped inside, leaning hard on the soft cushions. His knees ached and the soles of his feet burned. “I have fifteen dollars left.”