Nigh

by Zachary Leeman

  Why didn’t you fight? I slow my breathing and try to massage my thoughts down.

  “You’ve lost a few steps,” I hear from the other room.

  The only door to the trailer is behind Renks. He and the kitchen split me and my only weapon. There’s a window six or so away from me, but I will lose the cover of the couch if I go for it.

  There’s no chance. I’m slow and old and weak and Renks is going to kill me. Maybe he’ll paw at me first, play with me a little, but the time left for me to breathe depends on when he wants to race in here and end it.

  I curse the soft comfort I’ve grown accustomed to, away from everything and everyone. The world got harder and I got softer like a fucking coward.

  “Come out, man. I don’t want to play this game. It’s embarrassing.” Renks says, laughing again, the recognizable sound now injected with heavy doses of his sinister intentions.

  “None of them fought,” I hear, “they knew what the right thing was. I wish you did too.” My body shakes cold. I want it all to stop. The noise. The pain. I feel the pull of a piece of me that wants to give in, to give myself to someone I trust, someone I once loved.

  “You’re my responsibility. Please don’t make this hard,” Renks says.

  My eyes fall to the window in front of me, the foggy reflection of a pacing Renks playing out before me, gun flipping from hand to hand.

  “Have I ever broken a promise?” he asks, louder and angrier this time, his reflection still. “I brought you home. Every single one of you. Please don’t make this hard. Don’t make what is right so hard.”

  I close my eyes, the desert, the shame, the betrayed, the taste of the end all biting and tearing at my skin. It’s intoxicating at first, the quick heat with which it all comes.

  “I could walk in there and just shoot you.”

  “Come on in,” I say.

  “Why are you doing this? It’s supposed to be easy and quick. You’re my responsibility, every single one of you.” Renks keeps talking, but I don’t listen, my eyes diving around the room trying to think of a move, any move. For the first time in my life, I curse my simpleness, my lack of taste. The living room is empty save for the couch giving me cover, a television, and a small table with an overworked ashtray.

  I nab the ashtray and dump the burnt-out cigarettes to the floor, Renks’ mouth still moving in the other room. I can make out a faint reflection of him in the window. He’s pacing the kitchen as he pontificates.

  My eyes fall to the thick glass clutched in my hand, littered and stained with the remnants of countless restless nights.

  “I don’t understand,” Renks says, my mind tuning back into his frequency. I can see from the window that his back is to me for the moment and I push myself over to my knees, not daring to peek my head into the man’s eyesight. “Why you have to make this so difficult.”

  I clutch the ashtray tighter, feeling the blood stop in my hand.

  As I throw it into the kitchen, I’m to my feet and in a full sprint. I’ve taken only a step when Renks turns his attention to the shattering glass against the wall. He quickly flips his eyes back around and sees me.

  We both fall. I carry Renks all the way to the door, where he craters its bottom half. The gun clanks as it hits the floor, my eyesight too frantic to find it. I’m up before Renks. He pushes his way to his feet, and I break out into another sprint and push myself into my bedroom. I stumble to the floor and can feel him not far behind me. My hand drops to the bed searching for my Glock. Blankets and pillows scatter the room, but I see nothing.

  My breath is gone before I even notice Renks’ thick arms wrapped around me, literally squeezing life out of me.

  “Don’t fight,” he says quietly. Even if a piece of me doesn’t want to, my body embraces adrenaline and panic and I begin kicking and shaking. I can sense an intense sharpness grasping at my eyes, at my skull, at my fucking finger tips, begging desperately to leave my body. My arms and legs flail and my only clear thought is that I’m going to die.

  When my throat is scraping at my skin, I throw my head back as hard and as fast as I can and then I do it again and again. I hit the ground, my eyesight quaking, head cloudy and my body convulsing for breath and relief, not ready to take clear commands.

  Through a light shadow, the pistol shows itself under the bed. I reach for it, the familiar grooves of the grip warmly embracing my hand.

  “Why fight!?” Renks yells this time, his hands grabbing hold and pitching me onto my back. The pistol flies its way in front of me, my eyes catching the lining of the small front and back sight posts for a perfect split second, Renks looking the same as every other thing caught behind a gun. They’re all the same in that quiet moment before the final, easy squeeze, in the calm before the brief lightning storm of sound and fury.

  It’s a sound I haven’t heard in a long time, and it brings some modicum of strength back to my mind and body. The vibrations shooting through my arm feel good and electrifying. Renks falls like sack of potatoes would, his blood disfiguring the wall behind him. I can hear him as he gasps for breath, gurgling and choking his final moments away.

  I stay on the floor, gun still in hand, warm now. Grip loosens. I breathe slowly and sporadically, each inhale feeling like a sharpness ricocheting intensely and quickly across my chest. I’m not sure I’ll ever breathe right again. Renks makes his last attempt at breath and dies.

  8 days left

  Memory becomes reality as I enter a world long left behind. It’s drier, deader now, a hollow version of what once was. I park the car on the side of the dirt road. The air is thick and scratchy against my face. Different here than the city. Harsher, warmer.

  I run my fingers across the ring quickly and then pull the M1911 out of its holster and habitually check to make sure the magazine holds a full eight rounds. The magazine clicks back in and the smooth crunch of the hammer being pulled back is music enough to help me muster the confidence to walk again into a world many have not walked out of.

  My hand shakes and my fingers tap against my leg and I know I need a cigarette. I close my eyes and tell myself to keep using it — the hunger, the need.

  My eyes open and after two steps, the sun disappears and the temperature drops at least twenty degrees. I pull my jacket close. They say this is how it is now. I heard it described on the radio once as a dying brain sending off random, incoherent messages to the body as it surges and confuses what it needs to do as the end inches closer.

  Nobody gives much more of an explanation than that.

  I walk through the rotting, wooden gate and begin the march down the familiar quarter mile to the Hills family farm.

  The family land, somewhere around a hundred acres, had been passed down through the decades and eventually became a sort of commune for the Hills. The outside town didn’t want much to do with them and they didn’t want much to do with the town after a while. They only needed each other.

  It was miles in every direction around them before you would find evidence of civilization. As the Hills migrated to their sanctuary, everything else left, skittering away from what they saw as an infectious disease, a horror of a family that was better contained than dealt with.

  Jody was different. He’d always been different. Through some anomaly in genetics, he was cut from marble. From an early age, he looked like he had just walked off of a movie screen. It was a frustrating dilemma. He was like the rest of them, but with a smile and fierce eyes that could cut down the guards of most people.

  He hung out at the same bars everyone else did, played basketball and baseball with other people’s kids, slept with women of different blood. He was a dangerous new breed of Hills.

  I’m thinking about cigarettes and the ring and Jody’s beautiful, painful screams when a snap through the icy air stops me where I stand. It’s so black now, I can only see a few feet in front of me. I’m swallowed in nothingness and I can only hear the moans and cracks of the woods around me and I’m cold. So damn cold.

>   Out of my waistband, I snap a flashlight on. Through the thin beam of light, there are specks of snow slowly dropping in the darkness. I look up to see the weather has turned again and it’s only going to get colder.

  I pull my jacket closer and let my finger massage its way to the gun’s trigger. I keep walking, the noises around me growing louder and more frequent — moans and crackling shooting through the blackness. I don’t know whether it’s my head or the wind or something else. I focus on how much I want to kill Jody one more time and I walk a little faster, my blood feeling warmer now against the falling snow.

  When the home itself is in my sight, the dark isn’t so fierce and the snow has mostly stopped. The noises are gone. It’s just me and the whistle of the wind as I move closer to the large, but dilapidated house, lit by candles in nearly every window.

  The wood creaks and aches and everything is shadow. The 1911 makes its way to the front of my face and rests on the flashlight and my other hand after I push the front door open. The quiet is disheartening. The noises from outside are gone, only the faint echo of my movements keeping me company.

  I turn to face a flickering light and see a room with damaged and overturned furniture. It’s a few steps before I notice a lump of a man in the corner. The gun quickly catches him, but he’s not moving or making sounds, so I turn away to the piece of the room covered in shadows. I can feel the heat of someone there.

  “Never, never, never, never.” The beam of the flashlight darts around the room until it reveals a large, quivering body covered in white. It doesn’t turn toward me. “Never, never, never, never.”

  I take a step forward. A face turns, illuminated by a candle in the person’s hands. The face is big and black and blue.

  “Never, never, never,” she says, shaking. My skin crawls and my insides are quickly scrambled. If I ever needed a cigarette, it would be now.

  “Jody,” I say, careful not to be too loud, remembering the moans from outside and knowing how many of these Hills fucks there could still be.

  “Jody,” she says, her eyes saucers skipping across the ceiling, “pretty Jody.” Her voice echoes through the shadows and it worries me. I need to leave. I need to find Jody and fucking leave.

  “Where is Jody?” I say, harsher now, stepping forward again, the beam of flashlight now reflecting off her entire face, showing yellow and brown discoloration and a soaked neck.

  “Pretty Jody,” she says again, “he always pretty.”

  “Where the fuck is he?” My voice echoes as I yell, and I take a step back, my eyes uselessly scanning the darkness around the figure in front of me.

  “You take Jody away?”

  I turn back to her, my hand so clasped on my gun that I can feel a screaming tightness in my shoulder.

  “Pretty Jody. Always in trouble.”

  I move forward again, until I can smell the rot of her flesh. I rest the gun barrel on her slimy forehead. She doesn’t move, her eyes still scanning the sky, unfazed by me and the gun.

  “Where is he?” I ask.

  “Barn,” she mumbles, “they all in the barn.” I lower the gun to my side, my grip loosening and my arm grateful. The woman walks forward. I move to the side of her and she disappears along with her flickering light. I turn my flashlight to the corner of the room to make sure the lump of a man is still there. He is.

  The night is fucking colder now. Not as dark, but sharper and fucking colder. The air is broken glass in my throat when I breathe. I’ve always hated the goddamn cold.

  The barn is lacking light. It’s a dark, quiet, hollow looking thing in the distance. I wonder for a moment if the saucer eyed bitch lied to me, but quickly convince myself to keep moving forward. She didn’t seem capable of much, especially lying.

  I shuffle through uncut grass from the house and the moans and cracks whipping through the air are back, though they are more sporadic now. There’s been known to be nearly a hundred of the Hills clan living on this land at one time and not knowing where any of them are or even how many are left makes me increasingly nervous.

  A rancid smell nearly topples me back into the grass. It’s a gut punch mixture of mold and shit and it gets fiercer the closer I get to the barn.

  I cover my nose and walk through a large crack in the front doors and shoot the flashlight inside to see a large portion of the Hills clan. I wonder then and there if I should kill every one of them. I think about how alive and on fire my blood would be if I did it. I indulge myself the moment of fantasy.

  The stench is so thick in the air I can taste it and it clings like a thick layer of mud to my skin. I move the flashlight around the barn to see bodies everywhere. Some sleeping, some unmoving, some preoccupied with needles in their arms. Others stare into nothingness. In the corner of the barn are six or seven long haired, naked Hills men standing in a circle, all preoccupied with something between them. The slapping of skin on skin trickles its way to me and I move the light away.

  Body by body, I work my way across the barn. None of them seem to mind my presence until a skeleton of a boy comes behind me and mumbles something I can’t understand. By the time I turn around, he’s sprinting his way out of the barn.

  I turn back to my search, ready to leave, my senses crumbling in here. I turn a few of the laid-out bodies over. Some are smeared in shit and hay, and others tell me to fuck off. When I make my way around the barn and nearly to the front door again, I see him.

  The kid who had once looked like he was carved out of stone by gods takes a moment to recognize. He is harder to distinguish from the other Hills boys now. The handsome is still there though, buried under a few years of hard living packed into a handful of months.

  His hair is pasted across his face, long and stringy now. I roll him over and there’s a scar that can’t be more than a week or so old running across his cheek. His face is unshaven and patchy and he’s missing a front tooth.

  I try to think of something to say or do, as I stand there looking at the physical embodiment of the person who has been dancing through my head and fantasies for months, but nothing comes to mind. The moment doesn’t feel as profound or as real as I thought it would. I reach for the ring in my pocket, and then stop myself when I remember where I am.

  I bend down and put my arms around him, to which he can hardly muster a moan in response. I check his arms and see track marks take up most the skin. He moans a few more times, half asleep, before I manage to rustle him to his feet. He can hardly stand, so I keep one arm tightly around him.

  We start walking, he more shuffling, and I keep the 1911 tight in my hand, my eyes darting around the dark barn. No one moves. No one even looks at us. The poor fucks are lost in their own individual worlds.

  When I’m through the door and back outside, the sky is ripped apart by blinding sun. The air has turned blistering hot, which makes the smell of my companion all the worse. After a few steps, I can already feel myself sweating through my jacket, but there’s no time to stop.

  As we make our way around the house, I begin to wish I brought the goddamn car down the road. I didn’t want to risk leaving it in here, which may have been good foresight, but it makes the walk no less harsh.

  Jody stops and drops to his knees and lets mostly clear liquid out of his stomach and mumbles something I don’t try to make out. I grab him by his dripping wet collar and thrust him back to his feet. A piece of me wants to kill him now, cut him up, and then take on the rest of these useless fucks, all likely guilty of something, but that’s not the plan, that’s not what has been swirling through my head for months. I know how my last days look, and I know how Jody’s last days look.

  We begin walking again, Jody shuffling less and managing to get one foot in front of the other, his eyes still gone, and his mind seemingly unaware of who I am or where I’m taking him. I stop him before our feet touch the dirt road leading to the outside world beyond the Hills sanctuary. I stand still and listen for a moment, knowing it’s all been too easy, knowing there need
s to be something else.

  My eyes shift back to Jody, dribbling out of his mouth and trying to speak, but only chewing air. I pull him tight and begin to walk.

  The sun is fierce against my eyes. My senses adjusting, I see to the side of the road a bony man, naked, drooling like my companion, his eyes obsessed with my every step. He smiles big and wide, rotted teeth and a hanging green tongue displayed proudly.

  It unsettles me, but more unsettling is how quickly the man disappears between the trees. He’s gone as fast as he appeared. I want to grab the ring, to hold it and ensure myself of its every memorized millimeter, but there’s no time.

  I can feel the vibrations from my quickening heart in my throat. It’s like a corrosive pain that is impossible to swallow.

  As I walk, my steps picking up the pace, my eyes shoot to the outer edges of the road, to the tree line, my smiling friend gone. The tendons in my gun hand tighten, sending an uncomfortable twitch to my shoulder. My other hand tightens itself around Jody’s collar, pushing him forward to our shared future.

  When we make it a quarter of the way down the road, I begin to loosen my grips on the gun and Jody. For a moment, the sun makes me feel good and I start to taste the air beyond this road.

  I nearly smile at the ease of it all when my heart clenches and my body spasms almost completely to the ground. A heavy and pulling weight drags me down to my knees, my neck straining from something grabbing me from behind. My eyes push their way to my chest where I see two pieces of foreign skin clenching me. Claws lay into me, tearing skin, twisting and thrusting their way through my meat and bones.

  “We gots to eat! We gots to eat!” I hear hissing over and over through the tidal waves of pain. Jody mindlessly stumbles in front of me until I reach forward and grab his ankle, forcing him to tumble to the ground. I try to pull him close, but the pain rips me back. “We gots to eat!” is screamed into my ear again.

  My senses jump, unsettled and frantic, unable to focus on any one thing. I push enough energy into my arm to lift the 1911 above my shoulder.