Nigh
Page 13
I hit him again and again and again, embarrassed at my lack of strength, but slowly noticing the effects in his face. After I hit him a few more times, he stops moving and I can see blood drying on my knuckles. His cheeks are blue and swollen and he’s nearly unrecognizable from the man that first walked into the alleyway.
I stop and stand up, my wrists tight and locked in their positions. I think about dropping down and punching him some more because it feels so damn good, but I’m too tired.
“Rick!” I hear behind me like an echo. I look and see the thin girl start running down the alley.
She doesn’t even acknowledge me as she drops to the wheezing, bleeding man and starts to cry. I watch her and wonder how anyone could be as upset as her about another person anymore.
When I’ve heard enough of her sniffling and crying, I walk to the woman and grab her by the neck. She’s like paper to move. Her shoulders crack against the brick and she tumbles to the ground.
The man is mumbling, but I wouldn’t pay a dime to hear what he wants to say. I climb on top of him again, thoughts of my city flowing through me — the way she was, the way we both were. She won’t die. She won’t die if I don’t let her.
My finger slips in easier than I anticipate. There’s an initial stiffness, but the full weight of my body pushes my thumb through easy enough and suddenly I’m inside the gooey mess that is his head.
He screeches like no man I’ve ever heard. It’s piercing. He jigsaws as much as he can beneath me, but I hold his head still enough that it doesn’t matter. After a moment of squirming and pulling, I can’t hear as well as before. His cries reach me like they are from a faraway place and I am a ship sailing away.
My eyes are working like they never have before. Only this moment exists. Only this man and I are alive. I push my thumb deeper and deeper enjoying the strange and new fluid textures the socket provides me with. I push until I am the only person alive in our small world of pain and he is but a deformed thing left in the wake of my love.
The thick wetness of my breath glues the mask to my face.
My city is dying.
I am dying.
We are all dying.
100 days left
Great beginnings. They imprisoned him. He was always good at beginnings. The start of something came with a high like no other. It suggested greatness was to come, brilliance that had not yet crossed another person’s mind.
One after the other, he’d chase the high and when that high drained and turned into something closer to reality, to work, to commitment, he fled. There was no high in work, in the strenuous torture of actual creation.
Planting a seed is wonderful. Your imagination and hope can play out before you the wonders the future can potentially bring. Catering to that seed for weeks or months or years on end is not fun. Hope and imagination dwindle in the face of dirt beneath the fingernails.
Beginnings mounted on his desk, in his trunk, in his drawers. Some disappeared altogether, ideas lost to time.
Surrounded by beginnings. Drowning in them now. He’d never taken in the magnitude of them before, the building blocks for things that would not be, the blueprints for buildings with not one brick lain.
He sat there, blank page in front of him, cursor blinking away begging him for one more beginning, one more quick dash into nothingness.
For the first time in his life, there was no beginning to write. There was only a blank page. And all those beginnings. Drowning him.
4 days left
The world is blackness.
Smoke caresses my insides and massages my lungs and chest with its fiery magic. I hold it in and don’t let go for as long as I can. When I finally do, the months slip off me like silk.
I relish the smoke’s crawl across my throat. When it’s gone and I’m empty inside, my shoulder begins screeching again.
I remove my jacket and pull my shirt sleeve open to see the soaked bandage covering the mangled mess of flesh left in the wake of the Hills farm.
The constant stings are sharp and fierce and move through my left arm again and again promising no end, but there’s nothing much to do about it that would matter now. I make a mental note to at least change the bandage at some point.
A heavy sob pulls my attention back to him. Slumped over in his chair, tied and bound, he is still unaware of the hell he will endure before the end.
Another long drag of burning nicotine moves through me and I’m floating. I don’t know if it’s the cigarette or Jody or the end or some electrifying combination of all three, but I’m fucking floating and it feels so damn good to be alive.
“I want to watch you bleed,” I hear myself say. Jody’s eyes crack open the best they can and find me across the room, the 1911 and my hand embracing each other like rekindled lovers.
I let in one more long drag of smoke, taking in all it has left to offer and then drop the cigarette from my lips to the ground and stub it out with my boot. My eyes stay on Jody as the smoke makes another slow crawl across my throat.
Leg. Arm. Either will do. Anything that doesn’t make him bleed out too quickly. I move toward him, watching as he pulls with all his might against the ropes holding him in place.
The veins in Jody’s neck pulsate and scratch at his skin and he is showering in desperation and fear. He shakes and convulses furiously, but hardly moves.
Watching him struggle, the thundering electricity moving through me leaves as quickly as it came. I cannot recall the last time I slept.
My mind is foggy and my muscles and bones are weighty and awkward. Time catches up to me as I watch Jody sob and shake and struggle to no avail through the closing doors that are my eyelids.
I holster the pistol when it nearly slips out of my hand. I close my eyes to collect myself, but nearly topple over. My eyes open and move from Jody to my bag on the kitchen table. I slug my cement-like feet over to it.
“You know how hard it was to get you up here?” I say, hoping talking will give me some sort of boost. “I thought about quitting halfway up those stairs. Just giving up. Leaving you there with a bullet in the skull and then joining the rest of the animals in the street. Can you fucking believe that? After all this time, after everything that’s happened, those fucking stairs were nearly what beat me.”
As my hands wrap themselves around it, I know it’s right. Another bit of electric energy move its way into my fingers and then wrists and shoots its way through me and I feel alive and righteous once more. I feel a grin move its way across my lips as I turn to face Jody.
He’s still now, save for his chest moving rapidly up and down.
Up and down.
Up and down.
I watch the quick melody of it until I catch his wide eyes. They are bulging and white and glued to what’s gripped in my hands.
“Make sure to scream real loud,” I say, close enough now that I only need to whisper. Jody moans and sobs uncontrollably like a child.
It’s not enough. Fear is nowhere near enough. Everyone is afraid. What I want is pain. I want my knuckles to burn white as Jody’s screams claw at the walls.
His wails grow fiercer with anticipation. He finally manages to piece together words like “please” and “sorry” as I get closer. With each step, my hands wrap themselves tighter around it.
When I reach him and he shakes and rattles even more than before, I’m surprised to see Sarah. She’s in some vague image from some even more vague memory that doesn’t matter anymore. I close my eyes and she disappears like a cloud after a storm.
There is only me, and there is only Jody. There is only this moment, I tell myself, as I turn and wind the sledgehammer up behind me. My blood is a river of fire as I bring the full weight of it down on Jody’s left hand. The loud and succinct crunch is briefly deafening before Jody’s screeching overtakes it, ricocheting throughout the room.
I turn and wind up again, my shoulder giving resistance, but the rest of me caught up enough in the moment to ignore the signals to stop
. Coming down the second time, I notice the metal arm of the chair bent from the first hit.
The twenty-pound mallet only rips into two fingers and a thumb this time. The already butchered flesh gives off the sound of fruit slamming against a wall instead of the initial satisfying crunch.
After the third hit, I can feel his warm blood dripping down my cheeks. My shoulder wails more now, begging for me to stop, but I only use its cries to feed me.
I’m swimming in it.
The chaos disappears and a calm and focus takes over me that is intoxicating and beautifully brutal.
I can hear the crunch of his bones and the tearing of his flesh with a hyper-focus. His screams move through me and then pour out of me.
I can see through the months the man who has been haunting my dreams. The man who killed. The man I will kill.
With each successive, thunderous blow, I’m reminded I’m alive. I’m still alive because I see and hear and focus and love and hate. I am alive.
Perspiration blankets me and mixes with blood after I drop the mallet a final time, the arm of the chair now nearly detached. My arms are loose and uncontrollable and the hammer drops and clinks against the floor.
The hand is a pulpy mess of a thing hardly relatable to anything human anymore.
Nearly split in two, it shakes and convulses and spits bits of blood like tremors after an earthquake. What’s left of the fingers — the pinkie is nearly gone and the tip of the ring finger is no more — run in varying directions like birds fleeing a loud noise. One is moving skyward, one diagonal, another is flying left.
The sight of it brings back the full reality of my own shoulder, which is sending sharp and deep pains through my arm and neck.
Jody still screams. I imagine the piercing sounds are like when he first came into this world. I shuffle my way out of the room and into the hallway toward the bedroom, my body and feet heavier with each movement forward.
When the bed is within reach, I collapse onto it and my eyes close. A deep sleep grabs hold of me as I listen to Jody’s screams drown my world.
Consciousness hits me like a tidal wave. My body jolts forward and falls into the waking world. A sense of panic rips its way through me as hardwood greets my chest.
I lift myself to my feet, toppling over a couple times thanks to the mess in my shoulder nearly crippling my right arm.
Once I’m to my feet, I push myself into the hallway. The place is choked by silence. I’m surprised to hear nothing quaking its way in from outside or the other rooms in the building. I begin working my way back to Jody when, in a flash, I nearly fall to the floor once more.
Sarah and the other voices worm their way back in. It’s overpowering, the clashing noises and sounds, the piercing voices scraping the inside of my skull. I close my eyes and push the buttstock of the pistol against my head a few times to slow it all down, but things only get louder and heavier and more jumbled, the claws of madness and death sinking deeper into my mind.
Before it can fully grab me like all the times before I press my head hard enough between my hands to send a roaring thunder through my ears and then I scream. I scream until they all disappear one by one. I scream until I’m an island, alone in the world.
When the voices boil down to only the usual whisper and hum, my eyes open again. The walls are the same decrepit mess they were before. The musty smell, the creaking floorboards, the bed I’d fallen asleep on for far too long. Even the echoes from the rest of the building and the world outside are back, small chaotic moans to join the rest of the chaos at bay. Reality is back.
I continue to make my way to Jody.
He’s quiet, slumped in his chair, blood and spit dangling from of his lower lip.
His hand is like something put through a blender and then pieced back together by a drunk. Most of the blood has curdled and created a drying whiteness that looks like an infection. The hand seems like an entity unto itself despite how desperate the rest of him looks.
I walk to him and untie the ropes keeping him in place. They are no longer needed.
A sense of panic suddenly clasps tightly around my heart and I turn to see my bag on the kitchen counter. I move toward it, nearly stumbling to the ground as I trip over the sledgehammer now decorated in dried red, bits of skin and flakes of bone.
I make it to the bag and watch as my hands frantically throw items about, my heart pounding more and more fiercely until I find it.
When my mind can register the time and date on the digital watch, my senses slow and my eyes close and I listen as my heartbeat returns to a steady enough pace. A deep breath moves through me as I place the watch on the counter outside of the bag where I can see it from the rest of the room.
I’d nearly slept through it all. It’s almost funny. After everything, I’d almost missed the best part because I needed a nap.
I begin digging through the bag’s contents once more.
I find the couple bottles of water left and make the contents of one disappear in seconds. I open the other bottle and make my way to Jody and pour nearly a third of it onto his head.
He lets out a gasp and his muscles begin tightening and contracting. His mouth jumps to the bottle’s opening and he’s allowed a few swallows before I rip it away and finish the rest myself.
I move back to the bag on the counter and begin fishing again while listening to Jody moan and try to piece together words.
“Stay with me,” I say without turning back. “I have something for you.”
When the brown lunch bag finds my fingertips, I clutch it and smile. I move to the window directly across from Jody.
The street is covered in a layer of smog that nearly obstructs it entirely from where we are. Coming from the rolling flatlands that were her home for so many years, she must have liked this, feeling atop a world that had for so many years never given her a fair shot.
The building’s owner told me that she’d specifically requested an apartment toward the top of the building. The man had warned her the elevator busted every other week, but she didn’t care.
Thoughts of her remind me of the ring, and I realize I’ve gone the longest amount of time without thinking about it or touching it in months.
People in the street move about quickly, most seeming directionless and lost, with energy they don’t know how to place or use. To say they are hopeless is giving them too much credit.
When I move from the window and turn to Jody, the whimpering and the groaning has stopped. He’s completely still, his eyes sprung to life and fixated on what lies before them. To only look at his eyes is to see a hint of the charming young man so many saw in the past — including her.
All it takes to inject some life back into him is a bit of old junk bought months ago. Next to it is a rusted needle, a frayed rubber hose, and a spoon.
My own eyes again fall to my work from before, a dead appendage that now serves as a stark contrast to its owner’s lively and focused pupils.
The stench from it has become unavoidable. It’s pushing out a thick and pinching odor that Jody seems to, for the moment, be unaware of. His senses are hyper-focused on one thing, the only thing that will keep him here with me until the very end.
I’ve nearly made my way back over to him when a faint scratching sound crawls its way into our little world.
Jody doesn’t notice it, but I am as glued to the sound as he is to the contents on the windowsill.
The second set of scratching is louder and knifes its way across the back of my neck. My heart nearly jumps into my throat when I hear it a third time. I move into the hallway and the sounds grow louder.
Before I can hear the noise again or take another step, the 1911 is cupped in my palms with the front sight post just below my eyesight.
I make my way toward the repeating noise until I’m next to the door. Standing there I realize it’s not a scratching, but rather a thumping sound from someone weakly throwing themselves, or something else, against the locked entrance.
When I sense a break in the thuds, I throw the chair down the hallway and swing the door open in what is almost one swift movement.
Before I can fully make out the person standing before me, my right foot pushes against his sternum and he makes his way to the wall on the other side of the hallway and falls to the ground. I lunge forward and only stop when I can taste the sweat emanating from his pores. The barrel of my gun is pressed tightly against a racing pulse in his neck before he can utter a word.
“Wait,” he manages to piece together in between scrambled and short breaths. Doused in sweat, his neck quivering, eyes darting from my face to the gun and then back again, he struggles to find more words.
I lower the weapon and move backward a couple steps, feeling safe now seeing what he is. When my eyes move from my small view of him, I see for the first time a bony girl, dropped to the floor like a pretzel. His right hand has moved its way to her thigh, almost like someone protecting a fallen object of theirs from a predator.
My eyes move up and down the musty and empty hallway until the quivering man finally finds the fortitude to put together more words.
“I … I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” He moves his way to his feet, his eyes remaining on me and his shaking hands in the air. When he’s standing, he bends over, eyes still on me, moving their way back and forth from my face to the gun, and he struggles to pick up the pretzel of a human being.
The girl could be ten. She could be twelve. It’s hard to tell. Her skin is still pink, suggesting she hasn’t been gone for long.
“Another room,” he says, his thick, shaking arms struggling with the weight of the girl. “I find another room.”
He manages to slump her over his shoulder and then slowly makes his way back to his feet.
I can feel my teeth grind and my neck tighten watching him.