by T. Braddy
On his way out, he fired a few times, but the rounds were wild, mere attempts to keep me suppressed. Didn’t work. I crept along the edge of the bar, watching him go. Another errant shot, and he was out of the building.
He managed to get back out on the road and stagger back toward Savannah proper, where he probably thought he’d be able to get into hiding without much fanfare.
I wasn’t about to let that happen.
Cradling the shotgun in the crook of my good arm, I searched the back of the bar for extra rounds. I found a box and stuffed what couldn’t fit into the gun itself into my pockets.
On the way out, I said goodbye to Mickey.
My old boss lay face up on the bar floor, eyes dull and blood-spattered. Parted lips curled up, as if about to utter some bit of traditional wisdom. I half-expected him to douse me with a stream of curses when I leaned over him, but all I got, instead, was that blank, soulless gaze. He’d said the last of his good-hearted blasphemies.
Sorry, Mickey, I thought, closing his eyes. It’s the curse of knowing me.
Then I went back out, ready for whatever fate was to come.
twenty-first chapter
This time, when I wobbled back onto River Street, it was empty. Devoid of all activity, save for the festive lights that flashed and blinked on some of the bar awnings along the business side of the street. This was the first time I had seen River Street as calm as the river itself. Some people gaped nervously from behind poles or other obstructions, and further down either side, barhoppers moved about as if unaware of the commotion, but otherwise the area was deserted.
Fitz’s Igor shuffle was unmistakable up ahead, the man dragging one leg behind him and pressing one arm across the ragged, bloody wound in his chest.
He turned east, limping forward and knocking down anyone stupid enough to get in his way. I had the shotgun, but it’d only piss him off at this range. I had to get closer.
Bystanders learned their lesson pretty quickly. They made a wide swath for us as we went along River Street, headed straight for the swampy inlet close to the ocean. He was drawing me out to an uninhabited area, so he could kill me and then disappear into the wilderness, before the cops got us.
The two of us moved in slow motion. Every step I took jarred my hand, and my muscles had started to tighten up. The adrenaline had gradually subsided, leaving me feeling broken-down and worn out. Fitz was walking around with a few new holes and had to be a couple quarts shy of a full tank of blood right now, so I imagined his misery matched mine.
We reached a dune populated with a smattering of plant life, a fence running parallel to the ocean. Fitz tumbled headlong over the fence and scrambled toward the ocean.
I followed.
Under any other circumstances, the sand under my feet would have been relaxing. Now, it only filled me with a vague sense of unease.
I saw him in the distance, and though he moved with a deftness I scarcely could imagine were I in his situation, I was slowly closing in. The blood loss was taking its toll on him. Droplets dotted the beach, like breadcrumbs in a German folktale. Drop here. Drop there. A few ounces closer to bleeding out. Even if I didn’t catch him, eventually he’d exsanguinate, saving me the trouble of killing him.
Above us, the sky lightened. Clouds were visible in this lessening darkness. It was going to be a beautiful day. Cold, maybe, but the sun would be out. Great day to walk the beach. Great day to be alive, even if it might be my last.
Up ahead, Fitz’s struggle to move forward turned into something real. He refused to stop, even as his body commanded him to do so. He just kept on moving, lunging forward, his legs barely able to catch up and land beneath him. Looked like a TV zombie, shuffling along for the camera. Believable, too, and who knew: he might end up becoming one, of a fashion, after this were all over with. He might have turned to fire, but he was uneven on his feet, and it might sent him toppling over. This was a sort of race against time, and he was losing.
He fell, plunging hard into the sand. If only I were close enough to put him out of his misery. I fired once, just in case, and he jerked but didn’t die. He did sway when he got back up, and I saw the bloody, dotted configuration the pellets left behind. Wasn’t enough to kill him, but it’d slow him down plenty.
Staggering, he fell again, and I made up half the distance. He was crusted with sand and dirt and blood and looked on the verge of keeling over. This time, when he got up, he didn’t move forward but sideways, staggering toward the ocean.
Finally, maybe when he realized he’d had enough, he turned and faced me, although his face looked like a bad artist’s approximation of the human form. Like somebody had drawn it from memory. His grin was blood-soaked, and he was missing some teeth. Must have knocked them loose on one of his awful spills.
He raised the gun. I raised mine. At this distance, I’d knock him in half.
However, his aim was true and straight. I could see that from where I stood. If he fired right now, my brains would land several yards behind me, so I didn’t make any sudden movements. The shotgun was my patience and my common sense. If I needed it, I’d use it, but for the time being, I had to figure something out.
He spat. A red wad appeared in the sand at my feet.
“You fucked up my plan,” he said. “You fucked it all up.”
“A desire to live will do that to a simple plan,” I said.
“Now I don’t know that I can even go and kill you the way I wanted to, godamnit.”
He was bleeding, woozy. Didn’t look good. He was holding the gun up but didn’t seem capable of using it, not really. The gun was in the nondominant hand, since the other one dangled uselessly at his side. I figured I might even be able to wait him out. Maybe he’d simply keel over and die right before my eyes. That’d make things a hell of a lot simpler.
“Hoped to draw you out here and kill you,” he said. “Looks like it might end up the other way around.”
“Looks like it.”
“You fucker.”
His eyes turned to slits, and he tried to blow snot from one nostril, but it nearly upended him. “Without your supernatural bullshit, you’d never have beaten me,” he said.
“I guess we’ll have to speculate on that, now won’t we?”
“You know I fucked your wife?”
“I did.”
He tried to laugh. “Made her squeal, too. Like when I held her down after shoving those pills down her throat. Made everything else after that a whole lot easier.”
I tried to feel Vanessa’s presence here, tried to experience her spectral form, cheering me on in some way. But all I felt was a lack of her presence. An emptiness. Guess I’d have to get used to that.
“Tried to do the same to your girlfriend,” he continued. “But you fucked that up too. I guess--”
The strength had left him.
His hand slipped, like his eyelids, and he jerked to try and stay upright.
That was it.
He fired and I fired, but he fell and I didn’t. Something spun me sideways and lit my shoulder on fire, but I managed to stay on my feet. If I hadn’t, if I had gone down, I wouldn’t have made it back to my feet.
The tide sloshed him around, and eventually the water took him. I stayed to watch him go, this devil of Hell. Decided to take no chances. Once he was gone – completely gone – I tilted my broken body back toward the city and stumbled ahead, hoping I didn’t die.
twenty-second chapter
Time passed. I walked. At some point, the sun made it over the trees. I headed in the direction of my house, keeping my head up as much as was conceivable, trying not to pay attention to the horror story that was my body. My hand ached like a rotting tooth, but it was no longer excruciating. No, now it was the gunshot in my shoulder that threatened to topple me over for good. I didn’t bother to touch it to know it was there, because the pain was a constant reminder.
I steered clear of the scene of the wreck. Had to be crawling with cops. And an ambulance.
Deuce. Died trying to protect me. Just like everybody else. I’d left a trail of bodies like fallen pilgrims on a religious crusade, but somehow losing Deuce hurt the worst. His death was the most painful in a long line of painful deaths, and he’d been my best friend for years. Decades, now.
This, too, shall pass.
Everything – all the good memories and experiences – would eventually be curled under the wake of a tidal wave called time, and no matter what the expectation, it conquered all, even old friendships. We started as scared-as-hell middle school kids, fighting off the deathly crawl of the clock on Ms. G’s wall clock, passing notes and playing paper football on our desks. Talking about shit nobody but the two of us cared about. He had always been my protector, my savior. He’d kept me from dying a fiery death in the Boogie House, and he’d protected me from a monster named Fitz. He had ventured southward to put himself between his best friend and a bullet, and a bullet was all he got out of it.
Bum fucking deal.
Bum fucking friend, I was.
Sorry, good buddy.
Guess I was getting mine, for all the fucking good I had done everyone.
In my back pocket, I found the remaining pint of Beam, which I then proceeded to open and drink as I sloped toward mortality. No sense in letting a perfectly good bottle of–
I leaned forward and vomited. There was some blood in there. I shrugged, managed to get my own zombie walk a-walkin’, and I forced myself to keep drinking. If I was going to die, I was at least going to die drunk, goddamnit.
* * *
Somehow, I made it to my street and shambled forward. I didn’t quite know what it was I’d actually do once I got there, but I hoped the sheer act of stepping into my place would give me a sense of peace.
Fitz was dead; it was over. The circle was complete. I had nothing else left to prove.
Only, there were things. Yaelis. Allison. Jess, even. What would those intersections look like, if left uncrossed? Better than if I stayed in their lives, I was sure. Jess had been assaulted, drugged. What else would happen to her if I hung around? Allison, too. I’d already gotten Yaelis’s dad killed. What relatives might Allison have to get terrorized at my expense?
Time dragged on, my mind and focus pointed directly at my feet, moving slowly in the direction of the house. I was knocked out of my concentration by the sound of someone talking behind me.
“Hey, buddy, you all right?”
I turned, squinting against the glowing sun. “No,” I said, and turned to keep on shuffling.
“I’m– you need medical attention. Jesus, your clothes are soaked in blood.”
I stopped, staggered, and turned back to the man. “You call the cops, and I’ll make sure I pay you a visit when I get released on bail.”
His eyes widened, and he started to reach for his jeans pocket, so I ran.
Well, I couldn’t actually say that I ran. Couldn’t do much but a measured hobble, but I did it quickly as I could. When I checked again, the guy had turned and was walking in the opposite direction.
I kept going. It hurt, but I didn’t stop moving forward.
At some point, I realized I wasn’t moving at all. Thought I was. Thought my legs were moving. Thought I had made some progress to the house, but I had stopped and was lying face-down in the grass. I tried to get up, or at least I thought about it, but my shoulder and my fingers wouldn’t let me.
Just a minute, I thought. A little rest, and I’ll be ready to go again.
It was about then I felt the blackness overtake me, the sound of a jangly guitar echoing in my ears.
I thought of what had happened here in Savannah and elsewhere, and I came to the conclusion that I was all right with dying. If I couldn’t make things right, I could at least bow out and let my final act be one of defiance.
Mostly, though, I thought of Vanessa.
I hoped I’d meet her when this was all over, ask her what I could have done to make things better.
And then I let go.
twenty-third chapter
Smoke and fire surrounded me, the dark carnival of souls creeping ever closer, ready to take me off into the distance of the afterlife, but I did not dream. No, this was no dream, so far as I could tell. It was an indication of what would befall me. I saw hellfire and darkness but not the boatman waiting to ferry me across the River Styx.
Not yet, goddamnit, I thought.
It was not the Elysian Fields I had previously managed to find myself in, the last time I got shot. This was something decidedly more sinister. It didn’t feel like a religious place. I heard no wailing or moaning, and my soul or whatever felt...okay. It was just hot and dark and devoid of happiness.
The back of my neck burned, and the suit I was wearing – I had last worn it to Emmitt Laveau’s funeral – caught fire in places. My entire body was soaked through with sweat, a fact I could only acknowledge by wiping my face and looking down at my hands. I wandered forward, but this time I wasn’t greeted by my mother, or my own personal Virgil, through this sadistic form of the Inferno.
Fire on either side of me, I walked ahead, moving toward the illuminated force moving in my direction.
It was a wall of souls.
High as my eyes could see and twice as wide, the black-and-gray mass steered towards me like a storm from some form of the apocalypse. In the undulating mass, the faces staring back at me were those of all the people I had seen pass into that otherworldly realm. They were sloppy, disfigured representations of their living selves. Exaggerated forms of the drama masks. The eyes were rippling black ovals, like jagged holes torn in old t-shirts. The mouths sloped down at sad, canted angles, creating sounds not unlike poorly-played brass instruments.
The overall effect of them all emoting simultaneously was that my entire body shook uncontrollably. It was so bad, at one point, that I couldn’t move forward, but was forced to press against the force and stare up at the immense mess I had created of all those people’s lives.
I recognized the pulpwooders and H.W. Bullen and Mickey and all of the other people who had died simply for becoming entangled in the web of my life. Richie was there, too, and for some reason, I almost felt saddest about him. He’d died trying to step out of the shadow of his former self, not unlike me.
Above all of them, looming larger than the rest, was Winston’s face. The man who had helped resurrect me as a sober person for six months lingered in this ineffable form, eyes and mouth sadder, more expressive, than the rest combined. It reminded me I had unfinished business back in the world of the living.
As the wall drew closer, I felt a wetness on my face. I wiped it away, but it returned. The wall of souls grew blurry, the faces melding into a single, gelatinous image made of smoke and death, and suddenly I couldn’t see at all. I could only feel the wetness on my face and the fire scorching my back. I slipped in the sand of this netherrealm and tumbled again into darkness, though it was a darkness far brighter than the one featuring the souls.
* * *
I came to with the smell of something awful in my nose. Smelled like old salmon. My eyes squinted open, and it wasn’t the dark place between life and death I saw, but a little black knob of a nose. When I raised my head – not an easy act – I saw that it wasn’t just a nose but a furry little snout.
Willie was bouncing around my head, licking my face and barking. He was skinny but alive and apparently excited to see me.
“Good boy,” I said, reaching out my good hand to pet him. “Good fucking boy.”
With some time, I was able to get to my feet and propel myself forward with legs barely capable of holding weight. I felt like Hell personified, but I wasn’t going to die, not yet. I had one more bit of business to conduct before I found myself among the wall of souls.
Willie trotted along beside me, panting and occasionally barking when I threatened to topple over and die on him.
By sheer will, I made it home, bleeding though I was. The world had darkened, taken on the quality of an old, fa
ded photograph. My Aunt Birdie, the woman who had raised me, used to show me pictures of my distant relatives, unhappy country people wearing overalls, and the pictures nearly always looked the same: brown, faded, and wrinkled. That was the image of reality I was treated to right now.
No cops. No ambulances. No SWAT team. Just the house and the morning heat of an unseasonably warm fall day.
The front door was locked, and I didn’t have my keys, so I staggered around back to find my spare, when I noticed something on one side of the house.
Two feet poked out from the bushes in my backyard. Two giant feet, feet that would have been perfect for an adaptation of the end of Jack the Giant Slayer. Willie started barking his ass off, and I didn’t have the strength to shush him.
I shuffled closer and realized I knew those feet.
“Deuce?” I said, incredulous, a half-question.
When he didn’t respond, I kicked him. It was all I could think of or manage to do.
“The fuck, Rolson,” he said, trying to roll sideways. With my help, he managed to crawl out of the bushes and collapse on my back steps. The entirety of his shirt was covered in blood. He didn’t look good, but neither did I, and I didn’t think we could go to the hospital.
I tried to kneel down and check him out. The force sent me wobbling, and I nearly went headlong into the steps.
“They went clean through, I think,” he said. “I bled like a stuck pig, but so as long as I don’t completely bleed out, I might survive.”
I stood up, looked around.
“We need to get out of Dodge, old friend,” I said. “We’ve almost painted the town of Savannah red, and I don’t imagine the authorities would be too pleased to see us.”
Deuce grunted. “Oh, I think they’d be plenty happy to see us.”
“We just need to cut our losses and get the hell out, go hide somewhere.”
