Punishment

by Scott J. Holliday

  Barnes stayed silent. He fought through a riot in his mind. Whispers and shouts, rage and despair. “Why did you let Jessica live?”

  Andy offered no reply.

  Barnes peeked around the tree. Calavera was there, in the boxcar, shaking his head from side to side. He thumped his temple with the butt of his palm.

  Barnes said, “Why?”

  Calavera looked up. He blinked rapidly, seemed to register Barnes for the first time. His voice took on a Mexican accent, and the words came out with the struggle of a second language when he said, “I stopped him. I make him stop.”

  “Please. I don’t want to die.” Arturo Perez.

  “You love her,” Antonio Reyes said from the boxcar.

  Barnes said, “You’re under arrest for the murders of”—the timbre of his voice changed to match that of—“Edith MacKenzie . . .” It changed again, this time to “Kendra MacKenzie . . .” and again to “Raymond Philips . . .” And then “Maurice Chamberlain . . . Fred Jones . . . Amanda Jones . . . Nancy Fulmer . . . Roberta Jensen . . . Jeffrey Dunham . . . Dale Wilson . . . Andrea Wilson . . . Kerri Wilson . . .” Barnes’s timbre returned to his own as he added, “And Damon Beckett. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and wi—”

  Calavera cut him off with gunfire. Barnes ducked back. Bullets showered the trees beyond his position. Barnes looked up, saw bits of the blue sky through the tree limbs. “I’m coming, little brother.” He rolled out and stood, pushed through the low boughs, and started toward the boxcar, gun drawn and aimed.

  Calavera scrambled back. He fired from cover, lighting up the car’s interior like camera flashes. Barnes took a bullet to the left upper chest. It peeled him back, but he stayed on his feet, kept moving forward.

  Calavera shot again.

  Barnes’s right shoulder exploded in pain. He held his weapon, still aimed, and staggered forward, unwilling to fire. He deserved this death. For Ricky. For all of them. He stumbled toward the open door, just a few feet away now.

  Calavera fired again.

  Kneecapped, Barnes went down. He crawled up toward the boxcar, ducked around to the outside of the open door and backed up against it. He used his good leg and thrust as hard as he could against the door. It closed halfway on squealing hinges.

  Calavera’s voice had returned to that of Andy Kemp: “What the hell?”

  Barnes thrust again, smiled when he heard Kemp say, “Oh no, no, no. That’s not fair!”

  Barnes picked up his heel, dug it into the soft soil, and kicked with all his remaining strength. The boxcar door slammed shut. He reached up to the long handle and dragged it down into the locked position.

  Kemp’s voice was now muffled from inside the boxcar. “You bastard! Open this door. Let me out!” He pounded and kicked. He fired, but the handgun only clicked. Out of bullets.

  The forest came alive with the sounds of sirens, soon red-and-blue lights. Barnes sat with his back against the boxcar. Life was leaving his body. Kemp continued to scream and pound and dry-fire his weapon. Barnes tuned him out. He moved the Glock to his left hand.

  Cold.

  He pocketed his right hand to pull his jacket around his midsection, found Jessica’s bag of salt. He pulled it out and looked down at it . . . and then he began to laugh. He opened the bag and dumped some of the salt on his ruined knee. The pain was exquisite, like napalm rolling up through his thigh into his hip. He poured some on to his bleeding shoulder, cried out in horrible pain, kept laughing.

  The paramedics made their way through the woods, carrying a stretcher. Warden was behind them with the machine, bumping the wheels over the rough terrain.

  Good ol’ Warden.

  Barnes waited until the paramedics were within range. He aimed his weapon at them and said, “No closer.”

  The paramedics stopped for a moment, exchanged a glance, shrugged, and kept coming. Barnes closed one eye, took aim, and fired. The bullet tore a hole through the stretcher. The paramedics dropped their ends, ducked, and ran.

  Warden wheeled Eddie up to Barnes’s side. He began attaching the hoses, the needle.

  “Help me,” Barnes said, indicating his jacket. He dropped his handgun.

  Warden helped Barnes peel off his jacket.

  Darkness crowded Barnes’s vision. The end was upon him now. He ripped open his shirt, sending buttons flying. The hole in his chest had leaked blood over his belly, his pants. Warden attached the suction cups to his bald temples. He pushed the needle into his arm, turned on the machine. “Stay alive for me.” He offered a hospice worker’s smile.

  Barnes closed his eyes and concentrated, rewound through his memories until he found himself sitting in his parked car at Calvary Junction just three days before. He recalled stumbling drunkenly out of the vehicle, going to the tracks, waiting for the train to destroy him. He mentally walked himself through everything that had happened since then, including all the time he’d spent on the machine. He concentrated on every pain he’d experienced, every torture, every victim, and every brilliant moment with Jessica. He then dwelled on the pain of what he’d brought to her, stayed with the torturing images of her raw wrists and ankles, her cracked and bloody lips, her death mask. He mired himself in the vision, soaked in the gut-wrenching agony of the pain he’d brought her. Then he sat down in the love he felt for her and dwelled in the horrible emptiness of finding such love only to feel it now draining away along with his life. He walked himself right up to this moment, the moment when Warden had hooked him into the machine and smiled that hospice smile.

  It was then that Barnes forced faith to enter his mind. For the first time since he was a boy, he allowed the invigorating power of hope to course through him, to lift his spirits, to bring him joy. It felt good to hope. He hoped for Ricky’s forgiveness. He hoped for redemption. Perversely, and with a sneer on his face, he hoped that he might live, and that he might see her again.

  Then Detective John Barnes poured the rest of Jessica Taylor’s salt into the wound above his heart.

  37

  Darkness and silence.

  “End of transmission.”

  The Vitruvian Man test pattern.

  Please Stand By.

  38

  Andy Kemp woke up screaming. His chest felt like a crater of fire and char. Psychosomatic agony coursed through Antonio Reyes’s body to Kemp’s shoulder, his knee, his punctured lungs, his severed head, his broken ribs, his caved-in skull, the salt in his wounds. Tears drizzled away from his eyes and dripped from the suction cups attached to his shaven temples. The victims in his head cried out in anger, in hatred for him. They taunted and berated him. He struggled against the manacles at his wrists and ankles in his hospital bed.

  “Shhh. Goddammit, shut up!”

  Kemp blinked rapidly, but the fog would not recede. The victims stayed with him, as they had each time he’d been on the machine. Longer and longer they stayed. They pounded at his brain like blacksmiths on hot iron. Sparks of pain scattered and burned him. He screamed and wailed.

  “Shhh. Quiet now.”

  The voice seemed familiar.

  Kemp closed his eyes and shook his head. He blinked again, found he could see. The blurry room was four royal-blue concrete walls and a steel door with a shatter-resistant window. The woman above him was dressed in all white, like a nurse. Her black hair was tied up behind her head.

  “I know you,” Kemp said. He checked her name tag. MARTINEZ. “Yes, of course. You worked with Barnes. You helped him.”

  “You’re with us now?” Martinez said.

  “Where am I?” Kemp said. “What’s happening?”

  “You ask that every time,” she said, “and every time I tell you you’re in the Bracken Institute for the Criminally Insane, and that you’ve been on the machine for three days as part of your sentence.” She slid a needle out of Kemp’s left arm. The spot stung, burned. She wrapped up the tubes and dropped them into a hazmat box. She pulled another needle from his right arm and did the same. S
he plucked the suction cups from his temples.

  “You’re a nurse now?” Kemp said.

  “No,” she said. “I administer this machine for the hospital. Took the job after being let go from the police department. I’ve told you this many times over the years.”

  The steel door opened, and the big nurse came in. She took away an IV drip and held the door while Martinez began to roll the machine over the threshold. The big nurse said to him, “I’ll bring you to your room in a moment.”

  Sheila Martinez and the big nurse left, letting the door close behind them. Andy Kemp, forever trapped in a body he wanted only to borrow, sobbed openly in the empty room. His excruciating body pain was dwarfed by sorrow and numbed by despair, for his heart was once again filled with guilt, with lost love, and with the damnable misery of John Barnes’s unrequited hope.

  EPILOGUE

  Barnes sat on the wooden steps that led up to his porch, his leather tool belt unbuckled and set at his side. There was a framing hammer in the steel loop, 16d sinker nails in the main pouch, a twenty-five-foot measuring tape buttoned in its place. He sat with his forearms on his knees and a beer held loosely in his right hand, dangling in the space between his legs. It was Friday afternoon, and the foreman had let the crew off early. Barnes had come home to an empty house, pulled the beer from the fridge, and headed out to the porch, letting the cheap screen door bang and rattle as it closed behind him.

  He took a swig, set the bottle down, and examined his hands. They were calloused and muscular now, lightly coated with drywall dust and blue snap-line chalk. His silver wedding ring was battered and beautiful. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together, sending dust into the air. He then ran his fingers through a full head of hair. His surgically repaired shoulder ached. There was titanium in there now, beneath the scars. Same with his knee. They both gave him trouble at times.

  Barnes placed a hand on the scar above his heart. He pressed down on it like a button. It tickled and stung. He waited for the victims in his head to comment, but they were quiet now. Had been for some time. He smiled and leaned back against the stairs, placing his elbows on the step above and behind him. He kicked out his legs and crossed them at the ankles.

  A school bus appeared at the end of his road. The air brakes sounded off as the bus came to a stop at the corner. Jessica was waiting there alongside two other mothers. It was a warm autumn day but growing crisp as evening approached. Jessica wore a sweater and a long skirt.

  Richard J. Barnes hopped off the bus with both feet and landed like a paratrooper, Batman backpack firmly attached. He ran a few circles around his mother before taking her hand. They spoke with each other as they headed down the sidewalk toward home.

  The boy’s face lit up when he saw his dad.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There was never a time in my life when I felt incapable of achieving my dreams. I attribute this to my parents, who made sacrifices on my behalf before I was even born, before I was capable of understanding. I know they did, because I’m doing the same for my own kids—the beautiful, ungrateful little twerps.

  Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.

  Thanks, twerps.

  Thank you to music, bourbon, and Stanley Kubrick. Thank you to whoever invented those huge plastic tubs of cheese balls. Thank you to George Orwell for writing 1984 and making me walk circles around the living room, unsure if I was devastated or delighted, but certain that I needed to pay the gift forward. Thank you to John Steinbeck for Of Mice and Men, Peter Hedges for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and Patrick deWitt for The Sisters Brothers.

  Thank you to Thomas Harris for existing in this world.

  Thank you to Jessica Tribble, David Downing, Sarah Shaw, and everyone else at Thomas & Mercer for turning my mad ramblings into coherence.

  Thank you to Barbara Poelle for your wit and persistence (after you read this, ask me what I almost wrote here instead).

  And thank you to Nichole. Goddamn, you’re a great girl.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Scott J. Holliday was born and raised in Detroit. In addition to a lifelong love of books and reading, he’s pursued a range of curiosities and interests, including glassblowing, boxing, and much more. His two previous novels are Stonefly and Normal, the latter of which earned him recognition in INKUBATE.com’s Literary Blockbuster Challenge. He loves to cook and create stories for his wife and two daughters.