THE DAMNED

by William Ollie

  “I stayed with Rosie during this time, and found that she really was perfect. Smart, witty, irreverently funny. She had so much going for her. She was everything I wasn’t, and I hated her for it. Me, the globetrotting, high fashion model throwing everything away for her daily shot of smack. But Rosie couldn’t tell. After all, I was loaded to the gills and could easily maintain my filthy little habit. Good old Katie saw to that. Rosie idolized me, and why not. There wasn’t a bookstore or checkout counter in America that didn’t have my smiling face decorating their magazine racks.

  “But I couldn’t stand the fact that my little sister was happy with who she was. I hated myself and she was everything I wanted to be, so one night I laid out a few lines, and off we went. It was easy, getting her hooked. The parties and nightclubs… the men I introduced her to, gorgeous men who put up with her only so they could get close to me. Who wouldn’t be dazzled by that lifestyle? I certainly was, at first. And so was Rosie, and before I knew it I had what I wanted. My perfect little sister was just like me: a stoned-out junkie chasing after her next high.”

  Once again Lila snatched up the Jack Daniels and put the bottle to her lips, Scott still sitting silent as she washed a mouthful down with the last of her Coke. She dropped the plastic bottle to the floor and held the whiskey in her lap.

  “I went off to Paris on a shoot. But I didn’t leave her empty handed. Oh, no. I still loved my sister, especially now that we were on the same playing field. And it wasn’t all bad—she’d dropped a lot of weight. She wasn’t pudgy anymore, and she was quite attractive. I went off to Paris and left Rosie with an ounce of coke, and I might as well have pushed her off that…”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes, Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ. Rosie got so high she never came down. Higher and higher until she opened the window of my high-rise condo and flew out it like a big beautiful bird. My perfect fucking sister who would still be alive if she hadn’t called me home to our dying mother’s side. Our dying mother who didn’t want a fucking thing to do with her, and neither did I, really. Until I found out she had something I’d never have, and never did have.” Lila huffed out a laugh. “Doesn’t have it anymore, though. She doesn’t have anything.”

  “Jesus, Lila.” Scott didn’t know what else to say. It was a horrible story, one that had left him stunned. Tears were streaming down her face, but she wasn’t sobbing. She sat quietly, staring out at the window, and now Scott knew exactly what she was seeing: what was left of her soul, spiraling down to the fiery arms of Hell.

  “I told you this so you’d know who has your back. I’m not afraid to die. I don’t want to die, but I’m not afraid of it. I see a little bit of me in every one of those cocksuckers out there, and I’ll happily wipe out anyone of them who crosses me in any way. That’s why I could jam that shotgun in the midget’s mouth and pull the trigger while he was begging for his life. I know evil, you see. Because I am evil.”

  Lila gave Scott a friendly pat on the knee, looked at him and said, “You’re with me. You and Davey. I’ve got your backs, and if you go down I’ll go down swinging with you.”

  A scraping sound came from the dining room and Scott looked over at Davey, who was standing up with the candle in his hand. “What’s up?” he said, and Davey said, “I’m bored.” Scott smiled, because even with all the shit Davey had been through, he was still just a kid sitting alone with a couple of adults, bored half out of his mind as he waited for the lights to come back on. Except the lights weren’t going to come back on.

  The room grew a shade dimmer as Davey and his candle disappeared down the hallway, and Scott turned back to Lila. “You were on a bus, you said.”

  “Yes. When it happened, when the world turned upside-down. We were cruising down the expressway and most of the passengers disappeared. The driver had a heart attack and the bus ran off the road, straight through the guardrail and down a steep grassy knoll. We rolled over—who the hell knew a bus could roll over, but this one did… down the embankment until we slammed into a concrete pylon supporting the overpass.”

  “Is that where you got…” Scott ran a couple of fingers across his cheek.

  “Yep, seven weeks ago.”

  “So Warren was telling the truth. Some kind of biblical Rapture wiped everything good and decent away.”

  “Far as I can tell.”

  “Then what are we?”

  “That, my friend, is one hell of a question.”

  The flickering flame shrouded Scott and Lila in a dim yellow glow, and as Scott watched it waver along its wick, he thought for a moment of Sandi and all the cold winter nights they had spent in front of the fireplace, but he pushed the thought away, because he just could not bear to have those unanswerable questions come tumbling after him.

  Even though he hadn’t guzzled down whiskey the way Lila had, he’d still had plenty, and he’d just woken from a coma that very afternoon. His eyes were tired, and seemed to be growing heavier by the second. He settled back into the plush fabric upholstery. His eyes closed and quickly snapped open.

  “You okay?”

  “Huh?” He looked up at Lila. “What?”

  “Your body jerked.”

  “Heh, guess I’m falling asleep.”

  “Well,” Lila said, “you go on to sleep then. I’ll take the first watch and wake you in few hours. We’ll switch it back and forth ‘til morning.”

  “What’re we going to do in the morning?”

  “We’ll talk about it then.”

  “Well, okay… okay then.” Scott could have stretched out on the other end of the couch, but he didn’t. He liked the way Lila felt next to him, the comforting touch of her soft shoulder against him as he leaned into her. So he grabbed a throw pillow, fluffed it up and put it under his legs, which were resting on the coffee table, and once again settled himself back into a couch that seemed to swallow him whole. His eyes relaxed for a moment as he watched the flame, and before he knew it they were closed. And for the first time in what seemed like years, he slipped away to a place where nothing and no one could touch him, where no one could find him, down into the same dark void from which he had so recently emerged; floating quietly along as he drifted far, far away from this dreary landscape, toward a miniscule pinpoint of light a million miles away that quickly became a brightly lit tunnel, and just as quickly opened up into the light of day, until he suddenly found himself traveling down a four-lane highway in the middle of a sweltering hot August day, behind a light blue Honda Accord that was barely doing the speed limit. When Scott edged close to its bumper, the guy driving waved and moved into the right lane, and Scott blew by him. And Scott was glad. He had enough on his mind without having to deal with some road hog. Like what he was going to tell Sandi when she arrived home from work to find him sitting around the house well before his shift had ended.

  Scott tapped out a rhythm to the Skynnrd tune playing in the background as he picked up speed, leaving the eighteen-wheeler which had been creeping ever so close to his own bumper far behind him. He’d thought about screwing around somewhere for a while to give himself time enough to look like he’d just crawled in from a hard day’s work. But what would be the point, he’d still have to tell her. What else could he do, leave out every morning to a job he no longer had and hope she didn’t catch on until he lucked into something else? Sooner or later the bills would pile up, the checks would bounce and he’d have to break down and admit he wasn’t man enough, that he just didn’t have guts enough to tell her how a slip of the tongue had cost them their security.

  A slip of the tongue.

  Like it was his fault some stupid bitch had…

  Well off the Interstate now and rolling through the subdivision, Scott slowed to round the curve into their cul-de-sac, and there was Sandi’s three-year-old Celica sitting in the driveway, well before her shift ended. He was surprised to see it, surprised and a little dismayed—he’d hoped to have time enough to get his thoughts together before she got home, and he’d
spent all his time bemoaning the circumstances he found himself in.

  Scott pulled up in front of the house, killed the engine and got out of the car, opened the rear driver’s-side door and removed his umbrella from the backseat—‘Get your shit and get out’ his boss had told him, and that red, white, and blue umbrella with the ‘American Freight’ logo emblazoned on its top was the only thing he could rightfully call his own. And you could bet your ass he wasn’t about to leave it behind, unless he could have shoved it up his boss’ behind. He’d have left it then, all right.

  Should’ve shoved it right through his fucking eyeball, him and that mealy-mouthed cunt of a customer!

  Sandi was standing at the entrance to the dining room when Scott walked into the house, facing the front door like a guard dog roused from sleep. Obviously she’d heard him rumble up outside and wanted to know what in the hell he was doing home so early. She opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off with, “What are you doing here in the middle of the day?”

  “I had a doctor’s appointment.”

  “Doctor’s appointment? You didn’t tell me anything about a—”

  “Scott, what’re you doing here?”

  “Well, I… uh… Ho boy.”

  Sandi, long and lean and agile-looking, with high cheekbones and the well-defined legs of a competitive swimmer, stood in front of her husband, eyeing him curiously as he fidgeted with his umbrella. Long blonde hair fell across her shoulders like fine strands of corn silk; soft, as were her emerald green eyes, eyes which narrowed when she said, “What have you done?”

  “Aw, hell. I got fired.”

  “You what?” She took a step forward, and Scott said, “It wasn’t my fault.”

  There was a click, the shutter-click of a high-speed camera magnified ten-thousand times, so loud that Scott’s ears popped—a shadow passed over him and the room grew instantly dark, and he was standing back in his nightmare world of midgets and candles and roasted flesh. Standing in front of Sandi, who took another menacing step forward as Scott said, “What the…” and another metallic click sent him back to his house on Bayberry Circle, where his wife stood scowling in front of him, one brilliant blue eye flashing as the other green eye closed and opened blue as well. She took another step forward and Scott stepped back, and, CLICK!, he was back in the dark in front of the couch, holding not his umbrella but his trusty shotgun before him, blood trickling from his ears as Sandi screamed, “IT’S NEVER YOUR GODDAM FAULT, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”

  Her hand came up—

  Click!

  —clutching a gun, back in the house on Bayberry Circle, sunlight streaming through the windows as Scott backed up another step, and Lila, Lila who was back on the couch in that nightmare world of dust and ash and slithering creatures, stood before him shrieking in Sandi’s voice, “I TOLD YOU, YOU EVIL FUCKING COCKSUCKER!”

  Pain screamed through Scott’s shoulder as fire erupted from Lila’s pistol, and a roaring shotgun blast sent her gun bouncing off the thick shag carpet, the right side of her disintegrating face showering blood and bone and bits of brain on the wall and ceiling and the white-carpeted floor beneath her.

  The shotgun dropped to the carpet as Scott, his back against the closed front door, grabbed the smoking hole in his shoulder, watching in horror as Lila stalked forward, blood pumping from the cratered-jigsaw remains of her skull, spilling down her neck and shoulders and what was left of her face, drowning the sequined bunny ears decorating her chest, that one brilliant blue eye blazing next to the shredded stump of meat that had once been her nose. She took one faltering step forward, and Scott whispered, “No.” One faltering step after another, until a fine mist of blood was spraying Scott as well.

  “Nooo,” he wailed. “No, no, no!” as Lila leapt like a tiger on raw meat and Scott’s hands found her throat, pain shrieking through his horrified mind as he squeezed and shook, and what remained of Lila’s brain popped from her gaping wound, flopping back and forth like a mangled piece of gore-dipped cauliflower with each of Scott’s violent thrusts. Her hands clamped onto his wrists but he didn’t stop. He kept squeezing, squeezing and shaking—maniacal laughter spilled from the horribly disfigured, broken and busted mouth the shotgun blast had left behind, joined by the whimsically joyful laughter of a child as a motorcycle roared in the distance and the house began to tremble, Scott jostling to and fro while the hands tightened on him like handcuffs and the childish laughter rang out. Scott shouted, “Die, you goddamn bitch!” and his eyes popped open to find Lila staring wide-eyed at the dark ceiling, blood leaking from a gaping wound in her throat, saturating the couch and the sequined halter-top she wore, the hunting knife she’d so expertly used to keep Warren in check protruding from her chest like something left wedged in a half-carved Jack-O-Lantern.

  And now it was Davey in front of him. In the dim glow of the flickering flame, he laughed and pointed Lila’s gun at Scott, whose hands and feet were securely bound with lengths of the same yellow rope that had been used on the leering teenager by Warren The Rat-boy, who Scott now realized may have had good reason for leaving the little maniac tied face-down on his piss-soaked mattress.

  Scott couldn’t believe it was real, that he wasn’t dreaming it, but the rope biting his wrist and ankles was no trick of the imagination; neither was the kid laughing and waving the gun in his face. He looked at Davey, at Lila’s mangled throat and back at Davey.

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  “I told you I was bored.”

  “What?”

  “But I told you a lotta shit, didn’t I? Like how I came home and no one was there. Didn’t tell you what I did that morning, though, did I? Didn’t tell you how my fucked-up parents liked to go off and leave me home babysitting my kid sister—that fucking bitch! All the time with the Davey this and the Davey that and, hey Davey… hey Dayyy-veee! It’s no wonder I gutted her fucking ass.”

  “What the fuck are you?”

  “Who, me? Just a kid, Dude. The all American boy next door, who got sick and tired of his bullshit parents shoving their shit down his throat. ‘Hey mom, can I go to the movies?’—

  ‘No, we need you to stay home with your sister.’ ‘Hey mom, can I go over to Johnnie’s?’—

  ‘No, we need you to stay home with Jennie.’

  “Ain’t gotta stay home with her anymore though, huh Scotty? You shoulda seen me cleaning up that fucking mess. Googled my ass off for two hours coming up with that scheme, but, hey, it worked—it’s out there. Who’d’ve known? Kill somebody and go on the Internet to find a way to wipe it clean. I couldn’t sit there with her though, didn’t have the balls for it—got ‘em now though, huh, Scotty?”

  Davey nodded at Lila, but Scott didn’t look. He didn’t think he could ever look at her again. “Got all panicky and shit. Well, hell, I couldn’t sit there with her, could I? Could you? Hell no. Got her all bundled up and taped up and shoved under my bed. Then I hauled ass and waited for dark to come. Figured I’d sneak out in the middle of the night, swipe my dad’s car and dump her out in the woods somewhere. Man, I walked around for hours, sweating my balls off. Hours. Worrying about what might happen. What if they came home and asked for her? Highly doubtful, since they didn’t usually show up ‘til all hours of the night. But what if they did? The fuck was I gonna tell ‘em—I don’t know where she is? Yeah, right, that’d work.”

  Scott pressed the palms of his hands together, and slowly began working them back and forth. The rope was tight, and it hurt like hell, but, maybe…

  “Yeah, right,” Davey said, laughing and shaking his head. “You’re gonna get outa that shit. ‘Bout the time she wakes up.”

  “You sick motherfucker.”

  “Talk about sick! You shoulda seen me when I came home and nobody was there. I mean nobody. Turned green as a goddamn frog when that shit happened, and I sat there staring at the empty spot under the bed ‘til the sun came up, but the sun never came up. Hell, I ain’t seen it since.”

  Scott g
lanced past Lila, at the shotgun still leaning against the end of the couch, too far to grab, and even if he did get his hands on it, they were bound so tightly it would be useless. He didn’t want to see the knife buried to the hilt in her chest, but there it was in the corner of his eye, gleaming in the flickering light. “Look,” he said. “What’d we ever do to you? We rescued you, for chrissakes. Jesus, why’d you—”

  “I told you. I was bored. And now I’m bored with you. I just wanted to tell you my story, so you’d know how yours is going to end up.”

  “Look, you don’t have to do this.”

  “Sure I do,” Davey said, and then raised his arm, leveling the pistol at Scott’s face. Scott turned his head, but he could still see the black eye of death staring out from the barrel—he flinched when the kid jerked his hand skyward, pretending to pull the trigger as Scott cried out, “Shit!”

  Then Davey’s eyes narrowed, and Scott knew he meant business. His finger wrapped the trigger and he lowered his arm, until the gun was pointing directly at Scott. “Time to beam up, Scotty,” he said. He squeezed the trigger but nothing happened, squeezed it again, and then looked down at the pistol like it was a Chinese puzzle box. He looked over at the shotgun and Scott kicked the table. “Ow!” said Davey as the candle fell over and the light went out, and the table banged off his shin. Then Scott was moving, but so was Davey—Scott could hear his feet pounding toward the shotgun while Scott’s own feet, bound tightly together by thick yellow rope, prevented him from doing anything except propel himself in a clumsy, sideways lurch toward the edge of the couch and onto his dead friend. His bound hands came down on the knife and he clutched it, pushing it deeper into Lila to drag himself forward, while his feet dug into the thick shag carpet. The whimsically joyous laughter in his ear told him the kid had found the shotgun. Then a flash from the barrel as the weapon roared to life framed the kid, showing him to be directly in front of the dining room table. Scott didn’t have time to consider how he could’ve missed as he snatched up the knife and executed his own primeval leap. In the split second it took for Davey to ratchet another round, Scott leapt straight at the snick-snack of the shotgun, and another roaring blast sent a shockwave of air rippling across his shoulder. Then he was on the kid and the blade was in, and the kid was screaming. How the blade hit home he did not know, and didn’t care. He pulled it out and slammed it back down—five times, eight times, over and over as Davey screamed and gurgled and the knife came down, until the gurgling stopped and the kid lay still, and Scott pulled the blade free and fell off him.