With Nick on the ground, Michael regained control over himself and ran for the woods. When he passed the first tree, he stopped and looked back. Nick was trying to stand but kept falling over, his legs working independently of each other. Michael could hear him yelling into the night.
“Come back! It’s why you’re here! Come back! I’m begging you!”
Michael ran until he could no longer hear Nick’s words.
fifty-eight
MICHAEL SPENT THE REST OF THE NIGHT huddled under his coat, his thoughts circling around him. The stars had been out and the trees towered above, scraping the blackness. The woods were quiet. There was no wind, as if the earth had exhaled and was between breaths.
He saw his life laid before him the past couple of days. The naiveté of Will, the coldness of the meth heads, the madness of Nick. He knew where he was headed.
He dwelt on Nick’s confession. Michael would never know the comfort of another person. The knowledge of this would push him to the edge of breaking, where only by sheer will would he be able to hold it together. He knew his will would not last forever. He knew there would come a day when he would give over to despair and let go of this thread of hope that kept him in the realm of the sane.
Someday he would be the one begging in the mud.
But why bother? What did he have to hope about?
His hope should have died with Marcus.
His little brother.
But he did hope. Michael still hoped.
Perhaps that was the human element, he thought. Hoping beyond reason was what made a beast human. It wasn’t fear, as Nick said, but the constant striving of hope.
The memory of his mother’s touch and his father’s pride stung him the most. He thought he had lost all before he led Marcus down that path in the woods, the pistol in hand, but little did he know what real loss would feel like. He not only killed his brother with the pull of the trigger, but he had destroyed all those around him. His mom slipped into madness, his father’s heart gave out, his sister was taken to live far away from the destruction he had caused. The day he left for prison was the last time he had seen any of them.
The constant second-guessing of his life weighed on him like a lead blanket that he hauled through the forest toward his home.
But why go home? What was there for him?
The people of Coldwater feared him and wanted him dead. He could not show up and expect anything but another round of their hate. People who went as far as burying him alive would not stop at just one attempt. They had already crossed the Rubicon of timidity and would wade in those waters again without a second thought.
But home is where he was headed, something inside him driving him there.
Coldwater contained a remnant of past happiness for him, and he knew—deep down, he knew—that he could never hope to find happiness any other place in the world.
Michael stopped his walk and turned to look from where he came.
Perhaps Nick had been right. Perhaps Michael had come across his future self in the woods on purpose, perhaps he had been led to that house to bestow mercy on a man who had committed the same sins as he had. Only a fellow traveler down this road would know what a mercy they would be doing by ending his life. There would be no more guilt, no more hollowness, no more loneliness to count the days by.
This curse of the murderer’s soul that gripped the spine would never uncoil itself from the fabric of the accused. It sat in constant vigilance, protecting its hoard of regret, annihilating all those who would come to end its life with fear and hatred. But mercy—it knew no defense against such an act, for the world was devoid of such sentiment.
Michael was death personified. Destined to be alone, to be hated, to be feared. The earth wilted at his presence, blood ran in his company, and pain came to those who would do him harm.
The scourge of Coldwater.
Michael turned south again. He would not go back to Nick’s farmhouse. He would not be the merciful executioner of the man in the woods.
He had killed once before out of envy. Michael thought there would be no lesser retribution if he killed out of mercy.
fifty-nine
THE NIGHT BORE ON, and in his dreams he was back in the dugout, the tarp flapping gently in the morning light. He rolled over on the dirt and crawled outside. Smoke rose gently all around him as if the whole forest had burned and turned to ash. The sky was gray, the earth parched, the woods stripped of all bark. It was a torched world absent of color. He walked north, away from the ridge. His dream consciousness guiding him farther into the woods. It was all dead.
Up ahead he could see a boy kneeling over something small. He could not see his face or what he was looking at, but he knew it was Will, in the same way that a shadow is known in a dream. The boy was covered in ashes as well, his clothes singed, his hair matted and tousled with debris. His neck was the color of bone with ash marks here and there. Michael stood and watched him. From this distance, he could tell the boy was sobbing.
This place was all too familiar. This burned-out world. This dead world. There was no sound but for the rhythmic crying of the boy.
Slowly Michael approached, curious as to what Will knelt over and apprehensive about what he’d find. Closer and closer he walked, and with each step his heart became heavier and heavier. He was coming to the point of all things. His mind raced to question everything, but his heart knew all the answers.
He now stood directly behind Will.
In front of the boy lay a small creature. Its fur was burned off its body and its remains were scorched and charred. Michael could see what it was. It was the source of a crushed boy’s heart. It was Otis. Dead, disfigured beyond all comprehension, but he knew the body was Otis just as he knew the boy was Will.
The boy wept on.
Michael extended his hand to Will’s shoulder, but the boy flinched and avoided his touch.
“Stay away from me!”
“Will, are you okay?”
The boy’s face was buried into his hands. “How could you! How could you do this?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“How could you destroy all this?”
Michael could feel the pressure building inside him as if his skin were shrinking over his frame.
“We trusted you. How could you?” the boy went on, inconsolable. “We trusted you and you did this. You’ve ruined everything. Everything!”
Michael’s mouth went dry. He could feel the dead air slowly start to suffocate him. The dying wood encroaching from every side, the world closing in around him.
“You said you wouldn’t hurt us. You said so! How could you!”
“Will, I . . .” Michael’s voice escaped him. He could not speak. His vision began to turn slowly as the trees closed in. He looked down and saw Otis, burnt Otis, who rolled over to his feet, stood, and began barking with a skeletal growl.
“We trusted you!”
The world made no sense and perfect sense.
“How could you!”
The boy turned and looked into Michael’s face, but it was not Will. It was another boy. It was Marcus. His brother.
“How could you!”
And with that, Michael awoke.
It was still night, and the wood was still alive, save for the small dead patch of ground upon which he had been sleeping.
Michael adjusted his back and tried to find a position on the ground that would contour to his body in a more comfortable manner. The breeze rocked the top of the trees, and with the rustling of the leaves he could hear another sound entwined. It was a voice, faint but human.
“Michael!”
The voice carried on the wind. Repeated. Laced with exasperation and anger.
“Michael!”
It was Nick.
He was in the woods.
He was coming after him.
sixty
MICHAEL COULD HEAR NICK yelling in the woods behind him, calling his name, screaming. His heart raced as quickly as his fee
t, and the low-hanging branches scratched at his cheeks and his eyes. His sweat mixed with the chill in the air, his skin cold while his muscles burned. But he ran. Ran as if the devil was behind him. For all he knew, it was.
“Michael! Michael!”
The voice sounded more and more angry with each yell.
Michael had left Nick drunken and delirious in the mud. He seemed a madman intoxicated and desperate but harmless, or at the least, not much to worry about. But now the drunken madman had sobered up and had turned into something else. He could tell by the voice echoing through the woods. The tenor of it. It was peppered with rage.
He kept running, high-stepping over fallen logs, ducking under low branches, bobbing and weaving through the forest. He was pushing south toward home, but he had no idea what he would do when he actually arrived. The voice through the trees was unrelenting. The voice would not stop. It would keep pursuing him to the end of the earth if it had to. It was the voice of a man who had waited years to speak and he wasn’t going to shut up ever again.
“Michael!”
His own name sent a shiver down his spine. He thought about finding a place to hide, but each tree and stump he hurdled never looked like a secure place to take cover. Michael knew he had to keep running.
Suddenly his foot caught on a line of barbwire covered in the underbrush. Before he could realize what was happening, Michael fell and rolled down an embankment, the roots of the trees exposed in the bank punching at him as he tumbled down. He ultimately came to a stop on a bed of white stones. He looked up and saw railroad tracks. They ran across his path, but he could see that the tracks heading west curved south not too far away. Michael pushed himself up and started moving again, even though his back and legs were screaming from the punishment of the fall.
“Michael!”
The voice wouldn’t stop.
He got on the tracks and started a shuffled cadence on the railroad ties. Every few steps he would look back to the point where he had emerged from the woods to see if Nick had caught up with him. With every stride he got closer to the bend in the tracks, and every second his mind told him that he would not make it. His panic was starting to rise.
Almost there.
Almost.
He turned again. Nothing.
Shuffle.
Shuffle.
Turn.
The false safety of the curve in the track was almost in reach. He would be hidden from the point where the forest had spit him out in just a few more steps.
Shuffle.
Shuffle.
Turn.
And there he was, emerging from the tree line. A silhouette in the distance.
“Michael! Stop!”
For some reason, Michael did so. Fear was rising, and even though his mind was commanding every fiber of his being to keep running, his feet remained planted on the railroad tie. He turned around completely to see that Nick had something in his hands. It was a rifle.
Michael watched as Nick raised the gun to his shoulder, and he could feel the burning in his spine. Like a spiderweb cording around his muscles, up his stomach, to his neck. The dark web leeching off every fiber of his body. The shadow was constricting. Michael stared down the tracks as fire erupted from his veins and burned his nerves just as a flash exploded from Nick’s gun.
The bullet ricocheted off the rail not more than ten feet from where Michael was standing. He also saw that Nick had trouble of his own. The rifle had malfunctioned, the barrel seeming to have exploded in Nick’s hands.
Michael came out of his daze and he turned and started running down the tracks again. Nick had dropped the weapon and was clutching his hands to his chest, but he was also on his feet, running after him.
He was stuck between two bookends of death. The mob in the south and the madman in the north. At some point he knew, Michael knew, that he would have to stop running and confront them, but for now, he kept moving as fast as he could down the tracks.
Shuffle.
Shuffle.
Turn.
Nick was gaining on him.
sixty-one
THE LANDSCAPE FELL AWAY and Michael could see a bridge up ahead. This was the old stone viaduct that crossed the Coldwater River northeast of town. He had come a long way. He remembered the viaduct from his childhood as a structure that looked like something the Romans had built thousands of years ago, with its arching supports towering over the river below. He approached the bridge knowing he was losing ground with every step. Nick was gaining on him—the madman propelled by wings of a demon.
Michael made it to the viaduct and began crossing. The bridge was massive as it stretched out before him. A low fog covered the river below like dragon breath, the viaduct a drawbridge across the sky leading toward the safety of the southern woods. He was halfway across when he heard his name again and he could feel his body freeze as if by some uncontrollable force of nature.
“Michael! Stop!”
Michael turned and saw Nick standing on the tracks one step from the bridge. “Why are you doing this?”
“Just stop!” Nick yelled.
“Why?”
“Because I need you. And you need me. You know you do!”
Nick took a step forward onto the viaduct and started coming toward Michael with a slow, confident stride. Michael wanted to run, to keep moving, but now he felt himself wanting to hear Nick, to listen to him. Somewhere deep inside, he saw himself across the bridge, his future self, driven mad with the pursuit of release.
“It’s not by accident you ended up at my door. We are the same. We are the same, you and me,” Nick said, each step getting closer. “We wander this world alone but not alone. We are the storehouses of the fallen. Me and you. You are young, you don’t yet realize what the isolation can do to you. You have no idea. You leave now, you keep running, someday it will be you chasing someone over a bridge, down a road, through the woods, begging them to put an end to your life.”
“We are not the same.”
“Oh, but we are. I know what’s inside you. I know what is wrapped around your gut and cradles you like a baby swaddled in its mother’s arms. I know that feeling, that feeling of constriction, of a beast awakening from its slumber. You know what I am talking about.
“We are symbiotic men with the host of hell living off us like parasites. I felt it, far off, when you were clawing your way out of the grave. I could feel your approach in the woods. This black cloud that lives in me awoke, knowing that the means of its own destruction was near.”
“You’re crazy!”
“You think so? So tell me, who did you kill?”
Michael’s heart skipped several beats as he suddenly felt a spotlight on his soul had instantly been turned on, only to find him naked on the floor.
“Your parents? A sister? Your best friend? I know you killed someone. Someone close, someone who trusted you deeply.”
“Shut up!”
“You hollowed yourself out and became the perfect shell. A cell for an outcast of heaven to be chained in. A host. It’s why all that surrounds you suffers. Dies.”
“Shut up!”
“But we can end this. You and me. We can finally be free. Free of this black hole that we threw ourselves in. We can escape the event horizon of our own curse.”
Michael thought back to the night before, to Nick’s ranting as he slobbered drunkenly. “I’m not going to kill you.”
Nick and Michael were standing face-to-face now in the middle of the viaduct, both between the tracks.
“Last night, I admit, I was weak. I was overcome by the long years of isolation, of desperation. Me, groveling in the mud, that was pathetic. I know. You’ll have to forgive an old man some things. But I’m not crazy. Then it dawned on me, this morning, when the haze of the whiskey wore off. I was wrong. I was all wrong.
“It was like in school, when you stare at those sheets of math problems and it looks like it was written in Greek. And then something shifts in your mind and it makes
sense. That’s what happened.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was wrong to ask you to show me mercy. To kill me. I was wrong to think that was the only way to end my suffering.”
Nick slowly put a hand inside his coat. His fingers were singed from the rifle that had exploded in his hands. He grabbed the handle of something and slowly drew it out. It was a knife, a massive one.
“The things inside us, these inmates of the damned. They protect their home. I don’t know why. Perhaps we are a better residence than hell. I know I’d prefer to be in here than out in the ether somewhere.”
“What are you doing?”
“They will not go gracefully. They will fight to the end. They will destroy anything that comes to expel them.”
“Get away from me.”
“I was wrong to ask you to kill me. I can end my suffering, just by killing you,” Nick said as he lunged at Michael.
sixty-two
THE WORLD TURNED in slow motion.
Michael saw the blade coming up toward his throat and something inside him took over. Rage moved his body with elegant efficiency as he parried Nick’s hand away and delivered a punch to his attacker’s stomach. As his fist connected, Michael felt a bomb go off in his head that stunned him and made him stumble back, almost tripping on the railroad ties that were under his feet. Nick doubled over at the waist. One hand still held the knife, his other went to his head as well. He felt the same sensation with his own offensive move. He looked up at Michael with a sick grin.
“You feel that? It’s them. They will die defending their hosts. That is how we get free of them once and for all!”
Nick raised himself up and threw the knife. It spun faster than seemed possible and found its mark just above Michael’s right knee. The pain was excruciating as the blade sunk into Michael’s thigh, causing him to drop. His back hit one of the rails and sent another jolt up his spine.
Coldwater Page 17
