Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  This man was ordinary. This man was not the product of such a surreal landscape. This man could have nothing to do with any of this.

  But Sebastion saw anger in his face, anger so raw it was rage. And as the man in the maroon shirt stumbled and recovered, Sebastion even saw a bitter hatred in his eyes. The wind was knocked out of his gut as the stranger plunged into him with locomotive force. It gagged him and the two bodies staggered and fell, intertwined, and consumed by each other.

  They were noiseless: Sebastion out of shock and this other for no known reason. The two tussled, struggled, groped and bit. It was a mad fury with Sebastion unconscious of what he was even vying for. He didn’t have anything, no wallet, no keys. They weren’t even in his house in Vaughan anymore. For all he knew, this was the end of time, and nothing mattered anymore at all.

  But the ordinary man in the ordinary dark red shirt fought hard, fought dirty, fought without even taking breath, it seemed. And Sebastion opposed him with a strength he seemed to pull from down deep. He struggled and bludgeoned his fists outward. The two of them rolled in the snow at times, their bodies toppling each other and crushing the wind out of each other. His senses were maligned, tricked; the horizon seemed at once close, then terribly far away in the confusion. The snow felt cold against his skin, then suddenly hot. His eyes seemed bleary, his ears felt plugged then as if they were bleeding. He felt drugged or intoxicated or sick with fever. And when he cried out to his tormentor, his voice sounded bizarre, anguished, a voice of reverie.

  What do you want? he screamed at his attacker.

  He received only grunts and gasps of effort.

  Stop! What IS this? What do WANT from me? His voice sounded weak, even to him.

  But the man in the maroon shirt said nothing, only pushed and crawled and struck at him harder. He would not answer. And Sebastion felt that he may never.

  The stranger slammed a set of knuckles hard into Sebastion’s ribs and pain flared across his body. Sebastion smashed his right knee into a cheek, and the man cried out. But the cry seemed to come, not to Sebastion’s ears, but directly to his brain. They interlocked, the two, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, straining and forcing themselves in hot pressure against the body of the other. The background was still swirling and tilting, moving forward then back, becoming upside down. It was a disoriented mess that added to his confusion. Sebastion was exhausted. His arms and legs felt pain. They were strained, bruised, and pushed to absolute limitations. His mind was a smearing set of colors and emotions and his thoughts were muddy. In a tiny reprieve, the horizon steadied and he summoned the will to crane his neck and bite down hard on a flapping piece of reddened fabric. He felt, rather than heard, a tearing cry of anguish from his foe. The man tottered, braced one arm with his other at the spot where Sebastion’s teeth had sunk in, and reared back. Sebastion caught just a glimpse of the horizon in its distance, beyond the maroon shirt in his foreground, and it seemed irrevocably far away at that instant. Again it had played the game of depth switching. The stranger caught his momentary stagger and dove at Sebastion anew.

  This pitched Sebastion backwards with the weight of the stranger atop him and he braced for an impact that he knew would be coming. As they collided with the ground, Sebastion supported his neck instinctively, expecting the back of his skull to make contact next. But only his shoulders and upper back thumped to the ground. The collision jarred him. The earth below was harder and more jagged than it had felt beneath the snow only a brief moment before. But his head never impacted, only lolled back until he regained forward momentum enough to bring his shoulders and head back up and face that set of eyes. They were nearly face to face now, only a hand width apart. There was definite rage in that face. Rage and hate.

  To Sebastion the face he stared at was immediately that of the face in his Vaughan bedroom. Those were different eyes, different features, but somehow they were the same. There was a connection there, and he sensed it. Or witnessed it. Or felt it. He knew it and the stranger saw that he did.

  He looked at the face, flushed and contorted and immediately he was struck by how much it looked like the face of a thief. It was the face of someone who would take things, who wanted to take from him. It was the face of someone who had grabbed something, maybe a long time ago, and just kept running, falling deeper and deeper into his troubles, all the while trying to clamber out of his hole with every reach. Like a liar who has told a single lie, then finds himself trying to cover it and rid himself of it with still further falsehoods, this was the face of a thief who kept taking. This was the face of simple desperation.

  He peered to one side of himself as this taker, this thief, tried to lock his hands at Sebastion’s neck. In the struggle for possession, Sebastion caught a glimpse beside and partially below his head. There wasn’t more flat snow-covered field beneath it, but instead, sheets of jagged blue-gray stone.

  The face of the rock ran off to the distance, but that distance went directly downwards. They were laying in snow, kicking clumps of it up into the air, and bits of it were falling past Sebastion’s wide eyes and into the emptiness which went five hundred, maybe six hundred feet, downwards. Far below were crashing waves, seventeen or eighteen feet high, colliding on piles of rocks that looked the size of houses. There were objects down there, scattered among the grays and blues of rock. Were those bodies—?

  They were directly over an ocean’s unforgiving edge and Sebastion’s head and shoulders lay precariously above it, at a scraggly triangle of rock and snow. The waves hit the rocks below them soundlessly; it was like the whole world had become a vacuum, like sound couldn’t even carry up to his ears. The realization of where he was, the eerie absence of sound, and the question of whether it was bodies laying in pieces down there caught Sebastion off guard. His concentration on holding the Thief’s hands faltered.

  That was enough for the Thief to clutch at his throat and lock his grip around it. He wanted something from Sebastion still, and was going to have it.

  <> <> <>

  William Shears’ junior partner had only been riding the patrol car beat with him for a little less than eight months and they had done break and enters before. But this one, for Owen Lipnicki especially, was a world apart from those others. This one would stay with him for the long haul.

  In those others, the perpetrator had been long gone. Often it was Lip’s and Shears’ job just to be there, to fill out the reports, take the statements and calm the homeowners who had been violated. It was their job just to arrive. And after that, the procedures took over and the night carried on, eventually to day.

  This call held a weary promise. This call, from the moment it had been made, contained a tired undertone. It was in his partner’s demeanor and lay beneath everything else, the air, the front of the house, the snow-covered trees quietly deliberating along the causeway. From the moment the cruiser’s tires skidded to a halt on the ice and snow of the front lawn, from the first click of the snaps that held the black battering ram in the trunk, and from the moment they sent that ram bashing into the front door of the house, it felt like they had stepped into something that couldn’t go right. And it felt like the whole world—everyone, every thing but Owen—knew it.

  Shears had told Owen once that he had only ever drawn and aimed his gun at one person in his career. And that had ended peacefully.

  The presence of an armed gun, Shears often professed, immediately defuses the ticking bomb of a situation. Usually, that’s something you can count on like a sunrise. Usually, the sight of it alone brings the perp a hair width closer to his god and he realizes he doesn’t want to die. No one wants to die.

  It’s a last resort: pulling the gun, aiming it. It’s something you do when nothing else will solve things. And Shears had drawn his the moment that door flew off its hinges.

  <> <> <>

  No one wants to die.

  It was a phrase he had said to Lipnicki one night over steaming paper cups filled with coffee under a windshield of
mixed stars and raindrops. The perp is a man, just like anyone else, Shears had said. He sees his life in a grain of sand just as you and I would if someone pulled a weapon on us. Even a man on the edge will pull himself back. The ones who want to go do it over bridges, do it on tops of buildings, do it in their garages when it’s dark and there’s no one around. When they go, there’s a peacefulness.

  But confrontation. Those perps who are making confrontation, filling up on conflict, pushing and pulling at everybody but themselves, those are the ones who really don’t want to go. How could they? If they wanted to, they’d already be gone. They’d have done it somewhere else, somewhere alone. And we’d be filling out those reports instead.

  No one wants to die.

  <> <> <>

  So they had drawn their weapons, Shears first then Lip, and they had checked doorways and rooms and ended at the last threshold at the end of the hall. And they had used their procedural maneuvers to round the corner and confront what they found.

  And the man there, the one with the power, had a look in his eyes that shot Shears’ theory all to hell. To Lip, his eyes didn’t say, “I don’t want to die.” They said, Go on, I dare you.

  The dispatcher had said, “Hurry.” Lip had taken calls from dispatcher eighteen, had come to know his voice well enough in the last several months while on early morning duty with his senior partner Shears. He had always been forthright and unruffled, Eighteen. Just the business, over and out. But this call had something distinctive: Eighteen had tacked something on at the end, not even as a simple addition, but deliberately, hurry. He had said that for some reason. Had he heard the operator at nine-eleven say it? Had something in her voice made him say it?

  Shears stood with his arms outstretched, his weapon at the end of them in his iron hands. Lipnicki was to his side, a little further back, a little less solid with his pistol-grip.

  And there was this man, average size, darker skin, decent clothes, but smeared with drying blood. In front, held by a choking hold around his neck, with a presumably loaded derringer pressing its barrel to his jaw, stood a pale man whose eyes were fading, whose consciousness of things was almost completely gone. Lipnicki could see it plainly from where he stood.

  They had done the usual, had ordered the perp to ‘relinquish his weapon,’ to ‘put his hands on his head,’ had told him to ‘let the man go,’ that they could ‘talk things out.’ That things ‘didn’t have to be like this.’

  But in return, they got only a stare of emptiness. No words, only that solemn resignation in his dark eyes that told them to shoot.

  Shears’ gun had been trained on the dark skinned man’s forehead since they arrived. Lip had realized the perp’s knees were hidden directly behind the legs of the victim, and likely, thought Lip, Shears had understood this long before the notion had materialized in Lip’s brain. Shears was a total vet, a consice thinker quick to get things.

  Lip knew they couldn’t risk it: shooting the victim by mistake, even in a knee, was something they could not hazard. This perp knows that, he thought in a tiny second. This one knows it because he’s been in this spot before. So Shears’ barrel, mechanically, fell squarely on the space above the perp’s eyes, and Lip rested the aim of his pistol on the perp’s exposed shoulder, which wasn’t even trembling. He could see that plainly from where he stood too.

  And when Lip saw the left trigger finger in the loop of the derringer tense, he felt instinct take hold. One movement held a thousand small activities. Owen Lipnicki’s bullet left his gun. He had fired his weapon. The other had fired too. There were two loud bangs that erupted in his head. Both the body of the perp and the body of the victim fell downward. But the derringer held in the perp’s grip didn’t fire a shot through the victim’s jaw. The barrel moved, in a kind of jerky blur, backwards, towards his own chin.

  The tilting movement, as the perp’s face became an instant burst of red and white and gray, moved the heap of them on a sharp and sudden fall to one side. The victim was suddenly brought screeching sideways.

  Inches below a crumpling shoulder, as an arm flailed, the young policeman’s shot struck the chest of the man to whom he owed devotion and security. He’s been in this spot before. A burst of blood, one particularly long thick strand, blew outward from the hole it made, and, in Lip’s mind, seemed to hang there for a moment. That fraction of time was like a lie someone had told, one which had inexplicably been made true by an over-the-top fragment of circumstance. The strand of blood, dark and shiny, was the undertone made overt. That morning’s weary promise had been kept.

  The lower part of that dark skinned man’s face had exploded—the jaw, cheeks, mouth and nose were obliterated, but the eyes remained. Staring. The mess spattered backwards and upwards, across the wall, the curtains behind them, and across the victim. The vision held a horror.

  It held a sight so rotten that Owen Lipnicki, only eight months on the patrol beat and having never aimed his pistol at another living soul, would see it play in his mind every night for the rest of his life. It held a sound so fetid that he could not remove it from the space between his ears no matter how hard he would try.

  He had fired into his own head, this perp.

  This one had wanted to die.

  <> <> <>

  The Thief bore down on Sebastion. Am I passing out?

  A sudden comprehension followed. His vision was blurring, fading, darkening. At first it seemed the sky was getting muted, that everything within the flat panel of sky behind the Thief’s head was beginning to dim. But it wasn’t the world that was growing dark—it was Sebastion himself. Not passing out, no, this wasn’t the same feeling of drifting, of wafting away like smoke from a fire into an evening breeze. This was different than the fade away from consciousness he had felt in his bedroom. This was a level below that kind of departure, a more essential kind of drawing into darkness. This was deeper. This was permanent.

  He watched the eyes staring back at him from above. Their gaze was hypnotic. He grunted and groaned. They held him. He tried to shake free. They told him not to bother.

  His fingers were clasped in desperation around the Thief’s which were slowly compressing his neck like a sheet of pressboard. His legs, pinned below the maroon-clad man, throbbed and pulsed, trying to gather force and buck the monstrosity off. But his energy was fading. It too was unlike the energy he had felt in his bedroom, unlike the bodily energy he had felt brimming in him his whole life. That was a clumsy kind of thing. It could leave you, or exhilarate you; this was rawer, more basic, but it too could up and go. And every ticking moment that passed left him wearier, left less of it in him.

  This faraway body stopped straining against the Thief’s forces completely. The exhaustion took hold and he began to default to lesser battles, namely keeping breath inside. He had been progressively taking in less and less of that sickly air. His windpipe was finding itself the victim of greater and greater pressure. It shrank in size and the staleness teased him. It was tasteless and bad, but it was all he had. And now it was nearly gone too.

  His eyes threatened to close altogether. The sight of those eyes, the sight of that anger, was a blade that cut into him. It drained his energies, along with everything else. There was nearly nothing left—

  A flash of white, titanium and brilliant, came.

  It was sudden and harsh but over nearly before it began. Replacing it in Sebastion’s vision was a sight he had never seen before: himself.

  Behind his own head was the view of the violent water hundreds of feet below, erupting across and against steel-gray and black rocks as foamy breakers. They came silently with an astute rhythm.

  Within this new opposing view, his face was locked, still with whitened hands clasped at his neck, but there was a look of acquiescence in his face.

  The flash of alternate viewpoint was gone in an instant, only there long enough for realization. And the realization for Sebastion, in his dreamy, fuzzy state as the world darkened in every respect, was that it
had been a brief glimmer of this world through the eyes of the Thief. He didn’t know how that was possible when it came. But it left in its wake a whole new comprehension, as though the flash into the mind of the mad man had brought with it pieces of the mad man’s knowledge.

  Sebastion had been wrong, the vision told him with its broad but vanished perspective, he had been dead wrong. The ordinary man in the dark, blood-red shirt who hated him and wanted to steal from him did have something to do with this world. Had a lot to do with it. This world was his.

  <> <> <>

  Two ambulances arrived. One had been called as a precautionary measure when dispatcher eighteen had learned from nine-eleven operator forty-one that the homeowner had been attacked by the intruder. Standard operating procedure for an incident in progress.

  The second arrived three minutes later, called with shaky, bloodied hands clutching his CB mic to his lips, by Officer Shears. He was crouched over the body of the man his junior partner had shot, pressing his other hand—with as much force as his shocked body could gather—down on the bullet wound in Sebastion Redfield’s shoulder.

  The two bodies had fallen together, entangled. Shears, after a moment of incomprehension, had rushed to them and separated them. He had ignored the perp with his sullen eyes, still staring though most of his lower face was gone—smeared in chunks and pieces across parts of the room.

  Shears was shouting at Lip. He turned to see his partner collapsed with his hip braced against the bureau beside the room’s door. His eyes were wide and white. His hot weapon dangled in a loose-jointed arm at his side. He did not hear William Shears’s words.

  <> <> <>