During a transfer, he called home, but no one picked up the phone. He thought about an aunt, his mother’s sister Eunice who always baked his favorite chocolate cake when she knew he was coming along on a visit. She had never challenged his failures with angry questions, and had met his withdrawal from her with the kindly stoicism of someone accustomed to the inexplicable in people. She had never failed to ask for him when speaking to his mother.
Todd rested his fingertips lightly on the telephone’s cold metal buttons, then hung up the receiver. A voice whispered “no” in his head, and he shuddered.
He found himself back in his old neighborhood by seven in the morning.
Todd watched his house for a while, but there was no sign of undercover detectives waiting for him parked along the curb, or watching from windows or rooftops. His father’s car was also gone. He still had the key to get in, but their apartment’s darkened windows did not seem inviting. He went back to the school.
The candy store was closed, and chalk lines on the sidewalk and street marked the spots where the owner and the youth had fallen. Todd peeked into the store, saw display cases turned over, glass refrigerator doors cracked, and goods spilled all over the floor. He turned away in time to see a silver car pull up to the curb. The driver leaned across the passenger seat and looked out through the open window. He pointed a gun at Todd.
“Get in, boy,” the man said. He had exchanged his bullet-ridden tweed coat for a black leather jacket and hat slung low over his forehead, and cleaned the blood from his face and beard, but his eyes were still red and his voice was harsh and rough, as if it came from a distant place and had to squeeze through many tiny, ragged wounds to reach Todd.
The man he had brought back to life yesterday no longer reminded Todd of his father.
The man waved his gun back and forth. The gun was big and shiny, like something Dirty Harry would use. Todd glanced up and down the street, but there was no one around. The corner was a shunned place, the markings on the floor an evil omen warning the wise to stay away. He went to the car and slid into the front passenger seat.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about you since yesterday,” the man said. He put the gun between his legs and stared straight ahead as he drove. The door locks clicked shut when he touched a button on the console.
Todd shifted in the seat and leaned against the door. He stared out the side window at a row of abandoned buildings lined up like hollow-eyed skulls on the street they were driving through.
“Do not mistake me,” the man continued. “I am very grateful for what you did. I understand from my friends that the man who shot at us yesterday was shooting at the boy. Such things happen. We did not know. It was all a terrible error. You have no idea how happy I am that I did not have to pay for that error.”
He was driving a twisting path through the side streets and staying away from the main avenues. Todd noticed the car stereo and imagined a smooth rap by Kool Moe Dee or LL Cool J blasting from the speakers, shaking the windows, drawing sly looks from the occasional wanderer on the street, drowning out the man’s words.
“Excuse me,” the man continued, still not looking at Todd even though they had stopped at a red light, “I have forgotten to introduce myself. My name is Emilio. You may notice that I am not from this country—” He broke into a sudden peal of laughter. “Ah, I think what you did to me has made me finally lose my accent. Or changed it. I am still a traveler from a foreign land, no?” He laughed again. “Though I have a new homeland, now, and it is a more distant place than my old one.”
Todd crossed his arms across his chest and slouched in the seat. He put his foot up on the dash board.
“Please, make yourself comfortable. This car does not belong to me, but I am sure the owner would be pleased to see such a miraculous youth enjoying his wealth. Perhaps you would like a car like this someday? Drive it around with your friends, impress the girls, all those things you young people do?”
“No,” Todd replied, his voice matching the sullen look he put on his face.
“No you would not like such a car? Have no friends? Would not like to impress the girls? Is this what I hear, is this what your filthy clothes tell me? I understand the police are looking for you, to ask you some questions. Most certainly they look for me. They did not find you at home. Your father told them you had no friends, and that perhaps you had run away to your mother, though he did not know where she was and thought you did not know, either. I am very sad for you, Todd.”
Todd looked at Emilio. His arms fell, his hands slapped against his thighs. He opened his mouth to ask a question.
Emilio held up a hand to stop him. “Do not waste your precious words. I have friends in the precinct, and they told me all they could. What they could not tell me was how you stopped the bullets from killing me, and why I do not hurt, or bleed, or feel pain anymore. Or even breathe.”
They turned on to a highway, and drove in the high-speed lane. There was heavy traffic in the opposing direction. The clouds in the sky thickened, darkened.
“I do not think you can tell me, either. Certainly, the people at the basketball court where you play have said you show no particular talent for the game, or for anything else. They say you have been beaten and robbed, cut a few times, hit by a car. You even refused the money to be made in the trades of the street. So you see my dilemma—you have already said no to a great many things. No to friends, to your father, perhaps even to your own mother, certainly to pain, and the disciplines of school and the authorities. You have said no to the pleasures of life, to the money my distributors offered you to do nothing more than steer or look out for police, to the grand rush of power or the comforting blanket of solace my products would have given you. You have, in short, said no to life, or at least, to the kinds of life over which you were given a choice.
“There is not much else I can offer you, and very little I can do to a boy with your attitude, to make you surrender the secret of your new found ability from the vault of your denial. And your secret is something I desire.”
Emilio returned Todd’s gaze, and Todd immediately turned away.
“Though my desire is not so strong as to destroy its object.”
Emilio smiled at Todd, and patted him on the thigh. Todd shuddered, hearing the gunfire once more, feeling himself squeeze into the shadows on the wall, seeing the shell casing roll slowly towards him. Emilio withdrew his hand and drove on in silence. When Todd checked him out of the corner of his eye, Emilio was still smiling. His lips were black, and his teeth were yellow.
They crossed a bridge and went through neighborhoods with more trees and grass than houses. A drizzle of rain began to fall, but Emilio did not turn on the wind shield wipers. There were few cars on the road.
They turned on to a side road, drove through a gate in a chain link fence and stopped in front of a concrete, windowless warehouse with a sign hanging over a steel-shuttered truck bay. The sign read “Colon Imports, Inc.” but there was no hint of what kinds of items the warehouse stored.
Emilio shut off the engine and took the gun from between his legs. He got out, and motioned for Todd to slide across the front and follow him. They entered the warehouse through a steel door, and passed through a gloomy, empty cavern where their footsteps echoed with the same hollow sound of car tires going over steel plates covering a hole in a street. They headed towards the only light in the warehouse, which came from the window of an office on the other side of the darkness.
A man Todd recognized from the previous day’s shootout was sitting behind the desk, waiting for them. Another man lay on a cot in front of the desk. There were bloody holes in his clothes.
“You see my friend?” Emilio asked, waving the gun barrel towards the body on the cot. “Another misfortune. He fell yesterday, during a discussion with one of my rivals, whom I thought responsible for the attack. He was a valued member of my company, and I was wondering, Todd, if you might do for him what you did for me?”
Em
ilio held the gun on Todd while slowly running a finger along his bearded jaw. The man behind the desk sat up, leaned his elbows on the desk, and watched Todd with a somber expression.
Todd knelt beside the dead man and laid his hand on his chest. “No,” he whispered.
There was silence for a moment. When nothing happened, the man behind the desk scoffed and kicked the chair back.
“I told you this was stupid, Emilio,” he said, chopping the air with a hand while he glowered at his partner. “What’s running through your head, man? Why you bring this kid into this thing? You got lucky, the bullets didn’t hit nothing, they just inside you, that’s all. Now what we gonna do with this kid?”
Emilio’s eye lids lowered until he looked sleepy. “We are going to see exactly what he can do,” he said, then raised the gun and fired it into the man’s chest.
The explosion threw Todd over the man on the cot, and he lay stunned for a moment, covering his ears. The sound of the shot reverberated in his head, and the flash of the gun muzzle blazed like the sun in his eyes. Yet, with the same simultaneous vision he had experienced on the street, he also saw the bullet jolt Emilio’s partner, watched him jump back and push the chair into the wall behind him. Todd wiped his eyes as the man half-rose out of his chair, his eyes wide open and his lips parted as if ready to speak. Then he slumped back into the chair. His head lolled to the side.
“No,” Todd screamed, his entire body trembling as the reverberations of the gunshot refused to fade.
The man in the seat twitched, then opened his eyes. He groaned, sat upright in the chair. He looked down at the hole in his chest, then at Emilio. Finally, his gaze came to rest on Todd.
Emilio nodded his head. “So, by the scientific method, I think I understand.” He leaned back against the door and tapped the gun barrel against his forehead. He smiled at his partner. “Forgive me, but I needed someone to kill, in case my first hypothesis failed. Which, of course, it did. Our young friend cannot simply revive any dead body.
“He did bring you back, as he brought me to life. When I opened my eyes, he was beside me, with what I remembered was quite an expression of surprise and shock on his face. And that was my second hypothesis—that he can only bring back those he has watched die, and only if he is caught off-guard by their death.”
“You fucking bastard,” the man behind the desk said. He laid his trembling hands on the desktop. His voice now was brittle, harsh.
“Do not be angry with me, please. After all, I have given you a kind of immortality—who can kill the dead?” Emilio laughed, then turned to Todd. “A most unusual talent. I wonder, do you truly bring the dead back to life, or is it that when you say no, you say it to death itself? You bring to mind so many of the philosophical questions I once pondered in my homeland’s universities. Am I really alive at this moment, or has your will placed me in a limbo between life and death. Have you ever seen death? What is the source of this power—can it be a kind of innocence, or a twist and jumble of your chromosomes?—and can another like you be made? Ah, there are so many things you and I must talk about, so many more experiments I must devise, to discover the truth. You have brought new life to this trade I have taken up.”
Emilio laughed once more, throwing his head back and opening his mouth wide.
Todd slid away from the body on the cot and sat with his back against the office wall. He brought his knees up to his chest and rested his forehead against them. He thought of his mother, and his sister, and he wondered where they were, and if they would take him in if he found them. He remembered past friends, and old teachers who had helped him through their classes, and even basketball games in which he had scored the winning basket.
When Todd looked up, Emilio was watching him from across the office, the gun held across his crotch, while his companion was holding a flame under a spoon at the desk. His eyes flicked back and forth from Emilio to Todd, and his lips moved with silent murmuring. A syringe wrapped in plastic lay on top of the desk.
“Perhaps we shall call ourselves the Born Again Posse,” Emilio said, and smiled.
“I can’t cry, you bastard,” the man whispered. His hands began to tremble slightly. “I bet I can’t even get a hard-on. What the hell’s the use of being alive if I can’t fucking enjoy it.”
Emilio shrugged his shoulders. “There are the games to play, my friend. There is the search for knowledge, power, and wealth. There is the excitement of danger, of risk, and the sweetness of victory. There is much life to live, even for the dead. Think of the possibilities our friend here provides us with.”
The man at the desk grunted, but Todd saw in his face that the sound’s true meaning was the same as a whimper. The man carefully laid the spoon on the desk and unwrapped the syringe, cooled the liquid with his breath, then drew it into the syringe. He got up and came around the desk to stand over Todd.
“The air bubble,” Emilio reminded him, and the man grunted. Tears moistened Todd’s cheeks.
“Yes, the pain,” Emilio said as he approached Todd and crouched beside him. “There is so much of it in the world. I can give you something for that, something that will make the pain go away. In time, you will grow to love what I give you, and I will no longer need to lock you up or keep a gun on you to have you stay with me. I will be your new father, Todd, and you will love me more than anything and anyone you have ever loved before.”
Emilio smiled again, exposing the yellow pebbles that were his teeth. His breath was cold and foul, and brushed against Todd’s face only when he spoke. There was a sharp edge to the scent of his musk cologne, as if a rat’s rotten corpse had been squeezed into the bottle along with the fragrance.
“And then you will work wonders for me,” whispered Emilio. He cradled Todd’s head in his hand and nodded to his associate.
The man bent down, rolled Todd’s sleeve up and kneaded the flesh of his forearm. Sank the needle into a vein.
Todd felt warm liquid race through his arm.
The men backed away, and after a while Todd began to feel sleepy. Warmth, like a smothering blanket, settled over him. Fragmented scenes flitted through his mind—his mother asking him to come with her, his father asking what he was still doing in the apartment, a shell case rolling towards him, the youth’s body jerking forward as the shotgun blast caught him in the back—but Todd could not feel the hurt these scenes had once caused him. He watched his former friends walk away from him in the schoolyard, and he was empty inside. The red cyclops eye of his math grade stared up at him from his jacket pocket, and its condemning gaze did not pin him with the shame of failure.
Todd swam with the endless wave of solace that had swept him up, and he felt as if he would never again crash on to a shore of pain.
His head nodded. His eyelids felt heavy. Todd pushed himself to look up and around the room, curious to see what the two men were doing. A nagging sense of wrongness troubled him, and he wanted to settle that feeling so he could enjoy the warmth within him and the smooth, ever-cresting wave that seemed to carry him. He watched the two men talk, with the bearded one patting the other on the shoulder, and then he looked at the dead man on the cot, and then he stared up at the fourth figure, draped and cowled in black, standing over him as if it were invisible to the others in the room.
“Well, kid,” the figure said, its voice familiar but remote in Todd’s memory, “did you think about what I said last time? You said no again, and snatched another one from me. And look where it got you. I told you you can’t keep going on like that. Things are getting nasty. Your life is not getting any better.”
Todd groaned. Emilio glanced over his shoulder, turned his attention back to the other man.
“Time’s come to make a decision, Todd. You say no again, and there’s nothing more I can do. Three’s the charm. You’re on your own, and so’s the world. Tell me yes, give me what’s due to me, and I’ll get you out of this mess. You can walk out and get on with your life. Pick up the pieces, the loose threads, put it a
ll back together again.
“Tell me no, Todd, and you can stay here with this new father of yours, and snatch souls from me whenever he keeps that needle away from you long enough to make you want to do it for him, and murders somebody in front of you. I’ll never come back to you, not even when you die. You’ll be just like these others, except, you’ll feel the pain and shock of each death that brushes up against you, and when you say no to it, I won’t come to bring that person peace. And you will hurt, and not know peace, either. Forever.
“So say what you have to say, Todd. Yes, or no.”
Todd stared at the figure, into the starless night of his face. He wanted to deny the anguish, and embrace the darkness that did not seem to end, that went on forever, in perfect stillness and harmony. The fire that warmed his blood and the wave that carried him both suddenly seemed fragile, their strength easily extinguished in the infinite night of the hooded figure’s face. And once the fire died away and the wave finally came crashing to shore, Todd understood that he would be alone on a desolate stretch of time and space, far away from the lies of the world and all the pain they caused, but far, too, from his mother’s gentle caress and his sister’s laughter, trapped in a place of exile where he could never build a life that might stand against empty words and shell casings, abandoned homes and buildings standing like skulls along a street, the baleful single bloodshot eye of failure.
Todd fought with his desire to say no, until with a sudden lurch and flip, he found a reason to say yes: the word might take the pain into itself, so the hurt would not stand like a corpse that refused to lay down and stop talking, reminding him with every word it wrapped in its cold breath of the wounds Todd would not let heal.
A Blood of Killers Page 39
