by Tim McBain
Contents
Title & Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
The Awake in the Dark Series
BACK IN BLACK
Awake in the Dark #4
Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus
Copyright © 2015 Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus
Smarmy Press
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
The last of the day melts into the horizon, a pink smear visible just above the ground. I crank the wheel and jam the accelerator. The Taurus glides off of the exit ramp and enters the stream of traffic on the highway, jerks a little as it changes gears.
Exhaust plumes out of the dual stacks on the semi in front of me, the smoke just barely visible in the half light. I glance into the rearview mirror as the car climbs a hill. Rows of headlights burn behind me like the eyes of giant insects.
The eyes all look dead, too. It reminds me of pinching a praying mantis between my fingers as a kid, making eye contact with it, watching its pupils rotate around and feeling only cold. Distant. Like this thing was technically alive but not the same way I was. Am.
Maybe cars and bugs aren’t so different. They always look to be swarming someplace mindlessly.
I lean forward to adjust the bulk imprinting itself into the small of my back, feel the usually cold metal turned warm from its time pressed against my person. My fingers twitch, perceiving a little twinge of electricity when I touch it, a little spark of power. Oh, I could put it under the seat or something, but I don’t trust it. I need to keep it close to me, feel it against my skin. This is the only companion I have now, but it’s not so bad. It makes me feel good. That’s more than I can say for most of the companions I’ve had in my life.
Cop lights twirl on the side of the road, red and blue rotations of glow. Some guy performs the sobriety test, touching a finger to his nose. Looks drunk to me, all slack-jawed and droop-eyed and slow, but I pay it no mind. I care little for the things outside of this car just now.
I drive.
I am tired. Perhaps more tired than I have ever been. Not physically tired, I guess, though there’s a touch of that as well. My eyes are open. I am awake, alert, all of these types of things. Another glance in the rearview reveals red blood vessels criscrossing the whites of my eyes, but that’s not what I mean.
I am tired in a bigger sense. Tired of waiting around, moving in the same circles over and over. Tired of watching the endless repeat play out, around me and within me. Tired of this place, this life.
I mean, damn, I’m so fucking sick of it I can barely see straight sometimes. Sick of killing time, burning through the hours, waiting until the next big thing happens, spinning in place. Sick of it.
Sick of myself.
The glow of fast food and gas station signs on the side of the road thins out, giving way to dark woods, populated largely with pines at the moment. I move out away from the city. Almost seems like it should clear my head, right? But what’s the difference, I guess, when you’re part of this swarm of cars all flying in the same direction? I’m still surrounded by people. I still make out the faint noises of purring engines and at least one rusted-out muffler from the sounds of it. Same old shit, more or less. You can never really get away from it.
But while there are noises outside, silence lords itself over the inside of the car. This is not by choice. The Taurus is a 1993. The stock stereo died a tragic death, much too young, rendering it mute some years before. A little red light comes on if you push a cassette into its mouth, but that’s it. No other signs of activity. I can’t say for certain, but I like to think it died in 1999. Never even saw the new millenium.
The salesman didn’t mention this flaw at the used car lot. I suppose I didn’t give him the chance.
He said, “It runs.”
I said, “I’ll take it.”
All I did was look inside, touch my finger to the melted circle on the dash where a hot coffee mug left a scar. I didn’t even test drive it. I didn’t know if there would be paperwork involved, if they’d need to see my driver’s license. I never got one, so…
Anyway, I plunked down the bills, signed a few papers and drove out the way I walked in. Best $700 I ever spent. Grobnagger’s first car, and it cost less than a decent guitar.
As the night sky blackens above us, cars rush past in the left lane, which is no surprise. The Taurus tops out at about 58 miles per hour, if the speedometer is accurate. Get it over 53 and a bunch of stuff starts rattling around. The whole thing sounds like it’s about to splinter into bits, so I don’t push it that high. Considering the vehicle’s age, it’s a wonder the thing manages even that. Gets me from point A to point B, though. I’m not complaining.
In this case, exit 87 leads the way to point B, so I take it, slowing as I round the banked curve that ends at the blinking red stoplight. I pause there for a beat and head right. The trees hug much closer to the edge of this country road than they did on the highway. When I turn on the brights, the headlights catch on the branches hanging over the road, all gnarled and knotted up. It’d be a decent location for a horror film, I’d say. Not that I’m scared of trees, of course. I just think it looks pretty cool is all.
Darkness surrounds the boxy vehicle now. No streetlights. No passersby. Even the moon and stars are no help, shrouded in the wisps of cloud stretched out up there like cotton balls pulled apart and glued to the sky. That leaves just my two headlights to pierce the black nothing on their own. They do OK.
I fumble a hand behind me again to relieve a little pinch right at the place where back and butt crack meet, fingers slipping off of the steel, probing for something to grip.
There. Got it.
I ease the mass into a new position.
Better.
Chapter 2
I pad over the gravel lot and cross into the grass, walking the diagonal line from the Taurus to the door of room 113. The motel is a dump. Christ knows why they picked this locale. 16 miles off of the exit? How do they stay in business?
All the better for me, though.
I like the quiet.
The door sticks to the frame like it always does. I drive my shoulder into it, and it pops open. I can�
��t see into the room, just the little wedge of illumination that slants in from the light over the door to the lobby.
This is the moment that always freaks me out. I expect Farber to speak to me, sitting in my room in the dark, perhaps smoking a cigarette. Waiting for me.
I step into the room. My fingers find the lightswitch, flip it. I squint. My heart climbs up into my throat, poised there like a frog ready to leap out.
Nope.
No Farber.
Instead the glow of the orange carpet replaces the darkness, flecked with irregular brown bits that may or may not be there intentionally. This shag must be older than my car. I mean, shag carpet? Come on. Berber is where it’s at.
I grab the bucket and head for the ice machine, crossing the gravel again. Nobody mans the front desk for the moment. Perfect. No bullshit small talk tonight. Just ice. I scoop out my fill of cubes and head back to the vending machines by my room.
I buy two RC Colas and shove them down into the ice. “Ice cold in cans!” the machine brags. It, too, is surely older than the Taurus. It’s icy cold claims have turned out to be more on the lukewarm side, which is why I’m toting around this ice bucket.
Unfortunately, the sandwich machine is down to egg salad only. Not going to happen. The day I eat egg salad out of a vending machine is the day I deserve the inevitable death by diarrhea that would entail. The guys loading this machine seem a little sadistic. I mean, there are 3 rows of just egg salad. Unbelievable.
Anyway, I should have stopped and grabbed something to eat on the way.
I am dumb.
I get a bag of Doritos and a Snickers from the other machine. I consider Skittles for a long moment. But no. No rainbows will be tasted tonight.
I reenter the room, put the ice bucket down next to the TV and sit on the corner of bed to slip my socks and shoes off. I lean back on the bedspread, the weight of the world shifting off of my spine, shag tickling at my toes as they dangle to the floor.
This is the life.
Or, at least, this is what I get.
I wake up some time later, still fully dressed on top of the bedspread, lights on and everything. Guess I dozed off. It must be the middle of the night by now.
I fish an RC Cola out of the icy water in the bucket and crack it open, rip open the Doritos.
Shit. I was supposed to call Babinaux. I shove a handful of chips in my mouth and try to wash it down with a lengthy slurp of cola that sucks down about half of the can. I hate to rush through a gourmet meal like this, but I’ve got shit, too much shit, to do.
Leaving my food for the moment, I kneel on the floor, feeling under the bed for the plastic packaging. My fingers brush over it, grab it, pull it free. My hands whisk over the smooth exterior of the container, looking for something to catch on. I feel along the seam at the top and sides, but it reveals no signs of weakness.
Damn. I sort of forgot how hard these things are to open. One must resort to violence to get the job done.
I leave the thing on the bed for now, rising to return to my meal, sucking down another third of the can of cola and dumping a handful of Doritos in my mouth, trying not to think about how much Doritos smell like the unwashed dog that roamed our neighborhood when I was a kid, a scrawny black thing with an oversized ribcage and tiny waist like a greyhound. It always bounced around happily and ate everyone’s garbage and compost.
As I chew, I grab a pen from the bedside table, return to the container.
I grip the writing utensil like a knife and jam it into the plastic three times in rapid succession, using downward strokes. A fatal stabbing, but I’m not done. I loop a finger into one of the openings I’ve made and rip the thing wide open. The guts of the box spill out, and I catch them. I hesitate in that position, holding the disemboweled package, its innards stretched between my hands. I almost feel like I should apologize or something. I can be pretty barbarous with these types of containers.
I let the clear shell fall to the floor, and my fingers go to work with the disposable cell phone, pressing buttons. I hold it to my ear at the appropriate moment.
“It’s late,” she says. She sounds as tired as I feel.
“Sorry. I fell asleep,” I say.
She sighs.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “Any news?”
“Not really,” I say. I consider telling her about the Doritos, but I decide it isn’t newsworthy. “What about you? Anything new to report?”
Look, I don’t like eating on the phone. It’s rude, right? And crunchy food is probably the most obnoxious food you can eat at a time like this. The Doritos give me the look, however, and I can’t resist. I eat one, trying to chew softer so the chomps aren’t quite as loud.
“No. All was still quiet out this way,” she says. “Look, I’m going to go back to bed. I’m glad you’re all right.”
“Same to you,” I say, between nacho cheesy crunches. “Goodnight.”
I have to stop myself from saying, “Goodnight, Ms. Babinaux,” and yet I also couldn’t say, “Goodnight, Marcy.” It doesn’t seem right to me.
“Night,” she says.
I take another long sip of cola, killing the can. Regret wells up in me as I shake the last drops out of the now essentially weightless aluminum tube in my hand. A sense of loss. I shouldn’t have guzzled it like that. I should have savored it. Argh. But then I catch the bucket out of the corner of my eye, and I remember the other can waiting for me on ice.
Ha!
See?
Sometimes life is pretty cool.
Chapter 3
I lie in the dark. With the curtains drawn, it’s as black as can be. No crack of light under the door. No glow surrounding the drapes. I hear the light bulb buzzing over the lobby door, but it’s faint. Distant. Apparently its glare finds no point of entry into my room, and this is fine by me.
Just fine.
The room feels different with the lights out. The cheesy radiance of the 70’s decor gives way to a gloomy feeling. An isolated feeling. The ridiculousness on the outside melts away, leaving a core of disquiet, foreboding. Ferment. The rot on the inside that will find a way out.
Or maybe the room doesn’t feel different at all. Maybe I feel different. Maybe it’s something that’s always there inside of me, but it only comes out in the dark. I could go either way on this.
However you prefer to look at it, a violence creeps into my anxiety as I lie awake in the dark. What used to be a streak of innocence, a softness akin to a child’s fear, becomes something lean and hard, something desperate. Dark. Mean. And I know, somehow, that bloodshed is inevitable. It can only beat in my heart and thrum in my blood for so long before it finds a way to become real, a way to congeal into something tangible, a way to form itself into a physical act.
I realize that in many ways, I had remained a child all this time. A wounded child, unable to heal, unable to grow. Stuck that way. But the world obliged me the only way it knows how. It bludgeoned me and burned me and kicked me in the teeth. It bloodied me. It made a man out of me after all. A desperate man, yes, but a man all the same.
So now I recline here in the dark, and I feel the Doritos squish around in my intestines. And I take my insides out and look at them like I always do. I didn’t know that you’re not supposed to do that. That they get all gritty with dirt that can’t be cleaned off and never fit quite right when you try to put them back. I didn’t know that you’re not supposed to look inside there at all.
I think you’re supposed to crawl into bed, and the second your head hits the pillow, you dream about what’s going on at the office, and that vacation you’re looking forward to, and how the hell you’re going to pay for braces for your kid and have anything left to save for them to go to college. You’re supposed to dream about football games and movies that break up the tedium.
See, you’re supposed to pretend like you don’t have insides at all. That’s the trick, I think.
I roll over onto my left side, and I can’t hear the b
uzzing from the light bulb outside anymore. I lift my head a second to check this. Yep. I can only hear it in my left ear for some reason, and once it gets pressed into the pillow, the sound vanishes. Weird. Maybe I damaged the hearing in the right at some point. Hard to say.
Anyway, it’s too late for me. I took my guts out and played with them a thousand times. You can’t go back on something like that.
But it’s OK. I have no regrets.
Because I only want one thing. That’s all. One thing. And I will have it. I will make just this one thing right, and then I can be done.
And I can rest.
Chapter 4
I wake up, confused as I gaze up at the ceiling tiles stained nicotine yellow above me. Where am I? Not home. Not Glenn’s. Nicotine? I should know this. Oh yeah, real shitty motel. Yep.
I rub at my eyes, crusty bits tumbling out of the corners. It feels like I went somewhere else and back as I slept, in a good way. Like I actually went all the way under, a deep sleep, something I can’t often accomplish lately.
The gray light streaming out from behind the curtains somehow conveys that it’s early. I’d guess around 7:30 AM. For some reason I am good at guessing these kinds of things, so I know that’s probably about right.
I roll over and up and sit on the edge of the bed, bare feet snuggling into the shag carpet. I remain still like that for a long moment, all slouched over, taking long, deep breaths. I need to get up, get around, do the day’s deeds, but I can’t quite make myself move for this moment.
A car grinds over the gravel outside, and the reminder of people being so close somehow spurs me into motion. It gets weird being alone all of the time. You start to forget that there are billions of people out there, going about their business. It’s hard to remember that the things outside of this room, or outside of your car, are really real. Intellectually, you know it to be the case, but some chunk of your subconscious stops believing it at some point and is perpetually surprised to relearn its validity.
I rise, kicking through the pile of dirty clothes next to the bed. My toe stubs on something hard, however, and kicks it across the room along with whatever item of clothing it’s tangled in.
