by Brian Hodge
Jason seesawed his hand in the air. “I’m not sure, really. She’s a tough one to figure out sometimes.” Is he gonna be hurt by this? I don’t want that, but he brought it up. “I guess something’s there, between us. But it’s slow. No whirlwinds.”
He remembered the day of the liquor store confrontation, how she’d joined him in his room. He recalled her quietly moving shadow, the soft touch of her hand on his shoulder, the caress of her hair on his cheek as she leaned against him. She hadn’t stayed long, only a few minutes…she’d seemed to know the right moment to withdraw. Comfort, that’s all she’d come in to offer, wordless and honest and selfless.
It was a side of her he’d had only the faintest glimpse of before. And he knew then, all the arm’s-length encounters dispensed with, that she was someone he could likely love. If she’d let him.
“I’m glad for you,” Billy said. Did he really intend his voice to come out that flat?
“When I first got here, I thought maybe you had something going with her.”
Billy shook his head. “I was working on it, I guess. But she pays more attention to you than she ever did me.” He resumed the epic drum solo on his knees. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter anymore.” And just to show there were no hard feelings, he gave Jason the biggest smile he could muster.
When they found the surplus store, Jason backed the truck up to the front doors. They spent better than twenty minutes lugging out gallon cans of kerosene and loading them into the truck bed, until the shelves inside were bare. Lots of warm days were stored in those innocent cans. Jason wiped sweat from his forehead.
And that was when the four guys came around from the other side of the building, familiar faces one and all.
Oh shit. Jason couldn’t move his feet.
Travis Lane was the leader of the pack, at his side a black man with a rifle and a revolver in a shoulder sling. Next was the squat guy with red hair, and then the meanest-looking one of all, Lucas. Beneath violently hateful eyes, his nose was swollen and bruised and chunky. He looked as though he couldn’t wait to use the M16 in his hands.
“Thanks, Billy,” Travis said. “You follow us with the truck.”
Jason stood rooted to the sidewalk, trembling from the stomach out, his eyes boring a hole through Billy’s skull. You son of a bitch, you two-faced son of a bitch.
Billy refused to look at him.
Travis stepped forward, reaching past Jason’s jacket to pluck out the 9mm he’d taken to carrying outside the store. Travis grinned broadly, coldly.
“I’ve wanted to meet you like you wouldn’t believe,” he said, and smashed the gun across Jason’s face.
* *
Travis was all jubilation and frenetic energy when they made it back to Union Station. He raced through the mall and the Omni alike, rounding up all the strays to see his latest prize. Jason lay on the floor in the center concourse, where they’d left him after half-walking and half-dragging him through the south entrance. His hands remained bound behind his back, and he groaned and shifted positions now and again.
Pussy. Out like that after one tap with the gun. Or had it been two or three? Who was counting?
Solomon strolled out of the Banana Republic, the same place they’d gotten the machetes. He wore an Anzac hat and a khaki bush jacket, smoothing creases where it had hung cockeyed for months.
“Got him, huh?” Solomon said.
“Look at him. Look. That’s the badass we’re supposed to be afraid of?” Travis shook his head. “He didn’t even put up a fight.”
Solomon nodded and tipped his hat back, gazing thoughtfully toward the still form on the floor. Much farther and the kid might accidentally tumble into one of the fountains. “I don’t think he should go into the ring next week.”
The smile melted from Travis’s face like wax down a candle. “Say that again?”
Solomon leveled his eyes back at Travis. “You heard me. If he goes in, especially against Pit Bull, he’ll die. And that’s the end of it.” He reached out to clap Travis on the shoulders. “Don’t look at me like I just pissed in your cornflakes. I’ve got a better idea.” He grinned. “The Sicilians have a credo I like. Why kill an enemy, they say, when you have a chance to maim him? When you have a chance to give him something to remember you by for the rest of his life.”
Travis cocked an eyebrow. The options were getting more interesting.
“Don’t you think it better to make him live to regret what he did? Break him? Send him back much the worse for wear? Teach them all a lesson or two?”
They’ll know I’m not fucking around that way. Yeah. And he’ll be left around to remind them in case they want to forget. Travis nodded. “I didn’t want to feed the asshole for a week anyway.”
Solomon nodded, and Travis began giving orders to a few of the men nearest him. The only discontent in the place was that of Billy Strickland.
“I thought you were keeping him until next week!” Billy sounded close to tears. “I did my part. What is this shit?”
“Change of plans,” Travis said.
Billy flailed his arms as he spoke. “Look, I did this for personal reasons. If you send him back, no matter what shape he’s in, unless he’s dead, that means I can’t go back!”
Travis laid a hand on Billy’s shoulder, squeezed until his fingers pinched bone. “No turning back, Billy. Not from here, you don’t. Not from us.”
Billy sputtered, he gestured, he started sentences he couldn’t finish. Finally, his shoulders slumped, he slowly turned and collapsed on the nearest bench, head held in his hands.
“I can’t trust him,” Travis said quietly to Diamond, who nodded agreement. “Put him up for the week. Nice room. Make him comfortable. Get him laid. And next week…he goes in against Pit Bull.”
* *
Jason’s face throbbed as if he’d gone up against a wrecking ball, and his left eye was puffed half-shut. How could any one man hit so hard? He’d wavered in and out ever since the surplus store, and now, on the floor of Union Station, he thought he might finally stay conscious.
For a while, at least. Depended on what they had in mind.
It took every ounce of concentration, and fighting an uphill battle against a monster headache, but he listened to what they were saying. Not a whole lot made sense. Something about doing it now, as opposed to something about “the ring.” Neither alternative struck him as appealing.
That’s me they’re talking about, he thought. Hard to get that through his head at first. Life and death.
He focused on the voices. Travis he could make out, and Lucas came through clear as a foghorn. The black man. And for the first time, the voice of the man he had first seen at the executions, the fellow with blond, almost silvery, hair. His voice was smooth as silk; he could pass as a late-night DJ. But the more you listened, the more you heard something in that voice that compelled you to listen, even if you didn’t want to. Some authority, something…
Billy…that asshole…probably thinks he’ll move in on Erika with me out of the picture…hope she kicks his balls up his throat someday…
* *
Jason grayed out for a while, partly because of the pain in his pounding skull and partly because he felt himself slipping again and willed himself the rest of the way. Better, maybe, that he didn’t know what was coming.
The next thing he was aware of, a couple guys hoisted him off the floor and began carrying him. His head rolled, his eyes focused, and he saw an angled stairway leading up to the second level. Silver…two pairs of handcuffs were latched to the lower length of the railing, set a yard apart. A blade parted the rope around his wrists, then sliced his jacket and shirt until they hung in tatters from his waist.
Sweat popped out from scalp to feet, despite the chill of the unheated mall.
Someone on the stairs reached through the railing, seizing his
wrists and closing the handcuffs over each one. They let him go, his body falling with a jerk, and his legs swayed while arms stretched above his head. The edges of the handcuffs bit into the skin of his wrists. He twisted his arms until he could hold the short lengths of chain in his fists, and the relief on his wrists was the only good thing he’d felt in two hours.
Worse things waiting, though. Just like Caleb had said.
Keep your mind on Erika just think about her think about her face her smile her hair her touch
Jason opened his eyes and saw the people staring back. There must’ve been well over a hundred, easy. He saw the bright, sterile signs of the second-level shops and fast-food stands. He remembered the first time he’d been here, within a month of its opening…all the people, he didn’t have a care in the world that day, because the world was still sane and not wholly unkind, and he’d thought this city within a city was one of the most agreeable places he’d been in a while.
He forced himself to look at the faces that now inhabited the place. And they weren’t any different. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. A congregation of ogres and bridge trolls, maybe? But the faces were the same as they’d always been. Young, old, attractive, homely, male, female. Searching faces, faces that longed for order in their lives and took it where they could find it. A hundred years ago they’d have been the ones who lynched a horse thief and later wondered why. Three hundred years ago they’d have been the ones burning women just because the witchfinder pointed a finger.
A hush of expectation, footsteps behind him. Jason twisted his head to look back, hair brushing his shoulders. He saw Lucas, broken nose and all, grinning crookedly up at him. In Lucas’s right hand dangled a three-foot length of heavy leather. The lower half frayed off into six separate lashes. Jason squeezed his eyes shut. The grandfather of an old high school girlfriend had had something a lot like it.
He’d used it to train attack dogs.
No pain don’t let it hurt you no pain no pain
In the back of his mind he heard Travis, loud and triumphant, but he shut it out. There was only Erika, Erika, Erika and a warm beach, Erika and a lush green meadow, Erika and satin sheets…
Cold rivers of sweat ran down his sides.
No pain no pain no pain
The icy whisper of the lash, coming to meet him…
No pain no pa
OH GOD PLEASE!
The six lashes wrapped around his back, and he felt the impact all the way to the front of his ribcage. And just when they’d taken a good hold on his skin, Lucas ripped them away for the next swing. His back felt as though a garden claw had been raked across it.
Jason swayed again, squeezing the silver chains with every ounce of strength in both fists, his head knocking lightly into the stairway. When he heard the lash the second time, the sound was infinitely worse, because this time, he knew exactly what was coming.
And the next. And the next. And the thirty-odd times after that.
* *
Erika knew she’d remember the moment the rest of her life.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and she’d been reading a story to Julie, the six-year-old in her lap and leaning contentedly against her. Colleen had been doing a great job with the kids, but even she needed a break now and then. And Julie was a sucker for Paddington Bear.
Then Sam Dunne’s voice came shouting up the escalator from the fourth floor. Nobody, absolutely nobody, had sounded this freaked out since they’d all come together. He was screaming for help, someone was hurt. Hurt bad. And she knew she didn’t want to believe she’d heard Jason’s name in there somewhere.
The Paddington book slid to the floor and Erika stared ahead as Rich and Jack and a couple others ran past. Julie buried her face against Erika’s shoulder and clung to her with surprising strength, trembling and taut in the way children have of sensing just how serious something is and somehow feeling responsible.
Eternity.
Finally they came back, Jason facedown and horizontal in the midst of them. One on each leg, one at each shoulder, and someone supporting his middle. Clothing trailed toward the floor in strips.
Sam’s face was ashen. “Look at his back,” he was saying. “Look at his back.”
Erika rose from the couch, wanting to move closer but dreading every step of the way. Julie still clinging to her like a koala to a tree, she stepped as close as she dared. Let him be all right, please.
Tears sprang out like a dam had burst. His back looked like a raw side of beef.
“What happened to him?” she choked out, following as they moved ahead toward Jason’s room. By now the remaining people on the floor had clustered about as if drawn by a magnet.
“I heard a truck coming,” Sam said. “And I went to the other end of the bridge, ’cause I thought it was gonna be Jason and Billy finally coming back. But it was some black truck. Two guys in the bed threw him out and just kept on going.”
“Black truck,” Caleb said from the background. “We know who that was.”
“What about Billy?” Pam Patton asked. “Where’s he?”
“Don’t know,” Sam said. “Don’t know, I just don’t know.”
“Maybe they got him too,” said Jack.
Maybe it’s wrong, Erika thought, but that doesn’t bother me half as much as Jason. She rubbed Julie’s bony little back. Please, just let him make it through this. Is that too much to ask for?
They carried him into his room and laid him face-down atop his unmade bed. He wasn’t totally unconscious, as she’d thought earlier. He mumbled and grunted and balled the quilt in white-knuckled fists as if holding on to something for dear life. She saw with a renewed horror that his left cheek and eye were badly bruised and swollen. Rich grimaced and gently worked him out of the shredded shirt and jacket, tossing them into a corner.
She couldn’t look at him anymore. Not like that.
“We got no doctors here,” Jack said, sitting by Jason on the bed and moving his hair so it wouldn’t touch the bloody welts up near his shoulders. “Would you look at this? It looks like they whipped him with something.” His finger followed a few stripes that coursed out from the main mass, then he looked up at a few of those who’d managed to squeeze into the little room. “What can we do for him?”
Cleaning and disinfecting was the general consensus. Juanita Morris went after cotton and hydrogen peroxide.
“How could he survive something like that?” Jack said. “Do you have any idea how many times he must’ve been hit? And how hard?”
No one spoke. They could only stare.
Juanita returned with the peroxide, cotton, and gauze. Jack took them from her and paused a moment.
“He may not know what’s going on,” Jack said softly. “We’d better be ready to hold him down.”
After a moment four reluctant volunteers moved around the bed to restrain him. And Erika left the doorway. She set Julie down and scooted her off to play out on the main floor, then sagged against a wall in the hallway leading that direction. Her shoulders gave an involuntary shudder at Jason’s first cry.
“He’ll be okay, I betcha.” It was Caleb behind her.
“You don’t know that,” she whispered, not bothering to turn. “Like Jack said, no doctors. We don’t know how that might’ve broken him up inside. The only thing we know is how to make it look better.”
“But he’s got a fire in him, Erika. It ain’t always real apparent, but it runs pretty deep in him. Sometimes that makes all the difference in the world.” He rested a hand on her shoulder from behind. “I don’t want you thinking I’m cutting out, but I need to leave for a spell. I can’t say how long. Maybe it’ll help him, maybe it won’t. But I gotta try, that much I owe him.”
She turned to face him, not caring that her face was blotchy, that her eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed and her nose was runny. “I don�
��t understand.”
He touched a fingertip to her lips. “No time. Maybe later.”
She watched him leave, jingling a pair of car keys he’d filched off someone.
Erika returned to the main floor and curled onto a love seat in a tight, compact ball. Feeling cold, so very cold. She pressed her palms to her ears. No use…she could still hear Jason yelling. And what was worse, feel him.
* *
Early evening. Things had quieted down. Best of all, so had Jason. Erika sat upright on the covers of her bed, and her room was nearly filled to capacity, though it took few people to accomplish that task. Pam Patton had brought a chair and sat beside the bed, as had Juanita. On the floor, Colleen sat with her back against the wall, and beside her was Farrah, the twelve-year-old.
They’d all eaten but Erika, and so Pam had brought in a University of Missouri mug full of instant soup, insisting she sip at it. Chicken. It was about all she felt she could handle.
“Did you ever wish you’d done something, only it was too late to go back and do it?” Erika asked. The question was open, anybody’s forum.
“We’ve all got our regrets.” Pam stroked Erika’s leg, stretched across the bed. “Roads we never took.”
Erika wrapped her hands around the steaming mug, then pressed it to her cheek. Warm. “I feel like I’ve been kind of a bitch to him. No, that’s not right. I haven’t even paid that much attention to him. He likes me, I guess. And I’ve held back so much.”
“This isn’t the time for that, that’s certain,” Juanita said.
Erika nodded. “I know, I know. But I just couldn’t do any better. I’ve been so…so…”
“Scared?” Pam said.
“Yeah.” She sipped at her soup. “I don’t remember ever feeling that any guy really liked me for me, not when we’d get to know each other. It was like, whoever he was, he was only sticking around because of…” And how do I put this? “…because of what I’d do for him. And even that got old after a while, every time. I just didn’t want to go through that again. Jason, he seemed sincere enough, but it’s like I didn’t want to take the risk. Like I’d rather keep a couple little dreams alive instead of seeing them go sour. And now, if he dies…” She drew her knees up under her chin, hugged her legs, hid her face. After a few moments she looked up again. “You know, a couple times I wished he’d just grab me, and save me the trouble of worrying about it. All the modern woman stuff aside, that’s what I think I wanted.”
