by Jon Land
Max didn’t have a car. Living in New York City, what was the point? But his family had three and his mother hardly ever drove the Volvo wagon anymore, hardly ever left the penthouse period. Claimed she could see people’s souls, how dirty and retched most of them were. The sight so revealing and repulsive that she couldn’t stand to go out anymore.
“The world’s an ugly place,” she’d say to him over and over again. “Ugly and getting uglier by the day, by the minute. Don’t be tempted by the devil, Max. Lilith told me the devil says you belong to him, so always stay away from the darkness, because the darkness belongs to him. You have to fight him, fight him and push him away, and keep pushing until he’s gone for good. Pray, Max, pray to the Lord for forgiveness and He will listen, He will be there.”
It got so he began avoiding her, detesting in advance the next crackpot shit sure to come out of her mouth.
He couldn’t talk to his mom, but he’d bought a burner phone to call his dad, after ditching his and Vicky’s cell phones, so no one could use the signal to track them.
“Where the hell are you, son?”
“I’d rather not say right now.”
“Yeah? Then let’s try another question: You know the penalty for kidnapping?”
“I didn’t kidnap anybody. Vicky couldn’t go home to her father, Dad, you heard her.”
“She needs help, Max. She’s an addict. You need to be headed to a rehab facility, not the Canadian border.”
“Promise me you won’t tell her father.”
“Dale and I aren’t exactly on the best of terms right now.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.” A heavy silence fell between them, broken only when Ben Younger resumed. “But I want you to come home.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re not thinking straight.”
“Yes, I am, straighter than ever. You want to know why she does drugs? It’s because she’s got that piece of shit for a father. Best rehab for Vicky is getting away from him for good.”
“That’s not your call,” Ben said, although he wished it was. “You need to think like an adult here and bring her back.”
“That’s Vicky’s call, Dad. I’ve got to help her. I’ve got to…”
“What?” Ben prodded, when his son’s voice trailed off.
“How’d you know that you were in love with mom?”
“I couldn’t imagine my life without her. Is that how it is with you and Vicky?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know anything right now. Gotta go, Dad. I’ll call you later.”
And he’d hung up.
After leaving the city, they’d driven as far as they could until neither could keep their eyes open anymore. They’d stopped at a rest stop to buy gas and snacks, Max’s gaze lingering on a display of something called mood rings right next to the register. Just before paying, he couldn’t resist adding one of them to give Vicky as a gift, a souvenir of their escape from the city.
Midnight had come and gone, when Max steered the Volvo along a collection of backcountry roads on which theirs was the only car. He knew the general area most of the hunting cabins were clustered, all of them abandoned this time of year and suitable for borrowing.
He found one nestled back in the woods down a root-marred drive, hidden from the view of anyone—Vicky’s father, included—intent on following them. The one-room cabin was furnished well enough, but abandoned for the season, as expected. The utilities were shut down. And, although there might’ve been some juice left in the propane tank, Max figured it would be best to remain in the dark. Any light, other than the meager spill from a battery-operated lantern, would stand out and risk drawing attention to them.
They polished off all the snacks they’d bought at the rest stop in rapid fashion, washing them down with big bottles of water. Vicky was just draining the last of hers, when Max plucked the mood ring he’d purchased out of his pocket.
“Will you marry me?” he joked, handing it to her.
Her eyes gaped. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“What?”
She reached into a front pocket of her jeans and came out with the very same ring, smiling as she extended it toward him. “I couldn’t resist.”
Max smiled back. “Neither could I.”
Vicky slid the ring she’d bought onto his finger; Max took the matching one he’d given her back and did the same.
“I now pronounce us,” Max started, but stopped. “Pronounce us what?”
“How about ‘To Be Determined’?”
“Works for me.”
Then they lay down atop an old bare mattress, topped by a tattered woolen blanket, both utterly exhausted.
“Weird, isn’t it?” Vicky asked Max.
“What?”
“Being together like this.”
Max couldn’t make her out clearly through the darkness, but he knew she was looking at him. They’d never slept together, never even kissed until recently.
But tonight felt different, tonight felt right.
It wasn’t Max who made the first move; it wasn’t Vicky either; it was both of them together in the same thought, the same mind. Lying next to each other one moment, then embracing and kissing in the next.
The rest was a blur, played out amid the soft glow of the lantern light from the floor. Time measured in the blips between shifting about atop the bare mattress beneath the ratty old blanket. Or maybe time had stopped, explaining why their lovemaking seemed to go on unbroken forever. There were moans and Max quickly gave up trying to figure out the source. He knew this was his body, but he was no longer in control of it. As if the two of them had merged into one.
They finished together, both of them heaving for breath and collapsing in each other’s arms. Max fighting against sleep, so he could enjoy every moment of this. And then Vicky was taking him in hand, and they were going at it again, even better and longer than the first time, the second time ending with the expectation of a third, a fourth, as many as the night would allow. Max let himself fantasize about ditching their plans to go to Canada and staying right here. Make a home in the middle of nowhere where he could keep Vicky safe from her father, and the drugs, and temptations that had nearly destroyed her. Playing house. Making believe they were all grown up.
They fell asleep in each other’s arms, Max’s dreams the most pleasant he could ever remember, until a nightmare of the door to the hunting cabin being kicked in jolted him awake.
An instant before that door burst open behind a heavy boot.
New York City, 2008
“I wasn’t sure what to make of you asking to meet me so late at night like this,” Ben told Franklin Kirsch.
Kirsch closed and relocked the service entrance to CyberGen behind him. “I need to share the results of your son’s DNA tests immediately.”
“Tests plural?”
Kirsch didn’t nod. “I had it repeated. To be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
Kirsch waited until they were inside his office with the door closed before responding. He didn’t offer Ben a chair this time and Ben didn’t take one.
“Your son’s not sick,” Kirsch started. “Whatever is afflicting you hasn’t touched him.”
“Well, that’s something to be grateful for, anyway,” Ben said, feeling a wave of relief sweep over him that was just as quickly replaced by a sense of foreboding. “But you didn’t call me here to tell me that.”
“The matching mark on Max’s hand,” Kirsch continued. “You recall what you told me about it, ever since he was an infant?”
“How we’d touch palms, press the marks against each other.”
“Do you recall how it started?”
“With crystal clarity,” Ben told him. “Max was in his crib, a month old or even less, when he raised his hand toward me, palm up. I pressed my palm against his. It was the first time he flashed a smile.”
Kirsch nodded, as if that was exactly the answer he’d expected. �
��I didn’t ask you to come here about Max, I asked you to come here about you. You see, Mr. Younger, I think I may know a bit more about your illness.”
The Adirondacks, 2008
Dale Denton entered the cabin last. Took a look at Vicky covered up to her neck by an old, worn blanket, Max standing against the far wall buck naked with three sets of former special operator eyes locked on him.
“Put your fucking clothes on, you piece of shit.”
Max swallowed hard, continued holding his hands cupped around his dick. He smelled of musk, hair oil, and the stale lavender scent that clung to Vicky’s hair.
“You look like a girl with that long hair,” Denton continued, his words hissing out of his mouth. “A fucking faggot.” He turned toward his daughter. “So which is it, Victoria? Are you fucking a girl or a faggot?”
She sat straighter up in bed, pulling the blanket in tighter against her, tears starting to stream down her cheeks, as embarrassed as she was upset. “Daddy…”
“You’re still seventeen. Either way, he’s a rapist. Either way, he’s going to jail.”
“Daddy!” Vicky wailed, shaking now.
“How’d you find us?” Max asked him, underwear in hand.
Denton aimed his answer at Vicky. “When I gave you your mother’s locket for your thirteenth birthday, you swore you’d never take it off.”
Vicky grasped the locket dangling from the end of the chain round her neck.
Denton smirked, looking back toward Max. “Before I gave the locket to her, I had a tracking chip implanted inside it. So I’d know where my daughter was at all times.”
“Not anymore,” Vicky snapped, stripping the chain from her neck and tossing it at her father. “You can have it back!” she screamed at him, and then practically jumped out of bed, ended up on her feet, with the raggedy blanket clutched around her. “This is bullshit, total bullshit!”
Denton jabbed an imposing finger her way. “Watch your mouth.”
“He wasn’t my first, you know,” Vicky said, a biting edge to her voice all of a sudden. “More like my fiftieth. Guess the locket didn’t help you find all the rest of the boys I screwed. Guess you missed out there.”
That’s when Denton lurched toward her.
New York City, 2008
“What’s killing me, you mean,” Ben said, checking his phone again to make sure he hadn’t missed a call or text from Max.
“I’m a scientist, Mr. Younger, a geneticist, a physician for over thirty years,” Kirsch resumed. “I’m trained to evaluate facts and make clinical decisions, or help patients come to their own decisions. But I have to set aside facts for a time. That’s what I’ve been doing for the whole day before I called you. Setting facts, knowledge, training, logic, science, and medicine aside.”
Ben swallowed hard, didn’t prod Kirsch to go on but he did so anyway.
“I have a theory that touching palms wasn’t just a game for your son, Mr. Younger, or some infantile bonding ritual. I think, in theory, he was taking something from you, absorbing it.”
“Taking, absorbing, what?”
“Your energy at the subatomic level. Remember, this isn’t the scientist in me talking—I’m not really sure what it is. What I know, and as we’ve discussed already, your disease is due to a breakdown in the ability of your cells to reproduce. Oncologists looked at your test results and saw some non-primary form of lymphoma or blood cancer, decided that’s what you had even though none of their testing produced a definitive diagnosis. Your disease was differentiated based on the process of elimination.”
“I don’t understand,” Ben said, trying to even then.
“The results of both your son’s DNA tests I ordered indicated his cellular reproduction, the primary building block of life itself, proceeds at a rate ten times that of a normal person’s. How often has he been sick?”
“I never gave it much thought, traveling as much as I did. Not very, as I recall. Maybe never, now that you mention it.”
“What about sports injuries, broken bones?”
“He’s never been very interested in sports or had the discipline for them. He’s never broken a bone either, never even gone to a doctor, other than for regular checkups. My wife and I figured he was just lucky. And…”
“And what, Mr. Younger?”
“Something I just remembered,” Ben said, feeling distant all of a sudden, Kirsch’s words beginning to truly sink in. “We set a goal years ago to climb the highest mountain on every continent. And on every climb I can’t ever recall Max being short of breath, labored, in need of oxygen—anything like that. I just thought he was in good shape. And…”
“And what, Mr. Younger?”
“I’ve never told this to anyone. But we were hiking in Alaska this one time when a grizzly bear lurched out from the woods right in front of me. He would’ve torn me to shreds, and all I could think was to shove Max behind me so he wouldn’t be killed too. But Max had already stepped out, between me and the bear, trying to protect me. He said something inside him made him do it, that he had to take a stand to stop the animal from attacking, that running would have angered the bear even more. Told me, in that moment, he’d been ready to die for me. Max just stood there, looking up at the animal, their gazes locking. The bear growled, whined, then, shockingly, dropped down from its hind legs and scampered off. And you know what? The bear looked scared, actually scared. Tell me how you’d explain that?”
“I can’t, at least on a rational basis. But I can tell you about his test results. If I didn’t know the testing was on the level, I’d figure myself to be the victim of a hoax, an elaborate fabrication. Because on the sub-atomic molecular level your son’s cells aren’t aging, reproducing, developing, or replicating the way human cells do. And part of the origins of this … condition, or whatever it is, lies in his ability to absorb the life force out of your cells and into his.”
Kirsch stopped, started to compose himself with a deep breath, then just resumed.
“If you’re dying, Mr. Younger, as crazy and unprofessional as this sounds, it’s possibly because your son’s been killing you for nearly eighteen years.”
Ben’s phone rang, the number of Max’s burner phone lighting up in his caller ID.
The Adirondacks
Whap!
That’s what Denton’s slap against Victoria’s cheek sounded like to Max. He was pulling his jeans on at the time, had all the buttons done except the top one when …
Whap!
… the sound came and drew his attention across the room. Somehow the meager spill of the lantern captured Vicky’s face in all its perfection and beauty. In that moment she looked more like a photograph than a person, leaving Max to wonder absurdly why he hadn’t been head-over-heels in love with her for years already.
Because maybe he had been, the mood rings they were both wearing now a kind of testament to that.
And then Max was in motion. Before he could even think to move, he was halfway to Dale Denton, his face shiny with sweat in the spill of the lantern light he’d switched on.
“Hey!” a voice blared, Denton’s three goons converging on Max in the shabby, dust-riddled single room that suddenly felt more like a closet.
Max knew what was coming from a place deep inside him, before it got there. He’d felt it plenty often over the years, always when he was angry, always when something inside him boiled, and this was the hottest yet.
Whap!
The sound of the slap resounding against Vicky’s cheek resounded in his mind again, carved from his memory in the last moment before the three men were on him. Life blinked—that’s what it felt like. A blip in which everything stopped like a frozen image on a television screen, only to restart with the missing moments lost forever.
Blink …
One of the men was holding his throat, gasping and coughing blood in huge plumes. Max’s right hand was wet and sticky, coated in the blood residue of the impossible barehanded strike that must have pierced the man’
s throat like a knife.
Blink …
Hands tugging at his shoulders, pounding his head, while he pressed both his thumbs into a second man’s eyes, a great indescribable euphoria rushing through him when he heard dual popping sounds and the thumbs sank into something squishy. Pushed and kept pushing until they disappeared to the bases of his sockets. The man shaking horribly, convulsing.
Blink …
The third man’s body hit the plank floor with a hollow thud. Max looked down, saw he was holding the man’s head in his hands, the eyes seeming to look back at him while the legs attached to the rest of him kicked and twitched.
Max heard a plop and realized he’d dropped the head that was a gory mess of blood, splintered bone, and gristle oozing from the jagged line where he must’ve twisted the man’s head around 180 degrees. Then he turned toward Dale Denton, his cowering form slumped against a wall, face caught in the flickering light of the lantern, frozen in terror, Max wishing he could prolong that moment forever. Weak, reduced to nothing—Denton’s true essence.
Max stood over Dale Denton’s cowering form, pushed up into the corner, as if he was trying very hard to melt into the wood. Max felt the next blink coming, no idea what Denton might resemble when consciousness returned.
He felt himself almost smiling at the thought, a hot surge of absolute joy coursing through him because of the power he felt, the thick smell of blood he’d spilled only adding to it. Something was on fire inside him, a flame he couldn’t, and didn’t want to, extinguish. He wanted to feel this power, for it to be his, forever. The heat reduced to a simmer, only when a shape forced itself against him, washing the light back into his eyes.
“Max, no! Stop, please!”
Vicky pushed him away from her father, back across the room where the stench of blood was even stronger, his bare feet sloshing through the muck.
“You’ve got to get out of here, you’ve got to run!”
Max’s gaze flitted back to Denton’s shriveled form tucked into the corner, seeming to disappear a little at a time into the crack where two walls met.
