Consecration

by Ira Robinson

  Copyright © 2019 by Ira Robinson

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  OTHER BOOKS BY IRA ROBINSON

  Black Rose Files | Book 1 – SLIPPED

  Clockwork Heart

  John: Tales of Courage From Beyond The Apocalypse

  This Silent Earth

  One More Minute

  This book is dedicated to my loving Wifeling.

  You are the greatest of my stories.

  Chapter 1

  As the needle pierced his vein, he realized it was a damnable mistake.

  The chill of the air surrounding Carver kept the hairs on his arms raised, the dampness of the crumbling concrete against his back rubbing through his tee-shirt into the skin at the center. The subtle hint of light from the bare incandescent bulb above barely made the sighting of the vein easier, but it was a path well-traveled for him, small pucker scars along his arm evidence to anyone who would care to take a look.

  Only a little. Just enough to take the edge off.

  The slurry of sweat lining his body, dampening the fabric of his clothes more than the muck on the dilapidated basement floor, had increased as the minutes passed. Every nerve within him cried out for the drug, to give the nourishment it had come to expect from him since the first time it went into his veins. Deep ache and trembles, petulant whimpers from his larynx, all begging to be embraced by the bliss of the hit of heroin he had finally managed to find.

  His eyes slipped closed as he pushed the plunger down, just a brush, a hint, a tease. Only enough to get the edge away, to dull the sword of addiction that had become as familiar to him over the past year as the breath in his throat.

  An impression. Nothing more. There was so much he had to do, and he could not afford to take more.

  His fingers disobeyed. An unspoken command, a pressure as the first strands of the haze in his psyche forced the plunger further, and the stream within became a bullet.

  His hands followed the ritual, trained so well in the removal of the rubber around his bicep, freeing the flow of blood carrying the precious and heady liquid throughout the rest of his body, sending those same nerves that had been crying out for the peace the drug would give aflame. The heat went everywhere. The sweating poured further, and he squeezed his eyes harder as the daze deepened over his mind, riding the first wave of forgetfulness he desired so extreme.

  For that moment in time, he was able to forget how much he loathed himself for doing it, for searching out the destructive cycle he had once broken, falling prey again to the instinctive desire to crash and burn. The pounding of the heavy metal from upstairs endured, just as loud as it had been, but stretched through in waves instead of bursts, each beat spreading out and echoing through the chambers of his mind, caught but not grasped.

  The odor of piss and sweat, too, finally melted away, yet his breathing hurried.

  Her face was nevertheless there, swimming in front of him behind his closed, blue eyes. Her hair, once long and so pretty as it curled around her small features, now faded into strands that hung limp and in clumps that drained of color. That face, too, became gaunt and bloodless as the chemotherapy ravaged her body while it tried to save it.

  Lisa, his little girl, still so vibrant as she struggled to smile at him through the sickness that was eating her from her core, haunted him as he lay with his back against the cold and cracked mortar wall of the flophouse he had been to many times before. His daughter, the only thing he really had left in the world, waited for him on her hospital bed, and all he did was think about how miserable his life had become.

  Oh, he could fool himself and say he tried. His own bastard of a father always said he was good at trying, but lousy at doing. Carver had been striving for many years, especially in the time since his wife, Sasha, was killed by a drunk with a tank of a car, leaving him to raise Lisa on his own. Even then, when the cycle of addiction was first starting, he tried.

  He wanted to be better than his own father, to be there for Lisa no matter what she was going through, to cradle her when the loss of her momma became too much for her in the night and she cried out in anguish and grief. Mostly Carver was there and coherent enough to be of use to her.

  Sure, he could fool himself into thinking he had been there for her, done the appropriate thing and been a comfort when she needed it. He could perhaps trick himself into believing that his addiction was just a normal part of the grieving process and could easily be put away when it was no longer necessary.

  But then her suffering would haunt him again, and he knew he had never been right at all.

  Always trying. Always failing.

  That was Carver Dax, and it was only in the fleeting moments of bliss like this he could admit to himself he had been wrong.

  The needle dropped to the floor with a soft clatter, and he laid his head back against the cement wall and cried as paradise mixed with the misery he had come to know as intimately as his wretchedness in the mirror.

  The cycle of the disease was taking her. The endless stream of doctors and nurses confirmed it, of course, but all he needed to do was to look into her face and watch the life draining from her with the passage of days. Moment by moment, she was being ripped away from him, and, though he knew he should be there for her, that she had no one else but him, he could not break through the mire of self-pity and despair. Even in the rapture, he could see what a fool he was.

  He should be there with her, hold her in his arms while she cried when the pain could not be cut by the drugs that were flowing through those tiny veins of her own. Yet she would beam at him when he walked into the room, gracing him with wisdom and genuine love far beyond what her nine years on this miserable planet should have been able to give her.

  She was all he had, all that life had granted him leave to seize on to, and he was wasting it by huddling in the dank confines of the basement of a stranger's house, surrounded by the castaways from society drowning in a misery of their own.

  She had to be just as lonely. He was all she had, in return, but it was only in the moments of the highest sobriety that he could really see it, plastered across her face as another needle went into her own body or the latest doctor came by with the results of the newest test. Seeing her there, trapped on that bed with the cords and cables, plugs and tubes, her once glowing skin now graying and ashy, broke him in an almost physical manner. He could barely look at her, his shame over his addiction and the way he not only did not have the strength she needed to get through all of it but lacked the willpower necessary to say no to the need driving him more than he could bear.

  He would sit in the corner, the unyielding hospital chair beneath him digging into his bones as he waited for the moment she would finally, blessedly, fall asleep. Then he would be on his feet, fleeing the walls of green and the scent of pine and puke, searching for a place of peace, a spot he could drive another nail into his veins and trick himself into believing he was delivered.

  Selfish? Yes, he knew he was. It was a vicious thing he did to his little girl, abandoning her to solitude when she needed him the most. But the addiction was cruel, too, set into motion so long before Lisa was first diagnosed with the disease that consumed her.

  It was a painful mistress that demanded sacrifice, an endless amount of torment that would not finish until he, too, finally passed
out and would awaken no more.

  The only resistance he could give in the chain of his need was a few minutes only, a short space between coming down and waiting for his child to fall asleep so he could serve the craving once again.

  He hated himself for it. He wanted it to all end but was not strong enough to let the tail of this particular tiger go, no matter how he desired to do so or understood that each time he injected more, he was only serving to become needier.

  The money was gone. Somehow, he had managed to maintain hold of the house he and his wife inherited from her parents, but that, too, would probably not last much longer. Not when it would be so simple to sell it to let him buy more, an endless heap of the precious stuff that kept feeding.

  He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his light jacket, stemming some of the flow from his tears and the effects of the drug. He swallowed, the clicking in his throat loud in his ears as they dried from lack of water.

  At least the shaking had stopped, finally relieved by the endorphins twisting their way through his blood, flooding him with a peace he knew only when the crap was inside of him.

  The pulsing of music along the floor above matched the beat of his breast, but it warped and shifted as he suffused into numbness, liquid warmth and a chasm between his emotions and his mind expanding wider until he could no longer feel the worry that had been there only moments before.

  False joy, perhaps, but it was something.

  The surrounding room spun as his eyes rolled in his head, the oily darkness broken only by the grimy incandescent bulb hanging bare in its socket in the center spreading more as his vision tunneled inward.

  Soft crunching came into his consciousness, and he turned his head in the direction of the small set of stairs that had led him down into the basement a little while before taking the hit. He narrowed his view, trying to catch a glimpse of what was making the noise, but at first, saw nothing.

  A minute later, however, a glow of white smoke, or something akin to it, coalesced across the leading part of the stairwell. Carver frowned and furrowed his brow as legs came down the plank steps.

  One step, then two, slow but unhesitating as they approached. It took another moment before he could finally make out they were attached to someone, a torso dressed in a pale suit, a fedora hat on top of a dark-haired head.

  They came closer, watching him as he lay with his back against the wall. Carver could not move, the pressure of his brain trying to get his limbs to change in response to the presence of this person gone unnoticed by his body.

  His stomach knotted as the nervous twinge rushed through him and then cut off by the haze of the drug in his system.

  "Who are you?" He wanted to ask, but nothing more than a low moan pulsed through his throat as the figure, tall and lank, stopped in front of him and stared down. The profile was shrouded in shadow from the lack of light and the hat on the head.

  They bent, coming down to rest on the balls of their feet and one arm stretched out to grasp Carver by his own.

  The man - Carver could tell it now - twisted his bicep, the fabric of his jacket still pulled back away from his forearm for the syringe to access. The image shook his head and, a moment later, a thick, horrible burning began around the place the needle had gone in.

  Carver moaned again, louder, as the ache spread from that spot up his arm, entering into his shoulder with a gleam like acid, clawing once inch at a time along his insides. It did not stop there, though, as the fire blazed through the rest of him.

  Was it only a few seconds? Or hours? Carver could not tell, but he tried to move and buck away from the remarkably firm grip of the man holding him. One hand was enough, the strength of it so intolerable that he managed no more than wriggle as the burn kept up its pace.

  When it finally started to subside, Carver gaped, mewling escaping from his lips when a white liquid oozed from the hole in his arm, seeping out like a long worm.

  As it spurt, his head began to clear, the haze of the trip subsiding rapidly, but not like it would by just coming down. No, this was more forceful, the heat cutting through it, burning it away as the seconds passed.

  He reached out and tried to grasp the hand holding him, scrabbling at it, prying at the man's fingers with his own in desperation, but it only brought him pain.

  The oozing slowed until there were only a few drops, finally reaching an end as the opened hole closed up again and his skin was made whole.

  Carver raised his eyes and stared into the dark face, his high completely gone, shed by the passage of the fire within.

  Chapter 2

  "Poor man," the stranger said, his voice grave. It almost resonated off of the wall behind Carver's head, the bass trembling against his ears.

  He let go of Carver's arm and stood, coming off of the balls of his feet with unexpected grace. His eyes were still clearing after the haze of the high fled his veins and the flow of the world around him seemed strange, surreal, and unfocused. There was little sound as the man took a step back, sliding across the damp cement floor.

  Carver glanced down at his arm, the redness fading rapidly. The sticky substance that drained from his body glistened in the dim light and was already drying where it landed on the ground. He covered the spot the hole had been with his other hand, and the warmth from the top of his skin soaked into his palm with a fever heat.

  "Who are you?" he managed to gasp out, his eyes rising again to meet those of the strange man. "What did you do?"

  "You can call me Biel," came that low voice again. Carver frowned at the odd tonality of the name, trying to grasp it. "As to what I did, well, I just thought it sad to see someone stuck without a way to help his child."

  Carver's lids opened wide at the mention of Lisa, a trill running through his stomach as he not only wondered how this stranger could come to know anything about the fact he had one, but how he could have managed to do what he had done.

  Guilt tickled his senses, the realization he had allowed himself to fall victim to his addiction once again coiling through him.

  Was this guy a doctor? Had he followed Carver from the hospital and used some particular medicine on him to clear the heroine from his system?

  That made a kind of sense to his addled mind, but there was nothing he knew of that could cause something like that to happen. Why would a doctor bother to hunt him down and do it, to begin with?

  Carver put his hands beneath him and tried to rise, but his frame was worn out and aching, the remnants of the passage of fire through him still hanging on the edges of his system. All he managed to do was cause a bit of loose cement near the base of the wall to dig into his palm and abrade his skin before falling back down entirely to his butt again. He pulled his legs into his chest and leaned his body against them, wrapping his arms around himself as the chill of the air became more noticeable.

  "Poor man," the stranger crooned again. "So much guilt. So much pain within so short of a time. It's no wonder you've become what you are."

  He bent again, taking off his hat, revealing longer hair than Carver realized was there. It was dark, curled at the edges, and came down as it was freed across the countenance that brightened with the light as he turned. Bright blue eyes met Carver's own brown, and there was a sincere sympathy for the man on the floor there.

  Carver squinted, trying to catch as much as he could of the face who helped him, but there was something odd about the means he moved. It was, perhaps, how he carried himself; even though he was ducked down to meet Carver at his level, there was straightness to him, stiffness in his carriage.

  Dark skin, almost as gray as the three-piece suit covering his body, was dry in the damp air of the basement and his long nose reminded Carver of an old Roman statue he once saw on television.

  "How did you do this?" Carver asked, lifting his arm slightly. "Are you a doctor?"

  A strange laugh came out of Biel, reverberating as a smile cracked across the lips of the man. "No, Carver, not a doctor, though I am here to help if
I can."

  "How did you know my name?" What the hell was going on here?

  "What I know would surprise you," Biel said, "but let's just say I have invested considerably into you."

  "What does that mean?" Carver finally found the ability to move, the flow of his body recovering enough for him to shift into a better position. He managed to pry himself off of the floor to stand, though the wobble forced him to lean against the side for support.

  He put his hand on it, the cold grain of it pulling the heat away, and bit his lip as the anxiety over how this stranger could know so much about him, let alone even find him there, to begin with, gave him impetus enough to clear his head more. This was not right. None of this was correct. Things like this just didn't happen.

  "I need to go," he muttered, pushing himself from the surface in an effort to try to get away from this situation. The weakness in him reigned more than his fear could fight. He tipped himself backward again to come against the wall to keep himself erect.