by James Wymore
It hurt. The pain was glorious. It was, I knew, the pain of final birth. The pain that would lead me to the end of this place.
It was five o’clock before I reached my destination. I forced myself to stand because there were preparations that had to be made. I had thought of nothing else on the way here. Just what had to be done. Just the final test before leaving Hell.
One hour to go. I had put the paper that brought me here in a pocket, and now I took it out and looked at it. I touched the face, the first and only face I had seen in my long time here. I smiled, and I kissed it.
Then I heard a sound. I spun and saw someone approaching. It was 5:00 p.m., so the city was in twilight. Lights would not turn on after the sun went down, so every time night fell the darkness was complete. Now the dark fingers of night were clenching in on themselves, a fist that would hold all in its grasp in only a few moments.
I dove behind a sandwich board sign that advertised free drinks with a dinner entrée. Huddled quietly. Cursed myself for a fool. Of course the paper had said where the man would be, and that he would be there at six. But it hadn’t said he would arrive at that time… there was nothing that said he couldn’t get there early and simply wait.
My preparations were moot. Now I had only my own knowledge, my own experience.
I could hear him approaching. He was mumbling under his breath. He sounded drunk.
I looked around. The darkness continued to deepen, which made it hard to see anything useful. The only thing I could make out was a car—a Honda, battered and tired-looking—at the curb a few feet from me.
I hadn’t driven a car since the disastrous Lamborghini event, and I didn’t have any intentions of driving this one. But it might be helpful, nonetheless.
I waited until I heard the mumbles drop off a bit. Hoping that meant the man was moving away, or at least had his head turned. I slipped across the sidewalk, easing the car door open and crawling inside. The sound the car door made as it unlatched and then opened were louder than thunder to my ears, but the other man’s sounds continued unabated so he must not have heard anything.
I slid across the seats. Sat behind the wheel.
The keys were in the ignition, as they always were. I had tried for an entire lifetime to figure out why the keys were always ready, the cars always gassed, but had come up with nothing. It was just one more bit of un sense in a world created to mock rationality.
But now I understood. The keys were in the ignitions in preparation for this single moment. For this time when they would be needed—not merely to drive a car, but for something far more important.
I slid the key out of the ignition. Just a bit of metal coated with plastic at one end. Nearly no weight to it. But it felt like Excalibur in my hand. This was the moment I had spent the better part of eternity waiting for.
I rolled down the window. Slowly. Silently. The Honda didn’t have power windows, so it was one quiet crank after another, dropping the window a millimeter at a time until there was nothing between me and the night.
And it was night. Dark had fallen. The final starless sky I would see in this place. I was leaving.
I could hear the other man’s mumbling. Low, but with the bouncing tones of an inebriate or a madman. Someone speaking to people who were not there and never had been.
I sat. I waited.
The words started to drift into the windless night, and for a moment I worried that he was leaving. That would make things harder.
Then the volume increased. He was coming closer.
I slunk down in my seat. Lower, then lower still. I could only make out a single sliver of black night through the side window, and could not see over the dash at all. I was in a cocoon. Waiting to come out as a new creature, a thing finally Alive.
The sounds came closer. Closer.
Something darkened my view of the sky. I saw a strip of white—that shock of hair, so out of place on his head—then nothing. He passed.
I sat up. He was outside the car, his back to me.
I leaned through the open window, eschewing the use of the door to exit. But once I was almost completely out of the car, I didn’t drop to the ground. Instead I levered myself up until I was standing on the roof. At the last second my weight caused the cheap metal to buckle slightly.
The man stopped mumbling.
He turned.
I saw his eyes widen. That was perfect.
I jumped off the roof. Left arm outstretched to catch him. To hang from him.
My right hand held the Honda key. I buried it in his eye.
The man went rigid beneath me. He shuddered. Then he vomited, his body reacting to what had just happened. Sticky warmth covered me from neck to belly.
I let go of the key and it remained fastened in place, sticking out of his ruined eye socket. I slammed it with my bloody palm. Drove it another quarter-inch. Then hit it again. Again.
He shuddered. Tried to vomit once more. Then simply went rigid and toppled to the side. I rode him down, and before he hit the sidewalk I tore his throat out with my teeth.
A new, different kind of warmth covered me. But where before the man’s vomit had seemed disgusting and foul, his blood was sensuous, lovely. It was the blood of birth, of re birth, of baptism into new and real Life.
At the last second, the man’s body twitched. Spun. I was no longer on him, but rather under him. His body weight slammed down on me, driving me into the sidewalk as well. I hit my head against unyielding cement. The dark night seemed to flow into my mind. To take over my world.
I smiled.
I was free.
I woke up the next morning and knew it was 5:19 a.m.
I could hear birds singing.
I did not open my eyes. I wanted to relish this moment. I knew things were going to be different. That they were going to be better.
I had fulfilled my contract.
That was what I did in life. That was how I got here in the first place: a botched hit that ended with me getting the bullet instead of my target. And so it made sense that to get out of Hell I had to complete a final contract. Had to finish a job to balance out what had been left undone in my life.
A hitman doesn’t have the luxury of “what-ifs.” There is only the job, and it is either completed successfully, or it is a failure. Successful jobs lead to more work, more folded pages in dead drops known only to a handful of underworld contacts. More money, more power.
Failed jobs lead to loss of earnings, loss of prestige, and—eventually and inevitably—loss of life.
The last job I’d taken had looked fine. Checked out from start to near-finish, to the ultimate moment where instead of getting the drop on my target he somehow pulled a gun and shot me. Even after all these thousands of years I can remember how shocked I was how fast he was. Just a single shot, a small bullet was all it took to end the life of probably the most-sought-after contractor in the United States.
So when I saw the paper in my hands, I knew I had to make up for my mistake. Had to finish something left undone: a final, open job.
Job closed. Job done.
Now what?
I still hadn’t opened my eyes. But something new had seeped into my consciousness. A thing that I had felt since the first instant, but had either ignored or simply had been unwilling to accept.
Something heavy. Something on me.
I opened my eyes.
The man I’d killed was still there. Lying on top of me, lifeblood dried on both of our clothes like the world’s most horrific tie-dye. My body was still that of a five-year-old. I hadn’t accomplished anything, anything, anything. Nothing!
I started screaming. My voice was high, youthful. The shriek of a child; one burdened by untold lifetimes of madness, experience, horror.
I screamed and did not stop screaming. I fell senseless, and when the fog lifted I was still screaming under the body of the man I’d killed.
The birds had stopped chirping. Listening reverently to a song they could never h
ope to replicate.
Something moved. I kept screaming.
I thought at first the movement was my own: my overloaded mind—
How many lifetimes can one mind hold?
—starting to short out and cause my muscles to contract and relax without my conscious intervention.
Then realization penetrated my panic: the motion was not me.
Something pulled the weight off me. Yanked the dead man off my tiny frame.
I looked and saw the last thing I expected: another human face.
It belonged to a teenager. A kid with bright red hair, the peach fuzz of someone who didn’t quite need regular shaving on his chin.
He shook his head. “Sorry, kid,” he said.
I didn’t understand that, but there was something so confusing about the sorrow—
Madness
—in his eyes that I stopped screaming.
I realized—too late—that he was holding something in his hand. A folded sheet of paper.
I stood, jumped up so fast I actually managed to run. But of course he caught me. Only a few blocks away, he tackled me and I fell beneath him and then I drew in a breath. Perhaps to scream, perhaps to plead against what was coming, perhaps to laugh the mad cackle of hopelessness realized, but never had a chance to complete the motion.
“Sorry,” he said again. Then he slammed a hammer down on my face.
The last thing I saw was that paper in his hand, a picture of a child barely visible on it.
Is that what I look like?
I blinked, then squinted, then opened my eyes.
Awake again.
Not even murder could kill me.
I was lying only blocks away from the place I had killed a man, splayed on the sidewalk where someone else had killed me .
But I was alive again. Alive and small and still spinning my wheels through the unending course of a futile existence.
I wept.
Eventually, I got up. It is a sad fact of human existence that we cannot just lay back and accept our lots. We fight against our circumstances, we fight against fate, we struggle even against the inevitable reality of our death. And now I fought against the knowledge that I was doomed to stay here forever. Against the truth that no matter what I did, I would remain in this place for eternity.
I walked, I ran. I ate, I drank, and I voided my bladder and evacuated my bowels. My body aged and grew and if I damaged it too badly or lived long enough it gave out and I woke up anew.
After another thousand lifetimes I woke up holding another folded paper. I crumpled it and threw it away, but every time I looked at my hand I found it had somehow appeared there again. A new job, to be done whether I liked it or not.
I refused. I walked in the opposite direction, intent on avoiding yet another useless interaction. Who the people were that I should kill, I did not know. Nor did I care, just as I didn’t care about the boy who killed me . It simply was , just as my existence here was . There was no meaning, only the simple, undefined truth of existence. To think otherwise was to hold out agonizing, useless hope.
So I walked away from the place where there would be another man to kill. Why bother?
And then I discovered something new in this empty world.
Pain.
I remembered the pain of cauterizing the bloody stump of my arm after that first car crash so many lifetimes past. The pains of a million falls, a million lacerations and bruises and broken bones. None of them compared to the agony that drove me to my knees at this moment. I opened my mouth and vomited blood. Speckles of red fell to the street below my hands and I realized I was sweating blood… an agony so utter and intense that it was causing the capillaries to burst within my flesh.
I moaned. Swayed.
And as I did, I realized that when I swayed to the right the pain lessened. I slumped that way. The pain was slightly less intense. Not much… it was like taking a teacup out of the ocean, but anything was welcome.
I pulled myself that way. Inch by pain-ridden inch. No longer even capable of moaning.
Every movement in that direction brought a lessening of the pain. Every moment I stayed where I was, the agony intensified. I crawled.
Eventually I was able to stand again. To walk.
And realized I was moving toward the place specified on the paper I had been given; the paper that I once more held in my bloody hands.
It seemed that there was more to this existence than simple wandering. I was given contracts. And they could not be denied.
When I got to the designated location, there was an old, old man there. He was curled up at the base of a tree planted in a break in the sidewalk. He looked up at me as I leaned down to him, to break his neck and so end my pain.
He whispered something. I leaned in to hear it.
“Goodbye,” he said.
And I felt the knife stab me in the stomach. Heard him cackle.
Saw the paper he held.
Then the dark came, then the light and the unseen chirping birds, and I was young and held another paper with another name and knew that things had changed, and not for the better. How could they? This was, after all, Hell.
So many lifetimes. Iteration: 1,220,447
Sometimes I lived long and alone, nothing to do and nowhere to go. Others I was given a single job when a teen or a man in his twenties, others I got a new job every day and suffered agony until each was filled.
Sometimes I killed them. Other times I was the one murdered.
Nothing new. Nothing new. Nothing new…
Madness was my only refuge. But even that was all-too-often stolen by those white pages with unknown faces, by the choice of murder or pain.
The world was still sterile, still void of meaning. I could not see who I was, still could not see any faces but those on the pages, those I was to hunt. But there were changes. The birds no longer sang. There was only silence in the sky.
And the world was filling up.
Where I had spent eons alone, now I sensed more and more people. Never directly—the only people I ever saw directly were those I hunted, or those who hunted me—but I often felt watched. I often detected presences nearby, more of them as the years passed.
And one day I got a paper with an old man on it. Nothing new there; I had killed innumerable men and boys, age was of no matter to me. I walked to the place, bringing a Molotov cocktail I’d made for the meeting.
He was there, holding a piece of paper as well. He didn’t see me, but I assumed that he was looking for me, so I lit the cocktail and prepared to fling it.
I drew back my arm. It would be fun to see him burn. A bright star of difference in the infinite night of sameness that was my existence.
He turned, and as he did I noted two things:
First, he wasn’t holding a paper. It was a pad . And it was one that I vaguely felt I should recognize.
Second, he was holding it in his hand. His only hand. The other ended at the wrist. A stump, long-healed. Skin slick with burn-scars, a pinch to his back that indicated badly-healed injuries.
The pad, I realized, counted the days of an existence. A hash-mark to note each one of the first days of an eternity.
Me . It’s me. The first me.
The Molotov fell from my fingers. The bottle broke at my feet. I barely felt the pain or my own death.
Iteration: 1,220,448.
I woke on the pavement. Facing the early-morning sky. 5:19 a.m.
Only now I knew that the sky I was seeing wasn’t the next , it was the first .
Always I had assumed that when I died I simply woke the next morning. But what I had seen yesterday—
No, not yesterday, it was many tomorrows from now .
—had finally made me understand. When I died, I woke up in the morning—the morning, the first morning. The clock was reset, and I took my place in the world. But the Me that was did not disappear; rather I existed as a new copy of Myself. An iteration of my life that existed simultaneously with all the ot
her version of “Me” born through the years. Each time I died, I woke the first morning as a new copy. And eventually, over a million-plus iterations, I had begun to fill up this great city in Hell. The feeling of being watched? Of someone nearby? That was my own sense of Myself.
I had never seen a woman, I realized. Just men, boys.
Just me.
Something crinkled in my hand. A paper. I looked at the face printed on it and wondered how I could have failed to recognize myself. But of course, I hadn’t seen myself in ages. And even if I had… the selves had different experiences, different pains that carved different wrinkles on each face.
Here, in Hell, I was every possible Me, and none of them were recognizable to the others.
Until now.
I ran to the place on the page. Knowing what it all meant, knowing what I was to do.
I ran, knowing that the Me I found would be waiting with his own page, his own instructions, his own insane drive to kill.
I would have to save the man—or boy—I found. I would have to convince him not to kill me, and I would have to convince him then to save others.
Know Thyself.
I knew what I was. I was a killer, a murderer, a madman, a fiend.
I would have to show that truth to the other selves, and somehow would have to convince them not to do this. Not to kill. To seek out the names on the papers not to murder them, but to teach them and save them.
The way out of Hell was not killing. It was saving . I had finally come to know myself. Now I was beholden to save my many selves, to stop them from killing. I was driven not to destroy them, but to teach them. To teach all the infinite copies of “Me” a better way. A purpose that did not involve setting myself above others, but bringing them to selfless service.
How long? How long will I have to do this?
And the answer to that was obvious now, as well: as long as it took. Not just to save this Me, but to save all my selves.
Each time I killed Me, another was born. And each one must be saved, each one must be brought to understand what the true meaning of the pages was.
