Marc wanted to rub at his eyes to try to push back the ache hanging just behind them but couldn’t move his arms. Did he really hit me with a fucking frying pan? He leaned his head back and felt a tight constriction at his throat. He forced himself to calm down and breathe. A sharp jolt of pain shot through his skull as a flash of light erupted in his eyes.
“It’s perfect,” he heard Mari say, clapping excitedly. “Just perfect!”
Marc heard a muffled groan to his left. Through bleary eyes he looked over at the young woman tied to the chair next to his. She wore a pearl-beaded, white silk gown and a veil over her face. He looked down and saw that he was dressed up in a black tuxedo with a gray vest. He guessed that the tightness around his throat was a bow tie. “Wha’s goin’ on?” he asked. His bleary voice barely carried and he tried to repeat himself a little louder as the blinding flash went off again.
“Just in case,” Ron said. In the background, Nat King Cole sang about L.O.V.E. and what it stood for. Mark repeated his question a little louder to be heard over the music. Ron answered. “We just wanted to get a picture of the bride and groom before the night wears on and you two don’t look as perfect as you do right now.” The girl beside Marc groaned again and her head lolled to her other shoulder. Marc looked at his surroundings. He sat next to the girl under a wicker archway draped with white and silver garlands, plenty of glitter, and white balloons. He was tied down with zip ties and a bungee cord around his chest. The cord had a little stretch in it, but the zips held him fast. He tried moving his feet and felt plastic straps holding his ankles as well.
“I think it’s about time to be getting ready to throw the garter, Andrew. Michelle looks very tired.” Mari stepped in front of the spotlights blinding Marc. She walked up to the girl, roughly yanked the veil out of the way and shoved a rag in her tear-streaked face. The girl struggled weakly in her chair and whined a little before slumping over.
“Stop it! Stop! What are you doing?” He bucked against his restraints, but struggling didn’t do anything more than send pin-pricks of pain radiating into the backs of his hands and fingers as the ties dug into his tendons.
“Sh sh shh,” Mari said. “I think she’s had a little too much excitement. Did you guys overdo it with the champagne?” She smiled and winked and let go of the girl. “Naughty, naughty. You’re not going to have anything left for your wedding night if you don’t pace yourselves.” She winked conspiratorially and licked her lips.
“You’re out of your fuckin’ mind. Let us go!”
“Don’t you talk to your mother like that!” Ron yelled from behind the camera. He doused the spotlights and turned the overheads back on. Marc looked around in a panic trying to get a sense of where he was. Gray windowless walls surrounded him. In the far corner, a wooden workbench stood underneath a pegboard covered in tools. Opposite that, a stairway led up into the darkness. The cellar. We’re in the cellar.
“Do you want to get the induction picture now?” Ron asked. Mari stood up and walked back to her husband.
“I’m not sure his clothes are going to work. They’re too worn and ratty.” Marc looked behind them at another staged scene. This one resembled the set for the photo he’d had taken after completing Basic: a blue backdrop with an American flag and the Marine Corps standard hanging from poles on either side. Beside that scene stood a coffin on a bier draped with another flag.
“Wh-what is all that?” Ron held up a finger to shush him. Marc shouted as loudly as he could, his head pounding. “What the fuck is all that?”
“Shh, dear,” Mari said. “We only have two more memories to go. We wish we could do more, but sadly you gave all for your country. We’re so proud of you, Andrew. You meant everything to us.”
“Andrew Ballard died in a car crash, you fucking freaks! He got wasted and pulped his head against an overpass! My name is Marcus Welsh!”
She ran over and beat at his chest with her fists. “My son died a hero in Iraq! He saved his whole platoon!” Ron walked over and pulled the hysterical woman off of Marc. He shushed and hummed at her, trying to get her to calm down. Marc realized that wherever he was, he wasn’t going to get out by shouting for help.
“See what you’ve done to your mother? I haven’t seen her this upset since we first heard.” Ron pulled a pistol out of his pocket and aimed it at Marc. “I’m sorry, son, but it’s better than you coming home like some broken shell of a man. War is hard on us all.”
“You don’t know a fucking thing about war! I’ll show you war! When I get out of this, I am going to—” The sound of the shot stifled the rest of his threat. Marc had been shot once already in Afghanistan. It felt like being punched hard in the chest. He remembered how he’d struggled to catch his breath as his lung filled with blood and they dragged him to the medivac. He felt none of that now. Just the same pain in his head. He opened his eyes and saw Ron standing closer, pointing the gun at his heart.
“That was a warning. I don’t want to skip right to your funeral, but we will if you make me.” Marc felt the rag pressed against his nose before he noticed that Mari had slipped out of sight. Hold your breath. Hold it. Play possum. He did his best not to inhale the fumes of whatever it was—ether or chloroform. Despite his best effort, it still got through and his vision blurred. He slumped down, hoping that she’d take the rag away from his mouth soon.
As soon as he blacked out, she did.
The voices were distant and faint and faded in and out with his pained consciousness; still, he managed to catch a few words. Everything is going to be all right. I heard what he said. Just take a deep breath and relax. Then it faded back away into the fog. For a fleeting moment Marc thought that he was back at Walter Reed. Then he remembered the camera flashes. And he felt it then. The anger. The fury of having survived war—having survived homelessness and despair—only to die in a suburban basement, anonymous and alone. Except he was neither. He was worse than anonymous.
He was being made into someone else.
Marc peeked out through slitted eyes. He couldn’t see his captors. Their voices were distant. They’re in another room. He opened his eyes fully and looked around to make sure he was truly alone. They’d dressed him in his freshly washed and ironed BDU’s. They keep switching me up like a fucking Ken doll. At least, he figured, it’d be easier to get away in these clothes than in a tuxedo.
Plastic zip ties still held his arms firm to the chair. He pulled up hard against them. The wood creaked but didn’t give. The plastic straps cut into the backs of his wrists making his hands tingle painfully, but he kept at it. The elegantly arcing Swedish chair didn’t offer any joints near his wrists or ankles that he could loosen and the bungee at his chest prevented him from leaning forward to chew at them. Ron and his bitch had thought these things through. His only hope was brute force. Break the ties.
He shoved his arm forward, trying to create a better fulcrum, and levered up with his forearm. He was fairly certain that the strap would give before his ulna and radius. His head ached as he exerted himself, trying to stay quiet, trying to keep an ear out for the couple’s return. They kept bickering off in the distance.
“I don’t see the point.”
“Fine! Just get on with it then.”
He pulled and pried, pushing through the pain. Keeping on, knowing that if he stopped—if he took a minute to relax and let his consciousness wander—it would be all over.
And then, one snapped.
His arm swung up wildly, hitting the flag behind him. Marc didn’t wait to process what had happened. He’d have the rest of his life to be thankful that a quality assurance worker in some zip tie factory missed one. If he didn’t focus and get back to it, the rest of his life wouldn’t last as long as Mari’s bottle of ether with the cap off.
Pulling at the other wrist tie, he realized that his luck was only in once. This one held. He scanned the room for something within arm’s reach he could use as a tool or a weapon. There was nothing. The only things near him were t
he twin flagpoles standing behind him. He reached back over his shoulder and tilted the American flag forward, looking to see what topped the pole. An eagle. He carefully brought the pole around in front of him so he could inspect the ornament closer. Please, not plastic. Please, not plastic. The eagle was cool and heavy in his hand. Metal! Although it was gold-colored, he was certain the bird was made of aluminum. It didn’t matter. If it broke, that was just a more ragged edge to saw through his bindings.
Holding the flagpole between his knees so it wouldn’t clatter away and draw attention, he quickly unscrewed the ornament and went to work on the other tie, prying and poking with the wings of the bird—the eagle perched upon a globe, making its talons useless. It was slow work that had him wishing they’d chosen a spear tip or a Fleur de Lis as a topper instead. Eventually, however, the zip snapped apart with a satisfying pop and both his hands were free. He undid the cord tied around his chest and bent down to break his leg ties.
The noises drifting in from the other room dulled and Marc tried to work faster. Whatever they were doing sounded like it was wrapping up and he didn’t want to be around when they got back on task. He broke the last tie and stood up. The room swam. He willed himself not to pass out. He couldn’t tell whether the pain in his skull was the result of the frying pan or the shit in the rag they kept stuffing in his face. Neither did his brains any favors. He reckoned an E.R. visit was in his future, if he had one.
His rucksack was stuffed under a work bench at the far end of the room. He crept over to it and slid it out carefully. Resisting the urge to open it and take an inventory of his things, he slung the bag over his shoulders and fastened the clip in front before searching the surface of the workbench for a weapon.
Ron’s tool collection wasn’t expansive, but it was sufficient. Marc grabbed a long Phillips head screwdriver and a mid-sized claw hammer. Neither were what he’d prefer in a gunfight, but both were better than nothing.
Creeping toward the stairway leading up to freedom, he spied the room where his captors were getting ready for their next tableau. It was positioned directly opposite his goal, hidden by a peg-board partition on which a few odds and ends hung—small extension cords and cables. He’d almost walked out in front of it, exposing himself. He crouched and peeked around as discreetly as he dared. Both Ron and Mari were in plain sight. Ron looked like he was doing up his pants. In front of him on a table lay the girl they’d used as a prop in the wedding photo. Mari groused at her husband.
“It’s enough to understand the context in the photo,” she said.
“No. We have to know. It has to be real.”
“But it’s not his. And it’s too early to even tell if she’s pregnant. You just wanted to—”
Ron slapped Mari across the mouth before giving her a look that was an equal measure of frustration and pity. “I want everything to be perfect. I want to be a grandparent. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, holding her stinging cheek.
“Well, this is how it’s done.” Mari opened her mouth to reply, but Ron interrupted by showing her his hand, ready to respond to her protests with his reddening palm again.
Marc took cover behind the pegboard wall. Although he couldn’t see the pistol that Ron had brandished before, he couldn’t assume that it wasn’t within easy reach. What had seemed a difficult proposition before—escape up the stairs—had become more complicated. Although he still felt weakened and fuzzy from the dope in the rag, he couldn’t just slip away; he couldn’t leave the girl behind. He formed a quick plan and steeled himself. Blitz Ron and take the gun. Eliminate the primary threat before taking out secondary targets.
He thought about what it meant to kill them. What it meant was a fresh start. He’d save the girl. Call the cops and explain that it was self-defense. She’d back his play. He’d be a hero. Go on TV and tell his story. Maybe someone would see him and listen to his story and offer him a job. He could get his life back. Get back on track. Get better.
He peeked around a second time to take a better appraisal of the room and try to locate Ron’s weapon. His breath caught in his lungs.
Behind the couple on the wall were a dozen framed photographs. A young boy in a soccer uniform, kneeling in front of a ball . . . crying. A different boy, similar-looking but not the same, stared fearfully out of another picture wearing a black gown and mortarboard cap. A scroll of paper was stuck in his fist tied closed with the now-familiar zip ties. In another shot, a child, maybe five or six, sat holding a brightly colored present and shrieking in front of a Christmas tree. Still more pictures showed random scenes from the life of a boy depicted by a cast of similar-looking people. People who all look like me, Marc realized. A couple of terrified kids at prom. A screaming child with an Easter basket. In the center of it all, a pair of beaming parents holding a silent infant. Andrew Ballard’s whole life immortalized in pictures. The boy seemed not to exist at all except by proxy—except by pain and fear. Each milestone in his ersatz life was the capstone in someone else’s.
Underneath it all on a shelf stood a gray box with a brass plaque on the front—a crematory box. That’s him. That’s the fucking kid!
He leaned back behind cover, steadied himself, and took a deep breath before bursting into the room.
Immediately his plan went to hell.
Still woozy from the blow to the head and the chloroform, he stumbled over a step and fumbled his weapons. The hammer and screwdriver clattered uselessly away. Ron and Mari spun around, twin looks of stunned surprise on their faces. Marc clumsily regained his footing, but his angle of attack was way off. Instead of hitting Ron, he took out Mari first, driving his shoulder into her ribs and slamming her back against the table. Mari screamed. Ron raised the pistol and fired. The sound was like a bomb going off in the small room. Marc pushed himself off the woman and pressed forward, swinging his forearm out to hit Ron’s gun hand and drive the weapon’s aim away long enough to get in close. Ron got off another shot. Another miss. You’re not going to get lucky three times! Marc pushed in close, controlling the handgun and hit hard. Ron’s eyes bulged in shock and panic as his windpipe collapsed under Marc’s driving forearm. Marc swung up and brought his fist down hard on Ron’s weapon arm. The gun clattered away as he pulled the bigger man’s legs out from under him and took him to the ground. Together, they fell in a heap on the floor. Marc scrambled up onto Ron’s chest and began to pound at his face.
Mari lurched toward the men. She grabbed Marc by the hair and pulled his head back with a hard jerk, screaming incoherently. Despite seeing her weather the crack she took from her husband before Marc plunged into the room, he hadn’t accounted for her being able to take a hard hit and recover fast. Complicating matters, his initial burst of adrenaline-fueled energy was waning fast. The pain and dizziness and nausea were all coming back stronger than before as he struggled with the couple. He felt Ron slip out from under him as she dragged him off her husband.
He twisted under her arm, pinning her hand to his head with his own. He was readying to drive a hard kick into her stomach when he felt her other hand plunge the knife into his guts.
She has a knife. I didn’t see a knife.
Fire burned through his midsection as she shoved the blade deeper in. The feeling made him want to vomit. It made him want to let go of his bladder. He wanted to sit down and give up. An image of his parents in black funeral clothes flashed in front of him and he wanted to say that he was sorry. Say he missed them. Say that he didn’t blame them for anything. It wasn’t their fault.
It was too late to wish for third and fourth chances. He’d blown his second. And that was all he got.
The claw end of the hammer stuck in Mari’s skull. Her eyes dilated and rolled before she dropped, pulling the knife out of Marc’s stomach as she went. The girl in the black dress fell to her knees behind her, tugging weakly at the handle of the embedded tool. Ron stepped up to her, bloody drooling mouth hanging open as if to ask what she’d done. He placed the bar
rel of his recovered gun to her head. Marc fell back and fumbled and grasped at the crematory urn on the shelf beside him. Prying at the lid off the metal box, he shouted as loudly as he could through the pain and the shallowness of his remaining breath.
“Don’t you pull that fucking trigger!”
Ron looked at him with an idiotic blankness. If he had an expression, Marc couldn’t read it through the swelling rising up from the beating he’d given him. Ron pulled back fat, split lips in a dripping red grimace and hissed, “Let him go.”
Marc threw the ashes in the man’s face.
The girl swung a fist into Ron’s balls and he doubled over, firing the gun into his wife’s limp thigh. Marc grabbed the knife out of the dead woman’s hand. Pulling Ron by the hair, he jammed the blade into the man’s neck, and again, and a third time, before twisting and grinding like he was trying to saw through the neck of a Christmas goose. Ron’s gun fell to the ground and his body followed.
Marc looked at the knife and threw it into the corner before wiping his wet hands on his pants. The square urn lay beside him, the glinting plaque on the front facing up. Through bleary eyes, he read the engraved inscription: Andrew Raymond Ballard. Our son. 11/25/1990. He glanced back up at the picture wall. A collage of anguished semi-familiar faces stared back at him in a bleak farce of his life passing before his eyes.
1990? All these kids. None of them are him.
He looked up at the picture of a younger Ron and Mari holding a pale, silent infant. Seated together, they stared into the camera wearing smiles that looked pained. Maybe one was him. Maybe he was stillborn.
Marc looked down. Blood stained his pants and was beginning to pool on the ground, muddying the spilled ashes in front of him. The girl crawled over Ron and Mari’s bodies and through the ashes to wrap her arms around Marc and lean against him, crying into his chest. He held her and brushed her hair back to kiss her forehead to reassure her that everything was going to be all right. But he didn’t believe it. He wanted to ask her to go upstairs to find a telephone, to call for help. He needed an ambulance. They both did. He couldn’t find the breath to give voice to his fear that he was bleeding to death.
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