by Bryan Smith
But the problem with that was that the last vestiges of his buzz were deserting him. Every time he regained consciousness, he edged a little bit closer to the dreaded state of total sobriety. He began to suspect that a time of psychological reckoning was coming regardless of how desperately he tried to avoid it. This was what he was thinking before he drifted into his next period of unconsciousness.
This time he was only out a few minutes. When he opened his eyes, someone had removed the tarp and he could see again, but the sunlight had faded some. He was still in the back of the truck, but it had stopped moving. He heard voices nearby, Floyd and his buddy, Cletus. They were talking about someone named Delmont. One of them said something about checking out the sheriff’s office, which sounded like a really excellent idea to Harley. Why these scumbags would want to get anywhere near a law enforcement facility was kind of mystifying, but he wasn’t about to try to talk them out of it. He planned to start screaming his lungs out as soon as he sensed they were within earshot of anyone in a uniform.
Because…
Harley’s face crumpled and his eyes filled with tears as reality hit him like a freight train. The last lingering effects of the weed dissipated, leaving him stone sober for the first time in days. There could be no more hiding from what had happened. His best friends were dead. Two of the only people in the world who’d ever truly understood him and had never judged. They were just gone.
Forever.
There was a groan of metal and then a thunk as someone let the truck’s tailgate down. Harley whimpered when he turned his head and saw one of the big rednecks climb up into the truck bed. It was Cletus, the one with the hideously racist T-shirt mocking a cartoon version of the president. Cletus grabbed him and lifted him up, cradling him in his arms as easily as another person would hold a small child. He walked Harley to the edge of the tailgate and unceremoniously dumped him to the ground.
Harley cried out as his body hit hard asphalt. He rolled onto his side and saw that he was in the middle of a street in some small town. His confusion deepened as he spied various businesses on either side of the street. That this was happening at all was mysterious enough, but Harley was especially baffled by why these guys would be doing such a thing in what still amounted to broad daylight. It was like an invitation to get arrested and sent straight to fucking death row. Surely many people would very shortly take note of what was happening and call the cops. These guys were not just crazy and dangerous, they were stupid as hell.
This impression deserted Harley as he began to pick out other details about his surroundings, like how the street seemed completely deserted except for him and the rednecks. Also, many of the buildings were boarded-up and there were no other vehicles anywhere in the vicinity. It was as if he’d blundered into a post-apocalyptic scenario similar to ones from some of his favorite television programs. This place was a ghost town.
Before he could make any guesses about where this place was and why they were here, Cletus hauled Harley off the asphalt and made him kneel in the street. Harley’s throat clenched and he began to panic at the thought of what might be about to happen, a feeling that only worsened when Floyd stepped in front of him.
Floyd had a pump shotgun clutched in his hands. He pointed it at a spot in the street. “What do you reckon that is, boy?”
Harley frowned. “What?”
His teeth clacked together as Cletus clouted him in the back of the head.
Floyd chuckled. “One of these days I’m gonna go into that whole Pulp Fiction bit when one of these fools starts in with that ‘what’ business. You remember that scene, Cletus?”
“Yup.” Cletus flicked a finger against Harley’s skull. “How about you, boy? You remember that?”
“What?”
Cletus cackled.
Floyd pointed the shotgun’s barrel at the spot on the asphalt again. “Take a good look at that stain and tell me what you think it is.”
Harley wasn’t sure what these goons expected of him. It was pretty obvious what the stain was. They were playing some kind of game here. He was the butt of a joke, just as he’d been back in those middle school days before he started hanging out with the burnouts and found his niche, such as it was. Before that happened, he had no friends and was picked on relentlessly by seemingly everyone. His scrawniness made him an easy target for abuse. And now his friends were gone and it was as if time had run backward and taken him back to the bad old days.
And just like back then, he was in no position to fight back. What else could he do but play along with the joke?
He looked at Floyd. “Pretty sure it’s motor oil.”
Floyd nodded. “You know, I think you’re right.” His tone said he’d known this all along, of course. “Is it fresh?”
“What?”
Floyd rolled his eyes as he turned his face to the heavens. “Lord, give me patience.”
Cletus again smacked the back of his head. “Man asked you a question. Answer it.”
Harley’s terror began to get the best of him. His bottom lip trembled and tears welled in his eyes. He hadn’t felt this sober in years and wished more than anything that he could be doing bong rips with James and Big Train right now. But that was useless magical thinking. These guys would kill him if he didn’t play their goddamn game. Hell, they were probably going to kill him anyway, but Harley didn’t want to die and the longer he could forestall that eventuality, the better. So he bent his head toward the ground and took a closer look at the stain.
It looked wet.
He lifted his head and looked at Floyd. “It’s pretty fresh.”
“Are you sure?”
Harley nodded. “Pretty sure, yeah.”
Floyd made a tsk-tsk noise and shook his head. “Son, I’m gonna need you to be absolutely positive. So here’s what you’re gonna do.” A nasty, evil-looking grin curved his mouth now. “Put your ugly mug down there on the street and taste the motor oil.”
Harley groaned. “Oh, come on. Do I have to do that?”
A gun barrel touched the back of his head. “Do it,” Cletus said, his voice low and menacing. “Or there’s gonna be another stain on this fuckin’ street in a minute.”
The gun pushed against the back of his skull. Again, there was no way to resist or do anything other than exactly what they wanted. So he bent at the waist and tried lowering his face to the pavement. Having his hands tied so tightly behind his back made this more difficult than it should have been, even for a normally limber guy like himself. He gasped when Cletus clamped a hand around his neck and pushed his face to the street. The rednecks started screaming at him, exhorting him to lick the motor oil or have his skull emptied.
Harley stuck out his tongue and lapped up motor oil, tears pouring down his face as he did it. Cletus let go of him and both men whooped hysterical laughter. Floyd was so amused he actually slapped his thigh several times.
When their laughter subsided, Cletus hauled Harley to his knees again.
Floyd pointed to another stain some twenty feet farther down the street. “What about that one, boy? That motor oil, too?”
Harley sniffled and blinked away tears. “I don’t know.”
Floyd arranged his features in an expression of mock sorrow. “Listen, son, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. You see, we already know the boy we’re lookin’ for is dead. You can’t see it on account of being tied up and on your knees, but we found some blood stains up yonder.” He pointed to somewhere behind and to the left of Harley with the shotgun. “Trail of blood led right to him. Now, his lady has a temper on her like you wouldn’t believe.”
Cletus let out a low whistle. “Lordy, does she ever.”
Floyd grimaced. “Ain’t either one of us looking forward to breaking the news to Jodi Lynn. We’d like to be able to track down whoever killed Delmont and take the sumbitch back to her for justice, closure, and such.” He turned away from Harley and pointed at the stain down the street again. “We’re thinking these stains ar
e from the vehicle driven by the bastards who killed our friend. What do you say? That strike you as a logical deduction?”
A snot bubble emerged from Harley’s right nostril and swelled to the size of a marble before it popped. His whole body was racked with tremors as he made himself meet Floyd’s gaze. “I…I guess so?”
Floyd’s face conveyed phony disappointment. “I’m sorry, son, but that’s just not gonna be good enough. We need to know for sure, you see?” He stepped aside and waved the gun in the direction of the next stain. “You get on up there and check it out, okay?”
Harley clumsily tried to get to his feet so he could walk to the stain, but a firm hand on his shoulder pushed him back down.
Floyd’s expression was stony. “No, son. Walk on your knees.”
Harley gaped at him. “Please don’t make me do that.”
Cletus put his gun against the back of Harley’s head again. “Do it, boy”
All his remaining dignity gone forever, Harley began to waddle forward on his knees. The men chuckled and walked with him, Cletus maintaining his position to the rear.
After he had managed several awkward yards of progress, Harley heard Cletus say, “Sure you don’t want to hang on to this one?”
“Nah. Not enough meat on his bones.”
“Yeah, guess you’re right. Can I do the honors this time?”
Harley thought, Holy Jesus…
Floyd grunted. “Sure, but make it fast. Sooner we catch up to Delmont’s killers, the better.”
Harley heard the cocking of a gun right behind his ear. He screwed his eyes shut as he quit waddling. As he knelt there sobbing in the street, he put an image in his head of James and Big Train, the three of them hanging out in heaven and doing bong rips forever.
The gunshot that killed Harley echoed through the empty street.
He didn’t hear it.
20.
The light was getting dimmer outside. Pretty soon it would be hard to see in the house even with the window blinds open. Jessica stood at one of the living room windows and looked out at a scene rendered surreal by the fading daylight. Some of the neighboring houses had been boarded-up, while others had not. There was no rhyme or reason to it she could tell. Maybe the boarded ones were filled with rotting bodies. The yards had turned into overgrown fields and in some cases had overtaken the driveways. A few years ago the view from the window would have been of an ordinary neighborhood. But this was a dead place now, laden with a sense of stillness and slow decay. She felt a weird kind of awe at realizing this was how the whole world would look not long after an extinction-level event wiped out the last of the human race.
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. The human race had a lot of amazing technological and artistic accomplishments to its credit, but Jessica had seen enough of the human animal at its worst to know the bad far outweighed the good. Humans were beasts capable of a level of savagery far exceeding any of the so-called “lower species” in the animal kingdom. Human beings took advantage of each other and exploited each other whenever they could. They also often reveled in the pain and suffering of others. It had been that way from the beginning and it would be that way until the last woman on earth had drawn her last breath.
In Afghanistan and in secret prisons around the world, she had participated in countless prisoner interrogations, often utilizing techniques that went well beyond what was legally acceptable for agencies like Homeland Security. Waterboarding was the worst thing in their arsenal. And while waterboarding was no fun at all, it was child’s play compared to the range of far more severe options available to Jessica’s secret unit, which were often more medieval in nature. None of it was officially sanctioned by anyone in the higher levels of government, of course, but in the years since 9/11 units like hers had been granted a freedom to operate any way they saw fit and no one ever examined their activities too closely. Some people suspected some not very nice things were happening, but results were what mattered. The world was being kept safe and that was all anyone really cared about.
For a long time, Jessica had believed in what she was doing. The end justified the means. And because she had done the awful things she had done in service to her country, she had believed none of it meant there was something wrong or broken inside her. But she had been wrong about at least the latter part of that. Little by little, her soul had been chipped away, her sense of what was okay and what wasn’t okay forever tarnished.
She looked at Billy. Here was the ultimate proof of the irreversible damage done to her spirit, her humanity. He was again flat on his back on the sofa, staring up at the increasingly dark ceiling with eyes that looked as unfocused as those of a catatonic. She stared at him and waited to feel the regret she knew a normal person would feel in the aftermath of doing bad things.
But, except in one small way, regret remained elusive.
The assault on Billy hadn’t ended with the forced oral sex. After riding his face for an intensely pleasurable several minutes, she had pulled his pants down and sucked him hard. He was crying the whole time, but his body helplessly responded to her oral ministrations. So she got on top of him and pulled him into her, riding his cock with ferocious abandon until he popped inside her. Yet another of the many ways in which she was being reckless. There was no condom, no protection of any kind, and she was ovulating. They might very well have conceived a life just now.
Jessica shook her head at the thought.
As if I needed any other proof that I’m not in my right mind.
The sexual part of it had been just the first phase in her assault on Billy. After that, the torture commenced. Now that it was over, she was having a harder time understanding why any of it had happened, but the torture bothered her more than anything else. It made her think that this was just who she was now, that her time in black ops had turned her into the kind of person who simply enjoyed hurting other people, because there was no getting away from the fact that a part of her had enjoyed hurting Billy. Watching his face twist in agony when she inserted a screwdriver in his wound had thrilled her almost as much as the sex.
Jesus…what has become of me?
The screwdriver was on the coffee table next to an open toolbox. She had found the toolbox while rooting through the cabinets in the kitchen. In addition, she had found some very sharp knives in a wooden block. These were also on the coffee table. She had used them to cut on Billy. His face and torso were nicked in dozens of places.
The whole thing went on way longer than she had originally intended. During that time, she was a slave to compulsion, to an inner urge to hurt and punish Billy as much as possible, way, way out of proportion to anything his earlier resistance might have merited. After a while, she understood the compulsion was a kind of defense mechanism. She was trying to dehumanize Billy, to render what she had done acceptable because his pain didn’t really matter.
Jessica felt something wet on her cheek.
She frowned.
What’s this?
She touched her cheek and saw moisture on her fingertips when she pulled her hand away.
Oh, fuck. I’m crying.
She was startled because it’d been so long since she’d shed tears for anyone other than herself. But maybe the sense that the tears were for Billy was delusion, a belated, desperate attempt to believe that she could still feel empathy for others. It was just as possible that the tears were a delayed result of stress, of too much bearing down on her all at once.
Or maybe you’re overthinking this. Maybe the real you really is starting to wake up again.
At this point, she felt more moisture on her cheeks.
Fuck.
She wiped the tears away and tried hard to make them stop. During her time in the unit, she had been taught various ways of controlling her emotions. These included meditation and in-depth psychological analysis, as well as some experimental techniques involving hypnosis and drug therapy. Much of this occurred during an extended stay at the unit’s facility
in Maine. By the time she was sent into the field for the first time, she was able to disconnect from emotion entirely, a good and useful thing in her line of work.
Now, however, she seemed to be losing a grip on all the things she had learned.
“I’m sorry I hurt you, Billy.”
He had no visible reaction to her voice. It was the first either of them had said anything in more than half an hour and he didn’t even blink. Maybe he was so lost inside himself—so deeply traumatized—that he didn’t know she was here, or where he was for that matter. It was possible. She had seen things like it before. And if this was like those times, it might be a while before he was cognizant of his surroundings again.
She wasn’t sure why she was apologizing anyway. There was little point to words of regret in these situations. Regardless of which side of the equation you were on, they always rang hollow. All her moral handwringing aside, she wasn’t sure how sorry she really was. And even if he had heard and understood her, the words would have been meaningless to Billy. She had done what she had done and it could never be taken back, the damage both physically and mentally never entirely repaired.
Unable to bear looking at him even a second longer, Jessica walked out of the living room and through the kitchen to the back door. Though she was upset, her training had not completely deserted her. Rather than hauling the door open and rushing heedlessly outside, she paused at the door to peer through the window.
The sky was continuing to darken, but there was still some daylight, enough to sit outside for a few minutes before nightfall blanketed the neighborhood. She saw Billy’s truck and the back of another house on the other side of the overgrown field. She turned her face and pressed a cheek to the window to expand her field of vision. There still wasn’t the slightest trace of activity in the area, no cars and no people. Still, she hesitated a little longer, remembering her earlier paranoid suspicions about a lingering military presence in the area. As she stood there and thought about it, the dark tinge to the sky deepened even more.
