Dead Lines

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  The shitty taste is still in his mouth; but Rick has resigned himself to that much, at least.

  It will be hours before anyone notices that the goat man’s tortured breathing has stopped.

  ■

  In his dream, he sees the twitching dog again, whining in its pool of mud and gore. He feels the wild thumping of its tiny heart, the wet rattle of its lungs, as surely as he feels the rain that spatters on his head. Behind him, Daddy is digging around in the trunk for something. Ricky, age seven, follows the skidmarks on the highway to the side of the road where their car is stopped. Daddy pulls out something long and shiny.

  And for the millionth time, he watches his father’s grim approach. The cold, set features. The tire iron. For the millionth time, he sees the shadow loom enormous, Daddy towering like Cod over dog and boy. He hears the voice like thunder, telling him to stand aside. He feels himself obey.

  And he watches the cold steel come down in a shimmering arc, whistling through the wind and the rain. He watches the fur-covered skull split in two, the redmeat streams of horror launching off in every direction. The scream spirals up and up, crazily, as it has a million times before; and in the last moment before he turns away, opening wide to part with his fried clams and Hojo Cola, he notes that his father’s hand is coated to the wrist in glistening darkness.

  “It’s alright,” he hears his father say. “I couldn’t just leave him like that, Ricky, you know it? He was suffering.” The massive hands reach down, grabbing him by the shoulders, and the sickly-sweet smell of death assails him from his right, soaking into his T-shirt and haunting him forever. “I had to put him out of his misery,” Daddy says from far away, and he feels himself starting to drift…

  ■

  It was shortly after his ninth birthday that Richard Hale discovered his power. Their tomcat, Tom, had ripped a sparrow to shit and left it bleeding in the backyard. He had shushed Tom away and picked the poor thing up, sensing instantly that death was sliding in like a dagger. The dog’s death was still vivid, even after a year and a half; and when he heard Daddy’s booming laughter from the living room, a tiny voice that he recognized as his own said not this time. Not like that.

  He had put the bird to sleep, effortlessly, with that simple incantation. It had staggered him so much that he threw the sparrow into the woods behind his house, hardly breathing, and gone off by himself for an hour. Daddy’d paddled his ass something fierce when he got home, but he wouldn’t say a word about what happened.

  He never told anyone.

  Through junior and senior high school, he was one of the quiet guys that nobody knew. He got in with the partying crowd, to be sure; but he was the guy zoning out by the stereo, while others played guitar and cracked jokes, punched each other out, or pawed each other in the corners. He was the one who, when conversations turned to Ouija boards and UFOs, reincarnation and dope-spawned cozmic concepts, looked away with a face that spoke silently of pain.

  Graduation found him heading for New York University, where he would study medicine. Summer in the Village was an amazing experience, frightening and exhilarating all at once: he’d had no idea that humanity could rise so high or sink so low. He was staggered by the proximity to famous people, famous places, and the thousands more who aspired to that glittering stratum.

  And then there were the bums.

  Shuffling, shambling, dragging the wreckage of their lives behind them in grocery bags, staring vacant-eyed at invisible things while their voices told the same stories, over and over and over. Even in the sunlight, in comfortable weather, they sent chills down his spine. There were so many of them. Their presence was something that refused to leave him alone. Sometimes his fingertips would tingle just a bit. He tried not to think about it.

  He got a job as an orderly at NYU Medical Center. Classes began, and he threw himself into them. He made friends. He went to parties. He sampled the fruits of romance and rejection. And in weaving his way between the brilliance and the ruin, Rick felt something coming together inside of him. Not quite there yet. But coming. And soon.

  He never told anyone.

  And he never used the power.

  But when the broken bodies of accident victims and the criminally assaulted were wheeled past him in the hospital corridors, he would find himself praying for an opportunity to act. And when the news would come of somebody dying quietly in their sleep, he would experience a strange kind of jubilation: a thrill in the knowledge that cruel fate had been cheated of its option for imposing and sustaining misery.

  Then his first New York City winter had come; and with it, the discovery of his purpose.

  ■

  Like a dream. Like a dream. Turning the corner, a little tipsy, staggering slightly in the cold night wind… ant. almost tripping over the old woman on the sidewalk. Stopping, frozen, and staring at her: the flesh like chalk under a pale blue light, thin as tissue paper, barely covering her bones; the thin, tattered jacket, barely covering her flesh. And feeling the tingle spread across his fingertips.

  It took forty-five minutes to get up the nerve, and almost two weeks to get over.

  But it only took a moment to do.

  She was the first.

  There were more, then. There were always more. Rick found that it became easier as he went along. The pain and guilt faded, giving way to a sense of… what? Call it duty. Call it purpose. Call it chilly resolve. It was something that he could do. The only thing, when you got right down to it.

  And nobody else was there. Nor did it appear that there ever would be.

  So he took them out, one after the other. He cut them loose from their misery, his misery, the whole miserable world’s pain. He said goodbye to the forgotten grandmothers, the abandoned children, the former friends and lovers. He hushed the tortured voices of memory: their only remaining dreams. He tucked them in with a touch and a whisper, sent them gently off into that good night.

  How many? Not less than forty, he was quite sure … although, in truth, he’d lost count somewhere in the middle of January. It was hard to say. There were so many of them.

  And there were always, always more.

  ■

  “Gimme some coffee.” They are in the waiting room at Penn Station, waiting for the Boston express to take his friend Joe home for the weekend, when the bum’s rasping voice first accosts them. Joe brushes him off like a seasoned New Yorker; but Rick stops, staring into that face.

  “Gimme some coffee,” the bum says again, and his eyes are so blank that Rick shudders involuntarily. Filth covers him like a second skin, and the grotesque parody of a clever smile creases both layers on its way to Rick’s sight. He has the face of a mongoloid, without the excuse of having been bom one. He is a shambling, vomitous wreck.

  Rick pauses for a moment, tightening inside, before draining half of his coffee and handing it over without a word. He can feel joe bristling with anger behind him, but he doesn’t care. Let him drink, the small voice inside admonishes. The last supper.

  The bum doesn’t thank him. He takes a swig and spits it quickly onto the floor. Then, as if nothing at all had happened, he looks back up at Rick and says, “Gimme a cigarette.”

  “Wait a minute, pal,” Joe says, coming up beside his friend. “He gave you some coffee, and you spit it all over the fucking floor. Get a cigarette offa somebody else, alright?”

  “Joe!” Rick is as surprised by his own outburst as he is by Joe’s words.

  “Gimme a cigarette,” the bum repeats, now adamant.

  “Fuck you! Get your own cigarettes, goddammit!” Joe’s nostrils are flaring, his face turning red. Rick grabs him by the arm and starts to drag him away, but not before Joe can add, “You’re the scum of the earth!” at the top of his lungs.

  The bum starts laughing then: a dry, utterly humorless sound. The laugh of a man who has turned his back on everything, who no longer cares at all. It cuts through the air like hot shrapnel, forcing startled heads to turn. One of them belongs to a woma
n seated directly behind the bum. He turns to her and speaks, as though the laughter had never happened. He tells her to give him a cigarette.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Rick demands, pushing Joe into a seat beside him, down the aisle from the bum.

  “It just gives me the shits, man,” Joe mumbles, fists clenched in his lap. “I mean, we bust our balls for every penny we get, and we’re paying out the ass for our lousy degrees, and here this joker just sticks his greasy paw out and says gimme gimme gimme, and we’re supposed to hand the world to him on a silver platter so he can piss all over it. Makes me sick, that’s all.” He shakes his head furiously. “Makes me sick to my goddam stomach.”

  “You could have a little more compassion,” Rick says, but the words sound suddenly hollow.

  “Shit. You give it to him, he spits it out. He has no shame. He doesn’t care. Man, he forfeited his right to my respect when that coffee hit the floor. I’d sooner respect a dog turd. I mean, look at him!”

  Rick looks. The bum has a cigarette now, probably culled from the poor woman behind him. He has taken maybe three or four drags off of it. Now he tosses it to the floor and stomps it with his bare foot.

  His bare foot…

  Five pairs of socks are strewn around the floor, along with what passes for a pair of shoes. The bum’s pants are ripped up to the knees, and his legs are red and swollen. For the first time, Rick notices half a buttered bagel on the bum’s lap; with horror, he sees that several pieces are also on the floor, buttered side down.

  The bum takes a bite and chews it slowly. Then he rips a chunk, equal in size, from the bagel and tosses it. When it hits the dirt, Rick feels it like a slug to the stomach.

  “See what I mean?” Joe says, and Rick is unable to argue with him. “This guy is the lowest of the low. I can’t believe that nobody’s gotten around to killing him yet.”

  Rick’s whole body shakes at the comment. He cannot bring himself to meet Joe’s gaze.

  “I mean, doesn’t that make you want to punch that guy’s lights out? Doesn’t it make you wanna just grab him and shake him and say, ‘Hey, asshole! Wise the fuck up!’”

  “No.” Rick states it with conviction. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

  But when the hardass cop comes strutting over and tells the bum to get out… when the bum stoops to pick up his filthy socks and shoes, leaving the area strewn with spilled coffee and bits of bagel… when the bum disappears, laughing his soulless, inhuman mockery of laughter, Rick looks at him and silently says you’re next, baby. You’re next.

  ■

  That night… this night…the dream comes swiftly. He is kneeling over the dog, and his father is coming: a deadly leviathan, gaining unholy mass with every step, the tire iron glimmering cold as a thousand New York winters, obscenely huge in the grip of his clean right hand. As the shadow falls over them, Ricky hears a voice that he recognizes as his own say not this time. Not like that.

  Daddy tells him to stand aside, but the voice is strangely impotent: the thunder, the authority, is gone. Rick hesitates only a moment, pulled by the past and its endless repetitions. Then he moves. Shielding the dog’s body with his own, reaching down to take its head in his hands.

  To end its suffering, bloodlessly.

  To put it to sleep.

  Now, he whispers, and closes his eyes.

  That’s when the dog whirls suddenly, lunging with its sharp-fanged death’s-head grin, and rips his hand off at the wrist.

  ■

  4:27 in the morning, again. Manhattan, asleep under a thin, shabby blanket of snow. Behind the glass doors, three of them are sleeping in the entrance to Grand

  Central’s subway station. Rick watches and weighs, leaving round blobs of mist on the glass with his breath. And nobody else is there.

  The dream will not leave him alone. It claws at the back of his head like a rat behind a wall, trying to break through. He tries to ignore it.

  But he can’t.

  But here I am, aren’t I? Smiling sadly. Doing it anyway. I must be crazy. Rick takes another drag off his cigarette, a creature of two minds, watching over the broken men. Under the heavy winter coat he is sweating; and the violent shaking of his hands has very little to do with the cold.

  Rick lets the cigarette slip from between his fingers unfinished; he grinds it into the snow with his boot. No time for amenities. If he’s going to act, it has got to be now: before anyone comes, or his fear overwhelms him, or the bums in the foyer awaken.

  God, I’m scared, he thinks. I must be outta my goddam mind. Then he opens the door, almost independent of thought, and steps quietly inside.

  Softly, slowly, Rick moves toward the far wall, where the men lay sprawled out in filthy, tattered heaps. The air is thick with spilled liquor and piss, ripening in the heat from the tunnels below. It turns his stomach, and he almost stops. But not quite.

  For as he draws nearer, and the foyer widens to meet the top of the stairs, Rick realizes that the man in the center is the very one he’d been looking for. The realization jolts him, while the rat behind the wall in the back of his head claws away with renewed vigor.

  Shut up, he tells himself, fighting for inner control. The entranceway seems suddenly brighter, the bums starker in relief against the bareness of the wall. He lingers, trembling, while his eyes take in every detail of the three figures before him.

  The one on the left is small, slight, almost completely hairless. His skin is incredibly smooth and thin. There is an embryonic quality about him; curled up on the floor with his beak nose and bulging eyes, he reminds Rick of a chicken fetus floating inside an egg.

  The one on the right is much larger, with thick graying hair and a massive beard surrounding his strong, finely chiseled features. Years of drinking have eroded his face, like a statue left standing through a thousand acid rains; but there is still something commanding about him, an air of regality lost.

  And then there is the man in the center: the bagel-strewer, the spitter of coffee, with his blank eyes and horrible laughter. Sleep has not softened the apelike features or brought to light any hidden attributes that might have redeemed him. He is still ugly as a slug; and the wet trail behind him suggests an aptness to the comparison that makes Rick shudder.

  He catches himself in the midst of a deep, miserable sigh and realizes that he has been standing there for the last three minutes or more. Come on, he urges himself. Get it over with or get the hell out of here. One or the other, man. Now.

  But there is no question as to which it will be. After only a moment’s hesitation, he advances once again toward them.

  The man on the left is closest. Rick goes to him first. His naked scalp is baby-soft and clammy as Rick touches him with fingertips that feel drained of all circulation.

  And listens. Like all the times before.

  It only takes a moment.

  Then Rick is on his feet again, moving like a man in a dream toward the center figure. Kneeling there with his hands outstretched. Touching. Hearing. Saying the words. And rising again, amazed by how little he feels, how simple and quick and nothing it was in the end.

  Now there is only the man on the right: the fallen king, slumped against the wall like a monarch dozing on his throne. Rick stares at him for a moment, hesitating. What is it? he asks himself, but his mind offers up no useful explanations.

  Only the continuous scraping of the rat.

  Shut up, he angrily commands. Come on. This is stupid. But there is a tentativeness in his step that he has never known before as he moves to the head of the subway stairs and kneels before the broken man…

  … who reaches up suddenly with one gnarled graying talon and grabs Rick firmly by the wrist.

  Rick screams.

  “You’re the one, ain’tcha?” The voice is sibilant, horrible. The rheumy eyes are a baleful red. They are judge’s eyes. They latch onto Rick’s and hold them helplessly, as a hideous grin crackles across his lips and begins to bleed.

  “I b
een waitin’ for you,” the man says, leaning forward until his face is mere inches from Rick’s. “I knew you’d come. Sooner or later. I knew.”

  Rick screams again. Crazily, instinctively, he pulls himself backwards and to his feet. The bum comes up with him, smoothly, as though they were two dancers in a neatly choreographed routine, one hand holding firmly onto Rick’s wrist, the other reaching down to grab a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 by the throat.

  “Who appointed you God, mister? That’s what I wanna know. Who the hell do you think you are, decidin’ when ifs time for me to die?” The words are loaded with so much violence that Rick feels them rather than hears them. Nothing makes sense, suddenly. Nothing is clear.

  A part of Rick wants to offer some kind of explanation: about the power, the dog, the whole mad succession of events leading up to this moment. It’s a ridiculous thought, he knows, yet it persists, the parlor liberal inside him making one last pointless stand. His body, infinitely more sensible, tries once again to pull away, without success.

  The wine bottle comes up in a strobing slow motion, a dance of light across its surface. Rick watches it, frozen. Something prickles at the boundaries of his conscious mind from somewhere beyond; he struggles, for a moment, to identify it…

  … and then it strikes him with horrible, infinite clarity. It is sound: a billowing, echoing cacophony of sound, overwhelming in its density and texture and tone. It is the sound of inarticulate, goatlike braying; it is the sound of mocking, inhuman laughter; it is the sound of falling plaster, of a rat’s triumphant chittering song.

  It is the sound of a dog’s dying howl. Gnashing teeth. Breaking bone.

  It is the sound of a heart, wildly pounding. And pounding. And pounding…

  It is the last thing Rick will ever hear.

  Then the bottle comes around in its deadly shimmering arc and smashes into the side of his head. Pieces of glass splinter off and imbed themselves in his soft face and temple. The world goes black and mercifully silent, yet he remains on his feet, staggering.