by L. T. Vargus
“Hey.”
Loshak’s response was muffled by the closet.
“What?”
“You still have that box of cords?”
The shoe box skittered over the floor, landing with a bump against her toe. It was another few minutes before she had untangled the nest of wires enough to find the correct cable.
Abandoning the closet, Loshak came to stand behind her as she connected the cord to the old Flip camera.
“Whatcha got?” he asked.
She pointed the lens at him and waggled it back and forth.
“Video camera.”
Loshak followed her out to the living room where she hooked up the other end of the cable so they could watch on a screen larger than the tiny LCD. After exchanging a suspenseful glance with her partner, Darger pressed the PLAY button.
Chapter 46
Blurry forms took shape, sharpening as the camera’s autofocus made adjustments. It was Luke Foley’s face that emerged, filling the screen. The date stamp on the video would have made him fifteen or sixteen. He wore a black Metallica t-shirt and had the same gaunt face with the hollowed out cheeks, but his hair was longer and his complexion was spotted with acne.
The shot pulled out and swiveled over to a glass jar on a kitchen counter top. The label said, “Pickled Jalapeno Slices.”
“How much will you give me?” The question came from a boy in an Atlanta Falcons hat. He looked to be about the same age as Luke.
“I’ve got two bucks,” Luke said. “Levi’s got five.”
“Why do I have to give him five bucks if you’re only giving him two?” From the proximity of the voice, Levi was the one manning the camera.
“Just do it,” Luke said.
In the background, two other boys removed rumpled bills from their pockets.
There was a sigh from off-screen. The camera shifted as Levi handed it off to Luke, who zoomed in on his brother’s hand dropping the five-dollar bill to the pile. It was mostly singles, maybe fifteen or twenty bucks all together.
“Seventeen bucks,” Luke announced. “That means seventeen seconds.”
“Seventeen seconds of what?” Darger wondered aloud.
And then the boy in the Falcons cap unzipped his pants. Darger groaned as her brain did some quick math and figured out where this stunt was headed.
Loshak’s voice came from over her shoulder. “Ah yes, the old wanger-in-the-pickle-jar routine.”
She took her gaze from the screen long enough to frown at her partner.
“It’s really a wonder that our species has survived this long,” she said. “What is it about adolescent boys being so enthusiastic about performing parlor tricks with their genitals?”
Loshak held up a finger.
“Some adolescent boys. I prefer to keep spicy food above the waist.”
“Good to know,” Darger said.
The voices on the video counted down from seventeen, with Luke waving his arms like a maestro conducting an orchestra.
“Seventeen! Sixteen! Fifteen!”
The kid performing the act appeared fairly unperturbed thus far, aside from complaining about the coldness of the liquid when they’d first begun. But when the countdown reached ten, his face changed. His eyes suddenly bulged, revealing too much of the whites. Wrinkles formed on his brow, and his jaw dropped open.
He inhaled sharply. His feet did a little jig, reminding Darger of a jointed puppet. The boys had only reached the number seven when he wrenched away from the jar with a shriek and ran for the sink. As he attempted to splash water on his crotch, screaming about how much it burned, the camera got a shot of his friends all buckled at the waist, laughing so hard some of them had tears in their eyes.
“Get him some milk!” Luke coughed through his glee.
Someone fetched a half gallon of skim milk from the refrigerator, and Falcons Hat proceeded to pour it down his pants.
“A bowl! I need a bowl!”
This made Luke laugh so hard he keeled over on the floor, grasping his sides. His laugh was high-pitched and reminded Darger of someone who had inhaled helium.
The video cut.
The next bit featured grimy walls, dim lighting, loud music, and people shouting to be heard over it. A house party. The camera wove between the churning sea of bodies. Every hand held a red Solo cup.
Through a doorway into a kitchen. A pair of legs in the air and voices chanting, “Chug! Chug! Chug!” The feet flailed and came down to meet the floor. The crowd cheered. Keg stands. The next person stepped forward, eager to demonstrate their chugging prowess. The clip ended.
Another party, or the same party, who could tell? Levi, eyelids drooping, speech slurred. Obviously wasted. He practically swayed back and forth where he stood. He and Luke in conversation that couldn’t be heard over the music. Levi said something. Luke laughed and gave him a light shove. So drunk that a feather would have knocked him off-kilter, Levi stumbled a few steps backward and fell ass-first into a cardboard box. Luke and the other kids standing around howled with hilarity.
The scene changed again. A sixteen-year-old Levi perched on the roof of someone’s house. Nearby, a metal slide led to a nearby pool. Bridging the gap between roof and slide was a length of plywood, forming a very sketchy ramp. Darger guessed he was considering running down the roof, onto the ramp, and leaping onto the slide.
Standing in the yard below, Luke egged him on from behind the camera.
“Come on, man. Don’t be a pussy.”
Levi called out something unintelligible in response.
There was more goading, and then a countdown. Ten down to one. And then Levi lurched forward, trying to stand, and Darger noticed for the first time that he had inline skates strapped to his feet.
“Oh, God,” she muttered.
Levi tried to stand tall, wobbled, and then settled for a squat as the wheels rolled over the shingles with a bump-bump bump-bump.
Surprisingly, he made it all the way to the edge of the roof without incident. It was the makeshift ramp that tripped him up. The plywood must have been just a hair too high. When the roller blades struck it, the whole sheet shifted forward, uncovering the rain gutter. The front wheel on Levi’s right foot caught in the empty space, throwing him off-balance. He catapulted over the roof several feet shy of the slide, spread out like a flying squirrel.
He hit the ground with a thud.
The camera shook wildly as Luke ran over to capture Levi writhing in the grass, holding his arm. He sat up, and Darger saw the sharp end of a bone protruding from his flesh. There were shouts, and the camera angle twisted awkwardly and went black.
Later, in what Darger assumed was the ER waiting room, an older woman with thick waves of brown hair ranted at whoever sat behind the camera. It had to be their mother. From the odd angle of the camera and the way her head was partially out of frame, Darger figured she didn’t even know the camera was recording.
“Do you not understand how serious this is? Your brother is in surgery right now, having his bones screwed back together. He’ll have to wear a cast for at least six weeks. The doctor says there could be permanent nerve damage,” she said, then jabbed an artificial fingernail into the Formica tabletop. “He could have died.”
Luke didn’t respond, and Mrs. Foley persisted.
“What the hell were you thinking? Do you have no sense?”
“I didn’t know he was gonna get hurt,” Luke said, his voice sullen and detached.
“Do you have a single brain cell left in that thick head of yours, or have you killed them all with your liquor and your drugs? What did you think was going to happen? Did you think your brother was going to suddenly sprout wings and take flight?”
Luke was silent for a time, and then he muttered, “I don’t do drugs.”
His mother scoffed.
“I am at my wit’s end with you, Lucas. You lie, you cheat, you steal—”
“When did I—”
She cut him off with a chopping hand mot
ion.
“Enough! It’s bad enough the shit you pull on your own. You know you are this close to being expelled? And now you’re dragging your brother into it? I am so disappointed in you.”
The video cut off. A new scene took shape.
The point-of-view glided down a corridor bathed in harsh institutional lighting. The main sound was the loud slap and squeak of footsteps on the polished floor.
A large set of glass doors drew closer. In the reflection, Darger could make out Levi, fresh cast on one arm, camera clutched in the opposite hand. He hunched in a wheelchair with Luke pushing from behind.
Instead of slowing, the speed of the footsteps increased.
“Don’t crash me into the doors, dude,” Levi said.
“They open automatically.”
“Yeah, but — hey!“
It was too late. In the reflection, Darger could see Luke thrust the wheelchair forward and release it. Levi sailed down the remainder of the hallway, gasping as the glass barrier drew near. At the last moment, the doors opened, and he sped through. On the other side of the doors, a man walking up the sidewalk stood directly in the path of the chair.
“Watch out!” Levi yelled.
The man dove out of the way, but now Levi was bearing down on the street. The camera tumbled from his grip as he released it to fumble for the brakes on the chair. There was a screech and then the world lurched and rolled, the rotating jumble of images on the TV screen looking like footage from inside a clothes dryer.
A loud clatter blotted out most of the other sounds and then a beat of silence. The camera was upside-down, the slowly spinning spokes of the upended wheelchair taking up most of the screen. There was a groan, and then Levi’s foot kicked into view.
The thud of shoes clodding down the sidewalk got louder as they approached the microphone. The camera righted itself as Luke picked it up and focused the lens on his brother.
“Dude!”
Levi blinked up at his older brother.
“That was awesome. You totally bit it,” Luke said.
There was a flash of anger in Levi’s eyes, and then Luke burst into his tittering, chipmunk laugh. Levi’s face softened. He grinned and chuckled along as his brother helped him to his feet.
“Hey!”
Both boys turned back to the entrance of the hospital where a large and furious-looking nurse in teal scrubs stood with her hands on her hips.
“Where did you get that wheelchair? You boys better—”
Luke did not wait for her to finish.
“Run!” he said and took off down the sidewalk leaving his brother to catch up.
The clip ended.
“Brotherly love,” Loshak said, as the next video file began to play.
Luke hunched over Levi’s cast, embellishing it with a black Sharpie.
“This thing smells like ass,” Luke said.
“I know, man,” Levi agreed. “Larry Green told me that when he got the cast off his hand, it was all skinny and weird and like, filthy.”
Luke appeared to be a talented artist, if a macabre one. He had drawn a smiling skull with bulging eyeballs on Levi’s cast, and around the skull, a halo of flames. Now he worked on another section of Levi’s arm. It was on the back of the cast, currently out of Levi’s view. Eventually, it became clear to Darger that he was drawing a large penis with testicles. He snickered to himself as he drew. Finally, Levi figured out something was going on.
“What are you drawing now?”
“It’s not done yet, dickface.”
“Let me see it.”
“When I’m finished!”
Levi, much too suspicious now, finagled away from Luke’s grip and angled his arm to get a look.
“Luke! You asshole!”
He lunged at the camera and the video ended abruptly.
Darger skipped through the files until she found one dated several years later.
The shot was unfocused at first, but from the murmur of voices, it was clearly footage of a crowd. As the frame sharpened, Darger made out the familiar scene of people milling about the baggage claim of an airport.
The camera swayed ever so slightly from side-to-side, as if the person operating it was nervously stepping from one foot to the other.
An elderly man in a raincoat stepped aside, and a man in full combat uniform approached the camera. Darger squinted, almost not recognizing him.
It was Luke, but he was changed. More serious. A haunted look in his eyes. He was no longer the laughing class clown. The court jester.
A young woman with curly auburn hair stepped into the frame. Darger knew from the meeting that it was Luke’s ex-wife, though in the video, they would have still been married. The couple hugged and kissed and then parted.
“Hey, man,” Levi said, and the camera shifted as the brothers embraced.
When they pulled back, Luke asked, “Where’s mom?”
“She couldn’t come,” Levi said.
Luke’s nose twitched once, the only sign that he’d even heard Levi’s response.
The screen went black and the blue menu screen appeared. There were no more files to play.
Chapter 47
A single bar of light slipped through a crack between the curtains, and Levi stared at the spot where the glowing sliver wrapped itself from the wall onto the ceiling. His eyes felt glassy now, several steps beyond the sand flung feeling he’d experienced earlier. Even so, he looked into the light.
He still couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t sure how long it had been anymore. It was too confusing to try to count the days at this point. His brain wasn’t up to it.
Confusion. That summed up his feelings in general. If the disorientation had truly seeded itself with the pregnant woman, it had blossomed into something more with the introduction of the explosives. His mind circled back to the same questions over and over.
Who or what was Luke targeting?
And how much C4 did he have?
Based on how willing he’d been to use up a couple pounds of the stuff on their tests in the junkyard, Levi suspected his brother had quite a lot stashed somewhere. Ready to do mass destruction.
He could still feel that rattle he’d felt in his sternum when the El Camino got its roof and doors blown off. Could still see the ball of fire and the glimpse of the damage done before the smoke closed around it. They’d moved even further back for the bigger blast that took out the washing machine, and Luke had used a couple of hunks of plastic explosive, each the size of a foot-long from Subway. That was a massive overkill, of course. Luke said he wanted to see it obliterated into bits so small you couldn’t tell what color the thing had been.
According to Luke, the conventional wisdom was that a lump the size of a potato could take out a normal suburban home, and that a single one of those foot-long sized chunks could take out an I-beam if positioned correctly and detonated with a ribbon charge. Mulling over the amount of mayhem Luke could cause with these explosives made Levi’s belly knot with dread.
He rolled over, thought about getting up for the millionth time. But no. What use would it be? It was 1:26 AM according to the alarm clock on the night stand. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go.
Luke’s breathing filtered into Levi’s consciousness then, slow and deep and even. Regardless of his surroundings or circumstances, his brother slept without issue. He always had.
An hour seeped past like that. He tossed and turned in bed, and his thoughts did the same, making less and less sense with each passing minute, slowly devolving as the lack of sleep won out over his ability to reason.
Confusion gave way to delirium, a strange fever dream logic overtaking his thinking as he lost his grip on reality.
Again, he watched that sliver of light where it peeked through the crack in the curtains, but now it danced on the ceiling, undulating like a glowing tentacle.
He was losing his shit.
And he was up now. On his feet. Moving quickly. Quietly. Gliding across the room to the door. S
cooping the keys along the way.
It didn’t fully occur to him that he’d left the room until he felt the carpet change to wet cement under his bare feet. It had sprinkled on and off all evening. Slicked the sidewalk and parking lot. The streetlights gleamed off of the places where puddles formed among the lot’s gravel.
He eased the motel door shut behind him.
The road and parking lot were empty. Utterly still. And silence sprawled in all directions to smother the scene. That awful kind of silence that made him feel vulnerable and small right away, made him hold his breath, made his eyes swivel for signs of danger. The kind of silence that made him feel alone.
He staggered. His balance wobbling. He felt drunk. His thoughts and motor skills breaking down due to exhaustion.
And now he moved from the sidewalk down two steps onto the gravel, the texture once more transforming under his feet, going rougher and wetter, almost slimy.
The thick night air swirled around his body like fog. Heavy and chilly, like walking into a damp basement. Something about it was too cold to be normal, though. It constricted his chest and gave him goose bumps.
He looked down at himself for the first time and noted that he wore nothing but boxers. He hadn’t realized that. Most of his body was exposed to the night, that wet air moistening his skin, making direct contact from head to toe. But it didn’t matter now. Get on with it.
Levi climbed into the Jeep, fumbling in the dark to find the right key and insert it into the ignition. He got it. The dash lights lit up, their green glow shattering the darkness, illuminating everything before him. The starter grated and whined a little before it caught.
His eyes lingered on the door to their room as the engine came to life. He half expected Luke to come busting out with a shotgun or something, racking and firing wildly, flames and buckshot raining out of the barrel in waves. But nothing happened. Not so much as a twitch of the curtains over the window.
The Jeep eased out of the parking lot, the tires making that wet sound against the ground. He felt better once he was away from the motel.
