Red Rain: Lightning Strikes: Red Rain Series #2

by David Beers

  And she wasn’t done caring about him, either.

  She didn’t know how she would talk to him, but she knew she would keep trying. She cared about John and wasn’t quitting just because he hid something.

  No. Quit wasn’t in Cindy.

  * * *

  John paced.

  Back and forth across his room.

  “Take your mind off it,” Harry said. “You know how.”

  John didn’t look up. He wasn’t sad at what happened earlier that day, but angry—with himself. He couldn’t focus his mind on anything else but what he said to her, and the stress mounting from this constant worry felt overpowering, as if he might collapse on the floor from such a great weight.

  “Look, you didn’t want me touching her, so you did what you thought you needed to. Fine, I’m not going to be mad about it. But sitting here pacing won't bring her back. Going up one side of yourself and down the other with guilt won’t do anything either. We can do something, however.”

  How many weeks had John been resisting this? Arguing and arguing. For what? For his mother to tell him she already knew and him to lose his first girlfriend?

  The change in John wasn’t gradual, like a mountain slowly degrading against the relentless force of nature’s elements. No, the change occurred more like an earthquake right under the mountain, cracking it apart from bottom to top, from outside to core. All at once, the ground shifted, and when the first piece broke, the rest came right after.

  “What?”John said, his pacing finished.

  “I’ve been looking at some places,” Harry said, smiling.

  “Where?”

  “Well, about a mile from the school I found something pretty interesting. I think you might like it.”

  John went to the door and grabbed his coat hanging next to it. “Let’s go,” he said. He walked out of the room without waiting for Harry to follow.

  He exited the dorm and Harry was already outside on the stoop.

  “Which way?” John said. He didn’t care anymore. He was so sick of fucking fighting it, of wanting it, and without any help coming from anywhere—except Harry.

  “Oh, I like this version of John better,” he said. “Come on, this way.”

  John walked slightly behind Harry, who hummed a song that John couldn’t quite place. John looked down at his watch and saw it was one in the morning. If someone caught him out this late, he’d face repercussions tomorrow, but that mattered about as much as a tear in a hurricane.

  “How do you want to do it?” Harry said, the energy in his voice radiating throughout his whole body.

  “I don’t fucking know. Haven’t you been thinking about this?”

  Harry looked back at him and smiled. “Of course, John. Of course I have. I just wanted your input to make sure we were on the same page.”

  John said nothing, only looked forward as they walked through the campus’s northern quad. Harry didn’t speak up again either, as if he knew that John needed this time in silence. He led the two of them, walking quickly, and making sure that they stayed in the shadows, close to buildings, away from any possible eyes peeking out windows.

  Thirty minutes later John stood in front of the most broken part of England he’d ever seen.

  A dark building stood in front of him . He followed it up with his eyes, seeing that Harry had brought him to a decrepit, old ruin.

  “What’s in there?” John said.

  “The people society forgot about. Winos. Addicts. Schizos. Those that aren’t cared for, I guess,” Harry said, also looking up at the building.

  John offered no argument. “It’s safe for us?”

  “Not as safe as your dorm, but yes, I think so.”

  “How did you know about this place?”

  Harry didn’t turn his head, but kept it slightly raised and facing the building. “We have enough to think about right now. Come on.”

  Harry looked ahead and began walking. He made his way to the building’s front doors, where he veered to the right, heading to the corner of what once was probably a gorgeous stone entryway.

  John watched, standing a dozen feet back.

  “I know it’s here somewhere,” Harry said, bent over and rummaging in the dark. John couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but it sounded like stones were moving. Harry grabbed them gently, so that the scraping sounds didn’t echo too loud. “Where the hell is it?” he said, his head down, clouded by the building’s looming shadow.

  “What are you—”

  “Got it!” Harry shouted in a whisper. He walked back to John, holding something in his hand.

  “What’s that?” John tried peering through the night to see.

  “Grabbed it from The Old Hall.”

  John squinted, wondering what in the hell he would have grabbed from that place. The Old Hall was the first building built on the campus, but people rarely went into it. The thing was more or less a museum to brag what the school had done in the past.

  “This,” Harry said, lifting his arm at the elbow so that John saw a long metal pole with a point on the end.

  “A fire poker? You grabbed it from the fireplace?”

  Harry smiled. “Come on.”

  John watched as Harry walked off a few feet, not waiting for him the same as he hadn’t waited when they left the dorm. John wasn’t questioning himself or fearful. Just …

  This is it, he thought.

  Things had gone too far to turn back now, so John followed his dead friend into an abandoned building. Abandoned by all but those that society cast away.

  He walked inside the building and immediately smelled the musk of stagnant air. The place reeked of sweat and, somehow, pain.

  “Come on,” Harry whispered. He turned the corner with John right behind him. No lights, only the moon’s inconsistent rays shining in from broken windows. John followed, wondering if his shoes’s sounded as loud to anyone else as they did to him.

  Harry took a right and before them was why they had come.

  A man lay on the floor, his brown skin touching the linoleum. No pillow, no sheet, just the clothes on his back.

  “He’ll work,” Harry said.

  John looked to Harry, understanding what he meant.

  He’ll work meant that they had reached their destination.

  Harry lifted up the metal pole, handing it to John. He didn’t take it, though. Instead he looked at the sleeping man, who hadn’t even woken at the sound of someone next to him.

  “No one will know,” Harry said.

  And John knew that to be true. This guy had no family. Probably hadn’t paid taxes in two decades, if ever. No one was looking for him. If he died tonight, the world would spin completely undisturbed.

  “Take it,” Harry said. “Give it one good swing, and if you don’t immediately feel better, we’ll leave.”

  John felt a cold focus fall on him. He had felt it before, with the squirrel. With Harry.

  He took the metal stick, resting it on its point.

  “You do this and it’ll be over, John. You won’t need to stress anymore. You won’t need to keep thinking about how good it’ll feel.”

  John raised the poker high above his head, as if it were an ax and the man’s head beneath it a block of wood.

  John swung until he couldn’t raise his arms anymore. The man had stopped screaming ten minutes before.

  * * *

  John blinked, seeing the hallway around him as if for the first time.

  Though, that wasn’t completely true—he remembered what happened, remembered it in detail. Only, then, he hadn’t seen anything except the rise and fall of the black poker. The flesh beneath its descent ripping apart, one whack at a time. The blood—normally red, but now a dark maroon—spattering out as the man’s meat gave way to bone, and finally bone to brain.

  The man lay on the floor in nearly the same position, except his brown skin was now in tatters and his chest no longer filling with air.

  John looked around, wondering imme
diately why he didn’t hear Harry’s voice; Harry, who hadn’t stopped speaking for almost a goddamn month, should be talking now. Rambling on about how much fun they had and how great it was, and on and on until John could puke.

  As his eyes flashed around the dark hallway, though, he knew he wouldn’t find his dead friend. Even in the shadows, Harry couldn’t hide from John. But Harry wasn’t there. He left, leaving John and the body to reminisce about their fun times by themselves.

  “What the fuck ….”

  All the eagerness, the cold focus—the goddamn desire—was gone.

  John recognized what he’d done. For the first time, he saw the effects of all his daydreaming and wishing. It lay before him in a broken and bloody mess, with brains oozing from its head.

  Harry said John wouldn’t get caught. He said no one would find out about this man … but now Harry was gone, and what evidence did John leave? Were there cameras that saw him walking across the quad? Had anyone been up late and looking out their window, despite Harry’s attempts to keep them hidden?

  John looked at his hands for the first time and a bone-deep horror took hold.

  Blood lay splattered across his hands. No longer warm, but cooling, and soon it would cake onto him.

  “Oh no,” he said. “Oh no.”

  He couldn’t go back into the dorm like this. What time was it? Three? Where would he shower—just let the blood run off him into the communal bathrooms, hoping that the thin plastic curtain would keep anyone from seeing what he washed off?

  “Where the fuck are you, Harry?” John said, hoping—near the point of praying—that Harry would come back. Just joshing around, John! I’m still here.

  No one answered, though.

  John took the bottom of his shirt, smearing more of the dead man’s blood on it, and wiped off the fire poker. He went up and down it multiple times, making sure that no fingerprints remained.

  He didn’t have time to focus on Harry, or on what he’d done—not right now. He needed to make sure that he left nothing here for anyone to find. He leaned against the wall and looked at the bottoms of his shoes. No blood. That was good.

  What else was there? He hadn’t thought about any of this. His mind had only focused on getting up here and doing what Harry told him. He mentally backtracked, thinking about everything he touched on his way in—but he couldn’t remember anything. He had simply followed—right?

  “Oh, shit, you killed him!”

  The words flung across the hallway, hitting John’s ears like a bucket of ice water after stepping from a hot-tub. His eyes jumped from the body to the end of the hall where he saw a skinny white woman staring at him. Her hair was a bird’s nest of twisting clumps and her mouth hung open in disbelief.

  “You gone be in some trouble.”

  John didn’t try to make any sense of her words. All he saw, all he cared about was that she saw him. With the poker. Standing over the dead man.

  John didn’t think.

  He simply moved, stepping over the body as if it were a discarded t-shirt on the floor. The woman hadn’t quit staring at the dead man yet, not until John started running toward her. Then she looked up, her open mouth gaping even wider as she understood what was about to happen. Despite whatever problems lived in her mind, it clearly knew when survival was at stake.

  She turned to run, one hand reaching out to the wall for support.

  Too late, though.

  John attacked as if her head was a ball and her body a stand, rearing back for a powerful swing at a t-ball game. He connected in a bone-shaking hit, cracking the woman at her temple with the metal point. She collapsed in a heap, as if her body's thinness lied about an underlying massive weight inside.

  Her eyes were closed but it was too late for taking chances.

  John brought the poker down again, colliding with her skull in a wet thawp. Again. And again.

  He stood above the dead woman, breathing heavily.

  Walking back toward the first body, he looked at the floor, trying to see if he had stepped in blood and tracked it. He didn’t see anything, but how could he be sure?

  Sureties don’t exist in murder, a part of him said.

  25

  A Portrait of a Young Man

  Depression followed.

  It came on the same as winter, slowly, but day after day progressively growing worse.

  John spoke to no one; he kept everything inside, because there wasn’t anyone he could share with. He read the papers, but nothing showed up about the dead bodies. Two weeks later he checked the police blotter and saw that they had been found, but no one even bothered trying to identify them.

  Cindy didn’t call and neither did he. John wanted to, though. God, did he ever. If he could only talk to her, apologize, have someone just a bit closer to his world—it felt like he was underwater in a frozen lake, pounding at the ice above him, and if he could just crack through, air awaited. Cindy was that air and the ice the debacle he caused in the cafeteria.

  He ate little.

  He slept less.

  When he did close his eyes, he saw the woman—her hair pulled back from her face, and heard that thwap when he brought the metal pole across her head. He saw her blood leaking out all over that horrible, dirty hallway.

  Perhaps things would have turned out differently if Cindy hadn’t come back. Because he didn’t just want to talk to her; no, the depression compounded that to a degree John almost couldn’t handle. Perhaps he would have sunk lower and lower until finally he ended his own life instead of others.

  Instead, she showed up.

  Eight at night on a Thursday. John hadn’t so much as glanced her way the past month, not in class, hallways, or the cafeteria. And she treated him the same, as if he didn’t exist.

  Yet, she knocked as John lay in his bed on top of the covers, lights shining from the ceiling, ready for another mostly sleepless night.

  He thought about not answering, indeed, wasn’t going to until she spoke.

  “It’s me,” she said and John felt sure he hadn’t ever heard such sweet words.

  He sat up, swinging his feet off the bed and looked at the door in front of him. She wasn’t even allowed inside the dorm, let alone his room, but there she stood, just a few feet away.

  John stood and went to the door, turning the lock. He opened it slowly, revealing Cindy and feeling tears come to his eyes as he saw her.

  “Hey,” he said, not reaching up to wipe them away. His voice shook as he spoke, certain that the breakdown would come soon. The one in which all this ended, the depression, the self-hate, all ending when he threw himself from his dorm room window.

  “You’re going to need to get a restraining order if you don’t want to see me,” Cindy said. No tears in her eyes, only a hard clarity. “Because I’m not going anywhere. I don’t care what you say in lunch rooms or how much you ignore me. I like you, John. Hell, I might even love you and I’m not running just because you’re scared of something. So watch out.”

  She walked directly towards him, using her left arm to move him out of the way, though he gave no resistance. She walked past him and sat down in the chair at his small desk. She didn’t say anything, only crossed one leg and stared at him as he stood dumbfounded by the door.

  Finally John closed it and sat down on his bed, facing her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said and started crying.

  26

  Present Day

  John parked his car but didn’t get out.

  He rolled the windows down and turned the air conditioning off. His car sat in a motel parking lot, but he didn’t know the first thing to do. This wasn’t an American motel, but a Mexican one, and the clock on his dashboard read eleven at night.

  He drove the past twelve hours, crossing the border but not stopping there. He didn’t know where he was going, only that he wanted to be far, far away from Dallas, Texas.

  Harry hadn’t shown up the entire drive. John did it alone, as he did all the hard shit that H
arry put him through.

  “Fuck,” he said. John grabbed his cell-phone that sat on the passenger seat, truly not wanting to look at it, but having few choices. He knew what he would see, but knowing and seeing were very different things.

  Twenty-five missed calls, all from Diane.

  He needed to call her, but what would he say?

  “Buck up, champ!”

  John looked at his rear-view mirror. Even with only the moon shining its weak light into the car, John could see Harry’s expanded pupil staring back at him.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” John said.

  “I needed a little vacation time, that’s all. I’m back, no worries.”

  John shook his head, his eyes narrowing into slits. “What the hell am I going to do, Harry? I don’t even know how to go in there and ask for a room. I don’t speak Spanish!”

  Harry looked at the little motel from out his window. “Dingy thing, isn’t it?”

  “You were expecting The Four Seasons? I’m serious. I can’t go back. I can’t live down here. THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO GODDAMNIT!” His voice boomed inside the car.

  Harry didn’t even look at John. He just stared at the motel, the dim lights planted around the outside casting yellow rays down onto the concrete.

  “John,” he said after a few moments, “we’re fine. We’re actually more than fine. Don’t you see that?”

  “Clearly not.”

  “Dick Face is going to think you ran. So you stay down here for a month. Tell Diane whatever you want, but just stay here. And then, after that month, slide back over the border and kill them all. He will have moved on to the next case—his boss will force that. The Starbucks’ girl won’t be suspicious anymore. All of them will have gone back to their regular lives, and you can slip in and end their regular, little lives.” Harry looked to John. “This is temporary, my man.”

  “Tell Diane whatever I want? What about work, Harry? What do I tell them? They’re not going to like that I took a month vacation with no notice.”