by Russ Munson
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m staying with you.”
“You’re walking away from me.”
I looked down. My legs were moving. I was walking backward. Shit. I had lost control again.
“I’m not doing it,” I said.
She sat forward in the chair. She grimaced but ignored the pain. “Give me the child.”
“Something’s controlling me.”
“Stop it, Jake.”
“I can’t.”
“Give me the child, you ugly brute!”
I stepped into the hallway. The wind whipped down the hallway and cooled my tears.
“I swear to God I’m not doing it,” I said.
And then my body stepped toward the open hole.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I was walking backwards. I shuffled past Cushing in his wheelchair.
"Come back here!" Suzie shouted. She came to the door frame and leaned on it for support. Blood ran down her legs.
“I can’t stop it,” I said.
I walked toward the jagged hole. My arms were swinging the baby now. Whoever was controlling me wanted to see this baby fly through the air. It was some sadistic devil who wanted to see us suffer. All of us. And I could do nothing to stop it.
Suzie hobbled into the hallway. Her hand was between her legs holding that gauze.
I shifted my eyes to Cushing.
“You gotta stop me.”
"I can't walk," he said. “You took my legs away.”
I kept walking. Only three feet to go. My son looked up at me, his eyes blank and gray.
I thought of Suzie’s basement. Of playing games. Of sitting on that couch together. I had always wanted to give her a child, but I never thought I would be the one to take it away.
I thought of how I disabled Cushing.
“Suzie, take my legs out."
"What?"
“That brain in the sky is controlling me. Tell her, Bonecrusher. You have no idea how you got here.”
“He’s right,” Cushing said.
“You have to disable me, Suzie,” I said.
"I can barely move," she said.
“Do it just like I taught you in high school. Sweep kick. You hated it."
“You’ll fall off the edge.”
“Do it now!”
My feet were at the edge of the hole. I swung my arms back to launch the child into the flaming abyss. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to watch him fly away from me.
Suddenly, my feet were swept out from underneath me. I pitched forward into mid-air. The force left me and I twisted and tossed the bundle of the baby back to Suzie.
I caught a last glimpse of her. She was on the floor. She caught the baby and then my stomach rushed away and I fell.
I grabbed for the broken pieces of the hospital. I caught one, slipped, and grabbed another, stopping my fall.
I was holding onto a broken pipe, my legs dangling over thirteen floors of nothingness below.
The pipe shifted and dripped on my face. My grip slipped.
This was it, a fall to my death. This was how I ended. A long fall at the end of the world.
I hung there for what seemed like an eternity. Out in the sky, past the horizon, that brain was pulsing.
I didn’t have enough strength to pull myself up. I closed my eyes and thought about what it would feel like to fall through the air, to break through the debris, to hit the ground.
Then a peace came over me. In that brief moment when I got to hold my son, I had felt something. For a split second all of the things that I thought were important in this world had been erased by pure contentment. All the titles, all the adulation, all the principles, were meaningless.
Then my thoughts began to slip and with my last flicker of consciousness, I realized that this was how it happened in the old serials on TV. They were made before I was born and I had never seen one, but I had enough faith in our collective humanity to believe that they had actually existed. In those shows, the producers would leave the hero hanging on the edge of the cliff so the audience didn’t leave while the projectionist changed the reels.
And I was okay with that. For me, it was an ending either way. Like the creed for the country that was embroidered on my trunks, I was neither a hero, nor a villain. I was a guy trapped in a shell, that shell trapped on a planet whose revolutions were beyond my control, all trapped in a universe that conspired indifference.
Maybe someday, we could find a way to impose some kind of order on this chaotic bundle of stardust.
But not today. What mattered now was my contentment. And I found that in my son. The part of me that really mattered would never die.
I could let go now.
My fingers slipped.
“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
I opened my eyes at the last second and strained to look up.
Cushing’s hand was extended over the edge.
“So let’s go waste it.”
Undefeated
Jake Wright will return in Undefeated.
Coming soon.
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Also by Russ Munson
The Crime of the Ancient Mainer
The Curse of the Golden Scarab
The Knot in the Witch’s Noose
The Case of the Fire in the Hole
The Water Cure
