by Robert Ward
Bob watched in horror as chunks of bone, gristle, blood vessels, and cartilage spewed across the room. Cas fell a few feet in front of him, holding his stomach, and the big Samoan lay down, holding what might have been a gelatinous piece of eye. Tony was already dead, pancaking out on the floor. Only Ray remained unscathed.
But not for long, as the fat boy shot Ray in the back, causing Ray to turn and shoot him in the mouth, sending teeth and bloodied gums flying onto the factory floor.
“Bob,” Ray said, grimacing. “Watch the money. I’m gonna get that little shit Emile.”
Ray started to run to the steps, but then remembered the elevator and limped toward it.
“I can surprise him on the first floor,” he said.
He pushed the door shut and Bob saw a green down light go on.
That’s when the bomb exploded.
The blast hit the elevator doors and blew out into the room. Bob felt himself flung upward like a rag doll, and an awesome wave of heat pushed him backward right into the refrigerator door. He opened the door and stood behind it, using it as a shield.
In front of him he saw wounded men catch fire. The blast decapitated both Cas and Tony, who were flung into each other in midair, as though they were professional wrestlers. On the other side of the room Rafe lost both arms, then burned, his dead eyes staring down at his flaming torso.
The Samoan was sent flying up toward the ceiling, his Hawaiian shirt aflame. He came down on top of the old conveyor belt, itself curled and bent from the heat. His huge, legless body was splayed over the belt. Bob scanned the room for the legs, but he could only find one of them hanging off the top of an ancient air-conditioning unit that bulged out of a glassless window.
The blast had started fires in several spots in the room and Bob knew at once that he had to get out. The only part of his body that he was able to move was his hand, which now crept forward in front of him, his fingers moving like a spider’s, and magically, without Bob knowing how or why, his body followed. For a second he wasn’t sure what he was doing; then he knew.
He was picking up the suitcase full of money, which was still sitting there, right in front of him. The sides of it were charred, a little like himself, he thought … ha ha ha. Yes, he and the suitcase there together … charred twins …
He pulled it to him and laughed harder.
What an odd thing a human was. So fine, a miracle of engineering when all the arms and legs were in the right spot, and so ludicrous when mutilated and dead.
Bob heard himself screaming now, wandering across the floor, trying to avoid a huge, gaping hole. The floor, like the heads, no longer connected by logic to its walls.
Nothing connected to nothing, Bob thought.
Shit just floating out there. Could be an eyeball …
Oh God, God, God …
He was crying now, trying not to look in the blown-out elevator at whatever had become of Ray. Bright, cool Ray. Hipster, tough, cruel Ray, who lived with his mom. All of those character traits now described a mass of blood and guts inside the elevator. Pink, distended bowels hung off the walls like some kind of blown-apart Mexican piñata, but with no candies.
Instead, the candies were in his hand and he’d better run, run down the steps before the ceiling caved in. Nothing in here, see, neither building nor people are structurally sound anymore, oh no … no no … nothing is for sure … a ceiling could cave in, a nose could melt … ha ha ha …
So run, Bob, run…. He was talking to himself in the third person, a trait he always hated when athletes were being interviewed on TV (“That’s right, Darius know how to bound!”), but now somehow thinking of himself in the third person was the only way he could keep going.
He was Bob and Bob had to run down the steps, clutching the money like a favorite teddy bear, run and run, Bob, down to the third floor.
Where suddenly … oh, this was too weird … the steps ended.
The blast had twisted the steps so badly that there was nothing but a hole there … a hole with about a five-foot gap to the next flight of stairs. And down in the gap was darkness. Christ, the basement must be thirty or forty feet down….
You fall down there and who knew what would happen. If the fall didn’t kill you, it would probably break your spine, which, Bob thought, was perhaps what he deserved.
But the leap didn’t seem too bad. If he could just get a little head start. Go up a few steps and then get a good jump. Oh yeah, it was a piece of cake, really.
He hustled back up the steps, clutching the briefcase, and was getting himself set, doing his one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand thing, when he heard it.
Heard the crying and then the screams.
Bob stopped for just a second thinking that what he was hearing wasn’t real at all. No, not a chance, not real at all (was any of this real? No, yes, maybe …), then yes, yes, it was real, and he ran back up to the third-floor landing and he saw a door ripped off its hinges. The very foundation of the building must have been twisted. He peered inside and saw a hallway leading to a flat of offices. The cries had stopped now. He didn’t know which one to look in. He tried the first one. An old office with a couple of battered desks and no one inside. The suitcase of money still in his hand, he went back to the hallway and tried the second door. He looked inside a huge warehouse room, not unlike the one upstairs. There, by the far wall, were two kids, a boy and a girl, maybe seventeen years old, and the girl was kneeling over the boy’s body like he was dead, and she was holding her ears and screaming, and for a minisecond Bob thought he should run, run far away from them. Leave them there. They’d be okay after all. Bob couldn’t really afford to be seen with these kids, too many questions would be asked, too many questions he could never, ever answer about the mask and melting elevators and most of all about the dead bodies upstairs, and the nifty little briefcase full of money in his hands.
He had to go back out there to the landing, and he had to make his little jump and get the hell out of there and forget the kids.
But the girl was leaning over the boy and crying and above her there was this cracked ceiling and maybe the boy was only minutes away from death, and maybe Bob could save him, but why should he? He had his shot here. He had the money for chrissakes, and wasn’t that what this was all about?
He ran back out on the landing. Looked out a broken window. Below him was a Dumpster with piles of old boxes on it. Probably been that way for years. If he dropped the briefcase down there, behind it … if it didn’t open when it hit, he could retrieve it when he got outside.
But what if it did open? The money floating away in the wind like in The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Oh no, he couldn’t bear that. He couldn’t bear the thought of it.
The girl was crying louder now and saying, “Please. Somebody help us. Pleeease.” Her cries pierced his heart. And he hated her for it. Wanted to go in and slap her in the face and scream, “Do you know what I’ve been through to get this money, you little bitch? Do you know how many people I got killed? Why the fuck should I stop for you? You’ll never be anything anyway. You and your boyfriend will just grow up to be two more disappointing adults, who sell out your early promise if indeed you have any. So why the fuck should I give up five million bucks for you?”
But when she screamed again, there was something so helpless, so touching in her voice that he couldn’t turn away.
And so there he was with his arm out the window, and the suitcase there, hanging by the side of the building, and then, in spite of the voices screaming “Sucker!” in his head, he let it go. And watched it slide down the building and crash and land on some cardboard boxes just behind the Dumpster. He could still see it, lying there, shut … and he thought of Ray, so recently departed, already headed for hell, and laughing at him now … Bob Wells, the would-be barbarian, who gave away his fortune to help two white-trash kids in trouble. Trouble Bob himself had gotten them in.
The girl, whose name was Leslie, was su
ddenly hugging him and screaming, “Ronnie’s dead. Ronnie’s dead. Oh God,” and Bob was now gently disengaging himself and he was checking Ronnie’s pulse and he saw that Ronnie wasn’t dead at all, but damn close to it. He saw, too, that Ronnie was bleeding from his left arm and Bob found himself ripping off his shirt and applying a tourniquet and yelling at the girl that they had to get Ronnie out of there because the roof above them was falling and would drop right on them.
And somehow, he and Leslie, who he now noticed was really rather sweet and cute and not white trash at all but Latina, were carrying Ronnie Holocheck down the steps of the third floor of the American Brewery Building, down the crummy steps and over the condoms and crack pipes, and back to the hole, the gap, the maw of blackness forty or fifty feet down to the basement. Bob saw the hole and heard the sound of crackling above him, and the girl said, “Oh God, we’re going to die,” and Bob said, “No, no, we’re not,” and picked up the boy on his back and said, “It’s easy. We’re going to jump that little crack here in the steps now.” And the girl looked at him like he was insane and said, “I can’t make it,” but Bob had the skinny boy over his shoulder now and Bob, jacked up now with fear and anger, got in her face and screamed, “The fuck you can’t! You’re gonna jump over that crack, right fucking now!” But she only shook her head and made a mewing sound, saying, “I can’t. I just can’t.” And for a second Bob felt helpless, but then thought of Utu, his horrible stare, and he stared at her with his mask/face, his eyes blazing, his mouth contorted in a terrible grimace, and he screamed, “Listen, you little bitch, you either jump over that fucking hole or I am gonna throw you down it. Do you hear me?!!”
Her terrified eyes were locked on his and suddenly she began to nod her head in fearful agreement.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, okay, okay.”
And now bits of plaster and concrete were falling down on them like stone confetti and Bob felt the boy slip a little and bolstered him up on his fifty-year-old, creaking back.
“This whole place is coming down. Go!” Bob said.
He watched her back up then and start toward the crevasse with long, loping strides. Then she was up and sailing over it. She made it over to the other side, with room to spare, and her forward motion carried her into the far wall, where she bounced a bit but came up fine, in shock and awe that she’d made it.
Then she turned and looked back at Bob, and he hoisted the boy on his shoulder and got himself ready. He remembered all the running he’d done when he’d played lacrosse. All the times he had jogged nine and ten miles. But now he was fucking old, his legs weak, and he knew it, his left knee was already buckling and what if he and the boy went down the hole?
Only forty feet down or so, maybe they wouldn’t die. Maybe they wouldn’t be that lucky.
But what choice was there? What shot standing here in the building that his own crew, no, his own little evil mind had blown to bits?
He couldn’t make it. He couldn’t do it. He thought of praying to Christ, but there was no way. He wouldn’t know how. It had been too long and he had defamed the church he grew up in too many times to call on it now.
Then he looked at the kid and suddenly he remembered the way he used to feel when he saw someone helpless or hurt. He used to feel this kindness and compassion for them, but even more than that he used to feel that he couldn’t let them down.
And he remembered something his father had told him: “If you can help someone and you don’t, that’s a sin.”
God, he hadn’t remembered that for the longest time.
But having thought it now he knew it was true. He had to run with the boy on his back and he had to make it over the gulf.
He ran down the remaining steps, telling himself he could make it, he would make it, he had to.
Then he took off, the crevasse yawning beneath him. He felt the boy lurching from his shoulders, he felt his body being sucked down, down, down ….
He had to make it. He had to stay up. He had to.
PART III
RAIN OF LIGHT
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was funny.
The rain had changed form twice. First it came from the heavens as water, then it morphed into concrete, hard chunks of flaming concrete ingots that fell toward his head. And now there was a third kind of rain, a rain of white light, so harsh that he was sure his face was melting. He blinked, gasped for air, tried to speak.
“The kids,” he said. “The kids.”
He blinked again and realized that someone was shining a flashlight in his eyes.
“He’s coming out of it,” a voice said.
He squinted up at the terrible white rain of light and saw a woman in a white coat staring down at him. Her glasses seemed to be melting, like a Dalí pocket watch.
“Mr. Wells,” she said. “How do you feel, Mr. Wells?”
How does he feel? He doesn’t know. Only that there’s this terrible pain in his head, like someone has stuck a straw inside of it and blown it up. And why are they asking him about himself anyway? The kids, someone has to get the kids out of that place. Don’t they see that?
“There are these kids,” he said, pleading with them. “You gotta get them out. Two kids!”
“The kids are okay, Bobby. Thanks to you.”
Another voice from the other side of the bed. He turned his head slowly, so slowly, with the greatest effort. It was like a slow-motion camera shot that seemed to take forever and the pain in his neck was like someone had carved a trench in his skin.
“Baby,” said the voice.
Bob knew that voice and that sweet smile beaming down at him.
“Jess,” he said. “Jess … the kids …”
“They’re all right,” she said. “Leslie told us, Bob. She told us all about it. How there was a bomb in the building and how you went inside and saved them.”
“I went inside?” Bob said, and for the briefest of moments he thought it was true. He could almost see himself taking a late-night walk through the fog and rain. Right by the American Brewery Building. He lay there and watched himself watching the bomb go off up on the fifth floor. Yes, he could really see it now. Dr. Bob Wells, dramatically racing up the steps, no, fighting his way up the steps as the debris came hurling down all around him. He could feel the first wave of fear, telling himself, go back, go back, but then somewhere up on the second floor, dodging giant chunks of flying concrete and broken pipes, he heard the sound of the kids’ screams. “Help us! Help us!” And what kind of man could not respond to that? Of course, he had to go on. He had to. And he had, hadn’t he … hadn’t he … gone up the steps, no matter that any second the building might crash in on him? And the girl was screaming, but Bob had been undaunted, right, un-vanquished by fear … hadn’t he?
And then like somebody had clicked off the computer, it was over. His little fantasy was finished and he remembered it all, the way it really went down, and his feeling of disappointment and revulsion was so great that he had to vomit and he was barely able to signal to the woman in white, who somehow grabbed the basin and held it out for him, and then he was throwing up his dinner and, it seemed to him, his own heart, as well. And why not throw it up, he hadn’t used it for so long?
“Bob. Bobby, are you okay?”
Jesse was holding his hand and Bob fell back on the bed, as the woman in white handed him Kleenex so he could wipe off the stench. He knew it was merely a cosmetic thing because he would never be able to wipe off that stench, never, ever. The stench of greed, the stench of murder. There was only one path for him, it was obvious. He would find Detective Garrett and he would confess. He would sit in a room and tell them all what had really happened and Garrett would crow in triumph, finally getting even with the son of a bitch who’d broken his nose all those years ago. But that was okay, because what he had done was all wrong and their triumph would be his ritualistic cleansing. And he would never hurt anyone again. In jail he would become—the thought almost tickled him—the saint of
the prison. Yes, the wise old con who took care of the younger ones, the guy they called Doc, with the rimless glasses and the fancy Johns Hopkins education.
Bob fell back on his pillow, shaken and weak.
Then Jesse was there, putting her head lightly on his chest and saying, “You were a hero, Bob. You saved them all.”
God, she believed it. And then above her, coming from some corner of the room that he hadn’t been able to see, there were Dave and Lou Anne. And they were smiling down at him, too, their faces full of love and beaming admiration.
“Bobby,” Lou Anne said. “You are just too much, darling. You’re my hero.”
Dave had tears of happiness in his eyes.
“Bob,” he said, “you did it, buddy. You came up big.”
And despite the pain and anguish inside of him, the desire, the nearly overwhelming desire to confess, Bob Wells turned on his best “aww shucks, ‘tweren’t nothing” smile.
“You saved them all,” Jesse said. “You saved the kids.” And then Bob heard himself saying, quietly, with lovable modesty and humility: “Yeah, Jess, I guess I did. I guess I did.”
He lay there in the darkness, the pain much better now that they’d given him the Vicodin. In fact, there was no pain at all, either in body or mind, which was a curious sensation. Because when Tony and Cas’s flying, dismembered heads came floating back to him, when Ray’s bloody stump drifted up out of the primal ooze, he expected to feel pain, lots and lots of pain. But there was no pain with the synthetic opium coursing through his veins. The images were there, all right, but they floated toward him like in some corny old horror movie, The Heads from Beyond the Grave, and he was grateful for the temporary release from guilt.
