Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  “I don’t miss her half as much as you do.”

  Paul made the long slow climb to morning light, like crawling on skinned knees, broken elbows. Running the past hours through memory, the best he could. Twenty-four hours, thirty-six, forty-eight? Everything a jumble, puzzle pieces in a box, how did it all fit together?

  J.P. Sartre’s, that had been night before last. No. The night before that. He remembered quaking beneath blankets for a good twenty-four hours afterward. Ignoring Laurel at the door, her knocks, grateful she had no key. Passing the hours in solitude, dawn to noon to dusk to dawn. Paul, rolling in twisted covers, sometimes sleeping, sometimes not, sometimes dreaming himself awake with untrustworthy memories, killed him I killed him I didn’t mean to but it hurt hurt so bad he didn’t look human at first.

  Things blurred the nearer to today he drew. Last night, what of last night, and he threw back the covers with molten eyes and tried not to cry out. Different clothes than he last recalled wearing, he’d worn the same ones for two days, and when had he changed?

  If you couldn’t trust your memory, you couldn’t trust anything.

  Fragments, nothing more, did this happen last night?, driving under the influence of heat and fear downtown again blocks from the scene of the original crime hands his hands looking for someplace to rest alley cloudy silver moon crescent like a pendulum frozen among the stars alley and bricks dumpster overflowing a vagrant’s bounty of botulin nutrition his hands alley bedtime beneath newspapers under a doorway human refuse in stocking cap and scraggly beard the reek of budget wine waking only halfway while hands finding rest to bring a heart thick yellow burden and everlasting stop—

  Last night.

  It could have been a dream, or a fantasy. Fevers of the imagination, a bad trip. Like morning-after hangovers with bitter crumbs to fill a void of hours. Knowing that however shameful your memories of behavior beyond control, there was always the distinct possibility of something worse, blacked out forever.

  He had done it again. Done it again and barely remembered. Proving hardcore wisdom, understood by soldiers and murderers for hire: The first kill is always the hardest. After that, they get easier.

  Just how easy would it be to kill by the end? An errant thought, and perhaps the first time that the notion of an ending to this had crossed his mind.

  Paul crawled from the bed, dragged himself over to the room’s mirror centered on a closet door. See what manner of spectacle he had become, if the lives he’d taken had made him taller, more robust, more godlike. No, none of it. Three days of beard had grown when he hadn’t been looking, days he had apparently not eaten and hadn’t missed it, his face more gaunt than he seemed to recall. Wearing jeans and a gray pullover sweater — work clothes, robes of a divine executioner. Fallen angel of death.

  He gazed into the reflection, openmouthed. Like staring at a twin, long-lost, presumed dead. No hope. He pointed one finger at the mirror-Paul, gun-fashion, thumb cocked back for the hammer.

  Let it fall, bang, I’m dead.

  Or he could take his hands and remove them, hack one off with the other. But of course, that would still leave one, unable to turn on itself. Consort with the deities of power tools, then, find a table saw and raise the blade to a height greater than his wrists. Feed each one across like so much excess plywood, let them tumble to a sawdust-strewn floor like dead white spiders, bleeding their venom. Then stomp them until the fingers were mangled beyond repair, kick them toward the trash in hopes that some brave soul might pick them up and finish the job, sensing their worthlessness.

  Options were few.

  As he sought out shoes, put them on, he thought of peers. How truly dreadful and lonely your existence was when you had none. Contemporaries, acquaintances, yes. But none who could be called an equal. Only equals could empathize with the pain that was your lot in life, for they had experienced it too, or knew they soon would.

  He had none.

  But across the compound, however contrived, was the closest thing.

  Weary pilgrims of hope, some people climbed mountains to find their god, or traveled halfway around the world. Gabe’s walked in through the office door and called him by name. Undoubtedly he was held in high favor.

  “Where’s — where’s Donny?” Paul asked.

  “At home, probably,” Gabe said. “He keeps an erratic schedule these days.” Eyes softening, inner and outer Gabes contending for control of the moment. Deciding the time was improper for worship, his god would not accept it at the moment. “You seem to be doing the same.”

  “I need to talk to him,” a desperate plea, sliding by fingertips down a cliff face. Paul lingered in Donny’s office doorway, hand on knob, a stabilizer. He shut it softly, leaning back against it, and slid to the floor. “…anyone…”

  Not all were prepared to bear the weight of so heavy a crown. But Gabe was not the least bit disappointed. Sought out in Paul’s moment of weakness, this only confirmed that Gabe was worthy to look upon his face and speak his own mind. To give counsel? This would be divine.

  The confusion on Paul’s face was understandable, climbing the stairs to this sanctified aerie, barging past secretaries, intent on speaking with Donny, but finding someone else in the seat of the charlatan, the pretender. Gabe had spent most of his hours the past two weeks commanding the ministry from here. A surrogate on an assumed mandate from Donny. The underlings were easily led, and asked few questions. Sheep.

  Gavin had been trickier, calling from Scotland, worried about the increasingly high profile in the aftermath of the Hurstborn healing, all that publicity, all that validation. Gabe had soothed him, told him he was trying to steer Paul out of the ministry, but hang on, have patience, this was going to take some time. Gavin had hung up, sounding little reassured, but the faith in his protégé was still bedrock.

  While Gabe, with as free a rein as he could hope for, made preparations to meet his god without barriers of pretense in the way. On terms as pure and holy as he could engineer.

  Gabe smiled. “I knew you’d be up here. Knew you’d come.”

  Paul stared, saying nothing, expecting tricks or his own demise.

  “You’ve taken lives again, haven’t you?” What a comfort it was to have occasion to say this. The restoration of balance.

  And Paul began to cry, folding into himself at the bottom of the doorway, head on knees, still every bit the creature of magnificence. Questions in those streaming eyes, How, how?

  Gabe held a newspaper up from the desk and slapped it with his hand. “I read, Paul. I see things others don’t, because I know things they don’t. Back-page news, those two you’ve left behind you this week. But they’ve confused some people. I’m the only one here who can recognize your footprints.”

  Talk of mysterious deaths, representatives consulted from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Miracles of a lower order, but Gabe beheld them as no less wondrous than water to wine. For, surely, even greater would follow, and soon.

  “I’m doing terrible things,” Paul whispered. “I don’t want this anymore, this is tearing me to pieces, I don’t know where to go…”

  “And you thought Donny could tell you?”

  Shaking his head, wordless broken whispers, I don’t know, I don’t know…

  His anguish was palpable all the way across the office. This citadel, shown to be nothing but vain ambition in the purity of such tears. Gabe would gladly have taken these agonies of rebirth and transition upon himself had he been able, but they were Paul’s alone. Growing pains, although pain had its virtues.

  “They were mistakes. Just mistakes.” Soothing his troubled brow, for while the time would come for Paul to know his heritage, this was not it. Great power was often characterized by the fragility of its vessel. “Years ago, I had a job working under a woman who told me one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard. She told me if I wasn’t making any mistakes in my work, I wasn’t doing nearly enough work. Mistakes can be costly, but they can usually be correct
ed.”

  “You didn’t kill anybody on the job, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t even fucking try to compare this, okay? Okay?”

  Gabe shook his head. “Elder statesmen once wrote that all men are created equal, but … no. No. I don’t believe that, because the world doesn’t work that way. Some men are greater than others, we see that all the time. You are a great man. And great men should be allowed to make greater mistakes.”

  Paul’s hands in trembling fists, “But I’ve killed. I’ve killed.”

  “You’ve healed.”

  Shaking his head no, no, “That’s supposed to balance it out somehow?”

  Gabe’s eyes slid closed; this was closer to the truth than Paul realized. “You’ve healed hundreds. Many of whom would have died, you know we’re not turning away terminal patients.” Gabe, face alight, the wonder rising, let him shine on me and my death and I can go fulfilled. “You have eclipsed every other healer on earth, living or dead. And it’s still not enough for you?”

  “It’s not worth it if I have to hurt people.”

  “Worth it to who? If you’re talking about your own conscience, then that’s a little selfish. Four dead, a tragedy, I’ll admit that. But hundreds saved.”

  Gabe stood up at the desk, not even blinking for fear he might miss some nuance, subtle evidence of any change in Paul’s heart. And it was there: equations in his eyes, ratios, the lives of many outweighing the lives of few. Paul might not admit it, might not even be aware, but it was there.

  Onward, this entire dialogue prepared and rehearsed for precisely a moment of crisis such as this, and he came out from around the desk. “That you’ve made mistakes doesn’t mean you should turn your back on everything you are. And it doesn’t lessen what you are when you fail. The Old Testament is full of great failures. Jonah? God asked him to go to Nineveh, and he ran the opposite direction to try and avoid it. It didn’t work. King David? He wanted Bathsheba so badly, he sent her husband off to die in battle just so he could have her … yet here was a man after God’s own heart, we’re told.” And Gabe was there. Kneeling beside Paul in this darkest of hours. “Would you elevate yourself above them?”

  Paul looking up at him, “No,” scarcely a whisper.

  Gabe trembled to touch this magnificence. His deliverer. Hand to shoulder, tentative for a moment, doubting his worth, then thinking of all the pain withstood. Scourge and clamp and blade, he had prepared as fully as he knew how. To feel no shame, then, as he tried his best to allay the weight of Paul’s worlds.

  Paul sobbed, nearly flattening on the floor as he threw one arm around Gabe’s leg, the other around his waist. Baptism by tears.

  It had been so very long since he’d been close enough to anyone to give comfort. Smiling sadly down upon a trembling shoulder beneath his hand, Gabe realized it was just as well that he didn’t plan on being alive after this coming weekend. For all the years to follow would be but anticlimax. How terrible, with so much of life yet to be lived, to have peaked, and know it.

  He considered it a privilege.

  “I wanted,” Gabe said, beginning to choke up as well, “to take what’s inside you, and send it out into the world.”

  “Can’t,” Paul mumbled into his knee, “I just can’t.”

  “You can, if you believe. And if you’re believed in.” No more objections, just tight muscles beneath his palms, a good sign. Paul would see his wisdom. “It’s easy to be a holy man on a mountaintop. The difficult part is carrying it out into the world…

  “Take it from one who found out the hard way.”

  Chapter 37

  Just a couple of guys from Florida, on the road to Oklahoma City — the nonstop jaunt from Delray Beach took nearly thirty hours, Mike and Ramon switching off so one drove while the other caught lousy shuteye. Six states, back to back: Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and finally the promised land.

  It was a whole new climate of confusion up here, Donny Dawson now lodged like a tick in the national consciousness. The man could not turn out to be legitimate after all, please, anything but that. Mike decided to play this as if Clarence Hurstborn had never existed.

  Late Thursday night, they rolled into a motel down the street from the one Mike had stayed in before. Staying in the same place didn’t seem wise. Maybe they would remember him there, hadn’t forgiven him for the state in which he’d left his room. Mike paid cash for one room, two beds, and they wandered in glazed and dazed. Grimy, cranky, sore of butt and red of eyes. Thirty hours of highway humming through their veins.

  It would have been easier to fly, but riskier, since they were packing two guns — Mike’s new Smith and Wesson, and an identical gift to Ramon from his brother. No telling what would happen up here, so best to travel without leaving electronic footprints back to their doors.

  After check-in, they put up with five minutes of room claustrophobia and wandering attention spans before deciding to head for the nearest bar. A block and a half away; Mike decided he could use the walk, work out the stiff aches in his leg. The cast had come off a week ago. Strength and flexibility were not what they once were, and he’d left behind one perturbed physical therapist for discontinuing services indefinitely. He’d also left behind a job with a question mark hanging over it.

  Ramon was in better shape, had vacation time coming and never a day of sick leave. Comptroller’s pet, that’s what he was. Mike still felt gratified by his coming along. Stand-up didn’t go near far enough in describing Ramon. Brother’s keeper, shrugging it off by saying he’d held Mike’s hand through this much of it, might as well see it through, make sure he didn’t get stomped again.

  The bar was brimming when they walked in, all kinds of mutant clientele in this seedy lounge. Would-be soldiers and witches, an astronaut and a Viking princess, bogus doctors in scrubs and cheerleaders old enough to worry about stretch marks. This was too weird, and they shouldered their way to the bar for boilermakers, take the raw edge from their nerves.

  They’d been there a couple minutes when the dark-haired girl beside Mike looked at him with a smile. Black lace all over, pale face and bright rouge on her cheeks, red lips. Vampire.

  “Where’s your costumes?” she said.

  Mike lowered a few degrees into her face, arched his brows for her, bulging those bloodshot orbs. “Do these look like real eyes to you?”

  Ramon laughed and shook his head. “Fucking Halloween,” he said, and laughed again. “This’s so perfect I can’t stand it.”

  They slept the sleep of terminal exhaustion that night, and early the next morning shaved and showered, with long, luxurious hot-water rinses. Turning themselves into near-replicas of the men who’d left Florida. Breakfast came from a Hardees’ drive-through, and they ate in the car while Mike drove for South Squire Road. The routine was no different from his earlier trip here: leave the car in the same carpet and tile outlet’s lot, hoof it through the woods.

  “Shit, Mikey, it’s cold up here.”

  “It’s fifty degrees, quit whining.” Thirty steps from the car and Ramon was already complaining. “Is it my fault you don’t own anything with sleeves?”

  Ramon nudged him defensively. “You haven’t seen me in my suit I brought.”

  “Maybe if I get married, maybe then?”

  Tramping along, Mike began to regret the season. Autumn was poor timing for this. Not because of the chill, Ramon and his briskly rubbing arms aside, but for the changes of fall. Every step was a symphony in crunching leaves. A billion more on the trees, hanging deathly and brittle, just waiting to drop. The lush foliage of early September was gone, along with its ample cover. They might as well be marching up banging a drum and cymbals.

  They did the best they could, found a suitable spot to set up camp and keep an eye on Dawson’s house. A fallen log, eaten into by little shelves of fungus, served as their bench, and they spread out their gear. Thermos of coffee, two walkie-talkies, a sack with surplus breakfast biscui
ts. The pistols they set aside in close reach.

  “So what’s the plan?” Ramon said.

  “Hell, I don’t know.” Mike checked his watch, seven-forty. “I figure maybe we’ll just wait here awhile, see what happens.”

  Ramon nodded, eyeing the house. “Brilliant.”

  Mike was halfway into another steak and egg biscuit when something about the front of the house caught his eye. Conspicuous by its absence.

  “No cars on that cul-de-sac,” he said. “I just noticed that.”

  “So maybe they’re all in the garage. Look at the size of that thing.”

  “I mean nurses’ cars.” He lifted the binoculars slung around his neck to scan windows, could discern no movement. He lingered uneasily on the one through which he’d come flying. The curtains were drawn, placid. “When I was here before, they were staying with Amanda around the clock.”

  “Meaning…”

  “She either died or got a lot better.”

  Two-and-a-half hours snailed by before movement finally caught their attention. A golf cart was leaving from behind the house, periodic glimpses weaving through the intervening trees. Maybe seventy yards away, aimed for the compound, and from here it looked like Dawson, the dressed-down version. A late start on his day at the office, nice work if you can get it. Mike watched until Donny had sailed out of sight over a rise, then swept his binoculars back over the front of the house. Sometime in the past few minutes, someone had parted those third-floor curtains.

  “Somebody’s home,” he said in singsong voice, then he lowered the binocs. Flexed fingers and rubbed his leg, wincing. “I wonder how my breaking and entering skills have held up.”

  “Oh man. Oh man. You’re not going in there. Are you?”

  “Well, yeah, unless you’d rather sit out here all day and pray for Indian summer. Me, I’m getting bored.” Mike pulled the binoculars off from around his neck and handed them over, then grabbed a walkie-talkie for himself. “If anybody shows up, punch the code key. It’ll be quieter than your voice, and if I can talk, I will.” He wedged his pistol down into his back waistband.