Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  But little by little, his progress came to its end, at the front of the sanctuary where he’d stood a thousand times before. Standing in the middle, pausing for a moment as he gazed to one side, toward Paul, that elusive object of veneration so far gone into his own realms, he didn’t even know Gabe was present.

  Such a rare gift to observe him in this unguarded moment. Gabe bowed his shaven head in reverence and respect.

  Raising, then, opening his eyes…

  And inadvertently turning his head directly into a blow that rattled his teeth to their roots.

  Please. Get her out of here — it was Donny’s final request, Mike thinking sure, right, maybe he could even stand while he was at it. Still seeing motes of light throbbing after that boot to the head, one eye swelling into a slit mushroom, and when he tried to suggest to Donny they do it together, the guy wasn’t there any more.

  Best trick of all.

  Then Mike saw: Donny had taken Amanda’s quad cane and gone walloping for someone, something, down before the stage. He stared, one long moment of morbid fascination despite everything else. This was too grotesque to ignore. There was something fundamentally familiar about this mutant naked man — a slow dawn, it was Gabe Matthews, seen as never before. Mike remembered a Gabe of anal-retentive precision and implosive-explosive dichotomies. But this was a Gabe of raw breakdown, a Gabe of shaved head and lacerations, a Gabe of barbed-wire hair shirt raptures.

  Donny’s first roundhouse swing of the cane connected with Gabe’s jaw and sent him to the floor. Somewhere deep inside Mike could yet feel flickers of pity for both of these dismally broken human beings, their own worst enemies. At the same time, he felt the tiniest bit of relief in realizing that Donny Dawson may truly have been ignorant of a lot of things going on around here.

  He hauled himself up along the bullet-splintered pulpit as Donny treated Gabe to a second taste of the cane. No longer under fire, now he could safely stand — if it could be called that. Amanda struggled up alongside him, linked hand to wrist as he pulled, and looked out over seats, aisles, doorways.

  God’s mercy. This was a holocaust.

  Mike told her they should get moving, and she was adamant, what of Donny, what of Paul? Mike telling her they were sure to follow soon, and then he buckled, his leg turned traitor. He and Amanda pressed their sides tightly together, wrapping an arm around each other like a pair of picnic gamers in three-legged relay, and moving for the exit backstage.

  Wisdom said don’t look back, but he had to when she did not. Final glimpses, images to burn themselves into his brain and soul: Gabe taking a tumble down the stage tiers, front and center, Donny staggering in pursuit. And Paul, still holding rag-doll Laurel Pryce as if she were the last link to a sanity long gone.

  It seemed to him she was the luckiest of the four.

  Mike and Amanda retraced their path to the exit, hobbling along in a tandem drunken stumble. Sometimes they fell. Sometimes they careened from wall to wall. Sometimes he thought one more step would snap his leg off at the bone and he’d have to leave it behind. Get her out of here? What a laugh, it was the other way around. Amanda, saving the only one of them who apparently wanted to be saved, and had he not survived to this point, Mike wasn’t so sure she wouldn’t have stuck around to go down with the ship.

  If he was getting her out, it was only by virtue of his own helplessness. Whatever worked.

  The exit beckoned with doors and daylight, and they crossed the threshold into a new realm of anguish and discovery. Ramon. Mike stared down, then tried to drop to him, to check for pulse, for breath, any sign — but no. There could be no way.

  He should stay. Stay beside the body of his friend and they could rot together, a brotherhood of bones. There could be no more fitting punishment for involving him in all this.

  But Amanda was there, hanging on to him, and her reserves must have been limitless. Pulling him along the sidewalk, then the green lawn, with words of encouragement and purpose. Guiding them for the nearest building, the offices and production studios.

  A walk of a thousand miles.

  But they made it into the lobby.

  Just as the greatest of all hells broke loose at the chapel.

  Lost in a virgin wilderness where ancient met contemporary and sacrifice met submission. At one with a lineage whose age defied comprehension, already counting years by the millennia when an infant Christ stretched his tiny arms beneath a star.

  And somewhere in this soul’s vast wasteland of decay, Paul could sense himself trailing out through wires, circuits, airwaves. The empathy, again — he’d once been a thing they’d called an air personality, sensitive to his audience. Now he was at one with the suffering masses, the connection a two-way exchange, and how bitter the harvest. He opened his eyes again to the here and now.

  Donny Dawson Ministries. Last exit for the lost.

  Paul took his right arm from around Laurel and twined his fingers through his hair, penetrating the crust of misted spray, down to the wires. He yanked, ripping out tufts of hair along with electrodes. The wires pulled taut along his spine, and another brutal tug tore them free of the belt unit. He cast them aside like a well-used scourge.

  A battered Donny was climbing on hands and knees up the front of the stage, white suit speckled red, his face bearing wounds that no amount of makeup could hide. When he drew close, wheezing through gelid lungs, Paul smelled dank breath. A malodor of all things brown and gray; once lush, now withered. His father had smelled much the same during those final weeks.

  Donny swayed, then fell on his ass, sitting down hard. Shades of their first meeting, on some other distant stage. With eyes of glass, he looked at the burden in Paul’s arms, while Paul looked into her face. No peace of death there, only a lost struggle against being cheated.

  “I’ll help you,” Donny mumbled. “Carry her. Out.”

  Stiff-neck slow, Paul shook his head. “Don’t you touch her.”

  He supposed he should have been more gracious, Donny only wanted to help, to atone. Pathetic futility. Paul supposed he should have warned the man, too — but with breath like that, to what purpose?

  The newest Gabe, the last of all Gabes, was coming up behind Donny. Battered under the hands of his former master, shuffling forward and raising his arms on high, to bring down the detached head from camera three onto Donny’s skull. The single sledgehammer blow so tremendous that both shattered. Donny’s body spasmed for a moment, hands clawing carpet, then fell still…

  Prostrate before the fall of his kingdom.

  Engineer of his own vision of apocalypse, Gabe struggled to his feet, shuffling to the lip of the stage’s top tier. Where deliverance awaited.

  Smiling, and how it hurt to do so, thank you Donny, and this was exactly as it should’ve been. The body, the hateful flesh, heavy with woe. The spirit light, fleet of foot and dancing to its muse of righteous suffering.

  There was something imminently liberating in placing the axe in the hands of the headsman.

  Gabe stopped. Dropped to his knees and kissed that right hand.

  Weeping.

  Behold.

  His maker.

  Paul rose to his feet once more, heir apparent to all that still festered in this sanctuary. Having let Laurel go, she lay boneless at his feet like an offering. And he supposed, in a sense, she was.

  One of a multitude of offerings from this sycophant who knelt before him. Head bared like an ancient priest before his god of savagery. Body scoured of all traces of beauty, replaced with a lonely pastiche of gnarled scars, and adorned with wire. His genitals black and purple, like bruised fruit. And the eyes of a doe, brimming with soft tears of trembling supplication.

  Paul had never known how deep Gabe’s needs must have gone. Nor how deep his own.

  The knowledge was an awakening.

  “This was for me,” Paul whispered, not quite a question.

  “And for me,” said Gabe.

  Paul wondered how far back this had gone, whe
n peers under the tutelage of a charlatan had gone the way of deity and disciple? He no longer remembered, the transition so gradual. Or perhaps it had been apparent all along, had he only opened his eyes, blinded so willingly by seduction.

  He knew what Gabe wanted. It was written all over his body. It was woven from every life that had been forfeit this morning to push Paul to this brink and beyond. To give him the power, the majesty, the rage and the desire.

  He knew what Gabe wanted. Same as they all wanted, one more piece of him to enrich their own lives, give them meaning, make them complete…

  Far be it from him to disappoint.

  Paul reached down to wrap one hand around a loop of barbed wire, and hauled upward to bring Gabe to his feet. Eye to eye now, one pair narrow, one pair wide. Feeling the burn inside as he placed his hands on Gabe’s slippery shoulders. If this man hated his own flesh so much, then grant him no more cause to fret, and Gabe began to scream, a high note going up up up, loud, louder, as the outer man began to peel away and hurl aside. Wet red ribbons from limbs, great broad slabs from chest and back, some catching along the barbed wire, the rest airborne, coiling in flight, then dropping to slap the floor like discarded wrappings. His scream was endless, barely sucking air, going to mad brittle laughter in the end, guttural as his throat and head stripped into tatters, and finally Paul let him go, to tumble down the tiers and thud onto the lower floor.

  Wet and sticky, entirely red, a man of impressive musculature on display, we are all the same under the skin. Twitching, with rasping breath, still alive. Paul had been very careful about that.

  Let him know, for a time, at least, what it was like to be cheated.

  Paul paced a slow tread down the tiers, leaving Laurel behind and gazing out over his handiwork. Listening to their pitiful sounds, these followers to whom he had laid waste. Thoughts of hell no longer had yesterday’s power. Hell? Why, here am I in the midst of it, and I created it in my own image. Surely no God of love could forgive him now.

  The masses here had fallen immobile, no more frantic escape. Everyone who could get out apparently had.

  So much work here to be done.

  They were, after all, still his responsibility.

  He could walk among them, row after row, along every aisle. Kneeling to each in turn, gathering it all back into himself. He could try, at least. But when would the balance tip, turning benevolence back to resentment once more? He would not have it.

  Death wasn’t always the cruelest option. Sometimes it was the most merciful thing to be done for someone — because it was just another kind of beginning.

  Paul considered the mechanisms of healing … soaking it in, storing it up. Recalling another locale of mass annihilation, remember the Alamo, healing those he could as oil tanks raged in a background inferno. Soaking in, storing up.

  He still had reserves yet untapped, that he did.

  Perhaps death was the highest form of love he could show everyone in this chapel. He had always believed in euthanasia, another legacy from his father. He’d just never considered it in a mass format.

  He needed a conduit, of course, and knelt to receive Gabe in one last demonstration of mercy. Gently raising him at the waist as Gabe’s lidless eyes roved in mad ecstasy, and Paul hugged him close. Feeling one skinned arm weakly slap along his back, the embrace returned.

  Paul dug deep to find the proper tools inside, soaking in, storing up, the tanks burning the night sky. The thought of his shadowed mentor came to mind, something an ancient people had named Nergal. Surely it would have no qualms with him for a while, not with the bounty he was about to deliver.

  But its price, oh what a price.

  “Choke on them,” he whispered, a prayer of defiance.

  And pulled every trigger.

  Gabe went to particle vapor, and the devastation beyond was instantaneous and enormous. Standing at its epicenter, Paul was the eye of the hurricane, and like Samson in the temple, he would bring it all down upon his own head.

  The explosion was too much for the chapel to contain, and the entire building disintegrated into a firestorm of rubble, out of which rose one last great cry of martyrdom, more than a thousand shackled souls losing their chains. Walls crumbled out, and great slabs of roof came crashing down in boiling gushers of flame. Debris rocketed outward in all directions and showered down over better than a quarter-mile. The nearest cars in the parking lot went tumbling like toys, gas tanks erupting in sympathetic chain reaction, with no sympathy for the stragglers, and every window in every building facing the chapel across the compound imploded in its frame.

  The destruction seemed endless.

  But, after eternal moments, it too passed, as did wars and famines, plagues and funerals. Until the only sound on this early November morning was the crackle of fire, the only movement the slowly twisting columns of smoke rising from wreckage.

  And from the office building’s lobby, Mike and Amanda crawled from beneath stray chunks of glass and rubble. Little the worse for this latest wear. Beyond tears, beyond words, beyond thought. But not beyond the simple desperate comfort of holding hands while leaning on each other’s shoulders.

  So they sat on the steps, and scarcely blinked though their eyes burned with far more than smoke, waiting for anyone who might arrive to help pick up what few pieces remained.

  Chapter 42

  Near midnight, the wind was as cold as Arctic breath, sifting ash and freezing thought. A construction laborer named Carl Krost let another paper cup of instant go scalding down his throat, wearily thanked the woman at the Red Cross table, and returned to work.

  God have mercy.

  No one could have lived through this. He had seen no devastation like this since Korea, and it was still too soon.

  But hope was a battered survivor, reluctant to die, and the volunteers were still out in force. They’d been working since late morning, now under the glare of banks of floodlights. Just in case one set of fluke circumstances had protected someone inside. No one had come up empty-handed, but everyone had so far been disappointed. There were a lot of bodies. A lot of pieces of bodies. A lot of things that might have been pieces of bodies.

  The crew had, for hours, suffered frequent turnover. A lot of these workers — guys as tough as cast iron in any other respect — could handle no more than small doses. Sifting through the layers, stripping away debris piece by piece like grim archaeologists, rescuing nothing but human wreckage. They would be nightmares for everybody for weeks to come. Maybe lifetimes.

  In the charred crater, the floodlights made hulking shadows flow from blackened mounds. Carl Krost was tossing aside a burnt timber when he heard someone cough. From beneath the rubble.

  He should have called out. Should have summoned help. Should have raised the cry that would set off weary, needed celebration, their dogged efforts not in vain after all.

  But no. He grew roots and his throat froze, nearly wet himself for the first time since Korea. After twelve hours of finding nothing but dead ruin, there was something frightfully unnerving about seeing charcoal and ash take shape and form beneath your feet. To extract itself the rest of the way from its prison.

  It stood without help. Without need of help. Naked, filthy. Hair matted with grime. And amazingly intact from head to toe. It brushed away pebbles and ash that sifted back down to what by all rights should have been its grave. From the soot-blackened mask of its — his — face, a pair of luminous eyes stared with … what? Pleading, maybe. But not for help. No, in that respect he appeared quite self-sufficient.

  “Keep your mouth shut, okay?” said the young miracle man. “I just want to be left alone.”

  Carl nodded, yes, because this could not be natural.

  “Can I have your coat?”

  Carl gave it over and he put it on, still bare below the waist. Then he asked if Carl had money, and Carl wordlessly handed over his wallet, but the guy just helped himself to a pair of twenties, then gave the rest back, wallet included, and Carl
was more than willing to comply. Let bygones be bygones, with more coffee and rest sorely needed at the moment.

  Images that would linger forever, he had them to spare.

  But number one on the list was the sight of the young survivor running away, unnoticed, into the nearest shadows, into darkness.

  Alone.

  Friday, November 22, 1963/Chicago

  Miracles.

  That golden moment of splendor, when through pain and a rush of expelled fluids, one life became two.

  That this drama had played itself out in the back of a taxi did not diminish its power. God had looked down, God had smiled, and that light of life shone through even on this day of gray rain.

  The birth had come quickly, with scarcely a warning, the pain intense, though mercifully brief. Through sweat and tears of relief, she laughed, leaning back in happy exhaustion against the car door. Out on the sidewalk, a crowd had of course gathered. If it happened in the city, there were those who would stand and watch.

  The driver had done the honors. New World Italian, sire of a large family himself, he’d told her in reassurance — this process was no mystery to him. He had been the picture of calm fluster while wrapping the newborn in his own jacket, using a clean handkerchief to swab away most of the birthblood. With the smile of a saint, he laid her child upon her breast, still connected by the umbilical, which would wait for proper cutting.

  So this was the delightful little stranger who kicked in the still of night, who had made mornings dreadful months back. He barely even cried, blinking instead with wide-eyed wonder. She nuzzled the moist eggshell head to her cheek and gave thanks.

  The driver had drawn out of the cab, ushering her husband back in — this family should be together — and he squeezed in onto the stained floorboard. From outside came a burst of spattered applause.

  The father gazed down upon the fruit of their union, then leaned over and they kissed, deeply, quickly, passionately.

  “It’s a Paul,” she said, still short on breath. “Not a Julie.” Her eyebrows lifted then, with the maternal smile. These two greatest halves of her life belonged together. “Hold him?”