Roadwork

When Conner arrived at the gas station, he exited the car with a speed that surprised even him. He took a few quick steps, almost at a run, before turning back towards the car. Under the garish sodium lights of the service station, the little blue sedan looked a sickly greenish gray. It looked squat and malign in its stillness. The little throbbing headache at the base of his skull seemed to diminish with every step and he began to catch his breath.

He took the phone from his pocket and raised it high into the night sky, waving it from side to side like a signal flag. Nothing. The signal meter defied him by remaining empty. Not even a flashing roaming message. Conner scowled at the little phone and thrust it back into his pocket.

He glanced around at the station, two solitary pumps and a closed convenience market. An isolated island of pale yellow light in the dark of the North Carolina forest, the silhouettes of the trees bit sharply into the starry night sky, surrounding him like a ring of teeth. The grating hum of electricity mingled with the crackling of insects from the woods beyond, drifting in the warm summer night air.

Jutting from the side of the shuttered market was a scraped and listing pay phone, its metal stalk visibly bent from some long ago impact. Conner approached it, digging a quarter from his pocket, and gripping the scarred plastic handset. For a moment, nothing happened, and the sense of isolation deepened, like the ground being pulled out from under him, and the panic returned. A series of quick clicks bit into his ear and the dial tone chimed. His fingers felt numb as he dialed.

Even at a few hours past midnight, Reynolds answered on the first ring.

“Yes?” Reynolds' rolling baritone was silky, and unmarred by the late hour. “Who is this?”

“S’me. Conner.” He was unable to keep the quaver out of his voice, and he had a sudden urge to look back towards the car, suddenly afraid that it might have moved, or left him there all together.

“This isn’t the phone I gave you.” Reynolds liquid voice darkened, almost imperceptibly.

“It’s a payphone. Ain’t got signal out here. Middle of fucking nowhere. Listen Ren, I-”

“Is something the matter, Conner?” Conner bristled at the mild, calculated condescension in the older man’s tone, and inhaled slowly, measuring his next words with caution.

“Well... Shit. I don’t rightly know, Ren, but I got a real bad feeling about this.”

“Where are you?”

“Service station. Just got off the freeway. Bout to head south through Natahala.”

“And what is the matter, Conner?”

“Like I said, there’s something fucked up about this one. Didn’t like the guy I picked the car up from, don’t like whatever it is that’s in the fucking trunk. I know this sounds fucking stupid, but it’s giving me a headache. I feel like I can smell it, but I know I can’t. Something just feels rotten about it. I mean rotten, rotten.” 

There was a long silence on the other end, and Conner knew that Reynolds was unmoved. Even as Conner said the words, he knew how stupid it sounded.

“Conner,” the old man said at last, “We’ve worked together for a long time. I like you. But you’ve never given a shit about what you deliver. What’s the strangest thing I’ve had you carry?”

“The heart.” Conner answers without hesitation, seeing the white styrofoam cooler steaming with ice, strapped in the front seat like a babies car seat.

“Yes. You also once delivered several pounds of heroin. Did you know that at the time?”

“Not ‘till after the fact.”

“Because it’s better that way, isn’t it, Conner.” Reynolds paused, the smooth rhythms of his voice already calming the younger man. “It’s better if you don’t know. The man you picked the car up, in his own way, is as trustworthy and reliable as you are. I understand why you might bristle at him, given his unfortunate looking visage, but he is like you. A trusted contractor, and discrete. I employ you both, for your discretion. Do you understand Conner?”

“Yessir.”

“Good. I think you understand why I’m offering so much more for this delivery, and why it has to be late at night, and on the backroads. Our client this time has specific instructions, and we’re not getting paid to wonder why. We’re not getting paid to pry.”

“I understand.” It galled Conner, how stupid he’d sounded, how stupid he’d been, panicking, and calling Reynolds late in the night.

“I know you do. And I know this one is odd, son. I do. I hope you believe me when I say that it makes me as uncomfortable as it makes you. I’d do it myself, but no one is as good as you. I’m smart enough to know when to trust the best.”

“Thank you, Ren.”

“No, Conner, thank you. Now, get back on the road. When you drop off the car, the client will have his own men to take care of the package. And then you can sleep, and you won’t have to work for a year. All for one nights drive.”

“Okay. I gotcha.”

“Conner. I trust you wouldn’t, and forgive me if this is insulting, but, don’t open the trunk okay? It wouldn’t help, the package is locked up anyway. And it needs to stay locked because the client wants it locked.”

“Of course, Ren. Look I’m awful sorry for calling, I guess I just got spooked something fierce.”

“Not at all. That’s what I’m here for. Now, get on the road Conner. And call me when it’s done.”

Reynolds hung up before Conner could reply, and he returned the handset to the cradle.

Keys in hand, Conner returned to the car, driving himself forward even as his newfound confidence waned as he approached. The phantom odor, more like a memory of a scent than an actual smell returned, something sweet and corrupt. As he turned the key to start the engine, the gentle pain in the back of his head returned, rising slowly. He gritted his teeth, and pulled out of the service station.

The Natahala national forest closed around the two lane road, and the darkness swallowed the service station behind him. Conner tried to focus on the destination, the route laid out, the starry sky outside. Anything but the trunk. It worked, for a few minutes.

Conner’s blood coursed with caffeine, and a tiny dose of some high grade speed, just enough to keep him awake, but still, after a half hour on the dark road, his eyes began to flutter. At first, they simply felt dry, and he batted his eyes to wet them. But they began to stay closed longer, seeming to stick at the zenith of each blink. The tires hit the yellow reflectors of the center line, and with a sick jolt of adrenaline, he realized he’d been drifting.

Ahead, the headlights illuminated a hundred yards of road, and picked out reflectors for another hundred. The glowing dots chased out in front of him like tracer bullets, outpacing the lit road, and marking his path into the darkness. They curved upward ahead, signaling a rise in the road before it could be seen.

Conner focused on the reflectors, letting them swim by him like the gentle dripping of water. He watched the phantom line of glowing points dip and rise with the road, and then, with numb disbelief, watched it whip upwards, above his line of sight, twisting skyward. Conner thought absurdly of a sharp upward rise, wondering if the car could take such a steep ascent.

Then the line whipped like a snake, striking across the night sky, and his foot struck the brake with all the force that his terror could muster. The car slid to the right, and he corrected, pulling back onto the road, and jerking to a halt. From the trunk there was a hollow and dull thumping noise, and Conner’s heart surged.

Ahead, the road was perfectly flat, the yellow reflecting lights fixed back in reality. With the car no longer in motion, Conner’s guts sang to him to leave, to flee into the relative safety of the dark woods. His hands clutched the steering wheel, bloodless in their intensity. From the trunk, came another small thud, and Conner’s heart seemed to stop.

Conner was out of the car before he knew it, the keys rattling in his grip. The fear had become something like a manic curiosity now. If he could simply see the thing in the trunk, he could move on, could start driving, could do another line and stay awake long enough to dump the fucking thing and just sleep.

The trunk opened with greased efficiency. The smell caught him first. It was the phantom smell from before, but now it felt cloyingly real, clinging to his nostrils. Putrid meat. Dead dog in the hot summer road, burst belly and cloudy eyed rot. He gagged, choking on the intensity.

When he blinked the tears from his eyes, he could see what was inside, but could not understand at first. Shiny emergency blankets, silvery on one side and gold on the other, reflecting the trunks meager light, were wrapped loosely around a large, man sized bundle.

Conner’s hands were peeling back the metallic sheets before he had time to think, the drive to know almost painful, even as his mind screamed what he already knew: he was carrying a fucking corpse.

Beneath the first shining layer was an woolen army blanket, sodden in black and oily fluids. The smell was even stronger now. Conner debated, briefly, stopping there, but he reached out, and peeled back the blackened sheet, feeling the wet fluids adhere to his slender fingers.

The corpse was naked to the waist, and horridly disfigured. One arm ended in a shredded stump; an unmistakable bruised and pierced field, a buckshot wound, patterned the grey and sunken chest. The head was cracked open, one hand sized chunk of skull, clotted and matted with thinning gray hair, lying next to it. Black and rotten teeth grimaced through a frozen rictus of pain. One dull, dark eye stared up it him.

Around the neck, was a black leather collar, cinched tight against the mottled grey skin. What looked like metallic wires in delicate filagree curved across the leather, tracing a circuit board like design. At the clasp was a small metal box, where the wires met and joined, encircling a small green LED light that winked rhythmically.

Conner stared, disbelieving for some time. The silent forest surround him, and his eyes held fixed on the corpse, the dead hobo with an electric collar in the trunk. He wanted to be angry, he knew he should be terrified, but it simply didn’t make sense, and he could muster no single emotion, despite the hundreds vying for release. The headache pulsed sharply, and it pushed him out of his trance, where he found himself staring off into the woods.

He shut the trunk, after wrapping up the body and wiping off his hands. He found himself back in the drivers seat, staring ahead at the flat road, his breathing oddly calm. He was tired again, and the nameless dancing fear was far at the periphery.

It was simple now. He had to deliver the car. That was all there was to it.

He sped now, against his own rules and instincts, taking the forested roads with reckless velocity, music cranked loud to hammer him awake. It didn’t work. The drowsy fog seemed to tug harder at him now, and the ticking regularity of tall trees, and the rhythm of the white reflective paint on the road beat out a tattoo of hypnotic regularity.

It was a while before he came to realize that the radio was no longer on. There was only the steady lulling white noise of the engine, the hiss of the tires peeling away from the asphalt. And the knocking from the trunk.

A steady beat of impacts. Sharp raps. Fists on metal.

Conner closed his eyes tight, grinding his teeth together. The headache took on a new pitch, a sudden sharpening, and a chill spread across his body. He pressed the accelerator as if he could speed himself bodily away from the trunk and it’s cargo, but he felt it speeding with him, pursuing him with a matched intensity.

When he opened his eyes, his heart leapt into his throat. The forest was gone. He was on a four lane highway, but the terrain was foreign to him. He resisted the urge to stop sharp again, tried to quell the hammering in his chest, but he could settle the panicked animal desperation.

Everything was wrong. Despite the massive road, he was the only driver in either direction. There were no road signs. No mile markers. He’d lost time on long drive before, but he always stayed on course, coming out of the trance precisely where he wanted to be. And he’d never been lost. Conner knew every thoroughfare and backwoods trail for 100 miles in every direction.

But he could not tell where he was. The clock on the dashboard proclaimed that he’d lost mere minutes. He’d been a dozen miles from any road of this size.

It’s not fair, he thought, and then repeated it again, aloud. His voice was pinched and thin. A child’s protest.

“That’s not possible.”

The unbroken field of blacktop and reflective plastic and paint rolled away beneath him and behind. The trunk was now silent, but still lingered malignant behind him. He grabbed the telephone beside him, and flipped it open. Nothing.

Conner only had one course of action that he could see. Take the first exit, find another service station, reorient, deliver the fucking car. The little thread of hope, woven by as solid a plan as he could muster tugged at him, and he pushed the little blue sedan even harder. Together, driver and passenger hurtled down the road.

He felt a surge of elation, as up ahead, an orange sign broke the monotony of the phantom freeway. It resolved from the gloom as he approached, tall black letters reading ROADWORK AHEAD.

It wasn’t what he’d hoped for, but it was a change, and something to break the impossible blankness of the unknown road.

Ahead, the left lane was blocked off by a sloping line of bright orange traffic cones, pushing Conner one lane over. The line continued, disappearing into the dark. Conner strained to see the lights and hear the sound of construction vehicles, the late night shift adding a fresh layer of tar. Nothing.

The line of cones veered again, blocking of the next lane. Conner merged with it, feeling his hopes seep away into the dark. The line moved again, forcing him into the far right lane.

Finally, as he understood it would be before he even saw it, the plastic traffic cones blocked of the last lane, and then the shoulder, one bright orange line, bisecting and blocking any further progress.

Conner slowed, ingrained instincts to obey all rules of the road screaming as they tried to process this logical contradiction. It didn’t take long for him to decide. He knew he didn’t want to be out here, alone, and unmoving, with the thing in the back. The thing that might not be dead. If he was rolling, he was at least getting closer to being done with it all. He gunned the engine, brought the car back up to speed and plowed through the line of cones.

They folded beneath his wheels, tossed high into the air, and illuminated by the red of his brake lights as they bounced off the road into the night.

Everything in Conner’s career had been focused on not drawing attention. He’d not been pulled over since he was caught joyriding at age 13 with a phone book beneath his seat, and a tin can tied to his foot to reach the pedals. He’d made a career of escaping notice, but now he found himself wishing to see flashing blue and reds lights behind him.

He didn’t know how he’d explain driving into a roadwork zone, speeding, or the hideous wreck of flesh in the trunk. He didn’t care. He’d give anything to see another person. If he could just reach Reynolds, hear that calming voice...

Ahead, the four dotted lines of reflective paint vanished. The four lanes evaporated into a featureless plain of smooth black tar. Conner felt empty, beyond shock. Hot tears welled up in his eyes. Without the lines of the road, he suddenly felt he was drifting, veering of the road. Impulsively, he turned sharp to the right. The smooth field of blacktop spread away into the distance of his headlights.

“Fuck this.”

The sound of his own voice shocked him, causing him to leap slightly, and he let his foot of the pedal. The car drifted to a stop. He opened the door, and stepped out, onto the black plain. The brittle pain in his head flared as he did, but he knew that if he could just get away from the car, he could think straight.

He picked a direction and began to walk. The night sky was starless, the horizon featureless. He looked behind him, once, seeing the pool of bright light where the car still sat. His head throbbed, and he picked up his pace, jogging now.

The night air was clean and sweet, and although the throbbing in his head still continued, he felt refreshed by the freedom of being on his own two feet.

After what felt like several miles, walking blind across the asphalt field, he began to worry if Reynolds would ever hire him again. Such a relatively mundane concern, absurd in his current situation, hooked him like an anchor.

He was hallucinating, he realized. Although he couldn’t tell where his senses became unreliable, he knew that was the only possible answer. And sooner or later, he would stop. And he’d likely never work as a courier again, would likely have ruined Reynolds business with his strange, wealthy client that paid to have the corpses of transients shipped across backwoods roads, but so fucking what? With a dry chuckle he realized that Reynolds would be better off without that sort of client even if the old man didn’t see it that way at first, because who knows what the client would ask of him next? And hell, he’d find work again, even if he had to uproot and find a new backyard to get familiar with, because he was the best goddamn driver there was.

Up ahead, he saw a light, a tiny deviation in the darkness, and he began to run, a smile spreading across his face. As he approached, the skin on the back of his neck seemed prickle, and the icy point of the headache pushed deeper. He knew what he was looking at, but he still couldn’t accept it.

It was the sound that made it real. The engine he heard first, then the other sounds, the chirping ring of his cellphone on the front seat, the bleating of the car’s open door alarm, and then at last, the steady tapping from the trunk.

He didn’t want to look at it, wanted to turn away and run off into the dark forever, rather than confront the car and its evil fucking cargo just a few feet in front of him when it should be miles away.

He picked one errant thought out of the confused and desperate whirlwind of his mind: The phone. It was still ringing. He pressed in closer to the car, feeling its presence like a thick fog, blacker than the darkness around it. It seemed to yield to his incursion, allowing him in to shut off the engine and grab the phone.

He clicked the phone open and pressed it to his ear, trying to ignore the noises from the trunk.

“Hello?” he whispered into the receiver.

“Conner.” It was Reynolds’s voice, but something was wrong. The sharp precise diction, the smooth tone, some indefinable quality was gone. “Conner, listen to me.”

“Oh Jesus, Ren, I think I’m in a lot of trouble.”

“Did you unlock the package?”

“Fuck no, sir, but I don’t think that matters.”

“You have to check. As long it’s still locked, nothing else matters.”

“I don’t think I can look in there. I think it’s still alive.”

“Conner. You must.”

Conner felt the heat rising in him again, the paralyzing anger at the absolute bullshit unfairness of it all, and he yowled wordlessly at the sky, before shakily approaching the rear of the car.

He slid the key in, fingers trembling uncontrollably, and swung the trunk open. The smell hit him, but it had changed, the rot had gave way to some predator musk that put Conner’s hair on end.

The silver blankets were shredded and pushed aside. The thing inside was almost unrecognizable. The shredded arm was now a thin and reedy limb, pink and newborn with too many jointed elbows. The buckshot wound was almost invisible, and Conner watched in horror as one of the few remaining holes disgorged a small lead ball before closing up around it.

Both eyes stared out at Conner, one shrunken and glistening, but filled with malevolent light. It grinned, revealing not the black and rotted teeth he’d remembered, but a shark’s grin.

Conner found himself on his back, not remembering falling, scuttling feebly away from the car. The headache was suddenly gone, and a confusing flood of stimuli crashed against the beachhead of his senses.

He was still in the woods.

The car was pulled off to the side of the road. In the sudden painless clarity, the broken parts of the last hours fell into place. He remembered opening the trunk that first time seeing the body. He remembered stripping the collar from the corpse, tossing it into the woods. He remembered wondering why he’d done it even as his fingers closed around it.

He remembered forgetting. He remembered wondering why he’d found himself staring off into the woods.

He still couldn’t find his footing, could only crawl away from the open trunk, the thing now rearing upward, silhouetted by the wan light of the trunk’s single bulb. One of the too long limbs, with the impossible joints slid out, a spider emerging from a drain.

The phone was still in his hand, and he saw, without any real surprise, that it was still searching fruitlessly for a connection. He tossed it away, using his hands to pull himself upright.

It was out now, crouched and waiting. Its dark eyes flickered in the moonlight.

Conner raised himself slowly to unsteady feet. The thing mirrored him, extending to its full and horrid hight, the bloody scraps of pants clinging to it’s pale and now unmarked frame.

Disgorged of its hideous cargo, the little car now looked like sanctuary, like hope, like freedom. But the thing stood between him, and any chance of escape. It leaned forward toward him, the shark teeth glistening with spit.

Conner began to laugh, a hopeless and mournful sound, his limbs locking in fear as it reached out for him, its spider legged hands curling around his arms. Its touch was cold, and the knobby fingers felt like the tightening of vices.

The thing laughed with him.



This story is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license



Despite saying I was going to work on this a week ago, I only managed to sit down and write today, writing this whole story in the last four hours. It felt warmly familiar, very much like my first stories written in one sitting, yet suffering many of the same problems.

This is, more than most, is an exercise, a series of stretches to stay limber, written in traditional third person past tense, and a few other literary devices which I generally shy away from. It was probably more fun to write than it will be to read. There's a bunch of small elements that I like in it, but it never really coheres for me, and I'm unsatisfied with the ending, but could find no other out for myself, or for Conner. I tried a few, but they all felt false, and I couldn't muster any enthusiasm for them.

There's definitely some connection in this to some of my other earlier stories. For a while I worked at developing an underlying mythology for these tales, but I think I have a long way to go before I can justify creating a whole mythos. Although it's probably a tenuous and forced connection, I see the wealthy client in this story as the protagonist of one of my earlier stories. Whether you do or not is up to you, but it likely won't take away or add to it.

Either way, I hope you will enjoy.

Metapost - Let's be honest for a moment...

The mundane world intervenes, far more than we'd all like.

Work and life have been fruitful, but aggressive and needy, and I haven't been able to write lately. But, after a long, nighttime drive through a remote forest, listening to an excellent podcast (Radiolab - Afterlife), I'm brimming with the need again. When the need is great, it carves out time for itself.

The piece I've been readying, "The Watcher", is swelling to novella length, and I'm setting it aside for the moment to chase the thrill of finishing something.

I'll have a new story up by the end of next weekend, "Roadwork", a very simple little piece more like the stories I used to write on a weekly schedule. Finally, before the end of the year, I'll have a nebulous and... self indulgent meditation on death and mortality, called "Shiva".

I'm setting out this schedule not only as a promise, but as a threat to myself, a backup copy of obligations. Deadlines are the best friend art ever had.

See you soon.

Soon... but not as soon as I'd hoped

My apologies, but the chance to help design and work in a haunted house tonight was not something I could pass up.

I'll be posting at least a portion of the new story tomorrow.

Happy Halloween.

One

Hello again. Here is, at last, for better or for worse, my first draft of "One", a story I've been writing intermittently for the last five months. This may be the roughest draft I've posted yet. At one time, when this story was plotted out in my head, it ended with a rather banal revenge-murder plot, involving deus ex machina villains that existed for no other reason that to be unlikeable fodder. The story surprised me by refusing this ending, instead asking for something else. I'll be honest, I'm not sure if the story is over here, but I know it won't return to the wild west pastiche I'd originally imagined. For right now, I like where it ends, and what it portends. But I may hate it tomorrow. We shall see.

"One" is a little long in the tooth, and suffers from some disconnections and irregularites that stem from its long gestation and unpredictable plotting. I tried to clean some of the internal consistincies, but if you catch a flaw in continuity, please let me know. I try not to depend on you for editing of this sort, but let's be honest; you are better at it than I am.

Although it shouldn't be necessary to understand "One", this story is preceded by "Zero" and is followed, although some decades later, by "Before".




In the night, with only dim starlight holding back the true dark, I am alone. The day’s business is done, the traps checked and reset, water collected from the evaporation pits, the perimeter alarms set. My body uncoils, the thick ropes of aching muscles unspooling, as I lay in the filthy sleeping bag. The once springy down filling is clotted with a foul smelling dampness, bunching into greasy clumps and knots. By winter I will need to strip the filling, and find something to replace it, but it will not pack down as light. By winter, I might be able to venture back into a city, and find a sporting good store. By winter, this might be all over, or I may be dead.

I drift away, the pinpricked night differing very little from the haze of sleep. When I awake and shake the gossamer film from my consciousness, I become aware of the passage of time. The spine of silken light behind the stars, the heart of the galaxy that I have become re-accustomed with in the past month, has twisted across a quarter of the sky. Small coiling tendrils of fog are coursing up the sides of the mountain, like the rising of some vaporous ocean. And behind the wet and living thrum of the brush, behind the shudder and shiver of the breeze, I hear the clank of glass and tin cans.

The alarms.

I cannot pick out the direction at first, so I spring from the sleeping bag already gripping the revolver, finger already coiling around the trigger. I hold utterly still in a runners crouch, the pistol already slick with sweat against the walnut grip, despite the ragged cold of the night. My lungs burn with panic, but I wrestle control from my hindbrain and still the shuddering in my chest until my body is calm, still. My mind will follow.

In the stillness, the alarm rings again, a clumsy tremor of inorganic sounds against the night’s tapestry, just ahead of me now. I thrust the pistol forward, without thinking, and fire two shots, level with the horizon.

As the echoing of gunfire rolls down the mountain and is swallowed by the approaching fog, the night goes silent. I hold my body crouched and still, one hand splayed wide in the dirt, the other jutting forward, the gun forming the point of my spear. The alarm is silent. I count the beats of my heart. Somewhere shy of ninety, the alarms sound again, a violent surge that tugs and tears at the ropes and brush. In the darkness beyond perception, something crashes through the undergrowth. Away from me, away from the camp.

Dawn comes slowly as the waves of fog crash over the campsite, a smothering blanket of wet grey that chokes the thin sunlight. When the murky light reaches me, I hurriedly pack down the camp, hissing with regret at having to move again so soon. The small clearing at the intersection of several winding deer trails had been perfect, and I’d just started to dream of building a more permanent structure.

When I have scrubbed the site clean, I go to retrieve the alarms. They are of the simplest sort, ropes strung and staked between the bushes, lashed to bundles of clattering trash. I can see at once where they were triggered the night before. The ropes are down and tangled, tugged free by the intruders wild flight. There is a tiny spray of dark blood across a few leaves, and I allow myself a moment of pride at the lucky shot.

I hide my pack beneath the brush and I follow the little network of trails, retrieving the clear plastic sheets and cups from the evaporation stills. I pull apart the little traps to salvage the springs and ropes, not looking forward the work of rebuilding the network of snares and cages at my next camp.

As I approach the final snare, something shudders in me, like a plucked string. My teeth set against each other, and I can feel the skin on my scalp crawling. I drop again into the practiced crouch, head down and eyes closed, surveying the woods with my ears. There is nothing, only the gentle patter of condensing fog. After a moment, the sensation passes.

It’s almost noon when I set out; the sun is a white disc, barely picked out against the slate of the sky. I find the main trail, overgrown after a season of neglect, and press upward, towards the mountain ridge.

An hour later, the trail emerges from the fog and the forest with steep ascent. To the West, the sea stretches away, infinite and placid as it mirrors the gray of the clouded sky. The cry of a hawk drifts on the cool breeze, and beneath it, behind me, I hear the cracking of clumsy footfalls.

I am ticking through my options even as I turn my eyes to the noise. I can’t run with the pack. I can’t leave it behind. And I can’t allow the intruder to get near me.

The pack clatters to the ground, the metal cookpot clanging out like a bell against the rock. I fumble, frantic, at the nylon cords encircling the rifle, my fingers numb and cold. I jerk it free and bring it up hard enough to jar my shoulder, and squint down the sights.

The mouth of the forest breaths fog, cloaking the trail in a gloom my eyes cannot pierce. The hawk cries again, somewhere far above us. There is no sound from the forest.

I wait. My left arm starts to burn, and I slowly lower the rifle, allowing myself a deep, cold breath. My heart is just beginning to slow, when I catch sight of a hand, pale and thin, slowly reaching out from behind a gnarled pine. It drifts outward, shuddering and twitching, trailing an arm in a tattered sleeve.

The man drifts into view with a measured slowness, his arms raised high. His eyes lock on me, pleading. His face is a gaunt mask of fear, weathered by hardship almost to vanishing. His clothes are filthy and torn and I see the thin ruby stripe where last night’s bullet bit into the flesh of his thigh. His lips tremor slightly as he opens his mouth to speak, and he lurches towards me.

I raise the rifle again, finger almost squeezing the feather trigger in panic. My heart returns, surging blood and pounding in my ears.

“Stop, godammit, don’t move!” My throat is raw from disuse and what I hoped was an authoritative bellow comes out cracked and reedy.

He stops with a jerk, and his mouth snaps shut. He’s shaking now, body wracked with little spasms. It could be from fear. It’s hard to tell. He starts to smile, a sad line on his dirty face, and the corners of his eyes tilt as he is wracked by a sudden spasmodic sob. His hands fly to his face and I feel the electric currents of his shame; it wraps around my chest and squeezes. I inhale again, deep and slow. Something inside me suddenly wishes that I had shot.

He lowers his arms and slumps, defeated. When he speaks, his voice is the sound of a dry riverbed. When he speaks I see the bleeding cracks in his lips, and I wonder if I look any better.

“Please.” He leaves this hanging, flapping in the air like a flag of surrender. “Please, I’m not... I’m not sick, I promise you. I’m not a carrier.”

His words rend me, splitting the stitches on my memory and spilling it open, wet and fecund. I remember the girl, streaked with tears and dirt, in the sickly glow of lantern-light, I remember those exact words spoken, amidst the charnel house evidence of her lies. I struggle to stay on my feet for a moment.

“You know I can’t trust you.” I say. He nods solemnly, eyes squinting shut.

“I know. I just... I need help. Can you...” He struggles, stuttering, a man unaccustomed to begging. “I need food, and water. I’m sorry, I was... I found one of your water traps last night, and I-”

He continues to talk, babbling, but I’ve stopped listening. My mind spins away on a chain of causality, starting with the infection in his body, through the pooled water, to my canteen, and into the cells of my body, rupturing and spreading. That dark little something inside me screams to pull the trigger and I do, unquestioning, while my thinking mind frantically orders my arms to move, jerking the rifle a few degrees upward.

The bullet hisses over his head and digs deep into the heartwood of the pine. He jerks and for a split second I think I’ve killed him. He drops to the trail, his limp body collapsing like doll, and covers his head in his hands. I can hear him whispering to himself, repeating some monosyllabic word in a panicked mantra. It might be ‘shit’ and it might be ‘god’ and I know they’re worth the same. I tilt my head back and scream, my throat shredding with the sound. The wet air takes my cry and crashes it against the hillsides, returning as a pallid echo.

I’ve got about a day or two at most, before I’ll know. The son of a bitch.

***

In the end, I let him follow, as long as he keeps his distance. I tell myself that I have to help him, that its not his fault. The dark something chitters happily, and I know that if I wake up tomorrow with the shakes, sweating, leaking, delirious... I will still find a way kill him. I do not speak to him for hours. He keeps his distance, and I keep my rifle slung.

When we stop in the night, I gather wood and kindling, and build him fire. He stands apart from me at a respectful distance, watching with greedy eyes as I drop a handful of sun dried berries and a strip of salted meat to the earth. I take one of my plastic bottles, filled with fresh water, and place it with the food. Then I take 15 paces away, and build my own fire.

He has already devoured the food and is sucking at the water like a newborn at the teat. I feel a momentary rise of bile in my throat, a wave of contempt for this helpless mewling thing that may have cost me my life in his ignorance. He doesn’t deserve this. Hasn’t worked for it. Cannot repay me. The dark something dances among these thoughts with giddy grace, ringing them like bells so that they will not fade. I have to shake my head, hard, to clear it.

When it has passed, I look up to see him staring at me, fearful and wondering, and I feel ashamed, knowing he can see my thoughts on my face. I know that I have forgotten how to disguise these thoughts, forgotten how to wear the mask. But that is only part of it.

“Thank you,” he says, “I can’t tell you... you saved my life and I just want you to know-”

I wave one hand sharply, not wanting to hear him, wanting him to hold on to some shred of pride. He takes my meaning and only nods.

“My name is Javier,” he says, and waits expectantly. I suddenly wish he could take it back, and his name feels like a smothering blanket. I don’t want to know the name of the man I will likely have to kill in the morning. I wait a long time before responding. My fire shifts, and the pyramid construct of small branches collapses, the coal bed already glowing brightly.

“Philip.” I say, at last. It feels strange to say it, strange to think of myself as anything but ‘I.' Whereas only a day before I was only an id among the trees, tonight by our separate fires we are Javier and Philip. It makes me queasy, and I am suddenly afraid of what will come of this.

He takes my single response as a license to speak openly. At first, I want to reject this, want to throw a stone at him until he slinks away to sleep in silence, but the rolling notes of his voice are pleasant, and soon I am unable to shut them out, unwilling to ignore him.

“-two weeks at the least. I’ve hardly eaten since the captain died. Not sick, mind you, no, he fell. When we left the highway, he was sure we could subsist better in the hills and avoid any towns or cities on our way north, and... he just took a bad step, the third day we were out here. He turned to tell me the punch line of a joke, and then, he was falling. I couldn’t get down to the bottom of the cliff, could only look at the rifle on his back, and the tent, and the cans of food, some of them smashed open on the rocks. The tide came in eventually, and he was gone. I had what I was carrying, but no gun, and not a clue of where we had been headed, or what to do. I tried to head east, back to the road, but I’ve been going in circles. To be quite honest, I’ve no idea where we even are.” He chuckles slightly as if this struck him funny.

“This was a state park.” I say, “The Lost Coast. South of Eureka, north of Grey.”

“Ahh...” he says, as if this somehow mattered now. “Anyways, I’m lucky I found you.”

I raise my head, giving the dark something a good look as it rages at his ‘luck.' I see on his suddenly fearful face that I am wearing the predator’s look, naked and unhidden. With some effort I soften my features, and return my eyes to the fire.

“Look,” he says, and I hear a note of creeping anger and indignation in his voice. “I’m not sick, and I’m not a carrier. I know I’m not. I was working with the bug, since the beginning, until it all went. We were tested daily.”

“You know what it is then. What is it?” I ask.

“The bug?” he asks, “We still have no idea. Patient zero died in San Francisco almost a year ago, and then like clockwork, it appeared in large cities across the world the following week. It’s artificial for certain, a bioweapon, but every country was hit at the same time. It’s viral, and it looks like influenza may have been used to build it but some of it looks an awful lot like rabies... Do you know much about diseases?” He seems to realize instantly what a stupid question this is for anyone still alive, but I nod.

“Enough.”

“It’s well engineered. The goal seems to have been an asymptomatic latency period, in which the infected can spread the disease, and then rapid onset. It has an amazing lifespan outside the human body, a protein shield like a glass wall.” He laughs, a hollow, sad sound. “Quarantine was impossible. Almost everything that was said in the news was false, to keep the peace, but it all crumbled when people started fleeing population centers. They brought it with them. And it just became a race, outrun the sick. And the bug loved it, it kept right up. How long have you been out here?”

“I was at the head of the race,” I tell him, with a crooked smile thats half me and half the dark. “When it was obvious that it wasn’t going to blow over, we left Sacramento. It was stupid. We broke off of the main roads to try to avoid the quarantine camps, did okay for a while in the sticks.” My throat tightens and I struggle to bend my thoughts and words up and away from this dark furrow. “I haven’t heard anything official since we started moving, other than word of mouth, and it was all hysteria. Unless they really nuked San Francisco.”

He tilts his head in half nod, bobbing only once. “I was on the deck of the USS Nimitz when they burned San Francisco. Wasn’t nukes. It was thermobarics. They wanted to sterilize it, thought they could hold the peninsula as a quarantine. The next morning, there were two sick on board, I think pressure seals on the hotlab failed, but it didn’t matter much. There was a... there was a goddamned mutiny on board, the XO shot the captain, I got off on a stolen helicopter with our military liaison, Jesus, this all sounds so absurd. At the time, it was just the logical thing to do. Just four of us got off. The city was still on fire, and most of us docs had argued against the bombing, we knew it wasn’t going to kill the bug fully. We just started going north. The Nimitz is still out there I guess, full of corpses”

“What else?” The dark is rapt at these images, entranced by the grand scale chaos and violence. I am too. It helps.

“There were some nukes, on the East Coast. That was the last we heard from any sort of formal authority. Probably Russian. Most people seem to think we fired first, but no one really seemed to have the heart for it, so it was small scale.

“Something massive hit Vallejo, right where all the freeways met. Not a nuke, some big kinetic weapon from orbit. We heard the impact from a hundred miles away. The captain seemed to think this was a last ditch effort at disrupting the flow of infected refugees, but it came far too late.

“It quieted down, fast. The bug was just... too efficient. No one recovers from it, and everyone is susceptible. Even carriers die, eventually.”

This fills me with an elation. A sense of cosmic fair-play at work. Javier seems to withdraw a little once he has said this, his eyes mirroring the dancing flames of his fire.

“It’s... it’s bad,” he says after a quiet moment. “It was designed to do this. Even the carrier immunities seem to be intentional, a long range vector to continue the spread.”

“Built by who?”

He shakes his head, and shrugs. “It’s got something else, inside of it, something like a chemical timer. There’s a little self contained packet of DNA, completely inert right now, but... It’s going to change.” He shivers and puts his hands up to the fire.

“Change, how?” I ask, but he’s done now, I can see it in his black eyes. He shrugs slightly, his eyes suddenly wet, and I understand. When it was just me, on the trails, with only water and food to concern me, the global extinction of humankind seemed so pleasantly abstract. And here, we’ve torn back the bandages, and stared into the festering wound, together.

We’re quiet for a long time.

“I don’t think there’s anyone else out here.” I say, as the fires burn down to coals. “I’ve been alone for a long time. The little roads off the highway were empty, the main quarantine posts were further inland. I walked, with no one to stop me, right into the woods, and to the sea.”

“Where are you headed?” he asks.

“Nowhere. Away from people.” I say. “I’ve been ranging to the North, till I can see the Eureka quarantine camps, and then south again. It’s been a few months since I saw anyone alive there. The big fires are out, and the last of the power seemed to have faded away. It’s quiet and dark. I’m going to wait a few more months, and then... we’ll see.”

“It’s a better plan than we had. The captain thought we’d find another medical unit, and try to pool our resources, but... in the end it was just him and me, and I think he’d given up on anything other than staying moving. I was just following him.”

The dark begins to hum and vibrate in my skull and I stand up sharply. I kick dirt over the fire, watching the dry earth blot out the glowing embers. Javier rises and looks around him into the fire-lit trees.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing. I need to set the lines for tonight. And I don’t want to talk anymore. I like you, and that’s going to make it harder when I have to shoot you.”

He has forgotten his subservience, now that I have shared food and fire with him, and his fists clench. He doesn’t quail at my clumsy threat. He’s braver than I gave him credit for at first.

“I told you-” he says his eyes narrowing.

“I know. And I believe you,” I say. “But Megan didn’t think she was sick either. We’ll see. Keep your fire going tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to build a shelter.”

***

The next morning, I feel wonderful. The sun crests the mountain tops, and I can hear the wind singing in the branches of the fir trees. Birdsong drifts across the valley on an unseasonably warm wind. Even the dark is silent this morning.

Javier is gone. He has taken nothing from me, but he has fled sometime before I awoke. His clumsy trail leads north and slightly west. I know he can follow the coast or he will be lost. I sling my pack on my shoulder, and tuck a wad of dried meat into my cheek, and I follow the broken branches and disturbed earth of his passing.

I find him before noon, drinking greedily from a small tributary that runs down the saddle of two small rises, almost on top of one of my camps. When he has drunk his fill, he stares at the silver flashing of steelhead trout in the stream.

I sit quietly, and with no small amusement, watch as he fashions a simple spear and tries for an hour to spear a fish. He cries out in frustration with every missed shot. When I can restrain myself no longer, my face split into a wild grin, I call out to him.

“What would you do with it if you did catch one?” I holler.

He jerks, his head spinning around, and although I am perched on the knobby roots of a redwood in plain view, he looks past me twice before his eyes truly see. When they register me, he lowers his body, as if to run, but the rifle is slung on my back, and he holds still.

“Eat it,” he says, with a hint of defiance. “I’ve fished before. Just not with a spear.”

I nod approvingly.

“Why did you run?” I ask. He snorts a laugh, and looks away from me, towards the ocean. There is a long moment before he responds. Then he turns back, to hold my gaze.

“You said you were going to kill me. It seemed prudent.” This time it’s my turn to laugh.

“If you are what you say you are, you’ve got nothing to worry about. What you need to do is adjust for the refraction of water. Aim below the fish.”

He doesn’t seem to understand at first, and looks blankly at the spear in his hand.

“Or, you could just... shoot it,” he says. I smile wider. Somewhere, above us, a hawk screeches.

***

Before the sun goes down, he’s speared his first fish. I build two small cook fires, separated by 10 yards. I have to talk him through the act of gutting his catch, and he pales when his hooked finger draws out the black and shining knots of viscera. Soon he has the fish spitted over the flames and it drips hot juices onto the coals. I let him keep the water bottle he left at our first camp, and he fills it several times from the river, always down stream from me. It strikes me as unfair, as he has only my assurance that I am not carrying the bug, but then again, I have the rifle.

My river camp, only ten or so yards upstream, is a simple enclosure hidden behind a few woven panels of dry branches; one of a handful I have built across the coastline at strategic locations. We extinguish the cook fires, and head upstream, the forest illuminated only in wan blue moonlight.

I teach him how to build his own simple shelter near my own, instructing him to lean a dead branch, ten feet long against the crook of a tree, at the height of his knees. He gathers pine boughs to lay against the branch to create the walls, and packs the inside with dry oak leaves. Tomorrow, if I am well, I will show him how to create a more sturdy dwelling.

He tells me more about the last days before he and his captain broke from the roads to make a go in the wild. I tell him about the mad choking nightmare of the refugee columns and the cautious optimism of the small rural towns when we found ourselves along. It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him about our nascent survivor commune, and the barn, burning in the warm spring night. I can taste the ashes of it, can see the roaring whirlwind of fire. It wakes the dark up, to think about it, and I go sullen and quiet.

To his credit, Javier takes the cue from my furrowed brows and slides noisily into his little lean-to. I spend the night with my teeth grinding and the dark whispering filth into my ear. It tries to tell me that the little tickle in my throat, the one I know is caused by speaking more than I have in months, is the onset of the bug. When I’ve ignored it long enough, it becomes content to slither back and forth, pacing on oily black feet until the sun rises.

Javier awakes with the rising temperature, and then catches my gaze. He must see it, behind my eyes, because he almost breaks into a run then and there. I shake my head, rattling the dark away and rise to meet him.

“How do you feel?” he asks, and there is confidence now in his tone.

“Well,” I say. “Tired. I didn’t sleep. But I’m not sick.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he says, solemnly.

And then he takes a faltering step toward me. His approach alarms me, and for a moment, I almost run from him. I haven’t been near another person in three months, and the smells of his sweat and the small sounds of his breathing are alien and alarming.

I fight down panic, and he raises his hand, fingers extended, palm to the side, and offers it to me. I stare dumbly at it, before raising my own to clasp it. His hand is not smooth and uncalloused like I would have imagined, but nor is rigid and cracked like my own. We shake once, and he squeezes my hand gently. The dark is howling, but it sounds far away now.

“Philip,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. You saved my life.”

***

We spend the day setting snares, and although there is no need for the evaporation traps this close to the small stream, I show him the general principal. The freshly dug pit exposes the water in the soil beneath the surface, and the clear plastic tarp catches the evaporation, condensing in the center and dripping into a canteen. I tell him with some relish that you can piss on the wet earth, to accelerate the process and reclaim more water. It is a testament to the times in which we live that he only nods solemnly at this.

“Why the traps, when you have a river?” he asks.

“There aren’t enough of these streams to provide water where ever I am, and I don’t have enough bottles to stockpile. When I’m at one of the other camps, or on the move, the traps make sure I’ve always got water at hand. I don’t want to die of dehydration just for twisting my ankle.” He nods again, and we go to sit beside the river, drinking from cupped hands. He looks up at my hut, nestled in the burned out center of a redwood tree, and carefully hidden from view

“How many of these camps do you have?” he asks, waving one dripping finger.

“A half dozen, mostly by rivers, but a few in other locations. One on a bluff that gives me a good view of Eureka, north along the coastline. I was about to settle a new one where the deer trails crossed a few miles south of here, when you spooked me away.”

“You... you plan to stay out here. Indefinitely.” It’s not a question, and I shake my head in a maybe yes maybe no gesture.

“If it’s as nasty as you say it is, maybe I’ll give it a year before I think of heading inland. Maybe then I’ll live like a king in some rich old fart’s mansion for a while. Joyride some cars. I don’t know. Powers gone, water pressure... But if the bug burns hot, maybe it will burn out. After that, who knows.”

“What brought you here in the first place?” he asks, and the dark flutters. I can smell the wood smoke of the smoldering barn. I take a deep breath of clean cool air, filtered by the evergreens and I exhale the chemical fumes of burning leaded paint. I close my eyes tight.

“My wife. My daughter,” I say, softly into the air.

He is content to let the rest of the day pass in silence.

***

It’s almost winter when I am able to tell him. By then I have to tell him, although I can’t say why.

We’re at our northernmost camp, picking the meat from spitted raccoon. During the day, using a broken pair of binoculars, he believes he saw a man walking slowly down the road to the North.

As we sit around the smoldering fire debating the wisdom of an expedition to the dark and silent corpse of Eureka, I simply begin. Once I start, I can’t stop until I’ve spilled the story out onto the ground, drained it like an infection, purified by the air and fire.

“The farm was perfect. Walt had been a dairy farmer and was confident we could make it work, and it was far from the main roads. We’d been staying in the barn a week before we realized we didn’t have to run any farther. We’d seen no one for days since our convoy of vans ran out of gas, not a single car. The more we talked the more it made sense. The farm had made a poor attempt at modernization, but the barn still contained the old tools, the ones we could use by hand. The fences were high, and only a few of the cattle had starved before we arrived. We could set watch, we could plow the earth, and we could have a harvest. It was still early spring.

“For a month, we were alone, and we worked that dream like clay. We built bunks in the empty farmhouse, and carved dark furrows in the earth. Seeds sprouted, and we carried water in buckets from the stream that marked the line between the farm and the forest. We ate together, thinning our supply of canned goods, without ever worrying. We were going to succeed. My wife and my daughter, for the first time in months weren’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid.

“And then the girl came, walking right down the road. I was on watch, in the noon day sun, and when she saw me standing by the fence, she ran towards me, weeping happily. She was beautiful, golden hair whipping in the breeze and she held out her arms as if to embrace me.

“I almost shot her. I wish to god I had, then. Instead, I fired into the air, and she stopped. At the sound, the rest of our little doomed community came running.

“‘I’m not sick,’ she yelled at as. ‘Look at me, I’m not sick. I promise you.’

“We made her stay on the far side of the road while we discussed. Some of us wanted to send her away, some wanted to believe her, but we’d all lost friends in the early days to misplaced trust. In the end, we brought her food and water, and told her to stay across the road, in the field, for three days. Just to be sure. She agreed immediately. For the rest of my guard shift, we talked, yelling across the road and getting to know each other.

“Her name was Megan. Megan Galloway. She was 17 years old, and everyone she knew was dead.

“I think we all fell in love with her a little, even the old married men. She was radiant. A country girl with a curving body, and a wit like a knife. She’d yell jokes to my daughter and the two other children with us, leaning across the fence to holler the punch-line with relish, her apple cheeks glowing in the sunlight. In the night, her jokes were bawdy and shameless. She sang like a bird, and promised to braid flowers into my daughters hair when she was allowed in.

“At noon on the third day, they let her into the farm, welcoming her with open arms.

“It was dumb luck that saved me. The morning her quarantine was to end, Tom Nilsen and I had left, heading down the road to see if we could find seed, or fertilizer, or a working truck at one of the farms at the next tiny unincorporated town. We waved at her across the road, as we left, and Tom told her he couldn’t wait to get back so he could meet her good and proper, once her three days were up. He winked at her, and she winked right back. I really don’t think she knew.

“Tom broke his ankle more than days walk down the road, as we searched the farthest farm. Hooked it right in a gopher hole and came down sideways on it. It swelled up like a basketball, and it took me a three full more days to haul him back to the farm, one arm hooked under his shoulder, without anything to show for our expedition.

“It was just after sunset when we returned, and we could hear Megan wailing softly in the distance. I wanted to drop Tom and run to her, comfort her, to make it right, but I held tight to him as we hobbled closer. Other than her cries, it was silent.

“She was on the porch of the house, her head in her hands. No one else was in sight. My guts started to twist up as we approached. I think I already knew. She stood up and raised her hands, and began to babble, pointing at the barn. The ice in my chest solidified, and I felt like I was slipping away, seeing it all at a great distance.

“‘Megan, honey, where is everyone, what’s going on?’ I asked but she just wailed even louder, hands tearing at her hair. On legs that were not my own, I approached the barn. I could smell it before I could hear it. That terror scent of shit and vomit and death that we’d been free of that last month. Beneath that fluttering miasma, was a single rasping, dead man’s cough. I knew, without any sort of evidence, that we were all inside there. Our whole little community. All of us.

“Tom had hobbled to Megan, and was stroking her back when I returned, she was telling them how they’d isolated the first to show symptoms, my daughter. How it had all happened so fast after that. Tom was telling her how lucky she was to be alive.

This was when the dark little something awoke, but I didn’t know how to explain this to Javier just yet. I’ve always had it with me, I’m sure, but until that night, it was as yet unborn, still wrapped in a black and greasy caul. I’d felt it before, an ugly little echo in the back of my head, easily banished. It was born that night on the farm, sliding wet and filthy to the cold ground, already hungry, already calling out to feed.

“What happened next seemed like a dream, like I was watching it from the end of a tunnel. I don’t think I could have stopped it if I wanted to, and to be honest, I don’t think I wanted to.

“I pulled the revolver on her, and told her to come to the barn with me. Tom was shocked, his square jaw hanging open, and he tried to stand on his ruined leg to protest. But she knew. She understood.

“‘I didn’t know,’ she said plaintively. “I didn’t.”

“‘I don’t care. Come.’

“By then Tom had figured out what was going to happen, and he’d already drawn his gun. He started to speak, and I shot him, once, in the center of his face. He sat down hard, and slowly tilted back onto the wooden porch steps. I’d known Tom since we met him fleeing Sacramento. He was a good man, but he was dead from the moment he held her. I knew it was a mercy, but that only occurred to me after.

“Megan started to scream again and I shot her in the arm. After that, she drifted like a ghost, moving where I pointed. She was in shock as I led her to the barn. She opened the door, and looked back at me once. I leveled the gun at her, and she slipped inside. Whoever had been coughing before was silent now.

“We’d kept our last small amount of fuel in a barrel by the barn, siphoned from a few lawnmowers and tractors. I kicked it over, let it flow under the door, and tossed a book of matches.

“The barn burned all night. I watched it leap to the farmhouse, across the drier patches of crops. I watched Tom’s body burn. I waited until the sun rose, until the roof beam gave way, and the barn fell on top of my dead wife, my dead daughter, and Megan. I burnt them all, I watched, and then I headed west, to the sea. I didn’t want to ever see another person, and made care to stay unseen.”

In the dim light, the cook fire crackles in counterpoint to my silence. I feel clean and cold, like being sober for the first time in many months. Javier is looking at me with an unreadable expression across the fire. When it becomes clear to him that I am done, he simply nods, eyes locked to mine.

“It’s different now,” he says after a time. “Things are different.”

I see reflected in his eyes the burning of San Francisco, the mutiny aboard the Nimitz. I see in the creases of his brow his own tragedies. I see they must rival mine. Anyone still living, now, will have their own special nightmares.

Despite his haunted eyes, he has lost the corpse-look he had when we first met. He is healthy and tanned. If I were to leave him here, tonight, and leap from the cliffs into the oil-dark ocean, he could survive for a long time with the little things I have taught him.

The dark likes this idea, but I do not; it obediently goes silent.

“Tomorrow then,” my friend says, breaking me from my reverie, “We’ll move along side the roads, through the trees, and see if there has been any recent traffic. I know I saw someone, but we need to be cautious. We should know who they are before... if we decide to make contact.”

I nod, and I know I am no longer alone. We are Philip and Javier. We are two men, at the end of things. And we are determined to live.

We will go to Eureka in the morning and we will see if the bug has burned itself out, or if it has changed.

Tomorrow, we will see. Together.



This story is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license

Upon Returning - Metapost

Greetings, all.

My apologies for the late hour, but real life conspires against my efforts to finish a long overdue draft of "One". It is nearing its end, and hopefully before the end of the month, I will post a completed first draft.

"One" is proving troublesome, as I've been working at it on and, mostly off, for the last six months. I find the more I plan something out in advance, the easier it is to procrastinate on actually following through on it. The excitement, for me, is seeing where an idea will go once I set it free, and if I already know, well... it becomes difficult. The problem is, I know exactly where "One" goes, and although I like it, it feels stale now.

Looking forward, I've just returned from Germany, whose Gothic cathedrals, castles, and river-towns are responsible for a trio of new or reignited ideas that I'll begin as soon as this latest story is completed. One set in the present, one set during the aftermath of the second world war, and one set before recorded history. It's this last and oldest idea I am most excited about; expect to see it completed first, before September ends.

On the publishing front, I've started to receive my first rejection letters from a variety of publications. As per authorial tradition, these letters now hang on my wall, and for every one I receive, I submit two more stories. I will of course share with you if a story is accepted for publication.

Thank you for your patience, and I promise, you will not have to wait much longer.

Regret To Inform

Over the past two weeks, I've gone from loving this piece to hating it and back again a number of times. It clocks in longer than the others and comes from a small idea (the coffee table scene) I had months ago but never wanted to try. It's different from my other stories in a number of ways, and I wanted to finish both as an exercise, and because I still find the core idea to be compelling. I am still foggy on my final verdict, but that likely has more to do with the time of night I find myself in. Please excuse the innumerable grammatical errors, and as always, let me know what you really think.

Enjoy.



The night before I lost her, my wife and I fought about something I cannot remember. I remember the yelling, the sweat on her brow as she spat sharp words, I remember the welling frustration inside as I tried to remain calm, until I snapped, and began to fight back, only resisting for the sake of resisting. I remember the uneasy stubborn silence as we prepared for bed, opening all the upstairs windows, pulling all but the last sheet from the bed. I remember the heat of the night, cruelly unfaltering even into the small hours. I remember wanting so badly to touch her in the dark, to begin that small reconciliation, and I remember Linda pushing me away, gently. The argument was forgotten, I have to believe, and it was only the heat that kept us apart, that pushed me away.

She was gone when I awoke, the sun already hanging, bloated in the white and opalescent sky. She had taken the car, gone to work, leaving me a small pot of oatmeal simmering on the electric stove. Next to it, on the marble countertop was a glass of orange juice and a little yellow post-it, cheery and bright, with a quick pencil sketched heart, and a single word: ‘Sorry.’ Like that, the unrest was gone, and I remembered how in love we were.

I spent the day avoiding my contracts and my studio entirely, and instead began to clean and dust the house, running a series of damp cloths over every flat surface. My allergies were already flaring as the early summer heat coaxed a thousand weeds and flowers to disgorge a miasma of pollen into the air, drifting in through every loose fitting window pane. No matter how hard the anemic air conditioner chugged, the heat never dissipated, and my sinuses flared in the thick dusty air.

The time passed quickly, and despite the discomfort and fits of sneezing, the little yellow note in my pocket had a pleasant weight, a reminder that all would be right when she returned. I took a break only to cut thin slices from a fresh cucumber, marinating them in vinegar and sugar. The first course of summer meal we would never eat.

I didn’t begin to worry until the evening, an hour after I expected her home. Dialing her mobile phone took me straight to her voicemail, and although this always planted a paranoid seed in my gut, I tried to brush it aside. But when the house was still quiet and empty as the shadows grew long, the seed cracked open and took hold with sharp and hooked roots.

The vines inside me knotted around my chest, thorns sharp and piercing as I called first her private line, her receptionist, and finally her mother and sisters, ascertaining only that she had left on time, and had made no other deviations that I could find. That had been three hours earlier.

As I watched lettuce wilt in the salad bowl her uncle gave us at our wedding, the roots of the vine turned cold, burning my insides. I dialed the police.

I reported her missing with a mechanized calm, holding my whirling terror in check as I recited our license plate, and described my wife as a series of measurable quantities: height, weight, age, hair color. When asked, I described the fight the night before, told the officer about the apology at breakfast. He made some attempt at mollifying me, encouragement rote and automated, mirroring my own artificial calm, and then asked me to call again if I hadn’t heard from her by the following day.

When I hung up, the house seemed to flex with my exhale, shuddering in time with my heart. The heat had not faded as the sun set, but instead seemed to thicken, to congeal in the air, and my breathing was suddenly labored, congested and painful. Black spots swam in the air, and my head spun.

There was nothing more I could do, and I knew that if I yielded then, allowed myself to weep and curl inward, that it would be the longest night of my life.

So I lunged into motion, swept my shrieking conscious mind away, and began again to clean. By midnight, as the sickly yellow moon crossed the sky, shimmering in the unyielding heat, I had swept, dusted and mopped every square inch of the house. Without an articulated thought, I tore to the garage, and gathered sandpaper, wood polish, and a box of tools.

Before dawn, every door swung silently on its hinges, every rough spot on the hardwood floors was smooth and glistening. In the brief hour of respite from the heat, just before the sun rose, I took to the yard. First the front and then the back, I trimmed the hedges with shears, churned the compost pile, and pruned Linda’s azalea bushes.

With the rising sun, and the return of the smothering blanket of heat, I returned inside and began to tighten each bolt on every table and chair. I could feel it inside me, the buzzing of a thousand hornets, a churning despair that always just threatened to absorb me, but the pain from chaffed and bleeding hands, toiling without stop, kept it at bay.

I was in the kitchen, electric screwdriver digging a dozen long black screws deep into the wobbling table legs as coffee brewed noisily on the black marble counter, when the doorbell rang. The tool leapt in my hand and as I clutched convulsively at the trigger. The table squealed in protest and a shivering crack ran across the table leg, parting like a fault line as the screw went wildly deep, rending the soft wood.

For a brief idiot moment, I saw my my wife on the doorstep, ringing her own doorbell. My first deliberate recollection of her face sent entwining tremors of dread and hope across my frame, the muscles of my face in spasms as it danced through a hundred half-expressions. The trance that had taken me through the night broke, and everything it had held at bay flooded back.

Somehow, my quivering legs took me to the door. Early morning light streamed in through the frosted glass of the front window, silhouetting a dark shape on the front porch. My mind was a whirlwind, no single thought gaining purchase as I emerged from my waking stupor. I turned the handle and opened the door, blinking in the sharp light and heat of the morning.

She was a police officer, badge shining brightly on the lapel of her thick jacket, patrolmen’s cap tucked under one arm, and she stared at me from behind mirrored lenses. Her short brown hair was drawn back in a bun, her face was blank and smooth, the corners of her lips turned down slightly, and she cocked her head to one side, birdlike. Her free hand slid upward and she drew the glasses from her face, revealing sad brown eyes, almost black, surrounded by the wrinkles and wear of a decade more than I had initially guessed. They were kind eyes, full of sympathy, and she held my gaze silently for a hazy moment. The last of my resolve began to crumble.

“Mr. Covington?” she asked, in a lilting drawl. I nodded, feeling my mouth go dry and my skin grow cold in defiance of the rising temperature. “Sir, I’m Officer Willette. I’m sorry to... May I come in?”

I nodded again, but before I could raise my head I felt the world beneath me slide away and I gripped the door frame with weak and blistered hands. She darted forward with gentle grace, and hooked one hand under my sweaty arm, and caught me just as I began to give in to the increasing pull of gravity.

“Easy, easy, I gotcha, I gotcha...” she repeated, a stream of reassurance, and I allowed her to prop me upright. The only other option was to fall to the floor, and I don’t believe I would have been able to rise again.

The world shrunk, a dark border creeping into my vision, and she led me on shuffling feet to the kitchen, gently placing me at the table.

“I’m gonna grab you a cup coffee sir, just sit tight.”

Breath seemed to come from far away, refusing to flood my lungs even as I tugged them open convulsively. I could hear her opening cabinets, and pouring coffee into chipped mugs. She handed it to me, placing one warm hand on my shoulder, matronly, and almost affectionate.

She sat across from me, cradling her own mug, emblazoned with the logo of Linda’s law school. She raised it, and smiled sadly at me.

“I hope you don’t mind.”

I could only stare, my hands around the hot mug. It burned me, and the crackling pain drove the darkness from my vision. Her smile faltered, and she dipped her gaze.

“Sir, you reported your wife missing last night.” It was not a question, but I dipped my head once in assent. She looked up, but not to me, instead she stared out the kitchen window at the golden sunlight streaming in from the garden. I could see her lips working, and I suddenly wanted to scream at her, to demand that she say what we both knew what was next. My throat clicked, constricting against the promise of a retching tremor. Her eyes drifted back to mine.

“Mr. Covington, your wife’s car was found on the side of the interstate this morning.” I could not have moved if I’d wanted too. She turned away from me, scowling slightly.

I realized then that I didn’t want to know, now I wanted her to stop, but she opened her mouth, to finish it, and I was still locked in place.

“Sir, I am sorry, but, your wife, she passed on.”

There. Despite knowing all along why we were here, it was now real. The heavy fog I believed I had been holding at bay did not come. Instead, I felt light, and clear headed, and infinitely tired.

I knew. I could sleep.

My eyes dipped shut and I went slack for a long time. Outside, the buzz of insects grew to a steady drone, the thick and heady thrum of infinite life in the summer morning.

I opened my eyes. She sipped at her coffee, studying me. The telling of it had freed her as well it seemed, and the frown was gone. Now she watched me with a blank placidity. But no, something else was missing. Any sympathy that had creased her brow seemed to have evaporated in the heat. She was unreadable. My eyes fell on her heavy coat, only then noticing the incongruity. The vines inside me fluttered to life.

“Was it...” My throat was all gravel, cracked and coated with dust, wood shavings and pollen. I cleared it and started again. “What happened?” I asked, not wanting to know, but not knowing what else to say. She didn’t answer at first, didn’t even move, and her blank face unsettled me further.

“We don’t know.” She said, without inflection. “Hit and run. Maybe.”

From beneath the grief and exhaustion, something else was bubbling up, a curdling feeling of wrongness. I saw that the corners of her mouth were starting to curl upwards, the thin slivers of white teeth visible between pale lips, and my fingers clutched the hot mug tighter. I struggled to make sense of this, my mind unable to process this veering deviation from the pattern.

“Was- was it quick?” I asked, and I knew at that moment, that something was very wrong.

She was smiling. Her black eyes locked on mine.

“No.” She said. Her lips shaped out the word vividly, slowly. With pleasure. Her grin crept wider, a predator’s sneer now. The blank mask of her face was lifted, erased like the dark at the dawn.

Had I not been depleted, had I not been drained, I think I would have stood and ran then, and then things would have been incalculably different. Or maybe it would have been just the same. Instead, I held her sharpening gaze and tried to still myself. Tried to focus, to collect my thoughts, to still the nauseous maelstrom inside me. She seemed to content to watch me, her smile growing even wider with pleasure at my growing discomfort. Unable to bear the silence any longer, and still unable to find a course of action, I spoke again, an idiot attempt at stalling.

“Why are you doing this? Who are you?” I asked, and my voice sounded weak and mewling in my ears. Her hyena grin convulsed once, sharply tugging and banishing the last of her soft and pretty mask.

“Not yet, Mr. Covington,” she said, languorously drawling my name. “You can call me Grace, for now.”

“You’re not a cop, are you.” It was useless thing to say. A child’s protest. She devoured my weakness with her grinning eyes.

“Got this shiny badge, don’t I?”

I was wondering, almost idly, if the real Officer Willette was as dead as my wife when everything snapped into place, the jumbled puzzle of my mind aligning with electric speed, and I sprang into motion, preparing to toss the hot coffee across the table at her, to turn and to bolt for the upstairs bedroom. I could see the black revolver in our closet, could feel its cold metal grips already in my hand, cooling and firm.

My arm lurched forward, but she was faster. One hand batted the coffee cup aside, almost dismissively, and the black gout of liquid and steam spattered to the floor. The other hand already contained her gun, and it smashed across my temple. White starlight and a screeching noise overwhelmed me, and for a moment, I was swimming in the air, drowning and unable to move, sinking.

By the time I shook my head clear, she had already slapped the handcuff on my wrist, locking the other loop to the table leg. With practiced precision, she thrust her fist into my gut, two quick jabs, driving the air out of me in a series of wheezing coughs.

I gasped, breath coming with great difficulty. She was seated again, as if nothing had ever happened, sipping on her coffee. The hyena grin had never left her face. It was quiet again in the wake of that brief flurry of violence, and she was content to bask in the silence, a cat in a sunbeam. She finished the coffee, set it aside, and laced her fingers together.

“Here’s how this works, Edward.” She began, “I tell you what to do, and you do it. No questions. The more you do, to my satisfaction, the more you get from me. You understand, sir?”

“Why should I?” I asked with great difficulty, as my lungs found traction. Her response was grotesque caricature of hurt, lower lip jutting outward momentarily before the monstrous grin returned.

“Here’s the carrot, Edward. Your wife is Linda Covington. She had a busted lawn mower in the back of the car, has a strawberry birthmark just underneath her chin, and she gets the hiccups when she cries. And she did cry.”

This struck me harder than her fists, and I gagged, a thin stream of bile and coffee leaking from my lips. Somewhere on my temple, a rivulet of blood was forming, and I felt it spill forth with the twist of my head, streaming down to patter onto the freshly cleaned linoleum.

“However, she is not dead. Yet.” She chewed this last word, loathe to let it leave her mouth.

“What do you want?” I whispered.

“I already told you,” she spat, screwing up her face for a moment before it snapped back. “Now, are you ready?” She leaned forward across the table with feline grace, leading with her sharp gloating grin.

I was ready. I had twisted my hand around to grip the chain of the handcuffs tightly. The shackle on my wrist bit into the bunched flesh, and I flicked my gaze on the other shackle, shining and silver. It was clasped loosely around the table leg, hanging beneath the yawning crack left only minutes before by the twist of a errant screw.

I swung my foot forward and then back with all the force I could muster, smashing the heel against the base of the table leg. I heard a satisfying cacophony of splintering, and felt the leg give, bending away from the table. Leading with my free hand, I drove my weight against the surface of the table above the fractured leg, and my heart sung as the heavy bulk of the table dove downward on one end, and, pivoting off the remaining legs, swung upwards towards her.

She had unslung the gun again as soon as I’d moved, but the table bucked off the ground, crashing into her elbows, and sending her body backward. She scrambled for balance, the hyena grin unchanged, but somehow infinitely more malicious in motion.

The table leg wrenched free as I slid forward off the chair. The cuff rattled down the cracked wood, the chain trailing my hand down it’s length until at last I gripped tight at the bottom. I swung the heavy leg upward, grip not quite stable, but not wanting to hesitate for another moment.

The roar of the gun flooded the kitchen, and the whine of the bullet hissed by my ear. A second later the shock of the impact shuddered up my arms. The makeshift bludgeon collided with her forearms with all the graceless power I could muster, and her arms lurched high into the air. The gun arced through the air up, and away, clattering to the floor.

The inertia of the swing threw me off balance, and she clutched her arms close to her body, and again, we locked eyes, saw our true faces. I quailed before that snarling visage, and she growled, low in her throat.

I only briefly considered advancing. Instead I hurled the table leg clumsily toward her; somehow the handcuff slid free of the knobby foot. I saw the leg collide, and she stumbled backward against a standing shelf of cereal and breads, and I turned to run.

The garage was nearly in view when the thought hit me. I didn’t have the car. I pivoted and reached out for the bannister, pulling myself up with any extra strength I could find.

I could hear her behind me, cackling and panting, more alive than I could ever have been. The terror inside me solidified, and I knew it was hopeless.

We should all be so lucky, to love what we do, and be so good at it.

I grabbed the doorframe of our bedroom and pulled as I leapt threw. I skidded across freshly vacuumed carpet, arresting my motion and reversing to throw the door shut, and fumbled for the lock. I felt her collide with the door on the other side, and it threw me backwards. She howled, a long celebratory sound that ended in high tittering. Then she kicked, one sharp shock that bent the door in its frame, splintering along the hinges.

I scrambled, slipping to one knee, into the closet, and I tugged the pistol from its shelf. It felt like I expected. Cold, black, solid. She kicked the door again, and it swung half open, the lock tearing itself free of the mooring. Her hyena laugh continued.

I clawed the tension lock from the trigger, the one Linda had made me buy the year when we first discussed the children we would never have. I pressed with all my might and it came loose. I spun, and my legs caught around each other, and I collapsed roughly to the closet floor.

She was in the room. Gun drawn, she approached me as if she had all the time in the world.

I aimed and then turned my head away and shut my eyes tight. I thought of Linda, and pulled the trigger.

For a instant, I thought of how I had always been told that a real gunshot would be quiet, not like the movies. But this wasn’t even the dull muffled firecracker sound I expected. This was a dry click, of metal on metal. I pulled again, the hammer pulling back and striking, and I pulled again.

She laughed harder, her head tilting back, a wolf baying at the moon. Then she reached me and I was frozen. I pulled the trigger one more time, wanting only to cry. She brought a booted heel down onto my left shin, and snatched the gun from my hands as a spasm of bright pain lurched up my legs.

She tossed it aside, still laughing, and brought the butt of her own gun down onto the top of my head. This time I didn’t even feel the impact.

The air was suffocating when I awoke, and for a moment I was sure she has set me ablaze. I felt liquid fire dribble down my nose and throat, and somehow I was conscious enough to clamp my eyes shut. I heard the pressurized hiss of the pepper spray, just inches from me. I vomited, convulsively, voiding only the water I’d drunk in the 12 hours.

She was laughing again, an endless gleeful shudder that took no breaks for breath. My hands lashed out towards the noise and struck the metal mesh that divides us. I kept my eyes locked shut, and as I continued to retch, and I probed my surroundings, trying hard to ignore her pleasure.

I was in the back of a police cruiser, but aside from the dangling bracelet of the cuffs on my right hand, they were free. As the bright white pain of the pepper spray began to dull, I became aware of the throbbing pain in my skull, and the caked and cracked blood that had dried in runlets down my face. I wept, and clenched my eyes tighter. When she was done reveling in the moment, she sighed, a happy content sound.

“Well sir, how can I convince you not to try all that again?” I could not see the smile on her face, but I could hear it. She sighed again. “I suppose it’s a good lesson for you. I don’t do my work without a lot of planning. I could have just took the gun, when I was in your house last week, but something in me said leave it empty, and I am just pleased as hell that I did.”

A door opened, and I could hear her sliding out. The door to my left opened, and I wailed, shuffling away from the sound of her coming, but she wrapped he fingers in my hair and tugged sharply, dragging me from the back seat. I hit the hot pavement, shoulder first, followed by my head. Behind my closed eyes, stars bloomed.

She wiped a gloved hand across my face, in a motion so deceptively warm and gentle, I was shocked into stillness. The coolness of the alcohol swab that followed was like the answering of a prayer, and she cleaned my face with something that felt like an awful twin of tenderness. I started to weep, and some traitorous and simple part of my brain wanted to reach out to hold her, and to be held, and I retched again.

Then, horribly, she did hold me, one arm sliding around my back, and pressing my head to her shoulder, and I shuddered in disgust as my body refused to fight back. The false fur collar on her thick coat caressed my skin. It didn’t last long, and soon she placed her thumbs on my cheeks and tugged my eyes open. Pepper spray residue and sunlight slammed into my eyes in a fresh wave of pain, but I was to tired, to broken to do more than flinch slightly.

We were parked in the driveway of a house, in the dark shade of a willow. She was only a few inches from me, and although my eyes refused to focus, I could see that she wore a new smile. Not the false friend, not the predator's grin. This was simple and true warmth. Her dark eyes beamed.

“Okay,” she said, “Are you ready?”

I blubbered weakly; I didn’t know what she wanted, but I was knew I would do it. Not for Linda, but for me. To make it stop. She held my head steady, thumbs still on my cheeks.

“Edward, I want to help you. I want to help you save your wife. And the hard part is over now. You tried, and I respect that, I do, but we have to do it my way now. And I need you to hear this clearly. If you try anything stupid again, I’ll just kill you. That’s not what I want, but if you can’t work with me, well... Then it wasn’t meant to be. And if I kill you, I don’t have any need for your wife. Edward, look at me.”

I snapped my eyes open again, lenses of tears blurring the world, and her soft, warm face. I looked. And she looked back. Her eyes slid sideways, and I followed them across the street, and I saw the school.

I heard the children first, the loud, carefree raucous sounds of play, the glee of a hot afternoon. The world snapped wider, away from our intimacy, and I saw the wide green fields, and the bright primary colored play structure. I saw the old brick school buildings, surrounded by a field of portable trailers, like encircled covered wagons. I saw this all, and my heart surged. She saw me start and squeezed my head in her hands, twisting me back to her.

“Edward. Listen. You are going to stand up, walk over to them, and pick one. Whichever one you think looks like the worst of them, or whichever one you can catch. Wrap your hands around his neck, and squeeze until he stops breathing. If you do this like clockwork, I’ll come stop you before you kill him, and take you again. Falter for a second, and I wait just long enough for him to die. Understand?”

I wanted to scream, to lash out, to bite down on my tongue and to choke, but before I could think the traitor in my head was nodding, and she was smiling at me, wide and proud.

“Good. The hard part is over, Edward. Go. For Linda.”

And then I was walking, on hateful idiot legs, still weeping softly. And the traitor was telling me that it wouldn’t be so bad, and that if I hurried, no one would die, no one would even get hurt, and it was all for Linda.

I wanted to believe it. So I did.

The chain link fence barely came to my waist, and I threw my legs over. The dangling handcuff on my wrist clanked loudly on the top bar. A few of the children saw me then, bloodied and vacant eyed, blinking back tears and already forming claws with my hands, and some of them screamed, but it mingled with the summer sounds. I went straight to the play structure, allowing it to eclipse me from view, at least for the moment, from the sole adult playground monitor on the far side of a blacktop kickball court.

My feet hit sand, and now they were all standing and scattering, their screams still excited and buoyant, a play mockery of fear. I was too absurd to be a threat, and it was still just a game for them. Like fish, they flooded around and away from me, darting and giggling, some of them crying. Some stood paralyzed, staring at me with gaping mouths showing irregular gaps between baby teeth. I kneeled in the sand before one tow headed boy, his lower lip quavering as he met my wild and red gaze.

I saw myself, reflected in his pale eyes. The front of my white tee shirt was spattered with forking rivers of blood. My pale and puffy face bent across the curve of his cornea, a corpse in a funhouse mirror. I began to sob as I stared at him, and he began to cry as well, too terrified to move away from me. The traitor was already screaming at me to raise my arms and curl my fingers, for Linda, for this boy, for myself, do it quick. He would go home tonight, bruised and terrified, but alive, and I would see her again. But only if I hurried.

But the traitor was weak.

And I knew, staring at this terrified child, that as broken as I was, I would never hurt him. I knew if I did, it would only be the first in an endless stream of atrocities I would commit, as she ground me down, each one worse than the last, and each one easier and easier. I knew then that I would never see Linda again.

So I gathered great handfuls of hot sand, and placed them on the boy’s shoulders. My cupped hands pressed against the cool flesh of his neck, but gently. He screwed his face tight and wailed, and I whispered soothing words, promising it would be okay, begging him to stay quiet, but he only keened louder.

Around us, the last of the children had fled, and I could see in the distance the approach of a great lumbering adult, blowing a whistle as she limped towards me, fighting against the flow of children like a spawning salmon. The she stopped short, and I knew that Grace was behind me.

Above us, a clear plastic dome protruded from the play structure, and I could see she was ten feet behind me, one hand held out to stop the advance of the yard monitor, one hand authoritatively on the butt of her gun, where my blood and matted hair were drying in clots. I held the screaming child closer, hoping she didn’t see my loose grip, and the sand ran from between my fingers. I heard her call out to the yard monitor.

“Stay back ma’am, I got it.” And then quietly, she spoke to me, a mother’s disappointment thick and theatrical on her voice. “Oh, Edward, you know better than to try and fool me. He’s still sucking breath and yowling. Put your thumbs in his eyes, now, or your wife-”

I pivoted and flung the sand catching her off guard. The sand struck her eyes and she hissed ducking back and drawing the gun, but I was already rushing her, my shoulder checking her gut as I sprang forward. My bruised and protesting shins shrieked with the effort, and my head rang as I collided, but she made a noise, a surprised grunting exhalation that was as pleasing and wonderful as cool water.

I let the inertia carry us back and over, landing on top of her in the sand, my left hand flailing and grasping for the pistol, batting it out of her grasp. I raised my head and brought it down, hard, my brow colliding with the soft cartilage of her nose, feeling it give way. I soared, high on the smell of her spilling blood and her predator confusion, and I bounced on her, clumsily pummeling her with elbows and knees and fists

I lost myself there, as I had lost myself to the traitor before, and her struggling grew weaker. I leaned forward and without conscious thought, bit into the flesh of her cheek, spitting the tiny hot lump of meat out beside me. I watched it bounce, white sugar crystals of hot sand sticking to it, and I lost my focus, lost everything, and simply stared, not accepting what was happening.

She drove her elbow up sharply into my jaw, tossing me aside in a heap, and she was over me in a flash, pistol in hand. The hyena grin was wide, the lines between her white teeth picked out in blood and shadow. Her eyes burned from beneath her brows and the gaping hole in her cheek oozed. I had never seen her so luminous, so alive. I withered in her light.

“Oh, Edward,” she said, a bare whisper, sand on the wind, “You cannot conceive of what I will do to her while you watch.”

I would have died then if I could, curling, drying and desiccating in the sand, blowing away. On my knees, I looked up, and I saw him. Just a dozen yard behind us, a bald man in a police uniform, badge glinting in the sun as he leapt the fence and raced towards us, shouting into his radio. I saw her face twist, the grin melting away in a storm of true rage, and I felt real hope for the first time as I tried to process this turn of events.

He was on us then, gun raised at me, ignoring her. I could see the streaks of grey in his mustache, and I raised my hands high, the cuff dangling. I tried to speak, to tell him the whole story but I could only bleat out fragments of speech.

“Crazy. Not a cop, please god help me, she’ll kill me. She’s not a cop, please believe me.”

He held the gun trained on me, and then he looked to her; I saw the recognition on his face, and my hope broke apart like dried bones.

“Officer Willette... Grace, Jesus, are you all right?” he asked in low worried tones. She put one hand to her cheek and grimaced, and I saw her face take on that sad, sympathetic mask she had first worn for me.

“Yeah, I’ll live, thanks Tim. He got the drop on me, sonofabitch just hopped the fence and was going after the kids, gibbering like a loon. God damn lucky I happened to be passing by and heard the commotion.”

I was screaming, over and over again. No. No. They ignored me, just the shrieking madness of a broken monster on his knees. She tossed him a ring of keys, and he caught it deftly.

“Can you finish cuffing him while I wash up? I think he’s got all the piss out of him now.”

“My pleasure.” He stared at me with contempt, holstered his weapon, and started toward me. She passed behind him, holstering her own weapon.

My hand went to my pocket, scrambling for one last touch of the small scrap of yellow paper sodden with sweat and blood, the transitory heart drawn in pencil.

He was above me, his silhouette eclipsing the high noon sun, and I thought, how lovely prison would be compared to this. I thought how in a way, I was lucky. I squeezed the little yellow post-it. I felt the prick of metal piercing the paper, drawing a bead of blood; a single black screw, long, thin and solid. The last one, meant for the shattered table leg.

He leaned forward to grab my wrists, roughly, righteously, and then she moved like water behind him. Her hand grabbed his gun, brought it up to the back of his head, and fired. The thunder and fire enveloped his head, haloing him briefly. His left eye squeezed shut, rolling downward, while the right twitched spasmodically up and away, as if it could follow the path of the bullet through his skull. His forehead cracked open, blossoming in shiny white and vivid red.

Then he was falling, landing next to me, blood mixing with sand, still. She was there, above me, blotting out the sun, a creature of myth. Her smile was back. Her true smile. I curled my hand around the screw, feeling the ridges bite into my hands.

“You’ve just killed a cop, Edward. There’s no coming back from that, you know. You have to understand, you need me more than ever now. You need me. Let me help you.”

She was right, and I knew it. My future, my wife, everything was gone. But I still had this moment. I stood slowly on damaged legs, swaying, eyes dipped low, trying to get closer to her, trying to keep my welling excitement hidden. I played the hypnotized prey, the fly walking into the spider’s web. Her voice was soft, soothing, almost loving.

“We’ve changed the game. We’re off the map, and into the crooked place. But we’re together.”

I liked that. It sounded right. I was almost touching her, and she raised her arms to welcome me.

I raised my arm slowly, and then thrust the fist down, driving the screw into her neck. Felt it grate against bone. Felt it bite deep, striking true. She made a wet gurgling noise, and froze. I raised my hand and struck the screw again with the heel of my palm, and it slit open as the screw sunk deeper. I grappled for the gun, pulled it easily from her hand and shoved her forward.

She sat down, hard, in the sand, her legs stiff and straight, her back rigid and upright. She didn’t protest, simply stared up at me. Her face was a cypher, a blank slate. But she held my gaze. I thought she might go for her own gun, but instead she raised one hand to the screw, and tugged. It came out with the series of chalky clicks, and a great fount of blood followed it, pulsing onto the sand. When she looked up again, I saw something that might have been admiration on her face.

I pointed the gun at her, but I knew it was a pointless act. I could see her face paling, growing sallow. But there was so much I had to know.

“Where is she?” I said. My voice was weak and faraway. Tired.

She laughed once, one wet chuckle that formed a bubble of blood on her lips.

“C’mon, Edward. Not now. This is just us now.” She was looking at the screw now, turning it side to side in the sunlight, soaked in her blood.

“Why. Why then.” Again the single chuckle, and a little gout of blood from the seeping hole. Then she sighed, and I saw the hole was leaking in time with her heart, speeding up, growing weaker.

“This is what I do.” And she looked back at me, her hyena grin weak, but triumphant. “I make monsters.”

In the distance, their were sirens. She dropped her arms, too weak to hold them up. We were silent, and I watched the light drain from her eyes.

“Go, Edward. You might have time...”

Then she was gone, and I ran.

I still might have time.



This story is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license

Something New... - Metapost

Hello, all.

I'll be posting one of two new stories within a week, and the second shortly after. One will be the rest of the fragment I posted in March, and the other is something slightly different than usual. It all depends on what I feel like finishing first.

It's been far too long, and I hope this latest flurry of ideas and inspiration brings about a more regular schedule of updates.

I've missed you.

Stay tuned.


UPDATE 7/14: So close... I bet on the wrong horse, so my least favorite of the two will be done first. Any moment now.