In the tent, cold and alone together just past dusk. Me and her and a little lantern light. The steel gun rests in the back of my pants, locked and loaded beneath my coat. Something about it comforts me. Care grasps a bottle of butterscotch schnapps in one hand and the Glock in the other. She’s down to a pink tank-top and blue short-shorts, red in the face and mind wandering.
“Keep it cocked and ready, but safety on,” I remind her. After leaving Wall’s house and the misty woods of that side of town, she had nothing but complaints that I left her with the gun unready to use. Since then I instructed her on it just as incessantly.
“I get it, I get it. Safety on till I’m ready to use it,” she recites.
“Till you have to use it.”
“Yeah, yeah. And when it’s time, I pull it out, click the safety off, aim-”
“Aim steady, straight, line up the back and front sites. Right on the target. Breath out-”
“And blast their damn heads off!”
I slap my forehead. “You aim for the center, for the chest. Not the head, remember? That’s about all I can tell you... but it’s not so simple. It takes time, practice...” I look at her drunk, fiery eyes, full as much with defiance as will to protect herself, and probably me. “You’ll get it with time.”
“Yeah, you don’t gotta worry about me,” she gleams, rotating the deadly cannon in her grip, ever more enthralled with it. “I’ll be a master at it like you someday.”
“Don’t play with it. It’s not a toy.”
“You’re always playing with yours!” she whines and tucks it away in her purse after one last loving gaze.
“It’s not play. I do what I need to do, then put them away. So accidents don’t happen.”
“I’d like to cause a few accidents with it...” she mutters.
“Stay on target,” I remind her. “We got armed because everything kept turning to shit while we were trying to get rid of these drugs. Now what? What’s our next move?”
She bites her finger, shakes her head.
“What, nothing?”
“No...” she says. “It’s just... it’s a big risk. Something I’d sooner forget about. Someone I’d never think about going to, till now.”
My shoulders tense up nervously.
“This is a bad, bad guy. The type we want to stay away from.” She looks up at the fluttering tent ceiling like a dismal, foreboding sky. “But he could be our ticket out of here. One big sell, one big good-bye.”
“Sounds too good to be true,” I groan.
“It might be. But think about it. You said it. Everything’s been shit these few days.” She stares off pensively. I hear her voice breaking and anticipate a tear in her eye that never comes. “Every deal turns to shit and we nearly get killed for peanuts.” She looks at me sadly. “I want it over with. Let’s take a big risk and if it works, we’re gold, and if it doesn’t, hey, how many times have we already almost died trying? Our days are numbered with this half-assed shit anyway.”
I try to think of how many times. The numbers float in my head like a cloud of incomprehensible symbols and broken-up memory images.
“We tried to stay away from anyone Matty knew, stay away from the police, and still all we got was just as fucked.” She sighs mournfully. “This might be the only way. Those hicks you fought, that gun guy, they were nice, but they’re probably the only ok people in this town. We’re not gonna get that luck again.”
“Who is this guy? What’re we walking into?”
Her eyes shut hard and her head lowers. “He’s a guy Matty dealt with sometimes. Even Matty was scared of him. Big-timer. Every drug imaginable.” She gulps.
“But what?”
“He’s scary!” she almost cries. “They call him the Devil!”
Terrifying, even by her standards. “Then we shouldn’t do this. You’re always trusting your gut. Don’t stop now.”
“I want to be done,” her voice cracks. She starts to sob. “I want to get out of here.” She digs her face into her sleeping bag, coughing muffled gasps and tears into it. This isn’t like her, breaking down.
I shiver and my jaw tightens, wondering of desperation, escape. Danger and hope. I feel the pistol at my back, and it fills me with a pinch of strength and trepidation.
“Is this the way?” I ask.
Wet eyes rise from behind the sheet clenched in her hands. Unsure, fearful. They blink, suddenly thinner, ambitious. She wipes her face into the sleeping bag and picks up her pint of liquor, imbibing gulp after gulp with both hands. Her hand wipes her lips weakly. She nods.
I exhale a ghost of fear and lower my eyes. “Then we go to him. We’ll meet the Devil.” I take out my 1911, regard the gentle shine from its fresh polish, its crosshatched wood grips tight in my palm. I wonder at the mystery and certainty of its power, machine turned force... in my hands, so sure and so unsure. I tuck it aside, under a grey sweater.
Care whimpers and shuffles to me slowly, hands me the bottle, one-third full of honey-colored elixir. I’m low on courage and drink all but a sip. It goes down slowly, a tepid, creamy-flavored caramel syrup.
“Will you hold me? she whispers almost silently.
The heat in my stomach holds off a tremble. “Of course.”
She nuzzles into my arms and I take her in, holding the back of her neck, my hand on her belly. Slowly the alcohol begins to run its course. My hand massages her mess of hair, kneading it firmly and gently, steadily. I want to comfort and it gives me comfort. My heart slows but I feel hers quicken. Her skin is hot even in the cool tent air, thinly guarded against the night.
“Can I feel your skin?” a mouse begs.
I look down at her eyes, wide and hopeful, still red and a twinge of wetness in them. My chest thumps and she must feel it.
“I’m all covered in scars, like scratched up leather.”
“I’ve seen them,” she squeaks. “I’ve felt them. I like to feel them. I have scars too.” She guides my hand to her thighs, where neat horizontal strokes run along her soft skin nearly to the hips. The scars are feather-soft tissue. The inset marks feel flat and smooth. My fingers caress the healed stripes, run through the larger ones, some deep and pitted. Suddenly they scare me, their severities, their histories.
“Let me feel yours...” Her eyes search. Her fingers lightly run along my collarbone. Then short slow brushes down the middle of my chest, the top of a breast. She hums noiselessly, breaths sweet honey.
She slips my coat off, revealing my long pale arms, covered with broken spider-web patterns, chaotic lines and dashes, puffy or set-in like her leg lines. Her fingers caress the length of my arm gently, sending shivers.
She moves to massage my neck and shoulders and I get dizzy. Everything is cold but her. I wish only for more booze inside me, a larger fire in my stomach to match her radiant heat. She pulls closer to me with her nails, round from my shoulder, searches my avoidance with quavering heavy eyes. A cold hand feels my tummy. I wince. She lets it stay till it warms. It gently rubs in circles and I feel as if it magically flows warmth through my veins.
Slowly her velvet fingers crawl up, nails scratching my ribs softly, harder, squeezing, kneading the firm skin over shallow scars. Her nose nuzzles my neck, lips gently run down my chest. She inhales me and trembles, tossing my tank-top off into the air.
Her small hands glide up and meet in the middle of my back. My brassiere falls away and she pushes up on my breasts longingly, squeezing. Dissonant, trepidatious groans sound between us. She smothers herself in me, kissing, pinching, tugging my sensitive boobs’ centers.
Her nails dig into my back and force our chests together, rubbing against each other as her lips and tongue attack my neck and behind my ears, sucking and nibbling at them, her claws running wild through my hair, scattering it over us in dark, messy wisps. Her nipples swell against mine, till she rips her tanktop down suddenly, exposing great pale breasts speckled with tiny freckles, bothered pink blossoms staring impatiently.
She pounces, hands grasping the sides of my head, devouring my lips and biting everything that is bare, licking and nibbling and kissing from my eyes to my waist. Her hips buck and turn against mine in sporadic rhythm.
Her tongue enters my mouth and invades every corner. The honey-vanilla tastes meld. She sucks up my spit and sucks on my tongue, searching for more. She gapes my mouth with her lips, spits inside, sucks it back up.
She grins and snickers mischievously, breathlessly, panting, as a string of spittle falls down to my cheek. Our gazes lock as she leans up, clawing and kneading my chest. Her eyes are animal lust, irrevocable and voracious. They’re thin and sensual, her cheeks and skin glowing pink.
Her mouth presses on mine, her hands break my belt open, rip my zipper down and fingers spread me open between my legs. A chill runs from my neck to the back of my head, suddenly throbbing. Her wrist rubs my nub below in a slow circle, then back and forth, and she hunts for response in my eyes. Suddenly her palm is doing it, and a finger enters me, pushes deep. A twinge of pleasure-pain.
She withdraws her hand and laps a trail of wetness from the inside of her elbow to the tips of her three middle fingers, sucking the taste off and rolling back her eyes. She spits all that’s in her mouth onto those fingers and pushes two in me. My head spins. In and out her fingers go. Then she rubs at a point on the inside that feels different, opening and closing her fingers to stimulate it again and again, peeling me open below with her thumb and other two fingers while scratching over my breasts and belly with her second hand.
A sick sensation blows through me from down there, hot then cold. As she looks over me, her form darkens into a silhouette of pure shadow, and suddenly morphs and twists into grotesque forms and monstrous grins. The tent whirls in a storm of grey wraiths and deathly forms, transforming into a macabre membrane of hellish, twisting half-faces. Empty eyes, sharp teeth, manic laughter and screams of the damned.
The demon world turns pure black abyss and I’m falling through eternity paralyzed. Praying in blind flashes of non-time to grasp anything, anything at all. Suddenly I hit a surface, flat, the only sense of up or down the throbbing pain in my back, and especially in the back of my head. How bad it throbs and sends me, half-formless, into merciless throes...! My non-head shatters into black crystal shards and my consciousness explodes and fades into nothing.
The pain subsides slightly. I can almost think, but no real thoughts come. I’m not on my back anymore but standing, looking ahead. Nothing but a sense of vast space stretching ahead and all around forever.
A figure emerges, a shadow man cast in grey fog that floats about him, twirling in sinister, sentient wisps. I go to cry out but have no voice to speak, barely a form. He seems to take amusement in this, laughing soundlessly. His fog dances and jerks in sudden unearthly spasms.
He walks closer and I feel each step, as if my consciousness covers the whole of this void at once vast and small. He outstretches a dark slender hand toward me. Suddenly I have one hand, shaking, raised toward his as if to take it. He looks on patiently, his colorless anti-aura shifting to a hundred alien smiles surrounding him, grasping at me.
I pull my hand back. The creature withdraws, affronted, the fog darkening and exploding with prickles and spikes and strange shapes and runes. Its form turns unworldly and indiscernible, growing darker. It stretches forth its hand and pushes me away, and I’m falling again, grasping for the world.
A still small voice whispers as if through the whooshing of air. “Stand...” it says.
But I’m falling, I think.
“Stand!”
I’m on my back again. My head is anguish, pounding. My stomach churns and I’m covered in shards of pain and fear, bleeding red. I feel a great heat all over me. I struggle to stand and the agony sends a scream from my lungs, but I have a voice. I cry out, loud as I can, but no echo returns.
I force myself to move again. Unbearable. No, I push through. My hands take me up from glass daggers of pain, my arms dead, and I make out a silent, black space around me that resolves into a dream. A dimly lit room smashed to pieces, its pieces piercing me. I look beside. An eyeless head oozing blood and water. My breath hitches and I rise slowly to my knees, bile pouring from my lips, melting my bottom teeth. I spit up and struggle for breath.
I raise bleary eyes, blurred vision coalescing. A room of mangled bodies, crimson smattered on the walls. Broken glass and hot bullet casings. A dead man smashed through a thick kitchen table. A corpse with half a head, a tongue and jaw pouring blood and brain across a black and white granite countertop onto the floor. A blonde woman filled with glass fragments from the coffee table she’s buried in, gasping weak death-throes through openings in her lungs. Blood runs down my head, biting at my eyes.
“Stand!” commands a voiceless voice.
My knees buckle as I rise, an anguished whimper ringing in my ears. Footsteps approach. A door bursts open to blinding light. “Don’t move!” a man screams.
“Jesus Christ!” another says. “Jesus Christ...” More footsteps behind.
“Autumn, don’t move,” a man orders anxiously.
“Don’t you fucking move,” an officer shouts, approaching with his gun drawn and a padded vest. He comes close, gun inches from my face. Too close.
I swing round, grasping the side of his gun, glass bits pushing deeper in my hand. The hammer drops on my pinky with a harmless click. Fear fills his eyes.
I twist it away and hammer his temple with the butt of the gun. The two-hundred-pound ragdoll crashes to the ground. Gasps all around. I turn the gun on them and their hands explode in a rain of bone and fingers, pistols launching from their hands. The blaze of gunfire lights the room in horror flashes and the ringing sound all but mutes their screams.
I lurch, step toward the door, drag along another foot, wheezing. Walking toward the shaking gun held before me, walking toward the shaking doorway.
Pain explodes from behind. Thick pieces of ceramic scatter across the floor and I rub the back of my head. My hand is bright crimson. The gun drops with a clatter and my knees hit the floor. My head hangs low, and amid sounds of shouting, stomping feet, everything turns stinging red.
Escape.
I’m in a locker room, choking out a woman with dirty blonde hair who smells of cigarettes. She’s heavy in my arms and growing heavier. I know she will die if I hold much longer. I know she will wake soon if I don’t hold on long enough. I lower her to the floor and groan as my joints and muscles scream. I drop her aside, counting her slow breaths.
I strip her clothes and don them in a rush. Pastel blue scrubs over my shaking body, her sweaty black tank-top underneath. I put her shoes on my bare feet and tie them tight. None of it fits. I rip the ID card from her rising chest and pin it on my waist, grab a sweater from the locker. I walk out quickly through blurred halls of noise and blinding light. The outdoors appear. A sense of miracle and urgency. I walk fast. I run.
Running. Pain. Forest. Darkness.
Cold shivers. Morning light. Wind and water.
A silent spire. Dirt and stone... A door... stone cellars and horsehair plaster...a girl... Everything goes grey.
“You can remember.” The mystery voice.
Suddenly I hear my own voice. “Who are you?”
“I am the one thing they couldn’t take away from you.”
“Who am I?”
“You are who you are,” it answers. “Who you were, you can remember.”
“I don’t know if I want to remember. I don’t know what to do.”
“You know. You always know. There is power inside you.”
What power? How will I know? Who are you? Why is this happening? Why me? Why?
The questions trail off into emptiness without reply. Grey turns to black. Only silence.
My eyes open. Care is nude atop me.
“Don’t worry baby, we’ll get this working,” she pants, her fingers inside me.
I explode and push her off, clear to the other side of the tent. A clamor of bottle clanks and empty cans. I back up on my hands and feet, wrapping the sleeping bag around my naked chest with one hand, gripping it tightly, staring at her fearfully.
She’s wide-eyed, her arms covering her breasts too now. “What... what’s wrong?”
“I can’t do this!” I scream. “I can’t do this! I’m not like you!”
She stares at me long and hard, indiscernible and infinite in those moments. She starts reaching into her purse and I startle, my hand sliding against the tent floor, hand on the gun.
She pulls out a full vodka bottle and puts on just her quilted winter coat. I eye her as she walks out of the tent, barefoot in shorts, a glimpse of her thigh scars glimmering in the dim lantern light.
The tent door zips shut and her footsteps wander off, crunching over leaves. I shiver and take my hand off the gun, pull the rest of the sheet over me. I’m shaking and it’s cold. The electric lantern flickers. Suddenly its light dies out.