Forest and road blur together in the pale cast of moonlight, black streets made like grey granite, floating and fluttering in my vision. Old telephone poles line either side, then suddenly I’m hedged by trees, stomping through thorns and brush, praying mindlessly my legs will guide me right.
Then I meet road again. Confusing, familiar road.
Wood houses, dewy grass. Grasping, prodding pain in the belly my hand holds. Warm, oozing blood and stabbing crust. Lumbering toward the great shack at the end of the road. I pound on the door till my skeleton-cold hands numb. It opens with a twist, a dusty living room lit by gold side-room lights.
“Waaaaall!” I think I cry, collapsing to the floor. New hands of angels and wood and earth smells carry me to a brighter-lit room, all exposed beams with dusty cobwebs.
“Bless you, child,” a familiar man’s voice breathes. “I knew I shouldn’t have armed little girls.”
“Didn’t arm us enough,” I cough weakly, attempting a laugh or a smile. Neither comes, only visions of Care laughing, crying. “Told... told ya I needed a bazooka.”
“Hush now,” Wall says, lifting my shirt. “Your belly needs sewn. We’ll take care of that.”
“Doesn’t matter... they got her...”
“Who?” Wall’s puffy eyes appear over me, wide and searching, caterpillar eyebrows and scraggly beard. “Your little friend. Who took her?”
“Monsters.”
“Monsters...” he answers, with a mingle of confusion and understanding. “Right, take these quick, it’s gonna hurt bad,” holding a closed hand by my lips with a cup of water.
I shove his fist away, head swirling. “No pills. No water. What if it... got my guts?”
He takes another look at my stomach. “It’s nothing that deep, dear, just flesh. But it’s gonna hurt like hell.”
“Pain’s okay... can’t die...”
Wall gulps. “We won’t have you dying on us, darlin’. Wouldn’t be right” He shouts across the room to a son: “Come on, boy!”
Foots pad over and little indiscernible noises begin. A box opening, then a blur.
Wall stuffs a leather wallet in my dry mouth. I whine and breathe through my nose, staring up with wide eyes, the wood-house world suddenly a little clearer. Twine straps my legs to the end of the counter.
“Hold still now.” Wall commands, holding my arms down with his forearms and massive weight. “You don’t want the pills...? It’s gonna be hell...”
I want to tell him I know hell, I’ve seen it, but all that comes out is muffled grunts.
Then the alcohol pours on and I scream, grinding the leather in my teeth. My wits flee. Worse, the needle comes, piercing pain on piercing agony. I can’t feel any one thing, no sensitivity except pain, pure stabbing pain sewing my flesh together in the center of myself. I cry and plead and buck, hoping I’ll pass out. The wallet falls out of my mouth as I start to lose consciousness.
“You’re strong,” Wall’s distant voice says, through blurry gold tears. “You’ll get through this. You’re almost there.”
I whine and cry in muffled sounds, like the monster I freed from the Devil not an hour back, (or was it much longer? How did I find my way here through the delirium?) I can only think of that rank, twisted, tortured creature, feeling likewise mutilated with this hole in my belly. A logic in the back of my head says, “It’s just flesh, just a tiny wound,” or maybe it was Wall who spoke that thought, or his son suturing me, or the other boy watching silently with empty blue eyes. I wonder if they’re ghosts as my senses come and go.
“It’s done, pop,” a young voice says.
My muffled crying breaks off in a swarm of voices and thoughts and protestations. All boys, then no one in particular, then the blonde girl I killed, watching with dead eyes, laughing silently. Her face looks like a skull now. Death. Then it turns into Care’s face.
(...)
I gasp deeply. Blurs of dim light blind me. My abdomen is full of stabbing, tugging pain like knives and fire, but it’s bound up in bandaging.
“Stay still, let it heal,” a young voice says from across the room. The words blend together, a low sound of radio music behind.
“Gotta... save...”
“You can’t save anyone like this,” the boy says. “Stay the night, talk tomorrow...”
“Your dad...”
“He’s asleep. You sleep too. He’ll wake up before you.”
The radio swings between deep droning vocals and heights of guitar and drum. I’m still alive, the words go. I’m still alive, I think. The verses stir me, but finally the low chorus sends me asleep, to dreams of past and present in muddy visions.
(...)
“Wall!” I shout, rising from a nightmare that sends the back of my head against the solid wood table I’m lying on. A bundle of hallucinations or memories explode, imposed like cartoons on the blurred room.
“I’m here, child,” a gruff voice says, sitting on a stool in the corner of the room, hairy arms crossed in the dimness.
“Need bombs... and snipers...”
“Oh? And a nuclear bomb or two?” He cocks an eye.
“The only way...”
“There’s no way out of whatever shit-pot you’re in!” He barks. “You’re just a girl, come to my house bleeding and helpless. Helpless! you hear?”
“Not helpless. I have you.”
“You ain’t got me for nothing. Whatever game you were playing is done now. No girl’s got a place in war, and it’s some kind of war you made.” An indistinct scanner radio rattles off muttered communications and he slaps it off and stands over me, eyeing my stabbed belly. “You’re lucky to be alive. Take that and run with it.”
“What’s life... without everything that goes with it?”
“Everything goes- what? Chaos? Falling bodies?” He disappears and comes back with cotton pads soaked in alcohol, cleaning my wound. I wince before they even touch me and cry out when they do.
“Vengeance,” I whisper. “Survival. Get away. Survive.”
“Survive, you say, wantin’ bigger guns, more ammo... Food keeps you alive. Shelter keeps you alive. Guns and revenge only get you dead. You already survived, and that ain’t enough for ya.”
“More ammo,” I repeat. “Please...”
He shakes his head and I fall toward his face, into a twisted torrent of familiar and unfamiliar visages, suddenly sickened. My stomach melts into putrid sludge and my senses flee into fingers of shadow. I spill bile on the floor. I think it’s my blood and life leaking away.
“More ammo,” Wall mutters, shaking his head and slapping a table. “You can get away now. But you want to keep pushing till you’re dead?”
I nod and gurgle, more acid shooting up from the bottom of my stomach but not coming out. I wonder if there’s blood and guts mixed in, if I’ve taken a fatal wound, waiting to die here among stranger-friends in a dusty wood hovel, staring up at old cobwebbed beams.
“You have to rest,” Wall says. “You’re not going nowhere if you can’t move.”
“I can move.” I lean forward and shudder, cry. “Need something for the pain now, too.”
“Just the jack of all things, aren’t I...?” Wall sighs.
“Wall...” I mutter, half-coherent, “I know you can help me. I need it. Please help. There’s no other way.”
“Way to what?” he practically shouts. “Dying quicker?”
“Live... right...”
“Living right.” He looks over me, grinding his lower jaw against the top. I want to nod, but my neck won’t move, the battered back of my head touches the table behind me lightly. My eyes swirl.
“You living right, little girl?” he asks, then looks at me woefully, begins bandaging my stomach. “Lord above, I thought I’d seen all the weird shit there is to see.”
“If you only knew how bad things really are...” I mutter.
“Yeah? Don’t I? Why don’t you tell me? Tell me about stacking bodies for sandbags while your buddies die around you, gettin’ holes blown in 'em the size of a softball?” He holds out his giant fist. “Tell me about throwing dead, starved, raped little girls and limbless old men in pits for graves. There’s what your fighting gets you.”
He tapes on a new bandage. “I let you keep your secrets after you barged in here with a gun and your little girlfriend like a couple of comic book characters. Sold you my Colt on account of you fixing it, and believin’ you needed it. Now you’re bleedin’ on my table and I want answers.”
“Tape the bandage all the way around. Has to stay on,” I say. He grunts annoyedly and I arch my back up and feel stabbed all over again as he rolls the medical tape around me. I open wet eyes and start to get lost in the dim yellow lighting, the cloudy cobwebs over rough-hewn beams, thinking of the old church it all started in, how my consciousness seemed to decay there, then how I seemed to awaken. The pain’s too much to let me rest, too little to let me die.
“They got her,” I groan. “They got her and I got away.”
“Who got her?”
“Police... worse, I think. Bad people. Nightmare things. Child predators. Government. I don’t know.”
Wall wipes his sweaty brow into a smudgy mess. “You’re freakin’ me out here with this conspiracy theory stuff. This a joke or-”
“It’s real, Wall. Every conspiracy... everything... it’s all real.” I try to get up again but gravity pushes me down. My head spins and my eyes shut, sick. “Water... please.”
I hear the sink running, quiet footsteps. Someone puts barely cool water in my shaking hand. I dump most of it on my head, sip the rest. My arm fails and the cup shatters on the ground. Wall groans.
“It’s real, Wall, bigger than the world. They don’t want Care. They want me. They made me into something inhuman. I used to be normal, I used to be someone. They made me this way... but I broke somehow... malfunctioned. I killed a bunch, ran away, forgot, lost myself. Days or weeks or months ago. They want me dead or alive, one of them said. She was... like me, but not broken. I killed her, too.” No, that wretch I saved did. “She wanted revenge. She stabbed me. There’s more like me. I don’t know how many more.”
Wall paces beside the table.
“Assuming you’re not crazy, or wound up from this cut, or playing a prank... this is the mother lode, little lady. Police, government, girls with guns... this is above my paygrade. This is above all of us.”
“Police are nothing. So much deeper...”
“You don’t need to tell me there’s stranger things up the ladder and down the rabbit hole. I did my time. I know the system. Why do you think I’m out here on the fringes with just my boys away from all the mess?” He slams his fist on a smaller table and tools and screws clatter. “But God, this? Why am I even in this town? Why are you?”
“Don’t know... we just wanted out,” I say. “Got the money finally... then lost her.” I start pulling wads of cash from my pockets, from my chest, from my pants. He stares wide-eyed till he finally stops me.
“Where’d you get all this?”
“Last deal... drugs... then they found us. Don’t need the money. Just need her...”
Wall looks me up and down, the cash, the wound, and just shakes his head.
“If the police got her, there’s nothing to do. They’ve got a small army, and the gear to boot. Take your money and go away from here. Run far as you can. It’s the only smart thing to do.”
“Would you run, if it were your sons?” I ask. “Your family, your wife?”
Wall stomps his foot and growls in anger. He looks like he could explode. He looks like he’s seeing demons too.
“Don’t need money, Wall... I don’t need... smarts and talk.” I sit up slowly and almost scream. He and his son try to lay me back, but my legs dangle off the table, my head hangs low. “Need... help...” I lift a pile of cash and let it fall like leaves.
“What? Me and you versus the whole police department?”
“Your boys, too.”
“Them boys are rabbit hunters, not killers! You wanna wage war, be my guest, but I ain’t gonna put my boys at risk, takin’ on the whole world for one girl. This is crazy talk, all of it!”
“They’re worse than animals. They’re devils. The things they make people do... the things they made us do... and that’s just us. Two people. Two human beings... or we used to be. They kill us, sell our bodies, make us into monsters...” I flex my right hand, my trigger finger. “And no one knows. No one wants to even think about it. No one will help.”
“That’s exactly what I want to keep us away from. I’ve got to protect my own.”
A boy not more than sixteen steps out, with grey eyes and dirty blond hair.
“We gotta help her, dad,” he says, voice breaking. “I wanna help her.”
“Boy, did I tell you to come out of the dark?”
An even younger boy steps out. “We can’t let them hurt her friend.”
“We can’t let them hurt her, dad.”
Wall grits his teeth and slams his fist off the tool table till bits of metal go clattering off the floor in all directions.
“They’re right, Uncle,” a girl’s voice says calmly. I look around the room and see no one else. “This is why we’re still in this town. A little beacon of light, you said. This is the time to let it shine.”
“This is what we train for, pop, not hunting deer,” the boy agrees. “This is what we do.”
“I trained yinz to survive, and do what you can when you can, not play army on account of every evil in the world. We do this, there might be no comin’ back, and everything we worked for is gone. Once you step in shit like this, you don’t know how far you’ll sink.”
“We’re already in the shit, pop,” the older boy replies.
“Mind your mouth, boy.” Wall groans.
“He’s right, Uncle. Life’s short. If we sit back and watch evil win, waiting for the world to end, what good are we?” The girl steps beside the man and his elder boy and I gasp breathlessly at seeing her. “Besides, I already told you, they’re good people.”
“J-Jackie...?” I think I’m imagining things.
“Good to see you, Kade. I hoped you made it out of that party alright. I knew you did when I heard about the other trouble you two caused. Looks like you’ve seen better days.” She eyes me up and down. Her voice sounds normal, and her hair is cut to her shoulders, the red-dyed tips gone. “I’m sorry about Care. I wanna help.”
“I don’t understand... you were at the party, now you’re here? Who are you?”
“I’m just me,” she smiles. “I’m our link to the dark side of town. I watch and see and pretend I’m like the others. While everyone’s distracted by the bright lights, I watch from the shadows. We’re not ignorant about the twisted things that go on in Piercing, and we haven’t just been standing by... we’ve done a lot already, saved a lot of people...”
“Enough,” Wall commands.
“But there’s only so much a few can do... let alone one.” She lifts my chin up and I notice her sparkling hazel eyes for the first time, full of vitality, hope, strength. “I told Uncle about you two when we connected the dots. Small town, huh? But being everywhere and nowhere at once is my job,” she says.
“Enough!” Wall repeats.
“I wish you’d found us earlier, told us how serious it was... maybe we could have helped. Maybe I could have, at least.”
“I didn’t know... Didn’t know who to trust. Everyone’s trying to kill us, every second of every day. It was me and Care’s secret. We were gonna make it out together. But now she’s gone.”
“Don’t be so sure yet, sweety. Never give up hope.”
“It doesn’t matter, Jacklyn,” Wall says. “This is too dangerous to get mixed up in. We’ll do what we can and send her on her way, but this is too deep, even for us.”
“Maybe, Uncle. But how could I sleep at night knowing I didn’t try? How could you?” She crosses her arms.
“I sleep just fine for all the shit I’ve seen,” Wall spits. “How many lives will we risk for one girl?”
“We’ve all seen shit.” Jackie lights up a cigarette. “I’ve seen shit you haven’t seen. Them sending out teens to turn other teens out. Abductions. Murders every week.”
“Not in the house, Jacklyn!” Wall roars. “And this is not a democracy!”
She puffs her cigarette stubbornly. “No, you taught us to each be independent pieces, part of a greater whole. Well, this piece is going to help them.”
“Me too!” the younger boy declares.
“Pop, we gotta help,” the other boy says lightly.
“Damn it all,” Wall says, snatching Jackie’s cigarette and puffing half of it away in a big drag. “Ungrateful little...! Irresponsible! This is rule of the mob! How’d I ever raise such a bunch of reckless bullies?”
“You taught us to do the right thing, Pop,” the elder boy reminds him.
“And how to do it,” Jackie agrees, sparking up another cig.
“We can’t help anyone if we’re all dead, get it? The right thing is staying alive.” Wall grinds his teeth, stamps out his smoke.
“If Christ thought so, where would we be?” Jackie smiles knowingly.
Wall lumbers over to the sink, washes his face. A cleaner face and clearer eyes appear, sharp and strong.
“So... you’ll help?” I ask the silence.
Jackie places her cig in my mouth and I can’t help but think of Care.
“However you need,” she says.
“Draw a plan for whatever we’re walking into here. A good one. We’ll go over it tomorrow morning, after she rests,” Wall commands, his face dripping grey spots on his dirty white t-shirt.
“We can’t wait while they have her!” I plead.
“Tomorrow! Tonight we all get some rest. All of us.” He walks to the doorway to his workroom and looks back, a wolf-like look in his old blue eyes. “First light.”
“First light,” the boys answer. Jackie just nods, puffing away. The door slams, shaking the house.
“Can I get you anything?” she asks.
“Paper.”
She walks away and the boys come closer. They have much of Wall’s look, but not his worldweary eyes or the weight of his age. Their gazes are innocent but fierce.
“I’m Jeremiah,” the younger brother says.
“I’m Jacob,” says the older.
“You two are brave,” I tell them.
“It’s no problem,” Jeremiah says. “We love to help. It’s what we do.”
“They’re braver than you know.” Jackie appears with a pen and a notepad of yellow paper. “And skilled. My brave little cousins.” She wraps her arms around them sweetly and squeezes them together. They push away annoyedly.
“Your parents...?” I ask.
“More victims of Piercing. Drugs got Mommy, and Daddy couldn’t live without Mommy.” She puts two fingers to her head and drops her thumb. “So Wall raised me as his own, and I helped train the boys.”
“Pop trained us,” Jacob scoffs. “You’re just support, remember?”
Jackie punches his arm hard and he rubs it.
“And their mom?”
“Cancer. Lot of that going around, huh?” She smokes and shakes her head. “Poor boys. But Wall did a good job teaching us how to survive, and more than just that. When evil is superpowered, good people have to become something special, something greater. Like you.”
“I’m not extraordinary,” I say, starting to draw on the paper. It’s hard to draw the lines straight, and my letters come out crude, big and squiggly. “I’m just some failed experiment, running around aimlessly. Every time I did something right, two more things went wrong. I have all the cash we thought we needed, but it wasn’t for me, it was for us... for her... it was all for her...”
Jackie nods. “But you aren’t just an experiment. You’re you, Kade. Did it ever occur there was a meaning in all of this? That you’re supposed to save her, and we’re supposed to help? Or maybe we all just die trying- you never can be sure in this life.” She reminds me of Care for a moment. “But I’ve seen enough shit to know if the good guys don’t hit back hard, we’ll keep losing the fight.”
“What fight?”
“For what’s right,” she shrugs.
“You know about everything then? The conspiracy? The gangsters, the dealers, the pimps, the police?”
“We know enough. All we’ve got is bits and pieces of the puzzle, but the big picture is clear. Evil on a mass scale. In your neighborhood, in your church, in the pizza store, in the police and government, in people you didn’t even know. It’s the Devil, Uncle says. Satan is the god of this world.”
“I killed the Devil,” I say. Jackie chuckles, but the boys seem stunned.
“Well, not all of him, it seems. There’s enough of him to go around, we could never cut it all out, only fight it. And we have been. Tooth and nail.”
“Tooth and nail,” the boys agree.
“You said you know about the children? Being kidnapped... sold?”
“I’ve watched kids disappear. And I’ve seen footage.” Jackie’s eyes look straight ahead, through the world. “It’s bad here. It’s bad everywhere... but we’ve saved a few and sent them far away.”
“And people like me? Trained into killing machines in the shadows for... God knows what. Do people know we exist? Do you know who does this to us, where I could be from?”
Jackie shrugs sadly. “Your guess is as good as mine. Clearly, no one’s supposed to know you exist. You may know more than you think, but it’s all locked up there, isn’t it? Remembering bits and pieces...”
“How do you know...?”
Her thoughts take her back somewhere. “You may not be the first like you I’ve met. There’s lots of... different types of people. Not all of them are good or bad, and not all of them come from anywhere. They’re on their own, free, but alone, sort of like you.”
“If they’re like anything like me, they’re not free.”
She looks my way understandingly. “I guess you’re right. There was one kid... he was something else. Smart, fast, strong, sly as a fox. Charming. Handsome. And he knew things no one should know. The insides of helicopters, planes, guns. Special forces stuff. Things even me or my uncle or the boys barely know about.”
“Maybe he just read a lot.”
Her eyes glimmer. “You’d think he was making it all up, until he hotwired a car for a joyride, or made a bomb out of stuff lying around the house just for fun. But he forgot things too, little things, all the time. His memory just wasn’t there, and neither was his mind. He never said where he came from or who he really was. He made up all sorts of stories, but I knew he was lying. Only one time I really got him to think about it, he looked lost. You know what he said? ‘I can’t remember.’”
I can’t remember. I feel like I’m staring in a reflection, looking on a form vaguely like my own.
“Who was he? Where is he now?”
“No one knows. He used dozens of names. Came and went as he pleased. He was just a kid, always living on the streets but never fitting in with anyone. He’d get picked on till he was bloody... till he started breaking noses and snapping older kids’ wrists. Nearly killed one, then they didn’t fuck with him anymore, but everyone was scared of him. He grew up fast. I knew him for about a year and a half, then one day, he vanished.”
“That’s it? Gone?”
“Gone. Nothing. Everything with him was sort of... what’s the word?... enigma. It was like he had a lot of personality, but none of it was really him, and you never knew what was real or fake or what he’d be like next time you saw him. For a while, I even tricked myself... I thought I knew him.” She brushes her lip with the cig butt thoughtfully. “One thing I remember, when other kids beat him bad... he started carrying this black nightstick that folded out. He’d always have it on him, hidden. But you always knew it was there on him, like a wasp’s stinger. He was invincible with it, like a god. Everyone despised him, now they feared him. Everyone but me.”