XLVI
The Young Cripple was racked with guilt. The feeling pulsed like a sore tooth, defeating her every sense and bringing on wave after wave of unfixable sadness. She was shaken out of it though by a man standing over her bed, sweating profusely as he tore at the shackles on the young girl’s arms and then legs.
He hadn’t noticed at first. It wasn’t until he got close enough to peer into her eyes that he could see that this wasn’t some random passing. She wasn’t some passenger on a bus, or some pedestrian, passing him by like a loosely blown leaf.
“It’s you,” he said, feeling an urge to strangle the girl, or to shackle her back up, and leave her to the savagery of this institution.
The Young Cripple stared at the man with big teary eyes.
“Sir,” she said, her words popping out of her mouth like bubbles. “I don’t know who you are.”
He had hardly the face that anyone could ever forget.
“I don’t know who you think I am but…”
“I know who you are. Your legs,” he said, looking at her as if she were as riddled with deformity as he. “It’s you. Your eyes, they give you away.”
She didn’t have to know who he was; or any of these people for that matter. Most of them, if not all of them were here because of her. They were here because of what she had done to them, and not for them.
“We were fine until you came into town.”
He spoke as if he were gargling with a handful of marbles.
“We were surviving,” he said, now clutching some ghastly looking metal device made of shark’s teeth and bone saws. “Me and my boy. We were surviving.”
He held it high above his head, and it looked as if at any second he might strike down on The Young Cripple’s head and leave her bludgeoned and bleeding, with her only free hand covering her eyes.
It was when she heard him weeping that The Young Cripple lowered her hand and was able to see, after her fright subsided, the man who was about to attack her was one of the very last men she tried to save. It wasn’t easy to tell. His face was melted. It had passed through the heat of a hundred suns. His face, though, as charred as it was, only served to better outline the look of sheer panic in his eyes. This wasn’t some villainous monster, drunk on its desire to kill and maim. This wasn’t either, a gregarious act of revenge. This was the look of a father who had lost the thing most dear.
With every inch of her sadness, she felt herself sinking like a stone. She felt more inutile with every passing second, staring at the man whose temper had turned to tears, and though he still clutched that godless instrument, The Young Cripple no longer felt that he would use it against her. She was weighed down by her guilt. It was near on impossible to look at this man, let alone the rest of Ward Number Five, and not feel entirely responsible.
So with every inch of her sadness, she did indeed sink with the heavy sands of her repressions, to the very bottom of her fault and liability. And as her thoughts waded back and forth like a fly in cold soup, around her, the chaos that she had spawned was getting so very out of control. In such a short time, it had swarmed through the entire ward; through every infinite cubic dimension. The worse she felt about herself, the more tumultuous was state of Heaven’s address.
“Where’s my boy?”
The Young Cripple stared into his eyes. She ignored his burnt and charred face, and she ignored too, the bubbles and blisters on his hands. Instead, she stared him right in the eyes and it was at that moment that her misery widened, and her woe was impassable. She stared right past his burns and scars and saw, in his eyes, The Young Boy. They shared the very same Light. And its glow was unmistakable.
The last thought that The Young Cripple had was the sight of The Young Boy in the hands of a despicable demon, a second before a bullet whisked her away from reality. She remembered his face in such vivid detail. She remembered the trickle of blood from his nose, and the blackness and blotching on his skin, just beneath his eyes. She remembered too, how even though he was so apparently captured and ravaged by Death, behind the sickness, there was a look of absolute infatuation in his eyes as he stared at her, and she at him. She knew too, the exact second she was about to die. She knew by the brightness in The Young Boy’s eyes as if he were trying to reach out and save her with a look alone; either to pull her to safety or to trick the bullet into striking him instead.
It was that look, though, which she saw in the man before her, who swung his godless instrument wildly, kicking and picking at scavenging souls, who second by second were becoming more volatile, clambering over one another, clutching their mouths to nipples which now grew from like clustering warts in the walls. Each patient was desperate to drink up the Light that was theirs.
“Do you know where my boy is?” asked The Father, standing over The Young Cripple, shielding her from the chaos.
The Young Cripple thought of the radio – of T, and she remembered the sound of The Young Boy’s voice, arguing with a demon.
“Yes,” she said. “I know where he is.”
The Father cut off the last of the girl’s shackles.
“Can you run?” he said.
“Yes,” said the girl, desperate.
“Then run.”