Children of Paranoia

  Now I knew that there had been at least five of them. I had seen five. Two of those five were out of commission now. The man by the side of the road was as good as dead and the man on the fence, even if he survived, wasn’t going to be chasing anyone else tonight. I was trying, Maria. I wanted to call out to you. I wanted to tell you to just keep moving. But I hoped that you couldn’t hear me, that you were too far away.

  I tried to figure out how much time had passed. Twenty minutes? A half an hour? Longer? I didn’t know how long I’d lain there in the cemetery. I looked up at the sky. It was still pitch black. I turned another corner to see if I could catch my breath. I found a shadowy indentation in between two of the houses and stepped into it. It didn’t give me complete cover, but it would have to do for now. I tried to slow my breathing down. Then I saw another one. He was walking down the other end of the street. He had on a black pair of jeans and a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over his head. He had a gun in his hand. I tried to remember if he was one of the men I’d seen before, but I didn’t think he was. That meant there had been at least six of them and there were at least four left. Six. Why would they send six people after me? It didn’t make sense.

  I stayed quiet and watched the man as he walked by, hoping he wouldn’t notice me. As long as he didn’t turn down the street toward me, I thought I’d be okay. He walked by and disappeared around the corner. I had seen six people. I told myself that there couldn’t be any more than that. If I was right, then all the able-bodied ones were down here with me. If I was right, then maybe you were safe.

  I listened. The night was quiet again. I stepped out of the shadows and began to walk slowly down the street. I tried to walk quietly, hoping that I would hear anyone before they saw me. I didn’t know what to do anymore. I couldn’t keep running all night. I didn’t have the stamina for that. I began to wonder if I should go out looking for them, if I should start hunting them. I didn’t have to wonder for very long. It wasn’t that easy to simply become the hunter when you were the hunted.

  I was lucky that I saw this one seconds before he saw me. He turned down the street I was standing on and started walking toward me. I had just enough time to duck back into the shadows of a doorway before he looked in my direction. He started walking closer to me. If he got too close, I was a dead man. There was no place to hide on the street. I thought about running but if I did, I’d run directly toward the others. I was trapped.

  I reached behind me in the doorway I was standing in and grabbed the doorknob. I began to twist it. Mercifully, the door was unlocked. I opened it a crack and slipped inside the house. It was dark and calm inside. Even through the darkness, I could see the kitchen and the living room from where I was standing. Toys were strewn about the living room floor. I stepped forward, walking deeper into the house. I was still looking for a place to hide. There was a coat closet in the living room. I opened the closet door and stepped inside. Instead of closing the door behind me, I left it open a crack so I could see out. My heart was pounding in my chest. Waiting was almost more strenuous than the running. I could see the front door through the crack I’d left in the closet door. Slowly, it began to open. The darkness outside the door matched the darkness of the house. The man who was chasing me stepped quietly inside. He held the gun in his right hand up near his ear so that he could aim it quickly if he needed to. He did a quick visual scan of the rooms. I looked around to see if there was anything that I could use for a weapon, like a bat or a frying pan, anything. There was nothing. Then I noticed a light switch only a couple feet from the closet door. It was my only chance.

  The man stepped farther into the house. He tried to walk without making any noise. He looked like he was going to walk right past me toward the kitchen. I didn’t believe it, not for a second. He was only a few feet from me now. I could see his face. It looked pale in the darkness. I knew that he knew where I was. I knew that he was bluffing. I looked at him. I committed his position to memory, where he was standing, how he was standing. Then I reached outside the closet. I ran my hand along the wall until I reached the light switch. Then I flipped on the light. In a flash, the room was bright. I had counted on the brightness. The pale man tried to aim his gun at me but his eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the light. He was virtually blind. I couldn’t see anything but flashes of color, either, but I didn’t need to. I stepped out of the closet, lifted up my right foot, and stomped down into where I remembered the side of the man’s knee to be. I felt his knee buckle instantly and he fell to the ground. As he fell, he squeezed out one shot from his gun. I heard glass shatter as the bullet went through the kitchen window. Then, lights at the top of the stairs came on. I heard screaming. My eyes finally began to adjust to the light. I looked up toward the screaming. A woman was standing there in a nightgown. She was holding on to the railing at the top of the stairs and screaming at the top of her lungs.

  I ran again. I began to feel like nothing more than a walking disaster, running from place to place, wreaking havoc everywhere I went. I began to feel like this night was a metaphor for my entire life. I ran out the front door. I ran from the woman screaming at the top of the stairs. I ran from the now crippled man with the gun. There was too much commotion this time. The others would hear it. All of them sneaking around in the darkness would be drawn to this one spot. I had to get away. I made it out to the street and started to run south again. The sky was beginning to change color. It was a dark purple when I stepped out of the house. Dawn was coming. I made it two blocks before one of them was chasing me again. He was running toward the house as I was running away from it, but when he saw me, he changed direction and started coming for me. I recognized this one. It was the second man at the cemetery fence. I wondered if he’d left his colleague behind like they’d left the man behind on the side of the road. My legs were heavy now. I’d been running for a long time. I couldn’t run for much longer.

  It didn’t matter. There wasn’t much more room to run. There’s a park at the southeast corner of Charleston with oak trees and a small gazebo. Closer to the water there are old cannons and a large Civil War commemorative statue. After that, there’s the water. By the time I got to the water, by the time I had run out of anywhere to run, I was exhausted.

  The man chasing me had closed the gap between us until he was no more than ten yards behind me. When I got near the edge of the water, I turned to face him. I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t look like anyone I remembered. He didn’t look like anyone I’d killed. I could have asked why he was chasing me. I could have asked him why he was willing to risk so much to kill me. I had asked that kid in Ohio. Now I was too tired to care.

  The sky around me was turning from a dark purple to deep red. Soon the sun would come up behind me. The man lifted his gun and aimed it at me. I wondered if I’d bought you enough time. I wondered if our son was hanging on. I imagined you getting on a bus alone and riding west. I imagined you getting off the bus with no one chasing you. It made me happy to think about you getting away, but it made me sad to think that you’d be alone. It made me sad to think that, if our son survived, I was never going to get to meet him. What I would have given at that moment for even one day with our son. I looked up and stared into the barrel of my killer’s gun. I remembered the last time I’d been this close to death, floating in the water off Long Beach Island. I remembered the pure instinctive drive to live that I had felt then, even though I couldn’t think of one reason why I wanted to live so badly. Now, not only did I know that I wanted to live, but I knew why. Our son made the prospect of dying so much worse.

  I didn’t say a word to my killer. What was there to say? He didn’t say a word to me. I just heard the gun fire and I felt nothing. Then I heard it fire again. And then again. I still felt nothing but the breeze blowing by me from the water. I opened my eyes. The bullets weren’t meant for me. The first two shots struck my killer in his chest. The third hit him in the head. I opened my eyes to see my killer still standing there, blood dripp
ing from his fresh wounds. His gun slipped from his hand. We made eye contact for only a moment before he fell to the ground. He didn’t look scared, just confused. He didn’t know why this was happening any more than I did. I looked around me. I couldn’t figure out where the shots had come from. I didn’t see anyone. For some reason, I had been spared when so many people had already died around me. For some reason, knowing why didn’t seem to matter much to me at that moment.

  I started running again, refreshed, revived. For the last time that night, I ran. It was a good seven miles to the bus station now but I knew I’d make it. I had been given another chance.

  You were at the bus station when I got there. You were hiding in the corner, trying not to be seen. Two buses had left already but you had refused to get on them, waiting for me, holding out whatever slim hope you had that I would make it. Somehow I did. I didn’t tell you what had happened. How could I tell you when I didn’t know myself?

  The next bus was headed to Nashville. We got on it.

  You slept almost the entire bus ride. I asked you how you were feeling. You told me that you hadn’t had any cramping and only a little bleeding. Then you told me that during your walk to the bus station, you felt our son moving for the first time.

  I couldn’t have gotten more than two hours’ worth of sleep during the bus ride. Every time the bus stopped, I found myself eyeing each person who got on. I was sure that one of them was going to turn on us. They never did.

  We didn’t stay in Nashville for any longer than we had to. As soon as we got there, we bought another car. I found us an old beat-up Chevy for three hundred dollars cash. The guy who sold it to us promised me that the engine was in good condition. We didn’t have time to haggle. I figured we’d drive it as far as it would take us and settle down wherever it finally died.

  This time we’d go west. I wasn’t going to stop driving until I physically had to. You had already been through too much for someone in your condition. It was time for you to rest.

  Seventeen

  I drove fast through the darkness. The land was barren and flat. We’d been on the road for hours already. I didn’t even know how long. Day slipped back into night. I pushed that little tin can of a car as hard as it would go. The moon hung low in the sky and there were more stars than I had ever seen before. As I sped down the highway, the landscape became a blur around me but the stars never moved.

  I looked over at you, lying next to me. You seat was reclined as far back as it could go. You were lying on your side facing me, your hands between your knees for warmth. You had slept nearly nonstop since Charleston. As soon as we stopped moving, we’d get you in to see a doctor to make sure that our son was okay. I didn’t want to take any more chances.

  You woke up while we were still on the long, barren road cutting through the desert. You flipped the lever on the car seat to make it sit upright. You looked tired. You stared blankly at the open road. “How long was I out for?” you mumbled.

  “A few hours.” You’d been sleeping since we stopped for dinner. I looked over at you again. Your belly looked even bigger when you were sitting up.

  “Are we making good time?” you asked.

  “This little machine won’t go any faster,” I replied. Then I motioned out the window toward the sky. “Check out the stars.”

  You leaned forward so that you could stare up through the front windshield. “Holy shit,” you said, your eyes lighting up as if you were seeing the night sky for the first time. “They don’t make stars like that in Canada.”

  “They don’t in New Jersey either,” I replied.

  You stared at the stars for a few minutes. Then you leaned back in your seat again. I looked over at your face and could see the tears welling up in your eyes. You had held everything in for so long. You had been strong for so long. “Tell me that everything is going to be all right,” you blurted out to me. You didn’t look at me. You just kept staring at the road ahead of us.

  I thought about how I should answer. “I can’t,” I replied.

  You looked over at me, fixing your eyes on mine. You hesitated, taking a long breath. “Then lie to me,” you said. The tears fell freely down your face.

  I thought about it for a moment. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I assured you.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  I don’t know how much longer I drove. You eventually drifted back to sleep. I just kept pushing the car through the night. I wanted to create as much distance between my past and my future as I could. Eventually, I must have gotten too tired to keep driving. When I was barely able to keep my eyes open any longer, I pulled the car over to the side of the desert road and slept. While I was asleep, I dreamt.

  In my dream, a car pulled up in front of us as the two of us slept in our car along the side of the road. The car skidded to a stop, kicking up red desert sand, blocking any chance we had to escape. A man and a woman stepped out of the car. Both of them had guns in their hands. I recognized the woman. She was a pretty Asian woman. I couldn’t place her at first because her face had changed, like it had been reconstructed somehow and not everything could be put back like it had been before. The man was a stranger. Every time I looked at him his face changed. Nose, eyes, hair color, lips, everything changed. Every time I looked he was a different person. He was everyone, everyone I didn’t know, everyone I saw on the street and wondered which side they were on.

  It was still night when they stepped out of their car. They ordered us out of our car. Then they walked us out into the desert. The sky was littered with stars. The man and the woman kept their guns pointed at us. I told them that you were only seventeen. I told them that you were off limits, that you were an innocent. They didn’t seem to care. The man just kept asking me questions about the people that I’d killed. He kept trying to make me relive moments from my life that I wanted to forget. He was relentless, asking me about people I hadn’t thought about for years, people whose lives ended at my hands.

  I looked over at the Asian woman. I thought about Long Beach Island. I thought about Jared and Michael. I remembered that first night when Catherine had flirted with me. In a simpler world, I would have taken her home and we would have fucked until morning and then we would have gone our separate ways. I studied her face, her reconstructed nose and cheekbones. Her eyes looked the same but the rest of her face was different. She looked up at me as we walked. I expected her to be angry. She wasn’t. “You look good,” I said to her, my voice loud enough for her and only her to hear. She started to respond but thought better of it. She smiled slightly, her lips curling up in the corners. Even in my dream, I wondered which of the two of them would pull the trigger when they shot me. I hoped it would be her.

  We walked a long way into the desert. The cars disappeared over the horizon. Eventually, I turned to the man. “Did you follow us all the way from Charleston?” I took a deep breath. The air was cool and dry. It smelled of earth and stone. I looked over at Catherine again. She wasn’t looking at me. She was gazing off into the distance, into the seemingly endless darkness.

  “We followed you all the way from Montreal,” the man said. I didn’t want to think about the bodies that had been left behind in my wake. No more. I was done.

  “How are we going to do this?” I asked, turning to face the man without a face. All I could see was his ever-changing visage and the whites of his knuckles on his gun. He lifted the gun, his finger now tensing around the trigger. I stared up at the sky, not wanting the bullet to be the last thing I saw. Some of the stars had begun to disappear. The sound of the gunshot ripped through the air. I felt nothing. It was like Charleston all over again. The sun had begun to rise.

  The sun rose over the flat desert like a fireball being lifted into the sky. There were no mountains to slow down the light from the sun, nothing to create shadows. The day came with the immediacy of a tidal wave. I turned to look at you, standing there in the purple light of early dawn. I turned to see whos
e gun had fired, to make sure that you were okay. You were fine. Your belly created the largest shadow in the entire desert. Its shadow looked like the shadow of a mountain on its side. There was silence. Suddenly I felt a burning in my left hand. I looked down. There was blood dripping from my hand. The ground was so dry that the blood pooled up on top of it instead of seeping into the earth. I looked at my hand. My ring finger was gone. I looked over at the man with the gun. His face had changed yet again. There was smoke coming from the end of the gun. He’d shot off my finger. The pain came slowly.