***
Back again. Surfer-dude was trying to balance me on the chair again. I kept slipping to one side or another. It was almost funny, like a little war between us. I'm sure I started grinning. In the end, he had to use a bunch of teddies, cramming them into the spaces I didn't occupy, jamming me in place in the high-backed chair. It felt comfortable. He even used the toothy troll as a makeshift travel cushion on my shoulder to prop my head up.
"You missed it. She spoke aloud."
I looked. My girl lay in the centre of the double bed, atop the quilt, which lay haphazard, as if she had tossed and turned all night. She wore a tight bright green T-shirt and a pair of football shorts – her typical nightwear. This was a look and a scene I knew well. The only bit I wasn't familiar with was the thing wrapped around her left biceps.
Maybe he saw me looking at it. Maybe he was going to tell me anyway. "He pumped her. Lord knows how. Some shower attachment, some rubber pipe. You believe that? Watching her heart-rate now. It was low at first, but got better. She might make it. In time for you, I meant. Good old toothy-one, he still has all that knowledge in graffiti in dark alleyways in his brain. He thought you were a cunt, but look what he did for you."
For me? What did he do for me? Jesus, I needed sleep, and water. I should partake of neither, I knew. Not yet. Later, for sure.
"Silent at the back, silent at the back, that's all she ever-"
My girl spoke. We looked at her. I had never known her to speak in her sleep before. The drugs. What had they given her?
"Her?" Surfer-dude said, genuinely surprised. I must have wondered aloud. "Nothing. What made you think that?"
"Just me being silly, I guess. I just forgot about all the other times I came here to find her half-dead in bed, with strange bastards in her house."
My voice sounded strong now. I hoped that was a sign my strength was returning. I tried to lift a hand from the armrest, to point threateningly. It wouldn't come.
"For the next hour or so, you're the world's heaviest man, cock. You weigh hundreds of pounds. That's how it feels, anyhow. Watch."
He snatched away the troll from between my head and shoulder. My head flopped to my bony shoulder hard enough to sting my ear. It was painfully tight on the stretched side of my neck. I couldn't lift my head. Slowly, my head began to pull my body forward and to the side and I overbalanced despite the padding of teddies.
I hit the wooden armrest with my left arm and chest and it knocked the wind out of me. I felt as if I had fallen faster and harder than was natural, as if Earth's gravity had increased threefold, or as if someone had pushed me down with all their strength. Heaviest man on earth. That was bad. Superheroes needed to be lithe, quick. They didn't plod to the rescue like someone wading through quicksand. My head hung over the side of the chair, so heavy my skull might have been made of steel. It tugged on my neck painfully enough that I wondered if the flesh were going to tear, the bones shatter.
Surfer-dude was laughing. "Feels like you weigh ten times your weight, yeah? Freaky, that. I like the one where you feel really tall, like you're standing on a box, and it feels funny to step, because you can't quite shake the feeling that you're stepping off a high kerb. Dead funny at times. Especially watching women flail about like they're walking a tightrope or something." He stood before me. "Now, watch the world's strongest man in action."
He bent and picked me up, easily, and slung me over his shoulder. It was a fireman's lift, but it was also a carpet-fitter's lift - as one might carry out your old carpet to toss in a skip. Certainly I felt more like an old carpet than an inferno rescuee as he walked me over to the bed and flopped me down, hard. The bed shivered as I hit. Springs made a brief sound like a didgeridoo. My girl's body bounced and one arm slapped me in the face, bringing a dot of blood from one nostril. It felt very hot against my upper lip. I even felt the weight of that drop of liquid. Guess I had heavy blood, too.
What I felt under me was not soft sheets. I turned my eyes. Slowly, their weight on the side of my head turned my head to the left. It hurt, but now at least I was able to see what I lay on with my girl. I could smell her female scent.
Her jaw was loose, tongue visible resting against her teeth, like a nosey snake that lived in her gut but did not dare fully expose itself. Snot was caked under her nose. Her hair was a mess, stuck to her pajamas and face with sweat. But she was my girl and she looked beautiful, as always. She would look good floating in a bath of shit. She would look good half-decomposed.
The thought of death brought me back to the here and now. We were in her quaint bedroom, lying on her bed as we had done a hundred times, maybe three hundred. But things were different now, and I knew I had to pass on comfort. If I allowed myself to be mellowed in mind as well as body, I was done. There was a sheet of clear, thick plastic beneath us, which could be present only for one reason. The same reason that, I now noticed, Surfer-dude was wearing plastic bags tied around his shoes, and a pair of latex gloves. He looked like some cop perusing a crime scene.
But this wasn't a crime scene yet.
"What's with the face studs and the blue hair and stuff? You look like a Pokémon character."
Pokémon. Somehow, that made me think of my hands, my weapons. I hadn't lost power. Like a computer short on memory, that power was not missing or corrupted, it just lay elsewhere, in use by another part of my body running some other program. I needed to reroute power, that was all.
I tried to speak, but it was tough. As I opened my mouth, I could feel other places in my body weakening yet further. I was draining myself. I ignored my mouth. I closed my eyes so valuable power wouldn't be wasted as my brain deciphered sights. I lay back, head to one side still, eyes closed, mouth closed, mind blank except for a simple picture, in black and white strangely, of my right arm. Just my arm, disembodied. It lay there, floating in black air like a derelict craft in deep space. All the veins and arteries were glowing as if filled with luminous blood. And now I imagined those arteries expanding, pumping more blood into the muscles. The arm grew as I watched, like some leech feeding on blood. As it grew, so would my power. I put so much thought and energy into that right arm, into focusing on it, that I became aware of it lying beside me. I felt the skin enveloping it, and the ball joint in my elbow, and the tendons that held meat to bone. I felt the fleshy cogs and winches in my shoulder, the source of power for that arm. The cogs thickened, the winches gained more mass. The arm grew. I felt it get heavier as it grew, as if it were like a car taking on petrol.
Surfer-dude was standing before the bed, arms on hips, as if planning what next to do. He said, "You wanna know what the mixture was? My toothy friend, playing with chemicals and drugs, got himself written off. Silly bastard. He actually became a doctor only so he could help out his hypochondriac mum and himself. Treat himself, you know? Good idea, if you think about it. Why shouldn't people learn all they can about protecting and fixing their own body? He was high for years way back. I get the hardcore stuff we use, but he knows more about the mixing. They were all up to it in his circle. Doctors and pharmacists, eh? Worst drug dealers of all, albeit the cheapest."
"What is it?" My voice croaked, but that was good - it meant only minimal power was being allocated there, which saved more for my escape attempt.
"Eh?"
"The cocktail. Mixture."
He perked up. "Ah. Cocktail, that's a better word. I'll have that. Trial and error for the toothy one, it was. Days of puking, falling unconscious. But that's how you progress, eh? Trial and error."
"What is it?"
"Get this. Speed, for speed. Boosted, diluted, enhanced, warped, whatever, by Mescaline, X amount. That was the last part of the equation. It used to be LSD, but the trips were too much, they distorted the visuals too much. Lowered reaction time because of LSD - so, mescaline. A natural substitute."
"Just what I was thinking. What else?"
"In the cocktail, you mean? Alcohol. 'There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilli
ant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.' Abraham Lincoln."
"Well memorized for just such a moment. The gin?"
"The gin. But I have whisky, Malibu, all the usual stuff. It's a pub, remember."
"You feed mescaline and speed and alcohol to your customers?"
"Oh yeah, one-fifty for a shot of vodka, speed, mescaline and GHB? Have I got 'idiot' written on my forehead? I'd look like you. Nay, only special customers get my special brew. Wayward travellers. People who lose their souls when they lose their girlfriends. People I'd like to help."
"People you want to use."
"People I see fit for the job. Your sink leaks, you call a plumber, yeah?"
"I fix it myself. Then I go to the toilet, and I even manage to wipe my own arse. And after the exertion of tightening a nut on the leaky sink!"
"Alcohol. That's what's bringing the sarcastic, aggressive part of you out. Prolonged. Ever been this drunk before for so long?"
"I'm not drunk."
He laughed. "I watched you drink at least eight shots' worth. It's affecting you now as potently as it did seven hours ago. You don't stumble or mumble because the speed's forcing you along, and the mescaline is keeping your brain active. There's an appetite suppressant, too, which is why you won't want to or be able to eat until after you sleep. And it'll be a long sleep, maybe twenty hours. And you'll suffer, because today you put yourself through hell and didn't even know it. Check this."
He lifted my girl's hand mirror and held it over me, showed me my own face.
At first the dirt shocked me. I was as grimy as a clumsy coalman after a double shift. Then I looked past that to the bruised forehead, coming up big and purple now. I thought if any more blood rushed to my head, the studs would pop like bullets and do damage to anything in my line of sight. The nose and eyes were heavily bloodshot, the eyelids drooping. How I had missed this in the pub mirror earlier, I don't know. Maybe my brain was selecting what it wanted to see, to keep me motivated and unencumbered by fear of harm. Certainly I was having trouble concentrating for any length on any one matter. Here, now, already my mind was asking me another question, one unrelated to my bruised face, and as nothing more than an extension of my thoughts, my mouth formed the words in the air.
"What's GBH?"
He froze. "Eh? You mean the assault thing? Grievous bodily harm?"
Now I was puzzled. Hadn't he mentioned GBH as some kind of "Drug?"
He perked. "GHB." He snorted a laugh. "Gamma-hydroxybutyrate, called GHB. Sodium of some sort. I got the technical name memorized to get the girls."
"I thought you'd have rohypnol for that, pal."
"Funny. Well, the GHB is the most effective way to cancel out my cocktail. Unfortunately you shouldn't eat or drink anytime close to when you have it. It reacts with the cocktail. Dunno how. We didn't research. We just didn't eat or drink on trip nights. The first bout of GHB come-down nausea was warning enough, as will yours be."
I thought about the bottle of water he had given me. I had forgotten about the gin bottle, how it was sealed yet contained something foreign. Maybe this guy had the means to make and seal bottles. He used bottles in business as a pub landlord, after all. I tried not to think about him in Asda, planting bottles on shelves. Strangely, I wasn't annoyed about being drugged by Surfer-dude – again.
"You could have just told me. Thanks."
"Gotta be in the valleys to fully appreciate the mountains."
"So what happens now?"
"Your hand hurt?" He pointed at my right arm. I looked. I was actually able to raise my head from the bed and look down at the arm now curled on my stomach. Muscles in the wrist shivered as I opened and closed my fist. I felt the nails dig into my palm each time and knew that that arm had power now, all the power in the world. I raised that arm and put the hand to my mouth and spat on it. The effort was immense and took everything from me. The arm dropped onto my chest. I looked at the knuckles and the back of the hand. The skin was slick, glistening like a slug trail. There were droplets of water there, too, held in perfect little spheres by the oily gunk. God help anything that got in the way of that fist.
"It's fine," I said. "Pins and needles."
Just then my girl broke into a fit. She jerked like a woman fed an electric current. Spit and more snot oozed from her mouth and nose. My heart lurched and I feared losing her. And that brief lurch in my chest was better than any therapy. Suddenly, I didn't want her to die. Didn't want to know that lurching feeling again. It made me feel lost and empty. I didn't think I could cope with that feeling for the rest of my life. How close had I come to losing her?
"What's wrong with her?" I said. I lifted that big right arm of mine and laid it over her, using my fingers to wipe away the crap from her face.
Surfer-dude looked at me as you might look at an insect doing something unexpected - vague intrigue. "OD. Insulin. She's diabetic, eh? We saved her for you."
He looked almost proud, as if he wanted thanks. "For me?" I think I knew what he meant, but I needed to be sure.
He moved around the bed, to the bedside cabinet. I watched him. The cabinet was cluttered with make-up, two books on Sudoku, and paperclips, from which my girl liked to fashion jewellery for her teddies. He lifted something I hadn't seen. It looked like a cigar box, but I knew this was my girl's insulin pack. He took out a syringe, already filled. And then a couple more.
"We got here early, but already she was having heart palpitations. Toothy sorted her out before she could have a heart attack. Pumped her stomach for good measure, too."
I tried to take in what he was telling me. "Suicide?"
He nodded. "Guilt, I guess. Too late now, though. You still need to kill her, of course?"
It was a question. I coughed, took a breath. "No, the vote was…they voted to forgive her. It was a draw."
"Draw," he murmured, giggling. "I didn't know this was a game. Death's no game, cock. Who voted to forgive her? People who never met her, I bet."
Just like you guys, I thought. "People out there. Good minds. Good arguments."
"Good arguments." Now he looked annoyed. "So what was the vote? How many for and against?"
You know, I couldn't quite remember. 3-2? 4-3? Truth was, as the night progressed, I pushed my girl and her impending death out of my mind. I had been more concerned with getting to her, not deciding whether or not to kill her. And now I was here, next to her, seeing her all messed up, smelling blood and snot and puke, all I wanted to do was protect her. That was what men did for their women. A man who protected his woman was her own private superhero. Let the cops watch over the rest of the world. I wanted only to take care of my girl.
"Not sure. Close. But it's decided."
"Decided?" He seemed angry now.
Below us, a door slammed. Surfer-dude rushed to the window, murder apparently forgotten for the moment, twisted the handle and threw the window wide. He took a plastic flower from a vase on the sill and, leaning out so he could peer down, tossed it into the impalpable slipstream of gravity. I saw it get rapidly sucked downward, out of sight.
He giggled when a female voice - I say female, but of course I knew it was Nymph-girl who had exited the front door right below us - swore up at him with playful undertones. There was a pause, then Surfer-dude said, "I wish gold would rain from the sky for you."
Again the pause. Nymph-girl speaking too quietly for her sounds to carry the eight feet past Surfer-dude and to where I lay on the bed. Surfer-dude's reply was, "No, just getting there. I'd come down if it was already done, wouldn't I?"
"..."
"Just the knife, why? Dead basic." He held out the weapon in question, as if Nymph-girl might never before have seen such an item.
"..."
He shrugged. "Okay. Not a problemo. What are you doing now, sorting the van?"
"..."
"Yeah, okay. Five minutes. Toss me -"
"..."
"Look at you, smartass. I'll leave it tied then, eh? Few hours, to make s
ure, eh?" He laughed. "Toss me the keys. I'll lock up after."
He stepped to one side, clearing the window. A moment later there was a clack as a set of keys hit the window and bounced off. Surfer-dude laughed. He plucked and tossed another flower, then stepped aside quickly with an exclamation as the same set of keys hurtled fast and hard enough through the window to hit the ceiling before thudding to the carpet. Surfer-dude picked them up and stuck his head out the window again.
"Guess what, babe? He really went out to get votes, just like we said…" A pause, then he laughed. "He looks the sort…" He laughed again, then paused. After a few seconds passed, he shouted out, "Okay, see you there in a minute." He closed the window and stood there facing it, his hand on the handle. Even from behind, he looked like a guy who knew he had a tough, unpleasant task ahead.
"It's boom day, cock. The plan's on. See, we guys stick to -" He was turning round as he spoke. Seeing me now, he stopped. He seemed to have suffered nothing more than the equivalent of a scratch on a CD, because after a moment he continued as if he had not just witnessed a shocking sight. "- a plan."
I stood there, facing him, swaying a little on weak legs. But the weakness was natural, if that makes sense. I knew my body ached because it had been on the move all night, not because it had been drugged. I felt nothing of the drug any more. Not the one Surfer-dude had given me in a water bottle - there was no nausea. Not the cocktail he had supplied in bottle of gin - there was no ego, no sense of purpose. Right now, I was just some guy in his girl's house, facing off against a guy who shouldn't be here and wanted to do us both harm.
"There's enough to go round. You can do her, as planned, and I'll do you. Then it's not suicide and you won't go to hell." He twiddled the syringes in his hands, perhaps expecting me to ask for them. "Not for the suicide, anyway. Maybe for murder." He looked embarrassed because he'd given his sales pitch without thinking it through. I grinned at him and that seemed to stoke his fire.
"What's so fucking funny?"
"Boom day?"
He shrugged. "Cheesy name, I know, but why not, eh? Better than Murder-of-many-people day, you think?"
"Tell it like it is, I say."
"So what now? What's the plan?"
I think he was asking what I planned to do now. What was my next move? Well, I had travelled through hell and high water to get here to be with my girl. And now that I was here, some twat was hoping to kill us both and wrap our bodies in plastic and perhaps dump us in the local river, or throw us out at the scene of their bombing and hope our mutilated corpses were considered victims of the terrorist attack at the train station. Call me a stick in the mud, but I didn't like that idea. I told him now wordlessly by raising my hands in a boxer's stance.
"You're an ungrateful bastard, you know? If you now don't want to kill that whore, you should certainly be grateful that we saved her for you. If we hadn't been here, you would have found her dead and with her pants full of shit and piss."
And there it was. He was right. If they hadn't come here, she would have died by her own hand. The moment she put that sex tape on for me a world and an age ago at the cottage, she was a dead woman walking, and there was nothing I could do about it, especially not after she took the car and left. What had I been doing while she was injecting herself with a fatal dose of insulin? Trying on Tattoo-guy's spiked trainers? Conversing over the airwaves with Cleo and Dino? Tossing dead people into a river? Tough to think that I was oblivious to her plight as she injected herself. So overcome with guilt had she obviously been, she had decided to end her own life. A death sentence was a death sentence, it didn't matter that the executioner had not been me.
I was filled with a sense of purpose again as I stood facing off against Surfer-dude, fists up. If I hadn't gone to the Dark Cave... If these guys hadn't chased me out... If Tattoo-guy hadn't found me... If Coyote hadn't found me... A thousand things had had to happen last night as part of God's design to put me here in this room, right now, with these people, and that meant there was still a plan in effect, which meant there was still a deliberate ending to come. And sure as shit it involved my girl and me in continued life.
Surfer-dude and his cohorts had held up their end: they had come and they had saved my girl from the destructive power of her own guilt. Now it was my turn to save her from them, as they surely would have killed her had I not made it here. What a waste of everyone's time if I didn't do what was expected of me now.
I didn't want to lose her. I wanted eternal pain more than I wanted that.
I let my left hand drop. My right arm tingled and the knuckles sparkled under the glare of the ceiling light. This was a scene for my right arm only, for it was where all my rage and power and skill resided, and it was there for this one battle against this supervillain.
Surfer-dude put up his own hands.
I took a step forward and swung a punch with my right arm. It came at Surfer-dude in slow-mo. I saw his eyes watching the fist come, even saw them register mirth as it swept slowly past his face. The momentum made me stagger into him and he laughed. laughed as he got me upright like a man helping his drunk friend. He got me balanced and stepped back two feet and tapped his cheek.
"You get a free shot," he said. "One. And then I unleash." He was grinning, but there was something else there. It was a game to him, but the fun was wearing thin. He had murder planned here, cold and evil, and he was getting worked up, readying himself for the act. But he needed a final push. He was balanced on the edge of commitment and if I hit him in the face, even softly, that was going to do it. He knew it and I could see he knew it.
"Do it for your girl," he snapped at me. There was anger there. Never easy to kill someone in cold blood, but for sure he felt it would be easier if I attacked him. So I put up my arm in front of me, as if for a mid-air arm-wrestle, and bent my wrist so my fist pointed at him. Creases appeared on his forehead. Puzzled. This was no way to punch someone. The Incredible Hulk couldn't get power into a punch thrown like that. It was a cartoon punch. It was a joke. It said I was taking the piss.
"Stop playing. You want to save your girl?"
Now he looked angry. He needed that final push, that straw to break the camel's back, and this wasn't the way it was going to happen. But I stood there with my right arm looking like a swan's neck and said nothing and let him get angrier. And he did. Told me again to do it right. Told me I was condemning my girl to death. Then his eyes blazed real angry and something came over them and spread down his face and curled a grin on his lips. The push. The straw. It had come. Anger had done it.
"Do it," he said, calmly. In his head, I would punch and he wouldn't feel it, and then he'd unleash and it would all be over.
"Sure thing," I said, and swan-pecked my right fist into Surfer-dude's shocked face.
My hand bounced off as fast as it had arrived, so powerful the recoil that I my body twisted and I tripped over my own crossed legs. I landed hard on the carpet and curled immediately into a ball, my shattered right hand clutched against my chest and spraying blood against my neck, into my coveralls. The amount of pain was just silly. Pain is the body's way of telling us there's something wrong, that this hurting area needed attention - well I fucking knew that already, I could see the blood and the injury, and the agony was just overkill. The pain could stop now, thank you. Bad hand, blood, need doctor - got it!
I drew in slow breaths and spat them out full of saliva and drops of blood because I had bitten my tongue at some point. I lay there and breathed like an asthmatic boar, eyes open, never blinking, staring. Surfer-dude lay before me, still and dead, the upturned side of his face ruined. It was sunken and disfigured and bloody and it looked painful, but Surfer-dude didn't seem to feel it. Here the pain had been elevated to such an intense level the body had decided that there was no coming back, and it had shut itself down.
"I win," I croaked.
I cupped my hands over my mouth and bent over and spat, repeatedly. I did this, carefully of course, until my mou
th was empty and my hands were coated in gunk, and then I wiped that gunk, carefully of course, on the corner of the bedside cabinet. My mouth tasted foul and I was sure I'd swallowed some of the gunk. Should I worry about volatile stomach acids and internal destruction? Nah, a bit of potassium chlorate never hurt anyone.
I went to my girl. There was heat in my legs now, as if I had just applied Deep Heat. I didn't know what that meant, but it felt good. You have to be without the use of your legs for a time in order to fully realise just how much they mean to you. I wanted to kiss my feet for keeping me mobile. I made a note in my head: learn to walk on your hands, just in case. Just in case. It beats relying on wheelchair access. If ever I came across Tattoo-guy again, I'd share this gem with him.
My girl was limp but breathing and warm. Not dead. "Maybe I should thank Teeth-bloke for you," I said to her. Teeth-bloke! I rubbed my teeth with a corner of the quilt to remove a film of gunk from them. I spat carefully into my hands, removing the rest of the gunk, and wiped it on the quilt. I laid the quilt back down and sat next to my girl and took her hand. Very hot, it was. Not warm, hot. Hot enough to make me worry just as much as if her flesh had been cold.
"Baby! Baby!"
Muffled through the closed window, Nymph-girl's screaming voice. I looked briefly at the window, although I couldn't exactly see sounds, could I? Smiled down at my girl again. I remembered Teeth-bloke. "I'll have to thank him a lot later, I think."
"Baby! Kill him, gut him, cut his fucking balls off!"
Oh yes, Teeth-bloke. Maybe she'd found him.
"Baby, cut her eyes out, her fucking eyes, slice them, fuuuuuck!"
Yep, she'd found him.
"Jesus, he saved her, and look what he's done, fuuuuck! Kill!"
Hey, hey, I didn't know Teeth-bloke had once been a surgeon or doctor or whatever! I didn't know he'd saved my girl's life. He should have said something when I approached the blue van as it sat parked in the tunnel. But no, he'd watched me walk up to him, the merest hint of surprise on his face. I took out the knife and showed it him. I grinned at him. I even said something, some cheap threat I don't remember now. And all that took time, time aplenty for him to tell me what he'd done and to beg for his life. But he hadn't, so I'd killed him. Should I be blamed for that? What, I'm a clairvoyant? It had been his own silly fault. Maybe in the next life he'll remember his mistakes and will thus live a longer life. All's well that ends well, I guess.
“Send her to me,” said a broken voice, gargling blood. I jumped back, shocked, half expecting Surfer-dude - I had thought he was dead! - to lunge at me with a sudden explosion of energy - like the sort I had had throughout this night. But he just lay there, as close to death as you could get without starting to decompose. Fingernails jammed in the doorway between this world and the next, blocking passage for all others, he hung on, perhaps just long enough for this final request. “Send her to me.”
Nymph-girl, did he mean? Send Nymph-girl to him? Pause our war just long enough for me to call Nymph-girl and let her come sit by her man in his final moments? I was reminded of the story of the battle of Troy in which Achilles paused the attack on that famous city for twelve days while its people buried Prince Hector.
“She can’t wait. I don’t want to wait.”
Impatient. But I considered his request. And it sounded like a trap. Let Nymph-girl into this room? Ha, no! No fool, me.
“Too many years. Kill her anyway.” And with that, he exited stage down.
As I watched his body relax after its final breath, like a balloon deflating, I realised my error. Surfer-dude hadn’t wanted me to bring Nymph-girl into this room for a final goodbye: he wanted me to kill her so she could join him in the next world. I didn’t know if that was extreme love or just insane selfish jealousy. I thought there might be only one way to know for sure.
The woman in question was still screaming. Screaming like that in this neighbourhood was apt to make someone call the police and -
Ah, the emergency services - a great idea. An ambulance for my girl. Thanks, Nymph-girl. I headed out of the room and down the stairs. My girl’s mobile phone was where she always left it - hanging by its strap from a nail above the fireplace. I snatched it up.
When I threw open the front door, it was with my strength fully returned. I shivered with power once more. Was this the drugs again? Irrelevant. I think I had obtained the energy to do something Fate had planned for me, and nothing more. Just as minute women can find the power to lift crumpled cars off their babies, before returning to a status of normality.
Nymph-girl was out there, approaching from the direction of the tunnel, where the blue van was. Where Teeth-bloke sat in the driver's seat with a knife in his heart. She stopped. She looked down at my ruined hand. I looked, too. Blood was leaking onto the doorstep and pooling around my training shoes. My hand was the only place on my body that wasn’t cold; it was in fact screaming hot. I stuffed it in my pocket, ignoring the pain as my shattered fingers caught and bent as they were forced into the cotton cave.
“You’re not my baby,” she said. The way she said it, it was as if God had descended from the Heavens and told her that only one man would walk out of that house alive. The fear of major loss was written on her pale face. Her head began to shake slowly, as if she were trying to wrestle the truth into silence, preferring to keep her hopes up.
I saw faces at windows. In homes, in the offices. All the shouting, I guess. Nymph-girl didn’t look too imposing, so wouldn’t have made people reach for phones. I lifted my girl’s now and tapped out the number for the emergency services. I told the operator that I needed an ambulance for a girl who’d had an insulin overdose. Nymph-girl just stared at me. Fifteen feet separated us, but I could see in her eyes that there was still hope for her Surfer-dude. That hope held her frozen in place, much as you might remain in place after a horrible fall or car crash - fearful that even the slightest move might make things worse.
“And there’s a guy with no head,” I added for her sake. The operator said something I couldn’t hear because Nymph-girl immediately let out a low howl, like a domestic cat’s mating call, only longer and louder and far more chilling. It was a horrible sound. I felt sorry for her. You don’t ever want to hear that sound. Not from a loved one, not from a bloodthirsty serial slayer. It put goose pimples on my forearms.
“Kneel and I will send you to him. He wants that.” I waited. She cursed the day my mother had met my father, and that was answer enough for me: Surfer-dude was a selfish, jealous man. Sorry, dude, I think you’re in for a long wait. She‘s not going anyway just yet.
Actually she did go somewhere. She spun on her heels and walked away, slowly, almost calmly. Thinking. Calm and thinking was worse than angry and confused. I thought of the old saying that began "Hell hath no fury..." Suddenly I was scared and the shivering was no longer just from lack of heat due to blood loss. I started to feel a bit dizzy. Soon, I’d be lying on my back like Surfer-dude, perhaps staring into the face of my enemy and pleading with her to send my girl to me. I didn’t like the idea of waiting, either.
I shook my head, bringing me back to my senses. Nymph-girl was gone. I looked up the street, I looked over at gardens, and I even looked in the doorway behind me. But she was gone. I think I knew where. If Nymph-girl did plan to follow her man after all, she certainly wasn’t going to go quietly by my hand. The Shepherds still had a mission today. Two birds with one stone, so to speak.
An engine rumbled into life.
From under the tunnel, which was like a giant barrel, a large metal object emerged, which was like a giant bullet. Nymph-girl rode Axe-wielder’s Goldwing, dragging its trailer. They'd had it all cleaned and freshened up, ready for its big day. It dwarfed her, but she had it subdued - nay, even tamed - like a jockey controlling a horse. It was obvious to me that this was not the first time she had ridden the bike, nor the second or tenth.
A quick glance left at me, without emotion. That usually meant all the brain’s energy was
feeding the roiling mind, and I fearfully wondered what schemes were brewing in her psyche. Then she was facing front again and guiding the bike like a missile along the narrow street. So wide was the bike, wider even than its trailer, she had to boycott the lanes and travel along the dotted white line down the centre of the road. There seemed to be only a few feet between the handlebars and the cars parked on either side of the road, but that wasn’t a worry since Nymph-girl held a perfectly straight line, as if laser-guided. The end of the road got awfully close and a rising fear caught my breath. I feared that Nymph-girl would turn the corner and that the fading roar of the engine would sing her farewell. That fear was a sharp realisation that I didn’t want that.
I didn’t want her to leave? What did that mean?
I ran out into the centre of the flat lollipop, eyes fixed on the bike, almost willing my gaze to become a beam of glue that would slow and stop the bike. Somehow, I couldn’t let her leave. I didn’t know what it would mean if she did, but I knew enough to not desire it. Puzzling though that was, it was a deep instinct that had watched over me in times of danger previously, and I couldn’t now ignore it after all its prior input.
The Goldwing had big mirrors like the antennae of a snail. At this distance, the small mirrors were just dots, but I fancied that I could see Nymph-girl’s face reflected in them, primarily her eyes as they stared not at the road but at me. Nothing but me. I just stood there and let the feeling of loss ooze out of me like sweat. This wasn’t over, I knew.
I saw the brake light flash on as the bike slowed. I just stood there. There was no need to hunt this prey, for it would come to me, pushed by an engine of anger, fuelled by revenge. As much as I wanted to tear Nymph-girl’s life from her soul for what she had done to my girl, she surely wanted to kill me because I had taken away her Surfer-dude.
The bike leaned, veered towards one kerb, then cut an arc the other way as Nymph-girl curled the bike back in my direction. I heard the rumble of the engine as she accelerated. Fate was coming at me.
I thought back to earlier. After I had put the knife deep into Teeth-bloke's chest. Before going to knock on my girl's front door, I had gone to the back of the van, where the Goldwing had been parked, hidden by the bigger vehicle. I had opened its trailer and put my hand in. A small scoop of the gloop inside. I had thought about smearing it under my armpit, or in my pants. In the end I had decided to smear it in my mouth, in my cheeks. That had been improvisation. Something I had thought of only after I'd opened the trailer. I'd opened the trailer for an entirely different reason.
I lifted my girl’s mobile phone and hit the green button, which dialled the number on the screen. It was Coyote’s number. As I waited for the connection, I watched Nymph-girl and the Goldwing growing larger, coming closer. In a dead end street, she came at me like a bullet.
I held my breath. The roar of the bike was like some animal’s growl in the seconds before it would strike. The Goldwing came ever closer.
“If I wanted to speak to you, I’d bloody well answer, wouldn’t I? So leave a message, and if you’re lucky as hell, I might get back to you.”
Coyote’s voice, a recorded message for a diverted call. My heart sank. Deep in the Goldwing’s trailer, submerged in a bath of potassium chlorate and petroleum jelly, the mobile phone belonging to Coyote failed to receive the call, failed to vibrate in response, and failed to initiate the metal-rending, blood-spattering, explosive destruction of bike and passenger. Either I had stuffed the phone too deep into the gloop or the trailer's lid cut off the signal. Nymph-girl came on, unstoppable.
I held my ground, fighter’s stance. On she came, the bike’s engine uttering a growl of impending doom. I cancelled out everything but Nymph-girl’s pale, cartoon-princess face, much like the iris closing in on James Bond at the beginning of each of his movies, after he’s spun and shot at the camera. It was all I saw, growing in my vision. There was no body beneath that face, no bike under the body, no world around the bike. I concentrated on my right hand, the source of all my power. The rest of my body was nothing but a mechanism existing only to throw that clenched fist.
Then I became aware of heat in that fist. Then pain. Suddenly I was aware of that ravaged hand, torn apart by an explosive material. Pain, more pain. I looked down, seeing dripping blood and hanging flesh, and the pain hit me like heat from an oven, and I dropped to my knees and covered my throbbing hand with my good hand, which increased the pain to a level that made me cry out. Droplets of potassium chlorate that had remained in my mouth after cleaning were ejected out onto the tarmac, where they created a tiny fizzle as they exploded. The sound was much like that you might hear if you dropped a hot pinhead into a bucket of cold water.
I dialled the number again and waited. The bike came on, unstoppable.
The phone rang. But nothing happened.
The ringing wasn't loud - I didn't hear it over the bike's engine - but it was loud enough to shock Nymph-girl. I saw her jerk in the seat, her head twisting round. I saw the bike wobble as she jerked the handlebars. I saw the bike topple. Nymph-girl went underneath the big beast of a bike. Bike and girl tumbled and bounced, but at that point I was watching the trailer. Wrenched free from the bike's towbar, the trailer rolled onward, coming at me. I stumbled aside and my head followed it as it rolled past me. I shut out all noise of screeching metal and screeching girl and watched the four-wheeled wooden box roll towards the end of the street.
The front wheels hit the kerb and bounced up. The back wheels hit and slammed the front pair back down. The trailer bounced and swayed and settled and was still. I waited for Google Earth to become out of date. I waited to hit the skies like Superman. But there was no explosion. That was when I became aware that I was on my knees, fingers digging into my face with the tension, like some teenager watching a scary film. I saw blood on my fingertips when I pulled them away. Then I turned my head and looked for my enemy.
I crawled over to her as she lay dead some ten feet from the ruined bike. She looked like a rape victim, all torn clothing and bloody skin. I leaned over her, trying to see into her eyes. They were open, but glassy.
She reached for me. For assistance? Or to try to crush my life away with the last of her strength? Something glinted in the rising sun. It was my ring. There it was on her finger, where she’d put it after taking it from me. I reach for her, put our fingers together, and slipped the ring from digit to digit. Another girl deserved that ring.
I rushed into the house as quickly as I could, into my girl’s bedroom. She was out. I could hear sirens. Some nosey do-gooder had called one of the emergency services, probably the cops. So I would call my own ambulance. I slipped the ring onto my girl’s finger and held her hand. Screaming out on the street. I caught the irony: as one awaited siren approached, a despised psiren exited.
I kissed my girl and lay beside her. Obviously I couldn’t sleep, because the authorities were coming, but at long last I felt I occupied a place that was comfortable enough to allow me to do so, and I really wanted to. As if realising this also, my eyelids started to get heavy. The pain slipped away like a courteous friend. Two minutes, I thought. I’ll just have two minutes‘ sleep until the knock on the door and the next stage of all this shit. Police, hospitals, questions, etc. “Two minutes, please, God,” I said aloud, and closed my eyes. I believe I fell asleep instantly.
God, if such an entity existed, must have felt sorry for me, or felt willing to reward my actions. He gave me my two minutes and a whole extra one before I heard loud rapping on the door. But I ignored it. The door was shut and there was nothing out there to make the police think this house was special. They'd be knocking on all the doors, trying to find out what happened. I could have more time. I wanted a year to lay here with my girl, but knew that would not happen. I would have to get up sometime and face the music. As I looked at my girl, I was reminded of the last time I had loved her, and that made a number jump in my head.
Twenty-six minutes would do it. I would
rest for twenty-six minutes. Then the long day would begin.
THE END
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