Bring Me Flesh, I'll Bring Hell Page 14

  “How do you know that’ll work?”

  “I don’t. I just read a lot of books.”

  None of this explained why Jessica still retained her higher brain functions without medication or the use of special trigger words. I said as much, and Owen considered it a moment.

  “I don’t know why she doesn’t act like you when you’re off the meds. I’ve never seen her take a pill, but I think . . . I think . . .”

  He paused and looked at me strangely.

  “The reason I think the trigger word will work for you is because she uses a trigger, too.”

  “Something that focuses her? So much she can actually reason?” I asked.

  I was incredulous. I couldn’t penetrate the memories of my time as a shuffle-shuffle moan-moan, how the hell was she conscious and conniving to boot?

  “I think if you find her trigger, she’ll regress. She’ll go back to being a monstrosity.”

  “You realize what you’re asking me to do, don’t you?” I whispered. “You’re asking me to destroy my wife all over again. Who said I would do it?”

  He smiled, an odd quirk of his lips.

  “Because I know the secret.”

  “What secret is that?”

  “You don’t love her. And maybe never did.”

  And with that, he picked up the gun, resumed the mask, and eased out of the room like a wisp of smoke.

  *

  Irony, it turns out, tastes worse than my medication.

  In the wake of Owen’s absence I was left to ponder his parting words. I clenched a fist in my restraints, the long snaking marker DADDY curling along the line of my finger. The word that would focus me, allow me to hold on to a shred of consciousness. The idea had merit; the brain was a muscle, after all. But I was still yet a weakling—how could I pull myself from the murk of pre-deceased, low brain function? How could I rise above a reptilian limbic system that demanded flesh, and more flesh? I doubted myself, doubted I was capable of such a feat. This particular brain muscle was weak.

  Owen had made that brutally clear in his parting words: You don’t love her. And maybe never did.

  I laughed softly into the stuffy basement air. A weak man who made a weak marriage. He was right. I hadn’t loved her. At eighteen, I thought I found love in the back of a Toyota with a blond young thing named Jessica. And for awhile, that was all of love I knew. We played passion games in dark rooms at house parties, one hand up her dress and molding the shape of her hip, the other pulling her closer to me, closer to me. Like I could eat her. A shadow of our future.

  Then, two years after, I was in Bosnia. Kosovo.

  I groaned. How long until the dose wore off? Did I have hours, or only minutes? The disintegration of my waking mind was no longer an event to be feared. Now, I wished to retreat into a darkened world where no new memories were made, no old ones to haunt, and nothing to live through or to live for. Give me obliteration, give me an undead life. Instead, I went reeling back into the past.

  I had got the call in Mississippi, during boot camp. Jessica was pregnant; white knuckled fingers on the phone. I was the same age as the shooter in the ski mask that I pretended was my long-dead son. I hadn’t spoken to Jessica in months. The warm thighs of a Southern woman hot from the delta had been keeping me company during long, humid nights. I showed her what I knew and she wasn’t impressed.

  In that distant past I examined myself as I had been. Not quite a man, no longer a boy. Sweat and mosquitoes, I was suddenly a father, a role I had never pictured for myself. The old gray fox had been my only template for a father, and fear-sweat filled me as I heard the empty notes of Jessica’s voice—shock, surprise, wonderment. I shot rounds off at the range but I was terrified of a fetus smaller than a bullet.

  I told her I would give her an answer. But I never really did; I came back to her house when boot camp was over and she took me in, announced our engagement to her family. I had none left to announce anything to. The old gray fox was unreachable and refused to take our calls. My mother in exile. Jamie told me not to do anything stupid. My fate was decided by my fear, fearing to abandon, fearing to act. In a moment of hesitation, I became a father and a husband.

  No, I did not love her.

  A particular fondness, loyalty, devotion—perhaps love was nestled somewhere between those concepts and had carved out a space beside my cold and deadened heart. Ancient history.

  *

  Things were heating up in Kosovo, and rumors of ground troops were followed by Clinton’s refusal to send them. But we all knew it was a matter of time. The more Slobadon refused to yield, the more NATO bombed, which brought us closer to the brink. Ground troops would be inevitable if the Serbs did not capitulate soon. Bondsteel Camp wasn’t even on the map yet.

  I met with Jamie in Kosovo, which was an unplanned event. We talked about the air strikes, NATO, the whole mess. He said they’d called him down with the initial troops on our “peacekeeping” mission to look at the mass graves. Information was dodgy. Every side had a different version, and rumor was something had happened in the farmland. People gone missing. He was there to help excavate. That was the first drink.

  By the second drink, he explained they were working on something really revolutionary, the sort of thing that could change the way wars were waged. No more death, no more suffering.

  By the third drink, he was slurring his words and I thought I heard him wrong.

  Where are the mass graves? I asked.

  What mass graves?

  The ones we’re fighting this fucking war over, dumbass.

  He chuckled into his drink, and then ordered a fourth.

  About that, he began slowly. I’m gonna bring them back to life. How’d you like that?

  We never talked about that conversation in Kosovo again. I took him back to the barracks and helped him into bed while alcohol seeped from his pores and fermented in his sweat.

  The next morning, he requested I join him as part of an armed escort with a handful of troops to the mass grave excavation. This wasn’t what I had signed on for, and we stood by while a bulldozer raised the earth and broke apart its crust, shoving black dirt this way and that in heaps and mounds.

  There was nothing there.

  Jamie became agitated as the minutes passed and bulldozer’s metal jaws continued to come away with nothing but dirt; no bones, no meat, no corpses.

  A soldier beside me cracked a joke: Maybe they walked out, eh?

  But Jamie wasn’t laughing. He had a hard, desperate look in his eyes. I shared a smoke with another soldier and he asked me what the fuck that guy’s problem was. I shrugged and said nothing, but wondered what had my brother under so much pressure that he bit his lip and paced the outer edge of the hole like a prisoner before a set of bars. Something about that empty hole in the ground, his barely concealed rage, filled me with an apprehension the Balkan chill could not disperse. They’d find bodies much later; but for now, I could have sworn my brother wanted a massacre to supply him with corpses. Needed the corpses. I didn’t ask why.

  The next morning, he told me they had something they were working on that would make our careers in the military, if I wanted to be a part of it. I hesitated, distrustful, cautious. While I pondered my choices, Jamie talked about his project—Virus X—with me from the back of a convoy for cover, and in heated discussion I failed to notice the vehicle moving and swaying. Conveying us to the helicopter pad.

  He had been depending on the mass graves to further his scientific goals and use what he found as fodder for his experiments. Without them, he must turn to the scant reserves of volunteers, he explained, looking at me hopefully. He was impatient; mass graves would be discovered mere months later. That didn’t rule out the possibility that the corpses from the abandoned site hadn’t walked out on their own after all. Anything is possible.

  It’s a chance to change the world, Vitus. No more death. No one has to die. We could reverse every dumb-fuck thing our father ever did, you know that? Give
the old man something to make the rest of his hair turn white.

  In two years of hoping for advancement and receiving none, I took Jamie at his word. And in that moment of hesitation, my future was written. I was pre-deceased; I just didn’t know it yet.

  *

  All those things—long ago, far away.

  Another man walked in my shoes. I never really got to know him, the boy that I was. At twenty years of age, he died ignobly as part of a military sanctioned, pharmaceutical experiment. In his place, I was born—a darkling encased in rotting meat, a walking, talking corpse, still picking pieces of his wife and son from his teeth. A convenient tragedy packing heat. I was a pathetic human and I made for an even more pathetic monster.

  I flexed my hand again. The length of the word DADDY waved and I re-examined the word. Being Jessica’s husband had been an empty experience and a duty I had sought to fulfill out of a sense of obligation—as had my decision to join the military. My father had been a soldier and so I believed I should be one.

  Fatherhood had been different; I had watched Clay like a scientist unsure of the organism that had just outgrown the Petri dish. Even at the age of two, Clay had his own ideas about where he wanted to go, who he wanted to be. He didn’t want my help, or Jessica’s. He hated naps and enjoyed running from us.

  Until I stopped his running forever.

  And that left a hole in my heart I could not name.

  What does it mean to be a father? I asked myself, looking at the word. I tried to imbue it with a sense of responsibility, but all my responsibilities had been failures. No, DADDY wasn’t my word; it was Owen’s word. Owen, who believed he was my Clay, and that we were reunited at last.

  Instead, Owen had probably been snatched from an arcade while his parents left him there to shop at a neighboring store; or maybe Jessica had spotted him outside a school playground and the likeness had struck a chord in her that could not be silenced. How many children went missing every day? Enough so that a young boy, the first boy Jessica chose, would be lost in the mire of paperwork and AMBER Alerts.

  He was the first domino to fall. Once Jessica had snatched and indoctrinated Owen, it was only a matter of time before dissatisfaction set in, and she began to take others to fill his place. And whose fault was this but my own? In the long chain of unintended consequences, I was the living embodiment of chaos and everyone around me had been swallowed in the widening gyre.

  What had it meant to Owen, who must have buried the memories of his parents deep, so deep he could no longer remember? Instead, he was willing to accept me as his father with no questions asked. He gave his trust without hesitation; he gave his love without reservation and condition. His gift was profound in its depth, its size; I could not measure up to the pedestal he wanted to raise me to. And did I not owe him more, if I was the catalyst for all this misery?

  I looked at the word again.

  You wanted to pretend Owen was your son. Maybe the secret to this word, DADDY, is that you finally accept it—accept the role Owen aches to fill. Accept this new son in place of the old. You owe him that much.

  It’s sick! I lamented, stifling a wail. I refused it still. And inside, an ache crept steadily up my spine like a writhing snake and all the way up to the base of my skull where the ache expanded to ocean-size proportions.

  Not much time left to me now. These could be my last moments of consciousness before I was lost forever. I stared at the word fiercely. I thought of Owen and what it cost him to turn away the memory of his old parents in favor of a new one. Maybe his parents had never truly loved him anyway. Why else would he abandon their memory so eagerly, be so complicit with Jessica?

  And he spent his life waiting for me. Waiting for my arrival.

  Owen’s father wouldn’t lay here, bellyaching over the past. Time to pay back the love given. You know how precious that gift is. It’s too late for Clay—nothing can change the mistakes of the past. But there is still time for Owen. He’s giving you an opportunity to die with a final shred of dignity—knowing you did something for someone other than yourself—something for your son.

  Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

  A fly buzzed energetically against the concrete wall. I watched it with hatred rising through the fibers of my broken cells and leavening through my deadening brain matter. I wanted to eat the fly and consume the world and shove it into my jaws and keep going. My salivary glands worked overtime, wetting my lips with anticipation. The hour of turning was upon me.

  Curdled eyes rolled in my sockets. My belly churned. The time was now.

  “Hang on,” I whispered, I begged myself. Consciousness scrambled for purchase along the edges of my darkening mind. Did the light dim yet? “Hang on.”

  What was the word again? I found it hard to remember. There was a boy, a boy I had known. Just here. I was. Where. Hunger. Find the boy. Keep the boy. Safe.

  Keep. Him. Safe.

  Keep. Him. Safe.

  Keep.

  Safe.

  *

  There is no past. There is no future.

  “How did we sleep today, dear husband?”

  The Dead Man looks up.

  A woman crowned with long blond hair occupies the space before him. His nose crinkles like a wolf’s until the dead skin parts beneath the pressure. He smells her female smell, a mixture of incense and patchouli, but they provide a barrier for her real smell, the smell of rotting flesh, of long-dead corpse flesh.

  She is like him.

  His moonstone eyes meet hers from the bed where his hands clench and spasm in the iron fetters around his wrists. He wants to taste her and swallow her.

  She sees the feral look in his eye, the hungry look, and smiles knowingly, like an experienced woman about to lead a virgin into a bedroom.

  “I’m going to let you up, Vitus. I’m sorry I have to keep you on the leash, but hopefully that will be temporary until we have you trained.”

  The Dead Man watches her small, fine-boned fingers work a metal strap over his neck. A hard, steel edge rubs against the deteriorating flesh of his throat as he spasms against it.

  A sensation erupts from within the Dead Man as though two people looking out from behind his eyes and reflected inside one another into infinity but then it’s lost in the yammering background of his thoughts. Mirrors propped against one another.

  Trigger word, Vitus. You got the word?

  The Dead Man flinches but the Dead Man is me and I am him, and abruptly the conscious thought bursts like a bubble on the wind and whatever understanding he almost reached is gone.

  He is only a Dead Man watching a Dead Woman unlock his wrists from their iron prisons.

  He makes a grab for her and then hesitates with his head tilted in uncertainty. Her flesh is spongy as old cheese underneath the meringue swirl of her dress, and he retracts his hand as he realizes she is no longer a viable food source. Her rot is hidden beneath the clever application of spices and incense, and up close with his monster senses he recognizes her for the dead corpse she is.

  He frowns as he sits up, clenching and spasming fingers at his side, waiting for her next command.

  A long link chain leads from the collar around his neck to her small fist, where she clutches it as though he might fight against her at any moment. He cannot remember if he ever has.

  DADDY.

  The word written in black across the edge of his hand fills him with a torrent of trace memories and sent his thoughts cascading back with images and scents and trace impressions of a flimsy past that will not hold still; a man in a ski mask, blond hair, candid brown eyes. A father and a son.

  Me?

  The concept of me fractures and fragments and the Dead Man cannot seem to connect them.

  Vitus! You’re the father! You are me! Do you have the word?

  He does not have the word.

  The nattering voice clamoring at the edge of his thoughts makes his teeth clench until metal clicks inside his jaw. The sound echoes nostalgia and a woman’s black h
air with a burst of exuberance and then, the Dead Woman tugs him along. Across the room he shambles with broken and uncoordinated movements. He moves like a marionette with only half the strings cut.

  Out into a hallway. Little boys are stationed outside their rooms in flowing red capes like soldiers or superheroes. The Dead Man smells the scent of their blood, and recent wounds upon their bodies still weep blood beneath their bandages. White blood cells on top of the red like cream on milk. He makes a sound deep in his throat like a German Shepherd. Low, snarling growl.

  She tugs at the chain with force. The collar chokes off his windpipe, but he resists and tests his raw power, little more than sheer will behind collapsed and decayed muscle. Closer, closer, close enough to bite into the beckoning flesh and feed with abandon, without reservation.

  “Now, now,” she cautions and leads him down the hall.

  Boys watch him with wide eyes and try not to stare but snatch glances at him as he follows the Dead Woman at her heels. He snaps at one young boy who shrieks, and she sends the Dead Man reeling backward with a yank so hard he gulps at the damp air like a fish. He does not need to breathe, but the discomfort addles him as he struggles upright against the leash.

  “See, dears? He’s harmless, I’d never let him hurt you. We just have to get him fed, don’t we, Vitus? And I’ve got a special meal for you.”

  The boys rush past, wild snatches of crimson fabric down the hall. Their feet tap out eerie, discordant time against the concrete.

  Pied Piper. The Pied Piper of Hamlin, he thinks, but the thought disconnects into a free floating balloon above his head until it bursts and evaporates. He remembers a blond-headed boy that a man named Vitus used to read fairytales to. One of them was the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

  I used to read the Pied Piper to Clay.

  The moment of clarity is brief and the Dead Man looks down to stare at the DADDY word written in the skin of his hand again.

  “Wwh. Wh.”