Mateo, in form-fitting blue armor, sea whip hair undulating hypnotically as it glowed white, appeared behind the couch-audience I'd been addressing, two swords crossed on his back. After the shock of seeing him alive, I was forced to admit that he, similar to a cobra or a Lockheed F-117, looked dangerous. Turning from the fright of a real-life fighting game character, Fran, Joel, Candice, and Ruth pleaded with me. Their eyelids mimicked stretched-open mouths, and their eyeballs were desperate screams. Please protect us from him.
"How did they resurrect you? Is that suit keeping you alive?"
"I'm not--I look like Mateo, obviously. He was my brother. I'm Cory."
"Did a spell locate me?"
"No, Jeremy has--"
"Had."
"Jeremy had Caller I.D., he gave me your name a while ago. I found your address then found you then followed you here."
"For what? Oh, revenge, probably."
"Probably."
"How long have you been here?"
"I heard every song, every story. Saw you kill that guy earlier."
"Why did you--"
"I hate fighting. So, I waited."
An unseen, unheard timer began. When it reached zero, I chambered a punch for Joel's head. Before I could release the attack and feel his cranium crack on my knuckles, feel his brain collect in proximal crevices, a bomb of white light exploded in the room, forcing my plans to vacate as blinding brightness supplanted reality for a full second. As the light faded, I willed my eyes to work again. On the couch was a snapdragon shambles of limbs and vertebrae and skulls. Cory had--I refused to believe it, stepped closer to inspect. Cory had vaporized my enemies' flesh. Vaporized my chance for vengeance.
"They died wearing those shirts, so that's funny, but...you knew, Cory. What you were taking from me. You stole my perfect moment! They. Were going. To beg."
Cory walked around the couch to join me in front of it.
"I didn't execute a diabolical plan to steal your chance for revenge. That disintegration was meant for you, too. You just...are you crying?"
I didn't answer. I thought about emerald green animus. A spiral-cut sunset. The cool detachment of a list-maker who, as an unclaimed favorite hobby, enumerates flaws in a postmortem. But I shouldn't have let him kill you.
"Mateo. Slain by you, right? According to Jeremy, you smashed his head apart."
"He. Tried. To kill--"
"Hey. If I were at all concerned about the worthiness of justifications, I wouldn't be here."
We had to fight, and my curiosity saw no tonal friction between that certainty and asking more questions.
"The armor. The hair. How did you--"
"The Infinite Shard. So, magic. And before you feel honored, this augmentation was originally for demon hunting. I'm testing it on you."
"Ah, yes. The deadly girl-demons who wear tank tops and--"
"Some of them, a lot of them, use magic to disguise themselves, you're right. I know they're not all, in every waking moment, warlike disseminators of death, but the royalty from that side have sworn to conquer us. Only a select few men are wise enough to accept that danger. Only a select fewer actually fight it."
"Select fewer. How many?"
Cory looked at the floor, hair glowing and waving as though formulating a reply for him.
"Just me."
I laughed. "What happened?"
"At any point, the church was never above thirty members. We had the rival faction. The expected hazard of combat with demons. You. A hooligan dust-up that killed everyone at our sister church in England. And then a botched incantation from yesterday? Yeah, I'm it. The last one."
I moved a few steps to where Abraham had been covered by the blanket, pulled the blanket off. Saw the anatomical ruins generated by Cory's spell.
"You know. Jeremy could make these leftovers disappear."
"And?"
"And I think Jeremy, not you, should've been the final bad guy who trades banter with me ahead of our climactic showdown. I killed him too early."
"It won't be the end for me. Fate will protect my survival."
"Because now you're the only demon expert, and humanity faces doom without you?"
"Yeah."
"Because you wield the Infinite Shard, and conventional weaponry is futile against The Calamitous Horde?"
Cory nodded. "Yeah."
"Maybe a million years ago before the invention of explosive powder and nuclear bombs. Or wait, why haven't I seen any of you guys use a gun?"
"Guns are loud," Cory said, annoyed by my ignorance. "Obviously, they draw attention. They also risk involving outsiders, especially when bullets miss. Keeping everything contained was important, because it was our fight. Our stake in paradise."
"And now," I said, pausing for an effect whose justification fled me, "only yours."
I put him in a bear hug. Tripped him to the floor. Straddled him in a full mount then controlled him by wrenching his tentacle hair (which did not squeal like I thought it would). Each grunt that escaped him during my advancement presented as further resignation, not resistance. He crossed his arms over his face.
"Where's the Infinite Shard?"
I twisted my grip. Strands began to snap, cease their light. I sank the fingertips of my other hand into his breastplate, deforming the metal then tearing it off. The exposure made me pause.
"Is that an athletic polo?"
"It absorbs sweat."
I dismounted, allowing him to stand. A sizeable patch on his head no longer waved in oscilloscope tribute.
He drew both swords. No twirling, no whirling, no fancy display of bladeskill followed. Only a rigid stance opposed me. The blades, one in each of my hands, bent then snapped like taffy. He swung the broken weapons at me anyway, and I let them scrape across my face, my neck. Mateo's brother added kicks and elbows to the onslaught, dropping the swords to grab red plasma nunchucks out of the air. I let those hit me, too.
"Hobble!" he shouted, throwing a handful of polished pebbles at my legs.
"The book, please," I said.
"Poison blood," Cory said. "Cachexia. Putrefaction."
Each word accompanied a different item thrown. A lump of soft wax. A quartz sphere. A dead mouse tied into a ball with string. "Oh, spells," I blurted.
Cory knelt then sat on the floor, panting. I informed him.
"Zain the Nonpareil was a ten year old boy's immodest power fantasy. You'll never--"
"It's in my car. A block away. Green hatchback. Does that buy clemency from Greg the Nonpareil?"
I leaned forward to brace myself on a couch armrest. A straight jacket tightened over my diaphragm and lungs. Pressure filled my neck like so much popcorn bursting out the foil dome. Devin trying to rape Mick was the only other time I'd laughed that hard.
"Did you drive here with your blue anime suit and squiggly fuckin' hair visible to the public?"
"No," Cory said, sounding offended as he continued resting on the carpet, "the transformation--"
My heel slammed the top of his head as I brought down my first-ever axe kick. Cory stayed upright for much longer than I expected, keeping his chin tucked in a prayerful bow even as he slumped over to lie on his side. His remaining hair had a seizure, discordantly flopping as it blinked like an underfed filament, and a punch to his temple shut off that vestiges-of-life poppycock.
"She died," I told him. "Centrifugal force--and the skull of her dead son--caved in her head. But nothing will surpass the satisfaction I felt from tricking your stupid brother into believing I could do magic. Although splattering his brain on the wall came close."
A few hours past nightfall, I loaded remains of various integrity into Joel's car, drove a hundred miles to bury said car. I did the same with Cory's green hatchback.
The Infinite Shard was bound in black leather and kettle-stitched, and I couldn't read its language. I set fire to it with a magnifying glass. Inside a popcorn tin on my balcony, a sun-laser conflagration reduced the history and magic of mankind's secret guardians to ash.
#
Sandpaper lined my mucus membranes, and my heart pumped soggy bread through my temples. I felt the breeze of a ceiling fan on my cock before noticing a single breaded shrimp on my thigh."Fuck--"
A panic-flash poured numbness through me. I checked the room, left then right, over and over again until confirming my aloneness. The shrimp was still a mystery, though. Flicking the seafood from leg to floor, I sat up in a bed that wasn't mine.
Hotel, I assessed.
I showered, failing to re-assemble the previous night in my thoughts. Tracking the memory mimicked looking at a star--the focus dimmed the subject.
After putting on the only clothes I had brought, I walked to the grocery store to buy toothpaste and a toothbrush. The cashier laughed when she saw me.
"Back already?"
"What?"
"Couldn't wait to see me?"
Her pose--hand on her hip, slight smile, head cocked in a way that she probably thought was quirky and playful--meant our past encounter had gone well. Her name tag read "Zoe." Zoe's rounded cheeks were completely without blemish, and pressing one of them against one of mine would have been my goal during a hug. Her long brown hair took the form of a ponytail, and her brown eyes, I suspected (or fantasized), filtered out condemnation, projecting only support from their jejune glossiness. Her uniform was a white button-up shirt and black pants.
"Did I buy shrimp last night?"
She laughed again. "Yes. One bag. You talked about your plan to eat forty separate bodies, and how a bag of shrimp is a 'more respectful pile of death' than dinosaur nuggets or ground beef."
"I made sense. What else did I say?"
"You invited me to join you for hotel breakfast."
I stared at her. A fragment gleamed through the fog. "And don't think of it as free, I had to pay for the room to earn it. The food might actually be quite expensive, therefore."
Because I had paid for a hotel room. Because I had tried to kill myself in it.
I wasn't strong enough to rip out my own throat, and my neck was too strong for hanging or breaking. Suicide by drowning failed when my body instinctively thrashed then flew to escape the ocean. Asphyxiation beyond the sky similarly failed; the moment I couldn’t breathe, my Nonpareil reflexes lowered me back to safety on Earth. At the apex of my death-flight, I didn’t think about family or legacy or the uncounted years fading with the oxygen. I thought about my corpse landing on someone who didn’t deserve it. Landing on someone who might deserve it. I saw birds on the way down...
Cross-legged on the hotel comforter, I looked over the trinkets left by Cory. My theory, that a multi-modal bombardment from inside could destroy me, was about to be tested. I chomped the pebbles and quartz. I chewed the wax. Orange soda forced down the dead mouse and string.
Excellent, I thought, finishing the soda. Plans to see Ruth.
"I’m waiting to die," I narrated. But wasn’t I always? Wasn’t everyone, from birth? This version just happened to be more streamlined, excised from all the fake plans and hopeless promises that fill a mind and keep empty a life day after day. It’s not even darkness at the end. Darkness can be perceived...
Apparently, eating the talismans had caused me to blackout in lieu of destroying me.
"Hey. I have twenty minutes left. I'll meet you outside. Go, go, go," she said, waving her hand to dispel my presence.
Leaving the store, I saw white parking lot gulls pecking a pizza slice on the sidewalk then ran at them for no good reason, startling them away and therefore electing myself the arbiter of which bellies deserve pizza. Tyranny for a second because I was bored. Boredom, I think, had motivated me to keep the breakfast invitation with Zoe. When I inevitably would refuse to call her, to see her again, would she understand her role in the universe? A girl who appears at the right moment to validate the worth of a lonely person? Yep, that was it. Though she would never have a lasting connection with anyone, the brief bonds she did form were the orchestration of fate, vital points on the lattice of other people's destinies. She was evanescent. A momentary muse. Her purpose got instilled during childhood, as Zoe would befriend those classmates who were subject to ridicule and schoolyard psychological torture. She sat with them at lunch and played with them at recess. She invited them over after school. She always ignored their lack of social aptitude, her enthusiasm for their company never seeming a veneer. After healing their self-esteems by showing them that they were capable of--deserving of--friendship, they would cease contact with her--the previously rejected souls now having enough confidence to make new friends, friends of their choosing.
That made-up story justifies anything that happens, I thought. My behavior would support a theme, which was good. Who endeavors to fight the status quo on some random day?
Zoe sped along, unencumbered by the minor heft that lined beneath her skin. She walked with a cheerful tempo, a softened snap arcing through all her movement.
"Joking aside, you really don't remember seeing me last night?"
"Well, there's a corny thing I could say about meeting you twice, but, yeah, I don't remember."
The hotel had an open kitchen. On the counter, sausage gravy and scrambled eggs were looking like five-inch-deep glory in their respective church potluck pans. I immediately tore down a pyramid of cold biscuits then arranged six halves on a plate. Yellow globs rested on a sea of gray.
We sat down in the dining area. The meal was not everything it could be.
"If they had cheddar cheese, I could have made little pizzas," I explained.
"Or a big one that takes up your whole plate?" Zoe asked, eyeing my food as she bit a piece of melon off her fork.
"You know what? I'm still going to be polite and use more than six bites to eat all this. Even though you're poking fun."
She ignored the comment, kept her eyes from rolling. "So...what do you do for a living?"
I nearly choked with laughter. "Living" was not an apt word for the office.
"Put paper inside of other paper."
"That's it?"
"Pretty much. Unless you count dodging all the pendulum blades of shit-talking."
She chewed, gave a genuine effort to understand. "What do you mean?"
"It's fucked up. That place, that job, is all those people have. And not like orphans finding refuge in a tree house and the tree house and each other is all they have. It's way more pathetic. They start rumors and do this whole 'department warfare' thing because their lives are meaningless without that crap."
"Warfare, huh. What kind of--"
"Then this guy, Shawn, I fuckin' hate him. He always brags about his life from ten million years ago. He lived in Germany. He got into fights. He'll stare me in the face, like he's going to reveal something important--the secret location of a self-replenishing mound of gold coins, right?--then say, 'I could've had any woman in the world.' He has a wife, so I'm not really sure what he means. And I never respond to that, either, which probably makes him think his words enraptured me. Oh, and if he were my age, he'd be in the Philippines, sticking his...penis...in something."
Shawn's ignorant, police-sketch face briefly haunted, souring that moment's drink of orange juice.
"Do you enjoy anything at your job?"
"Hm. It’s quite mindless. I can daydream without killing a patient on the table or crashing the boat."
Silence, then the wet incisor-sound of Zoe biting an apple wedge.
"Nothing else?"
"Not really."
Lower lip pushed out, she made her frank, truth-telling face. "That's sad."
I never would have mentioned the mail room without prompting, and now judgment sat across from me at breakfast. Zoe was supposed to nurture but chose to critique, thus crashing through the guardrails I had envisioned for that morning.
"Why? Do you like everything about your life? The very moment things are less than optimal, you strive to change them? I fucking doubt it."
Zoe stopped eating, blinked a few times. Her expression was a buzz saw.
"Wow. Hostile guy. You're the one who couldn't resist complaining."
"Well, not everyone has your willpower. You resisted waffles and bacon, which fuckin' amazes me. I know your plate wouldn't be all fruit if you were alone at home. Potatoes get deep-fried more than once a week at your house, admit it. You eat them when you cry. When you cry, when you cry, when you cry. Because loneliness and bad memories fill your fuckin’ head, and you can’t shake them out. If only someone, just one person, could see the real you, then all the pain would be worthwhile and something something something...blah blah blah fuck you."
Years of coddling and evasive language, the pillowy support beams of her self-esteem, had been clawed to bits. I didn't have a truth-telling face.
"Something," Zoe said, getting up to leave, "is wrong with you."
Food competed with venom for mouth-room. "There will be less wrong after you leave. Now go eat margarine with...I don't know...doughnuts."
In the rush to be rid of me, she banged her pelvis then her hip on two different table corners, stretching my mouth into a grin.
Another plate of biscuits and gravy pushed my battered constitution to full recovery. So, for the next time I overdosed on thaumaturgical knick-knacks, I knew the cure.
Back in my room, I sat on the bed, flipped the hourglass on my final days. I needed only the willpower to dehydrate myself to death. Would it be like touching Byron? Superlative, self-inflicted agony? Or could Zain the Nonpareil die without suffering?
A door knock interrupted my thought. Zoe filled the peephole.
"Talk through the door," I said.
"Let me in," she said. So we can talk about what you did. Don’t be a coward."
"You ran away."
"And I came back. For an apology. If you can’t apologize, you’re a genuine scumbag."
"Whatever you think of me is fine, I promise. Although you do flatter me by saying I’m genuine."
"Talking in the hallway like this is rude. Everyone can hear me."
"I stand in my own private quarters. I contribute nothing to your rudeness."
"Greg--"
I opened the door. Tears had wet her cheeks.
Blue light, brighter than the orange of Byron's death, snatched her, snatched everything, from view.
