"Family meeting. TV off."
I visited every light switch, flipped them all on. Living room, kitchen, hallway, balcony--it was a magnificent tour of lights and light malice.
Four sets of eyes pictured my death. Four brains lowered my name into a bog of liquid shit. Zero hands reached for a remote control. It was the Both Couches Gang, the Roommate Gang, the Two Bitches Who Stayed at the Apartment More Than I Did but Paid No Rent Gang.
"Is everyone sure? Gawking only? Alright, count down from three, two, one. Off!"
Pressing my hand flat against the side of the wide screen television, I shoved it off the wooden stand. Without a single degree of downward arc, it blunt-missile rammed through--stuck into--the wall. The combination boom/crash jolted a flinch out of supercilious butts. The image on the screen sputtered beneath cracks and gypsum dust; as death began to claim it, the TV’s soul flickered...
Devin stood up to be in charge, to represent the group. "You’re paying for that, and the wall. And you’re moving out."
"TV was half mine. The other half comes out of three grand you leeches owe me."
Everyone laughed. Like they hadn’t seen me stab the apartment with a television set. Devin stepped closer to me.
"Leave. We don’t want you here."
"Then pay me. I’m on the goddamn lease, you simpleton."
Mick involved himself, joining abreast his idol. "You’re gonna pay. And you’re gonna leave."
"No one here can compel me," I said. "My volition, not yours, will be the only one I follow, from now until--"
Devin had stepped in even closer, semi-crouching to whirl an overhand right. I brought my arm up to block the punch, aligning precisely the point of my elbow with his fist.
That contact vitrified the bones in his hand. Everything shattered. Devin dropped to the floor, groaning in pain, clutching to his chest the limp bag of pebbles I’d just made.
Mick ran to his room. He called out for Heidi in one of those pretend whispers that is actually just a raspy loudvoice. She followed him.
Devin shouted fuck, stretching the expletive a good four seconds. He sat up. He studied his broken hand. He looked at the TV stuck in the wall. Then he looked at me.
"Three thousand? How do you figure?"
"The two girls live here more than I do. That’s their part of rent and utilities for eight months. And a thousand more for stolen food."
"If we pay that, plus cover your last four months of rent, will you move out? Today?"
"Yes. Money in hand, I pack immediately."
"Maria, can you? The phone? I’ll talk to my dad."
Maria stared, pinning a bloodline curse on my descendants while retrieving the cordless phone off the end table.
"He hit me," I reminded her.
Mick and Heidi re-entered the living room. Mick held his arms out, hands together, an embryonic grin twitching inside his lips. I noticed Heidi’s eager look before I noticed the AMT Backup in Mick’s possession. He aimed a gun at me.
That weird-head constellation of moles aimed a gun at me.
"We hate him, remember? Well, he attacked us by throwing the TV! We can get rid of him."
Even before the Byron Boost, I’m not sure how a threat from Mick would have been regarded. It was like when a toddler appears with a pill bottle or a snow globe, and a grownup says "no, no, no" before taking away the item. Plus, if he fired a gun, the recoil would rip off his arms, I joked to myself.
"Let’s vote," Maria said. She wasn’t dialing the phone.
"Yes," Mick said.
"Yes to a vote or--"
"Yes to ending him. We hate him."
"So that’s two."
The needle-thin fingers of realization slid under my face from jawline to tear duct, stinging the whole way up. The conversation about murdering me had tumbled into a serious pit. It all seemed less believable than faeries and demons and Calamitous Hordes.
Heidi raised her hand, waving as though trying to get the attention of a school days friend she randomly saw at the airport.
"Ooh. Three. But I think it should be unanimous."
"Four."
I protested.
"You just agreed to pay me."
"To get you out of my life," Devin explained, "but Mick’s plan does it cheaper."
"It’s not self-defense if I’m currently docile."
Heidi and Maria looked at AMT Mick for confirmation. Mick had an answer. "Wacky wowzers, Greg. If only I had a strategy to overcome that problem."
"Strategy, yeah. I bet it’s lying."
"Correct."
"That’s a good one," I said, fully earnest.
Everyone who wasn’t me congregated several feet away. I always knew that they valued me as unworthy to live, but the vindication felt less good than predicted. Mick was stalling, losing the momentum generated by their vote, had perhaps become less sure about puncturing me to death. I could run, I thought. Run then call the police. But then I’d be running from Mick and, whether or not he was ballistically--or I was magically--augmented, that violated a principle infused with my quiddity itself. Which left one acceptable action. Provoke him into shooting me. Provoke him into shooting me then rip out his lights for good.
"Do it, now. What is that? Nine-millimeter? Put ‘em in. Put my brain on the wall. Put my blood on the floor. Put a knife in my hand when it’s done. Fucking do it. Bounce bullet fragments all around inside me, rip through my bones and organs. Exclude me from life. You exclude me from everything else already. Come on. Be brave enough to prove me wrong. You can’t exert the required force to make it go bang, because you’re a physical and psychological bitch."
Mick swung his view from side to side, wiped his forehead with his non-gun hand.
"Right? No? Okay. You introduced the variable of a gun. To what? Scare me. Control me. Make me beg. Or am I not the joke you thought I was? You fuckin’ coward. You piece of shit. I will never respect you after this. And neither will they. You pulled a gun and you lost to me. Bend your finger, bitch. You frail, Devin-worshipping pile of whatever your siblings are not."
His breathing had conscripted everything, everything moved--his knees bent when he exhaled. He lowered his gun arm. Put it back up.
Devin recanted. "Goddamn it. Mick. We can’t do this. We’ll pay him off."
Maria blew air. "But we voted."
Devin continued. "I’ll bring him to my dad’s, get the money, and then he’ll move out. But we’re going to the hospital first."
"I can drive us," Mick said, scratching the back of his head with the gun, seemingly assailed by troubles far beyond the current circumstance.
The emergency department waiting room felt like breathing in the flu, just everyone emanating flu all around me. It didn’t matter, but I felt it anyway, so I kept my breaths to "well below enthusiastic."
An hour passed. Heidi and Maria gazed off at the floor. Mick stared at me.
Devin returned with a cast on his hand. When he said he couldn’t drive due to oxycodone, Mick volunteered.
"I’ll drive again. You enjoy a nice drug nap."
Mick planned to shoot me. He thought I was fooled. His earlier temperance came not from unwillingness to kill me, but from the logistics of killing someone in the apartment. Shared walls, people proximity, talking to the police--but he had finagled a fix for that.
I sat in the front passenger seat. We’d been out of town for several minutes, and nighttime stretched its increasingly opaque veils over the sky. Beyond the beam of headlights a formless doom, engulfment by the abyss, lurked in all directions. Man-eating, onyx-armored grasshoppers and limb-sundering lamb’s quarters--
"That’s the turn," Maria said.
A country road led to a long, nightmare-in-winter driveway. Mick drove up to a house, parked the car.
"Hey, Dev. We’re at your dad’s."
"I know. I’m awake," Devin said.
Big house, big property. Two metal equipment sheds. A tree line with tangible dark seeping through the gaps. Floodlights on wooden poles.
We got out. The open sky, the cool air, allowed my eyes and neck to move more freely--the confines of a car stuffed with four votes to kill me had tensed a few muscles. Mick jammed the Backup between my shoulder blades.
"Into the trees."
I walked ahead. Leaves and twigs and, presumably, one or two unlucky forest bugs crunched underfoot. In the dark, I pondered my situation and the situation around it. The blackness above me, the untouchable expanse bursting the bounds of my comprehension (and inflating my insecurity) with sheer vastness. Celestial light racing trillions of miles through dead, unappreciative space to reach my retinas on Earth. Nighttime turning its back on the Sun, snubbing the Supreme Lifegiver as a matter of routine. Birds, rodents, beetles, ants, trees, centipedes, the unprompted green sprouting and thriving and knowing it should come back year after year--all of it in harmony or the sometimes-discord that’s a part of harmony--was micrified to a speck, a mote beneath my solipsistic heel. I was the biggest thing. And equally so was anything I felt.
After a minute, we found a small clearing.
"This was a lot smarter," Maria declared. "No one comes out here."
"If I run, do you think you could hit me in the dark?" I asked Mick.
"Stop. Turn around. To face me."
"It’s not unanimous anymore. Devin voted ‘no,’ remember?"
"It’s back to ‘yes.’ I’ve been fantasizing about killing you since a week after we met."
I looked at everyone. The moon or floodlights or my hatred allowed me to see them.
"Don’t I get a vote?"
"Sure, Greg," Mick said. "And then we’ll tabulate the results. And maybe talk about volition."
"I vote...that I live and go home."
They laughed. Just like in the apartment. Laughed at the outnumbered object in front of their gun. Laughed at the idea that a universe might deign to heed my druthers. Devin wiped his eyes. Heidi bent at the waist, reporting that she couldn’t breathe.
My hand sank into her hair, formed a fist near the scalp, locking a tassel, a handlebar, in its grip.
You’re about to be right.
I jumped, pulling her into the air with me. Approaching the peak of my arc, I tossed her--yes, by the hair--above. Then, with my arms at full extension overhead, I snatched her by the ankles to complete the maneuver.
No goodbyes. No reflection. No regrets about unfulfilled dreams, unremedied wrongs. No tearful bedside hug with forgiveness and I love you and I’m so tired, momma, I need to sleep. And no final tour through nice memories. Just confusion and terror and pain.
And Greg.
Right as I landed, I slammed her against the world. Her pale body went limp. Her head, severed by the angle of impact, bounced up, spun, spun, spun in the air, flinging neck blood on those of us nearby before landing in the grass, face up. So that’s where everything was contained. I let go of her ankles. In the moonlight, Heidi’s half sleeve and quarter sleeve, her meaningful tattoos, were meaningful tattoos on a corpse.
Devin and Maria stood motionless, looking like they needed instructions to ever move again. Mick blinked, trying to behead the tears as they came out. He had the gun still raised at me.
So I snatched it from him. Stuck the barrel in my mouth. Pulled the trigger until the explosions propelling brass jacketed hollow points into my soft palate ceased. I spat smoke and copper. I wadded the gun into a ball then spiked it several feet into the ground. Dirt sprayed onto my face, joining Heidi’s blood.
"Let’s vote. Who loses everything next?"
"Mick," Maria said, nearly tackling Devin to hold onto him, hanging with her arms around his neck to keep her balance.
"Yeah," Devin said. "Mick."
Their choice ran.
I leaped--maybe flew--at Maria, hammerfisting the top of her head. I dented the calvaria, felt her atlas and axis crumble. She fell to her knees then folded backward, convulsing, mouth spewing foam like a baking soda lemon juice volcano from science class. From there, I leaped--maybe flew--again to collect Mick. I went over him, landed in front of him, then turned around.
"Go stand together," I commanded, shoving him back toward Devin.
"Don’t be dead...wake up...please..." Devin cried, shaking Maria by the shoulders as he knelt by her. He had straightened out her legs. He was pretending to have real feelings.
"You think that’ll work?" I asked him. "Should someone try it with Heidi?"
Both roommates glared at me. Devin rose up. I explained the situation to him.
"You know. You don’t believe, but you know. What I will do. So, you have to listen."
I thought back to the church basement, and how I should have handled Pastor and Jeremy. How I should have handled a million different things. "Okay. Whichever one of you can rape the other, lives."
Devin, as quickly as he’d voted for him, wrapped Mick in a body lock then tripped him to the ground as Mick seemingly offered no resistance. Devin straddled him, socking his face without deference to fatigue, to preserving the one good hand. When Mick, flailing and bucking, rolled to his belly to avoid the blows, Devin stayed on top of him, put him in a sleeper hold, damming the blood flow to his brain. Mick slept. Or at least I assumed it when he didn’t react to having his shorts and underwear pulled down to his knees. Devin disengaged, laid on his back in the grass, furiously tugging his own cock. He was trying to make himself hard. To rape his unconscious best friend in a second attempt at sacrificing him.
Laughter squeezed my lungs and abdomen. Squeezed my windpipe. Squeezed water from my eyes.
"Devin, Devin," I struggled to say, "you don’t have to. I was kidding. You really. You really. Wow."
Wakefulness returned to Mick; he pushed himself to all fours. Still laughing, I walked over to him, pulled him up by his arm.
"He tried. Full effort," I said, my hands on his shoulders, "but he couldn’t get hard for that ass. And you already know about how he voted for you to die. Hey. Me too."
Before bothering to ascertain if strangulation had affected his ability to feel betrayed, I turned Mick’s head one hundred eighty degrees then watched him fall--face down, chest up.
"Which leaves you," I said to Devin, who had left the clearing.
I hovered, rotating my view until I saw the driveway and the car. And Devin running for the car.
"Got ‘em," I said, floating at such a speed that I intercepted the Flat Top, the Final Vote, just as he reached for the driver’s side door handle.
"How can you fly?" he shrieked.
"I saved Byron. But then someone ate him," I said.
Before he could respond, I slapped Devin across the jaw then mid-fall grabbed his unconscious body with a bear hug. I laid him in the backseat. An empty bladder, an empty colon, spared his mouth and nostrils.
I crawled under the car then rose off the driveway, supporting the vehicle on my back by miming a wagon wheel or a splat. I flew over the trees, back to the clearing, easing my cargo to the ground as I landed on my belly. Back to standing, I gathered up the dead. Headless Heidi. Heidi’s head. Maria the Dumb Bitch Who Said "Let’s Vote." And Mick. I shoved the bodies into the car, into the backseat with Devin, snapping and deforming needlessly. Devin woke up buried in the mound of death. He addressed me through an open window.
"Greg. Greg. Please. Don’t kill me."
"I was about to ask you why. Why did you treat me like I was nothing? But listening to your answer and the inevitable lies about how I misunderstood your behavior seemed...wasteful."
He struggled to move against the tangle of dead weight. When he managed to open one of the rear doors, I slammed it shut, crushing his in-the-way wrist. He screamed. I opened the door then slammed it again. It closed without interference.
"I’m waiting. For a sliver of sunrise."
Heidi, Mick, and Maria were propped up in the back. Devin occupied the passenger seat, my grip on his forearm preventing his exit.
"I was going to drill the car into the ground by spinning it like a corkscrew then fill the bored-out hole with dirt and a transplanted shrub."
We reached 80 miles per hour on the empty road.
"But that seemed overly complicated. This will be better."
Spotting an elder oak that provided shelter and shade and allegorical visual strength to all in its dignified presence, I slowed, stopped the car. Reversed.
Angled the car at the tree before selecting “Neutral.”
Smashed my fingers into the side of Devin's head. Made a fist, pulled away my prize (akin to a toddler snatching an unsupervised handful of jelly roll).
“Look what happened, a fuckin' recount,” I said, positive that only his soul could have heard me at that point. I dropped the chunk of head onto his lap, wiped the pate and compote onto his shirt.
Devin had expired without a ruckus. No screaming. No sputtering. No seizing. It really resembled yanking the AAs out of a battery-operated toy. Vitality's wonder and the memory of having been alive at all, deleted from the front seat.
I stood behind the car. I set my shoe bottom on the bumper, leg cocked for a push-kick. When my leg extended, the sedan flew over the roadside ditch, colliding with the oak-bodied patriarch before it.
As a fire summoned itself from the ragged folds of metal, I stared. Nobody wore a seatbelt.
Chapter Thirteen