Authors: Andersen Prunty
The man, the conductor, turned to look at him again. He couldn’t help but think of how creepy the man looked. Painted all white like that and those eyes...
The conductor removed his left hand from a lever and held it out to Jack. Jack didn’t know what he wanted.
He had three keys left.
He gave one of them to the conductor.
The conductor turned and tried to stick the key into a small hole in front of him. The key didn’t fit. He handed the key back to Jack and Jack gave him another key. The conductor fit this key into the hole and turned...
Screeching deafened Jack.
He felt the collision, like something immense, engulf his body.
Pain scoured him.
Everything went black.
He screamed himself out and thought about the two keys he now had left.
When he came to he was aware of other screams, not his own and, horrified, realized he had found Gina.
Thirty
He was in a hotel room. Not surprisingly, it looked a lot like the one he had envisioned. A lot like the one he had seen earlier. Only a lot messier.
He saw Mr. Grin, standing there, grinning.
The next thing he noticed was the smell. It reminded him of a butcher’s shop or a hospital. Blood, come, shit and sex— all the smells crashed into him. Frantically, he scanned the room, knowing he wasn’t going to like what he found.
Jack stood on one side of the bed, still reeling from the train ride. Mr. Grin stood on the other. He was covered in blood. Otherwise, he looked the way Jack felt. Somehow different. Like a shiny, newer version of the John Briggs he knew from work. It made him think of a puffy balloon.
“Where is she?” Jack asked.
“She put up a good fight, shitcrawler,” Mr. Grin said.
“Where is she?”
Mr. Grin reached down to the bed and threw back the covers. Finally, after all the searching, Jack saw Gina.
She was splayed supine on the bed, naked. It looked like she was still breathing but her eyes were closed. She too was covered in blood. Numerous abrasions and bruises were painted across her flesh. Her sex, which she normally kept shaved, looked mutilated. A pool of blood spread around her on the white sheets of the bed.
There were so many questions Jack wanted to ask. So many questions shooting through his mind. But now was not the time. The questions were all secondary. What he really wanted to do was destroy Mr. Grin.
He came around the bed.
Mr. Grin waited, perhaps eagerly, for him.
Mr. Grin was roughly twice the size of Jack but that didn’t stop him. It couldn’t stop him. The man had told him on the phone that one of them would have to die. This was the end. One way or the other, this had to be the end. Jack wasn’t going to die and he wasn’t leaving here without Gina. He wasn’t going to let Sam’s death be for nothing. He wasn’t going to lose everything close to him in one day.
He slid the gun from the waistband of his pants, thankful for this leverage. It didn’t look like Mr. Grin had any weapons whatsoever.
Two keys left. A gun in my hand.
When he thought that, it all felt so close.
Then he had another thought.
This will make you a murderer.
And he thought that maybe he could have meditated on that. Like maybe he could have found a philosophic way around it. Which Briggs would he be murdering? Which man was the real man? For that matter, which Jack was the real Jack? Was it murder if the other Jack, this Jack, killed someone? He didn’t know. Didn’t really have any time to think about it. Didn’t even know if he really
wanted
to think about it.
“You know you’re gonna die, right?” Mr. Grin said.
Jack aimed at Mr. Grin’s head, trying to remember how many shells were in the gun. Three, he thought. Three shells and two keys.
The first bullet tore Mr. Grin’s left ear off.
Jack wanted to immediately fire the other two bullets at him but then, he thought, that would be it. He might never know the answer to anything. What if Gina died? What if she died before she could tell him anything? What if she didn’t
know
anything?
“I know you,” Jack said. “Why would you do this?”
Mr. Grin backed up from Jack, held his hand up to his ear and looked down at his bloody palm.
“You’d love to know, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I really would like to know why you decided to single-handedly destroy my life.”
“Put the gun down.”
“What?”
“You heard me, shitcrawler. Put the gun down and I’ll tell you. We’ll have us a little pow-wow.”
“How ‘bout you tell me and I won’t shoot you right away.”
“This was supposed to be about two men going at each other hand to hand. Fightin over a lady. Just like men have did for years.”
“I’ve never fancied myself much of a traditional man.”
“Put the fucking gun down or I’ll jump on this bed and snap her fucking neck!”
Could Jack live with not knowing any of the answers to this mystery? Would he live at all if he put the gun down?
He didn’t know if he would. There was no way he could go hand-to-hand with Briggs. He didn’t even really know if Briggs was just a man or if he was something more, something supernatural, capable of inflicting people with brands and forcing them to do his bidding.
Jack faked tossing the gun on the bed and watched Mr. Grin feint toward it. In that split-second he realized the giant man had no intention of telling him anything anyway.
He aimed and fired.
A hole blossomed in the middle of Mr. Grin’s forehead.
He took a step back, shook his head, blood flowing freely out of the hole until it collected on the tip of his nose and dripped off.
Jack wished he could quit smiling. This didn’t feel like a smiling activity.
“Fucker!” Mr. Grin shouted, now shambling toward him.
The hotel room was small. Jack didn’t have anywhere to run or to retreat to. Nervous, he fired off the final shot.
This one caught Mr. Grin in the left eye. It turned to black pulp. Jack kept waiting for him to stop and just drop dead onto the floor because that was what people who had been shot twice in the head were supposed to do, wasn’t it? They weren’t supposed to just keep coming like there wasn’t anything wrong with them at all.
Before he could even think of what to do next, Mr. Grin had him in his grip, stripping the gun from his hand and throwing it onto the carpet.
Mr. Grin threw him easily into the end table. While Jack’s previous pains had all been healed, this reassured him he was not immune.
Mr. Grin grabbed a large butcher knife from the bed. The knife’s blade and handle were already sticky with blood. Jack hadn’t seen the knife until now. If he had seen that before, he would have grabbed it while he still had the gun. Then he would have had
all
the weapons.
Mr. Grin approached him. Bent down over him. Jack smelled the stench like sweaty rotting meat.
He tried to kick him away, feeling helpless, but it was like kicking a stone.
Mr. Grin grabbed the back of Jack’s head with his left hand, holding it steady.
“How bout we make that grin permanent, shitcrawler.”
“No,” Jack said, trying to force him off.
“I call the shots here,” Mr. Grin said.
And he sliced at the left side of Jack’s face, opening up his cheek from the corner of his mouth to his ear.
Jack screamed. He didn’t want to. Couldn’t believe this man had brought him to a scream. He tried to bat the knife out of Mr. Grin’s hand but Mr. Grin only brought the haft of it down on his forehead. He felt the crack echo through his body.
Then Mr. Grin opened up the right side of his face.
This was it, Jack thought. He was losing. The pain was already making him waver in and out. He reached around, trying to grab onto something. Trying to grab anything.
Mr. Grin chuckled. “You liked that, didn’t ya? Wish the old come farm could see you now but she went out some time ago. Guess the body don’t like it when you shove one of these up its ass.”
He held the bloody knife up in front of him and Jack didn’t have to imagine too hard where all the blood on the bed had come from.
Jack tried to talk but it was very difficult.
“You said you wouldn’t hurt her until I got here.”
“I don’t hear you so well,” Mr. Grin chuckled. “Your mouth’s all fucked up. Anyways, I guess I got kind of bored.”
Mr. Grin stood up and Jack lunged at his knees with everything he had. He felt the man buckle and come down on top of him like a slab of concrete.
The knife entered his back. He heard it punch through the skin, maybe a rib or two, and felt the air whoosh out of him.
Shit, he thought.
A lung. The fucker got a lung.
He felt the knife punch down again and again.
He reached back, trying to grab Mr. Grin’s head. And Grin started biting his arms.
Jack’s body feeling like so much meat, he slid out from under him.
He stood up, coughing up a gout of blood.
“No chance, shitcrawler,” Mr. Grin said.
He, too, was standing. And looked much better than Jack felt.
Jack slid his hand, shaking wildly, into his pocket, palming one of the keys so the point jutted out between his middle and index fingers. It didn’t seem like much compared to Mr. Grin’s girth and his butcher knife but it was all he had. Behind Mr. Grin, he saw Gina on the bed.
He took a quick step toward Mr. Grin and took a swing. The tip of the key punched into his right eye.
“Fucker!” Mr. Grin shouted, clenching the knife in his fist and driving it into Jack’s skull.
He waited for the blackness but it didn’t come. The knife must not have penetrated all the way through his skull. Before Mr. Grin could work it out, Jack took a savage uppercut at his chin, feeling the key jab into the flesh. Then he stepped away, the knife still lodged in his skull.
Mr. Grin squealed.
Then he went for Gina. Defenseless Gina there on the bed. He straddled her, wrapping his giant hands around her delicate throat.
Jack thought about trying to work the knife free but knew he didn’t have time.
He repositioned the key, determined to open Mr. Grin up.
He jumped behind him on the bed, running the key along his fat throat.
Mr. Grin was growling, strangling Gina.
Jack could hardly breathe. He took the key across Mr. Grin’s throat again and again.
He heard something pop and saw Gina covered in a spray of red, smelled the sick copper scent.
With what last bit of energy he had, he yanked Mr. Grin back off the bed. He felt the knife twanging back and forth in his head. Jack pounced on top of Mr. Grin.
On Mr. Grin’s chest, he jabbed his hand in through the open neck wound and squeezed the bundle of veins, artery and cartilage there. He felt the beating of a heart. He squeezed until it grew faint. Until Mr. Grin’s eyes rolled back in his head and the beating stopped altogether. And, unbelievably, once the heartbeat had ceased, he felt something else. He stuck the key into the man’s open throat, poking it around inside until he felt the hole. He inserted the key, twisting it until he felt a barrel turn...
And found himself sitting on a bloody carpeted floor, the sounds of his ragged breaths very loud in his ears.
Standing up, barely, dazed and staggering, he crossed to the bed, to Gina.
He pulled her up. She was still out.
“Gina,” he said. “Gina?”
He could tell she was alive only by the whistling breath between her lips. Was this the real Gina or the Gina-double? And what was the double anyway? Was it the essence of a person? Was it their soul?
If this was Gina’s soul, it wasn’t in very good shape.
“Gina, it’s over...”
“Not,” she breathed. “Not over.”
Thirty-one
He found it hard to breathe and didn’t know how much longer he was going to be able to move. If this was
his
soul, then it was dying.
“No, Gina, it’s over. He’s gone. For good, I think.”
“No. Gotta find my body. My real body. Have to.”
Her eyelids were heavy, shutting completely only to open slightly.
Okay, so they had to find her body. Then it stood to reason that maybe he should be reunited with his body also. He knew exactly where his was, supposing it wouldn’t be too difficult to make it back to the Utility Shed. And, like a faint glimmer in the back of his brain, he thought maybe he knew where to look for Gina’s also but he couldn’t quite wrap himself around the idea just yet. Complete loss of consciousness couldn’t be that far away.
“Come on,” he said, standing up on what felt like a moving floor. “We gotta get up.”
He grabbed her hands, just happy to feel her flesh against his even if it was this weird glossy spirit flesh. It was something. It was more than he had had in twenty-four hours which, when faced with the prospect of never touching her again, seemed like an eternity.