Vision2 (22 page)

Kristi Brooks

“Do you have anything else you want to say, Firturro? Anything that might stall your death, like where that bitch
Del
is hiding?” the President asked from somewhere beyond his line of sight.

Firturro smiled, the tips of his lips pointing into cheeks he could no longer feel as the spit made small rivers across his dirty face before pooling into shallow lakes on his shoulders and neck, turning his body into a living replica of earth.

The President leaned over Firturro, “I hope her pussy was worth your life.” He stood up and walked towards his chair. “Go ahead, Tigaffo,” he said absentmindedly, as if instructing someone to clean out his office.

For a few tense seconds, nothing in the room moved. Not even the air. It clung to them as if it were a thick, warm fog that refused to be stirred. Firturro didn
’
t open his eyes, but in his head he could picture Tigaffo standing over him, looking down on his pitiful, smiling face and not being able to move. He could see everything in the room as if he were looking in from behind a window.

Just then, he heard something move in the back of the room, and he knew it was
Del.
Without even seeing her or hearing her voice, he knew she had entered the equation. And at that moment, Tigaffo swung the sword down as hard as he could.

Firturro could hear its blade singing through the air, could hear it biting into his flesh. But he felt nothing. As the last tendons on his neck finally groaned and gave way, his head fell back, swinging through the air in a giant arc.

In the depths of his mind, he sighed as everything went black and the silence rushed in.

Roger opened his eyes and knew something was wrong. He could feel it in the cool nothingness as it rushed into his pores and swarmed around him, as if he were being sucked into a pit of thick black goo. And that was when it happened, when something in the darkness passed him, reached out with a ghostly voice and whispered directly to his thoughts.
Just say my name when they ask, Roger.

And then it was gone, as if there had never been anything in the void except Roger and the suffocating substance. He began to struggle against the blackness that held him prisoner. With each movement, the confinement, the nothingness, closed its grip. It oozed into his pores and slipped into his mouth, pulling him farther into its grasp. The memory of being pulled through the mirror surged to the front of his thoughts, and he braced himself an impact.

Instead he opened his eyes and saw the world as if it had suddenly become a split screen. On one side there he could only see a black parking lot and here the faint click-click of high-heeled footfalls. On the other side of the screen, he appeared to be looking out at the same vacant parking lot and a lone woman as she walked toward a maroon car. It was the same maroon car that was immediately in front of him on the opposite side of the screen.

What the hell is going on?
Roger thought as he watched both stories unfold. He felt tense and anxious and yet, at the same time, adrenaline surged through his body, fueling him and making him feel alive. He was hungrier than he could ever remember being. In fact, the desire was so great that he wanted to catch something living with his own two hands and rip the flesh off of it with his teeth.

Just then, the screen on the left side began moving. The world bobbed up and down in rapid movements as the person raced across the blacktop, the heavy thud of each footstep echoing into the stillness. On the right side, he could now see a heavyset man running towards him, threatening him with a gun. He tried to jump in the car and get away, but the man pushed his way in, forcing the other person to the side of the car.

That
’
s what Firturro meant: one story, different perspectives.

He saw the woman
’
s scared face and the man
’
s bold sweaty face. They both loomed over him like gods. Roger could feel the thundering adrenaline of the man threatening to take over his entire body, but he was also filled with a fear so immediate and pressing he could feel his bladder threatening to drain out in a giant whoosh. Both points-of-view and emotional states flooded his senses so entirely that he could no longer think about what was happening. He was rendered useless and forced to watch the horror unfold before him.

The primal part of him that was obviously linked to the man was eager for this encounter. He needed this to sustain himself. He thirsted for her pain and her blood as if it sprung from the very fountain of life. At the same time, he was so saturated with terror that he didn
’
t think he would ever be able to move again. Thoughts and memories flooded his mind, and he suddenly knew more about her than he had anyone else. He knew that her first cat
’
s name had been Crickett and that she had lost her virginity in the backseat of an Oldsmobile when she was seventeen. She had dropped out of college when she was in her sophomore year because she wanted to get a jumpstart on working in the real world. But most importantly, he knew that she was mortified of death and the bleach-white bones she was destined to become.

Roger knew everything about the woman but nothing about the man. That person was hidden behind all of the rage and the energy that he wrapped himself in. Roger didn
’
t know a single thing about him except that he wanted to hurt the girl, to teach her an important lesson in humility and show her that she was the hunted. He needed to put her in her place and the best way to do that was to…to….

It was then that Roger realized what the man was planning to do. It wasn
’
t going to be as quick as murder. He planned to rape and sodomize the poor woman. He wanted to hurt her for being what she was with the only part of him that was a hundred percent male. The word
cunt
kept flashing before Roger
’
s eyes, rising out of the fog of this guy
’
s head like a huge red flashing neon sign as he stopped the car and pulled the woman into an abandoned building.

Roger wanted to turn away, to stop watching this tragedy unfold, but he had no eyelids to use to shut out the violent images. He was a part of these people, and he was trapped in this inevitable action.

Roger tried to reconcile his forced passivity with the knowledge that there was nothing he could do to have stopped this event, nothing he could do to change what was going on in the world he had once called home. If he struggled against the inevitability of this, he was liable to go insane, but he knew he could never again consider man to be an evolved species.

This belief was firmly cemented into his mind as soon as her scream echoed through his head, and he was forced to watch and feel how horrible it was to be violated on such a primal level.

The fact that a part of him was enjoying and even feeding off of her pain and her torture was not helpful. He hated himself even though he knew it had nothing to do with him. He hated himself for being part of the male sex, for having the ability to hurt women in this way.

When the man was finished, he left her lying on the floor of the cold basement in a puddle of blood, piss, vomit, and sperm. The man was already thinking about a shower, a desperate attempt to cleanse the sin from his skin while the memory remained a cherished event. The woman would not be that lucky. She would never be able to rid herself of the scent of the overweight man and the stain of his off-white sperm against her pale flesh.

An emotional tidal wave overtook him, pressing individual fingerprints of love, hatred, fear, loathing, and indifference to life on him, melding with his clay-like skin, thrusting him further into the surrounding night and marking his blood. He could feel millions of emotions ravaging him as the simulcast picture faded completely.

But it was in the nothing that he could hear the onslaught of voices that ingrained his body with the mark of a thousand lost souls, each swirl melding itself with his organs.

It was the kind of thing that made gods out of men in myths, but he didn
’
t want to become some kind of immortal, he just wanted the torture to end. He didn
’
t want to be branded by each unique emotional experience. He could feel welcome relief waiting on the other side of the blackness; all he had to do was get to it….

He remembered his mother
’
s voice in the desert, remembered that this was not his time to bow out.
Without thinking about what he was doing, Roger began to try to expel everything he had taken in with great hacking coughs. He couldn
’
t take on all of the pain; it had been too powerful, too overwhelming, and it would eventually crushed him.

The coughing turned into dry heaves, and he was filled with relief when the chunk of bile in his throat dislodged and began to pour out of his body in thick waves. The outpour felt as if he were vomiting out the world. The expelled waves turned into a stream and then a slow trickle, and finally, it was just an occasional drip.

When Roger could breathe again, he noticed that the black under him was now a floor and he could once again see his body. He found himself nude, bent over in a crouching position with his knees on the floor, his head pulled in towards his stomach, and his hands laced behind his head. His vision was still blurry, but Roger inspected every inch of his flesh to reassure himself that the vision of a million fingerprints pressing in on his skin hadn
’
t had some kind of physical effect on him. He wasn
’
t able to see anything, but he could still feel where they had once been, his skin tingling all over in tiny circles as if it were awakening for the first time.

He put his hands on the floor and found that it was cool and slick like marble, completely different from the warm goo he had found himself caught in only a few minutes ago. He stood up and noticed that Adenitril was standing directly in front of him, inspecting him. Roger wanted to cover himself or hide behind something, but there was nothing but his hands available. For a second, panic, the feeling of the women
’
s vulnerability, seized him, and he was sure would be taken back to the Obawok to be killed nude and shamed.

“Did I pass? And why am I naked?”

“Your clothes are still in the real world. You, however, are not, and there is one more thing you have to see,” Adenitril said as he turned and began to walk away. Roger wasn
’
t sure how this was possible since he was supposed to be in a trance, but he followed him anyway.

Despite Adenitril
’
s assurance that this was entirely within the realm of his own mind, Roger kept his hands splayed over his exposed genitals as they walked. When Adenitril stopped suddenly and turned around, Roger clinched his hands together so hard that he hurt himself with out meaning to.

Adenitril didn
’
t act like he noticed. “Whether you pass or fail is not my decision to make alone, but something has happened now. Something that has changed everything, and I
’
m not sure what to do.”

“What happened, what
’
s wrong?”

Adenitril didn
’
t answer Roger directly but held his hand out in front of him and waved his arm gently through the air in one continuous motion. Objects began to rise and form out of the darkness, moving in and out of Roger
’
s line of sight. As the shadows grew and moved, candles took form in the darkness to illuminate the tunnel like space in front of them. Roger shut his eyes in a moment of panic, afraid of what this Obawok was going to show him.

But nothing happened.

He could still see everything moving around him. As he watched, a chair with a headless body tied to it came into view. The hate twisted face of the President quickly followed this image. He was standing over Tigaffo, who was awkwardly holding a long silver sword and covered in a gruesome pattern of dark swirls and bits of green flesh. Roger knew who had been killed even before he could see the detached, lifeless head and its deep violet stare.

I
’
m so sorry, Firturro…so sorry.

There were also several other Obawok present in the room and even one half-dead gnome chained to the wall, but they didn
’
t matter. Not compared to Firturro
’
s death.

“This was the first thing that happened, but it has set off a great chain of events.” Adenitril paused, his hand held above the screen. “Do you want to see what happened?”

Roger was unable to answer as he stared at the once calm and friendly face of Firturro laying face up on the floor. Adenitril turned his head and waved his fingers through the air once more, setting the still picture in motion as if it had been nothing more than a DVD paused at a critical scene. And Roger once again found himself watching others
’
lives unfold around him.

Del
sat behind the door, her hand gripping Trulle
’
s arm so tightly it
’
d gone numb minutes ago, but she couldn
’
t lessen her grip. The most important thing in her life at that moment was making sure he stayed safe. It was what she was supposed to do, what Firturro and Six were counting on her to do, but she couldn
’
t just sit here and do nothing while the President brutalized them. They had risked everything to help her, and now they were in trouble.