Gabriel stirred and immediately groaned, feeling hot, bloody pain lance through his spinning head.
His first conscious thoughts were purely physical, hunger, thirst, the need to release the pressure building in his bladder.
The thud of a newspaper on the doormat, bringing its bad news. His mind turned inwards, trying to decipher the bewildering array of messages that whirled and spun their jig inside his head. Pictures, as hazy as the room about him swam across the fever dream hinterland of his gradually forming consciousness.
In one, wino wearing a crown of glass thorns held a fingernail to his head and carved away the bone. In another, a woman, bathed in the heat and the sweat of the act opened herself up for knives. Another, a bleached corpse bloodied with a scrawl of tattoos telling the murderers story.
The flash flood of images rolled on, gathering momentum. “We’re the same, you and me… We’re the same…” A blow out. A car, too close to the white line, too close to the curb, weaving drunkenly across the road. Driver fighting for control. Running a red light. Up on the sidewalk, people falling away in every direction. On the asphalt, burning rubber, throwing himself clear as the car slid into the side of a petrol tanker, licking up into a hateful conflagration.
The images punched into his head in a series of hammer blows — breaking glass, the diesel stench, the flame, smoke, darkness, death.
And in there, in its heat: Sam and Frankie.
Unable to pull away from the wreckage, his spirit floated towards the buckled door, into the heart of the firestorm, ethereal hands burning as they struggled desperately to open it, ghost eyes streaming under the insidious biting of the smokes teeth, knowing it was impossible, too little too late. The heat of the flame beating him back.
Through the glass he saw a young boy, blood matted in his hair, eyes opening to see his death all around him in the licks of fire and the choking gulf of smoke, to see his mother’s body half-in, half-out of the car, diamonds of shattered windscreen and a spreading pool of blood beneath her too-white face.
Smoke blind, Gabriel screamed with his son’s voice. To lose him now, again, when he was so close…
The same tears of loss were pouring from his smoke-stung eyes. He grappled with the buckled door, the metal stripping the flesh from his palms, burning him to the bone, but even in the dream the door wasn’t opening. Crying for his dead son, Gabriel gave up on the door and struggled to drag the corpse of his wife from the blaze.
Her ruined face stared blindly at him, mouth falling open, head lolling. A bloody spider crawled out through the crack between her lips and scuttled around the curve of her neck. Another bloody leg twitched through the broken lips. Another spider. And another. Swelling out of Francesca’s mouth, bloody legs of blood smeared spiders being born out of his wife’s head, crawling over her cheeks, her eyes, her hair, and still more being born from between her lips.
Only they weren’t her lips, beneath the bodies of bloody spiders her face melted into the thin lipped smile of a Latino angel with a face of finely carved glass.
“We’re the same, you and me… We’re the same…”