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Grand Cayman
Wednesday, August 13
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TODAY WAS A good day to die.
There are moments in a man’s life when he wishes he had never been born. There are other moments when he wishes he were dead. And there are still other moments when a man doesn’t give a damn one way or another. Dead or never born, the conditions are metaphysically identical. Nonbeing is nonbeing. The dead experience adds nothing. Hopes and regrets do not exist. Bliss or damnation only occur in the dreams of the living and the nightmares of the dying.
Whether Jack Coyote would live to see another day or breathe his last breath, his fate lay in the hands of the gods. It most definitely did not lay in his. He had blissfully arrived at the stage of noncaring. He would stay there for as long as possible.
When he finally awoke to the noisy chattering in his brain and the harsh discomfort of his body, he stood at the crossroads of a predicament. Should he stay? Or should he go? His mind had shut down. His nervous system was paralyzed. He was halfway between heaven and hell, between past and future, sucked into a vortex reduced to a pinpoint of nothingness. As if newly born from the womb of his mother, he struggled to assemble the bits of information that would allow him to perceive position, state, balance, motion, temperature, and spatial perception. All had become fused into a single screaming unit. He was alone within himself. Time seemed to pass, but in stillness. The stillness eventually fled. Chaos entered. A stepladder to consciousness loomed ahead.
The first senses he perceived were of taste and smell. The taste of blood. The odor of vomit. And the reek of bodily excretions. The first two were his. The third belonged to others.
Next came hearing. The buzz of insects and the cawing of vultures followed by the pitter-patter of fine rain striking a tin roof. Pain rushed to the fore, a symphony of agonies in eight octaves.
Awareness finally awoke within him. At first, a single neuron of consciousness floating in a symbiotic relationship with biological necessities. Then everything rushing back in an explosion. A sequence of scenes ran through his mind: of being run off the road, dragged from the car, transported to a shack, bound to a chair, and interrogated by an Austrian. An intruder entered, attended by drama. A spray of bullets followed. Violins rose to a crescendo and ended in a clash of timpani.
The interior of the shack was stifling. The heat made his shirt cling to his flesh. His limbs were yet taped to the arms and legs of the chair beneath his beaten body. His eyes were still blindfolded.
An hour later—or was it two?—he worked his way out of the bindings, weak and winded and sick.
Three man lay sprawled in the remains of their defecated body fluids. Carrion flies had already arrived, their metallic blue-green abdomens busy at work. The Austrian lay nearest, spread-eagle on his back, jaw agape, an intact eye staring blankly at the ceiling, the empty eye socket equally unseeing, his throat yet oozing blood, the occipital region of his forehead rendered to jelly. What was left of his face was cyanotic blue verging on gray. He wore a quizzical look. Death had played a cruel trick on him, and he wasn’t laughing. His henchmen lay just inside the open doorway. The first man sat awkwardly, his bowed spine propped against a wall, his chin hanging toward his lap, his arms languid at his sides, his pants soaked with blood and urine and excrement, the palms of his hands turned upward in supplication. The second man was piled into heap of tangled arms and legs, his skull shattered, a single arm slung forward as if reaching for forgiveness. The flies seemed more interested in him than the others, probably because his blubbery body was tastier.
Jack hadn’t known there was a woman, but there she reposed, slumped on the other side of the room, her slim throat sliced into silence. Blonde hair, even features, slender figure, legs spread apart, mouth slung open with astonishment, and faded eyes astonished by her sudden and unexpected demise. She had probably been pretty in life, but her body had dwindled to nothingness, her face but a withered mask, her pale skin clinging tightly to her skull, and her teeth protruding. Of the four victims, she had probably gone the least painful way, without seeing her attacker until the knife silenced her voice first before quickly snuffing out her life.
The door of the shack clacked against the wall, forced open by stormy breezes that blew away some of the ripe stench of death. Jack staggered toward it, zipping up his jeans as he went.
He stepped outside. The fading sunset cast an orangey hue over the greenery. Momentary dizziness overcame him. He pushed his head between his knees and gulped in fresh air. Rain washed away the stink of terror. Revived, he made it back to the main road and there retrieved his mobile from the mangled wreck of the rental car.
He looked above and around, and drank in the scenery. He reached out a hand as if he could touch everything at once. The top of the sun made a brief appearance through rain clouds, hovering slightly above the horizon before sinking in the west and taking every bit of light with it. Even without the sun, the air was thick with heat. Yet Jack felt cold to the bone. He limped to the side the road and there vomited what was left in his stomach into the ditch. Then he climbed into the truck the thugs didn’t need anymore, lay his head back on the headrest, and shut his eyes. He made an inventory of his injuries. The little finger of his left hand might be broken, but the joints bent where they should, even if stiff and swollen. The slice above his brow probably needed stitching but had stopped bleeding for the most part, just sticky to the touch. His ribs ached with every breath. Everything hurt, most especially his cock, damn the sadistic bastard and his broom of torture.
Today was a good day to die. Until he realized that dying is easy. It’s living that’s hard.
