Chapter Thirty-Seven

An hour later, a man I’d never seen before came into the gas station. He had dark skin, a thick brown coat, a machine gun strapped over one shoulder, and a sheet of paper in his hand. I tapped the ice chest twice.

“Whoa, that dude is mad strapped, and he has a lot of weapons!” Jerry said. “But it is, in fact, a dude.”

I rested my left arm on the counter, but I kept my right hand wrapped around the gun in my pocket. It was going to stay like that, with my finger on the trigger, until I knew who or what I was dealing with.

The man with the machine gun locked the door behind him. He wasn’t moving aggressively. He wasn’t pointing the weapon at me. He looked like he was running an errand. With a tired expression on his face, he walked up to the counter.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m Roger’s guy. He told me to bring you this.” He set the note in front of me. I didn’t look down. I knew better than to take my eyes off of him, even for a second.

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know. For your eyes only. I’m just delivering.” He looked down, saw my hand, and cracked a smile. “Oh shit. They almost got you too, huh?”

“What?”

He broke into a wide, toothy grin and lifted his gun hand. With a twist of his wrist, the fingers closed and reopened. It took a second for me to realize that this was a high-end prosthetic made of metal and plastic. The man looked from his hand to mine. “You were luckier than me if all they took was one pinky. I had to cauterize my own wounds. Almost didn’t make it.” 

I dropped my eyes to his other hand. It was the same kind of prosthetic. “What the hell happened? Does this Roger guy eat hands or something?”

He seemed surprised by my question. “You don’t know Roger? The way he speaks of you, I thought you’d have met before.” He looked me up and down, then asked, “You Army?”

This time, I was surprised. “No. Obviously not.”

“I knew a guy. He was a Ranger in the Army. You remind me of him.”

“Really?”

The guy shook his head and said, “No. Not really.”

He clearly had instructions not to say too much. And I refused to look away. Neither of us knew what to do next, leading to an awkward silence that was cut mercifully short by his cell phone ringing. When he pulled it from his coat pocket, I managed to catch the name on the screen. Two familiar words: “ANSWER NOW.”

He put the phone to his head. “Yeah?” He looked at me, nodded, and said, “I understand.” A second later, he held out the phone for me to take. I kept my attention on his weapon, but accepted the cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Jack, this is taking far too long.” Roger. Of course. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to speed things along here. I need to show you something, and this was the only way to do it.”

The man standing across the counter showed off the impressive functionality of his after-market fingers by unzipping his jacket. As soon as it was open, I took my hand off of my gun. Sadly, I recognized the bricks of material this vest was covered in. I’d seen those same plastic explosives the night Benjamin blew up a god. Only this time, there was a lot more of it. A lot a lot.

“You’ve got my attention,” I said calmly.

“Standing before you is one of my best men. He is going to watch the store while you do me a favor.”

I didn’t bother with the old “What if I refuse?” routine. I could read between the lines. Instead, I just asked, “Will it take long?”

“That is entirely up to you and circumstances out of either of our control. But this needs to happen now. On that sheet of paper, I have written detailed instructions. Follow them, and then you will understand.”

The line went dead. There was no point in fighting now. I handed the man his phone, then I reached into the junk drawer and fished out an old name tag for the newest part-timer (who would be assuming the identity of Guillermo for the remainder of the night). When I went for the ice chest, “Guillermo” put his robot hand on the gun and barked, “No!”

“Why not?!”

“Boss says you gotta leave everything and go alone. That includes the hand cannon in your pocket.”

“Oh. You knew about that, did you?”

“We know a lot more than you’d think.”

Under threat of death, I caved to Roger’s requests, laid down my weapons, and left the gas station with nothing but the piece of paper not-Guillermo brought. There were way more shadows in the parking lot than I remembered. I read the note beneath the retreating light of the setting sun. It was much shorter than I expected—only two sentences:

“Go to the place where you had your first kiss. The truth waits for you there.”

 

***

 

The one-lane bridge (as we called it) was the perfect place for those seeking isolation. Commissioned by a drunk city planner for his drunk brother-in-law contractor, it attached two dead stretches of road with leftover timbers and was never up to code. Many years full of humidity and rot ago, the bridge was too small, too weak, and too dangerous to be anything but a foot bridge and local ghost story magnet. Nothing had gotten any better since then.

The bridge was a hell of a walk from the gas station. The fact that I was making the arduous trek without a flashlight or cellphone sure didn’t help. By moonlight and dumb luck, I managed to navigate the woods until I reached the creek (thankfully, nobody had moved it since the last time I was here). The hardest part was over. Now all I had to do was follow it upstream until I came upon the rickety wooden deathtrap that once served as Sabine’s and my favorite hangout spot. This was our place, where we would go to avoid people and skip rocks and talk. Sometimes, we would… You know what? I don’t really feel like talking about this part and honestly it’s not really that important and frankly it’s none of your business. Hey, let’s talk about something else, okay? How about an abrupt flashback?

 

***

 

“Hey, I just remembered I still have that thing,” Jerry said out of the blue. We were at work, sitting behind the counter on a slow day playing a Chinese knockoff video game called “Super Hit Siblings.” This was a couple weeks after my amputation, shortly after the burning hobo incident. Simpler times—the kind that you don’t appreciate until they’re gone.

“Sorry,” I said as soon as my character (Karate Panda) fell off a cliff and exploded. “What are we talking about?”

He guided his own character (Robot cop) to the secret health cheese before answering, “Your foot. I got it.”

I waited until he’d destroyed the A.I. competitors Pirate Joe Pigeon and Super Jesus. The victory screen popped up, declaring, “Congratulation! You the Hoe!” while a midi track of the French national anthem played in the background.

I asked, “Is that some kind of euphemism?”

Jerry looked at me, eyes wide with excitement, and dropped his remote. 

“Oh,” he said. “You forgot already?”

“Twilight amnesia. I don’t remember a lot of things.” 

“Okay, here’s what happened: Right before your surgery, I loaned you like a hundred bucks.”

“Jerry…”

“You asked for it in all singles, too. Said you wanted to ‘make it rain’ on the surgeons.”

“If you have a point, please get to it.”

“So, there’s this form you can fill out for religious exemptions to organic waste ordinances, right? And you needed some help with the paperwork on account of how you were about to die and screaming about being ‘covered in roaches,’ so I assisted with the boring parts. You totally signed it and everything.”

“Signed what?”

“The request to let us keep your amputated foot on religious grounds.”

“What?!” I grabbed my crutch to hit him with. “What religion?!”

“Mathme—”

“That’s not a religion, Jerry! It’s a defunct murder cult!”

Jerry stared at the ground and mumbled, “Tomato Clamato. OUCH!”

After a satisfying (and totally justifiable) smack to the back of his head, I calmed down and asked, “Well, where is it?”

Jerry held up a finger, then bounded towards the walk-in cooler. Oh God please don’t tell me he brought it here. A few seconds later, he reemerged holding a large, clear plastic bag with the words “Caution, Medical Waste” written on the side with black marker in Jerry’s own handwriting. Inside, a human leg. 

My human leg. (Hopefully.)

“Tadaaa!” Jerry sang.

I insisted we get rid of it immediately. He begged for us to keep it. We haggled until a deal was made. I gave him until the end of my shift to prepare a funeral ceremony, one to “blow them all out of the water.” I was not expecting him to go quite so literal with it.

Several hours later, Jerry and I were standing atop the one-lane bridge. He brought a duffle bag full of supplies for a legendary Viking funeral. The foot was laid gracefully inside a boat, ready to drift off to its final resting place. However, this was back when the creek had frozen over, so Jerry had to adjust plans accordingly. 

He duct-taped the foot-coffin-boat to the top of a remote-controlled car, lowered it to the ice with a fishing pole, then drove it a distance somewhere between “too close for safety” and “too far to hit with roman candles.” After shooting at it with fireworks for a few minutes, the gas finally ignited, taking the foot, car, and a generous crater of ice along with it. All in all, it wasn’t the worst funeral we’d been to together.

 

***

 

I walked along the creek. To my left, the water flowed past, carrying the occasional bit of garbage and muck. Over time, the water widened out. The edges on either side began to rise. Soon, the forest was above me. Several feet to my right, a steep dirt wall climbed up to the wood’s edge. I stayed at the bottom, stomping through the wet sands hard enough to leave me a trail to follow in case I should have the opportunity to walk back. Intermittent clouds rolled across the sky, casting moon shadows and making the long hike to the one-lane bridge that much more difficult. 

I knew that somewhere at the bottom of the streambed was a foot skeleton fused to a toy car that might one day baffle an unlucky fisherman. But that wasn’t the worst thing under these waters. Somewhere, much further upstream, there was a sunken moving truck with the bodies of two enormous men in clown masks. One could only imagine what else lurked below the surface.

Somehow, I didn’t notice the bridge until I was already standing beneath it. A pair of spray-painted cement columns jutted from the center of the water. The rotten, water-logged boards were suspended about four feet over the top of my head. Burnt beer cans and fish skeletons decorated the ground. This was the place Roger wanted me to be, but why?

I looked closely at the graffiti on the columns. Lots of dicks. Lots of swastikas. Taggers in my town were never the most inspired or original individuals.

Waaaiiittt… The thought slowly dawned on me… How can I even see right now? I’m underneath the bridge… Where is all this light coming from?

I turned and froze. Ten feet away, a giant, glowing, green racoon monster stood at the edge of the water, on the same side as me. Nothing between us but air. She hadn’t noticed me yet. Her head was down as she drank from the creek with a loud laplaplap. Her tail flicked back and forth. Her wings were tucked tightly against her body. Her figure bioluminesced bright as day. I knew that this was Rita. Sure, it’s totally possible that there were multiple butterfly/raccoon/dragon hybrids in this town. But this one was undoubtedly my butterfly/raccoon/dragon hybrid. I could tell from the lumpy X-shaped wound on her hip where I’d pulled the arrow from her. Was this what Roger wanted me to see? I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.

I must have forgotten that laughing makes noise. Rita quickly lifted her head, bounced her ears, and turned her face in my direction. It seemed that she had, just as suddenly, taken notice of me.

I waved at her from my spot below the bridge, but before I could say anything, the wood above me creaked. I could hear someone moving on the bridge. Rita’s eyes snapped up, to the person or thing walking across. Her mouth transformed into a snarl. Her wings expanded. And then, a series of deafening explosions filled the night. Louder than the kind of gunfire I was used to. I fell to my knees in the mud and covered my ears. I couldn’t do anything but watch as Rita’s wings were blown to shreds, replaced by green blood and white bones. She cried out, and tried to lunge forward, but the weapon hit her legs next. She collapsed where she stood.

The noise stopped, replaced by a painfully loud ringing in one of my ears. Rita uselessly flicked what remained of her wings. She tried her legs next, but there wasn’t enough strength to even crawl. Her head hit the wet ground. In one final, desperate attempt to save herself, she looked at me. I willed Rita to get up and run. To escape. But that was all I could do before another weapon shot through the dark. A shiny metallic pole, covered in serrated hooks, impaled the poor animal straight through her back, pinning her to the ground.

Dust fell from the underside of the bridge. Whatever did this to Rita was on the move. I didn’t have the luxury of time to think. I needed to hide. And so, like a grade A coward, I crawled into the icy cold creek and waded through the black waters until I was standing between the cement columns. I disturbed a network of spiderwebs, but didn’t dare wipe the pissed-off arachnids out of my hair. The ground beneath me sucked at the bottoms of my shoes, and I knew I might not get out of this with my prosthetic (if I got out of this at all). Thankfully, it hadn’t rained in a while, so the water only reached chest level, and whatever the fuck that was coiling around my good leg seemed to give up and slither away without too much trouble.

I could hear Rita whimpering as I slipped out of view. And then I heard the voice of Spencer Middleton. “Hey, it’s me. I got another one for your collection, but I’m gonna need some help hauling her out of a ditch. She’s a heavy one.”

I stopped a garbage bag as it was flowing downstream, then ever-so-carefully drew it close to me. I dipped under the water’s veil, and reemerged wearing the black bag as a cloak. Was it a perfect disguise? No. Did it scare away all those spiders? Also, no (it just pissed them off more, really). But it provided enough concealment for me to feel comfortable peeking out from the edge of the column. That’s right. Nothing to notice over here. I’m just a floating pile of garbage.

Spencer had already made it to the bottom of the creek bed. He was right there, a stone’s throw away, with a machine gun slung over one shoulder, the harpoon gun in his left hand, and a cell phone to his ear.

“No,” he said to whoever was on the phone. “She’s still alive for now, but I can’t promise anything. Get here fast, and you’d better bring some band-aids.” He put the phone away, snuck up to Rita, and crouched at her side, taunting, “You’re an ugly bitch, aren’t ya?”

Rita flailed, whined, and fell limp. “Now, now, don’t fight it. That arrow’s a tungsten silver alloy. You ain’t getting free until I allow it. I own you, bitch. Understand?”

Rita whimpered loudly, as if to say, yes, I understand.

 

***

 

Spencer never left Rita’s side, and despite the cold seeping into my bones, I never moved from my hiding spot. The three of us stayed right where we were. Every now and then, I felt Rita’s eyes on me. I wanted to help. But Roger sent me here with nothing on purpose. By the time the truck arrived, I was relieved.

They parked off-road at the edge of the creek bed above Spencer. From Rita’s green illumination, I could see the back of a nondescript moving truck. Spencer stood upright and waited as two enormous figures came to the top of the creek wall. These were familiar monsters, the same kind that chased me back at the Mathmetist compound, wearing clown masks and jumpsuits. One of them had a heavy chain coiled in his arms. He tossed one end of it to the ground in front of Spencer, then leapt down to meet him.

The monster was every bit as nimble as I expected (so, not at all). He effectively executed a belly flop that sent a literal shockwave through the water. In the time it took for that clown to pull himself back up, the other had tied off the chain to the truck and climbed down the steep wall nearly as gracelessly as his predecessor, crashing into the earth like a meteor. He righted himself and joined his partner next to Rita. The two mammoth clowns dwarfed him in size, yet seemed to be consciously keeping a safe distance from Spencer. Almost like they respected him. Or feared him.

Spencer started giving orders, and in a flash, they were working together. One held Rita down as the other removed the spear. Blood sprayed, Rita screamed, and the giants wrestled her into submission and wrapped her in the chains. Spencer shimmied up the dirt wall to the truck. A moment later, he started driving. Rita slid across the muddy earth. The clowns each gripped the chain with one hand and allowed themselves to be towed up the wall and out of sight.

That was it. Rita, Spencer, the truck, and the clowns were all gone. Nobody knew I was there. I could crawl back to the water’s edge and follow my footsteps home. Hell, I could be lazy and let the water carry me most of the way. So why did I feel this ridiculous urge to do something stupid? To try and find a way to save Rita? Why was I shivering, standing at the edge of the creek? Why was I walking up to the steep dirt wall? Why was I searching for snake holes and tree roots to climb up the edge? I must have been absolutely crazy.

The climb wasn’t so bad. Forcing my body not to shiver as I lay on the ground, tangled in tall grass and covered beneath my garbage bag cape was another story altogether. The monsters were close, in the back of the moving truck with Rita. Now that she was gone and locked away, I could barely see a thing. But I could make out the two dark silhouettes standing on my side of the truck, backlit by cabin light. They were talking. One was Spencer. The other was shorter, rounder, and angrier.

“I hired you to catch her! Not kill her!” His voice felt familiar, yet somehow warped.

“She’s still alive.”

“Barely! What am I supposed to do with her if she dies before we get back?”

“Feed her to your dogs. Not my problem.”

I heard the keys in his hand jingle a half-second before the spotlights turned on, tearing away my cover of darkness. I held my breath and remained motionless as Spencer walked across the street towards the new source of light—his car. He must have turned on the headlights remotely, and now I could see everything. The key fob in Spencer’s hand. The look of pure delight on his face. And most unsettling of all, I could see the man Spencer was working for.

Nooo.

No no no no no fucking way this is happening.

It’s not possible!

He screamed Spencer’s name with the authority of an angry parent. Spencer stopped halfway across the street and turned around. “What do you want?”

“I want you to show a little more respect, but I’ll settle for this.” The Collector walked up to Spencer and handed him a manilla envelope as my mind screamed, I know him!

But then I realized that I was wrong. I didn’t know him. I only thought I knew him. Roger was right. I needed to see this to believe it. The man ordering around Spencer… the man collecting gods… the man I thought I respected... was the same one I’d talked to only hours ago. The one I almost sold the gas station to. How could I have been so stupid?!

Spencer opened the envelope and thumbed through the cash. With a soft laugh, he said, “Damn. I almost forgot I get paid to do this.”

Brother Riley stroked his beard and said, “You’ll find the information for your next target in there as well. This time around, try to leave more of it for me to collect.”

“I’ll do what I can, boss.”

The back of the moving truck slammed shut. Brother Riley got into his vehicle, followed closely by his clown-faced monstrosities. As they drove off, Spencer started back across the road to where his car waited, stuffing the envelope into his pants and whistling “La Vie en Rose.”

At the last moment, Spencer turned around, locked eyes with me, and winked. But it was just that and nothing else. He wanted me to know he knew I was there. He probably knew the whole time. Rather than finish me off for good, he climbed into his Mustang and drove away, leaving me all alone in the dark.