He hadn’t known that the knife going in would have been the easy part. Never would have guessed it. He had been around violent people long enough, had committed enough acts of violence himself, to think that he knew what it would be like when the dice finally came up snake-eyes for him and he would be on the receiving end. He had thought it would be like a punch; he had certainly received enough of those, and there was a weight to them, a finality, a lack of ambiguity. There were the fleeting instants before you got punched, then the instant you were being punched, and then a painful parade of more instants afterward.
A knife, though… a knife was stealthy. It came out of nowhere, at least this one had, and it had none of that sureness to it. Where the very tip of it was at any one point in time couldn’t be pinned down so finely. Even as he had seen the blade flash out of the corner of his eye, seen it sweep in toward his chest, he couldn’t be entirely sure that it had stuck him until the hilt bumped up against his ribs. Then, of course, the pain came. It had reminded him a little of when he had gotten shots as a kid. If you didn’t look, you couldn’t tell the doctor had done it until it was too late and you felt that burning rush under your skin.
They had kept him in the basement room long enough for him to lose track of time. His sleep patterns had gotten screwed up enough so that he had no idea whether it was day or night. The waves of hunger that had at first accompanied the passing of each mealtime had long since blurred together into a constant stream of ache that spread throughout his entire torso, and in the last few hours had started working down the length of his limbs. He’d gone hungry before, but had never realized that arms could throb with hunger just as badly as his stomach could.
He wasn’t even sure he was in a basement. The only reason he figured that was because the floor was dirt. He supposed he could be in one of the unfinished buildings out past the airport, that sort of reverse ghost town that had been abandoned even before it had been entirely built. But the concrete wall against his back was cold, too cold for summer, and his only guess was that the other side of its thickness had never seen the light of day.
By the time the tall man had come in and started interrogating him, he was a total wreck. That was one reason They were so stupid (and by They he meant anyone who wasn‘t part of his team); you always ask a man what he knows before he begins to lose sense of himself. If you give him time to become hungry and tired and disoriented, who knows what he’ll say. Get him to talk when he’s fresh, when he still thinks he has a chance of getting back to whatever his normal life was before you took him. When that promise is still within his reach, when he can still smell his wife’s/girlfriend’s cooking, can call up in an instant the color of his children’s eyes, that’s when he’ll spill all he knows, so he can experience those things again. If he had happened to have a girlfriend, or children, even by this point he wouldn’t have given up hope, but their memories wouldn’t be his prime drivers anymore. He would be focused solely on surviving, and lies come quick and fast to the lips of anyone who just wants to live to see the light of day again.
The burn was spreading through his chest now. How wide had that blade been, anyway? It felt like it had sliced him wide open, even though he had only seen a medium-sized blade swoop under his field of vision as it punched into his chest. The feeling was accompanied by anger, a sudden shock of it that was equally fueled by fear and the sense of being startled. He hoped it had registered on his face, and for just a second had made his attacker wished he hadn’t done it, because the stabbee just might jump to his feet now on pure adrenaline and kick his ass. But it probably didn’t. He didn’t have a whole lot of say in what expression passed across his face now.
His hands had raised up instinctively, but had gotten to the scene too late to do anything. By the time they jerked up from his sides (Reason #2 that They were stupid… they hadn’t tied him up), the blade had struck, been ripped right back out of him again, and the man had started turning to leave. Instead of his hands raising to -- what? Deflect the blade with a particularly hard callous, knock the attacker’s hand aside? -- instead they flew to the wound. And, just for a second, he wondered how the man had managed not only to stab him, but to dump warm oil on his chest as well. It was everywhere, couldn’t be contained.
By then the door had slammed and he was alone. No one to take out his fear-ignited anger on but himself. Whatever opportunity he had once had to get himself out of this was gone. Maybe that was why they had made him wait so long, to get him so tired and disoriented that there was no way he was going to be able to give them any information they would want. And here was the result, what they had just been waiting for an excuse for all along.
He didn’t panic, just tried to struggle to his feet. His front was coated with the slick stuff now, and in the dim light he could see how dark it was turning him. There was so much of it… how much could he stand to lose? He had seen lots of guys bleed, both friends and victims of his own actions, and past lessons told him that even a little blood seemed like a lot once it was out from under the skin. But this really seemed like a lot. And there was a new pain under the split flesh, something that made him start to really worry. A burble was starting to work its way into his breaths, which were labored now from the effort of getting up off the floor. Two days ago, he was fit enough to run a 10K without breaking a sweat, and now he was winded and he hadn’t moved a foot.
Then he realized how dizzy he was, and a titanic fear began to creep in around the edges of his mind. Fear that he might not make it out of here (deep down he knew that it was a certainty, but he hadn’t let that black knowledge shine through the rest of his mind yet), fear that his friends weren’t going to be able to help him, fear that he was alone in this basement and no one was ever going to hear from him again.
Then he heard the dripping. One time, when he was a child, his mom and whatever stepfather had been around then had moved them all into a dingy apartment where the roof leaked and he had the sense that the walls weren’t straight up and down. The sound he was hearing now was what he heard on rainy nights in that apartment, and it felt like there had been an inordinate number of those nights before all stepfathers and living quarters moved on in the rotation. That pattering sound, steady and rhythmic but coming from so many places at once that the sound became chaotic and relentless.
He didn’t have to look down to know that he was the source this time, rivulets of his blood running down his torso and legs to drip off in a dozen places. He had become the house whose walls weren’t true. He thought maybe he should look at the wound itself, just to make sure, but he couldn’t get his neck to angle downward. Even his body didn’t want him to see.
It didn’t matter anyway; the fear was sitting on his head, sinking its claws into his brain, taking hold and promising to never let go. He found that he couldn’t even convert it into anger, a currency exchange that he had become an expert in, out in the world, where there was always something to spend it on. Here, the only thing breakable was the single dangling light bulb, and unloading some fury on that would only put him further in the dark. And for once, he wanted to stay in the light as long as he could.
The burble in his throat suddenly decided to become sentient and try to choke him. He couldn’t breathe, his windpipe filling with fluid. His muscles clenched, he threw his upper body forward and he heaved out a massive quantity of red stuff, doubling the pool that had already gathered at his feet, already turning the floor of the room into crimson mud. He tried to draw a breath, but he hadn’t purged enough of it, and retched again. He almost felt the urge to thrust his hands forward, to reach into the scarlet waterfall, just to catch some of it, as if he could somehow keep it and put it back inside his arteries where it belonged. But he was paralyzed with the effort of bringing it all up, and it escaped onto the floor. He felt his heels sink a little into the bare earth as he softened it with his blood. He felt lighter when the spasms were over, cooler. The fevered heat of his cheeks had mellowed. He knew he was going to have to do the whole thing over again, maybe in as little as a few seconds, but his mind was racing now, and he had at least a little while to think. And the thought that kept racing around, over and over like one of those circus motorcycles that roars loop-the-loops in a spherical cage was this: I’m not going to be remembered.
Maybe he would be, in the same way that he remembered dozens of friends he had known, ones that had all been snuffed out in the same turf war that he was seconds away from falling prey to himself, but not really remembered. There was no family that loved him, no hot homegirl that always had his back. He had relished the power that came with being part of a large gang for so long that he had neglected to realize that he was equally anonymous to everyone else who he called his “family“. No one cared for him more than anyone else, just as he cared for no one else in particular. His love was more for the gang than the people it was made of.
So who would spend more time on his death than it took to empty a forty onto a curb outside his house? When it came right down to it, the ones who had the strongest memories of him probably remembered him in fear; those he had terrorized and beaten, the living relatives of the punks he had taken down for the sake of honor. He would live on in their nightmares, but nowhere else.
That was all he had time to consciously process before he was hunching forward again, great gouts of red stuff boiling out of him and expanding the pool of himself that he stood in. His leg muscles were starting to shake, lack of blood making them all too aware that they were the only thing holding him up, and they couldn’t bear the responsibility anymore.
He leaned backward until his aching spine hit the concrete wall again, cold as a block of ice. He slid down it until he was half sitting up, sinking into the dark mud under him, looking up and around, his eyes rolling in their sockets like a terrified horse. It made the room appear to spin around him. He was so dizzy, even though he knew he wasn’t moving.
Every part of him was hurting now, the slash across his chest only a brighter flare in the overall wash of pain. He’d only been really, truly nervous a few times in his life, and now each of his limbs felt like they were getting butterflies. Even with all the pent-up energy he felt, his body was getting heavier, becoming harder and harder to move. He was solidifying, turning to stone while the ground below him kept getting softer. The only real movement he could muster was another halfhearted round of coughing, his chest pumping like a creaky bellows while the rest of him stayed limp, sputtering red clouds of mist off his lips.
This is it, he thought. Never going to feel better than this again. Never going to laugh, or get laid, or leave this room. He didn’t even know who the tall man was who had stabbed him, and he had turned out to be one of the most important people in his life; the one who ended it.
He thought all this with a kind of detachment, fully aware of what was happening, still terrified, and yet having a part of himself able to think rationally about it all, analyze it like a spectator. He wasn’t religious; once he became fully engaged in his life of crime, it seemed ridiculous to think that there was anyone out there looking out for him other than his gang mates, and even that didn’t have a whole lot to do with him personally. They were just all part of the same team, and even though it was the deepest bond any of them knew, it still wasn’t much deeper than a wolf must feel for any other member of its pack. He felt safe, secure in their numbers, and he felt it was the best he had any right to feel, so never tried for anything deeper. Besides, if he still chose to believe in another life after this one, he was sure whoever was waiting for him on the other side wasn’t going to be proud of the way he had conducted himself. He found that he was staring at his fingers, hypnotized by the way they kept reflexively balling into fists and slowly relaxing without him consciously asking them to; they felt as if they had fallen asleep, and now were in a perpetual needles-and-pins phase of waking themselves back up. Instead of that tense, buzzing feeling fading away after a few seconds, it just kept getting worse. The fact that they were bloodier than they had ever been -- except for maybe at the moment of his birth -- only made the process more fascinating. It was like he were looking at dripping red-wax candle versions of his hands, and he was melting away before his own eyes.
He took an unusually deep breath, felt his lung whistle and bubble, unable to fully inflate itself. Then he pitched sideways onto his face, his shoulder sort of breaking his fall, his mouth and nose just clearing the mud puddle that his life had suddenly manifested itself in, while his temple fell right into it. He lay perfectly still. Movement was no longer necessary anyway, and he hardly even realized he had fallen. His mind was burning, spinning with sparks of thought, knowing it was racing against time, time in which he had to think about all the things he never had time to think about before, come to a decision about everything he had ever been ambivalent about.
It was a race that he lost, of course. But as the seconds dragged out, he became less and less aware of that fact. His vision brightened, all the colors in the dank room ratcheting up and up until they all became blindingly bright, the coolness in his limbs doing the same, growing warmer and warmer but never too hot. Thoughts came and went randomly, less and less frequently, and as his awareness evaporated into that same bright clarity, time mattered less and less. As a result, those last few seconds that he lay artlessly sideways on the dirt floor essentially went on forever.
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