Highway To Hell (10 page)

They grabbed him anyway, pulling him into cover, but not before another bullet had blown his gut open.

Now here he stood, the gaping holes in his skin present for all the (under)world to see. His skin was black, burnt, and putrid around the entry points, curling backwards like a flower. The wound in his chest was clean. His heart – now long since liquefied – had been cut in half by the first bullet: the kill shot. It was the second shot that had been the mess maker. It had come from a much higher angle, and had blasted Bobby’s malnourished body open, spilling his insides onto the debris covered ground. His dying moments had been spent holding his intestines and various other unidentifiable organs in his arms, cradling them like a father holding a newborn child. He had tried vainly to push them all back inside, as if that would somehow take care of the problem. Now, over half a century later, they still hung from the open wound. They dropped out of the festering wound in shriveled strands, black and wet with rot. They had a putrescent odor emanated from within the black festering gash in the young man’s body. Graham watched as a sea of maggots began to spew from the wound, flowing out on an ocean of pus; an abscess beneath the surface had swelled and ruptured, and now it boiled over, looking a lot like oatmeal. The beasts clung to the dead meat, desperate not to surrender their bounty, yet many fell of the floor, where they lay blind; some found their way back home, crawling up the booted feet, beginning their ascent towards their own decaying paradise. Bobby didn’t seem to notice.

When Graham’s body settled, leaving his throat raw and blood staining his teeth, Graham continued. “No, not getting shot, but dying. Did it hurt?” Graham asked again. It was a question he had been wondering about ever since they told him the cancer had spread and that the best they could do now was manage the pain. He had assumed that it would, simply because living hadn’t exactly been pain free for him. He had cursed God every night since his beloved Marjorie had died. He would close his eyes, clench his hands and lower his head. “Dear God,” he would begin. “Thank you for making me suffer so. Thank you for leaving me alone. Now it’s your turn, so just fuck off and leave me be. Amen.” These would be his favorite words; short and sweet, the use of any more would – or so he felt – make the gesture seem empty, lacking a little bit of substance.

“No, it doesn’t hurt, Sarge. You need to come with me; you won’t make it to her...”

Graham’s eyes sprang open.

“Marjorie, you won’t make it to her; there’s something coming. You need to come with me; the boys are waiting for you, Sarge.”

“What – how do you? No, I can’t, Bobby. I’ve got to find her. She’s waiting for me, I know she is,” Graham said, his voice wavering. He could sense how close he was to the end.

“She is,” Bobby answered him. “But you can’t get to her. The roads are blocked, Sarge; there’s no way anyone can get through.” He said each word carefully, as if there were some important message behind them.

“It’s so cold, Bobby.” He stammered at the end. Graham looked at it hands; his fingers had turned blue, as if he had been out walking in winter without gloves. He watched as the delicate shade spread onto the palm of his hand.

He looked up at Bobby. “Do you have a smoke for a dying man?” he asked.

“Sure thing, Sarge.” Bobby didn’t move, yet before Graham could realize it Bobby stood beside the bed, holding a lit match to his mouth. A cigarette rested between his lips.

Graham took a drag; a long, sweet, choking drag. The taste he recognized well. It was, in fact, unforgettable... Chesterfields: the cigarettes that started his lifelong love affair. He hadn’t smoked until he got to Europe, but after a few days of just being close to the war he had started puffing like a locomotive and had never stopped. Cut down, sure, but never stopped. Chesterfields had been his favorite, although as is the case with war, trades were needed in order to keep your morale up, and so he had smoked Capstan Full Strength on the odd occasion. That was a real party; his head would swoon for hours after a single one of those. How ironic, he thought to himself, that the brand of smokes that had started it all would also be the brand of smokes that would end it. Yet despite his long time love affair with smokes and strong spirits, it was neither the drink nor the smokes that had caused the cancer.

“These really were something, hey?” Graham smiled as best he could; his body had begun to slip away from him. His hands were completely blue. He looked like a Smurf.

“Yeah, they won’t hurt your throat,” Bobby offered, deadpan as ever. “Or something like that anyway. There were so many taglines around I get ‘em all confused.”

Graham took another drag. “What’s it like, Bobby?” he asked after a while.

The kid looked at him, his eyes showing a glisten of emotion – or was it just moisture from the decay that had spread through his body? “I don’t know, Sarge. We’re all still there. None of us came home. We’re all still here, standing around this fucking church. It just never comes to an end, Sarge. I don’t think any of us knew why until recently. It’s you; until you come back then it can never end... we hope.” The last sentence was whispered, near inaudible.

“They call these cancer sticks, did you know that?” Graham chuckled to himself, offering a bit of modern wisdom to the kid.

“Cancer, these things gave you that?” Bobby asked in disbelief.

“No, that’s the funny thing, kid. I smoked my whole life, drank whiskey straight up, nothing more than a lump of ice to help guide it down – and yet my lungs and liver are the two bits of me that ain’t completely dead with it.” He gasped as he spoke, a gargled rattling sound. The room began to spin, his head felt light, as if he had been strapped to a wheel and left to spin for a few hours before being cut loose. It wasn’t the Chesterfield, but something much more permanent.

“Come with me, Sarge, please. Something is coming, don’t you hear it?” Bobby asked. Once again his dead eyes gazed at Graham, and now appeared to be pleading to him.

Graham was about to say no, when outside of his window the world lit up: an explosion ripped through everything. Brick and mortar dust fell from the walls, filling the room with a thick grey cloud. “We’re all here for you, Sarge. Just come with us. Can’t you feel it? There’s something coming,” Bobby pleaded above the din, for in the background came the rattle of automatic gunfire. Graham looked through the dust and saw a large hole in the wall, and on the other side a tank – or rather the barrel of one peering through the building’s gash like one of the Tripod eyes in War of the Worlds. Graham didn’t need to see any more to know who it was behind the controls. Besides, he could hear them all calling him, beckoning him and cheering him on like friends and family waiting at the finishing line of a marathon.

“You coming, Sarge?” Bobby asked, and as Graham looked over at him he saw Bobby as more of a ghost than a figure; he could make out the shadow of the door through him

“No, kid, I’m heading home to my wife,” he answered. It was the same answer he had given all those years ago when the war ended. He had done well in the forces and they had been all too keen to have him stay on, as an officer on the path to greatness, one rather poetic solider said from his risky position behind a desk back home in the United States. Again, just as the last time he had used the line, Graham knew that his wife would be waiting to take him someplace else, or at least he hoped, his resolve in the final minutes seeming to weaken.

“Good luck, sir,” Bobby answered, his shadow disappearing just as the familiar buzzing sound of an incoming air attack began to shake Graham’s bones. Bobby was gone in an instant, leaving Graham once again alone in the small cell that had been his world for far too long.

“Come on, you son of a bitch. Come and get me,” he called aloud to the room, challenging God to come and claim him with the same finality that he had used on all of Graham’s friends and loved ones over the years.

It started; he could feel it. The pain was gone; not just numbed or forced into temporary hiding from the chemical concoction of pills had had to swallow several times a day, but completely gone. For the first time he could remember, Graham was pain free. It started in his feet. It felt like smoke snaking its way through his body. He breathed a heavy sigh, for death had arrived to take him home, to those he cared for, and oh how he planned to have a few choice words with the man upstairs if ever he got the chance. He raised his head and looked down at his feet. They were completely numb, and to his eyes they were gone: everything below his knees had just been erased.

As a final thought, before he turned his attention to his wife, two words formed on his lips. “Forgive me,” Graham whispered to the room, talking to Bobby, his men still out there, somewhere, to the Germans he had killed or helped to kill, to his wife, to God – just in case. He wasn’t sure why he said it, but with nobody around to hear any real final words, he figured they would have to do.

Death finally took him. Graham’s heart stopped beating, an instant moment, no wearing down as often described in old age: it simply ceased. Calm washed over him. His lungs cramped, his brain drained itself of information, and as a smile passed over his face, Graham closed his eyes and let the darkness envelop him.

As he slipped away, all thoughts of the war were gone, eradicated. He was in his own garden, standing looking at the house that he and his wife had purchased not long after he came back from Europe. A new career, a new house, new state... a new start. They had lived in the house until the end, tended its two gardens for as long as was possible, planting flowers each season to keep it cared for, but now Graham stood out the back, knee deep in weeds, the only flowers were the dandelions and thistles that seemed to rule the roost. The house was dark; several windows were broken.

~

The mind is its own place, and in itself
can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

John Milton

Paradise Lost

~

CHAPTER 2

I

Marcus: An Old Friend Returns

Marcus woke with a jolt. He was surrounded by darkness, shrouded in it. He tried to move but couldn’t. He was restrained.

“Hello?” he called out, his voice strained and distant. Sounding like the final repetition of an echo before it fades away.

His mind was a blank; he couldn’t remember anything. A few images fluttered in his mind; a woman holding a baby – his wife? The idea sprang into his mind and connected with the picture. The baby was his first daughter. Marcus remembered the day; the entire labor had taken five hours, which everybody told them was incredible for a first baby. Then, like the memories of a drunken night out, various events that surrounded his demise filtered back into his conscious mind. He remembered the shopping arcade. The woman and the man; it was still hazy. He couldn’t remember what had happened. Only that he had fallen – tripped? Marcus didn’t think so. He could hear a baby crying, constant and at a tone which suggested more than a simply case of hunger or a dirty nappy.

Marcus was hot. Sweat covered his body and soaked his clothes. He tried to move, but only managed to pull his bonds tighter, forcing his body against the wall behind him. It felt like rock, sharp and unforgiving. Marcus steadied himself and managed to work his bonds a little looser, when a cramp hit his left leg. Just behind the knee a knot of pain exploded. It felt as though his knee was going to twist right off. The lack of visual stimuli coupled with the solitude of his dark world made it seem worse than it was, or so Marcus told himself over and over, repeating it like a mantra. He tried to focus his attention to the external situation instead. Something had been placed over his head. It wasn’t dark: his face was simply covered.

Have they taken me somewhere?

“What happened?” Marcus asked aloud. His thoughts stumbled around like a drunk on Friday night.

His body ached. That dull rusty ache you get while fighting off the flu. His joints swollen with fluid, the skin stretched taut over them.

Marcus heard something moving. He felt it, no... not it, but them. Something crawled over the exposed skin of his forearms. Something tickled his scalp beneath the mask. Marcus threw his head around as panic started to tighten its grip on him.

“Get off me!” Marcus called out. The light cancelling cloth that covered his head stuck to his mouth like surround wrap clinging to warm leftovers before you put them in the fridge.

He felt a breeze against his chest, and Marcus became startlingly aware of his nudity. Something slid down his chest, descending like a lover’s kiss, caressing his skin to just below his navel.

Marcus’s stomach felt as if it were on fire.

That was when it came back to him. The darkness lit up and Marcus was back in the shopping arcade. A small crowd of elderly people and a handful of store employees had gathered. Marcus looked at them, their faces pale, mouths motionless circles, like unwanted fish left on a boat’s deck to rot in the sun.

The scene changed again, another flash of light; Marcus was on the floor; his hands were raised before his eyes. They were covered in blood. Another snapshot. Standing again, he saw a man and a woman –
God, she looks like a whore,
– arguing. The scene changed again. Marcus now looked down on it. He saw his own body surrounded by a pool of blood. Not far away lay a woman –
My God, she looks like a whore
. She was bleeding. Her face was also missing: someone had crushed it. What remained was a bubbling bloody mess. Her body twitched, and beneath her was a child. Marcus could see its arms flying around in blind, panicked movements. He also saw bloody footprints leading away from them all, the stride getting longer with each print as whoever it was picked up the pace of their escape. Another flash, this one followed by darkness.