The Lost and the Damned (36 page)

“I stopped his father from beating him. I changed the past, or at least Max’s past. I changed who he was, so it changes who he becomes. No more trauma, no more painful beating. Now he grows up to be a fine upstanding individual. We’re done here. Crisis averted.” I moved back to enjoying my Katie-hug.

“You did what?” shouted Merill.

I lifted my head and looked at him.

“You stopped that beating? You helped him avoid it?” asked Merill, his eyes wide.

I looked at him, complete confused. Katie and I both pulled apart.

“You defended him?” asked Merill, his voice even more incredulous. His voice even more concerned.

“I can’t believe you did that,” Merill said.

I began to notice that it was suddenly brighter in the room, something beyond flickering lights. I looked over and saw a golden glow in the middle of the crowd.

“Why did you help him?” Merill asked, sounding defeated now.

The golden glow was definitely growing brighter.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

Inside the crowd, a golden glowing form stood up. There were multiple noises – the sound of metal hitting flesh, the squeal and screams of the innocent, blood spraying. Five members of the crowd fell over, blood spilling from their bodies, knives sticking from their bodies.

An unearthly choir started singing, their voices seemingly coming from nowhere.

“You’ve doomed us all,” said Merill.

Seventeen

TRANSCRIPT: OBSERVATION ROOM 5. PATIENT 457. ATTENDING PHYSICIAN: DR. MERILL (CONTINUED)

PATIENT: There was one person who was supposed to protect me. He was supposed to be there for me. But he was the source of the biggest betrayal. The first betrayal.

DOCTOR: And who was that?

PATIENT: My father of course.

DOCTOR: Let’s talk about that betrayal.

PATIENT: What’s there to say? He nearly beat me to death. The state put him in prison and put me in the hospital, and my life has been downhill since then. I still wake up in the middle of the night, afraid he’s going to come through the door and grab me.

DOCTOR: And you feel he is to blame for everything in your life?

PATIENT: Yes, completely. I see him when I close my eyes at night.

DOCTOR: And you don’t feel that in any way your father might have had a reason for his anger?

PATIENT: You think he was justified in his actions? I was an innocent. I came home from school and he wanted to talk to me. Then he yelled at me and he beat me. I’m an innocent.

DOCTOR: Don’t you feel like you are avoiding some context for your father’s actions? Don’t you feel like you are leaving out important details?

PATIENT: I don’t understand what you’re getting at.

DOCTOR: Max, you killed and mutilated your own mother, stashing her body in the boiler room of your apartment building.

PATIENT: I have no idea of what you’re talking about.

DOCTOR: You had a history of violence that went unchecked. You preyed upon all the animals in your apartment building, skinning them and hanging them in that boiler room. Then when it wasn’t enough, you moved onto your mother.

PATIENT: That’s not true!

DOCTOR: It is true, Max. It is true.

PATIENT: So what if it is true?

DOCTOR: Don’t you feel some sort of remorse? That you should receive some sort of punishment?

PATIENT: No.

DOCTOR: No? Why not?

PATIENT: Do you expect a god to be responsible for his actions? Do you expect a god to feel remorse?

DOCTOR: You’re a god now?

PATIENT: More than you know, more than you know.

He stood over the pile of bodies, his body glowing with a golden radiance. A stronger light shined from behind his head like a halo in stained glass. His face was calm, beatific. His eyes were gently closed. I would almost believe he was a saint or an angel, if he didn’t stand over a pile of bleeding bodies.

It was Max, but it was so much more than Max.

He smiled and stretched, his eyes still closed. As he stretched, his knives gently pulled themselves out of the bodies in front of him and twisted around him like leaves in a breeze. Each came to rest around him, twelve knives pointing in all directions like rays of light. His smile widened and his eyes opened.

 “It’s good to be free,” he said. With a mere flick of his wrist, a knife shot out and stabbed into the body of a cowering patient in front of him. The knife slowly lifted the patient up into the air, the body reaching eye level in front of Max. They patient moaned and bled, but Max simply looked over his handiwork, nodding approvingly. Then he just slightly turned his head and the body was tossed to the side against the wall, the knife resuming its place in his array.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Yes,” said Merill. “We’re doomed.”

I turned to him. “I thought it would help him. I thought his father just fucked him up.”

“His father was the one thing that kept him in line,” explained Merill. “His father deeply wounded his mind, causing him to fear authority and the pain it would bring. Those nurses just reinforced that. But they weren’t the cause of his psychosis.”

“What caused it? What causes a man to be homicidal?”

“Nothing caused it,” said Merill flatly. “He’s always been violent. He killed his own mother. No trigger, no cause.”

“What?” I said.

“What a fucked up kid,” said Katie, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her face was pale and her voice was weak.

Max slowly scanned the room and then stepped forward. “Ah, Mr. Keats. I wanted to thank you for your kind service. You played your part perfectly.”

“How do you know my name?” I asked. I had told my real name only to Katie. Max at one point thought I was a doctor. Merill even gave me a look, now knowing my real name.

“Really, do you think me so unaware?” he said, his voice arrogant. “I’ve known everything about you since you entered my mind.”

“What’s wrong with you?” I said with disgust.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Everything is right. Very right.” He sighed, turning his head. His eyes fell upon another patient, one that I knew. It was the young man who had stared at me with angry eyes in the patient wing. That familiarity did not save him. Max merely flicked his wrist and knives nailed the young man against the wall, blood spurting and staining the floor the floor. The young man’s eyes went dead and his jaw slack. Max flicked his wrist back and the knives returned to him. Max turned his head back to us, challenge in his eyes.

I couldn’t take it anymore. There was no response besides action to that. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my gun. Without hesitation I aimed it at Max.

“Take this, you son of a bitch!” I growled, pulling the trigger.

Nothing.

I pulled the trigger again.

Nothing.

Again.

Nothing.

“Dammit!” I said.

Max laughed. “You think you can kill a god? You have helped give birth to a new god, a new divinity. I dub myself a deity, blood and knives my aspects. Think of me as the God of Knives. The Greeks would call me that.”

I wanted to say that this was a stupid name, a horrible title, and not even a good album title, but his eyes were full of anger and the knives just a wrist flick away. Instead, I targeted my next response at Katie and Merill instead.

“Run!”

I turned around quickly, grabbing Katie’s arm and pulling her with me. We ran for the double doors, hoping that we took Max by surprise. I got to the door, pushing Katie through the sole working door as I looked back. I forgot that Merill had a limp and saw him struggling to hobble away from danger. Max smiled as he watched Merill attempt to escape. I made two steps toward Merill to grab him before I found it was too late. Max nodded slightly and a knife drove through Merill’s working leg, the point of the knife sticking out of the front of his thigh.

Merill hit the ground hard. He tried to lift himself but another knife punctured his lower back. His face looked up at me, our eyes locking. His eyes were sad. There was an understanding that passed between us. He knew he was about to die and that no rescue was coming. There was nothing I could do for him, his wounds were too serious and Max too close. We both knew it.

He croaked, “Leave me, save yourself!” but we both knew he didn’t really mean it. He didn’t really want to give his life to help us, but he had no choice. He knew he would die here, regardless of what he wanted. He spoke heroically, saying he would distract Max only because he knew he could not avoid it.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to him, as I turned around and ran through the door, already feeling the weight of regret.

I caught up to Katie in a damp, dark hallway which felt like another bridge between wings. She gave me a funny look and asked about Merill, but I just shook my head and started running. The pain on my face was enough of an answer for her.

We passed through another set of double doors, these barely on our hinges. One of them fell to the ground in our wake, but we kept running. A sign on the wall identified this as Wing F. This wing was different from the others. Whereas the others were renovated (before the recent destruction), this wing was in disrepair. All along the hallway, the doorways were boarded up. Old, splintering wood held each door closed. We stopped to catch our breath. I looked at the ground. It was covered in dust, but that dust had been disturbed. I saw multiple footsteps and some streaks that I guessed to be wheels. A gurney, maybe?

Behind us I heard the screech of a door, probably in the corridor between the buildings. “John?” called a familiar voice, “Kate? Where are you? Your god commands your presence.”

I looked at Katie, our eyes both wide with fear. She mouthed, “Max.” I nodded and we ran. This wing was based on a single main corridor. We ran, looking for a place to hide, but all the doors were boarded up. As we ran, I considered grabbing one of the boards and yanking it, so that we could get into one of these rooms. But I wondered what that would gain us – a dusty room with broken furniture? Besides, the wood fragments and the disturbed dust would tip Max off to what room we were in, so we’d need some way to board it up from the other side. Hell, I wasn’t sure a boarded up door would stop him at this point.

“What are we going to do?” panted Katie, jogging beside me.

“Need… someplace to… hide,” I panted back. So much running had my muscles aching.

The hallway leaned left and we followed around this bend, screeching to a halt at a pair of double doors. I couldn’t stop in time because I skidded on the dust, so I turned sideways, ramming my shoulder at the doors. I suffered excruciating pain as I met complete resistance and bounced off the door, falling to the ground.

“Locked?” asked Katie.

I glared up at her. “I think my shoulder is dislocated,” I said as I got back to my feet.

“What are we going to do?” asked Katie.

“I don’t know,” I said, genuinely lost. I could hear Max’s voice far off but coming closer. I hated myself for not having an idea. We had come so far and run so long, only to find ourselves stymied by a locked door, the result the same as if we had never struggled.

I kicked and banged on the door. “Dammit!”

“That’s your cunning plan?” asked Katie. “Hit the door? I thought that’s what you originally did when you rammed it with your shoulder. Obviously it didn’t work the first time.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not exactly helping either,” I snapped back.

Katie slouched against the door, pouting. I knew I should say I was sorry, I knew I should say something, but at the moment I just had other things on my mind, other concerns. For example: we were really screwed right now.

Let me tell you, under the right circumstances, there is no more beautiful music than the sound of a door being unlocked.

Katie stepped away from the door and stood with me, staring at the door as its bolts were undone, wondering what was on the other side. We knew we had near certain death behind us, what was lurking behind the door as an alternative?

The locks were unbolted and one of the doors slowly opened just a crack. A familiar face looked out of the crack. It was the female patient I had seen before, her dark hair covering her face, her eyes just barely visible. I think I could see just a faint smile as she looked at me. This was just for a second, then she disappeared, her presence only marked by the receding sound of quick footsteps.

“Friend of yours?” asked Katie.

“Is that jealousy I hear in your voice?” I responded.

“You wish,” she said. “You know some strange people.”

“It got the door open, didn’t?” I said, pushing the door further open. “Let’s just get on the other side of this door and lock it.”

Katie stepped in after me and I got to work locking and barring the many locks on the door. Why there were so many well-cared for locks on a door in a ruined and disused area of the hospital crossed my mind, but it was answered when I turned around.

It was a wide room with white circular walls. Strange markings had been drawn on the walls with paint. A few standing incense burners circled the center of the room, but none of them were lit. Two had been knocked over, spilling ash and incense on the ground. In the center of the room stood a table covered with a blue cloth. On it sat a large book that Katie was stepping toward.

I looked around and saw debris all over the ground. I think there were more markings on the floor, but I couldn’t confirm with the rubble. It was strange, I could feel wind inside the room. It was faint, but noticeable. I scanned the walls, but the room had no windows. I found myself looking at the ceiling, and that’s where I found the problem. The ceiling was high to begin with, but circumstances had conspired to make it much higher. Sky high. A huge hole had been blown in the ceiling, opening it up to the night sky. It looked to be almost a perfect circle, the sides sheared away. There was a fair amount of rubble on the ground, but not nearly enough to make up the mass that would have been at the hole. The hole was immediately above the center of the room, a twenty foot radius with the table at its center, but there was no rubble in that area.