“It’s summer vacation, we’re at an endless beach!” he said with dramatic optimism.
All I could wonder was where the water was.
We had crawled from the belly of the flaming metal beast, the only two survivors. We looked back over our shoulders now as tiny pieces of shrapnel and corrugated iron flew up against the pale blue sky and fell, thudding loudly as they scattered across the sand. The explosion was loud and echoed toward the yellow horizon, but fell short of attracting any sort of help.
“You know it’s my birthday today right?” said my companion, not even shaken up a little.
My mind was elsewhere. I was focusing more on the salty throb of my wounds and the stink of our blood as the sun cooked it into our sweaty skin. My hands were still shaking. I shoved them into my pockets, expecting to find little white pills. I pulled them out quickly, as if their absence somehow bruised me.
“I was actually on my way over to France to spend my birthday on the beach with my wife” He continued. “But I guess that isn’t going to happen now.” He laughed. I glared at him in an emotion I wasn’t quite sure of; jealousy, anger, annoyance?
“So what’s your name?”
“Johnny” I grunted.
“My name’s David, David Rafferty.”
We shook hands, congealed blood on congealed blood. His touch somehow sent me into bloody desire, a wish to do harm, to shed my human skin and wreak havoc.
I shivered, clutching my arms around my sides.
It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me
The cold sweat leaked over my face. I reached into my pockets again out of habit. I swore loudly when I returned with empty hands.
“Are you okay Johnny?”
I looked at him. He flinched. I wondered what he’d seen in my eyes. I tried to smile.
“Just a little shaken up . . . nothing more nothing less.” Why weren’t you shaken up?
“Understandable, our flight to Paris did just crash into the Sahara desert, killing everyone except you and me.” He looked to me forlornly. “You didn’t have any family on there . . . being so young, it’d be scary to travel alone”
I ground my teeth together. If there wasn’t anything I hated more it was condescending adults.
“I’m Fourteen. I was flying alone.”
“Oh really! Wow!”
My fingers crept toward the knife in my back pocket.
The perfect knife in his chest, his blood on my hands, glistening in the Sahara sun
“Johnny?”
I snapped out of my hallucination . . . so real . . . so satisfying . . .
“What?”
“I just asked why you were going to France . . .”
Would I tell him the truth?
“There’s a good rehabilitation clinic over there.I’m flying myself over to find help for my disorder. . .” It wasn’t a complete lie.
“Oh . . .That’s a shame . . . so young . . . what are you addicted to?” The blunt assuming statement assured me of the type of life David Rafferty endeavoured to lead. His tattered suit and the mottled scent of his cologne told me he was a good church going fellow, sworn to live his life by what the media and his wife’s book club told him was correct. He seemed to stumble under the weight of his heavy American accent, and the ache of his wish to live the American dream.
“Nothing. I just have depression” I lied again, eyeing the ugly tie around his glistening neck. These observations somehow seemed to justify my decision not to trust David Rafferty. I couldn’t ever explain it in words. There was just something about his, arrogant aura, the way his mouth peeled back over his gums every time he smiled, and the hot caress of his breath against my cold skin that made me want to wade through seas of blood. The way he seemed so . . .Happy . . . Yes, he was happy the plane had crashed! He was happy all those people had died . . . He should die . . .
No.
No! It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me that wanted to do that, it was never me . . . my vision, fading . . .
My eyes peeled open revealing the foggy film of the doctor’s room. The cold steel of the operating table jerked me to life. I pulled forward forcefully, but found myself constricted, my head clanking as it connected with the table once again. The film over my eyes disappeared, and suddenly I could make sense of my surroundings; my arms and legs were bound in tan leather straps, the grey brick walls of the room . . . the wet ooze on the bricks glistening, sinister in the fluorescent light, shining bright on my pale naked body.
“Help!” I screamed, waiting for my mind to return to a more coherent state.
A memory fluttered from the back of my mind, a gentle butterfly of mercy. It was an image of white walls and tight constricting jackets, squares, lethargic feet shuffling past my room with deliberate routine.
The men in blue came into my room and injected me with the yellow sleeping potion, they dragged me screaming and frothing at the mouth . . .
“The hospital for healing minds,” I whispered, my breath a white opaque ghost in front of my face.
The ghosts danced in front of my eyes as I looked toward the door at the far corner of the room. Threatening voices echoed, the silhouette of a man with broad shoulders, wearing a hat . . .
a light came on , revealing the wide expanse of a window. The pallid faces of men peered toward me, their long noses pressing up against the glass. Most of them wore khaki, with gold and purple badges decorating their torsos, like shiny grinning stars. One wore nothing but a white coat and a green cap. He held up a devise for injecting magic liquids as he spoke to one of the decorated men.
“No! HELP!” I thrashed around, feckless against my constricting adversary. The ghosts danced fast and relentless now in front of my face, my bare chest heaving in time with the beat of the imaginary music, my heart a relentless staccato. The murmur of the men reached my ears, a terrible and horrifying melody. “ The drug will hopefully boost every human sensory function he possesses to super – human ability. His concentration, his strength, his conviction –“
“By conviction I assume you mean his homicidal tendencies,”
The man in white laughed lightly.
“Imagine a whole army of super humans, hell bent on destroying their enemy.”
“ . . . What’s to stop him from destroying his fellow men then?”
The white man held up a tiny white bottle. Everything was white . . . pure, pristine. Was this a place for cleansing? A purgatory perhaps?
“These pills control where the rage is directed. . . . So long as he’s taking these, he’ll be able to control who he releases his rage upon.”
“What if it fails . . .”
“We’re in a middle of a war Sargent . . . we can spare one more life for the lives of many.”
They talked for insurmountable time . . . their lips smacking together, their spit forming gelatinous strings on their dry chapped lips . . .
“HELP!” I screamed until my throat was raw and bloody, my eyes streaming with tears. The door at the far corner of the room opened. The man in white entered, a grin on his face, a wide uneven grin .
“DON’T PLEASE!”
“Please Johnny” he said coolly, “You won’t, feel a thing. Just, relax . . . ”
The devise penetrated my skin, fire flowing under this cold surface of ice. It spread throughout my body, to my eyes, colouring my vision red, swaying the room like a horrifying dream.
I tore from my constrictions, my hand over the man in white’s face. This wasn’t me . . . He yelped as I crushed his skull, his jaw hung loosely from his face, his teeth scattered like sand, crushed under my feet. . . it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me. . . my vision locked in on the other decorated men . . . their sinew and guts on my fists as I beat them to pulps of men, nothing but lumps of white, and shiny bloody metal. . . it couldn’t be me! It wasn’t me! My vision red . . . my vision . . . fading . . .
“All I remember is red . . .” my voice was a hoarse whisper, my fingers clutching the empty pill bottle in my pocket. I was red before the plane had ever crashed. “What was that Johnny?” David Rafferty’s voice reached me from the hole he was digging. He was looking for water, or shelter . . . but the only thing I saw for him in there was a shallow sandy grave.
The sun was setting on my day of madness; the chill of the desert shook my bones and made the sweat on my brow iced. “Nothing” I answered . . . my fingertips gripped the edge of my sanity, my nails gnawed and bleeding. Who was I? But that wasn’t me. . . Those urges . . . twenty seven per cent of the world has homicidal tendencies, the rest are just victims . . .
I clutched at my sweaty black hair, clawing down the side of my skull. I was trapped inside myself, trapped inside and someone had lit a fire. I clawed harder at my skin, trying to free myself. What was I without this human covering? A boy filled with too many thoughts, too many words. They spilt over my forearms and ears, red ink, stagnant uneven sentences that didn’t make any sense. Black when I tried to think blue. Red when I wanted to see white.
“Jesus Christ Johnny!” I looked up to see David Rafferty, his eyes wide on my eyes, crazed, unbelieving that they had once held the innocence of a child. He looked at my arms, leaking the words and words and words that brimmed and tangled together intelligibly in my mind.
My mouth stretched into an involuntary grin. Things were starting to become a lot clearer . . .
“In medieval times they’d put boxes filled with rats on people’s heads . . . then they’d light one end on fire . . .” I looked down at the flesh and blood under my nails, the words gushing from my arms and skull.
gushing and gushing and –
“The only way the rats could escape the fire was through the victim’s skull . . . can you imagine that? Can you just imagine the horror you would feel?!” I was standing now, screaming at David Rafferty.
“L-listen, boy, Jesus doesn’t want this for us - “
“Boy? Jesus? You still think I am merely a boy?! You think this has anything to do with religion?! David Rafferty? I was born without innocence! I was born like this! What kind of god would allow that? ”
I fell to my knees, the husk of a child swallowed inside me. I wasn’t sure what I was. Man? Boy? Beast?
Had I always been like this? I couldn't remember anymore, how I used to be.
David Rafferty didn’t speak as I screamed, my torn voice echoing throughout the forsaken land.
I looked at him, my jaw hung slack, my mouth drier than the sand moving against my wounds.
He stood ankle deep in his own grave . . . slowly swallowing him and his fear . . . I could smell it, rolling off him in shiny drops, winking at me, coaxing me forward . . .
Go on Johnny, you know who you are, this is you, go on . . .
“Now, Johnny, I think you need to calm down. It is a bit overwhelming what has happened to us, but I really think you need to keep a level head! These things happen! Just, relax”
My vision burned red. “Relax?” I hissed.
“It all makes sense now . . .”
The man dressed in white stood before me, I recognized his face, that uneven grin!
“It’s you isn’t it? The one who did this to me!”
“What? I have no idea –“
“You made the plane crash! You killed all those innocent people!”
“Johnny I didn’t do anything! You’re INSANE!”
I pulled the knife from my back pocket “ I wondered why you were so . . .happy. Why you were so optimistic. You somehow cheated death didn’t you? Made a deal with the devil! You think you have me, don’t you? You think you’re going to do more of your sick little experiments on me, DON’T YOU?!”
“Get away from me!”
“Get away? GET AWAY?! I don’t even know where I am!”
I leaped on him, my metallic claw sunk into the man in white’s neck. The corners of my vision burned a fiery silhouette. The white man became red as I gouged and gouged the pound of flesh for which I was owed. For the innocence never bestowed. It gushed and splattered and sunk into the sand, his head hung limply, shredded and meaty. I breathed in the stench of his death. The stench of my insanity.
I threw the knife down beside me, a winking metallic friend. My only friend.
My chest heaved, I could almost envisage the ghosts, dancing in front of my face, twirling merrily in the sand. I laughed once, relief flooding my mottled mind. I could finally see white instead of red, think blue instead of black. It was like wading through an azure pond that had once held the tar bodies of innocence.
I looked to the puddle of red that was once a man, laying in the grave that David Rafferty had dug.
Where was David Rafferty?
Realisation crept over my spine. I was cold, too cold for someone stranded in the desert.
“No, no!” I looked down at the dead man, his cheap cologne poignant, mixing with the iron scent of blood. Someone was laughing, lightly. I could feel him, I could sense the white man.
“Where are you! Show yourself!”
The whir of a monster came from overhead, giant silver birds. I collapsed into the ground, wishing it would swallow me whole, wishing I’d disappear inside myself, into the dark gelatinous pond.
The white man climbed out from inside the giant bird, perched in the sand not far from me. There it was in his hand, the device for inserting magic liquids. The yellow sleeping potion. “No. . . No”
I clasped my only friend in my hand, his sharp edge slicing the tips of my fingers. I held his face steady against my wrist . The words tangled inside of me fell once more, the hell I’d been keeping inside me, finally released. I was freed as I fell inside myself, swallowed by the sea of black, crushed under the weight of the magic liquids. The mystery of my identity never revealed.
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