Yes, he decided, he could taste Heron’s life stuff blended with his own. He became aware that he was rubbing at the wound just at his hairline. At that moment, realizing that he was fingering the bullet hole, realizing he was tasting Heron’s blood, another realization came to him, not as a possibility but as stark naked fact.
Heron’s shots had been close, but none had fully struck him. Belfast dropped his hands to his coat, rummaging through its folds until he poked a finger through a hole that wasn’t made for a button. Lifting his T-shirt, he saw blood oozing from a raw furrow across the outside of his chest, on the left, where a slug had skated along a rib. Heron was no trigger; he had never shot a man before. But Drake had. Drake had stooped down to expertly aim in at their victim’s head. And it was a ball of OO buckshot that had caromed from Heron’s exploded skull, up and out the driver’s window to bury itself in Belfast’s skull. He knew this. It was as though his fingers could feel the shape of that deeply buried ball of lead, like a dark pearl folded in the tender oyster of his brain. It was as if those tissues could taste the projectile, and tell its origin. It had been a miracle that Heron’s several panicked shots had all but missed him at that range. It had been another miracle that a magic bullet had passed through Heron’s brain and into that of the man hired to kill him.
The light changed, the car jumped into movement, Belfast’s head was slung back against the seat by the lurch. He turned arctic eyes on his friend’s tense profile. Drake had been trying to save his ass, but the idiot had fired with him just behind their victim. Belfast was too dazed, too numbed to be enraged. Staring at his friend, his eyes bright in a dark mask of blood, he felt…irritated? Bitter? He felt, most of all, disoriented…
Staring made his head hurt. He closed his eyes. Maybe he should sleep. Maybe he should die.
3: TERROR INCOGNITA
When again he opened his eyes, their lashes heavy with gummed blood, Belfast saw it was snowing. The sky just above the city glowed with its pink night haze like radioactivity, but beyond that where the heavens turned black they were swarming with glowing flakes. Yet the more Belfast gazed on this churning blizzard, the more he doubted his interpretation. It wasn’t only that it was April, but, in looking down at the street, he saw no snow on the ground. It wasn’t even raining any longer.
He decided it was his head wound, making faint lights swim behind his eyes, showing up better against the dark. Against black, specifically; he saw nothing, really, in the shadows of the car, but against his coat, dyed the actual color black, he observed the phenomenon with increasing clarity. Only, against the sky the lights were tiny, distant. Against his coat, the lights were large and close, if no brighter.
First, they mesmerized him. Then, as he watched them, he began to feel fear. He had been too stunned by the wound to feel concern before. The reality of his wounding had become unreal. But this phenomenon, which had to be unreality, had engaged his emotion.
Against his black sleeves, he saw rags of membrane sailing past, tumbling, tatters of ectoplasmic tissue floating in a black sea. One of these vague phantasms swam nearer to him, seemed to gaze at him from his sleeve as if it were pressing its face to a narrow window. For it was a face, he realized, this close up. Indistinct, a rough sketch; blurred smudges of dark eye sockets, a mouth gaping and yawning and working soundlessly like that of a fish sucking air from water. Then the face ducked down out of sight. On his other sleeve, another face had been peering at him, but darted away when discovered, trailing its ragged, ethereal vestments.
“Oh God…oh God.” Belfast clamped his hands over his eyes.
“What is it?” Drake asked, startled, turning to look at him. Belfast uncovered his eyes. Saw the driver’s face. The driver’s pupils were black, black as obsidian, and in them, swirling soft lights like fireflies in summer grass. Or will-o’-the-wisps, in cemetery grass.
“What?” Drake asked again.
The shotgun rested between them. Belfast scooped it up, worked the slide (clack-clack), pressed the truncated barrel under Drake’s jaw and hollowed his head out like a jack-o’-lantern, which softly caved in on itself. Drake thumped against the door, and Belfast reached across to the wheel. The car swerved off the street, up onto the sidewalk, but Belfast steered quickly and Drake’s foot had come off the gas. Belfast was able to work his left leg over the dead man’s to press the brake, and nuzzled up to the curve.
“You did this to me,” Belfast told the corpse, his own voice drowned out by the ringing aftershock of the twelve gauge.
He pushed the second headless man he had seen this night out into the street, scooted over to sit in the puddle on the driver’s side, wiped the windshield with his arm, and put the car in motion again. While he drove, he tried not to look at his sleeves. But above the city, the sky still seethed as if with volcanic ash.
4: REMAINS TO BE SEEN
He left the car a block from his apartment in the suburbs of the city. Large old houses with trees and scraps of yard between them, once the domiciles of the wealthy, now tenements for minorities and cheap housing for students at the college nearby. He didn’t like abandoning the vehicle this close to home, but had no choice; walking just a block so covered in blood was a great risk. Fortunately, Drake had left his baseball cap in the car, and Belfast clamped that over his head after wiping his face as best he could with Drake’s jacket. At least the car belonged to Drake, and not him. He walked to his building without incident. Belfast felt surprisingly well for a man who had been shot in the head; he did not stagger or trudge, but walked briskly and silently. Even the pain in his head was bearable, no worse than one of his hangovers. Trees rustled dreamily in the night breeze. He glanced at his watch to see that it was one o’clock in the morning. A week night, so things were quiet. A car drove by him with rap music booming, the sound forcing his heart to beat in sync briefly, but continued on into the night. Belfast walked with his head lowered to obscure his face…and so that he wouldn’t see the sky. He felt small and vulnerable, exposed under its vastness. All those billowing ghosts.
Inside at last, and he mounted the stairs to his second floor apartment. Somehow, though, he had lost his apartment key. He had done this before, however, and so he kept a spare hidden in a crack in the hall baseboard; dug it out. At last, he let himself into his apartment, locking the door behind him.
He tried to minimize his noise as he put on the kitchen light, then moved into the bathroom. He mustn’t wake Sheila, who had to work in the morning. He thought it was funny, being considerate about that. Never mind that he didn’t want her to come out and see her new husband with a bullet hole in his scalp.
In the bathroom mirror he examined the damage. The wound was clotted, remarkably didn’t even bleed any more. His hair was thickly matted, his face a smear. He should shower before Sheila saw him like this, but was afraid to unplug the wound. He stuck a band-aid over it. Again, he considered his actions amusing—until he noticed his eyes in the mirror, saw little phosphorescent fish swimming in them, and got out of the claustrophobic room.
In the kitchen, he opened a beer. He should call Doc Cool over here. Sheila would want him to go to the hospital, but he couldn’t take that chance. He seemed to be doing well enough. Except for the…hallucinations. No, Sheila didn’t even know that he was a criminal. A hired killer. Mass murderer. She would wake up to a whole new life. He wanted to spare her that horror as long as he could. She wouldn’t stay with him, and why should she? No, he was not anxious to wake her up to lose her. Let her sleep in peace a short while longer. Let him have the peace of her sleeping here a short while longer. The end of a dream.