CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I slept badly and dreamed of monsters.
It was the kind of sleep where you know you’re dreaming but you can’t wake up. Sleep paralysis of a kind, but it feels worse than that. It feels wrong. As if the force that binds you into sleep is malicious, maybe even vampiric. It’s feeding on something, some essence that’s important to you. It’s taking it against your will, and the violation is so subtle, so devious that you know that when you wake you’ll be diminished but you’ll never be able to prove the cause to anyone.
My body lay wrapped in the coils of some dark and shadowy thing, and it pulled me down into dreams. Fragments of dreams. Flash images. Parts of memories of things I’ve actually done, things I’ve seen in my waking life, but intercut with images from remembered nightmares and hallucinations.
I was fourteen and I never saw the punch that dropped me.
Sucker punch. There was a massive black explosion in the back of my head and then I was down. I would later learn that the blow cracked my skull. The resulting concussion was not the worst of it. Not by a mile. Not by a million miles.
Nor were the bones that snapped as four sets of sneakered feet kicked and stomped and broke me. Nor even the damage to kidney and liver and testicles and spleen. Not the broken jaw or broken teeth. None of that really mattered. What mattered — what hurt the most and what never healed — was what I saw. My eyes were swollen nearly shut, but not all the way. No. That would have been a mercy. Being beaten to death would have been a mercy. But there was no mercy at all in that shaded, remote corner of the park where I’d been walking with Helen. Two kids. Still virgins. Still innocent. Still optimistic and na ïve enough to think the world was a place that treasured the innocent.
I lay there and watched them beat Helen. That wasn’t the worst, either. I could hear the sounds of her clothes being torn. I could hear the sound of zippers being pulled down. I heard her muffled screams as she tried to shriek her outrage through the balled-up underwear they’d shoved into her mouth.
That was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Even though it wasn’t happening to me. Lying there, broken and bleeding but not dead. Knowing that I wasn’t going to die. Knowing that neither of us was going to die. Despite being killed like this.
Yeah. That was the worst.
Then it was later. Being stopped by her sister at the front door. Being told that Helen didn’t want to see me. Not anymore.
This was years later. After surgeries. After therapy. After being told that there was nothing the cops could do. No witnesses. No DNA on file that matched anyone.
Cathy stopped me from going in. “It’s killing her, Joe,” she told me.
“You don’t understand,” I insisted. “Things are going good now. The new medicine, the therapy…”
She had a look in her eyes like someone at a funeral. The eyes of a mourner who had already accepted the reality of death.
“She can’t stand to see you anymore, Joe. It’s killing her.”
This time I heard her. This time I got it. This time I felt the knife go deep and turn. Bleeding, I turned and left.
It was then that I felt the first fracture in my head. It was then that I knew that I was so far gone that there was never going to be a way home. Not for Helen. Not for me.
And that morphed into… Me in the dojo, kneeling, my hands aching, bleeding. My eyes filled with sweat and tears while I watched my sensei apply compresses to the face of the kid with whom I’d been sparring. My friend Dino. So much blood on the floor where he’d fallen.
Eyes looking at me. Not understanding. Hating me. Disappointed in me. Afraid of me. Sensei cutting me a look that was filled with pain and conflict. We’d only been sparring. It wasn’t a real fight. Points only.
But the light coming through the windows had changed his face into someone else’s. An older teenage face I’d seen in a park, grinning at me as he huffed and thrust and ruined something perfect.
I don’t remember the actual fight with Dino. It wasn’t me who hit him and hurt him. I know that. It was someone else inside my head. A stranger. Brutal and vicious and efficient in his cruelty.
Then later. Weeks, months, years telescoped together.
Learning about the people in my head. Thirty-four of them at one point. Not schizophrenia. Not true multiple personality disorder. Something else. A unique madness that was mine to own.
Rudy Sanchez came into my life. The memory of him was a light in the darkness of those dreams. Steady Rudy. Smart and kind Rudy. Doctor to Helen, doctor to me. Friend. Helping me hunt down the people in my head. Killing some, banishing others. Making hard deals with the ones who were left.
The Civilized Man. The tattered remnant of who I might have become if the world had not dealt those wicked cards.
The Cop. The person I was evolving into. Cool and precise, taking the discipline of martial arts and the analytical qualities of an investigator. Giving me a solid piece of ground on which to stand. Saving me.
And the Warrior. Or, as he prefers to be known, the Killer. The savage who had brutalized my friend Dino. The hunter who wanted to find those four teenagers — grown men by now — and hurt them in ugly ways. But who, denied that, was always ready to go to war under a black flag against anyone who hurt people like Helen.
There were other moments like that. None of them good. Staring into my mother’s eyes as she slipped over the edge of life and fell into the big black. That precise moment when, even through the cancer and the drugs, she found a moment of clarity and knew — knew — that she was dying. In that moment. Right then. The mixture of hope, regret, and doubt was unbearable. Hope that there would be something waiting. Regret that she was leaving her sons and her husband. Doubt that the fall would just go on and on and on.
And the day Cathy called me to say that she hadn’t been able to get in touch with Helen. Cathy asking me to go to Helen’s apartment. Me going. At Helen’s door. Smelling what there was to smell. Kicking the door in. Finding Helen days too late. Seeing the empty bottle of drain cleaner by her bloated hand.
Later still, holding Major Grace Courtland in my arms, inhaling her last breath as the assassin’s bullet took her away from me. Feeling her begin to cool; believing in the moment that it was the black ice in my heart that was stealing away her heat.
On and on, all through the night.
Fighting monsters. The walkers created by the Seif al Din pathogen. Genetically engineered soldiers deep in the dark of a military research lab. Being hunted by genetic freaks beneath the Dragon Factory. Looking into the eyes of berserkers. Facing the Red Knights and their bloody appetites.
And on and on. Year after year.