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“ Do you want to know what happens when a man kills his soul?
Nothing.
By the time he decides to pull the trigger, he can’t feel a thing.”
The City in the Sea
“ Where am I?”
“ The city,” whispered the Old Man, his breath rolling over me like rancid whiskey. His grizzled eyes were wide with terror, rolling around in their skeleton sockets like white marbles. Blood soaked his shaggy beard, streaming down the white scruffles of his hair, trickling from his nose, oozing from his lips.
“ What city?” I spoke the words, aloof, but my fingers were one step ahead of my brain, checking my aching body for the telltale wounds that may have killed me.
The Old Man was dying. I could smell the blood flushing out of the holes in his limbs. I didn’t need to see beneath those tattered black shawls to know how little was left of him. There couldn’t be much—not by the looks of that bloody water winding out of his cloak like the black river Styx.
That stench. I could smell every part of his dying throes—the sweet metallic aroma of blood, the gangrene of his lungs, the disease devouring his liver, the sour spoilage of his stomach ulcers, the piss trickling down his legs, and the fear; the rancid fear in his breath that surpassed everything else.
I’d never had a weak stomach, but fear like that can ruin even the fiercest gut. The stench of terror—sickening, like lead poison in my veins—overwhelmed all of my senses. I was filthy from it.
The Old Man’s fingers wrapped tightly around my wrist. His grey eyes were wandering in the moonlight. The eyes of a raving maniac.
It was the horror that held me there. I needed to know his fear. I needed to know it so that I could destroy it.
“ What city, Old Man?” I asked again, a little more fiercely.
He covered his mouth with one beggarly hand and began to laugh. His body convulsed from wave after wave of jarring laughter. The sound of his dying mirth was sacrilegious to my ears, like the music of an executioner’s grinding stone.
“ The city,” he sang, child-like. “ The city…in the sea…”
“ What the hell are you talking about? How did I get here?”
My sense of touch had turned to ice. I could feel nothing, not even my own claws tearing at my body. I may as well have been looting another corpse, fishing out a wallet for cash, or a license for confirmation. Both were important in my line of work: money, and proof of the deed.
“ Lo! Death has reared himself a throne,” rambled the Old Man, his voice suddenly loud and lucid, like a terrible Prophet calling down the Final Judgment. “In a strange city lying all alone, far down within the Dim west…”
“ Stop it.”
When I spoke, it was with the rugged edge of Texas. All of my years in the west were in my voice—three decades of murder in the towering Rockies, in the windswept bluffs of California, in the sunny graveyard of Texas. Thirty years of hired killings in the shadows of Vegas.
“ Far down within the Dim west…” he moaned. “ Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best...have gone-”
“ Shut up,” I growled.
His jaw was gulping for air. “ –have gone, gone, gone, gone to their rest. To their rest. In the city in the sea.”
“ Shut up!”
“ Gone, gone, to their rest, in the city. The city in the sea. In the sea.”
Ice-fingered spiders of horror were racing up my back, burrowing into my spine with their electric pincers. His fear was infecting me, curling my stomach into an iron ball, burning the back of my throat with bile.
“ Gone to their rest—all of them!” he was screaming now—when had he started screaming? The desperation in his words spread in a toxic cloud, and I could see it, the putrid green vapor of death.
“ Gone, gone, gone, GONE!”
My fingers scratched the hard steel of the gun in my belt. In one swift move, I unfastened the piece, tucked it under the Old Man’s chattering lips, and fired a shot into his head.
I had found his fear, and I had destroyed it.
Maybe I am in Hell.
Something wasn’t right with that picture, either. For one thing, the streets were empty. Now, I may have not lived the life of an apostle, but I had known and worked with dozens of men who had purchased a one-way ticket to Eternity Damned. They weren’t here, any of them, but the Old Man had been here, and I’d never seen him before in my life. I had killed him, too, hadn’t I?
Then there was the matter of my gun. When I had left Le Fantun Café, I had been carrying this piece like always, hadn’t I? Didn’t I have it with me on that dark street outside the Café? In the bank, I had certainly had it with me.
You can’t remember.
“ Can’t remember anything,” I said aloud. My voice bounced down the empty street, crashing into doors and iron shutters, slipping into the dark sewers, swallowed by the night as an unwelcome gift.
There’s no moonlight.
I was struck by this thought immediately. The sky was luminous, but not with the milky gleam of the moon. Instead, the clouds billowed and rippled like the translucent waves of a green sea. The sky was a charcoaled hue of green which spoke of a raw, carnal despair, the kind of which I had not seen in fifty years of black night.
There was something seductive and terrible in these heavens. A man could lose himself in the depths of this malachite sky, lusting for the flesh of that green goddess, the emerald mistress of night. Her light was beautiful, truly—as beautiful as it was damning.
“ No rays from the holy heaven come down on the long night-time of that town…”
From the darkness of a nearby alley came these words, rhythmic and soft. I could see nothing in the inky gloom of the alley, but I dreaded the darkness there. Better to be alone on the street, in the lurid light of the sea, than to be wandering blind and deaf where the things of the darkness lived.
“ The lurid light of the sea,” I repeated, and the words echoed over and over, washing against the walls of the town like gentle waves.
The city in the sea, said the Old Man. All are lost.
“ Where the hell am I?”
Suddenly I could smell the salty air in the ocean breeze, but it was not the crisp wind from the Pacific. Nor was it the warm caress of the Gulf of Mexico; nor the arctic chill of the harbors of Maine.
No—this ocean stunk of garbage, like Manhattan’s sewers. Beneath it all was that unforgettable smell of decomposing flesh. It brought back memories—the face of the man in the desert, the fat Italian tourist, whose body had putrefied the trunk of my car on the outskirts of Vegas. I had never thought that heat could work him over that quickly, but when I had opened that trunk, I had learned otherwise. .
That had been a messy job. A disgusting, messy job.
But that’s what the smell of this town reminds me of.
Where the hell is everyone?
I couldn’t deal with the emptiness, the bleak desolation that made this world into a desert. I valued people only in the sense that they represented normalcy and a functioning order. Without people, there was no order. Without people, there was only despair.
I thought about screaming, but the sound of my own voice terrified me. Worse, I knew that I would get no response.
Was I getting nervous? Were my palms sweating against the steel of the gun? Was that frantically clawing animal in my chest supposed to be my heart? Was I losing my goddamn mind?
Cool it, I ordered my body.
“ Resignedly beneath the sky, the melancholy waters lie…” the sea sang to me.
“ So blend the turrets and shadows there, that all seem pendulous from the air,” I murmured, my eyes half-closed. A blanket of warmth was coiling around my head; I was delving into its comforting embrace…
Then I heard the crashing of waves. Each came with its own oceanic drum, the eternal beating of the sea, except the shattering of the waves was thunderous and shrill, like the staccato hailstorm of gunfire.
I could see the policeman wheeling around the corner, his shotgun trained on me. I saw his eyes take in the hostage in my arms; saw the hesitation, the panic; saw the fear before I squeezed four rounds into his chest, the last one dodging the Kevlar and finding the beautiful, pulsing artery in his neck. I could hear gunshots, deafening roars, coming every three seconds, like waves. Like waves. Like goddamn waves.
My eyes fluttered open, and my heart sank deep into its cave. I was still in the green-dawn of my nightmare.
Only this time, my body was on fire with pain.
I couldn’t pinpoint the agony; it seemed to emanate from every nerve in my being. My blood was boiling, my back was breaking, my head was exploding, flames were dancing down my arms and legs. My lungs were being squeezed shut with a pair of pliers.
“ Oh God, stop!” I screamed, crumbling into the fetal position. “ Stop! Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop!”
I could see every person I had ever killed. It came like a slideshow, like a living slideshow, and I could see myself pulling the trigger over and over, and each time I did, the pain exploded, like I was the one getting shot. I could see their faces, their shouting, their begging, their dying gasps.
“ Look what you’ve done,” said a familiar voice.
I craned my neck from the ground, gazing through blurry eyes at the figure that was approaching. My brother—Jamie.
“ Look what you’ve become,” Jamie said, his voice hardening with hatred..
“ It doesn’t matter!” I snarled. “ None of it matters, bro. Whether they died now, then, or in a hundred years, it doesn’t matter. It would have happened, eventually.”
Jamie came to a halt ten paces away; his face was caught in the shadows, but I could recognize his posture, his skinny body, his sonorous voice.
“ Many have pretended to be Death, but there will only ever be one.” His words dug in like knives. “ He will judge you worse than others.”
“ No, Jamie,” I pleaded. “ Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t…don’t talk like that. We’re brothers, aren’t we?”
My pain was receding quickly, replaced by that sweeping, mind-consuming fear.
“ You were never my brother,” Jamie said, cold and distant. “ You let me die, Hayden. You shot me.”
“ No, no!” I said. “ It wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t kill you. Damien shot you. I owed him money, and he shot you.”
“ You shot me,” Jamie repeated. “ You pulled the trigger.”
“ No…” I whispered, but in my mind, I could see it all happening.
Jamie was staggering back against the wall, blood pouring from his chest. His jaw was working wildly, chomping at air, his eyes roaming aimlessly. He couldn’t hear any of my screams, my curses at Damien. He couldn’t see me as I struggled against the men holding me down. He couldn’t see anything at all, because he was dead, shot like a clay pigeon, and he had done nothing to deserve it—nothing more than being my flesh and blood.
Twelve years ago.
Now, there was only the cacophony of the waves, the rumbling of the jade-hazed heavens, and the maddening silence of the town.
“ Where are we?” I asked, nearly choking on my words, drowning in my torment.
Jamie titled his head back into the shadows, first to look at the sky, then to look at the streets around him. He cocked his head back at me, and when he spoke, it was not Jamie’s voice, but rather, the voice of the Old Man.
“ The city in the sea.”
“ What is that?” I stammered. “ What city?”
“ Lo, pity the man who thinks himself Death, for he will learn in all humility that he is nothing more than dust on the Reaper’s scythe.”
“ Jamie! Where are we?” I began to crawl backwards, retreating from the looming specter of my dead brother.
Jamie was swelling in the shadows, his figure losing its edge into the rustling of a cloak. I could hear the rattle of bones and the dry cackle of death hissing from the pores in his clothes. His eyes became pits of flaming red brimstone, his arm arching up, up, up, until it began to curve into the blade of a scythe.
“ Jamie, I’m your brother!” I screamed. “ Your brother! Your brother!”
I jerked up the gun that was glued to my hand. I didn’t think twice about pulling the trigger.
Ten bullets—I fired them straight into the monstrosity in front of me. I saw it shudder from each impact; I relished in the painful gasp from its lips. Then it was toppling forward, falling like God from heaven...
What fell into the light of the street was the bleeding, shuddering body of my little brother.
“ Hayden…?” he asked weakly, all the ferocity and judgment gone from his voice. “ Hayden? Why?” his voice became softer, fainter. “ You… again?”
There was nothing ghostly about him now, nothing shadowy or monstrous. He was the little brother I had always known. He was the same Jamie I had grown up with, the same Jamie I had protected, both as a kid and as an adult. He was the same Jamie who used to look up to me, who used to trust me.
“ Oh, oh no, God,” I whispered, staggering over. I fell to me knees, cradling his head in my arms, my tears spilling onto his smooth cheeks. My eyes took in the effects of my handiwork, the gunfire that had ravaged the life out of my brother. Horror and self-loathing filled me, buried by waves of regret.
“ I’m sorry, Jamie,” I said. “ I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.”
He couldn’t bear to look at me. With superhuman effort, he turned his head away and, gazing out into the darkness of the city, he went limp in my arms.
“ Jamie-”
His body immediately began to melt into soggy dust, like wet sand.
Disgusted, horrified, numbed, I backed away from the remains of my brother and wiped my hands on my jeans. My mind was a blank slate. The only thought that crept into my head was that of the sea, the relentless waters that encompassed this town.
I had to find it. I had to find the sea.
So I began running. All sounds of my shoes pounding the pavement were swallowed whole by the night. I was trapped in a silent motion picture, like some seedy film strip at Paradise Features or The Sin Bin. I could hear nothing except the rusty machinery of my lungs, sucking in air like a robot. My breathing was the sharp panting of a wild beast running blind through the dark woods. It was inhuman.
The town unfolded before me in all of its melancholic glory. As I careened out onto one of the main streets—emerging from the back-alley gloom of before—I was engulfed in the horrible grandeur of Hell’s Babylon.
Kingly turrets rose up to the sky like ancient swords amid a labyrinth of white-washed palace walls. Hanging gardens and empty terraces jutted from every part of this mammoth city. The doors of homes were concealed along the cobbled roads, hidden in darkness, all connected to the palace, to the terrible castle of Atlantis. Green light spilled down from the heavens, crawling up the domes and spires, up the ivy-coated statues and flowering tombs that pockmarked the face of the city.
One tower rose above all other. Its stone walls were blackened and rounded, as if forged in flame, and they extended upwards, solid and unbroken, until they touched the swirling green heavens.
This tower called to me. It beckoned my gaze upwards, so that my feet began to slow, and my lungs lessoned their cries, and my eyes came into focus.
For there, leaning against the parapets of the tallest tower in town, the phantom Death leered down at me. His tattered cloaks rippled in the angry wind, trailing out into the night like smoky fumes. And his scythe, held firm in his bony hand, caught the passionate green moonlight in its blade, so that it seemed to be filled with the evil fire of the night.
“ While from the proud tower in the town,” I whispered, trembling in horror, “Death looks gigantically down.”
The specter’s eyes were red—even from this distance, they bore deep into my soul. I felt my innards being ripped free from their chains, and then I was plunging headfirst through the air, flying wildly up towards the Tower. My mouth opened into a scream as the shadow of Death stood upright to greet me, arms outstretched, with the hollow darkness of his breast yawning like an open grave.
I was powerless as I flew towards him; powerless as I sped up the sooty walls of the Tower, faster and faster, until I thought the wind would peel the skin from my bones. I was powerless as I rushed up towards Death, towards those blazing eyes, towards damnation; powerless as I fell into those yearning flames…
The hostage wasn’t cooperating with me anymore. She began to kick and claw. I couldn’t control her anymore; she was ruining my aim. I screamed at her to stand still, but she wouldn’t listen. Police were barging into the bank. A cop appeared on the parapet behind me, but I was faster, and I shot up at him until he was forced to cover.
The hostage was resisting, still. I pointed my piece at the bitch's thigh and shot her. She went bat-shit crazy, started clawing for my gun, for my eyes. More police were coming; I could hear their shouting. I panicked. I cracked the butt of my gun against her head, dropping her to the ground like a ship’s anchor. She was dizzy, confused, her red hair in disarray; the pictures of her kids had fallen out of her wallet. I pointed my gun at her, filled with murderous rage, and fired twice into her head.
I was hovering over her body, over the bank floor, and the whole world was suspended in a groggy haze. My limbs were trapped in molasses; I hung in the air like a fly in a spider’s web. My eyes were locked onto her body, riveted on all that blood and skull around her head.
She stood up, slowly. Half of her jaw was missing, but she could still grin. With that maddening smile, she looked at me. The hole in her mouth made dry, gulping noises.
“ My children,” she rattled, the dryness of the desert in her voice. “ My children…oh, oh my children…Mommy’s coming…Mommy’s coming home…”
With slow, jerking steps, she began to drag herself towards me. Her body twisted and cracked in every direction, as if she had forgotten how to work her limbs. One bloody claw stretched out towards me, ripping at the air…
My screams resonated from deep within my soul. So complete was my horror that I felt as if I was sinking in an icy black sea, cold enough to be nauseating, dark enough to rival the yearning gates of Hell’s abyss. My hands frantically pumped through the water—I couldn’t breathe. The blackness was filling my lungs. I could see nothing more than the inky water that wrapped around me.
The burning in my lungs intensified. Where the hell was the surface? Why couldn’t I move?
Something was dragging me down—a bony hand, clamped around my ankle, weighing me down like a ton of bricks. I dug my heel into my captor’s hand, trying to rip it free. I couldn’t see the thing that was holding me down, not in the blackness of the water, but I dreaded knowing what was truly there.
I was free.
I was swimming madly upwards, my head whirling like a carousel. I wanted only air, air, air!
Then the world began to shake, violently, and the water boiled and bubbled around me. Spears of blistering heat pierced my flesh, like steaming hot jets of lava. From deep, deep below, a crimson red patchwork appeared on the bed of the sea, glowing in zigzags as far as the eye could see. The earthquake lines widened more and more, opening like gaping wounds, spilling out the blood of the earth.
In one magnificent flash of light, the entire ocean floor became translucent. To my utter horror, all I could see where bodies floating everywhere, interspersed at every twenty yards. There were young women, old men, and small children. Their hair drifted up in a cloud, trailing after their bloated, pasty bodies.
I broke the surface, tearing through the sharp ice like a wild animal. Shivering, gasping, weeping, I dragged my body onto the frozen sheets. I cut my hands, my thighs, and my hips, but I could hardly feel the pain. All I could do was gaze at the entrancing skies, wanting to lose myself in those emerald depths.
What’s happening?
A low, pulsing moan resonated from deep below. Then came the sound of ice cracking—except it sounded sharper, like glass.
“ Glass,” I whispered.
I spun around, my hand pressing firmly against the surface beneath me. Ice? This wasn’t ice.
I was lying on a massive sheet of glass which stretched far off into the horizon. Two hundred yards to the west was the harbor of an island town—a place I knew and dreaded all too much.
The City in the Sea.
From far away came the sound of glass breaking, getting louder and louder as the chaos approached. Through the ragged holes in the distance, I could see dark, squiggling forms worming their way out of the water.
A chilling breeze cut down from the steeples of the city, and with it drifted the haunting voice of Death:
“ There open fanes and gaping grave yawn level with the luminous waves…”
I began to run towards the town, towards my only hope. I slipped on the slickness, smashing my face into the ground, wincing as the slivers of glass spliced open my forehead and my lips. The taste of my own salty blood trickling down my throat made me sick.
“ But not the riches there that lie, in each idol’s diamond eye—not the gaily jeweled dead tempt the waters from their bed…”
Glass split beneath my feet. I could see the writhing monstrosities of the sea, separated from me by mere inches of glass, their palms flattened against the water’s ceiling, with wild and hungry eyes and jaws full of gnashing razor teeth.
“ Oh my God,” I moaned. “ What the hell is—”
I fell again, my hip cleaving open on a jutting shard of glass.
“ For no ripples curl, alas! Along that wilderness of glass—no swellings tell that winds may be upon some far-off happier sea…”
The hands of the dead were coming up through the glass, clutching at my torn pants. My shouts were coarse and rugged, their gusto lostfrom the exhaustion of constant terror. I beat the beasts away with every part of my body. I pounded them back under the glass, back into the icy waters—but they were trying to pull me down with them.
I saw the face of a young cop—a man that I had killed during a job in Brooklyn. He looked at me with those sharp, cunning eyes for a moment, mockingly, before he sank his jaws into the tender meat of my calf.
“ Son of a bitch!” I screamed.
I kicked at him with every ounce of strength in my strong leg, but he clung on like a bulldog, his mouth clamped like a vise. I could see my own mortality running down his throat, spilling down his chin. He was lapping it up greedily.
With one superhuman heave, I snapped back his head, using a well-aimed blow to the forehead. He took a chunk of my leg in his teeth, but I was free, and I could scramble backwards, away from the gaping hole. Hand-over-foot, I stumbled and staggered my way back to the harbor.
Death, in the meantime, continued to narrate the horror from his proud Tower in town.
“ No heavings hint that winds have been-”
I was almost there, almost to safety. Graves fell open all around me as far as I could see, and the glossy surface of the sea was shattering, becoming liquid again. Waves came lapping up to the heavens, spilling the secrets of the sea to the world above.
“…on seas less hideously serene…”
I could barely walk straight with my crippled leg, but I was only thirty yards away from the rotten wood of the city’s pier. At this point, my entire focus revolved around getting off this slipshod, glassy pitfall.
A deafening roar knocked me off my feet—headfirst towards the pier. It was a sound as terrible as the Trumpets of God, heralding the End of Days. It was the sound of the Apocalypse.
I twisted my head around, my body freezing in total disbelief at the sight that was rapidly approaching. On the horizon, a tidal wave was streaming towards me. The water was black, and in its turning depths were the bodies of the water. Mountains of rolling, broken glass were rising towards the clouds, flying wildly from the crest of the wave.
From the floor of the sea to the very tip of the clouds, the wave was all-mighty, all-powerful, and all-consuming. It devoured absolutely everything in its path.
And it moved quickly—so very quickly.
Way too fucking quickly.
I scrambled across the last sheet of glass, clawed my way onto the pier, and began to run as fast as I could for the high ground of the city. To ascend from the pier, I had to run up a long, winding path embedded into a rocky cliff. Up top, I would have a chance of surviving the wave.
Like an animal, I scaled the mountain pass. The shale was loose beneath my wet feet. Dirt and rock ripped at my fingernails; the downward breeze jerked at my shirt. It was as if the city was holding me back, keeping me out.
I passed around a craggy tree, a twisted, pathetic spectacle that accentuated a sharp turn on the path. The surface of the city lingered only twenty yards further up.
Then I was weightless, falling in a landslide of rock and dirt, screaming like a madman as the entire path caved out beneath me. My hands frantically groped the air—they latched on to the withered bark of the craggy tree.
Suspended in midair, my legs flailing wildly, I watched as the titanic mountain of water and glass rumbled across the sea, towards me.
“ Oh God, no, no, no, no. Help! Someone help me!”
My cries came as pitiful laments. They were useless. Everything I did in this damn town was useless!
It was obvious to me now that I was trapped in a vicious cycle of nightmares. I was the main player in the Devil’s theater, and the roar of the sea was Satan’s symphony, and this whole town was Lucifer’s playground, and all of Hell, every fucking piece of it, was nothing more than a reflection of my sins, a flashback to my eternal shortcomings, a reminder of all of that innocent blood that would never wash from my hands.
Goddamnit it all! The money had been good, but I had never liked it. I had never enjoyed it. Didn’t that count for anything?
Without warning, the angry hand of God seemed to slap me from beneath, ripping me clear away from the tree. I tumbled up through the air, all of the wind sucked out of my lungs, spinning like a ragdoll.
I landed on the asphalt—and felt every inch of it. My blood-crusted fingers scrambled for a purchase, and once they dug into the street, I dragged my dizzy head upwards. Somewhere behind me was the End of the All Things, approaching as surely as the Wrath of God—and with it would come the finale to this act. It would be the curtain-call for my miserable life; the end of one lustful and violent era and the beginning of a darker one.
Jesus Christ, I was terrified. I had never believed in Hell—that had been my loophole out of “the system.” But now, faced with my inner demons, I was so filled with loathing and despair that I was choking even to breathe.
“…now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
There were three of them, up in the window—two boys and a girl. No more than six or seven years old. Their sweet, angelic voices mingled together and rose above the howl of the wind, the rumbling of the clouds, the roar of the sea.
They wore tattered, burnt rags, but their faces were clean and pitiful and sad—the kind of wide-eyed sadness and longing that young children should never have to know. And there they knelt, up in the window of a pretty little apartment whose number read “701 Brigham.”
“ If I should die before I wake,” the children whispered, “ I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
I heard every word. Down here on the street, I heard each earnest part of that prayer as if it was happening right beside me.
“ No…” my heart plummeted.
“ Now I lay me down to sleep,” they said again, quietly.
My voice had disappeared in a raspy cry: “Get out…”
“…I pray the Lord my soul to keep…”
I couldn’t force my limbs to move. I was frozen to that street, and all I could do was watch with mounting horror, shuddering from the déjà vu.
701 Brigham.
“ Get out!” I shouted, hoarsely. “ Get out! Get out!” Tears streamed down my battered face. “ Get out, please!”
“ If I should die before I wake…”
“ Get out! Oh, God, oh God. Get out! Please, get out of there!”
“ I pray the Lord-”
“ NO!”
“-my soul to take.”
With one violent, tremendous upheaval of earth and sky, the entire apartment exploded into flames. Every window blew out in a storm of glass and fire. Bricks and mortar rained down from the heavens, along with burning pieces of furniture, carpet, and doors. Black smoke dumped out in enormous clouds, darkening the lust-soaked skies.
I didn't say a thing.
“ Back the fuck off!” I screamed back.
My arm was wrapped in a vise around the kid’s neck, smothering him like I would a little puppy. His piss-soaked pants rubbed up against my leg every time I swung him around, using him like a Plexiglas shield.
“ Look at all those guns, kid,” I whispered to him. “ You’re in the lion’s den now, Daniel. No way out unless God Himself decides to lend a hand.”
The kid was nothing but a feather in my arm, crying and shivering. That’s all that stood between me and eternal damnation—a single feather.
“ Hayden,” said the lieutenant.
“ You pray a lot, kid?” I asked the trembling ball in my arms.
“ Hayden, listen to me!”
“ Well, kid?” I continued. “ Did your Mommy teach you how to talk to the angels?”
I could feel him nod.
“ Wow,” I said. “ Wow. Good for you, kid. Good for you.”
“ Hayden, just listen to me!”
The cavalry had arrived. I looked at them—swarming around the bank in their black uniforms like so many beetles and cockroaches. All those guns, all that firepower, all those choppers and armored cars and flashing lights: all of it was for me.
“ There’s nothing glorious about this, kid,” I said. “ See the cameras and the policemen and those people over there? They’re all here to watch me die. Like the days of the Coliseum all over again.”
The lieutenant was at it again. Trying to play the negotiator. His eyes were on fire—my God, were they blazing! They had the kind of passion, the kind of anger that you only see once in your lifetime, if you’re lucky. It was the starkest, most primal rage that any mortal man can have. It was a look of utter desperation.
I pressed the gun up against the kid’s head. I had no other choice—not with the snipers in position. They knew that I had killed the lady in the bank, and that I had murdered three of their officers. They weren’t going to take me alive, but if I kept the trigger half-squeezed against the kid’s temple, they wouldn’t risk taking me out. Not when a knee-jerk reaction on my part would blow the kid’s brains out.
“ NO, HAYDEN!” the lieutenant was frantic. “ Please! Don’t do this! Not the kid—let him go! Enough, Hayden!”
I looked up at the night sky and all of those twinkling little stars that were hidden behind the spotlights and helicopters. And when I spoke, it was to the kid, but my mind was detaching itself from my body—the way it did when I needed to finish a job, when I needed to pull a trigger or watch a bomb explode. There was no way my mind could remain a part of my body during those act—not if it didn’t want to shatter like glass.
“ Kid,” I said, loud enough for only him and God to hear. “ I want you to go find your mommy-”
“ HAYDEN!”
“- and I want you to go home tonight and pray.”
“ HAYDEN!”
“ Pray for me, kid.”
I let him go.
Death’s tower was a cold and hollow place, and it was here I stood to watch to end of all things.
I could barely feel the ice crawling through my veins anymore, but I knew it was still there. I could feel it ripping me apart from within, bleeding me out inside, where no one could see. I was dying slowly, like I had been dying for the past ten years. Every damn day, I had been dying.
The huge stone slabs beneath my feet were rumbling and pulsing in anticipation of the tidal wave.
Here it comes.
I had never heard water scream before—but I heard it now. Sure as the sky is blue, I could hear the monstrous cries of the tidal behemoth, its jaws yearning up towards the heavens as it devoured the world.
That’s it, I thought. That’s the gate to Hell. Maybe I’m not there yet.
The ocean’s titan crashed into the western cliff of the city, launching chunks of earth and water up in muddy streams that were swallowed by its gaping mouth. Layers of the city were blasted skywards with dynamite ferocity, blasting up walls of rock and rubble. Piece after piece of the vacant urban world disappeared into the frosted depths of the boiling sea, that lustrous, frothing ocean of ice, glass, and moonlight.
As if the towers had thrust aside, in slightly sinking, the dull tide…
On my knees now. Holding on to the cold stone parapet of the Tower. Marveling at the blast of wind in my face—the trumpet blast to herald the destruction of Man. Oh, here come the angels.
Whose angels are they?
Then the wave crashed into the Tower, and the symphonies of Hell reached their crescendo, their thundering cannonade. I was still dry, well above the crest of the wave, but the Tower was shuddering, and my hands were numb, and my lungs were burning, and my heart—well, my heart had withered and died.
I would never feel its rhythm in my soul again. Everything that had once pulsed and warmed me had been replaced by the rumbling of the wave and the groaning of the city, the sound of a world being swallowed by the sea.
I waited for the Tower to explode like every other goddamn piece of mortar and stone in this town. I waited for the ground to lift beneath me, to pitch me head over heels towards those puffy clouds of toxins. I waited for gravity to plunge me down a hundred feet into those frothy waves.
Those frothy, furious waves. Those waves. In them were the impatient demons of my past.
Tears were running down my cheek. I hung on as hard as I could, clinging to that slab of limestone as if my eternal life depended on it—which it certainly did. My face was buried in the cold and comfortless shoulder of the tower. I could no longer hear my own sobbing over the roar of Hades’ fury.
“ The waves now have a redder glow…”
The voice resonated from deep within me, echoing across the hollow chambers of my mind.
“ Stop!” I screamed.
“ The hours are breathing faint and low…”
Death had come back to his tower. I could feel his presence on my back, colder than the ice and glass that numbed and bled my soul over the precipice. I could smell him back there, lingering with the metallic reek of the Old Man.
“ Hayden,” he whispered
I pried my face away from the stone, and all I could see outwards were mountains of rolling waves—everything boiling red. Even the sky had taken on a crimson hue, turning the sea into a tableau of blood and fiery glass. Nothing remained of the town.
How could there be nothing left behind? How could the whole world have been swallowed up without a single protest?
Pray for me, kid.
I turned around and gazed through bloodshot eyes at the Old Man, who stood behind me like a ludicrous scarecrow in the black robes of Death. Those sunken eyes stared right into me, vacantly, but the mouth was curled back into a chilling grin. His teeth were decaying and blood-washed by the same phlegm which had fought its way out of his dying lungs. He reeked of shit and blood.
His voice came with unexpectedly ferocity. “ Don’t look so surprised, you damn fool.”
My voice.
“ You’re what’s left…?” I asked.
“ All that’s left of your soul,” he replied, parting those withered lips to let my voice out.
“ A dying old man,” he said.
“ Does it hurt?”
“ Worse than anything you can imagine,” he said. “ Do you know what it’s like decay? Do you what it’s like to fall apart like rotten wood? Every day, another piece of me blackens and dies. It’s relentless pain, the kind that only gets worse with time.”
My fingers scratched the hard steel of the gun in my belt. In one swift move, I unfastened the piece, tucked it under the Old Man’s chattering lips, and fired a shot into his head.
“ I put a bullet in your head.”
He laughed. “ And? Do you think that’s going to kill me? Goddamnit, Hayden, you’ve been trying to murder me for years, you dumb bastard. The only problem is that you can’t bury me—or your fucking conscience.”
There he was. My brother, Jamie, dressed like in the same shawls as my Dying Soul. His face was pale.
Jamie was swelling in the shadows, his figure losing its edge into the rustling of a cloak. I could hear the rattle of bones and the dry cackle of death hissing from the pores in his clothes.
“ Jamie…”
“ Don’t,” he said. “ I’m sick of hearing it, your excuses, your rationalizations, all of it.”
He had my gun in his hand, and he was looking at me with those listless grey eyes, and I knew what he was going to do.
“ No!”
Four shots in rapid succession. I slammed into the stone ledge, myburning back grating against the jagged rock, my legs foreign and useless beneath me. I sank down to the wet floor, my chest caving in on itself, as if someone had forced balloons with razorblades into my gut and popped them in rapid succession.
I could see the policeman wheeling around the corner, his shotgun trained on me. I fired four shots, the last one missing his Kevlar and blowing wide his jugular.
I could feel his pain. I was choking, dying.
“ Let the kid go!” the lieutenant screamed.
“ Back the fuck off!” I screamed back.
“ Now do you see, Hayden?” said my Soul. “ Now do you see?”
The tower was shaking violently. Ahead of me, my brother stood like a statue, the gun in his hand, and to my left was the decaying corpse of my soul, and all around us splashed the icy, glassy foam of waves, their strength multiplying and crashing in crescendo, spraying red sheets of blood beneath the melancholic and unholy red sky.
“ Pray for me, kid.”
Then came the storm of gunfire, the ripping of lead through chunks of flesh, and the end of all that I knew.
“ It’s all gone,” I said. “ The town, the city, all of it.”
Jamie’s lips were moving, but the voice which I heard did not come from him—it came from the heavens, singing down in waves: “ And when, amid no earthly moans, down, down the town shall settle hence…”
“ Just end it,” I said. “ I can’t do this anymore.”
“ If I should die before I wake,” the children whispered, “ I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
With one violent, tremendous upheaval of earth and sky, the entire apartment exploded into flames, right in front of me, right in front of my eyes.
“ End it,” I cried.
The dark chill of death wormed its way slowly up towards my heart.
“ Get some pressure on these wounds! I need an EMT! Jesus Christ, Jacobs, PUSH down on that wound!”
“ They’re going to save you, Hayden,” said my brother.
“ No,” I said, weakly. “ They can’t. They…”
“ Yes,” he repeated. “ They’re going to save your life.”
“ Clear the ER! Where’s Doctor Johnson? Get scrubbed up, people!”
“ I don’t…deserve it,” I said.
Jamie looked at me with those cold, grey eyes.
“ Then you know what to do.”
He handed the gun to My Soul, who took it cautiously in his leprous, gnarled hands.
Except he wasn’t holding it anymoresuddenly, I was him, and I had the cold steel in my hands, and I was gazing down at the bleeding, dying shell of my body. For once, I was on the other side of the barrel, and my face glanced up at me with horror, with intense fear, with the struggle to live—everything that I had seen in the victims of my past life. I was my own victim, killed by my own hand and damned by my own soul.
“ Finish it!” Jamie growled.
The waves became louder, their ferocity threatening to topple what remained of the tower. The heavens quivered with anticipation.
In the city—the city by the sea…
While from a proud tower in the town,
Death looks gigantically down…
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence
And Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence…
“ Do it!” came the voice of the Old Man. “ You deserve this.”
Stones began crumbling away, consumed by the raging torrents of the sea. Piece by piece, the tower was being devoured in its entirety, just as the town had been. The hurricane winds brought a blinding mix of blood-water and glass in sweeping sheets, but there wasn’t much left to be had. In moments, the sea would swallow everything.
“ Finish it!” Jamie screamed.
“In a strange city lying alone,” I said, my throat numb. “Far down within the dim West…”
“ No!” my dying body shouted, eyes frantic and pleading. “ No! Jesus, stop, please!”
“ Kill him!” roared the Old Man
“ Now!”
“ NO!”
“ Now, Hayden! Pull the trigger, NOW!”
“ END IT!”
“Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best…”
“ KILL!”
“ NOW!”
" NO!”
“ Have gone to their eternal rest…” I whispered.
I pulled the trigger.
...like waves...
...like waves...
...like waves...
...like waves...
...like waves...
....like waves...
...I’ve found my place here, in this city, and I’ll stay by the sea as long as it takes...
...until I learn to understand...
...until I learn to repent...
...until I learn to forgive myself...