What he couldn’t stand were the thoughts that he had, and also the thoughts that he no longer had. Like back in the alley when the woman had been pleading for her life, Rogers had remembered something. It was just a fragment of a fragment and he couldn’t delve into it too deeply, because there was a mental wall preventing him from doing so. He could scale many walls, yet not that one. But there was something there. Something he would have done differently if he was still who he had once been.
But he no longer was that man. Not even close. And the fragment would never be more than that. They hadn’t told him that part, of course. Why would they? He apparently had no reason to know in a strict “need to know” world.
He removed his hand and with it any hope that things one day could be different for him.
He slept in his car on a side street of a town he was passing through.
Two days later he was eight hundred miles closer to his destination. By now a bench warrant had certainly been issued for his arrest for his failure to show up for his parole meeting. Perhaps they had found the tossed materials in the trash can by the bus stop. That evidenced his clear intent to never, ever perform any of the duties imposed on him in return for his having been released from prison ahead of time.
He actually felt that ten years of his life locked up in a cage was payment enough.
He was down to fifty dollars.
The next morning he stopped at a construction site and offered his services for a hundred dollars for ten solid hours of labor.
His task was to haul bags of cement from a truck to a construction elevator stuck back in a corner where the big trucks couldn’t reach. There were three other men assigned to this job as well. They were all in their twenties. Rogers carried more fifty-pound bags than the three of them combined. He never spoke, never looked at the other men. He just hefted bags, hauled them a hundred feet to the elevator, dumped them, and walked back for more. Ten hours with a twenty-minute break for a food truck sandwich and a cup of coffee.
“Thanks for making us look good, Gramps,” said one of them sarcastically when the day’s work was done.
Rogers had turned to look at him. He eyed the man’s neck where his jugular wobbled underneath the fat. Rogers could have crushed the vein between his fingers and watched the man bleed out in less than a minute. But what would have been the point?
“You’re welcome,” he said.
When the young punk snorted at him, Rogers fixed his gaze on him. He wasn’t looking at him so much as through him to a destination on the other side of his skull.
The punk blinked, his sneer vanished, he glanced at his companions, and then they all turned and hustled off.
It was then that Rogers did something he almost never did.
He smiled. And it wasn’t because he had intimidated the punk. He had intimidated many men. And he had never smiled any of those times.
He walked back to his car, climbed in, tucked his money away, and looked at the map he’d bought.
The Virginia border was still two hundred miles from here. And the place within Virginia he was heading to would tack on about another three hundred or so miles.
He should be tired, exhausted really, but he wasn’t. He should be a lot of things. But he wasn’t.
Now he was only what he was.
He drove to a diner, parked at the curb, and went inside. He ordered food, drank his coffee and two glasses of water, and let his mind wander back to the point where it had all started.
He made a fist and looked down at it. The skin on top was real but not his. The bone underneath was real and his. The other things, the add-ons, he had come to call them, were not real and were definitely not his. But he could not remove them. So, he supposed, they were real and they were his.
Or rather I am him. Paul Rogers. The thing.
The scars had faded over the years, particularly the ones on his fingers, but he would always see them as though they had just been done.
Sitting up in that bed, wrapped in bloody bandages, feeling…different.
His old self, his real self, gone forever.
He next rubbed the ring. It was a platinum band that had been given to him by someone who had once been special in his life.
There was an inscription engraved on the inside of the band. Rogers had no need to look at it. The words were burned into his brain.
For the good of all.
He had once believed in those words more than anything else in his life. But that was then, this was now.
Now he believed in nothing.
He ate with his face pointed down. He was hungry, but he could survive without eating for a long time. He could survive without liquids for a long time too although the average person would become dehydrated and die fairly quickly. The same with lack of sleep. You don’t sleep for two weeks, you hallucinate and then you die, your brain and other organs all going wacky on you before they shut down and the lights go out forever.
Yet it was all physiological. It was all about slowing things down, lessening the internal burn. Like animals hibernating, everything went from flat-out to glacial. Humans could learn a lot from animals about survival, because animals could do it far better than humans.
And I’m not a human anymore. I’m a fucking wild animal. Maybe the most dangerous of all, because I’ve got a human brain to go along with the “wild” part.
He finished his meal, sat back, and rubbed the spot on his head.
He took a sip of coffee and then his face screwed up. The pain came and went without warning.
He let out a tortured breath. It was the one pain that he could not ignore. The wound on his arm didn’t bother him. He had never even felt the bite of the knife.
But the pain in his head was different. It was special, apparently. They had never fully explained that one. It was his brain after all. The most important organ he had. It was what made him him. Or not him, in Rogers’s case.
He paid the bill and walked back to his car. He drove to another part of the small town, parked, and settled down for the night.
As the hours passed and the darkness deepened, Rogers lay there and stared at the ceiling of the car. It was stained and faded and generally worn out.
He was stained, faded, and should have been worn out. But his energy level had never been higher.
It was only during his last year in prison that certain parts of his mind had become fully accessible to him. And that was why he had marshaled all of his strength and determination and sat in front of the parole board and said all the right things. His remorse. His learning from his mistakes. His wanting to lead a good, productive life going forward. He was being sincere-well, mostly. He had learned from his mistakes. He did want to be productive going forward. He had even forced some tears.
But he felt no remorse, because he was incapable of the emotion.
He had only one goal now. And it lay, he hoped, about five hundred miles from here.
He was going back to the beginning to get to the end.
But the remnants in his head? That previously inaccessible spot? He focused on that.
The man was young, not yet twenty. Good-natured. Trusting.
That had been his mistake. The trusting part.
It was the same old story: a strange man in a strange land. No friends, no allies, no one to turn to for help.
He had come to this place for a better life, as had millions of others.
He had not found a better life. He had found a very different man at the end of the day living inside his body. He knew this and yet could not fully control it. To change himself back to what he was. He had tried. Over the last year when he had finally punched through that wall, he had desperately tried to uncurl the fist. To banish from his mind the desire to maim, wound, or more often kill.