“My senior year, woulda been your junior…” Dakota replaced the gun in the back of his jeans, and Bill felt the anguish of relief. He still didn’t dare twitch, let alone stand and try to leave. “I thought I might kill some people at school.”
Bill waited and when he didn’t say more, asked, “How do you mean?”
“Those kids who did Columbine, Klebold and Harris? I, like, read about ’em. Studied ’em. Dreamed about ’em. I just thought, how cool would it be to be remembered like that? You know, no one would remember anybody from New Canaan, Ohio, ever again except me. It would be a Me day. So I brought a gun to school. My mom’s. And I was planning on walking into the cafeteria and just start mowing fuckers down. I didn’t know if I could break Klebold and Harris’s record, but I thought I could come close.”
Bill’s throat clicked, depending on which lunch period Dakota was talking about. He thought of how cruelty created chain reactions, how one act could set off events, could eat through floors like acid, so to think of all the systemic cruelty in the world was to think of acid burning from one floor of a skyscraper down to the basement.
“But you didn’t do it,” he said.
A shake of his head. The worms made juicy noises. He shimmered between the person he was now and the kid he’d been then. “Can’t really remember why not.”
Bill felt dizzy, vomity, his heart slammering like a drunk kicking at the foot pedal of a drum kit.
Dakota nodded slowly, blinkless eyes fixed on the river. “I mean maybe I pussed out or maybe I just figured too many people would get away. I’d end up killing pointless kids. Not the ones who mattered.” Dakota swung his legs back and forth, childlike. “Gotta say I’m glad I didn’t. Might’ve been you, and then we could never have had this weird night. You got a good heart, Ashcraft.”
At this uninformed description of himself, Bill felt a crashing surge of guilt and remorse. Because that’s what he’d always hoped, and even though he knew it to not be the case, he nevertheless ached to hear someone say it.
They were both quiet for a long time, the tricks playing light on them.
Finally, Dakota stood. “Okay, man. I gotta head out. Got a bedtime story to get to.”
He didn’t know what else to say other than, “Thanks for not murdering me.”
Dakota cocked his head, and the worms on his head whiplashed. “You try to fly from evil, but evil will always come to you.”
And then something pretty strange happened.
Dakota began walking backward from the bridge to the road, and as he did, his body began to swell the way the night had, and then it was morphing. Unlike his vision of The Thing, this wasn’t happening in his eyes but their own physical reality. The skin along Dakota’s arms and sides grew into course, leathery flaps. His clothes shredded and fell away. His face contorted, and soon it was no face, just a grotesque collection of folds and bones. His fingers stretched into gnarled autopods, and the ulna of his forearm deformed into the angled zeugopod of a bat. The creature, this deformed angel, flapped harder and achieved liftoff as gray hairs sprouted from every pore. The digits webbed, and the gnarled face grew stranger still as huge worms came writhing from the orifices and fell to earth in wet clumps. The angel sailed higher and higher as the muscles in its back thickened and added power, percussive thumps of its wingspan crippling the wind. They grew to the width of a city street. The feet metamorphosed into talons and the knees buckled inward. It climbed into the dead sky, singing, screaming a song, until the air slipped open. A vortex of blue light spilled across the pavement, the streets, the downtown buildings, swirling violet violence and a piercing hiss as the oxygen was sucked into another dimension. It flew backward into the hot cerulean spiral, gazing mad black eyes, and when it passed over the edge of existence, the puncture in the universe wheezed painfully and then zipped up like a wound stitching itself shut.
Bill watched in awe as the worms left behind sizzled on the ground, vanishing to steam.
He spat into the water, feeling a real nice stair step bringing him back to the moment, excising some of that paranoia. The water gurgled over its carve of sediment, a murmur of voices rolling like time, telling rumors of the past. The wind, hot and fecund, deposited its consoling coat. Above this, a bizarre bleating sound. It took him a moment of looking around to realize the electronic squawk was coming from his pocket. His kitchen timer read 00:00:00. He couldn’t figure out how to silence it, so he chucked it into the river where the water immediately swallowed the tinny noise. It was time to make this delivery. And then ride off into the sunset like a good cowboy.
He followed High Street north, past downtown and into the rows of colonial homes. The cars had all but vanished at this late hour. The night grew quiet, introspective of its nightly self. The colonials gave way to two-family homes and dilapidated aluminum siding. Here was more flaked paint and sagging porches. Less care went into the lawns and more flotsam was left to accumulate spiritual inertia. Tricycle, garden hose, kiddie pool, another ROMNEY/RYAN yard sign halfway trampled, clinging upright by one wire spike, trampoline with rusted springs, white plastic lawn chair, swing set with runty plastic slide, an undulating brick street with drips and drabs of concrete patching the potholes, American and Buckeye porch flags vying for attention. One particularly parochial home had the state flag with its red-and-white bull’s-eye floating in a field of stars. The Confederacy was decently represented as well.
He heard a car idling ahead and then in a huff it continued down the road, tires drubbing the brick. His body tensed as the headlights spilled over him—surely this was the NCPD patrol car, finally caught up now that his legs had no sprint left. But it was a minivan. A dingy burgundy Chrysler with a pink stripe like a thin belt. The window was down, an emaciated arm hanging nearly to the outer handle. As the vehicle passed, the driver turned to watch him. Though Bill had known this person only by reputation, Dakota had name-checked him earlier. Frankie Flood had spent most of his teenage years in juvie for stabbing his stepfather. His face was cut-and-pasted from adolescence, affixed to a shriveled shoulder and completely inked arm. Bill turned his gaze to the ground before their eyes could meet.
He hurried on. His hands were still sticky with whiskey.
His sneakers scraped across a dry wild-flowered lawn as he cut over to Sandusky Street, checking the house numbers. 705 Sandusky bloomed before him and with it enough heartache and regret to fuel a vessel straight through the flood at the end of the world. A low and cramped two-family with white vinyl siding and a roof blacker than the night around it. He didn’t hesitate, though he’d suspected he might. The tape rubbed and creaked against his skin. Behind cheap venetian blinds, a low-wattage lamp left on for him. And there was his heart picking up. There was the sweat breaking out in his pits and on his back. There was the sinking in his gut, like a bowel movement going off in the wrong direction. There was his fist rising to knock on this cheap hollow door the color of cool stone. There was the door cracking for him, the dusky light washing into the night.
And there, of course, was Kaylyn Lynn, ten years on, a beautiful memory downloaded to flesh, with a bubble of a stomach jutting toward him like a beach ball about to pop.
Citing cause and effect here might be difficult. It would have been more satisfying if his transgressions had found daylight. If Lisa had just learned about Kaylyn. She would have said whatever needed to be said. But she never found out, and instead of resolution, there was fracture.