Welded

Tom Piccirilli and T. M. Wright

It’s a familiar story—

Kid and girl fall in love. Homicidal maniac kidnaps and butchers girl over a three-day period in an isolated cabin on the beach. Kid is left for dead at the shore with a partially crushed skull. Parents fail to identify girl’s remains. Kid winds up with a couple of metal plates welded in his skull. Kid awakens from coma and has to learn to walk again, feed himself again, rediscover spatial geometry, et cetera. Kid is called down to the morgue. Kid identifies girl’s bits based on a shred of a rose tattoo on a scrap of her left buttock. The parents, of course, didn’t know. Seven months after her death girl is at last buried. Memorial service has five thousand mourners and is blitzed by the media. Helicopters, reporters crawl over kid. Kid spends twelve weeks under psychiatric care for consistent outbursts of rage and violence. He does harm to himself. He does harm to others. Shrinks claim explosions of frenzy and phantom auditory and visual phenomena are the result of lasting minor brain damage. He sees things and hears things. Cops cut him a break and don’t stuff him in prison for bar brawls, for beating up pushy journalists, for drunk and disorderly.

Maniac racks up an additional nine kills before the feds shut him down. Maniac, like all the best murderers, terrorists, and assassins, has three names: Ricky Benjamin Price. Kid, like all the best heroes, has no name. Ricky likes writing letters. He writes his congressman, his president, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the ACLU, the pretty newscaster on Channel 4, the families of his victims, and he writes the kid. Nobody responds, except for the kid. Nobody visits, except for the kid.

The kid’s there now, letting Ricky’s soft and seductive voice work its magic on his nerves. He sits on a chair outside the cell while Ricky lies on his bunk, his arm thrown over his face, motionless except for his lips. The voice is like cold cream on sunburn. You take your kindnesses where you can, and Ricky’s voice is just that, a kindness, a mercy. The shrinks, the cops, the protesters pro and con capital punishment screaming outside, they all grate and fray and scrape. The kid can’t stand their gruffness, their know-it-all attitudes, their noise, their touch. Everything they do or say drives him up a fucking wall. He hates everybody.

The kid’s been visiting the prison for five years. Ricky’s been on death row nearly the whole time. His execution’s set for tomorrow at nine P.M. You’d think it would be midnight, but no. Nine P.M.—who knows the reasoning behind it. Ricky seems to be looking forward to his impending death. The kid isn’t so sure how he feels about it. The girl’s parents are out there right now, grouped up with the yahoos and rednecks drinking beer and promising to keep their lights off so there’s enough juice to fry Ricky good.

Of course, Ricky’s getting the hot shot, and the kid’s got a front-row seat.

Ricky wanted a firing squad. The kid thought that was still allowable in this state, but apparently not. They denied him. The kid knows what it’s like to go to sleep almost forever, lying there paralyzed, struggling for breath, while the waves roll over your knees and try to drag you under and away. They’ve got a lot in common now, him and the guy who almost killed him.

Ricky whispers on. What he says doesn’t really matter. Most of it is a play-by-play rundown of exactly what he did, and when, and to whom, and how they tried to run, or scream, or fight back. The girl was brave and very strong. She didn’t go easy. Ricky points this out over and over. The girl scratched and bit and struggled. She did better than any of the others. The kid feels the same stirring of love and pride he’s felt for her for years.

His skull aches and thrums and rattles full of locusts. He gets migraines that make the world tilt and send him into free fall. Ricky is used to the kid clenching his temples and crying out by now, and he calls for the bulls so somebody can drag the kid’s ass off to the infirmary. Aspirin are considered contraband but Ricky’s got a couple and offers them to the kid, who waves them off.

The bulls come. The setup is sort of funny. You can’t mingle with the cons so the infirmary is kind of a secondary ward set off from the primary one, with a lot of reinforced glass between the two. But you’re right here, and the cons are right there. The kid’s vision is unfocused, he’s seeing two, three, four of everything, looking beyond dimensions into parallel universes, the edges red and black and throbbing. The prison docs are aware of his condition. They treat him as a psych patient. They juice him with powerful sedatives, the stuff they give to the psycho killers who stabbed their mothers ninety-five times.

The cons stare at him through the glass. He stares back. He’s in here with a little boy who skinned his knee while visiting his father, who still has nine years to go on a fifteen-year stretch. The mother of the boy stares off into a dream, seeing herself in another life, another time, with fulfilled expectations, no guilt, no humiliation. The boy sniffles. The mother gnaws her lip. A pregnant woman who started having false contractions is moaning in the corner. She’s rattling in Spanish about how she wants to get the hell out of here so her child isn’t born behind bars. The kid hopes they move her out soon too.

The doc comes over and touches the kid’s head. His brain burns and sings. The metal feels white-hot. The doc pulls his fingers back quickly as the kid groans in agony. The doc hands him two horse pill pain meds and writes on a chart. The doc asks boring questions, not like Ricky. The doc asks about pain levels, about the consistency of stool, about sleeping habits, drug use, alcohol consumption, sexual function. The doc asks why the kid keeps coming back week after week. The doc asks about nightmares, about the violent outbursts, about anger management, psychosis.

Ricky’s back on death row but his voice is still whispering under the kid’s welded metal plates. The voice is malleable, mellifluous, slick, oily, like aloe. The girl is screaming under there too but Ricky shushes her, calms her, quiets her, the way he did in real life, or thought he did, before she worked a screw free from her cot and stabbed him in the guts with it. Ricky nearly croaked from peritonitis. The girl wishes that he would have. The girl stares at the cons too.

One Aryan with the face of Adolf covering his entire chest has got his tongue unfurled. He’s bandaged with three seeping shiv wounds. He makes kissy faces at the kid, he makes kissy faces at the pregnant woman, he makes kissy faces at the little boy, and the girl says, “Before you go, you ought to kill him.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s time for another brutal surge of rage. The kid isn’t afraid of his capacity for ferocity anymore. It feels good to cut loose. It feels righteous. And how are you going to get in trouble kicking the ass of a guy who has Hitler’s face on his chest? The only real problem is getting through the glass, getting to the other side of the glass.

Funny though, the girl’s never come right out and asked the kid to kill Ricky. She doesn’t seem to hold too firm a grudge against Ricky, despite the horrors and the slicing and the chewing and the rest of it. The feds, even with their top forensic scientists working the evidence, only got about half the story right in the end. The girl has explained to the kid in excruciating detail exactly what happened to her and the others.

The kid stands and knocks gently on the glass, then shoots the Nazi the finger. The Aryan sneers, reaches under the mattress, and holds up a little triangular piece of glass with a taped handle.

“No wonder he got shanked,” the girl says in his brain, pressed to the metal, sweating, beautiful as always. “That shit couldn’t protect anybody.”

The kid searches for a way past the glass. The doc is in his office area, chatting with a nurse, laughing, the doc reaching out to touch the nurse first on the shoulder, then the elbow, then the hip. The doc is oblivious to everyone in here. The doc is oblivious to the cons, to Adolf, to Ricky’s voice still humming, almost cooing, making the kid’s hands feel electrical, like there’s lightning in his fingers, and there is. The door is locked, but the girl was observant and picked up on the keypad code. The kid doesn’t even have to press the numbers, he just touches the pad and the lock pops and the door opens an inch. He slips inside.

Another door, another keypad, another code, another time that he doesn’t have to do anything but let his fingers touch the pad. The other door pops.

The Aryan is watching him enter. Adolf is watching him enter. The girl says, “Use his own shiv. Gut him.”

The Aryan tries to climb out of bed. There are other cons in the infirmary, some of them hurt bad, some just faking and keeping an eye out, like they’re planning a crash-out. One opens his mouth and says, “Hey—” to the kid, and the kid spins and brings his elbow across and down into the con’s collarbone.

The snap is so loud they hear it in hell. The girl tells him so.

The con hits the floor like a bag of wet sin. The kid continues on. The girl talks on. Ricky whispers on. The Aryan starts to mewl. Adolf starts to give a speech, his weird swipe of hair flopping across his forehead. The Aryan climbs out of the bed and holds his little piece of glass up in a defensive pose, jabbing at the air. He holds the weapon all wrong. Ricky knows the right way. He murmurs how you hold the blade out flat, low, so you can stab or slash or slice, forward or backhand. The Aryan hobbles forward and the kid leans in, blocks the shard of glass coming in toward his kidneys—these guys, they think the secret is to puncture the kidneys, forgetting it takes weeks to kill a guy that way—snaps his fist against the Nazi’s wrist, slaps the blade from it, and then goes to work.

Adolf is smiling now, getting a kick out of all this. His speech has moved on to the Jews, to destroying the Allies, to purifying the nation, and a hundred thousand Germans are Sieg Heiling in the square, going fucking crazy. The girl points up. American planes are flying overhead. Who the fuck knows what year it is. It doesn’t matter. Ricky says it’s 1941. The girl says it’s closer to ’43. The kid has no idea and doesn’t care. He jabs the Aryan’s gut, especially the area where he’d been stabbed before. After three or four hard shots, his fists are covered with blood. It’s a fine feeling. Ricky loves it. The kid doesn’t mind it.

Everyone loves to talk about the smell of blood, but it has none, not at first. Blood has to oxidize first, and then it grows copper colored, dries into a powder like rust, and then it has that acrid scent the morbid poets sing about. The girl bled a lot. She was kept around dying by inches for a long time. Ricky used to talk to her endlessly. He did things to her that still make the kid tighten his arms across his belly. The girl doesn’t care anymore. Why should she? She’s dead.

So’s the Aryan. The kid went too far, or maybe it was the girl, or Ricky, or Adolf, or all of them. In any case, there he is on the floor, his ribs shattered into splintered knives that have torn his organs to pieces. There’s a deep blue tinge to his flesh beneath the ink. It looks like his lungs are punctured. It looks like his heart’s impaled.

The other cons watch. The other cons take notice. The other cons do not fuck with the kid. The pregnant woman on the other side of the glass is staring wide-eyed. So is the little boy. The little boy’s mother is still absorbed in her daydreams. Her eyes are full of handsome bankers with huge swimming pools who give her diamond necklaces. The doc is feeling up the nurse. The nurse is being felt up.

The girl’s parents are chanting along with the other capital punishment fiends, trying to drown out the protesters who are singing some hymns that strike sparks off the metal in the kid’s skull. All of it is starting to get to be too much. He backs away from the corpse and bumps into the footboard of another bed, pulls off the sheet covering the legs of another con, some guy faking a fever so he get out of punching license plates or chain-gang roadwork or whatever it is they do here. Kid wipes his hands as clean as he can on the sheet and drops it.

Ricky hums along with the protesters. He was raised in a very religious household by deeply believing parents. He doesn’t blame his upbringing for the way he turned out. His parents were nice, good people. It wasn’t their fault. Neither was it his pastor’s or the congregation’s or his neighbors. He doesn’t hold God accountable. He doesn’t hold himself accountable either. He takes one of those views that say you are what you are, you are what you are meant to be, what you are fated to be. The girl says it’s an excuse. Nobody was meant to be what Ricky is. Ricky counters with the fact that there are more like him every day. Maybe it’s evolution. Maybe it’s the natural order.

Time to move. The kid slips back through the door. The doc is going full blast on the nurse now, finger fucking her right there, practically out in the open. She’s rubbing him through his trousers. Ricky’s getting a little turned on, but not as turned on as he was when killing the girl or helping the kid kill the Aryan.

The kid makes it back to the waiting room, and the pregnant woman sees the dried streaks of blood on his hands and knows, knows in her pregnant heart, what is pregnant inside of him. She crosses herself. The gesture somehow soothes the kid a little, calms him, even while the girl snorts and scoffs in disgust. She hears her parents too. She hates them. She hates all the living now, but that’s not her fault. All the dead hate the living. It’s just the way it is, just like Ricky is the way he is, just like the kid is welded between them and to them.

The kid washes his hands in one of those old-fashioned shitty drinking fountains, the water arching about a half inch. The boy has forgotten about his skinned knee now. The pregnant woman isn’t about to give birth. The mother of the boy takes him by the elbow and calls for a guard. The guard shows and everyone moves off together. They’re escorted down the corridors and out the front door, down the long sidewalk, past the main gates and the gatherers. The kid is recognized at once. There’s an even louder buzz. People grab at him. They question him. The girl’s parents smile at him. He smiles back. The girl doesn’t. She’s still slightly offended her parents couldn’t ID her body, but the kid doesn’t blame them for that, not at all.

“How are you?” her mother asks him.

He should answer fine. That’s the only answer anybody really wants or expects. He should say fine. He should embrace them and share in their sorrow. He should let one of them or both of them pat his back and rub his shoulders and stroke the back of his head. It’s what they did the last time he saw them. It made him feel better, a little, for a second. It took away a little of the lightning pain.

Reporters call him by name. Reporters jump in his face. Reporters jam microphones against his mouth; they jab at him with cameras. The protesters want him to sing with them. The yahoos want him to seethe and spit venom.

The kid walks past them all. Some follow. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t speak. He finds his car. He gets in and drives home slowly, Ricky’s voice dulling the intense traffic noise. The girl is sitting in the passenger seat, looking out the window. She’s got something to say about almost everything. The kid doesn’t remember her being so chatty, but death is apparently very boring. He isn’t looking forward to his own.

They cross a toll bridge and she says she misses the tollbooth guys who used to work there. Now you drive by and you catch a bill in the mail a couple of weeks later. She is nostalgic for the things that have changed since she’s died. TV shows that have gone off the air, songs played by bands that are no longer together. She asks him about things he doesn’t give a shit about.

“Are you listening to me?” she squawks.

He is and he isn’t. He’s really thinking about the ocean. He misses it. He hasn’t gone swimming since Ricky caved his head in. Hasn’t walked in the shallows, hasn’t even dipped his feet in off a dock. He still remembers lying on the shore with the waves pushing him up into the sand and then pulling him out again while the girl screamed and Ricky chased her down. He remembers Ricky talking then too, endlessly talking, keeping up a steady stream of chatter that didn’t make any sense, at first, not until it got in deep and festered and could be examined at length.

Ricky talking about his nightmares, his fears, his honest hopes, his games, his skills, his twists, his kinks. Explaining what he was going to do, and when, and how it would go down, and why it had to happen like that to one girl or another. He killed as many guys as he did girls but nobody focuses on them because they usually went quick. He brained most of them when stealing the girls. He left them dead in their beds, in the parks, at the beaches, at the drive-ins. Ricky was at the drive-in when they caught him, sitting there watching the end credits roll, with popcorn in his teeth.

The kid was the only one to survive. He doesn’t know why. No one does, not even the dead. People made a lot of jokes about his hard head, but they should try it now. If anybody ever hit him with a rock in the back of the skull again the stone would crumble into dust. Ricky once asked him if he was bulletproof now. Some asshole comes up behind him with a .22, a .32, maybe even a .38, would it get through or would the bullet shatter the way it sometimes did off bone? The kid didn’t know the answer. Ricky suggested he ask the doctors. He should know these things.

The girl harbors deep resentments. For Ricky and the kid, and her living friends, her sisters, her dog. She remembers the way Ricky pulled her away down along the beach, the kid’s body lying there in the sand, not even struggling, not even fighting to get up. Not climbing to his knees, not getting to his feet, not screaming, not coming to save her. The kid half in the water like he was just body surfing. The kid thinks she’s being unreasonable as hell, but she counters that it’s her right to be irrational. She’s dead.

You can’t argue with logic like that. He lets her try to pry up the plates and worm guilt into his brain. It doesn’t really matter. He’s already as guilty as he can possibly be. She knows this but she can’t help herself. She rages still. She cries still. She shrieks still, the way she did when she was Ricky’s prisoner and he brought out the tools that first time. At the moment she thought she was all alone, but afterward she learned that many people heard her anguish. They all mistook it for something else. Cats fighting. Babies crying. Dogs prowling. The neighbor’s TV too loud. Her screams echoed on the wind for miles and miles, up canyons, down the beaches, over distant fields.

When the kid gets back to his place, a new letter from Ricky is waiting for him. Ricky will never run out of things to say. The letter goes on and on, page after page, and Ricky, who often tells the same stories over and over, still finds a way to make his missives interesting, exceedingly readable. Ricky’s voice reads Ricky’s letter aloud in the kid’s mind. He finishes the letter and puts it with the others in the box in his closet. It’s the fourth box he’s filled. The other three are sealed away in the crawl space.

The girl hisses at him, “Why do you keep that insanity so close at hand? Do you want to be crazy? Is that it?”

Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s not. He hasn’t figured it out yet. Maybe it’s his nature, his fate. He doesn’t expect to ever figure it out. He only expects that the letter writing will end with Ricky’s hot shot. He knows Ricky’s voice is with him forever.

It’s a familiar story—

The kid lies on the couch and the girl crawls over him the way she did when she was alive. She liked being on top. She liked being close, as close as she could get, and would tell him to hold her tight, tighter, tighter than that, crush the breath from her lungs. He would grip her tightly and she’d yawp and go, “Not that hard! That hurts!” He’d ease up. They’d watch the news together. She’d comment on the ugliness of the world. He would watch quietly. She would ask him over and over again, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” He would stare at her and have no answer. He never had an answer to any of her questions, and still doesn’t.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

He could respond at length. She has time. She has nothing but time. He watches the news and sees her parents out in front of the prison and listens to the warden give a canned statement, and listens to the leader of the protesters discussing God and forgiveness, and he listens to the yahoos yahooing. He listens to a couple of cats fighting, a baby crying, and wonders if someone like Ricky has grabbed someone like the girl and someone like the kid is lying with his skull in fragments at a lakeside or on a beach or at the drive-in. He wonders if he should investigate. He gets to his feet. He starts for the door.

She asks, “Where are you going?”

Ricky’s voice tells him it’s nothing, it’s nothing. It’s nothing to worry about. And it isn’t. He opens the door and sees the cats fighting near the trash cans where the apartment manager has left them.

He shuts the door, he sits again, she sits on his lap, he flips the station, he holds on to her tightly, he looks at the tattoo on her ass. He presses the side of his face to her back. She’s in excellent shape, every muscle and tendon hard and well defined in her flesh that is only memory.

Sleep comes the way it has come since the attack. It comes like a rock to the head. It comes like a voice under the metal welded to the skull. It comes like murder. You can’t prepare for it. You can’t get comfortable first. You can’t make room for it in your life. It descends and owns you.

THE KID WAKES up and it’s morning. Reporters are at the door, calling his name. He goes to the window and pulls the curtains aside. The group is suddenly lively, active, like a gathering of pigeons that have spotted a cat. They call to him. They wave. They’re like a mob of Japanese tourists. They aim cameras at the window. The prettiest journalists preen. They try to draw him out with their moist lips, their heated gazes, the arcs of their breasts and asses.

The kid knows he is only news because he is alive.

The girl is there with some of the other girls, girls just like her, that Ricky tortured and killed. Some of the boys have come along too, lost, mostly forgotten, unwanted, uninteresting. They all look the same, the same as the kid did five years ago. They’re young, soft, without much character to their faces. No worry lines, no gray, cheeks buffed to a healthy, rosy glow, a golden hue, bursting with life and stupidity. They fill the room, smiling, laughing, like this is a frat house and they’re preparing for a kegger.

The dead boys and dead girls reminisce. The kid wonders if any of them have any burning messages they want to pass on to friends or family. Or for the world to know before Ricky finally goes down. He turns and faces them but they’re dancing now. They’re playing a song that was popular a few years back. The girl moves up behind him, gets close, puts her lips to the back of his neck, reaches around him and grinds slowly. Ricky has things to say about dancing. Ricky has things to say about everything.

She reaches down. She tries to rouse the kid. The others are doing their thing. The song plays on and on. He wants to smash the CD player, the MP3 player, the iPod, but he doesn’t own any of that. They’ve brought the music with them from the darkness, from the past, from the place where you go when you do not go all the way away. The pretty reporters bend their knees a little and sway. The girl becomes more grabby. She’s not holding on to the kid so much as she’s holding on to life. Whatever life she can still get her hands on.

The others moan. The others say what they need to say. They keep trying to make their peace but can’t quite do it. There’s no peace left to be made. They’re angry that the kid is friendly with Ricky at all. They’re angry he made it. They hound him the way they’ve hounded him for years. They cluster. They breathe his air. They try to peel up the metal plates and lie down under them, inside his blood and bone. They want him to give voice. They’re keenly aware of the reporters out front. They have messages for their parents. They have messages for Ricky.

The reporters are getting a little more aggressive now. They press the doorbell. They knock. They call the kid’s name. They peer in the windows. They shout out large amounts of money.

“Twenty thousand for an interview?” one of the dead boys says. It’s an impressive number, even after you’ve been croaked. It only serves to infuriate the dead boys and girls. If they had lived, they would’ve taken the money. If they had lived, they would be eager to tell their stories. If they had lived, and it was the kid’s ghost that was annoying them, they would listen, they would help him however they could, they would pay more attention.

“You do like having us around, don’t you?” the girl asks.

The answer is no, but he can’t tell them that, especially since they’re already inside him, in his marrow, in the marrow of his mind. They’re as welded to him as the plates to his skull, as Ricky. He wants them gone, but he doesn’t know what he would do without them. The thought of losing Ricky fills him with a sense of dread he doesn’t understand on any level. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s going to do when Ricky dies. He fears Ricky’s voice will leave with his life, and the kid will be left with nothing but these other dead.

“Thirty thousand?” the dead boy says, repeating a number hurled from outside. “What would you do with thirty thousand bucks?”

The kid thinks of what he might have said six or seven years ago to that kind of offer. He would’ve done what with the cash? Sailed around the world? Visited exotic locales? Bought a cabin on the beach? He’d always wanted to travel, used to dream about it, plot it, graph it, chart it, map it with the girl. Indochina, Burma, Egypt, Brazil, Pago Pago. There’s still time, he imagines, except there isn’t, and there never was.

“He’s going crazy again,” a dead girl, not his dead girl, says. He can’t handle the dreams and hopes he once found refuge in. They cause nothing but pain now. The metal plates are heating up as if someone is standing there with a blowtorch, burning him. He twists and writhes on the couch, the music still playing. The kid falls to the floor, manages to get to his knees, his feet, crosses the room, opens the front door. He’s ready to scream at the mob to leave him alone.

Except only the prettiest of the pretty journalists is standing there now. Time has passed. He checks his watch. It’s late. It’s getting late. Ricky’s due to take his shot soon. The kid has to move if he’s going to get to the prison in time.

The girl says, “She isn’t so pretty.”

But the pretty reporter is. She’s beautiful. She’s lovely. She’s alive. She holds herself in a way that exploits all her natural charms, all the curves and the brimming self-confidence. This is a woman who has handled herself well and overcome great odds. She’s vanquished her foes and resorted to whatever tactics she needed to resort to for that moment. She carries her guilt perfectly, as if she’s not carrying any guilt at all. She says another number.

“Fifty thousand.”

Kid likes her voice. It’s a mellifluous voice, but it has grit, substance, personality. He likes watching her lips. He likes the way she moves toward him, saying his name with some endearment, as if she’s been waiting for him at the train station for a long time and has just spotted him. He imagines her there, on the platform, waving to him. He shuts his eyes. She’s spurring his dreams again. The metal continues heating, red-hot, white-hot.

He tries to tell her to stop.

He tries to wave her away from him.

He tries to find Ricky’s voice in his mind to calm him, center him. The pretty reporter is close, with a mike in her hand, a cameraman appearing from nowhere, from everywhere. The cameraman says, “We’re rolling.”

The reporter asks, “Concerning Ricky Benjamin Price, have you forgiven him for what he’s done to you?”

The kid wants to say that at the moment he’s not as angry with Ricky as he is with her. Ricky kills dreams; she’s igniting them, she’s burning him. The kid has to shut her up. He lunges and presses his mouth to hers while she lets out a squeal of surprise and maybe lust. Who knows. He can’t tell. It doesn’t matter. He tastes her. He smells her. He breathes her in. She’s alive. That matters.

The cameraman goes maybe two-fifty, a big bruiser carrying big hardware, none of that compact machinery the small guys run around with when they’re after a story. Nah, he’s got the serious stuff, the old-school camera like a boulder on his shoulder. The bruiser catches a nice close-up of the kiss for maybe a three-count before he goes, “Heeyy—”

The kid wants to explain to her. You don’t know what you’ve done. You don’t know what you’re doing. You need to run. You have to run. Go. Go.

The girl says, “She’s not going to go.”

And somehow the pretty lady senses what he’s saying to her. Maybe he’s saying it aloud although he can’t hear himself. He can’t hear all that much over what’s going on in his head. He wants the fifty large now, in cash, thinking that maybe he can pay somebody off at the prison to stay the execution. It’s late, it’s too late, but he has to try.

The reporter slaps him. She tags him nicely. It’s not exactly a slap, more of a punch, and it hurts, catches him flush under the left ear in the ganglia of nerves there. The plates clang together. His head lights up even more.

The girl, his girl, his dead girl, goes, “Whoa.”

The dead boys and girls want to explain themselves. They’re dictating laundry lists of people they want to say something to on camera. Mothers and fathers, little sisters, brothers, cousins, loved ones of every stripe. They’ve got advice to share, secrets that need to be revealed. They bark, they plead, they demand. They want their turn at saying last words. Making amends, giving confession.

The reporter says, “I’m sorry. I . . . I’m sorry . . . please . . . let’s just—”

The kid launches himself, full of Ricky’s whispers. He backhands the reporter, drops her hard. It’s one of Ricky’s signature moves. All the dead girls gasp, remembering. The cameraman says again, “Heeyy—”

The kid slips his hands in under the camera, eases it off the guy’s shoulder, helping him, doing him a favor. The guy goes to one knee at the side of the pretty reporter. He’s in love with her, he’s got to be in love with her. Who could work beside her, stare at her, see her every day, and not be in love with her?

Cameraman asks, “Are you okay?”

“What happened?” she says, a dab of blood leaking from her lower lip.

“You didn’t have to hit her!” the girl goes.

But of course he did. Everyone knows that. They realize what else is inside with them. They know the truth.

In the kid’s hands the camera comes to life. The screen lights up. He sees himself in it even though the lens isn’t pointed at him. His other self seems to be trying to get his attention, tell him something meaningful and necessary. He tries to figure it out but can’t. He lifts the huge old camera over his head and brings it down on the sweet spot of the cameraman’s skull with an enormous crunch. Glass shatters. Plastic shatters. Bone shatters. Metal shrieks. The guy’s eyes bulge but stop short of popping out. The reporter screams. A few of the dead girls scream. Two dead boys scream. It’s a hell of a chorus. The kid might be screaming too. So might the other version of himself, whoever and whatever that is. Ricky laughs.

It’s a familiar story—

There’s just a little left to do. He does it quickly, efficiently, the way Ricky used to when he was pressed for time. He cleans up. He stashes and dashes. He kills and chills. He checks for nosy neighbors. He hops in his car and floors it to the prison.

CROWD CONTROL IS nonexistent. Everybody’s got a cause to preserve and Ricky’s at the heart of it all. The girl’s parents have been out here for days, unnecessarily. Their faces are badly sunburned. He can see that in the prison lights. Her father’s bald head shines red as the asshole of the sun. Her mother’s face is full of glee, as if finally there will be justice for their daughter, at last she’ll be able to rest in peace.

The girl says, “Idiots.”

That’s not the worst thing she’s ever called them. She hated them when she was alive and she feels even more anger toward them now.

More reporters are waiting in the wings. The witnesses of the execution are sequestered off to the side. They’re penned in, like cattle. The protesters and protesters of the protesters all shout at one another. They don’t consider this a solemn moment. They can’t see the ritual of it all. The reporters shout out their questions and tug at sleeves and ask the most cloying questions. They should all be allowed to come along inside. They should all show the world what it’s like for Ricky Benjamin Price to meet his doom. It’s such an awful scenario that the kid groans just thinking about it. The father of one of the other dead girls stands shoulder to shoulder with the kid and sort of props him up. He’s an ex-marine. He’s very into showing the world that he will not be bowed. He stares straight ahead. The bulls unlock the gates and march the witnesses in.

They enter the little viewing room. They take their seats. The girl’s parents sit on either side of him. Her mother murmurs and coos and tsks. Her father does what the ex-marine did, puts a hard shoulder to him, presses him, holds him up.

The girl says, “He used to do that to me in church all the time.”

There’s curtains across the viewing window. They part slowly, like the curtains rising on a stage. Act I, Scene I. Ricky enters, in the middle of a seven-man procession. He’s talking, of course he’s talking. The priest is praying. The warden is giving the speech about how Ricky’s been decreed to die at the appointed hour for the crimes he’s committed. The bulls drag him to the X-table and strap him down. There’s a doctor to stick the needle in. The machine that delivers the poison is practically transparent. You can see all the instrumentality within. You can see the lethal fluids. You can see the depressors. You can see the mechanics of the thing. It is, in its own way, a parallel to what Ricky did to the girls. The way he explained everything he was going to do, the way he showed them each instrument beforehand and displayed the function of their own organs. He left their eyes for last.

The mothers and fathers and other family members can’t contain themselves. There are curses, prayers, vicious barking outcries of fury and pain. Some of them turn away from the window. Some of them angle in. Ricky turns his head and meets the kid’s eyes.

The girl says, “He’s ugly. He’s always been ugly, but he’s gotten uglier.”

Kid knows the reason for Ricky’s ugliness. It’s his fault. Greater corruptions have been piled upon Ricky’s flesh and soul because of the kid’s actions. Ricky is uglier today than he was yesterday because there are more murders to add to his catalog of corruption. The kid is now Dorian Gray and Ricky is the portrait.

The dead boys and girls say, “It’s getting hot in here.”

And it is, inside the kid’s head, where the fear and the frustration are building, and the migraine is buzzing and almost blinding him, his vision red and black, vibrating him into new universes. Sweat pours off his face and he keeps drawing the back of his hand under his chin, across his throat, the same way the girl would do to him when they were at the beach and he’d sweat this same way in the sun.

But they’re not talking about the room, not talking about this room. They’re talking about their room, in the room between the metal and the brain.

“You’ve waited a long time for this,” the girl’s father says. “Enjoy it.”

Ricky tells him to kill the man. It’s easily done. Sitting here, this close, Ricky whispers how many ways he could do it. He ticks them off. One, two, three . . . he gets to nineteen. There are more, but he’s made his point, and the point has calmed the kid down a bit. The dead boys and girls see their folks and their siblings and cry out for them, try to reach out to them. The kid has trouble holding his hands down on his knees.

The warden asks Ricky if he has anything to say. Ricky always has something to say. Ricky says and says and says. He says so much that the warden has to cut him off. The witnesses are all moaning and sobbing again. The ex-marine is cursing. The girl’s father is sort of growling deep in his throat. Her mother tries to take the kid’s hand and he shakes her off, gently. To touch him like that is to destroy yourself.

She tries again and receives an electric shock. The spark arcs like something out of Frankenstein’s lab. It leaps. It’s bright blue and buzzes. It snaps against her wrist like it wants to ride her bloodstream up to her heart. There’s a small dot of black where the flesh is burned. She sucks wind through her teeth but that’s all. The girl’s father glances over and sniffs. The smell of burned flesh is pungent in the small viewing room. The kid imagines this is what the viewing room for the electric chair must smell like.

Ricky mouths words to the kid, specifically for him. They’re words of love, which make it all the worse.

The girl says, “That disgusting freak.”

The other dead boys and girls are offended too. Ricky never showed them any love or mercy, but that’s because they didn’t survive. Ricky doesn’t have any use for the dying or the dead. He doesn’t even have any use for himself anymore.

Originally, Ricky asked that he be dissected alive on television. It was a suggestion that made everybody go fucking nuts. The human rights groups, the prison boards, the anti-capital-punishment people, the pro-capital-punishment people, the cannibals, the sadists, the voyeurs, the other serial killers, fucking everybody.

The warden signals a go.

The first plunger depresses. It’s supposed to paralyze Ricky. It doesn’t. The contents of the needle makes him smile even more broadly.

Someone in the viewing room goes, “My God.”

Others echo the statement. “God. My God. Oh God.”

The second plunger depresses. Ricky begins to laugh. He’s still talking, of course, he’s always talking. Kid flashes on the pregnant woman and wonders if she’s in or out of labor yet. He wonders if Ricky’s going to come back in some newborn. He wonders if Ricky is going to shake things up in hell.

The third plunger depresses and Ricky’s body bucks a little, something that’s supposed to be impossible. His muscles strain. He looks like he’s trying to rise. The witnesses do the gasping thing again. They moan again. The women duck their heads like they don’t want Ricky noticing them. The men stare on.

More sparks fly from the kid’s fingers. Small arcs but they’re traveling, moving from person to person, chair to chair, forward toward the window glass. The blue light bops and weaves along, touching them all. Maybe it belongs to Ricky. Maybe it belongs to God.

The ex-marine goes, “What the fuck?”

Ricky relaxes and shuts his eyes. His chin slowly lowers to the side. It’s a pose of innocence, an awful caricature. He looks content, at peace. At last he shuts up. At least here he shuts up. In the kid’s head he’s still whispering, thankfully. Ricky croons while the doc puts a stethoscope to Ricky’s chest, then moves it to his wrist, then moves it again to his throat. The doc says Ricky’s dead. The warden repeats it. The witnesses give a sigh of relief, and there’s a few chuckles and sobs of happiness. The dead boys’ and girls’ names are invoked. Parents claim their children will rest easier now. Parents claim justice has been served. Parents claim they will sleep better now that the monster is dead. Parents don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

The spark reaches the machine. The machine schitzes out and the depressors depress, repress, compress, unpress, drawing blood up through the needles and into the tubes that had contained the poisons. The IVs in Ricky’s arm slurp his blood up. You can see it leaving his body and entering the machine. The pressure in the syringes goes haywire. The needles crack. The tubes burst. Ricky’s blood jets against the window as powerfully as a cut throat spurting arterial spray.

There’s something beautiful in the designs made by his painted blood. Everybody’s screaming. The dead boys and girls are laughing. They find it exciting, and it is. They recognize art in the making. Their parents scramble. The bulls are going wild inside the chamber. The priest is praying. The warden is shouting. Ricky’s dead body is dancing. Adolf is still adolfing. The machine is on fire.

The girl says, “You just had to ruin it for everybody.”

Maybe she’s right. The kid must’ve wanted this. The only reason things like this happen is because he wants them to happen, needs for them to happen, or else Ricky does. But Ricky’s finished now, except for what he’s saying, except for what he’s going to be saying forever now from the other side of the endless spanless darkness of infinite dimensions.

“You’re getting turned on,” she says.

She paws at him. She feels him. She likes when he gets aroused, whether it’s by her touch or her memory or her death or someone else’s. The blood makes her hot. She’s hot there beneath the heated metal. The next migraine hits and he thrusts his hands against the sides of his head and lets out a squeal of agony that brings the whole room to a silence. They all look at him. Some stare into his eyes. Some stare at his scars. Some show mercy. Some look at him pitifully. Some hate him because he seemed to be friends with Ricky. The girl’s mother smooths the back of his hair down. It feels like she’s hacking at him with a hatchet.

“Don’t you dare murder my mother,” the girl says, which surprises him, since before her death she’d been talking about how much she wanted to get away from this woman, how stupid she was, what a pain in the ass she was. Now she sounds protective, almost loving. Quite a switch after all this time. Even dead people can change.

He bolts. It’s allowed. It’s acceptable. What else are you going to do? Some of them talk about the future, some of them talk about the past. Some of them have become friends in their shared tragedy. Some of them discuss having dinner together. Some of them want to go get a drink.

The kid rushes for the door. A bull stops him like he’s making a prison break. The screw’s beefy arm is held out in front of him like a semaphore. The kid grabs hold of the wrist, whirls, and flips the guy over his back. The bull lets out a cry, then another. They’re loud enough to get into the little room. The warden looks. The other bulls look. Ricky’s corpse looks.

The kid makes his way out into the hall and vomits. The bulls sniff at him like it’s their problem, like they’ll have to mop it up now, not some lifer who’s been wielding the same mop for the last thirty-five years. The kid begs, “Let me out,” but it takes forever. They have to escort him, they have to call ahead to get all the gates and doors open. They drag him off like he’s a condemned prisoner, which he is, sort of. These pricks, these people, they all have to put pressure on, they all have to squeeze him.

Outside he flails against a railing and gasps, sucking air. The crowd cheers, like it was him who’d pushed the button, pulled the lever, punched Ricky’s ticket. He could’ve, perhaps he should’ve, and now he stumbles down the walk. He tries to read the signs that are being pushed his way. Passages from the Bible, literary quotes about the diminishment of mankind, pro-death-penalty vitriol, remember Sally, remember Robert, remember Timothy, remember Janet. He doesn’t remember any of them. Someone hands him a baby, a real baby, a live baby, a goo-goo baby girl, like he’s supposed to bless the child, or maybe murder it. Who hands a complete stranger a baby? The child goes, “Da da da da da da da da.” Singsongy, kinda with a salsa beat to it.

The girl says, “That yours? You that fucking kid’s da da? Were you cheating on me?”

He’s not the kid’s da da. He hands the baby back, not to the same person, but a different stranger. There he answered his own question. Who hands a complete stranger a baby? He does. Da da that.

Somebody gives him a full pint of Jameson’s. The seal’s not even broken. He twists the cap off and sucks deeply from the bottle. The liquor hurts his head even more. A couple of the dead kids drink deep, a couple of them go “phphooey, phoo . . . yuck” because they’ve never had a sip of the hard stuff. It brings things into focus for him, for a second. Which is Janet? Which is Timothy? He shoves his way through toward his car. The journalists are on him again. He wants to explain to them how dangerous it is, what they’re doing, where they’re standing, pushing him, touching him. He shoves his way past, makes it back to his car. He’s no longer news, he should no longer be news. Ricky is dead.

THERE REALLY IS nowhere else for him to go, nothing for him to do, but return to the beach. It’s clear and obvious. He walks alone on it. The waves crash, the waves reach. He scans the sand for the rest of his skull, his mind, his life. He lost it all somewhere around here. He sees footprints and thinks of the girl running for her life. The girl thinks of him lying there dying. Ricky thinks of them both, and the others, and a surge of pleasure fills him like a shot of adrenaline directly into the heart. You’ve got to wonder if he can still be saved, even after the mess with the machine. Some lab assistant in the morgue stealing Ricky’s body out the back and injecting it with bright green liquid, some antideath serum. Somebody’s got to be working on it, some other maniac in some other basement.

A storm waits over the water. Perhaps it’s been there since the day the kid died, or should’ve died. Perhaps it’s come back to meet him, hovering here for years, waiting. The pain is so great now that the kid drops to his knees as the sand crabs rise and begin to make their way to him. Sparks flash from his fingertips, his eyes, his open mouth.

The girl says, “This is it. This is the end.”

Maybe she’s right, maybe not. The storm comes closer. Black clouds swirl overhead, vortexes, funnels, sweeping down and bringing up tens of thousands of gallons of water. It gushes around him in the wind. The dead boys are especially impressed. A couple of them liked fishing, dug boating, lived on the water. Lightning blasts down and leaves more strange patterns of bubbling molten clouded glass the size of Cadillac hoods across the beachfront all around him.

Ricky calls this the divine. Ricky calls this the infernal. Ricky believes in great mythic resonance. It’s been there since his early religious upbringing. When he was alive, he was always walking along the beach hoping for tidal waves and hurricanes, as well as scoping victims. Ricky wants the world to burn, the world to drown. He wants to ride high on the next ark. Well, he did, when he was alive.

Ricky paws the dead. Ricky makes moves. He has no need to dismember but he still wants to fuck, still wants to have some fun. The kid turns and turns again as the lightning crashes down. The thunder is explosive but not as loud as Ricky’s voice in his head, not as loud as the dead girls’ disgust and the memories of their shrieks. The metal in his head draws the lightning to him. He’s the tallest thing on the plain, and he’s magnetized. His watch is going nuts. His fillings hurt. His mouth is full of fire.

Someone has got to be nearby. Ricky thinks his thoughts in the kid’s dented skull. The kid searches strangers out. He looks for retirees, he scans for young lovers, fishermen, he watches for kids who’ve come out to drink beer on the beach in wild weather. His hands glow blue and white. His hands can do amazing things.

The sand crabs stare up at him, curious, expectant. He sits and waits for the ocean or the sky to kill him. It would be a proper ending. He thinks he deserves that, at least. Ricky got a proper ending. The girl, in her way, received one. And so did the rest of them. He stands and walks along, the tide rising, the waves swelling, breaking against his knees, the foam exploding against the side of his face. Lightning continues to shear down, thunder like thrown sticks of dynamite.

He moves around an outcropping of rock. He moves around fencing, up and down dunes, slipping past saw grass. Isolated beach houses come into view. The kid keeps going. He walks up to a gorgeous place, the kind of place he and the girl used to talk about buying one day, the kind of place that it’s easy to talk about because everyone talks about places like this, and he knocks on the door with his burning fist.

Ricky enjoys the isolation, the deep loneliness out here, in the storm, on the water, away from the hateful population.

A girl very much like the girl, his girl, his dead girl, like all the dead girls, answers. Ricky’s mouth waters. The kid’s mouth waters.

She says, “Can I help you?”

The metal in his head clashes together and rings like the loudest church bell in twenty centuries.

It’s a familiar story—