A red sun rises, blood has been spilt this night.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
*****
He restlessly scrubbed his hands over his face. The screeching of tires rang through his head, sirens wailed, distant voices screamed and sobbed, his own heart pounded in his ears. Empty eyes stared back at him, life escaping before his very eyes as he could do nothing but look on in horror.
He stared at his hands as if they were not his own, as if they were instruments of horror wielded by him against his will. They memory of others' blood still coated his hands, making them feel heavy and damp. He felt like MacBeth as he scrubbed relentlessly at the ghost of the warm, sticky liquid. Will all great Neptune's oceans wash this blood clean from my hands? No, this my hands will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green ones red.
Each time he felt as helpless as the last. Each time was as horrible as the first. Each time he relived it every terrible detail tormented him with vicious clarity. Each time he felt himself slipping a little farther out of reach.
He didn't know what to feel, how to react. Sadness? Anger? Guilt? It was all of those things and yet, none of them seemed right. He pounded his fist against the wall, shouting at the top of his lungs, "Meaghan James, David James, Alice James, Jessica Barnes, Janelle Harmen, Nick Baker, Michelle Cook." A list of names. Names of six people he'd never met and one he'd known very well. Names of people he'd watched die. Names of people that weighed on his conscience every hour of every day.
Guilt burned away at his insides like he had swallowed a vial of acid. There was nothing he could do to assuage it, nothing that could make the burden any lighter, nothing that could ever make it go away. More than anything, he wished he could somehow cure the necrosis eating away at his soul, some way to repay Charon for rowing all those poor souls across the River Styx. But karma refused to let any repentance come easily, and rightly so.
Outside, cars ferried people to and from their suburban homes as they went about their suburban lives. The sun rose and fell. Children grew up and adults grew old.
Time went on. Things changed.
But inside these walls, nothing ever did. The guilt never lessened. The pain never healed. The memories never faded. Each day was just as difficult to get through. Everyday it was just as hard to live with himself.
Frozen in time, everything stayed the same. A living juxtaposition, a flesh and blood irony.
The world kept turning without him. And try as he might to break free, to run after it, to punch through into reality, the here and now, he was stuck on a mime's treadmill, watching dismayed as little by little life slipped a little further out of his grasp.
The pain now burning in his knuckles was oddly calming; he shut his eyes and took several slow, deep breaths, flexing and unflexing his fingers. He tried to clear his mind, to force out everything currently raising his blood pressure; hardly a task bent on success, seeing as it was always floating just beyond reach, waiting to explode and ruin everything.
He opened up the file waiting on his coffee table, something to occupy his mind, to balance the scales. But he hardly had the chance to get more than a sentence into it before there was a sharp, insistent knocking at the front door.
"Hey slowpoke! Were you planning on coming today? Or did you forget we have work to do?" came the muffled shouts, half joking, half annoyed.
He sprinted to the front door, sock feet slipping slightly on the hard-wood. He quickly made up an apology, "Sorry, I couldn't find my wallet."
As the images once more floated through his mind's eye, he knew it couldn't wait any longer. It had to be soon. Because he didn't know how much longer he could live with himself.