One afternoon, four-thousand men died in the water here.
And five-hundred more were thrashing madly, as parasites might in your blood.
Now I was in a lifeboat designed for ten, and ten only.
Anything that systematic will get you hated.
It's not a deal, nor a test, nor a love of something fated.
Death.
October 3 2008, Seattle
It was always the same.
He was driving his first car —an avocado-green Cyclone with primed fenders and a shredded vinyl roof— down an impossibly windy two-lane mountain pass. All four windows were lowered, and Susan sat laughing in the passenger seat, her black hair flying every which way. Jesse loosened his grip and goosed the throttle. The Cyclone dropped to third and cut the back skins loose. The force drove them into the dusty upholstery. Susan's delightfully terrified shriek was lost to the squeal of rubber on asphalt.
The Cyclone's built-up 302 howled. The guardrail's yellow reflectors ticked-by. The wind blasted their faces. Susan licked her lips and bent toward him. He could feel her breath; could smell her musk of cigarettes and Hubba Bubba. She whispered something indecipherable and giggled. He pricked an ear, eased the gas, and turned to her.
And in an instant he was thrown from the car, ass skidding on pavement, bootheels catching, clumsy somersaults. There was his Cyclone's back bumper, the gassy smell of carbureted exhaust, the rushing wind.
Over he went, flipping boneless down the centerline. Horizon, trees, asphalt and tail-lights. At last he came to a rest, clothing gusseted and skin bleeding, facing the direction had been headed. His girl and his car were disappearing around a hairpin curve.
A flash of sunlit chrome.
A tap of the brake-lights.
And gone.
Jesse shouted over the wind and scrambled to give chase. His legs wouldn't move, couldn't move. He glanced to his lap and struggled in his shredded bluejeans, but they seemed to have affixed themselves to the roadway.
The wind blasted. His jacket parachuted. He wrenched at his pantlegs. The blacktop was alive and slurping at his torso. In no time his legs were half buried. He shouted, alone, deafened by the jet-engine vortex around him.
Deeper, and deeper, legs swallowed. The quicksand blacktop lapped at his right hand, claimed the fingers and held tight. Jesse screamed like rabbit in a snare, jerked himself sideways, and ended up facing the opposite direction. In the distance, Raccoon City's unmistakable skyline twinkled and burned like some faraway act of divine retribution.
Deeper, deeper, up to his chest. The windblast stole away his cries for help. His free arm clawed at the tacky pavement and disappeared. Up to his chin, he took in a breath tinged with exhaust and gunsmoke, of ammonia and sewage.
And then he was underwater.
The asphalt roiled above him. Pressure from all sides crushed his chest flat. He was twisting in a slow roll while the hurricane continued to hammer his eardrums. Unable to resist, he exhaled. His final breath bubbled past his eyes. He flailed upward, managed a single clumsy breaststroke when strong hands grabbed his ankles and tugged. He sucked a half-lungful of brackish water, retched, and kicked at the restraint.
He couldn't breathe.
Another yank downward, his shirttails drifted. More hands found him and pulled. The sharp fingers clawed into the meat of his calf.
The wind bubbled and throbbed against his ears. He couldn't breathe.
Down, down, down.
He cracked his eyes. The water burned his retnas. The pressure pushed them deep against their sockets.
Jesse peered at his restraints. He attempted a gasp. Susan's sister —ten years dead from a bullet to the brain— had one arm snaked up to his crotch. Dead Stacey Kelso, one eye floating on its stalk, sawdust hair drifting like sea-anemone. He screamed his lungs full.
He couldn't breathe. Stacey smiled. Her bottom lip split. An Exxon slick of dark blood curled upward. She grabbed his belt and pulled.
His vision dimmed, but not before seeing a riverbed of corpses: Jim Hildebrand, Marty Danielson, Jenn Vincent, his mother. One hundred-thousand white faces. Two-hundred thousand crowblack eyes, hungry and waiting.
For him.
Stacey smiled and pulled.
The river beat against him.
He couldn't breathe.
Wet and heat and weight. Stuffy blackness.
He couldn't breathe.
He flapped his arms, fought against the straightjacket restraints. His arm struck something heavy and bunted it away. The wind buzzed. He flipped sideways. Cold air washed against him.
He couldn't breathe.
Eyes open, blackness and red points of light. He slipped against wet fabric. The Arklay River flooded his mouth and nostrils. His chest was molten slag.
But with frenzied strain, the tiniest of breaths kissed his lungs. It sounded like an imploding television tube. He jerked an arm. Something small but recognizable —a talisman, of sorts— spun to the floor.
The wind buzzed.
He couldn't breathe.
The sweatlogged sheets were flung aside. He rolled sideways, groped along the hardwood for his castaway charm. The blackness was like the void of outer space, his skin all at once feverish and freezing. His hand fell across the overturned lamp, a newspaper.
He couldn't breathe.
Success! His fingers closed around the inhaler, and he plunged it halfway into his eager mouth. One pump, two more. Cold metallic mist replaced the foul tang of riverwater. Two more pumps, breath came easier. One more for good measure, and he collapsed gasping into his nest of terror-sweat and tangled sheets.
And the bedroom was quiet once more, save his ragged breathing and the ring of his pulse.
The Arklay River, Raccoon City and Stacey Kelso were remanded to their uneasy confinement in his subconscious.
He shivered under the fan's steady blast and felt for the bedsheets. They were soggy and slick: repulsive. Wanting away, he propped himself up, his gimp arm screaming in outrage. The bed shook; Susan muttered and rolled deeper into her goosedown cocoon. Her head poked out from the curl of blankets. Her chest rose and fell in untroubled sleep. This made him furious. He was drowning in his own lungs and beating himself to death less than a foot away, and she slept through it, just rolled over and pulled the sheets over her head. Thanks for the help, Suzy-Q.
So he sat a good minute, shivering, and stewing with his bad arm cradled in his good. He swallowed and cleared his chest from its nightly accumulation of bloody phlegm. Only one lung worked properly. The other, the one that idiot National Guardsman put a bullet through, scarred uselessness. The docs said he'd live a long life, even if he wouldn't be winning any hundred-yard dashes, but they must have forgotten to prep him about the pain, about the lifetime's worth of pills and inhalers he's be chained to.
It beat the alternative, didn't it?
Meanwhile, Susan snored gently. He tugged the sheets away from her face and bent forward. She smiled in her sleep. She always did.
And he loved her for it.
Jesse wiped his forehead and cracked the kink out of his neck. It wasn't her fault that he couldn't sleep. She tried her best. Besides, she had her job, her kids, her life. Jesse was a big boy. He had made it this far. But he wasn't going to be getting any more sleep in the wet and smelly coffin on his side of the bed, and so he swung his legs out, grabbed the all-important inhaler and fished his jeans from the floor, leaving his serene wife to whatever dreams a thirty-three year old English teacher dreamt.
Jesse took slow and careful steps past TJ and Dana's rooms. He kept an ear cocked to their doors but heard nothing but his bedroom fan's muted buzz. It wasn't much surprise. Both kids took after their mother.
His toes curled against the cold tile. He clicked the bathroom door closed before turning on the lights, winced against the hundred-watt sunrise. Head on wall, he flipped open the medicine cabinet and swallowed a pair of extra-strength Aspirins with a palmfull of tapwater. He left the tap on, swung the cabinet door shut, and mopped at his face with a dampened rag. The cloth caught in his stubble and left tufts of turquoise along his jawline. He frowned, bent over the counter to pluck them out. He was close enough to see the purplish discolouration under both eyes, the unhealthy yellow in his corneas. Offended by the sight, but morbidly curious, he turned sideways and traced the grotesque roadway of puckered scar that crisscrossed his upper torso. He ran his hand along his protruding ribcage, to his bicep and pressed a thumb into the crater where Chief Irons had shot him, where the Army surgeons cut away a half-pound of infected flesh. He worked over his arthritic shoulder, down his flank, past the divot where Guardsman Jonathan Njeld's first bullet struck, and settled his palm over the softball-sized web of discolouration above his hip, where Njeld's second bullet punctured his liver. The bullet was still in there somewhere. The docs said it was lodged against his spine, too risky to remove.
"Scarred old slaver know he's doin' all right…" Jesse chuckled, coughed, and spat a bloody ribbon into the sink.
Goddamn Seattle. The humidity was bad enough, but as soon as the weather turned cold, it was absolute torture. They needed to move somewhere hot and dry: Arizona or New Mexico, maybe.
Who was he kidding? Susan loved Seattle, loved her school, and he didn't have the heart to take the city away from her.
The fucking martyr that he was, still alive and whining about aches and pains.
Disgusted, he clicked the lights off and retraced his mouse-steps down the hallway, feeling with his toes for any Hot Wheels, or Lego landmines. Past TJ and Dana's rooms, not a sound. Past his room, Susan was still snoring. All's quiet on the Western Front.
His quiet and careful path led him into the living room, where the couch, cool and comfortable, would make a perfect second bed. He allowed his eyes time to adjust to the darkness, gathered Dana's scattering of dolls into his arms and dumped them onto the loveseat. He kicked another of TJ's Hot Wheels out of the way and settled into the cushions. Something cold and slippery pressed against the small of his back. He fished the magazine out from under his ass and offered it a cursory glance before throwing it aside.
But the magazine wouldn't leave his hands. There was plenty of light from the streetside window. He could make-out the cover just fine: A barricaded turnpike. A rusting and dented 'Welcome to Raccoon City' billboard with a biohazard symbol spray painted over it. The Twenty-two point bold typeset was an easy read. REMEMBERING RACCOON.
A bead of sweat formed in his hairline.
Of all the things to pick up, it had to be a ten-year anniversary feature on Raccoon City. It baffled him why Susan would want to read about it in the first place. They lived that nightmare once. He escaped it. There was no reason why they needed to keep reliving it every damn year. It must be Susan's Catholic conscience that spurred her to collect every bit of half-assed Raccoon City memorabilia she could find. He asked Bachman about it once. Bachman said that she could be having survivor's guilt as well, even If she hadn't needed to escape like he had.
Survivor's guilt: such bullshit. Why should he feel guilty? He got lucky; others didn't. It was that simple.
Still, he was unable to let go of the magazine. He squinted and paged through, paused on a file photo of Chief Irons.
His breath whistled; his chest tightened. To think Brian Irons went down in history as a modern day Davey Crockett. Brian Fucking Irons: selfless hero who led the valiant but doomed defence of Raccoon City from the frontlines. Tom Selleck played him in that TV movie. His name was top of the list on the RPD's memorial in Latham. There was talk of building a statue of him.
Jesse dropped the magazine and massaged the hole Irons had put through him. Brian Irons: the blood-soaked madman in expensive clothing. Red-faced, his small teeth bared, the muzzle of his pistol flashing yellow again and again.
Sweat rolled down his nose. His lungs burned. He remembered his panic that day, scrambling out of the hallway, away from Marv and Stacey.
He remembered Stacey twitching and pissing herself, a red puddle growing around her head.
It was too much. He forced the memory aside, turned away from the tainted magazine and pressed his warm palms over both eyes. Just let the thought run its course. That's always what Bachman said. Find somewhere quiet, and let it out.
Let it out.
Let it out.
Let Stacey, and Marty and Suit Woman out. They want to play. Come on out.
"This is stupid." He dropped his hands and shook his head.
And his breath caught halfway before hissing back in. His legs kicked. Both arms flared out and cleared the side-table of its clutter. Every tendon and muscle was straining and rigid.
There was a white figure wavering near the hallway, head down and arms limp at the shoulders. A bib of black blood spread to the beltline.
"Holyfuck!" he gasped.
Starfished and unmoving as Dead Stacey Kelso, Jesse gawked, whistling his breath. His heart hammered against the roof of his mouth, and his eyes were wide enough to strain the lids. He didn't take his attention from the entranceway until his vision corrected, and he realised that he was freaking-out over a sweater on a coat-rack.
"Shit."
Stupid, so stupid. This was what he got for even looking at that damn magazine. Bachman was full of shit. Raccoon City belonged in the past. Let it out? Look what happened when it got let out.
At last, convinced that Susan's AFI hoodie wasn't going to come across the room after him, Jesse tucked his legs and glanced over to what he had hit: a pile of Susan's correcting and an empty coffee cup. He didn't move for a good minute, listening or any noise from the kids.
Nothing, he was lucky.
He had to get out of here. He was restless and twitchy, and he was bound to wake the kids.
A drive would help. He could go to the shop, work at some of that billing he had been putting off. All he needed was to keep himself occupied, 'get out of the bad place', as Bachman would say.
Jesse rose, slipped into his jacket and boots and penned a quick note.
Couldn't sleep.
At the shop
I'll bring back breakfast
J
The front door whispered shut. Jesse took a three-quarter breath of Seattle mist, coughed, and clicked the unlock button on his Marauder. The car's marker-lights flashed a hello. He smiled, ran a hand along its dangerous curves and climbed aboard. A turn of the ignition and the engine's pulse thumped through the firewall, six-hundred and ten horses waiting for the whip to crack. He backed onto the black-marble street and managed to wait five blocks before punching the throttle, grinning as the neighbourhood's bedroom lights flicked awake.
AN: I have a man-crush on Tom Selleck.
