Nicholas
A Few Minutes Earlier
The explosion went off silently at first. It took a brief second before the sound hit my ears. When it did, I felt it as much as I saw it. The heat, the din, the smell—it all collided into my senses at once. I was thrown backwards and slammed into the side of a brick building. My left arm was numb up to the shoulder, but the whole rest of my body was alive and wailing in pain.
I slid to the ground, dazed, while the soundless roar of my damaged hearing bellowed in my eardrums. The fires had taken root amongst the debris littering the abandoned facility. Heaps of garbage sizzled, sending smoke coursing up into the sky and forming a thick blanket of grey that choked out the sky overhead.
I looked forward and saw, dotted between the pillars of fire, the bodies of the Esposito men who had been standing closest to the bomb when it exploded. They were hideously burnt, damn near barbecued, with faces and limbs melted into shapes that looked barely human. The guns they’d been holding were reduced to twisted, molten lumps of iron, useless for anything other than pinning their sorry corpses to the earth. Good. Let them fucking stay there forever.
I scanned left and right. I wanted to see Cosimo’s dead body, get a glimpse of the horrified shock that would surely be seared onto his face. I frowned. He was nowhere to be seen. Giovanni, too, had vanished.
Using the wall to support my weight, I lumbered to my feet. The trigger of the gun in my hand was stuck, rendering it unusable. I tossed it aside. I didn’t think I’d need it again anyway.
The heat was becoming unbearable. The tall stacks of the plant kept most of it trapped down below, where I was, turning this open courtyard into a hellish sauna for the dead. I needed to get out of here immediately before the quickly diminishing supply of oxygen forced me to pass out.
I didn’t want to go back to the vans we’d arrived in. If any of the Espositos had managed to survive the blast, they’d be sure to regroup there. Instead of going there, I started staggering across the courtyard in the direction that Fists had come from. With any luck, I’d find one of their bikes parked that way.
I limped to the edge of the circle of white halogen light. I took one glance into the shadows that lay beyond there and then looked away as vomit rose in my stomach.
The Punishers were stretched out in a row. Each of them bore a bloody hole in the front and back of their heads. They’d been executed gangland-style, judging by the path the bullets had taken through their skulls. I forced myself to turn back and pay each of them the moment of silence they deserved.
One by one, I walked down the row and paused briefly in front of each body. If the man’s eyes were open, I bent down and used two fingers to pull them shut. They were cold already. The life was long gone.
It took everything I had not to break down when I reached Fists at the end of the line. His arms had fallen to either side of his torso. I picked them up and crossed them over his chest. Blood caked his forehead, forming a thick, maroon scab in the areas where it had dried.
I fell to one knee, careful not to let my shattered wrist knock against anything. It still hung at a grotesque angle, but I ignored that for the moment.
I couldn’t believe this was how it ended for Fists. My president, the one who’d taken me in and told me what had to be done to get the revenge I was seeking. He’d picked up where Smalls had left off, showing me what it meant to be a man. He taught me what pain was, how to use it to my advantage. How a broken bone can grow stronger in the aftermath of the trauma that hurt it in the first place.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do better for you, Fists,” I murmured. “I tried. I really did.”
Behind me, the fires were growing hotter. They had begun to spread outwards, catching on the wooden frames of windows and doors in the offices that surrounded the courtyard. Whatever they could eat, they did, multiplying and intensifying with every scrap of garbage or patch of grass. They were insatiable.
The heat lapped at my skin. I didn’t have much longer before this place, too, was consumed by the flames. I supposed it was fitting, like a funeral pyre for the warriors in front of me. They’d fought the good fight and paid dearly for it. But I knew these men. They wouldn’t have had it any other way.
I stood. Time to leave.
Then the fist rammed into the side of my head.
I lurched backwards, falling against a broad vertical pipe, as the second and third punches railed into my face. Stars exploded behind my eyelids. I slumped to the floor and raised my hands over my head to shield myself from the blows. Still, they rained down upon me with a fury.
I peeked between my crossed forearms and saw Cosimo’s maniacal scowl. He was attacking me with a boundless, coked-out energy. What his hits lacked in power they made up for in volume. Again and again, he brought hammer fists smashing against my arm.
One swung wide and clipped my broken wrist. I felt the skin give way to a shard of bone stabbing through. It looked like a mountain peak above a river of blood.
“Die, motherfucker, die!” he shrieked endlessly. He cocked one foot back to swing it at me. As he did, I took my chance and lashed out my own kick. It smashed into the side of the knee bearing all his weight.
His face went white as a sheet as the ligaments tore and the knee buckled inwards in a way it was never meant to go. Instantly, he fell to the ground.
I cautiously lowered my hands to see if he was awake. His body lay crumpled at an awkward angle and his eyes were closed. I rolled forward onto my knees, wincing as my wrist shot steel rods of pain all the way up to the joint in my shoulder. Looking into his face, I paused. His chest wasn’t moving.
I sighed. He appeared to be unconscious, and I wasn’t going to wait around to see what he would be like when he woke up. I planted my right hand into the ground and started pushing myself up.
Just then, though, his eyes fluttered wide open. He opened his mouth and emitted a jaw-clattering screech, then his arm rocketed forward and pulled hard on the wrist I was using to support myself.
I fell onto my right side with a heavy thump. He threw a wild punch into my cheek, then leaped on top of me. The battering resumed, a veritable hailstorm of elbows and knuckles descending into my ribs, my arms, my head. I tried to shield him off, but he still managed to land punch after punch.
Loading all my power into one knee, I drove it upwards into the soft part of his abdomen. He gasped and relented long enough for me to toss him off me.
I tried to scoot back to the wall so I could hoist myself onto my feet, but he recovered too quickly. He dove into me, swung around behind, and wrapped his arm around my neck, leaning back so the entirety of his strength was dedicated to cutting off my air flow. I started to choke.
“You rat!” he bellowed. “Filthy rat!”
I desperately swayed my right arm around behind my head, trying to find leverage to shove him off me, but he ducked and avoided my grasp. The power in my body was fading, too starved of air to continue functioning. I was sliding into blackness. I had enough power in me for one more effort.
Roaring, I kicked hard into the ground and shoved him back into the wall. His head hit the wall with a sickly crunch and his grasp around my throat instantly went limp. I tucked and rolled away from him, coming to a rest a yard away. A fire blazed next to me, soaking me in powerful heat. One skinny steel pole stuck out of the inferno.
Cosimo sat up and pressed a hand against the spot in his head where it had hit the wall. When he pulled it away, I saw a smear of blood shining on his palm. He looked at me in a daze. I started once more to push myself back up to standing. I managed to rise to one knee.
A rotund figure rounded the corner. In his two chubby hands, Giovanni held a gun with the business end directed towards me. His injured leg dragged behind him. The heat had cauterized the wound, so the blood no longer ran in a thick stream down his leg.
Cosimo saw him and his eyes damn near popped out of his head. He began barking orders immediately. “Kill him! Kill him!” he said, pointing a bony finger straight at me. “Fire the fucking gun!”
Giovanni looked at me, eyes wide. He cocked the hammer back. I closed my eyes. Go ahead, I thought to myself. Pull the fucking trigger.
But the gun never went off.
I opened my eyes after one beat too many had passed by. Giovanni had collapsed into a bloody puddle on the ground. Standing over him was Natalia. She held a brick in one hand, covered with the blood of the man at her feet.
She looked up at me. Her eyes shined in the fire. It reflected off her skin, her air. She looked like she was glowing. The air shimmered with the heat surging through it, blurring her outlines, turning her more and more angelic as the seconds ticked by.
Goddamn. I didn’t understand what she did to me. But I wasn’t done finding out.
A blur of motion to the bottom right corner of my vision broke the spell between us. Cosimo was lunging for the gun Giovanni had dropped.
Acting without thinking, I bent down and picked up the steel pole hanging out of the fire. The heated metal seared my skin instantly, but I ignored the pain. What was a little more agony when you were already as broken as I was?
Raising it over my head, I brought it crashing down on top of his skull. The pole scythed through scalp, skull, and brain, sending for a geyser of bloody fluid. Cosimo went limp.
This time, it was for good.
Natalia looked at me. I looked at her. I didn’t say a word as I stuck out my hand. She stepped forward tentatively and took it. Our fingers were slick with sweat, blood, and ash, but it didn’t matter. Beneath all that was skin. Hers and mine. Whole, for the most part. And close together. That was what mattered.
We walked out of the plant, leaning against one another for support. The heat gradually lessened as we moved away from the area where the bomb had exploded, but we could still hear the groan of melting rivets as the huge sheets of metal gave way to the greedy flames.
My throat burned with the acrid rasp of the chemicals we’d ingested. There was no way that shit was good for either of us, but as we coughed and hacked, a laugh began to bubble up. I looked at Natalia and, for some strange reason, a smile broke out over my face. The laugh took me over, growing stronger and stronger, until I had to stop and rest my hands on my knees because I was laughing so hard.
“What’s so funny?” she asked me, astonished.
It took me a long time before I was calm enough to answer. “I did it,” I finally said. “I fucking did it.”
# # #
We found a crowd of motorcycles huddled at the outskirts of the plant. I recognized the big yellow one. It was Fists’. The keys dangled from the ignition. I gave the handlebars a quick pat. Maybe, somewhere deep in the mechanical guts, a little part of him still lingered in here.
I helped Natalia onto the back of the bike. After she was settled, I swung my leg over, mounted in front of her, and put my hand on the keys.
I paused for a moment. The distant fires were no longer audible. The night around us was still. No animals moved or chirped, no cars passed by on the road. There was silence.
Then I twisted the keys and felt the thrum of the engine between my legs. Opening the clutch, I rolled back on the throttle. Gas combusted. Wheels spun.
Natalia and I took off down the road, leaving behind everything we’d ever known.