TWO
~JACE~
Fuck…
I’d been here before.
More times than I could count—but, to be fair, that wasn’t saying too much—and enough to let me be sure I likely wasn’t visiting for the last time, but I knew I’d been here before.
And why-the-hell-not? Let it never be said of Jason Presley, after all, that he’s not at least consistent with his insanity. At least, not in his dreams.
Lately my madness was going through something of an identity crisis.
Or something. Fuck, I don’t know. I wasn’t a shrink. If I was I likely would’ve never gotten into this mess.
But then I wouldn’t have met…
A palm made of pure, unforgiving flame hauled off and slapped me across the face. Another swept at my ankles, knocking me flat on my ass.
Oh… right.
I’d been here before…
Fuck.
Hell. I was in Hell. Not in any sense of “Here I am, paying for my sins,” or some hokey shit like that. No, this wasn’t a religious story—not unless I’m preaching the gospel of pussy and motor oil, though I wouldn’t disbelieve it if someone told me I was—and I certainly wasn’t dead enough to be going to the great Downstairs anytime soon. Nope. This Hell was the very Hell I’d escaped from—what?—a day ago? A week? Hard to tell; it was all just one big cycling dream, after all. I’d slide into consciousness long enough to know I was spread out on a hospital bed somewhere. Seemed nice. Somebody with the Crows must’ve put up some good money to make sure I had a private room all to myself.
Place even smelled nice, but that was only because I knew a certain someone was visiting…
But there was nothing so pleasant as that here. Here was the stink of a freshly blown meth lab, melting plastic, and the pungent stink of my life as I all-but threw it away.
And things were just starting to get nice, too.
The dream, like it always did, dropped me off just in the middle of the clusterfuck. I was already in the apartment—Candy’s and her apartment; or, rather, the apartment that had only just recently stopped being theirs—and the drug lab in the next apartment over had just gone off. That, I suppose, there was no rewriting in the cycling narrative of my mind. As an author of dreams, I was something of an asshole—an especially heinous realization when one considered that the only audience to such creative nut-fuckery was myself.
You can tell a lot about an artist based on how they treat their audience, I’m told.
Actually, nobody’s ever told me that…
Maybe the nurse should have turned up my oxygen. I was in Hell and digressing; philosophizing and…
And there was a fiery chunk of wall sailing through the air towards my head.
Philosophize later, Jason, I scolded myself as I rolled free of the debris.
A scalding mass collided with the back of my hip and I seethed, sucking in hot, toxic air through clenched teeth and feeling the sting through both time and reality. A shrinking sliver of my mind held onto the fact that this wasn’t real—that, sure, it had been real, but I was only reliving it all in the safety of dreams—but it did nothing to curb the pain.
Nurse? I thought, hobbling through the smoke-filled living room and calling out to Danny, I think my morphine’s runnin’ dry.
Still I called out to Danny, the part of my brain that knew this was a dream not on happy speaking terms with the part that was certain this was the first time all over again. I was there for Danny—had gone there for Danny!—and, dammit, I wasn’t going to leave him now, then, or ever!
“MERC! MERCURY, WHERE—”
A fresh burst interrupted my words. Wood screamed, splintered, and spilled out through the living room. I felt a swell of new air as the door exploded off its hinges; the gust blowing the rational bits of my dreaming mind into…
The stink! Fucking hell, it was awful!
I could practically feel the hairs in my nose curl; could almost hear them saying “FUCK THIS!” and preparing to evacuate my nostrils and head for more pleasant pastures. A nice manure patch or a perhaps a Florida landfill in the throes of summer.
Christ, I wouldn’t be far behind at this rate!
And yet, despite the stink, I spun on my heels to face the doorway—turned away from the kitchen where I’d been headed; away from Danny—and caught sight of something I already knew to be waiting there: a tall, lanky silhouette—all hunched and heaving and already hauling ass through the opening it had opened up for itself.
“YOU!”
I could have lived this moment a thousand times—and, fuck me sideways, I felt like I already had—and I’d never, never know for certain which one of us said the word. Long as I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think I could say with any real certainty if it was even truly said aloud.
But I want to say it was; want to believe I wasn’t just making that up.
“YOU!”
It seemed to hang there like a hot, smoky word balloon in some oversaturated comic panel. A shrink could tell me the word was written over our heads in smoke and fire and, yeah, I’d believe him. Time was certainly moving slow enough to up and freeze then and there, capturing us in an eternal “oh fuck”-moment to be paired beside other “oh fuck”-moments in a sequential tale of fire and friendship and…
Fuck!
T-Built!
The son-of-a-bitch who’d haunted any number of prior nightmares.
The son-of-a-bitch who ran the Carrion Crew’s drug and sex rings.
The son-of-a-bitch who’d had my pregnant wife murdered.
Oh boy… if I had to list all the reasons I wanted to see that son-of-a-bitch’s insides everywhere except on the inside I’d be writing ‘til my damn hand fell clean off my wrist.
And this would be the part of the time-slowed, nearly comic book-esque scene where our brave hero, driven by the power of friendship and fresh love, leapt bravely into battle and valiantly battled the forces of evil before hauling his best buddy and second-in-command from the raging inferno. Man, a guy could practically see the dynamic illustrations for that one, right? It’d be a comic to end all comics, wouldn’t it?
‘Cept it ain’t how it happened, true believers.
Nope. Our hero gasped—either on the word “YOU!” or maybe just a regular, old-fashioned too-sharp inhale—and sucked in a cloud of smoke that tasted dreadfully like cat piss. Heroics clocked out then and disgusted confusion started its shift; my world was all blurred forms backlit by a growing fire and a series of hacking, whooping coughs that seemed to propel me backwards. My feet worked to keep me upright only to have another wave of coughs try to push me down again. I imagined a cartoon doofus finding himself on a frozen pond without skates, feet kicking out comically and arms pinwheeling like a spas as he tottered back; a six-foot singed infant covered in soot and snot.
When heroics abandon Jason Presley, boys and girls, they abandon him in a show of fireworks.
Speaking of which…
Sparks and flames crept along after me as T-Built’s entrance fed new oxygen to the mayhem. Everything—absolutely EVERYTHING!—was a mockery of its previous form, now built entirely of fire and promises. They were the same sort of promises pissed-off bookies and scorned ex-girlfriends came bearing.
And this wasn’t even the predominant concern I had at that moment.
Two bodies, one teasing the blurred veil of my vision and the other, hidden somewhere in the kitchen behind me, existing as a memory of why I’d brought myself here in the first place. T-Built was following me in my chaotic not-quite-a-fall act, his own motions seeming far more graceful from what I could make out. Back in the kitchen, I thought I heard Danny call “Kid!” but it could have just as easily been “Kill,” “Kiss,” or “Kim.” With no way to execute T-Built at that moment, though, no chance that I was being urged into a make-out session with him, and, near as I could tell, no big-bottomed Kardashian in the immediate vicinity, I thought “Kid!” was the most likely bet.
T-Built seemed more motivated by Danny’s call than I was. With my coughing fit only then beginning to die down, I managed to catch my balance just in time to secure my footing so that the son-of-a-bitch could come crashing into me like a runaway snowplow.
For a scrawny little fuck, the drug-and-sex peddler sure knew how to throw a tackle.
I was off my feet and corkscrewing sideways then, a bony shoulder planted in my sternum and driving me back towards the kitchen. The tears in my eyes evaporated from the unbearable heat, forcing my vision to approach something threateningly near to clarity—who in their right mind would actually want to see all this clearly?—and I watched the living room pass. I watched the flames eat up more of my surroundings. I watched T-Built reach into the waistband of his burnt, stringy jeans to retrieve the Saturday night special he had tucked away there. It was a small caliber pea-shooter, the sort of number that gets the guys giggling in the middle of gunfight until its muzzle’s buried into the meat of their guts. I felt the muzzle vibrate with the locking hammer as it was buried into the meat of my guts.
I would’ve started praying then if I’d had the time. After all, getting shot sucks.
“T-BUILT SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES, PRESLEY!”
I should know.
I would have started praying then, but, in Hell, prayers don’t need to be prayed to be answered. Not so long as the solution sucks more than the problem one’s trying to pray away.
Gravity and physics tag-teamed me and T-Built then, deciding that his outta-nowhere tackle had run out of momentum and that my airborne body had enjoyed its weightlessness long enough. Down we went, cradle and all, and in the midst of our tangled fall the gun’s barrel lost its hold against my belly and went off harmlessly into a kitchen tile. The bullet, fleeing the deafening roar of its gunmetal womb, screamed at the sudden impact with the floor, and a split-second later I realized why:
That motherfucker was hotter than five porn stars fucking in a stolen Firebird on the surface of the sun!
It was my turn to scream, and I’m pretty sure I did. I’m pretty sure I cried, too; that, and let loose a stream of obscenities featuring an ongoing reappearance of one of my time-tested favorites.
Maybe T-Built screamed. Maybe he cried, and maybe he even had a few “FUCK!”s to share with the class, as well. I’ll never know. A scalding-hot floor and the threat of being shot have a funny way of distracting a man from such things.
They also have a funny way of getting that same man to rise to his feet in record time.
Feeling a bit like a drunk phoenix, I was up from the proverbial ashes and teetering on uncertain legs. There was danger aplenty in this mysterious land, a land that had, only moments earlier, been a living space for hookers; a land that had quickly become…
Fuck…
I’d been here before.
More times than I could count—but, to be fair, that wasn’t saying too much—and enough to let me be sure I likely wasn’t visiting for the last time, but I knew I’d been here before.
And why-the-hell-not? Let it never be said of Jason Presley, after all, that he’s not at least consistent with his insanity. At least, not in his dreams.
Because this WAS a dream!
Only a dream!
Only a…
“GIT DOWN!”
A pair of hands, each one the size of a ham steak and just as fiery-hot and grease-slicked with sweat, shoved me back. My tumble into the kitchen took an awkward reversal as I stumbled once again across the threshold—from carpet-to-tile and back again—and half-spun to try to catch myself before I could fall again. I half-succeeded. The first available surface my palms could find was the edge of a couch that was in its early stages of burning. I wasn’t sure if it was the jostle I gave it upon impact, or if I’d up and loosed a few weeks’ worth of trapped hooker farts from the cushions, but the moment I touched the damn thing it seemed to be reminded that, “Hey! There’s a fire a-blazin’ up in this joint!” and I was suddenly staring down a fiery mass that was poorly disguising itself as a sofa. I yelped and pushed away, scalding my hands in the process, only to have a dizzy-spell seize me at that moment and turn the room slantwise, sideways, and every ways in between. One foot went one way, the other went another, and I fell face-first into the burning couch.
Fire licked at my hair.
Smoke leapt up my nostrils.
Fumes wrestled past my lips.
I heard the sharp, violent pops of what could have either been gunshots or brain cells bursting in absolute resignation. Either seemed a reasonable source for the sounds at that moment. Not much caring which it was—who needed brain cells when your hair was at stake?—I fought to pull free of the flaming furniture. With the room still eerily tilted in my hazy mind, my steps away from the sofa felt more like a perilous, backwards climb up the side of a volcano. A few more gunshots-slash-blown brain cells echoed, and I tried to call out to Danny—I NEEDED to call out to Danny.
No words came.
Like the rest of my body, my voice simply wasn’t having any of this bullshit anymore; nothing of mine wanted to work the way it should.
Next thing I know my dick-hole’s gonna fart with rage and my ass will try to piss out the fire, I vacantly thought.
More of that sound. I was growing evermore certain they were gunshots, because I was fairly sure I’d never had that many brain cells.
Then I felt something tickling my feet…
Distracted, I glanced down and saw that the carpet I was standing on had, like the sofa, gone up in flames. Whether they’d been that way after my episode in the kitchen or if it was a more immediate reaction, I also saw that the edges of my boots were beginning to melt.
Hell, I thought with absolute certainty. I am in Hell.
Then, hearing a pained grunt behind me, I turned to face the kitchen and the aftermath of the small battle going on therein. Danny was teetering, looking not unlike he had the few times I’d seen him utterly plastered on cheap beer, and T-Built was gaining ground on him, his Saturday night special leveled and ready. This would be the part in a dramatic scene where the eyewitness would say that the small revolver’s barrel was smoking—some sign that there’d been shots fired from it already—but with absolutely everything in the place belching dark, reeking clouds of stifling smoke there was little chance of identifying the source of one wisp against the other. One would have an easier time identifying the source of a particular fart in the middle of FREE FRIED ONION-PLATTER-night at the Fry-N-Bye.
But there was no question in my mind that T-Built’s gun had been recently fired…
And it looked like Danny had taken most of the punishment while I’d been wrestling with the flaming couch.
The big man—one of my oldest friends and the most loyal member of the Crows since my old man had founded them decades earlier—went down on his knees. The entire apartment seemed to tremble with the impact. It was as though the very foundation of what our lives had become was sobbing.
And still T-Built wasn’t satisfied.
A leering grin spread across his face.
“… SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES…”
I wasn’t sure when my swimming mind had remembered the gun I’d been clever enough to bring with me; couldn’t be positive when my body had decided to act on that realization. There was a lot that happened in Hell—a lot that would continue to happen in Hell the next time I was cycled back into this horrible, recurring scene—and I’d come to peace with the fact that I’d never fully grasp a great deal of it. I couldn’t recall the ‘B’ of the ‘A-B-C’-sequence that came to pass then, but I do know that there was a gun in my hand, my index finger horny and ready to fuck that trigger into a stupor, and a roar in my heart that I can only hope made it past my lips.
I knew I could die happy if the last thing T-Built ever heard was the sound of my rage bellowing out across the fiery chasm of that Hell that he and his blown meth lab had brought into existence.
BLAM!
I saw my old home, lit with a flurry of red-and-blue; five-oh and EMTs parked everywhere except the driveway.
BLAM!
I saw a gurney, covered with a blood-stained sheet, carrying a slab of meat with a painfully familiar mound protruding from the middle, roughly the same size and shape as Anne—roughly the same size and shape as my wife—when she was sleeping beside me at night.
Except there was no peaceful rise-and-fall of breath then.
BLAM! BLAM!
I saw my life carried away in an ambulance, remembered morbidly thinking that it was too late for all that—that she should be tucked away inside something blacker; more final.
But hearses only roll in Hell…
Ambulances belong on earth, where the living still crave illusions and flashing lights.
BLAM!
The shots of my gun were echoed by the memory of another—the memory-echoed bullet actually burning fresh in my shoulder as I went on squeezing the trigger—as I saw one of T-Built’s cronies pull a piece on me on my own lawn, amidst a sea of cops and paramedics.
“T-BUILT SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES, PRESLEY!”
The number of shots got lost in the haze of toxic smoke, stifling flames, and the endless sea of rage that washed over me at that moment. I just kept on shooting, kept on roaring and cursing and sucking in cloud-after-cloud of poison. My skin felt like it was drawing ever nearer to levels of burnt known only in extra-crispy recipes, and if my hair hadn’t cooked down and fused into a single, carbon-caked mass of nastiness I’d willingly eat all that was left. I could hear the sweat sizzling like overdone bacon on my brow, my ear canals felt like boiling swamps, and my testicles were hanging so low I was sure they’d decided to finally leave.
But even the fires of Hell itself couldn’t burn as hot as my hate.
And not a devil that darted or danced in this place could hope to match the levels of crazy that I’d set.
I can’t say how many shots were fired. I just kept on shooting, kept on roaring and cursing and inhaling poison to fuel my toxic roar. I can only say that, when I had sense enough about me to actually register my surroundings, my gun was clicking empty over and over and over and T-Built was long dead, sprawled like an abandoned, unloved toy at the other end of the kitchen.
I wouldn’t even offer him my condolences.
Spitting out the taste of soot and poison and replacing it a moment later with a ragged inhale, I tried to take a step…
Only to realize I was on my knees.
“Oh fuck…”
The ceiling groaned above me, issuing a warning that it could only hold on so much longer. My body issued a similar warning. The ceiling held out longer.
I collapsed to the steaming floor of Hell, staring out across a fiery wasteland that looked hilariously like a living room. I stared, thinking one name—a fresh name; a happy name—and wishing I might have a chance to do things over.
But I was the author of this dream, and so was I the only audience of the work; an asshole and a stubborn glutton for punishment.
I thought the name again, a name that was there on my tongue and yet completely gone from me. Like oxygen and cool, fresh air, it was near to me but not nearly near enough. I remembered both fondly, though; remembered both with love and the wish that I’d get to taste both again, even if just once more.
Why couldn’t I remember the name?
Why…?
“M-Mi-ah…” I croaked then, feeling a small sense of victory in uttering those two syllables.
And then I saw her…
But…
But it wasn’t the her that I’d called to.
No, the “her” that I’d called to was locked away—safe and sound—in an office back in Danny’s shop. Far, far from this place; far, far from Hell.
No, the “her” that I saw was the “her” that I’d seen rolled out that night; the “her” that I’d seen since then, a ghost, lingering at the end of every street; the “her” that waved back at me, pregnant and beautiful, just out of reach.
Anne…
She came to me. She lifted me like I weighed nothing. She chased away the heat with her presence; chased away the smoke and toxins with her very breath. She held me, body and soul—though I might be embellishing that “body”-part—and spoke without words to me.
Anne…
Jace, my sweet, silly Jace, she said to me, one pearly-white hand cupping my charred jaw while the other cupped her eternally pregnant belly, just what were you thinking coming here?
I wanted to tell her about Danny, about wanting to help my friend and finally tracking down her killer, but I couldn’t find my voice. This, I decided, was best; I was pretty sure she wasn’t asking about the burning apartment.
Angels don’t come to Hell, I thought.
She smiled, seeming to hear this. She needs you, Jace, Anne went on, still smiling, she needs you almost as much as you need her.
And I knew that she was right. She’d always been right, even when she was wrong.
I would have laughed if there’d been any air left in my lungs to do it. Ah, the unwavering truth of marriage: happy wife… happy—
“Jace. Please… come… back…”
Go to her, Jace, Anne pressed, bringing her free hand away from her belly to cup my face between her cooling palms. Go—she tightened her hold, and the heat that flooded my body was unbearable—to—she sighed out the words, and my lungs filled with her breath—her.
“Goodbye, Anne…” I whispered.
And then, just like that, she was gone, and I was back in Hell.
But it wasn’t Hell. Not really. It was a burning apartment, one filled with deadly toxins, and she was in there with me.
“Anne?” I called out, but I already knew that wasn’t right. The ghost was gone, and that only left…
Turning my head, I saw a fresh beacon of hope—trapped in the same deadly spiral I was cycling in—and life returned to me with a vengeance.
“Mia?”
Fuck…
I’d been here before.
More times than I could count—but, to be fair, that wasn’t saying too much—and enough to let me be sure I likely wasn’t visiting for the last time, but I knew I’d been here before.
And why-the-hell-not? Let it never be said of Jason Presley, after all, that he’s not at least consistent with his insanity. At least, not in his dreams.
But let it also never be said that Jason Presley didn’t handle his business when it came time to do so. Whether it was out there on the streets or in the tedious cycle of a dream dreamt from a cushy hospital bed, Jason Presley handles his business. And so, once again—and likely not for the last time, either—I pulled myself out of the clutches of certain death, propelled solely by the love of a very special woman who looked almost as close to death as I was, and handled my business.
So what if we were both broken? We knew that of one another long before that fucking fire. But who said that two broken souls couldn’t build themselves into one decent one? And that’s just what Mia and I did, just like how we’d done it time and time and time again in this twisted, cycling dream since that one time we’d done it for real:
Together we escaped Hell.
Together we…
Together.
“Mia…”
****
“Mia…?”
The first thing I was aware of was the smell, her smell: sweet, flowery, and wonderously intimate. The next thing…
A pair of vertical, needle-like lengths of light cut through the dim and wonderful darkness of my oblivion. I was awake, only just barely, but—DAMN!—that was better than being dead.
And how great was it that I could finally think that?
How great was it that, in my heart and in my head, I didn’t resent being alive?
Both my heart and my head, however, cursed the sunlight that cut past the edges of my hospital room’s ridiculously useless little blinds and stabbed me like trained assassins through my pupils. The curse spread to my lips, and though I wanted to scream it I found myself grumbling something that was a distant cousin to “fuck.”
Even this, though, was deliciously familiar enough to keep me from truly resenting the rude awakening. Sure, my skull felt like it was a few sizes too small around a brain that was a few sizes too big, and I felt like I’d been the puck in a monster game of air-hockey played atop a field of sandpaper…
But I was alive!
I laughed, groaned, and laughed some more. And the next round of “fuck”s, though half-hearted at best, were more recognizable.
Consciousness—a fuller, more encompassing version of the keyhole awareness I’d woken to—glided back, and I found myself in the room I’d only caught phantom glimpses of over…
Over…
Geez! How-the-hell long had I been there?
Machines and monitors beeped and whirred and displayed all manner of nonsense around me. Seeming to challenge the assault of medical technology, a horde of flowers, stuffed animals—most wearing hilarious mockeries of motorcycle leathers and one even seated upon a big, plastic Harley—and all manner of “GET WELL” cards. The nearest card, stood upright and partially opened, offered enough of a view to let me read its handwritten contents:
need skin?
i gots a hairy kiester
COVERED in it!
har har har
M
“Marcus,” I said aloud to myself, recognizing the “trademarked” humor of one of the Crow’s more loyal new recruits. I could even hear his “patented” laugh—Har har har, indeed—chiming in my mind as I read it.
Similar cards surrounded this one, most likely containing similar sentiments, and I couldn’t help but smile at the combined effect of all the various sentiments. It was, admittedly, a truly beautiful thing to wake up to.
But wasn’t that the point?
“Finally awake, I—”
“SWEET TITTY-FUCKING CHRIST!” I cried out in alarm, nearly throwing myself right out of my hospital bed in the process.
My head swiveled. A fresh wave of dizziness traveled all the way to my guts. A heated deliberation arose about whether or not I should puke up whatever my stomach could find. Then, deciding I was too hungry to go puking up anything, my body went to work on my heart and lungs, trying to calm the two down so that I could fuel the lecture I was about to unload on…
The nurse was folded over, nearly toppling over, and crying with laughter.
“I-I’m… I’m so-sorry, Mi-Mister Presley,” she stuttered around her cackles, “b-but th-THAT was the… the f-funniest—” She left the sentence unfinished as she doubled over yet again with laughter, forced to hold herself upright against the door frame that separated my room from the rest of the hospital. “‘Sw-sweet titty-fuck—’” she tried to repeat before another bout of laughter interrupted her. “Hoh, boy, Mister Presley! That likely just made my entire day, I’ll tell you that much right there.”
“Happy to oblige,” I grumbled, still working to stifle the urge to die, pant, or outright murder the giggling woman. “Just call me ‘Mister Laugh-Riot,’ over here.”
“Well alright, Mister Laugh-Riot,” she teased, taking a step inside and pausing to appreciate another of the no-doubt poetic sentiments scrawled within another of the cards. “The doctor’s on his way. In the meantime, can I get you anything? Some water, perhaps?”
But I could only think of one thing that I wanted at that moment.