And in the Dark They Are Born, Part 7
"His ears are still adjusting."
CHAPTER 10
NAVY BLUE BRIEFCASE in hand, Vitri sprints across the street, away from the crash, and down the alley leading to the furniture store. He’d seen it unravel from streets over, through an abandoned art gallery’s fogged windows: the motorcycle, the crash, the stumble. He’d glimpsed the masked. And he’d hurried, all the while wondering what for, questioning why he wouldn’t flee now, why he hadn’t earlier.
South. East. Out of Shreveport. Away from Reyn. To Tallahassee, alone, like he’d intended, leaving her with the means to survive: food, fire, a loaded pistol, and the false hope that he’d come back for her—the façade that, yes, there may still be wanderers capable of humanity, to go out of their way to save, out of their way to heal.
And so he’d jogged south, one balled raincoat in his left hand, 9mm in his right.
What turned him around—what spurred him back to that clothing store, to that second raincoat, to that navy blue briefcase, and now back here, to feeding briefcase and backpack through the alley window he’d broken yesterday and scraped clean with this very pistol barrel—was the fact that Reyn had watched him sign his birth name to a lie.
He pictured her tucking those words into a pocket, studying the exchange for days, too young and naïve to know how the world works, too optimistic to burn the pages, to set the damn notebook down and leave, just leave, emerging from the furniture store only in search of him.
And so his feet had slowed as the thought came full circle; it dawned on him that he hadn’t at all given her the means to survive, but that he’d effectively given her the ammunition it’d take to die.
After Vitri vaults himself over the windowsill, he hurries over the floor’s boot-shaped bloodstains, to the wooden staircase. He wishes it weren’t guilt propelling him up the stairs, up-up-up. He opens the door into the hallway and slows his pace so as not to spook Reyn. There is a slight haze of wood smoke swirling into the hall from beneath the closed door. Vitri approaches, presses his ear to the door. No footsteps. The popping of plastic by flame.
“Reyn, it’s me,” Vitri says from behind the scarf, now blotted grey by the soot that had descended outside. “Reyn?”
Vitri opens the door slowly. Feet from the door is the trashcan and, beyond that, at the window and staring north, somewhere between crouching and standing, is Reyn, torso half-wrapped in the quilt he’d hung over the window. Without shutting the door, Vitri steps around the trashcan and into the room.
“Hey,” he says. “Don’t watch that.”
Reyn shifts her weight but, still, she doesn’t respond. She doesn’t turn around.
Vitri steps closer. “It’s okay, Reyn.” He tosses the briefcase on the floor.
A gunshot rings out.
Vitri covers his throbbing ears.
Reyn turns around, pistol in hand.
“Are you fucking deaf?” Vitri yells. He watches Reyn step out of the quilt, toward him, revealing a single bullet hole in the window. Vitri’s stomach tilts. His ears are still adjusting. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says, striding to the window.
Three-hundred yards out, one red-masked man forces the yellow-masked rider’s small intestine over a parking meter, a struggle halted only when he is waved forward by his counterpart, who on his own has advanced toward the furniture store.
Vitri turns, grabs Reyn by the shoulders, and says, “We need to get out of here.” Tears are in her eyes. The .22 pistol is no longer in her hand. “We need to get out of here,” Vitri repeats. He crouches, picks up the pistol. Places it in his waistband. “Did you hear me?”
Reyn doesn’t move. Can barely look at him. Stares at the window instead. Wipes her eyes. She, Vitri understands now, can’t hear him. She hasn’t heard him, not now, not last night. She hasn’t heard a single word that he’s said.
Still crouched, Vitri reaches for the pen they’d left on the hardwood floor and, after standing, shoves it in his front pocket. He then nudges Reyn forward, around the trashcan, to the hallway and toward the staircase. He makes her walk in front and up they go, toward the third floor, the sound of their creaking steps yawning along the walls, overpowered only by the sound of red-masked shoulders ramming the ground level door.
“Go, go, go,” Vitri says to Reyn. They pass the door to the third floor’s hallway.
A loud thud from below. A desk or dresser toppling over. The legs of other furniture skidding across the concrete.
“Fucking go,” Vitri says. As if she were a horse, he swats at Reyn’s right hip with an open hand. Again and again, and off she goes, up the staircase, to the fourth floor, until more than a few feet are between she and Vitri. Halfway up the staircase, due either to worn treads or an uneven equilibrium, or both, Reyn slips, falls, her left knee crashing into one particular step with enough force for the wood to bow beneath her weight. Within seconds, she is back on her feet and continuing up the staircase.
Another thud. Another skid. Distant now.
Vitri leaps over the bowed step and reaches the top. This door, as he’d discovered the night before, doesn’t open to a hallway, but to a large, carpeted room with fifteen-foot ceilings. An old break room for store employees. Two windows on the west wall and the hatched skylight above let in blocks of overcast sky. Blotches of muted pink paint linger on the walls. There is a nook at the south end of the room housing two vending machines, each with gaping holes crowbarred above their deposit doors, coils of stripped wire spilling out like guts. And there are three tipped café tables—two in the center of the room and one tucked near that nook, in the southeast corner.
After easing the door shut, Vitri grabs Reyn’s arm and leads her to one of the café tables in the center of the room. He points at the carpet behind the table—GET DOWN, he hopes it’ll be interpreted as. Reyn, without hesitation, drops to her knees and inches toward the table’s metal legs, body partially hidden by the tipped surface of the table. Once she settles, Vitri widens his palm—STAY. Reyn nods. Vitri pulls the pen from his pocket and crouches. Rolls up her sweatshirt sleeve and writes on her left forearm.
- LET THEM WALK IN
- THEY'LL WALK TO YOU
- DON'T LOOK AT ME
- I'LL SHOOT
- IF I CAN'T, YOU SHOOT
As Reyn reads, Vitri pulls the .22 pistol from his waistband. He isn’t going to hand it over until she nods, until she acknowledges that here, in the center of this room, she is to be bait. After she does nod, Vitri hands the pistol over, then quietly flips the café table nearest the door upside-down, onto its surface, and slides it across the carpet to the northeast corner of the room. He kneels behind the table, pistol barrel steadied on the narrow bar fusing leg to leg.
Over his breath he can hear them—somewhere below, he can hear the red-masked men. Second floor, third floor, something is rolling across the hardwood. Slowly, achingly so. Then, a door handle. A door latching. Vitri looks at Reyn, whose exhalations are seesawing his, and holds his index finger to his scarved lips. Presses his ear to the north wall.
Creak—
—creeeeeaaaaak-creak-creak-creeeeeaaaaak—
—creaks from one pair of feet, then two—
—creak-creeeaaak-creak-creeeaaak—
—the sound slows, then trails, as if they, convinced that their ears and eyes had played tricks on them, had turned around on the staircase, had given up and were ready to return to the rider they’d mutilated. And soon there is no sound. Nothing at all. Vitri looks to Reyn. Other than gingerly wiping sweat from her bruised cheek, she is still. She is calm. Eyes on the door, braced for whatever may barge through—
—SNAP—
—Her knee, Vitri thinks, the step she bowed, now split in two—
—creak-creak-creak-creak, the steps fast now, closer, creak-creak-creak-creak—
Vitri waves his left hand until Reyn looks his way. When he has Reyn’s attention he points to his scarf as if it were a mask, then to the door. She nods. Looks briefly at her inked arm before returning her eyes to the door. Vitri grips the 9mm. Tighter now. Tighter.
The doorknob turns.
Vitri glances at Reyn. IF I MISS, he wishes he’d written, knowing what’ll happen to her upon his failure. Yanked by the hair. Dragged. Raped. KILL YOURSELF.
The door opens.
The tip of the point man’s Bowie knife is the first thing that Vitri sees. It creeps, it lurks, it hovers, it grows as the point man slowly moves through the doorway. And then Reyn is spotted. Vitri can see it in her eyes. Strained, scared, wanting to flee but consciously denying the desire.
Don’t look at me, Vitri thinks. Just don’t look at me.
The door opens further.
A faded brown boot comes into view. A shin, a thigh, a waist, a bicep.
“Look at her,” the second red-masked man says. His voice is deep and crackly. “She’s perfect, isn’t she?”
The Bowie knife is twirled. Shoulders bob forward as if sea. Neck, head. One step, two steps, three steps, four—
Vitri fires.
To the floor drops the point man, to the air once more goes Vitri’s hearing, to the vending machine crawls Reyn, and through the doorway hurries the second masked man, turning, turning, stomping directly toward Vitri, a sickle secure in his right hand.
Vitri fires.
The masked man drops the sickle and clutches his gushing throat. Yet he continues toward Vitri, stomping until the stomps slow to toe drags. Eight feet and closing, stomping, staggering, stomping, dragging, bleeding all over himself.
Vitri stands. He waits for the masked man to come closer. Just a bit closer. Five feet, three feet. Aims. Fires. Down goes the man’s hands, buckled are his knees.
Vitri looks to the point man, who, though injured, continues to dig his fingernails into the carpet and slither himself after Reyn. Reyn, pistol still in hand, has nearly backed up to the nook now. Vitri steps over his tipped café table and hustles to the point man. He steps on the man’s back. Can feel the man’s groan vibrate through his toes. Presses the barrel of the 9mm to the back of his head. Pulls the trigger. Strips of mask leather adhere to the carpet.
The man goes limp.
Vitri looks at Reyn, who, backed all the way to the nook now, won’t take her eyes from the body. She is crying.
“Why are you crying?” Vitri says. He can barely hear his own words. “Huh? Why the fuck are you crying?” He walks toward her now, scarf shifting with his lips, feet gaining momentum as she cowers. “Do you feel bad that these men are dead? Huh? Do you? His hearing is coming back. “That’s four people I’ve killed because of you. Four fucking people.” Vitri snatches the pistol from Reyn’s hand and, in one quick motion, chucks it at the back of the point man’s head.
Vitri stands to the side of the second-floor window, peeking beneath the quilt. A dark green plane circles overhead. Straightens its path; descends slightly. Out of its cargo bay falls a black rectangle, small when compared to the tan parachute that unfolds seconds after to slow the plummet. Vitri watches the wind take the rectangle north. Watches three red-masked men emerge from the manhole below and chase after it on foot, around vehicles, through alleys.
The plane flies east, toward a distant grey cloud falling back to the earth. It circles, straightens, descends, unloads another rectangle. It isn’t until moments later, after the three red-masked men have returned and are shoving an oversized black duffel bag down the manhole, that Vitri turns around and writes to Reyn that they’ll leave in the middle of night.
BORN DEAF
CAN’T HEAR A THING?
NOT A THING
SPEAK?
WOULDN’T KNOW
SIGN LANGUAGE?
SOME. I READ. I WRITE
YOU’RE GOOD AT IT
CAN WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE?
SURE
WHERE ARE MY MAGAZINES?
FIRE
SYRINGES?
FIRE
WHY?
NEEDED FIRE. WHY’D YOU HAVE THOSE?
MOTHER’S.
DRUG?
THEY MAKE IT
WHO DOES?
EAST. MONROE. MASKS. YELLOW
YELLOW FROM MONROE?
LOTS OF THEM
SHOULDN’T GO EAST?
NO
WHAT’S SOUTH?
I DON’T KNOW
WE’LL GO SOUTH THEN
OK
WE’LL FOLLOW THE COAST
OK
SOMETHING WRONG?
WHAT’S IN THE BRIEFCASE?
RAINCOATS
HASN’T RAINED IN A WHILE
PROTECT FROM CHEMICALS
GOT IT
WHY DO YOU KEEP LOOKING AT THE CEILING?
UP THERE, WHAT DID YOU SAY?
I WAS ANGRY
I KNOW
NOTHING TRUE
THE TWO MEN?
WHAT ABOUT THEM?
NOTHING
WHAT ABOUT THEM?
I WANT TO SEE THEIR FACES
Reyn and Vitri roll the trailer over first. Scars coat his shaved head, some the length of a fingernail, others as long as a soda can, the majority, however, seemingly a work of something greater—above the neck and along the crown are multiple crescents, arranged in various patterns. Off-ruby stones on fishhooks droop from each earlobe. His neck has been stained so heavily that an entry wound cannot be located. Where there aren’t bloodstains, it appears as if his skin hadn’t only been shielded from the sun for stretches at a time, but that for months it had been scrubbed with some bleaching agent. Veiny, bloated. Since his death, his red vest has compressed to his chest, tight enough that the center button’s stitching has begun to unwind. Beneath, on his gut, Reyn sees a tattooed red hand, jagged along the fingernails, made illegible by the soaked and matted chest hair. The entire room smells of excrement, that which had been in each of these bodies still finding ways to surface.
Vitri tosses the sickle toward the door, then waves for Reyn to hover the candle over the man’s face. Leaning in, Reyn sees that there is a small hole in the man’s leather mask, above an eyebrow. Below are eye fissures, tear-shaped holes for nostrils, a mouth-hole wide enough to feed a small spoon through. Along the jaw and hairline, the mask is sewn to the trailer’s face, stitches an inch apart at most but, as if they’d run out of thread, from right ear to chin the mask is anchored to flesh by thick staples. Vitri places his scarf on the carpet and looks at Reyn. She shrugs her shoulders. He grabs the notebook, writes.
Reyn nods. She wants to. She needs to. Needs to see who these people are. Believes that by doing so, some form of clarity can be had. History. Purpose. Theirs. Hers. Why they are here, dead. Why she and Vitri are alive, why she’s still in Louisiana, why she has yet to put on a mask, things she’s never hoped to discover by staring at a stranger’s face. She expects Vitri to feel the same way, but all he does is stare at her, then at the man, his eyes sadly alert, his bottom lip between his teeth. “We shouldn’t do this,” the stare says. Reyn sets the candle down and asks for the notebook.
Vitri shakes his head. He pulls his knife from a pants pocket. Points at the candle and, once Reyn again brings the flame over the man’s face. He starts in on the staples, digging the point of the blade into the man’s flesh, then prying, lifting from the staple’s center. At first, the trailer’s skin resists: it lifts with the knife; shivers with the knife; descends with the knife. Won’t let go. Vitri twists the blade, lays it flat, applies his weight to the handle for seconds. Then, pluck, out it comes, bloodless and still bent around the loose bit of leather. Reyn, despite her curiosity, can only focus on Vitri’s right hand, on the wounds she’d given him the night before, when he’d pressed the hot blade to her tongue. Teethmarks from knuckle to knuckle, dried blood black in the dim light. I DON’T WANT THIS TO HURT YOU, Reyn considers writing, I’M SORRY.
Having established an effective method—dig, twist, pluck—Vitri quickly makes his way through the staples. Reyn takes it upon herself to lift what of the mask Vitri has freed. She peeks beneath; glimpses long, tangled hairs. Grey roots, black centers, red tips. And then Vitri grabs her hand. Removes it from the mask, redirects his light over the man’s forehead, and dives back in, slicing through four of the stitches. He cuts through more—two, three—then slides his hand beneath the loose half of the mask. Grips tight. And rips. Three more stitches out. Angrily resets the trailer’s tilting head, and rips. Two more. Reset, rip, until the mask is off.
There is bruising around the entry wound. Swelling, too, as far down as the trailer’s eye, reducing the oval to a slit. The other eye is open, wide open, whites strained red, the center a light purple. It is all Vitri needs to see. Knife in hand, he stands and walks to the point man. But Reyn stays. Examines the man further. A once-hooked nose whose angle has been intensified by the mask. Parched lips at a diagonal. Faint crow’s feet looping each eye. He is no younger than forty-five, and reminds her of no one.
Which makes it difficult for Reyn to decipher the feeling she has when looking at the dead man. It isn’t pity. It isn’t sorrow. And it isn’t satisfaction. She studies him for as long as she can, before it dawns on her that she must follow Vitri with the light. But it isn’t enough time for her speculation to mesh itself into anything cohesive, anything detailed. She pictures a faceless woman. A fast car, something he’d tinker with. Pictures a mangy dog by his side. No, a cat. He looks more like a cat person. Ralph, she thinks. She’s never known a Ralph. Has no basis for this. You look like a Ralph. And it is only in this way that Reyn feels closer to him, understanding of him, his life, the motives she thinks may have led him toward his time beneath a mask. Ralph just wanted to feel loved, she thinks.
Before she crosses the room, Reyn drapes Vitri’s scarf over her arm and grabs the notebook with her free hand. She turns and, if he weren’t leaned against the bit of wall directly beneath the window, moonlight on his hair, Reyn wouldn’t be able to see Vitri. Puzzled, she walks to the point man, candlelight flickering with each step—he lies on his back, face up, Vitri’s knife across his neck. His nose has been flattened. His lips are parched. He has the same earrings as Ralph, the same tattoo. There is matted facial hair, but it is blonde, wispy. There are no wrinkles on this face. The eyes are young. The cheeks are young. The point man is a boy, a tall, lanky boy with a swimmer’s torso, lump half-developed in his throat.
Reyn looks at Vitri. He stares at the floor but keeps pressing his hands together, fingers waging war with one another, grappling for something, anything. Maybe, Reyn thinks, Vitri knew the boy in a previous life. Nephew, neighbor, employee, something, some role. When Vitri finally looks up at Reyn, it is with wet eyes. Tragic eyes, eyes of anger, eyes of regret, eyes of grief, and memory, and—she can place the look—Vitri is lost, utterly lost.
Reyn drops the notebook, carefully sets the candle nearby, then crouches in front of Vitri. As he tips his head down, Reyn follows with her hand and dabs his wet face with the scarf. She watches his fingers. Grappling. Allowing neither to emerge victorious.
Eventually Vitri grabs her, not with malice, but with enough strength to tug her toward him, close, within his arms, to his chest. He holds her tight, so tight, so very tight, and his hands move all over—back to neck, neck to shoulders, shoulders to arms—massaging, scratching, shifting, stroking her hair. Calming those fingers. Vitri then kisses Reyn on the top of her head. He kisses her near the temple. He kisses her on the cheek. Again. And again.
Listen to Part 7 Author Commentary
Peek behind the scenes of Part 7 with author Garrett Francis.