The Weapon of Young Gods #35: Fitful Mind Games

My tolerance had really gone to shit over the past six months, as if I’d never realized that staying on the wagon in a college town would be fucking impossible. I had to maintain the facade and pretend to hold my liquor, not only to blunt the ball-busters-everyone suddenly seemed to decide they liked me better when I was drunk-but also to avoid any more epic blackouts. My liver, which had once been a slab of impregnable steel, had degenerated into a functional piece of meat, but that was a trade-off I could deal with as long as eternal sickness, halitosis, and the single life stayed the hell away from me. So it was a little disconcerting, but not exactly disagreeable, to find myself half-bombed in Frankie’s dorm room a few shades on the wrong side of tequila shots.

It had been three hours since we stepped off the downtown bus, and though it had been a good day I felt this creeping, nasty fear that sooner or later we’d be wading through a minefield of mutual mendacity if we spent too much more time together. Frankie solved that problem, for the moment, when she reminded me that we’d be getting happy and stupid with our friends at yet another dorm party. Finals were coming up, and this would be the last chance we’d all really have to relax before exams consumed our waking lives.

Previous Episode

We went down to Alex’s room and met him, Pete, and Ana for some sufficient fermented lubrication, and the hours just melted away into bad jokes and dumb behavior, the same way they always did. The back-handed pressure to give in became pathetically intolerable, and so when I finally took a shot from Frankie’s hand and clinked it with Pete’s glass, I was more than ready to jump off the wagon for the first time since New Year’s. Slipping into the ether was a foregone conclusion, but before I could process anything at all I found myself floating back into consciousness, half-naked and sprawling on Frankie’s bed. My eyes-my whole body-began to dilate in the dim light from her desk lamp, and I saw rather than heard her rummaging through a green duffel bag that was half-buried under the avalanche from her closet.

“What are you looking for, babe?” My words spilled out in a puddly slur, and Frankie threw me a sardonic grin, but took her time answering. I blinked in and out of the room a few times before her voice dragged me back. “Oh, I thought I’d seen some in the there, but they’re gone. Guess we used ’em all up, rock star.” Dead leaves hissed through her open windows as they blew across the cement, and I shivered a little. “The what? In the where?” She pointed vaguely at the bag, smothered beneath a mountain of clothes. “In there. I used to keep some in my swim bag, but this one isn’t mine. I can’t find it.” I tried to mumble a reply through the room’s thick air-shit, we’d been smoking things- but all that came out was a weak “Say what?”

“I thought it was mine, but it wasn’t. It was his,” she whispered back. The curtain was crashing down again, and Never-Never Land was giving me the hook. “Huh?” I closed my eyes before she replied, but then Derek’s voice cut through the choking darkness. “I thought it was mine, but it wasn’t. It was his.” He sighed and picked up the ball. Another soccer game had been called because of the fire, and we crunched through the dry grass and ash as we left the field. I waited for more, but Derek kept quiet.

“What was his? Who?” I asked, but he just shook his head again and repeated “I thought it was mine, but it wasn’t. It was his.” Shadows played in the contours of his stoic face as he shrugged and studied the ground. Everything got creepier as we moved away from the field’s massive light towers, and the smoke was making my eyes water. We kept walking right off the bike path, kicking pebbles and gravel whenever our footing slipped. I blinked and what light was left shifted dull and orange. Something moved in the thicker darkness to Derek’s right, but I was too busy looking past him to hear more footsteps hurrying up on our left.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I almost got whiplash turning around to face my brother, who was panting and sweaty. “Roy,” he wheezed, “Hey, um, how’s school? Listen, I uh, don’t know how to say this, but, well, I’m quitting the B-Nuts.” A brief flicker of exultant happiness sparkled in his eyes, but the rest of R.J.’s face was creased with apologietic guilt.

“Jesus, bro, don’t startle me like that.”

“Sorry, Roy, but they just asked me yesterday.”

“Who asked?”

“The Mimes. Colin and Ben. Their guitarist quit and they need a new one.”

I was still trying to come to grips with R.J.’s sudden appearance, but Derek just chuckled “Fuckin’ Zip, always one foot out the door,” and kept walking, so I let that go for the moment.

“Look, I’ve already talked to Alan and Mike about it, and they’re, um, cool, I guess.” Goddamn, I thought, why would R.J. do this to me? Would we even be able to book any more gigs without a lead guitarist? Would there even be a band anymore? R.J. simply kept talking as we continued up the hill. “I’ll understand if you need, like, some time to deal, so…so no hard feelings, all right?” I was still pretty shocked, but suddenly he was gone, and I barely had enough time to take in the brutal truth when Derek piped up again. “Tough break, man. I mean, I always liked your brother, but you better keep him away from my sister, though, okay?”

“Uh…sure dude, whatever you say.” Flakes of ash still hung in the air, and I coughed violently every five or six steps, but Derek was unfazed. “I’m not trying to be a jerk, man,” he said. “It’s just that-well, we might as well be brothers at this point anyway, you know?”

“Come again?”

“Remember your graduation, Roy? Remember your dad and my-” Suddenly Derek began coughing too, so I waited, but when his fit subsided he was silent, like he seemed to forget we’d been talking at all.

“My dad and your what? Your what, Derek?” The dull orange light still  flickered up ahead.

“My what? I already told you, dude. It wasn’t mine. I thought it was mine, but it wasn’t. It was his.”

“I’m not following you, D.”

“Yeah you are,” he chuckled. “Well, you are and you aren’t, so just-”

He was interrupted by a peal of laughter. “You just have to be patient with him.” Nadia’s voice rippled out of the darkness and she floated into view ahead, taking a small sip of beer from a plastic cup before pouring the rest out. “The boy definitely can be a little slow sometimes, can’t he, girls?”

More giggles. Frankie and Olivia materialized next to her, the latter tapping a pony keg. All three girls’ eyes were jewels of sublime perception, twinkling with the faraway light of compared notes, inside jokes, and communal comiseration. “Totally,” said Frankie, a smile playing across her face as she blew foam off the top of her own cup. “But I don’t hold it against him…much.”

“I think it’s…endearing,” chirped Olivia, pumping away at the keg. “Que humilde, no?” She gave the pump a few more jerks before giving it up as dry. I looked from Liv back to Nadia, who only smirked with disgust, and then to Frankie, who began to coo sweet nothings into Christian Addison’s ear. He’d just appeared out of nowhere, and his brothers loomed up on either side of my three sirens. I was having serious trouble dealing with this latest twist, still stuck in a feedback loop of cerebral double-takes when Derek’s voice slashed through the smoke again.

“What the hell do you assholes want?”

Chris looked up and casually cracked his knuckles. “Don’t play estupido, Haynes,” he spat. “I mean, I understand it comes natural and all, but still.” His sneer was immediately reflected on his brothers’ faces, and they wasted no time in piling on with a torrent of abuse. Justin kept cool, his skeletal arms locking around Olivia-no, it was Lisa now, Olivia was gone-and Kyle took a few steps forward, spitting indecipherable obscenities with increasing venom. Frankie and Nadia vanished as the younger Addison brothers stepped right through them. Then Justin spoke and my nerves froze.

“Niños estropeados…Niños  irresponsables…” His hand-no skin, no muscle, just bone-curled around Lisa’s neck, but her eyes were blank and she didn’t seem to notice or care. “Has desperdiciado…nuestros reprendos…nuestros sabidurías…y célebre su ignorancia…”  The ash kept falling, the fire kept up its dull glow, and then the ground began to shake, just like before. I looked to Derek in desperation, but all he said was “I thought it was mine, but it wasn’t-it was his,” with a weak gesture of resignation.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Der-?”

“Roy!” Olivia shrieked through the smoke, and when I looked back it was her neck in Justin’s bony vice. Justin’s fingers tightened and Liv started turning purple, but she kept shouting too: “Ahora todo la gente te has abusssado recibirá incluso…¡y pagar de vuelta con el furia de nuestros corazones!”

Her voice quickly deteriorated into a hoarse whisper and she became Lisa again, pinned to the empty chest of a Justin-calavera, whose empty eye sockets radiated malice. His brothers had transformed too, pulling out their rusty old guns with inexorable power, and I was still rooted to the spot, paralyzed with fear. I desperately tried to will myself awake, to yank my warped mind out of this unreal subconscious echo, but the nightmare was too strong.

“It was his…it was his,” stammered Derek, but I barely noticed, because Liv was choking again. Her face was blue-white and her eyes bulged with terror, but before their light went out she morphed back to Lisa.

“Vamos a saturar la tierra con veneno…extendiendo el miedo y el horror de lo que vaya…¡en una orgía de venganza!” The skeleton threw her lifeless form away and I sprang after it, but I only got two steps forward before she rolled off the cliff. “¿Y por qué no? Usted nos ha hecho una broma… ¿Por qué habríamos de poner con esta mierda? ¿Por qué nos merecemos esto?”

I looked up at them, right down the corroded barrels of the guns. “¿Cómo vamos a soportar cada vez la vergüenza? ¿Cómo vamos a sobrevivir de manera impotente?” Their final whispers sliced through the ash without mercy, and the revolvers clicked with fierce precision, just like they had all those times before. “Tenemos razón. Somos la ley. Estamos absoluta. ¡Estamos siempre, y no vamos a ir tranquilamente!”

When the guns finally fired I gasped like a landed fish, and every muscle in my body tensed up with the horrible anticipation of impact, but a massive shape flew through space in front of me, and the shots never hit home. Never hit me. It happened so fast that I’d turned halfway around in an epic flinch, and almost didn’t notice that Derek was gone when I opened my eyes again. Gone from where he was on my right. I had to finish the 360 to see him sprawled in the dust on my other side, his chest ripped open by the phantom bullets.

I woke up on the floor of Frankie’s pitch-black room, slathered in sweat-and worse, I felt damp and sticky below the belt-but it took a while to realize I’d crossed the line into reality again. She was fast asleep, as usual, and didn’t stir as I quickly got myself together and-with a nervous glance or two over my shoulder into dark corners-left her room yet again, sprinting through the dorm corridors with the calaveras’ croaks still echoing in my head: “¡Mira, huellas vividas!” they called to each other, “¡la arma esta proxima!” and “¡Muévete, ya mero capturamos!”

They didn’t stop, not even after I came in quietly, not even as I registered Peter’s sleeping form on his side of the room, not even when I burrowed deep into my own bed and its nightly promises of dubious slumber and fitful mind games. An hour later I was still awake, feeling demoralized and afraid that my deranged existence was getting unbearable again. I’d have to do something about it before I got too overwheled again, but I had no idea where to begin, and finally fell asleep at 5 a.m., praying for sanity.