-1TRIGGER MAN
A novel by
Richard Futch
Trigger Man
Copyright (c) 2013 by Richard Futch
Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti/Freedigitalphotos.net
All rights reserved. This includes the right to reproduce any portion of this book in any form.
Fiction/Horror/Fantasy
Trigger Man
Prologue
And it happened that a rich Jewish counselor from Arimathae learned of the fulfillment of prophesy recently demanded by Pilate. He’d not needed the news racing on the wind even, because the figures in the sky: the lamb devoured by the many-headed beast, the odd nest of locusts clustered around the serpent’s thick trunk, had plagued him for hours. And so it had been, in his despair, Joseph, this counselor, sat enveloped in grief within the shadow of the small olive grove where he lived and prayed. Had sat, and considered what still had to be done.
When finally able he shuffled outside toward the temple to find Caiphas, the high priest. Joseph had done business with the man before and knew any exhortations to Pilate would best be served through one of his sooth-sayers.
He’d not traveled a furlough when he came upon Nicodemus. Trembling, shaken, the small man pushed his ragged cart down the path, heavy with jars of salve and rolls of linen. Joseph knew well the figure even before the man’s features cut a clear profile in the darkness. The dreams had been many, and illustrative.
“So you’ve come to do this thing,” Joseph whispered in the ancient tongue of the prophets.
Nicodemus nodded, his eyes cast down toward the ground.
“They’ve done it,” the counselor intoned mournfully. “They have killed our Lord!”
Again, the other man remained speechless, mute to the workings of the world as his eyes danced to the vision, the proportions in his head. The counselor saw its otherworldliness and looked away, uncomfortable in the presence of such immensity.
“He will be delivered to my sepulcher in the garden,” he said then. “I go to make it done,” and he placed his hand on the trembling shoulder of the perfumist. The man seemed scarcely to notice and Joseph feared him incapable of the task. He leaned closer, until his lips fairly brushed the man’s ear. “You can do this thing?” he begged, failing to cloak the insinuated threat threading his voice. When no reply was forthcoming and still in the ancient tongue, he continued, “Through the shaft to the chamber, man. I will bring Him to you,” and he turned into the night.
And later, when the stone was rolled away by the wailing mob and the maligned Joseph made true his promise, Nicodemus was pressed to action. He, too, had been present at many speeches made by this One, but the lifeless body before him made the inspirational admonitions of hope He’d championed small and incomprehensibly distant now.
But he worked nonetheless, helpless to stop, fighting through the pain of enlightenment and confusion as he prepared the mixtures and herbs, transfixed as his fingers flew about their business: each step in the process unfolding with sparkling clarity, as if with him since childhood and only now accepting to loose the Secret.
The smell and consistency of the concoction were unlike anything he’d prepared before or would ever prepare again. Soon the salves were worked deeply into the linen, which was in turn swaddled about the bruised and lacerated body in intricate patterns of design. Only at the extent of his physical limit was Nicodemus finally allowed to collapse across the now-empty cart and mercifully visualize no more.
He was gently awakened sometime later by a Hand on his shoulder. The shock of recognition was sufficient enough to rush a startled burst of air through his teeth.
The Parable-Teller, the Messiah, the Carpenter knelt beside him, the consuming corruption of death no more than a memory of horror. The Son smiled, a relaxed easy expression that appeared foreign on the depthless, now ageless, Face.
“You’ve done well,” He said in a tongue even older than the prophets’. Nicodemus nodded, trembling, somehow comprehending every word though dumb to the process. He pulled away from the cart and to his knees in his rags, shielding his eyes from the brilliance of the Other.
And by morning the Christo had left through the shaft but Nicodemus was still there, staring through the sepulcher, his mouth open, his eyes rolling, unrecognizable even to his own mother after the revelation he’d survived.
***
The pounding of the shells easily reached the recesses of the bunker. The Russians were as far as Potsdamer Platz and it wouldn’t be long until they began hammering away at the very door down here. The chauffeur had recently been dispatched to round up 200 liters of gasoline. Adolf Hitler and his former mistress, Eva Braun, now married by the mere count of hours, already awaited the action of their funeral pyre.
The meal and farewells were done. As Dr. Goebbels and several generals waited nervously in the dimly-lit passages of the underground bunker, Hitler and his new bride retired to their private quarters. There were two Lugers between them and enough poison to ward off cowardice.
Inside the cramped, fetid confines the light was feeble now, most likely from the repeated shelling from above. Her Fuhrer looked older than his fifty-six years, worn and ragged like some common thief or alley beggar. The confidence he’d pretended at dinner was gone, replaced by a rising terror Eva had never seen before.
The Lugers were in the bureau near the bed. She noticed he’d absent-mindedly forgotten to close it after last he’d peered inside. Now it was a gaping mouth awaiting a feed.
Another dull whoomp sounded close by. A bank of dust swayed through the air and the man coughed damp malevolence into his palm. His eyes kicked about watery and searching as if looking for an answer in some random place he’d never find. His lips pouted within the shadows of the metal walls. Eva helped him to the couch, whispered soothingly in his ear. The Power was great in her now; with her official signature on the marriage document hours before she’d finally felt heir to this thing she’d known inside all her days.
She went to the bureau, fetched the guns.
Her Fuhrer mumbled something underneath another wet cough, and she strained to hear. Something about the Russians taking them both, how there might yet remain a chance of survival. Perhaps even exile…?
Eva placed a finger to the trigger of one Luger and tossed the other onto the bed. Here, she would allow no welching. Prisoners were not remembered to history, only martyrs. And the ones outside the door were waiting to make one.
She walked over to the man, still incessantly muttering some half-lucid harangue, and sat down with her arm draped reassuringly over his shoulders. His face was drawn into the stricken lines of a terrified and helpless old man. A mere human. Eva steeled herself with the knowledge that this weakness of spirit was for her eyes alone. The World would never be witness to this commonality. She kissed his ear, murmuring her own salves, and as the Fuhrer’s eyes closed, she brought the Luger up and shot him through the mouth. The noise was loud in the cramped space, but he went as easy and quiet as a lamb.
Eva Braun then stood and stared at the dead body. Tenderly, she placed the Luger in its still hand and walked over to the bed. She extracted the vial of arsenic from her stocking and looked to the ceiling with deadened gaze as she poured the contents down her throat. And in her last fleeting instant she was consumed by the power, her forever unknown courage as the filter by which her Fuhrer would be denied shame. After all, she thought before the darkness came down completely and forever, what good were lessons if the monster were defeated in the end?
When Goebbels and Bormann entered the room twenty minutes later a small smile still touched a ghostly print to the blue corners of Eva Braun’s mouth. And later, under the hellish siege from the Russians and the heat from the Viking funeral pyre, the legacy s
he’d helped make was solidified in black smoke and nightmares enough for centuries to follow.
Chapter 1:“At This Late Date”
The old woman across the courtyard downstairs has turned off the light above the sink and drawn the blinds. She wheeled her equally ancient husband inside an hour ago, and though I could not hear their voices, the tenderness with which she treats him speaks of years together. She reminds me of my grandmother; he reminds me of no one. Sometimes their glances at each other very nearly touch the memory of my mother, but I don’t let myself get drawn into these avenues often. At least when I can help it.
My grandmother, though. She’s still concrete in my mind’s eye; that certain squint she had when catching me in a lie, or how the lines in her forehead deserted her when she smiled. I remember all of it, more of the former perhaps, and it’s not so good since that’s what I’m left with. She’s gone, my mother’s gone.
And Mom…poor Mom, she’s much farther away. Her face has lost its place in reality for me; I see her now like a curled photograph discovered in some lost attic trunk. I don’t remember her voice, her expressions. The only thing that remains is her sense of desperation. Always the desperation. A woman enveloped in frightening whispers, uselessly fearing the fate she felt pursuing her.
Pursuing me…
***
The streetlights flicker on Rue Rampart. The old couple’s place dances blue through the thin curtains, the TV flashing random bursts of color within. It is this mysterious, haunting moment when the day sacrifices itself to night, drawing upon long shadows to make up the coming darkness. It is a dreaming time, thick with rich possibilities, pregnant with nightmares. And looking back there’s really not much to distinguish one from the other, or even reality from fantasy if you want to go that far. Not for me anyway.
I keep hoping to wake up, to find some kind of easy television-drama reality shut around me, but I already know it’s not gonna happen.
So I sit here this night, most likely my last night, staring down ghostly Rampart, for some unfathomable reason conjuring images from Orwell’s Animal Farm. You see, even though I was never much for school I’ve never been ignorant of literature. About some things, sure. But I’ve read, I’ve always read. Perhaps, initially, because we were poor and the only toys my mother and grandmother could afford were not even toys, really, but cheap Golden Books. Stacks and stacks of them now lost to whatever hell Time warrants. It was my starting point, the axis which has since impressed me with the peculiarity of living other lives through words on a page.
Therefore Animal Farm comes, and with it, those two great swine, Napoleon and the defeated one. Because I am that ill-fated Snowball, with just as much a chance in hell.
Regardless, I’ll confront him tomorrow, tell him what I didn’t do. Of course I could make a run for it but what good would that do? He’d find me eventually; the world is not large enough, the oceans not so deep, so I’ll wait the night, treading this thin line...
But I do go deeper, darker; somehow oppressively ripened. Driven on by this twilight period, this lull so ripe with ghosts they flicker on the very edge of my vision. I feel their icy, phantasmagoric fingertips dragging the ridge of my backbone even now.
Because the dream was upon me again last night. The same as it’s always been, its power neither increased nor diminished since childhood. What I remember from then, is still all I get now. But the worst thing is--unlike in my childhood--the nameless are finally recognizable. There are no secrets in the end, it seems.
***
Anyway, this is the dream as it comes.
As it always comes.
***
I’m in the cab of a pickup truck barreling down some south Louisiana highway. I know this instinctively because sugarcane fields stretch off to the horizon on both sides. And though I’m inside the truck, I’m not a part of what’s going on. Just along for the ride it seems. The driver, a trim, chiseled man, appears extremely nervous; it doesn’t look like he’s changed his shirt in days. Sweat runs freely down his cheeks even though the window is down and the rush of wind inside all but deafens the radio station ebbing and flowing tenuously through the air. The cab is littered with empty hamburger and candy bar wrappers, cigarette butts, gas station receipts and cans.
He checks his watch as if he’s late, grimaces and rubs his face. He slaps his knee in frustration then, barks words that are immediately torn away by the rushing wind.
And oddly enough, it is broad daylight. Not usual in my dreams, when I have them. Especially the bad ones, the ones that curl rank tendrils around my brain until hours after lunch. But it hardly makes any difference. Even though the sun is shining, the man’s nervous tension brews a thick contagion in the swirling, rushing air that proves just as ominous as nosing through a graveyard at midnight.
We near a town; could be any one of the seeming hundreds that sprout like ragweed along the highway skirts of Plaquemine Parish all the way into the marshes of Venice. I know because I’ve canvassed the area, enraptured by the weirdest sense of deja-vu I’ve ever experienced. So bad, in fact, I had to pull over eventually at a gas station and drink a coke, smoked a handful of cigarettes before feeling well enough, safe enough, to continue.
In this dream the highway runs parallel to a rail line, and as we approach the blinking signal lights announcing the reality of the next few scattered houses and lone post office as a town, my vision suddenly expands exponentially. I peel away from the tension-filled confinement of the cab, riding an impossible curve up and out until I’m directly above and in front of the speeding truck, my presence still as ethereal as a dandelion seed in a hurricane.
Now I see the man is not the only figure to play in this drama. There is a small boy hunched by the side of the road, seemingly intent on something I cannot, at first, make out. And it is at this moment also (always at this moment) that the fear crushes in on all sides, leaving me ragged and shaken for long minutes after I finally, eventually, awaken.
The familiar nightmare staples of slowness and helplessness contort the whole aspect of what I’m seeing into a slow grind of excruciating melodrama. Suddenly at ground level I’m granted the sight of a mute and stoic witness able to stare with unblinking nonchalance into the guts of an imminent accident.
Now I see what it is the child’s after. A beautiful green grasshopper, its veined iridescent wings half-drawn, nimbly hopping through the gravel which lines the shoulder of the road. I also see the Mason jar sitting crookedly by the willow tree, the partially-open front door behind the screen, and the boy’s intentions are suddenly clear. But the truck is too close and moving too fast. Even worse, coming up out of the vague ditch to street level, the boy will never be seen in time. The fear which seizes me is debilitating, but worse (I’ve always thought), far from blinding.
The boy races through the ditch, bursts above the lip of ground separating gravel from asphalt. The grasshopper, aware of pursuit and tensed on the center, yellow stripe, is poised to make its own escape when the boy makes his lunge. The instant afterward the driver’s eyelids peel back to the whites and he jerks the wheel savagely to the right, away from the uncomprehending child spilling out into the roadway. The grasshopper disappears to pulp as the boy goes down chin-first on the highway, his wail lost to the frantic screech of rubber.
A concrete culvert, strengthened considerably to bear the weight of the Illinois Central that races across it twice a day, proves unavoidable and unyielding. I see the man’s screaming face a moment before the truck tears into the embankment and explodes with the force of a bomb, throwing pieces of man and metal for hundreds of flaming yards. I also see, there at the end, as the screaming, bloody-lipped child raises his head from the asphalt, a bright, ragged seam rent the air between them.
That has always been the strangest moment, the most unsettling. Because with those two instantaneous glimpses a connection is established in me with just as much authority as a nail driven through my head. And I’ve never ha
d the slightest idea what the fuck it meant.
Up until yesterday I’ve tried to persuade myself I didn’t know who they were. Now there’s no sense pretending.
The man in the truck was my father.
The little boy is Aldo Sautin.
***
So at this late date it boils down to the point of acceptance. Do I really, possibly, believe anything I’m going to relate? Messages from reoccurring dreams, ghosts, divine intervention, predestination? Damnation, perhaps? Probably, to an outside party, it wouldn’t seem that far out of the ordinary, considering my Southern Baptist origins, but I left all that behind years ago. Or at least I thought so…. It’s funny, though, how all those lessons Grandma taught me have continued to flutter about my head like a misplaced halo ever since, regardless if I‘ve been aware of them or not. One I’ve refused to claim so far, and you may wonder why. Because it all seemed like a dance with mirrors to me.
Regardless…I can’t discount the unbelievable.
Not entirely.
I still recall That Day, playing in one of the many houses and duplexes we were constantly either moving into or out of. We were always on the move those days, not large jumps really after a while, but just apartment-jumping in the wake of back-owed rent and bill collectors. We lived off welfare and baby-sitting money and neither one of those makes for any kind of security.
But I’ll never forget Grandma’s face.
I’ll never forget the way she hustled us (Donnie was the other kid That Day, the only one she was getting paid to keep) into the dining room and dialed Cousin Linda’s number as she stared at the receiver with wide, uncomprehending eyes. Eyes like the ones from the dream. When you really think hard, everything comes back. It truly does.
I remember her crying when Linda arrived, and the two of them going into the bedroom (she would not go into the living room for weeks afterward) and talking in low murmurs while Donnie and I played as quietly as possible in the bedroom next door. Only years later, months before she died in fact, did she tell me what had happened. And, as I’ve said, she was never one to lie. She had no need for such trickery.