DEATH CYCLES
A deep muffled rumble began to grow out of the ghost fog like a death moan from a corpse. Alerting me like the bell over the diner door, the echoing growl announced the arrival of something. This time it wasn’t hungry patrons looking for a bite to eat. This time it was death; death on wheels, looking for me.
A distress signal danced down my spine from my brain to my legs, demanding me to pick up my feet and run. In my attempt to pick’em up and lay’em down, a bad connection made itself know. Something blocked the circuits somewhere around my waist, disabling the command from above, the input did not compute. Each step I took seemed to be on a delay, my brain now ten steps ahead of my body. Stiff from all the walking and the cold that found its way into my aching joints; my legs creaked and popped as I barely mustered a hurried shuffle, like that of a tin soldier or an old man who’s got to take a shit.
The snarl of exhaust pipes, now much closer, sang out in discord like a pack of howling wolves circling their prey. The wolves (the boys from the diner), were on the hunt and about to strike. If I didn’t get off the black top, I would soon be road kill. I made my best attempt to hobble to the shoulder of the road, right as four bright head-lanterns screamed past me. The biker foursome road in like apocalyptic horsemen, kicking up life into dead autumn leaves that danced after the motorcycles like resurrected armies of the dead.
I dove to the earth face first into a puddle and soaked in it as I waited to see if they had noticed me; if they would just keep going. I couldn’t pinpoint them through the fog, but with the squeal of tires followed by the killing of their motors, my stomach turned…They noticed me alright. The forest went silent once again. I didn’t dare move. I handled the four punk’s just fine back at the diner, but I had strength from a belly full of eggs and the element of surprise on my side. Now, I was playing under their terms, and my ability to beat all four in the open seemed unlikely.
The click of their boots on the road sounded like devils hooves, followed by the same hyena like laughter they let out at the waitress.
“What do you know daddy-o; Mr. Policeman let us go!” one punk said.
More hyena clatter filled the air.
“Yeah pops! Now come out and we’ll make this quick.” another added.
Their black silhouettes pulled back at the peaceful veil of soft white fog, and I didn’t dare rise to expose mine. As still as a sloth, without taking my eyes off them, I reached around on the ground for a big stick or rock. BINGO! My fingers wrapped a solid branch, pressing it firm into my palm. I tried to pull the would be club closer to me, but the damn thing wouldn’t budge. At first, I thought maybe it was an exposed root of a tree, or perhaps stuck under a big boulder. I soon found the stick to be something else entirely.
With a quiet roll closer to it, trying not to rustle up a twig snap or crunch leaves in the foliage beneath me, I hoped that maybe with better leverage I could release the stick for battle. I went from my belly, to my back, to my belly again. Now lying with my chest on top of it, I found pinned in the wood with a rusted nail, a piece of wet paper stained in a message that I had seen before.
FINISH THE JOB
The object that I had been clawing at was the bat from the folding room. The one with the nail and the note that the Nazis left for me to kill that… I didn’t care how it got there, I should have known better but in my desperation, my panic, it seemed like a god send. I tried to pry it from the patch of dirt where it seemed to be cemented, when I saw the earth around it move. Just then, a small sink hole opened around the bat. Loose soil gave way, as the faded black corpse of the man who I had killed in the folding room rose up out of the muck and clinched the back of my neck in one hand. He brought his rotting lips to my ear.
“Not this time cracker, you get no help this time. This here my bat now.”
I shoved him hard into the dirt, rising to my feet in a stumble that carried enough momentum to trip me up and send me right back down to the ground. Free from the corpse, but now lying on my back in the middle of the road, the fear of it all momentarily blinded me from worrying about the punks who were at my heels.
I cried out to the corpse, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry”
“It’s too late for that daddy-o!”
I opened my eyes to see the bikers staring down at me, circled like vultures; hungry vultures. Before I could say anything else, their boots made as if they were putting out a thousand cigarettes across my body. They literally stomped the shit out of me. Then, the one I put a fork in called them off and started in on what I knew would be the last words I would ever hear. I recognized them; they were my own words, words that I spoke once long ago. Devils words that rolled of what might as well have been my forked tongue, just before I ripped the throat of a poor soul to shredded wheat.
“What we have here boys is the enemy. A piece of German shit if you ask me. And what do we do to the enemy boys?” the devil mouth said.
His grease monkeys replied with a drone chant, “KILL, KILL, KILL!”
They all chanted together, over and over, as the leader straddled my chest and pulled a switch blade from his boot.
“KILL, KILL, KILL!”
“Time to fucking die NAZI!” he said.
He was wearing black Wayfarers, just like my black bent up ones. My reflection was clear to make out in them, and in it, I discovered the face of the man I killed over thirty years ago. He looked shocked, scared, and helpless with a giant black swastika tattooed across his Adam’s apple. Past my reflection in the glasses, a doppelganger of my youth in the face of my attacker. It wasn’t that it took all this time for me to realize he was me, and I was him. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize myself; it’s just that, up until that point, I couldn’t process it all.
I put my hands out. I tried to tell him. I cried out like the German I shot down in the latrine.
“NO, NO, NO…”
With each NO I let out, a gush of blood followed from my throat, until the NOs stopped coming, leaving only blood to escape my body. I understood the helplessness the German must have felt, executed in a fury of ignorant hate, sentenced to death over something he wasn’t guilty of.
As the life bled out, I came in and out between blunt blows of the full body weight of my younger self, jumping up and down on my chest. His face, my face, was no longer distinguishable. It had grown into a dark mass of hate. His hate. My hate. One of the blows came down so hard that it forced all the air from my lungs and jolted my head back. As he, the hate, continued to pound at me, the surrounding ghost fog grew thick and clumped into forms, materializing into a mass of men in white pointed hoods, just like the men in the folding room. Among them was the hoodless, blonde haired German.
In my last moment of consciousness the German signaled to the men to take off their hoods. They did, exposing more doppelgängers with my face, all identical to me. They were all in different ages from my life, all bearing the hate that I carried throughout my life, all present for the execution, our execution. In that moment, I had more hate than ever before, pure hate, hate for them all, hate for myself. Hate that could put out the sun. I realized then that all along, the hate, my hatred, had always been for myself. I would forever be trapped in my prison of hate, with no chance of escape or release. Damned to this cycled sentence for life and death...repeat, repeat, repeat.
My blood vision went black as the darkness superseded my life.
****
I stabbed a man to death when I was 28 years old…
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