Ye old standard origins story.

Chapter 4.

God, why am I even here?

No, god, I mean HERE, at “The Reaper” on a Friday night. My brains churning into paste from the wall of noise being broadcast at me constantly, drinking watered down beer that was weak before it ever made it to the club at all. Trying to pretend I understand, or even care really, what the lyrics are that are being screamed down from on high by the lead singer of “Angry Red Happy Place."

Seriously. The things I let myself get talked into.

I get up from my seat and try to make my way past the throng between me and the miserable scrap of demon kind that talked me into being here. I end up more or less having to shove my way through a couple dozen people, most of which pay me no mind. When I have almost reached my destination though, I feel a very purposeful tap on my shoulder.

Now, this isn't anybody I know. I know it isn't. The only person that I know in this pit is about ten feet in front of me. She is easy to spot in the masses as she is wearing neon green and pink. Looking like an eight foot psychedelic barber pole in a singlet with a built in skirt that reveals enough flesh to be illegal in some states and six inch leather and lace platform shoes that she must have gotten bored with because they have spiky bits on them. That is ignoring the bright blue hair that bounces around in a pair of pigtails that no one dares to call cute. Beyond all that she is dancing around in a manner that makes me wonder if she turned around too fast if she might smack some overeager fan boy in the head with bits he wouldn't mind getting nailed by.  She is right next to a table that has a half of a dozen balloons at it, one of which shows up well in the black light and says “Happy Birthday Broadzilla” on it.

So yeah, I know exactly where the one person I want to talk to here is, and it isn't the guy I am turning around and seeing in front of me now. He looks horribly affronted by something and is screaming at me, actual spittle flying from his mouth. I have no idea what he is saying, and based on the look on his face I am not sure it would matter if I did. I say “I AM SORRY,” mouthing the words slightly exaggerated and hoping that will diffuse whatever lunacy is about to transpire. His eyes go wider and he screams at me again, almost loud enough to breach not only the wall of noise but also the earplugs I habitually wear when I get suckered into coming to this place, my last stab toward sanity here.

Impressive really, the boy has lung power.

Unfortunately for somebody, I don't have patience.

I shrug and turn around, then a sharp pain against the side of my head followed closely by the feeling of cold liquid covering my head. I do what any normal person would do at that point. I duck, scuttle forward a few steps holding my head, and screech “M**********R!” at high volumes, all pretty much at the same time. About the time I am turning around, I trip over something or somebody and the net result is that I fall over backwards and slam full tilt into the wooden birthday table, my shoulders immediately promising me black and blue pain for a week and my head bouncing through something soft, into something hard, and then back off the table. After all that it seems like a good idea to sink to the ground in pain, sitting with my legs splayed out and my right hand over the throbbing spot. So I do.

When I look up the first thing I see is that Tiff has stopped dancing and is peering down at me with a ghost of a snicker playing around the corner of her mouth. Then I notice that held in a headlock on her side is the guy that was annoyed enough at me to bust a bottle on the side of my head. His face is turning more red by the second and she has her other arm up, waving down bouncers that are actually on the clock. Once they have collected him and I see him trying to explain something as they haul him bodily to the door, she offers me a hand and I take it. She gives me a wicked smile, holds me close, and then licks my head. I push away and turn around, and see the imprint of the back of my head pretty much demolished her birthday cake. I reach up and scrape my head and come away with a pile of black and green frosting feeling very much like a world class loser. I yell, “SORRY” and then turn towards the door, figuring that I had done enough damage here already. In the parking lot, I end up standing around trying to scrape off as much as I can before I get into my new ride. A sleek, sexy, nearly irresistible, orange, 45 year old, hard top Volkswagen “Thing” rust bucket. What can I say, I put the “a*s” in “class.” While I am doing this, and removing my earplugs, I hear a familiar voice say:

“No. Get your butt back in there and have a good time before I break your arms and legs and cart you around like a change purse.”
“You may not have noticed Tiff, but the inhabitants here don't seem to like me much.”
“I like you, and I'm here.”
“Yes. But you have also displayed other signs of higher intelligence as well so I am not really surprised. I am sorry I smeared your cake. Really I am. But I am going to go home, I am going to clean up, and I am going to do my best to enjoy my two days off, doing as little as humanly possible. While it won't kill me to attempt it I won't make any promises for any forces of evil that have the nerve to try to stop me.”

“Did you just call me a force of evil?” She is openly smirking now, and walking towards me with enough wiggle and jiggle that it is patently obvious she is still in “Vamp the Fan Boy” mode and hasn't quite gotten it through her skull that this kind of posturing is near meaningless to people who A) Have no intention of taking the option, even were it offered, B) Probably are suffering from a minor concussion, and C) Really hate large gatherings of drunk, moronic, strangers. I deal with enough strange already.

“Depends on your intentions. Are you going to let me go home in peace or are you gonna send me home in pieces? I am going home, either way.”

A couple of expressions flit across her face, and she settles on a look of concern.

“Are you gonna be OK driving home? He clocked you pretty good.”
“Nice try, but you are not going to convince me to give you my keys for safety reasons.”
She laughs. “Well, that wasn't quite what I meant but OK. Are we still on for dinner, movies, and ice cream Sunday night?”

“Only if you are still bringing the food, and it isn't pizza. And only so long as you haven't forgotten the “talk.”
She rolls her eyes and smiles, putting her hands up like she was swearing on a bible. “I do solemnly swear to harbor no feelings of affection towards one Kyle A*****e Smith that could be considered romantic or carnal in nature for he has already told me that such things are best not to do with people you work with. I will in no way try to influence his feeble male mind with my feminine wiles and intoxicating beverages, never ever, so help me god.”

“You got my middle name wrong, but other than that I think we can work with it.”
“What is your middle name?”
“I don't have one, I gave up trying to keep track of them.”
She mutters, almost under her breath but loud enough for me to hear. “Well, you have one now.”

“I am sorry, what was that?”
“Nothing.”
“No really, what was that?”
“I said it was nothing.”
“It was something.”
“No it wasn't.”
“Yes it was.”
“No it wasn't, now get the hell out of here you cranky old stick in the mud.”
“Blow me.”

She smiles and looks at me for a second, letting me realize my mistake.
“Well, I didn't use feminine wiles or intoxicating beverages and, of course, you propositioned me. Now what?”

I blink twice and get in my car. She is laughing and skipping her way back to the bar, and all I can think is “How in the hell does she always win this kinda crap?”

Me and what scraps of pride still cling to me make it back to the apartment mostly intact. I head in and lock it up after me, heading immediately for the shower.

I shower and wash my hair for a few minutes and then let the tub fill up and relax back in it, letting my mind wander through things I hadn't thought about for quite a while. Thinking about the scar on my right arm, that covers a piece of metal that is wedged against the bone. It hurts sometimes when the weather changes. It also hurts whenever I use it.

I was about twenty five when I was in the wreck. I was drunk. Stupid. And very, very lucky. Out in the woods with my girlfriend Cindy and my best buddy at the time. He had one of those little pickup wannabe things with a pair of seats in the back and we were intending to head out to a natural hot springs. It was around three in the afternoon and I was in the back going through cans of cheap beer at a rate that makes me shudder now to think about it. Then the vehicle swerved off the road and over the side of a good seventy foot drop. I landed in the top of a tree, so drunk and loose that at first I didn't realize that my girl at the time had landed with the top of the tree in her. I was hurt, scratched up pretty bad. But I wasn't bleeding and nothing was broken. I tried to reach for her and succeeded only in crawling off of my support and sliding down until I ended up at the base of the tree. I passed out.

I didn't wake up for hours. When I did it was full on dark and I woke up because I was getting damn cold. It was mid October, and we were pretty far up in the hills. It was going to freeze tonight and I was wearing a light jacket. My heavy coat had been in the back of the truck, wherever the hell that was. I considered trying to climb the tree, I mean I was pretty sure she was dead but I couldn't just leave without trying. Besides, it might not be as bad as all that, I was drunk as hell before. Enough to still be a little tipsy now. Maybe she was OK. I looked up, and that is the first time I noticed anything odd. There was no stars. No moon. No clouds. There was still enough light to see by, if only barely. But there was no source for it. My sad, inebriated brain wasn't quite up to the brain teaser at the time and I just stopped thinking about it. I tried to climb that tree. I must have tried twenty times. I just kept falling, getting colder.

By the time I had given up on the tree I knew something was wrong. I was sobering up some. I couldn't hear anything. No bird, no bugs, nothing. There was an interstate just up the embankment a couple of hundred feet, with no other noise to drown it out, and I hadn't heard even one car. I knew that there were people that lived out here, but I couldn't see one porch light, head light, tail light, nothing. Finally I had decided to head up to the interstate, just because I couldn't hear a car now may not mean much. Maybe the accident had been bigger than I thought and they had the road blocked off. Maybe I would get up there and the place would be crawling with cops. Very quiet cops. That weren't running their lights. Yeah.

I did climb up the embankment, but my instincts were right. The road was there, and the spot where the truck went off the road was fairly obvious, he had clipped off a couple of trees on the way down. But when I followed the trail the truck left I couldn't find the truck. It looked like it had already been hauled off. Apparently they had missed me and Cindy somehow. Suddenly it became important, even more so then before, to know if Cindy was still up in that tree. I didn't quite have it all put together yet, but I had to know that detail. So I climbed. I clawed. I broke branches and dug hand holds in the bark with the broken ends. I didn't need to get to the top. I could see, dimly, the blood stain she had left around the trunk of the tree. When my eyes followed it up I could see there was no longer a body there. I lost my grip and fell again. Catching myself on the way down, and easing myself to the ground. That was it. There was just no way they could have found her but not me. It just wasn't possible.

I panicked. I ran. The more panicked I got the more things I could see. Crawly things. Sometimes on the ground, sometimes right on my skin. I ran some more. Finally, I did see something ahead. A campfire. I stumbled toward it, calling for help. I fell forward, pain, exhaustion, and the lingering effects of my drunken binge finally demanding that I stop for a minute. When I looked up, there was a pair of Native Americans, fully adorned in beads and buckskins. A man and a woman, young. Maybe eighteen. They jumped to their feet when I fell into their camp, the man gabbing a spear that had been leaning against a tree. The woman walked over to me and pushed me over to see my face. She said something, but I don't know what. She looked surprised, but not unkind. She spoke to the man and they both busied themselves with activities that I later realized were preparing something for me to eat and drink, as well as something to smooth over the pain in the spiderweb of scratches that covered my arms and face. An hour later saw me eating some manner of roast animal with a couple of blankets thrown over and under me, while I saw the two of them perform the most heartfelt and obvious goodbye I have ever witnessed. I wasn't sure what to make of this whole situation by this point, and was to the point of hoping it was just a dream. The sun never came up that I noticed, but at some point the campfire died down some and despite that the woods were a little less dim. The male put on a boiled leather shirt over his normal buckskins, grabbed his spear, and walked away into the now slightly brighter woods. Maybe five minutes later I heard a gunshot, and the woman started to run towards the shot, obviously panicked, obviously terrified, just as obviously not able to stop herself from running forward. I ran after her. I didn't know what else to do. After a few seconds of chasing her I saw the problem. The man was dead, and over his corpse was a thing. It wore a coonskin cap and a set of tooled leather clothes. He was wearing a backpack that had a bunch of traps hanging off of it. He carried a rifle that also looked to be of that era, and a pistol shoved in his belt that I couldn't really see but it seemed probable that it would be the same. There all resemblance to a normal person faded. His head and hat were burned black in the front, and looked to be rotting besides. The muscles in his face all limp, making his jowls sway when he turned to look at us. His face an impassive mask he fired at the woman and the shot hit her in the chest, passing through and into my arm. I noticed as I spun in pain that the pistol he was using had blown up in his face as well, causing new damage to his face as the woman falls, dead. The trapper inspects the two, discovers something he doesn't expect it looks like, and falls to his hands and knees, obviously feeling terrible about something. About then I had passed out.

When I had woken up, it was morning. Really morning. And I was alone. I could see the sun and I could see a handful of people poking around in the woods, and I called out to them. They came over and got very excited, put me in a stretcher and called in for a helicopter that had shown up a few minutes later and hauled me off the the hospital where they managed to patch up everything, but apparently missed a small piece of that bullet, I know because I can feel it when I use it.

I never did find out what was up with the two Indians and that old trapper, but I have gone back to the crash site on a few occasions as I came into my power, and I have studied up some. They show back up, every year on the same day and reenact their little drama. I can sit by the side of the camp and watch it happen, and as long as I don't actually step into the firelight they can neither see nor hear me. The camp is not there, in shadow or reality, except on that one day.

I go back every year. To remind myself that there are things worth dying for, even if you know you are going to fail. To say thanks to a couple of spirits that took the time out of their own personal hell to help a dumb kid that didn't know s**t. To make sure I never forget that even if you do what seems right at the time, the consequences can last forever.

I wake up in the tub freezing my a*s off and I go to bed.