Nausea (18 page)

The number 9 came and went, and through the choking exhaust it left in its wake Nick crossed the street and speed-walked over the empty parking lot to the back of the gray monolith that once belonged to Siegler Bros. Sporting Goods Co. The front doors were blocked by a heavy steel shutter, but around back the loading dock—strewn with empty and broken bottles of beer and cheap wine—was considerably less enforced. He climbed up onto the concrete slab and tried the back door. The jamb had been pried apart by a crowbar or something like it, so the door came open with a tug. Nick propped it open with a broken-off chunk of the concrete and went cautiously inside.

There too was plenty of evidence that drunks and addicts had been inhabiting the place, from more bottles to the detritus of junk rigs, filthy bedrolls, and the acrid scent of urine hanging stagnant in the musty air. Nick tried to breathe through his mouth as he hung close to the open door, nervous about wandering too far from his sole light source. The aisles were mostly picked clean from what he could make out—even the shelves themselves were gone in most cases—though some bric-a-brac remained, scattered about as if the former tenants left in a hurry. In Nick’s mind he envisioned things the store once stocked, guns and crossbows, knives and hatchets. Implements for quick, effective work. Now all he saw were discarded and trampled hunting caps, shredded shopping bags, fishing lures and hand weights and…

Fishing lures.

He stopped and walked backward to aisle 3, the end of which was littered with little packages of lures and hooks and bobs. Distant memories of fishing from a rowboat in the middle of Smith Mountain Lake drifted through Nick’s mind, the scummy smell of the lifejacket and his old man’s half-drunk grumbling at the fish that wouldn’t bite, bad old Virginia days he’d just as soon forget. For now he focused on the items farther down the aisle—a pair of broken rods and a net with a bent handle, weights and more bobs, more lures. Pieces and parts that, put together, wouldn’t even kill a fish. The damned thing would still have to flop around helplessly in the boat, gradually suffocating to death.

Drowning, then?

Nick knitted his brow and wondered if there were any baseball bats still lying around.

He turned to make his way back to the end when a solid shape filled the void, backlit by the sunlight spilling in through the open door. Nick narrowed his eyes as the shape moved toward him, taking on human features.

“Hey,” he said, turning again to find yet another man coming down from the other side of the aisle.

This one said, “Whatchoo doin’ in here?”

“Shopping,” Nick said.

“More like stealin’,” the man said.

“Not your shit,” said the first guy.

“You must be the Siegler brothers, then?” Nick snarked.

Neither of the men laughed. The second one lunged for Nick, who fell into a squat before popping back up with a quick, tight jab at the guy’s throat. The guy squawked, stumbling backward with his hands to his neck and eyes bulging. Nick then felt the first man’s arms wrap around his torso in an aggressive bear hug. He couldn’t tell if the guy wanted to fight him or fuck him, but decided an elbow to the gut was the appropriate response in either case. His assailant grunted but only barely loosened his grasp before tightening up again, so Nick slammed the back of his head into the guy’s chin, then again, flattening his nose. The cartilage crunched and the man let loose a high squeal as Nick scampered away from him, doing his best to ignore the pounding ache radiating throughout his skull, when he nearly tripped over a rubber-coated free weight. He picked it up, judged it to be no more than four or five pounds, but good enough for what he intended for it. The free weight sailed down the aisle and smashed into the big man’s forehead, knocking him down. The other guy was still gasping and sputtering, bracing himself against the endcap and stamping his foot in anger or pain or possibly both.

For a fleeting moment, Nick considered leaving him be and getting the hell out of there. Instead, his anger bubbled up inside him, a collected sort of rage directed at two thugs who had nothing better to do than attack someone who was only scavenging, the same as them, and had they wanted any of this crap wouldn’t they have already hoarded it somewhere for themselves? Shoulders tensed, he moved back to where the free weight fell beside the dead, or at least severely concussed, man on the floor, but caught a glimpse of something infinitely more interesting.

U. S. Fisherman brand surfstrand, piles of it: spring-tempered, stainless-steel trolling wire in coils of fifteen feet a piece.

“Huh,” said Nick, bending down to retrieve a coil.

* * *

At the fifth knock Nick could hear the guard chain clatter off and the dead bolt turn, whereupon the door opened up to reveal Trevor Goode, closer by a mile than they’d ever been in proximity to each other. His spiky dye-black hair jutted up over a slightly chubby, generally amiable face that Nick suspected didn’t require daily shaving. The younger man raised his eyebrows up and over the thick black frames of his glasses and Nick glanced past him, for just a second, to where his significant other sat curled up in the concavity of a papasan chair with a video game controller in her hands and colorful chaos on the TV screen in front of her. She didn’t take her attention away from it. Nick returned his to Trevor, his eyes drifting down to the Cramps T-shirt barely concealing his substantial belly.

“You must be Trevor,” Nick said, his tone jovial. He felt oddly nervous, as though meeting a character from a favorite book or a minor TV celebrity.

“Uh,” said Trevor, “who are you?”

He asked as if he should have known, but it slipped his mind, maintaining the round O on his lips for several long seconds.

Hiernoymus
, his favorite old inside joke, nearly passed Nick’s lips then, but at that last possible moment he changed his mind.

Smiling sincerely, he told Trevor his name. His full, legal name.

He couldn’t recall the last time he spoke it out loud like that to someone, anyone. Nothing of his carried the name, not any of his driver’s licenses or Social Security cards or credit cards, none of his half dozen bank accounts. He never met anyone socially, nor did he ever share space with his employer or associates, none of whom he knew from a hole in the ground anyway.

Trevor’s eyebrows remained high and puzzled.

“I—uh—I mean, Mr.…”

“Nick is fine.”

“Nick.”

“You got a second, Trevor?”

“Y’know, not really…we’re just getting settled in for the night…”

“I know it’s kind of late, but I’ll just be a few minutes.”

“What is this about?”

Finally, the girl popped her head up from her game and peered past Trevor to the stranger at the door.

“Who is it, Trev?”

Trevor craned his neck to look back at her and shrugged.

“Nick?” he said.

“Nick who?”

He told her. She shrugged, too. Trevor turned back and assumed a helpless expression.

“We’re not religious,” he said.

“Atheist, myself,” said Nick. “Baptized Catholic, though.”

“Honestly,” Trevor said sheepishly, “this is getting a little weird, Nick.”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

“Trev?” the girl called again.

“I’m handling it, Charise.”

“Charise?” Nick chirped.

She said, “What?”

“Nothing,” said Nick, waving it off with his hand. “Look, this is all a bit of a mess. All right, it’s more than a bit, and it involves both of us. And Charise as well, I guess. Thing is—the truth of it is—you don’t happen to have a cold beer, do you? I’ll pay you for it, but Christ, I’m thirsty.”

“There’s an ice house up on the corner, if that’s what you’re after, man. This ain’t the 7-Eleven, you know?”

“I thought it might make a difficult conversation go down a little easier.”

“Difficult…about what?”

The game was paused now and Charise rose to her feet, staring. Nick gave her a sharp nod and edged a little farther against the jamb.

Time to quit fucking around and get back to work, Nick.

“Right,” he said, and he planted a hand on Trevor’s chest, right in the dead center of Lux Interior’s silkscreened face, and shoved him back into the living room. Charise yelped. Trevor windmilled his arms, struggling to remain upright as Nick barreled into the apartment and slammed the front door behind him. “Off on the wrong foot there, maybe. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?”

“What the fuck do you want?” Charise squealed, the controller still gripped in her right hand.

“It’s not about what I want. But somebody out there has shelled out some perfectly good money to put an end to your short life, Trevor, and an old pro like me?” He shifted his gaze to Charise. “Doesn’t tend to leave witnesses around, you understand?”

Trevor choked on his breath. Tears welled up in Charise’s eyes and spilled over.

Nick said, “Now, about that beer?”

* * *

Turned out to be a messy one.

Nick hadn’t accounted for that. He supposed, in the aftermath, that he’d just wanted to switch things up a bit, not make it a habit of throwing heavy things at guys’ heads to waste them. Besides, his shoulder ached. He wasn’t exactly an athlete.

The trolling wire seemed easy enough. Quiet. Effectual.

He gave the guy a shove that turned him 180 degrees so Nick could get in behind him, and the guy gave a long, panicked wheeze as Nick wrapped the wire around his neck and pulled it taut. It was then he realized he’d caught a couple of the guy’s fingers in there as well, left over from clutching at his impacted throat and used now to buffer himself from the wire. Nick cinched it with one hand and delivered a couple of rapid blows to the guy’s left kidney, one-two, and swiped at his arm to pull the fingers free. The wire snapped close around the guy’s throat and he threw the hand back up, but too little, too late. It was tightening still, biting into the skin and cutting off his air supply. It was much too dim to see, that far from the open door, but something in Nick delighted at the thought of the guy’s face darkening, changing colors. So too did he delight in the spasms the dying man made with his shoulders and arms and hips and legs.

Apart from that, Nick felt nothing. It was self-defense. And moreover, practice.

When at last the guy stopped struggling and expired, Nick held tight for a couple minutes longer to be sure. After that, he loosened the wire, let the guy slump to the floor, where the body fell against the endcap and knocked over a selection of different-colored water bottles to the floor. Nick stepped to the side, to allow as much of the meager light to reach the body as possible, and regarded it in all its stillness and total lack of function. Just a skin sack full of bones and meat, none of them useful for anything anymore—but were they ever? Animate, inanimate; ephemeral at best and hardly necessary in the grand scope, Nick thought. Superfluous. Like bees in a hive—the whole produced the honey, but any one was perfectly useless on its own, and hardly missed when squashed underfoot. The work still went on. What was a drone to the big operation?

Life, he considered while staring at the man he’d just killed, wasn’t at all unlike sex. The two inextricably linked, of course, but neither much more than the hopeful yet inadequate fumbling of nature’s meat-machines, as programmed and ultimately stupid as a cockroach or an ant, doing only what its instinct commands—no more, no less. People slept and ate and fucked and shit and worked eight hours a day, five days a week, 260 days a year, all the years of their lives until they were dead and rotting and replaced with a new warm body, a new meat-machine to get the entirely pointless work done. Trying like hell to put away their programming, the fight or flight, the survival of the fittest, the need to run and kill and rend flesh from bones. Tribalism. Warfare. Murder.
That
was the stuff of human instinct, wasn’t it? Kill and fuck and eat and shit and see who’s standing atop the mountain of cadavers come dusk, dripping blood and screaming victorious…

“Nothing but meat and bones,” he said to the corpse on the floor. A few of the water bottles still wobbled noisily on the uneven cement floor. Nick’s fingers and palms ached from where the wire had pressed hard into his own flesh, pulling it so tight. He tried to recall the name for that particular implement of execution but it wouldn’t come to him. Probably he’d read about it somewhere, or seen it on TV. He’d think of it eventually, probably in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep. Though something told him from here on out, he was going to sleep like a baby.

Or, better yet, like the dead.

On his way back to the other end of the aisle, he snagged a plastic bag off the floor and filled it with coils of wire, along with a few packets of lead line weights, heavy and ovoid. He stepped over the big man, dead by then, and made his way back into the blinding white light of day, freshly geared up and less anxious than he could ever recall feeling in all his life.

Because it was
all
like that, wasn’t it? he decided as the number 4 puttered up to the bus stop. People react the way they think they’re expected to, but it’s all programming. Killing, fucking, loving, living. All Spot ever was—all
Misty
ever was—was another bag of bones, another cog in the machine. He hadn’t loved her. He’d only done and felt what programming, instinctual and cultural, had told him to do and like a faithful dog he followed every command. Pathetic.

(
And look where it got you, Nick—look at what you are now!
)

He climbed the steps into the bus and fed his change into the slot. The driver did not acknowledge him. At the back, Nick sat down, peeked at the transit map up near the roof, and pulled the plastic bag tight to his abdomen. In doing so, a small hole in the side tore wide, and one of the coils dropped out to the floor. Two seats over, an older man with cottony white hair retrieved the package and handed it gently back, a smile on his pinched, wrinkly face.

“Call of the sea, huh?” he rasped.

“Yeah,” Nick said.