I’ve been staying in the cathedral for about a week now. It may sound weird, but the isolation of it all has been kinda peaceful. I haven’t really seen Tyler much after he brought me here. He pops in and out just to see what I’m doing, and then leaves again. God only knows what he’s doing when he’s alone. Or who with or doing to. It actually hasn’t been that bad considering the context in which I find myself. This place is actually much bigger than it seems. Whether it’s because that’s how it was before or because of the current occupants, I’m unsure. I’ve found room after room as I’ve wandered around on my own, from storage to some of the other personal rooms. It was grand in many ways, but always had a feeling of dread in the air. I’ve found access to the roof through the attic, which was completely empty oddly. The view is beautiful from up there, even with the weather being the way it is this time of year.
I found that this place also has a stone garden, with old weathered angel statues scattered throughout the paths. Some of them look like they’re in battle, some of them look like innocent children that have been left behind. The older ones were slowly being overtaken by giant trees and their roots, slowly being unearthed over the many years they had been sitting here. I even found several headstones of past priests who had stayed here long before we had. I’ve tried to imagine this place like it might have been, but I don’t think I could ever truly do it justice. I’ve started running these paths just to pass the time. The amount of energy I seem to have gained is insane. Every day I think I run for at least four hours straight, not having to slow down or even stop for water. Laying in bed doesn’t help, even just to try and slow my mind down for a few minutes. I’m just awake.
The one thing that did surprise me was the contents of the cell phone that was given to me. I've been using the camera a lot lately. Sunrises, sunsets, and even the occasional selfie when I felt slightly good about the way I look. I still get news updates and articles about random things going on in the world. All the basics had already been uploaded, but Tyler was right. The banking app was the best part of it. It was a bank I had never heard of before. The app icon was just a black capital E against a gray background. I opened it and about hit the floor. So many zeros were in that account, the most money I’d ever seen in my life. And my name was on the account. I haven’t used any of it, mainly because I don’t know how to, or if it’s a good idea to. I mean, that creepy fuck already took my life. What else could he take if I used the money?
After I had finished running this morning I headed back to my room, passing a few of the others as I did. They always seemed to look like they wanted to drop kick my ass or mount my head on a shelf. Most of them don’t speak, just grunt at me as I make my way past them. Whether that was by choice or not was beyond me, and honestly, I’m too scared to ask.
The plan was to take a shower and just exist like every other day until Tyler came running up to me. He seemed overly excited about something, and now knowing him for these couple weeks, that could be really good or really stupid. “What are you doing right now?”, he asked as he screeched to a halt beside me. “I’m taking a shower and then doing nothing, just like yesterday and the day before that. Why are you asking?”, I said. He followed me into my room and continued to talk. “You’re coming with me to the city today. We gotta get you trying out your abilities on the unaware to make sure you don’t fuck up and leave someone alive when they aren’t supposed to be”, he said. I took my shirt off as I walked to the bathroom, “how exactly am I going to do that? Just walk up and kill somebody walking on the street?”. He made himself at home on my bed while he talked, “no, smart ass. Just trust me”. “Not as far I as I can throw you, which could be pretty fuckin far”, I tell him. The more time I spend with this kid, the more it feels like I have a little annoying brother.
I turned to him before I went into the bathroom, “I’ll go with you into the city, mainly because I need to get out of here for a while. The ugly fucks around here aren’t much for conversation. But I’m showering first”. “Whatever”, Tyler said as he completely laid out on my bed, “I’ll just be here waiting for you to make yourself pretty then”. I shook my head as I went into the bathroom, “you’re a douche”. “Yeah”, he said smiling cheekily, “but I’m your douche”.
I shut the door behind me and turned the water on hot. Most of the time, this is the best part of my day for me. I climbed inside and shut the glass door, the steam quickly overtaking the small space. I stand under the water and let it run over my head and down my body, trying to relax and decompress. I’ve known that this day was coming, and I’m dreading it. I scrubbed myself and got out of the shower, wrapping myself in a towel before stepping out into the bedroom. I made my way to my dresser as Tyler started whistling at me. “Damn dude, you got a good set of abs on you. I’m still basically a cheese board over here”, he said as he jumped up and lifted his shirt, smacking his stomach. I opened a drawer and started pulling out clothes. “Can I get dressed in peace please?”, I tell him, “I don’t think you really need to see me naked, unless you’re into that sorta thing”. He put his shirt back down and turned towards the door, “I’ll just look at the door because we have to leave soon”, he said. I quickly pulled my boxers and jeans on before heading towards the door myself, smacking him in the back of the head as I passed him, “alright, let’s go”.
“We have one thing we gotta do before we leave”, Tyler said, “follow me”. We left my room and headed down the hallway, passing several mean looking men as we did. A couple of them actually sneered at us as we walked by them going down the stairs. “What’s their fucking problem?”, I asked. Tyler shrugged, “who knows. It could be anything between needing to shit to needing to eat. But I’m willing to bet it’s the eternal life coupled with constantly having to kill random people”. I didn’t say anything, but he added, “this life we’ve been handed to us isn’t what any one of us expected. Shit starts to weigh on you after a while”.
We traveled down several more staircases until we finally made it to a door. It was centered to the bottom of the stairs, so there was nowhere to go but back up or through the door. To me it looked fairly old, even older than the building itself. Tyler turned to me before he would open the door. “This is how we keep our eyes on everyone”, he said, “and now how you keep your eyes on them too”.
All he had to do was push on the wood of the door and it opened with ease. He put his arm out and invited me to enter through the threshold. I made my way through and didn’t know how to react to the things I was looking at. Very old analog clocks had been embedded into the stone walls, carvings of strange looking hands holding them in place as they ticked away. Several men stood around them, like they were waiting for something. One of the clocks started to ring very loudly and stopped moving as the men started to laugh amongst themselves. I did my best to avoid them as I started wandering around the large room, examining the locks up close. Each one looked completely different than the last. Some of them weren’t even moving at all, and looked like they hadn’t moved in decades.
I pulled Tyler over by waving him over to the silent clock. “What’s up with this one? Are the batteries dead in it or something?”, I asked. He tapped the glass a couple of times and knocked some of the dust off of it. “Nah”, he said, “it just hasn’t been activated yet. They only start to tick when someone’s death is inevitable. Then when said person dies, it stops”, “So literally a death clock”, I said. “Exactly”, Tyler said, “that’s what I’ve been calling them anyway”. He patted me on the back and led me over to one that was moving. “This will be your first”, he said, “should be relatively easy, but you never know until you know”. At that point he pulled out a small pocket knife and handed it to me. “The reveal requires a drop of blood. Wipe it on the glass and it will give you a name”.
I gave him a look to see if he was fucking with me again, but the face he gave me told me he wasn’t kidding. I took the knife and hesitantly pricked my left pointer finger. I barely got my finger to the glass before the small wound started to heal. The clock chimed three times as a name was revealed at the bottom of the clock in glowing letters: Jonathan Sims.
“Who the hell is that?”, I asked. “Don’t know”, Tyler responded, “but we’ll find out when we get there I guess”. He turned and started to leave the room, but I caught him. “How exactly am I supposed to find this guy? All I have is a name on a clock”, I tell him. “Don’t worry, you’ll know”, he said. As we started to leave, out of nowhere, I did know. It was like getting hit with a bolt of lightning. Jonathan Sims was a recently released convict who is living on the southside of the city. He lives alone, no family that lives anywhere near him. He’s almost eighty years old with a heart condition. The thing that disgusted me about this man that I had never met: he had been convicted of rape. He had abused his daughter for most of her childhood, and went away for it. Natural causes or no, this man deserves to burn in hell.
******
The car ride to the city was so silent that it was driving me crazy. We were about halfway to the city as it started to get dark, the moon and stars starting to peek out from behind the dark clouds. The more I thought about this piece of shit we were driving towards, the more pissed off I was getting. “Can you talk about something to distract me?”, I asked him. “Like what?”, he said. I thought about it, and I actually had something I wanted to know. “Here’s something. How exactly did you get caught up in all of this shit?”, I asked him. He sighed as he turned the car towards the city. “That’s kinda a long story”, he said. “Well we have some time, what happened to you?”, I asked him. “Alright”, he said, “I’ll tell you what happened”.
“I don’t know if you’ve tried to guess, but I’m only seventeen. Or I was at least when I died”, he started. “A long time ago, I wasn’t exactly making the best decisions. I dropped out of school, I smoked weed any chance I got to, and even started dealing for a short time. I was quickly turning into a career criminal. I only had one light in my whole bullshit of a life, and her name was Emily”, he said.
“You could ask me a billion and one times and to this day I couldn’t tell you why she agreed to go out with me. I watched her walk home from school almost every day from my corner where I was dealing at the time. I thought she was beautiful, though I can barely remember what she looks like now. I finally started ‘accidentally’ running into her a couple days a week just to have an excuse to talk to her. The more I got to know her, the more I liked her. I mean, she was really going places, unlike me. Good grades, early acceptance into MIT, and of course, the fact that she started to like me back. We hung out a few times, went out on dates after that. Everything was going great, until she finally wanted me to meet her parents”.
“Of course, naturally, her parents hated me. The minute they laid their eyes on me I knew they didn’t. Not that I really blamed them, I didn’t really like me either at the time. But Emily didn’t care. Even when I would start getting down on myself, she’d tell me I was so much more than I realized, in my mind and my spirit. She’d always tell me she loved me every time she saw me, in every text and every call. We’d meet up late at night after her parents were asleep, hang out on the roof of their building and plan our future together. But one night she kept coughing, so I made the decision to take her to the emergency room. And everything changed”.
“It took the doctors about a month to realize how bad it was. They gave her two years, and that was a generous estimation on their part. I stayed with her every day through the chemo they tried, and longer through the radiation, but it only seemed to make her sicker. After visiting hours were up, I’d hide out in a bathroom until the night shift came and sneak back into her room, staying with her throughout the night. She’d cry in my arms, telling me how much she was hurting, how she wished it would just stop”.
“Begging me to make it stop”.
“Eventually, the doctors and her parents caught me on camera in her room at night. They immediately filed a protection order to keep me away from her”, he sniffled a laugh, “yeah, like a fucking piece of paper was gonna keep me away from her”.
We turned onto the main road to main street as he continued. “I waited a couple of days before going back, but Emily and I had been making a plan for when I did in that time. It may sound crazy, but she didn’t wanna live anymore, and I couldn’t live without her. So we made a plan to go to sleep together, and peacefully go into the great unknown together”. At my obvious look of shock, he shrugged, “like i said, I was young and so was she. And we were completely in love. But we also knew she didn’t have long on this earth, and I knew I didn’t wanna live without her”.
“The final night I snuck into the hospital, I made a detour to the pharmacy. I found several heavy drugs to help us go to sleep and stay asleep. But the ultimate kicker was what I found behind the locked door in the back of the pharmacy. The fact that the password on the keypad was just the year at the time, first mistake. But I figured out real quick that it was the room where they kept the good drugs. I shuffled through the different veils and found actual Dramamine. I’d heard of it, but never actually seen it in person. I grabbed a couple of new syringes and filled them to the brim and made my way to her room. I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was so happy to see me. We hugged and kissed and made promises to find each other on the other side. We got in bed together with the pills and a bottle of water, making ourselves comfortable. I will admit, I was terrified of dying, but I couldn’t let her go alone”.
“I watched her shakily take about ten of the sleeping pills. I downed the rest of them before I could change my mind. I held up the syringes and handed her one. I told her we had to do them at the same time because they kicked in pretty fast. She did mine and I did hers. It didn’t take long to kick in, we just kinda fell back onto the bed. I took her into my arms, kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. It broke my heart when she started to cry. She told me she loved me one more time, and made me promise not to leave her in the dark by herself. I made that promise, and meant to keep it. The last thing I remember was hearing her heart monitor flatline and all the alarms going off right after. Then I just went to sleep”.
“I saw a bright light and thought maybe I was going to heaven. Like, maybe all those old people were right about what we’d see when we died. But instead, I found…..him”, he said. We finally made it to our destination, some shady looking apartment on the southside of the city. Tyler parked the car and turned it off, wiping his eyes. “If you wanted to go with her, why’d you take his offer?”, I asked him. He sniffled under his breath, “I thought that I could somehow find a way to save her”, he said while he got out of the car, “I was wrong”. As he slammed the car door shut, I took the hint. The conversation was over.
I got out of the car and tried to apologize, “look, I’m sorry I brought it up. It was none of my business”. Tyler took a deep breath and wiped his face one more time. “It’s fine man. Don’t worry about me”, he said.
I took a good look at the building. It looked like it had been there for years, maybe even decades without proper care. Whoever was in charge here wasn’t doing their job. “Alright”, Tyler said, “I’m following you. Where do we go?”. I looked up at the many windows, not really knowing where to begin. I felt a shudder run through me to my gut, like a physical intuition. My eyes immediately went to the third floor, four windows from the corner of the building. I watched and waited, then finally saw him walk past the window. He was definitely old and it showed. He was wearing an oxygen mask and I’m pretty sure he was using a cane of sorts.
When he walked away from the window, I turned to Tyler. “Are you serious?”, I said to him, “I’m supposed to go up there and just take him out? Not even think, just do it?”. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it”, he said with no hesitation. I looked back up at the window, a small amount of guilt building in my mind. Even with everything I now knew about this man, I still wasn’t sure if I could go through with it. I truly believe he deserved everything that was coming to him, but was it my place to give it to him? “What happens if I don’t?”, I asked him, “what if I just leave him alive?”. Tyler started to make his way to the side entrance to the building. “That’s not an option, it can’t be done”, he said. “But what if I did?”, I asked again, wanting an actual answer and not just an opinion. He stopped and looked directly at me, “no one has ever tried because no one wants to find out”.
We made our way up the three flights of stairs to the third floor, trying not to make much noise. The smell of this place was unfathomable, like someone had already died and no one had noticed yet. It didn’t seem to bother Tyler at all, or at least he wasn’t showing that it did. The walls and carpet looked like they hadn’t been touched since the seventies, and very much abused in that amount of time. The higher we climbed, the worse the windows got. You couldn’t hardly see anything on the outside. Even at this late hour, there were people out on the stairs, running in and out of doors, some leaving completely to god knows where. Even a few kids were running up and down the stairs. One of them almost ran right into me when we finally made it to where we needed to be.
This floor, for whatever reason, was eerily quiet. There were only five doors that he could be hiding behind. “Where is he?”, Tyler asked me. I looked at each door, trying to see if I could tell. My gut told me he was in apartment seven at the end of the hall. I made my way to the door, Tyler a few steps behind me. All of sudden I felt that same surge of anger that I had felt earlier in the car. It was like a burning in my bones that would only go away if I eliminated this evil man. I stood in front of his door, knowing what I had to do. I felt the light mist take over my face, felt it trace that dark face on mine again. Tyler kept staring while my face changed before his eyes. I looked and his face did the same thing, almost like he knew I needed the back up. We locked eyes, the looks we gave each other almost like an agreement. I let my rage take over, and slammed my heavy boot into the door.
The door exploded under my boot, bits of wood landing all over the entrance of the apartment. We quickly entered the apartment like a raiding party, scratching walls and knocking down pictures, glass shattering on the floor. “Oh, Jonathan”, I start yelling, “time’s run out for you, ya old ass fuck!”. I wandered around the apartment like a lion on a hunt, flipping over furniture and tossing magazines. Tyler made himself at home on the couch and tossed his feet on the little coffee table. “This is a sad little corner of shit”, he said, “it stinks like old dude and cabbage”. I stopped long enough to try and listen for him, and at first I didn’t hear anything. I stood there for a few minutes before I finally heard the faint hiss of oxygen coming from the bedroom. “We know what you did Jonathon, and we’re not happy with you”, I said. I stomped down the hallway, my boots becoming the loudest thing on the whole floor. I pounded on the door to the bedroom, hearing him gasp on the other side. “Whoever’s out there, get the fuck outta my apartment!”, he screamed through the door, “I’ve got a gun in here!”. For some reason that just made me laugh. “As if it would do you any good, ya old fuck!”, I yelled back. “You got one chance to get the fuck out before I start blastin!”, he said. I actually did hear a gun cock behind the door, kind of like a shotgun, which surprised me a bit. I genuinely thought he was talking shit just to get us to leave. I smiled to myself, not really sure why. Maybe my brain was just running on the adrenaline of the moment or the fear of this man actually shooting me was starting to sink in, but I realized something: I literally couldn’t die.
I stepped back a few steps and took a deep breath. “Last chance old man. Come face your consequences like a man, or go down like a coward”, I tell him. “Fuck you!”, he yelled and shot through the door.
I hit the ground before the bullet could hit me, a shot of terror shooting through my body. It quickly left as I jumped to my feet and ran full force towards the wooden door. The wood broke easily under my body weight as I skidded to a stop on the other side. I finally made eye contact with the son of a bitch that was hiding in the opposite corner of the room, gun shaking in his hands. His face looked terrified as I stomped towards him, nothing behind my eyes but death itself. I got right up in his space, had the barrel of the gun resting on my chest. This man could easily take me out at this moment, but I’d just keep getting right back up until he went down. I smiled at the thought of his face, and it startled him enough to make him drop the gun to the floor, putting his hands up like they would save him. Then, within seconds, he just gave up. He dropped his hands and just stared at me.
“You know what, fuck it”, he said shakily, “do whatever you want to me, I’m dying anyway”. He stumbled past me, shoving me over so he could get by. I watched him waddle over to an armchair and flop into it, dust flying off as he did. He kept grabbing at his chest and wheezing like he couldn’t breathe. Grabbing the oxygen mask off the floor he took a good long look at me, his eyes unsure of what he was looking at. “I knew this would eventually happen”, he said while taking a deep breath from his mask, “something seemed to always follow me, watching and waiting for the day it all comes to an end”. I started towards him as he kept touching his chest, wincing in pain. “Just do whatever it is that you came here to do”, he told me, “I wanna die alone”.
I bent down and got face to face with him. I could almost see the evil traced into every wrinkle of his skin, the hatred in his eyes. I placed my hand on his shoulder and began to see through a dark mist. I could almost see the things he did, feel every once of pain that his daughter felt from his hands, like tasting his memories. The rage inside me welled up again, white hot and unrelenting. My hand kept tightening around his shoulder, him trying to get it off and failing. “Good luck down there, you deserve everything coming to you”, I tell him. I felt the heat of my anger begin to bleed into his shoulder until I felt nothing. His eyes went dead, then turned black. I heard him continue to wheeze for another minute before going completely silent, going limp in the chair and dropping the mask.
I stood straight again and just stared at his body. I wasn’t sure how I did what I just did, but however it happened, Jonathan wasn’t coming back. As my face faded back to normal I couldn’t help but feel a little bad. It was the strangest feeling, knowing that I had crossed this line. And I didn’t even know what happened to him after this. I turned toward the hallway to leave when I noticed Tyler standing in the doorway, staring at the scene. “Not bad”, he said, “I would’ve just snapped his neck and left, but it’s your first time, so I’ll give you a pass”.
I followed him back out of the apartment building and stood next to his car for a few minutes, staring at the old man's window. “Don’t torture yourself, man. It’s not worth it”, Tyler said, pulling his keys out, “it gets easier the longer you have to do it”. “I think I’m gonna walk around town for a bit”, I tell him, ignoring him, “I need to clear my head”. “Alright, I’ll be getting tacos on eighth street whenever you’re done”, he told me.
I watched him drive away then started making my way down the block, trying to contemplate what I had done. Nothing really made sense, and I wasn’t really sure how I even did it. I just did it. I made it about three blocks when I started hearing crotch rockets coming towards me. I watched them park at the bar across the street and head inside. I decided to check them out, remembering how much I used to want one of them. They looked awesome, but my favorite one was totally black. I was checking out the matte paint job when I realized that the jackass who was riding it had left the keys in the ignition. I looked around, trying to see if anyone could see me. I slowly turned the key and handle bars until the bike started, the engine purring to life with a low hum. ‘Am I really about to do this?’, I thought. I swung my leg over and kicked the kickstand up, rolling the bike out of the parking spot. I looked up long enough to realize that the owner of the bike had seen me through the window and was yelling at me through the glass. I made the quick decision to just smile and wave at him before taking off down the street, the tires screeching against the blacktop. This thing took off like a rocket, I could barely keep myself steady for the first few minutes of speed.
I made my way through the streets and out of town, the cold wind on my face feeling amazing against my skin. I actually started smiling from the feeling building inside me. I could do whatever I wanted, take whatever I wanted, and there wasn’t anything that could stop me, even if they tried. I decided to just let it out and started laughing as I made my way back to the cathedral, finally embracing this crazy new life.
and then Add to home screen.