Chapter Text
It wasn’t dark. That was what struck me the most. The light was grey, which made no sense, and seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. I saw that I was in a corridor, but there wasn’t an end, nor a beginning. There was simply grey.
I was sat in a chair. No. Scratch that. I was sat in the middle of a row of chairs, all linked together, like seats in a hospital waiting room.
Ah. That’s what seemed familiar. A hospital waiting room. That explained the feeling of dread deep in my chest. Now that I had realised it, the rest began to fill itself in.
Where had I been before? Watching a gunfight in the centre of a restaurant across the street from us. Glasses shattering, people screaming, and us. We had been running. The men wore balaclavas, the eye and mouth holes yanked down into warped, screaming shapes. One of them shouted to the others, and the bullets started to rain down even heavier, screams soon silencing themselves. Well. Not themselves. Someone was doing the silencing.
It was a huge restaurant, the kind we would never have been able to afford so much as a glass of water from. Rich people went there. Really rich people. I pulled my love closer to my chest as we ran; the stampede around us wouldn’t reach her on my watch.
My love.
Her face came back to me in a blur. Where was she? I stood, pacing the corridor, but there was nowhere she could have hidden, or a place I could have missed sight of her.
Where had I seen her last?
That was a stupid question, the question everyone always asks you when you’ve lost something. “Where did you see it last?”, like you hadn’t already thought of that.
I had seen her last in an alleyway.
Surrounded.
Oh. Oh.
She had been afraid. She had been so afraid. She had been small, curled under my arm, her fingers clutching my shirt hard enough to rip the fabric. Her face had been buried into me, and every defence I had ever worked to create for her had failed.
The men in the masks. I knew who they were. Or I could guess, at least.
I thought about our bulletproof vests at home.
I thought about how stupid it had been to ever take them off.
They had cost hundreds. I’d had them made specially for us, with the sizing just right, and our names embroidered above the left breast.
Demolition lovers. That was a crude name. Penned first by my mother.
It was true, and so we had adopted it as our own. We ran a business blowing shit up. Not like real construction shit, our clientele was not so high brow. We blew up symbols. Big banks, sweatshops. We destroyed shit that needed to be destroyed, and we were paid damn well to do it.
The restaurant we had passed had belonged to my father. His property was the first one I destroyed. He owned more than anyone should ever own, and still could not give an ounce to his son.
I didn’t care about his money. It was never like that.
But for all the football grounds he owned, he never took me to a game. For all the cinemaplexes, and restaurants, and malls, and god knows what else, we had never spent more than an hour together.
My love saw that in me. She knew what I had lost. She held my face and stroked my hair, and told me I would be alright. She had married me, she promised if it came to it that she would bury me. I trusted her to carry me through this world to the end.
On the nights when we had made an explosion, we would kiss by the fire, our hearts thumping in tandem, our hands everywhere that wasn’t too far to reach. The prospect of being caught and killed was incredible for our romance. That’s a new idea for couple’s therapy: a gun to the head.
The alleyway. Think, idiot.
She had been scared, and I had been stupid, and the men had been angry. Rich men, then. Ex rich men.
“What did we break?” I had said, my voice loud and clear.
We had been here before. Cornered by someone we had destroyed. My wife’s head buried in my side, feigning sobs as she pulled out the gun I forever kept in my back pocket in preparation. We had the act down. I distract, she cries. We both shoot, we both kill.
No. This time had been different.
My wife had actually been afraid.
“What did we break?” I had repeated.
There had been a silence. And then there had been… not silence. Sound so loud that it had all blended into one beam of static, which in turn created silence in my destroyed ears. I held her head to my chest, trying to drown out the bullets in her ears with the sound of my heart. I remember falling, but I don’t remember hitting the ground. I remember her screaming, and a heaving sequence of breaths. I remember hot, sticky blood. I couldn’t squirm away from the blood. I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t move because she was lying on top of me, and she was dead weight.
In a split second, our fool-proof plan had gone wrong. I found that I was angry at her for not getting the gun.
Burning pain met my wrists, and I remember trying to hold in the pathetic noise my body made as a response. Hot shame met my cheeks as I failed, and even hotter shame stabbed me in the chest when I managed to steal a second to examine my priorities.
She was dead.
Oh, fuck. She was dead, she was dead, she was dea-
“You. Broke. Everything.”
I looked up at the man in the mask, and tried to make out the silvery mark between his eyes.
A gun clicked against my head, and the pressure in my wrists greatened. Boots. Massive boots were pinning them down.
I don’t know why. Did they think I was going to fight?
I had pressed a kiss to the temple of my love. I would not let myself have the realisation of what her death meant. I would not have to dwell on losing her, not when I was joining her soon.
I pushed my head up to the barrel of the gun.
-
This is a waiting room. This is a waiting room. This is a waiting room. This is a waiting room, and I am dead.
The realisation does not sting.
Where is she?
“Please.” I beg from the air, though I do not know what the air could give me.
If I am dead, then it is not air. There is no breath in my lungs.
It is just space, and I am begging space to deliver my love, as though I am special to it. I wonder if this is what every dead man does. Talks to the air.
Am I meant to be driven to insanity here?
I must be. This must be Hell. I’m smarter than most, I feel as though I have come to this epiphany much faster than anyone else might have. I do not try to deceive myself into thinking I am in or should be anywhere else than Hell. I am a murderer. I am an arsonist. I am a liar, and a cheat. I am a bad man, I deserve to be kicked away.
But my wife does not. She is the best of this world. She deserves her heaven for what she has done for me.
We had talked about this before. What heaven meant to us. She had said “you and me”, kissed my forehead, and left it at that.
I need her to be happy. I need to know that she is by a bonfire somewhere, a bonfire she started. I need to know that she is happy. I need to know that heaven has copied me for her.
She said she wanted me in her heaven, and so there had better be one there for her.
I find myself begging from the air again.
I am going crazy far more quickly than I feel I am supposed to.
-
A rumble. The first signs of an explosion, of an avalanche, of a spontaneous meal out. Things can mean so many other things when you think about it.
What else rumbles?
Thunder, bar fights, gun fights-
It is not an explosion. Nor an avalanche, nor the rumble of her stomach before she starts to complain that we should find a restaurant. The rumble is the growl of a throat being cleared. A drawn out sound, a warning of sudden presence rather than a sound made out of need.
“You want her back?”
I sit bolt upright. I don’t remember laying down on the floor to begin with. I wonder if dead men sleep.
“You want her back.”
It’s not a question this time, I note.
I nod. There is nothing else to say.
I notice that the man asking me this wears a bulletproof vest beneath his jacket not unlike my own, and his face is obscured by shaggy hair and shadow. I presume this is the devil. He looks different to how I would have imagined him.
I wonder if he is a metaphor.
“You’re a man of action.”
When I don’t respond, he presses on.
“You’re also a man who would do anything, aren’t you? When it comes to her?”
I nod. Of this, I’m sure.
“Then I have a deal for you. I know they say not to make deals with the devil, but you’re not going to get any better option.”
A deal.
I prefer to call it a gamble.
I was a gambler. I am a gambler. I can feel my hands closing around the dice, and my heart beginning to race- even in death- as I nod yet again.
“You’re a bad man. But you’re not evil. You know that, and that’s why you’re here.”
“And where is here?”
“Oh, you’re in purgatory. Or you will be, at least. You’re not quite dead yet, sunshine.”
Oh.
I’m not dead then.
That’s worse.
That’s so much worse.
“Is this a dream then?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Dream. Vision. Call it what you like. But it’s real.”
“Where is she?” I didn’t even try to conceal the crack in my voice. Why am I alive? Why isn’t she?
“Out of my hands for now.” He gestured vaguely downwards with open palms, as if to show me she wasn’t concealed like a playing card between his fingers. “But I can help you if you help me.”
“Why would you help me?”
“I want a job doing. One I can’t exactly do myself. An anomaly to set right.”
He’s pacing now, staring at the floor. I begin to doubt my instinct of trusting him.
I never doubt my instincts.
This is all so strange. My love, I’m sorry.
“You two are just so tragically in love, even the fucking devil feels bad about splitting you up.” he sighed, rubbing his face. “You did good, kid. You did bad stuff for good reasons. In my book, that’s a bullshit reason to end up here. To end up alone.”
I open my mouth to argue. I think better of it.
“Immortality. That’s what I’m offering. Full-on immortality. You help me out, and I can make her a path straight home. Straight back to the world.”
“Immortality.” I repeated back to him. No. This was bullshit. This sure as hell isn’t how the afterlife works. I don’t just… get things. Not like this.
“You’re a cynical man. Hey kid, I respect it. I knew you would be. But I’ve got paperwork. A real contract. Physical evidence of the deal.”
He held out his hand, a medieval looking scroll suddenly there, unraveling theatrically.
Two great bold statements stood out.
AN IMMORTAL LIFE ON EARTH
in exchange for
THE SOULS OF 1000 EVIL MEN
I could have burst out laughing. It was all so…. so comic book. I was in some terrible dream, and I was going to wake up next to her any moment.
“No way. You’re not serious.” I looked up at him, stood there, looking serious as anything. “…What qualifies as evil to you? What do you want?”
What a stupid fucking question.
“I think you know what evil looks like. And I think you know what I want. True love is rare these days, kid. Show me you love her. Kill every man who stands between the two of you.”
Everything had happened too quickly.
I couldn’t do this.
This was so much bullshit.
Oh god, my love, I’m so sorry-
I looked down. I had signed it.
-
There it was. My name, in furious black scrawl. My anger had run away from me: I had split the nib of the fountain pen in my hand, a steady stream of ink now dripping onto the corner of the page.
I expected something to start glowing. That’s how ridiculous this whole thing was. Instead, the scroll was rolled up again and secured with blood red wax, which I had to press my fingerprint into. Then the man left. No, he didn’t leave. The man disappeared. Simply there one second, tucking the scroll into some pocket of his jacket, and gone the next.
I assumed he had gone to do some admin. Was there admin in Hell? Was there a receptionist, with a great big filing cabinet of every man’s fate? Was this all just a mirage, made by hospital painkillers? If I wasn’t dead, surely I was in hospital. I’d definitely been shot.
A thousand evil men. A thousand men who stood between us.
Destruction had come for the demolition lovers. It was only right, in a way, that what we hungered for most should choke us.
But the timing. That hadn’t been right. She didn’t deserve death in an alleyway. She didn’t deserve a death surrounded by broken glass and scaffolding.
The deal had been too sweet.
I wanted only one thing beyond my love. One thing, and one thing only could satiate me.
Revenge.