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Jack listens to the gentle hum of the car’s tires as they roll across the asphalt. There had been times in the past—while seeking a remedy for his sleepless nights—that he had requested Arlene take him out for a drive in the country.
These attempts almost always proved fruitless, of course. Arlene—bless her—couldn’t keep quiet to save her soul, not even in the absence of her husband’s treasured conversation. No, in the event of his silence—sleeping or otherwise—Arlene was quite delighted to engage in the familiar habit of self-talk. She would narrate aloud her innermost thoughts as she drove them around under the diamond-filled upstate sky, an endless stream of scatterbrained consciousness.
There were occasions when Jack would listen to her words and follow along with her loosely connected stories, but more often than not he would simply tune them out in his half-awake state, hearing only the gentle cadence and rhythm of her voice.
It was a lullaby that neither drew him to sleep nor kept him awake—his mind content to wander within the twilight world of half-dreams.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
The car hits a pothole and jostles Jack's head against the floor. He blinks blearily into the inky darkness surrounding him, feeling a bit rattled—given how close he lay to the offending wheel well. Of course, Arlene was not exactly in the habit of locking him in the trunk of their car, either.
Minor details.
Jack sighs against the gag in his mouth. He should have known there was something off about the new hires; Stanley and Oliver did have that twitchy look about them—the type that only repeat felons have—but he couldn’t help himself; their names were too good. If he finds out they’re fake, he’s going to be more furious with the two bozos than he already is.
They’re double-fired, quadruple-fired, even. So fired that the NHTSA won’t even bother hiring their dead bodies as crash test dummies—not after Jack is done with them, oh no.
That said, it’s not like he can do much of anything now. Jack would kick himself if his legs weren’t tied together. Wait. On second thought—he probably still could, if he really wanted to. The restraints they’ve bound him with are amateur at best, and getting out of them would be child’s play. While Jack was no escape artist by trade, he wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with some of the intricacies of the profession either.
It wouldn’t do him much good, though. There’s no internal trunk release lever to push, so Jack couldn’t even throw himself out the moving vehicle if he wanted to—and boy did he want to—he couldn’t stand being alone with his thoughts for too long.
He can’t imagine popping out of the trunk and yelling “Boo!” after they stop the car will help his case either, not unless he wants to get shot.
Arlene would be furious with him.
Oh, Arlene. Jack never thought he'd be glad that she's not beside him, that she's home sick with a nasty cold instead. It's a bit funny—how quickly your perspective on things can change.
The oppressive darkness of the trunk bed is getting a bit suffocating, he admits. Jack has never liked the feeling of being trapped, nor has he ever particularly liked the dark. Nope, Jack slept with the nightlight on—thank you very much.
He figures he had better get used to it, because if something didn’t change soon, he would be looking at spending a whole lot of time in a similarly claustrophobic wooden box.
Well. He would figure something out, or he wouldn’t. That gave him fifty-fifty odds—a fair wager for any betting man (which he was).
The car rumbles to a halt, and Jack listens to the sound of the car’s doors opening as his abductors pile out, their boots clunking against the asphalt. One of them unlocks the trunk and lifts it open, exposing Jack’s ill-adjusted eyes to the evening glare of sunset. He squints as several pairs of hands grab ahold of him and tear him from the trunk bed. They roughly deposit him on the ground like a sack of potatoes, which he hits with a groan.
One of the men crouches down next to him and rips the gag from his mouth—big mistake. Jack cranes his neck to observe each of the men. There are seven of them in total, all dressed in red-lined jackets. He marks their faces one by one. Stanley and Oliver stand towards the back of the group, staring at him with vacant eyes, like they’re lifeless mannequins already. Jack smiles.
“What the hell do you have to be smiling about now, you little freak?”
Jack’s eyes flick over to the minivan he was just abducted in before settling back on the man standing over him. He meets his gaze evenly. “Oh, I was just enjoying the sunset.” Jack raises an eyebrow. “Why the bad attitude? What, are you afraid you’re gonna be late picking your kids up from soccer practice?”
The man grabs his suit collar with a snarl and punches him across the face. Jack’s head snaps back with a sickening crunch, and he’s not quite sure if it’s his nose that’s broken, the man’s hand, or both. He collapses against the asphalt, chuckling softly as he turns on his side to prevent more blood from pooling in the back of his throat.
The same man kicks Jack in the ribs, and his laughter stutters as the air is expelled from his lungs. It’s not enough to shut him up, of course. Jack opens his eyes through his wheezing laughter and meets the man’s gaze. The brows above his beady black eyes are furrowed, and his jaw is set tight.
Aww, no smile? Someone’s not a happy camper.
The man turns away from him to face the rest of the gathered criminals. “Let’s take him inside. Jones, you got the door code, right?”
Jack’s eyes swivel over to the gormless-looking bastard named Jones. “Y-yeah, I got it,” the man nods, his pasty turkey neck bobbing up and down. “It should work on the side door the employees use.”
“Everyone’s clocked out and gone home, right? We don’t need any interruptions.”
Jones nods again. “Yes, boss. My brother says that everyone leaves early on Fridays. There shouldn’t be anyone here but a few security guards on patrol.”
The boss nods tersely before snapping his fingers at Stanley and Oliver. “You two, haul him up and let’s go. We don’t have all night.”
Jack tilts his head up as they begin dragging him along the asphalt, his eyes scanning across the factory building’s wall sign: ACE Chemical Processing Plant. They must be in the industrial district. A lovely place, Jack is sure. If only they could have met under better circumstances—Arlene would have loved a tour of the Monarch Playing Card Company.
Jack detects a slight tremble in Stanley’s arms as he hauls him along—a wavering in his grip. Neither he nor Oliver has dared to look down at him, their eyes fixed on the building ahead.
What, never killed anyone before?
Perhaps he had misjudged them—maybe they weren’t felons, not if they were this squeamish.
They couldn’t be afraid of Jack. By all appearances, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Once they reach the side entrance, Jones types in the door code, and the two lugs pull Jack inside. The gawky little man sagely informs them that the guards should only be patrolling the ground floor at this time of night, so they take Jack up to an isolated supply room on the second floor of the factory, beside the catwalk.
“Drop him,” the boss says, lighting up a cigarette. Stanley and Oliver dump Jack unceremoniously onto the floor of the supply room, and he lets out a little oomph as he lands. The two men exchange an uncertain glance before turning to look back at their boss.
The man takes a drag from his cigarette and steps forward, brushing past Stanley and Oliver. He drops into a crouch beside Jack, leering over him. “Oh man, kid. Do you have any idea the trouble you’ve caused us? You’re so far up shit creek right now—and I don’t think you even realize it.”
Oh, Jack knows. He’s more than familiar with that maudlin waterway: the pull of its undertow, the despairing embrace of the riverbed beneath. Coming up for air now would be a long shot, and there’s no use crying about it.
No—better to greet it like an old friend.
The boss takes another drag of his cigarette and exhales the smoke into Jack’s face, who squints as the fumes begin to burn his eyes. He flicks the ash from his cigarette and chuckles lowly, “Since you’ve taken such an interest in the Red Hoods, we thought you might like to become an honorary member—even if only for a night.”
He presses the glowing end of the cigarette into Jack’s cheek, slowly bearing down. Jack listens to the sound of his own flesh sizzling and grits his teeth. He doesn’t cry out, nor does he break eye contact with the boss—his pupils constricted to pinpricks in spite of the low light of the supply room.
The boss takes note of his silence, and his brow furrows as he looks back into the hard green glass of Jack's stare. He pulls the cigarette away with a laugh, though the accompanying smile never reaches his eyes.
“Oh, now you’re quiet. Are you always this difficult?” He shakes his head. “Jones, go grab the hood—I’m sick of looking at his face.”
Turkey-Neck waddles into Jack’s line of sight, carrying something in his arms. It’s a domed capsule helmet, red and metallic—something straight out of the papers.
The Red Hood.
Okay, that actually is pretty funny. Maybe Jack was too harsh earlier.
The boss lifts him up into a position halfway between a sit and a slump while Jones pulls the hood down over his head.
Now Jack sees only red. Underneath the hood, he giggles to himself.
As the blows begin to rain down—another kick to the ribs, a punch in the gut, a jab to his right kidney—Jack wonders why they even bothered putting the hood on first.
One of the men kicks him in the head, and his skull rattles against the sides of the helmet like a coin in a beggar’s jar. It makes a funny sound—a hideous clanking as the world spins around him in kaleidoscopes of red. Jack would laugh if he could, but his voice seems to have left him. The mirthless wheeze he exhales is soundless.
Maybe they want him to remember. That last kick surely would have knocked him unconscious if it weren’t for the helmet. Their little joke would have been rendered pointless if he weren't awake to appreciate it.
He can't imagine they expect anyone to find the body.
Of course, it would be just Jack’s luck—that not even in the midst of this brutal beating would he be blessed with the concussive narcosis of head trauma.
An insomniac to the very end, it would seem.
Funny. Funny stuff—
Jack doesn’t scream, not even as his ribs crunch under heel and the points of steel-toed boots dig deep into his sides. A particularly vicious kick strikes him hard in the liver, and his body jackknifes in a sudden violent convulsion, arching wretchedly like a coyote or bobcat that’s just been struck by a powerful rifle round.
Beneath the red hood his lips pull back to reveal his white teeth in a hideous, reflexive grimace—a silent snarl. Eyes glassy and unfocused, like mounted taxidermy.
Jack feels like he’s just been struck by a rifle round. He feels dead already. He’s lost to himself for a moment—a flash of nothingness—but then he's back. There to bear witness, as always.
He wonders if that kick just lacerated his liver, if the internal damage will kill him long before the Red Hoods are done with him.
They wouldn’t like that.
Somewhere—elsewhere—Jack hears a tiny voice call out to him, screaming for it to stop.
Jack wishes it would just stop fucking crying already.
They’ve been over this. If it never did him any good before, then what use is it now?
None at all. Which is why he’s going to play a different game, one that's an old favorite. He imagines the faces of each of the men bludgeoned beyond recognition, their features ground into a fine red paste and splattered floor to ceiling like a Jackson Pollock painting. The deep crimson pools of arterial blood spreading impossibly far across the floor, like a cranial levee has just broken. He imagines their skulls flattened into the dirt, brain matter bursting out the sides after they’ve been run over by truck tires—fetid watermelons rotting in the summer heat.
Jack imagines these men faceless, nameless—nothing. He knows that if he gets out of this somehow, some way—he will ensure it becomes reality.
The sudden blaring of an alarm overhead jolts through Jack’s ears, though it sounds muffled and far away, as if he’s deep underwater.
He hears some panicked murmuring from his tormentors above, but he’s unable to make any of it out until the boss’ icy hiss of “Jones, I thought you used the door code—why the hell is the alarm going off?” pulls everything back into sharp relief.
“I—I don’t know! Maybe the code entry alerted their security team since it was entered during an unauthorized time slot? I guess they thought it might have been one of the security guards until they reviewed it…”
Further in the distance, Jack begins to hear the wail of police sirens, closing in fast.
The boss hears it too. “Goddammit. We don’t have time for this. Boys, change of plans. Grab him and let’s go—we need to get rid of the evidence, fast.”
Red shadows dance across Jack’s vision, and he feels himself being lifted up and dragged along the supply room floor. His legs give out from under him the moment he hopelessly tries to stand, and he’s tugged along onto the grated catwalk like a child’s ragdoll without much fuss.
There’s more indistinct murmuring as the world spins around him. Jack listens to the few bits and pieces of conversation that manage to slip through the haze of blood loss.
“Throw him in!”
“What—are you crazy?
“It’s acid; it won’t leave a trace.”
“I don’t know, boss, I don’t think—”
“Just do it!”
Jack’s head lolls to the side as he’s lifted higher, held up in one of the men’s arms. As he weakly shakes his head, attempting to stave off the next rush of vertigo, his eyes are drawn towards a sudden flash of movement high above the catwalk, hidden among the rafters of the factory floor.
No one sees it but him.
A great black shadow descends on them a moment later. In spite of the red film encompassing Jack’s vision, the figure is dark as night, a devouring void. And devour it does—this black shape. It pounces upon one of the gathered men and appears to swallow him whole, his screaming form vanishing beneath the black fabric of its billowing cape, which spreads out like the vast wings of some righteous demon.
“Shit! It’s the Bat! Quick, throw him in—now!”
Or perhaps an avenging angel, Jack thinks deliriously.
There’s a sudden burst of gunfire over the din of the men’s panicked shouts, but Batman appears to drift effortlessly between the bullets’ paths, and those that he does allow to strike him simply bounce off his armored chest—useless.
Oh, it’s a beautiful thing to witness. Such a shame then—that he’s too late.
The man holding Jack braces himself, then heaves him off the edge of the catwalk, down toward the vat of green chemicals below.
Batman turns and launches himself at the man, bowling him over. He leaps forward, reaching out towards Jack with an outstretched hand, and screams—
“No!”
Aww, Jack thinks, before the acid consumes him.
You do care.
Arlene walks down a dark hallway. Around her, time seems to dilate within the limited scope of her perception, and the hallway stretches on forever. She can see the exit, a tall doorway at the very end of the hall, but she never seems to get any closer, no matter how far she walks.
Strangely, she feels no sense of urgency. Arlene has never considered herself a particularly impatient person, but she wasn’t exactly the type to enjoy being stuck in rush-hour traffic either—her white-knuckled husband could attest to that!
Arlene can’t help but giggle at the memory. But no, that doorway—she can take it or leave it. Maybe she’ll reach it, or maybe she won’t, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference either way. It sure beats walking on the treadmill, at least. Those things always made her feel like a little gerbil.
She walks for hours and no time at all in her little temporal gridlock, pausing occasionally to admire the flickering shadows on the walls. The light source that permits their existence seems to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once—a dim glow that stretches from floor to ceiling.
It's a neat trick. Arlene just wishes that the puppet masters behind this little show would come out and say hi. She can hear them murmuring in the dark, just out of sight.
Oh well, maybe they’re shy.
Arlene hears a gentle thud behind her, like something small has just fallen to the ground. Perhaps her little shadow puppet-makers have finally gathered their courage.
She turns, smiling, and finds herself looking back at a tall figure, partially obscured in shadow. Arlene cocks her head. She can’t make out any of its features, but it's very tall—tall enough to brush past the ceiling. It steps forward, and the surrounding shadows shift just enough to reveal its glittering white eyes. Arlene raises her head to meet its gaze, her curious blue to its vacant white, and the figure—
Screams.
*
*
*
Arlene wakes with a start as something falls off her bedroom shelf. She sits up in bed and sniffles, still congested. She glances down at the pillow beside her—empty. Across the room, the Kit-Cat clock mounted on the wall dings three times, its glassy eyes drifting back and forth—the witching hour. Arlene furrows her brow. That’s strange; Jack should have been home hours ago. He said he was coming home early—since she was sick. He said he didn’t want her feeling left out, that it just wasn’t the same without her.
Arlene rubs at her eyes and throws the cover off before hopping out of bed. She walks around the side of the bed and passes Bud and Lou, who lie curled on the duvet. Lou raises his head to watch her, his eyes shining green in the dark.
“Sorry, baby—didn’t mean to wake ya,” she whispers. Lou seems to accept her apology, laying his head back down on the blanket with a gentle chuff.
The doll resting at the foot of Arlene’s shelf is a treasured favorite. She crouches down and cradles it in her arms, examining the fine contours of its porcelain features. No, Columbine is alright—in spite of her tumble. Arlene returns the doll to her rightful place on the shelf beside Harlequin and stands up, dusting off her tortoiseshell pajama pants.
She looks around the room, frowning. The window is latched tight, so there’s no draft blowing in. Their overhead fan is turned off. Nope, she hasn’t the foggiest idea how the doll could have fallen.
Arlene walks over to her bedside counter and checks the answering machine for any voicemails—there are none. She plops down on the edge of the bed and picks up the phone, dialing the number of the blocky Motorola Jack insists on carrying around. The ringback tone plays for several long seconds before Jack’s voice crackles through the speaker—but it’s only his prerecorded voicemail.
The sound of his voice doesn’t bring Arlene the same comfort it usually does; Jack almost always answers on the first ring. She sighs and sets the phone back on the hook, then wraps her arms around her knees.
There are a thousand, perfectly benign reasons for why Jack might not be picking up his phone—but the creature gnawing at the lining of her gut believes none of them.
Arlene has always trusted her gut—or rather—she has always trusted the roiling thing that dwells within it. Jack had called her superstitious once, before they were married. He said it playfully, but she had recognized the knowing glint in his eyes even then.
Just as he had recognized the one in hers.
Arlene takes the phone off the hook and dials the number to the police station. She stands up and begins pacing while she speaks to the dispatcher. Every minute or so, she pulls back the curtains to their bedroom window and looks out past their driveway and down the street—waiting for Jack’s purple Volkswagen to appear.
The afterlife is different than Jack had expected.
It’s an easy task—all it had to be was more than nothing. It can’t be anything else, for the face that greets him at the water’s edge is not that of a living man.
Impossibly, his broken ribs still ache. He’s jarred them over and over again in violent fits of laughter, but he can’t stop—doesn’t even want to stop.
The joke is too good this time. Woe to him—to have doubted the greatest comedian of all.
Every single square inch of his bleached-white skin burns. They said it was acid, but Jack’s still here; he didn’t melt away in the water—gone like a bad dream. He’s still him—still whole—and somehow, someone else entirely.
You know that face.
People used to tell him that death was the end of suffering, as it was the end of all things. Perhaps they had failed to consider that it might instead be an amplification, the sum of the essence of all that you were in life.
Hadn’t he wished, ages ago, back when he was someone else, that the pain might go on forever?
Jack wipes away the unbidden, bloody tears of laughter that stream down from his glowing eyes. He rises unsteadily to his feet and steps away from the water’s edge, leaving the other man behind.
The red light of a new dawn casts over the vast meadow before him. The summer-green shoots appear almost golden under the morning sun. The Elysian Fields, Jack thinks—half-hysteric, as he trudges through the grass.
Now, that can’t be right.
What poor soul did he switch ticket cards with?
Ole’ Peter must be furious.
Leave it to Jack to find a way to cheat both death and taxes in one fell swoop—because he’s clearly not paid his heavenly equivalent, not if he’s standing here.
If heaven has an internal revenue service, is it hell for taxpayers?
Jack releases a short bark of laughter that sounds like it’s been punched out of him, and his broken ribs creak under the pressure. He doubles over and vomits red into the grass. Jack tries to grimace, but the rictus pull of the grin he woke up wearing that morning won’t budge an inch.
He just can’t stop smiling.
Jack staggers to his feet and walks deeper into the knee-high grass—his eyes fixed on eternity.
Some hours later, the police will find him wandering the fields beside a wastewater treatment plant. The responding officers will call out to him, their voices colored with relief.
Jack will turn to look at them, and their faces will blanch nearly as white as his own.
They will behold the ruin of his spasming grimace and the horror trapped within his eyes, and then bright peals of screaming laughter will echo out across the fields, like the ringing of silver harlequin bells.