Shine Your Light on Me (2 page)

His wife had grown bored of his physical neediness the last few years, ever since Aiden became a teenager, and she sometimes complained that she would give him what he wanted more often if only he’d romance her once in a while.

But what was she really saying?

He couldn’t fathom what sense there was in romance. Just seemed like girls got brainwashed to expect things like that from reading too many princess fairy tales when they were children, and by watching too many movies when they were an adult. Real men didn’t romance. But maybe it was what Aria had been looking for, and when he hadn’t been that thing she’d expected, the thing she wished Mickey O’Connell could be, she pulled ole’ Jack’s plug in more ways than one.

He was lucky the boys hadn’t castrated him. Pine had wanted to, had Jack’s pants pulled down to his knees before Mitch had stopped him because Elroy had cried like a baby and ran off into the woods, and Jack had pleaded they spare him, hadn’t they done enough?

Seeing the pity on Mitch’s face was harder than seeing his anger. He’d told Pine to leave Jack there for the wild animals to pick apart. He hung there and bled all night, but he’d still had a few friends back then and they’d come looking for him. Once he was in the hospital and had stabilized, none of them came around to visit, but he couldn’t blame them. He was a blight to himself, to his family, and to pretty much everybody else.

It was his big turning point, that night, the following months of recovery, the hate inside him that fed on itself and him, constantly thinking he would settle that score with their clan even if he had to do it from his wheel-chair and drive his van over the lot of them and then pick them to pieces with his shotgun as they lay there praying for mercy.

They should have castrated me
, he thought.
Now it will cost them their lives, and I’ll take the consequences of my actions, and their premature deaths, like a man
.

The lights flickered again, almost in time to his accelerated heartbeat, and then the lights went out, and he sat there in the darkness until he heard people in the bar cry out in fear and wonder.

He blinked, thinking the sound he heard nothing more than the wind, although he knew something had happened in his bar, and he had to go back out there to find out what it was, that was his job, and usually it was an easy one, and he did not expect it to be anything special at all.

• • •

Mitch O’Connell was sitting next to his stepmother Aria in a booth in the furthest corner from the bar, and staring at the scratch on the back of his hand, when he first heard the commotion at the bar. The lights went out again, but then there was another light, and the sound of a locomotive roaring down the tracks in the middle of nowhere, and it thrummed against steel, and the building shook, the booth beneath him thrumming like his wife had before death carried her low, and Mitch thought:
There’s no train tracks anywhere near here
... so he couldn’t figure out what he felt, until his little brother Elroy jumped away from his friends and tripped into a table, and brought it crashing down on him.

And beyond his little brother, Connor LeDoux was backing away from his cousin Aiden. The pastor of the small assembly of God church down at the end of the bar had turned his head as well, and there was in his face something of horror, something Mitch had never seen on anyone else’s face except for Jack LeDoux’s out there in the forest.

But then the boy, Aiden, turned and Elroy was at his side, braver than the others for reasons unknown to all of them, and there was a fire beneath Aiden’s face, it glowed a reddish yellow, and the roar of that runaway locomotive quieted the bar completely until everyone listened to the boy say something was wrong, that he was dying...

And Mitch, who did not usually help other people, was pushing himself out of the booth until he felt Aria’s fingers close around his wrist, and he saw the scratch on the back of his hand, and then heard something pop in his ears, as if he were ascending to the top of a mountain, and the bar went deathly dark, a moment before Connor LeDoux said, “Holy shit,” his camera glowing, but not nearly as bright as Aiden’s face.

The light spilled from his eyes and open mouth and his ears, which he covered, shaking his head, that sickly powerful light shining over everyone in the bar as he spun around, crying out, and some people gasped while others whimpered.

Mitch saw the wound on the back of his hand close and his skin healed in an instant as if the mark of his misfortune had never been there. He blinked, opened his mouth to say something, but others around him were exclaiming similar experiences and nobody was listening to anyone else as Aiden slumped against the bar with Elroy on one side of him and Emmy on the other, and Connor, still recording the incident with his phone, saying softly, “Maybe you shouldn’t drink again...”

Some of those wearing glasses pulled them off and held them out and looked through them, as if something was wrong with their eyes, but Mitch knew that it wasn’t their prescription that had changed. They all looked at each other, and somebody said, “You too?”

Mitch’s stepmother, a wildly beautiful woman that so many men in the area craved not only for her beauty, but also because she was the richest woman in the county, said, “What the hell just happened?”

He watched more people confess that their eyes had been healed, that a rash had disappeared, that a broken leg had mended, and the pastor, who seemed like such a strange man to Mitch, and maybe to everyone else, said, “I don’t feel it inside me anymore...” and to a stranger who did not know what he was talking about, it would have sounded strange, but everyone in the bar had known about his cancer, how it was eating at his bones and draining his color and leaving little more than a husk of a once healthy, jolly man, robbing him of his faith in God as surely as it robbed him of his vitality. Now the pastor’s cheeks were rosy, his eyes clear. He said, “My God, this test you have put me through, that I have doubted you so abhorrently about, I repent, I beg for your mercy.”

His eyes filled with tears and he seemed to draw in on himself and then his chest heaved, and others, watching him, cried too, mostly in wonder at what had occurred, most still trying to process that a miracle had occurred at all.

Mitch didn’t need time to grasp the fact. He said, “Run home and get Jessica and bring her back here.”

Aria knew better than to question why, it was as obvious to her as much as it was to him, that everyone in the room had been healed, from minor scrape to terminal illness.

• • •

Aria O’Connell had always relied on reason to guide her. Understanding what people wanted had always helped her get what she wanted. But these last few moments were something her brain, at least for the moment, could not process fully. She suspected it was some trick of light, some prank the teenage boys had been playing, but how had they pulled it off? How had that boy Aiden pretended to experience something so sudden and so drastic so well? And... it happened, she’d seen Mitch staring at his hand, and she was staring at it a second before that and had watched the cut heal itself.

And she had felt sick to her stomach as she’d thought about the shoes Mitch would have to fill, and how unprepared for that responsibility he appeared, but after Aiden shone his light over her table, her stomach settled, and a great sense of wonder and peace had enveloped her.

It was only Mitch’s voice that drew her from such feelings with the sudden jolt of a fish hook in her ear. He wanted her to get Jessica. Somehow a miracle had happened, and there was a possibility—and that was all he had needed—that another miracle might occur, and his little girl should be there to bask in the glow of its healing light.

She went to her car and with trembling fingers stuck the keys in the ignition. She passed someone walking down the side of the road on her way out. Mitch’s house was only a mile from the bar, but the roads were slippery and she drove forty miles an hour, slowing down way before the serpentine curves that wound through the white and black night.

The lights were on in the house when she pulled into the driveway. She parked as close to the door as she could and the wind spit snow in her face and it swirled about her feet and the cold clung to her fingers and face, and she dragged the hair out her eyes and mounted the steps of the house and entered without knocking.

Mitch, afraid of the violence that Pine festered, had meant to keep him out of trouble and the public eye, by letting him babysit his daughter Jessica. Aria had known it was an unwise move from the beginning, the way she sensed many things, yet had kept her mouth shut in hope that she would be proven wrong.

But the boy of eighteen with the spattering of a star-shaped birthmark on his neck had the young child on his lap, her shirt pulled up, his hands rummaging the flesh beneath the fabric. He was grinning like a lunatic, his eyes lit with a corruption that anyone with eyes to see would determine ran into his soul like a bottomless fissure.

She did not hesitate to grab the lamp on the end table and rip its cord free of the wall. There was no sound in the room but Jessica’s whimper, the child startled by seeing her young grandmother there, weapon raised, Aria jerking the little girl by the arm out of Pine’s lap, and throwing her onto the floor, and with her other hand, slamming the base of the lamp between his eyes.

It rocked him good and she could smell the sharp tang of his ejaculation, and it turned her stomach and she hit him again, higher on the forehead. She couldn’t let go of the lamp. Jessica was crying on the floor behind her.

Pine shook his head and rubbed his brow and looked up at her with genuine curiosity. Aria could never tell if he knew what he did was wrong when it came to any number of things, and he put her in mind of a child of four years old who spoke and acted on impulse and mimicry. But his voice was that of a man’s and he said, “You hurt me.”

She ignored him, her eyes blazing, and she helped Jessica up and pulled her shirt back down and led her out into the wind and snow and to the warm, safe car.

• • •

Bobby Russell was walking through the snow, thinking about the booby traps he’d made and was carrying in his backpack, and what it’d be like after he broke into the school and armed them for tomorrow’s classes. He’d planned it well. The ones he’d place in the rooms, beneath the teachers’ desks, would go off simultaneously as the first bell rang at 8:35 a.m.

And one minute later those he placed in all the trash cans would thunder, while those who had not died in the initial explosions made their ways out into the halls, disoriented, terrified, and in shock.

And one minute after that those he placed in the shrubbery outside the exits would clap their mighty hands and reduce the exits to broken glass and twisted steel, a fitting coffin for those who had either ridiculed or shunned him.

Three minutes for him to stand outside the building and watch the place burn before the fire trucks and police arrived, and then he’d sneak up onto the water tower, where he’d hid his father’s .30-06, and turn the rescuers into sausage.

He wasn’t sure what he’d do then, where he’d go. It didn’t really matter. It was cold tonight and he had to get things in place for morning. He wondered what they’d call him... He liked to think of himself as an angel of death. He knew it’d been overused, but it was also easy to understand why when you considered the power you could have over other people if you had the guts for it.

Bobby had told his girlfriend Cindy that she needed to skip school with him tomorrow, and after the bombs went off, he could test her resolve, find out if she cared for him as much as she claimed to. He doubted she’d hold up. When she knew what he’d done, he couldn’t imagine her coming with him on his rise to fame. But truthfully he didn’t need her, he didn’t need anybody but himself, that was the way it’d always been.

He couldn’t foresee anything ever changing that.

The shoulder of the road was slippery and hard and he saw something going on at LeDoux’s, and considered, for a moment, throwing a brick through the large window that overlooked the parking lot. It’d have been nice to interrupt their good time. It’d have been nice to watch their expressions change, for them in that split second to realize they were powerless and inconsequential as the bugs they killed in their homes during the sweltering summer heat. But he was invisible to them, and he needed to remain so for one more night, and then they’d know him, everybody would.

Most of his classmates were already dreaming of prom, so let them dream this final night. Let them dream with all their hearts about what could have been. Let them lie down to sleep knowing that the world would remain as it had always been.

He walked on, the back of his neck wet, his armpits sweating, his gloved hands opening and closing, and his breath pluming out in front of him like the angry snorts of a charnel god inhaling the funk of its sour worshippers.

CHAPTER 2

The school was mostly dark and hidden by a haze of snow, seeming to materialize like some sort of mystical island in front of Bobby Russell. He walked around the side of the building. There were only four entrances by which he could enter, and the furthest from the road, on the back side of the gymnasium was the one he planned to use. But first he had to stop at the others, pull the small packet of dynamite fitted with timer and blasting cap from his backpack. He’d already placed each package in its own Ziploc baggie, yet still needed to duct tape them to ensure they were waterproof. He did so quickly, squatting near each entrance, behind the hedges, planting the morning surprise underneath them in the snow. He went to the back of the school and found the door he was looking for and used his father’s key to enter the building. It wasn’t a large school compared to others, thirty classrooms, a large cafeteria, the gym, the wide halls where other kids moved throughout the school year, carrying the poison they’d accrued in their studies that they would rarely use in their adult lives. It was such a waste, Bobby thought. The whole system was rigged so they were all like ants learning to manufacture an insecticide.