The Risen: Courage (10 page)

I know when we reach Paula’s infirmary. The lights brighten the hue of darkness my eyes hold from pitch to silver. I know the moment he places me upon one of the tables as the white-hot pain eats my body, opening my eyes. Everything is hazy and blurred as if looking through a window of dirty glass. I can make out who-is-who only from my understanding of what their outlines should hold. My voice is still locked and already my head is starting to swim back into the darkness.

I feel more than I see as Lawless places himself near me amid the dark shadows and shapes. “Don’t do this. Not after how far we have come. Don’t you do this to me.” His voice is crumbling, trembling with the same force as the hand that rests on the side of my face.

“Let her go.” Paula’s steady voice comes from across from him. Lawless must have shared some look of confusion because I hear her say, “You don’t want her awake for what I am going to do have to do. She is missing tissue. I’m going to have to pack this wound before I can stitch it. This is not going to be easy. It’s best if she just went under on her own. I don’t have anything here for pain.”

“Nothing?” It’s Chapel now that speaks somewhere from the void.

I can almost picture Paula shaking her head in the long pause of her answer. “Nothing for the amount of pain that I am about to cause her,” she says and it’s a rousing endorsement. I just can’t wait to get started.

“…but she is going to make it?” Marxx, my personal super-hero, is somewhere to my left. I wonder if comic book heroes ever grow annoyed with having to keep saving the same female counterpart over-and-over again? Do they ever just want to shout, “Jesus Christ, when will you learn, woman?”

“…skin is greying. Her heartbeat is irregular. She pretty much bled out in there and if you don’t let me get started, she may very well finish in here,” Paula says and I have lost some of the conversation with my mental debate. Am I going to make it?

There is a gentle kiss placed on my forehead. It stalls with the need to stay connected in some way. It’s the same kiss Lawless gave to me before he walked away and it is the same that he gives me now. “You like to prove people wrong. I think you do it just to piss people off. Do it now. Prove her wrong now,” Lawless whispers to the skin he left his mark on before I feel the heat of his body leave me. The missing warmth chills me in more ways than one.

“I know you’re still here. You’re a fighter to the end, but now, you have to give up. You need to let go, Helena. I’ll do my best to keep you alive, but right now, you need to let go.” Paula’s voice is already slipping away.

I try to fight to hold onto it as if it held mass but my mental fingers slide through it, falling like Alice into the hole. I am chasing white rabbits again and they have led me back into the darkness; right back into the same pitfall of irony.

“Helena? Helena, come play.” It’s Lilly’s voice. It precedes the same scent of innocence that has become her perfume like a haunting record.

I’m back on the grassy field, but this time it is J.D. who is sitting on the hill waiting for me. He is chewing on one of the blades of grass, unaware of the razor-like edge that has sliced his lips. He is oblivious to the blood that is flowing from the corner of his mouth, and when he smiles at me, it only flows faster. It drips down his chin onto the leather vest that I know waits for me in another world. A world I have left behind with my rabbit hole of hell.

“I thought you said you weren’t coming to see me today, Barbie?” He laughs with his joke and all I can do is cry. If Marxx saw through the gate of my secrets, J.D. will destroy the vault that holds them.

As I stand with the grass already breaching the flesh of my feet and legs with each wind that sways the blades like saws, I watch the children and I listen to the laughter. I have to wonder, do the ghosts of my past haunt
me or am I haunting them
? Do I cling to them for fear of forgetting them or do they cling to me with the fears that I will forget what I have done to them? When J.D. stands with his bleeding mouth to come to me, I know it doesn’t matter. We are all bound together now, through hell or paradise, we are together. The saints, the sinners and myself, like a collection of broken toys for the gods’ amusement in our purgatory.

CHAPTER
14

T
ime slips from me like sand in an hourglass or the hours wasted watching a predictable soap opera on television – whichever suits the situation better. Sometimes I can catch the fragments of conversations and I imagine what the words mean with comical glee. In the trapped darkness of my mind, I picture them dramatically acting out the things they are saying with forced emotions. Chapel and Paula have quite the romance, at least in my mind, anyway.

Sometimes there is just the shuffling silence of someone sitting next to me like a shadow that just hovers and watches the show. The shadows sometimes speak. They whisper encouragements to open my eyes or to give them something to let them know I can hear them. They tell me about what is going on and what moments I have missed. No one speaks of Aimes and I take notice of that. Does she lie beside me in her own dark well of dreams or has she escaped them to find security somewhere else far from any of us? Is she somewhere I seem to always be denied?

It’s Dolph’s shadow that is speaking to me now. He is telling me something that I know should be important, but my mind is already drifting back into the undertow of bliss. The harder I fight to stay in the long tunnel of his voice, the faster the current pulls at me.

“…know how much longer. They don’t even pretend…” I hear him and a wave of nothing crashes over me, drowning him out. “It won’t last much longer if…” Another wave before he starts again. “Lawless and Rhett won’t back down. They both…” Like the rocking of the sea, his voice ebbs and flows around me. “It’s going to shit, Helena. Simon said it was J.D. that held all of you together. Without him, they are just fighting with…”

I don’t need to hear anymore. If I could roll my eyes, I would. Let me guess, the boys are being naughty and you want me to bring them into line, again. End of the world, killing “zombies”, I’m one thread from a complete mental breakdown and I still have to muck through the miles of male ego. It’s just another day in paradise and me without my fruity drink with its matching umbrella.

I have lost time again. The last time I left Dolph was speaking to me like I was an effigy of a holy relic with the powers to save mankind. Now, there is shouting. Angry male voices reverberate though the room. Instantly the part of me that has a romance with my middle finger starts to dive back down again, but the humanity side of myself that has to look at the car wreck stays awake with curiosity.

Lawless is shouting about something someone has done. I can hear things being thrown around the room with metallic clamoring when the objects land. Chapel and Marxx are trying to talk him down from the steep cliff he has climbed in his rage.

“This is what they want. You are playing right into their hands with this temperamental bullshit of yours,” Marxx’ gravel voice demands Lawless’ attention. “You can’t keep taking the bait.”

“No, I’m just supposed to be spoon fed their shit?” The objects have landed, but Lawless hasn’t climbed from the cliff yet. It sounds more like he is ready to jump.

“You’re supposed to walk away.” Chapel weighs in from somewhere deeper in the room. He is letting Marxx do the subduing. I can’t really fault him.

“
He
would never back down to them.” Lawless stresses the word hinting at the one we all know he speaks.

“
He
isn’t here and you are not him.” Marxx doesn’t back down from the man Lawless viewed as a father. “Don’t become him. You won’t like that road.”

Stay dead J.D. Why can’t you just stay dead? I’m almost afraid he will answer me shrouded in the darkness of the chamber I mentally occupy.

“You saying I don’t have what it takes to be him?” Lawless asks.

“I’m saying you won’t like being him. You’re going to have to find your own way now, Brother. You don’t have to live in his shadow anymore,” Marxx says.

I put together the pieces of what is going on in the drawn out silence. I imagine Lawless standing there with his hands in the vest pocket rebuilding the layers of his brick walls while Marxx and Chapel watch motionless, afraid to break the fragile mortar that holds him together. I can feel the weight of Chapel’s eyes with how well trained they are to see into the corners of your soul that you either try to hide in or from him. I can feel them so well because it takes me a moment to realize that I am staring into them. My vision expands from the one pinpoint of his face to include the whole room. It’s like wiping away the film from a window before you stare through it. You just never expect anyone to be staring back at you when you press your face to the glass.

“Hells?” Chapel calls my name with more question than hello.

I blink, trying to keep him in focus and all the give-a-damn I can muster is, “What?” It’s very lackluster, but somehow feels perfect.

“It’s about time.” Marxx chuckles seeing my eyes swing to him. “Thought you had finally checked out on us.”

“If only you were so lucky.” I wince trying to sit up and reluctantly admit defeat from the pain. Chapel rushes with a mini-skip like movement to get to me when he sees my curiosity over the wound.

“You don’t want to do that,” Chapel tells me. Marxx and Lawless are avoiding my gaze. It’s bad. It’s very bad.

“She’s going to have to.” Lawless looks to me with pity and yet a moment of guilt crosses the shadows of his eyes.

“What? No more bikinis?” I try to smile, but their faces scare me. These are men that have done the things most of us only threaten to do in moments of anger. They did it because they found it fun. They were blood-soaked and sin-tainted before it became a necessity to be so. Now, whatever is hidden under my gauze-wrapped lower stomach is making them cringe.

“You really want to do this?” Chapel is asking me with a warning undertone. Lawless is right, I always have to push my luck; me and my white rabbits.

Chapel removes the tape and I hiss as the blood-stuck gauze is lifted away. They were right. I should have listened. My lower abs are a gaping, vertical arch of red meat. The many stitches that try to pull the jagged flesh together wander down my stomach in a drunken swagger of a pattern. I have seen better stitches in Frankenstein movies and I am feeling about as pretty as one of his brides.

“It kept getting infected. Paula had to keep removing more and more trying to find healthy tissue to save.” Chapel recovers the wound hearing my uneven sigh. “It looks good now.” His statement makes me wonder what it looked like before, but I think better of asking. See? I’m learning.

“Aimes?” I ask, happy to change the topic from my new accessory and myself.

“Good,” Chapel finally smiles and it spreads through the room like a candle’s glow.

“Giving us all grief like normal.” Lawless smirks and I know who has been her verbal punching bag. He comes to me with exhaustion weighing heavy on his shoulders. I guess I haven’t missed that much at all. “What am I going to do with you?” he asks me half-teasing, half-angry.

“Spank me. It’s the only way I’ll learn.” I tell him with hopes to pull the teasing further to the surface than his anger. When his eyes warm with half-masked thoughts, I know I have won.

“On that note,” Law’s voice is ripe with unanswered desires. We are suddenly alone in the room, or we might as well as be for the lack of attention we have to spare for anyone else. His fingertips caress my face, rememorizing the map of my features like a man drowning and desperate for pleasant memories. “I’m sorry,” he tells me as he stares at his fingers to avoid my eyes. “I should have been there.”

“You kept your promise.”

He chuckles with remorse. “I shouldn’t have to keep coming for you. I should already be there.”

Shrugging I tell him, “I’m not an easy one to keep safe.”

“That one we will agree on.”

“Where did he come from? Where did any of them come from?” I ask the question that has twirled in my mind with my forced slumber. “We cleaned out the place.”

“We never checked the second floor. We went right to the third. When they were bringing their dead down, it must have brought them down. We have found a few just roaming, but it’s clear now.”

I shift letting him sit beside me, but he isn’t happy with just that little space once the invitation has been given. Like a gentle lover, he stretches out the length of his body, pressing it against my side. He cradles my head with his arm tucked under me while the other travels up and down my body with soothing measures. This is the side of Lawless that only I am allowed to see. In private moments like this, he is mine and not the man he has to become for others.

“How long?” I ask him letting the waves of his fingers coast me out to a relaxing sea of safety.

“That you have been under?” He shrugs with his face. It’s a gentle frown before relaxing again. “Almost three weeks. Paula said if you didn’t wake up soon…” He stops, unable to continue and unable to look at my face. “You kept calling out for J.D. I never wanted him back more than I did then.”

I don’t have the heart to tell him that more than likely I was yelling for him to leave me alone in whatever state of purgatory he was walking with me. “I’m sorry,” I tell him and I feel like a coward.

He finally does shrug this time. “Don’t blame you. He was always the one we went to when we needed someone to pull us through. He always knew what to do.”

“It wasn’t always the right thing”
Is what my tongue wants to say. Instead, I say, “Yeah.” I’m earning that gold medal of chicken shit today. Silver isn’t as pretty, anyway. “Anything I should know about?” I bring the topic away from the man he sees as savior and I see as something between father and tormentor.

“Later,” he whispers against the sensitive skin of my neck, “let me just be right here, right now.”

Now who’s the chicken? “You know that is not going to happen, right?”

He sighs with a mixture of a laugh and exhales. “Yeah, I had hopes though.”

“Last time I left you alone…” I leave the accusation unsaid between us. I’m holding my breath just the same as if I had asked about Leslie out loud.

His sigh is long and wounded. I can feel his whole body deflate with it. “I told you. I’m all in. No more running, Helena. I’ll hold us both down if I have to, but no more running.”

“So is that a no or is the florist just out of white roses?” I ask, once again trying for humor to skirt having to face anything deeper. He bites my ear with gentle teeth and I have to laugh before pulling free. “Who were you yelling about?”

“Rhett has made some new friends.” Lawless settles deeper into the groove beside me, refusing to talk about it anymore. It doesn’t take long before his breathing is a steady, calm pattern of slumber. It is the only thing that is calm.

I remember the look on Rhett’s face when Selma had said that one word. That one word that we each hold dreams of with golden-lined aspirations. Did Rhett fall into his own rabbit hole or has he simply stepped to the side of Simon? Did the look of rooted angst the day when Lawless stepped up to lead bear poisonous fruit? How do you lure the beast back into a cage once it has tasted freedom? How far has Rhett taken his Independence Day and how many bonfires has it cost us? All of this rampages my mind with a new fear greater than the last with each new question that forms.

I want to be brave enough to wake the sleeping man at my side and ask it all, but I know that soon I will be facing them. Soon I will be out there, neck deep in whatever has befallen while I was held in the confinement of my dark, unconscious delirium. It waits for me like a noose, and if I am to hang, let me steal what bliss that I can, while I can. Let me just be right here, right now.