The Unlucky Man

H T G Hedges

Copyright © 2015 H T G Hedges

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In about three minutes time I’ll be dead. I’ve accepted the truth of the matter, somewhere between the shock and pain of the bullet making its explosive entry into my chest and the long, slow fall to the cold concrete, it became a fact in my mind that I’ve swallowed with fatalist equanimity. There’s no use in fighting it.

As I lie here, crimson blood spilling over the grimy white ground, all I can think is how inevitable this all seems. My whole life doesn’t so much flash before my eyes as my mind starts spinning cartwheels; jumping from event to event in a doomed attempt to try and make sense of what my body is feeling.

It circles in on something: a memory. I was stabbed once in a botched mugging and a moment of stupid, regrettable bravado. I remember the burning feeling as I lay on the ground, body cold with shock, hole in my shoulder burning and bloody. That was bad but this, my mind keeps telling me, this is so much worse.

So, as my body goes slowly numb and my ice-water blood circulates and pumps out, spreading away from the burning centre of the entry wound, the wreck of my chest, all I can think about is how I got to here. Central Station on a cold autumn morning, the wind howling around an unseen world outside whilst I lie in the detritus of a thousand people’s morning commute.

Just a bang, a flash, and then red, consuming pain and I’m thrashing and gasping on the cold ground, foaming up my life blood, stained vermillion. Dying this time, actually dying. And I’m really not sure why.

My mind’s going now, I can’t concentrate right, but I see through screwed-up tear filled eyes someone coming up the escalator. He’s a small guy, messy looking and dishevelled. He looks at me, through the panic and the chaos. He sees me and I know who he is – he’s the reason I was here. He doesn’t panic, though his face is painted milk white with shock and his eyes are wide and dumb with fear, he just melts back into the rush. I don’t blame him. I think he’s got a much better idea what’s going on here than I ever did, even as I fish belly on the dirty stones.

A shadow falls across me. A new figure, tall, in sunglasses is standing there. He kneels down. He speaks.

"What do you see?" he purrs and I hear it like through thick fog. His voice is gravel wrapped in velvet. Then he takes off the glasses and his eyes are impossible, like two concentric dark circles floating on a pale sea. They’re the cartoon outline of real eyes, drawn without the addition of retina or pupil colour.

He takes something out of the pocket of my jacket and puts it between my teeth, forcing my jaws together. The acid chemical taste burns as it hits the back of my throat like an electric shock. My eyes lose what focus they had, the world spins away on a new axis… I'm no longer in the drafty grey station. I’m somewhere else entirely - somewhere far away. Too far away to ever come back from.

"What do you see?" It’s that voice again, twisting into this new reality, bubbling and howling into my mind. And in my mind’s eye I do see. I see the sky explode then crumble into a hundred, a thousand, a thousand thousand black crows that soar and plummet into a boiling blood red nothing.

"The sky is falling…" I manage to say, each word a gasp, a splutter, an effort. I don’t see it, but the guy with the eyes nods.

"And you’re already dead," he whispers.

He puts a gun to my chest and pulls the trigger.

The sky through the windshield was a cold autumn grey, heavy with the promise of rain. I stared unthinking up at it as Alexander Corgen - Corg to his friends - drummed an irritable staccato rhythm on the steering wheel and glared grim icy blades at the stationary cars ahead of us, occasionally blessing those behind with the benefit of his scowl probably just for variation. We’d been stuck in traffic for over an hour, our hearse just one more growling, immobile machine.

We were on the way back from the yard and stuck behind some crash or other on a corner of run-down brown stone housing towers, all dirty rust coloured bricks and equally brown actually rusted metal stairs. The wait didn’t really bother me all that much - we’d finished for the day as it was and were on the way back from the crem garage and another job well done, although I was starting to sweat a little in the uniform black suit. As for Corg, I think every wasted minute in this traffic jam was a wasted minute he could have been spending with a drink in his hand.

Somewhere, someone sounded their horn in one long frustrated blast that put me in mind of migrating winter geese.

"Oh right," Corg muttered darkly, "Because that’s going to speed everything along right? Fucking idiot." Corg was one or the biggest guys I’d ever met, muscular and fat at the same time, a completely bald giant of a man squeezed into a dusty-shiny black suit and tie. He was also a part time criminal, a man of unpredictable humors and my closest friend. Sometimes, I knew, he ran guns and discount booze around the city for people he mysteriously referred to as "his associates", storing the merchandise between times in his treasure trove of a warehouse and making smuggle runs in the dead of night. Glancing at him now I knew that this current anger was more a way to pass the time than something borne of any real vitriolic feeling.

Idly he opened the glove box and rummaged around in it, a sure sign of boredom as Corg knew every inch of this car better than I knew my own apartment. He practically owned the hearse, treated it like his own, and refused to let anyone else at the parlour drive it. A vague smile came to me as I remembered how sour he had been when our boss - one Edwin Danvers - had auctioned off the old car and replaced it with a newer - near identical - model.

We were a small firm, working out of a quirky, slightly gothic stone fronted building wedged between an old-school barbers complete with red and white pole and a second hand book store. Danvers always said that the original crumbling façade was good for business, that tradition was comforting in our line of work, whilst the new hearse was his concession towards modernizing. He was always split like that when it came to business, the old rubbing shoulders with the new as uneasy bedfellows. Still, Corg had quickly bonded with the replacement and found a place for it in his affections.

Up ahead a siren sounded briefly and the car ahead inched forward then stopped again. We waited in suspense for a moment, staring at the break lights until they went out, but it seemed that was it for now.

"Fuck sake," Corg pronounced solemnly. "Seriously, Jon, can you believe this shower?" I started slightly and realised I’d been daydreaming, halfway to dropping off.

"Shower?" I asked as innocently as possible whilst stifling a yawn. He didn’t buy it for a second but jerked his huge head in my direction then in the direction of the motionless traffic.

“The world Jon," he said seriously. "The God damned world."

I sighed, realising that he was going to rant to kill time whether I liked it or not and that I might as well play ball.

"The world, eh?" I said. "Any reason in particular? You know, today?"

He broke his death-gaze concentration on the car ahead long enough to throw me a faux-horrified look of confusion. "Are you not seeing what I’m seeing?" he demanded, aghast, gesturing furiously at the stationary traffic. "It’s a simple matter of respect Jon, you know?"

"Respect?"

"Right. Respect. Don’t make me spell it for you. Like the song? I mean, we could have a body in here yeah? These bastards could be holding up some poor soul’s last rites, their final passage, their end-of-fucking-days! No respect, you get me?" Corg sure loved to right the wrongs of the world.

I glanced back at the empty space behind our seats. "Corg man, hate to break it to you but we don’t got a body in here." In actual fact we’d spent the last half hour previous to getting stuck in this unmoving line of traffic getting coffee and it was Corg, who viewed it as more or less his company car, who had insisted we stop off on the way back with the hearse. He was about to protest but I overruled him, "And I know you said
might
, but if we did we could have a trail of mourners a mile long behind us, and how much worse would this jam be then?" I leaned back in my seat whilst Corg brooded.

Silence. I stared at the sky some, feeling suddenly oppressed by the deepening heavy grey clouds. They felt expectant somehow, something gathering, in the long moment before the storm. For a second I felt there was something very wrong happening in the world, something very wrong about those brewing purple bruises against the morning sky.

I need some sleep, I told myself, and briefly tried to estimate how many hours I’d gotten in the last few weeks: not enough that was for sure - every time my head hit the pillow it felt like there was a pressure building behind my eyes. Maybe the storm would sort it all out…

"Jon, you listening to me?" I caught as I zoned back in.

"Not really," I said, then shook my head a little sheepishly, "Sorry man, miles away." Corg grunted but I caught the flick of his eyes at me in the mirror, something akin to concern perhaps, but just for the briefest second.

"Well, as I was saying," he continued after a beat, "What if we were on our way to get one?" he said with a triumphant glint in his eye.

"One what?"

"Jon G Hesker!" he thundered at me, using my full name like a parent might, an immediate censure. "A fucking body!"

Oh, I thought, guess I didn’t quite shoot this one down after all. "Then we’d be late," I said, "But we wouldn’t be the only ones." I grinned as I said it, but I could tell it wasn’t very convincing. The air seemed to have grown thick, heavier than it ought to be. I looked up at the clouds once more, hoping that they would break soon. If anything they looked darker, more ominous than before.

I opened my mouth to say something about it to Corg, maybe ask if he was feeling it too, but was stopped short by a sudden noise from outside. For a second I thought it was a welcome peel of thunder, but quickly realised it was too brief – a short, loud exclamation, like a car backfiring.

Or a gunshot.

"The hell was that?" Corg muttered. I didn’t answer, craning forward to look out the windshield as the first big heavy drops of rain fell and splashed across it.

We sat in silence for a moment, both, I think, listening though Corg could simply have been watching the fat drops spattering against the glass for all I know. At length I relaxed, leaned back.

"Nothing I guess -" but there was no mistaking the second report, a definite bang this time - too loud and too close, from above and to the left.

And then a body smashed from nowhere onto the hood of our car.

I saw it as if in slow motion. Saw the bonnet buckle as he hit it shoulder first, body bending at an unnatural angle, the crush of metal, the wet meat thump like the butcher's slab, the spurt of blood across the windshield that mixed with the raindrops to run pinkish rivulets down to the wipers.

"Fuck!" Corg roared, but I already had the door open and was halfway out of my seat. The pain in my head spiked with the movement, causing me to stumble along the edge of the car. For a moment I felt the pressure would force me to my knees, but then, like rising out of water, it passed and I straightened over the messed-up corpse on the hood. And realised it wasn’t a corpse after all.

"Christ," I heard Corg breathe, a sharp involuntary intake of breath. The guy on the black metal was still breathing, just about - shallow, wet, drowning breaths - though a hole in his chest was pumping frothy blood at a rate that spoke, beyond doubt, that it was too late to be of any help.

Suddenly his eyes snapped open. He was a young man - early twenties by my guess - but his eyes in that moment held an age that was impossible to guess at. He tried to speak but all that bubbled up was more gurgling spit and plasma.

He reached desperately out for me and, acting on automatic, I reached back and took his outstretched hand. To my surprise I felt him press something into it, his last gift to anyone on earth. As my fingers closed around this mysterious offering, his hand fell away and I saw that he was dead, his body steaming in the rain.

All this happened in less than a few seconds, the time it took me to blink a half dozen times, a handful of ragged, chest hammering heart beats. My mind was a mess of jangling, unchecked, panicking thoughts but one pushed past all the others crowding my brain and screamed for attention: where did this guy fall from?

My body stumbled across the answer before my brain caught up and I spun to stare up at the nearest fire escape.

A figure stood at its top, a jagged shape against the rain that was now falling free and heavy. It obscured his features, made him nothing more than a chilling impression, an insidious blemish against the sullen sky. But even from here, as he reached up and acknowledged my attention with a small and mocking half salute that left my innards chilled, I could tell there was something wrong with his eyes. Indistinct as they were, they were still far too bright, twin pools of mercury that locked onto my own gaze and sent a tremor down my spine that was nothing to do with the icy rain.

We stood like that for the briefest moment that seemed to last forever, my heartbeat loud in my ears, and then he slunk back into the shadows as sirens cut the air and when next I blinked, he was vanished from the world.

I turned back around, unconsciously slipping the contents of my hand - the legacy of a dead stranger - into the inner pocket of my suit jacket, and met Corg’s eye.

"I need a drink," he murmured, staring away from the mess on the car.

Nodding my agreement, my attention shifted back to the clouds for a moment. The world, I knew, had somehow just taken a lurch off kilter and fucked us over. I wasn’t sure how, but I was certain of the truth of this fact. This felt like the beginning of something, the end of something else. I could taste it on the air.

Now that it had started, the rain continued to fall and didn’t show any sign of stopping soon, the drops falling from an unyielding, brooding sky.

I turned back to the grisly hood ornament. "Well," I said, light headed with adrenaline, unable to suppress a shaky grin, "Guess we can get out of traffic now."

"How’s that?" Corg grunted.

I dipped my head, gestured with my forehead, feeling awful for saying it, "Looks like we got ourselves a body."

We didn’t have to wait for long for the cops to arrive, but even so we were soaked to the skin by the time they did. Cars discarded in the press of motor vehicles, the first uniforms arrived on foot pushing their way through a growing crowd of the curious and the ghoulish, with Corg and I stranded at its centre.

As they set about securing the scene an officer took our names and statements and then we were hustled through the press to a waiting squad car and then largely forgotten about. Through the rain streaked window I could see the uniforms dispersing the crowds, taking statements here and there. A hassled looking guy in a long beige coat hurried past, collar turned up against the deluge. Detective for sure.

"Corg?" I said at last.

"What?" he answered, a malevolent gaze leveled belligerently at the window.

"Does this seem like usual procedure to you?"

He grunted. "Who knows, man? Whole cities going crazy so I hear: gangs over the bridge, not enough cops." He grinned, "Total fucking break-down of law and order is what I read in the papers."

I knew Corg had been in trouble with the law before, on and off all throughout his life in fact, and that he didn’t hold much love for the police. For my own part, I’d only had pretty limited dealings so I guess I held no malice against them. I just hoped Corg kept his cool - I didn’t really know where we stood right now, but I did know there was a fast cooling body topping our car.

With something like a guilty start I realised my right hand was streaked with a dead man’s blood. As I tried unsuccessfully to wipe it away on my sodden trousers, another thought occurred to me.

“Corg," I said once more, tentatively, "You don’t have anything in the car right?"

He gave me a look that clearly asked what I took him for which dissolved into a quick smile.

"Never in the company car my man," he said.

"Good."

"Probably," he added. I chose to take that as a joke.

Eventually the raincoat got into the front seat of the car and introduced himself as Detective Andrew Cotter. "Andy," he added afterwards with a small tired smile. He looked washed out, like all the luster was gone out of him - too long on the job, nicotine teeth and fingers, deep set crow’s feet running erratic spider-webs around his eyes, hair more grey salt than its original black pepper and in need of a cut and a comb. I’d have put money that he only had a week left until retirement. He had one of those moustaches that only law enforcement types can pull off but the effect was lessened by at least two days worth of dark stubble crowding his cheeks and chin.