Part 4, Chapter 5

Eleven days between updates is a bit much, and for that I can only apologise, but lo and behold, here is the very final instalment of A Pittsburgh Storm.

If you've enjoyed reading the novel, then please go ahead and buy a copy from Lulu or Smashwords (the links are on the right) and support artists who do kind and noble things like give away their hard work away for free. If you want to give more or less than $1.25, or you want to cut out the middle man, then please feel free to use the donate button, which will direct you to PayPal. If you do any of these three things, you'll be visited by the holy angels of charity in the night, and who knows what they'll do in return!

But really, it's been a nice experience posting my work up here. I've received a lot of nice feedback and many thousands of visitors. Now that the whole work is finally posted, this site isn't going anywhere. It will still house A Pittsburgh Storm, and will be used to provide news on any news, updates, or writings of mine.

Now that the writing's complete, please feel free to send me any comments you may have. It's kind words and thoughtful comments that keep me going (because lord knows there's no money involved). And be sure to tell your friends -- particularly if your friend's a publisher, agent, or magazine editor!

Enjoy the final chapter.

Dave.

-------

5

I wake up. My vision is blurred and my breathing labored. I’m sat upright, resting against something. Martin crouches next to me, looking into my eyes, but falling in and out of focus. Behind him, I can see the loathsome tower of burnt furniture. Martin pulls his face back from mine and says something, but the sound is muffled. I can see the sweat on his face and the worry in his eyes. Then I see a body in the distance behind him: the second life I’ve taken. My jeans are red with blood, my own blood, clotting and sticking to my calf. The pain is terrible – I’ve never been shot before. Whenever I move the muscles in my leg, I stretch and tug at the wound with excruciating pain. I can see the trail carved in the ash where Martin has dragged me from the base of the tower, over to the sidewalk, to prop me against a fire hydrant.

The boy’s crying. “Are you ok?” he asks.

I can’t reply with words, but cough an acknowledgement. This satisfies him and a smile of relief crosses his face.

I stay on the ground for a long time, while Martin, crouching next to me, wipes my face and looks into my eyes, full of concern. We’re both exhausted.

It takes a while, but eventually the world returns to me, tactile and close. I can feel, again, the cold air on my face, and, when I put my hands by my sides, the soot that covers the ground, thick and slippery.

Somehow, I get to my feet, slipping on the ash, with one hand on the hydrant and the other on Martin’s shoulder, and I try to keep the weight off my injured leg. The wound doesn’t feel as bad as I expected it to. Maybe the shot just grazed me.

With Martin’s help, I stagger over to the stranger’s body, which still lays face down in the ash. Imprints of his final footsteps recede behind him and turn into Third Avenue. The man's dead face is turned to his left and blood pools beneath him, dripping from his mouth. This mixes with the ash and soot on the ground, turning it into a dark red paste. I nudge the body over with my left foot, half-afraid that the man could get up again and resume his assault. The moment I see his face I know this fear will never transpire because the right corner of his forehead is missing. His right eye has popped out, but I don’t know where it is. It may still be in there, but is now indistinguishable from the mess of pulp. The sight doesn’t disgust me. The sight is too alien to have any effect like disgust. I expect to hear crying from Martin, but he stands by my side, watching the body, as emotionless as myself.

I look to what was once our truck. Yellow flames lick the interior, reaching out of fire-cracked windows to flicker up at the sky.

I’m over stimulated, overworked, and tired. The situation takes on a surreal quality, distorted by waves of fatigue, and then further by waves of adrenaline that the pain pushes through my system. My hands are shaking. Does this mean I’m going into shock? And is there anything I can do about it?

“Let’s take a walk,” I tell Martin, meaning for it to come out as a question, but failing with the intonation and instead issuing a command. He doesn’t respond, so I start moving in a half-hop, south towards the Monongahela River. My butt aches from sitting down and my leg is in obvious agony.

My mind’s a blur and I feel lost. Of course, I know where I am, but I don’t know where I’m going. These days, I rarely know where I’m going.

Martin doesn’t ask any questions. He simply follows.

I keep my eyes on the streets ahead. I can hear the boy kicking a can behind me.

After a few minutes of painful stumbling, I find myself on the Penn Lincoln Parkway. I veer left and stumble eastwards, with the setting sun on my back. My left leg aches from supporting all of my weight and I doubt I can continue walking much further, but my body won’t allow me to stop. Not like this. Not here. Not now that I’ve come so far. Both Martin and I are silent; he knows as much as I do. He knows that we are walking, in a vague manner, towards Oakland, where I’m familiar with the streets and houses and still possess a key to my old apartment and the promise of shelter. Before I can reach these districts, I see the Smithfield Street Bridge, stretching out towards Station Square across a thousand feet of calm dark water. As we approach the bridge, the ashes blanketing downtown thin out. The bridge has been reasonably unaffected by the fire and on a whim I decide I would like to walk out along the pedestrian walkway, to take a seat and watch the river flow.

Martin draws up level beside me. Despite everything that has happened, he seems cheered by the view along the river, which looks out towards the low buildings of the Southside. Behind us, there is the impressive burnt out skyline of Downtown.

After crossing a third of the bridge’s length, Martin and I sit down and take a break. We lean our backs against one of the steel trusses and inhale the refreshing soot-free breeze moving up the river to join the Ohio, maybe a mile behind us.

Everything Martin and I owned was in the truck when it was set on fire. Now we have nothing but the clothes we wear, a machinegun a few blocks to our left, and whatever miscellany is left in my apartment. Moments pass and I search through my pockets for the photograph of Karen Spellman, in a bikini, with her pert breasts, tanned thighs, and firm midriff. I finger the photo in my left hand, and Martin looks over my shoulder in admiration of the girl. The sun shines bright in the picture, down on her browning skin, and a red bikini, skimpy, sexy, and unforgettable. She’s smiling her big smile, with straight white teeth, flirting with the photographer.

“Is that your girlfriend?” Martin asks.

“No,” I laugh.

“Then who is she?”

“Karen Spellman is her name but I’ve never met her. I found the photo and someone else told me about her.”

“Well…” I know the boy wants to say how attractive she is, but he’s only twelve, and most twelve-year-old boys don’t say things like that, since they’ve only begun to realize that girls can be so staggeringly beautiful.

We both know what each other is thinking and we acknowledge the pain we share. Karen Spellman stands in the photo, on a sandy Florida beach, oblivious of what’s to come. Her beauty emphasizes her loss and our loss and everyone’s loss. I’ll never see another woman. Somewhere, I know, is the body of Emily Jacobs, probably unburied. Somewhere else is the body of my mother, but I couldn’t guess where. Somewhere else, you could find the body of my father, perhaps, and my brothers, and my sister.

It occurs to me how much I’ve changed, after only two or three weeks of mind-fucking fuckups. After surprise transvestites, and dogs in grocery stores, and multiple killings, and the biggest funeral pyre in history at the funeral to end history, and smashing windows, and falling snow, and having gun’s pointed at me, and pointing guns at others, and finding a boy living alone in a once diner, now fort, and driving all day, and card games in the rain, and dirty jokes, and realizing that I’m in the last one percent of one percent left, with nothing else to do. And then, realizing that all I need to do in this new life is to look after one boy, and then doing just that, against all the odds.

“Where are we going?”

“I still have to keys to my apartment. It’s only about, well, thirty or forty minutes away.”

“We have all day. Is it nice there?”

“Yeah, you can see the museum from the window, and it’s comfy enough.”

“And there’s food?”

“Yeah, and clothes. And come summer, maybe we can go to the park – it’s not far – and plant some tomatoes, some peppers, zucchini, potatoes, carrots, corn. How’s that sound?”

“Sound’s good. Shall we go?”

“Sure. Let’s get moving.”

Martin gets up first, eager to resume the walk along the river’s edge. As ever, his energy impresses me. After a moment, he turns to me. I’m still on the ground, twenty years older than my age. He too suddenly looks somewhere in that age bracket. He holds out his hand and helps me up from the asphalt.