Chapter 31
Head Hopping
Adam
Ifroze, terrified, huddling in a small doorway. The man who just murdered two children put the revolver to his own head and pulled the trigger, sending blood and fragments of bone against the adjacent wall.
More blood than I’d ever seen soaked the old carpet of the single-wide trailer I’d somehow ended up inside.
I wanted to throw up and look away, but the blond child was still alive, twitching and taking rapid, shallow breaths.
I dashed to his side, though I was afraid to touch something so fragile.
There was no way someone could survive something like that, right?
Sirens called from down the road, and the front door exploded inward as men in uniform stormed the place, their guns raised.
They crept through the small, cramped space toward the room I was in. I threw up my hands. However, they didn’t seem to notice me. Two officers stepped inside the room and examined the scene, one covering his mouth as if about to vomit.
“Multiple homicide victims,” he said into the radio, barely keeping his composure. He knelt next to the man still clutching the gun. “Possible murder-suicide but keep an eye out for anyone else in the vicinity.”
The blond boy moved again, and both officers knelt beside him, one of them checking for a pulse. He held the radio to his mouth again.
“Dispatch, we need an eleven forty-one.”
The room disappeared, and I was left sick and confused by what I’d just witnessed, not sure whether to burst into tears or run.
This wasn’t some kind of bad trip or nightmare.
This felt real. I even smelled the blood, the gunpowder, and the stale cigarette smoke.
All I could do was go along with whatever this was.
An invisible force dragged me through the darkness until I was in a cold fluorescent-lit room full of medical equipment.
The child I’d seen earlier lay unconscious in a hospital bed, kept alive by countless tubes and machines.
The ventilator whooshed in time with the steady beep of his weak vital signs.
Keeping my distance, I looked around the room for a nurse or family member, but there was no one. The kid was in a coma all alone. The hands of the clock on the wall quickened as the light outside disappeared. Two nurses entered, both trying not to look at the boy too much.
“Thanks for helping,” the younger brunette nurse said, clearing her throat.
She looked to be in her mid-thirties; the other one was much older.
“I keep thinking about my kids. Every time I leave this place, I go home and tell them how much I love them.” She laughed and wiped her nose with a tissue. “They’re getting really sick of it.”
“Why don’t you check room 102 and see if Mrs. Allen needs anything.”
The younger woman nodded and quickly left, not looking back. The older nurse stoically changed the empty bag of saline for another before holding onto the child’s hand.
“You may not have any family, but we love you little Austin—”
It felt like a huge needle was being jabbed into my chest as I stepped closer to the child. This couldn’t have been my Austin. He was so small.
“You’re not alone, so come back to us.” The woman kissed his forehead and slowly walked out of the room, letting the door come to a soft rest against the frame.
“Austin?” I whispered, my face close to his. I could deny all I wanted, but I began to understand what I was experiencing. I was being punished in the worst way.
With a trembling, padded hand, I slipped it over his tiny one as I sat on the chair next to the bed. He was so cold, and if it weren’t for the machine saying otherwise, I would have thought he died hours ago. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried,” Austin’s adult voice whispered in my head.
Tears soaked my face as I leaned further into him. “You were just a little kid. This shouldn’t happen to little kids.”
His eyes snapped open, startling me enough that I jumped out of the chair.
He stayed still, but the intensity and terror on his face drilled into me as the room and everything in it faded away.
The hands on the clock spun so rapidly they lost form, time speeding along. People popped in and out of existence.
Finally, the clock slowed to normal, and I was in another room. The once little boy was a few years older now, his eyes open but not a lot behind them as he lay at an incline, a bit of dried crust along the corners of his cracked lips.
“How’s our patient today?” a middle-aged male doctor asked, looking through the charts.
“I feel sorry for you. It’s been three years, you’re still in PVS, and we’re legally obligated to keep you alive.
” The doctor’s tone was ice as he checked Austin’s vitals.
The child was unresponsive. “Not even the worst people in the world should have to live like this, let alone a child.”
The doctor left the room, and I sat next to Austin, holding his slightly warmer hand again. Though he seemed awake, he wasn’t there, letting out quiet moans every so often. This was agony.
“I’m so sorry, Austin.”
The child moaned again but continued to stare at the wall.
“Is this really what happened to you, or is this my guilt eating me alive?”
He turned until his eyes locked with mine, and all consciousness seemed to flood into him as he opened his mouth to speak.
Roscoe
This was weird. Don’t remember gettin’ high before going to bed, but as I sat in a pew surrounded by crazy motherfuckers screamin’ nonsense, I started having my doubts.
Only the strongest shit would’ve made me comfortable being there.
Still, no one seemed to notice a huge werewolf stinkin’ up the place. Then they brought out the snakes…
Why the hell did they have snakes in a church? Wasn’t that like inviting Satan or somethin’?
“‘Scuse me,” I said, clearing my throat as I scooted between the pew down a burgundy carpet. Still no one paid me mind as they hooted and hollered, jumping around while shaking cabasas and banging bead drums. Last time I’d seen something this insane, Darryl and I’d overdid it on the peyote tea in Sedona.
That was sure a one-and-done experience, especially when we threw up all over each other.
As I neared the doors, a little boy near the altar, probably not more than seven, caught my gaze.
He had thick, dark brown hair, neatly combed back while wearin’ his Sunday best. Just a plain white dress shirt with what looked like an oil stain, and a red tie with black slacks and those shiny dress shoes that always sounded squeaky when people would walk in ‘em.
He was scared and crying, and I immediately noticed the bruises over his eyes and on his arms.
“The Holy Spirit keeps me safe, so too can it cast out demons of disobedience.”
The kid was shakin’ like a leaf, but he didn’t say nothin’ as the man approached him.
“In the name of the holy spirit, I cast you out.” The back of his hand slammed into the kid’s face, and he fell to the floor without a sound.
“Hey!” I shouted, runnin’ to the stage. I didn’t often get violent, but if I saw a grown man lay his hands on a child, all bets were off.
My fist went through him like he was made of air.
So I was high. Never had a hallucination so real before.
The kid groaned and rubbed his head, and I knelt next to him to pick him up. For some reason, I could touch him. “You okay, kid?”
He shuffled away and wiped the tears from his eyes before looking up at me. “Roscoe?”
With a gasp, I let him go, and the whole room went dark and quiet. The way he said my name gave me chills. It was higher pitched, and he was holding back tears, but that was definitely Cody’s voice.
“No way,” I whispered as another hallucination appeared. I tried pinching myself, and it hurt, but it didn’t do nothin’ to snap me out of this.
Before I could blink, the church disappeared and a run-down mobile home just poofed into existence with me on the front lawn.
There was trash everywhere, and the grass was overgrown.
A rusted old Thunderbird sat under a big oak tree, its tires flat and windows broken, weeds and vines growin’ out of it.
I’d seen neighborhoods like this before, and the kids that grew up in ’em never had good childhood stories.
A man and woman were yellin’ at each other inside the old, run-down home, glass shattering. Bein’ the nosy SOB I was, I couldn’t resist a good domestic disturbance. I’d lived on the streets near a few trailer parks, and it was always entertaining for days—when there weren’t no children involved.
When I opened the door, the smell of meth, weed, and alcohol hit me, really taking me back.
The man looked like an older version of Cody, except he was sickly thin with messy long brown hair and a few missin’ front teeth and the rest of the teeth startin’ to rot.
The woman had fairer skin and blond hair with bags under her sunken-in eyes.
These were hallmark junkies, and just by lookin’ at the yellow tinge in the man’s sclera, he wasn’t long for this world.
As the fighting grew violent, my attention fell to a little boy peeking out from his cracked bedroom door. There weren’t no tears in his eyes, just wide-eyed fear. This was the childhood Cody never wanted to talk about, and all I wanted to do was block out the noise for him.
Just walking through the house was kinda hard.
It was like wanderin’ a landfill of old pizza boxes, trash bags, ripped up papers, makeshift pipes made from coke bottles.
And then there were the needles. A crooked, single-tiered birthday cake sat on a wobbling dining room table with nine candles shoved in it that had been freshly blown out.
It was the poor kid’s birthday, and I’m sure I knew what he wished for.