No Man's Land

5

IT WAS PAUL Rogers’s third day of freedom. And no grass had grown under his feet. He had already put a thousand miles between him and the prison.

He had looked for and found news of the double homicide back in the alley. The paper said the police were leaning toward it being a fatal fight between a young couple. There had obviously been a falling-out, because they had been seen earlier on a bus together kissing.

Yep, thought Rogers, there had been a really big falling-out.

On the second day of freedom he had stolen a beat-to-shit Chevy from an automotive repair place, swapping out plates he had taken from an impoundment lot. He’d driven six hundred miles that day, followed by over three hundred so far today.

He had spent a chunk of his cash on gas and about the same on food. He had slept in the car, finding a place to park and bed down for the night. He had purchased shoes that fit and an extra pair of pants, a shirt, a new jacket, underwear, socks, and a baseball cap. He’d also purchased some bandages and other medical supplies for his arm. And he’d bought a pair of off-the-rack reading glasses even though his eyesight was perfect and nearly catlike in his ability to see in the dark.

He’d also bought some hair clippers and a razor. The beard was now gone and so was all his hair. He’d even taken off the peach fuzz on his scalp and his eyebrows.

When he looked at himself in the mirror Rogers could barely recognize the image. He hoped the effect on others, in particular law enforcement, would be even more pronounced.

The scar on the back left side of his head was now visible. It was easier to feel now every time he rubbed it.

He had a couple hundred dollars left and still quite a ways to go. He stopped for supper at a diner and ate at the counter, keeping all the goings-on behind him in full view by virtue of the large mirror hanging on the wall in front of him.

Two police officers came in and sat at a booth not that far from him. He tugged down his cap and focused on his meal and the newspaper in front of him.

The world had changed some in ten years. But in many ways it hadn’t changed at all.

Countries were at war.

Terrorists were slaughtering innocent people.

American politics was at a standstill.

The rich were richer, the poor poorer.

The middle class was rapidly fading away.

Everyone seemed angry and vocal and generally pissed off at everything and everybody.

Beginning of the end, surmised Rogers, who did not care a whit that the country and apparently the rest of the world were in sharp decline. He just needed to get to where he was headed. He needed to figure some things out along the way, but once he got there his plan was pretty well set.

His only problem was it had been so long. Not just ten years. That was manageable. But in total it had been three decades. People moved. People died. Companies folded. Time marched on, things changed, conditions on the ground could be totally different. But he also told himself he would not, could not waver. There was no reason on earth that he could not accomplish what he had told himself for the last ten years he was going to do.

No reason at all.

He finished his meal, laid down his cash, and walked past the cops without looking at them. He closed the door behind him and reached his car. He drove off, the night beginning to fill in all around him.

His wounded arm was healing nicely. There had been minimal infection. His new jacket covered the bandage.

He drove east.

He did not need much sleep. He only stopped and rested now because he wanted to get into the habit of doing so, like other people did. Rogers did not want to stick out. He did not want to do anything that would make others notice him. And he could do lots of things to make other people notice. But if people with badges and guns took note, he was screwed. And he did not intend to be screwed.

Not ever again.

His hand reached up and rubbed the spot. He could still remember when it was done. Over thirty years ago. Lots of things had been done to him at that time.

What he couldn’t stand were the thoughts that he had, and also the thoughts that he no longer had. Like back in the alley when the woman had been pleading for her life, Rogers had remembered something. It was just a fragment of a fragment and he couldn’t delve into it too deeply, because there was a mental wall preventing him from doing so. He could scale many walls, yet not that one. But there was something there. Something he would have done differently if he was still who he had once been.

But he no longer was that man. Not even close. And the fragment would never be more than that. They hadn’t told him that part, of course. Why would they? He apparently had no reason to know in a strict “need to know” world.

He removed his hand and with it any hope that things one day could be different for him.

He slept in his car on a side street of a town he was passing through.

Two days later he was eight hundred miles closer to his destination. By now a bench warrant had certainly been issued for his arrest for his failure to show up for his parole meeting. Perhaps they had found the tossed materials in the trash can by the bus stop. That evidenced his clear intent to never, ever perform any of the duties imposed on him in return for his having been released from prison ahead of time.

He actually felt that ten years of his life locked up in a cage was payment enough.

He was down to fifty dollars.

The next morning he stopped at a construction site and offered his services for a hundred dollars for ten solid hours of labor.

His task was to haul bags of cement from a truck to a construction elevator stuck back in a corner where the big trucks couldn’t reach. There were three other men assigned to this job as well. They were all in their twenties. Rogers carried more fifty-pound bags than the three of them combined. He never spoke, never looked at the other men. He just hefted bags, hauled them a hundred feet to the elevator, dumped them, and walked back for more. Ten hours with a twenty-minute break for a food truck sandwich and a cup of coffee.

“Thanks for making us look good, Gramps,” said one of them sarcastically when the day’s work was done.

Rogers had turned to look at him. He eyed the man’s neck where his jugular wobbled underneath the fat. Rogers could have crushed the vein between his fingers and watched the man bleed out in less than a minute. But what would have been the point?

“You’re welcome,” he said.

When the young punk snorted at him, Rogers fixed his gaze on him. He wasn’t looking at him so much as through him to a destination on the other side of his skull.

The punk blinked, his sneer vanished, he glanced at his companions, and then they all turned and hustled off.

It was then that Rogers did something he almost never did.

He smiled. And it wasn’t because he had intimidated the punk. He had intimidated many men. And he had never smiled any of those times.

He walked back to his car, climbed in, tucked his money away, and looked at the map he’d bought.

The Virginia border was still two hundred miles from here. And the place within Virginia he was heading to would tack on about another three hundred or so miles.

He should be tired, exhausted really, but he wasn’t. He should be a lot of things. But he wasn’t.

Now he was only what he was.

He drove to a diner, parked at the curb, and went inside. He ordered food, drank his coffee and two glasses of water, and let his mind wander back to the point where it had all started.

He made a fist and looked down at it. The skin on top was real but not his. The bone underneath was real and his. The other things, the add-ons, he had come to call them, were not real and were definitely not his. But he could not remove them. So, he supposed, they were real and they were his.

Or rather I am him. Paul Rogers. The thing.

The scars had faded over the years, particularly the ones on his fingers, but he would always see them as though they had just been done.

Sitting up in that bed, wrapped in bloody bandages, feeling…different.

His old self, his real self, gone forever.

He next rubbed the ring. It was a platinum band that had been given to him by someone who had once been special in his life.

There was an inscription engraved on the inside of the band. Rogers had no need to look at it. The words were burned into his brain.

For the good of all.

He had once believed in those words more than anything else in his life. But that was then, this was now.

Now he believed in nothing.

He ate with his face pointed down. He was hungry, but he could survive without eating for a long time. He could survive without liquids for a long time too although the average person would become dehydrated and die fairly quickly. The same with lack of sleep. You don’t sleep for two weeks, you hallucinate and then you die, your brain and other organs all going wacky on you before they shut down and the lights go out forever.

Yet it was all physiological. It was all about slowing things down, lessening the internal burn. Like animals hibernating, everything went from flat-out to glacial. Humans could learn a lot from animals about survival, because animals could do it far better than humans.

And I’m not a human anymore. I’m a fucking wild animal. Maybe the most dangerous of all, because I’ve got a human brain to go along with the “wild” part.

He finished his meal, sat back, and rubbed the spot on his head.

He took a sip of coffee and then his face screwed up. The pain came and went without warning.

He let out a tortured breath. It was the one pain that he could not ignore. The wound on his arm didn’t bother him. He had never even felt the bite of the knife.

But the pain in his head was different. It was special, apparently. They had never fully explained that one. It was his brain after all. The most important organ he had. It was what made him him. Or not him, in Rogers’s case.

He paid the bill and walked back to his car. He drove to another part of the small town, parked, and settled down for the night.

As the hours passed and the darkness deepened, Rogers lay there and stared at the ceiling of the car. It was stained and faded and generally worn out.

He was stained, faded, and should have been worn out. But his energy level had never been higher.

It was only during his last year in prison that certain parts of his mind had become fully accessible to him. And that was why he had marshaled all of his strength and determination and sat in front of the parole board and said all the right things. His remorse. His learning from his mistakes. His wanting to lead a good, productive life going forward. He was being sincere-well, mostly. He had learned from his mistakes. He did want to be productive going forward. He had even forced some tears.

But he felt no remorse, because he was incapable of the emotion.

He had only one goal now. And it lay, he hoped, about five hundred miles from here.

He was going back to the beginning to get to the end.

But the remnants in his head? That previously inaccessible spot? He focused on that.

The man was young, not yet twenty. Good-natured. Trusting.

That had been his mistake. The trusting part.

It was the same old story: a strange man in a strange land. No friends, no allies, no one to turn to for help.

He had come to this place for a better life, as had millions of others.

He had not found a better life. He had found a very different man at the end of the day living inside his body. He knew this and yet could not fully control it. To change himself back to what he was. He had tried. Over the last year when he had finally punched through that wall, he had desperately tried to uncurl the fist. To banish from his mind the desire to maim, wound, or more often kill.

But he had made a little progress.

The punk back at the construction site was fortunate that Rogers had somehow managed to walk away with sarcastic words instead of a lethal jab.

It had been a little thing, certainly.

But it had felt empowering nonetheless.

That was why he had smiled.

I can exercise some control. I don’t have to strike every time. I can walk away.

In prison, after his encounter with the men who wanted to force their will on him, Rogers had been placed in a cell by himself. Better that he be completely alone, for none of the guards wanted to have to intervene in another fight involving Paul Rogers.

Thus there was no one to antagonize him. No one to bring out the monster that lurked just under his skin.

But as Rogers closed his eyes for the night, his thoughts held on that young man just recently arrived in this country with another name and a far different ambition for his life. A nice young man. A young man with a future, one would say.

Now that man was long gone.

The monster was all that was left.

And the monster had one more thing to do.