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Member
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: San Jose
Gender: Male
Posts: 2
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AntiHeroic
It was the age-old question when any human found himself in that position, high on a bridge with menacing concrete 80 feet below: jump or fall? A fall implied a purposeless death. If you fell, you didn’t really try; you didn’t really want it; you just stiffened and tipped. A jump, though, showed you cared. If you actively flexed those muscles and exerted focused energy off the railing it was much more than an unthinking accident. Of course, the 15 green-clad men holding deadly automatic weapons standing around you telling you to jump or they would kill you themselves didn’t help matters much.
Lady Liberty was engulfed in flames, choking on black smoke, crying amidst the conflagration for a Hero to save her. They had poured gasoline all down her body and set it aflame. The symbolism was ghastly and, considering their other nefarious works, this seemed apropos.
Our Hero stared at the French statue, standing on the cracked, blown-up bridge whose body could mostly be found in either the water or the street below. A charred and turned-over school bus hung precariously off the edge of the jagged cliff created by the bridge’s rupture. Exactly fourteen bodies, contorted and broken apart like the twigs off a tree branch, laid lifeless on the road far beneath him. The slight wind, whose stench was something like sulfur and dead fish, pushed his hair out of his eyes and stung his nostrils.
“Hurry the hell up,” one of the warriors shouted. “We gotta get all you bastards to jump off this bridge.”
Thirty other civilians stood, most with their heads down, in a straight line behind our Hero. He looked at their tired and worry-worn faces, emaciated by enormous fright and unbearable slavery. His pale face looked the same. Purple bags sunk underneath his eyes. He hadn’t been punched in these three years but it certainly looked like had.
“I’d rather you just shoot me in the face, actually,” our Hero said, the skin from his chapped lips flaking off as he spoke.
“You must be a dumbass. If we wanted to kill you we would have done it already. We were given orders to be sadistic sons of bitches. You have to kill your own damn self, you pansy. Now, hurry the hell up!” the warrior yelled angrily.
“Can someone else go before me?”
“No!”
Our Hero grabbed at his exposed, feeble right bicep. The arm of his sweatshirt had been ripped off while he was in Philadelphia. New clothes were probably illegal. The jeans he wore were too short and had great holes at the knees where he had been thrown down on rocks and asphalt. He had lost his shoes on the plane trip to Los Angeles. The hot road he stood on would have made normal people cry. Our Hero, though, had become immune.
Looking back at the line of people, perusing their wan and exhausted visages, he saw a young boy, maybe eight years old, standing near the back.
“There’s a child back there. Are you really gonna make a child jump?” he asked desperately.
“No…we’re gonna let him go, dumbass…Of course, we’re gonna make him jump.”
The man’s face looked downright sinister, almost as though his eyebrows were permanently pointed down like a villain in a cartoon.
“What if I don’t jump?”
“We got all day, don’t we boys?” the warrior asked the rest of his squad. They all nodded and mumbled affirmatively.
A rock, which had been creating itself in our Hero’s stomach, now found its way up to his throat, forcing his heart to hammer through his skinny chest and his dull green eyes to tear up. He had always wanted to see the Statue of Liberty but not like this. His mother had always wanted to see it, too.
Smoke was on every horizon; buildings collapsed; corpses lied around with such eerie and ghoulish stares you’d think they were both animate and crying.
Why don’t they just give us a break? he thought.
Our Hero looked at the sinister one, his eyes glistening in the Spring sun.
“Do you even have a heart?”
Those incensed eyes met those of our Hero; something had struck a chord in the boisterous warrior. Whether it was just the proverbial straw on the camel’s back or the issue of heartlessness nipped at his sensibility, there was an evident gaze of slight disillusion and an almost tangible darkness seemed to radiate from the man. Our Hero felt he could reach out and sense a physical presence, a fleshy limb or dusty camouflage pants, but it would dissolve into millions of screaming ghosts as soon as his lined and cracked hands ran across what he saw as a sentient and corporeal human being. The warrior stepped closer.
In a second, our Hero’s legs were swept backwards and he found himself chest first on the asphalt. Distressed, the line of people behind him began to step away and cry out in fear.
“Oh God, they shot his ankle!” one of them exclaimed. Our Hero grunted and swiveled his head. Blood and the grime from the road began to form a burning concoction across his foot. Red spewed from his exposed ankle. He grunted some more.
“Fitting,” he whispered through groans of pain. Some people in the line began to reveal their weak constitutions as though the whole ordeal wasn’t enough to have made them cry already.
“Stop crying!” the sinister Warrior shouted. “I swear to God, you people disgust me.”
“Hey! Now, that’s enough! I’ve had it with you!” a brave, bald man in the middle of the line said. The warrior walked over to the old man and lifted the AK-47 to eye level. Then he shot him: not once, or twice, or even three times. He shot everything he had. The body fell to the ground as the warrior pumped it full of bullets. By the time he was done, the human was lead-based.
Everyone else scooted away from the body. Most were covering their heads as they squealed in terror. Others looked at the heavy-breathing warrior with trepidation, trying to understand his motives or stay out of his path. Even his own comrades had taken to looking at him with big, bewildered eyes. Some warriors were even cringing.
“We’re not supposed to do that,” one of them said, frightened.
“Oh, like he’s gonna find out. He’ll never know if we just shoot all these bastards and throw’em over the railing.”
“He might.”
“Shut the hell up, Devin. He’s in D.C. He gives random orders. I’m the only warrior of rank here. Hell, I’m in charge of the City. What I say, goes,” he argued. “Now help me with this body.”
Our even more debilitated Hero had weakly pushed himself trembling onto one foot. Everyone, including the warriors, watched horrified as the bullet-pierced body was lifted by Devin and the sinister man. It was faceless and blood dripped from its top to bottom. One could hardly recognize it as anymore than a mass of red pulp with dozens of small black holes spread across it like a gopher-infested lawn.
Devin held the body’s feet and moved backward with caution. The other warrior’s eyes were dodging about; over the ledge, back to the body, to Devin’s face. His senses were heightened but his focus was narrow. Our Hero could smell him as he walked by, holding the gory head of a dead being. The bad man stood a foot away from him, barking out orders to Devin.
“Lift!” he screamed. Devin did as he was told and put the feet of the man over the gray railing.
The rock in our Hero’s throat was melting. Under such great seething pressure, his impulses to cry and acquiesce to death were boiled away and the remaining broth that stewed and stung inside his stomach fueled unbridled rage. Something about the sinister man’s dirty black hair and his greatness in stature and broad shoulders and violent demeanor made our Hero’s inhibitions useless. A gust of sulfur filled his nose, pushing his brown coffee hair out of his eyes. He limped a step closer to the bad man who was about to throw the body 80 feet below.
“What the hell are you doing?” the warrior asked, looking slightly down at our Hero.
Then, with all that he could muster, with everything left in his delicate frame, he struck the man’s sinister, tan nose with his bony, pink fist. Emotions on the warrior’s face were as easy to read as a child’s book: fear, pain, resentment. He dropped the body on the road, and realizing his gun was back amongst the line of people, he decided to push our weak and badly injured Hero to the ground.
“Oh God,” he said as his elbows scraped against the asphalt. It was simple now. When a lion is hungry, he has no qualms about devouring the fragile, wounded, and lost gazelle. But, at this point, our Hero felt his fate was damned before it began. Conceding his death, he laid there, the blood from his ankle-wound encasing his foot in a dark red wax.
Though perdition appeared imminent, Providence, it seemed, had other plans. Three plain civilians from the line hurried toward the man standing above our Hero and toppled him. Then, like the volatile animals they had become, they began smashing and scratching at his face, making sure to pin his arms and legs so he was helpless. Before too much time passed, more of the civilians ran over to wreak havoc upon the sinister fellow. Fists were pounding, bones were cracking, and blood was bursting. The small, enfeebled bodies huddled in righteous fury, slamming their skeletal hands across his face and body.
“Devin!” he screamed in horrified agony. “Kill them, Devin!”
But Devin stood, watching the primal and ferocious beating. He watched the hands and feet strike, the powerless human taking the bloodthirsty thumps in shock. His other comrades inched closer, curious as to the goings on. Somehow the warriors were all frozen in their unwillingness to help and their concentrated interest in the bashing.
Some began kicking his genitals. One man in particular began screaming, “This is for cookin’ my brother in Philly!”
More began to join the mob, kicking and punching and scratching his flesh. Others began to pull his arms and legs as far apart as could be managed. Then, with his face bloodied and every bone above his neck fractured, the mob had their best idea. Four of them pinned his head and torso to the road while two others restrained both of his feet. Then two more jumped onto his left and right kneecaps. When they found their balance on top of them, the two holding the feet began to lift them upward in a most unnatural and violently painful direction. The snap was audible and the subsequent cry was, in our Hero’s mind, the epitome of blissful torture.
They lifted the evil warrior off the ground. Some were still hitting him as they carried him over to the ledge. With his legs dangling like nunchucks and his voice cracking in pain so loudly that faraway Lady Liberty had begun to smile in the midst of her hellish situation, the mob of civilians tossed the sinister warrior over the railing. He landed in such a way that when everything settled, his shoulder blades touched the back of his battered skull. Needless to say, the end result was as gruesome as it was joyous.
And still, his comrades were speechless. Motionless. Their eyes wandered, trying to glean from one another what to do next. They all appeared to steer their attentions toward Devin.
Our Hero had waited to stand until he knew the man was dead. Amid all the carnage it appeared some of the warriors had lost track of their prisoners. Out of the corner of his eye, our Hero could see the young boy, that had once been doomed in the back of the line, in his tattered striped-green shirt and blue jean shorts running down the bridge to whatever safety might find him in the rebel-controlled New York City.
Hide he thought.
The enraged crowd dissolved back into a line and they, too, looked to Devin for answers. Our Hero and Devin shared an ominous stare. Devin is too amiable to be a warrior, he thought. Too ethical; too troubled. His face was pleasant. Five O’ clock shadow cheeks and chin were complimented by rich blue ocean eyes. His visage was long, his forehead short, his nose perfectly straight, and his eyebrows raised in dire concern. The black hair atop his head was short and unkempt. His hands shook carrying the deadly rifle.
Our Hero looked at Devin, his mouth open struggling to produce saliva and his heart pulsing so hard it was visible, waiting for the edict. Devin swallowed uneasily and looked about him. If he were a crying man, he would have been bawling. Such a great decision had been laid on his shoulders. His eyes were watery as he looked into those of our Hero.
“You’re next.”
Our Hero sighed and reasoned that, when he reached the top of the railing, he would simply fall.
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