Kealan Burke - Seldom Seen in August

He yanked again and his wrist caught fire. His head swam, lightning bugs sailing through the dark before his eyes. Teeth clenched, he persisted until he felt the zip-tie on one hand slip lower, taking with it a flap of skin. Wade hissed air through his teeth, and looked back at the screens to distract himself from the mounting agony.

The woman with the knife was standing in the living room, watched by a half-dozen indistinct and curiously faceless shapes. They twitched and shook every time she raised the knife and brought it down on her abdomen. At least a half-dozen of them were small, like children, watching impassively, shivering with almost orgasmic glee.

“Fuck,” Wade said and redoubled his efforts. Skin tore free, muscles strained, and nerves sang. With a startling burst of pain, his thumb broke with a dull popping sound, but there was no time to consider the injury. Slick with blood and sweat, his hand slipped free of the zip-tie.

“Hallelujah,” he said, hoarse from the effort it took not to scream. He took a moment to nail down consciousness as it struggled to leave him, then pulled on the seat of the chair while moving his feet downward. A bit of wriggling and the chair legs were free of the plasticuffs, freeing his own legs in the process. He stood, shakily, his limbs numb, the pain fierce in his right hand. Briefly he inspected it and grimaced. It would need some work, and soon, if he didn’t want it to get infected. He had come close to slipping the skin off like a latex glove. The restraint on his left hand proved no easier to remove now that he had all but flayed his right, but eventually he managed to snap the frame of the chair and slide the hand free.

Then he turned to face the screens.

The humming was so loud now it seemed to come from inside him.

Three of the screens had gone dark. Not just blank, they’d been switched off. Wade felt he knew what that meant, and didn’t like it much. He felt a modicum of relief that he wasn’t on one of those screens, waiting to be switched off, then realized he probably was, in some other place, with some other captive watching fearfully on the other side.

Resisting the compulsion to massage the blazing pain from his hand, he used his other hand to search his pockets, his waistband. He was not surprised to find they’d relieved him of his gun, and everything else he’d had on him.

On another of the monitors, a small squat man with a comb over was peering up at the light bulb in one of the upstairs bedrooms while behind him, a black man with half his head missing wriggled like a lizard out from under the sodden mattress.

August , Wade thought as he headed for the door through which Cochran had exited. The hell happened in August?

Another screen went blank. Wade could tell only because the blue light from the bank of screens faded a little. It inspired urgency in him. He did not want to be in this musty room when the lights went out.

August…

Despite what Cochran had said, he was sure that particular month held no significance for him. Unwillingly, he ran through a mental list of the people he had encountered and the things he had done over the years. It was difficult, as there had been more than one incident that had occurred during his “gray period”, a time in which, like the ill-fated Gail, he had worshipped a chemical god. Of the memories he was able to summon, was not proud, nor could he stand to dwell upon them for long, a development that Cochran might have found of great interest. Wade was not immoral; he did have a conscience. He had just found a way to exist and do what needed to be done without it plaguing him. Regret and remorse were like a pair of mean dogs he kept staked out in his backyard. He knew they were there, but only because he heard them barking, and it was easy enough to drown out the sound.

He found the door. It was made of metal and cold to the touch. There were a number of dents in the surface. Wade scrabbled for a knob and found it, turned, and the door would not open. It hardly budged at all.

“Shit.” He hammered on it with his good fist. “Hey!”

To his ears it sounded as if his cry had not gone further than his lips. Meanwhile, the humming seemed to have settled in his ears, those industrious hornets searching for the fastest route to his brain.

His shadow, blurred at the edges, faded as another screen died.

Wade turned. With only a half-dozen screens still on, he would need to find an alternate way out before the room was in total darkness. Quickly, he inspected the ceiling, but saw little, the light blocked by the heavy beams. He recalled how they’d looked in the full light—as if a few tugs would bring them down. It was a risky proposition. If it did come down, he’d be standing right under it and stood a good chance of getting crushed under the weight of its collapse. Another problem was that he was now one-handed and as such doubted he had the strength to cause those rafters much distress.

Sudden frantic motion on one of the screens made him look at them again. Just before it went dark, he thought he saw an obese man try to punch a sobbing woman, until she looked up at him and screamed from the open, fleshless hole of her face.

Wade winced and shook his head, his wounded hand throbbing and dripping blood on the floor. He looked back up at the ceiling. Darker now, the shadows thicker still. Okay, forget trying to bring it down, he thought . If it was as fragile as it looked, there was a chance he might be able to use something to knock a hole in it large enough for him to squeeze through. The table would help give him the boost he needed to reach up and pull himself out. Of course, he didn’t know where it would lead, but considering his options, it was the better one.

He squinted around the ever-darkening room, eyes scanning the gloom for something, anything he could use, and found only the broken remains of the chair. With difficulty, he braced the broken frame against his chest and kicked out at the legs until they broke away and fell noiselessly to the floor.

Another television went off.

Grabbing one of the chair legs, Wade all but leaped onto the table. It wobbled but held under his feet. He looked up at a dark space between the beams. There was nothing to see there, so he reached up with his unwounded hand and pressed his fingers against the wood. It was soft, spongy and crumbled at his touch. Wade smiled. Perfect. As he’d guessed, it wouldn’t take much to punch through, though the space between the beams was going to make it a tight squeeze.

He stepped back, the leg of the chair held like a sword before him, splintered end up, and paused as abruptly, Cochran’s words came back to him: I suggested we build a fully functional neighborhood right in the middle of Harperville’s black zone. Wade frowned, so preoccupied by this newest mystery that he scarcely noticed when another television died. If they had built the neighborhood only recently, why was the basement ceiling decayed, as if it had suffered the weathering of countless generations? The answer, when it presented itself, reduced dramatically the hope that he’d felt at the sight of that crumbling wood.

The ceiling was old and weak because in an otherwise sealed room, it would be the only logical escape route. The decay was deliberate, subtler than a flimsy trapdoor or a neon sign pointing upward, but the nature of it was the same. Like so much of what had occurred since he’d come to Seldom Seen Drive, this move had also been premeditated. Just not by him.

He swore and rammed the chair leg up into the ceiling. It punctured a hole in the wood on the first try. He quickly withdrew the spear and attacked the panel as hard as he could with only his left hand. It was an awkward assault, but the objective was reached. The leg penetrated as if the ceiling were made of bread. With almost manic glee he watched as a hand-sized hole appeared in the wood, lit by the faintest suggestion of daylight.