The Madman of Miramar/Epilogue
Epilogue
Madison Malholtra  |
Lunchmeat  |
Julie Skels  |
Duncan Slade  | |
Julie spent six months in Hell.
It was Dante’s Inferno where every layer was a different white-walled medical facility. There were no sinners in this Hell; no panderers or seducers. No vaults filled with burning heretics.
This was a hell of burn care and pain management and treatment.
It was the hell of an Intensive Care Unit, with faceless doctor-imps in pale blue surgical gowns grafting mesh to her ruined body. It was the hell of physical therapy, where they tried again and again to restore sensation to her hands. It was the hell of being asked a thousand times to rate her pain and saying ten. Ten. Ten.
Always ten.
And then there were still doctors but the room was different. The sterile white of the hospital had been replaced with dark wood. She was in a bedroom. Days still blurred as they treated her – but now she had a window. Now she could see farmland buried in fresh snow and hear the faint ring of wind chimes.
Now she had the sun.
The doctors came less frequently. By Spring, they didn’t come at all. The snow had started to thaw, and she had a new caretaker.
Lunchmeat.
He looked different. It took her a moment to realize that his tattoo was gone. No scar, no faint trace at all. He didn’t look better or worse. Just different.
He changed her bandages and gave her medication. She spoke his name and he asked that she call him Pavel. She did. And he read to her. And when she got sensation back it was his skin she first felt.
This was their new life. A 48-acre plot of land in what she would later learn was Nebraska. A home with a washer/dryer and a wine cellar stocked with expensive-looking bottles. There was a fireplace, its hearth etched with strange gold faces. They looked like silent Gods. Like ancient Greek statues. She imagined they flickered when the fireplace was lit. It probably looked beautiful.
But she would never know. Even in the dead of winter when the wind seemed to cut through the walls of their new home, that fireplace would not be lit.
She had had enough fire for one lifetime.
They had changed her too. Her tattoos were gone. She traced her finger along her chest, remembering the thin Y-incision she had inked into her flesh when she was fourteen.
They had new names now. Passports with their faces left for them in an unmarked envelope. Plastic bank cards too to six different accounts totaling just over twenty-eight million dollars.
Duncan was gone. All she had left of him was a fleeting memory. Something from before her trip through the inferno. A memory of floating. No, not floating...
She remembered being pulled as if by string or thread. Wet phantasmic cords that lifted her from her burning body and let her spectate as Duncan turned Miramar into a great blooming garden of corpses.
She asked the doctors for answers, but they knew nothing. Not about Duncan Slade. Not about Mal. Both of them were gone. Like they had been erased.
That felt wrong. It felt offensive. She could be kept here in her snow prison in Nebraska. She could be given pain killers and expensive bottles of wine and taunted with a golden fireplace. But to steal these two allies from her and erase them...
It was Julie’s idea to make the drive.
Interstate 76 to Denver. Then through the Rockies. She slept through Las Vegas and that was fine. After almost 24 hours of driving – Pavel did it all, no complaints – they arrived at the ranch.
Eddie Denim’s ranch.
It was empty. No sign of life. No sign of their stay from last year. A ‘For Sale’ sign had been placed on the property, but it had fallen over months ago and no one bothered to replace it. This place that had once been sanctuary was now a one-house ghost town.
And Julie had had enough of ghost towns.
She wanted to drive back immediately but Pavel needed rest. They curled up in the backseat together with the intent of sleeping for only an hour or so.
When she woke up, it was dark. She didn’t know how much time had passed. She had been dreaming of an island. Islands. A dream of Banyan trees and sweat. Of snow and rocky shores and faded Soviet propaganda.
It didn’t make sense. It never would.
The car was cold and so she pressed closer to Pavel. She felt his breath on her skin and it felt good. She kissed him.
They made love in the back of the car like two teenagers. Her body had healed – though she later laughed that her injuries made her feel like someone else. Someone decidedly delicate and she didn’t much care for that.
They drove back through the night and through the next day. Neither spoke.
This home in this forgotten part of the country would be her consolation prize. She had been given land and wine and more money than she could ever spend. She had been given Pavel. And that should be enough for her.
But that would not be enough.
The fire had buried the thing deep and the painkillers had kept it quiet. But the Monster was still there. It would always be there. They could take her tattoos. They could take her name. But they couldn’t take away the monster.
And the monster would come for them...