Retard (13 page)
Authors: Daniel I Russell
That’s enough, she told herself. Can’t do much passed out drunk.
Her guts grumbled, burning.
Christine sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth and rubbed her abdomen for all the good it did. A trail of chemical fire blistered from the back of her throat to the pit of her stomach.
Drank too quick, she thought and staggered back into the kitchen. At the sink, she rinsed out the glass, filled it with water and drank deep, hoping it wasn’t too late to dilute what she’d consumed.
***
“Wake up, little one. It’s safe now.”
Wesley shook his head, though he couldn’t feel it. Everything was dark, the bottom of the ocean, random currents sweeping his limbs and features far apart and smashing them back together. It hurt to talk, hurt to think.
“Wake up, Globin,” said Sasha. “For the Realm!”
“For the Realm!” cheered Yorin and EagleEye.
Wesley’s left eyelid flickered. He grunted and it lifted higher.
The lounge ceiling came into focus, blurred, and snapped back.
Wesley coughed, crying out from the agony at his throat. With tremendous effort, he flopped his hands back to pull at the noose around his neck but found only tender skin. His words croaked, coated in sand.
“Yorin?”
Wesley’s head fell to the side.
Before the black screen of the television, his Commander lay on the floor. It still stung. Not Globin.
“M-Mum?” he called.
Come on, he thought. You need to move.
He lifted a hand to the back of the sofa and gripping the soft fabric, hoisted his body to sit up.
He wondered if his mother had gone out and left him alone, as she often did. She might have gone to have a drink with Aunt Sally and Jason. It was Christmas Day after all.
A crash sounded from the kitchen; the jarring splinter of glass breaking.
“Mum?”
He thought of the great wide man he’d seen sitting on this very sofa a few nights ago. He’d haunted his dreams, a behemoth in armour, yellowed tusks bulging from his mouth. EagleEye had shot him through the head, but here in the waking world, Wesley had feared his return.
Had the kitchen window been smashed, the man reaching through to unlock the backdoor?
“Mum? Is that…is that you?”
His legs shook as he attempted to stand, and after a brief glimpse of hope, collapsed underneath him. On hands and knees, he shuffled towards the kitchen.
***
How
much
did I drink?
On her knees, she leaned against the cupboard under the sink. The shattered remains of her glass lay on the tiles about her, glistening like tiny crystal razors in puddles of pale green liquid. The smell of it filled her nose, her throat, her head. The inside of her mouth seemed to sizzle with a tart chemical dryness.
Fuck you, Sally! What is this shit?
Another wave of deep burning washed through her insides, heart burn from Hell, its fire roaring up her oesophagus.
Christine retched, her body arching. She drooled onto the floor, her saliva tasting like the bottom of a mop bucket.
Help me…
Nothing came from her mouth other than more spit, tinted the colour of mint ice cream.
She pushed a hand against her stomach, seeing it pass through the dissolving tissue and plunging into her liquefied intestines, smoking from the acid. Her body held together, but her hand did nothing to soothe.
That bottle, her mind screamed, spying it on the table. What the fuck was it? Sally had probably bought it dirt cheap, some random drop from a dodgy backstreet tourist shack. A type of vodka? Absinthe? What did they drink over there?
Half a litre, straight down.
She spluttered and heaved once more, flopping onto her side and clutching her body tight. A little vomit pooled in her mouth but that too burned, and she spat it onto the floor. Even her lips sizzled with the sharp sting of a fresh chili juice.
Christine coughed in a vain attempt to expel the drink from her tortured body. The liquid seemed to splash around inside her, a horrible dry magma, sour, chemical green.
She’d needed a drink, and that was all that mattered. The taste of booze had never mattered, so what if it was cheap, fake Absinthe? Just because it tasted like the contents of her cleaning cupboard all mixed together. Bleach, turpentine, the powdered poison she put out for the damn mice…
The realisation clawed at her guts, each scratch tipped in corrosive, poisonous dread.
***
Wesley crawled across the lounge, more of the kitchen coming into view with each tiny advance. Shattered glass twinkled in the light from the window. Having reached the arch, he stopped to catch his breath, and delirium aside, he wasn’t about to crawl through broken glass. His mum might think him a retard, but he wasn’t stupid.
He looked up at the kitchen table, expecting his mother to be sat there, a cigarette smoking between her fingers, glaring at him.
From the floor, the only visible object on the table was a tall bottle, its pale green contents sitting flat, a single bubble on its surface.
She found it, he thought. It’s no wonder she got so mad.
“Ruugh!”
His mother fell through the archway, vomit spraying from her lips, splattering across the painted magnolia walls and carpet. Her momentum carried her towards Wesley.
Screaming, he scuttled back.
His mother slammed into the floor, her shoulder striking hard. She rolled onto her side. Her watery eyes found him.
“Wesley? Oh thank God. Thank God!”
She reached for him, but Wesley crept back further still.
“Wesley…you need to get to the phone. They can…fix this. They can…” His mother convulsed, her teeth slamming together and biting threw her lower lip. The internal pain released her and she screeched, sending up a shower of light green and dark crimson spittle. She took a deep breath and vomited again. A puddle of clear liquid, slightly green with creamy white strands of froth and streams of stark scarlet blood sat stinking on the carpet. The chemical smell burned his eyes, much worse than the day he made the potion.
His mum wouldn’t have missed the bottle. He’d found it, dusty and neglected at the back of the cupboard. While she slept after drinking too much of her usual stuff, the one the Spanish man drank on the television, Wesley had tipped half of his find down the sink. The drink had hardly smelled at all then, but it sure tasted bad. He could make it better, use it to turn people into animals or give them super strength. Globin could do anything with the right ingredients.
“Help…me…Wesley.” Her breathing had grown shallower, and she stared at the ceiling. “Get to...the phone.”
Wesley knew better. He slunk even further back to avoid the bitter, alkaline reek from her vomit.
“Wes…ley…” He voice had grown weaker, the steady rise and fall of her chest little more than an afterthought. “Get…to…the…phone.”
No, he thought. I’ve done my best and I’ve learned. I’ve finally learned.
I’m not allowed to use the phone.
16.
“The story we were made to believe, by the Government agencies, the media, well…at least lots of good did come from it,” said Graham. The city night outside the high, long window had too fallen silent. The time at the corner of his monitor informed him that four a.m. was quickly approaching. He’d talked all night on a project he thought might take a week. He guessed it was hard to stop once you started.
He’d always wondered, in the comfort of day and the bustle of ringing phones and clunking photocopiers, what it might be like to spend the night here alone. He hated small, enclosed rooms, but corridors also freaked him out too. Throw in all the strange noises that echo in the hours of darkness…
He suppressed a shudder.
Better to crack on. It’s got me through this lonesome night.
“Wesley, despite his mother’s best efforts, is still alive today I believe, albeit under a fake name. It set the precedent in the rehabilitation and anonymous relocation of child-aged killers, as seen some years later in the Bulger case. While the Tory Government bought more column inches, and more importantly jobs, what with the added outside funding and investment in the aftermath of a sympathetic Great Britain, the media monster Christine Stephenson did
not
kill her son. She passed away by his hands, death via fatal ingestion of bleach, poison and other household cleaning products.” He sighed. “Wesley was found some days later when Sally Fielding, unable to raise a response at the house, alerted authorities. The boy had remained patiently waiting in his room: not eating, and only drinking water from the bathroom tap when required. He still continued to relieve himself in a bucket despite the bathroom next door.”
He snapped off the Dictaphone.
Graham yawned and briefly considered another machine coffee. The conveying of the case had left his throat dry.
Done for the night. The interview transcripts and permissions could be added once the written copy had arrived in his inbox. The meat of the story had been laid down, the truth put to bed.
“Done for now, my little friend.” He smiled and poked the action figure standing guard beside his monitor. The boy wizard smiled back under his removable hat, complete with spell book and action move.
Graham placed the Dictaphone into his desk drawer and removed his coat from the back of his chair.
“I hope Christine was ultimately satisfied that her severe negative reinforcement had created such an obedient little boy.”
About the Author
Australian Shadows Award finalist Daniel I. Russell has been featured publications such as The Zombie Feed from Apex, Pseudopod and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #43. He was also the former vice-president of the Australian Horror Writers' Association and was a special guest editor of Midnight Echo. Daniel is currently a psychology major living in Western Australia with his partner and four children.
Also available:
Samhane
Mother’s Boys
Tricks, Mischief & Mayhem
Critique
The Collector Book 1: Mana Leak
Come Into Darkness
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