Mercy

If there was a specific path Jakob was following, I sure as fuck couldn’t see it.

Somewhere along the line, I lost myself in the darkness. Twisted, mangled roots gracelessly intertwined, destroying any chance of discerning a maple limb from one of a fleshier nature. I felt utterly immersed in a world I clearly didn’t belong in despite how simple it had been to find myself as tangled in the trees as the vines that crisscrossed down their trunks. Every stumble sustained and every pain-invoking twist of an ankle endured shouted that very truth to the moon and back, and I swore the leaves rustling in the wind overhead were giggling, guiltless in their mockery of a lanky city boy who couldn’t tell a fucking dandelion from a goddamn daisy. I wanted to cry out, to beg the wind to cease its blusterous charade, but the air was knocked from my lungs like a baseball bat to the gut as Jakob felt it crucial to turn abruptly without warning. My body was ripped from its desired motion and dragged helplessly through the underbrush as if I were nothing more than a ragdoll at his disposal, forced through every whimsical twist and turn of the older man’s pathless flight without so much as an opportunity to fly on my own. His white-knuckled grip of my wrist made damn sure of that.

We rounded another impossibly arbitrary corner, my lungs gasping and wheezing with an overexertion I rarely allowed myself to endure. My heart was nothing but a constant hum in my chest, and the sweat beading from every pore caused the tragically thin fabric of my t-shit to cling to my skin for dear life. It too was terrified of how desperate Jakob appeared to be in reaching our puzzling destination and within milliseconds of the notion crossing my mind, a tree branch among thousands that were adamant about jutting out at awkward angles seemed to materialize out of thin air, impaling my side. The violent riiiiiip! of my shirt was felt rather than heard as a discomforting vibration radiated upon my skin from the point of impact, for the raucous laughter of the leaves made it impossible to hear much else. Man down I thought, sensing a dull sting beginning to swell from my wounded side but not daring to beg Jakob to stop running. I merely trudged along behind him, mentally willing away the phantom sniggering and the pain.

In the distance, there may have been a stream or a crook or a fucking river flowing, but I couldn’t feasibly say which with any certainty. There was nothing to illuminate the surroundings, and I was hopelessly shit at discerning the subtle differences in nature references, yet I was fairly certain we were near a small body of water. I didn’t need a fucking boy scout to explain to me that the small insects hovering just high enough in the air to become entrapped in the inescapable cavern of my mouth every time I struggled to draw breath to know that somewhere in the vicinity, there was water. I suppressed a giggle as I noticed Jakob cough and spit into the wind in front of me. Apparently, those tiny black bastards managed to charge their way into his mouth as well.

An echoing, manic cackle rippled through the darkness, volume somehow thwarting the incessant rippling of wind through the trees, and immediately, the grin was wiped clean off my face. I initially assumed my imagination had taken the leaf personification a bit too far and that I had temporarily gone mad, but the manner in which Jakob’s body tensed in response to the sound brought about a short-lived relief at not being the only one to perceive it. The eerie cackle resonated within my mind for hours afterwards, refusing to be ignored with the diligence of a particularly debilitating disease. I had been deeply disturbed by the sound, and I wondered vaguely if it had been Miss Mary Magdalene and her equally jovial boyfriend giggling into the night air as they began their blissfully naive descent into damnation.

Despite how plausible my theory may have been, however, I doubted the laughter truly belonged to the junkies. No…there was something else in the forest with us that night, but I couldn’t even begin to fathom what exactly it was.

At the drop of a dime, Jakob stilled. I was unprepared for the sudden halt and my body continued to barrel itself forward a fair few graceless steps before a foot collided with stone. I was forcefully acquainted with the forest floor before I was even aware of my impending futile battle with gravity. Twigs snapped beside me as Jakob began to pace with an anxiousness that made my insides twist and knot with my own mounting fear. I brought my face out from where it had been buried in the dirt and stole a glance at what possibly made this area so different from the rest of the forest, so special. What made it significant enough to harbor an old man’s shady secret?

I got my answer in spades.

Jakob had brought me to a secluded clearing where, for the first time since we began our spastic trek through the forest, we were not flanked by the trunks of trees on all sides. Instead, row after row of perfectly aligned stones identical to the one I had tripped over surrounded us, embedded in dehydrated grass, but they weren’t what primarily caught my attention. When I lifted my eyes, I was met with the beady-eyed, glossy stare of a dead squirrel I had seen once before perched upon a branch of a rotting tree. Even in death, the damn thing had an unmistakable look of inquiry in his unsettling gaze.

I was less than an inch from the carcass of Zombie.

“What the fuck!” I screamed, scrambling on all fours to get away from the horrid creature. No longer was it the audacious rodent I stopped to admire and name while in the company of Billie Joe. Zombie had somehow suffered a ritualistic and symbolic torture until the life steadily drained from his tiny body, yet I felt no sympathy for him. He was an omen, and an undeniably evil one at that.

“Did you do this?!” I cried out in spite of myself, fully aware of the impossibility of my accusation but far too terrified to care.

Perhaps this had been the source of the ominous cackle I’d heard and would continue to hear throughout the night, and Zombie was nothing but the victim of some teenage prank…yet there was a deeper significance to the placement of his body that was far beyond the comprehension of a handful of mindless teenagers. It’d be impossible for them to realistically produce something so vile without some sort of satanic message behind it. It couldn’t have been a simple mindless prank, for the damn thing was crucified in a cemetery for God’s sake, nailed to a headstone like Jesus fucking Christ with a tail.

“I bring you to a cemetery and the first thing you want to know is if I crucified a squirrel? What the hell’s wrong with you?” Jakob spat, obviously distraught by what I wasn’t seeing.

“It was right in my fucking face, how was I supposed to react?!” I shot back, stomach violently churning at the odor wafting from Zombie’s remains.

“Stop staring at your precious squirrel for five seconds and read the fucking headstone!” Jakob bellowed, his pacing stopped long enough to glare at me. Fearful of what he might do if I continued to ogle the bizarre display nailed to the grave marker as opposed to reading the exact thing he’d brought me here for, my eyes drifted to the weathered words etched into crumbling stone.

My heart nearly stopped.

Billie Joe Armstrong,
February 17, 1948 – December 2, 1970

There was no message scrawled claiming how extensively he had touched the lives around him, and there was no momentous bible verse claiming how the man rotting beneath had gloriously returned to his Father. Just a name, a date of birth, and a date of death were written as if to covertly convey that he had been nothing but an unsightly speck of dirt on the face of society when he was alive. The Billie Joe Armstrong I knew was more of a pain in society’s ass, though I suppose the analogies were similar enough to be considered interchangeable if the name on the headstone was correct. Fuck, if that name was correct, the deceptive old bastard was more significant than a speck of dirt or a pain in the ass.

He was the fucking cyanide waiting inconspicuously within a glass of wine prepared by society’s jaded lover.