Mercy

June 20th, 1966.
Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Voices.

I can feel their disembodied whispers floating through me from every direction.

One dances along my earlobe while another brushes against my cheek, and countless others lick up and down the length of my arms like vampires itching to dig in. It’s a damn good analogy if you ask me. Vampires and ghosts are both among the undead, soulless ghouls who wander the earth in search of their next unfortunate victim. Once that sorry sap is within their grasp, they feed on the living energy until there’s none left to drain. Their victim then becomes the hunter, a newly turned creature of the night, and the vicious cycle will continue without end until every last bit of life itself ceases to exist. The only ones keeping them from obtaining total world domination are people like me. People who can see their bullshit for what it really is and can stop them before it manifests into disaster. I know I’m a member of a burdened minority, but with the help of any random alcoholic beverage I can get my hands on, I become a part of the majority again. For however long my mind is doused in chemicals, I’m at peace.

At least, I think I am. My life is such a blur of segmented, drunken thoughts that it’s growing more difficult by the day to decipher if any of it was real. Sometimes, I’ll even forget I’m already drunk and will continue to slosh myself right into oblivion. I’ll black out for days on end, and usually one or all four of my brothers will be forced to hunt me down and drag my pathetic ass back home. My mother will watch this ritual in silence, unable to accept that her youngest son is becoming a burden.

There’s no one willing to drag me home anymore. Instead, I have Adrienne keeping me all boozed up and Richie making sure I don’t wander too far from the motels we’ve been staying at. I vaguely remember an escape attempt which involved me hanging out of the passenger side window on the interstate for a mile or two. Richie was flying at about ninety-five miles an hour, Adrienne was fast asleep, and I was about two inches from getting flattened into a bloody road kill pizza. After he yanked me into the truck, my big brother pulled into the nearest rest stop and sobbed for a good half-hour. That alone nearly scared me sober. I’ve never seen him cry.

Rich hasn’t let Adrienne give me a lick of liquor since, but I guess the hospital would frown on that shit anyways.

The nurses say they had to pump my stomach when Richie first brought me in. I don’t remember a goddamn thing. They also claim I’ve got a drinking problem. They want me to join a fucking program that the hospital runs for their more serious cases, and they’re practically foaming at the mouth for me to join it and succeed. They want me to be another positive statistic to help positively promote their facility. Fuck that. I laughed at them. Those do-goody nurses can’t take the only thing that shuts the goddamn voices up away from me. I will not let them.

I probably should have been nicer to them. Maybe if I had been, I wouldn’t be facing a week of psychological observation on top of my recovery from severe alcohol poisoning. I don’t like being trapped in this Building of Death. The ghosts…

They’re everywhere.

I should have a killer hangover, but the IV stitched into my skin is pumping my body full of enough fluids to obliterate the dehydration before it even had the chance to sink its ugly teeth into my skull. I can, however, still feel a pulsating pain in my twisted ankle. The doctor says he can’t do anything about it but give me an ankle brace and hope for the best. Apparently, modern medicine is shit at fixing sprains. I’m certainly not complaining about the pain meds they’re shoving down my throat, though. Having those in my system is almost as good as being wasted, but they don’t keep the dead at bay.

Hey kid. Kid! Stop pretendin’ to sleep! We need ya’s to do somethin’ for us.

I refuse to open my eyes. Just because one of them has the balls to call me out doesn’t mean I’m doing them any favors. I never do. One fucking ghost isn’t going to change that.

“Billie Joe, knock it off. I heard you yelling at a nurse not five minutes ago. Open your eyes. We need to talk.”

Ok, that voice is alive. I only know because it’s one I’ve been acquainted with longer than I can remember. My eyes peel open at her request. The light of my hospital room is blinding, and the six other people standing around her immediately make me feel uncomfortable. My eyes snap shut again.

Groaning, I tell her, “I’m ‘wake, Adie. I just…don’ like seein’ ‘em surroundin’ you like that.”

Adrienne is silent. Her thoughts become frantic and impossible to translate, but I’m not that interested in her short-lived fear. I know without opening my eyes that she just needs a second to frantically scan the room despite not being able to see the actual spirits herself. Her fear will fade into ravenous curiosity, and before long, she’ll be begging me to help them one by one. She does it every time regardless of how my answer is always an unwavering no.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have been so rude,” she mutters. In my head, I can clearly see her eyes falling to the floor in front of her in shame. There’s something else that’s troubling her. Something I don’t want to hear, but she’s going to say it anyways. She’s not usually one to hesitate in speaking her mind.

“I spoke with one of the nurses about my pregnancy. She was surprisingly sympathetic with me because of your…problem…and agreed to have an ultrasound done, free of charge,” she explains. Her enunciation of the word problem makes my skin crawl. My problem is partially her fault. If she wasn’t so hell bent on shoveling beer down my throat in the hopes of gaining some form of affection from me, I wouldn’t even have a future child cooking inside her.

“Well, ain’t she a doll,” I croak, sarcasm fully intended to ooze from each syllable. Adie’s head snaps up, her eyes instantly piercing into me, but mine are still closed. She wants her glare to be met by guilty eyes, yet I continue ignoring her. A smile graces my otherwise emotionless expression the moment her gaze drifts back to the floor.

“Yeah, she’s real nice. She thinks I’m about sixteen weeks along,” she rattles on. Though she senses my hostility towards our unborn child, she’s glowing. I can practically feel the heat of her excitement radiating from where she’s seated, and the chill I’d previously felt from the spirits in the room is gone. I no longer feel drained by their presence. Their collective disappearance eases my paranoia, but I keep my eyes shut. I do not want to look at Adrienne right now. I’m afraid I’ll get attached.

I’m afraid I’ll start to care.

“Four months, huh? Shit,” I mumble without much interest. Her excitement is knocked down a peg or two, yet she persists.

“It’s a boy, Beej. She said sixteen weeks is usually too early to tell, but she saw a fuzzy little blob on the screen that says it’s a boy.” Adrienne is smiling, assuming I’d be ecstatic by her confession. Wouldn’t any man prefer sons over daughters?

I merely flinch in response, a knee-jerk reaction to news I wish I hadn’t heard. After growing up surrounded by four brothers, I found myself subconsciously rooting for a daughter to offset the abundance of testosterone in my life. That, and I’m terrified my future son will end up a drunken, effeminate faggot with abandonment issues, just like his old man.

Worse still, I fear my creatures of the night will attach themselves to him the second he’s born.

“I wanna name our son Jason,” I blurt, brilliantly masking my panic with unabashed malice.

At last, I open my eyes just to watch Adrienne squirm.