Mercy

Billie sat directly beneath the clothesline, quivering, with his knees drawn up to his chest as tightly as his weakening joints would allow. His back was resting against a tree which the line was fastened to, and his breathing came out in short, jagged bursts. As I approached him, it became increasingly evident that the mere act of screaming had exhausted his lungs, yet his grapple for respiratory control wasn’t what held him under restraint. His eyes were vacant and void of any emotion, and when I lowered myself to sit beside him, he showed no signs of acknowledgement towards my presence. I sat close enough to feel each ruthless tremor as they ravaged his petite frame, but he couldn’t feel me. He was numb to everything but fear.

I took his hand in mine in hopes of bringing him back to me, though it did nothing but force his body to flinch at the sudden contact. His fist curled in my palm like a snowball of flesh and bone, nearly too cold to touch, but I wasn’t as eager to throw it aside as I would have been for its literal counterpart. Instead, I waited in vain for him to melt in my hand and relax enough to explain what had frightened him so significantly. I was naïve for assuming I could melt snow with ice.

When it finally became clear that my empathetic efforts in consoling Billie Joe were futile, I followed his line of vision to potentially gain insight as to what elusive being had traumatized him so. At first, I saw nothing out of the ordinary, but a subtle movement in the trees caught my frantic attention. Perched upon different branches of the same tree were five squirrels, and they were all watching the old bastard with impossibly rapt attention. Zombie grinned from his place atop the end of the clothesline opposite Billie and me. That goddamn rodent knew what supernatural force was gripping my lover by the balls, but he wasn’t telling.

“Billie, talk to me. Please. Why were you screaming?” I pleaded, unintentionally clutching his fist even tighter in my hand. He whimpered softly in response, yet any words that might have been spoken were far too indistinct to comprehend.

With my free hand, I guided his head down upon my shoulder and stroked his sweat-slicked curls, intentionally breaking his eye-contact with Zombie. A faint rustling of leaves stole my attention for a moment, and my hand froze mid-stroke as I noticed the squirrels had changed positions. Three were on the clothesline. Three were in the tree. All six were staring at Billie with sickening fascination as he whimpered again and pawed his way into my lap, burrowing his face into the crook of my neck while the rest of his body coiled on top of mine. I hugged him close, gently rocking us back and forth, until I began to feel his lips moving rapidly against my tender flesh. His breath on my neck might have turned me on, but I knew there was nothing sexual about the way in which his mouth fluttered against my pulse. He was muttering almost inaudibly, and I had to utilize every ounce of my own concentration to register the words tumbling endlessly from his trembling lips.

“The baby won’t stop crying where’s the baby oh God what’d he do to my baby,” he babbled, nonsensical in his verbalized fear.

“I don’t understand,” I murmured, burying my lips in his mop of salt and pepper locks. The kiss did little to soothe him, but knowing that I had him tucked protectively within my grasp was enough to calm my own relentless nerves.

“The baby the baby THE BABY I left him here and now he’s gone where did he go?!” he demanded, voice rising. My stomach plummeted, and my blood turned to ice within my veins. The old bastard’s accent was gone.

Billie was gone.

“…Joey?” I questioned tentatively. The body in my arms ceased trembling on a dime, and the stillness which engulfed us was beyond unsettling. I squirmed beneath him and shifted my gaze from the top of a graying head to a tree across the yard. It was devoid of any living creatures. The clothesline, however, sagged to bear the weight of five surreptitious squirrels and one undead Zombie. I wondered darkly how many more it would take until the weathered line snapped clean in half.

“Daddy?”

I didn’t have the heart to say otherwise, so I held my tongue as the ghost in my lap began to cry.

“Daddy help me I’m scared.”

I remained silent. I wasn’t in any hurry to scurry away from Joey, but I clearly was not his father. I wasn’t the one he needed or desired, and I was clueless as to how one would go about handling the situation. Billie was the one who dealt with spirits. Not me.

I had a tendency to unwittingly assist them in their senseless killing of babies.

“Daddy don’t leave me I need you!” Joey shrieked, voice echoing with impossibly throughout the air. He was fading before me, drifting away into a supernatural abyss, but the body he had borrowed remained limp and virtually lifeless in my arms. I was swallowed by a peculiar state of vertigo as I attempted to perceive what was happening around me, and the feeling was so intense that my heart bled for how Billie must have felt, if he was even alive in there.

For one horrifically agonizing moment, I didn’t think he was.

Then it was over. Billie’s body sustained a violent spasm before he was reduced to a coughing, spluttering pile of nervous tension on top of me. He hardly registered I was there, and when I tried to relax him with a touch, he promptly ripped himself away from me. On all fours he panted, making sure to keep his head low to the ground to avoid meeting my gaze, but he wasn’t down and out of commission for long. In seconds, he stood and limped his way towards the center of the clothesline. Once he was directly below it, he glared up at the six rodents peering hungrily down upon him.

Without breaking his defiant stare, the old bastard croaked, “Anyone ever teach you to shoot?”

I was taken aback by being regarded so unexpectedly, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure how to answer him. What did he want me to say, exactly? What did he expect me to shoot?

“Guns, Fairy. Have you ever fired a fuckin’ gun?” he barked, shooting his unnerving glower off in my direction. I cowered against the tree, suddenly terrified of him, for he was attempting a casual conversation with me in the midst of his elder son’s death. His complete disconnect from the tragedies surrounding him was unsettling.

“N-n-no,” I stuttered.

Billie’s scowl curled up into a grin as he announced, “Then it looks like I gotta learn you. Ain’t you lucky, sugah? After my daddy died, I was the best shot in all o’ Georgia. You ain’t gonna find a better teacher nowhere.”

“Why do I need to learn how to use a gun? Billie, your son’s dead. Isn’t that a bit more important?” I inquired, dazed.

He must have been losing his mind to so swiftly dismiss Joey’s existence.

“I got me a goddamn rodent infestation, Fairy. Only way to kill these bastards is to shoot ‘em,” he responded, completely disregarding my remark about his son.

“Are you even hearing me, Old Man?!” I shouted, but it was in vain. He wouldn’t allow himself to hear a single word I screamed. Instead, his eyes became narrow slits as he examined Zombie, shuddering in disgust at the sight of the vile creature.

“We’re startin’ wit’ this one. I don’t like ‘im,” Billie growled, viciously stabbing the air as he pointed up at the only squirrel I knew by name.

With a dejected shake of the head, I sighed, “That one’s already dead. I found him nailed to your headstone the other day like a tiny rodent version of Jesus fucking Christ.”

The old man’s lips pursed in thought as he persisted in scrutinizing the bizarre nuisance which so boldly wasted valuable space upon the clothesline. His fists once again tightly compacted into tiny snowballs at his side while he tried to make heads or tails of Zombie’s immortality. His knuckles glistened white in the sunlight, and it pained me to realize that only a smoking gun and powder residue in his hands were going to thaw them.

Smirking, Billie Joe finally decided how to eradicate us of our sinister problem as I felt my relevance in his life slipping away.

“Fine. If he ain’t gonna die, he’s gonna be perfect for target practice.”