“Doughnut?” he said. Melting chocolate pooled in his palm like spilled oil.

“Fuck off and die.”

“Just offering. Now’s not the time to get the munchies.”

“Chance, he said he didn’t want one. Or were you just being difficult, Cole?”

“Both of you can suck my dick.” I stuck my hand inside my pocket to keep it from shaking, sucked on a cigarette like it was life-support. “Let’s just get this shit done with so I can go home and never see you two again.”

Delilah stuck out her lip. “Come now, you don’t really mean that.”

Chance held her forearm, said it was time to move. When she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, I repressed the urge to crush the cigarette in her eye. They entered the building while I banged the back of my skull against the cinderblock wall, whispering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

We’d pulled the van into some shipyard junk depository in a neighborhood I’d never seen. Rusting shipping containers ringed the perimeter. Propellers, rolls of fencing, an anchor and several cars with rusted holes that might’ve been gnawed by giant metal termites lay strewn around the yard. I half expected to see some inbred yokel in overalls hobbling out to give us all what-for while his dog slobbered and gnashed teeth at us. Which would’ve been fine, preferable even, given what we really encountered.

Nothing. The stunning silence of a forsaken lot repurposed for trafficking humans. One cinderblock bunker situated in the middle of all this debris, the green shimmer of water visible in the space between the container-fence. Not a soul breathing, hiding, scurrying or dying. Only the three of us.

He’d parked alongside the bunker, rear doors facing the water. They sorted out their gun situation, then told me to stand at the front door and laid a shotgun in my hand as of it was a Faberge egg.

On the other side of the door I heard the dull murmur of voices. Some I could understand; others were foreign. They all sounded jovial, or as much as Russian can be.

A truck drove past the front gate. I held the gun behind my back. The sun crawled over us. I wished it would’ve scorched me to cinder. I wondered what Amy was doing. If she was debating which cereal would be healthier for the baby. If she was standing in front of the mirror, cheeks puffed and shirt bunched below her bra, looking for any change in the slope of her belly. If she was on the phone with Amanda, the woman she owned the yoga studio with, discussing baby yoga, all while I stood in front of a door with a shotgun as two old ghosts I thought I’d severed from my life discussed the transaction terms of human lives. The sun crawled over me. I wished it would’ve scorched us to cinder.

A loud crack inside, like when a book falls from the table and lands perfectly flat. Harsh tones, yelling, arguing. Cadenced Russian that sounded defusing. I tasted acrid copper in the back of my throat, looked at the watch I wasn’t wearing to see how long they’d been in there, how long I’d been daydreaming. The shadows had contracted, and I ventured that I’d lost at least twenty-five minutes inside my skull.

More yelling inside, and it wasn’t until I heard Delilah’s voice that I felt the metal claws of anxiety in the back of my thighs. Crashing noises, like a tabletop swiped clean in anger. Voices straining to stay calm while others snarled. I reached behind me and cocked the shotgun, then immediately tried to uncock it, but found I had no idea how. Chance’s voice tearing at another man’s, his words alien and ferocious but somehow enchanting.

And then a bang.

An inimitable bang followed by Delilah’s scream. Before the synapses could connect and tell me that rushing into this situation was detrimental for not only myself, but also my family, I reached for the doorknob, gun raised. It burst open from the inside, knocking me backward.

“Start the fucking car.”

I stood still, leaning on the shotgun as if it was a crutch. Chance’s arm was an albino snake wrapped around her neck. Her face, flecked with blood.

The ground shattered before my feet. “I said start the fucking car.” Her voice cracked. She cocked her gun again.

Chance’s leg, shredded above the knee. His lower leg dangled by a rope of muscle. When she pulled them along, it swung like a pendulum. Church bells rang out somewhere, announcing it was eleven o’clock in the morning.

I ripped open the back doors then started the van. Del hadn’t yet shut the door when the other men appeared at the hood. I stomped the pedal like it was their skull, Del screaming at me, asking what the fuck I was doing. She fired a few quick shots as they grew smaller in the rearview, and the whole scene became cold, non-existent. We were in their basement, twenty years ago. Chance and I were playing video games while Delilah yelled “Shoot ‘em shoot ‘em shoot ‘em.” I had no sensation on my skin. The air was heavy, embalming.

Delilah’s voice was a stream of consolations in the darkness, assuring Chance that everything was going to be okay, that he’d be fine. One arm at a time, I pulled off my shirt and tossed it back to use as a tourniquet. I only saw teeth and the reflection on her eyes.

I blew through a red light without thinking and it wasn’t until I heard the bellow of a horn and squealing brakes that realization came crashing down on the point of my skull: I could have died. I could have widowed my wife, abandoned my child. Because of some misplaced sense of loyalty, of family, I could have ruined not only my life but the lives of those who I loved most. Because I couldn’t hold the present tight enough, I almost stomped out the future.

Somehow, we’d gotten back to the job site. A moth to the flame. I shut off the engine. The house was empty, full of ghosts. Delilah whimpered in the back, helping Chance down to the ground and around the side. His skin was the color of caulk. Hers was yellow.

I dropped the keys on the floor and hung his other arm over my shoulder. These two, they were nothing more than harbingers of death. They were people who invited you into their home and hugged you in order to get in position to slide their knife between your ribs cleanly so that no blood would fall on their carpet. They were not fit for life and as I helped carry them inside, I knew that I would kill them.

#

Chance slumped against the wall, the bottom of his leg textured like some morbid tropical flower. The tourniquet had staunched the bleeding, but without attention from someone who knew what they were doing, he would die within the hour. Part of me wanted to sit next to him, to smooth his hair and laugh about pushing Del into the Commons Pond, to make peace with my feelings toward him. The other part begged to sink the claw end of a hammer into his temple.

Del skittered around like the room like a hummingbird on meth. She’d already ransacked the upstairs, looking for something to help her brother. Her face was almost as pale as his, though hers was horror and panic where his was a body running dry. I crouched before Chance, holding his hand. His breathing ran shallow, eyes flittered like they held a thousand butterflies behind them.

“Open your eyes,” I whispered. “Open your eyes and release them.”

Static-white dots clouded my vision when she smacked the back of my head.

“Fucking help me find something. Jesus, you’re worthless.”

A thin blue slit appeared between Chance’s eyelids. His lips quivered. I leaned to him.

“She can be such a cunt, sometimes.” His words rode on death’s sigh.

And before I could bite it back, before I could gnaw on my hand or swallow it to the pit of my stomach, a thunderclap cry escaped my mouth. My face shimmered with tears. I began to dry-heave, I was crying so hard.

Delilah’s boots were a terrified heartbeat. Her voice, a stiletto through my eardrum. “‘Is he dead? Is he dead?”

“No he’s not dead, you fucking cow!”

She tumbled to the floor, holding both of us between trembling arms. Chance lolled his head forward, touching his forehead with ours. I tried to control my breathing so an errant sob wouldn’t give anyone a concussion. I squeezed them until I thought my head would explode, then whispered to Delilah.

“Check in the basement.”

“What?” Her voice, ragged with tears.

“I cut my hand the other day. I think there’re supplies in the basement.”

She jumped up as if electrified and hurried downstairs.

I kissed Chance’s forehead, said, “I’m sorry, brother,” and followed Delilah.

She searched even more frantically than the upstairs, throwing tools as if she was in a cartoon. A hacksaw landed by my feet, and if I believed in Providence, I’d say It was one sick fuck. To think of using it made me ill. The nailgun she loved so much was on the other side of the room, and with a revolver tucked into her waistband, I wasn’t going to risk it.

She was rifling through the toolbox, scattering nails and screws, and didn’t hear me pick up the wrecking bar. I opened my mouth to make some apology, eulogy, something to justify my actions, but when she turned around, a single synapse fired and it resonated inside my skull: Swing.

The first time it felt like hitting a melon or biting into an apple. She fell to the floor, arms and legs akimbo. She almost rolled over, but I closed my eyes because I couldn’t handle seeing her watch me again, seeing that look of recognition, and just swung and swung and metal struck the concrete andI swung and swung and swung until my face was damp.

I faced the direction I thought was the steps and cracked open my eyes, relieved that I was correct. I peeked downward. Blood covered my shins, legs, hands, boots. I didn’t look behind.

Upstairs, Chance’s breathing had become weaker yet. Flecks of spittle at the corner of his mouth. I kneeled again, body operating on auto-pilot, like I was one of the videogames we’d played for so long, and picked him up as if he was several bags of cement. Walking to the basement took more than five minutes, each step an exercise in fine muscle mechanics. As we got to the bottom, I closed my eyes again so I wouldn’t see what was left of Del. His exhausted gasps said it wasn’t anything good.

I underestimated.

I thought the penultimate step was the last, and as my foot tried to plant on damp concrete, Chance and I tumbled forward. His grunt was little more than an exhalation. My eyes opened by reflex. Del’s head looked like a watermelon after a shotgun blast, her body blackened by bruising and blood.

My body moved, though I wasn’t sure who was controlling it. It walked across the basement, avoiding a slick of blood next to what had been Del’s bright shining face. It picked up the nailgun, then crossed the room again, kneeling by Chance. The silence in the room was crushing. I kissed his forehead, said, “I loved you, Brother. I loved you both, but I love her more,” then pressed the tip against his temple and pulled the trigger. His eyes twitched, breath skipped like a scratched record, then stopped. My body cupped his, then grabbed Delilah’s heel and pulled it in.

I remembered the feeling of their skin on my face. I remembered brushing their hair back behind their ears. I remembered telling Del that I found out who the girl in that movie was, the shimmering one she resembled. I remembered squeezing their fingers between mine, and how we were connected, like a circle, like an ouroboros. I didn’t remember passing out between the members of my dead family.