A Miserable Pile of Questions

“Can you actually kill him?”

Billy and the Sasquatch arrived at the Fuzon Corporation’s headquarters to find it even more of a ruin than it once was. What remained of the glass doors were scattered across the ground like Legos in a child’s bedroom. Some of the glass was lodged into the corpses scattered with even less meaning. It was clear that most of the action had long since ended and all that remained was the stillness of finality. And yet, they could hear, even from down so low, the upper floors becoming an even larger bloodbath.

One of corpse they saw just outside the entrance was that of a young man. He was dressed in the uniform of a police officer, but he couldn’t have been any older than nine. Last time Billy checked, the police started recruiting at the ripe age of eleven.  Then again, that was years ago. He was a blond child with a green eye and a twisted left arm. His other eye had been dislodged from his body and trampled on by the crowd. His teeth were filled sharp to make them akin to sharks. But their sharpness wasn’t enough to keep them from breaking after a baton was shoved down his throat. His eye looked to have wanted to cry before the end, but nothing came out. (His name was Luke Lucas. When he was a child, he dreamed of the utopias promised to him of moon colonies and robotic servants. He was the son of a computer programmer back when that was a useful skill to have. They had a falling out after Luke told his father that he was applying to work for the police. His father thought the boy too young to join the police. “A twelve year old has no place with those thugs,” he said to his son. They were the last words Lucas ever heard his father say to him. Nine months later, he would die still dreaming of those utopias stolen from him.)

Billy and the Sasquatch entered the building and crept through the wreckage like ghosts in a memory. The secretary had her head caved in. One of the police officers must have mistaken her for a… Whatever the group the other corpses belonged to. (He could tell it was by a police office as a balding redhead with a glabella unibrow was beside her body, his hands around the broken typewriter lying atop her head. He had part of a nameplate shoved through his head, though the name on it was illegible. [I do not know who he was. Police records were lost in a fire and there was no one left alive who knew him.]) There was some hair strewn around the corpse, though Billy couldn’t tell if it was brown or blonde. She looked to be about his age, maybe a year younger… maybe a year older. She had a nameplate a few feet away from her, though it was broken into several pieces, most of which in other people’s bodies. All Billy could see were the letters “Ca” on one and “t” on another, both jutting out of the corpse of a man of 12 years with terror on his face. Billy told himself he didn’t know who she was. (He did know her. They grew up together in an apartment complex that was torn down for complex and frankly petty reasons. Her name was Cate Blackwood-Smith. She applied for work at the Fuzon Corporation three weeks prior to her death. She was starving and they offered to feed her. She was shocked to discover they didn’t want her to work in the factories, but as a receptionist. It seems the previous one died and a replacement was required. She fit the build of being young, blond, and desperate. She never met the man upstairs, the CEO of the company, but there is evidence to suggest she was due to meet him the day after she died. Instead, she died.)

“Have you ever done this before?”

The pair continued moving. What else could they do for the dead? And yet, there was something different about these corpses. In most parts of the City, the dead bodies were akin to a backdrop to the general misfortune of life. Most people simply ignored them after a while. Unless there was something truly special to the corpses, so they’d say. For example, a corpse that was standing up with seemingly no help whatsoever would be something to look at indeed. Or, for that matter, one nailed to the neon lights of a popular bar tends to get a lot of attention from those who frequent it. Or even the corpse of someone who used to be famous gets some attention.

But there was something else to these corpses. Not the corpses themselves, a dead body looks like any other dead body (bar the details the body had in life); nor the sheer magnitude of the corpses, for there were some places where the dead are more numerous than in this building. They weren’t even placed into a pattern some would call “artistic.” They were just strewn about the building like any other massacre. And yet, there was some unnamable essence to this disaster, something in the air that changed it from a mere massacre into… something else. Incomplete might be the right word for it. Then again, this painting wouldn’t be completed until the last body fell.

“What do you want?”

The elevator was broken, as all elevators in the City were. Billy didn’t even know why they tried it. Most people instinctively go for the elevator, as evidenced by the number of corpses lying trampled around the elevator. So Billy and the Sasquatch went up the stairs. The spiraling staircase, fortunately, was large enough to fit the pair of them, and then some. Maybe that’s why less people were trampled on them. Each turn had a square area to turn to the next set of steps. There were fewer bodies there, but some littered the staircase. The remains of a child of three was lying on the foyer of the staircase, perfectly centered and incased by the spiraling steps. Five stories up, they found who could only be the mother. Her jaw was pushed through the metal railings and her hands were reaching out for her child. (Luna Peña’s boyfriend had left her the day she told him she was pregnant. She had few friends within the City, though none who could help her in this regard. Luna moved from building to building until she found herself standing before the headquarters of the Fuzon Corporation. There were other people there; all angry about a tragic incident involving three boys she had never met. She tried to get through the crowd, as her child was hungry and their new home was just two miles away. Sadly, someone shot an empty gun and the crowd swept her away like a black hole. Her child had no name.)

As they were walking up flight after flight after flight of stair, it occurred to Billy that he had no means of actually killing the CEO beyond strangulation. This wouldn’t be a problem, but he didn’t feel strong enough to do such an act. He didn’t think anyone within the City walls was strong enough. One time, Billy watched a fight between two people outside a bar over something he never cared to find out. The two ended up trying to strangle each other to death, but they only ended up passing out from exhaustion. He could only hope for a solution. Maybe a shard of glass will be lodged into someone’s throat or something, he thought.

As they ascended, the pair could hear the screams of the conclusion to this sordid affair. With each step, they grew softer and softer. Thirteen stories above the bottom floor, a couple was lying at the stair’s turn. He was once a bearded man with a sharp nose and balding black hair. She was a brunette with long hair and an eye patch covering her blue right eye. They looked at each other in their final moments with… not love, but something close to it. The feeling one has to someone who they used to love deeply, but now merely care for. (Maria and Juán Jacobson once existed and were married three days before their deaths. That’s all I know.) Billy tried to ignore thoughts of the secretary downstairs.

“Is this how you want to be remembered?”

They decided to rest by these former lovers, perhaps to wait for the screaming to stop. It gave Billy some time to think. One thought that crossed his mind was of what the Fuzon Corporation actually made? They were a ubiquitous part of City life, no doubt about that. To say that most people living in the City worked, in one capacity or another, for the Fuzon Corporation would be an understatement. The faded signs plastered around the City claimed they were once some kind of electronic company, something to do with computers. But if that’s the case, why didn’t they fix stuff like the elevators? Why did none of the buildings have electricity? What even is a computer? Is it some sort of writing apparatus or is it a portable theatre? But such questions would have to wait as the screaming finally died down enough for them to continue upwards. Where else could they go?

Up and up and up they went. Past corpses broken beyond recognition; past those who had been murdered for their righteous anger and those for their misfortune; past the young and the old; the sick and the sickly. One corpse had their eyes clawed out while another had her neck snapped. (Mary Smith wanted to be a school teacher when she was a child. Plex Jones wanted to be Plex.) The menagerie of lifelessness filled the stairwell like stars on a cloudy night: what was there wasn’t fully there, but what could be seen was such a sight (a nice way to refer to countless corpses of the innocent and guilty alike strewn across a confined space in all their grotesque grandeur). The Sasquatch would pause at times, seemingly for no reason at all. Did he know any of these people, Billy wondered. Did he pass them by on his travels? Or was he just the sort who thought about corpses? Billy thought himself of the same cloth, but step by agonizing step, he realized how wrong his assumption was simply from the amount of tears welling from the Sasquatch’s eyes. Who could hold such sadness? Who could feel so much?

“Are you ok?” asked the Sasquatch as if he wasn’t crying.

“Y-yeah,” stammered Billy, “Why?”

“Because you’re crying,” smiled the Sasquatch.

“What are you afraid of?”

“I-I I… am?” Billy said while whipping the stream of tears from his face. The Sasquatch didn’t respond. He simply went back to looking at the corpse before them. It was small corpse, probably a midget or one of the rare children flittering through the margins of the City. His teeth were broken, as was his nose, as was the wall half of his face was jammed into. He was wearing a denim jacket with a smiley face button on the left lapel. It was an odd button in that the printer must have made a mistake and given it three eyes. Billy resisted the compulsion to steal the button. (Jonathan P. Wilson was a traveling arsonist. He would go from ruin to ruin burning down the last buildings standing in each of them. Some were easy to do, as wood buildings tend to be easier to burn than stone ones. His last building was to have been the Fuzon Corporation’s headquarters, which he had been scoping for the past month. When he was done scoping, he would burn the building down for reasons that were only known to him. Or maybe he was hoping to get high up the building to see his true target. Jonathan was known for his secrecy in all areas save for his name and his profession.) Inside the jacket was a gun too big for the small man, but big enough for Billy. Inexplicably, the gun was loaded, though only with one bullet. Little guy must not have gotten the chance to use it, Billy thought.

“Have you ever fired a gun before?”

Round and round the stairs they went, passing by accomplished atrocity after concluded cruelty. It became apparent after the sixty-eighth floor that this wasn’t an office building at all. That would require offices for people to work within in the first place. No, this was a hollow shell created solely to lift one room higher than all the rest. A gravestone meant only to show superiority above all the other ones. The elevator probably never worked in the first place; just another broken promise in a City that offered so little.

“Can you live with yourself after it’s done?”

Eventually, the pair reached the top floor, where the remainder of the corpses lay. Two turrets positioned right in front of a steel door where whirling automatically and with nary a bullet within them. They followed them no matter where they went in the room. The turrets were spent on shooting the bodies lying before the two. Of the bodies before them, only one was clinging to life. She was an older woman, probably in her early thirties. She had red hair cut by someone who gave up halfway through a Mohawk and hoped no one would notice. She was large for someone living in the City, nearly 200 pounds. She had a few tattoos scattered across her arms, mostly in the shape of a chain of roses. One was of a cross. Even as her throat was gashed by bullet fire and she gasped her last bloody breaths, there was an infectiousness to her unexpected smile. It was as if even in such a cruel, unfair death, she was able to find something to smile about. Or maybe she just knew when to take a joke… Billy didn’t know either way. (Her name was Henrietta Williamson. This is the third time I’ve rewritten this section. Each time, I find myself at a loss as to what to say about Henrietta. She is, in many ways, the most influential person on this brave new world we find ourselves within. Her life story could fill an entire library from her early days as a child detective to her later years as an angry old woman who wants the best for everyone. And yet, the more I read about her, the more it feels like telling her story as a traditional story would do her an injustice. She was always flittering the margins, be she the Ace Detective you heard about but never read about, the loveable one off character who has an impact on the narrative, or simply the woman who brushes others to the side while she’s running home. Unlike the rest of the people discussed [and indeed, those who weren’t], Henrietta deserves to be in the margins of the narrative. It’s what she would have wanted.)

Beyond the corpse, there stood a set of doors. It took a few minutes for Billy to move the bodies away from the door so it could be opened. There weren’t many bodies in the area, just ten or so. The poor sods, Billy thought, so close yet so far away. As he went to open the door to what he presumed to be the sole room of the building, whilst the turrets continued clicking away as if such sounds could kill, the Sasquatch put his hand onto Billy’s shoulder and asked “Are you sure you want to go in alone?”

In those simple, complex words, Billy could hear all the implicit subtext such a question meant: all the unintended implications and earnest meanings. The unspoken promises between the two were given space to breath in the conscious world. The things they meant to say in their short time together. Things Billy didn’t even realize were questions in need of being asked or answered. Baseless assumptions he made long ago about the implications of the action. Billy didn’t have an answer to the subtexts. Such questions are Historical in nature; they could only be answered in retrospect, when the story has been concluded and all the players away from the stage. And even then, the question may be lost to the minutia of the moment.

Instead of answering, Billy continued opening the door. To his surprise, it was unlocked. Another broken promise, Billy thought with a cynical smirk. He walked through the doors while the Sasquatch descended down into the shadows. He didn’t even look back at the Sasquatch for one last goodbye. He told himself they’d see each other again once the deed had been done. And they’d laugh at the simplicity of it all, missing all the complex sadness buried within. Then again, Billy knew how this story would end. Which is perhaps why, as he stepped through the door and the Sasquatch said, “Fair thee well, Billy…” that Billy replied with “Palmer. Billy Palmer.” Out of all the names he has given, I’m inclined to believe that one to be his. If, for no other reason than I can’t see the con in it. The click of the closing door was disguised by the sound of empty turrets.

“Are you ready to die?”

Support the blog on Patreon.