Bench
Rural Maryland
9 years, 11 days after
The mob wants blood? I’ll give them blood.
Bench knifed his way through the crowd. His elbows jabbed between human bodies to make space, bony blades prying torsos apart. He twisted his figure, slithered sideways through the gaps he made.
And his eyes flicked now and then to that dark presence up on the stage. Sitting there. Nearly motionless save for the periodic slow blink of saggy eyelids. The figure looked small from back here, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d look bigger when he got close, when he slid the shiv between the ribs, when he drained the life out onto both of their shoes.
Subconsciously Bench pressed his arm against the jagged piece tucked in the inside pocket of his jacket. Let its bulk reassure him. A talisman as much as a weapon, at least for the moment.
Mud squished underfoot as he advanced toward the stage. The gallows jutted up from a sopping field just outside of camp. The collective feet of the crowd had torn away the sod, laid bare the sludge beneath. A clay-like gloop, thick as oatmeal, the color of rust.
It was something about the color, he thought, that brought back the memories. Life before the collapse. A small child playing in the rain. Kneeling on the sidewalk with her. Both of them leaning forward over a guttering puddle. Icy droplets slinking down the back of his collar, making him shudder. The two of them forming mud pies out of the thick stuff around the new telephone pole in front of their house.
He’d lost her, the child. He’d lost everything.
The crowd shifted. Cinched around him. The mosh pit growing tighter and tighter as he surged closer to the stage. Shoulders dug into him. Hip bones tried to lock with his. Still, he pressed forward.
A palpable agitation wafted through the masses gathered here. It was so heavy, he could smell it. A bodily stench. Like leather with some sour undertone to it. Something spoiled or rancid intertwining with the animal musk.
He could feel it in the atmosphere, too. Certain. Plain. Like a red mist plumed in the air here, lurching and angry. It was the same thing every mob experienced, he thought.
Blood lust.
All the hackles up. All the lips curling into snarls. Teeth bared.
Ready to leap for the jugular of the next motherfucker who showed any sign of weakness. Ready to tear someone to bloody bits.
Every mob wanted only destruction, he knew. To pluck something or someone from existence. Wipe it from the universe. Eradicate. Annihilate. Destroy.
Pull it apart and watch the juices come seeping out.
Like a cruel child ripping the wings off a fly, then having at the legs one by one. The mob wanted only to hurt something — a kind of entertainment that had spanned human history.
Every swarming crowd just needed someone to come along and pull their trigger. Release the fury. Savagery. Carnage. Unleash that raging red tide. Set it the fuck off.
Of course, that was precisely the point of today. The whole event existed to sate the bloodthirsty masses. To appease them, at least in part.
Give them blood.
Public executions. The barbaric pageant to show the might of camp, the might of its beloved leader.
Up on stage, Father blinked again. Skin creased around his eyelids, all slack and folded like the flaps around a dog’s mouth. Bags under the eyes the shade of a plum. It looked like he’d just woken up after a three-year booze and pills binge. Maybe he had.
He didn’t swing the ax himself, of course, Father. Didn’t knock the stools out from under those to be hanged. Didn’t fire any weapons, flip any switches, light any fires, knot the ropes of those to be drawn and quartered.
No. He always sat off to the side. Propped upright in his wheelchair. A bemused smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Just here for another event, a formality. A staged display. A letting of blood to honor the figurehead. A grisly photo op, more or less.
A spectacle.
It was a demonstration of order above all else. That was the point of it, Bench thought. To put this force, power, and control on display. To show the might that Father and the council wielded, to show how order still ruled chaos with force — excessive force if need be.
To awe the crowd with brutality.
After all this time, however many centuries that mankind had roamed the earth, it was still a public display of brutal violence that reached them the deepest. It was as if the darkest rituals fished a hand right into their chest cavities and clutched at their hearts. Squeezed and stroked and played with that crooked muscle, with their deepest emotions.
And that was why he had to do it here, do it now. In front of the bloodthirsty masses. He needed all of them to see it. To witness the raw power as it thrust through the tip of his blade.
The first group of those sentenced to death stood center stage, even as he pressed through the mob. Three men and one woman. Hands lashed behind their backs. Nooses looped around their necks. Feet balanced atop rough hewn stools.
Something awkward presented itself in the posture of all four of them. The shoulders stooped a certain way, vulture-like humps occupying their upper backs.
The eyes of the doomed danced over the crowd, looking for mercy in the faces out there and finding none. The whites of their eyes looked big and glossy against the dirty skin of their faces. They glittered where the sunlight touched them. Twinkled like dying stars.
Flies circled their heads. Anxious for the feast to begin, for the meat to hurry up and die already.
And as the black-hooded executioners crept out onto the stage and closed on the doomed, the murmurs in the crowd grew to full-throated bellows. Voices hitting higher notes, straining toward the tops of their various registers. Anticipation turned to impatience, pulsating in that red mist around them now.
A lust for violence, lust for death. Slouching toward that spasm of relief.
The mob twitched and fidgeted, all of them leaning forward, wanting to be as close as possible at the moment of death. Eyes open so wide.
Aroused, they were. Awed and ugly. Maybe there was nothing uglier than the lit up faces in the crowd, aglow and tingling as they waited for the blood to be let.
One of black hoods read off the names and charges against those to be executed, but Bench couldn’t hear it over the crowd. Every other word was swallowed up by the cacophony.
That sour stench intensified here at the front of the crowd. A musty bodily smell. Sharp like old cheese.
The black hoods moved on the doomed then. Kicked out the stumps from beneath them one after another.
The bodies bounced as the slack ran out, and the strain of the bodyweight pulled the ropes so taut they twanged out sounds, each one a slightly different pitch like plucked strings on an instrument.
And the flesh of the hanged faces bobbed and jostled with the jerking movements.
The crowd groaned, but there was some note of pleasure in their voices. Some ecstasy in the level of stimulation expressed.
The necks of the three men broke cleanly. Instant death. The biggest one shat himself.
But the woman lived. Choked. Kicked her legs at the empty air.
Her face went darker. Blushing to a deep red like wine.
The plump flesh of her neck bagged up around the rope. That red tint slowly going purple.
Her eyes bulged and quivered. Mouth gagging out voiceless anguish. Hissing and whispering and gargling out nothing.
And a restless sound rippled through the crowd. Inward gasps. Breath held collectively. Some reservation felt among them at last. Like maybe this was wrong. Like maybe they shouldn’t have come down here to cheer brutal deaths like they were watching the fucking Super Bowl.
When the woman finally slumped and went still, the crowd breathed again. The tension released. Whatever qualms they’d entertained eased up now. Fell away. That red mist strengthening once more around them.
Bench watched some of this. Eyes flicking from the violent display to the crowd to Father and back.
And he felt his breathing go in and out. Slow. Calm. Normal.
His heartbeat, too, remained steady. Under control despite the savageness on display.
But that made sense, he thought. He was on a mission. Doing something in service of something bigger than himself. He couldn’t let the world outside touch him, couldn’t let emotions get in the way.
And he pressed deeper into the crowd all the while. Deeper and deeper.
The bodies were packed tighter toward the front of the proceedings. All those limbs and torsos jammed together, as though the front row might well be a wall of flesh and bone. Uninterrupted. No empty space to be found among the body parts.
Father wasn’t within arm’s reach. Not yet. But he would be soon.
Bench drew up to just a few rows out. He would wait there for a while before pressing forward again. Watch. Pick his moment.
The executioners hauled the bodies away, set up the next spectacle. Something more gruesome than hanging, of course. These events always built in tension, in level of stimulation. There must be a crescendo, right? A peak. A grand finale. Such were the laws of storytelling, of myth-making, of excitement.
The nature of the human imagination demanded it. Maybe it demanded all of this.
So what would it be today? The space was probably too tight for drawing and quartering. He didn’t see any of the large vats of water to suggest boiling, which seemed among the more popular methods employed of late.
His eyes drifted down to the mud again as he pondered it. Looked at the craters, boot prints, cupped places etched into the muck.
And that rusty colored slop conjured ancient feelings again. Images of the world just after everything changed. Images best forgotten.
The first time he’d killed someone, he’d buried the body in that sandy layer of soil where the rusty stuff lay. Gouged at the earth with his fingers. Laid the bulk in that hollow and covered it over.
He’d vomited after that first time. Whole body gone queasy and clammy. Shivering despite the heat.
It had gotten easier after that. The softness in him going lean and hard like his body. Sun-charred. Sinewy.
The will to survive blossomed where old feelings once resided — mercy, empathy, tolerance — all of these replaced, erased. Forgotten.
Survival. That was the only thing now.
So kill. Destroy. Take what’s yours.
It all belongs to you if you want bad enough.
He glanced up, these memories and abstractions dashed by what he saw.
Two men were being lashed to the posts currently forming the structure of the gallows. A burning. Those were always the most harrowing somehow. He thought it was the screams. Shrill. Horrifying. Always made his skin crawl.
The hooded ghouls built up mounds of wood and straw at the feet of the two men. Then one read off what they were to be burned for, though the crowd once again swallowed up these sounds, rendered the words meaningless. Hollow.
As the flames at the feet were lit, he pushed forward again. Now was the time.
He snaked his hand inside his jacket as he reached the front of the crowd. Unsheathed his blade.
And he climbed up onto the bodies, like the tightly packed crowd was a human extension of the stage. He walked right up them like a staircase, his feet finding nooks and planes to hold his weight, and then he traversed the last six or eight feet walking on top of the lurching sea of humanity. Moved right to the cusp, the lip of the stage.
He hurled himself onto the wooden floor. Landed there on hands and knees. Knife jutting out from one hand, still firmly in his grip.
Father’s feet were right there. Withered legs that ran down to touch the wooden planks just between Bench’s hands. Almost like he was kneeling before the old man in worship.
He lurched for Father. Knife arcing to slash at the old man.
The first arrow stopped him short of his target. Ripped through cleanly. It came from his right at a faintly downward trajectory. Tore right through the soft flesh of his neck. Removed most of his throat in the process. A strange hollow left where it had been.
Open. Wet.
The force jerked him to the side. A stutter-step that tilted him away from Father.
Guards. They must have guards posted up on those platforms in the trees. Archers. Hidden among the leaves.
The second arrow came in on a straighter angle. Almost straight down. It penetrated his now wide open throat, the head lodging a few inches in.
Blood gurgled out. Spluttered into his cupped hands before him. Hot. Runnels of it spewing forth in pulses.
He staggered. Dropped to his knees.
He looked out at the crowd. All those glowing faces pointed his way now. Wide eyes and wider smiles. Watching him die.
Entertained.
And the world seemed farther away already. Going softer and darker.
He sank to his belly. Ribcage jammed against the wooden planks of the stage. Smell of dirt and raw lumber in his nostrils. Vision zoomed in on a gaping blackness between two boards.
He wasn’t scared somehow. Wasn’t panicked. Only cold.
Cold and empty.
He died face down. Eyelids fluttering and then stopping. Father’s feet were the last image he saw.
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