Short Story: "To Kill"

"To Kill" -- It is 1996 and I am eleven years old and riding my bike in the sweltering summer heat down the country lane along the long straight three-mile stretch before the road curves and splits off up into the hills and forests where I live and was born. From behind me some older teens, some of whom I will years later go to school with in the nearby town, race past my bike in a convertible at sixty miles per hour, swerving the car toward me as they pass howling and shouting in strange guffaws like animals from an alien zoo. I start hyperventilating immediately as tears form on my face absent the act of crying because I don't even have time to really feel. A quarter-mile ahead they pull into the road named after the town's butte and turn the car around backing into the lane so quickly the tires make a screeching sound. With nothing but ditch and fences and fields along the road, I have nowhere and no time to run or hide or get away. They drive back past me at seventy miles per hour howling and laughing again this time coming straight at me, swerving into the oncoming lane in a one-sided game of chicken. I throw my body out of the way and into the ditch just as the car passes. I feel the wind of its violent acceleration on my skin as my body hits concrete and ditch and gravel.

After they've gone I peddle home the last mile and a half as fast as I can hyperventilating the whole way, blood running down my arm, the sting of gravel embedded in my palm where my arm hit the ground somewhere throbbing like a heartbeat, the still-unreal pain gnawing at my suffocating awareness, the whole world dimming at the edges in an amnestic blur, looking back behind me every few seconds to see if they are coming back for another pass just for the fun of it all.

When I get home and my parents see the blood and scrapes on my arm and ask me what happened over and over again, I tell them someone tried to kill me. They ask questions and keep asking what really happened and I tell them but I don't know if they understand or believe me, so I tell them that I have to kill the virus-infected robots on the moon in Descent, the 1995 computer game about shooting robots in the tunnels of Earth's moon and Venus and Mercury and the outer worlds of the solar system beyond the asteroid belt. They laugh at the strange words I am saying to them. I always say such strange things, they say. I can only see behind their eyes, hear their laughter echoing down the distant corridors of my faded perception, the hazy heat of summer benumbing the present moment as the world recedes into a phantasmal afterglow, the anechoic chambers of my mind then killing it all with perfect silence. I hear their dull footsteps as they leave the room a thousand miles away, their world just a dream to be real now. "I am so gone," I say to the empty room.

Though I will not finish the game for nearly another thirty years, I will carry it with me constantly wherever I go. I will wonder what it would be like to be trapped out there on Pluto's moon Charon where the game ends, the vertiginous claustrophobia of billions of miles without safety and atmosphere crushing down on my body with all the weight and terror of a cosmic ocean of matter. I will dream of the Saturnian moon Enceladus's icy geysers coruscating in the terrible cold glow of the distant sun's rays, the white-hot albedo pushing the horizon's terminator into something beyond the black of nothing.

Later in the evening sitting there at the computer lost in the labyrinthine corridors and tunnels of a derelict moon, I still see that ugly maroon convertible barreling past me head-on, their faces drunk-sick with glee at my terror, the dark of their minds an inchoate maze of primeval torments etched upon the twisting stair to some insensate hell.

I bite my lip so hard I taste the metal of my blood.

I smile and laugh and cry and see through my heart's inward window the starwheel as it keeps turning ever downward the world and all it dares contain.