they are the hunters;

[wingborne]

“It’s not like us, he doesn’t have to vanish,” John says. “He gets to be alive.”

--

John is watching American Idol. He lies horizontal to the couch, arms draped over the flat of his stomach. Two white boxes sit on the coffee table, take-out from The Dragon. Chow mein, that’s all John orders, white boxes of chow mein decorating the apartment between empty beer bottles. A hammer lies between the boxes. Mechanic’s hammer, coated in blood on the flat head.

“Hey,” John says. “You almost missed it, buddy. They’re kicking her off, all Survivor and shit.” His eyeglasses, dark framed, reflect the crowd on screen. The distorted people jam forward, frantic and greedy, screaming.

“That’s shit TV, man. Melt your brain out, all pink and gross, out of your ears.” Dave washes his hands in the kitchen sink, picking at the flakes of dried blood underneath his blunt nails. The television rises in volume behind him, crowd reaching a crescendo. He snorts under his breath, drying his hands in the pink cotton towel.

“She seems nice,” John tells him. “That’s too bad. I liked her. She seems real nice, Dave, they shouldn’t kick her off.”

“Her? No way. They need to kick her off, look at that face. Eats babies in her free time to keep up that youthful larynx.” Dave sits in the sofa, hands still damp over his thin jeans. “Use your head, dipshit. What sort of show has a baby-eater? Bad for business.”

“I guess.” John finally looks at him, the first time since Dave walked into the apartment. “How was the job?”

“What do you think about getting code names?” Dave leans back on their dingy sofa. “Show we’re serious business. Strike fear into their hearts, make them think twice before they cross the Timestopper.”

“The Timestopper is hells lame, Dave.” John turns his head back to the television. “Do you really think it’s okay for them to kick her off? She didn’t do anything wrong. She was just trying her best.”

“Clean up your hammer before you go to bed, buddy. Blood doesn’t come out of that table.” He rises from the sofa, patting his knee. His shirt is still splattered with spit and blood, and small bits of bone embed themselves through the cotton. He balls the shirt, tossing it in the trash, and thinks John is right. Timestopper was a lousy name.

Behind him, a woman on the television cries into the microphone.

--

They were a two-man team. John said they fixed things for certain people at certain prices, and that they were professionals. John liked that word, he said it like they knew what they were doing. Professionals. Clean, quick, in and out, they fixed things and nobody would hear from them again. They did jobs. They ate. They slept. Dave could feel almost human, but never moral.

Rose hooked them up with the customers, contacting them through different numbers and masked IP addresses, people telling them names, a Morse code blinking from the neon sign across a motel. They hadn’t seen her in years. Dave could remember, when they were younger, she used to love the ocean in the sunlight. She lived alone, somewhere near the ocean. They would go to the beach, him in red shorts, her in lilac skirts, and they would stare into the ocean from atop a cliff. She said the light made the water like jewels, cascading down with the waves, and how she could watch the ocean forever. He could see her, sometimes, in his dreams. She’s still there, wearing her lilac skirts and standing on sand, eyes glittering with youth.

A job gone bad took out her eyes. She mostly kept to herself now.

It was understandable.

Jade supplied them with supplies. She was a supplier, and whenever she met them in a dim parking lot in some state without proper restrooms, she would give them firm hugs and kiss John on the cheek. Her beat up car always had goods in the trunk, things that went pop and bang. She, herself, had her own stash, showing a preference for her Remington. That went bang a little more like her grandfather’s supplies had gone bang. When she had the time, they would sit on the hoods of their cars with their cigarettes lighting the air, and she would tease them about being fugitives from the law, while she was on the up-and-up. She was employed for an agency, and she was very disposable. She seemed cheerful about that, but Dave had never seen her sad about anything.

“I just never thought,” she would say, every time. “Especially not you two!” And John would laugh, braying his awful laugh, and Dave would lie back on their hotwired car and stare up at the stars. Sometimes he could imagine the flickering of a street light was Rose, somewhere, saying that she was there, too. Those were the times he liked, when they were all together.

“You grew out your hair,” John would say.

“I did not! You just forgot. Admit it, you forgot!” And Jade would dive in, fingers tickling John’s side until he was out of breath, both of them scrambling and running around on the faded lines of the parking lot. She would always catch him, because John couldn’t run fast, and they would tumble together.

“Let me go, you smell-”

“You smell worse, pooplord-”

Dave would watch over them, judging on their techniques, grading Jade’s noogie to John’s faint bite on her upper arm. The smoke from his mouth would rise up into the sky, and he watched them push their heads together, intimate and rough. The motel sign would flicker above them, not in code, but enough for Dave to think somewhere, by the ocean, Rose was laughing with her hand over her mouth, just like she used to do.

They hadn’t heard from Jade for three months. She usually gave them a sign from a disposable cell phone, or at least an untraceable email, with the code for their next meet-up, within a month. But she had vanished, silent and mysterious. No more hair with a life, no more bright smiles, no more bone-crunching hugs, no more tumbles across scraped parking lots that result in bruises and bleeding cuts. He remembers her as a girl, young and happy, bare feet on the tire swing with her hands cut from grasping the rope, and promising John that she’d never let go.

“Do you think something happened to her?” Dave asks him, peering through the blinds, fingers sliding over the flatness.

“It doesn’t really matter.” John shrugs, indifferent.

Dave grunts, lets the blinds snap shut, lets the topic go, lets John’s sister fade away.

--

“We are not good people,” John says. “We are not good adults.”

--

Dave tests it out on his tongue. Timekeeper. Clock. Tick. Tock. Or: Flames. Fire. Heat. Burnt. They all taste wrong in his mouth, don’t quite fit the face in the mirror. His code name eludes him, and he doesn’t find it in the cramped bathroom with the egg white tiles. He’s gotten old, but that’s not what disturbs him. In the dirty reflection, above the stolen soap and cheap towels, he examines his burning eyes, and thinks it’s disturbing how he doesn’t look like sad. He doesn’t look unhappy, hell driven, wracked with guilt and heavy burdens. The things he’s seen, the things he’d done, he would have thought everything about him would be cold and twisted.

But he looks human.

In the garage, he can hear the faint scream. A man’s fingers are turning blue, flattening out against the table, and John is still swinging his hammer. He swings his hammer like it’s an art, graceful and clean, banging against the fingers, turning flesh into meat, turning bone into dust. Dave slips into the room, adjusting his tie, and takes a seat.

“I’m so sorry,” John says, eyes wide, face flecked with blood. “I’m so sorry, dude. You seem like a nice guy. Real nice. I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this.”

The worst part is, Dave thinks John means it. He thinks John is honestly apologizing. It’s sick, making the whole thing even sicker, the way John is like a big handsome puppy who tries so hard. John could have made it clean. He could have been a businessman. Not the fake businessman in the fake IDs and fake passports he’s got stored in their emergency duffel bags, packed away across abandoned stations, all listing under Jack Borne or Josh Hornet or Jord Collar. Real businessman. Real business. An office job, climb the corporate ladder, get a clear open window that overlooked all the other buildings where all the people looked like ants. He wanted John to have a better life, get married, have a thousand children in a perfect house, and not be here in this sordid empty garage in this blood soaked mess.

But he doesn’t know who he’s fooling, wishing this perfect life for his best friend. John didn’t need saving. Dave looks up from his tie, observes John’s sturdy face.

“I’m real sorry,” John says, “I know you were just trying your best.”

John looks human, too.

--

He always thought it was supposed to run in the family. He took the place of his brother, just like his brother took the place of someone else. But the rain made the alleyway slick and his dagger had broken off, a piece of it lost, and the man had made a sick wheezing sound, and the rain wouldn’t stop. He thought he would either feel nothing or everything, but it was neither. It felt like a piece of him was broken off, lost. It felt like not enough of him was lost.

A car passes and the headlights briefly illuminate the brick wall, covered in grafitti. His heart pulsates through his body, but the car passes into a faint rumble. Nobody knows, except maybe John, because John knows everything. He squats down, closer to the seeping garbage from the cold bins. He scrabbles to find the missing part of the blade, digging into the soft fleshy muscles, and he doesn’t quite feel sick about finding what the human body holds inside. The water was getting into his nose, and he gets the feeling the man must have had a family, once, too.

--

Sometimes, John watches the tape of his funeral. Dave got a tombstone, but nobody was left to attend and mourn and give him flowers. He liked it better that way, a solid slab of stone, a preemptive mark of his future. But John got a funeral, except he wasn’t interested in the weeping eulogies or the priest saying his deep intonations, the sky a perfect light blue for sailing kites.

He plays it over and over again, the part where his father lowers the roses, and kneels there. His father looks quiet, sad, and old. He looks like he lost his only son, and his shoulders sag, even as the crowd leaves in a mournful fear. John’s father replaces the flowers with fresh ones every week, sitting in front of the tombstone, not saying a word. He was never a man of words, just a man of looks.

“You regret it?” Dave asks, leaning with his forearms on the table.

“Well,” John says, “We are going to make a mistake one day. And then we will die. So I guess it is two tons worth of better than my dad thinks I’m dead already than him always waiting, right? And this way, he actually got to say something. I could hear it, too! That is also way better than him saying something and me being too dead to hear it. Now I know he loves me.”

“What do you think will happen to our bodies after we die?”

“Acid,” John answers, confident. “After we are tortured for like twenty thousand hours. In really, really bad ways. Then our bodies will get dumped in this big bin of acid and we will disappear forever.”

“Seriously? Dude, no. I was thinking way more organic. Stabbed to death, dumped in the river. They’ll dragged up our engorged bodies in a few weeks, days, but the fishes will have a great Thanksgiving over our face. They’ll go for your cheeks first. You’ll actually look better like that.”

“Sounds great, except you are totally wrong! Cement. Paved over. They will find our skeletons years, decades later, when they are renovating the place for a new laser space shuttle to outer space with silver spacesuits, because that is the future, and the future is totally awesome and nothing is wrong with my face!” John pinches his cheek, grimacing.

They spend the rest of the night offering ideas about their bodies. They don’t get funerals, neither of them, in their real deaths. Sometimes, Dave thinks about what he’d say if John went first. But something drops inside him, cold and hard, that makes him quickly forget. He doesn’t want to become the silhouette in front of the tombstone, leaving flowers every week. Even in the dingy hole without a real meal in months, rain leaking in from the cracks and missing half the deck of cards, he would prefer it with John than thinking he was dead.

He hopes John would say something nice at his funeral. With his luck, all John would say was that he smelled like feet, then toss a cigarette over him. But in the cold, with John curling up close to him on their sagging mattress, smelling like sweat and plaster, it’d be worth it to have that shitty funeral, to have John fucked up Egbert to even say that much at his dead rotting body.

That night, they don’t talk about where their souls would go.

Unlike their bodies, that much was obvious.

--

They can’t get out. Dave could, perhaps, but John could never run fast. And Dave didn’t have family anymore, just John. Always John.

A night, when they were sitting in front of the television, Dave drank another beer. John ate from his microwavable dinner, eyes glued to the daring tactics of a superhero on television. His shoulders gave soft twitches when the superhero threw heroic punches at the villains, a vague imitation.

“You want to be a hero?” Dave asks, putting his feet up on the table.

“It’s a good job. But he can’t ever reveal his super secret identity, because he’s stupid, so it sucks. It’s not like us, he doesn’t have to vanish. He gets to be alive. Everybody thinks he’s great, you know?”

“Vigilante justice.” Dave considers it. “Suits you. Maybe you should go respond to one of those old newspaper ads, get a job. One guy looking for another guy, must already have spandex underwear.”

“Haha, buddy. Haha.” John reclines against his seat, staring into the spotted ceiling. Dave moves next to him, watching his face intensely, the way it shifts in the light of the television. The bottles of beer stand before him in a clean row, and the night shifts onwards. He tries to see the boy in him, that youthful boy who laughed in his face, holding up that jar of apple juice in front of him in a taunt. He’d been happy, then. But the man sitting next to him seemed indifferent. He watched the ceiling the same way he watched people, without judgment and without care. A part of John Egbert had been buried a long time ago, and it was frightening to see that part of him still grin, like a ghost, when the people screamed for mercy.

“You ever wanted to get married?” Dave straightens the bow tie on John’s throat, fingers sliding down the buttons.

“I guess. It wouldn’t be terrible!”

“You’d make a lucky lady very happy.”

“I guess.” John still smelled like the perfume from the woman he’d been seeing earlier that night, the mark. It stung the nose, and Dave didn’t quite like it. John didn’t seem to mind, like he never seemed to mind. He just sat there, occasionally grinning his ghost grin, then fading away back to his tomb where his father laid flowers above an empty coffin once a week.

“You don’t want to settle down?”

“It’s not about what I want, Dave. It’s just-” John runs his fingers through his hair, eyes still watching the ceiling. “The first time, with my hammer, I realized it. I realized that we are not good people. We are not good adults. We’re gonna stay this way, forever, and there’s no way out, just a way in, and it’s like all this time, I thought I was gonna be someone great. But then I turned out to be me. And it’s weird, Dave, isn’t it? It sucks, and it’s weird, because all I think about is eating and sleeping, and I dunno. I can’t settle down. There’s nothing in me that can settle down.”

“I wish you got a better life.” Dave kisses him on the chapped lips, soft and coaxing, and the television still flickers over them. It’s impulsive. It feels right. It doesn’t feel like anything at all, but he wants to find the other part of his knife as badly as John wants to fix himself, too, hire some other loafers who could fix them up. But they were the fixers and cleaners and they didn’t exist, not technically. They existed as empty coffins, and Dave could taste the mark’s perfume scent over John’s shirt.

“Did you ever think of a code name?” John adjusts into the couch, curling up against him, laying his head onto his shoulder with his neck bent down. It was the most vulnerable that Dave had seen him in years, even though the hard look was still on his face. He was exposing his neck, and that was the best they could do for each other, now. Dave kisses the top of his head, tries to hold him still.

“It all sounds cheesy. Can’t think of anything good.”

“I don’t know why you need a code name. You already got a name that makes people really afraid.” John peers up, ghost grin flitting on his face, and the sound of bones cracking behind it. “It’s Dave, right? People are afraid of Dave.”

He strokes his hair a few times. He wanted more. He wanted better. He wanted to court him with roses, but now the roses were placed in a cemetery and they weren’t winding together like lovers, but like a house of collapsing cards.

“I wish I could fix you,” he said, and watched the contestant on television bow her head.