CHAPTER FIVE
‘HELL’
In a dank warehouse in downtown L.A. two men in dark grey suits sit on the bonnet of a black BMW, its windows tinted. A thin man in a torn pin-striped suit sits opposite the car with his hands bound to the back of a wooden chair. His face is covered in cuts and bruises and blood, some of it dried up and some of it sliding slowly down his pallid complexion before dripping onto his suit jacket or splashing onto the concrete floor; all of the blood will dry up in time. His once innocent blue eyes are now grey and lifeless. His head limply lolls downwards making his chin connect harshly with his breastplate. He is not breathing. He is dead. In a faraway corner of the warehouse a small incinerator sits patiently, orange flames crackling and spitting ferociously from within its metal grate like bulldogs being held at bay by their collars and chains.
The man on the left side of the bonnets face is pale. Dark bags tightly hug the bottom of his blue bloodshot eyes. He sits with a lit joint hanging from his lips. He stares solemnly at the body in the chair. He watches the blood drip-drip-drip down from the corpses face, the trails like new veins. He looks at the body and doesn’t see a person; the person in that body went somewhere else entirely.
The man on the right side of the bonnets face is tanned and distracted as he examines his fingernails and the blood that is trapped underneath them. He looks up at the body and says, “Well the incinerator looks hot enough. Might as well get to it, eh?”
“Yea… if you think so…” The pale faced man is not in the warehouse; He is somewhere else; He is with the person who used to be in that bloodied body opposite him.
The tanned man grabs the joint out of the pale man’s mouth and throws it to the ground. “For fuck’s sake Marcus, why d’you have to get stoned all the time? You’re spaced out man! We torture a guy for two days until he goes and dies on us, and the first thing you do is go and roll up and get high? Fuckin’ idiot man! The fire’s still burnin’ and we still got a body to put in it. Now snap the fuck out of it!”
“It’s… a coping mech-chanism,” whispers Marcus, his face barely registering the words that have just been spoken to him, “And don’t touch my joints when I’m smoking…Don’t fucking touch ‘em. It’s a coping mechanism man… It’s how I fucking cope…” Marcus whimpers and his whole body quivers, an intangible cold overcoming him.
“I’m… I’m sorry man.” The tanned man puts his arms around Marcus, embracing his shivering frame tightly. “I’m sorry man. I shouldn’t shout at you like that, I know. You cope man. You cope well.”
“I just… I keep seeing everyone else… everything else we’ve… they’re in my head Dean. All the time. Ghosts… they’re whispering to me Dean…”
“Shhh shhh shhh, I know man, I know. I hear them too.” Dean lightly kisses Marcus on the forehead, quelling his fears with a single action more comforting than words. “But we still got to do this man. He’s still got to go in the fire one piece at a time.”
Marcus pulls away from Dean’s hold, “Can’t we just put the whole body in this time? I don’t like seeing the cutting anymore…”
“You know we can’t man: smell’s too strong. Someone’ll come and rat us out. Anyway, incinerator’s too small here. Wouldn’t fit all of him in that thing. This is just how it’s got to be.”
Dean stands up from the bonnet and, adjusting his suit jacket on the journey, walks to the trunk of the car. Marcus pulls another joint out of his pocket and lights it up. He inhales and then lets the smoke drift out of his mouth with a long audible sigh. For a moment the smoke in front of his face obscures his full view of the body bound to the chair – Instead, a haze. Then the smoke disappears – fading into the light – and the body is still there, still not a hazy hallucination.
Dean comes back to the front of the car, walking with a steady stride towards the body, a hacksaw in his left hand, a bottle of peroxide and a cloth in his right. He reaches the body and places the peroxide and the cloth on the ground, the hacksaw still grasped firmly in his left.. He stares aimlessly for a moment, then turns to Marcus saying, “Y’know this suits pretty nice. We clean it up a bit and it’ll look brand fuckin’ new. You want it?”
“I’m not wearing a dead man’s suit. There are lines that I draw.”
“Fair enough… what about ebay then? We get a bit of extra cash and somebody else gets a new suit. Win win.”
“No! No fucking ebay! Just get rid of the body!”
“Ok, ok. I was kidding anyway. Just tryin’ to cheer y’up.”
“Don’t.”
“Alright. I’ll get started then, eh?”
Dean pulls up the dead body’s head by its greasy hair. The hacksaw is raised in the air. It comes down swiftly. Blood spurts out of the body’s neck, sprinkler systems making water arch and fall. “Fuckin’ veins man!”, exclaims Dean as blood splashes against his suit jacket, a final attack.
“That means his heart’s still beating. I guess he’s more alive than we thought.”
“Well he ain’t fuckin’ alive now!”
The blood flow dies down, then ceases. Marcus takes another drag from his joint. As more smoke slips from him he says, “One day… one day we’ll go to Hell for all that we’ve done.”
Dean hacks at the neck more, through bone, veins, vocal chords, muscle tissue, cartilage, his hands becoming more tainted with every movement.
Marcus leans back on the tinted car window, facing the tin roof of the warehouse, “Maybe we’re in Hell already. Af-ter we got back from guan… that place. We touch down on the landing pad and boom, we’re in Hell. Kicked out then Hell…”
Through the thyroid cartilage…
“That’s how we have to do what we have to do… The ghosts. Talking all the time. Their screams. It’s our punishment…”
Cricoid cartilage…
“Kicked out then Hell…Paradise lost for all our sins…”
Jugular veins…
“Torturers then tortured…with Earth…”
A severed head falls heavily to the floor like a stone. Dean sighs and says, “Done. One body part down. The fuck are you mutterin’ t’yourself?”
“…Nothing… just thinking.”
“Yea? Well you don’t gotta keep doing that just now. Come over here and throw that head in the incinerator. The fire’s still burnin’ brother and it’s gonna keep burnin’ ’til we’re done.”
“Yea… I know…”
Marcus walks up to the body and picks up the severed head by the hair. “We got everything we needed from him right?”
Dean nods, “Yep. Definitely. Jackson’ll get his moneys worth for info.”
Marcus looks the dead head in the eyes, “What did he say about some Simmon’s gang when we met him?”
“Fucked if I know. We probably should’ve asked him.”
“Yea… yea we probably should’ve.”
Marcus walk to the incinerator and carefully opens the grate. He looks deep into the flames but all he can see is burning. He throws the head into the fire and shuts the grate.
The smoke turns black.
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