Forever After

5


Martin Atkinson’s body festered where it lay, feeding the maggots and have-a-go scavengers on the edge of the park. The whereabouts of his soul was as big of a mystery to Michael as the people who killed him. Human victims were clear, their hidden lives, their potential deaths and their darkest secrets were usually revealed just as quickly as their eye colour or their accent. But the undead, of which there seem to be so many, were as opaque as the night.

“Good morning!”

A smiling vicar passed Michael on the winding footpath, nodding pleasantly as his incense-scented aroma wafted by. Michael didn’t return the greeting.

He didn’t believe in God or religion when he was alive and still wasn’t too sure in death. The vicar, a man who had never glimpsed the afterlife and had spent the majority of his adult years preaching about a martyr he would never meet and praying to a God he wasn’t sure existed, probably knew more about the afterlife than Michael; a man who had been dead for thirty years.

Michael liked religious people, it took a certain type of dedication to devote your life to an ideal and it usually created a pleasant and peaceful character, but Michael knew Reverend Edwards, there was nothing pleasant or peaceful about him. The only good thing about his existence was that it would be over within the decade.

He sat down on a bench and watched the vicar disappear out onto the street; waving to people he passed on the pavement, chatting jovially to the ones friendly enough to stop.

Michael turned away in disgust. The Reverend had a history. He had more skeletons in his closet than Dennis Nilsen; because the holiest man in town had, in his youth, gotten away with rape, robbery and assault, and currently spent his days dreaming up plans to get into the pants of his eleven year old step daughter. A few years from now he would find a way into her pants, right before she found the machete he hid under his bed and used it to hack him into Michael’s hands. If Michael still had his job by then that was -- he couldn’t be certain of anything in a world he barely understood.

The dark ones had an energy that was unmistakable and made them easier to read. They stood out likes flares in the darkness. Their deaths and their lives had a bigger impact on the lives and deaths of others, thus weaving an illuminating web.

Michael watched Jonathan Marks with something resembling awe and contempt. The youngster was a hundred feet away. He was on his way home but had been approached by three bullies heading the other way. The leader of the group was Dean Moore, a short, bulky kid with bright white hair gelled into meticulous spikes on his head.

Dean pushed Jonathan to the floor, the laughter of the three bullies filtered through to where Michael sat. Dean’s was the loudest laugh of them all.

When the feeble victim was on the floor he threw his hands in front of his face to protect himself before any punches or kicks had been thrown, this yielding posture was enough to incite more laughter, followed by a barrage of kicks and stamps.

Jonathan’s dad was just as bad as Jonathan's school friends. The laughter, the taunting, the occasional beatings. His dad was also a poacher and a drunk. Jonathan planned to steal his dad’s keys when he passed out drunk, use them to unlock his gun cabinet, steal his shotgun and then slip it under his bed for the night. In the morning he would hide the gun under his coat, walk the two miles he walked to school every day and then shoot every kid that had ever bullied or taunted him.

It was a simple plan and one that would give Michael a lot of work and a lot of credits, but there were many variables at play. The only thing that was certain was that Jonathan had the means and the motive.

Michael didn’t want the business, he wasn’t that desperate for credits and he certainly didn’t get enough of them to warrant bearing witness to such an event. The town was bad enough as it was, he couldn’t bear living amongst the sorrow and the spectacle that it would become should Jonathan find the right moment to go through with the act.

He wasn’t the only youngster whose life was on the line. Dean Moore, the youngster driving the majority of the kicks into Jonathan’s crumbled body, was also in Michaels’ sights, with a little more certainty over his future.

The brutish bully was a closet homosexual who had sexual fantasises about the people he beat up, including the aspiring sociopath presently on the receiving end of his frustrations. Like a six year old boy that taunts and mocks a girl he fancies at school, Dean used violence to express feelings he could never relate vocally.

He engaged in mutual masturbation with another boy in his class, a boy who walked the thin line between the bullied and the bully and didn’t want to slip. There was a strong chance Dean would try to further his fantasises with this boy, and if he did his sexual inclinations would be exposed, leading him to take his own life with the help of a bottle of his father’s whisky and a box of paracetamol. On the plus side, should his future converge with the twisted one of Jonathan Marks, then liver failure would prevent him from the romantic irony of being murdered by the hand of his tormented sweetheart.

A middle aged couple, their faces alight with the peppy glee of contentment, trudged past. They walked parallel to each other, a foot of pavement separating them. They tried to look nonchalant, uninterested in each other, but they were clearly paying more attention to each other than the dogs they walked or the park they walked in. They were telling the world that yes, they may know each other, but they weren’t exactly best of friends and certainly weren’t indulging in a sadomasochistic affair. An affair that would bring the cherry-faced woman close to Michael’s door when she forgot the safe word and her lover continued to strangle her.

Michael eyed them up as they passed, a complementary smile was dropped his way by both, but he doubted they even noticed him.

He sighed heavily and stood up to leave, cutting through the centre of the park, keen to avoid the outskirts where Martin Atkinson’s body was probably moments away from being discovered.

He shot a glance at the bullies and their victim as he moved to within ten feet of them. None of them paid any attention to him. Dean was still calling the shots as he stood over his anguished victim.

“Now, let’s jump on top of him!”

“Wait, why?”

“We’ll wrestle him! Come on, that’ll show him!”

Michael barely suppressed a smile as he moved past with quickening steps.

“Dude, that’s not wrestling.”