Goodbye from Hades PART 3

GOODBYE FROM HADES PART 3 of 3

THE ERROR

Pain narrows John's vision to a blurred tunnel. Thumping blood overwhelms the sounds outside his car. Rounding the last bend before Thornton, John by force of habit lets up on the gas. In his agony, he does not note the "Ungated Railroad Crossing" sign that has for years blended into the background. As his front tires bump over that first cold steel rail, John Scott Weston glances left.

"Whuh!" he startles with a lung-ripping inhale, jaw flung open in a flash of clarity and stuck there wide as his eyes. The shock of seeing a locomotive thundering in from 50 feet smokes bio-circuits in his head. Rapid as a rifle-shot comes the realization: No escaping this time! The only exit, he knows, is eternity.

Panic detonates a riot of visions across his mind. Apparitions of ruin zoom into focus and out, booming wide as a grand finale and ebbing small as an ember. But now a white horse comes galloping in with hope: I escaped death twice before; I might this time, too. The germ of a getaway scenario excites John's reptile brain.

Raucously crashing through the scene, ravens swoop in and peck out the fight-or-flight center of his brain, shrieking: "No escaping! No escaping!" To validate their death sentence, the blackhearts fly off dragging across his delusion a heavy shroud, dark as sin, stretching heaven to hell.

Instinct takes control for an instant and brings him back to reality. Eyes absorb terror while brain-stem utilities gauge the split-second time to impact. Accepting the ravens' verdict, instinct turns traitor, summoning: "Grim Reaper! Grim Reaper!" and throws his brain back to the deathstorm.

A scythe slashes through the ravens' curtain, felling towering sheets of blackness and unleashing icy death stench. There comes a horrific entrance of War-Famine-Pestilence, tall and dark as a tornado. John writhes on the ground, erupting in angry-red boils. Swarms of ghastly white lice, scrawny but wide as saucers, scuttle for him as The Reaper shakes its robes.

John shrivels ghastly white while lice plump angry red. The Slayer of Souls socket-stares and pumps its fist, churning storm clouds gathering 'round. Pointing down its bony finger big as a boxcar, it thunders a voice raspy like a thousand skulls cracking: "Now serving number ninety-two billion, four hundred sixty-one thousand and twenty... eight. John Scott Weston, FACE THE MUSIC!"

Sweeping an arm like a sorcerer, the Reaper bellows: "I now give you... YOU!" as it peels away time, flashing before John's eyes that fabled recounting before the final accounting.

This ruckus flares faster than lightning, yet runs in super slow motion. Here flits his backstory strewn like 44 years of rapid-fire slideshow--with more dimension than life and shining ever whiter... blindingly whiter.

THE JOHN WESTON ONE-MAN REVUE

The Life and Times of John Weston opens for him early in years and rich in serenity.

"Mmmmhh, thanks for wearing your strawberry perfume to school today. Why don't we skip out early? Or let's just stay snuggled-up back in here."

And then comes a velvet summer night. Heat-lightning flits the horizon while fireflies pulse in return. Crickets chirp from behind, in the tall grass beyond the outfield. A gangly young John is jarred from his daze by a piercing crack. A white orb grows bigger under the lights as three runners bolt their bases. It's a little too far to the left, maybe headed over the fence. He's running faster than in any dream... leaping, stretching, grasping for that raucous cheer.

Fame.

The glimmer of it brings on his father.

Again and again the black leather belt, sized for great girth, blisters the back of John's legs. "I did study!" he wails. "I did. I just can't understand fractions." His father's evil arm crashes down with each spitting tirade: "I said you're gonna be famous! You're gonna win the Nobel Prize. You better study!" Jerked by the wrist from the floor.

What I needed, John knows, was a helping hand.

Standing at a corner, a towheaded boy throws his arms up and jumps as high as he can off the curb. Arcing to a puddle, he lands in a two-footed splash, launching a struggling bumblebee from its deathtrap. He watches with delight as it buzzes away midair. In the background a drab yellow bus approaches. Looking down just as he boards, John is rent with shame and dread. "Oh no! I went to school in my tuxedo again!"

But did that really happen? Or am I just dredging up that stupid dream? I don't have time for that now! he fumes.

Time. His mother always had time for him.

"I won! I won, I won!" He watches himself bolt up the stairs two-at-a-time in super-slow-motion. He tosses a ripped-open envelope, waves a letter like a beacon, and hails his mom. She'd been his perfect friend and mentor, encouraging him at the easel, teaching him to wait for just the right light across a landscape, showing how to bring out the wild heart of an animal. "The YoungArts competition!" Thousands of teens had entered. "I can't believe it. On my first try!" he cries, diving into his mother's arms. The delight of that time and space bursts again to life. He actually sees his joy exploding, kaleidoscoping purple, silver, and green across the universe. I was so proud of making her proud.

The notion shifts the scene to a point in his life when he had everything.

"Will Work for Food," reads a soggy sign. Sitting in his Jaguar at a red light, John stares straight ahead through swishing windshield-wipers. He taps the wheel to the beat of Britney Spears' Oops!... I Did it Again. Behind him Wendy is singing along, remarkably in tune. He feels her tap his shoulder. "Daddy, can we give that man some money?" He adjusts the rearview mirror to see her, but her face is pressed to the glass. "You know Sweetie, I'd really like to, but he looks like he could get a job if he wants. It's actually not good to give money to people who could get a job if they want. Someday you'll have a job, and you'll know what I mean." He hears her little, "Awww," but drives off at the welcome green light.

Interrupting the show, a dove comes gliding through the death-dream. Clutching tranquility, it coos out a call to more tender emotions, and the next scene fades in softly. There are ravens, however, hot on the peace-maker's tail.

"I take you, Sara, to be my lawfully wedded wife. To have and to hold. Until death do us part." John's mind then brings forth the smush of wedding cake as her hand twists hard against his mouth, cutting his lips and leaving him coughing up cake for five minutes. He feels again the little panic running through him at the sight of her wicked grin, almost like he couldn't be sure what she'd be capable of. But instead of keeping him at the reception, Reaper only allows a glance at the foreboding. All the signs were there... How stupid!

In another sudden scene change, he sees himself from slightly behind--close, yet obscured by a swirling white-out. Great gales rake the icy torrents, smashing against the boulders his diminishing: "HELP! Help. help." No matter how hard he tries to live, his fingers remain dead sticks, desperately fumbling a dwindling pack of matches. Denali, he realizes in a wave of terror, is a cruel place in late August for the brash and brazen. It can be sixty degrees on a sunny afternoon, then down to twenty-five only hours later when an avalanche of a snowstorm roars off the Alaska Range. John's death-dream now reveals that ravens were posted behind his ebbing body--their feathers flaring in the wind--staring; heads turning toward one another, then with every tiny twitch he made, whirling back and glaring.

Next, watching from above--just as he had on that late August day--he hears doctors crowded around him at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. "Yaaay!" they erupt at the sight of the unexpected blip.

Life.

The scent is of moist, silken skin as John's nose nuzzles in behind a lithe young Sara's ear. The feeling is cotton candy as his lips press the back of her neck and into downy nap just below her auburn hairline. From behind, his hands clasp around her bulging bare belly, absorbing the wonder of Wendy's first little kicks. The tiny thumps seem joyful.

Wendy was a fighter but above all, joyful. She kept us laughing... right up to the very end.

Laughter... a guilty man's poison.

In the crowded gym he sees her--a moment both dreadful as he'd feared and opportune as he'd hoped when he came to the reunion. There is no mistaking, even from behind and after all these years, the lilting of Miranda's head and sway of her form as she laughs. Hope edges fear as he maneuvers into position and taps her shoulder. "Well, hi!" she gasps in a briskly increasing pitch, bouncing at the sight of him. Her smile rips through what should have been, and somehow he doesn't expect that. Too flustered to recall the planned chitchat, he fumbles straight to his fondest memory. "Remember that rainy Friday when we spent the last two periods hiding back in there?" he blurts with a nervous grin and a flick of his thumb toward the stage. "What happened to 20 years? Or I guess it's 22, since we were sophomores then."

Time... so mysterious.

John sees himself sitting in an easy chair on a rainy Saturday morning, Folger's in hand. Click, 23; click, 24; click; 25; click, "Wait... what?" Click, 25. "A talking yellow sponge?" It's his most delight in years, a welcome respite from his heavy burden--right up until sucker-punched by the thought: Wendy would have loved this!

No... show me more of when I had everything!

"Vietnam Vet. Please Help," reads a faded sign. John just stares ahead into the torrid sun, index finger tapping a cool leather armrest not two inches from the window button until the welcome greenlight. But this time he sits there a few seconds, pulls out a roll of bills, thumbs through 50s and 100s, grabs a 20 and waves the man over.

As if in punishment for that meager aid, his recollections grow sharper and more aggressive. They burst forth gaudy like a nightclub stampede releasing all that humanity holds--everyone from drugged-out riffraff to suited businessmen and scanty college girls surging for the exit, fighting against a fiery fate.

John stands in line at a convenience store. The idea hits him: I should use my credit card to buy this. Yeah, that'll prove I wasn't with Sara. Where's the security camera? I better not stare too long, or it may seem suspicious. Oh God, maybe I should go to the police. I doubt Sara would ever really do that to me for backing out of the plan, but Jake, I don't know about him. Look what he's done already... and she's just his little puppet on a string.

Rebounding from despair, his life story now bolts the heights of Machu Picchu and its timeless Temple of the Sun, Inti Watana, and Room of the Three Windows. His tour guide is fascinating and friendly, but at the end of the day, John hides from his group, awaiting the chill of night. Lying spread-eagle atop a temple wall under crystal starlight, he's steeped in power as his body absorbs from great slabs of limestone the sun's lingering bounty. How, he needs to know, were such massive boulders hewn from these majestic heights and so skillfully fit by those ancient artisans? As the who-hoo-ho-oo of a great horned owl ascends towering cliffs from the Urubamba Valley below, he muses aloud: "There's a reason someone came up with the word 'grandeur.'"

As if lobbed by a vengeful vagabond, a dreadful new scene slams down hard, crashing through a long walled-off corner of his brain and smashing his soul. Passionate kisses. Elaborate deceptions. Grinding guilt and the tears of begging forgiveness. Standing staring at a table in a barren studio apartment. A backhand to the bottle and the drip, drip, drip of cheap whiskey spattering a grimy floor.

With no time to spare now, his brain hurtles on and straight to the point.

Feeling ridiculous, John stands before an Inca shaman while wearing just a loincloth. Caving to peer pressure, he had disrobed, enduring rhythmic chanting, grass-bundle brushes being whisked up and down his body to flit away evil spirits, and even rattles shaken around his head to scare fiends into submission. But it is more than he can take when the prancing, feather-crowned holy man sips fruited water and sprays it from his mouth across John's back to bring good fortune. The scene that is yanked most vividly to light is: "What the hell was that? You're a nut case!" as he grabs up clothes and storms the door.

Circling back around, the dove, bearing tranquility, flits through John's backstory just in time.

But in a rage, a raven swoops down to snuff that glittering mirage, delivering instead a nasty splat on a shiny new car: "I've been shot! She shot me," John moans through the phone. Carlos screams, "Who!? Sara?" He then rebounds, "Call 911! Call 911! I'll call 911!"

Lying curled-up on his side, John's eyelids flutter as the receiver slips his bloody grip. Sara storms back to the kitchen and soccer kicks the phone, splattering crimson high up the refrigerator. Turning to him, she lies on her stomach in his sticky blood, reaches both hands in front of her turned-up face, takes aim between his eyes, and waits. And waits. "You fell asleep at the wheel. You killed her. She's gone, just when you were takin' her to her last treatment at Thornton Medical," she whimpers. Sara pulls the trigger to a welcome/awful, "click."

Opening his eyes, John sees her through tumbling sparkles. Gurgling, he strains: You like that... lying in my blood... don't you. She makes her most wicked smile, "Yesss IIII dooo."

Lips quivering almost without breath, he emits spongy grunts, struggling to voice: "Your heart could sink the Titanic." Then after a moment searching her barren green eyes, "I told you... I had to swerve." Weakening, he doesn't even try to utter: You knew she was making us late. You're the one who said I'd take her to Echo Point on the way. If I hadn't been wiping her tears after we had to go straight instead of around the lake, I'd have seen those ravens in the road sooner.

Instantly into his playback pounce hordes of the avian monsters, ravenously ripping into his brain, digging for that damning memory, shoving and fighting for the morsel. The winner thrusts its beak skyward and wings off with a victory roll, harried by a shrieking mob of losers.

But three runners-up peel off and sweep back to his brain, where they eye and probe, carefully tweak and jiggle, until they make this:

"Daddy..."

But that's all he gets of his joyful angel, his Little Miss Bubbly; just the briefest glimpse. The realization impales him--a lance hurled by an angry Zeus--as his mind grovels: Please, please... more! I can't go out like this. Whoever you are... wherever you are... show me some mercy!

No mercy.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

John's life-flash sweeps forward to the final day of September 2009. He watches himself tormenting his Taurus up hills and down, rambling along Auger Lake and drawing ever closer to his dead-end job, wishing for what could have been, raging for what should have been.

Put down, put out, rejected, he was thinking. How is the seething ever going to stop? For that to happen, something--at least one thing--would have to go my way. Yet deep within, he knew it never would. His family was gone... no more joyful Wendy and no second chances; just eight hours of monotony followed by staring at the table. "Drip, drip, drip... it's just like my third-rate life, fulfilling as a mirage slowly bleeding away." No fame. No Nobel Prize.

He'd then reached deep for his philosophical guiding light. It lay stashed away only for rescue from the absolute basement of despair. After having abused this mantra of its usefulness, he had begun to ration it more wisely: "I don't care! I don't care about being alone. I don't care about guilt or about grief. I don't care about whales. I don't care about ANYTHING!" But he had already sucked that solace dry, and it now tussled with the monsters under the bed as impotent as a dust ball. Then, like an ebbing flashlight that no longer glints an evil eye, this guiding light was out.

LIMITLESS

Now his visions came around full circle, back to when the Reaper appeared and ripped off the Band-Aid hiding John's wounded life. But with masterful choreography, the Reaper had not only flashed before John his life, he had at the same time wedged into John's mind some thrilling bonus footage.

As John was watching his tiny story rush past, the Reaper was shoving in alongside it an expansive parallel universe--like one stream of a 3D movie merging with the other. In the result, John also viewed each panorama that every other human has ever seen; inhabited all abodes in which they have ever eked and gluttoned; strode across every arena in which they fell vanquished and rose victorious. He'd become every puppeteer and every struggling puppet.

Their lives and his in mind-meld.

In this miasma of backstory and theirstory, John hopes every hope, feels all anguish and joy ever resident in this world and yet to be. Columbus discovers; Montezuma's armies die. In agony, Joan of Arc burns; in wonder, Neanderthals make fire.

An uproar in a thousand languages, all deciphered, rockets around his crackling neurons, whirling his black-hole brain and barreling down through his lonely soul, vortexing his life experience and smashing it to the dirt from which he arose--and against all those who rose that very same earth before him.

Staggering under the load--in this blazing microsecond--of vast data-streams from humanity and celestiality, his mind explodes like a quasar through its former boundaries. Just as in the gigawatt datacenter of his dreary eight-hour days, John feels the fire-up of massive processing-power reserves. Who would have known? he amazes, The other 90% of the brain just for this, the last iota of life!

Now his overarching awareness expands to subsume wondrous new realms... exploring, in fact, truly new worlds. Off in the future, towards the blinding whiteness, distant planets bustle with domed colonies. But in horror he watches as the great bubbles are burst, one by another.

In the timespan of a blink, the mystical is mashed-up, past, present, and future with stark reality... the reality outside his rattling old Taurus and the certainty roaring down the tracks.

The Reaper flings his visions a few minutes to the future, showing him the aftermath of his destruction. He hears onlookers from across the tracks, shaking heads in feeble comfort: "He probably didn't know what hit him."

But I know! John shudders. The Powers have ensured that he understands exactly what hits him.

Through the glinting eye of a raven he sees. He harvests the awareness of each horrified spectator through minds linked through the cosmos.

But now the Slayer has had his fun. With a socket scowl he jolts John back to cold, hard reality, hurling his awareness back to Earth. As his front tires bump over that first cold steel rail, John Scott Weston glances left.

GOODBYE FROM HADES

From out of nowhere comes thirteen thousand roaring tons of hard black coal, dug from the deepest eons as if pried from the grasp of Hades, carefully loaded and sent hurtling across the rails to this tiny place, at this precise point of time. Sixty menacing miles per hour of screeching, sparking, swaying steel... and inevitably bearing down.

The blasting horn means little to nearby residents as they tend to their banalities, nothing to shoppers stocking up, but eternal everything to him.

The engineer, wild-eyed as his errant target, hollers a voicebox-ripper that merely echoes inside the cab. No steering; no stopping. To this place solely; at this time only. The rails laid over a century ago, and thirteen thousand tons of Hades' ancient cargo, have long-past sealed this fate.

The thundering locomotive covers the last fifty feet in a half-second; it will not stop for a half mile. At the last wisp of life, John's anguished existence erupts: Good! I couldn't have done this myself. Then: Goodbye I love you, as he grasps Wendy to his bosom.

A brilliant blast smokes his reality. Suddenly he's made of made of air, yet falling backward into an abyss. Above him angel hosts and snarling demons swirl and smite in epic clashes across the ages, battling for souls--souls judged evil, errant, and fine. Fighting greedily. In terror he knows: Fighting for me!

Steeled for Judgment Day.

But one more bit of his backstory somehow gets flashed in: "Homeless. Anything Helps," reads a snow-crusted sign. Again, John just stares straight ahead, fingers nervously tapping the steering wheel. Slowly, though, his hand drifts to a rickety window crank, turning it tentatively.

In four strong strokes he runs the window wide open, then empties his wallet and places $328.00 in a jittery hand. As the light turns green he drives off steeling himself for a couple more cans of whoop ass.

Now into his death dream glides a lustrous figure, joining the angel hosts and beckoning him, "Come."

Vaguely familiar. Could it be?

Wendy! You're all grown up!

2024 Steven D. Overholt

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