Know Where To Run

Dead.

Killed.

Ended.

All of them.

I watched them die and there was nothing I could do. I witnessed every terrible second of their deaths, but now it doesn’t seem real. I’m cut loose in the world and I want to go back and discover that I was wrong and I only imagined those final tragic moments…

But I can’t.

I can never go back.

I managed to escape. I had to get away. They’ll think I did it. The blood. So much blood. I washed it off of me, but I still see it in the corner of my eye. In my peripheral vision I see the blood, but when I look down at my hands it is gone. I know it can’t be. I can feel it on me. I washed and washed and yet I could not get clean. I will never be clean.

The check-in was torture. I didn’t feel right at all. I didn’t fit in in that place. I don’t think I’ll ever fit anywhere ever again. I’m shaking just thinking about it. I can’t stop shaking and I have this urge to laugh out loud, but I know that if I do then I will never stop, that the laughing will amplify the shaking and I will come apart.

I will come apart like they did.

Lizzie.

Molly.

Hugo.

My beautiful wife. My beautiful children.

What the hell happened? I still don’t know. I don’t think I will ever know. Someone poisoned them. Someone trying to get at me, maybe get to me. They tried to stop me. I got away though! I ran and I escaped and I’m here, and that is all that counts now. 

I have to keep running. I have to slip through their net and get away.

I don’t think the lady at the check-in was with them. I don’t think she was. She looked at me funny all the same. She looked at me and for a moment there I thought she knew. I grit my teeth and tried a smile. A smile that would reassure her that all was well. That I was just one more traveller passing through her airport on the way home. I’m sure she has seen it all. My dishevelled and agitated state a result of rushing to get to the airport, or instead, thanks to a morbid fear of flying. 

My hand shook as she handed me back my ticket. I tried not to stare at its betrayal, and somehow she missed it too. I took my ticket and it was all I could do to slow myself and not break into a run, and as I walked it dawned on me that all I knew to do was to run, but I have no idea where to run to. I’m safe while I’m running, but I haven’t even thought about where I’m headed.

Home won’t be safe. The airport bar wasn’t safe. I could feel the prickle of eyes on my back as I drank at the bar. The alcohol did nothing to take the edge off, if anything it seemed to fuel the turmoil of my emotions and my hand did not cease its shaking. I must have looked like a drunk getting his next fix.

I nearly lost it there, in the bar. I don’t know why exactly, but then why should it have come as a surprise to me? I saw my family die. I ran. I escaped. All of that is bound to catch up with me. If I think I can escape all of that, then I’m mistaken.

I just need a little more time though. Just a little more. I need to get to some place quiet. Some place safe where I can think. 

Crammed into the plane, that there was hell. All those people and nowhere to run. I felt beads of sweat forming on my scalp and after a time they gathered together and made streams that ran down my forehead and the back of my neck. I took my jacket off and angled the overhead cool air blower on my face, but the blast of that cold air caused me discomfort. There was the promise of something harmful in the air as it pushed against my face, so I switched it off. 

Closing my eyes was the worst of it. Etched onto the back of my eyelids are the final moments of my wife and two children. Somehow I’ve rewritten history and made their dying moments coincide. All three of them trying to say something and their being unable to say the word drove it all the way through my skull and deep into my brain.

HELP!

They reached out for me and to my shame I backed away. Something about them frightened me. The three people I loved most in this world. When the time came I denied them. I denied them each and all. Three times I denied them and I can never, ever take it back.

I wonder what I am doing on this plane. I don’t even know how I got here, but I did. Why didn’t I stay? I abandoned my dead family and I’m running toward a home that can no longer be my home. My home died back in that hotel room. Besides, they’ll probably be waiting there for me, or if they are not, they’ll get there soon enough. Home is a bad idea. The destination of this flight is a bad idea, but what else do I have? I can’t contact anyone I know. They probably know all my contacts, my family, my friends and my work colleagues. Damn social media will lead them to every connection I ever had. 

As I thought about what I should do next, door after door closed on me. The world closing in and the confines of the plane becoming my coffin. But somehow I survived the flight and I made it out. I kept it together as I went through security. Having no bag to collect saved me time. Travelling light I might have been, but I carried the weight of the world with me. 

Instead of aiming for a taxi or a train home as I would have done in my past life, I took the tube into the City with the intention of losing myself. I didn’t know where to go, so having myriad options appealed to me right up until I was in the midst of tens of millions of people. 

Like a pinball I careened from one place to another. Seeking a quiet space in a city crammed full of busy people, constantly on the move. That movement and energy dizzied and confused me further. The sensory overload they created made me nauseous. 

I found myself in a packed bar, experiencing a fleeting feeling of de ja vu. A mirror held up to my memory, showing me in an infinite set of bars. Showing me an image of myself, only I wasn’t me anymore. 

I stared into that mirror and wondered who it was that was staring back at me. I’d travelled half way across the world. I’d run to get to this place and now that I was stationery I could see that I left myself back in that hotel room with my dead family. I’d died when they did and now I was a dead man walking, I just hadn’t known it until this very moment. That man in the mirror was here to tell me that and he looked like he had more on his mind than that simple message.

Oh, I looked the same if you didn’t know what you were looking for, but I knew. I could see. My surface wasn’t right. There was something about me that spoke of a terrible wrong and that was even before you went below that surface.

No, I didn’t kill my family. That wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do it. But neither did I do the right thing. When it came to fight, flight or freeze, well I fought to get away, then I ran as far as I could. I didn’t think! I didn’t think about anything other than running and I busied myself with that one thing. I’ve seen deer running from a forest fire. They were on fire and they were running. The sound of them screaming is terrifying. They scream and that scream speaks to you in a way you wouldn’t know was possible, but it’s the eyes that really get you. You can’t help but be drawn to those eyes and the madness in them. That’s no casual madness, it’s ancient and it’s terrible and it is the end of everything.

I see those eyes now in the reflection in the bar mirror below the optics. I see those eyes surrounded by a thousand people and yet no one else notices. Not one soul sees those eyes and they make it their business to ignore the loner in their midst. They fail to see the danger as they mill around their ending.

But first, my end, and right at the end I see it. I see the truth of it. I see what I have brought upon the world. I wasn’t running after all. I was pollenating. I am the bringer of change. I see that I had no choice after all. This was in my nature. This was Nature. 

My family burst open like flowers and the pollen coated me. I thought I’d washed it off, I really did. I thought I was clean. I didn’t know I was infected. Of course I didn’t. I felt OK.

The truth of it is, I wanted to be OK. I didn’t want to die, so I kidded myself that I was going to be OK. I was a coward and I didn’t want to die, so I told myself the biggest lie going. The lie that people tell so often.

I’m harmless.

The cough comes from nowhere and wracks my body with a pain which heralds my end and the beginning of the end for everyone else. Despite the pain I find myself detached and dispassionate. There’s no more running now. The reflection across the bar peers at me through a red mist. Even after that one cough, there really is a lot of blood. It’s beautiful really, and I know what is coming. I will open up and become something unrecognisable. I will open up to the world and give it everything that I am together with a gift that was mine for only a very short while. Just long enough for me to travel across the world and pass it on so I can’t take it back.

No one will ever take it back, that’s the revelation presented to me just before the sad and quite mad man across the bar from me mouths a single, silent word, and then my world turns red.