Something in the Way

This story contains graphic violence and references to sexual assault. Reader discretion advised. 

She was cornered now. It was her third week on campus and that oversized slob Chase had gotten her alone; backed her right up against a wall in one of the hallways with his arms braced on either side of her head. She was staring right at him in all his pale, shiny faced glory, with yellow teeth coloured in so deeply she could smell all of the residual grease that had been left behind. 

“Why’re you so cold to me?” He questioned, his tone high and shrill and totally at odds with his girth. “I ain’t done nothing wrong to you Codi, why don’t you like me?” 

Codi felt a bubbling anger rising up in her belly, but her demeanour gave nothing away of that. “You’re a fucking pig is why, and you act like I want you near me.” She was speaking in monotone, allowing nothing of her anger to get loose. As she spoke, she scanned the hallway on either side of her by moving just her eyes, as opposed to her head, and she saw exactly what had been seen when she came down here initially: blank white walls on all sides. Not even a window. She was now pushing down a new wellspring of fear. 

“Stop bothering me Chase, that’s all you’re doing.” 

He got a sour look on his face at that, which he laboriously twisted up into a straining grin as he leaned in closer to her. He slammed his palms flat against the bare white bricks behind her, making her jump. His grin became just as a bit more genuine as he said“You won’t be saying that when I show you what I have for you.” He took a hand down from the wall and Codi saw, with a new resurgence of rage, that he was going for his zipper. Fine. She thought. Whip it out so I can break it. My friends’ll get a kick out of it.

The moment Chase got his fingertips on the metal pull tab, he suddenly pitched over to the side, crashing with all his bulk down hard on the tile floor. He made no noise as he fell, only when he landed, and it was a sound not dissimilar to a young boy gagging back vomit. The young man in front of Codi now was a far cry from her tormentor, like someone had taken every opposite quality and put it into a person. He was lean and tanned and his hair was buzzed close to the scalp, with his features jutting and angular and sharp. He wore t shirt which held pressed tightly around his muscular arms. The new man shouted at Chase to “Get the fuck out of here” with a voice that came out in a low, scratching rumble which commanded Chases immediate compliance. When he was gone, the new man looked at her. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviators, the lenses of which were coloured in a murky golden brown that reflected her in them, leaning against the wall without a shred of emotion on her face, staring right at him.

“You’re good?” He asked, almost casually, and she answered yes. 

“You know that guy? I think we oughta report that.” 

“I can do that myself, don’t worry about it.” She paused for a moment, and then continued. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

“Not a problem, Miss…”

“Codi Marchetti.”

He just nodded. “Rust Jackson.” 

She nodded back.

He looked over to where Chase had fled, the back to her, pursing his lips. “You good to walk alone?”

“I should be.”

“Alright.” He stared for a moment, then, realizing he was doing that, he quickly turned his head away. “See ya around, yeah?”

“Hope so.” She responded, and she could have laughed out loud when she saw that he seemed to freeze up at that. He just nodded and quickly walked away. She watched him go the whole time before heading off herself.

She reported Chase that same day, and, when she came in to their one shared class - Criminal Code - she saw not a single square inch of him or his letterman jacket. When she inquired about that to the person next to her, she was told that no one had seen him all day. “Do you know anything?” She was asked, and she just said no. It was a non issue for the rest of the class, primarily because they were having a test and weren’t allowed to talk.

Codi was in the cafeteria when she saw him again, that new man named Rust Jackson. He was sitting off in a corner, alone, still in a T-shirt and jeans and with that same pair of aviators wrapped over his eyes. She looked to her friends table, coincidentally on the complete opposite side of the crowded, noisy room, and made eye contact with all three of the other girls. Codi just had to gesture to where Rust was sitting for them to get the hint, and they waved Codi over to him like they were trying to blow her away with the wind. He didn’t notice her until she was practically on top of him, which startled the hell out of him enough that she was afraid he’d jump out of his seat.

“Sorry.” She said. “I thought you’d hear me coming.” 

“No worries, I’m used to getting snuck up on. How’re you?”

“Better, I reported Chase like you suggested.”

“Who? Oh right, that fucker.” He suddenly cleared his throat, which did nothing to alleviate his gravelly voice. “Where’s my manners.” He said before getting up and pulling a chair out from the table. Codi let her eyebrows rise up, along with a brief smirk, before she puffed out a breathy sort of laugh. “Old school gentleman, huh?” She queried as she sat. 

“One thing I took from my dad is you always gotta treat a lady right.”

“Well, you’ve been doing a bang-up job of that so far.” She meant the remark jokingly, though not mockingly, but the look on his face changed in an instant. He’d gone from having a fully neutral expression to looking like he was somewhere between smiling and bursting into tears, even going so far as to pull his glasses up and wipe at his eyes, quickly pulling them back down before she could actually get a look at them. She saw something though, even if she couldn’t put her finger on it. 

“Thank you.” He said, and his voice was strangely quiet. 

“That sorta things a big deal for you, isn’t it.”

“That obvious.”

“A little bit.” She said, leaning in and ignoring her lunch. “It’s certainly not a bad thing, you’re the first guy in a while I’ve seen offer a chair like that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but I haven’t hung out with a lot of guys before now.”

“Well, I’m happy to be breaking the mold today.”

They sat for a moment, the conversation lost and the silence descending, before he broke it with question. “What program are you taking?”

“Police Foundations. You?”

“Electrical Engineering.” He leaned in now, and she did not back away. “You looking to be a cop?”

“Yeah, my families all cops, might as well keep with the trend.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

He seemed to absorb that for a bit, and she found herself wondering if he wasn’t really all for that sort of career path. She certainly saw no reason for him to be confused, It seemed totally reasonable to her. Her thoughts were broken up by his next question.

“You coulda knocked the shit out of that Chase guy without my help, I reckon?”

“He would’ve left with a few extra bruises, maybe more depending on how pissed I got.”

This got a laugh out of him, and it was an ugly, dry thing that came out breathless and with hardly a sound. “What’s so funny about that?” She asked. 

“I can imagine you giving him one of them, uh, gorilla press slams like in the WWE.”

Her eyes lit up immediately. “You watch wrestling?”

“Hell yeah I do, I love it to bits.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“No shitting?”

“I shit plenty but not in this instance.”

It was her turn to laugh, which came out full bellied and full throated and, with her eyes closed, she couldn’t see the way he looked at her, like he was staring at tall and ancient tree all coloured in reds and yellows and oranges in the autumn season. When she came down from that laughing fit, they talked at greater length about wrestling, and then about other precious nothings as the world sped past them, getting just that little bit brighter with each new topic between them.

Two weeks had passed since they met, and the snow had come down and left a thick blanket through the woods they were driving into. He drove, she rode shotgun, and both had come to a topic that had provoked this excursion; star gazing.

“You really ain’t seen stars before?” He asked, incredulous, as the car bumped over the uneven path.

“I’ve lived in the city my whole life. The only thing up for a lot of that is smog.” She answered, her tone holding no bitterness over that fact. “I’m interested, obviously, I wouldn’t be making you drive out here if I wasn’t.”

“I understand that part, but it’s still wild to me that you never seen em all clear up there.” He suddenly grunted out a quiet little chuckle before turning to look at her as they lumbered along. “I’m just a little hayseed from Podunk, Nowhere. I’ve seen the stars so much they ain’t even register anymore.”

“How do you feel about the smog up in the ‘Shwa?” She asked.

“It makes me appreciate the stars more.” He answered, and they both got a laugh out of that. 

When they arrived at their destination, Rust parked up to the cliff side and they both got out. Codi looked over the side and instinctually pulled herself backward. This got another chuckle out of Rust. “Not much for heights?”

“Nope.”

“Well, we ain’t going down there so don’t worry.” He came around the side and put and arm over her shoulder, pulling her close. She felt like she might just melt with how warm he was. “Take a look up there.” He pointed, and she looked, and was nearly beside herself with awe.

Hung above them was a vast array of lights, like distant Christmas string hanging layer over layer. Pinpoints of light puncturing the pitch-black night with consistent ease and a star shot across it all in a thin, white arc that was gone just as quickly as it had appeared. The moon was there as well, a bulbous star in its own right, glowing bright enough that you might see all its magnificent pores and cavernous, abyssal trenches untouched, maybe, by any recent life. 

She had no words, she could only stare up at it, her head turning to scan the vast ocean of lights in the darkness above before, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Rust. He was looking up to, but, to her shock, he was still wearing his aviators. It snapped her out of her trance. 

“Why are you always wearing those?” She asked, and he seemed to have been in a trance as well because he looked at her with a strange shock on his face.

“Wear what?”

“Those glasses. How can you see anything with those on?”

He didn’t answer. For a moment, Codi wanted to retract the question, especially when his arm left her shoulder. She badly wanted him to put it back. She was just about to tell him not to worry about it when she saw that his arm was now up to his glasses, pinching them between two fingers. 

“When I take these off.” He said, and his voice was so grave it chilled her to her core. “I don’t want any sorta meanness, alright?”

“I’ve got no reason to be mean to you.”

He was silent for a moment, unmoving, before he finally pulled the glasses off. Codi could see, even in the dark, that his left eye was a cloudy grey colour, and the pupil under that grey was huge in comparison to its counterpart. Scars crawled out from around it like spider legs, all of them encircling a socket which held between itself and the eyeball a strange blackness that gave the impression that the eye was suspended in unsupported air.

“Oh Rust…” He tried to out the glasses back on, but she stopped him with a gentle hand on his arm. “How did that happen?” She spoke with a tone that seemed to muffle whatever voice of insecurity had been resting in Rust, because he left the glasses up on his forehead and allowed his body to relax. When the tension exited completely from his body, he looked up at her.

BOOM!

Codi’s eyes were filled with hot blood as Rusts skull burst open like a torn up plastic bag. He pitched over onto his side into the snow with flaps over skin flapping down beside him, still connected to what was left of his ruined skull. Codi rubbed at her eyes and was met with that sight, which forced a high-pitched wail from her which was swiftly cut off by a blow to the back of her neck. She was face down in the snow when strong hands rolled her over roughly onto her back, and she saw him.

“Miss me Codi?” Chase sneered, hefting in one hand a long rifle and in the other a massive Bowie knife. “Just had to get that thing outta the way.” He gestured over to Rust, or what was left of him, and that sight once again sent Codi into a fit of tears and screaming and attempting to get up and kill the son of a bitch.

She was met with nothing more than a steel toed boot square to her mouth, sending her backward into the snow where she spat bloodied teeth out into the open air. “You’re still looking cold, babe.” Chase was upon her, rifle discarded but knife still clenched between white knuckles. “Lemme warm you up.” She tried to swing at him, but he shoved the knife through her forearm and wrenched it down until her arm was on the ground again. All she could was scream and cry and stare up at the bright, shining night.

The body of Rust Jackson would be found two days later, a frozen pool of gore encircling the semicircle of a skull still remaining. The head of Codi Marchetti was found crammed inside of his stomach, wide eyed with horror and despair. Her body was found three months later, under the bed of Chase Wakefield