A RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE (PART ONE): https://tinyurl.com/y4f3w739
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is a continuation of an older drabble I wrote a short while back. This is the story of the death of Andy’s father, but from the perspective of the killer. The first section is pulled from Discord banter. All of Claire’s dialogue, actions, and choices were written by her writer]
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Things started normal, as often was the case just before everything went to sh*t. Claire had spent a chunk of the day napping while Andy did some work on the house. Things were quiet, nice, peaceful. The thing about calms before storms was that at least people usually knew storms were coming. They had a chance to prepare. Andy and Claire Stoddard-Barclay were not so lucky. They were in the middle of a normal conversation, discussing where in the house they were going to hang their wedding photographs, and then everything went to sh*t.
“I’m surprised I didn’t wake you up. I was hammering a few studs into—” Andy’s button nose twitched. “Is that cigar smoke?”
Claire sniffed the air. “That or pot.”
“No,” Andy said, her face going pale as she looked around. “I know that smell anywhere. It only means one thing. The Baron, he’s—” Andy turned and there he was, Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of the dead. He was sat on their bed — having appeared out of thin air — smiling and smoking his cigar.
“Hello, Stoddard-Barclays.”
“Oh fun,” Claire crossed her arms over her chest. This wasn’t the first time this particular deity appeared out of nowhere in their bedroom.
“What are you doing here, Baron?” Andy asked calmly. She was sweating under her arms as if she somehow knew the answer.
“It’s time,” the Baron shrugged and took a puff of his cigar. “It’s time for my debt to be paid.”
“I got a dollar, will that cover it?” Claire shot back.
The Baron smiled a big bright smile that he directed to Claire. “You’re funny,” he looked back to Andy. I like her. She’s a good match for you, An-Dee. I’m sorry, my wolf friend, it is not that sort of debt, I’m afraid.”
“What is it?” Andy asked, not blinking. “What do I have to do?”
The Baron held his cigar in his mouth and reached into his jacket, pulling out a revolver. “I need you to kill a man.”
“Nope. Nope,” Claire held her hand out for the gun. “I’ll do that.”
“Tsk-tsk-tsk,” the Baron clicked his tongue and shook his head. “My debt is with her, not you, woofie. An-Dee is the only one who can do what it is I am asking. It is so.”
Andy forgot how to breathe for a second. She sucked in a breath of air and asked, “Who?”
The smile left Baron Samedi’s face. “William Barclay.”
Andy almost fell over.
“I take it that’s someone we know?” Claire asked.
Andy didn’t blink. Her eyes turned red, filling with tears. “That’s impossible,” she said flatly. “He’s already dead.”
“He is,” the Baron nodded. “So says time, but if he is to remain so da killer must take her gun and go do the deed.”
“The killer?” Andy tightened up. “I can’t… it’s not… I’m not the one who… You want to send me back in time to kill my father?”
“Wait, so you want her to go back in time and kill her father?” Claire wrapped her arms around Andy’s waist. “That’s pretty f***ed up.”
Andy was numb and quiet. Whenever she tried to speak only silence came out. She wasn’t sure how long she was standing there, staring, empty, blank. Her head shook from side to side. “No. No. F*** that, no way, I’m not killing my dad.”
“You owe me a debt,” the Baron sat up and swung his legs off the bed. “Dis is the price.”
“I don’t owe you sh*t. What I asked for you didn’t give me. You gave me some bullsh*t about Mia coming here, which I don’t f***ing understand. I’m not f***ing killing my dad for you!”
“Not for me,” he stood up. “For… the cosmos. It is done. So it has to be done.”
“F*** you,” Andy said. “F*** all of this. I say no. That’s my f***ing answer. No. If I don’t play your god-games my dad gets to be alive? That’s the easiest choice in my life.”
“How does your life change if William Barclay lives?” the Baron asked. “Are you willing to lose the life you have for the life you’ve already lost?” He pointed to Claire.
“Why does the cosmos need her father dead?” Claire asked.
“Some things are beyond knowing,” The Baron answered. “Answers may come later. They may never come at all. It doesn’t change the fact that William Barclay was gunned down some time ago on his way home from buying a pack of cigarettes and the shooter is standing just before me.” He gestured to Andy.
“I’ve… I’ve already done this?” Andy’s face wrinkled in confusion.
“Time is... fluid. Nonsensical. Deviate and it all changes course. Deviate and you as you exist now disappear. No Chucky. No new body. You can live a semi-happy life in poverty, always feeling off, always feeling like you’re in the wrong skin, never knowing true love.” He nodded to Claire. “Or you can do what is already done.”
Claire started pacing, the way Claire always paced in situations like this. “This sounds like crap.”
“I… I… I can’t do this,” Andy was frozen. She couldn’t move, she tried but she couldn’t. Her heart beat in her throat.
The Baron looked to Claire. “You know her best, woofie. Is she strong enough to do ‘dis?”
“Yes,” Claire said without hesitating, “But she shouldn't have to. I’ll take her debt, let me. If it has to be done let me do it.”
“Her debt is not the only debt in play here,” the Baron said softly. “Through it, I pay off a debt of my own. If I could send anyone else, I would. You may not believe that, but it’s true. An-Dee is the only one who can pull the trigger.”
Andy looked to Claire, tears running down her face. “H-How? How can I do this?”
Claire put a hand on Andy’s shoulder and gave a light squeeze. “I’ll go with you.”
Again, the Baron shook his head. “I’m afraid she can’t.”
“Well, that’s bullsh*t,” Claire protested before falling into a series of angry grumbles.
Andy shook. She was physically trembling, but when she looked into Claire’s green eyes she knew what she had to do, and she knew that if she waited too long or spent too long thinking about it that she wouldn’t make the right call. Stepping forward, she cupped Claire’s face in her hands and kissed her. “I love you,” she said softly. “Put me back together when I come back.” She turned toward the Baron, and he offered her the gun. Her jaw tightened and she reached out to take it, and when she did, she disappeared.
WHOOSH!
Everything was cold. A breeze rolled by that hadn’t been there a second ago. Gone was the bedroom she had been standing in a moment before. Gone. Gone. Gone. Everything was gone. No, no not gone, not yet. That’s… that’s what this was about. That’s why she was there, why she had to do the unspeakable, why it had always been her and why it would be her when the time came. If she didn’t do this… if Andy turned her back on the favor she owed the Baron then everything she loved, and held dear, all of her life — the good and the bad combined — would be gone. That, that was not something she could risk. Her wet, red eyes blinked and she thought of her wife. Andy had always said that she would do anything for Claire. Now was her chance to prove it. She looked down at the .45 in her hand — the gun Baron Samedi handed her — the weapon that was meant to set history up to play out how it always had been, and she started to weep.
The bedroom had given way to an alley — a dark and cold place where Andy was truly alone. She had her back toward the street and was facing the deeper shadows of that alley, but her eyes were fixed on the gun. A part of her thought that if she avoided looking away that it wouldn’t all have to start. It was a certain type of hell to stand in one place for eternity staring at a single object, but a part of Andy believed that it was a hell she would endure if it meant she didn’t have to ever turn around and slay her father.
A second ago she had been standing in her bedroom in Texas, laughing with her wife in the year 2019. Now she was in Chicago, she could smell it in the air and taste it in the cold. November 23, 1982. She didn’t need a calendar. Andy had always known the day her father died, the day her mother became a widow. Would knowing that she had been responsible all along have changed the way she grieved growing up — missing the father she never knew? Who was to say? Would she ever be able to look her mother in the eye again when she came back from this? Could she come back from this? The revolver in her hand was a thousand pounds. The weight of it felt as though it would drag her to the center of the earth. Standing there staring was hell, but maybe a worse hell waited for her if she looked away.
Free will. What a f***ing a joke. Andy’s choices didn’t lead her here if she was going to end up here all along. She made a deal with Baron Samedi; find her a way to stop the Vision — the bastards that tortured Claire — and in exchange she would owe him a favor, but this… this causality time travel nonsense, it was a bullsh*t. Andy’s father had been dead for thirty-six years before Andy made that deal, which meant Andy was always going to make that deal. She was always going to end up here standing in a dark alley, an adult in 1982, holding the gun that would kill her father. What would happen, she wondered, if she turned the gun on herself. If she pressed the muzzle of the revolver under her chin and pulled the trigger would the universe tear itself in two? Was she even capable of playing chicken with fate and the cosmos? Anyway she squared it, she was f***ed. She either lost her life — her family, wife; her reasons to live — or she lost her father, a man who had been lost to her since she was two weeks old.
All she could do was weep in the dark.
“You okay?” a deep voice called out to her, stretching from the street and into the shadows where she wept.
Andy had never heard her father’s voice before, not in a way she could remember, but those two words were enough to know it was him. It struck her down in her core and split in two. Fingers tightened around the grip of the pistol. Breath trembled in her throat, panic setting in. She was panting, losing sight of why she was there, how she was there, what this all meant. Closing her eyes, Andy thought of Claire. She pictured her wife’s smile and spun around on her heels without opening her eyes again. Her arm extended and a forefinger curled around a cold trigger. The revolver shouted and reverberated back through her arm.
Numbness set in. Andy opened her bleary eyes and looked past the smoking gun to the man at the mouth of the alley, standing there with a bleeding hole in his abdomen. He looked so scared, hand moving down to his wound and coming up wet and red with blood. Andy had never stared her father in the eye before but there she was, the last person he would ever see, and she cried, and trembled, and shook the gun that she was still aiming at him because she didn’t understand why it had to be her.
“Please…” he begged, his voice soft and haunting.
Andy closed her eyes again and pulled the trigger until the barrel was empty.
BANG-BANG-BANGBANGBANG
There was shuffling, and tires screeching, and horns blaring before the loud crash and the sound of a body being tossed over a car. Andy didn’t open her eyes. She knew her father’s fate, she knew it from the stories her mother told her when she was old enough — how her father was murdered in a random act of violence, shot six times in an alley before stumbling back into traffic and being struck by a car. It wasn’t so random anymore. It was close. It was too close, and Andy felt every inch of the pain she had been too young to feel at the time.
Panic flooded the streets beyond the alley. Andy remained in the shadows, trapped by the panic attack that was setting in. She opened her eyes and hyperventilated. There was no way to maintain control of her breathing. The world spun in the wrong direction and when she looked down at the gun in her hand she could see blood under her nails, even though she had been too far away to get bloody. The world was just noise, and light, and cold, and Andy’s knees buckled with pain, grief, guilt — it was enough to choke on. Then she smelled the cigar smoke.
Finding the strength to turn around, Andy spun back on her heel and looked into the dark pit at the end of the alley. Baron Samedi stood, leaning on a cane, a fat cigar dangling from his chapped, painted lips. Her eyes were red and blinded by tears but it didn’t stop her from glaring at him.
“I hate you!” she yelled, the words almost inaudible through the shrill call of her cry.
“The debt is paid,” The Baron waved a hand.
Andy cried and dropped to her knees, but she fell out of the cold. She landed on the carpet at the foot of the bed, weeping openly, the empty gun still in her hand. She was back. She was home. But all she could do was cry.
