The Beast and the Quicksand

by J.L. Hepler

Almost totally bereft of all reason. Naked besides underwear and unlaced tennis shoes. Blinded by the sun. Weary. Splattered in blood. Dehydrated and dying. This was Eloy Gonzalez’s current dilemma.

“I know you’re coming. I feel it in my side.”

He had been mumbling to himself for the past six hours at least. His once lucid and demanding mind was floundering bit by bit due to the deprivation. And the six-inch scar just above his left hip was burning more now. He didn’t know exactly what was happening anymore. What he did know, or felt, for sure though, was that that fucking beast had been closing the gap between them over the past day and a half. It was stalking him, calling out to him. A pact needed to be fulfilled.

Eloy, a third generation Amarillo Narcotics Officer, had abandoned his ’98 Ford Taurus on I-40 where it intersected the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. Leaving the car door ajar and incessantly dinging, keys dangling from the ignition, blood pooling in a pile of glass in the back seat, blood dripping onto the pavement beneath the car, and bits of skull and brain crusted to the passenger window.

He had bolted into the Painted Desert in an attempt to escape. Though deep down, beneath the initial panic and the delirium now setting in due to dehydration, he knew that the effort was futile. That fucking beast would know where he had gone. And despite his attempt to flee, he knew that their meeting was inevitable whether he was alive or dead. He just preferred dead.

If his life was going to end, and he knew that it soon would, this is where he wanted it to happen. On the sands of the uninhabitable desert that was interspersed with fantastic erosions, and random hills of soft toned colors of yellow and green separating the flow of red, whose crests were often tipped in black. “They were charred by the relentless sun” his father once told him. A sun that Eloy was hoping would scorch him too.

“Take me please death…Faster. I know you’re close.” His barely audible whisper sent the highly aware insects watching him scurry away.

While stumbling forward, he felt his knees buckle. Stopping and gazing out across the desert, he smiled for the first time in days. He was inching closer to death, on his own terms, it would be the last task he’d get to tackle alone in this world, and it was getting prettier the closer he got. Yet the scar continued to ache in the background of his joy.

“This is it. I want to die here. Going dow…”

And just before he took his last step, on his second to last step to be exact, his left foot hit a patch of red quicksand. Momentum carried his right foot onto the patch, and he instantly sank. His beefy and often overworked body penetrated the ground like a drill bit barreling into dry wood. The initial descent was quick. He was dumbly shocked and only slightly aware. But once fully immersed in the sand his body slowed, bringing the downward spiraling sand to a near standstill like a glob of noodles blocking a drain.

His fading mind was conflicted. The take-charge half fighting the tug of the ground, clawing to get out. The rebellious half glad to bring it all to an end, finally. He tried to scream, but only inhaled a mouthful of gritty sand.

His chest tightened, his body began quivering. But seconds before he was about to die, just before his lungs exploded and right after he had smiled at death, the bottom of the quicksand fell out from under him.

He yelled out “OH SHIT!” in a gurgle of spit and sand while plunging into darkness. He hit the ground flat on his back with a sickening thud.

He sat up and looked at the sand trickling from the hole that had swallowed him. It was contracting closed like a sphincter. The damp tunnel he landed in went from east to west, both ways descending down hill as far as he could tell into black nothingness. But once his eyes adjusted, the darkness seemed more maroon than black, resembling the glistening maroon color the pooled blood in his back seat took on when under the moonlight.

“Oh God… Sheila. The blood. No, that fucking beast, no.” It had taken Sheila and was inching closer to him. He could still feel it on his side. The scar was throbbing now. Swelling and reddening against his brown skin.

After he stood up and vaguely got a grip on the situation, he saw the signs. Two of them. One behind his right shoulder wedged into the mud wall, and the other behind his left. “You Want To Go This Way,” the one on the left said. “You Don’t Want This Way,” the right one rendered in bold black letters. Both had bright yellow arrows pointing in their respective directions.

Under normal circumstances the decision would have been simple. No contest. Take Charge Officer Eloy would’ve followed the signs like he had his whole life and gone the way he was ordered. But part of him, the scared part who realized that this wasn’t a take charge circumstance, thought it was a trap. A ruse to lure him into the beast’s grasp before he could achieve death.

Mulling it over was getting him nowhere in his state of mind so he made a choice, the reverse psychological one. He stumbled down the “You Don’t Want This Way” path in hopes of out-smarting the beast. He held onto the damp walls for support with one hand and clinched his scar with the other. And after walking for what he thought was a mile, but could’ve been ten steps, he heard sand falling from the hole up the path. That fucking beast is here, he knew it, he felt it. The scar was boiling the closer it got. It had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. His walk progressed into a staggered dash.

As the tunnel went deeper, the maroon darkness grew thicker. Hollowness began overtaking his heart the farther he went. His dislocation from self growing exponentially with each prolonged second. Stopping to catch his breath, he was tottering, about to go down again, when whispers from deeper in the tunnel drifted up into his ears. Then the voices amplified, calling out from the corners of the darkness, louder, carving into his hollowness, deepening it. Voices he recognized, but couldn’t place. The hot words cut through the cool moist air and hit him like hot candle wax dripping into his ears.

“You stupid asshole. You stupid bitch. You’re worthless. You’re fat and ugly. You’re the scum of the earth.”

The voices got louder even, overlapping one another trying to get his sole attention. Each remark still coming from a familiar voice. A voice with measured tones that Eloy knew well. He stopped and tilted his head like a bemused puppy trying to gauge the tone. An nihilistic horror fisted his heart into a tight ball. It was his voice. The scar violently pulsated with each scruffy word.

“I can’t believe that you did that. Get undressed bitch. You worm. Dregs of society. Fucking loser. Give me that dope. Go look in a fucking mirror.”

Eloy, buckled over, winced and covered his ears. The words were getting hotter, burning not only his ears, but worse than that, his mind. The doors to his fickle memory were being scorched open. He turned around in the tunnel, made an attempt to scream, but his own words echoing in the tunnel only grew louder and drowned out his terror. Going back would’ve been his next move, to follow the sign’s advice from the get go, be the obedient officer, but he couldn’t. The beast was coming. He could smell its stench wafting down the tunnel now, getting thicker with the darkness. The smell of blood mixed with Polo cologne engulfed him. The scar expanded. The damaged skin pulled so taut it was almost translucent now.

Memories began inundating him as the voice faded. The first one was positive. A fragmented silent film of him, his brother Odilio, and his father Estaban, walking through the Painted Desert. Estaban pointing out rock formations and animals along the way. Eloy embraced the memory. It felt soothing. But this was a mistake. For it was the only positive memory that would come. A trick to pull him into his mind’s cavern of buried memories.

Then a barrage of negative memories, negative ones, vile ones he’d repressed, ones that judged him, clouded his thoughts. Eloy collapsed onto the cold muddy floor, wailing like a child, and rolled over on his side as the memories rifled across his inner eye in sequential order. The pen he stole from Mrs. Edwards in second grade. The transformer he stole from David Hanna in third. The time he pissed in Odilio’s mouth at summer camp. The girl he molested in sixth grade. Rubbed her up good. The car he stole. The homeless beggars he and his friends put cigarettes out on under the bridge. The guy he beat with a bat at the park. The girl he raped in high school. And the many more in the back of his police cruiser. The homeless man he beat with his baton. The drugs he stole and sold. The drugs he took from the station and indulged in. The lovers he took on a ride.

His spine recoiled with the pain of the memories. Each prodding at him from the inside out. It felt like a prisoner was attempting to escape his body by burning through his skin with a hot poker. Especially on his left side. That damn scar, the curse. The memories continued to play, vividly. The last one in particular. The ride with the lovers.

They were all three in Eloy’s Taurus. He driving, Sheila, his wife in the back seat, and Odilio, his brother, in the passenger seat. The smell of Polo cologne filled the car. A gun was pressed tight to Odilio’s temple.

“Calm down Eloy. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re going crazy.”

“The fuck I don’t. I saw you. I saw you fucking her in my bed.” Eloy glowered at his brother. “Did it feel good?” He shoved the barrel of the gun harder against Odilio’s temple.

“No Eloy.” Sheila yelled, grabbing his arm from the backseat. “Just calm down. You’re going crazy.”

Eloy bit her hand, drawing blood. She jerked her hand away. The car swerved into oncoming traffic almost colliding with a diesel. Odilio instinctively tried to correct the wheel. Eloy cocked the hammer of their father’s six shooter and slapped him the cheek with it.

“Don’t fucking move.” Eloy shook his head in disdain. “Brother my ass. You’re like a fucking beast sent to curse me. The fucking devil himself.”

“We didn’t mean to hurt you Eloy.” Sheila proclaimed in a slobbery sob. Tears dragging eyeliner down her cheeks.

“Whatever. Like fucking my brother isn’t bad enough. Now you lie like a bitch. You stupid cunt. I hate you. All you do is hurt me.” he angled his eyes toward Odilio, “Both of you now.”

“Eloy, pleas…”

“SHUT UP WHORE!”

Odilio sat tense and motionless with his hands firm on his thighs as Eloy glowered at Sheila through the rearview mirror. He was waiting for his chance. Being a cop also, his robotic, take charge mind that was much like Eloy’s was going through the protocol on how to handle such a situation. Or better yet, how to diffuse it and get out alive.

“Don’t even think it.” Eloy said noticing his bother’s guise. They had a special connection. The finish-each-other’s-words, know-each-other’s-thoughts bond. Odilio cut his eyes at Eloy. Sheila shrieked and smashed her head through the passenger window in the backseat. A gush of stale air rushed into the car not unlike the gush of blood running down her face. The brother’s glanced back at her.

“You hurt me worse than her bro,” Eloy’s gimlet eyes pierced Odilio as they turned back, “we’re blood. We come from the same womb. We were fucking one person at birth.” Tears started running down his cheeks. He swallowed dry and hard.

“I’m sorry Eloy, but I don’t…” Odilio eked out.

“No buts. You shut up. You don’t deserve to answer.” Eloy’s fist clinched the gun tighter. He was in control and it was going to stay that way.

Odilio watched Eloy wipe the tears from his cheeks out of the corner of his eyes and saw a chance to diffuse the situation. He grabbed and twisted Eloy’s wrist holding the gun. The car careened onto the shoulder. The gun fired hitting Odilio square in the forehead and he crumpled over into the floorboard held upright only by his seatbelt.

“You fucking beast!” Eloy fired two more shots into Odilio’s chest.

Until that point, Eloy didn’t know what he was going to do, but now he knew what he must. Sheila started screaming and banging on the seat, contorting her body in spasmodic gusts of violence as she watched bits of brain and skull slide down the passenger window.

“ELOY!” She grabbed his hair. “What the hell have you done?”

He pointed the gun at her, struggling to maintain the wheel, and shot three times, blindly. Hitting her in the abdomen with the first two, and in the thigh with the last one when she raised it for protection.

“Eloy… why?” Her scream faded into a muffled cry and moan. She fell onto her side clinching her stomach. Grasping for breath. Then she went limp.

“You know why bitch. You know. How long have you been fucking him?”

Eloy knew what he had to do next. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life on death row, living with the same inmates he abused, robbed, ratted out undercover, and put behind bars. Oh no, he wanted to die in the desert. He knew Odilio’s spirit, that fucking beast who’d taken Sheila from him and given him the scar would know that he was going to the desert and follow. He didn’t want to die on Odilio’s terms though. Death was the last thing he would ever be allowed to do alone. He needed this last isolated event before an afterlife he was sure would be coupled with Odilio and his hatred. It was inevitable.

He’d dumped the bodies in a ditch behind a rest stop on I-40 and headed across New Mexico toward the Painted Desert. The pact he’d made with Odilio as a child, as a teenager, and over and over again as an adult replayed in his head. That’s when the scar on his side started hurting.Promise we’ll be together until the end of time. Always together even though we’ll be separated.

Eloy snapped back into reality with a scream. Back into the tunnel sitting up on his knees as if in prayer, in agony, but away from the memory of his horrid actions. His continuous screams were barely audible because of his parched mouth. He opened his bleary eyes and saw other eyes, his brother’s chocolate eyes, though his own eyes oddly, emerging from the darkness and felt them judging him. His first instinct was to get up and run, but his emaciated body was too weak and feeble for that. Besides, the scar was immobilizing at this point. He collapsed limply onto the ground. His eyes staring into the darkness awaiting his brother’s revenge.

Odilio eased over him. He had no shape but a shadow swirling behind his eyes. Eloy could feel his excitement at finally catching up. Odilio hovered over Eloy momentarily and then plunged what felt like a knife into Eloy’s bloated scar, rupturing it. Black goo mixed with blood oozed from the gap. Eloy’s mouth gaped open to scream, but nothing came out. Surprisingly, the pain and hollowness once consuming Eloy seemed to seep out the hole rather than intensify. Finally, Eloy thought closing his eyes in relief, death will sooth me and end this. I’m sorry Odilio. Forgive me.

Odilio reached into Eloy’s chest and grabbed his heart and leapt into the red sand above. It spiraled open for them.

“Heaven?” Eloy uttered with an undertone of sarcasm. He felt Odilio giggle as they floated upward. They penetrated the sand together as one and punctured the other side attached at the hip like they had been at birth.

Eloy opened his eyes, lying on the desert, an IV in his arm, surrounded by FBI agents and medics. Alone.

“You have the right to remain silent.” One of the agents mindlessly announced.

Eloy, dazed, looked around in a panic. He looked down at his side. The scar was not burning or swollen or bleeding. In fact, it was gone. “No Odilio. Take me with you. I’m sorry. We had a pact. Always together remember? I can’t go to jail. I’ll be tortured in there.” Eloy violently shook his head side to side grabbing his side. “Not revenge like this. ODILIO!! I NEED YOU!! TAKE ME!!”