The Vulture

 

by J. Edward Ritchie

 

Erik trudged down a fetid alley carving through the city’s bowels. The potpourri of urine and sewage was a welcome competitor for the musk emanating from his matted armpits. He sidestepped used needles while clutching a bottle of cheap whiskey, careful not to get snagged on the rusted trashcans and dumpsters. If it were all the same to the gods-that-be, he would rather not die from tetanus. Not before accounts were settled.

Halfway down the alley, Erik pressed his back against the brick wall and slid down to his haunches. His skull, metal plate and all, fit into a divot as though carved from it. Moisture seeping from the porous brick soothed the lice gnawing at his scalp. This was his haunt, more intimate and familiar than any place he had called home. Three hundred and sixty-six days without a roof over his head inverted Erik’s sense of comfort. Solitude was life. And whiskey. He loathed whiskey, especially the swill in his hand, but it had become integral to his nocturnal routine.

From sundown to sunrise Erik retreated within, drowning his pain. Whiskey brought truth without fear or judgment, and it asked nothing in return. Humanity, however, looked upon him and beheld only the rotting dregs of a man. They saw a bum to be pitied, loathed, or ignored as less than a stray dog. They were all of them so very wrong. Unlike the myopic masses shambling through their lives in a vain search for love, riches, or power, Erik had true purpose.

A voice had manifested from within Erik’s damaged soul, one both soothing and arresting like a mother who didn’t need to raise her voice to be heard––strength in composure. Maybe the voice had always been there, dormant until needed. Maybe his mind created it to cope, or maybe Erik had summoned an ally from the celestial depths. Whatever the voice’s source, she never minced words.

“He will come,” the voice promised as she had so many times. “Remember them. Celebrate them in blood, and I will bring you home. This I promise, my child.”

For three hundred and sixty-six nights, one thought kept Erik returning to the same alley: retribution. And for three hundred and sixty-six nights, he passed out in his own vomit, vengeance denied. But Erik was patient. When one exists only for a singular moment to occur, time becomes irrelevant. He could do this for months, years, whatever was necessary. Thus, Erik unscrewed the bottle and toasted in the tradition of his ancestors.

“Skål.”

750ml remaining

The whiskey burned Erik’s throat like an act of self-flagellation to expose his sins before the gods. Each night, that initial swig unlocked his own Pandora’s Box of rage, shame, desolation, and madness. A life lived in service of death created demons by its nature, but it wasn’t the faces of those Erik had killed that eviscerated his soul. No, it was memories of joy that poured forth.

Details once thought insignificant, taken for granted with the assurance of a lifetime more, became death by a thousand cuts. The silken touch of Bryna’s finger tickling the hairs on his neck. The giggle of their daughter Astrid carried on the breeze as she collected apples in the family orchard. Spaghetti sauce splashed across the kitchen from Erik’s farcical attempt to surprise them with lasagna. The beauty in those recollections was forever perverted by random human cruelty.

The bottle slipped from Erik’s mouth and spilled onto his shirt. He sucked the damp flannel and shouted, “Son of a bitch!”

A bourgeois couple walking past the alley jumped from his outburst. How dare they flaunt their happiness like an oversized lottery check? Fate provides bounty only to reclaim its fortune tenfold.

“Focus,” the voice instructed. “Prepare yourself. Remember.”

Three hundred and sixty-seven nights earlier, Erik and his family finished lunch at their favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant. He thought the parking meter had expired and wanted to cut through the alley before they got a ticket. Astrid serenaded them with a rendition of the latest pop hit, her dulcet tones perfect for the alley’s acoustics. Even surrounded by filth, his little girl was so graceful.

Then a twitchy idiot with a blade decided he should rob them.

Erik broke the mugger’s neck between the bars of a fire escape ladder before he could demand their money. The threat was assessed and eliminated with a dispassionate efficiency he’d hoped his family would never witness. Bryna went into shock, and the fear in Astrid’s eyes disarmed Erik. Fear of her father. By the time he saw the second mugger reflected in her glasses, it was too late.

Erik was grabbed from behind and hurled against the wall. Skull and brick compacted, jostling his equilibrium. His vision phased in and out, providing snapshots of horror as his family was murdered. Two sloppy shots from a snubnosed revolver meant they would die suffering. Erik couldn’t move. Couldn’t shout for help. His life was only spared due to nearby police sirens. Skittish, the fiend took ten dollars from Bryna’s purse and ran off with the herky-jerky, serpentine sprint of a junkie. 

It would be an hour before anyone found Erik and his family, and another two weeks before he could leave the hospital. He couldn’t even attend their funerals.

“I should’ve seen him coming. I should’ve––”

“Died with them,” the voice finished. “Died fighting for them.”

Ten dollars. Erik’s family was slaughtered for ten dollars and a parking meter that still had thirty-five minutes left.

600ml remaining

The cold rim of the whiskey bottle stuck to Erik’s chapped mouth. It was a poor substitute for Bryna’s lips, ever warm and inviting. Their first kiss wasn’t a grand romantic gesture, but it stopped his world all the same. Erik’s nerves were a frayed mess on their first date. He couldn’t stop sweating. Every time their eyes met, his legs threatened to give out like a collapsible toy figurine. He could stare down the sight of a rifle, target in sight, without any trepidation. But standing at Bryna’s door at the end of their date damn near gave him a panic attack.

Pretending to brush something from Erik’s beard, Bryna snuck in close and planted her lips onto his with just enough tender force to make her intentions known: Erik was now hers, and not once in over a decade would he dispute that fact. During the kiss, their entire lives together began to map out in his subconscious. Everything that could happen between them went from possibility to certainty. Erik would give all of his remaining days to be at that door with her for one more minute.

“You could find solace, if not love, in the arms of another,” the voice said. “But every day, you choose this life. Do you know why?”

Simple: Bryna was a Lamborghini, and everyone else was a two-toned, 1986 Ford Taurus rolling on donut spares. There was no comparison. The thought of touching another woman was revolting. Bryna may have been the height of godliness when she was alive, but death solidified her sainthood. Besides, pleasures of the flesh were for the living. Erik was a corpse lingering in the world for but a while longer. Nothing about him felt alive.

“Because I’m rotten.”

425ml remaining

From the moment Astrid entered his world, Erik knew that every violent act he’d committed was in preparation to protect her. He’d explored the most savage corners of humanity and seen its true nature. Staring into Astrid’s newborn eyes, both swollen shut like a boxer after twelve rounds, he vowed to be her shield against all threats. She was his salvation…and a misfit without parallel.

One evening, Astrid got it in her mind to play an impromptu game of hide-and-seek in the attic without telling anyone. It was ten minutes before Erik heard her chuckle, ten minutes of his mind racing to the worst scenarios imaginable. She had been kidnapped. Or she had an accident in the surrounding woods. Or she ran away. Each worry echoed like the blare of a gong, deafening him to all other thoughts, rational or otherwise. Erik had been in mortal danger but never been helpless. Never known terror.

When Erik found little Astrid tucked behind the boxes of Christmas ornaments, she squealed with such delight that his fears were cleansed in a snap. But those ten minutes became etched in the recesses of his memory like a harbinger of the future.

“I knew. Even back then, I knew she’d be taken from me.” Erik choked on the words and washed them down with another swig.

“That horror was not your fault,” the voice said as fact, not to soothe. “But to so many others, you were the horror. Become one again.”

250ml remaining

Erik was now drunk, not in the traditional sense (his tolerance had become obscene) but in the way that one’s thoughts begin to slip through the fingers of personal denial. The whiskey would soon run dry, marking the end of his vigil for another night.

Three hundred and sixty-seven days since Erik last held his wife and daughter, and the second mugger’s face endured as the backdrop of his existence. That pockmarked, yellow-toothed junkie grin was ever-present to mock his failure as a husband and father. For months Erik used every dollar and resource at his disposal to track down the man, but he was chasing a ghost, one indistinguishable from the city’s plethora of smackheads. That nameless piece of shit was still breathing. Still wasting his life sticking a needle in his arm while worms devoured Bryna and Astrid. Junkies, however, are creatures of habit. One day, his family’s murderer would return to the alley in search of another victim.

“He will come,” the voice assured. “And we will be here.”

Erik had entertained a play-by-play account of such an encounter many, many times. Government sanctioned or not, his past life was one of a professional killer, and those skills never faded. He pored over all the ways he could make the junkie hurt. Make him bleed. Torture was an ineffective interrogation technique, but he didn’t want any intelligence from the junkie. He wanted pain. Erik’s carnivorous appetite had been simmering for over a year, and he needed his pound of flesh.

“I’ve always watched over you, Erik. Every mission. Every kill. You were glorious.”

Family changed everything. The very reason he retired upon Astrid’s birth was the ultimate cause of her death. When loved ones are in danger, instinct becomes muddled by sentiment. The contradiction of self-preservation versus selfless protection made Erik sloppy when he needed to be sharpest. The bodies he’d dropped over the years could fill a mausoleum, and yet a junkie bested him. Shame swelled in his throat.

“And what am I now?”

“Reborn.”

100ml remaining

Nearly depleted, Erik’s whiskey had become a draft of backwash. It seemed his vengeance would be deferred yet again…until footsteps announced a foreign presence. Slender, perfectly manicured bare feet slinked towards him, one before the other like a model on a catwalk. A woman approached, her graceful frame caressed by a jade gown with a slit exposing athletic thighs. Ginger braids fell upon alabaster shoulders, completing her status as a measure of physical perfection.

“Rise, Erik.”

It was her voice, the one in Erik’s head. Before he could dismiss the encounter as an illusion born from drunken insanity, she took his hands and raised him. All of his two hundred pounds were hoisted to a stand as if he was but a boy. Her touch seemed to purge his inebriation, leaving only the bloodlust from a different life. Bringing her satin lips to Erik’s ear, the woman cooed two words that thrust him to purpose like a shot of adrenalin in the heart.

“He’s here.”

A man emerged from the sewer steam cloaking the far end of the alley, with the swagger and confidence of a fighter making his ring entrance. Even in the dark, Erik saw track marks speckled up and down the degenerate’s arms. Fate had delivered his target, one year older and ten years aged from hard living. But Erik was blind to the warning signs, the inconsistencies between past and present that concealed a truth no lucid mind would accept. Rage blinded him, a rage amplified and set loose by seductive encouragement.

“Do what you do best, my child.”

Erik dropped his whiskey and charged the junkie, each step accelerating his madcap momentum. His adversary did the same, placing them on a collision course that electrified the alley. Rats abandoned their trashcan havens. Pigeons fled from the impending violence. The barefoot woman, however, exuded no fear. She held her ground to savor the spectacle, yearning for blood, and she would have it.

No words would be exchanged between the combatants and no restraint observed.

Erik ceded control to a year’s worth of broiled resentment, lambasting the junkie. Crimson streamers splashed on the brick and pavement like a chronicle of his tragedy. He tenderized muscle in Bryna’s name. Broke bones for Astrid. And claimed trophies of teeth for himself.

But something was wrong.

The man didn’t fight like a junkie. He was stalwart, disciplined, and traded blows as though a gladiator upon the Coliseum sands. A calloused fist connected with Erik’s cheek, opening the skin like a split seam. He returned fire with a liver shot that bowled over the junkie warrior then followed up with a knee to his ribcage. The grueling back-and-forth carnage whittled away at both men, exposing their true selves beneath pretenses. One of them had to fall, not for vengeance or solace, but for the sheer glory of mortal competition.

Erik sidestepped a brutal haymaker aimed at his jaw and kicked his opponent’s knee. It popped sideways in a sickening crunch of cartilage. The junkie howled, immobilized. Erik wrapped his arms around the junkie’s tree trunk neck and twisted. Vertebrae strained under the pressure, bone grinding against bone…

What am I doing? Where am I? Erik wondered as a wave of disorientation drowned his conviction. Nothing made sense. Memories and emotions drained as if someone had opened a tap in his brain. Visions of a woman and a young girl swirled together into a dark blob like poorly mixed paint. Who are they?

“Kill him!”

The barefoot woman’s command shattered his perplexing interlude. There was only the mission. Erik snapped the junkie’s neck so viciously, so completely, that his skull swiveled about like a bobblehead––an act that felt as natural as breathing. The limp body slipped from Erik’s arms, its mouth gaping in a death stare that abolished what remained of his moral assurance.

“Masterful. And to think the others doubted my methods of persuasion,” the woman said and returned Erik’s whiskey bottle, utterly ecstatic from his performance. “To victory.”

What could he do but drink?

Empty

As the last droplets of whiskey trickled onto Erik’s tongue, reality began to peel away like chips of old paint. The weather-beaten bricks became walls of solid, pristine gold. The skyline shimmered into a massive vaulted ceiling adorned with a battle mural that made The Last Judgment look like a child’s doodle. An aroma of smoked meats and spices ousted the alley’s fetor. The transformation culminated with a blinding radiance that bathed Erik in warmth, healing his injuries. When the light receded, a new world was spread before him.

A world of pleasure and contest. 

Erik found himself within an enormous, golden mead hall stretching back to infinity as if reflected between mirrors. Marble dining tables overflowed with victuals and drinks to satiate any cultural appetite. Warriors plucked from the pages of history feasted and reveled like kings. Shaolin Monks, Romans, Aztecs, Samurai, Mongols, Huns, Spartans, Zulus, and legions more were all equals in the bacchanalia.

The whiskey in Erik’s hand was gone, replaced by a silver goblet lined with precious gems. The taste of honey wine lingered on his tongue. His fallen opponent was no longer a junkie but a Viking of beastly stature from a bygone era. The Viking gasped as life breathed into him anew. He rolled his neck to realign the vertebrae and leapt to his feet.  

“Finally, broder. I grew weary of killing you,” he said to Erik then joined a group of his brethren ravaging a roasted boar.

“Breathe,” the barefoot woman instructed as the blood drained from Erik’s head. “You know where you are. You know who you are.”

Gone was the woman’s jade dress, replaced with plated armor both noble and functional. Though freshly polished, no effort was made to conceal the saga of battle damage. She now stood a full head taller than Erik, radiating a beauty and fortitude that dwarfed even the most hardened warrior in the hall. She placed a hand over his heart––

Erik remembered everything. An assassination mission on enemy soil. Complete government deniability. Contact with a foreign agent. And a cold serrated blade sliding between his ribs. Truth conflicted with fabrication, and his psyche couldn’t reconcile the discordant narratives. There was only room for one.

“No, I left that life. I, I had a family.”

Even as Erik spoke of his family, they were little more than distant emotions that faded like a dream upon waking. He didn’t know their names. He couldn’t picture their faces. Nothing of them remained. The goblet slipped from Erik’s fingers and clanged on the stone floor.

“I had…I had…”

“You had nothing.” The woman took Erik’s face in her hands like a mother amused by her naïve child. “I wrote the truth you needed to accept yourself. You denied your nature for three hundred and sixty-six consecutive days, but I saw within you, my child. My Einherjar.”

The woman was a Valkyrie, a vulture of the battlefield who had abducted Erik’s soul into a cyclical nightmare of violence, death, and rebirth. Even before his death, she had been perched upon his shoulder, whispering in his head. Grooming him.

Erik had lived up to the Valkyrie’s expectations, and she couldn’t be more proud of the monster standing before her.