Subtraction

[Dogs231]

The young man's eyes slowly fluttered, blinking the crusted blood out of their folds, the shadowy vignette peeling away as his mind returned to pulsing, painful reality. Like a fish out of water, he took a long, hard gulp of air and tried to pull his mangled body up from the ground below him. It listened, but only just, and he dragged his buckshot-ridden form onto his knees. For now, he was still alive. Despite it, against all odds, he was alive.

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED FROM "Далеко бежит дорога"

Alexander's mind was hazy, an unsteady stream of muddled half-thoughts and wild signals from the nuclei, little more than the ganglic instincts that had so kindly dragged him head-first out of the grave. His hand lifted to feel the stinging wetness on his face, assessing the damage, and he felt little pockmark holes where the buckshot had embedded itself into his cheek. A few inches further, they would have torn through his skull.

He could taste the iron in his throat.

After clearing the red from his eyes with a sweep of his sleeve, bits of hemoglobin sticking to his arm like a clinging red moss, Alexander, still kneeling, stared at the desolate stretch before him—the broken wreckage of the mountain path. Scattered bits of rock and shrapnel dotted the straggling pathways like scabs on the domain. Then, he looked down at his white dress shirt, now stained with ugly black blotches of dried fluid.

Like his face, the shots were there, his shirt now specked with little holes and tears where the tiny lead balls had run themselves through to their destination, broken patches of skin and muscle behind them, voids in his skin plugged only with the metal that had made them. It looked terrible; it did not feel much better. He could already tell that the clock was ticking down on him, the hands on his watch face like swords to behead him.

Indifference colored him. These wounds were a matter for later, to be remedied or resigned to at some uncertain time, something with which only his future self need be concerned. Alexander lived in the now, brain clinging to the tiny shreds of light and hope that he still held in his heart, the two working in tandem. And so, without regard for how the wounds opened as he did it, he tried to stand, to walk. His body refused at first.

He forced himself to move; he did move.

With sudden, painful lurches of movement, Alexander dragged himself and his slow, lagging body behind him, towards a certain point, trying to focus his eyes on the spot of crimson in the near-distance, towards the figure he couldn't recognize by looks anymore, but whom he knew was of vital importance; towards Valentin. And with each stinging flex of his muscles, he was an inch closer until he could lift his legs and walk.

And then he shambled towards the broken form on the ground, its condition like a bird with cut wings, and he blinked the haze away. Then, he let himself fall to his knees again beside it and vainly reached out with his arms, his left still punctuated with those points of contact, and tried to shake the other boy awake, just as he had done on the first day of their nightmare, tried to shake his best friend out of the abyss of death itself.

"Val—Valentin," he murmured—as if learning how to talk all over again—jaw screwed in with lead. "I am here. Please, please, please wake up," his hands still shaking him, more fervently now, mind transferred from the basal ganglia to the limbic system, his emotions taking the reigns from the lizardine instinct. "Valentin, wake up. I am here," he said, a plea to the corpse beside him, denying the horrible truth he knew to be such.

He looked into the vast, gray eyes of the boy on the ground, empty and starting to glaze over, them staring heavenwards, towards a place in which Alexander had never believed. It was then he realized the truth—when he first began to accept its premise as fact. For a moment, he just held the corpse up in his arms and held it tight, torrenting streaks of salt and water running down his face, a literal cascade of his human misery.

Valentin was gone. Alexander, despite everything, was still here.

"Valentin," he mumbled, muffled, into the body's cold, ice-crusted chest. "I'm so sorry. Forgive me," begging to a voice that wouldn't ever hear him. And then, with a heave in his chest, he broke down into sobs, any former pretense of detachment from the situation discarded in a broken heap, just as the two of them had been, clinging tightly to the body of his friend. And, more than any of the wounds across him, his heart stung him.

He could have grieved for an eternity. But there was no eternity to have.

So Alexander slowly set the body down on the ground again and turned away, his eyes still stricken with tears. Then, he stuck his hands into the ground and began to dig; his long fingers turned to the thin heads of shovels as he scooped the cold, hard, frozen soil up and tossed it out of the way. He was silent as he did so. Even as his fingernails chipped and scattered and the skin on his fingers tore, Alexander said nothing.

Alexander and Valentin found a dead body rotting in the wilderness on the second day. The corpse—the girl—had died alone, in the cold, forgotten. To Alexander's surprise, Valentin insisted they pay their respects and bury it. He had so cruelly protested it—denied her any semblance of dignity in death, believing it a waste of time. And now, much later, much wiser, he stood over the corpse of the boy who meant the most in the world to him.

And he dug a grave.

It was not the first grave Alexander had seen in his life. He remembered one another. It was the funeral of his father. They lowered his coffin into the ground and filled it with dirt. And then that was it; each nail in the coffin, another strike at his heart. But now, he wished he could give that same courtesy to Valentin. It was the least his friend deserved for all his kindness. And he could only give him a shallow, cold grave for the trouble.

Several hours later, Alexander looked down at the simple groove he had dug in the ground. It was a poor excuse for a burial ground. Nonetheless, it was all he could do. His bruised, blackened right hand dripped a little with blood from accidentally cutting himself on a rock. His left was still chock with lead and had begun to scab over. He was tired and breathless. His limits were near. But he refused to be deterred by them.

He knelt beside Valentin and looked him in the eyes. "Valentin, I want to take something of yours as a keepsake. Grant me that last wish," he asked. Then, he waited a moment as if a response would come, and when none came, he placed his hand on Valentin's head. From there, he took Valentin's hat, a knit black cap that his best friend's mother had made, off of him and pulled it over his head, over his matted, sticky, bloody hair.

He still felt cold.

So he unwrapped Valentin's trench coat from the other boy's broad shoulders, sliding it away from the body. Then, as he held it in his hands, he stared at it. Outside of a few specks of blood and a broken button, it looked the same as it always had. He put his arms through the holes and wore it himself. It was far too large for his thin frame; Valentin was stockier than him and wore larger sizes. But over his coat, it fit right.

And, as he wore it, it felt like Valentin was still there. It comforted him.

"Thank you, Valentin," he said, brown eyes staring down at the corpse on the ground. "I wish I could still give you something in recompense." He knelt beside Valentin again, placed his hands under the body, and lifted it into the grave. It stained his arms, never robust, now weakened by violence, but he did not care. Then, he looked down at the corpse again and spoke to it, a long-forgotten tenderness in his voice resurfacing.

"Farewell, Valentin," he said. "May you rest well."

He slid the dirt onto the grave until the corpse was no longer visible. Then, he pushed the snow onto it. After that, it almost looked like no grave had ever been there. But he would never forget where it stood. And, if he had the opportunity, he would make sure that his body was returned to his family so that he could receive a grave worthy of him. Despite that vow, Alexander doubted he would live to see that possibility come true.

Alexander remained there, for a moment, next to the grave.

Then, silently, he began to walk, a bitter determination in each step.

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED IN "The Scientific Method"