The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

Whit started glancing around the room again as if searching for a perfectly rational explanation. Maybe these weren’t bullet wounds but something else.

“How could we…” he tried to ask. “How could we have survived this?”

“I don’t know. We’ve survived a lot so far, so why not—”

Whit pointed to his wound. “Look at this, Jason!”

“Shhh. Keep it down, goddamnit. And, no thank you, I’ve looked at it enough.”

Whit turned around. “Where’s the exit wound? Do you think it could have managed to slip out and miss the major organs?”

Jason waved him off without looking. “What about all of mine?”

Whit turned back around and briefly examined his brother’s chest. “I don’t know, maybe they…” Then he looked at Jason’s face. “You’re white as a sheet, too.”

Jason lightly slapped his own face. “I’ll get some color once we get out of here. C’mon, let’s figure a way out.”

Whit tapped at his chest. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, opened them. “I don’t feel dead.”

“Thank you for clarifying that.”

“But, I mean, I’m breathing. Are you breathing? How do you feel?”

“I feel stiff but…normal.” Indeed, Jason was feeling less sore the more he moved, as if all that his joints needed was to be released from their locked positions. “Shockingly normal. You?”

Whit nodded. “But if we’ve survived this and have been recovering here for a few hours, or days, shouldn’t we…feel a little worse?”

“I don’t know, maybe we’re on some crazy medication. Or maybe they used some new kind of bullets. Who knows? Look, a police station isn’t the place to be wondering about this. We don’t have time.”

Jason turned off the radio. A closer inspection of the police hat on the wall informed him that they were in Points North, Indiana. He told Whit.

“Where the hell is Points North?”

“Not far from Valparaiso,” Jason said. The plan had been to pick up the girls at a motel outside Valparaiso after the cash drop-off in Detroit. So had the drop-off been successful, only to have something go wrong when they tried to get the girls?

Jason motioned to the third cooling board at the other end of the room. “Come on, let’s see who our accomplice is. Maybe he has some answers.”

He walked over to the body, Whit following after bunching his sheet around his waist. The man on the third board was every bit as naked under his sheet and every bit as bad off. He was big, once inflated but now sagging, and a gunshot to the left side of his neck had not only left a large wound but had torn at the loose skin, shreds hanging there. The crooked bridge of his nose boasted that he’d survived previous acts of violence before succumbing to this one.

“I don’t know him,” Whit said. “You?”

Jason shook his head. Something in the man’s face, as well as the fact that the doctors or morticians had separated him from them, made Jason certain this was a cop.

“Hey, buddy,” Jason said, a little more loudly. “You awake?” He snapped his fingers over the man’s face, but nothing. Whit slapped the man’s cheek.

“Have some respect,” Jason chided him. He waited a moment, but the slap went unanswered. Then he placed his thumb between the man’s right eye and eyebrow, pressing at the socket of his skull and pulling up to reveal the still, hazel eye beneath. This man seemed content enough in his death not to be fighting it.

“I guess whatever we have isn’t contagious,” Jason said. He patted the corpse’s cold chest. “Okay, buddy. Rest in peace.”

The room had a lone window, small and high on the wall. Twilight was fading, and the clock beside the window called the time quarter past eight. What day was it? Jason had the vague feeling an entire day had passed since his last memory, if not more.

“What the hell happened?” Whit asked again.

“Let’s figure it out later. When we’re very far from here.”

Beyond the dead man’s feet was a wooden door; on its two hooks hung not only an officer’s cap but also a white medical coat, which Jason grabbed. The coat barely cloaked him, and it was so thin it was nearly transparent.

Jason began opening the drawers that lined the left-hand wall, hoping to find something worth taking. He had never been comfortable around doctors, and being alone in a medical room rife with their soiled detritus was even worse. He felt like the fool in an old silent movie who spelunks the depths of a monster’s lair without noticing the shadow growing behind him. He found a roll of surgical tape and some gauze and tossed them to Whit, who gave him a confused look.

“I don’t know, we might need ‘em later.”

He continued fumbling among the forceps and pliers and shears that lay on the tables, taking the two longest scalpels and handing one to his brother.

“The window?” Whit asked.

“You can tramp around in the nude if you’d like, but I want some clothes first.”

Jason had broken into and out of several buildings in his time: police stations and armories; the federally monitored homes of friends and family; a county jail; hell, even a moving train. On some of those occasions he had been unarmed, but never unclothed. He felt his nudity was an unfair handicap, the cops violating some essential code.

The room had a second door on the opposite wall. They pressed their ears to one and then the other, deciding that the one by the dead cop was the safest bet—through the other door they’d heard a dull rumble of activity.

Jason turned the doorknob slowly, glanced back at his brother a step behind him, and nodded. Then he leaned his weight into the door, his right hand clutching the scalpel still encrusted with his own blood.

It was a narrow hallway, white tiled floor and unpainted white walls, and just beyond was another door. Through that was a locker room, movable wooden benches lining the walls. It smelled of soap and sweat; an opening in the wall to the left led to some stalls, probably some showers—but all was quiet.

Jason silently opened the few unlocked lockers but found nothing. Whit did the same from the opposite wall until they met in the center.

Despite the speed of Jason’s heartbeat—either his heart was still beating or he could feel the lost echo of such vibrations like an amputee’s phantom pain—he was still cold, and the tile against the soles of his feet caused him to shiver. He stepped back into the middle of the room and found himself in full view of a mirror hanging between two lockers. Distracted as usual by his reflection, he stared at the dark bullet wounds visible through his thin coat. Then he noticed his hair—he ran his fingers through it but still it hung ragged down his forehead.

“They cut off some of my hair. Jesus.”

People said the Firefly Brothers looked alike, but Jason never saw it. Whit’s face was narrower and his jawline more prominent, something Whit had inherited from their mother, an angular Irish contrariness as present in bone structure as it was whenever he opened his mouth to utter his latest complaint. Whit was hairier, too, his eyebrows thick and the shadow present on his cheeks even at the moment he was washing his razor. He was the only one of the three Fireson boys who could boast of blue eyes—to Jason’s everlasting envy—and at the moment they seemed even bluer than usual, as the rest of his face was blanched of color.

Their attention was diverted by a flushing toilet. Without a word, they pressed their backs against opposite sides of the wall flanking the portal. Whit released the knot of his bedsheet to free his hand and then the uniformed cop walked in, eyes on his shiny brown boots as he adjusted his cap. Whit slipped behind him and threaded his left arm between the cop’s left arm and neck, clamping around the windpipe and holding the blade with his right hand just inches before the man’s eyes. Jason stepped in front of the cop, scalpel in view, the white medical coat fluttering around him, a sociopath medic forcing experiments upon the damned.

“Officer,” Jason greeted the cop, “we’d like to report a crime. Pants theft. We were hoping we could borrow some clothes while you investigated the crime for us.”

If the cop’s eyes had been wide at the surprise attack, they were wider still at the sight before him. His mouth dropped open and the color was draining from his face.

“Uh-oh,” Jason said to Whit. “Better lean him against the wall here, quick.”

Whit obeyed, and the cop slumped to his knees. His eyes were so wide it didn’t seem possible they could widen further, but they did. Then he gagged and vomited. The brothers stepped back.

“Actually, Whit,” Jason said as he viewed the mess, “he’s more your size. You can have his clothes.”

Whit stepped forward. He grabbed the cop’s collar and pressed his back against the locker.

The cop was thin, about Whit’s size minus a couple of inches. Jason relieved him of his sidearm—a Colt .38 revolver—and checked that it was loaded. He would have put it in his pocket if he’d had any.