| The World of Hurt Contest appears after the story excerpt
WORLD
OF HURT
by
Brian
Hodge
"The
mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of
heaven."
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
I.
U
never told me how u died.
The
cursor blinked in the empty text field, beckoning him to begin. It would wait
forever, or at least until the next power failure, and Andrei had a feeling that
the girl half a continent away would too; that as long as he didn't log off, just
sat staring at the dangerous keys, so would she, maybe prompting him now and then
but never giving up, waiting out the standoff until another night was over and
both their time zones had greeted the dawn.
Fingertips to keys - did it
have to be this hard? Just tell her what happened…
I drowned.
Two
simple words, a fact of life that nobody could take away from him. No, he owned
it. Owned his death the way Midas owned gold.
Im sorry. That mustve
been awful. How old were u? How long ago?
Easy questions, time and
demographics. He could handle these.
14 years ago this past winter.
I was 17.
He knew what was coming next, had braced himself for it the
moment he'd started down this path.
Howd it happen?
Except
he wanted it, deep inside. He must have. Why else would he be here? Nobody puts
a gun to your head and makes you cultivate friends - well, friend was a stretch,
more like an acquaintance here - that you would never set eyes on. Six months
from now he'd be doing some computer housecleaning and would delete Kimmy's name
from his instant messaging buddy list, because a list of one wasn't a list at
all, but something to be ashamed of, and what would be the point of keeping it
when he never used it anymore.
My friend Ty got a new car for Xmas.
It was a few days after, not even New Year's yet, and we were still on break from
school. I guess it was a dumb time to give him a new car. They should've waited
for his birthday next summer. Middle of winter in Pittsburgh, all that snow and
ice, and you couldn't get Ty out of the car. But actually, we were from a suburb
called Fox Chapel. It's the kind of place where lots of kids get cars for Xmas.
We were out drinking one night and he put us in the Allegheny River. It was over
quick, probably, but it doesn't seem like it, not when every little thing is so
vivid. It was a bitterly cold winter and the river was frozen over pretty thick.
We got the doors open while the car was still caught in the ice, kind of balanced
there like if you'd pressed a toy car into a pie crust, but we'd barely gotten
out when everything dropped from underneath us. Ty caught himself on the edge
of the hole and managed to haul himself out. Good reflexes. I got pulled under
the ice.
It flowed more easily than Andrei had thought it would. Like
ripping off a Band-Aid. The hardest part was getting started. The rest was just
momentum.
Jesus!
How awful! What kinda car?
He stared at the screen, feeling the vague
gnawing of an insult until he realized Kimmy was joking.
Sorry. Just
thought u could use a laff. A jolt outta the Big Bad Heavy.
Give her
points for sussing him out through the couple thousand miles of wire between them.
OK,
seriously … what was it like, if u dont mind me asking?
He hadn't
thought much about it for a long time, not in specifics, but he could still recall
the way he'd described the experience to the psychiatrist he'd seen a few years
ago. He'd fumbled for words then, dredging everything up like muck from the bottom
of a river, but tonight found he could distill it to its essence:
It
was monumental. An accident like that, everything you're up against is the size
of a mountain. The cold: It's so total, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Plus the panic. That's as hard to fight as the cold. Maybe harder. You're in the
water and you can't believe what's happened, and at first you have that flash
that everything will be OK in a couple minutes, you just want to be warm and dry
again, and you've got just enough time to think something stupid, like, OH SHIT,
Mom and Dad are gonna kill me. Then you realize they won't have to. Because you've
done the job on yourself. You've come up for air and all that's there is ice,
and more ice. You missed the hole. Your fingertips are numb but you've got just
enough feeling left to realize they're skimming along the underside of the ice,
and you know you're caught in the current. That's when the panic really sets in.
But you can't fight it for long. 20 seconds or so? Then the water starts coming
in and after a little of that the fight leaves you pretty quick. Except you're
not dead yet. You're just sorry, and sad, in this distant way … or I was,
at least. For the next little bit, it was like flying past a window and seeing
my life disappear on the other side. A big white window because of the snow on
the ice, and the full moon on the other side. And then even the sorrow was gone,
because I guess I was too.
Several seconds of a blank text field -
he supposed she must've been processing it all. Not so rapid-fire on her response
this time.
4 how long?
38 minutes.
Wow. & everyone
telling u its a miracle u survived, right?
Until I was sick of it.
&
no brain damage!
Well, that's debatable.
She didn't say anything,
just fired back a string of emoticons, faces that cracked open and shut as they
laughed in perfect unison. He wished he could delete them, their subtle and regimented
mockery.
It's the cold, he typed. Hypothermia. It preserves you
for a while, a suspended animation kind of thing. You can get away with being
dead and then revived a lot later than you can in the summer. They've pulled kids
out of frozen ponds, dead an hour or more, and after they were resuscitated they
were OK.
Xcept
u werent in a pond. Howd they FIND U?
I
popped out from under the ice downriver, at the lock and dam. The ice was broken
up there. Some paramedics and other rescue guys were already there waiting, just
in case.
They
had come to the part where normal people were supposed to pump up the miracle
talk: What a lucky guy, your guardian angel was keeping an eye on you that night
- all the things that oozed out when the person's fundamental perspective was
ignorance.
Kimmy
knew better.
So u died, she wrote instead. The tunnel, white
light, dead relatives waiting 4 u, the whole routine?
Textbook.
How
long b4 u started 2 remember the way it REALLY happened?
He looked
at the number keys across the top of the keyboard. Until this moment, he'd never
thought of them as a decade of his life, stretched between an accent mark on one
side and dashes on the other.
8 years
& u havent blown yr
brains out yet? (Paradoxically, it's been known 2 happen!) Or screamed yr throat
raw until they sedated u? Pretty impressive, Andrei. U may B 1 of those that make
it.
It was the first dumb thing Kimmy had said, of course, and she
probably wished she could take it back, that she didn't make such a habit of typing
before thinking.
He thought he'd sooner kill the rest of the world before he
would kill himself.
He put fingers to keys, to tell her so.
And
what was the point of making it when you already knew how much there was to dread
once death grabbed you and held on for good?
What
people are saying about WORLD OF HURT
"A
nightmarish vision of the sickness and gruesome power of feeling powerless. Hodge
gives us two protagonists we care about and keeps us guessing to the end."
- Michael Blumlein, author of THE HEALER and THE BRAINS OF RATS "Brian
Hodge is one of the best writers writing fiction today, period. His explorations
of religion, sexuality, violence, and magic, his characters so vividly drawn that
they make most of the rest of us look like we're working with stick figures, and
his always-absorbing, never-faltering voice have appointed him the master of any
form he tries. If you've not read him, you're missing out on one hell of an enjoyable
and important writer." - Poppy Z. Brite, author of LIQUOR and PRIME "WORLD
OF HURT compresses an epic's worth of complexity, vision, and the mythic horrific
into one little lean, mean heartbreak machine. This is spiritual hardcore horror,
both brutal and transcendent. And it will punch you right in the soul." -
John Skipp, author of CONSCIENCE and THE LIGHT AT THE END "From
its arresting premise to a jaw-dropping conclusion, WORLD OF HURT is a contemporary
fable in which a truly Gothic darkness lies skin-deep under our everyday world.
Brian Hodge has a powerful sense of the hidden forces that drive us, and a ruthlessly
effective talent for getting them onto the page." - Stephen Gallagher "WORLD
OF HURT is at once both one of the most horrifying and moving books I've ever
read. There are moments of breathtaking tenderness and hope amid the carnage,
and a sense of real people - damaged, frightened, courageous people - trying to
find their way in a world that has abandoned them. A thrilling, intelligent and
devastating novel that deserves every success." - Conrad Williams "Brian
Hodge remains one of the most marvelously irreverent voices in dark fantasy today.
WORLD OF HURT is a gritty and welcomed anecdote to a thousand rose-colored visions
of immortality and afterlife. A thoroughly captivating read!" - Caitlín
R. Kiernan "Brian
Hodge has always been one of those rare writers who can fuse ingenious concepts
with exceptionally rich writing, and WORLD OF HURT stands as a testament to his
redoubtable skills. This superb novel is everything you've heard is - twisted,
frightening, filled with stunning imagery and infused with a courageous gray moral
center where the answers are never neat and tidy. Hodge can pack more descriptive
power into a single paragraph than most writers can in ten pages. WORLD OF HURT
is a masterpiece, pure and simple, and if you value exceptional, exquisite writing
as much you do the well-told tale, this novel is a must-have." - Bram Stoker
Award-winner Gary A. Braunbeck
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