Mercy Read online

  Mercy

  J.L. Aarne

  Copyright 2014 J.L. Aarne

  Cover art and design by Lucy D. Sherman 2014

  License Notes:

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be resold or shared. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. No piece of this book may be sold for profit or adapted to other media without the permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Author’s Note:

  I don’t usually write author’s notes because if you’ve bought this book, I doubt you’re here to read anything like that, you’re here for the story and I don’t want to waste your time. About this particular story, however, I would like to say, please remember that this is fiction. I do not support acts of violence such as school shootings or rampage killings. I believe that more could be done to prevent them and that they are often handled very poorly when they happen, but that’s not my job and thank God for that. I’m a writer; I make shit up. In other words, please do not try this at home.

  Table of Contents

  1. Mercy: With Good Grace

  2. Corey: Memento Mori

  3. Mercy: The Edge of the World

  4. Ezra: A Bird in the Hand

  5. Molina: A Wild One Anyway

  6. Isaac: Whiskers on Kittens

  7. Corey: The Law of the Jungle

  8. Lundy: London Bridge is Falling Down

  9. Mercy: The Hammer Fall

  10. Paul: Pauly Want a Cracker?

  11. Ezra: Ceasefire

  12. Isaac: Let the Dogs Out

  13. Molina: Keys to the Kingdom

  14. Mercy: Turn Out the Lights

  Read an Excerpt of Needle Freak

  Other Books

  About the Author

  It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

  —Philip K. Dick, VALIS

  Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,

  And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.

  —Rudyard Kipling, The Second Jungle Book

  Mercy

  With Good Grace

  The woman who wanted to write a book about Mercy didn’t say anything to her while she set up her equipment on the table. Her equipment consisted of a notebook, two pens—one red and one black—and a digital recorder. She was tidy and blonde, her hair smooth and perfect, her dress casual but still professional, her purse more of a satchel for carrying her writing materials, but there was almost certainly a compact with a mirror in there somewhere for emergency touchups. She lined up the notebook perfectly with the edge of the table before she sat down and finally looked Mercy in the eye.

  “Hello, Miss Hartwell,” she said. “My name is Grace Goode. How are you today?”

  Mercy smiled and stretched in her uncomfortable chair like a cat. Like she was bored already. She wasn’t, of course. She was reading the woman across from her, calculating her real value against her perceived value and taking her measure.

  Grace Goode was a true crime novelist and an acquaintance of Mercy’s therapist, Dr. Darcy, but that wasn’t the most interesting thing about her. She had been trying for nearly a year, as long as Mercy had been committed to the hospital, to speak with her, but had been refused at every turn. She was persistent though and a few days ago Mercy had instructed her lawyer to find a way to make it happen. She would speak with Miss Grace Goode, who wanted to write a book about her so badly that she was still trying a year later. Grace believed that she had piqued Mercy’s interest with her determination and refusal to quit, but she was wrong. That wasn’t the most interesting thing about her either.

  Grace cleared her throat and shifted uncomfortably in her seat when Mercy said nothing and continued to stare at her. She crossed her legs and tucked them beneath her chair.

  She was the same height and build as Mercy, give or take a few soft pounds and an inch or two. Her hair was a couple of shades lighter and she had freckles, but at a glance, they might have been sisters. Or the same person.

  Mercy raised a hand, gesturing to the tall, dark haired man standing behind her next to the door that would take her back to her room when they were finished. “This is Adam,” she said. “Adam’s my orderly.”

  “Your orderly?” Grace asked, glancing at Adam.

  “He takes me places,” Mercy said. “Mostly between my room and Dr. Darcy’s office. Apparently I’m dangerous. I guess he’s here to make sure I don’t kill you.”

  Grace stared at her, unsure what to say. “Oh, well…” she said. “Well, hello, Adam.”

  Adam nodded. “Ma’am.”

  “Did you know, someone bought my hoodie on the internet yesterday for two thousand dollars?” Mercy asked. “The one with the man’s head turning into a flock of butterflies on it? I bought it for forty bucks when it was new, but now it comes with a certificate of authenticity. What do they call that in the art world, Adam?”

  “Provenance, I think,” Adam said.

  “Right. So now my sweatshirt has provenance like a painting by Van Gough. Probably has the blood work they did on it right there, signed by whoever tested it.” Mercy rolled her head on her shoulders and her neck popped with a satisfying crunch. “Adam’s father has an art collection,” she explained, though Grace didn’t ask.

  “Um. That’s very interesting,” Grace said. “So, Miss Hartwell, I’m surprised you finally agreed to speak with me. If you don’t mind me asking, why?”

  “Why not?” Mercy said. She gestured with one hand at the room, empty except for the table and the chairs they were sitting in. “I get bored like everyone else. More, so I’m told.”

  “Because of your mental condition?” Grace asked.

  “My IQ. It’s best if I keep my mind active,” Mercy said. She was not bragging, she was stating a fact. A fact which Grace Goode could check on later if she wanted to. “Though I suppose that would technically qualify as a mental condition.”

  “They tell me you’re a psychopath,” Grace said. “Is that true? What do you think about that?”

  “I think that they always have to come up with something to separate us from the rest of you. Wouldn’t want to go making people think that there is no significant difference between all of you and me or there might be an uproar. So I have to have Asperger’s or psychopathy or OCD or hell, PMS, just so there’s something. What should I think about that, Miss Goode? Hmm? What would sound good for your book?”

  Grace looked surprised. Mercy was pretty sure it was an affectation.

  “You are writing a book, aren’t you?” she asked. “I read the one Weston Brink wrote. I hear he made a bundle. New York Times bestseller. Rave reviews. Ellen, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, that book club thing on PBS… all the bells and whistles. Except—”

  “Except you wouldn’t speak to him,” Grace said. There was a note of pride in her voice that made Mercy grin.

  “Oh, I spoke to him,” Mercy said. “I just didn’t say anything he wanted to hear. Nothing quotable, I suppose.”

  “Yes, well, I hope that is not going to be the case today,” Grace said. “I hope that very much.”

  Mercy sat forward, put her elbows on the table and steepled her fingers before her mouth. “I’m sure you do,” she said. “So, here’s what we’ll do, hmm? Let’s you and I make a deal, Miss Goode.”

  “I don’t think I’m allowed to do anything like that,” Grace said nervously. She glanced again at Adam for some kind of confirmation, but he wasn’t paying attention
to them at all. He was picking at a hangnail. “It took me a long time to get this interview.”

  “I know,” Mercy said. “And you want it very badly, right? You want me to tell you the story that everyone wants to know because most of it’s still speculation and hearsay and it’s all so confusing and contradictory, my my. If I would talk to you—or my brother would—you could rub that in Mr. Brink’s smug asshole face. His book would be a flaming sack of dog shit. Copies might be yanked from bookstore shelves and returned to the publisher to be mulched and yours would take its place. Isn’t that what you want from me?”

  Grace nodded. There was a light in her eyes, an excitement that came, not only from thinking about it, but from the possibility that Mercy Hartwell herself was ready to help her make it happen. “Yes,” she said.

  “Then it’s only fair, isn’t it?” Mercy asked. “I give you what you want and you in turn give me something that I want.”

  “What?” Grace asked.

  “Something that I will name after I tell you what happened that day.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Mercy repeated, satisfied. “You heard her, Adam?”

  “I heard her,” Adam said.

  “Weston Brink’s book is called The Monday Massacre,” Grace said.

  “A dull, if apt, title,” Mercy said.

  “He doesn’t paint you in a very sympathetic or favorable light,” Grace said.

  “Why would he?”

  “There’s a rumor that you… that you were rude to him. That you scared him when he came to see you.”

  “Is there?”

  “How accurate would you say his account of things is?”

  “As accurate as you can expect from someone who wasn’t there, writing from the accounts of officers who also were not there, or from the accounts of victims and witnesses who were… well, rather hysterical at the time, and for some time after. It’s biased, but most books like that are.”

  “So, not very?”

  “Asked and answered, Miss Goode. What is your point?”

  “He depicts you as… well, as a villain.”

  Mercy laughed. “Do you believe that I’m under some sort of delusion that I’m not the villain of this particular story?”

  “I think many people—people your age especially—would see themselves as some kind of hero,” Grace said.

  “We didn’t set out to be heroes,” Mercy said. “That wasn’t the point.”

  “And yet, many young people regard you that way today,” Grace said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Don’t you think that might be kind of dangerous?”

  “Dangerous for whom?”

  “I see,” Grace said. She wrote something down in her notebook.

  Mercy waited and didn’t bother to try to read it.

  Still writing, Grace asked, “Are you aware of Michael Garrett’s case?”

  Michael Garrett was a sixteen year old boy from Texas who was being tried as an adult for doing something very similar to what Mercy had done. He and two of his friends, one of whom had been shot and killed when officers tried to arrest them, had attempted to take over their school a week after Mercy was arrested. Mercy was fairly certain that she wasn’t supposed to know about Michael Garrett, just like she wasn’t supposed to know that someone had bid two thousand dollars on her bloodstained hoodie, but she did.

  Such knowledge likely fell into Dr. Darcy’s catalogue of things that would disturb or upset the patient. It amused her to think so anyway.

  “I’ve heard of it,” she said. “Why?”

  “They say that he and his friends followed your example,” Grace said. She put down her pen and regarded Mercy over the table. “They were copying you.”

  “Probably. Isn’t that the way it usually works?” Mercy said.

  “They also say that he might be executed for it,” Grace said. “He and his friends killed six people. He will be the first minor on death row in… maybe as much as seventy years.”

  “Well,” Mercy said thoughtfully. She shook her head and sat back in her chair with a shrug. “Well, that’s Texas for you, isn’t it?”

  “Do you feel any responsibility?” Grace asked. “For those who came after you? Like Michael?”

  “No,” Mercy said.

  “You were only seventeen,” Grace said.

  “I’m only eighteen now,” Mercy countered. “So?”

  “Your whole future was ahead of you. You could have done anything. I’ve spoken to your teachers, to your friends. You had great potential, but your life is essentially over now. You’re a brilliant young woman, but...”

  “Just like they were.”

  Grace stopped and blinked at her in surprise. “Come again?”

  Mercy changed the tone of her voice slightly; spoke with dramatic, mocking emphasis. “I look around and see so many bright and shining faces, college-bound, brilliant, your futures just waiting for you to reach out and grab them…” She chuffed in a scornful way and looked frankly back at Grace. “What happened that day was social Darwinism colliding with actual Darwinism.”

  “You,” Grace said.

  Mercy inclined her head. “Yeah.”

  “You’ve always insisted on taking full responsibility for what happened,” Grace said. “You insisted all through the trial that it was all you. Thanks to the forensic evidence and witness testimony, we know that isn’t true, but you would never talk about it.”

  “No,” Mercy said.

  “Will you talk about it now?” Grace asked. “To me?”

  Mercy considered it for a minute in silence. Then she nodded thoughtfully. “Sure. I don’t see what difference it makes anymore.”

  Grace tapped her manicured nails excitedly on the tabletop and couldn’t help the pleased smile that spread across her face.

  “Adam, will you get Miss Goode a cup of coffee?” Mercy asked Adam, not taking her eyes off Grace. “Please?”

  Grace was surprised when Adam moved away from the wall where he had been leaning and crossed the room to go out the door Grace had entered through, leaving them alone. She sat tensely in her seat and looked around. The walls were institutional grey, the carpet some kind of cheap indoor-outdoor pile in a hideous shade of brown, there were two doors in the room, one behind Grace and the other behind Mercy. She was alone in a room with a convicted mass murderer and had only a couple of ballpoint pens to defend herself with.

  Mercy watched her taking it all in, watched the fear slide over her and crack her polished, professional top veneer. “Relax, Miss Goode,” she said.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Grace said, flustered.

  “So, you want to talk about high school and why I did it,” Mercy said. “First, I think we’ll talk about my brother. We have to if you’re going to understand anything.”

  “Corey,” Grace said. “You have… You have different fathers, don’t you?”

  “And mothers,” Mercy said. “My mother had me straight out of high school. I don’t know if she ever told my father or not, but I never knew him. She married Corey’s dad, our dad, when I was little. So, he’s my brother.”

  “Have you seen him?” Grace asked. “Do they allow you to see him?”

  “Of course not,” Mercy said. “Corey’s here somewhere, on another floor or in another wing, but we’re not allowed contact.”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace said.

  Adam returned with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. Grace thanked him when he set it down on the table, but didn’t drink it. She waited for Mercy to go on.

  “So, high school,” Grace prompted.

  “Yeah, high school,” Mercy said. “Thing about high school is, so many unimportant things are important. Facebook, Twitter, the brand name on your shoes, how much money your mom and dad make, your cell phone, your car, blogging, gaming, who your friends are, the music you like. These things are so important. They’re the currency of the realm. It has a way of shifting your perspective out of focus. It doesn’t always chang
e when you leave high school either. It doesn’t shift back. These people really do go out into the world and yeah, they get everything they want. Bad things don’t happen to them. They therefore come to the erroneous conclusion that bad things don’t happen.”

  “Bad things happen all the time. It’s not a secret,” Grace said. “You see it on the news every day.”

  “You see it on TV. TV’s not real,” Mercy said.

  Grace frowned. “Yes, but—”

  “No, shut up,” Mercy said. “I’m talking about high school and you’re here to hear what I have to say, so pay attention. It’s like this…”

  Corey

  Memento Mori

  There was a picture of him being fucked in the ass taped to the door of his locker that morning. A real photograph, grainy the way bad cell phones took them at night through a window, printed out on 8x10 copy paper. It wasn’t a fake and it wasn’t a photo-manipulation—some sleazy porno screen cap with his face cut out of last year’s yearbook pasted on the body of a guy twice his age with pimples on his shaved ass—it was him. There was nothing written on it. No big bubble letters screaming at him that he was a FAGGOT, not even his name. It didn’t need either one. The shock value of the image alone was enough. Corey’s face was clear, caught in a slat of moonlight through the window, the tattoo on his side so vivid even in the bad quality of the image he could read it—Memento Mori—and imagined he heard the skull cackling with laughter through its mouthful of red poppies. He even knew when the picture had been taken and where. Three nights earlier, Friday, at his boyfriend, Aubrey’s house.

  It wasn’t love and even at seventeen he knew it, but it had been nice; comfortable and intimate. It hadn’t been dirty, except in that delicious way that such things are dirty only because you’re doing it right, and it hadn’t been shameful, but this photograph, taped with deliberate care to the door of his locker for anyone and everyone who passed it on their way to class to see, made him feel dirty. It made him feel ashamed. It made the perfectly normal thing they had done that night rot away in his memory, feculent as cat shit on a rug.