The Marvelous Ethan Cole

Chapter 2

The lead man walked back around to the front and crouched down again, looking at Ethan's face.

“Still breathing,” he observed. He stood and looked at his men. “Cripple his legs.”

The man with the sledgehammer didn't hesitate.

The first blow landed on Ethan's left leg and the sound it made was not something that belonged inside a room with walls. Ethan's scream this time was different from the others. It was the kind of sound that a person makes when their body stops being able to understand what is happening to it, high and ragged and completely out of control. His hands clawed at the floor. His fingernails bent back against the tile.

Then the second leg.

After that, there was no more screaming.

Ethan lay still. Completely still. His eyes were open but they weren't really focused on anything. The pain had gone past the point where the body keeps track of it and had become something else, something that sat just behind his eyes and pressed outward. He was crying but he wasn't making any sound. Tears just kept coming, running across the bridge of his nose and dropping to the floor beneath him.

He couldn't feel his legs.

He could feel that he couldn't feel them, which was somehow worse.

“Look at him,” someone said.

The lead man pulled a chair from the nearest table and sat down, crossing one leg over the other, completely relaxed. He pointed at the floor in front of him.

“Crawl to me,” he said.

Ethan heard the words. They traveled through the fog in his head slowly, each one arriving a little after the last.

“Crawl to me and call me your god. Call me your savior, your almighty, your daddy , whoever it is you pray to, and maybe, just maybe, we'll show a little mercy. Maybe we won't break that last good hand of yours.” He tilted his head. 

“A man ought to have at least one working hand when he reincarnates. Wouldn't want you reincarnate back as  fog, or something that one has one hand.”

More laughter.

Ethan did not move.

“Are you deaf?” The lead man's voice sharpened. 

“Did you not hear what I just said to you?”

Ethan's eyes shifted slowly to the wall. To the frames. All seventeen of them, staring back at him.

“Or do you want us to burn this place down first and then talk about the crawling?”

Ethan's eyes moved back to the man.

The restaurant.

Everything in his chest that had gone quiet suddenly tightened into a fist. This place was not just walls and chairs. This place was his great-grandmother standing at the stove at five in the morning. It was his grandfather shaking hands with the first customer who ever walked through that door. 

It was his father showing him which table had the loose leg and needed to be propped up just slightly on the left side. It was everything they had handed down to him, one pair of hands to the next, for longer than he had been alive.

He could not let them touch it.

He pressed his one working hand to the floor.

He started to move.

It was not moving, really. It was pulling. Dragging. His legs were dead weight behind him and his back screamed with every shift of his body and the blood he was lying in smeared across the floor as he went, leaving a wide, dark trail behind him.

“Look at that,” one of the men said.

“Even a snake moves faster than this,” another one said, laughing. “Come on. Pick it up.”

A boot caught him on the side of the head. Not hard enough to knock him out, just hard enough to remind him who was in charge of this floor. Another one kicked at his shoulder.

“Move. Come on. Faster.”

Ethan kept moving.

Hand forward. Pull. Hand forward. Pull. The tile was cold under his palm. He could feel every crack in the grout, every small piece of grit pressing into his skin. He kept his eyes on the boots in front of him.

He reached them.

He stopped.

“Good boy,” the lead man said, looking down. He raised one boot slightly off the floor. “Kiss it.”

Ethan closed his eyes.

He kissed the boot.

“Now lick it.”

The back of his throat tightened. Every part of him resisted. Something deep in his chest rose up and screamed at him not to do it, told him that this was the last thing, that once he did this there was nothing left of him to protect.

He did it anyway.

Because of the frames on the wall.

“There you go.” The lead man sat back, looking satisfied. He looked at the men around him and gave a small nod. “We're done here.”

He stood.

Ethan stayed on the floor, his forehead nearly touching the tile, every part of him wrung out and empty.

“We're good,” the lead man said, straightening his jacket. He looked around the restaurant, taking in the tables, the old wooden chairs, the counter with the little bell on it that still worked, the frames. He took his time.

Then he said, “Burn this place down.”

Ethan's head came up.

“What?”

“Pour it,” the lead man said to his men, ignoring Ethan completely. “Everything. The walls, the chairs, the pictures, all of it.”

“You said—” Ethan's voice broke. “You said you weren't going to touch it. You said if I—”

“I lied.” The lead man finally looked at him. His expression hadn't changed. 

“You're going to burn with it. We'll wait outside until there's nothing left.”

“Please.” Ethan tried to push himself up and couldn't. His arms were shaking. 

“Please, I have money. I don't have much but I have some, I can—”

The laughter started before he even finished.

“You have money.” One of the men was almost doubled over. 

“He said he  has money.”

“Son,” the lead man said, almost gently, “the man who paid us makes more in a single morning than you will see in your entire life. There is no number you can say to us.” He looked at his men. 

“Get the gasoline.”

They had kept it near the door. Two large bottles, already waiting. Ethan watched as they moved through the restaurant methodically, pouring it along the baseboards, splashing it up the walls, letting it run across the chairs and tables. One of them stopped in front of the frames and poured slowly, letting it drip down across the glass, across all seventeen faces looking out from inside their frames.

Ethan watched and could not stop them.

“Please,” he said, but the word had no sound left in it.

They walked out the door one by one.

The lead man was last. He stood in the doorway and looked back at Ethan on the floor, surrounded by the smell of gasoline and old wood and everything that had ever meant anything.

“In your next life,” he said, “when you see a woman like her, a woman from a family like that, you run. You hear me? You put your head down and you run the other direction and you thank God she never learned your name.”

He paused.

“Say hello to your ancestors for me.”

He dropped the lighter.