I loved her concept and wrote this short story in keeping with her thrilling idea that Zeke, after being released from prison, finds out what has happened to Casey and rescues him, taking him on the run from those who would use him—and Zeke—for their own ends. This story takes place about a month after Zeke has taken Casey from his parents' home.
Thanks go to my friend for firing my imagination!
No slash; rated PG-13 for mild profanity.
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Balm in Gilead
Zeke was awakened by a light in his face. Barely awake and confused, he lay
with his eyes shut, trying to remember where he was. A name came to him…Gilead.
Gilead, Nebraska. He was in a motel on the outskirts of Gilead, Nebraska, which
had itself seemed to be on the outskirts of absolutely nothing. In a motel in
Gilead. In bed. By himself.
It was the awareness of being alone in bed that finally made his eyes snap
open. Casey? he thought, feeling a shiver of fear in his stomach.
Zeke saw Casey as soon as he opened his eyes, but the fear did not leave him,
it only changed into a different sort of fear, one that felt more like sorrow,
tinged with anger. Looking at Casey seemed to have that effect on Zeke, at
least most of the time it did.
Casey was standing by the window. He had pulled back the moldy motel curtain,
and the sickly yellow light from the motel porch fell into the room. Zeke could
see the flaking paint on the porch roof; beyond that he could see the dim light
from the motel's office, now closed for the night. Beyond that lay nothing but
the endless darkness of the plain.
"Casey?" Zeke said, but Casey didn't answer. He was leaning heavily against the
window, his forehead and left hand pressed flat against the glass. Zeke could
see the outline of vapor that his warm hand left on the cold window. Casey's
lips were moving, but Zeke could not hear him. His breath misted on the glass.
His eyes were emerald-green in the yellow light, emerald-green and vacant.
Godamnit, he's gone off again. Zeke thought, but his anger was not at
Casey. He was okay this afternoon. He was okay, he was talking and
everything. He knew where he was. He knew who he was.
Every time Casey had one of his lucid periods, Zeke felt hopeful and this
afternoon had been one of the longest yet. Casey had been alert and talkative.
He had sung along with the radio. Not once had that haunted, distant look come
into his face, the one that meant he was retreating back into the darkness of
his mind, into the craters that they had carved into his brain in that place.
He had even managed to stay awake long enough to watch a little television
before falling asleep on Zeke's shoulder. But now he was standing by the cold
window, ghostly in his white shorts and t-shirt, empty-eyed and talking to
himself.
"Casey, man, " Zeke said gently. "Come back to bed. It's freezing out there."
Casey only closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead against the glass in a
gesture of negation. His mouth worked slowly and now Zeke could hear him.
"Who is that?" Casey whispered. "Who is that, there's no one there. There's no
one there's no one there's no one."
Zeke could see Casey shivering. It really was freezing in the room; the
old window-box heater was putting forth an anemic stream of warm air, but it
wasn't enough to compete with the chill of a November night on the plains. Go
and get him, Zeke thought. Go and get him before he gets sick, and then
what will you do?
Casey had already been sick once since that day a month ago when Zeke had
loaded him into his car, actually loaded him in, like a sack of
groceries, because Casey had barely been able to walk on his own. Zeke hadn't
really had any idea of what he was doing, but he had known that he couldn't
leave Casey the way he was. Lying on top of the bedspread with that stoned
expression on his face, his vacant eyes wandering around the room, and all the
while, Casey's mom saying "He's so much better now, he's a little better every
day," with such forced cheer that Zeke had wanted to lay her skull open, had
wanted to cut her damn head off the way he had almost cut off Mr. Furlong's.
Casey's mom had gone downstairs to make coffee, and how she could sit there and
blithely drink coffee while her beautiful, bright son had been reduced to this
broken thing that could barely keep its eyes open, Zeke would never know. But
he did know, instantly, that he wasn't leaving that house without Casey.
Thinking fast, he had jammed some of Casey's clothes into a plastic grocery bag
that had been on the floor, barely looking at what he was taking. Winter
things, he remembered thinking. It'll be winter soon and we're not
coming back here, we're never coming back.
Zeke had lifted Casey in his arms, feeling almost sick at how light the kid
was, how light and limp, almost boneless. Casey's head had lolled backward and
he had moaned in protest.
"Don't worry, Case, we're just gonna take a little trip," Zeke had whispered
desperately. Please don't start crying, Casey! "You'll like this trip, I
promise."
Casey had muttered something and for just a moment his eyes had focused on
Zeke, and Zeke thought he had seen recognition there, a spark of the real Casey
that must still live inside his addled mind.
Then it had been down the stairs, past the kitchen where Mrs. Connor was putting
cookies on a plate. Enjoy your coffee, bitch, Zeke had thought
furiously, before he was out the door and strapping Casey into the shotgun
seat. Casey had said nothing, had not made another sound, but Zeke thought he
had known what was happening; at least, something resembling a smile had
twitched at the pale corners of his mouth when the engine had fired into life,
when Zeke had peeled out of the driveway and gone tearing down Elm Street
without a look back.
But for days after that, Casey had not smiled at all. He had been sick,
withdrawing from the cocktail of drugs they'd had him on, and Zeke had cursed
himself for not thinking enough to have taken them with him so that he could
have weaned Casey off slowly. But Casey had been forced to go cold turkey,
lying in the back seat, shivering and puking and begging Zeke to take him home,
to give him his meds, to kill him, to please please please do something.
Zeke hadn't dared to check into a motel during those days—their trail had been
too fresh and Casey's screaming and babbling had hardly made for a low profile.
So Zeke had parked them at night in out-of-the way places, beneath overpasses
and in abandoned lots, and he had sat in the back seat with Casey's head in his
lap, spooning Pepsi into the boy's mouth while Casey stared at him and
shuddered and sweated. At last a night had come when Casey had slept, truly slept,
and when he had woken his eyes had been clear for the first time in days.
Since then, Casey had been sick once, just a bad cold, the sort of thing that
would have been nothing but an inconvenience if he had been a normal
18-year-old who could have just gone home after class and had a cup of
Thera-Flu and gone to bed. But Casey had still been so weak and living out of
Zeke's car wasn't exactly conducive to good health, and finally Zeke had needed
to splurge and rent a motel room for a whole day so that Casey could sleep off
his fever in a real bed. Casey had talked in his fever, had talked about
Marybeth and about school, but also about the things that had happened to him
in that hospital, and Zeke had listened to him with his hands balled into fists
and tears of rage running down his face.
And now Casey was standing at the window shivering, and if Zeke left him there
for another second he might get sick again and it might be worse this time.
Zeke sat up and swung his legs over the bed and was grateful he had left his
socks on because the threadbare motel carpet under his feet was damn cold.
He went to the window and put an arm around Casey's narrow shoulders.
"Come on Casey, let's go."
Casey tried to pull away and his gaze returned to the window as if he had seen
something terribly important there. Zeke looked out the window and saw nothing
but the sagging, flaky porch and the parking lot and the night. He wrapped his
arm tighter around Casey and turned him away from the window.
"I don't want to go, don't want to go with you," he whispered in a reedy,
fearful voice.
"It's me, Zeke," Zeke said, knowing how Casey got when he was like this, that
he needed to be reminded of where he was and who was with him. "It's just Zeke,
and we're just going back to bed."
"Zeke?" Casey said, and he turned his face up to Zeke's.
Christ, but the kid was beautiful, even now, hollow-eyed, scarecrow-thin and
painted in toxic yellow light, and how was it that Zeke had known him since the
first grade and had never noticed until the whole thing with Marybeth? He had
always been just Casey, nerdy Casey, too short, too skinny, whose clothes never
fit right and who seemed ill at ease in his own skin. Even his name, Casey,
had been stupid, a girl's name, really, and Zeke remembered how the guys would
chant it in the grammar school yard when they were gearing up for some
especially hilarious torment like stomping on his lunch or throwing him into
the girls' bathroom. He had never outgrown his lowly status, not through junior
high and high school, and while other geeks and nerds had been forgotten as
their faces cleared up or they lost weight or got contact lenses, Casey had
remained everyone's favorite object of abuse. He was different from the other
losers, and maybe it was his odd and unsettling beauty that made him different,
that scared people a little, the way they might have been scared of a unicorn
that had wandered into their midst. What does a bunch of dumb kids do with
something so beautiful that they can't wrap their brains around its existence?
Maybe they destroy it, the way they tried to destroy Casey with their vicious
words and incessant bullying.
But they hadn't destroyed Casey, had they? Casey was strong, the
strongest of them all, as it had turned out. The others had all backed down to
save their own skins, had agreed to deny that such a creature as "Marybeth" had
ever existed so that they could just get on with their lives. Even Zeke, who
had always thought of himself as standing two steps above society, had finally
agreed to shut his mouth about aliens and to do his time for the petty drug
charge and leave it all behind him. Not Casey. He had told the truth almost up
until the day he had been taken away, and while part of Zeke thought that had
been unspeakably stupid, most of him thought it had been fiercely courageous.
Casey had been the strongest.
"Yeah, Casey, it's me," Zeke answered.
He turned and with one arm he drew the curtain on the ugly yellow light and the
black night and then put both arms around Casey to walk him back to bed.
"Where are we?" Casey asked.
"Gilead, Nebraska. At least that's what the sign said."
"Gilead…" Casey said faintly and then fell silent as Zeke laid him down,
handling him as carefully as a child. He could see the shimmer of Casey's eyes
in the light that leaked around the curtain.
Zeke lay down next to Casey and pulled the blankets up over them. The blankets
were musty and felt as if they hadn't been washed in a long time, but they were
warm. Casey was still shivering. Zeke drew Casey against him and rubbed his
back until the shivers stopped.
Zeke thought that Casey had fallen asleep, but then Casey spoke and he sounded
like himself again, not lost and confused as he had before. "Zeke…I'm sorry. I
don't know what happens to me. I think I'm getting better, and then I…it's…"
"Don't worry about it, man," Zeke said. He felt Casey's hair ruffle in the
slight breath of his words. "It's nothing, go to sleep."
"If you want to go, you know…if you want to go off on your own…it'd be okay.
I'll be okay."
Zeke closed his eyes tightly and reflexively pulled Casey closer. Even now the
kid was strong, even now when there was so little of him left. He had abandoned
Casey once, not being as strong as he was, but things were different now, and
Zeke would not fail him again. Zeke bent his head and kissed Casey through his
soft hair.
"I'm not leaving you, Case. Not now. Never again."
Casey responded with only a sigh. His body relaxed against Zeke's and his
breathing slowed and deepened until Zeke knew he was asleep.
"Never again," Zeke whispered into the darkness. He lay awake listening to the
soft rhythm of Casey's breath, and thought about beauty and strength until he
dozed and then slept. Outside, the wind blew over the dark plains and the pale
light of limitless stars pierced the wintry sky.