TRIX HAD sentenced Moko to death a couple of days ago, but was waiting for the right time to do it. He was aware that he was putting it off though; sentiment was a disease to an assassin, he told himself. Killing Moko would be a vaccination against future cases.
Today, though, he would chill out, play his computer game and relax. It was a game where he was playing a God ruling over a village; he had to punish and reward in the right quantities for the village to prosper. Today he was being cruel; the village was decrepit, the villagers lived in fear, but he was thriving, drunk on power and free of consequence.
Suddenly his body jerked, his vision blinked out and came back, but his body felt like the hunk of meat that it was, useless to him, and slowly his brain came alive to another’s control. Moko was his last thought before the recesses of his brain claimed him.
MOKO WAS sitting looking at a computer screen in a room that was almost as familiar to him as his own. As he gained control of the body he got up and moved over to the mirror. The reflection looking back at him was his friend’s. The thoughts that the brain was slowly revealing to him were of Trix’s master plan, obviously on the forefront of his brain, and Moko became sure that he was doing the right thing. Trix was no longer his boyhood friend.
Where was Trix now? Was he dead already? Was it possible for Moko to lie down and leave this body and go back to his own, leaving Trix to regain control, sufficiently scared off from what he seemed to be planning? It wasn’t just a fantasy though; the plan was for real, his brain was intent. He was dangerous now, and to give him back his life would be taking away the lives of many others, the first probably being his own.
He looked at the face that he’d watched mature alongside his own; he watched it twitch and change at his own will. It was strange, incestuous almost, but he looked into the eyes and he saw himself looking back out from them.
He moved over to the bed and lay down to contemplate suicide. The sadness of the situation intoxicated him and induced a melancholy trance. His mind drifted as he thought about how he might go about doing it. The anticipation of previous deaths was gone; it was just something he had to do.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been lying there, but he became aware that he needed the toilet; this he didn’t think he could bring himself to do and that served to spur him on. He got up and decided that he would just find himself something tall to jump off. There was a multi story car park round the corner.
As he stood up he heard the front door slam, and someone run up the stairs. The door to the room burst open, and he was suddenly faced with himself, red faced and sweating from the run over from his place.
Well, this presents us with a dilemma doesn’t it just?” His own voice jeered at him.
Trix....” was all he could say. He realised at that moment that he wasn’t ever going to take another breath with his own lungs again. The sadness deepened within; he would lose two friends today.
“Neat little trick this. I’ve been trying to figure it out for the last couple of days, but I hadn’t got round to trying it. Thanks for giving me the little nudge I needed.” He closed the door and walked to the bed, stopping briefly at the computer. “You could at least have finished my game for me.”
“Not my cup of tea Trix, you know that.”
“I can’t believe you did this. I thought you’d lost your bottle,” he said as he sat on the bed.
“I could see the way you were going and didn’t like it. The plane crash was a wake up call; it’s all wrong mate. Now I have an idea what you’ve been planning for yourself, I know I did the right thing.”
“You haven’t done it yet mate!”
“No, but I will. I will.”
“Listen to you, you heroic spas! No one will ever know what you’ve done. You realise, I take it, that to stop me now you have to crush the life out of your own body. That life is your life mate, but don’t worry, I won’t let you do it without a fight. You’ll owe me for that.”
Moko looked at him long and hard. He looked into his own eyes and saw a tear emerge from the corner of one of them; he wondered if the tear was his or Trix’s.
“Then, if you succeed in doing that you have to end the life in my body too, knowing that you have no body to return to. Have you got the bottle for that? Mate, we’ve cheated death so many times who’s to say that we won’t do it this time as well, immortals chasing each other through time in this world and the next, and for what? All because you couldn’t let me lead one life of luxury.”
“I’m not going to argue it out with you. I need to sort out the problem in hand, and I will, if that causes another one, then I’ll deal with that when I come to it.”
Moko started to look around the room for a weapon. A battle was brewing and he needed the edge. He’d always been bigger than Trix, which had been great when they were play fighting as kids, but that gave him the disadvantage now.
“This is about karma isn’t it?” Trix kept on. “You’re trying to reset the balance after the plane crash. Well I’m touched that I’m going to die for such a noble cause.”
Trix bent down and pulled a sword that he’d bought at some dodgy market a couple of years ago out from under the bed. “I should think you’ve reached the time in the day when you are beginning to think about this. Well it’s here, but you can’t have it,” Trix said smugly. “My god we’re really going to do this aren’t we. Are you sure you don’t want to swap back bodies first, at least that way there’s only one loser?”
“I’d love to, but I don’t trust you any more Trix. That’s why we’re here.”
“If I run,” Trix said with his head on one side, “I don’t know if I’m running for my life or yours.” With that he shoved Moko onto the bed and ran out of the door, down the stairs and out of the house. Moko was quick on his heels.
They ran for miles, zigzagging through the streets, the gap between them never closing much. The stitch in Moko’s side nagged, but he ignored it and the burning breath ripping in and out of his lungs; the pain was not his own after all.
After alleyways and main roads, bridges and tunnels, they came to face each other across a busy city street in a final stand off. Every few seconds they were stolen from each other’s view by a bus or another large vehicle, but they were always still there when it had passed. Their eyes were locked in defiance. They both knew what Trix planned to do, and the moment was nearly upon them; it was a gamble for them both.
With a smile and some words mouthed that Moko could not read, Trix stepped out and Moko watched his own body shatter, coming apart below the wheels of a large red bus. Amidst the screams of the witnesses, he heard a whoop of glee. The busy street came to a standstill, the traffic frozen in tragedy, as people ran round it to help. Moko sat back on a low wall behind him and tried to breath the nausea away. He surveyed the space between him and his death, listening to the eerie silence that had fallen, punctuated only by the occasional horn blast and sirens that were growing louder. Moko wondered what Trix was seeing right now. Then he felt it: a spasm. Trix was back.
Moko started on the move again, remaining in control of the battle for the body that he occupied. He jogged unsteadily away, in search of the nearest convenient place of execution, this was a fight that Trix would not give up, and would probably win if Moko didn’t hurry. He had to kill them both and soon.
He didn’t know where he was taking himself. Trix’s feet just ran, almost as if it wasn’t Moko controlling them. He floated through the familiar streets of his home town: shops, traffic and faces flashing by on either side, but he paid them no heed. He was running to his death – none of them mattered any more. Life didn’t matter any more; it was another world to him now, one that he no longer had a part in.
His feet stopped suddenly. A large red-bricked building stood in front of him, its doors open and welcoming. His head caught up with his feet when he saw the streams of people coming out of those doors, some with luggage but most without. A loud hissing filled the air as a train gathered itself to leave the station. A place of arrivals and departures – how appropriate. He wasn’t sure if he or Trix had selected the place, but the legs started moving again, carrying him up the stairs, through the ticket hall and onto the platform. He had not yet died of electrocution; it would be a new experience. It was the way that some criminals were killed in the states. Fitting.
He walked to the edge of the platform and looked down, trying to decide which rail was the one with the juice, and thinking about his life. At death life is supposed to flash before the eyes, but he had never experienced that. Then again, it had never been his own death. In a lifetime of death, he would never experience his own; he had died ten minutes ago. He smiled a sad smile at the irony. And jumped.
It might not have been his death, but he didn’t have that safe detachment that he had enjoyed in all the rest, and as he fell towards the tracks fear gripped him. Trix’s stomach turned over and his bowels relaxed. He landed between the tracks at first and knelt there, on all fours, between them. A middle aged woman who looked like his own mother dropped her shopping bags and ran to the edge of the platform shouting. A station guard was just behind her, talking frantically into a radio. Whistles were blown and more faces appeared, relief on them to see that he was still alive. He thought briefly about not doing it, but then felt his hand reach out towards the live track – he had no choice.
The world exploded into stroboscopic luminous colours. Trix’s brain grew hot within his skull, and every muscle in his body tensed. A sharp, acrid taste fizzed in his mouth, and smoke started to rise off his blackening skin. He had hoped that it would be instantaneous, but it wasn’t; it felt like several minutes though it was probably just seconds. Trix’s theory that another’s pain was no match for one’s own did not ring true as Moko’s soul screamed for mercy. The faces watching him mostly turned away with hands covering eyes, but a couple stared on, transfixed, until suddenly, none of them were there any more.
He was falling, falling through darkness that he had never imagined at a speed that he had never thought possible. Trix was with him, he couldn’t see him or feel for him, but he sensed somehow that he was laughing. He reached out with limbs that were no longer his and held on to what he hoped had been Trix, and they fell together into death. He couldn’t risk Trix escaping and roaming the world, body hopping at will. The world was free of them at last, he thought, bitter victory resounding around his soul until he too was laughing.
The yawning chasm of Death’s smile came at them out of the darkness, and Moko noted the silence in place of an angelic chorus. Death was smiling at a job well done – two souls for the price of one.