An Angry Chair
Blank, black, the big empty.
A nauseating wail, the cat calls of a thousand lewd maniacs. A sea of malformed and dysfunctional poor unfortunates, their filth coated hands outstretched. There are more people here than Garrett has ever seen in any one place. Maybe more people than are still left in the world. Each of them may as well be the stalks of that tall, yellow grass, they all have about as much individual meaning in such a maelstrom. There are faces that stick out nearby though, the men Garrett hunted for pay, the agonized faces of sick men, the ones from the lodge that he cut through and down. The boys from pig pen alley, so many cut down where they stood, embraced by their shot up and unrecognizable comrades.
Garrett turns away from the scene only to see a dais, a few carefully cut stone steps leading to a platform and what awaits him at the top. The thing is ridiculous under any circumstances but now, out here under a sky of perpetual red haze, the wing back chair is an absolute obscenity.
The chair rests as it always has, front and center on its raised platform, coated in its ancient purple velveteen. The chair bears her stains, if he takes the steps up and gets close to the thing it will undoubtedly stink of the Tumor Queen. He contemplates the awful chair until the nauseating wail grows louder. Words begin to form from the harrowing wail.
“Sit!”
“Murderer!”
When Garrett turns away from the chair and tries to walk away from the awful thing the ugly crowd begins throwing handfuls of rocks and filth at him. Something wet and horrid splats onto his bare chest and it takes a few moments for him to realize he’s been pelted with human feces.
“Sit!” They howl, the endless sea of them all. “Sit.” “Coward.” “Murderer.”
After a few more thrown stones and handfuls of unmentionable material Garrett takes a tentative step up to the damnable chair. There is no inner monologue to have here, no worries over when some sinister internal voice will make itself known. This isn’t a bad dream or some hallucination, this is insanity. This is the final resting place.
Garrett reaches the top of the dais and gets close enough to see the chair up close. All those terrible, trembling, terrified hours he spent down on all fours, daring only to look at the claw like feet of the awful chair. All those spent up days and months being her pet. He can’t even bring himself to look at the seat of the thing. All her stains will still rest there.
“Sit!”
One voice sounds out louder than the rest of the awful din. As though some especially loud and enraged member of the milieu has managed to push through their rank to lead their charge.
Garrett finds his way to the chair and grimaces at the endless circles of stains set permanently into the tired velveteen cushion. This is his seat now, all his and well, hasn’t he earned it? Finally.
Sitting and settling into the thing are inevitable cojoined twins, you can’t do one without settling for the other. The stink that comes is merely a byproduct of inevitability. Her aged stink plumes out and sticks to tender things like nose hairs or any bit of exposed skin. You sit and sink into ages of misery and misuse. You sit and absorb the ugly morbidity of time left to fester of its own accord.
The view from up top is always dizzying. The view from up here is no exception only it isn’t about the height of the dais or the memories of the old, filthy chair. The view that Garrett gains while settling down into nascent filth is one of magnitude. The retinue of detractors and enemies is truly endless. Beyond the vaguely familiar faces in the endless sea sitting front row are others, warring tribals, enemies of his adopted people. The proud, slaughtered braves of those who stood against him in the wastes. The seemingly endless multitude of tattooed and face painted folk he thought nothing about murdering where they stood. Out beyond even them though stands out in plain site the most resent and recalcitrant members of his victims.
Garrett spent decades out in the dry wastes making friends and enemies alike and over all he never, ever made the murder of innocents his business. Not until he made his last declaration.
The strangers who terrified and destroyed his village were nowhere to be seen, not Lucan or his lieutenants, not the howling monstrosities from the poisonous abyss of the Tumor Queens lair either. Just them, out at the edge of the din. The women and children that he swore to Melissa he would massacre for their slight of existing at all.
Garrett made good on his promise to the girl. He made good and then some. Whole villages, that was what he had promised to her. Whole villages and entire ways of life ended. That’s what he crept westward for and that is what he did along his way to what he thought was the end.