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Against all reason, you stand over a grave. There is a shovel in your hands, stained red. You are digging, digging. Your fingers itch furiously as your hands grip the handle, just as it had when you had wrapped your hands around the throat you and your family have served, and just as it had when you cut down the wicked with your bolo. It will never stop itching. This is the price to pay for justice. This is the price to pay for deliverance.
Johnrey Mallari stares at you as the shovel chips away at the calcified necrosol of his shallow grave. "Hindi ka si Jonathan," he slowly says. He is barely recognizable — he is nothing like the Mallari cursebreaker immortalized, nothing like the proud portrait hung upon the walls of the Mallari house beside holy deliverers like Father Severino. His face is caked with a thick layer of mud. He speaks with a parched throat, a mouth that has forgotten how to speak. He looks like he's more earth than man. Under your looming shadow, Johnrey looks nothing more than a shade—a desiccated husk.
He is almost dead.
"Si Kuyang ay may inaasikaso pa," You say. You unsheathe the bolo strapped to your side, rusted by blood. "Totoo ba na nasa inyo raw yung sisiw?"
Johnrey stays silent as you carefully chip away at his neck. He stays silent because there is nothing left to say. Who survives being buried alive for seventy-five years?
"Sino ka?"
"Hindi mo na kailangan malaman.” Chip, chip.
Johnrey closes his eyes. “Paano mo naman nalaman?"
Chip, chip. “May naiwang ebidensiya si Felicity.” Chip, chip. “Sabi niya ikaw daw ang pumigil sa sumpa. Tagapagligtas ng linyang Mallari.”
Johnrey's mudheld throat is fully bared, in the dim light of the moon. Your clothes are sticky with sweat and dirt and blood. Dapat patay ka na din, you think. Hindi maayos ang pagbalot mo sa iyong mga sugat, pero nandito ka pa rin; buhay. Hindi si Agnes. Ikaw.
Your fingers itch.
“Patay na si Felicity.” He looks resigned. “Patay na lahat ng minahal ko.” He tilts his head up at you, almost pleading. Begging, like many lesser men before him—men who did not understand obligation, and could not understand conviction. “Walang tunay na katumbas ang pagkawalang-kamatayan. Hindi mo makakamit ang nais mong makuha sa sisiw.”
“Maling tao ang kausap mo, among,” you tell him, still smiling. You thread your red fingers to grip his limestoned hair, and raise your bolo, moonshine glinting at its edge. Your hands don't shake. “Alarcon lang po ako.”
Jonathan stares at you like he's seen a ghost. He does not spare one look at the head rolling on the ground, the one you threw at him, the one that lands upon the stone slab entrance of the Mallari ancestral home like a sacrificial lamb upon an altar. Hindi niya maiintindihan, at alam mo ito. He will never understand the sacredness of duty.
In the shade of the early night and the forest lining the boundaries of the property, you are unseen. There is only the vague, grotesque silhouette of you, similar to the spirits he has seen in his dreams—half-withered, half-man. If he squints, maybe he can see the hole where he first shot you, close to the heart; then the hole close to the gut. They were both clean shots. Jonathan would know: he shot you himself.
“Lucas,” Jonathan stares at you, standing like the gunshots have never been there at all. Baka't ngayon niya ito maiintindihan. "Inunahan mo 'ko."
You tilt your head at him. You smile—teeth stained black and cracked, an endless cavern of hungry teeth. Your hands are washed clean, by freshwater from the nearby river. You are as clean as you can be, in both spirit and mind, and your hands still itch.
"Ano na, among?" You ask. Your throat is so, so dry. "Ipapakain mo ba ako?"