Sentinel Event

by Samantha Shelby

  With a cry of frustration, Aidriel began to run again, throwing himself by force out of their grasp. He dashed past a pond and through the yard of a farmhouse alongside the community, mounting a small hill and dodging around a windmill. On the other side was a large, pitch-black field of young wheat that obstructed his moving legs and slowed him down. Aidriel could see the lights of the main town ahead, and altered his course to run at an angle in hopes of avoiding the streets, keeping on the move and out of the reach of the Passers. A thick grove of trees blocked his path and he had to go out of his way to circle it, forcing through a line of pine trees on the other side.

  It was becoming tremendously painful to breathe and run, but he kept on. He ran as if he had been running his entire life, because if he didn’t, his life could end right here. His awareness of the ghosts began to become secondary to his conscious effort to suck in air and move his legs, one at a time, in the quickest succession he could muster. The pain within his chest began to overwhelm any pain outside of it, but he ran on.

  Eventually Aidriel crossed the expansive field and hurdled a cement curb into the parking lot behind a theatre. High lampposts at intervals made it easier to see where he was, and his steps became more confident. The asphalt caused more shock to his feet and legs, but Aidriel couldn’t spare the energy to acknowledge it. He crossed the lot and a strip of grass, entering another huge parking lot in front of the Walmart. There weren’t many vehicles on account of the late hour, but he could see a handful of Passers milling about in the smoky yellow light. It didn’t take them long to notice the chase and it freshened Aidriel’s adrenaline to see them turn to head him off.

  Moving with all possible force and drive, Aidriel weaved among the cars without stopping, his arms pumping, the sound of his steps drowned out by those of his chasers. Without hesitation, he dashed right through the Passers that stepped in his way. Their angry talons went through him with the force and pain of bullets, shaving off precious momentum. He stumbled and nearly fell, yet kept on the move, bashing his shoulders against the side mirrors of the cars he passed, continually off balance. One of the vehicles he brushed began to beep furiously in alarm. He dare not look back. He was too afraid and intent on escape to look back.

  A Passer stepped into his path; a man with short pale hair and a dagger. It raised the knife at the right moment, and he couldn’t stop. The paranormal blade struck him in a perfect blow to the throat and instantly Aidriel’s feet flew out from under him. His vision went dark and he choked. He could feel himself falling for the briefest of seconds, then his head struck the pavement with a crack and he blacked out.

  Aidriel regained awareness to the feeling of arms all around him, encircling his legs and chest, pulling in two different directions, holding him up at an angle. Blinking away the spots, he realized he was being dragged into a car. Dreamer had the back doors of the vehicle open and her arms around his chest, one hand in a fist and the other gripping her wrist. The Passers were holding onto his legs and were snarling and spitting furiously.

  Too dazed to move or speak, Aidriel felt Dreamer release him with one arm to try and block the attacks of the ghosts that had come in through the other side of the car. She yelled out in frustration and swatted at them, then cradled the back of his head briefly. He heard her wiping her hand on her scrubs. When she put her arm around his chest again and resumed pulling, he could see blood all over her fingers.

  “Stop it!” she screamed out. “Let go of him, you damned corpses!”

  Aidriel could suddenly walk again; his aching legs touched the ground, straining to support him as he stood up, pulling away from Dreamer. He was seeing stars and in terrible pain, but could turn his back on the frothing Passers. He closed the car door on his companion even as she shouted in protest. Sliding into the driver’s seat, Aidriel shifted out of park and gunned the already-running engine, screaming out of the parking lot and onto the road. A van slammed on its brakes behind him and blasted its horn. The angry sound halted instantly when the Passers flooded into the street in pursuit.

  “Your head is bleeding!” Dreamer said. It took considerable effort for her to pull the other back door closed before climbing into the front seat beside him. “You should let me drive!”

  “You’d drive like a girl,” he answered, flooring the accelerator and watching the needle slide up the speedometer.

  “I drove like a maniac to get to you on time!” she exclaimed.

  “You should have driven the other direction!”

  “Why? What would have happened to you if I had?”

  “The point is nothing should happen to you.” Aidriel’s tone softened miserably. “This is my problem. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “It’s my problem now too,” Dreamer told him definitively.

  “You just watch yourself,” Aidriel said after a pause, his capacity to think growing dull. “Keep yourself safe. That’s how I want you.”

  Aidriel felt the hot sticky blood on the back of his head and winced at the accompanying headache that was washing forward through his skull like fire. He pushed past 65mph to 70, then 75; surely there was no way the Passers could catch up. But somehow there was a ghost standing in the middle of the road just over the top of the steep overpass above the turnpike. Aidriel slammed on the brakes, swerving to miss it and nearly colliding with the back end of a car in the oncoming lane. The other horn bleeped at him, and his side of the car ground against the concrete barrier wall with a painful screech. Wrestling the wheel, Aidriel managed to swerve back into the proper lane. He didn’t notice how Dreamer was gripping the dash for dear life, only letting go long enough to strap herself in.

  Gunning the engine, Aidriel flew right through a stop sign, speeding by a small airport with a white-and-green-flashing beacon. Dreamer stared out the window, then turned in her seat to look back, her head tilting so her hair briefly brushed his shoulder.

  “I don’t see any,” she told him, though both knew that it didn’t mean they were out of the woods. The road continued further out into the country, winding around a mostly blind curve with pine trees and dead-ending into another street. Without a thought, Aidriel turned left, following the short stretch back to State Route 108, turning right. He continued to drive in excess of 70mph, unwilling to risk slowing enough for another attack, and turning the brights on to see further down the road, ignoring when other vehicles flashed for him to turn them off.

  Dreamer divided her attention between their surroundings and Aidriel. The cut on the back of his head was still hemorrhaging, though less than before, and he was still panting heavily, his limbs shaking with stress and fatigue. Digging through the glove compartment, the phleb found a wad of napkins, which she held to the back of Aidriel’s head. She wanted to tell him to breathe easier, to try and relax so his heart would slow down and his cut would clot. She wanted to tell him to pull over somewhere so she could take care of him; so he could stop shaking and rest; so she could take over the wheel. But she couldn’t because they weren’t far enough away yet.

  Aidriel didn’t acknowledge her; neither did he take his eyes from the road ahead, barely slowing at another stop sign at a T-intersection. He hesitated, and Dreamer said, “Left.”

  With a spin of the wheel, he turned and hit the gas again. Dreamer drew her legs up so she was half-kneeling in her chair, her weight leaning against her arm on the back of Aidriel’s seat while she kept pressure on his head. Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket, and she instinctively reached for it, but changed her mind and ignored it. She knew that it was one of two people at this hour, and she couldn’t speak to either at the moment.

  Aidriel allowed the car to slow to the speed limit; his heaving was beginning to calm. It was a small miracle that the automobile and the phone in Dreamer’s pocket had not been destroyed by the electromagnetic radiation caused by the Passers. It must be one of those strange occurrences Williams had mentioned about the ghosts doing thing
s just to keep them guessing.

  But Dreamer was already guessing. She was only now awake enough to let what had happened sink in, and she still wasn’t sure entirely what had transpired. She wondered if Aidriel realized that he had very nearly driven off without her. Perhaps he wasn’t acting as selfishly as it seemed; he could have thought of protecting her. Maybe that was why he was dressing to leave. He must have somehow known the Passers were coming. But who could blame him for acting only on self-preservation? His life was at risk, not hers.

  She was just infinitely glad he had left the keys on the ground beside the car; perhaps it had been intentional. It was fortunate she had caught sight of him crossing the field in the distance, thanks to the ghostly cloud that followed him. Otherwise, she might not have driven in the right direction, and if she hadn’t, by now he would be lying in a gory mess in that Walmart parking lot, dead.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Hey, I have a joke for you.”

  Dr. St. Cross patiently lowered the medical journal he was reading to look at Todd. They were sitting across the aisle from one another on the cramped little plane, and most of the other passengers were reclined and asleep. The night was dark and starry above the clouds outside the windows, and St. Cross was tired, but Todd was keeping him awake.

  “Okay, why are a gorilla’s nostrils so big?” asked Todd.

  “This can’t be going anywhere good,” St. Cross replied.

  “Because their fingers are so big!” Todd exclaimed softly, barely able to contain his amusement and keep his voice low. He broke into a fit of chuckling, and the psychiatrist rolled his eyes.

  “That’s infantile,” St. Cross commented, going back to his reading.

  Todd continued to snicker, and the woman beside him lifted her head, opened her sleepy eyes, and gave him a dirty look. Once he had controlled himself, Todd whispered,

  “Hey, I wanted to ask you, though—where are we going exactly?”

  “Columbus Airport,” St. Cross answered, transfixed on his papers. “Then we’re taking a charter to the Fulton County Airport in Wauseon.”

  “Wauseon? Never heard of it.”

  St. Cross shrugged, and turned the page.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, “that is our destination.”

  “Hopefully we’re going to a hotel,” Todd mumbled, pulling his neck pillow in around his ears and shifting in his chair to make himself comfortable.

  “Yes, we are,” St. Cross replied with a smile.

  Williams and deTarlo had reached the hotel first, and had questioned the night clerk and already left by the time St. Cross and Todd got there. The clerk ran his hand through his spiky hair and twitched nervously.

  “I need to make a phone call,” he kept saying.

  “I just need to ask a few quick questions,” St. Cross said in his best shrink voice. To better see him in his wheelchair, the clerk had come around the counter, and was leaning against it as if desperately wanting to be on the other side.

  “My boss isn’t coming in tonight,” he said. “I already called him and he said he’d call the cops, but I don’t know what we can tell ’em. There was just a bunch of stuff left behind, and they wrecked the TV and AC/heater unit. It was a good thing I smelled something burning and grabbed the fire extinguisher, ’cause it could’a burned the whole place down!”

  “Who did you see?” St. Cross asked, ignoring the drama.

  “When? I saw a guy come outta the stairway like a shot, and a bit later a chick with an armload of stuff came outta the elevator. She got in her car and drove off. It took me forever to figure out which room they were in; they left the door open.”

  “Did you see any Passers?”

  “Yeah, I saw a million of ’em chasing after the guy. My computer crashed just before that too, completely fried. Must’a been lightning or a power surge or something.”

  “You don’t know where they went?”

  “No, they left hours ago. I heard sirens and called my boss, but I don’t know what’s going on. You just missed the tall woman in the witch shoes and her son who came in asking about it. Said they came ’cause they tracked a credit card or something. Said they’d pay for everything.”

  “Did she say her name?”

  “No, but she was a Dr. Something. She called her son Chet.”

  “He’s not her son.”

  “Okay, man, whatever you say. I need to make a phone call. I should really talk to my boss again.”

  “Just calm down,” St. Cross said soothingly. “If something like this upsets you, perhaps you should consider a different profession.”

  “Yeah, really, right?” piped in Todd. “Weird stuff is always going down in hotels on the night shift. You should be cool as a cucumber.” He snickered at his own cleverness.

  St. Cross gripped the wheels of his chair, turning it to leave.

  “We’re not staying here tonight?” asked Todd, disappointed.

  The shrink moved a sufficient distance for privacy and took out his cell phone, dialing and smiling in relief when he got an answer. Tilting the receiver away from his mouth, he turned to Todd and said, “Get the car ready. We have to get moving again.”

  Aidriel finally relinquished the driver’s seat to Dreamer when she convinced him to pull over at a Walmart in Elkhart, Indiana, more than two hours after the attack. They parked in the furthest corner of the lot and she ran inside with the credit card from Williams. She knew that Chester’s people could see every purchase she made and where, but without access to her own money, she couldn’t think of any other way to buy what they needed.

  She grabbed a first aid kit, aspirin, a bag of apples, bottles of water, a couple of lightweight khaki jackets, and three plastic five-gallon gas jugs. Aidriel was dizzy and half-asleep when she returned, and once she made sure the cut on the back of his head and a few of the worse scratches on his arms were taken care of, she commandeered the wheel. He swallowed the pain pills on an empty stomach and fell asleep.

  Dreamer turned on the GPS and programmed it to guide them to the dead zone in Iowa. The location was a square at the center of four streets out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded, from what she could tell, by nothing but houses and a field.

  Her last purchase with the credit card was a full tank of gas in addition to the extra fifteen gallons she put in the trunk, so she wouldn’t have to stop again, at least for a while.

  As she drove, Dreamer began to feel the anxiety from the night’s attack easing a little, and she sneaked a glance from time to time at Aidriel sleeping. At a red light she studied him, taking in his every feature; his uneven but steady breathing, how his eyelashes flickered from time to time. He looked worried, even in his dreams.

  Dreamer reached over to take his hand, pulling it up to rest on the lidded compartment between their seats. It wasn’t exactly comfortable to have her fingers interlaced with his, if only because she still felt physical contact was premature. But somehow it seemed like she had to do it; like they were stronger holding hands. Aidriel didn’t stir, so she didn’t let go.

  When Dr. Ana deTarlo was working on her Study of the Psychological Limits of Vasovagel Syncope, Kara, her Passer, had not spent much time in her company.

  At Ana’s townhouse, there was a comfortable pair of wicker chairs on her back porch, overlooking a lawn that the landlord kept well-groomed, and a ditch with a trickle of a stream coiling through it. DeTarlo liked to sit in one of the chairs and savor the small victories along the path of her studies. One evening as she was lingering over the last sips of her favorite Cabernet Sauvignon, Kara appeared from nowhere beside the other wicker chair, and slowly sat down.

  Kara was much younger than Ana; the girl it had once been was only eighteen when she died and had been a real beauty before the melancholy of its restless purgatory afflicted its features. But it had been a ghost for longer than deTarlo had been alive, and though innocent, it was not naïve.
>
  “I wonder at the ramifications of your study, my friend,” Kara mused. “It strikes me as odd that you can call torture, ‘research’ in the name of psychology.”

  “It isn’t torture,” Ana responded in a calm, patronizing tone. She rested her head back against her chair and closed her eyes to enjoy the evening. When something cold brushed her shin, she opened her eyes and was startled to find Kara standing over her.

  “Back off!” deTarlo exclaimed, darkly surprised.

  “Imagine that tonight, as you sleep, the wires to the outlet by your bed spark and ignite,” said the Passer. “You remain blissfully oblivious to the danger even as the nightstand burns, and the bedclothes catch on fire. You only awaken when the flames spread to your nightgown and hair, scorching your skin too quickly for you to react. Imagine as vividly as you can the agony of your crown of fire, burning down your temples and around the back of your scalp, spreading to your forehead, cheeks, ears and neck. Sitting half-upright in your bed, you are overwhelmed with the agony and eventually faint away. Shall I, in the name of research, ask you in your last waking moments what you are feeling? Shall I record how many minutes you could remain conscious and endure the pain? Shall I try to revive you again without putting out the flames, to see if the suffering would keep you in a state of coma, all in the name of psychology?”

  Ana was not unmoved to listen to the Passer’s description, and barely waited to hear the end of it. Gulping down what was left of her wine and getting swiftly to her feet, she brushed her shoulder through the spirit as she passed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she spat, slamming into the house through the backdoor. “None of my patients are permanently harmed by my study.”

  “Pain is eternal,” Kara told her, drifting through the wall to join her in the kitchen. “Pain lingers in the heart and mind like invisible scars.”

  “How dramatic.”