Blood Echo

by Rice, Christopher

He just stares at her for a while. Biting his tongue, she realizes.

  “Why not?” he finally asks.

  “It’s not safe.”

  “What are you saying? Where are you going to stay if you don’t stay here?”

  “Someplace they can . . . I don’t know. Do a better job of taking care of me.”

  “Their labs? You’re just going to go live in their labs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re going to become their prisoner? That’s your response?”

  “How do you think I should respond?”

  “I don’t know, but not like it’s your fault.”

  “It’s not?”

  “You didn’t bring those psychos here.”

  “I didn’t? Cole brought them here, and I brought Cole here.”

  “Cole followed you here!” Marty shouts. “That’s different.”

  “Marty, lower your voice.”

  “I will not!” Marty shoots to his feet, looks to the ceiling over his head as if he’s searching for hidden microphones. “I will not lower my voice. I will not let you take the blame for this because some rich asshole’s decided to scare us with hidden cameras and helicopters and for-shit security! This is Cole Graydon’s fault, and I don’t care if he or his minions hear me say it. It was Cole Graydon who told us on that boat dock yesterday that we were safe like no one else.

  “He didn’t say, Sit tight but stay sharp, I’ve got good people coming. In the morning! He said we were safer here than we were anywhere. And if he’d said otherwise, I would have been out in front of your house with a gun on my lap and Rucker and Brasher backing me up just like we did when we watched over you before. And we would have caught those sick sons of bitches when they were moving in, not when they were moving out!”

  “Marty, please. Just sit.”

  “No,” he answers. “I won’t sit and I won’t quiet down, and I don’t care who’s listening in on a hidden microphone or a goddamn toaster oven. This is not your fault, Charley. It’s not your damn fault!”

  When no one comes running to put him in restraints and fly him off to an undisclosed location, Marty sucks in a deep breath and flounces down onto the bench next to her. He clasps his hands in front of him, elbows resting on his knees. It looks like he’s chewing on dip, but he quit doing dip years ago. There’s no misinterpreting his pose and his expression; she’s known him too long for that. His outburst didn’t satisfy him, so that means there’s a lecture coming.

  “Your grandmother used to tell me that she thought if she’d just feel guilty enough about something she could end it somehow. No matter what it was. If she just shouted to the universe that it was really her fault, the universe would say, OK. Thanks, Luanne. We get the picture. We’ll take it off everybody’s plate now.

  “It was driving her crazy, doing this. It was part of why she drank so much. And the thing she kept wrestling with when she first got sober was she really, she really, thought that if she stopped hurting for you and your mother every hour of every day that it was as good as breaking up your bones and throwing them down a hillside. As if they’d never been part of a person.

  “Those were her exact words. And do you want to know, when they found you, baby girl, is when she sobered up. When she stopped torturing herself every damn hour. Now, I’m not saying those two things aren’t connected, but what I’m sure as hell saying is that the first two things aren’t. She wasn’t keeping you alive by refusing to live.

  “But God help me, you are just like she was, Charley. You take the hit for something you shouldn’t because you think you’re gonna absorb all of it and nobody else will get sprayed. But you can’t. You’re not that powerful even when you’re triggered, and if you keep doing it, all you’re going to be is in more pain than you deserve.”

  “Marty . . .”

  “You’re in love, Charlotte Rowe. You’re in love for the first time, and under the craziest damn circumstances I can imagine, and this is how it feels. And that’s what you want to run from because when you’re in love with somebody and they get hurt, you hurt just as bad. If you don’t, it’s not love.

  “It’s true, darling. Don’t deny it.”

  “Marty, he saw me do things. Terrible things.”

  “You did them for him.”

  “Still, if he wakes up and he looks at me like he doesn’t recognize me because of what I did on that mountain, I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it.”

  “If he does that, then he’s the one who should ditch Altamira.”

  “I killed people, Marty. I killed them and I didn’t think twice about it.”

  “You did what we expect men to do for their women. What we expect parents to do for their children.”

  “No, Marty. Not the kind of things I did.”

  “You didn’t stop until the one you loved was OK, and you stopped the people who tried to stop you. You just did it with a tool nobody else has got. That’s all. That’s the only difference, Charley. And if Luke can’t see that, he doesn’t deserve you.”

  She’s not sure if she can’t argue with him because deep down she believes he’s right or because she’s just too damn tired.

  After a while, her head meets his shoulder, then she loses her sense of time and slips into that shallow sleep where you’re not sure what’s real or what’s a dream. Maybe the low murmur of Marty talking to the doctors and nurses is real, but sometimes it sounds like their words are quiet, whispered versions of the vicious things she said to Jordy Clements. Then the sunlight on the other side of her eyelids feels brighter, and she figures day is breaking fully outside. Someone pulls the window shade above her, but it sounds kind of like the winch on that horrible torture device did when she turned it. Is she lying flat on the bench now? Is someone—Marty? A nurse?—bringing a blanket up over her?

  Then there’s a loud crash, and when she jerks awake, she sees Marty standing a few feet away, staring through the doorway into Luke’s room.

  “Howdy, podnah. How’d you sleep?” There’s no answer, but she’s got no doubt who he’s talking to.

  She swings her legs to the floor, shoves the blanket aside.

  Marty enters before her, which means he’s blocking her view of Luke and Luke’s view of her.

  Then he crosses around the foot of the bed, and she sees what made the crash. When Luke started awake, he pushed his chest-support pillow off the bed and it knocked into a supply table next to the bed as it fell.

  Luke looks dazed, disoriented, and frustrated.

  “What was that thing?” he asks in a voice still scratchy from smoke.

  “It was supposed to keep you up off your back,” Marty says. “Got some burns there, son.”

  “I couldn’t breathe,” he says.

  “Well, that’s fine. You can breathe now, right?”

  Marty’s looking back and forth between her and Luke, probably waiting, just as she is, for the dreaded moment she described earlier.

  Charlotte’s heart feels like it’s hammering faster than it does when she’s triggered. And she can’t bring herself to step entirely inside the room yet, so her hand’s gripping the doorframe next to her.

  Then Luke sees her. His mouth goes slack and his eyes widen. Her heart drops. It looks like the sight of her makes him numb. For a second, she thinks it might be possible he really doesn’t remember her, that he suffered some terrible head injury before she got to him.

  “Charley . . .”

  He says it the way he said it inside the limekiln. Soft, but also distant and confused.

  “Charley.”

  Is it tears or smoke damage choking his voice? In this moment, does it matter? He’s reaching out for her, for real this time. She starts for him and when their fingers finally touch, he pulls her to him quick and forcefully. She’s about to throw her arms around him, but then she remembers the bandages covering his injured back. So she cradles his head in her hands instead as he embraces her as hard as he can.

  “You saved me, Char
ley,” he says into the fabric of her shirt.

  And that’s when she starts crying harder than she ever has in her life.

  This time when she wakes, it’s dark again, and she has the feeling she’s being watched.

  Earlier, around dusk, the nurses saw her trying to sleep beside Luke in the narrow wedge of bed left over after he rolled onto his stomach. They took pity on her and brought in another hospital bed they put right beside his. Around that time, Luke complained of more pain, so they hit him with another dose of painkillers. That’s probably why he doesn’t even stir as she sits up in bed now.

  There’s a shadow close to the open door, sitting in a chair that wasn’t there before.

  Marty senses it, too; he starts awake in his chair, his snore turning into a hacking attempt to clear his throat.

  The smell coming from their visitor combines body odor with dirt and green things. She hits the light switch on her bed. Cole’s sitting just far enough away for it to send a soft glow over him. But she can tell he’s wearing the same clothes he had on the day before, and the product that usually styles his hair into a side part has lost its hold. The scratches on his cheeks look like they were left by small branches. His slacks are dirty and his expensive-looking dress shirt dirt smudged. He didn’t just supervise the cleanup effort. It looks like he actually took part in it with his own two hands. No doubt he wants her to see this, and that’s why he hasn’t showered or changed.

  But there’s a feeling more severe than exhaustion in his look of glaze-eyed shock. He’s seen the bloody evidence of everything she’d left up there. Not just seen it. For Christ’s sake, it looks like he touched it.

  Nobody says anything for a while. When she glances at Marty, she sees his expression is a tense mask that betrays traces of anger, but he seems just as startled by Cole’s appearance as she is.

  “How is he?” Cole asks.

  She glances down at Luke to see if he’s still asleep; he is. “Resting.”

  “Good.”

  “How did it go?” she asks. Cole looks at her, confused. “The cleanup,” she says.

  “The less you know, the better.”

  “There were a few things we should have known yesterday,” Marty says.

  Cole’s face displays none of the jaw-tensing arrogance he showed them on the boat dock.

  “I didn’t come to justify my decision,” he says. “I fucked up. I failed you. All of you.”

  She’s so startled by this admission she’s not sure what to say. Neither, it seems, is Marty.

  For a while, no one says anything.

  Cole gets to his feet, crosses slowly toward Luke’s hospital bed. His eyes are focused on something, but she can’t tell what exactly. Then, when he reaches the bed, Cole reaches out and runs his fingers along the bandages on Luke’s right wrist.

  “Rope?” he asks.

  “Flex-cuffs,” she answers. “Plastic, I think.” She leaves out the part about how they had started to melt into his skin by the time she got there. The bandages say that for her.

  “Rope is bad,” he says quietly.

  Marty straightens in his chair like a cat hearing a strange sound.

  She waits for Cole to explain this strange statement further, but he doesn’t. Is he drunk? He doesn’t smell like booze. Just sweat and dirt. And smoke, a scent that takes her back to the limekiln with a sudden speed that makes her head spin a little.

  “They were going to kill him,” Cole says. “You know that, right?”

  “I figured there was a pretty good chance . . . yeah.”

  “It’s not a guess. I saw what they were using. You don’t use that to scare someone into being quiet. You use it to extract information before you get rid of them. They weren’t going to return him to his normal life covered in third-degree burns.”

  “How much else did you see?” she asks. “During the cleanup, I mean.”

  He looks into her eyes for the first time since she woke up. “Everything,” he says. “Nice work, even if it was technically unsanctioned.”

  She’s so unprepared for this, so surprised Cole hasn’t blown in and tried to take her to task for everything, she’s not sure what to say. For Christ’s sake, he hasn’t even asked her where she got the pills. Maybe he already knows.

  Across the room, Marty seems equally surprised, but not satisfied. When it comes to Cole, Marty will never be entirely satisfied. And maybe she shouldn’t be, either.

  “I’d like you to stay here for a bit,” Cole says. “There was another guy. Their driver, apparently. He ran, but we just caught up with him in Morro Bay. He was trying to get rid of their van. But let me make sure we’ve covered everything before you and Luke go home. We have real security here now. New people, good people. People who trust me and believe in what I’m doing. What we’re doing. But just stay for now, please. I’d hate to make the same mistake twice.”

  Now she’s the focus of Marty’s intense stare. Either he’s pissed that Cole’s passing the buck down onto the people who work for him, or he’s waiting for her to make the same proclamation she made to him that morning. To ditch Altamira, as he put it. To hand herself over to Cole’s constant custody.

  She doesn’t. The urge is gone. The need to run is gone. Maybe Marty’s lecture did the trick, or maybe it was the need in Luke’s eyes when he woke. But there are moments, she realizes, when her past will make her feel like she doesn’t deserve attachments and the messy complexities of love. Everyone deserves them. Everyone. But when you cut yourself free of the possibility, you forget.

  “Jordy Clements?” she asks, remembering the howling man, broken in more ways than one, she’d left in the dirt beside the storage shed.

  “The less you know, the better,” he says. “About this part anyway. Besides, as we agreed last night, it’s the least I can do.”

  There’s a sudden quickness to his step. She’s pretty sure he’s about to leave, so she calls out to him. Startled, he turns. Maybe he was trying to make this quick because he thought she’d never want to lay eyes on him again.

  A few hours ago, that was the case. But her only thought now is that she’s never seen this version of Cole Graydon before, and it’s too erratic and off-balance to be a put-up job.

  “What did you mean, rope is bad?” she asks.

  His stare seems blank, but it’s also steady. Steady in a way that makes her unsure if he’s distracted or just stalling.

  He looks at Luke again, at the little carpet of bandages on his naked back. Cole’s silences have surged with all sorts of thinly repressed emotions, but never this kind of sudden acute pain.

  Like her, Marty’s frozen in anticipation of whatever Cole might say next.

  “When I was thirteen, my father sent me to this wilderness adventure camp in Colorado. The goal was to toughen up rich kids like me. I hated it. Every minute of it. I bitched and moaned and whined like a spoiled brat. Because I was a spoiled brat. And at the time, I had no desire to be anything else. We hiked five or six miles every day. At night, we camped with these plastic tarps that would barely do anything if it rained. We didn’t even have tents.

  “But even as I hated it, there were beautiful things. I remember one day before dawn we hiked to the top of a mountain so we could watch the sunrise from several thousand feet. There were animals that came so close it was like we were . . . I don’t know. Siblings.

  “The hike was two weeks long, and the last day, we were supposed to rock climb. They took us to this little cliff face, and really, the cliff itself was only about twenty feet high, but it was on the edge of a mountain, so when you were at the top, looking down, the perspective made it seem like you could fall thousands of feet. They kept saying it was just a trick of the eye, but I didn’t give a shit. I wasn’t doing it. And this one counselor, he practically came at me with the harness. He’d had it. He’d had enough of me and my mouth. Well, I’d had enough, too. I took off running.

  “I was a good runner. Thin, light. They didn’t catch up to me. We
weren’t that far from civilization, so I had a pretty good sense of which way I needed to go. We’d all been hiking for two weeks. We couldn’t carry the rock-climbing gear the whole time, so we’d stopped off at the lodge before and the lodge was pretty close to a town. So anyway, my plan was just to walk until I got somewhere, and then I’d get to a phone and call my father and say that I had done as much of his little camp as I could and it was time for me to come home.”

  Cole nods, and for a second, she wonders if that’s where the story will end.

  “It turned out I wasn’t on the road I thought I was.”

  He chews briefly on his bottom lip. He hasn’t looked away from Luke once since he started to tell the story; he doesn’t now.

  “I heard the truck when it was pretty far away. And I knew it wasn’t from the lodge because it was . . . well, those cars were new, and this one was making a hell of a racket. I thought about trying to wave it down, but there was plenty of day left and I figured I’d be fine. If the guys in the truck knew anyone from the lodge they might turn me in, and God forbid they make me go back to that fucking cliff.

  “At any rate, I was going to ignore the truck. That was my plan. But at the last second as it was driving past me, I turned and looked, and the guy in the passenger seat was . . . He had the prettiest blue eyes. They were like crystal. And I remember, I smiled like I’d never let myself smile at another boy. That was my mistake.”

  Her stomach’s gone cold, and across the room, Marty’s jaw is set, his deep breaths flaring his nostrils.

  “They pulled over. There were three of them. I guess they were in their twenties. And they started out helpful. Asking me if I needed a ride, where I was going. And I told them I was good and not to worry about me. And then it was like they all smelled something on me. Probably from the way I talked or the words I used. Maybe they saw a city boy or maybe they just saw a faggot who could have been from anywhere. They all came at me at once. Like a force. I just remember it felt like my head was on fire all of a sudden. Then I was in the back seat of the truck and they’d tied my wrists up . . . I just remember being astonished by what was happening. Nobody had ever lifted a hand to me, ever. Nobody at my school fought. We were too damn rich!”