Christopher blinked and looked around sleepily.
“I told you I saw it. You’re preoccupied with it.”
Tom clamped his teeth around his cigarette. He made a three-point turn in the road. There were no headlights in either direction. He started back toward the glow of Lake Meer. The window down on Chris’s side, the air coming in smelled minerally of snow, like hard water. It was good, fresh air, and Tom could smell the Blazer’s engine wafting in. The ignition switch had been giving him some trouble for a while — he’d been meaning to take it in for a once-over — and there were some other issues, malodorous ones.
Tom started laughing, and then started coughing. They reentered the outskirts of Lake Meer. They drove back to the blinking yellow, and Tom went straight, headed out the other way, towards Little Rock Hospital. Christopher looked over at him, a faint smile on his lips.
“Change of plan?”
Tom nodded, still coughing, a fist to his mouth. When it subsided he cleared his throat and said to Christopher, “We go see about this boy at the hospital, okay? And, well, no matter how this all shakes out, I can tell you one thing. When this is all over I’ve got to turn myself in, too.”
“I hear you,” said Christopher.
CHAPTER TEN
The third patient on the ward arrived a little before 3 AM.
When the little baby boy came in, he was sleeping. Maddy thought he was one of the cutest she had ever seen. Most babies were cute, she knew, but this kid was outta sight. Made those Cabbage Patch Kids look plum ugly.
“Where are his parents?”
Roland shrugged. “He’s in between foster homes. CPS will be here in the morning, I guess. For now, he’s ours.”
They placed the baby boy on the bed in the room. He wiggled a little, stretched, but continued sleeping. There was a red pacifier in his mouth.
“Where,” she asked Roland, “right here?” She touched the child’s head which was covered in a soft white hat.
Roland nodded.
Maddy cocked her head to the side and smiled at the beautiful sleeping baby. She brushed his cheek with the back of her first two fingers. “Sweetie,” she said. Then she gently removed the white hat.
She prodded the child’s head gingerly with the pads of those first two fingers.
“I feel it,” she told Roland. “Under the periosteum layer. Over one of the sutures. Here . . . here is the fontanel.”
Her fingers, ever gentle, moved around. The child was oblivious to the examination.
“And the sac is . . . right here.” She looked up at Roland. “It’s like it’s filled with fluid.”
Roland nodded. He scribbled something on his clipboard.
“The doctor will want to get him into the CAT scan, I’m sure,” she said. “This could be a rupture. He could have internal bleeding, a subdural hematoma.”
She paused, thinking, watching the child, who sucked his pacifier and remained asleep. Then her expression grew serious.
She turned to Roland. “Go get George. Tell him to wake up the doctor. I’m taking him to radiology.”
Roland opened his mouth to say something, but Maddy whisked the boy up and left the room, with a breeze in her wake that ruffled Roland’s papers.
He wondered why Maddy hadn’t said anything about the child’s eyes, and scribbled something else when the papers had settled.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Liz swiped hair from her forehead with the heel of her palm. She looked at the broken glass spread over the floor and the tree branch which had smashed into the bedroom.
Her fingers were sticky with something — sap, maybe — and she avoided touching her hair or her face with them. She kept wiping her hands on her pants — a pair of Jared’s work pants that she rolled up and cinched with a belt — but it wasn’t coming off.
Next to her was the Browning bolt-action rifle, loaded. There was a box of ammunition with eight or nine rounds left. The firearm lay on the ground, pointed at the bedroom door. Her finger was hooked into the trigger loop, but that was all. She was so tired, so fatigued, despite the adrenaline coursing through her and the racing thoughts in her mind that she couldn’t even bear to lift it.
After hearing the tree branch come through upstairs, Jared had taken another gun from the cabinet, locking it shut again after stuffing the box of ammo into his pocket. He had done this while one of the . . . things (bird-men, circus freaks — whatever they were) had come in through the window in the living room.
Jared and Liz had backed up the stairs as the thing thudded on to the floor and started dragging its way toward them. Jared had blocked her view, and the doorway to the corridor of stairs had further shrunken her sightline as they’d climbed, but Liz had heard the thing thumping along . . . and squishing, somehow. She’d pleaded with Jared to stay up there with her, but he’d gone back down.
She heard voices.
Like before, when Jared had come home and had been muttering to himself and laughing. Only this time it wasn’t Jared’s voice.
There was no laughter, and it was in some other tongue.
The voice came simultaneously from the main floor where Jared had returned to, and also in her ears. In stereo.
“Vaguous, trechea, sensua. I will take him anyway.”
That bit of English at the end. It was hard to catch at first, after the foreign words.
Jared’s gun went off downstairs. She heard him howl. Above and to the side of her, on the wall, his guitar vibrated and resonated with the noise. The ghost music from the hanging twelve-string, for some reason, terrified Elizabeth more than anything else.
You’re in shock. It was Serafina again, speaking to her in her imagination. Finna-Finny with her dark, shining hair. The sisters were of Polish descent. Warsaw Poles; their maternal grandfather had come over in his twenties. Liz’s mother had the Slavic genetic influence with green eyes and blonde hair; her father was a light-complexioned Jew from Long Island, yet Finna had come out brown-eyed and brunette. Liz had forever longed for Finna’s dark, Gipsy eyes. Finna with her big eyes and big degrees. I love you, Serafina.
You’re in shock.
Yes, maybe. Probably. Shock and haze from a slight hangover from the red wine. Dear God, she had to pee. Come to think of it, she’d had to pee for a long time.
He tried to warn you.
Liz cocked her head as Jared fired a second time downstairs and yelled something garbled and slurred and terribly frustrated. To Jared, there were intruders in his family home. Uninvited desecrators of Harrier Trace.
Liz started to giggle and put a hand over her mouth. The stickiness was there, on her fingers, she’d forgotten. It smelled like spoiled milk. It smelled worse than spoiled milk, it smelled like vomit. She took her hand away from her mouth, her bout of giggles quickly subsiding.
That was what Chris was doing here; he was warning you.
Perhaps. That would have been Finna’s stance on the matter anyway. She looked at the world both from a fantastical point of view and a scientific one. She was a catch. With her long legs and sable locks, Serafina could have as many men as she wanted, yet she was a serial monogamist. She had a day job, an apartment in Queens, and three dogs, yet she was still free.
You’re the most un-free person I know, Finna had once said to Liz in one of their knock-down, drag-out fights to end all fights. By all your running and hiding, you’re trapped.
Finna. Goddamned Finna, going to church on Sundays. Flaunting that bright smile, that master’s degree. Naming her dogs after Renaissance poets. Who the hell did she think she was?
But I’m right, Finna said to Liz, as though she were there in the room, sharing the space with Liz, the tree branch, and the other voices. Christopher was here to warn you, and you know it.
Standing there, leaking water onto the linoleum floor, his head down, unresponsive. Chris, who she’d gone through a deal-breaking situation with in the midst of their second year together. Chris, who had then completely disappeared, hadn’t o
ffered a word, not a phone call, email or text. Not even second-hand information. She had grieved the loss of her best friend, her lover, and she’d gone on with her life, until, well, there he’d been.
In the kitchen. Raining on the floor.
Another blast from downstairs. The sound startled Liz out of her reverie and got her heart jumping, palpitating in her chest. She took a deep breath. She realized she was close to crying. Going through all sorts of emotions now, running the gamut. Who or what was down there?
“Verrega,” said the stereo-voice. “Vishnu. Parratu. Deigine.”
It sounded like Russian.
Liz slid her finger from the rifle’s trigger loop, put her hands over her ears and shut her eyes. It didn’t block out the voice. It was inside of her.
“Malcka. Verrega. Elzbeita. Serafina.”
Liz opened her eyes. Her name. Her sister’s name. In her head, spoken by this voice, calm, masculine, grave, and reverberating through her skull as though she were wearing headphones. The words were pronounced as her grandmother had pronounced their names when they were little girls, with the Polish accent she’d not entirely shed.
Liz took her hands from her ears. The film on her finger stuck to her hair, and she heard herself cry out in a breathy whistle as the goop clung to her hair and pulled it. Once freed, she picked up the Browning rifle with both hands.
With effort, she got to her feet. The ceilings in the bedroom were at an angle. She couldn’t stand up all of the way against the wall, and had to keep her head down, looking up at the bedroom door. A gust of wind blew a swirl of snow in through the broken window.
Below, Jared cried out again. Liz felt an icy chill. There had been something terrible in that scream. Something strangled, something that sounded like the end.
Thumping now, on the stairs.
Something was coming up towards her.
Liz looked to her left at the smashed window.
More thumping and dragging on the stairs.
“Elzbeita,” she heard, as though someone had uttered the words standing beside her, into her ear. The hawkish cold surrounded her in currents. She picked the rifle up again and turned the butt of it around, ramrodding the jagged bits of storm glass still stuck in the window frame.
I still have to pee, she thought. She rammed the butt plate of the firearm through the last bits of glass.
Behind her, whatever was coming up the stairs for her had reached the landing and was outside the bedroom door. In her mind she saw the eye looking in on the kitchen, the head horizontal, pinkish, scrubbed raw, hairless. Then the second head, impossible, like a bird’s. Crawling its way in, flipped over onto its back. The hooked, two-fingered hand scrabbling for purchase.
The door burst open behind her. Elizabeth leapt and screamed and turned and lost the gun again. She bent, got a hold of it and stood quickly, blood rushing to her head, seeing spots, but managed to aim it.
Jared was there. He was bleeding from the head and neck.
She set the rifle down on the carpet and went to him. She helped get him all the way into the room; he pushed himself backwards on his ass with his heels as she pulled him from the armpits. Then he kicked the door closed.
“Jared,” she said. She started to hug him around the neck but stopped. He was bleeding there. A tear in his flesh. Gore. He groped at her, grabbing her shirt and some skin. As he wrenched himself to his feet, Liz cried out in pain.
He stood, shaky. There was nothing in his hands.
“Where’s the shotgun?”
“One of them got it,” he said, “in its mouth.”
“Oh God,” said Liz. How was this happening? Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she was unconscious outside right now, her guy-loon bobbing under the water and resurfacing, cruising along alone and free in that wombing blackness. Maybe she was sleeping, and this was all a dream. They said a person considered that possibility when they faced something that made no rational sense.
“What are they?” She was almost shrieking the words.
Jared shook his head. He smacked his lips, licked them, like he had cottonmouth. His eyes were wide and glistening. He was looking at the bedroom door.
“Never seen anything like it. I don’t know. They could be rabid. They . . . they just . . . maybe they’re starving, I don’t know. I did hear this once. Gavin Bickford. Out at his camp. He said they were howling, and they were close. He saw one, just like a scout, doing some recon. It came right up onto his porch, growling, head low. Skinny.”
Liz didn’t understand. She thought of them as people downstairs. Some kind of people. Some deformed form of people, bird heads atop wretched flesh. What was Jared rambling on about? Was he drunk still? Hallucinating?
“Jared,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He turned, looking past her, looking at the window.
“What?”
“We’re not going to stay here, Jared.”
“Of course we are. Where are we going to go? Out there?”
“Jared, you’re not making any sense. I think you’re hurt. I know you’re hurt. Look in the mirror. You’re hurt bad, Jared.” Liz realized she had started to cry.
Jared stalked off into the bathroom, but not before bending and picking up the rifle she’d been using as a battering ram. He looked at himself in the mirror, lifting his head and turning his jaw this way and that, like a teenager examining a pimple. “Fucker,” was all he said.
“What happened?”
“What do you think happened, Liz? Fucking coyote bit me. Went right for my throat.”
“Jared, will you please stop talking to me like I’m a child?” She was really crying now, no stopping it. Sweat mixed with tears ran down her face and spilled down her neck and she thought of Christopher. “I don’t understand why you’re talking about c-c-c . . .”
She couldn’t finish.
He turned. “Coyotes? Because that’s what’s downstairs, Liz. I think you need to lie down. You’re going to get into one of those . . . you know. What you told me about.”
Jared went to her and hugged her and she felt the rifle press against her back, and he tenderly helped her over to the bed and whispered, “Here, lie down here, Lizzie. It’s okay.”
She could smell the blood on him. His own sweat. The beer and licorice-y odor of Jagermeister from when he’d been at the bar, when things had been normal.
“You just need to lie there. It’s okay; they’re gone. The coyotes are gone.”
He put the rifle down next to the bed. And he was pulling the blankets up and around her, and then he was gone, and out the bedroom door, saying “I’ll be back, just lie there,” over his shoulder.
Coyotes, she thought. No, no, they weren’t coyotes.
And she pictured her guy-loon diving through the surface of the pond, down into the depths, its feathers back, its body purling, seeking shelter from the storm.
And, despite everything, Elizabeth fell unconscious at last.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Hey, old man,” said a familiar voice. “Hey, babydoll.”
Tom opened his eyes. Maddy was standing there in front of him, sticking a needle in his hand, into the tender part between the thumb and forefinger. Tom jerked it away. He started to get out of the bed.
“Whoa, whoa, honey. Come on, lay back down.”
“Where’s the kid?” His voice was a croaked whisper.
“Not sure who you mean. Busy night, babylove. We admitted a young man, early twenties, a few hours ago, detoxing. Is that who you mean? And just before you showed up, a three-year-old boy. Now, you know I love to see you, Tommy, but collapsing in front of the hospital at three in the morning . . . You could’ve just sent a card.”
“What?”
“You’re okay, for now. You’ve got to lay off the coffee and cigarettes, honey. Your sleep debt is off the charts. How long has it been since you’ve gotten a decent night?”
“I don’t know,” Tom managed. “The one with me, the kid in the jean coat. Where is he?�
��
Maddy had already punctured Tom’s skin and the IV was in before he’d had a chance to resist it again. He watched her for a moment, still easy on the eye, with bobbing blonde curls, à la Marilyn Monroe, that Tom knew she had done once a week, colored and permed, at the beauty salon. She sported long red fingernails and smelled as perfumed as ever.
“Where’s the one who was in the car with me? Jean jacket, black hair.”
The talking brought about a coughing fit. He balled a fist and put it to his mouth. He saw that his fist was bandaged, and winced as he flexed his hand.
Maddy was propping him up, rubbing his back.
“Don’t know who you mean, doll. You drove up, got out, and plop. We thought it could be a heart attack. You’re lucky. Your vitals are okay, like I said, for now.”
In the other rooms, Tom heard talk and general hubbub. Then a PA, George Bletzinger, stuck his head into the room.
“Everything okay, Kruger?”
Kruger. They still called her that, Tom thought.
“Yep,” said Maddy. She finished propping Tom up.
George’s eyes found Tom. “Investigator Miller, is it? How you feeling?”
“Milliner,” Tom corrected. “Extra ‘I.’ Plus an ‘N.’”
“Oh,” said George, as if Tom had made the mistake himself. Tom was used to it. He never bothered to explain, though, the origins of his surname. It only made him more irritated.
George ducked back out of the room.
“Can you roll the other kid in here? The detox? That possible?” Tom was whispering.
Maddy bent and whispered back. Her breath was pepperminty.
“Something up?”
“Busy night.”
She winked at him. “See what I can do.”
Maddy left, the aroma of perfume and bakery-fresh scent of her breath trailing behind.
He heard the clacking jangle of her many necklaces and pendants rattling about her ample chest as she walked. Surely all the jewelry was a vexation to the hospital administrators.
“George,” he heard her calling in the hallway, “help us out and wheel in young Mister Massey?”
HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Page 8