by Marc Zicree
“On the way in, you said you felt as if the woods were watching you. What did you mean by that? Did you—I don’t know—uh, feel dread, excitement, impending doom, indigestion, bad juju—what?”
We all stared bug-eyed at Goldman as if he were a space alien. (I’ve wondered.)
“We were scared,” said Emily.
Goldman persisted. “But did you… did you hear anything? Did something speak to you?”
Jim cast Cal a fleeting and unreadable glance. Is this guy for real?
“I heard angels.”
The voice was small and came from somewhere around Jim Gossett’s kneecaps. Lissa had slipped unnoticed into the circle of adults.
Cal crouched so he could meet her eye-to-eye. “What do you mean by angels, honey?”
“Like angels singing. Oscar and I heard them. I think Gil heard them, too, but he pretended not to.” She sent the little boy an arch glance.
“Who’s Oscar?”
She pointed to the dog, who’d opened one eye at the mention of his name. The eye rolled shut.
“He heard them, I know he did, ’cause he barked at them and howled…” She paused to demonstrate, making Oscar’s ears twitch. “… and he tried to run away to find them.”
“Oscar barks at everything,” Gil commented.
Cal glanced up at him. “Did you hear the angels, Gil?” “It weren’t angels. Prob’ly just deer or something.” “Deer don’t sing,” said Lissa.
“It weren’t singing.”
“But it was like singing—it was.” Lissa looked up into the ring of grown-up faces. “Honest. Sure, Oscar barks at lots of stuff, but he hardly howls at all. He howls when he hears music. That’s why I think it was angels. Because Oscar could hear them. Dogs can see and hear angels,” she added.
“That was a movie,” said Gil. “This is real life.”
I swear to God, those were the most chilling words I’d heard all day.
“Real life,” murmured Goldie, and wandered out into the corridor that led into the wards, his shadow stretching eerily ahead of him.
Cal’s eyes followed him. He straightened and looked to the nurses. “Is there a hospital administrator here? Someone in charge?”
The nearsighted nurse—“Lucy” according to her name tag—nodded. “Dr. Nelson. He has an office right down that corridor to the right.” She pointed in the direction opposite where Goldie had gone. “I could take you—”
“Thanks, but I think I can probably find it myself. I would appreciate it if you could show my friends to the cafeteria, though. Colleen, would you… ?”
“Play Bo Peep? No problem,” I said. “I’m kind of hungry myself. I can keep an eye on Goldman for you while I’m at it.”
He shot me the ghost of a grin. “Thanks.”
Lucy took us to their makeshift mess hall. She pointed us at the chow line, which was hopping at this time of evening, and hurried back to the E.R. I didn’t imagine for a moment that Stan Beecher’s leg was the big draw.
I scanned the room. Even in the uneven lantern light Goldie wasn’t hard to spot. He was a real fashion plate, if you thought a purple and red paisley vest and a green plaid shirt made the perfect ensemble. He was sitting alone at a table near the glass sliders that gave out onto a large patio.
Through the glass I could see ranks of grills and hibachis and other low-tech cooking devices—the kitchen, I guessed. There were five or six people scrambling to make sure all the cook stoves were completely beneath the awning and out of the rain, which was suddenly coming down in buckets.
I hesitated for a moment, then went over and plopped down across from Goldman, who was busy worrying a piece of bread to tiny bits. He didn’t so much as glance up. I opened my mouth to ask how he was doing.
“Kids are very perceptive people,” he told me. “They hear angels.”
“Angels with hunting packs?”
“Maybe the two things are not connected. Just because two occurrences are synchronicitous doesn’t mean there’s a causal relationship.”
I hate it when he talks over my head. “Yeah, and maybe there’s not much oxygen on your world.”
“I think somebody or something saved our bacon.”
“You know what I think? I think our lurker friends had dinner plans, and that the only reason they backed off was to keep from becoming tweak flambé.”
A spark of amusement crept into his dark eyes. “Oh, clever. And you continued the food metaphor. I’m impressed. But a minute ago you were suggesting the big sissies were afraid of a little rain.”
Before I could offer a tart comeback, he added, “There’s something in that woods, and I think it’s important we know what it is.”
“Goldman, I’ll tell you what’s in that woods—weird, creepy, bloodthirsty critters that were once-upon-a-time human beings, just like you and me. They didn’t get called off. They just got scared because one of them bought the farm.”
“And you were forced to kill him… or her. I’m sorry, Colleen.” He gave me a liquid brown look of utter sorrow that bit through me like a north wind, then got up and headed across the room.
I was stunned. “What—sorry? Do I look like I need your sympathy?”
Part of me wanted to chase him down and make him take back his pity. Another part was just plain embarrassed, because people were staring at me. My dignity circuit kicked in. I grinned and shook my head, as if I hadn’t just let him get to me. I was still sitting there about twenty minutes later when Cal came in and sat down across the table.
“Where’s Goldie?” were the first words out of his mouth. They pissed me off.
“Just missed him.”
Cal’s eyes tried to catch mine and read them. “Did he say anything more to you about what he heard out there?”
“Nothing that made any sense.” I changed the subject. “You talk to the admin guy—Nelson?”
He nodded, looking down at his hands clasped on the tabletop. Something about the expression on his face… “What?”
He raised his eyes to the sheet of glass and looked out into the rain. Flames from the cook stoves were bright blossoms in the dark. Our reflections watched us watching them.
“They have some very real needs here, Colleen. They’re short doctors, nurses… mechanics.” He shot a glance at me. “You name it, they need it.”
“He asked us to stay.”
A nod.
“You’re not seriously thinking about it?”
“I don’t want to think about it, but…” He closed his eyes. “Just after you left, they brought in a kid with severe slash wounds. Deep slash wounds. I didn’t think they’d be able to stop the bleeding. Dr. Nelson didn’t think they’d be able to stop the bleeding. Doc did. And between the two of them, they pulled it off. The kid’s unconscious, but Doc thinks he’ll recover.” His eyes opened and pinned me to the back of my chair. “When I first walked into his office a while ago, Darryl Nelson struck me as a man who was worn-out—almost used up. No light in his eyes, no hope. He said it was the end of a long day, but it was more than that. When he shook my hand just now …” He turned his right hand over on the table, palm up, and I realized the cuffs of his shirt were stained with blood. “…he was a different man.”
I touched the stained sleeve. “That the kid’s?”
He pulled a wry grimace. “I’m a paramedic now.”
“And they need paramedics.”
“They need everything.” He sat back in his chair. After a moment of silence he looked at me, his eyes sharp and cool. “You know as well as I do that there’s not a lot we can do in just a few days. This place has problems that would take an ongoing battle just to keep under control. But…” He gazed around the cafeteria at the little knots of people scattered around the room—families, children. “We can make a little bit of a difference here, and the rest could only help us.”
I had to admit, the thought of setting up camp here, even for a couple of days, was awfully appealing. We were all exhausted. Even Cal,
for all that he seemed to have an endless supply of high-voltage batteries. This wasn’t an easy decision for him. Fear for Tina, fear that we’d be too late for her, for everyone, just hovered in the back of his head. You could see it in his eyes if you looked real close, as I often did.
“If you want to move on…”
He shook his head. “We’re going to be here at least for the night. Let’s just… be here now, or whatever Yoda said.”
I snorted. The thought of Cal being here now was a bit of a stretch. “Yeah, right.”
He almost smiled. “Look, why don’t you go get some sleep? I’m going back down to the E.R. and make sure Doc doesn’t pull an all-nighter.”
He got up then, automatically reaching down to adjust the position of the sword that hung against his thigh. The sword he’d pulled, like Excalibur, from a pile of trash in the Manhattan underground. Sometimes I thought the thing was more than a weapon. A familiar, maybe—like a witch’s black cat. Okay, that’s creepy, but these days you found yourself thinking stuff like that all the time.
I gestured at it. “You’re gonna forget to take that thing off one of these nights, and wake up with it fused to your leg.”
This time he did smile, and the smile got all the way up into his eyes. It was a smile that made you feel, irrationally, that he saw the end of all this, and it was a good end. He laid a hand on the sword hilt. “Darryl said if you go to the admissions desk, they’d find a room for you. With a real bed.”
“A real bed? I don’t know if I remember how to use one of those.”
He left, and I got a bite to eat—bread, jerky, dried fruit. Just about everything is dried or jerked these days. Then I fetched my pack out of the wagon and went up to Admissions and got myself a room on the ward. The guy there actually had me sign a guest register.
“Hey, when this is all over,” he said, “these kinds of records might be the only way of tracking people down.”
Either that made sense or I was groggier than I thought. I signed in and the guy handed me a towel and told me how to get to the showers. The showers, for godsake! I was so dazzled by the thought of showers that I didn’t take offense at the suggestion that I needed one.
The admissions guy warned me that at this time of night the fires under the hot water reservoir had been banked down for hours and wouldn’t be stoked until just before dawn. “Water might be a little cool,” he said.
It was merely lukewarm. Felt great anyway. After, I dragged myself to my room, lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. I don’t know how long I lay there trying, but I finally gave up, rolled out of bed, and wandered out into the hall.
From the ward I could look down toward the core of the building and the lobby, a two-story atrium with a lot of plate-glass windows and a skylight—almost like being in the open woods at night. I made my way down the hall past the gift shop (now a small supply store that took barter rather than money, according to Admissions Guy) and into the atrium. I curled up on a sofa in the lounge, my head resting on the arm so I could look up and see the sky.
The rain had stopped and the moon was still there, wearing a veil of clouds. She wasn’t full; it looked like something had taken a bite out of her. No matter. As days passed, she’d wax and wane and wax again. And there were stars, twinkling like a promise.
Something in the darkness of the west wing caught my eye. A shadow shifted, oozed. Static electricity arced across every nerve junction in my body.
I rolled my head a little to one side so I could see the mouth of the corridor from the E.R., which opened right next to the door of the pharmacy. After a moment of watching, there was more movement. Someone or something had just slithered around the corner into the darkened store.
I put the thought of shadows or lurkers aside and rolled off the sofa to slink across the moonlit floor, keeping low and using the groupings of furniture as cover. I passed soundlessly through the glass doors and paused to let my eyes adjust to the deeper darkness in the cluttered room.
My ears found the movement first; a secret scuffling, as of really big mice, came from the storage area behind the pharmacist’s counter. I crab-crawled across the front of the room, then slipped up and around the counter.
I could now see a tall figure standing at the head of a row of shelves filled with drugs of every description. A bluish flame glowed. By its light, he was reading something that hung from the shelf—a clipboard. Papers shuffled. He sighed.
He moved quickly then, down the row of shelving into even deeper darkness. I waited a beat, then scuttled forward to the head of the row of shelves.
The light flared again. He was kneeling at the far end of the row, exploring something on the back wall. The blue flicker revealed a cross-hatch pattern. Metal clattered on metal. He was trying to break into the lockup where I suspected they kept the really potent stuff.
I glanced around, looking for some source of real light. On the counter next to the deceased cash register was an oil lamp. I scurried, stretched and fetched, then fumbled the lighter out of my pocket.
The rattling was fainter and more purposeful suddenly. Whoever this was, he seemed to know how to handle locks. I moved with all speed back to the shelves.
He’d doused the light, but even in the dark I could tell the thief was making progress. The rattling stopped and the door of the cage creaked open.
I crept up the aisle, holding the lantern and lighter at the ready. Inside the lockup, he was fumbling in the drawers.
36 / Marc Scott Zicree & Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
“Damn it, damn it, damn it!” The voice was a croak.
I lit the lantern and thrust it through the door of the lockup. “Hey!” I said. (Original, huh?)
He froze, hands full of bottles and packets, something like pain in his dark eyes.
“Goldman? What the hell are you doing?”
THREE
GOLDIE
There are some moments in life you can only survive. Moments in which you find yourself desperate for oblivion, or a mantra—anything that will just get you through it.
I remember one night, coming up out of the subway tunnels near Central Park, running into a pack of young punks out hunting “moles,” which, since I had a subterranean address at the time, included me. My life narrowed to a circle of dark figures with gleaming eyes, the ominous creak of leather, lips forming crude and entirely rhetorical questions, biting cold.
It was the last week of November, and Manhattan was lit up for the holidays—Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa— take your pick. When the punks instructed me to take off my clothes, I suspected I’d get my fifteen minutes of fame by being the poor, naked, homeless schmuck found frozen to death on the first day of the holiday season. I’d make the headline news, and probably a handful of Sunday sermons as well.
I couldn’t run; I couldn’t fight; there was nothing I could do with the moment but just get through it. So, I thought of the Chrysler Building pointing up through the snow; a million frozen falling stars drifting down to blanket Fifth Avenue and catch in the bare branches of its hundreds of trees—and I spontaneously broke into “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.”
The punks found a naked mole-guy singing holiday jingles amusing, which derailed some of their misdirected spite and got me through the moment until some friends from the underground came to bail me out.
My failed attempt on the pharmacy’s goodies leads to one of these moments. There is no threat of physical violence here in Dr. Darryl Nelson’s cozy first-floor office, but there is a circle of eyes—anguished, disappointed, disapproving. And there are questions, none of them rhetorical.
I discover again (as if I could have forgotten) that an enemy’s hatred is less painful than a friend’s disappointment. There is no mantra for this occasion; there is more at stake here than my dignity.
Cal’s lips have stopped moving and though I haven’t really heard him, I know the nature of the question. Doc, perched on the corner of a large antique desk,
looks pensive. He is as reluctant to pass judgment as Colleen is to withhold it. I barely graze her face. It would be hard to read even if I cared to try. Where she sits, behind Doc in the window casement, she is half in shadow. Her condemnation, I can feel.
I pan back to Cal, whose eyes beg me to come up with a reasonable explanation for what I was doing in the pharmacy tonight. Moment of truth. Question is, what variety of truth? Half-truth? The whole truth and nothing but? Are they ready for that? Am I?
I open my mouth and a half-truth slips out. “I couldn’t sleep.”
I wait for somebody to feed me a straight line: So, you were just looking for something to help you sleep?
No one feeds me anything. I wonder if Cal the Earnest knows how hard it is to lie to him, or even withhold from him. I start again, flashing for just an instant on the cold sweat I woke up in about an hour ago. “I was having a hell of a time sleeping. I don’t know, um, maybe all the—the stuff that happened today just, um …” That isn’t it. Not really. I scratch my head. Time for a haircut. “I thought maybe some sleeping pills…”
Doc stirs. “You could have come to me, Goldie. I would have gotten you something, gladly. So would Dr. Nelson, I imagine.”
No accusation. He exposes me with simple compassion. “C’mon, Goldman,” says Colleen. “You were after something a lot more potent than sleeping pills.”
Cal raises a hand and she subsides, looking mutinous. He says, “If there’s a problem, Goldie, let us help you.”
He makes it so easy. Flashback to my parent’s living room and three different pairs of eyes. If someone—any-one—had uttered those words back then… But they didn’t, and the rest, as they say, is history.
You’re just like Grampa Ziolinsky, Dad said. An impossible drama queen.
I take a deep breath. Focus. “Tegretol,” I say, “I wanted Tegretol.”
Cal’s face is a total blank, then he glances at Doc, as if for a translation. In the miserable silence, I can hear flames fluttering in their lanterns. Doc raises himself slowly from the desk.