Inheritance

by Joe McKinney

  Everything he knew told him to turn around and run, and the impulse was so strong that he did turn around. But he didn’t run. He couldn’t have, even if his fear had gotten the better of him, for there were more of the dead men coming up behind them. They were cut off completely.

  He and Rachel were back to back. He felt her grab his wrist, and for a moment he was certain she was as scared as he was. But then she relaxed her grip. Her hand moved down to his fingers and squeezed.

  “Look,” she said.

  He turned, and what he saw, despite all his fear, made him stare in wonder. A woman had stepped out of the shadows behind Paul. She was small and thin, almost boney, and yet she radiated light. It filled her eyes and her skin was glowing.

  She walked up behind Paul and stopped.

  “Martin,” she said.

  ***

  Paul couldn’t turn around, but he could feel the hand on his shoulder. He could sense his mother’s presence as clearly as he could his father’s. Light was pouring into the circular chamber, swirling around him, warming him, comforting him.

  “Martin, I won’t let you have him.”

  It was her voice. It was getting stronger, just as the light was getting stronger.

  Paul’s father turned around. He still held the goat in one hand, the knife in the other.

  “Get away from here,” he hissed.

  “I won’t let you have him,” she said again. And then she stepped around Paul’s right side and into his field of view. She was glowing. Golden gleaming light scattered from her hair.

  Martin Henninger threw the goat to one side. It hit the ground heavily on one side and lay there, too stunned to move. He held the knife up, and the light from Carol Henninger glinted off it so brightly the blade seemed to turn molten in his hand. His father turned away from the light and the hand that had held the knife was up now in front of his eyes. Martin Henninger’s face was twisted in rage, and he was still hissing at his wife, Get out of here. Get out of here. But he couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t even hold his head up now.

  She crossed the remaining distance between them and folded him up in her arms. He struggled, but it did him no good. The more he fought, the brighter the rays of light between them became. It filled everything now, and from somewhere in the swirling brilliance, Paul could hear his father shrieking in rage and pain.

  The dead men had been slowly closing in on them, but they too were stopped in their tracks. One of the men had stopped right in front of Paul. A stray ray of light hit the dead man in the face and burned him away to ash within seconds.

  There was an explosion of light and wind that hit Paul full on, filling up everything in his world at once. Yet there was no heat, and the light didn’t hurt his eyes. There was only white, and the sense that, for a moment, something powerful beyond measure had passed through him and was pulling away, drifting off into nothingness.

  When the light faded, and he was able to see again, he stared out across the barren floor of the chamber and saw ashes circling in the air. Rachel was there, standing next to Anderson, and she was coming towards him, closer, closer, her hands on his face.

  Chapter 26

  After the explosion, Anderson drifted in and out. His son John put an arm around him and asked him if he was all right, could he walk. “Sure,” he said, and stumbled on his damaged right leg and fell to one knee. John picked him up again and led him away from the circular chamber. He was stronger than Anderson remembered. “Are those sirens I hear?” he said, and turned and smiled at his son. John was wearing a dusty, sweat-stained patrolman’s utility uniform. His silver badge glittered in the starlight. His hair was cut to a regulation one and a half inches. Anderson was about to ask the boy when he’d cut it, how he’d found the time after he died, but he just closed his eyes instead. He had a hazy sense of things happening around him. They were climbing down stairs and over catwalks and through debris. When his vision cleared again John was handing him off to Bobby Cantrell, his face still bearing that frozen, surprised expression it had had on the autopsy table.

  You’re gonna be okay, Keith. Just take my hand. Come on now.

  “Thanks, Bobby,” he said.

  “Huh?” Rachel said. She was down on the catwalk below him, looking up at him, one hand extended to take his.

  Anderson blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, both Bobby and John were gone.

  “Are you okay, Keith?” Rachel asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “I was talking to an old friend.”

  “Right,” she said. “Okay, we’re gonna get you an ambulance.”

  They made their way down to ground level. Rachel carried his right side, the hurt side, but Paul stood at his left and carried his weight. The world grew hazy again as they stepped onto the asphalt drive that led down to where their car was parked. There were bright lights down there, lots of them. Out of the flickering blaze Anderson saw a stream of dead men and women coming his way. He saw every murder victim, every suicide, every traffic fatality he had ever investigated, and they were coming up the hill towards him. Some were speaking his name.

  They seemed so urgent, so concerned.

  ***

  Anderson’s eyelids fluttered open. Bobby Cantrell was looking down at him, then at the blood pressure cuff around his arm. Anderson was on his back, strapped down. The bed jostled under him, and for a moment he felt like he was on a boat. Bobby was swaying, too, but he seemed used to the movement.

  “Why are we moving, Bobby?”

  “Excuse me?” It was an EMS technician talking to him.

  “Where’s Bobby?”

  “You lost a lot of blood there, partner. Just hang tight, okay? We’re taking you to University Hospital. Is there somebody you want us to call?”

  “Where’s Bobby?” Anderson said again.

  “Sorry, partner, I don’t know who that is. How about your wife? You want me to call your wife for you?”

  Anderson let his head sink back into the gurney. He stared up at the ceiling and thought, Ambulance. Holy hell, I’m in an ambulance.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Call my wife.”

  ***

  The next time he awoke, he was in a hospital bed. Margie was standing in the doorway, talking to John. They looked good together, mother and son. They turned and looked at him and he smiled.

  “How are you feeling, Keith?”

  “I’m good,” he said to Margie. “I’m good.” He reached over and took John’s hand and squeezed it. He smiled at the boy. “It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to smile at you. It’s nice.”

  John said something that Keith didn’t catch, though that didn’t seem important. All that mattered was that the boy was here. He had missed him so.

  “Keith?”

  Anderson’s vision cleared, and John turned old and fat. Chuck Levy was standing where he had just been.

  “I’m here, Chuck.”

  “Goddamn it, Keith. Why didn’t you call me? Damn it. That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do.”

  Anderson let himself slip under again. It was so much nicer when the boy was talking.

  ***

  Two weeks later, Anderson, red-eyed and bleary from the pain killers he was taking every two hours or so, sat across the desk from Deputy Chief Allen, waiting for him to finish reading his report on the Morgan Rollins incident. That’s what they had started calling it around Headquarters, the Morgan Rollins incident, though the final report Allen was reading now covered far more than that. It included Paul’s in-custody death investigation originating from the train yard chase and the murders at the morgue and subsequent disappearance of the bodies and the final confrontation in which he was injured and Rachel Henninger was rescued from her kidnappers. Anderson had never written fiction in his life. And he took a special pride in the fact that he had never once lied, either directly or by omission, in a police report during his long career, though there had been plenty of opportunities, and even a few under the table, politica
lly-motivated requests for him to do so. But the report Allen was reading now was a lie. From the cover sheet to the recommendation for case closure page, the entire thing was a fiction, a bold-faced lie.

  He wanted to cross his legs but couldn’t. The cut on his leg hadn’t gone over to infection, though that had been close. But it still hurt like a son of a bitch. The ribs, too. Those were still tender, even after two weeks, and he felt a momentary wave of annoyance at not being able to heal as quickly as he once had.

  Sitting still posed some unexpected problems. He found it was much easier when he sat down to keep the leg out straight and turn onto one side. Doing so made him look like he was slouching—or at best like one of those slapstick fools in the hemorrhoid commercials. But mostly he thought it just made him look lazy, and more than once he found himself gazing down at his body in that pose, the leg stretched out, the rest of him sunk deep into the chair, and thought of John. John had sat that way on the couch on Sunday mornings, his head still buzzing from the partying he’d done the night before. Anderson had been so furious with him back then, his rage never far from the surface. It had been a constant battle. He’d been thinking a lot about the bitterness of those days lately, and torturing himself with regrets.

  He realized he had been staring out the window at nothing in particular, and he forced himself to come back to the present. Allen was still reading, stopping occasionally to go back twenty pages and read something a second or a third time. It all matched up. Anderson had been very careful about that. As far as fiction went, it was tightly plotted. Every lie made sense, every glaring lack of evidence was supported with a reasonable enough explanation.

  And so what if it was a lie, he thought. There was no way he could have put what really happened in a police report. Nobody would believe it. They would think he was insane and that would have ended his career. They’d bring in some other detective and he would ask all sorts of questions that couldn’t possibly be answered, at least not by anybody who knew the truth, and there was no sense in that. Better to let the dead be with the dead.

  “You’re still hurting,” Allen said.

  “Yes.” He’d drifted off again, his mind staring off into nothingness outside the window. Anderson told himself to focus.

  “Well I appreciate you finishing this up so quickly. You gonna take some time off?”

  “I think so,” Anderson said. He thought, And refill my pain meds while I’m at it. “Margie has some family in upstate New York. Might be nice to go someplace cool.”

  “You could visit the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

  Anderson smiled. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  A quiet filled the space between them. Allen was waiting for Anderson to speak, but Anderson just went right on smiling.

  Allen sighed and pushed the report to the edge of the leather blotter on his desk.

  “Three hundred and twenty pages,” he said. “That’s a lot of work in a very short time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Anderson agreed.

  “How’s Jenny Cantrell?”

  “Good. Margie’s been with her a lot. You know that, of course. But I think she’s good. I’ve told Margie about what happened, and she’s talked to Jenny about it.”

  Anderson looked across the desk at Allen, an imposing man dressed in a dark charcoal gray suit, and in that moment he saw in the man’s worn down eyes all the stress and sorrow and exhaustion that he too had been experiencing the past two weeks. It was almost behind them now. All Allen had to do was sign the report and they’d be done with it—the business end of it anyway. The emotional wake of this thing would go on a long time into the distance, and no amount of falsified reports would ever change that.

  “I wish there were more answers than this,” Allen said.

  “I do, too.”

  “The Arson guys...they couldn’t determine what caused the fire?”

  Anderson shifted in his seat and hoped Allen would believe the groan he made was just because of the pain.

  “No sir,” he said, and waited.

  This was the hard part. One of the hard parts, anyway. Anderson had created an Azazel cult and given them the mission of bringing Paul Henninger into the fold to replace his father. The cult was the cornerstone of Anderson’s report, the scapegoat for all the unexplained events he described. But making up a cult meant he had to get rid of it, too. And that was where the fire in the circular chamber came in. They had all perished in the flames, and he and Paul Henninger and his wife Rachel had been lucky enough to escape just moments before the flames went out of control. It was the biggest lie in the whole report, but it beat the truth. If Allen could force himself to swallow this one last improbable detail, they could all move on with their lives.

  Come on, Anderson muttered to himself. Sign the damn thing. Just sign it.

  Allen swiveled his chair towards the window and looked out across the city. Anderson followed his gaze. The west side was shimmering in a whitish haze of dust and smog. It was indistinct and blurred, as if it too had died.

  “We look like fools on national TV. You know that, right?”

  Anderson said nothing.

  “First Child Protective Services gets their faces rubbed in shit with those bigamists, and now it’s our turn. You know I got a call from the president of ABC? They want to do a special on this for Twenty-Twenty.”

  Just sign it already. Please.

  “No thoughts on that, Keith?” Allen said.

  “No sir.”

  Allen nodded thoughtfully. Then he sat up straight and pulled the report in front of him again and turned to the recommendations page. His pen hovered over the bottom right corner, and Anderson realized he had been holding his breath.

  Then he signed.

  Anderson thought the noise the pen made scratching against the paper was the finest sound he’d ever heard.

  ***

  Several days later he was standing in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant down the street from Paul and Rachel’s new apartment. Rachel and Paul were holding hands. He looked at them, at their youth, and thought he was pretty sure the two of them were going to make it. There was a certain resilience to the young, both physically and emotionally. What the two of them had was strong. He could see it in the way she curled her arm around his, in the way he smiled when he looked at her.

  “I hear you haven’t been back to work,” Anderson said.

  “I’m not going back.”

  Anderson nodded at that. The sun was shining down on them brightly. Oily spots on the road turned to pools of molten light, and for a moment, Anderson’s heart quickened.

  He had expected Paul to quit. Things would be too hard on him if he stayed. There were no criminal charges against him, and Anderson’s report had cleared him of any other violations. There had been talk from a few civil rights attorneys on the east side about suing the Department over the death of the young man in the train yard, but even that had died down in the wake of the official findings. Anderson doubted the talk would ever move beyond the threat and posturing stage.

  But even for all that, Paul couldn’t stay. You make your reputation within the Department early on, and it stays with you forever. Paul’s reputation would be set now, and his name would forever be attached to the Morgan Rollins incident.

  “What will you do?” Anderson asked.

  Paul looked at Rachel and smiled.

  “We’re going back to Comal County,” she said. “They’re hiring English teachers at Smithson Valley High School. I had my first interview on Monday and I got a call back this morning. If my next interview goes as well...”

  “That’s great,” Anderson said. “How about you Paul? What are you gonna do?”

  “I have a friend in the Comal County Public Works Office. He says he can get me a job.”

  “Excellent.”

  A police car pulled up and a sergeant and a lieutenant got out. Anderson shook hands with both of them as they walked by, two old gray heads like him.

&
nbsp; “And, what about...?” He trailed off, not really knowing how to bring up the powers Paul had started to manifest before their encounter at the iron works. Anderson was pretty sure they hadn’t gone away. In fact, he was pretty sure they were stronger than ever. He didn’t know why that was, but he could feel it. Paul gave off a kind of mental heat. You could feel it when you looked him in the eyes.

  Paul just smiled, but not smugly. Not at all. It was wan smile, one that spoke of lessons learned the hard way.

  Anderson nodded again.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. It was good knowing you, Paul. You opened up my eyes.”

  They shook hands. He gave Rachel an awkward hug and she kissed his cheek.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Anderson turned away and walked off across the parking lot, and as he walked he whistled and thought of John and how lovely it was going to be when he saw him again.

  Chapter 27

  It was a Tuesday in late August, about two weeks after their breakfast meeting with Anderson, and Paul had been waiting around their new apartment for hours, hoping to hear from Rachel. From the kitchen window, he watched her truck pull into their parking space. He kept watching her as she walked up the stairs. She was carrying a manila folder full of papers and what looked like three or four textbooks. It was six o’clock now.

  He turned to the table. He’d bought them a special meal to celebrate. In the center of the small table was a chicken he’d split in half and pan seared and garnished with fresh cilantro. It was steaming on a platter now, surrounded by two different colors of rice, brightly colored mounds of red skinned potatoes and corn and beans. Next to that was a loaf of warm, crusty bread and hot tortillas wrapped in a red and white checkered towel. Bowls of peppers and salsa and guacamole were strategically placed around a galvanized bucket of bottled beer on ice. He had sensed her getting close to home, so it wasn’t hard to have dinner ready right as she walked into the apartment, but his powers weren’t developed enough to know if she had good news or not. She hadn’t called, and he wasn’t sure what that meant.