Empathy

by John Richmond

  He could just leave. He could walk the other way and out into the night instead of toward their voices. He could escape and live. He could escape and never see the woman he loved again. Charlie smiled in the dark and felt deep, easy warmth spread through his body from the belly out. He could no more leave Emily Burton than he could walk out on a trauma case in the ER. There was no question. He had to walk forward. In the next minute or so, Charlie Dunbar would die, but he would die very well.

  * * *

  EMILY SAW CHARLIE too late to stop him. All her concentration was on Fine and it was so dark in the warehouse. Charlie just seemed to appear at the corner of her eye, coming in directly between her and Fine. In the instant she registered him she understood his purpose. Emily didn’t even have time to say, “Babe, no.”

  * * *

  DRUM’S BAD EYES caught the flicker of the nurse a full second after Emily. Once when Drum was a boy, he’d stood across the street from a house fire in the old neighborhood. He’d been a good hundred feet away, but when the wind shifted, the heat painted his skin and he understood the true ferocity of the blaze. Drum had that same sensation of incredible power coming to bear as Emily Burton turned her will on him. He felt the ground fall away from his heels and lashed out with all he had.

  * * *

  DRUM WAS FASTER. He caught them both.

  * * *

  EMILY WENT DOWN on one knee as a ball of fire erupted behind her breast. Charlie clamped a claw over his own chest and fell backward as if he’d been struck. His head gave a wet crack as he hit the concrete. Fine lifted only an inch and dropped back to the ground.

  Emily gave a strangled sob. It was over.

  Fine walked toward her, holding his hands out like a wizard, his left palpitating the air toward Charlie and the right—stiff as stone—over Emily. Even through the gray veil that was descending over her mind she had time to think He’s focusing himself that way, so he can hold us at the same time.

  “It’s simple, yes? Move and your Charlie dies. Do as I say. Open yourself to me so I can feel all the others and he lives.”

  “If…if…,” she panted. God, it hurt. “If you let him go, I’ll do whatever you want.” She winced and groaned, disgusted at her own surrender.

  “You’re already going to do that, Emily. Thanks to your nursey-nurse and his ill-conceived heroism I now hold all the cards again.” He bent at the waist, his eyes enormous. “If I so much as suspect that you’re attempting to use your telekinesis, I’ll pop his heart like a water balloon.”

  “Yes. Just. God. Stop squeezing.” She whined through wet sinuses. Fine had felt her using her power before she could focus enough to do anything more than pick him up an inch off the ground. If she tried to use it now… No matter. She’d come to this city expecting to eat a bullet. Instead she’d found a real friend in an old man, and a young man to love who loved her. She’d found the beginnings of herself. Emily smiled weakly. She’d been lucky to get his much.

  Fine eased up, but she could feel his mental fingers like eels in her chest, slipping and sliming around her core. “Stand up, Miss Burton.”

  Emily got to her feet, head bowed low. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her hoodie like a little kid who’s been caught stealing and must now face the music from an angry father.

  Drummond Fine sniffed the air. She was finally afraid. The anticipation of their impending union sweated off her. He could hardly blame her. He was about to drown them both in the terror of millions. He didn’t expect either of them to survive the mental onslaught. If their bodies lived, their minds would surely be burned away. For him, it was the final cleansing act, his Rapture. Drum wondered if poor Mr. Dunbar would be killed. Drum’s proverbial trigger finger might slip. He thought it likely.

  Fine probed once more to be certain Emily wasn’t gathering her telekinetic will and nodded. “Good, we’re ready. I think we should join hands, don’t you?”

  Emily stared at his feet; ugly loafers. “Whatever.”

  “Give me your hands.”

  Emily pulled her hands out of her jacket. Her left was empty. Her right held her father’s service pistol.

  Drum bore down with all his mental force on her heart.

  Emily pulled the trigger twice. She hadn’t meant to but each bullet found one of the Phobia Killer’s strange eyes; lead for silver. Her pulse slammed to a halt and the dark descended like a hood. Emily Burton, daughter of Andrew, lover of Charles, was dead before her body even hit the floor.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 28

  “WAKE UP SLEEPYHEAD.”

  Emily rolled over, inhaling the shampoo scent of her own hair on the pillow. She turned her face away from the light. “Unnhm,” she said.

  The soft squeak of springs and gravity pulled her toward the person who now sat on the side of the bed. “C’mon, kiddo, wake up.”

  Emily rolled onto her back and sighed. “It’s too early.” But the light filtering through her eyelids told her it was, in fact, well into the day. She pushed her legs out straight and stretched, her arms out to her sides, yawning with a kitten screech. Her right hand pushed into the hip of whoever had yanked her out of her lovely slumber. Emily Burton opened her eyes and smiled at a woman in her mid-thirties. She had high cheekbones and quick, green eyes. Her dark hair was scraped back into a utilitarian ponytail that reached halfway down her back. Emily knew that when that hair was spread out it would reveal a thousand molten streaks of copper, gold, and bronze.

  “Hi, mommy.” Emily said. “What time is it?”

  Lisa Burton winked at her daughter. “Now o’clock.”

  Emily sat up, the sheet falling from the blue bra top with the underwires that always stuck her, except they weren’t. Without looking she knew her panties were the red ones. She recognized her room from their house in Janesville, but not as she had left it. The lace-trim duvet and My Little Pony poster over the child-sized desk; it was her old room; her childhood room. She squinted at the window, clean excitement rising. “It’s snowing.”

  Her mother looked out the window. “Yep, lookit those puppy-dog flakes coming down. Daddy’s going to want some help with the driveway.”

  “Ugh.” She hated shoveling snow. Loved playing in it. Hated shoveling it.

  “Yeah, ugh,” Lisa said, “I know, but some things have just got to get done.”

  Emily pulled her eyes away from the window and met her mother’s, held them. “You’re dead, mommy. You’ve been dead almost forever. It’s good to see you though.” Emily reached out and wrapped her arms around her mother. She laid her head on Lisa’s shoulder and her tears flowed warm and easy. “I missed you like crazy after the sonuvabitch patient killed you.”

  Lisa smelled her daughter’s hair and kissed her where the soft spot had hardened so many years ago. “I missed you, too, kiddo. But,” she held Emily back, looked at her, “time’s open here.”

  “Open?”

  “Yes.”

  “Daddy’s here?”

  “Yes,” Lisa’s eyes flashed. “Downstairs making pancakes and wrapping Christmas and birthday presents.”

  Emily laughed. “Awesome. Do I get both?”

  “You get everything, everywhere, everywhen.”

  “Charlie? Where’s Charlie.”

  A voice from the door: “He’s here…in a way.”

  Emily looked over, “Samuels!” then back at her mother. “So, I’m dead, right?” She beamed. “This is the shit!”

  Emily swung her legs over the side of the bed and was about to feel self-conscious for her lack of clothing when she realized she was actually wearing her jeans, blocky Doc Martens and an old tee shirt (The Smiths). With the tiniest sense of vertigo (or perhaps she just thought she should have felt some vertigo), Emily also realized that she was now sitting at the kitchen table. Samuels was sitting on the kitchen counter wearing his doorman uniform and kicking his legs like a kid instead of a seventy plus-year-old man. Her mother and Andy Burton sat across from her, “Hey, Dadd
y!” Emily cried.

  “Hi, Scoot.”

  “Did you see Mom’s here?”

  Andy Burton made a show of slowly poking a finger into his wife’s upper arm.

  “Ouch!” she said and lightly punched him the shoulder.

  “Yep,” he said. “She’s right here.”

  Emily looked at Samuels. “So you guys already know each other, right?”

  They all answered with easy grins, eyes that loved.

  “Hey,” she said to Samuels, “is your wife, here?” Emily was about to apologize that she’d forgotten her name, but then, “Greta, right?”

  Samuels smiled. “Oh, she’s around. You can meet her later if you like, Miss Emily. I’m certain you’d get a kick out of one another.”

  “Excellent. Oh, hey, where’s Charlie?”

  Hands gently covered her eyes from behind. They were warm and smelled faintly of disinfectant. “Hey, gorgeous.”

  Emily felt the tears come to her eyes, joy and joy and joy. It was all love. She knew it would be. Just knew it. We all do.

  She grabbed his hands and turned around in the circle of his arms. Now they were entwined in his bed, slick and sweet after love making. The window was open and a chorus of doppelering sirens and car horns wafted in on the back of a Manhattan breeze. It cooled her brow and sweaty hair. The quiet, sure ticking of his old alarm clock measured out the un-seconds. She licked the salt from Charlie’s bald dome and kissed the corner of his mouth. “Hi, babe,” she said. “Is dead cool or what?”

  Charlie smiled and sighed the breath of a deeply contented man, but something was wrong. Emily felt—an absence? She looked into his eyes. They were the same faded, kind denim she knew but there was something, something… She squinted. “Hold still for a sec’.” Emily planted her palms on his shoulders and stared deep into his pupils. An image swam up from those wells. She saw another Charlie in a dark place, sitting on a dirty concrete floor. He cradled a body in his lap, his strong arms supporting the head and under the knees. His mouth was bent in an almost clownish expression of grief. She couldn’t hear him.

  Emily blinked and looked at the Charlie in her now, in her there.

  “You can be done,” he permitted, stroking a lock of hair away from her eyes. “Jobs over. You got him, Em. You were Annie Oakley back there.”

  Emily was quiet. She could feel endless time and space spin out beneath her, within her. She was time and space. She was. The clock ticked, tocked, ticked. The clock kept an even rhythm, a beat to measure her time, her life.

  Her pulse.

  * * *

  DEATH CAGED CHARLIE. In front of him—the monster, Drummond Fine. He looked like he could have been napping. His glasses, though shattered, still sat on his face. His eyes no longer reflected anything but the emptiness behind them. His arms were splayed at his sides. His left hand lay palm down, right palm up, sweat evaporating. Neither shook. The back of his head was gone. Behind him the impossible remains of Emily’s friend, Mr. Samuels, cooled. Charlie had been unconscious that had happened, but it looked like the old man had been torn neatly in half. Harlan was somewhere behind him in the dark, his blood pooling, bacteria breaking him down one microscopic bite at a time. The process of decomposition puts off a fair amount of energy in the form of heat. A pathologist acquaintance once told Charlie that the industry term was “cooking.” Strange then that Emily already felt so cold.

  Charlie held her in his lap as if she was a child who had fallen asleep on the couch and he was carrying her off to bed. Her head lay against his chest, her hair hiding her face. Though Charlie was silent, tears rolled and rolled from his eyes and wet her hair. The scent of shampoo and cordite rose. The gun—where had she gotten that gun?—lay a few feet away. He’d been barely alive and sure it was over when she’d pulled it out and shot the Fine in the face. His hold on Charlie’s heart had vanished as he directed his deadly mind into Emily.

  Charlie hugged her tighter, rocking her slowly, slowly. He began to breathe a soft, rhythm with each motion. “Hmm, hmm, hmm.” The little noises grew louder, fed on the rain of his tears and began to echo in the warehouse. “Huh, huh, huh.”

  She was so cold.

  The echos melted together and he screamed.

  He folded into a heap over her as his cry died away, utterly spent. His body shook and his arms burned with the weight of her empty frame. Still, he couldn’t let go. Her poor, poor heart. Charlie could see it in his mind’s eye, smashed under Fine’s psychic heel. Tears squeezed from his clamped eyes as he imagined her heart inflating, reversing the damage. God, he wanted that so much. He could see it so clearly, could practically feel it happening. Charlie pushed his face into the cleft between her breasts and pressed his lips to her. I love you so much.

  Tump.

  Charlie pulled his face away; sat up a little. Were her cheeks pink? The arc-sodium lights from outside. He slammed his ear against her chest. Again, the picture of her heart, so clear in his mind, was there waiting. He got an image of dark red blood flowing through, cleaning away the stillness. Now, the vessels that fed the heart muscle itself filled in, branching crimson and cornflower.

  TUMP-tump.

  “Ohgodohgodohgod.” He carefully spread Emily out on the floor, holding the back of her head in his palm to ease it against the concrete. He got a flash of her brain in molecular perfection Harlan’s MRI could never have achieved. A lesion glowed in her left hemisphere, smack in the area responsible for fine motor control. Charlie blinked. Her hand tremor, he was looking right at it. Well, sort of looking, but this was more than imagination. It actually began to seep a tiny bit which could only mean… Charlie lay his head on Emily’s chest.

  TUMP-tump. TUMP-tump. TUMP-tump.

  His head filled with TV snow and he had to force himself to slow his breathing before he fainted. Charlie put his hand on Emily’s forehead. Warm! Holyshitholyshitholyshit! Warm! He closed his eyes and the lesion swam into focus again. As he “watched” the little tear began to zip shut like the seal on a sandwich baggy. An instant later and even the line of scar tissue melted away.

  Emily drew a sharp breath.

  Charlie moved back a couple of feet and watched. There was no mistake, her chest was rising and falling and her color was coming back. Her fingers flexed at her side. Charlie slapped his hands on top of his head as if he were keeping it from blowing off. He lunged forward and pressed his first and second finger into her inner wrist. Her pulse was as steady as the tick-tock of his old alarm clock.

  He made himself count to five before saying anything, fearful that he would shriek every word. After a moment he asked, “Emily? Can you hear me, honey?” He broke and sobbed the last word.

  Emily Burton, daughter of Andrew and Lisa, turned toward her lover’s voice and opened her eyes. “Why is my head wet?” Her vision cleared. Charlie’s face was glowing with tears. She smiled and touched his cheek. “Oh.”

  * * *

  CHARLIE AND EMILY stood over Harlan’s remains. In the dark of the warehouse’s belly, he was little more than a pile of rags. Except. Except for the single open eye that stared up into the rafters. Charlie squatted down on his haunches and reached out. For a moment he just stayed that way, surveying the ruin of his friend. Emily said nothing, the emotion coming off Charlie flared like a neutron star. She was barely in control herself after all this trauma; she couldn’t afford to tap into him right now. Charlie flattened his palm against the side of Harlan’s head, ignoring the clotting blood. His voice was quiet and rusty.

  “I met Harlan in the supply closet at Metropolitan Hospital.” He looked over his shoulder at Emily. “Anytime I go to a new shop, I try to stake out some corner where I can cop a nap when I catch a nightshift, you know?”

  “Yeah, sure.” She wanted to touch him. Didn’t dare.

  “Harlan was an intern,” he began stroking what remained of Harlan’s hair. “He’d been using that closet for a while already. I actually found him on the nod with a morphine spike hanging out of hi
s forearm. I guess he’d been out for a while because when he came to, he was surprisingly with it.” Charlie laughed. “I just about jumped out of my fucking skin when this guy who looks like he’s practically overdosed suddenly jumped up and was like ‘Oh, shit, you can’t rat me out, okay?’”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “Man, I was close, I’ll tell you. But something in his stupid face, behind those big old coke-bottle guh—guh…” A sob racked through him. He wiped his nose and shook it off after a little while. “Something about those big fuckin’ goggles just got me. I trusted him. Can you believe that?”

  Emily smiled and nodded her head a little too fast. Tears spilled over her cheeks. Even with her power held in check, her heart was shredding for him.

  Charlie said, “Like the last thing you’re ever supposed to do is trust a junkie, right? But there was something in there.” He shook his head slowly back and forth and continued to pet Harlan as if he were a sleeping child. “He promised me he would get on top of it. He said that if I didn’t rat him out, he’d get on top of it and start doing good for people. That’s what he used to call it, ‘doing good’.” Charlie squeezed his eyes shut and balled his hand, now red, into a fist. “God, Em, do you know how strong willed he was to get over the junk like that? To do it on his own—on the strength of a fucking promise?” His breath shook out. “God, they must have had to hurt him really bad to get him tell about everything about us.”

  Emily nodded. That much was obvious even in the dark. Fine and his golem, Sharon Dimke, had torn poor Harlan to pieces. She thought back to the day he met Charlie’s friend and how she’d used her new ability to yank those great big glasses off his face. Harlan had caught them and checked the frames for wires like he’d been worried they had him on Candid Camera or Punked.