by Hadena James
“Hello Malachi,” Patterson looked at my friend before turning to me. “Hello granddaughter.” A ripple went through the crowd. Flashbulbs instantly began going off. I was going to be on the front page tomorrow.
“Patterson,” Malachi said. “Put your hands behind your back.”
“Of course,” Patterson moved, putting his hands behind his back. We had caught The Butcher, but only because he had wanted to get caught. I pursed my lips together trying not to show my anger. There was no way I could put a bullet in Patterson Clachan, there were witnesses. Besides, despite his status as a serial killer, he was still my grandfather. If I needed any proof, it was there for the world to see. I looked like my father, Donnelly Clachan, and he, in turn, looked like his father, Patterson Clachan.
“Marshal Cain?” Someone spoke my name very quietly behind me. I turned to look at them. A Marshal, covered in blood, was speaking to me. His lips moved, his voice could be heard, but his words seemed to be in a foreign language.
“Are you okay, Marshal Cain?” Someone else asked me.
“Fine,” I shook the fog that threatened to overtake me.
“You’re shaking,” the first Marshal whispered. “Let’s get you out of this room.”
“I’m fine,” I looked down. Blood was pooling on the floor. “We need to get the reporters out of here. The last thing we want is my aunt’s bleeding corpse on the front page.”
“Ok, but only if you agree to sit down,” the second Marshal said to me.
I took a step. My knee buckled. It collided with the marble floor, sending a shockwave of pain up into my hip. Confusion set in and with it, the darkness. My mind slowly replayed the events. Gertrude pinching me as I handed her off to the court house Marshals. My hand went to the fleshy area of my side, just above the waistline of my pants. Wet, warm liquid was soaking into my shirt. The bitch hadn’t pinched me, she’d stabbed me. I’d been so focused on Patterson, I hadn’t realized it.
“Aislinn!” Patterson shouted my name. “Get off me, get off me! What’s wrong with her?” His voice carried over the noise of feet being ushered away. I stood up.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I looked at him.
“You’re bleeding,” Patterson told me.
“Just a nick,” I told him, feeling myself get angrier. Malachi walked over. He leaned in close to me.
“It’s more than a nick. Let me see,” Malachi tried to pry up my shirt.
“You are not a doctor,” I snipped at him, while my fingers touched the wound. There was something hard in it and small. I slowed my breathing, trying to slow my heart rate.
“Don’t be difficult,” Malachi snipped back.
“You just want to see what’s under my shirt,” I told him, feeling myself grow unsteady again.
“You are not all right,” Malachi grabbed hold of me. “Let one of the other Marshals look.”
“Fine,” I yanked my shirt up.
“Oh shit,” Malachi said, suddenly pressing something over the wound. “Medic, we need a medic, now.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Honestly?” Malachi frowned.
“I have been stabbed before,” I reminded him.
“With an ink pen tube?” Malachi asked.
“No, that’s new.” I admitted.
“You’re actually spewing out blood.” Malachi put more pressure on the side. “I don’t know if she hit an artery or a vital organ, but I can’t believe how much you’re bleeding.”
“Figures,” I sighed. “I never make it through a case without getting injured. Never.”
“Get off me!” Patterson shouted again. A collective grunt followed it and Patterson was suddenly at my side, hands grabbed at him.
“Leave him for the moment, maybe he can help.” Malachi looked at Patterson. “Well, any suggestions?”
“I should have killed her outside.” Patterson sighed. His head fell.
Someone grabbed hold of his cuffs and this time, he let them. For the first time, he looked close to his age. His face had fallen, lines creased it. I realized it was concern and defeat on his face. He was convinced I was going to die.
“I’m not going to die,” I snapped at him. “Just follow their orders. I still owe you for shooting Nyleena.”
Patterson smiled at me. Malachi did as well. Neither of their elevators went all the way to the top.
“Where are the medics?” The first Marshal to notice there was something wrong with me shouted.
Like Moses parting the Red Sea, a gurney with two burly looking paramedics appeared. I wondered if they were used to dealing with psychopaths and not injured Marshals. It wouldn’t surprise me.
The paramedics helped me onto the gurney. One of them began applying bandages. Malachi stood over me, looking down at my face, concern flickering in his eyes. I frowned at him.
“You realize this capture was as anticlimactic as the serial killer in Nevada.” I told him.
“What?” Malachi asked.
“The artist that was killing people with mercury. He accidentally killed himself. It was a very unsatisfying end. Now, after nearly fifty years, The Butcher just walks into a court house and turns himself in.”
“Well, he did kill your aunt.” Malachi said.
“She deserved it,” I closed my eyes. “An ink pen tube of all things. Where did she get it? You should figure out which Marshal lost an ink pen and tell Gabriel to deal with it. I’d tell you to do it, but you’d end up killing them.”
“Ok, I’ll see you at the hospital.”
“Hey, if I have to have surgery, put me in Nyleena’s room after recovery.”
Twenty-Eight
The ink pen tube was plastic. The end had been chipped and sharpened. It had taken time to create, this ruled out the possibility that my now deceased great-aunt had taken it off a Marshal. It also raised questions about how she’d managed to get it into the transport vehicle.
I wasn’t really surprised that she had tried to kill me with it. She’d never liked me, but more than that, people didn’t like being dangled as serial killer bait. She’d known Patterson would kill her. Taking me with her was a last act of defiance. I couldn’t really blame her for that. If I had been in her shoes, I probably would have tried to kill me too.
An audiobook played on Xavier’s iPod. The words cast into the room through special speakers that he had also loaned me. At least they had put me in Nyleena’s room. We could be recovery buddies.
The tube had hit my kidney. After learning this, I had demanded a shower. I’d had to settle for a sponge bath. All the warm, wet liquid hadn’t been blood and the thought of urine leaking from my side was gross. I was amazed I hadn’t smelled it.
But then, I hadn’t been thinking about smells. I had been concentrating on people’s faces. This was a difficult task for me. There was a vague memory of the scent, but I had thought it was coming off my great-aunt. Being used as bait could easily have made her a little leaky in the pipework’s department. Plus, she had been old. Old people occasionally just leaked. It was one of the problems with getting old.
Besides, urine was one of those human smells that you get used to, like menstrual blood. I could always tell when a woman standing near me was menstruating and the smell was slightly different than regular blood. There were other smells you learned to ignore just because they were common, human smells. Like a sweet, tangy scent on someone’s breathe when they have a sinus infection or the smell of decay when they have a bad tooth.
Most people didn’t know or understand that I smoked to help control the olfactory onslaught that I dealt with every day. Smoking masked some of it, kept me from being overwhelmed by the sensory information. I could still tell if someone smoked, was wearing a scented deodorant or had drank a cup of coffee recently.
My kidney wasn’t in danger, at least that’s what they said. They stitched the hole closed, in both the organ and the flesh. It hurt, but it was a dull, aching pain that affected my back more than my side. A c
atheter ran out from under the blankets and attached to the bed. In the three hours since I had awoken from surgery, they’d already had to turn down the IV. I was always well hydrated. The IV just made me retain more fluid and my hands looked pudgier than normal.
So pudgy in fact, that I’d had to give up on exploring my new toy. Malachi, in an attempt to be nice, had decided to load up some new books on my Kindle. Somehow, he had dropped it in a puddle of water. I was still fuzzy on the details. However, he’d immediately gone out and replaced it, not with a Kindle, but with a tablet.
The tablet was a little bigger than the Kindle and it had more reading apps. The surgery had taken about an hour and I’d spent another two hours in recovery before getting to my room. It was during these hours that Malachi had ruined my Kindle, bought the replacement, and loaded it with reading apps. Unfortunately, with the pudgy fingers, I was having trouble typing in any of my passwords to access my book collection.
Which brought me back to what I was doing. They had given me the ink pen tube. It had been cleaned thoroughly and it wasn’t needed for evidence. They’d found the missing bits in Gertrude’s jail cell. If I wanted to keep it, I could. There was a morbid fascination with keeping it. I’d never been given the opportunity to keep a weapon that had been used in an attempt to kill me.
Lucas would have plenty to say about my keeping it. However, I couldn’t bring myself to pitch it. Part of me found it hard to believe that this little piece of plastic had almost brought me down. It was like Batman finding out that his suit didn’t protect against Tasers.
There was a second container as well. This one was a small round dish with a lid on it, a specimen jar. Inside, nearly invisible through the clear plastic walls, were tiny plastic splinters. Pieces of the tube that broke off as it entered my skin and kidney. Those, I were not going to keep.
“Have I been sucking on salt cubes? My mouth is so dry,” Nyleena spoke softly from the second bed.
“Forced oxygen will do that to you,” I said. “Oh shit, you’re awake!” I exclaimed and began frantically pressing my call button.
“Marshal, what do you need now?” A nurse, who looked very tired of me, came into the room. I pointed at Nyleena.
“Oh,” she hopped into action. Several people began to fill the room. All of them were wearing either white coats or nurses uniforms. Someone set a clipboard down on my bed. Normally, I would have pitched a fit about this obvious disregard for me, but I let it slide. Nyleena was awake. The world could breathe a collective sigh for a few minutes as I stopped being my usual self.
Our room stayed full and busy for almost an hour. Tests were being done. The situation was explained. The longer they talked, the more tired Nyleena looked.
“Out, harbingers of gloom, let her rest a while and wrap her head around the situation.” I eventually yelled. “It is difficult to come out of a coma.” I spoke from experience. It was strange coming out of a coma. There was more than just lost time to contend with. Even as an emotionally-challenged person, I’d had a flood of emotions when I came out of mine. Plus, Nyleena had a hole in her face. It was covered, but it was still a hole. Even with stitches, I was always acutely aware of holes in my body.
“Thanks,” Nyleena said. “Patterson put you here?”
“No, Patterson killed Gertrude, while she was in custody and then quietly surrendered. It was very unsatisfying. Gertrude did this to me. She stabbed me with the tube of a plastic ink pen. It lodged in my kidney and I didn’t notice the leakage until after we had Patterson in custody and Gertrude was dead.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Only to order him to the ground.” I told her. “Another day perhaps. I may decide to visit him while he’s in The Fortress, but I honestly do not know what to say to him.”
“Me either.”
“You should shoot him in the face and ask him how it feels.” I told her.
“I’m not really mad at him for it. I know Nina asked him too.” Nyleena sighed. “I mean, she asked him to kill her, shooting me wasn’t really the plan.”
“How would you know that?” I asked.
“She told me, on the way to the restaurant. I didn’t expect him to do it right that moment, but,” Nyleena adjusted her bed. “I had the weirdest dreams about Ranger and the demon, Crowley. They aren’t even from the same books.”
“You always did have a thing for bad boys.” I grinned at her. “By the way, Patterson killed one of your ex-boyfriends, the Jack-Ass, I cannot actually remember his name at the moment.”
“Ah,” Nyleena closed her eyes.
“Still tired?”
“My face hurts.”
“Go back to sleep, it will hurt less when you sleep. I will turn on another audiobook.”
“I think I’ve slept enough for a while.”
“Well, you do not have to talk.”
“How’d he kill Gertrude?”
“He took a really long hunting knife and shoved it through her chin, up into her skull. Then he yanked it out.”
“Nina told me we’re sisters, biologically speaking.”
“That’s what our DNA says. My parents gave birth to you. It does not change anything. You are still my friend and my cousin. We got a new person in the SCTU, it’s a girl, her name is Fiona.”
“Pretty name.”
“Xavier says I’m going to hate her.”
“That’s ominous.”
“I know,” I told her. “I think I get out tomorrow, but I’ll keep you stocked up in books and things.”
“Thanks,” Nyleena touched the bandage. “How bad is it?”
“I do not know, I have not seen it.” I shrugged and the motion kind of hurt.
We settled into silence after that. Despite her protestations, Nyleena fell back asleep. Her soft snoring drifted to me, reassuring me that she was alive. I put the ink pen tube back in the baggy and stared at the ceiling.
My mind searched for something to think about and decided to think about Patterson. I hadn’t lied to Nyleena, I had no idea what to say to the man. He might have been my grandfather, but aside from a few homicidal urges and the same ringed eyes, we didn’t have much in common.
I pushed the button for the Demerol and was rewarded by the drug surging through my veins. This was why people became addicted to drugs. It stopped the brain from thinking. Mine turned off as it started working on the chemical receptors in my brain. I closed my eyes and let Nyleena’s snores take me off to sleep as well.
Mazes
The test run had been only mildly successful. The strain not nearly potent enough, not contagious enough. This new strain though, showed promise. If history had taught her anything, it was that sometimes, a virus or bacteria suddenly became very contagious and suddenly started wiping out huge populations.
The new strain was antibiotic resistant. She’d stolen the rats years ago from a university lab, keeping the bacteria alive by keeping a fresh supply of rats and mice for the fleas to breed upon. She wasn’t a scientist and could only guess that she had made it resistant to antibiotics by partially treating some of the rats.
At the moment, she had roughly four hundred rats, running around in a giant maze in an out building. Rats were easy to catch, she was an exterminator for the city of Dallas. Which was good, because it took about two weeks for the rats to die. The mice were another story though. She was finding the mice population, while most certainly infected, weren’t showing as many symptoms and took a lot longer to die. This was both helpful and problematic.
The fleas that carried bubonic plague wouldn’t leave their host until the host died. In the rats, this meant a transfer every couple of weeks. In the mice, it took a whole lot longer.
Her plan was simple, infect the rat population of a major city. At least, it sounded simple. She’d have to keep rats in stock that she knew had plague and she didn’t exactly have the equipment to test every rat. She couldn’t mix the rats and mice, the rats tended to kill their smaller cousins.
&n
bsp; In Dallas, she could trap twenty or thirty rats a day and bring them back to the house. She’d put them in the tubes and wait for them to get infected, but unleashing small waves of infected rats didn’t seem like a good dispersal method.
Dropping fleas on people was unrealistic. How would she get the fleas off the rats? These were problems for another day. She was tired. She’d think about it some more in a week or two. Maybe she could expand her tube system. If she did, she could hold more rats. Maybe if she could get two or three thousand rats infected and release all of them at the same time, it would work better.
With that thought in mind, she went to bed. Her pillow was soft. It cradled her head perfectly. All the years of torment and abuse were going to be repaid. That thought soothed her to sleep.
Epilogue
There was an impression of my butt on my couch. It was the first time I had actually noticed it. It glared at me, indicating that I sat in that one spot far too much. I’d owned the couch for a year and it was supposed to be a good couch. The accusation of it was too much. I threw a pillow in the spot and sat at the other end.
The other end wasn’t nearly as comfortable. I shifted several times without much luck. My gaze drifted to the pillow. Screw it, I could always have Trevor buy me a new couch. I took the pillow off and plopped into my usual spot, ignoring the implications.
I’d been home for four days. Nyleena had been released yesterday. My team was due back in about an hour. They’d caught their killer. Mine had quietly surrendered. Well, maybe not quietly surrendered, since he had killed someone in the process, but he’d surrendered without a fight. My face, along with Patterson’s, had been splashed on newspapers for the first two days after the capture.
My front door opened. Heavy footsteps crossed the threshold and entered the living room. Malachi’s long legs appeared and he fell into one of the recliners with the ease that only a cat could exhibit. I would have made it look epileptic, he made it look graceful.