Shadows of the Midnight Sun

by Graham Brown

  He stood and, without thinking about it much, grabbed the .38 and stuffed it in his pocket. He made his way to the front door, flung it open, and charged down the stairs.

  He stopped on the ground floor. The light in the stairwell flickered, illuminating a red bicycle chained to a post. Leroy stared at the bike. His son’s bike.

  What did it matter anymore?

  He lived in a crack neighborhood, in a crummy apartment with no electricity. He had eight dollars and a few dimes in his pocket. He had six shots in the .38. And he no longer had a son.

  What did anything matter, unless he did something about it?

  He turned from the bike and began to walk. Slowly, aimlessly, he wandered out onto the streets. Bare feet to the grime, dirt, and cement.

  At first, he didn’t know where he was going, but he kept walking. Soon enough, he began to realize he was headed in the right direction.

  The time had come, he decided. There was nothing left for him in this place, so the time had come for revenge.

  He pushed on. Two hours later, he’d covered five miles. His feet were bloody and blistered, his sweat-drenched shirt gone, thrown away in disgust. His eyes were as red as fire.

  He found the house he was looking for—a dirty little box of a house with plywood where the front window should have been and a warped roof sinking under its own weight.

  He pushed through the gate in the rusty chain-link fence and paused by a dead tree in the front lawn. A hundred yards away, a traffic light stood watch in the night. The street was quiet.

  Leroy pulled out the .38, sliding his finger up next to the trigger. He took a breath and started forward.

  “Time to pay,” he whispered. “Time to pay for what you done to my boy.”

  He crossed the postage stamp of a lawn and reached the porch. He cocked the hammer on the gun, aimed at the lock, and pulled the trigger.

  The gun sounded off, shattering the calm. Without waiting, Leroy slammed his two hundred–pound body against the door, splintering the wood frame and forcing the door wide open.

  He rushed into the house with the gun ready. A woman’s voice shouted. A dog barked continuously in the small kitchen. Leroy charged past a dilapidated couch toward a short hallway with two doors. He kicked in the right-hand door in time to see a teenager in skivvies grabbing a baseball bat.

  He raised the gun, and the kid froze.

  “You killed my son,” Leroy yelled. “You goddamned worthless piece of crap, you killed my boy.”

  The teenager backed into a thin wall of old wood paneling.

  Leroy lunged forward, slapped the bat out of the kid’s arms, and grabbed the kid by the neck. He threw the skinny punk down onto the ratty mattress of a bed and stuck the gun in his face.

  A woman stuck her head around the door.

  “Get back!” Leroy shouted.

  She ducked around the corner. “Oh God! Oh God!” she shrieked.

  “I’ll blow his head off. You come in here, and I’ll blow his goddamned head right off.”

  The woman screamed, and the dog continued to bark, and the kid yelled to his mom.

  “Get out of here, Momma. Just get out!”

  The woman disappeared and shouted from somewhere in the hall. “Please don’t shoot him. Oh God, please don’t kill him!”

  “Close the door!” Leroy shouted.

  “Please!”

  “Close the goddamned door!” As Leroy yelled, he felt his heart pounding, spit flying from his lips.

  The woman shut the door, and Leroy turned back to the kid. He was thin, a lot skinnier than he’d been the last time Leroy saw him in a police lineup. The same day, a couple of cops told him there wasn’t enough evidence to make an arrest.

  “Not enough evidence, my ass,” he said. “Enough for me!”

  The kid was shaking, the scraggly, pathetic attempt at a mustache quivering on his upper lip. The room smelled of pot and cigarettes and stale beer. The mattress looked like it had been pulled out of a dumpster.

  “Why?” Leroy shouted, jamming the gun back in punk kid’s face. “Why?”

  He didn’t really expect an answer. He expected the kid to cuss at him, to tell him to go to hell, or to promise that his gang would pay the old man back. But the kid shook uncontrollably, staring at the gun and then Leroy’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m so sorry…I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “I didn’t know him. They just told me to do it. He pissed someone off, and I had to do it.”

  Leroy’s world spun. “You didn’t even know who he was? You killed my son, and you didn’t even know who he was?”

  “They told me to,” the kid whimpered. “I had to.”

  Leroy cocked the hammer again and pressed the barrel of the gun against the kid’s forehead. The kid’s mother cried in the hall, the dog wouldn’t shut the hell up, and the teenager who’d killed his son shook and sobbed and closed his eyes.

  Leroy clenched his jaw. His own body was shaking. He felt like he was going to throw up. He pressed the gun harder and harder, pressed it down so hard that the kid’s head was forced back into the ratty pillow.

  “Goddamn you!” he shouted.

  He tried. Leroy tried with all his might to pull the trigger, but he couldn’t do it.

  He pushed himself off the boy and stumbled back, slamming into the wall. He tilted his head back and looked up at the ceiling, tears streaming down his face. He couldn’t do it.

  He couldn’t do it.

  His chest heaved and fell. His heart pounded so hard he thought it would explode. His head throbbed like he was having a stroke.

  He pushed off the wall. The kid hadn’t moved. He just lay there, shaking. Leroy turned and busted out the door into the hall. He raced past the sobbing woman, who’d slid down the wall and sat on the floor. He raced past the barking dog and out the front door.

  And from there, he ran. Bloody feet and all, he ran as fast as he could.

  He had no idea where he was going, but he couldn’t run fast enough. Sobbing and gasping for air, he raced down the block. He threw the gun away and ran toward a fence and climbed it. He caught his foot at the top and fell forward. He tumbled down a sloped concrete bank and landed in a trickle of water and filth that led to the LA River.

  About four feet wide and ten inches deep, the water ran in a narrow canal, half-filled with abandoned shopping carts, trash, and sand.

  The sound of police sirens spurred him on, and Leroy managed to get up and get moving again. He ran along the river. Ran until his arms and legs flopped and flapped with little coordination. He stumbled again when his knee gave out, splashing down in the water and skinning his elbows on the concrete beneath it.

  This time he stayed down.

  He lay still, half his body in the water. It was probably contaminated, but as least it felt cold. It washed over him and numbed his body, washing off the sweat. He could hear it trickling past, even over the sound of trucks and cars and the police sirens in the distance that he felt certain were meant for him.

  He cried quietly as his mind assaulted him for his failure. He’d watched that scrawny kid murder his own son in front of the apartment. He’d moved too slowly to do anything about it then, and now he couldn’t even find a way to even the score. He couldn’t kill him. He wanted to, he’d tried to, but he couldn’t do it.

  As he looked into the skinny kid’s eyes, the kid seemed different than the killer Leroy had imagined him to be. He seemed lost and mistreated, wasting away and afraid. The kid even wanted forgiveness for what he’d done.

  And for some reason, as he lay in the water, Leroy wanted the kid to be forgiven, wanted the child’s mind to be healed. It didn’t make sense to him, but that was what Leroy wanted more than anything else at that moment.

  A stinging feeling in his hand got Leroy’s attention. He looked at where the window had sliced it. The blood was trickling again, and the wound burned with a cold fire from the wat
er soaking into it.

  And then he saw something else, something that puzzled him. Across the palm of his hand, spreading out from the cut, his skin was changing color. It was turning a strange gray color, with a swirling pattern that spread like fire charring paper from the other side.

  He pulled his hand from the river. Suddenly, his senses returned. Who knew what the hell was in that water?

  He shook off his hand, rubbed it against his pant leg, and began to climb out of the stream.

  He looked up the concrete embankment. A ten-foot crawl was all he needed. But his head was spinning, and he found he could hardly move.

  He tried to set his feet and scramble up the slope, but he slipped and fell back into the trickle of the river. His head hit the concrete, and his world became blurry. Even the noise of the cars and sirens in the distance faded, until all he heard was the trickle of the water running beside him.

  Unable to move, Leroy rested there, slowly passing out and unaware that the strange pattern on his skin had begun traveling up his arm and across the rest of his body.

  CHAPTER 20

  LEROY ATHERTON felt something covering his mouth, smothering him. He brought his hands up to move it, but someone grabbed them and forced them back down. His eyelids cracked open.

  Through blurred vision, he saw a face above him—a woman in her thirties. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked Hispanic, with dark eyes. She wore a blue shirt. Her lips were moving, but Leroy could hear no sound coming from them, like he was watching TV with the mute button on.

  He reached for the thing on his face once again, but she pulled his hand back and slammed it down this time.

  He began to hear something, a wailing noise, up and down, up and down. It felt like they were swaying side to side, like when the earthquake hit a few years back. It suddenly dawned on Leroy that he was in an ambulance with an oxygen mask strapped to his face. The woman above him was a paramedic.

  “Blood pressure one ninety over one fifty-five,” she said loudly.

  She wasn’t talking to him, but to someone else in the cramped space.

  “He’s burning up,” she added. “Temp, one-oh-five. Heart rate, one seventy.”

  “One seventy?” another voice said.

  She glanced at a monitor. “And rising.”

  Leroy had no idea what those numbers meant, but by the sound of her voice, it had to be bad.

  Maybe he was dying. Maybe it would be better that way.

  She looked over him again, blocking the lights in the roof behind her. He could see her better now. She was young and pretty, not a stitch of makeup on.

  “We’re almost there,” she said, “just hang on a little longer.”

  The ambulance pulled into the bay at Pacific Hospital in Long Beach. It screeched to a halt as someone doused the siren. The back doors opened quickly, and Leroy was carried out on his stretcher and run into the emergency room.

  His head lolled to the side, and he saw others in the waiting room as they passed. Some looked ill and gray, others held bloodstained towels to various wounds, all of them looked miserable.

  He must have been worse, he thought, since they rolled him right past and into a trauma room.

  The pretty EMT talked the whole way, rattling off terms and statistics to a nurse. And then she was gone.

  A doctor appeared over him. He looked Indian to Leroy.

  “What do we have here, people?”

  “Found in a canal that leads to the LA River,” the nurse said. “Possible overdose.”

  Another nurse was attaching leads to his chest.

  “What’s he on?”

  Leroy shook his head. He didn’t take any of that crap, but the doctor wasn’t looking at him.

  Something began to beep rapidly, loud and alarming.

  “This can’t this be right,” the nurse said.

  “What does it say?”

  “Heart rate is over two hundred.”

  “Charge the paddles.”

  “But he’s not in A-fib,” the nurse replied.

  The doctor seemed stunned. He looked at the monitor. “Tachycardia.”

  “Rhythm is normal.”

  “We have to slow it down,” the doctor said. “Digitalis, ten cc’s. Stand by with Tambocor, and get him on a drip of potassium chloride.”

  The doctor turned his attention to Leroy and pulled the oxygen mask away. “What drugs have you taken? I can’t help you if I don’t know what I’m dealing with.”

  “I don’t do drugs.”

  “It’s not the time to lie,” the doctor said. “I’m not the cops.”

  The doctor looked scared. And suddenly, Leroy was scared. And some new alarm began to go off in the background.

  The nurse stretched out his arm, looking for a vein, and then froze. “What the hell is this?” she said.

  Leroy glanced over and saw that strange pattern again. It now covered his entire arm. It looked like spirals of light and dark, with swirls that radiated outward. In places, the pattern seemed to be moving and pulsating under the skin.

  “You gotta help me,” Leroy said. He reached for the doctor with his free hand.

  “What drugs are you—”

  Suddenly, his whole body arched in a seizure. Leroy couldn’t see anymore. He only heard movement and felt pain.

  A pair of hands pressed down on him, holding his arm in place while another set of hands began to wrap restraints around it.

  “What’s happening to his skin?” the nurse shouted.

  “Just get that needle in him.”

  “But there’s a pattern here,” the nurse said. “It’s changing.”

  “For God sakes, Nurse!”

  Another seizure racked Leroy’s body. He arched his back and felt his jaw clamp tight and his legs begin to shake. The nurse tried to restrain him, but Leroy threw her and the doctor aside, pushing them away from the bed. They crashed to the floor, along with a tray of scalpels and other medical supplies.

  Leroy pulled his arm loose from the restraint, rolled off the bed, and ripped out the IV.

  A pair of security guards appeared, and Leroy dashed the other way, crashing through the curtain and colliding with another gurney that was being wheeled down the hall. He hit the rolling stretcher so hard it tipped over. Leroy came down on top of it and on top of the young boy who’d been lying on it.

  “I’m sorry,” Leroy managed. “I’m so—”

  He looked at the kid lying on the ground in the fetal position—a young black kid, no older than his son. His head had been shaved for surgery, an old scar on a different part of his scalp showing that this wasn’t the first. The kid’s eyes were closed, and dark circles that looked like bruises lay beneath them. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

  “Get away from him,” one of the guards shouted.

  Leroy didn’t hear it. He kept staring at the child, thinking no one so young should die. He reached out for the kid, wanting to touch him, though he didn’t know why. A snap of energy surged through his fingers like an electrical shock. A flutter of muscle spasms ran through the kid, the tiniest of shudders, unseen by anyone but Leroy.

  Leroy looked on, stunned and dazed, until the security guards yanked him backward and slammed him onto the ground. This time they held him down and a needle went harshly into his leg. It shot liquid fire into his thigh, and Leroy went dizzy almost instantly. In seconds, the air seemed thick and hazy, and moments later, the world was gone.

  CHAPTER 21

  CHRISTIAN SLIPPED through the darkened halls at Columbia University long after everyone else had gone home. He approached Ida’s office and noticed the door was ajar. A thin beam of light spilled out of the office and across the marble floor of the hall.

  He pushed open the door and stepped inside. The place had been ransacked. He knew immediately by whom.

  Ida sat in the middle of the mess, picking through broken keepsakes. Some type of clear acrylic award had been separated from its base. She flung it toward a tras
h can. It hit the wall with thud and dropped into the basket.

  “Two points,” she said, then suddenly realized he was there. She focused on him, and a look of anger resolved into a mild scowl. “You sure do know how to sneak around.”

  “Comes with the territory,” he said.

  “I suppose it does,” she said, sifting through some more debris. “I was kind of hoping I’d never see you again.”

  “I came to warn you,” he said.

  “You’re a little late,” she said, looking around. “Can you believe this?”

  He nodded. “The Ignis Purgata,” he said. “You rattled their chain about Cologne. I showed up. They probably put two and two together.”

  She heaved a broken piece of an ancient pot toward the waste basket. “I really needed to clean this place up anyway. They just stopped me from procrastinating anymore.”

  She should have been in tears, but she was cracking jokes as she sorted through a lifetime of memories, now destroyed.

  “Did you find what you were looking for over there?”

  Christian crouched down and began to help with the cleanup. After a long silence, he spoke.

  “Do you believe in angels?”

  “Not really,” she said. “But then again, my perspective on some things has begun to change since I met you. Is that what you discovered?”

  “I found the truth about myself,” he said, “that Drakos is the one from whom this curse began. I also heard of a prophecy. It spoke of a chance at redemption for the Fallen. The arrival of an angel of forgiveness. The caretaker said there were documents pertaining to this redemption in the Vatican.”

  Her eyes searched him. “You believe him?”

  “I do.”

  Ida sighed. “I suppose a visit to the Vatican is out of the question?”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “The cathedral almost killed me.”

  “I was talking about me,” she said.

  He looked at her. “Oh, right. Well, I’m thinking you might not be on the guest list, either.”

  He lifted a bookcase back into position and found the picture of Ida and her mother beneath it. The glass was broken. He pulled out the last few pieces and handed her the photo and frame.