Out of the Shadows

by Timothy Boyd

  “You must leave before you lead the demons here!”

  “Sir, we weren’t followed. I promise we’ll be gone the minute—.”

  “The demons are everywhere. They’re walking the streets. They’re in the walls. They’re all around us!”

  Mary stirred awake from the sudden voice, loud and unconcerned that there had been a child sleeping on a pew.

  He continued, pointing an accusatory finger at me. “This has happened because of people like you! You are sinners and blasphemers! And God has allowed the demons to come here and punish you! Leave now before you lead them here!”

  Deb coughed, a small bit of blood escaping her lips. “Bear, let’s just go and—.”

  The reverend’s eyes widened at the sight of her injured arm. “Has she been bitten?!”

  I clutched my gun a little tighter now, holding up my other hand in an attempt to subdue his rising emotions. “Ok, calm down. We’re leaving.”

  “She’s been bitten!”

  Mary began to cry, and Deb put an arm around her for comfort. “Quit scarin’ the girl!”

  “Demon! She has been possessed! You’ve brought the demons into my church! They must be exorcised!” The reverend pulled a handgun from the back of his waistband, pointing it directly at Deb.

  Both hands on my gun now, I aimed squarely at him. “Sir, take it easy!”

  “The demons must be expelled!”

  “I am a police officer!” I lied. “Put down your weapon!”

  Mary screamed, and Deb yelled, “Bear, just do it now! Shoot me!”

  “Demon!”

  “I said drop it!”

  “Shoot me, Bear!”

  “Demon!”

  “Shoot me!”

  “Drop the damn gun, now!”

  Barren

  VII

  Milliseconds ticked past ever so slowly, my eyes darting from the hysterical reverend to the sobbing girl to the pleading woman. My senses were hyperaware of the passage of time. Time, which prevents all things from taking place at once. It felt as though hours passed in mere seconds, my brain overloading with well-thought arguments for each action I could take.

  If I listened to Deb, if I were to be the one to end her life, then little Mary would be horrified and not likely to voluntarily follow me to safety. If I ended the immediate threat by shooting the reverend, then I would be killing a frightened but innocent man. And being afraid was no crime.

  From Mama to the reverend, my gun’s aim danced forcefully, a passionate tango of indecision waiting to hold on its finishing pose. Deb, reverend, Deb, reverend, Deb…

  I raised the gun into the air and fired a shot into the wooden rafters above, hoping to command the attention of everyone in the room for an attempt at reasoning with all involved. The blast echoed in the cavernous sanctuary, briefly deafening the group, my eardrums ringing loudly in my head.

  For a few seconds, all was calm and quiet. The lingering echo of my shot vanished into the night when I noticed the reverend’s eyes grow huge with shock. He dropped his gun and slowly shuffled backward. “I… I… oh, dear… I didn’t mean to…” he stammered. He pointed a finger at me, tripping backward over his own feet, trying desperately to flee. “Your shot… it scared me, and my gun… Oh, no… no, no, no…”

  “Bear!” Mama desperately cried out, commanding my attention as I turned to make sure she was all right.

  It has been said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. The muses were surely watching over us now, boisterously laughing at the turn of events as I saw the abundance of blood draining from the gunshot wound in Mary’s chest, the front of her pink hoodie now stained crimson.

  I froze, images of my daughter Annie sweeping through my brain in great gusts, a storm of emotion taking over my body. My newfound strength was unraveling now, the knotted rope that encompassed my constitution fraying in defeat. I wanted to drown myself in whiskey, numb the pain and hide within a cloud of stench and self-pity.

  “Bear!” Mama yelled again with urgency, snapping me back to the crisis at-hand.

  “What did you do?!” I demanded of the reverend, gripping my gun so tightly the skin on my knuckles threatened to split open.

  My eyes surely burned with fiery rage, because the reverend’s terror was absolute. “It wasn’t my fault!” he tried to rationalize, still stumbling backward yet unable to look away from the tragedy. “Your shot scared me! It was you that did this!”

  If fury were a tangible object, he would have seen it pouring from my nostrils and blasting from my ears.

  “Yes!” he continued, pleased with his scapegoat. “This is your fault! Not mine! God is punishing you for bringing the demons to this sacred place!”

  “Bear!” Mama’s shrill scream diffused my anger and turned me toward the dying girl. “Help me!” she pleaded, begging me to leave the tragic man to his own devices.

  I ran to Deb and the girl, lifting the child into my arms and delicately placing her on the marbled tile in the center aisle, hurriedly placing my gray hoodie behind her head for comfort. I quickly unzipped her sweatshirt and pulled it back, revealing the gruesome, bloody hole. When I joined the Force, we had been required to take an eight-hour-long CPR and First Aid class, but that was years ago, and this wound was far beyond my recollected abilities.

  “Mary, can you hear me?” I asked the girl, trying desperately to come up with a plan.

  Her eyes rolled toward me, and her lips silently moved. It was as if she were imploring for me to help her, to save her. Don’t let me die like you did your little girl, her eyes said to me, even though she couldn’t possibly know of my tortured past.

  “This isn’t my fault!” the reverend continued behind me, approaching the pulpit, still stammering and trying to rationalize this great tragedy as the act of a vengeful deity. “God has spoken, and He will—.”

  “You shut the hell up!” Mama blazed forth with fury, a newfound energy rising within her sick and dying body.

  I heard a loud clattering as the reverend called out in surprise, and I turned just in time to see him trip backward over the rack of prayer candles, knocking their stand over. He landed on top of them, and his clothes quickly caught fire, engulfing his body in the scorching flames of Hell. His tortured screeches of panicked pain echoed through the peaceful church, sending chills up the length of my spine.

  After a few short moments, his howling ceased, and his body lay across the steps in front of the pulpit, a smoldering mass of flesh and bone, still crackling with small embers. With nothing more to be done for the misguided man of faith, I turned my attention back to Mary, thinking to myself: You’re right, Reverend. God has spoken.

  “Mama, can you walk?”

  She looked at me with her usual southern disgust. “Course I can walk! I ain’t dead yet!”

  “I need you to go find a first aid kit. And maybe some water and rubbing alcohol.”

  As Deb limped painfully away, headed to the doors at either side behind the pulpit, she muttered, “You best save this girl, Bear.”

  Hands shaking, I took a deep breath, focusing my recollections on the training I received years ago. A, B, C, D, E, I thought. Open the airway, check for breathing, assist with circulation, check for disabilities, expose the victim’s wounds. I had already opened her sweatshirt to expose the wound, and she was bleeding a little too much to risk raising her legs to force circulation.

  “Mary, can you move your feet for me?” I asked her delicately.

  Slowly, she forced them to twitch back and forth.

  “That’s great!” I encouraged her. Good – the bullet did no spinal damage. I carefully reached my hand under her back, trying to assess other damage. I discovered a tiny hole, which was probably the best news so far: a low-velocity bullet that cleanly went through her body.

  I placed my ear to her mouth. Her breathing was quick, but it didn’t sound stilted with gasps or wheezes. I exhaled deeply, my eyes flooding with tears of relief. There was almost
zero chance that her lungs, aorta, trachea, and vertebrae had all been missed by the bullet, and yet…

  My eyes instinctively raised and rested upon the painting of Jesus Christ at the front of the church, and I remembered Deb’s quiet prayer as she had lit a candle a few minutes ago. Thank you, I whispered quietly to Him, using the back of my forearm to dry the corners of my eyes.

  “I found this small thing,” came Deb’s voice from behind me, carrying a small blue box with a red plus sign on it. She had a bottle of water in her other hand.

  “Her chest wall is torn, but the bullet seems to have made a clean tear through the body, missing all her vital organs. She might have a bruised lung or broken rib.”

  “So, she’s gonna be fine?” Deb asked with hope.

  I shook my head as I explained, “She needs real medical attention. If she has a bruised lung, she could die in a few hours.” I looked back down at the fragile girl focusing intently on me. “And she’s losing a lot of blood,” I frowned.

  I grabbed the kit from Deb as she collapsed onto a pew to rest, her skin looking gray and clammy. As I opened the bottle of water, I leaned into Mary and said, “Don’t you worry. I’m going to make sure you get help.” I smiled in an attempt to calm her, but I knew she was in a lot of pain.

  After tearing the girl’s shirt open, I used a bit of water to wash some of the blood away from her wound. The growing pool seeping from under her was a cause for huge concern, but I wasn’t a paramedic; I was doing the best I could. I handed the bottle of water to Deb and said, “Try to get her to drink.”

  I immediately dug into the kit’s supplies, finding the antiseptics, the bandages, the surgical tape, the gauze pads – everything I could think of to save the child. Deb painfully sat on the floor by Mary’s head, softly caressing her forehead and talking soothingly, attempting to get her to take a drink of water.

  As I dressed the bleeding chest wound, I heard the child quietly cry to Deb, “It hurts, Mama.”

  I focused on my task, trying to ignore the heart-wrenching exchange.

  “I know it does, Sweetie,” said Deb, pushing hair from the girl’s sweaty face. “I got a lot of pain right now too, so I think we should jus’ be strong for each other ‘til it all passes. How does that sound?”

  A minute had gone by without words when Mary finally broke the silence with, “Am I going to die?”

  I worked diligently to clean the wound through the girl’s cries of pain as Deb responded firmly. “No, ya ain’t. Bear here’s gonna fix ya up as best he can, and then he’s gonna find some help for ya.”

  Mary’s bottom lip quivered as she asked, “What about you, Mama? Are you going to die?”

  Deb glanced back at me, sorrow in her eyes now, and then her gaze returned to the child. “Well… ya know what, Honey?” she began, nodding slowly. “I’m pretty sure that I’ll be dyin’ real soon.”

  “No!” the girl cried.

  “It’s ok,” Deb grabbed the girl’s hand and squeezed, as much for her own comfort as for Mary’s. “I’ve had a very long and happy life, and there ain’t a thing I regret. And that’s what’s important.”

  The conversation was clenching my throat and digging a pit within the depths of my stomach. Examining the bandaged chest wound, I said, “We need to sit her up so I can bandage her back too.”

  As we carefully did so, the girl cringed in pain and then admitted, “I’m really sleepy.”

  “No, Mary,” I said. “You can’t sleep right now. You have to stay awake for me.”

  “But why?” she wondered groggily.

  “We have to get you out of here first, and then you can rest.”

  Deb poured more water into Mary’s mouth as I said quietly, “If we get going, we can probably be downtown in about two hours. Do you think you can keep up with me?”

  She looked me in the eyes and bluntly said, “I won’t be the reason that girl don’t get saved. So, if I slow ya down, ya gotta leave me behind.”

  I knew there was no sense in arguing with the stubborn woman, so I agreed.

  “But jus’ so ya know, we ain’t got two hours,” she added.

  As I placed my gun into the waistline of my pants, covered Mary’s bare torso with my own hoodie, and lifted her into my arms, I asked, “What do you mean?”

  Deb glanced down at her silver watch and replied, “It’s a little before five. We got maybe an hour and a half ‘fore sunrise and that chopper says sayonara to Franklin.”

  This news smashed into my gut like a wrecking ball. I had seriously misjudged the passage of time this evening, thinking it couldn’t possibly be any later than three in the morning. When I had been in top physical shape, I could run an eight-minute mile, which would get me from here to downtown in a little over thirty minutes. But that was years ago, and I hadn’t been carrying a seventy-pound injured girl and trailing a dying woman back then.

  “Ok,” I took a breath, calming myself before I could fall into hysterics. “Let’s get moving, and try not to stop. We can check a few cars along the way – see if any have keys in them.”

  We walked quickly down the center aisle and out the heavy front doors, leaving the once-safe sanctuary behind, a pool of blood on the tile and a scorched corpse at the pulpit.

  * * *

  The black sky had already shifted to dark blue, pushing slowly but surely toward gray, the period of time directly before the sun peeked the rim of its head over the horizon, and when our ticket to safety would vanish forever.

  Exhaustion consumed us as we pushed as hard as we dared down the barren streets, stopping only as often as we needed. Mary was slipping in and out of consciousness in my arms, her life slowly draining from the two wounds in her body. After shattering a car window with the butt of my gun, Deb searched inside for anything useful but came up with nothing.

  We came across a car with its keys still in the ignition, but the gas tank was empty, presumably from its owner abandoning it with the engine running as the ensuing chaos of the invasion had begun.

  “Dammit!” Deb said, frustrated, pounding a weak fist against the steering wheel. She looked up at me from the driver’s seat, a rim of wetness forming on her bottom eyelids. “Bear, I don’t think I can go much further.”

  She looked bad. Her skin was pale and ashen, and she’d consumed most of the water that had been meant for Mary, just to keep her going. Her pallid skin dulled the crystalline nature of her eyes, and she coughed frequently in a horribly raspy way. Truth be told, I’d been going much slower than I was able in order to keep pace with Deb.

  I didn’t want to leave her behind.

  In my mind, I thought maybe there was a cure. Maybe if we made it to the helicopter, they would be able to save her. My eyes floated up to a hanging neon sign on the storefront before us. It wasn’t turned on, but under it was an intricate, silky spider web connected to the side of the brick building. In the center of the creation, a small spider worked busily, spinning a few tiny bugs into cocoons.

  As I stared at this creature on its web, I knew that it wasn’t a threat to us. This arachnid was too… normal. I was mesmerized by its exhaustive behavior, fighting for its own survival, creating such a lavishly patterned place to catch its food. It was quite beautiful, but after everything that had happened, I knew I would never be able to consider a spider in the same way again.

  I was reminded of my own struggle to stay alive and how exhausted I was. But just like that spider, I had so much to accomplish before the sun rose, when I would be able to crawl back into my dark hole and rest. I stared down the long street and saw the city’s skyline on the horizon.

  We were so close.

  “Let’s go, Deb.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes. “Bear, I’m tired.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Ya know what I mean!”

  “And I’m not letting you give up! Get out of the car, and let’s move!”

  Mary stirred awake and mumbled, “Mama? What’s going on?”

&nb
sp; The weary woman lowered her head in defeat and exited the vehicle. “Nothin’, Sweetie. Have some water.” Deb helped her drink a small amount before she passed out again.

  “We’re almost there, Deb,” I said with quiet urgency.

  “I can’t go anymore.”

  “You can.”

  “Bear—.”

  “You have to!” I blurted, fighting to hold back a deluge of emotion.

  She stared at me in frustrated silence.

  I continued, “Every single morning, I’d get off work and come into Gravediggers. And every single morning, I’d think about drinking myself under that counter and never getting up. But it was always you that helped me see that things weren’t as bad as I was making them out to be. You’re the one that sent me home to sleep off the day. You’re the one that listened to my pathetic problems and never seemed disinterested.”

  Deb pushed her hair out of her face, waiting to see where I was going with my ramblings.

  “Mama, you are the one who saved me.”

  My words clearly struck a chord with her, because her eyes moistened, and she pointed at little Mary in my arms, saying, “It’s time to pay it forward.”

  I nodded. “I plan to. But why do I have to choose which of you to save? Why can’t it be both?” I could see her eyes filling with tears of exhausted frustration, but I was unwilling to give up. “Yesterday morning, you told me not to quit. You told me I didn’t have to go through this alone.”

  A single tear rolled down her cheek as her face softened. Placing a delicate hand on my face, she smiled up at me. “Yeah, I did.” She turned and limped, leading the way toward downtown.

  We slogged down the street, exhausted and completely tapped but knowing we could not stop. We continued, the city looming ever closer in the distance. I encouraged Deb to carry on, to endure with me despite her tiredness.

  As we trekked, I felt Mary’s life slowly slipping away in my arms. I clung to her tightly, convinced that as long as I held on, she would not be able to fly from this world. On and on we went, ever closer, growing more exhausted, parched, and starving, our heavy limbs dragging across the pavement.