by John A. Daly
A brief temptation to pull over and give the man a tongue-lashing for leaving him on his own entered Andrew’s mind, but he ignored the taunt. He was done. The police would be there soon. They’d sort it all out.
The way Andrew saw it, he had tried to perform a good deed, and his reward was that he had nearly gotten attacked and his car stolen.
“Never again,” he muttered.
Andrew’s headlights lit up the overhanging branches of a long row of Nannyberry trees as he rounded a bend. Just a few months earlier, those branches had been dense with small white flowers. Now, they were completely bare other than with the thin blanket of accumulating snow that lined them.
Through a mesh of steady, large flakes, the Lexus glided up the short, wet drive to the entrance of the long, illuminated sign framed by a decorative concrete wall. It read “Hunter’s Cove.” Andrew had lived in the Greeley, Colorado, subdivision for years.
He slowed the car down to coast between a pair of oversized pine trees on either side of the subdivision entrance and then sped back up. He passed by several large, upper-scale homes with tall, arching facades lurching high above. In summertime, the residents’ wide, well-kept yards were all cast in the same deep and attractive shade of green, their lush landscaping having evolved from an unspoken ongoing competition among homeowners. Concrete fountains, koi ponds, artistically trimmed hedges and shrubs—all were purposefully exuberant in their nature. Under the even sheet of snow, they now all looked the same.
The lengthy arch of Andrew’s garage came into view from behind an eight-foot-tall hedge that divided his property from his neighbor’s lot. With the press of a button, he commanded the steady rise of the garage door. As he waited in the driveway of his home, it suddenly occurred to him that he had never stopped at the store for supplies. He shook his head in frustration; his thoughts had been solidly preoccupied with the scene back at the off-ramp. He’d have to get up a little earlier than planned in the morning and make the stop on his way down to Colorado Springs. He pulled the Lexus inside the garage.
The interior was nearly bare. No tools draped along pegboards and no rakes or shovels hung from prongs. Not even a lawn mower. Andrew always hired out whatever yard and maintenance work that needed to be done around the house. He had never been much of a handyman and had little interest in learning such skills. He was a numbers guy.
When the broad glare of headlights vanished as he turned the knob, he was left alone in the dark. The bulb in the garage-opener above had burned out months earlier and he hadn’t cared enough to replace it. The only assisting light came from a streetlight a couple of doors down and what little glow stemmed from his car interior light as he stepped out of the vehicle. He took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the night, losing himself for a second at the sight of faint flakes falling gently to the earth. Their delicate landing was a display of poetic profoundness.
He felt alone, fighting an adolescent urge to call someone—anyone—and tell them of the strange, harrowing event that had taken place that night. He somberly accepted that there wasn’t a single person left in his life who would even care. It was as if he was one of the flakes falling from grace outside, and upon impact, disappearing into nothingness.
He breathed in the cold air and stood with glazed eyes for a few moments longer before a broad, unexpected gust of wind brought him back to his senses. He turned toward the inside garage door, but as he did, he heard a muffled thump. It was quickly followed by a creaky groan of unsettlement that seemed to emit from his car.
He turned back to the Lexus and listened carefully. All that was heard now was some intermittent ticking from the engine. With his eyes narrowed, he took a breath and was about to unlock the door when he was halted by another noise. This time, it sounded like tapping metal.
He carefully walked to the rear of the car where the faint tapping continued and grew a bit louder. There in the dull light from the streetlamp he noticed the trunk wasn’t completely closed. The gusting wind caused it to bob slightly up and down.
A smirk slowly curled along his face at the thought of his last-ditch attempt back at the off-ramp to convince his deranged pursuer that he was trying to help him and not escape from him.
“Tow rope,” he whispered.
He had popped the trunk with his remote key before things got physical and it had remained unsecured the rest of the trip home. He slid his fingers under the edge of the trunk door and lifted it up in order to give it a good slam back down. He felt the sudden force of a sharp object plunged viciously into him just below his ribcage even before the trunk light exposed the large figure inside.
Andrew’s eyes swiftly swelled and his mouth gaped in shock, but he couldn’t breathe. He dropped the trunk and his hands instinctively went to his gut. He felt warm blood ooze freely between his fingers from the brutal stab. His face felt numb. A second thrust from the trunk sent another jolt through his body. This time he felt the object pierce just under his chest.
He staggered backwards, wobbly legs trembling. Wide-eyed, he watched in horror as a man’s large arm pushed open the trunk from inside. The light exposed a menagerie of tattoos along the arm—most recognizable was one of a large swastika.
The man he’d clubbed at the bypass now climbed out of the trunk. Clasped in his hand was a large switchblade. Blood dripped from it.
Andrew wanted to run, but he couldn’t breathe and his legs weren’t responding. He didn’t remember falling backwards, but he suddenly found himself sprawled out on his back along the frozen driveway. His fluttering eyes gazed up through the surreally peaceful white flakes that fell from the sky to his face. Among those snowflakes, he found himself gazing into the eyes of his tattooed attacker.
“You should have given me a ride, shitberg!” the man grunted out. He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm.
Unable to find his breath, Andrew’s body felt frozen as the man slowly and methodically approached him. To Andrew, he looked eight feet tall. Cloaked in relative darkness, his presence was sinister, almost mythical—a grim soul cast in the mold of an angel of death.
The man flicked his wrist so that his fingers were clasped over the top of the handle instead of under it.
Andrew saw him grip the handle, readying to plunge it down into his chest to finish the job.
Andrew’s lips moved in a silent plea for help, but he heard no sound escape his mouth. He thought of his daughter and all of the things he wished he had told her—the pride he had in her and all that she meant to him, the love that would last beyond the grave.
The evil hovering above him seemed to glare down into the trenches of his very soul, as if recognizing his every thought. Andrew knew that this sadistic man would be the last image he would see before he left this earth.
But as his vision grew blurry and his pulse winded down, he sensed another presence close by. He hoped it was an angel watching over him, ready to guide him to the afterlife. He mouthed a garbled prayer. The presence, however, wasn’t that of a spirit.
A bright flash of blue light and the juiced sound of something electric sizzled nearby and then Andrew’s attacker’s body buckled under a crippling force. He barked out an incoherent sound that was higher in tone than expected from someone his size. He staggered to the side befor
e dropping to a knee. The blue light lit up the driveway a second time and the man’s body contorted into an unnatural pose and then collapsed face first to the cement.
Andrew wasn’t sure what had happened; his mind rushed back to the life draining quickly from his body. His lower lip quivered uncontrollably. He could no longer turn his head at all. His limbs were cold, nearly numb. He could see his left arm rise in the air as if it were reaching for something that wasn’t there.
He realized it wasn’t he who was holding his arm up, but someone else. A man. The man’s hand was wrapped around it, supporting it.
A face came into view over Andrew, hovering just inches above. The night kept it mostly unseen, but Andrew was sure he could read concern and compassion etched across it through the thick lenses of the man’s glasses. The man’s mouth was moving, but all Andrew could hear was a buzzing noise that no one other than the dying could hear.
“Poor bugger,” a voice with an accent spoke.
The comment didn’t come from the man who held Andrew. It came from a shadowy figure that he now noticed standing a few yards away with his hands hugging his hips. There were two men hovering above, not one.
Andrew felt a wild, impulsive urge to grab onto whatever life he could manage to cling to and his fingers went to the face of the man who held him. They ran along his glasses and then found a mustache, a thick one. Only, it wasn’t real. He tore half of it from the man’s face. It dangled in the air, swaying in the wind above the man’s lips.
It was the last thing Andrew Carson saw.
January 24th, 2002
Thursday
Chapter 2
“Were you born or have you ever lived in or received medical attention in any of the following countries since 1977: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Niger, or Nigeria?”
Sean Coleman glared in irritation over the narrow, neatly kept desk at the woman who had asked him the awkward question. She was a large, top-heavy individual in her sixties. Her hair was short and nearly as white as the short-sleeved shirt she wore. Thick, black, wing-tipped glasses rested upon the edge of her round nose and her deadpan eyes suggested that she was in no mood for whatever guff she predicted from the man now silently judging her.
“Jesus. Are you kidding me?” asked Sean. His big body shuffled around uncomfortably in the orange fiberglass chair that would have been too small for even an average-sized adult. “I was just in here two days ago. You asked me these exact same questions then. Do you really think that sometime in the past two days I visited a witch doctor in some half-assed, bamboo hut in Africa?”
The woman’s eyes rose to the ceiling and she folded her thick, flabby arms in front of her chest. His rant wasn’t the first agitated outburst she’d had to contend with in her line of work. She sank back into a heap in her towering metal swivel chair. It let out a painful growl from the movement. Though she was short, her chair let her hover about six inches above Sean.
She replied in a restrained, seemingly rehearsed tone. “Mr. Coleman, it’s our policy. We have to ask the same questions every single time you donate. I don’t like it. You’ve made it clear that you don’t like it. But that’s the policy, and you should know that by now.”
He slowly gave a curt shake of his head, a grunt escaping his lips. He scoffed at what he considered nothing more than a waste of time inside a building he would have rather not been in in the first place. He lowered his gaze to his right hand as he peeled a cotton ball from the tip of his index finger. The inside of it was stained crimson from where his skin had been pricked to draw a blood sample. He’d passed his test for an adequate protein level.
“Fine,” he said abruptly. “Next question.”
“I still need you to answer the last one.”
“No! I’ve never been to any of those places!”
His raised tone stole the glance of a young man in a lab coat who negotiated his way through a tight hallway behind the woman. The man eyed Sean’s appearance, taking note of the large, silver badge that hung proudly on Sean’s gray uniform shirt.
“Hi. How are you?” Sean said loudly with wide, mocking eyes.
The man looked away and continued on by.
The woman behind the desk took a breath, leaned forward in her chair again, adjusted herself, and tapped a single button on the keyboard in front of her. The reflection in her glasses let Sean see a line of green text change on the small computer monitor that fed her questions. He could also see his own face in the reflection. It revealed that he needed a shave.
She proceeded with the questioning. “Have you ever had sex with another man, even once, since 1977?”
Sean’s eyes narrowed and his face twisted into a sneer so sharp that it could have been mistaken for a symptom of physical pain. “Why the hell would you even ask me that? Do I come across as gay to you?”
Her shoulders dropped as if she were a puppet whose strings had just been cut. An exhausted sigh spewed from her, followed by a low mutter of something to herself. She removed her glasses, planted her elbows firmly on her desk, and eclipsed her face with the palms of her hands.
Minutes later, Sean was back in the building’s intensely lit lobby, seated among a motley crew of men and women that ran the spectrum of age, ethnicities, and hygiene practices. His large body was positioned tightly between a short Hispanic woman who was knitting and a thin boy dressed in a raggedy t-shirt and jeans who couldn’t have been older than nineteen. Sean looked like a giant beside them. His six-foot-five-inch frame and broad shoulders towered above the others, forcing both the woman and the boy to tilt their bodies away from him at unnatural angles.
Sean was largely oblivious to the sporadic conversations that carried on around him as he contemplated the significance of the year 1977 from the scripted interview he had just endured. That specific year was used in a number of the questions, which left him to ponder what kind of global epidemic must have went down back then. He filed that mystery away in a mental cabinet of the things he’d one day look up on the World Wide Web—if he ever scraped up enough money to pay for an Internet service.
After selling his blood plasma at the bank for several weeks, he still hadn’t quite gotten used to the stench in the air—a mix of iodine and bleach. The smell emitted from all corners of every room.
He noticed a new donor being processed at the front desk. She was an older Arabic-looking woman with a younger woman, apparently a daughter, who was translating instructions from the receptionist into whatever foreign tongue they spoke. Both women wore burkas that covered their hair and bodies.
Sean felt some tension in the air from a few people in the waiting room. Cautious stares. Whispering. Only a few months had passed since the September 11 attacks, so the sight of a couple of individuals clad in Muslim attire in a public area didn’t go unnoticed. He wasn’t sure if the blank expression the mother’s face wore came from the inability to understand what she was being told or from despondency over a misfortune in life that brought her to where she was now.
He understood such misfortune. Less than a year ago, he would have never envisioned himself sitting in such a place—a purgatory-like holding dock where people were forced to contemplate their financial failings before
being strapped to a bed and drained of a liquid component in their blood for cash. A lot had happened in a year. A sober year, at that.
The money was good, though, as everyone sitting in the lobby knew. Forty dollars for the first donation of the week, fifty for the second. He was often amused that he was labeled a “donor” and that he was there to “donate” something. These were terms that implied he was giving something away for free, purely out of the kindness of his heart. He wasn’t. Still, it was wording that the employees there were clearly trained to use and use often, probably as a way to help the clientele feel more positive about themselves.
No one was setting aside two hours of their life to come there and donate anything. Despite all of the posters decorating the lobby that educated participants on how their plasma was used to save lives, people were there for the money. All of them.
For Sean, the practice had become a lifeline to help his fledgling security business stay afloat. Up until six months ago, he had merely worked as a contracted guard for the company. At that time, his uncle, Zed Hansen, owned it. Hansen, however, had been killed back in July. An unfortunate encounter with an unhinged drug dealer, believed to have also killed two U.S. border security guards years earlier, ended Zed’s life. Much to Sean’s surprise, his uncle had left the company’s assets to him in his will. The company wasn’t some fancy home-security outfit where a guy strapped to a headset monitored alarm systems from his computer and alerted the police when necessary. No, Hansen Security was hands on, meaning a little roughing up might be required when the moment called for it. Typically, jobs consisted of walking the grounds of a property or serving as some intimidating muscle at an event.