Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

Her voice caught in her throat. She didn’t want to die, no more than the next person. But she was so tired, and her shoulder and hands and knees were screaming with pain even though they would not bleed, and on the last bit of the climb up she had discovered her chest and arms were stitched with a hundred little punctures, each smarting like a bee sting. She found little pieces of glass, tiny slivers and shards, sticking out of some of the tiny wounds.

  A large part of her wanted nothing more that to sleep, even if it meant sleeping forever. But did she really want to die?

  She decided to argue the point instead of deciding.

  “I climbed, didn’t I? Wasn’t that the choice? Didn’t I already choose to live?”

  “No,” the huge voice answered, booming and echoing off the marble walls of the chamber. “Fear is a strong motivator - fear of the unknown or fear of those things that you know will harm you. You climbed out of fear, child, fear of the strange situation you found yourself in.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, his huge marble eyes never blinking, as he brushed the broken rock from his lap with his free hand. “Now you must choose, without fear. Running from the mist was not the same as choosing to live or die.” His hand went back to its armrest and he waited for her answer.

  She thought about it for a long moment, and then answered. “So if I choose to go back out there into the fog, I die?”

  Lincoln nodded. “Death is an easy choice to make. It takes courage to live, to accept the pain, the grief, the disappointment of life. And the pain will be greater than you have ever known. If you choose to live, there will be many times when you will regret that choice.”

  Sally nodded. But she didn’t want to die; as much pain as she felt, from the climb and from before, when she’d woken up, at least she was feeling something. And she needed to see Tommy, to tell him how she felt about him. And something else she couldn’t remember.

  Lincoln was right - death was the easy choice, something a coward would do.

  “Choose now – go back to your life, or stay here and wait for the end. Choose the pain of freedom and liberty, or the jail of death” commanded Lincoln.

  A moment later her answer was clear, the words coming from her lips strong and decisive.

  “I want to go back.”

  The marble giant smiled with stone lips again, and again the massive arm came up, dropping more pieces of broken marble to the ground around his throne-like chair. He pointed at the marble wall off to his right and Sally’s left. There, etched in the marble in letters three feet high, were the immortal words of the Gettysburg address, covering most of the wall.

  Below the etched words of the speech appeared a glowing yellow rectangle, and Sally realized that it was the glowing outline of some type of opening, right at floor level. Shining yellow light streamed out from the opening, illuminating Lincoln and Sally and the small cloud of white dust drifting between them.

  “Go, and good luck.” the stony visage of Abraham Lincoln commanded, and when she looked back up at him he had returned to the stony, unmoving form of her memory, the cracks and the marble pieces around his seat gone.

  He sat, solid as a statue, staring straight ahead as if he had never moved at all. She smiled anyway and walked toward the light, pausing only for a brief second as the blinding, warm light washed over her, and then, without looking back, she stepped through.

  Tommy felt her fingers move, and for a moment he was sure he was simply dreaming again. He had imagined her waking up so many times that it was difficult for him to accept it when it finally actually happened.

  But when they moved again he was staring right at them, and as tired as his eyes were, they could not deceive him. Her fingers had moved, a twitch, and he jumped to his feet, almost falling over. He’d had little sleep in the days since they’d brought her in, and his feet barely held him up as he stood and leaned over her, stroking her bandaged forehead.

  “Honey, can you hear me? Are you going to be okay?” Tommy wanted to be hopeful, he wanted everything to be back the way it had been before all of this had happened, but that was too much to hope for.

  But he wanted her to wake up, to look up into his eyes and tell him that she was going to be okay. And he wanted to apologize for causing this whole thing to happen. If only they hadn’t fought that night before...if she hadn’t gone back up to the campus instead of staying at his place...

  A low moan escaped her lips, the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. Her legs shifted beneath the sheets and one arm came suddenly alive, drifting up to her face to touch the bandages. He could see the faded bruises around her wrist from the ropes that had held her, and his anger was washed away by sudden joy. He grabbed her hand, kissing it over and over.

  Her eyes blinked and opened, dazed for a moment before slowly focusing on Tommy’s crying, smiling face. He leaned closer. She looked half out of it, and he heard her quietly murmur three words before she smiled and her hand dropped away from his, her head turning as she drifted off back into a peaceful sleep.

  Tommy screamed for the nurse, frantic that she might’ve come all the way back to him only to be lost again, but he saw the slow rise and fall of her chest and relaxed. He leaned over to kiss her, and that was when the nurse and the policeman who’d been stationed outside her room burst in.

  “She woke up. She talked! I swear!”

  The nurse turned and checked the monitors and instruments around Sally, confirming it. “Yeah, she’s sleeping now, a real sleep. She’s got healthy alpha rhythms now,” she said, gesturing to one of the monitors before moving to Sally’s bed and tucking the sheets in around her, checking her color and wiping a tiny bit of spittle from her chin.

  Both men nodded at her words even though neither of them even knew what an alpha rhythm was. The nurse turned and looked at the boy’s face, and the concern there almost made her eyes tear up. “Don’t worry. Her stock just went through the roof, Tommy.”

  He smiled and turned to the cop, suddenly wanting to hug someone and the cop was simply the nearest target. Tommy embraced the surprised man, and the cop’s expression moved through a quick range of emotions before smiling and patting the boy on his back with one big, beefy hand. “That’s okay, son. She’s gonna be fine, now.”

  Tommy pulled away, wiping his eyes and apologizing, staring at his fiancé and watching the slow rise and fall of her chest. “Yeah, she’s sleeping okay now.” He brushed the tears from his red eyes with one hand and suddenly remembered something.

  “Oh, and when she woke up, she said something. And then she went back under. It didn’t make any sense, what she said, but maybe that’s just cause she’s so tired, she didn’t know what she was saying.”

  The cop looked at Tommy, a boy he’d gotten to know fairly well over the past week. The policeman’s assignment to the girl’s room had been purely precautionary, just in case the wacko that had shot her in the shoulder and tried to kill her came back to finish the job. He’d seen the fiancé Tommy here all day every day, spending time in the hospital’s chapel when he was chased from the girl’s room. The boy was a good sort, and he’d make a fine husband if they could get through this whole mess and still ended up sane and together.

  But suddenly the cop was intrigued, his investigative senses sharpened after a week of dull hospital duty, guarding a girl that was probably in no physical danger at all, other than her medical condition. If the girl had woken up and said “I love you, Tommy” or something like that, the boy wouldn’t be discounting it so easily. “What did she say, son?”

  Tommy looked at the cop, hearing the sudden seriousness in his voice. “I’m not sure. It doesn’t make any sense, but to me, it sounded like she said ‘Going to Liberty’. What does that mean?”

  “I dunno,” the cop replied, shrugging. “Probably nothing,” he said, pulling a pad of paper from his back pocket to scribble down the mysterious words. His next call in to the station would report on Sally’s improved condition, and would include these mysterious words,
which to him sounded like a place. Maybe it was important.

  David Beaumont made it all the way to Illinois before he could contain his curiosity no longer and started to flip through Bethany‘s book.

  He’d driven all day through Indiana and the lower half of Illinois and made it to a small town called Centerville about 20 miles east of St. Louis, almost to Missouri. He found a little hotel that wasn’t too expensive, and the hotel also had a combination bar and restaurant attached to it where he could relax and get something to eat.

  The news from the East Coast hadn’t been good, as far as the hourly radio reports had gone. The hurricane was moving slowly up the coast and was expected to make landfall again sometime overnight on Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, and the guys on the radio were making a point of saying that this would be the third time Mandy had made landfall - already she had come ashore twice down in Florida.

  David didn’t know much more about weather than he had learned in school, but the way these guys were talking about it, this storm sounded like one of the worst in a long time. The mid-Atlantic states were gearing up for lots and lots of rain and flooding and strong winds, and there were scattered reports of airports and other transportation centers being shut down or, worse yet, stranding passengers in their waiting areas, people futilely waiting for the weather to lessen, gambling on the chance, slim as it was, that the weather would break and the airports would open. Rain fell everywhere on the southern Atlantic coast, and beaches and roads and bridges were being washed away by the rushing water.

  But as bad as that was, David was more worried about Liberty. Maybe it was the weather, or maybe he was worried about his aunt and Bethany and all of the other people he’d spent his life growing up with, but he had an almost uncontrollable urge to turn around and head home. He couldn’t do anything about the weather, of course, but he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was needed, somehow, back in Liberty. And his memories of that strange dream, the one with him and Bethany on that log raft, the huge hurricane coming and that tidal wave full of people washing over them, would not leave his mind. He’d been thinking about that crazy dream a lot today, driving through the flat country of southern Illinois.

  He was probably just feeling lonely.

  He booked himself into the hotel and took what was probably the longest and nicest shower of his life. The weather through Illinois had been cold and rainy, too - he guessed that with the hurricane as big as it was and affecting so much of the country, the weather would be screwed up all the way to Kansas.

  After his shower, he toweled his hair off and put on fresh clothes, watching CNN for the weather updates. The weather in North Carolina and South Carolina got top billing on the half-hourly newscasts on CNN Headline News, with honorable mentions going to preparations for bad weather in D.C., Richmond, and Boston. Cities in North Carolina and South Carolina were getting rain that was being measured in feet, not inches, and the words “excessive precipitation” and “flooding” were starting to be used with frightening regularity. Several smaller towns had been cut off from the rest of the world when bridges and roads connecting them to other areas were washed out or brought down, and there was some spectacular footage of one such bridge coming down in South Carolina.

  As he sat on the edge of his bed with his damp towel draped around shoulders that still ached from driving way too long, he watched clips of traffic accidents, closed airports, rising rivers and flood waters, and unending scenes of rain, falling and falling.

  The storm and the damage from it looked much worse than he thought it would. He’d heard the reports on his radio, over and over, but they couldn’t come close to getting across the realism, the stunning reality of the hurricane.

  And coming so late in the season, when people were already thinking about winter and snow shovels and the Holidays, it had caught a lot of people by surprise, making the storm that much worse. And with every passing scene, David felt his need, his urgency to return to Liberty, grow. Full color maps of the southern states, and live satellite pictures, and predictions of an overnight landfall at someplace called Bogue Inlet, south of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. Projected paths, done up in bright colors, that showed the eye of the storm moving through extreme eastern North Carolina and up into Virginia Beach, heading for Philadelphia. From what he could tell from the maps, that put the storm’s eye missing Liberty by more than a hundred miles, but the storm seemed more than capable of causing trouble for a couple hundred miles in each direction from the central eye.

  The red book of Bethany‘s was in the bag that he had brought in, and as he finished drying his hair, he pulled it out of the bag and began leafing through it.

  It was as he’d remembered it from earlier in the day, but now, as he really read it, he realized that she must’ve really put her heart and soul into this lengthy letter she had written.

  The pictures he had mostly seen before, but now, as he studied them more carefully, the TV forgotten, he saw that she had picked them out very carefully. She had only included pictures and souvenirs from times when they had been happy together. He saw pictures of her and him, smiling away at each other, reminders of their trips up into the mountains or down to the King’s Dominion theme park. There were souvenirs and receipts from their trips to D.C., and even a postcard from the American History Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution and his favorite part of the trip. She’d known that, but she hadn’t bought a postcard from there, had she? He tried to remember back to that happy trip together, spending the day with her and walking over to eat lunch in the glassed-in cafeteria at Air and Space, but he couldn’t recall her buying anything. He’d bought some small, glow-in-the-dark star stickers to put up on his ceiling. He didn’t think she had bought anything, but here was another one of the Smithsonian, and on the opposite page, two postcards of other D.C. landmarks, the Washington Monument and the Capitol building. But she hadn’t bought anything, had she?

  He set the binder down and popped the rings apart, taking out the loose-leaf pages that held the postcards. All of the pictures and postcards were taped or glued to ruled pieces of notebook paper, and he flipped over the two pages he held, examining them.

  The postcards were taped on, and he gingerly lifted up on one of the corners of one of the Smithsonian postcards, trying to get a good look at the back of it. The loop of tape that held the postcard strained and finally tore from the paper, and on the back of the postcard, right under the tape, was a date, scrawled in that same odd, backhanded handwriting style that he had always adored.

  The date said “9/12”.

  That was only a week and a half ago, that Monday when he’d drove up into the mountains, finally deciding to leave. He’d called Brian’s house that night, talking to his crazy girlfriend.

  Now David understood. She must’ve been planning to write him this huge letter for a long time, and she must’ve gone up to D.C. on one of her days off and collected these postcards and some of the other things in the book. Now he remembered seeing a menu for a little Japanese restaurant in Georgetown Plaza where they cooked the meal right in front of you, one of their very first dates - he knew for a fact that she hadn’t gotten a menu the night they had gone there.

  She’d been very busy.

  David Beaumont suddenly felt very stupid. Stupid, and very unworthy of Bethany and the obvious affection that she felt for him.

  She cared deeply for him, deeply enough to go to all of this trouble to construct this scrapbook of their relationship, and now he felt like crap. She’d loved him, REALLY loved him, and he’d stepped on her heart like some clumsy oaf.

  He got up, finished getting dressed, and headed out to get some dinner. He needed something to get his mind off of Bethany.

  The weather outside looked cool and drier, the rain finally stopping. The hotel he was staying in stood next to the bar/restaurant and was connected to it by a short glassed-in corridor.

  The restaurant was busy, but at least it smelled good. Gre
at, in fact, he thought as he pushed through the doors and took a seat at the counter. All of the tables and booths seemed taken and there was a line of people waiting to be seated at the greeter’s stand, so his only choice was to take a seat at the crowded counter or wait for a while before eating, and he was just too hungry to wait. The greeter, an older lady, stood with the clipboard in her hand, scribbling down names, and he didn’t want to bother with that. The counter wasn’t that great of an alternative - everyone seated there looked like they had just stepped out of some strange biker/trucker movie hybrid, but at least he could eat soon and get back to his room and catch some sleep.

  “Can I get a menu?” he asked a waitress behind the counter as she went by, and she returned a few moments later with one, handing it to him.

  He leafed through it, trying to decide what to get - dinner or breakfast. He knew it was nighttime, dinnertime, but David had always preferred breakfast food, and he often ordered it on the rare occasions he went out for dinner, provided he was at a restaurant that served breakfast 24 hours a day.

  “Coffee, hun?”

  He looked up and saw a nice looking older lady in front of him, dressed in a waitress outfit and offering him an already-full cup of coffee.

  “Yeah, that sounds great,” and the cup of coffee made up his mind about what he wanted to order. Nothing went with coffee like breakfast food, and by the time he’d reached over to pick up a couple packets of sugar, he’d decided.

  “Cream?” she asked.

  “Yeah, a couple. Thanks.” He poured them in and started mixing, expecting her to ask for his order. When a couple of seconds passed and she hadn’t asked, he looked up to see that she was still looking at him, simply looking at him. It made him a little nervous, the way her eyes were taking all of him in, almost like the way a person who studies insects might react to a new kind of bug they’d just discovered on the windshield of their car.

  She smiled at him, setting the coffeepot down on a narrow, cork-lined shelf that ran around the inside of the lunch counter, a shelf that also held a collection of condiment bottles and drying water glasses. “You’re not from around here, are you, son?”