“What are you doing, man? Check her pulse.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What?!”
“No pulse.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I don’t have one either.”
After a moment, the girl stops moving, and Jack crouches down next to her. He pulls a sheet over her face so there might be something to fall to the floor if she sits back up like they do in the movies. He hopes this will scare Rick enough to finally roll the ambulance on the next turn.
Hospital entrance. Next day. Jack is walking back to their lockers. Rick is walking behind him, glaring over his bottle of lemonade.
“You don’t work here anymore,” he says.
“She’s fine. She was fine. I was just fucking with you.”
“I don’t care, man.”
Derek the janitor runs up behind them before Jack can answer, tapping Rick on the shoulder, his mouth slack and hanging. Rick smacks his hand away.
“Yes, I know,” Rick says. “It’s piss. Yes, I’m drinking your piss. I’ve gone crazy. You got me. Now fuck off, Eric.”
Derek turns to leave.
“Wait, I’m sorry. Is it ‘Eric’ or ‘Derek?’ I can never remember.”
“It’s ‘Derek.’ I can never remember either,” he admits. Then he’s gone.
“I think you finally broke him,” Jack says.
“Just saving time,” Rick says, then, “Don’t talk to me.”
“You know, if anyone should remember that fucker’s name, is should be you.”
“Why’s that? You’re the one who stalks him online like you’re in love.”
“No, you. Because you’ve got half his name,” Jack smiles.
“Right.” Rick opens his locker. “So, am I gonna have to kill you by lunch or quit or both?”
“I don’t know. Did the sun come up today?”
“Probably?”
“Don’t worry then. I’m good.”
Rick finishes his lemonade, still skeptical.
“We’ll see. After that bite, you got Old Man Crazy Juice running through your veins.”
“Nah, he didn’t do shit. Old fucker’s teeth were soft as chalk.”
Right then, Big Mike and Little Mike walk by, talking loud as usual. Rick and Jack share a look like they can’t believe these guys are still slinking around the hospital.
“So I took my dog to get the shots,” Little Mike says, “Getting him immunized for the ‘hunta’ virus, you know, and I gotta hold him down every time because he goes bonkers. And I get a hold of two handfuls of fur right behind his head, got a good grip on him, right, and the doc says ‘ready?’ So I go ‘ready!’ And the doc sticks the dog. But the needle goes through a fold in the fur I’m squeezing and comes out the other side… and it stabs me right in my fucking hand.”
“Aaaaah! Fuck!”
“And the doc doesn’t even see this. Just jams the plunger down and injects the whole needle right into my hand. I felt so stupid I didn’t say nothing. Just stuck my hand in my pocket like an asshole.”
“You realize what this means, right?” Big Mike says.
“What? It means I feel so dumb I’m probably going to pay a bill for dog shots the vet gave me by accident? Just so I never have to tell anyone?”
“But you just told everyone,” Jack says quietly, but they ignore him.
“No!” Big Mike bellows. “It means you’re immune to the hantavirus now, too!”
“You ever hear of a man getting it?” Little Mike asks everybody.
“Nope. But that don’t mean nothin’,” Big Mike says. “Maybe there’s a lotta people that got shots by accident. Maybe what happened to you happens more than we know.”
“Shut the fuck up, Mike” Rick sighs. Then, “Wait. What did you mean by ‘too?’”
“Huh?” Little Mike frowns.
“You said, ‘You’re immune now, too.’”
“Oh. ‘Cause now we’re both immune.”
“But why are you immune to the… you don’t even have a goddamn dog that… I mean, the chances of the same thing happening to you that happened to me are… fuckin’ forget it,” Rick says, slamming his locker. “Okay, Mike and Mike, have a great day!”
“What’s up with all the names around here anyway?” Jack suddenly wants to know.
“What do you mean?” Rick asks.
“They’re all the same.”
“How do you mean?”
“Like doppelgängers?” Little Mike offers.
“Do you even know what that word means, Little Mike?” Jack asks.
“Hell, yeah.”
“What?”
“It’s German for ‘double walkers.’”
“Do you know what that means?”
“Well, it sure means something to you,” Little Mike smiles. Jack doesn’t argue. “And don’t call me ‘Little Mike’ no more,” he adds.
All four of them are heading for the exit when a young, bouncy candy striper walks up, handing out baseball caps. Both Mikes excitedly grab a handful from her, putting two on each, one forwards and one backwards. Jack is visibly alarmed by what he sees above the visors.
“It’s okay,” the girl chirps at him. Then to everyone, “You can wear them any way you want. It’s up to you!”
“Who are the hats for?” Rick asks her.
“The family of the girl attacked yesterday, that girl you brought in, I think? They had these made up and sent to all the schools, churches, and hospitals in the area. To warn the kids.”
“When I first got out of film school, I made a movie on that baseball diamond by my house.”
“Let me guess,” Rick says. “It was called Third Base.”
“Nah, nobody liked to see anyone get to third base, even in the movies. It was called, There’s No Crying in Baseball.”
“Of course it was. Same thing, really. Didn’t you know that the ‘bases’ mean different things to different people?” Then, “Hold on, when did you make movies?”
Jack doesn’t answer, instead reaching to take a cap as Rick pushes him past the girl and out the door.
Later that day. Massive car wreck. Fire, blood, screams, a “sandwich with the works,” the first responders call them. Three ambulances are lined up like they’re going to race later. Jack and Rick see a pile of men already working on a trucker next to his upended semi, so they run for the other vehicles. They find the worst of them, a smoking Buick Regal folded almost in half, and a bloody and bruised couple fighting with police and paramedics inches away from the steam of their hood. Rick joins the melee, as Jack attends to three young women crying near the curb.
Next to the Regal, the woman is calmer than her husband, and she allows Rick to treat her wounds. Rick gets to work, watching Jack out of the corner of his eye. Jack seems all business at first, securing necks, tying off wounds, checking pupils while whispering instructions and reassurance into ears instead of the wild conjecture he’d been partial to lately. Moving off to help restrain the husband, then watching for them to crack the car open and get to the baby that was trapped inside, Rick thinks back to how good Jack used to be at his job before shit started to slip. Jack was the best before the slippage, it was true.
Then a fire truck roars in at an awkward angle, stopping to block every ambulance’s line of sight. Jack sees this and runs over to raise some hell.
“Hey, move that thing forward, man!”
“Just do your job. We’ll do ours.”
It’s a Mike saying this to Jack. He’s not “Big Mike” or “Little Mike,” really, but a different Mike altogether, one who’s kind of in the middle today without his partner. If this was Goldilocks, normally this would mean he was “just right,” but this clown was anything but. Jack and Rick hardly recognize him without Big Mike and a dog pole in his hand. He’d washed out of the firefighting trade like the Big Mike, but had somehow wrangled his way back in.
Among the things that Jack and Rick never knew, was that Little Mike had finally h
it Lieutenant that week, after only a decade and a half, and he’d been trying real hard lately to get the other men to call him “Crow,” short for “Crowbar” because he carried one around even when he was just going to see a movie.
“Just in case,” he’d say.
But worse than all that, he was one of those assholes who, despite being a hateful, vindictive, judgmental sort, never, ever used swear words. No profanity crossed that smirk for years, at least while he was awake. He was also the kind of guy who joined the Fire Department instead of the Army after that B-25 bomber hit the Empire State Building in 1945, exactly the kind of glory hound that gave them all a bad name. The other firemen couldn’t remember a single encounter where Crow didn’t explain to anyone who didn’t know any better how he “never asked to be a hero.” They all called him “Heck” instead of “Crow” sometimes. Mostly because when they did this, they sounded just like he used to.
“Heck, why do we gotta go through this every time,” one of the EMTs says. “We don’t park in front of your hydrants. Pay us the same courtesy.”
“Move aside, Jack! We need a hose line set up here. Let’s go!”
“Dang it, huh?” Jack says, already furious, looking to the other men for sympathy.
“The bigger the wreck, the bigger the Heck,” they’d say sometimes. Which meant, the bigger the wreck, the more Little Mike, formally “Crow,” formally “Heck,” tried to throw his weight around.
But for once, his trusty crowbar was going to come in handy, as Rick and another police officer had been struggling with the crumpled passenger’s side door for so long the fire below them had started melting the rubber in their shoes.
“Good thing it wasn’t a Pinto,” someone says, an old joke that might be funnier if it wasn’t so hard to conclusively identify what model it was before the 18-wheeler centerpunched it.
“I got this,” Little Mike announces, slipping his hooked end into a space around the hinges. He pushes hard, and that’s when something strange happens. The door pops out and up, fast as a dog door, almost flipping the fireman into the car headfirst.
It only takes an almost imperceptible nudge from Jack’s elbow to erase the rest of Little Mike’s balance and dump him all the way inside.
He lands like those babies in the home videos, face plant right before a steady wail builds up in the backs of their mouths. Feeling foolish, Little Mike starts laughing right when the door slams shut, almost on his glove. He always wore gloves long past their expiration date, plastic burnt so bad it was almost impossible to make a fist.
“What the heck?” he asks the car.
Abandoning the girls on the curb completely, Jack runs back to try reaching inside a broken window and loosens the car seat with the screaming baby. He pretends to be shocked when finds himself face-to-face with Little Mike instead.
“How did you get in there, Houdini?” Jack asks him.
“No idea,” Little Mike laughs, kicking at the door with his boots. The fire is popping like high-end, gourmet popcorn as the electrical system under the car sparks out, and people start moving away, even the ones in the uniforms. Little Mike coughs and buttons the top button on his slicker for the first time in his life as he kicks harder. But the heat has welded the door firm, and, more importantly, his crowbar is lost somewhere under the backseat, buried in black smoke as the oil burns from the engine block.
“Hey, while I’ve got a captive audience, do those look like bite marks to you?” Jack asks him, pointing to the seatbelt.
An old fireman, gray hair curling out from under his helmet, pushes past Jack to get the baby loose.
“Back up,” he says.
Before Jack can argue, the car seat breaks free, and the baby is pulled through the hole. Then both of them are running the bundle to the side of the road to unbuckle her, gagging on the gas as the rubber burns off the exhaust system. As a fireman cuts the straps, Jack notices a bloody half-moon tear in the baby’s jumper and starts working to pull down the child’s pants, shaking the rolled cuffs, when another fireman throws him to the ground with an arm across his throat. Rick pulls the fireman off and prepares to fight, but the fireman loses interest as the rest of his brigade starts to circle the inferno.
Little Mike is punching the windshield, screaming as the black tips of his gloves ignite, and that’s when an airbag detonator blows, the bag already burning from taking that big drink of oxygen. It envelopes his face like a jellyfish, filling his eyes with embers and the diamonds of glass that sprinkled the dashboard. The flames inside the car have already gone from gas-grill cookout to couch-burning party size, and Little Mike is finding it harder to punch, blinded with the skin running off his knuckles and out the bottoms of his gloves like barbecue sauce.
The other firemen all know a B.L.E.V. fireball is imminent (a.k.a. “Blev-ee,” a.k.a. “boiling liquid expanding vapor blah blah blah…”) with the gas tank cooking as long as it has, and they’re pulling back. No one outside the movies tries to walk away from one while looking cool. And no one stays to stare through the window except for Jack and Rick.
They study the burning face of a man who swore to Jack once how much he was gonna hate Backdraft when it finally came out (“How does a movie not have an axe fight when the villain’s name is ‘Axe’?!”) then asked him if he wanted to try to sign up as stuntmen for it. This was the same fool who told Rick how years earlier he’d written letters to Ron Howard, the young director of Grand Theft Auto, about how fire and explosions never made animal noises, and to “save that shit for when you’re playing Twister while simultaneously trying to surf a Toronado.” Of course, Jack had heard him trying to sell that same line of bullshit to a couple girls at the annual fundraiser where they torched everyone’s old Christmas trees, pretending like the growls weren’t coming from the side of his mouth.
“It’s a real live monster,” he’d said, pine trees and ribbons burning over his shoulder and loving it. “It’s got teeth, claws, and a voice. Sounds like the MGM lion, I swear…”
But that’s the thing about Heck. He always swore. And it never meant shit. Not until today.
Rick turns away, thinking Little Mike sure picked a hell of a day to get his job back as a firefighter, but Jack breathes deep, smelling the cornucopia of flavors coming off the bonfire of the man’s body. The copper scent of his blood, like a mouthful of pennies, was first. That blood was the only thing that kept a burning human being from smelling exactly like meat on a grill. There’s a reason animals are bled out at the slaughterhouse.
I don’t know how we taste, but we sure don’t smell like chicken, Jack realizes. More like liver and spare change.
And when the rest of his hair burns away, the keratin and amino acids fill the air with another unique smell. But one that’s familiar. Now Jack is backing up. It’s the smell of the underworld, a chemical combination that Jack suddenly is convinced might responsible for all the myths throughout history involving damnation and bodies sentenced to the stake. Pure sulfur.
Then, for dessert, comes the fabled hot perfume of foaming cerebrospinal fluid. He’d heard about it from veterans, possibly smelled it once before at a factory blaze. It’s a musky, inviting scent that’s always struck Jack as almost lonely.
As a pheromone, how could you ever offer the equivalent in return? he thinks. This is exactly what it smells like down there under my feet.
Impossibly, Jack can still hear the man screaming inside the smoke as he cooks away into memories, swearing to the fire that he’ll change his ways, try to avoid running over animals on the way to the fires, swearing he’ll at least button that top button.
But it’s too late for him to start swearing, and everybody knows it.
Jack stops to watch a large dog run through a field on the horizon. His face pinched and distracted, he gets as close to the burning husk of the car as he’s able, then turns to a fireman and asks the question again, quietly so Rick can’t hear.
“Did those look like bite marks to you?”
<
br /> “What the fuck are you doing?” the fireman hisses, teeth clenched, waiting for their chance to get the dead man from the wreck.
“Something is wrong here,” Jack says, not noticing the fireman’s “No shit” look he’s giving him. Then the fireman has a handful of Jack’s collar as Rick is running over, cops and onlookers following. Rick shakes his head as a police officer breaks them apart.
“What’s wrong with you guys?” the cop asks. The fireman points at Jack, but before he can speak, two police cruisers and another ambulance pull in. Jack recognizes one of the dispatchers pointing him out to a stocky, brown-shirted officer. This Sergeant bridges the fifty yards between them in what seems to be three large steps.
“Is your name Jack Grinstead?” he asks.
“Yeah, why?”
“You need to come with me.”
“For what?”
“Attempted rape.”
“What?”
“He was undressing the baby!” the older fireman yells. “That’s the guy! I heard about this motherfucker. He’s gone nuts.”
“Wait a minute-” Rick starts, and the Sergeant holds up a hand, then holds up identification. It reads, “Joseph Stansberries. Robbery/Homicide.”
“Back off,” the Sergeant says. “After receiving an anonymous tip this afternoon, our department has reviewed the video from the back of your ambulance and discovered that… you know what? Just come the fuck with me.”
“They didn’t have cameras in the back of ambulances six years ago,” Jack says.
“Six years ago, huh?” Stansberries says. “We’re not talking about six years ago. But thanks for the tip. Now come with me.”
Jack takes a couple seconds to crack his knuckles, wondering how they could have gotten him on videotape. He isn’t too surprised really. One thing he’s learned on this particular adventure was any movie that existed at any time on VHS has always existed on VHS. And that includes himself.
“What?”
He realizes he’s said most of that crazy shit out loud.
“From the ‘80s until now, videotapes are always with us.”
“How’s that?”
The Last Projector Page 40