Bertrand had never filled the prescription, preferring to dull the tormenting images in his mind with beer. Had his parents had any warning—even the subtlest premonition—as the jackknifed tractor-trailer hurtled toward their car? Had his father braked suddenly when traffic on the Kennedy Expressway snarled because of the construction? Had he looked into the rearview mirror?
Bertrand's only aunt had flown in from Milwaukee and gone with him to the morgue and then the funeral home. Everyone had dissuaded him from viewing the bodies of his loving parents—the coroner had identified them with dental records. They'd been burned beyond all recognition in the conflagration following the accident, when leaking fuel ignited and the flames sent a column of black smoke into the air, warning distant drivers to get off the expressway.
Bertrand pushed out of the station, still trying to reason away this premonition that something was about to go hugely wrong. Perhaps he had a right to be anxious. He'd lived through tragedy and had no one to speak to, other than friends who would nod as if they understood while looking painfully uncomfortable. They preferred to get him drunk and bury the topic of death with talk of hot women and aggressive sports. Gradually they had all abandoned him, some moving away for work after college, others neglecting to call, and the last holdouts tiring of him never returning their calls. He found it embarrassing to talk about his parents' sudden death because it seemed so mundane, cliché even, that they had died in one sudden wreck. Bertrand preferred O'Malley's, a place he'd begun hanging around because no one there knew his history, so he could pretend there had been no tragedy in his life. The bartenders now knew him by name, but that was all.
Bertrand stopped outside the station, the day's heat still wafting from the asphalt, the stench of garbage from a nearby container reminding him that summer should be spent out of the city. Should he turn right and head for O'Malley's, or left and head for home and a plate of Lean Cuisine?
He turned left, walking to Bissell Street and the one-and-a-half storey house that his parents had so meticulously renovated in anticipation of his birth. Tonight he would be good. He would lock the door, watch HBO and drink water. He would take a Sleep-Eze D and crash by midnight, then get up and start fresh.
But his feet dragged as he headed up the sidewalk, the sense of doom rising from his stomach to his heart, which beat faster now, reminding him that he'd failed to even start losing those twenty pounds. He'd almost reached home—the clapboard a pastel yellow, the gingerbread trim picked out in a pale green—when a smash of breaking glass from across the street brought him to a halt.
Was this the disaster? Had Needleman suffered some calamity?
His neighbor across the street also lived in a one-and-a-half storey house, the only wooden structure that backed onto the 'L' train line. All the other houses on the west side stood shoulder to shoulder—three stories tall—like a nineteenth-century glass-and-brick wall against the noise of the trains. Needleman's place sat in stark contrast, a decaying shack sided with asphalt sheets. He had lived there for as long as Bertrand could remember. Developers and real estate agents circled around Needleman's house like sharks every few months, but the reclusive old man refused to budge. It was generally assumed that the day after Needleman died his house would go down in front of a bulldozer's blade.
Every light was on in Needleman's house, unusual for the stingy pensioner. Bertrand yanked his phone from his pocket, the fear rising to panic, but calling 911 made no sense. Would telling an operator that he heard a window breaking even prompt a response? He stepped past the parked cars and into the empty street, away from his home and closer to Needleman's, but halfway across he froze, the dread overwhelming. How could he even make it to the waist-high chain-link fence that fronted the property? He could hardly breathe!
Bertrand fell to his knees, his heart pounding, his panic climaxing. Was he having a heart attack? A panic attack? He tried to fight his broken respiration, to take calming breaths. His chest hurt. Was that a heart attack sign?
"Help," he said, but it was closer to a whisper than a cry. If only a car would come along the quiet side street now, they'd see him there, slumped in the middle of the road, wouldn't they? They'd call for help. Where was his phone? It had slipped from his grasp, but it had to be nearby.
A terrified shriek came from Needleman's house. That was it—Bertrand could call 911 now, but instead he found himself rising and stumbling forward, crossing the street and grabbing the gate of the fence, some heroic force welling up inside of him.
Bertrand lifted the latch of the gate, wondering what power had possessed him. From the moment of the scream, Bertrand's very soul had strengthened. His chest pain eased, his breathing calmed and the anxiety faded. His grumpy old neighbor—the last familiar face from Bertrand's childhood—needed his help. The gate swung open easily, and Bertrand rushed up the porch stairs to the screen door. He kicked at the aluminum panel on the bottom. "Mr. Needleman? It's Bertrand Allan from across the street. Are you okay?"
Stooped with some large burden, a figure rushed across the hall near the back of the narrow house. More breaking glass. That was enough. Bertrand yanked at the handle of the screen door and discovered it was open. He hurried in, heading straight down the hallway for the kitchen.
"Mr. Needleman. I'm here! Are you all right?"
Bertrand had a moment of doubt. What was he doing? Why hadn't he picked up his cell phone? Yet, he was ready to fight to save Needleman from whatever horror had prompted that scream, a concept that would be viewed as ridiculous by Bertrand's fellow call-center techs. Pudgy Bert fight?
But the kitchen was empty and the house was now silent. Had he imagined that figure with suspiciously body-shaped burden? How could anyone move that quickly carrying fat old Needleman?
He tried to guess when Needleman had last cooked a meal, but the pile of pots in the sink, the food crusted and dried, gave no clue. The stove looked like it had last been clean during the First Gulf War. The table was strewn with dishes, as if Needleman rotated between chairs, abandoning each finished meal and moving to a clear place setting for the next, until he'd gone full circle.
"Mr. Needleman!"
Bertrand hurried back into the hall and went upstairs to the bedroom under the half-storey eaves. The second floor was stifling in the heat, and it stank of sweat and mold. The bed sheets were gray and tossed aside, the dresser drawers standing open with clothes piled on them rather than folded in them. No one here. He headed back downstairs and into the living room.
A ratty La-Z-Boy chair, a sofa forty years out of date and a thick cathode-ray tube TV were the only furniture, other than a standing ashtray full of cigarette butts by the recliner. A carpet that wasn't fit to piss on covered the floor, and the wallpaper was so tobacco-stained it was hard to determine the original pattern. Empty Budweiser cans littered the floor.
The room stank of old farts, beer and tobacco. And something else. Something metallic and wet and fresh. It reminded Bertrand of a meat counter at the grocery store, but without the anti-bacterial cleansers. He stepped into the room, walking a circle around the La-Z-Boy but stopping when the carpet squished under his foot. It was wet beside the chair, a dark stain in the brown carpet, a dark red stain. Bertrand didn't have to stoop and smell to know it was blood.
"Mr. Needleman! Where are you? I'm here to help!"
Bertrand fled the room, tracking a red footprint into the kitchen. Now he saw what he had missed the first time while overwhelmed by the domestic chaos: the glass of the back screen door was smashed. Then came the noise, a rumble and metallic screech announcing that another train approached on the 'L.' Bertrand rushed out and down the back steps, finding himself right under the train as it roared overhead on its elevated path. How did Needleman live with that noise? Bertrand's house was only just across the street, but it was so much quieter.
Bertrand waited until the train had passed and gave one last call, looking up and down the alley on the far side of the tracks for any sign of human
movement. "Mr. Needleman!"
But the only sound now was a distant siren and the warm wind pushing through the trees. The dark lumps of garbage bins along the alley could hide any number of people, but Bertrand decided there wasn't anything to be gained by wandering in the weak light, looking for a potential murderer. He headed back through the house and into Bissell Street, where he found his cell still lying where he'd dropped it while panicking. The anxiety of that moment had totally vanished. He was ready to do battle, but he couldn't find the enemy. He dialed 911. There was blood.
Two - News
The doorbell rang just as the microwave beeped to announce that the Lean Cuisine had finished warming. Bertrand opened the door to find two uniformed officers, one younger and trim with one hand raised, ready to again ring the doorbell. The other officer waited at the bottom of the stairs, his beer belly pushing over his belt, his eyes on his phone, and his fingers poised to text.
"Bertrand Allan?" said the younger officer. "You called in a 911 about your neighbor across the street."
"Yeah, but like, an hour ago. What took so long?"
The heavy cop—clearly close to retirement and fed up with dealing with the public—looked up from his phone. "Shut your yap if that's all you got to say."
The younger officer didn't exactly roll his eyes, but he looked like he wanted to.
"We're sorry for the delay." His expression was sincere. "The call volume tonight is unusual even for a hot night. Now, what makes you think Mr. Needleman was the victim of an assault? Did you witness an attack?"
What had he seen? Had he imagined the dark figure with the human-shaped burden? He'd just had a panic attack, after all, maybe even a mini-heart attack. He should go see his doctor tomorrow, but he felt just fine right now, better than ever.
"No." Bertrand didn't like admitting this fact. "But there's blood on the carpet in the living room and the glass in the back screen door is smashed."
The older office looked up from his phone. "Well it's fricking obvious isn't it? The guy was probably stupidly drunk. He fell into the glass and cut himself and didn't even know it, and then went to sit and have a few more beers. Moron realizes he's bleeding and heads out for the hospital to get stitches and you waste my time with a 911."
"You've been over there?"
"Of course, sir," said the younger officer. "We even saw a bloody footprint going from the living room and out the back door of the kitchen. He clearly left there strong enough to walk. It couldn't have been a very serious injury."
"That was my footprint. That's how I found the blood. I stepped in it."
The officer drew a notebook from his chest pocket and flipped it open. "Are you a regular guest of Mr. Needleman?" It was an accusation accompanied by a frown.
"What? No. I mean when I was a kid I used to go over there sometimes when he was working on something out back. He used to build little stools and stuff and sell them at garage sales, and sometimes he let me help. I haven't been over there since before college."
But Needleman had come to the funeral in his seventies-era three-piece suit, which bulged with the weight the man had added since its purchase. He'd even patted Bertrand on the shoulder as if he was still a little boy. "They were good people," was all he had said.
"So you really had no right to enter the residence." The young officer was all business now, no longer placating. The older officer looked up and put away the cell phone, studying Bertrand with new interest.
"Can I come in?" Big Belly officer walked up the stairs as he spoke and moved into Bertrand's personal space, which prompted Bertrand to step back as if he were giving an invitation. Before he knew it both cops had pushed past him, the younger one going into the living room and Big Belly heading for the kitchen.
"Hey, wait!" Bertrand followed the younger cop. "Excuse me! Officer ..."
"Gonsalves." The introduction sounded friendly, but Gonsalves surveyed the room with a trained eye. It wasn't that different from Needleman's in layout, but it was clean, the sofa only ten years old. Bertrand had just purchased the La-Z-Boy last year, and the huge flat-screen TV that hung on one wall had been his birthday gift to himself.
"You don't think I had something to do with this?"
Gonsalves turned to Bertrand. "May I see your shoes please, the ones you wore while you were in Mr. Needleman's house."
The ones with Needleman's blood on them. Bertrand stooped into the front-hall closet. How had this gone so strange? Why were they treating him like a suspect instead of a concerned neighbor? He looked at the bottom of the Nikes as he handed them over, appalled that he'd forgotten the blood, that he'd put them away when he had burst into his front hall, already speaking to the 911 operator on his cell. One sole was brown and sticky. Any other day this might have turned Bertrand's stomach, but he had some new superpower this evening, some calm presence that strengthened his heart.
Gonsalves studied the shoes and leaned toward the stained one to sniff.
"That's blood alright. Bring them outside please."
Big Belly returned from the kitchen. "Dinner's in the microwave," was all he said before he started up the stairs. It wasn't clear to whom he was speaking.
Bertrand followed Gonsalves to his car, which was stopped in the middle of the street with the flashing lights quietly clicking away. Gonsalves produced a very large Ziploc and held it open for Bertrand. The order was obvious: hand over the shoes.
"Look here," Bertrand said while placing the shoes into the bag. "I was just trying to help. You should've heard that scream. It was, like ... It was a dying scream." But Bertrand knew that he had no true experience with death. He'd often imagined his parents' last moments, but he hadn't been with them, sitting in the backseat of the car. How would he know the sound of a dying scream?
Gonsalves made a note on the Ziploc with a Sharpie and placed it in the trunk of the car, slamming the lid. He again pulled out the notebook.
"Mr. Allan. Why don't you walk me through this? Start from coming home."
Bertrand left out his panic attack. That had nothing to do with Needleman's disappearance, did it? Unless one assumed that Bertrand had just totally lost it and started seeing and hearing things. But the blood was real. So maybe the scream was real, maybe the dark figure carrying the body was real. Each time Bertrand replayed that moment in his head, it seemed more and more like the figure had been carrying a body.
Big Belly officer returned in time for the end of the tale. "So let me get this straight: lights on, nobody's home, the screaming could be drunk teenagers on a patio three streets away, but you gotta waste my time because your drunken neighbor cut himself." He got into the passenger side of car, reaching over to start it before pulling out his cell to return to his texting.
Gonsalves flipped the notebook closed and removed his cap long enough to brush the sweat from his brow, his short black curls plastered to his forehead. "Look, I think you're a good guy, Mr. Allan, so I'm going to give you some advice, not as a police officer, but as one concerned citizen to another. The Ripper killed again this evening, so that's number six. This guy doesn't seem to care if his victims are old men or young women. You were right to call us." He glanced over at his partner, but the window was up and the car's air conditioning on full. "But you were wrong to go into his house. What if you did catch the Chicago Ripper in the act? It's not like I'm giving away any secrets if I tell you that the freak is brutal with a knife. I mean, don't you watch the news? You wouldn't have stood a chance."
Bertrand nodded, ashamed of his softness and his sweaty lethargy. "You're right, of course. It was just that I felt like superman for a minute there. I heard him scream and I felt stronger, ready to fight." His ears burned. What ridiculous nonsense.
But Gonsalves nodded. "I know what you mean. I've had those superhero moments myself in the last couple of weeks. Listen, between you and me, things are getting strange." He glanced at his partner again before he leaned in close to Bertrand. "Any other day we'd be bringing detectives
in to speak to you. But they're all out on the Ripper case—top priority. And it's not just Chicago that's got this asshole. There are Ripper copycats in other cities, even up in Canada and over in Europe. There's talk that maybe there's a cult, a worldwide devil-worshipping cult. Buy a gun. Get an alarm system. We can't protect you anymore."
Gonsalves hurried around to the driver's side, giving Bertrand a last glance over the flashing lights before he got into the car. It was an embarrassed look, or maybe guilt. He certainly wasn't behaving with the detached professionalism that Bertrand had expected.
He watched the car speed away with a short squawk of its siren. Where were they rushing off to now? Another nuisance call? He went inside to finally retrieve the Lean Cuisine from the microwave. The pitcher of filtered water in the fridge sat beside a cold can of Milwaukee. Bertrand intended to reach for the water, but his fingers closed around the beer. He popped it open just a little too easily as he headed for the living room, sat down in his La-Z-Boy and flicked on the TV.
"It's confirmed, Colin." The breathless blonde reporter spoke to a grave cable-TV news anchor via split screen. "This is already the third murder tonight, making this the ninth victim of the Chicago Ripper." Behind her, a stretcher with a white sheet covering a recumbent human form wheeled past, bound for a waiting ambulance. The scene was a confusion of flashing lights, police and firefighters tramping about the front lawn of a suburban house, and a crowd of curious onlookers held back at a safe distance.
"So it would seem his need to kill is growing exponentially." Colin—the mature anchor with hair that looked younger than his cheeks—said exponentially with just a hint of pride, as if he'd just mastered the word.
"Note to self," said Bertrand to the room as the photos of previous victims were splashed across the screen, people of all races and ages. "Tomorrow, buy a gun."
The 1000 Souls (Book 1): Apocalypse Revolution Page 2