by Kevin Wright
“Howdy, Em,” he might say. He’d thank her, and they would go off together somewhere. Somewhere warm and bright and clear. She saw something within those glassy green eyes. She saw life; she saw laughter; she saw love.
“One day, Elliot, it’s our destiny.” She placed the book on the nightstand next to his bed and turned off the lamp.
“Hello?” came a voice.
“Oh!” Emily jumped; she was a bit jumpy. “Sorry I woke you, Mr. Reynolds. It’s just me. Just reading to Elliot.”
“Oh, Em, that you, eh?” Mr. Reynolds said. “What time is it? Can’t see, my glasses?”
“Neither can I, Mr. Reynolds.” Emily looked at her watch. “It’s quarter past one.”
“You’re here late again, Em. When do you sleep?”
“Oh, I can never sleep when I get home, anyways, Mr. Reynolds.”
“Remember, call me Nate.”
“Okay, Nate.” Emily smiled.
“So, how’s that cat of yours? Give birth, yet?”
“No, any day now, though. She’s fit to pop.”
“Well, why not go home, get some sleep?” Nathaniel said. “Or try to anyways. You do too much.”
“I just like to reading. Helps me wind down before I go, you know?” She glanced at Elliot. “I’m sure he doesn’t realize anything.”
“I’m sure he does.”
Emily dabbed at a sparkling eye with a tissue. “Thanks, Mr. Reynolds.”
“Y’know, Em, you’re just about the only good thing about this damned place.”
“Thanks, Mr. Reynolds.” She adjusted the pillow behind Elliot’s head. “Wish I could take you all home with me. Goodnight,” she whispered and headed towards the door.
“Goodnight, Em,” Nathaniel said. “And be careful walking to your car. Read the papers, that nut’s still on the loose.”
“Thanks, Mr. Reynolds. I will.” She stopped at the door. “Can I get you anything before I go?”
“Could you ask one of the nurses to get me a glass of water?”
Emily shook her head. “No, I’ll get you one myself,” she said, and she did.
* * * *
“Well?” Carmine stuffed his mouth with a chimichanga, orange meat juice drooling down his chin. He pulled the door shut.
“Well, what?” Peter just stared straight ahead.
“Still pissed, huh?” Carmine said with his mouth full. In a perfect parabola, a piece of meat shot from his mouth and landed on Peter’s lap.
Peter wiped it off in disgust.
“What’s rule number one?” Carmine wiped his chin with the back of his hand.
“What? ABC’s?” Peter rolled his eyes. “Airway, Breathing, Circulation. I suctioned the guy.”
“Before that,” Carmine said. “Before you even step foot out of the ambulance and go tearing off.”
Peter shot him a hot glare.
“Has to be safe, kid,” Carmine said. “We do any more calls, you don’t step foot out of this bus unless I tell you, got it?”
“Look, if you don’t trust me—”
“I don’t trust you,” Carmine said. “You haven’t given me reason to trust you. Trust is earned. And you think you’re not happy? I’ve got to run through this hellhole holding your hand.”
“Look, if you don’t want to be my partner—”
“I’m not your partner,” Carmine said. “Partners watch each other’s backs. They don’t run off. My partner banged out. That’s the only reason we’re together. From now on, just make damn sure you do what I tell you.”
* * * *
Emily pulled her worn, pink winter coat off a peg and draped a scarf across the back of her neck. A buzzer went off on the counter next to the television and the two nurses sitting there fiercely ignored it. Emily pulled on her coat.
One nurse glanced at the blinking light. “One-eighteen. Mr. Reynolds. Crapped himself again.” She stuffed a cheese curl into her mouth. “It’s your turn, Maureen.”
The other nurse pointed at the television and guffawed.
“Goodnight Jean,” Emily said. “Goodnight Maureen.”
“It’s your turn,” Jean said to Maureen.
“No, I got Mr. Dean a … a glass of milk.”
“When?”
“Before, during Letterman.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Oh yes, I did. You were in the bathroom.”
“No, I wasn’t.” Maureen reached into the bag of cheese curls.
Jean yanked it away.
“Look, I’ll go see what it is.” Emily unzipped her coat. “Honestly…”
“Maureen will get it, won’t you, Maureen?” Jean said. “Go home, Emily. Say hi to your cats.”
Maureen rose slowly, licking the cheese off her fingers. “Fine, I’ll go. You better tell me what happens, though.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Jean said.
Emily headed out.
“Ooooh! Maureen! Quick, come here!” Jean wolfed down more cheese curls, eyes glued to the television, “It’s Antonio Sabato Junior!”
“Ooooh!” Maureen’s rubber shoes squeaked as she ran back.
“What did Mr. Reynolds want?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Maureen said, “I’ll go check in a second.” She sat down next to Jean. “Gimme some more cheese curls.”
* * * *
“Emily! GO BACK!” Nathaniel shouted as Emily walked past his window. “Emily!” He frantically squeezed his nurse-call button again. “Nurse! TURN AROUND!”
“God-damn you stupid fucking bitches!” he roared. No one came, though. His glass of milk and bedpan were already on the floor by the window. Emily hadn’t heard them slam into the glass. She’d kept walking by, toward her car, toward Him.
“Emily!” Nathaniel grabbed the bed rails and hauled himself over the side of the bed, crashing to the floor. “Emily! Stop!” He pulled himself across the floor, his braced legs twisting in excruciating pain.
“Stop! Stop!” His fingers scrabbled at the windowsill. Nathaniel couldn’t see what was happening outside, and if he could have, he couldn’t help anyway.
* * * *
“Wanna hop out and open the garage?” Carmine finished chewing the last of his chimichangas and crumpled up the wrappers into one giant, greasy, orange ball.
Wanna bite me? Peter slid out.
“Hey, Pete, you finish all the paperwork?” Carmine asked out the window.
Peter stopped mid-stride, pivoted, and marched back to the ambulance. He pulled the tin paperwork folder from between the seats. “Hope it stays quiet,” Peter muttered.
“Great,” Carmine shook his head, “you just jinxed us.”
“What? You superstitious or something?”
“Damn right I am, and you will be, too, working the bus,” Carmine said, looking up as if in fear. “EMS gods’ll never let us get away with that.” He grinned.
Peter gave Carmine an eyeful of despondence. EMS Gods? What a loser. “Yeah, well, sorry, I guess.” He meandered back toward the front door of the base.
* * * *
Bleary-eyed, Emily rattled her keys as she walked through the empty parking lot. The jingling gave her some small comfort. It covered those background noises that spooked her, and all noises spooked her. She walked faster.
“Should’ve asked Jean to come with me, or Maureen, not that they would have,” she said out loud, just to hear something. As a child, she had learned to sleep with a finger in the ear not pressed against her pillow. She didn’t mind monsters so much, as long as she didn’t hear them. Or see them.
“Whistle while you work, just whistle while you work,” she sang to herself.
Lights were scarce behind the brick monstrosity, and emaciated tree branches crept over the high wooden fence like grasping, skeletal claws. She hated parking way back here, especially on her night shifts, but management made her.
She stared down the row of mostly empty spaces to her white Dodge Aires parked next to the dumpster. A chill took her as the few brow
n leaves left clinging to the trees shook in the cold November breeze. She clutched her keys in a white-knuckled grip. She imagined footsteps behind her as she reached her car door.
She didn’t look back, though; she just couldn’t. Her chest heaved. “Come on, come on,” she said, scrabbling the key tip against the lock. The key went into the lock halfway and jammed.
It was upside down!
Yanking and twisting it, nearly crying, “Come on, come on,” she peeked over her shoulder. And saw nothing.
“Fraidy-cat, come on, come on.” She wiped her hands on her scarf then yanked the key again. It came free. She flipped it, pushed it in, and turned it with a thunk.
The door creaked open, and Emily slipped in. She pulled it shut, locked it, took another deep breath. Safety, a blanket of safety spread over her, and she relaxed, both hands caressing the steering wheel. She put the key in the ignition and turned. It started right up, and if it didn’t purr like a kitten it can be forgiven, for it soothed Emily more than a bubble bath and a glass of Asti. A ten-minute drive and she’d be home.
Emily pressed the brake, popped the shifter into reverse, threw her right arm over the seat, and screamed.
* * * *
Oh, this is gonna be so nice. Just a few hours. The paperwork was done. Finally. Peter unzipped his boots and kicked them off, leaving them at the foot of the mangled couch. He giggled to himself and slid into his sleeping bag, fluffed his pillow up, and laid his head down. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, EMS, earn money sleeping.
The phone rang.
Carmine picked it up. “Fuck,” he said across the room. “Fuck.”
Uh, oh, a double fucker.
“We gotta go, kid.” Carmine hung up the phone.
Chapter 3.
CARMINE SCREECHED the ambulance up onto the curb across the street from the Benson Manor Nursing Home. Red lights spun off the red brick face, dwarfed by the armada of blue sparkling from cruisers dotting the street. Police tape crisscrossed the sole entrance to the manor’s parking lot, set between the building and the high thick fence encircling the waste disposal plant adjacent. Two police officers in what appeared to be full riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder behind the tape.
Carmine clicked the mike, “A-14’s on scene with PD.”
“Received, 14. Thirteen-thirty-eight,” answered dispatch.
Peter, white knuckles clenching the OH-SHIT handle above his head, took a deep breath, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and popped open his door. Thank you, God. He unclicked his seatbelt and oozed out of his seat towards the blessed pavement.
“Sweet Jesus, Pete!” And Peter was yanked suddenly back, choking, into the ambulance. Carmine’s meaty paw had him by the back of his collar. “What the hell’d we talk about before?”
“Uh, chimichangas?”
“Great.” Carmine smiled despite himself and let go. “This scene look safe to you?”
“The, uh, the SWAT team’s here,” Peter said, “and a ton of cruisers. Some lights around back, too.”
“Look, kid, just cause the blue canaries are here, don’t mean it’s safe. We’re too close as it is.” Carmine pointed at the two police officers. “And see those two guys there?”
“What, the SWAT guys?”
“Yeah. They’re here, that means the scene ain’t safe,” Carmine said. “You don’t ever go in unless you got clearance from the chief, SWAT commander, or the sniffer.”
“What the hell’s a sniffer?”
“Him.” Carmine pointed to a small man, clad in a gray hat and trench coat, who materialized at the side of the two SWAT officers. Dropping to one knee, he surveyed the ground carefully then pulled a gray tile from his briefcase. He placed the tile on the ground carefully then drew lines outward from it.
“Chalk?” asked Peter. “What’s he doing?”
“Securing the scene.”
The sniffer abruptly raised his other hand, pointed at the ambulance with his forefinger, then gave a thumbs-up sign. Without looking up, he took an immediate interest in the walls of the Benson Manor, peering so closely at the bricks that his nose almost touched them.
“C’mon Pete, grab everything,” Carmine said. “C’mon, safe as it’s gonna get.”
Peter piled all of the equipment onto their stretcher: the first-in bag, the portable oxygen canister, the portable suction kit, a defibrillator, a collar bag, and a backboard. Then he pulled the stretcher, and the wheels came clattering down.
Carmine took the lead, and they walked over to the police tape. The SWAT officers did not move, did not acknowledge Peter or Carmine. They wore some kind of body armor that looked like black plastic, and strapped across their chests were assault rifles. Riot shields leaned on the fence within easy reach. Peter also noticed short broad-bladed swords strapped to their hips.
“Swords?” Peter asked.
“One cannot always rely on guns,” said the man in the gray trench coat, the sniffer, who was dressed like a CIA spook. He doffed his gray Oxford-quality hat and looked up. “Mister Gutierrez.”
“Detective Winters,” Carmine said.
Detective Winters’s gaze passed over Carmine and settled on Peter. They froze, intensifying. “They’re clean, for now,” Detective Winters said, glancing up at the SWAT team, then back down at the metal tile and chalk pattern he had drawn upon the ground. The silver lines seemed to shimmer and bend amidst the shadows. “You shall not require the stretcher.”
“Got your boy leashed this time, eh, Carmine?” said one of the SWAT officers. He towered over everyone but his partner.
Carmine grinned.
They left the stretcher and stepped over the silver pattern, following Detective Winters down the dark potholed pavement between the building and the large moldy fence. The only light came from the ambulance and cruisers behind. The tree branches seemed to crawl over the fence, reaching, rustling.
“Quietly, soft as silk, the killing began, decades past. Whispers, as throats were slit, echoed in the cool evening parks. Blood seeped from the nameless wretches who dwelt under the bridges and drizzled into the river to mix in the black misted canals that scar this scab of earth that is Colton Falls. And no one cared. Years passed.
“And the crumpled dead eyes of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson bore silent witness to the slaying of the banshee-whores who bled in the boarding houses and alleyways whence their trade was plied. Glass shattered, feet stomped, doors pounded, and guns shot, but always in the morning, sometimes later, sometimes much later, they were always found, gaunt and gray, a visage of eldritch horror riveted to their sallow flesh. And still, no one cared. For years, no one dared. Apathy, ignorance, as in ages before, became the mantra.
“Guns blazed in the night as tires screeched. Houses were strafed, riddled with bullets, and men quivered in corners, fuming, impotent. Then those shootings stopped.
“Sometimes those young men in those fine cars, suped up and shiny, after their tires had screamed, and their pulses thumped in the joy and adrenaline of explosion and recoil and death, they would be found. Young men armed to the teeth lay sprawled dead upon the cold concrete floors. Their veins as empty as the shell casings, still smoking, littering the ground.
“I shall not lie. The police were happy, less work for them. They tried to keep it quiet, to hide it, to conceal it, but word grows on the street, and death is its catalyst. But the bums and whores and gangsters talked. A festering wound, it scourged the city. And those who at first did not care, who ignored, those who looked away, began to hear, and despite themselves began to listen. And they began to fear.”
“What’s eldritch mean?” Peter whispered.
“Shhhhhh.”
“He always talk like this? Where’s he from?”
“The Twilight Zone,” Carmine muttered.
They rounded the corner of the building, and Peter shielded his eyes from the blazing scene lights that turned the mid of night to noon. More men in SWAT gear were posted along the fence and building.
“
The woman is dead; you cannot help her.” Detective Winters stared off; Carmine and Peter might not have even been there. “This way. The medical examiner has been detained at an apartment complex on Essex Street. He cannot be here to pronounce her, and though death to me is chaff to the scythe, I cannot pronounce her, bound as I am by these rules, these protocols my superiors,” he said ‘superiors’ the way most people say ‘local government,’ “tell me I must abide by, limiting my actions, movements, my effectiveness. One of you must pronounce her, you … medical personnel.”
“No problem, Winters, uh, Detective Winters, that is.”
Detective Winters just stared at Peter as though he were an insect or less.
“Sorry.”
Detective Winters led them through the parking lot. Between two duct-tape lines on the ground they walked. Photo flashes popped like lightning all around them. Men combed the earth, scuttling about like insects, their eyes on the grid-work set up covering the ground. Up to a white Dodge Aires Detective Winters led them. The front windshield was spidered crimson.
“It shall take only one of you to do this,” Detective Winters said. “Touch nothing but the ‘X’ marked on her neck. There you will find no pulse. Wear a glove.”
“What if—?” Peter began.
“She is dead, her soul has departed,” Detective Winters said. “I assure you, if it were any different, I would have taken the appropriate measures.”
Carmine placed a hand on Peter’s shoulder, “You mind doing this, Pete?” he asked. “Uh, I know the car, and … her. She’s a nurse. Here.”
“Uh, yeah, no problem, man,” Peter lied as sweat began to bead on his back, his forehead. Last corpse tried to kill me. Swallowing, Peter edged towards the small white car. Glass crunched underfoot. The driver’s side window was gone, only a jagged ridge left.
The woman in the car was a nurse; she wore scrubs, a pink jacket, a scarf. Peter leaned in the window. Half of her face was gone. “Jesus!” Peter yelled. His knees buckled, but he regained them, steadied himself on the door. Behind, Detective Winters hissed like an angry pit viper.