Dead Duck

by Micheal Maxwell

  As it turned out, though, Flynt didn’t need to run very far. Bower was heading directly for the cathedral connected to the quad by a thin strip of sidewalk. It was a small building and Flynt might not have known it was a cathedral or church if it weren’t for the bell-tower and the sign out front.

  “Time to fly!” Bower screamed at the top of his lungs. It was a sound of sheer joy. Flynt couldn’t help but think of a birthday party at a mental asylum. Bower’s cheer was a call to join the madness.

  “Humans can’t fly!” Flynt yelled.

  “Oh, but I can! You watch me! Quack! Quack!”

  Steele nearly caught up with Bower as he entered the cathedral. Bower opened the door, darted inside, and then reached back for the door. When Steele tried to enter, Bower pushed the door forward so hard it caught Steele in the face, sending him staggering backward and rolling down the stairs.

  He let out a curse as he fell and the sight of Steele hitting the pavement nearly locked Flynt’s knees. He never saw Steele in such a vulnerable position; it was not a good look for him.

  “Don’t stand there gawking at me!” Steele commanded. “Go get that lunatic!”

  Flynt gave a nod and a little salute as he ran through the doors and into the cathedral. The room was dimly lit, but there was enough ambient light to see the shape of Ben Bower running through a doorway in the back of the sanctuary. Flynt followed behind, his breath coming in huge gulps of wheezy air.

  Flynt ran through the same doorway Bower went through. There was a dark hallway with a flight of stairs at the end of it. Ahead of Flynt, Bower continued to sing out musical little noises. Quack! Ha! Time to fly! Ha! Ha! The taunting calls were growing fainter as Bower bounded up the stairs ahead of Flynt.

  Flynt went running through the darkness, more out of fear than pursuit. He was always slightly afraid of the dark, but darkness inside a church was a menacing inky blackness. He pressed on, fighting to overcome the searing pain of his lungs. He was sure some demon or other monstrosity was waiting just ahead to pluck out his eyes in the terrifying darkness, just waiting to—

  Mercifully, he came to the stairs. There was the promise of light coming from above, the soft natural light of the night. Flynt took the stairs two at a time, guided by the lunatic calls from Bower.

  Flynt reached the top of the stairs, finding himself standing in the bell tower. The bell itself hung between him and Bower. Bower was perched on the little ledge looking out onto the roof. Beyond the ledge, there was a drop of about thirty feet. Bower glanced back as Flynt carefully made his way around the bell.

  “Whoa!” Bower giggled. “The big cop is fast!”

  “So are you.”

  “Yo, did anyone ever tell you that you look sort of like a Leprechaun?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “That means you’re magic! That means you can fly with me!”

  “Fly? You going to fly off the roof?”

  “Yeah! They’re calling me to fly with them.”

  “Who?”

  Bower looked at him like he was an idiot. “The ducks, man! The angels!”

  “You don’t have wings,” Flynt pointed out.

  “Don’t need ’em. Ha! The ducks will take care of me. They’ll show me how.”

  Flynt could see that the kid was completely out of his mind. Whatever was in Leik’s drug was powerful stuff. Flynt rummaged through the mess of information in his mind, looking for anything that would help him talk down someone that was stoned out of their mind. He’d never done it himself, but he saw Bill Barrow do it a few times back in the day.

  “You think they’ll show me, too?” Flynt asked.

  Bower’s eyes grew even wider. He pointed at Flynt as if there was a magic wand in his hand. “Hell yeah! I bet they would. You could fly with me like I told you!”

  “Sweet.” He stepped forward, to the ledge. He looked down and saw that Steele was just now getting to his feet. It was hard to tell from the distance and the night, but he was pretty sure his partner’s nose was bleeding. He must have taken a pretty good thump from that door.

  “What about my partner? You think he can come, too?”

  “Yeah, man! Ha! The more the merrier. Everyone needs to see this. The ducks, the angels, the light…the swirling shapes and…yeah.”

  “Come with me, then. Help me talk him into it. He won’t listen to me.”

  “We have to go now, man. The ducks…I don’t know if they’ll wait.”

  “It won’t take long,” Flynt said. He stepped closer and took Bower’s elbow, figuring it couldn’t hurt, added: “Quack! Ha!”

  Bower cackled and bobbled his head side to side. For one terrifying moment, Flynt thought the kid was going to back off the roof. But, still laughing and beaming with joy, he moved toward Flynt. They walked back down the stairs arm in arm, with Bower quacking and laughing all the way down.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Steele wasn’t sure if he was ever so equally angry and embarrassed at the same time. Ben Bower was a strong kid, sure, but Steele knew he should have overpowered him. The fact the kid got away from him so easily after being cuffed was baffling. But then the whole thing with the cathedral’s front door…well, that made him want to put the kid in a headlock of his own. To top it all off, Flynt managed to get Bower to come down from the bell tower without any form of violence whatsoever.

  He was currently taking his frustrations out on the steering wheel. Flynt sat in the passenger seat, turned slightly sideways to peer into the back where Professor Leik and Ben Bower were sitting. Steele knew he made a risky decision allowing Bower to refuse to go to the hospital, or call for an ambulance, but Leik insisted he could bring the kid down from his high faster than any paramedic. A quick trip to his lab and a single injection later, he proved himself correct.

  Ben Bower was currently staring out of the back window, watching the night roll by. There was still a smile on his face but it was not the joyful, crazy one he was wearing while perched on the bell tower. Instead, this was a smile of the tired and peaceful. He was zonked out, so subdued that Steele fully expected him to start drooling at any moment.

  “What did you give him?” Steele asked.

  “Yeah, he looks like he’s about to croak,” Flynt added.

  “Just a minorly altered sedative. It’s really no stronger than typical sedatives, it just hits a lot faster.”

  “Good,” Steele said. “Because if we get him to the hospital and he’s still like this, that’s on you.”

  “On me?” Leik protested.

  “You made this crap,” Steele snapped.

  “Yes, and you have been playing fast and loose with who can abuse it and who goes to jail. A fine line of distinction.

  “That is my call, you’re right. However, it has saved your rear end, too. Would you want me explaining to the ER doctors what was wrong with him? Maybe how he got so high in the first place?”

  “You know, he doesn’t need to go to the hospital,” Leik said.

  “Is that right? He was seeing ducks and angels.”

  “And don’t forget,” Flynt said, “he was slamming people with wrestling moves.”

  “Or did you miss that in your retreat down to the parking lot?” Steele asked.

  “Honestly, that did shock me. Not a single time have I ever seen that sort of manic behavior. Especially not violence.”

  “So, you’ve never had kids throw punches or try to fly from the tops of buildings before?”

  “Never. Not at all.”

  “You think he just got too much?” Flynt asked.

  Leik considered the question. “It’s certainly a possibility, but the drug is not designed that way. The violence and the delusions of grandeur—hence his thinking he could fly—should not even be a part of the experience.”

  “What about the quacking?” Flynt asked.

  “On occasion, yes. You see, there are these processes in the brain that—”

  “Nope,” Steele interrupted. “I don’t want to
hear any of that right now. Right now, I want to get Ben Bower to a hospital to get some medical care.”

  “And what about me?” Leik asked.

  “What about you?”

  “Why am I here? You haven’t charged me with anything.”

  “Not yet, anyway. I need you with us because you’re familiar with the drug. When Bower can talk, I need you there to tell us what is typical and what is not. It may point us towards finding out what happened to Carson Butler.”

  Leik clearly was not in favor of this, but there was a look of acceptance on his face as he, too, looked out of the window. The car fell into silence, the only noise came from the labored breaths of Ben Bower.

  As Steele expected, Flynt broke the silence. He was starting to wonder if his partner got socially uncomfortable when there was a quiet of more than three seconds.

  “Professor Leik, does D710 give people the ability to suddenly know how to wrestle?”

  “What? No. Of course not. Why would you ask such a ridiculous thing?”

  Flynt shrugged, as if genuinely disappointed. “That really was an exceptional headlock.”

  * * *

  When Ben Bower was taken to his hospital bed an hour and a half later, the first thing he did was throw up. He wasn’t hooked up to any IVs, as the doctor wasn’t quite sure what to run. His mess went all over the floor, missing Flynt’s shoes by less than a foot. Flynt grimaced and immediately ran out of the room yelling: “Nurse!”

  Steele stepped to the opposite side of the room where Leik was sitting in a chair. Ben looked to both of them as he wiped his mouth. Steele took the pitcher of water from the small table by the bed and poured Ben a cup. He handed the cup to Ben and watched the kid drink it down.

  “Thanks,” Bower said.

  “See this mark right here on the bridge of my nose?” Steele asked. “That’s from where you shoved a door in my face. You’re lucky it didn’t break my nose.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You also punched me in the jaw, but there wasn’t much power behind it.”

  “Sorry, man. What do you want me to say?”

  “I want to know what happened to you tonight.”

  Bower looked beyond Steele, his eyes locking with Leik. He was scared and maybe even a little guilty. He looked away from Leik and then to his hands, folded in front of him.

  “I got a little high,” Bower said.

  “On what?”

  He hesitated here, looking to Bower again. Steele stepped between them and shook his head. “Leik has no authority here. It’s you and me right now. You help me out and be truthful, you may get out of this with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Tell me lies, you and Leik both might be looking at a lot of trouble.”

  Before Bower could answer, the door opened. Two nurses came in and a janitor behind them. The janitor pushed a bucket with a mop sticking out of it. As he set about his work on the other side of the bed, the nurses asked Bower a series of questions about how he was feeling. Bower claimed that he was feeling mostly fine, maybe a little tired. During all of this, Flynt stepped in beside Steele just as casually as he could.

  When the nurses and janitor were gone and the room smelled like stringent Pine-Sol rather than vomit, Steele pressed on.

  “What were you high on?”

  “D710. Sorry Professor, but these guys came visiting me today and it freaked me out and…I’m sorry, man. I needed more.”

  “So, you broke into my office?” Leik asked.

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the window.”

  Leik waved that away and looked to the detectives. “We found my rubber ducky shoved down your pants. Did you mean to take the D710 tonight?” Steele pressed on.

  “No! I was going to wait until I got back home. But I guess some sort of squirted out of the duck, and… what did I do?” he asked. “Other than try beating you up?”

  “You were holding someone in a headlock when we found you. And I believe you may have assaulted someone else before that. Once I cuffed you, you escaped and went running to the cathedral and—”

  “And I was going to fly.”

  “Yeah, but I stopped you,” Flynt said with a smile. “That was me.”

  Bower ignored Flynt. He looked back to Leik, taking a deep breath. Steele was startled to see tears in the young man’s eyes.

  “There was something wrong. Something different this time.”

  “What do you mean?” Steele asked.

  “The trip. It wasn’t the same. I knew it right away. It was scary.”

  “Can you explain what was different?” Leik asked.

  Bower searched for the right words. There was a nervous smile on his face. He was afraid of how nuts it would all sound if spoken aloud. “For starters, it was more intense this time. That initial breakthrough when it’s just the swirling colors, it’s usually sort of like rising up over a hill and being gently nudged down it.”

  “Yes. That’s a great way to explain it. But not this time?” Leik asked.

  “No. This time the colors were spinning and dancing and seemed alive. And when I felt myself getting to the top of that hill, there was no nudge. Instead, it was like being pushed by the hand of God. And the hill wasn’t a hill at all, but this huge sweeping nothing. And if I’m going to be honest, it was beautiful. For a few seconds, I wondered if I died. It was that peaceful.”

  “What happened then?” Leik asked. “Can you remember what caused you to attack people? Or why you thought you would be able to fly?”

  “Yeah,” he said. There was a dreamlike wonder on Bower’s face now. He spoke slowly as he recounted what he experienced. “I know it sounds crazy, but there were ducks. I know they were sort of there before when I’ve done it, but they were everywhere. And they were talking to me, but like with human mouths. They were floating in that nothingness and I realized that the nothing was water and I was drowning but…but it was good. They told me that now that I was with them, I could do anything. I could fly. I could live forever. I could do absolutely anything I wanted.”

  “But why attack people?” Leik asked.

  “I attacked those men because they interfered with what I was seeing. They were the real world, tearing into my paradise. The ducks, they told me to hurt them. But even in that command, there was love and peace.”

  Steele thought it was all mumbo jumbo, but he also recalled the look of glee in Bower’s eyes when he threw that first punch that socked him in the jaw. There was no malicious intent there.

  “And you really thought you could fly?” Leik asked.

  “Well, not really. It wouldn’t have been like flying. It would have been jumping into that huge open void they were all in. The ducks and the colors…I would have been joining them.”

  “You would have broken your neck,” Steele said. He looked at Bower, trying not to see him as just another rattled druggie. There was some sort of peace in his eyes. He certainly believed everything he saw while high. Nodding towards the door, he said, “Professor Leik, can I see you outside, please.”

  Steele waited for Leik to get up and head for the door. Flynt followed, taking one final look back at Bower.

  In the hallway, the detectives stood on either side of Leik. Steele couldn’t help but notice that Leik looked genuinely confused. He slowly started shaking his head and rubbing at his chin, trying to figure out what was happening.

  “You think he just had a really bad trip?” Steele asked.

  “It’s a possibility. But I’ve logged more than three hundred experiences—roughly twenty have been my own and the others have come from willing participants. Ben has been one of those participants on two occasions. Not a single time out of all of those experiences did someone report something like this. I’ve only seen one negative mention. It was from a girl that lost her father to cancer the day before.”

  “So, then what explanation can you offer us?”

  Leik frantically searched for an answer but could only offer a frustrated shrug. “I honestly hav
e no idea. The intense effects he mentioned as well as the complete disassociation with reality…none of that would come about due to any of the ingredients in D710. If it was just too much taken at once, the result would have been the same, but he’d be suffering from a headache and upset stomach.”

  “Well, we’ve still got the duck,” Steele said. “I’m taking it to the station.”

  Leik nodded in defeat. “If I can help in any way…”

  Steele had to give him credit. He may be very protective of his weird little drug, but he was beginning to understand what it could be causing.

  “Is there some sort of lab there?” Leik asked.

  “Yes, on the lower floors.”

  “I’d be happy to assist your people. I’ve been working on D710 for more than five years. I’m just as anxious as you to figure out what is going on.”

  “That would be helpful.”

  What Steele did not say, but was thinking, was that if it turned out this psychoactive drug was somehow starting to harm those that took it and Leik was giving it to them regularly, he might be seeing a lot more of the station than just the downstairs lab.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mandy stood in the center of the packed room, took a look around, sighed, and let out a curse. All around her, the terrible cliched pump-pump-screech of cliched techno music filled the old warehouse. Roughly two hundred ravers were writhing around like zombies. She supposed they would consider it dancing, but to Mandy, it looked like puppets being yanked back and forth by a deranged puppeteer. Some of them held pacifiers in their mouths or tied around their necks. Some of these pacifiers glowed in the dark or had blinking lights in them.

  How did she ever let Raven talk her into coming out here? She knew the answer but standing in this sea of zoned trippers, it was hard to remember. The truth of the matter was she came here for the drugs. It certainly wasn’t the men. There was an alarming number of forty-something dudes on the floor, desperately clinging to the rave fad that dominated the late nineties.