Sentinel Event

by Samantha Shelby

  But there was something liberating about dangling like that, being washed out into the sea of death, suspended, instead of curled up on the floor. When he had lost his sight before blacking out entirely, Aidriel had felt as if he were a part of the sky, floating free. There was nothing and no one around to press in and imprison him, only a total lack of boundaries, like the swirling of the winds. He hated being smothered, and that was how he was feeling now.

  The urge to run returned, like when he had sensed the Passers converging on the Bird Cage. These people were just as bloodthirsty and unreasonable as the spirits. And he had signed his freedom away without considering how much worse it was than being on his own. It suddenly dawned on him, however, that he was not entirely helpless; he needed only to sign something else.

  The others had waited with patient curiosity while Aidriel mused, and they looked on expectantly when he once more found his feet.

  “Dr. deTarlo, could I speak with you in private?” he asked, his voice calm and soft. Dreamer and Chester exchanged a surprised look but did not comment.

  “We’ll see about a car,” stated Williams. Dreamer pursed her lips in disappointment, but reluctantly followed the Passerist out of the room, the red shape of his handprint still visible on her cheek.

  Williams’s security staff and assistant were set up in an adjoining suite, waiting at his beck and call. Chester paused in the open doorway, thoughtfully regarding the men at their busy work.

  “Nearest car rental,” he requested of his slim assistant, who typed and clicked hurriedly on his laptop for a minute or two before telling Williams the address.

  “Would you like for me to set up a rental?” the assistant asked, his hand hovering at the ready over his mouse.

  “It’s within walking distance, yes? I’ll go there myself. I need to get out of here for a while.”

  “Just six blocks, on Annie’s Street.” The assistant quickly entered the address into a GPS device and handed it over to Chester. For several moments, the Passerist examined the map and route on the touch screen without speaking. Dreamer noticed one of the security staff was peering outside through binoculars from behind the moleskin curtains on the farthest of the windows, reminding her of a spy flick.

  “Alright,” Chester said when he was satisfied with the information he had gleaned. He gathered a few things from a table near the door. Stepping out, Williams gestured for Dreamer to come. She hesitated, but realized it was within his power to block her from seeing Aidriel, even if she punished the unacceptable way he had treated her by quitting.

  In the elevator, they stared silently forward, she caressing her stinging cheek, he pulling a knit cap down over his hair and zipping up his jacket. He looked at her thoughtfully and saw the mark on her face, but did not apologize.

  “You’ll get a raise,” he said nonchalantly, as if that was all required to avoid a lawsuit. “A substantial one. And a car or something.”

  Dreamer furrowed her brow unhappily, opening her mouth to reply but checking herself. If she had to turn the other cheek to hang on to her part in this, she would. She could be tolerant. They were coming back to her now, the things she’d heard about Chester’s famous temper. She’d just have to tread more carefully from now on.

  They passed through the lobby and out onto the sidewalk, Williams glancing at the GPS and turning left, slipping sunglasses on simultaneously. Dreamer took a few quick hop-steps to catch up and walk beside him. She winced at the pain in her limbs that the swift movement caused, and wished she had taken more painkillers before they left. The bruising effects of the ambulance crash were still very present to her nerves.

  On the outside The Pen Ryn looked nothing like the building printed as its logo; it was high and grand and surveyed the surrounding city center with gleaming window eyes, but was only a rectangular skyscraper. It was not the tallest building in the area, but the muted stonework was impressive from the front, nothing like the nondescript cement wall that filled the view from the parking garage at the rear. Looking up and back over her shoulder at it, Dreamer got the awed sense of being little and inexperienced in a major city. While Fort Wayne was not a small town, the phlebotomist had not traveled much, and was largely impressed by her surroundings. She impulsively wanted to express her wide-eyed interest to Williams, but he was clearly unmoved by the sights.

  For the first block neither spoke, and they pretended to be oblivious to the presence of the other. Chester looked around continuously, and Dreamer saw that he was looking at the faces of all the spirits nearby. He even looked for seconds at a time at what appeared to her to be nothing at all, though she assumed he could see the invisible spirits. Her Passer was nowhere to be seen.

  “What did it look like?” Dreamer asked finally, turning sideways to avoid a woman with a stroller coming in the opposite direction.

  “What did what look like?” responded Williams, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

  “The attack in the Bird Cage.”

  “It looked like a mob of Passers beating someone to death.”

  Dreamer wanted more details, but couldn’t think of how to ask.

  “Why do you think the Passers didn’t stick around after the ambulance crashed?” she inquired instead.

  “You got me. It’s as if they do strange things like that just to throw us, so we don’t know what to expect.”

  Up ahead, Williams’s Passer, Rod, appeared from around a corner and stopped to wait on the sidewalk, exchanging nods of greeting with Chester and falling into step beside them.

  “My friend,” Rod greeted in the manner that Passers used only when speaking to their living companion.

  “Where have you been?” asked Williams.

  “Wandering.” It was what Passers always said when they were asked their whereabouts.

  “I can speak plainly about your ‘patient’ while I am far from him,” Rod continued after a moment. “My deepest desire since first I clapped eyes on him has been to harm him. Even now, it requires my strongest resolve not to run to where he is and attack.”

  “Why’s that?” Chester asked calmly. Rod appeared to exhale slowly and shrug, its face grim and resolute. Dreamer watched the Passer tensely, wondering if it would do as it said.

  “Something about him inspires the purest, hottest of hatreds,” the ghost explained. “All control is lost in the instinct to cause him pain.”

  Dreamer glared at the Passer, but wasn’t noticed.

  The spirits were, for all intents and purposes, humans without bodies. While they were often plagued by the pain of their demise, they could also feel other emotions and were influenced by conversation. They could not fly or travel from one place to another any faster than they could run, and she was pretty sure they were not often, if ever, seen in any type of vehicle while it was moving. Their range of vision and knowledge was only as broad as their experiences, but they had an uncanny sense of what would happen next. Because of this sense, they often affected the outcome of future events.

  Though she was not old enough to have seen the beginning of the Sentience, Dreamer had learned of it in her history education at school, and had seen videos online and on television. She had witnessed the records of the greatest kindnesses the Passers had done, including showing engineers the flaws in trains and airplanes, warning about impending floods and fires, and even guiding lost travelers out of the wilderness. Everyone had experienced a lifesaving intervention by a Passer at some time in their life. Dreamer’s was when she was ten and was on a camping trip with her Girl Scout troop. She still had nightmares about the bear.

  “This trip makes me miss the protests,” Chester commented bitterly, breaking a brief silence.

  “You’d rather be cussed at and have stuff thrown at you?” Dreamer asked him. Williams shrugged his shoulders but smirked.

  “What exactly is the upset now, anyway?” asked the phleb. “I haven’t been keeping informed.”


  “Overpopulation,” Chester answered. “People seem to think that Passers are preventing too many deaths, and that the world is becoming overpopulated.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Of course not. Passers prevent such a small amount of accidents, it isn’t making much difference. People still die of natural causes and illnesses, suicides have increased, and many accidental deaths are because people are less cautious. They think that because Passers can see what is coming, that they’ll prevent every death. If there is no warning, people think there must be no danger.”

  “Doesn’t that tie in with why the Passers are here?”

  “In what way do you mean?”

  “I mean the belief that Passers aren’t supposed to be here. The Sentience was an extreme imbalance in the spiritual planes, most likely an accidental one that the Passers took advantage of, and there aren’t supposed to be so many of them. Ghosts used to be mostly oblivious to living people, but now they are controlling and try to bend the real world to how they want it. It’s unnatural how the dead hold so much sway over the living. The rate or manner in which people are dying is directly affected by the ghosts and is only increasing their number. The Passers are power-hungry.”

  As she spoke, she glanced distrustfully at Rod, but the spirit did not appear to be listening.

  “That’s a popular view on things.” Chester’s tone kept his opinion about her statement ambiguous.

  “It’s kind of the only view that makes sense,” Dreamer pointed out. “Aidriel could really be a poster child for it. If the naysayers heard about him, they’d have a perfect example to support their hatred for the Passers and their intrusion.”

  “That’s not going to happen.” Williams’s voice steeled almost threateningly. “That would be a bad thing for A.S.M.”

  “How would deTarlo’s report about Aidriel affect the protests, then?”

  Chester made a face and stuffed his hands in his pockets, hunching his shoulders as he walked.

  “That was a part of our contract,” he said. “In exchange for using the Bird Cage, she had to sign an agreement that the study would not be published for at least eighteen months.”

  “And what did you plan to do with Aidriel when the study was completed?”

  Williams shrugged.

  “To tell you the truth, I was skeptical enough at the beginning that I didn’t think it would matter. I thought he was just a head case, and would be locked up when we were finished.”

  Rod turned suddenly on its heel and faced the direction they had come from, standing still and staring back at the hotel. The look of hatred was visible on its face, but it restrained itself from moving.

  “We need to get a move on,” Dreamer commented, slowing to glance back.

  Williams continued forward without pause, and she painfully quickened her pace to follow.

  At the rental shop, Williams had the clerk put the vehicle’s rental in Dreamer’s name, as he had intended when he told her to come along, though he was the one to plunk down a card to pay for it. The clerk assumed as a result that Chester and Dreamer were a couple and made a comment to that effect, ignoring the resulting awkward glance from the phleb. The Passerist didn’t bother to correct him and told Dreamer to sign the agreement.

  The new smartphone in Williams’s pocket rang several times while they waited at the counter for the card to go through. In irritation, Chester took out the cell and glanced at the display, which read “Olivia.”

  “I need to take this,” he told Dreamer, leaving her to handle the rest of the paperwork while he stepped outside.

  Once on the sidewalk, Chester hit the answer button, staring at the pavement.

  “It’s Liv,” the woman on the other end said.

  “I know. Are you alright?”

  “Yeah, are you? I heard there was an accident.”

  “I wasn’t in the vehicle when it happened.”

  Olivia exhaled heavily in relief.

  “Bonnie broke her finger yesterday; I took her to the hospital.”

  Chester cursed under his breath, turning to glance through the window of the business. Dreamer appeared lost where the paperwork was concerned and was looking to see if he was done and could come help her.

  “What happened?”

  “One of her little friends accidentally closed a door on her. She was really upset; cried herself hoarse. She wanted you.”

  Williams grimaced, resting his hand on the wall and leaning against it.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said.

  “Don’t apologize. I’ve told you, I love the munchkin.”

  “Did you have to stay at the hospital long?”

  “Yeah, you know ERs. I miss you.”

  “You always say that when I’m gone.”

  “I always mean it.”

  Chester looked up and saw Dreamer was talking to the clerk, who was getting impatient.

  “I have to go now, Liv,” he said. As he was taking the phone from his ear to hang up, he heard Olivia tell him she loved him, but he’d pressed the end call button before he thought to respond.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dr. St. Cross’s Passer, Andrei, stood at the foot of the shrink’s bed, wearing what had been a khaki button-up shirt, watching and waiting for the man to awaken. The psychiatrist had been spending a lot of time asleep as of late since he switched to an analgesic that made him drowsy. His doctor kept insisting rest was required for healing, and though he complied, St. Cross didn’t voice his doubts that he would recover any faster than he already was.

  Blue velvet curtains were drawn over the blinds in the bedroom windows, creating an illusion of night that made Andrei all the clearer in its pale, hazy form. The temperature in the room began to fall and St. Cross shivered in his sleep, slowly coming around when he felt the bed shutter. Andrei was gripping one of the corner knobs on the footboard.

  “Wake up, I have something important to tell you,” it said.

  St. Cross propped his head up on his elbow, blinking repeatedly to clear away the sleep. There was an uneasy truce between the psychiatrist and his Passer after the accident, and though it had been discussed more than once, Andrei could shed little light on what had happened.

  “I saw what I would do,” it’d explained vaguely, “and I did it.”

  Even St. Cross’s psychiatric mind could not solve the puzzle of Andrei’s future sight.

  “I have learned,” said Andrei now, “that your patient is being taken to the dead zone in Wellsburg, Iowa.”

  St. Cross looked lost and continued to blink.

  “With this knowledge among my kind,” continued Andrei, “there will be a much more concerted effort to prevent him from arriving at any safety. If you want to find him alive, you should go immediately to where he is in Ohio.”

  St. Cross shook his head to become more awake and said, “Go get Todd to help me.”

  Williams had his staff load plastic tubs of clothing and supplies into the trunks of the rental car and his own vehicle. He, deTarlo, Dreamer and Aidriel sat lined up on the stone wall bordering the raised flower bed behind the hotel, watching. The patient and phleb were both hanging their heads sleepily, their eyes struggling to stay open against a stupor thanks to their pills.

  “You need to wake up,” deTarlo said to Dreamer. “You’re an accident waiting to happen.”

  Dreamer appeared offended and blinked rapidly, picked up her cardboard coffee cup and took a drink. The caffeine had not seemed to kick in yet.

  The trunks being slammed startled Aidriel and he rubbed his right eye with the heel of his hand. He got to his feet to stretch and the others followed suit. Chester’s assistant finished programming the GPS device in the dashboard of the rental and slid out of the driver’s seat, leaving the keys in the ignition for Dreamer.

  “You’re all set,” he told her, shuffling through some papers and handing her the
ones regarding the rental, along with printed directions and a credit card.

  “We’re only about an hour and a half from the airport,” deTarlo told the phlebotomist. “You can sleep on the plane. You need to stay very alert.”

  Dreamer pursed her lips and swallowed, nodding. She was becoming more alert as the gravity of the situation sank in.

  Aidriel blearily fumbled with the handle on the side of the car, slid into the passenger seat and strapped in. Dreamer walked over to the still-open driver’s door, but stopped when deTarlo gripped her sleeve at the elbow.

  “Be very careful,” the psychologist said, appearing to be concerned. “We all think he’s very important.”

  Dreamer nodded neutrally, pulling her arm away and entering the car. Williams, deTarlo and the others got into the second vehicle, and both engines started at the same time.

  As she pulled out onto the highway, Dreamer glanced at the reflection in the rearview mirror of the car following them. The computerized voice of the GPS told her to drive point-eight miles and merge onto a ramp to the expressway.

  Aidriel crossed his arms and leaned his head against the window, closing his eyes.

  “Turn on the radio,” he mumbled.

  Dreamer glanced at him and asked, “Why?”

  “I don’t like the quiet.”

  She flicked on the stereo and scanned until she found a station she liked, spinning the steering wheel to turn onto the ramp. Aidriel drifted to sleep easily.

  When he first awoke, Aidriel felt as if he had been sleeping for only minutes and was a little stiff. He was still awfully lethargic and wasn’t entirely aware of what was happening. The radio was quieter than before, and Dreamer was continually glancing into the rearview mirror. She was driving very quickly, weaving back and forth on the expressway around other cars, her eyes ever darting between the road and the mirrors.