Sentinel Event

by Samantha Shelby

  The city hall of Des Moines, Iowa, was a majestic structure built in the three-story Beaux-Arts style—long and rectangular, accented with faux pillars and made of cream-colored granite. It was fronted by gardens and a wide staircase leading down into a field that ended at the Des Moines River. Camped out all over the pristine front lawn were protesters. Their efforts dampened by the rain, clusters of people stood miserably under umbrellas or stretched blankets over their heads to try and stay dry, their posters and signs sagging in the downpour.

  Chester Williams sat in the front passenger seat of his car, parked along the side of Locust Street, a road that ran at a right angle to City Hall. Chester had told his assistant to pull over so he could gauge the scene before entering it. DeTarlo lurked behind him, her presence intense as if she could guess that he had spoken with Dreamer and hadn’t told her. She was, however, patiently silent, dividing her glances between Williams and the soggy picketers. Nothing seemed to be happening.

  Chester was a very hands-on manager. He was young and vital enough to not wish for a simple overseer position. He micromanaged A.S.M., which annoyed some and inspired awe in others. It took effort for him to ignore the constant requests for guidance in petty tasks by his employees. Some of them were too dependent on him, he felt, and he relied on Fagin, his close friend and the director of A.S.M. in his absence, to handle the things that he couldn’t. The fact that Fagin had had very little contact with him since his departure only cemented Chester’s trust that the other man was busy taking care of the organization and didn’t have the time or need to ask for help.

  When the private orderlies, doctors, and other temporary staff members were assembled for the trip to Kelly Road, Williams had personally seen to their “orientation.” Chester liked to pick and choose which tasks he wanted to handle himself and which he passed off to others. It was the privilege of leadership, and the only way to fulfill the need he was born with to be moving and doing things his own way.

  That was why he was sitting here in Des Moines; him, Chester Williams, a leading voice in Passerism and the head of the American Sentience Movement. He went whenever he could, if it mattered to him, which it had not where the Farrar meeting was concerned. But he hated having to send a representative to anything he had a specific outlook on, because they invariably made things worse and never handled it how he would. It was Chester’s opinion that if there were three or four identical copies of him, these protests would all be taken care of by now.

  “What’re we waiting for?” deTarlo breathed, as if afraid of breaking a spell.

  “I’m looking,” Chester responded. “I don’t rush in blindly.”

  “Ah.” Her tone of voice left it ambiguous whether she was agreeing genuinely or ironically.

  Chester signaled to his assistant, who started the car and drove up to East 1st Street and turned left, parking in the lot in the rear of the building. Getting out, Williams took a deep breath and entered the hall, deTarlo and the assistant following several steps behind.

  The Passerist did not require an introduction, and was almost immediately ushered into the mayor’s office. His assistant and deTarlo sat down on a bench in the lobby area to wait.

  Ana watched the comings and goings of the City Hall, observing in particular the Passers. Most of them ignored her presence completely, though they glanced around and at one another often, as if waiting for something. She fixed her attention on the assistant, who distractedly tapped at his laptop. He sensed she was staring at him, and looked up.

  “Any word?” she asked. “On the two of them?”

  Williams’s assistant shook his head apologetically, and Ana sulked.

  In a few minutes, Chester returned looking exasperated.

  “Sometimes I think I’m the only non-idiot left in this country,” he exclaimed. “These people think they can protest the Passers, but never once think that maybe they have just as much influence over the spirits as the rest of us!”

  The assistant looked around as if trying to figure out how to respond, and Chester moved in agitation for a few moments, shifting his feet and resting one hand on the wall beside the bench while gesturing with the other.

  “The mayor’s completely ineffectual, of course,” he continued. “I’ll have to try to talk to these nutjobs.”

  Before deTarlo could get out the words she clearly wanted to say, Williams marched across the lobby, past a secretary’s desk, down a hall of offices, into a second lobby area, down another long hall with closed doors and out the front corridor of the building.

  The rain was letting up as the Passerist stepped onto the stone veranda and crossed to position himself at the top of the stairs. The protesters began to stand if they were sitting, approach if they were standing, and talk if they weren’t all ready. Chester didn’t appear to know or care if they were aware of who he was, but held up a hand for silence. A reluctant hush fell over the crowd.

  “Everyone has a right to their opinion,” Williams started, projecting his voice in an experienced fashion. “We hear and understand your viewpoint; that the Passers are not good for public welfare. That they may be a danger, or are making us dependent, even that they are simply unnatural. You may be right; it hasn’t been long enough since the Sentience to say with any certainty. But the way you go about making your opinion known is not going to get you results.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything, then?” someone shouted from the crowd.

  “No, I’m saying,” Chester responded with evident patience, “that none of us have any more control over the Passers than anyone else. Just because you demand of the government for the ghosts to leave us alone doesn’t mean anything can be done for you. Should the government choose to grant your demands, and tell the Passers to pass on by, do you think the spirits would listen? Have you tried speaking to your own Passer companions and asking them to leave?”

  “Do you think we’re stupid?” a protester shouted.

  “Yes, actually,” Williams countered too quietly to be heard.

  “We tried that!” another voice screeched. “It didn’t work! The Passers are haunting our streets and homes and businesses like we live in a graveyard!”

  Others began shouting and jeering in agreement.

  “We can’t force them to go!” Chester yelled above the noise. “They aren’t physical entities! They won’t go unless they choose to!”

  “Who is this moron?” a loud man near the front demanded to know. “I want to talk to someone who isn’t useless!”

  “Yeah, who are you, anyway?” people began calling in agreement.

  “I can’t believe these idiots,” Chester said just loudly enough for deTarlo and his assistant to hear him. “The same bullshit everywhere I go.”

  The protesters were becoming more animated and upset, and deTarlo started to back up, leaving Williams and his meek assistant at the stairs. Chester was feeding off the anger of the crowd and was becoming upset himself, but unexpectedly recalled what Rod had said to him when they were discussing Aidriel. His Passer had advised him to walk away when “they” became violent. Chester had simply assumed since then that the warning was about Passers; he hadn’t figured it could be about this unruly group of soggy picketers.

  It was not Williams’s nature to walk away from a fight, no matter the odds, but he knew that Rod had watched his back on numerous occasions, and should be trusted.

  The Passerist was reluctantly turning to leave when a bottle sailed by him and shattered on the stone veranda of the City Hall. If he’d still been addressing the crowd, it would have hit him in the face. Instantly enraged, Chester turned and was about ready to fly down the stairs when his assistant caught him by the arm and pulled him back.

  It took only the few seconds while Williams tried to extricate himself from his assistant for the Passerist to notice the moving fog in the distance to his left, southwest on the Des Moines River. Ceasing his struggle, Chester
felt his wrath evaporate, replaced with curiosity. Of course he knew exactly what he was looking at, but he was confused by the sight.

  Startled and frightened out of their bloodlust by Williams’s strange reaction, the protesters began hushing and turning, following his gaze out along the river’s width. In a minute or two, a silence had fallen over the group as they all stood and stared at the moving mass of Passers. Their hatred for the spirits aside, the crowd was too befuddled to react. A visible migration of the spirits, like Tosya had described to Chester, was clearly taking place. Glancing to his right, Williams saw that more clutches of the ghosts could be seen crossing the river to the north, all of them heading northeast. It was curious none of them were passing near enough to the City Hall to be clearly seen.

  “What’s going on?” someone called out, afraid.

  “My sister in Chicago called me about this!” a woman loudly answered. “She said the Passers are all just walking away without a word! Maybe our protests are having an effect!”

  The crowd began murmuring and buzzing in conversation, but Chester just shook his head.

  “Think that if you like,” he muttered.

  His assistant glanced at his watch and said something about moving on. DeTarlo turned immediately to leave, but Williams was more interested in observing the fascinating migration of the Passers. He wished Rod was here to shed some light on what was happening.

  “We’ll see more on the road, I’m sure,” Ana said. “Let’s go, Chet.”

  Williams ignored her, and she and the assistant were forced to wait several minutes until Chester felt he had seen enough. The mob, in the meantime, had fully embraced the idea that the Passers were leaving as they had demanded, and became animated again, despite a stiff wind blowing across their damp clothing. Raising their voices in victory chants of sorts, the protesters yelled after Chester and his companions as they left.

  “So much for that, Mr. Expert Guy!” taunted the loudmouthed man in the front of the crowd. “Guess you’re an expert at sticking your foot in your mouth!”

  “I’d like to be an expert at sticking it in your mouth,” Chester retorted under his breath as the door closed behind him, and he and the others began to cross the building again to get to the car.

  Sliding into the front passenger seat, Williams immediately put his Bluetooth into his ear to make phone calls and tuned out deTarlo’s condescending questions. Ana shrugged him off and with relish began to write on her clipboard. After a while, she paused to reread a line of text with satisfaction, mouthing the word remarkable and smiling to herself.

  The drive from Des Moines to Wellsburg took Williams’s assistant more than two and a half hours with the traffic jams the Passer migration was causing. The three in the car were relieved to finally reach the town where it seemed everyone in the country was going.

  DeTarlo leaned back to rest her eyes and, in her own little world, imagined the praises her peers would be singing once she published her report. Chester was poking at his tablet in the front seat, oblivious to his assistant’s frustration at driving. The police car escorting them through Wellsburg had its lights flashing, but it’s siren off as it threaded its way through the roadblocks and crowds in the avenues. They pulled into the driveway of a house on one of the streets that formed the intersection where the dead zone was. The owners of the house were standing on their porch, one talking to a police officer while another was videotaping the migration of Passers. It was mostly sunny; the rain seemed to have missed Wellsburg.

  Williams’s assistant turned off the car and slumped back in his seat with a sigh. Hesitating for a moment, he unstrapped and got out to consult with the cops. Chester continued to tap a while longer, then set aside his tablet. He took in the sight outside the car with a look of dread on his face. It was expected by everyone that since he was an expert, he’d know exactly what was going on. The stinging of his pride was still fresh from the protest; as if it were somehow his fault that Passers existed.

  “You alright, Chet?” deTarlo asked in a shrink voice. “You need some time to regroup?”

  Williams ignored her, staring intently out the window.

  “We haven’t had time for personal conversation, have we?” Ana said. “It’s all the project or business correspondences, it seems.”

  “I have responsibilities.”

  “How’s Olivia, by the way?” deTarlo asked, sitting forward so she could see his face better. “You’ve had a long engagement, if I’m not mistaken. Have you made her Mrs. Williams yet?”

  “Shut up.”

  “And what about the little one? Bonnie’s her name, right?”

  “Her name is Argentina,” Chester responded hostilely.

  He didn’t say that only people in his closest circle could call her Bonnie. Argentina was a mouthful, and was a reminder of how her mother wasn’t in her right mind when she named her. Those who knew her called her Bonnie because of her large dark eyes and thick eyelashes, a gift from her mother, who was of either Indian or Pakistani descent.

  “How old is she now?” asked deTarlo, ignoring his tone. “Five?”

  “Four. It’s none of your business.”

  The psychologist sat back again and smiled smugly.

  “I’ve known her since birth too, you know,” she said.

  DeTarlo used to be Bonnie’s mother’s shrink, before the mentally unsound woman found herself broke and arrested for skimming when Williams gave her a job. While she was in prison, she left her daughter in Chester’s care because she knew he was financially stable. He wasn’t the father, but Bonnie’s real dad had disappeared before she was even born. Williams had resisted her at first, but Olivia, who was still his girlfriend and not his fiancée yet, had fallen in love with the little girl and insisted she would look after her.

  “Is she in kindergarten?” deTarlo pressed. “She was a creative little one, if I remember. Used to draw pictures on the floor of my office. Does she have a Passer yet?”

  Chester shifted uncomfortably and kept his gaze out the window. He did not like that Ana knew things about his personal life, but how could she not? She had met him as a teenager through Bonnie’s mother, long before the child was born, and through him, she became acquainted with his divorcé father. Russell Williams was almost ten years older than Ana, but they had spent six years in a relationship before it fizzled out into a friendship with lasting strings attached on both sides.

  In that time, she’d learned about and fawned over Chester’s unique ability to see all Passers. It was thanks to her insistence and financial support that he went to Bennington College for Public Action and Political and Social Sciences, and studied paranormal phenomena in the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program before it was closed down. He was bright and gifted; it didn’t take him long to acquire multiple degrees. But having a title and being a respected expert were two different things that were difficult to bring together for someone so young and inexperienced.

  DeTarlo had not been satisfied. She would sometimes have speaking appearances on a radio station during an “Ask the Doctor”–type show, and had convinced one of the DJs to interview Williams. That was only the start of the many debts she called in to get his name out and his face recognized by the public, much of it without consulting him first. But how could he complain when he was benefiting from it?

  “Doesn’t she miss you while you’re gone?” deTarlo asked, meaning Bonnie. “I think if I had a session with her, we’d find out she has issues with separation.”

  Chester bristled. It was never his intention to separate himself from Bonnie like her mother had after she got out of jail. He hadn’t seen the woman in more than a year, but he hoped he never would again. It was obvious in retrospect that she had insisted he legally take custody of the child while she was in prison because she wanted Bonnie to be taken care of for life. So when Williams realized he had a permanent ward, he had stopped insisting the littl
e girl call him by his name. He was Bonnie’s daddy now, and would remain so. There was no way that her mother could take her back, even if she wanted to. Liv was her new mommy. Both of them knew he wouldn’t and wasn’t trying to remain detached from them. But his previous life and previous attachments still demanded his attention.

  “I seem to recall,” he said sharply to deTarlo, “that I was in Denver with my family when my dad’s ex-floozy demanded I come to Fort Wayne.”

  “As if this trip is the only one you’ve taken recently,” responded Ana. “With a respected position like yours, you have hardly any free time to spend with your loved ones.”

  Chester instinctively prepared to argue that it was ironic she was the one saying that, since she had so drastically changed the course of his life. If he hadn’t initiated the American Sentience Movement, he might not have been wealthy enough for Bonnie’s mother to choose to leave her to him, and he would not have met Olivia.

  As if reading his mind, DeTarlo nodded and smiled, smoothing her skirt and opening the door of the car to get out. Chester got out too, surveying the area, feeling the dread of preparing to plunge into another difficult situation.

  “Chet,” said Ana, though he didn’t turn. “You’re only here because of me.”

  As he strode toward the police officers congregating on the porch of the house, his hands in the pockets of his sport coat, Williams looked back at her and said, “You’re exactly right.”

  Despite his discourteous actions, it was not at all the case that Aidriel wanted nothing to do with Dreamer. Sitting side by side in the back of the car that Todd was driving like a maniac through strangely docile Passers clogging the streets of Waterloo, Aidriel felt there was something he needed to tell her. She was staring thoughtfully at the display of her phone, though she didn’t press any buttons, and he knew they had a ride of at least an hour ahead of them. But he had a heavy sense of something he needed to get out in the open; he just wasn’t entirely sure what it was.