Sentinel Event

by Samantha Shelby

  “Dreamer,” Aidriel said softly, hoping to go unheard by the two men in the front seats. “I’m sorry about what happened at the hotel. I didn’t want to upset you, but I’m not sorry for what I did.”

  She looked up and smiled bashfully.

  “It’s nothing to do with me,” she said. “I can’t imagine anything I’ve experienced compares to what you have.”

  “That’s been building for years. I don’t want to talk about that; what happened is totally unrelated. I still want to pick up where we kind of were when we left off.”

  “Meaning?”

  He could tell by the sly grin on her face she was waiting to hear something in particular.

  “After this, do you want to…?” Aidriel realized Todd and St. Cross were watching him in the rearview mirror, obviously considering the conversation public enough to listen in on it.

  Leaning over with the intent to speak closely in her ear, Aidriel got an indistinct hint of her shampoo and smiled. He put his nose into her hair to smell it, and this time she didn’t pull away. He could feel her chuckle soundlessly.

  “Well?” demanded Todd, straining to see in the mirror. “What’d she say? What’d you say, Dreamer? You guys gonna go out?”

  “Todd, watch the road,” St. Cross ordered, turning his attention back to an open file on his lap. “Mind your own business.”

  “Hey, it is my business!” Todd insisted. “He asks her out in my car, it’s my business.”

  “I say yes, Todd,” Dreamer said, adding softly, “though it isn’t your business.”

  “Now watch the road,” St. Cross said, pointing forward. “You’re making me nervous.”

  Aidriel sat up straight again, clasping his fingers around the top of Dreamer’s half-closed left hand at her side. It felt instinctual, like how he had imagined them when he was at the first hotel. He gazed at her face until he felt he was staring, then turned his head to watch her out of the corner of his eye. Her cheeks were pleasantly flushed; she knew he was observing her.

  “When it’s over,” she said with a knowing smile.

  Aidriel looked out the window at the passing city and thought that perhaps there was a glimmer of hope on the horizon. As if reading his mind, St. Cross said, “Things are not fine and dandy yet. The crap could hit the fan all at once in the next hour, and almost certainly will.” He was staring grimly out the windshield.

  Aidriel noticed that though they had been encountering flocks of Passers since they left the airport and none had as of yet attacked, they appeared to becoming more and more numerous. There had to be hundreds of them by now, all walking in the same direction, their attention straight ahead, oblivious of everyone around them, even him. Pedestrians on the street would try unsuccessfully to ask them questions, or would stand aside and watch in awed curiosity. Todd even drove past a news crew filming the strange migration.

  Releasing Dreamer’s hand, Aidriel gripped the door handle, his eyes glued on the sight. The crowd of spirits was becoming denser. Where had they come from so suddenly? The familiar physical warnings of an attack began stirring, but he forced himself to remain calm. He could hear the rate of his breathing increase and it was making him light-headed.

  “Wow, this is all because of Aid?” asked Todd, watching the flood of spirits crossing the street in his path.

  “Look at the cars, though,” said Dreamer. “No electromagnetic disturbance. That’s strange.”

  The others sat quietly, observing that what she said was true, and it puzzled them.

  “Perhaps the electromagnetism is only when the Passers are upset,” commented St. Cross. “Think about it; Passers exist in our day-to-day lives without disrupting our electronics. Perhaps it’s only when they’re upset, and since so many have been congregating around Aidriel, they create a strong enough field to destroy things.”

  Aidriel reached up subconsciously and laid his fingers against the window, tracing an invisible line down the glass. He looked to the faces of the ghosts they passed, but all the translucent facades were blank and facing their destination.

  “There’s no way I’m going to get to that dead zone,” he whispered.

  “Yes you are,” Dreamer responded resolutely. “If we have to drag you into it against a million Passers, we’ll do it.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” asked Todd. “Doc’s in a wheelchair and you’re a girl.”

  “So?” she demanded. “You haven’t seen what’ll happen if we don’t.”

  “No one’s going to drag me,” said Aidriel.

  “Well, if we have to,” Todd talked over him, “I hope Williams and his goons are actually there like we think, so they can help me.”

  “You sexist twit,” Dreamer growled under her breath.

  Aidriel had nearly forgotten about Williams and deTarlo, and realized they were most likely already at the dead zone or on their way.

  It was alarming to think that the worst, most challenging race of his life could be only an hour away. He dreaded the ending of this journey, and could sense that the closer they came to it, the others feared it also. That Todd had pointed out the others’ general disability to help him made him all the more anxious. When it came down to it, when he would step out of the car and run for the small area—wherever it was—where he could be safe, no one was going to help him. His own two aching legs would have to carry him, and if they failed, he wouldn’t reach it at all.

  The day Aidriel arrived, barely alive, at the emergency room had been hazy and damp, and he had awakened late with the feeling that something was on the verge of happening. It took effort to reluctantly drag himself out of bed. His money was almost gone, and it was difficult to function. There was no point in looking for another job.

  Standing at the small window in the main room of his apartment, he could see the early-spring wind blowing violently through the tree growing in the middle of the sidewalk. It was storm-perfect weather, but the clouds held back the rain. The dancing leaves were strikingly beautiful, and the coffee Aidriel had brewed tasted just right. It was the last of the cream; there wasn’t enough money for more. It was the day, then. The day he had been waiting years for.

  Listening to the whistling of the wind against the building, Aidriel had taken his time knotting the rope. He watched the emergence of the noose, and felt like he was creating something. It had been so long since he made something, he couldn’t remember what that had been. The cord snagged on the ceiling hook when he first threaded it through, but with time and patience, he achieved the desired length. He brought a chair from the kitchen to position under the loop.

  Aidriel then set his affairs in order. Making sure his house was tidy, he collected all his important paperwork into a pile on the kitchen counter, laying what little money he had with it. The only items he could find to record his last words were an index card on which someone had scribbled a recipe for him, and a Sharpie, both in the bottom of his kitchen drawer. It didn’t take him long to compose a brief message, and after spending several minutes searching his apartment for the best place to leave the note, he decided on taping it to the back of his hand. Then no one could possibly doubt his intentions.

  Finally, Aidriel called Spiro, his neighbor down the hall who worked full-time, and left a message on his machine, asking that an ambulance be called. It might be days before someone discovered his body otherwise and there was no need to traumatize anyone.

  Taking a deep breath, Aidriel stepped up onto the chair and placed the rope around his neck. He waited for a miraculous intervention; for Rubin to swoop in and stop him. He had not been harmed in over a week, so he knew an attack was due. The wind continued to blow noisily against the building, but there was no visitation. No voice calling for him to spare himself for one more day.

  Aidriel steeled himself. He knew the hard part would be getting himself to start moving. Once the chair tipped over, the rope would take it from there.

 
“I’m free,” he whispered, “in three…two…one…”

  The chair toppled backward quickly and quietly, and the fall was short, but gentle. The noose slid up his neck, embracing the base of his skull, burning his skin.

  Closing his eyes, Aidriel tried not to fight, not to breathe, not to acknowledge how truly afraid he was and how painful this death was. Jolts of involuntary movement pulsated through his limbs. His mind was surprisingly calm, guiding him through a leisurely tour of his senses as they failed one by one.

  Goodbye vision. Goodbye feeling. Goodbye sound. Goodbye world.

  Spiro was exactly five months younger than Aidriel, and sky-blue-eyed. There was a tattoo on his upper arm of a sparrow wearing a gas mask. He said it was meant to symbolize his readiness for whatever life could throw at him, which annoyed Aidriel, who found that worldview naïve.

  “You can’t possibly be ready for anything that could come your way,” Aidriel reasoned.

  “Yes you can,” Spiro insisted. “Every person can know themselves well enough to know how they will react to anything. They can decide how far they would go to save their own lives or someone else’s, what they will refuse to be afraid of, where the boundaries of their moral structure lie, and how to keep their cool. That’s all they need to be ready for any situation.”

  It was no accident that Spiro, slumped at his desk in customer service and feeling under the weather, was encouraged by his Passer to call it a day that overcast morning.

  “Just go home,” the ghost insisted. “It’s better to just go home.”

  “It isn’t a matter of life or death,” Spiro mumbled miserably, messaging the ache behind his eyes.

  “Perhaps it is.”

  Spiro was skeptical, but eventually gave in and clocked out, driving home wearing a grimace of pain. The blinds were still closed, so his apartment was wonderfully dark when he stepped inside. The light on his answering machine flashed like a small green winking eye amid the gloom, and holding his head, Spiro shuffled over to it.

  “It’s Aidriel from next door,” the muffled voice on the old machine said.

  “Hey,” Spiro responded as if his neighbor was in the room with him. He took off his jacket with a smirk and placed it on the hook by the door. The smile vanished when he heard the rest of the message:

  “When you get home, please call 911 for me. Thanks.”

  Aidriel had paused to let his words sink in, or to gather his thoughts, then he bid Spiro goodbye. His tone was serious and final.

  Spiro turned so swiftly, he stepped through the icy fog of his Passer on his way to the hall. He dashed down the narrow, silent corridor, and pounded on Aidriel’s door. There was no answer; the knob was not locked.

  The image of the dangling body in the noose barely had a chance to register in Spiro’s mind before he was out in the hall again, dashing back to his own home in a frenzy. He slammed through the door and knocked a lamp off his coffee table on his way to his closet. He had a bucket of tools there, on loan from his brother, hidden behind his heavy coat. Spiro had not seen his sibling since moving to this residence from his last duplex, where he had needed the tools. Every time he glimpsed them of late, he’d thought of what little use they were to him. However, in this moment of adrenaline-heightened panic, Spiro knew instantly what to do. He snatched the heavy-duty branch cutters and sprinted back to the neighboring apartment.

  Aidriel’s face was as gray as a Passer’s by then. He swayed like a wet blanket on a clothesline when Spiro slammed into him. Fumbling at first, Spiro managed to position the rope inside the sharp beak of the cutters. With a squeeze, he severed the noose. Aidriel hit the couch with the side of his head as he fell, rolling into Spiro’s legs, landing facedown.

  Spiro was a very organized young man. It was not with detachment that he handled the situation at hand, but he did slip into his most productive mode, in which he ran through a swift checklist in his head as he moved.

  Drop these. He tossed aside the clippers.

  Call 911. Like most people his age, Spiro carried his mobile phone on his person, and handled it with the ease of familiarity as he dialed for help, turned on speakerphone, and laid it on the floor.

  Get him breathing. This was the most difficult task on Spiro’s list, but he moved without hesitation to roll Aidriel over. A check for a pulse was pointless, but he conducted it anyhow, loosening the noose and sliding it over the lifeless head.

  Spiro was also a skilled multitasker and was not aware he had begun chest compressions while he answered the voice on his phone that asked him about his emergency. He calmly recited his address and told the other person that a man on the third floor had hanged himself.

  “I’m doing CPR,” he panted.

  Aidriel looked serene, as if he were simply in a deep sleep. Spiro was not tired yet; his headache was forgotten. Behind him, his Passer appeared to be sitting bent forward on the overturned kitchen chair, its ghostly hands folded in its lap. Its opaque eyes watched with depraved fascination, a slight smile almost turning its lips.

  “Is the man breathing?” asked the voice on the phone.

  Without pausing in his brisk task, Spiro confidently and clearly answered, “Not yet.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The town of Wellsburg, Iowa, would under normal circumstances be only a fifty-minute to an hour drive from Waterloo, but with the streets congested with Passers and pedestrians, it took longer. Progress was maddeningly slow, and everyone in the rented car remained for the most part silent.

  Dreamer wanted to take Aidriel’s hand again to reassure him, but he kept his tight grip on the door. St. Cross was remarkably calm, reading and making notes in his file.

  They passed the sign welcoming them to Wellsburg at a snail’s pace, and Todd made a stressed comment about every gawker in Iowa coming to see what was happening. There were police officers corralling walkers and directing traffic, turning away anyone coming to watch or just passing through.

  Todd rolled down the window and told the police that they were going to the AGWSR Middle School, which was only partially true.

  “That’s where the action is,” commented the officer distrustfully.

  “Chester Williams sent for us,” St. Cross lied, leaning over to see out the driver’s side window and offering his I.D. The cop hesitated before taking it, stepping away to talk into his radio, his eyes on the card in his hand. Once the answer came, he asked for the names of the other three. It felt like an eternity that he spoke into his walkie and received answers back. Aidriel nervously tilted away from the window, watching the spirits drifting by.

  When the policeman finally allowed them to pass and moved on to the next vehicle, St. Cross told Todd to find somewhere secluded to pull over, as close to the dead zone as possible.

  “I think it best that you and I get out and try to find Williams to see if there’s any way we can get Aidriel into the zone with little trouble.”

  “Yeah, I’m doubting that,” said Todd, but he did as he was asked and pulled into the parking lot behind the middle school.

  Unloading the folded-up wheelchair from the trunk, Todd helped St. Cross into it. The shrink made sure he had the plastic case that he had brought from the nightstand at home resting on his lap with the file, Aidriel’s file. Taking a deep breath, Todd grasped the handles of the chair and pushed it into the crowd of Passers.

  Waiting tensely, Dreamer glanced over at Aidriel and saw how composed he was. He watched the ghosts with a detached neutrality that comforted her a little. If he wasn’t worried, why should she be?

  “Do you think Williams can help?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “What do you think will happen?”

  Aidriel’s hand moved down to grip the latch on the door, gazing steadily out through the window in the direction St. Cross and Todd had gone.

  “Where exactly is this dead zone?” he asked in lieu of responding. />
  “It’s an intersection,” Dreamer said. “Straight ahead, where West Jackson and West Fifth meet.”

  Aidriel continued to watch and wait, his keen gray eyes darting from face to face, his adrenaline rising. If he wasn’t mistaken, the intersection she was talking about was at least six hundred feet away. Behind the parking lot was a vast field that ended in a baseball diamond at the intersection. The whole of the field and diamond was swarming with milling Passers, all of them facing the dead zone, waiting as if in a trance. Waiting for him.

  “You okay?” asked Dreamer.

  “No…” Aidriel appeared to be realizing it as he said it. The familiar signals were there to warn him. The Passers walking by the car were beginning to slow. Some of them were turning their heads, looking at him, though they showed no sign of rage yet.

  “I have to get out now,” Aidriel said urgently. “Before the attack begins.”

  He swiftly unstrapped his seatbelt and threw open the door, Dreamer doing the same on her side. They couldn’t spare the precious millisecond it would take to close the hatches again, and began to run instantly, following the direction of the street.

  Dreamer had a little difficulty keeping up with Aidriel, but with effort, she caught his hand, falling into step beside him. They burst through the chilling clouds of spirits in their bid to reach the intersection, their shoes pounding the pavement. There was a stiff wind blowing against them, making it hard to hear or breathe.

  As he passed through them, Aidriel awakened the raw emotions that had driven the Passers to come here in the first place. They became animated, their faces contorting, their fingers becoming long, deadly claws. Shouts of wordless hatred went up, spreading through the midst of them in a wave. Once they were aware of him, they began to attack.