by Blake Pierce
He took off running before she even had time to get a handle on what to do.
Laura cursed and launched herself forward, practically flying out of the office door and after him. “Stop! FBI!” she shouted. “Paul Payne – stop!”
Of course, predictably, her words did nothing. He was shooting straight back towards the parking lot. Laura blasted past the confused coworker who was standing there nonplussed, only getting a glimpse of a puzzled facial expression and nothing more before he was far behind her. She kept Paul in her sights, but the EMT was young and fit, clearly full of stamina. More than that, he probably knew that he was running for his life – or, at least, his freedom. He was fast.
He ducked and wove between the first few rows of cars, leaving Laura double-guessing where he was going to be, making her lose precious time by trying to follow his unpredictable twists and turns, trying to get an angle that would put her on course to intercept him only for him to head in a different direction.
Laura’s heart was already hammering rapidly in her chest, her lungs burning with the cold air as she tried to get enough of it to power her legs. He darted right at the last second in front of a huge SUV, disappearing behind it for a moment, blocked by the blacked-out windows. Laura lost sight of him as she fought to keep up, running around the same vehicle and floundering momentarily –
Until she spotted him, off to the far right this time, making his way straight down the row of cars and having to slam his hands onto the side of a car that almost ran into him to stop his own momentum.
Laura put on a fresh burst of speed, taking advantage of his enforced pause. The owner of the car he’d stopped was gesturing angrily, shouting something, but Paul dodged around the front end and carried on running. Laura adjusted her own trajectory, taking a wider sweep that brought her around the front of the vehicle without having to pause, success driving her on. She was closer now. Close enough that she felt like she was really going to catch him. Even without a vision, she could see where he was –
He darted right one more time unexpectedly, throwing himself down a gap between two of the hospital’s buildings, making Laura skid against the tarmac to arrest her own motion and throw herself in the same direction.
He was… in a dead end?
Laura kept running as long as he did, her eyes scanning the area as much as she could while still keeping her sights firmly on him. He’d led her into little more than an alleyway, a place that held huge trash bins overflowing with waste from the hospital. She couldn’t see any doors to either side. Where was he planning to escape? Did he know of some secret or hidden –
Laura didn’t have time to stop herself when he did, spinning abruptly right in front of her. She barreled right into him, almost tripping over her own feet as her brain told herself she needed an immediate halt, her arms flying up to cushion the blow. But he was ready. He used his own arms to deflect her, doing little more than grabbing her and moving to the side, letting her own momentum do the rest. He hurled her towards the approaching wall, and without the support of her own feet anymore Laura stumbled, falling to the ground.
She couldn’t stop it happening – couldn’t manage anything other than to brace – almost not even that – and she rolled as she hit the ground, over and over until she was breathless. When she did stop, it was a moment before the world stopped spinning around her –
And then she saw him, filling her whole field of view, moving over her and then dropping. He sat his whole weight on her, pinning her arms, stopping her from reaching for her gun. Laura only had time to gasp out a breath before the blow landed, hitting her in the face, just above her right eye. It snapped her head to the side, leaving her even more dazed than the fall had, unable to process her next action.
Pain – that was all she could process for a moment – and the feeling of the cold floor under her, of how she couldn’t move –
She managed to turn her head, opening her eyes again to a light that now seemed far too bright, looking up at him. He seemed like a giant over her now, his fist drawn back almost comically, like she was watching some far-fetched action movie. Her brain seemed to be moving too slow. She knew he was going to hit her again. She knew she didn’t want that to happen. She just couldn’t seem to do anything to stop it.
And then his hand dropped and instead he grabbed for something else – for something down beside her –
For her gun.
He pointed it at her head, and looked her right in the eye, and Laura knew. She was going to die.
“Freeze!”
The shout seemed to come from nowhere, from everywhere, echoing all around them and bouncing off the brickwork of the two buildings. Laura could barely take it in, couldn’t understand why Paul would shout something like that, only it was him that was frozen, as if someone had suddenly turned him into a statue…
Until he swung around, pointing the gun in the other direction instead.
She let her head loll to the side, and she saw him. Nate. Standing there at the foot of the alleyway with his gun drawn and pointed at Paul, advancing slowly with a scattering of local cops behind him.
“Put your hands above your head, slowly,” Nate ordered. He didn’t take his eyes away from Paul. Reality was coming back to Laura, bleeding back into her head. Which hurt, incidentally.
“Put yours up,” Paul replied. His voice wasn’t shaking. He was steady. Firm. Laura blinked her eyes twice to bring his hands into focus, saw that they were firm too. His finger was on the trigger.
The safety was off.
He was ready to shoot.
Laura felt it in her gut. The wave of nausea, the shadow creeping across everything. The aura of death. She’d felt it so many times around Nate. She knew he was at risk. She knew he was going to die.
And she felt it in her gut that he was going to die now if she didn’t do something.
“Come on, drop the gun,” Nate was saying. “There are more of us. Be smart. You’re not walking away from this.”
“Then at least I’ll take you with me,” Paul replied. “And you’ll never know why I did it. You want to know, don’t you?”
Laura saw it. Saw Nate hesitate. He was going to do it, wasn’t he? Put his gun down. Raise his hands. Ask Paul to come peacefully.
And Paul would start firing and wouldn’t stop until they were all dead and he could run.
Laura’s head lolled to the side, so heavy and slow, and she saw them. A pair of crutches, discarded in the trash for some reason. One of them was broken, she saw. But the other…
“Alright,” Nate was saying. “Let’s be calm and talk about this. If we just put the guns down…”
Laura reached for the crutch, the one that was whole.
And she swung.
She felt the impact along her whole arm, ricocheting into her skull, and for a moment she had no idea what she had managed to do, or not do. But then she blinked and saw Paul laying on the floor next to her, turned away so she couldn’t see his face, and Nate rushing towards them to dive with his handcuffs.
“Laura? You alright?” he called out.
“Yeah,” she managed, though it came out more as a groan, belying her answer.
Nate covered the last bit of ground rapidly and snapped a pair of handcuffs onto Paul’s wrists. It was only then that he yanked the EMT to his feet, pulling him away from Laura. She groaned again, sitting up, feeling how the cold of the ground had seeped into her bones through her clothes. She was dirty, cold, and in pain, and still a little groggy.
“You’re under arrest for assaulting a law enforcement officer. At the very least,” Nate said, then to the other cops: “Take him in.”
He turned back to Laura and offered her his hand, and for once she took it, even though the swirling black aura of death around him almost made her throw up before she was back on her feet – though this time, she could swear, it was a little lighter than it had been before.
But it was still there, even though it shouldn’t have been.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Laura glared at Paul across the interview room table, placing her own hands flat on the surface between them. She could feel Nate glancing at her every now and then, as if he wasn’t entirely sure that she should be in the room. She’d reassured him as many times as she could bear that she was fine.
All she had was a bit of a black eye.
An eye that she was still able to use, albeit with a bit of a squint, to glare at Paul Payne and let him know that his presence was not appreciated.
“Alright,” Nate said, clearly feeling that it was down to him to take charge of the situation. “There’s something I want to ask you, Paul. I’m very curious. You’re an EMT. You’ve trained to get to this position, dedicated years of your life to the service. You’ve saved so many lives. So, why start taking them?”
“Taking them back,” Paul said, lifting his eyes from Laura’s to respond directly to Nate.
“Excuse me?”
“You said taking them,” Paul clarified. “I’m not just taking them. I’m taking them back.”
Nate shifted in his chair. “So, you gave them their lives and you get to decide whether they get to keep them? Is that it? You felt they didn’t deserve the lives they’d been living?”
“None of them deserve a second chance,” Paul said, bitterly. “No one does. It’s not about what you do with the time you get afterwards. It’s not supposed to be yours. That’s not the way any of this works.”
“Why don’t you tell us how it works, then?” Laura asked, lifting her chin. The challenge simmered barely under the surface of her words. Tell us how it works, if you’re so smart. If you’ve got this all figured out.
Paul moved his hands loosely across the table. They were cuffed, a chain between them, clinking as he moved. “It’s pretty simple. When you die, you die. That’s it. You’re not supposed to come back and get another chance. It’s not fair on everyone else.”
“Why not?” Laura asked. “We can’t all just carry on living together? Isn’t that the miracle of modern medicine, that people don’t have to die unnecessarily?”
“But they were dead,” Paul insisted darkly. “They were dead already. They came back. That’s what’s wrong with this whole thing. If they stayed dead like they were supposed to, I wouldn’t have to do anything.”
“Paul, you have to forgive me,” Nate said. “I’m confused. Aren’t you the one who actively brought them back to life in the first place? Why did you do that, if you don’t think it’s right?”
Paul studied his hands, like he couldn’t bear to look up at their faces. “I was wrong back then,” he said. “But it’s part of my job, anyway. It’s hard not to do it. Everyone’s looking at you, waiting for you to make the call. And I don’t want to stop being an EMT. I like helping people. Especially people who can be saved. Those people – they need me. I can’t stop helping them just because there are some out there who… who cheated. Who used me to cheat.”
“Where does this all come from?” Laura asked, hearing her own voice surprisingly soft. She had this sense of Paul like he was a wounded animal. A creature in pain. It was written throughout every note of his voice. There was a deep trauma in his words, a horrible conflict between the man who wanted to do good and the one who believed that some people needed to die. “When did you start thinking that these people needed to die – at your own hands?”
“The guilt got too much for me,” he said, his face twisting a little involuntarily. He looked like he was holding back tears. It was a strangely tender look, for a man who had just killed three people and tried to beat her unconscious. “I couldn’t take it anymore. I just kept thinking about those people, walking around out there with lives they weren’t supposed to have. All the ripple effect from that. The people they could hurt, the ways they could cause other problems. It’s like… it’s like time travel.”
“Time travel?” Nate asked. Laura blinked, hearing her own surprise reflected in Nate’s voice.
“You ever watch one of those movies where they talk about how going back in time is so dangerous?” Paul asked. He tilted his head up to look at them both, his voice soft. He was a good talker. A storyteller. Laura found herself hanging on his next word, waiting for the revelation that would explain it all. “If you change just one thing, it could ripple out and change everything else. Like, if you step on a butterfly, then when you come back to your own time, you could find out the whole world has ended.”
“What you feel is that the people you resuscitated could be changing the natural order of things, just by being alive?” Laura asked, choosing her words carefully to not make it sound like she was laughing at him. “That there’s a set path the world should be on, and these people are throwing it off?”
“Right,” Paul said, and again he had that way about him – it almost made her feel like she should be girlishly happy to have understood him, to have him praise her for it. “I couldn’t let it go on. I had to put right the mistakes I made.”
“Are you one of those mistakes yourself, Paul?” Nate asked, his voice quiet. When Paul stared at him for a moment, Nate shifted, opening the closed file he’d had sitting in front of him all this time. “We didn’t find anything on your record in terms of criminal behavior. But I did find your medical records, and they’re interesting, aren’t they?”
Paul swallowed, looking down at the table as if ashamed. “You found out about the crash.”
“I haven’t seen this report,” Laura said, which was a lie, but a convenient one. “Why don’t you fill me in? Tell me about this crash.”
Paul shifted, swallowing again. “It was when I was a kid,” he said, his voice hoarse for a moment, like it was a lump in his throat he was trying to swallow down. “I was in the car with my mom.”
“She was driving?” Laura said. It wasn’t really a question, because obviously if he was a kid then he couldn’t have been the one behind the wheel. But she said it to prompt him to talk. To fill in more details.
“She wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Paul said. There was a trace of the child in his voice, a kind of railing cry against the unfairness of the world. “She was just driving. This other car came out of nowhere and hit us. It wasn’t her fault.”
“What happened then?” Laura asked.
“She died.” Paul said the two words with a kind of cut-off choking sob, like it was too hard to say more. Like he was going to carry on but couldn’t. He was still stubbornly staring at his hands, or maybe the table beyond them. So many years had passed, and he was still carrying so much grief about it. Still struggling to bear it. Laura felt, somewhere in the back of her mind, a wrenching pain on his behalf. The pain of a child losing his mother – it almost didn’t bear thinking about.
But for the rest of her, in the front of her mind, Laura knew what he’d done. The pain he had caused to other families. And no amount of sympathy would make up for that.
“What about you?” Nate asked, taking the top page out of the file and turning it around, placing it on the table in front of Paul. “What about your injuries?”
Paul nodded, but there was an almost mutinous look on his face. “You already know.”
“Tell me,” Laura said, still pretending she had no idea what he was about to reveal.
Paul made a grimace, moving his hands to his chest, like it was physically painful for him to talk about it. To admit the truth.
“I died,” he said. “But they brought me back to life. They brought me back, and not her.”
And there it was – the crux of it.
“You had all this extra time,” Laura said, leaning forward in her chair. “Why shouldn’t other people get the chance to have that, too? Why are you the only one who gets it?”
“I shouldn’t have had it,” Paul burst out, and when he looked up at them both again there were tears openly and silently streaming down his face. “It wasn’t right! I should have died with her. And all I’ve d
one with that extra time is make it worse. I kept saving them and they shouldn’t have survived either. It was Veronica who made me see. And then I saw how all of them were supposed to have died. Their time was up! You don’t get more time! You don’t!”
“You only went after your own patients,” Nate said. “Why is that? Why not just look into the records and take out anyone who survived something like this? Why not go to a survivor’s help group and plant a bomb? Why do it this way?”
“Because I was the one who made these mistakes, and I have to fix them,” Paul said. His voice was raw with emotion, with utter conviction. It was clear to Laura that everything he was saying was as real to him as undisputable fact. “That was what I wanted to do. Fix every mistake I made, and then fix myself last. I was going to find them all. Start here and then go on the run, maybe. Track down the ones who left or moved. I didn’t want to be cruel. I gave them time to think about it. To realize what was happening and deal with it. And then I set the platforms to break their necks. It… it was supposed to be fast. I know I messed up a couple of times, but – don’t you see? It’s because I’m wrong. I’m not meant to be here. Everything I do – it’s always going to be wrong!”
Laura watched him, the war between compassion and hard-faced justice still ongoing inside her head. He was so damaged, so traumatized. Ever since he was a little boy, he had carried this awful guilt. Then he’d started saving people, doing something good with his life. And yet that trauma had twisted it, made it into something that caused him even more guilt. It wasn’t totally his fault. He’d obviously needed mental health care, interventions that had never happened. He had grown up with a weight that had mutated and twisted everything around him.
But ultimately, he was still the one who had taken that decision to end someone else’s life, even knowing what it was like to lose someone you loved. And no amount of trauma could ever condone that.
“How did you set up the platforms?” Laura asked. “They’re fairly sophisticated, but I didn’t see any hint of building work, or anything related in your work history.”
