The Burning Man

by Christa Faust

  Then, in a flash, everything was different.

  To her shock and horror, she realized that she and the cop were falling. Her mind barely had time to process the fact that the two of them seemed to be suspended in midair, about twenty feet above a massive scrapyard of some kind. Then they were plummeting helplessly together toward the trash-covered ground.

  The cop let out a shout of surprise as he let go of Olivia and shoved her away, twisting, cat-like, in the air beside her. Then her body slammed down on a pile of jagged engine parts, filling her mind with blinding white-hot pain that left her breathless.

  She blacked out and came to in a series of vertiginous stutter flashes. For a surreal moment, she thought she saw a large dirigible, drifting overhead, but then she realized that she couldn’t see the sky at all, because she was somehow trapped in the dusty crawlspace beneath the house, with barely an inch of room between the splintery boards and her nose.

  Then more blackness, followed by sirens and shouting and hands clutching at her, grabbing her by the ankles and dragging her out into the light.

  She thought she saw a policewoman carrying the mysterious toddler toward a squad car, but she couldn’t see the killer anywhere. The pain in her torso and left arm was unbearable, but she didn’t want to scream because she thought she saw Rachel’s worried face at her side, and didn’t want to scare her little sister.

  But as she was lifted onto a stretcher, she couldn’t hold it in anymore. The echo of that hoarse, agonized scream followed her down as she spiraled into the blackness once more.

  32

  Tony woke up alone. There were two nurses and a doctor in the room with him, but he was alone. For the first time in seven long, tortured years, there was no one in his head but him.

  Olivia was finally gone. Dead. She had to be. Her heat inside him had been extinguished, torn out by the roots. He had won. Slain the dragon and saved the world.

  It should have been a relief, knowing that the demon girl was dead. He should have been elated, but he felt bereft and empty. Crushed beneath a depression so profound that he could barely breathe. He hadn’t realized that she was his reason for living—until she was dead.

  They should have died together. That’s how it was meant to be, their destiny. Yet here he was, alone and useless, like an old, broken Christmas decoration someone forgot to take down long after the holiday was over.

  He reached out to the nurse, desperate to tell her about how much he missed Olivia and how unfair it was that she had died without him, but nothing came out of his mouth. Words seemed to elude him like skittering bugs under a lifted rock, leaving him mute and hopeless.

  * * *

  “What’s the current prognosis?” Doctor Eric Lansen asked, standing over Olivia’s hospital bed and pushing a stray lock of blond hair back from her slack, unconscious face.

  He felt like a little boy, waiting for the x-ray specs he’d ordered from the back pages of a comic book. He could feel it in his gut that she would be the one.

  The trauma surgeon who’d pieced her back together for him was Doctor Maureen Westfall, a brusque blonde with a profile like a pickax and chilly gray eyes. She was physically in the room, but her mind had already moved on to the next emergency.

  “She has a broken arm and a few broken ribs,” Doctor Westfall replied, pointing to a thick corset of bandage around Olivia’s midsection. “Along with some internal bleeding caused by penetrating trauma here and here. But her overall prognosis is good, and I expect her to make a full recovery.”

  “What about head trauma?” Lansen asked. “Brain damage of any kind?”

  Doctor Westfall shook her head.

  “Not that we’re aware of at this time,” she said. “Of course, she has to remain heavily sedated while her body heals, so you’ll need to conduct more extensive tests once she regains consciousness. However, there’s no swelling, cranial bleeding, or obvious tissue damage.”

  “Excellent,” Doctor Lansen said.

  “Speaking of head trauma,” Westfall said. “What’s the word on Orsini?”

  “He’s been relocated to a state-run lockdown facility,” Lansen replied. “Since he’s not a Cortexiphan-positive adolescent female, he has nothing to offer as an experimental subject. He might have provided some interesting data as a victim of Olivia’s most severe preadolescent neuroquake, if he hadn’t suffered such a severe concussion from the fall. According to our tests, the part of his brain that I suspect may have been activated during the original encounter was damaged.

  “As a result, he is utterly convinced that Olivia is dead now, that what he perceived to be a profound spiritual connection has been severed.” He shook his head. “It’s funny, if you think about it. The poor bastard was never really crazy, was he? He was just trying to find an explanation for something he didn’t understand.”

  “You don’t feel sorry for him, do you?” Westfall asked. “After all, you almost lost your new toy because of him.”

  “Of course not,” Lansen said. “I’m just amazed by how far the human mind will go to explain away the things that don’t fit into the accepted world view. And maybe that’s for the best. Most people couldn’t handle the truth.”

  “I never liked dealing with the brain,” Westfall said. “It’s much too fussy, and hard to work with. Give me a nice, simple, meat-and-potatoes organ, like the liver or the intestines. You can yank them out, throw them around, remove half and then toss what’s left back in, and they’ll work just fine. The brain’s a goddamn diva. Just one neuron out of place, and it has a total screaming meltdown.”

  “But that complexity is what makes it so seductive,” Lansen said, running his thumb over the curve of Olivia’s forehead.

  “That’s all you,” Doctor Westfall said, handing over Olivia’s chart.

  She left without saying another word.

  Doctor Lansen stayed with Olivia until the sun went down, holding her unresponsive hand and staring at her pale forehead as if it were possible to see through skin and bone and into the labyrinthine mystery beneath.

  * * *

  Rachel sat alone in a windowless room with a table and chairs, but nothing else. There was a camera up in one corner of the ceiling, and she had shouted and waved her arms at it until she was hoarse.

  Nothing happened.

  Now she’d turned her chair around so that her back was to the camera. There was nothing to do at all, and she felt ready to burst into flame from frustration and worry.

  Finally, after what felt like forever, two government agents came into the room. One guy was Asian and the other was white, but other than that they looked a lot alike. They both obviously went to the same barber, and shopped at the same boring old-guy store. They even had on the same shoes.

  “I’m Special Agent Steven Lau,” the Asian guy said, flashing her a badge like she couldn’t already tell what they were from their shoes. “My partner Dana Reinbold.”

  She frowned.

  “Isn’t Dana a girl’s name?”

  The white agent smiled and shook his head.

  “Nope,” he said. “It can be a man’s name, too.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Where’s Olivia? I want to see my sister!”

  “Your sister is at the hospital, recovering from her injuries,” Lau said. “She’s going to be just fine.”

  “But for right now,” Reinbold said, “we really need to talk to you about what happened in Jacksonville.”

  “I already told those cops,” Rachel said. “I ran outside with the baby, and then I heard that banging sound coming from under the house. That’s all I know.”

  “So you have absolutely no idea how your sister and your abductor wound up in the crawlspace underneath the house?” Lau asked.

  “If I knew, I swear I would tell you,” Rachel said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Try to remember, very carefully,” Reinbold said. “Even little details that don’t seem important could help.” He took a step closer to her and put his hand
on the table. “Just picture yourself standing there on the front lawn. You’ve just walked out of the house with the baby in your arms. What happens next?”

  “I heard that banging, like I said,” Rachel told him. “And then the cops came and got her out.”

  “You didn’t see your sister exit the house and enter the crawlspace under the porch?”

  “I think I might have noticed that,” she said. “I’m not stupid.”

  “There’s only one way to get into that crawlspace,” Lau said. “And that’s the hatch under the porch. Are you absolutely certain that you were watching the front door the whole time?”

  “She couldn’t have, maybe, slipped out?” Reinbold added. “Maybe while you were looking at the baby?”

  “I already told you a zillion times,” Rachel said. “Can’t I please go now? I want to go see my sister.”

  The two agents looked at each other for a long moment, then they both nodded. Lau turned to look at her.

  “I’ll make some calls,” he said.

  The two of them left Rachel alone for another interminable century. She was seriously considering curling up under the table and taking a nap when the door opened and Mrs. Gilbert—Olivia’s dorm mother— came into the room.

  “Rachel, honey,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  She was about to tell Mrs. Gilbert that she was fine, to try and be all cool and tough like Olivia, but she burst into tears instead. All the terror and pain and torment of the past few days ganged up on her at once, and she lost it, throwing her arms around Mrs. G and sobbing.

  “Oh, hey now,” Mrs. Gilbert said, patting her shuddering back. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  33

  Olivia didn’t wake up all at once. It was more like a slow leak of reality into her endless drug-induced dreams. A slanting spill of afternoon light through a distant window. A warm hand with a smooth gold ring. Deep, serious voices saying words like exploratory laparotomy and ultrasound.

  A stinging needle.

  The scratchy texture of overly starched and repeatedly bleached sheets.

  There was one word stuck in her throat like a bone, for days on end, and trying to get it out was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

  “...Rachel...”

  She didn’t realize that she’d finally said it out loud until the owner of one of the voices appeared out of the dreamsick fog.

  “She’s conscious,” someone said, sounding far away.

  “Olivia?” This from a closer, female voice. “Olivia, can you hear me?”

  The female voice turned out to belong to a tall, broad-shouldered nurse with dark, watchful eyes and a neat black bun with a pen stuck through the middle of it. There was another backlit, blurry figure in a white coat over by the window, but she couldn’t make out the face.

  “Do you think you can try to suck some of these ice chips?” the nurse asked, holding up a blue-and-white paper cup.

  “Rachel,” Olivia managed to whisper again. “I need to call my sister.”

  “Your sister is just fine,” the nurse said. “She’s safely back at school, and has been informed of your accident and current condition. You don’t need to talk to anyone right now, you just need to concentrate on getting better.”

  “Kieran...” she said.

  Then the fog closed in again, bringing with it more unsettling images and fragmented dreams.

  * * *

  The next thing Olivia knew, it was nighttime, and she was shivering beneath her thin blanket, which provided little protection against a blast of chilly winter air. She muscled her reluctant eyelids open and saw a scrawny, brunette girl about her age with a buzzcut and a cigarette, standing by the open window. She had the top tie of her hospital gown unfastened so that it revealed a deep V of her nearly flat, bony chest, but didn’t seem at all bothered by the cold.

  “They don’t open all the way,” the girl said, taking a drag of her cigarette and blowing the smoke out the open window. “Have you noticed? They only open enough to tease you with a taste of real air, but not enough to jump.”

  “They...” Olivia began, feeling like her voice was an unfamiliar instrument she had to relearn. “They let you smoke here?”

  “They can’t stop me,” the girl replied, taking the cigarette from between her lips and crushing it out on the inside of her left wrist without flinching. “Name’s Annie.”

  “Olivia.” She wrinkled her nose at the rich greasy stink of burnt skin.

  “So what’s your story, new fish?” Annie asked, flicking the cigarette butt out the window. “What’s your superpower?”

  “I don’t have a superpower,” Olivia said. “I just had an accident.”

  “Accident, eh?” Annie smirked. “Radioactive spider bite?” She let out a dismissive chuckle. “Don’t tell me you actually think this is a normal hospital.”

  An unfamiliar chubby Asian nurse with a mannish haircut appeared in the doorway.

  “Annie! What are you doing out of your room at this hour?” She frowned. “Are you smoking again?”

  “No, ma’am,” Annie said, glancing at Olivia. “I was just helping my new friend Olivia here get a little fresh air.”

  A burly redheaded man in green scrubs appeared behind the nurse.

  “Everything okay in here?” he asked, his voice unexpectedly soft and high-pitched.

  “Larry,” the nurse replied. “Will you please escort Ms. Pagliuca back to her room?”

  “Come on, baby,” Annie said, hauling the wide-open neck of her gown to one side and flashing the stoic Larry. “Let’s go back to my place for a nightcap.”

  “Knock it off,” he said, taking one of her fragile, scarred arms. “You want to go back to wearing the antistrip jumpsuit again?”

  “No, sir,” Annie said. “Teal is so not my color.”

  Larry led Annie out of Olivia’s room, while the nurse closed the window. Olivia’s shivering slowly subsided, but her healing ribs still throbbed from the shiver’s achy echo.

  “What was that all about?” Olivia asked the nurse.

  “Just a fellow patient,” she replied. “She’s a little eccentric, but harmless.”

  “What did she mean by saying that this isn’t a normal hospital?”

  “Annie likes to make up stories,” the nurse said. “She’s just looking for attention. Don’t pay her any mind.” She checked Olivia’s bandages and then pulled the blanket up to her chin. “Try to get some rest.”

  Olivia nodded and closed her eyes.

  As soon as the nurse was out of the room, however, she opened her eyes again and looked around. The door was shut, and there were no footsteps or voices in the hallway beyond. She waited a minute, then another, and then slowly, cautiously eased herself into a sitting position.

  It hurt like hell, and nearly took her breath away, but she was able to tough it out. When she felt as ready as she was ever going to be, she swung her shaky legs over the edge of the bed until her bare feet touched the cold linoleum.

  It took several attempts to get her battered and disused body upright and find her balance. Her legs felt like spaghetti and her chest felt like it’d been stepped on by an elephant. But her curiosity drove her on, and she made herself take one wobbly step toward the window, and then another.

  When she finally reached it, she had to rest for several minutes with the palm of her good hand against the cold glass and sparkles dancing around the edges of her vision.

  When her head cleared, she looked out the window. Nothing visible but dark pine branches. No lights or other buildings or highways. No parking lot so she could check license plates and see what state she was in. It was obviously way too cold to be Florida, but other than that, there was no hint of where she might be at all. Just those taciturn pine trees.

  She couldn’t see the ground, but she wasn’t above the treetops, so she estimated herself to be on the third floor of the building. She slid the window slowly open. Sure enough, it only slid about three inches before hitting so
me kind of block that kept it from opening any wider. Upon further examination, she discovered that the glass was reinforced with a thin wire mesh.

  What kind of hospital has locking, unbreakable security windows?

  She didn’t like the answer to that question. She didn’t like it one bit.

  * * *

  When the day nurse with the bun appeared the next morning to check Olivia’s vitals and dole out medication, she refused to allow herself to be examined.

  “I want to call my sister,” she said. “I’m not taking any more pills until you let me talk to Rachel.”

  “I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “That’s just not possible right now.”

  “Make it possible,” Olivia snapped. “Because if you don’t, I’m out of here. I don’t care if I have to walk back to Deerborn with no shoes and my naked ass hanging in the breeze. You can’t keep me a prisoner!”

  “You’re not a prisoner, honey,” the nurse said, reaching out to push a button on the side of the bed. “You’re just very badly hurt, that’s all. You need to take it easy. Relax.”

  “Fine,” Olivia said, struggling to her feet. “I’m leaving.”

  “Please, Ms. Dunham,” the nurse said, putting a strong hand on her shoulder. “You’ll tear your stitches.”

  Larry appeared in the doorway, blocking it with his big freckled arms crossed.

  “Just relax,” the nurse said, taking a capped syringe out of her uniform pocket.

  Olivia knocked the syringe out of the nurse’s hand with the hard cast on her left forearm and then shoved the older woman away. The pain shooting through her ribcage was blinding, almost unbearable, and she could feel cold sweat pouring down the channel of her spine.

  Then Larry had ahold of her, hauling her up and trapping her arms at her sides. She could smell his failing deodorant and his black-coffee breath, weirdly intimate and creepy in that panicky and irrational moment before she felt the sting of a needle in her right thigh.

  As the woozy red nothingness swallowed her up, she thought she saw a fleeting glimpse of Annie in the hallway outside her door, mouthing the words, I told you so.