by Ninie Hammon
But inevitably, birth and life demand a choice. Open your eyes, recognize goodness and evil and choose your side. Or keep your eyes closed and see neither. The current state of the world is testimony to the cowardice of the many and the futile courage of the few. Everywhere on the globe, evil thrives in the soil of denial, pruned by cynicism, fertilized by disbelief, watered by inaction.
Yesheb smiles a rueful smile. In the great apocalyptic battle to come, his forces will prevail, of course. He and Zara will reign supreme. But he wonders how many of the others, the shuffling turtles on the other side, will even pick up weapons for the fight.
Yesheb’s ears begin to pop. The plane has begun its descent.
“My little Angelina is beautiful, is she not?”
Theo jumped. He hadn’t heard Pedro come up beside him as he stood at the foot of the hospital bed. The tumor he’d dubbed “Cornelius” had got shook real good by that jeep ride and it was payback time. His temples throbbed relentlessly. He held onto the railing around the bed because if he let go, the dizziness would turn him upside down and drop him face first on the floor.
“I am sorry. I did not mean to startle you.”
“Hearing’s about gone, worn out. Just like the rest of me.” He taps his chest. “Got a lifetime warranty and it’s about up.” Theo turned back to consider the angel lying so still before him. “What happened to this chile?”
He saw Pedro flinch. Theo always had been blunt, cut to the chase. Lately, it’d gotten worse, though. When your train was about to pull out of the station, you didn’t have time for pussyfooting conversations.
“Brain damage.”
“So she not gone wake up for the party.”
Again the flinch.
“No.”
“She ever gone wake up?”
“… probably not. She has remained a little baby, never grew up, talked, walked or …” There was a heartbeat pause, then Pedro rushed ahead, “Oh, God could perform a miracle. We pray for that every day. We have hope, but ...”
“But probably not,” Theo finished for him.
Both men were quiet. The sheet that covered the child’s thin chest rose and fell in rhythm with the whoosh and hiss of the machine sitting on the table beside the bed. There wasn’t a wrinkle in the sheets anywhere. The lace nightgown was as perfect as the outfit on a doll. A clean, white bandage on her throat covered up the opening there for the tube that stretched across the bed to the ventilator.
The old man could hear the hum of conversation around him and music of some kind—a mariachi beat, nothing he cared about. He was beginning to discover that being deaf wasn’t an altogether bad thing.
“Because she ees my child, too, just like the others,” Pedro said. Theo heard that, turned and looked questioningly at him. “You want to know why she ees right here in the living room, in the middle of everything.”
“If I’d wanted to know, I’d have asked.”
Pedro smiled a little. At least Theo thought he did. With that broom on his upper lip it was hard to tell. “Yes, I suppose you would have.”
“You think she knows she’s here, knows what’s going on around her?” Pedro’s eyes were suddenly moist, but he didn’t blink, looked steadily into eyes that age had yellowed. “I pray every day that when I meet her one day in heaven, she will say she knew, she was aware every minute, she heard every word.”
GABRIELLA SAT DOWN on a couch covered with a beautiful Indian blanket—and fell so deep into the cushion it would take a forklift to get her back out. Obviously, the blanket hid a broken spring.
“Should have warned you,” Steve said as he eased down next to her. “This old couch is stuck here in the corner for a reason.”
Gabriella had elected to sit there for the same reason. Damaged goods had a way of finding each other.
“So finish what you were telling me about the guy with the string tie,” she said. For the past couple of hours, all through the taco buffet dinner, Steve had been giving her a running commentary on the various characters in the room—the old Indian with the rheumy eyes, the fat, bald man with a strawberry birthmark on his head. Every one of them had a story.
The string-tie man was middle-aged, with boots a little too polished and the creases in his hat a smidge too perfect. Drugstore cowboy.
“He’s pretty tight-lipped but I’ve got him down to an investment broker on the commodities exchange, a bookie or CIA. The safe money’s on bookie.”
There was the tall, clean-shaven, pressed-shirt-tucked-in man who’d moved to St. Elmo with his three wives, escaping a crackdown on multiple marriages by the Mormon Church in Utah. The youngest wife had promptly taken up with the man who drove the gasoline delivery truck that serviced the filling station. The other two couldn’t get along—not with each other—with him. They finally threw him out and lived together now with the seven children in the house he’d moved the herd into. He lived in a trailer set back from the creek down the road.
Ty ran in and out of the room now and then as the newest member of the Mormon herd. Or tribe, since it included a couple of native American kids and several young Hispanics.
The boy seemed perfectly fine, but the swelling in his face hadn’t gone down as quickly as Steve would have liked. He said if Ty’s eyes and lips were still puffy four hours after he finished the IV, he’d give the boy another one.
Steve pointed to a couple of indeterminant age standing near the head of the hospital bed. He had a full-bore Jeremiah Johnson—or John the Baptist—beard and long hair that fell in his face. She looked normal enough—except for the full sleeves of tattoos on both arms and both legs and growing like morning glory vines out the collar of her shirt.
“Albert and Sadie live in the house on the other side of the dry goods store. For five years, they had a line painted down the middle of the floor of their living room and on election day Al couldn’t cross that line. Their house is the polling place in St. Elmo and in Colorado a paroled convict can’t vote until his parole is up.”
He answered her next question before she had a chance to ask it.
“Some kind of drug charges, I think. Using, not selling.”
She spotted Theo and Pedro in conversation at the foot of Angelina’s bed and allowed her eyes to caress the child’s perfect features again.
“That little girl … she’s not just asleep, is she?”
“Angelina’s in a PVS, permanent vegetative state. She was like that when I bought Heartbreak Hotel five years ago.”
“How does Pedro …?” It hadn’t escaped her notice that the cooks for the event were Anza and another woman old enough to be the girl’s grandmother. “It looks like he’s single—”
She was surprised and a more than a little dismayed by how much she was hoping he was, that his wife wasn’t just visiting her sister in Omaha. She’d even searched the photographs on the wall, looking for a woman at Pedro’s side, but found nothing but pictures of the children.
“His wife left him. Pedro doesn’t talk about it much, but apparently she wanted to put Angelina in a nursing home, a permanent care facility, and he wanted to keep her at home so …”
“How does he do it, take care of her all by himself?”
“He has Anza.” He gestured to the room. “And all of St. Elmo. I bet Pedro’s telling Theo right now about the alarm system.”
Steve pointed to the machine that rested on a cart by the hospital bed.
“Angelina can breathe without that ventilator for short periods of time, but not for long. If the machine failed—came unplugged or the electricity went out—Angelina could be in trouble quick so Pedro rigged up an alarm. When it goes off ...” He looked at her and grinned. “… the result gives a whole new meaning to close-knit community.”
* * * *
Yesheb buckles the seatbelt but he has to wrestle the harness. He motions for the helicopter pilot to lift off anyway—he’ll figure it out in the air. He can see the flashes of distant lightning. It’s storming in the mountains on
the western horizon.
* * * *
There was a sudden crack, followed instantly by a boom of thunder. The sky had turned ugly after Gabriella got to St. Elmo. She’d have to stay here until the storm passed and the rainwater drained off the trail. Even so, she wasn’t looking forward to wet rocks in the dark.
Thunder rumbled again.
A storm. And a full moon.
* * * *
Yesheb hops out of the helicopter while it is still a foot off the ground, leans over and races through the hurricane wind of the blades toward the lone car that sits at the far end of the church parking lot where the chopper has been directed to land. The engine in the car is running.
He has kept in constant contact with Bernie throughout the trip, who is in contact with someone yearning to collect half a million dollars in cash for a chance encounter. As of Yesheb’s last conversation with the smarmy little agent, the informant remained certain Gabriella was attending a party in a tiny collection of houses high in the mountains that stood as behemoth shadows against the night sky above the valley floor. The information stopped there—no address to feed into a GPS that would display the route with a red arrow using information sucked down from some whirling silver ball of technology in the sky. But Yesheb doesn’t need a computer voice to talk him through the journey. Google Earth shows the town to be so small it would be impossible to miss a gathering there of more than two people.
Yesheb isn’t worried about finding her. He is a top-of-the-food-chain predator. Once he gets near enough, he’ll be able to smell her. He turns out of the parking lot and down the street. The tires squeal when he shoves his foot down on the accelerator, then night folds like the wings of a bat around the car and he disappears.
* * * *
When Gabriella jumped at a sudden boom of thunder, Theo looked at her with compassion. The old man had eased down on the couch beside her after Steve left about half an hour ago and Gabriella wondered if he had remained there because he was comfortable or because he couldn’t get up.
Her eyes scanned the room, seeking out Ty to make sure he was all right, was safe. The swelling was almost gone. She didn’t think it was likely Steve would have to give him another IV. To look at the boy now, you’d never have guessed he’d brushed up close enough to death to feel its cold breath on his neck. She shuddered, then dragged her thoughts away from Ty’s close call to the festivities around her.
The party had not started out loud and boisterous, but it had finally cranked into high gear. Once everyone had eaten, the old woman who’d helped with the tacos—who, it turns out, actually was Anza’s grandmother—brought out the birthday cake. The crowd of assorted misfits and miscreants held hands and formed a circle around the bed of a Sleeping Beauty who could not be awakened by a prince’s kiss. Pedro said a prayer of gratitude for the gift of Anza, then the group launched into an off-key rendition of Happy Birthday. Some sang in Spanish, others in English.
Afterwards, Pedro pulled out his vintage collection of old rock and roll tapes and actually had a boom box to play them in. Anza dragged him out onto the dance floor and though Pedro was certainly no Michael Jackson, the two of them danced to Thriller. Then the whole crowd took to the cleared-out area in the middle of the room, women dancing with women, children with old men, jumping around joyous and uninhibited.
Gabriella watched them, studied them with something like awe.
A flash of lightning strobed the darkened interior beyond the swinging doors and Gabriella jumped when the thunder on its tail rumbled.
Then she felt a hand slip over hers. Theo squeezed reassuringly. “You safe here.”
Such tenderness from Theo stunned her. Apparently, it stunned him, too, because as soon as it hit him what he’d done, he pulled his hand back like he’d stuck it in a toaster oven.
Gabriella struggled out of the hole in the couch to her feet. “I need to … after that taco, I could use a Tic Tac,” she said. “There’s some in the jeep.”
“Pedro moved it away from where you parked in front of the porch steps, put it down at the far end on the right …” He paused, wrinkled his nose. “… keys in the ignition.”
She knew Theo still couldn’t wrap his mind around all the unlocked doors and cars. He’d told her, “leave a car unlocked in the neighborhood where I grew up and next morning that car gone be stripped down to a bare metal frame with teeth marks on it.”
Gabriella walked through the darkened store and stepped out into the damp night where the rain had been reduced to the dribble and plop of drops off the store roof. She sucked in a lungful of clean, ozone-scented air and let it out slowly. She’d used the Tic Tacs in the jeep as an excuse to escape. The real reason she’d left the party was that she was … what? Overwhelmed. It sounded so trite and corny, but she was blown away by the joy she saw all around her. For the first time in … maybe for the first time ever … she was in the presence of simple, happy people. Not her walking-dead parents. Not tweedy college English majors. Not wacked-out musicians or fanatical fans. Just people whose lives, by anybody’s standards, were far from perfect.
And Pedro! In all their conversations, he had never mentioned his own suffering. She’d dumped a load of her personal sewage on him last week, wailed about the pain in her life and he never said a word about the pain in his.
She had nowhere to put that kind of behavior, nowhere to process it. She probably hadn’t lived a day, in total accumulated time, in the peace and relaxed joy that was all around her at that party. It shocked her, engaged her … and frightened her. How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen … How could she not long for that kind of freedom now that she knew it really was out there in the world?
A full moon shone through a crack in the clouds, but Gabriella didn’t notice it. Almost frantic to distance herself from the laughing people at the party, she hurried across the porch, down the steps and turned right on the street. The breeze blew wet pine needles along the ground and they tickled her shins as they passed like kittens with milk on their whiskers.
Then she felt a sudden chill. She hadn’t thought it was that cold outside.
* * * *
Yesheb drives through the night with all the windows down. The cold wind that smells of spruce and pine trees is refreshing and exhilarating. Far from feeling light-headed in the thin air, he feels complete clarity and laser-sharp focus. His time is drawing near.
He slows when he reaches a collection of old buildings on both sides of the road. He parks in the shadows across from what is clearly the only party in town. He can hear loud music and bursts of laughter every now and then. He is content to stare at the door of the building. Knowing his Zara is beyond that door, so close, fills him with a longing and a need he did not know he could feel.
As a circling lion closes in on its prey, so Yesheb must close in on Zara. He must figure out a way to separate her from the herd of people, isolate her. The others—the boy, the old man and the dog—are totally secondary. What is of paramount importance is that he subdue Zara, strike such terror into her heart that she will offer no resistance, will follow his lead, docile as a baby rabbit. He imagines her eyes full of fear and pain and feels a thrill of such power and passion it is almost too glorious to contain.
The storm has set off fireworks in the sky, fulfilling the prophesy in the holy book. Now it is time for him to claim his bride and—
The door he is staring at opens. Zara steps through it and out into the cool mountain air. For a moment, he is too surprised to move, merely follows her with his eyes. She stands for a moment, staring into the night, then steps down off the porch and begins to walk down the street.
His shock vanishes. He opens his car door slowly; he has already loosened the bulb in the overhead light so it will not shine when he gets out. He pushes the door closed but does not latch it. Then his senses drink in the darkness, his lair.
Though in human form he can no longer see them, he senses their presence. Demons surround him
, all sizes and shapes, their corrupted mouths in drooling smiles. They glide along the cold ground where he places his cane and each footstep carefully, silently. He can almost hear the murmured approval from their pitted throats. They watch him, their leader, their master. They cannot aid him, but they have come because their mere unseen presence grants him the superhuman power he needs. He makes his way through the shadows. She walks in and out of the puddles of light cast by the pitiful little street lights that are nothing more than lanterns hung on poles.
He watches her movement, her grace. Then he wills himself to her, moves through space without limping, without even touching the ground until he is behind her. He reaches out his hand and places it on her shoulder.
She whirls around, the fabric of her garment making a whuffing sound like sheets on a clothesline in the wind, her scar pallid white in the moonlight. She opens her mouth to cry out, but is too stunned, too surprised to make a sound.
So is Yesheb.
CHAPTER 12
GABRIELLA WALKED ONLY A SHORT DISTANCE BEFORE SHE IMAGINED she heard someone behind her. The sudden realization of what she’d done hit her so hard it stole her breath. She had just dashed off into the night—into the full-moon night. Alone! What had she been thinking? Her heart went into hyperdrive, hammering a hole in her chest wall. She didn’t burst into a run because she knew her legs wouldn’t carry her if she tried.
Then, in a reality ripped from her recurring nightmare, she felt a hand on her shoulder. But this was no dream. No overactive imagination.
And in the space between one heartbeat and the next, Gabriella Carmichael decided she was prepared to die—if it was quick. She wouldn’t let him drag her off somewhere and ... No!
It only took a second to whirl around, but by the time she faced him she was determined that the only way Yesheb Al Tobbanoft would get her off this street was to kill her.
She opened her mouth to cry out, but didn’t. Just stood there staring.
“I am sorry,” Pedro said. “I only wanted … you looked upset when you left. Are you all right?”
