Fallen Souls

by Linda Foster

  The policeman came back and stood beside the medic, looking grim. Ash frowned. Girl? Bleeding? That important thought came back, teasing along the edges of his mind, but darkness began to play in the corners of his vision, shutting everything else out. He fought it off, trying to keep the policemen above him in focus.

  “It’s going to be okay, son,” the policeman said. “We’re going to do everything we can.”

  Ash didn’t hear him. He was too busy looking at the man standing behind the policeman, his red eyes glowing in triumph. Then the world, the noise, and what was left of the light went dark. Everything faded away, leaving only the red eyes of the mystery man.

  Ash began to re-gain consciousness some time later. He had no idea how much time had passed, but he felt like he’d been having a terrible dream. There was an annoying beeping to his left, and something that sounded like wind. There was something lying across his face, too, and it was stuck to his nose. He lifted his hand to move whatever it was. His head still hurt, but it was a dull, heavy pain rather than the sharp one he remembered. When he opened his eyes, he saw a familiar facing sitting next to him, looking distinctly tired and anxious.

  “Ash!” The frantic sound of his mother’s voice jerked him fully awake. Both of his parents stood next to him. His mom’s dark brown hair was disheveled, her eyes puffy and bloodshot, and her face splotchy with crying. His dad had tears in his eyes, and his normally smooth chin and cheeks were covered in rough stubble. They looked like they hadn’t slept in months. What on earth was going on here? Had something happened?

  Then images began flooding his mind … a policeman and a medic, a dark night, a roadside, flashing lights … his sister bleeding and hurt … and another man. Ash fought to recall what he’d looked like, but the memory was fuzzy. He’d had … red eyes? At the thought, panic hit him and his eyes shot around the room, taking in the bed, the machines that surrounded him.

  Suddenly, everything from that night slammed back into place. They’d been at a party. There had been a strange man staring at Grace, and he’d convinced her to leave. The man had terrified him, and they’d both been frightened. He’d driven away from the house, watching the road behind them. He’d been so obsessed with making sure that no one was following that he hadn’t been looking at the road ahead.

  He’d crashed the car. The thought hit him like a ton of bricks and stole his breath. All of a sudden he felt light headed. It wasn’t a dream, or a nightmare. It was real, and Ash was in a hospital. That meant Grace …

  “Grace?” he gasped. His throat was raw, and made his voice sound raspy. At the mention of his sister’s name, their mother began crying uncontrollably. Her shoulders sunk down and she buried her face in his father’s chest. His dad closed his eyes and turned his head away to look behind him.

  Ash’s own eyes followed, to find Grace lying in the bed next to him. She was as pale as the white hospital sheets, except for the black and blue bruising across the left side of her body. Long red cuts covered her left arm, face, and neck. The heart monitor attached to her beeped slowly. A tube ran into her mouth, and something that seemed like an accordion moved up and down with her chest. She looked awful.

  Ash stopped breathing at the sight of his sister. The machines he was hooked up to went nuts and alarms started beeping in the hallway. Two nurses ran into the room, one holding a large needle filled with clear fluid. This only intensified his panic. He began to thrash around, his only thought that he needed to get to Grace. Make sure that she was okay.

  “Ash, calm down, honey,” his mom tried to say through her sobs. He paused, waiting for the assurance, but it didn’t come. She didn’t say that Grace was going to be okay, and that told him all he needed to know.

  “It doesn’t look good,” the policeman had said.

  Before he could ask the question burning in his mind, though, the nurse injected the fluid from her needle into the tube connected to his arm. A moment later, a warm, fuzzy feeling enveloped him. He tried to fight the sleep, which he didn’t want. He wanted to help his sister. He wanted to wake her up and beg her forgiveness. He tried to ask his mom, tried to sit up again, but within moments the drugs took hold of him and wrenched him into the unwelcome darkness.

  Ash woke to the rhythmic sound of the hospital machines. A doctor was standing at the end of his bed, checking his charts and talking quietly to his parents. When the doctor saw that Ash was awake, he came over to him, shined a light into his eyes, and glanced at the monitors.

  “You were lucky to survive the crash,” the doctor said firmly. His voice was flat and void of any emotion – the voice of someone just doing his job. “You have some minor bruises and lacerations, a few broken ribs, and a broken wrist, but that’s extremely lucky considering …” His voice and sentence faded off and his eyes darted to the bed next to him, where Ash knew his sister lay.

  “What about Grace?” Ash asked, his voice little more than a whisper. The doctor’s face went grim.

  “Her side of the car took the most impact.” The man’s voice was masked with indifference, but the sound of tragedy couldn’t quite be covered. “The truck turned at the last second. It wasn’t enough to avoid the collision, but it would have been much worse if it hadn’t. You would both probably be dead.”

  A knot formed in Ash’s chest, and a new pain gripped him. Both, as in one of them wasn’t going to make it? He could feel his heart breaking, piece by piece. He’d never experienced pain so all-consuming before, and could hardly believe it was real. Surely this was all some bad dream. He looked up, praying that there was good news coming.

  “She hasn’t woken up, and she probably never will,” the doctor finished bluntly. “She still has a lot of internal bleeding, and extensive damage to some of her vital organs. We’re keeping her in a drug-induced coma. We have her on life support for the time being.”

  Ash couldn’t speak. He could barely breathe. He turned to stare at his sister, surrounded by tubes and wires. Her face, though damaged, was still alive, waiting to wake up. The world tilted as he tried to process the fact that she might never wake. That a machine was keeping her alive, nothing more.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor added before walking away. His apology was offered as an afterthought. The final ‘to do’ point on his textbook list. He stopped at the door and turned back, no doubt trying to be comforting. “We’ll do everything we can.”

  And that was it. He turned and left the room, and Ash’s mom lost it. Sobbing uncontrollably, she dashed out of the room, without sparing a glance toward him. His dad managed to give Ash a sympathetic but heartbreaking look before he took off after her. Then he was left alone to think about what he’d done.

  He’d killed his sister, and there was no way around it. He’d been driving, and because of him Grace was going to die. She’d always been so bright and bubbly, the first person you saw in a room, the one you tried to make laugh … larger than life. Now she was dying, right next to him. No, he thought. She couldn’t … He forced himself slowly into a sitting position, determined to do something. Anything.

  He struggled to shove the railing of the bed down and throw his legs over the side. The movement took his breath away, and a sharp pain ripped through him. He waited for the machines to slow, to keep the nurses from swarming the room like a swat team again. He didn’t want to go back to sleep. Once the monitors had returned to normal, he stood up, leaning against everything and anything he could find as he moved to his sister’s side.

  “Grace,” he whispered in a weak voice. Tears began to well up in his eyes. “Please wake up.”

  He reached out to touch her, brushing his fingers up and down her nose in their secret childhood greeting. But she didn’t respond. He stood for the next hour by her bedside, crying and begging her to wake up. Finally he returned to his own bed, exhausted and heartbroken.

  The next few days went by like a dream. Ash spent his time in a daze, trapped in his own world of sorrow and guilt. He was out of the hospital bed now,
and had gone home to shower once, but returned immediately to his sister’s bedside. Today the doctor had come in to talk to his mom and dad. By the sound of it, it wasn’t good news.

  “She probably won’t make it through the night,” the doctor said quietly. “Even if she does, time is running out. If she hasn’t woken up by morning, the brain damage will be too severe …”

  Ash’s mom turned into the arms of his father, heartbroken. The doctor waited a moment before finishing.

  “My advice is to stop the machines at that point. Particularly if you want to donate her organs,” he finished. Ash closed his eyes on the scene, trying to control his breathe and stop from screaming. He knew that the doctor was just giving his professional medical advice, but that didn’t stop it from hurting. His dad pulled his mother’s face up, and they exchanged a deep and painful look. Then his mother nodded to the doctor.

  Up to that point, Ash hadn’t felt much. Everything had passed right by him. Now, though, he was filled with rage. Were they actually going to just let her die? Pull the plug, and that was that? They weren’t even going to give her a chance to wake up?

  “I’ll be back first thing in the morning,” the doctor said. He paused to look at Grace for a moment. Ash followed his eyes, horrified. Less than a day for his sister to wake up, or she’d be gone forever. He began praying, then, for her to open her eyes to twitch her hand. Anything to show she was still in there, fighting.

  Grace couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She’d been pacing around this stupid hospital room for days now, though her body was lying in bed, unmoving. She had no idea what had happened – or how she was able to walk around without her body – but everyone kept talking about a car crash. She wanted desperately to wake up and comfort her family, but she hadn’t been able to get back into her body, no matter how hard she’d tried. She’d done everything she could think of, to no avail, and it was driving her nuts. She wanted to throw things, but her hand passed right through anything she touched. She wanted to shout that she was still alive, she wanted to hug her mother and promise everything would be okay. She wanted to comfort Ash, who was wearing the look of a lost and very frightened little boy. She couldn’t, though; she was stuck in the air, or another dimension, or something else as completely useless.

  She glanced around the room in frustration. Her parents were talking to the doctor while Ash stared blankly at a wall. She sighed and turned her attention back to them. They were the ones discussing her future, and she didn’t like the things they were considering.

  The doctor talked for another moment, then put a hand on her mom’s back in what appeared to be an awkward attempt at comfort. Grace looked back at Ash, wondering what was going on. They’d barely looked at him, let alone spoken to him. They were concerned only with each other, choosing to grieve as a couple instead of a family. They’d abandoned him, and she could see how much it hurt. She moved over to him, trying to lay a hand on his shoulder like the doctor had done with her mom. But her hand passed right through, just like it had the last time she tried to touch him.

  “I’m here Ash,” she whispered in defeat. He looked terrible. The skin under his eyes was an ugly shade of purple, and he spent most of his time staring at nothing. She could only imagine the guilt he was feeling right now, and wished he could hear her. “It’s okay, little brother. I don’t blame you. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Something brushed against Ash’s mind, and he straightened up. He couldn’t stand sitting there any longer. He couldn’t accept that she wouldn’t wake up. When he stormed out the door, his parents didn’t raise a hand to stop him or ask him where he was going. Not that he knew. He just had to get out and get fresh air. He burst out the doors and kept going, wanting to put as much distance as possible between himself and that awful place.

  He walked until his feet hurt, past all the main streets and then down a dirt road that led to a forested area at the edge of town. He was taking the long way home. It might not be the smartest thing to do right now, but he needed time to think. He couldn’t sit anymore. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be by his sister’s side, it was more that he needed to do something for her. He just had no idea what that something was.

  He growled in frustration, finally coming to a stop, and watched the sky as it turned angry shades of green and gray. A storm was coming, and it mirrored how he felt on the inside perfectly. The sun faded, and a cold wind rushed through the trees, making goose bumps stand up on his arms. He closed his eyes, willing the tears to come, and thought back to the night of the party. The night that changed everything. Suddenly he remembered the man. He’d been at the party, and then at the crash scene, though Ash couldn’t remember anything else. Why’d he been there? Who was he?

  Death, Ash’s mind whispered. He shivered. Where had that thought come from? Was the man truly Death? Did that even make sense? And if he was … could he change what was happening to Grace? The thought was crazy, but it stuck. If that man was Death, then maybe he could also control life, and save Grace. He’d been searching for an answer, and suddenly it was right there: Hunt the man down and beg him to save Grace.

  “You know, that’s really not a very good idea,” a voice said from his right, interrupting his thoughts. The voice was beautiful and he turned, knowing that the girl’s face would match her voice.

  He was right. Her hair was dark blonde, almost red, and wildly curly. It whipped in the wind, covering and then revealing a pair of bright golden eyes. She was also staring into the sky, deeply thoughtful at what she saw.

  Ash was certain that he’d seen her before, though he couldn’t remember where or when.

  “Excuse me?” he asked, surprised.

  She turned and gave him a half-smile before returning her gaze to the sky. “Hunting down things that are best left alone. It’s not a good idea.” Her voice was like silk, soft and sweet, but her eyes were hard and strong. “In fact, it’s a very bad idea.”

  Then he remembered where he’d seen her. She was there on the night of the crash. She’d been there when he opened his eyes, and had sent the man with the red eyes running. Did she know the man? Could she help find him? Ash couldn’t imagine why she was here, but if she could help save Grace …

  “Why?” he asked, with equal parts worry and hope.

  The girl paused, considering how to answer his question. Her eyebrows drew together like she was in deep thought, and she pursed her lips as if she didn’t really want to answer him.

  “Good or bad, everything happens for a reason. You can’t change the mistakes of your past. You can only change the future. Dealing with people who promise to change the past comes at a price you might not want to pay. Although he’ll expect payment. Even after you’re dead.”

  “You mean dealing with that man?” he asked, excited. “Do you know him?” He walked over to the girl and stood in front of her, temped to reach out and try to touch her, to see if she was real. The thought crossed his mind that he might be having a mental breakdown – with this angel being nothing more than a hallucination – but he eliminated it. That wouldn’t help him save Grace. And finding the man with the red eyes might. “Where can I find him? Can he really help?”

  “You’re not actually considering such a thing, are you?” the girl asked, shocked. “Can you not see that finding him would be the worst possible thing?”

  He drew back, surprised at her criticism. “I don’t recall asking your advice in the first place. Who are you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do? Who the hell are you, for that matter?” he snapped.

  “Someone who knows better than you, that’s who,” she replied softly. “Someone who understands what you’re risking. Names are nothing. All you need to know is that I’ve come here to help you, with orders far loftier than your own.” Then she dropped her voice into a mumble, barely audible. “And those, I’m afraid, I can’t share with you.”

  If he’d been in his right mind, he would have questioned her more closely. But he didn’t have t
ime for that. All he cared about was whether or not she could help him.

  “Look, I’m not interested in your advice. Do you know where I can find the man or not?”

  “I cannot force you to do as I say,” she said, looking at him with a concerned expression, “but believe me when I say that searching for the man is a bad choice. There’s more at stake than you can imagine. Your decision will change more than just your fate.”

  He gasped, confused and frustrated. The girl looked the same age as him, but there was something in her eyes that held immense age and wisdom. She seemed … different. Larger than him, though she wasn’t tall. He took a step back, unsure of himself.

  “Fate is written and rewritten every day,” the girl continued, as if she wanted to take advantage of his silence. “One can only predict so much and try to …” She searched for a specific phrase before settling on one that fit. “… sway things in the right direction to a certain extent. I don’t believe saving one life is worth risking the lives of many, and you propose to risk many, many lives, including your own. There are two paths in front of you right now, and neither will be easy. But one is right, while the other is wrong.” She settled her golden eyes on him, making him feel naked under her gaze, and issued a warning. “It’s never a simple thing, telling one from the other.”

  Ash stood quietly for a moment, trying to understand what she meant. Was she saying that saving Grace was the wrong thing to do? How could that be? Grace was beautiful, innocent, and still had so much life to live. And it was his fault that she was lying on that hospital bed, dying. Was she saying that he should let her go? That couldn’t be right, no matter what this girl said. He needed to put things right, even if it meant risking his own life.

  “Where can I find him?” he asked quietly.

  “If you seek the devil, the devil you shall find,” she replied, looking at him with sad eyes. “I hope for your sake, and for everyone else, that fate changes. But that is up to you.”