Empathy

by John Richmond

  Not long after, he’d driven her back into the city and pushed her out of the car a few blocks from the station. Before opening the door, he’d shaken the bottle, her soul coffer, and made her promise she’d fulfill both parts of the plan. After delivering her message to the blondie, Sharon was to wait an hour and then assist The Doctor in his great scheme. How fitting that it would be born in the bowels of a hospital.

  Sharon looked up as the nurse checked her IV. She was a tiny woman, Asian. Her name tag said G. Rodriguez. Filipina. Glossy hair, page boy cut. A lot of nurses were being imported from the Philippines these days. She’d read that somewhere. Hard to think with the Valium drip. Great stuff, but not as lovely as the little pieces of her soul. Soon none of that would matter. She would do his bidding and The Doctor would give her all of her soul back forever. “Your color’s looking better,” G. Rodriguez said, but she scowled. “I wish you’d close your eyes and get some sleep, officer. You need to rest.”

  Officer. That’s right. She’d been a cop. Sharon glanced at the uniform standing guard in the hall, just visible through the chickenwire windows. “Could you send him in here, please?”

  “You should really sleep.”

  “I know. I will,” she slurred. “I just thought of something I forgot to tell them. It’s important.”

  That scowl again, tiny like the nurse. Sharon wanted to step on G. Rodriguez’s face. Instead she pleaded, “It could help save a life.”

  “All right,” the nurse said. “Wait a second.”

  “Thank you.” Sharon watched G. Rod whisper to the uniform. Fucking cops and healthcare workers were all the same, all you had to do was tell them it was about saving a life. She was beyond that now, higher. The uniform strolled in and loomed over her, G. Rod standing just behind. His gun was slung for a southpaw. He was trying to maintain professional distance, but Sharon could see the rage. He wanted a piece of who ever had done to this to her so bad he was actually mad at her. Sharon was as close as he could get to the real perp. “You got something else to report?”

  Sharon whispered, “Closer.”

  Officer and nurse leaned in like a mythological two-headed monster. Sharon’s right hand pawed the air, a limp rag. “Closer. Throat hurts.”

  They leaned closer, the cop was practically on top of her, wearing the nurse like a backpack. It was almost funny. In fact, Sharon let out a laugh as she popped the holster lock with practiced fingers, grabbed his gun, clicked the safety off and thumbed the hammer. No time to rack a shell. She just hopped he kept one in the pipe.

  The Glock-40 popped, a champagne cork that immediately overloaded her hearing. A dime-sized hole appeared just over the uniform’s left eyebrow. The back of his head burst as if someone had snuck a cheery bomb into his head while he was looking the other way. Tee-hee, joke’s on you, Ossifer! A shower of moist warmth coated G. Rod, her eyelashes flickering. Sharon watched her lips round over an “Oops!” and put a hollow-point in her mouth. The slug did its special trick, expanding into a spinning plate as it contacted the back of G. Rod’s throat. Three-quarters of her tiny neck exploded out from the base of the skull to the top of her tiny shoulders. Drugs or not, Sharon Dimke had always been a crack shot.

  Well, now this was quite a scene. The uniform was slumped over the bed like a big ol’ Doberman Sharon had once owned. The back of his head bloomed like a meat and bone flower. Kind of reminded her of that scene from Alien after the beasty busted through that English guy’s chest. She fucking loved Sigorney Weaver in that movie. G. Rod had flown most of the way across the room and had incredibly settled in the chair by the door, bent over as if she were taking a lil’ between shifts siesta. Bent way over. Her head was just about in her lap, hanging on by the sinew in the front.

  Sharon grunted and pushed the uniform off her legs. “You couldn’t have just sat down like G. Rod, oh nooo.” She could hear herself on the last few words, the ring in her ears reducing to nearly normal background hum, the “nooo” dopplering down like a receding siren. Sharon had clocked a lot of time on the range in her day. She was used to that. She gave the IV a longing last stare and yanked it out of her arm with a wince and a hiss. Never liked the feeling of needles in her veins. Loved what they delivered, but a piece of metal in her arm was just yucky.

  “Speakin’ of yucky,” Sharon stepped over the uniform and wove over to G. Rod, her butt swinging free and easy in the hospital gown. Adrenaline was kicking through her big-time now, but she was still a little wobbly. No matter. All she had to do was keep on her feet for a few more minutes. She put the pistol down on G. Rod’s lap and checked her pockets. Sharon had to push the head out of the way to get to the ID badge clipped to her scrubs and something in her ruined neck went off like a big knuckle. “Bleagh,” Sharon said and giggled. She gave a good yank, freeing the passcard. “Gotcha’,” she said and straightened up.

  The room didn’t straighten as quickly as she had. It rolled around the corners of her vision. Felt like there was too much space between her brain and her skull. She put her hands on the arms of the chair and leaned down to steady herself. Sharon opened her eyes and found herself staring at the top of G. Rod’s exposed spine, a knob of moist white bone in a jellied mess. Now that was really pretty interesting. She could see nerves and everything. No wonder The Doctor did what he did. Not that she could possibly compare herself with The Doctor. He was the everything smart and powerful and she was, she was…

  The room sharpened, the air crystalline. Every wrinkle on G. Rod’s uniform pulsed into relief. Each piece of wet flesh winked at her. She was a murderer. She was Igor to his Frankenstein. She was Renfield to his Dracula. Slowly, business-like, Sharon picked up the gun and put the barrel in her mouth. It tasted like grease and hot ceramic. She inhaled the breath of a glass dragon. The hammer was still back from her last two shots. All she had to do was flex her thumb.

  She yanked it out and smacked herself on the top of the head with her other hand. “The fuck?” had she been thinking? It’s not like she was going to be alive in a few minutes anyway. Might as well finish the plan. If she were going to die, she could at least get paid for it. And Sharon Dimke was pretty sure The Doctor wasn’t going to give her soul back if she didn’t deliver. He’d be there on the other side of the big flash and hand her the keys. He’d be there. He would. He promised.

  But she needed to get moving. People would be swarming this room any second. Sharon’s practical nature kicked in. She unbuckled the gunbelt from the uniform and strapped it on under the hospital gown. She edged the door open and slipped her nose slowly, slowly into the hallway. She could hear people around the corner, voices raised, smelled their alarm and went the other way, padded barefoot down the hall and swiped her stolen passcard at the first locked door. She slipped inside and pulled the door closed behind her, knocking over a mop leaned against the wall. Supply room for housekeeping. She smiled and shook her head back and forth. The power of The Doctor was truly great. He’d led her right to it. She peered through the square of chicken-wire window into the hall as several more people blurred past toward her room. Directly across from her was a stairwell. The door warned “Authorized Personnel Only”.

  Sharon turned and looked around. She only needed three things and they were all right there. Two gallon-sized plastic bottles and a bucket. The root of providence is “provide” and The Doctor had done it for her yet again. Thank goodness she hadn’t faltered back in the room. Thank goodness.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 27

  CHARLIE DID AS he was told and kept his mouth shut. Fine had said someone was coming and loped off into the dark again. He’d stopped just before the dark swallowed him up and flashed a look back at Charlie with those mercury eyes. The soreness behind Charlie’s ribs flared into a bright spike then retreated to a tolerable throb. Charlie nodded quickly, his lips pressed shut. No noise or he was dead. He got it already.

  After another moment he couldn’t hear Fine’s footsteps. He was here, though, lurking like
a wolf spider. The only sound was Charlie’s hushed breathing. Even the pigeons in the rafters were silent. Charlie looked at the pile of feathers and delicate orange claws a few feet away. Shit, maybe there weren’t any more pigeons up there. He squinted into the dark at the heap of rags and trash that was what was left of Harlan. He couldn’t tell if Harlan was still breathing or not. God. His eye had been out. His eye.

  Charlie had to not panic. He had to keep it together for Emily. If there was something he could do, he had to be ready to do it. He had to be ready to move. Had to be ready to fight a man who could stop his heart by thinking about it.

  A crash and tinkling glass sounded from somewhere up in pigeonville followed by the tick-tick-tick of a small, hard object skittering across the warehouse floor. The hell had that been? Charlie tensed. He didn’t think he could be more tense, but there it was—aluminum muscles into diamond. His mind felt light, untethered. This was how people got brainwashed he decided. You just scared them long enough and their brains floated away out of their noses. A sudden storm of giggles threatened just behind his uvula, but the memory of those silver eyes flashing in the dark tamped them back down his rusty throat.

  It came to him then. There was nothing he could do. In a few minutes, Emily would come and he would die. That was what he could do. He could die. It was the only thing he would be able to do. He would make noise, piss off Fine and get himself killed. If he wasn’t there as leverage against her, Fine couldn’t use Emily.

  Blood rushed in Charlie’s ears. His breath rasped little puffs off the warehouse floor like Gulliver blowing a sandstorm over a Lilliputian dust bowl. He wanted to howl, to scream, to make any noise, but fear of Fine kept him silent, panting. He was frozen stiff with it. He wanted to break the handcuffs and lunge into the dark after the spider waiting to suck his woman dry. He would break his teeth on its filthy chitin hide.

  - click -

  Blood sluiced back into his hands and burned in his fingertips. His wrists were free. The cuffs had somehow unlocked. Somehow his ass. Charlie rolled over and peered into the dark. Emily. It had to have been her.

  “Em! Emily,” he whispered. For one ridiculous moment he realized he was about to sound like something out of a Scooby Doo episode. “Get the hell out of here. Trap! Trap! It’s a tr—”

  Pain then. A mountain on his chest. The tusk of an elephant thrust in his back and protruding through his nipple, dripping his life away. Grinding gears and gnashing steel teeth mangling him between his lungs. If he’d had the power, Charlie would have killed himself to escape it for even a second. All he could do was lay on the floor like a twisted piece of copper.

  Fine stepped out into the dim light from the warehouse windows. His left hand shook at his side like a silent laugh. “Of course she knows it’s a trap. Don’t you, Emily?”

  Fine kept Charlie in the periphery of his mind, his stuttering heart clutched tight, but not too tight. Not yet. Fine could smell her, could sense the weight of the emotions she held behind her like a lake behind a dam. He gave Charlie a little squeeze; he yelped and spasmed. “You should come out and talk with me before I kill your friend. There’s no one here to aid poor Mr. Dunbar should something go wrong.” He wrenched another cry from Charlie and dropped his voice to an inhuman bass. “No one nurses the nurse, eh Charlie-boy?”

  Still nothing from the darkness. Fine turned, scanning the room with his senses, but the sheer enormity of emotion she filtered kept Emily’s location blurred, ten million flares overloading his heat-seeking nose. He had to have that in-exhaustible fountain of potential terror. Fine glared at the nurse and Charlie howled in agony.

  A steel pillar about ten feet to Fine’s left filled the air with a tremendous shrieking, a flock of Canadian geese amplified a hundred times. The metal wrenched and twisted, throwing a weak orange glow. Pieces of debris and dust sifted down from the section of roof it held and the concrete at its base cracked into a hundred tiny canyons. Drum could feel the heat baking his face, his eyes reflecting orange and fading back to iron as the metal cooled. A man with an unbroken mind might have begun to rethink his course at this point.

  Drum smiled. He would own this power as surely as he owned Sharon and her gun. “Do that again, Emily, and you’ll have the pleasure of watching Charlie cough his heart up like a hairball.”

  “Do you know the first rule of negotiation, Phobia Killer?”

  Drum whirled. The old man from the park sauntered out from behind another pillar. Drum spun out his mental hands and wrapped piano wire around the old man’s heart. Behind him Charlie let out a sigh and lapsed into blissful unconsciousness.

  Samuels kept his feet, but only just. It hurt, but he’d been expecting it and it wasn’t a killing blow. He was being held, examined. “The first rule,” he gasped, “is that you accept that you can’t have it all. You have to give something up to get something.”

  Drum sent a pulse through those piano wires. Samuels hissed but forced himself not to grab at his chest like some old woman expiring in the kitchen from angina. He was tired of living at the mercy of his body’s whims and winges. If he was going to charge over the hill one last time, then by God he would do it with dry boots. He would not cower nor whimper at the feet of a broken man-monster. Greta was close now. Aaron Samuels would walk into the circle of her arms with his head up.

  “Take you, for example,” he said. “You’ve just given up the advantage.”

  Drum eyes narrow to slits. “What do you mean?”

  Samuels drew himself up against those gripping internal claws. “Turn around, Phobia Killer. She’s gotten really good.”

  Drum revolved on the balls of his feet to find a track in the dust snaking into the gloom where Charlie had lay. What welled in him was not rage. Anger has heat. This was a dead thing, older than him, older than the world. It waits for the right people and the right times to flow. When soldiers—men with families and children of their own—rape and mutilate the children of others; when scientists discover a terrible potential and write it down instead of locking it away; when young children turn on their infant siblings in their cribs, this is the thing that rises as it rose in Drummond Fine. There was a sound like a wet phone book being torn in two. Half of Aaron Samuels fell forward in the dust, half fell back. And the blood…the blood flowed around all of it. Even the divided smile on his face.

  * * *

  EMILY WATCHED FINE from her hiding place as he thrashed her lover. She crouched on a catwalk that ran along the far wall high above the warehouse floor. When she and Samuels had crept into the belly of the toad she had played it like a good primate and sought the high ground, gripping her own body in a gentle wind and floating up. She’d stepped onto the catwalk then looked down, ready to pull Samuels up with her now that she was sure there was a safe place to stand, but he’d gone. Where the hell? She was frozen on her perch, the situation spinning away from her control with every second.

  Emily could feel her strength ramp up in tandem with her pulse, wave upon wave of energy layering like a chain-reaction. She yearned to inject it all into Fine, exploding him, but she didn’t know what that might do to Charlie. Would it be like shooting the bad guy only to have his finger twitch on the trigger in the last second? She couldn’t risk it. Fine had the proverbial gun to Charlie’s heart. But the power was rising, beating in her, cycling up with each of Charlie’s strangled cries.

  “No one nurses the nurse, eh Charlie-boy?”

  Her man’s name in that bastard’s mouth was sin. Emily let the power out and slammed it into the pillar a few feet away from Fine. Her hands tightened on the railing of the catwalk, wringing it like a chicken’s neck. Particles of rust sparkled in the low light as they snowed down. When it was over and the forge glow faded from the thick, twisted steel Emily gawped for a moment. That she could do these things!

  She pulled her hands off the railing and cradled the right in her lap as it jumped like a trout out of water. No time for these damned after-effects. She could pr
actically hear Charlie chiding her for it, but Emily threw another bolt of will at her hand and it stilled. Certainty settled in her. This time the voice in her head was her father’s. You’re going to have to pay for all this soon, Sheriff Andy Burton said.

  Fine. Whatever. She’d pay in full. She’d pay loan shark fucking interest, too, but first she had to win. She had to get Charlie and Samuels and get the hell out of there. You need to do more than that, girl. Emily’s throat went dry, metallic. She grimaced and something just shy of a rueful smile flickered over her lips. Turned out she was cop just like her Daddy, after all. In the end she didn’t need a badge to know that her duty here was twofold: protect and serve. The protection part was looking after her love and her friend. The serve part was about keeping the bad man from hurting anyone else.

  She stared at the tableaux below. If she could only get Charlie out of harm’s way it would free her to open up a fresh can of Wisconsin Whup-Ass without risking him. Charlie screamed. Emily waved her hands (the good one and the one that felt like a bag of frozen peas) in front of her has if she’d burned them on the stove. What could she do? There was no time. Charlie screamed again. She stood up and opened her mouth to yell “Stop!” when Samuels stepped into the path of the train.