Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  Inside the house, when Smithee and Fairweather had arrived, the younger officer wore a sick dead look of shock and horror. He had said nothing to them, barely even acknowledged their arrival. And the older one had raved and bellowed that the victim had to be saved, “Jesuschrise,” he had said, “You gotta save this one.”

  And to Fairweather every patient was one who had to be saved. The distinction, he supposed—almost without thinking about it—could be made for priority. That is to say a victim of a break and enter shot by the burglar in an ensuing scuffle should be attended to first if limitations arose. The burglar, if it came down to it by chance or by limited time and resources to care for both simultaneously, should be looked after second.

  Unlike the pale-faced officer with the weakening knees, Jewels had come across scenes like this one before. Not many, but enough to lessen the shock of this one. Marlon too. But in Fairweather’s mind, he could still not shake loose the image of the two victims lying on bloodied carpet, one nearer the bed and drapes, his jaw obliterated. The other, closer to the door, bleeding from a hole in his chest, lay with a dark-barrelled, bloodied gun at his feet. Why had the officer wanted Smithee and Fairweather to look after this man first? They had shot him, stopped what could have been an already bad scenario for both of them from getting carried any further along. But they both had such dire reactions. What did they know that he did not?

  Normally, a victim would be procedurally bound by the straps on the gurney if there was even a remote chance that they posed a danger. In the past, mentally unstable patients, or those under duress of drugs or situation, had come conscious and injured their EMT attendants or even themselves. And Jewels, a man bent on following rules and being concise about procedures, would have normally done the black nylon belts up around this patient as soon as the metal doors of the ambulance unit had been slammed. But this morning, he had let that rule go with simplicity, out of the idea that he could help spare this man his life. The constriction of his chest, Jewels decided in one swoop, was unnecessary. He really wanted to save another life that morning. He nearly needed to.

  A bubble of disinfectant jelly at the throat, large and threatening to burst. A gurgle of blood, accompanied by a deep guttural noise, spat up against the inside of the victim’s oxygen mask. It was a bright red color, and it dribbled back down towards the blackened, reddened hole of gnarled bone and tissue and jelly in his face to which the mask’s green rubber band held it loosely. The EEG’s beeps were erratic and shrill.

  Jewels was going to inject him with another epinephrine. If that didn’t do it, he would have to get out the paddles. He saw the two bodies on the carpet again, each heading for the cusp of that other world. It doesn’t let anyone return, that world—not ever—and he wished Marlon could somehow drive faster. One Hell of a Hurry, his mind yelled in panic, but he did not actually let the words escape from his mouth. This one’s in for it tough if we don’t get him home in One Hell of a Hurry. I can feel it in my bones. He leaned across the man on his stretcher and the smell of that disinfectant jelly, sweet and sour at the same time, wafted to his nostrils. He had an epi syringe in his right hand.

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  So involved in the private world she had invented behind her own eyes, Katie slipped backwards on the tile dance floor. Vaguely aware of her own petite figure and feeling a heavy intoxication now, she was barely able to catch herself from falling. She did, but not before colliding violently against another dancer.

  Her eyes snapped opened in time to see the other girl’s drink falling towards their feet below. Liquid splashed outwards in a jutting silky wave highlighted with punctuating strobe lighting. The splash fell down a pant leg and across a bright glowing running show—originally white, it was a sickly neon glow in the black luminescence. The heel of the tumbler banged across the toe of the girl’s shoe and then shattered into fragments across the white and black squares of tile.

  All hell broke loose.

  The girl, with raven-black hair that fell on her shoulders in a series of rolling impressions, was wearing a red bandana on her head and there was another tied around an arm of her jean-jacket. She was yelling with a snarled face at Katie, who couldn’t make out a word of it. Something about, Bitch, who’s gonna pay for that, bitch? Do you hear me, bitch? Bitch, bitch, bitch. Bass and guitar and a techno beat swarmed in Katie’s head, her vision was swaying, and she didn’t rightly know who the girl was even talking to. And if it was her, she didn’t have answers anyway. She looked forward at a hazy scene with distant voices and strange movements. Then the girl in the white running shoes had others gathering around her, similarly dressed with bandanas around arms, and tight black pants that ended mid-calf before socks and running shoes. Each of them was yelling cusses and lobbing questions about whether things needed to be “stepped up,” and Katie realized her own group was standing at her sides yelling back.

  The white running shoe group started pushing her then, as, one by one, the rest of the dancers on the floor became aware of the incident and began clearing away from the broken glass and the stand-off that was forming around it. As the blasting music tore from the speakers, and she was shoved backwards again, Katie heard someone yell, We don’t want any trouble. Let’s just go. Katie thought that was Suze, but couldn’t be sure. Her brain was clouded over with a thin fog that made everything seem far away and unimportant. Before she knew it, her arm was grabbed and she was firmly being guided by her friends once more towards the front of the club—that big steel door which stood silent, soaked in night-light, an immovable girder.

  It was Jewels, Katie thought as they rushed past it. The door was Jewels. His angel-face was embedded in the steel, that big mass of firmness was his shoulders and his chest. It’s him and he’s here. Here to make everything better—

  But then she was lost in the fog again...Jewels’ face, steel features or not, was gone.

  Out from the pounding music and into the looser air of the external world the girls went, dragging their own, ascending from the dark and the closeness of the club’s bowels. A scare was thrown into all of them by the altercation, and Suze Culpepper would later tell police that she remembered shaking as they came out of the Highchair. That group of girls had surrounded them on the dance floor and, she would say to the officers, it was clear to her from their colors and clothes that they were part of a gang. Not one of Katie or her friends had ever experienced a confrontation with gang members in their lives. Not one of them.

  Suze ran an arm across her forehead then shot it into the air, trying to hail a cab. When she realized, after the glaring pot lights on its front end had passed, that it wasn’t even a cab—just another car—she knew she was even more wasted than she had originally thought. Drunker in fact, than she had told herself she would be getting that night. She tried to concentrate, tried to focus her thoughts. They needed a cab. Once all four of them were safely squished into a cab and heading for home, they could laugh about the girls in the white running shoes with red bandanas tied around their arms. They could tell Jewels and Ben and T-man how stupid it had all been to get upset over a spilled glass of rye and Coke. They could laugh about it at their high school reunion in ten years when they were all stepping towards their thirtieth birthdays.

  The four of them, dizzy, far from alert, began awkwardly flailing their arms at passing cars. But none of them were taxi-cabs. It was a long distance to two a.m., when the club’s house lights would fire up, someone would announce last call, and a swarm of taxis would line Bloor Street. But that swarm wasn’t due for another hour and a half and the girls found themselves facing a nearly vacant stretch of asphalt, a little shaken from their experience and dull as the edge of a wooden spoon from drinking. In only a moment, they found themselves a block away from the throng outside the main doors of the Highchair, and Suze was getting further and further ahead of the other three in her quest to hail a cab. Back a ways, Corrine and Erica stood to either side of Katie, holding her up by the crooks under her should
ers. She warned them she wasn’t feeling good, that she needed to puke, and they told her to hold on while Susan finally got them a ride. Katie kept coming to a stop and falling limp. She was muttering on and on about girders and a steel face and neither of them knew what to do with her. Suze told the three to hang back while she ran further ahead to Queen to hail a Checker there. But Corrine went with her, leaving just Erica, barely holding Katie upright.

  The two of them, Katie and Erica, collapsed a moment later, both smashed, but Katie far worse off. Erica could no longer support the other girl’s weight and they both fell on their asses into soot and dirt on the sidewalk in front of a red-bricked building. Suze and Corrine meandered further and further away from that brick building and finally disappeared down a side street, undoubtedly checking for a cab there.

  In those harsh and lonely moments, with a splendored breeze blowing warmly across Katie’s face, she finally thought she would be all right again. It was then that everything changed. The two girls were surrounded by the same throng of three or four girls that Katie had spilled the drink on inside the Highchair. But they had found more followers. There were at least nine of them now, all with the identical red bandanas tied around their arms. And all of them were screaming and yelling obscenities. They had been separated from Suze and Corrine for maybe a minute and a half, resting on the pavement a block and a half from the doors of the club, still in plain view of anyone standing at the Chair’s metal doors and bothering to look down the road. And now they lay looking up at the looming figures of the girls. Beside them were pairs of white running shoes. Things happened in a rush during the next handful of seconds. They began quickly and they were over even faster.

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  Zeb had thought the Thief looked extraordinarily large as he loomed over him between his bed and the wall, that the stranger had a surreal and preternatural strength which Zeb’s tiny fists had been able to do nothing against.

  And in spite of Jewels Fairweather’s tanker build, he couldn’t grapple free of the Thief’s hold when the man came upwards and snapped one arm around Jewels’ chest and the other firmly under his chin, pressing brutally hard against the EMT’s airpipe. He would have agreed with Zeb about such strength if the two had ever been able to speak with one another.

  It was a swift, out-of-thin-air movement that, for the life of him, Jewels did not see coming. His breath was knocked from his lungs and he was spun around. He heard the EEG’s pattern-less beep turn back to a solid rhythm and he faced the back of the ambulance, the back of the stretcher on which the Thief lay. The syringe he was holding was freed from his loose grip on it. The last thing he saw, before his vision went black, was his patient’s shoes. His last thought was of understanding, of complete comprehension. He saw that scene in his head again—the one he couldn’t shake loose as he pulled the ambulance doors closed. It was of the bloody-handled derringer lying at the foot of the other victim. In that flash of image the other victim—the one sent ahead—had been barefoot. This one, the burglar, was wearing wet shoes.

  —In my bones—

  A closed hand came downward on him.

  —One Hell of A Hur—

  A syringe of epinephrine was plunged into his heart.

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  Her mind was nearly empty, save for one thought. It came like hiccupping static from a television signal that wants to work: Where was Jewels? Her brain sputtered. I saw him. He was here. But he’s gone now—

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  Saturday morning’s headlines would be splashed with giant black text against white pages. Phrases like “SENSELESS AND UNPRECEDENTED” and “VIOLENT AND SHOCKING.”

  “The two high school girls were beaten and bloodied in an attack by outnumbering members of a street gang...taken from behind and repeatedly kicked and punched in the face and about the head...reportedly after a drink had been spilled and a scuffle broke out in the downtown night club, ‘The Highchair’...”

  The news would ruin the club. It would go under the following year. And the members of Scarcely a Murmur never played a gig together again. Their sound, though, the mix of industrial techno and grinding beats saddled with unlikely acoustic rhythm guitars would sweep Europe in about four years. The rave scene would have them to thank, but would never know their names.

  Erica, still with her wits marginally intact, managed to get away and let loose weak but effective cries for help.

  His Steel Face, Katie’s mind blurted at her. Girder—

  No. Not Steel. Angel. His Angel Face—

  But Katie, already teetering near the edge of a black sea from her stratospheric blood-alcohol level, was rendered unconscious by the bludgeoning blows to her skull. The Red Bandana Girls struck her body mostly with their feet; those simple white running shoes and calf socks bounced and blurred, then became dappled with red. They were in a tight semi-circle, screaming and cussing until some passers by heard Erica’s wails and approached cagily. The white running shoes ran. The Red Bandana Girls were gone. But by then Katie Becks lay unmoving on the ground.

  It was the end of a nasty-hot Friday night in August.

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  The brief struggle between the bloodied corpse on the gurney and the EMT with a syringe sticking out of his chest ended with both of them flinging backwards. An elbow of Jewels’ flew outward and struck through the divider curtain into the front cab, shoving Marlon forward onto the steering wheel as he tried to take a turn onto the hospital’s emergency gate entrance ramp.

  A brief toot of the unit’s horn signaled impending doom. Marlon Smithee’s hands clamped the wheel and he tried to steady it on its tires but the road was slick and they had been sailing along at a tremendous clip.

  It listed to the right and its front bumper caught the hood of a parked Hyundai Pony, blue in color. That impact crushed the front end of the Pony and threw the ambulance’s ass-end over its nose, way up into the air in a long haphazard arc. Upside-down, the vehicle collided with the pavement at a peculiar angle on the entrance ramp, sheering off the spinning light fixture on its rooftop. As the unit slid, sheets of orange sparks blasted into the air, lighting up the morning. The siren still screamed.

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  Jewels had lived with crushing heartache in his chest for eleven years. He had dated again, briefly, sporadically—

  (You love me, Jewels.)

  —But he had regular nightmares about what had happened in those final moments, while Kathryn Danielle Becks, the love of his life, lay bleeding on the sidewalk. An ambulance had been called on a cell phone and they had come. She died, according to the EMTs on duty that night, en route to the hospital. Flat lined right there in the back of the white limo. He pictured it all perfectly in his mind. Too perfectly. Over and over—

  (You love me, Jewels. And that means I can get away with anything.)

  —And he had never really been able to let it go.

  He could still feel Katie’s finger on the dimple of his chin. If he closed his eyes it was still pressing there. I can get away with anything, it said to him with a smile.

  Though there was no logical way he could have been there to change things, though he had not stepped out of a routine, and though he had done nothing to make the events at the Highchair more likely, there was a blame that fell over him like fine fishnet. There was a set of ever-present what-ifs. What if the director’s cut of his movie hadn’t come in at Jango Jim’s Video that afternoon? What if he had just ignored his distaste for loud, abrasive places where smoke hung in the air like a fog? What if he had gone with her to the bar? There was a dark cloud that sat in his vision and colored everything he saw.

  It stayed.

  On the other side of life, the Thief, barefoot and wearing a maroon shirt, grabbed hold of a startled and confused Jewels Fairweather. But it wasn’t much of a struggle. Time was funny on that side and once Jewels caught the notion that he stood a step closer to where Katie might be, his push to re-join the living faltered. When the two traded perceptions o
n a flash of titanium white, the Thief caught it all and knew immediately that the title to this little fight was his.

  On this side, Marlon Smithee was dead, his larynx crushed, his spine too. Jewels Fairweather was spent as well.

  The Gatekeeper was gone.

  But he wasn’t dead.

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  Usually it was easy once they had been carried down. Usually it was just a matter of smothering out the other soul—forcing it to just give in. That had been the case with the Fairweather man—and, in truth, the Thief had not much more in him to do anything but.

  Zeb though. Zeb had been different. Along with what the Thief had seen in his mind, things that overwhelmed him with a flourish of anger and hate he hadn’t felt in a long while, there had also been something new.

  That boy, that Zeb, had bombarded him with things that the Thief had never seen. There were sights and colors, sounds and sensations. The buzzing he always heard behind his ears was nothing compared to that sensory onslaught and it caused him an initial sense of agony and panic. He tried to shake it off. He squinted his mind and threw back his head as though all that stuff suddenly inside him was a brick that would slide down the back of his neck and vanish.

  But Zeb was gone instead, pulled back above.

  In that instant, Zeb disappeared.

  In that moment, Zeb won.

  But the Thief had taken Jewels now. All of that had brought him to all of this. Two birds and a single stone had lost him a second chance but bought him a third. Two birds and a single stone had brought him here.

  And the Thief was again coming for Sebastion Redfield.