Captain Quad

by Sean Costello

  Impotent rage seethed within him as he dipped and tumbled toward the hospital, toward the ramshackle base camp that was his body. He was out of control—and he had been so close! Another few seconds and she would have been his—!

  Peter's involuntary retreat ceased. It was like running headlong into a cinder-block wall. A whining buzz saw of pain slit through the top of his skull—and now a chunk of light blew out of him and was extinguished; it felt like flesh being tom out, clawed out, and he screamed; he screamed and the gulls rose up from the island far below, a screeching, wheeling white cloud.

  Understanding followed the pain.

  Sam! It was a roar.

  Sammeeeeeeeee!

  Another chunk blew out of him, and another, crippling gouts of the thing he'd become, and now he was moving again, flipping and cartwheeling like a dead autumn leaf. He tried to hold himself in, the way a gut-shot soldier will clutch his uncoiling guts, tried to smooth out his flight. . . but it was pointless. He was a rag in a twister's sucking funnel.

  Sam was not just shaking him awake.

  Sam was killing him.

  The hospital came into view, a smooth black promontory in the dawn's brooding light, and Peter tumbled toward it. He felt no regret, only a blind, delirious fury and the consummate bitterness of betrayal. He had ignored Sam's threats, believed them to be angry but empty words.

  He had been wrong.

  He twirled toward his ninth-story window like a plummeting aircraft, the March wind wailing in his ears. When he struck it, the window exploded, the double pane pulverizing into fragments the size of sequins. They showered Sam where he stood at the bedside with a pillow seated tightly over Peter's face.

  Sammy, no. . .

  It was a feeble whisper, an unheeded plea.

  Too late.

  As Sam straightened up, removing the pillow, Peter caught a glimpse of his own dead face, fish mouth gaping, eyes mashed shut, airless chest jeweled with broken glass. In an agony of dissolution, he merged with the corpse on the bed. It was like sinking into raw, refrigerated meat.

  Sam looked down at his brother's corpse.

  It grinned.

  Then it sat up, and Sam screamed.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Dr. Hanrahan was the intern on call for the chronic ward. So far it had been a pretty laid-back rotation, nothing like the rat race she'd stumbled into during her stint in obstetrics the month before. Most nights she slept right through, curled up on a cot in the sleep room down the hall.

  But tonight the call had been an urgent one—a possible respiratory arrest in 908—and now she thumped down the hall with the nurse, the utensils of her trade jouncing in her jacket pockets. She knew the patient in question, a quad in his middle twenties. The remote alarm on his diaphragmatic stimulator had sounded, and the nurse had paged her right away. She'd said something about hearing glass breaking down there, too, but Hanrahan had still been half asleep, and the information had barely registered. They rounded the last corner before Peter's room—

  And stopped dead in their tracks.

  "What the hell. . . ?"

  Now it came again, a deep-throated lowing sound more beastly than human. Barely aware they were doing it, the two women clutched each other in the hallway, their heads rapping painfully together. They exchanged fearful glances, then separated, embarrassed, the renewed silence refuting the existence of that sound. If it had been there at all, it had been one of the old chronics, moaning in his senile sleep.

  They started along the hallway again, more cautiously now—and froze a second later when a terrific crash came from Peter's room, and a brilliant blue light began to flicker beneath the closed door.

  A crackling blue bolt struck Sam in the throat and sent him reeling into the wall unit. The TV slid off its perch and exploded. As Sam collapsed, the entire wall unit let go and came crashing to the tiles, narrowly missing him. He clambered to his feet, still clutching the pillow.

  Peter's corpse was sitting up in bed, its eyes pearly-blank, its scrawny arms flapping like the limbs of some haywire mechanical toy. Its mouth worked soundlessly. . . then that deathly moan rolled out and Sam felt his bladder let go. The air was saturated with a dense electrical charge, and when Sam clutched the bed rail for support the shock nearly snapped his wrist.

  He took a step toward the bed—and Peter's VCR sailed past his head, missing him by inches. It shattered against the wall, jags of plastic and fractured circuit board buzzing through the air like shrapnel.

  She's dead, Sammy. The words were blunt and hollow, as if spoken through an oil-filled tunnel. I drowned the bitch. Drowned her like a rat.

  Sam threw himself onto the bed, arms extended like pile drivers, eyes bulging in disbelief. His fingers closed around his brother's dead neck, the force of the attack driving Peter's body onto its back.

  "You're dead!" Sam cried, jamming the pillow over Peter's face again. "You're fucking dead!"

  Peter's body began to rise off the bed, supporting Sam's weight with ease. Barely sane, Sam released the pillow and it tumbled away. . . and now Peter was staring up at him, hard cobalt light twisting in his eyes. His corpse quivered between Sam's straddling legs, coursing with some awful energy, and now his flesh began to bloat and distort, throwing itself into hideous folds and excrescences. That killing light poured out of his eyes and surrounded them, blinding Sam to the horrid transformations that were still taking place beneath him.

  This is your eviction notice, Sambo, Peter crooned, I'm moving in.

  Suddenly flaccid, Peter's body dropped to the bed, dumping Sam to the floor. As Sam lay there, something jolted up through his balls and centered in his skull, and Sam felt like a sheet of wet paper, two giant hands tearing him slowly in half. His mouth fell open, but his voice was gone.

  You're going to die, Sammy.

  He felt the cold breath of these words in his heart.

  And it's going to be horrible.

  "Hey! Open up in there! Open up!"

  The commotion in the room had reached a frenzied peak—then it had ceased. That unearthly radiance had flickered and flared like a living thing; then it, too, had been extinguished, as if someone had pulled the plug on a freaky acid-dream light show. A few of the ambulatory patients had poked their heads out of their rooms, but the nurse had hustled them back inside. Finding the door locked, Dr. Hanrahan had used the nearest phone to call Security. The guard was thumping down the hallway right now, key rings jangling.

  "Unlock this door," Hanrahan said urgently.

  "What seems to be the prob—"

  "Just do it."

  After finding the right key, the security guard unlocked the door. He started to pull it open, but Hanrahan placed a restraining hand on his arm.

  "Let me," she said with quiet authority. She opened the door just wide enough to admit her head.

  It took the intern a few moments to credit what she was seeing—Sam Gardner, whom she had spoken to only once, standing in the dark by his brother's obviously dead body with a pillow clenched in his fist, the wall-size window that overlooked the science center glassless and blowing cold air, the room a shambles—then she withdrew her head. It took another few seconds to piece together what had most likely taken place in that room. Then she dismissed the guard and signaled the nurse to join her.

  The two women stepped into Peter's room, bits of shattered glass crunching under their feet. The intern knew the history in this case, knew of the steadfast devotion of the young man who stood with his back to her now, and felt a great weight of pity in her heart. Pity and admiration. What courage it must have taken to free through death his brother's tortured soul. What selfless valor. She met eyes with the nurse, and in one of those extraordinary moments that could only be described as telepathic, a conspiracy of silence was born. Obviously a pact had been made between the brothers, a contract against the horrors of quadriplegia. Peter had held out for as long as he could—Six years, Hanrahan thought, shuddering in the wintry air—but now it was
over, and there was no sane reason for what had happened here tonight ever to leave this room.

  Hanrahan glanced at the wreckage around her and guessed that in his grief Sam had stampeded through the room in a guilt-ridden rage. He'd pitched something heavy through the window, a chair, maybe, and that queer blue light had been nothing more than an electrical discharge from the shattered TV.

  In her mind the intern filled out the certificate of death—cause: respiratory arrest, resuscitation unsuccessful.

  Hanrahan advanced into the room and placed a hand on Sam's shoulder. Sam didn't react, only stared at his brother's body.

  "It's all right," the doctor murmured. "Your secret is safe with us. Why don't you come away from here now? We'll take care of all this."

  Sam didn't reply. He stood there a moment longer, staring. Then he turned and ran out of the room, the pillow still clenched in his fist.

  The duty officer in Emerg looked up tiredly from the chart he was working on. A tall, red-faced young man bolted through the department with a pillow in his hand, then burst through the ambulance entrance and disappeared. Curious, the doctor followed at a fast walk, reaching the dispatch ramp in time to see the man grab a uniformed driver and lead him toward an idling ambulance. He spoke urgently to the attendant, but his words were lost to the inquisitive physician. A few moments later, the white and orange van was ripping up Paris Street, dome lights flashing.

  Shrugging, the doctor went back inside. He'd find out soon enough what the trouble was.

  "Down the hill!" Sam cried, running ahead. "Hurry!"

  The paramedics followed, picking their way carefully through the patchy snow cover, a stretcher casting a thin dawn-shadow between them.

  Sam sped surefootedly down the hill. He could see her in the gathering light, an unmoving hump by the edge of the lake. When he reached her, he hunkered beside her, expecting the worst. He shook her briskly, got no response, then probed her neck for a pulse. It was there, thin and erratic. His fingers came away bloody.

  "Hang in there, kid," he said, and then called "Down here!" to the paramedics.

  When they reached Sam and Kelly the paramedics set down the stretcher and promptly began assessing the damage.

  "Oh, boy," the first man said, two fingers pressed to Kelly's wrist, "She's hypothermic. Feels like atrial fib."

  "Let's get a move on," his partner said.

  And they bundled Kelly onto the stretcher.

  Cold. So cold. . .

  She could hear her teeth chattering, could feel the cramps in her frozen muscles. . . but there was a comforting hand on her head, stroking her, and she knew that she would be okay. There were urgent voices, too, and a terrible wailing noise, but these things seemed unimportant.

  She concentrated on the hand.

  Now there was a quick stab of pain in her arm and her eyes flew open. Blue light strobed across the low, white ceiling and in a panic Kelly tried to sit up.

  "Easy," Sam said, continuing to stroke her hair, which was clotted with tiny icicles. "You're okay. They're starting an I.V."

  "But the light. . .” Kelly rasped. It trailed across the ceiling again. . . and then she understood. She was in an ambulance. The light was the dome light, nothing more. She looked up at Sam.

  "Is it over?" she said in a small, frightened voice.

  "Yes," Sam said. "It's over."

  Kelly took his hand and blacked out again.

  And the ambulance peeled into the dawn.

  "They're not going to keep me," Kelly said. They were at the University Hospital, in the emergency room holding area. Three hours had passed. Kelly's lips were still blue and she was shivering, but she'd kept down some tea and she felt a lot better. She sat up on the stretcher and looked at Sam. "What time is it?"

  "Almost ten," Sam said hollowly.

  "God, I hate the thought of going back to that house," Kelly said, needing to say something, anything. She felt numb, shell-shocked. "It's a mess. . .” And Chainsaw's still there. She shuddered, a brief, jolting spasm. "I guess I could go to my mom's, but I'm not sure I'm up to her just yet."

  "You could spend a few days at my place," Sam said in that same inflectionless tone. "There's plenty of room."

  Kelly touched his hand. "I'd hate to impose, especially now. . .”

  "Nonsense," Sam said, flinching noticeably at her touch. "You'll be good company."

  "Well, thanks, Sam. I believe I will."

  "Then it's settled. Come over as soon as they let you go."

  He drew her a map on the back of a public health pamphlet, then left the hospital for the last time.

  The morning's cool light inched its way through the apartment like an alien anthropologist, patiently unearthing the debris of an extinct society. It crept under the coffee table and revealed a dusty bottle of Jack, drained to the last sour drop and lying dead on its side. It stripped the obscuring murk from the couch where Leona had lain, reshaping it from a formless gray hump into the swaybacked ruin that it was. It extracted from its masking bed of shadow the dormant reel-to-reel. . . and Sam switched it on.

  There was a moment of static-laced silence. Then those first haunting chords drifted out, evoking a different age, a different set of possibilities.

  He lifted his chin and remembered.

  The shrine was still there, framed in a crisp oval of sunlight on the piano's white lid, and as he listened, he walked over to inspect it. After a few lingering moments, he removed the photo from its circle of adornments and turned it facedown on the lid.

  And the music played on, scratchy with age but still sweet, so bittersweet.

  He sat on the edge of the piano bench, a tall, strongly built lad with a pockmarked face and a tendency to slouch. He sat and listened to the music, his dry gaze settling on the orderly rank of keys. . . and now a strange, lopsided grin tugged at his lips and he plunked a single key.

  Middle C.

  The note was clean and perfect, like the day outside.

  He hunched over the keys and began to play along with the tape—flawlessly, as he always had. His grin never faltered.

  And when the piece was done and the tape commenced its infernal flapping, there came a hesitant knocking at the door.

  Aren't you going to let her in?

  He didn't move.

  The voice was like a cancer in his heart.

  Come on, Sammy. We're going to have to learn to share.

  When the knock came again, Sam got up to answer the door.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991 by Sean Costello

  ISBN 978-1-4976-2299-9

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

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  Captain Quad