Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  “Reinforce…reinforcements?” I broke into a fit of coughing, feeling the harsh smoke irritating the back of my throat.

  “Yes indeed. My apologies, but enlisting their help was one of the reasons why I was forced to stay away for so many of your hours.”

  The air was getting to be so thick now, I could barely see for five feet in front of my face.

  A figure suddenly loomed up out of the smoke directly in front of me, and my heart skipped a beat with the shock of it.

  “Why, hello, young man,” Spiessbach leered wolfishly. “Fancy meeting you here, of all people, hmmm?”

  Before I could react, I felt the touch of a cold blade at my throat.

  “I really would not move, if I were you. This scalpel has been sharpened to the standards required by surgical precision, and is more than capable of slicing open your carotid artery if you so much as flinch.”

  I froze, not moving a muscle. Please don’t let me cough now, or it’s game over, was all I could think.

  “Doctor Marko von Spiessbach, I presume. My name is Lamiyah, and I wish that I could say that it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance — but given the seriousness of our present situation, it seems best to dispense with the pleasantries, does it not?”

  Spiessbach’s hand didn’t move even a fraction, but his eyes flicked sideways in his head to regard the Indian girl clad in her colorful sari.

  “I suppose that would depend on your definition of serious,” he responded thoughtfully. “This situation is nothing short of a delight. As the Americans like to say, it is a ‘win-win situation’ for me.”

  “How so?” Lamiyah sounded politely curious, but she had that look on her face, the one I saw only rarely; when I did see it, I knew that she was up to something devious.

  “This building is about to be consumed by fire,” he explained. “Unfortunate, but it can do no harm to either myself or my associates.”

  “Or your patients,” Lamiyah added helpfully.

  “Just so. These children, who have caused me so much trouble of late, will die in the conflagration, hmmm? They may asphyxiate; they may burn; they may even choose to act preemptively and jump to their deaths. It is of no significance in the grand scheme of things, because no matter which method they choose, they shall be dead within moments, along with their methamphetamine-making companion.

  “And once they have died, like everybody else who has died here at Long Brook, they shall be mine to do with as I please.” Spiessbach’s eyes flicked back to meet mine again. “Would you like me to do you a kindness, boy, and end it all for you now, right here with a flick of my knife? I could empty out your lifeblood in the space of a few heartbeats. You would feel very little pain. You might even thank me afterward, hmmm?”

  Before I could tell him to go to hell, Lamiyah butted in with her own answer.

  “You’re forgetting just one thing, Doctor Spiessbach.”

  “Von Spiessbach,” he corrected her, irritably. “And what, pray tell, is that?”

  “Me.”

  The body-slam came out of nowhere, smashing into the surgeon’s left side with the speed of a truck. His scalpel went flying end-over-end into the air, lost in the smoke. I didn’t hear it clatter onto the rooftop, so it may have gone over the side of the building.

  Frankly, I didn’t give a damn so long as it stayed well away from my throat.

  Fists rained down on Spiessbach’s face in a flurry of blows that made me wince to look at it. For a moment I thought that Mister Long Brook might have come back with Polly in tow, but this level of ferocity was beyond even that guy’s fearsome rage.

  One very steamed-up Jennifer was straddling his chest and just pounding on him, releasing the pent-up rage of decades and decades of mistreatment through the medium of her clenched fists.

  Punch after punch pummeled Spiessbach’s head and neck, breaking the nose and splitting the lip, and still she would not stop.

  Spiessbach gasped, raising bony arms defensively in a pathetic attempt to ward off the blows, but the enraged nurse simply pounded her way through them and kept on punching.

  “You murdered me!” Smack. “You murdered them!” Smack. “All of them.” Smack-smack. “You vile” smack “pathetic” smack “loathsome” smack “miserable excuse for a human being.” Smack. “You killed our child!” Smack. Smack. Smack.

  Lamiyah laid a tender hand on her shoulder. Jennifer’s head flew up, wild-eyed and crazy-looking. She cocked a fist back as if to strike the little Indian girl, who simply stared placidly back at her.

  Finally, sense returned to the nurse’s black-within-black eyes…except, I saw, that they weren’t any more.

  I shuffled over towards them both, wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me; sure enough, Jennifer’s eyes were now a light blue against a bed of white, no longer filled with the sinister darkness of a spirit that had chosen the evil path.

  Holy crap. I guess this was what redemption looked like.

  Spiessbach wasn’t moving. He just lay there limply, every muscle flaccid. His eyes were closed, although based on the speed with which they were swelling shut, I doubted that he could have seen anything through them even if he were still conscious.

  I thought at first that Jennifer’s attack had put him out like a light, but after a few seconds his eyelids began to flutter.

  We were surrounded on all sides by smoke. I couldn’t see much of anything for a few seconds, but then everything around me was suddenly bathed in a golden light. It grew out of a pinpoint in mid-air, but rapidly grew to the size of a basketball.

  Slowly, in the manner of somebody who was either utterly exhausted or absolutely wasted, Jennifer got to her feet and staggered away from him.

  Spiessbach’s body turned a bright yellowish color as the light turned its full attention towards him. His eyes widened in horror as realization dawned.

  “No! Nein! Nein!”

  The doctor held up weak hands in a desperate effort to ward off the inevitable.

  It was pointless.

  I could feel that it was his time. The spirit portal had come for them both. A flood of warmth that was nothing to do with the inferno poured out of the light, and I could feel such a sense of raw, unbridled compassion flooding out of it that it brought fresh tears to my eyes.

  Despite all that he had done, all of the pain and suffering and misery that Spiessbach had caused, the light wasn’t judging him. It wasn’t here for vengeance or retribution, or for any other equally shallow emotion.

  No, it wasn’t about that at all.

  This was all about offering him help, an opportunity to accept responsibility for all that he had done, and possibly to begin making amends.

  “Nein! Please!” the doctor screamed. The light simply pulsed, and then a voice began to speak from somewhere inside it. I couldn’t make out any words, but just the sound of that voice — it was so perfect, so loving; I had never experienced anything more beautiful in my whole life.

  Jennifer reached out to it, a look of blissful acceptance on her face. I was so sure that she was going to go forwards into the portal’s accepting embrace, but then I was swallowed up in a tunnel of black smoke.

  The floor felt sticky beneath my feet. I realized that should have been impossible — stone and concrete don’t melt — so I looked down, and saw that the sole of my shoe was beginning to stick to the ground, which had gotten hot enough to fry an egg on.

  Lamiyah was suddenly beside me, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder.

  “Lamiyah, Becky and Brandon are still out there — a bunch of Spiessbach’s thugs are running around after them. Oh, not to mention the shotgun-carrying meth-head. If you brought reinforcements, we sure could use them in a hurry!”

  “They should not be long in arriving, Daniel; please bear with me. Now, come with me. Let us gather up your friends and devise a way of getting you all to safety.”

  She took my hand in her own, which was cold but strangely comforting at the same time. Swirli
ng geometric patterns had been either inked or tattooed across her fingers. It’s funny the little details you notice in times of stress sometimes.

  A shotgun boomed again from somewhere off to our right, followed by the sharper crack-crack of a pistol firing a double-tap. Lamiyah headed that way, stepping around the play equipment (even though she could have walked straight through it if she had chosen to, I certainly couldn’t) and angling towards the edge of the roof.

  I was worried that we were going to discover Tony and Becky in another shoot-out, popping off rounds at each other while the evil spirits closed in on them both. What we actually found was the two wannabe gunslingers standing back to back, with a violently-coughing Brandon shielded behind them both.

  With their shirts pulled up to the bridge of their noses, the three of them looked like a gang of bank robbers pulling off a heist.

  What worried me more was the pack of seven ghostly attackers who had surrounded them in a horseshoe-pattern, fanned out and closing in. Becky and the boys couldn’t step backwards, or they would be off the edge of the roof and falling six floors to their deaths.

  That didn’t leave them with too many options. We all knew that physical bullets wouldn’t hurt spirits — even in their most physical incarnations, the most a round or piece of buckshot could ever be was a minor inconvenience — but my buddies were fighters, and if they were going to go down, then they were going to go down swinging.

  Damn, but I loved that about them.

  I watched Becky squeeze off another round. Even now, despite the intense pressure she was under, she refused to panic and fire blindly or to snatch at the trigger.

  The shot was well-aimed, flying through the chest of a Neanderthal-looking male orderly who barely flinched as the lead struck home. The wound didn’t bleed; if he had been struck by a spirit weapon or body-part, that would have been a different story, but the ghosts knew that they had nothing to worry about from material sources.

  Becky squeezed the trigger again.

  Click.

  The hammer had fallen on an empty chamber. Her magazine was totally out.

  Flames were starting to flicker up and over the parapets behind her tiny little group now, and the crackling meant I couldn’t hear worth a damn.

  With a curse that I couldn’t lip-read, Becky pitched the useless Glock at the phantom orderly’s head with all the force she could muster. It missed, sailing over his left shoulder to clatter harmlessly onto a section of rooftop behind him.

  “Lamiyah,” I roared, struggling to be heard over the howling inferno that surrounded us. “Is there any way you can take these guys down?” I gestured helplessly at Spiessbach’s cronies, knowing that there wasn’t a damn thing that I could do to them.

  She had to stand on tiptoes to shout back her reply.

  “I’m afraid that I am more of a thinker than a fighter, Daniel…this is more of a job for those gentlemen.”

  With a sweep of the arm, Lamiyah gestured back behind us towards the golden spirit portal, now barely visible as little more than a blurry smudge through the billowing clouds of smoke.

  Suddenly a man burst through the smoke. He wore the uniform of a combat infantryman, and his entire semi-transparent body was outlined in blue. Five other ghost soldiers, similarly dressed and toting what I recognized as M16A2 assault rifles, rushed up to join him, weapons held at the ready.

  My eyes went back to their leader. He bore a look of concern on a face that was…

  “DAD!”

  I squealed. I actually squealed, which made me inhale a lungful of burning smoke and sent me into yet another coughing fit.

  “Hello son,” my father said solemnly.

  Then, with a grin that I would have given a billion dollars and my entire set of Star Wars collectibles to ever see again, he said: “I understand that there are a few asses that need kicking?”

  It might sound weirder than weird, but however you slice it, the concept of ghost Marines packing ghost machine guns is freaking amazing.

  A few quick bursts of well-aimed automatic weapons fire was all that it took for my dad’s squad to make Spiessbach’s cronies see sense.

  They didn’t even have to put rounds on target; once the chickens realized that Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children had arrived to save the day and were packing spirit weapons that could really hurt them, they threw up their hands and pretty much surrendered on the spot.

  Which was just as well really, because Long Brook’s roof was about to come down, taking all four of us survivors with it.

  “This is it man,” I could hear Bill Paxton’s Corporal Hudson from Aliens bleating in my ear. “Game over, man. Game over!”

  While the other Marines efficiently trussed up the wrists of their prisoners, I locked my dad into the fiercest hug I have ever given another human being, alive or dead. I didn’t care in the slightest about how cold his body felt. It was him, my dad, and he had come back for me in the end.

  That was all that mattered.

  And now I was going to die, but that was okay too, because we’d be together again.

  Almost as if he were reading my mind, Dad broke the hug. Holding me at arm’s length, he yelled to ask me what was wrong.

  “There’s no way we can make it off this roof,” I screamed back. “I get that, and it’s okay. We can be together again, all of us.”

  I looked around at Becky and Brandon. I could only see their eyes, but they were both streaming with tears as they watched our totally unexpected family reunion. Even Tony seemed to be choking up, although that might have just been the smoke.

  But then my fantasies of a blissful new afterlife spent in the Summerland with Dad and Becky and Brandon and Lamiyah were rudely shattered when another thought crowbarred its way into my brain.

  What about Mom…how was she going to cope, losing first her husband, and then her only son?

  It would utterly devastate her. She would be a broken woman. And what about Becky’s family, her Wicca-loving parents…and Brandon’s? Hell, even Tony had to have somebody who would miss him, somebody to mourn his death when he died here tonight.

  Another spirit-form materialized out of the smoke, moving over to stand with Brandon. I couldn’t hear a word either of them was saying, but I really didn’t need to. This was the one time that I could totally read his mind.

  Here on this burning roof, standing on the very edge of death, he was finally able to see his grandmother again. I came close to crying like a newborn baby as I watched them both embrace, the old lady patting her grandson’s back in that protective maternal way that’s completely instinctive to grandmothers the world over.

  Suddenly, my head was clamped in an icy vice-like grip. Dad turned my head towards him and stuck his face right in front of mine. He screamed every word slowly and clearly, making sure to enunciate it perfectly so that there could be no misunderstanding.

  “You. Are. Not. Going. To. Die. Here. Tonight!”

  And incredibly enough, I didn’t.

  What happened next was pretty much a blur.

  I’ll tell it as best I can, but you have to understand that it was all over so incredibly quickly, a lot of it seems like a dream to me now.

  Oh, and there’s the fact that I was so frightened for most of it that I was concentrating really hard on not peeing my pants.

  The Marines produced ropes from somewhere. The coils glowed an ethereal blue, just like they did. Visibility was down to practically nothing now, but somehow they managed to secure the ropes to some kind of anchor point on top of the roof.

  Dad scooped me up in his arms again, crushing me close to his chest and yelling at me to hang on for dear life. Before I knew it, Dad had jumped up onto the parapet of the roof and turned back to face the rope again.

  “Might want to close your eyes, son!”

  I took him at his word and screwed my eyes tightly shut.

  The next thing I knew, that sickening floating feeling was kicking up a storm in my stomach — you know, the on
e you get at the top of the rollercoaster’s first big climb, right before it plunges back down again at Mach 2.

  I remember feeling incredibly hot for a moment, as if we were falling into the open mouth of an oven. Then the feeling went away again as quickly as it had arrived, and suddenly it was back, fiercer than before; I figured out later that we had pretty much rappelled down six floors in about thirty seconds, and although Dad had done his best to choose a spot that was, in his own words, “a bit less flaming than the rest,” I was still a little scorched as we passed each burning floor on the way down.

  The thud of his combat boots on solid ground was my cue to open my eyes again. Dad was sprinting away from the building, and as I looked over his shoulder I could see smoke and flame pouring out of most of the open windows and doorways.

  Also standing in most of those same windows were the motionless apparitions of hundreds of Long Brook’s former patients, all of them watching silently as the tiny squad of Marines dashed out of the inferno and headed towards the safety of the treeline.

  Dad lowered me to the ground gently. Just a few yards away, the other members of his squad were doing the same for Becky and Brandon. The Marine that had been holding Tony just let him drop, and the meth dealer howled in agony when his wounded leg hit the floor.

  “Sorry,” said the Marine flatly, sounding anything but.

  Lamiyah hadn’t needed the help, and came striding up under her own steam.

  “It’s so good to see you, son,” Dad said quietly, clasping my arms. I was still crying, and I thought that I probably would be for quite a while yet. My next question came out as more of a sob.

  “Dad…why did it take you so long?”

  Dad took a seat on the grass next to me, in the same way he’d always done when he had something to explain.

  “Danny…when I died over there, it was…things were pretty bad, son. That’s about as much detail as I want to go into, but let’s just say that I wasn’t in the best state, either mentally or emotionally. It was my second tour, remember, and the sh…the stuff I was seeing was starting to get to me.”