Ghosts

by David A. Robertson

  “So what, then?” Cole whispered to himself, scanning the clinic, front to back, bottom to top, thinking of something, anything.

  He just wanted to find Pam.

  He kept looking at the roof of the clinic, two storeys up. Was it any higher than the electric fence he’d jumped over at the facility, when he’d encountered Reynold?

  “Maybe a bit,” Cole whispered again. “Twenty feet, give or take?” He measured this in basketball hoops. He figured two hoops, stacked one on top of the other, looked about right.

  Are you talking to me or…? Choch asked in Cole’s head.

  No, I just assume you’re listening anyway.

  Because I could come back, if you—

  Nope, I’m good, thanks.

  Cole figured he could make the jump. He had cleared the fence at the facility with room to spare. If he could get a running start, no problem. But the only way to do that would be to run straight through the open, across the field. If he did that, he’d be seen. The clinic didn’t have a back door. There might not be a guard, but there was no space for him to build enough momentum to jump onto the roof. Same went for the side door. Cole was agile, but not that agile.

  Typical Blackwood trees surrounded the clinic: tall, thick, strong. They covered the clinic almost protectively with branches that hung conveniently over the roof, as though to say: Come on Cole, try it.

  “Breaking door handles and climbing trees,” Cole said. “Why’d I think anything different?”

  Cole made his way to the back of the clinic under the cover of Blackwood Forest. As he’d hoped, there were no guards there. He hid behind a tree for a few minutes, waiting to see if a guard was patrolling the exterior of the building. When nobody came around, he stepped out into the open. He supposed there’d be no reason to have a guard patrol the back of the clinic. Mihko might have had an idea what Cole could do—they’d covered up Cole’s failed break-in at the facility the night he’d encountered the creature—but to them and everybody else, Cole Harper was dead.

  Cole found a particularly thick tree with branches stretching over the roof. He scaled it and walked the branch like a tightrope until it was safe to drop down onto the roof. He landed and rolled, like he’d seen in countless movies. It kind of worked. He waited to make sure that nobody had heard him, frozen as though by one of Choch’s tricks.

  “Now what?” Cole did a quick survey of the roof. It was flat, with some ventilation sticking out in one spot. No easy access inside the clinic. No door that conveniently led up to the roof from the second floor. “For once, I wish Choch was right about this being a story,” Cole said to himself. He walked over to the side of the clinic with no door and no guard. The windows to the second-floor rooms were reachable, but getting into them wasn’t going to be easy. Cole pictured himself falling to the ground and having to retreat to Ashley’s trailer on a broken leg. He could handle a broken leg. He’d be able to walk on it by the morning. His arm had healed fast when Tristan had broken it, and he was healing even faster now. But what if somebody heard? How would he outrun guards on one leg? He didn’t heal that fast.

  Pam is worth the risk, he thought. He held tightly to the edge of the building and lowered himself down the side. The tip of his toes brushed a window ledge. He took a deep breath and let go. His feet landed on the ledge, but one foot slipped and he lost his balance. At the last minute, three fingers caught on the ledge. Cole swung his other hand up beside it, secured his grip, and pulled himself up and to his feet.

  The room was dark, but somebody was inside. Lying on the bed, motionless. Sleeping. How sick were they? Was Pam sick? What if that was Pam? Cole slid open the window, and climbed inside the room. Whoever it was, they were attached to a monitor and an IV drip.

  “Hey,” Cole whispered.

  No movement. He walked to the bed and found a man there. Unconscious. Pale. Gaunt.

  “Hey,” Cole whispered again and nudged the man’s shoulder. “Wait a minute.” He leaned in closer, and, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he recognized who it was. “Mr. Kirkness.”

  Cole shook his head. “What did they do to you?”

  Scott, the murderer, had shot Wayne in the stomach, but last time Cole saw Wayne, he was doing better. Healing. Looking good. Now, he was unresponsive.

  Cole tried to wake him. Repeated his name, but not so loud as to bring anyone into the room. Cole shook Wayne gently, but not so hard as to break him. He looked like he could crumble into dust and blow away. As Cole’s eyes adjusted to the dark room, he could see Wayne more clearly. He found it hard to separate how Wayne looked now from how Elder Mariah had looked when they’d rescued her from this very place. The only difference, maybe, was that she’d gotten sick from the virus and had been admitted. Wayne had been here for another reason entirely, so how did he get sick? From others here? Was it airborne?

  “Everything’s a fog,” Brady had said to Cole, when Cole asked what Elder Mariah knew about her sickness, about getting better, then bad once more. “She remembers when you cured her, but then over the next while, she got weaker and weaker, and then…nothing. It’s all a blank.”

  Elder Maria had only known that she needed to get out of Wounded Sky, and Brady and his parents needed to come with her. She wouldn’t say how she knew, and maybe she really didn’t know.

  Cole put his hand on top of Wayne’s head, leaned in, and whispered, “I’ll come back for you, I promise.”

  A promise to Wayne. A promise to Eva.

  Every patient Cole found was in a state similar to Wayne. Sick, hooked up to tubes and heart monitors, wasting away in a hospital bed. It was unnatural.

  He needed Dr. Captain.

  The first floor was more of the same, although there, Cole entered rooms not just to check on patients, but also to hide from two nurses and a doctor, as well as a security guard. In the room he was in now, there was yet another sick patient. He checked to see if this patient was as sick as the others (he was). Cole heard the doorknob start to turn. He raced to the door and clamped his hand around the knob to keep it from turning.

  “What the…” The nurse tried again, but couldn’t budge the handle. “Somebody lock this thing?”

  The nurse muttered about finding a key, and Cole listened while their footsteps receded down the hallway. When he couldn’t hear them anymore, he opened the door, and walked to the next door just as a guard turned the corner.

  Cole lunged for the door, opened it, and got inside as fast as possible. He put his back against the door and listened for the footsteps. They approached, stopped outside of the door, paused there for an agonizingly long time, and then kept moving.

  Only then did Cole look around the room. In the moonlight streaming in through the window, he could see the patient.

  Pam.

  Cole rushed over to find her unconscious. Drained of life. He put his hand on her cheek to feel her cold, clammy skin. Checked for a pulse because he didn’t believe what the heart monitor told him: she was alive.

  “Pam,” he said, “Pam,” hoping that somehow, she’d wake up.

  She didn’t.

  He forgot about listening for guards, forgot about everything but Pam. He pulled up a chair and sat at her bedside, held her hand. He stayed there longer than he should have, praying for her to wake up, to be healthy. He knew he should have protected her from this, but didn’t because he’d let his guard down a month ago. He’d found his dad’s body and didn’t see the person dressed in the hazmat suit until it was too late. He didn’t act, just felt the bullet enter his forehead.

  “Think,” Cole said to himself.

  He wanted to take her with him, now. He went to the window and looked out. The guard at the front door was to the left. They’d see Cole leave with her in his arms if he tried to get her out the window. The guard or one of the Mihko staff in the clinic would see them in the hallways, and even if by some miracle they didn’t, she was too frail to leave the way he’d come. There was no way. He took her chart from the foot of h
er bed. He would give it to Dr. Captain.

  “I’ll come back for you,” he said. He would come back for everybody.

  He tucked the chart under his shirt and snuck back up to the roof. There, he pulled out the chart and read what he could under the moonlight, under the northern lights he’d called home for a short time. But not much of it made any sense to him, other than the fact that it had been filled out by Dr. Ament—her signature was on the chart—and there was information about Pam. Her name, height, weight, age, parents, cultural background. Cree. A box at the bottom of the paper had a note on it, filled out by Dr. Ament. The same handwriting as her signature. Pam’s date of transfer. To where? Cole had one guess. The research facility.

  He read the date over and over, before looking up to the northern lights, and whispered, “Two days.”

  He had to move fast.

  12

  VISITATIONS

  DR. CAPTAIN’S PLACE WAS BETWEEN THE clinic and Ashley’s trailer. Cole had stayed in the Blackwood Forest since jumping off the roof of the clinic, managing to make a clean getaway. The only evidence of his visit was Pam’s missing chart. The medical information was now stuffed underneath Cole’s hoodie, ready to be handed over to Dr. Captain to decipher. He left the woods and found the path that led to Dr. Captain’s place. Cole felt bad that he’d been gone so long. Brady was probably worried about him, but with only two days left until Pam would be “transferred,” and with Wayne looking so sick, he needed to be efficient.

  Another set of footsteps joined Cole on the path to Dr. Captain’s place, echoing in his mind. He looked to the left, to picture sneakers step-in-step with his. The last time he had seen Alex, they’d been walking from the cemetery, hand-in-hand. He’d found her there, standing in front of the rounded white headstones in neat little rows. Teachers, classmates. His mom. Her dad. She told him she went there often, on walks. She felt guilty because she didn’t want her dad to go to the school that night. She wanted him to stay home with her. Told him that she didn’t want him to come back. Ever. Then he didn’t, dying along with everybody else in the fire. Cole wondered if the guilt she’d felt then, as a child just wanting her dad to stay home with her, was something like the guilt he felt. After their walk, after bringing her right to her front door, after she’d kissed him on the cheek goodnight, she had been killed by Scott. Why? Cole still didn’t know, other than she’d been in the files, too. And Scott wasn’t around to ask anymore; at least, he hadn’t been in any of the rooms Cole had checked.

  He liked imagining her footsteps, pretending she was there with him. He looked up from her sneakers to her. She seemed so real that he thought Choch was playing a trick on him. He could even see her breath in the air, like puffs of cigarette smoke. She glanced at him, and they made eye contact.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Stop being a whiney bitch.”

  Alex, being Alex.

  She took his hand, and he could feel her fingers tangled up with his. When they’d walked together before, it was her hand in his. Stop being a whiney bitch. Cole stifled a laugh. Imagining her here, now, made him realize just how much like Pam she was.

  “Is that why you’re here now?” he asked.

  “Come on, dude,” she said. “You’re feeling guilty enough as it is. What do I look like?”

  “No, not like that. I mean…”

  “Pam’s right, though,” she said. “It’s incredibly, freakishly easy to mess with you.”

  Cole listened to their footsteps, soles against gravel.

  “She’s dying,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Am I dreaming you’re here to, I don’t know, motivate me or something?”

  “I am dreamy,” she said, “but I’m guessing that’s not why. Motivate you how, exactly?”

  “To save Pam because I couldn’t save you?”

  “Harper, that’s still whining,” she said. “I thought you were all superhero mode now, kicking names and taking ass.”

  They stopped at Dr. Captain’s door, right where they had stopped a month and a bit ago. He had let her go inside, and he left, and soon after she got shot. The saliva from her lips had still been wet on his cheek.

  “Stop it!” she laughed, and two-hand pushed him in the chest. “Jeee-zus.”

  Cole stepped back, and then steadied himself. “You’re not really here. You’re…” he looked skyward, at the northern lights. “…up there, where I was. I remember you…” Cole closed his eyes and pictured it up there, closed his eyes tight, trying to recall everything he could. There were ribbons of light. Dancing.

  “I don’t dance,” she said.

  “That has to be why you’re here. I’m trying to motivate myself. Right?”

  “You tell me.”

  “That’s why you’re here.”

  She let go of his hand, and they stood there, face to face, looking at each other warmly.

  “It’s not so bad, you know,” she said. “I’m with my dad again. There’s music. I like music. I love a good beat. Dancing,” she shrugged, “I’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t remember much about it. I try to remember more, but I can’t,” he said. “It’s like this…dream.”

  “Well, don’t rush back, okay? You’ve got work to do.” She pushed some hair behind her ear. She looked up, like she needed to get back. Like she was really here, but belonged somewhere else.

  “Did we dance up there?” he asked. “When I was there? Am I crazy to think that?”

  “Please, Harper.” Alex rolled her eyes. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

  “Who’s out here?” The front door swung open. Michael was there and Alex was gone. Cole scrambled to lift the neck warmer over his mouth.

  Cole’s heart raced. He wondered if Michael had seen him. He wondered if Michael was one of the many who hated him now because of the lies that had been spread. Or if Michael hated him because it actually was Michael who threw the rock through Eva’s window, interrupting Cole’s near-kiss with her.

  He wanted to run.

  “Nobody.” Brilliant answer, Cole. Nobody. Well done, he cursed himself.

  Michael looked confused. “Who are you?” He peered through the dark.

  Cole stepped out of the light that had been cast from inside the house, through the doorframe. He tried to pull his neck warmer up higher. What had Choch called him? Who had Choch created for that couple they’d encountered? Franny and Bill. “Justin?”

  “You don’t sound too sure about that.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “Justin Johnson.” Michael looked surprised that the name had come from his mouth.

  “JJ.” Cole tried to sound more confident with the lie.

  Michael hesitated for moment, and then his eyes lit up, like he’d just had an epiphany. “Are you sick or something?”

  “Uhh, yeah.”

  Michael checked his phone for the time. “How sick are you, that you’d risk being out after curfew?”

  “Got some kind of a flu. Puking all night.” Cole kept trying to make his voice deeper, so that Michael wouldn’t recognize it as his.

  “Mom doesn’t see people this late, JJ. Everybody knows that. A, it’s curfew, and B, you’re going to tip off Mihko that she’s doing this, and then where will people go? We’re trying to help.” Michael went to shut the door. “Come back tomorrow.”

  Cole put his scarred palm against it. Michael looked startled. “What are you doing?” He tried to push the door closed, but Cole wouldn’t let him.

  “There’s no time.” Cole almost lowered his neck warmer, to show Michael who he really was, but didn’t. “Please.”

  “You’re not going to die overnight.”

  “People did a month ago, Mike.”

  “That flu’s gone. You know that. Just…”

  “Please.”

  Michael looked Cole—JJ—over carefully, like he was a doctor too, and could assess the urgency. But then he relented. Another sigh. “Just hang on a sec, okay?�
� He left the door open and disappeared down a hallway.

  Cole listened.

  “Mom,” Michael said. “JJ’s here to see you. Says he’s got the flu or something.”

  “JJ?” Dr. Captain sounded confused.

  “Justin? From school. Justin Johnson?”

  “I don’t know any JJ.”

  Cole heard Dr. Captain’s footsteps. She walked across a room, then down the hallway and to the front door. Whatever reality Choch had pushed into Michael’s mind, he hadn’t done the same for Dr. Captain. She tilted her head as though to get a look at Cole from a different angle. But what could she see? His hood was up, neck warmer on, eyes probably covered in shadows.

  “I’m sorry.” She wrapped her robe around her body from the cold coming into the house. “Justin?”

  “JJ,” Cole stated, only because Michael was standing behind her, watching protectively. Cole understood that. He’d lost his sister, right in this house. All he had left was his mom.

  Dr. Captain’s eyebrows furrowed. “JJ,” she repeated to herself.

  “JJ. You feeling okay, Mom?” Michael stepped closer to Cole and Dr. Captain. “He’s been in school with us since we were kids.”

  Cole faked a heavy cough to sell the fact that he was sick, just to get himself inside the door. “Honestly, this won’t take long, Dr. Captain. I just need something to help me sleep maybe.”

  “Store’s all wiped out, right?” Michael said.

  “Yeah, man,” Cole said. “Like, just try to find Advil, or NyQuil never mind.”

  “Justin,” Dr. Captain said more confidently, as though trying to convince herself. She stepped to the side, leaving the doorway clear for Cole to enter the house. “Come in.”

  “Thanks.” Another cough, and then Cole entered the house, trying not to think about where Alex had been shot. Don’t be a whiney bitch, he imagined her telling him. He followed Dr. Captain, but paused, and turned to Michael.