Ghosts

by David A. Robertson

  “We killed you,” she said weakly. “I saw your body. I…you’d almost no blood left.”

  “What? Blood? What are you talking about? You killed me to cover up what you were doing, same reason you killed Ashley and Alex.”

  Dr. Ament looked away, like she couldn’t stand to look at him, like if she didn’t look, he’d go away. That it would mean this wasn’t real. “We only ever wanted your blood. Dead or alive.”

  “So you could use it to make a new cure?”

  She nodded. “We’re modifying the virus, testing out its efficacy, for what we need it to do. And—”

  “This time, you’ll have it. It won’t be only in my body.”

  Cole’s mind felt like it was about to burst, but he didn’t have time to mull it over. Guards could come rushing into the clinic at any moment. He got Dr. Ament on her feet and led her over to a chair. Sat her down.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just stay there.” He looked around the room. Settled on the metal bar at the side of the hospital bed. He ripped it off and returned to Dr. Ament. “Keep still.”

  “What are you going to do, beat me with that?”

  Cole put the bar behind the chair and positioned it properly. “You know everything about me. When I take the bus, when I practice basketball, who my friends are. All the things you know about me, and you think I’d beat a woman to death with a metal rod?”

  She looked at him like he was still just a walking corpse. “Clearly, we don’t know what you’re capable of.”

  “You’re right, you don’t.” Cole bent the metal rod into a circle around Dr. Ament. He grabbed her radio, dropped it on the ground, and crushed it with his foot.

  “It’s too late.”

  “It’s never too late.”

  Cole turned around and picked up Wayne. He carried Wayne out of the room, and only then did Wayne’s eyes flutter open. He squinted, trying to focus, and looked around, realizing that he was being carried.

  “Who are you?” His voice was faint.

  “I’m here to get you out,” Cole said.

  “Out where?”

  “To see your daughter.”

  Brady was in the lobby with the three patients he had gathered, two of them able to walk under their own power, and one leaning on him heavily. There was a guard on the floor, dead to the world. Maybe the same guard Cole had encountered earlier, when he’d gone to find Pam.

  Cole nodded at the guard. “What happened there?”

  “Tristan took care of that one,” Brady said. “No roasting sticks required.”

  “Well, I’m glad I almost died in his arms then,” Cole said. “Where’s everybody now?”

  “Already on their way to the boats.”

  “One of the doctors called for backup. We have to get out of here.”

  No new guards had arrived yet, but Cole could hear them coming from the research facility. He couldn’t tell how many, and he didn’t want to wait to find out. They left the clinic for Silk River as fast as the patients could go, following the edge of Blackwood Forest from behind the clinic through some thick grass and brush and down an embankment. Michael, Lauren, and Tristan were there, already helping people onto the boats. The guards were closer. Maybe at the clinic, Cole figured. Finding their colleagues knocked out, burned. They would check inside the clinic and find Dr. Ament strapped to the chair with a bent metal rod and all the patients missing.

  “Is that it?” Lauren asked, when she saw Brady and Cole.

  “Yeah.” Cole put Wayne down and helped him into Eva’s boat. Both she and Dr. Captain had looked anxious to get going, but when Eva saw her dad, she ran to him.

  “Dad!” she said through tears. “What did they do to you?”

  “Too many…romance novels…” He tried to laugh, but coughed violently instead. “Took the wind…out of me.”

  “You idiot.” She hugged him carefully. “Let’s sit you down, okay?”

  “Where…we going?” he asked.

  “Elder Mariah’s.”

  Cole watched Eva with her dad. He smiled in spite of the night they’d had, the night they still had ahead of them. She and her father were together again, after over a month of being kept apart. First, he’d been in the clinic for the gunshot wound to the stomach. The bullet that had been meant for Eva. Then, after Mihko had taken over the clinic, he, like the others, had become part of the new experiment.

  Lauren offered to drive their boat, so Eva could sit with her father. Cole, Brady, Michael, and Tristan helped get everybody else on board. They got into the packed boats after Tristan helped the last person on. Cole could hear the guards coming their way. He did a quick headcount, and satisfied, called out to the drivers. “Let’s get out of here!”

  The engines roared to life. There was a loud pop over the motors. Tristan, who’d been sitting next to Cole, hit the ground.

  Standing on the embankment, his gun raised, was Mark.

  “No!” Cole shouted.

  Another pop, and Cole felt a bullet hit his shoulder.

  He looked at Mark, looked at Tristan, who was bleeding out on the floor of the boat. He leaped out of the boat and charged Mark. Another shot missed. Cole laid his shoulder into Mark’s stomach and drove him into the ground.

  “What did you do? Why?”

  He straddled Mark and pummeled his face. Mark was out after one punch, but Cole kept going. He wouldn’t have stopped, would’ve beaten Mark into the ground, if it weren’t for Michael, who grabbed Cole’s arm while it was raised in mid-air ready for another strike.

  “Cole, stop! You’ll kill him!”

  “I want to kill him!”

  “No, you don’t!”

  Cole jerked his arm away from Michael, knocking him over, and raised his arm again. He clenched his fist. It was shaking. His entire body was shaking. Heart racing. Chest heaving.

  “This isn’t you!”

  “It is tonight,” Cole said.

  “Please!”

  A bullet whipped past Cole’s face. They were coming.

  Cole stared at Mark. Bloodied. Beaten.

  “We have to go, Cole.”

  He lowered his fist, stood up as another bullet narrowly missed his body, and ran with Michael back to the boats. As soon as they were in, they took off, speeding away from Wounded Sky and into Blackwood Forest.

  Eva was cradling Tristan in her arms. Blood dripped from his mouth. His hand was on his chest, painted red. Reluctantly, Cole moved Tristan’s hand away to reveal the wound. It was right over his heart.

  “Don’t think…I’m gonna…heal…like you…Harper.”

  “You’re okay.”

  “You…you’re a…shitty liar.”

  “I know.”

  Tristan grabbed Cole’s hoodie. “You finish…it…promise me.”

  “I will.” Cole took Tristan’s hand. He bent over until his lips were right by Tristan’s ear, so only Tristan could hear him. “I know where you’re going, Tristan. Don’t be scared. Do you see the northern lights? Remember those stories?”

  Cole looked up, to see Tristan staring at the sky. “Yeah, I…rem—remember.”

  “They’re true, man.”

  Tristan laughed, then coughed, and blood misted into the air. “Bull…sh—shit.” Tristan’s head fell to the side, and his eyes, still open, tore into Cole’s.

  20

  ESCAPE PLAN

  COLE COULDN’T TAKE HIS EYES OFF SILK RIVER, watching the churning water directly behind the boat and the ribbon-like trails left in their wake. He watched those trails dance their way to the shorelines, like the northern lights. This helped dampen his shakiness. The weight of the day pressing down on him and what had just happened.

  Back in the city, at one of his sessions, his therapist had written down anxiety on a sticky note and stuck it to her palm.

  “Now,” she said, “put your palm against mine.”

  Cole didn’t at first. Whatever she was doing felt weird, and he didn’t like showing his palms
to anybody. He used to walk around school with his hands in his pockets. He used to sit on the bench during basketball games, palms down. He used to like how much he played in games because there was always a basketball covering the scars.

  “Just for a second,” she encouraged.

  She jerked her hand slightly, in a way that Cole thought was meant to be encouraging. Finally, he raised his hand and kept it closed into a fist until the last moment, before he had to put his palm against hers. His scars must have felt disgusting to her, against her skin. He thought they were disgusting, too.

  “Okay, so first, push against my palm,” she said.

  He pushed and felt the resistance. After a few seconds, she stopped pressing, and Cole did as well.

  “Put your palm face up now,” she said.

  Cole looked at her curiously, but now they were into it, and that curiosity emboldened him to move his palm away from hers and point it to the ceiling. She placed the sticky note, the paper with anxiety written on it, onto his palm.

  “Easier, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Accepting you have anxiety, rather than fighting so hard against it, is one of the most important steps you can take,” she said. “Not to judge yourself for feeling the way you do, thinking the way you do, but just to acknowledge how you feel and keep living. Keep breathing.”

  Cole took a deep breath, and then expelled it. Five seconds in, seven seconds out. There was only now. Only their boat cutting through the river water, only the churning water expelled by the engine, only the trails left behind them, dancing at their freedom. And they were free, now. Cole’s body was shaking. It was okay. His anxiety hadn’t been left dead when his body had been resurrected. His body should be shaking. He might’ve killed people and had seen others die. Saw another one of his friends, one who had originally hated him, die while saving others. Then there was Lucy. Choch. Reynold being alive. He put all of this in his opened palm and accepted it.

  And there was Pam. Cole turned away from Silk River and scanned the boats until he saw her, curled up onto a seat, a blanket over her body, her head propped up on a rolled-up jacket. He stepped around two other patients and sat down in front of her. Her eyes were closed. She looked peaceful. He put the outside of his hand under her nose to feel her breath. Warm, but short. He looked up at Dr. Captain’s boat ahead of them. He wanted her to come treat Pam, now. Make her better. Save her. He looked around the boat again, at the people they’d saved, each in their own stage of the illness, and wondered how many of them would be around tonight, tomorrow, the next day. How many had they actually saved? Cole shook his head. He returned his attention to Pam.

  “Hey, you’re okay,” he said.

  Her eyelids fluttered, but stayed closed.

  “Pretty soon you’ll be teaching me how to play Fortnite, you know?”

  He wanted an IV and a needle, so he could give her some of his blood and make her well, like he’d done before in the clinic. His blood wouldn’t do anything now though, not with what they had given her. He caught Eva’s eye; she was sitting with her dad, Wayne leaning his head against her shoulder, sleeping. She smiled at him, nodded. A thank you for saving her dad. He smiled, nodded back.

  Cole leaned back against the seat, took a deep breath, and only then looked behind the boat again, down the river, at the trails they’d left behind. He closed his eyes and felt the shakiness, felt the unsteadiness in his limbs, in his joints, within his body, and accepted those feelings for what they were. That despite everything they’d gone through, over the last month and a half, over the last few hours, they were here now, and on their way to someplace better. And that all the people they’d brought with them, they’d be better, too.

  Time passed slowly. It was always this way during the most urgent moments. They had saved everybody, but they needed to get to the cabin and into the care of Elder Mariah and Dr. Captain. He hadn’t been wrong to bring them away from there, Cole knew that. It wasn’t like Dr. Ament had said. But Cole began to wonder if it had made what they’d done right.

  “You’re thinking.” Eva had left her dad sleeping on the seat, and had come over to sit beside Cole without him noticing. “Again.”

  “I’ve been trying to do things differently,” Cole said. “But I’m not sure I’m doing any better.”

  “And there’s Cole being hard on himself again,” Eva said. “It’s like we’ve gone back in time.”

  “People are dying again. Lucy. Tristan.” Cole looked at Tristan’s body, right near his feet. Covered up with blankets they’d found under the seats.

  “Cole.”

  “I keep thinking how if I’d just stayed in the ground, Lucy would still be here, because I wouldn’t have gone to Reynold’s house.”

  “Stop.”

  “Tristan wouldn’t have had to…”

  Eva took his hand.

  “I’m supposed to be saving people.”

  Cole wiped a tear away from his cheek. There was only this moment. Right now. He felt the wet spot on the outside of his hand. How the wind made it feel cool, even as the spot dried. Here, then gone.

  “What about these people?” Eva asked. “You saved them, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t…” Cole looked up at the northern lights, the ribbons swirling in their dance to music he could no longer hear. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re the math whiz, right?”

  “That doesn’t make it better.”

  “It makes it…I don’t know.” She sighed. Getting frustrated at Cole, like she used to as well. “It makes it what it is, Cole. It makes it what had to happen. Tristan knew what he was doing, coming with us. We all knew it would be dangerous.”

  “I just wanted it to happen differently.”

  “We all did,” Eva said. “I wanted to be there tonight with you guys. Remember that? How do you think I feel, knowing that maybe I could’ve done something? But I’ve got to let that go and so do you.”

  “And Lucy?”

  “Do you think you started all of this?”

  Cole looked down. River water pooled together in the cracks between the floorboards of the boat. She put her hand on his chin, and made him look at her.

  “Do you think you started all of this? Why are you here, Cole?” “To save the community?” he said.

  She leaned back against the seat. “You didn’t start this. You’re here to finish it.”

  Cole let her words percolate. He shook his head. “When you think you’ve got it all figured out…”

  “Is that the start of a meme?”

  Cole smirked. “No, it’s just. I was ready to go all hard core, like Rambo Cole or something. Thought I was over this kind of stuff, then I just slip back into it.”

  “You thought you were reborn as somebody else?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You left as Cole, and you came back as Cole. You’re just learning and accepting why you’re here. That doesn’t mean you’re a different person, or that you still don’t have things to learn.”

  Cole had been looking off into the woods, where his thoughts had enough room to breathe. Now, he looked at Eva until, maybe, she felt his eyes on her. She turned to him, smiled, and looked away shyly. “What?”

  “I love you,” he said. “I mean…”

  She reached over and put two fingers against his lips. “You can stop, now. That was enough.”

  They looked at each other. He was waiting for her to say it, too. He wanted her to say it. But she just took her fingers from his lips, put her hand back on his, and turned away.

  “Brady, come drive this thing for a minute,” Lauren said.

  By Cole’s estimation, they had to be close to Elder Mariah’s cabin. Eva had gone back to sit with her dad, his head resting on her lap, her arm protectively draped over his shoulder. Cole sat sideways on the bench, watching the water. Brady stood up and walked to the front of the boat. Cole listened as Lauren moved from the steering wheel, and Brady took her place. He felt a ta
p on his shoulder.

  “How’s she doing?” Lauren asked.

  “Same,” Cole said.

  “We’ll be there soon.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And they’ll be here soon, too.”

  “So what do we do? We can’t move the cabin, and they…” Cole lowered his voice. “…they can’t last much longer in this boat. They need Dr. Captain, and they need Elder Mariah.”

  “Brady told me we were close, but he didn’t tell me where the cabin actually was. Is it near the river?”

  “A few hundred yards maybe.”

  “Two football fields,” Lauren said thoughtfully. “That might be far enough.”

  “If they see the boats, they’ll come looking. If they come looking, they’ll find us. Everybody gets taken back, we probably get taken, too.”

  “What if they saw the boats in a different place? Far enough away that no matter where they looked in the forest—”

  “They wouldn’t find us.”

  “We drop everybody off and keep driving the boats farther down the river, deeper into the woods,” Lauren said.

  “We means us,” Cole said. “Dr. Captain and Brady, they need to be with the people. Eva needs to be with her dad.”

  Lauren looked up, looked all around, at the sky visible through the forest’s towering trees, then looked at Cole. “On the plus side, it’s a nice night for a walk.”

  Soon, the boats pulled up along the shore, where, a relatively short distance into the woods, was the cabin. Eva, Michael, Dr. Captain, and Brady were briefed on the plan.

  They helped the patients off the boat and removed Tristan’s body as quickly as possible. Cole and Lauren helped get their people away from the shore and into Blackwood, so that when the boats chasing them passed by, everybody would be safely out of sight. By the time they were ready, there were lights in the distance.

  Mihko’s security force were coming.

  “Let’s go!” Lauren jumped into one of the boats and took off down the river. “Follow me!”

  Cole got into the other boat and pushed the throttle.