Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  Again, she glanced toward the other end of the table, tensing slightly. Daphne was still glowering, arms crossed over her chest, listening to Izzie talk while periodically casting sharp glances at Joyce across the table from her. By this point Joyce seemed to be ignoring the conversation entirely, eyebrows knitted in annoyance as she typed a brief, furious burst with her thumbs on her smartphone’s screen, paused for a moment, then typed again. Patrick couldn’t tell whether Joyce was texting with someone else, or pretending to do so in order to avoid the conversation, or something else entirely, but she seemed completely engrossed in it, whatever she was up to.

  “It’s a long shot,” Izzie went on, “but the text of the interview that psychologist conducted with Fulton might still be on file in the archive at the Recondito Hall of Justice. Now, if I were to go through the system and file a record request with the city, it might raise some red flags, and I’d be hard pressed to explain to Agent Gutierrez or my superiors why the FBI has any business digging around in forty-year-old municipal court records. . . .”

  “But,” Daphne interrupted, slapping the surface of the table again to accent her point, “if the city’s medical examiner were to request those files because . . . I don’t know, there was an element in a new case that was similar, or some kind of pathology, something like that . . . then the city probably wouldn’t even blink an eye.” She wheeled around to address Joyce directly. “Look, I get that you don’t want to falsify records requests, but what if you just . . .”

  Joyce slammed her phone down on the table, screen up, the impact echoing as loud as a gunshot in the kitchen’s breakfast nook.

  “It’s a waste of time.” Joyce sat back with a look of triumph on her face. “Why go chasing dusty old files that might have been destroyed forty years ago when you can go right to the source?”

  She glanced around the table and took in the confused expressions on the others’ faces.

  “He’s alive.” She pointed at the screen of her phone.

  “Who?” Patrick asked.

  “George Washington Jett,” Joyce said, enunciating each syllable with exaggerated care. “He’s still alive.”

  Patrick shot a glance over at Izzie and saw that she was as surprised as he was.

  “He’s a resident at the . . .” Joyce trailed off as she reached for her phone and double-checked her details. “At the Northside Community Living Center, located here in town on Northside Boulevard, appropriately enough. It’s a hospital and assisted living facility for military vets, operated by the Department of Veteran Affairs for . . .”

  She paused, glancing up and to one side as a glimmer of recognition lit her face.

  “Is that the same the same VA hospital that Hasan . . . ?” she muttered in a low voice. Looking back to her phone, she tapped a link on the screen and then scanned the screen closely as she scrolled down a list of names. Then she sat up, a smile creeping across her face, and laughed in triumph. “Ha! And it just so happens that an old friend of mine from med school is on the staff there.”

  Joyce reached out and picked up one of the donuts, and took a big bite as she glanced around the table, looking like the cat that got the cream.

  “So,” she said around a mouthful of donut, “anyone want to go with me and pay the old guy a visit?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Izzie sat in the passenger seat of Joyce’s Volkswagen Beetle, trying to act casually preoccupied with the passing scenery as they drove through the sluggish Sunday afternoon traffic, acutely aware of the awkward silence that had stretched out since they had left Patrick’s house a quarter of an hour before.

  When she had enthusiastically accepted Joyce’s offer to introduce them to her friend who worked on the staff of the Northside Community Living Center, it had been Izzie’s assumption that the four of them would be travelling there together. But Patrick had begged off, insisting that his first priority was to tend to his great-uncle’s marks on the surrounding buildings, so as to prevent another incursion of the Ridden like the one they’d faced the night before. When Joyce had suggested that they could simply wait until he was done, Patrick was clearly tempted, obviously as curious to hear what Jett had to say as any of them. But he had made plans with some of the neighborhood kids he had run into that morning, to meet up later in the afternoon, to go over the basics of cleaning and tending the marks. The sooner that the rest of the neighborhood was secured, the better, but he was anxious to learn what they could from G. W. Jett as soon as possible. So he insisted that the others shouldn’t delay.

  Daphne had been forced to bow out as well, explaining that she had open cases that she had been neglecting the last few days. And while the cases were hardly of earthshattering importance, Daphne had told Agent Gutierrez that she would keep on top of her workload while she was away from the office, and that if she didn’t post updates on them by Monday morning then she would likely have him on her back, fabricated “long term stakeout” or no.

  There had been a moment when it looked as though Joyce was unsure about carrying through on her offer when Patrick declined to join them, and Izzie couldn’t help but wonder to what degree the offer had been motivated by Joyce’s desire to spend time with him, and whether she would have preferred to stay behind and help him. The fact that Joyce had been prompted to seek out the status and whereabouts of G. W. Jett in the first place in order to score points in a disagreement with Izzie and Daphne was never far from Izzie’s thoughts.

  She hadn’t intended for the disagreement around Patrick’s dining table to get so contentious so quickly. Izzie had known that she was probably crossing a line with the medical examiner by asking her to circumvent regulations the moment that the words had left her mouth. And if it been just the two of them in the conversation, Izzie would have likely walked the request back as soon as she saw the offended expression on Joyce’s face, and that would have been an end to it. But Daphne had taken offense on Izzie’s behalf, offended that Joyce was offended, and the situation had quickly escalated out of hand.

  Izzie imagined that the rest of them were as stressed and anxious as she was after everything they had been through, and their nerves were also frayed. But still she felt like she didn’t know Joyce well enough to say that stress and anxiety was all that was at play, or if the woman had some other issue with her. She was tempted to ask, but was uncertain how the question would be received. It was frustrating to Izzie, who normally didn’t have any difficulty talking with people. But this was also the first time that the two of them had been alone for any extended period of time, without either Daphne or Patrick on hand to facilitate matters, and Izzie couldn’t help but feel like the lines of communication between them were down, and she wasn’t sure how to reestablish them.

  So they rode in awkward silence, driving north through Oceanview toward the Financial District, Joyce staring straight ahead and not even going to the trouble of turning on the car stereo, and Izzie left to look out the window at the cars and buildings passing by. She rehearsed things to say in her mind, ways to bridge this silence that stretched between them, but before she could settle on what to say . . .

  “I’ve never had anyone try to choke me before.”

  Izzie was almost startled by the sound of Joyce’s voice speaking in the small, silent space. She turned to see that, while Joyce’s eyes were still on the road ahead, her brow was creased with worry.

  “I mean, never anyone that I didn’t want to choke me,” Joyce added.

  Izzie was momentarily confused, until she saw the faintest glimmer of a grin tug at the corners of Joyce’s lips.

  “And always with a safe word clearly established ahead of time.” Joyce’s eyes darted to the passenger seat as she sought to gauge Izzie’s expression.

  They pulled to a stop at a traffic light, and Joyce turned in her seat to face Izzie.

  “But seriously, this is all new territory for me,” she said. “I’m the one who deals with the bodies after all of the action is over, and then pieces
together what happened from the physical evidence. I am most definitely not used to being one of the people who is out in the middle of the action, getting attacked or grabbed or what-have-you. And when the people doing the attacking and grabbing and what-have-youing aren’t even technically alive?”

  She shook her head, but before she could continue, the light turned green, and she turned back to look straight ahead as she shifted the car into gear.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Joyce went on, “because I do not regret getting mixed up in this at all. Ever since I saw the state of the Ink users’ brains that kept coming into the morgue, I knew that there was something going on that was pretty far beyond the current scientific understanding. But I couldn’t have imagined how far it really went. Even now I think we’re only just getting the barest glimpse as to what is actually going on with the ‘Ridden’ and the ‘loa’ and whatever else you want to call it. For the sake of scientific curiosity, I’d continue to stick my neck out . . .”

  She paused, casting a quick glance in Izzie’s direction and mugging to emphasize her inadvertent pun.

  “Literally, if need be,” she stressed, unnecessarily. “But seriously, I’d continue to put myself in the middle of the action if it meant answering some of those questions. But . . . this is still new territory for me, and it’s taking some getting used to.”

  “Okay,” Izzie said, stretching out the syllables. What Joyce was saying made sense, but it didn’t seem to follow that it meant that she needed to give Izzie the silent treatment and the cold shoulder because of it.

  “I don’t know,” Joyce went on, sighing. “I know that these . . . these amulet things are supposed to keep us safe—” she patted the hip pocket where she had slipped the makeshift copy of the Te’Maroan markings when they’d left the house “—but I’d allowed myself to feel safe back at Patrick’s place, you know? And ever since we left his neighborhood I’ve felt like . . .”

  Her eyes darted over to the driver’s side window beside her, and she shivered, like someone had just poured icy water down the back of her shirt.

  That’s when Izzie finally understood what was happening. Joyce wasn’t mad at her, or annoyed about the situation, or still incensed about anything that anyone had done or said that morning.

  Joyce was scared.

  Izzie hadn’t expected that. Joyce had always struck her as fairly fearless, with a self-assured poise and unflappable sense of humor in the face of death. With her precisely sculpted asymmetrical undercut bob, her leather jacket festooned with pins, and her heavy boots, Joyce had always seemed like a woman who was completely in charge of herself and her own reactions. But Izzie had not considered the possibility that the calm and controlled exterior that Joyce presented to the world might not be a form of self-defense, a kind of carefully constructed armor to protect herself from the world around her.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Izzie said, “I’m pretty scared about all of this, myself. And I know that Daphne is, too.”

  Joyce glanced quickly in her direction before looking back at the road ahead. “Yeah?”

  “Of course. I mean, at Quantico we were trained to handle stressful situations by running through different scenarios and situations, testing out how we apply the tactics and techniques that we’ve studied in different possible scenarios. So by the time we’re sent out in the field as agents, we’ve already run through all kinds of various permutations of the types of situations we might encounter. The specifics out in the real world might be very different from the practice drills, of course, but there’s almost always something from those simulated exercises that we can draw on and use in real life.”

  “Okay?” Joyce’s tone suggested she wasn’t seeing Izzie’s point. “And how does that apply here?”

  “That’s just it,” Izzie answered. “It doesn’t. Nothing that we trained for at the Academy prepared me or Daphne for dealing with the undead.”

  She paused, chewing her lower lip, thoughtfully.

  “In fact, the only thing that comes even close to the kinds of stuff we’re dealing with are the stories my grandmother told me when I was a kid,” Izzie went on. “And honestly, that scares me even more.”

  The Northside Community Living Center was located in the northeastern corner of the city, at the edge of a network of blocks that included Recondito General, the city’s premier hospital, and Founders Square Medical Park—a cluster of office towers housing oncologists, surgeons, gynecologists, ENTs, and all manner of other medical specialists.

  Joyce had parked in a visitors’ spot in an underground parking garage that serviced several of the surrounding buildings, and while they were riding the elevator up to the ground level, Izzie couldn’t help but be reminded of their descent into the darkness of the warehouse subbasement on Friday night, and felt eager to be back out in the daylight.

  Izzie had trouble getting her bearings when they reached the street level, but Joyce pointed with her cane at a four-story building with a red brick façade and white trim. They crossed at the light, and made their way to the visitor’s entrance at the front of the building.

  While Joyce spoke to the receptionist at the front desk, Izzie stood to one side of the waiting room, keeping out of the way of nurses pushing patients in wheelchairs, families coming to visit their loved ones, and doctors discharging outpatients. Voices were kept low, and sounds in general seeming to be muted and subdued. When combined with the faint antiseptic scent of the warm recycled air, it seemed to Izzie to be very much like any retirement home or elder care facility that she had ever been in. Which, in a way it was, she supposed, except that all of the patients and residents here were veterans of the United States armed services.

  Joyce waited at the front desk while the receptionist made a call, and then, with a smile and few words of thanks, walked back over to where Izzie was waiting. Moments later, the elevator doors opened on a fit but somewhat weary-looking man with a neatly trimmed beard, eyeglasses, and an unkempt shock of dark brown hair, wearing a polo shirt and jeans with an ID badge on a lanyard and a stethoscope draped around his neck.

  “Joyce!” the man said, smiling warmly as he approached them. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to make it this time.”

  “Come on, Hasan,” Joyce answered, moving in for a quick side hug, her other arm occupied with her cane. “That one time I stood you up, and you’ve never let me forget for a second.”

  She turned and indicated Izzie with a nod of her head.

  “Hasan, this is Special Agent Isabel Lefevre of the FBI,” Joyce said. “Izzie, this is my old friend Hasan Khatib. He’s kind of a jerk, but I like him anyway.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, shaking Izzie’s hand. Then he turned back to Joyce. “So, what’s this about? There’s a patient here you need to see?”

  Joyce nodded. “George Washington Jett. Records indicate he’s a full-time resident?”

  “Oh, sure. Mr. Jett doesn’t get many visitors, I don’t think.” Hasan looked from Joyce to Izzie, eyes narrowed slightly in suspicion. “And the FBI is interested in talking to him . . . because?”

  “We’re doing some background on an ongoing investigation,” Izzie said, speaking up quickly. “Mr. Jett was involved in a case back in the seventies that we believe might have some bearing on what we’re dealing with now. We were hoping to ask him a few questions, see if he can’t help shed some light on things.”

  Hasan put his hands on his hips, head tilted slightly to one side.

  “Well, you’re welcome to try,” he said, his tone skeptical. “But like I said, Mr. Jett doesn’t really get many visitors, and he’s not the most, shall we say, social of our residents here.”

  “Is he capable of answering questions, though?” Joyce asked. “Given his age and residency status, I can’t help wondering if there’s any dementia at play, or anything of that sort.”

  “Oh, he’s perfectly cogent and lucid. He’s just kind of a misanthrope and avoids social interaction if at all
possible.” He gave Joyce a look and grinned. “So maybe you two would get along, after all.”

  Joyce rolled her eyes in mock exasperation. “I swear, Hasan, if you’re about to bring up that one time at the shore I swear to god I’m going to . . .”

  “Okay, okay!” Hasan held up his hands palms forward in a gesture of surrender. “You’re not a misanthrope. Oh, hey, do you remember that tall guy from biochem? The one with all the tattoos? I ran into him at the market last week and . . .”

  Izzie was managing to keep from tapping her toes in impatience, but just barely.

  “Can we see him now?” she said, interrupting, trying to keep her tone civil.

  Hasan turned to her, a distracted look on his face, eyes blinking behind the lenses of his glasses.

  “Mr. Jett?” Izzie clarified.

  “Oh, sure,” Hasan answered. “Let me see where he’s at. Most of the residents are in the community room this time of day, but Mr. Jett tends to keep to himself.”

  He walked over to the front desk, leaving Izzie and Joyce waiting by the elevators.

  “He’s awfully chatty,” Izzie said out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Yeah, but I get along with him okay,” Joyce answered. “Of course, I do spend most of my waking hours hanging out with dead people, so I may have low standards.”

  A short while later Hasan escorted the two of them through the labyrinthine corridors and hallways of the building’s ground floor until they reached an outdoor courtyard at the center of the complex. Izzie was sure that in the spring and summer months the space must get a lot of use from the residents and staff, with benches arranged around a fountain and a few well-tended trees to provide shade. But this deep into autumn, with winter just around the corner, the trees were barren of leaves, the grass underfoot was brittle and brown, and the fountain was dry, with the water turned off for the season. The benches themselves were untenanted, as the only person outside at the moment was the old man sitting in a wheelchair near the fountain, looking up at the sky.