Deathwish can-4

by Rob Thurman

  Where was Cal?

  The sirens were wailing louder. I heard the murmur of distant voices. “It’s a car wreck.” “They’ll never see it.” “Wave them down.” “Where’s the driver?”

  “Nik, it’s done, okay? The weapons are gone.” This voice was closer. The black and gray smearing into the white like a melting candle. Cloth wiped my face and then pressed against my temple. It was soft and warm and smelled oddly good . . . like coconut and chicken.

  “Thai,” I murmured.

  “Yeah, sorry.” A laugh, shaky and determined all at once. “At least it’s clean. I borrowed it from you this morning.” The voice raised, along with others. “Over here!” Then softer. “The ambulance is here now. We’re going to the hospital, okay? The hospital. We were in a wreck, all right? If they ask, we had an accident.”

  To the hospital. No. Cal.

  “No.” I closed my eyes and the darkness was as peaceful as the snow. “Can’t. Waiting for my brother. They took him.” And I wasn’t leaving until he came back. I wouldn’t leave, I wouldn’t move, I wouldn’t sleep . . . although I was tired.

  So tired.

  There was a pause, and I felt a grip on my wrist squeezing hard. “Don’t worry. He’s here. He’s back. I promise. You’ll see him at the hospital. I swear. You’ll wake up and he’ll be right there.”

  I wanted to believe him. He looked so much like Cal, only older than fourteen, and I wanted to believe. Then I forgot what I wanted to believe. I was waiting for someone, but I forgot who.

  Sleep, I just wanted to sleep.

  Other voices came. Loud and then fading until I could hear only one. The same one. “I’m right here, Nik. These guys are on our side. Do me a favor and don’t punch any of them out, all right?” Joke, but not a joke. Very much not a joke. Don’t hurt. Don’t kill.

  Then the voice disappeared. The hand on my wrist went with it . . . as did the world.

  And I disappeared with them.

  11

  Cal

  Alcohol, stale piss, and bad cafeteria food.

  Infection, sickness, and blood. Everywhere the sulfur sweetness of dying organs, the rot of gangrene, the stench of death. In all my life I’d never smelled so much death. It was on every surface in every room in this god-awful place of the living dead.

  I sat in the hard plastic chair beside Nik’s bed, my elbows on my knees and fingers locked over the back of my neck. I wanted to rock. Swear to God, I did. But that’s all I needed. To have some angel of mercy think I’d lost it and drag me upstairs to the crazy ward.

  Speaking of . . . there she was now. Nurse Panties in a Wad. She frowned at me from the door to Niko’s room. Gray hair in tight waves, coolly efficient blue eyes, and starched scrubs. The same type of scrub top I’d bummed from one of the ER nurses. I’d used my shirt as a bandage for Niko’s head wound. Soaked with blood, it had gone from light gray to dark red. Every inch of it. He’d bled and bled and bled.

  I focused on the nurse. She was the lesser of two evils. “What?” I demanded.

  “I told you, young man, visiting hours are over. You need to leave.”

  I don’t know why they wear the stethoscopes looped around their necks. It just made for one convenient strangling temptation. “I’m staying. I’m family.”

  “He looks like a big boy. Perfectly capable of spending the night on his own. He should come around soon. I’ll tell him you’ll be back in the morning,” she said, folding her arms.

  I picked up the remote from the bedside table as if I hadn’t heard a word she’d said and switched on the TV.

  “Sir . . .”

  Young man to sir. Wow. A promotion.

  “I’m staying,” I repeated through my clenched teeth. “I’m family.”

  With that she gave up. When she was gone, I kept flicking through channels, not seeing a damn one of them. There was a rustle of sheets and I dropped the remote in my lap as I swiveled in the chair. Hazy eyes blinked and Nik said hoarsely, “Making friends . . . wherever you go.”

  I smiled, one so sharp and relieved that it actually hurt, and wrapped my hand around his arm. “Hey, Cyrano, you really awake this time?”

  His hand moved to touch a row of twenty-five stitches along a hairline stained orange with Betadine. “I wasn’t before?”

  I let go of him to press the button on the rail that lifted the head of the bed up. “You kept telling me to put down my gun and finish my homework. You forgot I graduated Niko’s home-school academy with honors two years ago.” There was still dried blood in his hair although they’d gotten all the glass out down in the ER. The tie he used to pull the top of it back was long gone, and the stained blond strands fell inches past his jaw, messy in a way I don’t think I’d ever seen it. Not even as kids.

  “Honors?” His hand dropped back to the sheet and blanket covering him to midchest. “You spilled pizza sauce on the final.”

  “Yeah, you’re awake this time.” My smile faltered. It had been hours of silence, then two more of him drifting in and out. I’d cooled my heels in the ER waiting room forever. Security made it clear the only thing I’d get by trying to push my way back there was arrested. Finally, after tests and scans and stitching, I’d been able to go back to see him. He was still out cold. Concussion, they said. Moderate. He’ll wake up soon. Here. Fill out these forms. There was enough Rom in me that I promptly lied on every line of them and handed over one of Niko’s fake IDs. We’d stopped our running days, but some things would never change.

  I’d waited until the registration lady bustled off to make copies before I threw up in the garbage can beside Nik’s gurney. Rom, Sophia had said, didn’t go to doctors or hospitals, although with good old Mom I thought it was more cheapness than a cultural thing. This was the first hospital I’d been in, and the smell of it was unbearable. I’d thrown up twice more after Niko had been moved to his own room. Fortunately, he had a bathroom there. Made for more convenient puking. Lucky me. Since then, I was dealing with it and this strange, cold, painfully bright place. Seeing Nik awake and finally with it should’ve made it easier.

  It didn’t. A bright red string, scarlet as his blood, had run through me, stitching me up, keeping me together . . . so I could watch out for him. Guard him. Wait for him. Now the waiting was over and the string was unraveling and I was unraveling with it. “Want some water?” I didn’t wait for an answer, pouring lukewarm water into a plastic cup from a plastic pitcher with a hand that felt just as plastic, and handed it over.

  He took it and slowly sipped. “What happened?”

  I took the cup back when he finished. “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember . . .” His brow furrowed, wincing with the movement. “I remember Mickey getting in the car and . . . nothing. That’s all.”

  “The pizza sauce, you remember. A bad-ass tossing our car around like a Frisbee, that you forget.” I slid down in the chair a few inches and rubbed tired eyes. “Oshossi. He picked up the car and flipped it. You were thrown out through the back window. I still had my seat belt on. He shot at us with a bow that could’ve taken down a rhino, and I shot him with my BB gun.” It may as well have been for all the good it did. “Hit him at least five times, and he strolled off into the storm like nothing had happened.”

  “Then?”

  The word prompted me into realizing I’d gone silent. “Then? Oh. You were . . . hurt.” I rubbed my eyes harder. “You were thrown through the back window. Someone heard the crash and called the cops and an ambulance. I barely had time to get rid of our weapons. I don’t know what the hell the cops made of the giant goddamn arrow shish-kebabbing the car.”

  Bracing himself on the rails, he sat up a little farther. I could see him taking stock. “Just my head, then.”

  “Trust me, it was enough.” Enough blood, enough worry, enough of the whole damn ball of wax. I looked away at the window. More snow. The city was down for the count . . . buried. “But you’re okay now,” I said. It sounded kind of belligerent, maybe
, but there you go. I resolutely kept my eyes off him and on the window. “And I’m not holding your hand in some sort of made-for-TV brotherly death-scene crap, all right? So stay okay. Don’t die.”

  The sheets rustled again. “I won’t,” came the grave assurance, as if it were a perfectly reasonable request, and, hell, it was.

  This time I looked at him. “Promise, you bastard?”

  “I promise.”

  “Good.” I picked up the remote and started clicking through the channels again. “Glad that’s settled. Can I have your Jell-O?”

  There was no Jell-O. Only clear liquids and painkillers for the concussion victim. Nik passed on the meds, although by the lines bracketing his mouth, he could’ve used them. I’d given up on TV and had gone back to the tried-and-true elbows on my knees, hands on back of neck. I kept the rocking in my mind and almost dozed off in that position. The adrenaline of the past five hours had sucked me dry, and trying to keep from a total sensory meltdown in this place wasn’t helping either.

  “Cal.”

  I blinked. “What?” I ran back his words in my mind that I’d only half heard in my fog. Promise. He’d asked about Promise. “Yeah. I called her. Told her you were okay. She and Cherish can’t get here until tomorrow. The city’s shut down.” Although a vampire could probably walk the miles and miles through the flying wall of snow. I’d managed to convince her not to give it a try. “Maybe you should call her. She’s worried.” I patted my scrub top for a few seconds before I realized I wasn’t wearing my jacket. Reaching down, I picked it up off the floor and pulled my cell phone out of the pocket to hand to him.

  He took it. “I will, but I want you to go lie down. I’m safe now. I have this watch.”

  Concussed, but he had this watch. And truthfully, concussed or not, he probably had a better handle on it now than I did. “You’re okay?” I persisted. “Because you . . .” Because he hadn’t been. He’d bled like a stuck pig and had been barely responsive. He hadn’t known who I was. Was asking for a fourteen-year-old version of me. He hadn’t been okay at all. “You’re all right?”

  “Cal.” He pointed at the empty other bed. “One hour and I’ll wake you. Go.”

  I gave in. Nik was Nik again, and he knew what he was capable of. I got out of the chair, took off my sneakers, and climbed onto the other bed on top of the blanket and sheets. God help me if I messed up Nurse Panties in a Bunch’s clean bed. My head hit the pillow, and the sharp smell of industrial-strength bleach sent a spike of pain like an ice pick through my brain. I didn’t mind. The pain faded, and all I could still smell was bleach. No death or rot or creeping decay. It was such an utter relief that I slept instantly and slept hard, dreaming of sheets hung out to dry in the sun, of a thousand hungry rats tearing them down, of a living statue with blazing gold eyes, and of red snow.

  It was everywhere. Bloody flakes falling from the sky. Piling so high you could drown in it.

  And I dreamed of being watched. Of someone standing beside the bed, looking down at me. Someone who didn’t belong.

  I might sleep hard and it might take me a while to get up to full speed in the morning, but if the situation calls for it, I can wake up instantly and razor sharp. In this case all it took was the shuffle of a rubber sole. I was awake, across the room, and in the chair just as the Nurse Bitch on Wheels walked in the room. She did have a real name printed nice and neat on her name tag. I’d read it and forgotten it instantly. It hadn’t said Satan’s Bedpan Pusher of Despair, so it was wrong anyway. No point in committing it to memory.

  She eyed the slightly wrinkled empty bed, narrowed that gaze at me, but checked Niko’s vitals without comment and told him he might be discharged tomorrow. Maybe. If he stayed alert, there were no setbacks, the follow-up CT scan was good, the neuro doc agreed, and the planets all fell into alignment . . . it could happen.

  When she left, Niko looked at me. “Exactly how shut-down are the roads?”

  I checked the window again and shook my head. “Unless we can rent skis in the gift shop, it’s not happening.”

  He studied me, weighing the pros and cons. I had to look like shit; I knew that. There’s only so much overload you can handle before you shut down, but I wasn’t leaving Nik alone either. No way, no how. “All right,” he said. “Take us back to Rafferty’s.” He didn’t want to ask, I knew. Hated it, in fact, to have me do what he’d rather I never did again. Didn’t want to put me in that situation, but he also knew the situation I was in now wasn’t much better.

  I could’ve stood and went to the small closet to get the clear plastic bag that held his clothes, shoes, phone, and wallet. Could’ve scooped up my jacket from the floor, cradling it and the bag under one arm and placing a hand on Niko’s shoulder. I could’ve taken us out of here in a heartbeat.

  I didn’t.

  I sat, unmoving, in the chair. The hell with my situation. He was in one of his own. “Yeah, right. Traveling when you’re perfectly healthy has Robin puking and you five shades of green. It used to have blood coming out of me like a faucet. We’re not risking it with you having practically cracked your skull open. We wait for the doctor and the scan. By then the roads will be clear and your brain won’t be oozing out your ears from me dragging you through a gate. Hell, that’s probably on your discharge instructions. No traveling through rips in space for at least a week. The hospital cannot be held responsible for unnatural horrors of the supernatural world.” I saw the pain pills in a small paper cup on the table beside him. “So take your pills, and in the morning we’ll be out of here.”

  In the end, after a lot of squabbling—that would be bitching on my side and calm, forceful logic on his—we compromised. He took one of the pills and I took the pillowcase from the next bed, wadded it into a ball and took a deep whiff whenever the other smells, smells straight out of a slaughterhouse, got to be too much. Niko finally slept after making sure I was hanging in there, and I think I ended up slightly buzzed from the bleach.

  It definitely kept me awake and alert, which was good because when Niko woke up at about seven a.m., he wanted every detail I could dredge up about Oshossi and the battle. Other than almost killing my brother, I hadn’t been concentrating on those little personal details that make monsters so gosh-darn interesting. Like acid spitting, leeches for intestines, liquefying your internal organs and drinking them like Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup—fun stuff like that. When it came to Oshossi, I’d been preoccupied with my brother sprawled and bleeding in the snow, so I didn’t pick up much new from what I’d noticed at the car lot.

  “I hit him several times with the Glock, I know that,” I said as I swiped his blueberry muffin from his breakfast tray. He’d been upgraded to food for people with teeth by the day-shift nurse. Nurse Tiger-Stripe Thong/See-through White Pants Combo. I called her Tigger for short. For that and for her bouncy nature. You know the wonderful thing about Tiggers? Nothing. Not a damn thing. They’re annoying as hell with all that bouncing and good cheer.

  “He flinched but he didn’t go down,” I added before chewing and swallowing. “As a matter of fact, he grinned.” I picked out a blueberry—it smelled a whole lot better than bleach—and fiddled with it. “Good teeth. Just as sharp as before. His dentist would be proud. Bet he flosses like crazy.” Yeah, flossed pieces of punks like me out of those back molars like nobody’s business. “Cyrano,” I said seriously. “He is bad fucking news.”

  “Because he rolled, then flipped our car?” He regarded the fake scrambled eggs and hockey-puck sausage with the same distaste he showed flesh-eating revenants. “It would take serious strength and physical framework to do something like that.”

  “Yeah, but”—absently I gave him the last half of the muffin—“more that, hell, Nik, he wasn’t even trying that hard. It was like at the car lot. Like he was fishing, caught us, and thought, Nah, too small. Not worth my time. And tossed us back. You were down. My gun wasn’t putting him away. He didn’t even draw his bow on me. He just took the bullets, smiled with those
freaky teeth, and disappeared. We might’ve killed his cadejos and ccoas, but he doesn’t think we’re much of a threat. I think he’s telling us to mind our own business.”

  “From what you say, it wasn’t our best showing, and he is a hunter. Has been one for thousands of years. He might consider us unworthy prey.” He considered the muffin, sighed, and ate it. “I think I’m embarrassed for us.”

  “I think I’m glad I’m not a head mounted on his wall somewhere.” I focused on the smell of the blueberry muffin and nothing else and managed to keep it down. “You want to get cleaned up? There’s a shower in the bathroom. If Promise sees you like that . . .” Bloodstained hair, Betadine, a bruise spreading across his forehead to match the fading black eyes I’d given him.

  “No good?” he asked. “I’ll definitely enjoy being clean, but I hardly think it would matter to Promise. I never claimed to be as vain as Robin.”

  He missed it. Niko, who hardly ever missed anything. “You look human, Nik,” I said bluntly. “You look way too human right now.” Blood, bruises, faint lines of pain. Human. Vulnerable. Promise had seen it before, but not to this degree and not in a hospital. It was a reminder that couldn’t do anything but hurt her. I knew I wasn’t enjoying it.

  He could’ve died. Could’ve bled to death in the snow. My family, my only damn family.

  Which led to something I was far better at than meditation. Denial. Very big, very bad denial. I took the tray and started in on the leathery eggs. One bite was enough. Jesus. That was physician-assisted suicide right there. “There’s shampoo and crap in there. Try not to flash me on the way.”

  Fifteen minutes later he was back with clean damp hair, the Betadine scrubbed away from the stitches, and wearing scrubs instead of the hospital gown. He was still bruised, but he was steady on his feet, which was a good thing, because Promise was there, having walked past a scolding Nurse Tigger like she didn’t exist. They really were fascist with their visiting hours there.