The Meridians

by Michaelbrent Collings

  "What's going on with him?" asked Lynette, her concern for Robbie momentarily pushed aside now that he was with her and no longer in shackles. Rather, she wanted to know what was going on with the baby.

  With Kevin.

  "He seems to be responding to the transfusions and the medicine that we've given him," said Doctor Cody. But he didn't seem at all happy. Rather, he delivered this news as though he was giving positively horrifying information.

  Robbie apparently picked up on that, too, for he said, "If he's responding well to the course you've set for him, then why do you look like your favorite dog just got run over by the neighbor's lawnmower?"

  It was a tribute to how tense Robbie was, Lynette realized, that he had verbalized such a crass image, and had done so with neither apparent embarrassment after the fact nor any kind of remorsefully apologetic glance at her.

  The doctor didn't answer for a long moment, merely looking at his feet.

  "What is it?" asked Robbie. Still Doctor Cody didn't answer.

  Finally, Lynette leaned forward as far as she could. By doing so, she could barely - barely - reach the doctor's arm. She patted him as best she could, trying to communicate patience and hopeful confidence with the gesture.

  Apparently it worked. Cody looked up, first at her, then at Robbie, as though not just gauging them as recipients of possible bad news, but as humans in the eyes of God.

  "The complications attendant with your pregnancy and with the baby's birth are likely just a precursor," he finally managed.

  "What do you mean by that?" asked Robbie quietly. "Is this going to happen again?"

  "No, no," hastened the doctor, shaking his head hurriedly. "Most obstetricians go their entire practices without seeing an amniotic fluid embolism. It's not that. Rather...."

  Again, he seemed at a loss. And now Lynette knew. Or at least, she thought she did.

  "It's the baby, isn't it?" she said. "It's little Kevin."

  Robbie looked over at her sharply at the name, as they had never really decided on one, thinking they still had weeks to determine such a thing, but said nothing so apparently thought it was all right - or at least didn't think it was worth fighting about right at this instant.

  Doctor Cody nodded.

  "So, what are you saying?" asked Robbie. "Is he going to die?"

  "Perhaps," said the doctor simply, "though I tend to think that he's made it this far, so his prognosis is actually dramatically improved from what it was only a few hours ago. But what is more concerning to me right now is his future."

  "You mean," said Lynette, and felt her breath hitch inside her pain-wracked body. "You mean, something's wrong with him?"

  The doctor said nothing for a moment, then shrugged. "We don't know," he said, "and we likely won't for some time. But the fact is that he was without oxygen during your cardiac infarction, and children whose mothers suffer an amniotic fluid embolism often have...effects. Long-term effects."

  "Like...he's going to be mentally handicapped?" asked Robbie. Lynette cringed. Not because she thought Robbie was being cruel in asking the question; she knew he held nothing but the same love and concern for Kevin that she did herself. No, she cringed because the question itself had to be asked.

  "He's most likely going to suffer from developmental disabilities of some kind or other, yes," said the doctor.

  "Thank God," whispered Robbie.

  The doctor looked at Lynette's husband so fast that she thought he might get self-inflicted whiplash. "Did I just hear you correctly?"

  "Doc," said Robbie, and what he said next was enough that, even if Lynette hadn't already loved him body and soul, she would have fallen in love with him right then and there, "if he's going to have 'developmental disabilities' then that means he's going to be alive. And however our son is, if he's alive, then that's enough. I was worried we were going to lose him."

  "I was more worried about your wife, but yes, the baby's situation also posed a very real threat."

  "Why were you more worried about me?" asked Lynette.

  "No one told you?" asked the doctor.

  "I don't know...did they?" asked Lynette, amused.

  Doctor Cody smiled, the movement lighting up his otherwise dour face and making it nearly handsome. "You're right, that was a rather silly question, wasn't it." He took off the wire-rimmed glasses he wore and rubbed them between his lab coat. "The fact is, women who suffer from your condition have about a thirty percent mortality rate."

  Lynette heard Robbie gasp beside her and felt his hand clutch for hers. She held it tightly for a moment to reassure him that she wasn't going anywhere, then asked the question that had not been satisfactorily answered.

  "So if the baby's going to live, and I'm going to live, what was all this about a bullet wound? And why did you cart Robbie off?"

  The doctor looked suddenly nervous, glancing at the nurse, who studiously avoided his gaze, and at the policemen, who almost glared at him as though his presence was an affront to nature.

  Doctor Cody harrumphed, then said, "Well, the fact is, it seemed like the most likely explanation."

  "What did?" said Robbie, frustration peering around the corners of his normally calm and soothing voice.

  "It seemed most likely that someone had shot her, and given the fact that she had never gone to a hospital - at least not one that we could find a record of - to take care of the wound, and given the further fact that you failed to mention the wound when you admitted her, the hospital's Social Services division thought it most prudent to contact the police and detain Mr. Randall until we properly checked you out, Mrs. Randall," he said, nodding at Lynette.

  "Why would you think that someone had shot me?" asked Lynette, equally horrified at the idea that someone could have shot her and at the idea that anyone could think Robbie would have done such a horrendous thing.

  "Because you had a bullet in you," said the doctor simply.

  Lynette felt her jaw drop nearly to her chest. "A bullet in me?" she repeated.

  Doctor Cody nodded. "And not just in you, but in your womb."

  "What?" demanded Robbie.

  Again, the doctor nodded. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small baggy. Inside was a small piece of metal, twisted and misshapen.

  A spent bullet.

  Lynette's mouth once again gaped. "My womb?" she repeated.

  "Yes." Doctor Cody once again looked at the nurse, and once again the nurse failed to look back at him. "And even more oddly..." he began, but Lynette knew what he was going to say before he said it. Because just as she had dreamed of having a son, she realized she had also dreamed of this. "...it came out with your baby. Clutched in his little hand, in fact."

  After that, there was really not much to be said. The police shuffled out, saying that someone might be in contact with them and to stay near their home for the next few days. Doctor Cody clearly wanted to ask more questions, but he pushed the nurse out a few minutes after the police left, just as clearly seeing that Lynette wanted to be alone. To sleep. To hold Robbie's hand. To dream.

  And to wonder how a bullet had come to be in her unborn child's hand.

  And how she had dreamed of it before hearing of it from anyone.

  ***

  6.

  ***

  When the end came, it didn't come as Scott had expected it. He had thought that the end would come with a cool blast, followed by nothing. Instead what happened when the killer pulled the trigger was that Scott felt an intense heat on his face, and felt his eyes sting as something hit them.

  And in the next instant, he felt...something. Something strange, as though the world had just twisted inside him and around him, space bending and curving around like putty.

  And he was still alive.

  "What the fu -" began the killer, and backed away, looking at his gun.

  Scott watched him back away. Watched him move away from him as though the killer had just seen Satan jump out of the pits of hell and beckon to him. He reali
zed that the killer was looking at something beside him. With great effort, Scott looked to his right, and saw the last thing he ever expected to see.

  A dead body.

  Scott did not recognize the dead man; had never seen him before in his life and had certainly not seen him in the last few minutes. Where the man had come from was a mystery, but there was no doubt that the man was very old, and very dead. A perfect hole - the mirror to the one that Scott himself should have been wearing but somehow was not - perforated the old man's forehead, and blood pooled behind his head in a thickening puddle that slowly reached out to cover more and more of the floor with its dead embrace.

  The old man's eyes were open, wide and staring into the spaces of eternity. Even clouded by death, Scott could see that the twin orbs were blue, bluer than any eyes he had ever seen before.

  Where did you come from, Mister? he thought.

  There was a rushing sound, and pressure built up in Scott's ears, as though he were in the circle of a hurricane, the air pressure so high it almost made him gasp. An electrical snap sounded, lightning fast. Then there was an audible sucking noise as air rushed around him with gale force.

  Just as suddenly as it had come, though, it stopped.

  Scott looked around.

  The old man was still beside him. Still dead, eyes unmoving though his hair - which was still thick and full in spite of his apparent age - was mussed and ruffled by the passing of the strange storm which had assaulted the inside of the shop.

  The gray-suited killer, however, was nowhere to be seen. Whether he had gone up the stairs or taken some other route during the strange atmospheric effects, Scott did not know. But the man was gone, of that there could be no doubt.

  Then loss of blood and internal trauma finally caught up to Scott and he closed his eyes and lapsed into a fitful sleep.

  Not a long one, though. The next moment, it seemed like, he was looking into the face of Officer Terry Ramsay, one of the uniforms that worked out of Scott's precinct.

  "Detective Cowley!" shouted Ramsay. "Stay with me, man!"

  "The old man -" began Scott.

  "Dead," said Ramsay. "Don't you worry about him, you just worry about you. Stay awake, bro. Stay with me."

  "What's going on?" asked Scott, his speech oddly slurred and muffled, like he was talking underwater.

  "Don't talk, Cowley," said Ramsay.

  Scott wanted to say more, to ask where the old man had come from and what had happened to the gray-suited man, but he again lost the battle he'd been fighting since the first shot hit him in the gut. He blacked out.

  He was visited in the darkness. An old man, not the same old man with the electric blue eyes that had died impossibly beside him in the shop, but a different old man, one wearing a suit of subtly patterned gray, one with gray eyes half-lidded and teeming with internal madness.

  The old man had scars on his face, and Scott remembered in that instant the shot that had ricocheted off the wall near the gray-suited killer, spraying him with chips of concrete and brick. He looked to the old man's right shoulder, and saw that the suit was hanging in tatters on that side.

  As though the wearer had been shot there, a long time ago.

  Gray Man, thought Scott. The killer is the Gray Man. But he's old now. Mr. Gray is old. How can he be so old?

  Mr. Gray leaned over Scott, and whispered to him. "I will come back. I will kill you."

  A moment later Mr. Gray shimmered, as though walking away through the mirage lines of a desert sun. He leaned down, and picked something up.

  It was a baby. But so tiny, much tinier than Chad -

  (Chad, oh God, my Chad, please give me back my son!)

  - had ever been. A premature baby, it had to be.

  Mr. Gray picked up the preemie, and held it close as though in an embrace. But instead of love, hatred shone from the old man's insane eyes. And, slowly, he crushed the baby. Thin, mewling cries came from the place in the man's bosom where he was holding the child.

  "At last," breathed Mr. Gray. "After all these years."

  Then he looked over Scott's shoulder, as though seeing something in the dark void of this strange dream. "No," he said. "Not now. You can't stop me now!"

  Then the old man screamed and threw up an arm.

  The baby was no longer in his grasp. Instead, it was standing in front of the old man, growing impossibly, turning in an instant into a young boy, then an older boy, then a young man, then hurtling into middle age.

  The man was familiar somehow, though Scott could not tell where he had ever seen him before.

  Then, an instant before the man erupted into old age, the world twisted around him as it had in the alley....

  And Scott woke up in the hospital, wondering what kind of drugs were coursing through his body that could induce such a powerful and strange dream. He could hear the beep, beep, beep of the machines that told him he was alive, and he was glad for that, because the way he felt he was having serious doubts about whether or not that was the case.

  He looked down at himself and saw that he was covered in bandages. But the view was blurry, as though he were looking at everything through cotton. Tubes were running in and out of him, and a machine was making hissing noises that told him he was being aided in his breathing.

  Someone was next to him. Amy! he thought. But then he realized: no, Amy was dead, and so was Chad. So it wasn't them.

  It was Fariborz, his partner. The man, a swarthy Persian with thick arms and back that were currently covered by a shirt that was so tightly stretched over the man's muscles that it looked like it had been painted onto him, was looking at him from below thick eyebrows drawn close together with concern.

  "Hey, Far," whispered Scott. He tried to say more, but single small sentence was all he could manage. He felt like he wanted to cry, but no tears were running from his eyes. In fact, his eyes itched, as though he had worn contacts for too long and they had dried his eyes out.

  "Hey, Jase," answered Fariborz. The man patted Scott softly on the hand. "How you feelin'?"

  "Like crap," answered Scott after a long moment during which he gathered his strength to answer.

  "So you feel like you look, then," said Fariborz. "I guess that's good."

  "What happened?" asked Scott.

  Fariborz snorted. "We were kind of hoping that you'd be able to answer that, man."

  Scott related to him all that had happened, starting with seeing his family, then moving on to the shootout with the gray gunman, and ending with the dead body beside him and the disappearance of the killer.

  "That's where I don't get what happened," said Scott. "I mean, he pulled the trigger, Far. I saw him do it. I heard the blast."

  "No doubt about that," said Fariborz. "I mean...I take it you haven't looked in a mirror yet?"

  "No, why?"

  "Because you have powder burns all over your face, and the doctors said you've got some pretty hefty damage to your corneas due to the same thing. Your tear ducts are also whacked all to hell and back, and it's a miracle you didn't lose your eyes."

  "So how did I get through it?" asked Scott. "What happened out there?"

  Fariborz shrugged. "It gets weirder. We wanted to talk to you about the shootings, because we found something strange."

  "What?"

  "You say there were six shots fired by the bad guy, right?"

  Scott counted them in his head. One each for Amy and Chad -

  They're dead, they're dead, they're dead.

  No. Don't think that way. Focus on the job.

  - one that parted his hair, one that hit his gut, one that hit his chest, and the final shot, the one that should have taken his head off but left him only with a burnt face and scorched corneas instead.

  And the dead man beside him.

  "Yeah," said Scott. "Five bullets and then that last one...I dunno. Where did the sixth bullet go?"

  "That's the ten thousand dollar question, bud. But we know a few things for sure."

 
; "What?"

  "One, the guy we found beside you is a complete John Doe. We ran his teeth and his prints through a dozen different databases - state and federal both - and came up with zilch. Unless family comes forward to claim him or something, it's likely we'll never find out who the guy was. And two, we recovered six casings that matched the ballistics of the bullets we found in -" Fariborz halted suddenly, and Scott knew he had been about to say "Amy and Chad," but had stopped himself. "We recovered six casings. Not five. Six."

  Fariborz stopped a moment to let what he had just said sink in. Casings were ejected when a bullet was pushed out the front bore of a gun like the one the shooter had been holding.

  "So?" said Scott, not understanding. "Why is that weird?"

  "Because the John Doe was, to all appearances, shot within a few minutes of when we found you. Brand new kill. So that brings the shot total up to seven, counting the one that got you. But we only found the six casings."

  "So the killer took one."

  Fariborz shook his head. "Why the hell would he bother taking a single casing? Plus, we've got another mystery."

  "What?"

  "The John Doe was killed by a single shot to the head, we're guessing about the same caliber as the other shots we found laying around the alley."

  "You're guessing?" asked Scott. "Why don't you know?"

  "Weird thing number two. John Doe was killed by a bullet to the brain, and it looks like he was killed right there next to you. But we haven't found a bullet. Seven shots, six casings, five bullets."

  "And a partridge in a pear tree."

  "Don't joke, man. You know this is going to be a high-profile situation. And the higher-ups and the folks at I.A. don't like it when high-profile situations have numbers that don't add up."

  Scott groaned internally. I.A. - Internal Affairs - was not brought into most officer-related shootings, only operating in cases that involved or were suspected to have something to do with dirty cops. But since Scott had been working the mob beat with Homicide, and since there were so many apparent imponderables with the shooting - weird numbers in the ballistic evidence, a hitman that apparently evaporated into thin air, and a John Doe that no one could lay claim to - it was likely that I.A. would be sniffing around and making life a living hell for him.