The Children and the Blood

by Megan Joel Peterson

  Uncomfortably, she ran a hand through her tangled hair, but there was nothing to be done. The dark clothes made her pale skin stand out and blended with her black hair till she looked like an indistinguishable blob with a white face in the middle.

  Which, again, was probably the point.

  Turning from the mirror, she bundled up the police station sweats and left the bathroom, returning to where Spider waited at the end of the hall. As she came to a stop, the girl regarded her briefly and then reached up, tugging the hood around Ashley’s head.

  “So people won’t see your face,” she said, and Ashley couldn’t read her tone.

  Spider eyed her a moment more, as though weighing what she saw, and then swung her bag over her shoulder and walked out of the room.

  “They’re dangerous, you know,” Wood called from his spot by the patio window. “Probably get you killed, staying with them.”

  Ashley glanced back. Her skin crawled at the look in his eyes.

  Without a word, she followed the others, letting the door swing shut behind her.

  Chapter Nine

  Machines beeped in the distance and he could hear nurses and doctors conferring quietly at the station at the end of the hall. The lights overhead grew brighter, commencing a relentless assault on the glistening linoleum and mint-toned walls. The hospital was waking up, coming off the night shift, or whatever it was they called it here.

  Harris flexed his fingers and returned them to their folded position, elbows on his knees. A dull headache throbbed at the base of his skull, a souvenir from his tumble to the stairs yesterday afternoon. His head had apparently hit a step when he fell, leaving him a goose-egg sized knot and a couple bruises, not that he’d noticed them at the time.

  Rhianne slept in the waiting room behind him, curled beneath his sports coat on two cushioned chairs shoved end-to-end. She’d stayed awake all night, waiting for word on her husband, till she finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion an hour before. On the floor nearby, eleven-year-old Andrew was ostensibly watching cartoons, though no one in the room was fooled. The boy’s eyes darted to the door every time anyone walked by.

  Nicole’s tennis shoes squeaked on the linoleum as she returned from the vending machines at the other end of the hallway.

  “Here,” she said quietly, handing him the cup of coffee.

  “Thanks.”

  She sank down into the chair next to him, looking far older than her years. But teenagers always did these days. She’d turn fourteen in a few weeks, Harris remembered, and she’d been looking forward to her father watching her test for a red belt in Tae Kwon Do today.

  One more thing he’d ruined.

  Grimacing, he choked down the cheap black coffee. No one said it. They’d known this could happen, being the family of a police officer. But he could feel it, behind their eyes, behind the soft questions and the things they didn’t say at all.

  He set the cup down in lieu of crushing it in his fist. Malden had a wife. Kids. He was an elder in his church and the leader of his small group – most of whom had been sitting in the waiting room all night. Harris had none of those things. Was none of those things. Yet he was the one sitting here, while Scott was the one slowly dying of third-degree burns in the ER.

  Nicole’s hand rested on his forearm, and then crept down to curl into his rough grip. Emotions warred on her face, and he could see her fighting to hold back tears.

  He pulled one hand from her grasp and wrapped his arm across her shoulders. “Have you slept?” he asked, guiltily realizing he couldn’t remember whether the kids had gotten any rest since their mother received the call from the hospital the afternoon before.

  She shrugged wordlessly.

  “Come on,” he said, rising and bringing her with him into the waiting room. “No more coffee. Get some sleep.”

  He could see the protests hovering on her lips. “Staying awake won’t make things go one way or the other, Nikki,” he told her quietly.

  She looked away and then let him take her over near her mother. Two of the nameless church members rose and helped move chairs together, and the girl sank down onto the makeshift bed, biting her lip uncertainly.

  “We’ll wake you if there’s any change, honey,” one of the ladies said.

  Nicole nodded as she lay down.

  Harris walked back to his chair in the hall, retreating from the church people filling the room. They didn’t know him as more than Scott’s partner and they weren’t inclined to be rude. But as with everyone else, he could feel the questions behind the kindness in their eyes.

  Where were you? What happened?

  And he couldn’t answer. Because what he remembered was insane.

  He’d always trusted his memory; he’d had an excellent one his whole life. But people saw all kinds of things, and remembered even more. Their perceptions could be skewed by everything from the weather to lack of sleep, though especially by their mood. In light of that, he’d trained his memory to be as impartial as he could make it, to recall the world exactly as it was, and to catalog every detail without letting anything influence him.

  Then he’d seen a teenage girl go up in flames without suffering so much as a tan, and everything went out the window.

  For the first few hours after her escape, he’d been in shock. Barely able to recall anything since the moment they’d escorted her from the cellblock, he’d spent the better part of the night desperately trying to understand how Scott had ended up in the ER and how their prisoner had gotten away. But like a circuit on overload, his mind just seemed to have shut down rather than record the nightmare.

  But he was nothing if not stubborn, and somewhere between his fifth and sixth cups of coffee, memory started to return.

  She’d looked at him through the fire. The impossible fire covering every inch of her body. And then she’d made the flames disappear, while Scott lay on the floor screaming in pain.

  And she’d said she was sorry.

  He couldn’t stop seeing her face. His wonderful, damnable memory simply wouldn’t let it go.

  Doctor Patel came down the hall and Harris looked up. With a glance to him, the man continued into the waiting room, where the church people dutifully wakened the family.

  Rising to his feet, Harris followed.

  Nervousness plain on her face, Rhianne pulled Nicole close and motioned Andrew over as she waited for the doctor’s news.

  “We’ve gotten him stable,” the doctor said.

  Air escaped Rhianne.

  “It was touch-and-go for a while, but–”

  “Can we see him?” Nicole interrupted.

  The doctor hesitated. “We’ll let you know.”

  Harris could read between the simple lines. He knew what Scott had looked like the day before. The kids didn’t need to see that. Ever.

  “How is he?” Rhianne asked quietly.

  “We had to induce a coma. To help stabilize him, you see. At the moment, he–”

  From across the room, Harris could see Rhianne trembling as the doctor continued his gentle but direct litany. Words like skin grafts, blood transfusions, and extended physical therapy entered Harris’ ears, where they were filed away for later review. But his mind was elsewhere. Back there. In a narrow hall, watching a pale waif go up in flames.

  The doctor left. More words came, this time from the church people talking of miracles and hope. Harris glanced up from the erratically patterned carpet, checking on Rhianne. The others clustered around her, patting arms, murmuring comfort.

  And he walked out of the room.

  He could see Malden on the floor, in the moments after the girl fled. His clothes were ashes, his blood was everywhere, and there didn’t seem to be any earthly reason why he was still alive. His screams faded as his nerves gave out, and within the twisted mess of his face, his eyes rolled up into his head, making Harris think he’d died.

  And they had the audacity to call anything about this a miracle.

  The chair squeaked as
he sat down. His hands gripped one another, clenching back into the position they’d held for the past day, because he knew it was that or break something.

  “John?”

  Rhianne’s quiet voice came from the doorway, and he fought back the fury on his face before looking up at her.

  She wasn’t fooled. Crossing to his side, she lowered herself onto a seat.

  “You should get some sleep,” she said gently.

  “I’m–” he cut off, hating himself for the words he’d been about to automatically say. He was fine. Clearly. And her husband could still die, covered in burns with his skin peeling off. But meanwhile, John Harris was fine.

  Her hand rested on his clenched fists. “Go home, John.”

  Irrational worry flashed through him, but when he looked up at her, all he saw was empathy in her eyes.

  “Please,” she said. “Take care of yourself too. For all our sakes.”

  Guilt gnawing at him, he hesitated and then forced himself to nod. “You’ll have someone call if–” He couldn’t finish the sentence, and didn’t know what he’d finish it with anyway.

  She nodded. “No matter what,” she said, her voice catching.

  He squeezed her hand, and then headed for the elevator.

  By the car, he turned on his cell phone and was instantly rewarded with the buzz of missed calls and voicemail from the station. Clicking in the passcode to his mail swiftly, he held his breath, hoping to hear they’d captured the girl, or at least knew where she’d been hiding since the day before. The chief had summarily taken him off the case the moment Malden was injured, with implied concerns Harris would shoot the girl before any explanations could be obtained. Protocol or not, Harris wasn’t sure what to feel about the chief’s opinion of his own stability. But regardless, it’d left him sitting on the sidelines while others searched for the teenage torch.

  The chief’s voice firmly requested he come in the moment he received this message, and then hung up without offering additional information.

  Harris frowned. That didn’t sound good.

  Possibilities ran through his mind as he drove to the station and then climbed the steps to the chief’s office. They’d found the girl and she was dead. They’d not found her and she’d set someone else on fire. She’d gotten away. She’d not gotten away. The scenarios spun around and, with difficulty, he shoved them all to the back of his mind as he knocked on the chief’s door.

  “Come in.”

  He stepped into the office as the squat man behind the desk looked up. Though he was snidely called a leprechaun by those who disliked him, the cops who knew Chief Daly considered him a pit bull and were grateful if they could stay on his good side.

  Harris was fairly certain he’d never be on the man’s good side again. Not after yesterday.

  “How’s Malden?”

  “Stable,” Harris said, not trusting himself to say more. “Did they catch her?”

  The chief looked back at his papers. “Shut the door, Harris.”

  Definitely not good, he thought as he came inside.

  “If you recall, we talked about the events of last afternoon soon after the EMTs took Malden to the hospital,” Daly said. “And you told me you weren’t sure what happened.”

  Harris nodded, and though he towered over the other man, he couldn’t help but feel like a childhood version of himself, suddenly brought into the principal’s office.

  “I need to know what you remember now.”

  He hesitated. “I’m not sure what to say, sir.”

  Daly grimaced and set the papers down. “Listen, Sheldon from Internal Affairs has called a meeting with me tomorrow morning. And you know what that means. He’s already started throwing around phrases like charges of criminal negligence – for you and Malden. The girl had an incendiary device on her, that much we can ascertain. How it got there is unclear, as is how it got past the both of you. Sheldon wants someone to blame, someone who will satisfy the commissioner and the media hounds at the same time. He’s going to let you and Malden hang, John. Now, I don’t want that to happen, but you’ve got to give me something better than ‘you don’t know what to say’, understood?”

  Harris exhaled slowly. “What do the security cameras show?”

  The chief’s face tightened. “Nothing. Apparently, they were damaged by the fire and the sprinklers. We’ve got the recordings in the system, but the computers can’t seem to do anything to clear them up.”

  “And that FBI agent?”

  “No one saw anything, Harris,” Daly said, a touch sharply. “You and Malden were the only ones down there. So it’s up to you. What can you tell me?”

  Looking away, Harris ran a hand over his hair, evaluating his options. They weren’t good. “The girl went up in flames, chief.”

  “The girl,” Daly repeated.

  “I don’t know. I was in the lead, ahead of Malden. When I reached the stairs, all of a sudden I heard the girl protesting, unwilling to keep walking. I turned around, headed back to help Malden bring her on and…”

  He could see the flames burst from her hands, rush up her arms and over her body in the blink of an eye. The fire had engulfed her, melting the handcuffs from her wrists, while she just stared between the two cops, her hair stirring as though in a breeze.

  Drawing a breath, he jerked himself from the memory. “I can’t explain it. There must have been some kind of retardant on her. And fuel. Maybe something she injected beneath her skin. I mean, she was searched when she came in, and she was wearing department sweats, for Pete’s sake, but I don’t know. Maybe the drunk in the next cell was in on it, or she covered herself in the retardant before she was brought in…”

  He trailed off, knowing he was just making up answers. Making it normal, if such a thing was possible. A retardant that protected bare skin and clothes from heat that melted steel like butter? Or somehow made fire vanish as quickly as it came? Or destroyed video evidence? Or…

  “We’ve already talked to the drunk,” the chief said, cutting into Harris’ thoughts. “He claims to know nothing – which, considering his blood alcohol level at the time, I might be tempted to believe. As for the rest…” he shook his head. “If you remember anything, John, you have to call me right away. Sheldon won’t–”

  “I know,” Harris said, and to his credit, the chief let the interruption pass.

  “Until then,” Daly continued. “Go home. Get rest. You look like hell.”

  Wordlessly, Harris rose.

  “And I need you back here tomorrow after my meeting with IA,” the chief added. “They’re undoubtedly going to want to talk to you too.”

  Daly returned to his papers, but despite the clear dismissal, Harris didn’t move. “You never answered my question, sir,” he said, knowing he was pushing it and not caring. “Did they catch her?”

  “We will,” the chief said, and then paused briefly. “And my orders to you still stand.”

  Feeling more the child than ever, Harris left the room.

  Dozens of eyes watched as he left the building, but he ignored them all. The drive home was a blur, and when he finally reached his apartment, it took three tries to get the key into the lock.

  The walls echoed with questions, the same ones he’d asked all day. As he lowered himself onto the couch and tossed the keys onto the coffee table, he glared out the windows at the obnoxiously beautiful day. Blue skies. Not a cloud to be seen. If there was any justice in the universe, it would’ve been pouring down rain, desert climate be damned.

  Because this would just make it that much easier for her to get away.

  One hand rubbing at the knot on the back of his head, he sighed. City roadblocks. Police patrols throughout the suburbs and the metro area. And they hadn’t caught her. In the time it had taken to get everything in place, she’d slipped right past them, and from what he could tell by the chief’s statement, neither a sighting nor a clue had been found since. That she’d had help was certain. That her help was essentially anonym
ous – and presumably as dangerous as her – was equally assured.

  And only by a ‘miracle’ or whatever, Malden hadn’t been added to her body count.

  Harris leaned back on the cushions, trying to keep breathing. They’d take his badge. They’d sit him on administrative leave – such a nice, vague term. Investigations would follow. Culpability and other such things would be determined. And then…

  He didn’t know. If the investigations went the way he suspected, firing was certain and prison was a decent possibility. Anything could happen if they tried to charge him in connection with yesterday’s events, though at a minimum he’d be treated for mental instability.

  The report on her diary came back to him. Maybe the cops just hadn’t understood what they’d read at the time.

  But regardless, Internal Affairs and the notorious Sheldon wouldn’t be happy to leave matters at ‘girl spontaneously combusted, case closed’. Hell, he wouldn’t be happy leaving it that way. He’d tear the case apart to determine what really happened, if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

  He’d want to know the truth.

  Even if the truth was insane.

  Time passed. He paced the room. He watched the clock tick around. He tried cleaning, but ended up breaking two glasses in the sink. He was too awake for coffee, too tired for tea, and the thought of food made his stomach turn. Sleep was a joke, and the idea of flipping on the TV was absurd. The plethora of cop dramas annoyed him on the best of days, and he knew what would be on the news.

  The sun sank beyond the skyline and the city faded into purple shadows. Streetlights peppered the scenery, and gradually, windows began to glow in the darkness.

  And still, the phone hadn’t rung.

  Grimacing, he crossed the room, grabbed the keys from the table, and then headed for the door. There had to be something. A blip on the tapes. A piece of evidence they’d missed. Something, somewhere to prove he and Malden weren’t to blame.

  And he couldn’t just keep destroying his apartment, one dish at a time.

  His car found its way across town and, in the parking lot, he blinked, barely remembering how he’d gotten there. Shoving the gearshift into park, he climbed out and then thumbed the automatic locks on the key fob. At this time of night, the lot was nearly empty. Cutting across the parking spaces beneath the glow of the streetlamps, he headed for the side door to the station.