The Blood Singer_A Haden Church Supernatural Thriller

by Patrick McNulty

  “Where we going, Moses?”

  “It's through the kitchen.” He said. “There’s a walk-in freezer.”

  “All right, boys. We’re going through the kitchen.”

  Haden led pushing aside the line of people using his massive bulk. People covered their noses and stepped aside. Thankfully, no one noticed the gun in the midst of all the other crazy shit that was happening.

  At the end of the counter, there was a section that could be lifted to allow access to the kitchen area. Haden stepped to the bar and raised the hinged piece. A ginger-haired manager in an ill-fitting Wendy’s shirt pushed the partition closed again and stood in front of it with his chubby arms crossed.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked and, “What’s that?” nodding at the carpet roll the two scared boys carried.

  Haden read the name tag: Earl.

  “Earl.” He said, raising the gun to point the barrel between his eyes. “Fuck off.”

  Earl’s smug look of superiority vanished in a wheeze of fear as he stumbled backward, arms raised. Earl attempted to spin and run but only ended up stumbling over his own feet and falling to the ground screaming, “Gun! She’s got a gun!”

  Well, then the place went nuts. Customers screamed and flooded for the exits, but Haden spun and kept the gun on the two kids carrying Freddy.

  “We’re heading to the walk-in freezer.” He told them. “Let’s go.”

  Wendy raised the partition, and the boys marched straight past the cowering manager on the ground reeking of piss and grease. The fry cooks in the back stood stock still. Hapless twenty-somethings and women in their fifties with food cooking on the grill. They peered up at Haden and his little crew with a look of confused curiosity.

  Haden walked by smiling, the gun dangling by his hip and patted the stunned fry cook on his bony shoulder, “Keep up the good work. You’re doing great.” Haden picked up a small filleting knife from the kid’s workstation and held it up to eye level.

  “Can I borrow this?” he asked. He watched the kid’s Adam’s apple bob in his throat as his mouth worked wordlessly. He was nodding, though.

  “Thanks.”

  Moses was standing by the giant walk-in freezer, waiting.

  “Wendy, if you would be so kind,” Haden said. Wendy dutifully jogged to the double doors, and the boys carried the body into the freezing confines.

  “Right there is good, fellas. Thanks a million.”

  The boys released poor Freddy from about two feet up sending his body crashing to the grated metal floor.

  “Easy, boys,” Haden said. “That’s family right there.”

  All three of the college kids waited nervously to either be shot or released.

  Haden waved the gun toward the front of the store. “Off you go.”

  He didn’t have to tell them twice. They hot-footed it out of there like their asses were on fire.

  Haden shuffled around the big bundle of Freddy to look at the rear wall of the walk-in. He got the same tingling feeling he got when a thunderstorm was coming. Haden ripped down a poster detailing safe storing practices revealing the clean metal surface of the rear wall.

  Police sirens were drawing closer.

  “They sound pissed,” Moses said.

  Haden used the kid’s filleting knife to make a small incision on Edna’s left index finger. Blood began to drool from the wound almost instantly. He used the knife to make an identical slit in his right index finger and then set the blade on a shelf next to a box that read: Potato product.

  The sirens were getting closer and closer still.

  Haden stepped to the freezer wall and raised his hands.

  On the smooth metal, Haden used the blood spilling from his fingertips to paint a series of complicated symbols and characters. His two fingers moved in cooperation, writing at the same time until he completed a spiral of symbols. Words never spoken aloud for fear of the repercussions. Symbols passed down through generations of whispers. Characters whose very genesis were steeped in blood, war, and mountains of dead. After a moment, with his fingers still dripping, he stepped back, and exhaled, as if he were holding his breath the entire time.

  The wall was beginning to change.

  The sirens at his back came to a head as tires screeched signalling the arrival of the police. The blood painted on the door stopped running down the smooth surface. Haden hoped he had enough time. The blood rivulets stopped flowing and began to tremble. Slowly, the blood started to disappear, soaking into the metal wall, through its silver skin. The wall rippled gently, fading.

  Behind him, someone yelled, “Police!”

  Boots stomped through the restaurant as radios crackled.

  “Show yourself! Do it now!” the cop said.

  “Come on…come on…” Haden whispered.

  The wall was rippling wildly now. Shimmering. The last of the blood Haden had painted on the wall was gone, and very slowly he could begin to see through the wall. See past it. Wet cobblestones waited on the other side. An alley way. Nothing much more than that.

  “Get ready,” Haden said to Freddy’s body, bending down and grabbing the end of the carpet roll.

  “Hey! Lady! Put your hands on your head! Do it now!”

  The voice was so close. Haden glanced over his shoulder and saw the cop peeking around the edge of the freezer door, gun trained on his back.

  “Do it now!” he ordered. “NOW!”

  Haden could smell the rain through the fading wall between this place and the next. The cop said something to him. Another order, another whatever. But Haden wasn’t listening. He grabbed the corner of the carpet and stepped forward through the back wall of the walk-in freezer.

  20

  Dr. Raymond Singh leaned against the building that comprised the vast garage used by the ambulance crews. He was finishing his smoke. A practice he really should have been doing nearer the road, but the rain was drizzling all day, and he was lazy.

  He saw the woman park her beige Camry in one of the spots reserved for police vehicles. The woman seemed to flow out of the car. She wore a light grey tailored suit that hugged her every curve from her long powerful legs to her full chest. Dr. Singh always regarded himself as a gentleman. One who does not make a practice of gawking at beautiful women. But in this case, with the end of his cigarette dangling from his dry lips, he was indeed a gawker. He was gawking.

  Big time.

  The woman strode through the parking lot with a particular animal grace that aroused and intimidated him all at once, and when her head swivelled in his direction to find him staring at her, he found himself pinned in place. Frozen.

  He was a man of medicine. A clinical physician but this woman skewered him with those violet eyes as she quickly made her way past where he stood and into the ambulance bay.

  When she was gone Dr. Singh removed the cigarette from his mouth, which was little more than a filter by that time, and tossed it away. He realized he was holding his breath.

  He wondered what she was doing here. She looked to be a hospital official. Maybe HR or some visiting physician. He had heard rumours that administration was hiring another orthopaedic surgeon. The prospect of working in the same department as she stirred something wonderful up inside of him. He hadn’t dated in over two years, beyond a hook up with a neonatal nurse three months ago. It wasn’t a dry spell. It was a real desert.

  Dr. Raymond Singh finger-combed his hair in place and checked his breath. It smelled of cigarettes and stale coffee. He dug out a crumpled pack of gum and quickly chewed two pieces.

  Smoothing his lab coat, he made the turn into the ambulance bay and found the woman standing in front of the rear doors of an idle ambulance. She looked even better from behind, Singh thought slyly.

  Puzzled, he watched as the woman opened the door of the ambulance and stepped up inside. He stepped closer thinking of something witty to say, but when he saw her rummaging through drawers and dropping supplies into a canvas bag he ended up going with, “C
an I help you?”

  The woman didn’t stop rummaging but kept dropping bandages and suture kits and saline into her bag.

  “I need O positive blood.” She said, without looking at Singh.

  Did she say blood?

  “Are you…hurt?” he asked her.

  “It's not for me.”

  This felt wrong now. Who the hell was this woman? Singh looked around for the ambulance crew that belonged to the truck, but the garage was deserted.

  “They don’t keep blood in an ambulance.” He said finally, “Who are you?”

  Nyah turned finally and looked at the skinny little Indian doctor standing at the edge of the ambulance. His smile faltered under the full force of her stare.

  She stepped down out of the ambulance and he found that she was nearly equal to his six feet. Her eyes were such a vibrant shade of violet that he wondered if they were contacts. They had to be. But the more he stared, the more he couldn’t see the tell-tale outline of the lens on her eye.

  “Where do they keep it, Dr…?”

  Her skin, he noticed was very pale. Ivory, threaded through with spidery red and blue veins. The air around her seemed to drop in temperature. He knew that had to be caused by a draft blowing through the ambulance bay, but he didn’t feel any wind. It was just cold where she stood. Cold and damp, as if he had been lowered into a well.

  “It’s inside the hospital, they…”

  “I need it,” she said quickly, “and you’re going to get it for me. Now.”

  Singh backed a step away already feeling warmer, shaking his head as he smiled.

  “Who are you again? And what do you need the blood for?”

  Nyah shifted the canvas bag until it was slung over her shoulder and checked her watch.

  “I’m going to need to see some identification or something.” The doctor stammered. “You can’t just take that stuff…from the ambulance.”

  A pneumatic door leading to the triage area of the hospital opened, and Singh heard the sound of voices and a rolling a gurney.

  “Hey!” he said, waving them over. The two young paramedics snapped their eyes toward him.

  Nyah took half a step and jammed the barrel of her pistol into his soft stomach just above the belt line.

  “What?” Singh gasped as he felt the pressure of the barrel and the coldness return. He didn’t know which one felt worse.

  “Get rid of them and take me inside or all three of you die. Right here.”

  Singh eyed Nyah’s intense violet stare and then she shifted away, pocketing the gun.

  “What’s up, doc?” the first paramedic said, eying Nyah with interest.

  “I..uh…I…”

  “Dr. Singh here wanted me to meet some of the paramedics,” Nyah said, extending her hand to the first guy. “He’s told me so much about you. I’m Dr. Foster.”

  The paramedic shook her hand and then stepped away, uneasy for some reason that he couldn’t explain. The woman was beautiful, but her touch, even the briefest of handshakes seemed to drain something from him. He felt suddenly hollow, and very cold.

  Nyah waved to the younger medic standing behind his coach and then turned to Singh, “Well Doctor? Shall we?”

  Singh nodded a sheen of sweat on his face.

  “Right.” He said. “Let’s go.”

  21

  When Freddy was all the way through, Haden glanced back at the wall and saw the dumbstruck cop inching his way through the kitchen, gun out, watching as the back of the walk-in freezer began to look less like a doorway into an alley and more like a metal freezer again. Haden watched the cop open his mouth to say something, but then the gate closed completely.

  Prague

  The razored wind that cut through the alley sliced straight through the house dress Haden was wearing and his breath steamed in huge clouds around his head.

  Moses stood next to him looking dapper and comfortable as always.

  “So where’s her place?” Haden asked.

  Moses pointed past a rusted dumpster teeming with rats to the end of the alley where a single bare lightbulb shone in the darkness. Beneath the light there stood a wide wooden door banded in iron. On either side of the door two large men dressed for the freezing weather in long black overcoats stood just outside the reach of the weak light.

  “That way.”

  Haden reached down and, grunting with the effort, dragged Freddy’s dead body over the cobblestones toward the light.

  “I’m still not one hundred percent clear on what your plan is?” Moses whispered.

  “I’m a grieving grandmother looking for her kidnapped grandkid,” Haden said.

  “You’re lying to me,” Moses replied. “Please tell me you’re lying to me.”

  Haden took a second to rest, breathing deeply through his nose.

  “Remind me never to get this fat.” He said. “It makes everything so hard. Even breathing. Jesus.”

  Haden dropped the edge of the carpet letting Freddy’s feet clunk against the cobbles. He put his arms over his head, taking deep breaths, stretching out Edna’s back. When he reached down again, he changed his grip and continued to walk backward until he heard a man say something harsh in Czechoslovakian.

  Haden ignored the doorman and continued to drag the corpse until he felt the owner of the voice slap him across the back of his head. Haden dropped Freddy and turned to face the goon that hit him.

  The guy was six four at least with gym raised muscles that threatened to rip through his long leather coat. Presently his face was twisted in disgust as he searched for somewhere to wipe Edna’s blood and brain matter off of his hand.

  He started screaming at him, but Haden raised his hands and shook his head,

  “English! Only English!”

  “Fuck you!” came the reply from the doorman. The other doorman, this one a fraction smaller, materialized from the behind his larger partner holding his hand over his mouth.

  “Fuck you! Go!”

  “I have a gift for Olivia,” Haden said. “I need to see Olivia.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Tell Olivia; there is a gift wai…”

  The massive doorman slapped Haden across the face. Hard. Spinning him around, sending him toppling over Freddy’s bundled body. Haden struggled to his hands and knees and felt a sting as one of the guards; he couldn’t be sure which, kicked him square in the ass.

  “Fuck you! Stink! Go! NOW!”

  They didn’t know much English, but what they did know was effective.

  Moses squatted down to meet Haden’s eye. “Whats the plan now kid?” Behind him, Haden heard shuffling footsteps. He spun and caught the foot of the smaller doorman as he attempted to kick him square in the ribs. Haden twisted the man's ankle sharply, hearing bones crack. The man squealed and fell to the ground grabbing his ankle.

  The larger guard charged at Haden and shot out a short jab that Haden tried to dodge but with the extra weight and lack of muscle tone, Edna’s face didn’t have much of a chance. The man’s ham-sized fist sunk deep into Edna’s fleshy face like he was punching into a pile of cookie dough. Edna’s nose exploded, and Haden saw stars as he stumbled backward.

  The smaller guard was still squealing on the floor as his larger partner advanced. He rolled his block head on an invisible neck, warming up, relishing the thought of beating this old gypsy Grandma to death. His first jab knocked away Haden’s defences, and the freight train right hand that followed felt like it broke something vital in Edna’s head. Haden saw nothing but darkness for a second and the next moment he was on his back staring up at the night sky over Prague.

  Somewhere far away a metal bolt was thrown back, and Haden heard the massive wooden door scrape open.

  Everyone stopped.

  Moses stared down at Haden, “Come on, kid. Get up.”

  Haden slowly rolled himself onto his belly and then struggled to his hands and knees, looking up at the woman framed in the doorway. She was tall and wire-thin with pale grey hair. Sh
e wore a flowing white robe that hung limply from her skeletal frame making her look like a child playing dress-up.

  “Hey, Olivia.” He said.

  She didn’t smile.

  “Haden Church.” She whispered in accented English. “And it's not even my birthday.”

  Haden spat a wad of blood and snot onto the cobblestones, still trying to shake the ringing in his ears.

  Olivia’s eyes never left Haden’s.

  “Bring him inside.”

  22

  Maura sat in the interview room of the police station feeling hollowed out. When the police finally arrived at her house, she was a raving lunatic. She kept screaming for Charlotte so loud and so often that the attending paramedic crew finally broke down and gave her something to take the edge off.

  Maura stopped screaming. Now she was just furious.

  Her make up was ruined, she felt sick to her stomach, and every muscle in her body was pulled as tight as piano wire. The detective that had been interviewing her for the past thirty minutes excused himself and left the room, locking her inside, when he was told there was a phone call waiting for him. Maura had nothing to do but dream of all the ways Freddy could have hurt her daughter. She prayed he was dead and a flicker of pleasure ignited inside her when she imagined that one day if he was still alive, she might be able to kill him herself.

  She almost smiled.

  The door opened, and the detective murmured his apologies as he dropped back into the chair.

  “Okay,” he said. “Our guys have gone into your mother-in-law's house.”

  “Ex-mother-in-law.”

  “Right, ex,” he said, “Charlotte was not there.”

  Maura went back to nervously tapping her fingers on the scarred wooden table top.

  “Was anyone there?” she asked.

  But the detective was already shaking his head.

  “They found…some evidence of what they are considering two scenes within the house.”

  “Scenes?” she asked. “What does that mean? Scenes?”