by Alex Dolan
Helena had taken her foot off the second gun, which now lay unattended on the floor behind her. I saw Tesmer looking at the gun, and then looking at me, hoping one of us would seize the opportunity. If only it were that simple.
Helena lifted her head off Veda’s shoulder, and he smiled at her. I hadn’t seen him smile much, and never like that. She looked down at the revolver in her hand, shrugged and simpered, “Baby, we need to do this.” She looked down at Veda’s mother and father. “You want to come with me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.” Another few steps and I was as close to Helena as Tesmer.
“Then we need to do this. It’ll be quick, I promise.” A tear rolled down her frown line. “Lickety-split and we’ll be gone. We’ll go wherever you want.”
Veda’s fingers curled around her gun hand. The same fingers that had lovingly stroked her cheek now tightened on the revolver. “I need this,” he insisted. His voice dropped into a man’s tone, and his placating smile flattened into a sneer.
Helena was confused. “What are you doing?” My small steps couldn’t go unnoticed anymore. I was too close. Suddenly, she looked in my direction. “What the hell is this?”
The gun rose, but Veda steered it away from me as it went off. Glass tinkled. In the enclosed space, the shot shattered our ears, leaving a piercing whine in its wake. The bullet hit a glass pane next to them.
Veda struggled with Helena until he snatched the gun. For a moment, he held the revolver, scorching himself on the barrel before he controlled it by its grip. He only maintained control of the weapon for a moment.
A prehistoric squall came out of Helena. She came at him with arms flying and clawed at him until she’d batted the gun out of his hands. We all watched it fly out the shattered window.
Veda punched her, but he’d never been taught how to throw a punch. He landed a soft blow and yelped when he crunched his knuckles. If he’d caught her in the nose again, it might have been enough to stun her, but he just caught her on the fleshiest part of her jowl.
Helena did know how to fight, and she didn’t hesitate. She threw an elbow, catching Veda under his chin. He collapsed to the carpet.
Leland tried to kick her from the floor. His wound took a lot of the fight out of him, and he moaned when he tried to move his leg. Helena stayed out of reach.
Perhaps spurred from Helena knocking her son down, Tesmer lunged across the carpet for the second gun, but Helena kicked the Glock under the bed, swooped down, and slashed Tesmer across the back of the leg. She rolled aside to dodge the second stroke of the knife, and then cried out a few seconds later when the pain set in.
Helena blocked my path to the bed and the gun, so I stormed her.
She lashed out, and I barely avoided getting my stomach sliced open. Her movements were powerful and deliberate. If she cut me, there wouldn’t be any surface wounds—she’d dig in with the steel. But so long as I was a primary target, she wouldn’t descend on Leland or Tesmer and finish them off.
I kept some distance from her, but after a few misses, she was impatient to hurt me and lunged, giving me an opening. I sent a haymaker into her ear. I wanted to knock her out, but her bulk absorbed the hit. Instead of concussing her, I whipped up her fury.
She stumbled after me, tottering like a penguin on the plastic leg. The shiny metal knife tip darted here and there. I couldn’t predict how she would move, and it was happening too fast for me to consider fight strategy. I could only retreat.
The next time she stabbed at me, I pulled my hips back, and fell on my ass. I scrambled backward, crab-style, as she hurtled toward me.
I needed something to defend myself with, some kind of weapon. Why couldn’t Veda have held onto the gun? I thought. It could have all been over by now. But Helena had incapacitated the Moons. Veda had resumed his paralysis. Tesmer rolled in pain from her leg wound. And despite all of his FBI training, Leland lay bleeding out on the carpet.
My back pressed against the desk, so I couldn’t retreat any farther. With only a moment of decision afforded to me before Helena pounced, I remembered the bottom drawer. I tore it open. Loose metal jangled. I scooped out a handful of steel.
Helena raised the knife high above her head so she could plunge it deep into me.
I jabbed into her body. Helena yelped. The knife faltered, and she staggered back two steps. A fork dangled from her rib cage.
Instead of plucking out the fork, Helena marveled at it. Pumped full of adrenaline, she might not have felt it. If you plugged four prongs the size of nails into a tender spot below my left nipple, I’d probably drop. Not so Helena Mumm.
As soon as I climbed to my feet, she ran at me. I barely had time to toreador out of reach. As she passed, I sunk another fork into her upper shoulder. The prongs stopped short at the scapula. This time she screamed, and swiped at me, the blade narrowly missing my arm.
She cornered me by the desk, the equivalent of being against the ropes in a boxing ring. She swung her knife in the motion of an upper cut, intending to slice my neck; and by some miracle I dodged it and stabbed a fork into her deltoid. Her momentary disorientation allowed me to skirt around her to the open side of the room.
By the third fork, the pain didn’t surprise her. She just became incensed. Helena scowled at me and zigzagged the knife. I thrust my next fork low, and it landed in her thigh.
She groaned. The collective agony of the wounds was wearing her down. Helena was too charged up to remove any of the forks, so the flatware flopped off her like migration tags on a wild animal.
Veda moved behind her, although I’d been too preoccupied to watch him approach. Stepping behind her back, he scooped the remainder of the forks. With Veda behind her and me in front of her, Helena didn’t know where to focus. She looked over her shoulder at her would-be son, dumfounded. “Baby?”
I still had a few forks, and now Veda had his own quiver. The three of us formed a triangle. Helena looked at me and then back to Veda, questioning why he had weapons in his hands. “Baby?”
Veda didn’t respond.
She kept us at bay with the knife, but the dynamic had changed. She no longer had the momentum. Instead of lashing out at us, she held the knife to protect herself from us.
Veda struck next, swift as a scorpion. While she aimed the knife at me, he plunged two forks so that they rooted in her middle back and right ass cheek. He howled at her, his voice not as untamed as Helena’s, nor as afflicted as Leland’s. He sounded lustful for violence.
Helena slashed through the air behind her and nicked his forearm, right atop his self-inflicted scars. He plunged another fork between her shoulders. Another fork found her kidney. She squawked as if something had caught in her windpipe, and then her arms spasmed. I plunged two forks into her chest. I operated without thinking, but looking back, I suppose that was the moment when it started to feel wrong.
Helena’s arm dropped, and her fingers uncoiled. The knife fell silently on the carpet. I kicked it toward the staircase. I wanted to stop then. Since Leland first cuffed me, all I wanted to do was walk away. The more I involved myself, the more my actions and their consequences tied to those of the Moon family. I wanted all of this to finish. With Helena Mumm disarmed, I might finally leave them.
I dropped my forks on the carpet.
Veda kept his. He wasn’t finished.
He planted his remaining forks into the woman. Now unarmed, her entire body was a target; he drove the prongs until they hit bone. The spilled blood inebriated him in a sadistic frenzy, until his last fork entered her stomach, where she had stabbed his father. When he stepped back, he panted and stared at the blood on his hands.
Helena’s legs quavered. She dropped to her knees, her weight quaking the floor. She stretched her arms toward the ceiling, possibly longing for whatever god would have her. A dozen steel rods protruded from her, glinting in the cascade of sunlight from the front window. Helena Mumm had turned into an effigy of Saint Sebastian.
I attended to the Mo
ons. Tesmer held her bloody calf, but the gash in her leg didn’t seem major. I was worried for Leland. He could have passed for dead but for a fluttering gasp, as a rivulet of blood drooled from his lips. His eyes couldn’t focus, and he was possibly delirious from blood loss. While I dialed 911, I saw Veda from across the room.
Veda had retrieved the chef’s knife from the floor. My cell phone was ringing at my ear. He walked back over to Helena, who was sobbing from both the pain and the understanding that she had lost. The emergency operator picked up, but I was too transfixed by the youngest Moon to speak.
With both hands, Veda thrust the knife into Helena’s neck until the blade disappeared. Blood sprayed on his arms and stomach. Veda cherished the moment. I saw the relief in his face. His hands stayed on the handle so he could savor the woman’s every tremor, and he rotated the blade so she would feel it more. She convulsed as she expired, her eyes frozen on him.
Sometime later, I would realize that I hadn’t issued a word of protest.
Chapter 18
Mortality may be universal, but people experience death in any number of ways. I can’t pretend to understand what that experience is, since I have never gone through it (yet, I suppose). When it happens to me, I don’t know whether it will come as a relief, even deliverance, or whether it will seem like nagging regret over a life unfulfilled, or even the bleak misery of knowing I’ll be orphaned again once I sever my connection to the world of the living. Some clients have expressed a mournful resignation of leaving life incomplete, while others have seemed petulantly exuberant that they were exiting the world on their own terms. Walter Gretsch ended his life in confusion, haunted by his victims, and as I like to imagine, possibly tortured by the thought that he might pass into an eternal torment for the things he’d done. When Helena Mumm died, I sensed that she felt cheated by her life, denied a child and a family, and in denial about the pain she had inflicted on others.
Those who witness the transformation of the living into the dead respond to the phenomenon with vastly different reactions as well. Families of my clients have wept from the possible selfish desolation that comes from understanding that you will never see that person again. After unearthing the offspring buried within that redwood cathedral, the wreckage of those families reminded me how mortality might harrow the best of us. Conversely, Veda Moon took gluttonous satisfaction in watching Helena pass on, and possibly drew the strength he needed to move on from his own trauma.
Since death can be experienced in infinite variations, I cannot place a universal value on it. This also means that I cannot place a universal value on what it means to bring death to another person. Let’s just say I can’t approach my work with the same certainty as before. So I’m taking a break and considering other ways I might help ease suffering.
Shortly after Helena Mumm died, I visited Gordon Ostrowski at San Sebastián. I didn’t say anything to him. Not that I was afraid to talk to him. I simply sat on the other side of the glass and observed him. At first Gordon leered at me, as though no time had passed, and I was the same teen who cowered under his pregnant volcano. But eventually he recognized my contempt, the way I studied him as nothing more than a curiosity, an iguana in a terrarium. He called the guard to take him away, and that’s the last I’ve seen him. I don’t believe Gordon possesses the capacity to grieve, but I hope he will buckle under the frustration that he was lost any control he once held over other people.
Almost a year has passed. It is August in Boston, and I’m starting medical school in two days. The MCATs were a bitch, but I have a good head for numbers, and I perform well under pressure. The summer in this city is hotter than what I was used to in California. Muggy too, and the mosquitoes love my pale skin. Everything’s brick out here; and the squirrels on campus are smaller and gray. At last, I feel disconnected from where I grew up.
Out here I’m Ella. Pamela to school administrators who don’t know better. Pam to some. Never Kali. I feel younger than a year ago. My hair grew longer, and maybe it makes me look more feminine. The university sweatshirt definitely makes me feel girlish. I’ve started to meet my classmates at some wine mixers. Turns out, med school students can be just as buffoonish as firemen when it comes to drinking. I hope this makes it easier for me to adjust.
Jeffrey Holt visited me when he was speaking in town. The Holt family is back living up at the cottage in Shallot. He’s gotten over being angry with me, and we had drinks and watchfdiaed a Sox game at a bar. He pitched me on coming back to the network. I told him I wouldn’t take on clients now, not while I’m in school. He teased out the idea of me helping with some of his policy work, and I said I’d think about it.
At the site, they found eighteen girls; more than they thought were taken. The FBI let Leland reopen the case. His stomach is mostly healed. He can’t run much, but it was a close call when he got to the hospital, and he seems grateful that he survived at all. Leland and I trade e-mails, and that’s how I found out that Veda moved in with Cindy Coates. They’re coming out to Boston next spring to run the marathon, and I’ll give them a couch to sleep on. Leland tells me that for all of Veda’s crankiness, Cindy softens him up a bit.
Today I’m shopping for books and wandering the stores in Cambridge. Emmanuel skips on a slack leash by my ankles. In one of the bookstores I find Jeffrey Holt’s book.
One of the few things here that reminds me of home is the abundance of vintage clothing stores. Second-hand clothes, whatever you want to call them. Strolling down the lumpy brick sidewalk, I’m drawn to one particular shop because of the wigs displayed in the windows.
Inside, I try on a bright pink bob with bangs. Maybe I linger longer than I should. Looking in the mirror, you can barely tell it’s me.
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Table of Contents
The Euthanist
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
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