by Chris Capps
The Sherriff paused only momentarily to lean up and wipe the thin film of sweat collecting on his brow. Uncovering a grave, even one as shallow as this, was bound to be tiring and slow work. The roots from the surrounding trees had quickly worked their way around the wooden box, squeezing it and threatening to tear it apart in the coming short centuries of rest. It also made digging more difficult.
Rind started to step up from the grave when his foot caught one of the roots and he tumbled onto the wooden headstone, snapping it backward like a broken neck.
The sound echoing in the mist was different, somehow. Their surroundings had changed. It was closer now, more claustrophobic. It was as if the fog around them was beginning to harden, to freeze them in a capsule over the grave to suffocate or dig forever. But that was just an illusion.
It was undulating, that fog, dancing in flux like a sky blown from an elder dandelion. Their audience was trees. Their stage was little more than dirt. And the spotlight, now shaking more than Sugarhill could control, was resting squarely on the Sherriff's hand. In it, in the palm of his hand, he had gripped something blue as he tried to stand. The object was small, slightly bent as he opened his fingers.
"What is it?" Sugarhill asked. But he could see it as clearly as Rind.
It was the bud of a flower, folded from paper. It was unmistakable. A flower had been folded by hands unknown and placed here at the grave only Rind and Sugarhill were supposed to know about.
It was an offering.
The Sherriff sat upright on the ground, his boots shifting in the dirt on top of the exposed wooden footlocker. He sat there, puzzling silently to himself. His breath was visible in the cold now, broadcasting silent witness to his quickening gasps as he grappled with the impossible. His eye turned up to the mayor, and he asked simply,
"Who did you tell?"
Perhaps it was the unadulterated honesty in the Sherriff's tone. Perhaps it was the fact that they knew each other. Mayor Sugarhill crouched laboriously, and pointed the shaking flashlight closely at the flower. It was intricate, crafted by someone who had spent a long time folding the edges with great care until they were this perfect effigy.
"No one could have known," the Mayor said, "I swear to you. Someone found it on their own. Someone who likes snooping outside of the wall." The Sherriff closed his hand around the flower, squeezing it and crushing his fingers shut until they shook and clenched. He tossed the crumpled ball on the ground, and then for good measure he stepped on it as he rose to his feet.
"Later," Rind said twisting the toe of his boot over the folded paper as if he were stamping out a cigarette.
He turned back to the grave, sniffing his nose as he placed the blade of the shovel in the small seam at the lid. The small crack had widened with the weakening of the lock in their makeshift coffin. Sugarhill braced his foot beneath the lever end of the shovel.
The two strained and pulled up, slowly twisting the rusted locking mechanism loose and pulling with a patient sustained grunt. With their combined effort, the lock at once ripped fully from the lid of the coffin and the door jostled up for a moment before falling shut again.
"One of us holds the flashlight," Rind said between breaths, "The other holds the gun."
"It's only right," the mayor said as he coughed and ran his knuckles beneath the tip of his nose, "You hold the gun, I'll open it."
Rind gingerly reached down to where his shotgun was resting and picked it up, wrapping the arm sling around his wrist twice and then training it on the lid of the coffin. He leaned his head down, releasing the safety with his thumb and pressing the butt of the gun firmly into his shoulder. He inhaled slowly, clearing his mind as best he could, and began a slow gentle exhale,
"Do it."
Sugarhill pressed only the tips of his fingers underneath the coffin lid, before lifting it up. The rusted hinges, buried in the moist ground for years, clicked and squealed as the coffin lid rose. Pouring light into the coffin before he dared look, the mayor found that he was shaking so hard that he might fall right into the open box unless he opened his eyes.
"That's her," the Sherriff said, lowering the shotgun, "Close it and let's get out of here." Sugarhill opened his eyes and was met with the skeleton of Molly Nayfack. It was her, of that there could be no doubt. She was lying sideways, curled up in the same position they had placed her in so she would fit in the makeshift coffin. On the left side of the skull was the fracture and hole that had ended her life.
"So," a gentle voice said from behind them, "So, it was you."
It was a voice they both knew. One that hadn't been heard in years. Impossibly, it was the voice of a young, breathing Molly Nayfack.
Chapter 4
It was just after sunset when Dr. Samuel Rosario finally reached his screened porch and unloaded the bundles he had been carrying to the refrigerator. Sam's elderly and morbidly obese pug Michigan barely looked up from the hammock where it lay breathing laboriously until it heard the sound of its bowl being set down. With bug-eyed interest, the dog wagged its tail once and raised its head. A thin trail of slobber was descending from its wrinkled lips as it switched from panting grin to alert interest.
"Sorry to do this to you, Michigan," Sam said tearing the paper from one of the parcels of meat and dropping its contents into the dog's tin bowl, "But I hate to waste food."
The pug gradually poured itself from the hammock with the grace of a slinky, thudding and rolling once before snorting back to its feet. Soon it was clicking untrimmed claws across the hardwood floor and sniffing the contents of its bowl. It looked up at him with its bulbous cataract eyes, fogged over long ago, and whined again. The doctor had already gone inside.
Resigned to its meal, the pug sniffed the sweet pulled pork and then wandered back underneath the hammock to rest in the cool breeze of night.
Inside, Sam collapsed into his overstuffed office chair and tossed his glasses onto the linoleum tile grafted to the desk's surface. Squeezing the bridge of his nose between index and forefinger, he fumbled at his radio's on-switch. After a second of static, the solitary speaker began broadcasting the day's news on repeat from the Daily Sentinel. It was a simple broadcast, managed by interns at the University for next to no budget. The inexperienced and wholly anonymous broadcaster's voice began mid-sentence,
"...is the KOIF Sunset News brought to you by the Daily Sentinel. We begin our broadcast tonight with news of an unexpected accident at the airfield. At the moment no official word on the nature of the incident has come to light, although KOIF's Jared Francis says he spotted not one, but two wrecked helicopters at the scene. Police dispersed crowds shortly before sunset, and the mayor's office has yet to comment on the incident officially. Deputy Jessica Myers was quoted as saying a full investigation was underway and the Daily Sentinel would be informed as soon as more facts became known. Police and rescue forces are currently at the airfield, warning off onlookers and citing a potential localized chemical leak that could pose a health risk to those without the proper training in hazardous materials."
Dr. Rosario picked up his glasses and replaced them on his nose during the course of the report. It wasn't unusual for the Daily Sentinel to get its facts wrong. Thanks to an emphasis on free press by the Sentinel's owners, any call for fact checking was generally disregarded by the less-than-zealous editors. Sensational headlines were the only thing the Sentinel and its affiliate KOIF could do to keep readers and listeners alike from wandering off to the more bombastic and inflammatory "Daily Finger." Of course the latter was generally considered more of a local tabloid than an honest news rag. The result had been a steadily growing arms race of media sensationalism.
Slowly letting air escape from between his flapping lips in a sigh, Sam considered his next action. It had been a long day, filled with errands. And as soon as he heard the radio announcer's voice, he knew he was ready to go to bed - with or without this new revelation of a disaster.
He could very well get away with switching the radio
off and never checking his own frequency to see if he was being summoned to the hospital. He could even start on the bottle of McCarthy whiskey hidden behind a stack of well abused history books in his office. It would be so easy to give in on a quickly chilling night like this. He considered it even as he found himself rising to his feet to respond to a knock at the door.
"Sam," he heard a tired and strong woman's voice call through his screened porch door. It was the deputy, Jessica Myers. Sam kicked his chair on his way out to meet her.
This was it. This was precisely the way he would begin a long night of thankless work. He nearly tripped on Michigan as he met Jessica at the door. The dog was once again timidly approaching the tin food dish, and had rolled over onto its back blinking up at him with its nearly blind eyes.
"Yes, what is it?" Sam said through the screen door, looking down at the dog. Best not to look at her. Jessica had that little green notepad out. She closed it and leaned her free hand against one of the porch's foundation beams,
"Problem, doctor. There's been an accident at the airfield."
"I was just making the decision to head out there," the doctor said, "I'm sure the eight other trained doctors on staff aren't capable of handling something like this. Better to pry an old man out of bed."
"The other doctors have already had a look at the bodies," Jessica said, "We're trying to figure out who they are. You've treated as many people in town as anyone else, so we need you to look too."
"I assume," Dr. Rosario said, "That I already know who the victims are. There is only one person in town that can fly a helicopter. The victims are, as far as I understand it, from a helicopter crash. By the process of elimination we can assume it was Chance Cooper and that co-pilot of his. What's his name?"
"Rob Howell. He was badly burned in the crash, but we're assuming he was the one still sitting in the first helicopter. Chance was identified as well. He was struck by wreckage from both vehicles and then burned during the subsequent spill of fuel. So was Walt Garvey. There are two additional bodies, badly burned by this point, that have not been identified."
"I'm sorry," Sam said, "You said first helicopter. What do you mean?"
"There were two," Jessica said nodding and holding a hand up preemptively, "Pretty soon the scene will be safe enough for us to begin the process of identifying the second craft. There was a lot of fire."
"A second helicopter?" Sam said opening the door and stepping onto the porch, "Alright then. You've certainly got my attention."
Down the street a lamplighter was slowly making his way toward the city's center leaving a trail of ghostly argand candle lamps suspended above them. The tiny bright flames danced in the wake of the lamplighter, swaying in a line like a parade of fireflies. Dr. Rosario stepped outside as Jessica poked a thumb over her shoulder,
"The hospital's this way. I'll take you there."
"I know where the hospital is," Rosario said narrowing his eyes slightly, "Unless there's another reason I'm being escorted."
"Let me go with you," Jessica said. Rosario caught sight of the .38 hanging from her hip. She caught his eye lingering on her gun and put a hand gently on his shoulder to reassure him. "This whole thing has me nervous, doc. Let's just go together without giving each other a hard time. Okay?"
Sam looked back up at Jessica's face. He wasn't the best at discerning peoples' intentions, but years in the medical field had offered him rare insight into peoples' reactions to stressful circumstance. There was something else to this situation that she wasn't telling him. Something that, judging from her gun, may mean danger. He nodded and they both made the short walk from his house to the hospital in silence.
When they arrived, Sam waved at the front desk, failing to notice no one was sitting behind it. His eyes were somewhere else, distant. He was running through the procedure for corpse identification in his mind. That purely practical thought process was competing with the thought that this was likely someone he knew. In all his years of practice in Cairo and his lengthy career in DC, he had never gotten used to seeing someone he knew personally disfigured. Death as a whole was abhorrent, but the disfigurement of a gruesome death - something like a fire - was something he had never been able to cope with. That aversion had followed him many years.
Of course that had been precisely one of the problems with treating the Newmann child in the later stages. When she finally did die, she hardly looked different in death than she had in life. It wasn't that she looked alive after finally releasing her final breath, it was that she had been wearing the pallid complexion of death for weeks prior. That had been a rough one for the Newmann family. Even rougher on them than would be normal.
Sam rounded the hallway leading up to the morgue and broke the long silence between him and the deputy.
"I dislike going to the morgue," he said, "I much prefer interacting with people who didn't die."
"I understand, doctor," Jessica said, stressing the last word.
"I suppose it isn't impossible to believe that a doctor would come to hate death and fear the dead. And yet I feel it's something I don't share with the other doctors in town."
As they reached the door, Dr. Rosario placed the palm of his hand on the door and paused. His voice was troubled, distant. It made a sound reminiscent of a wind startled mouse, and then he asked over his shoulder to the deputy,
"Do you hate criminals?"
"Not particularly," she said finding her hand once again on his shoulder, "It's something that happens. It's my office to help the victims, not hate the perpetrators. If I do my job well, maybe there will be fewer victims."
"I don't share that comfort," Dr. Rosario said, "It's possible to live in a world without criminals. Just erase the laws. Unfortunately, it's not possible to live in a world without death. And so I do think I hate the dead. I think I hate them a lot."
He pushed the door inward just in time to see the elder McCarthy boy Felix pulling aside a white sheet from a prone form on the table. The form itself was mostly blocked from Dr. Rosario's sight by the preacher, who was quietly mumbling an improvised prayer.
Only part of the skeleton was visible to Rosario. The detail stuck out in his mind, and the unexpected shock would stay with him for some time. It was a blackened leg bone with the glint of a steel pin poking out.
Immediately, Rosario gasped in disgust and whirled around to see Jessica unbutton the gun at her hip and rush into the room. He held out his hand to stop her from barreling in, but she sidestepped him, fuming. The doctor called after her, covering his eyes with his wrist,
"I know who that is. Please cover it up."
Jessica shoulder checked the preacher roughly as she retrieved the sheet and placed it over the charred skeleton. It stared up at her, screaming silently between macabre hues of pink, red, and black. The burns had been complete, nearly consuming all trace of the victim's former humanity, leaving a tortured inanimate monster behind. The white sheet mercifully concealed what was left of the body, and Jessica glared between Felix and Pastor Ritzer.
"This is no place for you," she said in abject shock, "You know I could have you locked up for this for a very long time. It's going to take me hours just to explain how much trouble you're both in."
"It was my fault," the pastor broke in, "I convinced the boy to help me by threatening his immortal soul."
"Pastor," Jessica said, the rage in her voice hardly contained, "No one is going to believe that."
"Reconstructive knee surgery," the doctor said suddenly, turning back into the room and leaning heavily against the door, "Distal femoral pins inserted on the medial side to avoid the femoral artery, then removed and placed on the opposite side. The femoral artery was discovered to have been on the wrong side due to a rare medical condition. One in a million."
"You got that from a leg bone, doctor?" Felix said, leaping on the opportunity to change the subject. He ignored Jessica's glare as she snapped the guard over her pistol once again, "Are you sure?"
The d
octor had walked to the sink in the corner of the room and begun washing his hands as if he were prepping, or recovering, from surgery - or simply giving in to a sudden and overwhelming desire to clean himself. He lathered soap up to his elbows and placed his hands beneath the steaming water.
"Of course I'm sure," he said, "I'm the one who did it. It was a real mess. If we hadn't been completely isolated when it happened, I could have written a book on femoral artery mutations. Football injury busted his knee and would have cost him his life if I hadn't controlled the bleeding. Of course Chance Cooper was pretty fond of that leg, as he later told me."
"So this skeleton is the pilot of the first helicopter, then," Jessica said, "And you could tell that all just by looking at his knee."
"Not difficult. No one had ever done a femoral artery pin that way before. I made it up as I went along to save his leg. There is no doubt in my mind."
"Let's hope they'll all be that easy to identify," Jessica said, her rage beginning to give way to hope. Both Felix and the pastor were staring at each other silently with their mouths slightly ajar, as if both were thinking in unison of some terrible secret that they dare not repeat. Both the doctor and Jessica honed in on it as the two men scrutinized each other, finding no solace, no comfort, other than simple shared perplexity. The pastor was whispering something beneath his breath,
