by Mark Tufo
Callis stood in the doorway that led into the garage as Talea stepped into her father’s BMW. She turned over the ignition, smoke began to pour out of the tail pipe. Callis waited until she could no longer see Talea before she shut the door.
“I wonder if I even need to hold her in place?” Callis said even as she did so.
The further she walked away from the Fields household the more strain it took to hold onto the connection, she was halfway to Mindy’s when she thought about turning around. The pressure behind her eyes was threatening to shoot them forward like in the old time cartoons. Blood had begun to pour from her nose more than a street crossing ago, and it had only picked up pace.
“I can’t keep doing this.” She was starting to feel the effects of vertigo. Callis pressed forward with her mind and began to squeeze Talea’s windpipe closed. She could feel the panic in the other girl rise up, which was making the strain on her that much more significant.
Talea had resigned herself to her fate; even come to terms with the idea that she probably deserved it. Her family had paid for her transgressions. She hoped that they would still welcome her as she came to meet them.
“What if I can’t find them?” She panicked. And then something strange began to happen, she could feel her right hand, more specifically her index finger. She looked down. I can wiggle it! she thought excitedly, not wanting to voice it and have to take in any more of the offensive poisonous air. She tried to remain calm as more and more of her began to come back under her own control. However, it was at an agonizingly slow pace. Fits of coughing racked through her body as she fought off the sleep that was threatening to overwhelm her in its cold embrace.
Her arm came up slowly; she was barely cognizant that it was under her own power. Her eyes were beginning to close and her lungs were full of the noxious fumes. She rested her hand on the key in the ignition, not entirely sure at all what she should be doing now that she had worked so hard to get there.
She turned the ignition off, but smoke still swirled lazily around her.
Get up, Talea! she was shrieking inside, but much like the populace in general, it was a small minority that was doing most of the bitching. And much like in life, the vast majority just didn’t give a shit.
Talea now had use of most of her upper torso. She rocked her body like an overturned turtle. She was grateful Callis had not made her shut the car door, she did not now – and most likely never would have – possessed the dexterity to open it before she succumbed. She didn’t think she would be able to get her arm up to protect her head as she fell, but right now that was the least of her troubles.
Talea could only watch as the ground came rising up to meet her, she cracked a tooth on the left side of her face as she caught the edge of one of her dad’s tool boxes. He had been telling her mother he was going to move them for the last year, but somehow that had never happened, and now it never would. That was what she thought even as her mouth flooded with iron-rich blood. The air, though; there was sweet, breathable air where her head now laid.
She brought her right hand up by her side and pushed, her head swimming in a murky blend of unconsciousness and poison.
Another fit of coughing dropped her back onto the cool cement floor. She thought she may have passed out, the large glob of drool, phlegm and blood being the indicator. Her legs were still a stranger to her, but her upper body seemed to be completely under her own power. She began to pull herself towards the set of stairs that led back into the house.
“You can do it!” she shouted as loud as she could, which wasn’t much louder than a mouse fart.
She coughed again. Blood sprayed forth, the far reaches of it nearly making it to the wall ahead of her. A look of sheer determination warred within her as she fought to gain inches. She was nearly out of energy when her hand struck against the pine step. She looked up the three stairs much like an ant would stare up Mt. Fuji. She had no idea how she was going to make the ascent.
Talea had pulled her head up onto the second step. Blood and a lone tooth fragment was spat out as she coughed. Her left leg shifted as she pushed, her upper body was exhausted. She was beginning to think she would have been more comfortable dying in the car than with the head of a nail poking in her cheek as she lay there.
She pushed again with her nearly free leg, the only part of her that wasn’t completely worn out. She hefted up again, getting her upper body onto the second step and her head onto the third step. The air was getting dirtier as she climbed, and the cloying in her throat made her bark out in pain.
Her hand clawed up the side of the steel door. She turned her head to watch, her hand was a good foot short of its mark – may as well be a quarter of a mile to the handle. Even if she got to it, she wasn’t sure if she would have the strength to turn it. And, if for some reason Callis had locked it, that would pretty much be game, set, match.
“This isn’t a game,” Talea rasped.
Her right leg still dragged uselessly. Callis was still holding on like a pit bull to a bone – or a baby depending on what the news was reporting. Talea lifted her free leg. She was able to get it on the bottom step and, with the last of her flagging energy, she pushed. Her head struck the door. She turned so that her back was against it. She valiantly fought gravity, her body sliding up until the bottom of her head struck the knob. She twisted back and grabbed it with her hand. She fell into the kitchen foyer as the door swung in. She was once again unable to do anything as she headed for the floor and was vaguely aware that she was happy she hadn’t been at her full height.
She pushed herself further into the house, her right leg beginning to come to. She was able to completely get herself in and able to shut out the death dealing vapor.
“Ha, I’m alive!!” she tried to shout, but was once again cut short as her body expelled the contaminated air she had inhaled.
“Go to hell, Callis Rose,” she said over her ragged vocal chords. Her plan was simple: she was going to lay there for a few more minutes until she felt human, then she was going to grab all the money she could, get in her car and drive as far away from this nightmare as she could. She would call the cops and tell them everything she knew, then she was going to toss her cell phone into the nearest large body of water.
The cops of course would want her for questioning, but until they put a bullet in Callis’ head, she wasn’t coming anywhere near Colorado again. Her head quickly began to clear as she pulled in fresher air. Within a couple more minutes she was able to sit up. Her head ached and was threatening to split; partly from her two floor collisions, but mostly from the clear odorless gas that had been trying to rob her of her life.
She debated for a second about calling Mindy and warning her about Callis’ imminent arrival but decided against it. “She deserves whatever comes her way,” she said as she pulled herself up onto her unsteady legs.
She stepped into the kitchen proper using the counter top to keep her feet under her. She wished she had access to a mirror. She was convinced her head was splitting from the top of her skull straight down the center of her forehead her pain was so great. She got to the cabinet next to the stove. With her left hand she held on tight to the counter, and with her right she reached up to open the cabinet. She pulled down half the shelf until she realized the bottle was on the counter.
She popped the top off and shook at least five of the round pills into her hand. She moved a few feet over so that she could be by the sink and pulled the handle up. Cool water flowed from the spigot. She leaned down, letting the water run over and into her mouth. She took in large gulps trying to drench the scraped raw feeling in her esophagus. She kept a mouthful of the fluid in her mouth as she turned her head and shoved the pills in. She swallowed hard. The pills were mid-way down her throat when they lodged tight. Not because she didn’t have the power to get them down or enough water to wash them down with, but because her air pipe was clenched tight as if someone had pulled a lasso taut around her neck.
“No!”
she gurgled in alarm.
She quickly stuck her head back under the water trying to get some in there so that she could breathe. Panic made her feet dance around independent of what the rest of her body was doing. She had thought at first that it was the carbon monoxide poisoning that was choking her, but then she realized that Callis must have somehow figured out she had escaped and was now taking a more direct approach to her demise.
Her eyes were growing wide even as white spots began to burst in front of her. ‘Tracheotomy’ blazed across her mind. She had never been much of a student in class, never really saw a reason to be – especially in biology – but she had at least learned enough to know what the word meant. She moved quickly to the butcher block knife holder now devoid of two knives. She grabbed the nearest one, it was a four-inch steak knife; not necessarily ideal for what she was about to do, but she didn’t really see an alternative as she dragged the blade across her windpipe.
Callis was on her hand and knees. Putting this much effort into killing Talea from this distance was taking its toll on her both emotionally and physically.
“Why is she still alive?” she asked her reflection in the growing pool of blood that was coming from her nose, mouth and ears.
Detective Lawrence Tynes was sitting at his desk filling out some long overdue paperwork. He loved nearly every aspect of his job except this one, so when he heard the call about a murder suicide in Highlands Ranch he figured he’d investigate. Even open-and-shut cases were very rarely that easy.
“So I’m not going to have the Robison file today?” his captain asked.
“You think you’d know better by now,” Lawrence answered. With that, he grabbed his jacket and headed out.
It was a pretty eventful day as far as crime went in Colorado. He had heard about the fatal stabbing in Parker; he would have gone and investigated there earlier if he hadn’t been laden down with past due paperwork. He wondered if the events were somehow linked. He didn’t believe in coincidences, especially not when murder was involved. Possibly there had been an affair and a jealous lover had killed off her competition only to get in a deadly fight with her spouse when he found out what she had done. It made sense on the surface, but he was careful to only keep that as a potential option and not the be-all-to-end-all explanation.
The day was cool and crisp. One of those weather days that Lawrence absolutely loved, it reminded him of why he liked living in Colorado. He was snapped out of his thoughts as he pulled up to the home. Black and whites were parked all over the place. It looked like there was a discount warehouse donut sale going on.
“How bad is it?” he asked the first policeman he encountered.
“I’ve been a cop for seven years, most of it on highway patrol, and I’ve never seen a mess like what’s in there.”
Lawrence knew that was saying a lot. Bodies involved in seventy mile per hour and faster crashes rarely resembled anything human by the time the forces involved in the crash were done with them.
One of the emergency technicians ran past him to get something out of his ambulance.
“Someone’s alive?” he asked. EMTs had seen it all and only moved at a rapid pace when a life was involved.
“Young girl…the one that made the call,” he answered as he grabbed what he had been looking for and headed back into the house.
Lawrence hastened in after him. It was clear to him no one in the front room was alive. Two adults and a child were having numerous still-life photos taken of them; their last portraits.
“Cause of deaths?” Lawrence asked as he donned his surgical gloves XXXL-sized. He’d had to special order them from a Chicago medical supply store.
“The mom here got her head bashed in, dad took a knife to the heart. Looks like one hell of a domestic dispute, must have been arguing over what show to watch,” the cop taking the pictures answered. His grim humor was a way to deal with the horror he was witnessing. “Not sure about junior yet. Looks like he got caught in the crossfire. Can’t tell for sure until I get his parents moved.”
Lawrence walked around the entire room, taking in everything, trying to see if there was more here than met the eye. The television was off, so the initial idea the cop had was dismissed. Although it wouldn’t be the worst excuse he’d seen for people killing each other. He’d once worked a case where a brother had killed another over two dollars and twenty-five cents, laundry money. One brother was going to wash his clothes and the other needed the change to be able to afford a pack of smokes. One now lay six feet under, the other was spending twenty-to-life in prison at twenty-eight thousand a year in incarceration costs. Ten quarters had destroyed a family and was now burdening the American tax payers. Lawrence shook his head at the insanity of it.
He walked into the kitchen where the two techs were working on a girl bathed in blood. Lawrence, from the sheer volume of it, couldn’t imagine how it could be all hers. He stayed out of their way. The girl was conscious but in a great deal of pain.
“Where are you taking her?” he asked.
“St. Joe’s,” the one who was putting a trach tube into her neck responded.
Lawrence wrote it down in his small notepad.
“Suicide attempt?” he asked.
“Don’t think so.” came the terse reply. Lawrence knew the tone. Let us do our job and then you can do yours.
He walked past them and into the foyer, opening the door to the garage where he caught the overwhelming smell of exhaust fumes.
“Well this is interesting,” he said as he walked in pressing the mounted garage door button to let in some fresh air.
He was careful to not step in the blood spray as he descended the steps. He moved over to the BMW. The hood was still slightly warm. The driver’s door was open. He leaned down and noticed the blood and tooth fragment.
“Weird. Was the fight about her and she decided when they killed each other to take her own life? Possible…but what made her change her mind? It looks like she dragged herself,” he said aloud, looking at the pattern in the dirt and debris along the floor. Why all the blood on her then? There’s more here, but then, isn’t that generally the case? He took out his small digital camera and started taking pictures, beginning with the tooth fragment.
“Detective,” a uniformed officer said opening the door. “There’s a suicide note.”
“Be right there,” he told him. He knew something wasn’t quite right, but as of yet, he hadn’t figured it out.
“It’s a weird one.” The cop handed it to him. The kitchen was empty and the ambulance was pulling out of the driveway.
Tynes read it: ‘Can’t always live life in sanity, remembering others seems exacting.’
Lawrence took one look at the note, his eyebrows rose up. “How was the girl when the techs took her?”
“Awake, aware, and in a great deal of pain I would imagine.”
“I’ve got to see her.” Tynes stuck the note in his pocket.
“Do you want us to keep the crime scene intact, sir?”
“I’ve got everything I need,” he said as he nearly ran out the door.
“You sure do look like you’re having a bad day,” Callis heard just as two leads containing 50,000 volts of electricity made contact in her lower back. Her body convulsed and went rigid on the ground. Her connection to Talea mercifully lost.
“Did that hurt?” the familiar voice asked as she depressed the voltage button again. Callis shook spasmodically from the current.
“Please...stop.” Callis exhaled, trying her best not to sever her tongue from the chattering.
“You know I was sitting at home after sticking that white trash mother of yours, and I was like, ‘Hmmm, you know Callis is going to just absolutely KNOW who did that.’ So I figured why not be proactive. But, I mean, what more could I hope for? You sprawled on the ground like the dog that you are. It’s just about perfect.”
“You, there, what are you doing?” someone shouted from across the street.
“Shut up yo
u old bat!” Mindy yelled.
“I’ve called 911,” the woman said. “You’d better get away from that person.”
“Come on, you’re like a hundred and seven. There’s no way you have a cell phone,” Mindy said as she took a step away from Callis and towards the woman who was walking her dog.
Callis’ muscles ached and were cramping. She tried to tap into her inner abilities. The Taser had scrambled her thoughts, and concentrating was difficult. She reached out and could barely stroke Mindy’s mind.
Mindy spun around. “Is that the best you’ve got?” Mindy asked. She pulled out a knife that she had been hiding under her jacket. “I’m going to stick this knife in your neck, twist it around a bit to make sure I cut everything worth cutting…then I’m going home to paint my nails,” she said as she shrugged off Callis’ attempt at control.
Callis’ head blistered in pain as she once again sent out a signal. She moaned in pain and shut her eyes against the onslaught of red hot pokers driving themselves into her mind.
“Geraldine!” the old woman shouted. “Stop, Geraldine.”
“What is a Geraldine?” Mindy asked as she turned.
Callis curled into the fetal position covering her head, not from Mindy’s oncoming knife strike, but rather from the pain within that she was powerless to do anything about.
Geraldine was a slate grey Greyhound who was now streaking across the street, her mouth opened, her lips pulled back to show a ferocious set of canines. She was barking as she loped, a look of wild madness in her eyes as she dragged her pink leash behind her – the pink sweater only adding to the surreal feeling of the attack.
“Shit,” Mindy said, squaring off to face her new adversary. “This has you written all over it, Callis.” Referring to the dog’s charge. “Don’t worry. As soon as I’m done cutting her throat, I’ll do the same for you.”
Mindy was not completely prepared as Geraldine jumped. The dog’s muzzle came precariously close to her face. She was able to get her left arm up at the last moment in a defensive measure. Geraldine took advantage of whatever body part was offered and clamped down hard on the proffered forearm. Mindy screamed in pain and rage as the dog sunk her teeth in.
