by MB Mooney
“Oh, shit,” he said.
Chapter 21
Vikki screamed as Matt shoved her to her knees. “Get down,” he said, and she watched the flaming Sprite bottle arc towards the school like in slow motion. She covered her ears as the explosion knocked them both down and the flames erupted from the Chem classroom, the windows shattering and spraying glass over the lawn. Her ears still rang as she looked up and saw Matt beside her, flat on his back. Vikki cried as she shook Matt for a second time that evening, her hands on his shoulders, her sobs coming fast and desperate.
Looking around her, she didn’t see anyone or hear anything. Only the dim light of the moon and the small flames now inside the Chemistry lab threw any light on the lawn here. She said his name through the choking sobs and the rustle in the cold grass as her body moved forward and back to try to wake him. She couldn’t believe what just happened.
The man in the long dark coat, was he dead? Did Matt kill him? It took her a moment before, when they were in the Chemistry lab, to figure out what the hell Matt was trying to do, but she finally did. And now Matt lay here on the grass, flat on his back and unconscious. Again. She still cried as she looked around, still shaking Matt, still saying his name.
He moaned, and she glanced immediately down at him. “Matt?”
His eyes fluttered open. “Hmn?” He turned over, groaning like a sore old man, and he sat up. His gaze moved to the window of the school just in front of them both. “Oh, man,” he said, and he moved to his feet.
She rose with him. “I know.”
His head turned from side to side, as if he didn’t believe what he saw or what he had done. His hair was tousled, standing awry around his head.
A moment passed. She ran her hands through her own hair. “Did you ... Is he ...?”
He began to walk parallel to the school, towards the parking lot of the school. “I don’t know,” he said. She followed. “But I think so. I think he’s dead.”
“Where are you going now?” His step was quick, and she was worried.
They reached the parking lot, the gray asphalt making sandpaper sounds underneath their steps. “To see if Richard is still alive.”
-----
It took them longer to reach the apartment building than they closed the distance to the school, at least it seemed that way. Matt led Vikki up the stairs of the apartment building after he heard the sirens in the distance. The emergency vehicles came up the road, and he wondered silently who had called them and how. He turned his back on the flashing lights coming towards them. Stepping on the landing first, he hearing Vikki cry out from behind him.
There was blood. Lots of it.
Matt thought for a moment that he was dead, lying there bleeding on the cold concrete landing for how long? Five minutes? Ten? Fifteen? He bent down quickly and pressed the tips of his fingers against Richard’s neck, which was soaked with blood from a nasty gash on the side of his face.
He turned to Vikki quickly, who had her hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes speaking horror to him. “Go inside, in there to his apartment and get some blankets and sheets and things, anything.” But she just stood there. “Vikki!” he shouted. “Did you hear me? He’s still alive, but we have to keep him warm before that ambulance gets here.” It woke her from a daze, and she spun on her heel without saying a word and raced off.
He turned back to Richard, kneeling over him. Richard lay on his back, and there were cuts all along the side of his face, his left arm, and possibly his back. But Matt didn’t want to move him, at least, not before the ambulance arrived. He heard somewhere that was bad. A police car arrived first, spinning into the parking lot of the apartment building. Matt could hear the ambulance not far behind. He put his hand on Richard’s head, feeling a tear on his own cheek.
“Come on, man, live,” he said, whispering it, willing it.
Vikki arrived behind him, and he helped her place the blankets and sheets over his body. Vikki leaned over Richard as well, nearer to his head. She still cried, whether she was aware of it or not, and she placed a towel in her hand over the nasty cut along Richard’s cheek to stop the bleeding, holding it there with gentle pressure. Matt made sure the blankets were placed evenly over his body.
The police car screeched to a halt just next to the ravaged black Honda Civic, and a policeman stepped out of his vehicle. He was dressed in the usual blue uniform, and his belly exaggerated the clinking of his belt, weighed down with gadgets, as he bounded up the staircase. His flashlight blinded Matt temporarily, and he saw Vikki experience the same reaction. “The ambulance is on its way,” he said, obviously seeing the blood on the concrete, the blood soaking the towel on Richard’s face and the blanket around his left arm.
Matt turned back to Richard and away from the cop, nodding.
The cop moved closer. “Are either one of you hurt?” He shone the flashlight over their bodies.
Matt looked down at his own hands and saw the cuts on his hands were gone. He shook his head. “No. We’re okay. Just him.”
“Who did this? Did you see it happen?”
“We saw it,” Matt said, his voice low.
“I’m sorry, say that again?” The policeman took the radio out of his belt and knelt down behind Matt and Vikki.
“I said we saw it.”
He took Matt by the arm and forced him to stand. Matt looked into his eyes with anger. “Come with me over here,” he said. Matt only resisted him for a moment and weakly. He led Matt over past the top of the stairway, a few yards away from where Vikki knelt over Richard. Matt stared at Vikki while the cop spoke to him. “Did you see who did this?”
Matt nodded.
“Who? Can you give me a name?”
Matt shook his head, glaring at the cop.
“Where did he go?”
“After us.”
“After who? You and the girl?”
“Yes. He came after us. It was me he wanted.”
“What?”
Matt gestured towards Richard. “It was me. He did this to him because of me.”
The policeman, who still had a firm hold on Matt’s upper arm, groaned. “Okay, so why was he after you?”
A long moment passed.
“Come on, son, tell me why he was after you.”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, so he went after you. What happened then?”
“He followed us to the school.”
“Okay, the school. Then what?”
The ambulance pulled into the parking lot. “I killed him.”
-----
Vikki was pushed aside as the two paramedics began to examine Richard. The policeman had Matt pinned to the wall, asking him questions. Matt gazed at her, then at Richard. One of the paramedics spoke to her. “I’m sorry?” Vikki said.
“What happened here?”
It took her a moment to understand to what exactly this paramedic referred, but she answered finally. “I don’t know. We ... just found him ... like this. This is how we found him.”
The paramedic, a young pudgy man with graying dark hair, turned his attention back to Richard. They had carried the stretcher with them up the stairs, and they prepared to move him over to it. An oxygen mask soon covered Richard’s mouth and nose. They both said something about blood and losing a lot of it, then something about back and neck injuries from going through the window.
She could see the apartment doors open down the way, people opening and then shutting their doors or stepping outside in bedclothes to see what was happening. The policeman left Matt for a moment and shone the flashlight up and down the landing at other residents, some of them murmuring questions or cursing if they could notice the body of Richard being attended to. The policeman yelled something about witnessing this incident, and Vikki watched as the paramedics placed a harness on Richard’s neck and proceeded to strap him to a board. Another police car entered the parking lot.
She felt Matt’s presence next to her, standing by her. The paramedics moved R
ichard onto the stretcher. Vikki stepped forward to follow them. “I’m riding in the ambulance,” she said, and they didn’t answer as they tried to maneuver the stretcher around the landing and down the concrete stairs.
She heard Matt’s voice from behind her. “I’m going, too.”
The paramedics took Richard down the stairs, mumbling some sort of agreement. Vikki and Matt followed. They reached the bottom of the stairs and quickly took the stretcher into the open doors at the back of the ambulance. One of the paramedics sprinted to the front of the ambulance.
The other one turned to Vikki and Matt. “Y’all his friends or something?” Vikki nodded. “All right, you guys better come on with us, we’re a little shorthanded tonight, and you two better get checked out, too, just in case. You guys look a little rough.” They followed the paramedic into the ambulance.
Vikki heard a voice as the paramedic began to close the door. It was the first cop, the one with the big belly who had questioned Matt. “I need to question those two.”
“What is this?” the paramedic yelled. “A freaking bus? Ride up front if you wanna talk to these kids. They’re going with us.” And he slammed the door on the cop. He turned and eyed Vikki and Matt, who now sat across from him, looking over the stretcher with Richard strapped to it. The engine roared to life. “I hate that bastard,” he said. “He doesn’t give a shit about people, just his job. I love slamming that damn door in his face. I’ve been waiting all day to do that.”
Vikki smiled in spite of herself. “Thank you,” she said.
He smiled back at her. “No problem, ma’am.” He started to attend to Richard, using a heavier, cleaner towel to press against the gash on his face. He turned to Vikki. “You wanna hold this for a second?” She nodded and did as he asked.
Matt spoke up. “Is the power out at the hospital?”
“The power’s out all over the county, but the hospital can run off of a couple old generators in the basement. They do pretty well for what we need in times like this, which is why we’re shorthanded.”
“Why are you shorthanded?”
The paramedic shrugged. “A couple guys out with the flu, the power goes out and forty or fifty people fall down the stairs or stub their toe or bang their head on something, and they call 911. This is the only serious one we’ve gotten all night, once we finally got it.”
“How bad is he?” Vikki asked.
The paramedic’s demeanor changed. He had been friendly, talkative, and bright. Now he frowned, serious. “I don’t know. We have to get him to the ER before we really know, but he could have severe back or neck injuries. And he lost so much blood, in the cold, and we don’t know how long he was there. I tell you one thing, he’s definitely going to have a scar on the side of his face unless the doctor can do a bang up job of stitching him up.”
Vikki nodded and turned to Matt as the paramedic continued to hold Richard as stable as possible while the ambulance moved along some of Georgia’s roughest country roads towards the main highway and over to the hospital. “You have to help me,” she said to him, leaning close and intimate, and she noticed the paramedic glancing at her, trying to ignore what was supposed to be a private conversation.
Matt looked at Richard, as if attempting to see what she meant. “What?”
She shook her head at him. “You have to help me understand what happened back there.”
He met her eyes. “What do you mean?” He spoke low now, as well, and leaned in closer to her.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“About Richard? How did you know he was in trouble?”
His brow creased, and he looked down, bowing his head. “I don’t really know how, but when I fell asleep, you know, after?” His eyes shot back up at her, then down again.
“Yeah ...”
“Well, I dreamt, and I kinda just knew. I just knew it like ... like I told you how I knew things before, remember?”
She nodded a silent affirmative.
“Well, it’s a little like that, except different. The thing is ... I can’t explain it. I swear I would if I could, but I can’t. I can’t explain anything that happened tonight.”
“Do you know who he was? Who that man was?”
“No, not at all.”
“But why did he come after you like that, if you didn’t know him?”
Matt shrugged. “I never saw him before in my life. Well, except for in my dreams, I think.”
“Dreams?”
“Yeah, I’ve been having these ... dreams lately,” he shot a glance at the paramedic, and Vikki leaned in closer. “And I see things sometimes, and it’s weird.”
“But you never saw him before?” He shook his head. “But how did you know he would be after you ...” He started to answer, but she interrupted him with her hand, waving it in front of his face. “Don’t answer that, I know, I know, you just did.”
Matt nodded.
-----
And he was about to say things to her, even though the bothersome but necessary paramedic could hear, things that he didn’t even know if he believed, things about himself and the dreaming in color and the image of the naked woman and about angels that come to your door and tell you mysteries.
But he never got the chance to do that.
The ambulance rocked suddenly, and Vikki squealed from beside him. The paramedic cursed loudly, grabbing desperately to balance the stretcher between them, and Matt reached up and touched the roof of the ambulance above him, standing to his full height. The ambulance shifted, the sound of traumatic tires and wrenching metal moving through his body like a wave, and then it began to roll. His body was thrown against the roof of the ambulance without warning, too quickly for him to truly react. He felt his knee slam against something hard, maybe the roof, maybe the wall, he couldn’t be sure, he was tumbling so fast, and he cried out in pain. They continued to roll, and Matt was blind to everything.
His shoulder hit the wall across from him. He heard the rustling of things hitting the outside of the ambulance and the shattering of glass. His body was thrown against the front of the ambulance, and his elbow crushed the glass there. As he landed hard, he realized the ambulance rested on its side. He looked up and waited for his vision to clear.
Everything was still. Matt tried to stand as the dizziness began to pass, but his knee screamed with pain. Unable to fully put his weight down on his leg without crying out, he staggered toward the back of the ambulance, the doors wrenched open from the wreck. His eyes adjusted and he could make sense of the shapes around him, straining to see where Vicki and Richard were. But as he looked around, he couldn’t see anyone else.
He was alone.
Looking past the open doors Matt saw a trail of debris along the sharp incline of the side of the road. He could see the headlight of a car stopped on the road just above them and behind them, but the front of the car had been smashed in. Had it hit them?
Gathering his strength, Matt crawled to the back of the ambulance and fell out the opening. Rolling himself over the door, his torn knee twisted as he cried out and cursed. He landed on the cold ground among some brush and tall grass and yelled at the pain in his knee, closing his eyes. He opened them again to see someone five or ten yards away from him. He saw the blond hair.
“Vikki!” he cried weakly as he noticed her movement, her struggle to stand. Just beyond Vikki lay the stretcher with Richard still attached to it. Farther on up towards the road, the paramedic rolled over, sat up and held his head.
A figure got out of the car, a shadow against the brightness of the headlight bearing down at them. Matt’s pain gave way to the pounding in his chest and he felt like his breath was knocked out of chest.
It was him. It was the madman, the killer, the one Matt thought he had killed.
How the hell did he survive?
The madman stumbled forward, not wearing the long coat. He stepped towards the ambulance, completely ignoring the others, holding the sword in his rig
ht hand. Could he see Matt here among the brush? Matt didn’t know, but he crawled as quickly as he could without making much noise around the ambulance, hiding behind it, the wrecked emergency vehicle between him and the headlights of the car on the road above.
Testing the pain in his knee as he moved, Matt found he could stand, barely. The ambulance rested on passenger side, so he reached up and pulled himself over the top of the cab and looked down into it. The driver was held to his seat by the safety belt, unconscious and bleeding from his nose. The policeman lay in a crumpled heap among broken glass, brush, and the grass beneath him, his leg twisted as an unnatural angle. The policeman was also unconscious, maybe dead.
The driver’s side window had broken in the wreck, and Matt pulled his body on top of the wreckage, moving through the window easily feet first, landing on his left leg, his left foot resting just beside the policeman’s head. He reached down and tugged on the revolver at the policeman’s hip. The cop appeared lifeless as Matt pulled it from the holster, ripping it out. Sticking the revolver in his jeans, he lifted himself up past the unconscious driver, using the steering wheel and the dashboard to climb up with two hands and one leg and out into the open air.
Chapter 22
Vikki looked around herself, her head still spinning from being thrown from the back of the ambulance. The ambulance itself lay on its side, resting against the trees just away from her. She sat up and closed her eyes, waiting for some great pain to overwhelm her, but nothing came. Checking herself over, there were minor cuts, scrapes, maybe a potential bruise or two, but nothing else. A movement above her caught her attention. She squinted and saw a shadow move towards the ambulance.
It was a man, moving slowly, painfully from the car that had stopped above them on the road. They had obviously been involved in some type of wreck, the ambulance going off the road down this incline and now resting on its side. She peered long at the figure coming towards the ambulance, moving like an old man. Was it someone to help them? She stood and raised her arms. He moved a little closer.
