Interference

by S. L. LUCK

  Sylvia shrugged as though she didn’t really care about meeting Anabelle Cheever. “Of course you can’t. It’s silly of me to ask. It’s just that it gets lonely in here. It would be nice to have something to chat about besides our aches and pains. That’s all they do here, Troy. And once the festival is over, there won’t be anything to talk about. Ah, well. Once I’m out of here, I won’t have to worry about being bored anymore, I suppose.” A glint passed over her pupils.

  Troy went to the window and turned the wand to let in more light. “It seems like your rehab is going well.”

  “And I have you to thank for that,” Sylvia said. It was the most honest thing she’d said.

  The sudden urge to vomit overwhelmed Troy and he excused himself to use her washroom. Glassy-eyed, Sylvia flicked her hand to indicate he was welcome to get sick wherever he wanted; it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, nothing mattered but the girl. She didn’t hear Troy’s indrawn breath as he rushed past her or the bang of his knee against the door when the handle turned too slowly. Then he was in, whamming his back against the door, panting, sweating; his stomach, now lungs, now heart, now head, all reeling, spinning, shriveling from their casings, going inward like liquid down a drain. He lurched over the toilet and retched, expecting something, anything to come out, but his heaves were as empty as his heart.

  Get … out … Troy, Dark Friend pleaded. His insides constricted, and Troy thought for a moment that his Dark Friend would spill from his mouth into the toilet and that he would finally get to see the thing that was inside him—but the water was unchanged.

  On the rare occasions he got sick, it wasn’t medication that soothed him, it wasn’t rest or tender care that healed whatever broke him down. It was the memory of his hunts. They recharged him; the extinction of another filling him with energy, vitality, strength. Sitting back on his knees, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck, Troy turned to the memory of the nurse. His Dark Friend inched toward the memory like flowers toward the sun, and together they remembered Troy’s fortune in the nurse coming along when she had. He thought that perhaps she had been following him, for when he left the hospital after meeting Anabelle and drove to the river to release his tension, Tammy had appeared not ten minutes later.

  It wasn’t until he read the news reports that he realized he’d come upon the route that she’d taken home for years. Even in the middle of the night, Tammy felt safe enough that she carried no pepper spray, no personal alarm, no weapon to protect herself. He’d seen her coming toward him as he stood looking out over the water, and he pretended to have trouble lighting a cigarette with his mangled hands. Their earlier introduction had kindled what she assumed was a kinship with him, as many people naively would. When she saw him struggling, she rushed to help.

  She was so taken with him he could practically smell her pheromones. It wasn’t until his hands were around her surprised neck and pain shot through his palms that Troy realized the previous delirium that had anesthetized him had worn off. One, two, five stitches in his dominant right hand ripped open but still he squeezed, crushed, mangled. There was no blood, of course, just saliva and snot and tears ejected in the ninety seconds it took for the nurse to stop struggling. When he laid her down, looking left, right, all around him, Troy took his pocketknife and put it to her skin.

  Dark Friend squirmed, livelier now with the sip Troy gave him. Rasping, his Dark Friend tried forcing Troy to his feet. Leave before she gets us. Before she gets ME…

  “I don’t understand,” Troy said aloud, leaning over the sink.

  He turned on the tap and splashed his face until his cheeks stung. An image came to Troy then, but it was faded, like an underdeveloped photo. He toweled his face and focused on his friend’s blurred subliminal message. It looked vaguely human. Troy tried blocking out the noise of his own heart, his own breath, any outside noise so he could understand what was being told to him, but the more he concentrated, the more the image seemed to shift and escape his comprehension.

  “Are you okay in there?” his mother called from the other side of the door.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Troy grunted back. When he eventually extracted himself from the security of the bathroom, his Dark Friend hissed at the reunion with his mother.

  In her faraway voice, Sylvia said, “I heard a girl got murdered yesterday.”

  “I heard about it on the radio this morning. Poor woman.”

  “Yes. Poor woman,” Sylvia robotically agreed. “They say she was one of the electric girl’s nurses. Did you know her?”

  Visions of the nurse’s terror leapt to Troy’s mind: her frightened eyes, her bulging veins, her open mouth gaping like a fish out of water. “I’d have to check my files. The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Did they release her name?” his mother asked, latching onto a detail Troy couldn’t confirm.

  If they hadn’t released the nurse’s name yet, Troy realized he’d just incriminated himself. Gooseflesh spread over the entirety of his skin. “I thought they did, but maybe not. I had a terrible sleep last night.” He held up his hands to her to illustrate the point, but her blank eyes were fixated on the wall behind him.

  Sylvia’s mouth opened and her lips moved on Pandora’s volition. “Hmm. It’s not good news, but it’s something to talk about, I suppose. It’s something interesting, though, isn’t it? My son might have known the murdered nurse. People around here would find that exciting. Very exciting.” Her lips curled into a smile unbecoming to the harmless woman he’d previously known her to be.

  “You can’t talk about that, Mother. It’s not appropriate,” Troy said.

  “Since when did you ever care about being appropriate? At least with me, you haven’t been.” Then his mother’s distant eyes pounced on him. “Everyone will want to hear about it. I’ll be the talk of the town around here. There’s a woman here who likes to gossip more than your Aunt Vida, even, and you know what her son does? He’s a police officer. I’ll bet he’d want to know that you knew the murdered nurse. They say that no detail is too small. At least that’s what they say on those murder mystery shows.”

  “I didn’t say I knew her, Mother—”

  “And you’re a lawyer yet, so maybe you can help them, huh?”

  “Mother—”

  Sylvia’s hands clasped together as Pandora sang with her lungs. “My son knew the murdered nurse. My son knew the murdered nurse. My son knew—"

  “Did you miss your medication today?” Troy glanced at the door to ensure it was still closed.

  At once, her damning song became a chant, became a call, became a yell. Spittle flew from her raving mouth, and Troy rushed to quieten her with his hands. She bit him. Again, her teeth dug into the gauze, scraping what stitches hadn’t already ripped open, sending a fresh wave of pain into his tender hand. His own goddamned mother had bitten him! Only because they weren’t at home, he resisted urge to cover her nose, too, and press, press, press.

  Her muffled cries broke from the edges of his palm. “Ma! Saa! Nuuu!” Gibberish. Gibberish. “Ma! Saa! Nuuu!”

  Troy leaned over and spoke to her ear. “You have your way, Mother. I’ll do what I can to get you that meeting.”

  Like nothing had happened, Sylvia instantly relaxed. Gone was the maniacal glimmer in her eyes and the ambush in her throat, so Troy removed his hand from her mouth.

  “Shut the blinds for me, will you please? I’d like a nap now,” she said sweetly.

  Already working on a plan to make the introduction to Anabelle Cheever, Troy left his mother in darkness.

  30

  Anabelle did it. After countless attempts, after overloading the batteries she was attached to, after nearly shocking her own heart and singeing the hair on the nape of her neck, she finally managed to rein in her current. She knew not only because the hum that accompanied the flow of her energy toward the floor had vanished, but also because she felt a fullness she’d not yet experienced since awakening; something akin to the satiation
of a fed craving.

  Now, days since she’d woken, and after examinations by a team of doctors and electrical engineers from across the country, Anabelle again stunned her caregivers, who were reluctant to detach the wires.

  “You just want to keep me to lower your power bills,” she told Doctor Huxley, who studied her from the corner of the room.

  “We might keep you forever if we could actually figure out how to do that.”

  “Funny, Doctor.”

  “All joking aside,” Huxley said, “I can’t explain your recovery. As I told your parents, you check almost every box you need for discharge. Every diagnostic test we’ve done on you came out squeaky clean, but we haven’t got you walking yet.”

  “It’s hard to walk when you’re chained up like this,” Anabelle slid a leg out from under the blankets to show a makeshift manacle on her slender foot.

  The doctor’s eyes, still amazed by the feat, widened appreciatively at the genius contraption. “If I hadn’t just operated on your brain and you hadn’t just charged all the batteries from our wrecking yards, I’d give you a clean bill of health and kick you out the door; with respect, of course. But at the moment, my fear is two-fold. First, if we remove those wires, I’m concerned about a relapse in your recovery. I don’t know that whatever phenomenon that made you a real-life version of Electra Girl won’t happen again. Secondly, I’m not only responsible for your safety, but for the safety of my staff and our other patients as well. I won’t compromise either, but I also understand that we can’t hold you forever. I’m saying that we’ve got to proceed slowly, for everyone’s benefit.”

  Anabelle crossed her arms, aware that the doctor didn’t see the demons that lurked around them. She tried to shut out the forked tongues and black eyes and sharp claws, but as her time in the hospital wore on and her room became infested with evil, it became impossible to ignore their threat to her safety. The weaklings she saw when she first awoke were nothing to what now prowled beneath her bed, along the walls, against the ceiling. They were bigger, darker, meaner, and sometimes when they got close she could feel them breathing on her. Now that she was able to retract her energy, she couldn’t risk using it to fend the creatures off, for fear her caregivers would notice she was still electrified. That would be catastrophic to her plan. As long as she was confined to the hospital, Anabelle was an easy target, and the realization that she had to save herself bore heavy on her mind. She looked at her oblivious doctor and the monster circling his throat.

  “If you don’t remove the wires, I’ll do it myself,” she said.

  Huxley held up his hands. “Let’s not be hasty. I promise I’ll do my best to get you out of here as soon as possible; all I’m asking for is a little time.”

  “But I’m not electrified anymore; there’s no reason to keep me here,” Anabelle protested.

  “We need to be patient, Ms. Cheever—”

  “Am I under arrest?” she asked Huxley, and when she saw him flinch, she knew that arrest wasn’t the right word. Of course it wouldn’t be. She’d done nothing wrong. No, she wasn’t being arrested, she was being detained, possibly by the men and women in dark suits that sometimes congregated around the nursing station, asking questions about her condition.

  The doctor laughed uneasily. “You watch too much TV, Ms. Cheever. The things you’re suggesting don’t happen in real life. I promise you; we are keeping you solely for prudence purposes.”

  Only, what had happened to Anabelle didn’t normally happen in real life, either. Huxley couldn’t refute that, nor could he refute the growing and mysterious contingent that visited her room and asked questions she didn’t want to answer.

  Anabelle drew up her knees and tapped the screen of her iPad that lay on her lap. The news report she’d been reading appeared on the screen, and she turned it toward the doctor. “Is this the stuff you say doesn’t happen in real life, Dr. Huxley? I don’t mean it to sound the way I know it’s going to sound, but aren’t there more important things to worry about than me?”

  Huxley’s eyes swept over the image of the yellow tarp covering the body of nurse Tammy Cormoran. While they hadn’t publicly revealed her name yet, it became obvious she was the victim when she didn’t appear for yesterday’s shift, and this was then confirmed by the investigating officer who’d already interviewed a handful of hospital staff before the day was done. His face went white. “That’s different.”

  “What’s different?” Dr. Tanti’s upbeat voice came from behind Huxley, and he turned to see Adhira and Abe, charts in hands, ready for their daily check-ups on their famous patient.

  “We’re talking about important things,” Anabelle told them, and flashed her iPad to the two doctors, enlarging the picture so that the nurse’s body filled the entire screen. She knew she had no reason to revive the tragedy, but the juvenile parts of her that demanded retribution for her incarceration drove her to flash the image to the people who had saved her. Their faces fell.

  “She was valued member of our staff,” Adhira said stiffly, and the eavesdropping nurses at the station desk erupted in a fresh wave of sobs.

  Abe’s lips clamped together, and he sighed heavily through his nose. “She cared for you, yes?” Anabelle murmured an acknowledgement. The doctor was not prone to chastising a patient, but the indignance Anabelle conveyed caused him to scowl. “Then you must be thankful for her life, as we are. Put that picture away, please.” She did.

  Adhira lowered herself onto the edge of Anabelle’s bed. “I take it he’s told you we can’t release you yet?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  Adhira put her folder down. “You’re right to be upset, Anabelle. If I were in your position—”

  “You’re not in my position.”

  “No,” Adhira concurred. “I’m not. But if I were, I’d be upset, yes, but I’d also do whatever I could to speed my release. I hear you’ve been reluctant to answer our questions.” Anabelle ignored the shadow of a demon that jumped onto Dr. Tanti’s lap.

  “I don’t like talking to them,” Anabelle said of the suited mystery people who pretended to empathize with her but really only wanted to run tests, tests, and more tests.

  Adhira leaned in and said in a lowered voice, “I don’t like talking to them either.”

  “They’re not really doctors, are they?” Anabelle asked, and the look the doctors exchanged was all the answer she needed.

  “I know this is not an ideal situation, but if there’s anything we can do to make you more comfortable—within reason, of course—just name it. Sometimes a different meal or a visit from a friend can make all the difference. We had one guy insist his dog stay with him, and we made it happen. I know it probably seems like it, but we’re not heathens, Anabelle. We do want to make this easy on you as long as you’re here.” The female doctor patted Anabelle’s ankle and rose with her file.

  From the back of his hand, Abe whispered, “Says the heathen who took the last cup of coffee this morning.”

  “First come and all that.” Adhira smirked.

  Pleasantries more or less settled, Huxley left the other doctors to do their work. The two nurses on-duty outside of Anabelle’s room were wiping their faces as he approached. He offered the women his shared sympathies and instructed them to keep a close watch on Anabelle, for fear she might try to remove her attachments. Then he rode the elevator to the third-floor staff room, where he took his lunch bag from the refrigerator. The savory smell of his wife’s beef stew soon seeped through the seams of the whirring microwave, and Huxley inhaled the comfort of home as he looked out the picture window at the snow-flecked trees along the empty walking trail. He’d used the path many times, as the majority of the hospital staff did, and wondered now if they still felt safe doing so. Would they alter their schedules to avoid walking in the dark? Would single walkers pair or even triple up? Or would they avoid the trail altogether, afraid of being victims themselves? The hospital would need to address their anxiety, and Huxley h
oped Cliff had the mind to dig deep into his latent reserve of empathy. The CEO was capable, he knew, but willingness was another obstacle altogether.

  The microwave beeped to signal that his lunch was ready but still Huxley stood, looking at his faded reflection in the window. His formerly dark hair was now mostly gray, and the fullness of face that he’d enjoyed as a young athlete and student was now isolated to banana-shaped puffs of skin beneath his eyes. He was not old, but getting there, something Tammy Cormoran would never get the opportunity to do. A long timer at the hospital, Huxley had seen many hires, advancements, and even retirements, and his memory took him to Tammy’s nervous first shift, when she’d changed the gangrenous dressing of a geriatric patient only to go squealing from the room right into Huxley when the woman’s toe fell off. He’d reassured her, then, that her reaction did not make her a bad nurse and relayed the story of when he was a resident and told the wrong woman that her husband had died in surgery. The story made her feel better and endeared her to him for the rest of her shortened tenure. He sighed heavily against the glass, knowing that her death would sit on him like a stone.

  He left a patch of breath fog on the window and took his stew from the microwave, sitting in the corner away from a cluster of nurses where he could be alone. Though full of flavor, his food was tasteless to him, and he mechanically ate while his brain tried to compartmentalize the events of late: the bus crash and animal attacks, the drying of the Callingwood River, the strange weather, the electrification and subsequent de-electrification of Anabelle Cheever, the Searles children’s deaths, Tammy’s murder. Together they made no sense; apart they were no less peculiar. He wondered if he were dreaming, but his dreams were another story.