For Everything a Reason (3 page)

Chapter
Four

Chairs
scattered in all
directions. The two tramps caught in the centre of this chaotic scene launched
themselves towards each other, fists flying and teeth visible. This sudden and
unexpected act of unrehearsed violence temporarily locked Carter’s finger in
place. He found himself unable to apply the pressure required to fire his
weapon.

Rage burst
from one of the tramp’s lips. The other homeless guy backed away. His act of
theft now seemed foolhardy and reckless. Still, the mouldy old bread roll
stayed clasped between his grime-coated fingers, clutched protectively against
his chest.

Carter
maintained his position, his arm rigid, and the weapon’s target fixed firmly
within its sights. He felt an all-consuming hatred boil to the surface of his
being, rage and hatred twisting his face into a ghastly contortion. His arm
began to tremble uncontrollably and the weapon in his hand felt too heavy. He
wrapped his other hand around it, forcing the short barrel to steady,
channelling all of his pain and grief into an unbreakable chain of
concentration. A deep, bestial whine rose from his gut, which was both
agonising to hear and awful.

***

Presley Perkins sat just a few yards
away, watching the bizarre confrontation before him, unaware of an even greater
threat. Then, as one of the tramps moved forward, he spotted the detective. His
blood turned cold. The worn-out face looked familiar, even though they had
never met. It was a face that visited him every night, albeit younger, which
haunted him from the darkest recesses of his mind.

As Perkins
jumped to his feet, his chair fell backwards with a clatter. What he now faced
made the two tramps fighting over a crust of bread seem almost comical.

Perkins’ once
expensive Italian shoes, now scuffed and torn, tangled within the overturned
legs of his chair. He landed in a pathetic heap, scrambled up, and lurched
toward the exit. From behind he heard a cough – barely audible over the ruckus.
Just above his shoulder, a crater appeared in a puff of exploding masonry. He
ducked instinctively as a second bullet slammed into the doorframe, launching a
hail of splinters.

In the next
instant he was outside. In contrast to the sombre interior of the soup kitchen
the near-blinding brightness of the street was disorienting. Neon signs
streaked the dark canvas of night in an ultraviolet splash of brilliant
colours. Perkins heard the door behind him bang into place, and his brief
paralysis broke. He tore down Southern Boulevard as if the hounds of hell
themselves were snapping at his heels.

***

Carter pushed his way through the
doorway and then skidded to a halt. To the left and right of him, a sea of
multiracial faces expressed shock at the sudden appearance of a homeless
gun-wielding lunatic. A scream drew his attention to the right. A young couple
had been knocked to the pavement. Carter caught a flash of movement beyond
them, and pursued.

***

The street took Presley Perkins in a
wide arc, away from the busy sidewalk and towards the dark corridor of
Tremont Avenue
. The lights from a
civilised world dwindled, and instead, Perkins found himself racing through a
tight canopy of trees. Up ahead, two solid barriers blocked any further
progress. In large letters, formed from moulded iron, were four words stencilled
on a plaque, which sat at the top of the two gates.

Bronx
Zoo:
Asia
Gate.

At this time
of night the gates were sealed tight. A chain threaded itself through adjacent
bars to keep out unwanted visitors. Perkins turned, his chest labouring under
the exertion, and watched as a shadow not far behind him took shape. He whined
hysterically. Then, belying his size and bulk, he began to climb the gates.

Fear pushed
Perkins over the top. He landed on the other side and soon regained his
footing, then ran deeper into the attraction that was
‘Jungle World’
.
Sounds that belonged to another land, not the heart of
Manhattan
Island
, met him as
he raced through the tangle of trees.

***

Carter hit the pavement. He scanned the
way ahead in time to see Perkins disappear into the darkness farther up the
trail. His hand tightened around the grip of his gun, he found comfort in its
weight.

The trail
funnelled towards an ominous black hole. It took Carter another few seconds to
realise he was peering into an overturned and hollowed-out tree. Some
unaffected part of his mind was impressed by the authenticity of the
attraction. He entered the mouth of the tunnel and hurried through. Glimmers of
light ignited at the periphery of his vision – bioluminescence? The earthy smell
of his next breath told him the giant tree was not a clever plastic fake, but
the actual remains of an uprooted forest tree. A thick clogging stench of mould
filled his nostrils, and the sparkles of light revealed themselves to be
glow-in-the-dark mushrooms.    

Something else
moved within the gloom, and the detective grimaced as a foot-long centipede
marched along the curve of the inner wall, matching Carter step-for-step. He
broke through the tunnel to find himself in the depths of a rain forest. Somewhere
out of sight, the sounds of running water could be heard, possibly masking the
sounds of other things that ran: feet. Carter stood still and strained against
these strange noises. Up ahead came the slap of footfalls navigating a trail
leading deeper into the thick undergrowth. The detective began to follow the
path through the manmade jungle, home to an unknown number of possible
nightmares.

***

Perkins’ laboured breath reminded him of
the wheeze of a rusty old steam pipe in one of his late father’s old slums. His
shoes slipped continuously on the small stones shifting under his feet. Next, a
face broke through the trees to his right. A pair of luminous eyes locked onto
him. Perkins threw his arms up instinctively, expecting the whip-crack of
pistol fire. Instead, the small black and white face rocked to one side, and
the creature clapped its furry hands together. Perkins remained rooted to the
spot for another second. The little bastard swung out of the branches and
dropped to the ground in front of him. Were monkeys carnivorous? Probably not,
but that didn’t stop his imagination from flashing terrible pictures of the
flesh being torn off his bones.

He let out a
nervous laugh and hurried along before the idea could be tested. The path
opened out into a mock setting of a safari encampment. The bleat and hoot of
recorded animal noises filled the night, and over that, a counterpoint of
radios, speaking to each other in a hiss of metallic voices.

Footsteps
echoed towards him. They were heavy and coming fast, and definitely not those
made by a monkey. Presley’s chest tightened, his beating heart aware once more
of real danger. He ran over to a table littered with binoculars, water canteen,
radio, and mercifully – with the screech of animals growing louder - a rifle.
He grabbed hold of the stock, but the rifle refused to budge. The fucking thing
was glued to the table. A desperate whine burst from Perkins’ lips. His
attention turned instantly to the radio. That, too, was fixed firmly to the
surface. The only movable parts were a large dial to change settings and a
sliding volume control. Perkins fumbled with the latter, and the wild noises
around him grew to a deafening pitch. Covering his ears, he spun on his heels
and headed toward a nearby field tent, its entrance an open flap, like that of
a hungry, gaping mouth.

***

The fine hairs at the nape of Carter’s
neck bristled. He froze at the sound of a ferocious roar. The guttural noise
came again - close enough this time to hold him rigid on the spot. By the next
repetition, he recognised the hollow, metallic quality to the roar – it was a
recording, not one of nature’s fiercest predators stalking him through the fake
jungle.

The pathway
gave way to an encampment. The only visible and hungry beast was the open maw
of a tent.

“Perkins, you
son of a bitch!” Carter yelled into the darkness, levelling his weapon towards
the flap. Marshalling his resolve, he crossed the distance and stepped inside.

The tent was
surprisingly bright thanks to a pair of lights at the rear, each casting a
shine of electric blue. The entrance itself sat steeped in shadow. As Carter
inched deeper inside, his feet crunched over glass.  He chanced a glance down
to see a pattern of sharp diamonds and white powder. More broken glass lay several
feet away, directly beneath the remains of a light bulb still fixed within its
socket.

“You in here?”
he called.

A few bare
tables and chairs loomed on the inside of the tent; this part of the attraction
possibly out of bounds to the public. Carter banged his thigh against the side
of a table. Metal legs screeched out a warning.  He halted his advance.

“Show
yourself, you coward!”

Still no
response came. Carter resumed his press forward. Then the sound of a laboured
breath reached beyond the cadence of his racing heart. He faced its source and
fired. The bullet tore through one of the tables, splitting it in two halves.
As the table collapsed, the source of the noise revealed itself: four stumpy
legs ending in a short snout.

“Christ,”
Carter huffed.

The spotted
pig tottered over to the detective and eagerly sniffed at his shoes. In the
broken light, he saw that the animal’s coat looked almost two sizes too big,
the folds of brown and white flesh hanging off its body giving it the
appearance of a walking concertina. The pig waddled to the rear of the tent,
where it disappeared through a tear in the canvas. Carter followed it through.

He almost lost
his footing as he emerged from the tent. The ground on the other side sloped
away abruptly as it ran towards the edge of a concrete wall. Below him was an
open enclosure, filled in places with a dark body of glistening water. The rest
of the area was dotted with islands. On this side of the tent the air felt
easily ten degrees cooler, as though winter had been bottled up in this one
specific place.

Sprawled out
on the ground in front of him in a foot or so of water, with arms and legs
akimbo and surrounded by a flock of agitated penguins, was the object of
Carter’s search. Perkins took a backwards swipe at one of the short-winged
birds; the penguin hopped effortlessly out of the way. Another stepped forward,
its white chest puffed out in a show of angry defiance. Perkins scrambled to
his feet before kicking at the little birds and scattering them to the edge of
the pool.

Carter took
aim and yelled, “Perkins!”

Perkins turned
his attention from the penguins to his pursuer, and slowly raised his arms in
surrender.

Fresh anger
surged through Carter’s blood. “You killed my son!”

Perkins
shifted from one leg to the other, as if they threatened to give out on him at
any moment. “It was an accident,” he said. Even to his own ears, the response
sounded pathetic, pointless.

“Accident?”
Carter parroted.

“Wait…”
Perkins begged. “You don’t understand.”

“Understand
what,” Carter closed on his prey. “That you cold-bloodedly killed my son?”

“It was an
accident. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Carter opened
his mouth, intending to speak, but no words emerged. He heard the hammer of the
gun click in that terrible, mute moment.

Now faced with
the real possibility of death, Perkins began to ramble. “The Russians. They
were going to make me pay. You don’t understand. They’re animals! I had to get
them their money – or they’d have killed me.”

Carter found
his voice and asked, “And I’m supposed to care?”

“If I could
take it back…”

“It’s too
late.” Hand shaking, Carter readied to fire.

Perkins looked
around desperately for any hope of rescue. To his surprise, salvation came in
the form of an almost recognisable dark blue uniform.

Chapter
Five

Joseph opened his eyes. The right eye
peeled open, tearing a thick crust of sleep apart. The left eye was a tight
slit, little more than a cut in the centre of a swollen mass of tissue. His
entire left side looked blackened and sore, and a drop of blood had dried into
a red jewel along his cheek.

The hospital
room was dark now. All day he’d slipped in and out of awareness, occasionally
hearing a snippet of conversation, either from an anxious sounding Marianna or
the snap and snarl of his coach, or the hushed, measured tones of hospital
staff. At first he thought they were speaking in an alien language. Perhaps his
sudden illness had rendered him stupid, he thought worriedly, but then even the
most brilliant of minds would have struggled with some of what he’d heard.

Cerebral
infraction, ischaemic stroke, hypertension, atrial fibrillation, and a
confusing monologue of fantastic sounding words had momentarily forced Joseph
to believe he’d either awoken in a foreign land, surrounded by imposturous doppelgangers,
or that he’d lost his mind. Only when Marianna returned to his side to tell him
she loved him did he realise that they had just been speaking words that were
simply beyond his understanding.

Now, at this
late hour, Joseph found himself alone. His thoughts turned to the previous
night: the night that should have seen him retire, financially comfortable, a
long career behind him, ready to spend all his time with his family, and also
in good health. Yeah, right.

Without
actually having been told, Joseph knew that he must have either suffered an
almost fatal blow – maybe
The Warrior from Queens
had finally found his
range – or he’d had a stroke. It really didn’t matter; either scenario had led
to him laying here, immobilised and fearful.

He forced his
head to one side, the muscles on his right side offering little help, and
focused on the window on that side. Darkness pressed against the glass.

Where were Marianna
and his son? Were they elsewhere in the hospital or back at home, huddled in
bed together in an attempt to keep both the cold winter’s night and darkest
despair at bay? A teardrop slipped down Joseph’s cheek. He should be at home
with them, their protector.

A slight noise
pulled him away from his own bleak thoughts, to the second bed in the room. The
top sheet had fallen down to reveal a single bony white leg. The leg twitched
spasmodically, which caused the sheet to slip even more. Another leg appeared,
as white as ivory, and this one too did a short tap-dance, before going slack.
Now the sheet had practically worked its way onto the floor, and the patient’s
hospital gown had gathered around his waist, exposing the shrivelled stump of
his penis.

Joseph turned
away, embarrassed by the man’s nakedness. A wheeze from constricted lungs drew
his gaze back. The privacy curtain that separated them stood partway open, but
a short section hung in place, blocking the upper-half of the other bed. Joseph
tried to lift his head in an attempt to get a better look. The muscles in his
neck screamed out in protest and his head sagged into the soft embrace of his
pillow.

Joseph licked
at his dry lips. He spoke, but the word he’d formed in his head sounded nothing
like the one that escaped from cracked lips. He tried again; what emerged was
guttural, alien.  He traced the outline of his face, only to recoil as a jolt
of pain arced across his left cheek. Delicately now, he lightly brushed his
fingers over the swollen contours of his face. His heartbeat quickened as they
walked over to the numb right side. Nothing. He prodded harder. His right arm
fared no better; it was just an impotent lump of flesh and bone, incapable of
feeling movement.

“Shit,” he
moaned, only what came out was more the hiss of a snake than the curse of a
man.

His arm
slumped to his side, the examination over, for now. The man in the other bed
wheezed again, and a macabre picture formed unwanted in Joseph’s mind. He
imagined that the stick-thin legs and shrivelled penis gave way not to the
torso of a human being but to the scaly body of a huge fish. And, instead of a
deeply lined, wizened old face, the head of a trout would lay on that pillow,
its gills gulping for air.

Joseph forced
these bizarre images out of his mind. They were replaced instead with a burst
of annoyance. Where the hell were the old man’s caregivers? And more to the
point, where the hell were Joseph’s? What if he needed to use the bathroom?
Infuriated now, both by the indignity of the old man’s exposure and by the lack
of any compassion towards himself, Joseph scanned for either a call button or
other means of drawing attention. Apart from the two beds, there was little
else in the room. A couple of straight-backed chairs sat empty by each bed. A
simple nightstand each – Joseph’s with a vase of flowers on top and the old
man’s bare – stood on either side of their beds. The window on Joseph’s side
was the only indication of an outside world and adjacent to that, a single
doorway, tightly shut.

Unable to find a call button,
Joseph reached out, intent on pulling the curtain further back. He managed to
grab a handful of material, which felt cold and slimy under his touch, like
that of a mouldy shower curtain, and tugged.

Nothing as
hideous as a man-fish lay dying in the other bed, just an old guy with a crown
of tufted white hair. An oxygen mask was fitted tightly around his face. An IV
bottle hung from a stand; clear liquid dripped silently from it, into a long
tube, which entered the man’s brachial vein via a steel needle. The slight hiss
of released oxygen could be heard over the man’s laboured breath. His narrow
chest heaved with the effort of liquid-filled lungs. Pneumonia gripped him in a
parasitic embrace. A couple of twisted wires ran from under the old man’s
blanket to disappear somewhere inside the wall, reappearing at a nursing station,
where the beat of his heart ran in green lines across a monitor screen.

“Hey,” Joseph
whispered, trying to get the old man’s attention. The noise that left his lips
could quite easily have come from a leaky oxygen tank. Still, Joseph called
over again, not wanting his roommate to be found by a relative, or worse, a
young nurse, in his present condition.

“Hey, old
man.”

The tuft of
white hair shifted slightly, and the old man’s grey-yellow eyes opened and then
fixed themselves to Joseph’s. The eyes appeared fearful before turning away.

“Light…” he
wheezed from behind the mask.

“Huh,” asked
Joseph; this noise actually forming as it should.

“The light…”
the man said again.

It was then
when it became apparent that the room’s light source came from directly above
and behind Joseph. He forced his head back and caught the full glare of the
lamp above. Bright spots burst across his eyes. He squeezed them shut and
watched as phantom colours washed across the insides of his lids. Blindly, he
reached up, fumbled around for a moment, and then found the light switch. The
light clicked off and darkness filled the room in a heartbeat. Words from years
long past flashed through Joseph’s mind.

Muhammad Ali
had once said:
'I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in
my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.'

Joseph
chuckled quietly; once he’d believed he was capable of similar feats. Not now.
Seemed like both Joseph and Ali had fallen victim to fate and illness, and
would now have only memories and past triumphs to boast about.  

He lay in
darkness for a while, the old guy at his side unwilling or unable to speak.
Eventually the silence was broken with a wheeze of breath, and then the man
began to talk.

“They’ll never
find what they’re looking for…” he rasped from behind the mask.

Joseph turned
towards the darkness. Now, the old man’s form was little more than an outline,
barely darker than the gloom that surrounded it.

“Huh?” Joseph
asked.

“My secret. My
insurance,” the man said with a hint of both slyness and contempt.

For a second Joseph thought the
guy was boasting about himself. About some astronomically sized savings account
or life insurance policy. But then the guy chuckled slightly and said, “They
wouldn’t dare touch me now. Not with what I know.”

Had Joseph’s brow been capable
of expression, he’d have offered the guy a frown. “Insurance?”

The guy paused. He took a few
agonisingly liquid-filled breaths before speaking. “Who are you, some sort of
foreigner?”

“Huh..?”

“Never mind,” he said,
dismissing Joseph’s inability to communicate clearly as either ignorance or
misapprehension. “Let me tell you, they think they run the whole show. But not
now. Hah! I’ll have the last laugh – now that I’ve secured my insurance.”

What the hell was this guy
talking about? A parasitic family member ready to claim the guy’s inheritance?
Or some sort of bloodsucking financial body waiting in the wings to recoup
monies owed to them?

The old man rambled on for a
while, muttering incoherently, Joseph catching just a few words at best. He
kicked out with his stick-thin legs, hooking the hem of the fallen sheet with
one calloused foot, and then succeeded in drawing the blanket over himself.

The room fell silent, and
Joseph drifted into a fitful sleep.

***

A deep, gnawing chill woke Joseph some time later. Frost
had covered the window with a white crystallised layer, which had formed the
outlines of macabre faces into it. Joseph pulled the single sheet tightly
around him, and again felt an abrupt gutful of anger towards the absent
hospital staff. This time, though, an ample serving of self-pity was mixed into
it. 

Where the hell were the nurses?
Why would they just leave them to freeze like this? He looked over at his
roommate and found the old man shivering uncontrollably. A cold sweat broke out
across Joseph’s body. His teeth started to chatter.

To hell with this!

He reached up, intent on
hitting the light switch, ready to find assistance, even if it meant lying here
bellowing or gibbering or slapping the side of his bed until he got somebody’s
attention. However, before he connected with the switch, a sudden burst of pain
ripped through his skull. God… no. Not again. The shadows engulfed him and,
before he knew it, the fragile ship that was his consciousness became swamped
with darkness, and then quickly sank towards oblivion.

***

Not long after the door opened. Light flooded into the
room, a burst of false dawn. The thin membranes that were the old man’s eyelids
scrunched tightly, hypersensitive to brightness. Someone entered, dressed in
starched hospital whites. The figure moved over to the old man’s side, ignoring
Joseph completely – for now. A hand clad in latex reached out and the hiss of
oxygen died slowly as the flow to the patient’s mask dropped.

The old man’s eyes shot open
and filled with terror.

“Can’t
breathe…” he wheezed. Underneath the mask his nostrils flared and then clamped
tightly shut as he desperately tried to draw breath.

The face above
him smiled. The valve on the oxygen tank stopped turning, now fully closed. The
visitor’s hand moved away from the tank and gently traced the line of morphine,
which ran from an intravenous drip to the old man’s arm. A button was pressed:
once, twice, three times, increasing the flow of morphine to the patient’s
brachial vein. Instantly, his pupils dilated, and his initial panic seemed to
flow away, diluted by the increase in opiates.  

The old man
felt himself drifting on a calm sea, as if the water from his lungs had flooded
out from his every pore. He managed to stay afloat for a short while, but then
his frail body lost its buoyancy and, quickly, he began to sink. Skeletal hands
shot from under the blanket, gripping tightly onto the rails of his bed,
desperately trying to keep him afloat. However, his ragged and weakened body
was unable to resist, and soon he felt the current pull him under. In one final
attempt at survival, his brain released a burst of adrenaline. His head cleared
and a flow of energy flooded his veins. He kicked hard, using both feet to
propel him towards the dark surface above. He reached out, ready to punch his
way through the surface. His hand hit something solid. The water above had iced
over. Winter had somehow found its way inside this room, trapping all inside in
its icy embrace. The old man kicked again and his hands slapped feebly against
the ice. The air in his lungs turned suddenly caustic. He opened his mouth to
inhale and filled his lungs with ice-cold water.          

The latex
glove stayed clamped over the old man’s mouth for a little while longer, thumb
and forefinger pinching both nostrils closed. Eventually, the pale feet stopped
kicking. The blanket had gathered around two bony kneecaps to reveal stick-thin
legs and skin like parchment.         

The room fell
quiet.

The visitor
lingered at the bedside, head bowed and shoulders hunched. Then the gloved hand
traced out the sign of the cross, from head to navel, from shoulder to
shoulder. Finally, two fingertips drew the old man’s eyelids down. Something
metallic glinted. A few minutes passed as the visitor worked on the patient.
Next, the morphine drip was returned to its correct setting and the oxygen
valve reopened. A faint hiss of compressed air filled the room.