Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (5 page)

"... please ... don't leave me here ... Petey ... don't ... leave ... me ... here ... alone ... again! ..."

—Running feet—

Pete pumped his arms furiously. His sneakers slapped the floor hard as he ran. The dark figure blocking the doorway grew impossibly large in front of him, swelling and expanding until it blocked out the sunlight entirely. Pete thrust his hands out in front of him, prepared either to wrestle with the apparition or else reach through it and slam the door open. His long, agonized scream was abruptly cut short when he smashed full-force into the wall of wire-reinforced glass.

Cindy was standing on the other side of the door, bending forward as she peered into the school. She let out a high, piercing screech and threw herself backwards when she saw Pete running down the hallway directly toward her.

In a blinding instant, she heard a sickening, wet
thud
as Pete slammed into the door. This was followed by a shattering explosion as broken glass, glittering in the sunlight, sprayed like a fountain of diamonds into the air. A few needle-sharp fragments showered the walkway, but most of them were held back by the wire mesh embedded inside the glass. They sliced into Pete's body like hundreds of tiny knife blades. A bright scarlet spray of blood shot out through the shattered glass.

Ryan was playing behind the maple tree. The loud crash drew his attention, but Cindy wheeled around quickly and scooped him into her arms, shielding him with her body so he wouldn't see as his father pushed the door open and staggered out into the afternoon sunshine. Over Ryan’s shoulder, Cindy watched in horror as Pete took a few staggering steps forward and then spun around in a lazy half-circle and then dropped dead on the sidewalk.

…..

The dull brown wash of afternoon sunlight pouring through the windows took forever to shift across the floor as Petey drifted down the empty hallway. The floorboards slid like slick oil beneath his feet. He tensed as he waited to hear the harsh clang of the school bell, signaling that—as always—he was late for class.

Glancing over his shoulder, he smiled at his best friend, Ray Makki, who was tagging along a few paces behind him. In a slow, sludgy voice whose echo never seemed to stop, Petey said, "Come on, Ray! We've gotta hurry up, or Old Lady Doyle will nail our butts."

Ray chuckled softly.

"Heck, Petey, she'll nail our butts no matter what we do."

Ray's dark, dead-looking eyes were like windows that were no longer able to reflect light. His gaze shifted over to Mr. Clain, the janitor, who was standing by one of the open classroom doors. Mr. Clain gripped his mop and scowled deeply as the boys approached. From behind, Ray grabbed Petey's shirt sleeve and gave it a quick tug.

"Hey, come on! Wait up! Don't leave me behind."

Petey drew to a halt, glancing over his shoulder at his best friend. The corridor glowed with an eerie golden iridescence that made it look like it stretched out forever in both directions.

"Don't worry," Petey said with a soft laugh that echoed hollowly in the hallway. "You know I'll always wait up for you."

"That's 'cause we're best friends, right?"

Petey nodded, his head moving slowly up and down as though on a spring.

Then they started walking down the hallway again, side by side.

They glided past the motionless janitor and continued on down the hallway to where Mrs. Doyle stood waiting for them in front of her open classroom door. Her flabby arms were folded across her chest, and her pale face was set in a deep scowl as she watched them coldly, shifting her eyes without blinking or moving her head.

Petey stared at her and wondered if he and Ray would ever make it to her classroom on time, but he didn't care now that he and Ray had made it past Mr. Clain. He cringed inside, feeling the cold glare of the janitor's gaze drilling into the back of his head; but when he turned around and looked, the janitor was no longer there.

"Yeah," Petey said, his voice no more than a hollow whisper that rustled like dust in the amber-lit, empty hall.

"We're best friends ... forever...."

I was there at the beginning—or at least the beginning of the small part of it that happened at the hospital where I work. What happened there was happening—is
still
happening—all around the country and the world, for all I know. There have even been reports of several instances in China but, naturally, these have been officially denied. The first physical hint of it that we got here in the United States was when that baby was born in a hospital in Oklahoma City. The baby—a boy—entered the world with everything just the way it was supposed to be except for one small detail.

He didn’t have any fingerprints or footprints.

When did it really begin? Who can say? If you listen to the pop-philosophers on the television talk show circuit, it started the day ... the cosmic
instant
the scales shifted.

Shifted from what to what?

Well, just hang on a bit, and I’ll tell you. First, I want to tell you a bit about myself. Not that it really matters, but ... well, if something does happen, I want all of this to be on record.

My name is Judy Morrow, and I’m a nurse at Southern Maine Osteo., in
Portland, Maine. I got my nursing degree from B.U. Medical School some years ago. Wanting to get away from big city pressures prompted me to move to Maine. The simple ... or, at least, the simpler life was going to be the key to my future happiness. And it was ... for a while.

The only opening I found was working the swing shift in the ob. at Osteo. Even some of the staff call it Osteopathetic, but it’s a nice hospital. Since I always liked babies and thought I’d never have one of my own, I didn’t mind ushering the little cuties into the world. Of course, most parents-to-be have innumerable fears, both rational and irrational, but the vast majority of cases are absolutely normal, and so are the results of anywhere from two to twenty-four or more hours of intensive labor.

Mostly ...

I suppose it’s time to mention Doctor Thomas Jacobs. “Tom” He was one of the residents—
the
resident, actually, who set most of the nurses’ hearts a’flutter whenever he was around. “A’flutter!” What a stupid phrase, but that’s the best I can come up with. The night I met him, after I’d been on duty only three nights, my heart literally skipped a couple of beats, and I was as tongue-tied as a junior high school girl with a mad crush on the high school quarterback.

Look, I was young at the time, but I was a “city girl.” I’d been around. I knew the score. But—
damn!
My heart did skip a few beats. I wish I could stop resorting to these clichés, but—really—that’s how he made me feel. Look, I
said
I was young!

At first Dr. Jacobs—Tom—and I would sit together now and then in the break room (the one with that cute little sign reading: “BEWARE OF STAFF INFECTIONS!”) and shoot the breeze. He told me right up front he was married, and I didn’t miss the gold band he wore. He told me how he hadn’t started med school until several years after college, with a stint as a medic during the Gulf War—the first one—in between, so he was quite a bit older, almost twelve years older than I was.

Okay. I did the math. Twelve years, three months, and fifteen days.

But like I said, I was a “city girl,” so I thought that more or less evened things up. What started out as just a doctor and a nurse co-workers—chatting over a cup of coffee now and then turned a bit more serious— after a while, a
lot
more serious. Long hours working double shifts—the usual pressures of the job, especially in those rare instances when “complications” do occur—all of that more or less brought us together. It happens. And after a while—hell, I won’t mince words here—Tom and I started sleeping together. Never at work, mind you ... although every now and then an empty bed in an unoccupied room got mighty tempting. Just a couple of times at my apartment on Montrose Ave after work ... and once out behind the hospital in the parking lot one hot summer night. Steve Blodgett, one of the janitors, came close to catching us that time. I teased Tom about that, telling him I was the “kid,” and he should have known better. And we laughed a lot … I remember that.

Then ... well, of course, we heard about that baby in
Oklahoma City like everyone else did.

Just the idea of a baby with no fingerprints or footprints was pretty freaky, to say the least. But when we got more of the details, what was at first
interesting
or
weird
started to get downright creepy. Rumors travel fast in the medical field, and we started hearing things that didn’t get into the media right away, like about how the baby in Oklahoma City was ... different.

I know this sounds like something out of a cheap paperback horror novel, but word got around that the baby boy supposedly “looked” … dead. His eyes, so the rumor mill informed us, looked like the eyes of a dead person. No life. Oh, he was alive, all right. Make no mistake. He ate and slept and filled his pants like any normal baby. But the way some folks described him, he looked like he had no soul ... like he was empty ... the husk of a human being, but not the contents.

Then reports started coming in from all around the country. Soon, within a couple of weeks, the news reported nearly fifty cases of babies—both boys and girls—being born with no fingerprints … no footprints ... no souls!

Six weeks after the first one was born in
Oklahoma City, we had one right here in Portland. Believe me, all the grist from the rumor mill and the sensationalism in the media didn’t prepare me for that baby.

It was...
cold
.

Now, back-stepping a bit here, I don’t intend to analyze what brought Tom and me together. Chemistry? Pressure at work? Fate? Sure. And the problems he was having with Becky, his wife, certainly didn’t help. So it might have been all of these ... some of them ... or something else.

Who cares?

I
do
know what broke us up, though. It was when Tom found out that, after three years of trying, Becky was pregnant. Once that happened, he dropped me like a bad habit, let me tell you.

It hurt.

Oh, yeah.

You might say I was crushed, but—hey!
Be realistic
, I kept telling myself. You don’t have an affair with a married man and honestly expect him to dump it all—lay his marriage, his life, and his career on the line for ... for what, truthfully, had been just a couple of nights of fun.

There’s this thing I’ve noticed about life, you see. You have to pay for your fun.

Always!

Like I said earlier, parents-to-be have all sorts of worries. Most of them, I know from experience, are absolutely groundless. But with everything that had been happening lately, and news reports of more instances coming up daily ... well, Tom got pretty upset.

No, that’s putting it mildly.

He was in a state of near constant dread that
his
baby would be born with no fingerprints.

The media didn’t help. It rarely does. They’d picked up the stories from around the world and were running them for all they were worth. Radio and TV talk shows, and newspapers at the grocery checkout counters were the worst. Aren’t they always? They started in with explanations ranging from terrorist plots (after nine-eleven, people could believe anything) to pre-invasion tactics of the interstellar aliens to astrology and reincarnation.

It was the reincarnation angle that got to Tom, and after listening to him, I have to admit that it kind of got me worried, too. We had stopped having sex altogether by then, but we were still friends. Many a slow night in the staff room, we’d talk ... and talk ...

Tom admitted that he was convinced the reincarnation angle was the right one. That’s what I meant as the start about the “scales tipping.” The basic idea is that, with all the improvements in medicine and with life expectancy being extended well into people’s eighties and nineties, the Universe was running out of souls to be born. Babies, so the theory went, were still being born within the normal course of biology, but there simply weren’t enough souls left over to fill all these new bodies.

“NO
BODY
IN THE BODY,” as one banner headline put it.

Fingerprints were like the souls’ identification card number, the cosmic bar code, if you will. There was no way to stop the babies from being born, so the cosmos or whatever just kept churning them out, but it had to leave out the spiritual contents.

Does any of this make sense?

Well, to me—as a nurse trained in the sciences—of course it didn’t. But if you read and believe those sleazy newspapers, it
might
make sense. No worse, anyway, than “Amazonian Frog Boys” or the B-52 that was supposedly found in a crater on the moon. What truly amazed me was that Tom, an educated medical man—a doctor, for Christ’s sake!—would embrace such a cockamamie idea.

And I’ll be damned if, after spending several nights talking with him, he almost had me convinced, too. He certainly said enough to make me worry.