Necessary Evil of Nathan Miller (31 page)

I became aware of the faint sound of
sirens, coming closer, as I realised Caitlin had fallen silent, her
head coming to rest on my chest.

"Stay with me, Caitlin. You can’t sleep
yet," I warned her.

She raised her head. "Tell me about
you, instead," she mumbled. "I don’t know anything about you, not
even your real name, nothing, except that you finally want to help
me. Pity you’re not a doctor..."

That night I wished I was a doctor –
how much she’d never know.

I tried to laugh it off. "I’m dull and
boring. If I tell you about me, I'll put you to sleep. Maybe later,
when you’re warm and having trouble getting to sleep."

"So tired." She yawned. "It’s hard to
imagine having trouble getting to sleep. It’s too hard trying to
stay awake...Tell me something interesting about you, something
that will help me stay awake."

I hesitated, opened my mouth to say
something even as I didn’t know what to say. "I’ll tell you my real
name when you’re safe in hospital," I lied. "Hang on until then and
I swear I’ll tell you anything you want to know." I wouldn't be
allowed to go with her to hospital – I was about to be
arrested.

"Okay..." she began grudgingly,
"but..."

Red and blue flashing lights lit up the
beach. People in police uniform came spilling out of the dunes,
shouting incoherently, as I strained to hear her finish what she’d
tried to say.

"It's all right, angel," I said softly.
"The police are here. They'll take the vicious, raping bastard away
and you'll be safe."

Her reaction was the opposite of what
I’d expected. She clutched at me, her arms suddenly around me under
my jacket. "No. They'll find a way to kill us. If you leave me
alone, they'll hurt me again. They won't want to leave witnesses.
Don’t leave me. You promised!"

Fuck. My whole plan lay in tatters. She
was right, of course. They'd kill us. Maybe if I killed myself
they'd leave her alone and…no. The only way to keep her alive was
to stay with her. Oh God, I called the fucking police. In a move
that could get her killed.

I pulled her closer, unconsciously
tightening my grip on the gun as they fanned out to encircle us,
stopping several metres away.

"Great. Now, thanks to the sirens, he's
got a gun and a hostage. Now what?" a voice lamented.

Her raspy breathing became more rapid.
I had no hostage – she couldn't feel her legs, let alone walk – and
the gun was useless empty. My brain raced her breathing, the gun by
her throat. I lifted the gun into the air and started to pull back
the trigger, to show them that it wasn't loaded, and they backed
away a bit.

"Don't kill her," one of them breathed,
more in disbelief than to me.

Kill her? I couldn’t do it, not even
when she begged me to.

I stood up slowly, cradling her body in
my arms, trying to keep the blankets around her.

This gave one of them the cue he needed
to start giving orders. "Put the girl down and step away from her,
hands in the air."

"No," she whimpered, her face white
with pain and effort as she wrapped her arms clumsily around my
neck. The blankets slid away from her chest, exposing her
blood-soaked shirt.

I only held her tighter. "Get her an
ambulance. She needs help. She’s badly hurt – I’ll put her down
only in an ambulance."

I could hear one hiss to the other,
"She’s bleeding badly – look at her shirt! Let him get her back to
the road, then….." He lowered his voice so I couldn’t hear the
rest, but I could guess…then we get him. I was beyond caring.

"I want to get her to hospital. She
needs help – there’s so much blood," I repeated, much louder.

"There’s an ambulance back at the road.
You can take her there," a voice called back.

I took a step forward and they took
more steps back.

One step forward, two steps back, like
some kind of deadly dance, through sand dunes that shifted and
presented a pale backdrop to the real drama, like unwilling
spectators. To say nothing of the unwilling participants.

Back on the road, bathed in the
blinking red-blue-purple light from the patrol cars, was the
promised ambulance, glowing like a beacon in the weird light show.
It had one door open and ambulance officers standing by – like a
chauffeured limousine, ready to take care of her every need.

I laid her carefully on the ambulance
stretcher. In the bright, harsh light of the ambulance, I saw for
the first time what they’d done to her – what I’d done to her, in
letting them hurt her. Every bit of her skin that I could see was a
mess of bruises and fresh and dried blood. Mike’s bloodied shirt
hardly helped matters, but it probably hid far worse injuries than
those I could already see.

You let them do this, I told myself,
trying to hide my horror as I covered her up with a hospital-issue
blanket. Scared to do anything that might hurt her further, I
forced myself to reassure her as she looked at me pleadingly. I
touched her hair, briefly, and smiled as best I could as I voiced
my desperate hope. "You're going to be all right."

And, with an effort, she smiled
back.

I drank in the sight of her. Surely
saving this amazing girl's life counted for something in the
overall scheme of things. Deep in my gut, I dreaded she was right
and I was going to die soon. I wished I'd left some bullets in the
gun – I could've used one to end the uncertainty.

Somebody behind me roughly took my arm,
saying something about a few questions, and started pulling me back
out of the ambulance. I stared at her in shock as she reached out
for me with a hand on which all of the fingers were definitely
broken, bones protruding through her skin in ways that were far
from normal. Just like Alanna’s had been. As I focussed on her
hand, for a moment it wasn’t her face I saw behind it, but
Alanna’s. Not alive, but as dead as she'd been when I identified
her in the mortuary. Like a zombie, risen from the dead to make me
pay for my negligence.

You don't get to die today. You still
have work to do.

I was too stunned to resist as I
followed my arm out of the ambulance and back onto the road.

An ambulance officer climbed in then
and hid her from sight.

Reluctantly, I turned away.

"You're in no shape to drive. I'll give
you a lift to the hospital." The sympathetic voice belonged to a
police officer who looked almost thirty – Senior Constable Nick
Dennis, his uniform said. He gestured toward one of the patrol
cars.

"Aren't you going to arrest me?" I
asked dully.

"Just get in the car," he said. "As
long as you cooperate, I won't need to yet." He opened the rear
door.

My bum had barely touched the seat
before I heard raised voices. I jumped up, trying to see what was
happening.

He turned his head toward the noise,
his body blocking the doorway as he started to close the door. "You
should have shot her while you had the chance."

I froze with one leg sticking out of
the car.

No. No…not Caitlin…they paid off a
police officer…and he'd shoot me as soon as we got on the road.
Caitlin…her time would come later. The ambulance officers? The
nurses? The doctor? Oh God…

I threw my weight against the door. It
flew open, knocking the crooked cop aside for a second, and I saw
it.

Caitlin crouched at the door of the
ambulance, where she wasn't supposed to be.

He took advantage of my distraction,
trying to push me back inside his car, but the crack as my fist met
his jaw sent him to the ground. Once he was out my way, I ran to
her.

She'd climbed out of the ambulance and
started staggering toward me, arms outstretched. The image of a
zombie, a walking corpse – an image I'd never get out of my
mind.

I swore softly under my breath – she
had a death wish, this girl I had to keep alive. And I couldn’t
live with myself if I let her die the way Alanna had.

I could hear the police officer on the
ground shouting something at me, but I wasn’t paying attention, so
I didn’t turn around to look, just kept running toward her.

"NO!" she screamed as, sickeningly, she
stumbled, and her legs gave way beneath her. She fell to her knees
in the gravel. She would have pitched forward face-first had I not
dived forward to reach her before the rest of her body hit the
ground. Her weight pushed me down onto the road. Pain burned across
my shoulder as she screamed again and more blood flowed down her
leg. The echo of the shots resounded in the cold air.

I opened my mouth to tell her how
stupid...but those tortured eyes could have shut up even the most
garrulous politician.

She sobbed helplessly, drenched in
tears, shaking so violently she had trouble getting the words out.
"Don't...leave me."

She’s been shot. The cop was aiming for
me but shot her instead. It’s my fault she’s been shot. The thought
registered and I forgot anything else. "It's all right. I wasn't
leaving you." I tried to stem the stream of blood with my
hands.

The torment and the pain in her eyes!
Under that lurked raw terror. "Never...hurt...again. You...
promised!"

God, she'd been right. Her terror at
being alone and helpless again had driven her to find me. She
barely had the strength to stand and it had almost killed her. I
knew she’d kill herself before she’d let them hurt her again, if I
wasn’t there to stop her. And I'd let her get shot.

Her twisted fingers clutched at my
shirt, scrabbling at the gun in my pocket. Oh God, she's going to
try and shoot herself again.

"Chris. Please." Her eyes were on fire
in pain. Still she didn't let go.

"I'll never let them hurt you again. If
I have to stay with you every waking moment until you recover.
You'll never have to remind me again. And I won't let you hurt
yourself, either." I peeled her fingers from my shirt. She gasped,
squeezing her eyes shut, and her body went limp.

Her blood tainted my hands once more,
but she was only unconscious. I carried her back to the ambulance
and laid her down again, dimly aware of the other police officers
pushing the handcuffed Senior Constable Dennis into the back seat
of his own patrol car. The car he'd almost killed me in.

I sat beside her in the ambulance this
time, as the paramedic returned to take care of her. Squeezing past
me, he didn’t spare me a glance as he sat beside me.

He pulled out a stack of dressing packs
from the cupboard above her and tossed one to me. "Here, press down
hard with that. It should slow the bleeding."

I stared at the dressing in my hands,
confused. "You need me to help you?"

"No, but it’d be nice if you didn’t
bleed to death while I’m taking care of her. She’s lost too much
blood already."

I looked at him, more puzzled than
ever, and he took pity on me. "You’ve been shot, Rambo. There’s
blood all down your arm."

At the bottom of the last typed page,
Nathan’s handwriting was almost illegible, but the words were
carved deep into the paper and underlined.

I’m sorry.

I ripped the pages into pieces and
dropped them into the kitchen bin, on top of the mushy, mouldy
remains of some tomatoes I’d left in the fridge before I went to
Melbourne. As I carried the bin bag to the wheelie bin outside, I
wondered at his stupidity in writing it all down. What if someone
had found it? After all the trouble I took – we both took – to hide
the truth from the police and everyone else, as I’d promised I
would...did he think I’d forgotten? Horrible memories, carved into
my mind deeper than any knife could?

I dragged the wheelie bin to the kerb,
hoping the rubbish truck wouldn’t be too long. I needed Nathan’s
compromising evidence to disappear as quickly as possible.

Then I went to my bedroom and started
packing my things, so I could fly away and leave all this behind to
start my new life with a new name.

There could be no looking back.

After all, however sorry he might be,
he didn't want me.

The story concludes with
Afterlife,
the third book in the
Nightmares Trilogy, in 2014.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Demelza Carlton has always loved the
ocean, but on her first snorkelling trip she found she was afraid
of fish.

She has since swum with sea lions,
sharks and sea cucumbers and stood on spray drenched cliffs over a
seething sea as a seven-metre cyclonic swell surged in, shattering
a shipwreck below.

Demelza now lives in Perth, Western
Australia, the shark attack capital of the world.

The Ocean’s Gift series was her first
foray into fiction, followed by the Nightmares trilogy.

Want to know more? You can follow
Demelza on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or her blog, Demelza
Carlton’s Place at:

http://www.demelzacarlton.wordpress.com

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Necessary Evil of Nathan
Miller
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