Out of the Black (10 page)

"Yeah, but bring them, you never know when they'll come in handy."

"Hold on just a minute here..." Ping held out an uncertain hand. Somewhere here he'd lost control of the situation.

"Oh, that's right detective, don't forget Rae's gun."

"Right," Ping said, handing over the weapon. "But that's not what I meant..."

"You need to get moving, detective. Don't forget that thing, you know... it's pretty important. You're barking up the wrong tree here, the guy you're going to want to talk to is..." Ahmed put a conspiratorial hand on Ping's shoulder as Rae disappeared into the back of the apartment. "Sparky." He looked around to make sure they were alone before continuing. "He's going to be in the school library tonight at nine o'clock, fourth floor, in the psychology section. Keep that a secret." He clapped Ping on the shoulder and turned away.

"Don't leave town." Ping said with an authority he didn't feel. "We're not done here."

Ping walked to the door and fumbled for his keys. It was really detrimental to his tough cop exit that he couldn't get the door open right away.

"You only need those from the outside." Ahmed said.

Ping looked at the old metal keys he had been trying to fit into the smooth surface of the doorknob. "Yeah."

"...of your house." Ahmed finished with a solemn nod.

Before her, ashes.

Anne's eyes were locked on her plate, but all she could see was just how pointless her life would be. Chattering others surrounded her at the portable table. Though she loved them all to varying degrees, she couldn't raise her eyes to look at them. If she did, they might look back, might see her, might realize.

She wanted to cryto run away, but what she wanted most was to hide. Her fork and lips still moved in the elaborate dance of dinnertime camouflage. How much longer could this last?

"Hey Anne, why so glum?" Her cousin Jamie asked from across the table.

"Mm." She said, nodding. She hated the frilly dress she wore... he'd probably noticed that first and felt compelled to start a pity conversation- Jamie was nice like that.

"This isn't you anymore," Jamie continued, undeterred. "Or it doesn't have to be."

This was not happening. The death of hope was not a moment she wanted to share, even with well-intentioned relatives. Without looking up, she said "Mn-hmn" in her most noncommittal voice. Please, she thought, let this end soon. Each utterance brought her closer to sobs, closer to the uncontrollable tears that even now burned behind her eyes.

"Anne." He said, voice deepening into the voice of a stranger. "Anne, listen to me... life is about the future. It's about what you will do
now
."

Shocked, she looked up, across the table, and into the dead man's sharp blue eyes.

"It's all up to you now... and I'm not even exaggerating when I say 'all' here." He said with a warm smile. She could find no malice in his voice or eyes, though the memory his face brought was of the blackest terror.

For an instant, the world was filled with rain.

Kind eyes and soft voice, he continued. "I see you, Anne.
You
. I know you can do this."

Rain. A hot spike of pain drove from neck to heart- she was running through white mists.

She must have blinked because now something was chasing her through impenetrable darkness. Unseen but not unheard, the wolf's howls grew louder and deeper with each occurrence. She stumbled and went down, her shriek filling the darkness.

"Wait just a minute there Anne..." a clear, playful voice from above. She looked up and saw a light dividing the blackness above as a very white man in a very white robe fluttered down from above. No kidding- he was actually fluttering with two feathery wings and a halo that must have been left over from someone's elementary school play. Sprawled out on the cracked, bloody concrete, she waited... this would definitely be worth seeing.

As he descended, she heard a choir singing some fairly strident church-type music. 'Hallelujah! Good tidings! Hey, check it out sista!'

The angel with the tinsel halo alighted on the car next to her. The car's roof crumpled as if he weighed several tons. Broken glass from the car's shattering windows danced on the ground around her.

"I bring you good tidings..." he declared with the upraised finger of piety she'd seen on a stained glass window somewhere. He stepped lightly onto the sidewalk in front of her and cracks radiated away from his feet. The unseen choir backed him up with a resounding "Goo-ood tidings sista!" Around them, the nighttime city spread.

Then she realized it was the dead man again. "Good tidings owv geweat zhoy!" He managed to finish around his mouth full of shark's teeth.

The choir concluded with an emphatic, "Gonna eat you like a sandwich sista!" Then there was silence.

"Wi you zhdop vhat?!" He exclaimed, probing his new teeth with his index finger.

But she was back in flight, really hauling too- as opposed to the normal dream flight mode where you felt like you were running in yesterday's oatmeal and moving in geologic time. The sidewalk, then grass, and then pavement blurred beneath her feet. She was in the suburbs now, passing donut shop after ice cream store after donut shop. She was getting a bit tired...

She skidded to a halt in front of a shop with a huge poster of a plate of donuts with a scoop of ice cream where the hole should be. "Heyyyy." She said. She pushed the door open and paused only briefly to make sure no one saw her enter such a den of iniquity.

Inside, she looked back out through the window. Something had been chasing her, though she wasn't sure what anymore. She'd think more about it over a snack.

"What can I get for you?" a friendly voice from behind her. She turned to the counter, "Well my man, let's start with a little bit of..."

The dead man stood behind the counter with a plate of ice cream topped donuts like the picture in the window. He wore a bright white and red striped uniform with a small white cap. His smile seemed genuine, but nervous like a kid on his first date.

"We really need to talk Anne. Why not do it over some err... donut ice cream?" He glanced down at his tray, then back to her with a mischievous grin. "You know Anne, your mind is a deeply weird place, and coming from me that's really saying something."

Tempting. Except that she thought it more likely that he'd be the one eating. Sure enough, she looked again and noticed that the fangs were back, and the mouth was split impossibly wide. Something dark and wet crawled up from his throat and peeked at her from behind his teeth.

"I've got something to share with you." He said in a voice like a warped record.

Her scream faded as her eyes opened to reveal a strange landscape of cloth. Shaky hands pushed out and she rose painfully away from the bed. The familiar room was dim yellow, the pain was hot orange. She tried to turn her head to look about, but her neck felt like it was in a vibrating iron cast. The world shook- no, it was her- every muscle was knotted with uncontrollable cramps, her bones felt like bows bent at the ready.

She'd escaped death on the street only to die in her own bed, she thought as her tenuous control of her arms faltered, and she landed back onto her bed. She shivered and convulsed there for an unbearable, immeasurable time. She felt like her muscles would split under the strain, but she couldn't make them relax.

Was this it? You know, the big "
it
". Anne didn't believe in heaven or hell, but for the first time it occurred to her that it didn't matter at all what she believed, it only mattered what really was.

She considered the complete dearth of useful information that she had used to arrive at her beliefs on the subject. If the afterlife was an eternal hellscape filled with torture and tax preparation, it didn't matter if she believed in reincarnation or paradise. She was transfixed by dark resonant epiphany: what she believed was not a get-out-of-jail-free card for wherever she ended up when these convulsions finally ate the last life from her body.

Looking back, she guessed that she had been living dead for so long that she had just assumed that being really dead would be more of the same grindingly humiliating thing. Now though, standing on death's rickety po, the afterlife (if there were such a thing) seemed a lot less subjective and a lot more unknown.

Sure,
now
she thought of this.
What's after this?
The question was an abyss above which she dangled.
What's next?

It might have been minutes or hours before she slipped into oblivion.

***

When she moved, it hurt. If she didn't move, it just threatened to hurt. As she became more aware, this constant threat became unbearable in a Chinese water torture sort of way and she began to shift and fidget. Though this did hurt at first, it slowly became a manageable thing.

For the second time in the last day, Anne was surprised to be alive. Her second brush with death had left her feeling hopelessly alone, powerless, and just a bit hungry.

The bed beneath her was wet. The damp, tangled sheets clung to her as she moved. Her entire body tingled. Her mouth tasted like zombie brain crap. With great effort, she rolled onto her back, and from there she sat up on the bed. The room swam for a few seconds before the wave of disorientation receded.

The room beyond the bed was cluttered, small, and only partially lit by yellow light coming from an over-ornate desk lamp her stepfather had given her for her sixteenth birthday. A veneered shelf held her collection of old hardcopy books. A mismatched dresser held her clothes and was topped with an accretion of trinkets and memorabilia- crystal figurines, perfume bottles, framed pictures of cousins.

She had mixed feelings about her home. It was comfortable and familiar and entirely hers. Sometimes when she arrived here after a hard day's work, she felt independent and secure, the queen of her small domain.

But hers was a palace of isolation, a home of slow warping separation. Sometimes as the hours ground by, she would run out to the store, any store. Sometimes she bought a toothbrush or socks, other times she simply loitered. She'd walk aimlessly through aisles of products, buying only distraction, feeling like a vagrant begging for spare attention. Her fantasy at times like these was striking up a conversation with someone met by chance. Of course she would never try... the need was too close, too dear to brook any thought of failure. She remembered once in a convenience store several months back, a man had asked her if she had tried some drink or other that he was thinking of buying. She mumbled that she hadn't, but she never saw the drink or the man, because she had looked immediately at her feet, had immediately turned away.

A sense like heat washed over her. Insight. That's what fear does- it makes you turn away from the things you really want, away from the things you need. Then it taunts you later, it tells you that you are too weak or broken to be happy, that you don't deserve it. Fear's only happy when you're not, only content when you're hungry but as still as a deer in headlights.

For as long as she remembered, she'd thought that she worshipped no God, but this was a deception. Fear was her God. She had built Him altars of emptiness and worshipped Him in temples of isolation. She'd wasted her life in his service.

Assuming this was alive, she felt like she'd been given a second chance. If she was alive, she was done with Fear and his little smelly minions.

First things first, she wobbled unsteadily toward the bathroom. She didn't want to start her new fearless life with wet pants. She looked down as she passed the mirror as always. Ok, she was
almost
done with fear and his smelly minions.

A few minutes later, she searched through the medicine cabinet, parsing through her dewy-decimal encoded library of misdiagnosed cures. Past the antidepressants, to the left of the sleep aids, behind the mood eveners...ah! Painkillers.

She exceeded the recommended dose and washed the capsules down with water cupped in her hands from the sink. Straightening with the aid of hands on the edge of the sink, she faced the music and looked into the mirror.

And immediately burst out laughing. She was a yellow plastic mountain! The shiny yellow plastic of the wrinkled poncho covered her like hair on a gorilla. The hood's elastic border puckered around her grave face and dripping chin. A black tuft of hair had staged a prison break and now protruded from under the elastic and was plastered to her forehead. She looked like an imaginary friend on some over-the-top children's program. She looked like Grimace and Big-Bird's love child.

Cautious of her stiff limbs, she struggled out of the poncho. Underneath, she was a wreck. Ripped and stained clothes, the same cuts and bruises, though they were looking better today. She angled her head to take another look at her atomic hickey, but wasn't able to locate it. Weird. She probed the area with her finger and felt only a slight hardness beneath the skin.

In videos, the mark always disappeared when the vampire turned.

Now that was just crazy thinking... if she let it continue, the next thing you know she'd be wearing wet ponchos to bed. She grimaced into the mirror, stretching her lips back over her teeth. She had an almost imperceptible flash of the dead man's curving teeth from her fever-dream, but her teeth were just as they had always been. She was too exhausted to try the growling again; besides, that worked better as a spectator sport anyway.