Revelations (12 page)

“It’ll keep me occupied, anyway.”

He grinned, his pointed canines showing. “I’m just a phone call away.”

“I know,” I said. “You better go.”

He nodded and bent to kiss my cheek. “Take care, Christiana.”

“You too. Drive safe.” In his ear, I whispered, “I’m sure she’s beautiful.”

Since he knew I knew, Philip only smiled softly. “See you soon,” he told me. Then he got in his old bug and drove away. It would be a long time after soon that I would see him again.

It was simple and fast. That was life at the Commune. Before I knew it, Philip was gone, and we were left alone. I stayed outside until long after the dust settled behind him.

“You gonna stay out here all day?”

I didn’t turn but I knew Jonas stood right beside me. “I might, yeah,” I said.

Jonas moved closer to me and planted a kiss on my temple. “He’ll come back. I’ve been here long enough to know. He’s left before. He always comes back.”

“Not this time,” I said. “This time’s for keeps.” I turned my head upwards to see his eyes.

“He’ll come back,” Jonas said, his voice reassuring. “Even if just for a visit. Besides, now I’ve got the truck running so we can visit him.”

“You’d take me out there? If I asked?”

“Of course. All you have to do is ask, and I’ll do anything.”

I gave him my best smile. He put his arms around me and held me close. When I couldn’t get in a good breath I said, “Oxygen is important, love.”

“Sorry,” he said, releasing me, but only slightly. “You’re just too small.”

I snorted at him. “Ever stop to think that you’re too big?”

“Now what do we do?” he asked.

“I think I will get a job.”

Jonas raised an eyebrow ridge. “You? A job?”

“Yeah,” I said, giving him a light slap on the arm in response to his sarcasm. “Me. I’ll get a job. Wanna help me?”

Jonas put his hand to his chin in thought. “I already have a plan.” He swept me into his arms and devoured me on the spot.

“Hhm,” I said when he let me go. “Does your plan involve nudity?”

“No,” he said.

“Then I don’t want to hear it.”

He told me anyway.

Chapter Twenty-One

Jonas’s plan. It led to so much. I should have never listened or agreed. I should have known what would happen. It was obvious. Except it wasn’t, not to me anyway. I doubt even Jonas really thought it good idea. Of course, he had no idea how much trouble a girl like me can really get into, when left to my own devices.

So I got a job at the hospital forty-five minutes away in Las Vegas, Nevada. Using a fake address, the one on my fake ID, given me long ago by Philip, and a little manipulation of the mind to make myself seem somewhat desirable as an employee, I was able to get a position at the hospital cafeteria as a food server. I delivered food to the patients’ rooms, which meant I interacted with a whole bunch of sick and injured people. Yeah, Jonas, really good idea. I’d be able to keep my hands off the dying. Dingos will come racing out of my butt. Pink ones. With guitars.

I’ll tell ya, at the end of the first day I had a splitting headache, probably stress induced. I walked in and out of rooms, followed by the woman training me, and her name was Bertha and I ain’t kidding. I gave food to cancer patients, to people with broken bones. I helped an old man open a small carton of milk because his arthritis was so bad. So many things I could fix and yet I did nothing. It was hard, so hard in fact I gave myself a headache.

Modern medicine is certainly not very modern. Nor are humans very humane. Many of the patients were alone in their rooms and had very few, if any, visitors. Some people had just been left to die on their own, and not by choice like my father. I hated humanity as I walked out the front doors of the hospital. I hated the way they treated each other, as if other human beings didn’t matter in the slightest. I almost hated Jonas for telling me this good idea.

Jonas was waiting for me in the parking lot when I got off the first day, at just after two o’clock. He wore sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt to cover his face so no one walking by would see the abnormalities of his skin. When I got in the truck— his now precious white pickup that he swore he’d never get rid of— he took off his sunglasses and gave me a long, hard look.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Just a headache,” I said, having long since learned there was no reason to lie to him.

“How was it?”

“Hell,” I said. “Can we go?”

“I’m sorry, Chris. I just thought—”

I put up my hand and gave him a light smile. “I know what you thought. And I could have. I could have spent the whole day healing. You know, doing what I was made to do. I didn’t. I couldn’t possibly out myself like that. Someone would have noticed. Someone would have seen. Who the hell knows if I would have been able to walk away or simply passed out.”

Jonas reached over and took my hand while starting the truck with the other. “There are plenty of other jobs out there, love.” He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it.

I knew he had only been trying to do good. He knew I could heal all of those people. He didn’t know I couldn’t bring myself to heal them. Not because of the fact that I might collapse after a healing finished.

Because of who might come knocking at the Commune door.

I however couldn’t help myself.

As Jonas drove me home, I made a vow. I’d quit the job. One person and only one would benefit from my having been in that hospital. One person and only one would feel the healing touch of my hand.

I picked a number. I couldn’t have picked a worse number, but I picked at random and that’s how it ended up. I picked 606. I would go into the room and the lucky person from my random lottery would be healed by my hands. Since I’m a good manipulator, that person would never know I had been there. I wasn’t expecting a hard heal, like a cancer patient or a dying man. I was expecting something simple. Of course, as you may have figured out, nothing is ever as I expected.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I wrote, in one of the other versions of this story (the fictional version written during yet another three-year-stint, this time as an amnesiac which I will explain later, if I find I have the time and space), I first saw this girl on the television. I saw her on TV after the fact, after I entered her room the next day, after meeting a cab at the gas station near the highway, after walking the miles of dirt road alone in the early hours of the morning. I snuck out at just before dawn and called a cab from the gas station on Cima Road. The cabbie met me there and dropped me off at the Vegas Memorial Hospital. I stepped through the doorway, said hello to the girl at the reception desk. Then I went down the appropriate hallway and found my way to 606.

She was six-years-old, nearly seven, but she would not live to see her next birthday. Not unless I did something about it.

Her name was Sarai, after the biblical character who was supposedly the niece of Abraham. She didn’t know that. Her parents, strict Christians, would have told her eventually, given the time. Sarai was dying of a malignant brain tumor. She would be dead within the week. Her parents were in the room, praying over their daughter’s weakening body. Judging her condition by using the powers within my own mind, I knew I could not do it alone.

There was a pay phone outside. I’m not one for carrying a cell, though eventually I did get one years down the line. I went downstairs, pulled a couple of quarters from my pocket and dialed the Commune phone number. Yes, the Commune had a phone with an unlisted number, and Philip took care of all the bills and did what could be done to keep the number an absolute secret. Caller ID is a wonderful thing, so no one at the Commune answered the phone without knowing the number calling. Lucky for me, I had the foresight to write down the pay phone number to give to Jonas and the rest of the household, just in case I needed something while at work so I knew to call from this phone. Anyway, I called the number and Starch answered. I told him to hand the phone over to Jonas, who was already freaked out, because I’d gone missing.

“Where are you?”

I smiled at the worried tone in his voice. “I’m in Vegas at the hospital.”

He breathed a sigh of relief. “What are you doing there? I thought you quit? How’d you get there anyway?”

“I’ll explain later. Can you come over here?”

Without questioning my motives, Jonas said, “Sure,” and hung up the phone. He arrived thirty minutes later, and he drove like a bat out of hell to do so. Once again wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses to hide his amber eyes, Jonas found me standing outside the front door to the hospital. I hid myself from prying eyes, manipulating minds to keep myself from being seen. No one saw me pacing a rut in the concrete before the front door. No one, but Jonas.

He grabbed my shoulders and brought me to him. “You scared the life out of me,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, kissing his lips with all the vigor I could muster. “This was your idea.”

“Whaddya mean?” he asked, grasping my chin in his hand so he could get a good look at my face.

“You wanted me to get a job here,” I said.

He saw right through me, and for that I was grateful. I didn’t have to explain anything to him. “Okay,” he said. “Who is it?”

“A little girl,” I said. “I just want you to help me get out safely.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yes, Jonas,” I said. “I’m sure. But just her. No one else.”

He raised that brow ridge at me. “Just one?”

“Just one.”

Without another word, I led him inside, keeping him out of all the minds we came across. Jonas was hard enough to explain on a normal day. I’m sure every doctor in the hospital would have loved to have gotten their hands on him. Or me, for that matter.

“This one,” I said to Jonas as I stopped outside of a room. “Take a look.”

“Is it safe?” he asked.

I nodded. He knew what I could do with the minds of others. “Nobody will see you. Or me.”

Jonas peered into the room.

The girl was asleep in her bed. Her eyelids were sunken and purple, and her breathing shallow. Her parents were there, talking to a lone doctor, who explained the details of her illness to them, telling them these would be her final days. Her mother stood locked safely in her husband’s arms. The woman’s head was buried in the man’s shoulder. She was crying.

“I’ll make them go away,” I whispered to Jonas. I reached into the father’s mind and told him he needed to go make a phone call to his sister, the little girl’s aunt. The family needed to be told this was the end for their Sarai. The doctor said he would leave them be and all three exited the room together. When they were gone, the doctor to another room and the father and mother to the nearest elevator, I looked at Jonas. “Come on.”

He followed me into the room without a word.

She was once beautiful, little Sarai. She was now pale with dark eyelids and faintly blue lips. Her body was thin, and I could see the bones of her wrists protruding from beneath her skin. I sat on the edge of the bed while Jonas guarded the door, and I took one of those tiny wrists in my hand. Though her mind was a jumble of childish dreams and horrible nightmares, I picked through it.

What I saw in her mind broke my heart. Sarai never went to school but wanted to go. She had not learned to ride a bicycle without the training wheels but wanted to. Her parents gave her a yappy (my description, not hers) Pomeranian dog called Peanut whom she wanted to go home and play with, but she couldn’t. In many ways, she knew she was dying. Nobody told her this. She just knew. Her mind was aware of what happened to her body. Yet she still dreamed of a sunny day, green grass, and a small, yellow dog nipping at her heels.

It wasn’t right.

It wasn’t fair.

Alendra asked me if I had faith, and I said no. This was why. I didn’t lie to her when I said I’d seen reasonable men kill innocent children. I once saw a little girl’s head blown off by a policeman’s bullet. Though his panicked mind couldn’t see a little girl running at him, but an adult male, he still killed her. He shot her in the temple and took her life. His mind justified it by making her look like a young man. He murdered a child, took her life in a heartbeat. Without thought, I took his. That little girl was ten. Hell, I was twelve at the time. I got that particular little girl into that situation, and it was my fault she died. I won’t deny that. Looking at this other little girl, this Sarai, I knew I’d come to make amends for what I did all those years ago, when I got my friend murdered and killed a cop in return.

Holding Sarai’s hand in mine, I delved deep into her melting brain. The tumor was large, about the size of a golf ball. It affected the proper functioning of her brain, shutting down all her organs, and it would soon kill her. I took that away. It took all my effort to eliminate that tumor from a little girl, but I did. I closed my eyes and put my hands and brain to work. I focused all my energy on the one spot destroying her, and I cured her. Healed her.

When I opened my eyes, she looked up at me with deep blue pools of light. I swallowed against the darkness threatening to swallow me whole only because I wanted to hear her voice.