The Colour of Death (2 page)

There is a moment of eerie calm.

Then shotgun shouts, “The fuckin’ gook’s hitting the alarm,” steps forward and fires both barrels.  Nathan squeezes his eyes shut just in time.  When he opens them again the clerk has disappeared behind the counter.  Blood drips like crimson treacle off a stack of cartons behind where he had stood.

“What do we go now?” Pistol says, agitated, pumped.

Shotgun leans across and empties the cash register.  “Get out of here, I guess.”  As shotgun moves for the door Nathan notices he has the same tattoo on his arm:  a cobra coiled round a strange crucifix.

“What about them?” Pistol says, turning suddenly to Nathan and his family, who are standing in a line:  Mum first, then Dad, Alice and him — a firing squad in reverse.

Shotgun shrugs as he opens the door.  “Killed one pig, may as well kill ’em all.  I’ll get the car running.”  As Pistol raises the gun and flexes the muscle in his forearm Nathan watches the coiled cobra tattoo writhe into life.

“You don’t need to do this,” Nathan’s father pleads with an urgent calm.  “I’m a doctor.  I might be able to save the clerk—”

Pistol’s hand shakes, making the cobra dance.  “Shut the fuck up,” he snarls.  “You can’t save anyone.  You’re not worth a fart in hell.  You’re not chosen.  You’re not one of us.  You’re all pigs.”  At that moment Pistol looks directly at the boy.  Despite his hood, the angle of the light catches the dilated pupils of the man’s bloodshot eyes and Nathan knows he is going to kill them.  As Nathan’s numb fingers drop the comic book to the floor his last instinct is to turn to his mother—

The first shot rings out.

The boy feels the bullet hit him.

Followed by searing, unbearable pain.

Then nothing.

Until Nathan becomes conscious of a young cop kneeling over him.  The brass badge on his navy uniform says Portland Police.  “C’mon, son.  Let her go now.  We’ll take care of this.  Come with me.”

As if in a hideous dream Nathan looks down and realizes he is cradling Alice in his lap.  Her eyes stare up at him but they are as lifeless as a doll’s.  There is a bullet hole in her chest, a well of blood so deep and dark it looks black.  He remembers their argument in the car and feels sick.  “She’s my sister,” he says numbly.

He turns to his parents but the cop pulls him to his feet.  “Don’t look, son.  No good can come of that.”  As the boy stands, the policeman examines him.  He is covered in blood but none of it is his.  “You weren’t hit.  Why weren’t you hit?”  He detects an almost accusing tone in the cop’s disbelief.  Nathan feels no relief at being unharmed, only confusion.

How can he still be alive?

“Come with me,” the policeman says.  “There’s nothing you can do for your folks, but you’re safe now.”  The cop opens the door and the boy flinches when the doorbell rings one more time.  There’s a small crowd outside and police cars with bright flashing lights.  He squints, dazzled and dazed.  He hears his name being called and turns in the direction of the familiar voice.  In his confusion, watching her run toward him, he thinks for one blissful second that his mother has survived.  Then he realizes it’s her sister, Aunt Samantha, and the sweet illusion disappears forever.  She sweeps him up in her arms and squeezes him to her.

“You’re OK now,” she says.  “We’ll look after you.”  Over her shoulder Nathan sees his uncle Howard.  His face is white with shock and he looks angry.

The cop leans in close.  “What exactly happened in there, son?”

The boy buries his face in his aunt’s coat.  Her perfume reminds him of his mother.  “I don’t know,” he says.  “Two men came in with guns.  They killed the clerk but I don’t know what happened after that.  I can’t remember.”  He starts crying, big painful sobs.  “I can't remember anything.”

“It’s OK, Nathan,” his aunt soothes.  “It doesn’t matter.  All that matters now is you’re safe.”

But she’s wrong.  It
does
matter.  Knowing how his parents and sister died, and understanding why he didn’t die with them, matters more to him than anything else in the entire world.

Part One

A Memory of Dying

Chapter 1

Portland, Oregon  —  Nineteen years later

It was June, summer in the city, and the night breeze felt cool on her skin as the young woman hurried through the quiet streets.  An ambulance siren rang out and she could see its wailing sound unfurl before her eyes:  a ribbon of reds and blues that flared across the dark sky.  The alien city teemed with unfamiliar sounds, smells and sights that threatened to overwhelm her senses.  Clouds obscured the moon and stars but the sodium street lamps held back the velvet darkness, revealing ghosts flickering in her peripheral vision.  To keep them at bay, she looked straight ahead and walked down the middle of the sidewalk.  Clutching the heart-shaped locket at her neck with one nervous hand, she stroked her cropped hair with the other, unconsciously feeling for the missing blond curls she’d cut off to alter her appearance.  Despite everything that had happened she yearned to forget the last few days and return to a state of blissful ignorance, homesick for the once-idyllic world she had fled.

Heading for the bus station, she passed houses with trees and yards, and began to relax.  It was less enclosed here and quieter, as if everyone save her was asleep.  Even the ghosts.  She looked up at the sky and realized it would be dawn in a few hours.  She smiled with relief and her face — sun-freckled, with razor-sharp cheekbones and pale haunted eyes — lit up.  Perhaps she could survive out here among the children of men.  She’d take a bus down the coast to California, to the place she’d been born, and start again.  Her mother had said it was beautiful, that you could reinvent yourself down there and become whoever you wanted to be.

A police car approached, the sound of its engine a symphony of greens.  Panicked, she gripped the locket tighter and backed into the side alley of the nearest house, hiding in the shadows.  As the car disappeared into the night she sighed and leaned against the wall.  Suddenly, she arched her back and jumped away, as if scalded by the red brick.  The dark, silent house looked no different to the others — two stories, shuttered windows and a red-tiled roof — but she had learned how deceptive appearances could be.  Tentatively, she rested her palm flat against the wall, like a doctor placing a stethoscope on a patient’s chest.  Her face was sickly pale now, as white as the moon that made a sudden appearance through the dark scudding clouds.  Every instinct screamed at her to get far away from here, as fast as she could.  But a small internal voice counseled her to conquer her fear and make
it
flee.  Using her hand like a divining rod she let it lead her along the wall.  All the time her terror grew — along with the certainty that she couldn’t turn back.  The night was still but she could hear things, terrible things, and she could see…

She squeezed her eyelids shut but was unable to close her mind’s eye.  Looking down at the clear stone path, she stepped over something visible only to her, and then came to a solid wooden door.  It was locked.  Sick and frantic, she knew this was the moment of no return.  Fight or flight.  Run away or break down that door.  Looking around in panic, she noticed a truck in the large carport.  Beside it was a pile of logs.  And an axe.

As if in a trance she picked it up and tested the keenness of the blade.  Her father would have scolded her for letting it get so blunt but it would suffice.  The thought of him converted her fear to rage and hardened her resolve.  Wielding the axe, she braced herself, took a deep breath and swung it as hard as she could.  She slammed the blade into the door with practiced, powerful blows that belied her slender frame.  With each impact she willed the sound of rending wood to drown out the screaming in her head.  Stepping through the splintered door she found herself at the top of mildewed stone steps, which led down into the dark underbelly of the house.  She shivered, despite her exertions and the warm night.

More cries, some angry, some fearful, echoed in the dark but it was hard to know if they were real or coming from inside her own head.  At the bottom of the stairs a dank passageway greeted her, illuminated by an infernal red glow.  Like a lost soul entering hell, she walked toward its source, the sounds growing louder with each step.  She passed a generator flanked by two cans of kerosene and a red wall light, then the corridor widened into a room walled with vertical wooden slats.  It took a second to realize she was surrounded by cages, occupied by hollow-eyed young women.  As they turned to her, half in terror, half in hope, she saw they were even younger than she was, little more than girls.  She raised her axe and smashed the slatted, padlocked doors to tinder.  “Run,” she shouted, as she dragged them out of the cages and pushed them to the exit.  “Get out of here.”

Shepherding the last dazed girls down the corridor, she heard guttural male voices cut angrily through the screams.  She turned to see two men running toward her.  The nearest was bald, stocky and breathing hard, his face contorted with rage.  In the far gloom two more men were descending a stairway from the house above.  All carried guns and spoke a language she didn’t understand.  Their unfamiliar sounds tasted strange on her tongue.  She dropped the heavy axe and ran for the exit.  The sound of the first gunshot flashed crimson before her eyes, like a blood vessel bursting.  The second shot hit her, grazing her temple and spinning her against the concrete wall of the narrow passage.  Dazed and gritting her teeth against the pain, she got to her feet and stumbled past the generator.  The impact of the third shot sounded — and looked — different:  metallic.

The kerosene cans
.

Time paused for a second, followed by an explosion that sent a kaleidoscope of colors flashing before her eyes.  A ball of intense heat knocked her to the ground.  Then the colors disappeared.  Replaced by black.

Chapter 2

A few miles across town, Dr. Nathan Fox woke with a start and found himself in a dimly lit room, slumped in a chair, back aching.  For a moment he didn’t know where he was.  It sure as hell wasn’t his apartment.  Then he saw the bed and remembered he was in one of the private rooms at Oregon University Research Hospital.  This had to be the first time he had spent the whole night in a hospital since his years as a medical student.

Tonight wasn’t work, though.  This was personal.

He stood and studied the patient lying in the bed.  In repose, with his eyes closed, the man’s gaunt face looked relaxed and at peace.  In the low light Fox could almost imagine he was well, except for the sound of his ragged breathing, which told Fox that the pneumonia was now in its final stages.  Since the antibiotics had been stopped the disease had advanced rapidly.  Pneumonia hadn’t been the real killer though:  just the merciful coup de grâce.  Fox stroked the patient’s clammy forehead and the man’s eyes flickered open, stared blankly for a moment then closed again.  At least the morphine was minimizing his discomfort.

A sigh made Fox turn to the woman lying on the couch beside the bed.  Like Fox, she too had been keeping vigil all night and as he straightened her blanket he was glad she was now sleeping.  The glow through the shutters told him it was almost dawn.  Yawning, he flexed his legs and checked his watch.  His first outpatient would be here in a few hours and he welcomed the distraction of work.  First, though, he needed to go for a run in the hospital grounds and wake himself up.  He met the senior nurse in the corridor.

“You OK, Dr. Fox?”  She instinctively reached out a comforting hand but, equally instinctively, he shifted his body, subtly evading her touch.  “Can I get you anything?”

He smiled.  “Thanks, Kate.  Just look after Samantha when she wakes.  I’ll be back to check on both of them but page me if anything changes.”

A little over two hours later — after a run around the grounds, a shower and a hot milky coffee with two sugars in the hospital canteen — Fox was sitting behind his desk in his small office in the psychiatric and neurology department with his first patient of the morning.  Fox enjoyed the variety of his work.  Although he treated outpatients here at the main hospital he spent much of his week at Tranquil Waters, the hospital’s specialist residential psychiatric clinic, and still managed to squeeze in time for police forensic work.  This morning’s patient had been on Fox’s latest experimental program and the man’s first words buoyed Fox’s spirits:

“I can’t tell you how much the treatment’s helped me, Doc.  You’ve given me my life back.”

“I’m pleased, John.  Really pleased.”  Fox contrasted the beaming young man sitting across from him with the desperate, haunted patient he had met six months ago.  Then, John Fontana had been tyrannized by obsessive-compulsive disorder triggered by spending several years in a religious cult.  Fox prided himself on his professional objectivity but detested cults and the damage they caused.  John’s form of OCD didn’t involve manifest behavioral compulsions but obsessive repugnant thoughts (he was convinced he was possessed by the devil), which made it notoriously difficult to treat with behavioral therapy.  The condition had stopped John working, sleeping or having a social life — or any kind of life — for almost five years.  Finally, after every other treatment had failed, he had joined Fox’s experimental program.  Fox scanned John’s notes and went through a checklist of questions.  “How would you rate your anxiety levels now?”

“Overall, I’d say they’d halved, down from a ten to a five.  I even have moments when I actually forget about my OCD.  I got my old job back, too.”

“You’re working again.  That’s great.  How’s your sleep?  Still need Valium or chlorpromazine?”

“Nope.  My sleep’s fine.  Just taking the Prozac and risperidone you prescribed.”