Aberrations (8 page)

Canavan had no idea what to say, and it shamed him.  She was pleading for some sign of human compassion, and it was just her lousy luck to meet with a man who could no more give it to her than he could cure the riot raging in her bloodstream.

“Will you do it?” she asked.

“Will I...?”

“Please.  I don’t want to be one of those things.”

He followed her gaze to his right hand and was dumbfounded to see his pistol still there, the slide locked back in the empty position.

“I don’t,” he said, and trailed off.  “It’s empty.  I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that.”  Her voice was muted in resignation.  “Stop saying you’re sorry.  It only makes it worse.”

He nodded.

A helicopter passed overhead, its blades a padded staccato rhythm.  Soon they would start hearing more gunfire, he realized.  He’d need to be ready to signal the rescue squads before they gunned him down like one of the dead.

She started to cough, and to Canavan it sounded like her insides were being shredded by knives.  The coughing went on for a long time, and when it subsided and she could once again lift her head to look at him, the deep valley between her breasts was flecked with black, clotted blood.

“Can’t you do it?  Please, Jim.  I don’t want to be one of them.  I can’t…”

Canavan forced himself to swallow, as though there was an almond was stuck in his throat.  His chest hurt when he breathed.  The shame of his own impotence in the face of this woman’s pathos at first left him speechless; but gradually, his feelings of sympathy gave way to a vague, unfocused anger.  He resented her for making him remember how lost and helpless he could feel.

He turned to leave.

“Wait!” she said.  “Please, don’t go.  Please.  God it hurts so bad.”

He knew it did, and he wasn’t without pity.  During their training, Canavan and his fellow Marines had been given the skinny on the necrosis filovirus and how it worked its way through the body, how it waged war in the bloodstream and gradually took complete control of the host body, leaving only a staggering train wreck of a virus bomb.

This woman was pretty far along.  Infection had probably happened as much as an hour ago.  Her temperature was spiking, leaving her face flushed in sweat.  Already the blood in her veins was coagulating.  A blueberry stain of cyanosis was forming around her mouth as her cells starved for want of oxygen.  Her eyes were milking over.  The coughing and the fluid in her lungs had affected her ability to speak, her voice taking on a whiskey-edged roughness that was becoming less and less human with each passing moment.

He wanted very much to leave her.

She began to cough again, the hacking shaking her like a rag doll in a dog’s mouth.  She seemed unable to control her movements.  A sudden sour odor of defecation reached him, and he knew she voided her bowels.  She didn’t have long to go.  Complete depersonalization would no doubt happen within the next ten minutes, probably less.

“Please, I need you to do this,” she said, barely able to lift her head now.  “One bullet.  Don’t you even have one bullet?  That’s all it would take.  Please, I hurt so bad.  I can feel it inside me.”

He shifted uneasily and the glass crunching beneath his boots sounded very loud in the sepulchral stillness of that ruined lobby.

She watched his feet.  She lifted her milky eyes and webs of wrinkles spread from the corners of her mouth.  Within the few minutes he’d been with her she seemed to age horribly, as though she was a peach left on the sidewalk and puckering in the sun.

And then her face cracked with rage as she screamed at him.

“Why won’t you fucking help me?  You bastard.  All I want is a bullet.”

Canavan had to force himself not to look away.  The look on her face, the baffled anger and desperation, brought images of his daughter into his head.  Once again he saw her slipping under the waves.  Heard her screaming, “Daddy!  Dad-dy!”

He realized he was crying and swiped the tears away angrily.  But the dying woman didn’t notice.  She had started to cough again.  When it subsided, she seemed detached and blunted, as though her mind had been scrambled and left her little more than a babbling idiot.

But he would not have told her about the depth of his self-loathing and shame, even if she had been capable of comprehending it.  Perhaps she had her own issues, her own regrets, and perhaps she too had failed someone who had depended on her for their very life; but there were some things that cut so deeply into a man’s conscience that they could not be mentioned to anyone.

“One bullet,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

She groaned once and his gaze fastened on her.  Her breathing slowed, her mouth working like a fish that has been left on the shore by a wave.  She tried to speak and couldn’t.  He watched her struggle through two final breaths.  There was a phlegmy rattle in her throat and her shoulders sagged, as though at rest after carrying a great weight.

Stillness descended on the lobby.

And then, slowly, laboriously, she climbed to her feet.  Her head drooped to one side, her mouth hanging open.  A fine patina of dust coated her lips.  She reached for him, but he did not move until she began to moan; and when that happened he slid the collapsible baton from its holster at the small of his back and snapped it open.

She never acknowledged the danger.  He sidestepped the woman and slapped her in the back of the head with the baton, knocking her forward onto her face.  But he was still dizzy from the concussion bombing and was uncertain on his feet, and the force of his swing also knocked him onto his hands and knees.

In the stillness that followed he heard something small and metallic drop to the floor.

He looked into the puddle of broken glass below him and saw a single, perfectly clean bullet glittering amongst the dusty rubble.  At first he didn’t know what to make of it, but gradually it came to him, the loose round he’d accidentally ejected while clearing a malfunction in his pistol during the fighting the evening before.  He’d forgotten it was there.

That one bullet.

He stared at it for a long time.  He could have helped her if he’d only had his wits about him.  It was like Sarah all over again.

The thought curled around his heart like a cold, wet vapor.

He heard the echo of automatic rifle fire in the near distance, like people clapping in the next room.

“Marines, stand and identify.”

“In here,” Canavan shouted.

Another Marine appeared in the doorway, his rifle at low ready.  “Identify,” he said.  “Are you wounded?”

It was a question Canavan didn’t quite know how to answer.

* * * * *

Fourteen months later, Canavan made his way up the front walk of a one story white wooden house in a Nashville suburb and rang the doorbell.  It had been raining all that evening and the air was thick with the damp scent of mown grass and pulsing with the sound of frogs.  He had researched a lot of dead leads, but now his hunt was at an end.  This was the house.

Paul Shepard was the spitting image of the smiling fat man Canavan had seen in Jessica’s photograph, though he had begun to gray at the temples and the bright smile had been replaced by nests of wrinkles around his eyes.  He invited Canavan into the entryway but no further, and the two men stood in a web of soft white light and shadow cast by three glass chandeliers in the hallway that led to the rest of the house.

“My twelve year old has the flu,” he said in a whisper.  “She just got to sleep about twenty minutes ago.”

Canavan nodded, though images of Sarah rose in his mind like corks that won’t stay submerged.

Then Canavan told him about San Antonio, and about his sister Jessica’s final minutes.  Shepard listened to it all without interrupting, the expression on his face never wavering.

A woman poked her head around the far corner of the hallway and said, “Paul?”

“It’s okay.  This is Mr. Canavan.  He was with Jessica when she died.”

The woman looked at Canavan without expression.  “I have Cokes and Dr. Pepper in the icebox,” she said.  She waited a beat.  “Scotch, if you’d like something stronger?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

She nodded and slipped back into the quiet darkness at the back of the house.

Shepard said, “You’ve come a long ways, Mr. Canavan.  Are you sure I can’t offer you something?”

“I’m fine, really.  I ought to be going.”

But before Canavan could leave, Shepard put a hand on his arm.  “A moment, Mr. Canavan.”

“Yes?”

“Fourteen months is a long time to spend looking for somebody.”

“Your sister wasn’t completely lucid there at the end,” Canavan said.  “She never told me anything about you.  Besides your name, I mean.  It took a while to find you.”

“I don’t mean that.  I want to know why you didn’t stop looking.  You didn’t have to come tell me this.  We all figured my sister was dead.  Deep down we knew it.  You must have realized that too.”

“I guess I figured I owed it to...I don’t know.  To her.”  Canavan’s eyes slid off of Shepard’s face.  “Maybe to myself.”

Shepard’s brown eyes seemed to soften, and the knots of veins that stitched his temples seemed to slacken.

He said, “Mr. Canavan, when my sister left for San Antonio she did so to escape our mother.  The woman was dying of cancer of the small intestine.  Have you ever known anyone with that particular condition?  She was in terrible pain.  There at the end she was living with Jessica because we couldn’t afford a hospice nurse and sometimes when I’d visit I’d see Jessica sitting on the curb in front of her house, crying her eyes out.  You could hear our mother moaning all the way out in the driveway.  I’ve sometimes asked myself if Jessica didn’t go down to San Antonio knowing what she’d find there.  I think maybe she found what she was looking for.”

Canavan just stared at him.

“Did you know, Mr. Canavan, that the Japanese have a word for the people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  Those people with the thousand yard stares.  Those people who cannot hold down a steady job or stand in a crowd without wanting to cower into a ball or even carry on a conversation that goes beyond a few inane pleasantries.  They called them Hibakusha.  It means sufferers.  Our word for it is survivors.  But I think their word seems much more fitting, don’t you?”

Canavan said, “Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. Shepard?”

“I think I just did, sir.  I think all survivors carry hell around with them like a turtle does his shell.”

Canavan thought about those words several hours later, as he washed his face in the sink of a gas station bathroom south of Nashville.

In his hand he held the bullet that had dropped from his pocket back in San Antonio.  He turned it round and round in his fingers, feeling its oily smoothness that was as slick as bacon grease against his skin.  Out the window to his left he could see the wind gusting across the station’s roof shingles, feathering the rain off the corner flashing.  His mind was crowded with images of the living and the dead and those in between.  The screams of the innocents wouldn’t stop.

He looked down into his lap and studied the single bullet and the pistol that rested there.  Then he fed the bullet into the breach.

The Hounds of Love

by Scott Nicholson

Dexter licked his lips. His stomach was shivery. October was brown and yellow and crackly and tasted like candy corn. He knelt by the hutch that Dad had built back before the restraining order was filed.

He touched the welt under his eye. The wound felt like a busted plum and stung where the flesh had split open. Mom had accidentally left her thumb sticking out of her fist when she hit him. She hadn’t meant to do it. Usually, she was careful when she punched him.

But one good thing about Mom, she didn’t hold a grudge for long. She’d turned on the television and opened a beer, and after the next commercial break had forgotten all about him. It was easy to sneak out the back door.

Dexter poked some fresh blades of grass through the silver squares of wire. The rabbit flashed its buck teeth and wrinkled its nose before clamping down on the grass and hopping to the back of the hutch. It crouched in the shadows and chewed with a sideways gnashing of its jaws. The black eyes stared straight ahead. They looked like doll’s eyes, dead and cold and stupid.

Dexter’s stomach was still puke-shivery. He opened the cage and snaked his hand inside. The rabbit hopped away and kept chewing. Dexter stroked the soft fur between the rabbit’s eyes.

Gotta tell ‘em that you love ‘em
.

He snatched the leathery ears and pulled the rabbit forward into the light. He held it that way for a moment, like a magician dangling a trick above a hat, as it spasmed and kicked its four white legs. This was October, after all, the month when anything could happen. Even stupid old magic, if you dressed like a dork in a wizard’s cape for Halloween.

Dexter looked over his shoulder at the house. Mom was most likely passed out by now. After all, it was four o’clock in the afternoon. But Dexter had learned from his dad that it never hurt to be paranoid.

He tucked the rabbit under his windbreaker and crossed the backyard into the woods. When he reached the safety of the trees, he took the leash from his pocket. This was the tricky part. With his tongue hanging out from concentration, he squeezed the rabbit between his knees.

He pressed harder until he heard something snap and the rabbit’s back legs hung limp. He almost puked then, almost wept, but his first tear rolled across the split skin beneath his eye and he got angry again. “I’ll teach you better than to love me,” he whispered, his breath ragged.

It was the rabbit’s fault. The dumb creature shouldn’t have tried to love him. The rabbit was trying to get him, to play the trick on him, to make him care. Well, he wasn’t going to belong to nothing or nobody.

Dexter used both hands to attach the leather collar. The collar had belonged to his little redbone hound. Uncle Clem let Dexter have the pick of the litter. Dexter had chosen the one with the belly taut from milk that wagged its thin rope of a tail whenever Dexter patted its head. Dexter had named it Turd Factory. Well, stupid old Turd Factory didn’t need the collar anymore.