Divine_Scream (17 page)

Well, these ponderings were pointless. Jared would need to explain himself when she got to the Bayou Cat. Kaitlin was certain that’s where he was. On the phone call, the voice in the background clearly said “muffuletta,” and there wasn’t any other restaurant nearby that served those sandwiches.

Another roadblock came into view. Police cars. Uniformed men impatiently directing traffic around blockades.

“Fudge,” Kaitlin muttered. If she missed Jared she’d never forgive herself. After a quick reroute down the street she found a parking spot along the curb. Quickly she grabbed her purse, killed the engine, and got out. The weather was peculiar, damper than usual. Faint traces of steam wiggled up from cracks in the sidewalk. Kaitlin got a bad feeling all at once and considered, for the first time, whether coming to look for Jared was a good idea. After all, wasn’t it always the person trying to help a bad situation the one who ended up stabbed or killed?

Keep scaring yourself, but you know you won’t leave him until he’s safe, so might as well knock it off.

She slowed down for a family arguing near the bus stop. The man had a bloody gash, which the woman tried to delicately inspect.

“Goddamn it, I said don’t touch it!” The man shoved her away. “I told you I’m fine. I couldn’t breathe for a second and now I’m fine. Shit! I’m not a kid. You always treat me like a goddamn infant.”

“Go to hell, Frank. I was checking because I care.”

“Get off my dick, you nag. Go and take that rat-faced daughter of yours with you.”

The little girl stuck to her mother’s leg and buried her face in the flower patterned folds of her dress. The woman’s mouth was open and quivering with shock and rage. “Don’t talk to her like that. What in the hell, Frank?”

Kaitlin gave them a wide berth. “Excuse me, sorry,” she said in a low voice.

The man and woman remained quiet as she passed, but as soon as Kaitlin got a few steps away she heard a growl and a scuffling of feet.

“I said leave me alone!”

He pushed the woman and child back. The little girl dropped to the sidewalk and the woman crashed into a chain link fence.

Kaitlin whipped around. “Are you kidding me?”

The man’s pale eyes burned at her. “This is private. Go on. We’re done here. Take that fake ass red hair with you.”

“Fake?” Kaitlin almost lost it. She was always accused of that, but her scarlet hair was natural. “You need to leave right now buddy, or I’ll call the cops.”

“Oh,” he said, taking a few steps toward her, throwing his arms left and right. “You may get one to come calling in say… uh, a
few weeks
, but go right ahead and call, sugar-tits.”

Kaitlin met the end and did it without thinking. Her purse flew out, and perhaps halfway there to its mark, this guy’s big stubbly stupid shitface, she regretted her choice.

But.

It was already done.

And maybe, not such a big regret.

Her strike connected and the man’s head twisted around and his body followed in a punch-drunk ballet. The purse’s center seam split and everything spilled out. Compact. Wallet. Grape bubble gum. Lip gloss. Tampon case. And something opalescent—when it struck the ground, two honey colored roots burst free and anchored into the concrete. A flake of stone nicked her arm and peeled some flesh away.

“Ouch!” she yelled.

The man staggered back, holding his swollen eye. “Goddamn ouch?
Ouch
? I’m gonna yank your head off, woman.”

The bulbs Banch had given her—something Kaitlin had planned to eventually throw in her dish of rocks and pebbles at home—swelled with orange and green stalks that shot up and shoved the man into the woman. Both flew back to sit on the sidewalk with the child.

“The hell?” the woman shouted.

“I don’t know!” the man shouted back. “Let’s get!”

The trees grew around Kaitlin in a ring shape. Her impulse was to throw her arms up, but the trees weren’t really growing, but instead
appearing,
and as her hand lashed out in front of her, the trees formed around it—she pulled back but two fingers caught inside the trunk. The inside became denser, squeezed her ring and pinkie finger with an ungodly strength that became something evil—it hurt so bad she chewed into her lip and couldn’t even wail. The flesh, bone, and muscle blew up inside the tree and grisly bits spattered at her feet.

Kaitlin smacked against the other trees forming behind her. She held up her hand and saw the torn, bloody sockets where her two fingers had once been. The air blazed with midnight diamonds and dark starbursts that connected, married, and brought complete black. Her blouse bunched up her back as she slid down the tree trunks and passed out.

When Kaitlin opened her eyes her gaze was pointed at the redness of bone, blood, and sinew on her shoes and the concrete sidewalk below. She tucked her bleeding hand under her arm and felt faint.

Banch had told her to stay still when using the bulbs, hadn’t she? But Kaitlin didn’t—wouldn’t—have ever believed those bulbs magical. She thought Banch was giving her some kind of mystical hippie meditation instructions or something. What in the world was going on here?

“There is no magic,” she said, in spite of the foreign trees flexing around her. It was obvious she’d inhaled some of that toxic gas the terrorists were using—it must have been that steam she saw wiggling up from the sidewalk.
You’re a first-rate fool, Kait.
This was a convincing hallucination though—as well as the pain pounding in her exposed knuckles. Maybe she really had been injured, just not in the fashion she’d seen?

She bent closer to look at the pieces of her fingers on the ground and without any warning the red and pale bits burst into flame. The fire was aggressive, like it had met with gasoline, and it expanded from where the mess had been and reached the perimeter of the trees. Kaitlin grabbed onto the trunks and started to climb. Her gory, shattered hand painted the beige bark as she went. It hurt like nothing she’d ever experienced before. She locked an arm around one of the thin trunks and peered down. The fire climbed with a steady flow of licking blue and white flames.

If this is a hallucination, I can just fall into that fire—it can’t hurt me.

Heat waves blew back her hair, beads of sweat immediately covered her forehead, and she shook away that thought. “Hell with that,” she said, and climbed higher.

Something struck her shoulder and pushed her down. She fought to keep hold on the trees. Looking up, she saw several other branches snap off as the trees grew together at the top. Four other branches fell down past her. She tried to flatten her body but couldn’t—they struck her—she slipped—her legs dropped into the fire.

“No!” she wailed and scrambled up. The fire made a tremendous fluttering sound, as though it might die out, but instead it resumed its climb toward her, this time faster.

Another branch dropped and walloped the top of her head. She got a view of racing silver streams of pain and the accompanying fire below. She realized she’d let go of the trunks completely and held on with only her thighs. She started to slide and threw her arms back around the trees. Her legs stung as though badly sunburned, but not horrible considering direct exposure to the fire. She could deal with that pain, but as she scaled upward, the agony in her injured hand became a person of its own: raw, unrelenting, vindictive, and incapable of caring.

She was more than half way to the top now. A voice jabbered on from just outside the ring of trees.

“Well, how do we get in? There’s smoke!”

“It’s a chemo-dimensional reaction. She must have moved before it was done. Why did she use the bulbs? The Assembly isn’t even here!”

It sounded like Jared and maybe that Banch woman. Kaitlin’s mind, again, was probably doing naked jumping jacks, but still, she played along, even if this was a hallucination. “Jared? Is that you? I’m almost to the top!” she cried out.

“Keep going!” the woman’s voice replied.

Kaitlin craned her neck and was slammed in the face with another falling branch.

She lost hold and fell.

Fire engulfed her completely. But something tingled around her body, especially in the two open wounds in her fingers—they pulsed in the bare sockets almost like an SOS and suddenly the fire sucked into the ground and the trees vanished.

Kaitlin stood there on the sidewalk, clothing lightly singed and her skin feeling like it’d spent the day at a nude beach with no sun block. The air around her hung with the odors of burnt paper and sweat. She hadn’t realized it until now, but she was weeping. Jared bounded over and caught her.

Then everything went dark.

The people affected by the Gilded Scream had to be shooed away. They set up a makeshift bed for Kaitlin with t-shirts and black fabric cushions from the bench in the restaurant’s lobby. All were arranged on the sidewalk with exacting care. Many offered to drive her to the hospital, but one man insisted on calling his brother-in-law who drove an ambulance for a living. Other emergency calls were placed too. The bleeding in Kaitlin’s hand wasn’t completely under control at the moment, but much better than before. Thoroughly cleaned and bandaged, one of the gilded now kept her hand elevated.

“How did she not catch on fire? Those flames were so intense.” Jared moved some crimson locks of hair away and touched his friend’s flushed face. She slept a restless sleep.

Banch watched the street like an indomitable hawk. “The fire wasn’t completely resident in this world. The chemo-dimensional reaction occurred by the coupling of her flesh and the trees. Two different groups of matter shared the same residency. She moved into the trees’ space and that set off the reaction, causing a fire, which then lost all residence when she fell into it. It could have started a minor disturbance paradigm, but thankfully it did not.”

“Makes sense,” Jared muttered, shaking his head.

Banch silently said something—it sounded more like whispered singing than just mere words.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Since we’ve lost time and our edge with the Assembly, I’m working out one of the new screams I learned from my twin.”

“I can take the car and drive to the beach,” Jared told her. “I just need to make sure Kaitlin gets on her way to the hospital first.”

“It wouldn’t matter. The Assembly will be reestablished very soon. You would have to leave right now and there’s still a chance of them intercepting you at the beach. Assuming they asked the Silent Kings for the Lung Spike as their second grant, their expense account has not run out. They still have one grant left, and I believe they’ll use it for direct access to the beach through a corridor shadow. They’ve been avoiding going anywhere near the beach since the water scares them like nothing else, but they’ll face their fears if they know they’re going to lose you.”

Kaitlin stirred and Jared leaned in closer. “Easy Kait, easy, we’re getting you help.”

“Knew the fire… was a hallucination,” she said and smacked her dry lips. “Sucked in poisonous gas.
Terrorists
.”

“You’re safe now.”

Banch resumed practicing her new scream. The ginger-haired accountant holding Kaitlin’s wounded hand in the air winced and supported his arm with his free hand.

“I can take it,” Jared offered.

“No!” the man said, his eyes wide with disappointment behind the lenses of his glasses.

“I got this. Trust me. My muscles are only a bit tired.”

“You’ve held it a long time. Let me take over and you can come back in ten minutes.” Jared noticed the man’s reluctance and added, “I don’t want you to drop it.”

In sullen agreement, the accountant nodded, and Jared gently took Kaitlin’s wrist.

“I’ll be back soon,” the man said. “Going for Motrin in my car. Do you need anything?”

“No thanks.”

He got up, and with one more thoughtful look back, shuffled across the street to the parking lot.

“Who were you just talking to?” Kaitlin asked. She had come more fully awake now.

“Oh,” said Jared, “just someone who helped us out.”

Her eyes darted around. “Don’t see anyone.”

“Kait,” he said softly, “why the hell did you come here?”

Her eyes narrowed. “What has gotten into you, Jared?”

“Wait up, let’s talk about you. Coming out here and almost getting yourself killed. What? Just in the name of babysitting me? You wouldn’t have gotten hurt if you just listened to me and stayed put.”

Kaitlin closed her eyes. For a few minutes he thought she’d slipped off again, but when her eyelids drew up once more, clarity was there, greater than it had ever been. “Jared, you’re my best friend. I love you more than most of my own blood relatives—”

“STOP IT!” he shouted, and Kaitlin flinched at his volume. “You will
never
love me. Okay? You’ve only made my life harder.”

“Just calm down for a second—”

“Just stay out of my life from now on,” he said, looking her levelly in the eyes. “I don’t need your help anymore.”

“And how about her?” Kaitlin looked to Banch, who was doing a poor job of appearing to not listen to their discussion. “That’s how it is?”

Jared seethed. “I need no one, okay? Nobody.”

A moment later the whine of an ambulance rounded the street. Dozens of the gilded came out waving their hands and pointed at Kaitlin, making it impossible for the ambulance to miss her.

Jared didn’t say anything else to Kaitlin. He spoke with the paramedics and gave them her purse, but that was all. In his mind the same idea kept repeating,
goodbye, so long, farewell, later...
His eyes watered at the insistent mantra. As the EMTs put Kaitlin into the ambulance on the stretcher, he saw her eyes watering too. It wasn’t like her to cry.

Better to hurt now, my old friend, my first love,
thought Jared.
If I escape today, I’ll be gone in a few months, at best, and this will be easier.

The doors of the ambulance shut.

Forgive me, Kaitlin.