The Scrubs (6 page)

Keeler didn’t like how Rebecca finished her sentence with ‘yet,’ like his death at the hands of Jeter’s twisted mind was a foregone conclusion and it was just a matter of time before the inevitable happened.
 
Maybe that was the point, though.
 
If he wasn’t dead, he could get out before he ended up in Rebecca’s condition.
 
Slim hopes by any measure, but it was something to cling to.

“Michael,” Rebecca said.
 

“Yes.”

“You have more important things to do.
 
You need to find the boy.
 
Can’t you hear him?” she asked.
 
“He needs you.”

Keeler didn’t hear anything, except a humming like a florescent light on its way out.
 
But within a few seconds, the tone changed.
 
He wasn’t sure if he was just adjusting to its sound or whether the sound was changing.
 
The noise shifted from an amorphous frequency to something more recognizable.
 
A child cried, its anguish a distant whisper on the breeze.
   
Instantly, its pain was Keeler’s pain.
 
He turned his head in the direction of the sobs.

“Go to him, Michael,” Rebecca said.
 
“Take him from this place.
 
Give him a life away from here.”

He turned back to Rebecca.
 
He went to say something to her, but found he didn’t have the words.
 
Instead, he took a hold of her cold, lifeless hands, drew close and kissed her on her stitched mouth.
 
He wanted her to enjoy a piece of beauty in this world of ugliness.
 
It didn’t feel like he was kissing a woman six years dead.
 
Her lips were cool, but they were soft.

Obviously, Rebecca didn’t react to his affection.
 
If he thought he’d been blessed with Prince Charming’s powers of arousal, his answer came in the form of her static condition.
 
He didn’t need her to throw her arms around him and go wild.
 
The movement of her lips to meet his when he kissed her or the merest of creases at the corners of her mouth to show a smile would have been enough.
 
But Prince Charming didn’t raise the dead, only the sleeping.
 
He stepped back from her.
 

“Thank you,” she said after a long moment.

She went to say something else, but Keeler stopped her by putting a finger to her bound lips.

“I know,” he said.

Keeler didn’t give her a chance to say anything else.
 
He turned and hopscotched his way back across the bodies to dry land.
 
Confident steps marked his return trip.
 
He didn’t miss a beat.
 
Before racing off in the direction of the child, he turned back to gaze at Rebecca perched on top of her fellow victims.
 
He smiled at her.

“Good luck,” she said.
 
“Remember one thing, Michael.
 
Even though Jeter isn’t here, he has great power.
 
Be careful of your thoughts.
 
He will read them and use them against you.”

As soon as she finished speaking, the pond bubbled.
 
The bodies supporting Rebecca lost their buoyancy and they slowly sank below the surface.
 
Rebecca descended below the water with majestic elegance.
 
By the time he’d retrieved his shirt and slipped it on, only rose-colored water marked her presence, but that reverted to a cobalt blue in three rapid blinks.
 
In a moment, it looked as if his encounter with Rebecca and Jeter’s other victims had never happened.
 
Keeler wished he could mark the occasion by saying something, but the words didn’t come, so he set off at a jogging pace towards the child.

Beyond the trees that circled the lake, the lost boy’s sobs intensified, marking his location with greater clarity.
 
The cries were coming from beyond a rise in the neighboring field.
 
There was no north, south, east or west here, but Keeler knew one thing.
 
He was heading farther away from the Rift.

Before Keeler reached the top of the rise, fatigue got the better of him.
 
The thick air clogged his lungs and the waist-high meadow grass eroded his strength, forcing him to his knees.
 
The dry, coarse blades of grass grazed against his face, nicking his flesh.
 
He clambered to his feet to avoid the cuts, but couldn’t remain upright.
 
He bent over, resting his hands on his knees while he sucked in lungs full of syrupy air that clung to his throat on the way down.
 
He turned back towards the tree-shrouded pond.
 
He’d covered a pitiful distance.
 
If he called it two miles, he’d be rounding up and he seemed no closer to the lost child.
 
The boy’s cries still carried lightly on the air, seemingly tens of miles distant.
 
He wanted to lie down and sleep, but he feared if he did, by the time he awoke, the crying would have stopped and the boy would be lost forever.
 

“You’re gonna have to wait a little while longer, kid,” Keeler panted waiting for his strength to return.
 
“I need to rest.”

Suddenly, the wind gusted with an intensity that flattened the grass and shoved him back, threatening to toss him on his arse.
 
A scream led the charge on the angry air and Keeler couldn’t deny what he’d heard.

“Save me!
  
Don’t let him hurt me.”

The pain in the boy’s plea refueled Keeler.
 
He wouldn’t let Jeter hurt this child.
 
He broke into a sprint.
 

“I’m coming,” he shouted, but thick air in his tired lungs forced his words to spill from his mouth as a hoarse whisper.

Pounding across the meadow, his legs looked for any excuse to buckle, but the frightened boy spurred him on.
 
He wouldn’t let him suffer.
 
He hated Jeter at that moment with an intensity that ignited within him, fueling his tired limbs.
 
Saving the boy wasn’t his job, but to hell with it.
 
Lefford and Allard deserved nothing.
 
They weren’t worth saving, but the boy was innocent.
 
If one person deserved something, it was the boy and if O’Keefe didn’t like it, well, fuck him.

When he crested the rise, another field stretched ahead of him, except this one sloped gently towards an immense forest that stretched beyond the horizon to his left and right.
 
Navigating his way around could take years.
 
Not that he had to.
 
The child’s cries slipped from between the trees directly ahead of him.
 

Not another damn field
, he thought.
 
It had taken him at least thirty minutes to make it this far and he was looking at the same distance again, but this time, he’d be running on tired legs.
 
The boy cried out again.

“I’m coming,” he repeated, more to himself than to the boy.
 
He repeated his promise over and over until it became a mantra that drove him forward.

Finally, when Keeler reached the edge of forest, his legs gave out and he crashed to the ground.
 
He struggled to all fours.
 
Blood trickled down his forearms from multiple grass cuts.
 
The meadow grass had been sharp enough to cut his trousers.
 
Sweat found every laceration, igniting his wounds and leaving them to smolder.
 
He crawled from the meadow into the cool of the shaded forest.

“Please,” the boy whined.
 
The single word stretched into a sentence.

Keeler clawed his way up a redwood to get to his feet.
 
He went to take a step but hesitated.
 
A curious thought crossed his mind.
   
Had Rebecca lied to him?
 
After all, she was a talking corpse, nothing more than a puppet for Jeter’s amusement.
 
So who was pulling her strings?
 
Jeter.
 
The hypothesis carried more than a little weight.
 
This world was his invention populated by the people he’d slaughtered.
 
Wouldn’t it be just up Jeter’s dark, twisted alley to manipulate him into a trap?
 
Was there even a boy in here to find?
 
Keeler shook his head in disgust.
 

As if Jeter could read Keeler’s mind, the boy yelled out again.
 
The crying had changed.
 
No longer was it light and vapory.
 
It had intensified, the tortured pleas bouncing off the trees only to be reflected back on themselves.
 
Keeler’s earlier bravado to retrieve the child at any cost leaked from him.
 
This had to be a trap, but the boy’s despair sounded so real.
 
How could it be manufactured?
 
Keeler looked up, staring between the branches at the fragments of hazy sky sliding by.
 
He glanced back at the endless fields.
 
He wasn’t getting out of here.
 
He knew that, so what did it matter?
 
Jeter wanted him to find this boy for some reason, so why not do as he was told?
 
That was what a good inmate did.
 
He followed the rules and if he did it well, the powers that be might let him go early.
 
Keeler would find the boy and maybe Jeter would finish him off just that little bit more quickly in return.

“Help me,” the boy sobbed.

“There in a minute,” Keeler called back and broke into a run.
 

As he darted between the trees, the child’s pleas grew louder.
 
Even though the trees deflected the boy’s cries, Keeler still managed to zero in on his location.
 
He didn’t seem far away now.
 
A wall of unkempt juniper seemed to be the only barrier between Keeler and the boy.
 
He could have gone around the juniper, but he didn’t bother and hurled himself through the obstruction.

He penetrated the hedge with ease but lost his balance and crashed to his knees.
 
His fall winded him, dissolving his vision to blobs of primary color and he struggled to take in his surroundings.
 
He tried blinking away the confusion, but confusion remained.
 
Instead of kneeling on a blanket of woodland leaves, he was kneeling on well-trodden industrial carpeting.
 
The boy’s screams were nowhere to be heard.
 
A security alarm wailed instead.
 
Keeler rose to his feet and stared into the faces of two-dozen frightened people.
 
They edged away from him.
 
He raised his hands to calm them, but found a sawn off, double-barreled shotgun in his grasp.
 

He turned to look behind him.
 
The forest was gone.
 
Jeter’s world was gone.
 
He took in the illuminated prancing black horse logo.
 
All confusion left him.
 
He knew where he was.
 
This was his nightmare.
 
The single moment in his life he wished he could erase.
 
He was in the Brentford sub-branch of Lloyds Bank.
 

 
What was going on?
 
Was this a hallucination handed to him by Jeter to confuse him, to send him in the wrong direction to prevent him from saving the boy?
 
Or was this his chance to rewrite history?
 
All of the above?
  
None of the above?
 
Keeler didn’t know, but he did know what was going to happen next.

Tim Mitchell sprang out from behind the carousel of leaflets with the toy gun in his chubby hand.
 
Tim’s mother screamed at her son to stay where he was.
 
Keeler whirled on the boy and returned Tim’s little boy grin.
 
This time, he didn’t shoot.
 
He knew better and let the sawn-off drop to his side.

Tim raced toward Keeler, giggling and squealing with the toy 9mm pointed at him.
 
Keeler crouched to receive the charging boy.

“Give me all you got,” Keeler teased the child and opened his arms wide.

And Tim did.
 
He squeezed the trigger three times and the simulated report sounded from the recording device inside the toy weapon, but real bullets left the muzzle.
 
All three bullets thudded into Keeler, one in the stomach just above the navel and two in the chest.
 
An inferno of pain raged where he’d been hit.
 
The impacts lifted him off his feet and left him prone on his back.
 
The bank’s customers closed in around him.
 
As they all watched him die, Tim pushed his way between the legs of the crowd, jabbed the toy gun that fired real bullets at Keeler and shouted, “Bang.
 
Bang.
 
Bang.”