Between a Grizzly and Her Cub: Part Two

A young man in a blue lab coat led Chad Heel down a cold, concrete hall and into the even colder autopsy room beyond it. A corpse (not David’s) rested on its back atop a metal table. A doctor in another blue coat stooped over the cadaver.

The doctor spoke into a tape recorder, which hung from the ceiling on a length of string. “Severe trauma to the frontal lobe. Murder weapon must—”

Chad cleared his throat louder than necessary.

The doctor glared over her glasses at Chad, who stared back at her.

She reached up, clicked off her tape recorder, and strolled towards Chad. She slid off her bloody, latex gloves. “Can I help you?” She tossed the gloves into a red trashcan.

Chad glanced at his wristwatch. “Detective Redwood asked me to come here and identify my brother.”

The doctor’s expression deflated. “David Heel? The suicide?”

Chad almost argued. He still couldn’t accept that David killed himself. Such an act made no sense. “That’s me. Let’s get this over with.”

She waved him towards a wall covered with wide drawers. She opened one near Chad’s knees, pulled out a steel slab upon which David’s corpse rested.

The air in Chad’s lungs froze.

David’s eyelids, obviously glued shit, seemed the only part of his face that hadn’t turned blue and bloated. Had the doctor sewn shut David’s lips? Chad couldn’t say for certain.

“What . . . happened?”

The doctor (whose nametag, Chad finally noticed, read “Dr. Marshal”) wandered towards a set of organizers set atop a steel desk. She removed from them a file folder.

“His wife found him in their master bathroom,” Marshal said. “He duct taped a plastic bag over his face. Their son was still at school, thank goodness.”

An image of David’s ten-year-old boy, Matthew, surfaced in Chad’s mind. He shoved away the image, focused on the moment at hand. “How do you know he wasn’t murdered?”

Marshal thumbed through her folder. “His body doesn’t display the slightest suggestion of a struggle. Neither did his house. No drugs in his bloodstream. He either killed himself or let someone—”

“Mister Heel doesn’t require the details of our investigation,” someone said.

Marshal and Chad turned to discover Detective Redwood. The man stood outside the autopsy room, in the concrete hall. His hands stuffed his pants’ pockets. He wore sunglasses for no apparent reason.

Chad marched towards the detective. “I beg to differ. I require details.”

Redwood shook his head. “You need only to identify the body.”

Chad swallowed back the seed of a volcanic retort. “It’s him. It’s David.”

“Good.” Redwood pointed behind Chad. “Sign that, please.”

Marshal removed a sheet of paper from the folder. She, with an apologetic expression, handed the sheet, a clipboard, and a pen to Chad.

Chad accepted, read, signed, and returned the paper that confirmed David’s demise. “David had no reason to commit suicide.”

“Perhaps he didn’t want to outlive his wife,” Redwood said. “It seemed that her losing battle with cancer came as a surprise to you.” He tilted his head and actually grinned. “Perhaps you didn’t know as much about him as you thought.”

Chad ground his teeth. “Are you trying to upset me?”

Redwood slid his sunglasses from his face. Chad nearly gasped at the sight beneath them. A vicious, diagonal scar sliced Redwood’s right eye, which sat as a milky, sightless orb of smoke in his skull.

“Forgive me,” Redwood said. “I tend to act rather crass under these circumstances. Every time someone decides to . . . remove him- or herself from the grade equation, the family refuses to accept it. They want a murder investigation.”

“I do,” Chad said.

“I assure you, Mister Heel,” Redwood said. “No one murdered your brother.”

Chad frowned, unconvinced. He thanked Marshal for her time and turned to leave. He had to pay his sister-in-law and nephew a visit, offer his condolences, and try to make sense of all of this.

Marshal caught up with him in the parking lot.

“Redwood’s an ass,” she whispered, “but he’s a dangerous one.”

Chad treated her to a curious expression.

“Do you keep up with current events?” Marshal asked.

“I write about national politics. Health care issues.”

Marshal fixed him with a gaze that dripped concern. “You should pay more attention to local politics. The police around here are corrupt. Redwood’s the worst. He—” she glanced around to ensure they stood alone.

Chad’s foot tapped. “He what?”

She returned her attention to him. “No one performed an investigation into your brother’s death. Redwood saw to that.”

“Why?”

Marshal shrugged. “My advice? Let it go.”

Chad frowned. No way in hell.

To be continued . . .

Between A Grizzly and Her Cub: Part One

A few polite golf claps concluded Chad’s speech. He reckoned most of them, perhaps fewer than that, came half-hearted. He stood behind his podium in the small, elementary school cafeteria he and his team borrowed.

He had lectured that America remained the only first-world country where entire families go broke from injury or disease. He recounted the tales of many such families, financially ruined by medical bills. He wondered if anyone cared.

Congressman (or did they prefer “congress person” nowadays?) Mitch Barrow marched up the stage to accept Chad’s microphone.

Chad hesitated, felt he should share something more with his audience. He swore he heard the second hand of his wristwatch. He knew that every tick represented an American closer to death from a treatable illness.

Mitch wrapped his overly smooth hand around Chad’s microphone. He smiled a little too hard, stared Chad in the eye. That’s enough, the stare seemed to say. Let’s not subtract the “fun” from fundraiser.

Chad surrendered his microphone. The thirty-five-year-old stepped from his stage and wandered towards the refreshment table. He met Rose along the way.

The seventy-something woman smiled at him. “Nice speech, Chad.”

Chad shrugged. Would a single voter demand a better healthcare plan as a consequence of his speech?

He filled a plastic cub with club soda. “My blog just lost its two biggest sponsors.”

“You in it for the sponsors?” Rose asked. She worked as an editor for a democrat-based, political magazine. She published a few of Chad’s blogs when she could talk her supervisors into it.

“I can’t write fulltime without them,” Chad said. “Words without readers won’t pay my rent.”

Rose squeezed his arm. “Maybe it’s time you found a second interest in your life. You spend so much time in front of your computer with your research and writing. You need a life outside politics. Set your blogs and columns on the back-burner. Find a job the forces you to leave the house.”

“Ambitions go to the back-burner to die,” Chad said.

She ignored this. “When’s the last time you shared a meal? Your solitude isn’t healthy.”

Chad knocked back the last of his soda water. “I’ll have you know that Alice provides me with wonderful company every night.”

“You cat doesn’t count.” She led him towards the open, makeshift bar at the other side of the cafeteria. “Let’s get you a drink.”

Chad dug in his heels. “I don’t drink. You know that.”

Rose sighed, exhausted. “What do you do for fun?”

“Scrabble.”

“By yourself?”

“You can play Scrabble by yourself.”

“What a waste! You won’t stay young and handsome forever.”

He dropped his gaze. He did not, at five-foot-five with a slight gut, appear handsome.

He checked his cellphone (which he had tuned to silent so as not to interrupt his speech). Someone had called, but Chad didn’t recognize the number. Whoever had called him, she or he had left a message.

Chad shouldered his way through the crowd, headed towards the nearest exit.

Mitch concluded his own onstage speech, the usually grandstand event with no real message. He promised everyone everything without any concrete plan on how they would get it. No wonder the voters continued to reelect him.

Chad passed two kids, brothers by the looks of them. An image of Chad’s mother surfaced in his mind.

He saw her skeletal, yellowed body, stretched across her bed. Her sunken eyes stared into the near distance while Chad and his older brother changed her bedpan. He recalled, with a boulder of guilt, how much he wanted her to die.

Liver failure. No money to treat or make her comfortable.

Dad had vanished a year beforehand.

The chilly breeze slapped him from his trance as soon as he stepped outside. Fort Myers, Florida did not often get this cold.

He checked his voicemail.

One. New. Message. The drive-through-speaker-like voice crackled from Chad’s cellphone. A beep stretched, and then:

“This message is for Chad Heel. I am Detective Redwood of the Fort Myers PD. I need you to call me back at this number ASAP.” He left his number.

Chad blinked. What had happened to David? His mind conjured terrible suggestions, tragedies that might’ve befallen his brother’s wife or ten-year-old son.

He dialed David’s number. It rang several times before it switched to voicemail. He disconnected and dialed Detective Redwood’s number.

“Redwood.” He sounded exhausted.

“This is Chad Heel. I got your—”

“Ah,” Redwood said. “Right. I’m going to need you to come down to the autopsy room and identify your brother.”

The air in Chad’s lungs froze. “I’m sorry. . . . Could you repeat that?

Redwood sighed. “I take it nobody informed you about your brother’s death.”

“No. No one called me to tell me that my brother died.”

“Sorry about that.” Redwood sounded at best distracted and at worse disinterested. “I regret to inform you that your brother killed himself around three o’clock today.”

Chad paced the school’s parking lot. “David wouldn’t do that. He had a wife and—”

“A kid. Right,” Redwood said. “Well, that plastic bag didn’t wrap itself around his face.”

A sense of the surreal overwhelmed Chad. “This is how the police department tells me—”

“I don’t want to ask David's ten-year-old son to identify the body,” Redwood said, “and his wife seems a bad candidate, given her condition. That leaves you, unless I grab someone from his family law practice.”

Chad steadied himself against a flagpole. “Wait. Back up. What condition?”

Another pause. “You didn’t know? She’s fighting skin cancer. Losing, too.”

“You really suck at this, Officer Redwood.”

“Detective Redwood. I’m not a security officer. I’m not a psychiatrist, either. I’m a detective with a desk overflown with paperwork. Can you make it to the autopsy department by nine tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll be there.” Chad hung up, gazed heavenward at the American flag that flapped above him.

David wouldn’t kill himself. The method of suicide didn’t even make sense.

It all smelled wrong . . .

(Yep. A legal thriller. I'm performing some temporary, paralegal work in Florida, if that explains anything.

(Don't forget to check out my movie review blog at moviesmartinwolt.blogspot.com. I'll knock out The Judge in a day or two at that site.

(The third novel in my Darkwana series will appear on kindle in two months! Meanwhile, feel free to sample and/or download "Daughters of Darkwana and "Dreamers of Darkwana"!

(Thanks for reading!)

Unburied

Barbra knelt and pulled the tray of potpies from the oven. She straightened and shut the oven door with her knee.

Her husband, Albert, cleaned his hunting rifle on the coffee table. Albert liked to consider himself a skilled sportsman, though he only once ever bagged anything bigger than a rabbit.

The elk in question still hung (its head, at least) over the fireplace. Barbra thought the thing monstrous, but she kept her peace about it.

Enough screams already filled the house. Barbra’s thirty-four-year-old daughter, Emma, always screamed.

Emma, an attorney for a small, family law firm, spent several hours a day on the phone, usually in the midst of a heated argument. Barbra suspected that Emma argued louder than necessary to draw attention to her “demanding career.”

Emma did work hard. She graduated top of her class. Barbra and Albert had missed Emma’s graduation speech. The van had broken down, and they couldn’t have loaded Billy’s wheelchair into the pickup.

Billy sat in his wheelchair at the kitchen table, which Barbra loaded with the fresh potpies. A string of moist drool hung from his lower lip.

The accident changed him. He had hit his head hard in that car wreck. The doctors had mistakenly considered his subsequent death inevitable.

Albert had planted a cross on the side of the road to mark the site of Billy’s accident. The cross would serve as a reminder of the dangers of drunk driving . . . and as a grave for Billy’s former self.

Billy hadn't spoken since the accident. His doctors doubted that he could even form complete thoughts. He wore diapers. He used to play football.

The accident had deformed more than Billy's mind. The car had, upon its roll down one of Colorado's thankfully shorter cliffs, claimed Billy’s right ear and twisted his right hand into a hooked mass of tattered meat.

“Dinner’s ready,” Barbra said.

“Be right there.” Albert reassembled his rifle.

Emma raised her voice from her bedroom/office. It sounded as if she argued with another lawyer over the phone.

Emma would arrive at the table late as always. She would afterwards complain in machine gun fashion about how hard she worked. She would report every obstacle and subsequent victory of her workday.

Barbra tucked a napkin into Billy’s front collar. She would have to spoon-feed him his pie.

The phone rang. Barbra frowned.

“Let it ring.” Albert seated himself at the table. “People shouldn’t bother folks this late.”

The phone continued to ring.

Barbra sighed, entered the kitchen, and scooped the phone from its hook. “Hello?” she said into the receiver.

“Mom?” Billy’s voice.

Barbra straightened with alarm. She hadn’t heard her son speak since the accident.

Her eyes darted past Albert (who watched her with an expression of annoyance with a side order of concern) to her son, who sat in his chair, his eyes vacant.

“Mom, why did you bury me? I wasn’t dead.”

Dread corkscrewed through Barbra. “Whoever you are, this isn’t funny.”

“You have to dig me up, Mom.”

She slammed the phone into its cradle so hard that Albert flinched. Emma wandered with a stunned expression from her room (she had that damned "smart phone" thingy pressed against her ear).

Albert stood. “Who was that?”

Barbra shook her head. “Nothing.” She seated herself at the table.

The phone rang.

Albert tossed his napkin on the table and stood. “I’ll handle this nonsense.”

“Don’t!” Barbra shrieked, though she couldn't explain why.

Her husband treated her to a curious expression. He marched towards and lifted the phone’s receiver. “Parker residence. What can I do you for?” He froze. His mouth dropped. “Who the hell are you? This ain’t funny, you little shit.”

He slammed the phone twice as hard as Barbra had.

Emma whispered into her cellphone. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” She disconnected, stared from her mother to her father. “What happened?”

“Nothing worth fretting over.” Albert reseated himself. His hand shook while he raised his fork.

The phone rang.

“Damn it to hell!” Albert launched to his feet. “I’ll handle this.” He marched into his den, slammed the door behind him.

Emma’s cellphone rang with an overly cheerful tune. Emma had not programmed her cellphone with a cheerful tune.

Emma’s face screwed with confusion. She set her phone on the table, then touched the screen to both answer her call and put it on speakerphone.

A crackled of static preceded Billy’s voice, which echoed unnaturally from the cellphone's speaker. “Dig me up, Mom! If I have to claw my way out of this cold dirt, I’m gonna tear your fucking face—”

Emma shut off the phone. She sat, breathed very hard.

Barbra glanced at Billy, who continued to sit and stare into the near distance, unaware of anything that surrounded him.

Seven insect-like legs sprouted from the potpie in front of Barbra. It scurried towards Emma, who scrambled out of her chair so fast that she knocked it backwards onto the hardwood floor.

The pie halted, bubbled, liquefied. The pie and its legs dissolved to steamy mush, until only a human ear rested in its place.

Albert screamed a blood-curdling scream that arrived from above the fireplace, where his head now hung in place of the elk’s own. The decapitated head choked on its own cries. Its eyes rolled. Foam frothed from its lips.

The door to the den slammed open. Albert’s naked body (his head replaced by the elk’s) trampled from the den into the kitchen. The creature tried to run on all fours, crashed sideways, and threw itself threw the nearest window.

Crash. The creature fumbled onto two legs, sort of mastered the idea, and raced into the dark woods that surrounded the house.

. . . Barbra and Emma took a moment to catch their breaths.

The phone rang.

“Ignore it,” Emma whispered. Her voice shook.

The phone fell silent.

Emma’s cellphone, still on the table, produced another overly cheerful tune. It coughed static and other white noises until Billy’s voice seeped from its speaker.

“Diiiig me up, you biiitch. Diiiig me the fuuuuck up.”

“Fine!” Barbra screamed.

She grabbed her keys, ignored Emma’s objections, raced outside, and climbed into her pickup. She fought to turn its stubborn engine. The vehicle awoke. The cheerful tune from Emma’s cellphone blasted from the radio speakers.

Barbra’s frantic hand turned the volume down on the radio. Silence followed.

She thought she saw the shadow of her naked husband leap over a fence in the distance.

A new sound dripped from the speakers. The sound that torn fingernails might make while they dug at hard packed earth. It continued while Barbra drove to the site of Billy’s accident. The sound gained speed and urgency along the way.

She slammed her fist against the radio, over and over again, until the sound stopped and her wrist ached.

She arrived too late.

She stepped out of her car and approached the cross that her husband planted at the site of Billy’s accident. Something had forced its way up from the ground in front of the cross, something bigger than a man. Or a bear.

Clawed footprints led from the ruined “grave” to the woods beyond it.

A cheerful tune played from inside Barbra’s car. Emma’s cellphone sat on the passenger’s seat, though Barbra knew she hadn’t brought it with her.

The tune groaned to a rusty halt. Heavy, bestial pants rose from the phone’s speaker.

Barbra wandered towards the phone as if she walked through thick sheets of syrup. The phone displayed footage of Barbra’s kitchen. Billy sat in his wheelchair at the kitchen table.

She heard, through the phone, the squeak of her front door. A mammoth shadow spilled over Billy. His eyes, which hadn’t focused on anything since the accident, rose to face whatever stood before him.

A smile crept across his drool-coated lips.

A blur swept over him, and the screen went black.

Terminal

The airport offers countless gates, a monorail, windows (through which one can see nothing save fire and smoke), but no doors. If you board the train, it’ll circle the building before it returns you right back where you started.

I have marched through every gate (save one), walked down the narrow, metal tunnel that connected the doorway to one of the planes stationed on the tarmac. The planes never leave.

The airport offers plenty of pay phones. I hear my younger self when I pick up one. I try to communicate with him, but he can’t hear me. The phones won’t work both ways.

I served as a soldier for the United States Army. Tomorrow would bring my twenty-forth birthday, except that I died about a month ago.

Misinformation multiplies, so I can’t say for certain who started the last World War. The American government swore that the Middle East started it, that the Iranians developed Rage Serum.

A person catches the virus in one of two ways. A bomb releases the virus via gas. A person inhales it and goes bat shit. She or he will attack anyone, which brings us to the second way that the virus infects someone: bites.

The Iranians, supposedly, launched the first bomb. We responded with one of our own. It might’ve ended there, if not for the whole infection-via-bites-thing.

I remember the day that old woman infected me. She smashed through the boarded up door of the abandoned house that a few other runaway soldiers and I found. I shot her down, but not before she sank her foamy teeth into my ankle.

I should’ve confessed my injury to the others, but I knew they would’ve hung me by my neck before the virus overtook me (we couldn’t afford to waste bullets on each other). I convinced myself that the woman failed to infect me. I felt fine.

My guts turned hot an hour after the hag bit me. My vision turned clouded. I felt paranoid, angry. Everyone spoke too loud, too fast. I couldn’t think. I drooled.

I attacked my best friend that night, sank my teeth into his throat before someone (probably Rizzo) hosed me with a shotgun.

I awoke in this airport . . . with the other ghosts.

We still have bodies. We still feel.

Many of us tried to kill ourselves again. We keep whatever injuries we acquire in the suicide attempts, but we never die. We can’t. We already did.

The “hobgoblins” attack us every so often. None of us knows anything about the creatures.

We call the one with the wide shoulders and bad posture “Regret.” His skin shares the same color as a wet sidewalk. Chains giftwrap him. He drags them along, so we hear him when he hunts us.

“Revenge” runs the fastest, despite her lack of muscle (all skin and bones, that one). She shrieks, especially when she runs across the walls. Her eyes glow crimson. Her narrow teeth drip amber poison.

“Doubt” oozes right out of his victims’ shadows, grabs them, and pulls them into their own darkness.

“Depression” attacks from the ceiling, slides down on a thin cord like a spider on a silk string. Her victims usually notice her shadow right before she pounces them, but few ever escape.

They can’t kill us, for obvious reasons. They eat our skin, and the ghosts they catch never regrow it. Most ghosts, after a hobgoblin catches them, crawl into a ball and scream, skinless muscles raw, wet, and bloody.

The goblins never catch me. I plan to keep it that way.

I tried to shatter the airport windows. I never accomplish a single crack across their glass surfaces and the hateful reflections stretched across them.

I often wander by Gate B4, the one guarded by my ex-wife, the gate I can’t force myself to enter.

Screams echo across the airport. Another soul lost her skin.

I raise the business end of a random pay phone, hold it against my ear, hear my younger self say something stupid, like “I can’t stay with you, babe. I can’t watch the cancer eat you alive like this.”

You coward, I want to tell myself. Stay with her. Hold her hand. You vowed to experience the rest of your lives together. Life. Death. You can’t separate them.

I didn’t stay with her, though. I fled. She died a few months later without a hand to hold—a year before the Rage Serum outbreak.

I still remember that abandoned house, my fellow ex-soldiers and I huddled and hidden within it while we waited for the sum of our sins to crash upon us.

I wander past the gate where my ex-wife, bald and skeletal, rests in her hospital bed. Her wet eyes watch me with silent petitions. I continue to walk, away from my past and towards nothing at all.

(You can catch my novels, such as "Daughters of Darkwana," on Kindle. Thanks for reading!)