Echoes of Darkness (22 page)

She looked where I was pointing, and said “What girl?” She saw the couple, even told me their names, then started looking around for the girl I was talking about. I told her to never mind, trying to sound natural, though I had ice water trickling down my spine. The albino was still there, grinning, almost nose-to-nose with the woman, but the woman and my nurse—they couldn’t see.

Granny McCalloum always claimed I had the sight, and I had ignored her, but I guess dying changes a person. Now it was different. I kept seeing these . . . things.
Everywhere.

I took to wandering about the corridors and public areas of the ward. I saw doctors and nurses working with people, talking to people, these red-eyed freaks right there, but no one ever acknowledged them.

I didn’t either, but sometimes it was so hard.

The nurses acted all impressed that I was exercising, “trying so hard to get well,” they said, but all I really wanted to do was keep an eye on the ward. I was also terrified one of those things might come into my room and I’d be trapped, with nowhere to run.

So I watched them in secret. They were so silent, never speaking, that I thought for a while I might be seeing ghosts, but what I saw made me eventually decide differently.

As far as I could tell these albino mutes were stealthy, but couldn’t pass through walls. Someone would enter a room and one or two pale figures would slip through before the door closed. I don’t know if they couldn’t open doors or if they just didn’t want it showing up on the security tapes. They could touch the doors: a couple of times I saw them knock on a door lightly, attracting enough attention that a passerby would check it out, and the Mutes used the opportunity to slip through.

Then there was the smell I’d noticed at the warehouse: these things reeked of licorice. That made me realize what I’d seen back at Tree Girl’s accident. Those silent watchers had been Mutes. I hadn’t been able to see their skin and eyes in the dark, backlit by the ambulance, but I had smelled their sickly sweet scent.

I used to like Good-N-Plenty candy. Now I can’t open a box without the smell reminding me of those things.

I don’t eat Good-N-Plenty anymore.

Another thing. Once my meds stopped dulling my mind, the pain came back, and this scared me most of all. The Mutes seemed to gather whenever someone was in a lot of pain. They always hung around fresh post-ops, or during physical therapy. Remember that guy with the external fixator on his leg? Every day when the nurses cleansed the pins holding the fixator to the bones, the Mutes formed a crowd. I sometimes heard him crying out during the procedure. The Mutes were enjoying people’s pain. Maybe . . . feeding on it, somehow. That thought really scared me, and I knew I had been right not to attract their attention.

I spent three weeks in that hell, ignoring those silent parasites. I wasn’t sure how many of them I saw. With their white skin and red eyes, they all tended to look alike from a distance, only the hair showing that one might be a woman.

After three weeks I left the recovery ward, and I spent five weeks here in my apartment before I was ready to go back to work. Emergency medical services work is pretty physical, and until I could move and lift a stretcher without pain again, I was no use to anyone out there. For five weeks, when I wasn’t exercising, I was sitting in the chair by my front window that overlooks the street, keeping an eye out for Mutes. In five weeks I didn’t see a one.

Then I went back to work.

Jerry had picked up a temporary partner in my absence, a new guy named Mark. No big deal, we’d just run a three-man team for a while. Happens all the time. We piled in the truck and were off.

Our first call of the night was some guy who had passed out at a company party. Jerry was behind the wheel and I was riding shotgun, nervous as hell, as we rolled on in to pick the guy up.

When we got to the restaurant, Jerry wanted me to check the guy out.

“Naw,” I said. “I wanna see what the rookie can do.”

That wasn’t it. I really wanted to stand back and look for Mutes. I was sure they were going to be gathered around the injured, smiling obscenely at his wounds, lapping up his pain, or whatever they do, and filling the air with their nasty sweet smell.

There weren’t any. Not around the guy lying on the floor; not in the crowd of concerned co-workers; not even mingled in amongst the other diners. I scanned the place twice, but there were no white faces, no blood red eyes, and not the faintest hint of licorice. I started to relax until I noticed Jerry staring at me. Down on one knee, helping Mark get the patient ready for transport, he kept giving me long looks while Mark was talking.

Tape ends, Side A.

Tape begins, Side B:

I just checked the window again, and there don’t seem to be any more of them than before. They might come soon. I don’t know. They seem to be gathering around one particular Mute. If they have a leader, I guess that’s him.

Anyway, Jerry waited until we had the guy in the ambulance and we were en route to the ER before asking me what the hell I’d been doing back there in the restaurant. I told him it was nothing, I was just checking out the new guy, but he didn’t believe me.

He kept his voice low, so Mark wouldn’t hear, but he said “You didn’t look at the new guy once. You were looking all over, but you barely looked at us, or even the pickup. What the hell were you looking for?”

I tried to think of something smooth, but I’ve never been good at that shit. I just looked away and said I was watching, but it sounded lame, even to me.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t mean to be a hardass here. I know the door thing was bad—I was there, and it was bad for me, too. But if you’re not up to the job yet then you have to take more time. You can’t freeze like that. Not on this job, man. People will die. You understand me?”

He was right, and I nodded, but his eyes were on the traffic. He glanced at me, a risky move at that speed, and asked me again.

I said, “Yeah, I understand.”

We pulled into County General, where up on the fifth floor recovery ward I knew the Mutes would be wandering about and grinning. I forced that thought from my mind as we climbed out of the truck.

Jerry opened the rear doors to the vehicle and told me to help transport the guy.

I nodded and took the foot of the stretcher. We dropped the wheels and started rolling. We burst into the ER and one of the docs came and paced us, directing us to take our patient to ER-2 while Mark gave her the rundown. I just pushed the stretcher, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, trying not to stare. Or scream.

The Mutes were there.

It wasn’t like up on five, where there were just a couple at a time—three or four at most. In the hubbub of the ER, they seemed to be everywhere.

Next to us in ER-1 was a woman who looked like she’d gone through the windshield of a car. The side of her face looked like hamburger from sliding along on the macadam—what motorcyclists call road rash. She had little cubes of safety glass in her hair and ground into what used to be her skin. The blood running down her cheek on the abraded side of her face hinted that some of those little cubes were even lodged in her eye. Every movement and twitch of her optic muscles were grinding that eye to jelly. The doctor and two nurses slid, unknowing, in and out of a ring of almost a dozen red-eyed demons. The Mutes showed white teeth and red tongues as they silently laughed whenever the girl made a sound of pain. The whole thing had a strange grace, like some macabre dance.

Mutes crowded around the patient in ER-3 so tightly I couldn’t even see what was wrong.

Everywhere I looked, there they were—except in ER-2. We wheeled the patient in and helped transition him from our stretcher to the hospital gurney, and as far as I could tell, not one of them even looked our way. I looked at the guy we’d brought in, trying to avoid staring at the Mutes and going stark raving mad right there. I was trying to figure out why they weren’t swarming in here for the fresh meat when it hit me.

Our guy was unconscious, and he wasn’t in any pain. He hadn’t even hit his head when he fainted. There was nothing here for them, so they were ignoring him.

We trooped back out to our ride, and I brought up the rear, avoiding any conversation until we were outside. I tried to focus on Mark and Jerry, ignoring what only I could see around us, but we passed some folks waiting to be seen, and there were Mutes waiting with them. One guy’s hand looked like he’d caught it in a machine, fingers sticking out at every angle but the right ones, blood leaking from several places where the bone had poked through the skin. He was holding it elevated, sobbing in pain; there were two Mutes bending down to inhale dreamily over the ruined hand like they were sniffing a bouquet of flowers.

I struggled not to cry.

We took up our positions again, Jerry driving with me riding shotgun. Mark and Jerry kept up a constant stream of conversation, but I was mostly silent as we cruised for about a half hour without a call. I started to hope it would be quiet night, which would have been fine with me; I needed some down time to try to assimilate what I’d seen in the ER and figure out what the hell I was going to do. But then the call came in, and like that one that sent us to the warehouse, this one wound up being a life-changer.

There was a fire. A big one. Just thinking of it now still makes me want to scream.

Burn victims go through more pain than any other trauma victim. It’s supposedly the most painful way to die. This wasn’t going to be some businessman fainting quietly at a company party. I had never been to a big fire before, but I figured I knew what to expect. Even with the Mutes.

I had no idea.

Jesus. I checked on them again and they were all looking at my window. They weren’t moving around or anything. The leader guy was in the front. I—I don’t think I have much more time.

Anyway, the tenement was what firemen refer to as “fully involved.” Flame roiled out of windows on all four floors, reaching for the sky—the building was a lost cause. Hoses were aimed at the surrounding buildings to keep the fire from spreading, and toward the front door of the inferno in case any more tenants were able to escape. There were people still in there. The fire roared like a wounded giant but there were still occasional shrieks, the mindless sounds of someone driven mad by pain or fear, barely heard over the din.

Jerry told us to stop gawking and start working, and gave us the plan. We would split up and triage whomever we could on the scene. Anyone who needed an immediate ride to County would go with two of us while the third stayed to keep working triage.

Mark tore his eyes away from the fire and said “got it, boss,” in a voice that didn’t sound at all convinced it was going to be that easy. I just nodded at Jerry, not trusting myself to speak. I hadn’t been staring at the fire.

I was staring at the Mutes.

Dozens of them. Maybe a hundred of them—it was hard to tell in the flickering firelight and all the rescue personnel running about. The Mutes seemed to ring the entire structure, probably in as close as they could get and still bear the heat. Each time there was a shriek from the flames the whole ring of them swayed, leaning in and out, the faces I could see twisting with obscene pleasure. Their grinning, bone-white faces were bathed in the rippling red firelight as they seemed almost to dance.

In my nightmares, it’s what Hell looks like.

I picked my way through the milling people, looking for wounded to take care of. I heard “Hey, big guy! Little help here!” and saw one of the firemen trying to flag me down.

He was carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle in both arms, and it was moving. There were three Mutes trailing him, two male and one female, all grinning and nodding. I ignored them as best I could and pulled my kit around so I could get at it. He flipped the edge of the blanket back, and I saw her.

She was maybe six or seven. Hard to tell in the blankets, and she might have looked younger with her hair burned off like that.

This was bad.

All I could see was her head and face, but I barely kept from screaming. The left side of her face was untouched, and perfect. Tears of pain streamed from her left eye, round and staring, open wide enough that I could see the white all the way around, like a maddened horse. That side of her nose was straight and strong, leading the way down to her mouth, which was open as she panted, wheezing sounds coming from a throat made raw by smoke and heat.