Authors: Geoff Jones
Al
pulled her to her feet. One hand landed on the side of her breast and he awkwardly slid it up under her armpit. “Are you okay?” When she didn’t answer, Al gave her a gentle shake and repeated, “Lisa, are you okay?” She finally responded with a small nod.
Al looked at Tim. “She might be in shock. Can you get us back to the coffee house?”
“Yeah. I think so.” Tim started off through the brush.
Al moved his arm around Lisa’s waist and they followed him back upriver.
Al had visited The Daily Edition
Café almost every day for three years, and now, because of some kind of crazy-ass disaster, he had his arm around Lisa Danser. He normally considered himself lucky if his hand brushed hers when she gave him his change. He could feel her inhale and exhale in sharp, hitching breaths. He felt the hard bone at the top of her hip and the soft flesh on the side of her belly.
He tried to look at her face, but
she stared down at her feet as she walked across the uneven ground. She had lost one of her shoes in the river. Al wanted to say something clever, but he couldn’t think of anything. He pulled her close, trying to stop the shivers.
As they followed the light from Tim’s phone back through the woods, Lisa put
her arm around Al to steady herself. He smiled. He didn’t know where he was, or how he had gotten here, but he knew one thing. This was a good day.
Inside the café, Cal
lie Grey tended to the old woman’s shin while her fiancé held his phone overhead to provide extra light. Callie knew that Hank wanted to be outside with the others, trying to figure out what was going on, but she needed him. The sight of blood made her want to vomit.
While cleaning the wound,
Callie had asked her normal set of introductory questions. They helped distract her from all the blood.
“What is your name?”
“Helen. Helen Davies.”
“And where are you from, Helen?”
“I was born on the island of Crete, in Greece, seventy-six years ago.”
The questions came automatically to Callie, who practiced psychiatry in a downtown office. She earned twice what Hank made as a prosecutor
, thanks to the medical degree which allowed her to write prescriptions for all the anxieties brought on by affluence. The medical degree also meant that Callie was the most qualified to patch up the old lady.
“
Greece. How did you find your way to the United States?”
“An Englishman named Lawrence Davies met me on holiday and brought me over here when I was nineteen. My mother was so angry about that.”
From the tone, Callie detected that Helen wasn’t too sure about it either. She noted that discussions about this subject could probably be drawn out over several months of sessions.
The
young man with the cuts on his face paced to the front door and then back to the side wall. He leaned over the sloped floor where one of the baristas had fallen into the river. “I don’t believe it.”
Hank took a slow, deep breath.
Callie sensed that his fuse had run out. The irony never failed to amuse her.
She
was the redhead. She was supposed to be the one with the temper.
The man with the cuts on his face
had repeated “I don’t believe it” non-stop since coming inside.
“Hey
kid, come over here,” Hank said. The young man looked up with a vacant expression. Hank nodded. “Yeah, you.” He walked over and looked down at the operation.
The falling espresso machine had peeled away
an inch-wide strip of skin from the front of the woman’s shin, starting just below her knee and running all the way down to the top of her foot, where it was still connected. Blood flowed freely from the exposed flesh. Callie held the tissue-thin flap between her finger and thumb. It looked like a piece of used packing tape. Callie reached for a fresh napkin and dabbed at the skin flap to remove the last few bits of dirt. Then she stretched it across the front of the woman’s leg, hoping it would help stop the bleeding.
“What’s your name, son?” Hank asked
the young man, who stared with his mouth hanging open.
“Morgan.” A dozen shallow slices covered his face.
“Morgan, I know you don’t believe it. None of us can.” Hank said.
He is so proud of himself for not losing his cool
, Callie thought. She almost always knew what Hank was thinking.
Hank
continued, “But when you repeat yourself over and over again, it just makes a bad situation worse. You’re freaking people out.”
Morgan showed an expression of disb
elief. “Dude, shut the fuck up! This is some kind of end-of-the-world catastrophic shit. I’ll say whatever the fuck I want.”
H
ank’s face turned red and Callie thought for a minute that he was going to hurl his cell phone at Morgan. “God-dammit, don’t you speak that way in front of -”
Before Hank could
finish, Morgan turned and wandered out the door to join the group outside.
“Count your blessings, honey,” Callie said. “At least he’s gone.”
She had finally aligned the flap of skin with its original location on Helen’s shin.
Hank grunted and glared toward the front.
Callie dabbed the edges of the cut with a paper towel, soaking up fresh blood. She dropped the towel into a trash can Hank had found for her. It landed with a splat. She forced herself to stop and look outside, through the missing wall. It had grown bright enough to see the clearing on the opposite riverbank, with a dark forest beyond.
Hank
checked the screen on his mobile device.
“
Still nothing?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “No bars, no service. The
map says, ‘Satellites not found’.”
Callie dabbed up the remaining blood.
Helen winced and moaned. “Why did this happen?” Her voice sounded almost childlike with fear.
Callie stopped. “I don’t think anybody knows yet.” She gave the woman a sympathetic smile. “I don’t suppose you have any Advil or Tylenol?”
Helen clutched her purse, which looked large enough to hold a pharmacy. “I always carry a bottle of aspirin. They say it’s good for the heart, you know. Larry died of a heart attack.”
“Aspirin is a blood thinner. We need yours to thick
en right now.” Callie tried to press the napkins against Helen’s leg more gently. Blood seeped out the sides of the skin flap. “How bad does it hurt?”
“I can barely feel it. I don’t see why you’re making such a fuss.” She smiled, showing teeth that were too perfect to be the originals.
“I just wanted to stop the bleeding. You were making quite a mess in here.” She turned to her fiancé. “Hank, let’s see if we can prop up this nice lady’s leg.”
Hank pulled a small table over to the orange couch
and they got Helen to sit back with her leg across the tabletop, higher than her head. Callie swapped the bloody napkins for a fresh set and nodded, satisfied that the bleeding had finally begun to slow down. She stood by the table, holding the napkins in place and allowed herself to look around.
The café looked like the scene of an explosion. The emergency lights made a pair of bright cones as they shone through the concrete dust hanging in the air.
We probably shouldn’t be breathing that
. All of the other lights were off and the back corner of the room had caved in. The river rushing by below the missing wall created the sensation of movement. After looking at all of the blood, the continuous motion was almost too much. Callie sat down on the couch next to Helen and closed her eyes.
“It’s
real, babe,” Hank said. “We have been teleported into a goddamn forest.”
Teleported.
Callie rattled off other possibilities in her mind: a dream, a hallucination, a drug. Someone might have drugged her at a night club. Hank had told her about a case like that once. Maybe she was lying unconscious and defenseless somewhere. The idea seemed almost preferable.
At least it made sense. Teleportation did not make sense.
A pair of large bugs flew in the open wall and spiraled around in the light cones in the front of the building. They looked like wasps
and buzzed like toy helicopters.
“Hey gramps,” called Morgan from the front of the building. “We found something.”
Callie looked up at her fiancé. Even in the lousy light, she could see in his eyes that he needed to go out there.
Hank held up his hand as if swearing an oath. “I promise not to murder t
hat dumbass. I just want to go outside and scope things out.”
She gave him a small grin.
Hank always knew what she was thinking, too. It helped make up for the age difference. “Don’t go out of sight, okay?”
Hank responded with his biggest courtroom smile, showing wide rows of perfect teeth that
were
still the originals. “You got it, babe. I’ll be right over there.”
Hank
stepped out onto the front sidewalk. Four parking meters stood in a row and a green metal trash can sat bolted to the concrete. The executive lady hunched down in her designer jeans and held her own mobile device over an object near the end of the sidewalk.
Hank
wasn’t sure who he disliked more, Morgan or the woman in the slick business casual outfit. She had come around poking her nose in everyone’s business, as if it was her job to check on them all. She probably thought her blazer and jeans ensemble looked hip and cool. He thought she looked lazy. Nobody dressed up any more, especially in a cowboy town like Denver.
Not that you look any better yourself right now, counselor,
he thought, looking down at his flimsy jogging shorts and art museum t-shirt. He squatted next to the woman.
The light shone on a severed hand, with a few inches of forearm still attached. It looked like a woman’s hand. The diagonal slice was perfectly smooth. Two grey circles of
bone were visible in the center. A small puddle of blood pooled on the concrete.
“Morgan
here thinks he saw her earlier on the sidewalk,” explained the business woman. “He was right outside when all this began.”
O
n some days, Hank and Callie stopped at the café after their morning run. Callie would enjoy her latte and gossip about her patients. She would eventually notice the time and they would run back to their tiny penthouse and scramble to get ready for work. On other days, when they ran straight home, they usually had time for a hot wet fuck in the shower.
Why couldn’t today have been one of those days?
Hank thought.
He
pointed at the hand on the sidewalk. “Did she fall in the river too? Whoever this was?”
“I didn’t actually see her when it happened,” Morgan
said. “I was looking in the window.” He pointed to his slashed face and grinned. “That was lucky, huh?”
“So what happened to her?”
“Think about it, man. She was right at the edge
.
Most of her was on the outside, but her arm was on the inside. She was walking along, perfectly fine, when all of a sudden, whammo!” Morgan brought his hand down in an axe-chopping motion. “No arm!”
Hank
pressed his lips together and breathed through his nose. Callie called this his “bull snort.” He looked around and realized that he was still as clueless as when he first stepped outside. He had learned nothing.
That’s not completely true,
Hank thought. He had been able to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that he disliked Morgan even more than Ms. Business Casual.
“Is this a goddamn adventure to you?
That woman might be bleeding to death in the street back in Denver.”
“At least she’s still in
Denver.”
Patricia Hayman
stepped down from the sidewalk onto the riverbank mud and studied the lone footsteps of the man who had run off downstream. She noticed with annoyance that thick mud clung to the sides of her Lucchese boots.
Whatever was happening required a plan of
action. The first step toward taking action was assessing the situation. Assessing was one of Patricia’s strong points.
She walked out onto the mudflat, deliberately
not
looking down at her boots, and turned back to the building. The coffee shop sat on the inside curve of a wide bend in the river. It appeared alien, out of place and alone. More than half of the building sat on solid ground, but a decent chunk extended out over the water’s surface. The river itself stretched about thirty feet across. On each side, the tree line pushed back a hundred feet from the water.
Patricia remembered her son going through a phase where he was obsessed with books that showed cutaway views of buildings, vehicles, and even made-up things like movie spaceships. The café looked like it belonged in one of those books. She squinted and thought about it.
No.
The café really looked like the part that was
missing
from those pictures. Back in downtown Denver, the rest of the eight-story building must look like it belonged in a cutaway book.