Chapter Thirty-Six: The New Reality
DANIEL raced south on the freeway, all but daring the CHP to pull him over, silently praying that Nicolette would wake up. He leaned toward her, one hand on the wheel while he checked her vitals again, hoping for any sign of improvement; he snarled with frustration as he sat back up, disappointed. His fear for her warred with with his horrified wonder at what had just happened, at what he had just witnessed. The implications were staggering, pushing at the boundaries of his mind. One thought kept reverberating: If that can happen...what else is possible? He shuddered as he heard the hissing gurgle of Mr. Haverford’s voice in his memory, the clicking of exposed ligaments working as it…he…it spoke.
As it motherfucking spoke!, he thought with a mixture of wonder and horror.
He pushed the thought away.
He’d deal with it -- and the terrifying implications of its words -- later. He forced himself to focus on Nicolette, forced himself to think through the fear and panic and make a plan. The rational thing to do would be taking her to the nearest hospital; but he had developed an almost talismanic fixation on getting her home, to safety -- somewhere she considered safe as if that would cancel out the fear that had (broken) stunned her...as if it could summon her spirit back. It was irrational; subconsciously he knew it, but the idea had taken root and he couldn’t let it go.
As he exited the freeway, tearing down the offramp which merged with the 92W, heading over the mountains, he fanned out all his options in his mind. He systematically rejected them one by one until he came full circle back to Nicolette’s apartment...and his mother. After nearly two decades as an ER RN, he knew she had experience dealing with situations like this; she definitely kept a better emergency kit than he did. Ramona wouldn’t like it if he showed up out of the blue in the middle of the night, but he was desperate, and she might--
He turned sharply toward Nicolette, “What?”
Hope filled him when she blinked slowly, animation returning to her face as he approached the end of the short frontage road, the intersection a brightly lighted island in the shadow of the freeway.
“Go east,” she repeated, her voice barely above a whisper.
He exhaled with a long, slow breath, the muscles around his lungs finally relaxing, “Nikki, are you okay? What happened? You were...out...for the better part of an hour!”
She levered herself upright, wincing at the rushing night air. A moment later, she found the controls and rolled the window up.
Her voice was hoarse, but in the sudden silence following the window’s mechanical whir, it seemed to fill the cab, “I’m...not sure what happened, exactly.”
She sounded exhausted.
Hell, she looks exhausted, he thought, her pallor and the circles under her eyes giving her a gaunt, emaciated aspect which Daniel found disturbing; she hadn’t looked so skeletal earlier that evening.
“We need to get you home so you can get some rest...”
She shook her head emphatically, her voice strengthening, “No.”
“Nikki--“
“We have to go east!”
Her expression filled with determination and a feverish intensity, her eyes bright with it. He wondered if she was even hearing him.
He tried to force calm into his voice, “Nikki, slow down. Whatever happened back there, it hit you hard! You look” insane “unwell. You need rest -- then we should talk it over--“
Shook her head emphatically, “You don’t understand! I was...shown... Mr. Haverford had a wife and daughter!”
“Nikki, that’s--“
She spoke over him, her gaze turning inward, “I think his wife was also killed.” She looked up, “But I think his daughter might still be alive!”
Daniel gritted his teeth, “Nikki, slow down! You’re talking crazy!”
He was startled when Tommy spoke from the back seat, “What happened after Mr. Doe...Mr. Haverford grabbed you?”
Nicolette shuddered, viscerally recoiling at the memory. She could still feel the marble-cool strength of his grip, the bruise encircling her wrist a darkening bracelet. Daniel could still feel the stinging itch on his own hand and wrist where Nicolette’s nails had torn him in her panic to get free. The scratches were mute testimony that the Medical Examiner's office had been real, that it wasn’t some kind of flashback; the bruise around her wrist adding emphasis.
He struggled to take a step back, to summon the cold detachment he had learned during his service. Nicolette was still staring at him, wide eyed, her gaunt gaze unnerving. He was worried about her, worried that whatever touching the corpse had done to her mind might still be metastasizing and gaining strength, threatening to drag her further over the edge -- possibly bringing him with her, if he wasn’t careful.
Nikki spoke, her wide-eyed desperation making her voice quavery, “Ever since that night in the Sandflea, we’ve been heading toward this! I’m not going to abandon my daughter to those monsters!”
In his experience, hesitation was one of the surest ways to get hurt when violence was imminent; he had found that it was better to act quickly -- even if he chose an undesirable option -- than to hesitate and evaluate and vacillate.
“Nikki. Stop.”
She snarled at him, reaching for the door handle, intent on exiting the vehicle. He had no idea what she was going to do once her feet hit the pavement, still wearing her pink puffy jacket over her summery cocktail dress, miles from anywhere, but he had no intention of finding out.
He reached across to her, gently placing his hand on the back of her neck where he could see exposed skin over the collar of her jacket. Her skin felt cool and clammy under his hand, the muscles in her neck rock hard under his fingertips.
If her skin feels that cool to me, my hand probably feels hot to her, the thought briefly swirling through his mind.
She shuddered at the contact, almost gasping at the heat of his palm. For one, brief instant, she was poised between shrugging his hand away, and waiting to hear him out. Moist, cool air filled the cab as she hesitated, the incessant chiming of the door-open alarm demanding attention. She didn’t turn to face him, though he could see she was nearly panting with exertion, still thoroughly in the grip of her fever.
“I saw the dead man speak, too, Nikki. Okay? I thought you were gone, for a little while back there.” His breathing hitched involuntarily as he spoke.
She heard the hitch in his voice, his emotion reaching through her urgency. She realized with a kind of embarrassed wonder that she had forgotten he had been standing beside her when Mr. Haverford grabbed her wrist and identified his killer. Some of her pain eased as something in his gaze touched her. Her expression softened, a hint of apology evident as their eyes briefly locked.
She pulled the door shut, a small part of her wanting to cry out at the loss as he withdrew his hand; his palm on her neck had been calming...comforting...his warmth pushing back the memory of chill, dead flesh.
When she was facing him, he spoke, his voice still quavering slightly despite his efforts to project calm, “Tell me what happened.”
She hesitated, gathering her thoughts. She was aware of Tommy in the back seat as he shifted, studying her.
When she began speaking, she was hesitant, choosing her words carefully. As she spoke, she gained confidence and speed, memory eliding into reliving the memories, “After Mr. Haverford grabbed me, I just...I lost it. I think I always knew what was going to happen, which primed me, ramped me up. But when it did...I just...I wasn’t ready for it. It felt as though my fear -- my terror, consumed me and I sort of went outside myself. It’s something I...”
Daniel frowned as she left the original thought unfinished.
“I fainted, I think, though I could still hear you and Tommy -- but it was like listening to a television through the wall in the next room. In my mind’s eye, I started to see what had happened to Mr. Haverford, sort of...dreaming his last minutes.”
Her voice changed, calming, as her gaze once again turned inward
, “Mr. Haverford was jogging in the park this morning, before dawn. A man stepped out of a stand of trees beside the trail he was following. Mr. Haverford thinking about his wife, about his daughter -- they'd recently separated; he was distracted and didn’t see the man approaching him. The man grabbed me and...bit me, bit Mr. Haverford on the neck. I wanted to scream with the pain -- I could feel his teeth popping through the skin of my throat, but I...I couldn’t scream. I tried to fight back, to use some of the self-defense things he knew, but the man attacking me was too strong.”
Daniel and Tommy exchanged worried glances when she unconsciously switched to the first person, pain and fear suffusing her voice, her eyes wide but unseeing as she spoke.
“After I was laid on the ground, dying, almost paralyzed from my injuries, I watch as the man pulls my wallet out of my pocket. I can see blood running down his chin; his skin is cadaverous, waxy, spotted with black rot -- I’m afraid I might catch a blood disease. He flips through my wallet, smiling down at me as he looks through my pictures. I try to get up, try to fight back, but he doesn’t even flinch, my struggles barely register! I’m so weak and my neck and throat hurt; I can’t close my mouth, it hurts and the m-muscles aren’t working right. I’m choking on my own blood.”
Daniel reached for shoulders, massaging her through jacket as her face crumpled, lips pulling back from her teeth, "I wanted to scream at him to leave my family alone, my family..."
She unconsciously clutched her throat with her right hand, “I can barely breathe! I’m choking, but I can barely move!
Her dark, tear shot eyes widened with horror and fear, her hand rising as though she was reaching through her memories, reaching toward the tableau she saw in her mind’s eye, her hand closing convulsively on his jacket.
“I try to yell -- to shout for help, but I can only whisper, only make a faint buzzing noise through my throat. The man, my killer -- a man named...a monster named Archangel, picks me up and carries me off the trail. He lays me on the ground, in the shadows hidden from the jogging trail. I’m so cold and dizzy; the air is painful where it bubbles in my throat. I haze in and out for…it felt like hours. I try to crawl away, toward the trail, to get help, but my throat hurts so much. I can’t remember where I am. I scream when I’m rolled over onto my back. The monster bends over me -- Archangel... But there’s a second monster, now. They both…”
She shuddered visibly, one hand splayed over her abdomen, the other convulsively clutching her throat protectively, seemingly unaware of the tears slipping down her cheeks.
“Never mind that,” Daniel prompted gently, “what happened afterward?”
“I…I think I -- he -- died shortly after that. That’s when I came back, sitting here with the cold air from the open window...
“He died thinking of his family, even as he felt the monster's teeth in his throat. Mr. Haverford’s daughter, Marnie, is six. If she’s not dead, she’s now probably an orphan; if we move quickly -- if we go east! -- we can still save her! Keep her from having her head half chewed off like her father and by now probably her mother! I don’t know how I know all this, or what caused me to...dream it...relive it, but I know it’s all true, that I wasn’t just...imagining things! On top of everything else...”
She spoke pleadingly as her expression filled with horror, “I don’t think I could live with myself if I -- we -- don’t do something!”
Daniel watched as her fever began to rise again, her desperate urgency reasserting itself. He realized he agreed with her, implicitly understanding that she was right; he needed to act.
He shook himself as Nikki’s hopeful expression began to darken into a scowl of impatience, “Did your vision give you any hint how we kill a vampire?”
She sighed, sagging back into the bucket seat as she momentarily covered her eyes, then shook her head. Daniel glanced at Tommy in the back seat, raising his eyebrows in implicit query. He watched as the faintest hint of a sardonic smile played about his lips, then he shrugged, “You watched the same shows I did. Wooden stakes? Holy water? Sunlight?”
Daniel glared at Tommy, silently promising that they would have words when things calmed down, then rubbed his forehead, “Well, I’m fresh out of sunlight and I forgot the holy water in my other jacket. The best I can offer are a couple of wooden dowels. We’re lucky -- I have some woodworking tools in the back that I’ve been storing in my truck -- no space in the workshop.”
Tommy nodded, muttering, “On it,” as he unbuckled himself and began rooting around in the wrack in the back of the Ford.
Daniel turned toward Nikki. Their eyes met and his heart sped up. He realized it felt good to be doing something, even if the intel was...sketchy. As a soldier, he had often contemplated the ironies of his job as he dealt death and destruction in pursuit of an ideal, an ideal that was fundamentally compassionate; helping a foreign civilization under siege stabilize and grow. By the end of his service, he had lost those ideals, that sense of altruism in the fighting; he’d lost himself in the killing, watching his friends kill and die, sometimes with injuries that were...unspeakable. His work as a paramedic had been a step toward rebalancing from the killing and death. If he wasn’t crazy, if Nikki wasn’t crazy, if this whole insane situation wasn’t just a psychotic break...he felt as though he was being given something akin to a second chance, an expanded capacity to make amends...and perhaps find healing along the way.
As Tommy began rattling around in the storage area in the back of his truck, Daniel met Nikki’s gaze and smiled grimly.
“Do you have an address?”