The Meridians (12 page)

Fiery, fierce pride erupted in her bosom at her son's touch. He might not be like everyone else, she knew, but she also knew that he was going to be - already
was
- something special. He was hers, her little Kevin Angel, and he was a loving boy and he was her son, and to her those two things were worth any Nobel prize that another child might grow up to earn.

In front of the group, the magician helped Ashton open her tightly clenched fist. The ball was still there. He frowned. "I guess you guys weren't loud enough," he explained with a comically sad face. "Let's try it again."

"ZIMBO ZAMBONI BIG MACARONI!" shouted the children, laughing at the inherently funny sounding words as Ashton waved one hand over the other so hard that Lynette wondered if the girl was going to take flight.

The magician opened the little girl's clenched hand.

The ball was gone.

A cheer went up from the children. The magician raised Ashton's hand triumphantly, as though it had been her who had done the trick. Ashton, a natural performer herself, bowed and then clasped her hands and shook them over her head.

The magician held his hands up to signal for quiet. And though such a thing as true silence was impossible at a four year old's birthday party, the kids quieted enough to hear what he said next.

"And now for the hard part," he said. "I will make the ball...
reappear
!"

He pulled back his yellow jacket sleeves, exposing thin arms and highlighting his long, dexterous fingers, which he waved over Ashton's head.

Lynette felt something happen. Something that made the hairs on her arm stand on end as though she was passing through the static of an electrical storm and was about to be struck by lightning. She glanced at Robbie to see if he was aware of the feeling, but he seemed to be fully engaged in the show, a grin on his face as big as that of any of the children.

"Zimbo, zamboni, big macaroni!" shouted the magician, and waited.

Nothing happened.

With a look of exaggerated sheepishness, the man shrugged as though to say, "What happened?" Then he snapped his fingers in discovery. "Of course," he said. "To make the ball
reappear
, I have to say the magic words in reverse!"

Lynette was barely listening. She no longer felt like lightning was about to strike, she felt like it already
had
, and left her a hollow shell of shattered skin and bone. She reached out and grabbed Robbie's arm, holding it hard enough that he looked at her in instant concern.

"Lynette, what's wrong?" he said.

"Big macaroni, zimbo zamboni!" shouted the magician.

"I don't know," whispered Lynette, barely able to make the words come from her mouth. "I don't know what's wrong."

Then there was sudden silence. The crowd strained as the magician reached forth a hand, put it behind Ashton's little ear, and withdrew...nothing.

The magician's expression changed to one of genuine bewilderment. He casually put a hand in his pocket, then withdrew it while shouting "Big macaroni, zimbo zamboni!"

The electrical feeling swirling around Lynette intensified. She could hardly breathe. Her heart was beating fast as that of a rabbit, and hard enough that she could feel the pulse throughout her body.

"Honey?" said Robbie.

The magician reached forth his hand again, and this time reached behind Ashton's other ear. "I must have grabbed for the wrong ear," he explained in a theater whisper, though even in her distress Lynette felt like she could detect a chord of real doubt in the musical tones of the magician's voice.

He drew forth his hand. Opened it.

There was nothing inside.

And then the screaming started.

Christian started first, but then a few others screamed, and then a few more. Lynette glanced around quickly. Doris was very active in the FOAC, and so there were a good half-dozen autistic children of varying ages at the party. The screams were coming from them. All of them.

And they were all pointing at one thing.

Lynette's son.

She looked down, and even as she did the feeling of electricity in the air dissipated, replaced by another feeling, one just as awful though less strange.

She felt dread.

Now it was Robbie's turn to grab
her
arm, his big hand clutching at her arm as though she were a life preserver and he was the last person to jump from the Titanic.

"What -" began her husband.

Kevin was sitting there, playing as usual, organizing his cars in perfect lines, first by size, then by shape, then by classification, then by color.

Only this time, he had added two items to his toys.

He was a good forty feet away from the magic show, but somehow, without moving, he had added two new toys to his collection.

Two small red balls.

***

12.

***

It was official. Scott Cowley was no longer a cop.

In the almost two years since the death of his wife and son, Scott had done what he could to pretend to keep living. He ate food, he drank water, he put on clothes every morning, he shaved every day.

To all outside appearances, Scott had no doubt that he actually looked quite human. But he knew that it was only an act. Inside he was just as dead as his family; it was just that he hadn't had the good sense to lay down and stop moving yet.

He had flown a desk since the day he got back to work almost seven months after the shooting. It was all he was good for. Even if his insides hadn't been blasted all to hell, even if he hadn't carried with him a permanent limp and an inability to run more than a mile without suffering excruciating pain, even then he wouldn't have been able to resume his duties as a homicide detective in the field. No, he was just another desk jockey, just another walking corpse among several of the living dead on the force: people who had suffered some event so traumatic that the act of firing a gun - of even
drawing
a gun - would be as impossible as if their firearms were nailed to their sides.

The shrink was very understanding. Dr. Simek told him that post traumatic stress disorder was extremely common to those who had suffered a crushing loss like the one that Scott had suffered. So Scott nodded politely and stared at her inkblots and made sounds whenever she paused in an effort to get him to speak, but he knew that it was an act, like everything else he did. He wasn't getting any better under her care - that was the great part about being dead while alive: you didn't
have
to get better. You didn't even have to keep breathing, so anything you did was gravy.

That was why his days had been numbered at the LAPD. Even as a desk jockey, there were too many people relying on him - on his accuracy and his diligence - for him to feel good about staying on. Sooner or later, he knew, he would screw up just as he had screwed up on the day his family died. Then there would be more blood on his hands, more ghosts in his mind, calling out to him in the night and asking why he hadn't saved them.

Scott didn't want that. Couldn't handle it.

So he finally gave notice after finding a different job. He was moving back to his home town of Meridian, Idaho, and was going to work as a teacher there. He was going to be the PhysEd teacher at Meridian High School, where the biggest problems would be the fact that half the freshmen didn't want to use public showers and the other half were eagerly trying to figure out how to get into the showers of the opposite sex without being seen. And those were things he could handle. Those were things where, really, no one's life was on the line. Where if he failed - and he had no doubt he
would
fail - no one would get hurt.

He was packing now, packing to go from the home he had shared with Amy and Chad to one more suitable for a bachelor. As he carried a box full of toiletries to the growing pile of moving boxes in the front room of the apartment, he happened to pass a mirror, and grimaced. He stopped in spite of himself, though, and looked at his pocked and scarred face once again.

Amy would have loved him, he knew. Even ugly, she would have loved him.

He missed her. He missed Chad.

Then all thoughts of his family fled as he saw something in the mirror. It was minute, just a dark patch in the glass, but as he looked, Scott could swear that the darkness was a shadow.

Someone was in his house.

Scott spun around.

No one was there.

Scott looked around. He felt like he was being watched, like there was someone else in the apartment with him. But there was no one to be seen. It was impossible, but his sixth sense, his cop sense, was ringing in a way it had not done since the day he lost his family.

Then he heard it. The sound. So soft it was almost inaudible. The scrape of a shoe, the sound of someone sneaking up on him from behind. Scott whipped around.

And there he was.

Mr. Gray. But unlike Scott, who had aged two years during the time that had intervened since the death of his family, the killer appeared to have aged a lifetime. It was still clearly the same man: the same flinty eyes, the same receding hairline, the same gray suit with a ruined shoulder where Scott had shot him. But he no longer looked like a fit though unassuming man in his thirties. Rather, he looked like he was in his seventies or even eighties, an evilly grinning octogenarian with a face like death come to call. He looked, in fact, the way he had when Scott was in the hospital, during the strange dream where he was trying to kill a baby who then grew from infancy to adulthood in the space of an eyeblink.

I must be dreaming
.
I
have
to be dreaming.

The man smiled, and his teeth were snarled and yellowed. It was that fact that convinced Scott he was not, in fact, dreaming after all. Because while his mind might have cast up some image of guilt from his past, it would not have had the level of detail required to provide a view of oral hygiene long-neglected.

The old man's face was a mask of scars. A multitude of tiny marks marred his face, the result of what looked like a bad collision with a plate glass window, and his nose looked like it had been badly broken years ago, and never properly reset. But for all that, he was still Mr. Gray.

"Been seeing you," said the too-old killer. He smiled, as though he was telling a joke and expected Scott to start laughing at any moment. Scott did not laugh, mostly because in the same instant Mr. Gray raised his hand and Scott saw that the man was holding a razor-sharp knife in his hands. And that he clearly intended to use it on Scott.

Scott screamed, and dodged to the side. But he knew that he was already too late; that he would never get away in time. And a part of him, he knew, didn't
want
to be in time. Didn't
want
to survive. A part of him wanted to die.

But the animal part, the part of him that was not rational and never would be, that part didn't want to die, and so he dove as fast as he could even though he knew that as fast as he could wasn't fast at all, and certainly wasn't nearly as fast as the gray man who stood before him with dead eyes and bloody face.

It wasn't even a contest. In an instant the man held his knife to Scott's throat.

"Ah, ah, ah," whispered the scarred gray man, and Scott suddenly realized that there was something else different about him, in addition to the age and the scars: his eyes were not merely gray, not merely dead.

They were insane. As though in the intervening months, in addition to aging a lifetime, the killer had seen things no human should ever see, and the sight of them had driven him completely, utterly mad.

Scott looked at the old gray man. He was going to die. He knew it.

And there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.

"Been seeing you," said Mr. Gray again. Scott could smell his breath. It was fetid, rotten, the breath of something ill.

The breath of the dead.

"Close your eyes," whispered the killer.

Scott did. He didn't want to, but he didn't see that he had any choice. A single glance into the killer's eyes was enough to convince him that he had no chance of reasoning with the man or pleading with him. There was only obedience.

So Scott closed his eyes, and hated the feeling of helplessness that overcame him. He hated that he had fought through to life again after being shot in the stomach and chest only to die here, this way. Waiting for a madman to end him, a madman who had killed his family and whom Scott had in turn failed to kill.

He closed his eyes. Waited.

Waited.

Nothing happened.

"Shit," said the visitor under his breath. Then, as though speaking to himself, the gray man's voice said, "Do I kill you or him? You or Kevin?" He giggled, a high-pitched, hysterical giggle, and Scott felt a chill go through him. Kevin. The name from the note he had found in his home soon after returning home from the hospital.