The Meridians (8 page)

He turned around, and, impossibly, there was someone else in the NICU. It was a man, his back turned to Benjamin, standing next to one of the incubators. The baby in the incubator was a preemie, a sweet baby that the hospital staff was calling The Angel. Partly that was because the baby's skin was so translucent it almost glowed, and partly because his middle name was Angel, but mostly it was because the baby just had a certain presence about him. That seemed silly to those who hadn't seen the child - how could any baby, let alone a preemie, have enough of a personality to have such charisma? But it was true. Something about the baby was...powerful. Magnetic.

Now there was someone standing over The Angel, and Benjamin shuddered. The man had his back to him, so all Benjamin could really make out was that the guy was wearing a gray suit coat with matching slacks.

"Excuse me?" said Benjamin in as strong a voice as he could muster. "How did you get in here?"

The man turned to look at the nurse then, and Benjamin stopped moving toward the man. He was old, looking almost like he was in his mid-seventies, and he had the grayest eyes he had ever seen, deep and non-reflective as slate.

"When am I?" asked the man.

Benjamin's mouth dropped open as he realized that the man's face was a mass of scar tissue, the result of massive wounds in the not-too-distant past, and he was sporting what looked like an open bullet wound on his shoulder. "Are you okay?" asked Benjamin.

The man ignored him, simply swinging back to look at The Angel. "The baby," muttered the man, and then said something else, so low that Benjamin couldn't hear him.

"What?" said Benjamin.

The man turned back to him again, and in a calm voice, as though explaining nothing more interesting than the weather, he said, "I've been living in Hell."

Benjamin's open mouth turned into a positively gaping maw of surprise. The man looked back at The Angel, and added, "I have to kill this baby."

Benjamin was hardly a world champion boxer, or a karate expert, or anything even remotely related to violence. But when he heard that, he felt all the muscles in his body bunch up. He realized that, as a nurse, he was not only prepared to minister to the sick, but to harm the healthy if that was what it took to protect his patients. His hands balled into two tight - though unschooled - fists, and he dropped into a pre-lunge position, ready to throw himself at the man.

Before he could finish the movement, however, there was a strange rushing noise. Wind gusted throughout the NICU, though that was impossible since the room was an extremely controlled environment with its own independent heat and air ventilation controls. Benjamin's hair blew about him in a way that was reminiscent of the halo of hair that had surrounded his head on his eighth birthday, on that day when he had ridden out of control and into the harsh embrace of a rock. Pressure built up in his head again, as though he were suddenly suffering from the granddaddy of all sinus infections, so quickly and so badly that he felt one of his eardrums pop and possibly even perforate.

His vision blurred, and when it cleared, he was no longer alone in the room with the gray man.

There was another man present. Very old, but still radiating vigor and energy as much as any newborn that Benjamin had ever met.

The newcomer looked at Benjamin with eyes that were blue, bluer than the deepest ocean, bluer than the clearest sky, and - incredibly -
winked
at him. As though two geezers appearing out of thin air in the middle of the NICU was not only an everyday event, but a highly desirable one.

Apparently the old man in the gray suit lacked the sense of humor of his counterpart. "You can't keep doing this to me!" shouted the gray man.

"I will as long as I have to," responded Blue Eyes.

"We both know how this ends," retorted Gray.

"Yes, we do. But it doesn't end today."

And with that, the gray man rushed at Blue Eyes with a bestial roar.

That was when Benjamin decided he was definitely in over his head, and no amount of fatherly protective nature could help in this insane moment featuring two old men who thought they were professional fighters in some geriatric mixed martial arts league.

He turned to the nearest wall phone and picked it up, intending to call security. But when he glanced over his shoulder to make sure the stranger was not hurting the babies, he dropped the phone.

The men were gone.

Benjamin was a rational man. A man who had put a great deal of his life into science and rationality. So nothing could have prepared him for that. The men could not have gone through the door to the NICU - it was a good twenty five feet away, and no way could they have gone so far so fast.

Then again, there was no way they could have gotten
into
the locked NICU in the first place.

Benjamin toyed for a moment with the idea of just hanging up the phone; of not calling security. After all, how would
that
conversation go? Benjamin: "Hello, security, there were two old guys in the NICU." Security: "Where are they now?" Benjamin: "They disappeared, so I don't know. But one of them winked at me and the other one did mention something about Hell." Security: "Why don't you just lay down on the floor in a spread-eagle position and we'll have someone right down to lock you up."

But after less than a moment's debate, he decided that he was morally obliged to call in what he had just seen - or at least, to call in the fact that there had been a mentally unstable intruder in the NICU.

As expected, the conversation that Benjamin had with security was less than enthusiastic. Things were even cloudier when the hospital's chief of security suggested that the closed-circuit monitors be checked for any men looking like the two that Benjamin described, specifically looking in the hall outside the NICU.

There were none. No one even remotely looking like the two aged fighters passed by the NICU in any of the twenty-four preceding hours.

Benjamin managed to hold onto his job, though he had a helluva time explaining what he saw - or rather
not
explaining it, since the reality seemed to defy all description - and then ended up taking the rest of the day off "for rest and needed rejuvenation time," as the head nurse very politely put it. The message behind her words was very clear to him, however: get your act together or don't come back.

Benjamin returned in two days, and never again mentioned either of the old men. His one concession to what he believed had happened was that he asked to be taken off the NICU shift.

He pondered whether being a nurse was worth it, and finally decided it was.

He just couldn't give up the healthcare benefits.

But if one more person appeared or disappeared during his shift...he was going to take his mother's advice and get a real estate license.

***

9.

***

At least they waited for him to get well - or rather, get
better
, he still wasn't back up to what he had been, and probably never would be again - before they put him on trial.

A number of the cops that Scott worked with were up in arms over the inquiry. After all, they told him, it wasn't enough that he had lost his wife and child in the same day that he had left his spleen and a good portion of his intestines in a hospital operating room. It wasn't enough that he had spent four months in a hospital room and another four learning how to walk once more - though even now he still couldn't get around without the aid of crutches. It wasn't enough that he had survived a shootout with one of the strangest endings anyone in the department could ever recall.

They had to have their trial.

Not that Scott could blame them. After all, there had been a very public murder, followed by an even more public shootout, followed by...nothing.

No prints.

No shooter.

No evidence, other than the spent casings and three dead bodies: two family members, and the blue eyed John Doe.

Of course the journalists got a hold of the story and ran with it, running exposé after exposé on Scott Cowley, asking the question of whether he was a good cop, but asking it in such a way that it was never really in doubt what the answer was: no, he was not a good cop.

For those journalists who ran the pieces, after all, there was no such
thing
as a good cop. It didn't matter to them that Scott and people like him were the reason that they could write their drivel without having to look over their shoulders at night for fear they'd be attacked. It didn't matter to them that freedom of the press existed because of the blood of men and women who kept the peace and who provided a community safe enough that such freedoms were even possible.

It just mattered to them that there was a shooting, and that there was a cop involved. So it was only a short leap from "Cop Involved in Shooting" to "No Suspects Found" to "Cop Under Investigation."

So no, Scott couldn't blame his superiors on the force, who were under pressure from the mayor's office, which was under pressure from the voters, who were being spoon-fed a load of crap about Scott being an irresponsible and perhaps irrational, gun-toting lunatic.

The trial itself wasn't termed a trial, of course. It was an "inquiry." He told his story over and over, to police commissions, to civilian oversight committees, to Internal Affairs, and to anyone and everyone else who asked. Even though he knew it was going to end up as a public flogging sooner or later, he answered the questions, and answered them truthfully.

But yes, eventually it became clear that though there was no real dirt on Scott - he had a record as spotless as the floors that Amy had kept in their home - even so, there was also no real evidence to support his story. Just bullets and casings and some "friends" who had come upon a scene where, ultimately, there was no suspect to be found.

Eventually, he was reprimanded and demoted several levels. His career as a cop - at least, as a cop who had a chance at any serious vertical movement in the department - was over.

And Scott didn't mind.

In fact, on the day that the letter was delivered to him at his home, he was almost relieved. It was over. The people had their scapegoat for a crime that had "likely never occurred except in the mind of an overstressed officer." Indeed, he was aware that it could have been much worse; that there were those in the department and in the journalism sector who quietly whispered about the possibility that Scott had staged the whole event for the sole purpose of covering up the real crime: his murder of his own wife and child.

The day that he was demoted, he came home early from work, feeling like hell. What were they going to do, demote him again? he reasoned. So he said goodbye to the few remaining friends he had on the force and came home, reasoning that he might take a nap.

Or he might kill himself.

It was a tossup. On one hand, a nap sounded damn fine.

On the other hand, you had to wake up from a nap, and Scott didn't know that that sounded so very good to him these days. What did he have to wake up to? An empty apartment. A room full of toys that would never be played with again. Presents that had not quite been unwrapped for his child's last birthday, and never
would
be unwrapped, for the child for whom they were intended was gone forever.

So Scott walked through the place, looking at the rooms, at the evidence that once he had been alive, and wondered if he wouldn't be better off just ending it all. It wouldn't be hard, he knew. He could cut his wrists in the tub and sink into a warm oblivion, leaving the world as he had come into it: in blood and water and pain. Or he could just throw back a couple dozen of the OxyContins that he had been prescribed in the aftermath of his ordeal, to help him cope with the almost daily pain he now suffered.

Either way, it would be easy, quick, and final.

All good things.

He actually got as far as filling up the tub for a final bath when it happened.

There was a sound.

Immediately, Scott was transported back to the alley, to the sound he had heard when the hitter - the man Scott called Mr. Gray, a man who had never been identified, though Scott had spent countless hours and even entire days looking through various photo files of criminals and killers - had crept up behind him with the intention to end his life.

Scott froze. He turned off the water, which dripped for a moment and then was silent.

He listened. Waited.

He watched the doorway to the bathroom, wondering if what he had heard had been real, or simply some post-traumatic hallucination dredged up from his subconscious to torment him.

The sound did not repeat.

Even so, Scott went from room to room in the small apartment, clearing the area with the precision of a Delta Force member sweeping for hostiles.

Nothing. The apartment was empty, save only him.

Even so, there
had
been a sound. He was sure of it. It was the sound of a shoe scuffing on the floor, the sound of someone trying hard to be stealthy and not quite succeeding.