The Meridians (9 page)

The sound of a killer, of a predator, laying in wait for its prey.

Scott went through the apartment one more time, this time more carefully. He looked not only in each room, but in each possible hiding place in each room. He opened every closet. He looked under every bed and table. He even opened the cabinets under the kitchen sink on the off chance that a very small intruder might be hiding there.

Nothing. Still nothing.

But then the sound came again. The soft scrape of leather on wood, the murmur of a shoe on the floor.

Scott ran to the front room, the area he thought he had heard the sound.

But again, there was no one there. Just him. Just him and....

Scott turned in shock. It hadn't been the sound of a shoe on the floor. It hadn't been anything as easily explained as that. Instead, Scott watched as a paper fluttered off the small writing desk where he wrote checks and paid his bills each month. The sound had been the movement of the paper.

Scott stared at the paper. How had it fallen? He was always very meticulous about his stationary, placing it in the exact center of the desk where it could be easily reached when necessary, but where it was out of the way whenever not needed. There was no way a page could have fallen from the pile of papers on the desk.

Scott looked at the nearest air conditioning vent. It was a good fifteen feet away. Besides, even if a breeze might have explained the movement of the paper at a different time, there was no fan or air conditioning or heater active right now. The air in the apartment was inert; stagnant.

Scott hobbled over to the paper where it sat on the floor. A strange foreboding gripped him, as though he knew in some portion of his mind what he was going to find, and dreaded the discovery.

He reached out, surprised to see that he was actually shaking, and took the paper by the corner, holding it as gingerly as he would a dangerous pit viper. The side that had been face up was blank, but Scott knew as he turned it over that he would see...something.

But he was wrong. There was only another side of white, empty paper looking at him.

So why were the hackles on the back of his neck standing on end? Why were his arms awash in gooseflesh?

Telling himself not to be foolish, chiding himself for falling prey to fear of something as mundane as a falling piece of paper, Scott moved to put the page back on the pile of similar stationary on his desk.

And froze.

Because the second page, the page
under
the one he was holding, had also moved. One moment before, it had been perfectly stacked on its companions, an exact rectangle of paper ready for use. Scott was sure of it. But now, the page that had been below the one Scott now held was slightly askew, as though someone had been fingering through the papers, looking for evidence. What kind of evidence could be found in a pile of empty paper, Scott did not know. But he drew his gun, feeling both silly and reassured by the action.

He pulled the paper aside.

And dropped his gun.

He backed up, moving as far from the papers on his desk as possible, moving in reverse until he was backed up against the wall opposite to the writing desk. His mouth was open in a round "O" of shock and terror.

The page below, the third page down in the pile, had writing on it.

"I'm still here" it read, in writing that was thick and awkward, as though it had been written by an epileptic in the midst of a seizure.

Scott scooped up his gun and moved as quickly as he could through the apartment once more, making sure that every window was sealed, every door locked. The short hairs on the back of his neck were still standing straight up, and he knew - he
knew
- that someone was in the apartment with him. Someone unseen, someone well-hidden.

But someone.

He moved back to the pad, intending to call the precinct and ask one of the two or three guys who weren't treating him like a pariah to come over and give him a second set of eyeballs. But when he returned to the writing desk, all thoughts of calling a friend fled from his mind.

Because there was more writing. More words on the piece of paper that still sat in the middle of his desk.

"I'm still here, and I'm coming for you and Kevin."

Scott swept the house one more time, but he found nothing. No more notes, no evidence that anyone other than him had ever been there.

Just a note. And he knew -
knew
somehow - that if he turned it into the department for testing, they would find no prints, no clues that might lead them to the invisible author of the short missive. It would be just one more reminder to those who had it in for him that Scott was not to be trusted; that his life and his career were over and might very well be more of a liability than they were worth.

So Scott balled the paper up and threw it in the trash. He went to bed that night and dreamed of phantom notes, and old men holding babies, and most of all he dreamt of a question:

Who is Kevin?

***

10.

***

They were a family.

Kevin Angel Randall had stayed in the hospital for nearly three months, enduring problem after problem, treatment after treatment, operation after operation to deal with the seemingly unending set of challenges he had to endure. It felt sometimes to Robbie as though some higher power had intentionally shoved up roadblock after roadblock to get in the way of Kevin's ability to live. After one problem came another. And after
that
problem came another. And after
that
problem came still more, until even Doctor Cody was forced to remark that he had never before heard of a child who had suffered so much in its fight for survival.

When he said that, Robbie remembered shivering, because he got the distinct impression that the doctor was leaving something out. Specifically, that he was leaving out the words "and lived." But then, on second thought, Robbie was actually glad in a way that Kevin had had such a rough road of it. Because surely things couldn't go any worse now. Surely things would look up. Surely things would go well.

That was why the first Christmas was so optimistic. Kevin was eight months old, and grappling with the motor control needed to stand. Robbie loved that his son was - against all apparent indicators and predictions - developing so well, but he also knew that he was going to miss some things. Like the Army Crawl.

The Army Crawl was what he called his son's primary mode of transport back in that first year. At first, Kevin had just lay there like a human pudding, not doing much more than eating, burping (and making other noises), and pooping, and Robbie began to realize that one of the reasons that having a baby was so hard was that they were simply
boring
. Not that he didn't love the kid - he did, and would gladly have sacrificed his own life at any time if it had meant the difference between life and death for Kevin. But that didn't change the fact that it was hard to have any kind of intimate relationship with a person so small you could put them in the palm of your hand, yet with an inside so impossibly big that it was capable of pushing out enough poop that Robbie was seriously considering looking into the cost of shovels and pitchforks for dealing with the problem.

Sleeping was good. Robbie loved it when Kevin slept in his arms. Unfortunately, Kevin didn't do that terribly often, but was instead determined to stay awake night and day, taking approximately six hundred short naps in a twenty four hour stretch, which meant that consequently someone had to help him wake up and deal with the fact that he was no longer inside the comfortable space of his mother's womb every four to six seconds. It was hard, and Robbie remembered that one night the baby monitor had gone out because its batteries had died. He tried to replace the batteries, but was so exhausted from a constant series of wakeups and cranky crying jags that had lasted for what felt like the last sixteen to eighteen millenia that he kept dropping them. And then when he finally
did
manage to put them in, the monitor still didn't work, and he realized that he had put the batteries in backwards.

Lynette woke then, because Robbie, in a totally uncharacteristic fit of pique, threw the monitor so hard against the wall that it dented the drywall and the monitor exploded into its molecular components. He was terribly embarrassed that his wife had caught him in such a fit of rage, but more than that he was tired, and cranky, and determined to let the universe know it.

Soon thereafter, though, Robbie horrified his wife even more when he finally discovered a way to make Kevin sleep. It was an accident, really. It was one of the long nights when Kevin seemed determine to cry and poop his way steadily through the night, and it was Robbie's turn to take over in the never-ending battle to get the kid to do a little bit of sleeping. He walked around, bouncing the boy lightly against his shoulder and singing softly to him, but no number of renditions of "Hush Little Baby" or "Wheels on the Bus" would quiet the child, and Robbie had finally slumped, exhausted, on the couch and turned on the television.

All they had was basic cable, and it turned out that at three in the morning the only things on basic cable were infomercials and horror movies. Robbie neither wanted to learn how to buy into the latest fitness craze nor find out how many girls had gotten drunk and flashed a camera last Mardi Gras, so he turned on a horror movie.

And blood and guts had never been such a godsend. From the first moment that a teenager got stabbed wickedly from behind by a mask-wearing maniac, Kevin Angel Randall settled down. He stopped crying, stopped twitching, even stopped
pooping
for goodness sake. He just calmed down and squirmed deep into Robbie's arms and fell asleep.

Lynette came out of the bedroom a few moments later, awakened no doubt by the sound of oversexed teens being dispatched with a large barbecue fork, and immediately scolded Robbie for subjecting their son to such horrific imagery. Robbie pointed out that Kevin had approximately the same memory capacity as a sea sponge, so probably would not turn into Jack the Ripper later in life.

Lynette was not amused by this.

Instead, she turned off the television, silencing the sound of horror mid-shriek.

And Kevin - little, innocent, beautiful Kevin - instantly awoke and began screaming. Lynette tried to comfort the baby, but he would not stop crying - and, of course, pooping at intervals so short that Robbie began to wonder if the boy was turning hollow inside - until finally Robbie marched over and turned the horror movie back on again.

Kevin immediately quieted.

Not even Lynette, as smart and capable a woman as any that Robbie had ever met, could argue with that kind of results. Instead, she just put the now-sleeping Kevin back in Robbie's arms, turned the television volume down a notch as though in a final act of defiance, then marched into the bedroom to get some sleep.

After that, whenever Kevin was acting up in the middle of the night, all Robbie had to do was sit down on the couch, curl his son up on his lap, and turn on whatever B-grade slasher flick was on television at three a.m., and Kevin would be out like a light.

He would also stop pooping as much, which was such a miracle that Robbie seriously considered calling the Vatican to inquire about the possibility of having Freddie Kreuger beatified and made into a saint. He did not, however, ever mention this to Lynette. Her capacity for humor was great, but it had boundaries, and Robbie had no wish to incur the wrath of a wife whom he loved so much.

So Kevin learned to sleep, and then learned to roll over, and then learned the Army Crawl. It started out as the Poop Scoot: he would stick his butt up in the air, then inchworm his way across a floor, unable to so much as turn if he ran into something in his path. But then the Poop Scoot disappeared, and the Army Crawl came into being. It was the most amazing thing Robbie had ever seen: little Kevin would get down on forearms and toes, and crawl across the shag rug like a Green Beret slithering through a forest under tracer fire. Robbie laughed the first time he saw it, laughed so hard he thought he was going to have to be hospitalized for a hernia.

So all through that first Christmas, Kevin Army Crawled everywhere. He Army Crawled through the rooms, he Army Crawled around the table where Robbie and Lynette had put their tree (high enough that their son could not possibly get to it and pull it over on himself), and he even Army Crawled through every one of the boxes that his Christmas presents had come in - while neglecting the toys themselves. It was wonderful, and Robbie had allowed himself to think that the worst was over; that things were going to go well for them from then on.

That was the first Christmas, however. This Christmas - Kevin's second Christmas - was different. This Christmas was not spent nearly so much in paper and ribbon and stockings and Army Crawling as it was spent in tests and hospitals and anxiety.

It started early, shortly after Kevin's first birthday. He started crying again, rolling jags of weeping that reminded Robbie and Lynette of his first few months, when all he did was cry and sleep. And no matter what, they could not find a way to comfort him. Not even a good horror movie on his daddy's lap was enough to console whatever angst was hiding in his young heart.